Monthly Archives: February 2014

RPGs

OSR Superstar Contest

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Tenkar’s Tavern is hosting the OSR Superstar Contest.

There are three stages. If you make the cut of the first stage you move on to the second stage.

The first stage involves submitting a magic item. You can submit up to three of them. Don’t post it on the blog, it will be disqualified, it must be emailed to the specified address. The deadline is “Sunday, February 16th, at 1PM Eastern (NYC) Time.”

I have decided to participate. So far, I have two magic items sketched out in pretty good detail. You have to use the Swords and Wizardry rules, so I am having to refer back to those. I can do AD&D without a lot of thought and just for specifics. At least it will be flexible to work with any OSR like rule set.

If you make the cut with the magic items, next is a monster.

If you make it to the third round you must use an assigned dungeon map to craft an adventure using the magic item and monster.

 

OSR Superstar
OSR Superstar
RPGs

Day 14: Did you meet your significant other while playing D&D? Does he or she still play? (Or just post a randomly generated monster in protest of Valentine’s Day).

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My ex would not go near an RPG, she does not get it. She considers D&D to be evil. Oddly enough, she bought “Magic The Gathering” cards for our sons.

I have known very few female gamers. There were none in my high school and in college they were girlfriends of other players.

It would be awesome to meet a woman who does not think you are odd to be playing D&D.

RPGs

Ravenloft – Cool Maps!

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I saw this post on RPG Bloggers about Ravenloft today on The Geek Life Project  and I had to make a comment here.

This is only one of two modules from the glory days that I own, the other is Village of Hommlet.

I bought Ravenloft because the maps are cool. When I got back into planning my own campaign a few years ago, when I found a copy of the Dungeoneers Survival Guide and it has a section on how to do those kinds of maps, I bought it.

I think one of our gaming group from the 80’s had his own copy of Ravenloft and ran it. I know that I never ran it. I did read it, but the maps are what got me.

I love maps. I could get into trouble buying maps. When I was in college, I was too poor to take advantage of a USGS office in town. I love all kinds of maps, just to look at them. I can draw OK maps by hand and modern graphics programs make it easy to do decent maps, but I am addicted to well done maps done by others.

I think we played Ravenloft and maybe the sequel. I don’t recall when it came out. Maybe we did our own return to Ravenloft, it has been too long to recall for sure.

I have downloaded several free modules from various places across the internet and like the ideas I get and the maps I can use from the OPDC.

I also prefer the “classic” vampire to what many modern authors and movies have done. See my article on playing 1st level vampire hunters for a laugh.

RPGs

Day 13: First miniature(s) you used for D&D.

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We could not afford a lot of miniatures. We often used the redcoats and continentals you could order from the back of comic books, since they were small. We we lucky if every player had a miniature of their character.

We used Ral Partha mostly. I know there were a lot of companies doing them back then. You would pick up a package of goblin archers, some orcs. Slowly those who DM’d the most built up a collection.

Miniatures were not needed most of the time. Usually we only used them for the party to show marching/riding order or where we were relative to each other. A big piece of paper or wet erase mat would then have marks for the enemies, or a unique die, Lego, small Lincoln Log, etc.

We have played with nothing more than X’s and O’s or initials on the mat or paper to distinguish players from monsters.

Not all miniatures were painted, and not all that were painted were painted well.

[EDIT] – Here are pictures of my entire miniature collection. All but one is from Ral Partha, 1979. The skeleton, I am not sure of, and I can’t read what is on the bottom of the three-pack minis. They all have lead, and the warning on the back of the box mentions it. the cool thing about the three stage minis is that you could change your character’s pose mid-game, or you had three minis for whatever you needed.

I have also participated in the Hero Forge Kickstarter at the level to get my own mini. This will be fun! It has four days to go as of February 13, 2014.

Skeleton and Goblin
Skeleton and Goblin
Dwarves With Mattocks.
Dwarves With Mattocks.
Ral Partha Three Stage Character - Half-Elf
Ral Partha Three Stage Character – Half-Elf
Ral Partha Three Stage back of box.
Ral Partha Three Stage back of box.
Closeup of Ral Partha Three Stage Character.
Closeup of Ral Partha Three Stage Character.
RPGs

Places to play D&D

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What places have you played D&D or any RPG?

Here is my list. The last one, my own house is cool. I need to expand it to be more than my sons and one of their friends.

1.) Parent’s basement in high school and college breaks.

2.) High School Library

3.) Around the campfire in high school.

4.) One tournament at a convention in KC, MO.

5.) Apartment in college.

6.) Student organization in college.

7.) My brother’s apartment, later his house.

8.) My own house in whatever room I please.

RPGs

Day 12: First store where you bought your gaming supplies. Does it still exist?

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The hobby shop in Independence Center in Independence, MO. It had trains of various gauges, plastic model kits, and games. We bugged our parents all the time to drive there so we could see if they had anything new. Hoping we had the cash to get the items we desired. I think it went out of business in the late 80’s, that would have been when I was in college. But I’m not sure it stayed in business that long.

One guy two years behind me in high school said that he planned to start a game store and he did and is still in business. Some people from the same group still play with him.

RPGs

Day 11: First splatbook you begged your DM to approve.

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I assume this means supplemental rules for critical hits. There were all kinds of things from Judges Guild booklets and tables in Dragon Magazine, etc. We developed our own systems for critical hits. Some of our systems were complex and specific as to what body part got injured to instant death. This worked for both critical hits and critical fumbles 1 on d20. No matter what a 1 always missed.

If we rolled a 20 or a 1 on a 20 sided die, we would roll again and second 20 or a second 1 would result in a critical hit for a 20 or a fumble for a 1. There were many awesome hits and fumbles. People shot themselves with their own bow and arrow, or bow strings broke, or people cut off body parts, etc.

The simplest of these was just rolling double damage to keep things moving.

A few of those who DMd would go all out with these materials. Others decided it slowed things down too much for the intricately detailed tables.

I do remember one time that someone wrote to the small town paper complaining about a Judges Guild booklet that had a picture of a woman on an altar and said that proved D&d was evil. The guy from our club who now owns his own game shop, Phil, wrote back and I will never forget this line. “Calling Judges Guild D&D is like calling football Spaulding.” Of course that was back when the D&D was evil was very powerful.

RPGs

Day 10: First gaming magazine you ever bought (Dragon, Dungeon, White Dwarf, etc.).

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Dragon Magazine. I had a subscription starting around #70 and past #200. I was a poor college student and couldn’t afford to keep up the subscription. I traded my box of magazines to my brother, Robert, still with their original envelope to protect the covers. I think it got destroyed when my parents water heater went out or maybe it was the washing machine. I wish I still had them.

RPGs

Day 9: First campaign setting (homebrew or published) you played in.

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This would by my brother, Robert’s, “Quest For The Dice Of Destiny.” We did not finish it, but we did have a lot of fun up to that point. Prior to that it was someone made a dungeon and those that didn’t make a dungeon bought modules.

There was a lot of build up as to what we would do, but the game stalled and we never got it going again. We were having fun with it. As I recall, Robert got bored with it and dreamed up something else.

It would be best described as a complete world with ecology, weather, calendar, places, plots, NPCs and lots of ideas with lots of materials to back it up. There are lots of places we have never explored, and only one character has ever gone off the map. The area is about the size of France and Germany. It also has a sandbox quality as Robert has planned out enough of it that he does not have to make it all up as he goes along, but he is creative enough and go with the flow enough to make it all up as he goes along. I have a hard time telling when he is making it up as he goes and when he is going off planned information he has in his head.

I can sort of do that with the campaign I developed for my sons. It surprised me how ideas just came to me to fill in the gaps and make things happen. I still find it a challenge to scale things to be appropriate for low level characters, but we are having fun with it.

RPGs

Marmalade Dog 19 – Part II

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Last night I wrote here that I found out that the local gaming convention at WMU in Kalamazoo is this weekend.

It started at 9:00 AM and due to waking up way early, I lost track of time working on something since I was up, then having a hard time figuring out where to park to avoid a ticket from campus police, I got there just before ten.

I figured there would be a line to sign up to place D&D Next, so rather than going to the sign-up sheet first, I looked around then tried to find the table. I could not find it, so I went to the sign up sheets and no one had signed up, so I signed up and went to the table, no one was there. There was no note nothing, just a long table and the chairs around it.

I went and said something to the registration staff and the DM for all the D&D Next sessions, all using the Temple of Elemental Evil, and they said he ws not there. One of them mentioned that this was one of their smaller years. The whole event fit into one ballroom/auditorium.

There were less than a dozen vendors. One vendor advertising himself as a travelling game shop. I take that to mean he does from CON to CON. He had jewelry, used games, dice and trinkets. Most of the vendors appeared to be focused on Magic The Gathering. I never “got” the Magic card game. I still don’t so I skipped over those tables. There was one local used book store there and their had their rule books, and Science Fiction and Fantasy books there. The rules they had were “new rules”, probably for D&D 3.0 or 3.5, I did not look closely. I mentioned that and they said any OD&D and 1e books went straight to their eBay site.

There looked to be two tables of board games for whatever enough people wanted to play. There looked to be two tables where two games of Blood Bowl were going on, and there was room at the tables for at least two more games at each table. I played Blood Bowl when it first came out, my brother, Robert had it. That was over 20 years ago.

There were a couple groups playing miscellaneous games, Call of Cthulhu, a magic/fantasy RPG I never heard of, and maybe a couple others. The bulk of their RPG offerings were hosted by the PathFinder Society and there looked to be 6 or 7 PathFinder games. The PathFinder Society or else it was a vendor had three tables with two workers for selling rules books. I am not interested in laying out a bunch of money to GM another game system.

They had eight double tables set up for Warhammer miniature wargaming and it looked like two or three tables were setting up to play.

They had some big screen with some sort of Star Trek game that one worker said he was excited about, but nothing was happening yet.

They also had 8 immersive stations, basically boxes with doors for MechWarrior, but nothing was happening with that. There was a big screen TV to show the action once it got started.

One of the workers said that some people usually had pickup games, but I did not see anyone else who was not involved in something. I brought my Player’s Handbook and ACKS soft cover (I helped with the Kickstarter so got my name in the acknowledgement.) and my tablet with the AD&D PDFs, and the final D&D Next play test rules. so I could have ran an impromptu or played in one had there been others there.

Since the first session went until 2:00 PM, and I was not feeling into any of the other offerings, I decided to go run some errands and pop back home to drop stuff off and let the dog out. Due to my waking really early, once I got home I felt how tired I was, so I elected to take a nap. Of course, I slept until after 2:00 and the next session started at 2:30. So I planned to go to the next session, but something personal came up and put an end to that. A day that was a good one, even though it was not going the way I had hoped, took a turn due to some real life drama.

It continues tomorrow, but I put off things I planed to do today that I have been putting off too long. My computer room is a mess and it is driving me nuts, so I need to clean up so I can focus on some campaign planning and other real life things.

I had never been to a strictly gaming convention before. Obviously it was focused on playing, which is a good thing. There were no panels or guest speakers, etc. My impressions of the whole thing are pretty neutral since the one thing I wanted to experience wasn’t happening when I was there.

I did get some good out of it. I learned of some other SW Michigan conventions, one in Grand Rapids, only about an hour away, I don’t recall where the other is at the moment. On my errands I stopped by my FLGS and picked up three spare sets of dice, if I ever manage to get some players that need dice for a session. I also looked at their board and got a picture of a group that meets regularly at WMU that might give some local leads. Local colleges should have some RPG players that might let an old Grognard play. I now know where to park for next year’s Marmalade Dog and can watch for it next year. If I sign up early, I can run a game and get a t-shirt and discounted admission.

For now, I will continue the quest to find locac players for face to face play, and explore the options for online play, like Google hangouts or Roll20. Of course, more posts about those endeavors.