Anvil of the Sun Belongs in Gamma World 1e

 Michael Gibbons has a great blog called Metal Earth and it is chock full of his delightful thickly inked line drawings for his games and books. I fell in love with an evocative map he published early in the blog's history, a map I like to refer to as Anvil of the Sun. It screams 1e Gamma World and my favorite post-apoc comic from the seventies, Kamandi, Last Boy on Earth. Now that I am playing in a Gamma World 1e/2e campaign (as a PSH called Kamanja) I had a terrible jones to world build on the old blank United States of America map which was included in the original game.  

Many a wee lad had trouble like I did when first exposed to this vast blank map. While the outline of the USA was lovingly tortured by the early age of the global devastation which besets the campaign world, the map was empty. Where and what should middle-school kids put in this future earth? Where to start? DC, New York, Miami? I played the great module The Albuquerque Starport but never connected it to a greater Gamma World.

Metal Earth solves all this, for me. Last night I reviewed Anvil of the Sun and contemplated where I should set it on the original 1e map. The important feature of Anvil is that there are large bodies of water on either side of the land mass. This being the Atomic Ocean and the Stained Sea. A quick search of  the US map gives me only one logical place for this Metal Earth map and that is the Baja of Mexico, Baja California, which once enclosed the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez. Now I'm going to set up a scale to interpose the Anvil map onto the new and reduced Baja.

I've chosen 16 kilometers per hex on the Anvil map and extrapolated this to the 43.7 kilometers of the greater US map. I've actually changed the official Gamma World scale to 48 kilometers per hex because this neatly conforms to a 3x3 hex area on this new campaign map.

Here is what it looks like: Now I only need to populate the radioactive sandbox with my own original details as suggested by Michael's great map. I've decided Shaft 17 is home of a large PSH colony of Restorationists (I do love PSH's it seems) determined to restore their world into a New Earth akin to the past world which has been lost. The Tower of Zola has been tagged with being the shrine of the dominant religious belief on the Anvil with the Priests of Zola residing in the fascinating city Skull. Skull and the Priests of Zola are the dominant power of the region with the small nation-state of Szan and the Shaft 17 colony the next legitimate recognized powers of note. Notice the hex labeled "Ghostland" just east of Shaft 17 standing in the poison waters of the Atomic Ocean. What exactly is these water-based ruins and its relation with Shaft 17 is the first mystery of the campaign world I wish to resolve before I move on to the Tower of Zola. A forbidden, taboo site for the average Shaft 17'teener is my first obvious leap, but the devil is in the details they say :)
 

 

I'm Writing a Treasure Island Setting Guide

Thomas Denmark at Night Owl Workshop was soliciting for a writer for a campaign guide for his OSR game Freebooters, a pirate-themed retro-clone intended to be compatible with the original fantasy RPG. Night Owl appears to like formatting their OSR games in the original 0e format, fondly known as the Little Brown Books. Raiders, Guardians, Colonial Troopers, and Warriors of the Red Planet are some of the company's previous releases.

Specifically a Treasure Island campaign guide/adventure/setting book. Ridiculously long 25,000 word document for the usual pittance found in the indie ttrpg publishing world. Sign me up I said. For the love of all things degenerate the blind fools recruited me to pen a red tide of pirate intrigue and adventure on the Spanish Main!

So VTP is happy to announce are first freelance gig with a written contract and everything! Seriously, I pounced on this cold solicitation because of the subject matter. While the Clockwork & Cthulhu campaign I ran online is well in the rearview mirror of life I still have all the material I generated when the PCs hit the high seas for the New World and got involved in their own fucked up pirate action. Not so much in ship to ship combat, but got involved in the despicable slave trade on the Gold Coast and a Spanish raid on the island of Roatan before they plunged into the Central American jungle to battle evil Mayan necromancers. 

I did a stupid amount of research on late seventeenth century sailing and colonial exploitation for the game run, but it was easy to do because the subject material was fascinating and I had stumbled on some first source memoirs of sailors who experience the pirate trade up close and personal. 

On top of this Treasure Island still remains one of my all time favorite adventure yarns ever writ. Give me Billy-Bones swinging a cutlass at Black Dog's head any day over Bilbo sweating out a riddle contest against Gollum any day! It is not hard to recall the heart palpitations I suffered when Jim faced off against ruthless pirates in the rigging of the Hispaniola off the shores of Skeleton Island. The anxiety I felt while the good guys hashed out desperate strategy under musket fire in the block house. Stevenson displayed a mastery of pace in his famous book and made me wonder how much REH owes to RLS's for his adaptation of brisk pacing when he set out to write his pulp fiction. I read this book, and Howard's yarns, before I ever got ahold of Basic D&D and though as a kid I could not use the technique all that well, pace of adventure has remained an all important ingredient in the games I run.

There are some exciting and unique challenges inherent in turning a pirate adventure story into a full blown campaign setting and adventure and this is what I am really in it for. Doesn't hurt in trying to get some street cred outside of my own self published stuff too! 

Crooks in the Hobby

 An interesting as well as sad post was put up on the rpg subreddit today and highlighted another bad actor in the TTRPG industry walking away with $100,000 in Kickstarter funds and delivering no tangible product. 

I suggested, as this list gets longer every year, pinning a message at the top of the subreddit listing bad actors in the TTRPG industry cause these punks never go away. They ghost the gaming world for a few years and then pop back up. And I'm not thinking so much of the consumer, when it comes to Kickstarters backers seem all to willing to let failure slide, no I'm thinking of the freelance folks. The artists and writers who sign on and eventually get stiffed when the jig is up and the money is gone. This where the real shit lies. Stiffing subcontractors is a matter of course in any industry which operates this way. Sure there are disagreements on whether a sub has met obligations for full payment or not, but the TTRPG industry smells of one of the places where it is part of the "business" model. The person handling the cash flow has little to fear when they pay themselves first, even if it means failing on the project and hired help. 

A freelancer has little recourse but to know as much about the people they intend to do business with and make a judgement call. But this kind of information is not easily found. 

So if you have dreams of making it big in the shallow pool of TTRPG's add Jim McLure and Emily Reinhart to your list of poisoned pills.

Circling Back to Online Campaign Manager

 In an earlier post I talked about my use of an online campaign manager for my games. At the time I was running a fantasy game and a supers game. I also set up three others for my solo roleplaying. My reason for liking them was a permanent record available as long as I have an internet connection.

For the fantasy game the campaign was coming to a conclusion so my entries were more of a way to clean out some three ring binders and touch the history one more time before shelving. The supers game I need to have a place for stats and rules I needed to access quick because I was using Champions and there are to many rules for me to effectively adjudicate and maintain interesting banter. The solo stuff is perfect for the online campaign manager. I play at these so seldomly it saves space on my shelves and if I pick one up in three months all the details of what was going on are at my fingertips. Once again I can play these games on the road.

My current game, my only game I am running, is a continuation of my supers campaign but with the DC Heroes rules. Specifically the Blood of Heroes Special Edition rule book. 

As this has been going on I have been using three ring binders less and less. Has nothing to do with the use of a campaign manager though. I believe I have just settled into my "minimalist" approach to world building and game notes. 

I love these compact, hardbound notebooks for all my brainstorming and upcoming adventure building. The one in this photo has the Rom'Myr fantasy campaign from the time the PCs arrived in Zeu Orb to the finish and the Champions campaign which has now morphed into a MEGS campaign. The other book is a blank drawing pad. I have soft cover and hard cover books of these drawing pads and here I put down my drawings of the games action when inspired to do so. And this is all I'm using except having a hard copy of a games rulebook nearby. I'm not even writing things up on my computer anymore. My file folders for games are now just a repository for pictures I scanned, pics from the internet and character sheets so I can print out a villain's profile I need before a game. I sometimes write a session report, but I would rather draw some pictures of the action then write down the action. Besides I record all my game sessions so I have an audio record which is the best session report you are ever going to get. 

When I got back into gaming in 2012 I started with my USR Sword & Sorcery campaign and I have three to four thick three ring binders of the whole damn affair. Same for my second campaign Clockwork and Cthulhu. My shift to a minimalist approach began when I stumbled on means to record game sessions. And it has steadily refined into a not-time-consuming means of game prep and organization behind the scenes of my other overt attempts at taming the beast which is DM'ing. 

The point of all this is I don't use an online campaign manager. I take that back, I have a MeWe group for the game but this is just to post when the next game is and a quick way for anyone to get a hold of anyone else. I look at this as a continuous refining of an artistic process. I love to put pen to paper, to sketch, write and think. Compact size of notebook restrains going on and on with text. I hesitate to put anything down which isn't immediately relevant. A good way to stay in the meditative state of "the action is where the players are!"

I have come to the conclusion I have no use for online campaign managers, go figure.