RPGaDay 2023 #31 FAVOURITE RPG of all time

I'm going to go ahead and say OSRIC and the OSR.

While I haven't done a lot of dedicated gaming over the last several years, as I've been thinking and planning about campaigns that I could be running, this is what I keep coming back to.

Part of it is the feeling of accessibility. You're more likely to get players if you say you're running some flavor of D&D, and it's a flavor of D&D that I've become familiar with.

Secondly, there are the storygame elements. It's a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff and that's supported by the mechanics. It can feel janky and limited if you try to treat it as a generic game, but let it exist in its element and it can sing.

Third, there's the wealth of resources. Not only could I run entire campaigns of published modules from nearly every decade, but there are also setting creation and random generator tools for every need.

There are other games that I enjoy playing and other games that I'm eager to try. But in terms of that go-to, pick up like you never left game, for me that's OSRIC.

Fiasco also hits a lot of those points, being easy to pick up and amazing at doing what it does. I think the only reason OSRIC is edging it out right now is that I've played Fiasco more recently, and it's not terribly easy to do a Fiasco campaign.

I have yet to run a campaign this year, in spite of it being one of my New Year's Resolutions.

RPGaDay #30 OBSCURE RPG you've played

I've mentioned The Great Ork Gods, which is probably the most obscure game I can think of. When other events brought it to mind, I had to use the Wayback Machine to track it down.

I did also manage to play in a game using the Arduin system, which was notable in its heyday, but has faded into obscurity. It was run by Mark Schynert, who was a major organizer at DunDraCon and responsible for the assembly of The Compleat Arduin, which has been on my shelf for some time. We didn't use the Arduin fantasy setting, but engaged in a bit of meta fun as we played fictional characters who were pulled from our books. I played a Wonder Woman-esque Amazon (because I am secure in my masculinity and am not threatened by taking on other gender roles), while my wife (who was also in the session) played a romance novel heroine with Mary Sue powers.

RPGaDay #28 SCARIEST game you've played

Posting a little out of order because this was a tough one to write.

I'm not a big horror fan, so I haven't done any real horror gaming. As much as it's a nerd staple, I've never played Call of Cthulhu.

I did have a con-friend at DunDraCon who ran "CthulhuTrek" a Star Trek/Lovecraft mashup, though he wasn't particularly looking to scare anyone, Just enjoying geeking out about his two favorite things at the same time.

Another time, I was honored to play in a one-shot of Vampire: The Masquerade run by Kris Newton that was set in our (at the time) home turf of Humboldt County. My character was the shadow owner of the Eureka Inn and our adventure took us out to an illegal marijuana grow. At the end, my character got cocky and careless and lost his daughter (and human agent) to the machinations of a big city vampire muscling in on our rural turf.

Again, not scary. It was however, a good dramatic time. It set the bar for what I want a Vampire/World of Darkness game to be like.

RPGaDay 2023 #29 Most memorable ENCOUNTER

It might not really be accurate to say Tina, but I'm going to say Tina. While our initial encounter with her was only fairly memorable, the main thing was that she became an information resource as we explored Kris' megadungeon.

Tina was a pixie, which meant that she could cause amnesia with one of her magic arrows. And that's how we encountered her. She hit our party rogue with an amnesia effect, then immediately rushed to his side and begged him to defend her from the rest of the party since she was his wife. It was a tense moment that almost went badly, but thankfully, the sorcerer reminded him of all the times that we made money together. Even if he didn't remember us, he knew that he liked making money and if we knew that too, we were clearly friends.

She escaped, since pixies also have invisibility powers. But whenever we needed some information about what's going on inside the megadungeon, we sought her out.

This amused Kris, because apparently, this fixture of the campaign was something that had started as a roll on a random encounter table.

RPGaDay 2023 #27 Game you'd like a new EDITION of...

 D20 Modern. There have been imitators, but none of them really hit the same spot. Even the most recent successor, which claims some of the same designers isn't really what I'm after. Everyday Heroes, I think it was called.

I had heard about it while it was on Kickstarter and could have backed it, but there were a couple of things that just made me turn away.

Strongly Archetypal Character Options: One of the strengths of D20 Modern was the ability to built the sort of character that you want to (within certain limits) by multiclassing into various broadly themed classes and maybe aiming yourself towards one of the advanced classes as you leveled up. But Everyday Heroes disapproves of multiclassing, setting your character on a path from the beginning. And it's not such a long path either. The classes in D20 Modern only went to 10 levels because it was assumed you would be mixing and matching to potentially make it all the way to 20th level. Everyday Heroes classes have 10 levels and that's the top of your progression.

In it's day, it was a slightly crunchier alternative to something like Savage Worlds, but not as heavy as something like GURPS.

Lack of Cross Compatibility: While Everyday Heroes borrows the chassis from D&D 5e, it does not claim compatibility. One of the perks of D20 Modern is that it was compatible with the then-current edition of D&D, so I could potentially throw my modern day, real world heroes up against a beholder or displacer beast or sewer kobolds.

If they were to do a new version that was wholly compatible with 5e, or just gave the old game a quality of life upgrade, I think I would buy that in a heartbeat.

RPGaDay 2023 #26 Favourite CHARACTER SHEET

It's been a long time since I ran Savage Worlds and swore "Never Again!" But one of the things that appealed to me as I was getting started with it was the character sheet.

There were a couple of things that needed to be tracked in the game, like Wounds levels, Fatigue levels and Power Points for characters with powers, and rather than go the conventional thing and expect players to scratch them out and write in a new value several times a session, they printed those things on the edges of the character sheet. This allowed the player to clip a paperclip to the side of the page and slide it up and down to track Wound levels.

My view of Savage Worlds might be softening, so it might happen that I get to use that character sheet in another game.

RPGaDay #25 UNPLAYED RPG you own

Quite a lot of them, actually.

Though I will say that the most egregiously unplayed game that I own is Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius. I've been a Trekkie for the majority of my life and once I got into RPGs, I've managed to collect all the Star Trek RPGs. But I haven't run a Star Trek campaign in quite some time. That would have been GURPS Prime Directive back when my friend Jorden was a young impressionable lad.

As much as I bemoan the size of my physical collection (at least what I have access to), I do have the Star Trek Adventures corebook at just about eye level on my shelf as I write this. And I have never played it.

Is it my white whale or an albatross hanging from my neck?

RPGaDay 2023 #24 COMPLEX / SIMPLE RPG you play

A lot of what I've been playing for the last few years have been simple games.

Without access to much of my physical collection, I haven't been able to bring whatever big thick book to a session and say "This is what we're doing. Read up!" like I used to. Or at very least be the person who brings the rulebook to the game that I'll be running. And while I do have a number of games in PDF, it can feel like a thin line between sharing the rulebook and data piracy.

So most of what I've been doing has been fairly simple games that I can easily teach with only the PDF in my phone/tablet. InSpectres and Fiasco have been great fun, but the one that I've most recently gotten a handle on is Fate Accelerated using the "It's Not My Fault!" scenario starter cards.

Fate Accelerated has the advantage of not only being a simple game, but one with very inexpensive rulebooks. Well, the PDF is free, but even the printed rulebook is only $5. On at least one occasion, I have ended a Fate Accelerated session by gifting the rulebooks we were using to the players.

RPGaDay 2023 #23 COOLEST looking RPG product / book

 If I had been doing more planning of these entries, I might have held back the Dresden Files specifically for this one.

Castle Falkenstein is certainly a book full of beautiful illustrations. White Wolf and the various World/Chronicles of Darkness games devote significant space to highlighting their settings with introductory sections presented as in-world media. But only the Dresden Files RPG commits so fully to the bit.

The entire book is presented as an in-world artifact. The text is presented as a way for the novel characters to spread knowledge of the supernatural world in a sort of plausibly deniable way, so every word is potentially written from an in-universe perspective. The characters comment on Post-It notes or scribble in the margins. Some pages appear to have coffee stains and other indignities. Illustrations are seemingly included with paperclips.

It can appear busy and messy, but that's the point.

RPGaDay 2023 #22 Best SECONDHAND RPG purchase

I consider myself very fortunate to have located a copy of the original Deities and Demigods from a used bookstore.  It was only $10, so you know I had to buy it.

For those not in the know, the original AD&D supplement Deities and Demigods included gods from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos as well as the gods from Micheal Moorcock's Melnibone. Later printings removed these pantheons due to the complexities of licensing.

RPGaDay 2023 #21 Favourite LICENSED RPG

While I am duly proud of Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, it is not properly licensed. It's based on public domain works, so I didn't need one.

 One thing that impressed me about the Smallville RPG is how it tried to balance its characters. While much ink has been spilled about balancing Superman with Batman, the Smallville RPG was forced to something rather different: They had to balance Superman with Lois Lane. And they did a pretty good job of it.

I also though that the Dresden Files RPG was a good effort. The novels are all written in the first person, from the perspective of Harry Dresden, the only Wizard in the Chicago phone book. To leave Harry out of the game would be missing some of the essential flavor of the novels, but to make a good RPG, you need to have some room for the GM and players to make it their own. Scattering notes and comments from the novel characters throughout the book squared that circle for me, though I am aware that some people disagree with me on that.

RPGaDay 2023 # 20 Will still play in TWENTY years time

Give me a good game and I'll be happy to play it. Doesn't matter how new or old.

 One of the things that appeals to me about the OSR is that it feels like I could run a campaign for 20 years. It feels less daunting and more easily manageable to manage a setting for 20 years than to keep writing plot and backstory for an ongoing campaign of just about anything else.

I'm sure I could find or devise tools for other games and genres. Traveler probably comes close for science fiction, and Since Nomine keeps coming out with sandbox toolkits for the genres that they cover. Maybe I'll be able to give one of those a try.

RPGaDay 2023 #19 Favourite PUBLISHED adventure

I'm going to go ahead and shill Castle of the Mad Archmage for this one. Even though I started on the original version, before it was professionally published, I did snap up the new version as soon as it was available. It didn't hurt that it was very affordably priced.

While designed for it's companion retroclone, Adventures Dark & Deep, it can be used with any OSR game, or the original game.

It let to the longest RPG campaign I've ever run under any system at nearly 5 years of regular play and we didn't quite make it halfway through.

RPGaDay 2023 #18 Favourite game SYSTEM

I do still have a lot of affection for GURPS and would like to get back to it at some point.

I've been pretty deep in the OSR for a while and the idea of managing a sandbox campaign instead of structuring adventures and scenarios has an appeal.

But I think for right now, I'm going to say Fate. My Wednesday group sort of formed around a Fate game and if I were to clear whatever is blocking me, I think I would do something with Fate. Probably sci-fi. I've been impressed with Diaspora ever since I bought it, though it is pre-Core Fate and might want an adjustment or two.

We'll see.

RPGaDay 2023 # 17 FUNNIEST game you've played

Fiasco is a game that has a lot of comedy potential. Most of it is dark comedy, but one group I played it with went straight for the guffaws. My friend Jorden usually ran a variety of games using GURPS (which makes sense, since it was what I used a lot when I taught him how to game all those years ago). But after we lost touch and then reconnected, I was a slightly different person who liked to play games like Fiasco.

And one time, he let me break out Fiasco with his regular group. They had a blast, mostly because they treated it as an excuse to freeform roleplay. Which is fine. But Fiasco is something of a winnable game, with your performance over the course of play determining the final fate of your character in the Aftermath phase, which can be good or it can be absolutely horrible.

Then I invited my friend Alex to play and I finally met someone who plays Fiasco to win. On the one hand, this was pretty easy because everyone else was goofing off. On the other hand, it still requires the other players to buy into the BS that you're laying out. I think I only picked up on it because I've played Fiasco before in other contexts.

It did result in some gut-busting comedy such as a plan to put someone's "nethers to flame!" But there was also something of a secret joke between the two of us who understood the game.

RPGaDay 2023 #16 Game you WISH you owned

 Most of the items on my gaming wishlist have ultimately found their way to me, wither by hook, by crook, or by Bundle of Holding.

I think the main thing missing from my collection at this point would GURPS 4e Prime Directive.

I am a big fan of Star Trek, so I try to pick up all fo the Star Trek RPGs, including the AU/spinoff Prime Directive. I am also a long time GURPS guy, so GURPS Prime Directive was an instant buy for me. The only issue was that it came out not long before the Fourth Edition of GURPS came out.

They did respond with a 4e conversion, but it was still early days and therefore less than great. The main thing that suffered was starship combat. They had put a lot of work into meshing their Star Fleet Universe assumptions with the GURPS 3e starship combat system, but that all went away when GURPS 4e came out without the depth that 3e had developed over the years. There were cursory vehicle rules in the main 4e books, and it would be a while until 4e got that developed, so they sorta limped along with one of their main draws (big ships like the Enterprise) sadly missing.

In the intervening years, it looks like they have found some degree of their footing. There's a new core book for GURPS Prime Directive 4e that's a two volume set. There are more mature starship rules for core GURPS 4e, and it looks like they have made their way into the Prime Directive Universe/

Now I just need to develop the disposable cash to pay for it,. And then maybe get a group to play it.

RPGaDay 2023 #15 Favourite Con MODULE / ONE-SHOT

When I was a regular con-goer (a state of affairs I dearly miss), I ran games and played games and I've discussed just about everything on this blog.

I think the thing I want to talk about this time was the session that Kris Newton ran of The Great Ork Gods. It didn't happen at a con, which means that I haven't written about it here, so this is a new story whether you're just joining us or not.

Kris, my future wife, and our friends David and Jordan were a pretty regular gaming group for a while. I kept trying to run Exalted, and we had some fun with short campaigns, but if I didn't have anything to run that week, Kris often had stuff that he wanted to try and we would play lots of little one-shots here and there.

One of the games was The Great Ork Gods. The mechanics are based on the idea that the Gods that rule every aspect of Ork life hate the Orks. The game's stats are based on how much each Ork God hates each individual Ork and players will also take on the role of the Ork Gods, setting difficulties for various tasks.

This session opened with a fairly standard "Orks raid human village" scenario and we had some fin being Orky for a while.

Then the tarrasque appeared. For those not in the know, the tarrasque was a D&D monster that is supposed to be the most powerful, scary and mythic monster in the whole Monster Manual. Sort of a D&D version of Godzilla.

At one point in this conflict, an elf shows up to face the monster. But it's not just any elf. It bears the trademark halo of a Player Character! (We had something of a running joke about the "Halo of PC-ness" that lets other PCs identify who is a fellow PC and therefore implicitly trustworthy, even on first meeting.)

While even the might of a Player Character and a couple of Orks couldn't truly defeat the terrasque, we did manage to drive it off. Though David's Ork had a spoon as a signature weapon and he managed to use it to scoop out the creature's enormous testicles.

I've thought about running a game of it recently, but with all of the discussions in the time in-between now and then about the presentation of orcs in gaming, I would want to do some rethinking. One idea would be to have the Orks want and try to be nice, but since the Great Ork Gods hate them, every effort at niceness is thwarted.

RPGaDay 2023 #14 Favourite CONVENTION purchase

 DunDraCon was my supplier of just about everything for a good long time. Picking one thing out is a challenge.

At this specific moment, I will go ahead and say Blades in the Dark. If only because I am looking forward to playing a game of it tomorrow night. I've actually scored something of a regular Wednesday group. I played Fiasco with them last week and this week one of the other players volunteered to run Blades in the Dark.

We've done it a few times before, and it's been fun. The real treat would be to admit that we're doing it and build a campaign out of these one-shots and get into the long-term stuff that we've been avoiding.

RPGaDay 2023 #13 Most memorable character DEMISE

I've got a couple of these.

The first is the one that happened to me.

Kyle was a cleric in a D&D 3.5 megadungeon campaign run by my friend Kris. I was determined to "old school" it by describing my interactions with the dungeon rather than relying on dice rolls. This proved to be Kyle's undoing the session when the party rogue didn't show up/

Kyle took it upon himself to do any searching and whatnot that needed doing. So when we came to a door and we asked Kris "Is it locked?"  he asked me "How are you searching?" I tell him that I'm trying the knob to see if it moved.

The door was not locked, but my rattling had alerted the hydra (with some white dragon ancestry. There was a white dragon somewhere that got around quite a bit on that level of the dungeon as I recall) on the other side, so when Kyle opened the door, he was immediately blasted with ice breath.

I took my lumps with grace and rolled up a new character for the next session.

Both of these next stories were character deaths that I oversaw in campaigns that I ran.

The first character death in a campaign I ran would have been Scout. The funny thing is that I was running Cartoon Action Hour as the system, and death is not typically on the table in that game.

But it was the last session of this campaign and we were going for the big finish. The premise of the setting is that in the distant past, a technomagical civilization (similar to a mythic Atlantis) had been invaded by insectoid psychic aliens (Good old invader from Mars). There was an uneasy peace in the setting, but there was trade and other things making all-out war undesirable.

The villain of the campaign was a psychically preserved general who had been revived and sent from the Homeworld to reignite the war and ultimately win it. He had a crystalline body that he was able to operate and inhabit, as well as new war machines. Among these were flying saucers that were piloted by telekinesis.

One of the party members was Scout, who was actually one of the psychic aliens who had grown up on this planet and his Queen didn't want the war to restart, so he teamed up with the rest of the party to stop the General's plans.

Since Scout was an alien, he did have the ability to pilot the flying saucers. So during the big climax, he sneaks aboard one of the flying saucers and commandeers it. I assume he's going to use the craft's weapons (telekinetic force rays, I think) on the general, but he declares that he is 100% crashing the flying saucer into the General.

I decided that was suitably dramatic that it made a good death for a game that didn't normally include death and also cued up my CD of the soundtrack to Transformers: The Movie (the good Transformers movie) and played The Touch by Stan Bush.

Some time after that, I started my Castle of the Mad Archmage campaign, having no idea how long it was going to go.

Fairly early in, I had invited Scout's player. a friend of mine named Mike, to join us. He rolled up a gnome thief/illusionist named Bentley, who went into the dungeons under the castle with Ashlee's ranger who everyone just called Boots/

The reason the character was called Boots was because of her Strength score. It was 18/76, which put her in the second highest possible bracket for Strength. Her chance to kick down doors in the dungeon was nigh legendary.

One of the doors that Boots kicked down had a small room full of animated skeletons behind it. Battle ensued and Bentley got himself into the fray quickly. Boots had a tougher time, since there were so many skeletons to fight. Ashlee asked me if I would let Boots get into the room where the skeletons were, so she could fight them properly. I told her that if she could defeat one of the skeletons, I would allow her to move into its space immediately. This should have been pretty routine, since her Strength also boosted her ability to hit and damage enemies.

But then she rolled a 1. The worst possible result! To make things interesting, I said "Ouch! That means that you have a chance to accidentally hit Bentley instead of a skeleton. Make another roll to hit."

Natural 20. Best possible result. Double damage and a free toaster! (Well, maybe not the toaster) Even just doubling the flat bonuses from her Strength score was more than enough to put Bentley below 0 hit points. Allowing her to roll the damage from her weapon would have been overkill.

It was such a surprising and unexpected turn of events that even though Mike had just lost a character, he was laughing in surprise with the rest of us.

RPGaDay 2023 #12 Old game you STILL play

Well, I could talk about the OSR again, but I think I'll hold off for now.

I think this might be time to talk about my strange fondness for D20 Modern.

It's funny because I will kvetch all day about D&D like it needs to get off my lawn, but D20 Modern gets a pass.

There are three major factors that really work for me over other iterations of the same rules.

1) The treasure treadmill is gone. At least in the 3.x era of D&D, there was an assumption that, in order to be "properly balanced" at each level, the characters had to have a requisite amount of treasure, gear and magic items. This is not present in D20 Modern, taking an extra layer of planning off of my mind.

2) Magic is optional. While D&D magic has always felt artificial, it's fine if it's happening in a fantasy world. Bringing that into something that's supposed to feel like the real world doesn't work for me. But D20 Modern has set the magic system aside as an optional feature, so that's just fine.

3) Cross compatibility. Probably one of the big things that I like about D20 Modern is the cross compatibility with the then-current edition of D&D. While I'm not a big fan, it does mean that there's a whole trove of material that I can use if I want.

One of my favorite things to do was to use it for a "Tabloid World" style campaign, where the magical, mythical and weird stuff from D&D was lurking somewhere just outside the everyday.

I ran a one-shot in this vein within the last year or so, so I think it counts as a game I still play.

RPGaDay 2023 #11 WEIRDEST game you've played

I think the weirdest game that I've played would have to be the Spaceballs one-shot that I played at DunDraCon one year. Not just for the wacky hijinks (It's not every day that you get to hit someone over the head with Spaceballs the Frying Pan), but the fact that the system they used was derived from Burning Wheel. To be clear, they did a fair bit of hacking with it, so it wasn't the deep, intense roleplaying experience that fascinates and intimidates me about Burning Wheel. Mostly, it was just the dice rolling mechanic and the notion of scripting combat moves.

Either that or the system behind Heckin Good Doggos. That took a lot of handling. Once you get your dice, you then get a pool of points to manipulate your rolls based on the relevant stat, with options for before and after you actually roll the dice. And then opposed actions don't use dice at all, but cards. And since I got the quickstart version of the rules for Free RPG Day, it wasn't clear how to determine difficulties for either the dice or cards and how to decide which mechanic to use outside the activities set out in the scenario (which was not very good).

RPGaDay 2023 #10 Favourite tie-in FICTION

For the most part, I've never been a fan of game fiction. A portion of it is that most if it is fantasy, which I am not a major fan of. Another part is the fear (which may be completely irrational) that they will read like transcripts of a gaming session, to the point that I can hear the dice clattering in my head as I read.

I tried reading the Avatar Cycle, a trilogy of novels set in the Forgotten Realms, but couldn't make it through the first book. It was dry and dense and just didn't do it for me.

Then I found a novel set in the world of the Pathfinder RPG written by Robin D. Laws called The Worldwound Gambit. I had been listening to his podcast for some time, and enjoyed his game writing, so I decided to take a chance. It was very satisfying. You could clearly understand how the characters fit into the structure of the game (who was a sorcerer, who was a rogue, etc.) without having it be defining and without hearing the clatter of dice as they did their schtick.

RPGaDay 2023 #9 Favourite DICE

Probably my favorite dice came in a giant box a number of years ago.

This was before I moved down to San Diego, and my brother was visiting. We spent some time catching up, but it turns out that since he lives right in the Seattle area, he attended the PAX convention that year. While he's more of a computer/video gamer, PAX has something for everyone, including stuff for tabletop gamers like me.

On the last day of the convention, he told me, he was touring the dealer's room and noticed the dice booth. Along with neat little plastic boxes with dice sets, and silly loose dice, there was also a bin of scoopable dice. For a certain fee, you could scoop a coffee cup and walk away with all of the dice you catch. A slightly higher fee would let you do the same with a beer pitcher.

Being the last day of PAX, the bin was running pretty low. Thinking of me, he said to the person running the booth "I know you don't want to carry those extra loose dice home with you. What would it take to sell me just the remainder of the dice in that bin?" Since it was the last day of the con, and the vendor didn't want to carry that home with them, they worked out an equitable arrangement that left him with a box full of nerd dice.

While his company was the most valuable present, the box full of nerd dice was a very nice bonus.

Over the last year, I've been bringing the box to my Meetup group meetings and sharing them with the people who come. I think helps new people feel welcome, and definitely makes the dice goblins happy.

RPGaDay 2023 #8 Favourite CHARACTER

I don't get the chance to play many characters, since I'm so often the GM. But I think my favorite character was the one I played the longest, in Dan's D&D game that I mentioned earlier this month.

Konrad was a barbarian. I wasn't going to the "X the Barbarian" naming thing. I just didn't give him a last name, so people just kept saying "Konrad the Barbarian." I stopped fighting it eventually.

Dan did a very cool thing as a DM. He would give characters a random magic item when they started out. For Konrad, he rolled a +1 undead bane warhammer. It was very cool and gave him a cool focus.

That went off the rails once Dan started running the original Ravenloft module. There's a fortune-telling scene at the beginning and one of the things determined in this scene is that one of the heroes is actually carrying the fabled Sunsword that can defeat the evil vampire Strahd, and it turns out that it's Konrad.

Konrad points out "But I don't have a sword. I have a hammer!"

The fortune teller takes Konrad's hammer, flips this, pops that and suddenly, it's a blazing magic sword.

I am so proud of Konrad's response and I love telling this story to this day.

"You broke it! Now it doesn't hammer anymore! Stupid broken hammer!"

RPGaDay 2023 #7 SMARTEST RPG you've played

 This would have to be GURPS.

Not only are the rules designed to relate to the real world as much as possible, using physics and real-world measures as much as possible, but they are also renowned for their historical sourcebooks that lean on historical research first and fictional tropes second. Their Cyberpunk sourcebook was based on research and consultations with hackers of the time, which got the company raided by the US Secret Service.

 Even their original settings focus on solid, realistic-feeling world-building. Their flagship fantasy setting includes not only elves and orcs, but also Christians and Muslims. Their Technomancer modern-magic setting tries to explore what would happen if magic had replaced atomic energy as the fuel of the latter half of the 20th century, while still keeping things somewhat familiar.

And the variety of sourcebooks is also impressive. There are even online tools that generate campaign ideas by making random selections of the available works. I've even run a campaign that was inspired by that process.

RPGaDay 2023 #6 Favourite game you NEVER get to play

There are a number of games that I've been excited about but maybe only played once or twice, or not for a very long time. I was big on GURPS for a very long time, and still have my collection, but I haven't played or run GURPS in the longest time. I still have a strange affection for d20 Modern, even though I've only run it a few times. Over the last year or so, I've gotten to give Fate a serious try, so it doesn't really count.

I think the game that has excited me the most that I still haven't given a serious shot would be Burning Wheel. I got the book years ago on the recommendation of Ken Hite and was impressed by the sheer density of it. But ironically, that's the thing that keeps me from playing it. It's so dense and you have to take it so seriously that I can't really see it as something that I could run for a one-shor, or for a group of strangers. I feel like i would need a stable group who were all on board for what the game has to offer. Especially after I moved, I didn't feel that I had that.

Things are looking up, but not there yet.

RPGaDay 3023 # 5 OLDEST game you've played

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

While most of my Old School gaming has been via retroclones, I did manage to become a player in a game run by an unreformed AD&D DM who ran from his books that he's had since he was a teenager.

I had been running my megadungeon game for a while, when one of my co-workers mentioned the D&D game that she was playing in. Since I was using OSRIC, I was pretty sure that she was not playing D&D the way that I was,so I asked a few questions. I don't know if 5e was out at the time, so I figured that they were either playing 3e/Pathfinder or 4e (or maybe something else, since a lot of people say that they're playing "D&D" when they're actually playing some other game. No shame. I do that too.). But the answers to my questions did support the notion that it was indeed another Old School campaign.

So the DM of that campaign wound up playing in my game and I got an invitation to his and it was great fun. The only reason I stopped is that I was moving to San Diego.

RPGaDay 2023 #4 Most RECENT game bought

The most recent game I bought was Fate Condensed.

I've had an investment in Fate for quite some time. It may not have been the new hotness when I finally bought it, but Spirit of the Century was still pretty hot. I've had a copy of Fate Core since I picked it up at DunDraCon the year it was released. I've been picking up copies of Fate Accelerated left and right and giving them as gifts.

While I've been aware of Fate Condensed for some time, I hadn't gotten around to picking up my own copy. Finally, I got a chance to play in a Fate game run by San Diego local gamer/novelist Tone Milazzo and his primary reference for the game was Fate Condensed.

That did it. I finally went to Bards & Cards, my Friendly Local Gaming Store and requested that they order a copy of Fate Condensed so I could buy it from them. And so I did.

RPGaDay 2023 #3 First RPG BOUGHT (this year)

 I've been pretty sparse on my RPG buying the last few years.

Since my wife and I moved to San Diego, we've been living in her in-laws' house. It was supposed to be a temporary situation while we got jobs and got ourselves established. That was 4 years ago. Admittedly, at least one of those years was 2020. So between the financial issues and the assurance that we'll be in our own place "soon," taking on piles of new stuff has not been a real priority.

Not to say that I haven't bought anything. And I do wish that I was buying more.

I backed a couple of Kickstarters last year, and they finally arrived this year, so I don't know if they count. Notably the Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG Kickstarter. It's got so much stuff, including a pile of tchotchkes and feelies that I'm still afraid to open the box for fear of losing some small collectible item.

I also got my print copy of the Atlas of the Latter Earth, a setting supplement for Worlds Without Number, the fantasy version of Worlds Without Number.

I have also picked up my share of free stuff. I got a good dose of Free RPG Day swag. When the local RPG Meetup holds their swap meet meetings, I'm usually open to taking home whatever people don't want to bring home once they've sold what they could.

RPGaDay 2023 #2 First RPG GAMEMASTER

My first gamemaster was a guy that I'm pretty sure was named Chris who lived in Culver City when I was living in LA. While I found him on the internet due to his interest in GURPS, when I reached out to him, he was starting a Rolemaster (affectionately known as "Chartmaster") campaign. My future wife and I only made it to a couple of sessions before transportation logistics just got too stressful to keep up with.

 My first long term GM was Dan, who ran a 3rd edition D&D campaign right when the books came out and there was a lot of interest. I'm sure I've told tales of Konrad the Barbarian before. The only reason I stopped playing in that campaign was because my future wife and I were having a rough patch, so the DM disinvited me to minimize table drama. We did eventually reconcile (and get married), so things did work out.

I want to say that my favorite GM was Kris Newton. Before he was a pretty awesome podcaster, and now a father, he was just a local gamer that I knew. He was usually up for whatever I wanted to run, but also ran some pretty good and interesting stuff of his own. I'm sure I've told the story of the time that our D&D party got pwned by a bard. That's the sort of thing that he excelled at.

RPGaDay 2023 # 1 FIRST RPG played (this year)

The first game I played this year was at the January general Meetup of the San Diego Roleplaying Association.

As is typical, there's a period of hanging out and catching up with everyone, meeting the new faces and grabbing some lunch. Although the prices have gone up in the past year, the location still has a very reasonable lunch menu.

But then, it's time to game. Prospective GMs are encouraged to come up in front of the gathering and pitch the game they would like to run. I think I had tried to pitch my "All Outta Candy Canes" one last time. (I should have it ready for this Christmas season, I'm sure), but got no takers.

So I went with one of the other games that was on offer. One of the other regular GMs, named John, was offering a one shot using GeneSys, the generic version of the system underlying the current Star Wars RPGs, set in the setting of the Dragon Prince animated series. (There is an officially licensed Dragin Prince RPG that uses the Cortex Prime system.) 

I recall that my character was a human sorcerer using Dark Magic.Mostly because the Dark Magic spells are English words and phrases spoken backwards, Zatanna-style.

I wasn't expecting to play a GeneSys game, so I didn't bring my GeneSys dice. But there is a convenient dice rolling app, which I grabbed for my phone (I still have it installed, though I haven't used it since).

It was actually my first time playing a GeneSys game since I played that Star Wars demo game back at DunDraCon all those years ago. Back then it felt like the dice were putting out too much information for the GM to handle, but John was a bit more into it, letting us add details as our dice gave us differing amounts of successes, advantages and threats.

Maybe a little too into it. Or maybe it was just a one shot and he wanted to make sure we got to have a complete story. But it felt like we were playing on easy mode. Maybe one day, I'll get to play (or run) a campaign using GenSys.