7 January 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

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Old School Star Trek RPG Roll for Initiative

Forum
JAN 06, 2010 07:17P.M.
Philip “Falconer” Sokolov has established a new forum dedicated to old
school Star Trek roleplaying. As he explains in a post at the forum:
I am a fan of roleplaying. My primary background is in Gary
Gygax’s Original Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. I have had enough
experience with skill-based games to know that I don’t much
care for them.
JAN 06, 2010 06:49P.M.
Podcasting is a medium about which I know very little. My experiences
with it are limited to being a guest on a couple of them. However, a lot of
people enjoy them, so I thought I’d pass along a link to one specifically
dedicated to AD&D. Called Roll for Initiative, new episodes are posted
regularly and focus on a variety of 1e-related topics, with a special focus
on the Greyhawk setting.
If you have some time to spare, drop by and give it a listen.

I am a fan of Star Trek. My primary background is in Star ROGUE FEED

Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated
Series. I have enough experience with the movies and the Microdungeons
other shows to know that I don’t much care for them. JAN 06, 2010 05:19P.M.

The goal of this board, then, should be pretty clear. It’s a
narrow focus, but I hope there are some who would like to
share this journey with me. Let’s pretend it’s the 1970s,
roleplaying is still new exciting, and Star Trek is still all about
fighting evil Klingons and romancing beautiful aliens on
exotic red planets!
To put it less poetically, it’s not really that we’re pretending
it’s the 1970s so much as that we’re applying all we’ve learned
from studying what the “Old School” is all about in order to
create a Star Trek experience that feels right.
Reader JD passed along a link to this cool site, Microdungeons by Tony
Dowler. Microdungeons are very stylized representations of partial or
entire dungeons, done without a map grid but intended to inspire
referees when designing their own sites. I think it’s a very nifty concept
and hope we’ll see the site take off in the coming months. I know how
difficult it can be to stock a megadungeon and having a supply of bits and
pieces to riff off of like these is a terrific boon.
Take a look!

Anyway, enjoy!

Looks like I have another way to waste my rapidly dwindling spare time
...

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net
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Young’uns
JAN 06, 2010 03:41P.M.
As I’ve mentioned too many times by now, 2009 marked the 30th
anniversary of my introduction into the hobby. I started playing D&D at
Christmas 1979 at the age of 10 with the Holmes-edited boxed set.
What’s intriguing to me is that I keep meeting gamers who are younger
than me and yet have been roleplaying longer than I. This means that
there were apparently lots of kids who started gaming when they were as
young as five years old.
That strikes me as strange; I can’t imagine having the interest, let alone
patience, to play D&D when I was in Kindergarten or First Grade. I’ve
long suspected I got into the hobby when I did not just because of a
series of serendipitous events, but because, at age 10, I was ready to do
so. That is, I had grown up enough to (mostly) cast aside a lot of my
childhood toys, but I wasn’t yet old enough to cast aside the fantasies
that went with them. Roleplaying thus provided me with an outlet for my
imagination free from the toys I associated with being “a little kid.”
Had I been younger, I doubt I’d have taken much notice of D&D, since it
would have seemed a poor substitute for playing with GI Joe or Star
Wars figures — and too complicated to boot. Obviously, not everyone felt
this way, given that seemingly so many of my “elders” in the hobby are in
fact younger than I am — but it’s still odd.
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Whte Box Sold Out!
JAN 06, 2010 12:22P.M.
Just a little over a week after opening pre-orders for a boxed edition of
Swords & Wizardry: White Box, John Adams of Brave Halfling
Publishing has announced that the product is sold out for the foreseeable
future. This is both terrific and disappointing news — terrific because it
means that BHP has obviously created something for which there was
much demand and disappointing because many gamers, myself included,
won’t get their hands on copies of this game anytime soon.
John has said there will be a second run of boxed sets “later in 2010,”
though no specific date has been given. He has also indicated that a
single-volume version of the White Box rules will be released “as soon as
possible.” The latter is good news for those who don’t already own copies
of White Box, but, speaking only for myself, it was the boxed, small
booklet format that really appealed to me and made me consider buying
a copy not only for myself but for my friends as well. Without the box,
the appeal of the new release is minimal.
I certainly look forward to seeing what BHP produces to support the
White Box rules. I do hope, though, that the company finds some way to
keep a boxed version of the game in regular print rather than its being an
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occasional grab-it-before-it’s-gone product. I think a boxed set of simple
fantasy roleplaying rules could do extremely well, particularly if they
were readily available through game stores. That White Box won’t be
such a game, at least not in the near future, is a disappointment,
although it does leave an opening for Jim Raggi’s own offering, which he
plans to release as a boxed set, though I have no idea if his game will be
put into distribution or not.
Still, congratulations to Brave Halfling for producing an instant winner. I
guess I’ll just wait until the next print run before I snag my copies.
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Rulesets and Supplements
Thereof
JAN 06, 2010 11:19A.M.
Last week, Jim Raggi posted a “rehearsal tape” version of his upcoming
old school RPG rules. It’s quite an interesting document and well worth
looking at, if only to see where Raggi’s ideas match up with one’s own.
I’m also intrigued by the fact that it’s called a “weird fantasy” roleplaying
game, although there’s not much (to my mind anyway) evidence of that
in the material that’s currently available online. Perhaps that will be
more apparent in later iterations.
I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing the publication of this game,
though. I personally appreciate seeing lots of mutant descendants of
Dungeons & Dragons, each one reflecting the idiosyncrasies of its
creator. To me, that’s where the hobby lies, not in unambiguous “official”
rules that admit to only one interpretation and foster only one style of
play. Confusing though it probably is to an outsider, I adore the crazy
quilt nature of the old school movement these days, with all of its
participants presenting their own eccentric takes on the game. That’s
why you’ll never hear my complain about “too many old school rulesets”
except to the extent that it’s often hard to keep up with them all.
Despite this, I am of two minds about the possibility of ever publishing
the rules I use in my Dwimmermount campaign. That’s because the rules
are mostly just tweaks to already existing rulesets rather than extensive
rewrites. Likewise, they borrow from no single source but are instead a
Frankenstein’s monster knitted together from OD&D, Labyrinth Lord,
and Swords & Wizardry, along with my own ideas and those I’ve
borrowed from others. The result is a game that’s at once not so different
as to justify being called a “new” game but also different enough that I
couldn’t just point to already existing game and say, “Use these.”
This is why, despite my criticisms of it, I am sympathetic to the fanciful
reinterpretation of OD&D’s supplements advanced by Geoffrey
McKinney. I think it would have been terrific if each supplement to
OD&D had in fact been one writer’s take on the game presented through
the lens of his home campaign. That’s more or less what I’d love to do
with a theoretical Dwimmermount supplement, since most of my “rules”
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net
are in fact rules changes. The basic structure of my game is still
recognizably OD&D it’s the little nuances that are different and deserve
mention.
But, as I say, the problem is that I’d prefer it if I could say, as Rob Conley
did in his own Supplement VI, that Dwimmermount was a supplement to
Ruleset X, but I can’t. My baseline is OD&D rather than a retro-clone. I
suppose it’s fairly close to Original Edition Characters in many respects,
so perhaps I could associate it with that. It’s also similar to Swords &
Wizardry: White Box, but since I refuse to include ascending armor
class notations that option isn’t available to me. In the end, it might not
matter, since this isn’t meant to be a mass market product and, in all
likelihood, those who purchase it are probably more interested in the
world and megadungeon I’ve created than in my rules variants. Still,
something to ponder.
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Retrospective: The Lost Caverns
of Tsojcanth
JAN 06, 2010 09:40A.M.
Published at the tail end of the Golden Age, 1982’s The Lost Caverns of
Tsojcanth was one of my favorite modules for a long time. Even today,
looking back on it, I retain a great deal of fondness for module S4, in part
because I played it so often. That’s something that’s been missing from
D&D modules for some time: replayability. Back in the day, I clearly
recall using many, perhaps most, modules multiple times and not just
with different groups of players or even characters. Rather, the same
characters would re-visit modules in which they’d previously
adventured, a phenomenon I don’t recall happening during the 2e or 3e
eras, when modules seemed much more “disposable” in nature.
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth was anything but disposable. Firstly,
unlike a lot of modules, this one included an extensive wilderness
component, with the characters having to travel overland to reach the
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dungeon itself. Now, wilderness adventuring was commonplace in those
days, but comparatively few AD&D modules dealt with it explicitly,
focusing instead on the dungeon itself. That’s probably due to the fact
that a great many of these modules had their origins in tournament play,
where wilderness adventuring would eat up too much time to include.
Ironically, The Lost Caverns is based on a similarly-named tournament
module played at WinterCon V in 1976, which did not include a
wilderness component.
The meat of the module itself consisted of two levels of caverns, formerly
the abode of the archmage Iggwilv, binder of demons and mother of the
demigod Iuz of the Greyhawk setting. Consequently, the caverns are
home to all manner of strange beasts, many of them former servants (or
slaves) of Iggwilv, now free to pursue their own agendas. This gives the
caverns a strange, almost otherworldly flavor to it, a feeling that lingers
more than two decades later. Despite this, Gygaxian naturalism is in
somewhat attenuated force, with the various inhabitants of the place
doing more than just hanging around awaiting the arrival of the PCs.
Even so, most of the naturalism is suggestive rather than explicit,
depending on the referee to expand upon the brief details given in the
text. That’s part of the fun of this module — figuring out why, for
example, a hill giant keeps a giant rhinoceros beetle as a pet or what the
dao disguising themselves as harem girls are up to.
I suppose the real draw of The Lost Caverns was its 32-page monsters
and magic items supplement. Remember that this module was published
in 1982, before both the Monster Manual II and Unearthed Arcana
ushered in “AD&D 1.5e.” Unless you were a regular reader of Dragon —
as many of my players weren’t — you weren’t familiar any of the new
creatures, magic items, or spells previewed there before their appearance
in module S4. I’ll admit that I loved most of the new material introduced
here, particularly the expanded menagerie of demons and demon lords,
as they were frequent antagonists in my old campaigns. I also
appreciated the new magic items, particularly the Prison of Zagig, which
saw much use in the hands of one of the PCs back then.
For all my affection for the module, it’s a tinged a bit with
disappointment and not a little sadness. Like many late Gygax works,
you can see a definite change in both the presentation and content.
There’s boxed text aplenty in The Lost Caverns and, although it’s mostly
innocuous (compared to, say, Isle of the Ape anyway), it nevertheless
presages a shift toward a hand-holding, pre-packaged style that
eventually turned me off buying TSR adventure modules at all. Likewise,
while I don’t generally mind “more stuff,” S4 feels a bit like an extended
advertisement for upcoming products, notably Monster Manual II. The
original tournament module included, so far as I can recall, no new
monsters and was perfectly adequate for its purpose.
But then that’s the point. By 1982, TSR was changing and the purpose of
adventure modules along with it, as we’d see more fully in the watershed
year of 1983. That’s why, much as I like The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, I
also see it as a harbinger of much I would not like and whose effects
proved far-reaching.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 7 January 2010