I Went To Read The Ongoing Campaign Blog And All I Got Was This Lousy Post

I didn't blog anything in December, and now the end of January is almost upon us. I guess I should write something, right? A little update, talk about where gaming has taken me lately? People coming here mainly for GURPS content won't find a lot this time around, just a brief recap of the first session of a new campaign I've begun using the system.

I spent most of the first part of this year ill. We spent most of the month not gaming, then I managed to get in a Call of Cthulhu game on Saturday (my character now has a fear of bandages), then I ran the first session of my Sundaland sword & sorcery game. Due to the illness and laziness, we didn't actually do much in the latter. The characters arrived at a port town that was larger than anything they had ever imagined might exist (actual population of around 1500 people) and began learning how life works when there are more people than you can recognize offhand. There are three characters (there were going to be four, but one player has a new schedule that forces him to have to bow out of gaming on the day we play), Tech the magician, Jade the "hobbit" blowgun hunter who is small even for her small race, and Gar-whee the warrior.

The setting is around 10,000 years ago, more or less, in southeast Asia, where a substantial subcontinent, around half the size of the continental US, had not yet been submerged under the rising waters at the end of the ice age. Historically, that was probably a mesolithic society, but in my imagination, it is an early bronze age one, with currency, social organization, and pretty much everything you'd expect other than wheels and common beasts of burden. No horses, no wheels, cattle are mainly food sources, and only elephants are used for transportation—obviously only by the very wealthy. Only humans (and some rare hominins like the Flores Island "hobbits" or the few Gigantopithecus "giants" from the jungles in the north) The characters are trying to wrap their heads around a currency economy after having lived their lives in a gifting one. They are preparing to travel overland, upriver, to the city they've heard makes chieftains out of everyone who sets foot on the streets.

So good of GURPS to give me some excellent tools to be able to run this. Articles on gifting economies in the Low-Tech book and its supplements, as well as one in an issue of Pyramid. Tech levels that can manage the slightly unusual set of situations in southeast Asia of the period (even given my somewhat optimistic assumption of bronze working). An amazing magic system in the Path/Book Magic system that can handle spirits well, leading my characters to carry around little amulets and such provided by the party sorcerer. There is a lot to love in that game.

I'm reading a supplement for Chronicles of Darkness (formerly called the "New World of Darkness", being the reboot and reimagining of a world with vampires, werewolves, and magicians, plus other supernatural stuff) called Princess: The Hopeful. It's an attempt to provide a society of mahou shoujo "magical girls" inspired by the likes of Sailor Moon, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Pretty Cure, Cardcaptor Sakura, and so on. Its most important inspiration is "Sailor Nothing", a deconstruction and reconstruction of the mahou shoujo genre, one of the earliest of its kind. It posits a baroque world of "nobles", both male and female despite the title, who wield magical powers of hope and heart. They come from the lands of dreams and fight against corrupted nobles from the lands of tears, storms, and mirrors, among other threats to the hearts of humanity. It began development before Madoka existed and when Pretty Cure was not yet the overwhelming phenomenon it has become. It's been making me look at some of the other mahou shoujo games I have (the Sailor Moon RPG that used the Big Eyes, Small Mouth system, Magical Fury which is based very strongly on Madoka and uses a streamlined version of Powered by the Apocalypse, and the Star Sailors supplement for White Star that gives a mahou shoujo character class powered by the Starlight Entity and dedicated to fighting the Gloom, mainly, but I have a few more too) and considering how I would approach such themes. Mostly, I am interested in playing in a game of Princess, to be frank, but I do have other ideas to bring to the table too.

It might be fun to convert Princess: The Hopeful to GURPS. I feel like it should use something based on the Sorcery system, with some unique colleges of spells. Because another project that goes nowhere is just what I need, right?

Speaking of projects going nowhere, I'm still homing in on exactly what I want from a game of my own design, but I think I am closer than ever now. Almost ready, if I can get myself to sit down and write it. A little bit Flashing Blades, a little bit MegaTraveller, some dashes of Lace & Steel and GURPS and Hârnmaster and Pendragon, maybe a bit of some other games too. I want to tie it to a setting, at least at first, but I haven't decided on what sort of setting to tie it to yet. I think that I've been assuming a space opera type setting, with galactic empires and such, but I'm not sure if that's right yet. Being immersed in mahou shoujo stuff, I've been thinking about how the systems of interpersonal relationships drawn from Lace & Steel and Pendragon can be used to model the emotional content that is often given a position of narrative significance in anime generally and mahou shoujo specifically, and Star Sailors provides a way to tie that into a space operatic setting. We'll see, assuming I can get myself to actually do it.

Then there's my ideal D&D, which is probably unnecessary at this point in history except that I want to have a copy in print. It would combine my favorite ideas from over the years: morale from RC, experience tables and hit dice from S&W White Box, the Expert from LotFP instead of the Thief, the Attack Priority initiative system, and so on. If I can figure out a way to incorporate a social system inspired by Courtney Campbell's "Solving the Social Trap", I'd probably do that too.

Anyway, sorry about the poor content. I want to get back to this blog on a more frequent basis, but I feel like I don't have a strong or proper focus for my gaming thoughts at the moment. So you get stuck with this.

What? More Than Three Months?

I was looking at Old School RPG Planet, which I highly recommend, and noticed that my blog was underlined for some reason. Hovering over it, I saw that it was because I hadn't updated in over 90 days! What‽

Okay, so I think I'm just going to update on what has been going on with my gaming. I will divide this into four parts, one for the GURPS game I was running and the one I am currently running, one for the AD&D 1e game I am currently playing, one for the Call of Cthulhu game I am currently playing, and the final one for the Fantasy Wargaming game that I am currently preparing. That's going to get long, so I think that I should put in a cut tag.

My Gaming Life, An Update And A List

My campaign of GURPS set in my own world of the Deindustrial Future is winding to a close. I have committed to running another GURPS game after that, this one being about superpowered humans in the modern day. It's going to try to explore some of the disrupting influence of superpowers, which should be interesting, in the sense that I would not want to live in that world. I  am increasingly certain that, while I still like GURPS quite a lot, it is dropping down my list of favorite systems pretty fast. Still, some settings I want to do are easier to do in that game than in others, since other games would require inventing and writing down game statistics for things and such, where those statistics already exist or are easily customizable in GURPS. It would be so much better if there were some reasonable way to randomly generate characters. Also, GURPS allows for some superpowered characters that are not possible or are difficult to depict in other systems.

I have a friend, a great Lovecraftian fiction fan, who has decided to give running Call of Cthulhu a try, and he is learning very quickly and doing very well. So, that's a second group, and one that is growing. I'm finding that to be a lot of fun too.

One of my players for the GURPS game is now running AD&D 1st edition, attempting to play mostly by the rules as written (no psionics, a few other small changes). We've had two sessions so far, one spent doing a large combat mostly so that we could get the feel for how the AD&D combat rules as written work in practice. It's so much easier than some people say to use weapon vs. armor type, weapon speed factors, charge rounds, and so on. Even so, since it was completely new to some of the players, and years since those of us who had ever played that edition had played—and even then, we weren't really playing by AD&D rules, but rather a streamlined form of B/X or BECMI using the AD&D tables—the second session was completely taken up by that one combat, as we looked up various pieces of information. Even there, we missed important information about how Clerical Turn Undead worked in that edition, but we'll get it next time now that we know.

Playing AD&D has, perhaps paradoxically, re-inspired me to work on my update to Fantasy Wargaming. To do that properly, I think that I'll need to play it as it is in order to see how things work and understand how best to approach any changes. It's been since 1982 or so that I last played that game, and my memories of it are a little foggy. I do remember that the game worked just fine, so it's definitely not "unplayable", as some allege. I do think that there are some areas that I will be changing pretty drastically, such as formalizing fatigue a little more given how important it is as a limiting factor on some activities, changing wounds to conditions instead of a pool of points, maybe tightening up the magic rules some. I have a feeling that I would want to tighten magic back toward things that were supposed to have happened, either as actual magic or as miraculous events given the close affinity of religious miracles with magic in the system, rather than the very wide-open system given—or perhaps I won't, and maybe just tighten up the rules some as they stand, or even work out a way to make it even more flexible. The question is how I am going to manage to get some play of that game in, given the limitations on which days of the week I have available for gaming. I have some ideas on how to make that work, so we'll see if I can get that working.

Which does remind me that I still plan on returning to the series on real magic and how it can be depicted in gaming. Let's just say that the source of inspiration for that series has gone silent for the moment, though I expect it to begin nagging at me again any time.

I've committed to finishing up my conversion of the meta-tasks of the Marc Miller's Traveller (aka T4) supplement Pocket Empires into MegaTraveller equivalents, even though I have no ability to test the rules. That is going slowly but surely.

I've been occasionally noodling around with ideas about running a PBEM game of Realms of the Unknown, which would require me to set up a better record-keeping system than I have managed to put together yet. It's definitely been moved from the back burner to somewhat active development, though. I'm not sure how the setting would look yet, as I'm probably going to wait to work on that until I have more useful tools for that sort of thing.

So, given that my gaming priorities have been changing now that I am back to gaming mostly regularly, let's give a new list of my top 10 games, or really top 12 but who's counting:

1: MegaTraveller and classic Traveller (tied)
2: AD&D 1st edition
3: Fantasy Wargaming
4: GURPS
5: Chivalry & Sorcery (2nd edition, though other editions are fine)
6: Hârnmaster
7: Aftermath!
8: Cyberpunk 2020
9: Swords & Wizardry: White Box and White Star (tied)
10: Villains & Vigilantes 2nd edition

Honorable Mentions: Flashing Blades, Adventures Dark & Deep, Space 1889, anything Basic Roleplaying but especially Call of Cthulhu (and I guess I haven't mentioned that the player who is running AD&D has been low-key hinting that he'd like me to run RuneQuest 3rd edition, which he loved when I ran it many years back, so that's another thing that is impinging on me; if I did, I'd have to choose whether to run it in the default Fantasy Earth*, Glorantha, or a setting of my own design that I've had simmering for a few years and is in fact a development of the setting I used for that game of so many years ago), Lords of Creation, The Arcanum (1st or 2nd edition, I haven't seen 3rd or the 30th anniversary editions yet), In Nomine, Guardians (the superhero RPG based on original D&D), Delving Deeper, Pendragon, Lace & Steel, Marvel Superheroes RPG, Realms of the Unknown.

Settings that I am working on to varying degrees of effort: the GURPS superpowers one, an authentic-medieval one with monsters and such set around the Third Crusade for Fantasy Wargaming, a feudal-medieval-authentic world based on the 20 kingdoms of the SCA that draws loosely on the actual history and notable events of that illustrious organization plus added fantasy (this would be intended for any of Chivalry & Sorcery, Fantasy Wargaming, Pendragon, or Hârnmaster, or really any game that can handle an authentic medieval feudal setting), a setting based on the world of Lords of the Middle Sea—which is an obscure wargame that Chaosium published back in the '70s—and a more detailed deindustrial setting set some time in the further future that doesn't rely on so many fantastic elements as the one that I am currently finishing up. I've also spent a few brain cycles on the Flanaess Sector idea, but it hasn't really gone anywhere lately.

Yeah, as usual, I have put way too much on my plate, but hopefully I can actually turn some of it into practical use.

*The Fantasy Earth setting for RQ3 was set somewhere roughly around the 8th or 9th century, probably, given the territory available to the Byzantines in it.

Games That Influenced My Current Understanding Of RPGs

I'm still working on the follow-up to the "What is Magic?" post, describing what spirits are, exactly. I also need to write up the events of the Deindustrial Future game, where the players' characters fought off a major assault by the forces of the antagonist—or antagonists, as the case may be—and realized that they may have been making some bad assumptions about what is going on. However, because I want to post something before the end of the year, this will be a simple social media game about my history in gaming. All it really is is a list of "games that influenced me", but I want to include some commentary to make it worth your time to read. Without further ado, and after the first two in no particular order:

1. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition - This was, of course, the first RPG I played, before I had even heard the term "RPG". I learned a lot about gaming from this, in part because I had no idea what I was doing. It was where I learned that having followers is a good thing. It was where I learned that maybe you shouldn't trust your fellow players, but also that you could generally rely on them if they weren't dicks. I learned what it means to be able to attempt anything, even if you might or might not succeed. Some of those I would count as life lessons, too. I learned that resource management is a fun game in itself, even if it took me years to be able to articulate that lesson.
2. Traveller - Since it was the first game I'd ever run instead of just being a player, this is where I learned the value of Referee tools. Random encounters, rumor tables, world generation procedures, and so on mean that the Referee can concentrate on the arc of the story and leave the details up to the dice. This has served me as well in learning what the value of divination is outside of gaming, too.
3. Call of Cthulhu - This is where I learned that even a single rule, if properly designed, can thoroughly change the experience of the game by altering the approaches that the players will tend toward.
4. Champions - I didn't know it at the time I was playing it, but this game taught me that point-based character creation is terrible. Even if the intent is otherwise, it encourages players to find as many loopholes in the system as they can. This is also called "system mastery", and it continues to infect some games to this day. Some games revel in that, such as Pathfinder, while others, such as GURPS, try to minimize it.
5. RuneQuest, 3rd edition - Proved that it is possible to use points to generate characters and not have it be awful. On the other hand, it does this by limiting the point use to only one segment of character creation, the skills of the character. Technically, I probably learned this with 2nd edition and with Call of Cthulhu, but I really like 3rd edition RQ and wanted to include it in this list.
6. Marvel Super Heroes - I learned that the description of a power—what Champions calls "special effects"—is very nearly as important as the mechanics of the power. I also learned that the direction of complexity that I was heading deeper into was not necessarily the best direction.
7. Pendragon - There are other ways to play a game is what Pendragon taught me about gaming. Adventures can be had without making "adventuring" the centerpiece of the game. Instead, adventures can serve a larger purpose of supporting the play of families and the exercise of power politics.
8. Hârnmaster - This game taught me that not every situation affecting a character is best simulated as a pool of resource points, but that conditions applied to the character are often the better tool to use. Also, that characters don't have to be high-competence to be fun to play. Other people learned that latter lesson with Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing, but this game was my lesson in that.
9. Flashing Blades - Here I learned that the proper focus of a game is on the players' characters, even if the events being portrayed are larger than those characters. I also finally came to understand the lesson that I should have learned in Traveller or even earlier, that character development is not necessarily something that affects stats and skills.
10. GURPS - Taught me that the math in the game is important, but that it should absolutely not be something that the players have to deal with much. It should be baked into the system as much as possible.
11. Lace & Steel - Here, I learned one part of the lesson that even small things can make an adventure more fun, by helping to immerse the players into the setting. In particular, the concentration on the small indignities of travel, and how this encourages characters to choose to pay for better accommodations when available, taught me about the little things that matter to characters.
12. Swordbearer - Like the previous entry, I learned that even seemingly minor elements, presented correctly, can add immeasurably to play, with travel being another area treated especially well, in this case by detailing how things like setting and striking camp, the condition of the travelers, weather, and so on affect matters. I also learned that sometimes finances are better handled abstractly, since the characters shouldn't be worrying about every last copper piece and so neither should the players, at least in some settings.

That gives an even dozen games, though I could have included more. I learned things from Chivalry & Sorcery, Fantasy Wargaming, Vampire: The Masquerade, TORG, Rolemaster, and many others as well, but I have to stop somewhere. That's not even counting the negative lessons—other than Champions, which I think was one of the most important lessons—such as the WotC editions of Dungeons & Dragons.