Miniatures Renaissance

In the non-role-playing department it's been a good year already.

We are playing 40K on a regular basis which I have not done in years and it's motivating me to paint figures and finish armies acquired as far back as Rogue Trader or 2nd edition.

I played my first game of Battlefleet Gothic with my own miniatures - I have had the game since it came out but I only ever played a few games at cons or stores using other people's ships. Now mine are finally getting some action.

I also played my first game of Blood Bowl, another long-held-rarely-played classic. We did that on Super Bowl Sunday before the big game. Now that the kids are old enough to play some of these, it's a lot easier to get a game going.

Tomorrow we will play our first game of Song of Blades and Heroes which I have been following for over a year but have not had a chance to play. Now with 4 warbands built we are ready to do some fantasy skirmishing.

Kids Campaign Note

One note, A while back I tried 4th edition D&D out with my zero-experience kids and decided I didn't like the way it was going. I then tried a few sessions with Moldvay Basic D&D and I liked it much better. That has somewhat gone on hold with limited weekend times and a resurgent interest in Warhammer 40,000 in the house. We will be coming back to it in the near future as the party investigates the dungeon beneath the ruined wizard's tower in the coastal burg of Porttown.

And the Winner is...

My 4 players and I got together and despite my initial efforts it eventually turned into a let's throw some books on the table and flip through them while we debate session. These have had a way of generating really wild results in the past but everyone gets a say, so what the heck.

Star Wars and M&M were discussed. One player was really interested in Saga.

Champions was discussed and one player was less than enthusiastic due to a bad GM in the past. I threw out Marvel and DC as potential options but Hero System remained a maybe.

Deadlands was a surprise dark horse and may come up again. I have it in original flavor, D20, GURPS, and Savage Worlds, so it has a lot of flavors.

The Deadlands discussion led to a Savage Worlds discussion which led to Necessary Evil...and that is our new campaign. I fell in love with Savage Worlds before it was even published and I've been on the email list since it started, even though I've run a grand total of one session of it ever. Now I get to run it with super heroes...

I can't wait.

New Beginnings

With the old group splintered and the old campaign dead I spent some time thinking about what to do next. One of the good things to come out of the split is that my "D&D only" players are gone, so I can actually consider running some of the other games I have been interested in. I talked to 2 players who had been in and out of the group and 2 of my core members and threw out some options:

• Star Wars Saga edition - I had run 2 mini-campaigns of Star War d20 that were well-received, I have quite a few ideas that I would like to run, and the Saga rules are solid.
• Supers - Either Champions or Mutants and Masterminds. I haven't run a supers game since the 90's but it had been the "next game" for about 4 years with the old group. Now I could finally run it.
• Warhammer Fantasy RP 2nd edition - I play Warhammer, I love the background, and I love the 2nd edition RP rules. I wasn't burned out on fantasy but I didn't want to run D&D again when I had the chance to run something different.

So it was a diverse group of games but all of them had a ton of untapped potential. We scheduled the first get-together for 2/6 and I decided to go ahead and make it a thrash-out session since we had not gotten together in a while.

End of a Campaign

I have been running games for a fairly set group of players since 2000. The core was 5 players (2 female, 3 male) and then 2 to 5 rotating players who came and went through different campaigns. It was a good run but like ll things it eventually had to come to an end.

The first campaign was my first 3rd edition game - set in Greyhawk pre-wars. We began with The Sunless Citadel, ran through a Dungeon update of the old AD&D Monastery adventure, and ended up going to Hommlett and working through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. It was great and we ran roughly 18 months with those until the party was wiped out on one of the bridges from the outer dungeon to the inner dungeon.

We decided to take a break from the mega-module with a side trip to Kalamar and a new set of low-level characters. That lasted for a few months until the group decided they wanted another crack at the temple.

We made up a new set of characters, some related to members of the first party, and headed out to Hommlett. Another long run with more progress made but it too eventually ended in a TPK.

After this we had played roughly 3 years of nothing but 3rd edition D&D and some of us wanted a break so we took a 6-month detour into Shadowrun which was a lot of fun.

At this point the group was ready to return to D&D but not the temple so we began a new campaign in the Scarred Lands. This began with the traditional 1st lvl party in a free started adventure and wound its way around to the City of Mithril and eventually into the Lost Tomb of Abysthor where we spent a great deal of time. While finally wrapping that up the group moseyed through Goodman's Temple of the Dragon Cult and Bloody Jack's Gold before climaxing with The Blackguard's Revenge and Iron Crypt of the Heretics which ended 2007 in an avoidable, disastrous TPK at about 12th lvl. This left a bad taste in some mouths and was probably the beginning of the end.

We took a 3 month side trip in early 2008 into the insanity that is Rifts until I came to my senses and suggested a new 3rd edition D&D game with most of the 3.5 books. This was heartily approved and we started in April of 2008.

The final campaign was set back in Kalamar and was going to use the classic Freeport Trilogy and the Savage Tide Adventure Path from Dungeon Magazine. This was mainly a reaction to the previous game where much of the action took place in one dungeon and one city - this time we would do some travelling. Things started well enough and the ending of the 3rd Freeport adventure provided a nice initial climax for the campaign as it was a near-TPK with party members dropping one by one as they desperately struggled to slay the big bad and only one member was still breathing at the end.

The Savage Tide part of the campaign really took off after that with long sea voyaging and island hopping and eventual arrival on the isle of dread. After one session on the island I called the game for the holidays at the end of 2009. Some of the group was not thrilled about this and some members ended up starting their own game by the time I started talking about starting things up again in January 2010. It wasn't handled well and spelled the permanent end of what had been a good group. It was a nice long run and I am glad to have been a part of it.

Gaming Fiction Reviews - Major Players

Gaming fiction has mostly been published by just a few companies:

-TSR/WOTC: TSR really got things going with the Dragonlance novels in the mid-80's. They took off and are still being published today. These were followed up with a series of Greyhawk novels which did not do as well, and then the Forgotten Realms novel line got going in 1987 and has never looked back. This was and presumably still is the heavy-hitter line of gaming fiction.

-White Wolf published numerous Vampire novels in the 90's and 00's though it seems to have petered out recently. I was never a Vampire player, so I admit to limited knowledge of these books and will probably not be reviewing them anytime soon, if ever.

- Games Workshop began publishing books set in their Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes in the 90's and these have continued through today with new works published quarterly (if not monthly) and omnibus editions of older works coming out to keep them in print.

These are the major players as I see them at the current time

Gaming Fiction Reviews - Prologue

The first piece of gaming fiction I know of is Quag Keep, published in 1979, and written by Andre Norton (an author whose other works I like). I will save the review for another post but it is the first I believe.

There was a lag before other gaming fiction was published - the next BIG thing was the Dragonlance series that kicked off in 1984 - , though several related types of work fired up right away.

One related work was Thieves World, which created the concept of the shared world novel. Multiple authors wrote about their own character in one shared setting, a fantasy medieval city in decline. Elements of these stories and backgrounds were developed through RPG play at the time. The first TW novel came out in 1979.

Another related type of work was the "players transported into a fantasy world" novel, which is similar to Quag Keep but does not used a published game world. The first of these that I am aware of is "The Sleeping Dragon" by Joel Rosenberg, published in 1983. There may have been others, but it's the first one I encountered and the oldest one I can find any mention of.

Finally, the third related type of work is the conventional fantasy novel that takes place in a world and may even use characters generated from a role-playing campaign. Raymond Feist's novels are exhibit A in this genre. Early works in this field tend to have the hallmarks of early D&D - wizards without armor and who do not use swords, priests that heal/temples that are centers of healing, and a gradual progression of the power level of enemies. Compare this to say, Lord of the Rings where one of the first hostile encounters by Frodo and Sam are with Ringwraiths! - clearly not a level - approproate foe.

I intend to do a series of reviews of gaming fiction, but I may go back and include some of these related works as well, because they can be interesting and many of them are read by the same people who read gaming fiction. Considering the amount of ausdience crossover, I think I can justify some review crossover.

Gaming Fiction

One area of RPG's that has developed and become big business in the last three decades is gaming fiction - That is, books based on a game universe. Most of these are based on some role-playing universe, but not all.

I do have somewhat different standards for gaming fiction than I do for a history book or more mainstream fantasy or science fiction novel.

- I expect at least one interesting main character, preferably more than one.

(Since most gaming fiction is rooted in the concept of "the party" this is something most gaming fiction succeeds at achieving)

- I expect some interesting supporting characters.

(On some level this boils down to "things I can steal")

- I expect to feel immersed in the world - most gaming fiction is based on a very well-developed world and this work has been done for the author before their story was written or likely even conceived. The story should use that - it's one of the potential strengths of gaming fiction. The background details are already there - all the author has to do is come up with interesting characters and a situation to put them through, and then they should be off.

- I expect the story to obey the laws of its particular universe. A parallel to the above, this can be a cardinal sin to me - if the author sets their story in an established world, then violates the tenets of that world, they have failed as a writer.

So, we have a situation where a game is published, has a great background, develops fans and takes off, and then some novels are written to tell some stories in that background - sounds like a great situation, right. It should be. Unfortunately there is a lot of bad gaming fiction out there and it has been there since the very begining

Next Generation

I attempted to start teaching the kids D&D by beginning with 4th edition as it is current and looks to be combat-focused which will keep them entertained. After 3 sessions I have changed my mind and will be introducing them via the Moldvay Basic Set. Here is why:

1) Grindingly slow - This is due to multiple reasons, among which is my unfamiliarity with the nuances of 4th. It's difficult to teach 3 new players how to play RPG's in general on top of teaching them how to play a rules-heavy edition you have not played before yourself. Plus they only made it through 4 rooms in 3 sessions.

2) Powers - I like the concept, but with new players it quickly turned into a situation where Character = Powers. if it wasn't on the list it did not occur to them to try it. I don't want them to learn to play like that.

3) Starter material - I have no starting 4th edition material other than the core books. No adventures, etc. I could make my own, and I was looking forward to it, but I also like the idea of them sharing some of the same experiences as the earlier generations. I have quite a few basic and 1st ed modules and this will give them some shared experiences and make my prep work a lot easier.

So, we're going with old-school training for the crew. Stay tuned.

Mutant Future

I recently discovered Mutant Future, the free retro-rpg along the lines of Gamma World 1st & 2nd edition. I spent a lot of time playing GW in 2nd,3rd, and 4th editions and I always had a good time - even character deaths usually managed to be memorable in some way. MF is a worthy successor. The character types are similar, there are long lists of randomly-rolled mutations, and combat is old-school descending AC. If you enjoyed GW I recommend it.