The DunDraCon Review 2017

Masks: A New Generation is a teen superhero game using the Apocalypse World engine. All of these things sounds really cool. I picked this one up because not only did Ken Hite recommend it at his seminar, but the One Shot podcast played it on a recent episode and they made it sound really cool. And it is. It is also one of my major disappointments this time around.

One of the strengths of the Apocalypse World engine is that each character type has their own character sheet that includes every rule they will ever need. This works because those rules (called moves) are very spare and very specific. 1 or 2 pages of information is all you need to play that character in that game for as long as your campaign lasts.

The flaw here is that neither the character sheets nor any of the rules that are on them are reproduced in the physical book. In the section discussing the different character types that the game uses, it's basically "This is a cool character type to pick if you want to X" with a side of "They come with cool ability Y so you can do Z" with no way to know what anything actually does.

Of course, like all modern games since the dawn of the internet, you can download the character sheet from the internet, which does have all of the rules on it as expected. But to have this be mandatory in order to get core rules of the game is incredibly annoying.

Epyllion is another Apocalypse Engine game, this time themed around dragons. You play as dragons of varying types, but the overall playstyle is a little more My Little Pony: dealing with relationships and solving small problems. There is a War of Shadow in the setting's backstory and the implication is that Shadow is a corrupting influence. Preventing the next rise of Shadow is all about seeking out the small evils of life in Dragonia before they have a chance to grow into the corruption of Shadow.

Bubblegumshoe: This is the new hotness of the year. A teen detective game in the vein of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or Veronica Mars using the Gumshoe mystery RPG system. On top of a streamlined version of the basic Gumshoe rules engine, it also has extensive rules for relationships and a detailed social combat system. In fact, there's very little to support physical combat in the game.

One of the things that this game takes pains to point out is that you're playing teenagers, who don't have the same freedom of action as adults and much less freedom of action as an adult in a heroic, action-oriented career. When guns come out, it is serious business and any teen detective should take that as a cue to get out of that situation.

The writing feels modern and casual, without using a lot of slang or "of the moment" lingo that is going to make this feel dated in a year or so, so it should appeal to actual teen fans of teen detective fiction. Bonus points for being inclusive, with the sample characters being ethnically diverse and mentions of characters in non-heterosexual romantic relationships.

I was also able to pick up both Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents in the Buyer's Bazaar, making this year a real Gumshoe-a-palooza for me.

On the subject of Cthulhu, the copy of Call of Cthulhu went directly to a friend of mine, as did the Song of Ice and Fire RPG and a copy of the D&D module White Plume Mountain (I'm sure it's in the picture, but it's very thin, so you might not see it), so I didn't have the opportunity to develop an opinion of them.

Myriad Song (not pictured) is a space opera game from Sanguine Productions, publishers of IronClaw and a couple of other furry RPGs. This game, however, is a departure from that. All of the races are aliens. Sure, some of them are dog aliens or spider aliens, but there are also some really interesting alien aliens, as well as humans and robots available as playable races. I haven't seen the second edition of IronClaw, but the mechanics of this game remind me very strongly of the rules variant used for their Usagi Yojimbo game.

The setting is not specific about where in space and time it is compared to us, so it could be our far future or it could be like Star Wars and its "Long ago in a galaxy far far away." The Myriad Worlds were run by an empire known as the Myriad Syndicate. The Syndics were a race of advanced beings that had mastered the art of xen-harmonics, which enabled them to do all sorts of amazing things. They even had the ability to imbue beings with xenharmonic powers via genetic engineering, so the same principle that powers the setting's space drive can also enable your character to teleport and so on.

Then the Syndics disappeared. Their technology still functioned, but the ability to manufacture or repair it went with them. Various factions struggle to fill the power vacuum, including a faction that is trying to keep the universe in order for the Syndics eventual return.

Rounding out my GURPS collection, I picked up a couple of adventures. Adventures are not a big part of what GURPS does, so these were interesting finds. School of Hard Knocks is a superhero adventure written by Aaron Allston, who did a lot of work with Champions back in the day, though my primary exposure to him was his novel Doc Sidhe. I thought this adventure was interesting because the script calls for the PCs to win some fights, but lose others. While you can't guarantee outcomes where dice are concerned, it seems like an interesting break from the assumption that the heroes must be successful in every encounter.

Bili the Axe: Up Harzburk is a solo adventure to support GURPS Horseclans. The format is fairly similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but sometimes where the story goes is dictated by a die roll rather than a choice. The storyline here is actually a military campaign, so it could definitely be run as a group adventure as well.

While I haven't had the opportunity to find any of the Horseclans novels since I bought the GURPS Horseclans book last year, I have read some of Robert Adams' other writing. I have little interest in tracking down any more of it.

Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles RPG from Palladium Books was an interesting read. Palladium had the Robotech RPG license back in the 80's, but it seems that they have reacquired it about 10 years ago. The new book is "manga-sized" to catch the eye of the new generation of fans. The order in which the material is presented is odd, starting with game stats of the Invid, who are presumably the primary enemy in the Shadow Chronicles (making this the game's "Monster Manual"), followed by details on the humans and their mecha with the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of the game coming in very last. While it makes sense to catch the eye by starting with the good stuff and things that build the setting, it feels a little odd (and maybe even refreshing) to my experienced RPG-reading eyes.

Also from Palladium was After the Bomb, a supplement for their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. It features an alternate, post-apocalyptic setting for the game, in which Gamma World's weird gonzo mutants with 6 arms and 2 brains and psychic powers are replaced with mutant animals of various kinds. There's a sample adventure included featuring a conflict with a cadre of rabbits with punny names, such as Bug Bunny and Gun Bunny.

A standalone After the Bomb game was released after Palladium let the TMNT license go. Maybe one day, I'll find a copy of that somewhere.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is an Old School RPG who's primary gimmick seems to be randomness. Players are encouraged to create a plethora of level 0 characters that then go through a "character funnel," a starter adventure that will kill off most of them. Once they have proven themselves worthy, they then achieve level 1 and gain a class.

The magic system is the most random thing in the game, with each spell having its own table to roll on which can determine if you cast the spell and exactly how much bang you get out of it. Spell failures lead to misfires and corruption, each with its own table to roll on. But fighters also get their own critical hit and critical miss tables to roll on during combat.

Warriors of the Red Planet is another OSR game that takes a different approach. Rather than a big sprawling book, it's a very slim volume. It covers only the barest essentials while letting your imagination do the rest. 4 classes with simple mechanics, a few maps and random tables followed by an interesting bestiary and you're off to the races.

The publisher had a few other OSR-style games at his table, but I picked Warriors of the Red Planet because I thought that sword and planet adventures were something that was right up the OSR alley without being too beholden to classic fantasy.

The picture also includes the Adventure Time Fluxx card game, making Adventure Time one of 2 franchises where I have the Fluxx game and the Munchkin game (the other being Oz). Also another Noteboard. Now that I have 3, I have the same surface area as my conventional battlemat in a form that fits in my pocket(s). Though it did wind up being roughly the same cost.

I was very disappointed in the lack of Star Trek merchandise available this year. Notice that there are no Star Trek shirts among the stash (though there is a cool Star Wars one, but that's my wife's). If you look closely at the white bag shopping it has little Enterprises on it, and the lining is command gold. I also got a bag with a Walking Dead fabric featuring the show's logo and a grasping hands pattern. That's another gift for another friend. (If you are my IRL friend, I will spoil you with convention goodies. Just saying.)

The black bag is actually a very deluxe dice bag called a d-bag. Not only is it nice and sizeable for dice collectors, it also has smaller pouches inside it, so you can keep your cool dice sets together without keeping them in their bulky plastic boxes.

I did, however, jump on some of the other Star Trek merchandise where I found it. I know the guy in the bottom right corner is not from Star Trek, but if you don't love the Flash Gordon movie where Queen did all the music, then we just can't be friends.

The DunDraPost 2017

As is my tradition around here, I'm writing about my annual trip to DunDraCon. As I mentioned previously, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road did not have a presence there this year. So this was more of an actual vacation than the working vacation it's been the last few years.

Unlike last year, there was very little to criticize about the trip. Everything went fairly smooth, with connections occurring in a timely manner and no expensive redirections. In spite of the fact that California's weather has been pretty rough this week, my wife and I made it through the trip without getting thoroughly soaked.

Friday was the first official day of the con, but it's usually more of a warmup to the main event that is Saturday and Sunday. Check out the people selling used games for a song in the Buyer's Bazaar, check if there are any cool seminars on Day 1, that sort of thing.

This year came with a new wrinkle, however. It turns out that my younger sister was living just a few hours drive from the convention location. She reached out to me on Facebook and we met for a late lunch/early dinner during the lull in con activities. It was also a good chance for me to finally meet her new husband. I had met him once previously, but only for long enough to shake his hand before they moved away.

Since her husband is from India, we went to an Indian restaurant. (If I were to talk about my family more, we'd probably have a very Modern Family sort of vibe.) I hadn't really had Indian food before, so this was my chance to try it out.

We made it back in time to discover that the official Dealer's Room was open. It normally isn't open until Saturday morning. We wasted no time in making our initial purchases of new stuff.

Then it was time for our game. Yes, "our." My wife and I had signed up to play in the same game. It was a game using the Arduin system, and I knew my wife was a fan of the setting. And it was run by someone who was close to the original designer, who has passed.

It was not what I expected. My reading of the Arduin books in my collection, including some written by the fellow running the game, was of a sort of pulp/sword and planet/fantasy world. What we got instead  was a metatextual genre mash in which the characters were self-aware protagonists of bad, half-written novels who wind up traveling through each others stories. My character was a Wonder Woman sort of superhero, while my wife got a character that was a joke about Mary Sues, who could bend the narrative around her to her wishes. It actually came in handy a few times.

If you've played RPGs long enough, you'll meet the guy who says that their game of choice can do anything. Even if it's some old game that use different dice for different things, some rolls you want high, other things you want to roll low on. But because this guy has been playing this one game for the last 10+ years, he's achieved a sort of bond with the system and knows how to fold, spindle and mutilate it to get the results that he wants. This was one of those sorts of games.

On Saturday morning, I did not play in the annual Mythos Trek game. Not that I didn't want to. It's always been great fun. I was not assigned to the game by the convention's Sorting Hat. It happens sometimes. I could have just shown up and probably could have gotten in that way. But it was early in the morning and the nearest fee-free ATM was about a mile away, which meant about 40 minutes of walking before I could have my morning coffee. (I know I can use my bank card to just buy coffee. But limiting myself to cash that I pull from the ATM ensures that I pace my spending so I don't run out of money on the first day.)

I took advantage of the free time during the day to get some shopping done. As per tradition, I'll spare you the boring details in this post and then go into some exciting details about what I bought in a separate post. Needless to say, I am overall rather happy with my purchases this year, with only a few disappointments.

It also meant that I was free to catch some of the seminars in between bouts of game shopping. Ken Hite did his typical City Building seminar, this time with a post-apocalypse theme. Then shopping before a seminar on indie RPGs by Jason Walters, the guy who runs Indie Press Revolution. I'm regretting not staying after the seminar to introduce myself, since I do sell my game through his company, but I had signed up for a game that was starting immediately after the seminar on another floor of the hotel.

And that game was Mecha vs Kaiju, a setting for Fate Core. Although I didn't realize it at the beginning of the session, but the GM was the setting's designer. Always cool when you can do that sort of thing. The other fun thing is that we generated our characters during the play session.

As I've said before, most con games I've played in have used pregenerated characters. The interesting thing this time was that Fate character generation can be an intensive process. Not a lot of math or anything like that. Just a lot of examination of "Just who is my guy, exactly?" And part of that process is talking with your fellow players and figuring out "Just who is my guy to you, exactly?"

Needless to say, this took a lot of time, so the adventure proper was very simple. The formation of a sentai team, told in 2 fight scenes with some exposition in the middle. It was fun, but a little frustrating. My concept was of a guy who is very modest, but keeps finding himself in the middle of events. But the sentai fighting style that he wound up using was very showy and uncomfortable for him, so at the end of the session, I declared that my characters was officially the "Sixth Ranger" of the team.

Sunday morning was my wife's chance to play in a game without me. Another Fate game, this time using pregenerated characters in an established universe. The Steven Universe, actually. (If they don't call it that, they should.) My wife went in wanting to play Amethyst, but after some negotiation settled on Steven's friend Connie.

While she did that, I checked out Ken Hite's "What's Cool" seminar and adjusted my shopping list accordingly. Which did lead to one of my disappointments, but more on that later.

We then spent the evening taking advantage of the hotel pool and doing a little pre-packing to make checking out in the morning a little easier. We actually bring an extra, empty suitcase along with us that always makes the return trip full.

Time Out!

For those of you wondering if I will be at DunDraCon this year, have no fear. Unfortunately, Adventures in Oz will not be there in an official capacity. It seems that real life intruded at just the wrong time and I missed the event submission deadline this year. Unofficially, if anyone wants to play Adventures in Oz, I and my adventure notes will be there and there's lots of space in the Open Gaming room.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on expanding my podcast listening to the System Mastery podcast. They review old and (best left) forgotten tabletop RPGs with a healthy dose of humor.

It should also be noted that they have a few biases and pet peeves regarding the games that they review. The one that I want to address in this post is the requirement of extensive downtime, especially with regards to healing and recovery. It was a common feature in games for quite some time and some treatments of the subject are indeed worthy of mockery (How it's discussed in the Prime Directive RPG is something of a running gag for these guys).

But it doesn't have to suck. I ran an Old School campaign for many years with all of the downtime rules switched on and that was overall a success. Here's a few tips that I've picked up from my experiences.

1) Give every player a character to play. The first time I did this was back in my Cartoon Action Hour campaign. The party was split, with only one character remaining at the site of the big set-piece battle I had devised. So I decided to give each of the players whose character was not present a temporary character to play for that battle.

For the run of my Old School campaign, each player had several characters, some of whom were in downtime at any given moment. When the characters were high enough level to attract henchmen, those henchmen were also available as alternate player characters while their main character was unavailable.

2) Make downtime worthwhile for everyone. My earliest experience here was kind of a bad one. By Third Edition D&D, most of the required downtime rules from earlier editions had fallen by the wayside, except for those required by wizards. Spellcasters still had to take time out to make magic items, like scrolls and potions, as well as to add newly acquired spells to their spellbook. So for the megadungeon game that Kris Newton ran, the party wizard tended to be something of a drag on the rest of us. It didn't help matters that we had a rival party exploring the dungeon, so whenever we took downtime, we felt the need to negotiate with the rival party to keep them out of the dungeon as well.

I had better luck running the Pathfinder version of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. By the time i got that organized, Paizo had published their book Ultimate Campaign which featured, among other things, a detailed downtime system. Now, while the spellcaster was making magic items or was otherwise holed up in their sanctum, the rest of the party has activities that they can do as well. Earning a few gold pieces, building credit with the locals, or even catching up on experience points for when the player misses a session.

3) Use downtime to provoke dramatic choices. At least some of the problematic treatment of downtime, specifically as it relates to injury, is the assumption that attempts at recovery must happen immediately after the injury. But what if there are still things to do in the adventure? The System Mastery guys suggest that the injured character must go into recovery mode immediately and the player must avoid the gaming table because their character is functionally useless.

But what if the character doesn't go immediately into recovery? While I didn't have this happen due to injury, I did have players make the choice to not take the downtime required to level up immediately in my Old School megadungeon game. Because leveling up not only takes time, it takes money in those rules. In the early levels of the dungeon, there was not a massive amount of treasure, so it did sometimes happen that a character would earn enough XP to advance in level, but not enough money in the bank to pay for the training.

In a slightly different game, that could be a dramatic choice. If the villains of the adventure are working on a timetable, the heroes will have to act quickly and decisively to thwart them, which may not leave significant time to heal up between fights. The big fictional example is the first Die Hard film (The only Die Hard film I've seen). John McClane is increasingly battered in his fights with Hans Gruber's henchmen over the course of the film and the increasing difficulties those injuries cause him are not shied away from. And since he is isolated in the building, the best he can do for healing is some improvised first aid.

The Burning Wheel RPG makes this sort of decision a little more interesting. Since skills only advance in those rules when they are used for increasingly challenging tasks, characters are encouraged to attempt more difficult things. But there are also a lot of mechanisms for making tasks easier. The result is a tension between making the task you're rolling for hard so you can advance your skill, or get lots of help so the roll is easier and you're more likely to get what you want.

When a Burning Wheel character in injured, they take wound penalties to their die rolls, making things harder until they recover. So again that tension comes into play. Do you take the time to recover and remove those penalties, or do you accept the penalties and use them to make tasks more difficult and therefore more likely to improve?

Any other thoughts on making downtime a more natural and interesting part of your game?

Not What I Wanted, But It'll Have To Do

Of course, once I am home from the con, it's time for me to tell you all about the cool stuff I bought. Unfortunately, I didn't buy very much cool stuff this year. The main reason for this was a lack of core product for sale.

For example: One item that was really big this year was the Dracula Dossier, a supplement for Night's Black Agents, a game of spies versus vampires. But there were no copies of NBA to be had. After listening to Ken and Robin plug this thing all to heck on their podcast, I was looking forward to closing that gap in my collection and adding on the new hotness in one fell swoop. But it was not to be.

Supplements tend to be a tough sell with me. I either have to be running the game or sufficiently impressed with the game just by reading it to throw more money that direction. I also enjoy checking out new ideas in gaming rather than dwelling too much on the same thing.

Buying supplements also makes me feel like I'm doing a disservice to you, my dear reader. I know not all of you are tabletop gamers. Recommending a supplement to people who haven't bought the core system is like recommending DLC for a video game that other people might not have. But it seems to be what we have to work with this year.

Rifts: 3 Rifts books (and one Rifter magazine) made it into the collection this year. South America 1 and 2 written by  C.J. Carella, the one Rifts writer I've found that doesn't suck. Other Rifts fans may disagree with me, but I think his overall body of work outside of Rifts is pretty impressive and his work within the Rifts universe maintains that standard.

Men in Black: One of only 2 core rulebooks I picked up this year. It was released to tie in with the first film, so it's a pretty slim volume. It was published by West End Games using a version of their D6 System. Needless to say, I bought this one used from the Buyers Bazaar.

Doctor Who: Having picked up the Fourth Doctor sourcebook last year, I thought I would pick up some more Doctor Who supplements. So this year I got the sourcebooks for the Second and Third Doctors. The Third Doctor is pretty much my favorite Doctor, though mostly for his supporting cast rather than the specific virtues of Jon Pertwee. His era featured my favorite Master as well as my favorite companion, Sergeant Benton.

These books are something of an exception to my rule of not recommending supplements. If you are a fan of classic Doctor Who, you will find something to like in these books.

DC Universe: Another vintage buy from West End Games. I've owned the core book for some time, but this year adds the Metropolis and JLA Sourcebooks to my collection. Most of the content of these books are character write-ups with game statistics. There are interesting bits of history and setting details buried in there as well.

Licensed superhero RPGs seem to rely fairly heavily on the existing characters of the franchise. Which really sets them apart from nearly every other RPG out there. There might be a blog post in there somewhere, but for now, it's just an interesting observation.

Inner Sea Races: The wife's pick this year. I don't mean to imply that she only buys one book a year. She makes a number of game buying decisions over the course of the year. DunDraCon is just much more of a vacation and chance to play for her. Inner Sea Races is primarily a "fluff" supplement detailing racial and ethnic groups in the Inner Sea region of Golarion, the default setting for the Pathfinder RPG.

Golden Sky Stories: This is a game from Japan, translated into English and the second and last core rulebook I bought this year. It calls itself "Heartwarming Roleplaying." The characters you will create are henge, animals with magical powers, including the ability to transform into a human. The system doesn't use dice to resolve tasks, but instead gives you points to spend on your actions. These are Feelings (for mundane actions) and Wonder (to use a henge's magical abilities).

You are rewarded for helping humans with Threads and Connections to help you on later adventures. Every now and again, I'm tempted to add a more complex relationship system into AiO. But I think that exploration and discovery are major themes of the stories, so a mechanical bribe to stay in one place doesn't seem right. But for this game, it seems to work fine.

The animated films My Neighbor Totoro and Pom Poko are good inspirational material if you are going to run or play Golden Sky Stories.

Munchkin Adventure Time: Without as many RPGs to buy, I picked up a few card games. This version of Munchkin features not only monsters from the land of Ooo, but also gives you the opportunity to play as your favorite Adventure Time heroes (or their cross gender fan fiction counterparts).

The Dungeon Crawl expansion offers another new card type: Dungeon cards. These offer neat bonuses and penalties based on locations.

Fluxx: I had previously purchased the Oz version, so I decided to pick up the Zombie and Cthulhu versions of the game. The main twist here is that both of these games feature "Ungoals," which work just like Goal cards, but if their conditions are met, the bad guys win and everybody loses. However, there are also cards you can play in order to "switch sides," making a victory for the bad guys a victory for you, too.

Deck of Fate: An accessory for Fate Core. If you can't get your hands on those funky FUDGE  dice, this is an interesting alternative. The main deck can be used to simulate a roll of the dice and each card also contains a small bit of description related to how high or low you "rolled." There are 2 additional "arcana," mini-sets which are supposed to be inspirational, but I don't see much use for them at this point. Maybe when I get around to running Fate.

And yes, that is another Noteboard on the top of the stack.

 Just because my wife doesn't buy a lot of games at DDC doesn't mean she doesn't spend money. There was a nerd crafts booth, where my wife got me this: a wooden medallion with my name written in Gallifreyan burned into it.

And a new addition to my collection of Star Trek nerd shirts.

DunDraCon 2016!

Hey there, blog fans! My slump may be slowing down my blogging, but it's not keeping me from taking my annual vacation (and marketing opportunity!). The reason that I haven't been liveblogging, or taking many photos this year is that I've actually been too busy gaming and having fun to tell you all about it.

Well, it wasn't all fun and games. The Greyhound bus that was to start my wife and I on our adventure on Thursday started out about a half hour late. We arrived in San Francisco probably about an hour and a half to two hours late. The BART train was still running, but by the time we got to Pleasanton, the last bus had already left. So a $4 bus ride became a $25 cab ride. It was past 8 PM when we finally got to the hotel, so all we did after that was to get some dinner and go to bed.

The one perk of this trip was this: a license plate I spotted in the McDonald's parking lot during our meal stop.

I understand that only 1 person in the state can have a license plate that says "BATMAN" and that the early bird catches the worm. I almost thought this guy remembered the '90's and Bart Simpson as Bartman, but then I noticed that there was more than one R on the plate. All I can say is ERMAHGERD! IT'S BRTMRN!

We had reserved Thursday night at the convention hotel. Even though the con didn't start til Friday, they were good enough to get us convention pricing on the night before. Thanks to that, it actually came out cheaper than the Best Western we laid over in last year.

Friday is when the fun officially began. Not only was it the first official day of the convention, but also the first time I ran my new scenario, “The Winged Monkeys of Oz” (it's a tentative title, but they're a big theme in the adventure, so it works). I was actually kind of surprised that it was scheduled for the “P” session, which players could only sign up for on the convention website before the con actually began. As it was, I got three signups and 2 no-shows. But I also did get 2 “crashers,” people who had not signed up, but hoped to play anyway. In this case, a mother and her 10-12 year old son.

This session was probably the most fun I've had running Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. I think mostly because the characters being played were Toto, the Scarecrow and Bungle the Glass Cat. Accomplishing some of the tasks the adventure requer ired while being so small and having no opposable thumbs was an entertaining challenge. And because the adventure wasn't as structured as I typically do, (though more structured than Jaded City) there was just enough room for me to feel comfortable improvising.

And not long after that was my first opportunity to have fun as a player and not worry about all the things that a Narrator has to worry about. The game was set (somewhat) in the universe of the classic TV show Lost in Space. The players were portraying the crew of the Jupiter-1, the testbed for the technologies on the Jupiter-2 which would later house the Space Family Robinson.

The system was a variant on Classic Traveler and we all rolled up our characters before we began. It was actually something of a fun twist, since most of my experience has been with pre-generated characters. Most modern systems offer more detail and depth, but that makes generating a character a time consuming process that you don't want to do if you're only playing the character once. But by using an older system, we were able to build our own characters fairly quickly with instruction from the GM.

Though like the Space Family Robinson, we were sabotaged by Dr. Zachary Smith (though he didn't get stuck on board like he did when he would later sabotage the Jupiter-2). Our space warp drive misfired and we wound up way off course around a planet we had no reason to believe even existed.

I won't spoil too much in case that GM runs it at another con, but there were natives where we didn't expect there to be natives and the main trade goods we could think to offer them were Pop-Tarts in their shiny mylar packaging (which matched our space suits). It became something of a running joke throughout the adventure.

I think I managed to get a full 8 hours of sleep between that and my next game, which was Whitney Preston's Mythos Trek. I might not have. There was fun, but I don't know if it was quite the degree of fun we could have had if I had been more present. There's also the fact that I had to take some time out from this session to make sure that the Dealer's Room was stocked with copies of Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

To make sure there were no hiccups this year, I brought some copies of my game so that the vendor would have inventory. The operator of the booth got stuck in traffic for a few minutes and his booth didn't open when the Dealer's Room did. But that's the worst that happened. I checked back at the booth a few times (and bought some things, too) and people did buy it.

There was a game immediately after the Mythos Trek game that I was interested in attending, but I realized that I had to take some time to help polish my wife's adventure. It was her first time trying to run Fate Core. Her tastes normally run to Pathfinder, but then someone had to make a setting for Fate called The Secrets of Cats, featuring magical cats protecting their humans (whom they think of as Burdens) from various supernatural nasties.

The morning led to another run of The Winged Monkeys of Oz, with a full table. There were a couple of crashers, too. Two players were even daring enough to create their own characters. I use the AiO Characters Pack for my pregenerated characters and that includes 2 blank character sheets. I've offered several time to allow players to make their own characters, but this is the first time anyone took me up on it.

We picked up Prince Nawer, a Field Mouse Noble and a cowboy version of the Scarecrow with a lasso, a pop gun and a magical stick horse. I didn't note his name and he took his character sheet with him when the game was over.

Once another successful and enjoyable Oz adventure was had, there were only 2 hours until it was time for my wife to present her adventure. My wife and I are very different people. It's part of how we get along so well. I'm a planner and she's an improviser. So every year when she runs an adventure, I'm the one who tears his hair out trying to make sure that she has some idea of what she's going to do. Then I hand her the framework of an adventure (always far less than she needs to run it, IMO) and then she goes in to the room and improvises an entertaining adventure for all.

I offered to stick around and sort of assist her with the system, but I quickly realized that having 2 G.M.s was making things more complicated, not less. I stuck my nose in a few times to make sure everything was okay, and it seemed to be doing alright. The way Aspects work in Fate Core is always a learning curve, but it seems she did fine and the players had a lot of fun.

Since Sunday was Valentine's Day, the rest of this very full day was dedicated to a romantic dinner and other such things. The only thing we didn't do was take a swim in the pool. We don't have ready access to a pool back home, so it's one of the things my wife looks forward too every year. So we made a point of taking a quick swim in the morning before breakfast. I can't swim, but I love looking at my wife in a swimsuit, so I hang out in the shallow end while she cuts loose. It's a win-win.

My wife says I have great legs. So for Valentine's Day, I wore a kilt for her. Here's a photo of me for all those fans of me, sexy men's legs and kilts.

From there, it was a very smooth packing-up process and I am writing this from the Greyhound bus that is the last leg home. There are still things to discuss, such as what I bought this year and my design process for the first new Oz adventure in quite some time. But I think those are blog posts for other days. Hopefully soon.

The Annual Review

Now to tell you all about the awesome stuff I picked up at this year's DunDraCon! I know it's been a while, but once I got home, the daily grind has just been really grindy. I do have a couple of other things in the pipeline that I hope to be able to get out, but getting this out is kind of symbolic.

We do often pick up a number of non-book items at the con, and this year we decided to show them off a little.I've been feeling my Star Trek fandom rise in my breast lately, so I picked up a Stat Trek t-shirt with all of the main ships from the Star Trek TV series' (on the left end) and a Star Trek dice bag with the classic Enterprise and logo (roughly center). My wife got the rainbow dragon dice bag on the right, and between my shirt and dice bag are a couple of shirts that she got representing the D&D classes of monk, rogue and wizard.

I was actually able to round out my GURPS collection a bit.

GURPS Ogre is a roleplaying setting book for the popular miniatures combat game Ogre, also by Steve Jackson Games. It has a very tough job ahead of it, since the Ogre supertanks that the setting gets its name from exist on a level far above any mere player character. Loaded with weapons up to and including tactical nuclear weapons, going up against one in anything less than another supertank is an epically bad idea. And although they are artificially intelligent, and therefore, theoretically, playable as a character, they would only really fit in a party made up of Ogres.

GURPS Espionage is another really interesting book that tries to balance the trademark GURPS detailed research with the expectations we get when we watch a James Bond movie. It succeeds for the most part.

GURPS Cyberpunk Adventures is probably the first GURPS adventure book that I've managed to get my hands on. It is of particular interest to me as a historical artifact. While I've never gotten the opportunity to play in the cyberpunk genre, I have read things on the internet by people who have. One of these things I have read is that current cyberpunk games (Shadowrun, as it's pretty much the only cyberpunk RPG still standing) are more focused on interacting with megacorp politics, while older games and adventures focused on protecting the little guy from megacorp politics. And not just in a broad way, but by helping a specific person against the machinations of an evil megacorp. Two out of the three adventures in this book are very much in that mold. The third is a identity-questioning mindscrew that I would probably have to run to fully understand.

Ultimate Psionics was my wife's pick this year. I've never been impressed with the psionics rules that have come out for D&D 3.x. It feels like an alternative magic system rather than anything that I would call psionics. But if you're going to use an alternate magic system in Pathfinder, this does look like the book to get. It's actually a couple of prior books from Dreamscarred Press rolled into one, given a slight update and using the font that Paizo typically uses for the titles of its books (as well as the word "Ultimate," which has appeared in several Paizo titles) to make it look a bit more "official" even though it isn't.

The Emerald Spire superdungeon was released as a tie-in to the upcoming in-development MMO Pathfinder Online, and it intended to be something of a preview of the game's content. The main way this shows through is in the listing of "quests" to be completed within the dungeon. I came away from the product rather unimpressed, if only because it's merely a superdungeon rather than a full megadungeon. Sorry, but I find that I'm spoiled on that front.

Noteboard is a simply brilliant product. It looks like a sheet of notecards laminated together into one piece. And that's pretty much what it is. But that's what makes it brilliant. It folds down small enough to fit in your pocket. One side is printed with both a square grid and a hex grid, so it can work as a battlemat. Because it's so inexpensive, you can do things to it that you would never put your battlemat through. Tack it to your wall. Cut off a piece. If you need a bigger mat, just buy another one for another $10 and double them up.

Fate Freeport Companion is one of those chocolate and peanut butter ideas; Two great tastes that taste great together. Bringing the fantasy setting of Freeport to the Fate system. The Freeport setting has been around for quite some time, first appearing in a trilogy of modules for the then-new Third Edition of D&D, and expanding outward. I did pick up the original adventure trilogy, but very soon after got burned out by the d20 glut of the early Aughts, so I haven't seen all that the setting really has to offer. Like a lot of other Fate products, it uses a "hack" of the Fate Core mechanics, trading out Fate Core's skill list for the classic D&D ability scores. Race and class are loosely supported, with suggestions for race and class stunts and aspects, but the book insists on nothing.

The only thing missing from the book is Freeport itself. Readers who want to explore the city of Freeport are recommended to the Pirate's Guide to Freeport. I can't say I feel cheated, though. The mechanical gimmicks provided can be used for a wide variety of fantasy games using the Fate Core system. There are stats for several monsters and a loose conversion guide for bringing over any monster from the D&D monster manuals that you want to.

The next two items are minisettings for Fate that were produced as part of the Evil Hat Patreon project. I find myself liking them a bit more than the slightly flashier Fate Worlds product they put out as part of their Fate Cote Kickstarter splash. For one thing, they hack the mechanics a bit less. When I looked over Fate Worlds, they had some really interesting ideas, but most of them had their own skill lists and other custom mechanics. It felt like I was learning a new game every time I changed setting, which seems like the opposite effect from what a universal system should achieve.

The Secrets of Cats is a game of playing cats as the secret defenders of the human race. All of the nasty horrors you've ever dreamed of are out there, and it is up to the neighborhood's Parliament of Cats to stop them. Cats can also learn certain magical skills to protect their humans. While the book claims a diverse number of inspirations, the main thing it made me think of was the Bunnicula series.

Aether Sea features magically empowered sailing ships in space, but it feels only a little bit like the Spelljammer setting, and a bit more like a reskinned Traveller. There's not so much swashbuckling against evil and more of a focus on running your ship and keeping it together in classic "Free Trader" style. It is intended to be used with Fate Accelerated Edition and uses the Approaches method of building characters. Fantasy races are implemented by giving each race a "favored Approach," including humans (who get "Flashy"). Rather than providing a bonus to make your favored Approach more awesome, it instead provides a safety net. You can never score a result of less than 0 when you use your favored Approach.

Beyond the Supernatural is an interesting beast. On the surface, it looks like a "follow the leader" game, tracing the footsteps of Call of Cthulhu. It's billed as a horror game, and there are rules for insanity (or at least an insanity table). But if you actually read it, it feels more like proto-Rifts than anything else.

Most of the setting flavor comes from a single narrator within the setting. Here it is paranormal researcher Victor Lazlo, while Rifts would get historian Erin Tarn. The discussion of ley lines, places of power and dimensional rifts sets up the pins that Rifts would knock down a few years later. The psi-mechanic class also seemed to presage the Techno-Wizard from the Rifts RPG.

I'm not sure I could really call it a horror game. I'm sure people have gotten some awesome horror experiences while playing it. It seems more like a game of psychic investigators (both investigators who are psychic and also the fact that they investigate psychic stuff) that hang around near ley lines waiting to get sucked into other dimensions.

Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is the newest boxed RPG that I own (as well as the second Doctor Who RPG). There are boxed D&D campaign settings on my shelf, an old FASA Star Trek RPG boxed set, and the Pathfinder Beginner's Box (the previous title holder). It is a very densely packed box. There are 3 books in this box, the Player's Book, the Gamemaster's book and an Adventure book. I got the Eleventh Doctor edition, so it came with character sheets for the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory and River Song, as well as a number of partially filled sheets and some simply blank. Below that are perforated sheets that break down into item cards representing major pieces of gear from the Doctor Who universe and Story Point chits. There are 6 six-sided dice packed so tightly that the box doesn't rattle at all. I get the feeling that, if I ever played the game and broke down the perforated sheets and rolled the dice, I would never get it to fit neatly back in the box again.

There are rules for making your own character that do not involve arm-wrestling the GM (a particularly amusing rule from the other Doctor Who RPG I own). Although the rules do feel like Eden Studio's Unisystem, there are apparently enough differences that neither C.J. Carella or Eden Studios are mentioned in the credits. You can create Time Lord, as well as simply human, characters. Although the game does not assume you will be playing the Doctor and his companions, there is the assumption that your characters will have the run of space and time to adventure in.

Doctor Who: Fourth Doctor Sourcebook uses a rather interesting conceit in how it presents the material. It is formatted mostly like a series guide, going through the Fourth Doctor era of the show story by story (Not episode by episode, as each story took between 2 and 6 episodes to tell). But along with the story synopses, it includes notes on adapting each story into an adventure for your group, along with stats for major supporting characters and villains. They even suggest twists in case your players have actually watched the show and know what's going to happen. There are also story hooks for further adventures based on ideas presented in the televised stories.

The book also includes playable stats for The Fourth Doctor and his companions, including Nyssa and Tegan, who I don't really count because they only appeared as his companions for his final story. I think of them more as Fifth Doctor companions who were introduced early.

13th Age looks like an attempt at "epic" D&D, from one of the designers of D&D 3rd Edition (and a bunch of other guys, none of whom are Monte Cook). It's very streamlined, with very little of the traditional D&D bean-counting. No worrying about rations or torches and spell-casters have rather small, but potent spell lists. Characters do not even track experience points to determine when they level, but instead simply gain a level whenever the GM decides that they've earned it. While they do offer some rough eyeball guidelines, the fact that each class only has 10 levels means that each level is a significant jump in power.

It does have some interesting bits to it. Most notably the idea that each character has "one unique thing." This is not really a power, but instead is something that is always true about the character. This can have impacts on the setting, like declaring that your character is the One True Fizzbin, or the Only Schnozzwanger in the World, but mostly feels like color.

The other neat thing about the game is the idea of Icons, major NPCs that run the world. And every character has some relationship to at least one of them. This doesn't mean that one of the most powerful people in the setting is your buddy, or even your friend. Just that you're on each other's radar.

Remnants is an interesting, but very small post-apocalyptic mecha game. The world achieved an incredible Golden Age, but was then cut down. All that's left now are Remnants, pieces of the previous world. Some of them still work, others don't. The most common functional Remnant is a slightly-larger-than-man-sized mecha, known as a Battle Remnant. They are self-repairing to an insane degree and are even able to adapt and change in response to circumstances. The longer a single individual holds a Battle Remnant, the more powerful it becomes. But if the Battle Remnant changes hands, it reverts to its "factory defaults" and it will customize itself to the needs of the new pilot, whatever those may be.

The setting provided is fairly loose, with many unanswered questions for the GM. It even leaves the nature of the apocalypse and the Remnants as open questions. Was the Golden Age a technological paradise and the Remnants built of adaptive nanotech? Or was it a magical wonderland and the Remnants are extremely powerful magic items?

Legends of the Wulin is a game that tries to emulate the Wuxia genre. I'm not a fan of the genre, mostly due to lack of exposure, so I can't really comment about how well it accomplishes that goal. The setting is conveyed very loosely in the form of "Loresheets" which can represent factions, philosophies, or locations. The idea is that characters can purchase them during character creation and draw various benefits from them, from privileged information to special kung fu moves.

I feel like I would have to play it to give it a proper grok. The entire book is written is a fairly flowery style, probably trying to emulate Chinese poetry. The mechanics seem simple, but the way the books' language breezes along, I'm sure I'm missing some details.

DunDraCon Days 4 & 5

The past few days have been so packed that I haven't been able to take the time to tell you about it.

When last we left our intrepid hero, he was just about to run his adventure for the Teen Room. When I got there (yeah, I know. As fun as that opening line sounded, I don't think I want to write this whole thing in third person) I found a full table waiting for me. Including the two presenters for the seminar where nobody showed. I had the time to talk to them about the game as part of our conversation that night, so they decided to give it a try.

Overall, the game went well, and the party came up with an amusing solution to the final problem. There's typically some variation in how the players handle the problems presented in the adventure. Most groups come up with fairly typical solutions to the problems presented, but the final encounter is very open ended and demands a unique solution.

The Jaded City of Oz is a city so magical that they're not entertained by much anymore. In order to get into the city, the players have to demonstrate that they have something unique and interesting to offer. That night, the player who had the Shaggy Man (I use the Characters Pack to provide pregenerated characters to play) used the Love Magnet to romance the guard into opening the gate.

We started at 7 PM and finished the adventure at around 10:30, which wound up being bedtime for me.

The next morning was nice and easy, with very little to do. I wasn't scheduled to run my game for grownups until 2 PM, so I took advantage of the morning to get some shopping done. I'll tell you a bit more about what I got and what I think of it in another post, once I've had proper time to digest it all.

I had a full group by the time I showed up. One player had announced that he would not be arriving, and I believe that one other person who signed up simply did not arrive, but I had two girls turn up to see if any slots were available. Since there were, and I wouldn't have minded squeezing a few extra players in anyhow, they both joined the group. That left us with 4 females and 2 males (a father and son team if I'm not mistaken) to start off the adventure.

Both of the guys picked the Soldiers, Omby Amby and Private Files, and I got the feeling that they were expecting a more traditional, action oriented adventure. They did find some action and eventually got into the swing of things.

The girl who picked Prince Inga played him as haughty and overbearing, but it was fun because she kind of expected the trouble she caused. Between the encounters in the Winkie Country and the Gillikin Country, Prince Inga was such a mess that they were allowed to enter the Jaded City because they'd never seen a Prince who was covered in so many egregious substances.

One of the things about the Jaded City of Oz adventure is that it never really takes as long as I schedule. On at least one occasion, I've had a group clear through the whole thing in only 2 hours. The average time is actually closer to 3. It's just that the minimum amount of time I can request on the schedule is 4 hours.

So once the players completed the adventure after 3 hours or so, I checked with Game Registration to see what game I had gotten into. I had 2 selections that were at about the same time, so I decided to let the con's computerized Sorting Hat make the decision for me.

It was a Fate game set in the Star Wars universe. Even though I've got all the books and several sets of FUDGE dice, this was my first time actually taking it for a test drive. The GM was really awesome and the game was very visually and cinematically oriented. He had pictures of every character and background images for every place we went. He had Star Wars theme music loaded onto his tablet for background music, and even started off the proceedings with a title crawl.

The characters were pregenerated, but we were allowed to choose their gender. The GM had pictures of the character whichever choice we made. I decided to try playing the female version of my chosen character. There was a female player in the group, so I told her that this was my first time cross-playing (as I've heard it called), and I was relying on her to correct me if she found I was doing it wrong. (I don't know if I've told you any of my horror stories of when male players have tried to cross-play in games I've run, but I do have a couple.) She told me that the fact that I was worried about doing it wrong meant that I was very unlikely to do it wrong, which made me feel much better about the proceedings.

We also got to fill in some of our character's backstory. Most of it was already established and we were given a sheet that laid out the major formative moments of our character's lives, but also leading questions about the specifics of how those moments went down and what they meant to us. It was the first time I've had to put that kind of thought into a con game, but I think it did help the experience a bit.

One of the characters was a really exotic looking alien (an Ithorian, for those who know the Star Wars universe) and whenever the player spoke in character, he would speak so that the air blew over the top of his drink bottle. It was a really cool effect, making him sound a bit like he was using Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer, but with far less technology.

The GM's cinematic focus came through not only by the way he described scenes and scene transitions, but also how we required us to roleplay. Rather than simply letting us say things like "My character is suspicious of that guy" or "I think about it, but decide against it" he would make us describe our character's internal monologue as if we were characters in a movie. "Okay, you're suspicious. What does that look like?" "How can we see the decision process? Tell us how that decision process would play out visually so the audience can understand it."

It was an interesting and exciting challenge. The GM has apparently run the scenario several times, and might do so again, so I'm not going to go into detail on the plot, but I had a lot of fun.

That started at 6 PM and we kept at it until about 2 AM. Everyone was having a blast, but we were all pretty wiped out near the end of it. On top of that, I knew I would be facing a busy morning. The last day of the con, we would have to be packed and out of our hotel room, while making the last sweep of the Dealer's Room, which would only be open for a few hours.

It was rough, but we managed to get out and catch the transit bus and then the BART very smoothly. We did run into trouble at the Greyhound station, however. It seems that with all of our purchases, our checked baggage wound up exceeding the weight limit. We juggled some things and packed them into our carry-ons so that our luggage would be under the limit.

Finally, last night and about 10:30, we arrived home, safe and sound. And after such a full day, it was pretty much straight to bed for me.

And that's why I didn't write this until now. But there you have it, folks.

DunDraCon 2015 Day 3

There was one thing that I failed to mention about yesterday, which was the seminars. Aside from the Buyer's Bazaar, that's one of the big things to do on a Con Friday. I attempted to attend 2 seminars yesterday, but both of them went somewhat wrong.

The first was a GMing seminar. The problem here is that the speaker was about a half an hour late. It turns out that he was tied up getting his hotel room squared away. Once he arrived, it turned out to be a pretty good seminar. He'll be giving it again later in the con, hopefully for the full time and the ability to expand on some of the topics. I'll try to catch it.

The second was a seminar on gaming with kids. When I walked into a room with only 3-4 people in it, I assumed we had another speaker no-show. I was only half right. The lead speaker had failed to show (having gotten distracted by a game) so he left his 2 co-presenters to do their best. This was compounded by a lack of an audience. What resulted was a bit less focused, but a bit more intimate.

It turns out that the cosplayers from last night wound up doing a karaoke performance. Actually, it was more of a karaoke event run by cosplayers. Skeletor was the MC and He-Man ran the music. A few people, both costumed and not, got on stage and did some karaoke. Optima Prime, the girl dressed as a robot, performed a "traditional song of her people:" Dare to be Stupid by Weird Al Yankovic.

I only stayed for the first set, since it was getting late and I had a game to play in the morning. If I didn't have the time pressure, I probably would have gotten up on stage myself. It's been a long time since I've been able to do karaoke.

The game was, of course, another Mythos Trek adventure by Whitney Preston. I had played in his game last year and had a lot of fun being a total Star Trek nerd for 8-10 hours, so I decided to repeat the experience. While the adventure did have some Mythos elements, the main MacGuffin of the story was actully the puzzle box from the Hellraiser films.

Although he had reserved a 10-hour block to run his game, we wound up finishing a little bit early. Thanks to that, I actually have time to write this.

As much as I was looking forward to having my game sold at this con, it wound up not happening. I was tied up with my game, so my wife checked in on it for me. I don't have the details on wherewires got crossed or why, so I'm not going to make damning speculations. Needless to say, however, I am disappointed.

I will soon be going to run my game as part of the convention's Teen Room, where I had run Castle of the Mad Archmage last year. Here's hoping that goes well.

DunDraCon 2015 Day 2

The first official day of the con.

It was an easy morning. Coffee and pastries from a coffee shop is a pretty nice breakfast. If only we could do it every day. The Best Western was only a few blocks from the transit center, which is where we had gotten off of the BART last night and were now boarding a local transit bus to take us on the last leg of our voyage.

Once we had things properly coordinated with the guy who's room we were sharing, we proceeded to get some shopping done at the local Target. You may have noticed that we didn't take any pictures on our bus trip yesterday. It seems that our last digital camera had gotten fried about a month ago. The USB hub we were charging it from had surged, killing not only our camera, but also 2 MP3 players and our largest flash drive. So we went to the Target to scout out a replacement.

While we were picking up some other things, we did notice something interesting.

I have no real problem with pink tools. My wife's main comment on the color was that she would prefer purple rather than pink. But I am irked with how power tools are marketed to women. Both the pink electric screwdriver and the kit of pink tools are marked with "home" somewhere in their name or branding. As if women need to be reminded that, no matter how handy they may be, the place for their handy skills is in the home. The non-gender-branded tools do not carry such reminders.

So yes, I am calling sexism on this, but not in a "burn the non-believers" kind of way. Just in a "This is the 21st Century and the fact that we can't get past this sort of thing is the reason we haven't been allowed to invent flying cars. /facepalm" kind of way.

Digital camera and a few other needs taken care of, we went back to the con hotel to check out the Buyer's Bazaar. The Dealer's Room is not open today, since the dealer's are taking the time to set up, so the Buyer's Bazaar allows individual sellers to rent a table and sell off their games that they haven't played in ages. I picked up a few Palladium books as well as a couple of GURPS books that I didn't previously have. The list continues to shrink and one day, I will have them all. I'll tell you all about that in my annual "This is what I bought" post.

I will, however, give you a small teaser:

DunDraCon has never had a strong costuming/cosplay component, but that seems to be changing this year. There is some sort of cosplay karaoke event going on pretty much right now. I think once I'm finished with this post. I'll go get some more pictures and give you a fuller report tomorrow. But I do have some pictures to share with you right now.

DunDraCon 2015 Day 1

No, the convention hasn't started early. This is just me trying to get back into a blogging groove by writing about my annual convention adventure as it happens. This is the second year that I've had a laptop that has been able to travel with me, and free wifi is everywhere these days, so I figured I should probably start embracing modern technology.

The majority of today was spent traveling in one conveyance or another. My wife was up late last night making sure everything was packed and ready. Although she accompanies me every year, she is really the unsung hero of getting ready for the con. She does tend to overworry and overpack, though. It's one of the things I love about her.

After only about 2 hours of sleep on her end, and perhaps a few more on mine, we gathered up our suitcases and carryons and sherpa'ed our way to the bus stop. Which is where my worrying started to kick in. I have traveled by Greyhound several times, but I always worry if the bus will stop where I expect it to. When I was a kid, there was a Greyhound station in town and that's where you went to buy tickets and get on the bus. The station closed a number of years ago and the property is now a used car lot. You can't buy tickets in town (I went to a neighboring city to get the tickets for this trip), but the Greyhound does stop where it used to, in front of the used car lot that used to be the bus station. Even so, I worry every time I wait for the Greyhound bus there, sure that the closure of the station was a sign that the company doesn't want to do business in town anymore and this time, they won't stop for me. They still do, but I still worry. Every time.

The bus did arrive and stop for us. It was an uneventful trip overall. I caught up on some reading, while my wife did some sewing. She made a pair of snowboarding mittens. Not that she's into snowboarding (she responds very negatively to cold), but she liked the style of mittens with a distinct index finger. So she cut some fleece fabric into the proper shapes, packed a simple sewing kit, and took the time during the bus ride to hand stitch the pieces together.

Once we arrived in San Francisco, we took a moment to hit a coffee shop before boarding the BART. We were both running on very little energy and trying to carry my wife's overpacked bags, so the rest and caffeine did us some good.

The interesting thing about us traveling on the Greyhound and the BART is that we simply follow both routes to the end. We got off the bus at the last stop of its route, then got on the BART train and rode that to its final destination as well.

That got us as far as Pleasanton, where we have hunkered down for the night in a Best Western. Tomorrow, we'll hop on a local transit bus to take us the rest of the way.

More news then.

First Post of the Year

Just in case you were worried, I am still alive and still posting here.

DunDraCon is just around the corner and I will definitely be there. And so will Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. Not only will I be running AiO on the convention schedule, but I have also arranged for the game to be available in the Dealer's Room. I am very excited.

Getting things organized for the con has been more work than I expected this year. The hotel sold out in a matter of days. It happened before anyone expected, even the convention organizers. While they were trying to get an overflow hotel setup, they put up a room sharing page on their site. This is how I managed to get lodging at the convention hotel this year.

Transportation was the next major step. We've been going with my friend Mike for several years now, but he declared last year to be the last year he would do it. His car was capable of handling 3 people and their convention gear, but when we added his new girlfriend to the mix, there was not enough room. So it's back to Greyhound buses

But I did take advantage of Google Transit to figure out the local bus system in San Ramon and turn a $20 cab ride into a $4 bus fare. Modern technology is wonderful, isn't it?

RPGaDay #15 Favourite Convention Game

I try to play in at least one game every time I go to DunDraCon. It can be hard to find one, since I am rather choosy. Coupled with the fact that my schedule also gets taken up with running my own game, trying to sit on a few seminars, and having time to cruise the Dealers Room and the Buyer's Bazaar, one is usually all I get.

I generally avoid the D&D games. I generally prefer non-fantasy games and supporting systems that don't get a lot of play or that I haven't tried before. There is one GM who regularly runs GURPS games, so I've tried to get into his games when I can.

Though I must say that my favorite convention game was actually one that I played this year. It was the Mythos Trek game. Although the system was ostensibly Chaosium's Basic Role Playing system, the GM ran the game very loosely. Good, cool, or funny ideas typically had a very good chance of success. Coupled with the GM awarding "Cool Points" good for free rerolls if you could make him laugh, there wasn't a lot of tension regarding whether or not we would succeed at anything we were assigned to do. So most of the game was about exactly how we were going to accomplish our missions. And with all of the sci-fi nerds that signed up for this, we had a lot of fun coming up with ways to reconfigure the deflector array to augment the spin of the graviton matrix and other such silliness.

There was a lot of humor and lots of opportunities to strut my Star Trek geek stuff. Best convention game ever.

RPGaDay #14 Best Convention Purchase

This one's a toughie. As I've mentioned, I do most of my game shopping at conventions these days.

I could talk about the joys of discovering old GURPS sourcebooks, like the licensed GURPS Conan and GURPS The Prisoner.

Or the times I was able to pick up some bit of new hotness, like Spirit of the Century, Diaspora, or Monsterhearts.

Or the random and vintage, like the original Castle Falkenstein. I've had the GURPS adaptation for years (by the end of this month, you'll probably be sick and tired of me talking about GURPS), but the original rulebook with its card-based rules, and a couple of supplements, were finds in the Buyer's Bazaar.

Along with most of my vintage Talislanta collection. My wife insisted on buying the Fourth edition when it was new (she lovingly calls it "The Big Blue Brick"), but it wasn't until we started shopping at DunDraCon that we found books for the older editions. We even bought the only Tal4 supplement, Midnight Realm, at DDC.

DDC 2014 Reviews

Fate Core: Despite all the hullaballoo surrounding the Kickstarter for this project, this was my first real opportunity to pick up this material. (I know the PDFs are PWYW, but I'm a lover of physical products whenever possible.) Fate Core is a clear step above previous Fate games I own; It's refined and flexible and robust. I haven't been able to give the System Toolkit a full grok, but it looks pretty powerful on the surface.

And that slim little volume on the top of the stack is Fate Accelerated Edition, which should not be judged on the basis of its size. It is not a stripped down version of Fate, a playable teaser to get you to buy the big book. It is a neat little game in its own right that can support campaigns as easily as one-shots.

Isle of the Unknown: This one was my wife's pick. Intended for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess retro-clone, it's pitched as a setting, but doesn't have a lot of things that would make it a setting. There are those who regard this as a feature, but I don't see it. It's pretty much just a big list of weird things. It might have been more effectively packaged as "exotic & weird random encounter table/s".

Torchbearer: Another fantasy game from the Burning Wheel gang, this one feels like a mid-point between the crunch-heavy, Tolkein-flavor-filled Burning Wheel and the really very light and approachable Mouse Guard RPG. It incorporates classes and levels very loosely, but neither really seeps into gameplay.

GURPS Fantasy II: One of Robin Law's first published works. This has been on my list of GURPS books that I really want, but didn't have for a very long time. It doesn't have many of the traditional fantasy touchstones that the main GURPS Fantasy setting (Yrth) has. It doesn't really have any of them, actually.

In the Mad Lands, magic is chaotic and distrusted. The worship of gods is suspect, because the only gods in the setting are more or less Chthonic Elder Gods (who just happen to be inspired by Winnie the Pooh and his friends). And the monsters are not random magical mutations of known animals, but people who have fallen to terrible fates. The primary focus of a Madlands campaign is survival in a world that is out to kill you.

GURPS Ice Age: Another GURPS classic. A sourcebook for playing in the eras that Creationists insist never happened. Or maybe it's the era that Creationists insist happened, with all of the early species co-existing all at once. There are even stats for a few dinosaurs, so you can run it that way if you want.

Rifts: Picked up a couple of Rifters this year. I find them rather interesting because of how much material is contributed by fans. The Rifts Sourcebook and Conversion Books were from early in the line, so they give me a good view of what early Rifts was like, before things got totally gonzo.

Ninjas & Superspies: It's a mess, but it's a clearly an enthusiastic mess. Mystic martial arts, spy gadgets & vehicles all in one crazy book.

Not pictured

Mutant City Blues: Now for what Robin Laws has been up to lately. One of the hottest things in recent years is the GUMSHOE System, which is intended for use in mystery/investigation RPGs. The primary conceit of the system is that information gathering does not require dice rolls while still letting other things get dicey. While the second edition of the first GUMSHOE game, The Esoterrorists, was on a couple of shelves, the one that grabbed my interested was Mutant City Blues. The game is intended to emulate cop drama shoes in a world where super powers exist.

The key to making this premise workable is the Quade Diagram, which lays out all of the superpowers available in the setting in relation to each other. So if you've got a crime committed by the use of one power, you don't need to know zoology to know what animal powers your suspect has or high end physics to figure out the limits of someone with energy blasts or whatever.

Even the cops get superpowers. The whole "costumed vigilante" thing got discredited fairly quickly early in the super era of the setting, with several notable incidents involving un-expert civilians being allowed into crime scenes and hot situations and flubbing them totally and tragically. So super heroes have been relegated back to the comics, though some comics companies will license the likeness and abilities of "real" superheroes, who mostly do PSAs and mall openings. If you have powers and want to fight crime, you become a cop.

DunDraPost 2014

Ah, my annual adventure. While it would be nice to go to some of the other conventions out there, whether some of the other gaming cons that people go to (smaller ones like KublaCon or CelestiCon, or even the big grandaddy of them all, GenCon) or finally get to meet some of the very cool Oz people I've interacted with online at WinkieCon, it would take quite a lot of doing to make me give up DunDraCon.

(Sorry about the lack of photos this year.  We brought the camera, but forgot to dig it out for most of the trip.)

As has been our habit of recent years, we talked our friend Mike into coming along. This year, however, he found a girlfriend who wanted to come along. He's had girlfriends before, but this was the first who wanted to spend a gaming con with him. It was a little crowded in the car, with four people and their luggage, but we got along rather well and it was an overall pleasant trip.

After our typical sleepover at Mike's mom's house (which included a playthrough of the Discworld board game, which was quite fun), we headed to the hotel on Friday morning. Although Friday was Valentine's Day, there was little romance going on that night for my wife and me. She wound up falling ill rather suddenly. Even with the most potent cold remedies available at the local Target, she was still miserable and had difficulty breathing.

It wasn't until Saturday that we realized that it was probably allergies rather than some kind of flu bug. We had all of the feathers in our hotel room removed (feather pillows, down comforter) and started treating her with antihistamines and Sunday and Monday were dramatic improvements in her condition and mood. Unfortunately, the game she really wanted to play was on Saturday morning, so she wound up not playing in a game (though she was able to run her scheduled game on Monday morning).

One of the big draws of the convention is the ability to shop for games. There are at least 3 Bay Area games stores offering all of the new hotness, on top of smaller publishers and dealers vying for your business in the Dealer's Room. The only problem is that the Dealer's Room doesn't open until Saturday. This year, they ameliorated this somewhat by offering a Buyer's Bazaar on Friday. The Buyer's Bazaar lets individual gamers sell off the games they don't play anymore. So I got to do some game shopping on Friday and filled out more of my Palladium collection (Due to ethical concerns regarding the company, I only buy Palladium products used.)

Friday was also the day I attended a GMing seminar. Even though I've been a Game Master for many years, I always like learning someone else's perspective. Sometimes they have tricks you haven't heard of or faced problems that you've never had to deal with.

Saturday was the day I got to play a game. And why I signed up to play this game is something of an interesting story. 2 years ago at DunDraCon, I had signed up to play a GURPS game. The scenario was set during WWI and the player characters were pulp hero-style supernatural investigators. I think we were supposed to be investigating a time rift that let dinosaurs come through and eat people, but we ran out of time just as we discovered the vortex. But one of the players in that game made an off-hand Wizard of Oz reference and I happened to have a promotional copy of Adventures in Oz handy, so I handed it to him.

He invited me to play in a game he was running at the con, which actually seemed up my alley (a Chthulhu/ Star Trek mashup), but my schedule did not allow.  (He may have already run his scenario that year and I missed it.) Last year, both of our games overlapped each other, so I couldn't play in his game. I did manage to stop by and autograph the copy of AiO I had given him the previous year. This year, however, my schedule finally allowed me to play, so I made a point of it.

It wound up being a lot of fun. I only caught a few of the Chthulhu Mythos references (Chthulhu didn't actually show up in this one. It was all about Yog-Sothoth this time around), but the Star Trek was flowing fast and furious. He ran the game very loosely, letting players come up with ideas and rolling with them. Including the player who decided to write Making Coffee as a skill on their character sheet. That player actually wound up using that skill in the game.

There were also props aplenty. My character was the science officer of the ship, so I got a toy tricorder to play with (It made all the noises!). There were also lots of ship models, some official, some not. He's a very crafty sort, so there were a number of home-made ships as well. One of his regular jokes after he pulled out a new prop was that he should never be allowed to be bored within easy reach of a hot glue gun.

Sunday was the day I ran my game in the Teen Room. As advertised, it was the Castle of the Mad Archmage using the Adventures Dark & Deep rules. Although I've been running an old-school campaign for quite some time, this was my first experience with these specific rules. Character creation was a little more complicated than what I had done before, mostly because of the expanded options. Most of my players (2 out of 3) opted to play humans rather than wrangle with the number of races and subraces available as well as dodging the potential race/class restrictions.

Once characters were completed, play went very smoothly. Since most of the upper works of the castle were uninhabited, it was mostly exploration without a lot of mechanics. Both of my players at the time (a third joined a little later) particularly enjoyed the Charlotte's Web reference in one of the stables. One of the characters very nearly died once they entered the dungeons proper, victim to a centipede's poisonous bite. (Technically, the character did die, failing a save versus a "save or die" poison. Given the circumstances, I decided to let the character live so play could continue.)

Progress was overall slow in the exploration of the dungeons. Even though I was there for 8 hours, there were only 2 combats, the second occurring as the next group was coming in to use the room, so I began running it auctioneer style. At least part of this was the distract-able nature of teenagers, as well as my willingness to discuss the ins and outs of Doctor Who (like my ability to name every single actor to play the Doctor, my favorite companion, and comparisons of the different theme compositions).

For some reason, the last few years my wife has had her game scheduled for Monday. It's actually kind of irritating, because that means moving out of the hotel room (we always take home more stuff than we bring) and taking care of all the last minute get-in-the-car-and-go details becomes my job. Late departures are also rough on Mike, because all the twisting and turning through the redwoods that is so lovely on the way down becomes far less fun in the dark. Add on the last mad dash through the Dealer's Room to make sure I don't have any money left, and it can be pretty crazy.

We got home about 11:00 Monday night and passed right out.

Next up: My usual review of all the cool things I bought there.

My DunDraCon Plans

Wow, my first post of the year. And it's an interesting one.

First of all, I will be going to DunDraCon, as is my tradition. If anyone is in northern California and has the ability to attend, you are encouraged. It's a fun con, and I'd love to meet my fans.

In an interesting twist, I will not be running "The Jaded City of Oz" this year, for grown ups or for kids. I will instead be running "The Castle of the Mad Archmage," the megadungeon by Joseph Bloch as part of the con's Teen Room. I downloaded it a couple of years ago when it was a fan project, and have been running an Old School campaign focused on it ever since. He is putting a bit more effort into it and turning it into a professional release coming very soon. Depending on when this release happens and my own personal resources, I may run the old version or the new at the con. Either way, I will be running it under Joseph's Adventures Dark & Deep rules. I bought a set of the rulebooks for my birthday a few months back and would very much like to try it out.

But why would I do such a thing? A couple of reasons, actually. Before I submitted a game to the scheduling committee, my wife submitted hers and was rejected on the basis that she had submitted the same adventure for the last 3 years (In truth, she only submitted the same pitch to the committee. It's been a different adventure every year). While they might have a slightly different criteria for publishers or Kids Room games, I didn't want to push it.

So why not write another Oz adventure to run? Well, I am working on another Oz adventure. But it's not quite ready yet, and it was even less so when the deadline for submissions came. So I submitted something that I would be willing to run at a moment's notice. (And it's less of a leap than you might think.)

It's certainly possible that this new adventure will premiere at DunDraCon, in the Open Gaming areas. More news on that as it comes available.