The image that says "D&D" to me

I came to D&D late in my gaming career, only acquiring a copy of the AD&D Players Handbook last year, at the ripe age of 27. Thus this image, while dazzling to my adult self, didn't have near the impact that it would have had on my 12-year-old self had I seen it back then.

Anyway, this is the image that says "D&D" to me. Part of me wants to yell "Don't look at that freakin' mouth, there's some glowing eyes at the end of the hallway! Get your shields up!"

Anytime I want to get juiced up for fantasy gaming, I take a look at this image. And whenever I need to get in the right mindset for D&D in particular (what with its adventuring parties, hirelings, 10-foot poles, secret doors and the like) I take a look at the following image.

Flying Blind Down the Railroad Tracks

We played our second session of ICONS last night, and I was not a fully prepared GM. I had miscalculated. I was completely ready to finish the previous (published) adventure (The Skeletron Key), to simply show up and play Heroclix, or to play some combination of the two. But throughout the day before the game, I started to get the feeling that the players who showed up for this game wouldn't have a strong overlap with players from the first game. So, I downloaded the second (published) adventure for ICONS (Sins of the Past) and read/skimmed about 3/4 of it on the el on the way home from work.

Surely enough, we had four players, but only one from the original game. So, we played the new adventure. Like the first adventure, Sins of the Past was a real railroad. I'm generally not into railroading my players, but I understand that non-sandbox adventures tend to be railroads, and the GM just has to deal. When I've run railroady adventures in the past, I feel like I've done well on the fly modifying the adventure to fit what the players do. But this time was different: I simply didn't know the adventure well, and I hadn't read the ending before we started playing.

I think I did alright at the beginning. Within literally the first 10 minutes, the players had left the tracks. They were supposed to form a friendly relationship with the Golden Agents - a classic superhero group from the WWII era - and the Golden Agents would help lead them through the adventure. But the relationship didn't work out this way. This was partially because of my actions. In the earlier game, one of the characters threw a helicopter into a skyscraper, and the one repeat player wasn't very popular as a result. The Golden Agents reacted accordingly. For the most part, this worked out fine, and we managed to progress through set scenes in the adventure with a plot reconstructed on the fly.

But I made a bad decision at the end, right as we got into the part that I had quickly skimmed/not read at all. The characters by all rights should've captured a super villain (a talking monkey with a tommie gun!), and I didn't let them. My actions were a little believable, given the capacities the villains had shown in the past, but they were way too facile - a probability controlling teleporter snatched the hostage away in a single turn. In retrospect, I realize that I did this out of desperation - I simply didn't know what was coming next, and a hostage was the railroaded outcome of the scene (which in turn would lead the PCs to the next scene). Now that I've thought about it and read the full adventure, I know that I clearly didn't need to do this. So, I'm thinking about a retcon to even things out in the next game.

But I still feel like I made a rookie mistake: I railroaded the players with a bs move to further the pre-existing plot. I know that kind of thing can grind. Just goes to show that you shouldn't fly blind down the railroad tracks.

Stuff for sale - fantasy and scifi

The run-up to GenCon

My biweekly game fell through this week, which probably for the best — I've got to pack for GenCon!

Typically I'll bring an assortment of notebooks, pencils, erasers and dice to carry around during the convention, just in case a game falls into place in a hurry (like lightning, games can strike anywhere at GenCon). I'm not currently signed up for any games, but I hope to do some last-minute registering and/or bump into some folks interested in playing.

As far as shopping, there are a few stops I make every year. First, I go to the dice vendor and buy a big mug full of random dice, which I then distribute over the course of the year to friends (mostly non-RPG players) as gifts to sucker them into gaming. (Disclosure: I also keep the occasional super-sweet dice for myself.)

I also make time to paw through the loose D&D miniatures, of course. It's almost always duplicates of the same dozen figures, and you have to shoulder aside sweaty dudes wearing 3 Wolves Shirts, but it's generally worth it to track down a few plumb figures for cheap.

This year I'm also planning to spend a lot of time browsing cool fantasy miniatures that could work for Song of Blades & Heroes. Since that game lets you use any combination of minis from different manufacturers, it's prompted me to look again at figures from Crocodile Games, Privateer Press, Reaper, Wargames Factory and others.

Running games for large groups of people

Participating (and especially running) games for large groups of people can be a difficult enterprise, but it can sometimes be quite rewarding. I recently participated as a player in two different large gaming get togethers. The first of these was to restart a gritty/old-school/fantasy/low-magic/wilderness/sandbox savage worlds campaign. The second was to continue a fairly long-running D&D 2e campaign with an overlapping group of people that's much more magical, goofier, and pulpier in tone. I really enjoy both. Although neither of these games have involved huge numbers of people at any period in time, many have flitted in and out of the games. The games respectively involved 8 and 9 participants in our most recent sessions.

In the gritty/old-school/fantasy/low-magic/wilderness/sandbox game, we didn't actually play - we simply introduced our characters (which took a little bit), checked out some of the old maps and rehashed some of the old plot threads, and devolved into heroclix and magic tables. Wow. I guess I'm a geek.

Anyway, you could feel the enthusiasm for the game building. Pat, the GM and main writer on this site, was leery of GMing so many people, but man, people wanted to play. That said, we have players of all different experience levels with the campaign, savage worlds, and rpg'ing itself. It'll be a challenge for sure.

My D&D game a couple days later game me some insight into the nature of the challenge. It went off pretty well. Lots of fun around the table, but there were some expected problems. First, it was a little slow. I was the "caller" for the group to speed things along, but with 8 players, that's just what happens anyway. Second, there were some very inexperienced players (including one who was a pure rookie), and DM conversations with them naturally slowed down the game. Third, we were focusing on picking up the pace so much toward the back half of the game, that some of the visuals and details faded into the background as we focused on systematically checking out all the rooms of the dungeon and ploughing through the mechanics of combat.

So, what are the lessons of all this?

(1) In combat, the DM should press people for fast and hard responses about what they're doing, or else they do nothing.  It is combat, after all.  More leeway should be given to beginners.

(2) Newbies should have a buddy to make sure they know what they can do and don't hold up play in the middle of a fast paced sequence.

(3) A caller out of combat is good.  But the players need to breathe when they're out of combat and make collective decisions about some things (e.g. not which way to turn at a dungeon intersection, but definitely how to storm the keep or whether to turn back home).  Still, it's worth it to set a clock for these sorts of conversations (maybe at 10 minutes or so?).

(4) The newbies matter most.  Some of the newbies thrive on character stuff.  For example, we had one newbie talking in character like bob dylan for 3 hours.  The newbies also get a real kick out of the descriptive stuff, both hearing stuff from the DM about the environment and making up for themselves how their magic missiles look ("how do your magic missiles look, newbie dude?" "Uh... hmmm... like glowing bright blue arrows emerging from the outstretched palms of my hands that arc instead of going in a straight line." "cool!").

But it's worth noting that some newbies just fade in a big group like this, especially outside of combat.  I'm not really sure what the solution is for this. Except for maybe introducing these people to gaming in a smaller setting.

(5) Don't skimp on the descriptions and the character moments. This is probably the first thing to go in a big group, but it should probably be the last for the kinds of games I'm most interested in. If I want a more tactical game, I'll play heroclix or something. But if I'm playing Prometheor of the Righteous Flame in Savage Worlds, I want to imagine his self-righteous paladin ways, his flaming sword, and his placid smile as shit hits the fan. And I want to do it while he's having a disagreement with Adabraxes Stormcrow, the White Wolf of the North, his shapechanging friend who's a barbarian psychic detective. It's weird, but it's one of the biggest reasons why I play these games.

(6) If you're going to shoot for any ideal, shoot for the Justice League (says the comic book fan). At least with the classic lineup, there was some niche protection, but some nice areas of overlap. The villains and scenarios could be interesting in themselves, but the real joy was to see the team interaction - both in terms of powers/tactics and personality - in these wacky scenarios. Somehow, the spotlight still needs to remain on the characters... as a team. Not the DM. Not the players. The characters. Without that, any ensemble lineup will fall apart. And that's what this is really all about - how to make an ensemble game hum.

My SAGE submission - Random Treasure

I almost forgot, but I jumped on board Zak's Secret Arneson Gift Exchange in honor of Gygax's birthday. I was sent a random request by one of the 50 or so folks who chose to take part...my request was to come up with a list of 20 or so random non-magical treasure items, so here they are!

Roll 1d20:

1. A small leather purse containing six pearls. The pearls themselves are valued at 75gp each, but rumors persist that each contains a kernel of platinum at its core. So who wants to smash one open and find out? The pouch and pearls weigh one pound.

2. A medium-sized urn filled with three double handfuls of ruby dust and sealed with wax. The ruby dust is a vital component of certain magic spells, though it is not magical itself, and wizards will pay varying prices for doses of the stuff, from 100gp for a pinch to 1,000gp for a handful. The filled urn weighs 25 pounds.

3. A leather-bound copy of Tales of the Southern Prelates, by Master Magician Hoeth. The book weighs 7 pounds and is valued at 800gp.

4. A small icon of a hawk in flight, wrought in silver and wrapped in rough green felt. The trinket fetches 30sp, but it holds special significance for dwarves, who will pay 15gp for it. The idol weighs less than 1 pound.

5. A pair of supple calfskin boots, each with a silver buckles. The pair is valued at 30gp, though the clasps could each sell for 10gp. The boots weigh 16 pounds.

6. A boar's tusk upon which the word "Vainglorious" is etched in an elven dialect. The boar's tusk is valued at 200gp and weighs 2 pounds.

7. A roc's feather, which is at least as long as an adventurer's leg but weighs just 5 pounds. The feather is quite unwieldy, being so large, but it is valued at 1,100gp.

8. A necklace of polished agate weighing one pound and valued at 90sp.

9. A hollowed-out wyvern egg the size of a large dinner platter weighing just 1 pound. Its surface is painted with beautiful scenes from a high lord's court, but it is very fragile, requiring a saving throw if it is jostled or dropped. It is valued at 400gp.

10. A matched pair of giant beetle mandibles weighing 9 pounds. They are glossy black and valued at 150gp.

11. A fist-sized chunk of amber with a jeweled ring encased inside. The amber piece weighs 3 pounds and is valued at 215gp. The ring would need a professional appraisal to determine its worth...

12. Three sticks of wax, each the size of one's finger. The wax has flecks of gold embedded in it and each stick is valued at 15gp. Each stick weighs 1 pound.

13. A tarnished brass trumpet wrapped in animal hide. The trumpet is valued at 90gp and weighs 12 pounds.

14. A prancing unicorn crafted out of brass and enameled in a rich purple color. Fittings and latches suggest that the small decoration was once affixed to a helm. The unicorn weighs 15 pounds and is valued at 230gp.

15. A sundial made of polished silver and carved with elven runes. The sundial weighs 40 pounds and is valued at 750gp.

16. A set of jeweler's tools in a leather case valued at 100gp and weighing 8 pounds. Hidden inside one pocket is an uncut diamond valued at 500gp.

17. A drinking horn banded with alternating gold, silver, and platinum rings. It weighs 10 pounds and is valued at 450gp.

18. A bolt of patterned silk valued at 100gp per square yard — or more, depending its rarity. The bundle of fabric weighs 15 pounds.

19. The arm from must have been an ornate throne. The arm alone is carved from mahogany and encrusted with six 500gp gemstones.

20. A potted plant in a stone urn weighing 30 pounds. The plant is an eastern lotus, which produces 1d6 blossoms each month (with proper care and feeding). When burned, the blossoms have a powerful intoxicating effect. Each flower can be sold for 1,250gp. The plant itself is beyond value.

I should also mention that my own request, sent to a random participant, was answered as well. I asked for quite a bit...in particular, I wanted a map for a particular area of my wilderness campaign. And my SAGer delivered! I'll look over the submission and hopefully post it here soon.

Unique scrolls in fantasy RPGs

I never was too keen on generic magic items, to the point that I ended up running a low-magic fantasy campaign specifically to get away from them. Ring of invisibility, bracers of defense, wand of paralysis...it all struck me as way too goofy. Same with scrolls — the charm of fantasy falls flat when I describe how the wizened mage hands the characters a scroll of water walking. Eh.

The obvious solution is to come up with unique names for spells, magic items, potions and scrolls. Which I've resolved to do, starting with scrolls. In particular, I like the idea that they're part of some larger body of research or some school of magic. So it's not a magic missile scroll, it's Vendamyr's Annotations on the Application of Force. A piddly light scroll becomes Deleterio's Bright Idea. Protection from evil becomes A Survey of the Nether Voids and Their Denizens, by the Arch-Wizard Foclis. And so on.

Not all generic names are bad. Renaming just a few injects a lot of character into my milieu, and it also has a powerfully beneficial effect on my creativity.

Huge lot of Dungeon Crawl Classics on Tanga

Tanga.com is offering up 11 separate Dungeon Crawl Classics modules from Goodman Games for the bargain price of $31.99 + shipping. They're written for modern editions of D&D, but that's never stopped me before. This deal's only good until the end of today, May 21.

So a cleric walks into a club...

Question for all you old-school DMs out there: How would you handle this scenario?

My 1st level cleric's mace breaks, so he drops it, draws a dagger, and attacks a charging orc.

What happens? Does the cleric auto-miss? Does his dagger break? Does he instantly forget all his spells for the day?

See, clerics are prohibited from using anything but blunted weapons—which I find to be a very "gamey" decision foisted onto the cleric class for no other reason than to balance clerics against fighters. The idea that holy warriors can't bring themselves to spill the blood of their enemies—yeah, that's crap. If you've got a job to do, you'll hardly turn up your nose at the most common weapon in the entire game (sword) to get it done. Or something.

But still, within the paradigm of "imagine the hell out of it" old-school gaming, how would you referees deal with a cleric player who insists that his character tries to attack with a sword? Or uses a dagger to cut the bonds on a captured prisoner? Or picks up a cursed sword and puts it in his backpack?

I'm genuinely curious, because Mike/Chgowiz and I came up with a neat little workaround to deal with this scenario in his Dark Ages campaign. It removes the gamey aspect of the restriction that I find distasteful, while not overpowering my cleric character. I'll post the details on that later, but I wanted to hear DMs' responses first.

Miniatures review: 6d6 Fireball's Quorakons

Recently I painted up three Quorakons kindly provided to me by Chris over at 6d6 Fireball, a publisher of old-school-themed miniatures and adventures. Quorakons are a race of four-armed simians that use primitive weapons and enjoy a tribal lifestyle. Adrian Wood (also part of the 6d6 Fireball team) actually put together a free 10-page PDF detailing their entire culture, including its social composition and battle capabilities. The stat block is a bit dense for me, but it's easy to jettison the extra baggage to get down to the old-school essence of these humanoids.. It's definitely worth checking out if these miniatures pique your interest.

The PDF is packed with story ideas, some of which occurred to me while I was assembling and painting these figures. The Quorakons use stone weapons, right? So how would they react if the PCs arrive and are willing to trade their steel and iron hardware for access to the Quorakons' tribal mystics?

The figures themselves were a ton of fun to assemble. They arrived with empty hands and two extra sprues full of primitive weapons (clubs, spears, javelins and stone axes). I started putting weapons in hands, and before I knew it, each of these Quorakons were holding three weapons. Overkill, you say? Well, if you've got four arms, why not use 'em?

The one on the far right in the photo above is also holding a dead rabbit—a little treasure I had kicking around in my bits box, waiting for the right miniature to pin it on.

Anyway. As far as the paint job, I wasn't all that pleased with how the fur turned out. I got impatient while painting them and rushed through my typical fur painting process (slowly building up lighter and lighter colors). So that's why the fur might look a little garish.

The best part about these miniatures are the simian faces. Designer Rob Grimly did a superb job capturing the ape-like characteristics of these fellows.

As far as criticisms, the chieftain arrived with a small chunk of metal missing from his ornate feather headdress. Chalk it up to casting issues, I guess. You can see it missing in the second photo. He also had a rather odd hole or gap in his chest, where all four arms would sort of come together in his torso, which I can also only assume is the result of some casting problems.

Really, though, these guys were a lot of fun to paint up. The PDF is icing on the cake, as it really makes the Quorakon culture come alive. Even if you don't use 75% of the stuff that's included in the free supplement, there's still enough added value from 6d6 Fireball to make these guys several steps up from your average Monster Manual denizen.

Check out the packaging on 6d6 Fireball's minis

I'm going to be reviewing some miniatures that were sent to me by Chris at 6d6 Fireball. They arrived last weekend, and while I've not been able to paint them up yet, I did have a chance to admire the cool packaging. Check out the box for the Quorakon War Party.




And how about that one-sentence descriptor: "Four-armed, stone-weapon using apes with a rich culture." That's brevity that even the most old-school of referees couldn't help but admire.

I really dig little boxes and storage units, for some strange reason. So doubtless this box will get put to some shrewd use long after I've painted up the Quorakons and posted the photos here.

Adiken's miniatures and the fall of a gaming company

At last month's gaming auction, I picked up a bag of loose fantasy figures—mostly orc-lookin' dudes and some adventurers. I just finished painting five of the orcs above (although in my campaign, they'll be hobgoblins, because I never cared for the Asian-themed old-school hobgoblins, and these guys seem vicious, and I already have enough orc figures).

Anyway, these miniatures were marked "Adiken 2003" on the bottom. I wasn't familiar with the company, and that seemed odd given that they were produced just 7 years ago. It's hard for a gaming company to rise and fall in the age of the Internet and not have anyone know about it. Upon cursory examination, all that existed about Adiken was a cryptic Wikipedia stub.

So I did a little digging—and found a fascinating account of the frenetic rise and fall of the company, as chronicled by Paul DeStefano, a member of the Board Game Geek online community. Paul was a freelancer who landed what sounded like the job of a lifetime working for Adiken a few years ago. The company had massive financial backing, a team of talent, and the mechanical capabilities to make the game (a dungeon crawl board game called Nin-Gonost, which those minis are for) into a big hit.

Paul wrote:

[T]hey are so floored by the work I have done that they give me complete creative control of the project. Whatever I want, I get.

Stories I write get painted into beautiful paintings by famous D&D artist Jeff Easley. I swear I am brought to tears.

Shortly thereafter, it all fell apart. The company's financier lost his father, and it appears he also lost his will to head up the company. Paul was left with crates of miniatures sitting in his garage, but no finished product to sell them for.

It was a riveting, tragic account of the company's short life. As someone who's done work for RPG companies—and has gotten paid promptly—I was heartbroken to read that Paul was apparently never paid for his work on Nin-Gonost.

Anyway. I thought this was a really fascinating bit of reading that ties into the new miniatures I just finished painting up. Perhaps Paul will take some heart in knowing that Adiken's miniatures will once again stalk the dim halls of my dungeons.

D&D marathon—12 hours at the Keep on the Borderlands in Chicago

Chgowiz lives! Everyone's favorite old guy RPG guru showed up at my local game shop in Chicago yesterday to attempt a daunting task: a 12-hour D&D marathon using Keep on the Borderlands.

The format was similar to the Tower of Gygax events that have been run at GenCon the last couple of years. Players could sit down, grab a pre-gen character sheet, and join in the fight. When they died, they stood up and someone else sat down to play for a while. Mike also kept track of how long the players had been in the game; when no one died and there was a player standing around waiting to jump in, he'd boot the longest-living player. It was all in good fun, and the players cheerfully vacated their seats to let the newbies sit down.

As for me, I live 4 blocks down the street from shop, so I played two separate sessions: one before noon, when ol' Chgowiz was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and another toward the end of the evening, when he had the thousand-yard stare going.

The game was Holmes D&D, which had a few interesting quirks that I learned about (clerics have no spells at 1st level, oil does crazy damage, adventurers can walk three abreast down a dungeon hallway).

Throughout the day, there was remarkable continuity in terms of player progress. When the mapping player's character died, he'd pass along the map (which had probably been started 2 or three players ago) to the next likely mapping player, so he could take up the pencil for an hour or so. Likewise with treasure and magic items looted from the Caves of Chaos. We just passed 'em down the line. A healing potion filched at noon might finally be used around 5:30 p.m. by a new player.

Mike kept things rolling throughout the day and into the evening, fueled only by pizza and an everful chalice of iced tea. He used miniatures for the sticky combats and allowed players to roleplay to their heart's content back at the keep. The action definitely wasn't centered on the Caves of Chaos; in true sandbox fashion, we went wherever we wanted and found adventure waiting for us when we arrived. We uncovered a plotting priest of chaos in the keep itself, led an attack on a hobgoblin camp in the wilderness—and of course, pilfered the Caves of Chaos, albeit in a haphazard fashion.

Each player who survived an hour got a free d20 and a d6, compliments of the good folks at Chicagoland Games. Mike also had some very nice printed copies of Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, which he gave out to players as well. (This was probably the ideal context to distribute this most excellent treatise, following on the heels of a glorious one-hour old school dungeon romp.) In the end, Mike estimated we probably got through 20 percent of the module. I'd guess 15 to 20 players rotated in and out of the game throughout the day. Some came back three, four, even five times to play new PCs.

The best part came during the final hour of the game. Two players who had never played D&D—or tabletop roleplaying in general—stopped by the table. I'm guessing they were a boyfriend/girlfriend combo. They said their only experience with this type of geekery so far had been playing World of Warcraft. So of course, we happily booted some players to make room for them. Mike explained their character sheets, we pointed out what was on their equipment lists, and they plunged into the fray. There was much laughter and gnashing of teeth for another hour or so, and then Chgowiz called the game around 9 p.m. Applause broke out at the table—he'd been at it for 11 straight hours.

Afterward, I asked the two newbies how they heard about this D&D marathon. Stunningly, they had simply googled "D&D chicago" a few hours before—having never played, only heard about the game from a friend—found the game store's website at the top of the results page, found this event on the store's online calendar, hopped in their car, and drove out to play. Their whole day of gaming coalesced in less than six hours. After the game, they inquired about the weekly D&D 4e game that takes place each Monday at the store, and they left with plans to return next week. It's an amazing world we live in.

Office space roleplaying: Swords & Wizardry Quick Start

Last night I gathered a couple coworkers, and a buddy who works down the street, to try out the Swords & Wizardry Quick Start module. Jim, Dustin, Mick and I ended up having a smashing good time rampaging through the Dungeon of Akban, looting the hell out of the place and (so far, at least) living to tell the tale. The photo above shows our den of geekery, converted from a small conference room in our office building. We stayed late, sneaked in some beers and had a grand old time.

The session was my chance to introduce these colleagues of mine to RPGs. After a year of hearing me rave about how cool old-school tabletop RPGs are compared to video games, they would finally have the chance to decide for themselves. We were joined by a friend who's part of my regular gaming group—he added a little veteran perspective to our group of newcomers.

Character generation was quick and simple. Jim had played before, waaaay back in his elementary school years, and even he was surprised at how quickly stuff like Armor Class and Saving Throw came back to him. Mick had played a lot of video game RPGs like Fallout, so he really enjoyed the wide-open nature of the game—if you can imagine it, you can try to do it.

Mick and Jim rolled up straightforward fighters, and Dustin made an Elf fighter. So...three fighters. Veteran roleplayers will no doubt be wondering how the party survived without a magic-user or a cleric. But really, it's a testament to the quality of the Chgowiz's Quick Start adventure that we were able to plump the depths of Akban despite having a rather lopsided group of adventurers.

And so we delved. I introduced them to the concept of mapping, and Dustin took to that job with great aplomb. He gave advice when needed—based on his own D&D experiences playing Chgowiz's Dark Ages game—but he didn't smother the other two players. They all contributed to the evening's successes and failures.

We did a bit of exploring and saw three hard-fought combats: one when the group charged into a nest of giant centipedes, and two more running battles against the bands of goblins that infested the dungeon. In the first goblin combat, oil bombs took out 6 goblins in one round, leaving just one horribly wounded survivor who was interrogated and then summarily executed.

The second goblin combat was far more dangerous, and resulted in Spier the Fighter collapsing in a bloody heap (I quickly implemented the -10HP countdown rule to give them time to revive him). You can see Spier's prostrate form in the foreground of the photo above, with his fellows standing guard over him as the goblins move into position down the hallway. Only by killing the pesky goblin shaman—who tried his damnedest to flee the scene—was the group able to steal 3 healing potions off his still-warm corpse and use them to revive Spier.

And right around that point we decided to call it a night. We'd played for maybe 2 hours, with a break in the middle to check the doors and make sure we weren't accidentally locked inside the office. I didn't want to initiate them with a marathon session. But the best part came at the end, as I started gathering up my miniatures and dungeon tiles. Both Jim and Mick said they had a great time, and they asked to play again soon. I said sure, we'll make a note of where we are in the dungeon, and when we sit back down we'll play the same characters and go from there.

I don't care if you're rolling dice in 1980 or 2010: That's how campaigns are born, folks.

My contribution to International Traditional Gaming Week

After a few weeks spent wrangling schedules, it looks like I'm going to run a Swords & Wizardry game for a couple of my coworkers this evening.

It's serendipitous that our game falls within International Traditional Gaming Week, because I made a conscious choice to run S&W for these guys. Specifically, I'm using Mike Shorten's Swords & Wizardry Quick Start, so we'll see how things go after tonight. I've got dice, graph paper, miniatures and dungeon geomorphs stashed away in my cubicle, waiting for the bosses to leave. Then, it's off to the dungeon—er, conference room.

Photos to follow.

Focus on the newbies

I run games in constant fear of boring my players, especially some of the veterans in my group who aren't all that enthused by game elements that might interest newer, less experienced players. I find myself catering to the veterans more frequently by giving them whatever "red meat" pushes their buttons—that might be in-depth roleplaying opportunities or epic battle scenes or scenarios that test their personal codes of honor.

But I need to get over that tendency, because it's more important to focus on the new players for whom roleplaying is a fresh, wonderful endeavor. They're the ones who peruse equipment charts with starry-eyed wonder and take careful notes about what sort of stone the dungeon walls are made out of. They're very likely in the midst of the same "lighting in a bottle" phase that veteran players (me included) find so hard to re-capture.

My fellow player Ben, himself a veteran of countless RPGs, drove this point home recently in an email. Experienced RPGers, he said, can find ways to have fun and get their kicks out of virtually any well-run game. But newer players, when presented with the vast, open-endedness of most RPG settings, might be looking for a few specific things right off the bat. Maybe a nice, succinct dungeon delve, or a way to cast themselves as heroes (or villains) in a sleepy frontier town.

It's a good GM who can recognize this and help encourage their growth. That's something I'm going to do more of in the future.

The glory of the gaming auction, part 2

So the twice-yearly Game Plus gaming auction came and went earlier this month. If you've read this blog much, you'll know that the auction is a fixture in the Chicago gaming scene—literally hundreds of sellers unload their unwanted gaming goods (board games, RPGs, miniatures, everything else) over four frenetic days of bidding. It's almost a convention unto itself, albeit one restricted to a single event.

It's fascinating to attend, because it really gives a sampling of the Midwestern gamer zeitgeist of the each particular year. Last September, for example, D&D 4e products didn't sell (to one commenter's woe). This year, a bunch of older gamers whipped themselves into a bidding frenzy over a string of Middle Earth Roleplay products, which I gather are becoming increasingly hard to find. Each year, a few reliable products command high prices (Deities and Demigods feat. Cthulhu, the D&D little brown books, entire Warhammer 40k armies painted to a decent degree, etc).

In any case, the March auction witnessed an undeniable resurgence of interest in D&D 3.x products. Gently used Players Handbooks and DM Guides consistently sold for $18 to $22 all day long; at the height of the bidding, when the room was packed with a standing-room-only crowd, I watched a 3.5 PHB sell for $38...that's right, more than the original retail price.

I participated heavily, both as a seller and as a buyer. I ended up selling off a bunch of oddball RPGs, assorted board games and random miniatures that I convinced myself I'd never get around to painting. I also put up my entire collection of Star Wars RPG d6 books—this was only a bit sentimental, as the SWRPG constituted my initial foray into roleplaying. But the prequels have forever soured my desire to ever roleplay Star Wars ever again, and I was pleased that my whole pile o' loot sold for more than $200. Sweet!

On the buying front, I ended up sitting through 8+ hours of bidding on Saturday and Sunday with very little to show for it. I was interested in a lot of stuff, but not so interested that I wanted to get in a bidding war with the dude sitting across the room, know what I'm sayin'? I'm going to have to re-think my strategy, especially on the RPG front, because I'm finding that there's not that much I'm really looking for anymore. The gem of the day was a very nice copy of Palladium's Weapons and Castles sourcebook from 1982. This was an excellent buy, given my current fascination with castles sieges (due in no small part to my recent re-reading of George RR Martin's Game of Thrones books).

I fared much better on Sunday, which was dedicated to miniatures. There I picked up two awesome random bags of old, half-painted miniatures from a variety of manufacturers and game system, all for $10 a bag. Between the two bags, I probably scored 35+ individual figures. I got Ral Partha, Grenadier, Citadel and a big pile of figs from the now-defunct manufacturer Adiken. That should keep me painting for a while!

The review that got me into RPGs

Back in 1997 I was a year into high school and obsessed with Magic: The Gathering. Who wasn't? The game was on fire, and I was making lots of friends at drop-in Magic events.

As far as RPGs went, I had purchased and played just one: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, by West End Games. I loved it, but I didn't run in RPG social circles, so I really had no awareness of the hobby as a whole...it was just me with my SWRPG book, tinkering around with stats and dreaming of ways to sucker my friends into a campaign.

I had just subscribed to InQuest magazine, Wizard Entertainment's zine dedicated to the CCG industry; coincidentally, they expanded to cover RPGs about this same time. That's where I ran across this review of Blue Planet, the hard sci-fi RPG by Biohazard Games (and now published by RedBrick) set on a waterworld brewing with action and intrigue.

I still remember reading this review: It made my head spin. Suddenly I "got" what made RPGs so immersive. I understood why players returned to the same characters time after time, eventually creating a shared narrative that unfolded over months and years. My experience with SWRPG mostly consisted of finding the fastest way to kill three dozen stormtroopers. With Blue Planet, I finally had the sense of an entire hobby built around these innovative games of the imagination.

It wasn't until 2000 that I got any closer to finding out about Blue Planet. As fate would have it, I attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO...the home of Blue Planet creator Jeffrey Barber. To make a long story short, I eventually met Jeff and had my "geek moment" where I gushed about how cool Blue Planet was, how I'd always wanted to play it, etc. We did end up gaming together, but it wasn't Blue Planet; it was Midnight, a D&D setting Jeff was writing for Fantasy Flight Games.

I still remember when Jeff got his dream job, a gig teaching biology at a school in Hawaii. I mean hell, it doesn't get more Blue Planet than that! Before he left to go live on an island and swim with stingrays, though, Jeff gave me (I was 22 at this point) one copy of each published book from the Blue Planet line from his personal stock, thus equipping me for the subsequent Blue Planet campaigns I would run over the next few years.

I was going through a box of my old InQuests last weekend and came across this review...you can't imagine how it fired my 15-year-old imagination.

An epic map of Westeros

I don't own the edition of A Clash of Kings that featured this epic fold-out map of King's Landing, the largest city in George R.R. Martin's Westeros, but I ran across a decent high-res photo of the map on Awful Books (which criticizes not the content, but the presentation of various books. Eh.).

I'm hosting the image here on the outside chance that it disappears from Awful Books, because I love this rendering of King's Landing and plan to use it in my own games one day.

Puzzles: The one part of old-school gaming I could do without

Last night's Dark Ages game with Chgowiz featured some problem-solving as we tried to deal with an enchanted wizard's tower that refused to let us go in a straight line and kept buffeting us with wind whenever we tried to walk down the hall toward our destination. We eventually triumphed, but only after a ton of dice rolling and frustration.

The episode highlights a part of old-school gaming (and new-school gaming, I guess, but it's emphasized much more in old-school play) that doesn't appeal to me at all: puzzle solving.

For a style of play that focuses so much on real-life concerns—ration tracking, paying hirelings and taxes, orienteering in the wilderness—there's just nothing real-life about granular puzzle solving. It seems out of place in an otherwise coherent fantasy medieval setting.

Perhaps it was because last night's puzzling situation didn't yield much by way of a payoff. I guess I'd be fine if the puzzle led directly to a treasure room or a magic sword or something. But in last night's case, we "beat" the puzzle by rolling fistfuls of dice, then blundered into another room where two players died and the rest of us got our clothes burned off.