Old School Champions - Links!

Just a few:

• A nice bio on Mark Williams here.

• A blog with some cool old-school Champions memories

• Another blog that looks like they made an attempt to run old-school Champions more recently

End of a Very Good Run

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php

I don't know what to say just yet. There's nothing good about this.

Easy-Way-Out Friday - Bookshelves

Awhile back commenter "Mick" had asked for some "bookshelf porn" after the move. I've been involved in some interesting things before but that was a new request. Anyway, I hope this is what he meant:

Those are the D&D 40K, and Shadowrun shelves. The one thing I haven't found a home for yet is the magazine collection. I do have some room left but they take up a lot of space and I tend to refer to the Dragon Archive CD for the older stuff and for 4E they're all digital anyway, leaving just the 3E versions where the hard copies are the go-to resource.

The Battletech shelf - books & binders only for now, the mini's are still TBD as far as a permanent home. Also some of my older boxes are out on the table as we've been using them to learn how to play. The simpler 3025 era is much like Basic D&D - not as many options but it's where we started and it's still a lot of fun to play. Note: The drill is not typically part of our Batteltech game - that was just a convenient open flat spot.

The Deadlands/Gamma World/Savage Worlds/Lords of Creation/Feng Shui shelf. Man those Deadlands book shelves are visible for quite a distance. Lady Blacksteel (hi dear) specifically asked me not to put those on the tall shelf on the end that's visible from downstairs - those colors really draw the eye. Yes, those are Battletech mini's on top of the non-battletech shelf - don't try to figure out my system, it works for me. Besides, there's a drill in the way on that other shelf. I've been thinking about letting the Apprentices try out Lords of Creation so it's in a more prominent place than it has been in the past. Of course, so is a lot of the test of this stuff, as in "not in the garage".

...and then these 3 shelves are pretty much the rest of it. The near shelf is Every Major Superhero RPG Ever Printed I Think (on the top 4 shelves) plus Star Trek (on the bottom). The next one has some boardgames & wargames plus all my Star Wars RPG stuff. The far shelf has WFRP, Twilight 2000, Traveller, Rifts, and some other games.

You may notice that I have "multiple copy disease" - I don't necessarily need two copies of "Keep on the Borderlands" or "Denial of Destiny" but I do like having two or three copies of the main rulebook and sometimes major supplements too, like the magic book or cyberware book for Shadowrun. Anyway, I have enough space now to handle that a little easier.

Things not included: as I mentioned above a lot of my game magazines are not on a shelf yet. Most of my miniatures are not on a shelf yet and some of the miniature rules & supplements aren't either. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them but it's a problem I can live with.

There's also a TV with the videogames hooked up and a computer desk with a PC for the kids too. It's a nice open area with plenty of room, so we can put up a folding table and play something and still have room for other people to do other things. Hey, they called it a "game room" - I'm putting as much game in the game room as is legally allowed.

I expect that a year from now this arrangement may look quite a bit different but for a month I'm pretty happy with it. My next quest is to find a better place for the big box games on top of the shelves then purge the remaining moving boxes from the house and make it look like we actually live here.

EDIT: I missed a shelf when I put this one up - I also have one more with the "spaceship game" rules on it. It's mostly Star Fleet Battles/Federation Commander with some B5/Battlefleet Gothic/Full Thrust as well. Yes, there's more unorganized miniatures and junk on top of it too - this is still a work in progress.

Old School Champions: Strike Force!

Among the recent acquisitions is one of the most highly regarded of the early Champions books: Aaron Allston's Strike Force. If you've been around Champions for very long then you've probably heard it mentioned with some fondness/reverence. I have been hearing about it since it was published in 1988 but I've never laid hands on a copy of it until now. I know for at least part of that time I thought it was a 3rd party book like those AutoAdventures for Car Wars. The late 3rd Edition stuff for Champions in the late 80's was a big blind spot for me as I had the 2E stuff and used it until the Big Blue 4th Edition came out and fired things up again.  I eventually started working through this blind spot and after hearing it discussed again recently on an episode of the Vigilance Press podcast I decided it was high time I owned this legendary supplement.

After acquiring it and reading it I will say that it is one of the most useful books I have seen, for Champions especially and for people-who-run-RPG-campaigns in general, particularly Supers campaigns. There is a lot of discussion of the practical elements of actually running a campaign - not so much about designing plots and villains but about keeping players happy, pacing a campaign, and some ideas like "blue-booking" which deal with the practice of running a campaign - not the theory.

Besides the advice sections this also effectively a sourcebook on one man's superhero campaign run over a period of about 7 years. He talks about how the first few sessions went, talks about the types of players, which characters they created and ran, provides a history of the campaign world, includes Champions character data for most of the heroes, the major villains, the bases, and the vehicles used in the game, plus maps of the major hero bases and notes on the organizations and other hero groups around the world. The fact that most of it developed in play makes it a little more complex and a little more messy than a setting created out of nothing for a game system, but it also reads much more like a history of the X-Men or the Avengers from a comic book. Crazy things happen and relationships get complicated and viewed as a whole some of it looks a little strange but I'm betting at the time these guys were having a blast.

I'm pretty sure some of the advice sections made it into later Champions material, but taken as a whole this is a very solid work and I think it holds up well today. I think a lot of DM's Guide type books nowadays are plagued with lengthy, wordy advice sections that go on and on but say very little that's truly useful ("you need a table and some friends and some snacks" - really?). This book is all about the practical and is much more useful as a result, even for someone who's been at it as long as I have. If you're interested, it's worth a little time and effort to track it down.

Summer Slowdown

We had a pretty good run for June & July but as we close out August things have been pretty light in the gaming department around here. I haven't run anything in about a month and I am feeling it.

• I downloaded the latest D&D Next playtest pack and I haven't even opened it. Just not feeling it right now.

• Picked up Civil War for MHR right before the move and I have yet to finish it. I can't seem to sustain my focus on it and while it's a pretty lengthy document it's one I was waiting for! Hard to say what's up here.

• I picked up High Space for Savage Worlds which looks pretty promising but it's kind of been lost in the shuffle here.

I've mostly been reading old school Champions and old school DC Heroes which are unlikely to be the basis for a sustained campaign anytime soon but they are pulling in my interest so that's where I've been spending my time. BA's August of Star Trek has had me cracking open the old ship manuals and other books too, which isn't helping.

The only thing we've played is Battletech and it appears to be a hit with two of the Apprentices - I'll call that a win but it doesn't scratch the RPG itch. They are asking about playing the RPG version so I've dusted off Mechwarrior 3rd edition and skimmed it and as much as I liked it 10+ years ago I'm thinking Savage Worlds, Traveller, or even GURPS would be more to my taste now. It's looking like a research project for the near future. 

Not running the 4E game for over a month and the release of what is likely the final book for 4th Edition (Menzoberranzan) has me fighting some apathy there too. I don't normally care a great deal about whether a game  is "dead" or not but I'm feeling it a little bit this time. The new house combined with the start of a new school year has me feeling the urge to cut ties with the old and start something new which is a good way to annoy the players - I'm fighting it guys, let's not panic just yet. I'm not feeling the whole fantasy thing right now so Pathfinder and old school D&D and Next are all gathering dust too. It's more of a genre thing than an edition thing.

A lot of this is the move - most of the boxes have been emptied, but not all, and that has taken up a lot of time. As we move into more of a routine then I expect things will start to get back to normal. This weekend we should have time to play a few things, especially with the holiday on Monday so I'm going to let the Apprentices pick what they want to do. More to come.

Old School Champions: 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and the Island of Doctor Destroyer

Among the variety of Champions material I've picked up recently I've made a few discoveries that were new to me and I thought I would share.

First off - and this is probably not new to those of you who really care - for some reason I always assumed the color-cover version of the old Champions rulebook was a reprint of the 2E book. Apparently I was wrong. I knew the grayscale cover was the second edition of the game and that's the one I started with, but who knew that the first edition had a color cover? It also has more art on the back, unlike the gray one which has the speed chart instead. It's only 56 pages long and is organized somewhat differently than the gray-cover second edition which is 80 pages long. So I learned something I didn't even realize that I didn't know! It's a little embarrassing considering how long I've been around this game but there it is. I will say after looking through 1E that I am glad I started with 2E - it's just better in every way - organization, completeness, and even the art is at least consistent - it's almost all Mark Williams in the 2E book.

Also, there are at least two different printings of The Island of Doctor Destroyer. One version I have is staple-bound and has a blank inside cover. The other version I have has slightly different coloring, the cover is separate (like an AD&D module) and has a large hexmap of the island printed on the inside of the cover. That's a pretty noticeable difference having just read through what I presume is the older no-map version, only to have the nice shiny big-map version arrive in the mail.

Even Heroic Worlds - a handy resource when you're digging into older games like I am - doesn't mention two separate versions. Since all of the older Champs adventures are in this staple-bound format maybe the separate one is a later reprint? My copy of that version is certainly in much better condition though that's no guarantee. I poked around the net a bit and didn't see anything about it so maybe someday someone will shed light on it with a comment here.

Motivational Monday

Remembering a Trek Campaign

Barking Alien has been talking Trek this month and I've mostly kept my comments there but he hit a pressure point with this post and as my typing continued I decided that it belonged as a full-blown post here more than as a simple comment there.

I was fortunate enough to have the experience described in his entry - pretty much everything we did in the FASA Trek RPG was one long campaign. I rolled up a command officer and pretty quickly took command of the U.S.S. Lexington NCC-1709. That was pretty soon after the game was released, so call it 1982. We ran all over the Federation dealing with everything from Gorns to Orions to Klingons. We played through a few published adventures but it was mostly the GM's own ideas. We might go for several months without playing Trek, and then come back to it, then move on. Our friends made characters, lost characters, brought in new ones - looking back it was a lot like what I think that kind of life would be. My character was about the only constant, though our Vulcan chief engineer was around for most of the campaign too.

Eventually The Lex was used to test out an experimental sensor system which included fire control system upgrades as well. I think the original intent was to be more effective against Romulan cloaked ships (this was before Klingons were cloaking all the time) but we didn't go that route. We ended up in a tremendous fight against a Klingon task force - I don't remember the reason behind the fight but it was a big deal in the campaign universe - and though she survived the ship was in bad shape ("damn - we lived but look at this damage!") and was going to need a complete refit. This meant an upgrade to Enterprise class ("Yes!") and during the refit time  we were sent out on some intelligence type missions using a Mission class courier (that was in the basic game, I think).

The Mission was a fun little ship, more like a runabout than a "real" ship, but we focused on sneaky planetary adventures and had some fun. I'm pretty sure we were captured at least twice and had to escape. We knew the ship was temporary and our lack of attachment to it should be evident from my inability to remember its name.

We were all thrilled when the Lexington went back into service and our first mission, much like our first one ever, was to deal with a Gorn problem and the Lex quickly showed a couple of Gorn Battleships exactly what the pecking order was in this part of the galaxy. We later got involved with the Romulans and had to deal with competition more on our own level.

That campaign ran from about 1982 to about 1988 or so and the ship was always a big part of the "status" - ship good then "party" good. Ship torn up then there's a bunch of tension in the air. Awesome ship in drydock to get even more awesome = happy but stuck with crappy temp ship - no more smack-talking the local D-7 captains. Several of us were serious gear-heads back then so ship stats were something we pretty much had memorized anyway so keeping the hardware together was a high priority.

I have to say that looking back I was as happy with this campaign style, and this ship, and this arrangement for player participation as I have been with any of them. There was no set schedule and no set group of players. The GM came up with an idea, figured out who could play and when, and off we went. If you had a character, they were there. If you did not, then roll one up and they were newly-assigned to the ship. Prominent characters whose players were not available were working on other things or might even be on shore leave.

As far as the campaign itself we never decided that we were going to do things that way - it was just assumed that if we played Trek it was as the crew of the Lexington. The game wasn't tied to a particular character, or a particular group of specific characters. It wasn't even the 430 crewmen of the Lexington, because some of them might have moved on and some new ones might have joined since the last adventure, but setting it on a ship somehow gave the whole thing a continuity that a lot of other games lack.

I think it's a model that would work very well in the modern grown-ups-with-kids-and-jobs environment that many of us find ourselves in now. There's a touch of the open-table approach in there as well and it would be easy to make that a formal part of it without going to a full West Marches sandbox campaign, keeping the more traditional mission/episode style approach but still being able to accommodate a random-access player base and having a sense of continuity that makes it a memorable campaign years later.

Thanks for walking me down this road again BA, it's been awhile since I've thought about this aspect of it.

New Star Wars RPG?

Apparently it looks like this:

It's from Fantasy Flight

It's a Beta test.

It's $29.95.

Don't believe me? Take a look here.

Seriously. When did it become OK to charge people for beta testing? There used to be some kind of reward for being a PC game beta tester. Is this some kind of riff on the privilege of early access, like with an MMO game?

From the site:


This limited edition, 224-page softcover rulebook provides you a chance to lead these galactic explorers. This is a complete and playable version of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and (compared to the final version) it excludes only art and certain thematic material.

So it's not really a test version? But then they have a section on submitting feedback, so it appears that maybe it is. After Pathfinder and D&D Next I would think that some kind of open beta would be the new hotness but I guess not. For a serious playtest effort though why make it a physical book and not a PDF? There can't be much of a secrecy element to it because once you pay for a book I don't think they can stick an NDA on top of it. It's a strange approach but who knows, maybe it will work for them.

It's also set in the Rebellion Era and will be in 3 books according to the description - one for smuggler types and the Rim, one about the war, and one about the Jedi. This independent-but-combinable approach is the same one they have taken with the 40K RPG system they publish and I suppose that's fine. I think the people most likely to play a new Star Wars RPG are the ones who played previous Star Wars RPG's and those games pretty much covered all possible character types right from the start, so this approach seems kind of limiting. At least that's my initial reaction to what I see on the screen.

Oh, last but not least - custom dice. Wonderful. Is the final game going to come in a box with those dice? Will there be enough for more than 1 player? If you're wondering what I mean then take a look at this - I assume WFRP is at least a partial template to what they're thinking. Core set at $99.95 including custom dice and cards that are required for play. I'm trying to stay open minded about this but it's very difficult. I have games that use custom dice - Heroquest, Memoir 44, and Command and Colors Ancients to name a few. All of them come in a box and none of them are truly RPG's. Remember d6 Star Wars? All I needed was a set of d6's. Remember d20 Star Wars? Even there all I needed was a standard set of RPG dice. Savage Worlds uses normal RPG dice and adds in a deck of normal playing cards - I'm all for trying out new mechanics but we're not talking d14's from Goodman Games here - they're likely special dice made only for this game. Plus, aren't we moving towards lighter mechanics in games? Less fiddly bits, more fast & furious? Just looking at M&M/DCA, ICONS, and Marvel Heroic as recent launches in one typically over-complicated genre I would say "YES", and if any game seemed to cry out for that type of mechanical approach isn't it Star Wars? Again I would say "YES"! That does not appear to be where this is headed though.


I'm sure more information will come out but I'm feeling disappointed about this. I'm still a little interested but I won't be lining up for a pay-access beta version of a game book, and I'm not thrilled by what I know right now about the approach. I guess we will see where it goes.

Some New Old Champions Stuff

Continuing the Super RPG theme:

An eBay pickup, this one has duplicates of a few thing but that's the price you pay with these grab-bag type lots. The main initial attraction was another copy of the 4th edition Champions rules -  you can never have too many copies of the core rules floating around the table. There are some other tasty nuggets though:

• On the right is the 2E Gamemaster's Screen. I didn't even know they made one of those until about a year ago, and they don't turn up all that often. I doubt I'll be running 2E any time soon so I suppose this is more of a collector type thing, which is a path I really do not need to tread. Probably too late now though. It's two 2-panel screens with things like the speed chart and a list of powers and skills and most of those charts that were all over that rulebook printed on both sides. I really could have used this about 1983 when Draco and Solar Flare and Titan were rolling full-force against Gladiator, Lobsterback, and all those bads from the rulebook and Enemies 1 & 2. It's still kind of cool even now.

• The Island of Dr. Destroyer : I've seen it online but I did not own a copy - now I do! This is the first published Champions adventure and it is comparable to some of those ICONS adventures I keep downloading from DriveThruRPG. You have a supervillian threatening the world from his fortified island base and the heroes have to go in and stop him - simple and straightforward, if a little more James Bond-ish than comic-bookish. It has pretty detailed maps of the island and the base, notes and stats for the defenses and the patrols and the vehicles that are involved, and an outline of the plan - it's ready-to-run. I think it would make a nice not-first adventure, as there should be some reason that the heroes are called in to stop Destroyer and a group of brand-new heroes seems like an unlikely choice to do that. It might make a good climax or penultimate adventure for Season 1 if you were running a campaign in seasons like a TV series.

• The Great Supervillain Contest - I don't think I like this one as much as IoDD but I didn't have a copy before. If nothing else it's a framework for a certain kind of campaign and it does have some maps of a secret base and some new villains in the back.

• Enemies III - Known of it for some time, have never owned a copy. I'll be scouring this one for Unfortunate Characters this week. The format is a little different than the first two but I see some likely candidates right there on the cover.