I love the OSR

If it wasn't for the Old School Renaissance I don't know if I would have ever found my way back to the most creative exercise I've ever had the privilege to participate in.

Somewhere between eleven and twenty seven I had always been made to feel that playing a table top rpg was something to be ashamed of. But I kept the important books on my book shelves, in the trunk of my car, in my back pocket hitchhiking. Lined paper in rain soaked bus stops scribbled full of fantastic world, villains, connections.

And pissed off because this medium I loved so much had garbage directions for how to play the game. I didn't know this at the time. I felt there must be something wrong with me. If so many people are into this game, fuck it was a cultural phenomenon as big as skateboarding, and I can't get it... What am I doing wrong?

So I gave it up. In 1998 on Lower Hurrican Gulch at an off the grid cabin where I live in the
Elk Mountain range I torched the whole collection. I was getting "real".

I've made many foolish mistakes in my life, and I'm not done yet, but that was by far the worst. I would have limped through life three times less the person I am if I did not resent this act.  Not that my creative endeavors lapsed because I remove rpg's from my daily scribbling, reading life, just that they kept swirling around undirected.

Fast forward to Gary Gygax's death and I'm googling D&D and I stumble upon an essay about some guy traveling across country and showing up at Gary's house and playing. I haven't been able to trace this article down again, but yeah, the author of the essay was saying it was amazing to just drive up to Gary'ss house and there were people hanging out and you could just start playing D&D at the picnic table with the guy who created this game. I am so stupid. Instead of laying carpet in Daytona Beach I could have gamed at Gary Gygax's picnic table. Instead of surfing and doing drugs in Tijuana I could have gamed at Gary Gygax's picnic table. Instead of climbing fourteeners and big mountain skiing down into potential avalanche chutes I could have gamed at Gary Gygax's picnic table. Instead of .... Yada yada yada.

Long story short, the OSR has given back what I thought I lost, and I love you all for it, roll d10 tell me what you get;

1- You are a weepy tart aren't you.
2- My half orc father would suck the juice out of your finger bones,
3- I'm surprised they gave you clothes milk sop.
4- Clean the latrine and we won't kill you, yet.
5- Got any coin?
6- There is room for sycophants such as yourself.
7- I believe your private parts may fetch a fair price on the open market.
8- Rumor is...
9- A breath of fresh air in a cloistered belfry, give this man a fresh towel.
10- Have you tried the sorbet?

Sailing Vessels for USR

For sailing vessels commonly found during the age of Sword & Sorcery pulp fiction adventures I have turned to Elric!'s Sailing on the Seas of Fate supplement from Chaosium for basic seafaring statistics.


There is a nice spread of different types of sailing vessels to be found in its pages; from simple canoe to two-masted brigs and war galleys. It also provides a nice guide of terminology you will find when describing characteristics of sailing vessels.

Having a ready made terminology for adjudicating sea adventures I find immensely useful when I'm trying to provide a nautical setting, and Chaosium does provide enough of this bedrock information.

The book is also useful for providing basic answers to everyday mechanical questions one would encounter plying your fantasy seas regardless of the game system to be used. The most important of these being movement speeds.

One topic the book does not cover are costs of purchasing and maintaining a sailing vessel ins a fantasy world. A sailing vessel naturally occurs as a likely resource sink for adventurers who have looted their fair share of moldering crypts. That and land holdings, estates would likely come up as possible uses for the PC's ill-gotten gains. Mercenary forces too. With enough gold any barbarian dog can put together a band of desperate sell swords, but how much gold is that really? How do you come up with a sensible economic scale for these above mentioned enterprises?

I'm not saying the Elric! supplement should have addressed all these topics, but if you have costs on ships and what it takes in men and material to maintain them on a monthly basis you should be able to extrapolate out all these other concerns for your campaign world.

In the spirit of the USR rules set I have had to approach the Chaosium BRP system with an eye towards stripping game elements and mechanics to a minimum. Seaworthiness, Hull Quality, Structure Points, these all become your USR Hits, Armor, Stats... Specialisms can be used to detail characteristics to differentiate say a war ship from a merchant cog. For example;

The Moebius; a Ghazorian merchant cog, 15 crew members.
Hull Quality: 4         Length: 70'   Beam: 18'  Draft: 7'
Seaworthiness: 22

The Sailing on the Seas of Fate descriptions and uses of the few game statistics for the boat are easily understood, and can be taken out and used on their own in most fantasy settings. The Sailing on the Seas of Fate ship record sheet provides a great compass heading for "stat'ing" up a sailing vessel in USR game terms and can be adequately shoehorned into USR's simple format.

From my experience with D&D, Champions, GURPS, BRP, etc. vehicles in general become overly complex character sheets and their utility gets buried under the time heavy bookkeeping and cost calculating. For both the player and the GM. And vehicles in a campaign world, at some level become a commodity and therefore must be able to generated in large numbers.Through USR I am trying to reduce the paperwork so everyone can spend more time courting adventurous death. Unless your players want a crunchy sea battle. I think these rules can be used with battle maps and detailed turn sequences if everyone wants to game out a tactical simulation.

I found Zach S.'s Wavecrawl Kit a useful tool as well for random encounters at sea. Combined with the Sailing on the Seas of Fate event tables I have plenty of material to game out fantastic Sword & Sorcery sailing adventures. If the supplementary rules I'm hacking into my Sword & Sorcery game are lacking in any area I would say I don't have rules for flying creatures and vehicles. At some point I will search the web for useful rules to hack and add them in.

Pulp PDF's

This seems to be a site where you can download a pdf of old pulp magazines available in the public domain.

This type of original source material should be of keen interest to the harried Game Master desperate for plot hooks, npc's, adventure seeds, world info, items, etc.

Thanks to +Rob Garitta for pointing this site out.

Cracking the Nut

How do you all handle NPC actions in a "hotbed of political intrigue" interactions with the PC's? Do you heavily script the encounter, randomly roll, or rely on tables? How about the ever cascading complications from the PC's actions and gauging NPC's reactions? Specifically any behind the scenes info that the PC's would not be aware of? 

While in an average dungeon crawl monsters are prepared to act in rather well defined roles in the immediate tactical situation, providing a dynamic stage within the greater "world",and when to present antagonistic forces full on into the faces of the PC's  and make it a believable, logical  occurrence... I've always found a challenge. 

The old addage "if it makes for a better story, just do it" makes me feel good all over, it isn't the fine grain detail of some type of "method" I seem to be fumbling for.

Lately I rely on random tables for immediate, in game encounters than ruminate endlessly in between game dates on what to do with the situation. 

RPG in the wilderness...

Up front, I wanted this blog to chronicle how I got a face to face rpg game going in Aspen, CO, and it hasn't happened yet. Mostly because I haven't tried hard enough. Also, like the way I ski, I'm picky. I want blue bird days with fresh pow pow and the less than twenty minute access to the best in bounds, patrolled, extreme skiing available on the planet.

Hangout games have been real plus to. I would have to give up my hangout game if I committed to a live game here in my neighborhood. I'm not ready to do that.

But gaming in the wilderness is still a compelling idea for me. I really got jazzed on the idea when I was on a wonderful fall vacation in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The AMC hut system is a real treat along this eastern mountain chain, and allows those who can pay hotel rates to grab bed and board along this northern section of the Appalachian Trail.

The heart and soul of a hut system is the army of young volunteers which work the hut during the winter and summer. Maintaining the individual huts and servicing the guests, these seasonal kids  are energetic boot campers having a unique wilderness experience which... well, probably another whole post in itself.

Point is, out of all the groups who have spent their time working and living out there, smoking cigs, drinking some wine round the fire, the croo has played games. Cribbage, chess, yahtzee, now Settlers of Catan I've seen played. What a great place to play some table top rpg's, no?

I've gone ahead and put together a quick and dirty Kickstarter project to gather the funds I think I need to distribute dirt cheap copies of Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game, including dice, to the huts.

If you think this is a good idea please kick down. If you think this idea is unmitigated garbage please let me know

Vault of the Ni'er Queyon Review

Okay, there is a review of this FGU module here.

Quite surprised, as I am only pulling out a review of this dated module because it has sat on my shelf since it was printed in 1982, and once again I am vainly trying to find some useful material from its thin pages. No, that's not true. I'm dragging this old school product out so I can vent. I want to vent a bit on some of the garbage which was put on the store shelves when I was scraping milk money together so as to buy material which would give my friends a good game.

Here is my main beef; the module encourages the Star Master to waste the PC's time as much as possible. That they should be taken along a dangerous, fruitless trek across the galaxy pursuing a red herring. Then once the mistake is discovered, turn around and begin another long and dangerous trek across the galaxy and hope they are right this time.

I feel this kind of direction just frustrated my young, budding gamemastering experience. That this type of tutelage was leading me down a similar path of red herrings and fruitless encounters. Tricking my players and giving them nothing for their efforts. Granted I never got to run this module as the Space Opera rules were so difficult for me that we barely made it through character creation and a spacer brawl before it was back to D&D. I had better luck with Champions with my group cause I was a serious student of the medium and who doesn't like throwing Buicks and garbage trucks at each other.

I don't want to completely trash Stefan Jones' efforts. I think I get what he was after, a quest into an intriguing mystery which takes PC's deeper into the history of the game universe with the promise of a lucrative payoff in the end. But there is no evident compelling reason why the PC's should continue burning tremendous resources in the search.

The encounter of the old man pursued by thugs in an alley I can do. While not ripping original, it seems like the good stuff adventure seeds are manufactured from; that being the characters are free to chose how they want to approach the situation presented. Are they noble and wish to follow an honorable path, to seek deeper truths, to defend the value of knowledge? Or are they interested in being black hearted scoundrels worse than the current adversaries involved, only out for financial gain? But the clues which are to be gained from the book I found incomprehensible. I get that this first book is to lead to a second book which is to eventually lead to the secret vault, but the clues don't make any sense. Go ahead, read em out loud to an audience and tell me they get what you are talking about.

So than screw the narrative. You have a couple of ships stat'ed, two planets described and a some intriguing adventure locations. You should be able to do something with that. When  I purchased this module I did have a copy of the Space Opera rule book (which kicked my ass) and I still had a hard time deciphering how the illustrators keyed the deck plans of the ship. Is a deck plan key just too much to ask? Exploration of the first location, some ruins, will basically leave the PC's coming up empty. Trying to get to the ruins is the more interesting part of the adventure considering the details provided. But the ruins themselves are quite lackluster. Clues to continue come from garbage left behind by a previous adventure party. You could make a more interesting story line by making your PC's garbage collectors in a galactic city coming across a winning lottery ticket and trying to figure out how to cash it without looking like thieves.

The end point of the adventure is the treasure vault itself and it is not much. Bill Willingham's illustrations on these pages are actually the strongest feature of the entire module. The module should have been just about the vault. A detailed, mysterious, imaginative treasure vault filled with art collected by an unknown forerunner race is a cool idea. It begs the question, what would this species consider art? How would future species be able to recognize it for what it is? What importance would artistic taste and creativity from 150,000 years ago have to the current game world, what impact would it have? These are the nuggets that this module promised, but just never even came close to delivering on.

Why did I buy it? Cause I hoped a produced module for the game rules I just bought would help me decipher how best to deliver a great sci-fi rpg campaign. I trusted that Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham as artists on the project meant it was good stuff.

The name of the module is really the best part.

Seduction, Wagering and Drinking: more than reaction rolls

The following are suggest steps for resolving all three of the different game activities with the USR game system, it should point the CK in the right direction for adventure excitement.

The character makes a contested attribute roll against the people involved.

Relevant situational modifiers and specialism bonuses are factored. Critical success and fumbles are in effect.

The CK adjudicates what a win and a loss looks like.

The CK decides how many checks should be made but the idea is to focus on describing the results of a die roll, not to roll many dice.

Usually no more than two or three attempts at an individual contest can be attempted.

Seduction Example;

The seducer and the victim roll a contested attribute roll against Ego to find out if the victim resists the seduction. The unwilling victim and the seducer can modify their roll with apt Specialism, such as Diplomacy, Seduction, Charm, Court Etiquette, etc. If the victim fails to beat the seducer’s roll, the seducer is doing well and may continue. Otherwise, the victim realizes what’s going on.  Willing participants need not make checks to resist a seduction attempt, but simply give in to their aggressor's advances.

If the victim’s roll succeeds, it means that they realizes what is going on and lose interest, become angry, find amusement in the seducer’s efforts, etc.

The seducer can try again, but must subtract 2 from their roll each time the victim beats their roll. 

This penalty is cumulative, with a duration of 24 hours.