Oops, I con gamed again

I made another one of my rare public appearances DM’ing yesterday at Socal Smackdown in Anaheim. Last year’s session was a big success, and the organizers (wanting more RPG events, especially old school) had asked me to run a game again. I was back and forth about it for the last couple of weeks, but having not a whole ton of other priorities for the long weekend I was leaning towards it. Earlier in the week a player from my regular group was interested, so I said “what the hell” and went for it. Last year I stayed at a cheap hotel near the con, but this time just travelled down there for the session

I did not have a lot prepared, and had not done OD&D since the pub game earlier in this year, but I dove in the last few days whenever I had a few minutes and tried to hammer out a scenario. I pretty much used my Tegel Manor Dynasty setting I did in the pub game; basically a prequel to full blown haunted Tegel Manor. This setting is sort of turning out to be my Ravenloft, a recurring locale with undead, demonic forces, family intrigue, and atmosphere. In a lot of ways I’m inspired by the old Dark Shadows program to give a living family angle to the cursed mansion.

Even though the con blurb did not mention me specifically, there were three people from my pub and Smackdown 2010 groups, so including regular player Terry it was not a total batch of strangers, which was nice.

It was really kind of a wild and wooly session, the 4 or so hours going by pretty quick. There was a bit of over the top dorkery from a couple players, but it was more funny than annoying. My sessions tend to be boisterous and filled with wild laughter. As a matter of fact, one guy who played another game at a table near mine last year and was playing in mine this year commented that he remembered how loud and fun my game looked, and how he wished he was in that session. And again, it was a success and very worthwhile.

I do have to say that campaign play is always going to be my main fun and focus. I just love having time for characters and situations to be developed through ongoing gameplay. For these more or less one shots (although this is the second time running the same character for both Terry and another guy, so I try to collect the character sheets at the end to keep them in case somebody plays again in the future), I just think in terms of several encounter situations and loosely tie them together. There isn’t a ton of time for sandboxing.

Anyway, I’m in my busiest time of the year now, so I doubt I’ll do another public session anytime soon. But it turned out to be another great way to spend one day of a long weekend.

“Don’t Drink and Game”

Obviously if you’ve read a few of my posts from a year or so ago, you know that I am no stranger to “mind altering substances” at game time. With my love of brewed liquids (and I ain’t talking coffee and tea), the title of this post is obviously a ruse. These days I enjoy several ales during the games I run, with Bass Ale, Fat Tire Ale, and Blue Moon being current favorites (all usually on sale in 12 packs at your local Rite Aid store). I know this sounds like a lot to you, but I am over 6’2”, currently built like a Samoan, and for sure ain’t no momma’s boy Sunday drive drinker. Although I have cut down lately so I can chop down that Samoan build 5 or 50 lbs, my years of practice give me a certain amount of tolerance. And for sure when driving from a session I’ll knock it off around an hour and a half before ending the game (I privately refer to this as “Engine Cooldown Period”), and often take a walk a few blocks to shake the mist out of my melon. Maybe grab a vitamin water at the local market before heading back to the car.

Almost everybody in the group but Big Ben (total tea totaler – although now that I think of it I don’t think he even drinks tea) enjoys a few drinks. Dan Dan the Power Game Man almost always has a sixer of Rolling Rock he’ll suck down 5 of. Andy, fairly slight of build, like 2 or 3 ales. And little Ben often has a tall can of something. Paul is not much of a drinker, but a couple of times has brought along a few Jack Daniels Lemonades. Our lady player Terry likes a couple of ales as well.

And as you may know from past posts some of us like to smoke a bit of the pipeweed before the game and maybe during a break. The fact is I would probably do this more, but during the game sometimes if I step out on the patio for a quick inhale Dan will come running out thinking it’s a chance for a cigarette break, and this can cause all the other little penguins to come waddling out to see what the fuss is and take part in whatever substance they prefer. But for the most part I would not say that anything is getting used in excess. If I am getting a ride, I might drink an ale or two more, but nothing crazy or shameful.

So sometimes I think about gaming, and how for the most part my experiences outside of the group have been fairly sober. When I was running KOTOR sessions for an established group of middle aged Star Wars dorks in Hollywood the other year, it seemed like at least one of them was a beer drinker but did not do it at the table. So I ran those sessions, that were already treated like I was working for these guys, stone cold sober. And that was one place I really felt I could use a few drinkypoos, being surrounded by what amounted to very weird and ultimately unfriendly creeps. At another session I went to last year, the host made it very clear to anybody that was playing that no substances, alcohol included, would be tolerated. And hell, in that case, being a fairly mellow and happy drinker (much nicer guy than sober me) things might have worked out differently if I had had a couple of belts when something unpleasant and unfriendly ended up going down. I just might not have walked out of that game less than an hour into it, which I don’t think any DM worth his salt wants a player to do.

I’ve had a couple of nice drinky games outside the main group the last year or so though. At last year’s Socal Smackdown con I had brought a little cooler with some beers in to get me through the session, and Cyclopeatron who was in attendance even hit me up with a nice rum and coke from the hotel bar. And earlier this year Cyclo organized a little pub game in Anaheim (or was it Fullerton?) with me and Trent Foster running our early sessions, and I had quite a few pints in that one (full tab for me and my driver Terry’s drinks? 90 bucks).

But one of my attendees at the Smackdown Session, Gary his name was I think, asked me to run some sessions at his place for some people in the future, but that no drinking of any kind would be tolerated. Needless to say, those games never panned out.

What is it with the drinking hate among many gamers? This is not a new phenomenon. In the 90’s, when I was running games for a group of mostly women in the latter part of it, those were some smoke and tequila soaked gaming. But each and every person there parties. And not falling down drinking. They were several hour weekend sessions, and we would do a shot and a toast from time to time. Well ok, I was putting beer in that mix too, but I lived a 15 minute stagger away so no big woop if I was feeling pretty wet on the brain by the end of the session. Hell, I was a much younger man then. But I also remember going to some games in the area on a Friday night some guy was hosting in the late 90’s. . These were terrible games, with a GM who kept no notebooks and totally made things up, badly as he went along. But I stuck with it because I think I was low on players at that time and was sort of trolling one player he had who I felt was a right fit for my group. But by game two I was bringing a six pack along to dull the pain and boredom. A couple of games later I was alone with the host working on some GURPS character for another game, and when talking about drawbacks for a character, disabilities or whatever they called them in that system, he made a big point of telling me alcoholism would be considered a weakness, and that he personally was creeped out by it. Ah, I see. My sixer on a Friday night habit was freaking the boring little douche out. I think I was done with that group at that point.

What do this people think is going to happen? Am I, or anybody else who wants a few refreshing adult beverages, some kind of old west Indian savages who will go nuts and kill the whole family if we get our hands on firewater? What’s the deal with that?

You only have to read a few threads on Dragonsfoot or RPG.net to see that there are drinkers out there in the game community. But that seems to be not the norm, and for the most part gamers are some kind of dorkish prudes who see it as evil. They probably would even see drinking half a Near Beer as some kind of pathetic persons personal struggle with Satan. I don’t get it. If you have kids, then I understand not wanting smoking to go on around your property. But a few beers? What is the real harm? Would these people see prohibition come back to save all the poor sick souls who enjoy a handful of suds during a several hour sit down were pretending and mind expanding seem to go hand in hand?

I myself would not want to run a game on mushrooms or acid or have players doing so, but I think that is a far cry from a little alcohol. Nobody is going to come to your game, have a few drinks, and wreck the place. They aren’t going to offer any to your kids (if you have kids why are you having weird strangers over to your place anyway?). What the hell is the real harm here? Stick up the ass may be the best explanation I can come up with for each and every time I have encountered anti-drinkers in the gaming scene.

Catwoman and The Princess Diaries

Here is a fairly solid pic of Anne Hathaway (Princess Diaries, Get Smart, shitty Oscar hosting gig) as "Catwoman." She be looking like she stole the Batpod, Jack.

I say "Catwoman" because, just like Harvey Dent was never referred to as "Two Face" in the last film, she will probably be just a cat burgler named Selina Kyle (although you can count on her action figure being "Catwoman"). It's Nolanverse, so there won't be any dead Selina Kyle lying in an alley being licked back to life by a bunch of cats in heat.

Oh, there have been plenty of pics released of Bane, one of the villains from the film. You can find those all over the place, but they are fairly underwhelming. In some pics, Bane seems to have possession of several Batmobile Tumblers. This and the Selina Kyle Batpod pic would have us believe that in the next film Batman has forgotten to lock up his toys.

Stars Wars - Less Lucas the Better

This post over at Grognardia reminded me how much better a lot of the expanded universe of novels, video games, and comics were than the "hands on" work of George Lucas himself. Much of the talent working on these other non-movie aspects of the SW universe were fans of the material, and it showed in loving ways more than The Man himself. They "got it" while the master had "lost it."

Case in point. Several years there was a Clone Wars cartoon (not the odd looking one they have now - talk about "uncanny valley") miniseries that really got it right. Bad ass Anakin and Obi in mountain-shattering combat with Sith agents. Clone Troopers having their own piece where a group of them find themselves in a sort of Black Hawk Down situation where they show more skill and action than any of the movie clone warriors did. And best of all, they gave us a frightening and powerful General Grievous. Not the wheezing, slouched cyborg clown with the bad Dracula voice. Take a look at this clip if you haven't seen it, then tell me which version of Grevious is cooler.

Starship Crash - the horrible fate of the Silver Princess

The characters boarded the passenger ship “Silver Princess” after a few drinks at the space port outdoor cantina. After having mixed it up with murderous outback poachers, space port gangsters and thugs, and a Darkside Marauder, the group was looking forward to a short 10-hour trip to the remote planet of Dantooine, where their two Jedi comrades had already left for a few days prior. The party had a spacious passenger lounge to themselves (there were several such lounges on the ship), and after liftoff they settled in with their datapads to connect to the media center to pass the time.


Several hours into the journey warning alerts sounded, and the ship’s captain’s intercom voice commanded all passengers to strap into the landing seats near the center of the room until further notice. Soon, the vessel rocked from an explosion within the ship, and the captain announced that the escape pod bay had been destroyed by a mysterious blast. There would be no escape from whatever was going on.


Within moments more explosions were felt. The combat veterans of the group knew that ships were assaulting the Silver Princess, and panic set in when the blast doors to the room dropped with a smash. Kruk the Feeorin veteran of the Mandalorian War unstrapped from his seat in an attempt to reach the weapons locker, but found himself flailing around the room, bouncing off the walls, as the ship took a brutal shellacking from the attackers. Beaten and bruised and lucky to not have broken any bones, Kruk got back to his seat.


Soon the attacks stopped. Were they safe? Not by a longshot; the characters hearts sank as they realized the beaten ship was awkwardly entering a planetary atmosphere at frighteningly higher speeds than was normal. With various alarms still sounding, they found themselves pushed back into their seats by the momentum of the dive, and started feeling the air grow thin and hot. The life support systems were failing. They knew there was no way to survive this, as the lack of air and the heat mercifully eased them into unconsciousness. When the Silver Princess hit planet side, there would be no fear and pain.


In the hilly grassland of Dantooine below, the young Jedis Rokran and Lucia were on patrol in a speeder piloted by Cisco Patelli, a teenage son of settlers who did odd jobs for the Jedi Enclave. As they took a break and Cisco heated up a hearty Ibez stew with his camping gear, both Jedi sensed great coming of mass death from nearby. Looking skyward, they saw a flash and heard a boom, and realized a large starship was breaking through the afternoon clouds on a crash course for the planet. Blazing down at an angle, the crippled ship disappeared behind nearby hills, and with a sickening bang and shaking of the earth, a huge fireball shot up, and a huge wall of fire appeared beyond the hills, marking the skidding of the flaming wreck across more than a mile of landscape.


Rushing to the speeder, young Cisco fired it up as the Jedi leaped aboard, and they shot off for the area beyond the hills. As they rounded the gentle slopes of the foothills, they came around the flaming blast area and saw the long and wide trench created by the crash, and beyond that the main portions of the middle and forward sections of the craft lay in a huge heap of infernal wreckage, flames wisping up towards the sky. They knew there could be no survivors…

Talisman – visiting an old friend

Last week we were short a couple of players, and even though I was willing to have a go of KOTOR with who we had, Terry had been talking up the old Talisman game a lot in the last couple of weeks for some reason, so we went ahead and played it with four of us over at Andy’s. It was me, Paul, Andy, and Terry.

I’ve known Terry for over 20 years. When I first started going to and working at California Renaissance Faires around 1989, my buddy who went with me to get a job there for the first time eventually hooked up with Terry, who worked at a costume booth and we stayed friends after the rather brutal break-up. Terry lived in a nice condo with another Faire person, Lisa, right above the Hollywood Bowl, and I used to hang out there a lot. You could go behind the condo building, hike for a couple of minutes across a field, and find yourself in a spot where you could see part of the stage, and hear whatever was going on there perfectly. That was kind of cool.

Lisa had this huge comic book collection, and the living room hallway had long shelves where she kept them. Paradise to me. I was there so much, you’d have thought I was going out with Lisa, but despite her drunken, clumsy advances one late night I had no interest in romance with the lady. What I was interested in was reading the comics, and playing the two boardgames she had copies of; Blood Bowl, and Talisman.

We all got pretty addicted to Talisman. It was the 2nd edition, and she had both the Dungeon and City expansions, so these tended to be loooooong sessions.

I got my own beat-up copy during the 90’s for a song, but really only had the chance to pull it out and play every 4-5 years. The last time was around 2003, I think. So anyway, Terry brought a copy she had picked up at some point, and it turned out to be a later version with plastic mini’s instead of the cardboard stand-ups. I thought it was all good, because Terry not having any of the expansions for that meant we had a chance of finishing it that night, which we did.

Everybody had cool rangers and barbarians and the like, but I got stuck with the one very lame characters; the Goblin Fanatic. It actually had OK abilities, but the figure was so lame. It used a wrecking ball for some reason (by this version of the game it had been remade a bit to look and fit more with the Warhammer Universe), and the mini had a hard time staying upright. Constantly falling over. Getting stuck with this mort made me feel like I got last choice at a convention D&D game preroll character or something. Ugh. Even in Talisman I like to connect with a character to some degree, but eventually I was just looking forward to the game being over. And Terry eventually won with the Ranger.

I for sure would like to use my older version, with expansions, next time, but that can often lead to a several hour game so who knows. I had some fun, but really, I kind of wish we had used the evening to do some RPG action whatever it was. I think as with a lot of things, my desire to play some Talisman that night had more to do with nostalgia for past games than for a great desire to use it as an alternative when the full group is scarce. I think Andy and Paul liked it a lot though, so I may just be playing again before too long. But if I get the Goblin Fanatic again, I’ll make sure I die quick this time.

Talkin' Smack to Hitler

In honor of the repellant Hugo Weaving playing the repellant Red Skull in the Captain America movie, here’s a couple of favorite scenes of mine from Super Villain Team-Up #16.

Few Marvel villains were eviler than Red Skull. He was a bad guy who was chosen to be a bad guy, and he embraced it, and the hollow promises of the Third (and Fourth, and Fifth, etc…) Reich. A bellboy whom Shicklegruber pulled from obscurity to prove to his toadies that he could create an Aryan superman practically from thin air, he exceeded all of that rat fink Adolph’s expectations.

Marvel may never have presented a splash page as truly heinous. Two hoity toity pricks enjoying a feast while prisoners starve below.

And The Skulls thinly veiled insults at the Hate Monger have a special resonance when you realize HM is Hitler himself. Few could speak to Der Farting Fuehrer in such a manner, but The Red Skull feared no man. He will very much come to life with Hugo in the wheelhouse.