Spider Spider, Burning Bright...

 Seeing as years ago Grognardia was my inspiration to do some rpg blogging, it makes sense that I can still get inspired by posts there to make my own posts on related subjects. But in this case James' post about spiders reminded me of a game related spider thing that happened earlier this year. Early in the campaign the characters were travelling through hobbit lands, and killed a wayward giant spider on a rainy night while taking shelter in an old cottage. The local governess was pleased, and let them stay at her estate in cozy, round halfling guest cottages.

The dead giant spider was placed by and Ettercap, who called upon all spiders large and small in the local area to descend on the domiciles and attack the party. The characters awoke in the dark covered in small spiders, and ran outside to face a half dozen of the giant variety. It was a nasty fight, but the PC's prevailed. 

Later after the game, the players had logged out and I was cleaning things up. That's when I notices something odd. A spider on the 50 inch TV screen I use for running the session. A small spider, about the size of "O" on your keyboard, was just running around. 

I like spiders, and heard long ago it was bad luck to kill one. So I tried to knock it into a glass but nothing happened. It was immune to my touch. A ghost spider? OK, this may sound silly, but for a few seconds I thought (being new to Roll20) that the program could mess with you with animations depending on what you did in the game. Maybe just based on the word "spider" in text somewhere in token notes. But good sense prevailed, and I realized quick that a little spidey had gotten inside the screen. Wow. This had never happened to me before. 

Odd, right? I mean, I'm running a spider based session and I spider invades my game map. Anyway, here is cell phone video I captured it with.

You'll notice the fellow runs through a door into the domicile, past a couple of swarms of spiders, then out a small round window. Clever little guy.

Old School vs. New School

Yeah, I was a pretty tried and true 1st edition guy. I can nail down a handful of reasons for spending decades NOT trading up to newer edtions:

1)  it's what I knew for most of my life. 

2)  It was easy not having to memorize the DMG. Just proclaim "rule of cool" and wing everything. 

3)  Who wants to learn a new system?

4) Who wants to buy a bunch more books?

When rejecting 2nd edition back in the day it was easy to just say "its not Gygax." But even then it was more about the 4 points above. 

In the 90's it was easy to stick with 1st ed. 90% of my player pools would be friends who wanted to play but had little experience with it. So no rules lawyers or power gamers. They were happy to play and didn't care about system. Those were the salad days. Long, amazing campaigns of a half dozen genres. 

Then in the 2000's after some years off I entered a period of years where most of my players were seasoned 1st edition wonks. Here I was forced to be more rules wary, or what passed for rules in 1st ed. Forum folk would argue that it's a sound system. But they are wrong (IMHO). Its a mess.  So open to interpretation all it leads to is argy bargy and rules lawyering. So many "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations. It could get annoying. I mean, all you want to do is present a fun game. That thing right there is not even in the top 3 list of what many 1st edition enthusiasts want out of it. 

Dissatisfaction with old school D&D and the people who were the most into the edition  lead to me running anything but D&D for around three years. And I was happy for it. Some Metamorphosis Alpha, Cthulhu, Runequest, and even Champions filled my gaming needs.  

The group suddenly got an influx in its last year or so, of younger dudes who were 5th edition guys who had zero 1st edition experience. I ran a somewhat short campaign1st ed, using the environs of Tegel Manor. It was some brutal scenarios and a couple characters died, which the newbs were unfamiliar with. Though I think this campaign was some of my best DMing ever, they wanted to play 5th edition. So we decided to give it a go with a more or less noob DM. 

I ran a bard. What struck me the most was how pretty much every character class is a magic user of sorts. I found that very odd. A bard casting thunder wave? But there were things I liked, such as the standard stat modifiers. Not having to have the hit tables handy was nice. But I wasn't really sold. In all honesty it may have been the ability of the DM that kept me at arms length, but at any rate I wasn't ready to make the full move to the new edition. Though there were good points for doing so:

1) straight up rules so you have less arguing about them. 

2) You don't really need all that many books. The PHB and Monster Manual will do (if you don't have power gamers). 

3)  there is a far far far far far far far greater player pool if you want to start a group. And they skew 20-40 years young. And, heaven forbid, lotso grrrrls..)

4)  you can still run games with an old school feel and mentality. Its still D&D if you think of it as that.  D20's. Rangers. Elves. It's D&D as you want it to be, dog. 

Along the lines of this post but also as an aside, a couple of years before leaving LA I had a shot at putting a Champions group together with a lot of people who weren't in my regular group. I love running Supers campaigns so I gave it a real go, but my Grognard attitude about edition got in the way. I wanted to use the old Hero 4th edition, the one that was a sort of all inclusive system for all comic book stuff, not just superheroes. I even had multiple copies.  But the folk I was looking at running for where insistent at using the newest Champions edition, so I demurred on the whole thing. If I had at least tried to learn a newer edition I'd maybe have had some great games of Champs. 

When I moved into my new town the other year, I started an old school rpg meetup and tried to get some 1st edition going. Though the meetup had a lot of folk join it, there just was not that much interest in actually playing it. 

So I got involved in a new campaign at *gasp* a game/comic shop. Dungeon Crawl Classics seemed super popular, but I got involved in some D&D after a few fun games of DCC. The 5th edition DM I played under for a few months was a good guy, and a sort of unofficial community leader, but he was inexperienced. Though fairly talented at running from material he did not prepare all that much (the revamped Keep on the Borderlands), for me the lack of prep shined through. Lots (and I mean lots) of reading the text box descriptions out loud. And actual role play was about zero. In one session the other players would be gung ho wanting to kill all humanoids, then the next would have all this sympathy for them and be anti-killing. It was all fairly annoying, though to be fair many of them were more or less noobs. One guy, a young redneck construction worker who showed up covered in drywall dust, was a jackass at a nuclear level.  When at some point I asked the DM what a particular statue represented and he replied, annoyed,  "it doesn't matter"I knew I was more than ready to get out of the shop and get my own hand picked group going. Something like that should matter to a DM, not to mention a player actually showing some interest. If you are unprepared with the material just make something up that makes sense. You don't have to look at it as art, but put a little work into it. 

So I did with the help of a couple I met through the local game shop Facebook page.  They actually became my besties in general in town, also getting me involved in a local poker group. I got to do a bunch of great games (centered around that old classic The Lichway, which I'll probably talk about in another post) but then the whole virus thing hit.  So I started looking into running games on Roll20, with some helpful remote guidance from  the comic shop DM I mentioned above. 

OK, its all kind of off topic from the title of this post. Getting back to that I guess my point is a transition to a newer edition was fairly easy. I find it enjoyable because I can inject my old school philosophies, such as they are. Noobs at the shop didn't want to hear about it, and maybe they were right. Stop talking and just run new edition games and find my old school nostalgic joy within what I bring to the table as a DM. 

More play injected with my old school style, less reminiscence. Walk the walk.

Cheers

Once upon a time in Los Angeles

The “street” I was born on in Venice.

The world seemed like a very different place when I started a humble little underachieving gaming blog around 10 years ago. At least my world. I was working in entertainment industry finance and management (occasionally going to parties and events of household-name celebrity clients), involved in world music and Renaissance Faires, and GMing games for the longest running group I had ever had. I was doing so many things writing a blog was not a priority by any means. But I loved to talk and write about things I loved, and there was this OSR thing going on, and I had a group to run for after years off from the hobby, bringing back great memories for me of early days gaming. Decades of great groups running my favorite games. D&D, Cthulhu, Champions, even some Runequest. It was unfortunate that often times the memories of games of yore were much better than that games of now, but I'm sure that's a common condition of long timers in the hobby. When in doubt, recapture. Bask in nostalgia. 

My attempts back then at getting out of my private groups comfort zone and into the gaming community certainly had its ups and downs, with some especially bad downs. For my own blog writing I decided to go with a sort of Howard Stern "tell it like it is" mentality which didn't serve it all that well (even Stern has stopped being Stern and looks critically now at his own public persona behavior in the past). It was a reactionary style to be sure. But it seemed a way to go since I saw so much negativity in the old school online scene already. I mean, one of the first statements I read about the so called OSR when I looked at it online was "old schoolers are too busy bayoneting their own wounded..." 

That was certainly true.

RPG scene in-infighting. "Shit Wars." It didn't take long for it to make sense (or maybe it never really did). 

 It soon started to feel like I was doing more of some kind of Andy Kaufman-based gaming performance art than just talking about things game related, and I was getting negative attention when in reality I didn't really want much in the way of any kind of attention. Fuck. Just wanted to talk games with other old schoolers. But it was way beyond the simple pleasures more often than not. It often seemed like war. 

 I eventually quit the blog and the seeking of games outside my group, and for RPG's I just settled into running for my occasionally evolving group at our hosts house in the beach community of Santa Monica. You know, the play is the thing. Blogging in the OSR may start out nobly just an urge to share ideas and tell tales, but it easily just turns into a vanity project. And I was just a long time gamer. I had nothing else to be vane about. No big following, no products to shill for beer money.

 Just play the damn games.

Life went on, but I slowly realized I no longer wanted to live in the city I was born in and once loved. It dawned on me that I needed change in my life. Frank Herbert said "the sleeper must awaken."

 I had grown complacent despite being dissatisfied where I lived (a city seemingly on the verge of apocalypse; already in a state of dystopia).   I was a weekend hedonist; a lover of parties, world music, top shelf potables, and intoxicants of a mild variety. A confirmed bachelor and off and on wanna be playboy. A big city lights and beach life party boy, a Ren Faire/Burning Man world citizen semi-hippy.  But I started to crave a slightly less candle-at-both-ends life. A change.

The city I lived in, the neighborhood I was born in and lived in (now a jungle of tent cities on every street corner), the job I had for years, the people I was gaming with. A slowly growing dissatisfaction. So since I was a bachelor with no kids, and had great savings and some property investments, I had the ability to leave that job and spend time casually trying to improve myself and decide what I wanted to do next. 

My old neighborhood where I grew up currently. In the 90's most of the show Baywatch was filmed in a 6 block radius right here. Go watch the old David Lee Roth video California Girls (also filmed here) for what people have in their mind when they are on their way here. 

What I did was move out of Southern California. I decided to change everything. I moved away from the beaches and into a mountain/river community in the Northwest. Now I live in a small city. I now live across the street from a rustic park and a part of the river that is a protected bio-sphere. During fall and winter flocks of geese and ducks come to the area for months and are hanging out everywhere. Sitting in my garden looking at me like "what you gonna do about it?" I love the little bastards. I love living where you get a bit of snow. I love being away from a big crowded city  where it never rains to wash away the hubris and pee smell. 

N

The area is great for biking and hiking, and thanks in large part to that, and finally living somewhere fairly quiet and peaceful where I could get restful sleep (when I left LA I was living on the busiest street in the city), I'd lost around 40 lbs. (weight gained years before after an auto related back injury) over a year without taking any extreme measures . My time in a local gym continued the process of getting much more healthy. Discovering new things like wall climbing and battle ropes has been life changing.  A few months into my gym habit the owners named me member of the month and gave me a plaque, putting me on the wall of fame.  I feel 10 years young. 

 I have to be honest, it took me months to get used to sleeping without traffic and emergency vehicle sirens surrounding my senses. The loudest thing at night is the passenger train on the other side of the river, coming down from the mountain pass, and that is more lulling than loud. In winter as you doze off you can imagine it coming down from the mountains covered in snow. I love it. I don't know that I'll live here the rest of my life, but for now its great. 

a favored fishing or just sitting spot right across the street from my house. Yeah, about a 200 yard stroll away. 
#brandywineriveriscallingme

I got a great job, again, different. Instead of working for private firms enriching a select few Individuals, I was now working for a large not for profit health organization. Another needed change. Doing some good. 

I made some friends in town who helped me get a D&D group together. Yep, 5th edition, another change. Easier to get players for. I'll write soon about my transition to that, though I will always hold on to an old school perspective.

My local besties who helped me get a group going for D&D, and also got me boardgaming like crazy. Talisman, Dead of Winter, etc.  Every D&D game I ran they would bring a sixer of expensive beer for me even when I told them they are way too generous. Man, all players should be more like these fine folks. Players who act like I'm something valuable rather than working for them and catering to their needs as a DM. Talk about change!

Well, then all this virus/helter skelter stuff. Again, big changes. But this seemingly negative change begat new things. I've started playing friends for the first time online with my XBOX Live. But even bigger than that I finally got into Roll D20 and have a great online group to do D&D with during these end of times. A whole new world. Loving it.

In hobbit cottages awaiting a spider attack

But talk about changes In the old school gaming scene. As mentioned my style of blogging lead to some negativity, but there was a ton of negativity online in relation to gaming at the time. But really nothing compared to that of the OSR the last few years. Negativity and argy bargy online? You can have your "OSR shitwars." 

With being settled into a happier and more satisfying life-space I've decided to come back to my old blog to talk about some of these gaming changes in my life. Not that I or anyone else needs it so much, but I was recently inspired to start blogging about my old comic collection just for shits and giggles and I thought what the heck, why not drop in here from time to time to document my changes and ideas in gaming. And if you (or anybody) actually reads this, maybe you'll have some comments about your changes or whatever. I have no desire to sell anything. I have a career and investments to make money in. Though it is nice to share some gaming ideas, my scenarios are for my players and that is all the attention I need from my game prep. But it can be fun to put your gaming ideas out there, if only for yourself. A blog can be a way to get in touch with your own personal gaming id. Moments of reflection.  Do it for yourself. That's my main motivation. So here I am again for however long it is fun to do.

And gaming goes on. 

Cheers,

Mac

Richard Corben's "Den" film?

OK, though I am usually "in the know" about various fantasy and sci fi upcoming films, I have no knowledge of any plans for a "Den" film, or if there has been any plans in the past. There for sure must have been talk of it over the decades. 

I collected Heavy Metal throughout my teens, and Den was my favorite. The epic tale of a young geek who got swept from his suburban back yard, transferred into a muscular body, and taken to a grim/dark fantasy world much as his uncle had once been, is a D&D fans delight, or even just a fan of strange fantasy. I loved seeing Den in animated form in the Heavy Metal film of the 80's. 

Having heard of Corben's death from a Grognardia post, I thought about how a Den movie could be pretty cool. Yeah, they could fuck it up. And the main way they could do that is by casting the most logical and best choice as Den..

OK, I'm not a Vin Diesel hater. I liked him in Pitch Black. Though I haven't watched the films he is best know for (outside of hearing his voice in Guardians of The Galaxy), I respect his geek cred. He is an unashamed D&D gamer, and also has a great love of video games. But the casting of Vin would make the movie more about him than the heroic Den himself. 

But dang. Despite maybe being a good couple decades or so older than the young Den seems to be, he just fits the part physically, and probably in personality as well. 

I'm sure Vin will have a long and healthy life. So by the time they do a Den film he'll be too old, but will at least see it (surely Vin has seen his resemblance the character. He's a geek). And hey: Den actually encountered his buff uncle at some point in the stories, so he ain't out of the running of a film I hope I'm  around to see when its made. 

Dare to dream!

2012 - a great year of just plain gaming

With the Temple of Demogorgon 4 year anniversary just this last week, I thought it might a good time to talk about some of my gaming from the last year (as seems to be the tradition). Mostly the last year was about focusing on actually running games over blogging or kerfuffling in the OSR, and I found it both peaceful and fulfilling.

In 2012 I didn’t do much in the way of gaming outside the regular group. After a couple of shitty experiences in the previous and other years both at tabletops and online (there were some good ones too), I dedicated myself to the regular group and to new campaigns with gusto, and kept my posts here to an average of 2 or 3 a month.

Pretty much started the year jumping right into my long-daydreamed about classic Runequest game. I did a lot of research, and dreaming up of my own stuff in relation to existing data for this campaign. It was a lot of work, but I love Glorantha and could not wait to portray my version of it. Though I used a lot of the Celtic imagery and some clarifications on locations from later editions, I did my best to keep my Glorantha very basic, they way I experienced it as a kid. There was a bit of work to be done with the crunch, as I almost immediately threw out some of the Strike Rank stuff and started houseruling to make the game and all it’s combat focus go smoother. I think that went well, as I’m pretty sure I captured the groups imagination with strong tribal-clan setting, a nice break from generic medieval Europe setting of D&D. I finally got to do the classic Gringles Pawnshop and Rainbow Mounds scenario’s, and it was all good. I think I left the campaign off later in the year with the players wanting more, and that is the feather in the GM cap as far as I’m concerned. I will for sure revisit the characters later this year.


In January regular player Paul brought a copy of Arkham Horror boardgame when we were low on players, and though lengthy (as most boardgames seem to be) it was fun, and got my juices flowing to do some Call of Cthulhu. We did eventually get a few sessions in, and it was good times. I called this part of the campaign “Fangs of New York,” with a classic New York setting. Byakhees and Chinese Gangsters over Times Square on New Years Eve, Cho Cho People and Chaugner Faugh in the Jersey Pine Barrens. Really great sessions, and as in the past some players hemmed and hawed about the genre, but loved it once we played. Quite honestly, I think I do my best GMing with Cthulhu. I’m really “on” when I run it. Looking forward to getting in some more of this soon. It is a good game for when you are low on players.


Just a quick video gaming mention as an aside. Around the earlier part of last year my video game of choice ended up being Fallout 3. I hadn’t played a video game with this much enthusiasm since Resident Evil 4. Just a great and immersive game, and a big time waster in 2012. Right now, into 2013, I’m putting a bit of effort into Borderlands 1 and Bioshock (I might have mentioned in the past that I am always 2-4 years behind on my video games).

My Knights of The Old Republic campaign continued. Despite the crunch, or maybe even because of it, the group on a whole seemed to really enjoy it. I cannot compare it to AD&D as I hadn’t run that for the group in over two years, but out of everything else I have done; Mutant Future, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu, this seemed to be what the gang liked best. I ran it right up to the holidays, but have set it aside since I want to do D&D so bad. We’ll hopefully get back to it later this year, maybe summer.

In addition to this new D&D campaign we are just getting underway, I also still want to do a mini-campaign with the high level dudes left over from the Night Below campaign I ended two years ago. The players seem very attached to these characters, and it seems a shame to not do the occasional outing with them, despite my mild dislike for high level play.


So we in the group have started my new AD&D 1st edition campaign, and the characters seem like a lot of fun so far. So my gaming wish list for lucky number 2013 is to do a bunch of this AD&D campaign, a smattering of the high level AD&D, More Call of Cthulhu here and there, a continuance of KOTOR later in the year, and…heaven forbid…maybe sneak a little Champions in? That would be a damn good gaming year for me.

Fumblin’ around with The DMG – character creation

Dan Dan The Power Game Man™ has been scratching to get out of the house. His wife just had another kid last week, and his Mulholland manse is chock full of relatives from around the globe. After a hard partyin’ Christmas weekend, I was not totally up for a full game of any kind. But with only Dan and Andy available anyway, I thought why not sink some Newcastles and do character work for the new campaign, and maybe a little combat encounter or two.

With a return to more BTB game play in this 1st edition campaign, I wanted to be strict with the character creation. Strict for me, anyway. Racial stat and level limitations were in play this campaign, and with none of us being DMG experts (despite my recent ongoing efforts), there was quite a bit of fumbling through the beloved tome to try and make sure our bases were covered. I have a pdf of OSRIC I printed and bound to serve as a backup play aid in this campaign, and it was a little useful. It would have been moreso, but here’s another book I need to read and familiarize myself with. It’s better organized than the DMG, but it ain’t perfect when you need a particular piece of info. Nothing I wanted to look up in OSRIC was listed and easily found in the index's, but that may have been more bad luck than anything else. I am going to take a better look at it though (it is, like, a 400 page thing).

Before delving too deep, we did that stat rolls so they could start formulating ideas on what to run. So I had them both do up three full sets of stats, each with roll 4D6 use best 3D6, in order. This is a tightening up of my usual assign to taste preference. There would be no stat dumping here. You get three full sets to make a choice from, and that still seems fairly generous. I allowed only very minor tweaking, and only in cases I suggested. I took ZERO player suggestions on stat swapping and such. Nope. Mr. Tough Guy. Despite that, they came out pretty above average in most respects. Dan even got an 18 in strength for the set he chose.

So harsh restrictions in the book popped up only once or twice to burn players. Mostly in Dan’s case. He wanted his fighter/MU/cleric to be a full grey elf, but the rules say he’d have to be half elf. He was fairly disappointed for some reason he could not be the full elf, and I almost caved. But Andy chimed in and kept me on the straight and narrow. I’m happy for that, because hell, full elves are these immortal dudes. There should be reasons to make it harder to be one. Despite being all over the place, 1st edition does have some balancing acts going on, and I don’t want to do my usual willy nilly houseruling to mess with it. So it’s a half-elf for big Dan.
So after fumbling around to get characters properly created by the book, I set them up with a little giant rat killing at a city tavern to stretch the combat muscles for the pair.
New characters getting done up is always big fun for me, and I’m glad we’ll get to stretch it out when the other players are there to roll up. I had to admit, it was kind of refreshing to “go by the rules” for character creation. We’ll soon hopefully see how that goes for long term gameplay.

Rereading the DMG is gonna be a bitch

I can’t remember if I ever read the DMG all the way through when I first got it as a kid. Logic would say that I would have. It had to be an exciting thing, getting this tome. I just don’t remember it. I certainly never made a study of it. I’d say more than half my handwaved houserules came out of my not wanting to look shit up (the rest because, well, I thought a lot of stuff about the rules sucked). So I never came anywhere near to mastering the “official” rules of AD&D 1st ed.

Well, I have kind of decided to make a cover to cover reading of it. For one thing, I want to weed out some of my more arbitrary houserulings (many of which are just in my head and fuzzy sometimes) and get back to being a wee bit more by the book. This is something I should maybe have done when I started the group 4 years ago. In contrast to the many noobs I introduced to the game back in the 90’s (in the 80’s most of my players wanted to be experts), these guys were fairly seasoned players, and in at least one case knew the DMG much better than I did. So I had to sometimes fight tooth and nail with players over some of my “lazy” changes. So for sure to not have to go through that struggle again, and some other reasons, I am going to get more familiar with things in the tome. So I thought a cover to cover read would help. Even if I'm not as excited about it as when I was a kid, and its more like work.

After around a week I am not all that far into it. 30 pages or so. But in that short amount of time I remembered how disorganized the book is. One page I’m reading about spells, the next henchmen and homestead upkeep, and back again. Maybe this will, at the very least, make me more educated on what all is in this book I’ve had several copies of for well over 30 years. More thoughts to come.
And a happy Christmas to you!