The New Old Campaign - Session 3

We begin with the party camped in Room I of the Holmes basic started dungeon

Apprentice Red: Horace the Dwarf, Drazier the Elf, Skullduggery II the Magic User
Apprentice Blaster: Apollo the Elf, Logan the Fighter, and Steven the Thief

The group forms up and moves into Room L, where they find more of the underground river and a lot of glowing mosslike fungus. They tried all kinds of things with the fungus like smearing it on their swords or putting a patch of it on their shoulder, all kinds of crazy stuff - I love having new players - but it didn't really accomplish anything.

Then they step into the river and the giant crab lurking in the water attacks. Combat ensues, and in round 2 the crab scores a crit on Drazier the Elf (I go with max damage on a natural 20 for crits) killing the demihuman instantly. The rest of the party gangs up on the beast and kills it in round 3.

Pausing after the battle the groups strips the dead elf of valuables then tosses his body in the river and watches it go away (?! there's a city right over their heads ?! - new players!) then they skin the crab trying to figure out what they could do with the shell.

After this brief rest they move into Room K, a large room with more river and a pile of junk on one side. Apollo the Elf investigates and finds a skull with a dagger embedded in it, which he removes (Dagger +1, gold hilts, blue gem in pommel (100gp value) shaped more like a Bowie knife more than a regular dagger being a large single-edged weapon - probably Sea Elf work). Clearly fate is favoring him over his fellow elf in the party. The rest of the party starts looking for magical daggers too but finds nothing else of value.

Moving on, the party enters Room M and finds an underground lake, a beach, and 6 pirates digging a hole. They assume a hostile stance once they notice the party, which happens when the dwarf has another "Do you mean us harm?" moment as he calls out to them. The party says they just want to pass through the room As they can see what looks like an exit on the far side of the beach. The pirates are having none of this and refuse to let them through, telling them to "go around" and "this is our beach". Showing the beginnings of true old-school player attitudes, the group decides that no NPC is going to talk to them that way and charge! A 5 round combat follows (one of the longer ones we have had) and daggers are thrown, punches are thrown, magical weapons are used in anger , and no PC's die. New treasure is discovered, along with a hostage and some new house rules! Lemunda the Lovely, daughter of a noble in the city above, is freed and taken into the custody of Horace the Dwarf who intends to seek a reward. There is some argument over how to divide the treasure but it is quickly settled. After this the party decides to head back up to the surface to count their loot and level up.

DM Notes:

• I love having new players in the game. The fascination with the glowing moss was one example where an otherwise mundane detail caught their attention for 5 or 10 minutes trying to find cool things to do with it - no game mechanics, no skills or attributes, just some kids imagining what they would do if they found this cool stuff. The giant crab was the same way - we have this giant crab the size of the kitchen table - what can we do with it? let's try and do something cool - can we make armor out of its shell? Can we eat it? Should we throw it back in the river? Red was determined that his dwarf was going to make some armor out of it. I finally told him that armor was tough since he already had plate mail anyway, but he could have a shield made out of it in the city and that made him happy.
• Red was a little upset about his elf getting crunched but he's getting that 1st level characters are very fragile and that's why he's playing with 3 of them, so we're good.
• I added the magic dagger because with 6 characters we only have the 1 magic weapon so far and I wanted to get one more into the party. With 6 characters there is a lot of room for items and if Lady Blacksteel jumps back in I'm not sure which characters will be in play.
• Lots of house rule situations came up in that pirate fight. I decided a punch does 1d3 (that way it's not nothing but it's still less than any weapon) because one character was using a bow and ended up with a pirate in his face and didn't want to drop the bow or take the time to pull a weapon. He asked about punching and that's where we went with it. There were a lot of discussions of shooting into melee, shooting while meleed, and moving away from a melee attacker and we probably got some of it wrong but it all worked out.

The party may be done with the starter dungeon as there was some talk of moving on. If they do they will be heading for the Keep on the Borderlands, east of Dragonport, near the Great Barrier Peaks. If not, they will probably find their way to the Crypt in the starter dungeon which should be a lot of fun.

Necessary Evil - Session 5 - Red Hammer!

As our villains relax after their underground adventure, they get a call from Dr. Destruction informing them that the Red Hammer has returned and is killing V'Sori and their sympathizers very publicly, along with some other Omega cells as he apparently still considers the supervillains his enemies too. Additionally...

"I have learned that the Hammer's former partner, Scarlet Sickle, has been seen talking to him between his mad forays into the city. Sickle may be the only person who can reason with the addled avenger so I advise you to find her first. She lives somewhere downtown and Red Hammer may be with her. If you can convince her that influencing the Hammer to cooperate with us is the best way to help him, you may may be able to bring the mad mutant in without a fight. If not, use her as bait to lure him out then capture him and bring him to me. Failing that, kill him."

So the team heads out to try and find Sickle. Since the duo was once a part of a famous Russian super team, they start by locating the best Russian restaurant in the city and watching/making some inquiries. They know what she looked like in costume, but they do not know her secret identity - then again, how hard can it be to locate a 6' blonde athletic woman with a Russian accent?

Our team's investigation approach is not subtle - Nissa mind controls the bartender and holds up the picture above, asking if he has ever seen a woman like this but not in these clothes. He replies that yes he has, because he has internet. Frustrated by the language barrier with the young immigrant, Nissa orders some drinks for the team then feeds on him behind the bar.

NightBlade does better with an amazing display of skill (and some 30-range rolls from a d4 streetwise skill!) and the hostess points out Countess Kuznetzov who comes in at this time every week -and there she is now! The countess admits nothing at first and resists a glamour attempt from Nissa (finished with her snack in the bar) but finally admits who she is when MegaStrike appeals to their common Russian heritage and the shame of not taking a more active role in Hammer's situation and the invasion as a whole.

Sickle sighs and admits that she was severely injured in her last battle with Dr. Destruction years ago and had to learn to walk again - her heroing days are behind her, though she does still have her gear. She married a wealthy aristocrat and retired. She hates Dr. D more than anything else fro what he did to her and Hammer. She has heard rumors that he has something to do with the resistance and secretly hopes Dr. D will intervene personally so that she can team up with Hammer one more time and destroy him.

The team convinces her to lead them to Hammer's location to try and get him some help before the V'Sori take him down. They are careful not to mention anything about Destruction. She leads them to an Overpass where a group of homeless men apparently live, one of whom is Red Hammer. He is clearly disturbed ranting about aliens, villains, and the Doctor. The party struggles with their limited social skills to convince him to come along and has no luck until Nissa once again manages to glamour him into coming along quietly (there were some very strong rolls tonight).

Along the way the villains ask Scarlet what exactly happened in that last battle with Dr. D. She describes Hammer's attack on Destruction and that the mastermind hit him with a strange beam that she had never seen before and he disappeared with a flash. She assumed he had been disintegrated and she went berserk. She managed to crack D's armor and then he went into a rage that led to her being beaten into unconsciousness, with massive injuries and many broken bones. He took down several other members of the Russian team that day and they were never the same afterwards, disbanding a short time later. In his rage he went strictly physical, dropping his various beams weapons and using the raw power of his armor to physically beat down their entire team.

Having contacted Destruction on the way to the warehouse contact point, the Dr. is waiting when the team, the Red Hammer, and Scarlet Sickle arrive. As soon as he steps out of the door, the Russians start to go into a frothing rage, breaking Nissa's control, but before they can do anything Doc hits them with a beam that freezes them in place, then walks up and shoots them in the head with a blast from his megablaster, killing them both. He tells the team "I was listening to your conversation on the way in - they were beyond help, and we don't have the luxury of imprisoning them or trying to reason with them. You did an excellent job here, it just didn't work out."

He went on: "They would have been a powerful ally for our movement. Despite the outcome here I am impressed with your work. I would still like to try and bring in another powerful ally and I would like your cell to take the lead on it. This time we will recruit an old villain, so he should be a little more open to contact from us. You'll be heading to Japan to bring back The Monolith."

DM notes:

• My team has very limited social skills - no persuasion, limited intimidation and streetwise. Nissa's mind control makes up for a lot, but I would be happier if we had a few more option besides it and Night Blade's Jack of All Trades edge - we're relying on a lot of default rolls to get through the non-combat encounters. I will say that this lack does lead to some very funny situations and we are having a lot of fun with it.
• City of Heroes is a very handy tool to have when running a supers game as it makes creating character images (and building images too if needed) easy and fun, both for the players and the DM. So much of the Supers genre is visual, having a picture of Hero X in his costume adds a lot to the game. The Champions MMO would work too. If you are interested, both games have free demo versions that have full access to the character creator so you can work through a characters look then drop them into the city and take a few snapshots of your new hero or villain in action, all without spending any money on it. The COH demo can be found here. The Champions Online demo here.

After a week off...

...it's time to get back in the swing of things. We've actually made it through sessions of NE, Basic D&D, and D&D4 so I have a few things to discuss. Part of the downtime was to build this, so the net-cruising should be even niftier from now on. Not that y'all will know the difference, but it helps me out a bit.

RPG's and Music - Part 3

So once you have some music what do you do with it? How do you include it in the session?

1)Most basic is just burn it to a CD or put it on an ipod and let it run in the background. This has worked for years, requires minimal intervention during the game, and works just fine.

2) A slightly more complicated approach is to set up different groups of tracks or playlists of tracks that share a theme - In Town, In a Tavern, Battle Music, Forest Music, Dungeon Music, etc. When your players hit a new location, switch to that playlist. This is pretty easy to do and prevents the aural disconnect that happens when Anvil of Crom kicks in while buying potions at the healer temple. This is a good compromise between prep work and payoff. It's easy to update too - if the party heads to sea, add a "Nautical Music" folder, probably flavored with a lot of Pirates of the Caribbean. Over time you will build up a nice library of themed music and the players will pick up on it when they hear familiar tracks.

3) Most complicated is the full suite of music for your campaign by location, character, activity, etc. This is a lot of work and I have only done it once. It was worth it but if you are pressed for time don't bother with it - go with #1 or 2 above. In mine, each character had a theme, each step in the adventure path had a theme, each town had a theme, the taverns they frequented had different themes, eventually their ship had it's own music, each dungeon had separate music - it's a lot of work but at the time I loved the way it turned out. The players liked it, but probably not as much as I did. I switched playlists depending on where they were and had several different sets of battle music - one for shipboard combat, one for underground combat, one for fighting in the city streets- it was overkill, really, and I probably won't go that nuts again. Plus, with 8 players for most sessions, I already had a lot to do and didn't need the extra overhead.

Let's get to specifics now since I am running 3 campaigns at the moment:

• Basic D&D - my players in this one are new and haven't really heard any of this stuff before so I'm going to keep it simple. I haven't been running any music for them yet but as we get back on a more regular schedule I will probably bring in some combat music using the classics - Conan, Starship Troopers, Gladiator - maybe some LOTR but I'm leaning away from that right now. I will see how they like the battle music and go from there. Pounding Poledouris is more their speed I suspect.
• Necessary Evil - I haven't been using music in this one, but I want to. Some of the NFL Music may be recycled here. The Robocop soundtrack is good and underused in my games so I may use it as a major theme. I'd like to have a track for each character and some general background music and just let it roll while we play - no switching between folders, etc. Big heroic themes are good so this will mostly be movie music.
• D&D4 - this one I will be spending a little time on. Since Phlan is divided into districts, I am thinking about having background music for each district so I don't really have to worry about switching during most of the game. Civilized Phlan will basically be "Town" music while the slums will have low-key slinky music like some of Aliens and Escape from New York. The Graveyard will have spooky stuff. Sokol Keep will have sad "after the battle" type music while the Temple of Bane will have big blaring martial themes. I will probably also do a Main Theme for the campaign and a track or two for each character, just because I like that kind of thing. I would play that at the beginning of each session while were getting ready and then go to whatever section of the adventure we are in after that - give it an "opening credits" feel for each session.

A note here: I don't think any of this is strictly necessary. I mainly do it because I like it and it makes a campaign feel more polished or complete to me. As long as the players don't hate it and I like it then it's a net plus to the game as it helps me get in the right frame of mind to run. If you're the DM and aren't that interested in the musical aspect then don't sweat it. You might consider farming it out to a player who is though, if you have one. Tell them you'd like some music for the game but you don't have time or whatever and let them run with it. My players cringe when I ask for backstory but for NE I asked for character portraits. Since we all play City of Heroes and it has an awesome character creator, they had fun designing a character for a totally different game for a change and the results were very nice - I will post them here at some point. The point was that now everyone has a character illustration regardless of artistic talent and is that much more invested in both character and campaign. If your group has someone with musical inclinations let them do some of the work here and you will have similar results- more atmosphere in the game and more investment by at least one player.

Finally a technical note. We used to play in my living room so I could use a burned CD or DVD with all of the tracks on it playing through the big surround system and operate it with a remote. This worked well but now with a much smaller group and in a different house we tend to play in the kitchen at a table. The solution to this is the ipod/iphone in a small speaker dock right by the table. It's quite audible but doesn't overwhelm the table conversations. It's easily controlled, has useful audio apps for impromptu musical needs, holds more than CD's and even DVD's typically do, and can be organized in a very detailed way with playlists that are easily modified from session to session. I will be putting it to the test with my campaigns and will note how it works out down the road.

That's the end of the spic RPG Music discussion. Hopefully it will be useful to someone else out there. I didn't realize beforehand that I had quite that much to say but I have used it a lot over the years and I think it does add a lot to this hobby of ours.

RPG's and Music - Part 2

One problem in using music in RPG's is finding music that works. Here are a few of my thoughts:

My basic rule is No Singing! I want orchestral movie them type music for most of my RP sessions so that's what I look for. I do make some exceptions occasionally, mainly when it's a language no one at the table understands well enough to translate on the fly, but most of what I want is just music - no singing.

Movie soundtracks are source #1 for me. The big advantage is that they are usually well done and widely available. The downside is that they have to be appropriate - Star Wars games need Star Wars music, but in a Traveller Free Trader campaign they are wildly out of place. If I was running 50 Fathoms for Savage Worlds or a 7th Sea game then the Pirates of the Caribbean would be my core material - 3 movies worth of nautical pirate music is a no-brainer. However, this can be a double-edged sword. If one of your players listens to this every day on his way in to work, he may be bored and jaded with it - it's appropriate but worn-out. Some good Rp-useable movie soundtracks that hopefully aren't worn out for your group:

• Fantasy - Gladiator, Last of the Mohicans, Legends of the Fall, Braveheart, the Recent BBC Robin Hood TV series, and Aliens.
• Science Fiction - Babylon 5 has several soundtracks out there and they should be less recognizable for many groups then Trek or Star Wars. For more gritty or cyberpunk type games Escape from New York is one I used in a Shadowrun campaign and liked.
• Western - look for Ennio Morricone soundtracks and you are bound to find something you will like. Themes from various western TV shows can be handy too.
• Special - The Godzilla soundtracks have some good marches and martial themed tracks and usually a few quieter ones too. If your player's aren't fans they probably won't recognize them either.
• Supers - this is a tricky one because most of the music from superhero movies is pretty closely associated with that particular character or group. They can be co-opted if you're doing say an homage - our old Professor Y and the Y-Men campaign could have used the X-Men music pretty easily - but it's tricky. You may be better off with another source. For one of my characters that originated in City of Heroes, Adamantium Man, I use the Fox NFL theme as his personal theme music - if you've ever listened to their pregame show you know the tune. It sounds bold and dramatic and while it's familiar to some it doesn't make you think of some other super hero.

Classical music pieces can work well - many gamers past a certain age will know the end music from Excalibur, for example. Ride of the Valkyries is another well-known example. I am not a great guide here as I haven't used a ton of them but selected pieces can fit in quite well with other music if you stick to the orchestral / no vocals idea.

New Age/Techno/Space Rock/Electronica - Again I am not a great guide here but every decade seems to have it's instrumental concept music fad and these may fit well with your campaign concept, and if you don't want the orchestral movie feel this is a good place to start. Yes/Pink Floyd/Tangerine Dream all have instrumental tracks or ones with minimal vocals that might work in some campaigns. Cyberpunk games need some club music at some point and some kind of electronic or techno can give them a very different feel than a sweeping instrumental score - online searches are your best friend here as that's where you will find most electronic music, even moreso than other music. The flavor here depends on whether you want more piano, strings, or synth in your background music.

Finally, my best source other than movie scores is...computer and video game soundtracks. To some it may be old hat but if you haven't used them before they are a gold mine of good stuff waiting to be used. Some suggestions:

• MMORPG's often have soundtracks available for free download somewhere on their sites - you may have to look but they are there. Two I know of for sure - City of Heroes, Dungeons and Dragons Online. Others may not have company downloads but often have files that can be located or extracted from the game files if you have installed them at some point like Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online. These are very handy and usually have a lot of location-specific tracks - tavern music, dungeon music, battle music, etc.
• CRPG's usually have decent soundtracks and some special editions of them come with a music CD containing some of the game's best music. I personally have CD's from Ultima, Icewind Dale, and Titan Quest among others, and all have seen use in my games. Baldur's Gate has a few music tracks, as do Morrowind and Oblivion.
• Strategy Games - One of the best soundtracks of all time is the music from Total Annihilation. if you don't have it go find a cheap copy online and copy those tracks- it's very good orchestral stuff that sounds good in any genre. Heroes of Might and Magic 2 also had some nice orchestral tracks if you can find a copy. The Dawn of War games have some good tracks that could fit multiple genres.
• Shooters - Halo music could fit some campaigns. Various updates of the Doom soundtrack might have a place too. Most of them tend to be louder and faster and more guitar/rock/industrial than I want in a fantasy game but for a cyberpunk or Mechwarrior game they could be just fine.
• Wild Cards - the NFL soundtrack I mentioned in the last post has a ton of useful stuff and doesn't fit into one of these categories. Music from the Olympics or other sporting events could be very useful if you can find it. Military performances may have some good marching or memorial music that can be used in parts of your game.
• Internet Radio - Having a iphone or ipod or a computer with Pandora Radio on it can be useful - I needed background music for the ball in the Freeport Trilogy and used Pandora to pull up some Baroque chamber music that sounded appropriate and the players thought it was great. I'm not going to buy a bunch of tracks for that kind of thing but having a source of on-the-fly music for special situations is very handy. If you need period music for a game like a 1920's Call of Cthulu session then this may be a good way to fill it in.

There are most of my sources - tomorrow some thoughts on execution.

RPG's and Music - Part 1

I've been using music in the background of my games since the mid-90's. It really started with our 2nd edition D&D games. My usual DM got hooked on the Conan soundtrack (the gateway drug of RPG music) and it got played a lot. He later worked in Last of the Mohicans and Legends of the Fall and those are both great atmospheric sets. I innovated within our group by adding Conan the Destroyer and The Planets to the rotation.

After the barrier was broken, our Fasa Trek games soon were played to the sounds of the Trek II & III scores and later the First Contact score as well. Our d20 Star Wars games had a massive soundtrack from the various movies and special CD releases. Once the LOTR movies came out those soundtracks were added to the various fantasy campaigns too. Battletech/Mechwarrior games were played to the strains of Starship Troopers and Terminator.

Early on this wasn't really an organized thing - when we started the game we started the CD player and let it roll. We would occasionally switch to "battle music" when we got into combat but for the most part the music was on in the background continuously during the session with no real planning or effort made to tie it to the activity in the game. It works, it's just not as atmospheric as it could be, and when all of your games are using the same music regardless of which campaign you're in, it loses a little flavor. Later I had the opportunity to use multiple CD's so I would load up one for "Town", one for "Traveling", and one for "Dungeon" and switch between them. This helped but it was a little clunky and it was the same "all-purpose" music we had been using. Better, but still ripe for improvement.

I experimented with situational music a bit during my 2006-2007 campaign in the Scarred Lands. For different adventures I picked different music. Best was Bloody Jack's Gold where I used some Pirates of the Caribbean for the sea voyage and the island and then some videogame music for the dungeon.

My first serious effort at changing this really only came in 2008 when my Savage Tides of Kalamar campaign kicked off. I got a serious itch to use new music so I needed a completely new source. I found one in "Autumn Thunder: 40 years of NFL Films Music". It's really good. If you're a football fan you will recognize much of it of course but if you have players that are not it's a rich untapped vein of greatness. There's a lot of martial trumpeting, a lot of traveling type music, a few sweeping themes - all of which can be used easily in an RPG session. I went a little crazy and picked out a "Campaign Theme", a "Freeport" theme (the campaign was the Freeport Trilogy mixed with the Savage Tide Adventure Path) a theme for each adventure in the Savage Tide path, a theme for the party, and a theme for each character ( I had 8 players). It ended up around 30 tracks altogether and the players liked it a lot. That suite served as our musical background for pretty much the whole campaign. Now when half the party died in the epic conclusion of the Freeport trilogy it did screw up my plans somewhat and we used it less after that, but I should have added in some new tracks and continued with 2.0 - I didn't but it would have been a better option.

The real challenges to using music in a game I see are these:

• Finding fresh music your players haven't heard thousands of times already - if your player's haven;t heard the Conan Soundtrack before then crank it up - if they've been using it for 20 years then it may be a little stale.
• Choosing the right music - Duel of the Fates is great if you're playing Star Wars, but it's almost impossible to use it for anything else as it's an immediate mental switch to thinking about Star Wars when you hear it.
• Figuring out a way to make it appropriate to the moment - it's not 100% necessary but I think it helps. Like I said a simple town-travel-dungeon breakdown may be enough for a straightforward D&D campaign.
• Executing - setting up different suites of music is great but you have to switch them when called for. All of the wonderful speakers for ipods out there can make this much easier than the old days. Remote controls can help here too.

For Necessary Evil I haven't been using music but I may start. For Return to the Ruins of Adventure, I will from the start. More on that tomorrow.

Games I have not played

As long as I've been playing RPG's (and boardgames and mini's too for that matter) sometimes it seems like I've touched everything at one point or another but there are a few holes in my gaming resume:

• I've never played or run Call of Cthulu. I've read a ton of Lovecraft, I owned 5th edition CoC for several years, and I think it would be fun to play in a limited campaign (like my star wars runs) but I never have. Even though it's considered one of the classics, my players never wanted to play it and no one around here ever wanted to run it.
• I've never owned, played, or run any of White Wolf's World of Darkness games - no Vampire, no Werewolf, no Mage/Mummy/Hunter etc. I know they were popular but not with the guys I ran with.
• At one time or another I owned Midnight, Oriental Adventures, Dragonlance, Dawnforge, and Eberron for 3rd edition but I never played or ran any of them. I picked them up at various discounts and assumed at some point we would try them out (we played a lot of d20) but we never did.
• I own all of the published game books for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition Shadowrun but not a single 4th edition book. They just changed it too much and my players stopped caring. I could run for years with the material I have, so the incentive to rush out and buy a new version I like less is just not there.
• I own almost everything for Deadlands, all of Deadlands d20, GURPS Deadlands, and 2 copies of Deadlands Reloaded for Savage Worlds but I've never run a game of it. We have come close several times but it never has worked out.
• I have a full set of the Decipher Star Trek rulebooks and have never played or run it. I loved Fasa Trek and have a ton of stuff for it but I played it a lot too. When Last Unicorn's version came out I thought it was terrible. Then Decipher came out with a new version and it's pretty good. The only problem is my players seem totally uninterested in Trek, old or new, klingons or feds, it doesn't matter.
• Babylon 5 - It's the only TV show I own a full set of on DVD, still in my opinion the flagship for knowing what you are doing with your story and your characters when you set out enabling you to work in long-term plots and character arcs (I'm looking at you X-Files and Lost) and come to a solid climax. I picked up every damn book for the d20 version (both 1st and 2nd edition), the deckplans, 3 different miniatures rules for it plus some miniatures and my players just have had no interest in it at all. I have campaign ideas written out, adventure notes, long term plots I could work in - none of it matters, I've never run a single session of it. I finally dumped the whole set not too long ago because I was tired of the space it was taking - and probably a little frustration was in there too. I think if I ever did get to run it I would just go Savage Worlds or Traveller (Mongoose put out a pair of books for this) and maybe use the miniature rules for space combat (I kept those) and not sweat it, rather than keeping 3 feet of bookshelf tied up in d20 minutia.

Anyway, there are the major gaps in my RPG background. Some of the are hard to believe considering I've played multiple sessions of Timeship and have run 2 Rifts campaigns, but there you go.

Star Wars - Campaigns I Have Known

I have played in 1 d6 session mentioned in yesterday's post. It ended badly.

I have played in 2 short d20 campaigns. In one I played Jeet Kundo, a Rodian Scout. It was fun but it only lasted about 3 sessions. In the other I played Shub Nurath, a Duros Scoundrel with maxed out piloting skills and a light freighter just waiting to be modified. that lasted 3 or 4 sessions too. What can I say, my friend the usual DM is a bit fickle and his campaigns tend to shift fairly often.

Now I have run 3 campaigns myself:

Campaign 1 was a conversion of the old Star Frontiers Volturnis Trilogy. I set it in the time between Episode 1 and Episode 2 had the star frontiers systems as a distant cluster in the uncharted regions that was resource-rich and would be a big asset to the republic if war broke out. The players were part of a small diplomatic expedition that included senators and jedi. Their ship was attacked by pirates near Volturnis and that's where the campaign began - with the characters trying to get off the crippled ship before the pirates captured them or it crashed into the planet. The whole thing followed the plotline of the modules with the Sathar being an old ally of the Sith who had been hiding and biding their time way out here. With their modified creature army they fit some of the old Sith material very well and the epic battle at the end of the third module it would make for a very Star-Warsian climax and open up future encounters with them.

This campaign unfortunately only got about halfway through the first module before schedule issues killed it, but I still have my notes and doing it in d6 or Saga would be pretty easy.

Campaign 2 was "Desperate Measures", my special forces campaign set during the Rebellion right at the beginning of ESB - the rebels have been chased off of Hoth and are sending out some strike teams to try and knock the Empire off balance or at least distract them while rebel leaders try to re-establish control and a base somewhere. The PC's are one of these teams.

Now this was designed from the start to be a "limited campaign" - I had a concept, I wrote up one good adventure, and ran the players through it. When we were done, we were done. We could always come back and do a new adventure with some of the same characters (and we did) but I wasn't promising an open-ended freeform campaign - I wanted a definite start and a definite end - basically a movie's worth of action. This was the first time I really thought about this kind of game and it set a pattern for everything that followed, whether Star Wars, D&D, or Shadowrun. I always set a campaign goal now - it may be as simple as" get to level 20", but it's a goal. Also we were playing this on our weeknight game and the weeknight game was always our more experimental session where the games changed frequently. It was also the only night I got to play so I didn't want to sign on for a year-long adventure path or something on top of my regular saturday night D&D campaign - this was my compromise.

Anyway it was awesome - it went on for 2 or 3 months, probably 8-10 sessions (I didn't log it the way I do the Saturday campaign) of roughly weekly play and the players still talk about that run. They started at 6th level because they aren't supposed to be newbies, they're supposed to be experienced so they could do some cool stuff right from the start. I won't get into the details of the campaign (another post) but I worked in a nice little arc for the Jedi player, some chances to shine for the soldier, some fun for the pilot (stealing an AT-AT was big for him) and a big-bang climax with the unfrozen clone wars era jedi dueling his old padawan who has a nice new red lightsaber atop a giant mining vehicle while the soldier tosses thermal detonators into massed stormtroopers and the pilot tries to get their ship close enough to evac them before the star destroyer in orbit blows him out of the sky - it was great and I had as much fun as the players as everything came together - it's one of the high points of my DMing career.

About a year after Campaign 2 ended, my guys wanted to do another run with those characters. I had been thinking about this and decided to run Tatooine Manhunt, the very first Star Wars RPG adventure which I had owned forever. I added some material to it to make it a "movie" but I thought the basic plot worked really well in the context of a special missions force. They jumped right on board with their now 8th level PC's, including some new faces, and landed right in good old docking bay 94. There was a lot of fun roleplay around Mos Eisley, at least one barfight, and several encounters with Bounty Hunters looking for the lost republic general. I'd say the high point was the encounter with the Krayt Dragon out in the desert with only a pair of landspeeders and hand weapons to use against it. The soldier was happy that he finally got to cut loose with his big repeating blaster but it is a _very_ big beastie. It swallowed the jedi whole, and that almost had the other PC's turning around to run "We can't beat it - let's just leave!" until he finally managed to get his lightsaber turned on (while being crushed in the thing's gizzard) and cut his way out from the inside.

Alas this one was never finished due to schedule issues again - by the time we could get the group back on track I wasn't keen on trying to pick up where we had left off. Too much time had passed and some of the players were different so it wouldn't have made much sense anyway.

I can say that converting the d6 to d20 was very simple - I just used standard NPC's for soldiers, stormtroopers, pirates and bounty hunters out of the main rulebook. I had creature stats too and just used them where necessary. Spaceships, speeders, weapons- it's very simple. I basiclaly had one page of notes adding some encounters and NPC interactions and one more page covering some equipment changes and that was it. I put standard vehicle and NPC stats on different colored index cards and keep them in an index card box so I can pull them during play - it's a snap to run, even totally on the fly and everyone knows star wars so well it just works out.

Heck even the Star Frontiers conversion was easy - jet copters become air speeders, Explorer ATV's become landspeeders, guns are guns, sonic swords become vibroblades, etc. Again it ws a few pages of notes, namess, target numbers for skills, and connections and a page on what = what and then I just translated on the fly.

So there are my main experiences with the galaxy far far away. I'm sure they won't be the last. If I do start running d6 for the apprentices then I will probably start with Tatooine Manhunt - it's a classic and this time I won't have to translate anything.

Star Wars RPG Thoughts

Last weekend due to being in schedule hell one of the apprentices and I discussed letting them play the d6 Star Wars RPG. He read the rulebook some time back and thought it was cool and I think the d6 version is perfect for kids as it's pretty simple - read the numbers, add them up. It's a nice universal mechanic and it reinforces basic math very well. Since the Red apprentice was going to be unavailable I thought Blaster, Lady Blacksteel, and the Aspiring Apprentice could sit down for an hour or two of old-school d6 rebellion-era Star Wars.

Well that didn't happen to due to some last minute schedule issues. I was not happy, but I let it go. We will probably play it this weekend, but it may take a back seat to Basic D&D, we'll just have to see. It kind of depends on who's available. If nothing else it will make an appearance in July when everyone is here for an entire month.

But back to my reasoning- the Aspiring Apprentice is only 7, so I want to limit what we try to play - no 3rd edition D&D, no Hero System, etc. I though about basic D&D but even that is a little much IMO. He is a Star Wars fanatic though, and that counts for something, plus the d6 version is right in his math skills target area so it's a perfect fit. He already knows what a Jawa is and a Stormtrooper and a blaster and a lightsaber and he knows how Star Wars works. Plus the concept of "if you are better at something you roll more dice" is easily grasped.

Now I have only ever played 1 session of this. We just weren't into it back when it was popular. I am part of the Star Wars generation being in 3rd grade when it came out and I picked up the 1st edition rulebook about 1990 and thought it looked cool but no one ever wanted to run it - too many other games and D&D was always first. Eventually my main GM decided to run a game of it. I made a jedi -ish character. In our first session our 4-man party landed our tramp freighter on a primitive planet, walked down the ramp, encountered some natives, who then attacked us for no apparent reason and my jedi took a spear to the chest and died before getting to hit anyone with his lightsaber - I did get to draw it, I just never got to swing it. 2 other PC's died and the only survivor locked himself in the ship, unable to pilot it and unable to fight off the remaining natives by himself. That kind of put the group off of Star Wars for a while.

I did get interested again when WOTC started making the d20 version. The first edition was alright but lacking in some areas. The second edition was much better and I ran 3 short campaigns using it and the player's were all very pleased with how it played. Saga edition looks like the best by far to me (and is what D&D4 should have been but that's another story) though I have yet to run it.

After playing around with the d20 version I started picking up the d6 books on the cheap for extra material like maps and adventure ideas and figured out that even with a good d20 version there was merit in the d6 system too. It looked like it would play faster and there was a ton of material out for it and it was not expensive to acquire. So I did and I have a lot of it now and I am going to run it at some point, probably for the kids as mentioned above. I like that the mechanics take less overhead then d20 which I think makes it better for new gamers - d6 still has the "look at what I rolled" factor but d20 has that and also has the metagaming thing too - what feats to take, what prestige class, should I multiclass or not - and that's fine but it's better for more experienced players. I don't want them getting bogged down in those kinds of details yet which is why I think the d6 version is the better choice for this. If I was going to run it for the NE crew or the D&D4 crew then it would be Saga, no question about it.

Pool of Radiance - the novel

While preparing to run the new campaign I went ahead and picked up the old "Pool of Radiance" novel too, from 1989. I'm not going to do a full review of it because it is not worth it - it's not great. There are a few interesting bits here and there but it fails my main test of game fiction - does it faithfully recreate the world it is set in? This isn't a huge problem until the end, during the climactic battle against the dragon. The Dragon, a bronze, thinks to itself that it can't hit one character with it's breath weapon because He's "too close". A paragraph later the magic-user realizes she can't hit it with a lightning bolt -her favorite blasting spell up to now - because it's a bronze and since they breathe lightning her spell wouldn't hurt it. Then a short bit later the dragon's breath is reflected back at it and severely injures the dragon! A bronze dragon damaged by its own breath weapon? Even if a decision was made to ignore the immunity thing for purposes of the story, then why would the wizard girl think to herself that she couldn't hurt it? Just trim that one comment and then even if the story deviates from the game universe the novel is at least internally consistent - as it is, it doesn't follow D&D as we knew it AND it doesn't make sense within the novel either! This was a pretty big disjunction coming in the climactic fight of the book and I was disappointed as it wasn't as bad as I had expected up until then.

A few other nitpicks -

• One character is a Human Ranger Thief. This novel was written during 1st edition and I'm not even sure how that would happen. I suppose he could have been dual classed but even then it's pretty rough with the level requirements. Oh, and he uses dual shortswords - this is pre-Drizzt pre-2nd edition, and pre-decent rules for dual-wielding. Maybe some playtesting for 2nd edition had been going on and so they worked it in. Regardless, two weapon use was looking cool even back then.
• One character is an apprentice wizard and her master goes off to Phlan first to help a colleague fight off a monster attack. He leaves her a) his familiar, which is a horse - I don't remember that being an option under the "Find Familiar" Spell and it effectively serves as a fourth party member during the book b) his Wand of Wonder - OK I don't have a problem with this. Hell I've handed out a wand of wonder at the beginning of a cmapign myself just for the funny factor c) his STAFF OF POWER ?! WTF?! Can you see any wizard going into a big fight leaving an item like that behind? Maybe if he had a Staff of the Magi?! Even then wouldn't you let your buddy mage use the Staff of Power to help keep your hide intact? I can tell you none of my player's would ever do that - they tend to be of the "my items die with me" school - so I found this to be a pretty obvious sore thumb.

Anyway the story is pretty much an abbreviated run-through of the adventure by 3 characters of differing backgrounds who grow significantly in power during the tale. It's not the worst D&D fiction I've read, but it's not great. For what I'm doing it wasn't a waste of time as there are some names and things I can steal but that's about it.