Memories of Jorune Past

I don't know. Found it on the web. Cerberus? Hypno-dog?

I have no pressure on me to produce the newest material, so Jorune is relaxing back to the point where I can get nostalgic about the games we had. It occurs to me that other people might have similar memories to share.

One of my favorite scenes came with a player who ran with my games for many years in California.

The character was a Woffen who got things wrong - a lot. Extreme die rolls.

Hot Air Balloon Fail

This is the Woffen who was amazed at a Thriddle balloon that cold fly with no Ebba Isho. As told in an issue of Segment: Sho-Caudal, the balloon flew because it was a big bag filled with hot air from a little brazier with fire to feed hot air into the skyrealm shaped silk bag.

He had dice that tried to kill him, but was loyal to his dice and wouldn't use any other.

He did a critical failure on his Learn ... so we decided he got it so wrong that he believed that the reason the balloon could fly was that they set it on fire. Several times in later games he set things of fire to get them to fly.

The Power Hold Sword Fight Fail

This same character had Power Hold as his allowed dysha through every iteration of the system that would eventually bear the name "ORFA." He was in a running fight while on a thombo with another character riding a thombo. Terrible roll - fell off his thombo. His opponent turned and charged to swipe down at him.

Our Hero and a buddy who watched it all.

Our hero threw excellent advantage roll - 2 actions. He chose to do one now and hold one for after his opponent could swipe down at him with his sword. (Good move.) He was already in his dodge, which gave his opponent a penalty on connecting with a downswing. The second move was to throw his Power Hold. Excellent roll and grabbed his opponent, pinning his arms to his side... and his thombo ran on. His opponent was suspended four feet above the ground, arms pinned to his side.

This time our hero decided to give a little speech on his revenge on this helpless foe, and went into a backswing to deliver pure justice to this bad guy.

And rolled the worst he could roll. Tragic 20. 20 on a 20. The only way we could see that as happening is he went into his backswing and lost his grip on the sword.

We used a mechanic to give the Player some control - he permanently spent one of these points. The last one he had (thanks to previous tragedies). He used that last Oracle die to go back and say that 20-roll never happened. We re-narrated it to he just lost his balance on the uneven footing, so he still had his sword. So he re-prepared to strike the "blow of justice" at his foe, gave his speech ...

And rolled a 20 again! We agreed it was a duplicate of the previous scene.

The whole team was rolling with his bad rolls. No one believed he could role that badly that many time (there were episodes prior to the balloon and the power hold disaster). Players were offering him replacement dice. Begging him not to roll it again.

We were all having a grand time, including the guy with the cursed dice.

He picked his own doom and decided the double failure dictated he broke his weapon. I have to say he was very ethical in his fairness in balancing gameplay and bad die rolls, etc.

George Barr's version of dharmey.
The tails make great steaks. Yum.

Since we are dealing with non-metal weapons (Jorune is a low metal world), that made sense. So he was unable to succeed in the original swordfight on thombo-back, unable to strike an opponent being held in mid-air by a super success with Power Hold (four feet off the ground), spend his last Oracle point to buy away the failure, and failed with the same roll again... and broke his weapon

The Death Scene

Another time a Player was going to have to leave the game and we were just into the East Trinnu Jungles at a village where the Dharmey were mutating to get really big (we think it was because of all the ancient curses - the yellow circles with black triangles on them) and our heroes where hunting them down to exterminate as pests.

In a big confrontation fighting the monster mama dharmey protecting her eggs, one of the players wound up horribly wounded (I think a leg was torn off) and with a savage war cry, dove into the monster's mouth to stab at her from the inside, and her jaws were almost biting him in half. Quite a memorable scene, which is what the player wanted.

An Invitation

We had fun. Sometimes we had some solid action, but we had fun. I'm going to ask some of my players to post their own memories.

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I'll post some more favorite moments. Do you have a memory from Jorune that still makes you think gaming was the second-best fun you had? (I hope it was second-best.)