New Arrivals

The Stripey Hole by Inner City Game Designs is an old-school indy boardgame in a bag, with pages and pages of rules. The basic idea of being cons in the slammer planning to be the first out either by serving out one's sentence or bustin' outta the joint is a nice one, but to pull it off and include activities like tunneling, crawling through sewer lines and/or air ducts etc requires a bunch of rules I doubt I'll get anyone from today's audience to sit still for.

I found this one at Men at Arms in Center Island and couldn't resist it, or another Inner City game Gargantuan which is an attempt to survive a sinking ship as the decks flood under one's feet. Both these are sold in 8x5 baggies like the old Task Force Pocket Games used to be, have components that must be cut out and eschew color - actually, the standees for Gargantuan are in color, printed on photo paper.

If I said I had a weakness for games produced on a shoestring in someone's front room would I be surprising anyone? Anyway, if you are in New York of a weekend and want to play an old-fashioned board game of easy-to-moderate complexity, give me a shout.

Back in 1977, as my college days were coming to an end, I remember playing a wargame set in South Africa in which players took the part of Black South African rebel forces and White South African government forces as the two sides fight for control of the country still at that point being run under apartheid. I was the rebels. I lost.

The game in question had been given away in Strategy and Tactics magazine. This was an every-two-months publication from Simulations Publication International (SPI) and I often wondered what it would be like to replay it. The nature of the changes in South Africa would lend the game a surreal feel, I thought.

And so it was with some surprise that I found a copy of said magazine c/w an unpunched copy of the game inside on Amazon for a reasonable price. The game is now mine and I await the discovery of a worthy opponent so I can wreck my investment's collector value by punching out the components and playing the game with them.

I miss SPI wargames something fierce. Some of my best friendships were born over those four color maps, including that with Paul, the globetrotting wargamer of previous mention in these e-pages. But most of today's kids are scared of anything with more than a page of rules and won't try such games out.

Also scored a decent copy of Avalon Hill's Starship Trooper, a game put out in the early 1980s depicting the action from the Heinlein book. Like all Avalon Hill games it features a proper ("mounted" in game parlance) board in place of the paper maps of SPI. The humans get to fight two different sorts of alien (not at the same time), and the insectile sort have a hidden tunnel mechanism that looks like it will generate much fun for all.

Assuming I can find a player who isn't frightened off by the rulebook of course.

I picked up a digital handful of pdf game publications too.

More Lankhmar products for Savage Worlds including Savage Foes of Nehwon, a book of characters and adventure seeds featuring them - I have a similar book for Solomon Kane and it was great value for money - and Lankhmer Archetypes, a sort of quick start for players wanting to get a character up and running in double quick time.

I kickstarted into the Weird War I product launch and have a bunch of pdfs for that setting, including the GM and player handbooks and some scenarios, maps, archetypes and so forth. The product seems to be well worth what I kicked in and I can recommend these quick-delivery e-product kickstarters from PEG without reservation. I've been a part of two PEG kickstarters and each delivered in about a month or so.

Lastly, I grabbed me an e-copy of The Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition. Expensive at about $25 plus tax etc but people were singing up the changes, which for the first time since second edition were more than a cosmetic change in the rulebook and some tweaks to make the mythos bits even more unplayable.

I've some very strong opinions about what has been done to the game over the years. I honestly believe that by 6th edition what had been a very simple and easy to play game had become a nightmare of contradictory nonsense, mostly concerned with implementing rules that emphasized a certain set of "realistic" views on certain crucial factors in the game that sucked all the fun out for everyone except for a few moody teens.

But 7th edition was written as an attempt to drag back an audience lost to Trail of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu and umpteen other game systems' <Insert Verb> Of Cthulhu offerings. It has been back to the drawing board and emerged a different beast (or so they say). I haven't gotten too far into it, but already I'm gritting my teeth over certain pesonal hot buttons.

However, I've cut the vitriolic story-so-far I wrote and I'll post a more considered view when I've read it through again.

New Find, New Purchase

Just before we went on vacation to Florida, I came across a game called Splendor, made by Asmodee.

The game is very well made. The components are cards, which are of a nice sturdy quality and printed in many colors, card components on thick card similar to that used by Fantasy Flight these days and by Battleline in the '70s, along with high quality poker chips with card insert artwork to represent the "gems".

Play is very simply explained. On your turn you may do one of the following: Collect three different colored gems into your "personal bank" to a maximum bank of 10, collect two gems of the same color provided that by doing so you leave at least two gems of that color in the pool, use gems to buy cards that are played openly on the table for all to see, and reserve a card for possible future purchasing by taking it into your "hand" and taking a joker gem token (the only way to collect a "wild-card" joker gem), to a limit of three cards reserved in your hand.

Cards are arrayed on the table in three ranks, displayed face up so they may be purchased. Cards offer two features: some have points scores and all convey bonus gems. Cards of the first rank are cheap to buy (typically costing three gems) but rarely offer points. Cards of the second rank are more expensive (typically four to seven gems to buy) and offer points as well as gems. Cards of the last rank are wildly expensive (typically eight to twelve gems) but offer generous points values of 4 or 5 points each. As cards are bought new cards are drawn from face-down decks to replenish the field.

The objective is to have the most points when a player declaration of 15 points owned is made and all the players left in that round have played a turn. Obviously, if the last player on a turn declares she has 15 points, she will win. If the first player in a round declares he has 15 points, the other players have one turn each to pip him at the post.

Players can claim bonus scores by being the first to meet certain criteria and getting a visit from a patron (the game's conceit is that the players are renaissance merchants). Needless to say, this makes for interesting strategic play as players attempt to win or deny patrons to others.

Not only that but the bonus gems on cards can be spent whenever a purchase is made which calls for that color of gem, and they don't get used up by doing so. This means that eventually players are able to claim cards from the first rank without necessarily spending any actual gems at all. This can be a dangerous distraction, or can be a lifesaver when one player has a corner on all the gems of a certain color as a denial tactic.

What I like about this game, and I like it a lot is the overall production values make you want to try it, the simplicity of player options makes it easy to pick up (about five minutes by experience) yet the options available to the player in a game are wide open, allowing for subtle and complex play. Each game is complex, the rules are not. Think of a game of draughts (US Checkers). The moves are easy to teach. But the play can become fiendishly complex. The same holds for Splendor.

I also like the fact that the box holds the components securely so the game can be transported, played and then packed away without losing parts or having to resort to baggies. It drives me nuts when I get a game that will not go back in its box once deployed (Mansions of Madness) or won't stay in it if the box is tilted (Tokaido).

Resources:
Splendor at Amazon.com

New Arrivals

So I went a bit crazy on the PDF acquisition front in the last three months or so.

I began the slow process of converting some paper resources into more space-saving and generally more useful for my commute-friendly RPG research needs by buying Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown pdfs for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, an "old school" RPG very much in the vein or White Box D&D that bills itself as "Weird" while having absolutely no in-game mechanics I can discern to bring on the weird tone at all. I also picked up Hammers of the God, The Grinding Gear and The Random Esoteric Creature Generator. I already had the rulebook. Not sure whether I'll run LotFP. To be honest the game is aspiring to be Solomon Kane is as many ways as I care to notice, to judge by the suggestions in the rulebook itself. The artwork is both disgusting and awesome by terms.

I picked up a metric tonne of original GDW Traveller books in a "Bundle of Holding". Traveller is a game close to my heart and I'm dying to run it in campaign mode again, but I cannot get anyone interested in playing. In any event, the bundle provided the three rulebooks, five expansion rulebooks and a selection of the supplements. Not as complete a set as I would have liked, but not bad at all for what it cost me.

I picked up Stone and a Hard Place and a collection of Trail Guides. These represent episode three of a four part campaign of campaigns for Deadlands reloaded, and a collection of one-off adventures. Stone also contains rules re-introducing the long-gone Deadlands "Hexslinger" character type, and expanded rules that allow a player to play a so-called "harrowed" character. I am still mulling over the content of this volume, and can't say more without spoiling anyway, so perhaps I'll keep a detailed discussion of Stone for another time. In any event, after my attempt to run Last Sons hit player fatigue I am disenchanted with Deadlands campaigns for a bit. Hence the Trail Guide adventures. I'll review those as we play them.

Rippers also arrived, in record time for a Kickstarted project too. Not bad, and people will definitely take to the Gothic Horror/Victorian Steampunk Super Hero aspect of the setting I imagine. There are a few small changes to the original rules (which were included in the bundle but which I had bought recently anyway) alson with some modification of the settings backstory. The ancilliary products that were bundled in, like maps and adventures, were a welcome addition. The usual high quality graphic design is front and center but to be hinest I preferred that used on the older version. The deal included a set of inserts for the GM screen too. Nice.

I picked up a copy of Microscope, a co-operative game involving RPG elements in which the players work to build a history of, well, whatever they decide. It has an innovative approach to what would seem to be an anarchic process, and it can be used to play just for its own sake or, perhaps more interestingly, to arrive at a setting in which to place a home-brewed RPG, especially one in which the players share GMing duties. I'm looking forward to trying out this one, though th eidea is harder to convey as an exciting prospect than I imagined it would be.

I bought Weird War II after ignoring the Savage Worlds setting for years. I was trying to build my own setting and realized I might be re-inventing the wheel, so decided to take a look. The pdf is a far more lavish affair than the last paper copy I had in my hands, with color illustrations to boot! I'll be reviewing this one in more depth at a later date. Given the way the Weird West caught my attention after years of "meh" I may have a new fad on my hands.

While on the subject of Savage Worlds I decided to buy a pdf of the Kerberos Club setting, which I have in paper form and have not really taken much a liking to, but on re-reading find a little more interesting. The setting is Victorian England (my original reason for buying was to increase my library of Space 1889 resources) and the conceit is that of the Victorian Costumed Hero. Think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and you are in the right neighborhood. The paper copy is of rather indefferent quality to be honest, far below the general Savage Worlds accepted standard. In pdf these things matter less. More to come later.

I finally weakened and bought The Vorkosigan Saga, a self-contained RPG set in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Barrayar" universe and a gorgeous production. It took so long to bring it to press it became that rarest of things, a fourth edition setting book for GURPS (for the rules in the book are GURPS-Lite). This is a great thing if you are a buying in hardback (I was an early adopter). Buying the pdf perhaps will inspire me to run a GURPS game for a bit, though I find the though terrifying. It's like trying to interest people in tax instructions. The base rulebooks are hysterically funny, insisting on the essential symplicity and stripped down feel of fourth edition GURPS in a sidebar on a page containing dense type explaining how to calculate fractional characteristic values. But nobody does a setting book like the GURPS guys do, which makes the idea of porting the thing wholesale to a different engine if not easy, at least not a herculean task.

Please note that while I find GURPS unattractive for many reasons as a GM I do acknowledge the awesome flexibility of the engine itself and also the people who built it. An achievemment that is underappreciated by many, including (of course) me.

Perhaps the most unlikely new purchase for me has been that of the Firefly RPG and a couple of scenario books for it. I got one of these in a "for charity" bundle I coughed up for, and was intrigued despite never having been a fan of the Firefly series or the Serenity movie. Some reading, and I was hooked. Hooked enough to start planning a game and start researching by buying and watching the series and the movie on Blu-ray, both soundtrack albums for planned background music (I rarely use music in my games as it usually becomes a distraction, but the "feel" I got from my reading was that it might work positively here. And I buy and listen to soundtrack albums anyway. I also felt the need for a small model of the ship as a focus item for the table. The cheapest way to that goal was the Firefly Yahtzee set, which has a very nice model of the Serenity as its dice cup. So yes, I bought in to the FIrefly game bigtime and can't wait to run it.

And despite my feeling that the Sixth Edition of Call of Cthulhu is the least accessible rulebook for the game ever published, making what should be a simple and quick assimilation by a new GM a tortuous trip through contadictory and confusing nonsense, I bought that in pdf too. I was about to start running Call of Cthulhu again from the BRP rules (I've been running a Delta Green game using the much-maligned D20 rules for more than five years for perhaps the best Call of Cthulhu gamers I've ever had but missed the 20s and BRP experience) and needed an electronic form of the book. I'm using 5.2 for the game itself, but couldn't source that as an e-book for luvner money.

This brings me to the lamentable quality of comparably high-cost Chaosium e-books. Chaosium have been coasting on their quality for some years, with customers acting as appologists for the horribly dated look and the fact that the lack of production values has resulted in every case I've paid for in a book that is functionally useless as an in-game resource.

The products are consistently higher priced than lavish equivalent products from other publishing houses, lacking any sort of relief from the tedious greyscale. Compare, for example, the monochrom but much more interesting Trail of Cthulhu with Call of Cthulhu and you'll come away with a sour taste in your mouth.

Forget the artwork for a moment. Let's look at the way a pdf is navigated. Hyperlinks from the table of contents to the content itself is best, but not essential. Bookmarks are absolutely essential, the more granular the better. These become most useful if they approach index levels of depth, but don't have to go that far, as long as they can be used as anchors in which to page back and forth as a game progresses.

Not one of my Chaosium pdf products has bookmarks, meaning that one is reduced to using "search", just about the lousiest, most useless way of using a rule or setting book in-game. And I'm not talking about old products here. Gold Book BRP, Cthulhu by Gaslight (the latest one that was delivered by the author as an electronic version for Hastur's sake!), Beyond the Mountains of Madness (a magnificent but most of all HUGE book that cries out for bookmarks), House of R'lyeh and, of course, the Sixth Edition Rulebook. All came without bookmarks.

And Chaosium are not alone in "not getting it" when it comes to how pdfs get used by GMs. Wizards of the Coast finally published pdf versions of their D&D 3.5 core books. As locked-down pdfs.

Now you may be wondering who would lock down a pdf of an obsolete version of an RPG which for all intents and purposes is available at a fraction of the cost under a different name in an unlocked format, and so am I. The locking of the pdf means that the GM cannot annotate the rulebook they have just bought (and not cheaply either I might add; Pathfinder is a better buy on cost grounds too). So no highlighting and no post-it notes, something I have come to understand is more than just extremely useful to me as a GM, it is essential. Way to protect your IP, Hasbro. On a game nobody wants to buy anyway. Pfft!

I am told that the Seventh Edition rulebooks (plural, there are now two sold for the game) for Call of Cthulhu do have bookmarks, but I am not remotely tempted to pony up almost thirty dollars for the GM manual to find out. Chaosium have burned out all the customer brand loyalty from me with mediochre and half-hearted attempts to "serve" their audience. There has been a change of management there of late in an attempt to revitalise the company still reeling after a financial misstep in the 1990s (!) but we can still see self-defeating behavior such as floating the Seventh Edition Kickstarter before they had fulfulled the long over-running Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter, with predictable results wioth respect to both products and unhappiness in the backer ranks.

Oh, and I picked up Legend, the pdf that replaces Runequest in the Mongoose line of products (lapsed licence) so I could contemplate running an Elric or Hawkmoon game, but that is way off in the nevernever future.

Fall of Magic Arrives

About two weeks or so ago I took delivery of The Fall of Magic, a project I had kicked into in late May, and a nice item it is too.

The box it comes in is reminiscent of the sorts of games my great grandmother had hiding in the back of her closet. More like the box in which you'd find a tenor recorder than a game. Inside is a really neat idea.

The chief component of the game is the map, which is presented on a linen scroll that the players unroll as they advance through the game, depicting a road and towns along the route, each with four locations picked out. There are counters for the players, cards that extend the map when the players reach "the islands" and a die for the rare random number needs.

The conceit of this GM-less RPG is that the magic in the world is dying. We don't know why. The players are students of The Magus. The Magus is undertaking a journey or pilgrimage. We don't know why. All the things we don't know about the magic, the Magus, the journey and the other players will hopefully be made manifest as the journey progresses.

Each turn a player can move his/her counter along the road to a new location or move the (non-player) magus to the next town. As each player moves, he or she adds a little more detail to the story of the journey, prompted by hints determined by that player's location.

There's a bit more to the game than this, but that is the gist of what the game is about. It is a cooperative storytelling, a cross between Fiasco! and Tokaido to put it entirely too broadly.

This game also represents something of a rarity: a game Kickstarter project that ran for less than a year and delivered what it said it would only about three weeks late. That should make it eligible for some sort of Kickstarter award.

I can't wait to play.

Pictures to follow later when I have time to arrange them; Watch this space.

Cluless In Nottingham

Thirty five dollars for an e-book format Codex?

And it isn't even available as a PDF?

Please stop sending me this nonsensical blither, Games Workshop. If you want people to buy your stuff again you must start getting realistic about how much they have to pay. It simply isn't sustainable to ask people to fork over $70 for a rulebook that then requires at least one $50 codex before it can be used in a tournament. Then there are the armies that cost in the hundreds of dollars to acquire, and the hours needed to assemble and paint the bugger.

And now you are "offering" me the chance to invest in overpriced e-books in formats notorious for markup f*ckups, formats that won't travel well and require a proprietary reader to access?

Still not getting real, chaps. Your heyday is o'er and the hobby you built from nothing is now as moribund as the daft gothic universe you made up to house it all in.

And it all started so well, too.

I guess you all lost the thread, a fact obvious to some when you killed off the bits business. The whole point of the hobby to most of us was the customizing of the miniatures to personal standards using stock pieces from other minis. To have to buy the entire mini just to get an arm or the wings, though, is a plan for millionaires and idiots.

And when you did away with the custom casting business you killed my Imperial Guard army expansion plans. "EBay" said a GW rep when I asked how I was to source stuff. This after two decades of being warned away from "recasters" and fakes.

"Time to die", as Rutger Hauer once said.

Reality Obscures

I just tried accessing the Reality Blurs website in order to catch up on what they were doing. Reality Blurs puts out the Realms of Cthulhu setting for Savage Worlds, among others, and I was looking to see what was new in the swamp.

Big mistake. The website is an animated splat of animate incomprehensibility, approaching Peter Gabriel levels of Function Drowned By Art.

Shame really. I might have been interested in buying something, but I'm damned if I'll fight someone's website to give them money, especially when it is drinking my limited mobile bandwidth like an Englishman drinks beer after someone says "free bar". Sorry, Reality Blurs, massive fail.

No link because if you really want to dip your feet in the toxic sludge you need the practice that searching for it will give you.

A Reboot For A Gothic Horror Classic

PEG are calling for backer on the reboot and rewrite of the spiffing Rippers setting for their Savage Worlds engine.

Werewolves, vampires and Jack the Ripper are examples of The Enemy. The Good Guys fight them, and neutralize The Enemy's (un)natural advantages by ... stealing their organs and surgically implanting them in their bodies.

Unfortunately this causes a strain on the body and mind, leading to organic rejection of the new parts and looming madness. Omelets, eggs etc.

You can get the original version in PDF from DrivethruRPG or RPGNow. It is my belief that these are actually the same outfit with different branding, though I only have personal observation of the sites to back that up.

You can support the Kickstarter project for the new version too.

You will also need a copy of the Savage Worlds core rulebook, which can be had in PDF for for about $10.

This sort of cinematic action/adventure horror setting is exactly what the Savage Worlds game engine was written to handle, so the game should play well. Actual game mechanics are simple to pick up and very easy to mediate as a GM.

The system has its weaknesses, mostly in the way damage has a nasty tendency to snowball at the end of a session because for most of the game players have the ability to shrug off damage suffered by their PCs using "bennies". As the game session nears its end, the players run out of bennies. This tends to manifest as a sudden escalation of PC casualties.

Not only that, players only have three "wounds", the fourth putting them down for the count and possibly killing them (though that is not the most usual outcome). This contrasts rather starkly with other systems that use "Hit Points", systems in which combat is a matter of slow attrition rather than sudden overwhelming catastrophe.

That said, I'm fond of the system for a number of settings, and have been toying with the idea of a short "Rippers" campaign for a while. Now I have a new incentive.