Posts in Category: Games
Crawl to Liberty module change
When I first started the Crawl to Liberty project I had a vision of modules being two sided like the old Larry Wilde ethnic joke books from the 1970s: One side Polish jokes, flip the book over and now you’ve got Italian jokes. The front side of my book would be for patriots and the flipped over back side would be for the loyalist. It would be the same mission but run from the other side. I haven’t been able to work this out yet without the module feeling contrived or artificial for one side or the other. It was one of the things that held me back from getting to publish-ready so I may return to this idea but for now I’m doing patriot focused mission with an outline for a loyalist book in the future.
Crawling to Liberty near the finish line
At GenCon 2012 I was introduced to Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was my first GenCon; really my first con of any kind. I was wandering the exhibit hall and found the Goodman booth and picked up the $10 core rules. I saw the wire racks with Appendix N paperbacks, the tables loaded with books, and the people all engaged in conversations about the modules they loved. It hit me in the feels as the kids say these days and I have been a DCC guy ever since. I spent a year working Road Crew trying to get students at my college to play DCC. I started collecting rule books, the OARs, modules, you name it.
In 2014 or 2015, I do not recall the exact moment, I was watching the 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows and on-line episodes of Derrick Waters’ Drunk History and I got a spark of inspiration. Why not make a DCC game set in the Revolutionary War? I got all sorts of crazy ideas about funnels and adventures. magic and monsters, classes and rules. Some of them were truly awful and have been cast into the dustbin of history or relegated to an additional rules appendix in the current book.
For the past decade(ish) I have been working on the core rules and adventures. I made my Monday night RPG gathering test run the game early on to see if it was even worth pursing. People who normally want high fantasy said they enjoyed it and my Monday night group are not the type of people to be kind to spare feelings. We’re playing Paranoia right now and no clone is making to the end of a mission without a stack of treason stars or a fresh clone due to “friendly” fire.
I admire authors who can write their works and blog about their work. I have been so focused on the book itself and the adventures that I have not found the time to update the 2 people and 40,000 bots who look at this site.
More coming soon-ish… maybe
Guest of the Queen: a new Shadowdark compatible adventure going to DriveThruRPG
We’ve written a 17 page solo adventure for ShadowDark/SoloDark and published it to DriveThru RPG. The character is captured by coblins and must escape. Using tables to generate a map and encounters you sneak, fight, run, or talk your way out of their underground country back to the land of the “sun people”
Based on the stories of George Macdonald, “The Princess and the Goblins” and “The Princess and Curdie”
D&D Begone, my take on things
There’s a lot of churn and chop in the TTRPG industry thanks to Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro trying to change the foundation of the Open Game License. There’s a lot of coverage on lots of web sites about this. If you need more background, check out the Youtuber DndShorts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4kGMsZSdbY
My opinion:
The game Dungeons and Dragons has been in a toilet spiral since the fourth edition and WotC is still trying to migrate the TTRPG game to a video-game style of play. 5e was an attempt to stifle Paizo and other companies who were trying to fill the space of table top, paper and pencil, printed book games. Now in the 2020s WotC thinks they can try this again with software (video-game engine VTT with AI DMs) and XboxLive/PSN style subscription fee for pdf over printed books. In order to make this transition complete WotC/Hasbro needs to make the traditional TTRPG market place undesirable and that means doing away with 3rd party content and making home-brew content difficult to use in the new setting.
My prediction:
How will this all play out? Badly for Hasbro. There is already an entire industry pushing out solo role playing experiences using video-game engines. There’s another entire industry pushing out team based playing experiences. Assassin’s Creed to Horizon Zero Dawn, Grand Theft Auto to World of Warcraft. In fact some of those video games produce paper and pencil TTRPGs. Why make a TTRPG out of Sea of Thieves or add a Conan Exiles source book to the Conan TTRPG?
Because people WANT to sit around a table (physically or virtually) with other people and IMAGINE. They want to tell their own stories using an intellectual property that they love.
In Conan Exiles you cannot talk to the dragons on the map. They just bite you. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a chat with them and find out why they sit in ruins at a bottom of a hole in the desert surrounded by undead hyenas? Perhaps they are lonely and doubtless annoyed with all the yowling dogs.
The silver lining
Just like the birth of Paizo during the 4e idiocy we will see a birth of something new as a result of this OGL/One D&D idiocy. Some of the vendors who are committed to printed books and paper and pencil will gain market share. Games that should be household names (7th Sea, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Savage Worlds, etc) will fill the void left when DnD becomes as half-assed quasi-MMO with no player agency and stifling IP rules and the players just wander off.
That’s WotC/Hasbro’s silver lining here. The public outcry is a gift. If they had just rolled out One DnD they have just faded into obscurity with other niche MMOs. WotC/Hasbro here’s your chance not to suck…
Vermont scifi & fantasy expo
Gamemeisters is proud to sponsor Red Hoodie Games at the Vermont scifi & fantasy expo this weekend (23-24 April) head over to the Champlain Valley expo and see Red Hoodie content and play a scene from The Painter & the Pirate.
Pieces of Soul
A kidnapping and a chase brings the heroes to the dark and mystical mountains of Eisen where they must confront an ancient horror. Can they rescue the victim? Can they stop the evil plot of a creature who’s lived for centuries?
You and your 7th Sea second edition group can find out. This is the last installment of the Tale of Art, Love, and Fear story arc now available for purchase at www.drivethrurpg.com
Running X2: Castle Amber again after 40 years
It’s been almost 40 years since I first brought a group of friends into The Castle Amber. Last night the grey mists swept in and the party awoke in an elegant foyer. Their hirelings and pack animals are waiting outside in the thin band of grass between the walls of the chateaux and lethal fog.
Rather than running this as a B/X we are using DCC for the mechanics and that has been a complete blast. The off the wall encounters and strangeness of the Amber family makes this such a fun adventure.
Why not break the boredom of centuries ensconced in a mansion by watching some unexpected guests wander around and get into trouble. Perhaps some family squabbles will be set aside (or resolved at sword point) by presence of these interlopers. At least it’s something new for the inhabitants.
For the adventures: adventures, riches, and really wild times. So far they’ve boxed, been blinded, and fought deadly slimes and oozes. I can’t wait to see what they do after lunch.
The Faux Marquess
The second adventure in my A Tale of Art, Love, and Fear is now available for purchase on drivethrurpg.com here https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354526/The-Faux-Marquess
This second 5-7 step story for 7th Sea second edition is a follow on adventure from The Painter and the Pirate, also for sale at drivethrurpg.com. The heroes attempt to find a woman that everyone thought had perished in a storm at sea. She’s very much alive, looks like a missing marquess, and has amnesia.
This second adventure offers more chances for fighting and chasing as the heroes work with or against one or both villains to help the “Marquess”
Traveller T5 first impressions
The PDF files for the recently concluded Traveller T5 3 big black books have been released to backers via drivethrurpg. I’ve read through Book 1 and here are my initial impressions:
Wow. It feels like the little black book. These PDFs are visually similar with a simple black and white presentation and a writing style that is concise and focused. For modern RPG people this will be a very different experience from the glossy full color pages with rules explained in great detail in multiple sections. I have started on Book 2 and the same feel and style are consistent.
One of the reasons I’m a fan of Traveller is that the game is imbued with science. The science fiction theme is an obvious reason, but the game system uses a base 33 numbering system (Original aka Classic Traveller uses hexidecimal) to represent stats for players, monsters, planets, and vehicles. The rules include mechanics for things like item quality and durability. Something lacking in most other RPGs. I’m D&D I can just wander around stabbing and slashing with my short sword adventure after adventure and never wonder about it breaking or needing to be sharpened. If I wander into a town and the blacksmith is making swords there’s no reason to upgrade from what I have because a short sword is a short sword is a short sword in D&D.
In Traveller that’s not the case. I have a cutlass that I’m using in an adventure and I stop in at a space port with a higher tech level than the planet where I bought my cutlass I can compare QREBS scores and see that the new carbon fiber aluminium cutlass is lighter and more reliable that my old steel one. QREBS includes quality, reliability, ease of use, bulk, and safety. Objects get a score and the referee and players can use this value to determine what equipment is good and if you have to use that chainsaw with the low QREBS score what may happen to you…
Having metrics and mechanics for things like planetary composition, item quality, and space travel that are based on physics and realism creates the impression of a science based game for me. I’m sure others may find the system overly nit-picky.
Book 1 does not have a lot of fluff and feels like a series of tables connected together with prose and examples in key places, but in general the book does not do a good job of explaining some basic rules clearly. I could not find character death rules in the book. In the combat chapter somewhere near the assigning damage rules you would expect to find a sentence or two about how to handle character death. There isn’t one. There is a rule for assigning damage and then a rule for assigning massive damage (nuclear explosion, decompression, vehicle impacts) and then a mention that if all stats are reduced to zero you die. I felt like that should have had its own paragraph.
As I continue working through the PDFs I find myself thinking about writing software to implement some of the tables and help with the game mechanics. I find this very thematic and yet another reason while Traveller is my favorite Sci-Fi game. I can see how that sort of mathy experience could be off putting to people used to some of the more modern RPGs.
New Pathfinder ACG Core set
The new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game core set arrived at the house yesterday. I broke it open and read the rules. The rule book has an excellent section for those of us who have played this game a bunch to highlight the new rules and some of the changed terminology.
Tonight I tried the starter adventure a few times with one character and it did not go well. These are some of the changes:
- Locations that have small, medium, and large deck settings that controls how many cards are at each location.
- Blessings have specific powers vs the generic give me an extra die on this roll.
- Cards have a numeric level value that maps roughly to the old basic or expert text
One thing I was hoping to change was the text size. The art is good and the boarders and colors are nice, but for a card game that is text heavy using a larger font would have been extremely helpful. I have had one friend say they will pass on the game due to the small text size.