Virtual Grogmeet 2024
Taking place in April every year, Virtual Grogmeet has become a shining light in the early days of spring, as the flowers bloom and the bees stir from their cozy hives, I shut myself off from the world and batten down the hatches for a weekend of online gaming.
This year I signed up to GM two games and play in three, a bonanza weekend of gaming lay ahead and it delivered on all fronts. For the first time I skipped the pub quiz due to an ongoing The One Ring campaign so my Virtual Grogmeet weekend started on the Friday evening with...
Dragonbane: Deep Sun Barrow
I was a bit underwhelmed when I first played the Dragonbane quickstart adventure a couple of years ago, it was ok and the adventure was fun, but I couldn't see anything special about it (besides the wonderful artwork). But over last year my social media streams have been full of folks harping on about how bloomin' marvellous it is, how it gets right all the things a fantasy game should be doing.
So when it popped up on the Friday night slot I decided to give it another go, and come the evening of 19th April I was so glad I did. GMd by Dragonbane aficionado @fenrisgames.com, I joined a worthy band of experienced adventurers helping their friends the Jug family deal with mindless cultists and worse on their farm and beyond. This had everything I enjoy in a fantasy game; an interesting premise, a good bit of scrapping, fantastic world building, a clear path to follow and an unknown and unknowable enemy. Lovely stuff. I feel there's a fair chance Dragonbane may find it's way to my gaming shelves at some future point. A great start to the weekend.
Comms: Jitsi Meet
This has improved quite a bit since I last used it. Very stable with a range of viewing options. The only notable difference between Meet or Discord is that the video quality wasn't quite as crisp, but for a free service it's very good, I may try this for my games.
VTT: Role
I've played on this a couple of times before, it looks nice and is fairly simple, but the character sheet can be hard to navigate. Role has lost it's USP since dropping built in comms. In the end we just used it for maps, using the honour system for dice rolling.
Mythic Bastionland: The Knights of Misrule
An early start on the Saturday morning offered a last few minutes of tweaking before running my first game of the day. A fair old bit of work had gone into setting this up on FoundryVTT, fortunately aided by the rather fantastic Mythic Bastionland system which did a lot of the heavy lifting, so I was pleased when all the players joined the game with relatively little effort.
IMHO there is so much to like, maybe even love, about Mythic Bastionland. A spiritual descendent of Pendragon with a system firmly drawn from Into the Odd, crafted and polished to perfection. The characters are all young knights starting off in a relatively unknown and randomly generated hex-mapped realm; the knights have an oath to live by which drives their actions:
Seek the Myths
Honour the Seers
Protect the Realm
The game is ideally suited to a long form play style, something from a few sessions to a full on campaign. In the realm there are a number of active myths at any one time which the knights discover omens of as they explore. The omens are encounters that drive the knights towards the conclusion and resolution of those myths, and as they do so more pop up. A great configuration for a longer game, but not ideal for a one shot.
A few weeks earlier I'd arranged a test run that resulted in an unexpected TPK. This gave me real insights into timing, pacing and adversary toughness which I brought into this session, and as a result it played much more smoothly. The game still had a strong sense of peril, but all the knights survived. I'd strongly advise any GM to test run new adventures for conventions if you can arrange it.
For a one shot (my approach refined following a play test) I selected just one myth to push in front of the players while having the option to skip a number of omens and still fit in a satisfying conclusion. This worked well, we blasted through a few encounters and had a grand finale on the battlefield defending the House of Healing.
Mythic Bastionland adds some very clever extensions onto the core Into the Odd system which makes combat much more interesting, each round offering tactical decisions while still remaining pretty deadly. I'd highly recommend checking it out.
Comms: Discord
This has been my go to comms choice since free Google Meet had time limits. For the most part it does the job pretty well and works in the app or browser.
VTT: FoundryVTT v11
The premium VTT and my VTT of choice. Mythic Bastionland has a great system in Foundry which made it a no brainer; auto generate knights, squires and warbands, and all the spark tables a click away.
True-D6: Temple of the Moon Priests
Initially I'd planned on running just one game at the event, and I prefer that to be on the Saturday morning. But after stumbling across the nifty, light and simple True-D6 RPG I was desperate to give it a try, so after a scan over appropriate adventures I settled on the one page dungeon, Temple of the Moon Priests. True-D6 is definitely worth checking out, it costs $1 (about 78p when I bought it) and comes as a text file with no art (which makes it easy to read in Notepad or similar). I'd guess English isn't the author's first language, but they do a great job and communicate the rules clearly. You can read True-D6 in half an hour which is always a bonus, perfect for a one shot, and maybe for a short campaign, and the author publishing a FoundryVTT system for it was icing on the cake. Temple of the Moon Priests was a perfect match, a punchy, colourful, well illustrated adventure with a nice setup, a simple hook, a challenging environment and fun encounters.
Wanting to avoid running of an evening (as I'm always knackered) I booked this in the Saturday afternoon slot. Once again benefitting from a test run, I made a few tweaks which really improved the pace of the adventure. I was impressed with how True-D6 quickly got out of the way, and how quickly the players picked it up. Using a single D6 it provided all the peril we've come to expect and love with old school gaming, resulting in a single character death.
I had no idea how the party would complete their objective of claiming the mystical Sky Shard, but they did it with a combination of skill, caution and clever use of abilities, a satisfying outcome, and we had a lot of laughs on the way (which I've noticed frequently accompanies old school games).
Comms: Discord
VTT: FoundryVTT v11
Basic Roleplaying: Navigators of Narwal & Scar Scavengers of Dialo
The Grogfather @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social had posted 3 sessions across the Friday to Sunday evenings set in his "back in the day" setting of Raclash, and I eagerly signed up for the two I was available for. I played Blannis of the Narsi, a warrior from the forest of Narsi, trying to save his people and the sacred tree of his village on the Saturday evening and helping the strange insectoid Dialo deal with a demon problem on the Sunday. The world was vivid and strange, it's influences clear, Raclash is no Middle-Earth variant but a strange lovechild of Vance and Moorcock. Sadly no screenshots with this one...
Comms: Zoom
A good choice for RPG sessions for those who splash out on it, but always reminds me of work.
VTT: Roll20
A light touch used for maps and dice rolls, our character sheets were custom builds sent out as PDFs. A light touch with Roll20 is my favourite kind.
The Big Interview
The traditional Sunday morning interview was with Dan Whitehead, author of Speccy Nation and ZX Spectrum fan. I guess the target audience is a niche with our niche community, not really RPG related by still really interesting and insightful. Following the interview I grabbed both his books.
And with that Virtual Grogmeet 2024 was over, a fantastic weekend of top-notch gaming. Big thanks to @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social and @blythygrog.bsky.social for all their organisation of the event, it's greatly appreciated. Ok, now to start thinking about the UK Games Expo weekend...