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Viking Gods: Big battles on a small scale

Viking Gods: Big battles on a small scale

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In many ways the early 1980s were the heyday of classic microgames, also called minigames, with the popularity of such games as Car Wars and Revolt on Antares, but those were far from the only games available. For instance, TSR Inc. made its fair share of microgames, including Viking Gods.

Published in 1982, Viking Gods allowed players to take part in the battle to end all battles, Ragnarok. A game for two players, one player took the side of the Forces of Chaos while the other player was in control of the Gods of Asgard. Each side in the battle had a mission. The job of the Forces of Chaos was to storm across the Rainbow Bridge and destroy Yggdrasil, the sacred tree. The side of the gods had the job of either killing Loki or destroying his army while defending the tree.

A somewhat simple war game, Viking Gods still packed lots of combat. All you needed were the included map, the game pieces, and a pair of six-sided dice. When it was their turn, players were allowed to move their cardboard pieces two spaces across a map until they came up against enemy forces. Then combat could begin. Using the combat chart at the bottom of the map, the dice were rolled to determine the outcome of battle. Depending upon that outcome, forces could be pushed back a space or they could be defeated, wiped out. Another option was the battle could lead to a draw.

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Against the Darkmaster Brings Me Home

Against the Darkmaster Brings Me Home

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My nostalgic roleplaying game (rpg) is Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP). That’s not a good one to bring to a table of what I term “casual” gamers. Casual gamers are the kinds who say, “Tell me what dice to roll?” MERP requires a level of energy and investment that leaks away while the GM performs all the calculations and looks up all the results on various tables. As one of my gamers tellingly noted, a few years ago when I was struggling to run it for a passive group, “Gabe’s apparently playing his own private game over there as we sit here waiting patiently for results.”

I’m not blaming the game, of course. This is the unavoidable result of this kind of game coupled with certain players. But I didn’t give up on this game until the player characters (PCs) randomly encountered a Wyvern. “Oh, man,” I chuckled, “this is going to be dangerous for you guys.” Well, it wasn’t. A lucky first hit Stunned my monster. Whether the effect lasted for one Round or eight really didn’t matter, because those PCs circled it and protracted that effect by wailing on it, as if they were those guys in Office Space, surrounding and battering at an office copier.

This is what we call being stun-locked, a known “problem” in Rolemaster systems. When it happened in my MERP group, I told my players, “I don’t think I want to play this anymore.”

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Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign: Part III

Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign: Part III

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The Black Madonna (GDW, 1985), part V of The Polish Campaign for Twilight: 2000

This is Part III of a detailed review of The Polish Campaign, a 6-part adventure sequence published by GDW in 1985 for their Twilight 2000 role playing game. The campaign covers Escape from Kalisz, The Free City of Krakow, Pirates of the Vistula, The Ruins of Warsaw, The Black Madonna, and Going Home. Part I, which looks at The Free City of Krakow and touches upon Escape from Kalisz, is here. Part II, which looks at Pirates of the Vistula and The Ruins of Warsaw, is here.

Twilight: 2000’s Polish campaign is iconic in the world of RPGs for providing supplements and adventures that fit its sandbox emphasis. Many RPGs rely on set adventures with expected scenes and outcomes, and many game masters (GMs) use those preset stories. While this is all well and good (nothing wrong with it), most GM plans do not survive contact with the players.

Sandbox games flip the script. What do the players want to do? The GM then reacts to this, often relying on random encounter tables. However, pure sandbox play can pose problems around ongoing interest. Humans like stories because they have beginnings, middles, and endings. The Polish campaign proved extraordinarily successful at negotiating the balance. The books are not pure adventure nor pure sourcebook.

The Black Madonna is, perhaps, the most famous supplement. So popular is it that Free League added a revision by the original author, Frank Frey, as a Kickstarter digital stretch goal for their forthcoming edition of Twilight: 2000. It is interestingly within the campaign the one that seems “out of sequence.” The previous supplements, Pirates of the Vistula and The Ruins of Warsaw, provided numerous incentives to the players to make their way from Krakow to Warsaw. The Black Madonna’s primary area of operations is northwest of Krakow and in Silesia.

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Video game history: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivison

Video game history: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivison

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To those of us old enough to remember, there is little doubt the king of home video game consoles in the early 1980s was the Atari 2600. However, Atari had stiff competition from Mattel Electronics in the form of the Intellivision. First released to the public in 1979, the Intellivison console was perhaps ahead of its time. The Intellivision didn’t even have a proper joystick, something almost unheard of at the time, but came with controllers that used a directional pad and a numeral keyboard. Also, the Intellivision had far superior graphics to any other consoles available when it first hit stores, and it was the first home system to utilize a 16-bit processor.

More importantly, however, was the fact the Intellivision had some darn good games. One of those games was titled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Mattel had received a license to make AD&D video games from TSR Inc., then the owners of all things D&D, and Mattel wasted little time in bringing such games to the public. The first console game, of course, was titled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which would be renamed a year later to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain when a sequel game was released.

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Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign, Part II

Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign, Part II

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Pirates of the Vistula (GDW, 1985), part 3 of The Polish Campaign for Twilight: 2000

This is Part II of a detailed review of The Polish Campaign, a 6-part adventure sequence published by GDW in 1985 for their Twilight 2000 role playing game. The campaign covers Escape from Kalisz, The Free City of Krakow, Pirates of the Vistula, The Ruins of Warsaw, The Black Madonna, and Going Home. Part I, which looks at The Free City of Krakow and touches upon Escape from Kalisz, is here.

As I re-read Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign, the set of adventure supplements that take place in the immediate aftermath of what starts the players on their adventures in the desolated landscape of World War III and Poland, I’m struck by how much world-building and detail the writers put into the world. For the Polish campaign is a rich sandbox for players and game masters (GM) to play around in. Encounters, towns, villages, NPCs, and mysteries galore fill the pages of Pirates of Vistula and The Ruins of Warsaw, parts 3 and 4 of the Polish Campaign.

The players, surviving US soldiers of the US 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, will have fought their way to safety, escaping the Soviet armies that crushed them. If they made their way from Kalisz to Krakow in the core rulebook’s opening scenario, Escape from Kalisz, they probably found some respite and have managed to resupply to a degree. They may have even made some friends. The overall, presumed player motive in Twilight: 2000 is that they want to return home, that Poland is but a stop over. Now, this could change, and it may not even be the case initially depending on the players. Nonetheless, the players need to find a way to survive in this aftermath of a world collapsing from the creeping nuclear holocaust. 

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Early Competition for D&D: DragonQuest

Early Competition for D&D: DragonQuest

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Throughout the 1970s and very early 1980s, Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) was a company known for its board war games. Then in 1980 it took a stab at the growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons and other popular tabletop role-playing games. SPI came up with a different style of fantasy RPG known as DragonQuest (DQ), published in a boxed set with multiple books.

Eventually there would be three versions of DQ. SPI published a second edition in 1982 in a single book, but soon after the company was purchased by TSR, the developers of D&D. Eventually in 1989 TSR would produce the final, third edition of DQ, this one also in a single book, but since then they have done next to nothing with the property though they did release a few gaming modules for the system. Fortunately a few other companies also released DQ-related material and to this day there is a somewhat active DQ community online. As for the three versions of the game, they are pretty much compatible with few differences between them, especially between the second and third editions.

Created by Eric Goldberg, later known for his role in the publication of the tabletop RPG Paranoia and numerous other games both at the table and online, DragonQuest separated itself from D&D and its imitators by not focusing so much upon a class system for character creation and advancement. Instead, characters in DQ were mostly based upon growth in skill rankings.

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Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign, Part I

Twilight: 2000‘s Polish Campaign, Part I

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Twilight: 2000 takes place in the aftermath of a limited tactical nuclear war during World War III. While the inciting event is over (the use of nuclear weapons), the world is still very much in collapse, so the players are engaged in a game of survival. They are what is left of the US 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, crushed by two Soviet divisions in Poland in the spring of 2000.

The game is one of the few true sandbox games that I have ever encountered. While my Traveller games often had sandbox elements, they were still typically guided by a grand narrative. Twilight: 2000 forgoes even that, for the most part. Casting the players in the roll of trying to make their way in the world. The operating presumption is that they want to return home — aka, the United States. 

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Video Game to Film – A Reason to Hope

Video Game to Film – A Reason to Hope

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Good morning, Readers!

I was recently quite ill, and while under basically house arrest, stuck in my room with neither the ability or the will to go anywhere else, I came across a trailer for the new Mortal Kombat movie that piqued my interest. At the end of the trailer, I literally scream-laughed. Needless to say, I’m going to see this movie for, and only for, Kano, who was so quintessentially Aussie it could not help but make me roar with delight.

Here’s the trailer, for those who are curious.

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Start Your Engines… for Car Wars

Start Your Engines… for Car Wars

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the old TSR minigame Revolt on Antares, and that got me thinking about other microgames which were popular back in ye olden days, and that brought to mind one of my favorites, Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games, published in 1981, a vehicle combat game.

If you ever wanted to take part in the fast-driving, hard-hitting action of the Mad Max universe where guns and cars ruled the roads, and the plains and the deserts and the … etc., then you would do well to buckle in and pick up one of the versions of Car Wars which has been made available over the years.

But my first love was the original Car Wars which came in a small, black plastic box, though there were copies of the game which came in just a plastic bag (but who would want that when you could get your hands on a cool plastic pocket box, as they were called?).

The action came in various scenarios from arena battles to highway combat against marauders and the like, and that original pocket box included everything needed to get you on the road to war. Included were the six-sided dice needed for the game, a rules book, maps, vehicle sheets, and cardboard counter pieces of vehicles, road hazards, and more.

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Tales of an Indie Game Designer — After: The Machines

Tales of an Indie Game Designer — After: The Machines

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One day a few years ago, my brother casually mentioned how he thought it would be fun to create our own RPG game. After a bit of conversation, I understood this was not an off the cuff remark and found myself excited about the prospect. We had a number of conversations about it. Would we use an existing rule set or setting that allowed others to write content into, or would we create our very own?

We decided to build our own. Neither of us had built a game from scratch, but we have played a lot over the years. I had also house-ruled any number of decisions. For those that do not know, house-ruling in RPGs is when the game master (GM) determines a rule on the fly or establishes a rule for their game that either contravenes or is not covered by the rules themself. This is a common activity for GMs because RPGs cannot cover every single thing a player may want to do.

My brother and I bounced a few ideas around, particularly setting. What kind of game did we want? Without knowing it, we stumbled our way through answering a number of questions in the Power 19. In the early 2000s, among the indie RPG movement, a number of names in that space interacted on The Forge. Folks in the indie RPG game community — for example, Ron Edwards the creator of Sorcerer — discussed game design.

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