Black Wizard White Wizard

I remembered something random from the earliest days of my gaming career.  When I was around 10 or 11, I had only played a few games of D&D at this point and the only gaming books I had read were "The Hobbit", the "Lord of the Rings" and a ton of kids fantasy books. 

Lacking an actual materials (which only one of us in our group owned any D&D books at that point) my buddy and I created our own game/comic book.  I remember we only used d6's and I was the only player and my friend was the DM.  I had two characters: Black Wizard and White Wizard.  

I explored "The Dungeon" and there might have been a "Castle" above the dungeon, where other people lived, but all I remember is little bits from the dungeon itself.  We would play and then the next day my DM, who was a pretty good artist would draw all the adventures.  I think maybe there was a real comic that was really similar that he had based all this on.  

The wizards he drew looked a lot like the one from Final Fantasy at the top, they had really big hats and little beady eyes.  One of them had a staff and the other a wand or rod or something.  The white wizard had control of the wind and could heal; the black wizard could create fire n lightning and might have had other powers.

Anyway, not sure how interesting all this is to anyone else.  When I think about these games/comics, we were just roleplaying, making the rules up, and just having fun with imagination.  When folks get into edition wars, and fights over what is good and bad in rules systems, we should just remember this kind of play from when you are a kid.  Rules don't matter, it is just having fun.

Mech Warrior

Yep, you can own your own mech warrior!

D100 Gaming

I've been pretty silent on this blog for about 1-2 months now. I had a wicked bout of migraine headaches that forced me to limit my computer usage. Since I'm not sure I'm completely over it I'll make this quick.

While I have been away from the computer I did get an amazon gift card a present... I made pretty good work of it scoring:

Rolemaster Express (love this book!)

Chaosium BRP hardcover
Stormbringer 4th Edition
Glorantha 2nd Age
Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition Rulebook

Yes that's right, lots of d100 gaming goodness!

I've been reading them over and when time permits I plan to review some of this stuff. The Chaosium skill based system has me the most interested. It really works for Call of Cthulhu - I've been playing the PBEM game with Daddy G, DungeonMum, and O4E for a while now and it runs smoothly for that style game. The question is can it correctly handle all the other genre that it advertises in the BRP book. I like that it has so many options that can be brought in and out of any campaign yet the core is straightforward and simple.

Well, that is all for now, hopefully my head will stop this nonsense and I can cover some of this game material in better detail.

You Can Call Me Al

Meet Allessandro Mancini, my Call of Cthulhu character for the Decade of Darkness campaign initially helmed by Daddy Grognard who also plays as Chester Allen, followed up by Old 4 Eyes who also plays as Solomon. The game is currently being ran by Dungeonmum whose character is currently indisposed but normally plays a mildly alcoholic millionaire pilot.

My thesis for Allessandro is:

A passionate bare-knuckle boxer who spends his days serving espresso in coffee bars and writing poetry.

Initially, I thought it would be fun to try playing a character in an investigative game who has almost no investigation skills. I would have to make my way though encounters with my punching ability (not good when facing things with tentacles) and my witty turn of phrase... I figured since CoC characters have such short lives, that it wouldn't matter much anyway.

However, over time, Al's personality has really grown. I see him as a tragically heroic character in a nihilistic universe. He believes in right and wrong, goes to church every week with his mother, he was forced out of his boxing career by gangsters who wanted him to throw fights, he spends his days serving high quality coffee to rich people and his nights dreaming up poetry. He is a dreamer, and an optimist in the face of everything that has happened to him. He relishes the good things in life, art, food, wine, coffee, etc... maybe he is a bit hedonistic, but hey, it is the roaring 20's!!!

"his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

Quote from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Doing it Wrong

"You can't do it wrong" or "As long as you are having fun, you are playing it the right way"

These statements have been showing up a lot on the blogs I've been reading lately. It is a way of approaching the RPG in a hippy laid back way that I really like, however, I don't totally agree with these statements. I think you can "do it wrong" as a DM and as a player.

Before I get all preachy and contrarian, let me explain where I am coming from. I'm speaking from the experience of having whole games come to a death spiral over one bad ruling from the DM. Even the best DM's make mistakes - maybe it is how you handle a wish, or a fight between two players, maybe you become biased, or maybe you are actually too fair and you let them crash and burn without you intervening in real life and coaching them.

For example, the DM could really screw over the PC's on a single wish spell and end a long running campaign. Did the DM make the right move? Should he have worked with the PC's to aim smaller in their intentions with the wish spell to lessen the chances of backlash? Maybe the DM feels that he "taught the players a lesson" but then maybe he just lost his group and it will now break up because the players feel defeated.

I played in another DM's game where he just constantly gave us too much treasure. Every game we had turned into a Monty Haul style campaign. We never felt challenged and we never really liked playing in that game. He kept telling me he was only giving out the treasure that he had rolled up on the tables in the back of the DMG. So he was technically following the rules. Where he was screwing up was that he wasn't offering up the appropriate challenge to the players. All of his monsters just came out in the open, and attacked the party without any guile or use of tactics. So a party was able to walk all over monsters of much higher level than they should have been able to if he had made his goblins use bows and arrows and fire down at the party from a vantage point. If he used more random encounters in his dungeons the party would have been weaker from facing lots of monsters with very little treasure, before they encountered beasts in their treasure laden lairs.

Anyway, I think you can "do it wrong" and sometimes the ruling that seems like it would make for the most "fun" right now is not what leads to the most fun in the long run. Experienced DM's learn this over years doing it wrong and making mistakes... maybe the OSR should talk a little bit about what they have learned over their combined years of DM'ing about doing it wrong that would help novice DM's not have to make all the same mistakes.

Custom B/X DM's Screen

I made this custom DM's screen for B/X DnD for my castle amber game in december, I have used it now for 4 sessions and I really like it, it drastically reduces the amount of looking up I do in the books.

Starting off with a picture from the DM's side, I took 4x 8"x11" pages and taped them to the inside of the Castles and Crusades GM's screen. I never DM castles and crusades in person so I don't ever anticipate using that DM's screen for what it was intended and using it for BX allows me to use a screen with amazing art by Peter Bradley!



Now from left to right, what the heck did I paste on the inside of the board. I started with the saving throw sheets. Monsters typically state that they save as a "fighter 3" or a "magic user 10" so this page worked when I was rolling saves for monsters or when I was rolling a secret save for a PC.

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After that, I added the death and dismemberment table. This was only used about 4 times total - but it was fun showing it to the PC's once in a while to freak them out.



After that page was the variable weapon chart, the armor chart, and the ranged weapon ranges with modifiers table. This was nice to have in front of me. DM's who use the d6 damage for everything rule, would probably be able to replace this with the ranged weapon table and maybe the EXP for monsters table or the random treasure tables? I didn't have either of these at my finger tips but it wasn't necessary since I was running a pre-generated and populated module. I'm thinking about changing this page up and adding those tables since in the future if I do get a campaign up and running I will be running more "on the fly" encounters. I really didn't need the armor table and I could make the other tables smaller to make space.



The final page was the most used, it had the attack tables for PC's and Monsters - nuff said.

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And finally, here is a crappy phone photo of the awesome artwork by Bradley.



I was pretty darn happy with this DM's screen overall. I'd love to see something like this professionally done up, but my scotch taped version will work for me until that day ;)

Recent History and Strange Observations

If anybody is still checking in on this blog... thanks. I've been massively overwhelmed in the last several weeks which has impacted my previous schedule of ~12 posts per month. Alos, my PBEM Greyhawk game is really taking off. My players have descended another level, finally acquired a bit of treasure from their adventuring :) and found an albino cleric. This albino cleric cannot communicate well with them for lack of overlapping languages but through miming and pictography they have decided they are on the same team for now and are now following this cleric down into the depths of this dungeon.

This albino cleric worships a god Ishu, which is the symbol of a three fold woman (bearing some resemblance to Istus) and they seem to be at odds with another group of clerics who have now captured the half orc assassin. There seems to be a battle of sorts occurring somewhere underground and the PC's found their albino cleric nearly fatally wounded lying on a bed in the dungeon. After quite a bit of debate about whether to heal the man they finally did and he awarded them with some treasure (by showing them how to use some golden masks to make their way past mechanical wasp guardians armed with death poison to pilfer some gold and gems).

But during this encounter I noted something quite odd about PC's. They will sometimes obsess over really strange things that you would have never guessed about. Take this description as evidence:

As Geodine and Esmeralda approach the wounded man he looks up apprehensively toward your strange ensemble. Geodine examines the man from a closer and closer distance noting that his stomach wound will be fatal without magic aid. As Esmeralda comes close to the man and takes first his club and then tries to grab at his Emblem he knocks her hand away and yells out something sharp and quick in his strange tongue.

As the torches draw near and he whips his arms about you note that his skin is pale, he must be one of these albino people you have heard about. Looking closer, his eyes seems to have dark brown pigment, so he is not a true albino - perhaps his skin has not seen the sun... ever. His dress is very simple, dark thick padded armor pants, thick boots, and he is shirtless except for his bandages. His hair is a long mass of brownish yellow and held back with a yellow tie. He has a bit of wispy beard upon his face but it doesn't grow thick.

Nau Gui addresses the man in two languages but he doesn't seem to recognize any of it. Instead he speaks once more in a non-sensical tongue, "Curthag unkthatack arosthack!"

A little later I posted this:

In the chests there are some thin metal masks (maybe steel) covered in gold
paint (you can see where it was scraped off in some spots. Also in the chests
there are more pants, shirts, bandages, a jar of what looks to be a salve of
some sort, and a light cudgel.

The rest of the room is bare except for a deck of cards on one of the small
tables. There are two doors in the back of the room one on the wall to the left
and one on the far wall. Esmeralda hears a slight buzzing noise on the other
side of the door to the far wall.

While some of the pc's focused on the dying man or the strange buzzing noise, and the chests full of strange thin metal masks... other PC's decided it was wiser to spend the next week of PBEM time examining the deck of cards that was mentioned in passing. They got into a minor in game argument over who would keep the deck calling each other grabby among other things. PC's will focus on strange things and forget about your obvious clues, I don't understand it, but it is true :)

Rolemaster (Take 3) and Amethyst

Having read over the rolemaster core books I set right out to make a character. I started small - a common human ranger. I rolled some stats, then potential attributes, then modified for race, chose some languages then started flipping through the skill list and figuring out things like development points and power points, etc...

Well, lets just say that I may have been accustomed to a simpler way of making characters over the last couple of years (during which the only systems that I have used are Fudge, Risus, and 2nd Edition DnD). I'm not sure I have the time or patience right now to make Rolemaster characters unless I got a group together who would get me inspired to do so. Or maybe if I can figure out that Fudge conversion for Rolemaster that I think is a really juicy idea....

Anyway, I shelved Rolemaster for the short term and I am following the sacred teachings of Risus Monkey by trying to get a Mythic game started up. For now I may start up solo and then add my buddy in later if that makes sense. I'll probably post something up about the game I am planning in the next couple of days. I read through that book over the last couple of days and it immediately "clicked".

Also, Chris Dias of Dias Ex Machina contacted me about his game Amethyst which is being sold by Goodman Games. I checked out these links here, the pictures here, the free adventure Biohazard ( a zombie apocalypse style game), and finally this youtube clip. I wrote this blog post a while back about adding guns to ODD, well this game adds guns, and computers, and cars, and pretty much everything about our modern world to the conventional D&D game. Chris popped the top off his head and completely imagined a really excellent world where all the stuff that exists in our DnD games "came out to play"...

I think this picture that I popped into this post pretty much sums up the game (to Chris Dias or artist Nick Greenwood - if you want me to take this down I will immediately). They talk about it quite a bit in that cool YouTube series where they not only discuss the gameworld but how it evolved with the art from Nick Greewood (who did like 99.9% of the art for the game apparently). I've said before that having Peter Bradley do like 90% of the art for the Castles and Crusades game set up a consistent look and brand for that game. I think the same will hold true for amethyst.

Anyway, I can't say much more since I haven't picked up a copy of the game (I probably won't anytime soon since it is written for 4th edition DnD which I have no plans to play). The combination of technology, magic, fantasy, politics, and interesting imagery makes me want to slap my practical side silly and BUY THIS GAME (which is saying that I have like 50 different campaign worlds that I downloaded as part of the Haiti bundle and like 50 more campaign worlds that I have thought up in my sick head and don't in any way need another game world).

I'm not a fan of the 3rd edition, 3.5 edition, and 4th edition DnD rules - however, just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean there is a lot of gold in a game world/concept regardless of the rules. I could see me running a game in the amethyst game world using any of the familiar rulesets that I have become accustomed to over the years. Or if my DM buddy would get his $#!& together and want to start up our tabletop game (which was supposed to use 4th edition rules- since this DM likes 4th edition and convinced all us "old-timers" to try it but then never started the game all winter long after we made characters in November)

Maybe, just maybe I could convince him to run this game-world instead of the standard fantasy world he had been thinking of running a campaign in.

Who knows, I may go rogue and pick up a copy after all. If I watch that YouTube video about the art one more time I'll probably fail my saving throw and cave in to a moment of consumer weakness :)

Rolemaster

Now that I have partially digested the three core books of the Rolemaster Classic edition that I have purchased I've come away with a couple of thoughts:

1. I'd really like to play this game in the traditional table-top form... I'm still working on getting a gaming group together, maybe I can convince them to try Rolemaster.

2. Arms Law is awesome and you could use it to add some critical hits to almost any game.

3. I think you could use a Fudge based system for attributes and skills to simplify character creation. Fudge and Rolemaster are both very modular so I think the fit could work out. I love the ease and detail of Fudge/Fate style character creation but I'm not a huge fan of the granularity of fudge dice and the way combat plays out in that game. I'm going to be thinking about how the two could be combined over the next couple of weeks.

Unrelated to rolemaster I picked up the Mythic Game Master Emulator and I might try to use that to run either a solo game or a game with a good buddy of mine who is separated by some distance and I think has the right kind of mojo for playing this Mythic game style. I ran into the Mythic system by reading over some of the stuff here. Maybe I will even post some of the game content up on my website in a similar fashion to the monkey if it ends up working out for us.