An apology and a photo or two

So, once again, August is RPG a Day, when all sorts of bloggers and video-creators talk about roleplaying games. And while I've had a lot of fun with it in previous years, August is looking like a very hectic month for me. Also, a lot of the questions are much more personal, in the sense that they're about my campaign or people I know, and I'm not sure that would have a lot of relevance to anyone who doesn't know those people. I may try to be periodic recaps, like I did for the weekend questions last year, but I'm not sure I@m going to be able to do the whole thing.

Anyway, speaking of things that are distracting my attention in August, I finished the unreleased Foundry pig-faced space orcs I've been working on. I had to convert a few of the models up to make them work with my chosen theme, which is why the last few took so long (even though they were very minor conversions). I'm pretty happy with how they came out overall.

All 15 pig-faced space orcs, ready for battle. 

The MG team hustling into position.

We are on a first-name basis in this man's army ... and my first name is Herr Kapitan!

The rifle squad.

The assault squad ready to batter down a door or two. 

RPG a Day 2015: Wrap-up!

So, this August was RPG a Day 2015, and I have made a bunch of posts about it. Last year I did a mixture of blog posts and YouTube videos, but this year almost everything I've posted has been on my YouTube channel.

Here's the wrapup video, covering the last three days of 2015's project:

Now, this video had a lot of references, so here are some of the links:

Blogs I am currently enjoying reading or wish would update more include:

• Straits of Anian. 
• Goblin Punch. 
• Middenmurk. 

Also, one of the nice things about RPGaDay is that it brings out the posts from friends such as Out of my Mind, The Anxious Gamer and others. There are others I should be linking to -- honestly, I should just set up a proper sidebar. 

The writer I mention in the post, Ta-Nehisi Coates, writes about history, politics and comic books. I can't imagine why I like him so much!

RPG a Day, Day 7: Our favourite price

Today's RPG a Day topic is Free RPGs, and I'm going to say boring things about them. I've been making videos for a while, but this is such a resolutely unvisual topic that I'm just going to do a blog post here.

My favourite free RPG is probably ... yeah, I think it's got to be Stars Without Number. If you're running a science-fiction game of any kind, I think it's a really useful thing to read. There are even tons of free supplements! Of course, after that I bought loads of supplements and other Sine Nomine games, so it seems like this free-rulebook business is working out for Kevin Crawford, at least as far as getting my personal money is concerned. While you're at the Sine Nomine page, there's another free Crawford title, Exemplars and Eidolons, which I have but have never read. I'll get to it!

I got a free (well, "included in the price") copy of the Victorian Scientific Romance (that's "steampulp" to you) RPG Forgotten Futures in an issue of Arcane magazine back in the day, but you can get it for free as well here. I'm not wild about the system, but the game's supplements provide vast resources for anyone wanting to run a Victorian Science Fiction game.

Obviously, there are umpty-bazillion free scenarios out there, but I strongly recommend Gormand's Larder, a weird little mini-dungeon with no text whatsoever, just illustrations.

RPG a Day so far

Last year, I participated in Dave Chapman's RPG a Day, and it prompted me to write and think about my gaming habits. Well, it's back, and I've been making videos for each day of the month so far. Here they are for those that haven't seen them.

I turned out not to have a good answer for the first question about games I was anticipating.

On the second day, I was a guest on the main RPG a Day video, talking once again about Silent Legions. It really is very good.

Day 3 was about things I've purchased in the last year, including recent ENnie winner A Red and Pleasant Land. It is also good.

In my next video, I talked about a game that surprised me; there was a cameo appearance by a classic.

And today, on Day 5, I talk about recent purchases including Tunnels & Trolls and Many Gates of the Gann.

RPG a Day, Day 31: The final chapter

So today's post is about my favourite RPG, but naturally I'm going to talk about my favourite games in general, not just one.

Notes:

You can find Stars Without Number and its various supplements here. I have not really looked at Sine Nomine's fantasy stuff much, but I find it hard to believe it isn't equally great.

Here is the online version of the Ralios game writeups I liked so much. If you played in "Once Upon a Time in Kerofinela," you may find the tone familiar; it was a big influence.

My most recent big UA campaign was "Rose Crescent," which I ran in 2006. I wrote it up -- much of it anyway -- on my old livejournal; you can see the posts here. I don't have the notes for my previous two campaigns, "The King Leopold Society" and "Unknown Ellroy."

Beyond the Supernatural is goofy fun, and has some cool art. The supplement, Boxed Nightmares, came with a little newspaper, which was pretty cool.

I do like the props in CoC, like these ones from Propnomicon:

RPG a Day, Day 30: There's something you don't see every day.

I have never been a collector when it comes to RPGs, and I only started to get interested in that side of miniatures relatively recently -- and even then I'm pretty haphazard about it. But I do have one or two good things, including some interesting old magazines and a few weird editions of various games.

Notes:

 You should check out Forgotten Futures. Loads of extra material is available on the game's website. It really is an unparalleled VSF resource.

RPG a Day, Day 29: Brief encounter

So today's prompt is "most memorable encounter." For me, as a player, I don't think that I necessarily think of my favourite gaming memories in "encounter" terms -- if a traditional tabletop game is going on, like as not I'm running it, and the kind of social live play I really enjoy isn't really "encounter"-y. And older games tend to fade a bit for me so that I can't really remember the precise details of an encounter. I remember laughing like mad during Luke's WHFRP game, but I'm not sure I could put my finger on any one encounter.

So anyway, here are two of my favourites from games I've run -- not the best, not the best-run or best-designed, just two that spring to mind at the moment.

The first is a recent scrap from my D&D game. I don't think this was actually my favourite encounter from this scenario, but it does have a photograph that illustrates the chaotic nature of an interesting fight. Here we see the PCs locked in titanic struggle against the mysterious mole men and their earth elemental minions. I wanted to create a sense of the multiple levels in the cavern, so I set up some rudimentary terrain.

The title is a reference to an old interview about the game Serious Sam, but I like the phrase as a way to think about a good combat scene. The mental soundtrack of a good fight should be "ohshitohshitohshitohshit," which I think was pretty much how this one went. Plus I liked roleplaying the Mole Men; I got to say things like "you are lying! All surface-dwellers are alike" in a hissy monster voice. 

The other one that leaps to mind comes from when friend Jeff and I co-ran the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign. Near the end of the campaign, the Investigators were fleeing from a shoggoth, as one does. 

See?

Now the shoggoth's task (spoilers for a campaign that came out like 12 years ago, I guess) is not to kill them but to harvest their living brains for use in the Elder Things' botched-up bio-computer. They don't know this, but if they get grabbed it's a quick trip to the flesh-removing pits or whatever for them.

So they're running like hell, and as the creature gets closer and closer things are getting pretty tense. And finally one of the players, already looking a bit guilty, says "OK, I'm gonna trip him." So his character trips up the guy fleeing next to him. Or maybe he just naturally tripped up and the other didn't help him? I cannot recall. Anyway, the shoggoth swarms over the fallen explorer, the other guy scrambles to safety, and that's that. Except ...

The guy playing the betrayed character -- and I will always admire him for this -- decides that just because he's been glomped by this ancient protoplasm doesn't mean it's over. Instead, he goes to town roleplaying the process of having his nervous system removed from his still-living flesh, sitting there and wailing in terror and agony: "oh God, it's eating me alive! I'm not dead! No! No! Why did you do it? WHYYYYY?!"

The surviving player sat through it, just getting paler and paler. His character got back to base camp, completed whatever it was his mission had been, made sure everyone else was going to get out of Antarctica safely, then took off his parka, walked out into the snow and was never seen again. 

Personally, I found it very satisfying. 

RPG a Day, Day 28: Putting the frighteners on them

Today we talk about scary games. I think I've run one or two in my time, but fear is a tough emotion to generate at the table, or even live: much tougher than excitement or laughter.

Notes:

Qelong is really dingdang good, like a horrible fantasy Heart of Darkness set in horrible fantasy Cambodia, and the PDF is less than £5.

Cthulhu Live has its hits and misses, but it opened my eyes to a completely different way of conceptualising live gaming, one which I still make a lot of use of even in parlour-style games. The third edition probably has more stuff, but the first edition has a nice wide page format and cute illustrations by Steve Gallacci.

RPG a Day, Day 27: Everything old is new again

Today we talk about new editions. I got cut off right near the end of this one, but I think you can extrapolate what I was going to say. A good bad game is a delicate thing, much like a good bad movie.

Here is a picture to make this post look better on social media. 

EDIT: I am reliably informed that UA3 is go. Yay!

RPG a Day, Day 26: All there in black and white

Today I talk about character sheets!

Notes:

I like stationery from Squarehex. I like stationery in general. I'm really absurdly excited to getting an isometric pad. Is that silly?

RPG a Day, Day 25: Alone in the crowd?

The question for today is "favourite RPG no one else wants to play," and I have a really short video to go with it, because I ... don't have an answer to that question. In general, I think that a) I don't really have a huge desire to run very weird games, and b) I am usually able to communicate my enthusiasm effectively.

I do not run this game, for instance. 

RPG a Day, Day 24: Involutions

OK, so the topic for today is "most complicated game owned."

I don't think I own a lot of complicated games. I don't have the kind of memory that allows me to be good at procedures, and I try to avoid looking things up at the table (my memory for text and trivia is not bad). I suppose that the most complicated game I own is probably World of Synnibarr, since I did spend the better part of a week creating characters for it. Although honestly I don't think I would call it the better part.

I have run and played games where the system is time-consuming, like old World of Darkness. ("Roll to hit. OK, now you roll to dodge. OK, now you recalculate your pool and roll damage. OK, now you roll soak." For every attack.) But although that game has some dumb elements, I don't think the resolution system is complicated per se. The Unknown Armies system consists of a simple, versatile core mechanic and eleventy billion subsystems that you just have to look up because you'll never remember them, but I'm not sure that that is what we mean when we say "complicated" either. 

I guess Underground was complicated; so complicated that I don't even really remember the gist of the system other than that you had to convert everything into some kind of points (action points? Advantage points?), leading to insane questions like "how far is a mile?" or "how long is two days?" So in its attempt to have a single mechanic that handled how all the powers worked (rather than having a different results table for each power a la older D&D or WoD) it introduced something that gave me an ice cream headache just to read. 

But I think that all I'm establishing is that I'm a complexity wimp. Even though I play what is, by my standards, a relatively complex game, I have a tendency to just gloss over and skip the complex parts of it when I don't feel like letting someone else do it for me. 

Eh, it works for me. 

RPG a Day, Day 23: Hey good lookin'

Sometimes I think I am just making video for the sake of making it, but today we have a visual question! Let's take a look at the coolest-looking gaming products I own. I am a pretty utilitarian gamers, so I don't have too many fancy games; this is pretty simple stuff.

Notes:

You can get Hell 4 Leather from Prince of Darkness Games.

Wayne Barlowe's books are stupidly expensive on Amazon, but if you see one at a reasonable price you should grab it. They are pretty cool. You may know Barlowe as the artist who did a lot of work on the kaiju in Pacific Rim.

I mention Underground, which was published my Mayfair Games. A friend of mine had this in high school, and it was ... interesting. I don't think I was too impressed by this at the time, but I've come to appreciate it in context. I think at the time the flaws in the execution (and a certain amount of trying too hard from the game) put me off.

It's a game about being genetically-modified and cybernetically-enhanced supersoldiers who are trained to believe that you're superheroes. When the war ends, though, you're just dumped on the streets of a comically grim American dystopia and left to make your own way. It was in full colour when that was pretty rare, and it had lots of neat visual features: the page borders were colour-coded to tell you what section of the book you were in, for instance, and there were all sorts of materials like a newspaper full of stories and images from the setting and a campaign notebook that was an actual binder you could add stuff to. Unfortunately, I don't think the execution was really there in every case, and the system, which if I recall correctly was a variant on the old DC Heroes system, was a dog from hell. It had art from all sorts of people including Geoff Darrow and Peter Chung. Gotta love that Darrow cover. Someone called it Marshal Law, the RPG, which I don't think is quite right, but it should give you a taste of the aesthetic, anyway. I acquired pretty much the whole line in the early 2000s, but I got rid of it when I moved because the chance of my ever taking the time to convert it from a system that wasn't a migraine factory was 0.0%. These days I think I would find that process a lot easier. 

You can still get it, quite cheaply, either in print from Paizo or in PDF from DTRPG, so that's cool. It doesn't look like Paizo has the core rules, but they do have the superb Ways and Means Washington D.C. supplement by Robin Laws. 

RPG a Day, Day 22: Man the bargain hunter

So tomorrow I am going to London, and one of the things I am most excited about doing, apart from all the great bookshops and museums and so on, is going to this tiny model shop in Ealing:

I'm going to buy something for the sake of being a good customer -- I can always get some modelling materials even if they don't have anything I specifically want -- but really what I like the most is the fun of bargain hunting. You never know what you're going to find! I've actually been much more successful in the miniatures field than in RPGS; my collection of Rogue Trader era rarities doesn't mean I was picking up weird Adeptus Mechanicus models when I was 9, it just means I am assiduous in my searching of flea markets, car boot sales and of course the internet. 

But that's not to say I haven't found a few cool things second-hand in the RPG world, mainly thanks to my old games shop having a good used shelf but also thanks to the various online communities I'm part of. 

                                    

Notes:

Now, as you might expect, most of the games I talk about in my second-hand post are out of print, but not all of them. 

You can't find this specific Glorantha book, but Design Mechanism has some other ones, including many for $1. Those are only a fraction of the many books out there, I'm just saying that they're from the same era as the one I mention in this post. 

And of course Reign is still available. And if you just want the leading-large-groups rules and not the setting, you can get the Enchiridion.

More info on the upcoming new version of King of Sartar.

RPG a Day, Day 21: The game of the book of the film!

Today: licensed games.

Notes:

Several times in the show, I refer to Out of My Mind, friend of the blog and fellow RPG a Day project-doer. 

I namecheck an absolute shitload of things in this video, and here are some of them: 

The Mouse Guard RPG, and the comics it is based on. 

Burning Empires, and the comics it is based on. 

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, still in print after all these years!

James Bond 007 is long gone, but there is a retroclone of it, Classified.

A less punctilious and law-abiding man than I might draw very different conclusions from the fact that the long-OOP Ghostbusters RPG, both first and second editions, is not hard to find online. 

These are the classic 80s Citadel Doctor Who figures my pal Jesse was kind enough to send me. I mean, not these actual ones, but you know what I mean: 

RPG a Day, Day 20: Yourself at 55

Seriously, it is pretty good.

Before I tackle the question of games I'll be playing in 20 years' time, an additional point about yesterday's post: how could I have forgotten "Raid on Innsmouth," from Escape from Innsmouth, as a contender for favourite scenario? I have actually never run this thing, but it's brilliant -- the investigators volunteer to join (or are bullied into joining) the raid on Innsmouth mentioned in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. There are a number of different teams doing different things in the raid, and each winds up consisting of an investigator and a number of military or Treasury department pre-gens. You will be surprised to learn that many of these brave young men will not make it. The division allows the scenario to explore a bunch of different environments in a way that would be very different to do plausibly in sequence. I've even wondered if this wouldn't actually be a better way to do Masks of Nyarlathotep, sending one PC from the original group to Kenya, one to Shanghai, one to Australia, etc., and then recruiting a team of locals who might actually know something about wandering around the outback or speaking Chinese.

Anyway, today's topic is "what games will you still be playing in 20 years' time?" To answer this question, I've looked back at the games I was playing 20 years ago to give some indication. Of the games I was playing in those days, there are only two that are really still in my to-play pile: Call of Cthulhu (even though I haven't actually played that much of it lately) and the various World of Darkness games (even though they are much changed).

In a way, this makes me a little unhappy. Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic game, of course, but the White Wolf games are ... just OK. Some good ideas hampered by a gooey mess of a system and a world that's equal parts good stuff, messy contradiction, derp and who-gives-a-shit. However, Vampire: the Requiem at least is well-suited to the kind of social/political live game I like, and I really like the group of people I play it with, even though I'm not wild about the game itself.

I would be happy to be playing CoC in 20 years, but I really don't want to be playing another dingdang edition of Vampire, at least not month in, month out. I'm having fun playing it in my current group, but I don't know that I would join another game of it.

As for games that I've started playing since I was 15 that I think I'll still be playing in 20 years, I think that, coming to D&D late, I've found that there are parts of the fantasy adventure genre that really let me do fun stuff as a GM. I could definitely still be playing some form of D&D in 20 years, although I have no really strict preferences about edition or system. I think that game's got a lot of versatility and therefore a lot of replay value.

The other category of game I currently own that I might be playing at 55 would be things I haven't yet got round to playing. Perhaps by 55 I'll finally have started that Spaceship Zero campaign?

RPG a Day, Day 19: Let me tell you of the days of high adventure(s)

Some time ago I said this:

Some people will tell you Masks of Nyarlathotep is the greatest long - form RPG scenario.
— James Holloway (@gonzohistory) August 2, 2014

These people suffer from a curious speech defect which leaves them unable to pronounce the phrase "The Enemy Within."
— James Holloway (@gonzohistory) August 2, 2014

And I stand by that. Don't get me wrong; Masks of Nyarlathotep (here and currently on sale in PDF, here in print) is amazing, but I don't think it's game-defining in the way The Enemy Within is. In fact, arguably Masks is very different from the common run of Call of Cthulhu scenarios. It would be the ideal culmination for a long campaign, taking the action to a new and larger stage. By contrast, The Enemy Within is pretty much the defining WHFRP scenario.

But that doesn't make either of them my favourite published scenario.

To be honest, I am not in the main a runner of published scenarios, certainly not as written. I ran my D&D group through Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God some months ago, but only after completely redoing the lower levels, changing the monsters in the upper levels and generally stretching it to fit my game. Which is, of course, what old-school scenarios are supposed to be used for. And I used to run a lot of Call of Cthulhu and TMNT scenarios back in the day, but these days I feel like my own scenario-creation instincts are sound enough that I can design things for my own game without too much trouble.

So, favourite scenario ...

... if it is the scenario I have run the greatest number of times, that's probably "In Media Res," which appeared in issue 10 of The Unspeakable Oath and was subsequently reprinted in one of the The Resurrected volumes. This is a little one-shot Call of Cthulhu scenario by John Tynes, although I like to think of it as an Unknown Armies scenario before there was such a thing. In it, the players find themselves standing around a murdered body, wearing uniforms from an institute for the criminally insane, clearly having participated in some kind of horrible murder ritual and with no idea how they got there. It's a nice simple start-off premise, and I have run it several times, each time as a live-action game. I monkeyed with it a bit every time to make it fit the location it was being played in, of course.

Alternatively, my most-run scenario may be "Caesar's Weasels," which appears in the TMNT and Other Strangeness corebook. I talked about this great game back on Day 2 or 3, and this has been my go-to scenario every time I've run it, if only because a) it is very simple, b) the villains are kind of sympathetic, and c) the central conceit has that kind of "Flash Fact" level of scientific plausibility that you might find in a 20-minute episode of a Saturday morning cartoon.

I'm not sure either of these is my favourite -- like, if you asked me, I wouldn't name either of these -- but the evidence suggests that I do keep coming back to them. I think it's no coincidence that they're tight, self-contained done-in-one stories, which may be something that appeals to me in a scenario. If I'm going to be running something huge, I feel as though I would prefer to customise it a little more to fit my group and its needs, which sort of disqualifies it from being my favourite published scenario.

I'm sure I've probably left some things out, especially scenarios I've already mentioned ("The Cooks of Cuirnif," Forgive Us) but if there's something you feel like I've slighted, let me know!

(I have never been as fond of "Jailbreak" from One Shots as most people seem to be.)

RPG a Day, Day 18: Crunchin' numbers

I am not a systems guy; I don't feel like I have a strong preference in terms of game mechanics for the most part. I therefore wouldn't say I have a favourite system, or at least not a favourite system for a reason that is at all interesting -- like, I like the Call of Cthulhu system because it's easy to understand and easy to explain and, with one or two exceptions, all the things on the character sheet do just what they say. So instead what I'm gonna talk about is some mechanics that I like, without necessarily identifying a game as my favourite system.

Yesterday, I talked about why I like the tagline mechanism in Dying Earth. I think it encourages the kind of conversations you want in the game, adds some laughs and guides the game. But today's subject is a game I've mentioned a few times before, Stars Without Number, which is available as a free download.

There are two things I really like about the mechanics in this game. OK, three. These are probably also in other systems, so if you know the antecedents let me know. I love the way the random system allows quick generation of space settings with scenario hooks rather than as a sort of simulation engine. I really like the way skill use uses 2d6 while combat uses a d20, so that skill use is relatively predictable while combat is very swingy. And I like how psychics can permanently burn off parts of their point pool to gain the ability to use a power at no cost, meaning that the class can vary between being a classic wizard and a more supers-y character. The psychic in my campaign had a few of these permanent powers, and was able to use them to problem-solve in very creative ways.

RPG a Day, Day 17: Laugh, clown, laugh.

Today I'm going to talk about the funniest game I've run. Despite what you might think, it's not Paranoia. If you know me, you might know what it is ...

Notes:

You can get the Dying Earth RPG on Drivethru. The update to the rules is the Revivification Folio. You can also get the book in the traditional format. And you should read the original stories

Somehow I failed to mention that a) of course, the Dying Earth stories are where the D&D magic system comes from, more or less, and b) that one of my favourite things about Paranoia is that its definitive artist and I have the same name. He even once sent me an email headed "evil clone must die!"

RPG a Day, Day 16: The shape of the world to come

I have only recently started getting really interested in collecting certain types of games. I'm still mainly interested in getting fun old books on the cheap rather than snapping up rarities, but I've got a few things lately I'm quite happy about:

But that's not what I'm going to talk about today. The game that I want to acquire isn't a specific game -- rather, I wish I had a version of a particular game that would give me the resources to do certain things.       

Notes: 

Weirdly, no version of Gamma World seems to be available in PDF, but Metamorphosis Alpha is, for less than £4. I'm going to have to pick that up just for the read. 

And of course once again I mention Other Dust, which is really ... it's pretty good, I think. 

I'm not saying that the Gammarauders comic was good per se, but it had some crazy visual stuff.