Thank You, Ralph.

A shout out to my friend Ralph, who has lived far away from me for Lo! these many years.

We vacationed in the Poconos this year on account of a hurricane wiping out our Florida plans (hence, no reports of an expensive visit to the local friendly game store this summer) and managed to swing by Ralph'n'Cate's place in Pennsylvania before departing for home. They have a beautiful house in a wonderful neighborhood, but that's a subject for a different blog.

What gets a mention here is that Ralph was extremely generous as we left for home, gifting me with two fine game products: the remade Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu ¹ and something I hadn't seen before: Gumshoe: Cthulhu Confidential , which is a special rewrite of the Trail of Cthulhu rules for one player and a GM.

These fine gifts shall not go unappreciated, and Cthulhu Confidential is scheduled for a detailed reading in a couple of weeks, after the Planet Mercenary RPG playtest.

So now I need to find a platform that will support Ralph and my long-distance gaming interests. I'm thinking Google hangouts.

1. which I'd seen but steered clear of on account of having the original and not believing Chaosium would ever deliver on the Kickstarter² ↑
2. And in fact they almost didn't but for the intervention of some "angels"↑

So What Am I Playing These Days?

I'm GMing Delta Green once a month.

On the first Saturday of any given month I gather with a few people (currently down to 3 others, but there have been as many as 8 others at the table in bygone days)  and we play out a modern day, conspiracy-theory heavy cross between X-files and Cthulhu Now using the D20 version of Call of Cthulhu.

I picked D20 in part because I wanted an action/adventure feel for the campaign, but mostly because I was using the whole Delta Green thing to challenge my assumptions.

Call of Cthulhu GMs tend to be reactionary sticks-in-the-mud who cleave to the BRP or Nothing mantra. BRP, or Basic Role Playing, is the system from which Call of Cthulhu is adapted and it is a simple-to-use game engine that lends itself to quick uptake.

A character has less than twenty attributes to take care of, most of them derived from the core attributes generated by rolling dice in the familiar RPG manner, and a list of skills he/she selects to reflect competences in various disciplines. The list can be a tad arbitrary depending on the published version you are using, and GMs are encouraged to use it as a springboard rather than a finite limit on what can and cannot be achieved by a character.

BRP advancement involves identifying the skills used "successfully" by characters and allowing attempts to increase these skills at an adventure's end.

D20 is a rather more complex affair, adding (some would say "larding") to the richness of the player character build-outs with experience-earned "feats" that give characters special abilities above and beyond the skills the system also offers. D20 also has the hated "levels" that are a legacy of the D&D RPG that started the ball rolling and which drive the BRP or Nothing Brigade to apoplexy.

Advancement in D20 involves the use of "Experience Points" that are collected until one has enough to "level up". Once a player increases a character's level, that character gets more hit points, gains increases in various bonuses (to attacks and various "saving throws" that grant reprieve from pitfalls, mental attacks and poisons to name but three) more feats and points towards the purchase of more skills and so forth.

I picked D20 and Delta Green five years ago as a way to open my mind to two things I'd always turned away from without really thinking about it. I didn't care for the incredibly detailed background of Delta Green, never really found that end-of-the-millennium paranoia to my taste to be honest, and had the standard BRP or Nothing GM's stance on Call of Cthulhu.

But I had the books, and the D20 book had some rather good ideas in it. Moreover, it made the whole business of players being able to access the ancient and maddening books of magical lore much more like the original first edition of the game. Later editions had strived to make the business of reading a magic book and being seduced by the lure of power something that took so long no player would ever consider doing it. One book famously takes over a year to read!

I had long held that the model for this nonsense was "obviously" derived from the story The Dunwich Horror, but that story is really detailing the process of Magical Research rather than a straight reading.

The BRP way of dealing with books is also intended to be a "between sessions downtime" thing, something I hadn't realized until I read John Tynes' way of doing things, which is not only an in-game affair but is more evocative and just all-round better in every way than the stilted and rather pedestrian BRP loss of sanity between sessions method.

A few games saw players being lured in and coming, inevitably, to bad ends for the best reasons and doing so from the most altruistic drives. It was wonderful, and the sense of wonder was back in the game. I was happy.

I also liked having the possibility of mass combat with modern weapons actually be manageable. I wanted to be able to model 50 debased inhabitants of Innsmouth chasing panicked investigators armed with Glocks through the streets at dead of night with the fog rolling in off the ocean.

BRP GMs scream another old mantra "If you are using combat you are doing something wrong" but that is an overly broad interpretation of the game's reality and contradicted by the content in the published scenarios and campaigns, just about all of which feature combat prominently.

There is a school of thought that the reason people don't fight in Call of Cthulhu is tha the combat system doesn't work very well. It is derived from a rather persnickety combat system intended to model hand-to-hand combat with edged weapons and shields, and really doesn't port well into a "scared academic with a pistol" scenario, let alone the "four ex-marines with advanced tactical training and mac-10s" scenario.

D20's combat system addresses those concerns by providing a robust combat system that can be played out on a grid (BRP Call of Cthulhu didn't even specify the speed character could move, making a mockery of the old joke about Call of Cthulhu player characters having higher "flee" rates than shooting skills - everyone moved at the speed of plot.)

It turned out that just about all the concerns BRP GMs were using as places to stand and dig in their levers were non-issues.

The hit points thing ("The PCs end-up being God-Like") is simply not true. The D20 rules have and always have had something called a Massive Damage rule, which is a level of damage inflicted at which a character must take a Fortitude Save - Difficulty Check 15 - which if failed is instant death. The monsters have the same rule, but the damage threshold is 50.

This means that you would have to inflict 50 points of damage in a single attack to stand any chance of killing a powerful thing from hell, but it would only have to cause ten points of damage to you - and almost forgone conclusion and one that had people dropping like flies until they learned to keep their distance from the nasties. Just like they do in BRP.

As for the levels, well, the players tend to be irretrievably mad or so fragile they'll go mad at the drop of a tentacle long before they become "Godlike". There are only so many things man was not meant to know you can look at before you are about as stable as a three legged cow.

And the game has become fun again. If you check out the forums you'll find them depressingly full of people claiming that their players "don't get" Call of Cthulhu and that they can't seem to scare up a game these days. The evidence is right there in front of these GMs - no-one enjoys the rather sterile experience of Call of Cthulhu as it has become. I also couldn't scare up a trad Call of Cthulhu game, but people were eagerly waiting each month for the Delta Green game. I had players who fell into the lure of Eldritch Power with predictable results. I had players gleefully treading the path to madness. All having fun doing so.

And that game has generated more deep immersion "buy in" than any other I've run. The sheer effort the players drove me to at times to provide them with challenging and interesting mysteries was exhausting. I've throttled back a bit, running some published scenarios rather than home-brewing them, because I couldn't sustain the mental effort any longer.

All from a setting and rules-set I had initially thought worthless.

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.

Some Thinks About BRP

I like the fact that BRP has an APPearance stat rather than a nebulous CHArisma one. I think it more accurately models something people react to the first time they see someone: their physical prettiness or ugliness. It is a stat that is helpful when it comes to roleplaying where Charisma isn't. It is a stat that give lots of traction to a player trying to bring the character to life.

Recent rewrites of BRP derived games have replaced APP with CHA. The latest version of BRP derives CHA from APP directly. I think both of these are wrong and miss a rather neat point.

Charisma in real life often works at odds with a persons appearance, but we don't ignore that appearance when we interact with an ugly or deformed charismatic individual. A pretty charismatic is more appealing than a homely one.

My thinking about this was long and twisty but finally zeroed in on three BRP characteristics: APPearance, INTeligence and POWer (defined as a person's "inner reserves", Chi, what-have-you). My thinking is that charisma could be expressed in terms of a combination of these stats, derived from them. Let's talk cases.

Bill Clinton: Highly charismatic, highly intelligent, good looking (so I'm told), very centered but poor impulse control - lets say moderate inner power.

Alistair Crowley: Highly charismatic, highly intelligent, very average looks, high inner power (we might suppose).

Hitler: Highly charismatic, distinctly average intelligence, good-looking by the standards of his day, very driven (high power).

Now admittedly the sketches above are highly subjective but they are based on other people's assessments I've noted over the years (but cannot cite of course).

Anyway: I was thinking that perhaps charisma might be arrived at by averaging the APP, INT and POW characteristics, which allows for people who are ugly (in some way) and yet still fascinating.

Lets take a case:

STR 9, INT 13, SIZ 12, APP 5, POW 15, DEX 8, EDU 13. This is a character of average strength, above average intelligence, big, distinctly homely, possessed of high inner/psychic resources, a tad clumsy on occasions and educated to around A-Level (associates Degree) level.

The BRP charisma stat for this character would be 25%, for too low in my opinion given that outstanding POW. Lets average out APP, INT and POW rounding down, giving 11 which converts to 55% in the BRP scheme, which multiplies by 5.

Conan: POW ~ 10, INT ~ 9, APP ~ 18 - Charisma from BRP: 90% Charisma from my figures: 60% (His attraction is all about his looks).

James T. Kirk: POW ~ 16, INT ~ 16, APP ~ 18 (can't argue with the man himself) BRP Cha: 90% My value 80%

So. Hmm. Not a finished system perhaps, but definitely better than "APP times 5".

Why do I care? I play mostly Call of Cthulhu, which is played using a stripped-down BRP. In that game it seems to me that first impressions are highly important, it being at heart a detective game. I need a way to express "The guy has terrible wounds, obviously a result of some WWI injury, but you can't help but feel a strong fascination for him" and "This woman is drop-dead gorgeous but there is something repellent about her".

Something else occurs to me: Charisma is used to modify NPC reactions to PCs in negotiations and interractions. Call of Cthulhu (and by extension BRP) models this mechanism by the skills "Persuade" and "Fast Talk".

All this suggests to me that BRP doesn't need a Charisma stat as much as other systems do, and providing one can be done without throwing out the existing stats in the interests of political correctness.

Azathoth forbid anyone should admit there are ugly people out there.

Another Amazon Box Arrives In The Mail

This one contained the Basic Role Playing hardback (the so-called "Gold Book") and the pocket edition of A Song of Ice and Fire.

I normally buy my stuff locally, but I wasn't really jonesing for BRP badly enough to pay RRP and the deals on each of these were so good it was too good to pass up.

I've been using BRP, or one version of it, for about thirty years now in my Call of Cthulhu games. I used to keep a copy of Runequest with me for those times when the Call of Cthulhu version failed to deliver (typically in combat). Runequest was the original game from which BRP was derived.

I started a voyage of discovery about a year and a half ago in which I deliberately sampled many new game systems. GURPS, Savage Worlds, D20, these were the initial focus of my experiments.

Savage Worlds was a spectacular success. I have reservations about some aspects of the system, but the benefits it offers as far as easy adoption and rapid assimilation along with the obvious enjoyment of the players have made his a new favorite with me. I have become known as something of a Savage Worlds evangelist at my LFGS (Local Friendly Game Store).

GURPS was fascinating but scary. Characters take forever to build in this system, but the realism possible using it is incredible and the flexibility of the engine for powering the incredible number of settings is legendary. It seems that Steve Jackson Games is not in the business of Setting books any more - there's only one I'm aware of (Vorkosigan Saga) in a fourth edition, er, edition. In any event, the rulebooks are terrifying to me now. When I was thirty I would have lapped this stuff up. Now, I don't have the time or the mental agility for it.

D20, the old workhorse, has proved surprisingly flexible while at the same time proving that the GM must be aware at all times of the level-based abilities, even in a game where XP are sparse. D20 Call of Cthulhu has proved popular, but I think I may be close to breaking the game because of my earlier carelessness in adjudicating advancement awards. We'll see. I'm not scared of D20, but I think Savage Worlds offers much that D20 does at much less cost in brain cells.

But of late I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about with the Gold Book. The price was right for me to explore BRP in depth again. Who knows where that will lead? As I skimmed the book I found myself pondering different games I could run using BRP...

Maybe I'll do a port into BRP that I was intending to do as a Savage Worlds port.

In any event, I'll post my thoughts here as I browse.

A Song of Ice and Fire was purchased because I signed up for a game just to see what the fuss is all about. I'll let you know what I think after I've had a chance to digest it.