#rpgaday Day Seven

Hmm…I’m not entirely sure how to address this one.  Nobilis is very literary, or so I’m told (I found it rather impenetrable, but I love the book design).  Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth is certainly the most pseudo-intellectual.

You know what?  I’m going to go with everything I own that’s set in Glorantha.  The sheer depth of that setting, the detail, the thought that goes into working out the interactions of man and myth is just astonishing.  It’s been more than thirty years since I first encountered Glorantha, and I can still pick up my old stuff and find new meaning and insights after all these years.  It challenges me on levels most RPGs can't without using math.

Plus, I once found a copy of Prince of Sartar shelved in the Anthropology section at Half-Price Books.

So that's two Greg Stafford games in two days.

#rpgaday: Day Six

King Arthur Pendragon.  Greg Stafford’s other masterpiece.  

I own virtually everything published for it.  I’ve pored over the rules and immersed myself in Arthuriana.  But I’ve never played a lick of it.  Some of that is down to finding players who want to commit to a game with a built-in generational aspect.  Some of it is down to players who think they’ll be overwhelmed by the need for specialized knowledge.  A lot of it is down to me fearing that I can’t do the subject matter justice.  Maybe it’ll be my retirement game someday.

#rpgaday: Day Five

Most Old School RPG Owned

By which definition of “Old School?”  I mean, I’ve got the D&D collector box with reprints of all the original stuff.  I’ve got a first printing of the DMG and a full set of Orange Spine AD&D books.  I have a first edition Champions book, as well as the brown ink printing of Call of Cthulhu and a Stormbringer boxed set.  Most of this stuff I got when it first saw print.

OSR Stuff?  I’ve got tons of it.  I’ve played Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry in the past year, and play in a regular Mutant Future game.  If it’s available in bits and bytes, I probably own a PDF and maybe a book as well.

Actually, I think the most intensely Old School game I own might be Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.  It is intentionally and deeply Old School in its sensibilities and execution, despite using a lot of modern rules approaches.  In fact, it’s Old School in a way the other games really can’t be, because it’s intentionally crafted to create a feel that occurred organically back in the day. And that’s a remarkable achievement.

Or maybe the brown Greyhawk folio I bought for about ten bucks used that had notes in pencil on the map that read “Tim’s Dungeon,” “Doug’s Dungeon,” “Our Fort,” and the like.  Old stuff that got used is the best.

#rpgaday Day Four:

Most Recent RPG Purchase

I was going to write about The Valiant Universe RPG.  I love superhero games and, even though I actually play very few rules sets, it’s almost impossible for me to pass one up. Particularly if it gets good buzz.  The Valiant Universe game seems to have that going on.  I’ll admit, there are things that make my Traditional Gamer very confused, and that I’ve mostly spent my time since buying it reading Valiant comics to absorb the setting.

But here's the thing.  I wrote all that a few days ago, because I had to bank a few entries in advance to make sure I could post on a regular basis, and in the intervening time, I bought something else.  Cosmic Patrol, which uses the same rules engine as Valiant.  I’ve not read much beyond the setting background so far, but it’s pretty nifty.

#rpgaday: Day Three

First RPG Purchased

 Metamorphosis Alpha.  I saw an ad for it in the back of Starlog, discovered the near-ish hobby shop had a copy, collected bottles and did chores to raise the five bucks to buy it (being a lower-middle class child of Depression babies, I didn't get an allowance), and it was mine.  I remember taking it to school and showing it off to the gaming club, only to find it the subject of a bit of mockery over the cover copy that began, 

“Have you ever encountered a moose with quills? Or a teleporting woodpecker with a double brain and a poison beak?  How about a nearly invincible jaguar, completed with the ability to change its body density and emit a sonic shriek, but which fears birds?”

OK, it is pretty cheesy.  But it didn’t help that in 1978, the MacArthur HS Wargame Club was ground zero of the wargamers vs. RPGers struggle that originally gave us the term “Grognard” (which, by the way, didn’t refer to RPGers back then).  I persevered.  Played it with my friends.  At some point, I even hacked the rules to turn it into a rudimentary superhero game (remarkable, because I wasn’t a comic book reader at that point), something I suspect Jeff Dee and Jack Herman did as well.

A couple of years later, Gamma World came out, which was much more interesting, what with it still being the Cold War and all.  My copy of MA, worn and battered from being hauled to school and back all those times, was relegated to the bookshelf.  But I’ve still got it.  In fact, when I met Jim Ward last year, I got him to sign the beat up old thing. So, I’m kind of glad I held onto it.

#rpgaday: Day Two

First RPG Gamemastered

This one I’m not so sure about.  I could cop out and say “Death Test,” but I’m not gonna.  It may have been D&D, but I suspect it was more likely Metamorphosis Alpha, which I’ll be talking about tomorrow.  One of those two, but I’ll say MA.

Obviously, it was totally memorable.

Maybe tomorrow's post will be more interesting/informative.

#rpgaday: Day One

OK, so let's do this.  First up on the topic list, First RPG Played:

The answer to this depends on how you define RPG.  If you go by “A published RPG that said so on the box,” then it was the Holmes Rules Blue Box Basic D&D.  My friend John got a copy the summer before my Sophomore year of high school, and on a Friday in September, our friend Rob joined us on the patio of the school cafeteria after classes and we played for about two hours (Back then, you could do stuff like that and nobody blinked.  Hell, I once took a sword to school just because).

If, on the other hand, your definition tends more toward: “Played a game where we had characters who killed monsters, and explored dangerous environments for experience and gold,” then the answer is ‘Death Test.’  Confused?  Welcome to my introduction to the hobby.  I got in via wargaming when I started high school in 1977.  One of the most popular lunchtime activities of the Douglas MacArthur HS (Go Brahmas!) Wargame Club was playing ‘Melee’ and ‘Wizard,’ a pair of companion microgames from Metagaming that were referred to as ‘The Fantasy Trip’* (TFT). 

‘Melee’ was a simple game of man-to-man combat; ‘Wizard’ added magic and some additional magic to the mix.  Notable in the game was the fact that your warrior or wizard could gain experience through victories in the arena, boosting his stats and gaining access to better weapons, armor, and spells.  It was easy to learn, easy to play, and you could get in a couple of rounds at lunchtime if the dice were friendly.

Besides these two games, Metagaming put out a TFT product called ‘Death Test.’  It was a programmed adventure for a group of up to four warriors and/or wizards who enter a catacomb under a great city, seeking acceptance into the Imperial Guard.  They make their way through a labyrinth of connected rooms (all the dimensions of a ‘Melee’ board) fighting opposition, gaining treasure (gold bars!) and healing potions.  In short, a dungeon crawl.  I didn’t know the term at that time, but it fits all the criteria.  My buddies and I played it to death.  We had the damned thing memorized in short order.  As well as the sequel, the imaginatively named ‘Death Test 2.’  Soon, we began making our own ‘Death Tests,’ trying to out-do one another.

These were still largely tactical exercises bereft of role-play, but all the essential vocabulary was in place.  A few months later, a kid at church overheard me telling a friend about our “Death Test” games and asked, “Hey, have you ever heard of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’?”

The rest, as they say, was history.

*Astute readers may recognize these games and TFT as the components of ‘In The Labyrinth,’ considered one of the lost treasures of the early age of RPGs.  ITL was the full-on RPG derived from these rules.  It’s also the father of GURPS and the uncle of the HERO System.