Rogue Games Tabbloid -- June 25, 2009 Edition

25 June 2009

Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

ROGUE FEED

looking for.

I am a gamer

With MSH, I got fast paced super hero action, and was able to tell the stories that I wanted to. I changed rules to fit my vision, and ignored a lot of what was going on in the comic book world. With Ars Magica, my love for story telling was filled, and I bought into the concept of a shared gaming experience. I loved the setting, and for me this is how magic should be. Sadly I grew tired of the game and found myself researching more about the Middle Ages and less time writing stories to entertain my friends.

JUN 24, 2009 06:43P.M. I am a gamer. Games have been a major part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up playing such classics as Candy Land, Mousetrap, Monopoly, and too many others to mention. I remember when I was in the third grade I devised a game using my Star Wars figures. Gluing Lincoln Logs on a large piece of cardboard, the goal was to rescue Princess Leia and escape the Death Star. I played this game for hours with my friends, laughing at the truly nasty death cards we made up.

Then there was Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. To this day I still do not know what it is about WFRP that first attracted me to it. The magic system was not finished, Games Workshop released product of various quality, and then simply killed the game to make room for the lead figure juggernaut. The game languished for five-years until Hogshead took the licenses and slowly began to release new product.

It was not until I entered the 6th grade that I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. I had no idea what this game was. There was no board. Instead there were six funny shaped die. It was the summer of 1983 when my best friend Clayton took the role of Dungeon Master and escorted our little band into the terror known as Keep on the Borderlands.

The one thing that stands out for me is the world Warhammer FRP is set in. The world was deliciously dark and filled with hopelessness. Chaos hides behind most things, and often times the only differences between the “heroes” and villains is that the heroes are PCs. This is a world of nightmares, a world without heroes. It is a world with a sick sense of dark humor.

The summer was spent either playing soccer of braving the horrors that Clayton came up with. This was not art; this was a group of kids having a grand time using their imagination. It was also a group of kids who used this new game to propel them to study.

Regardless of what games were consuming my attention, two stayed with me, and were played regularly.

I was always a good student, but it was not until I started playing that I was charged with the task to learn everything and anything related to the middle ages. I wanted to know as much as I could, and my friends and I competed to see who could learn more.

One is D&D. Not AD&D, but D&D. Here is a game that was self contained and allowed the DM to do what he wanted. From the old Basic and Expert sets, to D&D Rules Cyclopedia, I ran a campaign that lasted from 1985 to 1998. This game gave me the tools to make my own world, and ignored the ever increasing volumes from AD&D.

As I grew up my taste in games changed. I still played D&D, but branched into Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and Boot Hill. It was not until a friend bought a copy of the Middle Earth Role Play that I broke out of the TSR ghetto I was stuck in. This one game opened more doors to me then I would ever know.

The other game? Pacesetter’s Chill. Oh man, how I love this game. The rules might not be the greatest, but the sheer wealth of cool bits and ideas is something I still return to. Even today, even though I have my own horror game of Colonial Gothic, I still run occasional one or two session games of Chill. Hell, one of the earlier versions of the game that became Colonial Gothic, used Chill. I love this game.

MERP, lead to Villains & Vigilantes, which lead to Bushido, which lead to more games then you can possibly guess. My taste varied with age, and I even remember the one summer when I played Rolemaster almost religiously. I can safely say that the mind numbing charts would forever sour me on overly complicated games. (Well that summer and the Rolemaster game I played at Gen Con in 1989).

Game systems come and go and my taste in games seem to change every day, but it is these two games that I keep finding myself returning to time and time again.

There were some games that I became hooked on and stuck with for longer then I care to admit. Marvel Superheroes, is one example of this, while Ars Magica is another. You can not get much further apart in style and content than these two games. Yet at the time they were what I was

Posted in Games, Life, thoughts Tagged: colonial gothic, Games, Gaming, thoughts

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

25 June 2009

they’d make themselves an emotional wreck in fairly short order. ROGUE FEED

The absence of constant esctasy is not an indication that a campaign is failing or that it’s grown stale. It could be, but, in my experience, it’s mostly an indication that a campaign is growing comfortable and that players and referee alike have settled in to a pleasant routine. Now, routines must be broken from time to time and I certainly don’t advocate allowing a campaign to fall into a rut. No one wants that. However, we need to be sure to distinguish between comfortability and staleness. The two are not the same and to confuse them has, I fear, brought a premature end to many a campaign on the verge of having the staying power that leads to long-term satisfaction.

Dwimmermount, Session 14 JUN 24, 2009 10:42A.M. The most recent session of Dwimmermount was one of those sessions. Anyone who’s run a longstanding campaign knows what I’m talking about. It’s not that the session wasn’t fun or that nothing transpired during the time we played it, because neither of those things is true. Indeed, the party ventured further into the current level and made a number of possibly significant discoveries, chief among them being that Dwimmermount was used at some point as a monastery devoted to the Thulian god of magic, Turms Termax. Granted, they had suspected this for some time, but the preponderance of religious artifacts, monastic cells, and ritual chambers more or less confirmed it.

I think a lot of gamers are too impatient to let a campaign find its feet and they bolt at the first sign of things becoming “boring.” By many measures, my last session was “boring,” because it consisted mostly of mapping and some scattered combats, few of which had any greater significance and none of which were all that dangerous to the PCs. Nevertheless, I think last session was important and contributed to the health of the campaign, even though nothing particularly exciting transpired. But, months from now, as the campaign has unfolded further, no one will remember Session 14’s dullness. If they remember it at all, it’ll be for its significance in the ex post facto “story” of exploring the megadungeon, a story they themselves helped to create through their shared memories of time spent around my dining room table imagining a world not their own.

It’s also not that the session was devoid of “action.” The characters continued to encounter vermin, such as giant spiders and centipedes, as well as hobgoblins and an increasing number of undead, albeit of a mindless variety. There were traps to be overcome and secret doors to be found and all the usual obstacles one would expect of a megadungeon. The characters have also finally begun to find some valuable treasure, not the paltry copper and silver coins they have found in large numbers to date. Brother Candor acquired a stash of clerical scrolls for future use, as well as some potions, which will come in handy. And Dordagdonar and Iriadessa inched ever closer to advancing a level.

Nothing of great import may have happened in the game, but I can assure you something of great import happened in my home this past weekend: my friends and I got together and gamed.

But Session 14 was a classic “just a bunch of stuff that happened” session and my players were fine with that. That’s the nature of RPG campaigns in my experience: not every session is a roller coaster ride of excitement. That level of intensity is neither sustainable week after week nor, in my opinion, desirable. “Slow” sessions are valuable. They give everyone a chance to catch their breath and they’re very low maintanence for the referee. I didn’t have to come up with impromptu NPC personalities or describe an entire quarter of the city-state because the PCs wandered off on some whim. I could simply use my notes to the dungeon and proceed more or less as planned without much hassle, which I appreciated. I should note too that my players seem to do so as well. It being Father’s Day, our contingent was smaller than usual and the social aspect of the evening loomed larger than usual. This was a “comfort” dungeon crawl — something to pass the time without placing too much of a burden on either my players or myself.

ROGUE FEED

Retrospective: Swordbearer JUN 24, 2009 08:20A.M.

I am loath to compare long-term campaigning to anything in the real world, since I know from hard experience that one or more people will misread my intention. Therefore, I will be vague and simply say that, in life, there are many long-term, emotionally-engaging commitments into which one can enter. To expect that those commitments will each and every time generate the same kind of passion and intensity is a recipe for disappointment. Sometimes — often — one is simply content and perhaps even grateful that the level of emotional engagement has subsided to less thrilling levels. I doubt that human beings can be ecstatic 24/7, 365 days a year and I rather suspect that, if they tried,

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25 June 2009

I read Swordbearer with great relish. Consisting of three landscapeformat books of varying length (illustrated throughout with black and white art by the then-unknown Denis Loubet), Swordbearer wasn’t quite what I expected. The game has no classes, being a skill-based one in which any character can conceivably learn any skill. The system isn’t particularly complex by today’s standards, but it seemed a fair bit more involved than D&D. That made it harder for me to get into it than I’d hoped, but I soldiered through nonetheless. The magic system is interesting and based on a node system that’s inspired by a modified version of Asian elemental theory. There’s also spirit magic that’s based on the four humors of classical Western medicine. What set Swordbearer apart, though, was its broader “social” focus than D&D. There were many, many more playable intelligent races, including the bunrabs, an obvious nod to designer Dennis Sustare‘s earlier Bunnies & Burrows RPG. This made it possible to create a campaign that felt very different than the implied pseudo-medieval setting of most of the fantasy RPGs with which I was familiar at the time. There were also rules about social status that tied into the game’s abstract wealth system, as well as just what being a member of a particular social class meant in the context of the game world.

The early 80s were a funny time in gaming, both for me personally and for the hobby generally. By “funny,” I mean a combination of “interesting” and “unusual.” Gaming, particularly fantasy gaming, was now firmly ensconced as a popular pastime, with everyone trying to cash in on the craze. And there was lots of experimentation with different rules, formats, styles of presentation, and so on. The result was a kaleidoscope effect, making my visits to places like The Compleat Strategist simultaneously exhilarating and confusing. What were all these different games and which ones would I like? There were reviews in Dragon and White Dwarf, of course, as well as the opinions of the guys in the game store, but, even then, I knew that reviews didn’t tell the whole story and that the opinions of reviewers didn’t always jibe with my own preferences.

All of this may seem like old hat nowadays, but, in 1982, it was a revelation to me and it gave Swordbearer a “serious” feel to it that both impressed and frightened me at the same time. I very much wanted to play Swordbearer, but didn’t think I was “good enough” a referee to do so, a feeling I’d also gotten from RuneQuest, another game I owned but never really managed to play. Looking back on it now, I feel bad I never had the chance to try out Swordbearer with my friends. I think, even though the gravitational pull of D&D ultimately proved irresistible, my gaming would have benefitted a lot from having had the chance to test out some of Swordbearer‘s innovations.

There was also the fact that, then as now, D&D exerted a strange effect over most gamers. By 1982, D&D was starting to feel a little “stale” to me and I was keen for new gaming horizons. It’s not that I didn’t play other RPGs — I did, particularly Traveller and Call of Cthulhu — but D&D was my introduction into the hobby and had left its mark on my imagination in a way no other game ever would. Consequently, even when I was looking to replace D&D with another game, D&D was still there in my mind. It was the game against which I was judging other games and I know now that that probably lessened my ability to give other RPGs the fair shake they deserved.

After my recent interview with its designer, I dusted off my copy from the garage and have begun re-reading it and it’s quite the trip down memory lane. It’s also sparking some ideas in my head that might see use in my Dwimmermount campaign. Copies of the game pop up on eBay fairly regularly and the ghost of Fantasy Games Unlimited (which published the game’s second edition) sells both PDF and print copies here. You might consider picking up a copy, if only to see firsthand some of the diversity the gaming of the early 80s had. It really was a magical time, both for the hobby and the industry, and we shall not see its like again.

It was in this context that Swordbearer entered my life. I knew Heritage Models quite well, having purchased many of their miniatures and having enjoyed their Dwarfstar microgames like Barbarian Prince and Outpost Gamma (both of which, along with the rest of the line are available as free electronic downloads at this site, thanks to the kindness of their current copyright holder, Reaper Miniatures). So, when I saw this odd little boxed game, which proclaimed its contents to be “realistic, fast-playing, complete, expandable,” I picked it up, hoping to find a game to cure my D&D malaise.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

25 June 2009

ROGUE FEED

And to answer the question I know many of you have. The 13 Colonies and Natives are covered in the next chapter, Chapter 8. There is a logic

[13 Chapter in 13 Weeks] Chapter 7. The chapter you get a lot of background.

to the layout. In all Chapter 7 is a tight chapter filled with the bits and pieces that aid both the player and GM in running and playing the game. I really like

JUN 24, 2009 07:13A.M.

this chapter, and I hope others do as well.

Two posts this week about Colonial Gothic Revised. Earlier this week I talked about the short stories written by Jennifer Brozek that are found in the book. Today I want to talk about the next chapter, Chapter 7.

ROGUE FEED

Colonial Gothic Revised — Proof in hand

Chapter 7 begins a major section of the game: background material. Though background — be it historical and setting — is found throughout earlier chapters, starting with Chapter 7, background takes center stage. So what does this chapter cover? Well the title explains it all: “Player’s Guide to the Colonies.”

JUN 23, 2009 08:28P.M. At exactly 5:00 PM CST today the doorbell at the Rogue Games Compound was heard. When the elite crack security ninja team returned they informed me that a Messenger in Brown had delivered a package. Said package, once inspected, was the proof of Colonial Gothic: Rulebook aka Colonial Gothic Revised.

One of the things I wanted to do with Colonial Gothic Revised was address a lot of criticisms I received about the first edition. That criticism was that there was not a lot in the first book talking about the world of the colonists. Little things people wanted to see was discussions about religions, education and the like. For me, I wrongly assumed that gamers and GMs new as much as I did about the period. I also assumed that those who wanted to know about the period would do research. I assumed wrongly on this, and for that reason when I decided to tackle Colonial Gothic Revised, the first thing I wanted to do was make the period as accessible as I could. Chapter 7 is an example of how I did this. The goal with Chapter 7 was to give all the information a player and GM would need about the period. This is not indepth, and if you want to know more about the period reading a few of the books found in the Bibliography are good places to start. Still this chapters answers questions like:

So how does it look? Awesome. Said book is thicker than the first version, hell it is thicker that Thousand Suns, and looks so much better. Ariana, upon seeing the proof, had one word to say: “Wow.” Book will be printed sometime this week and then it wings it ways to the warehouses.

• What was the education like?

ROGUE FEED

Colonial Gothic Revised: The first review

• Can my hero go to a library? • What were the main religions?

JUN 23, 2009 05:46P.M. • How do you get from Point A to Point B? Robot Viking has the first review of Colonial Gothic Revised. You can read it here. I am a happy person right now.

I answer these questions, as well as others, and give you enough to use to create your hero, or as a GM, to throw in details. One of the larger sections in this chapter is the one dealing with Religion. I included this because it is an important topic and and important detail about the period.

>

Also found here is a long discussion about magic and alchemy. Unlike the sections found in the earlier parts of the chapter, this is where Colonial Gothic’s background comes in. It is with the magic discussion that you start to see what I mean about the secret history of the game. There is a lot of historical truth in the section, but there are also touches to things that happened in the background.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

25 June 2009

ROGUE FEED

Gaming as a Social Occasion

ROGUE FEED

JUN 23, 2009 01:36P.M.

The Rhythm of the Old School

It was suggested in the comments to another post of mine that I run a “tight ship” when it comes to my gaming sessions given how much we accomplish each week, but the reality is quite different. As I explained, most of our gaming sessions run about six hours, of which no more than half of that time is spent sitting at my dining room table and rolling dice.

JUN 23, 2009 09:30A.M. Running the Dwimmermount campaign has been a valuable experience on many levels, chief among them being how much fun I am having playing “D&D” again. I really can’t emphasize enough the pleasure that this campaign has brought me. As I’ve said repeatedly in this blog, it’s all well and good to theorize and philosophize about this stuff — obviously — but, without play, it’s all largely meaningless. This is a hobby, after all, not a debate club and it’s play that really matters. I’ve had fourteen sessions of this campaign since January (the most recent of which I’ll post about later today or tomorrow) and they’ve all reminded me in various ways why I not only entered but stuck with this hobby for nearly 30 years. I think we all need to be reminded of that regularly or else the old school movement will, like many other movements, eventually become hollow and lifeless.

There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is that our gaming sessions are an adjunct to friendly get-togethers. Because we’re all adults with other distractions and responsibilities, our Sunday afternoon meetings are our only occasions to see one another face to face. Consequently, a goodly portion of our time is spent simply talking, whether it be about our mundane activities or our gaming-related ones. Likewise, we generally start play after dinner, which I make while I talking with my friends about this or that. It’s a long-standing ritual going back many years and I can’t imagine a more “business-like” arrangement where my friends arrive and we simply start gaming right away. That would feel wrong to me.

The other thing of which the Dwimmermount campaign has reminded me is that the much-derided resource management of old school games — the mythical “15-minute adventuring day” — is actually a boon rather than a bane. In the majority of our sessions, the party’s explorations into Dwimmermount cease because the players decide that they’ve used up too many of their finite resources — spells, potions, hirelings — to continue without seriously risking their own deaths. They then head out of the dungeon either to nearby Muntburg or (more likely) three-daysride-away Adamas to re-supply.

But that’s because, especially as an adult, I see gaming a social occasion, a time to indulge in some much-needed conviviality with dear friends. Even once we’re playing, our sessions are broken up with digressions, interruptions, and other “frame-breaking” events that we simply accept as part of the way we game nowadays. Looking back on my experiences as a younger person, this isn’t really much of a change from the way we used to game in the early days. The main difference is that we usually got together for much longer stretches of time and we generally didn’t make our own food. We often did have lunch or dinner together before we gamed. Such gatherings often involved my friend’s older brother and/or father playing with us, so they were especially well liked and remain powerful memories of the best that this hobby offers.

The result is that, with a few exceptions, most forays into Dwimmermount are not very long and typically occur at inopportune or at least unplanned times. That is, the players can’t anticipate when one of their front-line fighters is going to be slain by a giant ant or when their magic-user will run out of sleep spells. These events may in fact occur just as they’re about to explore a new section of the mountain-dungeon for which they’ve been searching for some time or that they know will contain both great riches and great danger. But prudence — that fine old school virtue — dictates that discretion is almost always the better part of valor. Thus, they leave the dungeon keen to return as quickly as they can, because they are often on the verge of some new discovery. The finitude of their resources regularly ensures that they never have their fill of the dungeon in any given session; they are kept hungry for more, which ensures that the megadungeon holds their interest.

So, in truth, my sessions tend to be rather rambling and unfocused, because we treat gaming as but one part, albeit an important one, of a larger social occasion. I suspect the reason why it seems we accomplish so much is that we’re all of a like mind when it comes to the campaign and what we want out of it. Consequently, the exploration of the dungeon is done fairly efficiently, with a designated leader and cartographer both setting the pace for how things proceed. Likewise, we’re all very experienced roleplayers, so we quite easily fall into extended in-game conversations without the need for much prompting, which helps move along most sessions as well. In short, we’ve all been gaming for nearly three decades and that makes it possible to get a lot done despite the distractions of its also being our only occasion to see one another each week.

That’s not the only benefit of managing finite resources, however. All these trips back to Muntburg or Adamas to re-supply and seek out new hirelings to replace their fallen comrades are opportunities to roleplay and to explore the world outside the dungeon. Some referees could simply let the PCs buy what they need without incident, treating it as a purely mathematical exercise and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not every trip back to Adamas is an occasion for me to throw some random encounter at the party or to introduce some eccentric NPC — but many are. I relish those opportunities, because they’re where I get to ground

Of course, none of us would want to give up those distractions; they’re half the reason why we get together at all.

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25 June 2009

the characters and the dungeon in a larger context and to create a “web” of connections that I can then later use for ideas, both within and without the dungeon. Many of the emerging “plots” of my Dwimmermount campaign were extemperaneous inventions of mine as a result of rolls on a random encounter table or simply riffing off one of my players’ comments about his character’s activities in the city. Those inventions were made possible by the fact that the PCs aren’t self-sufficient. They have to leave the dungeon and return to their home base, sometimes several times in a session. I don’t see that as a flaw in old school gaming; I see it as something praiseworthy, for, without it, there’d have been no Jasper the alchemist or Saidon the spoon-wielding cleric of Typhon or the Argent Twilight or many other now-integral elements of the campaign. Because the characters only adventure 15 minutes a day, as the saying goes, they had to fill the other 23 hours and 45 minutes with something. That something is the stuff from which a campaign is made, the stuff that keeps the players coming back week after week keen to keep playing. Resource management is, in my opinion, one of the key features of old school gaming. Its removal, or at least its watering down, is a marker for the end of that style of play. I also happen to think the impetus behind its removal is built on a fallacy, one that equates any form of “downtime” as antithetical to fun gaming. My experiences with Dwimmermount over the last six months have taught me that, while resource management guarantees that, at some point, the characters must pause for a time, that’s not always a bad thing. The action may end when the PCs leave the dungeon, but that doesn’t mean the adventure does.

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