Painting update and more charity shop finds!

 A few things I've painted recently and some great deals I found in a local charity shop.

This is a Reaper Bones model from the second Kickstarter. It is a "Desert Thing," apparently, but I think it'll come in handy in Strange Aeons, D&D, even Warhammer. I don't think it's currently available in Bones, but I'm sure you can find it where things are resold. 

This little fountain is a neat-looking piece of scatter terrain. 2nd ed. Gretchin for scale!

This Metal Magic / Hobby Products Spacelords adventurer is now available through Moonraker Miniatures. I've used my typical dark red colour to tie him visually to some of my Inquisition models, but he'll do as any kind of crook, agent or gunslinger. Sorry for the out-of-focus image. 

I got this lovely old Citadel cleric as part of a trade at this year's Oldhammer weekend. She may have a role in D&D, but I'm also thinking maybe I will play some Frostgrave one of these days. 

Picked up this classic 80s boxed set in a local Oxfam for £4.99. It even has dice, the original maps and card miniatures, and some handouts from another scenario.

It occurs to me that with all my old White Dwarf magazines, I basically have a whole little campaign for this game now.

Same shop, same price tag, same lesson in the history of gaming!

And now, a word from our sponsors

Just a short post today after Friday's novel! It's the Christmas in July sale over at DriveThru, and lots of things are 25% or more off. I thought I'd take a moment to go over all the reviews I've posted on this blog as well as last year's RPG a Day posts and see if any of the things I recommended are on sale. And what do you know, there are a few.

Maelstrom Domesday

A spinoff or reimagining of British classic Maelstrom (itself currently on sale for less than £3!), this is a game that's right up my alley and possibly no one else's, a scrub-level horror/mystery game set in England in the late 11th century with tons of period detail and a strong chance of being a disfigured peasant. I wrote a full read-through and a character creation post.

I do keep meaning to run this game, but when? Anyway, you can get it for super cheaps -- less than a fiver for the PDF -- on DTRPG right now, since there's an extra sale on.

After the Bomb

It's about cartoon mutant animals fighting in the wreckage of a nuclear-devastated America, and it started as a supplement for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. Now it has its own system -- and OK, Palladium character creation is complicated and time-consuming, but it's dead easy to strip away the cruft. And you get a hell of a lot for just a few dollars with these After the Bomb PDFs. Road Hogs is my personal favourite -- and it's like £2.50! -- but they're all cool. It's the only post-apocalyptic hot rod samurai funny animal rockabilly western you're ever going to need.

Sadly, the original TMNT game is out of print, but my experience is that it's not hard to find on eBay, and there's a new After the Bomb RPG that all these books are compatible with.

The Flying Serpent

Not a game at all, just a weird historical document that would make a great prop for anyone running a supernatural mystery game set in England. And less than a pound.

Tunnels & Trolls

My very first RPG, this game has a fancy new edition, but you can actually buy the first edition from the 70s in PDF for less than two dollars American!

Cyberpunk

Your pal and mine Chris wrote a guest post about this classic after picking it up for a song at the SELWG bring and buy. I don't think the first edition is still available, but you can definitely get the second and third in PDF for about seven quid each. 

Everything Sine Nomine has done ever

The only thing more tiresome than my love for Silent Legions (two-part review here and here) is my fondness for Stars Without Number and its spinoff, Other Dust. Come to that, I just read Spears of the Dawn and enjoyed it as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and endorse pretty much everything Kevin Crawford does. Get you some. 

So anyway, that's what I've reviewed or talked about on the blog that's currently on sale at DTRPG. Get 'em before the end of July for, you know, big savings. Three floors of values! You know the kind of thing. 

Guest Post: The not-too-distant future!

Today, guest blogger Chris of Dreadnoughts and Dragons takes us back to the future with this look at 1980s classic Cyberpunk and its vision of the dark dystopian future of, er ...

... 2013.

One of the greatest problems with roleplaying games in general is that they over-engineer solutions to problems that don't really exist, and ignore problems that would actually make life a little better. Of course, in the real world the exact opposite is true: technology advances fastest in areas where there is greatest consumer demand.

If you want an illustration of just how this can date a game, look no further than Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future. Unfortunately, this dark 'future' is the world of 2013, as envisaged by Mike Pondsmith in 1988. I picked up the first edition of this game for £1, and found myself back in the world before the Internet. Imagine the bastard RPG lovechild of William Gibson and Don Johnson, then add more hair spray. How dark is 2013? Well, apart from being perpetually set at night (this is cyberpunk, duh) it's your basic corporate police state/impoverished street gang dystopia. 

The 'cyber' side comes in the form of a worldwide network which you literally have to plug yourself into (to help out players who have never used a computer that didn't require a cassette tape, there are detailed sections explaining what a modem does). 

The 'punk' aspect are the party-loving, tech-fixated gang members. The character creation guide states that your motive is to wear the coolest clothes and visit the coolest clubs. One of the nine classes available to play is Rockstar. The willpower stat is called Cool. Everyone uses a nickname ('handle') to sound as cool as your idol, Johnny Silverhand.

But the technology... oh, the technology is glorious. Behold this little gem.

Fax. This is the letter-writing mode of the future.

Thank fuck the game was wrong on that score.

It's not the only glaring anachronism. In a world where the first NPC you meet (an uninteresting hacker girl called Alt) has a “gold-plated cyberarm with hidden compartment”, mobiles are still giant bricks the size of walkie-talkies.

In fact, it's worth noting where Cyberpunk gets it right, and where it gets it wrong:

Right:

• Internet! 
• Europe is great apart from Spain and Greece, who are broke 
• 24/7 news coverage has turned the media into crazed lunatics 
• People love technology 
• Everyone wants a gold-plated cyberarm with hidden compartment.

Wrong:

• No cyborg implants are in general use, let alone gold ones with sneaky compartments 
• No gangs of mullet-sporting rock musicians roam the mean streets of America like they're the fucking Sharks and Jets 
• Phones are not bricks 
• People use the internet for things other than corporate espionage, like looking at pictures of cats 
• Newspapers are not printed out by fax on street corners 
• Fax is not the letter-writing mode of the future, cat pictures are 
• Nobody wants a modem or fax machine planted in their skull 
• Phones are not the size of bricks 
• Hovercars don't exist 
• You can't melt people's brains with your 133t haxxor fax skillz 
• A phone or a laptop is not more expensive than a motorbike. 

 Anachronisms aside, Cyperpunk is surprisingly easy to pick up and play: you can generate a character very accurately in a few minutes. Part of this is because it removes any real say in your character's background; you have to pick from one of nine classes (including Rockerboys, Solos, Cops and Corporates), each with a single special skill. You're then encouraged to generate your life history, with one event per year after 16, roll for your sweet sense of style, even roll to see who you care about. 

This is all very, very easy indeed to get moving: I generated a full character in under 10 minutes, who ended up a 'silly fluffhead' rockerboy addicted to drugs and with a mental health problem, who dresses in battle armour and spiked heels, has a kid sister who looks up to him, and a pet cassette tape that he loves more than anything else in the world.

While it can appear simple, there's more than enough detail to go on. The three books (my edition also has the Friday Night Firefight expansion) come to a whole 150 pages, but have detailed corporate biographies, walkthroughs of games, and even encounter generators for anyone who wants to surprise their players with chance run-ins with celebrities, gangs (the 'Bradi Bunch' is mentioned as a particularly vicious band of miscreants) or corporate secret police.

Overall, Cyberpunk is silly, simple and hopelessly outdated. It's pretty much a defining game for the 1980s.

---

Chris also points out that to send a fax you type it into a computer, which sends it to a local post office, which then prints it out and delivers it to the recipient; also, adding call-waiting and autodial to your phone costs $2600.

Now, I went to high school with computer-loving kids in the 1990s, so obviously I know a lot of Cyberpunk fans, although they mostly came up playing the second edition. Despite all that -- and despite that same edition being one of the games owned by the cousin who set me on the Call of Cthulhu path -- I have never actually played it. Have you? Did you update it or was the retro-futurism part of the appeal for you? Let us know!

Fallout: New Vegas and the Closing of the West

Today's post is another one in which I look at a video game and imagine a deeper cultural significance that may not exist. Mostly I do these over on my history blog (scroll down for the Skyrim stuff), but today I don't have even the most tangential history connection, so I'm just going to talk about Fallout: New Vegas and how a thing I found frustrating about the game might actually be one of its big themes.

I got my Xbox late in the console's life, so I only finished Fallout: New Vegas a few weeks ago. I had put off concluding it for a long time -- I started playing it in 2013, got to a certain point and then moved on to play other games. One of the reasons for this was that I found that the game's main storyline wasn't really what I enjoyed about it. 

The thing that I like about games like Fallout 3 and this one -- about this type of RPG in general, I guess -- is the exploration aspect. I like choosing a blank sector of the map and just saying "well, let's see what's over here." I like running into weird people and their weird problems. I like the hints, not at a wider story, but at the thousands of individual stories taking place everywhere in the world. 

And as the game progresses, there's less and less of that. The areas you visit have been cleared of baddies. Problems have been solved (at least in my case, because I tend to play a goody-two-shoes character in games), territory conquered, threats defeated. And finally there's nothing for it but to make your way to the climactic showdown at Hoover Dam, knowing that this means you have to say goodbye to the Wasteland. 

And I found that really frustrating and disappointing, even though I was pleased to see how it all ended. I popped in Fallout 3 (which I had also never finished) almost immediately to get back that that wandering-the-wasteland feeling. And then I began to think: this is a Western, right?

Today's activities will include: rootin', tootin', six-gun shootin'.

I borrow my summary of the core theme of the Western from Kenneth Hite, who phrased it thus (I paraphrase): 

Civilisation can only be defended from barbarism by the gun. Whoever takes up the gun is a barbarian.

And it's true -- many of the classic Westerns focus on this theme: a lone outsider or outcast who defends settled people from an external threat but then finds out that he can't exist in the society he's defended. Sometimes he dies, sometimes he rides on, and sometimes (The Magnificent Seven) it's a bit of both.

Ah, the forces of order. 

So was the disappointment and frustration I felt with the end of New Vegas actually how you're supposed to feel as a lone gunslinger when you finally take down the bad guy, only to realise that a bad-guy-free world has no place for your brand of rootless, .44-calibre problem solving? I loved the Wasteland, and I wanted to protect the people in it. But protecting the people killed the Wasteland, the Wasteland where anything could happen, where a man could wander as he liked with nothing but his trusty suit of power armour and heavy machine gun. I mean, Stetson and six-shooter. 

Now, obviously, my version of this experience is coloured by the fact that I sided with flawed, corrupt, bungling democracy, and that I routinely chose the nicey-nice option when available. I might feel different leaving behind a wasteland that I had terrorised and plundered, I guess. Or rather, I would feel the same way, but it would hardly be an iconic Western. 

I guess the thing I wonder is whether this "end of the frontier" phenomenon is something that the designers intended? Or is it just that if you populate a landscape with six-guns and sarsaparilla Western themes will just appear in the players' heads through the process of association? Is it just that the genre is so well-established? I expect I'll feel the same thing as I near the end of Fallout 3, and that won't have anything to do with its fundamental conflict of nostalgia vs bricolage. 

Does this extend to other genres? Can I get people to think about society's relationship to technology just by putting neon all over everything and giving everyone ill-advised haircuts?

I dunno. But from a game-running perspective I think it's an interesting question. 

The Mysterious Thingummy of Whatsisname

So I wrote this long blog post and I somehow deleted the entire thing, and now I'm too frustrated and unhappy to write it all again. So here's the highlights.

I have written before about valuing incompleteness as an aesthetic -- or not incompleteness, but unfamiliarity, the kind of incompleteness that suggests the presence of some deeper system or at the very least an overriding aesthetic principle. The first place in gaming that I encountered this was, where else, in Glorantha, specifically through David Dunham's East Ralios campaign, which was written up in Peter Maranci's old Interregnum APA back in the day. It was a major swipe-source for my own Dragon Pass game.

When I first read something like this ...

As Halvar Stormeye raised his hands, a powerful whirlwind rose around them, blurring their vision. They were swept into the air, finally coming back down in a valley that looked much like their own, but greener and brighter, with taller hills and a fast-flowing river in place of the stream.
Between them in the spot the stone had been was an odd person with legs as long as a man is tall. Aidin recognized him as a Flint Slinger, a spirit which often punishes initiates who break their vows. They gave the Orlanthi Greeting. He answered and introduced himself as Left-Stone Shouter, and said he would be their guide.
The valley contained no steads, but Left-Stone Shouter pointed them towards some trees. Sitting in them were two winged men, arguing about who had first spotted a bag of sand. Konall suggested splitting the sand, but they told him it was the bag that was magic. Minara proposed taking turns using the bag, and drawing lots to see who would have it during Sacred Time. They agreed to this, then brought them to their tree-top stead where they were greeted by the thane and given meat and water. The thane, who had magnificently dyed feathers, asked them to entertain the assembly. Konall played his flute, Harmast and Jornast told stories, and Una made whirligigs for the children. The thane was well pleased, and gave them each a feather bracelet.
Left-Stone Shouter leaped into the air to the height of 20 men, and described the green-skinned lady he saw. When they got to her, she asked them to rescue her herd, which had been stolen by men of darkness.

... it blew the top of my head right off with its suggestion of a mythology that was actually, well, mythological.

Now, in the case of Glorantha, it so happens that there is a huge underlying depth and complexity to all this, one that until relatively recently you had to be some kind of initiate to get full access to. But I'm not completely convinced that that really matters.

When I was younger, the other place you came across this was in video games. Consider Street Fighter II, for instance. If, like me, you were 12 when it came out, you were enthralled by the graphics and the different fighting styles and the characters. Some of them were easy to figure out, but like Dhalsim and M. Bison and Blanka -- who the hell were these guys? And most of all:

WHAT IN THE SHIT WAS A "SHENG LONG"? 

Of course I know what it means now -- new versions of the game have him saying things like "you must defeat my Shoryuken" or whatever, and there's even a little joke about Gouken sometimes being called Sheng Long, which I think is a callout to this old hoax: 

But at the time it was a mystery for the ages. And that sense of entrancement came from the fact that the whole "story" aspect of the game consisted of maybe a few garbled, contradictory, half-translated lines here and there, and that "story" was an aspect of the game considered so unimportant that no effort was made to make it consistent or comprehensible. 

And we liked it. 

For me, the pinnacle of this is Rygar. Inspired by a friend's writing about old games, along with my recent trip to the Centre for Computing History, I have been thinking about old video games even more than usual (can you tell?). And I keep coming back to Rygar. Maybe it was the bitchin' soundtrack: 

Or maybe it was the insane enemies: 

More here and here.

Or maybe it was the fact that your only guide around the game's weird (and surprisingly open) world were a bunch of weird giant hermits: 

Thanks a lot, Muscle Beach Santa. If I knew
where the fuck either of those places were,
that would be super helpful. 

But that game had the sense that you were right on top of either a surprisingly rich mythology or a Kirbyesque fever dream, and without an internet there was no real way to find out what in the Samuel Langhorn Hell was going on (which was kind of why they never bothered to come up with anything).

I miss that game. I started playing it again recently and it turns out I'm still terrible at it after all these years. 

Anyway, what all this adds up to is that I think I have a tendency to do this in my own game writing -- to try to create worlds that seem like if you studied them for a long time they might make sense, but which don't necessarily do so at first glance. In fact, I think a certain amount of alien incomprehensibility is desirable in any non-historical setting, especially if the characters treat it as no big deal. That's the secret to the success of Star Wars, after all, but that's a story for another time.

RPG a Day, Day 9: Let them fall where they may

Dice! One of those gamer cultural tokens, I guess? Some people are very into them.

I have to admit that making this post made me want to buy some more dice just to sort of have them and touch them and roll them and feel them clatter. Perhaps The Anxious Gamer was onto something about the whole physicality thing.

RPG a Day, Day 3: The first game I ever bought

In today's RPG a Day post, we'll be taking a look at the first game I ever owned, a classic of 80s game design that I feel still holds up pretty well today. Check out the video to find out more about it:

Notes:

• Sadly, Erick Wujcik passed away in 2008. 
• I checked Amazon for used TMNT books and whooee. Road Hogs is pretty reasonable, though.
• Oh! Here's some good news! It looks like Palladium stopped publishing TMNT but maintained the After the Bomb line with a new rulebook, which I guess has all the animals from the original core line. As a result, all the supplements are still available as inexpensive PDFs or in print. Get. In. Of course, there's only two I don't have, but still!
• One of my fondest memories is of my dad bewilderedly trying to play one of the scenarios from Guide to the Universe with me and my brother. He had no idea what was going on (nor did we, of course) and he disapproved of all the violence, but he tried, God bless him. 

RPG a Day, Day 2: First game I ran

No video this time, because I don't really have anything to wave at the camera.

The first game I ran ...

... this one is kind of lost in the mists of time. I have mentioned that my hometown had several games stores when I was very young, but either at a young age I didn't know where they were or I didn't know that they had the kind of thing I was looking for. So a lot of time was spent sort of ... reconstructing RPGs from memory. I remember one time I was at some kind of ... I don't know what it was. It seems like it was some kind of day care, but that seems really unlikely, since my mother hadn't yet gone back to work at the time. It could have been a summer day camp, but in my mind it was winter. I am pretty sure I remember watching A Christmas Story there, which would be a weird thing to do in July.

Anyway, there was another kid there who had played D&D, and he sort of reconstructed what he remembered of it, and I reconstructed what I knew about T&T, and he ran me and a few other kids through a dungeon, of which I remember nothing other than that there were some kind of rock monsters who were living stalactites. They fell down from the ceiling and might hit you, and then you had to fight them. I am pretty sure I died.

But as for the first game I ran ... well, I suppose you could call it a LARP.

One of these was my dungeon:

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure. 

And I was well supplied with fireballs: 

KABOOM!

Apart from that I remember nothing other than that I, as GM, represented some kind of an evil wizard, who if memory serves was called Zoltar. 

And there you have it. I was drunk with safe, soft, colourful power. My future as fateweaver and world-imaginer for all but one of the boys in Mrs Eng's 3rd-grade classroom was sealed. Or possibly Mr De Amici's 4th-grade classroom; I'm telling you, I remember nothing.

RPG a Day 1: My first roleplaying game

August being the month of GenCon, it's time for #RPGaDAY, in which David Chapman suggested that we answer different questions about our gaming history on different days of the month. Today, the question is: what is the first RPG you ever played? I made a short video about mine:

A few notes on the video: reading up on it, it seems like T&T was probably the first solo RPG in paperback format, even ahead of Fighting Fantasy. Huh! The game is still available in a bewildering variety of versions. There's even, you guessed it, a new deluxe edition coming via Kickstarter. But you can also still get the fourth edition (for four bucks, the same price it was when it came out in 1977! That was a lot of money in those days but it isn't now) or even the first, with typewritten text and everything. That's pretty cool.

The scenario that came in the boxed set was this one, Buffalo Castle.

You can learn more about the game from its publisher, Flying Buffalo.

Also, I forgot about Grimtooth's Traps. Man, I had a bunch of those.