Issue 10 - Now Playing (and some other stuff)
A few words on the games I'm currently playing, Gamehole Con, and the Reaver Kickstarter.
Hi folks. Bit of a detour today as I’m going to open a bit of a window into the games I’m currently running and playing. I figure it might provide a bit of insight into who I am as a gamer and bloggywog.
But first…
The Reaver Kickstarter is in its final hours as I write this, and it’s looking to be tight as to whether it funds. If you like sword & sorcery, great art, fun mechanics and supporting indie RPG development, consider backing this Raven God Games project. I played in a Reaver game that author and developer Joe Salvador ran back in January and had a total blast. It’ll be a shame if the project doesn’t fund, so here’s hoping a final push sees Reaver get where it needs to go!
Right, on to the main event this week, which consists of three things: Now Playing, wherein I lay out the various games I’m currently sinking my teeth into, a Gamehole Con preview, and Coming Soon a peek ahead at some blogposts I’ve been working on.
NOW PLAYING
So what RPGs am I spending energy units on these days? Let’s break it into play-by-post (PbP) games and live / virtual games.
Play-By-Post Games on Gamersplane.com
Advanced OSE: Keep on the Borderlands — playing
Folks who know and converse with me will know that of all the different flavors of OSR that are out there, retroclones are about my least favorite — usually rating just ahead of the original games themselves. There’s no doubt Old School Essentials is a stellar product and a great game, but I am so not down with multiple saving throws, percentile skills for thieves, phased combat turns… I could go on. So why am I playing in this? Well, two reasons:
I’ve never played Keep on the Borderlands before! So this is my chance to experience a classic. The players each have two PCs and a high lethality rate is expected.1 I’ve got an illusionist with some delusions of grandeur in the field at the moment, and I must admit I’ve having a hoot playing him.
It’s the GM’s first time running an old school style game, and they are putting a lot into the game and learning as they go. I wanted to help make their first experience at running this kind of game a good one, so I decided to lean in and support wherever I can.
It really has been fun so far, and after one player exited I even picked up mapping duties! (This game is running in full-bore old-school mode.)
Barbarians of Lemuria: Night of the Star-Spawn — gamemastering
For the past few months I’ve been running a duet-style game (one player, one GM) for my gaming pal Gabe, to whom I’ve long preached the virtues of both BoL and PbP. I don’t think I’ve convinced him that Washbourne’s classic is a replacement for his beloved 2d20 Conan, but it’s been pretty fun for both of us, I think. I hope!
Black Sword Hack: The Doom that Befell Miklagard — playing
Just getting going on this so the jury is still out, but I dig the heck out of my PC and love the premise:
Though you came to the grand metropolis of Miklagard as mercenaries for a great army, chaos has broken out as the coffers were discovered empty! You must now escape the city before it eats you alive. Are you strong enough to survive the Doom that Befell Miklagard?!
It’s basically Escape from New York, sword and sorcery style as we try to flee a city that is about to go up in flames and consume itself. While grabbing treasure and drinking flagons of wine on the way out…
Dungeon Crawl Classics: Doom of the Savage Kings — gamemastering
I’ve played DCC a fair few times over the years, usually in convention or one-shot settings, and in almost exclusively 0-level funnels. I’d run one game previously via PbP over on tavern-keeper.com, and it too was a funnel: Joseph Goodman’s The Portal Under the Stars.
These were virtually all great experiences, but beginning in 2023 I began to feel an itch to run higher level DCC. To see mighty deeds and thieves’ luck in action, to take the wraps off clerics, spellburn, patrons, and all those juicy spell tables.
So in February of this year, I tricked the amazing PbP players I’d previously run Warlock! and Mothership for into agreeing to play Doom of the Savages Kings, then recruited one more victim and got underway. It’s been a pretty fabulous ride so far, at least from my side of the screen — probably one of my favorite PbP RPG experiences of all time. DotSK is a highly social module; there are a ton of NPCs and lots of interplay between them. All the players seem cool with leaning into that, so while the game is taking its time getting to where module designer Harley Stroh intended it to go, the whole thing has just been stellar, largely due to the fantastic writing, characters, and characterizations from my very talented players. Kudos to them all.
The shit is hitting the fan big-time in this game at the moment, and I’m dying to see where it all goes!
Dragonbane: Riddermound — playing
If PbP RPGing has a weakness, it’s that it can be s l o w… Such it is with this game. I’ve yet to sink my teeth into Dragonbane in a really meaningful way; I’ll keep trying.
Eldritch Hack: Deep Roots — gamemastering
Had a bug to run something Cthulhuish, but Call of Cthulhu isn’t my bag.2 So after gathering a crew of ace horror players for this 1960 Louisiana-set game, we decided to kick the tires on Professor Mister Doctor Dungeonmaster’s RPG, Eldritch Hack. It’s pretty lightweight, and you know what? We’re still just getting revved up in this game, but it’s pretty solid so far. I have high hopes it’ll carry us right through what will likely be a (wonderfully) terrible end to this game.
ICRPG: Warp Shell — playing
Really just getting going on this. Will report back on how it all shakes out…
Mausritter: The Estate — playing
Early days for this game as well, and while I’m playing with a bunch of people I don’t know, the GM is a proven quantity, one of my favorites on gamersplane. I LOVE Mausritter and am excited to see how this all plays out. Squeak!
Mythic Bastionland — playing
Another game that’s just getting off the ground, this one is gonna be a goodie. I’m playing with two folks I really enjoy bouncing off of in PbP games, and the GM is an old friend with serious writing chops who introduced me to a whole slew of new games and RPG ideas over the years. I owe Alfred a lot for expanding my horizons, and love what he’s doing with this game so far.
I did say it was Mythic Bastionland, right? This thing looks like it’s going to be amazing. It’s still in pre-print form as Chris McDowall appears to be waiting on art, but Sweet Christmas it’s good. I’ll be covering this game in a blog coming up, and if it doesn’t win Ennies we all need to burn down Ennietown.
Primal Quest: Mother’s Vale — gamemastering
This is one of those games that stumbled out of the gate a little, and I don’t know if it’ll ever find its footing. I’ll nuke it if it doesn’t. (I used to run limping PbP games for far too long, keeping them sputtering along for months and years; I have learned my lesson and tend to put a bullet in things when they need it these days.)
One takeaway: I think the core mechanics and the ‘tag’ system that produces positive and negative dice that Diogo Nogueira came up with is elegant and probably quick and streamlined in live play… and it’s torture in the PbP format. Far too much back-and-forth, far too many ‘transactions’ to get the action settled.
Prowlers & Paragons — gamemastering
Running a relatively slow-moving but solid duet here, one player, one GM. Kind of a unique situation where the player always feels one-upped by NPCs / villains and other heroes in most supers games; she feels like her heroines never get to be the star of the show. So this game is all about that, and also testing out P&P Ultimate Edition as a system.
System verdict so far: it’s okay. Better than a lot of what’s on the market, but it still doesn’t quite scratch my post-modern supers mechanics itch. I need to buckle down and convert my own half-built supers system to 2d20 and see if it pans out like I think it will.
Swords & Wizardry Complete: The Northlands Saga — playing
To return the favor of my running Barbarians of Lemuria for him, Gabe is running this for me, duet-style. We’re not very far into it, but I’m loving the story, setting, and characters so far. More! More!
The Walking Dead: What We Become — playing
When Free League first announced this game, many poo-pooed it. Zombies are passé, the show flamed out, etc. But I had an inkling the Swedes would pull from all over the YZE3 line to assemble great combat, resource gathering, stress, and base-building rules. They did all that, and so much more. It’s a pretty svelte ruleset, clocking in at 175 pages, and there are new approaches and abstractions in the game that are difficult to appreciate if you just breeze through it. I’ve played it live a couple of times now and really like it… but this PbP game is shaping up to be the best experience I’ve had yet with the game. (Kudos to GM KCC who is also running Mausritter, and the other players. Good stuff.)
Five stars so far, and I plan to run TWD myself at some point.
Live / Virtual Games
Biweekly Thursday Night Group with Wayne, Phil, Kevin, on-again / off-again Sean
This is the long-running group where I first played and then ran Forbidden Lands4… and since those days, years ago, we’ve played a bunch of different games together. I just finished running a Mothership module called Green Tomb which I greatly enjoyed, and next up Phil is going to roll out a couple of sessions of The One Ring. Pretty keen to see that game in action, actually.
Delta Green with Dwayne, Roger, Jim, and Victor, GMed by Sean
Playing about twice a week on the off-weeks not conflicting with my usual Thursday group, this is an extended one-shot of an opera I’m forgetting the name of. We’re about five sessions in and I bet need 2-3 more to finish it. Sean is a great Delta Green Handler / GM — never leads the players by the nose, never cuts off lines of inquiry, gives you lots of leash. It means that the games can take a little longer to get through, but also that the pace is very natural. Thumbs up on this one, I’m enjoying it despite feeling like my character is a little on the boring side. I need to steer clear of straight-laced types.
Against the Darkmaster Dune with Mirko, HOOS, and Gunderman / Chad, GMed by Gabe
This game started out as an Against the Darkmaster (VsD) campaign that Gabe felt compelled to run because, on his advice, several people hunted down and acquired the expensive and for a while hard to find core book. I have no love for Rolemaster or MERP, but I love the art and the vibes in VsD, along with the mechanics for building the world, the Darkmaster, their aims and their minions. It’s super-fun stuff. The gears began to grind a little as the sessions went by; Gabe could sense that this crew, not having the childhood nostalgia for MERP that he had, wasn’t loving the ruleset. Moreover, he normally prefers a much more modern set of mechanics — specifically 2d20. So after dallying with converting VsD to 2d20, we decided to just full-on switch gears to Dune.
This is an excellent crew — we all loved the setting we built for VsD, and the stuff that emerged in session zero for Dune during House Creation was similarly inspiring and imminently gameable. We’re really just getting going on this… so more to come5.
GAMEHOLE CON COMETH
Yep! I’ll be in Madison at Gamehole Con from October 16th to 20th, and I’m hugely looking forward to it. This will be my third year in a row attending, and since this con is well-attended by fans of the former Gaming & BS podcast, many of whom now congregate on the transmogrified BS Landia Discord Server, I have a veritable pack of gaming friends that I’ll get to see and game with in the flesh.
I’ll do a full report on the con in this blog, but here’s the preview of what I hope to play:
ICRPG: Altered State
Deathmatch Island
Worlds Without Number: Temple of 1000 Swords
Agon: The Island of Nimos
DCC: Crawl for the Cure
There also might be a little off-book action around the following games, but we’ll see what pans out: Into the Odd, Operation White Box, Outcast Silver Raiders, OD&D, The Walking Dead, Burn 2d6 — and others I’m sure I’m forgetting.
COMING SOON
And since I’ve interrupted my regular broadcasting patterns with this post, here’s a quick peek at some things you can expect to see in the months ahead:
Thoughts on Coriolis: The Great Dark and Mythic Bastionland
An analysis of opposed / simultaneous combat rules
More in the space marines series, likely 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars
Mass combat systems in RPGs
Why I don’t dig PC “Conditions”
Tips, tricks and best practice in PbP RPGs
Ideas for bulking up, building out, and interconnecting the classic Delta Green opera “Last Things Last”
Harrigan's Heartbreaker series… my own take on some classic OSR rulings & rules.
All for now, folks. Thanks for reading and see you next time!
And has been confirmed. After three combats (with gnolls, giant rats, and stirges), three PCs bit the dust. Mine was not among them! (Also worth noting we’re only playing those PCs one at a time — we essentially have backups.)
7th edition is pretty cool compared to earlier editions, though, IMHO.
Year Zero Engine, from the first game in the line, Mutant Year Zero.
Session Zero is slow and there’s some spotty video and such at times, but we had fun with this AP.
For the record, I’ve loved my two prior Dune experiences at cons, so I’ve got high hopes here. No pressure, boys!
I didn't know where else to post this, but did you invite me to this, or is Discord reading the algorithmic tea leaves?
Crap. Can't embed images. Well, copy and paste this to see what I'm talking about. I promise that it's safe.
https://www.dedzone.net/images/HarriganNitro.gif
I share your love of Mythic Bastionland, even if I've only read the WIP rules and played two sessions of it (saving my full readthrough for the physical book which will be *gorgeous*). A GM I play with often has been running all the Mark of the Odds, currently playing shinobi assassins, and we're using MB's manuevers - so good.
Looking forward to quite a few of your upcoming posts, the tips for Last Things Last probably being on the top of my list. (I'm still waiting for my turn to run DG)