I finally got to finish the Pirates of the Spanish Main one-sheet “Dead Men Tell No Tales” that I've been running for the kids.

E.A. and L.B. were both here for this one, so the roster was:

• T.A. playing Isaiah Kestrel, Captain of the Lady Faire
• E.A. playing Alice Pettigrew
• M.A. playing Scarred Jack
• L.B. playing Phelicity Gujon

Because we've had to split the adventure up over three sessions, and they'd finished the last one the skeletons, and I wanted a big start to this session, I told the kids their PCs had been arguing about what to do with the treasure and hanged lady for about an hour. They spent a few minutes talking about it, and then I had them make Notice rolls to avoid being surprised by the skeletons, reanimated after an hour. They picked up a few wounds in the fight, but managed to finish the skeletons off. T.A.'s bad luck with initiative cards and low rolls continued, though not as badly as before.

They then tried to figure out how they could free themselves of the curse and the skeletons, and decided the lady needed buried, which they proceeded to do, right outside the mine entrance. I had them make Strength roles to avoid becoming Fatigued, which a couple of the characters failed. And that finished out another hour, and a few minutes later the skeletons attacked again. M.A. failed Scarred Jack's Notice roll, so he didn't get dealt in the round, and got hit by the one of the skeletons. T.A. forgot to have Isaiah boast the first round, and ended up owing me a bennie. Eventually they killed the skeletons again, and decided, since the curse obviously hadn't been lifted, that they needed to bury the hanged lady in a cemetery at the church in town. Meanwhile, the weather was working up to a storm.

So, they dug the lady up, but in doing so T.A. and L.B. failed enough Strength rolls to fall unconscious (remember that the curse has been aging them rapidly), and they knew if they left the unconscious characters there they would be killed when the skeletons reanimated, so M.A. and E.A. had Jack and Alice pile the hanged lady's body on Isaiah and dragged them to the town. Unfortunately, part way through digging the new grave, E.A. failed Alice's Strength roll and fell unconscious. Jack was able to get her most of the way out of the grave, and finished burying the hanged lady with the six skeletons only 20 yards away and the zombie pirate captain only 60 yards away. (Apparently, the zombie pirate captain had been chasing them for days across the bottom of the sea). Unfortunately for our heroes, the rest of the crew, who'd been left on the sloop offshore, picked this moment to come ashore. Upon seeing the sorry state of their captain and officers (and failing their Spirit rolls, they were overcome by greed, whacked Jack on the head with the shovels, stole the map from their unconscious captain, and set off for the treasure.

The PCs awoke to a hurricane (which I'd earlier rolled using my weather die from Flying Buffalo), and found shelter in the church crypts. I actually wanted to end the adventure there, but the kids insisted we continue.

After a few days the weather finally subsided and they immediately headed back to the mine to look for the treasure. It was gone, except for a bent half-farthing piece that had been overlooked in a crack in the floor. At this point they were all suffering from Fatigue from not eating or drinking for days, and so they went back to the town to search for water. When T.A. failed a roll to avoid Fatigue, I ruled he'd gone delirious, wandered out on the dock, and falling into the water, to be washed out into the bay. L.B. had Phelicity swim out to save him, but by the time she reached him T.A. had failed his swimming roll and was drowning. Phelicity swam down and brought him to the surface and back to shore, but he had died. Luckily, M.A. tried to resuscitate, and failing the first roll spent a bennie (the last bennie among the group) to reroll, and aced well enough to overcome the –4 penalty from drowning and the –2 penalty from being untrained in Healing, and saved Isaiah.

At this point I pointed out Isaiah's consistent bad luck, loosing the treasure, loosing his ship, and Jack's comparative good luck, and like proper little pirates they voted Isaiah out as captain and Jack in. After that Jack climbed some palm trees and found some weird fruit so they could eat. I decided that the island had no living creatures at all, due to the curse, but that they could find enough edible plants so they wouldn't starve for the weeks it would take while they built a small boat (with both oars and a sail) from timber scavenged from the houses in the village to take them off the island to begin their search for their traitorous crew and their treasure.

And that's were we left them.

Since this actually ran pretty long, once all sessions were considered, I gave them all 5 XP. Not wanting T.A. to be too discouraged, I let him trade his “Captain” edge in for something else. I didn't let him buy off his “Cocky” Hindrance, though. Judging by everybody's reactions, I've got a Pirates of the Spanish Main campaign to run now. I can already see how to work the “Smuggler's Song” one-sheet in as the next adventure.

I ran another session using the the Pirates of the Spanish Main one-sheet “Dead Men Tell No Tales” with the kids.

E.A. couldn't attend, but L.B. could, so she played Phillipe Gujon and Alice Pettigrew, and out of deference to her dislike of playing “boys”, it was revealed that “Phillipe” was actually “Phelicity”!

So, the roster was:

• T.A. playing Isaiah Kestrel, Captain of the Lady Faire
• M.A. playing Scarred Jack
• L.B. playing (as her main character) Phelicity Gujon and (as her secondary character) Alice Pettigrew

We picked up a couple of days from the island on the map. Not liking the look of the decayed dock, they anchored offshore and left the crew to guard the sloop. On shore they found everybody 50 years dead. They easily found the mine, ignored the skeletons wrapped in pirate flags, and were shocked to find the lady hanging above the treasure in the depths of the mines. And of course, they were then attacked by the six skeletons wrapped in pirate flags.

T.A. was plagued by poor initiative card draws and low rolls, and earned the unhappy nickname “Captain Slowpants”, and eventually ended up “Captain Slow-anything”, much to his dismay. Eventually, however, they managed to kill the skeletons, and that's where the game ended. (We only had a short time to play.)

Some of the kids and I played through about half of the Pirates of the Spanish Main Savage Worlds one-sheet “Dead Men Tell No Tales” this afternoon and evening, before and after supper. This is one of the free downloads Pinnacle Entertainment Group did for the game.

The roster was:

• T.A. playing Isaiah Kestrel
• E.A. playing Alice Pettigrew and Phillipe Gujon
• M.A. played Scarred Jack

They found the dying pirate with the chest manacled to his foot, and after he died opened the chest and found the treasure map, and decided to head for the island. Along the way they found and boarded the decaying pirate ship, from which they deduced had come the dying pirate. They had a hard time with the zombie pirate captain wildcard, who had the luck of the initiative most of the time, ending up with the Joker three times, and the high card of the draw most of the rest of the time. The zombie wildcard incapacitated Alice with one blow that ended up doing five wounds at a whack, and things were looking dire. However, the zombie pirate captain's luck with the iniative cards finally left him However, E.A., rolling for the crew extras who showed up after hearing Alice scream as she went down, aced an attack roll, then aced all three of the damage dice, and then aced at least one of the rerolls, putting the wildcard down decisively. After that M.A. had Scarred Jack try an untrained Healing roll and aced it big time, so most of Alice's wounds got healed and M.A. wants Jack to learn Healing for real now, which is neat. After they returned to their ship the other ship collapsed and sank. They decided to continue to follow the treasure map, even though a storm came up. Alice was unconscious for four days. After couple of days it was obvious that they and their ship were suffering from the curse, and that's were we had to leave the game.

Lots of fun.

I ran the first part of the Savage Wolds fantasy one-sheet “Tomb of Terror” for the kids after we got done with farm work.

Second, I ran “The Eternal Nazi”, a Savage Worlds pulp one-sheet for them. Like many of the one-sheets, it didn't come with a map, so I made one a couple of nights before using printable PDF tiles. The kids had fun, but I can see why Kator the Ape Boy wasn't in the most recent pregenerated pulp characters download intended for use with “The Eternal Nazi”: as the sole melee-only character he was at a serious disadvantage.

I think this was actually the first time I've used modern weapons in Savage Worlds. It went ok, although I did forget each shot on auto-fire counts as three bullets expended. I think I'll add some grenades to the PCs gear the next time I run it, suggest the PCs other than Buck pick up some of the germain submachine guns, and up the number of extras with the big bad.

I was trying out some new technology (for me): using printable PDF tiles from Skeleton Key Games (SKG) for the battle mats. I especially like the SKG tiles for a couple of reasons. First, the tile graphics in the PDF files can be easily extracted (just right-click and choose copy) and munged to produce custom tiles. Secondly, the tile sets include thumbnail catalogs of the tiles, which can easily be extracted and added to the tilesets of programs like DungeonForge. This makes it a lot easier to design the map layouts to begin with (virtual tile flipping replaces physical tile flipping) and makes it easy to produce small scale maps for reference for laying out the tiles on the table by exporting the maps from DungeonForge as .PNG files and adding labels with the tile numbers with the GIMP. (This is especially useful when using wilderness tiles!) On the printed tiles I wrote the tile number on the back, again to make things easier when laying them out on the table.

Overall the tiles worked pretty well. The worst problem was that the tiles tended to curve up at the edges, a common problem with cardstock printed on inkjet printers: as the large surface area of ink dries the edges curl up. This didn't prevent their use, and curling them in the opposite direction before laying them out helped, but I think I'll try laminating them and see if that helps. My first map designs using the tiles were not as interesting as I wanted, but the tiles themselves looked good and worked pretty well. The kids occasionally dislodged the tiles a little, but that was easily fixed, and once while dealing initiative cards I accidently slide one under the tiles, which got a laugh.

After we played I redesigned the maps to give a more dynamic environment, since I'm planning on running “The Eternal Nazi” for another other gaming group. I got a couple more of the SKG sets, and used GIMP to make three custom tiles. This let me make a much more interesting environment. Part of the problem I had with designing the map in the first place was inexperience with the tiles, but part was because the tile sets I had were heavily slanted towards fantasy, and I was constructing something more out of the “lost race” pulp adventure stories, set in the 1940s.

One thing that I'd like to see is a bunch of tiles with items that could be dropped on top of other tiles, like piles of metal barrels and so forth.

DungeonForge has a couple of annoying bugs, but it's free and works well enough, as long as I remember to save often and not put tiles against the edges of the map.

On Sunday we continuing the weekend of gaming, with L.B., D.B., T.A., E.A., and M.A. attending again.