Motivational Monday - Kicking Off 2012!

The Rambling End of the Year Post for 2011

The Amazing Aluminum Man keeps an eye on Baby New Year - just in case

Wrapping up a few loose ends and clearing the decks for 2012:


 - A week or so before Christmas: Wizards of the Coast's annual Christmas layoffs appear to have begun. So far, casualties appear to include Rich Baker and Steve Winter. Yeah that's great. A wonderful holiday tradition. I've been "downsized" a few times over the years ad it's not fun at any time of the year. Hopefulyy (given their time with the company) there were severance packages sufficient to see them through the holidays and find something new.

 - Going back to Thanksgiving: Hero Games has been around for 30 years with ups and downs. The economy's been pretty rough lately, as has the gaming market. With declining sales and fewer releases, Hero has reached the point where it's no longer possible to maintain a full time staff of three, so it's scaling back. Darren and Steve will be departing December 2nd, with our thanks for a decade of hard work that gave us 108 books, and best wishes for their future endeavors, which may include producing new books under a Hero System license. We'll keep you posted on that. Jason will remain to continue shipping books and handling day-to-day matters. Existing books will continue to be available for purchase, and the company will continue in business, just a bit more slowly. The online store remains open. Steve will continue to answer rules questions on the Hero boards as "the guy who wrote the rulebook." We're looking into doing a Kickstarter to print Book of the Empress, since it's complete and ready to go. For the near future Hero would appreciate your kind thoughts and your patience. Transition periods of this sort take time, and Jason has a lot of work cut out for him, so the support of our fans is much appreciated. Wow more good news. Forum discussion here.

I think Hero's biggest problem is that while it has a great system (one of the best if you like crunch) it doesn't have any compelling worlds to play in. 5th edition was sold primarily as a toolkit and the game universes were left as sort of an add-on. People get interested in systems but they get attached to worlds and Hero has little in the way of shared experiences the way everything from D&D to RuneQuest to Traveller to Pathfinder has. Even Champions has only a proto-universe that gets rewritten every time the edition changes. The first Champions game I played had Gargoyle and Marksman as heroes. Then we got Seeker and Obsidian. Now we have Ironclad and some other new faces. Sure some of the villains are still in the game, and some of the organizations, but they change pretty drastically between editions too, and that's their BEST universe! What's a compelliong reason to play Star Hero? It lets you do anything you want? Traveller covers a lot of that ground, and so does Savage Worlds, and if I'm looking for a universe they have everything from the Third Imperium to Hammer's Slammers to Slipstream! Same question for Fantasy Hero - if I haven't been a fan since the 80's or 90's, why should I even look at it? Between the 14 versions of D&D out there from OSR clones to Pathfinder to 4E I have a whole lot of D&D to choose from. Oh wait, it's "not D&D"? Well I have everything from RQ to  WFRP to Savage Worlds (again! - Evernight, Sundered Skies, etc.) for "not-D&D". Fantasy Hero's potential campaign worlds get 1 book (at most) and then get changed in every edition (80's-90's-00's) anyway! I know the thinking is that Hero players prefer to create their own worlds but does that mean you shouldn't try to create some compelling world to share with your players instead of yet another edition of "300 pages of pre-built spells" ? I suspect 6th edition Hero will sputter along for a while under most people's radar until some new blood/new money gets interested and takes a run at a 7th edition.

 - Dark Sun 4E: I realize I'm a year behind on this one but I finally got it, read it, and it's a pretty good version of Dark Sun. I think it's great for Heroic, interesting for Paragon, and then I'd like to know what Epic is supposed to be about. With no gods and almost no planar travel, then if you're playing the game of thrones at Paragon what do you do after that? Conquer the world? Alright I guess. Restore the world? Even at Epic that seems like more of a long-term mission than something you roll dice for - "Alright now we're in the Great Slat Flats - roll your Gardening check, DC 50 - OK, it's green again. See you next week!" I think it needs something more. Maybe you restore an old battleship and head off through Astral Space to Iskandar or something, but I don't think it's a great setting for Epic as it stands right now. Earlier levels though, I can see it being a fun change of pace from the usual approach.

 - The Sellswords Trilogy:

• Servant of the Shard - This first one is OK, but it was written yeras before the next two and was notable at the time as the first Drizzt novel without Drizzt. It does wrap up the story of the Crystal Shard nicely though.
• Promise of the Witch King - This second one is actually pretty good, and serves as a shining example of how an "evil" party of characters might go adventuring together to investigate/avert/steal from a larger threat. I really liked it.
• Road of the Patriarch - The third one is terrible as it picks up right where #2 leaves off and then goes in a completely different direction, focusing back in on Artemis Entreri, particularly his bad childhood which I didn't find all that interesting. I also think that Calimshan had been covered pretty thouroughly in the earlier books and wow, the world's greatest assassin takes his revenge on a corrupt local priest - whee. A letdown after #2.

 - Obligatory End-of-Year-Prediction: Despite pronouncements to the contrary when 4E was released that we would never need it, and despite pronouncements that Essentials was and was not 4.5, I think that we will probably see D&D 5th Edition announced in 2012, probably at GenCon, for a 2013 release. The timing works with a 2013 release coming 5 years after the 2008 release of 4E. Beyond that I don't think they would have hired Monte Cook this year if they didn't have a job for him to do, and I suspect that job is 5E. 

Now that all that is out of the way, I have to say that for me 2011 started off on the lower end of things and has ramped up nicely in the family, professional, and recreational sense. I hope 2012 continues the trend, and if your personal trend hasn't been going the same way then I hope it turns around soon. I plan to continue the blog through thick and thin so there should be no major changes here.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from the Family Blacksteel! See you in 2012!

WFRP Campaign Thoughts

The Warhammer universe is extremely rich, which, oddly enough, makes it difficult to decide what kind of campaign to run. For some games, they are built around a particular type of play: Mechwarrior is mainly aimed at playing giant robot drivers; Shadowrun is focused on largely criminal behavior by off-the-grid free agents;. Sure, you can try something else but the premise of the game and most supporting material drives it in a particular direction. Other games present a universe and a mechanical system for playing in that universe and leave the rest up to you: Traveller is pretty strong at this, and most universal type games are good at this. Even something like a Star Trek game can fall into this category: Fasa Trek started out centered around playing Star Fleet officers out exploring the galaxy. Over time it added support for the major alien races for similar kinds of campaigns, then it added rules for the intelligence services opening things up for espionage type games, then it added rules for playing a merchant type campaign as well. After digging through my WFRP material I would add it to the list of games that says "here's a universe - go!"

The mechanical part of the game does make certain assumptions:

- you're playing a human, elf, dwarf, or halfling. That covers some physical items but culturally there are a lot of options that are independent of physical race.

- technology is at a renaissance level: armor, swords, early firearms, telescopes, and some beginning experiments with steam power

- magic is present, unpredictable, powerful, and dangerous

- there are gods in the universe that are benevolent to indifferent

- there is a thing called Chaos that underlies the world, it's bad, and it contains entities that care nothing for the current state of the world or the beings that live in it

There are not a lot of assumptions, though, about what characters will be doing. There is a combat system, but it's pretty d*mn dangerous and it is explicitly stated in the game that a lot of combat leads to maimed and dead characters, so much so that a Fate point mechanic was added to help mitigate the seriousness of those consequences. There are various skills and abilities that relate to personal interaction between characters and to business transactions too.

I could certainly see running a traditional D&D style campaign that involves dungeon and wilderness encounters on a personal quest for wealth and power - it would probably feel quite different than most D&D campaigns but it could be done.

Having recently looked through Pendragon and then through my Bretonnia supplement, I think you could run a very solid "Lords and Ladies" campaign similar to what a Pendragon game would encompass set in Bretonnia and involving a little more of the fantastic than a baseline Pendragon game. I'm thinking about writing this up in more detail a bit later but I do like the idea of combining these two things.

You could run a Traveller-style Merchant game running a ship up and down the major river of the Empire.

If you wanted to tie in the Warhammer miniatures game you could have a very fine Mercenary campaign that included some occasional mass battles.

Need political intrigue? The nobles of ther Empire are quite a bickering lot, as are the major religions, and then there are the hidden threats of Chaos cults and the Skaven to make things even more shadowy that stubborn noble houses.

Picking up the Tome of Corruption supplement then you could flip things upside down and go over to Chaos, running a campaign where each player runs an aspiring champion of chaos, perhaps using the recent Storm of Chaos invasion as the background.

There is another supplement that covers the Border Princes but is largely composed of a system for creating, mapping, and then managing a small realm  pacified, claimed, and run by the player characters.

Now you could try a lot of these in various editions of D&D but the difference here is that there is quite a bit of support, both mechanical and with background material and advice for each of them. That was not always true in various editions of D&D - or Runequest or Fantasy Hero or whatever other system you care to compare. The fact that all of these options feel like they could fit coherently within one edition of a game set in one particular fantasy world is a pretty strong positive in my opinion. I like the idea that I could run 3 different campaigns at the same time in this world and not feel like I'm repeating myself at any point.  

I also think that this could be run as an episodic campaign if the DM had a particular aspect in mind - say one fo the items above - but it could also run just fine as an open-ended-wander-the-world-and-see-what-happens kind of game. I do think I would run it as a more traditional serial campaign in most cases as that just feels more right to me in an age when traveling long distances is supposed to be part of the adventure. You're in Altdorf and need to talk to someone in Marienburg? Getting there might be a whole session in itself whether by land or by sea!

There are several published starting scenarios, more if you drop back and use some of the old 1st edition material. There are quite a few published adventures, both long and short, linked and independent, enough to sustain a decent campaign if that's the way you wanted to go. I do like the idea of using some of those for that shared experience  that lets you swap stories with other players about how YOU handled that trouble in Bogenhafen, but I would definitely want to mix in my own stuff as well. The border princes book is pratically a campaign in itself, as is the mammoth Thousand Thrones advanture and the Altdorf-Nuln-Middenheim trilogy. For a limited campaign I think any of those is a solid choice.

This is a little more general than I originally planned but I have some ideas on some specific campaigns that I will get into in a little more detail and some other ideas too.

Motivational Monday

Deadlands - A Campaign Discussion

Begin: It's 1876 and the PC"s are on a train headed through the Rockies to Denver. This is the starting adventure from the older GM's book and it makes for an easy justification of why a diverse group of characters might end up stuck together. Unless one of them decides to play an old ways Indian - still not sure about that but my players tend to like their guns so it's not likely to come up.


-ANYWAY-


That gets the characters acquainted and has one adventure binding them together. I see this as being a more episodic approach with each session being somewhat independent of the others and whichever players can make it determines which characters show up. I see this as being a tour of the Weird West for a while - Texas, Denver, Salt Lake, the Great Maze & Lost Angels - hitting the high points.  Then there would be a sort of finale of the big trilogy of linked adventures that I would convert over from original flavor Deadlands to wrap things up for "Season 1".


Keeping the scenarios short enough to fit into one 4-6 hour session would be a specific major goal. I haven't tried to run an explicitly episodic game since a Shadowrun game several years ago. That one had mixed results as my ideas were hard to fit into a single session's worth of time and so we had a lot of "two part episodes". I think Savage Worlds as a system is a better bet for this approach as it plays faster than just about anything I have tried. The one-sheet adventure is also a popular format for it, featuring an adventure that fits onto one sheet of paper (front and back) with the assumption that it's one session's worth of fun. I also think that the Western genre is friendly to this approach as so much of it built up in half-hour or one-hour TV shows that quite a few of the basic plots one could steal are fairly short. The basic idea is that the characters enter the town (or the mining camp, or the ranch), discover a situation, get involved, and resolve it, most likely leaving behind friends, enemies, or corpses - all within one session. Next week, it's all new. After a while, past encounters might show up again in some way via NPC's or enemies or news from a town they know, but I wouldn't want to go overboard on that.


The advantage for the DM if you can pull it off is that a) you get to try out a lot of different ideas and b) if only players X,Y, and Z can make it one week but only players A,B, and Z can make it the next week then you don't have to deal with the sudden appearance and disappearance of PC's in the middle of a situation. It also means you don't really have to worry about the passage of time as you're not playing a linear, continuous campaign. If they're in Denver one week and in Fort Worth the next, then in Tombstone the next we don't have to worry about rations and horses or train tickets and stage schedules every session - we just start with "As you step off of the train, you hear gunfire coming from downtown Tombstone and see people running past you, presumably fleeing."


Original vs. Published? Probably some of both. There are quite a few online freebies for Deadlands Reloaded, plus I have quite a bit of material from the first go-round including the Devil's Tower trilogy. I would mainly want to spend some time in each of the high-profile areas to see which of them connect the best with my players and to give them maximum exposure to the lore of the game. For a hypothetical "Season Two" I would consider settling down in one area, maybe focusing on one town, with some old and some new characters, close to whatever region/threat/plotline they liked the best. The amount of published material used would mainly depend on whether it fit into these plans.


A Planned Campaign: This means it would be planned to have a start and a finish. Say we planned to start in January 2012 and run for one year of real time - this would be the "2012 Dealdands Campaign"-  figure 2 sessions per month for 24 sessions. Make a rough outline of what 24 things I would like to cover, work out some details on the first 3 or 4, then go! One of the benefits of doing it this way (episodic and planned with a definite end) is that it doesn't really matter if some of the PC's die or are replaced as the sessions aren't linked in a serial fashion. Some bad guy NPC or organization might show up a few times in different sessions both in the background and as direct opposition to set up the finale, but it wouldn't be a running chase from one to the next unless I saw a really good opportunity to work that in.  One alternate approach is that if you're tied to a school year, then plan your campaign based on that - start in the fall, mini-climax at the break, picks up again in the new year, then runs to May and the big finale. Season Two? See you next fall!


Oddly enough this is a complete 180 from the approach I believed in the first 20 years or so of this whole thing. I was "raised" to think that the open-ended-multi-year-ongoing campaign was the "right" - heck the "only"- way to do it and any campaign that we started was expected to go on forever unless it was explicitly stated to be a one-shot up front. Now this didn't happen - every campaign petered out eventually due to player and DM fatigue or interest in trying out whatever shiny new game someone had just acquired. This can lead to some churn in both players and campaigns and it also means that some adventures end in the middle, with no end to the story - did we finish off the giants? Did we stop the drow? For some parties we will never know, because we stopped in the middle and never got to the end. Putting a definite timeframe on the campaign avoids that issue, assuming you can stick with it all the way through. Hmm, maybe I should shoot for a 12-episode mini-series...


What to include? Well I really like the Great Maze region - City of Lost Angels, Shan Fan and the Kung Fu thing, maze dragons, ironclads, ghost rock mines - that's an area I want to spend some time exploring. Heck, I'll run a thinly disguised version of Big Trouble in Little China set in Shan Fan - there's one! I also think that Salt Lake, Helstromme, automatons, steam wagons, and the worms are important enough to spend some time on too. In between I think some more traditional western locales like Tombstone and Deadwood are worthy of some time. I feel like I should work at least one brush with the Blue vs. Gray in there too. A few "normal" western problems like rustlers and bank robbers would help set off the weirdness too, so I would want to work those in as well. I think there's plenty of material there to fill 24 sessions and let them start to figure out what's *really* going on.


Of course all this only matters if I run it as the "main" game. If it's only one of my "games of the month" with the Apprentices then I only have 3 sessions to worry about anyway, and now I'm overstocked with ideas. Someday...


Tomorrow: A very similar post about a completely different game

Blogonomic Slowdown

Well with the kids deployed to various other houses and much holiday shopping in the evenings there hasn't been much actual gaming to report.With a need for a new "main" campaign, and the possibilitiy of doing a game a month with the Apprentices next year I've been digging through the shelves and burning through game books like a madman. Deadlands (SW), Traveller (Mongoose), Shadowrun (3E), GURPS (4E), Warhammer FRP (2E) and even Pendragon have all been seeing some daylight. I even finally broke down and picked up Dark Sun for 4E and it's on the stack now too. I'll probably put up some thoughts about each of these (the ones I haven't already anyway) as far as strengths, weaknesses, and what kind of campaign I might run. It's not super crunchy I know, but it's what I have right now. There's also a set of games that I've mostly ignored that are looming as extremely likely possibilities to show up in a big way too.

Motivational Monday

The Game That's On My Mind This Week: Traveller

I've been re-reading the Mongoose Traveller main book this week and it's amazing just how well the system hangs together. Traveller was probably the first non-D&D RPG I got into , around 1981, and the Mongoose version is very similar to that original set of little black books yet it feels very modern in many ways too.

Looking back on the multitude of sessions I've played and run with this game I can say that almost all of them were set in the Third Imperium and almost all of them eventually involved some illegal activity. Sad but true...maybe the game needs an alignment system...

One other thing that strikes me is that most of the time players want to operate at the higher end of the tech level scale - anything less than TL15 is weak and needs to be upgraded as soon as possible. I blame the setting info that the Imperium is TL15 as setting the bar a little higher than I would like. This has gotten me thinking about a different type of campaign - what if you held on to most of the basic Traveller assumptions but dropped the history and assumed that TL10 was common, TL11-12 was cutting edge, and TL9 was where most people operated, especially interstellar operations. Lowest common denominator means it's easier to find parts and crews and probably cheaper too.

This would keep the most common jump capabilities in the 1-2 range, keeps things in the sweet spot for a lot of gear (giving your mercenaries somewhere to climb to that doesn't involve fusion guns), and provides a better explanation for why so many spacers run around with shotguns and cutlasses instead of lasers and plasma guns.

Politically I see it as a region of individual systems with a few extrasystem colonies discovering and competing with each other in an economic and military sense but without open warfare just yet. I see it as a post-collapse recovery but with whatever interstellar empire once existed being a vague legend.

What would characters do? The traditional merchants and mercenaries campaigns are an option but so would a "Shadowrun" type game where the PC's move in between the major players as independent free agents. If someone is a scientist or academic then the discovery of ancient tech (TL15 maybe) could lead to a surge of interest in archaeology (and the men with guns who guard that work). The lack of knowledge of what's in every single system would make it much easier for pirates to operate and a campaign could go hard in a "Pirates of the Stellar Caribbean" way. Combine that with the ancient tech plotline and you have a lot of material to work with and a lot of directions to go. Merchants could be part of the regular supply run to a dig site. Agents might be infiltrators from a corporate entity or rival government that wants to keep an eye on things. Drifters might be hired for basic labor tasks like digging. I think having a solid outline for your initial adventure or starting situation makes it easy to include almost any character type - then let events run their course and see what the players do.

I guess that my point is that it would be refreshing to run and play Traveller in an area where everything isn't "known" but not where galactic society is in a total dark age with unrepairable declining tech ala 40K and early Battletech. I thnk there's a fertile middle ground that I know I have yet to explore where the tech is higher than our world today but not dramatically so and where some of the big picture is visible and the rest begs to be explored - preferably by player characters.

Blast from the Past

Digging through the pile of papers and CD's under my desk I came across a soundtrack CD I burned for one of my 3E campaigns. It still worked and kind of got me back in that mindset for a little while.  Here's the track list:

The notation for most of those means "Autumn Thunder" the NFL Films soundtrack collection from a few years ago which is surpisingly handy for a lot of RPG type background music when you've burned out Conan & LOTR and should be useful even for some non-fantasy games.

This campaign was a combination of the Freeport adventures and the Savage Tide adventure path from Dungeon and I was pretty fired up about it. Each character got a track, each adventure got a track, and there were others beyond that. I have more detail in this post.

It went over pretty well, but I have yet to do it again. Accounting for character death and replacement was tricky - new track? Replace the original track? I just left it unchanged for the campaign and decided I would do a "Remastered" version if we ever finished. As it turned out we did not, so I never had to undertake it.

I compiled this one pretty much solo. Next time I might ask for more player input on their personal themes, but that can drag things out. It was pretty satisfying having this ready to go for the very first session, running it in the room while eats and drinks were prepped and dice were warmed up. I'm going to have to take a look at doing it again, just to see if I can improve it.

A Glimmer of Hope for 2012

I don't want last week's pondering to make it seem like I'm all down on the future of RPG's. Though there's not a ton out there right now that I want but don't already have, I did see some things coming next year that I am very interested in.

First, from Mongoose:

Last but by no means least, a new universe will be coming to Traveller. Under our agreement with Amarillo Design Bureau, we were to produce a Star Fleet Universe edition of A Call to Arms and, in return, ADB were to produce a Traveller edition of their Star Fleet Universe game, Prime Directive. This will appear in 2012, and we have requested it cover not just Federation away teams and independent free traders, but bridge crews for, well, all the key empires – here at Mongoose, we can’t wait to jump in with a Klingon bridge crew campaign!

Prime Directive is Original Series Trek split off before any of the movies or Next Generations took place. There's a ton of background for it developed over the last 30+ years with Star Fleet Battles and there have been RPG versions in the original system, d20, and GURPS but I think using Traveller could lead to the best system yet by far. There's a lot going on in the Star Fleet Universe and finally having a decent set of mechanics to play it should be a lot of fun.




Second:



MARGARET WEIS PRODUCTIONS TEAMS UP WITH MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT TO UNLEASH MARVEL HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAMES
August 2011—Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd., a publisher of cutting-edge roleplaying and adventure games, is thrilled to announce MARVEL HEROES, a family of tabletop RPG products under license from Marvel Entertainment, LLC. Beginning with the launch of the BASIC GAME in February 2012, MARVEL HEROES delivers action-packed Super Hero adventure in the Mighty Marvel Manner.

I think this was announced at GenCon but I had forgotten it, then I ran across it while catching up on Vigilance Press podcasts. I have not been a fan of MWP's products thus far - Smallville, Leverage, etc. as they were just not my cup of tea. Their existing system was somewhat similar to Savage Worlds, I know, but I'm guessing it will be tweaked and tweaked hard for Marvel. I don't know that it stands a chance against M&M3/DCA with a lot of people but I'm happy to see it being worked on and I'll give it a look when it comes out. The basic book is supposed to be based on the beginning of New Avengers (the breakout) and then the 3 big releases will cover Civil War, Annihilation, and Age of Apocalypse - sounds pretty solid to me.

So there we go: two solid, interesting products for 2012! Familiar universes, no doubt, but with a different spin that should be worth a look.