Warhammer Online Shutting Down

A virtual fistbump to all the players of Warhammer Online who found out this week that their game is shutting down in December. I never got into the game beyond the demo but I love Warhammer and I know exactly how you feel. I hate to see any online game that has a following fold up like this. Last year it was CoH, this year it's Warhammer - who will it be next year?

Articles:
 Massively summary:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/09/18/warhammer-online-to-close-december-18th/

Dev Thoughts (lots of cool stuff in here):
http://www.warhammeronline.com/article/Warhammer-Notice-Shutdown

Overreaction Friday

Fun Stuff:

• Temple of Elemental Evil is free at DTRPG/RPGNow/DnDClassics.com for a week or so. Check here or log into your site of choice to get it.
• This week was the 30th anniversary of the D&D cartoon. WOTC article here. I had mixed emotions about it as I was 14 when it came out and it was clearly written for younger kids. The visuals of the monsters were cool, especially Tiamat, but listening to Ralph from Happy Days flip into panic mode multiple times every episode made it hard to watch. I did pick up the DVD a few years ago just to have it but it's not a humongous part of my 80's D&D memories.  

New Stuff

The final D&D Next packet is out and I'm still digesting it. They have added new races, changed expertise dice to flat bonuses, and added skills back into the game. Oh, and the Bard is in too.

There are numerous and significant changes to every class - it looks to me like any existing characters of medium levels and up will require a rebuild. I suppose that's part of the "playtest" aspect but I thought we were closer to the final form than this.

Multiclassing is in.It's pretty much 3E style with minimum ability scores required for each class. Spellcasting looks a little messy right now as they attempt to solve the multi-classed spell-casting progression problem - there's a table specifically for figuring spells per day - but it looks to me like if I take 5th level fighter/5th level M-U I'm still only throwing spells as a 5th level M-U - the fighter levels still add nothing. A Ranger though, would add half levels, meaning a 5/5 M-U/Ranger would have spells per day as a 7th level caster, which is potentially a little better, but it's still capped by individual class level limits as far as what spells you can throw, so that character wouldn't be tossing any 4th level M-U or Ranger spells Confusing? I agree. It also means that this is another thing they have to consider when adding new spellcasting classes to the game and how this would interact with any alternative mechanics. I hope this gets better over the next year.

There will be updates to this packet! Both the Druid and the Paladin mention a future update to this packet.

Dragonborn do get their breath weapon (basically an encounter power) and it goes up in damage as they level - interesting.

Warforged look pretty strong - no need to eat, drink, or breathe, +1 AC, Stat bonuses are +1 to Str and Con. I can see a lot of metal barbarians in the future.

Drow get their classic spell abilities as they level up rather than all at once. Makes sense to me - assuming you're allowing them as PC's in the first place.

Skills are not like any previous edition of D&D so let me summarize:

• There is a fixed list of less than 20 skills but it looks like it would be trivial to expand this if desired
• Skills are just a more specific ability check - "Make a Stealth check" is just a d20 + dex bonus
• Each class grants "Proficiency" in certain skills (some fixed, some variable) and Proficiency gives a bonus on that kind of skill check. This bonus starts at a +1 and goes all the way up to +6 as the character levels up from 1-20. 
• Since it's a bonus -and not a ridiculous one - that means a fighter and a rogue can both make stealth checks but the rogue will have a +1 (at low level) that the fighter would not, unless he picked up the proficiency somehow, like with the "Stealthy" feat.
• Craft type skills have been rolled into "Tool Proficencies" so if you're proficient with blacksmiths tool you can make stuff and with thieves' tools you can open locks, etc. 
• Some classes have a further thing called "Expertise" which gives them a flat +5 bonus to checks on a number of skill and/or tool proficiencies.

I like this approach in general, though I'm not sure about the tool thing. 

Expertise looks pretty powerful too as Rogues get it at level 1 and Bards get it at level 3 - that means while everyone else is running around with a +1/+2 proficiency bonus (on top of stat bonuses) the Rogue or Bard will have a +5 on top of that. It definitely keeps the thief's niche safe as picking any lock or sneaking past anything with a decent perception ability is going to take an "expertised" thief at low levels. At higher levels other characters can handle the routine stuff pretty easily but I would still want the expert thief for the truly difficult stuff. 

I think this is pretty useable in play though as it basically creates three tiers of character when it comes to resolving individual tasks:

• "Well I have a decent stat bonus, I can try it" - There's a chance
• "I am proficient in that" (and have a decent stat bonus, hopefully)- I should be able to make it
• "I have expertise in that" - No sweat

Beyond these long term considerations you also have the situational modifier of advantage/disadvantage coming into play as well. I think that's pretty flexible and easy to run in play. 

There's a big article about it here where they explain the thinking behind this approach and I mostly agree with it. There's some Q&A stuff here too.

Hopefully we will get a chance to update our characters and play it this weekend. More next week.

Coming Attractions: Wrath of the Righteous

I've been reading a lot of Pathfinder lately. What sparked the resurgence of interest there just as we're digging into Next? Well, this:

Here's the blurb:
For more than a hundred years, the demon-infested Worldwound has warred against humanity, its Abyssal armies clashing with crusaders, barbarians, mercenaries, and heroes along the border of lost Sarkoris. But when one of the magical wardstones that helps hedge the demons into their savage realm is sabotaged, the crusader city of Kenabres is attacked and devastated by the demonic hordes. Can a small band of heroes destined for mythic greatness survive long enough to hold back the forces of chaos and evil until help arrives, or will they become the latest in a long line of victims slaughtered by Deskari, the demon lord of the Locust Host?

This is the new adventure path that just kicked off last month. I'm on the Paizo email list and when I saw the description I realized I was probably going to need to look into it. I have a player that typically plays a paladin and has mostly played paladins in the 25 years (wow that's a bigger number than I realized before) that I have known him. He likes being the heavily armored stand-up good guy fighting the good fight. He goes off in another direction occasionally but if I'm starting a new fantasy campaign I can pretty much count on him to play a knight/paladin type character, regardless of system. This new AP is pretty much "Knights and Paladins Throw Down With Demons to Save the World!" and it has him written all over it. Because this exists, I must run it for him.

Seeing that this was coming I went ahead and dove into Pathfinder, both the rules and the Inner Sea setting. I already was familiar with the rules having had the core book for a while and having run the Apprentices through the Beginner Box a while back. I picked up the Advanced Players Guide which adds some classes and feats and stuff because it looked like the most generally useful addition to the core game. My main focus though was the setting.

I really have not paid much attention to the setting for Pathfinder. I need another fantasy game setting like I need another set of fantasy roleplaying rules, so my general rule has been to ignore new settings and focus on the ones I already have. In the last month I've added Numenera and the Inner Sea World Guide and various other supplements so clearly I'm not paying attention to my own rules about these things either.

I haven't finished the big book yet but so far, wow, it is very good. It's very much made to game in, not just read about, and much like the Rome book I posted about yesterday it strikes a great balance between detail and brevity. Two of Paizo's founders were long time fans of Greyhawk and there are a lot of touches in this world that I recognize. Also, "Realm of the Mammoth Lords" - damn I'm ready to throw dice just reading that. So I do like the world, more than I expected to.

Yep, there's a smaller setting book on the Worldwound too and I went ahead and read it as well. It's somewhere between post-apocalyptic and "let's invade hell" turned backwards - the Abyss has invaded the world instead. There's some similarity to the Chaos Wastes in Warhammer Fantasy too. I plan to use quite a bit of that kind of flavoring.

So at this point I've refreshed myself on the rules, read most of the general setting, read the regional setting book, gotten to play a little bit, and read the first adventure. Am I still keen on doing this? Oh yeah, it's happening. This is very much the "crusade" adventure path where the good guys take on un-debatable Big Evil for the fate of the world - there's a lot of black and white with just a little gray.

They're also using the rules from the new "Mythic Campaigns" book which I have not read. Apparently it is comparable to the stuff from epic level play but instead of having to wait until you hit level 20 to start down that track, you can add in "mythic" abilities alongside the normal leveling path, representing divine will, fate, destiny, whatever. It is a power increase of some kind but it does seem appropriate for this set of adventures so I'm willing to give it a try as there are mythic monsters too.

Oh, also, on top of all that, this is the first AP that is specifically planned to take characters all the way from 1 to 20. Most of the others end up somewhere in the teens - this one is the full ride. Add in the mythic stuff and this should be a pretty good test of how Pathfinder circa 2013 handles high powered play.

Practical Considerations:

• We still have the scheduling issue. Finding a day where people can play regularly has been a problem. I've tried to solve this by setting two goals: I want Steve (the player this is meant for) to be able to play, so I'm working around his schedule first. Second, I want the Apprentices to be able to play in this one with the grown-ups. I typically run separate games for the kids and the adults - this is the crossover game. So it's looking like this will be a weekend game, on the weekends we don't play our ongoing 4E campaign.
• Players: Well I have the one, and at least one of the Apprentices should be available. Now I have to see if the rest of the grown-up crew can make it or if I can find some new players. I'm also willing to allow them to run multiple characters to make this happen. So we're probably looking at 3-6 players to make this work. 
• Juggling other campaigns: It's a challenge. I finally had to set a schedule for the 4E game to give us a reasonable chance to stay on track. - more on that in another post. Having that predictability does mean that I can set some times for other games and not worry about favoring one over another . Assuming we carry on with 4E Next, and Pathfinder that means I'm running three campaigns just for D&D type fantasy! I've often said I'd like to have 3 campaigns going most of the time: one fantasy, one sci-fi and one supers, and I have it half right! One plan was to run next on a weeknight when the kids are here but so far homework has interfered with that and kept it to weekends only. That may just have to do for now. It's going to be hard to squeeze in any supers time for a while though. If I can do some Marvel or M&M also on an alternating schedule then that means I'm only running twice a week and that should be manageable.
• I had also talked at one point about starting a game up at the LGS because I feel like I could manage a weeknight game and it would be a nice way to find more local players. One of my players asked me about burnout and that's a consideration but if I'm running in different systems with different groups of players I don't think that's as much of an issue.  

So while I'm still solving those problems I don't see anything insurmountable and the campaign binder (and cover) is under construction and I'm looking at what I can do with HeroLab and PCGen and other online tools. Schedule-wise I think it's going to boil down to four regularly-running games: 

• 4E Impiltur - twice a month
• Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous - twice a month 
• D&D Next - a few times a month on different days (easier since everyone involved lives here)
• Super-something once or twice a month, because I want to.

Anyway this Pathfinder thing should kick off fairly soon. More to come on that. 

Weird Wars Rome

Introduction:

This book brings together three things I really like: Savage Worlds, the Weird Wars series of supplements for that game, and ancient Rome. This is the product of a kickstarter that closed out at the end of August 2013 and yes I was a backer.

• Savage Worlds has been around for over ten years now. The rules have been printed several times but there's never really been a drastic change in "edition", nothing comparable to the edition changes we've seen with D&D over the years. It's right at the top of the systems I like the most but have played the least, having run several short campaigns but nothing longer than six months or so. I run it when I can and I follow the game pretty closely as there's a lot of interesting stuff, both from Pinnacle and from the multitude of third party publishers for the system. There is almost always something interesting in the works.

• Weird Wars started out as a d20 game set in World War 2 back during the early 2000's d20 boom. I had many of the books for that one (since sold off) and I ran a few episodes of it. The material in it was pretty solid and the mechanics were fine but it never really felt like something that needed the full 20-level zero to hero to demigod progression. At the time I thought it would have been better as a GURPS campaign and that's still not a bad idea. Since then it has been reborn as ongoing set of releases for Savage Worlds, beginning with Tour of Darkness - Weird Wars Vietnam back in the early days of SW. Since then we have seen a new Weird War Two book as well and now we have Rome.

• Ancient Rome is something I've been interested in for a long time. I took latin as my foreign language in high school and took plenty of ancient history classes in college. I consider it an "area of interest" and pick up new books on it whenever one catches my eye. I also think it has great potential for a fantasy campaign with a slightly different flavor than D&D.

Composition:

This is a single volume about 100 pages long, with PDF, softcover, and hardcover versions all coming out of the project. About half of it is for players and about half is for GM's. It's very pretty, with full color throughout, a parchment look to the page ground, and plenty of art.

Let me say up front that this is not a general resource for either the republic or the empire. This is very much focused on the military of Rome, the legions, and the military history of Rome. If you want a more general resource for gaming, the GURPS Imperial Rome better covers that angle. If you want a military focus though, this is probably the best single resource for that kind of game that I have found.

There is a character creation section that covers things like ranks and titles, there is coverage of Roman military equipment, and some setting rules covering things like sieges in Roman times and naval battles with galleys. This is plenty of material to make a member of the legion and get a good feel for what he's about. These sections give you the "who" and the "what" of Rome. Note that there is no way to start the game with magical powers - no arcane backgrounds, no holy stuff - you may be able to do some pretty cool things but you are not a wizard or a cleric in the D&D sense.

There is a section on both the history of Rome, from rise to fall, and the regions covered by the Romans at some point, typically province by province. This takes less than 20 pages but it is solid and is plenty to get a player up to speed on "Rome". For this section in particular, I like the balance of breadth vs. depth. If you want more, there are lots and lots of books out there on this subject. This is the "why" and the "where" of Rome. I should also note that all of this is real history - none of the weird stuff is in here yet. That comes in the GM section.


Then comes the "War Master's Section" and we have a rundown of the general weirdness, some mechanics, a guide to running a military campaign, a random adventure generator, two adventures (kind of a mini-capping), and a bestiary. Again, this is about half of the book and it is packed with useful material. Call this the "how" of a Roman campaign.

Execution:

So how would a Weird Wars Rome campaign play? Now I haven't run this yet but here's how it looks to me: It's a militarized Call of Cthulu where you don't always lose. To expand:

• The assumed beginning is that you are new or lightly experienced members of the Roman army 
• As you carry out your duties and fight some battles you become aware that there are some strange things going on
• Sooner or later you confront this strangeness directly and (hopefully) overcome it

Upon confronting the weirdness you could of course die or be injured, but you might also go mad (there are insanity/trauma rules) and you might be inducted into one of the secret societies that fight the weirdness to preserve humanity, expanding the options beyond straight-up military campaigns. This is where the magical powers can enter the campaign as these groups can teach the characters some new tricks. There is also some discussion around a campaign that spans the range of Roman history, playing a series of mini-campaigns with descendants of earlier characters fighting the secret war across the centuries which is a cool idea.

Now is this a campaign you run for ten years and everyone has characters retired to keeps and temples? Maybe not. It is certainly conducive to an intermittent and episodic mission-style campaign with no set end point. I think you could run it with a gradual progression up the ranks approach and end up with the characters in positions of power where they can take on a bigger role in both the nation and the ongoing war.

I have a vague concept in my head right now where over time the weirdness becomes more known and the emperor creates "Legio XIII" to deal with the problem on a larger scale - it's still a secret, but this 13th legion's leaders know what's going on and the unit is sent in to deal with problems that are on the verge of getting out of hand. This would add the fun of keeping the secret a secret on a bigger scale, potential rivalries with other legions who resent this other unit joining in, and some political fun as nobles and others scheme around the fringes.

To enhance the flavor of a Roman RPG there are a lot of tools available:

• Use Roman numerals as much as possible. They're easy to learn and easy to read.  There are dice numbered this way and that adds more to the game's flavor than you might think.
• Throw in a little latin, at least for titles and the names of the cities and provinces which are easily found in this book and a ton of other references as well.
• There are plenty of Roman and other ancient miniatures available. This helps change up the look from a typical D&D game and Savage Worlds works well with mini's. There are supposed to be figure flats coming out for this specific game as well.
• Ground it in history - pick an era, pick a region, and set your adventure in that specific time and place.  Use historical figures associated with your chosen setting. Even if your players aren't history buffs this makes the world feel more real just like it does for Faerun or Glorantha, and it has the advantage of being actual history - it might come in handy sometime other than at the game table.

Comparisons:

• This is unlikely to be a sandbox campaign, at least right out of the box. I can see ways to maybe run it that way but the game as presented is more like a superhero campaign: You are defenders of the status quo and when a threat to humanity or Rome arises you must deal with it.
• This is a game with swords and magic but it is a pretty long ways from D&D in that you are not stating out with magical powers and you are not typically motivated to fight this fight for loot and XP's
• On a power scale Savage Worlds is more cinematic than GURPS but less so than D&D 4th Edition so your characters should last for more than one fight and be able to do some cool things but you are not actually superheroes

One other note: like the other Weird Wars books Rome takes full advantage of Savage Worlds' designed ability to allow PC's to easily run their own NPC companions and fight larger battles in a session. The PC's may be accompanied by other legionnaires, auxilia, or helpless villagers caught in a bad situation. This can really enhance the feel of being in a larger scale military operation and should be a lot of fun with all of the colorful elements of a Roman force.

Inspiration:

• Having recently rewatched HBO's "Rome" with Lady Blacksteel it's a good source of inspiration as the two main characters are Roman soldiers in the late republic. If I ran this game I'd expect to see a lot of Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus in any characters I or my players made.
• Gladiator - pretty obvious but this movie deals more with internal Roman politics while the game is more focused on weirdness in the provinces and the frontiers of the realm. At the very least though the music makes for a good background while playing.
• Also having rewatched/introduced Apprentice Blaster to King Arthur, the Clive Owen version form a few years ago, I think it's a really strong source of inspiration for a campaign in Roman Britain. There are some interesting characters, you get a feel for the land, the opposition, and the overall situation, and there is plenty of room for weirdness. What might the "Woads" do when the Saxons invade besides call on Arthur? What if the Saxons have some more sinister influence than just conquest? What the heck is really going on at that villa in the middle of barbarian country? I can run an adventure based on this without almost no prep at all - it writes itself!

Next-to-final-thought: This is one of the few RPG's that would fit in well at a historical miniatures convention and I bet it would be a blast as you get a bunch of players who really know about these characters and this era get to dive in at a micro level and geek out, and then you get to throw zombies at them. I think it would be a blast.

Conclusion:

This book solidly covers its promised subject and strikes a perfect-for-gaming balance between brevity and detail. If you play Savage Worlds and are interested in a Roman campaign it is definitely worth a look. If you do not play Savage Worlds I'd say it's less of an easy "yes" and may be more dependent on the price and your personal sensitivity to that. Much of the content on Roman history and military equipment could be picked up through other non-gaming sources but it is handy to have a single book that brings it all together if that's a type of campaign you are interested in trying. I, however, do play Savage Worlds and I feel that with this book, a rulebook, some cards and dice, and what's in my head I could run an enjoyable game for my friends or my kids or both and run it for quite some time.  

40K Friday - Special Monday Edition - Heights of Ridiculousness: Buy a Chapter!

I got this an email with this subject line yesterday:

The entire Ultramarines Chapter available to buy now!

Right. Inside is this picture:

Clicking through to the site yields this:

We proudly present our most ambitious collection ever! Nearly 1,200 Space Marine models representing the Ultramarines as deployed at the Battle of Orar's Sepulchre 888.M41. Marneus Calgar leads his entire chapter against the perfidious Eldar of the Iyanden and Alaitoc Craftworlds.

Here it is company by company:

That's quite a pile. Here's the summary:

Alongside the entire Chapter of Space Marines you'll also receive a signed copy of Codex: Space Marines; a signed copy of Insignium Astartes (the definitive guide to the heraldries and squad markings of the Ultramarines); a full Chapter organisation chart; a breakdown of the composition of each of the 10 companies; a signed art print of the Codex: Space Marines book cover; and a signed art print of Paul Dainton's painting of the Ultramarines assembled for battle.

This collection includes 1 box of Marneus Calgar and Honour Guard; 1 Chief Librarian Tigurius; 1 Chaplain Cassius; 1 Space Marine Captain in Terminator Armour; 1 Space Marine Terminator Chaplain; 1 Captain Sicarius; 1 box of Space Marine Masters of the Chapter; 1 Space Marine Captain: Lord Executioner; 1 Space Marine Captain: Master of the Marches; 1 Space Marine Captain: Master of the Rites; 1 Space Marine Captain: Master of Relics; 3 Space Marine Command Squads; 2 Space Marine Librarians; 1 Space Marine Librarian in Terminator Armour; 1 Space Marine Librarian with staff & book; 1 Space Marine Librarian with Force Sword and Bolt Pistol; 1 Space Marine Librarian with Force Axe and Plasma Pistol; 3 Space Marine Chaplains with Crozius and Power Fist; 3 Space Marine Chaplains with skull helmet; 1 Space Marine Chaplain with Crozius and Bolt Pistol; 1 Space Marine Chaplain with Crozius and Plasma Pistol; 1 Space Marine Chaplain with Jump Pack; 8 Space Marine Terminator Squads; 4 Space Marine Terminator Close Combat Squads; 4 Space Marine Vanguard Veteran Squads; 4 Space Marine Sternguard Veteran Squads; 39 Space Marine Tactical Squads; 47 Space Marine Rhinos; 4 Space Marine Drop Pods; 14 Space Marine Assault Squads; 14 Space Marine Devastator Squads; 12 Space Marine Centurion Devastator Squads; 4 Space Marine Razorbacks; 2 Space Marine Techmarines; 4 Space Marine Thunderfire Cannons; 7 Space Marine Dreadnoughts; 5 Space Marine Ironclad Dreadnoughts; 1 Space Marine Sergeant Chronus; 7 Space Marine Land Raiders; 3 Space Marine Land Raider Crusader/Redeemers; 7 Space Marine Stalker/Hunters; 2 Space Marine Vindicators; 5 Space Marine Predators; 3 Space Marine Whirlwinds; 3 Stormraven Gunships; 7 Space Marine Stormtalon Gunships; 13 Space Marine Bike Squads; 1 Space Marine Bike; 5 Space Marine Attack Bikes; 11 Space Marine Land Speeders; 1 Space Marine Sergeant Telion; 10 boxes of Space Marine Scouts; 4 boxes of Space Marine Scouts with Sniper Rifles; 5 Space Marine Land Speeder Storms; and 6 Space Marine Strikeforces.

I particularly like "47 Rhinos".I suspect this all is as much a promotional thing as it is anything else and if so congratulations GW and it is cool on some level.

Now I'm fine with capitalism and I'm sure there will be at least one person who will buy this but REALLY?! 

• Money-wise there's a a car or a down payment on or a house or I can get 1200 space marine miniatures - tough choice! Is there a financing option? Just for fun I ran it through a loan calculator and if you financed it for 5 years at 15% you're looking at $278 a month. Think carefully before using those credit cards kids
• Who would buy this much unassembled plastic at one go? I don't care if you make it a "club project"  it's going to take forever to build and paint all of this stuff. This is effectively a "lifetime subscription" to marines in Warhammer 40,000. Better pick a color scheme you really really like.
• Storage space: forget about displaying it, where are you going to put all of those boxes while you're working on the thing? That's going to be a fairly big chunk of the garage, but hey it's priced like something that should go in the garage right?. Then once you build it all and paint it all you still have to store that.

All that said ... it would make a helluva Apocalypse army. Good luck transporting it though. Maybe you pay off the loan during the 5 years it takes to paint it all and then you're clear to buy a used minivan to carry it all around. 

Finally, if you're reading this and you do get one PUT UP A BLOG ABOUT IT! I'd love to follow along as someone tackles something like this. 

Motivational Monday

Thinking Back on Steve Jackson Games

I used to be a huge fan of Steve Jackson Games, and while I don't have anything against them they just haven't been on my radar much in the last 5 years. I thought I might work through why on this post.

Like a lot of gaming stuff for me, it starts in the 80's. I saw Car Wars on the shelf at the local mall hobby shop that was my main place for that kind of thing. It pushed three of my buttons (cars and games and blowing things up) and it was not very expensive in pocket-box form so I picked it up and had a blast. I ramble on some more about it here. Keep in mind that this was pre-Battletech, an era when the goal of most wargames was "realism" and the resulting complexity was embraced by all. Star Fleet Battles and Squad Leader were the big dogs here. The idea of a smaller game that didn't try to cover everything with a full page of rules and where "fun" was the main goal was definitely marching to a different drummer. We played it quite a bit and there was new material every year and I picked up a lot of it.

Not long after Car Wars I picked up another pocket-box game called "Ogre" about a force of conventional military units trying to stop a giant robot tank. I was already a fan of Keith Laumer's Bolo stories by this time and having a game that effectively fettered them was extra cool. The expansion game G.E.V. soon followed and now I was a fan of two SJG games.

Pretty soon I also picked up Illuminati, the conspiracy card game and though we never played it a ton it was a blast whenever we did and I loved the whole concept. That's three SJG games that were in our rotation by the early to mid 80's.

Then, as I was going through college GURPS 3rd Edition came out and was a big player in our RPG sessions for several years. A comprehensive system that provided a solid non-class-and-level approach and was as well supported as D&D was a great thing to have as AD&D petered out after 10 years for some of us. From pure historical campaigns to crazy time-travel shenanigans to standing in for Rifts and Mechwarrior we got our money's worth from GURPS.

Somewhere in the late 90's (looking back now) things started to drop off. Car Wars sputtered and died except for a few regional tournaments kept alive by dedicated gaming groups. Illuminati went through a couple of editions and a CCG version that didn't really last past the first few years and then that game went silent. Ogre had a very cool miniatures focus for a while but that pretty much dies out by the early 2000's.

GURPS kept going for a few more years but seemed to mostly be caught up in licensing stuff like Deadlands, Vampire, and Castle Falkenstein - popular 90's games. Also, GURPS Traveller, which seemed to make up a significant part of the line in the 90's - we preferred original/mega flavor ourselves. If it wasn't that then it was second editions of books we already had, from Greece to Rome to Magic to Old West to Martial Arts - it was fine and all but there was not a big incentive to go spend another $20 on a book that was a slightly cleaned up and perhaps moderately expanded version of a book I already had. Also, we were still playing third edition - there wasn't a new edition of the game. Then in 2004 they went to a new edition and that pretty much killed GURPS for my group. We were in full on D&D 3E mode and there was not room for much else. I ended up getting most of the very nicely done GURPS 4E books but I've never read half of them and never run or played the game at all.

Somewhere along in the early 2000's is also when SJG first published Munchkin, which exploded and has in some sense consumed the company. Don;t get me wrong, I'm glad they found a way to survive the d20 wave, the CCG collapse and the general tough economic times for game companies of the last ten years, and I like Munchkin as a game, but I wish that they had been able to keep more life in their other game lines while they kept feeding the beast. I'm glad the best-known Texas game company is still rolling but their games today don't interest me as much as they once did. They were a pretty innovative bunch too, running their own BBS and later their own local internet service for years. Warehouse 23 was one of the first online retailers and PDF providers too. They're still dabbling in online games and mobile apps. I wonder what their next cool thing will be - something besides Munchkin Discworld, I hope.

There is hope - they had that big Ogre Kickstarter last year ... that has not yet been delivered. They do seem to be making progress but it is clearly consuming the majority of their non-Munchkin resources and is taking far longer to deliver than they had planned but I'm sure it will happen. There has also been talk about a Car Wars Kickstarter too but that is on hold until Ogre is completely finished and they've said we won't see Car Wars before 2015.

So what took their place?

I think Mongoose was the English SJG for a while, with a wide range of RPG's and miniatures games though there was a lot of churn from 2000 to about 2010 or so.

I thought Kenzer was going there too with KODT and Kalamar and Hackmaster and some boardgames but they quieted down too in the last few years.

For me I think Pinnacle took over as the "smaller American game company doing interesting stuff." Between Deadlands, Hell on Earth, and Lost Colony they had a solid line and they had their Brave New World supers game for a while too. They then shifted over into Savage Worlds which is looking like GURPS in some ways when it comes to the product line - a nice mix of historical, fantasy, and generic support books that don't require a separate version of the core rules every time you start a new campaign. They don't really have boardgames but they do have miniatures and have had card games and seem to have some interest in expanding into other types of games as well. I like almost everything they do, and I can be pretty picky (and cheap)so that's saying something.

So to wrap up - I hope SJG continues on strong for as long as they desire. It's a little like an old girlfriend where things ended without big drama - people grow apart sometimes and while the interest isn't what  it once was I have no ill feelings toward them and generally wish them well. Maybe someday (like when they get back around to Car Wars) our interests will align again and we will see where things go. Some of us do remember them before they were the Munchkin company and hope to see them reclaim some of that status again.

Fantasy Trek Campaigning

Starting scenario: Start with a large island/small continent isolated from the rest of the world, possibly by some horrendous godswar or magical catastrophe or the fall of the big connecting empire. Now, years later, the rulers of this island want to know what else is out there and so  commission a ship and begin recruiting a crew. The long term goal is to journey to the capital of the previous world-spanning empire and find out what has happened and what is going on. Armed with some old maps and rumors from fishermen and local travelers (and perhaps aided by some scrying magic) the group sets out to what should be a relatively nearby land that was friendly in the past and might have maps of the rest of the world.

The first obstacle is to come up with a reason that your starting location a) doesn't know what's going on in the rest of the world and b) wants to find out. Maybe it's not a government, maybe it's the Mages Guild or a Merchant Guild of some kind, or an individual mage or sage or merchant. If you need a real world model think of Brtiain after the departure/fall of Rome. It never was the center of the empire and after a few decades detailed knowledge of the rest of the world would be fairly scarce. It might even be a plundering expedition - some Viking lord invades Britain sacks a church and finds some information about Rome and decides to outfit an expedition to go sack it! This would be hundreds of years after it has fallen - but he doesn't know that! 

There is also a need to determine what character options are available. I would probably let the player choices drive some of this. If I end up with a party of gnomes, drow, and halflings then those three races are players in the homeland. If you're talking about a place at the far end of the world then the exotic stuff makes sense anyway.

The players should have some limited information about the world  - old maps work for me - as your party needs an idea of which way to go and what their options are. You can still change things up, but it's good to give them an outline of what might be out there. 

This is also a great campaign to break out the random encounter tables and the weather charts if you don't typically use those. Even the planes have some kind of weather - introduce your players to it.

I do think that some kind of "ship" is needed for this kind of campaign. Without a ship you have a a series of footslogging quests or an army on the march. With some kind of mobile base, the party doesn't have to carry a bunch of supplies on their back and has a place to run to when they're in trouble. It's one of the things that makes this kind of game different and I would think carefully before doing away with it. 

Not strictly fantasy but you get the idea if you've seen the show

For a fantasy campaign I also like the idea of giving them a goal beyond pure exploration. Giving them a quest - to find the old imperial capital or to track down some old hero or maybe even the previous expedition sent out a few years ago that never returned - gives some focus to the campaign and sets up a "story" if you want to make it one. There's a natural arc to it at least - traveling to the goal finding it/exploring it, and then traveling home. The story of the Argonauts tends to focus on the "finding it" while the Odyssey is all about the "going home" part, but there's no reason your campaign can't cover both.

Once it starts you have an open ended campaign that is largely player-driven. If things get too quiet there's always a chance that an evil humanoid race is taking an interest in exploring the area as well - maybe seafaring hobgoblins have developed their own civilization out there and start showing up in the explorations and random encounter tables. 

Alternate Approach #1 (from an post of my own a few years ago):

After reading through the Manual of the Planes, a short scan of The Plane Below, and reading through some of the published paragon and epic adventures a certain theme began to coalesce in my head. Call it..."Plane Trek". I would start the campaign at 11th level - PC's can be from any campaign world, any race, any class, etc. They are heroes on their home world, at least in their village/city/kingdom. They are then recruited into an organization based out of Sigil (most likely) that explores the planes and deals with threats that involve more than just one world - the Big Threats. The organization sends them out on planar ships to explore, map, and deal with these kinds of threats. I'm not sure how formal to make the organization - more rigid command structure and ranks or more loose almost like a pirate crew. If I could keep it somewhat episodic - this week the ship has detected an astral dragon heading for a githyanki fortress and is moving in to investigate - then it would make it very easy to drop in onetime players in a sort of sandbox, sort of mission-based delve format. At paragon they would be the lesser officers on the ship but once they hit epic they would be the "bridge crew" and in charge of their own travels in a big way.

Alternate Approach #2 

Flying Boats - this approach removes the need for big areas of water and makes enough sense in higher magic worlds that your player shouldn't mind. It also explains why the players are out there on their own - "hey we can only afford to make a few of these things" - and why it's an especially good idea to keep the ship intact - you can build another watercraft easily enough but you're probably not going to build another flying ship from scraps.

The Star Trek Model of Campaign Design

1) The World is Not Known: In contrast to the Rangers or Star Wars, exploration is the focus and that means the setting is a major player in the campaign. Compared to the Rangers campaign where the setting is really just wallpaper behind the big action, in this style of game everything from geography to races and civilizations to even the weather can play a big role in the campaign and any of those could be the focus of a session. Compared to Star Wars the physical layout of the setting and the cultures are largely unknown, and while both can feature interaction and combat, this concept adds in the whole getting-to-know-them stage. In short: In Power Rangers you don't need a map, In Star Wars you just look up the map, in Trek the campaign is about the people who make the map!

2) Travel will be common and interesting. The PR game characters might never leave their hometown. In Star Wars travel is common and mundane but not typically a focus other than as a rest period between adventures. For this style of game travel is how the campaign advances. It may well involve a craft of some kind.  This could easily be ship based, even a flying ship or an airship if you're going in that direction fantasy-wise. A literal interpretation of the source material could lead to teleportation circles and flying carpets as supplementary travel options.

3) Character Diversity: This one is not as essential as the first two but in keeping with the source of the inspiration the concept can easily handle a wide range of character types, classes and races. It also makes some sense to start above 1st level if you're so inclined. Think those flying races are overpowered for a traditional campaign? Not so here. Always wanted to play a locathah or merman or sea-elf? This might be the place to do it. Reluctant to include the Drow character in your usual game? This is where you can "Worf" in your Drizzt wanna-bes. Steal justifications and explanations from the source without remorse.

4) Steady State: Unlike PR there is not necessarily a strong character progression here, making it more suitable for non-level-based games. That said it works fine with a level progression, and an expedition into distant planes of weirdness can be a good explanation for why your former frontier farmboy becomes a demigod. Unlike Star Wars there is not typically a huge amount of social change going on, and adding that in can distract from the exploration theme and change the campaign, moving it towards a Star Wars style game. In general the home social situation stays the same, and the characters may or may not progress a great deal, but the discoveries made by the players can certainly stir things up back home.

5) Open Ended: Also unlike PR and SW there is no requirement that characters defeat a world-threatening evil or change the state of the world. Individual characters may come and go but the exploration can continue for years. It might be different quests, different missions, or one really long Odyssey, but there is no inherent limit on it.

I did something like this with a Rifts campaign years ago described in this post. Here's how it breaks down as far as the elements in this post:

1. In this version the only information available were a few scattered reports from other travelers and some pre-apocalyptic maps.
2. Travel took place via a giant robot with room on board for everyone. They stomped across the post-apocalyptic US and had to deal with various challenges
3. It was Rifts, so character diversity is a given. Wizard? Check. Ninja? Check. Cyborg? check? Dragon hatchling? Check? Power armor guy? check. Not a problem.
4. They started at first and made it up to about 6th by the end. They were not in regular contact with the home base so it didn't really figure in the campaign. The world itself was not in the middle of a war or an invasion, just the usual Rifts stuff
5. Some characters died, some dropped out, others dropped in, and at least one underwent a racial transformation. There's plenty of room for change, even with a seemingly limited crew.

So running this in Trek or Traveller is easy enough, and I've given a Rifts example above, how about D&D? It's not difficult as it's a fairly traditional sandbox/hexcrawl game at heart. I think I will save that for a separate post - check back tomorrow.

Next - Caves of Chaos - Session 4

I really need to think up a name for this campaign. We originally started playing Keep on the Borderlands a few years ago as part of their introduction to D&D Basic. They covered about a third of B2 and about half of B1 (I stuck it in the "Cave of the Unknown" on the B2 area map like many other people) before we decided to give 4th Edition a try, but we always intended to come back to it. I was having fun coming up with a new campaign world for it all and it does have a different feel than later editions. We used the Caves for our initial foray into next and it went poorly. We came back to them for this latest Next package and it has been much better this time around.

The party is now second level:

• Wood Elf Ranger (Blaster) - mainly a two-weapon fighter
• Human Cleric (Blaster) - sun cleric, mainly a ranged combatant.
• Wood Elf Monk (Who) - two-fisted fighter aspiring to try the new airbender subclass
• Human Rogue (Red) - sneak & shoot
• Human Mage (Red) - enchanter sub-type but pretty free with the blasting so far

The Apprentices have explored (and massacred) the kobolds and the goblins so far and tonight they went after the ogre. It's fun watching them use what they learned previously, even though it's meta-gaming in a huge way and makes no sense that they would have it. They were a little fuzzy on the exact order of the caves, but as soon as they saw the "bear' they knew for sure the ogre lair was at hand. The fear of the one-shot character kill set in and suddenly there was a lot more sneaking around.

I had seriously considered a) swapping the ogre out for some other creature or b) having the ogre slip through the secret door and come after them by sneaking out and around and trapping them in his own lair. I decided against both because I don't really want to punish them for learning from experience. As it turned out it might have been better if I had. They took Mr. Ogre down in one round. The wizard magic-missiled him, the ranger double-sworded him, the cleric inflicted wounds on him, the rogue shot him, the ogre swung and missed, and then the monk double-punched him and dropped him to end the first (and only) round.

It's not so much that monsters in Next are weaker, though his AC is fairly low. The whole party is at 2nd level now so they are tougher, but their offense is quite a bit stronger compared to Basic PC's. The ranger and monk can make two-weapon attacks with few penalties (not even an option in original Basic), the rogue gets sneak attack damage even at range (unlike the old backstab move), the cleric isn't that much stronger but "inflict" is a ranged attack in this version, and the wizard gets 3 magic missiles from his spell for 2-5 each and it still autohits - certainly a stronger contender than it used to be. When the cantrips do 1-6 each the actual first level spells have to do more and this one does. I'm sure some will complain about power creep but they are all pretty comparable defensively to old school characters, they just have a few more options on offense - I don't think it's game breaking.

There was much celebrating after this and the requisite looting. They figured out the gold-colored copper coins pretty quickly and found the rest of the treasure. There was the traditional extended conversation over how to distribute potions at low levels but nothing serious. Then they decided to move on after a short rest.

Next up was the orc lair back across the canyon. As soon as they saw the heads they remembered their previous experience in this set of caves and I am pretty sure Apprentice Red was ready to play the same gambit if he had the chance. They moved in (and of course were spotted by the "head sentry") and went left towards the banquet room. The ranger just had to check out the Big Chair in the banquet hall but had made it back to the party when the first wave of orcs attacked.

Four orcs from the guardroom tried to sneak up on the group but didn't pull it off and charged, engaging the cleric and the monk. A few rounds later three more from one of the other guard rooms came down the northern corridor and circled in behind them. A pretty good fight broke out with casualties on both sides.

Orcs are notably tougher in Next: they average 11 hp so are less likely to drop in one hit, and they swing greataxes for 1d12+2. It's not ogre damage level but it's scarier when there are 4-7 of them fighting the party! The pair that went around the back of the party (one of the late arrivals went to the front to aid the fight there) tore into the rogue and dropped him in round 4, but the fight was over by round 5 and our party retreated outside the caves to attend to the rogue and recover.

We're aiming to work in another session this week - more to come if we do.