Intro – By Kev
A few months back I was approached by Corehammer Webmaster Stevie, who said that he wants to start playing Pathfinder, and thought that between the Corehammer group we might be able to muster up a few bods who might be interested. I had a think and decided I’d have a go of being GM. I’d never played Pathfinder before but had played D&D 3.5,Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, AD&D etc. GM’ing had never been something I had an interest in, but it was either be GM, or worry about there being no game. I’d had some ideas in the past for a cool campaign, but being a little overwhelmed by the whole tidal wave of data put in front of me meant that designing my own encounters as well as learning to play the game, and run the game meant that I wanted a good few sessions in front of me before we moved on to the things of my own design. With that in mind, I started writing Tower Of Antlers, and working out where I could crowbar it in to the existing Inner Sea region. It just so happened that Varasia was perfect in every single way, however I’m not going in to how as I don’t want to drop any spoilers for the 4 players I’m working with. We’re playing through a pre-existing story at the moment, but I know exactly at which point we’ll be breaking off and heading in to the campaign proper. I know what level I need my guys to be… and I’m excited to get in to my own content. And now over to Nate.

Despite Warhammer and it’s various bastard offshoots being the catalyst for the birth of this website it would be remiss of us not to include coverage of the other games and formats that have had a hand in its creation and that we still love dearly. I recently hooked up with Leeds Warmachine to take part in their slow grow Journeyman League so expect some ongoing coverage of that, and moving into the new year we’re going to be covering Kingdom Death and Mantic’s Deadzone in detail as a lot of the guys in the crew went in on the Kickstarters, so that’s tabletops covered for the forseeable future. But lately there’s been a yearning hunger gnawing at my bones for the halcyon days of my adolescence spent huddled round a table poring over musty old rulebooks and scavenged Ral Partha models.

I’d been kicked out of grammar school half way through my first year (Year 7 for those under 35) and ended up attending a much tougher local comprehensive. For the first couple of weeks I had to wear my grammar school blazer to my new school as money was always tight and my parents couldn’t afford to fork out for another school uniform. I’m sure you can imagine how that situation played out on my first day. On top of that I was a painfully shy, nervous and lonely little kid with the full range of teenage pox cast upon me, least of which was a generous seasoning of acne and a shocking bowl cut. My parents were already seperated and in the middle of a shitty divorce. So yeah, things were not ideal. Against this fairly typical backdrop of 80’s teenage angst I stumbled into my first Dungeons & Dragons adventure hosted by my science teacher after he saw me tightly gripping a copy of a Lone Wolf book in class once. It was my first experience of roleplaying in a group and whilst it was exciting for me to finally be interacting with other enthusiasts, it was also very daunting as the other kids were a year or two older than me and were more experienced/socially adept. Nonetheless it provided an escape and gave me somewhere to go after school for a few hours a week, to lose myself in my own imagination instead of going home and dealing with a heavy reality.

So here we are twenty years later, after a lengthy absence from gaming I find myself involved in a Wargames group with other blokes of similar age/background etc. Inevitably the spectre of RPG’s soon raised itself from the tomb of our collected youthful folly. Kev had been banging on about Pzaios Pathfinder being the new hype and expressed an interest in DMing himself after having a decent long running session last year with some local fellows. There was one condition, if we were going to do this it’s got to be all or nothing. No nickel & dime dungeon crawl, no half stepping. No, Kev had plans for a much larger ongoing narrative. With similar open platform mechanics to AD&D 3.5 I was keen to have a bash at Pathfinder and revive my mothballed dungeoneering career. The only problem being the members of our inner circle are spread out across the length and breadth of this glorious Isle Of Albion meaning localised regular play would be a dead end. Kev suggested the use of a virtual tabletop platform called Roll20 (more on that shortly) would enable us to play online via google hangouts. I was skeptical about it to be honest. I had concerns about potential drag on video-linking affecting play and just how well we’d be able to generate that all important sense of atmosphere and camaraderie that adds much needed texture to these immersive type of games.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of the core rules and I’d already gotten the Pathfinder Beginners box for my birthday so we decided to have a run through at my place a couple of weeks beforehand, just to get to grips with roleplaying again after such a long absence. Myself, Boardman, Ager, Kev and Connor worked our way through the adventure that comes with the Pathfinder starter box. Just your basic dungeon crawl but despite starting out late in the evening and our party being hampered by a useless mage (Connor) and Ager coming out with some bizarre olde world dialogue and earning himself a slap in the process, it was a lot of fun.Sadly neither Ager or Connor were able to join us in the Tower Of Antlers campaign Kev had planned as the other seats at our virtual table had already been baggsied.

A couple of weeks later we’d rolled up our characters and were ready to begin. Our party was a mixed bag of old players and RPG noobs with Kev (our most experienced member) hosting the sessions. Our character creation didn’t really break any new ground with Stevie playing a solemn and reticent Half Orc ranger, Boardman naturally slipping into the role of stoic dwarven mercenary, Robb chose to play an earnest but hapless mage, Tony a humble cleric and yours truly really stretching himself as an opportunistic rogue/occult investigator.

We had all obtained Roll20 accounts beforehand and logged in to get started. Roll20 has maps that are mutually visible for the DM and the members of the party which replaces tabletop floorplans and miniatures and obviously a dice roll simulator that all work together really well. Within that framework are webcams and mics all synced so that we can communicate without any real hassles. There were a few minor connection issues but nothing we couldn’t resolve. Our adventure commenced in a small beach town of Sandpoint currently in the midst of a Swallowtail Festival celebration. Boardman and myself entered the town together and Kev introduced Tony’s Cleric and Stevie’s Half Orc Ranger at pertinent intervals during the first half of the session. Robb couldn’t make it to the first sitting so he would be introduced in the second session. Our DM seasoned the pot with clues and suggestions from the NPC’s (Non Player Characters) that despite the apparent care free nature of festivities taking place, there was more to Sandpoint then first met the eye. For the majority of the first session our party simply familiarized ourselves with the town and its key landmarks and interacting with its various denizens. Needless to say It didn’t take long for trouble to find us though and an incursion of rowdy goblins wreaking havoc and killing dogs kicked off the first violent encounter and…… that’s where we left session one.

Cool dude alert

With any new game, there’s a period of settling in required both for the DM to start hitting his rhythm and for the PC’s to find their feet, to build a rapport with one another and to get a flavour for their own character. This is made all the more difficult by not having the benefit of physically being sat round a table, which definitely made our initial outing a little clunky. However as I hope you’ll discover in future reports, as we’ve progressed through our adventure one of the most rewarding things is seeing how the players slowly grow into their characters both individually and as a group.

Now I’ve given you a little context, future installments will be focussing on the actual game details and specific scenarios as the adventure unfolds rather than mechanics and background. I’m hoping we can publish about one a month.

As an aside, one of the things that I thought was a nice touch in the Pathfinder core rules was a paragraph tucked right at the back with a reccomended reading list to check out if the ideas and scenarios in the game were speaking to you. Loads of great stuff in there from Lord Dunsany through Manly Wade Wellman to Mike Mignola. Just a simple tip of the cap and an acknowledgment from the authors that these ideas have been floating around the aether for time immemorial and are not the sole dominion of one company that seeks to monopolize and copywrite myth for maximum profit that I found refreshingly humble and honest, good looking out Pzaio!