Rather than depress myself by dwelling on people I’ve lost or simply lost touch with, I shall instead only slightly depress myself by saying that the gamer I miss is this guy right here:
Gamer-me, late 1900s style…
That’s me in the 80s, that’s me in the kitchen (of a friend’s parents house), probably just about to play some game or other. Back then summers were no job, no school/college, playing D&D, Cthulhu or Runequest every day for what seemed like endless weeks at a time.
Of course now there’s more games than ever, and I have a smidgeon more money to pay for them, and then very little time to play them, and organising around work and family and other commitments. Yay.
There have been a great number of them – that time my character had a heart attack trying to stop a bomb; once in a James Bond RPG where the two ’00’ agents were killed and we just started the game again from the day before like a save point; I’ve probably mentioned this previously but ‘Before?’ – and the D&D I’m currently running for the family gaming group is basically just a string of memorable moments as the party: (1) attempt to befriend everything that’s not actively trying to kill them, or (2) steal all the doors.
I’d vote for Cairn again for this one, as everyone in the group seemed to take to it pretty swiftly during the first session. Second edition will be out soon and I’m not sure if that will complicate matters. The book’s certainly a lot longer now, but at lot of that is monster creation stuff and world building advice – so far as I can tell from the preview PDFs, the core rules are still short and to the point.
Also I should mention Hero Kids, which was the first game I ran for the family group several years ago.
Characters have a certain amount of dice in various skills. You want your character to do that thing, you roll that many dice, the opponent rolls their dice, highest roll wins. Doesn’t really get any more complicated than that. Simple rules, great friendly art style. Also there’s a Space expansion set for science fiction style adventures.
A character sheet for one of the many classes in Hero Kids…
As for the Day Seventeen question about ‘an engaging RPG community’?
In the olden days that would have been Dragonslayers at QUB in Belfast, but now it’s mostly dice.camp on Mastodon where I tend to just lurk about absorbing the ambiance.
I love the Chromebook stuff from Cyberpunk, and the massive lists of equipment you find D&D stuff, not to mention the heaps of 1920s-esque gear from Call of Cthulhu et al.
My main issue with RPGs… or maybe it’s not an ‘issue’ so much as a thing that I love about them, is that I find almost all characters compelling. Any random selection of numbers or traits you hand me and I start to wonder what they’re thinking, what their plans are, what happens next…
Obviously, it’s great to come up with detailed and specific characters, min-maxed to perfection, but literally anything also works for me.
For example, look at this random image I found on my hard drive:
Come get some…
This is, I believe, some sort of spinning fighting Mexican-wrestler style toy I got for the kids many Christmases ago.
But now that I’ve rolled some stats in Cairn, he’s now Gringle Getri, an apprentice butcher, tall for his age and lately banished from his trade in a local town, for reason as yet unexplored. And now he’s setting out into a world of adventure with only a big knife, a gaudy yellow tabard and a strange painted face mask to protect him.
What’s next for Gringle? Dunno. Might run a solo game though and find out.
The question for the day is: Evocative environments?
My answer for this is (amusingly for those who know) Broken Rooms.
But first, a quick shout out to the ‘realms’ creation section of Kevin Crawford’s Silent Legions RPG.
Silent Legions is a Cthulhu Mythos-esque game, run using old school D20 rules, with the twist being that you get to create your very own mythos and an entire pantheon of godlike things to trouble mankind. Part of the process offers the opportunity to create sub-worlds or realms called ‘kelipah’ – ranging in size from a single room to an ‘entire world…though it may not respect the geographic laws of mundane reality’. There’s various tables for random generation of features, peoples, technology level etc. It’s fun stuff.
The sort of thing you can create in Silent Legions
Using just the first six rows of the relevant table, I came up with the following:
A blasted waste, with vast blocks of earth and rock floating above the plains, where the vegetation is at certain times of day intangible, and what creatures you can see appear dead and yet continue to move…
Broken Rooms, the RPG previously known as The Nearside Project, features variations of Earth, variations where Something Bad Has Happened. There’s one with an alien invasion, one where an asteroid hit, a freezing one, a burning one, the one with nanotech zombies…
As the player characters will most likely be travelling from variation to variation in the course of the game, it’s important for the GM to set the proper vibe, and the rules offer suggestions on how to do this by way of lighting, musical cues etc, and how best to emphasise what is different from place to place. Are there corner shops and newspapers say, or burning cars and half eaten corpses in the streets?
The rules also feature explanations of each variation in the form of what purport to be actual documents/reports from the relevant Earth. An example of a bit of one is given below, and rest assured the fact I wrote this particular one is purely coincidental…
I wrote a bunch of these weeks ago and then spent so very long faffing around trying to choose images that I never bothered to get around to posting any of them. So the last few days of RPGaDay month will be playing catch-up. As is traditional for me at this point tbh.
The questions for days 11/12: and RPG with well supported one-shots/an RPG with well supported campaigns.
There’s a bunch of them, to be fair, but for both these questions I’m going to settle for D&D, mostly because I’ve been running a lot of D&D lately, and also because I signed up for a gaming magazine part-work thing called D&D Adventurer.
It’s both a guide to how to play D&D and series of scenarios; both one-off ‘guard the auction’ type events and longer linked series of stories that build to a more coherent story.
It’s a Hachette thing so it’s not exactly cheap, but you certainly get a lot of ‘free’ dice if you subscribe – with the option to spend more on binders and a very splendid (but possibly unusable at the table) full metal D100 in a wooden box.
D100 living in a box
I’d already run the group through the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign from the D&D starter, so they’re probably too high level already for some of the early scenarios in D&D Adventurer; but to be honest having an easy run through some not too challenging enemies fits both the fun playstyle of the group and also gives me a chance to get up to speed on the (up to now) current edition of a game I’d not run since the 80s.
Builds up week by week into a massive money sink and enough dice to choke a giant salamander
“Discover the Nearside, a network of 13 doomed parallel worlds. As a Nearsider, one of the rare few who can travel this network of worlds, you can discover broken rooms, the nexus where worlds touch, allowing you to cross over. Will you bring solace to these dying worlds or will you treat the Nearside like your personal playground?”
Endless possibilities for stories in that kind of setting.
I may already have written a screenplay for a pilot episode…
From the alternate RPGaDAY options list – Present an idea for a random encounter.
The Treasure Hunters…
As the player characters are travelling through any marsh, woodland or wasteland area, they reach an old and much overgrown graveyard, glimpsing beyond this what seems to be a barrow mound from an ancient time. There are two figures in the graveyard. They are digging in a grave, and there is evidence that other graves have been dug up already…
This pair is Grob and Tuko.
Grob is clearly a soldier, tall, imposing, chainmail and well-worn clothes. A heavy sword, a short sword, and a helm, all within close reach. He is currently two foot down in a grave, still digging.
Tuko Damu is heavily built, and looks like a monk, hair lacquered into a top knot, wearing a robe and sandals, but he too has weapons close at hand and is leaning on a shovel, offering advice.
Grob and Tuko are adventurers and, having heard tell of a great treasure hidden by a wizard, they are here looking for it.
Someone may wish to suggest the barrow is a better location for a mighty wizard’s treasure.
I was going to go with The Wildsea, as it’s an odd shape and is also gorgeous – just fantastic art that really brings the setting to life – but I can’t find my copy of that to take a photograph so I’ll go with Cloud Empress instead. Neat little booklets of rules and stuff, and also very pretty artwork both outside and in. In the version I bought I also got patches. It’s an ‘ecological science fantasy’ RPG, so in some ways a very similar vibe to UVG, but more importantly extremely reminiscent of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Other examples of good form: Be Like A Crow, Mothership, and really all of the Free League stuff in that classic box/nice art/special dice/solid rules-set format (see Aliens, Twilight 2000, The One Ring).
