Game Store Gloat

Holy fuck - quite a run to the local game pit this afternoon. Check it out:

JG88 Dark Tower (Paul Jaquays' legendary "upside-down dungeon", set in Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting.)
FR5 The Savage Frontier (Also by Jaquays - a classic sandboxing/expansion of Ed Greenwood's FR1 Waterdeep and the North. It's like Forgotten Wilderlands; been meaning to pick up a hard copy of this for years now.)
9031 The Rogues Gallery (Random NPC generation guidelines and stats for TSR employees' PCs - some of them included under protest, while Blume was forced to make up others when the players wouldn't cooperate. 1980 edition, B+W with Erol Otus art on the front and bogus Mordenkainen and Robilar stats inside.)
9047 Monster & Treasure Assortment (Dungeon level-appropriate encounters and treasures, 100 a piece for 9 levels, and trap/trick tables. I already have one of these, but this is useful enough to keep a copy in each campaign binder - I'm up to maybe four at this point.) (!!!)
B1-9 In Search of Adventure (Compilation of the first 9 modules in the B series, loosely tied together in a campaign. I've got maybe half of these already - from what I hear, the half that matter - and by all accounts this compilation contains heavily-expurgated and hacked-together versions of these modules, but I'm curious to check it out, and from a completist's point of view - well, it was missing from the collection. What can I say? LOL)

All of these for $5 or less. FUCKING SCORE. Dark Tower goes with the JG pile - the Wilderlands is my "someday maybe" setting, as I'm working on the GH stuff first. Savage Frontier was a must before I restarted my Realms campaign, so maybe that'll get going a little sooner. (This would be the PCs from my rather long-running (now defunct) d20/1e hybrid Realms game, only converted over to Hackmaster/1e hybrid stats and thrown some 30 years back in time to the Grey Box era. They keep requesting this, and I keep not having it done. It'll likely involve a lot of Hacking in Undermountain, so once I've got Castle Greyhawk out of my system and my megadungeon legs under me, that'll be a prime candidate. One of these days.) M&T and the Rogues Gallery are just great all-around table aids. (Although I should mention that Kellri's Encounter Netbook is a more-than-suitable replacement for both products, plus a whole shit-ton more. Worth checking out for any pre-2000 D&D edition.)

Damn this collector bug. Hahaha...

-DYA

What is good in life, Conan?

Nothing momentous to report. Just another Tuesday night around here: Me and some good buds enjoyed some single-malt scotch and some good buds. The party dickered over terms with some hirelings, then made an expedition to Castle Greyhawk, only to run into a hobgoblin and his goblin cronies - the same group that they'd only a few sessions earlier routed with judicious application of murder holes and flaming oil. It was a near thing, with the party pulling out a win but with the thief injured and the rest near "E" on healing and hp, but the haul was just worth it. The hired spearman ate it, while the torchboy ran away. They returned to the city, blew a week while the thief rested up (two members were offered positions in the military, another Gilliganed his way into a possible knightly appointment, and the thief picked up a nagging chest cold that will slow him down for a few weeks)*, then wandered the streets (passing by a Pelorite pilgrimage being harassed by street urchins)* hocking their ill-begotten gains and recruiting for the next adventure.

Man, D&D fucking rules.


* Random city events courtesy of Midkemia Press's fine "Cities" book - now re-available from Midkemia's website here: LINKY)

-DYA

Cyberpunk 2025 (or, "15 Shitty Years")

Speaking of GM ADD...

I made what I would consider to be a fairly successful FLGS raid last week. I scored a really nice copy of Warhammer City (with the map in) for WFRP, a Role Aids Dwarves module (cool detail on a few dwarven settlements and an adventure for dwarven PCs), the Traveller introductory adventure (I've got tons of supplements, still need to track down the 3BBs) and, most relevant to today's mental meanderings, two Cyberpunk supplements - Rockerboy for Cyberpunk 1e (AKA Cyberpunk 2013) and Eurosource Plus (for Cyberpunk 2020 - an update of a previous CP1 supplement, as I understand it).

Now, it just so happens that while AD&D 2e was my first love, gaming-wise, CP2020 was always the girl on the side. Second game I ever ran, with even less resulting campaign play then AD&D - sessions generally went catastrophically off-script as soon as the players realized they could just run around shooting shit, and tended to culminate in Grand Theft Auto 3-style SWAT showdowns. Everyone always had a blast regardless, but it was irritatingly dissatisfying as a neophyte GM. Anyway, flipping through my newly acquired nerd lore, all kinds of fun one-off ideas started to run through my head. I'll run it in a month or so just once, I told myself. Just once - got a new AD&D campaign to play, after all.

Enter my IT recruiter with a two-day contract working on Blackberries in Boston. This job involves my taking the (stupid fucking) Commuter Rail into Boston, so I have plenty of time to read my new CP crap on the train. What I do not have, however, is time to prepare for the 1e session on Tuesday (not slinging my CZ stuff in a backpack to get banged up), nor the energy or inspiration to freestyle one.

Luckily, I'd just spent two days going back and forth between my slacker metalhead home life and my fast-paced tech-y corporate life, pounding pavement in Boston's glittering yet filthy downtown financial district, working on improbably tiny yet ubiquitous hand-held portable PCs - the kind of experience that drives home how close we really are to the cyberpunk era (and how close Gibson and pals really came to outright prophecy in their fiction). CP2020 inspiration I had in spades (and my players weren't tough to convince), so we whipped up some characters and ran'em through a few introductory encounters (read: gruesome and needless firefights) to get a feeling for the system. (Protip: If you're an unprepared GM who needs time to throw together a quick scenario, hand your players the CP2020 cyberware and/or gun list. Guaranteed at least an hour of drooling while you get your homework done.)

A few things about running CP2020: First, the system is suckawesometastic. By that I mean that it's a great base mechanic (ability 1-10 + skill 1-10 + roll 1-10 to hit a target number anywhere from 10 and up) with a super-brutal and nicely medium-crunchy combat engine built on top, but there are a decent amount of holes in the combat system (forcing GMs to make some tough calls on some pretty basic combat procedures), and the character creation is both inspired and super super super broken. Now, it needs to be said that this was published in 1990 (based on a ruleset from '87 IIRC), and that kind of thing was a lot more acceptable then. If anything, the ambiguities and rough spots give an experienced GM plenty of elbowroom to tinker - and CP is an old school system in that it responds beautifully to careful house ruling (and in that this is almost a necessity in places). However, as a newbie GM in the early '90s, this was a bit beyond me, and as a result combat was slow and often confused, while characters were bristling with guns, cybered to the gills, and world-class combatants to a man.

Then there's the assumed setting, the timeline, the net, and the glam rock. (Oh, the glam rock.) 2020, from 2009, looks hilariously late '80s - the graphics, the lyrics, the culture, etc. The USSR never fell, we got space shit done on time (instead of falling into a post-Challenger funk), the US economy collapsed in the '90s (without the benefit of the dot com boom) and cybernetics are everywhere. The net is pretty much as all-encompassing as it is now - dead-on in places - but the specifics are laughable from where we stand (even if you buy into VR/simstim as a viable consumer interface).

There are three ways to handle this: Draw up your own timeline, say fuck it and call it a divergent timeline (from say 1990 on), or some combination of both. There's a lot to be said for just rolling with the silly - CP works as a game even if the assumptions are a bit off, and the gonzo anime feel you get from the CP2020 setting material is cool in its own right. On the other hand, devising your own timeline is a great mental exercise (I love this shit - extrapolation is what real SF is all about), and you end up with a more plausible future from where we sit. I went with option C, and started drawing up a timeline that takes us from where we are now (with a few "top secret technologies" retconned into the last decade or so) to pretty much where the 2020 book puts us, with a good bit of the Net and other tech stuff given a modern facelift (along with some of the cultural stuff). I was able to come up with a workable sequence of events that gets us there in 15 (admittedly tumultuous) years, giving me a street date of 2025 (which is a nice round number and can also coincidentally refer to the houseruled-to-fuck "version 2.5" that I'm running). I kept most of the classic setting elements (Arasaka and the other friendly corps, hyperviolent and strongly-themed gangs a la "The Warriors", the Sprawl, the Combat Zone, balkanization of the Americas, etc.), I just chose to get us there in a different way. On top of that, I was able to whip up a gutload of new stuff - if there's one thing I can do easily (almost reflexively), it's dream up ways things can go as tragically wrong as possible. I'm also stealing with abandon from the standards - Gibson, Neal Stephenson (especially the strip mall/franchise culture from Snow Crash), etc. I plan on a bit of Appleseed-style hardsuit cop drama (in my Boston, the Highway Patrol has their own reality show - sponsored by Militech, which indidentally provides all their equipment and training), a bunch of street-level craziness (the Bay flooded, and downtown got rebuilt around the elevated highway, so the North End is now a series of canals under the "shelf" of the new downtown), and a good dose of Mad Max highway combat.

Anyway, gotta go - playing in Long Island with my boy's folk rock thing. Here's 3 great CP2020 resources on the web to tide you over:

2k20: http://www.mecha.com/~conkle/cyber/
The Blackhammer Cyberpunk Project: http://www.dreadgazebo.com/2020/
Datafortress 2020: http://datafortress2020.110mb.com/

- DYA

About The New Campaign (Or "GM ADD Strikes Again") [CZ:UW+WG13/1e]

When I stopped posting a few months back, my main campaign was my B/X homebrew sandbox. Sketchily detailed fantasy city-state with attendant a-wizard-did-it megadungeon below, Wilderlands-style hexcrawl areas in the surrounding hills, forests and swamps (using the Known World map from the Expert Set, but ignoring the Mystara stuff). One of the nice things thing about this campaign is its portability - I can run it with just one binder, no bookshelf required. Since I was running a lot of games out of my house, that was huge. However, my gaming time sorta fizzled around May, and I wasn't running games for a while.

Right when I got some free time to game again, a few things happened at once. I got some of the guys from the band hooked right around the same time several players from my old group became available on weeknights, so I suddenly had a double-handful of players. The GM of the BFRPG / Castle Zagyg game I was playing in abruptly suspended the campaign, and I'd been sitting on a brand new (unread) Castle Zagyg:Upper Works boxed set since the winter con season. And I needed a good excuse to clean out the Nerd Loft (incidentally, where my big table and AD&D / HackMaster shelf reside). A recipe for GM ADD if there ever was one.

So now we're on the fourth or fifth session of AD&D First Edition, using CZ:UW and Joe Bloch's WG13 as Castle Greyhawk, placed 2-3 hours' walk to the east of the Free City of Greyhawk (ignoring Yggsburgh and all TSR-published versions of both the City and the Castle), with the '81 folio and '83 boxed set versions of the World of Greyhawk campaign settings for background. I'm keeping most of the background material from the pre-'85 modules (I've got most of the 1e-era stuff) but ignoring most of the other Greyhawk material and changing whatever strikes me at the moment. I'm using lots of anecdotal material from the Lake Geneva campaign (pulled from forum posts and interviews on the net) for inspiration, but I'm not worried about canon or any aspirations to "authenticity". From what I can tell, the key to running a Gygaxian campaign is not obsessively parroting details from the game he ran, but rolling with the punches and thinking on your feet to see what kind of game you can come up with.

The group itself is a blast: Three players from my first long-term campaign (all hardened AD&D vets), three complete D&D virgins (the guys from the band - all 3 have played plenty of PCRPGs, including Baldur's Gate, so they're picking up fast), and rotating assortment of other folks - I'm seeing anywhere between 6 and 9 folks turning out every week. (It occasionally strikes me that I'm a lucky bastard - all I ever read is tales of woe from guys trying to get 3 players at an OAD&D table on the same day, and I'm almost to the point of turning good players away.) Running a group this size is an interesting challenge, but using a caller (and loudly-rolled wandering monster dice) is keeping things pretty smooth.

In keeping with my understanding of the original campaign, I've thrown alignment restrictions to the winds, so of course the guys immediately seized on playing an eeeeeeeeeevil party. In practice, they're not going as apeshit as I expected them to - it may be that, over the years, I've impressed upon them the repercussions for out-of-control PCs who Get Caught. (Hahaha...) They're plotting the betrayal of good-aligned adventuring parties, terrorizing small farming hamlets, abusing hapless hirelings, and indulging in the occasional good-natured inter-party assassination bidding war, but nothing that would arouse the wrath of the gods (or the guard) so I'm letting them play it out. All parties involved are half-expecting the whole thing to go down in a bloody PC-on-PC TPK at some point, but so far they're actually more or less working together.

What's more, they're actually succeeding. [CASTLE ZAGYG SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] They've made the trip to the Castle grounds a few times now (over a couple weeks of game time), in which time they've made a cursory exploration of the lower and middle courtyards, successfuly penetrated the dungeons (huh-huh, "penetrate"), and made inroads to Level 1 (the Store Rooms). Nobody's died yet (to my utter consternation), although they've had several close calls. They've had skirmishes with various humanoids in the Ruins level, and driven off the gnoll minions of a rival evil cleric (who they then seriously murdered to death*). (The party currently contains 3 evil clerics, so clearly they were protecting their job security.) They've managed to secure a defensible (if somewhat nightmare-inducing) refuge from the predations of the undead. The party MU also managed a neat little coup - they scored a few magic items by smart (and lucky) play, gave them to the MU, and he netted enough XP to go from level 1 to the cusp of level 3 in the space of two games. This, and the plate mail they liberated from the cleric, should give them a decent toehold on survivability, and it's looking like this batch just may make it over that 1st level hump.

Here's the line-up as it stands now:

Grishnakh Skuthne - Half-Orc Fighter 1
Baldermir Von Bizmark - Human Fighter 1 (on the cusp of 2)
Vladimir - Human "Fighter" (Assasssin) 1
Gozher the Gaucherion - Mountain Dwarf Cleric (Abbathor) 1
Mordis Pitborn - Half-Orc Fighter/Cleric (Incabulous)
Rudger - Half-Orc Fighter/Cleric (Fuck if I can remember)
Vas Deferenez - Half-Elf Fighter/MU 1/1
Treg Kerelius - Human MU 2 (on the cusp of 3)
Alberoth (AKA Dingle) - High Elf Thief 1
Falatious Bowlhard - Grey Elf "Thief" (Assassin) 1

Currently they're on level 1, just having won the fight with the gnolls (I'll be giving them the results of the room-loot next session.)

More on last session later.

-DYA



* Man, speaking of players messing up a perfectly good plan. Gnolls, 4th-level cleric with hold person on tap. Rough situation for a 1st level group - unless the friggin' F/C PC on point wins initiative and drops a darkness spell on the enemy priest (who then obligingly fails his save like a good little xp-container)(grumble grumble). Tough to cast PC-party-fucking spells when you can't see them. *grump*

Basically, I waste him with my crossbow. [Sort-of HackMaster Basic Review]

So, I got to try out HackMaster Basic today. My overall reaction would be more or less "fuck yeah."

I should preface by admitting that it was a pretty stellar and Hack-appropriate group, so the target audience was firmly in place. The player group consisted of: Dale (who runs the monthly-or so HM 4th Edition game I play in, and who hosted), Tyson (he'll be joining Dale's regular game next week), and myself (with a BTB HM4 campaign on hold and a HM4/AD&D hybrid campaign in early prep stages). GMing was Charles Brown, who's authored a couple Kenzer HM modules (Dead Gawd's Hand comes to mind as I write this); Chuck's a pretty active HackMaster booster in the local gaming scene.

I was ready to be fairly critical, sitting down at the table - I play HM4 for the AD&Disms, and tend to cross-pollinate the two systems pretty freely, so the news that HM5 wasn't going to be AD&D-based was a downer for me. Overall, new HM material is only useful to me as far as it's easily converted / ported over to my heavily-customized AD&D engine. That said, I was also licking my chops anticipating what cool rules I could steal for my HM4 game.

Come to find out that, while it may not strictly be "1e on crack" like HM4, it's not that damn far off. It sure as hell isn't d20 (and it's a far cry from World of 4craft). From AD&D, we still have "6+1 stats" (the familiar 6 along with "Looks" subbing in for Comeliness), and the super-granular stat bonus charts from HM (most bonuses and penalties start below 9 and above 11), but the functions of these scores has been shuffled around. Strength no longer provides a bonus to hit, however both Dexterity AND Intelligence do. Similarly, Dexterity provides a defensive adjustment - as does Wisdom (!). (The dumb fighter, as both Dale and I would learn, is not nearly as effective in HM5 than in previous editions.) Score generation is more flexible now - you have the option to take six-in-a-row, swap two scores, or arrange to taste - but you earn big Build Point bonuses by taking the more restrictive options (25 for swapping, 50 for taking it like a man). Scores can still be increased by cashing in Build Points (5 fractional points per BP as opposed to 25 in HM4). I rolled decent Dex, average Str and Con, and abysmal everything else. I decided to play a dwarf fighter. (When all was said and done, I was able to buy the Str and Con up to respectable levels, but everything else stayed crappy - I ended up with a 3 Charisma.)

Skills are percentage-based, where the score to hit is the relevant ability score plus whatever mastery dice the player bought in character creation (this more or less directly from HM4), but now we have a whole list of skills that regular people "just have" at a base rate (a nice addition). Also, wherever a skill depends on two scores, the lower is used (where previously they were averaged). I kinda like that - again, makes dumb PCs a little tougher to deal with. There isn't really a dump stat in HMB. With my lower-than-low mental scores, most of my skills were absolute crap. I also took a roll in swimming and one in first aid on top of the freebies.

Nobody played a spellcaster, but apparently there's a spell point system. *shrug* I like my clunky old slots/level Vancian dealie, but I'm sure that's house-rule-able.

Quirks and Flaws: In HM4, these are rolled randomly (as many times as you're dumb enough to ask for), and you earn BPs based on how hard you get boned. Here they don't buy you anything, instead all PCs roll for one Quirk (mental) and one Flaw (physical) (I think). I got "Foul-Mouthed" (like he wasn't gonna be anyway with a 3 Charisma) and "Pocking" (i.e., I got acne scars, -1 to Looks).

Combat: Here's where things get crazy/awesome. First off, instead of ACs and to-hit charts, combat is an opposed test. (Lots of things seem to be opposed tests.) The attacker rolls their to-hit (on a d20, no worries), and adds any bonuses from level, abilities, specialization, talents, magic, and so on. (These are, thankfully, all summed up on the weapon profile - no hastily adding them up on the spot.) The enemy makes a defense roll (d20 if they're aware, d8 if surprised or prone), adding in defense modifiers from abilities, magic, and such. If the attacker wins, the enemy is hit. Shields and weapons both boost defense (if the character is aware and can bring them to bear), whereas armor does NOT - however, both armor and shields absorb damage from a successful hit. If a shield is hit (i.e., makes the difference between a hit and a not-hit), it makes a save against breakage (modified by the damage and shield size). There's also knockback if you score enough damage (not sure of the math, but it happened once or twice). Interestingly, there's still crits, but now you can also roll a Perfect Defense and score yourself a free counter-attack.

Initiative is cascading - everybody rolls once (on a d12!), and then initiative is counted up from 1 (no rounds, the count doesn't "reset"). Attacking adds your weapon's speed to the count, attacking again adds it again. It's surprisingly fluid, and makes high-speed weapons like daggers nice and mean. (Honestly, this is a big change but I think I really like it - HM4 has this weird dichotomy between its round-based initiative (imported almost verbatim from the 1e DMG) and its tracking of movement and non-spell-melee-or-missile actions by segments. This system seems to remedy that.)

We played the introductory module that (as I understand it) is downloadable from the Kenzer & Co. site. To sum up (SPOILER ALERTS): Stuff is missing, go find out who took the stuff and get the stuff back, murdering the stuff-takers is optional. We got to the place, fought some wolves, fought some snakes, defeated a (normal, non-magical) apple tree, talked to (and successfully resisted the urge to murder) an old lady, murdered some halflings (the GM insisted they were kobolds but we had decided early on that the culprits of the stuff-taking were halflings, and wouldn't be dissuaded) ("mountain halflings" my dwarf theorized), and got the stuff. Then the guy wouldn't pay us because he keeps his money in a module that hasn't been published yet (no, really, I'm not making that part up). A good time was had by all, we won at HackMaster.

So, I'll be ordering myself a copy about as quickly as I can manage - it's pretty crunchy, which is not exactly how I prefer my AD&D, but as its own game it's got an awful lot going for it. (I'll be stealing from it liberally, both for 1e and HM4.) And the one-book presentation is a big plus. If you can arrange to sit down at a table for a test-drive, do yourself a favor. Thumbs up.

- DYA

Attention Vault-Dwellers

Holy fuck, this is awesome:

Wasteland

Wasteland is basically Fallout for tabletop, using a modified Traveller engine. Everything's there - the weapons, the creatures, the whole lot. This is sheer brilliance. I want to run it right away. DAMN YOU, GM ADD!!!1!!11

OH SHIT A NEW POST

Hey, I was gone for awhile* but apparently I'm back**, so here's a random (experimental) house rule to screw with.

SKILL PRACTICE / SKILL TRAINING


I always liked the skill systems in games like Ultima Online or old BBS MUDs, particularly the ability to learn a skill either by in-game practice or by training from an instructor. However, tying skill advancement to repeatedly performing a task over and over again is tricky.

First off, in online CRPGs game time generally equates to real time (albeit at a compressed rate), so advancement by practice is at least limited by the player's playing schedule and/or capacity for boredom. In a pen-and-paper RPG, where real time has an extremely nebulous relationship to game time, there's little to keep enterprising players from simply saying, for example, "I climb the inn wall a hundred times, let's start making skill rolls". How exciting for you and your players. Players should be rewarded for working on skills in-game without reducing play to a MMO-style grind session.

Second, some skills are way, way easier to learn than others. You can learn to build a fire effectively with only a few attempts (even quicker if you're camping out in the cold without a gore-tex mummy bag), while some hunters hunt for several seasons before ever making a kill (especially if they're doing it without a hunting buddy who knows what he's doing).

That in mind, consider assigning a die type to a skill based on how tough it is to learn (small dice for easy skills). Taking examples from the Wilderness Survival Guide, fire-building might have a d4, fishing perhaps a d6. Something like hunting maybe as much as a d8 or d10. On a skill practice attempt, the die type assigned is rolled - if a 1 is rolled, further attempts are made on the next lower die type. If the player gets a 1 on a d4, they have successfully learned the skill.
A player may make only 1 such practice attempt a day in this manner. (Not to say they can't keep trying, but only the first roll counts,). Basically, either you practiced (GM's call on how practice for any given skill takes), or you didn't.

To account for a trainer, a practice attempt could be considered successful on a 1 or a 2. This could be used for a peer trainer (i.e., PC training PC), where perhaps a master trainer could even allow success on a 1, 2, or 3.

Furthermore, in a game where skills are rated by competence (as opposed to binary "you have it or you don't" skills), this system can be reversed to track advancement beyond simple competence. Roll from d4 up to d6 and so on, and assign a skill level to the die type being rolled - maybe d4 = clueless, d6 = novice, d8 = apprentice, d10 = average, yadda yadda yadda. (Could also apply to NWPs that have multiple slots.) You could assign different ratings for different skills if you wanted that degree of granularity.


Keep in mind this is all system-neutral brainstorming, except that it obviously assumes some sort of skill system is in play. I use simple roll-under ability checks in Basic, but I'm considering working NWPs and/or secondary skills (as per the 1e DMG)into my new AD&D campaign - however I'm not a fan of the "proficiency slots per level" system in the Survival Guides. In any case, the above could be used in any game with a similar system. I may use it, or a variant thereof, for LBB Traveller at some point soon.

-DYA


* Family illness + PC issues + unemployment + new band getting ready to play shows, all teamed up to make blogging (and gaming) the last thing on my mind for a few weeks, there.

** However, a) things calmed down a little bit, b) my bandmates started asking about D&D, and c) the guy running the fucking sweet BFRPG/Castle Zagyg campaign I had been playing in made a sudden departure from gaming, leaving me free to read mine. It was immediately necessary to start a new 1e / Castle Greyhawk campaign. ;) More on that in probably my next post.

*** Also I got a Blackberry so I can post random nonsense as it pops out of my head now, and then I sat down for a smoke, read about rules for catfish noodling being included in an old issue of White Dwarf, and the preceding rule nugget popped out. Yay for the illuminating properties of the halfling's weed.

**** wait, there wasn't even a "***" up there, why did you read that last bit? why are you even reading this?