Tower of Zenopus

Weekend Notes - DDXP

2012-01-28T14:18:00.001-06:00

It's a kid-free weekend here so not a whole lot of time to post but I have seen a few things:

From the DDXP this weekend:

Elminster's Forgotten Realms in Quarter 4. We basically went to Ed and said hey, why don't you take all your campaign notes, all the information you've been putting together for your FR campaign and lets compile it into a book. Show us the realms as you've developed it in your campaign setting and lets get that to everybody. It's our celebration of the Forgotten Realms and pulling back the curtain to show you what the designer of the campaign setting has done.

Any plans to rerelease the other products for 1E and 2E and other editions, either in print or electronically? We are looking at making a lot of that older material available to you, but we want to make sure we do it right for you guys and for Wizards. We'll have more news on that.

They also mention that the FR stuff should be largely system-neutral. That sounds pretty interesting. I'm curious to see what it looks like.

As far as the second point - people are making money off of the old editions, why shouldn't WOTC get in on that?

Bad Game Ideas for Wednesday

2012-01-25T21:10:00.000-06:00

Finding some system that lets us play a coherent game of Rifts has long been a dream of me and some of my players. Hero is the obvious choice and will do it, but you have to have players that can accept a 300 point differential in character values and that's ... unlikely.

GURPS can probably do it too but that means a lot of time spent with GURPS vehicles and I did enough of that in the 90's. It is fun to hear people argue about what's realistic when trying to turn Rifts into something that fits into a formula though...

Mutants and Masterminds I am almost certain will do it but I haven't tried, and I think the power levels might make it tricky. Perhaps another day...

The best answer is to stop trying to fix it and just embrace the madness - it may have the DM pulling his hair out at times but once again it leads to awesome player justifications for why that horrible thing that just happened couldn't actually possibly happen "because it's not rrr...rrrr...rrr...this system sucks!"

If you can't just ride the wave man ... well ... I've been having dreams about converting it to ICONS. Yeah, yeah, it's a little weird, but I think that the less detailed take of ICONS might be just the approach that handles the ridiculous levels of relative power without making the squishies feel overshadowed. You just assume that normal weapons are completely ineffective against everything in the Rifts universe and start with a rough conversion of something like weapons get half their dice as a power level and 1 level of Invulnerabilty per 100 MDC - like I said it's a rough idea right now. It keeps popping into my head though, demanding some kind of escape. Maybe if I just start with the main rulebook ...

Not so different is it?

ToEE 4E Session 4 - The Green Slime

2012-01-25T12:00:00.000-06:00

This was a short session but it was time to get things back on track. After the death of the Dragonborn Paladin last time we needed a replacement and this came in the form of a Dragonborn Sorcerer. Names have been omitted to reduce boredom and annoyance - this is the Apprentice campaign after all and they are still finding their feet with the whole naming thing. I will say though that they aren't any worse than a lot of the names I see and hear so I probably shouldn't slam them for it.

Much time was spent in Hommlett (in this campaign it's in Mistledale - see here for details) shopping, trading, haggling, and outfitting. Now better equipped and riding horses for the first time the newly reinforced party heads for the Moathouse.

Once at the Moathouse, they decided to head down the stairs to explore the lower level and were promptly attacked by Green Slime. Now this stuff used to be pretty nasty in AD&D, then it was changed to a hazard in 3E which was a little less satisfying in some ways. Well it's back in 4E and it can move and attack and inflict ongoing 10 acid damage if it gets lucky, so it's pretty nasty. Three of them in a confined space like a stairwell is especially nasty, but they handled it very well. As the battle opened, we discovered that the Dragonbron breath weapon is pretty nasty in confined spaces too, and it just makes Po's defense boost that much easier to hang onto.

So in a 6 round fight the party cleans house without taking too much damage (no drops and no kills for Team Monster) and then fans out to explore the big empty room at the bottom of the stairs. That's also where we had to stop as our time ran out - Short rest, we will pick it up next time!

Bad Game Ideas for Tuesday

2012-01-24T21:51:00.000-06:00

The stack of game books next to the computer has been growing some - new year = new ideas. Feng Shui, Reign, Pendragon, Rifts Ultimate, and some 3E Necromancer games modules are all in there. So I'm getting a lot of cross-pollination. The main focus has been boning up on Star Wars Saga, but I've been having some strange campaign ideas so I'm going to share:

Idea I might try to run: A Pendragon campaign set in Warhammer's Bretonnia using the WFRP 2E mechanics but with Passions and the family thing grafted on. I need to re-read Pendragon as it's been quite awhile (that's why it's on the stack) but I've been obsessed with mixing it into Warhammer and I don't have a really good reason for that. I really need more time to run these things.

Idea discarded on Day 1: Converting 4th Edition D&D modules back to Basic D&D. It can probably be done and it would make a nice story to share, but I realized that was my main motivation to do it: to be able to say that I did it, rather than because I think it would be a quality gaming experience. So after looking at some monster lists and the like I let it go. The world is probably better for that.

A Brief Note on WOTC Republishing the 1E Hardbacks

2012-01-24T12:00:00.001-06:00

'Shrug' - OK

Alright, maybe that's too brief.

4E players probably don't care, annoyed 3E players probably won't be mollified by books for another game, and die-hard old-schoolers won't give them the time of ... what? Wow, I didn't think they were that easily appeased.

From a business perspective I can see wisdom in catering to pent-up demand. There's a seemingly healthy old-school movement that thinks AD&D was the apex of design (exeept for the parts they keep tinkering with)? Why not put some of those old products back into print? It makes your customers happy and makes them your customers again! I think they're stopping short -why not put some of every edition back into print? Look at the prices for 3.5 Player's Handbooks on eBay! Look at the sales for Pathfinder! Why not grab a piece of that action? Put the core books for each edition back into print, some of the bigger-deal adventures (or a bundle of the old adventures in a hard or soft cover book) and make some money! Do it year by year - make 2012 the 1E revival, 2013 the 2E revival, and 2014 the 3E revival. Make it an annual celebration of each edition leading up to the 40th anniversary of D&D! Quarterly at least! Try to make everybody who has ever played the game hear about it and think about it one more time - it might turn into some money. Plus it looks to me like the opening salvo of a barrage of olive branches to soften things up for D&D Next. That's a good move.

As someone who is more D&D focused than edition-focused and who has run multiple sessions of at least 3 different versions of D&D in the past few years I'm less impressed. My 1E books are in great shape - those things last - and the extra copies of the PHB that I picked up last year were all in pretty good shape and let me tell you, I didn't spend over $12 on any of them. So even now, AD&D rulebooks are both plentiful and cheap - why would I go buy a new printing?

Gamers are notoriously cheap. Beyond eBay and used bookstores there are PDF's of everything floating around for free plus there is OSRIC so I don't even really need any of those other options if I just want rules. Assuming I am someone actually trying to play the game there are all of these other options from free to cheap that get me what I need, so why would I buy a new printing?

If I'm a dedicated old school gamer who's been unhappy with TSR/WOTC/Hasbro since Gary left then I'm probably not going to trust anything "they" do to try and convince me to play anything less than 23 years old - or 30 if I'm Truly Oldschool. I'm just going to gripe about it online for now and see what happens.

The only reason I myself might buy it is because it's helping a good cause in the most obvious and appropriate way and I'm impressed that WOTC got on board with it in this particular way. I think it's amazing and it's the only thing that's going to convince me to spend money on a reprint of a book when I already have at least 5 copies floating around the house. So somewhat to my surprise I have a thumbs up for this - a big thumbs up. Nice job WOTC.

Motivational Monday

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-06:00

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - D&D Next

2012-01-20T12:00:00.000-06:00

New editions cause angst to many players. We all realize that WOTC isn’t going to come collect your books and that you can keep on playing past the “deadline” – and some of us do just that – but there’s a psychological factor for many people (myself included) when your game is “dead” that decreases interest in playing it. I’ve come to recognize it and I am pretty good at working past it though it tends to be easier with older games for some reason – maybe a few years have to pass and then they achieve classic status in my mind. I notice that so far WOTC is being very careful not to call it “5th Edition” as that very name implies a 6th Edition (probably about 2015 at this rate). As the lifespan of each edition has decreased, long term players have commented that they are not getting their money’s worth out of the books they buy and that they are tired of learning the rules all over again. I find this an eminently sensible position – if a game works and I like it, why should I buy all those same books all over again every 5 years? I know how it benefits the company but what problem are we solving here for the player? If it doesn’t make the game better in some clear way then why should I spend that money and time on the new version when I could instead keep right on playing with the old one?

Thus, my two biggest concerns with The New Thing:

One of the stated goals of Next is to never require a new edition. I think that’s a questionable goal. From a business perspective, the easiest money you can make is from printing a new Player’s Handbook. Why would you explicitly state that one of your design goals rules this out? Because on the flip side the players know how that works, and we see it as an unlikely scenario and that leads us to conclude that someone is not being honest about their plans. Looking for nuances, if the plan is to print an updated PHB for what is technically the same edition at set intervals, well, that’s not exactly “not” a new edition if I’m still going to need to buy a new book every few years now is it? Either way it looks a lot like a deceptive approach and I hope someone is thinking this through. If the company was to go to an annual update model (2012 PHB, 2013 PHB, etc.) as I suggested when Essentials came out then I think most players could be convinced of the benefits if they would just be upfront about the plan! They also need to keep it cheap. Additionally, something similar was said about 4th Edition and we can all see how that turned out.

The other goal that concerns me is to present a set of rules that caters to players of every edition and “unifies the game”. It’s a noble goal, no doubt, but it puts constraints on the design that I don’t think a new edition needs. Some of the biggest differences between players of each edition are mechanical ones – they don’t like the way one edition handles things compared to another edition's approach. How is one set of rules going to reconcile something as basic as ascending vs. descending armor class? How about a complete lack of skills (OD&D) vs. a few class‐specific skills (Thieves in 1E) vs. a full‐blown universal skill system (3E) vs. only encounter‐relevant skills (4E)? How about Feats vs. no Feats? Racial limits? Wizards and armor? Clerics and edged weapons? Multiclassing –is it for demi‐humans only? Is it per‐level‐mix‐and‐match‐as-desired like in 3rd? Is it handled via Feats? Prestige classes? Paragon paths? I just don’t see a way to integrate these different systems in a coherent game system short of including them all and saying “pick which one you want”! Guess what? I can already do that! I have Basic! I have 1E! I have 2E‐3E‐4E! I can pick which edition I want to play and start up a new campaign any time I want to! Thanks to the miracle of the Internet so can anyone else! Between PDF sales and eBay there’s a ton of material easily and cheaply available for nearly any edition of any game! Beyond that we have retro clones in a multitude of flavors plus Pathfinder, the biggest “retro‐clone” of all! So to me this new edition is now not just competing to be better than 4E – it’s attempting to be better than all of the prior editions to all of the people that think their chosen edition is the best. That’s a very high bar to set, one unlikely to be overcome IMO.

Additionally I don’t really want the mechanics of the 2013 edition to spend a whole lot of time looking backward to the Cleric vs. Undead tables of 1978 – I have that already, and anyone who doesn't probably doesn't care! If you don’t have something new to say about it then I don’t need a new set of rules. I don’t even need a simple refinement of 4E as my 5E – I’m willing to take a look at a completely different approach if it makes for a good game. What I don’t automatically agree is healthy is the appeal to disgruntled players. Looking at their concerns, sure. Bending the game backwards 20+ years, not so good. Do you think the kids learning to play this decade care how wizards worked in the 80’s? Is that relevant to them at all? Let me tell you from experience – no! Should their interests and expectations be a part of this process? I’d say at least as much as the guys who stopped at 1E and possibly more! The 1E guys have their edition, and in 3 updates since then they’ve said “No thanks”, to the point that some brag about how it's been 20 years or more since they purchased a D&D product! So quit poking them with the edition stick and let them go!

Now despite these misgivings I am interested in seeing what comes out of this whole operation. I've moved along (eventually) with every new edition of D&D and in general I would expect to do the same here. I do see some early signs that have me concerned about the direction of the game but I'm willing to give it a chance. I'd like to see them look backward for inspiration, but look forward for the design. Don't concentrate so much about pleasing all former and current fans - think about the future and make the best D&D that you can make. Impress us.

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - D&D Fourth Edition

2012-01-19T12:00:00.002-06:00

By 2007 I had been running 3E games almost continuously since 2000 with a pretty stable group of players and I was seeing more of the flaws in 3rd Edition than I liked. Monster stat blocks were incredibly dense and I found that they had more abilities than I was ever going to use (assuming I could remember to use them in the first place), plus many of them were pointless things for an enemy designed to be killed off in 10 rounds or less. Building new opponents was more complicated than I liked, too much so to do it on the fly and it was limiting my reaction time. The final straw was when people started finding numerous errors in the WOTC monster statblocks in their own monster manuals – if you’re going to come up with a complicated system for monster building for your game then at the very least you should stick to it in your official supplements for that game! If your own design team can’t keep up with it then maybe that’s a hint that something’s wrong! Now looking back, I will grant you that a dragon missing 3 points of Craft skill is not really a problem but by this time I was burning out on 3E in general and these kinds of things only fueled the fire.

So when they announced 4th Edition I was happy to hear it. I felt like we had gotten nearly a decade out of 3rd and I assumed 4th would be a refining and clean up of what had gone before. There was not as much pre‐communication as what we had before so things were a little murky, but what I was hearing sounded good. I preordered the books and waited. Then once I got them I read part way through the Player’s Handbook and hated it, totally and completely. I put it back on the shelf.

Time passed ...

The main reason I picked it up again was my kids. They were old enough to play so I got them started on the old Moldvay Basic set and we had a really good time. Later, I decided that as much fun as it was, why load them down with the baggage of all the previous versions of the game? Why not give the “modern” one another try and see if we could have fun with it and let them have their own game instead of making them play mine. So I looked at it again with a new perspective and found some strong similarities to the design approach used in the oldest editions of the game ‐ not 3rd‐ and finally had a breakthrough – I’ve been happy with it ever since.

Now there was a pretty big backlash with 4E. Actually there was a pretty big backlash with 3E and a lot of older players bailed out then, sticking with their 1E/2E/BECMI games, but a lot of people forget about that. There was at least as much change in the 2E to 3E transition as there was in the 3E to 4E transition, and quite a few people hated that – and there’s nothing wrong with it. Any edition change for any game gives people an opportunity to say “I’m done” and bail out. I think a lot of 1E players bailed out at or during the changeover to 2E and went out and played other games. By the time 3E was released, and after hearing that it was good, at least some of them came back in. With 4E I think a similar thing happened – people were unhappy with the change and saw a reason to go play something else. This time there was also the new wrinkle of Paizo’s Pathfinder, giving current players a new option somewhere between standing pat and moving to a new edition and it remains to be seen what the long term impact of that is – we know it helped divide 3E players when it came time to move to 4E, but time will tell how it will factor into this new edition.

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - D&D Third Edition

2012-01-18T12:00:00.002-06:00

When 3E was announced I had a very strong “sure, whatever” attitude as while we had a 2E campaign running I was pretty sure it was petering out and we were headed for other things. However a funny thing happened over the course of 1999 – 2000. Each month Dragon had an article about some aspect of the new system and each one I read made more and more sense to me. By the time it was released I was ready to fire up a new game and go! Once again, careful and consistent communication wins over a skeptical customer! After reading those previews it felt like they really undertook a serious analysis of what had come before and changed all it all for the better! The unified d20 mechanic made a lot of sense and felt like the game was keeping up with innovations made over the last 10 years. Ascending AC was so obvious – why didn’t we think of that before? Unlimited multi classing! A logical arrangement for saving throws! So many little changes that made the game fresh and fun to play again!

Third Edition quickly became our dominant game once again and stayed there – I was still playing 3E (well, 3.5) in 2009 and I know plenty of people who are still playing it. Now over years of playing a certain system you will find some rough edges and with things moving into the established internet age those edges get uncovered a lot faster than they did in the 80’s. So sure, we got 3.5 in 2003. I can tell you we pretty much ignored and only incorporated it in our ongoing campaigns as players picked up the books and asked to use parts of them. I know some people got pretty agitated about the changes and the timing, but we never really ran into the issues that it solved as we tended to run at lower levels and my guys aren’t really powergamers or trying to break the system. As a result, we never treated it as a mandatory upgrade and that made the whole thing a lot less stressful for everyone.

Campaigns rolled forward and gave us some of the best characters and adventures we had ever had. Our games were both all-new (Scarred Lands!) and retro (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, White Plume Mountain, The Monastery) and between the regular stream of supplements and the contents of Dragon and Dungeon we had more material, especially adventures, than we were ever able to play. Thank you Goodman Games! Thank you Necromancer Games! Thanks Green Ronin for Freeport! Thanks Paizo for your stewardship of the magazines and the first few adventure paths! Thanks Monte for Arcana Evolved! So much good stuff! So much good stuff still unplayed! Nonetheless, all good things as they say. Maybe there's room for one last 3.5 campaign in my future somewhere...

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - AD&D Second Edition

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-06:00

When the time came around for 2nd Edition there were some things we thought could be handled in a better way: Level Limits were too low. Unarmed combat was a mess, initiative as written was a mess,and other parts of the combat system were largely ignored because they didn’t work for a lot of people. Also, after playing Traveller & Champions & GURPS, James Bond 007, and other games many of us thought the lack of a skill system was a glaring omission. So our issues were mostly mechanical ones – we wanted a cleaned up 1st edition with some new things bolted on – like a skill system – and that’s pretty much what we got. The classes were revised, spells were cleaned up, and the combat system worked better – all good.

It was handled in a pretty good fashion at the time with several articles and surveys in Dragon and then finally a preview pullout section of what was coming ...

... it was a pretty decent way to keep the players up to speed on what was coming.

I know some people were incensed at the content changes - no assassins, no half-orcs, no demons and devils, but we didn't really care - we never cared much for evil characters anyway, and the demons and devils weren't all that common of a monster anyway. Later as we added in the brown books and the Tome of Magic it felt like we had more material than we had ever had in the AD&D days and more customization of characters and just "more" in general so we didn't miss that stuff, and a lot of it ended up coming back later in 2nd Edition anyway.

So we spent the 90’s playing 2nd Edition as our main game – D&D has always been our main game among my friends, and I suspect that will never change – and it kept us very satisfied for years. It did, however, have some hard edges – cleric weapon restrictions, magic‐user gear restrictions, humans couldn’t multiclass while demi‐humans still had racial limits (even if they were higher than before), lots of save or die effects – and those hard edges began to wear on us as time went on to the point that by the mid 90’s other games just felt like they played better and our time spent on the game began to decrease as other games crept into the rotation. Among other things we played a lot of Shadowrun, which has a very different feel in play than 2E. The biggest indicator of this decreased tolerance for 2E’s quirks is that we still played a lot of fantasy but we were doing it with Fantasy Hero, GURPS Fantasy, and RuneQuest and not just 2E because we liked the way those systems handled things compared to the game we had effectively been playing for 15‐20 years at that point. Dark Sun and Spelljammer seemed like square pegs in round holes. We greeted the Player’s Option books with a yawn – I think only one guy bought them and we only tried them once. Heck, Gamma World 4th edition (1992) seemed like a revolution in system mechanics compared to 2E! TSR flaming out in the late 90’s didn’t help as it was starting to feel like the time for our game had come and gone and we were prepared to move on to other things like Deadlands or Underground or the new version of Shadowrun, keeping other games for our fantasy fix.

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - Basic & AD&D

2012-01-16T12:32:00.011-06:00

I started with a Holmes Basic Set that I bought in a K-Mart in Tennessee in 1979. I quickly became aware (throgh the toy store in the mall) that there was an Advanced version and over the next two years I started procuring those - it's a longer process when you're running on allowance, lunch money, and Christmas and birthdays - but we typically start off characters in Basic and then moved over to Advanced once every had things figured out. I moved a few times in those years so I started a new group more than once.

I know that at the time I didn't see Basic to Advanced as a different system or an edition change the way we see them now. I saw it as a natural progresssion - Basic covered the basics, Advanced added in the rest. Of course once the Moldvay sets came out, especially Expert, that was clearly not the case, but I was mostly playing AD&D by then anyway. I was happy to play in a Basic or Expert game if someone ran one, but considered my self an AD&D player first and foremost.

For me, the 1st edition of AD&D was a time of excitement – there were new adventures on a regular basis,there was new stuff in The Dragon every month, and my friends and I were doing this all for the very first time! There was a lot of cross‐pollination back then as there were articles on Traveller and Champions in a magazine that was mainly about a different game. We played it for years, constantly playing around with new rules from the magazine or things we thought up or trying out some of those rules we had always ignored before like weapons vs. armor type or the as‐written unarmed combat system, so while it was really never in a completely settled state we always thought of it as the same game and we loved it.

So we spent the 80's playing AD&D as our #1 game and we played it a LOT. Multiple characters, multiple gameworlds, multiple DM's, rules tweaks wise and unwise, and it filled out summer vacations and our weekends and any other days off and even some after school time. We played other games too, but AD&D was the center of it all. I doubt I have played any other game as much, and I doubt I ever will. I like to think we get more out of them now with the background and the understanding that we have now. but I'm not absolutely sure about that. We played a lot, and quantity has a quality all it's own.

As good as it was, by the late 80's there were a lot of things people saw as flaws in the game and when word got out that a new edition was in the works there was both excitement and concern but we were young and eager to soak up any new set of rules - even one for AD&D.

Motivational Monday

2012-01-16T07:00:00.004-06:00

ICONS Supporting Cast #1 - Billy Mack

2012-01-13T12:00:00.001-06:00

(A lightning strike of inspiration during a drive into work this week)

Billy Mack - A Detective Down in Texas

Prowess - 4 (Good) He's a tough customer

Coordination - 3 (Typical) Average in this regard

Strength - 4 (Good) He's a big guy

Intellect - 4 (Good) He's not super book-smart, but he's canny

Awareness - 5 (Excellent) He has good instincts and senses from years on the job

Willpower - 5 (Excellent) he doesn't give up easily

Stamina - 9

Determination - However much the DM says

Origin - Natural

Specialties - Investigation (Expert)

Powers
None!

Qualities
"Knows Exactly What the Facts Is" - He's a non-nonsense kind of guy who has a knack for cutting right to the heart of things. This can be tagged to help figure out a mystery or to for a flash of insight to get out of a dead end or even when hit by some kind of beguling power

Connections: Texas Law Enforcement

Motivation: "Ain't Gonna Let Those Two Escape Justice" - He is a determined, dogged pursuer of criminals and does not give up easily

Challenges
Enemies: Billy Joe and Bobbi Sue, a pair of armed and dangerous criminals

Bad Luck: Somehow sometimes his quarry just slips away

Description: He's a Texas detective so this is pretty simple: Suit, bolo tie, boots, cowboy hat. He carries a pistol and a badge and drives a Chevy Tahoe police model. For a younger version use Timothy Olyphant, for an older one Tommy Lee Jones pretty much defines the role.

Points-wise he's under 30 so he's more of a connection or a personified opponent for a hero who's brushed up against the law somewhere. He could also serve as a sort of rival who comes into town on a case that the heroes get involved with, starting some kind of competition to see who can solve it first.

Thoughts on the 40K RPG's

2012-01-12T12:00:00.003-06:00

Apparently these are pretty popular right now and I've had a chance to look through the first three:

Dark Heresy: You're a fairly low-powered group of characters working for an Inquisitor rooting out heresy inside the Imperium. This does very little for me because while Inquisitors and their personal retinue are interesting, the guys that work for them at this level don't do as much for me. Plus, the things that you're investigating can get very powerful in a hurry and I suspect this would play out a lot like a Call of Cthulu game. I'm sure some peoepl would be interested in that but not me, and I think the popularity of this game was largely due to it being the first 40K RPG ever released rather than the awesomeness of the premise. Beyond this, I just don't think the spirit of 40K is in sneaking around uncovering mysteries - that's too much 90's conspiracy x-files game. The 40K part of the story begins after the planetary governor has turned to chaos and declared a rebellion and the sky fills with marine drop pods streaking towards the planet.

Rogue Trader: You're the command crew of an an interstellar trading ship sent to the borders of the Imperium with a warrant to trade and interact with Xenos cultures. Now this one is interesting - tons of freedom to do as you wish, enough power to not be overwhelmed the first time you find something interesting, and all of the cool background of the 40K universe to play in. It does have a bit of the Star Trek problem in that one player is supposed to be the ROgue Trader and theoretically in charge, but I don't think this would be a major issue most of the time. I like this one a lot.

Deathwatch: You're a Space Marine, from one of just about any chapter, and you've been assigned to an all-star team of space marines that deals with alien threats, primarily through violence. This is the highest powered game - marines have 20 genetically modified implants and organs, extensive training, access to the best weapons, and then they get power armor - and is centered around commando raids and assaults on things. It's a very military flavored game, but it also looks to me like it would be a lot like a super team - some rely on their "natural" talents, some are gadgeteers, and some have psychic powers - where dramatically overpowered beings invstigate and solve mysteries using a lot of violence. The small size of the team, differences between the chapters, personal rivalries, and competition make this a little different than a Traveller merc unit or even a Twilight 2000 player character group.

There's a 4th game out now called Black Crusade that deals with playing chaos marines, traitor marines from a civil war a long time ago. I haven't seen it yet but I assume that (much like the Chaos Marine Army in 40K itself) it caters to those players who want all the badaceness of the Marines without having to play the "good guys" - Heh.

The mechanics are the same as the Warahmmer Fantasy RPG second edition from a few years ago so it's pretty much all a percentile-based roll-under system. It's not as flashy as some, but it works, and the DM is encouraged to use a simple list of modifiers to run the game, from a -60 (Hellish) to a +60 (Trivial). Character stats are rated on a percentile scale and then skills allow a character to use the related stat to roll for a task. There are also Talents which are similar to Feats in d20 games, allowing a character to do something outside the normal rules. The whole thing is fairly clean and for the most part does not get bogged down in a bunch of subsystems or special exceptions.

I have to say I was pretty happy to see that these were finally coming out when they were announced. A 40K RPG has been a dream of many of us who have played 40K for a long time, and many, many homebrew efforts have been made, from custom systems to GURPS to Savage Worlds. Basing it off of the WFRP mechanics keeps a certain level of flavor (since the miniatures game 40K was based on and is still similar to Warhammer Fantasy Battles) and makes it fairly easy to translate the vast list of creatures and gear from 40K over to the RPG. The vast amount of lore in the 40K fluff gives the DM a lot of material to use for a campaign too. This is especially true if one has had some of the various side games published over the years: Battlefleet Gothic yields a lot of information on how ships and systems and fleets work in the 40K universe. Necromunda covers a lot of background on Hive Worlds and Gangers. Even going back to the original Rogue Trader game book that stated the whole thing gives a lot of information on creatures and terrain and general weirdness that might be encountered. The interlocking web of support of both useful game material and background details is probably only rivaled by D&D campaign worlds and maybe published universes like Star Wars and Star Trek. There's a ton of it, and when you get out to the more fringey material like the old Realm of Chaos books, there's a pretty good chance more recent players won't know anything about it.

So am I starting up a game of one of these? I'd like to, I'm just not sure where to fit it in. It will likely become one of the rotating "when we feel like it" games with the Apprentices. We have made characters for Deathwatch, and we will do the same for Rogue Trader, and we will play at least an introductory mission to get a better feel for it. After that, well, we will see.

Thoughts on a Middle Earth Campaign

2012-01-11T18:28:00.000-06:00

Barking Alien had a good post on Monday here, particularly the part about playing a game in someone else's universe - it's worth a read

I like the closed vs. open description, that's not a bad way to visualize it. I tend to think of it as a question of whether I can work within the movie/show/book or do I have to work around it? Star Trek is one I can work within because there are other interesting things going on in parallel with whatever show or movie you're watching - the rest of the universe is shown, not just mentioned and the plot of the typical show or movie doesn't fundamentally change the universe. It's hard to define in specifics but LOTR in contrast, is one where I feel like I would have to work around the main story because the plot does drastically change the environment.

In the specific case of LOTR I think my best option for running a middle earth game would be to set it quite a while after the end of the trilogy. At some point within 100 years or so the wizards are gone, most of the elves are gone, and the fellowship is all gone. Set it in the time of Aragorn's son's first few years and there's a new feeling in the world and with the passing of the heroes of the third age it's time for a new generation (cue theme music). There are still plenty of nasties in the world and there are plenty of good normal folk threatened by them - who's going to stand between that lingering darkness and the innocent and defenseless? Beyond the orcs and trolls there is old magic to be rediscovered and old cities of dwarves and men and elves to be reclaimed. It's a time of expansion, rediscovery, exploration, and pushing back the frontiers!

This approach lets you use all of the background material and lore and the races and cultures of middle earth without that feeling of playing second fiddle to the main story. I think "what happens next" is a nice way to make all of that relevant but not confining. Plus it's customizable to taste - want more connections with the big story? Set it in the later years of Aragorn's reign, make sure Gimil is still alive and Legolas is still around and maybe a couple of the elderly hobbits are still upright. Regardless, Treebeard and TOm Bombadil are going to be present for quite a while so even if you go later they can still provide a link.

With a theme of exploration, rediscovery, and a crusade against evil you have a reason to have adventures all over the map, moving through familiar areas as you do so. A nice range of character motivations fits in here from curiousity or restlessness to greed or vengeance against those orcs that wiped out your family. The type of adventures could include anything from dungeon crawls to cross-country pursuits to discovering and hunting down a dragon that's come down out of the north.

So that's my best take on how to make a LOTR game that would work for me. I realize you aren't going to be rubbing elbows with Frodo or Boromir, but for me that's not the attraction of the world anyway. I can see the armchair Tolkien scholar having some problems with it, but they're going to have problems with pretty much any game unless they can accept some compromises, and there's really only one big compromise here; Everything you know is in the past. Once you can get past that, then it seems like we could have some fun with this.

Sandboxing Rifts

2012-01-10T12:00:00.001-06:00

While researching for my latest mania I realized that I ran and odd kind of sandbox back in the 90's for Rifts of all things. I think Rifts might be a decent game for this kind of approach, better than I had thought at first anyway.

The concept for the campaign was that the PC's all started out in one of those quasi-coalition towns in Post-Rift Arkansas. A local mage was recruiting for an expedition to Detroit, where he was convinced that he would find some ancient magic items in the collection of a wealthy collector from the time before. The plan was to travel cross-country in a Behemoth Explorer robot (pictured above) with a crew of adventuring types, explore things along the way (and sell that information later) and then dig into the ruins of Detroit.

I gathered some real world atlas pages of the travel route, slipped them into sheet protectors, and marked them up for apocalyptic damage, rifts and ley lines, and interesting locals. I knew the course the 'bot would travel, so I stayed within 100 miles or so of that course for any kind of detail and made some notes on what else might be off the edges.

The beauty of this approach is that the trip was going to take a few months to get there and presumably that much to get back so you get many sessions of sandbox exploration -with a moving map- but there is an overarching goal at the end for players who need a plot to work off of.

The giant robot follows all the rules of a typical West Marches/Sandbox Town - it's safe and nothing really happens inside it as that's where you go to heal/repair/learn new spells/accuse each other of being idiots. The interesting twist (other than having a base that moves) is that it can be attacked! Especially if the players start some kind of trouble and lead their enemies back to it, which happened once and spurred one of the biggest fights of the campaign, leaving the bot mobile but pretty heavily damaged. They learned form their actions, but they did enjoy getting to unleash some of the big guns and bigger missiles on the thing, so secretly I don't think they regretted it.

Managing players was easy enough - somebody can't make it? They're sleeping on the bot. New character? They are passing through the same area / a local / running from the law/ suffering a mechanical breakdown and agree to help out on the expedition. There was payment up front and at the end of the mission as this was a job, but money in Rifts isn't always a huge motivator, but XP's and knowledge, gear, and interesting types of ammunition (nuclear weapons) can be.

It was an interesting array of characters like the crazy who was severely claustrophobic so she slept in a tent bolted down to the top of the robot and the glitter boy who liked to drive his own truck alongside the bot (with his suit in the back). Along the way they fought demons, raiders, giant robots, vampires, superheroes, renegade wizards, and in a gladitorial arena somewhere in what used to be Tennessee.

We did eventually make it to Detroit (and among other things they nuked Windsor - sorry, but they had a good reason) but the game fell apart before we could make the trip back.

Looking back I think this kind of game works pretty well with Rifts because the power levels are all over the place and while rapid ground and air travel is easily arranged, enemies have all of those options too. Limiting things to a set region might work too but the moving base opens up more and keeps them from mapping everything from the air on Day 1.

One thing with running Rifts of any kind is forget about balance - it doesn't really matter. In a sandbox game the less powerful characters can actually shine as the Wilderness Scouts and Rogue Scientists have an environment where their abilities are extremely useful. That said, having a giant cannon with a range over a mile and a swarm of missile with double that range ready to go is still very comforting. In fact it gives your weapon-heads plenty of room (and likely plenty of reason) to cut loose. Yes the system can be a mess but once you stop trying to fix it things get easier to live with and the DM and the players can have a lot of fun.

Yeah...

2012-01-09T20:41:00.000-06:00

... I went ahead and signed up for the playtest. Why not?

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120109

Taking the Easy Way Out - with the Force

2012-01-09T12:00:00.001-06:00

So we have a slight kink in the schedule this year because someone decided to go and have ANOTHER baby, due in May and no, not at our house as four is quite enough.

Gven this, and given that I'm still working out how to run a West Marches game for D&D (shhhh - they don't know yet) I offered to run a mini-campaign of 8 to 10 sessions from Jan to May. Options I threw out were Deadlands, Star Wars, Supers, Warhammer, and a 40k RPG. Top 3 responses were Star Wars, Supers, and Deadlands, pretty much in that order.

Since I have done something like this before that was pretty well received I decided to go with Star Wars. I'm sure the new MMO has some people fired up about it and the release of the movies all over again should stoke it further. So interest is decent and because I've been playing around with Saga with the apprentices the system is not totally new to me which should help us get more done.

Then, having blindsided myself with a campaign out of nowhere (wasn't planning on this two weeks ago) and agreeing to start it in two weels or so I realized I needed a concept and I didn't have one. C'mon, I've been reading that huge Deathwatch book and every blog post about west marches, megadungeons, and sandbox games I can find! How the heck did I come up with Star Wars?

Anyway, I realized that given the momentum mentioned above, and that since it's not the first baby, the interruption might not be terminal to the campaign, so more than just a one-shot I needed it to have some future potential. KOTOR is a big deal right now with the new game and all but I'm not very familiar with it and I don't really want to compete with it directly. The Clone Wars could be a blast but I haven't tried to put anything together for those either. Rebellion Era is the place we've played the most but I want to do something a little different and I'm tired of unfreezing Jedi. So I'm copping out and using the published "Dawn of Defiance" campaign from WOTC.

Why?

One, it's "Rise of the Empire" which is fresh because there aren't any movies or AAA video games coming out about it. It has stormtoopers and star destroyers, but there are still renegade Jedi running around too, so I get the best of both worlds.

Two, it's about the beginning of the Rebellion, so my players will feel like they're part of a major storyline and not just holding the bag for big doings over there by other characters.

Three, it's probably the major common ground set of adventures among Saga Edition players - quite a few people have run and played it, netting us that "shared experience" thing I ramble on about sometimes.

Four, it's made up of 10 separate adventures that will take the PC's from levels 1-20 if I want. The first one covers the first few levels and should be perfect for our Jan-May timeframe, and if we decide to keep going then I have plenty of material to work with. If not, we still have a complete adventure finished and a premise established for a future game down the road someday.

Five, it's published and ready to go and has some nice supporting material (especially since I'm running it a couple of years after everyone else), so I can focus on the mechanics and working in character details rather than plotlines.

I have at least one player excited. Since he played in my old game referenced above he's already thinking about making his new one that character's father - there's some "retroactive continuity" for you in a slightly different sense. I've read through the advanture and it looks good so here in a couple of weeks we should be firing it up and of course I will post up details here.

Motivational Monday

2012-01-09T07:00:00.002-06:00

Organizing an Open Table: West Marches vs. Megadungeon

2012-01-06T16:00:00.000-06:00

As I investigate this further I came back across some of the megadungeon articles I have found on other sites and the discussion therin (Best are on the Alexandrian here and here) and realized that was also a valid approach for what I want to try. So here's my internal debate, for anyone else who might be contemplating the same thing.

West Marches: Open Table, Player-Directed, Wilderness Exploration (Breadth)

Megadungeon: Open Table, mix of player and DM direction, single-site exploration (Depth - almost literally - HA!)

My goals here would be to

A) Avoid some of the scheduling hurdles we have faced as even with a fairly dedicated group twice a month has been our average and I think we can do better

B) Bring in some new players

C) Get more use out of all those books on the shelf - play more!

Now the West Marches game that originally started this fire with me stuck to some very strict rules - 1 character per player, no quests from NPC's, and no adventures in town. Some of the original D&D campaigns which inspired the megadungeon type of game did not follow this - players had multiple characters, could gain information and missions from NPC's, and could get into fights and other adventures in town. Figuring out these kinds of ground rules has a huge impact on how the game will work and I have to nail them down before I can send out any information about the game, regardless of the dungeon vs. wilderness question. Let's look at them in order:

One character per player?
I like this idea as it gives everyone a definite identity - "Jim plays a Wizard". It also aids focus - Jim is going to want to be the very best wizard he can be. However I know that over time players may want to try different types of characters and limiting them to one may decrease their interest in playing the game. In old school D&D it was easy enough to make a new character that this wouldn't even be a time issue. WIth 4E character creation is more involved, but with a character creator it really doesn;t take that long if you walk in knowing what you want to play. Plus I would probably require players to show up with a character ready to go, maybe even emailing it to me in advance. So I'm leaning towards allowing multiple characters.

No Adventures in town?
I still like this one for West Marches as there's a whole region to explore. I also really like the "adventure is OUT THERE!" philosophy in general. The town/homeland is safe - it's where you go to spend your money. Out there is not safe, and it's where you go to make your money. For a megadungeon game I can see the town being a handy option for a break from the dungeon - bar brawls and breaking and entering a rival temple or guild - that kind of thing. Right now I'm leaning towards No Adventures in Town.

NPC quest-givers?
This is a tough one as an exploration game almost demands various legends and rumors to jump start interest in the more distant regions/deeper levels. While this could be handled as "you heard it in a bar" type rumor generation, I like the idea of giving the PC"s some social options in town. If they curry favor with the high priest of Thor, he might tip them off down the road about an ancient champion of Thor who went into the dungeon in search of a certain magic item and never returned - and he was also carrying a Hammer of Thunderbolts. It's not a mission from the PC per se as he's not asking them to do anything - he's just informing them. West Marches started people off with treasure maps which gives everyone a specific goal and is a good explanation of why someone would come to the new region in the first place and then relied on player discoveries to fuel further expeditions. I like that approach too but I'm not sure I can completely ditch the handiness of the NPC legend-dump too. I am fine with skipping direct NPC quests though - I think that takes away too much of the player-driven aspect. If the players are sweet-talking or intimidating leads out of NPC's that's still player-driven in my mind and with 2E/3E/4E gives them a mechanically useful arena for their social skills.

Now for the setting considerations:

Wilderness:
Advantages that I see here are the wider locations and environments available - forests, mountains, lakes, all with smaller to medium sized dungeons dropped in as needed. There is less chance the players will get bored with the playground. Plus you get to use the overland travel rules which opens up interesting choices about mounts, campsites, spells/rituals, and the weather. Travel and encounters take on a more three dimensional aspect too as there is no roof over your head! It also alleviates some character concerns - more with older editions than 4E, but still lingering - as all characters work well outdoors but druids and rangers and outdoorsy types in general lose some effectiveness in a constant dungeon environment.

Possible downsides: It's less predictable as a party can go anywhere compared with the limited entrance routes to a dungeon, so there is more general prep work involved. It's also easier for a party to get in way over their head as they stumble into a higher level area. In a 4E game I wonder if some of the attention paid to travel plans might detract from the enjoyment of a session as it's not often explored in this edition.

Megadungeon:
Advantages include focus - there is no question what we're going to do tonight, we're going into the dungeon! Things are also more structured as if Orcus lives on level 20 there's no way for the party to get to him directly from level 1. There will probably only be one known entrance at first, making it _really_ easy to roll out the campaign. That also means I can outline 10 levels or so, prep the first 3, and then run a few sessions before I cover more - I don't even have to decide that Orcus is on level 20 at the start! I also think it's easier to manage a set of dungeon maps game to game than it is to manage a wide-open wilderness over time.

Potential negatives that I see for an open megadungeon game include it being an old-school kind of thing which somewhat limits its appeal, and players potentially getting tired of the whole dungeon thing after a time. It's really a matter of what is standard - this way would be mostly dungeon with some unusual stuff dropped in. Wilderness is a variety of stuff with some dungeon dropped in There are also the impacts on outdoor characters mentioned above. Odly enough I think that the lack of wilderness travel might be a downside with these players, as old-schoolers tend to enjoy that stuff more than many of the new-schoolers. If you don't have to go anywhere you miss out on the main use of some of the cooler spells and magic items.

I do like the idea of a mega-dungeon campaign, but I am still leaning towards a wlderness game for 4E because I can add as much dungeon to that as I want, whereas it's hard to add in miles of forest to a dungeon, even a really big one. Some kind of Underdark wilderness map with mushroom forests, underground lakes, and magma rivers might be an option but I don't want to start there. Maybe the next one can go there. Since my last campaign was a limited geographic area I kind of like the idea of making overland travel a larger factor in this one. For the Megadungeon, there's an old school con around here later this year and that might be a better place to find some interested players rather than starting cold. Additionally I'm not sure about running two open games at the same time as they might interfere with one another scheduling-wise. I'll probably start the 4E one and see how that goes and then consider my options down the road a bit.

West Marches - Opening the Table for Different Games

2012-01-05T22:04:00.000-06:00

The other core element of a West Marches game (see yesterday's post for the first one) is the Open Table - the idea is to not have a set time to play and to not have a set group of players. Instead, players can get a group together and schedule something anytime they and the DM are available.

One consideration: It seems like online play would make this even easier to schedule by a) eliminating travel complications and time and b) opening up the pool of players beyond the local area, but I haven't done enough of that to want to try and run a game like that just yet.

Genre considerations:

Fantasy is again the go-to option here because one of the concerns is having a large pool of available players. It doesn't get any larger than the D&D crowd and fantasy games in general. Structurally it works well because you can have an "expedition" that consists of a few guys walking around or riding horses together. Then once they get "back to town" there are no further constraints on the group to remain a group.

Sci-Fi - probably the next biggest pool but traditional sci-fi games usually involve a ship, and typical sandboxing involves going to different planets. There is no good way to manage Player A on Ship A and Player B on Ship B unless you assume we have a bunch of one-man ships (not very satisfying IMO) or we all go back to base every time or everyone is a captain and can decide where they want to go. I kind of like that last idea, especially in a Star Trek type environment, but there are other issues there. You might say that if the knights and wizards can go back to town every session then why can't the ship go back to base every session? Well, part of the attraction of sci-fi is the ship, and one of the things ships do is break down or get damaged. If you get into a fight and the hyperdrive gets taken out, well, you're stranded somewhere until it gets fixed, and so is your character. I'm not saying this is insurmountable but it works against the structure of this type of game. I'm thnking that maybe you could manage it with a "call in the dreadnought" rule to bail you out from an untenable situation (it's a big pure-combat ship that is expensive to operate and useless for exploration so it sits at the starbase until someone needs help, either through gratuitous use of photon torpedoes or a helpful tow) but there would have to be some consequences to doing so - maybe you get a reprimand or after 3 calls you get demoted to a smaller ship - something that doesn't take you out of the action but isn't anything anybody wants to have publicizied. The characters on different ships problem is just an additional obstacle that fantasy doesn't have - it doesn't mean it's not worth trying however.

PostApocalyptic - this is pretty close to fantasy. Most travel is by foot or at least on the ground, and the players could be leaving from a fortified city, a hidden underground base, a beached aircraft carrier - there are lots of ways to have a secure "town" to go back to, and all of the positive reasons for playing it in fantasy work here too.

Western - same thing here. If you can come up with a good concept then having everyone operate out of Fort Somewhere at the end of a new rail line works just fine. You're on foot or horseback for the most part so it ends up working a lot like fantasy. It does make the inclusion of some Native American character types a little tricky but I think it still works.

Steampunk - you might run into the ship issue from above if you have a bunch of people exploring by balloon or dirigible of some kind. Otherwise I don't see a lot of structural issues here.

So as long as the setting sets an expectation that the characters will be individuals on foot or mounted or driving a ground vehicle of some type then we're OK with players coming and going. Even there I can see travel becoming an issue if mounts or cars are damaged or destroyed, but at least then it's still physically possible to return home - it's just a question of time. When a method of transport becomes the only means of returning to the home base AND is a destuctable thing, then we have a problem because it potentially locks in a group of characters when the players may not be able to reassemble. One solution to this is my "everyone-is-a-captain" concept where if 4 or 5 ships are out exploring a system together it mitigates the chance that the party will be stranded - surely someone can beam over survivors and then warp out - right?

The biggest problem I foresee (and it's not genre-specific) is that the players must be free to group and ungroup at will and choose their own destiny. If the characters are part of a military, government, or corporate organization then this could be a problem, whether it's Star Fleet, House Kurita, or the U.S. 7th Cavalry. I can see ways to work around it in some settings, less so in others. In a Western or Steampunk game the characters might be outside experts, freelancers, or on detached duty. For a Trek game the concept could be that in the newly opened Zeta Quadrant the players are all ship captains and their experienced command staff can decide how to investigate this vast new frontier and follow up leads as they please, rather than being micro-managed by a remote command structure. Post-Apoc games avoid most of this, as do fantasy games, so it's not likely to come up there but it's something to think about regardless.

I think a mechanical solution to potential bog-downs has to be in place, even if it's as simple as Jeff R's escape from the dungeon table. An ironclad rule that forbids session spillover prevents a lot of headaches for this kind of game. Plus the potential severity of the results provides additional incentive to get back to town in a timely fashion. I think I would probably take a hard line on this - even if the entire party (and the DM) agree that they could gather again the very next day to pick up where they left off, I would still lean towards closing it out and starting fresh the next day. Kids get sick, cars break down, wives get cranky, and hey, what if someone else wants to join in?

It's interesting that this is probably the less-common of the two elements, yet it seems to have fewer potential complications. As long as you have a means of scheduling things, I don't think the kind of game matters a great deal. Once you've decided to sandbox things, adding this in really doesn't change much in-game other than the return-to-base rule.

Idle Thought #1: Of course, you could just play fighter pilots/mechajocks/space marines/jedi stationed on board the Heart of Gold. Since it simultaneously passes through every point in the universe you could all deploy to anywhere and everywhere for each mission, the rejoin on the next jump. "OK this request indicates that a Space Wolf team accompanied by Darth Greedo and Sir Guinness of the Round Table is making an orbital drop onto Greyhawk looking for Leman Russ, who may in fact be the divine being known as "Kord" on that world. Alright let's roll to see where you land..."

Idle Thought #2: If you want a stationary home base I think the home planet of the Timelords from Dr. Who might do it. All characters must fit into a League of Extraordinary Gentleman type theme but with time period no longer an issue. Heck, universe might not be an issue. Run that as the Ultimate Sandbox! No hexmap - you can go anywhere, anywhen, with anyone. Maybe rule out straight-up superheroes -that's a little too obvious - but anything else. Of course then you get into system questions and that could be tricky, but it's fun to entertain the notion. "This session it looks like we have Colonel Steve Austin, Colonel Mustard, Colonel Sanders, and Colonel Sherman Potter and we're headed for the ice planet of Hoth..." Typically this kind of campaign would be driven by DM plots (Save the Chronoverse!) but this would be the anti-campaign to that - "Nope, the Gallifreyans have no mission for you, just some accomodations and a Universal Gateway." I think for sanity's sake I would want a week or two's notice and a description of where the group wants to go, but even with that it would be a tremendous test of improv skills. Pretty sure I could work up a theme song though: "We're the time guardians who don't do anything..."

West Marches - What if it's not Fantasy?

2012-01-04T22:13:00.000-06:00

There are really two main components to a West Marches game:

1) Sandbox play - an open adventuring environment with no "plot complications" imposed by the DM

2) An open table - players are free to mix and match and come and go as their interest level and schedules permit

I want to focus on the sandbox element in this post, and look at genres and best fits. One of the common themes I've seen in reading about various sandbox games is that they tend to be some flavor of D&D and the ones that are not are some other flavor of fantasy game like RuneQuest. I assume that some of this is due to fantasy games being more popular but I think some of this is also a structural limitation inherent to certain types of campaign. So let's look at some of them.

Beyond the open environment a sandbox game generally requires a motivation for characters to go exploring - there has to be some payoff for doing so. D&D offers experience points, gold, and magic items, which are the whole reason you go dungeoneering anyway, so it's an obvious choice and our baseline. Any level-based game could start from a similar place by offering XP's for exploration -and possible combat and diplomacy as well. You wander around, you level up, and keep finding danger and interesting situations.

This is something you could create with Traveller (and is the main drive behind Stars Without Number) and really any game where you have an unexplored region and a group of characters that can ... explore it. Fantasy and Sci Fi both seem to work for it - besides the previous mentions I can see it working with Star Trek, Star Wars, Mechwarrior, Rogue Trader, and even Mekton. What's the reward? Well, XP's of course. The chance to use some of your big guns without some outside authority cracking down on you - "Imperial regulation 11539.17 outlaws the use of nuclear weapons on a planetary surface - you will now be vaporized". Meeting new races - "Borg? Like Cy-Borg?". Naming planets after your character - "Welcome to Sparacus Jonesworld". New technology - "They call it a Star-Trigger". Old technology - "They call it a lightsaber". F-r-e-e-d-o-m to roam as you please without being assigned missions from Star Fleet Command every week. You can usually find a good reason for any player and character.

Post-Apocalyptic games work too - Gamma World, Twilight 2000, and Darwin's World all lend themselves to it, for mostly the same reasons.

One genre I am not sure about is Westerns. The core of the Sandbox game is the blank map - typical cowboy games have much of the map filled in already, so I'm not sure they would work. I suppose you could try using "Fort Safehaven" as the base and have the party out exploring Indian Territorry as the game, but it feels more forced to me. You generally do not have aerial travel though, which at least keeps it viable and leads me into a related genre.

Steampunk is another type of game I wonder about - you still can have some unmapped areas of the world like a fantastic Africa or a hollow world, but once you get into aerial travel then you lose another core element of sandbox gaming: the danger of the hexcrawl. In a sci-fi game you may travel by spaceship, but the assumption is that dangerous things may exist in that same space that your ship travels through. In a conventional planet-bound game aerial travel avoids much of this danger, at least enough to change the flavor of the exercise, and a steampunk game invariably has some kind of aerial travel available. Allowing players to sidestep much of the danger just kills this kind of game in my opinion, as the focus shifts from exploration of the area to hitting the high points and determining the optimum sites to loot. Going into a game like this with the intention of haivng the players fly around for most of it could be a fun chalenge to undertake and a refreshing change of pace, but I think I need to level up my dusty sandboxing skills before I would want to try it. There is also the issue of rewards. Unless you have some kind of magic/psychic/powers and artifacts to go with them then you're back to loot and XP's - which may work just fine for some groups.

One campaign concept I had years ago might get around some of these issues. My pitch was "Cowboys on Mars" which was to be a hopefully entertaining fusion of Deadlands and Space 1889 using at one point GURPS, and then at another point Savage Worlds. In short it was going to have steampunk tech, cowboys, and funky powers, all set in the 1880s. Space 1889 does have fairly common methods of air travel, especially on Mars, which lessens the usual travel dangers but a) the natives and the rivals have air travel and powers too, upping the danger almost back to where it should be and b) It's a whole frigging planet! I originally had some plotted stuff to kick it off but figured a large part of it would be a sandbox type exploration for loot and knowledge and possibly power - "Shotgun" Slim Durango, usurper-king of the tribes of the northern dust-plains - that kind of thing.

Horror is my final "maybe" genre. I generally see it as something that gets layered over another- fantasy, modern, sci -fi - rather than a separate genre of its own, but you could set a game in an earlier time and make expeditions ito the wild neccessary for survival and not looked-forward to - gathering food, perhaps - rather than a voluntarily loot-seeking activity. Players might know that "going outside" means strange visions, strange creatures, shared dreams - or any or all of the above. Maybe it's a colony world on a distant planet. Maybe it's a base near the Eye of Terror. Maybe it's something like Dark City or maybe the characters are normal survivors caught up in something like the battleworld form Secret Wars and left behind and forgotten after the big fight. It's workable, but I think there are better choices for a true ongoing sandbox game.

There are really only two genres that I think have real problems with a sandbox campaign:

Cyberpunk is typically a high-knowledge setting so you're not likely to have unexplored territorry or unmapped regions. They also tend to be centered in a particular city, dropping travel distances down to hours at most. You could try to rig up some kind of hexcrawl through a city but your tech player is likely to just pull down a satelite map and auto-nav to where they need to go - and they should! It's part of the genre! "Exploring unknown territorry" doesn't really come up a lot unless you mean in the virtual sense or the limits of humanity sense. Why not set it on a new space colony? Because you're still going to have orbital satellites and air travel and remote operated drones and a bunch of other ways to kill the mystery and sense of exploring the unknown. When the tropes of cyberpunk don't support it and most of the settings and systems don't support it, I don't think it's worth pursuing when there are so many better options out there.

Supers is the other type of game that just fails as a sandbox. One, they're usually set in the modern day so you don't have much unexplored territorry to work with. Two, supers go way past aerial travel and get into weirdness like teleportation and time travel making the dangerous travel element a non-factor. Three, supers is an inherently reactive genre - they take action when a badguy starts something, so at its core it's a plotted type of game and there's nothing wrong with that - it just makes hex-crawling an unlikely activity for superheroes. You could strand them on an alien planet and take away their powers but at that point you're pretty much playing D&D or GURPS anyway, and it's probably a side-trek, not the focus of the campaign. Plus what's the payoff? These characters generally aren't looking for loot or magic items - they're looking to fight the good fight! One final consideration is that the mechanical systems that usually go along with supers tend to have them wired in to an existing society - Dpenedent NPC's, Group Affiliations, Enemies, Rivals, Day Jobs - all of these mean that it's difficult to separate the hero from the typical environment.

So what would I run? I have to admit I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of an open-table-everyone-is-a-captain Star Trek sandbox. I'm not sure I could ever get 10 people to play it, but I do like the idea. Second choice would probably be a PA game using some version of Gamma World, just because that's always been a thing for me. We'll see how it all shakes out.

Thoughts on a West Marches Game

2012-01-03T12:00:00.008-06:00

Background Item #1: If you don't recognize "West Marches" check it out here then come back.

Background Item #2: Someone who tried it with 4th edition D&D here.

I think 4E is perfectly constructed to accomodate this kind of campaign with the levelling of mosters and magic items and the push to smooth things out mechanics-wise. The accusations of being too MMO-like aren't really a negative here as the concept behind a West Marches game is very MMO-like anyway, with the important difference that the players can have a permanent impact on the world through their characters. The geography is similar to the levelled zones found in an MMORPG as well, so the whole thing fits pretty nicely.

Things to steal:

I like placing the town across a distant ocean as a colony in a "new world". This means I can run an "anything goes" campaign when it comes to races and classes and such. I can also demand that each player describe their character's place of origin "back home" and potentially turn this into a bit of a world building exercise - potentially for some other campaign! It also means I am not tied to any publised campaign world yet I do not need to map out a civilzed continent - just a town and some wilderness
I like the customized wandering monster tables and I think 2d6 is a good place to start.
I like the idea of most of the placed magical treasure being wondrous items, replacing the rest with extra cash.

Further thoughts

I could stick with the standard D&D gods, but ... what if defining a homeland also means players can define their own deity as well - more back door world building.
I would consider going with the inherent bonus concept from the DMG 2 and pushed in Dark Sun to remove the need for magical weapons and armor but I'm not sure that makes for a better game in this case. I still like the idea of magic items, even if the PC's are picking out their own most of the time via gold peices instead of finding them in dusty tombs.
I can see this going well for Heroic and Paragon tiers but I'm not sure about Epic. I'm not sure that matters anyway. Maybe the sandbox extends into the planes or maybe there's a really nasty portal to the Abyss in the bottom of a dungeon in there somewhere.

Logistical concerns

I would want to set up a wiki or Obsidian portal to run this so I would need to refamiliarize myself with those options
Need more players to get the true feel of the thing so I would have to post up notices online and in some stores
I usually play at home but that might not be the best way to handle it so there's another conversation and possible transportation issue
Timing - would this take the place of what has been "game night" or would I try to work it in around my regularly scheduled games? I'm not sure, I suppose some of it depends on the response.

I already have some ideas for the map and locations and encounters, and lord knows we have enough gamers in the area. I really have to think about this.

Additional thought - There are a lot of old-schoolers too. No reason I couldn't run a second game like this in 1E/2E/BECMI/LL/BF though house rules would be an interesting discussion. Plus it would let me indulge my inner old-school DM.

Really thinking about this one...

Game-planning the New Year

2012-01-02T13:35:00.000-06:00

I've had a very refreshing week off and spent a lot of time reading and thinking about how I want to spend my gaming time this year. I've realized that the ideal mix for me would be one D&D campaign, one Supers campaign, and one "other" campaign - sci-fi, western, something different. I'm not sure I can arrange that, but it's a goal to keep in mind.

Looking back, I did manage to get in quite a bit of D&D, some Star Wars (both d6 and Saga), some Supers (ICONS & Marvel), and even managed to work in some board games (including Federation Commander) before the end of the year, so I'm going to say "Mission Accomplished" for 2011.

The big want-to's for the year:

Run Warhammer Fantasy RP - I've sat on those books for too long and after re-reading a bunch of them it's a really good game that I want to run
Run a sandbox game of D&D 4 - too much West Marches on my brain and 4E is darn near tailor-built for this kind of "campaign". More on this later.
Try one of the 40K RPG's - they do seem to be popular and lord knows I've spent enough time and money on 40K over the years.
Get some kind of regular Savage Worlds game up and running - probably Deadlands, maybe something else

Sandboxing D&D, running ICONS or Necessary Evil with the Apprentices, and then some kind of Deadlands or Warhammer would would meet my other goals above and hit most of this list. I'm continuing the Temple 4E campaign with the Apprentices regardless.

I'm still considering my "game-of-the-month" plan for the apprentices. It might be better to just focus on 2 or 3 recurring games with them and not try to switch out on some limited schedule. Depth or breadth, it's a hard choice.

I kind of feel that if you can find a few games you like and play them regularly with a group of interested players then you shouldn't fret too much about what you're NOT getting to play. Still, this is the time of year for looking ahead so I don't feel to bad thinking out loud and online about it for a bit.

Motivational Monday - Kicking Off 2012!

2012-01-02T07:00:00.002-06:00

The Rambling End of the Year Post for 2011

2011-12-31T12:59:00.001-06:00

The Amazing Aluminum Man keeps an eye on Baby New Year - just in case

Wrapping up a few loose ends and clearing the decks for 2012:

- A week or so before Christmas: Wizards of the Coast's annual Christmas layoffs appear to have begun. So far, casualties appear to include Rich Baker and Steve Winter. Yeah that's great. A wonderful holiday tradition. I've been "downsized" a few times over the years ad it's not fun at any time of the year. Hopefulyy (given their time with the company) there were severance packages sufficient to see them through the holidays and find something new.

- Going back to Thanksgiving: Hero Games has been around for 30 years with ups and downs. The economy's been pretty rough lately, as has the gaming market. With declining sales and fewer releases, Hero has reached the point where it's no longer possible to maintain a full time staff of three, so it's scaling back. Darren and Steve will be departing December 2nd, with our thanks for a decade of hard work that gave us 108 books, and best wishes for their future endeavors, which may include producing new books under a Hero System license. We'll keep you posted on that. Jason will remain to continue shipping books and handling day-to-day matters. Existing books will continue to be available for purchase, and the company will continue in business, just a bit more slowly. The online store remains open. Steve will continue to answer rules questions on the Hero boards as "the guy who wrote the rulebook." We're looking into doing a Kickstarter to print Book of the Empress, since it's complete and ready to go. For the near future Hero would appreciate your kind thoughts and your patience. Transition periods of this sort take time, and Jason has a lot of work cut out for him, so the support of our fans is much appreciated. Wow more good news. Forum discussion here.

I think Hero's biggest problem is that while it has a great system (one of the best if you like crunch) it doesn't have any compelling worlds to play in. 5th edition was sold primarily as a toolkit and the game universes were left as sort of an add-on. People get interested in systems but they get attached to worlds and Hero has little in the way of shared experiences the way everything from D&D to RuneQuest to Traveller to Pathfinder has. Even Champions has only a proto-universe that gets rewritten every time the edition changes. The first Champions game I played had Gargoyle and Marksman as heroes. Then we got Seeker and Obsidian. Now we have Ironclad and some other new faces. Sure some of the villains are still in the game, and some of the organizations, but they change pretty drastically between editions too, and that's their BEST universe! What's a compelliong reason to play Star Hero? It lets you do anything you want? Traveller covers a lot of that ground, and so does Savage Worlds, and if I'm looking for a universe they have everything from the Third Imperium to Hammer's Slammers to Slipstream! Same question for Fantasy Hero - if I haven't been a fan since the 80's or 90's, why should I even look at it? Between the 14 versions of D&D out there from OSR clones to Pathfinder to 4E I have a whole lot of D&D to choose from. Oh wait, it's "not D&D"? Well I have everything from RQ to WFRP to Savage Worlds (again! - Evernight, Sundered Skies, etc.) for "not-D&D". Fantasy Hero's potential campaign worlds get 1 book (at most) and then get changed in every edition (80's-90's-00's) anyway! I know the thinking is that Hero players prefer to create their own worlds but does that mean you shouldn't try to create some compelling world to share with your players instead of yet another edition of "300 pages of pre-built spells" ? I suspect 6th edition Hero will sputter along for a while under most people's radar until some new blood/new money gets interested and takes a run at a 7th edition.

- Dark Sun 4E: I realize I'm a year behind on this one but I finally got it, read it, and it's a pretty good version of Dark Sun. I think it's great for Heroic, interesting for Paragon, and then I'd like to know what Epic is supposed to be about. With no gods and almost no planar travel, then if you're playing the game of thrones at Paragon what do you do after that? Conquer the world? Alright I guess. Restore the world? Even at Epic that seems like more of a long-term mission than something you roll dice for - "Alright now we're in the Great Slat Flats - roll your Gardening check, DC 50 - OK, it's green again. See you next week!" I think it needs something more. Maybe you restore an old battleship and head off through Astral Space to Iskandar or something, but I don't think it's a great setting for Epic as it stands right now. Earlier levels though, I can see it being a fun change of pace from the usual approach.

- The Sellswords Trilogy:

Servant of the Shard - This first one is OK, but it was written yeras before the next two and was notable at the time as the first Drizzt novel without Drizzt. It does wrap up the story of the Crystal Shard nicely though.
Promise of the Witch King - This second one is actually pretty good, and serves as a shining example of how an "evil" party of characters might go adventuring together to investigate/avert/steal from a larger threat. I really liked it.
Road of the Patriarch - The third one is terrible as it picks up right where #2 leaves off and then goes in a completely different direction, focusing back in on Artemis Entreri, particularly his bad childhood which I didn't find all that interesting. I also think that Calimshan had been covered pretty thouroughly in the earlier books and wow, the world's greatest assassin takes his revenge on a corrupt local priest - whee. A letdown after #2.

- Obligatory End-of-Year-Prediction: Despite pronouncements to the contrary when 4E was released that we would never need it, and despite pronouncements that Essentials was and was not 4.5, I think that we will probably see D&D 5th Edition announced in 2012, probably at GenCon, for a 2013 release. The timing works with a 2013 release coming 5 years after the 2008 release of 4E. Beyond that I don't think they would have hired Monte Cook this year if they didn't have a job for him to do, and I suspect that job is 5E.

Now that all that is out of the way, I have to say that for me 2011 started off on the lower end of things and has ramped up nicely in the family, professional, and recreational sense. I hope 2012 continues the trend, and if your personal trend hasn't been going the same way then I hope it turns around soon. I plan to continue the blog through thick and thin so there should be no major changes here.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from the Family Blacksteel! See you in 2012!

WFRP Campaign Thoughts

2011-12-27T12:00:00.001-06:00

The Warhammer universe is extremely rich, which, oddly enough, makes it difficult to decide what kind of campaign to run. For some games, they are built around a particular type of play: Mechwarrior is mainly aimed at playing giant robot drivers; Shadowrun is focused on largely criminal behavior by off-the-grid free agents;. Sure, you can try something else but the premise of the game and most supporting material drives it in a particular direction. Other games present a universe and a mechanical system for playing in that universe and leave the rest up to you: Traveller is pretty strong at this, and most universal type games are good at this. Even something like a Star Trek game can fall into this category: Fasa Trek started out centered around playing Star Fleet officers out exploring the galaxy. Over time it added support for the major alien races for similar kinds of campaigns, then it added rules for the intelligence services opening things up for espionage type games, then it added rules for playing a merchant type campaign as well. After digging through my WFRP material I would add it to the list of games that says "here's a universe - go!"

The mechanical part of the game does make certain assumptions:

- you're playing a human, elf, dwarf, or halfling. That covers some physical items but culturally there are a lot of options that are independent of physical race.

- technology is at a renaissance level: armor, swords, early firearms, telescopes, and some beginning experiments with steam power

- magic is present, unpredictable, powerful, and dangerous

- there are gods in the universe that are benevolent to indifferent

- there is a thing called Chaos that underlies the world, it's bad, and it contains entities that care nothing for the current state of the world or the beings that live in it

There are not a lot of assumptions, though, about what characters will be doing. There is a combat system, but it's pretty d*mn dangerous and it is explicitly stated in the game that a lot of combat leads to maimed and dead characters, so much so that a Fate point mechanic was added to help mitigate the seriousness of those consequences. There are various skills and abilities that relate to personal interaction between characters and to business transactions too.

I could certainly see running a traditional D&D style campaign that involves dungeon and wilderness encounters on a personal quest for wealth and power - it would probably feel quite different than most D&D campaigns but it could be done.

Having recently looked through Pendragon and then through my Bretonnia supplement, I think you could run a very solid "Lords and Ladies" campaign similar to what a Pendragon game would encompass set in Bretonnia and involving a little more of the fantastic than a baseline Pendragon game. I'm thinking about writing this up in more detail a bit later but I do like the idea of combining these two things.

You could run a Traveller-style Merchant game running a ship up and down the major river of the Empire.

If you wanted to tie in the Warhammer miniatures game you could have a very fine Mercenary campaign that included some occasional mass battles.

Need political intrigue? The nobles of ther Empire are quite a bickering lot, as are the major religions, and then there are the hidden threats of Chaos cults and the Skaven to make things even more shadowy that stubborn noble houses.

Picking up the Tome of Corruption supplement then you could flip things upside down and go over to Chaos, running a campaign where each player runs an aspiring champion of chaos, perhaps using the recent Storm of Chaos invasion as the background.

There is another supplement that covers the Border Princes but is largely composed of a system for creating, mapping, and then managing a small realm pacified, claimed, and run by the player characters.

Now you could try a lot of these in various editions of D&D but the difference here is that there is quite a bit of support, both mechanical and with background material and advice for each of them. That was not always true in various editions of D&D - or Runequest or Fantasy Hero or whatever other system you care to compare. The fact that all of these options feel like they could fit coherently within one edition of a game set in one particular fantasy world is a pretty strong positive in my opinion. I like the idea that I could run 3 different campaigns at the same time in this world and not feel like I'm repeating myself at any point.

I also think that this could be run as an episodic campaign if the DM had a particular aspect in mind - say one fo the items above - but it could also run just fine as an open-ended-wander-the-world-and-see-what-happens kind of game. I do think I would run it as a more traditional serial campaign in most cases as that just feels more right to me in an age when traveling long distances is supposed to be part of the adventure. You're in Altdorf and need to talk to someone in Marienburg? Getting there might be a whole session in itself whether by land or by sea!

There are several published starting scenarios, more if you drop back and use some of the old 1st edition material. There are quite a few published adventures, both long and short, linked and independent, enough to sustain a decent campaign if that's the way you wanted to go. I do like the idea of using some of those for that shared experience that lets you swap stories with other players about how YOU handled that trouble in Bogenhafen, but I would definitely want to mix in my own stuff as well. The border princes book is pratically a campaign in itself, as is the mammoth Thousand Thrones advanture and the Altdorf-Nuln-Middenheim trilogy. For a limited campaign I think any of those is a solid choice.

This is a little more general than I originally planned but I have some ideas on some specific campaigns that I will get into in a little more detail and some other ideas too.

Motivational Monday

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

From the Family Blacksteel to anyone and everyone...

...Merry Christmas!

Deadlands - A Campaign Discussion

2011-12-22T23:53:00.000-06:00

Begin: It's 1876 and the PC"s are on a train headed through the Rockies to Denver. This is the starting adventure from the older GM's book and it makes for an easy justification of why a diverse group of characters might end up stuck together. Unless one of them decides to play an old ways Indian - still not sure about that but my players tend to like their guns so it's not likely to come up.

-ANYWAY-

That gets the characters acquainted and has one adventure binding them together. I see this as being a more episodic approach with each session being somewhat independent of the others and whichever players can make it determines which characters show up. I see this as being a tour of the Weird West for a while - Texas, Denver, Salt Lake, the Great Maze & Lost Angels - hitting the high points. Then there would be a sort of finale of the big trilogy of linked adventures that I would convert over from original flavor Deadlands to wrap things up for "Season 1".

Keeping the scenarios short enough to fit into one 4-6 hour session would be a specific major goal. I haven't tried to run an explicitly episodic game since a Shadowrun game several years ago. That one had mixed results as my ideas were hard to fit into a single session's worth of time and so we had a lot of "two part episodes". I think Savage Worlds as a system is a better bet for this approach as it plays faster than just about anything I have tried. The one-sheet adventure is also a popular format for it, featuring an adventure that fits onto one sheet of paper (front and back) with the assumption that it's one session's worth of fun. I also think that the Western genre is friendly to this approach as so much of it built up in half-hour or one-hour TV shows that quite a few of the basic plots one could steal are fairly short. The basic idea is that the characters enter the town (or the mining camp, or the ranch), discover a situation, get involved, and resolve it, most likely leaving behind friends, enemies, or corpses - all within one session. Next week, it's all new. After a while, past encounters might show up again in some way via NPC's or enemies or news from a town they know, but I wouldn't want to go overboard on that.

The advantage for the DM if you can pull it off is that a) you get to try out a lot of different ideas and b) if only players X,Y, and Z can make it one week but only players A,B, and Z can make it the next week then you don't have to deal with the sudden appearance and disappearance of PC's in the middle of a situation. It also means you don't really have to worry about the passage of time as you're not playing a linear, continuous campaign. If they're in Denver one week and in Fort Worth the next, then in Tombstone the next we don't have to worry about rations and horses or train tickets and stage schedules every session - we just start with "As you step off of the train, you hear gunfire coming from downtown Tombstone and see people running past you, presumably fleeing."

Original vs. Published? Probably some of both. There are quite a few online freebies for Deadlands Reloaded, plus I have quite a bit of material from the first go-round including the Devil's Tower trilogy. I would mainly want to spend some time in each of the high-profile areas to see which of them connect the best with my players and to give them maximum exposure to the lore of the game. For a hypothetical "Season Two" I would consider settling down in one area, maybe focusing on one town, with some old and some new characters, close to whatever region/threat/plotline they liked the best. The amount of published material used would mainly depend on whether it fit into these plans.

A Planned Campaign: This means it would be planned to have a start and a finish. Say we planned to start in January 2012 and run for one year of real time - this would be the "2012 Dealdands Campaign"- figure 2 sessions per month for 24 sessions. Make a rough outline of what 24 things I would like to cover, work out some details on the first 3 or 4, then go! One of the benefits of doing it this way (episodic and planned with a definite end) is that it doesn't really matter if some of the PC's die or are replaced as the sessions aren't linked in a serial fashion. Some bad guy NPC or organization might show up a few times in different sessions both in the background and as direct opposition to set up the finale, but it wouldn't be a running chase from one to the next unless I saw a really good opportunity to work that in. One alternate approach is that if you're tied to a school year, then plan your campaign based on that - start in the fall, mini-climax at the break, picks up again in the new year, then runs to May and the big finale. Season Two? See you next fall!

Oddly enough this is a complete 180 from the approach I believed in the first 20 years or so of this whole thing. I was "raised" to think that the open-ended-multi-year-ongoing campaign was the "right" - heck the "only"- way to do it and any campaign that we started was expected to go on forever unless it was explicitly stated to be a one-shot up front. Now this didn't happen - every campaign petered out eventually due to player and DM fatigue or interest in trying out whatever shiny new game someone had just acquired. This can lead to some churn in both players and campaigns and it also means that some adventures end in the middle, with no end to the story - did we finish off the giants? Did we stop the drow? For some parties we will never know, because we stopped in the middle and never got to the end. Putting a definite timeframe on the campaign avoids that issue, assuming you can stick with it all the way through. Hmm, maybe I should shoot for a 12-episode mini-series...

What to include? Well I really like the Great Maze region - City of Lost Angels, Shan Fan and the Kung Fu thing, maze dragons, ironclads, ghost rock mines - that's an area I want to spend some time exploring. Heck, I'll run a thinly disguised version of Big Trouble in Little China set in Shan Fan - there's one! I also think that Salt Lake, Helstromme, automatons, steam wagons, and the worms are important enough to spend some time on too. In between I think some more traditional western locales like Tombstone and Deadwood are worthy of some time. I feel like I should work at least one brush with the Blue vs. Gray in there too. A few "normal" western problems like rustlers and bank robbers would help set off the weirdness too, so I would want to work those in as well. I think there's plenty of material there to fill 24 sessions and let them start to figure out what's *really* going on.

Of course all this only matters if I run it as the "main" game. If it's only one of my "games of the month" with the Apprentices then I only have 3 sessions to worry about anyway, and now I'm overstocked with ideas. Someday...

Tomorrow: A very similar post about a completely different game

Blogonomic Slowdown

2011-12-21T20:21:00.000-06:00

Well with the kids deployed to various other houses and much holiday shopping in the evenings there hasn't been much actual gaming to report.With a need for a new "main" campaign, and the possibilitiy of doing a game a month with the Apprentices next year I've been digging through the shelves and burning through game books like a madman. Deadlands (SW), Traveller (Mongoose), Shadowrun (3E), GURPS (4E), Warhammer FRP (2E) and even Pendragon have all been seeing some daylight. I even finally broke down and picked up Dark Sun for 4E and it's on the stack now too. I'll probably put up some thoughts about each of these (the ones I haven't already anyway) as far as strengths, weaknesses, and what kind of campaign I might run. It's not super crunchy I know, but it's what I have right now. There's also a set of games that I've mostly ignored that are looming as extremely likely possibilities to show up in a big way too.

Motivational Monday

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000-06:00

The Game That's On My Mind This Week: Traveller

2011-12-14T23:43:00.000-06:00

I've been re-reading the Mongoose Traveller main book this week and it's amazing just how well the system hangs together. Traveller was probably the first non-D&D RPG I got into , around 1981, and the Mongoose version is very similar to that original set of little black books yet it feels very modern in many ways too.

Looking back on the multitude of sessions I've played and run with this game I can say that almost all of them were set in the Third Imperium and almost all of them eventually involved some illegal activity. Sad but true...maybe the game needs an alignment system...

One other thing that strikes me is that most of the time players want to operate at the higher end of the tech level scale - anything less than TL15 is weak and needs to be upgraded as soon as possible. I blame the setting info that the Imperium is TL15 as setting the bar a little higher than I would like. This has gotten me thinking about a different type of campaign - what if you held on to most of the basic Traveller assumptions but dropped the history and assumed that TL10 was common, TL11-12 was cutting edge, and TL9 was where most people operated, especially interstellar operations. Lowest common denominator means it's easier to find parts and crews and probably cheaper too.

This would keep the most common jump capabilities in the 1-2 range, keeps things in the sweet spot for a lot of gear (giving your mercenaries somewhere to climb to that doesn't involve fusion guns), and provides a better explanation for why so many spacers run around with shotguns and cutlasses instead of lasers and plasma guns.

Politically I see it as a region of individual systems with a few extrasystem colonies discovering and competing with each other in an economic and military sense but without open warfare just yet. I see it as a post-collapse recovery but with whatever interstellar empire once existed being a vague legend.

What would characters do? The traditional merchants and mercenaries campaigns are an option but so would a "Shadowrun" type game where the PC's move in between the major players as independent free agents. If someone is a scientist or academic then the discovery of ancient tech (TL15 maybe) could lead to a surge of interest in archaeology (and the men with guns who guard that work). The lack of knowledge of what's in every single system would make it much easier for pirates to operate and a campaign could go hard in a "Pirates of the Stellar Caribbean" way. Combine that with the ancient tech plotline and you have a lot of material to work with and a lot of directions to go. Merchants could be part of the regular supply run to a dig site. Agents might be infiltrators from a corporate entity or rival government that wants to keep an eye on things. Drifters might be hired for basic labor tasks like digging. I think having a solid outline for your initial adventure or starting situation makes it easy to include almost any character type - then let events run their course and see what the players do.

I guess that my point is that it would be refreshing to run and play Traveller in an area where everything isn't "known" but not where galactic society is in a total dark age with unrepairable declining tech ala 40K and early Battletech. I thnk there's a fertile middle ground that I know I have yet to explore where the tech is higher than our world today but not dramatically so and where some of the big picture is visible and the rest begs to be explored - preferably by player characters.

Blast from the Past

2011-12-14T12:00:00.008-06:00

Digging through the pile of papers and CD's under my desk I came across a soundtrack CD I burned for one of my 3E campaigns. It still worked and kind of got me back in that mindset for a little while. Here's the track list:

The notation for most of those means "Autumn Thunder" the NFL Films soundtrack collection from a few years ago which is surpisingly handy for a lot of RPG type background music when you've burned out Conan & LOTR and should be useful even for some non-fantasy games.

This campaign was a combination of the Freeport adventures and the Savage Tide adventure path from Dungeon and I was pretty fired up about it. Each character got a track, each adventure got a track, and there were others beyond that. I have more detail in this post.

It went over pretty well, but I have yet to do it again. Accounting for character death and replacement was tricky - new track? Replace the original track? I just left it unchanged for the campaign and decided I would do a "Remastered" version if we ever finished. As it turned out we did not, so I never had to undertake it.

I compiled this one pretty much solo. Next time I might ask for more player input on their personal themes, but that can drag things out. It was pretty satisfying having this ready to go for the very first session, running it in the room while eats and drinks were prepped and dice were warmed up. I'm going to have to take a look at doing it again, just to see if I can improve it.

A Glimmer of Hope for 2012

2011-12-13T12:00:00.000-06:00

I don't want last week's pondering to make it seem like I'm all down on the future of RPG's. Though there's not a ton out there right now that I want but don't already have, I did see some things coming next year that I am very interested in.

First, from Mongoose:

Last but by no means least, a new universe will be coming to Traveller. Under our agreement with Amarillo Design Bureau, we were to produce a Star Fleet Universe edition of A Call to Arms and, in return, ADB were to produce a Traveller edition of their Star Fleet Universe game, Prime Directive. This will appear in 2012, and we have requested it cover not just Federation away teams and independent free traders, but bridge crews for, well, all the key empires – here at Mongoose, we can’t wait to jump in with a Klingon bridge crew campaign!

Prime Directive is Original Series Trek split off before any of the movies or Next Generations took place. There's a ton of background for it developed over the last 30+ years with Star Fleet Battles and there have been RPG versions in the original system, d20, and GURPS but I think using Traveller could lead to the best system yet by far. There's a lot going on in the Star Fleet Universe and finally having a decent set of mechanics to play it should be a lot of fun.

Second:

MARGARET WEIS PRODUCTIONS TEAMS UP WITH MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT TO UNLEASH MARVEL HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAMES
August 2011—Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd., a publisher of cutting-edge roleplaying and adventure games, is thrilled to announce MARVEL HEROES, a family of tabletop RPG products under license from Marvel Entertainment, LLC. Beginning with the launch of the BASIC GAME in February 2012, MARVEL HEROES delivers action-packed Super Hero adventure in the Mighty Marvel Manner.

I think this was announced at GenCon but I had forgotten it, then I ran across it while catching up on Vigilance Press podcasts. I have not been a fan of MWP's products thus far - Smallville, Leverage, etc. as they were just not my cup of tea. Their existing system was somewhat similar to Savage Worlds, I know, but I'm guessing it will be tweaked and tweaked hard for Marvel. I don't know that it stands a chance against M&M3/DCA with a lot of people but I'm happy to see it being worked on and I'll give it a look when it comes out. The basic book is supposed to be based on the beginning of New Avengers (the breakout) and then the 3 big releases will cover Civil War, Annihilation, and Age of Apocalypse - sounds pretty solid to me.

So there we go: two solid, interesting products for 2012! Familiar universes, no doubt, but with a different spin that should be worth a look.

Motivational Monday

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-06:00

ToEE 4E Session 3 - The Dragon!

2011-12-08T23:00:00.000-06:00

We begin in an inner chamber of the ruined moathouse with our quartet of heroes - Torgar - Dwarf Druid (and his bear companion Po), Apollo - Elf Bladesinger, Isaac - Human Swordmage, and Torin - Dragonborn Paladin. After fighting off the dire rats in the middle of the night, they sleep a little later than usual and wake up ready once again. Looking at their sketch map they realize that there can't be too many unexplored areas left and they resolve to thoroughly search the entire place - for both stragglers and loot.

Heading into the southern end near where they fought the giant snakes, they begin smashing down doors and tossing the interior. The old wooden doors give them quite a bit of trouble but they manage to overcome this. As they ransack the place they find no opposition - fortunate, given the amount of noise they are making - and discover a sword hidden behind a stout piece of furniture. The Bladesinger pronounces it magical, a Luck Blade, and claims it for himself as no one else uses a sword as their primary weapon.

Moving to the north end of the place they discover a set of stairs leading down but after some debate decide to finish clearing out the upper level before descending. They work through some otherwise empty rooms and halls, finding a few trinkets. They then break into an old kitchen, disturbing a nest of stirges and finding a whole mess of trouble.

The stirges swarm the Paladin and the Bladesinger who are in more exposed positions in the room. The Swordmage tries to help, but the Druid and his bear are hindered by the narrow doorway and the efforts of the others to fight off the attacking bloodsuckers. They prove to be tough opponents and by the time two stirges are killed the Paladin is also down! He soon regathers his strength and rejoins the fight but it's a near thing. Eventually the Druid and the bear manage to get into positions to help and the situation turns around at that point. As the last stirge turns to buzz away the Bladesinger splatters it with his magical blade. The battered and bloodied party rests briefly, uses some healing magic, discovers a magical suit of acid-resistant hide armor (folded up on a butcher block for some forgotten reason) and resolves to push on to the last unopened door in the place.

The Paladin and the bear force open the large doors and walk into a room that is partially open to the sky.It is also apparently home to a small black dragon, who is reared up next to a battered wooden chest and asking in draconic just what the heck is going on? The Paladin replies diplomatically that they are exploring the ruin and tries to figure out if the party is in shape to take on this horse-sized wyrm. The Druid offers to trade magical items with the dragon but the dragon interprets this as an offer of tribute, which he accepts - "leave the item on the floor and back out of the room and you may live". There's nor way our heroes are going to agree to this and so now a fight breaks out.

The Paladin and the Swordmage charge the dragon while the Bladesinger stands his ground and launches his spells. As the two warriors run up the dragon lets fly with his acid breath, catching every member of the party but the druid, wounding everyone and killing Po. Dripping and smoking, the team responds and tears into the dragon with sword and spell. The Druid pauses to restore his friend to life but is now exposed and when the wounded dragon sprays his acid again he blasts the entire party, dropping the Paladin - and the bear! Enraged, the heroes send even more violence against the dragon with the Bladesinger stepping back to get out of blast range and the Druid, somewhat protected from the acid breath by his new acid-resistant hide armor, moves into a better position to fight the beast up close. Once again the beast spews forth liquid smoking death, severely wounding the Swordmage this time and killing the Paladin! The Druid strikes hard and the Bladesinger blasts away with magic missiles, staggering the dragon. It tears into the Druid with its formidable claws, but the newly-returned Po flies into a rage at the sight of this thing hurting his friend and rips the thing apart in response, ending the danger and the carnage in a furious assault.

Battered and with one member down for good, the heroes rest briefly, gather up their loot, and stagger back to Hommlet for the night, bringing word of the bandits' (and a dragon's) demise.

DM Notes: This was a nice little run that got our temple game moving again after a longer than expected break. I figured they could clear the upper level of the Moathouse in one more session and they did so thoroughly.

As they went to start smashing in doors they discovered that they are a pretty low strength party, making those Strength checks to break down doors a lot tougher than usual. The bear was recruited to be the primary battering ram as his Strength of 20 is the highest in the group by far. Once inside I use a combination of Perception rolls and common sense (if you look inside a drawer you can see what's in the drawer, no roll necessary) and had a little fun with them as they insisted there had to be something in one of the rooms because they rolled really high:

DM: "OK you think there must be something in this room"

Blaster: "Can I assist?"

DM: "Sure"

Red: "28 with the assist"

DM: "You don't find anything yet but it must be here somewhere"

Repeat until frustrated Apprentices finally catch on that they are chasing their tails here and move on.

They seriously debated going downstairs - "Because there's more stuff and more XP's down there" - and then decided to make sure the upper floor was empty first so they wouldn't get ambushed. I think that's sound reasoning in general, not just in D&D.

The Stirge fight was much tougher than I expected. These are, again, out of the Monster Vault and are pretty nasty mechanically but they are also fun to run. They have a fairly normal attack but once they hit they attach and do ongoing 5 damage at that point, untyped. So if two of them latch on, that's 10 points per round coming out of your adventurer and that's a lot. Their AC and Reflex Defense also go up when they attach so it makes them that much harder to hit. Now it's only a move action to try and break loose (it's considered a grab when they plug in) but it's a tricky thing in a tight space and these aren't minions, so they don't drop in one hit. It's considered to be a level two encounter but my level one party had a tough time with it and took nine rounds to end it.

I think the dragon surprised them, especially since Apprentice Red had just made a comment after finding the stairs that "We have a dungeon, now we just need a dragon". I want to give them some credit here too - they did try to talk to it first! It didn't go the way they hoped but they did try. My idea here was that this was a very young dragon wounded and on its own. It holed up here in the moathouse to recover and gathered up some treasure in an old chest that it might be able to carry off when it decided to move on. This was not a part of the original ToEE but I added it because a) I wanted another "big" monster and the giant lizard in the original made me think "dragon" and b) I think dragons should show up more than they do in a lot of published adventures, old and new. One of the best moments in my 3E RttToEE campaign was when my extremely confident players walked into the Moathouse courtyard. Some of them had played or run the original ToEE and were thinking it would still be a "starter area". When the blue dragon appeared the look on their faces was priceless, as was their reaction in trying to deal with a sudden major threat in an area where they had been expecting quiet. When you have cool iconic monsters in the game you should USE THEM! So I did. I killed the bear twice and the paladin once, thanks to two good recharge rolls and the bloodied breath ability. Firing off the breath that many times and hitting that many characters may be a personal record, especially considering it only lasted three rounds! Stat-wise I used a tweaked "Fledgling White Dragon" from the Monster Vault which is a Level 1 Solo.

Mechanically, the main thing that I learned here is that I need to watch levels more closely now. Having only a 4 character party combined with using the powered-up monster stats from the MV means that my guys are taking more of a beating than the older low-level runs did. Monster damage is significantly higher now, and having no striker types means that fights last longer. The Sentinel Druid is a decent healer but two defenders and an easily hit bear mean there is a lot of damage to heal. In my main campaign they were taking on encounters 3 and 4 levels higher just to give some teeth to the monsters. I'm thinking I need to adjust things back to truly reflect a 4-man party or I need to keep the levels down, possibly both. They ended with enough XP to level up to 2nd and Apprentice Blaster was pondering whether to bring back his Paladin or make a new character. They both retreated to the character builder right after and were checking their options for next time.

Beyond the mechanics I learned that the Apprentices instincts are right on and they are having the same kinds of conversations we used to have back when we were playing B/X D&D and AD&D. I choose to see that as confirmation that I'm doing something right. It also tells me that despite all the changes in things over the last 30 years that some things are just fun - army men, BB guns, firecrackers, and looting and mayhem with D&D.

Looking Forward to 2012

2011-12-07T12:00:00.000-06:00

Today I'm thinking about next year, and unlike yesterday's more general post this one is more personal. What do I want to change or accomplish next year on the gaming front? Well what did I do this year?

In 2011 I worked on creating a more balanced gaming diet, introducing the Apprentices to more board and card games like Munchkin, Memoir 44, and Command and Colors Ancients. It is, however, the year I let Warhammer 40,000 mostly die. Part of it is competition for time, part of it is that it's really built around 2 sides and with 3 interested parties that's tricky to pull off, and part of it is expense. Maintaining multiple armies for multiple people is a strain, even with my economic upturn. When a single unit for the game is as much as a core rulebook for an RPG I can get a lot more hours of fun out of the RPG book in the short term.

RPG-wise we expanded their horizons to include Supers via M&M, ICONS, and Marvel. We went into space with Star Wars d6 and Star Wars Saga. We are trying on some boots and saddles with our foray into Deadlands. So it was a good year. Blaster and Red are my main two gamers and they have been armed with PHB's for every edition of D&D along with books for a few other games too. I don't think the OSR is big amongst the high school and junior high crowd just now but if some local 16 year old decides he wants to break out a Greyhawk Wars campaign then my two are ready for it!

What about next year?

Well my main 4E campaign came to an end so I will probably move to fill that gap. I'm tempted to go back, pick up, and finish my Neccessary Evil campaign just for a change of pace. I'm also tempted to run a Mutants and Masterminds game both for a change of pace and just because I think it would be fun. Somehow though, I suspect I will be back running 4th Edition before the year runs out and I'm fine with that - D&D has always been our "trunk" game, with other games branching out from it. Nowadays I seem to only have the bandwidth to run one regular (sorta weekly) full-length grown up game, and Lady Blacksteel and my other regulars seem to prefer that schedule too. In the past the desire for more variety has spurred me to try alternating sessions between two games and it works some of the time, but it can cause a loss of focus and some "what did we do last time?" moments each session. Have to ponder that one.

With the Apprentices we have ongoing campaigns of D&D 4E, ICONS, and some irregular games of Basic D&D, Star Wars, Marvel, and now Deadlands. That will probably continue. The other RPG's I'm sort of interested in introducing are Champions, Gamma World, Traveller, Shadowrun, and Star Trek. I realize "only" may be a mischaracterization there but they are still so new to this thing that I want to expose them to a wide variety of games and then play more of what they like. I once half-jokingly proposed to my gaming group that was suffering from a serious case of short gaming attention spans that we just go ahead and plan to play a new game each month: assuming we could meet 3 times in a month, session 1 would be character generation and the kickoff, session two would be the meat of an adventure, then session three would be the finale and a discussion about the game. The next month we would do it all again with a new game. It was funny then, but I'm seriously considering it now for 2012 to help me better manage the Apprentice games. If we can keep the main 4E Temple of Elemental Evil going at least once a month too, then I think this would be a really good "World Tour of RPG's" because I could work in a few more besides - GURPS and Warhammer FRP and some others. Hmmm.

Besides RPG's I want to continue the boardgames and I will probably work in Settlers of Catan and some more light wargames like Combat Commander. I also want to work in some other miniatures games (I have a lot mini's, many of them gathering dust) like Federation Commander, Battletech, B5 Call to Arms, Song of Blades and Heroes, and Giant Monster Rampage. I had some homebrewed car combat rules and giant monster rules of my own a few years back so I might even dust those off if the time opens up. I'm not sure how 40K fits into this anymore as while I love the universe and have nearly 25 years of stuff for it I don't like the cost and the overhead of painting and storage and keeping up with the rules so much anymore. It's probably going to be a "when I really really feel like it" and not according to any kind of plan.

On their own the boys have made some attempts to start their own D&D games with friends but it has not been easy. All of them have complicated schedules and homework and there is still a huge "nerdy" stigma attached to it even in this age of Warcraft and Skyrim. They also have been playing some Heroquest (the old MB boardgame) and Risk and Stratego so that's been fun to watch too.

Beyond this we do some Xbox time together and play City of Heroes regularly too so we don't lack for options with our fun time - the trick is juggling kid schedules and work schedules and doing all of those normal family things while still making time for these. I've found that if we don't schedule it ahead of time, like any other gaming session, that it tends to get eaten up by other things and bumped by last minute changes of plan. I did a lot of that this year so I intend to change it for next year so no one ends their weekend disappointed.

I'm sure some new things will emerge that will change all of these plans at some point, but for now these are my goals. Whenever I do set up a new main game you can rest assured it will be chronicled here, warts and all. If I do go with the "Game of the Month" plan - and that idea is really growing on me as I write this - then I will certainly document that here as well.

Pondering the Hobby - 2011

2011-12-06T12:00:00.000-06:00

I try to stay plugged in to what's new in the hobby. That mostly comes from online sources of course but occasionally something new sneaks up on me in the local game store. One thing I've noticed this year is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of NEW out there. This year's Gen Con is the first one in a long time that seemed to have almost nothing new being announced. I mean both new games outright and supplements for existing games apart from adventures. - things that players and DM's get excited about and generate some chatter and some interest. Some of this is probably my fault.

With all of the edition turnover and balkanization - the end of the d20 boom for example - a lot of companies have gone off and done their own thing. For me Green Ronin, Sword and Sorcery, Kenzer, Malhovic, and Goodman Games were big players in the days of 3rd Edition D&D. Green Ronin is still on my list for M&M but they went off and did Dragon Age which holds little interest for me and have a few other things that are mostly outside of my interests as well, and they do nothing for 4E now. S&S is just flat out gone. Kenzer has Aces & Eights and Hackmaster which interest me a bit but not enough to keep up with them constantly and they make nothing for the games I play now. Malhovic pretty much went on hiatus with the launch of 4E. Goodman tried and gave up on continuing their 3E business model with 4E and has their own fantasy RPG coming out now. So these companies that were getting a lot of my money over the last 11 years stopped getting most of it over the last two.

Insert Fistful of Dollars reference here

This is not entirely their fault - a lot of it is tied to badly handled licensing arrangements by WOTC. Rather than the glory days of 3E where a whole bunch of the industry was devoted to supporting one game system - yes it was chaos but it was a glorious chaos - 4E has sort of gone off into it's own fortress and shut the gates, keeping everyone out. Sure, you can come in, but you're going to have to pay rent to stay and they can kick you out at any time. Most of these companies didn't choose to leave - they were told to! Pathfinder has tried to capture the 3E glory and has succeeded to a degree, but not on a scale like what we were seeing before. If you like more-retro-than-that there is all manner of old school goodness available at costs ranging from free to not free. There is Hackmaster. There is Goodman's thing with the d5's. There is Dragon Age. There is GURPS, Hero, and Savage Worlds. There is Warhammer FRP. There's probably some version of the Palladium FRPG in print right now too. Diversity is good, having options is good, but I can't personally contribute to all of them - and those are just typical fantasy RPG's! So I think a lot of us "choose sides" and try to focus on one or a few games. For a few shining years we really didn't have too - we could get the output of a lot of good people and it was all intended to work together. That's no longer the case.

Glorious Chaos - Kor agrees. And wants his new game.

Sure I could just pick them all up - at different points in my life I've pretty much done that. Not anymore - I'm trying to actually run these things, so the priority goes to new stuff for games I am running, or might run in the near future, or have run and liked enough to maybe run again. In a way, keeping up with a game system is like starting a relationship. I have to buy the main rules, check out supplements and adventures, stay in touch with the forums and the website to see whats going on. I don't really have time to sustain that kind of effort for more than a few systems, so if I'm not running it then these days I probably won't even bother taking a look at it other than a review somewhere. It's not so much the expense of buying one rulebook - it's the overhead of keeping up with the game. That's time I could spend working up material for my campaign, running my campaign, or trying to see what people are doing in the forums for a game I already have, like, and run! In the pre-internet days we had less to keep up with, and the "news updates" only came about once a month in the form of a magazine or a new book showing up at the store. Now a popular game with an active fanbase can generate a ton of material and be found in a dozen forums and blogs and fan sites. It's not a bad thing in and of itself but it does mean that there is just more "there" out there for any game nowadays*.

I used to buy main rulebooks for some games just because they looked interesting, I liked the subject, and if someone decided to run a game of it I would know enough to join in and play.** As it turns out, there are a lot more players than DM's and so what got played was largely determined by what myself and the other DM in the group felt like running. On those rare occasions someone else stepped up to run a game, it was usually a game we had already played because that's what they knew! The outcome is a lot of shelves of books that got read (or more often skimmed) and then set aside, never to see real action***

So yeah, some new games that are undoubtedly cool go uninspected by me. Some join the rotation. It feels like there just isn't a whole lot of new out there this year. Last year saw Dragon Age, M&M 3/DCA, Gamma World, a bunch of D&D Essentials stuff, Deathwatch, ICONS, the Dr. Who RPG (maybe that was technically 2009 but it was the end of 2009 so it's pretty close). This year we have that new Middle Earth thing and ... what? Looking at RPGnet for reviews of games published in 2011 and there's not much RPG there. It's a little bit of a conundrum - I don't really have a ton of free bandwidth to go diving into a new game but it bothers me when I see that hardly anything has come out this year. In many previous years I felt like there was more coming out than I could keep up with - now I feel like there's not much coming out that's worth keeping up with and I'm not all that picky about these things.

Now it's not like I'm going to run out of games to play - I think most of us are well-supplied in that area and could probably make one up on the fly if pressed. It just seems like this is a low point for new game releases or development. I hope so. The last few years haven't exactly been prolific either - if you take away 4E and Pathfinder I didn't see a whole lot of new books on shelves in 2008 - 2009 - 2010 either. In 2007 we had Star Wars Saga edition, Hollow Earth Expedition, Savage World's Explorer Edition, Aces & Eights, Battlestar Galactica, Dread (not my thing but hey), Reign, and Scion. That's a pretty varied group. After that it narrows considerably with Traveller and the 40K universe games being a notable bright spot.

So what's my point? Well, at this time every year I can usually think of at least one game that came out that I don't have that I wish I had picked up. I don't feel that way this year. Now there are some supplements that I'd like to catch up on, but no new games. Since my personal economic downturn ended earlier this year you might think there would be some pent-up demand for some things I missed while things were tight - there really aren't any. I've managed to pick up the few games I really wanted and managed to mostly keep up with the 4E product train when it was humming. For the things I am running though, I don't really feel an urge to grab a bunch of stuff - I have plenty of material and there's nothing else out there that I see as a must have. I still like to play, and I still like to see new stuff, and lord knows I have plenty of room to comment on things, so I don't think it's a tremendous attitude change on my part, I think that there is less stuff out there.

Is it an economic downturn thing? I'm not sure. Is it the fracturing of D&D into 4E/PF/OSR? Maybe. Is it the growing "New Model" approach of publishing primarily PDF's that some companies use, leaving the physical books to print on demand services? I could see that. With bookstores and game stores taking a beating I wonder if physical books will become a luxury version of an RPG, an optional upgrade kind of like the special leather cover limited editions we saw a few years ago, while most will "get by" with pdf versions of the rules. I was thinking that this trend along with the end of the d20 license as "the" system that we would see an explosion of creative new games published like a small press game of years ago, mostly living online and growing in scattered small pockets where a DM manages to talk some players into trying something new. I'm not seeing that to the degree I thought we would, but I do see it happening. I do like my books, but if things go that way I think that I can live with it.

I'm still a little surprised though - where's the new Star Wars game (it is on TV right now)? Where's the new Trek game (there was a movie in 2009, and presumably will be another)? Aren't we due for a new edition of Shadowrun about now (4th came out in 2004 - The previous record was 6 years!) ? How about some kind of competitor for Vampire - we're 4 movies into Twilight and 4 seasons into True Blood and we only have the original game as any kind of big player here? I know we're neck deep in fantasy RPG's and about hip deep in superhero RPG's (look at the movies and TV shows over the last 11 years to see why) and that's fine but there are other things that are popular right now that might spur some interest in an RPG. C'mon people! I'm not the guy to do this - I've been playing too long to see vampires as anything other than experience points waiting to be collected - but surely there's someone out there, maybe even a female game designer, that could pull a nice mechamically light supernatural romance game together. Or else let Cinematic Unisystem take it - they managed to turn Smallville into something resembling an RPG. Heck, over the last 10 years we've also had the Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, and some other shows about criminal lives - why isn't there a non-supernatural dark side of life game out there somewhere? I wouldn't expect to see it from WOTC, but I would expect to see it on RPGNow.

Twilght: The Hunter

I've probably rambled on enough now, but this has all been on my mind as I start to look back at 2011. It's been a definite upswing for me personally, but "this thing of ours" doesn't seem to be doing terribly well on the whole. I hope it's temporary or at most a transition to a new method of doing business. In 2021 I expect I will be playing some of the games I enjoy now but I am not sure I will be acquiring/updating or supporting them. I suppose I'm just trying to stay on the lookout for The Coming Thing.****

*Except for Rifts - nobody is allowed to talk about Rifts on the internet. Thank you Palladium Games.

**This was the source of my Law of Gaming Depreciation: The value of a main rulebook to any game declines over time. Not financially - mechanically. This is because traditionally a Big Book is 100% of the game for a few months and then a supplement comes out. Probably one about guns (modern/sci-fi mainly) that adds a bunch of equipment and possibly new combat rules. Then the main rulebook is 90% of the rules. Then there's one about Elves that adds some new stuff to character generation and the main rulebook is 80% of the rules. So a year or so into the life of a new edition you're Big Rulebook is still mostly useful. By about the end of year two though, bringing only that book to the table will get you sneered at by regular players as they are forced to share their stack of splatbooks to help you get your character up to par. If you need examples I suggest Rifts, Shadowrun, and every edition of D&D since 2nd. GURPS was pretty good about avoiding this, Hero too, and Savage Worlds is too. I'm sure there are conclusions to be drawn there but I'll leave that to another day.

***unless they were pulled out to argue with someone on the internet. Even I get bored sometimes.

**** and for both of you who get that reference *hat tip* and we should play something sometime

Motivational Monday

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

Some Math for Icons and Savage Worlds

2011-12-02T23:07:00.000-06:00

ICONS has some pretty simple math. Abilities are rated from 1-10 and players roll 1d6 - 1d6 then add the result to the relevant ability to beat the target number which is typically an opponent's ability score. Since the roll tends to give a result of zero you can pretty reliably predict whether or not the characters will be able to succeed at a given task. There are things that can modify the target (darkness, etc.) There are also ways to gain bonuses to rolls. There is some motivation to do these things as exceeding the target by 3 is a special success and by 5 is a major success and can yield some additional benefits beyond "you did it".

Character creation uses a table that limits character stats to a 1-8 range weighted towards 4, 5, or 6. A straight 3d4-2 roll would accomplish a similar effect while leaving the slight possibility of a 9 or 10 stat out there if someone wanted to go that route. As it is the "global" average lines up very well with the "global" target number. If you want to make things harder, give your villains higher stats and lower stats will make things easier. The good thing here is that assuming the human average is a 3 means that heroes averaging a 5 will clean up against them easily, as they should. Bumping "quality" thugs up to a 4 and "Elites" up to a 5 for their main stats should provide a noticeable bump in difficulty without being overwhelming - that comes in with the 8's, 9's, and 10's.

As with most things ICONS, the simplicity of the mechanics conceals the elegance of the design - the math works really well. ICONS tends to not be a very crunch heavy game anyway so this approach fits perfectly.

Savage Worlds has a little more crunch to it. The base target number is always 4, with 8 being a "raise" and each subsequent jump of 4 equals another raise. There are modifers to different tasks that can change this but let's use 4 as a baseline.

1d4 = 25% chance of success (which will then explode and give a chance of a raise at 6% - that's a 4 plus another 4)

1d6 = 50% chance of success (exploding for a raise happens 14.9% of the time - that's a 6 plus a 2+ on the next roll)

1d8 = 62.5% chance of success and the possibility of a raise on the initial die roll (12.5%)

1d10 = 70% chance of success (Raise is now at 30%)

1d12 = 75% chance of success (Raise is now at 41.7%)

Ratings can go above a d12. The next step is d12 +1, then d12 +2, etc.

1d12+1 = 83% chance of success (Raise = 50%)

1d12+2 = 91.6% chance of success (Raise = 58%)

1d12+3= 100% chance of success (Raise = 66.7%)

Further increases are really just upping your chance of a raise, which hits 100% at +7

There is also the Wild Die, which is an extra d6 that all PC's and important NPC's get to roll alongside their normal die type. The higher of the two applies. This is a "PC's are Special" type rule that ups the chance of success somewhat (especially noticeable if you're rolling d4's and d6's otherwise) but since it applies to all player characters equally then I think we can ignore it for now.

So...are there sweet spots in the Savage Worlds system? Well there is that weird kink in the curve for raises on a d6 where it's slightly better than the chance of a raise on a d8. For normal successes though, a d6 is twice as good as a d4 and the rate of change drops at each incremental increase after that.Clearly the jump from a d4 to a d6 is the most bang for the buck, especially considering that base attributes start as d4's and have to be raised beyond that. Based on this I suspect that it's better to raise all five attributes to d6's than it is to have 2 d8's, a d6, and 2 d4's but only if you have an intentionally broad character! If you intend to specialize in certain skills tied to one attribute then I think the d10 level is pretty effective as it pushes your base success chance up over 2/3 and it doubles your chances of a raise over the d8 level. Plus you would have 2 points left to raise other stats to a d6 - no sense in sucking at everything else if you can avoid it. Adding +1's to a d12 roll seems very inefficient but at higher experience levels that may be your only option.

Let's look at it in the context of combat. The target in melee is Parry, which is 2 + half of Fighting. Damage is compared to Toughness, which is 2+ half of Vigor. Meeting or beating these is a success, beating by 4 is a raise, and each additional increment of 4 is another raise.

Average human stats are d6's so assuming getting in a fight have a d6 in Fighting then most people's average Parry & Toughness = 5. Effectively what this does is shift everyone down one notch on the chart, roughly. Due to the way exploding dice work, certain target numbers do not change the odds. If you're rolling a d4, the odds of rolling a 5 are the same as rolling a 4 (d4 + d4). For d6's a 7 is as likely as a 6, for d8's a 9 is as common as an 8, etc. It does impact the Wild Die so there is an effect overall even for the d4 roller, but the base odds on your "main" die don't change.

You could go d12 in Strength, d6 in Vigor, then d4's in Smarts, Spirit, and Agility. Given the presence of the d6 Wild Die you actually still have pretty decent capabilities with your other stats and be pretty nasty in hand to hand combat.

So the baseline for Savage Worlds - the d6 - will succeed about half of the time on a normal test. That's a pretty solid base but could be unsatisfying in play because it also means that the average character fails at the average task half the time too. The Wild Die bumps the success chance up to 75% in this case which makes for a much more satisfying game for the players without breaking the universe for everyone else. As skill (die types) increases this has less and less impact, so it nicely expands the "middle ground" for the system and then takes a lower profile as things ramp up. I think it's a very well-done mechanic.

There are of course various edges that can affect certain kinds of rolls and hindrances that will let one buy stats up another point or two but those are not universally available. Also, even with a little more crunch than ICONS, I'm not sure that SW is worth much agonizing over the math. Higher dice = better chance of success in every case (even if raises have that one kink) so most of the time the higher die type should win, though SW's other cinematic mechanics (Wild Die, Bennies) can be used to overcome this.

Anyway there's my math homework for the week. I do like the d20 systems out there but they are kind of plain probability-wise as everything is so simple: +/-1 = +/-5% chance of success, regardless. Efficient but boring math-wise! Thank goodness for the multitude of choices out there that still try out other approaches and let us flex our brains in slightly different ways from time to time! Each individual approach may not be better than a particular standard but having options is always preferable to a boring uniformity.

Some other time (some other website if you care about it right now): GURPS, Hero, and those dice pool games.

Varying the Approach

2011-12-01T22:17:00.000-06:00

One thing that's been pretty consistent over the years in my gaming circles is the way we run things. It's pretty much people sitting around a table, screened DM at one end, battlemat & markers & dice & character sheets around the edges. The number of people and the size of the table varies, but this has been the Way It Is Done for me and the people I have played with since the early 80's. I've run every edition of D&D this way as well as Hero, Gurps, Traveller, and all the others. I'm of the opinion that the reason for this is because it works!

That looks about right

However, I try to stay open minded about how I do things like this. During one of my 3rd edition campaigns I was a little tired of toting the 8 X 4 table in and out of my living room so I decided to play without a giant table. It felt weird to not have a big table and a battlemat with everyone around it but having the players scattered around the living room made for a more casual atmosphere. I did this several times, mainly when I knew it would not be a combat-intensive session, and it seemed like the players did get into the non-mechanical aspects of the game more than was typical. I probably would not do it if the evening was going to feature an assault on a dragon's lair but if it's the lord mayor's summer masquerade ball I might do it just to change things up.

I also typically have everything I am running printed out and on the table or behind my screen - mostly because that's how I've always done it. In my main 4E game some of my players started bringing their characters on tablets and smartphones and it kind of surprised me. I suppose it's a logical continuation of the character building tool - build it on the computer, export it to some device you carry aaround all the time anyway. At first I was opposed to it but I realized there really wasn't much reason to rule it out as long as I can see it on demand. So I let it go and we had zero problems with it. Heck, with a dice rolling program you can be game-ready without carrying anything extra! Even the rules are available online, so if you want to go totally electronic it is an option now, at least for D&D 3E & 4E (and probably others as well). The no-dice thing is still a little weird though. We all have a ton of dice - stash a backup dice bag in the glovebox!

I like this better than the spreadsheet approach but I think they outsmarted themselves on the d4's

Technology side note: Remember when printing out character sheets was a challenge? We used to go up to the library and pay a nickel or a dime per copy to get our blank sheets and we tended to be a little stingy with them because there was some effort involved in replacing them. That was the age when purchasing pre-printed sheets was a big deal - some of them even came in colors other than white! I remember writing programs in BASIC to print D&D sheets on my old dot-matrix printer but they were never as good as the pre-printed ones. Also, games that came with a pad of character sheets were just awesomely cool as well - James Bond 007 and one of the Lords of Creation adventure modules came with these. I think one of the forgotten bonuses of the age of the internet and the cheap inkjet printer was freeing us from the tyranny of the copy machine! Even after that some games still put out packaged sheets. One of the supplements for Underground came with a pack of character sheets (and kill stickers!). Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 2E had a supplement pack that included a pad of sheets too. Kinda retro but I still bought them.

Yep, that was it

The last few years I have picked up quite a few smaller games and supllements as PDF's. I used to always print them out if I intended to actually use them in play, otherwise they were just for reference. When I decided to run ICONS I realized everything I had was electronic and I was low on printer ink. Not wanting to waste time and ink printing a 100+ page rulebook AND a 30 or so page adventure I decided to run completely electronic, something I had never done. To be really radical, I didn't get out the mini's, or the battlemat, or the table either. This was 3 Apprentices and myself sitting around the living room with no books. They had their dice, pencils, and character sheets and I had a laptop and my notebook and a pen. It went amazingly well! The change in approach from my usual table setup really emphasized that this was something different and they went with it - no complaining about the lack of maps or anything else. Now ICONS does cater to this approach by not being the kind of game that demands a grid - it's not that detailed of a tactical exercise - and it doesn't even have the DM roll dice. It was the perfect opportunity to change things up and I was very satisfied with the result.

I do not own this, and I am comfortable saying that.

I know those of you playing online are likely unimpressed with these revelations but these are big changes for me. Now I would not do the mapless thing with a Hero system game, 3E or 4E D&D, or probably even Savage Worlds as those games benefit from a richer tactical experience. I might give it a try with our Basic D&D game though as an experiment. The all-electronic thing I would probably be willing to try with about any game, and some of those more detailed RPG's might benefit from it even more! I'm not that interested in game-running programs but for keeping multiple books in an easier package I am a little bit interested. The only problem is that I have a LOT of books for these things, so it's likely to only happen for newer games. - and games not behind a paywall that charges per month.

Deadlands crawls into the light

2011-11-30T12:00:00.001-06:00

The other game we played over the holiday was Deadlands, specifically the Savage Worlds version. I got interested in Original Recipie Deadlands back in the 90's and have a just-about-complete collection of it and the nuclear version as well. I got interested in Savage Worlds back when it was just a discussion on a mailing list in the early 2000's and own quite a bit of material for it. That said it was a looong time before I got to run either one. I've mainly run Neccessary Evil in Savage Worlds (a Supers campaign) so I was very pleased to have the chance to run Deadlands in it. Finally!

Apprentice Who isn't as excited about cowboys as he is about Star Wars or Superheroes so he decided to take a pregenerated character I downloaded from the Pinnacle site and scurried off to play some Xbox while Red and Blaster made their own characters - even at this stage of their gaming careers they absolutely hate running characters that they did not create. That said Who did pick a winner. He was seriously considering the Guy With the Lightning Gun but ended up going with the Guy With the Gatling Shotgun. It's hard to go wrong with a gatling shotgun.

Apprentice Blaster was flipping through one of the older books and decided a Texas Ranger looked pretty cool and so went with that as his concept. He's big, tough, strong, and not too bright, but he's good with a rifle and in a fight so he was happy. No, we don't have a name yet.

Apprentice Red was instantly hooked on the Huckster concept. He's pretty smart but not much good in a hand to hand fight. Fortunately his magical abilities mean he doesn't need to be up close to hurt people. His card tricks allow him to attack a single target at range, cause an explosion, and protect himself. Again, no name yet.

After all this character building time was growing short so I told them they were at a small town in Missourri waiting on a train headed for Denver. They had arrived separately but realized they were headed for the same destination and so spent several hours getting acquanted in a local saloon. Now it was nearing sundown and they decided to take a shortcut through a wooded area to the train station.

As they move through the brush, wolf howls break out and soon enough six wolves move into sight. The two men stop to see what the wolves are about. The pack catches the scent and charges in. Cards are dealt out and combat begins!

Blaster's Ranger puts a rifle round into one of the lead wolves and drops it in one shot. Red's Huckster tries to blast one of them but is off just a little bit. The Ranger drops one more with a shot from his rifle. Then the card-slinger drops a perfectly placed blast on top of the main pack and blows 3 of the wolves away in a storm of burning cards. One wolf manages to run up on the huckster and gets his jaws on one arm but the Ranger blows it away at point blank range. The two then hustle on towards the train station, arriving in time to catch the ride to their next adventure.

I do like the SW initiative system - using the the cards just feels so different that it breaks the typical D&D mindset and puts us in a different place. It worked well enough with superheroes but it feels even more "right" with western heroes. Switching initiative every round was something the Apprentices were also unused too, as most of our games use a more static system.

Combat moves fast, very fast, and I was once again elated to play with the awesomeness that is No Record Keeping - Basic NPC's and monsters are either Up and Fine, Shaken, or Dead, sort of like minions in 4E D&D. Special characters (called WIld Cards) can have up to 3 wounds but these are marked with poker chips instead of being tracked by hit points or on a chart. I use white chips for Shaken, red chips for Wounds, and blue chips for any oddball status I need to mark which is pretty rare. Unlike my usual campaign logs where pages are covered in long descending hit point tracks, my notes for a session of this game just covers actions of note and lists which opponents or NPC's were encountered.

Playing it again, even as just a brief warm-up, reminded me all over again why I like this game so much. It's a beautiful system which feels like you're getting a lot done in a short period of time but with enough detail to make it worth doing. It is very much on the "Cinematic" side of things with characters blazing away, shaking off wounds, and moving on to the next big action sequence. It is more detailed than say ICONS, but less complex than M&M. There's enough mechanical crunch to make it interesting but not enough to need rules-heavy supplements. Most of the supporting material is campaign material with a few rules tweaks or additions to flesh out that particular universe - superpowers in Neccessary Evil, expanded rules for sailing ships and ship combat in Pirates, more 1870's-specific gear in Deadlands, 1960's gear in Tour of Darkness, etc.

This session also helped me recognize bits of other games in there too. There are elements of d6 Star Wars in Savage Worlds that really jump out at me now after having gone through that system in some detail, including changes that I would make to that system as far as movement and actions and paring the skill list down to its core. I think if I ever go for a lighter Star Wars game it will use these rules.

In addition to the official material, there is a very strong community attitude of do-it-yourself online. There are numerous conversions of other games out there and numerous home grown sets of campaign material. Check out this page - everything from Harry Potter to World of Warcraft to TORG to Eberron to Star Trek and Warhammer 40,000 - that's a pretty wide range!

So this session got things started - what's my plan? Not sure. I'm going to run them through the old Deadlands starter adventure "Comin' Round the Mountain" (which I have never gotten to run) because I think it looks like fun. Hopefully that will happen this weekend and we can include Apprentice Who in this one. After that I may run a little thing I had written up years ago set in the Great Maze and after that well we will just see where things go. It's very unusual for me to go into a potential campaign situation without some kind of outline but I don't really feel the need for that yet with this game. Since we already have ongoing D&D 4E, Star Wars, and ICONS games with occsional forays into D&D Basic and MSH I don;t thin I need to over plan this. Plus I don't have a really compelling idea for a long term campaign of this yet. I'm feeling it as more of an episodic thing, more like "this week on Deadlands - the Night Train!" rather than a zero to hero epic that spans 50 sessions and 2 years of real time. I think the more segmented approach will work here so I'm going to try it that way for now.

Holiday Campaign Necromancy - Zebulon Space Returns!

2011-11-29T12:00:00.001-06:00

The extended holiday weekend was a good one with much family time, football, Apprentice Twilight's birthday, and general goodness. The long-awaited return of our X-Box 360 from the grave cut into some of the home game time but I still managed to work in two sessions with the Apprentices, the first of which was the resurrection of our Star Wars Saga campaign. Binder still on shelf, notes still on computer, ideas still in head ... DING! It was the one game that Red, Blaster, and Who could all agree on so that's what we played first. The outline for it is detailed here but in short it's a conversion of the old Star Frontiers Volturnis campaign to the Saga version of Star Wars. We got off to a strong start earlier this year and we all had a good time but it was bumped back several times in favor of more D&D and then stopped coming up in conversation. Things are better now.

When we last left off, the PC's (two Jedi padawans and a rodian scoundrel) had fought some space pirates in the corridors of their ship, discovered it was damaged beyond repair, made it to an escape pod, and crashed on an unfamiliar planet. That was Chapter One as outlined in my Campaign ... Outline.

Chapter Two begins with the stranded heroes picking up their packs and getting their bearings. With the 3 salvaged survival packs in the pod they figured they had about 4 days worth of food and water, more if they stretched it. Surveying the land around the mfrom atop the rocky outcrop they had smashed into, they saw desert, lots and lots of Tatooine-esque desert, with some mountains in the distance. They also spied a small dome-like mound a few klicks from their rock, so they decided to head their first.

At the mound they find that it is hollow and entered via a small opening. Inside is a well. There's not much room but they can all 3 fit inside so they take shelter from the sun and Apprentice Blaster's Kel Dor Jedi decides to sample the water. Blowing his Survivial skill check, he decides that any well someone would protect must be good and takes a nice big drink of it. Aprentice Red's Human Jedi does somewhat better with his Survival check and remembers that ground water can be dangerous so he should use the toxin scanner in his survival pack before drinking. This begins what I suspect will be a long-running joke about "remember that time in Jedi Scouts when we went camping?" and it was pretty funny. He determines via the scanner that the water is heavy in arsenic and should be boiled and trapped in a tarp for safety. They are trying to determine if they have firestarting gear when Apprentice Who's Scoundrel draws his blaster pistol and shoots some rags they have gathered, pointing out the obvious. Late in the day a sandstorm blows in and they decide to wait it out inside the well dome. Once it's over they head for the mountains, making occasional Survival checks and Perception checks to navigate to rock outcroppings and rough patches as they travel, seeking shelter and signs of civillization.

On Day 2 they hear the sound of a vehicle in the distance and hunker down in a convenient rock formation (Stealth checks), realizing that they have made no effort to cover their tracks as they travel. A skiff approaches from the way they have come, back towards the crash site, likely following their tracks. It's pretty high up but three figures peer over the side and it bears an unfamiliar insignia, a circle of red stars. Uncertain as to whether it's friend or foe, Apprentice Blaster's Jedi stands up, hands clear, and hails them. They hear a clear "yep, they're from the ship" a split second before the three open up with blaster rifles. Annoyed at the response, frustrated by the 50 meter gap (no lightsaber throws or force leaps here), and tired of traveling by foot, he yells out "try not to hurt the vehicle", pulls out a blaster pistol, and returns fire, frying one of the presumed pirates. Apprentice Red tries to focus on the force but can't quite pull it together, but the Rodian drops another hostile in one shot, staying down in the rocks for cover. At this point the remaining shooter calls out "go go get us out of here" to the unseen pilot and the skiff streaks away over the desert. Since it headed towards the mountains the trio decides they must be headed in the right direction. They are very disappointed that they did not acquire the skiff and decide their best chance to get a vehicle is to leave their tracks visible to try and lure in pirates or scroungers. Leaving VERY OBVIOUS tracks they continue walking towards the mountains, being even more careful to look for shelter as they go and especially as they end their marches each day.

Day 3 is largely uneventful until they spot something moving towards them under the sand (described to them as looking like Bugs Bunny when he travels underground). Blaster and Who pull guns while Red charges towards it. As it closes the last few meters, a "fin" pops up out of the sand and then a whole bunch of teeth are suddenly headed for the impetuous Jedi. Blaster and Who open up on it and wound the thing but it clamps down on Red's leg and we learn about the concept of the Damage Threshold in Saga Edition. Wounded pretty seriously, Jedi Red manages to concentrate long enough to force blast the thing off of his leg and onto its back where it expires from the massive trauma inflicted. Dubbing it a "Sand Shark", they study the beast as the Scoundrel Treats the Injury with a medpack.

Unshaken by the attacks on Day 2 and Day 3, the party continues on Day 4. Stopped for a rest they suddenly see plume of dust rising up behind them. A couple of dozen riders crest a dune within view and pause. Five of them break off and approach closer, with one of them finally stopping the dinosaur like beast he rides, laying down his weapons, and approaching with tentacles out and making sounds the heroes do not understand. Jedi Red reaches out with the force to make contact and to his surprise is contacted back! Jedi Blaster joins in and soon everyone is sharing thoughts of peaceful intent, danger in the desert, and the need to head for more friendly countryside. The octopus-like creatures are called the Ul-Mor and offer aid to the trio if they agree to join the tribe - this is a tribal law thing. They do and are soon following along on borrowed Lopers, riding across the desert. The Ul-More mention an underground shortcut to their homelands and a ritual of manhood needed to become full members of the tribe but the team is just happy to be headed out of the desert among friendly folk.

DM Notes:
It was good to dust off the rulebooks and campaign notes for this one. There was time spent at the beginning refamiliarizing with characters and rules and filling in any blank spots on the character sheets (except for name, apparently) and recalling the overall situation.

Star Frontiers has a device called a Toxy-Rad gauge that detects poisons. I'm not sure if Star Wars does or not but I included it because it made sense. That was more fun with poison than I've had in a long time. "Jedi Scouts" or "Padawan Scouts" - it was funny in the room, and the firestarter question was funny too.

The patrolling pirate encounter in the original is just supposed to be a dramatic thing to let the players know the pirates are active on the planet. That seemed like a letdown too so I turned it into a combat encounter. There wasn't much chance they were going to get the skiff but a gunfight beats a simple flyby any day. The pirates in the original are the "Star Devils". This led me to a bit of a crisis - would Star Wars have a "Devil" reference? Trek does, but Trek is Now + 300 years. Star Wars has nothing to do with the real world, history, or religion, so I don't think it would, so I changed it on the fly. It caught me off guard but it's kind of important for giving the bad guys an identity.

The Sand Shark - what it's called in the original module - is just a reskinned massif stat-wise, which I described as a cross between a shark and an alligator. Both of these outdoor combats helped make the Jedi players aware that while sabers and force powers are good indoors, some of them have serious limitations in a wide-open outdoor environment and that 30 meters is not nearly as long there as it might seem on a gridded map. Damage Threshold is an alternate axis of damage, separate from hit points, that inflicts a -1 to -5 on actions, depending on severity. Lots of damage at once, poison, fatigue, radiation, and certain weapons can send one down the condition track, eventually causing unconsciousness. It's a nice blend of simplicity and effectiveness and gives the game an alternative to hit point damage for showing effects.

The Ul-Mor encounter went pretty well with Use the Force checks and diplomacy and actual role-playing all combinning nicely. There is some curiousity about exactly how they get inducted into the tribe but they're willing to wait and see. They all thought the idea of octopus-people riding dinosaurs was kind of cool and I will agree that it's not something you see everyday and that it's not really out of place in a Star Wars game.

The total laughing breakdown of the game came when I was describing the desert and one of them thought I said "Trampoline" instead of Tattooine right after someone else had made a comment about force-hopping across the desert and this rolled into jokes about the "wide, flat, low-gravity desert world of Trampoleen" that had us all laughing our heads off. It's pretty good when they can make me lose my focus with a sustained funny, so this run was an all-around win.

Motivational Monday

2011-11-28T07:00:00.001-06:00

Return to the Ruins of Adventure - Epilogue

2011-11-25T12:00:00.001-06:00

So the party was all but wiped out in the hydra-dragon-vampire fight series with only the wizard fleeing the scene (after being revived by the fighter). "So What?" you might say. That's kind of what I said. I had even offered up the opportunity to take out some insurance against this kind of event by having the temple of Torm make a deal with the party: In return for services rendered, if the party left a lock of hair then the temple would raise them in the event of a catastrophe - at no cost. Since the party had already undertaken a mission in return for this, there was no further obligation. My thinking was that the team would return, take a short quest or two to rearm themselves against their known foes (perhaps there is a legendary weapon or two made to fight the lizard king and his undead legions) and then go set things right. That's not what happened.

First, Uthal's player decided to let him rest, as he was a pure Tempus follower and didn't sign on for this deal. Now there was enough gold available to have the ritual done if he had wanted to return, but he felt it was more in-character to go out in a big fight. No problems there. Then, two other players decide that they don't want to bring their characters back either. Now my basic philosophy is that players should be allowed to play the characters they want to play, but I have tailored this campaign a bit to this party. Losing 3 out of the 5 players changes quite a bit of this and reconciling things is tricky. I have been explicit that they are by far the leading/toughest new band of heroes in town and no one else is even close. This helped explaining their growing role within the city and its various groups, but it's a real pit trap when having to bring in multiple new characters at a level similar to the two remainders. Plus we have the question of the consequences of not stopping the lizard king's looming attack on the city which adds a time element to things now. I had also sketched out the final level's worth of encounters to be a little more of a narrative thing than I normally run and this was going to wreak all kinds of havoc with that.

So I thought about it and decided that if we were changing out 60% of the party anyway that something drastic was required to explain the changes. So I proposed a timeline jump of about 2 years and a level jump to move all existing and new characters to 11th, the start of Paragon tier. This would reflect the time and experience spent fighting the Lizard King and repulsing his attack on Phlan, giving a reasonable explanation for the presence of new heroes, changing out some NPC's, and generally going with a "Season 2" or next movie in the series feel for it*. Working through this process had me fired up again about the campaign as I admit the lack of interest in rezzing the existing party had taken some of the wind out of my sails. Unfortunately my players decided that playing through a war sounded like a lot of fun and that they didn't want to skip levels. I pointed out that most of the new party would be skipping a whole bunch of levels unless they wanted to play firsties again but to no avail. After the down-up-down-up-down cycle I was losing my enthusiasm for trying to continue this campaign. I did not want to run a wartime game because I had spent no time planning or laying the groundwork for it and it's just not a direction I wanted to go, in part because I was planning on doing that for a big chunk of Paragon tier. I typically try to stay flexible, thinking that over-planning leads to a loss of flexibility and that a good idea for today's game is better than a great idea for the "next" campaign but I really didn't want to short-circuit a great Paragon concept for a short-term problem in Heroic that I didn't want to run anyway!

There was a last ditch idea where I was going to have the characters come back as 20th level versions of themselves passing through time and planes to deal with another problem deep beneath the keep and incidentally raising the lower-level versions of themselves along the way with some funny scripted dialog to explain it (like the old Star Wars d6 read-aloud opening scripts) but it seemed to incorporate the worst elements of things such as forced raising of characters and forced playing of characters they didn't want to play anymore,and the more I thought about it I decided it was just too cute and too much DM fiat - I shouldn't be putting words in the mouths of their characters or forcing their actions to that degree, it's not nearly as cool as I thought it would be initially and I don't know how I would feel about it as a player. So instead of trying to shoehorn something into the game that both I and the players could stand I decided to just end it.

Epic Kordan?

Thirty sessions is a pretty good run and I enjoyed it a lot and learned a lot. I like 4th edition just fine. There are changes and differences of course, but it still feels like D&D when I run it. Fighters still run around with +1 swords and b*tch when they miss a saving throw. Players still try to get away with crap they shouldn't - "Daily" means once a day, not "as often as I can get away with it until the DM notices"**- and have to be reigned in. I'm still drawing up maps on graph paper and picking out monsters to inhabit them. There are still mage guilds, thieves' guilds, and temples to various deities. This version lends itself to traditional extended campaigns just as well as the earlier ones did.

Downsides? Well it does play better with mini's and maps and if I was going without those I would just play B/X D&D rather than trying to cope with gridless AOE's and the like. Combat does take more time than older versions but it is a lot more detailed and interactive, keeping players involved even when it's not their turn. We were lucky to get through 3 encounters in one night and two was our real average. Would you rather have 3-6 fairly simple fights in a 4 hour run like in Basic or 1-3 detailed crunchy fights with 4E? It's mainly a matter of taste and mood. Minions help quite a bit, and remembering that every "Encounter" doesn't have to be a combat encounter helps too. Skill challenges are nice new addition too, after the kinks were worked out. I don't like the attempt at tying the game to an online subscription model via DDI either, but that's more of a publishing issue than a problem with the game itself.

Process-wise the way I ran this one was a reaction against the way I ran most of my 3E campaigns from 2000-2009. Those were mostly published adventures (there were so many...) and I actually flowcharted out possible paths from levels 1-20. Depending on how Adventure A ended up, the party might be driven more towards Adventure B, C, or D. I didn't spend a lot of time preparing the individual adventures, instead I spent time trying to make connections between them via legends, rumors, maps, NPC's, and enemies. It worked well enough but I was never 100% happy with the adventures themselves. With 4E there was not the glut of published material and it was reputed to be easy to prepare so I wanted everything to be hand made by me. For the most part I stuck to that (I did use some material from Dungeon Delve) and it was very refreshing to know my material backwards and forwards and it also makes it incredibly easy to improv when neccessary as you know what makes sense and what doesn't because you wrote it! So despite the ending I still see it as a successful tour of (most of) Heroic Tier 4E.

I think this experience is also what is driving my interest in converting old material to the new version. Even this campaign started out as a conversion of "Ruins of Adventure" theoretically, although I never intended anything more than some thematic similarities - you fight humanoids, undead, and lizardmen and there is a sorcerer's pyramid, and that's about it. The best of the old material is incredibly familiar in a general sense because I've been looking at it for 25-30 years. Things like White Plume Mountain and Against the Giants are part of the lore of D&D. Converting them to another edition forces me to look at them again in extreme detail (is this room physically big enough to hold these creatures?) and to think about how to make them a better fit to a new mechanical system. This makes them mine, all over again, almost as much as if I wrote them from scratch. Yet they also have the benefit of tying in to the legend - it's a pretty good sandwich for an evening of dice-busting.

So what's next? I'm not sure. I still have my 4E game with the Apprentices that we play when we can, and the other games too. I've run the main game on Friday nights for the past 2 years and schedule wise Saturday nights make more sense for us now so that's going to have to change and may cost me some players. I'd like to keep a "grown-up" 4E game going but I'd like to get back to Savage Worlds (Deadlands?) too and I'd like to give Star Wars and Mutants and Masterminds a real shot as well but I'm not sure I can juggle all of those at once. I have to see what my players are up for, now that they (and I) have had time to get over the end of RTROA.

*Yes this was somewhat inspired by the BSG "one year later" thing in the middle of that series. I thought that was brilliant and if I could get some mileage out of it here then great.

** It's funny that encounter powers are rarely over-used in an encounter but the limit on dailies are "forgotten" somewhat often.

The Thankslisting

2011-11-24T12:00:00.008-06:00

I'll keep this short:

1) I'm thankful for having a decent steady job this holiday season, unlike some in recent years. I don't think of myself as particularly materialistic (then again who does?) but money in the bank sure does make things run more smoothly.

2) I'm thankful for having kids that are pretty good and pretty smart and are not embarrassed about liking some of the same things that their dad likes too. It's easy to pull off when they're 5 or 6, trickier when they're 12 or 15.

3) I'm thankful for having a wife that at a minimum tolerates (without venom) and quite a bit of the time shares or joins in my interests and hobbies. It's a huge win to go through life with a partner that doesn't require you to lock away a part of yourself to keep them happy, and that's what I have. I've had it the other way too, so this is the voice of experience: that experience sucked, it's much better this way.

4) I'm thankful for having friends that are low-maintenance, long-term, and solid. We can go for months without talking, caught up in the routines of life, and have a brief chat out of the blue and be caught up just like that.

5) I'm thankful for this whole internet RP community thing. When I started playing these things the "community" was pretty much the few other kids at school that played and the letters section of Dragon. Now we have so many, many, ways to run into each other, swap stories, gang up on each other, bore each other, and generally get in each other's hair - it's awesome! See a game you like or hear about it from someone, look up the company, find a discussion board, download a podcast, find some local players ... these are remarkable things! Can't find one you like on a subject you like then make your own! Then publish it online and see if anyone else likes it! When I stop and think about this whole thing it's just amazing how it all works now. I still prefer to play in person with local friends but the level of support out there now is just amazing and something I almost take for granted now, but it's still incredible when I think back to how we did things in prior decades.

So let's all party like the pilgrims ... violent, occultist-hunting pilgrims ...

... or maybe we could just watch football.

... and let's not forget the fuzzies.

Return to the Ruins of Adventure - Session 30: The End

2011-11-23T19:40:00.001-06:00

We begin in the ruined Star Keep, with our heroes standing amidst the shattered undead forms of the knights who once ran and defended the keep. Somewhere along the way the Lizard King animated the long dead knights and used them as guardians. Dispatched by the party, it is hoped they have now found whatever rest awaits them.

Now however, a booming crash echoes from the large double doors leading to the inner section of the keep. At the same time, Uthal notices and points out to his companions that the tower behind them is frosting over, ice creeping down from the top to cover the sides of the half-ruined round tower that adjoins the gate. The party makes a choice and decides to worry about the booming first, as the planks sag outward under repeated impacts. Kordan takes up sword and shield at the bottom of the wide stairs that lead to the rapidly failing doors. The rest of the team spreads out behind him, readying their powers to aid him and stop whatever danger lurks within.

(The next part is best read in the style of a 1920's radio boxing announcer - too much Boardwalk Empire lately...)

With a final shriek the doors are ripped asunder and a 4-headed monstrosity smashes through them, trailing a length of chain. The huge hydra shuffles forth, blinking in the light. Now it focuses on the puny shiny thing directly in front of it and charges, only to be tripped up by a quickly spoken phrase from the bard - Blunder! The hydra trips, staggers, and Kordan strikes with his blazing sunblade - first blood to the bard and the fighter! Althea joins in with Grasp of the Grave and hundreds of skeletal arms burst forth form the ground, tearing into the hydra and holding it in place. Kordan takes another swing! The beast strikes back with all 4 heads tearing at the fighter but the Invulnerable Coat of Arn(ol)d protects him from the worst of the damage! Uthal charges in and unloads a vicious set of stabs with his spear, ripping off one head...

...then two more spring up in its place! Kordan takes another shot! Jovanni ramps it up again with a Stirring Shout! The wizard summons a Flaming Sphere at the foot of the beast, and pinned in place by Grasp of the Grave it cannot escape! Mikal lands a strike with his Force Grip, squeezing the pinned opponent! The beast replies with vicious multi-headed attacks against Kordan and Uthal who strike, tearing off one more head and again two more spring up! In a burst of energy the beast lashes out in a hurricane of snapping jaws, bloodying the mighty fighter and seriously wounding the goliath barbarian!

Staggering, Uthal hits back hard with the Black Spear of Thar! Kordan joins in with a Brazen Assault! Althea blasts away with Magic Missile! Mikal unleashes the Phlames of Phlegamegathos, immolating the screaming beast with purple flames! Enraged and hurting badly, the hydra strikes out with all of its heads focusing on the fighter - and even with his mighty magical armor it's too much and down goes Kordan! Down goes Kordan!

Wiping away the blood and stunned at the punishment inflicted on the toughest human he has ever seen, Uthal rams his mighty iron spear into the beast one more time as the rest of the party blasts forth in unison! Even that's not enough to finish off the huge thing and now the bell tolls for Uthal as 7-10 heads (explanation later) slam into the lightly armored and already wounded barbarian, ripping him asunder in a fountain blood and body parts! The Black Spear of Thar drops to the turf as Uthal's spirit goes to join his ancestors. Shocked but not giving up the wizard, warlock, and bard all unload their most potent remaining magic into the beast and it finally collapses, blasted into ruin over the shattered body of the goliath. The heroes...win?

DM Notes Part 1:

The Hydra encounter was a 4 round fight, which seemed (and seems) really short for an 8th level party against a 10th level solo. I saw some potential issues with the standard hydra so I did make some changes to it. One example - the Hydra sprouts new heads when it has taken certain amounts of damage. Unfortunately if it takes fire damage that round it does not sprout said heads. Considering how common fire damage is in even a low level party, this seems to me to rob the hydra of one of its signature features, and there was no way I was going to let that happen. Flaming Sphere is a 1st-level wizard daily power that hangs around the battlefield doing fire damage, as just one example, so once it's dropped on the beast the whole sprouting head thing is over. There are many other fiery powers for the wizard and warlock as well so it was a problem I wanted to mitigate. I called it a "Swamp Hydra" and gave it some fire resistance and a few other tweaks to make for what I thought would be a better fight. No problems there.

Once I got into the fight, though, I let some things get away from me in the heat of battle. Most significantly I was having a 4 headed hydra that had lost one head go to 6 heads when it regrew, instead of 5. This got really nasty near the end when instead of the 7 heads it should have had it ended up with 10. At 3-30 points of damage for each bite attack, that's noticably more potential damage. I also screwed up some of the timing as the heads are supposed to regrow with a bit of delay instead of instantly as I was having them do, and that made a difference on some of the opportunity attacks, but I think the 3 extra heads was more egregious overall. My original goal was to make the creature a little more able to hang in a fight, but with this screw up on my part he got a lot more offensively capable as well.

Remarkably, this was the first time I have actually killed a character in this campaign. Now I have had several drop and require medical attention, but none of them have been flat-out dead until now. I think that's a pretty good record for 30 sessions. Now the hydra is a potentially nasty opponent and my head-miscounting made this nastier. I think the players take some of the credit for this one though as they locked down the hydra on round 1 but had their two melee fighters continue to attack it up close while the other three members of the party stayed at a distance. You might say that's the defender's job, but the hydra has no ranged attacks - once it's immobilized it can't hurt you from more than 2 squares away! So even with my head-math problem, some of that danger could have been avoided by backing off and acting as a firing squad for a few rounds - Range 1 = 10 head attacks, range 3 = 0 head attacks. As it turned out the hydra only broke free on the last round, but by that time Uthal and Kordan were so battered they couldn't take another round of that kind of punishment. Rolling 6, 8, or 10 attacks with a decent attack bonus is a lot of fun for the DM, but only having two targets to receive them magnified the impact greatly. Plus 8-10 rolls means you're get a crit for 30 points of damage about every other round. One good round of rolls at the end flat-out killed the barbarian, taking him to -70 or something from a non-bloodied state, because he was the only one in melee range - that's a bad place to be with a relatively low armor class, even with better hit points than most.

However, at the end of this encounter things were still alright - one glorious character death against a big bad monster isn't neccessarily bad for a climactic run to the swamp adventures. I didn't want Uthal's player sitting around bored for the rest of the session so I recruited him to run one of the main creatures in the next encounter. He digs into the mechanics of the game so I thought it was a good choice. The rest of the party seemed a little unsure of this move, confirming to me that it was a good idea. We continue:

Part 2:

As Jovanni revives Kordan, the rest of the party hears a strange sound from behind them. As they turn and look up at the tower, it turns out to be the mocking laughter of the Lizard King who now stands atop the structure, gazing down at them. Behind him a long, white-scaled, ice-rimed neck unfurls and leans down over the side of the tower, observing the remaining heroes.

Zarius, the undead lizard king, announces: "Fools! You have slain my guardians but you will not stop the plan I have set in motion! Soon the remaining tribes of the swamp will march on Phlan, aided by the undead legions of all the prior generations of lizardfolk slain by the Phlanites! We will swarm the city and slay the inhabitants! Sturmovax (gestures at dragon behind him) will freeze the defenders on the walls and then the gates of the city itself, allowing us to shatter them! We will pour in, an irresistable tide of vengeance for all the scaled folk ground under the heels of the humans! First, however (points at party), we will destroy you and the last hope of Phlan!"

Our heroes spend some time debating how to fight, whether to fight, and what their chances are with Uthal out of the picture. As they do this a swarm of lesser lizardman vampires emerges from the tower and hey move to engage the more lightly armored members of the party. Sturmovax the Blizzard Dragon drops down from the tower and blocks the gate leading out of the courtyard. Concerned, Mikal the Warlock unloads, blasting Zarius and some of his minions with fire. The sort-of retreating party is driven back towards the center as the lizard king drives into the middle of the party. As the lesser vampires drop, things look alright for the party.

Unfortunately this does not last. Kordan is torn between attacking the vampire lizard king with his sunblade versus attacking the blizzard dragon with his dragonslayer and switches targets a few times. Sturmovax flies about, switching positions nearly every round, and tends to time his swirling ice storm aura's peak with near-perfect positioning to inflict the most harm on the party. Zarius manages to stun multiple party members, blood drain them, and even manages to take control of the warlock at one point and cause him to take a shot at the wizard! Soon Mikal is down, Althea is down, and then Jovanni goes down, leaving only Kordan, bloodied and alone, to face off with both a vampire lizard king and a blizzard dragon. Desperate but not defeated he does manage to revive Jovanni and Mikal during the fight, but the warlock goes down agan soon after. Atop a crumbling wall (where the dragon had carried her body), Kordan revives the wizard with a healing potion and orders her to run as he prepares to make a last stand to give her time to get away and warn the town. As the dragon swoops back down, Althea teleports into the swamp and runs, until the sounds of battle die out behind her.

DM Notes Part 2:

In contrast to the earlier fight, this was a 10-round epic with several ups and downs and points where it looked like either side could win. It was a level 11 encounter which should be difficult but not deadly for an 8th level party, and despite the outcome I don't think that's inaccurate. Some points:

1) All of the monsters were from the Monster Vault or the MM3, some of the "new style" books for monster stats and I now agree that there is a substantial power boost for many creatures in comparison to earlier versions

2) This was the second half of a back-to-back encounter during which the party had burned many of their big-hitter daily powers

3) Having another brain to run a somewhat complicated monster while I ran the rest meant that I didn't forget any of the dragon's powers which can happen from time to time in multi-creature fights

4) The party was in no mind to retreat - it was discussed briefly and then never discussed again until the very end

Nastier monsters do make a difference, and having an assistant amplified that impact. It worked so well that if I ever run Champions again I might recruit a villain-runner just to help exercise the rich tactical options found in that game's mechanics. Knowing that they had expended many dailies already and knowing that Uthal was dead and knowing that the lizard king's rep is as one bad hombre, I think the team should have seriously considered a retreat rather than staying for the fight. This has always been a problem with the parties I run for - they pretty much never consider a retreat. I have begun to wonder if it's something I am doing that encourages this kind of behavior but looking back I would say my games tend to DIScourage it - most of the fights where characters die tend to be when the party is at a low ebb, regardless of edition, and where there is a lot of room for an escape. I've been conscious of the need for options besides "frontal assault" for years and so I do try to ensure that at least one exists. I'm comfortable blaming the players of course - : ) - and my players often describe themselves as a "Plan A kind of group" but I can't help but wonder how I could make this option more obvious and more palatable.

As far as specific monsters let me say that vampires are quite a bit of fun in 4E combining mobility, a good melee attack, and the ability to dominate during combat and turn party members against each other into one fun package. The blizzard dragon is a dragon but it's not a solo, making it a nice "sidekick" for another strong monster type. He's also pretty mobile and does decent damage up close and has an aura type attack that grows in power each round until it peaks and starts over again.He also has no vulnerability to fire or anything else which is nice. With the vampire as a strong single-target threat and the dragon hopping all over and making himself a whole-party threat and some minions running around to provide some numbers, it was a pretty good mix in my opinion.

The outcome was not really what I expected. This was supposed to be the big climactic encounter that would end the threat of the lizardman rebellion in the swamp and secure a keep for the party, setting things up for Paragon tier a little bit down the road. Instead it was nearly a TPK (effectively it was, with only one member surviving and running away at the end). The party has fought through some realy vicious encounters before and I felt that they could handle this one, even with the barbarian down. Alas I was wrong and whatever "story" we had going with this group ends here as another group of heroes falls prey to the forces of evil. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was also the end of this campaign which was another unexpected outcome. More on that next time.

Blogometric Slowdown

2011-11-21T12:00:00.001-06:00

Things are a little slow game-wise around the lair these days. With the conclusion of the main 4E campaign (more on that later) and the Apprentices being tied up for the past few weeks there have not been a lot of dice being rolled. I expect that will change with weekends freeing up and the holidays coming up too. Rough plans:

I'm feeling the itch to pick our Basic game back up for at least one run as I'd like to have them finish up the two B modules they're in right now and then I'd like to send them off to the Isle of Dread after that for a change of pace.

On the Supers front we are in the middle of an ICONS adventure and need to finish it. Depending on who is available and when I may also run some MSH - they seem to like playing the actual Marvel characters so we may take on the challenge of the Breeder Bombs next (the concept of which is kind of like the first X-Men movie so they should be on board with it. At some point we may take on M&M 3E but probably not yet - maybe during December vacation time.

Then there is the ongoing 4E ToEE campaign which should fire up again, maybe as soon as this weekend. I'm looking forward to it as I worked through a lot of prep to get it started and it's fun to run.

Anyway that's behind the slowdown in posts lately - less game time = less material driving the blog. Lots of other good things have been going on too, so everything's good here, but I'm lookig forward to getting back in the groove.

Motivational Monday

2011-11-21T07:00:00.001-06:00

For Barking Alien ...

2011-11-15T12:00:00.001-06:00

... to settle this thing once and for all, it's sometimes best to consult the classics:

Motivational Monday

2011-11-14T07:16:00.000-06:00

The Most Interesting Character in the World - for ICONS

2011-11-09T12:00:00.002-06:00

A legendary figure, TMIMitW has been around since the late 20th century and possibly longer. He lives much of his life below the radar, surfacing in the public due to a rare interview or public endorsement.

Prowess - 5 (Excellent) - a casually trained fighter, he combines a lifetime of experience and a lot of knowledge into a formidable package

Coordination - 5 (Excellent) - though he is older now and not a quick as in his youth he is still quite a bit more coordinated than the average, less interesting man.

Strength - 4 (Good) - Somewhat lessened by age he was strong enough to wrestle competitively at one point in his life

Intellect - 5 (Excellent) - Still as sharp as ever he is quite inteligent, insightful, and resourceful.

Awareness - 5 (Excellent) - He is very in tune with his surroundings, whether it be the jungles of Africa, the Mongolian Desert, or a cocktail party in Paris

Willpower - 6 (Remarkable) - This man knows exactly what needs to be done at any given time and is not easily dissuaded or turned from his path

Stamina - 10

Determination - 6

Origin: Trained

Specialties: Athletics, Drive, Leadership, Pilot, Stealth, Underwater Combat

Powers: NONE! He is The Most Interesting Man in the World, not The Most Interesting Superman in the World! Also, see Determination, above.

Qualities:

The Most Interesting - In an age when everyone strives to be intriguing, TMIMITW can't help it. He is unselfconscious yet profoundly self-aware, hard-nosed but friendly. He "lives vicariously through himself." This is not awarded by some outside force, it's just something everyone naturally agrees on. This means that merely being in the same room often draws people closer and often prompts them to start a conversation if he is not already having one. This is best tagged in relation to physical presence or somehow tied to a conversation. It's a flavor of super-charisma in some ways and should be easy to tag in most social situations. Think of him as the pop-culture Chuck Norris of charisma and you have it right.

A Life Lived Well - "Most people are safe in their own world and don't experience the total spectrum of life. Life is like a parade most people are watching." One of the things that makes him interesting is that he has been a part of many things in his life, many of them just a notch better than what most people experience. This is a man who is often a traveler and never been a tourist. He wasn't just a fisherman, he was a fisherman in the Philippines when the volcano erupted. He doesn't just drive fast cars, he filled in during the 24 hours of LeMans when one of the drivers wore down. He didn't just go hunting he was part of the expedition to central Africa that captured the Most Dangerous Animal in the World - then took it to a safe habitat at a wildlife park and threw the greatest party in the world in 1987. This is a pretty general ability but should be a lot of fun - think of a "one-up guy" that you have known. Now do that while being cool and likeable and not annoying and desperate - that's this quality. The taggability of this lies in coming up with a similar situation tothe one you face right now and recalling how you handled it then.

Challenges:

Not as Young as He Used to Be - Even the Most Interesting Man gets older, although that really just makes him that much More Interesting. Occasioanlly, despite his Excellent physical condition, he has trouble keeping up with his own high standards. Any physical challennge is open to a DM tag on this - hopefully the Determinaiton arising form this helps to resolve an interesting situation. Note to DMs: Please don't overdo this. He's older now, but he isn't crippled or enfeebled. Once per session should be plenty.

Points: 36! Awesome! Reasonable stats and no powers makes for a remarkably cheap hero, and I would happily play this guy in a game without feeling overshadowed - after all, how do you overshadow the Most Interesting Man in the World? Determination of 6, some very flexible Qualities and an easily tagged Challenge means you're going to have some options - get very familiar with the Determination rules!

In play I see him as sort of like a Batman or Reed Richards but using history, experience, and charisma instead of science, knowledge, and gadgets. If Galactus threatened the Earth and TMIMitW was our only hope, he would sit down with him, have a few drinks, then lead him and the Surfer off into space on a new adventure - then he would return later and let his friends know how it went! He's not a combat monster but he isn't helpless either. Beyond basic fisticuffs, if he encountered fiery super creatures he might use a point of Determination to retcon a firehose in the next room and use it against them. To take it up a notch he might retcon a tank of liquid nitrogen and freeze them with it, because anyone can put out a fire with water but not everyone can freeze it in place!

His laugh is the baritone honk of air escaping lungs filled with whiskey fumes, cigars smoke and fresh air.

Personality-wise remember not to over-specialize him. He's not a trained fighter but he's pretty good. He's not a trained scientist but he's pretty smart. He's not the Best Pilot in the World but he's better than most. He is not typically vengeful, petty, fearful, despondent, or bitter - he is quietly and confidently optimistic most of the time and many of his enemies end up thinking of him as a friend - they just can't help themselves. Just keep in mind that even in a world of supers he has seen and done and just been a part of many things that most people have not.

Finally, remember:

When in Rome, they do as he does.

Sharks Have a week dedicated to him.

His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser mans body.

His blood smells like cologne.

He has amassed an amazingly large DVD collection, and has never once alphabetised it.

If he were to mail a letter without postage, it would still get there.

Every time he goes for a swim. Dolphins appear.

Alien abductors have asked him, to probe them.

If he we’re to give you directions… You would never get lost. And you’d arive at least 5 minutes early.

His legend precedes him, the way lightning precedes thunder.

His reputation is expanding, faster then the universe.

He’s a lover… Not a fighter, but he’s also a fighter, so don’t get any ideas.

I think it could be a lot of fun to include these as elements of the "Most Interesting" quality and allow the player to tag any of these once per session if they can find a way to work it in - there are whole websites devoted to documenting these, so why not use them? Of course, you need to announce them in the same voice the announcer does as you bring them into play. Here's a link if you need a refresher.

Motivational Monday

2011-11-07T07:00:00.001-06:00

Even misspelled it's still kinda funny...

More Tales of Suspense

2011-11-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Tales of Suspense 40-50

After ToS 39 these cover the first year of Iron Man, circa 1963. Artists are pretty much Don Heck and Jack Kirby depending on the issue.

#40 features Gargantus, a giant Neanderthal Man. A girl doesn't show up for a date with Tony (clearly an indication of trouble) so Iron Man flies over to the town where she was visiting and finds it's cut off from the surrounding countryside by a big stone wall. He burrows under the wall and finds the townspeople hostile, referring to a "Gargantus" who now rules the town. he had them build the wall and they are now building a statue to him in the town square. The buildup here is pretty good.

Now there's no way IM is going to tolerate this state of affairs so he starts damaging stuff and calls the big G out. The traditional caveman with fur briefs and a big club appears (about 10' tall too) and starts fighting IM all over the town. Tony notices something weird about his eyes during the fight, deduces that he has hypnotized the town and that therefore he's more than just a caveman and then uses some kind of magnetic attack to rip Gargantus apart - he's a robot! And he's controlled by a UFO hovering above the town concealed by an artificial cloud! The aliens flee and the people snap out of it, saved by our hero.

Armor: Iron Man is repeatedly told that he is frightening at the begining of this issue so on the advice of a girlfriend he paints the suit gold to give himself more of a shining knight appearance. He's otherwise the same, so this marks the beginning of the original gold suit. Another thing to note is that he really doesn't have a lot of blasting powers at this stage. He's very much like a tech-based Magneto as he is throwing out magnets, reversing charges, and tossing metal around. He is strong and he can fly and he is armored but he is constantly running out of power and struggling to get to an electrical outlet to recharge.

Things you can steal: I think the basic plot looks like a lot of fun, though it makes no sense at all. Sure, have a local town cut off by a big stone wall and have a huge hypnotizing caveman robot controlled by a UFO behind it all! It's awesome! Then when your players tell you it's stupid you can point to the second Iron Man comic ever and say "Stan Lee and Jack Kirby thought it was just fine" and bask in the glow of your superiority! Seriously, you might need more than one big robotic Neandethal to give your team some real opposition but it can work.

#41 features "Dr. Strange" who is definitely not the Strange we all know. This one is a villain in a purple suit (eventually - see:).

He does use magic, sort of - he's a kind of menatlist. He disappears at the end.

#42 features Red Barbarian who is not literally red (unusual for this time period) nor is he literally a Conan-esque barbarian, nor does he appear to have any actual powers, but he is pretty angry during most of this story. He is a Chinese warlord who plans to steal Stark technology by sending a face-changing agent known as "The Actor" (effective but not very inspirational) over to impersonate Stark. There is some simple skullduggery here and rather than a straight-up fight Iron Man uses his brains to get ahead of Actor and set him up for execution at the hands of Red Barbarian. RB is alive at the end of this one.

#43 features Kala, Queen of the Netherworld who again does not appear to have powers beyond being the queen of an underground kingdom with some advanced technology. Her goal is to conquer the surface world. She uses a device like a Star Trek transporter to kidnap some people, including Tony Stark who is caught without his suit. Feeling a little Deja Vu he promises to build weapons for her if he is left alone in a lab for a while. He promptly builds another suit (gold from the start this time) escapes, makes his way into the throne room, and then convinces the queen to marry her right-hand-man who is against the war anyway. This is another one where Stark talks people into things to resolve the situation instead of just issuing an armored beatdown. Kala ends the issue engaged and dissuaded from attacking us. Note the rather conservative costume, by today's standards anyway.

#44 features a trip back in time where Tony hooks up with Cleopatra and defeats the Mad Pharoah who is rebelling against her. This is an odd side trip story and is the kind of plot you probably cooked up when you were 12. It's kind of funny to see several panels regarding Tony's contemplation of whether he could have scored with Cleopatra - almost as much time as is spent on whether IM could defeat an ancient Egyptian army. Iron Man smashing chariots is cool and all but that's about it.

#45 finally features another super-powered opponent: Jack Frost! He runs around freezing stuff (including Happy Hogan) until IM reverses a polarity somewhere and freezes Frost. He is melted out and taken into custody. A lot of these early plots boil down to "guy attacks Stark Industries, Iron man has to figure out how to stop him in between charging cycles, Iron Man pulls new manuver that defeats bad guy" - this is one of those. Also: Hapy Hogan and Pepper Potts (called "Kitty" in one panel for some reason) make their first appearance. Not sure about that "favorite" comment on the cover but they are a part of the lore.

#46 brings in one of my favorite bad guys and one of IM's oldest (maybe he is the oldest, looking at the timing here) recurring foes: CRIMSON DYNAMO! A Russian electrical genius builds a battlesuit, gets endorsed by Khruschev, then flies off to America to take out Stark and Iron Man. It's a big bulky red suit against a big bulky yellow suit! Stark eventualy convinces the scientist that the Russian leader is planning to betray him by using a trick voice recording (wasn't that part of 24 Season 2?). The Russian defects to America and all is well by the end of the issue. The funny thing is that the Russian leader WAS planning to betray him. This follows the pattern I mentioned above but it's better because it has communists and the Dynamo.

#47 features a new supervillain named the Melter (again descriptive but not all that imaginitive). He has a ray gun strapped to his chest that melts things when fired. This again follows the usual pattern but it has Tony running around worried about his secret identity being revealed if his maks gets melted off. Personally I would be worried about having molten metal dripping down my face but that's not really an issue here as the melted armor seems to run off without burning the exposed skin beneath. There is an extended running fight and the Melter ends up fleeing into the sewers, surely to return another day.

#48 introduces a brand new red and gold suit, the one with the "double-peaked" yellow mask It also introduces "Mister Doll" (wow that is bad, even for 1964) who uses a small voodoo doll he stole from an African witch doctor to cause harm. He uses it on several millionaires to get them to sign their fortunes over to him (on threat of voodoo-torure, not because of mind control) and then comes after Tony Stark. The odd thing is that he shapes the doll to look like Iron Man and makes Tony hurt...then he makes it look like Stark and hurts him again - I'm not sure that should work that way but it's magic anyway so who cares? Iron Man saves the day by reversing the whip - he makes a sudden move and changes the doll to look like its owner just as he drops it from a height, seriously harming the villain. He is taken away by the police.

#49 is the first IM crossover featuring Angel from the X-Men, who gets caught in a nuclear blast which scrambles his brain and makes him a bad guy. He and Iron Man get into a scrap, he quits the X-Men, then spends a bunch of time doing bad things to get the attention of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants until Iron Man comes back and sorts him out by ... falling. He puts himself into a lethal situation which forces the good side of Angel to act and snaps him out of the evilness. This seems a little out of character for what we know about Tony so far and it also seems to me to be more like something a sidekick would do to save his hero, not something Iron Man does to save an X-Man he just met the same day! Gaming note: If your players can handle it then having one of them "turn bad" for a session could be a lot of fun.

#50 features the first appearance of The Mandarin, a recurring Iron Man enemy. He has a big old fortress somewhere near China and is a bad enough dude that Chinese generals go to him begging for help and fearing for their lives. The Pentagon asks Iron Man to do something so he flies out and pretty much gets his lunch eaten by the Mandarin. He ... sort of defeeats the Mandarin, then while he is recovering IM escapes ... and flies back home. This is the first time we see IM not really coming out completely victoroius - instead it feels like he was lucky to get away! This is kind of an odd way to go but it does set the big M up as a formidable opponent. It also reverses the typical plots we have been seeing which is kind of neat.

One funny note: despite being Chinese the Mandarin's costume features a big "M" in the middle of his chest. It's one of those Silver Age things you don't see as much anymore and I love it.

So by the end of Iron Man Year One (1963 edition):

- We know his origin

- We've met Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts, two major supporting characters

- We've met Crimson Dynamo and The Mandarin, two major recurring villains

- His powers are more like Batman plus Magneto than the later versions of the character

- We've seen him build a suit, repaint a suit, build another suit, and build a new version of the suit much closer to the iconic version

Oh and ...

Yeah, that dreamy Rock Hudson...guessing it would be Clooney today.

Yeah. Anyway that's not a bad first year. More to come...

Tales of Suspense

2011-11-03T12:00:00.001-05:00

If I'm about to start a campaign I like to dig back into some of the things that inspire it. For DD that might be Howard, Leiber, Tolkien, some newer writers, and maybe a viewing of the LOTR movies or some Conan or Sword and the Sorcerer. For the Greek campaign I kicked it off with Clash of the Titans and re-reading some of the myths. For Star Wars there is the obvious material. For Champions, DC, Marvel, M&M, ICONS, BASH, etc. I think comic books are the true original source. I know some people try to run super campaigns even though the only inspirational material they see is the occasional summer movie but to me that's a pretty limited set of material, even after the last 11 years of annual super-releases. The animated series for these things are more plentiful and often more true to the comics and I think they're a fine way to go and I've done that, but I want more. So I've been going back to the beginning on some source material and I decided to start with old school Iron Man.

Iron Man makes his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39

This is his origin story and it's very similar to the first part of the movie if you swap out Middle East for Southeast Asia. I originally read this years ago in a big hardback full-color compilation from the local library called "Origins of Marvel Heroes" and I thought it was pretty cool then. Seeing it up on the big screen was a particular thrill for me as IM has long been my favorite. For a very long time the only comic long boxes in my house were Iron Man, eventually covering from about issue #100 up to about #300 or so when I got busy with other things. This drew me into the Avengers and West Coast so I was always more about that branch of the Marvel family than the X-branch, but I was at least aware of them too.

Anyway, back to this book: It's very simple and it's a very linear story. Injured > Captured > Building> Breaking Out> Free. The villain is "Wong Chu" who is a martial arts expert and local warlord. We don't learn much about him other than that - he is clearly there to be defeated - and by the end he's presumably dead when Iron Man detonates the ammo dump Wong Chu just ran into.

Things you could steal: Not a lot since it's an origin story and a fairly well-known one at that. You could use the tail-kicking warlord with soldiers who is taking over a small country as part of an adventure, but for an international run it seems pretty limited. Maybe reset it in Mexico and make him a drug lord who's stirring up trouble. I think a Wolverine or Batman type character dropped into this scenario could have a ton of fun. Give the warlord some mental defenses if you have a mentalist so that one die roll doesn;t cure your whole scenario. Better yet, give him a rival warlord who moves in if the original one goes peaceful and double the trouble.

Armor: The Gray Armor, the Mark I of all Mark I's. It looks clunkier than the one in the movie if that's possible, but this is where it all began.

One other note - these early Tales have a few extra stories added in after the Iron Man material and some of them are kind of cool. They are all modern to futuristic in setting and very much in the Twilight Zone school of science fiction where there is a big twist at the end. There's not much you would use in a campaign sense, but they did push the old-school science fiction button for me.

Return to the Ruins of Adventure - Session 29: Dead Man's Party

2011-11-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

After resting overnight at the temple ruins, the party sets forth across the swamp. As they approach the ancient keep the swamp quiets down. A single tower looms in the darkness, broken off twenty feet above the ground. The rest of the keep is in similar shape, ground down over the centuries by weather and war. A once-gated arch hangs open, inviting the adventurers in.

They enter and see a barren courtyard surrounded by broken and partially collapsed walls with a single inner gate in the opposite corner. As they look around, the ruined forms of might once have been men begin to emerge from the ground. With squelching and clanking noises the undead things move forward, evil intent in their eyes.

The experienced champions stand unshaken - they have fought the undead before. Kordan and Uthal charge the largest concentration as the arcane members of the party unleash various blasts and bolts, dropping several enemies in their tracks. One of the undead issues a wail that stops the fighting man and the barbarian in their tracks, allowing some of the lesser undead to sweep past them. Mikal is the focus of their efforts and the warlock moves backward as rapidly as he can while keeping up a steady fire on his attackers.

Enraged, Uthal explodes in fury raining blows all around him and stopping the general encirclement of the party. The other heroes also step up and deal out devastation in their own way. Despite effort this a pair of fast ghouls weave through the lines and assault the wizard and the bard back near the gate. As the rest of the creatures succumb, the party converges near the gate to finish off these last few opponents, ending a nasty little fight where every member of the party was hit and injured in some way.

Pausing for breath inside the gate they attempt to recover, then a booming crash echoes through the ruin as dust cascades down over the inner gate. As heads turn to see what new terror awaits inside, Uthal's trained senses notice frost creeping down the stones at the top of the ruined tower, and it is in no way cold enough to be a natural event. Just then another boom crashes out and the heroes gather themselves up for another fight.

DM Notes: This session was shorter than some but we still managed to get the party to the keep, only to find out it was not exactly the dreamhouse they had been hoping for. The main part of the session was an 8 round fight against a variety of ghouls some of which I pulled from the 4E Open Grave - still handy despite being one of the earlier books in the 4E run. Several daily powers and action points were burned as the quality of quantity proved to be somewhat effective against the group on a relatively open battlefield. It was a good fight and brought in some more of the lore about the keep, its origins, and its ancient inhabitants the Knights of the Silver Star. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion in Session 30...

More Qualities for Icons That You May Recognize

2011-11-01T12:00:00.008-05:00

A different take this time. You may scoff at the source but slogans are driven into people's brain and millions of dollars are spent to do it because they work! If some of the players and the DM already have some pictures in their heads tied to a catchy phrase, why not use that for our own purposes?

Engineered Like No Other Car in the World - change "Car" to "Battlesuit" or "Robot" or "Clay Golem" or anything else you can think of and I would tag this one anytime I took a serious beating - DM: "You're armor fails and you're uconscious" - Titanium Titan: "but wait, it's Engineered Like No Other Armor in the World!" - Ta daaaaa! Thank you, thank you. You could have a lot of fun playing this up too - "Wow that's some really nice plating there" or "Triple-redundancy in the power relays eh?" and that kind of thing. It gives you superiority when the monthly armored heroes club meeting rolls around. Unless somebody else takes...

The Ultimate Driving Machine - change "Driving" to "Armored" or "Fighting" or "Speed" and you have some bragging rights with this one too. To keep them separated conceptually I would look at ELNOCITW as more defensive/materials type superiority and TUDM as more of performance or functional superiority. Titan's suit may be tougher, but Ironhead's suit just works and it's faster/shootier/better in some way than any other. I think as long as there is a mechanical element to the character then either of these works well. It's a versatile Quality too as more than just functional superiority it implies a reputaiton as well! When Karateka Robotika cuts loose the thugs may have to make a Willpower check because he is widely known as the Ultimate Fighting Machine.

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection - You are a techie hero. You suffer a setback or are even defeated because of some weakness in your tech. Tag RPOP for a point to overcome this problem as you would "never stand for leaving that kind of flaw unattended to". The DM might have you make a roll to overcome this - bargain and see if he'll give you two points for it - remember you are Relentless - it says so right there on your sheet. This might even work for non-tech heroes if it was redirected at an over-planning type - "where did my plan go wrong?" and that kind of thing.

We Build Excitement - Some heroes are natural celebrities, justified or not. For a hero with this quality, wherever he goes, whatever he does, people are interested. Reporters show up whenever he is in public - crowds gather, vid is taken, twitter is abuzz. This implies a very public persona. There's a lot of old school Tony Stark here, and a lot of Fantastic Four movie Johnny Storm here too. Rock Star/Reality Star is a good real-world model to follow here. Lord forbid multiple characters with this quality get together...Uses: It's basically impossible to become lost or stranded with this quality. It's incredibly easy to publicize any kind of information imaginable as even the outlandish or implausible will at the very least be repeated/reported. Getting in touch with another celebirty is as easy as mentioning it to a fan or reporter or blogger. One downside is that any super-fights will probably have to happen near some bystanders. They may scatter but they WILL return - that's just how it works.

Interlude: I would submit that the Iron Man movies' Tony Stark has all 4 of the above qualities. Discuss, then continue:

The Heartbeat of America - this character embodies the qualities associated with "America" in a traditional patriotic sense, the hero is in tune with those qualities and is known for them. Tagging this one could involve patriotic symbols, "doing the right thing", and "The American Way". It's probably best for a high-profile character.

Quality is Job 1 - You are all about quality, in this case getting it right the first time. Fail a talent roll? Tag this and roll again! I would direct it towards talents and attributes more than straight-up powers as it's hard to have a focus on quality with your teleport or energy blast but it makes sense with a science skill, detective work, or inventing things.

The Standard of the World - this one comes with a lot of baggage and there's not much room for multiples. For a DC example it's Superman. For marvel we might focus it a bit and say Doctor Doom on the bad side and maybe Reed Richards on the good side. For heroes it means you are the one they all count on when things get as bad as they can get, the last hope. For villains it means that if you're involved then it's a Big Deal. To tag this the stakes need to be high and everything should be on the line and you're responsibility, your place in the world, your history - all of that should be coming to the fore.

Motivational Halloween Monday

2011-10-31T07:00:00.001-05:00

Distractions

2011-10-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

My posting of late has been interrupted a bit by, among other things, this:

I don't watch a ton of regular season baseball but after nearly 30 years of futility when they get to the postseason I start watching like a true fan. It didn't work out for them this year (or last year) but having them in the Series is a huge advance from past efforts, and two runs in a row shows that they may have finally taken a step up into the ranks of the serious contenders - finally!

Now that it's over and I don't have 3-hour games distracting me 5 out of 7 nights a week, things should settle down here.

Mid-Week Motivational

2011-10-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

What makes it "Animated" ?

2011-10-26T12:00:00.001-05:00

I've been calling my ICONS campaign "The Animated Series" to differentiate it from my "real" Atomic City campaign which was originally put together with Mutants and Masterminds in mind as the system and adult players running around in it. I decided to use it as the background for my occasional ICONS runs with the Apprentices but I wanted to separate it from the M&M game and so the Animated Series was born. As it turns out, I'm running ICONS more than M&M right now so I thought I would share some thoughts on what makes it different.

Feel over Realism - even comic books try to work in some nods to realism. I'm not terribly concerned about that in this game. If someone says they have a time machine then accept it - there's a time machine in there somewhere. We're not going to technobabble it in or out of existence - take it as a given and just deal with it

Simplicity over Complexity - I'm not going to run quituple-layered X-Files style plots in this campaign. If there's a rumor that Think Tank is behind a crime then he's involved - there might be some kind of twist (like maybe he's not working alone) but the players aren't going to have to spend multiple sessions sifting through layers of innuendo.

Speed over Detail - "Fast" beats "Intricate" whether we're talking plots or managing a session. They shouldn't need to make 3 detective rolls to gather clues from a crime scene or multiple stealth checks to get into a building unobserved - one roll gets it done.

Violent but not Gory - I am running this for a younger crowd. It's not strictly all-ages material but we're not getting into torture or detailed descriptions of carnage here.

Sexy but not Sexual - again, moderated strokes for the younger folks. In my experience most RPG sessions don't focus much on this anyway.

Wonder Man? Crmson Dynamo? You look different...

Evil but not Depraved - I'm fine with making the bad guys bad for a reason but we're not going to recreate the Jason Todd Experence. Think TV to Silver Age Joker, possibly even older movie Joker, not Dark Knight Joker.

Action over Discussion - this is Original Trek-style, not Next-Gen Trek-style. Meetings are held to decide whose butt gets kicked, not whether we should be kicking butts or not. Brief debates are fine but we're not going to spend a ton of time philosophizing over right and wrong.

Broad Strokes - every character should have an Epithet. If you can't summarize a character in one sentence you may be over-thinking it for this campaign. This makes the whole Quality/Challenge system a central part of defining a character, possibly more than the other more typical mechanical elements. In an almost counter-intuitive way, demanding this kind of shorthand description forces a player to really boil a character down to its essence and focus on what he's really about. Hulk, Thing, and Colossus are all very similar characters as far as powers - what is it that makes them different? That's where this comes in.

Timelessness - the final element of the campaign and one that I consciously chose. My original plan was to sketch out Atomic City decade by decade form the 50's to 2020 or so to give me an outline of tech, groups, politics, industries, etc. I'm still going to do that, but not for the Animated side of it. One of the things I like about the Bruce Timm animated shows is that they are not anchored in a set time period. Batman episodes sometimes looks like a story from the 40's but has video communications in his car - and it's OK! My animated adventures are not set in any particular decade so that iconic heroes from any time can show up and it's no big deal. Same goes for villains. If something happened "back during the war" it might be WW2 or Vietnam or the Gulf - who knows? Comics change this stuff up regularly (see Stark, Tony - what war did he get hurt in again? Cause the one in that movie ain't the one I read about as a kid...) I'm just fuzzying it up in advance. Of course running a bunch of animated stuff first means I can see what combinations work better than others and then arrange the "real" history to my satisfaction after the fact, a hidden advantage of flipping the planned order.

The major inspirations here are Justice League and the new Avengers cartoon. Batman and Superman play a pretty major role too. Brave and the Bold is in there a little bit, and I would even call Superfriends enough of an influence to mention. Young Justice is fairly new but I like what I see so far and it probably falls into the mix as well. There's a bit of 60's Batman of course - it might as well have been animated in some ways. From a comic perspective it's very much Silver with a touch of Bronze. As a final touch I'm trying to ensure that character sketches come out looking "animated" rather than our typical computer or live-action type picture.

70's Style!

Anyway those are the guidelines guiding my efforts on the Light Supers campaign. It's working pretty well so for now it's also the Main Supers campaign, and I'm perfectly content with that.

They look meaner but Aquaman still whipped them - Aquaman!

Mayhem is coming ... for ICONS

2011-10-25T12:00:00.015-05:00

A supervillain on the rise, the being known only as "Mayhem" is showing up everywhere these days. Always unshaven, always wearing a black suit, and often sporting visible evidence of his prior actions, he appears to be a typical human - but he is so much more...

Form of - a flag!

Prowess - 3 (Typical) He does not appear to be a trained fighter

Coordination - 4 (Good) Decent agility and dexterity

Strength - 4 (Good) Decent physical strength

Intellect - 6 (Remarkable) Mayhem seems to know exactly what he needs to know

Awareness - 8 (Amazing) He is extrememly aware of everything going on around him and extremely difficult to surprise

Willpower - 9 (Monstrous) Mayhem is nearly impossible to control, persuade, or redirect

Stamina - 13

Form of...a football player!

Determination - X - however much the DM says.

Origin - Unknown

Specialties - none

Powers
Transformation - 8 - Any form

Shrinking - 7 - Down to 1 inch in size

Growth - 3 - Up to 15 feet in size

Immortality - Yep.

Form of... a blind spot!

Qualities
"Force of Nature" - he is always up to something, following an agenda known only to himself. If his current action is thwarted he will move on to the next one. He is nearly impossible to reason with. Even if defeated physically his Immortality means he will eventually return.

"Agent of Chaos" - he seems to strike randomly, with little to no warning, amd with no discrernable pattern. He does not concoct elaborate schemes, plans, or deathtraps. He moves in, acts, and leaves.

"Indirect" - Mayhem does not walk up and hit someone. He takes the shape of a tree limb and drops onto their car, or chews a hole in their roof, or drives erratically in front of his target, causing an accident.

Form of... a raccoon!

DM Notes: OK I'm having a little fun with this one, but if you need a random encounter one night, here he is and it's perfectly in character! Let the players see a guy in a suit walk by and interfere with an NPC or a girlfriend or just a random bystander and see what happens! See how they deal with a fairly non-violent opponent who can still mess up their plans. It should be quite a bit of fun, especially if they recognize him. He won't completely ignore them, maybe giving a nod to them as he walks by, intent on his target. After carrying out his plan, he straightens his tie and walks away. If they interfere, then things get interesting - let them start having "accidents" in the form of a shapechanged Mayhem. Play it out and then let them off the hook before it gets stake.

Form of...a texting teenage girl driver!

Motivational Monday

2011-10-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

Atomic City: The Animated Series - Gangbusters!

2011-10-20T12:00:00.002-05:00

As our heroes await the results of various agencies and their attempts to track down the stolen SPARTAN suit, a call comes over the police band: "We have a bank robbery in progress and the robbers have superpowers. We have officers down and hostages inside the bank. ACPD requests any supers in the area please assist!." The three new heroes Wheels, Mento, and Soldier-X all arrive on the scene and are briefed on the situation, including the two officers who are trapped under their car near the entrance. The criminals are blasting anyone who comes near with flame, electrical, and ice blasts, stopping any rescue attempts.

Throwing caution to the wind, Mento decides he is tough enough to take the assailants on head-on, and Wheels agrees to back him up as does Soldier-X. They charge the main entrance to the bank and are met with the expected trio of energy blasts. Mento and Wheels shrug it off, but X is temporarily frozen by the ice blast, slowing him down. The Mighty Mental Hero tears through the three criminal defenders and the Handicapped Hero finishes them off as they tear off into the central lobby, followed shortly by X. They note in passing that all three of the perpetrators are members of the sluggers gang but instead of their characteristic baseball bats they are using large metal gauntlets that are the source of the various blasts - this old-school gang has suddenly gone hi-tech!

Roughly a dozen more gangers wait inside the bank, guarding hostages and piling up sacks of money, and roughly half of them have the new "power gauntlets". The team swings into action as the criminals open fire and bodies go flying everywhere - Soldier X uses his TK ability to throw opponents around, Wheels unloads with electrical blasts of his own, and Mento punches and kicks his way through the room. The gangers do manage to overload some of Wheels' systems with their electrical blasts, but he stays in the fight. Despite the Sluggers amped-up powers, the fight is one-sided and over in minutes.

As they assist with the cleanup, the police lieutenant on site tells the heroes that an undercover operation is underway across town and may reveal the source of the technology used in today's incident. He asks them to assist in case more powered types show up during that meet. They agree and are soon waiting near a police command post outside of a warehouse in another part of town.

Listening in to a wireless mic worn by the undercover cop, they soon learn that the Scaglietti crime family, specifically Joe Scaglietti, is trying to broker a peaceful settlement and alliance between the Sluggers and the Hellions and offering the power gauntlets as the incentive. As the discussion unfolds there is a crashing sound and the new hero "Atomic Roach" orders everyone to drop their weapons and surrender. The sound of gunfire, bats, and energy blasts is heard as is the officer's request for intervention.

Once again our heroes make a frontal assault, charging the nearest warehouse door and smashing aside the thugs who guard it, regardless of their blasts. Bursting in, they see the Atomic Roach blasted into a storage rack that then collapses on top of him, burying the unfortunate hero. Wheels blasts one group of Sluggers while Soldier-X begins force-tossing them into each other. Mento spots a man in a nice suit giving orders and wearing gauntlets and heads straight for him, only to discover the expensive suit is covering an armored exoskeleton, and that Joe Scaglietti can hit back! Mento duels with the mob scion while X and Wheels take down the other gangers. For a brief moment X manages to mind control Joe, causing him to blast one of his own minions, but Joe shakes it off and goes back to trading punches with Mento. Eventually the other gangers are down and Joe is backing towards an exit when Wheels hits him with an electric blast that staggers him back, leaving him open to a super-punch from Mento that takes him down for the count. As the police and SWAT team members take control of the building, the heroes attempt to find out the true source of the new weapons...

DM Notes: Our ICONS experience was stunted a bit by the holes in the Skeletron Key adventure I used as a starting point. Recently Adamant Entertainment released a new adventure, "Gangbusters", which looked a lot more like something we would like. I bought it, downloaded it from RPGNow, and ran it. It is a much better adventure, mechanically, and it also fits better with my players' experience as fighting various superpowered gangs is a common early mission type in City of Heroes, which colors some of their super-expectations. I like that it opens with stopping a crime in progress then throws some plot into the mix. These first two chapters went very well and I am quite happy with things so far.

Greyhawk 4E - Running a Campaign

2011-10-19T12:00:00.001-05:00

Once you have settled on your character guidelines (discussed here) then you need to think about adventures. For myself, one of the big attractions of running a Greyhawk campaign in 4E would be to run a new generation of players through some of the classic early adventures. GH does have a lot of background and history so there's no reason you couldn't just create your own, but you probably don't need a ton of help with that.

As far as creating your own 4E adventures with a Greyahwk flavor, I would say the two main elements to keep in mind are organizations and monsters. There are a lot of organizd groups in Greyhawk from orders of knighthood to political groups to religious groups. The Big Three of Evil in a classic campaign are Iuz, the Great Kingdom, and the Scarlet Broherhood. Other factions and areas of interest include the Horned Society, the Bandit Kingdoms, the Drow, temples to Nerull, Ralishaz, Incabulos, Hextor, and the rest of the major evil gods. Much of the opposition in Greyhawk centers around humanoid races like orcs and hobgoblins and norkers (don't forget the norkers!) but the religious and political conflicts alo mean that other human factions make good opponents as well whether it's Nyrond vs. Aerdy, Keoland and Veluna against the Baklunish coming in from the west, or more localized unpleasantness around the Theocracy of the Pale and its neighbors. The mysteries of Blackmoor and the Land of Black Ice have possibilities (especially for Paragon and Epic levels) as does the far south with Hepmonaland and the Amedio Jungle. Maybe the depths of the Nyr Dyv hold secrets yet unlocked. Vecna and Kas might also serve as high level threats, and there is always the legacy of Acererak.

When it comes to published adventures we are buried under choices. Let's talk about some of them:

Heroic Tier: Well the Temple of Elemental Evil is the obvious choice and it's enough to run your players through the entire range of 1-10. At least I think it is, and I'm testing that theory right now in one of my campaigns.

If you don't want to commit to that there is also the Saltmarsh series, specifically set in a coastal region of Greyhawk. They are a pretty nice mix of exploration, problem solving, and combat, though much of the fighting is towards the end which might not make some players happy. I'm pretty sure there's enough there to work PC's up to level 2 if you use some skill challenges during the haunted house part of the adventure and even in town for the more social players in the group. From there you have the followup Danger at Dunwater which also has a nice mix of combat and roleplay and could use some skill challenges as well. It also has some underwater action which can make it feel truly exotic, especially at a low level. The final part of the trilogy is The Final Enemy which is almost totally underwater and is mostly combat as the PC's invade a sahaugin lair. I can see some level issues here but they should be manageable. I'm thinking this series could be arranged to where the party is level 5 or 6 by the time they finish it up.

Another personal favorite is Against the Cult of the Reptile God which was a really good little adventure until the end where an NPC was needed to weaken the final bad guy so that a party of low level characters could take it on. With the more mechanically controlled levels in 4E I think it would be pretty easy to find a mid to high heroic solo creature and not need the NPC assist. If nothing else, it's a good way to work in a young dragon to an early adventure.

There are always the B series adventures too - B1 is OK and has a few memorable rooms but really only exists to give some structure (and a map) to do whatever you want to do. B2 is the old classic so many of us started out with and is not difficult to adapt to 4E's encounter system. Treat each lair as a 5 encounter mini-adventure, rework the ogre and the minotaur as solos with a level adjustment, and you should have a nice little starting area. B3 was never my favorite but the frozen palace could certainly be worked up as a 4E site. B4 could be used as the start of a whole lot of desert adventure by placing the Pharoah series nearby. The Sea of Dust seems like the most likely place for this kind of thing and you would need to come up with a rationale as to why a low level party is running around an area like that but it does have potential.

For the middle levels the Slavers series could be a core to build around. The first one is a tricky thing to convert as it's a very linear tournament adventure with some unique and way overpowered opponents. A2 is pretty straightforward as is A3 and then A4 could get a little weird again as it assumes the PC's are captured, which they ALWAYS hate. I might have to look these over again and I would carefully consider how you want things to end up with the Slavers and let that guide your planning.

Other good mid level adventures include White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Tamoachan, and maybe even some of the X modules like Isle of Dread. They tend to involve exotic locations, some interesting opponents and traps, and best of all they tend to be short enough that your players won't get tired of them before they finish, unlike some super-modules.

For Paragon the obvious choice is to go Against the Giants, then into the Depths of the Earth and against the Kuo-Toa and the Drow. That's really enough to keep a group busy for 10 levels I would think. If this is your plan for Paragon then I would make sure my group got to do some traveling during Heroic so that they get to see some of the Flanaess besides it's basement. Other Paragon choices include the Tomb of Horrors and the Barrier Peaks, both of which could probably be worked in during the other ongoing missions against the giants and the rest. I considered at one point taking Dwellers of the Forbidden City and making it into a Paragon adventure - I think it has a ton of potential for that. It makes for a nice campaign shift too if you play through heroic in a civilized area - the party makes a name for itself and then gets asked to help or lead an expedition down to the ruined city in the jungle - sounds good to me!

For Epic it might be time to take down a big nasty dragon that's been interfering with their travels and the nation, say the Yeomanry or Keoland. An old Suel Arch-Lich might be waking up out in the Sea of Dust and need a lesson in good behavior. The Circle of Eight might need some help recovering an artifact, leading into the Isle of the Ape.It could be time to take down the Scarlet Brotherhood once and for all and then perhaps it's time to take the fight to Iuz himself. Spending the first half of Epic tier fighting a war against Iuz and his demonic minions would be a pretty satisfying experience I think. Eventually it could come down to a direct confrontation and a chance to custom build a say, level 28 solo. Then of course Lolth is still waiting in the Demonweb Pits and sooner or later it's time to finish the job they started back at 11th level and stop the Drow demon-goddess for good.

As far as ridiculously high level characters running around Greyhawk, well, look at some of the original player characters and their unique abilities - clearly EGG was pretty flexible in those early games and looking at the 1E Rogues' Gallery and some of the characters written up in Dragon and the EX adventures you get quasi-deities and hero-deities like Murlynd (who uses dual six-shooters) and Kelanin not to mention that ascension to demigodhood is expressly spelled out in the Deities and Demigods book! So don't be afraid to have a few level 25's taking a hand in things in the form of your party. Deities come and go, nations rise and fall, and races ascend in power then get banished to the underworld - go ahead and let your players make a difference! It makes the campaign that much more memorable and gives the next Greyhawk campaign a fresh starting point.

Some ideas on conversion, based on doing a few:

Reference the actual original modules, not your memories of them. Things get fuzzy over time. If you're going for the original experience, stick with the module. If you're going for what you remember, then go with that - it might be more fun! But at least take a look at what was actualy in there.

Don't get caught up in the levels or hit dice - mechanics change. Flavor is more important than numbers - it is Against the Giants, not Against the Ogres. Descriptive text is edition-neutral! Illustrations are edition-neutral! Even maps are edition-neutral, though you may want to put a little more detail into some of them rather than sticking with so many bare stone rooms.

Don't worry about the original treasure - use the 4E treasure system. Descriptions of art objects, jewelry and gems are still valid even if the value changes. Try to find similar magic items to the originals, but stay flexible. Lose the cursed stuff unless it makes for a particularly interestng encounter and even then use them sparingly.

Keep the traps. That's part of the old school flavor and there are lots of example conversions in the DMG 1 & 2. Plus 4E characters are pretty tough and they aren't going to be killed by a 10' deep pit at 1st level.

Encourage thinking and be specific in play - don't fall prey to "I search the room...22 Perception. What do I find?" Most old modules have things in specific locations like under a loose stone in the floor, behind the bed, in a locked drawer in the desk. Ask each player what part of or thing in the room they are searching - this makes it a little more interesting and ensures that the character with the highest perception doesn't automatically find everything. Limit it to one thing or area per round of searching so everyone gets a fair shot.

Look for places to add in some skill challenges - they break up the combats that comprise most of these early adventures and give different characters chances to shine. Deciphering inscriptions, opening a special secret door, climbing across a dnagerous area (like the disks over the boiling mud in S2), answering a Sphinx's riddle or other challenge, or talking one's way past the otherwise neutral guards all make good skill challenges and can be surprisingly fun.

Anyway that's my outline and guideline for running classic Greyhawk in 4E. The mechanical changes do have an impact, but the world is the same. If you're uncovering agents of the Scarlet Brotherhood in Keoland, negotiating with the Elves of Celene and Highfolk to help drive the hill giants back into the Yatils, Fighting Yuan-Ti in the Forbidden City, ambushing one of Iuz's patrols in the Shield Lands, or taking over the throne of one of the Bandit Kingdoms, then it's still Greyhawk, and it's still a blast.