The good news is that I’m beginning to feel inspired and creative and interested in running a game again.

The bad news is that, if I were to run anything I currently feel inspired, creative, and interested in, I’d largely have to recruit new players.  This is not a gripe about my current crop of available players; they’re a great bunch of gamers.  But, the sad truth is, a World of Darkness game or Unknown Armies won’t appeal to most of them.  Also, the typical size of the Tuesday crew precludes any sort of game with intense emotional or roleplay-heavy elements.

I’m actually considering trying a one-on-one game with my wife, though we’ve never done any one-on-one gaming.

Slow Game Is Slow

Today's D&D game was set aside for a board game day.  I tried out "Arkham Horror."  All in all, while I think I see the appeal, I don't see myself playing it again unless the folks demonstrating it have a better grasp of not only the rules, but the overall strategy.  As it was, there was too much flailing around and far too much referencing the rule book at every turn to keep me engaged.

Mail Order Nostalgia: The Unboxing

So, Monday evening (as my wife and I were, appropriately enough, on our way to a Peter Murphy concert), this showed up on my front porch:

This being the 20th anniversary special edition of Vampire: the Masquerade, the game that probably shook the RPG hobby harder than anything else.

I remember purchasing the first edition, with no idea what to expect.  Twenty years ago, there was no internet hoopla, no huge buzz about the Next Big Thing.  Certainly not in San Antonio, a gaming backwater at the best of times.

But in 1991, I was definitely into vampires and horror and all that good stuff.  I'd discovered splatterpunk fiction, that darker, edgier, less genteel take on horror writing and I was all about anything that gave a middle finger to the established status quo.

And so I picked up Vampire: the Masquerade, entirely on the strength of that beautiful, iconic cover.  I have an incredibly distinct memory of reading the opening fiction (the letter from VT to WH) sitting out on the patio of a Mexican restaurant, late on a Saturday afternoon and being transported to another world.

Over the years, V:tM would take up a significant portion of my book-buying and reading.  Oddly enough, the one thing it didn't take up was gaming time.  To this day, through multiple editions of the game, despite having bought and read many volumes of rules and sourcebooks, I've never played the game (or it's successor, Vampire: the Requiem, for that matter).  It's one of my dark gaming secrets and an omission I hope to rectify with the receipt of this glorious new volume.

The book is, simply, a thing of beauty.  In the past few years, I've allowed myself the occasional purchase of big special edition RPG books.  I've got the Guardians of Order A Game of Thrones RPG, with the special art and the George R. R. Martin interview.  I've got a copy of Ptolus, and the Shadowrun 20th Anniversary book as well.  In terms of sheer production quality, this one has them all beat.  Which is only fair: back in 1991, White Wolf substantially upped the ante on presentation and trade dress.  To do less with an anniversary edition would be criminal.

The first thing I noticed (because it was still in the box) was how massive it is.  At 520 pages, it wasn't going to be light in the first place, but add in an embossed leatherette cover and silver leaf edging on the pages that, in the words of one of my friends "You could cut yourself on," and you get the very definition of a weighty tome.

(Much to my amusement, the spine is stamped with "XX," which is a wonderful visual pun for folks who may recall one of White Wolf's signature ongoing editorial failings back in the day.)

The interiors are beautiful:  full-color art on slick paper all the way through.  The art is a combination of some classic pieces from past editions, along with new work, including a brand new series from Tim Bradstreet, an artist who very much defined what the World of Darkness looked like (IMO).

Needless to say, I'm still working through the rules and will be for quite some time.  Since I never actually played the game, I never really grokked a lot of the differences between the various editions.  I know that the rules here are substantially like the ones from earlier editions of V:TM, cleaned up and tweaked in a few places.  It keeps the Clan-centric model of character creation that was an essential part of the old game, and pretty much throws in as much of everything from the old sourcebooks that they could fit in.

All in all, a most satisfying purchase.  But unlike all the other WoD stuff I've bought over the years, one I hope to actually put to practical use.  Maybe in conjunction with that Los Angeles I've been mulling over.

I Want To Live In Los Angeles. Not The One In Los Angeles.

During my creative downtime, I've been doing a lot of reading.  Last week, I finished up Aloha From Hell, the latest volume of Richard Kadrey's "Sandman Slim" series.  It's hardcore Urban Fantasy on a Crank binge.  It's like In Nomine and Unknown Armies had an orgy with Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and The Germs, and the unholy spawn was born in a grindhouse theater.

In other words, very much NOT on the Paranormal Romance side of the Urban Fantasy street.  One of the things I love about the series is the way Los Angeles is as much a character as any of the people.  Or monsters, for that matter.


LA inhabits a strange place in my brain, fellow gamer, almost a mythic or religious place.  I was born there (well, Glendale, actually, but like Kadrey says, "Los Angeles isn't a city, it's an archipelago," and Glendale counts as LA from a thousand miles away).  Though a native Angelino, I have zero memories of the place, since my parents moved to Texas as soon as I was old enough to travel.

In the ensuing fortymumble years, I've spent less than seventy two hours in the city of my birth.  Two days when I was nine (we went to Disneyland), and about five or six hours in 1985 when me and some buddies drove up the coast from Comic Con (a story in and of itself).  So, apart from that, everything I know about Los Angeles comes from books, music, TV, and movies.

In other words, I know nothing and everything about the place. Sounds like the perfect starting point for a campaign setting.  We gamers spend a lot of time creating our fictional places.  To my mind, LA is the most fictitious place on the planet.  No offense to my friends who live there, but it just seems slightly unreal to me.  I'm at a point now where I actually don't want to visit out there, just because the reality would interfere with the thing that lives in my head, a weird mash-up of "Repo Man," "Dragnet," LA Confidential, "To Live and Die in LA," "The Terminator," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Rock 'n Roll High School," "Valley Girl," "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization," "The Runaways," "Runaways" (the comic book), and every song recorded by X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, The Weirdos, The Misfits, Suicidal Tendencies, DKs, Bad Religion, Public Enemy, NWA, and Missing Persons.

Yeah, it's a weird, messed-up place.  It seems I should set a game there.

And now, in honor of the this post's title, here's a message from Frank Black:

All Over The Map

I'm still alive.  My imagination is still a mess of competing influences that won't settle down enough for me to do anything productive.  My wife's had some health issues that have kept me away from the gaming table for my last two scheduled game sessions.  Nothing serious, but the sort of thing where I feel better being close to home.

So, what's competing for my attention these days, anyway?

Star Wars Saga Edition: I got a little tired of listening to "Gunsmoke" every night on my evening walk, so I started listening to the Order 66 podcast.  SWSE is a cool system I've never gotten to try out, and one of those games I could definitely see myself running for my son (the local Star Wars fanatic).

The One Ring: Adventures Over The Edge of the Wild:  I'm a sucker for Tolkien, and this is, far and away, the best depiction of Tolkien's Middle Earth in an RPG.  Unfortunately, my hummingbird-esque attention span means I'm reading this in tiny little bits and it's hard to get a good handle on the rules yet.  But it's lovely and a game I'll have to run at some point, if only as a one-shot.

Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium:  About two weeks ago, I found out that Rafael Chandler put everything for his self-published game of demon hunting horror out on RPGnow for free.  How could I resist?  I'm still reading my way through the first book, but feel of the game and its cosmology appeal to me so far.

Vampire: the Masquerade:  I bought myself the 20th Anniversary Edition back in July for my birthday.  I've got the PDF and the book is due to arrive any day now.  VtM is another one of those games I've never really gotten to play, and the newer version just doesn't grab my attention the same way.

Not to mention the usual temptations: supers, westerns, getting my 4th ed game back on track...Here's hoping things will click for me again sooner than later.

Oh, and Den Da Las' Night of Troll Camp Dat Year

Muh buddy Osbad and myself stole a raft and went across the lake to Troll Girls' Camp.  But dey had dese nasty wire traps and one cut my head clean off and an alarm went off.  Osbad stuck it back on, but I had to row all da way back to our camp lookin' over muh right shoulder.  Never did get to see da girls.

Den Couns'ler Boltorg caught us and took me to the nurse's cave.  She cut my head off AGIN and put it on right.

Didn't hurt...

Den, Dis Udder Time At Troll Camp

Da counselor led us on a twenny mile walk, then cut off our hands and feet and put them back wrong and made us walk all da way back dat way.

Didn't hurt.