Big Ten Gets Big Ass-Whipping in Bowl Season

[Kudos to the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Northwestern who both pulled off upset wins.]
The best conference in college football in the regular season just finished an embarrassing bowl season with a 3-7 record.  That record looks even worse when you consider that the Big Ten's top teams went 1-3 in the high-profile New Year's Bowls with the conference's only win being the Badgers beating a MAC team in the Cotton Bowl.
Penn State blew a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter to USC in the "grandaddy of them all," the Rose Bowl.
Iowa was destroyed by Florida 30-3 in the Outback Bowl.
In a National Semi-Final Playoff Ohio State was embarrassed by Clemson 31-0!!!
Another high-profile Big Ten program, Nebraska, got trucked by Tennessee by 14 points.

Vikings and Gophers

The Good: In their latest bowl projections, CBSSports.com, FoxSports.com and SI.com all have the Gophers heading to San Diego on Dec. 27 for the Holiday Bowl. The Gophers haven’t been to a California bowl game since the 1962 Rose Bowl.



The Bad: There were a lot of similarities between the Vikings and Gophers last weekend:
Both teams were road underdogs.
Both teams led by a touchdown at halftime (Vikings by 6, Gophers by 7).
Both teams got shut out in the second half and lost by a touchdown (Vikings by 6, Gophers by 7).


The Ugly: The Minnesota Vikings are the worst rushing team in the NFL. The Vikes are averaging 69.8 yards per game and 2.7 yards per carry.

Sam Bradford vs Eagles

Sam Bradford passing under pressure on Sunday in Philadelphia.

Trump supporters who are allergic to facts should click elsewhere. For the rest of you, I'm going to present some factual analysis here. 

Obviously, Sam Bradford did NOT look good on Sunday against a solid Eagles defense. He completed 58.5% of his pass attempts for 224 yards and one interception. Bradford did manage to throw a TD pass to Cordarrelle Patterson after the game had already been decided. Its worth noting that Bradford's arm was hit on the one interception he threw into the endzone in the first quarter.

During and after the game, Social Media was buzzing with talk of Bradford being overrated and reverting back to his "Bust" status (you know who you are). Is it time to panic Vikings fans? How much of Bradford's poor play was his fault versus other factors? Well, that's hard to quantify.

Obviously, the offensive line has been a liability this year: Matt Kalil, Andre Smith, Phil Loadholt, and Mike Harris have ALL been lost for the season. The Vikings signed Jake Long off the street last week and were forced to play him even though he hadn't worn football pads in over a year.

Typically a quarterback's best friend, the Vikings running game has been non-existent this year. The Vikings are 31st out of 32 teams in rushing yards per game and dead LAST in the NFL with 2.6 yards per carry.

How tough is that Eagles defense? The Eagles are currently ranked #2 in the NFL in yards allowed and #3 in the NFL in points allowed. The Eagles have an elite pass rush; they are currently tied for #3 in the NFL with 20 sacks. Will they be a top 5 defensive unit at the end of the season? Maybe not, but those rankings show you that they are for real. This Eagles D was the best defense that Bradford has faced this year.

Against the Eagles, Bradford's Quarterback Rating was 71.6 on the day; by far his worst game as a Viking. To put it in perspective, Bradford's previous worst outing was at Carolina on September 25th, when he finished with a 93 QB Rating. Even including the clunker on Sunday, Bradford's QB Rating is 100.3 on the year.  Hot rookie of the year candidate, Carson Wentz, owns a 92.7 QB rating this season. How does that compare to an elite quarterback who will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?  Last season, Aaron Rodger's Quarterback Rating was 92.7 and this year its 91.7; and that's WITH Jordy Nelson back....

The bottom line is that on Sunday, Bradford played against a very tough defense on the road with a terrible running game and one of the worst offensive lines in football. Bradford was pressured and knocked down on almost every passing play, and yet with all that adversity, his numbers weren't horrible. If the Vikings can somehow keep Bradford healthy all year (a big IF from this offensive line and Bradford's injury history), he should continue to put up solid passing numbers to help this team get to the playoffs and make a deep run.
Skol Vikings!

Tales of the Demon Lord - review

Review by ShyberKryst

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a new dark fantasy role-playing game created by Robert Schwalb as part of a successful Kickstarter campaign that launched in March 2015. As part of that same Kickstarter, Tales of the Demon Lord was given to all backers at the $48 level and above. If you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign, you can still purchase Tales of the Demon Lord as a 49-page PDF from Schwalb Entertainment for $10.00. In addition to the PDF, a softcover book can be purchased through DriveThruRPG for $19.99.

Tales of the Demon Lord is the first campaign written for the Shadow of the Demon Lord role-playing game. The campaign consists of a loosely connected series of 11 short adventures which take place in and around the city of Crossings in the Northern Reach. Tales of the Demon Lord is designed for the players to start with new characters who level up after each short adventure. The characters must gain power quickly in order to rise to the challenge of saving Urth from the world-devouring being known only as The Demon Lord.

Tales of the Demon Lord is a visually appealing work. There are 7 pieces of unique art attributed to Jack Kaiser which are evocative of the dark setting. The two-column layout is clean and the stat blocks are clear and concise. The choice of blood red and black as the primary colors is an obvious one, but the unique font for the chapter headings is a nice touch. You can see the same font on the cover shown above. The pages have a gray parchment appearance and the watermark behind the chapter and page numbers is a pentagram (gasp)!

A short introduction provides the gamemaster a synopsis of the main campaign plot and provides details of an evil artifact central to the story: the Eye of the Demon Lord. Chapter 1 describes the city of Crossings: its government, districts, and key NPCs. A small, half-page map of the city is provided with 19 keyed locations. This chapter provides a lot of detail and flavor to the city that is central to the campaign. Reading about the various personalities in Crossings and their motivations, one can envision plenty of political intrigue and opportunities for role-playing. This city could easily be dropped into any campaign, even if you are playing a completely different game system.

Chapters 2 through 12 contain the 11 short adventures that comprise the campaign.  The adventures are sufficiently dark in tone; some are even horrific. For example, one scenario involves saving an aristocratic damsel in distress, only to see her butchered by her cultist lover in order to free the demon inside of her! Another adventure tasks the players with exploring a hidden temple with the goal of stopping a plague that causes the dead to rise as demon-possessed zombies.

The adventures have plenty of variety to keep things interesting. There is a nice mix of role-playing, investigation, exploration, and combat. About half the scenarios take place in Crossings with the rest taking place in the surrounding lands. The adventures are only loosely connected, so a clever gamemaster could jumble the order, or even delete some adventures, and not affect the main campaign plot. However, the difficulty level does increase gradually throughout the campaign, so you have to keep that in mind if you play some of these scenarios out of order. 

Most of the adventures in Tales of the Demon Lord work well on their own without the over-arching metaplot. As a result, if you aren't interested in committing to the entire campaign, a gamemaster could pick out a favorite adventure or two and drop them into his existing campaign or run a scenario as a one-shot with a group of players new to the Shadow of the Demon Lord role-playing game.

My only disappointment with Tales of the Demon Lord is the brevity of the adventures. Four of the scenarios are only 2 pages in length and the rest are 4 pages, with the exception of the final adventure which is 5 pages long. Keep in mind these page counts include the artwork, maps, and stat blocks, so the shortest adventures often contain only a handful of encounters. Even the longer, 4-page scenarios may only have one location to explore with 9 to 16 keyed encounters. That being said, Tales is still a good value since purchasing the PDF will give you 11 mini-adventures for less than one dollar each. 

The scale of the scenarios in Tales of the Demon Lord is a clear design choice by Schwalb as evidenced by the product description:

"Plays Fast: Stories (adventures) are playable in one game session lasting from 3 to 5 hours. Stories are short, covering about one page per hour of expected play. You can also complete a typical campaign (a string of 11 connected adventures) in 11 game sessions. The core book has rules for playing characters up to level 10. This means that if you meet once a week for a 4-hour session each time, you can complete your campaign in about two months. That’s six campaigns a year!The benefit of short campaigns is that the game lets you tell more stories, create more characters, and experience more of the game's options. As a player, you’re not locked into one character for one year or longer. You can have several. And, as a Game Master, it is possible to run a complete campaign in a compressed time span. Best of all, the campaign brevity gives other interested members of the group a chance to become the Game Master.
Little Preparation: You can make a starting character in about 5 minutes. You make one big choice, note the information on your character sheet, and you’re ready to go. And a Game Master can prepare for a game in the time it takes to read a couple of pages of text."

Staying true to the vision stated above, this minimalist approach to adventure design is also featured in the other adventures that I have read for Shadow of the Demon Lord. You won't find large, multi-level dungeons or "read aloud" text boxes, but you will get random encounter tables in Tales. And if you like new creatures, you will find four variations of an excavating insectoid, an iron titan, and a mob of animated corpses described in the appendix.  The rest of the creature stats needed to run the campaign are detailed in Shadow of the Demon Lord core rules.

The maps in Tales of the Demon Lord are noteworthy. They are meticulously hand-drawn and hand-lettered by Cecil Howe with a rough, back-of-the-hide aesthetic. Unfortunately, the maps are often too small and sometimes difficult to read; most are just one quarter page or less. The interior maps don't include a scale or grid lines; however, these maps are works of art on their own and grid lines would definitely detract from their appearance. And where else can you get a published map with blood splatter?

In summary, Tales of the Demon Lord is well-crafted, cleverly written, and contains a variety of interesting, albeit short, adventures. The reasonable price ($10) of the PDF from Schwalb Entertainment makes it a good value for a short campaign. Tales is must-own if you play Shadow of the Demon Lord, and highly recommended if you're a fan of dark fantasy and are looking for some horror-themed story ideas to use in your campaign. With a little effort, these scenarios could easily be converted to your favorite game system.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.