The Black Campbell

This question brings up an interesting secondary one: Is a game ever really “dead” if you can find it online (either as a used book or a scanned copy?) I would say “no.” You can play a game long after it’s out of print. I was regularly running James Bond: 007 which went down in 1988 or ’89, if I recall correctly. It certainly wasn’t dead to me or the numerous players who enjoyed the system. Space: 1889 was defunct in the middle ’90s, but never really died; it was eventually resurrected as a Ubiquity and Savage Worlds setting recently. FASRIP Marvel Superheroes and Mayfair’s DC Heroes still have followings, as does (god, knows why!) FASA’s Star Trek.

As Doctor McCoy once said, “No game is ever dead, Jim, as long as we play it.”

So which game would I like to see resurrected? A few years ago, the answer would have been Space: 1889. Done! I think I would go with James Bond: 007 that Victory Games put out in the ’80s. I was working on it as a project a few years back, but there was a retroclone, Classified, that beat me to the punch. I changed tack and started working on a new version of the mechanics, but I have been waylaid by teaching, raising a young girl, and other projects that could be busted out quicker and cheaper.

I would like to see Castle Falkenstein come back, but I would want to see the combat rules reworked to be more cinematic. (I did a set of house rules that sped play and were more fun for the players almost immediately after buying the game.)

Another good one would be the Marvel Heroic — probably the best application of Cortex Plus. It was an excellent set of mechanics for the superhero genre. Hand-wavy enough to get the job done, less focus on experience and improving characters (you could just build what you wanted), and the use of character and story based milestones for advancement was a great idea, if a bit imperfectly implemented.

There’s a glut of small press RPGs out there. I’m guilty of it — I produce adventures for Fate and Ubiquity. There’s a lot of folks chasing the same dollars, even if e’re not necessarily “in competition” with each other. My stuff, for instance, doesn’t really intersect with the Dungeons & Dragons crowd much. I’m not competing for high fantasy eyeballs, but am I competing with, say, Triple Ace..? Maybe.  Because there’s so much out there and most of us don’t have a trust fund or cashed out big in the early internet boom, I suspect a lot of folks are like me — I do’t let go of money for a game book unless I know I want it, or I want to support a line or the people doing it. (I wasn’t a huge fan of Cortex Plus Firefly, for instance, but it was a solid product and I wanted to see the line succeed.)

That’s where reviews come in.

It’s hard to find information on a lot of the smaller guys; DriveThruRPG patrons don’t appear to rate the products they buy very much. When you do see a rating, it’s usually very good, or very bad, and often highly subjective. You can sometimes find reviews of smaller games on YouTube and Facebook, but they are often targeted at specific systems — Fate, Ubiquity, Runequest, D&D…

For the larger publishers, reviews are a little easier to come by. You can find them in the same places — YouTube or Facebook,the forums on rpg.net, but also in smaller game blogs like this one. Interested in a review of a game? Google is your friend. There’s also Amazon ratings.

Often, I get my reviews from some other gamer I know. “Dude, you’ve got to check this out!” Which is usually followed by something from me to the tune of, “Do you have an e-copy or book I can borrow.” If I like what I see and I think I’ll use it, I buy a copy. If not, it gets deleted because I didn’t pay for it and the producers do deserve to get paid for their wares. (Seriously, I’m no piracy-basher. Borrow, look it over, if you like it, buy it. If not, delete it and press on. It’s the right thing to do.)

I’m caught up! Day nine of #RPGaDay asks what a good RPG to play for 10 sessions is. As with the last question, my answer is “All of them?”

When you consider that a four to six hour adventure in an RPG has usually got roughly the same meat as a two-ish hour movie, ten sessions of three or four hours means you are planning a movie trilogy of sorts, or roughly the same story and character development of a short novel. This gives you enough time to come to grips with a world — even if it’s just a small piece of it — and allow characters to develop or be explored over the course of a short arc, or three distinct stories.

I’ve got a copy of The End of the World: Alien Invasion on my coffee table, right now. I haven’t perused it, yet, but lets use that as an example:

Session 1-2: Introduce the characters and the main plot — aliens have (or in the course of those sessions d) invade. The characters are hard pressed to transition from normal life to life being hunted by highly advanced creatures. Maybe you jump in in media res and the invasion has already happened.

Session 3-4: Finding a “resistance” cell or some kind of temporary sanctuary that seems to take the pressure off, but it’s just temporary. Maybe you are getting ready to “strike back, and strike back hard!” and there should be a good set of action sequences toward the end of this chapter of your game. The should also fail, and have the pressure turned up on them.

Session 6-7: Regroup, rethink, or find out new information about the invaders. They should have some kind of victory that helps them find this info or confirm it. This is where they get hope they can succeed.

Session 8-9: Planning and launching their final desperate attack on the mothership/main base/whatever. Session 9 should see them fully in the thick and it should be a desperate!

Session 10: The finale. Loads of action, the possibility of failure, and either grand success (Independence Day) or some pyrrhic victory (ala They Live! where Nada has destroyed the transmitter, but will it really matter?), something more ambiguous (The Thing), or a dour failure (Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

You could compress that framework to three to four sessions for a “trilogy”, say a James Bond-like spy game where they go after a bad guy for three sessions, but find a bigger fish for the next adventure.

What’s the best game for 10 sessions? Whatever one you want!

All of them?

Facetiousness aside, most of our game sessions start about 6:30pm, so everyone can get here from work. (One guy takes the bus…) We have dinner and socialize — to my mind, the real point of gaming — and that will take us to seven or 7:30. Often, we end about 9:30 to 10 o’clock because the wee one and wife have to be up for school and work, respectively, the next day. If we gab longer than usual, a session can be an hour and a half to two; others are three hours plus. So, to me, all RPGs can be played in short sessions, if you have good time management skills and can structure the adventures with cliffhangers or good stopping points.

In this, it’s much like pacing a movie. Most action or suspense movies (and that’s usually how you could define adventures in an RPG) have action sequences that are cut up by character development or exposition scenes. You wind the audience up with some thrills, then back down to give them a moment to breathe. (Or should…some of the newer action pics don’t get the idea of a breather. After a while, interminable actions scenes aren’t exciting; they’re boring.) If you set yourself up for an hour of character or plot development, and have an hour or so of action, you’ve got a good, short session.

When I plan a con or Meetup game, I plan on a three hour window and break the adventure into a three act play, with each act being roughly an hour. Get goal A (say, character introduction and plot initiation) done by 45 minutes to an hour, and hour for a small action set piece and exposition, and an hour for the final fight and wrap. For shorter sessions, you could make each session an act and get three play sessions out of a story.

I’m a bit late for day seven, having had birthday parties for kids, myself, and other end of the summer nonsense to deal with, so let’s roll!

“impactful” is a strange word for this…do we mean the most meaningful session for the characters? The players? The storyline? In the current game(s) or from 30+ years of gaming?

I chose to go with recent games — within two years. Probably the most important and emotional session in recent memory for player, character, and for the storyline would have been in our successfully concluded Battlestar Galactica game. The rag-tag fleet had reached Kobol, which was sharply different from the one of the show. This world was overrun by Cylons and was the base of operations for “the Blaze” — some kind of jealous “god” that had destroyed the Kobolians 2000 years ago. To find the way to Earth, they needed to raid the Tomb of Athena.

This was a massive battle set-piece that took two full sessions, and included space, air, and ground battles. The first night was just the insertion of the team which saw a few PCs die. The second session was the real push session: a major NPC and love interest for the “main” character of Galactica‘s commander is fatally injured and dying, they manage to get into the tomb and find there’s a lot more going on than the holographic sky map of the show. The session gave us the deaths of major PCs and NPCs, saw the fleet have to really fight it out with the Cylons, and revealed the metaplot of the game universe — the fight between this Blaze (and his real identity), the history of the gods themselves, as well as Earth, and broke away from the RDM Galactica in a sharp way. (The synopsis here.)

It was also “impactful” in that this was the first time I ran a licensed, established universe and really broke away from canon. I had run Star Trek with a lot of caveats — certain episodes (and series) didn’t happen, tech worked a certain way (no rewiring the deflector dish to fix plot element X), and we explored what the Federation might actually look like. But for the most part, the overarching series themes from the various shows were maintained. The first abortive attempt to run BSG was much closer to the structure and canon of the Moore reboot, and our Serenity  campaign stuck pretty tightly to what we saw in Firefly.

This was the game where I finally learned to treat a universe like a Chinese salad bar: take what you want and leave the rest. It set me up well for the recently on hiatus Hollow Earth Expedition, in which I had to fight my urge to make the game more historical and realistic, instead pushing the envelop on pulp/comic outrageousness. That Galactica session probably also gave me some of the storytelling tools and confidence to really strike out on the current Dungeons & Dragons campaign — which has grown from a alternate Roman period game where a few humanoid critters take the place of other races, and has veered heavily into an intertwined Christian and Classical mythology story involving issues of morality, ethics, and the nature of gods, angels, etc.

That single session was a real jump in quality and confident as a gamemaster and storyteller. It also was one of a few sessions in that campaign that really stood out and had a effect on the players.

A better question might be: What do you play?

I took this to assume that all conditions were perfect: You’re not working (that week.) Your spouse and child have either gone on a trip or you’re still single. You have friend in the same situation, for some reason — maybe you’ve gone visiting the old buddies from college, but instead of a raucous Las Vegas trip where comedic hijinks involving prostitutes, drugs, and wild animals ensue, you’re all 40-50 somethings who just want to f***ing game again.

Assuming I would be GMing, I would put together a “trilogy” of spy-fi stories, bust out the old James Bond: 007 system Victory Games put out in the ’80s, and we would play as long as we could stay awake.

If I’m playing, I don’t care what we’re playing. I’m building a bad ass character and throwing myself into Jared Leto levels of psychotic immersion.

There are a lot of good covers out there — especially some of the Scandinavian stuff that has hit Kickstarter and seems to always have been based on fantastic concept art. There are a lot of bad covers out there — just hit DriveThruRPG for a quick selection. And there are many more pedestrian ones that do the job — most of these are connected to licensed properties that use screen caps and some photo manipulation. Games like Firefly or Atomic Robo (the latter which I really like!) fit this last category.

The one that really capture what the game is about and look damned good has to go to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Don’t like the new edition? I’m cool with that. I’m not getting drawn into edition wars BS — especially as I had sworn off d20 in 1984. Certainly the loveliness (if somewhat had to read and hence use qualities of modern RPG graphic design) helped lure me into the game. I can tell you it was one of the tiefling pictures and the intriguing concept of that race that sold me on trying. I’ve yet to use one.

Honorable mention: Hollow Earth Expedition‘s covers always captured the campy pulp novels and comics that the game as emulating, and was much better art than the equally good for telegraphing the flavor of the game that was Spirit of the Century‘s cover. The cover got me to peruse the book, the interior art sold me.

That’s simple — there’s only been two games: Hollow Earth Expedition and Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

The first game started in January 2016 as a filler for a week when the “lead character” for the Battlestar Galactica game was out on vacation. We played a “pilot” episode of HEX and it took off from there. The Galactica game ended very satisfactorily in April, and the adventures of our heroes in the Interior World zipped along until I hit a massive break point. Needing real time to figure out what the hell i was going to do, I pitched D&D5 to the group and a few others, as I had come into the books from a friend who didn’t like the system. (He’s an indie or nothing sort.)

I didn’t want to do standard high fantasy. I started thinking about a different character to D&D and hit on an earlier, less medieval setting. Then I realized I could do everything I wanted to do in a late Antiquity setting, using the monsters (humanoid ones, at least) as stnad-ins for racial differences, and this would allow me to keep deities that were known to the players from general Western culture. The choice of one of the players to have a Christian monk (and damn it, of course Late Antiquity Christianity was his focus in his history grad studies…) led me to start introducing Christian myth and characters into the world. Along the way, this has led to a tighter story, and a more nuanced view of the gods and angels, and has led to several in-character arguments about the nature of morality and the gods; and has also made Arian Christianity much more “correct” than the Nicene version of the late 300s. It’s flying along quite nicely and the players are really engaged, even the ones that were in it for the hack and slash are now interested in the metaphysics of the world, the NPCs around them, and the are enjoying the world.

Good question! It used to be you went to the local game store, but good luck with that in some places. I used to haunt some of the game-related boards and blogs, but I think most of it comes from other RPG writers or players posting on Facebook about a Kickstarter or upcoming product from a known group like Evil Hat or Cubicle 7.

Som Kickstarter-related posts have led me to that site, only to find something even more interesting to me. That’s how I found the excellent board game Xtronaut and the soon-to-be-released Constellations by the same gang. It’s how I heard about Cam Banks’ going solo from Margaret Weiss with a new iteration of Cortex Fate (I mean, Prime…) Most of the new stuff I’ve seen, however, is all from Mödiphiüs, which has gone license-happy (rarely a good sign.) They’ve got Conan, John Carter, and Star Trek, but their 2d20 system is lackluster. (Their Thunderbirds board game is excellent, by the way!) I was keeping up with Cubicle 7’s releases for a while because I was doing work for them, but I’m not a Whovian or Tolkein fanatic, so that doesn’t leave me much.

Because my interest in spending money of new game systems if they aren’t able to do a better job than Fate or Cortex (classic, not Plus) has waned of late, I’m finding I’m not actively seeking out new games. Even D&D 5th Edition, which inspired enough nostalgia for me to start running a campaign, only to realize that the stuff I didn’t like still remains (mostly related to hit points and healing, but the “everyone gets magic” schtick is annoying, as well.)

There have been a few good settings that have surfaces. Tales From the Loop looks interesting, but I’m not really looking to spend a bunch of dosh to see pretty paintings (and they are) turned into a game setting.

Man, I’m a cranky old bugger today!

Simple: I want an updated, improved version of the old James Bond: 007 RPG.

Barring that, I’m thinking I’d like to see a game set in a retro-50s sort of universe, ala Streets of Fire or Trouble in Mind with noir styling, biker gangs, elevated trains, great old cars, coupled with ’80s style urban decay and ennui. A place where tough, laconic guys go out and under protest do the right thing — save the girl, take down the mobster, face down the biker gang leader with frickin’ sledgehammers! (Serious…if you’ve never seen Streets of Fire, stop reading, rent it, and enjoy. No, it’s not good; but you rarely achieve cool like this with a bad movie…)

I think you’d almost have to have a series of soundtrack albums to go with it. Tough and grungy stuff, like Ry Cooder.

A second choice, and one that has inspired an up-coming Black Campbell splatbook for Fate and Ubiquity would be a Porco Rosso RPG. I discovered the movie a few months back, having had it in my wish list on Amazon for a year or two. My daughter loves it. My wife loves it. I love it.

I would love to see a game where the setting really pushed the love of a vehicle, and handles combat of the same well. Think of all the movie and TV vehicles that stick with us: Millennium Falcon, USS Enterprise, or “Mad” Max Rockitansky’s ’76 Ford Falcon (XB chasis, if I’m not mistaken) posing at the V8 Interceptor, Cutter’s Goose from Tales of the Gold Monkey, or John Wick’s Shelby 350GT. Certain vehicles just link to a character. They are as totemic as a cowboy or ancient soldier’s horse, maybe more so.