The Black Campbell

Over forty years of gaming (man, I’m old), there’s too many to count, so I’ll go with the most recent one that sticks in the mind. This was the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’d run since the 1980s, back in 2016-17. The setting was an alternate Roman Empire with low magic, monsters being either rare or stand ins for the various tribes (hobgoblins for Vandals, for instance). The characters had been traveling for a while and had come across a village that had been wrecked by a troll, and who was still sorting through the loot when they came upon him.

The characters leapt into action and proceeded to start getting their butts kicked by the creature, who was incensed that they were coming to steal his things, and that “stealing was wrong”. The monk character, suddenly inspired by the troll’s focus on the injustice of them coming to steal from him and attack him when he hadn’t hurt them, he started to try and preach to the troll. He apologized for their actions and in the end converted the troll to what would later be a half-assed, barely understood collection of folk ideas, bits of Bible, etc.

They escaped with their lives.

In a later, follow-up campaign set in Arthurian, end of Roman Britain, the new characters ran across the troll — twenty years later, running a parish in the Cotswolds and shaking down travelers using the bridge next to his church for alms while protecting/terrifying the life out of the locals as their priest. It was a last minute, unexpected callback that the group loved. His understanding of the Scriptures hadn’t improved at all.

Ooo — good one! Easy one for me: I’d like a second edition of the Alien RPG using the Blade Runner/Twilight:2000 die mechanics. The die pool of d6s for Alien, while simple, seems to weirdly, not lead to the number of successes it statistically should. We had a mathematician playing in the game for a while and even he noted the frequency with which we didn’t get successes, but should have. The BR version of the game uses different dice for attributes and skills — d6 through d12, as you get better and get a 6 on at least one to get a success. Every 6+ is a success, and over 10 is an extra success. We’re finding it works better, and there’s something tactile to rolling different types of dice that gamers just seem to like.

We’ve all got ’em. That game you bought that looked cool, or was a licensed franchise you like on TV or whatever, or you used to play and just don’t anymore, or everyone just wants to play D&D… The orphan taking up room on your shelf that you’re not going to play, but keep because — just maybe — one day it’ll happen.

I’ve got a bunch of these. Sometimes I buy them to steal ideas, or the art s pretty to look at, or I liked other products with the same mechanics –either way, there’s a host of these things sitting waiting to entertain my gaming group (or not…they might suck.)

Some are new and we just haven’t gotten to it. The obvious one here is The One Ring — the new Free League version. I bought it because the wife is a Tolkein nut but we just haven’t gotten to it. There’s settings for D&D: Odyssey of the Dragonlords, or Age of Antiquity — a Rome-based campaign that, had it published on time, would have been useful when I was running a Rome-based D&D game. There’s Forbidden Lands, another Free League game. I bought it to possibly play a more realistic and brutal version of D&D. Blacksad is still waiting for its test run. I never got a chance to run Firefly, and honestly, I bought it to have material for the original MWP Serenity game; I do not like the Fate-ified version of Cortex that has been their go-to since the Leverage game came out. There’s the perennial outcast — Jovian Chronicles, a rich and interesting anime-inspired hard sci-fi setting. The mechanics are awful. Similarly, I was really pumped for Altered Carbon. I liked the show (haven’t read the books) and the initial art, etc. looked promising. It’s a hot mess — mostly due to it’s use of symbols for everything that makes the rule book all but unreadable. There’s Capers — a superheroes meets Prohibition America. Look interesting; haven’t gotten to it yet. Another old one — Aces & Eights, a Western RPG that has some weird mechanics to it. There’s a host of interesting material that I’ve stolen for other Victorian-period games, but the game itself looks like a hot mess. But again — fantastic background material.

So what have you got on the shelf you haven’t played and why?

I have increasingly liked rule lite systems. I used to like not so much complexity, but a more simulationist approach to combat and equipment and the like — an artifact of playing the excellent James Bond:007 game for too long. But as early as Star Wars by West End Games, I liked seeing simple mechanics that could aid in character development and roleplaying over roll-playing.

The endpoint of the “easy to play and run” search was Broken Compass by the game company called (at the time) Two Little Mice. The characters have six attributes like Action or Wild or Knowledge with three skills under them. Depending on the number of pips in the two, that’s the number of six-sided dice you roll. It doesn’t matter if they’re typically or have funny symbols — the BC dice had N, W, E, S, a compass, and another symbol — so long as they all match. The goal, like Yahtzee, get as many matches as you can. Difficulty steps required you to get more matches: a pair for a basic success, three of a kind for a critical, and so on. Aid from others, environmental effects, equipment provided a die of advantage or took away a die for disadvantage. Simple. It’s the engine, I believe for their Household game and a modified version looks to power Outgunned! which just finished its Kickstarter at the time of this writing. You can find it here.

On the complex side — that’s easy. Anything 2d20 by Mödiphiüs. We’ve been playing Fallout, with another of the game group running, and I’m planning on running Star Trek Adventures, now that I’ve got a handle on the mechanics. The basic mechanic is simple, but still more complicated that it needs to be: roll 2d20, get under the number that your attribute and skill combined gives you, and get an extra success when under your skill. However, there are disadvantages and advantages to gain and lose dice, there’s two different game currencies — momentum (also called threat when the GM has it…ust to be confusing) and determination. Spend these game currencies to get extra dice on one hand, or extra damage dice on the other, among things you can do with them. I find the two game currencies — the equivalent of “luck/story/plot/whatever points” in other games, to be overly fiddly and confusing, but for the most part it’s a serviceable system. They do manage to do space combat without needing a completely different set of mechanics like some space games, and its set up in such a way that it emulates the “we need more power” schtick of the show, while giving everybody on the bridge something to do.

Honorable mention for complex mechanics goes to Lex Arcana, an excellent game that feels very old school. The character creation gets a bit fiddly, and the die mechanic is a simple roll dice and get over a target number…except you take the number of whatever you’re using — say, de Bello [war] to fight. If you have a de Bello of 15, you can break that number into up to three dice — say 3d5, or a d10 and d5, or a single die if the number were appropriate. It has a steeper learning curve for that reason, although some of the gaming group figured their best spreads and just jotted those down on their character sheets. It’s weird, but once you’re used to it, it works alright. Mathematically, using three dice is more likely to ensure a success, but it’s an exploding die system; get the maximum on all the dice and you roll again and add — that allows a player to roll one die, if they can, and that raises the chance of an exploding die.

This is a tough one. Between multi-million dollar Kickstarters, good desktop publishing software, and real money behind some of the bigger production companies (Wizards of the Coast, of course, has Hasbro in their corner, there’s Mödiphiüs, Free League…) the production values of RPG books and extras has really improved. There are some staggeringly beautiful books put out by all the big names. Most of 5th edition D&D books are well-laid out, well bound on good quality paper, and the artwork is top notch. Free League really hit their stride with Alien and Blade Runner, although the art style has been getting a bit stale for me. Kickstarters like Blacksad — based on the anthropomorphic noir comic books (trust me, they’re good!) has stellar artwork, a well designed GM screen (a rarity in the past) and had cute dice with the character face on them. Modiphius does specialty dice for bloody everything — ’cause up yours! buy our stuff! Magpie Games knocked it out of the park with their Avatar Legends Kickstarter. The paper quality, binding, artwork, card design (and the card box! superb card stock), a cloth map from the show, a little Pi Sho tile, die with the element symbols on them and the dice bag… Magpie deserves a huge bunch of kudos for their work on this game and everything connected to it. The Altered Carbon RPG was similarly beautiful to look at, but not so much to read thanks to the impenetrable use of weird symbols for f#$@ing everything. Everything Lex Arcana is beautiful.

So if i had to go with the coolest RPG related thing (for me) lately, I’d go with the dice and dice bag combo from the Avatar Legends game. They look cool with the color appropriate die with the symbols for the elements on the highest number face. They have a nice feel, too; I really noticed the quality of the dice when handling them. It’s a shame the GM doesn’t really get to roll in the game.

I think my honorable mention would go the the excellent Herbalist’s Primer by Exalted Funeral, “a system-agnostic illustrated guide to real-world magical plants. Inspired by the 19th-century herbalists and the millennia of folklore, myths, and legends, it brings a wealth of easily-accessible, organized information straight to your gaming table.” The artwork on the plants, the real-world use of the same, plus the fantasy game uses — it’s an excellent addition for the druid/cleric/whatever in your party to work from. It did well enough there’s a Geologist’s Primer Kickstarter that finished up last month and might still be available for pre-order.

At first, I thought this was a really weird prompt, but thinking on it — there’s a lot of older games out there that we wish weren’t gone. And to paraphrase Dr. McCoy, “they’re not really dead so long as we’re still playing them…” So the best second-hand purchase is probably the basic rulebook and GM box set for James Bond: 007 RPG from Victory Games. I’ve said (a lot) before that this was most likely the game I ran the most from 1983 until around the 2000s — not coincidentally because I drifted into that community through the army for a while and lost my taste for it.

An honorable mention has to go to the eBay score where I picked up pretty much all of the books for Jovian Chronicles — a anime-inspired, hardish sci-fi setting that I’ve wanted to run, but the mechanics are terrible and I’ve never been quite able to find an “in” to the setting. It’s rich, there’s tons of stuff, and there’s a background story in the materials that can be quite limiting. I guess I just never quite got to the point of dumping the background story material so that I could “make it my own.”

That’s why eBay and places like Wayne’s Book Store (thanks to Runesligner for turning me on to these guys), and Noble Knight all allow the dedicated (and sometimes money stupid) gamer to find all that stuff we used to love, but that is out of print.

Gah…! I looked up Wayne’s to get the link and there’s something I want.

See?

This one’s a tough one. I realized, looking at the wall of gaming books across from me that a lot of the stuff I run is licensed material now. It wasn’t always the case. The only real licensed game I ran was James Bond: 007 by Victory Games, and while I had bought a few like the execrable Indiana Jones RPG that was really an unfinished set of rules, I remember playing Ghostbusters once and it was fun, and the DC Heroes game from the 1980s, but that was it. It wasn’t until the 1990s that licensed games started to really multiply.

Let’s see: there was West End Games’ easy and rules lite Star Wars — which is still better than the ones that came after. It was the king of the dice pool games — nothing like needing a wheelbarrow for your big climactic battle with a stardestroyer. There was the Last Unicorn then Decipher Star Trek systems, the weird Babylon 5 game that I ran for about two years straight. In the aughties, however, there were a bunch of these — Firefly or Serenity, depending on the flavor of Cortex you liked; Supernatural, Dresden Files, Battlestar Galactica — and that was just Margaret Weiss Games. Doctor Who, Avatar, and now Alien and Blade Runner. The goes on…

My favorite license? Hands down, Blade Runner. I love police procedurals. I love moral and ethical dilemmas. I love cyberpunkish settings. It’s got all that, in a setting I love, with solid, rules lite mechanics, great artwork, and a solid creative team on it.

But my favorite licensed RPG..? I think that’s a tie, really. For the longest time, it would have been — without contest — James Bond: 007. The mechanics were elegant and innovative for the time, it was perfect for the ’80s and my fascination with spy movies, action movies, Bond, cars, guns, you have it. We played the hell out of it and I’m on my third boxed set and main book. I modified the rules for a cyberpunk campaign and a Stargate campaign, and the system worked without much tweaking. A few different games split my attention about the middle of the aughties and JB:007 got less and less table time…then we just never got back to it.

One of the reasons is the other licensed RPG that ties with JB:007 — Battlestar Galactica. I loved the reimagined show, as most vets I know did. It was produced by a guy, Ronald D. Moore, that had been naval ROTC and did a rotation on the frigate WS Sims. He actually knew what military life was like — something pretty rare since the WWII and Vietnam vets in Hollywood aged out. It presented “realistic” version of the Galactica universe — not one where your civilization gets wiped out and next week your at the casino planet hanging out, but where the impact and consequences are dire. There’s moral and ethical dilemmas — something my daughter has noted I seem to like in my movies. Best of all the lightweight, simple rules of the early Cortex system — but improved from the Serenity rules set — lent to roleplaying over roll-playing. I wound up running the best campaign I’ve ever done in that game and setting — one that lasted five years and was so damned satisfying when it ended that I still look back on it six years later and wish we were still playing it.