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Dragonstar: More than just D&D IN SPAAAACE!!!!

Dragonstar: More than just D&D IN SPAAAACE!!!!

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dragonstar3aD&D in space. It’s an idea that has been around for a long while in the form of TSR/WotC’s Spelljammer.

However, a few years ago, Fantasy Flight Games produced an OGL supplement for a new kind of science-fantasy game. Thus was born the Dragonstar universe.

In a nutshell, the known galaxy, which theoretically includes any and all fantasy game worlds, is ruled by a council of dragons. These are the standard dragons of D&D fame, the Chromatic and Metallic breeds, and they follow the same alignment guidelines. The chromatics are generally evil, and the metallics are generally good.

Each breed takes a turn at ruling the Dragon Empire, alternating between the two factions. At the time the game is set, the Red Dragon Emperor is assuming the throne, and a dark era is descending.

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Review: Night of the Necromancer

Review: Night of the Necromancer

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Bela Lugosi's dead.Night of the Necromancer
Jonathan Green
Wizard Books (384 pp, ₤5.99, CAN$12.00, April 2010)

One of the many things I admire about the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks is how little space is wasted establishing the scenario. In Night of the Necromancer, you are a crusader returning home after a three-year campaign against vampires and diabolists when an ambush at the foot of your own castle leaves you slain in a ditch. But the dead shall be raised! A paragraph later you are reborn as a ghost, launching you on a quest to avenge your own murder.

Over the course of a single night, you explore a wonderfully atmospheric English countryside haunted by things worse than you, a landscape that is half M.R. James and half Ravenloft (you may even encounter a ghost hunter named Van Richten). Rather than a linear course, progress is made from crossroads to crossroads, allowing you to explore areas branching from a central nexus, then return to that nexus to investigate other avenues. When you’re ready, you move on to the next node, and so on.

Night of the Necromancer is a new addition to Wizard Books’ reprints of Fighting Fantasy from the ’80s and ’90s, and nearly 30 years of evolution shows in Necromancer‘s sophistication.

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Gen Con 2010 Reflections

Gen Con 2010 Reflections

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Kung Fu Fighting gameNow that Gen Con is done, it’s time to offer up some final thoughts, experiences, and, of course, games.

Art Show

One of the best areas to walk around at Gen Con is the art show. This is always fun for me, because I honestly don’t follow artists that much, so sometimes I stumble upon someone really famous whose work I’ve never seen before or who I’ve never heard of. Unfortunately, since the artwork is the artist’s main product, I really can’t reproduce it here without getting into all kinds of messy copyright issues. Fortunately, what I can do is link to the websites of some that I found most enjoyable:

Still More Games

While I covered some fun pulp roleplaying games in yesterday’s post, I didn’t get around to talking some fun games of other types. One publisher that I’d like to discuss is Slugfest Games, which has a wide assortment of card and board games which have a pulp feel to them. The one that I demoed this year was Kung Fu Fighting, a card game in which you play a series of karate moves.

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Gen Con – Day 3 Update

Gen Con – Day 3 Update

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Saturday was my last day at Gen Con, and it will be missed … at least for another year. Tomorrow, I’ll post a bit more in the way of reflections, but for now, let me cut straight to some of the games that I came across.

hollow-earthPulp Adventure Roleplaying Games

For gamers who lean toward pulpy goodness (which I imagine includes many Black Gate readers), there are a lot of great options out there.

One of the best games available for pure pulp action is the Hollow Earth Expedition game (reviewed in Black Gate #12), which is sort of like Indiana Jones meets Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow … with some other craziness thrown in. You really can’t go wrong with a setting that conveniently allows apemen, dinosaurs, Nazis, ninjas, sorcerers, zeppelins, and mad scientists to intermingle.

Since the original release of the game there are now two hardcover supplements available: Mysteries of the Hollow Earth and Secrets of the Surface World. Starting in fall of this year, the creators are planning to begin releasing a series of PDF adventure modules, which they refer to as the “Perils” because they’ll have names like “Perils of Morocco” and “Perils of Brazil” … and, perhaps, if we should be so lucky, “Perils of Scranton.” These PDF modules should be available through DriveThruRPG when they are finally released. In 2011, however, the word is that they’ll be releasing a Revelations of Mars sourcebook … so keep your eyes open for that, lovers of planetary adventure settings!

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Gen Con 2010 – Day 1 Update

Gen Con 2010 – Day 1 Update

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Water Street Bridge entertains people as they head into the Exhibition Hall at Gen Con 2010. A comely wench sells CDs.
Water Street Bridge entertains people as they head into the Exhibition Hall at Gen Con 2010. A comely wench sells CDs.

Gen Con is packed full of entertainers, in one form or another, but some of the most visible are the singers. There aren’t many of them, but they do stand out … mostly because they’re playing musical instruments.

In this case, it was the musical stylings of Dan the Bard and Water Street Bridge, carefully positioned in the high traffic areas right outside of the Exhibition Hall. Dan the Bard seems to be taking a page from the Old Spice Guy promotional playbook, as his business card indicates that he is “Now accepting commissions for songs about characters and campaigns!” Now you, too, can have your half-elf bard

Dan the Bard entertains at Gen Con
Dan the Bard entertains at Gen Con

While the entertainment is great, it doesn’t look like any of the big media guests show up until tomorrow. Sorry, no Wil Wheaton or “The Guild” cast members today … although at one point, I did believe that I passed Mo Rocca in a hallway. (And, it turns out, I may very well have been right. From his Twitter feed, @MoRocca said, about 7 hours ago  “At #GenCon in Indianapolis. Far more authentically nerdy than ComicCon. That’s a compliment.”)

This gave me an opportunity to head into the Exhibition Hall and poke around the periphery a bit. I was able to check in with a couple of old friends from last year.

First, I talked with the folks over at the Shard RPG to see what fun they had coming. It turns out their game of Eastern mythology-based anthropomorphic animals (it’s a lot cooler than that just made it sound, honest) is going strong, and they’re expecting to have their new supplement, Magic and Martial Arts, out by Christmas. Their own website doesn’t even have this information yet, they said, but they had a preliminary copy of the book available. It looks like it will really expand the possibilities of the game in great ways.

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And Gen Con Begins

And Gen Con Begins

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gen-conAfter a hectic morning, my wife and I finally made the 45-minute drive into Indianapolis with our littlest, 8.5-month old Gideon. (The elder, 5-year old Elijah, will be joining us tomorrow.) Parking was crazy, but we found a spot finally and made our trek over to the convention center that is the home to Gen Con, the best four days in gamig (self-proclaimed).

This is the first year that Gen Con has offered free wi-fi access, but it’s not cooperating with my laptop too well, so this will be a short post. A lengthier post, with accompanying pictures will come later in the day, possibly in the evening when I get home to my computer.

In the meantime, follow my Tweets on the event (my iPad TweetDeck App seems to connect fine) at @azjauthor.

Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

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marvel-supers-4John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.

I didn’t play Nova, the game he and many of his friends played as a sort of long-form creative wargaming campaign. I did play, and in one case referee, long-running role-playing campaigns that gave everybody who took part a special vocabulary, a shared set of touchstones and references that (I think) acquired a particular power from being our own: our own stories, independent from the culture at large, shaped by us and our choices.

I was about seventeen when I met a group of role-playing gamers who’d created their own world for the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing system. I think the game had been going on for something like eight years at the point I met them, and it’s still going today. (Jeff Grubb has a thoughtful reminiscence on the secret origins of MSH here.)

The world, as such, was not and is not stable; it has been re-invented several times over, as campaigns and storylines begin and end (and, this being a super-hero game, occasionally lead to a reboot of the timeline in the course of play), sometimes incorporating actual comic-book characters and sometimes not, but always using many of the same heroes and villains created by our group of gamers.

The characters were, are, the essence of the game; not their histories, but their concepts, and if you played in that world you could add something to it that would become a part of the ongoing tale.

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Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

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echo-small-image

So Echo Bazaar, the free browser game set in the Fallen London, “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell,” is a fantastic diversion. (I’ve mentioned it before.)

One of the things I love about it is that, despite its pseudohistorical goth neo-Victorian/steampunk setting (it’s like what might happen if steampunks discovered black), it’s not all that hateful about sex.

Which is a fine line with historical or pseudohistorical fantasy, right? You don’t want to be intolerably oppressive with your historical attitudes, and you don’t want to be irritatingly anachronistic by jamming in progressiveness where it doesn’t go.

And with history, at least you can rely on being accurate: with fantasy there’s a whole nother element where you have to be plausible, which basically means subscribing to historical fanon. There were black people living in Victorian London, but if what you know about it comes from seeing fifteen different versions of A Christmas Carol, you’ll probably think that the Repentant Forger is an example of unrealistic political correctness.

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Classic Horror Games of the 1980s: Alma Mater

Classic Horror Games of the 1980s: Alma Mater

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alma-mater2Over at Grognardia, James Maliszewski has posted a retrospective review of one of my favorite RPG relics, Oracle Game’s Alma Mater, the role playing game of high school life in the 1970s.

And I do mean relic. I collect role playing games and, after nearly two decades of fruitless searching, I finally gave up and paid an outrageous sum for an unused copy on eBay a few years ago. It was the last significant RPG title from the era I didn’t own.

It was worth it.  Alma Mater was notorious when it was released in 1982, and it retained much of that notoriety through the years.  It was banned from Gencon by TSR, and well-known artist and editor Liz Danforth wrote a famously scathing editorial in Sorcerers Apprentice magazine attacking the game.

Today though, Alma Mater is chiefly remembered for its artwork, by old-school TSR artist Erol Otus (who did the classic cover for Deities & Demigods, and interior artwork for the AD&D Monster Manual, among many others).  The content of the game itself, as you’d doubtless expect, is fairly tame by modern standards, but the artwork can still raise eyebrows. You can see much of it collected at the Cyclopeatron blog.

I’ve never played the game. Not a lot of people did, as a matter of fact — it quickly vanished, despite (or perhaps because of) all the publicity. Hence its relatively scarcity today, and the delight it still brings to bloodless eBay vulture sellers, may they suffer a thousand deaths.

I’m not sure why more game companies didn’t stumble on this idea — it seems completely natural to me now.  Let’s be honest; not much scares me any more.  My senior biology teacher, Ms. Bray?  She still scares me.

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The Art of Storytelling and The Temple of Elemental Evil

The Art of Storytelling and The Temple of Elemental Evil

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toee2Role-playing games have always interested me because, at heart, they’re about stories. They’re ways to tell stories that you don’t know in advance, ways to bring people together to create something unpredictable but still structured in a narrative form. Now, that said, the question is: how do you go about doing that? If you’re writing a module, an adventure, that referees are going to pick up off a store shelf (or download from a web site), what do you give them to help create that story with their players?

The traditional first edition Dungeons & Dragons answer to this was: you give them a dungeon. You give them a sandbox, an area to explore filled with monsters and treasure, and maybe a few adventure hooks. What will the players do with it? Who knows?

For a long time, probably starting in the mid-80s at about the point where I started seriously playing D&D, this approach was in disrepute. A dungeon with a bunch of monsters isn’t a story, the argument ran. A story should have a structure, and ideally different moods, maybe even different settings. It should end in a different place than it began. You could see this philosophy settle in at TSR with the Dragonlance series of modules, taking firmer hold with second edition D&D.

Nowadays, though, at least a few people are beginning to swing back to the first approach. Structuring stories out ahead of time kills the spontaneity of the game, one might argue. Let the players and referee develop the story at the table, not by going through the motions worked out ahead of time by some designer. Don’t railroad the players; give them the situation, and see what they do on their own. (I’m vastly simplifying all these positions, and only presenting some of the arguments. I think I’m getting at the essence, though.)

I’ve come around to that last argument. I want to explain why, because I’ve recently wrapped up a First Edition game in which I was fascinated to see a story I never anticipated arise out of a module that features little in the way of pre-structured narrative: The Temple of Elemental Evil by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer (TSR, 1985).

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