Weekend in the Realms

I hosted a game for Weekend in the Realms at a local games shop, a couple of weekends ago. A good time, but lower attended than other "Weekend in..." RPGA sanctioned games I've run in a long time. Could have been a bunch of factors.

How was the game? A good time. Josh, Martin, Mouton and Susana from the usual crowd at Time Warp Comics showed up to play. We ran the recommended "The Icy Queen's Crossing" adventure that the RPGA sent to shops with some cool glossy color character sheets. All told, the adventure was neat, but I have two qualms with it, similar to issues I saw with larger release Living Greyhawk games over the years.

1) Tying in the marketing of other products is fine, and something I think the RPGA should do to help grow the hobby, but maybe tying these events to a date a couple of weeks after the release might help with making the brand new products more usable for the game itself, rather than just a direct tie in. I recall this happening with the Bright Sands arc for Living Greyhawk tying into the Sandstorm book and nobody having really had enough time to get the book and get used to it before the games started. (That may just be misperception, but that's the way I recall it.) In this case, "The Icy Queen's Crossing" was a tie in to The Fall of Highwatch a new Forgotten Realms novel by Mark Sehestedt, which came out only days before the Weekend in the Realms. If the adventure was a prequel, that would have been fine, but according to the intro the adventure actually took place after the events of the novel. Haven't read it yet, but I've got to wonder about the spoilers or if waiting a few weeks would have been a better tie in. Read the book? You'll love the game!

2) Part of why I think the Living campaigns over the years had such legs was that they afforded players the opportunity to have organized play, and the actions of those games were reported back to a central repository and in some cases that affected the course of future campaign arcs. This was done very effectively with Living Greyhawk, for one. I do, however, have some disappointment that due to the Region system for RPGA over the years and due to wanting to hold back what I assume must by WotC's intellectual property for more formal releases that few of the Core adventures ever let you really play in the sandbox with your favorite characters from the books. Would it be so terrible if Drizz't or Elminster from the Forgotten Realms books made an appearance in a special Core adventure? I think it'd be a great touchstone, and perhaps ramp up some interest. Maybe there's even an NPC or two in this adventure that played a large part in the Highwatch novel - when I get a chance to read it, I'll find out. But adding in some of the power players from the novels as window dressing would be a nice touch.

All told, the adventure itself was a good solid 4E afternoon game - a new monster, a cool villain, and a couple of twists to roleplay through. If you didn't get to play it at the Weekend event, try to find a DM or store who got a copy. Despite my philosophical flaws about release dates, etc., above, it was still a hella fun game.

Halloween Call of Cthulhu Parts I & II

Halloween Call of Cthulhu Parts I & II

So, last weekend, DJ Lance Rock, Chef Boyardee, John Wilkes Booth and one of the experts on the Cottingley Faeries gathered to play Call of Cthulhu. (Our wives, a Poodle Skirt Dancer, a Faerie, and my lovely wife, who was taking this picture who was dressed as a Flapper, suffered us gladly.)

I cracked out one of my favorite of the more recent Cthulhu tomes, Secrets of New York. As all of the players grew up in the suburbs of New York City or the city itself, it was fun to see our stomping grounds through the eyes of 1920s Lovecraftian horror. (ooo scary) BRP/CoC is one of our favorite systems to play, and although we only get to play it a few times of year, it was like putting on an old pair of sneakers (albeit ones that are creepy and can summon a demon from beyond the abyss).

Stephan (Expert on Faeries, above) created the characters (thanks, man!) and he played a mystic. Josh (Chef Boyardee) played a young man from Spanish Harlem who was taking classes at Columbia. Mark (John Wilkes Booth) played a street urchin with the voice of a wise-cracking New Yawk kid from a Depression era radio serial ("Aw, jeez..." was muttered frequently...). I GMed the game and NPCed a Columbia professor and a jazz trumpet player.

We played the "Transgression" scenario out of Secrets of New York, which was a lot better than I thought it might be! The source book itself is fantastic, but the scenarios seemed to fall a little flat when I originally read them when the book came out, but the story of a Columbia professor gone mad and about to open a gate to the beyond came across less hackneyed than I thought it might, especially with the fine roleplaying of the party. The image of baseballs appearing mysteriously in apartments all over the city somehow being connected to a horrifying end-of-the-world scenario worked a lot better than I thought it would! The background of NY for Cthulhu also provides a very rich framework to jump into, which is something else that I was surprised at. With so few Lovecraftian and Mythos tales taking place in New York, I wasn't sure if it would seem forced, but the folks at Chaosium - like always - created a very deep campaign to leverage. Great stuff!

The day after Halloween, I got to do it all over again at Time Warp Comics in Joisey. While the Jets game played in the background, we played "Masks of Halloween" by Oscar Rios (see earlier post for background on that scenario and the "Halloween Horror Returns!" product). Josh, Susana, Martin and I played through the Masks scenario, with Josh playing his character from the previous night, Susana playing the Columbia professor, Martin playing a charlatan mystic, and me NPCing a gentleman's boxer. The Chaosium line of monographs have some excellent stuff in them, and this scenario (a haunted farm stand where Nyarlathotep is trying to bring about as much mayhem as he can) was well worth running in your own campaign, or as a Halloween one shot.

Stay tuned for more ghoulishness as winter - and in turn gaming season - progress!

D&D Forgotten Realms at the Shop

Just wanted to include a snapshot from the most recent D&D 4th Edition Forgotten Realms game at the shop. That's Greg, Josh, Martin and Susana and their figures around the battlemat. Huzzah! Good times at Time Warp Comics.

Prepping for Call of Cthulhu Halloween Game

On Halloween itself and then on Sunday November 1st, I'll have the opportunity to run two games of Call of Cthulhu with a Halloween theme. Thankfully, Chaosium has published a number of collections of one-shot Halloween scenarios, including "Halloween Horror Returns!" which is my personal favorite. The scenario "Masks of Halloween" is what I'll likely run for both sessions, giving the players the ability to explore the seemingly mundane (Halloween hay rides, etc.) with lots of great Mythos madness lying just beneath the surface...

In the past, I've run one-shots from Blood Brothers, Mansions of Madness, and even a D&D campaign build around Heroes of Horror. (Thanks for derailing that so well, Mark. Thanks...)

What will you do for Halloween, this year? Any cool gaming stuff planned?

Found two D&D Templates on Google Docs

Check this!

http://docs.google.com/templates?hl=en&q=dungeons

At the time of this posting, there were two Google Docs templates for D&D, including one to organize your thoughts for an encounter, but another that was a 4E Character template. Suh-wheet!

Forgotten Realms in the 4th Edition of D&D

So, I understand why WotC is focusing more on building a Campaign Guide and a Player's Guide for the worlds they'll support, with minimal modules and additional setting books. (A completist at heart, even I gave up on owning all the FR materials during the mad rush of 3.5E D&D.) But, that said, I do somewhat miss the support materials to expand upon what's in the campaign settings. Is the 4 pages of content about Cormyr from the Campaign Guide going to be all that the largest of the Realms' kingdoms will get during 4th Edition? (with the exception of D&D Insider articles, that is) I'm having fun taking advantage of this void of information by digging back into my archives, even into the Volo's Guides. If you never read the Volo's Guides, think "Let's Go Forgotten Realms" or a Zagat's guide - starred reviews of the inns and locales of the Forgotten Realms, written by the Realms' most notorious bard/vagabond, with lots of plot hooks inserted here and there (as well as "corrections" from the ever accurate Elminster the wizard...)

What campaign support materials do you use when prepping a campaign?

Auditing the Dungeon Master's Guides

I'm getting back into the DM's seat for Dungeons & Dragons after almost a year hiatus. (I've spent my time playing D&D, and running Runequest and other games over the past many months, and will continue to do so. Halloween Cthulhu is just around the corner!) I'll be running 4th Edition D&D at my friends' comic book shop for regularly scheduled games, with Forgotten Realms as the campaign setting (the setting I've been running in pretty regularly for about 20 years, with the occasional side trek to Ravenloft, Greyhawk or Eberron).

In prep for the games, I've been scouring my years and years worth of Forgotten Realms supplements for adventure hooks, encounter sites, plots and NPCs. In my humble opinion, the Realms run best as a sandbox, rather than something where the players are led by the nose into a large metaplot. (I'm still trying to understand how TSR thought having the Horde or the Times of Troubles as playable encounters in the 90s was a wise idea... Unless the PCs are driving the action, having them suckered into large campaigns as bystanders - soldiers in the army, instead of instigators - can make for a difficult scenario to DM...) So, to create the best Realms sandbox that I can, I've been leaning on a lot of the campaign resources, but also on decades' worth of Dungeon Master's Guides. It's kind of wild to see how this product has evolved over the years.

• The First Edition DM's Guide, of which I do not have the fancy one pictured above, but instead the yellow spined edition that had some revisions to it, was a stream of consciousness walk through gaming philosophy, tables of random items and dungeons, and much much more. Not a practical guide by any stretch (not even its champions, myself included, would claim that) it was instead basically a brain dump by Gary Gygax of how gaming ideally works. Much fun is the random dungeon generator for solo play, as well as the artifcats that are still finding themselves used in games today.
• The Second Edition DM's Guide was the weakest of the bunch. Neutering D&D to make it "adventure without danger" in reaction to a lot of the pressures of the 80s about the evils of roleplaying games (I'm using fairly broad strokes here - there were a lot of other factors to the revision), 2nd Edition started the trend of making the DMs guide slimmer than the Player's Handbook. Put the rules in the PHB, put the philosophy and commentary in the DMG. But, sadly, there was little of that in the 2nd edition guide, focusing more on magic items, etc.
• The 3.5E DM's Guide (I don't have the 3e one), took a step back to offering more in the way of guidance, including a chart of 100 plot hooks that I still use, lots of advice about running games and creating adventures, as well as tons of info about how to DM. I think it may be the best of the WotC/TSR DM's guides.
• The 3.5E Dungeon Master's Guide II, which I couldn't lay my hands on in the past few days - must be in a box somewhere, was a fantastic resource. Taking the 1E village of Saltmarsh and expanding it, building plot hooks for months of adventures, and statting out so much of it was tremendous. Perhaps even better was the advice on how to make a world living and breathing, including how to build out official factions. Now was this likely in reaction to what was happening in the video game world with factions as a way to relate to a game world? (See Oblivion, WoW, etc.) Likely yes, but the way to enact it for a tabletop RPG as well done, and made it something I started trying to do more and more of with the Ptolus campaign I was running when I purchased this book.
  
• Not an official TSR/WotC product, but noteworthy nonetheless was Green Ronin's Advanced Gamesmaster's Guide. (Full disclosure - I playtested this for Green Ronin, and felt right from the start that it was going to be a fantastic product.) There was more keen advice in here than in any other product I'd seen to that point about how to be a good DM. Not just the stuff about "here's how to prep a published adventure," but stuff about roles in the playing group and how to address particular needs that different player types might have, how to craft scenarios to different play styles, and lots of great ideas for NPC behavior, plot hooks, and more. Great, great stuff.
• Lastly, the 4th Edition DM's Guide. Now, I've been kind of hard on 4e. I still feel like the overall focus of making a game that is more relevant to the World of Warcraft gang (of which I'm happy to be an on-again-off-again member) takes away from the fun of "play" that previous editions had. ("Do you want to be a wizard or a fighter?" has been replaced with "Do you want to be a controller or the tank?" as I've stated before.) That said, the DM's guide does a good job in going over the mechanics of being a good DM - how to build good encounters, how to build quests, etc. I feel the overall system itself is too focused on the mechanics of 10 encounters are needed to level, and here's what should be in those encounters, and that sort of metagaming, but the result is what you make of it. I'm going to work hard to make a 4E sandbox where it's about the characters, not the stats and artillery roles. The way the book closes, with the introduction of the town of Fallcrest as an adventure starting point, does a good job to show what the game can be, and I hope more and more DMs embrace that.

I'm looking forward to a very role heavy version of roleplaying through the Forgotten Realms, in my new campaign. (No munchkins allowed, folks!) I'm also looking forward to the 4th Edition DMG II that is due out, focusing on running campaigns for characters levels 11-20. Bring it on WotC! I got some dice and am ready to game!

Runefang by C.L. Werner (Warhammer Fantasy Fiction)

While flying to and from England, last month, I read C.L. Werner's Runefang, one of the Warhammer Fantasy titles published by Black Library. My exposure to Warhammer Fantasy has been a long one, dating back to the table top game that I started playing - er well, at least painting minis for - in the early 90s, and into my introduction to the Fantasy RPG through my friend Travis in the earlier part of this decade. I've read all of the Gotrek and Felix novels, as well as some of the lower profile titles released over the past few years. Runefang was a well done addition to the canon, being a title that expanded upon the world of Warhammer. Gorbad Ironclaw, Gordreg Throatripper and Uhrghul Skullcracker, two of the game's orc legends, were introduced as characters in the novel, marauding orcs who led hordes across the world. In the midst of the maelstrom of these orc invasions (spread across several generations) were attempts to wield a magical sword called the Runefang to defeat the tide of monsters descending upon civilization, albeit a dark and hopeless civilization, unlike the shinier safer worlds of many other mainstream fantasy series like Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms and others.

The world of Warhammer is not a place where tidy and charming wizards pop up at the last minute to save the day - I actually lost count of the number of primary and secondary characters that died during Runefang. That, I think, is the key piece about Warhammer Fantasy, and what works and doesn't work for it as a shared world of fiction. The world itself is immense and much more like the "points of light" idea that Wizards of the Coast is trying with the Forgotten Realms now - the idea that society in between the outposts of civilization in a fantasy world is a harsh, cruel place without much amenities or even safety. Werner did a great job with painting that image in Runefang, wherein a Dirty Dozen style motley crew of characters are sent on this suicide mission to retrieve this magical sword from a long lost outpost across the barony where the story unfolds. There are bandits, orc tribes, rival factions in the court who would not like to see the (anti-heroes) succeed, and more. But Werner balances this with some hope and some heroism, which is more than I can say for what some of the other Warhammer titles are able to carry out. Particularly Elfslayer, the latest in the Gotrek and Felix series, and the other dark elf titles, seem to border on exploitation rather than "dark fantasy". Knowing that a village was razed by vicious marauders should be enough for the readership of the novels, without details of the torture and pillage. I know there's a market for very dark fantasy, but I do have some concern that the readership of novels based on a tabletop game played by young people may not be the place for exploring this territory. (Wow, never thought I'd sound like an old fogey like this.)

Warhammer titles that I thought did a good job of expanding upon the Warhammer world in a fashion that I thought lent more to the overall "shared world" include:

• All of the William King Gotrek & Felix titles, as well as the first couple by Nathan Long (Orcslayer and Manslayer)
• Fell Cargo by Dan Abnett
• The Adventures of Florin and Lorenzo by Robert Earl
• The Enemy Within by Richard Lee Byers
• Mark of Chaos by Anthony Reynolds

Weigh in below on the comments thread if you have thoughts about any of the other Warhammer Fantasy books.

John Madden DM (with thanks to RPG Blog II)

Saw the below over on RPG Blog II, and couldn't resist sharing it via my own pages as well... Tis the time of year to enjoy football, role playing games and other indoor pursuits. (well, I guess football takes place outdoors, but I like to watch it from the comfort of my couch...)

The passing of my father

My father, the man who raised me, taught me, and introduced me to so many wonderful things - hiking, philosophy, poetry, gaming, carving, and painting, amongst many other vocations - passed away. Such times as these when I've lost a close friend and cherished mentor, before, have caused me to think of e.e. cummings' poem 'Buffalo Bill'...

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death