Pourin' Out a Little Liquor

I just started gaming with a new face-to-face group about a month ago.  We're running through a Pathfinder campaign right now, and while it's not my favorite system, I do enjoy getting back into face to face gaming.

With that being said, it's always a bit awkward at the beginning, especially when you're joining an established group.  There's an entire world of shared memories and experiences and inside jokes that you haven't been a part of yet and while the longer you are a part of the group, the more of those become your own, at first it can be difficult.

Sorting through all of this on my way back from the game, I began to wax nostalgic about my old gaming groups, so I thought I'd put up a tribute to all my old groups.

My first group was, as I'm sure is common to most of us, a group of kids from school.  Most of us were in the same grade, except one guy that was a grade ahead of us.  Even though we didn't know what a grognard was at the time, we were still able to conceptualize the idea, because he had played white box with his uncle when he was younger and would always talk about how that system was better than this newjack 2e.  The rest of us only knew 2e, though, and we loved it.  We had our established GM who also played his Mary Sue sorta-NPC, the guy who always played a dwarf, another guy who always played sneaky thieves, you know the group.  You've PLAYED with that group.  Anyway, we'd get together a couple times a month at one of our houses and, fueled by soda, candy and potato chips, we'd game until the sun came up, then pass out and sleep until noon.  Eventually, we left 2e behind for other games - Gamma World, Warhammer, Twilight 2000, before settling on Old World of Darkness sometime during High School, and that was our jam until we graduated.  Folks went off to college, and that was the end of that group.

There was a long stretch where I didn't game at all.  Life was pretty hectic, and there just wasn't any time for it.  It wasn't until I was about 25 that I found myself back at my folks' house, digging through the detritus of my youth that I found my old Gamma World 1e box set.  Sitting on my old bed, flipping through it, I remembered spending how much fun roleplaying was.  I thought of the late nights, the laughter and the camaraderie.  I remembered sunny afternoons flipping through the 2e Player's Handbook while Pink Floyd sang about how "Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell draws the faithful to their knees in a softly spoken magic spells."

Just like that, I was hooked again.  I called around to my old group to see who was still in town, found a couple of them, and we agreed to start getting together weekly.  A few of the old gang brought some new faces along, and we decided to go with Gamma World, mostly I think because I was the only one who actually brought a game to the first get together.  From there on out, we'd meet in my apartment, which was in a not-so-great part of town that was right next to the bar district, and we'd leave the windows open to let the sounds of the city filter through as background noise.  We spent the better part of a year tripping the light post-apocalyptic before my job moved me to Texas and, for the second time, I had to say goodbye to my friends.

Shortly after I moved to Texas, I discovered the Pen and Paper Games forum, which has (or had, to be honest I haven't been there in awhile) a very lively section for DFW gamers.  Not knowing a blessed soul in the area, I figured this was as good a way to meet people as any, so I started looking for open games.  I met up with the group at a local Barnes & Noble for the first meeting, where we talked through 4e (which had just been released), and the GM explained his idea for the campaign.  The group was mostly older guys, I think I was the youngest one there, but there was good stuff in the mix there. The GM was invested in his campaign, the players were enthusiastic (well, except one Guy, but he was the gruff sort anyways) and we had a blast.  Unfortunately, as time went by, my job got pretty crazy, with 60-80 hour work weeks being the norm, and I just didn't have the time or energy to devote to a game, my future wife, and my sanity.  Something had to give, and it was the game.

The campaign obviously carried on without me, and the GM was nice enough, when it finally wrapped, to shoot me an email containing an afterword he'd written for my character, detailing how his life had progressed after I'd left.

I got word at some point that one of the guys that had been in the group had succumbed to a long illness he'd been battling as longs as we'd known him, and the GM and I saw each other at the wake and agreed to keep in touch.

When my workload eventually lightened, I decided to take another crack at a Gamma World game, and put an ad up on Pen and Paper.  I convinced two of my IRL friends who had never roleplayed to give it a shot, and together with a husband and wife team and their friend and another guy who looked just like the Dean from Community, we started a new campaign.  My apartment had zero parking and wasn't all that big, so after one attempt to run it at my place, we moved it to the husband and wife's house.  The group was great - we probably shot the shit more that we actually played, but we had a blast doing it.  While one of my IRL friends didn't stick with it very long, the other enjoyed the hell out of it, and we ran through 4e Gamma World for about a year.  Unfortunately, my work picked up again, and they lived a half hour away.  In normal times, it didn't bother me too much to play till midnight and then drive home, but after an 70 hour work week, I just didn't have it in me, and I had to bow out of that one.

There was another lull in gaming for awhile as I dug myself out of my workhole before the GM from the 4e campaign called me up and asked if I wanted to try out a game called Labyrinth Lord.  He was gaming with his son and another guy from the old campaign, and we sat around his kitchen table and rolled up new characters for an open world, sandbox style game.  Our first time out the gate, we rolled up a green dragon as a random encounter, people died, and it was fun.  We kept on going, slowly adding people as we went.  The son of the guy who had passed away joined up, and we moved the games to his house.  A friend of his played video games in the background, but was slowly drawn in by the laughter emanating from around the table.  We went from Labyrinth Lord to Stars Without Number, to Traveler.  I tried my hand at GMing again, running them through 2e, then World of Darkness.  At our height, we were getting together six to eight times a month.  This was probably the longest I put in with a group since my high school group, and I enjoyed the hell out if it.

Then it ended.

To be honest, I'm still not really sure why, and at this point, I guess it doesn't really matter.  One week we were gaming, and then next we weren't.  One of them said they were burnt out, and everyone just evaporated.  I was in the process of moving away from the area that we'd been congregating in, so to be honest, it would have been harder to keep getting there, but it was still weird, to have a group of people that you spend that much time with just not be there anymore.

At some point towards the end of the old group, I got into Constantcon style gaming, and got together with (in order of beardedness)  +Wayne Snyder, +Edgar Johnson, +Adam Muszkiewicz, +Bear Wojtek and +Gabriel Perez Gallardi, we have explored deepest darkest Ur-Hadad, Survived Fort Simian, slew Mushroom Wizards and smoked their brains, etc etc.  You had to be there sort of stuff.  It's still ongoing, and it's been epic..  

Still, after the end of the old face to face group, I fell into a bit of a funk, and while I kept myself busy moving myself, my wife, our cats, a condo full of stuff (books), and two storage sheds full of more stuff (more books) into our house (a process which took way longer than it really should have), I didn't do much face to face gaming, or blogging about gaming for that matter.

Then I heard from the husband and wife gamers, who were looking to start up the Pathfinder game.  I am the New Guy in a group that has been playing together for the better part of thirty years, and once again I'm probably the youngest person there, so it can be a bit of a struggle at times, but we're busy creating new things together, so it'll get easier with time.  They've got a Runequest game that they play on alternate weekends that I think I'm going to jump on, and the wife keeps threatening to run a Call of Cthulhu game at some point.   Each game starts with a potluck dinner.  We eat well, shoot the shit for awhile, then kill some orcs for a bit.   It's a good group with good people, and it's good to be gaming face to face again.

So for all the groups that I've gamed with before, this one is for you.

My Love Letter to White Wolf

I still remember exactly how I was introduced to White Wolf.  I was in high school, and my gaming group was sitting around the table when I was handed a dog-eared copy of the first edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.  It was already looking a bit beaten up, with the claw marks in the cover starting to tear, and the edges of the book starting to curl, like an old textbook.  I flipped through it idly, and asked, "So we're like, hippies?"  and my friend snatched it back, flipped through the pages until he came to a two page splash of two werewolves eviscerating each other, superimposed over text describing combat.  "Fuck that, we're PISSED OFF hippies," he replied.

You have to understand, prior to that, my group had only played AD&D 2nd Edition.  There was very little subtlety to our adventures - 14th level was our 1st level, we all started off with 2 magical items, and we rolled in a flying ship, battling tarrasques and nests of elder red dragons, and our final bosses were gods as often as not.  Our missions were all combat based, with a few traps and mostly given to us by mysterious hooded strangers in bars.  You know - we were that type of group.

Werewolf was something else entirely.

There was nothing heroic about it - the world had gone to shit and it was your own fault.  You fought, knowing that by fighting you were surrendering your own humanity in what would likely end up being a pointless battle - the enemy had already won by the time your troops ever hit the field.  The End Times Were Here, Baby, and you were damned if you did, damned if you didn't.

And yet, you fought - but did you fight because it was the right thing to do, because you didn't know what else to do, or because it was all you knew how to do?  So many questions, so much ambiguity, so completely unlike any of the games we'd been playing up until that point.

And the world - it combined the best aspects of comic books, sequential novels and role playing games - it was a fully realized world (or at least it seemed to be in those heady days), that still left enough unspoken that there was room to breathe.  My only other experience with world building on this level was the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, but both of which had been paved over by the stories of others that it didn't feel as though there was any room for my characters - why were they hiring us when Elminster was right around the corner?  The World of Darkness, though, had nooks and crannies, darkened corners and shadowy alleyways with room enough for everyone.

At first, we played it true to what we knew - half the party were Ahroun Get of Fenris basic fighter types.  But as we went along, we started playing around with it - someone put their primary stats into Social, and decided his character owned a bar, and didn't appreciate it when the Gets went full Crinos during happy hour.  Another created a Scottish Fianna Bagpiper, and soon we had a wacky bunch of misfits, none of which were worth a shit in battle, and our GM had to start thinking of... y'know.... OTHER stuff for us to do besides kill formori.

I picked up Mage: The Ascension not long after, and then things got really crazy.  Playing characters who could literally do anything, we got into all kinds of mischief, constrained only by the limits of our imagination.  I picked up Wraith and Changeling, and while we were intrigued by the ideas presented, neither seemed to mesh with our style of play.  Strangely, although we had a copy of Vampire, without articulating it exactly, we could sense that the game was a bit too "scene" for us, and while one of our group talked about playing Wednesday Addams as a Tremere, we never found a good way to integrate her into what had become a MageWolf game.

These were the last games that my original gaming group ever played.  We went our separate ways, and while we got together briefly for a few months six or seven years ago, we never did recapture the same cohesiveness that we had in those halcyon days.

So I wasn't playing any longer, and while I picked up some of the novels here and there, I found them fairly bland, and not representative of the feel that I had gotten from reading the game books.  I drifted - I wasn't gaming, and had mostly forgotten about the World of Darkness.  Then in 1999, White Wolf released the first Vampire Clan Novel, Toreador.  I picked it up on a whim, and was sucked right back in.  It took them 262 pages to completely and utterly knock over the apple cart, totally disrupting the status quo of the World of Darkness, and I couldn't get enough.  To make matters worse, they started integrating their game books into the novels, with the two working in concert - the novels gave personal accounts of the events that took place, while the game books told you what actually happened, as opposed to what was experienced.  This had it's good points and bad (I understand why they didn't spell out the Technocracy dropping a "spirit nuke" on the warring antediluvians in India, but without it, most of the Ravnos novel made absolutely no sense), and in general while it made for excellent marketing, it made it a pain in the ass to keep up with the narrative.

But keep up with it I did, and followed along through the Dark Ages novels, then the Werewolf Tribe books, the Mage novels with the destruction of Doissetep, you name it, I was there.  To this day, I speak fluent Classic World of Darkness, as it's apparently known now.  Gangrel Antitribu, Gnosis, Deathmarks, the Autumn People, the Earthbound, I absorbed it all.

And then, it all went away.

They wrapped up the cWoD, wholesale.  The novels were fairly good, the closeout gamebooks offered some interesting ideas, even if they were frustratingly vague.  As was their wont, each novel was a personal tale, with little of the big picture that I craved, and while they provided the gamebooks as usual, this time they just gave suggestions on how each GM could end things, should they so choose.  Frustrating, but honestly, it was about as good of a sendoff as the line was going to get.

I remember standing in my FLGS, holding the New World of Darkness book in my hand, and thinking, "Do I really want to get back on this train?"  I had ridden the beast from it's inception to its apocalypse, what more did it have to offer me?  I put the book down, and haven't looked back since.

For ages, my bookshelves had groaned under the weight of the WoD books, but as more RPG books came in, they began to fight for space, and gradually the World of Darkness was edged off of my shelves, and into storage, until there was nothing left.  I still had the trade paperback versions of the clan novels on my shelves, but for the first time in ages, I had no White Wolf game books on my shelf.  It was around that time that I was swept up in the Old School Rennaisance, so I didn't miss it much.

Then last week, I was at my local Half Price Books browsing the clearance shelves, and lo and behold, there were two copies of the Second Edition of Werewolf.  You know, the one with the Tony DiTerlizzi comic book at the beginning of the book?  The spines were a bit loose, but they were otherwise in pristine condition.  Nonetheless, HPB had marked them at $5 each.  Impulsively, I grabbed them, not knowing what I would do with them, but just feeling as though they deserved better than the $5 bin at HPB.  They sat in my truck that day while I worked, but it was as though they had opened a floodgate, and I started thinking about the great times I'd had playing it, how much I loved the world, the charactes.

That night was my Traveller game, and I gave the books to the group, and basically browbeat them into agreeing to giving it a shot.  It's going to be a challenge - they're the type that see a wall, lower their heads and charge.

I'm not sure if it's going to work.  I'm prepared for it to fail utterly.  But I'm playing old World of Darkness again, and I can't wait to see what happens!

I'm In A Post-Apocalyptic State of Mind

My wife and I are driving cross country, from Dallas, TX to Flagstaff, AZ on our honeymoon.  We plan to see the Grand Canyon, then take Route 66 back to Dallas.  We left Dallas on Friday afternoon, stayed in Oklahoma City Friday night, and made it to Albuquerque, NM late yesterday evening.

I often find that folks from other parts of the world, and even other parts of the US, don't really appreciate just how friggin' huge the southwestern part of the United States is.  For instance, the only reason we drove through Oklahoma at all was because it was quicker to go up to Oklahoma City, then west to Amarillo Texas than it was to drive directly to Amarillo from Dallas.  Yes, we have entire states that exist to be shortcuts through other states.  After a day and a half driving, we're in our third state, but we're really only a state and a half away from where we started.  Wrap your mind around that.

Further, calling stretches of our trip thus far desolate would be understating the matter.  Gigantic wind turbines and cows are all that break up the scenery for miles at a time.  It's mostly grassland and prairie through Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle, but as you get into New Mexico, it changes.  The grass thins out, replaced by pockets of shrubs, and honest-to-god tumbleweed.  At first, just faint outlines in the distance, you begin to see mountains rising up on the horizon, hazy blue in color.  Along the sides of the road are abandoned buildings, long surrendered to nature.  Texaco signs missing the X and the C, free-standing chimneys with the buildings they once warmed lying in ruin around them.  As you approach Albuquerque, the  mountains loom above you, when suddenly the road veers sharply to the south, going through a valley south of town before juking back up north to bring you into the sun-baked adobe homes that are scattered around the town.  As the sun goes down, you can't help but think that while Big Sky Country may be Montana's nickname, it applies equally well down here - the colors radiate out from the sunset, stretching almost to the opposite horizon.  The sun dips below the horizon as you enter town, and you find city colors replace it - underpasses are lit by lamps of shifting hues, from reds to blues to yellows and back again.  Driving through Albuquerque at night is a surreal experience.

And of course, finding myself in Albuquerque, I can't help but think of the Albuquerque Star Port Mini-Adventure, packaged in with early editions of Gamma World.  I have a soft spot in my heart for this adventure, I remember reading in the back seat of the car on a trip back when I was a kid.  It was the first Gamma World adventure that I ever played, and the first one that I ever GM'd.  The wonder of the adventure stays with me to this day - midway through, there's the big mindtwist, as you find out something you're exploring isn't quite what you thought it was, and suddenly you're looking at things from a very different perspective.

I've been focused on fantasy RPGs of late, but this trip is tickling a part of me that has been resting for awhile.  I feel a need for some Post-Apocalyptic RPGing coming on.  I need to gather some folks looking to explore the wastelands, to protect the villagers from rampaging hordes of mutants, to recover lost artifacts of the Ancients, to venture into the Bones of the Giants.

Other Dust, Mutant Future, Gamma World, hell maybe I'll even finish up on From the Ashes.

G+ Gaming

Ages ago, I used to game with a group that had a member who was out of town frequently.  He drove an eighteen wheeler for a living, and would spend weeks at a time living in hotel rooms in one horse towns.  Like airline pilots, truck drivers can't drink when they're on schedule, and there were only so many days he could sit in a room and read or watch television.  So his friends, the great people that they were, jury-rigged a setup to allow him to role play with them.  They hung a microphone from the ceiling in the middle of the table, and sat a speaker on the table in front of the seat where he would sit when he was with them, and he would play right along with us.

These were less technologically adept days, the phone line was analog, we took his dice rolls on faith (although the general consensus was that he rolled a suspiciously high number of critical hits compared to the rest of us), there were lots of, "Wait, what did he say?"s from us, and even more, "Could you repeat that?"s from him, and the general feeling was more like sitting on a conference call than playing an RPG, but hey - it kept him sane, it kept the GM from having to come up with in-game reasons for the guy's character's absences every couple of weeks, and it kept the group together.  It wasn't ideal, but it pretty much kinda almost worked, most of the time.

Flash forward to the present, and I'm hearing about playing on g+, and the first thing I think of is all the nights spent shouting into the microphone and trying to figure out whether he said, "I hit it with my axe", or, "That pit is full of cats!"

I received lots of positive responses from my previous post regarding online gaming, so I've been keeping my eye out on g+ looking for games and my god, I had no idea there were games going on at such odd hours.  A good part of it is time zones, I'm sure, but it seemed like half the games were either happening while I was working or sleeping.  Then along came an opportunity too good to pass up.  Edgar Johnson and Adam Muszkiewicz run a game on Thursdays using DCC RPG called the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad.  They were wrapping up the first adventure, the Crypt of the Lizard King.  Reading further into it, I discovered that it riffed off of Jim Morrison and the Doors, and I was sold.

Despite some technical difficulties (from what I've read online since last night, Roll20 doesn't always cooperate with the Chrome browser - switching to Firefox, check), I had a blast.  I was officially inaugurated into the ranks of the experienced when Michelangelo Aggrosong, the crowbar swinging cooper fell in glorious battle, followed shortly by Miff Sapsipper, the Elven Navigator.  Crag Beerbeard the Dwarven Blacksmith and Lardo Cutpurssian the merchant lived to die, er... I mean fight another day, and collected 5 xp each for their troubles, setting them on their way.  The highlight of the evening was a wonderful example of Death By Treasure when another party member discovered, to their horror, that a magic helm did one point of damage per round to non-chaotic characters who wore it.  He was lawful.  He only had 1 hp.  He died.

At three hours, the timing was just right, I had a blast, and I'm looking forward to the sequel, Slaves of the Silicon God!

G+ Gaming/FLAILSNAILS

So I read this page awhile back, which has prompted me to set up my +James MacGeorge g+ account, (which also explains why I've abandoned purestrainhuman, in case you were wondering - if I wanted to link my blogger account with my g+ account, I had to use a real name, not my nom de plume).  I followed all the directions on the page, and have started engaging in the online g+ community, and I'm interested in the idea of gaming via hangout and such.  While I've read the information , I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it conceptually.  I think I might need to observe a game, see how it works mechanically.  I see people talking about playing talking alligators wearing sweaters, and others playing half orc paladins, my brain turns to mush.

I haven't seen any negative reviews of the process, so it must be working for others, and I'd love the opportunity to play more games, I just need to figure out the right trajectory from which to approach it.

Stars Without Number - Dr. Ramesh Ramapudi

I've been participating in Ark's Redshirts campaign, where we play... you guessed it!  Expendable, low level characters hopelessly out of their league sent out to do the jobs nobody else wants to do.

Continuing my ongoing efforts to create characters as ill prepared for combat as possible, no matter the game, I created Scientist/Lieutenant "Professor" Ramesh Ramapudi.  Lieutenant Ramapudi carries a Laser Pistol, but barely knows which way to point it.  He is far more proficient with his Dataslab, Compad, Metatool and Survey Scanner.  He started off rather bland, somewhere between the guy that manned the science station when Spock was on a mission, and Microsoft Tech Support.  He was quiet, supportive and hung around mostly with his assistant, Petty Officer Owlicious.  He used his survey scanner to communicate with an intelligent AI, and communicated effectively with a clan of flying mosquitos.

All was going well until this mission.  This mission, the party hijacked an ancient ships warp thingamabob, discovered and awoke a shibboleth, which picked poor Ramesh up and would have eaten him, had Ramesh not been able to convincingly describe a process that would send it home (scientifically!).  The shibboleth didn't buy it, instead shaking him violently and screaming, "HOOOOWWWWWWWWWW" at him, but hey!  It didn't eat him!  The group only barely escaped the beast after a security officer sacrificed himself to take it down, detonating all of his rockets.  Escape they did, however, hacking down tree-limb sized crab legs as they went for food, finally getting back into their own ship just in time to escape being warped to god-knows-where. 

Over the course of the session, Dr. Rampaudi's calm exterior began to crack, and his fundamental, primal personality began to crystallize - calm and collected until he is placed under stress, and then the SCIENTIST SUPREME is revealed!.  The SCIENTIST SUPREME is not to be questioned or denied, as evidenced by the constant berating of his team mates for examining med packs instead of teleporting the monster into the vaccuum, for burning a round using their tactics skill to determine the best angle from which to shoot the giant frikkin monster, for wanting to shoot firearms in the room that had the warp thingamabob in it, etc etc etc.   Whenever the word "Why" was used in the form of a question, the answer was, inevitably, "SCIENCE!", and he may have, at one point, ordered a security officer to gun down a possessed team member, suggesting that he could be lazarus patched back to life later.  That last was unconfirmed, and did not make it onto his evaluation report for the session.

So it turns out that he would not have made for a good Customer Service Agent after all.  Or at least, not if he had to perform Customer Service in a war zone. 

In fact, he is sounding more and more like Dr. Nemesis, from recent X-Men comics!  Here are some of Dr. Nemesis' more choice moments, some of which actually align fairly well to situations that occurred last night....

Realism vs. Hyperrealism

Much has been made of joethelawyer's review of the session of Dwimmermount, run by Erik Tenkar, of Tenkar's Tavern fame, and I'm hardly the first to weigh in, but since when have such considerations ever stopped someone from blogging? 

There's a reason why nobody has published an rpg based on accountants who go to work every day to deal with their shitty bosses and crunch numbers in excel spreadheets.  With that being said, nobody has published an rpg where the GM asks the players what they want and then just gives it to them, either. Realism vs. Hyperrealism.

So most games fall somewhere on that axis, with the "sweet spot" being, like many things, in the eye of the beholder.   I noticed it for the first time when I was playing Grand Theft Auto IV.  I absolutely LOVED GTA2, 3 and all its iterations.  It was big, it was brash, it was gonzo.  It was a cartoonish version of the 80s and 90s that was close enough to reality that it could look over at the player and wink knowlingly, and if you were familiar enough with its in jokes, you got a good laugh.  If not, you still had a solid game playing experience.  With GTA4, Rockstar drank its own bathwater and suddenly we were in a real life simulation as a gangster.  There were occasional flashes of humor, but nothing comparable to the previous games.  It crystalized for me when I sat down on my couch and play a game on my television where my character sat down on a couch and watched a television.  At that point, the navelgazing created a singularity that pulled me right out of the game.  I put down the controller, and haven't played it since. 

I've been reading Grognardia for awhile, and anyone who does is probably familiar with Jim's turn of phrase, Gygaxian Naturalism.  Basically, the idea being that the monsters the PCs encounter existed before the combat, and will still exist afterwards (assuming they survive).  Based on the descriptions I've read of the session, it seems as though Dwimmermount is the architectural extension of this theory.  This is a dungeon that has been around for ages, has served multiple purposes, been inhabited by numerous creatures, etc.  It's a "naturalist" dungeon - it existed before the PCs arrived, and will be around long after they're gone.  Some of the stuff they find will make sense, perhaps because whatever they're interacting with is from a recent incarnation, perhaps because it's just obvious, but some of the other, more obscure stuff just might not make sense because the PCs lack the context to understand it. 

Is that a design flaw?  I don't think so.  Is that context required?  Again - I don't think so.  It just depends on where, on the axis described above, your "sweet spot" lies.  What, for you, constitutes a "good" dungeon?  If, as joethelawyer says, you're in it for the gold and glory, high adventure and praises from the serving wenches, then you probably lie closer to the "hyperrealism" side of things - titans riding tarrasques into battle would be the extreme end of it.  If you're looking to simulate the feeling of exploring ancient, long abandoned ruins, you're probably closer to the "realism" end of the spectrum, with 1st level adventures from 1978 D&D where you're being paid a few coppers to clean the stirges out of the bar's basement on that far end. 

Although I was a Dwimmermount backer, I have yet to download any of the previews, preferring instead to see the finished product before going back to see how the sausage was made.  I do feel pretty confident saying that Dwimmermount probably just didn't work for that group of players.  Hell, when I get it, it may not work for mine either - my group tends towards the more gonzo side of things, so they may react the same way.  Either way, though, I'm looking forward to holding the finished product in my hand.

So where does your group fall on the spectrum?

Death and Taxes

Well, it happened.

I warned you that if I tripped over an RPG, I'd post about it, and here I am.  My nerdly bachelor party was a success, with a Battletech match, followed up by a complete, first-to-three match of Epic Spell Wars.  Along the way, a case of beer and a half bottle of mezcal disappeared, and there was much rejoicing.

As the evening wore on, Ark started poking around my game library, alternately chortling and gasping at my incredibly inconsistent taste in RPGs.  Then he came across my box set of the 1st edition of Twilight: 2000, and, as they say, shit got real.

Now mind you, I played Twilight 2000 last when I was in high school, and the sum total of my memories of this game consisted of the party wandering through a radiation soaked area and dying several hours later of radiation poisoning.  TPK, end of game, thank you come again.

Ark had fond memories, though, and waxed romantic of the joys of the game, and our friend Kaye was taken in, announcing that he wanted to play the game, and sooner rather than later.  Merwyn chimed in that he was down as well, so plans were made for this afternoon to get together for a quick game of Twilight 2000.

As I said, I didn't remember much of the game, but it didn't take too long for it all to start coming back.  For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, T2000 is a realistic RPG.  They drilled character creation down to a science, in such a way that all of your stats feed into other stats, which you plug into equations, which tell you what your other stats are, which are used as the basis for another equation which tells you how many skills you have, and so on and so forth.  About ten minutes in, I made the realization that the game must have been designed by an accountant, because the character creation process is essentially your tax forms in RPG format - Take Line A, divide by Line B and multiply by 100, placing the result in Line F.  If Line F is more than 100, skip lines G through L, and take the sum of Line F and Line B and put that in Line G2.  You get the point.  Encumbrance?  Check.  Counting bullets?  Check.  Counting out liters of gasoline?  Check.  You name it, it's there.  As Ark said, it's a doomsday prepper's wet dream.

So finally we had our characters.  I was playing a 5'2 120 lbs fiesty Irishman named Mickey O'Reilly, an infantryman who specialized in Heavy Weapons and driving.  Unfortunately, the weapon he used and the ammo required weighed more than he could carry, so he stashed most of it in the 8 ton military vehicle that he found himself driving, with Kaye's Native American Mechanic (with a bow and arrow) riding shotgun.  The Boy and Merwyn (both officers) followed in a smaller vehicle.  All was well for about five minutes, until we ran into the Polish forces.  We tried to run the barricade, and took out five soldiers, just with the truck.  Then they fired back.  Kaye took a bullet in the leg and panicked, forfeiting his action.  I also took a bullet in the leg and was blown out of the drivers seat.  We managed to regain control and sped off, only to run smack dab into a convoy of tanks.  We tried to escape, failed and died.

So it wasn't quite, "You've wandered into a radiation field, you're dead!", but it was damn close.  Twilight 2000 is exactly what it sets out to be - a realistic depiction of a nuclear holocaust, and the people trying to scrounge out a living afterward.  It is a cruel and unforgiving mistress, and it will accept no foolishness.  You make the wrong decision and you're dead.  You make the right decision, and there's a pretty good chance you'll die anyway.

I wish the character creation was a bit less intensive - a game this lethal should encourage throw away characters.  It was still entertaining as hell, and strangely liberating.  We all got into the fatalistic spirit of things almost immediately.  It didn't take long for us to figure out that we were all probably going to die, so to hell with it - go out in a blaze of glory!

Good times.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

A pair of topics today, each too short for a viable post on their own, mashed into one, like Peanut Butter and Bacon!

Agone RPG: According to the wiki page, Agone is "an epic fantasy roleplaying game based on novels by award-winning fantasy writer Mathieu Gaborit". 

According to me, these books were a steal on ebay, where Troll and Toad is offering ALL FIVE of the books for the eminently reasonable rate of $5.19, plus $4.99 shipping, for a grand total of $10.18.  Well, says I, a complete game and four supplements for 10 dollars?  How can I go wrong?

Apparently this game was the bee's knees in France, where there were over 30 supplements published, but only the afore mentioned 5 were translated into English before the publisher, Multisim, went out of business.  Oddly enough, only two of the books upon which this game was based have been translated into English, and those were only in extremely limited editions, although I have come to the conclusion tha they do not inf fact exist, after a somewhat exhaustive search of teh intarwebz. 

So I'm guessing that might have been a contributing factor when T&T was considering their pricing.  Note: its probably a good idea to get the material a game is based on out to the public before trying to sell said game.

I haven't had a chance to give the actual materials more than a perfunctory glance, but I did note that, had I paid full price for the 5 books, they would have gone for over $100.  So that's a win in my book. 

Harlan Ellison: Closing out my gushing fanboy posts on Harlan Ellison, I have written a letter which I will mail later today that let's Harlan know that I would like to make an RPG based on I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.  I expect to either be ignored, or to have a shrieking swarm of slavering lawyer/locust hybrids descend upon me and flay the skin from my bones.  Let the record show, for posterity, that the following list captures what I believe to be his finest works.

'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, A Boy and His Dog, The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World, Paladin Of the Lost Hour, Mephisto In Onyx, The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, The Deathbird, Demon with a Glass Hand, Basilisk, Shattered Like a Glass Goblin, I'll just save time and say Deathbird Stories because every single story in there is a winner, Night and the Enemy

And seriously, no conversation of Unca HarHar would be complete without mentioning The City on the Edge of Forever.  It's the episode of Star Trek you show to people who don't like Star Trek.  As amazing as the final product was, though, it's nothing compared to the crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat versions that Ellison originally turned in.  The drama surrounding the rewrites Roddenberry's staff made after he submitted his final version is the stuff of legend, and the link provided gives the whole story.  Trust me, it's well worth your time.

Improvements in POD Tech to Reduce Costs Significantly

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/manufacturing/article/53482-ingram-makes-color-print-on-demand-more-economical.html



Ingram Content Group has announced a new “standard color” pricing model for print-on-demand technology that has reduced costs by roughly two-thirds, making color POD an economical publishing option for the first time. Achieved through advancements in inkjet technology, the price drop means that a greater range of book content can be printed in color and done faster around the world.

Depending on the exact dimensions of a book, color POD for a single 120 page trade paperback would previously run in the general range of $12-$13.50, making such books prohibitively expensive.  Standard Color reduces the cost of a single book to the general range of $4-$5, with a short run of 500 books pricing out at below $3/copy for a 6”x9” trade paperback. 

As much self publishing as is going on in the RPG community, this could be huge.  

Card Games!

I received two (well, two and half, maybe three) games yesterday, and I'm excited enough about them to post about them here!  Yay!

The first game is Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre, published by Cryptozoic Games

With a design sense that is somewhere between Munchkin, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Flapjack, and a tongue planted firmly in cheek, this game is ridiculously entertaining, with nice high production values. 

As the back of the box says: 

"Did you know that magical wizards are battling to the death ... and beyond ... right now!? "Why battle?" you might ask. "What have I got to prove, magic man?" Only who's the most awesomely powerful battle wizard in the entire realm, that's what!

As a Battle Wizard, you'll put together up to three spell components to craft millions* of spell combos. Your spells might kick ass, or they could totally blow -- it's up to you to master the magic. You will unleash massive damage on the faces of your wizard rivals in a no-holds-barred, all-out burn-down to be the last Battle Wizard standing. And it doesn't stop there! Powerful magic items bring on a whole new level of bloody carnage as you and your mighty wizard opponents tear each other limb from limb in an orgy of killing! Do you have what it takes to use epic spells in a war at Mt. Skullzfyre? Will YOU be the Ultimate Battle Wizard!?! "
                                                                                                          ~The Back of the Box

While definitely not a game for kids, this is an extremely entertaining game.  The artwork is top notch, the game mechanics are easy to pick up, but with sufficient complexity to keep you entertained.  It uses a mixture of cards, counters and dice, as well as a true depiction of Mt. Skullzfyre to set up between the players!  The object is to collect cards (spells) that link together to form more powerful spells!  With player names like Jung Jung the Spirit Master, Pisster the Pissed Wizard, Fey Ticklebottom the Enchanter, and Princess Holiday and Her Furicorn, how can you go wrong?  At $30, it seems a bit pricey at first, but once you crack the box you see where your money is going.  The cards are hearty, the counters are thick cardboard, every piece of this seems built to last. 

And seriously - a giant Mt. Skullzfyre!  Shown here:

The second (and second and a half, well third) game(s) that I got was(were) Gloom (and Cthulhu Gloom).  Both are essentially the same game, just with slightly different niche markets to cater to.  The original version of the game, published by Atlas Games, was based on the art and aesthetic of Edward Gorey and has a marvelous gimmick that i'm honestly suprised has taken this long to be utilized. 

The basic story is that you play a family who is faced with various trials and tribulations, which eventually result in their Untimely Deaths.  You have a card for each member of the family, and you play additional cards on each member, each of which represents a new horrible thing that happens to them (pursued by poodles, that sort of Gorey-esque sort of thing).  The trick here, and the brilliant mechanic, is that the cards are transparent, with the exception of various symbols which are strategically placed on the cards.  As the cards are laid down, the effects described by the symbols activate, and as additional cards are laid down, symbols which are covered deactivate, while only the one on top is active.  Each effect, each horrible situation you curse your family members with, lowers their self worth.  Once it's as low as it can go, you can play an Untimely Death Card, which pulls the family member out of the board, and puts "points" on the board.  The goal is to have the collectively lowest Self Worth by the time your entire family dies.

Sounds like fun, right?  I might not have explained that as clearly as the rules do, but it's actually quite easy to pick up.  But again, the design is where it's at - these are beautiful cards, and someone has gone to great lengths to ensure that this has an Edward Gorey feel to it.  It probably helps that I'm a fan of Edward Gorey already, right?

Anyhow, Cthulhu Gloom is pretty much the same thing, just with Cthulhu references thrown in, since apparently you can just draw funny shapes on a 12 sided die, slap "Cthulhu!" on the cover and turn it into a succesful game about... rolling dice.  No names there, but you know who I'm talking about.  Anyhow, Cthulhu Gloom is basically the same joke told twice, and like most times, it's not quite as funny the second time around.  I dunno, I guess I just preferred the understated humor of the original.  Cthulhu Gloom just seems a bit... on the nose.

Still worth playing, mind you, I would just recommend that you pick one or the other, since once you have one you essentially have the other, just with a different set of artwork.  So if that's important to you, you love Lovecraft and Gorey so equally that you can't have one without the other, or you just support this sort of thing existing and want to reward its creators, then by all means, buy both.  At $24.95, it's not horribly unreasonable for a card game.


So, for anyone who has bothered to read this far down the page, and is interested in card games, are there other card games like this that I'm missing? 

Session Report: It's the End of the World As We Know It...

And so it was that the party finally finished off the Chaos Cave.  Steadily escalating earthquakes rattled the group as they forced their way into the center of the dungeon, in search of the Holy Relic of Moradin, the Dwarven God of Dwarves and Beer.  There, in the center of the dungeon, they found Gorgosh, a Dark Cleric, summoning swarms of the Undead, and his Death Knight servant.  There was a force bubble surrounding the entrance, which all of the party save Glacia and her manservant were able to bypass with no trouble.  Wading into the ocean of the Undead, Banebeard, the Dwarven Cleric, was an Undead Turning Machine, destroying scores of Skeletons and Zombies each round, and it essentially because a race between the two clerics - Gorgosh raised them, Banebeard put them down.  Then the Death Knight entered the fray, pointing it's deadly finger at poor Serendipity the Thief/Mage, recently returned from retirement at the insistance of her paramour Aloud.  A deadly Power Word: Kill (aka Fus Ro DIE) spell was spoken, and just like that, no Saving Throw, Serendipity was dead.  The pitched battle continued, with Gorgosh slowly retreating to a small back room, where an eerie blue light glowed ominously. 

Finally Glacia passed her saving throw and was able to penetrate the bubble, and in two leaps bounded all the way across the battle, and into the back room.  So focused was she, that she didn't even see the Illithid playing with a machine in the back of the room.  The machine that was casting the eerie light.  The machine that extended below the surface into the earth.  Which was shaking violently by this point.

Slowly the party whittled down the vast numbers of undead, and closed in on Gorgosh and the Illithid, who turned and fought.  The Illithid unleashed it's devastating mind blast on Glacia, but unfortunately, she was in a state of frenzy and apparently immune to such effects.  It tried to charm her, with similar results.  It was still confused by the lack of effectiveness when Vincent, the militant wizard cleaved it's head from it's body.

Nonetheless, the damage was done.  The machine spun to stop, but the earthquakes continued to rattle the dungeon, causing portions of the cave to collapse entirely and lava to spew from the earth.  Grabbing the Holy Relic of Moradin from the dead Illithid, the party ran as fast as their legs could carry them, but the earthquakes knocked them from their feet time and time again.  Just as the lava was cresting and about to swallow them, Veravum, the hapless Githyanki paladin, opened a planar portal and rescued them.

Passing through the astral plane on their way back to their flying ship, they saw the Githyanki Astral Fortress Weissehaupt burning as it fell through space.  Clearly there was some serious s**t going down.  Arriving back on their boat, they saw the earth rippling like water.  The horizon to the east, the direction of the Human Lands, was glowing steadily as lava overtook it.  To the south, they watched  the entire Elven Nation rip itself from the earth and spin away into the sky.

Veravum helpfully pointed out that the Holy Relic of Moradin was mined by the Moradin himself from the earth beneath Sigil, and posessed, among other things, the ability to function like a portable Spelljamming Helm.  A debate immediately began with regards to who, if anyone, should be saved from the impending global apocalypse.  Some suggestions included an order of Militant Wizards, a tribe of yeti, and "F*ck 'em all, I never liked anyone on this dirtball anyways."

Only time will tell what becomes of the party!

The 5e A-Team

So my group has decided to playtest D&DNext, and as such have formed the perfect group in order to provide WOTC with the most balanced set of feedback possible.

Hannibal, aka Ark.  He's the man with the plan, he's the Grognard of the group, he's guy WOTC would give it's proverbial left nut to get back in their camp.  He'll be DMing.  Specialty: Crunching DM-side rules.

B.A. "Bad Attitude" Baracus, aka Kaye.  Our resident tank.  Cut his teeth on the powergamer-friendly 3rd edition, and is trying to adjust to Labyrinth Lord and 2e restrictions.  Specialty: Tweaking characters to the point where they exist solely for a specific purpose.

H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock, aka The Boy.  Regards 4e as "real Dungeons and Dragons", he's WOTC's other target demographic.  He's unpredictable at the game table - sometimes his characters fight, other times they go out of their way to avoid conflict, and contemplate settling down and roleplaying a quiet family life instead.  Specialty: Can the rules keep up with his imagination?

Templeton "Faceman" Peck, aka Me.  Yeah, that's right, I'm a ladies man.  You didn't know that about me, because I keep it low key on here.  But now you do.  I was raised on 2e, and my characters tend to be smooth mother f***ers.  Specialty: non-combat focused, charisma based character generation

The Rotating Girl Character, aka The Woman.  My better half.  Rounding out our group is my fiancee, who has never roleplayed before.  Ever.  She's not really sure if she even wants to, or will enjoy it, but is a good sport and is helping out for a session or two to test out the rules.  Specialty: Doesn't really have one, that I know of.  She's there to see how easy the rules are to pick up.

Meanwhile, in Grognardia...



He will break you.  But will he learn from the experience?



A link to yesterday's post by James M was emailed to me yesterday evening.  I read it in the middle of the night, and I've been wrestling with it ever since.  On the one hand, my inner Ayn Rand is offended - hamstringing those who are naturally gifted, giving undeserved bonuses to second-handers, etc.  On it's surface, it Harrison Bergeron-izes D&D, strapping lead weights to the legs of the physically gifted and such. 

On the flip side, within the confines of James' example, it seems to make sense.  If you accept the precepts of D&D, that melee combat is a strength based affair - someone with massive strength wouldn't need to learn as much about fighting, they get a bonus to hit by virture of their muscles, and crush skulls when they connect.  You can even extend that example to Rogues and their Dexterity stat - for them, everything is all about their Dexterity, and a slower Thief would have to pick things up quickly in order to succeed.  Higher Dex = better AC, harder to hit, etc.

I think things break down, though, once you get to the Cleric and Wizard.  Until you get to 4e, while your Intelligence and Wisdom would have an impact on your progression through those classes, there wasn't as much of a direct correllation between the Stat and their abilities.  A low Intelligence could keep a wizard from casting high level spells, and a low Wisdom could cause Clerical spells to fail, but how do you draw a direct line from that to increased/decreased experience, like you do with a fighter?  In 4e I can see it, since everything is stat based, no matter what class you have, but in older versions of the game, you just didn't see that.

And yet...

And yet, I can't shake the feeling that there's something to this.  The game can really punish you for poor stats, as poor Torvalds found out, and this is something good to level out that sort of thing.  But it seems to run counter to the idea of Old School Lethality.

Needless to say, I am conflicted.

FtA: Apocalyptic Nihilism

I was discussing my idea for From the Ashes with a friend, specifically the idea that once you reach Level 9, your powers have reached their peak, but they destroy you in the process.  Chewing on a pen, he replied, "That's pretty nihilistic, man."

I started to argue with him, but what's the point (heh).

It did get me thinking, though.  Every once in awhile, I look around at our society, and think to myself, "We're never going to make it."  The impulses which drive our species are as contradictory as they are destructive, we strive to discover truths that undermine the very same things we build, we prod, blindly, at forces well beyond our control, and we do it all with a pride, a hubris which causes the beast within me to howl with desire to see us fall, to finally receive our comeuppance, at last.

So as you can imagine, reading books like Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture is not very good for me.  It contains essays, written by those who promote extreme philosophies, each representative of the decline of some facet of modern society.  Whether it's making a case against art, or a meditation of the ascension of the atom bomb in the superpsyche of our species, it is 362 pages on why we should just cease to exist.  Some of the stuff included within I don't even want to print, considering the number of people who leapt upon this blog at the mere mention of "porn".  I shudder to think of the type of attention this blog would draw, were I to mention some of the things contained within the book.  I'm relatively jaded, but even I put the book down several times, exclaiming, "Oh come ON..."

Interestingly enough, in the introduction to the Revised Edition, Parfrey states that he simply revised the 1st edition, because he didn't feel as though a book entitled "Apocalypse Culture" should have a sequel.  Of course, having made that statement, he did exactly that 13 years later, when he published Apocalypse Culture II.  No doubt he chuckled ironically and twirled his moustache as he did so.  I haven't read it yet.  It surfaced on my "to read" pile, but after glancing over my shoulder to make sure noone was looking, I moved it down a few books.  I guess I have to be in the mood.

I am a fan of comic books, and while my interest has been waning in recent years, I still manage to pick up anything that Garth Ennis writes.  His books tend to have a very distinct "style" to them - they very often involve hard men living dangerous lives that get by with the help of good mates, who drink heavily and swear profusely, but at the end of the day can be counted on to get the job done.  In 2000, he was given free reign to pretty much do whatever he liked with the Punisher, a title that hand been mismanaged and was currently languishing in obscurity.  His first stab at it was absurdist and over the top, a dark comedic romp more than anything else.  In 2004, though, things got serious.  The title was relaunched in Marvel's MAX imprint, which was basically an R-Rated Imprint, and things got ugly.  White slavers, IRA bombers, the war in Afghanistan, the Punisher took them all on.  His run peaked, however with the release of the one-shot, "The Punisher: The End"

With gritty art by comics legend Richard Corben, this was the Ultimate Punisher tale, with the character taken to it's natural conclusion.  Emerging from a fallout shelter in the remains of a prison, he finds himself in a post apocalyptic wasteland.  Not the fun kind, there are no biker gangs or mutants, just death and destruction.  He journeys through Upstate New York to a last holdout of mankind in the ruins of the former site of the Twin Towers in NYC, where he finds the last holdouts of humanity, the powerbrokers, the wheelers and the dealers who drove humanity to it's current state. 

The story is as bleak as it comes, and the statement it makes about humanity is dark, but it's worth the read. 

Nihilism is tough to pull off in an RPG.  RPGs, and games in general, are typically purpose based, making nihilism difficult to portray in any sort of meaningful sense.  How do you build a system around a lack of purpose?  The two concepts seem fundamentally at odds.  To a certain extent, you can put Call of Cthulhu in the category, where "victory" means surviving without going insance, but the "Game" aspect creeps in, meaning you have to give them some sort of satisfaction, some closure.  Even so, it's tough to take CoC seriously in a nihilistic sense, when there are tentacled monsters popping out of cupboards and such.  Lovecraft's nihilims was all about subtext and that's nigh impossible to allow to shine through in an RPG. 

Twilight 2000, though.  Now that was a Nihilistic RPG.  You play a soldier, stuck in Europe as a war nobody cares about anymore slowly grinds to a halt, not because of a lack of will, but merely a lack of supplies.  I played this a couple of times in High School, and haven't played since, so I'm not sure if the impact this game had on my design of From the Ashes was based more on GDW's design or my GM's own nihilistic tendancies.  We played for several months, as our party first tried simply to survive, until we were able to find some measure of safety with a group of people, and we fought off intruders, scavenged for supplies and tried to rebuild society, at least within our own little part of the earth.

And then we died of radiation poisoning.

Seriously, that was it.  We turned right when we should have turned left, and stumbled into a hot zone, and three sessions later, we were all dead. 

I don't think From the Ashes is a fundamentally nihilistic game.  Or at least, it doesn't have to be - it's not designed to be.  Are you going to die?  Yes.  Absolutely.  There is no retirement for these characters.  They are agents of change, as society digs itself out of the rubble, and they burn themselves out affecting that change.  They flare brightly and then they burn out.  The idea is to shape the world around them before they go, and that, I think, gives more purpose to a game than a hundred plundered dungeons, or a thousand slain dragons.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

As some readers may know, I run a 2e campaign, in which a friend Kaye playes an unfortunate soul by the name of Torvalds.  Both myself and Ark at Rather Gamey have blogged about him several times.  If this is all new to you Take a minute to catch up if you'd like.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

So after a series of (mis)adventures, Torvalds finally made 5th level, and decided to learn the spell Summon Familiar.  In typical Torvalds fashion, he did not read the fine print on the spell.  In 2nd edition, there's a random chart for everything, including the type of familiar you get when you get the spell.  So rather than getting something cool/useful such as a bat, black cat, raven, weasel etc.  Torvalds get's a Toad.  As he contemplates killing the Toad and trying again, only then does he decide to read the fine print - the death of the Toad would be traumatic to it's owner, to say the least - he would have to make a system shock roll - fail and die, pass and lose 1 point of Constitution.  Tempting as it was to roll the dice, he decided to stick with the Toad.

You would think that this would be the end of the story, but no.  It got worse.

After vanquishing an Elder Mummy, a Lesser Mummy and their summoned Earth Elemental, the party was looting their stuff when they came across the bane of all 2e DMs - The Deck of Many Things.  I contemplated fudging the roll, but I have been a stickler for the dice roll what they roll, so I stuck with it.  The fighter drew his card, and got 2 points added to his Strength.  The Dwarven Priest drew and was granted an 18 Charisma and a small keep.  The Dwarven Thief lost his soul - oops!.  The Half-Yeti Barbarian Reaver (don't ask), was given 10,000 XP or 2 more draws from the deck, took the 2 draws, gaining the service of a 4th level fighter, and an 18 Charisma.  Oh, and the keep, too.

All eyes turn to Kaye, who asked to go last.  His first draw caused him to lose his soul.  His and the thief's souls were banished to one of the Seven Hells, where they were leapt upon by Dev- er, excuse me Baatezu, and tormented.  Their nights would be tormented by dreams of their souls in unending torment until they undertook a quest to regain them. 

You would think that this would be the end of the story, but no.  It got worse.

The Dark Powers offered each of them another draw from the deck, in exchange for 10,000 XP.  Kaye jumped on it, and made the deal.  Unfortunately, the 10,000 XP dropped his level, which meant he no longer had access to the Find Familiar Spell.  Which meant his Toad died.  Which meant he was in extreme pain, and likely to die.  He did pass the System Shock roll, but lost a point in Constitution for his trouble.

You would think that this would be the end of the story, but no.  It got worse.

His next draw caused him to be stripped of all his wealth and real property, including his spellbook.  He still had all the spells he had memorized that morning, but once they were burned, he would have no access to any spells until he got a new spellbook.

At this point we were all laughing helplessly, as poor Kaye stared glumly at his character sheet.  "You're pretty much a crappy fighter now!", the Fighter cheerily piped up.

You would think that this would be the end of the story, but no.  It got worse.

Torvalds pled with the Dark Powers for one more draw, offering up still more XP (not enough to drop him another level, though), and in the spirit of the magnifying glass looming above the ant, his cries were heard, his wish granted.  His first draw got him 2 more draws or 10,000 XP, but like any good compulsive gambler, Torvalds doubled down, drawing twice more. 

The table was silent as we all waited to see what new horrible things the Deck would do to Torvalds.  Much to our disappointment, there was a brief glimmer of hope with his first draw, which granted him 50,000 XP and a Miscellaneous Magical Item.  "Things are looking up!" he cried.  But then, proving that the Dark Powers have a sense of humor, his next draw was the Donjon - You Are Imprisoned.

Poor Torvalds never got to find out what Magical Item he got, as it was stripped from him, along with the rags he had been offered after previously losing everything.  He currently languishes somewhere, contemplating his folly, wondering where it all went so wrong.

"Maybe you're imprisoned in the same place as your soul?" the Fighter offered helpfully.

You would think that this would be the end of the story, and you would be right - that's as bad as it gets.

Next session, Kaye will be debuting his new character.  No doubt it will be more fun for him to play, but I can honestly say that I, and the rest of the party, will miss poor Torvalds.  Let's all take a moment of silence to reflect on the passing of the Best Character Kaye Has Ever Played.

I was reminded of the strip below, so I leave you with it.

Steve Jackson's Ogre collects almost 1 million dollars!

So Steve Jackson's Ogre Kickstarter wrapped up today, collecting just shy of $1 million - $923,680.  That is absolutely astounding, especially when you consider they only requested $20,000 to begin with.  There were 5512 backers for Ogre, which amounts to the average person giving $167!!  That shows some serious enthusiasm for a product. 

I think what's especially interesting is when you put it in the context of media in general, and the direction it's going.  Up until now, publishers have held the pursestrings, and acted as the gatekeepers, determining what it is that the public would be exposed to.  And while self-publishing and the like has opened things up a bit, let's face it most DIY projects just don't typically have the production value of mainstream marketed products.  Kickstarter levels the playing field - it allows you to narrowcast in the extreme, connecting with people who share your particular/peculiar interest to raise money for the product you want, as opposed to the product the companies tell you you want.

What's interesting, to me at least, about this project was that, up until this point, as far as I know, most Kickstarters had been projects in the idea/design phase, collecting money to raise the production value of their product.  Steve Jackson used it essentially as a preorder system - the game was essentially done, it was just a matter of determining how many to make.  Did it cut into the profits of FLGSs?  Maybe/probably, but at the same time, you can't play Ogre by yourself.  Most of those 5,512 backers are going to need people to play against, and each of those people are a potential sale the FLGSs CAN take advantage of. 

All in all, I'd say this is a win, not just for Steve Jackson, but for the gaming industry as a whole.  If Steve Jackson can collect a cool million on a game that hasn't been in print for over 10 years, imagine the possibilities for our neck of the woods...

I Finally Played the 40k RPG!

A friend of mine was organizing a Deathwatch game last Friday, and I happened to call him about something completely unrelated at the perfect time!  Despite having been up far too late the night before catching the Avengers midnight premier, I headed over there with all due haste.

Making the character was fun - everyone else's was made by the time I got there, so there would be no poring through the tomes searching for the perfect expression of the Space Marine in my head.  Instead, it was more like, "Uh... I want to be a sniper.  Which of those makes me most sniper-like?"  This resulted in some confusion as we went along (Two hours in, "Wait, I can spit acid on people?"), but overall the character creation was easy enough, although there didn't seem to be a whole lot of flexibility built into the system to allow for customization of characters.  I guess that makes sense within the concept of mass produced soldiers, but it doesn't necessarily make for interesting character development.

Hahaha character development.  I'm playing Deathwatch and I'm worrying about character development.

So having built Mek Halfhand, I joined the squad already in process, sent to put a stop to an Ork Wauugh before it got off the ground.  They had intimidated one Ork leader, and were setting out to intimidate the others, in the hopes of turning their own mini-waugh against the larger waugh. 

Things... happened, and we faught, and slaughtered orks, and it was glorious. 

The system is a bit crunchy, though, to say the least.  First you roll to hit.  Yay, you hit!  Then they roll to dodge - boo that hit didn't hit because they dodged!  What???!  And even if you do hit, it's entirely possible they just took a flesh wound to the left thigh.  No big deal.  So as you can imagine, combat can take some time.

Mek Halfhand, though, was truly a friend of the Emperor (they were on the JV Wrestling team together), because there's a peculiar little rule that says when you roll a 10, you get to roll for another attack.  Mek just kept rolling 10s.  Standing up before the Ork Chieftain, he unleashed hell's own fury condensed into bullet form.  The one attack took the better part of 15 minutes to resolve, as 10s just kept coming up over and over again, resulting in more attack rolls, which resulted in more 10s, etc etc etc.

When all was said and done, when the calculator had been put away, the eraser burned down to a nub, the cramped forearms massaged, Mek Halfhand had done 524 points of damage to the Ork Chieftain, who had started out with 40 or so to begin with.  The Chieftain had been reduced to a greasy mist, which Mek had parsed out particle by particle, and put a bullet in each particle.

It was about then that we decided that 40k might be a bit broken.  Maybe we just didn't understand the rules right, it's possible, but either way, we decided to switch over to Stars Without Number.  I don't think most of the guys really got how big of a power gap there is between a 1st Level Space Marine in 40k and a 1st Level Dude Who Has Decided To Be An Adventurer in SWoN, but I suspect they'll realize shortly.