Gaming in the Death Bat Zone These Days

Things have been busy with life and work, which has meant neglect for the blog. Luckily, it's always possible to just chat a bit about what's been going on, talk about the ongoing campaigns....

On Wednesday I continue to rotate two campaigns (each one gets a week in the spotlight). Every other Wednesday sees a continuing tale of a gang of adventurers with too many paladins (and paladin-likes) roaming the desert lands of Galvonar in Lingusia. On the other week we have the ongoing tales of a gang of sailors and adventurers for hire who have now been marauding their way through the Western Nakamura Isles, with each session slowly bringing them closer to visiting mainland Mataclan.

The Galvonar game is level 5, creeping very slowly to level 6. The Western Isles game started at level 1 and everyone just hit level 3. Both games are aimed at more visceral "low key" adventuring, with no obvious "epic plots" looming....this is pure sandbox-style adventure, survival and exploration. The Galvonar game has also been working to defy expectations and norms....the first major "lost temple" they had to explore was actually a forgotten bastion of a good deity, for example. When the players are so used to temples being for ancient evil gods that they rationalize how the "good deity" must have gone evil or rogue then you know I, as GM, both made the right choice and need to break out of my traditional mold a little bit.

Saturdays have been a serious contrast. Saturday mights have been my "historical, or something like that" evening for gaming, with two rotating games using Call of Cthulhu and Mythras, respectively. The Call of Cthulhu game is about ten sessions in and focuses on the weird happenings of coastal Oregon near the towns of Coos Bay and Astoria. It's got a bit of a Twin Peaks vibe (a subject on which I have not yet written but really should, given Twin Peaks: The Return was the best damned television I've seen in decades) but this is Twin Peaks with the characteristic mythos twist. The campaign is really about seven different mythos tales all interlaced and sometimes connected together. The adventurers have been exploring these many weird tales at their own pace and often jumping back and forth between one situation and the next according to where their investigations take them....the net result has been a fascinating proof that you can indeed run Call of Cthulhu quasi-sandbox style. The game takes place in the modern era, and I'm borrowing more than a little bit from Delta Green as well.

The off-night game for Saturday has been Ancient Mesopotamia, powered by Mythras. I plan to put more up on the blog about this setting soon, but the idea is it is a "historically precise" time period set at the dawn of the Sumerian kingdoms, some time during the formative years of the Ubaid dynasty (the first kings of Sumeria), around 2,900-3,300 BC. It's sufficiently early in the era that much of what is known from later periods does not yet apply, or is simplified (or has been mythologized)...smaller number of deities, for example, and the fact that the first direct evidence of mass siege warfare dates to around 3,500 BC. Small donkey-like asses (onagers) are the only real "horse" in the region (mostly Elam), and they are considered prestige animals for nobles to use to haul their chariots.....you don't see the Eurasian horsemen until you get out past Elam, and even then it's still a style in infancy. The professional soldier isn't a thing, yet....every able-bodied male may need to take up arms for the city but needs a viable trade to sustain his or herself outside of the protection of the city....except in Spring when everyone goes to war against the neighbors you hate.

It's been a great deal of fun running a literal swords & sandals epic at the dawn of civilization and the early bronze age. There's magic, and a hint the supernatural is real....but it's tricky, too! Players have noticed that I've been describing magical effects as potentially "influential" but not necessarily real....and the only "magic" people see is in the eyes of the one looking for it. The result is the hint that magic is real and subtle....but potentially also just a matter of belief and not necessarily really there, either.

Anyway.....eventually I'll have content to post related to these campaigns, but not until my players exhaust one or more of the settings. In all four cases it looks like that could be a long ways off, possibly months before any one of these campaigns reaches a conclusion, especially considering all four campaigns are modeled on a sandbox-style approach. This is both cool and rough at the same time, as I have a great interest in running a Cold And Dark Campaign, or trying out Hyperlanes 5E, never mind the fact the new Conan RPG is now out and my copy awaits my chance to grab it at the game store this week! As always....too much gaming goodness, not enough time.

Sense of Scale: The True Size of the Hobby Games Market

There's a fascinating article here on ENWorld using ICV2 data which really hits home just how niche-of-niche the hobby games market, and within that the RPG market, really is....click on over and take a look.

I think the only thing more impressive than the microscopic nature of RPGs in the midst of all of this is just how enormous video games have become, eclipsing movies.....wow.

2015 Needs More Cow Bell...er, Cthulhu

As one of my new year's resolutions I plan to spend a lot more time playing the other non-D&D games I neglect too much. Part of the reason is because I really want to play them (durh) and the other is because I am finally admitting that I am pretty burned out on D&D in general...and if it weren't for 5th edition I might be moving away from it all together. Not even poor 13th Age can fully stave off my sense of ennui toward the D&D-genre right now; I just need a break....or just a change of pace periodically. Yes, it is possible to get sick of chocolate if you eat too much of it for too long!

Luckily, I have the following staggeringly awesome games to focus on for 2015, and I plan to run campaigns and one-shots for each this year:

Goal: to run at least 1 BRP and/or CoC game each month between D&D sessions. 

Goal: to run a short 1-3 session mini campaign for both Void Core and Astounding Adventures; I may waffle and use Cthulhu Rising/Jovian Nightmares instead of Void, though....we'll see.

Goal: to revisit my world of Pergerron with Magic World and to run at least one session of Blood Tide to see if the group has enough interest.

Goal: to run another 4-8 session Savage Worlds Sci Fi campaign in the Savage Space universe and to run at least one of the four published modules for Interface Zero 2. 0 that I picked up (and do more if my players like it) 

Mutant Year Zero is freaking me out with how cool it is. My local group isn't as gung-ho about post-apocalypse as I am, but if I have my way we'll run at least one full length campaign in this system sometime in 2015.

Goal: see if I can actually get this thing read and find inspiration to run it.

For 2014 I managed to run Dungeons & Dragons 5E weekly from its date of release, as well as wrap up ongoing Pathfinder campaigns. I got a lot of 13th Age in with three distinct campaigns, and I also managed to get a good Magic World campaign in, as well as a lengthy Savage World Sci-Fi campaign. So all told not too shabby. Will I be able to run  as many--or more!--than I did last year? Well.....that's the goal.... and there's at least one or two not on the list I'd like to hit too, but don't want to over-commit to (i.e. Fantasy Hero Sixth Edition, the mythical Deluxe T&T if it comes out in 2015, and The Strange RPG).

As always, any of the product of this gaming addiction shall be liberally sprinkled throughout this blog!

Dyverse shows off how Diverse the OSR Blogosphere is

Thanks to Tenkar's Tavern for pointing out this blog. Chris Atkins' Dyvers is, aside from an interesting blog, also providing the most comprehensive directory of active and dark OSR related blogs out there. He even says some nice things about RoC so fair disclosure and all that! If you'd like to expand your range of blog options for gaming online this is a fine resource....I have discovered quite a few blogs I'd never heard of before but wish I had just in the last few dozen minutes' browsing.

Cool Blog and Other Stray Bits

To keep up with my Monday-Wednesday-Friday regimen, I present...another post!

First off, go check out How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying by S.P.. I really like what he does there, it's full of useful stuff and inspires me to do more like it. He's also pushing out monsters you can use with 4E or Gamma World, which is pretty danged cool.



On the computer gaming front I have been playing lots of Rift, which is a weird way of responding to how much I liked Guild Wars 2.....you'd think I'd be playing more of that, right? The problem remains that GW2 is what everyone is playing right now, so the crowded mobs charging around from heart to heart have been crazy, especially for someone like myself who has an aversion to digital mobs. But you know, Mists of Pandaria just arrived, so maybe they'll go back home and I can enjoy GW2 more as a result. I have a serious aversion to the new World of Warcraft race: the pandaren look suspiciously like fat furrier cosplayers to me, and I loathe cutsey anthropomorphized things of all sorts, so this expansion effectively killed my interest in ever returning to WoW. They'll need to have the Lich King himself show up on Pandaria and slaughter every last one of the furries before I'll set foot on Azeroth again...

Anyway, Rift is pretty cool in its own right. I am planning to buy their deluxe expansion deal, which gets you the Storm Legion expack with a year's gameplay and some goodies. It's nice to be committed to a game again, to have one I'm happy with. Rift has many dynamic features that are just interesting to experience; it's gimmick, the perpetual battle against the invading elemental forces which try to blast their way into reality through Rift gates, is endlessly fascinating to me. The storyline's not half bad, either, and I like the look and feel of the game. I'm such a slow leveler though that it's hard to imagine I'll make level 50 by the time the expansion releases November...13th? I think that's when it hits. That's about seven weeks away. I have a level 26 human warrior and a level 24 Bahmi (half giant) rogue....I'd have to level each of them 3 levels a week, roughly, to make the level cap before then. That's assuming I ignore all my alts in the process. It seems like I can manage 1 to 1.5 levels for every 2-3 hours or so of gameplay. Assuming I can pull off 30 hours of game time in seven weeks....hmmm yeah, not gonna happen.



It's fun browsing all the blogs out there dedicated to MMOs. I get the feeling that to really play an MMO properly you need to sink 40-50 hours a week into these things. Not a month....a week. I once ran with a group in WoW that chastised me for playing only 20 hours a week a few years ago (at a time when I was unmarried and childless, though my soon-to-be-wife was also playing WoW at the pace of a full-time job). I was told that anything less than 30 hours a week was considered "casual" and I would never pass muster for the endgame. Well, showed them! I never even made level cap, let alone bother with the endgame.

Anyway, the MMO scene has already hit the one-month mark, if even that, in Guild Wars 2 and are already complaining about the game. Really, people? Doesn't anybody work anymore? I know a lot of kids play these games, but even kids have responsibilities outside of the internet, right?

 I get the feeling that there's a huge schism between what one might consider a reasonable amount of time to focus on hobbies (i.e. MMOs) and what's actually being funneled into those MMOs. Maybe not a lot of MMOers have kids, or are trust fund babies, or have no lives outside of gaming? I'd say my wife and I have fairly bland lives outside of raising our son and gaming and the idea of devoting full time hours to a game every week endlessly for months at a time strikes me as bordering on maniacal and obsessive.*



Anyhoo! This is old, well-trod ground and other people who have been through the culture of gaming addiction have written far more interesting stuff about it than I ever could.

So my weekend downard spiral into dismal discontent with life has already improved with the return of my wife and child from their two week vacation. Yay! My kid has 4 teeth and a fifth on the way. He's standing up from sitting on his own, and can walk--carefully--if he's holding my hand. He's making noises that sound less like a baby and more like a little boy. It's amazingly cool to watch him develop.

Either way tonight's our third wedding anniversary so no game for Wednesday, that shall resume next week. And yesterday was my son's ten-month milestone! Poor little guy came home with a cold, but he's holding up well. My wife is worried about it, as she came back from vacationing in an area with a West Nile Virus scare. She's going to call the pediatrician today for advice to help calm her, hopefully.

This Saturday my bi-weekly group is going to go retro with a 1E AD&D retro excursion. Next week my Wednesday group will resume one of its many Pathfinder games. I'm not that satisfied with Pathfinder, I think the system is a bit over-powered, but I don't run games for the system anymore, I do it for the camaraderie, the story telling, and the adventures. Good stuff.





*Maniacal and Obsessive were two traits that fit my wife's MMO obsession prior to the arrival of our child. She still makes a good show for it, but only fractionally that of pre-mom-era. Speaking of which, not that anyone ever looks at my Raptr card, but I actually haven't been playing Fallout 3 (well, maybe a couple hours) or even Dead Island. I was annoyed that two of my favorite games showed no hours logged and wanted to reflect that I actually had sunk a ridiculous level of play time into both, pre Raptr...well, not so much Dead Island (just a fews hours missing) but definitely Fallout 3, a game I have played more than any other except friggin' World of Warcraft, and continue to load up and play for an occasional hour or two every couple of weeks, just to see what else I can find in the wasteland; I have 74 hours on one character (I've played four characters in Fallout 3 now) and still haven't done two of the DLC packs on him, or found 20-odd locations that remain unexplored. Admittedly, he's like some sort of walking post-apocalyptic god with his winterized T51B power armor, his rail cannon and his seemingly bottomless gatling laser....not to mention his trusty supermutant sidekick and dog....but its still fun to wander around getting into scraps and finding entire chunks of game I've never seen before....

Anmyway, Raptr lets you do manual adjustments, but for some reason shows these hours as current playtime. Meh.....I just want the petty distinction of demonstrating my dedicated 200-odd hours in Fallout-Land.



You know you've played too much Fallout when you switch out your T51B armor for Hellfire armor for fun. You know you've played waaaaaay too much Fallout when you think going totally nude with a random knife and streaking through downtown Washington DC to see how long you live sounds like fun...

Oh, and FYI don't try searching for "streaking through Fallout 3" in google. At least, not at work.

Decisions, Decisions. Plus, A Break Week! Also, Classic Monsters

My next entry in the "Watchers" series will happen next week, probably...it's been a busy week for me so I haven't had time unfortunately to devote to my next entry. But it shall resume soon, I promise!

I've had a rather limited budget lately due to an enormous number of post-baby medical bills I've been paying off, car issues, the shopping event of One Million Diapers plus all the accoutrements that accompany having a wife and child. The short version is that this left me with one choice for myself out of three possible, tantalizing choices, which included: Dungeon Crawl Classics (the gold foil edition plus modules), ringing in at around $80-90 before discounts; Dragon's Dogma, a console RPG which sounds rather interesting (but costing $60 right now)....or option #3, the one I didn't expect but went for: a new copy of the World of Darkness rulebook and Hunter: the Vigil core rules. Dunno why I decided on that, but I think it had to do with the fact that poor 'ol DCC is rather pricey for yet another fantasy retroclone/pseudo-retroclone that as interested as I am in it I know I'll never play (but hell, I'm still picking it up later in June, my copy is on reserve), and I have no time for Dragon's Dogma right now when my backlog include Fallout: New Vegas, Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim. Seriously. By the time I get around to trying Dragon's Dogma it will be a $20 special, I'm sure.

Anyway, I once got a chance to read Hunter: The Vigil and really liked the premise, much improved over the old Hunter: The Reckoning. Maybe I'll get a chance to run this one. Plus, it would be a chance to enjoy some modern supernatural/horror gaming again, which I really miss.

But you know, I do have one good old fantasy game book freshly added to my collection: Classic Monsters the Manual for Castles & Crusades has at last arrived. This one was one of the "freebies" (paid out of my meager return on online book sales) but well worth it. It's lots of classic monsters, but anyone who (like me) really loved the old 1st edition Fiend Folio and who also likes C&C will love this book. It's probably one of the best overall products Troll Lord has put out since...well, the Castle Keeper's Guide, I suppose. It also dramatically boosts the monster count for C&C, cleans up and presents converted stats and backgrounds for about 200 monsters, most all of which are derived from the OGL versions of those classic fiends that were converted by way of Tome of Horrors, and in that sense it is delectable old school comfort food. Just having the Hooked Horror, Adherer, Huecuva, Flumph and more under one roof, poised and ready to strike in my C&C games, is worth it.

Actual Monsters Inside May Vary; No guarantee of actual chimera or drow chick promised*

Anyway, apologies this week, my blog's been a lot of meandering thoughts, chatty nonsense and discussion of computer gaming habits and buying tendencies. More real game content soon!

*between the 4th Crusade (green cover) Monsters & Treasures and Classic Monsters, I am surprised we haven't got an official entry on drow somewhere in C&C as an official 8th race option, since they seem to spend a lot of time fighting monsters.