Mining for Horrors (A Shadows of Brimstone Topic)

Man, these games are sounding pretty epic, making me think about this over Dungeon Saga in my dungeon crawler purchase priority.

SebastianBludd wrote:

That's bad ass!

I've made Excel sheets that will take data entered on the first page and insert it into areas on a second page, effectively making a generator. It's pretty simple - just insert a photo (frame, etc) into the second sheet, and set it to background, and make the cells very small so that you can precisely control where info is displayed when it's inserted.

Makes character generation fast. If you know VBA, you can also assign random values and stuff. Fun times.

That sheet I posted is a modified version of one I snagged off BGG and modified to make the fields larger. All I did was open it in Paint.net and add text and icons (the anvils, hands, arrows and Dark Stone in particular) via layers. My new one is black and white with form fields I added by uploading the pdf to pdfescape.com*, and I now have about 34 lines of text to work with in the Items section alone. I'm hoping I can still paste in the icons because that's the sort of info I like being able to discern at a glance at my character sheet.

Your excel solution sounds like it might be more customizable than a pdf. Can you format the destination cells to have different fonts, sizes, stuff like that? Methods to insert icons would be nice, too.

*Pdfescape.com is amazing. I've used it to delete pages from pdf's and recompile, combine multiple pdfs (only 2 at a time for the free version) into one file, white out sections and add my own text, add form fields, etc. I stopped looking for offline solutions after I discovered it.

FWIW, the Gencon Preview stuff has finally hit FFP's website. So far I see: Edge of the Abyss card expansion (15 new Growing Dread cards); Cowboy, Frontier Doc and Jargono Native hero packs; Trederra Other World and Undead Outlaw Deluxe Enemy Pack. I picked up Edge of the Abyss, the Doc and the Native. I can wait for Trederra, especially since I have the Derelict Ship coming with Wave 2 and I also want to see how the Blasted Wastes other world shapes up.

edit: In the time it took me to type this, the Flesh Stalker with Flesh Drones Deluxe Enemy Pack went up, so there might be more to come.

I think I have to ban myself from spending more until I at least paint the minis for what I have already.

I think we're going to ban certain Threat cards until our posse is a higher level. Last night, during our For a Few Dark Stone More mission, that we were playing to try and stock up on loot and gear, we got absolutely wrecked by a couple of Threat cards we couldn't handle. The first was the Undead Gunslinger Challenge. The UG appears and the game pauses (I assume no Hold Back the Darkness rolls during the challenge but I screwed up and we did a couple before I realized how many rounds a Challenge could go) while the heroes take turns - every hero must fight once before they can go again - rolling their Initiative against however many dice the UG's Threat Card specifies, which was 6(!).

Only sixes count as damage. If the UG rolls any sixes, you draw a card per six from a special deck to see what his shot(s) do. If the hero rolls sixes, they can use their sixes to cancel the UG's sixes (which you want to do because his cards can be nasty) and any extra go through as hits to banish him. We needed 7 hits to banish him and it took forever. The Orphan had Initiative 5, 4 for the Outlaw and 2 for the Prospector. The Outlaw got hit twice by the card that reduces his Initiative by 2 for the next round of the Challenge, and he also got hit by the card that does 12(!) Damage, ignoring Defense, which burned our only Revive token. The Prospector used his once-per-Adventure ability to recover up to his Max Grit of 2 so he could use "Speed of Greed" to double his Initiative to 4 for two turns, enabling him to land a hit or two, but the Orphan also got hit by the 12 Damage card and went down.

One of the Undead Gunslinger's cards does Corruption damage and the Prospector got hit by it twice and failed enough saves that he mutated. Thankfully his mutation was Barbed Tail (+1 Combat, can hold one fewer Corruption before mutating), so now he's throwing 3 D8's in melee. The Orphan rolled a Chest Wound on the Injury Chart, so now he's -1 Initiative, knocking him down to 4. We'll probably try to get that healed as that's one of the few things he does well.

So after the fight we were completely out of Side Bag tokens; all of our Bandages and Whiskey which represented about $300-$400 we'd spent in town during our last stay. The next room was our Objective and the Epic Threat was... Be'lial and some Void Spiders. LOL, no thanks. We immediately left and now D3 buildings in the next town we visit will be destroyed due to our failure, so we're going to go to a Large Town to guarantee at least 5 buildings in town. I understand making Epic Threats more challenging for higher level posses, but some of the enemies are clearly out of our league until we can improve our characters.

The positives from the mission were the Barbed Tail Mutation and the 4 Dark Stone and $1,000 in loot for the Prospector (he doubles all cash and Dark Stone that are generated by cards) and the Scafford Hat (+1 Initiative per Mutation, max +3) the Outlaw picked up. The Orphan just got knocked around some more (but I think at least he and the Prospector will level up) and I'm really struggling to figure out what to do with him. His personal item lets him re-roll a Melee die once per turn, but his Combat is 1 and he's using a pistol. Oh well, I'm going to have to figure something out or else he's going to get replaced by a Frontier Doctor or Jargono Native who will be making their way to the region shortly...

I don't have them, but I'd think the Undead Gunslinger and Belial are the answer to comments about the game getting easy at higher levels, and may be best left alone until your posse is some kind of elite task force.

Also, armour.

SebastianBludd wrote: That sheet I posted is a modified version of one I snagged off BGG and modified to make the fields larger. All I did was open it in Paint.net and add text and icons (the anvils, hands, arrows and Dark Stone in particular) via layers. My new one is black and white with form fields I added by uploading the pdf to pdfescape.com*, and I now have about 34 lines of text to work with in the Items section alone. I'm hoping I can still paste in the icons because that's the sort of info I like being able to discern at a glance at my character sheet.

Your excel solution sounds like it might be more customizable than a pdf. Can you format the destination cells to have different fonts, sizes, stuff like that? Methods to insert icons would be nice, too.

*Pdfescape.com is amazing. I've used it to delete pages from pdf's and recompile, combine multiple pdfs (only 2 at a time for the free version) into one file, white out sections and add my own text, add form fields, etc. I stopped looking for offline solutions after I discovered it.

Yes, that's all very easy with Excel, easier if you go with VBA on the back end. You can even build a front end with Windows-native dialog/text input boxes if you really wanted to.

JEM wrote: Also, armour.

The Orphan has default Armor 6+, but at 8 Health with 12 Damage incoming you don't have to whiff on very many to go down. At the Church the Orphan got a free Blessing so I opted for Spirit Armor 5+ since the Armor 6+/Spirit Armor 6+ dual Blessing seemed like a waste. And the cost of the Blessings for the Outlaw aren't worth the risk with his Spirit of 1, and none of use have found, nor can we afford, the good Gear right now.

Visiting the Church for Blessings is always a priority for my low-level characters, as is buying a Dark Stone Buckle and having a good supply of Side Bag Tokens. The mission could have turned out worse but I'll take a second look at Enemy stat cards going forward.

Sounds like my glass-cannon Gunslinger better get his ass to church!

So. Many. Tentacles.

On Friday we had one of those Brimstone games that can happen sometimes. We were heading into the mines to Seal the Void Gate. Part of the setup for this mission is that you move the darkness track D3+1 spaces before the first turn. We rolled 4, of course. This triggered two darkness cards, both of which were ambush attacks. On turn one, before moving we were surrounded by eight hungry dead and six tentacles.

Dynamite hilarity ensued again, with the bounce back landing on my character, and hitting four of the five in the group. It at least hit five monsters and killed off three of them, wounding the others. We slogged through that fight, then got ambushed by more tentacles from the nun's void portal.

We got a small break when we drew a corridor for the next tile but in the next room the encounter card resulted in another attack- this time by 10 hungry dead and two corpse piles. The gunslinger and rancher did a good job of popping the piles, the rest of us chopped, bashed, shot and stabbed corpses as best we could, then the next darkness card triggered and we were ambushed again by another three tentacles mid fight.

Peas and rice.

We were making out like bandits with the loot and xp, but it was taking some time to get through the mission. Speaking of bandits, we pulled a bandit attack in the next room, which was the first mission checkpoint- the local preacher's party had been murdered by Infamous Bandits! The Brimstone Devils or something- basically the worst ones. The tentacles in the chest portal must have felt left out, because they sprang out again mid-fight. Somehow we kept surviving these fights- possibly due to all but my character having armour- two of our party are Fused With Rock for a 4+ save, the gunslinger has the Serpent Skull Helmet for a 5+ and the Bandida found that Ned Kelly armour which she passed to the Rancher for the 4+ saves. I was relying on my standard good melee dodge and decent grit recovery for re-rolls.

In the final room, with the void gate we found a Goliath, a Harvester, a Void Sorcerer and three Void hounds. The Goliath's elite ability meant it caused three horror hits (roll three willpower saves at the start of your turn, lose a sanity for each failure) on any heroes on the same or adjacent tiles. I essentially dodge-tanked the Goliath and Harvester, the rancher moved back to a further back tile (range 12 on that hunting rifle really worked for that) while we all tried to figure out how to clear the void hounds so the nun could get to the mission tile to seal the gate. The void sorcerer only hit with the lightning bolt a couple of times, and we eventually took the hounds and harvester down. I axed up the Goliath a fair bit, then the rancher sniped the remainder of its health. The sorcerer was the last to drop, executed by the gunslinger. We got lucky with the portal not spawning additional monsters, and we passed the book around outside of combat so everyone could roll to close the gate.

The ambush attacks were fairly relentless in the game, and added a lot of time to the mission. I know I made over 850xp, usually getting between 300 and 500 for a mission, and the whole thing took almost five hours, but it was also epic, and glorious. We are dragging the nun to the doc's office at the next town, though. See if he can't stitch up that void portal.

Another week, another batch of Brimstone.

Friday's five-player game started with a town visit, catching up from the epic adventure last week. No blacksmith in town, much to the disappointment of the group who were hoping to procure some tomb chests to stash their darkstone shards. There's a lot of gear I'd love to get for my Saloon Girl, but with Strength at only 1, managing weight becomes a real issue (being able to carry only six anvil icons in total). Still, I was able to horse trade with the gunslinger to get him an upgraded pistol, get his old basic shooter, and a dandy Scout's hat for possible future bow usage. This might be a rules hole, I'm not sure- the Saloon Girl starts with a restriction of only being able to use guns with the keyword "light", gaining a level-up upgrade allows the use of any one-handed gun. The rules say nothing about bows... We'll see.

I was going to dump my fire whip until I realized I had read it incorrectly- its attack can be used every turn, not once per fight as I'd thought. A hit with the whip means a guaranteed two wounds to an enemy from the burning marker, regardless of defence so I was happy to keep it.

For the mission, we tried the first from the Frontier Town book. This was our first time using the town map board, but we got the hang of it. The rancher came into his own sniping bandits from rooftops at long range. Short range/melee characters like mine had less to do, though I did get in a fight with one bandit. Still the mission took like 30 minutes in total and everyone was up for running straight to another mine mission immediately.

The mission we rolled was technically a Cynder mission, but it took place entirely in the mines (you wouldn't need Caverns of Cynder to play it). The basic premise is that we are sealing some void cracks with some hand-wavey McGuffin and we were to clear the entire mine. In game terms this meant that every time we found a clue token, we rolled the Peril Die and moved the Posse Depth marker that many spaces. When the marker reached the end, and no monsters were on the board, we would win.

This turned out to be a pretty swift adventure (as most of the ones from the Cynder book seem to have been for us). Hell vermin, harvesters, stranglers and void spiders were the bulk of the enemies, with some slashers as the final creatures. Interestingly there is no Epic Threat draw in this mission, so there was no Big Bad to defeat at the end.

We had time enough for another visit to town. I was able to make over $600 exploiting the saloon, though I did sprout a bitey tail due to too much pocket picking, but it was enough to get me a boned corset for armour. Not a bad haul at all.

Sunday was the two player game, level five. We were up against the Night Terror mission from the City of the Ancients base set. This one turned out to be something of a slog, as it relied on pulling five clue tokens, and we flipped all but one exploration counter. Still, we got a gate into Targa and were able to explore through there. In this game we decided to use the advanced encounter rules, which state that you always use the encounter card listed on the map card, plus whatever is on the token. We almost ran out of Targa Encounters, and re-used two when they came up as map specific ones. That's something of a problem, but I wonder if using regular mine encounters will work alongside the world specific ones.

The big bad in this mission is a brutal terror with all elite abilities plus over double health and immunity to critical hits. We limited it to three abilities because there's no guidance on balancing the threat for different posse sizes. We were able to take it down in two rounds of combat, and during the mission the nun was one-shotting Harvesters with Smite (which bypasses defence). Even with the time, it was a relaxing Sunday afternoon. We watched Tombstone on the TV then finished up with a short town stay- there's very little I want or need for this character except for healing/curing services and there was no Doc or Church at our town.

Man, it sounds like you guys are having so much fun with this game!

Really enjoying these write-ups. This is a great game with so much content to explore. Unfortunately I can't get it to the table as often as I would like right now, life just seems to get in the way at times. I have been trying to get it all painted and streamline the playing process, so when I do get it back on the table it all looks good and moves along nicely. I look forward to reading more of your posts about this one.

I'm procrastinating on painting mine. It would look a lot better without a sea of grey plastic for sure!