#RPGaDAY: Day 23 - Coolest looking RPG product/book

There are a number of interpretations of 'coolest', but I cover most of the bases in today's video entry... in a narrow strip in the centre of the picture.

It's a learning curve.

This is the other book I was talking about, and a sample image, which I take to be an homonculus bottle of some kind. I need to make more use of shit like this in games that I run.

I think that this is the same Secret of Art and Science/Nature that I have/had. It's a facsmilie reprint of an actual 17th Century digest of the 'entire' canon of natural philosophy, which is what makes it way cooler than the modern collection in the Medieval Miscellany. A local bookstore got hold of a big stack of copies almost at random and a bunch of us bought them. It's full of references to and extracts from people like Cornelius Agrippa, and has a chapter on 'the secrets of sciences, as natural magick...'

Oh. Yeah.

#RPGaDAY: Day 22 - In which I change horses mid-stream

Okay, so this - best secondhand RPG purchase - is a bit of a toughy, as I don't buy many games secondhand. Back in the day I used to get them new on my way home from work (I was paid in cash on the far side of the games shop from the bus station; it was a fit up!), and when I've not had the money to do that I've never possessed enough of a collecting bug, not enough prospect of playing random purchases, to go for things secondhand. As a result, pretty much all I have are books I've talked about before, specifically Maelstrom and Allansia, the Advanced Fighting Fantasy wilderness and mass combat guide.

I think that's a remora, which always
confused me because a remora is also
a small fish that attaches to larger fish.

So, let's talk a little about Allansia, since I've covered Maelstrom quite a bit.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy was Steve Jackson (the GW one, not the Steve Jackson Games one) and Ian Livingstone's first shot at an original RPG, based in the world shared by most, but not all, of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I'm pretty sure that by this point their names were just on the 'present' banner and they weren't writing all that much, but...

Holy shit.

So, looking up who wrote the books (Marc Gascoigne and Pete Tamlyn) I have discovered that there was a new edition (published by Cublicle 7) a few years back, which included a campaign book called The Crown of Kings, for running the Sorcery! campaign in new AFF. Oh, man, if I had money I would be spending it right the fuck now!

Okay, fuck second hand purchases; we're talking about Sorcery!

Sorcery! was the first attempt to do something really different with a Fighting Fantasy book, and featured an epic quest stretched across four volumes. Your hero, 'the Analander', was an agent sent from the Kingdom of Analand into the chaos of Khakabad, through The Shamutanti Hills and Khare - Citiport of Traps, over the Baklands in pursuit of The Seven Serpents, and finally through the fortress of Mampang to confront the Archmage and recover The Crown of Kings.

It also had an awesome spellcasting system, which required the player to memorise a book of 48 spells, each with a three letter name and a crucial ingredient. In combat, you would have the option of casting one of three spells, one of which was usually a dud, one hopelessly inappropriate and one useful. If you picked the right one, actually had the right ingredient in your backpack, and paid the Stamina cost, you got to feel like a fricking Wizard for a few minutes, until the next time you tried to cast YOB without a giant's tooth in sight.

And it was tough. Dear lord, it was difficult. In Khare you had to collect parts of the password for the gate by completing what certainly seemed like fucking Mensa-level IQ tests. I don't think I ever completed either Khare or Crown of Kings, and not for want of trying.

Sorcery! was an eye opener for me; the first thing that showed me that fantasy games could be more than just a single book. The idea of character continuity was a revelation, and was I think what really hooked me into the idea of roleplaying. It's certainly what attracted me to Dungeoneer when it came out.

So, yeah... Wow, the idea of running The Crown of Kings for a group is pretty tempting. The wild beasts and vicious tribes of the Shamutanti Hills, the cutthroats of Khare, the Seven Serpents and the Archmage. I know it's probably just the nostalgic haze talking, but I am practically salivating at the thought. It's such a wonderfully rich setting and I have such fond memories of the books. Of course, ideally I wouldn't be killing off all of my PCs at the Baklands Gate of Khare, so it wouldn't be just the way I remember it.

£19.99 for the core book from the publisher, and I can get the campaign for £11.99 on Amazon...

No! Bad blogger! No biscuit.

Apparently, I could shift my old AFF books for about £500, and the new ones are only £100 or so all told, but... I guess I don't roll that way. One day, I may sell Dungeoneer to buy something awesome for my daughter, but not for me.

Still, I feel better about paying £30 for Allansia now.

Come back tomorrow - or possibly after the weekend, which may be Tuesday, because bank holiday - when I will still be wrestling with my desire to spend money I can't afford on books I will likely never use, and also talking about my coolest looking RPG product/book.

Man, that Crown of Kings campaign looks pretty cool to me right now.

#RPGaDAY: Day 21 - Favourite licensed RPG

Technically, this is a licensed RPG,
although the licensed property is -
or was, at least - also an RPG, making
this the game of the game, or the
game of the game of the game, since
the original WFRP was built on the
wargame.

I tend to be a bit sniffy about licensed RPGs (see yesterday's blog, for example), but the truth is that this is because my mind tends to focus on a few specific examples, and in particular the rash of D20 licenses for SF properties such as Stargate, Farscape and the big daddy, Star Wars that ensued from the first flush of the Open Gaming License.

The problem of these licensed products is threefold. Firstly, D20 is a shockingly poor choice for a game attempting to recreate a dramatic setting. The games attempt to hack this - with greater or lesser degrees of success - but ultimately if you're playing Star Wars, you really don't want to start off with a level 1 Fringer who's getting pwned by Stormtroopers, and while it's an easy fix, if you have to ignore the first 5-10 levels of character progression to make the game work, you're playing with the wrong system.

Umm... adventure? Wow; this is a cover
that screams 'we don't give a shit about
this product.'

Secondly, D20 is intrinsically class based, which means that you need to define classes in a setting which is not class based (even Call of Cthulhu D20 had 'Offensive' and 'Defensive'). Stargate flailed particularly horribly in this, creating a not-entirely-convincing divide between 'Soldier' and 'Guardian' (alien soldier/barbarian), while at the same time failing to make the fairly obvious - I thought - distinction between 'Scientist' and 'Scholar', or even 'Engineer'. Creating the highly-competent lead characters actually required prestige classes, which feel like they ought to be an extra, rather than standard.

This brings me to thirdly, which effects all licensed products: When push comes to shove we all have our own ideas about how a fictional setting works, and by locking down fictional history and trying to reconcile the available information without actually being a canon source, the licensed RPG often becomes a source of contention, even resentment (Ra was a Goa'uld possessing an Asgard possessing a human, puh-leese!). Even one of my most level-headed friends* was drawn in to note that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (which will be covered more in the second part of this article) gives Angel a higher Strength than Buffy (who is also strong, but ultimately is statted as a Dex monster), despite the opposite being explicitly stated in Angel (the show, not the RPG). Blasphemy.

Of course, there are also games licensed from other media, including books (MERP and The Lord of the Rings RPG draw on the books as well as the films, regardless of the heavy use of movie photos in the latter, Call of Cthulhu is not exactly licensed, but is subject to a whole mess of legal and quasi-legal brouhaha, and if The Dying Earth RPG isn't mentioned in today's Gonzo History Gaming, it will only be because it turned up on Day 17), computer games (World of Warcraft is the RPG of the CRPG of the RTS), and wargames (the assorted iterations of the WH40K and WFRP, it least once away from Games Workshop's direct control and into the licensed sphere). If nobody has ever hacked out an RPG based on Hamlet, I would be amazed (and indeed, here is Forsooth!). All are subject to similar limitations (although wargames and especially CRPGs are probably better modelled by D20).

ETA: I completely forgot comics, from Judge Dredd to Mouseguard.

I am struck by how much better this
cover is than Stargate's, despite still being
just a bunch of faces.

Which brings us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Easily my favourite licensed product (discounting anything Cthulhu as being far more complex than that), BtVS addresses all three of my main concerns (that minor point three thing aside for now). Of course, Eden Studios lost the license for Buffy in 2006, but the books that were published are still available.

BtVS runs on the Unisystem Lite/Unisystem Cinematic engine, which divides characters into 'Heroes' built largely on attributes and skills, and supporting characters (for BtVS 'White Hats'), who have less raw ability, but a larger stock of Drama Points, making them more wild cards than the dependable Heroes. One of the key features of this system is the great swathe of Qualities and Drawbacks available for character customisation, including packages (such as 'Watcher', 'Werewolf' or 'Slayer') which can be absolute game changers. What this does mean is that, while the system is absolutely perfect for dramatic settings, it does require a substantial amount of prep on the front end for anything that doesn't have published material (and I know that Buffy does, but when I ran a Watcher-focused game I still had to create a run of tailored packages so the PCs weren't all functionally the same).

Heroes and White Hats is a good split for the setting, and no further class-based division is needed, which is just as well. I can't imagine that the game would be helped by having to split Buffy's levels between Slayer, Student and Cheerleader (let alone those prestige levels in Fast Food Wage Slave).

Finally, the game avoids the problem of canon and fanon conflict by being totally and irreverently upfront about the non-specific nature of Buffyverse history and cosmology, which is largely whatever works for the drama of the episode. Getting way too involved with the cosmology is part of what didn't work with Season 8 (also the artwork and the fact that by the time they did the time-shift episode I pretty much disliked Buffy to the point of wanting Fray to punch her lights out), and the RPG is perfectly willing to put its hands up and say 'it looks pretty much like it works this way'.

I've only actually run one game, but it worked well enough except for the bits that weren't entirely the system's fault (I underestimated the degree to which the mook rules would render a heavy-hitting adversary truly monstrous and almost managed a TPK with a giant scarab beetle, and the sorceress would only use the single sample spell from the book and so tried to solve every problem in the game with a magic missile).

Tune in - some day soon that idiom is going to be replaced with 'log on' or something similar - tomorrow, when I may be talking about my best secondhand RPG purchase, if I can find something else to say about it, because I don't buy many games, let alone secondhand, so I've already covered most of the options quite a bit.

* Actually a friend, not code for 'me'. I already told you I had a PC who was Drizzt Do'Urden's cousin; do you really think I'd be ashamed of a little nitpicking?

#RPGaDAY: Day 20 - Will still play in 20 years time...

I'm not keen on that ellipsis in today's prompt. There's no call for it, and the only thing it could realistically stand for is a pause before some sort of sass.

"Will still play in 20 years time... bitch."

I mean, I know that none of these prompts are grammatically complete sentences, but this one niggles at me like the themes from Live and Let Die (which does go 'in this ever changing world in which we live in' and not 'in this ever changing world in which we're living') and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ('just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax', apart from the first series, which had 'then repeat to yourself...'.)

Which is a pretty long winded way of saying that I have no idea what I'll still be playing in 20 years time. I suspect that I will still be gaming, but what I'll be playing escapes me. Maybe something using Fate Core, but probably not the current edition and certainly I don't think any of the other systems I currently use will last unchanged. Setting wise, I have even less of a clue. Maybe I'll finally write and sell my own game, based on my bestselling novel, retire and give up this life of crime.

Okay, actually... I don't know about 20 years, but here's my plan for 15 years in the future, which may or may not come off in the end.

Sometime between 2025 and 2029 I'm going to teach my daughter about tabletop. She's been LARPing since she was a twinkle in her parents' eyes, but I'm going to teach her about small-group, tabletop roleplaying, and I'm going to do it with Call of Cthulhu (since I'm pitching her the setting good and early). My plan is to run a session for her and any interested friends set in the unimaginably distant and romantic past of the early 1990s, with all those half-discredited tropes like MiB conspiracy theories and other Delta Green goodness. My own past will be retro, and I plan to use that.

Tomorrow's topic is Favourite Licensed RPG, and I'll talk about that if I can stop laughing at the concept. There must be something; is CoC a license?

Meantime, check out the hashtag and talk about your future gaming prospects. Catch you on the flipside, as all the retro investigators will be saying in 2029.

#RPGaDAY: Day 19 - Favourite Published Adventure

A cover that promises a tense, horror-
themed adventure... for those who really
care about Frugelhofen.

Man, fuck published adventures.

Okay, I shouldn't say that there are no good ones. The Enemy Within for WFRP (see Day 17) is a classic for a reason, an epic campaign consisting of a series of interlinked adventures that take your PCs from wandering ruffians to badass heroes of the Empire in a time of tumult and turmoil, taking in most of the major themes of the game along the way. I talked about it as the funniest game I'd played in, but that wasn't to say that Slagdarg the Mutant Ogre Torturer wasn't a tense fight in which Sven the Glass Dwarf almost got his head staved in, or that we didn't have moments of intense and slightly misty-eyed concern for the Graf's lovable lunk of a champion, who was acting all possessed, and just when he wanted to retire and buy a farm with his sweetheart.

The flip side of the coin is something like Lichemaster, one of my least favourite published scenarios. It's a WFRP adventure that was adapted from Terror of the Lichemaster, a Warhammer Fantasy Battle campaign, which thus consists of a series of the kind of massive combats that the roleplaying game is so bad at. It fails mostly on the grounds that, unlike its original version, it needs - and fails to - provide a reason for the PCs to give a rat's ass about the fate of the little town of Frugelhofen, rather than just punking the fuck out when the Army of Darkness comes to call. There's a whole section where the PCs are supposed to persuade the people of the town to make a stand against the horde of the undead rather than evacuating, then in the end you have to flee down the river in barrels or some such shit because you're overrun. The real problem is that there is no reason for this; not even that if you don't make that stand the undead will overtake the retreating children and other civvies (because then the villagers would be persuading the PCs, which wasn't what they wanted, I guess).

In an oWoD scenario, you're the one in the middle. Not the
one actually firing a gun at someone; the one behind that
guy.

On the up side, it doesn't have what many White Wolf adventures have, which is cut scenes. The average WW scenario contains at least one moment when the PCs are basically obliged to watch as a couple of NPCs do their thing. Maybe Sam Haight murders someone, or Baba Yaga eats a Niktuku child-vamp and asplodes, or a werewolf and a four thousand year old ghoul fight to mutual fatality, while the player characters apparently watch and do nothing. This is specifically an old World of Darkness problem, since that was a game line which had a serious crush on its metaplot, and often forgot that even if they aren't the movers and shakers of their society, the PCs are still who the game is supposed to be about.

In between these extremes, the bulk of scenarios that I've seen - especially the short-form versions, which as they appear in the back of core books I have seen most often - suffer from the problem that they are railroads. This might make them a useful aide to a novice GM, except that the nature of a railroad is that it leaves the driver without any useful tools in the event that the train jumps the tracks. They often assume a single solution, whereas as a friend once put it: "If you devise N ways for the PCs to solve a problem, they will come up with N+1, so I just set N as 0."

The best published adventures I've found are more like setting guides in which something is happening. The Enemy Within is a very open adventure, especially as it moves up to Middenheim and Power Behind the Throne (which is in fact often packaged with the Middenheim setting guide), an adventure in which the PCs could conceivably just profit as best they are able from the fall of the city to Chaos infiltrators and run off to the Border Princes to live like dissipated kings.

So, a bit of a non-answer today, and I can't promise better for tomorrow's topic 'a game I'll still be playing in 20 years time'. In the meantime, check out the hashtag for more #RPGaDAY.

#RPGaDAY: Day 18 - Favourite Game System

I got the original core book and ran my
game within a few months of first
publication, I still had about six sides
of errata stuffed in the back. This revised
edition was badly needed.

I haven't yet found my perfect system, so instead I'm going to talk about some bits and pieces that I like.

I'm a big fan of dramatic system design. While I feel that there ought to be a random element, or at least a risk element in RPG design, I don't feel that the purpose of RPGs should be competitive, but rather collaborative, and that this is easier to achieve when the players and the GM/ST/Ref share a degree of control over the world, usually through some form of drama or fate point system.

I first came across this concept in two very different implementations: Eden Studios' Buffy the Vampire Slayer licensed RPG, and White Wolf's Adventure!.

BtVS used Eden's Unisystem lite - Attribute + Skill + roll + mods vs difficulty, IIRC - to model the world of the TV show. Perhaps its finest achievement was in its implementation of the stake through the heart: Roll a penalised attack and calculate damage, then triple it. If that's a kill, the vampire is dust; if not, untriple it and use the penalised damage. Why is this so awesome? Because it provides a mechanic that supports combat as it is seen in the show. Against a fully healthy vamp, a stake is a very long shot indeed, but it's an excellent finish after a few rounds of kickboxing.

That action is one-fisted; one-
and-a-half tops. I want my money
back!

Buffy's Drama Points were used for bonuses and rerolls, or to absorb damage, and in character creation a player could chose to play a Hero - lots of skills, not so many Drama Points - or a White Hat - not as skilled, but the story loves them. Drama Points did not refresh or recover automatically, but were gained by doing cool and awesome things without spending Drama Points, or by taking a throw for the story (a player could allow their character to be knocked out, captured or otherwise hurt or imperiled without resistance in exchange for Drama Points).

This being Buffy, emotional pain also netted one Drama Points.

BtVS was all right. Unisystem lite I loved and used to run a Star Wars game. The only problem is that there is a system of advantage and drawback packages, which requires a fairly substantial piece of front-loading on the part of the Director.

Adventure!'s aim was to model the pulp heroics of the early twentieth century. It featured almost-superhuman Stawarts, psychic Mesmerists and exceptionally skilled or lucky Daredevils, all of whom used their Inspiration pool to activate different abilities. Inspiration could also be used to improve rolls, to further the plot by gaining hints, or to make small alterations to the scene (such as adding a chandelier to swing from).

Fate is setting non-specific, rather than
trying to work in secret agent wizards,
swordswomen and cyborg gorillas. If
you want that, however, see Feng Shui.

Ultimately, the White Wolf system remained too clunky and mechanics heavy to really do the concepts of Adventure! justice, although it was better than the D20 system version, but the idea of altering the scene was one of the first I'd seen which brought the collaborative nature of gaming to the fore.

Collaborative is pretty much the watchword of Fate, a system which has been through many iterations, including Spirit of the Century, a pulp adventure game which by all accounts knocks Adventure!'s spirited effort into a cocked hat. The Fate system is one I touched on in Day 9's discussion of dice. Fate Core is the most recent variation.

In Fate Core, everything is collaborative, from world-building upwards. Character creation is part of play, and adding features to the world isn't even a function of Fate points; it's a standard action.

Horns on ma hat, and I don't care

The system is basic and generic, and any non-standard mechanics need to be devised as part of a front-load, but even this can be collaborative ('you want to play a wizard? How do you see that working?') I like the system a lot and it's currently one of my favourites. I use it for my campaign Operatives of CROSSBOW, which is about to get a darker, edgier, sexier reboot.

We're very serious people

Rune takes the collaborative play thing a step further. I've not played it (I have played the PC game, but this is a different beast), but the concept is interesting: All players have a character and take it in turns to be the Runner, who GMs for a session. I'd be interested if anyone has played it to know how - and if - it words.

Finally, a favourite mechanic that I came up with myself. I've mentioned before my habit of assigning a campaign a theme tune and getting people to narrate their characters' credits montage (c.f. more or less any credits sequence ever, but especially Buffy and Angel, cop shows and The Tudors).

In my Dark Heresy game, Lost, in Space, I added a mechanical hook: As part of the credits sequence, there would be a 'this week on...' section. I narrated a few likely scenes, and based on this - or on character traits - the players would narrate a brief scene including a line from their PC. If they managed to use this in the game, they got bonus XP. This was of course inspired by the catchphrase mechanic which James references in his description of the Dying Earth RPG, with my own twist.

Come back tomorrow for 'favourite published adventure', although having kind of covered that in 'funniest game', I may do something a little different.

In the meantime, check out the hashtag for more RPGaDAY stuff.

#RPGaDAY: Day 17 - Funniest Game You've Played

Hello again, WFRP

The Enemy Within is a classic of 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the published campaign that actually worked. Mostly. The concluding chapter was not so well-received and was later replaced by Hogshead Publishing.

The current (boxed) edition of WFRP has its own Enemy Within campaign, written by several of the same authors, but I can't speak for that at all.

The campaign consisted of several linked adventures:

• The Enemy Within/Mistaken Identity
• Shadows Over Bogenhafen
• Death on the Reik
• Power Behind the Throne
• Empire in Flames (redone as Empire in Chaos)

My University gaming group played Death on the Reik and Power Behind the Throne in the twilight days of the best roleplaying time of my life. Honestly, there is nothing like university for roleplaying; when else can you get away with those sudden all-nighters without care or consequence (for me at least; as a solid 2:1 I have the comfort of knowing that all the hard graft in the world likely wouldn't have tipped me over to a first)? I was playing the game with a group who had been together for two years, as of Death, and three by the tie we played Power, and it was one of those things that just clicked.

There were a couple of other players in the first part of the campaign (taking on the elf and the druid), but the core group that carried through was:

• X, The Dandy Highwayman, whose name I forget in part because we spent most of our time ribbing him for being 'the Chosen of Sigmar';
• Gregor the even dandier illusionist, who didn't have more taste or flair than the Highwayman, but did have more money;
• Sven the Dwarf, see day 8;
• Ambrose Tully, Halfling thief-turned-honest trader.

This game was the funniest - and most fun - I ever played in, simply because the group dynamic was by then near-perfect. Highlights included:

• Everything Sven, including his absolute umbrage at being given a 'drinking allowance' after Ambrose took control of the group's finances, despite the fact that he could have handily drunk himself to death with what he was given.
• The group egging the Highwayman on to romance a princess for information, including everything from pooling resources to buy a ring of invisibility to briefing him on his lines ("Tell her 'you're the only one I can trust,' she'll love that.") The fact that we OOC fully expected (incorrectly) that she would turn out to be a murderous Slaaneshi cultist, and not a hopelessly drippy damsel after all, just added to the fun.
• Gregor insisting on splashing out to dress everyone 'suitably' for the Graf's ball, resulting in the party turning up like a pack of peacocks in the ever-so-serious City of the White Wolf.
• After the third time his enquiries at the Temple of Ulric received the same response, Ambrose decided that it must be the cult's ritual greeting, and thus opened his interview with the high priest (the gist of which was to tell the leader of a cult of storm-worshipping, wolf-wrestling battle-priests that we knew he was being blackmailed for sleeping with a serving girl) with the words 'don't make me hurt you'.
• The highwayman, seeking to rally the people, leaped onto a table, brandished the magical blade Baracul, which marked him as the chosen of Sigmar (less of an achievement since the field from which Sigmar had to select his chosen human warrior consisted of him, a halfling, a dwarf, an elf, a druid and a wizard), and declared: "I have Baracul!" Ambrose immediately leaped up next to him, drew his dagger and declared: "I have bugger all!" HELPING!
• The day after the highwayman's super-seekrit romancing of the princess, being greeted by her sassy handmaiden in the pub with the words: "Chosen of Sigmar, huh?"

It's moments like these that make a game fun, and funny, for me. Moments like the Tunkin manouevre (faced with armed goons on the far side of the door you just opened, close the door again) and deathless quotes (everyone who played in my Star Wars campaign, Beyond the Fringe, seems to call back to the almost-dead ace pilot's assurance that "I'm fine," every once in a while).

In short, rules and setting are props, but games are people.

With that in mind, the next entry is 'favourite system', so that should be interesting.