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Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

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black-crypt-smallSome 20 years ago, shortly after I graduated from the University of Illinois, I bought my first home computer. It was an Amiga 2000, essentially the same as the entry-level Amiga 500 but with a hard drive. The hobby computing industry — which is now dead — was booming in the early 90s, and there were thousands of fun things the dedicated hobbyist could do with a decent home computer. Video editing, BASIC programming, ray trace imaging, indexing Chicken Cacciatore recipes… and if you were cutting edge enough to buy a modem, you could even log into BITNET and post on those electronic bulletin boards everyone was talking about. Crazy.

All of that was very interesting. But I shelled out my $1,500 bucks for one reason, and one reason only: to play games. And that’s exactly what I did.

I played the role playing games I’d been aching to try out in my last year of grad school, while feverishly finishing my Ph.D. thesis: Pool of Radiance, Bard’s Tale, Dragon Wars, many others. I played late into the night, before dragging my weary butt into work at Amoco Oil the next morning. It was an exhausting and emotionally draining lifestyle but, let’s face it, those dungeons weren’t going to clean themselves out. Countless terrified townspeople in tiny electronic villages were counting on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down.

About a year after I bought my Amiga, in March 1992, Electronic Arts published one of the most acclaimed role playing games ever made for that platform: Black Crypt, the first release from Raven Software, future makers of the popular Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Quake 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warware 3. Inspired by the legendary game Dungeon Master, another famous Amiga title, Black Crypt was nothing less than a vast trap-filled dungeon crammed with monsters, secret passages, hidden switches, and magical loot. The graphics were gorgeous, and the wonderful sound effects — the distant clanking of trapdoors, odd footsteps, and telltale sounds of the teleporters — immersed players like never before, and made you want to play with the sound cranked up and the lights turned down low.

I played the first few levels and was mesmerized. Then, in November 1992, I got married and moved to Belgium, leaving my beloved Amiga behind. I thought about the game many times in the intervening years, as I returned to the States, got a job at a tiny software company, worked on Internet Explorer 1.0, and was at ground zero of the Internet revolution that transformed the entire country. Some time during those turbulent years, my Amiga was moved to the basement, where it quietly sits today, collecting dust.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been on a quest to find and complete Black Crypt. It’s a quest filled with exactly the kind of twists and turns you’d expect for a man determined to find a long-lost crypt, spoken of only in half-forgotten legend. While critics raved, Black Crypt was released when the Amiga was already in decline, and was never successful enough to be ported to any other platform. It vanished quickly, both from store shelves and collective memory. As I search for the right magical tools that will allow me to open the crypt, I’m well aware that it’s not going to be easy.

But that’s okay. After twenty years, one of the things I’ve learned is that true joy isn’t always in the destination. It’s in the journey.

Our most recent Vintage Bits articles were Sword of Aragon, Lordlings of Yore, and Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception.

An Intro to Warhammer 40K: Explore the Horrors of the Jericho Reach in Deathwatch: The Achilus Assault

An Intro to Warhammer 40K: Explore the Horrors of the Jericho Reach in Deathwatch: The Achilus Assault

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the-achilus-assault-smallI’ve mentioned a few times now that the modern game that has most captured my interest is Fantasy Flight’s Rogue Trader, set in the darkly fascinating Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Let’s back up a bit, because that was probably confusing. What is Warhammer 40,000? Back in 1983, British game company Games Workshop released Warhammer, a tabletop miniatures game which allowed fantasy fans to simulate massive battles between orcs, elves, humans, and the forces of Chaos using thousands of hand-painted lead miniatures.

The game was a major success, and in 1987 wargaming designer Rick Priestley asked the fateful question: “Hey lads — what would happen if we gave orcs space suits?”

Thus was born Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop miniatures game which allowed fantasy fans to simulate massive battles between orks, elves, humans, and the forces of Chaos — in space. And yes, it’s exactly as cool as it sounds.

Of course, a concept as powerful as Orks in Space couldn’t be contained in one genre for long. The tabletop game is currently in its sixth edition, and by 1999 Games Workshop was publishing Warhammer 40K novels and comics through its Black Library imprint. Over the last dozen years, it has produced well over 200 titles, including The New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy series.

The novels have vastly expanded the far-future setting of Warhammer 40,000, filling in the back story of the all-powerful Emperor of Mankind, who sits on his throne on Earth while his Space Marines sweep across the vast reaches of the galaxy, reclaiming the far-flung worlds of man lost in the dark millennia since the treasonous forces of Chaos brought an end to the Golden Age of Mankind. The loyal Marines — and the Rogue Traders who follow closely behind, powerful merchant princes of the stars — come face to face with strange mutant offshoots of humanity, ancient and sinister alien Xenos, gene-stealing Tyranids, and whole civilizations fallen to the corruption of Chaos.

And of course, space Orks.

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Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

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perry-rhodan-the-cosmic-leagueI’m willing to bet most of you have no idea who Perry Rhodan is.

Believe it or not, Perry Rhodan is the most ambitious future history ever written. Since its creation in 1961, over 3,000 Perry Rhodan novels have been published; the series has been translated into half a dozen languages and spawned at least one movie and a popular computer game, The Immortals of Terra.

Why haven’t you heard of him? Probably because the last English-language Perry Rhodan novel, #118 The Shadows Attack, was published by Ace Books in 1977. The English-language version was the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman, who hired his wife Wendy to do most of the translations. The series has continued in its native Germany, where it is published weekly.

I bring all this up because A) Perry Rhodan practically introduced me to science fiction, at the tender age of eleven, and B) I recently purchased Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League, a two-player card game from Z-Man games that makes use of the Perry Rhodan license in a fast-paced game of interstellar trading and politics:

A newly colonized star system, populated by different peoples… Mysterious remains of age-old technology… Orbital stations to organize the trade between the worlds… and you and your spaceship right in the middle of it all…

Discover the Ambourella system with all its opportunities. Fight the adversities of gravity and do business with the planets. Your are the captain of a spaceship transporting goods and passengers. Invest your earnings early in valuable technologies and thus strive to become the most wealthy merchant of the Cosmic League.

Perry Rhodan doesn’t actually appear in the game, but it does draw on the rich backdrop of the Cosmic League. It comes with 60 technology and interventions cards, 6 planet tokens, 30 different cargo cards, and 2 spaceships. The average playing time is under half an hour. It’s a fairly simple game at heart, and the tie-in with Perry Rhodan is fairly light, but nonetheless it brought back a lot of great memories of 1970s pulp science fiction.

Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League was published by Z-Man Games in 2007. It retails for $24.99, but I bought my copy new online for around 10 bucks.

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

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kobold-quarterly-fall-2012-smallIn the early days of the adventure gaming hobby, the field was pretty diverse, with a healthy assortment of successful RPGs and board games. Much like today, as a matter of fact.

One major difference, however, was that each of the major titles was supported with its own magazine: Dragon (for D&D and other TSR games), Different Worlds (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu), Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Tunnels and Trolls), White Dwarf (Warhammer), Space Gamer (The Fantasy Trip), The Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (Traveller), and many others. Board gamers, too, weren’t overlooked on the magazine rack, with Nexus (Star Fleet Battles), Ares (SPI’s sci-fi games), The General (Avalon Hill), and others.

With the exception of White Dwarf, all those magazines are dead today.

And I miss them. Many were good, and a handful — including The Space Gamer and Different Worlds — were excellent. They kept us up-to-date on rapid market changes, talked-up overlooked games, and generally kept the level of excitement high around the whole industry.

I never expected the era of the specialized gaming magazine to return. For one thing, I know what it takes to keep a magazine alive these days (a series of miracles).

But Wolfgang Baur’s Kobold Quarterly has changed my mind.

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Solitaire Gaming

Solitaire Gaming

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eia_front_cover_fullI should probably blame the whole thing on John O’Neill and Eric Knight.

It was Eric who introduced me to the true joy of war board games. Sure, I’d played many a game of Risk back in junior high, but the more I read about actual tactics, the more frustrated I became with the original board game which is more about luck than real strategy.

The late ’70s and ’80s, when I was in junior high and high school, were a golden era for tactical boardgames like Panzer Leader and Axis & Allies. I was aware of, but rarely played these games because when given the chance to game with friends, I chose role-playing over board games every time. I didn’t know how cool they could really be until Eric drove down a few years back and introduced me to the wonderful old Yaquinto board game French Foreign Legion and we had three hours of fun pushing cardboard counters into death-defying positions a la old Hollywood desert adventure movies. In those over-the-top extravaganzas every bullet counts and even the extras get dramatic death scenes.

I suddenly realized the fun I’d been missing, but I wasn’t well and truly hooked until O’Neill gave me an extra copy of Barbarian Prince and told me about solitaire boardgames. You can play a lot of games solitaire if you have to do so — as any younger sibling or only child can tell you — but it was never much fun to play Risk or Clue against yourself. Some games, though, are designed to be played solitaire, which is what drew me to Victory Point Games.

What I was REALLY looking for was a copy of French Foreign Legion (copies are very, very scarce, although Eric generously tracked one down for me as a gift). What I found was a solo wargame based on the Battle of Rorke’s Drift that had been inspired by one of my favorite movies, Zulu. Since stumbling upon that first game I’ve tried out a number of Victory Point Games titles, and today I thought I’d write about one of my favorites, Empires in America.

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Discover the Secret History of World War Two in Achtung! Cthulhu

Discover the Secret History of World War Two in Achtung! Cthulhu

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achtung-cthulhu-smallOn Tuesday, I talked about the latest crop of exciting fantasy games I’ve discovered, with the help of The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games. They included recent supplements for CthulhuTech, the game of Cthulhu versus giant robots, and Incursion, an intriguing mash-up of BattleTech and Squad Leader.

Cthulhu, zombies, Nazi super-science, occult experiments… you’d think these two games alone would keep me completely content for the next decade. And they might have, too, if I hadn’t just discovered Modiphius Entertainment’s Achtung! Cthulhu.

Before you accuse me of having the attention span of a three-year-old, I’d like to point out that Achtung! Cthulhu combines all that stuff in one game.

Did you ever want to see what would happen if Sgt. Rock went toe-toe-toe with the minions of Nyarlathotep in Nazi Germany? If Indiana Jones stumbled on a nest of shuggoths in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden?

These are rhetorical questions; of course you did.

Achtung! Cthulhu is a tabletop roleplaying campaign that pits elite Allied soldiers against Chthonians, Deep Ones, Dimensional Shamblers, the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, and other creatures from H.P. Lovercraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It is fully compatible with Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and versions are in the works for Realms of Cthulhu (for Savage Worlds), Pelgrane Press’s Trail of Cthulhu, and the PDQ Core Rules from Atomic Sock Monkey.

The first series of adventures is called “Zero Point,” and so far two chapters have been published: Three Kings and Heroes of the Sea, both written by Black Gate‘s own Sarah Newton. The overall series is under the direction of Chris Birch.

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X-Plorers: Space Exploration the Way it Should Be

X-Plorers: Space Exploration the Way it Should Be

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x-plorersI have to admit I’ve been generally disappointed with science fiction role playing games. It’s true that I’ve discovered some recent gems — especially Ashen Stars and Rogue Trader — but I don’t really get to game much these days, so they’re mostly of academic interest.

You know what would have been great? Discovering a fast-paced, easy-to-learn science fiction RPG when I was still gaming every weekend. One that captured the spirit of 1950s sci-fi, when space exploration meant wide-eyed explorers stepping gingerly out onto mist-shrouded planets, clutching futuristic sidearms and highly unreliable sensing equipment.

I’m talking about the science fiction of Forbidden Planet and Planet of Vampires, where every alien landscape concealed ancient secrets, unknowably strange artifacts of long-dead races, and sinister lifeforms. When an alien encounter meant checking first to make sure the safety was off.

A key feature to this ideal science fiction game, of course, would be that it’s rules-light. Something you and your friends could learn in an afternoon at most, and be deep into your first encounter with space vampires on the rings of Saturn before the evening news.

Believe it or not, at long last my ideal science fiction role playing game seems to have finally arrived: X-plorers, from Brave Halfling Publications. X-plorers celebrates the spirit of pulp science fiction in all the best ways, and it unapologetically embraces those things that made it great, including robots, space pirates, and aliens with tentacles.

There’s even an entry in the Sample Creatures section for Vampire Moths. You see? That’s what I’m talking about.

And yes, it’s a very quick read — about 25 pages of core rules. The chapter on Playing the Game is shorter than the Equipment chapter. These guys know how to write a rulebook.

X-Plorers was written in 2009 by David Bezio, and first published by Brave Halfing in 2011. I have no idea why I haven’t seen it before now, but I’m glad I spotted it on the New Arrivals shelf of my local game store when I did. It is 40 pages, professionally illustrated, and priced at $12.95; a PDF version is available for $5.95. Complete details at the Brave Halfling website.

The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games, Part II

The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games, Part II

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Some of the games I purchased at the Paris Fashion Week of Games. Click for bigger version.
Some of the games I purchased at the Paris Fashion Week of Games. Click for bigger version.

Last Monday I talked a little bit about the Fall Games Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, Illinois. I compared it to Paris Fashion Week because, much like a fashion show, it’s an opportunity to see everything new all in one place.

And not really in a leisurely, browsing-in-a-bookstore fashion, either. While you’re gawking at a fabulous fantasy game you never even knew existed, people all around you are bidding in a frenzy, intent on making sure you never see it again. On average, you get an 8 to 10-second glimpse at each treasure before it’s gone forever.

Unless you outbid all those other bastards, of course.

There’s a perfectly natural outcome to this mad situation. It’s known as “auction fever.” Don’t ask how I know this. (I refer you, without comment, to my March article on my last trip to Games Plus, “Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever.”)

In any event, I attended the Fall auction with much greater spousal oversight over my finances, and severely diminished resources. Still, I was able to come away with a host of treasures, and a lenghty list of exciting new science fiction and fantasy games to track down and investigate.

I’m not going to turn this into a catalog of new games I discovered over the span of five hours. For one thing, that would take a lot of pixels. Instead, I think I’ll focus on the most interesting items I brought home with me, and a few of the tantalizing ones that got away.

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New Treasures: Ashen Stars by Robin D. Laws

New Treasures: Ashen Stars by Robin D. Laws

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ashen-stars2Back in August, we reported that Pelgrane Press’s new space opera RPG Ashen Stars had won a 2012 ENnie Award for Best Setting. That was enough to pique my curiosity, and I ordered a copy.

I’ve been waiting for a science fiction role playing game with a truly rich setting for a long time. Our Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones has been exploring Traveller in a series of occasional articles — most recently on the Netherell setting and The Third Imperium — but to be honest I always found the setting for Traveller to be fairly generic, at least in the early editions. The last SF RPG to really impress me was Rogue Trader by Fantasy Flight, a gorgeously produced game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe; before that I have to go all the way back to Holistic Design’s future-medieval setting Fading Suns, first released in 1996.

I’m very pleased to be able to add Ashen Stars to that short list. Drawing heavily upon his successful GUMSHOE mystery system, author Robin D. Laws has created an extremely appealing game of space opera procedural mysteries. In the tradition of the best hard boiled detective fiction, players are constantly scrambling for money, equipment, and respect… all of which they’ll need to succeed in a war-ravaged perimeter where trust is a precious commodity, and very little is truly what it seems.

The players in Ashen Stars are private eyes — excuse me, licensed mercenaries — acting as freelance law enforcement on a rough-and-tumble frontier called “the Bleed,” where humans and half a dozen alien races mingle, compete, and trade. The Mohilar War that devastated the once powerful governing Combine ended seven years ago, and no one is sure exactly how. The Combine is in no shape to govern the Bleed, and rely on loosely-chartered bands like the players to maintain peace in the sector, keep a lid on crime, and investigate odd distress signals from strange corners of space. Like the crew of the Serenity, your loose band of players operate on both sides of the law, secure lucrative contracts, scramble to maintain your ship and upgrade your aging equipment, and maintain a code of honor in a place where reputation is the most precious commodity there is.

The writing and color art are impressive throughout, and the book is filled with fascinating tidbits that will make you anxious to play, and re-introduce you to the essential joy of role playing.

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The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games

The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games

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empires-of-the-voidSix months ago, I attended the Spring Games Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, Illinois, the premiere auction in the country for serious game collectors. Last Friday, I was checking the calendar. They occur every six months, which meant the next one was… holy cats! Saturday morning. I packed up my rental car the next morning and headed out, after making a blood oath to my wife Alice that I would be fiscally responsible this year. Or at least act within the bounds of forgiveness, I told myself.

The auction did not disappoint. The Saturday auction focuses on science fiction and fantasy board games, as well as role-playing games of all kinds. They start promptly at 10:00 am and run for the next seven hours, rattling off about ten games per minute; hundreds every hour, and thousands over the course of the day. For me, it’s the Paris Fashion Week of games — my chance to see all the latest and greatest in new games without having to leave the comfort of my metal folding chair.

Just as last time, the real wonders weren’t dusty artifacts from the early days of gaming, but a panorama of gorgeous and enticing new titles. And again, my knowledge of modern science fiction and fantasy gaming proved woefully inadequate, as time after time, games I’d never seen before made their way to the auction block.

Now, it’s dangerous to be ignorant at an auction. It’s easy to overbid on an item that looks expensive and rare, only to find Amazon has it on clearance for ten bucks. It’s even easier to drop out of the bidding when the going gets tough, confident you can find it cheaper online — only to find copies commanding outrageous prices on eBay. I’ve done both, and while most collectors agree that the greater pain is the memory of that rare item that got away, that’s because they haven’t met Alice and her corrective-therapy broomstick of agony.

So I played it safe this time. I watched a lot of marvelous games go to other bidders, jotting down the titles as they did. I gave up on a used copy of Fantasy Flight Games’ Sky Traders, a game of intrigue and trading in an era of skyships, when bidding shot past $27; it’s in stock at Amazon for $35. Same with Guards! Guards!, a fabulous-looking Discworld game from Z-Man Games, which sold for $40 (new for $57 online), and — perhaps the hardest to let go — a magnificent space combat game based on David Weber’s bestselling series, Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, which the fellow next to me bought for $40 (cheapest copy I can find online is $75). And plenty of others, including Zombietown, Dark Minions, Peregrine Games’ Prince of Chaos, and the curious Gnomes of Zavandor.

Later this week, I’ll talk about those items I did bring home, including Empires of the Void, a terrific-looking space exploration game from Red Raven Games. That post will be much more cheerful, I promise.