January Update: The Campaigns Continue, Christmas Party, Media Page Updates

Table of Contents

Overview

Well, it’s been almost 3 months since our last update and we’ve been pretty busy. In our D&D Forgotten Realms campaign Storm King’s Thunder, we have started to touch upon the edge of war with the Giants when we aren’t busy leaving destruction in the wake of every town we visit.

In our D20 Modern Running Alive game, the player survivors are starting to piece together the cause of the mysterious apocalypse as we fight for survival against zombies, genocidal hillbillies, nuclear radiation, cannibals, and the upcoming weather conditions of winter.

The TableTop Guild Christmas Party was a resounding success as everyone gathered to feast and celebrate the season at local pub Monk’s Cellar. After feeding ourselves and running up large bar tabs, the group moved on finish up the night with a session of our 5E game as we took on an evil green dragon in the ruins of an ancient elvish city.

Many of our group members have continued to hobby out or discover usable models for our games. Shout out to Brin in particular, as he has been a workhorse for the last few weeks, finding and painting dozens of models.

Our friends at Hobby Badger have moved into a new, larger location. For those interested in visiting, feel free to check out the Hobby Badger Facebook page.

Finally, In the coming days I will also be doing a much revamp of our Media page. More details can been seen below.

Storm King’s Thunder

The Triboar Explorer Corp have continued their adventures, facing road bandits, sieges by Giants, bridge politics, detective work, and attempts to infiltrate flying citadels in a high stakes heist. For more details, make sure to take a look at the game notes.

The Triboar Explorer Corp come upon a group of distressed traders whose cart has broken down.

It turns out the traders are actually thieves, and physical conflict erupts. We defeat them and move on to Olostin’s Hold.

Olostin’s Hold is in trouble as a group of Hill Giants siege the city.

The Giants throw rocks at the city walls.

Ballistae are brought in to take down the Giants, who don’t like that and advance towards the city walls.

The guard tower is destroyed, creating a bridge into the city. The Giants advance.

The Giants are finally defeated as the city defenders come together.

After leaving Olostin’s Hold a better place, the Triboar Explorer Corp move on to the city of Everlund, where they are ambushed the moment they arrive in the city by cloaked figures in an alleyway.

They shoot arrows at us from the roof as our adventurers fight back and call for help from the guards.

After we establish ourselves in the city of Everlund, we are sent by our local Harper’s contact via teleport to the ancient elvish ruin of Myth Drannor to battle a domineering green dragon.

After a fight for survival, we prevail and return victorious with a small dragon’s hoard. Everyone seemed to want to climb onto the dragon’s back during the fight.

We had to do some detective work to discover the culprits behind a recent vault theft. During the course of the night in which we were playing, the power at Grant’s place went out due to heavy storms.

It’s nice to play by candle-light once in a while.

We return to Everlund to embroil ourselves in the local politics of bridge building and the taxation. Eventually we decide to build a bridge in the middle of the night and make it appear like divine intervention.

Andy made a 3D model of our attempt at a bridge.

We enter the flying citadel of the Cloud Giants to take back the stolen items from the Harper’s vault.

Sometimes staring at a map for too long is not a good thing. ?

Running Alive

Times have been tough for our group of apocalyptic survivors. Being chased from their home by a genocidal paramilitary group with a combat helicopter, everyone tries to find new roots in Rio Linda in a new compound next to Andy’s brother’s house. We have been able to survive as a group for 75 days, but not everyone in our group has made it. For more details of our adventures, make sure to take a look at our game notes.

Later, we raid AirGas to gain crucial chemical supplies to create explosives and propane to fuel our heavy machinery.

We almost immediately find ourselves surrounded by zombies.

We get swarmed and desperately defend ourselves against bites.

We start a convoy to Beale Airforce Base in a retaliatory raid to save captured relatives and get revenge against the Beale Raiders.

We breach the on-base commissary, where our family and friends are being held. We have our allies the McDougals right behind us.

Firefights break out almost immediately as we fan out from room to room in cover, taking shots at the savage paramilitary group that has taken residence on Beale Air Force Base.

We discover the hostages in this room, but there are enemy soldiers inside.

They continue to fire, killing a few of the McDougal clan.

We free the cage full of prisoners before making a getaway.

We assault the Beale Raider base one final time before deciding to leave the area permanently.

After settling down in Rio Linda at GoatHub, we discover an airplane repair professional named Miles holed up in a fortified pile of debris on the McClellan Air Force runway. We also discover a working Cessna airplane.

The Smokers, a local gang, arrive in a convey of trouble. We refuse to pay their “taxes”, and start lobbing tear gas and grenades at their vehicles.

The Smokers’ vehicles break down as their gunners fan out, taking shots at GoatHub.

Smokers start sneaking down our side street.

Vehicles explode as the firefight intensifies.

The tear gas grows to cover the whole Smoker convoy. Thankfully, most do not have gas masks.

Patrick picks off one of the few remaining Smokers from the rooftop in a prone position.

TableTop Guild Christmas Party

Everyone got together to celebrate the season by having food, drinks, and gift exchanges at the Monk’s cellar. We then did what we do when we get together: play games!

We played the first half of the game in the bar.

We eventually ended up finishing the game over at Andy’s house.

Hobbying

Many of the TableTop Guild members paint or seek out miniatures to use in our games. Check them out!

While strictly not a miniature, Andy’s new fully functional Ghostbusters backpack is awesome and deserves a mention. It makes noises and everything.

Hobby Badger New Location

Anthony’s gaming store has moved locations. The transformation has been amazing. For more information, head over to the Hobby Badger Facebook page.

Congrats Anthony on the new location and great job decorating it!

Revamp of Media Page

I’m going to be revamping our Media page in upcoming days since it’s in dire need of some changes. Some of these changes include:

Direct Links to Source Books
I know that most of us have digital copies of many of the source books. I personally have a fairly large collection, and I know Brett has a large dropbox with resources for many of our play systems. Our server currently has 20GB of free of space that we are under utilizing and I figure we might as well host some of this ourselves. The current rulesets I plan to make available for download:

5E D&D
D20 Modern
Star Wars

If you want other systems available for public download, let me know in the Discord thread I plan to open in the coming days to gather opinions.

Personal Creations
I’m going to include an area for personal creations, such as art, 3D modelling of characters or items that we interact with in-game, etc. We have a talented group of people and sometimes we post really awesome stuff in Discord or FaceBook that eventually just gets buried over time in other posts. I want to create an area where we can sort of consolidate these creative works for posterity.

Any other ideas are more than welcome.

Closing Remarks

As always, if you are interested in creating posts or content for the TableTopGuild.com website, feel free to contact me (Patrick) and I can hand out a login. Also, don’t forget to click ‘Going’ to the D&D Movie event coming up in a few weeks if you plan to go. It looks to be at least mediocre – we can only cross our fingers it’s better than the majority of gaming movies.