Slaughter a Sacred Cow for Santa

 On this Thanksgiving eve I feel a bit reflective, philosophical and wish to hold court and slaughter some sacred cows for the fires of Tar-Aweil.

Classic Traveller’s adventure modules. I will spill this beast’s blood first. They are uninspired piles of  space dung. It is said H Beam Piper’s stories were a touchstone of inspiration for the original Traveller game and it is apparent in the official adventures. I have read H Beam Piper. It is awful. Not only do the Classic Traveller

adventures present as limp lines of text it ushered in the “official” Traveller Universe, the Third Imperium. Official settings appear to be inevitable with any successful roleplaying game and I have no interest in moaning the soul-killing beast official settings can be for cool games. Not now. I will probably get up into that though at some point before the holidays are over.

But for Traveller it was tepid adventures laid into a tepid game universe. The Pirates of Drinax have been hired by the King to…. Aaagh! Snoozefest. Science Fiction is wild. It is really fucked up shit smashing through the technical power of humanity as it marches through the stars, it is the unrelenting incomprehensibility of the cosmos which make a science fiction adventure good. The first few published adventures for the game quickly buried the genius of the tight game kit for referees and players for years to come. Just for the record, I love Classic Traveller rules. I dream of building and running a Dune-like campaign universe to sketch my roleplaying ambitions on and I would do it with Classic Traveller.

I know this probably comes across like I’m picking on the slow kid in school but let us now turn to the Palladium Setting books. System dreadful and convoluted but great setting books. Yin-Sloth, Western Empire, Timiro. A paragraph here and there around a made-up name a great setting book this does not make. The maps in these books shows what the creator thinks of fans and players, not much. Your campaign notebook has better maps then Palladium setting books.

The one for the north has this bad ass illo on the cover. Coyle witch doctor and undead crawling out of a frozen forest pond. Metal as shit. Take my word for. Just tear off the cover and throw the rest away. So the total amount of ink I find reviewing the Palladium canon is depressing in its sucky-ness.

Gurps source books are great! No they are not. They are a dagger into the heart of good fun and inspired adventure in many a naïve new roleplaying heart. Did you want to play a game in the Rome Imperium because you wanted to know the names of how they measured wheat. Or what they called their houses. No, you want to stick a short sword in a barbarian’s neck, race chariots recklessly and burn down cities! Many, many ttrpg setting books have sickened a dreamy mind dry. Inspiration, not accuracy is what players and referees need. Take for example B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvy. There is a pretty complete adventure and sketched out city for a setting. Not much. All in thirty-two pages? Since I’ve played that module in high school I didn’t see a full-on setting book worth a shit until Yoon-Suin! You see, the value of a setting book is guiding one into genre-fidelity when spit-balling the moon, not in “accuracy”. 

My advice is steer clear of Gurps and Palladium setting books. Take what fires you up about an adventure setting. It is not in the setting details. There must be a sophisticated layering of useful bits which end up imparting flavor. Not facts. 

Can there be too many charts? No!

 My latest call-in on the Vanishing Tower Podcast posed two questions. For those specific questions you can hear them at the front of the blog recording. Here are my answers, which I putting up.

The description of the game session watched was a less than optimal use of tables in a Dungeons & Dragons Game. The reasons why it is a poor use of a table are apparent, numerous and generally understood. So, I won’t dwell on that here. I have used a campsite set of charts in the OSR game I run. It was stuff from Wormskin zine. The PCs were deciding whether to travel in the wrong direction and take refuge at a village for the night or continue and hope for a suitable camp site in rough, rainy terrain. All for 50 men. They chose to move on and look for a suitable campsite. I rolled on a chart for this from the zine and told them what they found for use later. 

Notice I am not rolling to determine whether they have found a spot to camp. I’m rolling for what kind of campsite did they find. Finding the camp site and firewood is a forgone conclusion. I have decent charts which provide something I can use for descriptions and random encounters. If it does not, I shouldn’t be using it. And the roll, most importantly, will inform me if an interesting encounter happens in the night or is it dawn and time to get moving. I hope the tactile details I provided were enjoyable enough they pin the location for later use, but that is just icing on the cake if it occurs. We all did just add something to the campaign world, a camp site, all because the players made a choice and acted on the choice and details of possible results has been anticipated by the DM. So, whether on a table or from a block of text the information I'm throwing out there is in concourse with the game. It has a reason for being and is not wasting the player’s time.

As For the follow up question, no, there cannot be too many charts. Here is my thinking on this, the game designer included the tables and charts they believe should be used with the game. If I’m having trouble and frustrations with the amount of charts I need to reference, and I’ve given a good faith try in learning/running the system, then it isn’t a good fit for me as a DM. There is nothing inherently wrong with the game, I tried RoleMaster back in the day, but it was a backward fit for what I do at the table. But there were many other players who used it and enjoyed the game. They were able to use the tables in a learned way to make their play create what they were after.

Charts and tables, just like the rules, should fade in the background as everyone roleplays. As a DM I would rather be fluid and concise in the moment and not have to look back at anything. Charts, rules, previous history. This is a broad generalization of my goals at the table. But those three functions I have just mentioned are guiding principles, the charts are easy and fun to use, I rarely need to refer to the rulebook because use has got me using the game mechanics well, and previous history does not need to be looked up because everything has been so exciting everyone knows what important “stuff” to do right now!

2019 in Review

Never did get around to this semi-quasi-generally-recurring blog post about what kind of gaming I have gotten up to over the last year. Starting to look like my company Christmas party, we usually get around to that in August. 2019, what the hell have I been up to. My first OSR module was released to great acclaim and mild sales. 26 copies to date. I think that is great for this project. The only part I fucked up was making the POD copy available on Lulu. Which means all the copies out there are all PDF's. I couldn't direct any sales over to Lulu. Too bad cause the physical copy isn't shabby at all. Proud of the work. It also had an editor which puts it above like 90% of the DIY game product being shucked on DriveThru. The other serious goal it accomplished is making sure 2019 wasn't a dud, as far as new product being released. Hate to see the Press have a zero output year. If you are not publishing anything you are not much of a game company are you?

I sold 131 of my own game products in total for the tidy some of $86.66 commission in 2019. This includes the novel war game Santapocalypse. I should look at these "card" capabilities at DriveThru, see if I can make some mounted, color counters you could cut up. Color matters in game products.  Or it would matter on this one I think. Nice poppy unit counters. Interestingly it is my first product released by another "company", Peryton Publishing, so that is strange. It definitely is the the way to live, have someone else publish for you. I was edited, got an original piece of art added to it. I just need someone to fetch me coffee and empty out my ashtray! Fucking big time baby.

The D&D conversion guides chugged along grossing a little over $1,000.00. leaving me with $849.00 profit. Lets see... Mark bought a t-shirt. I think they are cool cause it has my art on it.  I "monetized" the venerable blog with using affiliate links to DriveThru and that is a strange, stunning $148.00 in folks clicking thru and buying stuff on the site.  

Business aside, the actual part of gaming, the reason I am all in on DIY gaming stuff, was absurdly off the charts again. Not in volume of play but quality of play. 2019 saw me running only Rom'Myr Dying Earth, but it has spawned my most detailed fantasy world I've worked on yet. As is every other campaign I've run it has a direct motive, game challenge which I set out to accomplish and test the validity of. Rom'Myr is your standard high fantasy fare using Dungeons & Dragons to prove, at least to myself, the shit about D&D being good for only dungeon crawling, or it is only about combat, or it isn't good for telling stories or whatever drivel is being declared about the deadness of trad roleplaying conceits, is just that; shit. The end analysis I come to is shit players/gms make for shit games. I've taken the zero-to-hero, xp leveling for character improvement, counter-intuitive AC system of combat and put so much sword and sorcery meat on the bones that I'm satisfied with my most strident conclusions. I can use any system to give red in tooth and claw roleplaying adventure as long as I have two things; a firm grip on the genre to be run, and players who do shit. Interesting shit. They like talk with each other, work in character based on what the character actually does and don't tell you what their character is, they play the sum'bitch and who these imaginary heroes are comes to life in truly unique ways. I can't get invested in a game or character unless their is an opportunity to be surprised by the character's life and achievements waiting to be had. I won't go through the laundry list of preconceived bias built into critiquing the world's first, and most successful, roleplaying game I and my players obliterated in play. Suffice to say concepts such as immersion, in character, rich game world reacting to the players, player agency and self-directed adventure goals are pretty routine stuff around the Vanishing Tower game table.

Hitting the two year mark with this campaign has got me in the joyous position of thinking of conclusions, campaign endings. When does the campaign reach its end? My first two campaigns ended in the traditional manner of petering out with month-long breaks, rage quits, and changing personal schedules. This one though, Rom'Myr Dying Earth just might make it to a final resolution. A place where the character's stories are done, the last oaths have been uttered and the last betrayal suffered. Where the PCs get the just reward of fading into legend... It could happen. Maybe in 2020!

Death in Rom'Myr

The last session was a continuation of coming to grips with the denizens of the Pale Knight's Palace. They had indeed returned to the Aticorn with the 8 threads from the vampire lord’s cloak, and the creature of Faerie did release the party from the peculiar geas laid upon them. But they had left the young Violet behind in the nightmarish palace. None of the warriors could look each other in the eye if they left their potential meal-ticket lost and uncashed. So instead of pushing on to the realative safety of Le Freniae, the party turned around and marched back to the ruined structure which just last night held an alien conclave and was racked by terrible explosions. The daylight did little to relieve the gloom saturating the steep, forest hollow. Once inside they wasted little time plowing to the room of dragon eggs and the broken throne room. The 3 eggs which were left behind last night appear now to be gone. The throne room was appropriately barren, but the unbelievable events which overtook the group last in this room left behind signs of the awful reality which had transpired. 

Clues wrapped in a dropped communique hinted at deep conspiracy on now a cosmic scale. But nothing yet seen prepared them for the colossal marble snake coiled in the center of it’s room of rampage. Not a hallucinatory dream after all. Stone it was made and still it breathed and slumbered. Above the beast, as if suspended like an acrobat, the silvery beauty, the alien and powerful Aladonia floated like a billowing cloud over the rubble. Her advisory, the grotesque talking hair-skin thing, was no where in sight. An unoccupied alchemy lab provided insight on the child-snatching which they were bearing witness to. Their bowels turned to water as a closing, suffocating trap threatened a TPK and still no sign of the lovely Violet. Questions dogged their every step; what with the stealing of children? What was the significance of multiple dimensions filled with strange beings? And how was all this going to pay? 

Don't use Camtasia and Review Opportunities for the Interested

AA03 Purging Woth Nrld Oekwn's Muddy Hole is now in the editors hands, the Lulu files completed, proof ordered to inspect layout and graphic design issues! When final draft is uploaded I will want to offer PDF copies for interested reviewers. Richard Leblanc gets his own copy obviously. I used his illo's and stats for several monsters from Big Dragon Games CC1 Creatures Companion. 

The inclusion of creatures from this OSR packed bestiary guarantees your players will have some surprises. Nothing chills a player more than confronting a brand new species of monster! 

So, if you see yourself actually using this short adventure for an upcoming crawl I am happy to distribute. Email me at jay-at-vanishingtowerpress.com.

In other news; 

The audio production of my last live game session is complete, at least as far as I intend to take it. I should have just stripped the audio like I did at first and be done with it. Time involved properly editing an audio project is a time sink like you wouldn't believe. Camtasia is nothing special except a two hundred fifty price tag! There are solid, free screen capture and video editing software choices. Search around and review. You will find something which suits your needs easily.

With AA03 mostly in the bag work can resume on Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery. My work that is. Daniel Hernandez is still working on his fantastic line illo's but the previews he has sent me are amazing! Adventure drafting and setting guide drafting are the predominate work right now. Everything is now kind of assembled on a cork board of lines like a police investigation. Slowly you see parallel paths of work start to merge towards a finished product. Like driving a new road and suddenly finding yourself at your destination. 

Winter 2019-2020 looks to be a busy season for VTP releases, to see some of these long-simmering projects become adventure books for you to use!

The Shortest of Adventures

Reading to much ten foot pole can make me gloomy and despondent for honest industry. To combat this mood I challenged myself to write the shortest adventure I could and remain useful at the table. Even as a system agnostic module. Here is the result;

A Short Adventure

The PCs are passing through a rural village on their way to someplace else.

The locals ask for their assistance.

A lost relative of the long absent Lord has returned to the Lord's empty manor and claimed his inheritance.

This is enacted by a pair of tough henchmen who travel from hamlet to hamlet taking tribute from the scared peasantry.

If they give any more they will run out of their harvest stores.

The village is prepared to offer up wine and amorous friends, perhaps they are in need of craft services? If you cannot think of anything to entice the PCs interest you may resort to money. Just remember these poor sods are living on the edge.

Shortly the PCs get their chance to confront the two powerful mercenaries, as they are now coming to town. They have a cart and sturdy horse. They are in full plate and equipped with two handed weapons, say axe and sword. They talk a tough game, but are really poor, hungry peasants from a nearby village. They will yield quickly after taking any damage. They will plead their case, but the enraged citizens of the hamlet are angry for revenge.

After the killing the villagers pay off the PCs for their part. Then the villagers start trying on the armor. They think they can go around and start doing some extortion of their own. Everyone knows the hamlet over the bridge are a bunch of dunder-heads.

What do the PCs do?

Villagers are skilled only in farming and the like. They are mostly unarmored, but any in the impressive plate mail will have improved protection.

Things to consider:

- Where the armored men come from, and where is the stuff they have been pilfering?

- How many hamlets were victimized and how many hamlets were in on it?
- Change the cart to a truck and it is good to go for modern all the way to post-apoc!

My Five Favorite Role-playing Games

Gamma World: TSR's Basic Dungeons & Dragons was the game which introduced me into ttrpg's but it was Gamma World which really opened up the endless fun to be had with the role playing format. While D&D channeled my love for Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Gamma World allowed me to play out my passion for comic books. Kamandi and TheWarlord specifically. There was a certain freedom in world building and character creation which I could not embrace with D&D. Not that there was anything wrong with D&D, I just felt, as a kid, Gamma World asking more imagination from me than a game concerned with High Fantasy.

Champions: I love, love the role play potential built into comic books and Champions got my attention with the promise of custom character builds for your superhero, and by extension, your supers game world. Issues of Marvel with Dr. Doom and Iron Man battling it out in King Arthur's court and the ubiquitous future science fantasy woven in most comics of the day made it apparent in a supers role playing game I could fold in any genre trope into the campaign. The stacks, racks and boxes of used comics throughout comic book stores told me I would never be short of adventure material for my game. The breakdown with Champions came with the self same tools for custom builds prohibited breezy world building. As a Game Master I made the mistake of using the crunchy game mechanics as the method for game prep. I bogged down and just couldn't do it anymore. But Champions holds the number two spot because I did run it more than any other superhero game. And nailing down an important Game Master realization; the mechanics are for the PC's, not the GM!

Stormbringer/Elric!: Blood and souls for my lord Arioch. Not only did this game introduce me to pulp fantasy beyond Conan, it turned me on to another way to break from the level/class scriptures of Dungeons & Dragons. The ability to build a fantasy character as I see fit was liberating.

Why can't a PC wield a sword, wear power armor, fire a gun and use magic? My favorite stories and comics all have these polyglot type of characters. Why are my games restricting me? Obviously they are not. I was just too hidebound, narrow in my thinking and only as good at gaming as I was going to be. I find indie games and their popularity similar to the popularity of paint by numbers. Create a Van Gogh, in the comfort of your own comfort zone! Just follow these easy step by step instructions. Yeah this is fun to do, but this isn't art. This is not a challenge. But Chaosium's d100 system met my young person's ability half way and gave me a system which justified my belief the depth of role play was real. Any failings in the game where not a result of system, but within myself. Made me believe that if I didn't want a bad game just don't suck.

Renaissance: A smart polish on Chaosium's venerable d100 system Cakebread & Walton's black powder era game does all the right things for those who want to tap into this historical time period for fantastic gaming. Rules for Alchemy and Witchcraft add the right amount of fantastical for adept players and game masters to hit any high note they want. Humorous and cinematic, realistic and gritty grimdark and grotty. Renaissance will do it. It is my current number two favorite role playing game of all time because it is what I am running right now. At two and a half years the system has not only satisfied myself, it has kept the same group of online players invested since the first opening adventure!

USR Sword & Sorcery: Yes my favorite role playing game of all time is the one I built from the ground up using Scott Malthouse's (U)nbelievably (S)imple (R)oleplaying game mechanics. USR is a simple set of resolution mechanics balance against a PC having few attributes while at the same time offering an extremely player facing, flexible way for character customization. I used this generic role playing system to try out a deliberate approach to a game I though Gary Gygax and D&D first challenged and thrilled me to apprehend. Pulp fantasy; Howard, Moorcock, Carter, etc. was source material which I always envision when I daydream about role playing games. Why not just rely on these stories and tropes when running a game? Shouldn't I just let the rules and mechanics lie in the background waiting to be used when required? This may be rote for better gamers than me, but I had always relied on game mechanics to deliver the package, and this is exactly contrary to what original role playing games promised. USR gave me an opportunity to approach the art fresh with young expectations and seasoned eyes. The result was USR Sword & Sorcery and it was sufficient to run, after being out of gaming for 25 years, a swingy, blood soaked pulp fantasy campaign with a dedicated group of strangers on line for three years. Mission accomplished.

Problematic Interrogating of Colonial Oppression in your Misogynistic OSR game

It is what it is. Running a role playing game in Seventeenth Century Europe where all the superstitious historical and literary tropes are real. In a game sense. We all know witches aren't real, but it was "legal" to burn people alive. We know forcing others into bondage is horrid, but slavery is matter of course. We know zombie movies are a parody of the depredations humanity visits on itself, but the next Battle of the Bulge is just around the corner.

I love the fact that the horrid human fantasy is but window dressing in the furious car chase which is my Clockwork & Cthulhu campaign. Slavery, splat. Cowardice, splat. Alien infestation, splat. Thieving and double dealing, splat. Cannibalism, splat. Gun fights and murder, and murder, and murder, splat. Taking advantage of the unhinged and mentally soft, splat.

Coming from a literate society and playing with others who are well read in the classics; Kirby, Beowulf, Hustler, just makes for a great game. Nothing is sacred and everything is on the table. Traditional role playing games can take any premise, any genre, any implied conceit and make it rock if the principles of good gaming are respected; Game Master with a firm grip on the genre, and Player's who do stuff. After that the setting doesn't matter cause the random mechanics of game play just add an edge to the event. This being everyone at the table has done something awesome, and you know what, you still may get fucked. Trust your Game Master or become one. Do both and be of service to gamerkind. Use POD and DriveThru to make all you have available to others. This is the golden age of gaming. It can only get better!