The 2023 Death Bat Year in Gaming and Looking to 2024

 What a weird year it has been for me. I spent a lot of this year overworked and with less free time for fun than I would like, but on the plus side I got a bit better at managing what free time I did have. My son, who is now 12, monopolizes a fair amount of that, but he's also very into D&D now and plays in a school group as well as my Wednesday night group....which doesn't play D&D as often anymore, but hey, we're starting a new campaign this week, so there ya' go.

This year kicked off with Wizards of the Coast annihilating trust in their shepherding of Dungeons & Dragons through the OGL, resulting in numerous spin-off games appearing under a creative commons or new license (ORC) through Paizo, including the revamped Pathfinder 2E v2, and the imminent Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press. It's a boost for existing products like level Up! A5E RPG, though honestly Morrus and his ENWorld crew are not really the sort to dramatically capitalize on the negative hype aimed at WotC, and they continue to do their own thing. 

I spent a lot of time this year deep diving into the alternative and indie RPG market that I dub "zinerpgs" because most of these seem to have spun out of the zine scene where small publishers and authors (usually one and the same) along with their art-generating college buddies create elaborate, minimalist, starkly artistic and utterly weird entries into the market. I stalled out a bit on that project of reviewing all I had found but need to get back to it. Maybe 2024 will be a slower year for me....sheeya right!

This year I did manage the following:

First and best, I got the Wednesday group back to live nightly gaming again. This has been a welcome relief, as I tend to associate facetime on web events with work; it is not fun for me. My Saturday game remains on Roll20 out of necessity, but even then I am thinking about making Roll20 a bi-weekly deal and interposing a live event every other week.

As a player I got actual action in this year. I played in a campaign of Pathfinder 2E run by a friend; found that being a player in this edition is more frustrating and unfun (imo) than being a GM. Another friend in Seattle has managed to run a lot of Victorian Gaslight Call of Cthulhu for much of this year until unfortunate circumstances led to that group collapsing (temporarily; three of us wish to resume it in January). He has also run a fun bi=weekly D&D 5E game I have played in for the better part of the year using the Kobold Press Southlands campaign.

I have run live games this year of BRP in a near-future hard SF/Cyberpunk setting, Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, D&D 5E at very high levels (levels 15-20), a couple D&D mini-campaigns on Roll20, an aborted Pathfinder game (what I like to call "the one that made me gun-shy over Pathfinder"), Vaesen (a game I'd describe better as Dark Fantasy and less horror), Call of Cthulhu (both modern day and Cthulhu Dark ages, using the 6th Edition of the Dark Ages rules), Mork Borg (which was a blast but I have not been sure what to do with it next; it is most decidedly a beer & pretzels dark metal RPG), and at the start of the year we had a 1st edition Gamma World holiday campaign wrap up. Fun stuff! I may have blogged less this year, but at least I kept the gaming up. There might have been a game or two I forgot about....OSE maybe? I think I ran that all last year, though.

Of those games I ran, I came away a bit cool on Vaesen (fun but hard for me to get in to, which is damning if you're the GM), happy that Mork Borg was so fun (but also realizing it is best used sparingly), excited for the Call of Cthulhu games, but also realizing I need to give it a rest a bit so my idea engine can recharge, and for BRP I am now intrigued at the idea of exploring how many oddball genres I can get out of it. I really enjoyed the Savage Worlds Fantasy and Pathfinder adaptations, but I am not 100% sure my group did as when I suggested returning to it they all seemed "m'eh" so I think the joyful simplicity of Savage Worlds may not be as endearing to them as it is to me. As for Pathfinder.....man, I want to, but I've had some issues and bad experiences with running it now and that is proving tough for me to get over. D&D remains viable and my energy to play it is recharged, thankfully, but I plan to ditch it entirely for Tales of the Valiant unless whatever WotC pumps out for new editions next year knocks my socks off. My suspicion is it will be a product aimed to steer me toward their online platform, and that will be a no deal situation. Meanwhile, Kobold Press is more or less continuously making smart and fun books and their grip on Shard Tabletop is where I'll put my online money. I am confident the Kobolds won't forget their analog wood-grain table crowd.

My biggest issue this year has been wrestling with GM burnout. Playing more helped a bit, but I have never been very good as a player (I know too much how the cheese is made, so it can be tough to feel invested unless the GM is shockingly good at running things). I got pretty tired of D&D for a bit, but I feel more interested now, especially as I did get a chance to explore other games there, and that, if anything, helped hammer home that the grass is not greener on the other side, and what really makes things fun is what I put in to it more than what system I am using. Getting to play D&D 5E for once was a godsend, and my friend Mike runs a mean, tight game in the Southlands, loads of fun.

For 2024, I hope to run a good long fun D&D 5E game in my Pergerron setting. I think the Roll20 Saturday group would like to do part 2 to an older Pathfinder campaign in Oman'Hakat, and I may be up for that. I have strong plans for a Traveller campaign, maybe before we do D&D or Pathfinder on Saturday, especially now that it seems they finally have some real character sheet support. The 2022-2024 revisions of Traveller have been great books, not really necessary but welcome nonetheless, and I may even use them to continue the campaign concepts I started in the BRP campaign earlier this year. 

Beyond that, I have some hopes of experimenting with Dragonbane, which I almost ran but never quite got to this year, as well as Mutant Year Zero. I'm hopeful that Friday Knight Games finally coughs up the gigantic Kickstarted boxed set of Mothership 1E this year so I can resume running that. Steve Jackson Games is making a big monster book for The Fantasy Trip, too, and I am thinking about what sort of logistics it would take to give TFT a spin. And, of course, Mork Borg and its evil cousins Death in Space, Vast Grimm, Pirate Borg and Cy_Borg call for my attention the next time I have a week with nothing better going on. 

I'll try to do more blogging, too! I have found lots of RPG bloggers on Substack, may forge a new blog over there as well to see how it goes, but I am reluctant to abandon this one as I have so many years behind it now. We'll see, who knows.

The First Vaesen Scenario is Done

 Saturday heralded the end of a three session Vaesen campaign. My group, which vacillated between 5 and 7 players per session with everyone choosing to use the randomized character generator in the back of the book. I think they favored that for two reasons: it made figuring out a PC very easy, and it helped generate a back story, particularly useful for players not overly familiar with what a 19th century Swedish investigator should look like.

Players had few issues by and far; Roll20 has a decent character sheet which includes a D66 button and it seemed to calculate things just fine. The odds of getting a success in the incredibly simple Vaesen edition of the Year Zero Engine are generally pretty good unless you're rolling a suboptimal skill, so much of the system's emphasis on only rolling when really needed is predicated on this notion, I suspect. Unlike other Year Zero Engine games, though, Vaesen doesn't have some sort of willpower or mutation mechanic that is predicated on pushing the rolls to generate useful points.

As a GM, some oddities cropped up during play, as follows:

The Preamble Phase - There is a preparation phase of the game, early on during the initial introduction to the mystery. In actual play I realized this was a bit more convoluted to approach than I expected, in that the book didn't give as much useful advice on how to execute it as I would have liked, and I will need to study the prepublished modules to see if they offer any suggested direction.

Issues of Setting - During play we got into a vigorous discussion on Swedish naming conventions of the era. Apparently surnames beyond "Thorson" type nomenclature were not in common use in the 19th century, but none of the "historical name generators" I used talked about this, nor did any of my research (or the Vaesen campaign section) address this. The intent in Vaesen is for this to be a pseudohistorical Sweden that you make your own, but sometimes players (and GMs) crave that specificity or verisimilitude and this did cause a teensy bit of a hiccup during the initial game session. We got over it, though....and ironically much of the game was set in Turku, Finland anyway.

Initiative and Roll20 - Roll20 does not support the kind of deck that works for initiative in Vaesen, and if you can craft such a deck in Roll20 I do not know how to do so. We made do with a regular deck of cards and winged it.

During the course of game play I got a pretty good feel for the base game mechanics. If we play again we'll be exploring more of how the group can explore and develop their castle in Upsala, the core setting for the investigators in the game. It's reminiscent of the way the Cthulhu by Gaslight sourcebooks for Hudson & Brand handle things, where the campaign revolves around 33 Golden Circle and the legacy of the erstwhile investigators. It proved a useful setup nonetheless, as I relied entirely on the expected starting point of the core book to get the PC introductions and purposes out of the way. 

Very little actual violence happened, with one brief shoot-out in session two. The vaesen encountered, while potentially very threatening, were approached with a level of circumspection by the PCs and as such they were leaning heavily into a problem-solving approach and no violence (beyond some errant NPCs in the mix) was had. The potential for any encounter with the vaesen to turn lethal was pretty obvious, though.

After my first session I was feeling a bit unconvinced I wanted to continue, but by the end of session two I had found a bit of a groove, treating it a bit like the way AD&D 2nd Edition used to let you play in a sort of gothic European setting in the Masque of the Red Death for Ravenloft, except with the PCs being very fragile and the vaesen being in their own ways just as bewildered and conflicted about humans as the humans (who could see or believe in them) were about vaesen. The end result felt a lot more to me like a dark fantasy tale with a sprinkling of gothic horror and some victorian investigative procedurals than anything else; the book itself seems to imply you could (or should) lean hard into the enigmatic horror of the vaesen, but its really hard to do...especially if you were, like me, a kid growing up with stories about tomte (nisse) and other creatures. Making them feel scary or mysterious can be a bit of a task, though I think I pulled it off.

For my group I think it was a nice change of pace; horror that wasn't too horrifying, and an historical setting that was also vaguely mythic, while still being mostly grounded. A lack of overall familiarity with the  Nordic19th century didn't overly impair us, though it as a side effect led me down a rabbit hole learning about the Lapps, better known as Mani, of whom I have family ancestry. That was entirely due to one of the online sourcebooks Free League lets fans publish, but it in turn got me reading extensively elsewhere about the mani and their marginalized existence....interesting stuff.

My group overall had fun. I think I may run it again, down the road, but who knows. The system is incredibly simple, and I am more interested in trying the more complex versions of the Year Zero Engine to be found in Forbidden Lands and Mutant Year Zero now, to see how it holds up when extra layers of complexity are added to the mix. This might sound odd to those who prefer simpler mechanics, but maybe think of what I am referring to less as "complexity" and more as "nuance," and I like nuance in my rule systems. I will say this much: I am now more motivated to get a Kult game together. 

Next up we will at last give Death in Space a shot. I'll write more about that soon.

In the Works: Vaesen

It looks like the Pathfinder 2E campaign (Extinction Curse) is coming to another pause soon. We're on....um, I think it's the end of the second module in the Path, but we're already like level 8 so I am not really entirely sure, maybe we plowed on in to the third adventure path. Who knows! I am a good player and simply do not cheat and look at modules I am playing in. 

But that means I'll be back to running again soon. I've been running a live ongoing high level D&D 5E campaign on Wednesdays, but I've pleasantly avoided running anything on VTT lately. I have been messing around with the prospect of Foundry at last, and I think I could do it....Foundry has a lot of potential, although it also has some curiously rough spots as well, things which, say, Roll20 does exceedingly well but which Foundry does not (and the reverse is also true). 

I threw out a mess of ideas to the player group, and the one which seems to have the most traction is Vaesen. It's not hard to see why: it has an exotic historical setting (19th century Sweden), an entirely new and different approach to horror (the monsters of Swedish myth and folklore), and an interesting game system with a robust and easy way to make genre-appropriate characters without needing to be intimately familiar with Sweden in the 1850's-1860's. 

My biggest road block at the moment is grasping how to make Vaesen as scary as much of its descriptive text promises. It has some decent background and setup for the GM to work with, but when I get to actually reading some of the monster descriptions they sound entertaining....but maybe not as scary or weird as I'd like? The art, based on a famous book of illustrations on Vaesen in Sweden, is almost adorable in its modest cartoonish style, giving me a "children's spooky stories for kids" vibe, which --I'll be honest-- is going to be hard for me to work with, because these illustrations generally aren't evocative of adult horror. 

There's got to be something I am missing, some spooky and unknowable element I am overlooking throughout the process. Maybe I am just ruined by more grim and dark horror like Call of Cthulhu and Kult (a game which I can readily, almost immediately see the full and dark potential of)? Maybe my poor old brain has been too deeply influenced by decades of obsession with Cosmic Horror to find itself able to wallow in traditional spooky old folklore. "It needs something truly weird, really out there," my old brain is thinking. "It can't really just be an angry fairy that's curdling milk (and maybe the milk maid is being curdled, too)."

Still, I am going to give it the old college try and see how it goes. Everyone is prepped with main and backup characters already, and the player enthusiasm is strong, so I must feed from that for my own. 

I mean, hey, at least its not yet another D&D game! More on that and my extreme D&D burnout in a future post, though.

Random Things - Mothership, Vaesen, X-Box E-Waste, Switch vs. Steam Deck, Xenoblade Chronicles and So On

 For the last two years or so this has been just the sparsest, most random sort of blog. I used to be able to keep up! Three times a week, or even more....life has a way of making such commitments tough though.

Still, every now and then the urge to just write some fun nonsense overcomes me. Here are some random thoughts of note....

Time to get rid of e-waste! I think I can get rid of the Xbox Series X (and S). More accurately I may give my son the Series X and trade in the Series S. I'm just not doing anything with them. They have no meaningful exclusives that I can't get on PC as well, and I can't benefit from the Game Pass as I already own the games I'd want the pass for in the first place. My desktop and laptop PCs both out-perform the Xbox Series X consistently, which is not a good look. M'eh. At least this is one way I can cut down on electronic clutter in my home study!

Mothership Boxed is going to come out sooner or later, and a combination of new downloads has me pretty excited for the finished product....it looks like the new edition won't deviate as much from the 0E version as I thought it would, and the Warden's Guide is awesome. Speaking of which, for today only Tuesday Knight Games has 50% off 0E Mothership products if you don't already own all of them.

I've been diving more deeply into Vaesen. I think I will, contrary to early assessments, be able to run this game and quite enjoy it. The potential for some truly eerie gothic horror in a non-Lovecraftian domain is proving quite appealing. The Free League game system is just complex enough but also kind of stupid simple, and works well.

Steam Deck vs. Switch! I've had the Steam Deck for a couple months now. It has not buried the Switch, though I thought it might; I have still spent more time on the Switch when traveling than the Steam Deck. The reason, I realize, is because the Switch's game selection by and large caters to on-the-go, short stint play, and even the long games (Xenoblade Chronicles, for example) provide for a fairly quick in-and-out experience if needed. By contrast, I unwittingly loaded a bunch of hardcore games on the Deck, games which require time and focus to properly enjoy, so therefore make less than stellar game choices when on the go. My bad!

Speaking of Xenoblade Chronicles, I decided to at last tackle this series from start to finish (yeah you can check in at any entry, but I wanted to do it this way). I am about 35 hours in to the first Xenoblade Chronicles. It deserves a proper review when I finish, but I can state the following: casual mode is nothing to be ashamed about; I played it on regular settings until around 16 hours in when I was starting to find the combat really boring and repetitive. I read up on what Causal Mode did, and after trying it realize all it does is make the trite, boring combat go much faster. I could set it on hard mode, but the problem is I really just want to play this game to be a completionist; Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is the target goal, here. Anyway, the point is: Casual Mode is your friend if the idea of leveling up Colony 6 sounds like hell to you. If you are ready to drop kick the next Nopon that wants you to murder everything in the name of cuteness, then yeah, try Casual Mode, you won't regret it!

Skyrim and Fallout 4 on Steam Deck, though! Don't count it out, despite what I said earlier. I am getting further in Skyrim on the steam deck than I every have before, and random bouts of Fallout 4 on the Steam Deck are just great. Also, well worth checking out is Soul Hackers 2, which runs extremely well (so far) on the Deck. 

Free League Publishing - Swedish Gaming on the Brain (Vaesen, Mutant: Year Zero, Alien and Forbidden Lands)

A few games on my "backlog" list I published what feels like ages ago -- since my last blog post I have both contracted and recovered from the latest variant of COVID (my first time! Thankfully I was on my fifth vaccine shot), and among the list is Vaesen, which after I dug it out of the backlog I have been reading quite a bit of. It's not nearly as grim and existential as, say, Call of Cthulhu, but it is an ambient and moody universe with lots of gothic potential. I am thinking hard of what I can do with it.

When I was in Florida earlier this year I stopped by a great game store and snagged most (but not all) of the Mutant: Year Zero lineup, with only some modules and Mechatron missing (a book which Ebay asserts only one copy was ever printed so be ready to pay hundreds of dollars for it--yeesh). Luckily every book in the Mutant series is a stand-alone take on a segment of the post-apocalyptic world, and the core book is pretty much "Gamma World, using the Free League rules." Genlab Alpha is for animal mutants, and Elysium is a rather interesting take on the idea of pure strain humans and the M:YZ idea of vaults....pre-cataclysm colonies beneath the earth who weathered out the bad times, but are in turn slowly depleting their resources and creating gruesome level of social strain on their internal social controls. Interesting stuff.

That's all to say that in addition to reading up on Vaesen I am prepping to run Mutant; Year Zero soon. Probably after the current Saturday Call of Cthulhu arc concludes and my co-GM runs the next arc of his Pathfinder 2E campaign, but it seems like a no-brainer to me. We had a lot of fun with my guest Gamma World games, but as seems to happen so often these days, I really do like a bit more meat to my game systems, and the old school stuff is fun for a palette cleanser, but no longer sustains for long term campaigns. Mutant: Year Zero appears to be just the fix I need.

Alien RPG is also still looming, and I also dragged Forbidden Lands out of storage, having all but forgotten I had been collecting it, too. Forbidden Lands looks genuinely interesting, but the problem with any fantasy game system is that I am so invested in my own worlds and pursuing their stories that I just haven't quite pieced together how I would cobble together my own style of campaign from what Forbidden Lands has to offer. The game straight up tells you in the opening chapter that it knows some GMs will use it for their own thing, but the rest of the game proceeds to provide you with such a setting integrated take that it is hard for me to imagine how to extract it in a useful way; made tougher by the fact that its own setting is sufficiently intriguing. What I am trying to do is reconcile my "desire to run my own fantasy world my way" with the book's cool built in setting and style, and see if I can somehow mesh the two. I worry if I simply try to run it straight that I will become disaffected with it and lose interest, but on the other hand I am trying to think of it more like how I run Call of Cthulhu, which is itself fully immersed in the mythos, but is my own specific take on modern day horror with a specific blend of features distinct to my take on what the mythos would look like in the 21st century, borrowing as I see fit from Delta Green, ufology, modern notions of the paranormal, and a reimagining of those things which made more sense in the 1920's and 30's but maybe less so now (example: K'n-Yan is not a giant cavernous realm below Oklahoma, but is an other dimensional space through which certain ancient portals found in Oklahoma can take you; Pluto may not be the actual Yuggoth, but it definitely is a staging ground for the mi-go; tcho-tcho are not a deviant asiatic humanoid species but are genetically modified subjects who's experimental history is ancient and cross-continental; stuff like that). 

If I can do that: take the cool stuff in Forbidden Lands and then transplant it to something I can make my own, I think I can figure out how to use it. Because I do like the system, and I like how it structures a distinct exploration style of gameplay, and I would really like to try that out. 

Free League also distributes (though did not write) Death in Space which I am still thinking about. I feel like I am too much into the "science" part of science fiction to fully appreciate Death in Space, which is a sort of eschatological space-fantasy treatment with the feel of grim SF wrapped around it. It has some core conceits I just don't like, in other words. You don't need all that stuff to make a good SF horror game, as Mothership proves again and again. 

Meanwhile, back in the reality of "what I can actually run and find players for," D&D high level begins, hypothetically, tomorrow! Live! I hope I am not jinxing it (again) by saying this on the blog, as every other time I have triumphantly announced the return to live it ends up getting interrupted by work or illness, so fingers crossed.....