The Black Campbell

Define “weird”. I suspect the intent here was to angle toward discussing horror or horror-adjacent RPGs. That’s never really been my thing. I played Call of Chthulu once back in the early ’90s with an absolutely horrible GM. (As an aside, the dude was a goth Christian that wrote really bad goth Christian music.) The experience was so awful, I’ve never played CoC again, and avoided most of the White Wolf lines of the ’90s. (Which, to be honest, having hung around with some of the LARPers that played them, seemed to revolve mostly around dressing up and trying to get laid. Nothing wrong with that, mind; just not my idea of “role playing”.)

I remember buying Kult back in whenever it came out and being unimpressed with the rules. Other than that, the closest I’ve gotten to “weird” — other than being an RPG player in the first place — is probably Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. These games are meant to evoke the kids-on-bikes movies of the ’80s, but could be taken in the Stranger Things direction very easily. I ran a few sessions of TftL, but just couldn’t quite get the groove, although the players seemed to like it.

Another than might count more for the material explored in the campaign would be Alien. I love the franchise but we’ve steered away from the alien body horror for the most part and focused on corporate intrigue and the horrors of synths replacing people, genetically-engineered critters for pets — from cute anime synths to gene-spliced sabertooth tiger “pets” and worse. Instead of looking to space for the truly awful, I’ve focused more on people.

Anyway — that’s about all I’ve got for this one. What are some “weird” games I’m missing out on?

This prompt again outs my shaky geek credentials. I know there are a lot of games that have tie-in novels, comics, movies, etc. There’s stuff for Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs, but for the most part, I’m usually focused on my take on that particular property, so I don’t really tend to buy those things. That said — and this particular game keeps coming up — I did rather enjoy the run of DIE the comic, which was developed and published at the same time as the creative team were working on the RPG. The run of the comic is over, so you should be able to get a hold of these at your local comic store or via Comicology or Amazon, or whatever. I suggest the LCS — they probably are still reeling from shutting the planet down.

The comic follows the adventures of a group of friends who got together to play a mysterious new roleplaying game in the ’90s as high school students and subsequently got transported to an alternate world based on RPGs, Tolkein’s experiences in World War I, HG Wells’ fascination with wargaming, the writings of the Bronte kids, and of course, Lovecraft. (As one does…) This world is a 20-sided die, with each facet containing a world (although there’s more to it), and over two years, they existed there before finally escaping — minus the GM who was caught in this other world. They come back to their hometown 15 years later and when their friend’s blood-covered (and magic) d20 is delivered to them, they find themselves trying to decide if they should destroy it. Too late, they are pulled back into DIE, where as their characters, they must figure out what’s going on. The comic deals with the emotional and other issues of the players as they deal with a world that feeds on their emotions and actions — good, bad, or indifferent.

It’s pretty good and worth grabbing the four volumes of graphic novels.

The other obvious one is Dungeons & Dragons; Honor Among Thieves which was a surprisingly good, and just flat out fun! movie. I took my daughter to see it and about half way through realized it was the most fun I’d had at a movie in a long time. And the fat dragon — well done.

Otherwise, without that, I would have to go with one of the properties that a roleplaying game was based on — a sort of inverse tie-in — and then there are so many: Babylon 5, Alien, Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (the good one), and so on… If we’re allowing for that then the hands-down winner for me is Blade Runner. I saw the original in the theater opening night as a teen and was simply blown away by the look and feel, the moral ambiguity, and Rutger Hauer’s amazing performance. I know some purists prefer the original release, but I felt the “director’s cut” improved the movie dramatically by removing the quasi-happy ending, the listless narration, and the addition of the dream sequence that throws an awful lot into question — some of which the newer sequel dodged.

Something a lot of people seem to miss. Gaff makes origami figured to suit the personality of the replicant they are dealing with — the stick figure man for Leon, the unicorn for Deckard (if he is, indeed, a replicant)…and the chicken for Captain Bryant. For me, that one bit begs the question: how many people were actually replicants and didn’t know it? Never went off the reservation and lived out their short lives not knowing?

The Denis Villaneue sequel is excellent, and I think from a standpoint of story and pacing, character and acting, and hitting the emotional and moral elements of the original, it far surpasses the original. (But I could be full of shit.) That said, the world created by Ridley Scott was so unique at the time that it inspired a host of manga, anime, and science fiction films’ look. Ghost in the Shell and Akira owe much to Blade Runner, as do other sci-fi animes (and curiously, to two smaller films — Streets of Fire and the very strange Trouble in Mind (which has one of my all-time favorite villains, Hilly Blue, a gangster played by Divine [out of drag]).

So — tell me what I’m missing out there? Is there a tie-in I absolutely need to see/read?

This is probably unusual for most gamers, but I don’t really have a favorite set of dice. I’ll use pretty much whatever is at hand, and since I run a lot of the games using my laptop, I often just use a dice-rolling app like Dice by PCCalc on the MacBook Air. This app works well for me as you can set up strange sided dice, like d5s and d7s — which are useful if you play Lex Arcana with it’s strange dice mechanic. It allows for Fate dice, as well.

However, there is a new trend in games of having bits and bobs to go along with it — especially stuff on Kickstarter where stretch goals usually include some form of card deck and dice. Of those specialty dice, the ones from Broken Compass were pretty neat — with faces reading N, W, E, S, and a compass face. You don’t really need numbers in a game of (essentially) Yahtze, where you are looking for matches. The red and black ones from DIE are neat in that the highest face has a graphic representation of the type of die you’re using. The facehugger dice for Alien were cool, and helped craft a mood — but necessary? Not so much. I particularly liked the specialty dice for Avatar Legends, which have the sigils of the various elements on the 6 face.

Are any of these necessary? No — but they are fun and help set the mood.

Does chess or Parcheesi or Go count? Probably not.

The oldest RPG I’ve played was pretty new at the time — the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. The one where you didn’t even have die, but had to cut out chits and shake them in a cup. The rules were fairly simple, especially compared to the encyclopedias you need now just to know all the bits your characters do.

The oldest game we still play is Space: 1889, although I’m running the old setting with the new, lite Broken Compass rules. The oldest rules set we used up until about 2010 was the James Bond:007 RPG. It’s still worth a look.

Well, a lot of the stuff that has come in recently was Kickstarter between last year and the end of 2020, so the RPG bought this year was Mödiphiüs’ Star Trek Adventures, reviewed here. I had run a Star Trek game a few years ago, but I used the old Decipher system that had powered our long-running campaign of the early aughties. (A friend was a Trekkie, Enterprise was showing, I figured why not?)

Fast forward to this year. One of the other players has been running Fallout for us (review here) and the 2d20 system that had been so damned awful in playtesting years ago, was much better laid out and explained than when we were trying to struggle through the unedited playtest material for John Carter. I had popped for the PDF of the game a few years back never intending to play it, but maybe mine it for ideas at some point. After playing in Fallout, I had a pretty good sense of how the system worked, and what rules were a bit to wargame-y and would get conveniently ignored in a Trek game.

So I bought the Corebook bundle (comes with the PDFs for pretty much all the books expect Lower Decks and the Klingon supplement), a GM screen (which comes with an excellent set of starship combat sheets to aid players in what they can do when the photons start flying), and the Discovery-period sourcebook (more for the Strange New Worlds ties.) The goal is a “season 2” of the campaign we played a while back, using the 2d20 engine.

This post will also cover the Most Recent Game Bought post for tomorrow.

This was long enough ago I honestly don’t quite remember. I’ve been playing — starting with the box set of Dungeons & Dragons I got from Hess’ department store in…’78? ’79? maybe? Long enough that it was “dungeon master”, not gamemaster. I know it took a long time to find someone who wanted to play. There was a distant cousin I wound up running the game for, and there was an older guy who was running D&D at the local library, but I don’t remember his name, but I remember he didn’t make it very exciting; it was very rules oriented.

Once I had an actually group of friends playing by 1980, we played a lot — and I was usually the GM’d. We cycled through a lot of games — all the TSR offerings, then hit on James Bond:007, which was my favorite system until about a decade ago. It’s still damned good.

In college, others would take over running games, but they usually would last a few episodes then hand it off to me because they were busy or just didn’t have the time.

The only one that really sticks is the redheaded giant dude, totally spectrum, who ran Dungeons & Dragons for the group for about most of a session before we started working on peeling out the good gamers for our own group. This guy was stunningly misogynistic — after going through his 80 page bible on his game world, he gave us our characters, making sure the singular female got the cleric…who was mute. Better yet, he made sure his wife was getting us drinks and food. He had played once at our place and while stretching, he knocked the glass light cover off the kitchen ceiling. Shatter. Did he offer to clean up? Nope — he expected my then-wife to.

Then there was the goth Christian who ran Call of Chthulu — more on him later…