I still hold that the Broken Compass RPG and the Kickstarter that spawned it was one of the best bang-for-your-buck games I’ve ever bought. The Kickstarter (and now Backerkit) campaigns that 2 Little Mice ran were well orchestrated — with constant updates, quick turn-arounds that had the PDFs on time, and delivered their products on time or only slightly late for physical materials, in the case of Outgunned. Now, they are releasing Outgunned Adventure — the successor to Broken Compass. Their system now has a name: Director’s Cut, but it’s the same basic mechanics we’ve seen since BC, just with some tweaking here and there to improve the product. The PDF landed in my inbox a few weeks ago, and the physical product is in the offing. So how is it?
Excellent. There are a few differences in character creation: there is one less Attribute than in BC, and each attribute has four — rather than three — skills associated with it. You start with one pip in skills, two in attributes, and these get added to as you choose your role (Hunter, or Professor, for example) and your Trope (Like Action Archeologist). That’s the die pool you roll for a task, plus or minus a die per advantage or disadvantage gear or scene traits, etc. provide. You look for matches onthe die face, so you can use their fancy dice or normal d6s, just like in Broken Compass.
Only the players roll — you either take an action or a reaction to things happening. Tasks, challenges, fights — all the same mechanic. It’s dead simple and easy to learn and play. It’s Broken Compass, but with improvements.
What improvements? Gear, for one. It pulls the gear “feats” from Outgunned, and which I have suggested should be applied to Vehicles here. Strangely, the one set of rules they left out were the Chase rules, replaced by the Run rules in Chapter 5. The real additions to BC/Outgunned are made here: chapters five and six.
Chapter 5 gives us Temples & Traps, and makes suggestions for how ancient temples should be deployed in your adventures. Does it have to be a temple? No — it could just as easily be a library, ancient building, whatever. Traps gives suggestions for what kind of taps are cinematically appropriate and gives plenty of examples. After this are the Run rules — the trap is sprung, the bad guys are on your tail — You set up the number of turns they must run to escape the danger, what kind of reactions are appropriate, and what happens win or lose. It’s very Indiana Jones-flavored, but what about a car chase or the like. You could absolutely use this; it’s simpler in some ways than the “Need for Speed” car chase rules in Outgunned, but I think I would probably use those, instead. Chapter 6 delves into the Supernatural. It is a location, a creature, a treasure…and rules for what traits and dangers these opponents would pose. It also gives examples, once again. There’s a chapter after that on how to run the genre and a complementary adventure at the end.
At 250 pages, it’s the same general length as the other core books for Broken Compassand Outgunned. It will most likely be the same size for the books (9.5×6”) wth a hard cover and bookmark ribbon. the art is much improved from the more spare stuff in Broken Compass, and there’s more color art from Daniela Giubellini, and the few pieces that aren’t are — as with Outgunned — simple black & white (well, sepia-tone) line art. The writing and the translation from Italian to English is good; the tone is still more conversational than American audiences might be used to, but less so that Broken Compass (something one of my gaming group had remarked on while reading Outgunned was that it was a bit more polished.)
Paul Harrell was a YouTuber who did excellent videos on guns, ammunition, and other subjects connected to the shooting community. A former Marine and soldier, he brought a no-nonsense approach to the sport that advocated safety, provided reviews of products, compared different types of ammunition for their efficacy, while always bringing a wry humor to his presentation. So it was completely in character to pre-film a video entitled “I’m Dead”, in which he apologizes to all his 1.2 million viewers that he had passed. Harrell was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that was much more aggressive than originally thought.
“My sincere apologies…I had hoped that I would continue in this format for the next 10 or even 15 years. And even once I was diagnosed I had hoped we would be here two or three more years, and it’s turned out to only be a few more months. And my apologies for that. It really makes me feel like I’ve let everybody down.”
The video channel Harrell created will continue to be available on YouTube and his brother will supposedly be creating new content.
A couple of the NPCs in our Star Trek Adventures campaign are Caitian — the Chief Engineer and one of the lead security officers. Whilst using BC Holmes’s excellent website to build characters, I noted that the Species Talent options were “prehensile tail” and “disarming nature” — both from STA 1.0 and they would have been just fine. However, I seem to remember Caitians as possessing fangs and claws, something that was confirmed in the prison break episode of Star Trek: Prodigy when the cute Caitian kid below rips up the baddie pretty spectacularly.
The nice thing about Talents is they don’t pull from the other talents you get to choose. So I dropped one in of my own: Tooth & Claw as a species talent, seen below.
Species Profile: Caitian
Eras: Originial Series, Next Gen era, Picard era, 32nd Century (?)
The Caitian are a bipedal felinoid species with a strong history of service within Starfleet. Their homeworld of Cait is a pleasant Class-M planet with extensive grasslands that support sprawling city complexes that integrate seamlessly into the environment, for which the Caitians have great respect. While known to be extremely effective and proud warriors, the Caitian culture holds artistic and philosophical endeavors in extremely high regard. Following their acceptance into the Federation in the late 22nd Century, Caitians have come to serve at all levels of Starfleet – to include high-ranking flag officers as well as often being elected to serve on the Federation Council. On average, Caitians tend to be slightly smaller than most other humanoid species. While this often results in Caitians being somewhat weaker than Humans, they more than make up for this in their balance, agility, and dexterity. Caitians are one of the few species actively serving within Starfleet that possess a tail – which requires alterations to standard Starfleet uniforms.
Example Values: War is Instinct, Conflict is an Art
ATTRIBUTES: +1 Daring, +1 Fitness, +1 Insight
TRAIT: Caitian. Caitians are all slightly smaller in both height and weight than average humanoids – with most reaching between 1.5-1.7 meters. They have retained the retractable claws of their evolutionary ancestors along with a flexible tail. Caitians are carnivorous and prefer uncooked meat. While they evolved from predatory felines, the Caitians are regarded as some of the greatest poets and philosophers within the Federation.
TALENTS: The character receives access to the following Talents:
DISARMING NATURE
REQUIREMENT: Caitian, or Gamemaster’s permission. Despite their reputation for being fierce warriors, Caitians are extremely sociable and adept at putting others at ease. Whenever you are engaged in a Social Conflict, you reduce the Difficulty of any Test to make your target relax or to trust you by 1.
PREHENSILE TAIL
REQUIREMENT:Caitian, or Gamemaster’s permission. While most Caitians have some functional control over their tail, characters with this Talent have worked to increase their control over the appendage to the point of it becoming fully functional. This provides the character with the ability to hold and operate an additional piece of equipment, like an additional hand. In addition, the character gains a bonus d20 to any Fitness Test to maintain balance or to climb.
TOOTH & CLAW
REQUIREMENT:Caitian, or Gamemaster’s permission. While all Caitians have claws like a Terran cat and sharp fangs, characters with this Talent have learned to use these to great effect in combat. This provides the character with the ability to turn an Unarmed Combat melee attack into injury type deadly, not just stun. The character may choose either type of injury, although moving to deadly is an Escalation 1.
NAMES: Caitians derive their names from their familial units, to which they have strong connections. Their names often have a near-musical quality, though most humanoid species have difficulty pronouncing them correctly – as the species generates extremely low frequency vibrations that are at the far range of Human hearing.
Most of this verbiage comes from the Star Trek Adventures, Alpha Quadrant sourcebook, copyright for 2d20 system in Modiphius, 2019. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios inc. All Rights Reserved and no infringement is intended.
The ship is doing a survey sweep through an unremarkable system when they encounter a space-borne life lifeform.
OPENING LOG ENTRY
Science officer’s log: We are doing a sweep of system SSC-0913. The parent stars are a pair of unremarkable M4V main sequence stars of similar size. Both are 0.8 the size and brightness of Sol and are circling a barycenter 3AU from each star. Survey probes have been launched to map the system.
MAJOR BEATS
1) Do the Science Thing
While moving through the system, the flight control officers can set up courses for the probe with a Reason+Conn, Diff 2 to create an advantage of “Probe Data” for the science officer. The science officer can scan the system with a Insight or Control+Science, Diff 2 to gather information.
The system has a pair of red stars circling each other at roughly 6AUs with a barycenter that is littered with asteroids and gas in a bar-bell shape where the stars are pulling on them. Each star has a J-class gas giant companion at half an AU and 1.1 AU, respectively, with a T-class superjovian orbiting the pair at 12AUs out. But the real surprise: they note an anomalous vector change on one of the asteroids. It’s a bit smaller than their vessel and looks like it had an outgassing of material. It’s weirdly shaped — almost shrimp-like, and with a momentum spend of 1) it’s warmer than the surrounding rocks with a crust of nickel-iron, and the material expelled is a curious mixture of elements; another 2) the rock appears to have an extensive system of caves and is pinging back EM and heat signatures, as well as chemical signatures that indicate life. Lots of it!
They can reorient the probe to have another look or bring the ship in. As they get close, they can take another look. Insight+Science, Diff 1: their scans look to be making the rock outgas again, changing course and moving away. Whatever it is, it’s alive and responding to their scans. A momentum spend will also confirm there appear to be multiple life forms inside the network of caverns; some kind of ship? Ant attempt to communicate will not get a response, but the transmissions also seem to make the rock thrust away from them.
2) Beachhead
Control+Conn, Diff 2 to beam the landing party into the cave system. The extensive life signatures mean locking in on the party to return them will require a Control or Insight+Conn, Diff 3 to bring them back. (If they take transporter signal repeaters with them, this gives “Signal Repeater” trait that will give an advantage to this test.) The initial scan suggests a toxic atmosphere; they’ll need space suits.
As soon as they beam in, the creature will react to their transport and start to move away from the ship, requiring a Control+Conn, Diff 2 to stay in transport range, but not cause the creature to react.
Having beamed into one of the outer areas, they will find it has a more organic quality and are smaller than they were ready for. There’s no gravity, either. There are critters moving around the “corridors” and avoiding the team. Insight+Science, Diff 2: there’s everything from microorganisms up to creatures that are person-sized. Some of these look to be cleaning plague off of the corridor walls. If they have used their tricorders or set up signal repeaters (Control+Conn or Engineering, Diff 1), this counts as an Escalation 1. (What they don’t know: the radiation signatures of their equipment has drawn the attention of the creature’s immune system.)
Exploring the interior will require a Control or Daring+Conn, Diff 2. The Spacewalk trait knocks this down to Diff 1. As they explore, a Insight+Science or Medicine, Diff 2 to note there are areas of damage — the walls of the corridors have collapsed exposing musculature and vascular material. A spider-like creatures is appears to eating the damaged tissue, like a maggot, then excreting material to “fix” the damage. A momentum spend or second test using Reason to determine it’s either had some form of disease or injury. With a +2 momentum spend — it’s damage. It looks like something has eaten its way through the flesh? If they scan — or have the ship scan — the creature, Insight+Science or Medicine, Diff 3 to locate the reason: the creature has some form of parasite. It’s a nematode of some sort, but big — ten to twenty meters long.
As they’ve worked their way into the interior, their comms get more and more spotty from interference. They’ve found a sort of energy plexus, where energy is surging through massive conduits through a central spine. Reason+Science or Medicine, Diff 2: the “digestive” system, maybe? What is it “eating”? Could it be absorbing radiation and channeling it through this system? Is it eating rocks?
3) Immune Response
The team’s communications and scans will attract the attention of the creature’s immune system and they will be aggressed by some kind of critter — an ameboid like thing with tentacles/cilia. It’s main target is the repeaters (the radiation is being deemed a threat.) Reason or Insight+Medicine or Science, Diff 1 to realize there is something about the repeaters the creatures are responding to. It will attempt to eat them. Using phasers will be an Escalation 2 and will bring more immune response.
Beaming out could be difficult. If they left a team with the transport repeaters, they will also be attacked — the leucocytes are going after the repeaters. They’re not interested in the crew — just the stuff that is transmitting. If they left them alone, the repeaters have been eaten; Control+Conn, Diff 3 to beam the team(s) out.
4) Call a vet…
If they’ve found the parasite, they can either monitor the activity for science-sake, or they can attempt to help creature S-69281 by going in and killing it. (When I ran this, the doctor actually got creative and they used the transporter to beam the brain out of the worm.) Any use of transporters, phasers, etc. caused the creature to try and escape. Inside, any use of phasers or other energy weapons will bring the leucocytes within two rounds. If they can damage the worm, this will distract the leucocytes, which will attack the worm.
CONCLUSION
The crew should have assisted the creature and learned a little bit about it’s biology and behavior. If they monitor it for a while, they will also find that some of the asteroids in the system have the creature’s larvae inside. They eat the interior of the asteroids and wear them as a shell once they are large enough to set off on their own.
The copyright for 2d20 system is Modiphius, 2019. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios inc. Image copyright of Adobe Stock. All Rights Reserved and no infringement is intended.
Stop reading if you’re one of those people that “can’t watch a movie when you know what happens…”
I’d like to say I’m a fan of the Alien franchise but that’s not wholly true. I loved the first movie, which I watched on HBO — oh, so long ago — while skipping school. I already knew what happened, as I’d read about it in Omni and read the comic book version. Still, you’re not really prepared for the chestburster scene, nor the surprise when Ash gets decapitated to a gout of what I’m told was milk (and which Ian Holm, supposedly, couldn’t stand but had to slobber out of his mouth for the scenes afterward.) (Oh, look — spoilers. And it didn’t ruin my enjoyment.)
I loved Aliens, which took the suspense and horror of the first movie and turned it into a roller coaster ride with more aliens and more action, but grounded in a good set of characters and a mother/daughter relation. The director’s cut has a two minute scene where we find out Ripley had missed her daughter’s entire life, and that she had just died a few months before Ripley is found. It creates an emotional through-line to Newt and why Ripley gloms onto her so passionately in the movie. (It also has the fantastic automated sentry gun scene that should have been kept, as well.)
But after that, Alien movies have been a steady exercise in disappointment. The less said about the third, the better. The third even makes the terrible Alien: Resurrectionlook good, or at least fun. The cloning thing to bring back a character is usually when you know a series is done, but it did give us a prototype in the pirate crew that if you squint looks a lot like another crew that the writer, Joss Wheedon, would give us later. I didn’t even bother to watch the Alien vs. Predator movies. Prometheus was an exercise in frustration — there was a good story in there, but the original Spaihts script got badly mauled by Damon Lindelhof. The only saving grace is Michael Fassbender’s David — one of the best movie villains of the last couple of decades — and the main reason to watch this movie. Covenant — again, a movie that could have been good, but bad writing with characters making obviously bad moves brings it down.
So I wasn’t expecting…anything…from Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus. The trailers looked good, but I’d been fooled before. I’d heard the director had done some good work with his other movies…but so had Ridley “Covenant” Scott. But I had also just quit my job and had a load of stress and time to burn off. I hit the opening matinee which was surprisingly well attended.
The story is simple and set between the original movie and Aliens. It revolves around a group of twenty-somethings who have been raised on a crappy colony world run by Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the bad guys for most of the series. The look and feel of the colony is top-notch. You can see that life on these “shake and bake” colonies is filled with back-breaking work, weird diseases from the terraforming process, and this one has a tidally locked world where they never see the sun.
The lead character, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), has finished her indenture with the company, but because there’s a large number of their folks dying, she gets involuntarily extended. It’s obviously, she’s only getting out feet-first. She is joined by her adoptive brother, Andy — a salvaged Weyland android who is twitchy, filled with bad dad jokes from her father, and who has one directive: do what’s best for Rain. He is planned stunningly well by David Jonsson, who I’ve never heard of, but expect we’ll be seeing more of. She gets an opportunity to get the hell out when an ex-boyfriend, Tyler, and his crew of miscreants including his pregnanat girlfriend Kay (only really there for a later body horror moment), his brother Bjorn (the android hating douche), Navarro, a twitchy pilot that you know is going to be the one that loses her shit when things go bad — and they will swiftly.
The crew have found out there’s an old, abandoned Weyland ship (later, they realize a space station) in a decaying orbit over the colony. They’ve got 36 hours to pop up, steal a bunch of cryo-pods and coolant for the trip to another, decent, colony a few years over the way. So far, so good. They need her because Andy is a Weyland machine and should be able to get them past the security systems. There’s the set-up.
The movie is beautiful to look at and once they get to the station, with its Nostromoaesthetic, I was on board for the ride. The sounds of the console and equipment, the look of the hatches and corridors blends Alien and Aliens seamlessly. They manage to break in, find out the station’s gravity is offline but cycles every certain number of minutes (used later), and they get the place mostly up and running. They find the cyropods — that’s good. They don’t have enough coolant to get them to the next colony — that’s bad. So, they go looking for more coolant and find mysteries: there’s weird damage that the audience known is from the acid blood of the eponymous xenomorph. There’s security lockouts that they can’t get past to find out what’s going on, but there’s a damaged android. They try to fire it up but it’s hostile, so they short it out.
They manage to find coolant in a red light-bathed laboratory, but when they pull the tanks, they disable the cyro that been keeping dozen…hundreds of facehuggers out cold (so to speak). Mistake #1. Security locks out the room, leaving Tyler and Bjorn trapped. Rain and the others need better security clearance, so they take disabled android’s OS chip, and plug it into Andy to get higher access. Mistake #2: now, Andy has uploaded security, better software that makes him stop acting like Lennie from Of Mice and Men into a confident, cool, and efficient “artificial person”. This includes a new directive — to do what’s best for the company.
By the time they can get the hatch open to get Tyler and Bjorn out, the facehuggers are on the loose. Here again, Alvarez and Stan Winston’s special effects team, knock it out of the park with animatronic facehuggers that could run and jump, although others are CGI’d. Facehuggers were always creepy, but here they’re terrifying. Of course, one of the crew get impregnated. This is Navarro, who through the rising tension is doing a lot of praying and freaking out. So it’s in character when they learn from the “dead” android, Rook, that she’s most likley infected with a chestburster.
And here’s where people start to complain about the fan service in the film), a version of Ash that uses CGI to recreate Ian Holm over an actor’s face. The voice is an AI-cooked combo of Holm and Daniel Betts, who did the initial performance. The voice is well done, the face is just into the uncanny valley, but I’ll admit I didn’t mind this enough to ruin what was a — so far — a well-paced, acted, and written movie. Yes, he used some of the lines from the movie. Again, it’s not bad enough to take me out of the movie — save for one uttered by Andy near the end.
Mistake #3: Navarro freaks out and with Bjorn makes a break for their ship, with Andy in close pursuit with the intent — it seems — of killing her before the monster inside can come to fruition. Kay, who had been left on the ship feeling morning sickness, tries to aid Navarro but it’s chest burstin’ time. Unfortunately, Navarro had been decoupling the ship from the Romulus station and in her death throes kicks off the engines, smacking into the station for the inevitable bit of pyrotechnics. The ship had knocked the station into a faster decay and it will hit the ring system of teh planet in less than an hour. Now, the first bit of bad writing. Conveniently, the ship scraps along the station doing damage, but winds up in another hanger bay on the other side of the station. Better would have been to see the ship go boom and the rest have to get to a shuttle or ship still docked on the other side of the station. This is the first strike the movie gets in my book.
The rest of the movie is the last three trying to get past the army of facehuggers in the station to their ship, and Bjorn and Key dealing with the “baby” Navarro chest bore. Of course, there’s been hibernating xenos from when the station has crew that will come into play near the end. There’s the “can we trust Andy anymore” angst and moments where we can see the struggle between protecting the “company and Rain. Jonsson really is the best part of the movie. There’s even the black goo from Prometheus— we find out this was the real goal of the company, not the xenomorphs who are more of a side project. The goo is the key to improving the human species so they can actually survive in space. (Humans have been doing badly everywhere, we learn…) Supposedly, the goo can heal creatures at accelerated rates, like we see with the accelerated life cycle of the xenos. (I’m simplifying — but it’s a scene that, for me, redeemed some of the material from Prometheus.) It also gives the company a bigger reason, other than “alien=good weapon” evil of the other movies; here, there’s at least some level of good intention that makes W-Y less a caricature of the “evil corporation” and gives a move nuanced, realistic set of motives.
So that’s the first two acts and most of the set-up for the when they big chaps show up. There’s some really good stuff in here, and they pull from all of the movies to try and weave things together. Are they successful? For the most part. The folks that complain about the fan service, like Critical Drinker — whom I usually tend to agree with — have some valid points. but ultimately, to me, this felt like a love letter to the series from a real fan. Another gamer I know said the fan service felt like he was watching a really good night of role playing in an Alien RPG. I tend to agree there.
So the good: it looks great, sounds great, and the creature effects are top notch. We even get a new awful thing at the end. the acting is generally good, but Saeny and Jonsson are quite good. With one huge exception, the characters do some dumb things but not the usual “we need to get to the next action scene” dumb of modern movies; these are scared kids working on limited understanding of what they’ve up against, or from pure expediency. (I can’t count on fingers and toes the number of times I’ve done something stupid out of expediency or lack of knowledge.) That one exception is the “we need to get to the new bad guy” dumb.
The bad: the use of Holm might disturb those that are on an anti-AI or use of dead actors’ likeness kick. I thought we could have gotten the same utility out of another “evil” android…or hell, give us a version of David. I can always watch Fassbender do some acting. The one dumb move by a character is truly, mind-numbingly stupid and while it sets up the last face-off; I think this is almost enough to take me out of the pic. The use of lines from the other movies — “get away from her…” for instance were a bit forced, but the audience seemed to love it. Sometimes, fan service is appreciated. The ship conveniently crashing into a hanger bay was, for me, the most egregious moment in the movie.
So is it worth it? I had a blast. I found the pacing and suspense well executed, the look and feel of the piece screams Alien. The creature effects were fantastic. There’s some truly great action set pieces involving zero-gee and acid blood. If I put it on my scale of “should you see it” I’d say it’s a full price, but not quite IMAX money. Definitely a cheaper matinee.
If you like the Alien franchise, you’re gonna love it. If you’re like me, and you think everything save the first two and David from Prometheus are dreck, you’ll most likely be pleasantly surprised. If you’re a nit-picker; the third act is gonna piss you off. If I had to place this in the best to worst of the series, I’d say it’s a solid #3 behind the first two. Hell, even Covenant is better than Alien 3, which should follow Willow the TV series into Disney’s memory hole.
My is it worth it scale: top being “full price in the theater”, “a matinee”, “rent it at home”, to “borrow or stream it”, and lastly “avoid like the plague”.
It’s just getting started, so there’s not a ton of the material that’s here just now, but I’m starting to port over the more popular stuff from this site to there. Come join us.
We’ve got the main page where everything new shows, but it’s also now broken into pages for games and geeky stuff, movies and entertainment (reviews and the like), firearms, and motor sports — this set up allows the fans of certain content and maybe not others to exclude those and get what you want.
I’ll begin with this: I’ve been playing — starting with one of the box sets of Dungeons & Dragons I got from Hess’ department store in…’77? ’78? maybe? Long enough that almost no one knew what D&D was. 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 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 guy running the show. That was partly because I didn’t have a lot of extracurricular activities, I could come up with a plot pretty, quick, and could usually improvise stuff on the fly. We cycled through a lot of games — all the TSR offerings, Universe and Traveler, 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. After college, I was down to a single player for a while before I moved to Philadelphia and picked up a new group. Again, me running. It was in Philly that I started being a lot more selective about who got invited to play. My roommate and I had the misfortune of meeting a 350-pound “ninja” who was so unrelentingly bad at peopling that we dropped him. He then stalked us for two months. I remember an incident where he was trying to call into the building, whilst me and my not-inconspicuous falt mate slipped into the atrium, got the inner door unlocked, and managed to slip up the stairs unnoticed by his well-honed ninja perceptive abilities.
There was an interregnum between Philadelphia and moving out to New Mexico where I was again down to one player before cobbling together a group over six months, pulling good gamers out of mediocre groups to form something special. In one of the groups, where I would meet my former wife, there was a goth Christian who wrote awful religious death metal music. He ran Call of Chthulu — and the experience was so Earth-shatteringly bad, I didn’t play CoC again.
The one GM that really sticks is this redheaded giant dude in Albuquerque, totally spectrum, who ran Dungeons & Dragons for his group of four. For about most of the session — which was a disaster — I started working on sussing out the players that were worth the effort, then peeled out the good gamers for our own group. This guy was stunningly misogynistic: after skimming 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. Seen, not heard. He rarely asked what she was doing, save when it was time to heal up the guys. Better yet, he made sure his wife was getting us drinks and food. He once played 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. Lovely fellow.
Even during the military, I was able to keep a game going with the wife and a rotating group of folks that came and went as we changed posts, and on returning to Albuquerque, I reconstituted parts of the old gaming group and added more. Divorce, remarriage, and a kid — there was always the gaming group, usually with me GMing.
I’ve manage to keep my gaming groups together for a good while. The original high school group gamed together, on and off, for almost eight years after we graduated and went out separate ways; we would get together once or twice a year at wherever was most convenient. The first Albuquerque group lasted — with a break for military service — twelve years. Several others followed, bouncing between two and six players, plus me. Recently, the current iteration of Nerd Night™, has been mostly the same people since 2017. In the last year, one of the other players took the role of GM for the first time. He’s been running us through Fallout, which several of the players know and have played the video game version, and there’s a promised Mythic Odysseys of Theroscampaign promised. It’s nice to play and not have the responsibility of the group on me but I did note — if I’m not available, the group doesn’t tend to get together elsewhere.
That brings me to the second topic of this piece: how does a group hold together for a decade or more? There’s a few reasons: 1) you have to be friends…not just for D&D. You have to get together for cookouts, or movie nights, or on the extreme end, blow a bunch of money to got to GenCon together. 2) There has to be the one guy that coordinates and keeps things moving. As forever GM, that typically has fallen to me, and still does — even when I’m not running. 3) Pick a day and time and commit. Yes, there will be kid’s plays, and illness, and trips, etc. but the group needs to meet regularly. Once a week is ideal, but at least every two. Longer than that and the momentum is lost. Chores, travel, other things will keep people away. If we have one player out, we typically have another player run the missing person’s character, or if the game allows for it, they are busy elsewhere. In our group of five, we’ll usually still play even with two down. We might do a board game night, movie night, or I find something I can run in a night. But you’ve got to keep it going.
This was originally posted at the new blackcampbell.substack.com. New stuff is hitting there. Come join us!
The Black Campbell 