RPGaDay #16: Game You Wish You Owned

Another big list here. Even though I have the biggest collection of game among all my friends, I still want more.

I'd love to have a copy of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. I have the old Time Lord RPG which covers the classic series, but I would like to have something that covers the new show as well.

There are those who would say I should turn in my nerd card for not having any edition of Call of Cthulhu.

I'd love a mecha RPG with a decent, approachable mech construction system. Any recommendations?

I'm sure there's a lot slipping my mind right now. If you gave me the run of a game store or convention dealer's room with an unlimited budget, I'm sure I would come back with mighty stacks. Probably not everything. I don't think I could break my choosiness habits. But it would be a mighty stack, I'm sure.

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.

RPGaDay #13 Most Memorable Character Death

With my own limited opportunities to run a character rather than a campaign, and the issues that cause all campaigns to run shorter than intended, I have only experienced one character death.

He was named Kyle, a Human Cleric of Pelor. This was the first character I played in the megadungeon campaign that led to Ted, Avenger of Kord (I told his story a few days ago). Since it was a megadungeon, I decided I was going to play my character "Old School" style. He got no characterization or backstory at the beginning, but would grow in depth as play progressed and we learned things and made decisions. Also, even though we were playing D&D 3.5, I would put no ranks in the Search or Spot skills, relying on description to make my "search checks."

This last bit turned out to be Kyle's undoing. The player who usually played the party rogue was out, so there was no one to play it safe, rolling dice for searching for traps and picking locks. So Kyle readily volunteered for scouting duty.

We encountered a large double door. Our first step was to check whether or not it was locked. Since I had no Search skill, the DM asked me ho I was going to check the door. I said, "I'm going to rattle the knob and see if it opens." The door was unlocked, but it was also the only thing between Kyle and a half-white-dragon cryohydra (one of the things we learned fairly quickly about this dungeon was that there was a white dragon somewhere that really liked to get busy with nearly any other creature it could find), which had manage to hear Kyle rattling his doorknob. So when we opened the door, Kyle took a face full of ice breath. I don't recall if he made his saving through, but it was enough damage to do him in, in any case.

RPGaDay #12 Old RPG You Still Play/Read

I'm probably going to disappoint a number of people with this one. Since I didn't really start collecting game books with any seriousness until the 21st century, the majority of my collection is from the 90's and 00's.

While running the original Castle of the Mad Archmage, I used OSRIC for my ruleset, but the monster section didn't have all the monsters that were used in the dungeon. Thankfully, I had copies of the original AD&D Monster Manual II and Fiend Folio to help round things out. Now that Joe has Adventures Dark & Deep out and a version of CotMA that uses it, I don't I'll have to look past the AD&D Bestiary for my dungeoneering needs.

In terms of recreational reading, I've been reading in the 90's. I mentioned a little bit ago that I have been contemplating a Star Trek campaign, so I dug out my Last Unicorn Games Star Trek RPG which came out in the very late 90's. To bone up on NPCs, I took a look at GURPS Supporting Cast (I mentioned I had a lot of GURPS books), which is copyright 1993.

Though I did see my wife peeking through the Compleat Arduin the other day, which is also 1993.

RPGaDay #11 Weirdest RPG Owned

I've got a couple of weird ones. It's hard to say exactly which one is the weirdest.

I've mentioned Talislanta before. It's a very non-traditional setting, frequently promoting itself with the tagline "No Elves."

GURPS Fantasy II: The Mad Lands is another one that throws off much of traditional fantasy in favor of weirdness. But in this case, it's a pretty scary weirdness rather than the exotic weirdness of Talislanta. Including Elder Gods based off of Winnie the Pooh and his friends.


Both Rifts and Gamma World scratch any "post apocalyptic gonzo" itch I might have. I've got one of the books from the Second Edition Gamma World, the rulebook for Fourth Edition, as well as the Fifth Edition (Alternity) rulebook. I even have the Omega World issue of Polyhedron.

And then there are the game concepts that are totally out of left field. Like Pandemonium: Adventures in Tabloid World. You play tabloid reporters in a world where you are the only ones willing to tell the truth. The random scenario generator is probably the best bit of the whole thing.

Castle Falkenstein has a number of interesting features, aside from being one of the first Steampunk RPGs. The setting is presented largely via lovingly illustrated game fiction about Tom Olam, a man from the real world who got pulled into a world of magic and pageantry. It's even suggested that the game itself was designed by Olam and played in the setting. Cards are used instead of dice because dice are for gambling, and therefore inappropriate in the setting's high society.

GURPS Illuminati University is a comedy setting featuring a university where anything goes. Sort of a slightly more mature Teenagers From Outer Space. But only slightly. All of GURPS setting and genre books are encouraged for mashing together in truly comedic fashion. There are setting in-jokes for everyone, from Tolkien geeks to Doctor Who fans.

The Ghost Dog Roleplaying Game and Resource Book is probably the oddest thing I've ever come across. Published by Guardians of Order, it naturally uses their Tri-Stat system. Amusingly enough, this is the same system used by all of their anime sourcebooks, like their Sailor Moon RPG (which is also on my shelf).

I've seen the movie that this game is based on, and enjoyed it, but it didn't scream RPG to me. There are no dangling plot threads, or deep, rich setting. The film is heavy on symbolism and metaphor, which are very difficult things to implement in an RPG. And with most of the characters dead at the end of the film, it felt like there were very few places to go with it.

It's not deliberately funny or weird. Just a real odd duck.

RPGaDay #10 Favorite Tie-in Novel/Game Fiction

I've never really been attracted to the idea of game fiction. Part of the problem is that I'm not a big fantasy reader, and most game fiction is published in that genre. I know there are some sci-fi games out there that might have accompanying game fiction, and I might look those up at some point.

The other problem is the fear that the novel is actually the write-up of someone's home campaign. Between meticulously detailed descriptions that make you hear the dice clattering in your mind, and stuff that worked great at the table, but is boring or anti-climactic when it becomes prose.

I tried to read the Avatar Trilogy (a trilogy of Forgotten Realms tie-in novels), and couldn't make it a third of the way through the first book.

I did find myself enjoying The Worldwound Gambit by Robin Laws. I knew his reputation as a game designer and game writer, but I wasn't sure how he's do at fiction. It turns out he actually did pretty good. I never heard the dice roll, though I was able to identify other game-related elements, like figuring out the classes of each character.

I also made a point of tracking down a novel called Curse of the Shadow Beast by Christine Morgan. It first came to my attention as a bit of GURPS game fiction. It was a novelization of the author's GURPS fantasy campaign. As she was writing, she was afraid that too many GURPS-isms were peaking through, so she sent it to Steve Jackson Games for approval. Steve Jackson was apparently impressed enough that he wrote a foreword to the book praising it. It does not use any GURPS logos or trade dress, probably because it does not use the default GURPS Fantasy setting, Yrth.

And while it was a transcript of a campaign, it avoided most of the fatal flaws of such things. The battle scenes did not receive excessive detail. It also seemed written from the perspective of one of the PCs rather than the GM. The main flaw of the book is that it seems divided into two sections. One is the gaming transcript, which includes a modestly sized adventuring party. The other half focuses on two of the characters and reads like a romance novel.

This first outing apparently resulted in a trilogy. And then another trilogy. The first book made me interested to read the rest, though mostly out of curiosity regarding how she developed as a writer after this.

But other than this, if I read a book that has a game associated with it, it is a book that inspired the game. Even if I pick up the game first.