Savage Worlds - Crown of Kings

The Crown of Kings is an adventure module produced by Dark City Games. Constructed as a sort of “choose your own adventure” game that can be played solo. Recently, they have started to convert some of their modules for Savage Worlds. Now, I purchased this “Savaged” adventure a long while ago, but due to the amount of time the free trial module took to play, I was leery of playing through this adventure. Don’t get me wrong I love the stuff that Dark City Games produces, but as a scripted solo game you don’t get many replays once you have completed the ‘entire’ module. Trust me, in playing their games, there are times that you really need to go back to a ‘save point’ and start again. I can’t tell you the number of times playing through their system (an offshoot of melee/wizard) that I’ve been killed by the die rolls!

Of course, I picked up the Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion so after reading I really wanted to use my now two (err… three) savage world books. I’m a big fan of the Savage Worlds game rules so any time I can get a chance to play, I’m all for it! My new spark for playing this game is that I’ve been reading a great web comic called Clockworks that is based on a RPG using the Savage Worlds rules. So, I got everything ready to play and waited for a couple hours free time to have at it…

Since it is a scripted adventure, I don’t want to spoil too much of the game, but since you get monster counters in the game, I feel like I can give some highlights…

It was all going pretty well until I met a dragon! Unfortunately, the module doesn’t give any rules on Game Master Bennies (or if you should even get any). I ruled that the module itself doesn’t get any GM Bennies, but Wild Card (WC) creatures would. I also ruled that the WC creatures would use their Bennies only for wound soak rolls. Also, critical failures by wild cards would result in a shaken result. In the end, I might have made the dragon harder than the writers’ intended. With the creature rolling d12+4 and d8 for damage, my characters were in a world of hurt if they got hit. Once the Bennies were all gone, characters starting to take wounds. On my end it was easy to hit the dragon, but with a toughness of 15 I really needed to hit with a raise and roll pretty well on my damage roll. In the end, Ramel was killed (got 4 wounds and with two bad vigor rolls died).

Fights with a WC with a high toughness also take a lot of time at least it did for me. I didn’t count the number of rounds that I was fighting and I admit that I had to look up the rules a lot, but it still took me 2 hours to fight the dragon!

I’m pretty sure that this was one of the major fights of the module, but I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it through the rest of the adventure with only 3 characters - all of who are out of Bennies or Power Points.

To Be Continued (with pictures hopefully)...