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Big Fish D&D: The Time We Joined the Crew of The Ship of Horror (Part 2)

by keith on July 10, 2019 at 11:26 am

Posted In: Blogs, Gaming, Homepage, Jon, Jon's Junk, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

Where our heroes are still in the goth infused majesty of to 1991 when vampires were the absolute coolest. They are on a ghost ship, not any ghost ship: The Ship of Horrors.

An adventure starring Jaxxo the Lizardfolk Monk, Jim Clocks the Half-Aquatic Elf Rogue, Brubax the Goliath Barbarian, Tidus the Triton Cleric and L’Eau D’ur the Genasi Warlock.

I’m in black and Jon (the DM) is in blue.

If this is your first time checking out our little D&D Adventure Blog, you might want to check out this post that explains the setup and format of the game. You can check out all “Big Fish” content on this nifty landing page. And if you’re enjoying our little GameTale Adventure Blog, please tell your friends on whatever platform you interact with them. If you think Jon and I are at all entertaining please consider checking out the geek-centric podcast we do every two weeks “9ES” right here.

How To Get Off The Ship of Horror

One of the issues that creeps up in this game is the fact that this group has faced a lot of nonsense scenarios and come out of them relatively unscathed. The Expedition to Barrier Peaks alone would be enough for most parties to become unflappable heroes. Throw in being trapped in The Underdark, sailing through space in SpellJammer and occasionally squaring off against high level Demons and Beholders and you have a crew that has absolutely no problem with marching up to the Captain and telling him a thing or two.

It takes a lot to phase this group of adventurers.

I’m guessing the fact that Jon didn’t want to drag this module out for more than two sessions helped a little two with the pace of discovery.

Time for lightning round part 2, as before Jon, your comments are a treasure.

We basically mean mug the Captain into revealing that he used to ferry corpses for the Grabben Family for a lich
- Actually not a lich. Boring old Necromancer. Would have been great to tie his background into Grabben Island and had a few clues about him to earn there.
When he suddenly developed a conscience, the Captain threw the corpses overboard and tried to break his deal with the family, thereby invoking the wrath and curse of a lich.
The ghosts want their bodies laid to rest, so we need to find their bodies under the ocean and bring them back to Grabben Island to bury them.
Again, this would probably be pretty tricky but we’ve all got swim speeds and some of us straight up breathe under water.
The lady and Madeline want to be buried, but Jacob wants vengeance.
- Tidus decides to give into the demand and accepts a creepy ghost hug.
- Jacob is now a set of glowing eyes in a sack that Tidus carries and to try to reason with him is to possibly be consumed by the darkness of the wraith.
  - Man I hope none of this comes back to mess with Tidus later.
  - I just liked the imagery from Hellboy, obvs, plus I had some lingering desire to mess with Eric after letting the sword go.
Superior Ranger and tracking abilities allow us to nope the hell out of encounters with:
- A Monstrous Sea-Star
- Some Vodyanoi, aka, Aquatic Umberhulks.
The heroes head to Grabben Island to bury the bodies and track down the lich that started all this nonsense.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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└ Tags: anne brown, anne k brown, big fish, big fish dnd, dnd adventure blog, dungeons and dragons, game tale, gametales, montreal geek, ship of horror, ship of horror playthrough, ship of horror ravenloft, ship of horrors, ship of horrors play, ship of horrors ravenloft

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Big Fish D&D: The Time We Joined The Crew of The Ship of Horror (Part 1)

by keith on June 26, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Posted In: Homepage, Jon, Jon's Junk, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

Where our heroes travel back in time to 1991 when TSR was frantically trying to get all grimdark on our asses to compete with Vampire: The Masquerade.

As Jon has done several times before, our heroes find themselves stuck in an old school D&D module from the past. This time around they unwittingly join the crew of The Ship of Horror.

I think there was some kind of nostalgia here for you?

Very much so. The first major campaign I ran was a 2nd edition Ravenloft game, and its 4th chapter was the Ship of Horror. Took most of highschool, started with 2 players and grew to 4. There were 6 adventures, from level 1 to 13 or so. If for some inexplicable reason you could survive the end of Ship of Horror, that is.

An adventure starring Jaxxo the Lizardfolk Monk, Jim Clocks the Half-Aquatic Elf Rogue, Brubax the Goliath Barbarian, Tidus the Triton Cleric and L’Eau D’ur the Genasi Warlock.

I’m in black and Jon (the DM) is in blue.

Point of order, in my brief little dive into the history of this module I found that it was written by Anne K. Brown. A few things here. One, big props to her for being a lady in what was certainly a male dominated industry in the late 80s and early 90s and going from Assistant Editor of Dragon Magazine to designing modules in like a couple of months. Two, she was apparently a big fan of Greyhawk but wrote for Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance so that is cool. In fact, Ship of Horror was the first module supporting Ravenloft which I am assuming is kind of a big deal and shows that the company had a lot of faith in her. Three, she had a bit of a renaissance in the 2000s as an author of non-fiction aimed at middle-school aged kids. Wait, what? That’s right, you can read Anne K. Brown’s take on the lives of Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, Roger Federer or her takes on “Staying Safe Online” and “Migraines”. Weird.

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, let’s get started. We actually took two sessions to get through this little adventure, but I seriously took like 20 little pages of notes. That said, we’re going to be skipping through some of the narrative and just focusing only on the best bits. You’ll thank me later.

Dealing with Those Githyanki

The session started off with us onboard The Clepsydra, the fast little sloop owned by Jim Clocks. We were on our way to a treasure island, which in fact will be our next adventure. While stopped at a port city, the Ne’er Do Well Cads are pulled away from the important business of drinking by the sounds of a ruckus in the town square.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on our little foray into Spelljammer, you might remember that in the very first adventure we kind of happened upon a +3 Vorpal Sword that has since been wielded by our Cleric, Tidus. Small problem: the sword belonged to someone called The Lich Queen and every so often we are kind of ambushed by Red Dragons and Githyanki. I think this session marked the third such encounter.

But anyways it wasn’t an encounter, Tidus just gave the Githyanki back the +3 Vorpal Sword without a fight. Womp womp.

Almost certainly the first time in the history of DnD that someone gave back a silver sword. Color me a little disappointed. See, yeah, red dragon/githyanki wizard battle in populated area is no good, innocent bystanders and all. But I wanted that stolen silver sword to connect Tidus’ divine destiny into having to go to war with the Githyanki. Womp womp indeed. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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9ES 161: We Should Start An Ultramarathon

by keith on July 5, 2018 at 7:15 am

Posted In: 9ES, Podcast, Podcasting

I mean it, look up the Barkley Marathon. Honestly. The 9to5 (dot cc) ultramarathon will become the most intense, grueling 100+ mile marathon of all time. Instead of a starter pistol the race will start when Scott fails to say “fuzzy bunny” after putting as many marshmallows in his mouth. Jono sat this one out because he is in Canada’s martimes. We will be following up in episode 162 with the question that I’m sure is on all of your minds: How many times did he sing “Barrett’s Privateers” either to himself or publicly while he was there? My guess is more than 12.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!

The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.

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└ Tags: barkley marathon, barkley marathons, free agency, glow, gorgeous ladies of wrestling, habs, leafs, lebron james, luke cage, montreal geek, montreal geek podcast, montreal podcast, nba free agency, netflix, nhl free agency, nhl trades, tavares, world cup, world cup 2018

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Dozens

by keith on July 4, 2018 at 7:34 am

Chapter: Saga

Characters: jon, the board

Would you stop booing? There’s nothing wrong with being an urban wizard. There are dozens of them. Dozens.

(With reverence to Arrested Development).

I’m not even 100% how we got around to writing this one. I wish I had better recollection of our process because I do not remember how this strip came to be. I think it started off as Jon dipping back into the well of his DM experience in a workplace setting and then sort of evolved into being about Jon wearing wizard robes to work. Which, as we know, he wears under his clothes anyways.

Wait a minute, is Jon a dowser? Aren’t they the real urban wizards?

You know you’ve been blogging, podcasting and writing comics for a long time when you can find previous references to DM’ing at work, wearing wizard robes all the time and dowsing for water all on your website. That stuff is just there, kicking around. For you.

As always, please tell your friends about this comic and this website. Every time you share a post, Sophie gets another set of wings. Soon she will transcend into her final form. Which I presume is kind of a heavy-metal dark Seraph of some kind.

Jon is a Master of Dungeons of the highest caliber. He podcasts with me over on 9to5 Entertainment System and occasionally blogs here in Jon’s Junk.

Sophie does all of the arts on 9to5 illustrated and blogs weekly about her adventures with beer in The Ignorant Beer Review.

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└ Tags: comic, dnd, dozens of us, dungeon master, geek montreal, montreal comic, montreal geek, montreal webcomic, urban wizard, urban wizards, wizard, wizard comic, wizard robes

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The Truth Is So Much Worse…

by keith on April 4, 2018 at 11:48 am

Chapter: Saga

Characters: Jom

Location: Comics

Sophie is back from the dead!

Wait a second, Sophie died last week and is back this week. With Easter in between? Guys, I think we’re on to something here.

We have had a hard time keeping up with the ideal of publishing at least one comic a week in the nearly 7 year run of the website, but still, we’ve managed to put out nearly 200 strips in that time.

Somehow, despite all of that output, people are not stopping us in the street to ask for our autographs. In fact, I haven’t ever even been offered a free drink due to my webcomic creator celebrity status.

One can only imagine what the result would be if any of us tried to use this comic as a pick up strategy.

If you like these comics and want to support us, feel free to drop as little as $1 a month into our Patreon fund. The amount we would love you would be staggering. You would be staggered.

See you next week!

Jon is a Master of Dungeons of the highest caliber. He podcasts with me over on 9to5 Entertainment System and occasionally blogs here in Jon’s Junk.

Sophie does all of the arts on 9to5 illustrated and blogs weekly about her adventures with beer in The Ignorant Beer Review.

The background image of the bar taken from “Back Bar Designs” at xdmagazine.net

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└ Tags: montreal comic, montreal geek, montreal geeks, montreal webcomic, webcomic, webcomic artists, webcomic montreal

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Reboot!

by keith on February 28, 2018 at 1:48 pm

Chapter: Saga

Characters: jon, keith, scott, sophie

So, funny story. We decided we were going to dust off the comic and get together to write a few one panel strips to get our creative goo flowing.

Then Scott told us he didn’t want to do the comic anymore. The first comic wrote itself.

Creating and producing a webcomic has always been part of why this site even exists. We’ve been through the “origin story” of this whole little enterprise several times in the past, but the initial thing that became this entire website was Scott adding word bubbles (copy-pasted out of emails) to a doodle that Sophie did of the three of us.

We’ve had a number of stops and starts with the output of the comic. The problem with doing something as a hobby is that the pressures of the real world tend to take priority. It takes a lot to get us all on the same page.

In terms of Scott no longer working on the comic, that’s totally cool. He just wants to focus on a few individual projects for the time being, and he’ll obviously be around on 9ES (we can also make him blog if we get one more donor at the 3$ level or higher on our Patreon). But for the foreseeable future the comic is going to be run by myself, Jon and Sophie.

We’ll see how that goes.

We’re getting our groove back on by doing these fun 1 panel comics. We’ve got a million other ideas kicking around, but for now, the goal is to at least get one of these dudes up a week.

To quote the dearly departed Scott: “Like a family circus, but funny?”

I hope so buddy, I hope so.

Jon is a Master of Dungeons of the highest caliber. He podcasts with me over on 9to5 Entertainment System and occasionally blogs here in Jon’s Junk.

Sophie does all of the arts on 9to5 illustrated and blogs weekly about her adventures with beer in The Ignorant Beer Review.

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└ Tags: 9to5, 9to5 cc, 9to5 comic, 9to5cc comic, Montreal, montreal geek, montreal webcomic, webcomic

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Laura Flynn – Go Plug Yourself 149

by keith on February 8, 2018 at 7:57 am

Posted In: Go Plug Yourself, Podcast, Podcasting

We’re just 1 week away from our Episode 150 Live Spectacular at Mainline Theatre so we thought it would be a good idea to have Laura Flynn on for episode 149. Why? Because she’ll be our Mainline buddy over in the Mini-Main! Hurray! If you haven’t had the pleasure of witnessing the singing, storytelling, “dancing” and Patrick Swayze-loving Laura Flynn you are doing yourself a disservice. We talk about all kinds of things, like Irish celebrities and a choir of elderly Francophones in Joliette. Enjoy!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

Check out Laura’s latest rendition of her hit Fringe show “Get Your Shuffle On” Feb 16-18 at Mainline Theatre.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.

Walter J. Lyng is a stand-up comedian based out of Montreal, you should follow him on Twitter @wallygoodtimes and on Facebook: Walter J. Lyng

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└ Tags: get your shuffle on, go plug yourself, gpys, laura flynn, laura flynn podcast, montreal comedy, montreal comedy podcast, montreal geek, montreal podcast, podcast montreal, walter, walter lyng, walter lyng podcast

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Big Fish: The Treasure Map – A D&D Adventure Blog

by keith on January 10, 2018 at 8:32 pm

Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Jon, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

Where the adventuring party follows a magic treasure map at the behest of young Jim Clocks, a pirate.

If this is your first time checking out our little D&D Adventure Blog, you might want to check out this post that explains the setup and format of the game. As always, I’m in black and Jon’s in blue. Our last adventure was “The Fancy Party“. You can check out all “Big Fish” content on this nifty landing page.

At the end of the terrible trouble a few adventures back, my character pocketed a magical treasure map. It would be the focus for the adventure that Jon was catering to my character. This session would be the first time for my character in the “starring” role and I thought that going with something treasure map related would be sticking to the piratey roots of the concept. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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└ Tags: 9to5 dnd, adventure blog, big fish, dnd, dungeons and dragons, jim clocks, mimic, montreal geek, montreal geek blog, pirate ship, wood hag

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Shaking the Dust Off – Motivated Nonsense

by keith on November 28, 2017 at 12:52 pm

Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

This is going to be one of those blogs where I ramble on and on to myself and try to stay motivated. Will it work? Find out by reading all of it.

Sarah and I have had a kind of recurring conversation about looking back at our time together and nostalgia in general. I think looking back is only natural as the year winds down. I even keep a little list of cool stuff that’s happened over the year to take a look at as the new year approaches. I don’t like being “stuck in the past” but I like kind of going over the things that made me happy in the past. I think there’s kind of a proactive way of doing it, one where you avoid getting bogged down in just reliving former glories.

If you take stock of the good times, the things that you found were rewarding, you might be able to focus your efforts into pursuing similar things in the future. At least, that’s the theory.

It seems that as I work my way into my mid-30s I am more and more likely to get trapped in that mindset of “things were better when…” You know, when everything seemed simpler? When there were always a friends hanging out to meet up with? When there weren’t so many bills to pay? When we all got together to watch a movie because there was only one copy of it on tape in the whole city?

Life used to be like a loose bag of Legos. You could put it together any way that you wanted to. It always seemed like it would be easy to just quickly pull it apart and make something new if you didn’t like what was happening. But now it’s this complicated Lego tower and changing any of those blocks way down at the bottom seems nearly impossible.

So maybe it’s not the end of the world to take a look at your Lego tower and relive the parts that you’re happy with? There’s still a lot of tower to build. Maybe it’ll be easier if you focus on building up the good parts. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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└ Tags: aging, am i too old, geek\, montreal blog, montreal geek, motivation, perspicacious, perspicacious geek, self motivation, shea weber is 32, stay motivated, why aging sucks

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Big Fish – A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Blog – Prologue

by keith on November 15, 2017 at 8:05 pm

Posted In: Blogs, Featured Post, Homepage, Jon, Jon's Junk, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

Every couple years it seems like Dungeons & Dragons makes another push further into the mainstream. Initially the only mainstream attention that it got was negative. With horror stories of demon worshipping kids getting lost in sewers and other nonsense only tangentially linked to the game itself.

For most of my memory, tabletop roleplaying has been associated with a negative stigma. Throughout high-school and college it was a pastime that, while popular, was almost exclusively relegated to nerdy niche. However, we are recently enjoying an increased visibility of all things “geek” in mainstream media. A lot of which translates directly into the increased popularity of D&D. The most popular show on TV (Game of Thrones) is a fantasy setting. The heroes of another hugely popular show (Stranger Things) love to play D&D.

You can check out all “Big Fish” content on this nifty landing page.

Don’t take my word for it, even The New Yorker is extolling the virtues and resurgence of the game.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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