The What Have You Been Doing Lately Post

It's been a while since I did one of these, and I kind of like the moment in time feel of them.

Last (non-RPG) Book I've Read...

The Third Secret by Steve Berry.

Treading much the same ground as Dan Brown's terrible novel turned into a mediocre movie, Angels & Demons.  This one treads much the same ground.  In this case, the camerlengo is the hero, the Pope is murdered (and anticipates it), and the newly elected Pope pretty seems like he modeled his life after the Borgia Family.  It's a better read just because the characters involved in a lot of instances have conflicting agendas and loyalties.  Worth a read if you enjoyed either of Dan Brown's novels that tread the same territory, as I consider Berry to be a better writer.

This would make a great d20 Modern Blood & Relics game, if I ever found the time or the group.

Last Music Listened To...

Black Rain, Original Soundtrack, Hans Zimmer

I've been on a soundtracks kick again recently, and I've been collecting a lot of Hans Zimmer's early work.  While his later stuff is a lot more orchestral, and enters the same bombastic territory occupied by John Williams, a lot of his earlier stuff is more synth/light orchestra/chorale heavy, and trades the same ground as some of Vangelis's early stuff.  Most recently, I picked up a copy of the Black Rain soundtrack.  The movie was eh...but the soundtrack just screams cyberpunk to me...without being quite as familiar as the Blade Runner soundtrack, but treading some of the same ground.  It may wind up at the gaming table some day for a cyberpunk or neo-noir game.

Last Movie Watched...

Inception

Rewatched Inception a couple of days ago.  I tend to watch more TV series than movies these days.  I don't go to many movies and I tend to occasionally go on DVD/Blu Ray buying binges.  I'm about due for another one.  Anybody got any suggestions?  I'll certainly be picking up John Carter (I'm a Burroughs fan) and a few others.

Last Television Watched...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heroes, Supernatural, Fringe, every Sunday night.

I don't have cable, and I don't have Netflix (though the later should be rectified soon), as I read a lot more than I watch, but the family and I got in a habit of watching television series on DVD a few years back on Sunday nights, starting with Firefly and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.  Since that time, we've worked our way through X-Files, seasons 1-9, and are currently working our way through Heroes, Buffy, Supernatural, and Fringe.

Supernatural is brilliant.  If you haven't been watching it, you're making a big mistake.  We're about halfway through Season 5, and loving it.

Buffy I saw bits of this series on the WB back in the day, but frankly I worked a lot of nights during its run, and I missed a lot more of it than I remembered.  It's been fun, though frankly, I thought the series may have jumped the shark in Season 4 a bit, and I'm hoping Season 5 (which we started just a few weeks ago) tries to restart some of the momentum.

Heroes we just finished Season 1, which was brilliant.  I understand the remaining three seasons represent a huge drop in quality.  But the complete series was $8 a season on a Black Friday special at Target last Christmas, and I'm figuring I'll get $24 of enjoyment out of the last three seasons at some point.

Fringe we just started with Season 1.  Looks like early X-Files with fewer supernatural terrors and more alien weirdness.  I understand it got better with later seasons, but so far, I could take it or leave it.

I'm also collecting True Blood and Game of Thrones as they come out.  Both television series are amazing.

Last RPG Book Purchased...

Physical Books:
Hollow Earth Expedition, Exile Game Studios
Wild Talents Essentials Edition, Arc Dream Publishing

PDFs:
d20 Deadlands Hell on Earth & d20 Deadlands Hell on Earth Horrors of the Weird West
Thrilling Hero Adventures (Hero System)

I'll talk about these in order.  Both were purchased from Darren from Imperial Outpost Games at Conflagration.

Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX) scratches my pulp itch.  For those who know me, pulp, horror, and noir are basically the main themes that run through my games.  Even when I run other systems, they wind up with noir or pulp elements, depending on the mood appropriate for the game.  Although I'm still learning this one, the Ubiquity System looks like it would fairly easy to run, and most of the obvious pulp archetypes can be created readily.

One of the things I like about HEX in particular is that unlike a lot of pulp RPG games and settings, its very tightly focused.  Most pulp games try to cover the gamut from boxing stories, to westerns, to car racing to space, to 1930's adventure yarns, and so on.  HEX's emphasis and inspiration, is based on things like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar novels, and other novels using a Hollow Earth or Lost Island style adventures.  The setting is pretty tightly focused on that style of fiction, and doesn't try to be all things to all people.  If somebody's looking to dip their toes in the water with classic 1920-1940 style pulp gaming, you could do worse than HEX.

Wild Talents scratches my One Roll Engine itch.  I've come to admire A Dirty World and Nemesis, and the simplicity of One Roll Engine, so I picked this up for a song.  It's strictly the rules, but I'd probably roll my own as far as setting if and when I ran it anyway.  I mainly just picked it up ($9.99 sticker price, but I got a bit of a deal) to check out the mechanics.  One of these days I'll get around to picking up Reign as well...not enough money, too many games.

The d20 Deadlands stuff is a bit peculiar for me.  I love the Deadlands settings (including Lost Colony and Hell on Earth), not so fond of Deadlands system (or its successor, Savage Worlds, for that matter, which I know puts me in something of a minority).  Thought this might be fun in case I ever try to do a d20 version.  Besides, RPGNow was selling them for $5 apiece as part of their promotion for the recent release of the Savage Worlds compatible Hell on Earth Reloaded.  If nothing else, I've got some more creatures to throw in a Darwin's World game, so it's all good.

Thrilling Hero Adventures is more pulp.  Although I'm great at math, I don't run Hero System, as I prefer not to be that rules heavy these days, but this was a $10 volume, has a number of great pulp adventures, a lot more great pulp ideas, and heck, I'll convert some of it to d20 Modern Thrilling Tales or maybe even Hollow Earth Expedition one of these days.  I usually buy pregen adventures to steal ideas from, rather than run them whole cloth anyway.

What I'm working on currently...

I'm a bit of a gaming floozy.  Even when I've got campaigns running, I like to tinker around with campaign ideas for other genres.

As far as games I'm running, I'm running a Pathfinder game based on RPPR's New World Campaign.  It was originally written for 4E, but I'd rather rip my toenails out than play 4E, so I retrofitted it to Pathfinder.

For Basic Roleplaying (Chaosium's house system), I'm running my take on S M Stirling's Emberverse novel series.  The grittiness of BRP seemed to fit Dies the Fire rather nicely, and its an easy system to adapt to new settings and genres, and an even easier one to teach.

Stuff being worked on, but not run at the moment...

I'm working on another one shot for A Dirty World...going to be setting this during the Cold War, but still toying around with ideas.  No big rush, as con season is about over for Phoenix this year.

We're about to return to our Star Wars Saga Edition campaign, but I'll leave that for another post.  Needless to say I've been working on that.

I'm tinkering with adapting the first scenario from Thrilling Hero Adventures to d20 Modern Thrilling Tales for use as a one shot the next time the mood strikes me.

I'm also working on the beginnings of a cyberpunk setting.  Probably d20 Modern/Future, but I may try it with BRP...I'm not sure which direction I'll go.  It won't be run for a while yet.

I've also been asked to run a Supers game.  I'm actually thinking I may combine this with the Cyberpunk feel, and create sort of a Neo Postmodern/Iron Age in the near future sort of game.  Not sure yet.  At this point I'm just bouncing around ideas in my head, and haven't put pen to paper yet.

Con Game Preparation III: Darwin's World-The High Road to Hell.

Next Up, I'll talk about preparation for the High Road to Hell.

Darwin's World is a third-party campaign setting for d20 Modern, WotC's venerable, out of print Modern line using the OGL. Fortunately, while the d20 Modern print books are long since out of print (though they can still be had second hand rather readily), the Modern SRD is still available for the asking, and a nice PDF of the MSRD rules can be had free from Darwin's World's publisher, RPG Objects. Darwin's World is simply the best d20 post-apocalyptic setting out there, with a broad range of support, and a very plausible, post-nuclear setting.

The High Road to Hell is another published adventure. My responsibilities here have mainly extended to building serviceable pregenerated characters, drawing up maps, and getting things ready to run. I've still got a few maps to do, but that should be finished by tomorrow afternoon. High Road to Hell is basically a wilderness adventure where the PCs are attempting to catch up to and rescue some kidnapping victims while racing the clock to do it.

Con Game Preparation

After watching one of my long-running campaigns come to a screeching halt a couple of weeks ago, I've devoted the last two weekends to preparation of four one-shot adventures for the upcoming 2012 Phoenix Vul-Con.

Although I've certainly done it numerous times over the years, preparing for convention games is a unique experience. When I run games for my regular gaming groups, I've got a reasonable idea of what may fire up my players (though this can vary at times), and if nothing else, I can always ask.

Obviously, there is no feedback loop in time to do any good with a player group at a session. You can playtest it with your regular group (unless some of those folks want to play it at the con, but that's about it) for length, but even that is a different experience than it will be for first-time players who don't know you as a GM, in most cases won't know the game system, and likely don't even know each other.

So what does a conscientious GM do? In my case, I've created (or chosen, in the case of the couple of pre-made adventures I'm running) games that I think I can run successfully, and would enjoy playing in as a player.

In the coming days, I'll discuss the four adventures I'm running, and comments on each of them (spoiler free, of course), on why I chose them, and the things I think they bring to a con game.

For Those Going to Vul-Con

Consider this another preview of coming distractions.

I wasn't liking the way the pulp game was looking, so I pulled it. Still, there's plenty of amusement to be had by all. Here's a thumbnail sketch of each of them.

Call of Cthulhu-Delta Green: The Last Equation.

For those unfamiliar with Delta Green, it basically takes H P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, late 20th Century UFO and Government Conspiracy theories that were such fodder for the X-Files (though Delta Green predates the X-Files), puts them all into a blender and hits frappe.

The Last Equation is a Dennis Detwiller creation I figured was about the right length for a late night Saturday night convention slot. It's a great game with strong Mythos undertones and should play well.

Star Wars Saga Edition - The Betrayal of Darth Revan: Set in the same era as the two Knights of the Old Republic video games (and roughly 300 years before the recently released MMO), this is a former GenCon WotC game I've not had the chance to run before, and am looking forward to. It's something of a prequel to the first video game, Knights of the Old Republic, and looks very good.

Darwin's World - The High Road to Hell: Based on d20 Modern's rule system (still available online as the Modern System Reference Document, or MSRD), Darwin's World is a grimmer, grittier take on Post-Apocalyptic role-playing than Gamma World, or some other takes on the genre. The designers were very definitely thinking of the first two Fallout games when they designed this one, though it's enough different from Fallout to not really be compared to it. This is a low-level (5th Level) adventure that is a former GenCon scenario for the game).

A Dirty World - Bucknell 13, Delaware 7: Based on Greg Stolze's one-roll engine (the same dice mechanic behind Wild Talents, and its various brother superhero games, as well as Reign (sword and board fantasy), and Nemesis (horror), this is a film noir game. For Senator Benjamin Bucknell, the day began by watching his alma mater win a football game, and ended with his being shot. What happens after is up to the players.

What I'm working on...

Have a dinner party scenario to run for the next session of Masks of Nyarlathotep, so I'm detailing a few NPCs to give it some life.

I'm also putting the finishing details on the current chapter of the Star Wars Saga Edition campaign I've been running (I tend to run this campaign in episodic form, short campaigns of 10-15 sessions, and we're close to wrapping one of them up).

I'm currently writing a pulp one-shot for a convention in February. The game will use d20 Modern, mostly because I know it like the back of my hand, and I'm a big fan of Adamant Entertainment's Thrilling Tales line of pulp adventure stuff (also available for Savage Worlds).

The latter game will likely include as many of the following as I can fit in a four hour session: flying boats, hostile natives, dinosaurs, giant ant swarms, quicksand and other natural hazards, a secret Japanese base (and lots of Japanese baddies) and possibly some mutated half-men, half-animals as a result of super-soldier experiment gone awry. About the only pulp cliche I've omitted is Pulp Nazis.

More on the scenario as I develop it.

The Obligatory Autobiographical First Post

My story begins with a 1979 trip to the local hobby shop. In those days, in addition to the stuff you might find in one now (HO/N Gauge Trains, models and supplies, craft stuff, etc.) my local one carried board wargames (mostly Avalon Hill and SPI titles...with a little bit of GDW and other stuff thrown in). I was a board wargamer in those days (had been since picking up Avalon Hill's The Russian Campaign at the ripe old age of 12.

I had a little bit of lawnmowing money, and I went ostensibly to purchase another wargame, but stumbled upon the First Edition, Little Black Book Traveller boxed set. Like every other burgeoning 14 year old sci-fi geek, I'd read Asimov, some H Beam Piper, a bit of Poul Anderson, Harry Harrison, Heinlein, Herbert, etc. and so the idea of running SciFi games sounded fun, and on a lark, I bought it.

Yes, I was one of the rare late-70's gamers whose first game WASN'T Dungeons and Dragons, though that deficiency was rectified later that year, when my mom and dad hooked me up with the old red box D&D Basic Set for Christmas, followed by my own purchase of the AD&D Core Books (DMG, PHB, MM (the early version, with the Cthulhu Mythos stats that something of a collector's item these days, since Chaosium got medieval on TSR's a** about including Cthulhu Mythos creatures without permission.

Like everybody else, I recruited some of my high school friends, we rolled up characters, and a ran terrible SciFi games, and fantasy games. Other games I flirted with in the early years included TSR's Gamma World (First Edition), a GDW Age of Musketeers game called "En Garde", SPI's DragonQuest and Universe (I keep meaning to convert the setting from the latter to d20 Modern or maybe Savage Worlds some day), and a lot of First Edition AD&D.

Still, at the end of the day, the game that kept me coming back was Traveller. I collected a lot of Classic Traveller, everything published for the second edition of the game MegaTraveller, Traveller the New Era (which I never played, but did convert a lot of it back to MegaTraveller). I keep meaning to pick up the new Mongoose version, but never have.

The game was grim and gritty, the published setting was strong and intriguing to me, mixing feudal elements with megacorps and space travel in a unique blend. Eventually, in the late 1990's, I was given the opportunity to work on the ill-fated Fourth Edition of the game, writing for the first setting book, Milieu 0, and co-authoring with a variety of folks the new material for the hardcover version of Milieu 0, Psionics Institutes (still the go to source for Traveller Psionics), Pocket Empires (which effectively converted the old Classic Traveller board game Fifth Frontier War into an open ended system that could create a strategic wargame out of any Traveller setting), an Alien volume, and an unpublished Adventure.

That was pretty much me until the 1990s. I'd just about got out of the hobby, until the early part of the last decade, when I began searching for something to play with my own kids. Enter the video game Knights of the Old Republic. Built on a modified version of the first version of the d20 Star Wars system (Original Core Rulebook or OCR), it seemed like a fairly elegant system. Just as I hadn't started with D&D back in the 70's, my first entree into the world of OGL (Open Gaming License) wasn't with D&D either.

I never actually ran OCR, but I did pick up and run RCR, and later Star Wars Saga Edition. From there, I branched into 3.0/3.5 Dungeons and Dragons, d20 Modern, and more broadly into d20. I also scooped up Mutants & Masterminds, Savage Worlds, and most recently, Call of Cthulhu.

These days, I run a D&D 3.5 third-party Setting (Fantasy Flight Games' Midnight setting), a third-party d20 Modern post-apocalyptic setting, Darwin's World (currently on hiatus), a Star Wars Saga Edition variant campaign, along with the occasional Call of Cthulhu and Pulp-era one shot. I'm also working on creating stats for an unofficial Yuuzhan Vong-era Star Wars Saga Edition supplement as I have time and devotion.

I'm married to a loving gamer woman, with two children who also double as my primary gaming group. I may talk about gaming with family some from time to time. I may post character designs, adventure seeds, reviews, etc. as I see fit, as well as After Action Reports, if I see fit.