The Runequest Obsession

Runequest was the second game I ever played after D&D. When I started hanging out at the local hobby shop as a kid, I had only around a year’s worth of experience with D&D. But the older crowd there were sort of past D&D, and heavily into other games. Traveller and Runequest was what were getting the most play at that time. Owner Gary had campaigns of RQ going on, and he had one big wall of the play area covered in situational maps for his games. Gary loved that game so much. Gary died a few years ago, but you can still find some writings of his online outlining various Runequest themes. He had obviously continued on with the Runequest love from the late 70’s and onward through the following decades.

When I stopped hanging out in the store after the early 80’s, Runequest pretty much left my life. The gaming side of my life would carry on for many years with only three favorites; AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions (games like Toon, Bunnies & Burrows, and Empire of The Petal Throne never got on my playlist, unfortunately). But I left my RQ at Aero Hobbies and never really looked back. I think my preference for AD&D, besides true “Sorcery” magic, was that I had a game world I loved and the rules of RQ would never have translated into it. By the late 80’s, RQ would have been just another game that my regular players were unfamiliar with, and would have taken up precious Champs and Call of Cthulhu time if I introduced it to them.

But man, those early games at the shop. They were this huge mystery to me. The world of Glorantha was based on historical places that were very much unlike what Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and other “classic fantasy” writers were presenting in their worlds. It seemed alien to me. Of course, I had yet to have any interest in ancient Mesopotamia, so I didn’t grok that influence. Adventures took my guys (my favorite was a Dragonnewt and second favorite was a duck. I called him “Scotty MacQuack” because I found a duck figure playing a bagpipe!) from the rough plains and temples of Prax, all the way to the greener hills and grasslands of Lunar Tarsh and Dragon Pass (I think I have that right). This was a patchwork world that was being put together and expanded, in-game, by the game designers at a time when I was having my earliest adventures with it. Cheapo modules like Apple Lane and Barristor’s Barracks gave me the medium to eventually start running some Runequest adventures for my friends. But those games soon got swept away by other things we wanted to play.

Well, I got my hands on a copy of second edition, 1970’s Runequest, and some other items on PDF like Cults of Prax, Pavis & Big Rubble, and Snakepipe Hollow. I never had these before, and my imagination is being fired up again by reading more about Glorantha than I ever did back in the day. Then I was just confusedly being a character running around in these modules and sourcebooks being run by the older pricks at Aero. Now, with all this reading I’m doing, I finally am starting to feel like and “insider” in regards to Runequest. I’m unlocking it’s mysteries for myself, man!

So I guess you could say I am a bit obsessed by old RQ right now. With a (probably short) Knights of The Old Republic campaign in full swing right now, I won’t be running any Runequest any time real soon, but when I do get to introduce its mysteries to my regular players I’ll be ready. It’s a long road to Rune Lords status. Better to get on that road sooner rather than later!

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Cthulhu zeitgeist

There is more of it out there than I thought. Not just plushies and Miskatonic U. bumber stickers ( Go Pods!), but I’ve discovered from my Amazon.com browsing that there are a pile of Cthulhu humor books out there. “Where the Deep Ones Are” is obvious, but an interesting one, not so much humor as a “Cthulhu for Idiots” type info book, is Cthulhu 101. Made for people who don’t really know what the works of Lovecraft are all about. It gives you the lowdown on the various entities of the Cycle, goes over Lovecraft and his life, and hits on the pop culture items where the Old Ones and their crew make their mark. Cthulhu zeitgeist!

Much as I am with zombies, I’m sort of Cthulhued out (although that may not jibe with the fact that I do a twice monthly Cthulhu post). Although I’d love more than anything to have a CoC campaign going on in the coming year, I think I can take a pass on the plethora of ancillary Lovecraft floating around out there. I wonder what HP would think of all this stuff?

Do I like Champions more than D&D?

D&D is my first and always will be my best love. I think.

I’ve been running my 1st ed. (started out as OD&D) game world for over 30 years, and it would be hard not to look at it as a favorite son. And jeez, I can run it in my sleep. I practically phone my games in a third of the time, and the players still love it. It’s easy peasy, and satisfying.

But see, I have these other two games I love. Call of Cthulhu has been a fave since before I ever read Lovecraft. At around 14 years old I played in some games at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, and although I found those to be lacking in the fun department (I have to be honest, most of my worst gaming experiences happened in the 4-5 years I spend time at Aero), I fell in love with the feel of the game and the system, and was soon running my own games of it. In the 90’s, I did long running campaigns. My D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested it (not one of them then was a Lovecraft fan), but after a game or two they were often preferring to do it over the D&D. It was great, but unlike my D&D it was a world I didn’t create, just one that I presented (I’d like to say I invented the 1920’s, but that would take Al Gore balls).

So the only thing that came close to my D&D game world love was my Champions campaigns. I started early on in the late 70’s with Superhero 2044. Most people to this day find it a perplexing set of rules to use, but my young mind didn’t seem to have much trouble working around the lightness of the rules. I have spoken elsewhere about my experiences helping playtest, then running Supergame in the early 80’s, so I won’t waste more breath on that here. Soon my friends and I were on to Villains and Vigilantes, but by the mid-80’s it was Champions that had captured my comic book loving heart.

I created my own futuristic game world for it. Heavily influenced by Superhero 2044’s “Inguria,” I made my “New Haven” a pacific island metropolis. America and a lot of the rest of the world was blasted by nuclear war, and New Haven was a place that accommodated many refugees – the majority of whom were rich and or/scientific people. Always exactly 20 years in the future, this setting has grown since the 80’s and the world has become a thing of my own. The 90’s were my heyday with New Haven, and much like CoC my D&D players fell in love with it after giving it a try.

The open nature of what you could create with Champions/Hero System (and in the 90’s I focused on the Hero System 4th edition book) appealed to what I was trying to do with New Haven. That is, create a setting where you could have not just superheroes, but anything that you can imagine from science fiction could be worked in. Aliens, interdimensional beings, things out of fantasy, whatever. Of course, seeing as I was setting my game world in a futuristic version of the Marvel Universe, combined with my weaning on Marvel growing up, many Marvel elements entered into it (I even had a futurist version of the X-Men as a campaign long ago). But my inspirations came from many other, more alternative sources, such as The Watchmen, Marshal Law, and Judge Dredd. Things that turned the superhero myth on it’s ear.

I loved the world, and the open nature of being able to have anything you can envision, and during the 90’s some of my greatest memories are of that game. Close to the year 2000, I pretty much ended my last campaign with a several game long assault on earth by an alien empire. After that, my game group and my gaming in general sort of petered out. And I was well into my 30’s and sort of just figured I had outgrown gaming for other things.

When I started my current group the other year after several years off, it was put together for AD&D 1st edition. But in my mind I knew I would be doing Call of Cthulhu or Champions as an alternative. Well, it is Champs that has come up as the alternative (finally). Regular players Dan and Ben have to take June off (Dan the big South African is getting married, Ben is going to his hometown in Vegas for a few weeks), so I sat down Wed night with Terry, Andy, and Paul for some Champs.
Right before the holidays I had gotten together with Paul and Andy to work up a couple of characters, and even did an encounter with them. They came up with some pretty good dudes. What I was going for was a version of my old Justice Incorporated campaigns (more or less a Dark Champions cross between the A-Team and the X-files).

Andy came up with a cool, Jackie Chan type Hong Kong cop who is in hiding from enemies in New Haven. Paul, still pretty new to gaming generally, came up with a French chemist who, besides having a bit of Savate kick boxing skill, carries chemical compounds that have various affects (gas, smoke, knock out).

Terry, whose characters featured prominently in my 90’s campaigns, came up with “Jane Doe,” a female Bourne Identity type who is a government assassin with amnesia.

I can’t tell you how jazzed I was to be doing a Champions game, especially with Terry, again after ten or more years. This is how gaming is supposed to feel! Terry, who is often a bit slow with her turns and such in D&D, took back to Champions like a duck to water, pouring through the Hero System book to work up her characters. She remembered the rules better than I did!

In that first short session with Paul and Andy, I had their characters hanging out near the theater district near downtown. A mysterious nun in black, wearing white chainmail, and bearing a broadsword showed up to each of them, and guided them into the back alleys where a yuppie couple was being mugged by several gang members. Sister Mary Alice, or “Malice,” was one of my old NPC’s in the game, and was the ghost of a nun who had been murdered. Both the characters, Ken and Jacques, beat up the muggers and saved the couple.

So in this week’s session, the couple thanked them (and unknown to the players Sister Mary will later possess the young woman to have a flesh and blood vehicle for her murderous vengeance on rapists and murderers) and they took off. But Sister Mary guided the two to another assault down the alleyway (comic book alleyways are just chock full of evil doing). They came upon a girl in a hospital gown being menaced by almost a dozen more gang members. The girl was “Jane Doe,” and she had woken up in a hospital with a head wound, hypothermia, and no memory. She woke up with doctors and nurses around her, and thinking she was being tortured she struck out, knocked them away (luckily not killing anyone with one of her heavy killing strikes), and took off to end up woozy in the ally. She came to in time to help Ken and Jacques beat the hell out of the mugger gang.

Successful in the combat, the three strangers were approached by Tawny, a girl who it turned out worked for industrialist Elizabeth Patricia Kyono, a billionaire of Irish and Japanese decent (I’ve always had a great mini for Kyono, and luckily found it). Kyono also ran the hero for hire office Justice Incorporated as a hobby from time to time, and she had Tawny out at night looking for possible employees. As comic book fate would have it, she found three at the same time.

Long and short of it, after meeting with Elizabeth Kyono and agreeing to work for her, the three new members of the new Justice Incorporated took a job protecting some merchants in the bad part of town from a martial arts Dojo turned criminal, and managed to top the night off with them beating up some vandalizing members of the gang. Nice high kicking and karate chopping combat session!

It was great fun, and these being basically martial arts characters very easy to run. They really seem to like their characters, and next week we are hopefully finishing up this adventure.

So right now Champs is my game of choice. When Ben and Dan get back in July, they might not be into it but that is fine. We’ll get back to the D&D, and Champions is best with two or three players anyway. When we are missing a couple D&D players, it’ll be Justice Incorporated, my friends.

p.s. –and oh what a joy to only have to use D6!

Bumper Crop of Cthulhu minis

I really don’t do a lot of shopping for figures lately. The other year I bought a few cheap batches of great, prepainted plastic minis from Ebay, and there were plenty of fantasy and sci fi ones. And with a nice basic color coat on them, it only took a little extra model work and couple extra colors to make the mini stand out or look like a particular character or NPC. These, and my older metal minis, form the stock in my miniature soup.

But for 1920’s Cthulhu fun, my mini collection is a bit lacking. Sure, I have the odd Mi-Go or Dark Young figure left over from the olden days, but not much in the way of 1920’s humans. Here and there some of my Champions and other modern figures can do in a pinch, but it’s really not enough.

So yesterday, seeing as I was in the Neighborhood for the Queen Mary Scottish Festival, I stopped by The War House in Long Beach. Actually, since I have been competing at these games for years now, I kind of make that Saturday afternoon my yearly pilgrimage to the place. I remembered from the year before that they had some Cthulhu minis, and I was hoping to find a couple of items for characters or NPC’s in the current campaign.

They had Chronoscope, which has a few nice pulp adventure minis. But these are pretty pricey. Not that I can’t afford it, but I really need to justify how much use I will get out of something I buy for gaming. But then I saw that War House still had a nice lot of official Call of Cthulhu figures, but sadly most where monsters and again, I have to justify to myself that I will use a particular mini enough to make it worth it.

Then I spotted this pack of Adventurers. 10 character/NPC types in one package…for 10 bucks! I immediately saw three or four that I liked rolling around in that little see-through plastic bubble, so that was my purchase. I cannot pass up 10 metal minis for that price. I knew I would use a few of them. The photo above from the official web site actually shows less than are actually in the pack, so people online are getting a better deal than they bargained for.

There is a big gamer hunter that might come in handy for a “Most Dangerous Game” type scenario, or for a character. The young female archeologist is perfect a couple of the players characters, and the two or three pith helmet guys will be useful eventually. The cops as well.

OK, so the old librarian lady and the South American native guy might not find much purchase in the game, but ya never know.

I haven’t sat down to paint for many months, so here’s my excuse. Hope my paints haven’t dried out.

Another Campaign Ends

Last night we wrapped up the fairly short (maybe 8 sessions or so) Runequest campaign I popped on the group a few months ago. I had actually intended to mix in a lot more Call of Cthulhu, a sort of Chaosium mix, but we were having such a good time with the RQ that we pretty much stuck with that and breezed through the campaign.



I used the classic Apple Lane setting for this, and went through the usual progression (besides my own added bits and encounters) of the tribal initiations battle circles, Pawnshop Baboon attack all the way through finishing up Rainbow Mounds last night. Whiteeye and his trollkin defeated, and the Lizard Mother and the Lizard Spirits destroyed (the Newtlings made Terry’s character Rowan their queen – for what it was worth).



The party got to touch the adamantine column hidden behind the newt idol, gaining some spells. They also found the Issaries statue to later sell to Gringle. In a wild twist, the party forgot to search White eyes’ lair for the main treasure. They rested after the White eye fight for a night before moving on into what they though was a tunnel to another area (it was actually a small chamber with White eyes bed and the main treasure of the adventure), then later got distracted and didn’t finish searching that area! Thousands of lunars and other precious stuff left behind! Kind of a hoot.



I mean, they were told there would be a lot of items White eye and gang robbed people of, but they happily left without any of that. I waited until they were back at the village to tell them. There was the usually thrashing around for a couple of minutes trying to find the poor GM at fault, but the realization set in that they had been idiots to not realize they didn’t have what they, in part, went to the Rainbow Mounds for. Doesn’t really make up for anybody not getting killed or maimed in the campaign, but it helps.



So time to regroup, get out the Star Wars stuff, and repack my mini’s box with Sci Fi figures. We’ll be doing KOTOR for the rest of the year, with the odd Call of Cthulhu game thrown in here and there when we are short on important players.



But yeah, there ya go. Another campaign in the bag. It’s always kind of a satisfying peace that comes over you when you are at the finish line of a fun campaign.

Runequest - the Buzzkill of Strike Rank

Ran the second Runequest 2nd edition session the other night set in that famous Sartar lane known for its apple orchards. The Tin Inn and environs were still hopping from the Spring festival. I say “Spring” because I have yet to memorize the names of Gloranthan days, weeks, and months, and seasons. As an aside, speaking of the calendar names in RQ, I have been reminded of how much I snagged out of Glorantha as a kid to plug into my game world Acheron (I still hate that name for a game setting, but I was a kid, man). The names for seasons and some of the names of days (such as “Godsday”) were apparently shamelessly ripped-off by me. I totally forgot about that over the decades. That’s OK of course; I hardly ever use them in my D&D game anyway. I get lazy and just call the days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday…

Before I go any further, let me lay out the characters for any Runequest fans who might be reading. Their backgrounds were all rolled out of the RQ 2nd edition chargen section. None of the characters are laymembers of any cults yet (well, Paul’s barbarian “Bjorn” being a herdsmen is automatically a lay member of the storm god Waha).


Catuanda – from the sage-heavy city Jonstown. He himself is scholarly, but like all the other kids he is setting out on the bloody road of violence to better himself physically. Instead of being a follower of Lankhor Mhy, the main knowledge god in Sartar, he went with a minor one (the name escapes me). Has a preference for the long spear, and is pretty lucky with it in combat.

Rowan – from main Sartar city Boldhome. At 21 years old, she is the oldest of the PC’s. Her father was a successful weaver in the city. Like all the new young fighters, ask her why she is setting off down the road to violence and she will tell you “because everybody else is doing it.” She has a liking for the warrior girl goddess Vinga, daughter of Orlanth. This last game she met “Siobhan Lomand,” a Rune Priestess of Vinga, who has offered to make her (and some other girls at the festival) lay members of the Vinga cult. So Terry will probably be the first character in the campaign with a god connection (BTB you need to be a lay member for a year before you can get to the Initiate stage of worship, and all the perks it comes with). Rowan currently uses a short sword as her main weapon.

Bjornheld – the only “barbarian” of the group, Bjorn comes from a sheep herding tribe. He left because they made a lot of fun of him…he has a size of 4. That makes him small. He could wear Vern Troyers kilt. Bjorn makes himself look even smaller by preferring the long spear in combat.

Tensen – From Boldhome. Started with a dagger for combat, but has a bow and is favoring its use. I see a bow-master in the future! This last game Big Ben decided out of the blue that Tensen would be very vocal of his hatred of the Lunar Empire who are occupying Sartar. Just goes to show you, you need a couple of sessions before characters start to differentiate themselves. Even in RQ, where human characters can seem very similar, these characters are standing out from each other pretty good.

Yuri – Little Ben’s new character (LB missed the first session the other week). Guess what? Another townsperson from Boldhome (that makes three character from the capital city). Hasn’t been fleshed out fully yet. I can’t even remember what weapon he used.

Yuri showed up in town while the festival was still going on, and the other characters had finished up their blood combat initiation from the previous game. To give Yuri his own combat, the character volunteer to fight again as teams in the Humakt battle circles.

Which gets me to the topic subject; strike rank. Ah, the buzzkill of it. It’s crunch man. I had forgotten how much there was too it. Too much Call of Cthulhu in the 90’s, where Basic Role Playing left SR out of the mix. The system is soooo easy without SR.

OK, it ain’t rocket science (I have Champions for that). But it requires a lot of rewriting the order folk go in from round to round, especially if they are using missile weapons. Basically, your strike rank is an attacking order based off of weapon length, dexterity, and size. So a fast guy with a spear is going to hit before a slow guy with a dagger, capishe?

Look, I like the grim and gritty nature of RQ combat. Every blow can be crippling or deadly. Odds are some of these characters will be missing a limb or dead before somebody is advanced enough to have a six point healing spell (needed to attach limbs and bring you back from the brink of death from a stoved-in head or skewered torso).

But the busy work of strike rank – is it worth the trouble? Well, although I am a 50% combat/50% roleplay kind of guy, the group on a whole might actually be more like 75% combat/25%roleplay. With 50% I feel like I can relax, have a beer, and paint a world around the characters shenanigans. When the combat encroaches on that, I start feeling like it’s work. Don’t get me wrong, I love the action, irony, and heartbreak of RPG combat. I just don’t want it to be what it is all about. I put heart and passion into my GMing in part because I think that is a bit of a lost art these days. People are either too much on the serious side, or too much on the “beer and pretzels – games are a party” side. I just want to be in that sweet, sweet spot in the middle. But not sure there is room for both me and SR.

Next session things are going to heat up, and combat situations are going to get a bit more complicated. But we have had some good practice over two sessions now. Two combats among characters in the battle circles, and last game a nice fight against some weapon snakes (snakes with swords and maces for tails – chaos creatures), and also a couple of Broo. So for next game, we’ll continue to use strike rank as is (but without movement and encumbrance considerations). But I’m still looking at toning down the crunch factor a bit so I can relax more.

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: The Sundered Veil

(above image is fan art for this story found online)

OK, with scheduling conflicts and so much going on right now, I won’t be running any of my game stuff for the group for a few weeks (I don’t do my main 1st edition campaign if anyone is missing, and the alternatives I do also depend on who is there). I’m going to let regular player Ben do his D&D next week for those of us available.

But without actually GM’ing, I lose a little inspiration for my blogging (so you have an idea what will happened if my group falls apart). So I thought that at least for Fridays I would keep myself inspired, and hopeful that I will get to do a CoC campaign for my group at some point, that I would do regular homage’s to stuff related to Lovecraft, which I have been reading a lot of stuff on lately.

OK, so recently I have been rereading the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Graphic novels, and then some. In them, Allan Moore shows an even bigger love of the Wold-Newton stuff than Phillip Jose Farmer himself! It seems like almost all of literary fiction exists in the world he has set up. Forget the laughable Sean Connery film (shame it was one of his last) based on The League, I think Moore’s LEG is one of the greatest triumphs of modern comic/lit genres. The amount of stuff from fiction created since the dawn of man that he has included is just astounding. Entire books have been written to act as a guide to the people and places he references.

In the back of the Volume 2 series (the one where the Martians from War of the Worlds meet resistance from Captain Nemo and the rest of the league), there is a text story (with some artwork) that tells a tale about an astral team-up with Allan Quartemain, John Carter of Mars, Randolph Carter from Lovecraft’s dreamlands cycle, and the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells.

Wow, who could even imagine such a teaming? The weirdo/genius mind of Allan Moore, that’s who. To add to the level of geek cool, here Randolph Carter is a great nephew of John Carter, who of course views his future dreamer nephew as a bit of a wuss.

At the start of the story, Allan Quartermain visits an old mystic friend looking to partake of the Taduki drug from his adventures in King Solomon’s Mines and other places. Passing out and going into a metaphysical trance, Quartermain enters the astral realm. Here his disembodies spirits encounters two other such souls. One is John Carter, his spirit body in transition from earth to his soon to be new home on the Red Planet. Also in spiritual transition is Randolph Carter, the grandnephew of John. As the three wonder the purpose of their meeting, H.G. Wells unnamed Time Traveler and his wondrous machine shows up. The Time Traveler tells them that fate has brought them to him, and they are to help him defeat forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. Awesome.

The quartet is soon attacked from nowhere by motley, primitive beasts that the Time Traveler curiously describes as being known both as Morlocks and Mi-Go. Escaping on the time machine, the group travels to the material world of the far future. It is the sphinx from the Eloi time, but even further into the future than that, when that once lush area is now a desert in a dying earth. Apparently the Time Traveler has made this lasting far flung structure his home base in the battle against the Old Ones. After explaining the problem of ancient Godlike creatures invading the mortal realm, both the Carters realize that they are not bound to any realm and are actually forms destined to other places, so they fade away. John goes to Mars to win Dejah Thoris and begins his adventurers there, and Randolph heads off for his adventures to Unknown Kadath.

Things go from bad to worse when Quartermain is possessed by Ithaqua the Windwalker, and returns to the mortal realm. The Time Traveler is left to his further adventures in the time stream, and Quartermain manages to become free of his possession in the earthly realm. Broken by the loss of his Taduki drug, Quartermain heads off to the Middle East to become an opium addict for awhile before he joins the League.

This team up is amazing, really. To me as a fan of all of them; Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice, this really blew me away. If this sounds good to you, I recommend you get your hands on either the comic issues, or better yet the graphic novels. The story is several pages long in small print, so you for sure get a lot of meat for such a short adventure.

Oh, for extra awesome, the comic book portion of the book begins on Mars, where John Carter, Gulliver of Mars, and other literary Mars figures and creatures gather to fight off the Mollusks from War of the Worlds. Too much cool, man!

Thinkin’ about campaigns for 2011

November always seems to be the time I start to look towards what will pan out for the game group in the coming year.

I’ve been doing pretty much the same 1st edition campaign for over two years now. So, with maybe three or four games left for my AD&D Night Below campaign (actually, the first few months of gaming in this group had nothing to do with the NB, I hadn’t originally planned for the party to end up in that grinder of a setting) I have to start thinking of what to do next.

A part of me wants to get right into a new D&D campaign. It has now literally been years since I ran for a group of low level characters, and it would be fun to start something fresh after all this time steering the destinies of higher level PC’s. But really, I love running other games besides D&D, and I want to have an opportunity to do more of that without it just being an alternate. So what I will do is take a break from running D&D for the first few months of 2011 (with the exception perhaps of the occasional White Box game) and do something entirely different.

Big Ben has been running his AD&D elf-centric game here and there, but I think for the first couple months of the year we’ll play a bit more of that, plus Terry has expressed interest in revisiting her old 2nd edition game world so we will maybe be doing a bit of that as well. So D&D, which Andy and I basically started the group to play, will be well represented without me actually running it. But run something regularly I will, but what?

As much as I love Call of Cthulhu, I’m still not sure this is the right group for it. Role playing abounds with these guys, but lots of combat also seems to be a big preference. That just don’t happen in CoC. I have done a few street level Champions games with Terry, Andy, and Paul, but I’m not sure that doing that or full blown superheroes will fit the bill for what I want from the group right now (I find Hero System, like all crunchy systems, to be best for small groups).

Basically, I have recently that I would do a space game of some sort for next year’s early months. But what would these guys like? Star Wars? Dune? Aliens/Firefly/Traveller type settings? Anyway, I posted those choices on our Yahoo Groups page, and out of the five who voted so far, Star Wars is the clear favorite. So I think I will do a short SW campaign. This is good for a couple of reasons:

One, I really have a bad attitude about Star Wars. All the Muppets and the childish, unfunny humor. The three prequels that put a bullet in the franchise for me. Sure, I find them watchable on TV here and there, but have zero desire to live in that universe or to know any of the people in it. What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, as much as I think much about the films are lame, I love the Knights of The Old Republic setting with a passion, based mostly on my experience with the XBOX game of that same name. 4,000 years before the hubris of George Lucas. And less Muppets because less Outer Rim planets have been discovered. Lots of epic things happening too, like the end of the brutal Madalorian War, and the beginning of the Jedi Civil War. Jedi and Sith are all over the place, and Lightsabers more plentiful than empty beer cans on the floor of a Culver City bus. No stupid “Rule of Two.” Really, there are a million reasons why it is a great Sci Fi setting despite the silly films.

And reason two, well, I had a pretty shitty experience with running this game last year for a group of middle-aged Star Wars freaks who treated me like an employee and stuck around when I left to discuss my game performance at the end of the day (yeah, I know, much more to that tale but I have pretty much moved on from just another negative experience in a fairly overall shitty year). What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, yeah. I like my regular group, and I put a lot of work, time, effort, and a certain amount of money (I owned no Star Wars books when I accepted the “assignment”) into the few games I ran for that Hollywood group. I think we can have a lot of fun with it, and light Sci Fi is something I can practically phone in like my D&D games.

So Knights of the Old Republic it is, for the first three or four months of the year, anyway. Besides the KOTOR games, I will of course throw out that odd OD&D White box dungeon crawl as an alternate, as well as some bits of Champions when the group is lacking players on a game night. I’ll alternate my games with whoever does some of their D&D. I’ll let Big Ben and Terry slug it out for those slots.

I just gotta finish up the year, and finish up this damn Night Below campaign. Fun, but jeez, it’s starting to feel like I’ve been walking uphill with this setting over my shoulder forever. Gotta wrap it up (and kill some characters if at all possible). Stay tuned for details on that (finally back to AD&D next week).

Goatees and Black Trench coats

I never put much thought to gamer fashion. At least here in California, it tends to be the same stuff you see anywhere on the streets – t-shirts and jeans or shorts.

Sometime in the late 90’s I noticed a strange fashion trend in gamers. Around 1998 or so I had gone to a handful of GURPS sessions in West LA. This was a rare move for me; for most of the 90’s I had decent sized groups and consider it the heydays of my D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions campaigns. But my group was slowly petering out towards the end of the decade, and a couple of strong players had moved away or got married or whatever. So I will admit that I looked for some local groups to game with and maybe troll for and cull some decent players for my own group. What was I to do? I still wanted a large group, and I didn’t go to cons or hang out at game stores. At the time I had no idea of what was going on in the gaming world outside my circle, besides the occasional trip out to Long Beach to The Warhouse (for some of the reasons I would not set foot in the more local Aero Hobbies of Santa Monica, look at this old experimental post).

So there I was sitting in on sessions of some kind of GURPS games, run by a dude who used no notebook and made it up as he went along. And not in any kind of good way. It was some kind of science fiction thing where all science fiction things existed at the same time. Sounds like a great idea (which I think the dude stole from Nexus Comics, but he denied it), but the execution was pretty poor. You would go out and do something, and he would brainstorm on what to have happen to you. The host of the games thought this GM was “imaginative,” but I did not agree. Over a couple of games my guy would go out jogging or out to a bar, and the only thing the guy could think of was “a predator from the Predator movies is jogging there too,” or “a predator from the Predator movies is on the barstool next to you. “ I guess Predator was on HBO the night before or something.

Ugh. Horrible. But here is the rub, the guy wore a black trench coat. Not bad you say? It’s fucking summer here in So Cal, dude. Really? A black trench on a warm summer night? OK, not that big a deal. Columbine was still a year or two away, and the black trench was yet to be thought of nationwide as the gear of pathetic loser geeks who got picked on and went batshit instead of lifting weights or taking karate or whatever. it struck me as weird. But hey, I’m a lifelong beach dude, so what do I know of trench coats?

I did not last long in that little group. My gaming life with my own group continued on.

Sometime around 2001 or 2002 I went for a couple of hours to the Gateway convention over at LAX to do a little shopping for miniatures or what not. I parked a few blocks away, and I noticed groups of the pretty much all-male convention goers heading back and forth to the Jack in the Box across the street. Of the 20 or 30 guys I saw in that few minutes, 90% of them (I’m not kidding) were wearing black trenches. OK, so I don’t recall what time of year it was, but this is Southern California. In deepest winter it is often 75 degrees. Jeez.

Now, keep in mind this was not all that long after columbine. Granted, Columbine had nothing to do with goatees. The Columbine jack-offs were pretty clean cut and studly compared to the squirrely dorked-out trenchers I saw around that con hotel. And at the time I did notice a lot of goatees in various fandom gatherings in general, especially at Renaissance Faires. So I guess that is neither here nor there (outside of the fact that combined with the coats it made the con dudes look like a bunch of clones).

Not long after Columbine I was partying at the So Cal Ren Faire one night and saw the head of security giving a hard time to a pair of black trench donning teenagers for being so stupid as to adopt the fashion of a pair of losers who shot up their school because they were the only two kids in the school who couldn’t get laid. And those were teens, lots of these con dudes looked well into their 30’s at least. I remember also thinking about the crummy “imaginative” GM from those GURPS games, who attended that same con from what I understood. But at least that douche was doing it without the stigma of the shooting hanging around.

I only had a pass for the shopping area, but from what I could see there was an ocean of these black trenched yobbos at the tables.

I just didn’t get it. Why would you want to wear anything associated with the biggest high school losers in human history? It was mind boggling. Maybe after 10 years or something, but a couple? C’moan. Some of them in addition also seemed to like to wear those fingerless driving gloves with the coats which was just extra weird.

Next week I am going to be in attendance for a couple of days at a So Cal game convention. No shit. That’s right, hell froze over. And this isn’t for lack of my own decent group. I’m actually trying to get out there more in the game community since I blog and all that. I’m getting older, and who knows if this is my last big hurrah for gaming. I’m not sure I can see myself doing this at 50. But of course, I said I wouldn’t be doing it at 40 when I was 30. My, how time flies and we lie to ourselves.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the latest con going fashions. If it’s just t-shirts and shorts I guess I might secretly be a little disappointed. Hmmm…maybe I’ll drop by the thrift store and see if I can find a trench in my size.

Blood Meridian and the Immortal Warrior

“Whatever exists.” He said. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. “These anonymous creatures may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of mens knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” – Judge Holden

Judge Holden is like something from another world. A kind of mutant in the old, pre- civil war west. He is almost 7 feet tall, an albino, and is completely bald and hairless right down to the lack of eyelashes. Seemingly strong as an ape, he has been observed to lift a large anvil up over his head, and then toss it nearly ten feet on a bet. He has escaped near certain death by doing outlandish things like firing on his enemies point blank with a Howitzer under one arm and a lit cigar in the other hand. He is widely travelled and highly educated, maybe self so, and can converse with others in multiple languages (German, French, Italian, etc.) about such far ranging subjects as philosophy, paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, law, geology, and astrology. At night in the wilderness he will often spend his time collecting natural specimens of flora and fauna, keeping careful notes. To even those who know him, the Judge seems more than a little supernatural and fully out of place in most situations.

In Cormac Mccarthy’s 1985 book Blood Meridian, Judge Holden rides along with a group of border scalp hunters, fighting renegade Indians for a price. Apparently, the Judge met the current group he rides with as they were fleeing from superior numbers and low on ammo. Holden is sitting on a boulder in the middle of nowhere as if waiting for them, and in mere moments after their meeting, the Judge has gathered the proper local materials to show them how to create gunpower, with which they chase off their foes. Every man in that group of disparate men claim to have met the Judge at one time or another in the past, adding to his spooky mystique.

On top of everything else, Judge Holden seems supreme in his evil. Even among cutthroats, bushwackers, rapists, murderers, and thieves he stands out. When the group of outriders devolve into killing and scalping innocent villagers and pilgrims, the Judge takes no hesitation in slaughtering children when others flinch. An obvious pedophile, the Judge will keep a young captured boy or girl alive for a couple of days, before tiring of them and scalping them to add to the loot pile. He flatters children with sweets, and in communities the Judge arrives in a young girl or boy will invariably go missing or be found murdered.

In Blood Meridian the brutally biblical seems to meld into the blatant metaphysical. The colors and textures of the Southwest, much like those Carlos Castenada’s Don Juan experienced, take on an alien life of their own. But here it is more sinister. Every sunset seems like an open gateway to hell. When a lone tree in the prairie is struck by lightning at night, tarantulas, lizards, scorpions, and vinegaroons seem to gather around it in natural awe as if summoned by demons.

Judge Holden walks this landscape like some sort of ancient and devilish warrior of a bygone fantasy age. Like the good hearted immortal warrior John Carter of Mars, Judge Holden seems to come out of nowhere in the past and is not necessarily restrained by natural laws. Decades after the beginning of the novel, towards the brutal and controversial end of this visceral epic, Judge Holden seems completely unchanged and unaged in any way, his great strength and great appetite for evil undiminished.

I just finished this book, and one thing was on my mind at the end. What a great character Judge Holden would be to insert into a Boot Hill, Old West Cthulhu, or any weird west. The Judge could obviously appear in any age one wished, him being a supernatural entity and all (at least in my conclusion). A Roman citizen; a black knight in the Middle Ages; or even a futuristic setting. But I think to use him in the Old West would be best, to portray him as he appears in the book. And as I said, he appears to be the same in the 1850’s as he is in the 1870’s. I feel he could easily show up in the 1920’s, prancing to dark music arm in arm with Alister Crowley at an occult function.

If you haven’t read Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in the West, do so. But only if you can stand the brutality; inhumanity; and Cormac’s ruthless use of metaphors. I think that if you are a descriptive game master (or even not) you can up your game by making as study of this author’s colorful and flavorful (to the point of delirious overload) prose.

In true gamer fashion (and because this is a game blog) here is the basic Call of Cthulhu stats for The Judge as best I can make them on the spot. I may just use him if I ever get around to my Old West Cthulhu campaign. Hey, what if the Judge is yet another avatar of Nyarlothotep? Hmm…

Judge Holden
Occupation: Soldier/Warrior. Holden is an unapologetic lover of war and conflict.
Age: unknown. Appears generally to be in his late 30’s/Early 40’s.
Strength: 18
Dexterity: 15
Intelligence: 17
Education: 17
Constitution: 16
Power: 17
Charisma: 16
Size:18

*Note: as a supernatural/near supernatural being, Judge Holden is already “crazy,” and therefore immune to sanity affects.

Skills:
Anthropology, archeology, paleontology, geology: 60%
History, linguistics, chemistry, physics: 50%
Accounting, law, psychology, calligraphy, occult: 40%
Climb, jump, ride, sneak, drive carriage: 50%
Oratory, persuade:65%
Pistol: 70%
Rifle: 75%
Knife, club, brawling, grapple: 80%

*The Judge likes to dress in clean white clothing whenever possible, including a hat to cover his bald head in the sun. If he finds himself hatless in outdoors, he will first bargain, then kill, for one. Same for weapons if he is weaponless. Gaining a firearm, especially a pistol, will be a priority if he is unarmed.

Judge Holden prefers to be naked when camped out or in private, sometimes donning a light robe. When travelling he likes to carry his gear in a European Portmanteau instead of the more rugged leather satchels of his companions. If encountered “in lair,” he will probably be only wearing an open robe or coat and otherwise nude. In this circumstance he is likely to have: 40% a young but adult female (50% whore/50% against her will victim), 40% chance of a child under the age of 13 (60% female, 40% male). In addition, there is a 10% chance Holden will also have some form of unusual person (mentally disabled person, midget or dwarf, carnival freak, etc). All will be naked and possibly assisting Judge Holden in his abuse of his other “guest.” The Judge seems to also be capable of restraining and raping a strong, full grown man.
In this case he may only commit this act out of some kind of vengeance, although it is possible he has an attraction to certain grown men outside of revenge. His preference for evening “companions” is almost exclusively children of a pubescent age.

The Judge loves to use his oratory/persuasion skills to cause ruin of others. He once convinced a mob at a church revival that an otherwise steadfast preacher was a child and goat rapist. This is the type of thing he might do in a town for laughs. Once somebody becomes his enemy, the Judge will seek revenge on them relentlessly, even if he has to wait decades for the opportunity.

Tintin and Me

Since childhood my folks would buy stacks of comics for me at various garage sales and swap meets. One day, sometime in the mid-80’s, they came home with a pile of large format Tintin books, and therein I discovered the Zen joy of the adventures of this diminutive French reporter and his rum-chugging sailor buddy Captain Haddock (Haddock actually didn’t come along until the later, best stories. He started out as a sort of villain). They were great adventure stories, spanning the globe and even going to the moon (while most of the stories were firmly grounded in a certain realism, the moon adventure was far more a flight of fancy).

A sort of sly, winking Euro-humor within the stories really added to the subtle flavor of the tales. The antics of the heroes were always rousing adventure, with the occasional violence sudden and brief. The very feel of the stories lent themselves very well to a Call of Cthulhu vibe. I mined ideas for my COC games pretty heavily in the 90’s. For example, there was a scene where Tintin and Haddock were trapped on a train in the Mountains (a footnote at the bottom of the page let you know it was the highest rail in the world at that time) of Peru that was out of control and rolling back down the mountain at increasing speeds to eventually end up careening off a bride hundreds of feet up. My ripping off of that entire sequence (and also later the attempted sacrifice of the heroes by cultists and their being saved by knowing an eclipse was coming) made for one of the most exciting Cthulhu games I had ever ran.

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have produced a 3D animated movie of Tintin for Fall of this year, with an all star cast of voices including Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (of Shaun of the Dead fame). Although an animated version has the best chance of being true to the source material, I am a bit sad this will preclude a live action version any time real soon. The film will for sure be huge in Europe where Tintin is still beloved, but who knows how it will pan out in the states. I actually think there is a big fan base out there in the USA, plus references to Tintin are all over pop culture here for decades. The popular 80’s cheese band Thompson Twins are named after Tintin’s policeman pals, and every now and again you see the little dude and his dog “Snowy” on T-shirts. So we’ll see. A big hit or not, I’ll be seeing the film. If for nothing else, Tintin inspired some great gaming from me, and just all around gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Blistering barnacles!

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Gaming in Arkham

My very last CoC campaign in the late 90’s was set in 1922 Arkham. This was around the point when that current long-time group had pretty much petered out where I had just Terry and Janet Planet left as regular players. Yep, two players. Terry and Janet had been around in my games since around 1988, 10 years at that point, and I was pretty comfy running games for just the two of them. In fact, around 1989 there was a period of around a year when they would come over to Venice Beach once or twice a month on a Friday night to play a little two player Champions, which was just great times. Sometime in the mid-90’s there was also a point when I was doing campaigns for a group of all women (not by choice), of which Planet Janet and Terry were a part of.

So around 1998 or so I ran what was going to end up being some of the last few games I would be doing before my several year semi-retirement from gaming.

At some point a dude had let me borrow and copy some of his Cthulhu material, including the Arkham sourcebook. I loved reading that book, and all the little 1920’s details that came with it. The big apartment building with interesting NPC’s that the characters stayed in, to the small lunch diner where they “served meatloaf and mashed potatoes in big white crockery,” it was just brimming with period flavor. The shopping district, the city hall, the Miskatonic environs where all cool, and there was even a speakeasy for Terry’s torch singer “Lila” to perform and get caught up in gangster activities (and even meet Al Jolsen who attended one night, who offered her a job when she made a great singing roll if she ever went to New York).

Terry ran her singer, a veteran and survivor of no less than two CoC campaigns (maybe a little light in the sanity department, but she had been a very lucky and well played PC). Planet Janet came up with a new character, a rich English country girl who came to the U.S. to attend Miskatonic. Oh yeah, a buddy of mine and longtime player, Gary, also played here and there, but missed many sessions due to commitments. When Gary did play, he ran an American Indian guy based on the Indian soldier from “Predator.” You know, the dude who seemed to be able to sense the Predator’s presence in the woods (Gary figured he would hear things, but that it would be Cthulhu stuff instead of a dreadlocked Alien).

Anyway, there were just a handful of those games, and most of the ones with just the girls were about shopping and exploring the places in town; mixed with the occasional weird happening. The group tangled with gangsters, evil seamen, and even visited an old Civil War bone yard in a cave that rose from the dead when they took some Necronomicon fragments. They made a few friends in town too, including an English jester dwarf and “Colonel Sausage,” a limbless midget from the local carnival.

Alas, the campaign did not go as long as previous ones. Both Terry and Janet were tough to schedule for get-togethers, and after almost two months of no gaming at one point I said “fuck it” and more or less started my long game-less sabbatical that pretty much ended with my current group a couple of years ago.

But again, I loved that Arkham supplement. Maybe I’ll drag it out one night for inspiration. Although I am kind of leaning on Victorian England or The Old West for my eventual new campaign, Arkham is the classic setting, and a hellacool one.

Campaigns End

Well, there you have it. Last night we finished up my Night Below campaign. At a bit over two years in duration, it is surely the longest campaign I have ever run. It was cause to party, and I was sucking down the brewskies with the satisfaction of a long run concluded.

No combat went down in the session, although towards the end during the final treasure shares, Krysantha the Drow and Vaidno the Bard seemed prepared to whip out there weapons and throw down, specifically over what to do with the Crown of Derro Domination. That would have been cool; finally a character death, at the hands of another character no less. But they managed to table further discussion on it and leave it with Vaidno for now. I have to say, it was really nice to relax and watch the characters, more vocal with each other than ever, pretty much take the ball and run with it. Some great role-playing went down.

Back at the surface and cleaned up, the characters were taken before the Queen of Tanmoor, Libertine, who had secretly come to town with some royal guards to see what all the fuss and kidnappings were all about. Meeting with the characters and hearing their story, she gave them modest rewards, and each a Royal Medal of Valor.

The group all went to Terry’s long-time hobbit character’s castle on the border of the Halfling lands for a party in their honor, with all kind of food, kegs of ale and wine of the finest hobbit make, and musical revelry. Lumarin the high elf MU amused himself by giving Terry’s hobbit’s children Tenser’s Floating disk rides in lieu of a pony.

Although rolling in dough from the adventures (I think most characters ended up each with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 thousand golds worth treasure, not counting magic items), nobody is truly rich, so there will be plenty of reason for them to set out and adventure again in the future. I have a couple of high level modules in mind I might like to use on them.

But for now, the characters can go on with their normal above ground lives. Vaidno can go visit the tower the Deck of Many Things provided him (along with his 18 charisma), and Terry’s fighter Helena can marry the NPC soldier she got hooked up with in the course of the adventures . What the others will do, time will tell. But all characters have earned a deserved time of rest in the sunlight of the surface world.

Considering that three years ago I was on year 4 or so of gaming retirement (and dying to run games), I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to run a fairly intense and complex campaign for such a great group of players. Most of our games were like little parties, and were big fun. I want to give special thanks to Andy for hosting us at his place; his wife’s backroom workshop (thanks to Andy’s wife Kara are in order as well) which, with its kitchen and nice garden backyard patio, was a nice place to play. For Andy, Terry, and Dan who have been there pretty much since the inception of this group over two years ago, I give wide thanks for being there for the whole ride.

Andy and the wife are probably going to be renting out the back room at some point in the near future, so we are losing the space to play most likely. Our best bet after that for our regular games would have been Dan’s spacious house up on Mulholland Drive, but he is still having construction done on the house and his wife is apparently days away from having her baby. So the games I run may lessen for awhile. A break might be nice, but I’m hoping to put AD&D aside for awhile and do a little of the Knights of the Old Republic thing I want to run. Some more Champions would be nice with just three or four players, and you know I’ve always got my precious Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind, waiting for the right time to strike from the shadows. Game dreams and hopes galore.

But whatever happens in the near or far future, I’m just damn glad to have been able to run a long and fulfilling campaign. Here’s to more gaming goodness to come! “Excelsior,” as that old bastard Stan “The Man” Lee would say.

Player Appreciation and Beyond

 

(note: for most of my gaming life my groups were made up of friends I already had. This post is about experiences with mostly strangers that made up a new group)

I've probably mentioned in a lot of my posts over the years that my main pet peeve as a GM was to feel like running a game was a job that didn't pay. It has been a few years since I actually felt that way. But during my 10 years run for a group in Santa Monica (my first group that was mostly made up of strangers) from around 2008 to 2018 I felt like that fairly often. Now, it's not a TOTAL buzzkill. Sometimes it was even fun. At first. Kind of "pretend player vs. DM." One of the long-time players was a guy we called The Power Game man. A big white South African guy, he would create a character that seemed interesting and layered, and you would soon realize he was just min-maxing. Using stats, race, and class in combination to create especially powerful characters. 

Now on the face of it that isn't so bad. That is kind of baked into current D&D.  Lots of players do it, and it's part of their process. It's part of their fun. But where I get frustrated is when that kind of play treads on not just the other players fun, but especially mine. A couple of these "power game types" came along during that group's existence. And don't get me started on our long-time host then, who was not just a min maxer to a degree, but also one of these guys who liked to live vicariously through his characters getting laid and seemed to think I was his PC's pimp. So while Power Game Man was busy treating every NPC as an enemy (a power gamer trait I have always noticed), the host was always trying to fuck them. 

Look Andy, I'm not going to role-play the
process out for you; just roll your charisma
and we'll leave it at that...

As a DM you are in a unique situation where you have the power to pretty much come up with a sneaky way to kill any character that bothers you. But I was never like that. I was never an "enemy" DM who was out to get characters. Quite the opposite. I was fair to a fault, even in my earliest childhood games. And the worst players, like Power Game Man and some others, could tell that and use it as an advantage. And Therin is where the worst of my frustrations come in. I don't usually have some well-crafted story written up, or a way things have to go in game in order for me to have fun with it. I just try to make it a fair and interesting setting for the characters to romp around in and look for hooks. If I get into a players vs. DM situation, its because I got dragged into it. I'm not really into that mess and I resent it when I feel I've been put in that situation. I just want us to all have fun together.

I may complain (a lot), but I can see silver linings on any cloud. In the case of our old host, though in a lot of ways he was a pain, he was very supportive of my desire to run things other than D&D. It was in large part due to his support that I had successful campaigns of Champions, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and even Metamorphosis Alpha. I will always be grateful for that.  Power Game man? Naw, I have nothing to be grateful for there. Just an ass in a seat at best. 

But hell, for any player at my table who isn't a total annoying wack job, I'm grateful for them giving their time and putting their gaming fun in my hands. But every now and again I have to appreciate the players who, without even trying, seem to value what you are doing as a DM, and in turn are valuable themselves. 

So I'll mention two "points of light" in my player pools. First is my old Friend "T." She has been in a majority of my gaming groups since the early 90's. She doesn't exactly go out of her way to make my experience better. But her mellow and consistent play style jibes well with my styles. She just...plays her characters. There isn't a power gamer bone in her body. Oh sure, she wants strong characters. But its usually just enjoying the life path that unfolds for her many characters in my campaigns that motivates her. She accepts the good and the bad that happens in the game. She is patient as hell. She gets along with other players. She quietly and steadily just role plays her characters. Even the very infrequent evil character she runs isn't a pain in the ass. But she is the anti-power gamer. In my Night Below campaign years ago her fighter character got a wish from a Deck of Many Things. Of all the things she could have wished for, she wished for an NPC her character fancied to propose marriage to her! Some would call that a wasted wish, but that was her just role-playing her character. Outstanding. T still lives in my old town, but we get to play here and there through Roll20, and she remains reliable and dependable player. 

In most recent times there is "B and L," who I mention a lot in my board game postings. Its thanks to them I got my first group together in my new town. L had no experience with gaming, but B played 1st Ed. in the service (D&D in Afghanistan, ya'll!). They were looking for a DM through the local shops Facebook page, and we hit it off right away. They are not the most outgoing players, they certainly are not there for community theater. But I specialize in somewhat introverted players, and they have come out of that shell pretty well. Quiet players much like "T," but they come up with some interesting moments. L, a woman straight as the day is long, had her female half orc fighter end up in a same sex relationship with an NPC. It was a situation that I certainly did not push, but the fact that it happened organically in the course of the games points very much to a role-playing frame of mind. 

Anyway, not just getting me as a DM and putting a group together, B and L would bring me a six pack of expensive beer or ale every damn game just for me. Even now, a couple of years later when we have a board game day, they bring me the same. Even during the times they are on health kicks and not drinking. I'd be like "look guys, if you aren't even drinking its not right to being me drinks." But deaf ears. Any time they come over they bring it to me. And me being raised on not showing up at a house with empty hands means I very much appreciate it. Its not the main reason we became so close so quickly (I'd take a bullet for them, meanwhile my oldest friends I've known for decades can go take their own bullets). That is mainly because this younger couple sort of adopted me at a time I didn't know anybody in my new town. Had me over for Xmas day only knowing me a brief time, when I would otherwise probably have spent it watching TV and eating Jack in the Box tacos (or maybe in a casino). I have been in a couple of relationships (with non-gamers) since coming to town, but most of my time with B and L is just me and them (and sometimes with some of their local pals). Dinner, drinks, local theater..I love being a third wheel with them. 

Now, you aren't always going to get close to people you met through gaming. As a matter of fact, they are the only case where it happened to me. We are already like brothers and sister. I appreciate the hell out of them in games or otherwise. They are my besties. And as I get older, in gaming or otherwise, I try more and more to focus away from the pain-in-the-ass players (or whoever) of the past, and put more of it, more positivity, into those who truly deserve it. People being positive towards you should make you want to be a better person. For them and for yourself. 

But we should all go through life doing that.

 

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: Time Periods

Happy 120th birthday HPL! You sick bastiche.

It has been around 10 years since my last Call of Cthulhu game, and now that my group seems to be getting more open to lots of non-D&D alternatives to our regular game, I figure next year might be a good time to introduce it to some CoC . My long time player Terry is the only one of them with any experience with the game, and she loved it. She actually had a character survive at least two campaigns with her sanity mostly intact (by staying in the background and hiring a gangster bodyguard).

But should I do it in the 20’s again? I’ve had a couple of long running CoC campaigns, and they have both taken place between 1919 and 1922. One I set in the Los Angeles area, and the other shorter campaign in and around Arkham.

Victorian England is temping, and there are sourcebooks available for that setting. And I work a couple weekends of a Charles Dickens Christmas Faire up in San Francisco during the holidays, so plenty of inspiration there (the White Chapel district that they set up inside the Cow Palace is just dark and creepy). Switch that era to the Old West, and you have a setting I would love to do CoC for. Last week I got my hands on a copy of Deadlands, and that is inspiring an old west thing even more.

American Revolution seems like untouched and fertile ground for a few games. Or how about the Elizabethan Renaissance (my Ren Faire experience should really pay off for that)?

Hell, I think CoC with some Cro-Magnon Man tribesmen might even be worth a whirl.

Oh man. If only there was time for them all.

Keep on Truckin' (more or less)

Wow, more than two weeks without a post! What the hell is going on around here? Actually, one big thing that is going on to sap up my “Funny time” is a big promotion at work. Career making. So to earn that nice extra chunk of change and the occasional invite to a big Hollywood client party now and again, I need to spend more time actually doing something productive on the computer, instead of all this frivolous, asinine game stuff that is unrelated to my actual playing of the games.

Also, with my long AD&D campaign now well over, I’m slightly less inspired to post about gaming stuff in general. Sure, I’m doing KOTOR and want to do Call of Cthulhu and more Champions in the future (and leave us not forget my current obsession Runequest) All this, combined maybe with my disappointment at how many less than fulfilling gaming experiences I’ve had outside my own group in the last couple of years (those great OD&D session at local events being an exception), in person and online, will keep me from posting very often for the foreseeable future. A lot of the negative crap I read online reminds me of those early Aero Hobbies days I had as a young teen at the local game shop. Exposure to a lot of bitter, unhappy people who seem to make up a huge portion of gamers (and maybe pop culture geeks in general). I keep getting sucked into stupid arguments with people online that I probably wouldn’t even acknowledge if I met them in real life. I gotta cut back on that for sure. Treat these people online who get on my nerves much like I do fucked-up shitty drivers when on the road. Think of them not as people, but as nothing more than blips in a video game comin’ atcha.

In gaming, I need to focus more on the actual gaming. Right now I’ve been playing every other week in Big Ben’s evil campaign, where I’m running a monk (the one non-evil character). That has been fun to a large degree because my guy came along after the first game, and this lot of evil punks were practically at each other’s throats. So my lawful neutral guy has brought some sense of order to the party.

In my game every other week, I’ve been doing the KOTOR thing and it’s a success so far. It’s based on the campaign I put together for the infamous Star Wars group I ran for a bit the other year. But the difference this time is I know these players, they are all pretty cool, and not one of them is even that much of a fan of Star Wars movies, which is a big plus for me. I’m trying to run anything but a Star Wars film with this. I don’t think the other group necessarily appreciated a little bit of hard sci fi and rated R situations being injected into their precious George Lucas setting. Yeah, it’s fun, with some great characters. The players are loving all the options you get for character building. I more or less dig the system (for Sci Fi…I don’t know how they could have called this game engine “D&D” at any point), and both Big Ben and Paul have PDF’s of the SW Core rules, and seem to know the system already better than I do.

For more changes on the game front, we are for the foreseeable future pretty much losing Andy’s place to play in after almost three years of playing there. But luckily, despite his wife just having a baby recently, Dan the Power Game Man has managed to sweet talk the new mom into letting the gang come over to play on weeknights there. Mulholland on a weeknight is a bit of a pain to get to from the West Side, but it’s good to know we still have a location.

So the games continue. My online presence, well, may be a bit less for awhile. I’ll still check in to post here and there when inspired, or pissed off by one of my players, or any possible number of things that get my goat or gets me excited (yay)in the grand scheme of gaming. I’ve really lost my taste now for trying to get involved in any kind of other groups outside the great gang of people I have now for our regular thing. Actually gaming on a regular basis. Seemed a far off dream around three years ago. I’m going to focus on keeping that healthy for as long as I can. For my gaming life right now, it feels like home.

Top Ten Craziest AD&D Rules (part 2)

5) Nearly Anything in Unearthed Arcana

Sure, the cantrips were nice, and weapon specialization was popular with players, and already in-use in many campaigns -- but the unbalanced "new" PC classes (mostly cribbed from Dragon Magazine), the new sub-races of elves (why play any elf but a grugach or drow anymore?) really embraced the new "risk-lite" era of gaming, in which munchkin-ism was an assumed part of the game, and characters being anything less than superhuman was unthinkable. UA also introduced the new format of most TSR products from there onwards; the half DM/half player supplement. Which obviously never worked. DMs couldn't surprise players with the new info, since most of them obviously read the "for the DM's eyes only!" material. There is no honor amongst thieves, nor amongst gamers when it comes to players trying to beat their DM.


My take: UA blew me and my friends away when it came out. We used the new classes shamelessly, to the point where pretty much every character in games for around a year were classes out of this book. Cantrips, spells, whatever, I loved them. Never really used proficiencies, and don’t really use anything out of it in terms of characters these days. I let Big Dan run a female drow. There will be no more female drow PC’s in my game. Nuff said.

4) God Stats

If you don't want me to kill Loki, don't tell me how many hit points he has. It's as simple as that. Deities and Demigods went to great lengths in gaming-up pantheons (both real-life and fictional -- including the Melnibonian, Nehwon, and Cthulhu mythoi that would be excised for copyright issues in the third printing), which was sort of cool--but giving the divine stats is really just begging for them to be used as high-level monsters. Which, it was constantly claimed by TSR, was not the point--though the fact that TSR's own module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits includes a climax in which it's very possible (if not exceptionally easy) to kill Lolth herself makes this claim somewhat dubious. Later editions have had their cake and eaten it too in claiming that these stats aren't the gods themselves, but their avatars on the material plane. Which is sort of cheating, but then again, so is claiming to have killed Zeus fair and square.


My take: Heh, I love that first sentence. Deit & Demi’s was a fun read on the toilet, but never got much in-game use out of it. Especially when I had created my own gods for my game world at around age 13. I actually got more ideas of of the book for my Call of Cthulhu games than I did for my D&D, although it was my reference for a Lovecraft inspired D&D campaign I did in the 80’s.

3) Material Components

Ah yes, the rule that turned all magic-users into ghoulish souvenir-hunters and gem-hoarders. This is one of those rules that some DMs used just to piss their players off--I mean, Identify is one of the most common spells cast by Magic-Users, and the material components are a 100gp pearl, and an infusion of an owl feather in wine with a miniature carp both swallowed whole. (Minature carp? Is that even a thing?) And at higher levels, the components get ridiculously expensive -- Shape Change requires a jade circlet worth at least 5000gp, Duo-Dimension requires a similar ivory cameo of the caster worth 5000-10000 gp, and even the fifth-level Wall of Force requires a "pinch" of diamond dust. It's pretty ridiculous, and with all the weird stuff that wizards would have to cart around for all their spells--gloves for the Bigby spells, balls of guano and sulphur for Fireballs, and rotten eggs for Stinking Cloud (you don't really even have to cast the spell--just throw the damn egg) -- it's surprising that Magic-Users in D&D don't come across more as the fantasy equivalent of cart-pushing bag ladies.


My take: yeah, it gets pretty stupid. In a lot of ways I think some of this takes the piss and fun right out of spell use. I really don’t like to have any component be all that rare or expensive. I for sure don’t make Big Ben’s high elf MU Lumarin in my game swallow a fucking miniature carp when he does one of his ID spells. Then again, in his particular case maybe I should just for laughs. Ben is sort of “by the book. ”Take that, sucker! Make a con roll to avoid choking on that fish and owl feather.”

2) Encumbrance

The ultimate rule that almost no one played with. There's no denying that it makes sense -- if you're striving for realism, there's no way that your character is carrying around much gold at all, especially if you're a thief relying primarily on stealth and agility. And especially in that case, encumbrance rules are pretty generous. But still, they're a pain, and most groups tended to fall in to one of three categories: those that ignored it completely, those that really only paid attention to it when it was egregious, and those that were granted a plethora of bags of holding in order to "realistically" be able to ignore it completely. And why? Because it's a dumb, real-life rule that gets in the way of, you know, actually having fun. It's the same reason most characters are still carrying around that one-week supply of iron rations, and generally don't worry about food unless they're in a tavern. It's the same reason that there aren't rules for potty breaks in the dungeon. It's the same reason there's not a table for seeing if you have a stiff neck from sleeping on a dungeon floor. Because it's a game.


My take: I’m pretty easy going on this. Although sometimes it irks. Recently Andy told me he was carrying three weeks worth of food. What, for a fucking hamster? Do you have any idea what three weeks of food would be like? And not just for a 6’3” fatass like me, but even skinny Andy’s three weeks of jerky and trail mix would be three shopping bags worth. Ah well, best not to think on it too much. Like alignment and components, Encumbrance is a pain in the patoot.

1) Grappling

This system has never worked in the history of the game. Non-lethal combat -- even just grab-moves in weaponed combat -- has always been a nightmare of a process, in every edition. Which is a shame, because a good tavern brawl should be easy to have. It would also be a pretty fun way to make combat more interesting--instead of just trading blows, you could actually grab that evil fighter by the hauberk and throw him across the room. But no, it's not so easy as just rolling to-hit. You have to consult percentages charts, figure out how many increments of 10% your strength is over 18, compare it to how many points over 14 your opponent's dexterity is, determine the kind of helmet your foe is wearing (open-faced? nasaled but otherwise open? visored or slitted?). And then, at some point in the process, you consult the "do you no longer care about actually following through with this move?" percentage on Table F.I.2: Loss of Interest. And if you're like 99.9% of the players who tried this, you eventually determine: "Ah, fuck it. I swing my sword."


My take: when AD&D first came out when I was a little kid, I could already tell by the weaponless combat rules that Gygax had never been in a fight in his life. Not only did I have two older brothers who were quick with a punch (go tell dad and he’d say in his thick Scottish accent “better learn to git yer hands up” before bopping me on the noggin with his huge, coal miner hand), I grew up in a poor version of now rich and trendy Venice Beach, and had to make the occasional statement to creeps who were usually smaller than me but thought they could box me around. Even before getting into boxing/kick boxing later in life, I knew how to take it to somebody’s grill. Needless to say, I had my own brawling rules very early on. I’ll post on that one day, fight fans.

Mutant Future on the Starship Warden

As I've mentioned in previous posts, my current AD&D 1st ed. group has being going strong for over a year, and I feel it is time to do as I always do with a group I put together for my D&D world - introduce a back-up alternate game genre. I'm going to do that this coming Wednesday night with Mutant Future.

As a kid running a bit of Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, Mutant Future appealed to me (and I didn't have to buy anything. I'm Scottish, ye ken?), and I've wanted to do some Met. Alpha again for years, so I thought I'd just do MA with the MF rules.

I'll start things off on the "Valley" level that the inhabitants call "Europa," a place more or less at a dark ages social and technological level. Three major international groups had colonist towns on this level and are now the largest populations of pure strain humans - Irish, German, and Italian. In the several hundred years since the "cataclysm," these groups have maintained many ethic features of their own. The Irish descendants are in a wooded area town of "Dublin" and are hunters and archers. The Germans, or "Germanans" whose original colonists mined large deposits of raw iron placed in the northern part of the level, are much like ancient Germanic warriors, and pure humans from there would start with metal weapons. The Italians, who originally were made up of many historians and anthropologists, have evolved their town into a mini-Roman empire with togas and higher learning and all. The people of "Nova Roma" tend to be more educated, and they created the monetary/trade system of the Valley. The Nova Romans have a gladiator arena, and often force mutant slaves and monsters to fight it out for entertainment.

Gypsies and savage hill people round out the PSH population.

To the humans of Europa, iron is the greatest commodity. Without it, you have to rely on weapons and armor of wood, bone, and stone. These items break easily.

Mutations are thought of as curses from the "bad times," and the three major pure human communities tend to cast out and chase off any obvious mutants. So most mutants live in the wild, except for the few who have created the mutant colony, a mutant town with a flop house and a public house for anyone willing to stay there, all run by mutants. Just like I would for any D&D town or village, I've come up with a few interesting NPC's the players might encounter. As I expect most if not all of the players to run mutants, the mutant colony will likely be the home base for the "Europa" portion of this campaign.

The NPC who will bring them all together is "Garth," a middle aged travelling scholar who is actually an original crew member, unfrozen a year or so ago, who is trapped on the level and trying to get out (the doors and elevators have long gone into malfunction - opening on their own briefly every 1-100 days). He is a high ranking electrical engineer, and he wants to get back to the command deck to meet up with his fellow crew members (and perhaps captain) to work on restoring more ship systems. So he will ruse the characters into questing around with him, and hopefully after three or four games in the Valley, lead PC's to other parts of the ship. Besides a mini-computer "Mother Box," Garth carries a plasma pistol that he wants to keep quiet from players. It'll only have a couple shots left, as Garth has had to protect himself while in Europa.

So Garth will probably encounter and hire the players at the public house in the Mutant Town, and go in search of tools and crew badges to get out of the level with. Yeah, I'm starting out with a standard D&D type meet n'greet.

I haven't really thought much more out than that. I'm hoping to get the party to Nova Roma and into some arena combat somehow. I also have a "necromanser" (misspelled on purpose) in a "castle" in the hills who can create undead that I want to be encountered somehow. I even want to use the all-18 stat PSH "jungle girl" described in the original Metamorphosis sample valley level. The hunt for crew badges can lead to all of that.

I can see in the future having the party go between decks, learn that they are on a giant starship, and perhaps get recruited in the quest to save the ship.

I am fairly successful so far in not revealing the true nature of the environs to the players in this pre-game stage of discussing characters. Nobody seems to know I am basically doing Metamorphosis Alpha. I'm not allowing androids or robots as characters yet, and as far as the first characters are concerned, these things don't exist in my game. Once characters go to other levels and learn the nature of the environs, I will allow dead characters to be replaced by androids or crew members.

A few weeks ago I got together with a couple of players to work on characters. One wanted a mutant human originally from Dublin (he doesn't have obvious mutations, but does sort of look like he has Downs Syndrome or something), and the other a mutant tree from the wild. The human rolled teleport, disintegrate, thermal vision, and as a bad mutation ended up with slow movement, basically letting him only do things every other turn.

The mutant tree got acid blood, shriek, and thermal vision. He also ended up with a bad one, fast aging. Despite somewhat crippling bad mutation, both players were happy with their characters, which is a good sign. I'm going to have a month equal a year for the tree as far as growing is concerned, so it might be interesting to see how big he gets if the campaign goes on for a long time.

The randomization of mutations was done as given in the rules, and I like they way it worked out. I can't wait for another player or two to roll up a mutant. I do hope somebody runs a pure strain human, though. I can't tell them that eventually the pure humans can command robots and get other perks, so they seem like sort of bland characters compared to mutants. But there are advantages in terms of equipment and weapons and wealth for the pure humans, so hopefully that will entice somebody to go the "pure" route.

Game day is just a couple days away, and I'm still trying to decided on my house rules. I don't want to change too much, but I want to have some rulings about the particular mutations (especially teleport). I also want to have going up in level mean a bit more, and maybe tie that in to mutations improving as well. Guess I better get on that stuff...

As and old dog who never strayed too far from D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions, it's pretty exciting to face running a brand new game to me. Tonight I'll finish up my small amount of house rules, and post them tomorrow. After that, it'll be the big test Wednesday night. Not all my players are totally excited about me running anything other than the AD&D campaign they are enjoying so much. I hope it wins them over enough to be an alternate game they won't bitch about having to play when some players are missing for D&D.