Did You Miss Me?

Two and a half months since I've posted anything here, and for some reason I think that there will still be people reading it. Maybe I'm crazy. Anyway, I've got a couple of things that I wanted to mention, gaming-wise, and so I'm going to post about them now.

First off, I looked in my mail today, and found a neat little packet from Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor and GM Games. It was an envelope containing the spiffy adventure (originally a one-page dungeon) called "Where is Margesh Blackblood?". It's available in PDF form at RPGNow for "pay what you want", so you could run right over there right now and get it for free, or for a buck or two, or for a hundred dollars if you wanted to pay that much for it. It's a quick little bounty hunt for a wayward bandit. I love Tim's adventures, even the simple ones like this one. Well, simpler than some. There are some neat twists here that will probably have the players questioning their characters' motivations. Or not.

I am still thinking about how best to really review Traveller5. For a quick one-liner, though, I am sad to say that I am not entirely happy with it. Still, it's got some really good stuff in there.

I was recently nudged back toward working on my Top Secret retroclone. I opened the file, but didn't really get anything done. We'll see how that goes. Most of my other projects, such as the WRG Ancients-based RPG, have pretty much been abandoned. A major exception is the MegaTraveller retroclone idea, which I have modified into a version of that edition adapted to my own SF starfaring setting.

People who have been paying attention to that Goodreads widget down there toward the bottom of the right sidebar will have noticed that I have been reading Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series of books. This is my first time reading them. When I finish the one I am on, I am going to go ahead and read the eighth one (The Wind Through the Keyhole) rather than going on to the fifth one. I am told that this is the intended order, and that King only wrote the fifth-seventh ones first because he wanted to finish the story before he dies (the car accident that almost killed him kinda kicked him in the ass to do it quickly). I'm a little bit surprised that I have never seen a gaming version of Mid-World. I like it, though it is substantially different than my own "sixguns & sorcery" setting.

Speaking of my own settings, Tim Brannan over at The Other Side has given us his own version of Appendix N. I think that's a neat exercise, so I've done up my own, as it would currently be. Like Tim's, mine will also include particularly interesting movies (I'll list them after the books, though). I make no apologies for the fact that I include a couple of westerns, and even an SF title or two. I am, however, going to avoid non-fiction and gaming books for now:

Books:

• Asprin, Robert L.: "Thieves' World" series (editor)
• Burroughs, Edgar Rice: "Barsoom" series
• Cherryh, C.J.: THE DREAMSTONE and THE TREE OF SWORDS AND JEWELS (particularly as published together and slightly revised under the title THE DREAMING TREE; can also be found together, unrevised, as ARAFEL'S SAGA)
• Herbert, Frank: DUNE
• Holdstock, Robert: "Mythago" series
• Howard, Robert E.: "Conan" stories
• L'Amour, Louis: THE HAUNTED MESA, THE WALKING DRUM
• Lee, Tanith: "Flat Earth" series, THE BIRTHGRAVE, et al.
• Leiber, Fritz: "Fafhrd & Grey Mouser" series
• Lovecraft, H.P.: "Dreamlands" stories
• Martin, George R.R.: "A Song of Ice and Fire" series
• Powers, Tim: ON STRANGER TIDES, et al.
• Sabatini, Rafael: CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE SEA HAWK, et al.
• Smith, Clark Ashton: "Zothique" stories, "Averoigne" stories, et al.
• Tolkien, J.R.R.: THE HOBBIT, "Lord of the Rings" trilogy
• Tremayne, Peter: "Sister Fidelma" series

Films:

• Cat People (the original, though the remake is not terrible) and Curse of the Cat People
• Conan the Barbarian (it is not Howard, but Milius's magnum opus is still an intriguing fantasy film)
• The Dark Crystal
• Dead Man
• Dragonslayer
• Excalibur
• Eyes of Fire (sometimes called Cry Blue Sky)
• Fire & Ice
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the other two "Man With No Name" films
• Heavy Metal (the Taarna sequence)
• John Carter (like Conan, above, it is not the original, but it is still a good science-fantasy film)
• Krull
• Labyrinth
• Legend
• Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Pale Rider
• Pirates of the Caribbean series
• The Princess Bride
• Princess Mononoke
• The Secret of Roan Inish
• Spirited Away
• Star Wars (the original, now called "Episode IV", is an excellent fantasy adventure story with coming-of-age themes)
• Unforgiven
• The Warrior and the Sorceress
• The Wicker Man

There you go. I don't know if I'm back in the sense of regular posting, but I hope to at least post a little more often than I have been.

Goth Of The… Now, I Guess

Miry Vainaja

What The OSR Means To Me

Pardon the public wanking, but I don't have anything else to write right now. Also, I forgot to get something finished for the Obscure Games Appreciation Day, but I still want to write up my suggested changes to Fantasy Wargaming.

Over at The Mule Abides, James Nostack has written a screed claiming the end of the OSR (and this is not the first such claim I've heard – it's pretty much like "Death of Hippie" or "Punk Is Dead" it happens so often), now that a person using the moniker Skidoo has composed a complete flowchart of AD&D 1E combat, from surprise rolls to psionics and unarmed combat. Nostack's argument, as I understand it, is that because this ends any need for further analysis of the core engine that makes up AD&D, there is no further need for an OSR to exist. It seems as though his assumption is that such "rabbinical" (in his words) focus on understanding a particular form of the rules for D&D is the raison d'être of the OSR.

I wrote in response to that, saying that for me, "the OSR is about a rejection of the primacy of story that ultimately led to the Forge and the concept of 'story games' or 'story now' play styles (and I was once very interested in Forge-style gaming – it was when I discovered that I wasn't having much fun playing that way that I looked around and found the OSR). It is about emphasizing actions over the alleged meanings of those actions. It includes a return to the wargaming roots of the hobby, and regains for logistics and strategic thinking a place in play that informs player choices rather than being abstracted away as supposedly 'un-fun'."

That's really why I am interested in all of this early play-style discussion and practice. I look at it like this: back in the early days of motion pictures, they approached their subject like documenting a play or adapting fictional writing directly. It was when filmmakers began paying attention to the particular strengths of the actual medium, rather than adapting the methods of other media, that motion picture became a meaningful artform in itself. Similarly, if roleplaying games are limited to reproducing fictional writing or motion pictures in an interactive format, they will never get anywhere. It is only when roleplaying games take advantage of the unique strengths of the format that they will become a serious and meaningful addition to the arts. That's why I am not really interested any longer in rules that duplicate the requirements of traditional storytelling, such as "hero points" and the like (unless they are fully integrated into the setting, as was done with TORG, such that they become something that the characters could possibly discuss in a meaningful way). I realize that these sorts of rules showed up at an early stage (for instance, there is a crude "hero point" rule in Top Secret), but they seem unnecessary and intrusive from the perspective of roleplaying as a game.

To me, roleplaying is about playing "let's pretend", not about making stories. That is, I want to be able to express my heroic, dinosaur-tripping self, not write a story about a guy who is heroic and trips dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. If I am not heroic, then my character in the game should not be. I can write a hero, I can write a story about tripping dinosaurs, those things are easy. What I want from a roleplaying game is to be able to be a hero, even if it is only at the table. To be a hero, I have to have the possibility of not being a hero in front of me. If I fail, then I fail, and failure can be fun, too, through pathos. Plus, there's always the next character, the next situation.

I dunno, what do you think? Am I merely wanking here? Or is this line of thinking actually something that might inform real play at the table in a positive way? Or, more chillingly, is thinking about this sort of thing destructive to actual play, and my predilection for it part of the reason that I haven't actually played an actual game for months?

Nothing To Say

I confess that I've hit something of a dry spell of stuff to write about related to gaming. This is probably because I am not doing any lately. I want to get a solo GURPS Voodoo-based (but with 4E rules) thing going using Mythic Game Master Emulator, but I am balking at the logistics involved. I have a couple of electronic tools that should help, but I am seriously a Luddite when it comes to roleplaying games. If it isn't on paper, I have a hard time using it.

I am thinking about running a MegaTraveller game using my own setting. But I am also still interested in running a D&D-type game (maybe AD&D). I have a bunch of stuff that I've written toward the latter, but it isn't ready for prime time yet. This is something that I should avoid, though. I should just run it, and let the design work be done at the table. (This is me talking myself into it.)

I'm still writing something for the Obscure Games blog fest, or carnival, or whatever it's called. I'm going to write up some of my suggested changes for Fantasy Wargaming, after all. Wait, I have less than a week to go on that? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Also, I wasted my 200th post on this?

Ray Harryhausen, 29 June 1920 -- 7 May 2013

I wanted to do something nice for today's Ray Harryhausen Appreciation Day, but I couldn't think of anything. My creative juices just don't seem to be flowing at the moment. Maybe it's the heat.

That said, Ray Harryhausen is a man to whom we all, especially gamers, owe a great debt of gratitude. He will be missed.

Another Appreciation Day!

Over at Mesmerized By Sirens, Catacomb librarian is sponsoring an Obscure Fantasy Games Appreciation Day on May 30, dedicated to fantasy games from 1975-1989 that aren't D&D. He plans to make it an annual thing, too, so that's pretty awesome. I will be participating, of course. Hopefully, I'll come up with something different than just another entry into my Obscure Games series!

Maybe I'll write up some of my suggested alterations for Fantasy Wargaming. Or maybe I'll write up a location for Lords of Creation (I dunno, is fantasy plus science fantasy plus crossing genres "fantasy"? I'll have to ask). Perhaps I'll do something else. We'll see!

[Obscure Games]Swords & Wizardry

Well, here it is, the first Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day. Perhaps this will be the only one, or perhaps there will be more. Certainly, a number of the people involved are making posts all week! I'm just doing the one, though, because I am a lazy blogger.

Of all the retroclones, Swords & Wizardry was the most interesting to me from the start. Where Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC presented the rules very closely to the source, S&W chose to make a couple of significant changes that streamlined play (and also moved the rule sets further from the possibility of the current D&D copyright holder choosing to engage in legal shenanigans to try and suppress the game). It turned out that the legal worries were not very important but, as often happens when constraints are placed on creativity, it resulted in some really interesting design choices that further illuminate what we mean when we talk about "D&D", and even roleplaying in general. For that alone this is an important set of rules. However, it is also an elegant and fluid set of rules that works well at the table.

Swords & Wizardry comes in three basic "flavors": Whitebox, Core, and Complete. Each of these represents a version of the original D&D rules set, with varying amounts of influence from the four supplementary booklets that were published for use with it. S&W:Whitebox sticks almost entirely to the original three booklets that came in a white box. S&W:Core adds material from the first supplement, Greyhawk. S&W:Complete adds more material from the supplements, and furthermore continues on to some of the early options presented in The Strategic Review and the first few issues of The Dragon magazine (before it lost its "The"). In addition to these basic "flavors", other people have put together versions that emulate the Holmes "Blue Book" edition of Basic D&D, that reskin the whole thing for Japanese-style fantasy adventures (Ruins & Ronin), and so on. In addition, there are a few supplements that alter the basics to better fit specific settings (my own favorite is Savage Swords of Athanor). The Whitebox and Core versions are published as POD products on Lulu.com by Mythmere Games, while the Complete version is published in print by Frog God Games. Over there on my blog's sidebar, there is a link to the online SRD for S&W:Complete, though. Also, Mythmere provides free versions in PDF and even .rtf format for those who want to use the text to write their own version.

S&W:Whitebox strips the game almost to its barest essentials. There are only three character classes: Cleric, Fighter, and Magic-User. The stats have very minimal effect on characters, generally giving only a ±1 to rolls affected by them, though experience bonuses are the real benefit. Each character class starts very similarly in hit points, with Clerics and Magic-Users getting a single d6 hit die at first level, while Fighters get a d6+1. These quickly change as the classes go up in level, with the Magic-User rising only to 3d6 at fifth level, while the Cleric has 4d6 and the Fighter 5d6 at the same level. Every character has a saving throw determined by level, with the Cleric and Magic-User starting at 15 and the Fighter at 14, each improving by 1 point per increased level. This roll is used for any instance where a saving throw is called for, though certain specific situations may have modifiers (dwarves, for instance, get a +4 to saving throws versus magic). There is an option to use a saving throw grid derived from the original game, for those who are unable to function without save categories. Characters are given experience charts up to tenth level, with anything higher presumed to be according to however the Referee wants to handle it. Magic-Users do have an expanded chart indicating their spell use at higher levels, since sixth level Magic-User spells aren't available until a character reaches twelfth level.

Damage of all weapons, as in the original edition (and the Holmes Blue Book), is always a single d6, though a modifier of ±1 is given for heavy or light weapons. Armor Class, in a particularly interesting move, is given in both the traditional descending form and also in the innovative ascending form of the WotC editions of D&D. So, an Armor Class might be listed as 5[14], with the number in brackets being the ascending form. The license to use the rules does require that this format is always used for Armor Class, so derivative games need to do so. This ensures that the players and Referee will be able to choose which they prefer at the table.

Other than lists of equipment, spells, and monsters, and a system for placing treasure, that is it. A completely simple set of rules that avoids the sometimes odd emergent behavior and occasional outright missteps of later editions of D&D.

The somewhat longer S&W:Core adds a number of things from later supplements for the original D&D, such as an optional Thief class, variable weapon damage by weapon type, variable hit dice per class, and expanded spell listings up to seventh level for Clerics and ninth level for Magic-Users. There are a few spells that I'd use the Core versions over the Whitebox ones (Contact Other Plane, I'm looking at you), in part because they are actually closer to the original writeups in the three original booklets, and in no small part because they work better than the Whitebox versions.

In addition, Core explores hirelings in more detail, adds a rudimentary mass combat system, more monsters, and more treasures (especially increasing the number of magic items).

S&W:Complete finishes this by adding all of the fundamental classes that most of us got used to in AD&D, such as Rangers, Paladins, Druids, Monks, and Assassins.

For myself, I am especially attracted to the stripped-down, house-rule-ready version that is Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox. I am particularly attracted to stripping out (arguable) mistakes like the Thief class, as well as questionable "improvements" like variable hit dice and variable weapon damage. A house rule that gives secondary skills to characters whose "class" is simply a description of whether or not they use magic spells, such as the skills system in Savage Swords of Athanor, seems like a good way to avoid the need for a large number of character classes while also separating character class from the idea of a character's profession. Merging that with, for instance, the secondary skills system that is in Adventures Dark and Deep might be a fruitful way to go, actually.

Another useful item from Mythmere Games is the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book, which includes (according to the back cover) 265 monsters from the original books (0e-2e), 3 monsters from the third edition, 9 monsters from Monsters of Myth, and 186 monsters never before seen in print. Some of the entries are dull (it's difficult to make a wolf interesting, but it is something that needs to be statted out), some are interesting (the Wandering Hole!), and some are spectacular (such as, for me, the Tsalakians and Kzaddich, the Artificers of Yothri and their Amphorons, and the various Toad monsters such as the Yurmp and the Todawan Masters, among others).

Most of the books from Mythmere Games are available for free in electronic version, and none of the books is very expensive in print. The Frog God Games version is available online (again, the link is over there to the right), and is not too expensive in print either.

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day Sales

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day, which is going on as you read this (my entry will go live in a few hours), includes a few sales which will last only one day. Here is information about two of them:

From Frog God Games:

Frog God Games has discounted their entire line of Swords & Wizardry products for 1 day only in celebration of Swords & Wizardry appreciation day (April 17th 2013). The discount is good for 25% off S&W Products but you must use coupon* code SWApprDay on April 17th 2013 at check out. 

*The coupon excludes items less than $1, S&W Cards, Pre-Orders, and Subscriptions.

From the S&W online SRD:

Here is the coupon code for the Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day sale [17 April 2013]!

SWAD252013

It applies to everything listed here: http://shop.d20pfsrd.com/collections/swords-wizardry-appreciation-day

Happy S&W Appreciation Day!

Adventures Dark and Deep

I wrote the basics of this review as a comment over at Mr. Bloch's excellent blog, but I figured that I'd bring it here and expand on it. You can go to his blog for a link to purchase the book.

The idea of Adventures Dark and Deep is a speculative one. If Gary Gygax had not been forced out of TSR and had been allowed to develop AD&D in the ways that he wanted, what would the game's second edition have looked like? To build this, Mr. Bloch researched every word that Gary ever wrote on the subject, and compared those to work that he did in later games such as Dangerous Journeys: Mythus or Lejendary Adventures. Of course it is not exactly what Gary would have written, but it does look a lot like what he was moving toward.

I support this idea enough to have funded it through Kickstarter, at a level that would get me the hardcover of the Players Manual (there will be two more volumes, one for Gamemasters and one with monster descriptions; this is obviously the basic format of every edition of AD&D, as well as the WotC editions of D&D). My hardcover showed up on Saturday, and I am very pleased with the physical quality. It's not perfect (it uses, as usual for a POD product, glued rather than stitched signatures, for example), but it is at least as good as most products. The ink is clear and doesn't smear, the paper is smooth and has a good feel, and so on.

The text, as well, is high-quality (even if it does retain some things from Unearthed Arcana that I would have liked to see developed further - notably, the Chromatic Orb spell, which has always just been removed from my games), and I am very, very pleased with the work that Mr. Bloch did on this. I am considering using this ruleset in place of 1E in the future. I am especially happy that he chose to include the weapon vs. armor type table, even if he did relegate it to an appendix as an optional rule. On the other hand, he also rationalized it by separating the armor types from armor classes.

For those considering it, if the idea strikes you as a good one, then the product is well worth the $30 price tag for the hardcover.

(I also received my copy of Traveller5 on Saturday, but that is over 600 pages, so it will be a little while before I can say anything about it. Finally, sorry about the radio silence for the last couple of weeks. I hope that will be over now.)

Tell Ya What I'm Gonna Do

There's a little appreciation day coming up, focused on Swords & Wizardry. I've decided to participate in it.

Now, I've been quiet for the last week for a really good reason: my local cable company is making the first two seasons of Game of Thrones available for free for the week, so I've been (re-)watching like heck, and not doing a whole lot else.

I haven't finished any, but I've given some thought and a bit of writing to the next couple of Obscure Games entries.

I hope that you are doing well.

Goth of the Week

Demi Doom

This is the last time that Goth of the Week will be regularly published here. I may occasionally do this in the future, but I won't hunt for photos and schedule posts on a regular basis anymore.

Turning The Gatekeeper Test Back On

I'm getting tired of dealing with spam comments. Captchas back on. I apologize to everyone.

Do spammers actually think that anyone is going to respond? Don't answer that, I know the rationale. It's just annoyed me too much today.

Goth of the Week

Luka, from Croatia. Deathrock styles are awesome, and show the connection between goth and punk more clearly.

Oh, and yesterday (the 14th) was my birthday. I'm older.

Metal!

Brass six-sider prototypes! The actual
dice will be laser-etched, they say.

A couple of people have mentioned it, and I want to add my voice because it looks pretty nifty, and I like nifty things. There's this Kickstarter which is set up to manufacture a bunch of metal dice, precision engineered. I mean, who wouldn't want steel dice? Or frickin' magnesium dice! I mean, that is pretty damned spiffy. The people who play Victorian adventure games that don't want brass dice? I don't want to meet anyone that lame. You can get them by the set of seven (d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 tens digit, d12, d20), by sets of d6, or by sets of d10. The aluminum dice are the least expensive, at $70 for a set of seven, but they go down to $40 for a set of 6d6 in aluminum (or even less for a single d20 in any of a variety of metals, if you get in pretty soon).

Think about having a set of titanium dice. Those would last for-frickin'-ever. Of course, they'd also run a chunk of change ($160), but they're precision machined and you'd never need to buy them again.

So, they're like Zocchi dice, but without the flash and they're made of metal so they'll never chip or crack (and no bubbles inside to throw them off). Stainless steel dice, copper dice, bronze, brass, magnesium, aluminum, titanium. Man, I wish I were rich, so I could get those titanium dice. Those would be sweet. I'll probably get the brass six-siders, for use with Space 1889.

\m/ METAL! \m/

Character Occupations

People throughout the land have to make money somehow.

One of the things that I think about is what the player might want to do in the game, and how to accommodate those desires. Most games provide a system for fighting, so that's easily covered, but the reasons for fighting aren't usually discussed. Of course, the main reason is usually money, either directly or indirectly. However, the way that the character intends to make that money is highly variable. We can call these different ways of making a living "occupations", and there are only a finite number of them. They are also not the same thing as "character classes" or "archetypes" or other ways of designing a character's abilities. Anyone with any set of abilities can engage in any particular occupation, though perhaps some ability sets are more suited to particular occupations than others. Occupations, as I see them, are more like the basic assumptions of a game, and the more that are available in the game, the wider the opportunities the players will have. Here are the ones I can think of offhand that have adventuring possibilities, and what game systems need to be in place to make them viable.

Baron - this is a general term for those characters who are in charge of administrating a domain. However, see Homesteader. Needs a system of domain administration and probably a mass combat system.

Bounty Hunter - characters that take money to find and bring back other characters, whether dead or alive depends on the contract. Needs a system of investigation in order to find the target characters.

Cunning Person/Alchemist - characters that make magic items, such as potions or charms. Needs a system of magic item creation. See also Priest/Magician.

Explorer/Ruin Robber - the prototypical adventuring occupation. Needs a way to explore ruins or wildernesses. Traditionally, this is by hidden map.

Homesteader - characters who travel to uninhabited (or at least unclaimed by any civilized people) area and plant a homestead or colony. This usually leads to becoming a Baron. In addition to the requirements for a Baron, also needs a system of building up an area with buildings and other infrastructure and for discovering what forces might try to destroy, raid, or conquer the homestead. Those elements might also be useful for a Baron, but are not necessarily essential.

Mercenary/Guard - characters who go where they are told and perform violence when needed. Can't think of any special requirements.

Merchant/Pirate/Bandit - in this occupation, characters buy low and sell high. If they're lucky. Needs a system for generating and pricing trade goods. Pirates and Bandits are just like Merchants, but they are willing to incorporate violence into their process of buying low (and sometimes of selling high).

Priest/Magician - providing spiritual or magical services to other characters. The exact nature of these services depends on the particular game system and setting. Frequently this includes varieties of healing or attending to matters of a character's spiritual state (aka "piety"), or otherwise assisting an individual or community. This occupation also includes character magicians who cast spells for money, as well as both mendicant and temple/professional priests.

Spy/Assassin/Thief/Ambassador - a variety of related occupations that involve deception and deceit in various ways. Requires a system to allow various types of deception, such as disguise, lying, stealthy movement, and so on. Oh, and poisons.

What other player occupations might there be?

Kill Your Television

And your movies and books, while you're at it. Roleplaying games might take inspiration and worldbuilding cues from movies, TV shows, and books, but it should not attempt to slavishly simulate them. This is because roleplaying is an entirely different medium, even though it looks slightly similar.

This came up in a search for "boring
theory".

(A quick warning: this is all going to be boring theory. Feel free to skip this one.)

In a traditional fiction, the narrative is linear - this is true even when the story is told in "cut-up" order, or flashbacks, or whatever. The few exceptions (Naked Lunch) simply prove the rule. A traditional fiction is told from beginning to end, even though that beginning and that end and the parts in between might not be chronologically sequential. That is, you read the book, watch the movie/TV show, examine the comic from the starting point, following along through the medium as it leads you, then finish when it no longer continues.

There is a sole exception to this, and that is the genre of "choosable path fiction", such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. But, you see, now we have entered the realm of those things that are traditionally called "roleplaying games". These are fictions which interact with the audience in meaningful ways, in which the audience makes a choice that is then reflected in the continuation of the narrative. Some Computer Role Playing Games (CRPGs) such as Fable and Darklands fit this criteria, though many seem to have no meaningful choices, only scenes where the player fights, then is moved on by the linear narrative scenes into the next fight.

So we have the situation where a character in a linear narrative has to have certain events occur (and others not occur) in order for the ending scene to occur as necessary to the satisfactory resolution of the narrative. This means that the character will exhibit strange distortions of statistical likelihood. He will not be hit by any bullets that could kill him, she won't fall off the cliff as she climbs up the side, he will always find the critical clue that finalizes the villain's guilt, she will be able to dig herself out of the grave in which she's been buried alive. These happen in traditional fiction because they have to happen in order for the final resolution to occur.

In a roleplaying game, this sort of "lust for result" is not inherent to the form. A roleplaying game doesn't have a predetermined character who will achieve a predetermined outcome (rescuing the princess, killing Bill, whatever). Instead, a roleplaying game is more like a puzzle, in which there is a situation that exists (and it may be a situation that changes in response to player actions or a timetable), and it is up to the players to "solve" that puzzle in such a manner as fits their own conception of success.

Some games, though, have given players a resource (points, a special character talent, or some other metagame method) which allows them to modify the character's world in ways that simulate the distortions of statistical likelihood inherent in a linear fiction. When I was younger, I grudgingly accepted this as a way to "simulate" (as I thought) such linear fictions. I called this "cinematic play" at the time. I have since come to dislike the idea, and prefer to consider "cinematic" as a general descriptor of particular physical assumptions that vary somewhat from those in the real world.

A roleplaying game should avoid lust for result. That is, it should not start with a conception of how it will end. The ending (such as it is) of a roleplaying game should develop from the imperfectly-understood choices of the players in relation to the scenario and the rulings and play of the Referee. And even that is a bad way to formulate the situation, because unlike a linear fiction, a roleplaying game does not (have to) have a defined ending at all. A long campaign, if it ends at all without the deaths of the people playing it, is more likely to just peter out. If it bears any resemblance to a linear fiction in this way, it would be to an ongoing series, such as comic books or some types of adventure novel series (The Destroyer, Perry Rhodan, whatever).

In avoiding lust for result, Referees are freed of the temptation to control the players' characters. They are freed of the need to alter dice rolls. They are freed of their quantum ogres. This allows everyone, even the Referee, to be surprised by events in the game, to experience the fiction entirely new, because the fiction didn't come into existence until the communication of the players (including the Referee) and the universe's weighted random number generator as revealed in the dice and the game's rules.

(OK, yeah, I realize that all of this is old hat, but I'm starting to see that people new-come to the ideas in "old-school" style gaming are not really understanding what's going on, so I thought it would be worthwhile to make a new formulation of the concepts.)

Goth of the Week

I do not know who the model is, but I found this here.

Edit to add: The model is Corinna Cassani. Thank you to Mild Colonial Boy, Esq. for finding it!

Gameable Fiction

I've been spending most of my reading time these days with George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. I was introduced to the setting through the excellent HBO adaptation, but quickly decided to read the books as I was sure that there was deeper content, and more of it. I was not disappointed.

Of course, we all know that the series has been adapted as a roleplaying game (though to be sure, I don't know very much about the game and how well it adapts the material; it seems to me that HârnMaster would go a long way toward developing the feel of the setting, with some work adapting the terrible and exotic magics of Martin's fantasy). There are a few other literary settings that have been adapted by specific roleplaying games: Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock's Melnibone and some other Eternal Champion material, Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, Niven's Known Space, Fleming's James Bond (though perhaps that was more an adaptation of the movies), Constantine's Wraeththu, Herbert's Dune (twice, though only once officially), Butcher's Dresden Files, Zelazny's Amber, along with a very few others. This doesn't include those settings that were mere supplements for other games, such as Thieves' World, Wild Cards, or Adams's Horseclans. There are even a few, such as Howard's Conan, that have been adapted more than once. In addition to those, there are some movie and television settings that have seen adaptations, like Star Wars (three times so far!), Star Trek (more than three times, depending on how you count it!), Firefly, Babylon 5, and so on.

However, there are some settings of fiction that have not been adapted to roleplaying games, and I am not sure why that is. Eddings's Belgariad, Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Butcher's Codex Alera, Burroughs's Barsoom (well, it sort of has, but not really), Lee's Flat Earth or Birthgrave, Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, Brooks's Shannara, and so on. Some of them, I can understand if the rights have issues or are otherwise difficult to secure, but the popularity of such as Malazan or Shannara would seem to have caused someone to go through the effort.

What settings do you most want to see turned into freestanding roleplaying games? Which would be better off as a supplement for an existing game like D&D/Pathfinder, GURPS, BRP, or whatever?

Goth of the Week

Maria Amanda

[Obscure Games]Hârnmaster

Before we get started, there's a song that has been going through my head a lot today, so I'm going to share it with you now ("What becomes a legend most? The love and lives of men. And machines."):

OK, now that you've listened to that (you have listened to it, right? It's totally worth the less than three minutes it takes) let's get on with the overview!

The Hârn setting has always been about making a fantasy world that has a resemblance to actual early medieval European society, without actually being medieval Europe. To this end, it includes very detailed information about everything from farming and herbal remedies to castles and the uncivilized tribes of the island known as Hârn. The island is about the size of Madagascar, though oriented East-West instead of North-South, and contains several sovereign nations from three main ethnic groups. Well, two main ethnic groups, and one subjugated one. Plus dwarves. And elves. And gargûn, which are the setting's version of orcs and goblins. It's not really simple, actually.

But we're not here to talk about that. We're here to discuss the roleplaying system that was developed to showcase the setting. Although the setting can be used with any fantasy system (and many of the supplements describing Hârn's world have come with stats for D20 in recent years), HârnMaster was specifically designed with the setting's assumptions in mind. For example, we find in the character creation a discussion of how the astrological science of the setting affects a character, making the actual birthdate of the character an important matter.

Character creation is pretty old-school, with dice rolls for pretty much everything (though, of course, the Referee can override anything, such as making all the characters come from the same background, deciding whether or not particular races are allowed for the PCs instead of randomly rolling for race, and so on). Roll for race (with an 8% chance of being a gargûn!), roll for sex, roll for birthdate, roll for parent occupation (which also determines starting social class), roll for sibling rank and "estrangement" (how much your relatives like you), roll for "medical" issues (which range from poxmarks and scars to being a drug addict, an epileptic, or even a lycanthrope!), roll for height, weight, complexion, hair color, eye color, comeliness, and so on. Then you get to the actual stats!

There are five physical stats, plus four senses, the quality of the character's voice, three mental stats, and "Morality", which last is a rating of the character's views on moral issues (ranging from Diabolical on the low end to Exemplary at the higher ratings). A player is allowed to choose the character's Morality, or can roll it on 3d6. All of the other stats are rolled on 3d6, then modified for race and other factors. Next comes the Psyche chart. Roll on that to find out if the character has mental problems (phobias, manias, paranoia, violent temper, hypochondria, and so on) - 40.1% of characters won't have any, but the other 59.9% are neurotic or worse. Pick a deity, then roll 5d6 for starting Piety (which is a pool of points used to ask the divine beings for miraculous interventions).

Whew! That's a lot to do. These characters aren't going to be throwaway types that you can fling at a dungeon and hope they survive the funnel. You're going to want to keep this character alive. Worse yet, we aren't even done! There's the "Pregame", where several years are played out with a few decisions, including which occupation(s) the character pursues. Occupations add skill points to the base levels. This part is a lot like RuneQuest (the Avalon Hill version, mostly, but not too different from the Chaosium edition). Oh, and roll to see if the character has any psionic talents. These are low-level wild talent magics that the character can do, like astral projection, hexing, or even minor pyrokinesis.

Skills are based on a formula that averages three stats (sometimes, the same stat is used twice, making it an average of a stat, the stat again, and another stat), then modified for astrological sign. Basically, the character's astrology modifies his talent with various skills. Pretty cool way to do it, especially after seeing the weird stat modifiers in Fantasy Wargaming. Then the character gets some money and the player chooses what to spend it on, and we're finally done. Unless the character is a Shek-Pvar (wizard) or a holy person. But we don't have all day, so just figure that you've got more to do in those cases.

Action resolution is based on rolling a d100 against the skill. If the skill or under is rolled, the action is a success. If not, it is a failure. There's always a 5% chance to fail (roll 96-00), and a 5% chance to succeed (though only with a skill that is actually possessed by the character). Any roll that ends in 0 or 5 is a critical. If the roll is a success with a 0 or 5, then it is a critical success, a failure with a 0 or 5 is a critical failure. So, if the character has a 49 chance, a roll of 45 would be a critical success, while a 60 would be a critical failure. There are a bunch of other things involving skills, such as Skill Index, but those are details that aren't necessary to know in an overview like this one (which is going to be long enough).

An important modifier to skills is the Physical Penalty. This is a combination of encumbrance, injury, and fatigue that affects most of the skills. Each of the skills is given a pretty detailed workup of normal uses. There's nearly a half page on listening for noise, for instance (on the other hand, the whole writeup for Dancing is: "A character's ability to perform various types of dance. Specialties such as folk or erotic dancing are viable if desired. Cultural background has a lot to do with repertoire.") Mostly, these stick to things that characters actually do that have an effect on the game.

At this point, it is likely that your character is illiterate, knows a few weapons, and has a few other talents. With luck, he has a psionic talent that can be used for a minor advantage at the cost of a few fatigue points (remember Physical Penalty?)

Combat is pretty straightforward, but detailed and therefore somewhat complex. Characters attack by rolling against the appropriate combat skill, and defend in the same way. There's a detachable page of charts that show what happens when a particular defense is used against a particular attack with the various success levels for each. For instance, a Melee Attack that gains normal success against a Block that has a normal fail results in "A*1". That is a result of "Attacker Strike*1". The number represents the number of d6 to roll for Impact of the hit, which is added to the weapon's Impact. Impact is modified by the armor on the hit location struck (roll for hit location, by the way), and the total Impact is compared to a chart that is broken down by hit location, type of attack (is it Blunt, Edge, or Puncture? or other, more exotic types like Squeeze, Fire, Frost, or Tear - which last covers bites and claws, mainly), and amount of Impact. Cross-indexing these gives a result that shows a color (yellow for minor, orange for serious, red for grievous) and usually a letter/number code such as "E3". The color indicates how serious the wound is, and so what dice to roll for Injury Points (Physical Penalty again). The letter/number code indicates special effects of the wound. An "E" is a Shock Roll, and the number indicates how many dice to roll against the wounded character's Endurance stat. A "B" code is for Bleeding, and the number indicates how many Injury Points worth of bleeding will happen every round of 10 seconds. The most dramatic letter codes are "A" (for Amputation) and "K" (for instant Kill). An "A" result at the neck is also an automatic "K". Those results also have an additional "E" check implied, should the character survive. So, the annoying thing is that a wound takes up a lot of table time, what with the roll to hit, the roll for Impact, the roll for location, and the various rolls for the actual wound, but this is forgivable in the sense that a wound, like in real life, is a big deal. Getting seriously wounded pretty much usually means that you are out of the fight, but it is difficult to be seriously wounded if the character is reasonably skilled and wearing decent armor.

Healing takes these wounds and (usually) rates them with an "H" code, for Healing Rate, based on the treatment that the wound receives. It is important for characters to carry first aid tools, like bandages, splints, and cold compresses, even suturing needles, or to have some way to improvise them. Although, to be fair, an untreated wound is better off (usually) than a critical failure when treating it. The killer, though, is when a wound becomes Infected. A normal wound will likely heal in a few days or weeks, but an infected wound is serious business. Just like in real life.

This isn't the only system that uses wounds as the injury metric instead of hit points, but it is one of only a few that do so. I'll be talking about a couple of the others in later installments of Obscure Games. Also, some of the games that ostensibly use hit points actually seem to use a version of wounds (like RuneQuest for instance, where each wound heals independently of the others - though there is also a total hit point value for the character).

Next come the sections on religion and magic. These are pretty straightforward. You get Piety by participating in religious rituals, and spend it to try to get divine intervention. Magic is learned, and spells cost fatigue to cast. The spells typically have very flavorful names and descriptions ("Ordeal of Frida", "Nurture of Isla"), which make it all have a vaguely Vancian feel, though it doesn't use Vancian methods.

After that are the campaign notes. Costs of various items and equipment, how to be a Mercantyler, how to run a game, monsters and creatures of Hârn, and an excellent random treasure generation system. None of this is particularly unusual, though.

I left out a lot, trying to make this not be like the Fantasy Wargaming series. There's information on how a character can craft items (and make them more valuable), the languages of Kèthîra (the world of Hârn), and a lot more. The details of the religion and magic systems are also fairly involved, so I left those out for the most part. The upshot of all this is that the game is really good for the thing it does, but I imagine that not many people really want the thing it does, which is to adjudicate a highly realistic and detailed setting in a highly realistic manner. This means that a lot of things that other systems do well, such as heroic high adventure, are not well-suited to HârnMaster. Adventures run in the system are likely to resemble Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series rather than, say, Conan or Tolkien. That is, characters are likely to die or be permanently disfigured if they engage in fighting, which might mean that a lot more social interaction between characters and with NPCs would occur. Maybe. Players are a weird bunch. Anyway, I don't think that I'd run this at a table, myself, but I like the ideas a lot in theory, and intend to steal be influenced by a bunch of them for the Computer RPG I intend to write.

Also, the specific version I have discussed here is the 1st edition, which was published back in the ancient days of 1986. Since then, the game has split into two different development tracks: HârnMaster Gold and HârnMaster Third Edition. These have taken different paths of design decisions, with Gold continuing the high-detail, high-realism track, while Third Edition (and the previous version known as HârnMaster Core) preferred to simplify and speed up play.

As a side note, I have a few more Goth of the Week posts in the queue, but I may allow the series to end. It seems to be fairly popular, but I am spending a lot more time looking for decent pictures these days, and I'm ending up with more alt-models than everyday goths. If there's a huge outcry in its favor, I'll keep it going, but otherwise it's just got a few more weeks.

Goth of the Week

This is a gothy dress, and I like the square line of the model's hair, though I don't know if she identifies as "goth", per se. Anyway, as the picture says, it's a John Paul Ataker dress. I think she's probably cold.

Thanks to Dave Kristof for bringing the picture to my attention.

Look At That

I was going to write another Obscure Games review, but Game of Thrones Season 2 DVDs came from Netflix today. So, that's what I've been doing all day.

I do, however, want to make note of the topic du jour: WotC is releasing a reprint of the White Box edition of D&D. It will be $150, which seems like a lot, but it is not really all that much for what you get. Also, they haven't said that Chainmail will be included, which would suck. However, take a look at the picture:

Count the books in there. I see eight. That is three original books, four supplements, and one more hidden book. Could it be Chainmail? We can only hope.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be getting this. Now to go back to watching Starks, Lannisters, Baratheons, and Greyjoys fighting it out for Westeros, and the Mother of Dragons getting ready to take it all back anyway.

Goth of the Week

I have no idea who this is, I found the picture in a Tumblr (actually, in several Tumblrs), but was unable to follow it back to any information about where it came from.

[Obscure Games]Space 1889

Back in the late 1980s, advertisements appeared for an unusual game, different in some ways from anything that was on the market. Called Sky Galleons of Mars, it was supposed to be a wargame, like Battletech or Car Wars, that pitted individual vehicles against each other in combat. Anyway, it kept being pushed back, and I watched as other people's interest waned and eventually vanished. I was one of a few people who were still quite excited about the premise: these weren't just vehicles from a modern or science-fiction background, but from an alternate world where science took a quite different path than it did in this one. These days, you can talk to geeky types and just say "steampunk" to describe the premise, but back then it was a pretty difficult sale to make. The FLGS I frequented (and would later work for) ended up selling only a few copies when it finally appeared in 1988.

Shortly after that, a roleplaying game set in the same background appeared, titled Space 1889. That was a source of some amusement due to the similarity of title with the old TV series Space 1999, of course, which seems to have been the intention. I was still quite in love with the setting at the time, but no one else I knew was, so I picked up a few items, read them eagerly, and let them sit on my shelf otherwise (except for one attempt to run the game, which fell apart for several reasons, not least of which was my incipient Gamer ADD, an illness I am trying to overcome to this day).

The basic idea of the setting is that the old theory of light propagation that said that there was a "luminiferous ether" (which was the medium that the waves that make up light propagate through) proved to be true instead of relativity and quantum mechanics as in our real universe. Thomas Edison used this ether to develop a type of motor that could propel a vehicle through the void between worlds, and made an historic voyage to Mars (the Moon was difficult to reach for a number of reasons, and in fact the sample scenario in the Space 1889 rulebook is centered around the first voyage to the Moon). There, he discovered an ancient, decaying civilization of Martians whose cities lay on a network of canals. These Martians traveled between their cities in flying ships made with a special type of wood called "liftwood", lumbered from certain trees found high in the Martian hills. The Martians had developed two different ways of propelling these sky galleons, either by a complex arrangement of sails ("kites") or by an arrangement of turncranks powering an aerial screw through a flywheel system ("screw galleys").

Of course, the European powers quickly colonized Mars, the British setting up a colonial government at Syrtis Major and the Belgians at Copratia. The British colony is described in terms that make it clearly similar to India in our world, while the Belgian Coprates is similar to the Congo (and the Belgians are quite as ruthless on Mars as they were in their African colonies). As later products made clear, the colonial experience on Earth is largely similar to that in our own history. The Europeans, of course, had steam engines, which they quickly applied to their own aerial flyers, along with giving them ironclad hulls.

The Germans, unable to set up a colony on Mars for various reasons, instead colonize Venus. Venus is a jungle world, with lizard people living a primitive existence. The Venusian atmosphere has a corroding effect on liftwood, so British and Belgian sky galleons are at a disadvantage there, and German zeppelins rule the skies.

The arrangement is one of increasing age as the planets move out from the Sun. Mercury is like the Earth in the pre-dinosaur period, Venus when the dinosaurs were ascendant, Mars like a decadent Earth, and there are hints about the asteroids (though few details) that seem to indicate a final destiny. Because the ether flyers are powered by solar steam plants (since burning coal is impossible in the vacuum of space), there have been no explorers further out from the Sun.

For some reason, when people talk about running the game, they almost always follow it up with "but using [some other set of rules]". There seems to be a perception that the rules of the RPG are somehow unusable. Nothing could be further from the truth, actually. The rules are beautifully simple, but yet also broadly useful enough to satisfy most gamers. They are an early, cruder but simplified version of what would become the GDW House System (which would power a number of RPGs produced by GDW, including Twilight 2000, Traveller: The New Era, Dark Conspiracy, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, among others). Characters have six stats, which are similar to those from Traveller: strength, agility, endurance, intellect, charisma, and social level. Each of the stats is rated from 1 to 6, which can be generated in one of three ways. The first method is to rate each stat in order from 1 (weakest) to 6 (strongest), using that number as the rating. The second is to divide 21 points between the stats, with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 6. The final method is to roll a single d6 for each stat in order, taking the result (but if the total of all six is less than 18, add points as desired, within the limits of 1 minimum to 6 maximum, to bring the total up to 18).

Each stat is associated with four skills. Many of these skills cascade to sub-skills (Marksmanship cascades to Pistol and Rifle, for instance). In those cases, the player must choose a single sub-skill as the specialty, though the other sub-skills are also known by the character. To gain skills, a character is given one or two careers, plus a number of general skill points. A career gives a number of skill points in certain specified skills (and also affects such things as starting money, and might give a character an "Associate", which is an NPC who is closely associated with the character - examples of the latter include the "gentleman companion" who accompanies an Adventuress and gives her a facade of legitimacy in the intensely patriarchal world of the Victorian era, the maid or manservant who accompanies a character with a social level of 6, or conversely the bumbling "master" who is influenced by a Personal Servant character, or the "henchman" who serves a Master Criminal).

To resolve most actions, there are two different methods. The more involved method involves rolling a number of dice (all dice are d6 in Space 1889) and comparing the total to a target difficulty number (lifting things is a difficulty of 1 per 10 pounds, a generic "Difficult" task is 12, and so on). For simpler checks, a single d6 is rolled and compared to the skill or stat being tested.

Inventions are the "magic system" of the game. Scientific knowledge allows a character to build his or her knowledge of several different fields. Once a die is committed to that field in general research, though, it is used up, as it were, and can't be used for another bit of knowledge. Once a character's general research in a field is high enough to attempt to develop an actual invention (each invention is defined by the necessary knowledge in one or more fields), unused dice of scientific knowledge can be spent to attempt to invent, being used up in the process. The number of dice available is equal to the skill level in the branch of science in question, plus the character's Intellect stat. Using up the dice for research or invention does not lower the character's skill or stat levels, of course.

Combat is described in a tactical boardgame that can be ignored and abstracted by the Referee. Turns are 30 seconds long, and allow a character to make one or more actions. Normally, a character can make four actions per turn, but close combat allows actions equal to the character's Close Combat skill or Agility, whichever is greater. Combat involves a third type of resolution: rolling a pool of dice based on the weapon used, skill, and other factors, and comparing each die to a target number and possibly to a defense pool rolled by the target. There are rules for NPC morale, explosions and demolition, and other aspects of adventuring in the Victorian age. The game also includes a version of the sky galleon combat rules from Sky Galleons of Mars. Animals also receive their own section in the combat rules, discussing the special considerations of large creatures, flying creatures, claws, fangs, tentacles, and so on.

There is a section discussing travel and exploration, important considerations in a Victorian game. Characters can get fever, get lost, or succumb to other hazards. There are rules for random encounters in proper old-school style, and a discussion of "invented encounters", which are those pre-designed by the Referee. Weather, oddly, is tied to the random encounter system, but it's a design decision that works well. There's extensive discussion of space travel in the setting, including the problems with trying to land on the Moon or Mars's moons. The rule book is finished off with an adventure (as I mention above) detailing the first expedition to the Moon and contacting the Selenites, detailed discussions of various aspects of Martian geography and society, and finally somewhat less detailed discussions of Venus.

I haven't really gone into the details of the Martians, because I think that's something that is best left for the players to discover in the game (and also because most of that information is fairly easily available online and off).

It's an amazing achievement, and all the more so for being one of the foundation pillars of Steampunk (along with Morlock Night and The Difference Engine). I'm going to leave you with a bit of music in a mode that we call Sepiachord.

Goth of the Week

Persephone at WGT.