Mining for Horrors (A Shadows of Brimstone Topic)

It is a big commitment, thats for sure. I had everything done from the original shipment and was feeling all happy with myself. Then I jumped on the 1.5 shipment option and received a flood of additional items to paint. I had also added the Slugs and a couple of other items, thinking I could keep up with things as they came in, but that i.5 wave totally crashed my plan.

In-between painting I have been trying to streamline the in-game card management as well as trying to settle on character sheet/tracking that works the way I want. I have found a lot of good ideas for the character tracking, but nothing that exactly fits what I was after. Maybe I will have to adjust my expectations. I am not usually into apps for boardgames, but it would sure be excellent to have an official character management app for this game. I have figured out a solution for the cards, but the character side is proving trickier.

I started on printing out cards, then switched to filling out letter sized character sheets. Now one of the players wants cards or card images to use as a reference. FML. I did also take a gamble on some BGG user's android character app, but it looks like some generic form stuff thrown together into an app. It doesn't "do" anything, and you would be just as well using google drive sheets or something like that.

My lookup tables for threats are working, but if I add more monsters that's going to break my D36 tables. Ideally I'd throw everything in some kind of database and use a front-end app. But that's a long term kind of project, and FFP are notoriously clingy on their copyrights, which often seems to be the case with people who's IP is mostly lifted from other sources.

I checked out an Android app as well, but as you said, it didn't really do anything, so it doesn't really save much time over creating something myself. I am using character sheets in Excel. I have a second page with scanned copies of the cards that each character has. It works great during the game, but its a bit of effort to maintain. It at least avoids having a table full of cards for every player. I have all the decks from the game in Vassal, so I use that in game to manage all the decks, monster sheets, initiative, etc.

The lookup table sounds like a good approach, until you hit the limit with new monsters anyway. The Db option sounds like a good idea, but as you stated could be a large project. Vassal fills that gap for me for now, just wish I could incorporate a workable character solution into it. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.

The basic way I deal with character stats is I note each stat twice where necessary, eg health 21(19) which shows total health with and without relevant items (important for Cynder missions if you have to unequip clothing items). The best solution I found for the basic character sheets is to cut up small parts of post-it notes and stick them over the printed stats.

Both of my regular Brimstone games are on hiatus for most of the month so last night I decided to try out a solo mission with a new character. I picked the US Marshal, which is the only class I haven't played or seen played yet. Spectacles were drawn as the personal item which looked handy, offering a re-roll of a hit die each turn.

I shuffled the world cards and rolled the dice and (skipping missions with specific map layouts as my table isn't large enough) I found that Marshal Parker was going to head to the Targa Plateau. So, loaded up with whiskey, dynamite and two revive tokens, it was into the mines.

I thought things were going well when the first new room revealed a gate- short trip to the City of the Ancients! Unfortunately it was guarded by a Void Sorcerer who started hurling lightning bolts. After a couple of rounds where he started chanting instead of attacking, his pet Void Hound showed up as an Ambush Attack- I can't remember how many doubles I rolled on Hold Back the Darkness, but I'm sure I'd run out of tentacle fingers before accounting for them all. I needed to get Parker adjacent to the sorcerer to get past his void shield (which makes him immune to critical hits) but the hound had her pinned in place, so she gave it both barrels. That turned out well, as the sorcerer's chanting finished the next turn with casting a shielding spell at +2 levels, meaning a crit was the only way to do any damage. Parker was able to take half his health, and the rest the next turn, after he fried her, triggering the first revive token.

Loot was some cash and a couple of Dark Stone. Parker peeked through the portal, and got jumped by three Ancient Spiders. Ack! Still, at least she was pretty fresh from reviving, and was able to shoot them down fairly quickly. I needed two clue tokens in Targa itself, but the second just would not reveal itself. Even after an encounter offering the chance of guaranteeing a clue icon on the next token, I couldn't roll a 5 on five dice even with a re-roll. Oh well! On about the ninth tile in I found the end room, and pulled the High Threat that Parker would be facing; in this case a squad of six Trederran Raiders, no doubt looking for the same loot that she was. Ack!

The US Marshal starts with 10 health and 10 sanity, and was down to about 4 and 5 respectively at this point, so I knew that the fight was going to start rough. They ran in, shooting her up really nicely, and surrounding her on five sides. The raiders get to both shoot and melee attack so they're pretty brutal. By the time they were finished in the first round of combat she had one health point left, having wisely spent some grit on re-rolling defense. She also had a stick of dynamite. At this point we could take a moment to talk about the hand-wavy, narrative breaking nature of the revive tokens but where's the fun in that? Maybe it was because the corruption hits from standing near those guys, plus a fresh Growing Dread card mid-fight triggered a mutation that fused her shotgun to her hand, but blowing everything up seemed like the perfect solution to Parker. The stick bounced back (as it almost always does) and exploded by her feet. With one health left she was going down for sure, but so did three of the six raiders, two others taking a handful of wounds. Boom!

Added note! The remaining raiders were shot down in the following round after using the Marshal Badge (+2 shots once per adventure) a grit, and the "shoot again if you kill something" Marshal ability. Mission accomplished!

Final score after one mission:
680xp (level up!)
$450
One snazzy new mutation (shotgun fused to hand, and cannot be unequipped).

The town was overrun by monsters on the second night, but that gave enough time to sell a dark stone, and buy another dynamite and dark stone bullets for the next adventure.

Solo Brimstone is a pretty fragile beast- there are plenty of situations where the wrong dice roll could have ended the mission, or if the Void Sorcerer had just focused on shooting bolts but that's also OK- when we started our two player campaign we failed three missions (carrying the injuries also) before winning one. The magic of Brimstone is not just leveling up a Weird West Bad-ass, it's taking the lumps too- the rubbery, squishy, squamous lumps of mutations, madness and injury that help to define your character as something unique.

I'm not sure how much more I'll play the marshal, because the doctor and Jargono native are arriving next week... Yes, I failed my willpower roll on that post-GenCon stuff.

JEM wrote: I'm not sure how much more I'll play the marshal, because the doctor and Jargono native are arriving next week... Yes, I failed my willpower roll on that post-GenCon stuff.

I can't blame you, both of those classes look great; the Native is what the Indian Scout should have been.

We finally got to town tonight after a lengthy break due to school and sports practices winding up. We're using the Hexcrawl map to keep track of the towns' stats, so after failing the mission in Mine #12, we went to Stone's Crossing and decided it was going to be a Large town. (Of course, we forgot to roll for Dark Stone Corruption after the end of the last mission, but what would a game of Brimstone be without screwing up or omitting a crucial rule or two?) If you go to a Large town each hero automatically adds a Travel Hazard and rolls a D6 to see if they add another one. The Outlaw rolled one Hazard and the Prospector and Orphan each added 2 apiece. The Prospector rolled a Hazard where you take 3 Horror Hits for each Mutation, Dark Stone and Corruption point you have ("Indian Curse"). The Prospector had to absorb 15 Hits and only saved 6, and then he had nightmares at the Camp Site, so before the next mission even started he was down 12 out of his 15 Sanity.

We also got the Sleeping Under the Stars Hazard where you get +1 Sanity or Health (your choice) for each 6+ rolled on a Lore 6+ test. The Outlaw gained 2 Health, the Prospector 1 Sanity (14 to 15), and the Orphan Grit rerolled his to get go from 8 to 9 Health. The worst, however, was the Mimic Beast Hazard where the Orphan, selected randomly, was abducted by a shapeshifting monster and had the crap beaten out of him, taking D6 wounds and losing 75 XP (D6 times 25 XP), meaning he could no longer level up.

We rolled a Mining Town as our town type, and Mining Towns always have a General Store where everything's $25 cheaper than normal. Our other buildings were drawn randomly: Doc, Sheriff, Mutant Quarter, Church, Blacksmith, Gambling Hall and Smuggler's Den. On the first day, "Persecution" was drawn from the new Daily Event Deck. It's potentially bad for anyone with a Mutation, but since we had a Mutant Quarter in town it was canceled. Then, the Outlaw got immediately kicked out of the Smuggler's Den, the Orphan sold his Fallen Gunfighter's Pistol to buy a Dark Stone Pick (to take advantage of his melee-buffing Personal Item) and then couldn't afford the surgery for his chest wound, and the Prospector bought a Tomb Chest at the Blacksmith.

No Town Event was rolled (you still roll for them, even with the Frontier Town expansion, and in the Mining Town you roll 2 dice, either of which can trigger an Event) and we drew the "Just Another Day on the Frontier" card from the Daily Event deck. This card does nothing in normal towns, but in specialty towns you have to roll on the town's D6 event chart and we got the event that reduces the price of Dark Stone from $150 to $100. On our second day in town, not only did the Orphan cure his chest wound (his Initiative went back up to 5 from 4), but he rolled a 6 on the Surgery roll to gain +2 Health, putting him at 11 for a net gain of 3 Health between missions. The Outlaw bought the Dark Stone Buckle (he bought the Dark Stone for $100 apiece for a total cost of $750 for the Buckle) and the Prospector went to the Smuggler's Den and checked out the black market goods (roll 3 dice to see if you get an Artifact or Gear, he ended up with 1 Gear, a Cynder Artifact and Jargono Artifact, all of them underwhelming).

Again we dodged the daily Town Event roll and we elected to leave town. The Prospector leveled up and took the Wheeler Dealer upgrade. It makes all side bag tokens half price, but I mainly took it for the +1 Initiative boost so that when he uses Speed of Greed his Initiative will be 6 rather than 4. He also rolled a 7 for his Upgrade Bonus, giving him +D6 Health (rolled 2 for a total of 19) and +D6 Sanity (rolled a 6 for a total of 21). Next up is a Jargono Mission.

My kids have been begging to get back to Shadows of Brimstone, but school has been in their way. We started an adventure on Thursday night when they had a homework-free evening, and finished up on Saturday Night.

The aged Gunslinger, the sturdy US Marshal, and the young two-gun Bandido enter the mines, intent on stopping the flow of monsters in the area (Seal the Void Gate Scenario).

They enter the cave, finding a strange Prospector. He ends up being harmless and helpful, pointing out some Darkstone to the Bandido. There's also a wall with tracks leading to it, which we pass by, and head out the south Entrance into a Railway Tunnel. In the tunnel, we're immediately Ambushed by Void Spiders and Stranglers. The party handles them with fairly minor damage, and they turn out to be hiding a cache of weapons. The Marshal finds a Void Pistol, and the Bandido finds a Hunting Rifle.

Pressing on south, we enter the mine lift. It's filled with bones, so many that they collapse and nearly suffocate us as we run. We elect to back off and follow the rails the other direction (more table space that direction...). The tunnel splits, and as it widens, we run into a room jam-packed with more Void Spiders and Stranglers, the maximum of each. (Clue token, which is overridden in this scenario). The Quickdrawing Gunslinger drops a Strangler and two spiders immediately, but then the void spiders swarm us. The void spiders clog up the hall, and prevent the Stranglers from getting close on Turn 1. We mostly shrug off the spider bites, and everyone pitches in to blast them down aided by the Marshal's Badge for extra shots. The Stranglers succeed it getting some hits on the Marshal, even through his Defense. Turn 2, the Marshal is being swarmed by two Stranglers, the Bandido has some left-over spiders on him, and the tide is turning. We dispatch the last of the attack, find gold and darkstone littered in the hallway, as well as the remains of the previous party and The Book, a critical part of the adventure.

Heading south, we peer down a long tunnel, when a Night Terror ambushes us. (Darkness card draw) Gunslinger lights it up with quickdraw, doing some damage. The Night Terror rushes the gunslinger, misses its attacks, gets mowed down from behind by the rest of the party.

At this point we're getting pretty deep into the mine, and haven't been doing very well on Clue tokens. The Darkness track is also getting hairy. "Time to turn around, I thought I saw something... ", and we decide to go use the Tracks in the Dust encounter to force a clue out.

We head back towards the first room, triggering a Suffocating Mist event along the way, which is luckily in the Rail Tunnel, not the room with the tracks. We take turns bashing down the wall, to discover the Big Room, with the gate at the far end.

The gate is guarded by three Night Terrors (out of a D3) and a Goliath. Sanity starts dropping...

The Marshal backs out of the hallway to the edge of his range, then shoots a Night Terror with his void pistol, wounding it. He pulls off a massive roll to resist most of the 9 Horror coming his way. Bandido tries a long-range snipe with the hunting rifle and whiffs.

The Night Terrors come at us but are just short on movement, Goliath shoves one out of the way to get into the hall (luckily)

Gunslinger takes down the wounded night terror with a critical hit, damages another. Marshal pings it twice with the void pistol but can't get past the Terror's defense. It rushes the Marshal, but the Bandido blasts away at the now damaged Terror, leaving it within an inch of its life (1HP).

Gunslinger takes a heavy Sanity loss (4 out of 5), steps back and unleashes hell. A two-gun attack on the Goliath nets *six* hits expending three remaining Dead-eye shots, plus an Amulet of Heinghal adding five damage. Two-thirds of the Goliath's health disappears.

The Marshal has a barely-moving Night Terror in front of him, and a Goliath bearing down. He drops the Void pistol in favor of the shotgun. Rolls a complete whiff. The Marshall is staying surprisingly sane in all this craziness, his Willpower dice are holding strong. The Night terror roughs him up for 8 damage, but he shrugs off most of it.

The Bandido blasts away at the Goliath, damaging it further, but then it gets close enough to sweep us all with a tentacles attack. The Gunslinger takes the brunt of it, taking 7 wounds from 9 damage, but is still standing with 1HP. Marshal resists almost all the damage, Bandido takes 3. The Bandido is getting dangerously low in Sanity, and chugs some liquid courage.

The Gunslinger is ready to blast the Goliath back into another dimension, but the Goliath focuses the full horror of the Void onto the Gunslinger's mind, and he collapses after an awful Willpower roll on the Horror hits. KOed with madness. (out of grit, no whiskey)

The Marshal sees the Gunslinger go down, and blasts the wounded Night Terror with the shotgun. Critical hit, it splatters and he aims the other barrel into the Goliath and fires, killing it. The bandido takes on the remaining Night Terror (who can finally get in the room), while the Marshal starts reading from The Book to close the gate.

Success, and the heroes ride on. The Gunslinger is still warped by the Goliath's madness, and knows it's out there in the Void waiting for revenge (rolled an It's Coming For YOU! madness effect).

The heroes netted a ton of Darkstone in this adventure (the Bandido left the mine with 8), and correspondingly took a lot of Corruption. The Marshal lost his nose, while the Bandido grew a second head. The Mutation table was possibly the biggest highlight of the night for my kids. It was getting late already, so town will have to wait. At least the town is still standing, I suppose...

I had a little time to do some more updates to the Vassal mod I am using for Brimstone. I am still trying to come up with a functional character management board inside the Vassal module, but I haven't come up with anything I like just yet. I do have all the various cards, monster sheets, sheets with other details, towns, etc. all included and an initiative tracker though. I made individual modules for each of the add-ons, so they can be enabled/disabled depending on what you have.

I wish I had separated out the two core boxes as different modules instead of including them in the base "main" module, but at this point I don't know if I have the motivation to backtrack and change it. Its not a huge deal, but it does have an impact when adding new stuff to the system and after learning a bit more, I would do it differently if I were to start over (probably never happen). I have been trying to do a little cleanup work on it before Trederra arrives as I expect that will be a time sink to get all of that scanned and added given the amount of content included.

I have no idea how (or if) I can embed an image here? So I ave attached a couple screen grabs if anyone is interested in taking a look.

After a few weeks hiatus, it was Brimstone Time with two sessions this weekend.

Friday's group was the five player, level three posse. The first random mission we picked was from Caverns of Cynder- the fixed map with the bridge in the middle, and monsters spawning and trying to escape the map. Each time you kill three monsters (or one large monster) you move the posse marker down. When you roll to Hold Back the Darkness, if the roll is equal or higher than the current posse level marker (which starts at 15 and lowers one point at a time), you stop the spawns, and just kill what's left.
We had some cool monsters on the initial spawn- slasher, 12 void spiders, void sorcerer and void hound. Those were all we would see, however, because killing all the spiders dropped our posse marker to 11 and we rolled 6+5 on the next turn. We decided to go straight into another mission after that somewhat brief encounter.

We picked a random mission and got "Night of the Dead" from the Swamps of Death set. This meant that basically all of the enemies we'd be facing would be Hungry Dead and Corpse piles. We'd have to kill 12 corpse piles and clear the board to win the game. I'm not a huge fan of this mission, because of the lack of variety in the monster encounters (though the randomized elite abilities did change up the tactics a little). Our nun was making good use of the Weaken sermon to help us get past the toughness on many of the undead, and the rancher was doing a good job of sniping corpse piles from afar. The game did run down to the final turn- we were close to losing on time when one player ran ahead during a fight to trigger what would be the final room (we were at 11/12 corpse piles, and there's always at least one per room). The rancher was last to go and took out the final enemy on the board. One more failed HBtD roll and we would have lost.

Currently I'm struggling with a gear set for my Saloon Girl. I actually pulled the cavalry sabre which, on my other character is an excellent weapon, but it doesn't quite gel with the rest of what I have on this one. Pickaxe and Fire Whip give me four dice to roll with a chance of a burning marker. Sabre & pistol would still give only four dice, but with no fire marker option. If I can find a three shot pistol and darkstone bullets that will change the equation. The strength limit hurts also (1 strength character), though I was finally able to ease that problem with a +1 Str by taking a new level track skill. We didn't go to town after that, because it was getting late at that point, so we'll pick up there on Friday. One thing we did at the end was let the nun player change his spec from Redemptionist to Firebrand, because the shotgun was not getting much done, and he's focused more on casting judgements.

Sunday was the two-player, level five game. It was nice to settle back with these characters. Now they are only one level above the friday posse, but they feel more lived in, more experienced characters. The big posse group feel kind of more like cyphers at this point. Naming characters is a key element of immersion, I think. So the plucky duo descended into the Temple of Dread. We had terrible luck with the HBtD rolls, pushing through half the track pretty quickly. We did manage to find the swamps in the first room which helped, and then the temple itself two rooms later. So that relieved the pressure from the timer, and we were mostly dealing with brutal ambushes. Again, at this level it was a case of getting hit for 15+ points of damage in the first round, then killing everything in the next. A very swingy combat situation now. final "boss" was three hell vermin*, which were taken out pretty quickly.

At town, Jessica the nun finally had enough to buy the Spirit Bow from the Indian Trading Post which is a pretty fantastic weapon. 10 range, shots equal to spirit, (so, six) and critical on a 5/6 roll. One fluke roll on the location chart some sessions ago really changed the whole story for the character. The kind of game driven narrative that I really enjoy in games like this. Patsy the Bounty Hunter (ex-lawman, but you can't wear two badges) got a horse with some fancy horseshoes to help us with travel event rolls.

I also opened my Trederra box again and wept at the amount of models to put together. They're still on the sprues for now.

I love reading all of these posts. I'm going to make it my goal to finally crack open my City of Ancients base set this weekend and get it all glued, ready to go. Really excited to try this game.

Friday's session was a weird one, but maybe it turned out alright. We had to go to town first, so we did that. With some horse trading for items, shopping lists and whatnot. We went for a pure random mission again, and pulled the big Cynder mission about the Void Seals. In this mission you can choose the size you want- One, two or three seals to close (which is basically a Lore 5+ test while stood next to them). The exploration tokens are stacked in sets of three with a guaranteed clue icon in each stack, and you start on a crossroads tile- the idea being that you head down each branch to the seal and close it. The weird thing is, there were no mission based monster attacks at all. At all. The only fight we had was from an Ambush Attack exploration token, which caused a wandering threat (Elite Trederran Raiders) which we killed in two rounds of combat. So we saved the world, mostly by running around. I read the page three times but maybe I was blind and missed something- I'd expected to see a threat at each void seal but I couldn't find one. The last Cynder mission we did, we cleared the game in two turns, so it's certainly the option for a fast session.

We went back to town after that. I upgraded Lili Von Shtupp's boned corset to a darkstone corset and bought a Scout Bow (Thanks, Scout Hat!). Someone had pulled a second Fire Whip from Cynder and I was tempted to go Double Whip but decided against it in the end because the group needed the money more. Also a doppelganger ate my horse on the way to town, which was pretty distressing. Mother O'Malley'O'connell'O'Carrell'O'Reilly'O'Brien'O'Sullivan is aiming at the book of Armageddon since her switch to Firebrand Preacher (I don't think there are rules for switching your basic character class, but to hell with rules). The other three players didn't name their characters so I'm going to refer to them as Rancher Fred, Bandida Velma and Gunslinger Daphne.

I accomplished my goal of getting all of the minis glued together and ready to go over the weekend. Now I just have to digest the rules and I'll hopefully be diving into the mines later on this week. Very excited to give this one a whirl.

nm (posted in wrong thread)

Alright I've been going through the rulebook little by little each night. Hopefully I have it all internalized and can solo a game over the weekend.

Couple of questions though:

1) If one were to theoretically just play this as a one shot instead of a campaign, what would need to be done? Are there certain cards that need to be removed (stuff that only gives XP/Gold)? Just curious, because I'm not going to always want to play this as a full blown campaign and I'm curious how much of a pain in the ass it would be to one shot.

2) How important is it to get the other Base game? I've currently got City of Ancients but I'm thinking about adding Swamps to the game for more heroes and enemies. Or does it make more sense to pick up an expansion like Cynder, with a couple of new enemy packs?

3) Do you buy any of the supplements that are offered on FFP's webstore? Any ESSENTIALLY stuff that one should know about?

Thanks!

Egg Shen wrote: 1) If one were to theoretically just play this as a one shot instead of a campaign, what would need to be done? Are there certain cards that need to be removed (stuff that only gives XP/Gold)? Just curious, because I'm not going to always want to play this as a full blown campaign and I'm curious how much of a pain in the ass it would be to one shot.

If I were doing a one shot with new players, I'd let everyone start their character at Level 2 or 3 where they get to roll on the 2D6 chart for improvements and choose three character upgrades. Then I'd let them have some random Gear - draw two, pick one, or draw one per hero and everyone decides who gets what, something like that - to play around with. As for the Loot cards during the game, yes, they'd be useless but it's still a fun part of the game. Skipping the Loot phase would streamline things but you'd also be missing out on a chance for people to draw additional Gear or Artifacts.

Egg Shen wrote: 2) How important is it to get the other Base game? I've currently got City of Ancients but I'm thinking about adding Swamps to the game for more heroes and enemies. Or does it make more sense to pick up an expansion like Cynder, with a couple of new enemy packs?

I would prioritize the second base game and/or enemy packs over Cynder, IMO. Cynder's kind of light on content and the base game has the advantage of more mine tiles (which you'll use more often than Cynder's tiles) and additional character classes. Swamps has the Preacher which, as Brimstone's resident "mage" character, is my favorite class. Plus you get more enemy types whereas Cynder only comes with Lava Men and tokens to represent alternate versions of a couple of the Swamps enemies ( Swamps Zombies are ghosts in Cynder, and Swamps Hell Bats are Lava Bats in Cynder).

FFP was smart about how they did some of the enemy packs where there is built-in variety within the packs, resulting in pretty decent value. Those packs are: Undead Outlaw gang (draw a card when they appear to see which gang they belong to), Serpentmen of Jargono (draw a card when they appear to see which of six tribes they belong to) and Masters of the Void (Void Hounds, and Void Sorcerers that cast different spells from a spell deck).

The Masters of the Void go with City of the Ancients (I don't remember if they show up in Targa, though), the Serpentmen have Threat cards for Jargono, and the Undead Outlaw Gang is restricted to the mines, IIRC. The Trederran Raiders also might be a good buy as they have Threat cards for every world, so you might see them anywhere.

Egg Shen wrote: 3) Do you buy any of the supplements that are offered on FFP's webstore? Any ESSENTIALLY stuff that one should know about?

Most of the webstore-only supplements are cards that can add to your decks. If you're on a budget, I'd stick with the Artifacts for whichever other worlds you own. I have everything because I like the variety, but I wouldn't classify most of them as essential. The only one I'd say to get for certain would be the Jargono Artifacts because the ones that come with the core set are pretty underwhelming.