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!

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.

Roll20, where've you been all my life?

 

Until recently I had almost zero experience in playing RPGs online. That's mostly because I had zero interest in it. With the exception of a handful of times in my life I was always able to get some kind of group together for face to face. My most recent long term groups lasted about 10 years. We played 1st edition D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Runequest, etc. But in the end it disbanded as I made the move out of Southern California. It took awhile to get a Group together in the new town, and even that only after I made the dreaded switch to the newest edition. I sailed along with That for awhile, but the couple who helped me start the group moving away, combined with The apocalypses, shut that down. 

A local DM suggested I try out Roll 20. It seemed like time to give that a shot. But rather than try to get in on a game to experience it from the players side, I dove into learning enough about the system to get a campaign up and running. As cornerstone players I tapped a guy who was going to join our face to face game right before The Virus hit, and an old player of mine from my home town Los Angeles, and recruited a couple of others and got it going. 

Though I was a Roll20 noob, I just started small and used each session as a chance to learn a bit more each time. I marveled at the way I could yoink a map out of a google search and lay it right down and put squares on it. The first couple of games were set in the hobbit shires, so I just needed country roads, farm fields, and hobbit houses and cottages. 

I discovered a token maker, and loved it. I could put any creature or NPC into a cool little ring. Players pointed me out to artwork online and I whipped up tokens for them. 

Suddenly buying and painting miniatures seemed like a real hassle (I never loved it... the process was a necessity). With the tokens the sky is the limit. Just put some keywords into your Google machine, use a stamp app to make it look like above, and get on with it.

Players are granted control of their token. DM has his. Move them around the map you laid out (maybe going that extra mile by locking the grids in properly for ease of tactical movement). The majority of the rest of the work is using your actual books next to you. Or use PDF stuff if that floats yer boat. Find a map online that suites your encounter then slide it into a page and place grids on it. Wow. 

The above video is of my "Control Center Alpha." My set-up for game night. The music in the background is live from a college radio station, playing from my alma mater Santa Monica College's radio station KCRW, and what is playing was totally unintentional but so appropriate for the moments before everyone logs on to play. When I'm in the "command chair" I feel a lot like the guy running games from behind the scenes in Larry Nivens D&D based novel Dreampark.

Man, I'm loving it. I want more. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I may like it more than face to face. My DMing is more concise, focused, and this format appeals to my episodic style. I keep it tight now that I'm not right in front of faces waiting on my next utterance. Not seeing the players has helped me open up in a way. I know, right? Somehow impersonal is making it more personal for me. Yeah, its weird. 

2012 - a great year of just plain gaming

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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.

Cup runneth over - but not Full

Look at that great action scene from Herioc Comics in the pic above. Isn't it just bugnuts amazing? A blonde babe in black leathers, standing in a T-Rex's mouth, smacking a gorilla in a space suit with a great white, as Ed Wood-looking flying saucers float about.

Reminds me so much of my old Champions campaigns. No, really. Dinosaur rampages during unusual great white shark migration as alien apes attack a major city. And hot super babes? Oh, you bet. Over the decades my female players would not always have beautiful characters in their D&D, but in Champions they were all Baywatch circa 1996. Ah, the good old days.

But shit, I'm running an old school Gloranthan Runequest campaign and a Call of Cthulhu campaign at the same time. I posted over the years about how I would really love to do these campaigns, and here I am now doing them. I have my players loving my currently hiatused KOTOR campaign, and they also often ask about their high level characters in my 1st ed. Ad&D campaign (been more than a year now I think for that). So why do I pine for Champions? Why do I wish I could run this crunchy system and my awesome futuristic comic books setting?

Because I am a gamer, and true gamers are never satisfied. There are so many games to run (including multiple settings and time periods over several game systems, such as CoC for Ancient Rome and Victorean London), I'll never get to them all. I know I should be happy with what I am having fun with at the moment, and I really do. But the daydreaming man, the daydreaming. It'll get you every time.

A little Chivalry and Sorcery, anyone?

Chaugner Faugn and the Tcho Tcho People

The party had gone to the a secluded portion of the New Jersey Pine Barrens in search of a missing anthropology professor and one of his students. The prof, from New York University, was looking into tales of the existence of a displaced tribe of Tcho Tcho people (an especially nasty cannibal tribe from Burma) near a small ghost town originally founded by German immigrants who for one reason or another imported the Tcho Tchos. Some decades ago the Rosens died out, but rumors say some of the Tcho Tcho’s still exist.

The party spent the first night in a mostly intact barn, looking over some weathered notes the professor had left behind. In the later hours the Tcho Tcho chanted from beyond the treeline, and threw rocks at the barn. Next morn, the group discovered a tunnel leading down in the ruins of the old house, and descended to find a short maze, and eventually some kind of worship chamber filled with human bones, and huge statue of the Tcho Tcho diety Chaugner Faugn. Also there was a prone figure, and it was alive! It turned out to be the student assistant of the professor, now emaciated and his face mutated. His nose had become long and probiscan like an elephants, and his ears were fanning out in mockery of an elephants ears. All sure signs of complete domination of Chaugner. He begged to be killed, lest night falls and he comes for them to kill them like he did the professor. The party would have none of it (all mostly good souls), and decided to carry him out and eventually to a hospital.

And here is where all Call of Cthulhu characters who carry big guns try to prove they have balls. As the others were leaving, Roland Smythe, the big game hunter, took a parting shot at the big statue with his elephant gun. To his shock, it turned instantly into a living, roaring Chaugner Faugn, and loped off its base to chase Smythe. The group, terrified and party split up, plunged into the small maze area while Chaugner battered around trying to seek them out.

Luck rolls and intelligence saved the day for them, as they escaped the underground tunnels into daylight. But Tcho Tchos armed with spears and bone clubs (and a couple of old swords) waited, with the masked and robed shaman. The party managed to fight their way out of the village area with only modest wounds, and hiked the 5 miles to the main road and escaped.

All that leaving out much of the detail, but suffice it to say it was a great session. We have already had a couple of games so far, but this is the one I think really blew the players away and got them honest to god terrified during the underground incident, with the added bonus of a thrilling fight with cannibals, and a hectic escape. The players really seemed to have a great time with this session, and I think I have them hooked.

This happened in the early 90’s with one of my old long running groups. My regular players hemmed and hawed when I suggested a 1920’s horror game (I don’t tend to get players with a lot of experience with HP Lovecraft), but within two or three sessions are just eating it up. So I was confident the current gang would love it as well. Man, that’s the power of a good Call of Cthulhu session.

As I wanted to get back to a little more Runequest (sans Strike Rank), I’m thinking this Chaugner Faugn encounter would hold the group over so I can get back into a little Glorantha goodness. Then back to CoC, and we’ll see what horrors that nimrod with the elephant gun brings down upon them next. Smythe!

Dive bars…always with the dive bars…

It’s my basic gaming staple. Bars. Usually divey ones.

Whether it’s D&D (ok, those are “inns” and “taverns”), my futuristic Champions setting, Star Wars, or Call of Cthulhu, I always play the dive bar card. I’m not sure I ever did it with post apocalypse stuff like Gamma World, but if you ever saw Book of Eli with Denzel Washington, then you know those are great places for encounters/fights as well. I know from firsthand experience, because in the 90’s, especially when I was into darts for extended periods, I spent a decent amount of time in them.

It’s my go-to setting, because I can always get characters to spend time there. Often an entire session if I want. Have an interesting guy behind the bar, some mixed-economy patrons (there are always “yuppie” types who like to go slumming at dive bars), some ladies of ill-repute, some informer types, low-level criminals, and you have a nice mix of NPC’s to play with. Have a table or two with some open gambling, and frost the cake with fist-fight betting (cage matches or otherwise) and you got yourself a good time.

Players can chat to a lady of choice, get in on the gambling, or if they are the rugged type get involved in some nice punch-up play for fun and profit. My current group really loves my bar settings, and what was maybe going to be a very brief encounter often turns into the better part of the night.

Case in point: In the last Call of Cthulhu game, the characters needed to go to a lowbrow Hudson Bay dockside bar to find a guy who could lead them to a Ghost Town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens they needed to investigate. So after dealing with an attack from multiple byakhees (they have been stalked by a Chinese Business man since NYE who can summon them with an ancient whistle), they went into the bar for the usual bar fun.

Of course there was some fist fighting going on. It didn’t seem like any characters were going to get involved in it this time, until the young Turkish antique dealer grabbed Wing Kong, the young Chinese cook/martial artist, by the arm and sort of forced him into it. She is a brash young Turk, that girl is. Anyway, in the ring against “Slippery Pete,” Wing, who’s English is not so good, just dodged around confused while the guy threw punches. Wing Kong is the best HTH fighter in the group, and it was refreshing to me that he didn’t want to fight unnecessarily. But Andy’s old business man/’semi-hobo Michael (sort of an aged Clint Eastwood type) got up on the small dais and pushed Wing out of the way to take on Pete himself. After a devastating head butt and a good right hook from Pete, poor Michael was laid flat on the ground (this seems to happen pretty much every game to the poor old guy). Wing did not like that, and he got up to give Pete a thrashing with his five fingers of death (our young female Turk even tried to get a punch in). By the end of the evening, a group of international sailors were buying Wing drinks, and even Slippery Pete, black eyed and bruised, joined the characters at the bar.

I didn’t intend for the group to spend the better part of the game there, but these dive bar encounters just seem to have a mind of their own.

We have almost an hour left of the game, so we did manage to get them to the Pine Barrens, and a little bit of investigation into the presence of some Tcho Tcho people there. More on that, and a Mythos deity, next game.

Cthulhu's Brother

I'm currently reading the Brian Lumley book The Clock of Dreams, one of the Titus Crow stories set in the Mythos.

Lumley's stuff is from the "Derleth School" of Cthulhu Mythos adventuring. That is to say, Lumley took to August Derleth's imposing of a Christian-like "good vs. evil" mentality upon the Elder Gods and The Great Old Ones. Die-hard fans of Lovecraft took exception to much of what Derleth did, including such minutea as his coining the phrase "Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft himself used the term "Yog-Sothothery"), but mostly for his creation of heroes who could take it to the grill of Lovecraftian monsters. They are not milquetoast academics who faint at the smell of a fart like most of Lovecrafts heroes. Guys like Crow, though outmatched, fight back against the slimey gods of the Mythos. Lumley said it best here:

I have trouble relating to people who faint at the hint of a bad smell. A meep or glibber doesn't cut it with me. (I love meeps and glibbers, don't get me wrong, but I go looking for what made them!) That's the main difference between my stories...and HPL's. My guys fight back. Also, they like to have a laugh along the way.

I have to admit that this is my favored type of character for Call of Cthulhu play, mostly because I prefer long campaigns. BTB CoC is not meant for long campaigns

Still, I take exception to the somewhat corney creation of entities such as Kthanid (pictured above), a brother of Cthulhu who is his twin, except for his crystal eyes. He is the "good" to Cthulhu's "evil," which I just find way to simplistic and far too Christian in concept. In The Clock of Dreams his is a helpful figure, and I have to admit I think a helpful monster should be pretty rare in The Mythos, no matter what flavor. And c'mon, a helpful brother of Cthulhu is just plain lame.


For my Cthulhu games, I like to find a kind of balance to the hopeless universe of Lovecraft. Sure, you may find a powerful friend here and there, but really, you need a mostly hopeless and terrifying universe to get the most juice out of this genre.

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.

Suddenly – Cthulhu

It does feel very sudden. In the last four years of this gaming group’s existence, I have run a long AD&D campaign that took characters from 1st level to close to 10. I did a handful of Metamorphosis Alpha sessions. I timidly started a Star Wars KOTOR campaign that most players quickly fell in love with. I have even managed to get in a couple of sessions of my beloved Champions setting (too long ago now, around 2 years). And with Big Ben regularly running AD&D I have gotten to sit down as a player more than I have since I was a teenager.

But the entire time I have had Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind. My “big three” games of my adult life have been 1st edition AD&D, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu. These are the games I ran long campaigns for over the years from the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s. Full, satisfying, amazing campaigns with these three genres. And seeing as during the latter part of the 90’s we only seemed to be able to get one several hour session in every month or so, I am in sort of a renaissance of gaming. Running and playing almost every week (weeknight) which a few years ago would have been inconceivable to me. But here we are literally rolling in gaming goodness.

This has given me the opportunity to branch out a bit, and that was especially good for me because after a little over two years of AD&D I was ready for a break. With Call of Cthulhu holding a special place in my heart, I could have gotten a campaign underway sooner, but in all honesty I was not sure this was the best group for it. I have Terry, a veteran of those 90’s Cthulhu campaigns (which were often mostly comprised of female players, which would be another difference from the current group), but the likes of Dan Dan the Power Game Man™ might risk it being more farce than fearful. So as recently as a few weeks ago I decided to go with Runequest, but quickly hit a (hopefully temporary) snag because of my dislike for Strike Rank. I decided after game two to shelf that, and go the hell ahead with Cthulhu. With Big Dan overseas for a temporary period, it seemed like a good time to get a session underway before he came along and futilely tried to powergame a Basic Role Playing character.

My last campaign towards the end of the 90’s was set in around 1922 or so, so I decided to have 5 years go by and set the first session on NYE 1927. My catalyst would be my old NPC “Mr. Troy,” a sort of Truman Capote look/sound alike who was a wealthy antiquarian and high society mystic. Mr. Troy featured as a sort of benefactor in my previous campaigns, at one point setting the old characters up in an occult themed antique shop on the newly built Venice Beach Canals (“Venice of America”). At the start of this game, Troy is in New York, and after character set-up I managed to tie most of them in with Mr. Troy so they can be present at his New Years Eve party at a Times Square hotel penthouse.

One character was a female Turkish Antique expert, and another a female dilettante who used her massive trust fund to travel the world and indulge her hobby in archaeology. These two I connected to Mr. Troy, them being hired to both accompany him to the “underworld” private auction where a well-preserved 2000 year old Chinese urn containing the ashes of a X’an Dynasty sorcerer. I spent a few minutes running this auction with the girls in attendance, and got to introduce a rival of sorts for Mr. Troy, “Hong Lo,” a restaurateur and reputed occultist.

One of the male characters was a young Chinese martial artist working in Hong Lo’s restaurant, which incidentally was catering Troy’s party. So that’s how I got Ben’s guy at the party.

Andy ran a 70 year old investment expert named Michael who had taken a bath in the 1893 market crash, and since then has lived frugally off of some minor, safe investments. During some rougher patches he learned to handle himself brawling for survival or profit. I got him invited to the NYE party of Troy’s because he knew Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, heir to the Whitney fortune, business-man, wanna be Bohemian, and invitee to the party and he asked Michael to come along with him and his free-spirit pals.

The Times Square penthouse party was within view of the madness of Times Square on NYE, and within a stone’s throw of the ball-dropping. The party had a Chinese theme, and the female characters, the antique expert and the archeology-loving dilettante, stayed near the displayed ancient urn and acted as both custodians for it and information dispensers. As a band played and the large, eclectic crowd (sort of reflected in the character make up; Chinese food service people, business people, academics, entertainment folk, Bohemians, dilettantes, etc) in the party danced, ate, drank (those wacky Bohemians hissing like vipers as they smoked reefer by the fireplace) and had a good time.

Not long after the time Hong Lo showed up uninvited and unannounced ( still a bit miffed that Troy had outbid him on the private auction of the urn), and with some of his Chinese thugs acting as servers, he had secretly arranged for the urn to be covented in the chaos of the midnight countdown. A gun was pulled, the urn was grabbed for, and a nice pulp action sequence began as the martial artist intervened, and even the girl characters threw some Indy Jones punches during the ensuing brawl. It was actually a pretty enjoyable action scene, and proving that CoC is pretty good for this kind of thing.

Eventually Hong Lo whipped out a special magic whistle that could summon Byakhee, and as he blew it an loud, eerie Byakhee cry brought forth one of the creatures from the air of the wintery New York evening sky. As drunken party goers screamed and ducked in fear, the Byakhee rages around the room, and a couple of the characters engaged Hong Lo (Andy’s old dude going cane-to-cane combat when Hong Lo revealed his sword cane).

First sanity loss of the game, with Terry’s dilettante taking the worst san hit for 5 whopping points. She went catatonic for a couple rounds, as Big Ben’s kung-fu cook took it to the Byakhee’s grill. His well placed kicks hurt the creature pretty bad (I threw one of the Mythos’ few harm able creatures at them for this first game), and one of Mr. Troy’s armed assistants shot it down.

So 1927 passed by with a bang, and a successful session was in the bag. I was really happy with it. In past years my D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested something like Cthulhu, but they would soon be requesting it over D&D after they saw how fun it was. I think my current group could well feel the same. I’m really looking forward to more of this!

Arkham Horror begats Call of Cthulhu

Being down three players last night (Dan Dan the Power Game Man is overseas for awhile, Little Ben has to take a month or two off suddenly, and Big Ben had a cold), we decided to finally play Paul’s copy of Arkham Horror he got for Xmas instead of my Runequest session.. In all honesty, I’m not feeling Runequest like I thought I would. I love the setting, but the super crunch of the combat rules really killed my buzz. I’m going to go back to the drawing board on that for awhile. Like I said a thousand times on this blog, my pet peeve in GMing it to feel like its work. I don’t wanna work during a game. I want to have a couple of beers and paint a picture. I’m all heart and passion at the center, not the crunchy shell. I actually was willing to carry on without using the mind-numbing, high maintenance Strike Rank, but with a couple of the guys being heavily for using it BTB, I just wanted to step back for a bit and take another look before we spent another session trying to adjudicate a battle with the characters and a couple of weapon snakes.

So we finally play AH (the latest version), and it seemed pretty cool. As the only real Lovecraft aficionado in the group, I had to hold back and not bore everybody with the back story of every side street on the Arkham map and all the monsters and books and such. What was weird was they, the Cthulhu novices, seemed to enjoy it a bit more than me. In all honesty, I like a board game to be a little simpler, and to be able to be played inside of three hours with 4 people or less. I’m actually surprised that we finished by 11:30, but I think we fudged a couple of things to be able to get to the battle with the endgame god (in this case it was Yig the serpent god, and we beat him with only one character dying).

We’ll have a better handle on it next time so it will go quicker, but one really good thing came out of this: we got the Lovecraft bug, and I’ll be running some Call of Cthulhu for my next session! Next week at Big Ben’s D&D I’m thinking of taking up a half hour or so for some CoC chargen so we can do less of that when I get the Cthulhu session underway.

Usually this would be a good time to get that weekly gaming in, but some of us are having our schedules become busier on weeknights than usual. Andy is getting involved in some kind of local politics, Terry is going to start bartending at her club a night or two during the week, and in addition to my usual once weekly music practice I want to start learning some new instruments – so all of a sudden we find ourselves dashing about trying to work it out for weekly gaming now. Once or twice a year we have a longer weekend session, and I suggested we try to make that once a month or so to make up for some lost weeknight sessions, so in the long run I think it will be all good and the group will carry on with standard operations bullshit for the foreseeable future.

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.

Obligatory 5th Edition post

My experience with an D&D beyond 1st edition could fit into a thimble. In the early 90’s one of my players wanted to run D&D, so she went out and bought the 2nd edition stuff. She ran a few games, but I don’t really recall the major differences in systems.

One of the main reasons I stuck with 1st edition all through the 90’s was probably because most of my players tended to have very little gaming experience until they came to my games. “I always wanted to play but never go the chance” people. I of course was the “seasoned veteran,” and was able to lead these gentle lambs through many a campaign with 1st edtion. Hell, they didn’t care. That was a time of wide-eyed wonder for my players, it seemed. And I often had a lot of females in games then (at one point in the mid-90’s outnumbering the guys at many sessions), and in my games they tended to lean heavily towards role-play (especially shopping trips, which in D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions was always great for developing those “winging it” DM muscles), so task resolution was not the main source of fun during those times. We’d have these amazing several hour session with minimal combat or action.

From around 2000-2008 I was not gaming, and not even really keeping up on what was going on with D&D. My stuff was all in boxes in a garage, and my internet interests were more about comic books, music, and movies.

Then out of nowhere *BAM* I’m running games for a regular group, reading about D&D and other games constantly online, and started this friggin’ blog. Gaming and D&D was all up in my grill. Still, I’m not exactly Grognardia James in terms of my knowledge of the history of gaming, and what is going on in the OSR. Obviously I’m a much better talker than a listener. Powergame Dan sometimes marvels at what I know that is going on in gaming and the OSR, but really it’s reading Grognardia and a couple of other select forums that gives me any particular knowledge on what is going on. And that knowledge is not exactly deep even after three years.

And in all honesty, looking at online stuff about gaming is starting to lose it’s luster. “G whiz” factor is gone. It might be different in my case if I was back in semi-retirement gaming-wise. I’d look online and do a shitload of “remember when.” But with a full and regular group going, I’m trying to enjoy that more. In some ways because I’ve slowly realized that it is a fairly rare and precious thing.

As for 5th edition, well, it’s not very relevant to me. I don’t think D&D is relevant at all any more. You don’t see it getting played by characters in films or TV shows like you sometimes did in the 80’s and 90’s. You never hear it getting joked about. Even the Ubergeeks on The Big Bang Theory don’t play it. In dorkdom these days, it seems pretty bottom of the barrel. If you watch Attack of The Show for a week you might hear a smarmy D&D reference, but even in venues like that it is rare.

So I don’t much care. I have a KOTOR campaign going, a Runequest campaign just started, a 1st edition setting to get back to, a player who is regularly running 1st edition games for us, and am itching to do some Call of Cthulhu before too long. I have plenty on my plate. So let me join the throngs of “happy wanderers” and toss my own “I wish them well” into the ring. That’s it, Mac, Smile and wish them well. But it’s ok if inside you just don’t give a rats ass.

Statement of Intent is Buzzkill

I hate Statement of Intent. It’s in the 2nd edition Runequest rules, and seeing it in a game I wanted to run was just depressing.

I guess I must have encountered it back in the day, but for sure did not carry it forward. From the late 80’s onward moving and attacking seemed to work out OK for my D&D (and Call of Cthulhu as well, Champions has its own excellent rules for when you move and attack) with me doing it all in Dex order. My players never complained. Ahh, the good old days.

My first modern experience with SOI was when Big Ben was trying it for his Evils D&D game. I don’t think it worked out so good. For one thing, it’s a time waster; yet another thing that makes you have to go around the table, person to person, and have them tell you what they are going to do that round. Then you have to go around again for everybody to actually move, attack, etc. But why it sucked in this particular case was that at least half the players forgot right away it was about saying your intent, and they would grab their miniature and move it. I did this too at least once. It just added to the time it took for task resolution, and caused confusion. Yeah, that’s all a game needs, more of that shit.

Getting rid of it in Runequest combat was the first thinh I wanted to do. It’s a friggin’ buzzkill to me. I don’t want to spend more time on combat. In RQ it takes long enough as it is. Luckily, the combat in the first session was restricted to fairly tight Humakt combat circles, so it did not matter very much. But for next game I gotta get it figured out.

I’m thinking individual initiative rolls might be in order for this. That way, each combat can be different, characters who went last could maybe go first next time, and there will be less bitching from the guy who goes first; in this case Andy, who when he has a fast character always wants to wait and see what everybody else is doing, requiring allowing him to change the order he goes in. With initiative rolled for each combat encounter, this can be eliminated. You just go when you are set to go. If you get the chance to act early in the combat, you gotta STFU and take it and hope next time you’ll get to be last and see what the hell everybody else is up to.

When we started the Knights of the Old Republic game, I chaffed at the thought of using it’s initiative rules. But you know what? I got to like them. It was clean, fairly easy, and it changed often. I might make me ditch Dex order entirely in my AD&D games. Anything that gets me the hell away from Statement of Intent. Faaaar away.

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!

Runequest – how much flavor do you force on it?

One of the most challenging things about running classic Runequest, beyond the mechanics of full character creation and combat crunch, is setting the mood. Hell, originally I wasn’t even sure a proper mood could be set.

A little over 30 years ago I was a kid at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, playing in whatever game one of the older pricks decided they wanted to run (and that owner Gary Switzer wanted to play). That meant very little D&D, and lots of things like Bushido, Traveller, and Runequest. There were always a couple of Runequest campaigns going on.

Outside of the focus on god worship and common spell use (I do remember thinking that everybody pretty much ran clerics in RQ), I don’t remember much of what I learned of the secrets of Glorantha at that time. The older guys seemed to know the world and it’s conflicts very well, and it makes sense that Gary would because as a store owner he could read all the material in the form of books and fanzines that filtered through. This and that battle; this and that war; this and that location. Stuff on that classic setting that you have to search through a thousand sources to get bits and pieces of. And it’s worse now, because there is so much more that has been added to the milieu over the decades.

With limited time on my hands, I put in much more research in the Dragons Pass setting (where I would ultimately start the first game; that was another hard decision – Prax or DP?) than studying up the rulesbook. In all honesty, I forgot how much there was too the crunch. I ran a lot of Call of Cthulhu in the 90’s, but I forgot that is a fairly retarded down version of those RQ rules. Basic Role Playing at its most basic.

But whatever. In games I’m a “flavor man.” A good solid foundation in your setting and the player’s surroundings is crucial for my style of character development. So, with the under-populated classic Runequest forums being of little help, I thrashed about for Dragons Pass location info, at least enough to hang my hat on and add my own items to it to make it my own. I got the Kerofinela Gazette, but that describes things to a certain degree in terms of at least several years after the time period I am using. So I have to play fast and loose with that info. Just use what I need to describe a location. And of course Cults of Prax is big help, but that describes the gods in terms more of the natives of that area.

So into it I go with only shards of info and my own winging skills, on the raggedy edge of trying to express a world I did not create with scattered and sketchy info.

I did not want to hit these guys over the head with too much data. A few days before the game I created a several page primer on the setting. Basically, getting across that it is a Bronze Age version of a marriage between ancient Scotland and ancient Norway. That city civilization is a very new thing, and that even the haughtiest noble is not far removed from barbarian herd culture. I gave the basics of how the Lunar Empire has spent a generation chaining Dragons Pass because they need it as a highway to the holy land, and how they are suppressing the god Orlanth. That all the characters, townsfolk or barbarian, are of the kingdom of Sartar, and how it is a conquered kingdom, but has not been so for long.

As far as the official history of the era, I hope I am not too far off with all this. So much is assumption.

To get away from the D&D reasons for adventure, I explained that this particular period (1615…two years after Starbrows famous Sartar rebellion) was a time of youngsters of both sexes hitting the bricks in search of combat and mysteries for a variety of reason that created a perfect storm: a feeling that major wars are on the horizon, that the gods and their before-time adventures and dungeon crawls are to be emulated, that success in all endeavors is achieved by personal fitness and growth, and a sort of hipster faddishness (“everybody’s doing it, mom” sort of thing). That last reason alone seems to makes sense to me as to why teenagers who can’t use a weapon for shit would set out into a world where one lucky sword hit could take an arm off you, and probably will no sweat.

As you might know I like to have music going during my sessions, although in the long run I’m not sure how the group on a whole feels about it. But in all honesty I don’t really give a rats ass about that. The “right” music going during a game is important for MY mood, and I’m running the game so my mood matters most. But when you run your games somewhere were somebody else is the host, there can be some ackward moments. There was a point not too long ago when our kind host seemed to think Butthole Surfers was good for D&D. And when I emailed the group saying to bring any ancient Celt/Tribal music for our first Runequest session, the first thing said to me when I showed up was “we decided David Byrne was ancient enough for Runequest”. Oooo-kay. "We." Right. But again, MY mood, so before long I had some drums and pipes going, as well as some Vasen (Swedish super-folk group I met last year at a music camp). Set the mood for me.

As for the combat, I think it was a good “working out the kinks” session. It did take awhile. You can tell when a combat it taking too long – I usually judge it by the look on Terry’s face. If it is kind of blank, half smiling, with the eyes half shut zombified sort of thing, then things are getting old. But I think it will go quicker next time, especially when people have better chances of hitting and are a little less challenged by everything. But just the fact that they are young dumbshits with no training; punks cracking wise and full of piss and vinegar, seems flavorful to me. I hope they see that too.

And I see things already for the characters that might evolve naturally for maximum flavor, things I realized later on after the session. Big Ben’s guy seems to favor the bow, and with archery being invented by the sun god Yelm he might want to go in the direction of that cult. Might go good with his characters apparent love for singing. Andy’s guy has a Power and INT of 17, and he happens to be from the city of Jonstown which has the biggest library in all of Sartar. That might make Jonstown a “college town,” and that would go good with his apparent scholarly leanings. Terry as a female fighter and devotee to Orlanth’s daughter, Vinga, will surely lead her to some interesting things. And Paul’s midget barbarian, well, nuff said there. Character was born with flavor (and “Shorty” uses a long spear, which is pretty amusing).

In the long run, the guys seemed to have fun doing something new. But it was very much a learning experience for us all. I’m sure the second session will go much smoother. If not, well, Terry was hoping we were doing a Call of Cthulhu campaign instead of this…




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasen