Dan, CJ, Kevin, and Brandon sit around for a bit and discuss their thoughts on the most piratey of RPG’s: D. Vincent Baker’s Poison’d. We discuss the basics of character creation, conflict mechanics, and how play works out. To be succinct, it’s nasty, brutish, and short. Good stuff!

Relevant Links

• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Poison’d
• D&D Word Cloud
• Poison’d Word Cloud (Thanks, Joe!)
• F.A.T.A.L

Crunchy Bits!

• Discussion Episode 18: Poison’d Review. 36 Minutes
• Intro Music “Plunder” from Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
• Outro Music “Seven Deadly Sins” by Flogging Molly

Things were looking up for our nefarious crew of the Dagger when we left off last session. That doesn’t last long. This session is an impressive display of bad rolls making the situation worse with every turn. Give a listen and see how Poison’d lives up to it’s moniker of “Reservoir Dogs on a Boat.”

Relevant Links

• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Poison’d
• Wookie LifeDay / Life debt
• Chewbacca’s Death via Moonfall
• Ninja’s Vs. Pirates Vincent Baker Interview
• Graham Walmsley – Play Unsafe – The Dying of St. Margaret’s
• PedoBear
• Poison’d Q&A page

Crunchy Bits!

• Poison’d Actual Play Session 3: 1 Hour 45  minutes
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part A: 55 Minutes
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part B: 52 Minutes
• Intro Music “Plunder” from Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
• Outro Music “Drunken Sailor” by Wylde Nept

Promos:

• Thursday Knights
• Spooky Outhouse Productions

The crew of the Pirate ship the Dagger beaches itself upon Isla Luna to gather much needed water and supplies. Murmurs of discontent can be heard rippling through the crew, as Isla Luna is well known for being the home of a powerful witch. What’s the worst that could happen? Word to the wise: this episode gets pretty rank. “Dirty Dick Wiggins” makes good on his name, among other atrocities.

Roles

Brandon: Dirty Dick Wiggins Ship’s Gunnery Master

CJ: Bloody John Parr Ship’s Surgeon

Kevin: Solomon Cruikshank Ship’s Captain

Relevant Links

• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Poison’d
• Forum Post About 2x Wear and Breakage
• Last Exile
• Germ Theory of Disease

Crunchy Bits!

• Poison’d Actual Play Session 2: 2 Hours 11 minutes
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part A: 1 Hour
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part B: 1 Hour
• Intro Music “Plunder” from Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
• Outro Music “Strike The Bell” by Wylde Nept

Kevin, CJ, Dan, and Brandon sit down for our third and final D. Vincent Baker game: Poison’d: A Pirate RPG. This session covers the creation of our individual pirates, as well as the crew and specifics of our pirate ship. We do just a tad of roleplaying at the end to get a feel for how Success Rolls work, and set things up nicely for next session. So far we’re all enjoying it a lot!

Roles

Brandon: Dirty Dick Wiggins Ship’s Gunnery Master Soul: 4 Devil: 4 Brutality: 4 Ambition: 4 Brinkmanship: 4

CJ: Bloody John Parr Ship’s Surgeon Soul: 4 Devil: 4 Ambition: 4 Brutality: 3 Brinkmanship: 4

Kevin: Solomon Cruikshank Ship’s Quartermaster Soul: 4 Devil: 4 Ambition: 5 Brutality: 5 Brinkmanship: 5

Relevant Links

• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Poison’d
• Sgt. Hatred
• Cervantes
• A map of the Caribbean
• The Gunpowder history book Kevin mentioned.
• Burning Wheel
• Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dogs in the Vineyard
• In a Wicked Age
• 2-Masted Bermuda Sloop
• “That’s a REAL GHOST!”
• Misspent Youth
• Hardtack
• Rogue Trader
• Lego Tie Defender

Crunchy Bits!

• Poison’d Actual Play Session 1: 2 Hours
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 1 Part A: 1 Hour
• Poison’d Actual Play Session 1 Part B: 1 Hour
• Intro Music “Plunder” from Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
• Outro Music “You Are a Pirate” from Lazytown.

Our review of “Vincent Baker’s Concentrated Awesome” aka Dogs in the Vineyard. We sit down to discuss the dice mechanics, moral ambiguity, and how advancement is inextricably tied into not only changes to your character, but also the damage model. Also, Brandon’s still not over his fear of cows.

Relevant Links

• Dogs in the Vineyard
• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Dogs in the Vineyards Forum
• Apocalypse World
• State of Deseret
• Burning Wheel
• Diagonally Through the Woods
• Mutants and Masterminds
• D&D
• Warhammer Fantasy RPG
• Mind Flayer
• Arcana Evolved
• Burning Empires
• Oregon Trail
• The Jank Cast
• Call of Cthulhu

Crunchy Bits!

• Discussion Episode 16: Dogs in the Vineyard 50 minutes
• Intro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)
• Outro Music “Palomino” by Tree Adams.

Dogs in the Vineyard wraps up with the small ranching town of King’s Crossing. The players experiment with taking on conflicts solo, and finds some pretty serious challenges facing their characters. The defeats culminate with a very tense final showdown!

Unfortunately this is our last session of Dogs. We had a pretty rough three months this winter and have only managed to record twice due to plague, work, weather, and holidays. It was very difficult to keep the momentum going, but we all feel this is a good session to end on. The conflicts were tough, the morality fuzzy, and the ending suitably tragic.

Relevant Links

• Clancy Brown
• Deadlands: Los Diablos
• Little House on the Prairie
• Wolf Brother
• Conner from Angel
• Silent Lucidity

Crunchy Bits!

• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 3: 2 Hours, 34 Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 3 Part A: 65 Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 3 Part B: 1 Hour 28 Minutes
• Intro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)
• Outro music from “God’s Gonna Strike You Down” by Johnny Cash.

And here we have our first full town for D. Vincent Baker’s Dog’s in the Vineyard. The gang learns a few good lessons this session. Namely, there’s pretty much no stopping a group of Dogs when they team up, and no matter how bad you don’t want your cousin to be a Sorcerer, sometimes you just have to face facts.  This town was created by Jason Morningstar, and is based on the true story of Olive Oatman. When Jason found out I was running his towns, he shot me an email warning that a few of his early town designs aren’t the most ideal. I thanked him for his concern, but went ahead anyway.

Since then, I’ve done a LOT of reading on the lumpley forums on The Forge about town design, and gotten a bit of play under my belt. I now know what Jason was concerned about. I’m not sure if it comes through in the recording, but this town lacked the tension of some later ones I’ve run, and I know exactly why: The situation was too clear, the antagonist too one-sided, and the problems of the town hadn’t escalated to Hate and Murder yet. Vincent recommends ALWAYS designing a town up to Hate and Murder. I learned a lot from running this town, and my second town is one I made myself, and I think really hits all the right spots for what a town should be. Stay tuned for that!

Relevant Links

• Dogs in the Vineyard
• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Dogs in the Vineyards Forum
• Kevin’s Post on the DitV Forum about this session.
• January Branch Document
• Jason Morningstar’s awesome play aids
• Mouse Guard
• Wheel of Time
• Detect Evil
• Carnivale
• Deadlands
• Unknown Armies

Crunchy Bits!

• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 2: 2 Hours, 51 Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 2 Part A:  Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 2 Part B:  Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 2 Part C:  Minutes
• Intro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)
• Outro music from “When The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash.

Although we’ve had terrible luck getting people together for gaming these past couple months, we did manage to get some time to sit down for an awesome 1-shot of Mutants and Masterminds. Join Claws, Jaquelin Frost, and The Grinch as they save Christmas from a reanimated Hitler (from Mars!) and the vile Corporate Crusader.

Relevant Links

• Mutants and Masterminds
• Green Ronin
• Old Man Logan
• It’s Green and Pissed

Crunchy Bits!

• Mutants and Masterminds Christmas Special: 2 Hours
• Mutants and Masterminds Christmas Special Part A: 53 Minutes
• Mutants and Masterminds Christmas Special Part B: 60 Minutes
• Intro and Outro Music from “Christmas is Interesting” by Jonathan Coulton.

Everyone here at The Walking Eye has been champing at the bit to finally get some sweet, sweet Dogs in the Vineyard action. It marks the half way point of or Vincent Baker Marathon (the final chapter will be Poison‘d) and it’s been an absolute blast. In this first session we handle character creation and establishing the basic facts about the world. It’s a good demonstration of how to pick Traits, and gives three different and interesting Initiation Conflicts. Check it out!

Relevant Links

• Lumpley Games, Vincent Baker’s website and blog.
• Dogs in the Vineyard materials
• State of Deseret
• The Noble Savage
• Blade Barrier
• Mouse Guard
• Deadlands

Crunchy Bits!

• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 1: 2 hours
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 1 Part A: 53 Minutes
• Dogs in the Vineyard Session 1 Part B: 62 Minutes
• Intro and Outro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)

The gang spends a good 45 minutes ranting and raving about how awesome In A Wicked Age… is.

Relevant Links

• Lumpley Games
• In a Wicked Age…
• Sword And Sorcery
• Tanith Lee
• Jack Vance
• Robert E Howard
• Iron Age
• Marvel Comics Conan
• Lumpley Games Oracle Generator
• Misspent Youth
• Duel of Wits
• Emily Care Boss
• Mouse Guard
• Conflict Flow Chart
• The Dreaded D&D 3.5 Grapple Rules
• The Dreaded D&D 3.5 Attacks of Opportunity Rules
• Abulafia
• Silver Age Comics
• GURPS
• Grey Ranks
• Spirit of the Century

Crunchy Bits!

• Discussion Episode 15: In A Wicked Age… Review 50 minutes
• Intro and Outro Music from The Prince of Persia by Inon Zur and Stuart Chatwood published by Ubisoft.