What I cherish most about these two friendships is I got the two of them back into TTRPG's. I wrote about getting a face to face game going like 11 years ago when I started this blog. It was this 7 hour long session which got my illustrating friend to active in engaging the industry to sell his illustrations. And he has been doing well. The other friend dragged me to Gencon 2017 to help him with his board game. He couldn't believe I was still playing rpg's. I hadn't been. Just rediscovered them. I got him into my online Basic DnD game which renewed his interest. He went on to run a Gamma World 1E campaign which, while short lived at 20 or so sessions, it was epic Gamma World. A setting guide has come of it and I will be working on getting it closer to publication with him this coming week.
Oh yes, I will be able to deliver another slip case to an AMC Hut with Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game and adventures inside. A gift for the Croo of volunteers which run the huts each summer. This will be the second one (the first being delivered to Madison Springs Hut) and I will be delivering it to the Zealand Falls Hut. This hut is open year round so will be accessible this time of the year instead of being closed up. Hopefully I won't have to do much post-holing along the trail. Not sure what the snow conditions are like in New Hampshire right now.Contact Information:
Wednesday, December 6
Gaming & Garbage
Monday, October 23
Even Heroes Bleed is Back!
The “Even Heroes Bleed” (EHB for those legions of fans) campaign has been revived, with the possibility of new heroes!
Continuing my road trip through old school games, EHB uses the BoHSE (Blood of Heroes Special Edition) rules, which is a 2000 retroclone of DC Heroes 3rd Edition from the now defunct Mayfair Games.
It has come to be my super hero game of choice. It does so much which modern claim to offer as new, such as narrative control, meta-currency, rules for social interaction and simple resolution mechanics. I have used it for over 2 years in regular play. Until schedules changed, and it stopped.... May, June I think.
But now it has resumed with a lead-off solo session with the indomitable Olympian. This adventure falls right after the conclusion of “The Sinister Secrets of Starhold”, and featured Olympian turning his attention to the continued attacks by magically -embued EE’s running riot in Capitol City. Not being magically inclined, the Kordarian Paragon of Power stopped at the last scene of a serious magical attack; the Hunniford Library. There is a librarian knowledgeable in the occult at the library. He hopes to get answers which will help him track down these threats.
But first he checks in on Donna Hannah, the late Dr Avery’s granddaughter, and now a living elemental of air. She is no longer staying at the mansion, preferring to lead a “normal” life back at CCSU. Everything being all good on the home front, the librarian and super hero concoct a means to track the “Lance of Unending Pain”, the artifact stolen by Black Paladin. But it is going to take a bag of cats....
I love the fully realized campaign games I have been playing since returning to ttrpgs. Without one the blog and podcast seem relatively pointless. Because the general purpose of this blog is to chronicle my journeys into fully realized campaign games I never managed as a kid. Counting them off they are pulp sword & sorcery, age of sail, black powder Cthulhu, B/X D&D, Traveller/Space Opera, and now supers.
The line up appears to be the Olympian, Mettle, and Pirlvag. Mr. Zoozoo and Bug have scheduling conflicts, and a new player in Vietnam is hungry to join in. The dooms which stalk the peace of Capitol City is about to go to 11!
Wednesday, October 4
Delta Green First Time
It happens ever so often, I throw out a willingness to run something specific for a one-shot and a few people respond and it gets off the ground for one, two, or three sessions as the particular plot is played out. Most of the times nothing happens. Time doesn't work or no interest in the game proposed. This time I tried something a wincey different, I offered to run whatever a small group of players wanted to to try out. This got three to four people wanting to play Delta Green. Perfect!
Delta Green is modern conspiracy horror. Federal Agents leading a double life as secret commandos on the front lines of supernatural conflict. Built on the venerable BRP game system from Chaosium, the game puts a focus on sanity damage and damage to relationship "Bonds". Otherwise it is straight-up monster hunting in the Cthulhu Mythos.
The group consisted of some gents from Kansas and one from the UK. I used the scenario from the quick-start rules "Last Things Last" for the evenings action. I opened the adventure at Baughman's apartment. The DG agents (two of them) were sweeping the late Claud Baughman's apartment for any Cthulhu contraband the former "Friendly" may have hidden or retained in his domicile. The conspiracy must be concealed! The other two players, as regular uninitiated civilians, show up at Baughman's for their own reasons and an awkward conversation begins.
This is a big part of the game, and really any session of Delta Green, coming up with valid, palatable reasons disparate individuals would work together on strange, deadly shit, let alone trust each other. We spent some time going around on this until we were all satisfied the opening made "sense". After that the game went pretty straight forward, they followed the breadcrumbs, uncovered contraband, confronted by new adversaries looking for something at the second site location, and uncovered the true horror that waited for them.
With bodies being burned and contraband secured the session wrapped up with enough material still open to play another session. Or at least we agreed to play another session. Talk about a possible continuation of a campaign was floated but none of us saw the time nor availability, so talk of a campaign was tabled, for now.
The second session opened right where we last left off. We discussed whether players should get a skill check roll for chance of improvement to skills used last session. We decided not enough time had passed to warrant experience checks. The PCs also discussed their next move, which was nothing more than returning to Capitol City to their Handler and turning over the goods. The trip was immediately interrupted by more villains trying to ram them off the road. They failed Drive rolls so their 1995 Crown Victoria fishtailed into the guard rail coming to the stop. Their attackers demanded some of the contraband from the footlocker they took from Baughman's cabin. The PCs declined. This prompted the villains, one of them at least, to open up with a military-grade assault rifle and try and kill the lot of them. After much ammo was expended the thug with the machine gun was cut down and the Crown Vic was noticeably shot up. The women in the SUV, the last remaining villain, sped off in her suburban while the PCs debated whether to scope up the body in the road and speed after her, or just speed after her. They chose the latter. They decided there was nothing to tie them to the dead guy in the road (they are rural West Virginia at this point) so running down the last living mystery assailant was the best play.
This second car chase goes better for the PCs, They come out on top and the woman is critically wounded (they blew her foot off with a shotgun). She just would not come quietly and tried to shoot her way out of her predicament. And cast magic! She had spoken some strange words, spells it appears. Had made one of the agents see nightmarish hallucinations and one of the civilians to shoot their handgun at an agent. As the session wound down we roleplayed the aftermath. The cops, their Federal Handler, the actual SAIC of the FBI offices in Capitol City, was brought in and we had a chance to go over consequences and next actions. I truly enjoyed playing their handler as they hashed out the events at a roadside stop under cover around some wet picnic tables in a morning drizzle. Smokes were smoked, and things supernatural hashed out. We roleplayed the civilians being introduced to the conspiracy and joining the "cause". At least long enough to find out what their prisoner/detainee wanted out of Baughman's stuff and what she intended to do with it.
All heady stuff, and a successful short-run adventure arc. What did I think? Well, I am well versed in the BRP game system and its many custom games using it, so as the Game Master I didn't have to fuss over rules much. I could spend time on maintaining fidelity with genre being played. Which is good because their is a lot to consider and hand-waving all these plot complications away is very unsatisfying way to play Delta Green. But once the PCs have settled into a good (enough) reason to get in a car with each other, armed with guns, and go out to a cabin in the woods.... well, the session can go for another couple of hours at least without bringing up another set of complications which has to be dealt with in the same manner. I had the usual tension of making sure I shut up often and force the PCs to talk to each other, not me. The more I could keep the conversation on their side of the table with me out of it was an intentional action. Really in a game set in "real-life" settings their is less as a Game Master you have to describe, feed into the Theater of the Mind engine environmentally-wise. Sights, sounds, smells, we all no what a wet highway and damp woods smell like. Which is a plus, because the action is not so much set-piece, site location exploration. It is interacting with people and getting away with what you are trying to do without getting arrested and trashing the character's life.
So I find all modern games, set in contemporary earth must have strong, interesting NPCs to interact with. Feats and gunfights are cool. But when the players start talking in character with each other, arguing really, the game is playing well. As the GM I found my job was to be mindful of when I should interject and prod some forward action and when best to stay out of it and let the players talk their way into their next actions. Horror is tough. The intro adventure provided in the quick-start rules offers a good set up for players to get right into the complications the game sets up for the PCs. The end horror element is good. It's reveal was built up well and came at the right time in the action. I would have no problem recommending Delta Green for those wanting to play contemporary horror roleplaying!
Sunday, December 25
Game Master Advice I Never See
Surprisingly, to me, given the sheer amount of threads started by folks on this topic, I never see much reference to the source material of the genre being suggested as something essential. I mean being steeped in the genre being run. Not just a cursory read of a few books or watching a couple of movies. I mean a deep dive as if one were taking a course study in college.
To be an effective, to be a "good", "great" Dungeon Master, Game Master, Keeper, Star Master and what not, you need to be extremely versed in the genre being run. If you are planning on running a supers game you should be reading comic books all the time. If you have never read comic books much you should go back in time and work your way back up to the present. The grand sweep of the comic tradition should be a topic you can nimbly navigate, process and use at the table. Many folks today seem to be asking how to run a cyberpunk game. Much product is being suggested as the platform of use, but rarely is their an insistence on the asking individual to read a fuck-ton of cyberpunk novels. I would even go so far as recommending extensive reading of the latest technology publications available to the laymen drafting out the latest developments in technology. Climate crisis, political efforts of social constructs, and corporate bloat, basically a master of current events with a bedrock knowledge of cyberpunk literature since William Gibson jump-started the genre. The catalogue of horror literature is incredibly vast. How many Keepers are knowledgeable of Mary Shelly's masterpiece, all of Lovecraft's work into your King and Barker? The horror Game Master also has the task of diving into the incredibly vast library of horror films.
Why? Why would one need to become a scholar of a particular genre to be a good Game Master? It is the underpinning, scaffold, colossal structure supporting every decision the game's referee will make at the table. Creating your mind into a rolodex of genre tropes transcends mechanics and system
The benefits of being a studied master of the genre blow all other considerations being debated on the subject away. Random encounter tables write themselves, adventure ideas come unbidden, thorny knots of character interaction become organic growth under good sun and good soil.
Friday, December 16
End of the Year Round-Up
2022 is rapidly coming to a close and everything gaming is... good. I was real worried my DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes game was coming to an end because due to scheduling conflicts with work, but the players were actually happy with the change. Whew! I mean, nothing to get bitter over if it didn't. The two, two-and-a-half year mark seems to be about the time campaigns in the past have ended, and its always been the same reason. One of the players schedule changes. I take a bit of happiness in the fact when someone has to bow out the rest of the group decides to call the game. The relations and dynamics they all had free-reign to foster became paramount. So when that dynamic ends because someone has to shift their time commitments they (the group) says it has got to end. Validates my feeling everyone at the table played their A-game, and gave each and everyone of us helped create a truly remarkable game experience. I like the stance no game is better than anything less then a great game.
But Even Heroes Bleed (name of the campaign) will continue into 2023. New player joined the group as well. An Artic Indian Spirit protecting the world from the dark side of the pantheon he is part of. Mr. Zozo, a demon paying rent in a human's body, just got a playmate. The Olympian and Mettle are still standing so a good solid group of 4 supers. Feels about right size-wise. I think we may even be able to bring plot threads to a conclusion. There has been a metric-ton of interesting activity in Capitol City, and while super villains have been taken down, taken out, and incarcerated, there are still prime movers out there who have yet to be discovered and violently prosecuted with extreme prejudice. Another development in the campaign has been the acquisition of a group headquarters outside of Mettle's loft apartment in Mint Ridge. With their involvement in the affairs of the late Dr. Avery and his granddaughter the mystic-soaked Avery Mansion has opened its doors to the group. Organic development of classic super hero tropes is what I live for in this campaign!
Deluxe USR Sword and Sorcery got out. Finally. Well, two books out of three at least. Not to worry though, the setting book is well in hand and should be released in the first quarter of 2023. Then I can concentrate on the hard part of roleplaying; coming up with quality adventures which are not a pile of derivative slime. I don't know what these adventures will be, what they will look like, but the daydream portion of creative thought is my favorite part of design and publication.
My once a month dive into FGU's Space Opera is progressing better than I could have hoped. Even though the three of us who make this game go only meet once a month for a couple of hours the session always feels fresh and full of potential. I attribute this to great players playing great characters, and blasters. Blasters are cool. I'm finding the biggest challenge running a sci-fi game is coming up with the BIG idea. The hall mark of all the good science fiction I've read over the years has been that BIG idea, that truly galaxy-sized blob of creative ideas which make you go wow this was a good read. Of course this big idea needs to maintain fidelity with the campaign universe we have been building through play, but there in lies the art, know?
Looks like I am going to get a chance to be a player in a DC Heroes game too. Some time on the other side of the screen is going to feel good. Every chance I've had to run my favorite NPC in the current supers game puts me in touch with the shit I really love about supers. Drama combined with kick ass brawls and destruction on a large scale. Peanut butter and jelly I tell you.
What do I want to see in 2023? A return to a few, solid game conventions. Ghengis Con in Denver being held this February probably won't happen, but I think I can get time off for North Texas. My other convention mission is to go to the Chaosium con. Fingers crossed right now for that gig. And great games of course. I'm continually trying to challenge myself to do "better" as a referee, self-evaluate, and dive deeper into the art. Yeah, ttrpg's are just a wee bit more than just a game for me. There is real valid art under the hood and I have been happily trying to rip out the plugs, oil, and engine block of the beast for nigh on ten years now. So I am completely jazzed about experiencing the fruits of the labor which will occur!
Good gaming to you all, and I'll see you on the other side!
Sunday, September 4
Capitol City Crime Journal - The Red Report
The Even Heroes Bleed supers campaign continues to be a new, dynamic experience for me. Once again I turned over the Game Master reins to Mettle's player Mike to run an adventure of his own devising. When I get a chance to play instead of run I use my favorite vigilante-NPC of the game, Ultra-Rosa. A gun-toting, martial arts master and gadgeteer wizard with red body armor, an array of firearms and a specially modified red 2018 Chrysler 300. Paid off. A female version of the Punisher basically.
Today she got to team up with our newest PC hero, the Olympian. He is a flying brick from another world, a human enhanced alien. Straight up Superman vibe except he is way cooler than the Man of Steel, just saying.
We, as a group, took this detour because the PC hero Mr. Zozo couldn't make it. In a couple of weeks I can't play, so then we are looking at the Olympian and Mr. Zozo teaming up. Making me pay attention to the campaign calendar. With all these side quests going on where everything begins to occur has meaning. Since old-school gaming encourages emergent play the game group is getting a wider world to play in and everyone at the table (including the two co-GMs here) do not know where this all leads and what dramatic outcomes await. My strategy is now no matter who can make the game session we have episodes/issues which can always be played.
To keep the story threads in order I've broken the run so far into several "comic book" series. The main comic line is Even Heroes Bleed. All other story lines have to acknowledge this story line as the main story of the campaign. Every PC hero in the game has had to walk the stage in this blockbuster line. Bug, Mettle, Red Runner, Ultra-Rosa, Olympian, Mr. Zozo.
Mike took us on the campaigns first side quest with the Capitol Point Casino Adventures. These adventures (and today's session) are going to fall under the Capitol City Crime Journal: The Red Report. We have had 10 issues now of this vehicle for Ultra-Rosa's exploits when she is being run by me as a player. The Olympian has had a single issue. This was the episode where I ran just him in an adventure against some visiting galactic bounty hunters.
Now, since I cannot make next session we are going to try and continue the adventure we started today (investigating the New Revelations Church and a string of murders) in Mr. Zozo's own comic book, Road to Redemption, featuring the Macabre Mr. Zozo. Pretty nifty. The game is getting really dynamic and all the PCs feel their efforts make a notable difference in the campaign world. The only thing the game suffers (and this is common in all ttrpgs) is how long it takes to play involved adventures. There are so many potentials and intriguing avenues for rich drama, we will never see them all played out. Ah, the frailty of an rpg world. Only so much of the game world gets told, only so many tales will be spun before life changes our real destinies. And we don't know yet what those will be!
Wednesday, August 31
How to Go Meta on your Supers City-Wide Drug War
Most Superhero campaign cities are going to have their various gangs, organized crime families, and drug lords. And they all via for control of everything shady; gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, murder, etc. And the heroes come up with all sorts of ways to put these mangy dogs down. But how effective are the PCs efforts, really? I'm not referring to tactics, what the PCs actually do, but what happens as a result of the PCs smashing up what was otherwise a violent, deranged, antisocial way of making a living.
Most of the time it looks like this; so-and-so gang is fighting with so-and-so criminal family over the lucrative drug trade. The PCs arrive and smash both organizations beyond recognition. Yeah, the neighborhood is saved! And there is no major dealing, death and extortion in the bad part of town for a time. Until it is time to reconnect the PCs with the criminal underground and the GM provides drug-dealing city criminals to replace the ones previously vanquished.
Another common tactic of PCs with an ambivalent attitude towards drug use is to play for a reduced body count out on the streets. People are able to purchase what they want in relative safety and the love gang reaps in a Supers game is to beat hell out of the entire criminal underworld until you are down to just one player. In this scenario the PCs are trading leaving one gang in tact while all others are obliterated in exchange for being the "official" drug dealer of the city.
But while the PCs eyes are off the local drug war ball these numerous urban blights, these self-spawning criminal gangs, are re-filling in the dark cracks and trying to get back in the business.
I wanted to come up with a mini-game to meta-game the overall drug war between the gangs of Capitol City to determine which one is coming on top, on the rise, and posing the greatest threat to the PCs.
My eyes fell on my copy of the satiric card game Grass. It is a point-scoring game with protection cards and different types of "hazard" cards. The dealer who makes $250,000 first wins. So that is how you get multiple rounds of play as a hand has an opening and a close followed by scoring. Rinse and repeat. So the thematic coloring melded perfect for the exercise.
I played four hands to represent 4 weeks of drug trafficking between 4 different "players". Each player was one of the primary gangs in the city. The cards have all sorts of thematic hazard cards so these made nice, punchy random events which could be noted down. Not very exciting. I have to say, I will not do it again. But I did get notes for a nice detailed timeline of events and relative cash asset values for each gang which I can use as needed. These stupid little things create elements which help make a living game world, but it is still a labor of love than something mind-blowingly cool.Saturday, July 16
The Winding Waterslide of RPG Terms
The new buzz word for running a ttrpg correctly is the “waterslide”. This is used in contrast to both railroad and the sandbox style of play. The waterslide “slides” in between these two supposed modes of play. I say supposed because when I cracked opened my Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons for the first time when I was eleven, I knew what the fuck Tom was talking about, explaining to me about this new form of play. It was more like being introduced to a mode of play I had been looking for but didn’t exist until DnD. There are no terms like the above being used in Moldvay’s description of the ttrpg concept.
“‘Winning’ and ‘Losing’, things important to most games do not
apply to D&D games! The DM and the players do not play against each other,
even though the DM often plays the role of various monsters which threaten the
player characters. The DM must not take sides. He or she is a guide and a
referee, the person who keeps the action flowing and creates exciting
adventure. Player characters have fun by overcoming fantastic obstacles and
winning treasure, but this does not end the game. Nor is the game ‘lost’ when
an unlucky player’s character dies, since the player may simply ‘roll up’ a new
character and continue playing. A good D&D campaign is similar to the
creation of a fantasy novel, written by the DM and the players.” Tom Moldvay,
p. B4, Basic Rules.
Like much of human communication, everything gets lost in
translation. Preconceived expectations or a prepared agenda is how we approach
new things. This approach is a dumpster fire when applied in the prosecution of
creative endeavors. And make no mistake, ttrpgs are a creative endeavor. It
follows the current of art and artistic process which mere “games” do not. And
people are generally bad at being creative due to fear of the unknown and a
required intimacy. Two things ttrpgs generate in abundance: mystery and
intimacy. Two things people in general have a hard time with. I mean anything
in life we encounter which doesn’t come with a guidebook, except those among
use correctly wired not to pause and assess, freaks us out. Guard rails,
boundaries, and a reluctance to participate are common reactions as well. I’m a fierce creative because I lack fully
developed executive functions. My brain never gets enough satisfaction from
goals achieved with a need for greater and greater emotional hits. I lack an
appreciation of consequence because I’m not living in the future like normal
people. Reckless, I am reckless to a dangerous degree.
The one good thing being a reckless, impatient person
affords me is obsession and openness. When I don’t know where I’m going, I have
developed a “let it happen” psychic state. This is due to a lifetime of not
knowing where I’m going. I better see the current experience with less me and
more clear, present reality. A very good mental state to find when wants to use
the imagination and be creative. This is a long, round about way of saying I
can get over myself when involved in artistic pursuits. Less direct action and
more paying attention.
What this all means, to me, is not many people involved in
the hobby actually read the section on how to play the game. I’ll guess
dedicated players pretty much not at all and DM I’ll give it 30%. 3 out of 10
DMs read the section on how to play the game.
The reason most eschew such relevant information at the
outset of their gaming career is because they are not reading to learn how to
play the game but reading to find out what they are going to get out of playing
the game. “What do I get?” Well, you get nothing. Nothing any regular game
promises to give. Those who develop a fine taste and ability in ttrpgs
understood this deal at the outset. These games are not about what you get out
of them, they are insatiably demanding you give to it. An empty balloon which
will take all your effort and breath to inflate. And once it is full and takes
shape, you may not like it. It may blow up into a shape neither desired nor
expected. It may blow up in your face, a stinging rebuke against half-hearted
efforts.
There is no sandbox, there is no railroad, there is just a
tool to leverage your imagination, and for most involved in playing ttrpg’s
this is a no-go. The generic terms of the ttrpg deal are utterly beyond
comprehension for most. Therefore, you have many gamers looking for something
never promised by the game. So it gets made up.
My recommendation for those who want to get the most out their
ttrpg experience is to take an art class with a teacher who does not prioritize
technique over creativity but teaches creativity. The medium being just the
tool being used to act. Personal lessons taking from such an approach will be develop
your ttrpg ability more than anything else I can think of.
Monday, June 27
Wargamers roleplayed first.
Recognizing Wargames as patient zero in what would become tabletop rpg’s and go on to infect the brains of millions of nerds breeding ground is usually brought up in the context of demonstrating how DnD is shit for roleplay. Besides the open abyss of vapidness which overtakes me when this discussion occurs. Mostly because it is soft talk around the fact maybe you suck at the game and the person juuust can’t get their head around that. Besides all this, it is the clear miss of most to consider wargames as devoid of roleplay.
Wargames are historical simulations which get turned into
games because optimizing routine behavior is hard-wired into humans. The
historical simulation thrill of orchestrating sweeping military campaigns takes
back seat in concern of the win. Aside from the obvious competitive urge which
can get me to take my eye off of the wargame ball, which I call immersion. I
want to see what it would be like to command armies and experience the
decisions these commanders faced. If I have no connection to the historical
context of the game, I end up playing a complicated game of checkers, looking
to leverage all advantages in the system to score a “hit”. Even if I have a
keen interest in the historical action depicted, I easily drift into a competitive
mindset. I must beat the other person if I am to consider the game fulfilled. That
is why I always end up playing the game two times, I’m sure.
But I also can get into the groove. I can tell the stories in
my head of the sections and squadrons, what they did on that day. The flipped
over chit on the hex map is now the smoldering pile of defeated men and
machines. And it is happening on a certain day, a certain hour under certain weather
conditions. I feel the wind in my face as I lean against the hatch, scanning
the horizon for the enemy. Fuck, I can roleplay the shit out of my wargame. I didn’t
call it that because I had never heard of ttrpg’s when I first started playing
at Rommel in the Libyan desert.
And that is the wargame ball and it has been an immersive
roleplay experience ever since Tactics hit the table for a shit-ton of people
who enjoy this kind of thing. If you can ttrpg a wargame you can roleplay anything
which comes after marketing itself as a ttrpg. Wargames don’t lack the role
play experience; it just doesn't appeal to many people. It is mostly a solitary
experience, that is the key difference. Once you start thinking how to make the
experience a shared one with multiple people you will notice the nugget of gold
which is buried in a wargame can be extracted and applied to other imaginary experiences.
Not something better either, just different. I want to get my rocks off this
way as well as that way.
DnD didn’t introduce ttrpg’s to the world, wargamers had
already created this for themselves. Eventually someone participating would
(and did) make the connection simulated fantasy play would have broad appeal. And
they worked on it until they had what they were after. And they were right to
do so.
Monday, June 20
SciFi Setting Size Comparison
I finally got around to sizing up the Space Opera official universe and the Traveller official universe to see how they compared size-wise to each other. First I need to figure out how big a Traveller Subsector is and compare that to a Space Opera Star Sector, these being the basic unit of measurement for their respective maps of known space.
The Star Sector for SO is easy to figure out, a 200 ly x 200 ly x 200 ly cube of space (ly = light year). Here is a picture of the Star Sector map for The Confederate Systems Alliance.
There is no superimposed hex grid over the sector map, only grid locations indicated by letters and numbers coded on the top and side of the map. Much like a street map. For example, Doug's Groceries is in grid BB04. Everything is plotted on an x/y/z axis, with the Star Sector's Primary as the 0/0/0 point. The maps are created to scale, 1 cm = 10 ly. To find your straight-line distance between planetary systems you plug in your values into your formula for a right triangle. For example, Janus to Lilith is 128 ly apart.
Classic Traveller (CT) on the other hand, measures distances by the parsec. A parsec is 3.26 ly. The traditional Subsector map is laid out on a hex map 10 x 8. So 32.6 ly x 26.08 ly. There are no values for up or down, the map is a 2-dimensional representation. The distance between two planetary systems is determined by the number of hexes needed to cross to get there. Therefore if a system is three hexes away that system is 9.78 ly away.
It is clear already the SO universe is much larger than the CTU (Classic Traveller Universe). But how much bigger? CT does offer us another map scale, the Sector. A Sector is made up of 16 Subsectors arranged in a 4x4 grid. 130 ly x 104.32 ly. Here is the well-known map of the Third Imperium by Sector.
This map is arranged 8 Sectors x 16 Sectors, which, if using the Sector values established above yields 1,040 ly x 1,669.12 ly for known space in the CTU.
Here is a similar map for SO;
These are 200 ly x 200 ly cubes so sizing it up against the CTU should be a snap. 5.2 cubes x 8.34 cubes. It looks like to me the Space Opera universe is about 6 times the size of Traveller!
Saturday, May 21
Cartoon Olympics, Toon! solo-play
Trying to get a pickup game going this afternoon and someone suggested Toon! Needed to be played. Now I must confess I never played a game of Toon! When it came out in 1984. I did see it flopped out at my high school gaming table and I remember reading the rulebook. At 68 pages that was light for a rule book in the mid-eighties.
So, seeing as a game of something didn’t look like it would
get off the ground this afternoon, I decided to roll up a pair of Toon
characters. I used random rolls and got
Kasper Kangaroo and Clock-a-Doodle the Time-Sensitive Chicken. Kasper wears
boxing trunks, believes she is the best boxer of all time and is extremely possessive
of anything she has in her pouch. Clock-a-Doodle believes being on time is very
important and wears an alarm clock around his neck and a Christmas sweater for
clothes. I have thirty points to spread around a character’s skills and this is
a simple process.
Now thumbing through the actual rules on how to do things I
come across an introductory adventure, the Cartoon Olympics. Some solo
roleplaying in order, perhaps? Why not, it is only Toon, this cannot be too
complicated (side note, the slim rulebook comes with this adventure and four
additional. That is five adventures in one game book of a very short page
count. Sure, they are short, but that is in genre. So my hats off to Greg Kostikyan
for going the extra mile and giving the new player something to play with. More
rule books should include five adventures in their pages.
Let the Cartoon Olympics begin! Our first contest of the
games is a boxing match. How fortunate for Kasper. She packs one powerful kick
and is a natural in boxing gloves. Poor Clock-a-Doodle had a woefully
inadequate Fight skill but has a very high Dodge skill. This could turn into a
bit of a running circle. Obviously, the object of the first contest is to knock
the other player out.
The ref is an old blind mole, and she is responsible for
firing a starting gun at the beginning of each contest. But this is a boxing
match, you ring a bell. The adventure calls for the blind mole to randomly
shoot, accidentally, at one of the PCs when they pull the trigger of the
starting gun. Now this is a big, exaggerated, cumbersome revolver and the old thing
can barely raise the pistol. The ring side announcer yells for her to stop. You
are supposed to ring the bell for a boxing match, not shoot the gun. Blind
grandma mole can’t hear either, apparently. Mole shoots at Kasper who blows her
Dodge roll. The bullet ricochets off Kasper’s head (causing 3 points of damage)
and strikes the bell to start round 1.
Clock-a-Doodle takes advantage of the reeling Kasper and
tries to talk her into lying down. “You just took a bullet to the head. Why don’t
you just rest right down hear on the mat and get back your strength.” Clock-a-Doodle
clucks. If he can get Kasper to lie down, he can win the match due to knock out!
But Kasper is too cagey of a character.
“Wise cracking chicken, I’ll show you who needs a rest!”
Kasper winds up and throws a haymaker. Clock-a-Doodle easily dodges and the
bell rings concluding round one.
Round 2 begins with Kasper keeping a good eye on old blind
grandma mole and sure enough she lets loose an errant shot to begin the round.
Fortunately for the boxing cartoon animals her shot this time goes wildly
amiss, eventually finding its way back to mole, knocking her out, then striking
the bell to begin the round. Clock-a-Doodle yanks out from under his feathers a
cracked Bic pen and with a mouth of sloppy spit wads fires a volley at Kasper.
The chicken has no fighting ability so is going to have to win this fight at a
distance. Kasper Kangaroo leaps and bobs around the shots and lands on her feet
unscathed.
“Try and dodge this!” Kasper pulls out from her kangaroo
pouch a stick of dynamite, lights it, and lobs it at Clock-a-Doodle. She
figures it will be hard to dodge an area effect attack. She also neglects to
figure she will probably be in the blast radius to.
With a terrified squawk Clock-a-Doodle flaps his wings and
flies up above the ring and the lit stick of dynamite. “Not going to turn me
into a six-piece McNugget.”
Kasper screams, “Disqualified. Besides not being able to
wear boxing gloves, the damn chicken has left the ring. But her plea falls on
deaf ears, literally. Grandma Mole still snoozes away, knocked out from her own
gunshot. KABLAM. The dynamite goes off and Kasper takes another 3 points of
damage. She only has 2 more. As for Clock-a-Doodle, he has so far come through
the fight unscathed. This is starting to really work Kasper up. The round is
concluded and the two cartoon animals return to their corners.
Both these characters took enemies at character creation, Clock-a-Doodle
listed a fox and Kasper Kangaroo put down a crocodile. So these characters pop
up as their respective trainers in their corner’s. The each get some respective
fight advice which amounts to nothing more than oblique references and non-sequiturs.
As the third and final round begins both boxers plead with
grandma mole to hold off with the starting gun. Their plea goes unheeded, the
gun is fired, everyone ducks (including mole) the bell is struck and the round begins!
Clock-a-Doodle looks at his watch. “Ah, right on time. Make way for the nine o’clock
speedball express!” He pulls out a train whistle and gives a long blast. Grandma
Mole lifts up the ropes to the boxing ring and lets a steam locomotive come
barreling into the ring straight at Kasper Kangaroo.
This is when my Discord server starts binging and a couple
of players have gotten together and want me to run another session of Classic
Traveller in my Shattered Worlds campaign universe. Off to Vandars Dome, but
before I go, I just want to give a nod to this nifty game from way back when. What
is Toon good for? Besides a lighthearted break from any serious dark gaming you
may be doing, the elastic nature of the cartoon universe will keep you on your
toes improve-wise. Which is always a good skill to continue to develop in any
of your games.
Friday, April 15
Pulsar, the Perfect Super Hero Roleplaying Game is in Production
I'm chewing through the powers right now, I think I'm in the "M"s. Pulsar is my attempt to create a legal retro-clone of DC Heroes 3e.
Besides used copies for this out-of-print game and its first retro-clone, The Blood of Heroes, there is no legal way to get this great superhero system in print. What I am after is MEGS, Mayfair's Exponential Game System. The engine and internal logic which drives the game. Stripping out all intellectual property is not much of a chore. In fact, I have the rules, combat and gadgets complete. Middle of the Powers right now like I said (limitations, bonuses, etc. completed) so the next big chapter to write is Mysticism. Don't need to include any setting material, this is just a rulebook. There still are DC Heroes adventures you can find in the usual places, but you should pass on those. From my experience, super hero modules are fairly derivative an rarely stray far into the realm of unique or original. Game Masters are best creating their own stuff. Poach villains from anywhere. MEGS is simple enough to do conversions. I've wrote up one for Icons myself and posted it on the blog.
The art is not going to cost me anything either. I'm adding in my drawings from the actual MEGS campaign I've been running for over a year. When I mull over the previous session I like to capture a scene that sums up the action and doodle away while I daydream. So yeah, we got art!
Layout, the original rule books were built inefficiently. I believe this is due to all the optional rules available to add to the base rules. And these are littered throughout the book. Fortunately I am not taken with much, if any, optional rules the game has so that is the first clutter to go. The only other real change I am doing in layout is putting character creation after "The 8 Ideas". the rules, and combat. This is so the GM can go to the front of the book and be confident of finding the rule they are looking for, not go to several places piecing the answer together. I will do something simple, like run a black header all the way to the edge of the page, in the Powers section of Character Creation chapter. This gives you a black "section" you can see looking at the edge of the book. When making a character you are going to go to this section many times, this should speed up getting there. The way BoH is arranged I would end up in the combat chapter when I'm looking for player information and always ending up in the Powers section looking for Knockout, or Falling rules. So rules first, then character creation.
I'm wishy-washy on the Gamemaster section of the book. I write genre-centric rule books for my games and I write for people who know what they want and the campaign they want to run. Pulsar, the Perfect Super Hero RPG will be built the same way. I'm going to toss that section, except for Standard Awards. How to gain additional Power Points will need to be known so PCs can be, well, heroic.
I'll finish the book with a substantial appendix containing all the charts found in the game. Being able to scan Power Point Benchmarks and choose combat modifiers with this information side by side helps me during a fast and furious punch-up.
This will be interesting, seeing how it is received and all. It is a dusty old system, but it kicks all sorts of supers ass. We will see, we will see.
Thursday, March 3
Should I Start Live-Streaming Again?
I mean, recording the game session is my major priority. I think editing the audio and posting it later is a much more interesting product to consume, but some folks do enjoy seeing a game session being run in real-time.
I dusted off OSB and it is dead-simple to reconnect and fire up a live stream on my youtube channel. I've changed over my output folder for Bandicam to my hardrive so as not to lose my recording of the game session to "jiggly" cords and my dry run with sound check appears to make a audible live stream as well as audio recording.From past experience I know I can feel a bit rushed and get flustered trying to get everything set before the game goes live and this can put me off my focus for the job at hand, being the GM of the session, which at the end of the day is my ultimate priority.
The upside of live stream is it offers another means of engagement with the roleplaying community and this illusionary closeness and connection does give warm fuzzies. But not altogether necessary. Sifting through the pros and cons I end up at the same place; I like mucking around with broadcast software and creating content for online consumption, whether it gets much notice or not. So I'm going to start doing it again.
If you think this is a bad, bad idea drop me a comment and let me know. Otherwise, tune into the Vanishing Tower Press Youtube channel Sunday morning 7am MT/-7 GMT for the next session of Even Heroes Bleed!
Sunday, February 27
Why USR?
No secret, I love Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying by Scott Malthouse and Trollish Delver Games. I'm going to qualify this with a review of the system and why I use it.
Boiled down attribute list. A character's attributes are three in number. Why? Because you do not need any more than three to cover most any character's attribute numbers. There is Action, Wits and Ego. You could call them Strength, Smarts and Spirit. You could call them Physical Dexterity, Mental Dexterity and Personality Dexterity. You could call them Grit, Guts and Cool. You could use any number of descriptions any regular player would know and understand. I've played and run games with a shit-ton of attributes. Rolemaster, Champions, Space Opera, etc. And I find the long list of attributes in these games not needed. I get the point of having 8 to 15 attributes. It is to create "granularity", creating subtle differences in a character which can be exploited up or down to make the character "unique" and create a greater range of probability.
When I first looked at USR I was also exploring the semi-new hotness which was FATE and Savage Worlds. And when I held them up against USR I began to appreciate the thought which went into the die spread. Which is assigning one of the following three dice to the character's three attributes as mentioned above. The dice are a d6, d8, and d10. So a player has to make choices at the start of character creation; do you want the PC to be a stand out in physical action, or intelligent or very charismatic? The granularity sought in games with bucketloads of attributes is achieved by USR with varying the dice size. Rolling a d10 against a d6 has one degree of probability just like rolling a d8 against another d8 is another set of probabilities. Savage Worlds does the same thing with their character creation process, but USR does it in 3. A nice tight number you do not have to agonize overmuch.
Match this with a simple resolution mechanic able to create tension and uncertainty and you have a powerful little engine of could. USR has contested and non-contested "tests". These are bedrock resolution mechanics which have been with us since the creation of rpgs. You are usually, no matter what game you are playing, going against a set target number (really common) or rolling off against an antagonist (not as common). When working to repair a radio, for example, you use static target numbers. The not uncommon spread of easy, hard, impossible, etc. So USR has a Difficulty Table to set these metrics and combined with different die sizes you end up with increased (granular) probabilities. If you have a Wits of d6 and fixing the radio is a Difficulty of 6 then you have only 1 number you can roll to succeed. If your Wits are d10 you have a greater probability of success.
Contested rolls was a method of resolution I first encountered when I got into Chaosium's Stormbringer game, specifically combat. Percentile based so very easy to grasp. Two sword fighters go at it. One has an ability of 50% and the other has an ability of 80%. Clearly the character with the higher ability score is "better" and should win the contest. But one must roll. All the 50% has to do is score a good roll while the 80% rolls shit and you have tables turning. Tension, uncertainty, the meat-and-potatoes of rpgs.
Character customization and abilities. So most games have you with a character built on attributes and then they have "special" abilities, or skills, or aspects, traits, whatever the hell you want to call them. Scott calls them Specialisms and a player gets to create 3 for their new character. It is left up to the player to pick and create their character's Specialisms but they all have one thing in common. They provide a +2 to any resolution roll which the player can justify adding. Have a Specialism in hand-to-hand combat? When you are in a fight add a +2 to your die roll. So you have a skill, this Specialism which to leverage rolls in your favor, contested or otherwise. Since it is up to the player to come up with them no one is tied down to a set "skill list" or package of "feats" or some such. Smart to use the principle of threes here again. Just enough for unique variety while also maddening tight so a player really needs to lean into their character concept to arrive at satisfying results.
And this is all fast. Creating a character takes ten minutes, tops. Resolving actions and complex situations are quickly derived because their isn't an exhaustive list of abilities, skills and modifiers which need to be waded through before the value is set and die are rolled for result.
And this is a universal system. A generic role playing game engine. I have used it for Sword & Sorcery, Westerns, Cyberpunk, talking animals and 70's sex politics and sports.
But there is a price to be paid with generic systems. Setting and character types need to be described and created. Or not. But the system is best used in the hands of an experienced Game Master with a great love for the genre being played. Being a fan of a genre means you should have a good catalogue of tropes which to embellish the new, generic game world with the necessary (an interesting) window dressing. Player's can be complete nubes, the game system is far from complex. Experienced players should be able to jump all over the character creation choices which are wide-open to create anything they want.
So why USR? It does everything the best of role playing games do and it does it in a very small package. Which is free. Call it fat-free.
Sunday, January 16
Endgame's End Game
Putting down for posterity the events which concluded the racially motivated arsons adventure arc in my The Blood of Heroes (tBoH)supers roleplaying game. The portable drive got jostled during play and stopped saving data half way through. What I have is going up as an episode for the podcast, but much needs to be shared here.
Bug and Mettle drop back into the halls of the closed radio building and force their way into Endgame's control room where the mobster has the brainwashed Shamrock Bane film crew. It is all set up for round 2 against Troll and more special ops soldiers when Endgame takes their offer of de-escalation. The gangster can't believe it at first but eventually comes around to the fact the PCs mean what they say. Turn over Shamrock and they will walk away. Further, don't sell guns and terrorize people and the PCs would leave Endgame unmolested long term.
If Bug and Mettle can keep the other players in line as well Endgame is content to "play" along with the PCs. The value in de-escalation to overall profits is not lost on Endgame and he can't turn down the numbers. Of course he believes he can get another chance at killing the PCs down the road.Before the PCs return to the city with their traumatized friend a mysterious black helicopter appears over the radio station and fires several Hellfire missiles into it. The attack copter delivers its full payload of 8 missiles before flying away. The building is nothing but a smoking pile of rubble. Nothing could survive the collapse if they were inside. It could only be assumed Endgame and his minions were still inside at the beginning of the attack. Troll could survive though and this EE proved it by mutating further, gaining more mass, size and power! The heroic duo coordinate abilities and put the kaiju-sized villain down before he can destroy the suburbs.
This prompts a call to Bisbee Sharp and the FBEE, see if the feds could clean up their mess. It is not a pleasing idea to the SAIC. He resents getting led around by the nose by the PCs as they smash Capitol City gangs. The PCs have been effective, but the cost in lives and property has turned the public opinion against EEs and the government's use of them as law officers. Bug and Mettle promise they are going to bring peace to the streets if left alone to do their work, but Bisbee has yet to see the full fruits of their labor.
Shamrock Bane is turned over to the staff at New Bedlam Asylum to heal her mind. She gets transferred along with the serial arsonist the heroes helped the FBEE apprehend. Troll is packaged in the EE containment truck and driven north to the STARHOLD downport. Their holding cells are the strongest the FBEE has right now to contain powerful EEs.
And that is kind of it. The rest of the session was spent going over the connected events so far and considering where the game goes in the future. Plot-wise it will be searching for Creepazoid and his pals Backtrack and Leatherneck. These EEs were encountered in the very first episode of tBoH Capitol City campaign. Pretty cool we are going back to a cold story thread and following the string. Like most of the plot elements in the campaign world, Creepazoid and the story behind it is not really formed. I am not modeling the entire campaign setting, only where the PCs are and only what has relevance to the action at hand. Pretty standard GM techniques.
With the deflation which comes with an adventure arc concluding I almost talked myself into taking a break. I have been running an online game of some sort non-stop since 2012. I am definitely feeling burnout and challenged to be enthused for another creative work out which is running a ttrpg is. But thankfully I reminded myself this isn't just for fun. There are a tremendous amount of new emotional frontiers to experience and ideas to engage with and so little time! It took me about 5 days to get out of the funk, the ennui. But once I had a plot situation worthy of engagement in mind the sheer determination to win at all creative costs has been sustained. Tally ho!
Friday, November 26
OSR Treasure Island Wrapped
I'm feeling extremely liberated today for I have submitted the second draft of my manuscript for the Treasure Island adventure book for Freebooters. I experienced nothing new that any writer would have experienced; days when I couldn't even stand to look at the manuscript and tackle the editing needs of the work. There was always a hard turn into prepping for my next supers game. I hear this what kept the Game of Thrones novels being so far apart in release because the author would spend time on his rpg campaign instead. I get this.
Also, I get ideas for other rpg stuff and of course it feels more interesting at the time than what I am currently trying to complete, fully aware if the projects were reversed I'd feel the same way. Something about commitment makes my human soul cringe, even though it thirsts for completion and accomplishment. Fortunately I sort out all these contradictions with music and drugs and make weirdly streaky bouts of content generation. My artistic process has much "linger and wait for it" strategies which don't go so well with deadlines. But deadlines are really the only way to get creative projects done. There is no end to anything, you just have to find the right moment to pull the rip-cord.
I think I ended up with a 35,000 word manuscript and the publisher, Night Owl Studios, is really excited about what I wrote. I'm excited to. The quality of the writing is enhanced by having an editor on board. No book is ever going to be as good as it can without an editor. Period. Folks who can't take unvarnished criticism and turn it into gold, I weep for you.
Now that my work is done (mostly) I can relax and let the publisher do the next chunk of thankless work it takes to make a book. I've said it before, I have never worked on an artistic project as demanding as writing a book. Now I have had the experience of working for someone else, and it has been very rewarding. Learning how to write adventure content for others to use at the game table has been a very rewarding experience.
What next? While writing Treasure Island I sent what I had done to date for Deluxe USR S&S to my editor and now it is time to look at that bunch of harsh criticism. Writing can feel like self-flagellation, here is my stuff, rip it apart, tell me how bad it is, more more hit me harder...
I'm reading Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess' thick tome Veins of the Earth right now to decompress. Along with some jazz, hot coffee and Colorado bud.
Sunday, October 24
Sunday, September 19
Even-Handed Brutality, Douglas Cole Interview Part 1
Audio Version of the Interview on Anchor here!
You're on the vanishing tower. I'm Jay Murphy of the Vanishing Tower, Vanishing Tower Press, all things Vanishing Tower. You are my second interview. The first one was Matthew Finch.
Oh, yeah, I interviewed him, too. He's a great guy.
Great interview.
Just like him. You're way off the main street of the gaming world. I'm in the
back alleys of the DIY scene. How did you find me then? Decide that, hey, we
should reach out to this person because I'm in the bad neighborhood man.
Probably the same
person who brought you Mat Finch, John Barnhouse. John keeps his fingers on the
podcast interview show scene. So, I reached out to him and I said, look, you
know, I want to I have to I'm trying something new. Basically, my current
project tower in the moon went right to backerkit. I didn't do
Kickstarter because I didn't need to fund it. It wasn't that expensive. But
more importantly, I had already paid for it. I paid for the art. It was all
that.
So, you printed
physical copies?
I did. And then Backer
Kit is, hey, I've got this product. You can buy it now.
Now, why is that
something you would do on Drivethru or any other outlet?
Well, I mean, for
one thing, drive through, takes a third of your money.
Yes, it's so if
you're in in it for the long haul, those are that's margins that you can't
absorb.
If I were. It's
one of these sort of a vicious circle things. If I were pulling in routinely a
thousand or fifteen hundred or so backers, everything would be different. And
you could potentially just go to drive thru or whatever and whatever. But but
I'm not. I am attempting to stake out my little corner of the world. And I'm
not where I need to be in terms of sustainability as a long term. Yeah, I got
this gaming ballistic.
Is that your full-time
job?
It is.
Fantastic. So,
you made the leap. I'm so glad you said that, because if you said you were
working another job at forty hours a week, I would just feel really bad.
I was for a
while. I was doing up until this last year. I drew my last paycheck a little
from the company a little over a year ago and was formally laid off in June of 2020.
Can't get a callback.
Really?
Yeah, and my
resume is strong, but I cannot. Get. A response worth anything? So apparently
my resume isn't quite as strong as I'd like to think, but it really ought to at
least generate some.
It's the dead
silence that is odd. So you were kind of pushed into it.
Pushed into it a
little bit. I said, well, maybe I should try to do this for real.
Yeah, that's very
exciting.
Well, yeah, but
basically what it came down to is I had a project run long. My last one, the
manuscripts that were turned in were not what they needed to be. They weren't
what I thought that they should be. And so, I sent back for corrections, and
they came back and they were not adjusted the way I needed. I said, okay, fine,
I will do this. It was the project for character collections. I didn’t like it.
It was OK. It was more Perilous Journeys Project for the Fantasy Trip, which
was five books written by other people. But three of them were the third,
fourth and fifth in a campaign series, fourth and fifth. I didn't feel the
fifth one in particular started to be the NPC show. It was not characters
having agency doing cool things. It was, Ooh, look at this good NPC and isn't
he cool and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, no, absolutely not. That
that's not why people, if you want to do that, read a book or watch a movie.
And so, I basically rewrote it. Had I been writing an adventure from scratch it
would have been easier than trying to tie all the pieces together and preserve
the core of it while basically making it something that the players were in the
driver's seat. So that ran long. It was the only Kickstarter I've ever been
late on that set me back, and then I was finishing that up. As the year turned,
I was like, all right, I'm not going to go really job hunting until I deliver
onto to my backers what I told them I would deliver. And I did that. And it was
difficult and painful and made me gnash my teeth and whatever.
But it's very
admirable because a lot of people throw in the towel and go dark.I wouldn’t say
a lot. It just happens enough.
I've had people
say, I will not preorder, I will not back. When you have a product talk to me,
until then. Forget it. And it is stuff like that when people throw in the towel
or they're like, well, gee, I have this money from a prior project, but I've
used it and now I need more. So, I will use that money to make a new product
because this one isn't going they will forward or whatever. But no, I might if
I have a rep, it's on time, high quality. Give the backers what I told them and
don't start something new until I finish the old thing. I don’t mean I don't
feather. I try to keep my promises.
Very good. Your
new product is Tower of the Moon.
It is.
It's a great
looking module if you don't mind me calling it a module.
No, no.
Absolutely.
I notice you're a
fan of two column black and white, and I applaud that. Many game companies give
you pages with drawings underneath it, illustrations underneath it, colors on
the pages. And I find that very difficult to use as a game master.
Yeah, I do have
some products that have the color or whatever, but the fantasy trip is
delightfully old school and the black and white form factor is actually a
production requirement.
Interesting.
As part of my license
because Steve Jackson Games holds the copyright on the fantasy trip
And let's dive
into this because this is intriguing you are doing backer kit, your stuff is
out there, it's available for sale.
That's working
out Kickstarter. You start with maybe an idea or maybe a half-finished product
somewhere there, and you're looking for funding to make it come into existence.
From what I've
been reading on your blog, it seems that correct me if I'm wrong. Kickstarter
gave you a flood of interest in action. Financially wise for a project
different than backer kit.
That is correct.
That's weird.
It is. And it's
not. And I have three quarter composed in my head and have to post on the page
trying to help backer kit saying, look, you know, the thing that Kickstarter is
really good at is the countdown timer sense of urgency. Yes, I need this now.
It gives you a feeling of participating in something and making something
happen. So, it's not just, oh, I'm spending my money, it's I'm making this.
Oh, the participators
feel a part ownership.
Yes, absolutely.
I think they do. I want to help fund this kind of thing. And let me come back
to that. Not right away, but in a minute, because I think I'll come back to it.
And then the third thing that Kickstarter does pretty well is they have call it
a mini forum. It's not spectacular, but the little community posts thing and
that people can comment on the updates. And there's a level of interaction
there that they provide around the project. And everyone at Kickstarter can
theoretically see your thing. So, there is a built in on ramp for curious
people taking advantage of the network effect that is Kickstarter and come in.
And every project my audience would grow by a few dozen people.
Interesting.
Ideally,
something takes off and you do something, and everyone loves it, and you get a
million backers or whatever, or a thousand backers or 10000 backers. And then,
you know, you've got what you need for like the rest of time, in a way, as long
as you keep doing interesting things so it is mostly about reaching out to
people who have already bought your stuff, because that's the mailing list that
they provide. And I've curated one as well. So, for that, you're trying to
leverage the marketing philosophy that the people most likely to give you money
are people who have given you money before. They like this stuff, they bought
your stuff, and I've run 12 projects now, or maybe this is my 13th makes my
job. So I'm not an unknown to the people, to the 500 or so people who usually
show up to get my stuff. I'm not unknown to them. They know that when they
close, they know more or less what they've gotten. They've probably gotten it
before and hopefully they want more of it. But what I'm not seeing in this case
is the same number of people showing up to say, yes, give me Tower of the Moon.
My fantasy audience has been very strong to this point between five hundred and
six hundred and twenty people. But the backer kit, which was admittedly an
experiment, is drawing about half that. So, it's not pulling people along. Now,
the funny thing about Kickstarter and why it's just a little surprising is that
while in the beginning you were funding your dream. Now most people come to
Kickstarter. I think they were the most successful. People come with a project
already.
Yes. Yes. Right.
Yeah. Because the novelty has worn off a bit. The horror stories are well. So,
I got to see a little more. You've got more skin in the game before I give you
some cash. Show me sweat equity if you would.
Lay out. Show me
a writing sample. Show me a cover if you can show me something that says that
you can get there from here. And so you're the only real difference how I
usually come to Kickstarter and how I came back at this time. It was two
things. One is all the art was in hand instead of ending. And two, I placed a
risk order for 100 copies of the physical product ahead of time.
That is a risk. A
hundred copies is, in the game world is who knows?
So, if my prior
projects had usually moved about 60 to 65 percent physical or, you know, real
physical plus media. So usually about three to two. So I said, well, you know,
three to two, 60 percent of all, you know, go low. Five hundred people. Right.
That's 300. So, I'll order a third of that. That makes sense. And I sold
through those right-away.
That was very fast.
I placed another order for a hundred. And then I, I waited a day or so. I'm
like now I'm on track to have the entire project fulfilled. OK. So, I might as
well order the final 100 copies to make sure that I can basically as soon as people
are placing their orders they can go out the door. And in the middle of this, I
got an order from a retail outlet who has supported me before. And I was like,
wow, you know, if I get more retail orders, I'm going to need a bunch more
books. So, and that's where that third came from. Now, I haven't gotten into
that yet, but I'm 12 copies away from finishing the second hundred.
So, in no ways
has it been a failure.
So, where I am
and I tend to be kind of open kimono, I find that if you look up, I do
postmortems I publish.
I read those.
I've read those before. They had my curiosity here at the Vanishing tower. I
usually give an annual report in January to show the meager offerings that I
got. But hey, people out in the world, there's, you know, 20 new people with
these products. And it's, you know, it lives and breeze.
The project has
paid for itself. And I had spent on international shipping. I'm sure everyone's
heard this before. The international shipping is a Charlie Foxtrot right now.
It is hopelessly, fully dorked up. So, people are paying 20 times what they 10,
20 times what they used to for a container. And, you know, like today, I got a
note from ship station saying that the United States was suspending certain
class of mail to Australia.
There you go.
Well, fortunately, Doug, you're in the largest consumer market already. If you
want to sell something, you go to America.
That's right. And
but for the first time in my product history, I did not offer international
print during this campaign. And while the campaign is, I think, you know, has
been successful, not as successful as I'd like. And, you know, these projects
are interesting because, you know, gaming projects in particular, you have a
fairly large outlay on a per page or per product basis to get to a printable
PDF. And first, you have to make that back. And then after that, the profit
margin of each marginal sale goes way up because, you know you’re not digging
yourself out of the hole. International shipping over my last project, my last
project was Delvers to Go, powered by GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. Brilliantly
executed by Kevin Smith, the author and something that I had written about in
twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen saying this is what group's needs. I have
always been a fan of GURPS since 1989. And the system. I love it. I play it.
But this is what it needs. And I really thought that people would look at that
and say, even if I'm an expert in the system, my friends aren't. And this lets
me get to the table in 15 minutes. It's OSR fast. It's TFT fast, right? It's
all west end game StarWars d6 fast. And now that a fan has created GURPS
character sheet support and the author of GURPS Characters, this the officially
licensed character generator is writing game aids for this. Some of my backers
for this project can make a fully competent, ready to play, totally decked out
dungeon fantasy role playing game characters. Three minutes, you can literally
have a character die. And by the time your turn comes around, be ready to play
with a new one in GURPS, even if you've never played GURPS.
I have played GURPS.
We will be going into that a little bit.
Right. But it's a
system that is heavily front loaded for both the game master and the player.
You need to invest time to make your character. You usually need to chat with
your game master. You go through the rules. The game master has to go and
remove, is like the old line about the sculpture. First, take away everything
that isn't your campaign. Then you have to take away everything that isn't
available for characters. And then you have to as a player, you say, OK, now
let me take away everything is in my character. And that can be laborious. It
can take days or even weeks or whatever.
A lot of back and
forth between the game master and the players.
There can be a
lot of back and forth. Right. Whereas with Delvers to Go you have a lot of
advantages playing. You can just do it and get done. You're like, I want to
start here and then choose this and make these two or three other choices. So, it
did OK. But because of international shipping, there were thousands of dollars
in unforeseen expenses that left my working capital a little lighter than I'd
like. And Tower of the Moon had brought me back. David has really
brought me back to a solid foundation of working capital. If it continues to
sell over the next two weeks of the campaign, I will have, you know, something
to walk away with. Right, because I'm doing this for a job. It is no longer just
kind of a pay for my hobby. But it's something that I need. I have an
opportunity cost, right. I've got a Ph.D. in material science. I've got skills
that I could bring. If I'm just sitting here not bringing anything to the family,
I have to make different life choices. If I find myself making the same money
as I did as a hobbyist when I was just kind of out there saying, yeah, I’m
going to starve. The lights are out. But so, you know, I need to I need to
contribute. And there's an opportunity cost to being a Full-Time game designer
that my other skills would make up for. So I am in competition with myself, so
to speak.
Well, you have Dragon
Heresy and there's Dungeon Fantasy. What's the difference?
What's going on there? Because I see that they're both GURPS. Am I wrong?
Dragon Heresy is
not GURPS. It is a fantasy heartbreaker. It's D&D, but different. And many
games are. But in this particular case, once fifth edition came out, I was
reasonably impressed and pleased with the robustness of the game engine itself.
I liked how the designers had whittled things down to a couple core mechanics
that they used faithfully and attempted to, with reasonable success, simplify
and streamline the resolution mechanics that would be brought to bear.
It's what I call
the internal logic of a game.
That is a great
way of putting it. The internal logic of the game is is straightforward. Some
of the implementation of certain things were a little bit troublesome to people
with certain outlooks. So, I don't know if you know Tim Short at Gothridge
Manor or read his blog.
I've listened to
his podcast, so I know the sound of the man's voice.
And Tim's a good
guy, but one of the things that really bugged him and we were talking because
we used to play in Tenkar’s Sword and Wizardry game together and that's how we
got to know each other. But he just thought that the short rest and the long
rest was just killing his willingness of suspension of disbelief because you
know, you do a fight and you have a hard fight and you get done with it and
then you take a long rest and you're just better. Everything's better. Your hit
points are fully restored.
Yep. My reaction
as well.
And he was like,
I didn't like that. Yeah, I don't like it. And, you know, there are people who
will point to page 82 of the old Dungeon Masters Guide first edition and say,
look, hit points out what you think. They're not blood and guts and intestines
on the floor. It's maybe the last couple of blows, like in Lord of the Rings
movie. The Balrog and Gandalf are fighting and fighting and fighting and
fighting. And he pulls up the sword and lightning hits it and he stabs the guy.
And that's when he goes over to a negative hit point and he dies and that's it.
But in my gaming life since 1981. I had never had it described to me by a game
master or described it to other people as, oh, you swung your sword at the orc
and he wet his pants a little bit, right. He swung the sword and he got hit or
you hit and you try to describe it in a way that brings your players into the
game. And so the bright blood flows.
You have to step
back a little bit as the game master and the player and embellish the action at
maybe a greater distance because of the narrative mechanical disconnect, the
narrative isn’t just, oh, you lost hit points, you probably had a close call.
You were driven
back a step. Right. But that's usually not how it was done. And I thought to
myself, well, why not? Why not have a wound's track and a defense track or a
vigor? I called it vigor. And as it turns out, that had already been invented,
although I invented it on my own. But there's a wound and vigor system in, I
think, the back and one of the Pathfinder books. And I know that when the Star
Wars game had a separate wound effect. So. Okay, great parallel evolution. No
problem. But what if we did that? What would happen if you enable wound and vigor
and you said, well, what if I can get past the defense because I'm an old GURPS
player. Right. And you're you have a defense role which totally negates an
attack.
It's similar to Chaosium’s
style of you taking offensive action and the defensive player has a chance to negate
it.
Exactly. If I
start doing defense roles, I might as well play GURPS, right? So, the defense
role itself is neat and it has options to it, but it does come at a mechanical
overhead cost. What do you mean? I hit, but then I didn't? There's a bit of a disconnect.
And you know, when you have a one second tactical combat game, you know, you
want to try and move things along. And so in any case, the one roll I thought
one roll resolution was important to the 5E experience. So I didn't want to
lose it. So what I said is, if you make your role by enough, you bypass vigor
and go right to wounds. So, if you're decked out head to toe in plate, you
don't even have to necessarily defend. I'll swing. You don't care because I'm
not hitting you hard enough. And again, I'm not the only one to do it, but I
really like how it works. You could spend a reaction to throw yourself out of
the way by absorbing twice the roll damage.
As a designer,
how extensively tested were these ideas?
Pretty extensive.
Really?
Yeah, I think we
put, I played the hell out of them before I wrote it up, because what happened
was the 5E thing came out and say, hey, this is really cool. I talked to Tim,
blah, blah, blah, you know, this would be cool. And then I had started like,
oh, look, the shield is -you’re your Armor Class. But that's only 10 percent
change in hit posture. It is not a big factor. Like how come like the first
thing that you put on after a helmet or a little head protection, the first
thing that you picked up for like thousands of years is a shield. But it's not
mechanically advantaged, really, in 5E. You see a lot more two weapon fighters
and stuff that you didn't see in history. So, what's up with that? So, I wanted
the shield, as it turned out, the shield rules that I came up with were later,
again, parallel evolution. But the Pathfinder reaction to employ the shield to
block the blow was we've sort of ended up the same place. But I wanted shields
to be cooler. And I was like, you know, that's my hunch. But. I didn't have any
practical experience, so I went and got some I. I joined a HEMA, a group that
does short sword and shield fighting, and you can see that on my blog.
You do Viking
style sword and shield fighting.
And that was a
fun coincidence because while playtesting the rules went through several
iterations, I mean, I revised the heck out of them because I was doing all the
stuff. I was like, oh, wouldn't this be cool?
When you had the
rules ready to get tested was it three years before you, or in two years. When
did this edition come out?
When did 5E come
out? Twenty fifteen? Twenty sixteen?
Twenty sixteen is
a good approximation.
The kick starter
for Dragon Heresy was I think in late seventeen or twenty
eighteen. The thing is though by the time that I had gotten there, I had four
hundred thousand words written.
That's a lot of
words.
I had three
complete volumes and a complete monster manual. I had a complete campaign
setting in the guide equivalent, and I had a very complete players book, level
one through 20, blah, blah, blah. And they had announced the SRD. They had announced
the DMS Guild or whatever. And I was like, oh, wow, they're going to let me do
this sort of thing. You know, maybe I could throw a quick rules mod up. But as
I was playtesting…
You have a
different game.
I have a
different game. And most importantly is one of these things where because of
wounds and vigor and a few other things, when you went to look up a spell or whatever,
you were going to have to constantly stop and say, how does this convert? And I
feel that if you're a paying customer of mine, it is my job as the author and
publisher to do the work for you.
Yes, I would
agree.
And so very
quickly, it became something where I was like, you know, I really ought to you
know, if I'm going to turn all spells into wounds and vigor, I'm going to need
a grimoire. If I'm going to turn character generation into wounds and vigor and
blah, blah, blah, I'm you need the books. I was like, I might as well just do
this. And then shortly after, I'm like, well, this is going to be challenging.
They came out with the SRD and, you know, they didn't say, you know, I'm going
to tell a total untruth, plagiarize all you want we’ll make more. They said
here are the things, here's all the mechanics crunch, the one big daddy game. Here's
the mechanics that that we cannot copyright and said, Yeah, go ahead, let a thousand
flowers bloom very quickly. I realized that I could absolutely write all my own
fluff around that, the mechanics that I want. I wanted a spear, the most common
weapon in medieval history. I wanted those to be a little cooler. So, I
invented a martial spear fighting style. I wanted to be able to take advantage
of certain things, and I thought the advantage disadvantage was great. I said,
oh, if you take a turn and attack action to evaluate or aim, you'd have
advantage on the next attack. You can do that sort of thing to punch through an
opponent's defenses or get around them or whatever.
Ever considered
simultaneous rolls? The roll to hit and damage is decided in one? And both
players, players and NPCs are rolling the dice at the same time. And that gives
you a degree of success. I wrote USR Sword and Sorcery so I could plung
down into that rabbit hole and I was quite happy with it.
That's not
something that I wanted in my heart. It wasn't necessarily that I looked at it
and said, no, I'm not going to do that. It was instead an affirmative decision
where I wanted to say, look, 5E, it looks like a really good system. There are
some things that I want to change, but I wanted to keep it the 5E experience.
And so I did. And that was a very deliberate decision on my part to try and
make it as approachable as possible to the point where an experienced player
could pick up. One of the play tests that I did before I published was, I
grabbed an adventure off of drivethru and without doing much more than prepping
the math, ran it spontaneously and did conversion on the fly with only what I
had in front of me.
If the game
master is steeped or understands the internal logic of the game, you can do
that, right? You can do that pretty fairly.
It must be
capable of that. You can't be like, oh, I have calculations to do, right? You
need to be quick enough, like, oh, this is this and this and both. But like,
for example, I had a monster manual, so I said, oh, you're fighting three
skeletons so I can look up the skeleton entries. I was able to use the
references in the system to just play. And it was balanced enough because the
places where Dragon Heresy was harder, like, you know, a little more
brutal. It was more brutal to the bad guys to. It was an even handed kind of
brutality. Ultimately, though, Rob Connelly from Bat in the Attic said, you
know, there's a really famous game designer who you ought to talk to because
he's really good at all this stuff. You should send him an email. And I sent
him an email.
Care to say who
this designer is?
I never do.
OK.
Yeah, I never do,
it's just one of these things. He's like, look, this is a terrible plan. You've
got four hundred thousand words and no history with Kickstarter. There's no
proof that anyone should give you a dollar let alone one hundred and fifty
thousand. And you are going to fail. You're going to fail huge because the rule
about joint ventures, don't, because ninety five percent don't work. The rule
for venture capital is don't, because ninety five percent of them lose money. Another
four percent. Maybe break even then you're looking for that one percent that
goes above and beyond. And the odds of being in that one percent are not
awesome. They're one percent. And you need to have all the right things. So, this
suggests to me I really shouldn't even respond. You're going be mad at me, but
just don't. Get a rep. Do something else.
Well, that's one
of the key things I think is important to be successful in a publishing enterprise
is, you know, you can put your ego in the right place. You have to take the
criticism from other people, reflect on it and find the truth out of it. And
act on it.
Exactly, and that
was what I sort of didn't I don't even remember thinking that I needed to argue
with this guy when I remember thinking, I'm going to ask for advice. I needed
to give it serious thought. And so what I did is I pulled out the old adage, if
you're asking for advice and you're not going to take it, you're…
Why ask? You're
just talking about yourself now.
So, I pulled the
grappling system out of Dragon Heresy, which was based on a
system that I had written for years. I published Dungeon Grappling. I went
to conventions and stuff. I say, here are the rules for D&D grappling which
don't suck?
A tall order.
Dungeon Grappling
was my first published book. It's about 50 pages long, for Swords and Wizardry,
5E and Pathfinder.
It's the same philosophy
like arms law, character law back in the 80s. You don't need a whole new game.
Here's just something to add some punch to what you're doing.
Exactly.
Ironically, First Sergeant Wizardry is the easiest.
And I had
published a simplified version of this with Peter Dell'Orto in Gothard manor.
Sword and Wizardry
is old school, the little little brown books, or Holmes? Probably little brown
books.
That is an
excellent question.
I got to ask. We
got to get ask Mat.
That's the right
place. In any case, the point of dungeon grappling was quite simply, if you are
willing to abstract away all the complexity of the sword fighting and fencing
and offense and defense in the role, 1D20 plus a bonus against an armor class, don't
pull out some alternate system when it comes time to grappling, because as you
study sword play the old fight manuals and stuff, there was really no
separation between grappling and cutting and punching and stuff. They’re the
same thing. So, use the same thing. Roll your D20 plus a bonus against some
kind of armor class or grapple DC or whatever.
You're saying
that hand-to-hand combat is eventually going to get really close.
Here's an
example. You attack me with a sword. I parry. Push your blade off-line and use
that to come in. Anyone who does unarmed combat will recognize those motions in
the flow and that control. As whether it's Muay Thai or whatever, you know,
wrestling, whatever. A lot of these moves and stuff that you do are
foundational and they're universal.
So, wax on. Wax
off.
Exactly. And the
thing is that I do the Viking sword and shield thing and the style that we do.
You don't just sit there with the shoulder. I’m trying to use the edge of the
shield to dynamically move the opponent, open them up, you're not doing a bash,
although you could if there's an opening. But what you're trying to do is
control your opponent, control the line through pressure in order to open up
for a strike where you can enter that space, strike, one strike fatally and get
out without being struck back and grappling and striking merged together.
In that case,
with sword binds and shield binds, Corker disarms, all of that stuff was not. And,
you know, every attack leaves an opening and then throw the guy down, you know.
Does that break
down, that those ideas break down in large formations, large field combat? The
reason I asked that, Romans, how they fought with shields back then. It sounded
a little more like rugby. There is a couple of hours of pressing, pushing and
exerting pressure.
Right. And
running in. And then when the someone is just exhausted and breaks down, then
comes...
Yeah. Chop, chop,
chop, chop.
Let me answer it
in three ways. One is I'm not entirely sure that it breaks down because you
have mutually reinforcing defensive lines. Control on you doesn't necessarily
relieve the other two people who are helping you hold that line. Number two,
what I would say is that it does kind of start to break down, but nobody cares
because we're not simulating in a role-playing game exact combat. You're dueling.
You're dueling one. And besides, if your players play the way mine play
anything involving a formation is crazy talk.
Well, you know, you
say crazy talk. And to me, that's a, that's a challenge. That's a creative
challenge. How do you run the mass combat like any other encounter? The action
is where the player is. They can't see the other side of the battlefield unless
they're at a command position. And so how do you role play that out? So far,
I've come up with some simple mass combat rules, as well as a lot of random
tables to generate flavor on the battlefield and adjudicate it in a breezy
manner.
I suspect that
ultimately what you wind up doing there is if you're looking for mechanical
inspiration, all that stuff, I think what you're probably going to do is say,
OK, well, you're going to have an overall pressure feel. But instead of saying
that happens over one second or five seconds or six seconds or whatever time
span, it's a minute or six minutes. And what opportunity to do something
interesting happens in that six minutes or ten minutes, because as you say,
battles last a long time. And if you look at the casualty figure, while I'm
sure that they were tragic to all involved, relatively speaking, what you
usually see in a movie where a thousand people oh, my God, it's like three
people standing in the field was carpeted with bodies or whatever.
That's just like,
that way is Robert E Howard.
A few dozen
people die. So, I've had quite enough of this. Thank you. They run away. And if
there's going to be a slaughter, that's when it happens. But if two formations
advance on each other, they poke at each other a little bit or do whatever and
then like, yeah, you know, whatever. Then they fall back and maybe the nobles
do their dueling thing and honor is satisfied. But by and large, the unusual
circumstances like Agincourt where one side just mops the floor with the other.
Even then, when you look at it, the casualty rates are not what you think based
on media. So, you know, it's a lot of running and fleeing for your life and
hiding and stuff. And like even in modern combat, the last man thing is rare.
First of all, nobody really wants to do that because you get tired of it.
And formations
could be reconstituted, and the savagery of the battle doesn't equate to destruction.
You know, where does he get these other men? Well, it's some of the same it's a
lot of the same guys. They just form up. So, I think. Yeah, you make it
personalized. I'm going to solve it. Yeah.
So, you asked
about Dragon Heresy, and what basically happened is I had three books
ready to go. Person says start smaller. So, I started with Dungeon Grappling.
I made a convention adventure called Lost Hall of Tyr, which is like sixty-four
pages. I demoed the dungeon to demonstrate Dungeon grappling in twenty
eighteen. Then I did the Kickstarter for that adventure, that gave me two under
my belt and then I did the Dragon Heresy Kickstarter and I said because I
wasn't doing it as a job if I get to this funding level, then I do an offset
print run, big thing overseas and whatever, and I wasn't going to make it. And
then at the last minute, someone came in and I had been saying, you know, for
the top tier pledge, I would make you a Viking style shield…
I saw that on your
blog.
If people are
curious, go to gaming ballistic. You can see Viking shields. It's a five-hundred-dollar
product. It's expensive. The shields that I made then are nowhere near as good
as the shields that I can make now.
Is it like a
book? Your next book is always better.
Yes, but in this case,
it's you know, you get better at it. And my technique improved. I actually had
better materials. I actually went and cut down a tree instead of going to Home
Depot or Menard's and getting the wood. I've since learned to work with rawhide
that I import. That is the proper thickness for a Viking shield. Stuff like
that. And so these are very robust, really historically accurate. The only
thing that I'm having a hard time now with is the person apparently who used to
make the bosses of the shield that was the right historical weight and
thickness, which is thin and light. He died. The company that I used to get
them from can't find a thin light boss that I can put my own rivet holes in. Wow.
So it's just one of those very surprising things. My Viking martial arts
instructor does have the capability to forge the bosses. But someone said, you
know, I was like, you know, if we get to fifteen thousand or sixteen thousand
dollars, I'll do this awesome print run. I was like fifteen thousand forty
five. It's 20 minutes before the end of the campaign. I'm watching the clock
tick down like, oh, you know, we've only got four hundred and twenty some odd
people. Not having this offset print run is probably OK and somebody bought two
shields. Bingo. They dropped a thousand dollars on me. Wow. And pushed it over.
Then I made the rookie mistake and then I said, you know, thousand dollars, a
thousand book has the cost of whatever, but fifteen hundred bucks is much
cheaper. I mean, those five hundred are a marginal cost. I have a lot of Dragon
Heresy sitting in a warehouse somewhere. I talked to Steve Jackson and Phil
Reed and said, hey, your Dungeon Fantasy role playing game box set is
straight up what we talked about earlier. Take away everything that isn't a
dungeon crawl roleplaying. Take it away, box it up and say this is what you
need to play in this genre and all you're going to need is in the box. It's a
physical corral
Do players come
to a game of GURPS expecting all rules aew in force at all times?
I think there's
two and three. Again, three answers in that. One is just. Yes. I think that
they do.
That sucks for
the GM.
The second answer
is it's not just the players who come with that expectation. The GMs come with
that expectation, too.
Not this guy, not
Varnishing Tower. That's antithetical to our approach to the art of roleplaying
games.
Operating within
the constraints of a particular genre is not cheating. It's what you need in
order to have a set of mutually satisfactory shared expectations without having
to spend nine years talking about them and interrupting the game. If you are
playing a sword and sorcery game and someone pulls out a blaster rifle someone going
to get mad unless you're in expedition to the blaster peaks. That's the big
reveal. It's not a castle but a spaceship. I'm sorry, spoilers, you know, 30
years ago adventure. But the thing is, is that when all of a sudden your
expectations change and I had a great example of this in a modern game that I
was playing when they were infiltrating a bad guy base and they're like, oh,
there's a sentry over there. Like, yeah, no problem. I got this silencer. Like,
they kill them and then, oh, you know, but no one heard, of course, because I
have a silenced rifle. I'm like, no, it's suppressed. It's silence. It's not a
movie. It's as loud as dropping a book on the floor. It just doesn't damage
your hearing. That doesn't mean it's quiet and they're looking at me like I
have violated them. Because I had violated their expectations unexpectedly. You
know, there's no give backs with “I shot the guy.” Right. So it ended the
session early and we actually did a reboot, said, OK, do we want to do
cinematic suppressors?
Yes, we do. OK,
cinematics suppressors. Goes for both sides now. So we actually sort of did a
restart and then ran that session again.
The best a game
master could do to prepare for these what I call genre tropes, genre
expectations is to be well steeped in the source material. I'm talking about
the books. I'm talking about the movies mostly. For me, it's books, it's
fantasy books, it's sci fi books from way back. Sometimes I think that gets
lost. There's a disconnect between people looking to the rules for the
connection to the genre when it's just a tool to facilitate the genre that's
already been written. And you're not going to tap into that visceral feel
unless you read the source material or watch it.
That leads to the
disconnect there, is that the media that I had set myself in were technical
manuals, real work videos and battle reports and whatever, the hardcore way,
because that had been an interest in my blog and my company for gaming
ballistic, it is no surprise that the nitty gritty of that is of interest to
me. Now, the people who were playing with me, my good friends, whatever the
people who were playing with me knew of weapons and combat and stuff from
action movies. When you pull out the pistol, you go off and three shots kill all
the bad guys.
The classic one
in this is I pull out my like two inch knife and I throw it from across the
room and it hits in the chest and they're just that cinematic. What my former
martial arts master used to say is knife throwing is the art of tossing away a
perfectly useful weapon, accurately tossing away a perfectly usable weapon.
You're just not, first of all, you're probably not going to hit. Second of all,
even if you do. It's more of a distraction than a fatality. And it's certainly
not the instant kill sort of thing that you'd get with a gun at the base of the
skull and you're off like a switch. Right. That's not any of these things. But
that's what people are familiar with. They see the knife throwing thing and
they want to do that. They see Legolas doing the thing and they don't realize
that the expected rate of fire of a bow was six arrows a minute. The sustained
rate of fire is about 10 to 12 hours a minute, if you were good. And if you've
ever tried one the pull is one hundred and some odd pounds. You draw it with
your legs. I had the experience of drawing about an eighty-five pound bow some
years back. And that's work.
I did see a guy.
What is the guy's name? Not Stretton. There's another gentleman who casually
draws a one hundred- and seventy-five-pound bow. Like it's nothing. It's the
darndest thing. He's skinny. You wouldn't even know it to look at him.
Those are the
people that gets the biomechanics just spot on.
Some of the
people at the local archery range was saying is that you can get like these
big, long linebacker guys coming in and will try and pull a compound bow and
they can bench 350, but they can't pull the compound because it's a very
specific kind of muscle. Now, once they figure out how to use it, they can they
do it, no problem. But they struggle initially because it's a very specific
technique, and we are a little far afield, but the point is, is that the box set
in a universal generic flexible game is an absolute requirement. You have to
start somewhere. And what this was for the most popular genre of roleplaying is
fantasy. Nine or nine and a half dollars out of every 10 are spent in that
genre.
So, you believe
that the first role play game that was wildly popular. Spread throughout
popular culture stamped the genre that was going to be played. What if Mark
Miller's Traveller sold?
Well, it did. If
Traveler had taken off or Gammel World or something else and had exploded. Maybe.
Maybe it's well, what happened? But Star Wars was already. It was. No, it
wasn't. It was seventy-seven and the games that were coming out. But it didn't
have. No, I can't even say that because there was Buck Rogers and all the
serials. It just didn't for whatever reason, the distributor just hit it. And
then I think there was network effects. You played it because other people were
playing it and you had a first mover advantage. And I think the thing is, is
it's such a fertile ground. Yes. For that. Yes. Yes. Regardless of what might
have happened, the Dungeon Fantasy role playing game came out in twenty
fifteen or so. Twenty eighteen. And so by attacking the market leader, the
market leading genre, saying, OK, this is the biggest thing we're going to get
the most people. And this was not this is not just theory. They've had a Dungeon
Fantasy subline that was out for a while and had sold multiple, multiple
books. Right. I mean, they were like Dungeon Fantasy Nine or something.
Right. So, I mean, people were buying them and they were selling. And so they
it wasn't just, oh, well, maybe we'll cautiously do the most popular genre of
the. We're no, we're going you know, we got to go all in with both of them.
We're playing. That's what people are playing. And I went to Steve and Phil at
the time. I said I would really like to take this Lost Hall of Tyre
adventure I've written and support your game by converting it to this. And they
said, talk to me later. I said, I will. So I waited. I said, how about now? Not
now. And I did the Kickstarter. And Phil was flying through Minneapolis. And I
came by and I said, here's this, Lost Hall of Tyre and here's Dungeon
Grappler. So here are three examples of me successfully delivering a
product that you can take home to Texas with. He said, OK, thank you. And then
not terribly long thereafter we had a conversation and I said, I want to do
this. And they said, OK, let's do this. I said, I would like to offer more than
just my sixty-four pages because I've played this, I've seen it, I've got some
reviews and I want to do more with it. They said, OK. I said, I want to do a
lot more with it. This is OK. OK, so we're going to see what happens. And it
wound up being one hundred and twenty-eight pages, had a town to base off called
Ishtiaq, Mountain of Ice. It had better maps. I paid for better maps by the Midderlands
guy, fantastic cartographer. Fantastic guy in the UK. He did my maps and it
just got better. And it was quite successful, You know, I got five hundred or
so people and people dug it and I got a great print run. And then I said, hey,
you know, I'd like to do this again. And they said, yeah, do that. I said, I
want to do it in the same Viking Norse inspired thing, because there's such
great culture for role playing in Vikings. I mean, talk about your OG, go out,
kill monsters and take your stuff.
They traveled too.
They were farmers
and agrarians or whatever. However, their legends and their ideals are so
squarely aligned with the fantasy RPG tropes. Yes. And the popular
consciousness. Of those things are like this is what you expect, you expect
shield maidens and fighting and so you deliver that and people enjoy it. And it
really allows you to do a lot of things in mythology. So deep in the stories,
in the monsters. Let me do a setting, and they said, all right. Shakespeare and
Spider-Man. All right. And the really the two of them intersect. So, first of
all, we'll start with Spiderman. Like any good story, this one's about a girl. Hmm.
Right. So that's the opening line from the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie. And
I said, well, if you're going to have a girl, it's got to be a Romeo and Juliet
thing, because you have to have star crossed lovers. They want to get together
and they can't. Why not? OK, there's one layer. And what I wound up doing is creating
a mind map, a relationship map you started with the star crossed lovers and
then their immediate relations. And then who was influencing them and then who
were supporting them?
That's what I
did, what I focused on when I found myself in my own searchings and
exploration's for creating my sword and sorcery city. That's how it developed.
And I just made it cool.
Louise McMaster
Bujold, who wrote the Proposition series, had something that she used to say,
which was, let me think of the worst possible thing that could happen to the
character and then I'll just write that. And that's kind of what you do, is you
go and say, OK, how can these persons lives get complex. Right. And so you get
all these branches and what ends up happening is you get the spider web of
interactions, primary interactions, hostile interactions, friendly
interactions, whatever, that create a web of relationships. Every time the
player characters interact with somebody, they send ripples through that web.
And what I have found is if you have a reasonably doesn't even have to be that
deep, a reasonably robust relationship, you no longer have to plan. Because you
can just let the characters do what they're going to do, they have an agenda.
Right. And so you say, OK, this person just talk to these players, just had a
friendly interaction with NPC A. NPC B is friendly with A. Okay. So B is going
to want to help the players. F G and E don't care and H hates the PCs with a
fiery passion of a thousand suns. So, when the ninjas show up, it's going to be
one of them. And then because NPC F tries to kill the players, whoever was keeping
an eye on the PC says, oh my goodness, there's a new faction in town and it
just builds. And now NPC H goes and tries to ally with NPC D because it has aligning
interest.
You're delivering
the player's holy grail. They call it a living world.
That's right.
That's right. And if you ever run out of things to do, you're like, all right,
well, I have it mapped out, the relationships, and as long as you're about
three deep you can almost always keep ahead. And so that's what Nordlandr
does. And you're not supposed to pick favorites of your children. But I really
think I did a good job with Nordlandr.