Look! Up In The Sky!

Last night, I got word that Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds Third Edition Hero's Handbook was available for pre-order, with a PDF copy thrown in for another five bucks.

 Needless to say, I jumped on that more or less immediately.  Yes, I already have DC Adventures, which is the same rules set, but I also knew this would be a cleaned up and reorganized version of said rules.  Also, I'm a sucker for just about anything Steve Kenson writes.

At first look through, I'm really pleased with the purchase.  GR did a nice job of re-organizing and changing the presentation of some key bits of information, clarifying a few things, and generally making 3e a tighter, better product.  And the new "iconic" characters are pretty sweet (especially Princess).

Wherein I Call BS

I was going to post a long rant here about people who feel that engaging in alt-history is the only way to run a sustained Old West campaign.  I decided against the long and cranky version and will go with the short and sweet:

"Gunsmoke" ran for twenty years on television (635 episodes), not to mention a decade on the radio.  Never once did it have to dip into magic, steampunk, kung fu, or a version of the west where the CSA was still a nation.


"Silverado" and "Lonesome Dove" are both blueprints for awesome RPG campaigns that could run for many sessions.  In neither do the main characters end up movers and shakers on the map of the US.  The same can be said for virtually every classic (and not-so-classic) western ever made, hundreds of radio shows you've probably never heard of, and thousands of novels. Even out-there westerns like "Briscoe County, Jr." and "The Wild Wild West" still operated in a recognizable late 1800s American West, without someone messing up the timeline or altering the map to suit their needs.

The reasons for this are actually pretty simple.  The essence of the western is the individual (or small group of iconoclasts) dealing with the inevitable waning of the frontier.  Whether it's the tension between law and lawlessness, or the power-hungry versus the weak, or civilization versus savagery, these are the themes that recur time and again.  The stories and their stakes are largely personal.  Even in books and films where politics plays a part, it's almost always local.  As a result, successes are small scale and often temporary.  There are no epic foes to overcome.  Becoming a legend doesn't keep you from being shot in the back by a guest in your own home while adjusting a picture.  Honestly, the real success is surviving long enough to settle down and stop living dangerously.  Maybe that's not what some folks want out of a gaming experience and I can certainly understand that, but it's a cornerstone of the genre.  As far as I'm concerned, it's a feature, not a bug.

All in all, there seems to be a conflation in some people's heads between alt-history and historical fiction.  Historical fiction is the middle ground between the actual history in textbooks and "What If?" For my money, it's entirely possible to run a "realistic" western game entirely in the terms of historical fiction without slipping over into the realms of alt-history.

(Hmmm...turns out that wasn't so short.)

Priorities

No gaming today.  I forgot we had someone coming over in the afternoon that would've made it impossible.  But we've still got tomorrow afternoon/evening and Sunday for me to get my revenge.  Instead, I spent the better part of the day reorganizing my gaming shelves.  Being an old gamer and a packrat, I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the years.  And even though I've sold off some bits and put more in storage, the shelves in my study are still filled to bursting.

And then there's the overflow.  Books piled up on my side of the bedroom (fortunately hidden from view for the most part by the bed, but still a navigation hazard) as whatever is interesting this week gets hauled off the shelf for bedtime.  To help combat this, a few years ago, I set up a small bookshelf in our bedroom, with the goal of keeping stuff I was most likely to want to read at hand, rather than stacking it up on the floor or nightstand.  Sort of an "A-list" as it were.

Of course, that only helped so much.  My tastes changed, and inertia set in, and most of the shelf space wasn't devoted to the stuff I'm most likely to need these days, so it was time for a change.  Also, roughly 90% of the books I'd gotten at and since GenGon had never been shelved, but were dwelling in piles of their own on the floor of my study.  I decided to fix it, which meant trying to decide what got to stay on the shelf in the bedroom and what had to go. 

Ultimately, what went was my Hero System stuff.  Mind you, I love the Hero System.  I've played it more than anything else in the past 25 years, and it's still my most likely go-to for a sustained superhero campaign.  But I really haven't broken out the Hero stuff in well over a year now, and the odds of me needing, say, Asian Bestiary II or The Ultimate Skill on a moment's notice are pretty damned slim.  So, they've been moved out, in favor of an assortment of Urban Fantasy/Horror games that are more likely to see use.  Aberrant also got moved into the study (I'm not sure what it was doing on the A-shelf in the first place) to make way for my Feng Shui stuff (on the off chance I get to run it in the coming year).

Do you prioritize your collection?  Do you consider your gaming stuff a collection at all?

I Came, I Saw...

I got my butt kicked.

This afternoon, The Boy and I broke out the Star Wars minis for a massive (by our standards) 250 pt per side battle.  As expected, he opted for the bad guys, which suited me fine.  Or so I thought.

We'd agreed that our armies could be drawn from any era, which was probably where things went completely wrong for me, as he drew a force composed of about 2/3 droids under the command of General Grievous (who has a really frightening and perhaps unbalanced Commander Effect) with the remaining third made up of Yuzhan Vong, the Force-Resistant baddies of some of the later fiction.

For my part, I went with a really well put together squad of mixed Clone Troopers, under the orders of Commander Rex, supporting Mace Windu.

(You'll note that even though we could draw from other eras, I went for consistency.  Because that's how I roll.  Not that it helped.)

Anyway, given the fact that his droids were ridonkulously deadly thanks to Grievous, and Windu was hindered by the Vong, I lost pretty badly.  I conceded on Turn 3, much to his delight.

We'll be playing again tomorrow, but I think I'm going to check the errata on Grievous.

Budget Minis!

So, today I decided to drive into Houston to buy comics, and, since I was in the area, check out the nearby Target to see if they had any cheap Star Wars Minis boosters.  They did.  A bunch, in fact.  At anywhere from 40-50% off original list price.  I bought a bunch.  Not the entire bunch, but probably half of what they had left, a more or less equal distribution of the Clone Wars, Galaxy at War, Jedi Academy, and Legacy of the Force sets.

The Boy and I spent about two hours this afternoon unpacking and sorting them.  He's in his room refreshing himself on the rules so we can play tomorrow.  I guess it's either an early xmas present for him, or a late birthday gift (he turned 11 last Friday), but it's as much a present for me, since this is something we both enjoy, and should I ever run a SW game, more minis is a good thing.

A Few More Star Wars Thoughts

(I had four teeth pulled this morning, so there's no way on Earth I'm going to get much done in any sort of creative capacity today.  At best, I can meander further down Memory Lane on the subject that's been close at hand lately.)

Thought One:

For the three or four youngsters who might be reading this, 1977 was a different time for movies.  There were no nationwide releases, except for the very biggest films.  As no one expected Star Wars to do well, it opened in only a few theaters, and then, as the critical acclaim hit, spread out across the country.  It took until July to open in San Antonio (my hometown), and the anticipation was sheer murder.  For weeks all I knew about it was little bits gleaned from the trailers and a review Gene Shalit did on "The Today Show" that contained a two minute clip of the Falcon vs TIE Fighters sequence, with hardly any context.

Finally, the week before it opened, my local newspaper started serializing a condensed version of the novel (newspapers actually used to do this, or at least the San Antonio Express-News did, as I remember reading several books that way).  Over the course of that week, I got my first indoctrination into Star Wars, along with a few still photos. So, I actually read it before I saw it.  In doing so, I got a few things wrong.  For instance, I thought Darth Vader's last name (I never assumed his first name was anything but Darth) was pronounced Vah-der, instead of Vay-der.  I also thought there was a long i in Wookiee, like Woo-KY-ee.

The other truth of movies back in 1977 was, without a video market, movies stayed in the theaters for months on end if they were making money.  My second viewing of "Star Wars" was for my younger brothers' birthday, six months later, and the film hadn't left the theater.  The following summer saw it re-released. Of course, by that time, we'd been inundated with stuff.  My brothers and I had action figures (sadly, our cloth-robed Jawa is lost to the sands of time, but I still have my Han Solo).  They had bedsheets (which my son now sleeps on occasionally).  We staged massive lightsaber battles in the back yard using the plastic tubes stolen out of my Dad's golf bad.  And, on the gaming end, I had my little rules-hacked together Jedi vs. Stormtroopers game.  I'm pretty sure I let the Jedi throw fireballs, since there was nothing in the established canon that said they couldn't.

Thought Two:

My son just turned eleven.  To say he's a fan of the franchise would be a bit of an understatement.  Of course, the stuff he loves is largely the kung fu Jedi, the Clone Troopers, and the droids that try to kill them.  Thanks to this interest, we have a decently little accumulation of stuff from WoTC's minis game (which is a decent little skirmish game).  With the death of WoTC's Star Wars license, I've been finding booster packs at Target for cheap.  I wonder if the secondary market has declined any, because I wouldn't mind a few dozen more Stormtroopers.

Thought Three:

If one were doing a Star Wars game with limited canon, would the Holiday Special be part of that canon?  Discuss.

Distractions and Departures

I need to write up some NPCs and critters, but the Barbarians of Lemuria round is basically written.  DC Adventures is going to be harder.  For one thing, BoL PCs can be pretty easily knocked out in a few minutes.  DCA requires a considerably longer time.  Also, since I'm adapting characters from media, this will entail a fair bit of adjudication on my part.  When I submitted the adventure, I expected the two volumes of heroes and villains to be out, at least in PDF form, but even if they were, I'd still end up changing the characters to better fit their animated versions.

For the time being, I'll just work on the plot and make sure it all fits into place.

Of course, since I'm supposed to be working on this, I am, of course, thinking about other games.  At the moment, the two topics of most interest are Feng Shui and Star Wars.  A thread opened up on RPGnet recently about running Star Wars using only "A New Hope" (aka "Star Wars" for those of my generation) as the sole piece of canon.  This turned up a somewhat earlier thread and they both make for interesting reads as well as inspiring a slew of memories.

I was fourteen when "Star Wars" came out in 1977.  In fact, I saw it on my birthday, because movies didn't open simultaneously nationwide back then.  Fourteen was also the same time I discovered wargaming, which led directly to Melee and Wizard, which eventually led to D&D and then other RPGs.  But within weeks of learning how to play Melee and Wizard, I'd already begun modifying them.  One of my early efforts was an adapation of Star Wars.  This was still a couple of years before of The Empire Strikes Back, and the only other contributions to the canon at the time were Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Marvel's Star Wars comics (which are effing CRAZY), and little snippets that would show up here and there in the pages of Starlog magazine.

My rules mods were rudimentary.  My sense of what the world was about was, in retrospect, just crazy.  Dragons from Wizard were re-skinned as Krait Dragons.  Blasters were stupid deadly, Imperial Stormtroopers couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, and a Jedi Knight was the most powerful force on the board.  All in all, I suppose, not that different from any incarnation of the RPG rules.  What I do remember is playing the hell out of it for at least a couple of months before D&D came along and introduced me to Traveller (which I immediately houseruled to include lots of LucasArt Intellectual Property).

What I really remember though is that sense of sheer potential.  Since virtually nothing was known, it seemed virtually anything was possible.  The thing is, I don't think I could run a game today that could capture that lightning in a bottle.  Things are just too well nailed down and creating the setting would be an enormous exercise in "OK, this exists, but in this game it's like X instead of Y.  Also, Z doesn't exist at all."  In short, it's fun to think about, but actually doing it would require more work and player buy-in than would probably be worthwhile.

And if thinking about that approach isn't enough, there's another that's been intruding on me.  A few weeks ago, I managed to score a copy of Bill Slavicsek's A Guide to the Star Wars Universe: From Airspeeders to Zorba the Hutt and Beyond -- Everything You Need To Know About the Expanding Universe of Star Wars! (2nd Edition).  It's from 1994 or so, during the period when Star Wars pretty much existed as a source for novels and comics, computer games, and an RPG published by West End Games.  In fact, WEG had pretty much become the official keepers of Star Wars continuity, so it's no surprise that Mr. Slavicsek's name would grace the cover of this weighty tome.  Every word of it comes from well-before "The Phantom Menace," and as such, entries like The Clone Wars and the Sith are wonderfully vague.  The Marvel comics are intentionally left out of canon (as are the newspaper daily strips that no one but me seems to remember), but pretty much anything else they could cram in is there.  It's a wonderful testament to the state of the art, a decade or so after the supposed end of the franchise.  I think it would make an awesome game setting as well, provided the players could be well enough informed about the differences between the universe described in the Guide and the one Mr. Lucas later decided to saddle us with.