Movies! TV! Wild Speculation!

I see the Wayne Enterprises/Stark Enterprises merger is going well...

Might as well get 'em all out in one post:

Past:

• I liked Age of Ultron. It wasn't quite as much of a rush as the first Avengers movie, mainly because it wasn't the first, but I thought it was still good. 
• I really liked Mad Maxx. It's definitely worth seeing if you liked any of the first three. even if that doesn't ping your radar, I promise you won't see anything else that looks like it this year. 
• Jurassic World looked good but plot-wise felt like a remake of the original movie. That's OK because I liked the first movie a lot. I just would have liked to have seen a little more "new".

Present:

• I'm cautiously optimistic for Ant-Man. It looks like they're taking the right tone with it, and I like the idea of Michael Douglas playing Hank Pym. There's a lot they could do with that and he's a great choice to play him if they do. 
• Fantastic Four I am not optimistic about at all. In the trailer I see a dark look and tone which is about as far from the FF as you can get. I know there's been a lot of furor about the film already but I think it's going to have a lot of problems beyond casting choices. 
• Terminator Genesys - don't know, hoping to see it sometime this week, watched the first three with Apprentice Blaster in preparation. 

Pretty sure that is not an accident

Future:

• The new trailer for Batman vs. Superman looks a lot more interesting but it still looks _so_serious_ and really dark. I'm not sure we need this much Dark Knight Returns this early in the program (and it is a whole bunch of DKR, see above) but maybe they can pull it off. 
• Ash vs. Evil Dead is a show! Sold!
• Shannara is going to be a show too - wait, what? Well, the trailer looks pretty at least. I'm going to keep expectations low as I did not like the books, but maybe they can do something interesting with it. 
• Finally, if you haven't watched the SDCC trailer for Star Wars and you are reading this blog, go ahead and take a look at it here.

More to come!

Goings-On Around the Tower:

A slow creep back to action ...

• The one campaign I am running, Wrath of the Righteous for Pathfinder,  is finally getting back on track this month after being on hold since March
• The one campaign I am playing, Kingmaker for Pathfinder, has also been taking a break but is getting back on track this month
• Apprentice Red, Official College Student of the Tower is finally embracing the full college experience and is planning to start up a campaign on campus. It's likely to be Pathfinder as well, probably the Emerald Spire, because I have a fair amount of supporting material for it that he can borrow. 

It's a little funny that I've gone this Pathfinder-intensive. I like the game fine, but 5-6 years ago I was as  done with 3rd edition as one could be. The last couple of years it has somehow turned into my main game.

I do intend to use some of those other books on my shelves. Most likely candidates: Savage Worlds, Mutants and Masterminds, ICONS, Spirit of 77, FATE, or some flavor of Star Wars. I have ideas for all of them, and all of them are good candidates for a one-shot game to break things up. That's also all everyone seems to have time to do right now anyway. 

More to come!

Superhero RPGs, Characters, and Supplements

There are probably more superhero RPG's available now than ever before. This is largely due to the growing acceptance of PDFs as "real" game books over the last ten years and the proliferation of sites like DriveThruRPG making it easier to find those PDFs. So somebody finally sees their chance, writes up their own set of rules, publishes it, some people love it ... now what? Supplements!

Every superhero game from Champions to Mutants and Masterminds to ICONS to BASH to Supers to all the rest has a series of supporting books. Typically they include additional powers (handy), a setting or three (also handy), a set of enemies to oppose your heroes (also also handy), and maybe a focus on a particular topic, something like gadgets or vehicles or magic or mental powers. Those are all more or less useful. I own a bunch of them and they are nice to have when your campaign is up and running and players dig into an area you haven't spent a lot of time developing.

There is one type of support book I have a problem with though, and that's the book of thinly-veiled clones of a well known superhero. I don't remember this kind of thing coming up years ago, presumably because most books of Super - NPCs were sold as villain books, a Monster Manual for a different type of game. If you needed a hero it was simple enough to use the stats and the illustration and just give them an attitude adjustment to "good guy" and you were all set. Lately though I've started to see a few things like this:

Spartan (PL 10) is a carousing playboy by day and an armor suit-clad hero by night. Fueled by genius, curiosity, and the occasional recreational pharmaceutical, he makes no apologies for his public identity, nor his quest to squash those who would misuse the technology stolen from his family.

There's a series of these on DTRPG and I have to wonder what the creator is thinking. Just on the Green Ronin forums alone there are multiple versions of Iron Man, let alone what a google search turns up. Why would anyone pay for this interpretation? It's only $1.99 but it's also only 2 pages long which tells me it's the above picture and a page of stats. Compare that with this, as just one example.

I don't want to just pick on this one product - there are others out there- it's just the most recent one I have noticed. This type of product though ... I'm not a fan. Sure, if you're publishing the official marvel RPG then go ahead and give us your official game stats, same with DC. For a non-well-known setting though, well, original concepts or twists on well-known concepts are always welcome but it's difficult for me to envision purchasing someone else's interpretation of a well-known existing hero. The internet tends to generate those in large quantities for any moderately popular supers game system. Interesting art? Sure, I can use that. Stats though ... stats are pretty widely available. Even the classic "Enemies" type book has lost some of its luster for me. It's become a go-to choice for most publishers and I'd say every game system benefits from at least one such book. That said, the value of each one diminishes as more and more are released, as a given campaign is only going to need/use/burn through so many NPC villains and heroes, even if it runs for years. There's a chance that something new comes out that is truly inspiring, but if I already have a dozen inspirations then the challenge for the campaign is to work them all in, not to find more.

I suppose the challenge with most superhero games is that they tend to give you all the tools you need to build an entire universe in the main book so no supplement is really all that essential. Stats are easy, so books consisting mainly of more stats are not automatically awesome. Now that I've been somewhat negative what would I like to see?

• When it comes to characters, good or bad, give me an interesting concept, backstory or origin that demands that I bring that character into my game. 
• Locations locations locations, and I don't mean "Super City Zeta Prime". I mean "Grandma's Ice Cream Shop" complete with a map, an illustration, a description/backstory, and some characters. Specific locations, with flavor, and some stats, are something most games could use. These things connect characters more closely to the world, whether it's the scene of a battle, a romantic encounter, or a crime scene investigation. Details aid immersion and interesting details can be hard to come up with on the fly.
• Organizations! Many superhero campaigns contain multiple good and evil agencies out to rule or save the world. Champions has been pretty good about detailing them but most supers games could stand more. Agenda, methods, gear, typical locations, typical operations, stats for operatives, vehicles, background, connections to other entities in the setting - all of these are useful bits of information, Also: illustrations of these things are a nice option too. They don't all have to be HYDRA either - what does NASA look like in a super-powered universe? How about the Coast Guard? With weather-controlling heroes in the world does NOAA take a more active role than just monitoring and predicting the weather? There's a lot of ground to explore.

So there's some thoughts and venting on Super Supplements. Things are always changing so maybe we will see more of the above ideas and less of a focus on pros & foes in future add-ons. 

The new Metamorphosis Alpha is out.

So there is a new edition of MA out this month - it's available here.

There is a free preview document here which sheds some light on the background and the system.

I was not a part of the kickstarter but I have read through the preview document and I have a few thoughts:

• First, I've always loved the concept of MA. The descendants inhabiting a lost generation ship is an awesome setting for a game and a step beyond the basic post-apocalyptic world in a lot of these swords & laser type of games. It's a game I always wanted to play or run but have never had the chance - Gamma World was our bread and butter for this kind of thing. 
• Second - I really don't like that cover. It tells me nothing about the game and looks like it could be anything from a typical fantasy game to a stone age type of setting. Compare it to some of the old MA or GW covers and while it's more professional on the surface than some, it just doesn't convey anything about the game itself.
• Third, I've never heard of "System 26" before this but it looks a lot like the basics of the classic Shadowrun rules and that could be just fine. You have a variable number of dice (d6's) with a variable target number and each die is a success or failure - more successes = a better overall result. 

Bonus thought: From the book itself:

 

"✇✇ “The Petting Zoo of Death” is an introductory

adventure for Metamorphosis Alpha. It offers a great

starting point to get a group of diverse characters

together and shows how scenarios are presented in

the game.

Yeah - that's a terrible name for the intro adventure too.Whatever seriousness is conveyed in the intro and background material flies right out the window upon reading that, and this is coming from a guy who was perfectly happy fighting Gallus-Gallus-13's in Famine in Far-Go years ago.

Despite the stylistic knocks I am more than a little interested. A classic setting with a ton of potential combined with a simple yet mechanically interesting system ... yes, I will probably pick it up at some point. The only thing holding me back at the moment is the giant backlog of RPG material I am reading through and the ever-present "when am I going to get to run this" conundrum. I'll work through those and let you know how the full game looks a little bit down the road.

Spirit of 77 - in Hardcopy!

The hardcopy books from the Kickstarter arrived this week and they look good. They are digest-sized, more like the Savage World books have become of late. I am a fan of PDFs, but there's still something about holding the book in your hand that feels good. It seemed particularly appropriate to post them up for Throwback Thursday.

Now to find time to read them ...

40K Friday - Catching Up

 I haven't played any 40K in the last 2 months but I have been working on some of the armies. Details below:

Orks!

I finally picked up the "new" codex and started going through my existing army. This was going to be a project for 2016 but I decided I wasn't that far away from a usable force and I already had the parts. The "right now" force is shaping up like this:

• Warboss + Nobz in a battlewagon
• 3 mobs of boyz in battlewagons
• A mob of infiltrating Kommandos
• Dakka jet and a Burna-Bomma
• Rokkit Launcher Buggies
• Grots

This is just a regular CAD force for now and ends up around 2000 points. I have enough boyz to use the Ork Warband formation and the Ork Horde has some potential too. The biggest problem at the moment is that Heavy Support slots are over crowded. I'm working on a second CAD force as a Mekboy force - Mek Gunz, Kans, Tankbustas, another battlewagon, etc but the points get really high with "everything". It's going to take some experimentation to figure out whats fun for small/medium/large point values. The good thing is that almost everything in the above list is painted and finishing it up won't take much time. That's really the goal here is to get something together I can put on the table in a week or two.

Chaos Marines!

The Iron Warriors "ally contingent" (cough) has expanded beyond its original purpose and is becoming a full-fledged second Chaos Marine army. At the moment that's 3 squads of CSM's, a Rhino, a Helbrute, and a Heldrake, led by a Chaos Lord and a Warsmith. All of it is painted too, which is nice. Future goals include more rhinos, a triple-lascannon predator, and maybe some vindicators. I plan for it to be my vehicular CSM army so there's a lot of room to grow. 

Force Bane, the plague marine army, has not changed much. I am up to 6 squads of plague marines and I am still painting them. That's really the core of my army so I want to do it right. I've also made a little progress on the chaos spawn and it should take much to finish them up. once that's done it's really just touching up the havocs and then the Nurgle bikers and some terminators are all I have left to finish. Can I finish it this year? Hard to say. It seems totally doable, but the other armies on the list may distract me.

Blood Angels

All army parts acquired, very little work done on building and painting them. Pretty much the same plan as outlined in this post, just not much to report. 

Dark Angels

Not much progress here either. all parts acquired, all tanks built, squads and weapons allocated, everything base coated, but not much infantry actually completed. The basic outline is still the same as what I described in this post.  

I did add the Deathwing Knights and the Crusader. I also added a terminator chaplain as a possible second HQ unit (instead of the librarian) because he makes the Knights even nastier in melee and adds a little more punch to the squad - probably more than 2 warp charge dice are going to bring in a bigger battle. 

I added a third tactical squad to increase my options to something besides "more plasma". I have not added a third rhino to transport them as right now I see it more as a swap-out option than as adding a third squad to a fight. 

Finally I picked up a second Razorback to serve as a transport for the devastator squad. Why not add another vehicle and another heavy weapon to the mix?

It was a good cover ...

Eldar

Oh boy, Eldar got a new codex and I've been furiously rearranging and acquiring the elements of what I want the army to be. 

I was working on an Iyanden-style all-wraith army as my core and the new codex slightly alters that with a new formation. I have all the pieces, I juts need to build and paint them now - same old story.

I also started refining my non-wraith units to form a Guardian Battlehost. I have everything for it except the artillery so that's high on the list of Things to Acquire. Supplemental forces will include aspect shrines and possibly the wraith host too.

So for smaller battles I can go with a CAD and/or the Wraith Host. Bigger fights could bring out the Battlehost formation with some extra support. 

The newly-squadron-ed eldar tanks are interesting but I don't have enough of them to make use of the special rules. I did pick up a pair of wave serpents to give the wraithguard some mobility but that's as far as I've gone. 

For this army I have plenty of options. the goal is to get it to a playable state and start figuring out what works and what is fun to play and moving in that direction. 

Overall

So ... five armies all in various stages of building. I don't know if I will "complete" any of them this year but I hope to get them all into shape as a playable force - even a small force - and get in some games with each of them. I don't recommend this approach if you're just getting started but it's where I am at the moment.  

Long Term RPG Thoughts

I haven't run or played anything in more than a month - taking care of business etc. I have had some time to reflect on the whole hobby though.

• It takes a fairly high level of effort to conceive, create, begin, and maintain an ongoing RPG campaign. 

• It takes a long term commitment to keep one going, for the GM and the players. 

• Playing takes up space and time.

• The books take up space and typically are not free. If you're like me they can take up a lot of space. 

• There is an opportunity cost as well - if you're playing for six hours on a Friday night that's time you are not doing something else. 

All of these things may sound obvious but I think that we (and I know I do) often sink down into the daily or weekly routines and don't really assess what the upsides and downsides are of these things.  For a casual player who owns a few books and plays a few times a month it's probably not that much. For those of us who are more into it though, who are constantly running, playing, or thinking about them, it can be difficult to step back and look at the bigger picture.

On one level, no matter what you're playing you are having fun spending time with friends and family and that's a good thing to have in your life on a regular schedule.

But it doesn't hurt to ask questions of oneself: Is this still a good way to spend my time? What else could I be doing with that time/money/effort/mindspace? Do I need all of this stuff? Do I truly enjoy the specific game I am running? How about the people I am playing it with? Where does this rank among my priorities? What about my other interests and hobbies?

If you're a single guy in your teens or twenties you probably have a different set of conditions than the forty-something married with kids guy who is writing this, and that's cool because I was there once too. Things change though - relationships, living space, finances, families - all can have an impact. For me there were the junior high /early high school days, then the later high school days with a job and a car, then the college days with new friends, and then the post-college days of singlehood and full time employment, and then the family days of adding a wife and kids on top of the full time job. It's worth re-assessing the whole picture every so often to see how it's working for you right now.

Now I'm not planning any drastic changes for myself right now. I considered thinning out the RPG collection but there's not a really urgent need to do so. I did end the Necessary Evil/City of Heroes game because while it was fun I was having trouble meeting the commitment and it just is not worth the aggravation when I can't maintain it like I want to. For now I'm running the one Pathfinder campaign bi-weekly and playing in another one monthly and that's enough. Anything beyond that will probably be one-offs or a limited 2-3 session game planned that way from the start. I feel like I need to spend a little more time with the non-RPG'er friends and family and that's the way I see to do it. I'd love to run a regular, ongoing supers campaign but if there's any genre best suited to short runs and one-offs it has to be superheroes and that's how I'm going to handle it for now.

I know it's not for everyone but right now I am totally happy running and playing Pathfinder. I accepted long ago that I would always have a "D&D" game if I was playing at all, and anything else would be a bonus after that. If I can work in some M&M/Champions/ICONS?Marvel after that I would be very happy too.  Spirit of 77, Feng Shui, Deadlands, and other Savage Worlds games are going to have to be one-shots or irregular games at best. Star Wars and Star Trek are "someday" games where I'm going to have to round up some new players to make them happen and I just don't have the bandwidth to do that - but I might someday.

So I'm still going to be involved in RPG's and they are still one of my hobbies. I may not have quite as much to say because I'm not as worried about the day to day new type stuff about them right now and I'm not running quite as much as I have been in the past. I will talk about what I do run here though and try to keep the focus on running and playing and less on theory, news, and generic stuff. More "games I like and am playing" and less "gaming stuff" in general.

Back to Action!

Things are settling down a bit so I thought it was time to catch up with some new arrivals.

First the final PDF of Spirit of 77 came through last week - now to read it! I am looking forward to this and already have some thoughts on a limited series (noted here) that might even allow me to run it semi-regularly. Also:

The supplementary material PDF came though too. man I love that cover!

Then today, some other stuff came:

Like everything else about this game it's done with coolness and style and completely in the spirit of the theme. Just passing this stuff around the table will help set the mood bigtime.


Last week also brought the PDF of Feng Shui 2E:

Now I've never been able to talk a group into playing FS but with a new edition, why not try again? I need to read it and brush up on the changes first but I think a one-shot is possible this summer. I usually pitch it as "the game you would use to run Big Trouble in Little China" and that should be enough to get that far at least.

A few weeks back I added this to the collection:

Partly because I'm in a Star Wars kind of mood what with the trailer and all, and partly because I want to see how FFG's funky dice based rules are really working. I liked d6 , I liked Saga, might as well give this a whirl, especially since the build-up to the next movie might finally push some of the crew over the top in wanting to play a Star Wars game. I picked up the starter set too so we have some pre-made characters and adventures to expedite things if we need them.

The main focus is still the Pathfinder campaign and given our limited time right now anything else is a bonus, but I suspect we will at least get in a try-out session with most of these before 2015 is over.

Rig for Silent Running

Too much going on here at the Tower this month so I'm going to have to submerge for a bit. More to come as things develop.

"... and - Dive!"

Spirit of '77 Adventure Seeds

I was doodling a bit the other day and started coming up with one-liners I thought would make a good title for an adventure for Spirit of '77. These are in no particular order and may of them are clearly mixing some familiar things:

• Land of the Lost Saucer
• Space: 1977
• The Outlaw Mary Tyler Moore
• Interstate '77
• Cloned to Run
• Schoolhouse Rockets
• The Poseidon Inferno
• Any Which Way You Can Lose
• Capricorn Dos
• How the West was Run
• The Galileo '77
• The Shiner Syndrome
• Kotter vs. Kotter
• May the Magnum Force Be With You
• The Computer Wore Racing Slicks

Now those alone might be enough to start your wheels turning, but here's what I came up with for them as I thought through it a little more. I may have individual entries on them down the road when the final rules come out.

• "The Computer Wore Racing Slicks" - The world's first intelligent car is being tested - then it takes off! The PC's are hired to secretly (SECRETLY!) bring it back "alive". The car appears to have an agenda of its own and there may be more going on than simple advanced electronics. There are also other parties interested in acquiring the vehicle for themselves, some far less scrupulous than the party.

• "Land of the Lost Saucer" - An old friend of one of the PC's, a crazy scientist, has been working on a wrecked alien spacecraft and its robotic crew. When terrorists interrupt his first attempt to power up the craft, the crew takes a journey to ... somewhere else. Somewhere with dinosaurs, furry humanoids, scaly humanoids, and strange crystal-filled pylons.

• "Space: 1977" -  Organized crime has taken a crew of NASA astronauts hostage. They are the only ones trained to fly a new experimental spacecraft and with the launch only days away the agency needs them back, pronto! One of them may have escaped - and is now hiding on the tour bus of a famous rock band.

• "The Galileo '77" - a massive, high-tech airship named "Galileo" is taking its maiden voyage from LA to Honolulu and the PC's are invited. While on board they get to know the other members of the inaugural passenger list and everything seems fine until a storm and a series of equipment failures force the airship down onto a strange island filled with strange, savage inhabitants. Can the PC's keep the peace? Can they get everyone working together to repair the craft? Can they protect everyone from the savage inhabitants?

• "The Outlaw Mary Tyler Moore" - An old reporter friend of the PC's shows up on the FBI's ten most wanted list. Has this once happy big city girl gone rogue and fallen in with kidnappers? Is it case of stockholm syndrome? Or is there more to this than meets the eye? 

• "Interstate '77" - in a nod to the wonderful 90's PC game Interstate 76 the team crosses paths with Groove Champion and Taurus for some automotive mayhem out west.

• "Cloned to Run" - a new criminal gang is causing trouble back east and when the PC's intervene and get a chance to remove some perpetrators' helmets it turns out they are identical! A science experiment gone wrong falls into the hands of organized crime and it's up to our heroes to clean up the mess.

• "Schoolhouse Rockets" - A high school auto shop class in the inner city has become affiliated with a powerful local gang. When the PC's intervene to save a kid brother, the gangs don't take it well. Lessons are learned and extreme property damage is inflicted. An ABC Afterschool special produced by Michael Bay.

• The Poseidonworld Inferno - The PCs are on vacation at a massive underwater resort which suffers a few problems when a nearby underwater volcano erupts. Also, why is the robotic waiter looking at us that way?

• "Every Which Way You Can Lose" - Clyde the Yeti has escaped and taken up with a trucker and part-time brawler out west. Add in a animal activists, corporate repo men, vengeful motorcycle gang, a legend ready to retire, and some rival girlfriends and things get complicated quick. (PC hooks include contact by the biologist or being old friends of the trucker) Lots of room for a sequel too.

• "Capricorn Dos" - A fringe reporter friend of the PC's has photographic evidence that an astronaut who supposedly dies in an accident years ago is actually alive and living in Mexico. He wants the PCs to head south of the border and find out what's going on.

• "The Shiner Syndrome" - In the wake of widespread reports about the appalling conditions of the big corporate breweries the best little brewery in Texas is trying to expand -  but the Big Beer Companies are trying to buy them out (to water them down like any other corporate beer) and the PC's are called in to help out and deliver a special shipment to a potential benefactor across the country.

• Kotter vs. Kotter (double sequel) - A high school teacher meets himself walking into class one morning. A science prodigy with a thing for the teacher's wife accidentally clones the teacher instead. Ties back to "Schoolhouse Rockets" and "Cloned to Run"

• "May the Magnum Force Be With You" - San Francisco's greatest inspector runs thinks he's investigating a series of grisly killings but this time the perps are Not From Around Here and this time the .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, may not be enough.

• How the West was Run - A greatest hits adventure as all of the notable NPC's from all of the other adventures - and some new ones - come together for a "friendly" race across the country. A big "season finale" adventure that's going to take multiple sessions to complete. It should also lay the groundwork for some future encounters too. Featuring:
• The Car from Computer Wore Racing Slicks 
• The Mad Scientist from Land of the Lost Saucer who shows up in an unusual prototype
• Groove Champion and Taurus
• The High School crew from "Schoolhouse Rockets" has an entry - possibly the cloned teacher from K vs, K
• The main NPC from EWWYCL (and Clyde?). The motorcycle gang will probably show up somewhere along the way too. 
• Reformed bad guy from Shiner Syndrome shows up as another driver
• Outlaw Mary could be an entry
• A famous Russian race driver
• A British secret service agent