a Trome is a half-troll, half-gnome

Here's the custom wandering monster charts I threw together for my Big Stupid Dungeon Party. Sadly, almost no wandering monsters showed up.

Winter War report, part 1

Man, do I regret not blogging over the weekend. Now I have to try to remember all the cool gaming stuff that happened. Despite only drinking one gin-n-tonic the whole weekend, I still have that post-con hangover thing going on this morning. You know what I mean? Back when I was a bachelor and could get away with it I would take the day after the con off just to rest and recuperate.

Friday night's Encounter Critical game was a blast. I had eight players, more than I've ever had at an EC game. It was an interesting mix of people. Two players, Max Davenport and rogue attorney Chris Tichenor, are guys I know primarily from the internet. Two others, Joe and Marc, are locals that I've gamed with many times before. Max and Chris showed up with their own PCs: Zerok, a mad scientist bionic planetary ape modeled after this guy, and Bizarro #38, a mutant frankenstein with a black hole metal club, photosynthetic skin, and an evil talking magical birthmark on his left hand. Playing the role of the birthmark I kept trying to warn Bizarro #38 that Murderfrog was not to be trusted, but he just wouldn't heed my warning.

The other fours guys, as near I was able to gather, were some 40K players who had no friggin' idea what they were getting into. To their credit, they adapted pretty quickly to the fact that EC is basically the Schroedinger's Cat of roleplaying games, where the rules are in a quantum indeterminate state (alive/dead/phasic). Of course most normal players will react well if you hand them a charsheet with a skill like 'Murder' listed right on it. Long John Silverback, the ape pirate, was all over that one. And the player with the psi witch improvised several good psionic effects. My favorite was encasing an explosion of knock-out gas in a telekinetic force bubble. Of course when he later released the hold on the gas it knocked the whole party out anyway, but it was for a good cause, as it also took out a jungle flower monster straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. Fortunately for the party some of them woke up before the monster did.

The adventure was an Encounter Critical adaptation of the Gamma World mini-module that came with old 1st edition GM screen. Man, dig that classic Erol Otus cover. The adventure comes in three parts. Part 1 involves finding a starport buried in the desert sands. Power is off at the joint when the PCs arrive, so it's a basical sci-fantasy dungeon crawl with lurking mutant menaces (snakemen, sand sharks, giant insects, the aforementioned killer potted plant, and etc.) and vaguely useful techno-treasures. The party managed to get the emergency power up and running, which allowed them to communicate with some of the robots in the complex. They then proceeded to phase two of the adventure, taking an automated shuttle trip into outer space. The main threats here are self-inflicted. The players did not seem to realize that every attempt to manipulated the ship controls could spell their doom. After all, something as simple as accidentally switching off the autopilot would have vectored them off into the endless voids of space.

The other big spaceship hazard was the effect of escape velocity-plus forces on the human(oid) body. Six of the players got wise to the fact that maybe they should strap themselves into the big comfy-looking acceleration couches. The other two hung out in the cocktail lounge even as klaxons were sounding and alarm lights flashing. Even the robo-barkeep putting away all the breakables didn't clue them in. Taking 2d6 damage per round from extreme G forces didn't quite seem to get the message through that they were in danger! One of the two intrepid barflies eventually saved himself by pulling the lever that activated the airbag-like emergency acceleration couch, but not before Murderfrog was reduced to a reddish amphibian paste. That was the only PC casualty of the night, not done in by mutated horrors or rogue robots but by failure to give proper respect to the laws of physics.

The final section of the adventure takes place on an abandoned space station haunted by Canopan Plague Zombies and a few mummies I threw in just 'cause I could. Early into this section of the adventure Zerok found a small sample of Canopan plague goo sans zombie and decided to taste it, giving him a slow-burning case of the zombie plagues. When they later encountered the first of the plague zombies and Zerok understood his eventual fate, he set up an alchemy lab in the starport lounge. Using med's stolen from the starport pharmacy, Romulan ale, various monster bits, and whatever other ingredients he could lay his hands on, Zerok eventually developed an antidote. Meanwhile the others were busy fighting plague zombies. Each hit by the zombies had a chance of infecting them, and every time the PCs splattered a zombie they stood a chance of infection as well. But the dice favored the PCs and no new cases of the plague were reported to the CDC.

After much mucking about in his makeshift lab, Zerok drank his antidote. I told him he was cured by means of vomiting up a stomach full of frothy brown zombie slime. Max one-upped me by noting that his cyborg head was entirely mechanical, so to purge he'd have to unscrew it and puke out of his gaping neck-hole. I'm still kind grossed out by the mental image of a headless gorilla vomiting.

When the party arrived at the station the robo-intercom announced that the shuttle would be returning planetside in two hours. They burned through those two hours pretty quickly, between looting boutiques and fighting zombies. As they hussled towards the spacedock they saw a big glowy techno-pyramid shimmer into view, all TARDIS-like, right up against another docking ring. This triggered a bit of debate between returning home via the shuttle or seeking new adventures in the mysterious pyramid, and then some tense negotiations with a half dozen shotgun-toting space orcs seeking to debark from the pyramid. The call to adventure won the day (huzzah!) and the party agreed to swap rides with the orcs. Thus the seven surviving PCs were whisked away on strange new adventures and the space orcs exploded when the autopilot winked out during the landing back at the starport.

Happy Shatnerday!

a non-update

The 36th annual Winter War gaming convention starts tomorrow and I am totally stoked. Sorry for the lack of blog posts, but I've had to bust ass at work as well as finish prepping my games and trying to keep up with life in general. You may not here from me again until Monday. Except for Shatnerday, which will continue as scheduled.

WoAdWriMo update!

It's half a year late, but the official Worldwide Adventure Writing Month downloadable archive is up and running. Click here to check it out! Big thanks to James Hutchings of Age of Fable for agreeing to host the WoAdWriMo adventures! My apologies to all the contributors and other interested parties for the horrible delay.

the many talents of Professor Barker

I became a game player when I was 4 or 5 years old. I played with miniature soldiers. In those days, they were a nickel a piece at Woolworth's and over the years, it was easy to acquire a small army of WWI soldiers. With my friends I played the usual toy soldier games. However, very early on I became interested in Ancient and Medieval battles. At the same time, the germs of my own fantasy world were developing through the reading of Science Fiction. So I started working on my own stuff, modifying figures, but eventually, I gave up trying to work with purchased figures entirely. Since I had a little workshop in the basement, I carved my own wood figures. I have over 1000 1.5" tall figures, carve din wood and painted with model airplane paint. They're certainly not marketable quality or anything, but they served their purpose.

Way back in the 30's and 40's, I was playing a kind of fantasy role-playing game. It was not just a series of battles, there was roleplaying with adventures, scenarios, and the whole thing but without the benefit of any particular rules. As we went along, we would work out the scenario and my friends and I would play. If we came to a place where we thought something had a possibility of happening or not happening, we simply argued about it until it got settled or rolled dice solving the issue, usually without too much bloodshed.

The same went for combat. We didn't plan anything very sophisticated, it was mostly dice rolling. We gave points for a person's strength and allowed him so many dice rolls for so many points of strength. The points were actually painted on the figure on the underside of his base. So in a way, I think I anticipated fantasy role-playing games by 20 or 30 years. But, as I said, we had no rules so I can't claim to be the inventor of the present systems that exist. That credit certainly goes to Arneson and Gygax. My own game designing started early in the sense of designing scenarios, BUT, I didn't do more formal things until I got into college or university when I revised Monopoly, so that it represented Mogul India.

That's a brief excerpt from "An interview with M.A.R. Barker", creator of Tekumel, appearing in the October/November 1980 issue of The Dungeoneer Journal. Has anybody ever seen photos of Barker's wooden figures? That'd be cool to see, even if they suck by modern mini sculpting standards.

Also, note the brief section that I have bolded. That's pretty much the way roleplaying works to this day, isn't it? Talk it out or throw the bones.

There's a spot later in the interview where the good Professor reveals that he had possibly the worst royalty arrangements in the history of game publication. Barker claims that in order to get Empire of the Petal Throne into print, he had to agree to a 20% royalty. That is to say for all his future Tekumel products, no matter the publisher, he would owe TSR 20% out of the his take! I am not making this up! The justification for this arrangement, according to TSR, was the exposure Tekumel got by their agreeing to put out EPT. I think the record will show that EPT came out a wee bit before Lorraine Williams got her claws into TSR, so we can't lay this one at her feet.

Winter War on the horizon

My local convention is next weekend. Here are my picks for the coolest stuff happening at the con this year:

Left Turn at Alba-Quirky - My Encounter Critical game on Friday night (7pm).
Kingmaker on the Big Board - Fight the War of the Roses on John Satterfield's custom set-up. Mr. Satterfield is an absolute hoot to play with. Saturday morning.
The Dwarven Rail - Saturday afternoon 2nd edition AD&D game. Don't know much about this one.
Arcane Vault of the Magic Goddess - AD&D/OSRIC adventure by Gameblog reader Alex Riedel, also Saturday afternoon.
30th Annual Blind Sniper Tournament - This is a long slog of an event, but because of its hidden movement nature a lot of other boardgames games get played while the ref processes the turns. In my humble opinion the best boardgaming at the con happens at this event. Also a Saturday afternoon, but clearly the best non-RPG event to shoot for if you can't get in on either D&D event.
A Mob Is A Terrible Thing - Old school fantasy adventure using Microlite20, a d20 variant that I would cheerily recommend to the grumbliest of d20-haters. Sunday morning.
Jeff's Big Stupid Dungeon Party - Maybe not the biggest event at the con and possibly not even the stupidest, but we'll try our best. Sunday afternoon.