Weeee! Me and OD&D!

Before it gets later in the week and into a possible Mutant Future session, I wanted to post about the OD&D game I did for the group last week as a little alternative. My eyes are a bit bleary, as I sat through three full length movies over the weekend in addition to the usual tons of TV, reading, and video games. The Sci Fi Academy happened to have three screenings scheduled, including a 3D screening in a Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive office building Sunday afternoon. So I saw Eclipse (lame as hell with a moment or two of cool, but my +one was a fan so she thought it was the best movie ever – Team Edward, no doubt), Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (out on DVD right now actually, the Academy gets foreign films months after they are out, and even if you aren’t a suspense/mystery fan YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE. Rent it next time you’re at Blockbuster), and Air Bender in 3D, which despite the 3D adding nothing of value, was actually a pretty good time at the movies. Lots of actions and wild visuals. The setting would make a great game.

Anyhoo, so I popped OD&D on the group. Dan, a total dice-aphobe when it comes to stat rolling, was beside himself at the thought of 3D6 in order. The others took it in stride, and with a slight bit of generosity (I let them roll two sets in order, with the option of a third set rolled, or a best 3 of 4 elimination roll on one of the stats of the first two). Nobody came out a total Elmer Fudd, and a couple of them had some decent above average stuff.

So, I’m doing White Box plus Greyhawk, but even so there are few options. Andy was the only one who did a single class, a human cleric. Desperate Dan worked up a nice little fighter/thief dwarf. Both Paul and Terry did up elvish fighter/mu’s. With Greyhawk involved, I let them operate simultaneously in both classes.

Only took a half hour or so to get rolled up, named, and supplied, and off they went. Now, in my 1st edition games I usually put a ton of stuff into character set-up. I want to know as much as possible about the character before we begin. But for this it was “OK, off we go” without really worrying about where anybody comes from.

The setting is 200 years prior to my current 1st ed games, and that puts it about 70 years before my very first game in that world as a kid. So this is well within my world’s “Age of Dungeons.” I thought it appropriate, because I pretty much started on White Box with Greyhawk, so I set it closer to that retro time when all we did was dungeon crawl in my world. Sort of a full circle via going back in time.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too many details of the actual gameplay because of the event I’m doing it at next month, but things went by much faster than it in my usual game. Everything just so nice and simplified. Few adjustments, just raw “up and at ‘em.”

After an hour or two I was like “Ok, I could just ditch 1st ed. All together, stop over thinking things, and go simple from now on,” but that wasn’t what I really was trying to do. In the long run, I think I would pine for nice, complicated AD&D. But this was a nice, hassle free change. Talk about phoning it in!

And I even went with a more traditional combat set-up, rather than my going in Dex order method. I basically did a spell-missile-move-melee thing that actually worked better than I thought. It is very possible I will go with that for my AD&D in the future. There ended up being several combats in the actual three or so hours of play, and they all went fast and furious. The party made out ok, getting a few hundred gold, a couple of magic items, and they all survived despite a couple of bites from poisonous foes. What surprised me most of all what the party taking stairs down to the next level as soon as they came across it. They fought a foe or two of higher level, and still came out only mildly scathed. At games end, they did what any old school party should do – they left the dungeon to camp for the night.

It was a lot of fun for me, and I think the gang liked the change of pace from my usual high adventure crap. Dungeon delving for its own sake. Nice. I think things will go well at the event next month, although it will be as many as twice the four players I had for it this time (Ben was out of town, hence the reason for the alternate game). But I have a good feeling about it.

I want to mention that I leaned heavily on the dungeon as mythic underworld stuff to get my player in the right mood, so a big tip o' the old school hat to Philotomy

And wow, the last several months I have gotten to do a lot of alternatives to the usual 1st edition campaign. A year ago I was only dreaming of a chance to do my old Champions game world a bit, and a bit of Mutant Future. I’ve been getting that. Now a bit of OD&D for grins and giggles. Damn, the sky is the limit. Maybe I’ll get to inject some Call of Cthulhu into the group before too long after all! Dream big.

Temple Of Demogorgon – 3 Years and still underachieving

As usual, a day late for my own party. Yesterday, Saturday, marked the 3rd anniversary of this most humble, somewhat under the radar and highly underappreciated gaming blog. I’m obviously not keeping a real keen eye on things like that. I’ve never really felt like this was a “vanity blog.” I hardly ever talk about my life outside of games. Having a big, noticeable voice in the online community was never my goal (less than 175 followers after three years is fairly pathetic). I don’t work at all at it, or try to be on a lot of blog rolls. What would even be the point of that? You don’t get paid to blog with under 10,000 readers. You don’t get prestige in any circles that matter for shit in the world at large.

I mean, this is a community that rewards blogs with huge followings because the particular blogger is a skeeve who happens to know some low end sex workers (poor me always having females in my games who were mostly legit actresses and entertainment industry people, professional artists, or successful business women of one kind or another), or made his bones by posting fairly droll commentary of various kinds 3-5 times a day. I don’t constantly post charts and tables (I stopped having time for coming up with that shit when I got out of high school), or focus on corny-ass old school cartoon dungeon mentality that tries to recapture the vibe felt by a 14 year old playing D&D in the late 70’s. I don’t make post after post of “Mr. Nice Guy” gamer fluff that is about as interesting as watching flies fuck. I don’t laser focus on any one thing, like games about Mars or Cimmeria. I don’t try to be especially wacky, refined, literary, or insightful.

This is just a dude who was out of gaming completely for almost a decade, and fell ass backwards into a host who was willing to help put a regular group together and lived fairly close to me and was looking for a 1st edition DM. Luckily we found some folk who were (mostly) not hopeless, catpiss-smelling nons or disturbing geektards. It was a perfect storm that swept me up into putting hours of precious time back into this hobby. And some of that time went into this blog. Yeah, it’s weird, because before that I had zero interest in blogging.

But I sometimes do tend to over think things, and starting this blog may have been an offshoot of that. It’s mostly because I actually enjoy writing down my thoughts, but I really felt I had a lot to say, and had a lot of unique situations from back in the day to talk about. My early, often shitty experiences as a youngster playing in a filthy game shop full of older weirdo’s; girlfriends who played in campaigns (once again non-skanks, sorry); friendships gained and lost. Growing up on onward all while gaming on the sidelines of a fairly full, non-nerd life.

A couple of times doing the blog felt like it was overshadowing the games, especially with my less than satisfactory exploits trying to get involved in the local gaming community outside my comfort zone of a regular group of hand-picked non-cretins. But earlier this year I had an epiphany and decided my focus would be on playing and not writing about playing. That is what it should be about, no? Enjoy the fruits more than you study their roots. Having a bunch of people read your words is great, but having 6 people in front of you hanging on your words and laughing, moaning, bitching, begging, cursing, and yelling is priceless.

So this last year big changes at work and in my career, a couple of somewhat regular relationships including one at work (Sam Adams might tell you that is NOT always a good decision) and some other good life things gave me less time to post. It comes and goes of course, and through the holidays up to right now I’ve had more freedom to post more often. But the fact is I’ll probably post less again. I’m going to try and struggle through a few Runequest games (one game and I already want to houserule half the shit) so I’ll want to post on that a bit just because it’s new. And hopefully I’ll get some Call of Cthulhu games going, and I know from past experience that will be worth posting about. But again, I want the actual gaming to be more important than reading my own thoughts and sharing them with a small, closed community.

So going into another year of this, and who knows how far it will go. Another three years? That’s a long time when you are getting into middle-age. Then again, my doctor tells me because of my outstanding Scottish genetics I could get back close to high school shape in a year if I skipped a few beers and got back on my mountain bike on weekends. Miracles can happen. In two years I could be married, have kids, working harder to make even more money. Who knows. I still want a beach house and a super-model as mother to my future children. Weirder things have happened. Just look at the very existence of an OSR. Who would have thought 30 years ago that this was a possibility.

Thanks for your support and best of luck in the new year!

Oriental Adventures & The Legend of Green Snake

I was going through a box of my older DVD’s last night, and came across my copy of the 1993 Hong Kong film Green Snake. I really love this movie, which I think I originally saw at the WLA revival theater The Nuart in the mid-late 90’s. I don’t know if there is a voice-over English version, but I hope not. The movie is so beautiful to look at (when the sadly terrible special effects are not on screen) and combined with the sing song native language it is almost mesmerizing, and part of the films charm (at least for a Yankee).

Wikipedia describes the film thusly:

Two snake spirits have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake (Joey Wong) is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged with local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo), with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters and she is not yet quite sure about the benefits of the human world. The two snakes move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town.

Their enemies are a buffoonish Taoist and an overzealous Buddhist monk Fa Hoi (Vincent Zhao) who make various attempts to banish them from the human world. The monk thinks of himself as a keeper of the natural order of the world and is very prejudiced against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He brings things to a head when he abducts White's husband from the human/spirit mixed marriage into his religious reeducation camp–styled temple.

Anyway, whenever I think of this film I think of Oriental Adventures (applying things that I like to gaming terms was a habit I never managed to fully lose after attaining it in childhood). Around 2003 I was into the second or third year of my gaming semi-retirement when I ran into an old player of mine at a suite party at Loscon in Los Angeles (a very rare sci fi con appearance by me) at around 2am. Lisa was from that period in the mid-90’s when almost all of my players were female and we were mostly doing Call of Cthulhu and Champions. Lisa, pretty high on joy juice, talked about how much she loved the old games, and raved to her fairly new husband about my DM’ing prowess (of course a party at a convention is the perfect place to hear that). It was decided right there that I would be doing up some games for these guys and whoever in the near future. At the husband Jeff’s request I would be doing some Oriental Adventures (something I hadn’t run since around 1990). Current player in my group Terry, who had played with Lisa in most of those 90’s games and was Lisa’s roommate back then, was up for it as well so there we were doing OA on a semi-monthly basis on weekends for awhile.

The movie Green Snake had a heavy influence on many of those games for me. For one thing, Lisa ran a Hengeyokai, and I tweaked that race just a little to match the changelings of Green Snake (animal spirits who spend many years of training and meditation to change into the higher human form). Then there was the super-powered, self-righteous monk of the film who both admires and distrusts the White and Green Snakes, Fa Hoi. I totally ripped-him off to create Tai Seng, a monk who I used as and NPC to guide the players towards various adventures and activities (he was not a prick like the movie version…for the most part).

Anyway, take a look at my favorite scene from the film, where the snakes White and Green make their transformation to beautiful human form on the roof of a tavern during a rainstorm, while a wedding/orgy goes on inside (little nudity so be careful at work). Maybe you’ll get the chance to watch in it’s entirely at some point. If you are going to run OA in the future, I demand you watch it! It might give you some great ideas as well.

Mad Max Role-Playing?

I first saw Mad Max about the time The Road Warrior came out. I'm not sure which I saw first. I know I saw RW in theaters (multiple times), and either right before or after Mad Max on tape. It was in those early years of playing table top RPG, and just like almost everything else it was hard not to see role playing possibilities in it. Car Wars was a thing, although it didn't really include much in the way of ongoing campaign possibilities, unless you injected that into it yourself. If I recall in early Car Wars your guy could exit the vehicle, maybe being able to take some pot shots at others as they ran to avoid being run over. But when I got the hankering to DM some stuff in a Mad Maxapocolypse, I did what proud RPG playing teens did at the time and circumvented Car Wars to whip up my own rules for a Road Warrior game. 

Memory is dim as too the details, but I had character classes. Wasteland Wanderer, Road Warrior, Corporate Agent (see below), former Athlete, former Soldier, Wasteland Raider, etc. 

Two things should stand out in the last little paragraph. First, "former" careers such as athlete and soldier. So of course that makes it obvious that this is not too many years after the end of the world. My setting followed the Mad Max and Road Warrior 1 and 2 implied progression of a society in decline for some years followed by an eventual nuclear holocaust. So maybe 10 years after the nukes? Secondly, the "Corporate Agent" implies that there is still some vestiges of civilization somewhere, and so there was. In 1982 there was a cheap little film called "Parasite," Demi Moore's first film. In it, there was a Road Warrior wasteland, and also a remnant of old world corporation groups called "The Merchants." In the film the Merchant agent tooled around the bad lands in a three piece suit and a cool sports car. And a laser gun.

A well funded 401K makes up for any poxiclipse...

The couple of little campaigns I did were successful. One was at the local shop Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica. It was early enough in the hobby that the stalwarts of the shop were still crusty wargamers in their 40's thru 60's, with a decent smattering of the owner's college buddies in their late 20's. So the teens who came in didn't often get the chance to run games there. But one of the nicer older dudes was a big Max fan, and jumped at the chance to play so championed me doing a few sessions. It went well. The guy ran a Lord Humongous clone among a variety of the character classes mentioned above, and he did the voice spot on and it was hilarious. 

You know the drill. Just walk away...

At one point they had a little convoy. This was a sandbox game, and most encounters were random. At one point a storm passed through, an anomaly event based on the storms in the book Damnation Alley (used also in the famous Judge Dredd arc "The Cursed Earth." These storms would rain not just water buy random things. In this case a bunch of sea life whipped up from the ocean. Humongous took a nice sized dead great white shark and tied it to the hood of his Mustang. Those were fun, beer and pretzels sessions (without any actual beer or pretzels). 

Another little campaign I ran around the time for some friends went just as well. One memorable character was a Former Athlete, a Rollerball player from the before the bad times. He still wore his uniform and armor, rolling down the interstate on his roller skates. I loved that image. 

No participation trophies in Rollerball, snowflake...

The thing about the setting is its hard to inject variety. Vehicle crashes and hand to hand combat with more or less the same kind of foes made it so the game seemed geared towards short term campaigns. And that was fine. We moved on after that to all the other games I was running at the time (D&D, Runequest, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Gamma World, etc) and at some point my note book containing the rules was lost. 

The Mad Max resurgence of recent years had me thinking about it again. Fury Road was the old movies turned up to nitro boost. Characters like Immortan Joe, his war boys, and concepts like the Bullet Farm and such adds a lot of color to the wasteland. Max, who we always assumed could handle himself in a fight (he did alright in the Thunderdome) the new Max was clearly a badass, though it was still mostly assumed...he never gets in a real melee on screen other than his scuffle with a one armed woman.

She actually punches him with that arm nub which is pretty sweet

Some months after the release of Fury Road, the Mad Max video game came out. It was the world of Mad Max tuned up to an ever higher turbo level. This Max gets right into fist fights with gangs of raiders, and he goes to town with devastating blows and clever blocks and ripostes. 

Not long into the game I was taking on groups of up to 8 guys no problem. But of course the driving is the thing, and the game captures various auto related things exceptionally well. You get to give your car upgrades as you go, with things like harpoons, nitro boosts, and better armor. 

End of the world media just loves using that bridge in posters..

This wasteland is clearly the result of a world wide apocalypse beyond what the other movies showed. Here an enemy base might be a land locked aircraft carrier, or a wrecked giant submarine out in the dunes. 

If I ever do another tabletop version I would certainly use this more extreme and fanciful wasteland of the video game, with inspiration from the great characters of Fury Road. Concepts like The Bullet Farm and Gas Town hint at points of light civilization that might add variety to the sandboxing of characters. And certainly the possibilities of weird weather events, mutants, and other sci fi concepts would tighten up the mix. 

But will I ever run a Road Warrior campaign again. Likely not. But one can dream about the possibilities, right?

Witness!

MY “APPENDEX N” (hold the applause)

MY “APPENDEX N”

OK, the rage this last week was listing books that inspired your D&D ( or other gaming), so here is mine in a nutshell.

Comic Books – probably the most influential media in terms of my love of gaming, and not just my long-running Champions games from the 90’s. I have always tried to inject the drama and descriptiveness of comics into my games, D&D or otherwise. I think it is one of my greatest points as a GM. Without going too much overboard, my humanoid villains often came off a lot like Marvel Comics villains. I do try to go light on the corny dialogue, however. Offbeat, genre-slapping comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight returns, and Marshal Law also taught me to turn clichés and expectations on their ear a bit in game terms.

The Hobbit/LOTR – Natch. Nuff Said. Oh man, my mind is still on comics. Tolkien was my greatest gaming influence in the earliest days, just as it was for D&D in general.

Conan – I was in my early teens when I started devouring the first several Conan paperbacks. REH’s mood, passion, and swift and blinding violence transported me to that dark prehistoric place where Conan tread in his sandaled feet. Marvel’s Conan comics, especially Red Sonja, helped color my world as well.

Tarzan/John Carter of Mars – My dad read me the first Tarzan book when I was a kid. Years later I would jump on the rest and be transported to those awesome jungle places. And the sweeping adventure of JC of Mars really set my gaming blood on fire. I so wanted to have dashing sword fights like those in my games. Edgar Rice B. has such a terrific sense of adventure, and such a great sense of love and honor.

H.P. Lovecraft – Ok, I didn’t read HP before I got into D&D, but when I started in the early 80’s, it lead me to one of my favorite D&D alternatives: Call of Cthulhu. It was hard to talk my D&D players into trying it when I went for a full campaign in the early 90’s, but they soon fell in love with it, even the girls. It was always a great break from D&D.

Lankhmar – of course of course of course. The big guy and the little guy and their crazy city came in second only to Tolkien for my game inspirations. I could not get the most out of Judges Guild products like City State of the Invincible Overlord or Hargraves’ Arduin until I got into Leiber's great (and ahead of their time) books. This was one of those rare series that let you know how limitless the possibilities were in a fantasy world, as opposed to how limited. Somehow, the world of Fritz seems an amalgam of all the reading material I have listed above.

Taking off the DM hat (at least a little)

I always preferred GM’ing to being a player. From the mid-80’s through the late 90’s, I was the DM/GM 99% of the time and was the guy who would put the gaming group together. The last time I sat down as a player was around 1998 for a couple of times in some local folks GURPS games. I had no experience with GURPS, and there was nothing special about the games to make me a fan. With a GM who had no real talent and seemed to make it all up as he went along (“notes light” is fine, but I don’t trust any GM who doesn’t even have a notebook to refer to during the game), that didn’t last long for me. I re-resigned myself to GM’ing only.

When I put my current group together a couple of years ago, I had no intention of being a player in it. I had just taken around 6 years off from gaming, and I came back to it with a thousand ideas in my head, pent-up in me like sperm cells in a set of blue balls. Although one new player from last year clearly had joined us to try and get us to let him run his games (he wasn’t at his first game an hour before he started inquiring about anybody wanting to play in his 3.0 D&D – what cajones on the dude), my other players have been happy to go player only.

But since getting involved in the online gaming community the other year, I have started to have a little bit of a hankering to sit down as a player (and it’d be nice to sit down – I run our weeknight games standing up the entire time). Not out of a great love of playing a character. Outside of doing the occasional Champions or Call of Cthulhu campaign, my first and greatest love is my AD&D world setting. I started it out at around age 14 towards the end of the 70’s. It has grown and expanded over the decades, and has seen the coming and going of hundreds of player characters. My love and attachment to it has kept my away from various Forgotten Realms and Grewhawks and Blackmoors since day one (well, I did dabble a good bit in the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting around 1981).

But I feel that perhaps not being a player in D&D has made me jaded, and maybe even a bit out of touch. So I have wanted to get a little player time in, and one of our newer players has offered to step up when I feel like having a little break from DM’ing, or when an important player cancels and I don’t want to do one of my alternates. I plan on wrapping up my Night Below campaign (at least the first half of it) by late July, and I may not want to jump right into DM’ing another campaign. So I’ll need a break at some point.

I had planned for a rare weekend session this coming Saturday, but with a crucial player not being able to make it, and me not wanting to do an extra long Mutant Future alternative (we are doing that Wed night this week) I gave Ben the go ahead to get a game ready for us. I think he is pretty excited about it.

Ben started with us around late fall of last year, and he is an excellent player. He knows 1st edition well, and that is a plus. I actually would like to lose a few of my less necessary house rules and go a bit more by the book when I do my next campaign, and Ben wanting to go by the book for his games will give me a chance to re-familiarize myself with rules I haven’t used as-is in decades (if ever).

So I am looking forward to coming up with a player character for the first time in forever, and about blogging about my player experiences rather than just my GM joys n’ headaches. Ben wants to make it elf-centric (he runs a high elf in my game, so he obviously has an elf fixation), so I think I’ll do up a rakish half-elf Fighter/MU.

And...then there was Eldritch Horror

 

It's kind of odd really, to be several games in to a successful D&D campaign with people I first met in the 1st session and to mostly be posting about board games. But it's my current passion. Not just any people to play with (my local besties B and L), and not just any games. All the games I have posted about that I love are games with action, mystery, adventure, and whimsey. 

When I first moved into my new town a few short years ago I looked into local board game meetups. But unfortunately, the gamenuts present had long since moved on from some of the games I loved, and on to others. Games that I didn't find especially inspiring. There was one game where you built different colors of coral. Yawn. Another popular one was Stone Age. I was excited to try it. Mammoths and hunting! But no, turned out it was all worker and resource management, something I find about as exciting as two flies breeding. I gave up on that scene fairly quickly. But I soon met B and L. They were looking to get into D&D and tapped me to run the games. The group went well for a few months, but when it folded for the usual reasons, I decided to try and get them into the board games i wanted to try. B and L already went to a local bar that had over 100 board game free to play, so they were no strangers to them. 

At first, I got them into my old copy of Talisman, and they liked it enough to quickly buy one of the more recent versions. Soon I was buying games I wanted try with them, mostly seen on Will Wheaton's Tabletop show. King of Tokyo, Epic Spell Wars, Dead of Winter, etc.  We played and continue to play the hell out of them. Some others as well. But the one that sat on the shelf since I know them went untouched. It was Eldritch Horror. 

A relative of Arkham Horror. EH was a complicated game, with tons of cards, tokens, and a huge number of fiddley rules to unpack. I was fairly intimidated by it. When I first got it almost three years ago I broke it open and tried a few rounds to learn it, and man, I was baffled. Too much. So it remained stashed away. 

But recently I was like "what the hell." I kept studying on it, and got some info locked into my brain, but the only way to learn it was to actually play it with people, and B and L were up for it. Honestly, just taking the half hour or so to set it up made you learn a lot. Many of the decks involved are identified by artwork, often very similar to different decks, which makes it harder to organize. So far we are maybe three sessions in with it. We devote our entire game day to it, but never seem to finish it. Usually, things look bad and rather than try to hang on with our characters for another hour or so, we pack it in and play some shorter games to end the evening. B and L are fairly competitive, but unless money is involved, I'm about the journey. I don't really care if I win or not. I'm a role player. 

Not to say it isn't fun. It's awesome. It has a lot of role-playing elements that appeal to me. The interesting characters, the different story beats that can happen. It kind of plays like a more epic, international Call of Cthulhu campaign. 

You basically choose of of several Old Ones, including Cthulhu, and build things around that deity. One card deck you actually have to work on to apply to that specific God, organizing it in particular layers. Then your characters travel around the world locations, doing actions (travelling, shopping, etc) and having encounters. As you play gates will appear (during the games turn; the "Mythos Phase"), and monsters as well. It's hilarious, but B and L have almost no Lovecraft experience, so I'm constantly explaining what things are. The Mi Go takes out your brain and fly it to Jupiter or whatever. Hounds of Tindalos come through angles to get at you. Etc. But playing last night a Colour out of Space showed up, and they got excited, having recently seen the Nick Cage movie of that name. We're playing with Shub Niggurath as the deity, and had to keep telling them to mispronounce it because it has an unfortunate similarity to a word we should not say out loud. I kept saying "no, say "Shub Nagrath." I'm serious, did Xenophobic HP Lovecraft purposefully use that unfortunate pronunciation? 

The game play is fun and very deep, so even if you aren't a Lovecraft fan, if you are cool with learning a lot of awkward (yet strangely effective) rules, and are willing to put like 5 hours into a game (some will be a lot shorter just due to bad luck), you might like it. We love it (B and L specifically asked to play it yesterday), but a little goes a long way. So many games to play, so little (generally speaking) time. 

Favorite board game obsessions of recent years part 1 - Talisman started it all

 Some time in 2019 after I moved to my new town and had gotten a nice little D&D group together (my first real dabbling in DMing 5th edition) I also started getting into a variety of board games in a way I never had before.

Outside of typical board games of my childhood (Monopoly, Clue, etc) I had really gotten into Talisman in the 90's. I mean, really into it. My buddy had a girlfriend who's roommate had the basic board and the dungeon. At our height of play I might go over for the weekend, surfing the couch, and we would play Friday night, finish that game the next morning, start another in the afternoon to finish that night, and then start a new game Sunday morning after breakfast (starting our days drinking with some Mimosa) to finish that late afternoon. We were bonkers for it. I eventually bought a used copy of the game and the dungeon of my own, and played it with folk all over the rest of the 90's.

Talisman had a ton of elements I loved. A bevy of fantasy characters with varied abilities to play; a ton of things that could happen based on encounters and event cards (very often game changing); and most games you could finish in about three hours. 

 Then in the early 2000's I pretty much retired from RPG's and gaming in general for several years, and my copy of Talisman went into the closet with my D&D stuff. 

In my later long running  group that lasted from around 2008 till I left Los Angeles in 2018, I think I only had maybe one or two occasions to break Talisman out from hibernation. But the one time we actually played a boardgame as an RPG alternative was Arkham Horror. I don't even recall which player had a copy. I mostly just recall what a long night it was. The game was so complicated and dense (far more than I felt it needed to be) I found it hard to enjoy despite loving Call of Cthulhu. That was about it for boardgames until I moved to this town almost three years ago. Then I met B and L. 

They were a local couple who I met off a local shops Facebook page because they wanted to play D&D, and pretty soon they had a adopted me (I didn't really know many people in town and hadn't been working yet) and were my besties pretty quick. Besides us having a D&D group for several months, we also started playing boardgames. They were already avid board gamers, being frequent visitors to a local bar that stocked games. There besides a bevy of microbrews, you could pull any number of their hundreds of boardgames off the shelf and play it. They have everything. 

But they had not played Talisman before, and after I first pulled out that old beat-up copy, they fell in love with it. Soon they had the most recent edition (that was by then several years old). I'll be posting about some other faves soon, but here I'll talk about the most amazing discovery of all that is Talisman related: Digital Talisman.

I had just made some offhanded Facebook post about Talisman, and a friend in Sacramento mentioned that there was a digital edition on steam. Zuh?!

I had no Steam experience, but within minutes I had an account and bought Talisman and a few of its expansions. Oh man, how amazing. This was an incredible discovery. Not just the main game, but they had a ton of the expansions. For physical copies this would all be about a thousand dollars if you could even find them. But on Steam the main game was like 6.99, and the expansions were that or less! Many of these weren't even available in physical form. Of all the fucked up things that happened in 2020, discovering digital Talisman was a highlight. And I have friends who love it as well. B and L left town to travel around the country in a huge luxury mobile home. But whenever they are somewhere they can get decent cell phone coverage for hot spots they are up for a game. You can even play it solo with the software running other characters (fairly intelligently as well). 

There are few downsides to this version. Of course there can be a glitch here and there, but rarely game breaking. And so far if you play a game online that game will be erased if you play another one before you finish. So you have to make sure you have plenty of time to finish. 

The upgrade in my Talisman playing has in a way changed my gaming habits. Digital Talisman, as well as the MMO Elder Scrolls Online (will post about that later) have in large part overtaken my desire to run D&D. These days there are just too many options.

Voices and sound FX part 2 - Sci Fi etc.

 In the last post I bleeped and blooped about occasional amateur voice "acting" in D&D games. I wanted to follow-up with a short post on my somewhat minimal experience with Roll20 and its Jukebox function. But because a comment was left mentioning Sci Fi games I thought I'd touch on that a bit (who would have thought I'd get multiple posts out of this daffy subject).

"Going to the well one too many times"
as a wise man (probably) once said. 

I think there is something about D&D, no matter how you approach it as a DM, that lends itself to be a bit silly with the sounds of things happening in game (see the Don Martin examples that I have cherished for most of my life in my last post). As I've mentioned before I'm sure most of the anti-community theater in games folk have at least done a "thunk" as an arrow hits a body, and a "splurt" as it's pulled out.

 I mean, in most games but especially D&D there is a certain humorous irony that lurks around every corner. Behind every door. The whimsical nature of the game along with the various actions of players and the consequences of such as dictated by random number generation leads to a certain amount of suspense mixed with surprise, a great recipe for laughs. So the "spladaps" and "sizafitz's" just kind of grooves along with that. How often do we enter a session with a mind towards seriousness, and it devolves into slapstick? 

Don't even ask me to bring up that one Toon session so long ago. The voices. We all...did...voices. 😬

I ran Champions (or very early on Superhero 2044 and Supergame as a literal kid) on and off for decades, and you know the deal there. With superpowers it's kind of a no brainer; fire blast ("swoosh"), lasers ("zark!), explosions ("booosh!"). But Nothing all that silly. Uh, unless you aren't a comic book nerd, and do consider those examples silly.  Where it got real dorky was when characters with powers similar to famous characters described their stuff with those familiar sounds. Hence "snikt," "bamf" and "thwip." But hey, if it made them enjoy things more I would not complain (out loud). 

Call of Cthulhu? Ran great, long campaigns (and one or two short ones) on and off for decades. I probably voiced some scary moan, the rattling around of a skeleton in a basement before the party sees it, maybe a gurgling sound for any number of things. But really, I was pretty much about the verbal description of the dark goings-on. Trying to give voice to, say, Wilbur Watley's brother would probably just elicit laughs, which is great for D&D but not so much for CoC. 

 I laugh so I won't cry.

Let's see. What else? Well, I did a classic Traveller campaign a few short years ago, dipping into the original rules set. Not a lot of meat on that bone to go all Michael Winslow from Spaceballs. 

Ship to ship combat was silent, though somebody probably imitated various guns during firefights. But since they weren't "blasters" it would be your basic rifle or machine gun thing. "Pow pow" is so just banal. But I relied on appropriate music cue's more than anything (with CD's, so I was slapping them in and out of the player like a Free Trader computer operator would be slapping computer "tapes" in and out of the computer tower). Classical music, the 1984 Dune movie soundtrack, The Sci Fi Channel Children of Dune soundtrack, etc. 

I mean, have the right music on for a ship battle, or a Free Trader bravely skimming a gas giant, and you don't need to make cutesy sounds. 

This is Free Trader Beowulf...
mayday, mayday...iiiiiiieeeeee!!! Skidooooosh!!!

The moral of this tale is that in D&D you can't really go wrong going overboard in D&D with this stuff, but in many other games it's like wasabi. A little goes a long way. 

The True Enemy of Game Groups - Attrition

 

Player attrition. It happens. It happens to all of us who put a group together. No matter how long it lasts, it will eventually fall apart, either by losing players faster than they can be replaced, or the GM moves on and nobody else wants to take the mantle. 

It can start slow. A player or two has life events that make them busier. They still clearly want to be a part of things. But missing every 4th game will usually lead to missing one out of three, and soon its "sorry, I just can't play on a regular basis anymore because this and that."

Or maybe they just out and out have to quite without a slow bleed out. Its extra tragic when its one of your best players. 

Back in my teens and 20's we seemed to have long campaigns that saw little in the way of lost players. Mostly it was friends I was playing with though. This was most of my experience from childhood up until the late 90's. I played with friends I already had. That is what usually made up my groups. We played as friends. We had long campaigns that at some point just fell apart fast because two or more of us were getting hit by life stuff. Though it often started as only being able to play one day a month. Then longer and longer between games. Momentum loss is a great foe of regular groups. Go a couple of months without a game and that group is likely through. Though I should say that by the late 90's some campaigns I had with regular life friends might seem done for, then after 3 or 4 months a long since flaking friend who kind of helped slow things down will be all "hey, when are we going to play D&D/Call of Cthulhu/Champions again?" Uh..whenever you are available.

And even that is all good, really. In that case above I was indeed having infrequent games with about 3-4 players at the time, but those games were 6-8 hour affairs that let me throw in everything and the kitchen sink in that one day. Hell, in those long D&D games a character might level up twice in that single day. But that too finally had to end. And it was the last time I would have a group made up of real life, long time friends. 

So in later adulthood, well into the 2000's, it was less groups of my friends and it became maybe one longtime friend, and a handful of strangers. It was not just a huge dynamic shift in general, but now it was folks who were devoting time to strangers, away from their usual life. After decades in the workforce, and relationships/marriages, people just place more of a value on their leisure time. Often not even in a hugely conscious way. But there are important things in life. Sure, go to a forum like Dragonsfoot.net and you'll find a bunch of older people who seem to want D&D to be the be all and end all of life. But for most folk hitting or going beyond middle age free time gets sucked dry by a million things other than tabletop gaming. I'm personally not ready to retire from my professional life; and even if I did I'm not sure how much of that I would want to be spent on tabletop. 

Yeah. This. 

My longest group went from around 2009 to 2019, but that group saw a lot of players coming and going. The entire time the long-time host was always there, then there was my long time friend "T," and then players who stuck around for a couple years, and those that played for some months before a life thing got in the way. That dynamic kind of worked for me. There were enough people who stuck around here and there that lead to nice year long multi-genre campaigns with 4-5 players. That all ended when I moved out of my native city, though I often think about how I was fairly burnt out towards the end. For me running campaigns on a weeknight, running out of work at a fairly professional job and driving 15 minutes in rush hour traffic, wore me down. Getting to the hosts house, eating fast food as I drove, then slamming a couple beers and puffing a doob to get the day shrugged off so I could get into a fantasy mood wasn't all that conducive to a peaceful DM persona. All that week in and week out made me fairly easily annoyed by dumb player things during a game. And an annoyed DM is the last thing a party wants. 

In my new town I ran for a new group, started by my soon to be local besties (B and L, a younger couple who kind of adopted lonely old me because I didn't know anybody in town. I bring them up in every boardgame post I make because I mostly play with them and sometimes a couple others). But after several months they decided to take up a somewhat nomadic existence that only had them in town a few short months of the year and that group fell apart (I didn't mind, one of the other players, a female no less, was a cheat and I think on opiates or something). 

I then discovered Roll20 and did around a 12 game campaign with Los Angeles Bestie "T" and a couple of folks I met in the local game shop Facebook page (it was a couple games before I learned one of them worked at the same hospital I did). It was going really well, but one of the guys had a new baby that was taking up a lot of time, and the other guy was going back to school. They would still be able to play now and again, but with the precious momentum going the way of the dodo I more or less nixed things. 

Most recently, for a few months last year, I was tapped by yet another local couple, plus a couple other folk they found on local meetups. We had several games, and things were sailing along and all seemed to be having fun, but then the male host messaged us saying that his elderly mother had been found to have a severe illness and were having to move her in. We were going to be starting up again when the mom got settled in, but it has been awhile now so that may not be back.  

I certainly have long since learned to manage my expectations with game group longevity. And to be honest, I love to GM games, and often get into a zone where the hours just fly by. But it can also be a bit of a hassle, even with long since losing my habit of putting hours into game prep. Setting things up then being the center of attention for three or more hours has lost a certain amount of its luster. 

I forgot the battlemat..

So, with no current RPG group, and most of my boardgame pals out of town for months now, I think I'll be settling in for a Spring where the majority of my gaming will be on my XBOX. Grand Theft Auto 5, Elder Scrolls Online, and some other games new and old (Jedi Fallen Order, Dead Rising). It can be super relaxing to just let yourself get immersed in those worlds. Don't have to go anywhere. Don't have to set anything up. Don't have to worry about being down a player and cancelled sessions. Nothing to do but work on my carpel tunnel and zap my eyeballs from sitting too close to the big screen. 

But then again, I'll be chomping at the bit to run games before long. And even if something doesn't come up locally, "B and L" want to check out Roll20 gaming when they settle into where they are going for the summer (to manage a high-end RV park halfway across the country). If they got the internet for it, LA pal "T" will want to jump in, and the gaming will be on again. And the highway of gaming will be as it always has been, for me anyway. On again. Off again. On again. Off again. 

Wii owners, help a bro out

For the most part, I have always gotten video game systems years after they come out. When folks where digging on their Playstation around the year 2000, I was still plugging away with Sonic on my Genesis. When games were jamming on their Playstation 2’s, I was still going strong on my Playstaton 1.

For the most part it has nothing to do with cost (at least for the systems, I would never buy a new game at full price. As if.), it was that I didn’t spend as many hours on a game as lots of other people would. Unless I was burning my way through the better part of a twelve pack of Bass Ale, an hour or so would do it for me on any given night. Plus I liked to get games used, because I’ve got Scottish blood filling my veins and will rarely pay new retail price for anything but socks, underwear, and liquor. And when I like that game, I’ll play it a couple of times, unless that game is of the likes of Final Fantasy 7 that you can easily put 80 hours into and has no replay value.

Right now I think I am ready for XBOX 360 or PS 3. My mouth has been watering for around two years to play games like Bioshock, Dead Rising, and Fallout. Damn, these games all have sequels out already. Well, last year at the office Xmas party I was lucky enough to win the best raffle prize – the Nintendo Wii (a two year streak – I won a high end DVD player the year before. Maybe I’ll win a car at next weeks party). Although weaker in ability than 360 and PS3, it was at least a newer system. Alas, after putting maybe an hour into tennis and boxing with the game it came with, it has now spent around 11 months in its box in the closet next to the set of Spanish bagpipes that I paid 500 bucks for but never play (fucking toy).

For one thing, I have games I am still enjoying on my Original XBOX and PS2. I’m on my third run through on Knights of the Old Republic (I got inspired by my upcoming KOTOR RPG I’m going to do for the group to have one more run through), am still trying to get the motivation up to finish the very difficult Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and once a week or so regular group player Terry comes by for a couple of hours to play Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 that I happen to have for the XBOX. But before this year is up I’ll be done (or fed up) with these, and will want to maybe give that Wii a shot before trading up to the 360.

So, maybe you can help me. I’m fairly unfamiliar with the Wii. I know it is mostly a kiddie/family system, and is famous for that Wii Fit stuff (c’mon, I get a better work out washing my Jeep). But what else is there I might have fun with? I know of Mario Galaxy from others who have the system, but I’d like something with a little more realistic and/or serious action for a grown up. I also know that Dead Rising was ported over to this, but I heard that it has features of the original that are missing (important ones, like the ability to jump over fences). So what would I like?

Here’s an idea of the things I like to give you an idea: I like mellow jazz, long walks on the beach, holding hands, fluffy kittens, and sipping tea while curling up in front of the fire with a good book. OK, I don’t really like any of those things. But heres some of my favorite games from older systems to give you and idea of what appeals to me (whether it be RPG, action game, or shooter).

Super Mario Bros. 1&3: what’s not to love? Mindless but challenging gameplay.

Final Fantasy 7: Taught me to love again. And also to have patience. I put 80 hours into it.

Resident Evil: Played all the regular ones in the series on Playstation, and then Res Evil 4, the best, on PS2. I played it through 3 or 4 times. Outstanding gameplay and story. Terry has this on the Wii, but I don’t need to play it on another system. I’m done.

Silent Hill: all the thrills and great gameplay of Resident Evil, with more creepy scares. Especially liked the first in the series, and The Room.

Castlevania: loved ‘em on the Genesis, and adored Symphony of the Night on PS1.

Fear Effect: 1&2, great action gameplay similar to Res Evil, but with interesting story, characters, and lesbo love.

Tenchu Steath Assasins: My one and only Ninja game. Played it a half dozen times through.

Dune 2000/Sim City 2000: yeah, I can dig a certain amount of Micromanagement. Makes me feel like a god, I tells ya! I especially loved the cinematic live scenes in Dune 2000, as well as the movie soundtrack used in it. Shamelessly used money cheats though.

Diablo: Oh yeah, fun fun fun top down gameplay. How could anybody who grew up on D&D not like it?

Champions of Norrath/Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance: both with that winning Diablo style top down gameplay. Terry fell in love with CoN, and because of that I have a girl coming over a few times a month who I am not banging. Thanks a lot, CoN/BGDA.

Halo 2: Oh man, I can still pop it in for huge fun. One of the only shooters I ever got into. Great story and solid Sci Fi concepts.

So, anything you can recommend for Wii? Or should I just try to get 60 bucks or so for it on Ebay, and put that towards a nice used 360?

You’d GM it if you could (but probably never will)

Since the 80’s, I’ve always tried to have an alternate game to do for my D&D groups whenever I was feeling a little burnt out, or if a player important to the current scenario was missing. From the late 80’s until the late 90’s, my usual alternative would be either Champions (my long-running setting was based heavily on Superhero 2044), or Call of Cthulhu. Both genres originally would meet with resistance by the group (they never burnt out on my D&D), but after a couple games under their belts my players would often request an alternative session.

After several years off from gaming, I have had this new group going strong for over a year now. At a time of year where it is easy for players to miss a game due to end of the year obligations, it is more important than ever for me to introduce an alternative game. Something that we can do if only three players can make it (I like at least four players for the D&D session, but three is ok for most other stuff).
For months I have been putting thought to this. For the most part, I don’t feel like putting all the prep into Cthulhu like I used to do. My Champions setting is something I would like to rekindle, with my only consideration being that we play for only around three hours on a Wednesday night. Many simple combat scenarios can take more than three hours with Champs.

Having remembered the great times running Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha when I was a kid, I have also been tossing around the thought of doing Met. Alpha using the Mutant Future rules.

So last week I got together with a couple of my players (the ones most into doing an alternative genre) over a few beers, to work on characters for both Champions and Mutant Future just to see how we feel. Both players came up with mutants (a human and a plant), and the results of their random mutation rolls really brought back the old fun of those old mutant games. Both characters ended up with one really crippling bad mutation, but the others were so good they wanted to use the characters as is (the plant got the faster aging mutation, but also got the three dice of acid blood damage mutation – nice. The human mutant got the slow action mutation, but also got the disintegration and teleportation powers).

Then we really got to work on the Champs characters (oh, the crunch) and there were some good ideas there as well. A street level game is what I want to go for at first. Andy came up with a chop socky Hong Kong cop, and Paul (a fairly new player to the group) dreamed up a two-fisted chemist who carried special attack vials of chemicals (web, acid, smoke screen) and knew Savate (French kick-boxing.)


So the alternative will for sure be Champs or Mutant Future based mostly on great characters getting created, maybe both. But this has me thinking about the games and settings I have wanted to do for a long time, but probably never will. Maybe one day I will game more, and on the weekends, but twice a month on a Wednesday night isn’t exactly conducive to lots of experimenting. And with at least a couple of my players not wanting to play if it isn’t my D&D, these alternatives will always be the least priority in what we do.

But here are the ones I’d like to do if I could, but may actually never get the chance:

DUNE – I never really could get into the book when I was younger, but I always got a kick out of the David Lynch film. Several years ago I suddenly got into a Dune phase. I watched the directors cut of the film, and went right out and got the book. With the film setting up some of the locales and themes in simpler form, I was able to enjoy the nuances of the book more. I even read the two or three sequels that followed. Then I logged in countless hours on the Dune 2000 video game. It was around that time I got a real hankering to GM a game in the Dune setting. With no official game releases on this, I probably would have used the Hero system . With players running mentats, pilots, warriors, etc. I would have adventures across the planets of the empire and finally to Arakis itself. Whenever I mention wanting to do a Dune game to my players, it usually goes over like a lead balloon. So I guess this one shall remain a dream unfulfilled.

RUNEQUEST – I played this more than I ran it as a kid, but I loved it. I always dug the simple elegance of the Chaosium basic role playing system, and the mythical, ancient Greece styled setting was a great break from our D&D games that were going strong at the time. With most of my current players preferring the pulp fantasy of D&D, this one shall likely remain a dream as well.

TRAVELLER – another great game from my youth. Like Runequest I played more than I GM’d back in the day. At Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, where I hung out as a kid, this was a heavily played game, much more than D&D. I also really loved the Dumarest novels by E.C. Chubb as a kid, a major influence on Traveller even thought it doesn’t get enough of that credit. Although I’m not a fan of the whimsy of the character creation process, and that I think there could be more character development as games progress, I really would love to do a straight Sci Fi game with little or no fantasy elements.

KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC – I loved the video game on XBOX so much it made me want to run games in that setting, despite not being a hard core Star Wars geek. KOTOR is so removed from the yammering muppets, mincing droids, and lame humor of Sir George’s works, it really shines as a separate, more mature section of the SW multiverse. I actually got the chance to run several games for an established Star Wars gaming group recently, and despite that not working out the way I would have liked, I would love to spring this on my regular group. Problem is, they ain’t exactly hard core Star Wars geektards either. Long live Jar Jar (not).

BUNNIES & BURROWS – Even though I sold my first edition of this 1970’s game on Ebay a few years ago (sniff), I would love to run a small campaign of this Watership Down inspired old school RPG. I think I would find an alternative sytem to use for the character types (maybe Chaosium’s basic role playing) as presented in the original game, but I would really love to see how game play would pan out. Just going out in the field to look for truffles is a huge danger to these characters. So tense, furtive gameplay would be the order of the day. Yep, another lead balloon for my players. I don’t think they would buy my pitch.

So, those are some of mine. What kind of game would you like to GM, but probably never will?

Eric Bischoff's SARSA method - for gaming

 

Eric Bischoff is a television producer and wrestling announcer who worked for a couple of wrestling organizations until ending up doing similar work for Ted Turners WCW promotion in the early 90's. He eventually caught Ted Turner's attention, and was named CEO of WCW over many more seasoned candidates. This happened for a variety of reasons, but the main one was Turner's fondness for Bischoff's "gumption." Eric was coming in with, at the time, off the wall ideas, including putting WCW's new television show on opposite Vince McMahon's WWE (at the time the WWF). This was a batshit move, as WCW had not turned a profit for years. It was a vanity project of Ted's, but WWE was the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.

It as not long before the profits started coming in. Eric's ideas were new in wrestling, a format that still had its feet in an old school mindset that shouted out that change was bad for the industry. Besides the Monday night move, he masterminded the New World Order storyline and Hulk Hogan's shocking "heel" (bad guy) turn. The attention from this shot the ratings up and WCW, the red headed step child of major wrestling organizations, at one point beat WWE in rating for 83 consecutive weeks. So much pressure was put on WWE that story has it Vince McMahon had the water coolers removed from the Titan Sports offices for budgetary reasons. 

I would never say I was ever a fanatic wrestling fan. I watched a couple years in the 80's, and was a huge Hulk Hogan mark. Then I showed little interest until the mid 90's, when Bischoff's moves were getting people talking. This late 90's "Monday Night Wars" period is really the only era I'm still a big fan of. I don't watch much wrestling these days, but I listen to several podcasts by personalities from the time period. Bischoff, Jim Ross, Bruce Prichard, Stone Cold. And years ago I read a few biographies, including Bischoff's Controversy Creates Cash.

In one part of the book Eric talks about the SARSA method, his outline for putting together wrestling angles and storylines. 

“As I felt more and more comfortable and especially in ’96 when I got a lot more involved and around the same time, I focused on a formula that was born out of a newspaper article that I read, ”Bischoff said. “Dick Ebersol was being interviewed about what he was going to do to improve audiences at these Summer Olympics and one of the things I took away was the formula. 

“Ebersol spoke about making sure that you don’t just cover the sport, but that we tell the story, bringing reality to it, creating anticipation in all Olympic sports. I thought, “Well wow, a lot of that applies to what I do. And I had to tweak that formula a little bit and I did and I found a formula that I called 100,000 times “SARSA”. the acronym: Story, Anticipation Reality, Surprise and Action, and throughout my career to varying degrees, certainly in WCW to a large extent because I was in control of my own destiny there for a long time, in TNA once I really started to get involved in booking at all levels then tried to make it in WWE I just wasn’t around long enough to be successful but I always believed that no matter what, I don’t care how the fight changes, how audiences change, how many streaming platforms are coming in, how many people are watching their shit on their phones, I don’t care record because at the heart of why people watch, what they watch on any device they go to watch it on is “history, anticipation, reality, surprise, action.” If you can combine these elements into any content on any platform, regardless of audience generation, you are likely to be very successful. “

He would sit down with a legal pad and jot down notes according to his SARSA method. You can imagine how it works for wrestling plots, but suffice to say some years ago I loosely adopted Eric's interesting method for my RPG's. 

Its not hard and fast. Nor does it need to be done in any order. But this helped me as dedaces past I would sort of brainstorm possibilities for the coming game (on a walk, at the gym, at work during boring moments, etc), take a note linearly here and there ("if the characters do this then this might happen," "these NPC's might be encountered at the tavern and this is some things that might happen depending on PC actions," "characters will get access to a partial dungeon map" etc). But finding a more organized method to help me organize these thoughts and notes better, more concise, has helped immensely. Especially since thinking about game specifics on the job or anywhere else has diminished for me in recent years. So if I only take notes on a game while having some beverages and a little smoke with some tunes on, then this is a way to get them down in a more helpful manner.

SARSA

 STORY - No, not really storygaming with a well written out plot. In the case of RPG's its the overall box within which your campaign or several game arc will take place in. If your setting will be The City State of The Invincible Overlord, where the characters will spend several games exploring the shops and markets at will for the entire group of scenarios, well, there is your story. In my recent story arc the setting was an area near the frontier of the kingdom, a far flung town where chicken farmers produce the best chickens in the kingdom of Tanmoor. The people are well off, but are a kind of grim folk, who I portray with East London accents and say "Bloody" a lot. Like every other word. There is a crypt of a bandit from 200 years ago and some of his men whom the folk of the town are descended from, and of course one or two other locations they might want to look into. An arc like this, just part of an overall campaign, starts with just the seed of an idea (a crypt crawl) and expands. Hey lets put it in the east most part of the kingdom. Lets have a rooster demon involved in there somewhere. And lets have the town in the area be chicken farmers who say "bloody" a lot. That seed of an idea came from the John Cooper Clark poem "Evidently Chickentown." Here it is in part:

 

The bloody view is bloody vile

For bloody miles and bloody miles

The bloody babies bloody cry

The bloody flowers bloody die

The bloody food is bloody muck

The bloody drains are bloody fucked

The colour scheme is bloody brown

Everywhere in chicken town

And that's the seed of the story. And more and more bits to add will come to mind the more you let it simmer. In the last town before Chickentown I had the characters overhear some little girls jump rope and sing lines from the poem to give characters a heads up that unpleasant people may lay ahead. This is all flavor and outline, and the characters will be the ones that make it an actual story with their actions. So in a nutshell you just put together possibilities hung on the skeleton of a story that the characters will fill in for you. Of course, if you like to storygame then I don't judge. It fits here under SARSA.

ACTION - Action is action. Role-play is fine, but action scenes are the meat and potatoes of it all to me. Just enough to please both the combat wonks and the role players. My basic notion is for two major action pieces to occur in every three hour session. At least one of them should be a true combat that involves all or at least most of the characters. But one of the action pieces could be a chase, where various rolls are involved (how fast you are moving, jumping over fences, jumping from roof top to roof top). Any scene that might involve climbing steep surfaces, avoiding hazards, swinging from ropes etc. Anything that has an element of danger and requires rolls be made to fail or succeed. In a game like Call of Cthulhu, or classic Traveller, where death comes easy and you need to have less combat than in D&D, various action ideas that don't have to involve bloodshed can be injected. Perfect for CoC really, especially if you run it a bit pulpy. There are lots of dangers in the world that don't involve guns or tentacles. So in SARSA you just keep in mind that static role-play is fine, but factor in lots of dice rolls and non-combat danger or at least suspense. Fit them in as much as you can. And of course PC's might find some chances for rolls on their own. Thieves pickpocketing at the local market is for sure a chance at multiple actions instances. So jot possibilities down under the "action" column ("players might face a fencing master if they get caught cutting his purse," "there might be lots of nobility at the market today so bigger stakes...but more guards," "there is a wizard convention in town so a chance at magic items, and possible wrath of a magic user, is possible tonight" etc).

 REALITY - Yeah yeah, it ain't real life. But verisimilitude is what to strive for; the reality in context of the setting you are presenting. But trying to keep a mind on basic physics helps make the times when reality is bent stand out more. For instance I like to have things as "normal" as possible, real-world adjacent, so that when big spells go off or I inject something whimsical (silly?) it stands out. My setting is a basic D&D world, fairly mid-magic, but I grew up on things like Judges Guild and Arduin. I just have to throw in batshit monsters or situations based on that experience. But its a sometimes thing. Most of the time my reality is kobolds, orcs, giants, big bugs. That's the reality for my players. But watch out when I've been looking at my old third party materials. The players may briefly be swept out of their reality by encountering Tegel Manor (for 5th ed!), or perhaps a merchant for the pop-up store of The Multiverse Trading Company. Or maybe a dungeon of the Mythic Underworld variety, where the laws of nature don't always apply. But everyday life should be held to the laws of physics we know (up is not down, most animals do not talk, nothing is free, etc). So in this column you jot down parts you want to have a full hold on everyday reality, and the things that might vary from those normal physical laws. And how you will bring that down to reality eventually.

SURPRISE - Twists, turns. Will there be any? Can and old enemy show up in this game? Maybe something the PC's thought of in a certain way will be changed up. Maybe a friend will turn out to be a traitor. Any ideas that might make characters do a double take can go here. 

 ANTICIPATION - I find this very important. Setting things up for the players to look forward to, and how that thing might pan out, or NOT pan out, can go here. Classically in D&D treasure is that thing they look forward to besides the monster combat and exploration. Levelling up is another basic anticipation. But maybe you have other ideas that can set up anticipation. Possibility of promotion from the queen and all the perks what come with? A surprise romantic possibility that will be put on a slow burn (true role players love that). An opportunity for revenge might be on the horizon? But if you do boil it down to treasure, a hint at what might await can get player juices flowing. But also unknown foes. PC's might know an armed force awaits them, but how many? Don't let them know unless they have some scouting tactics. Will this be an easy fight or a party-killer? And not everything has to be a mystery. Knowing a powerful force is ahead that they cannot avoid. That stirs it up. Some fights are over the PC's head, and often they can overcome such. Aid coming in at the last moment can be jotted down in the "surprise" column. Its that real possibility of death that has always been key to anticipation in games. Find ways to keep reminding them. Jot it all down in this column. 

Again, this is just an outline of one method for organizing possibilities you are thinking of that might normally just bounce around in your head, maybe forgotten by game day. Outside of your maps and nuts and bolts notes on dungeon contents and other important adventure notes, SARSA or something like it is a great way to set up a one page set of organized notes to create flavor and list the "mights" and the "maybes."