There's no point to any of this and no one should ever read it.

I originally started this blog with the idea of extolling the virtues of AD&D 2E, which remains my favorite system.

2E seems to be the least represented of the editions, not old or new but middle school fifth grade like junior high, to quote the bard.

2E has flaws, like any system and rules that can be confusing, and has the black marks of being the first version of D&D sans Gygax as well as having been hit with self-censorship.

At the time I started playing however, I had no idea who or what Gygax was, didn't understand the TSR situation, and had never been exposed to a previous version of Dungeons and Dragons.

AD&D 2E was fucking magic.

Still is.

I won't go on and on about how awesome roleplaying is and how it positively affected my life, many others have testified to that with more eloquence than I can summon.

I won't even preach the gospel of 2E to you. I think It's fantastic, you might not. It is worth a look.

If there's a published system that gives it a run for its money, however, Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying does it.
It's the one game I've played so far that I've found myself thinking, "This could replace 2E as my go-to game," But there are still things that really grind me about it. My players seemed to like it and we went from "Let's play" to "Holy shit, we're all going to die" in about an hour.
It wasn't unusual for us to set aside our first session just for rolling characters in 2E. In LotFP, it's easy for a relative novice to roll a character by herself during the game, after her first is killed by a swinging log trap.

Lately, I've been play-testing my ol' buddy Edward's game. It's heavy on the RP light on the G and if that's what your group is interested in, it works very well. If they want to see who can roll the biggest numbers on a D20 with arbitrary bonuses from made up bullshit, then they need to get the fuck out. For their own sake.

It's hard to describe Eddy's game without sounding like a tool, you'll have to trust me that 1. I am not a tool. 2. Eddy is not a tool.

In its current state and in my opinion, the games rules serve as minimal descriptors to arbitrate an imagined reality. AND THAT'S IT, MOTHERFUCK. Then they shoot you through the bowels and you die. No saving throw. Any character development is up to you and is less about acquiring larger numbers and is more about if and how your character's personality changes and the things he/she/it accomplishes and experiences.

So...

I guess all this was to say, "I used to only play one game, but now I've played others and I like some of them."

Vornheim

So I bought a hard copy of Vornheim: Complete City Kit as recommended by the author of said tome Zak S. of D&D With Porn Stars fame.

Initially, I purchased it because "Hey, I've been reading dude's blog for a while now. I like his ideas and wish to support him in his endeavors."

After spending some time with the product, it's pretty damn cool. As advertised, it's less of a "Here is a city," and more of a "Here are some good tools and techniques for running a game in a city,".

Though, it is designed to let you create and run city adventures in a medieval fantasy world on the fly, I'll be using it in my upcoming Mass Effect game with minimal modification.

I've been so pleased with it that I plan on transporting Vornheim and the surrounding environs wholesale into another setting I've been cooking up that will incorporate several other ideas lovingly stolen from TotGaD.

Maybe on payday I'll buy a hard copy of his book, too.

I might pick up a PDF copy of Vornheim as well. Many of the charts and tables are things that I'd like to have printed out so that I could paste them to the back of a GM screen, or stick in a binder.

At any rate, if you've been thinking about getting your own copy of Vornheim, well, why wouldn't you?

Brain Stew

Everybody has a different process for doing everything.

Time to talk about mine.

Process, that is.

When prepping for running a game, I make brain stew.

I fill my head full of interesting things and then vomit that onto my games.

One of the things I've found to be true is that he who preps least, preps best. When it comes to me at least. I've tried in the past to write out detailed scenarios that would span months of gaming sessions and end in a satisfying way and, in general, what I find is that the more detailed and exacting your outline, the more doomed to failure it is.
The best sessions I've ever ran have been completely off the top of my head. It makes the game exciting for both your players and you and you're players so long as you can keep improvising and riffing off what they do. The game becomes a lot like free form jazz, except fucking awesome.

I do a minimum of prep work. 99% of my prep is making sure I have papers, pencils, and dice. But that last 1% is equally important. I take the bits about the setting, the bits about the system, and (if I have them already) the bits about my player's characters that I dig and just think about them. Usually in the shower or while pooping. Sometimes I just lay in my bed let all those elements stew for a while.

Once you've got a good pile o' shite in your head, it's time to start work on the "Gel de Groupe" which is only about half as gross as it sounds.

Why the hell would the player characters ever hang out together? Very rarely players will make characters who naturally fit well together, but most times, they create a motley assortment of undesirable and anti-social scumbags. How do you get the one-eyed half-jackal necromancer and the Priest of the God Who Punishes the Naughty work together with cannibal man who also a secret homosexual?

The short answer is you don't.

In my games, that responsibility (if there is one) falls squarely on the players. The most I do is give them a nice nudge. I say it's storming and have some NPCs recommend the same tavern to all of them, or have only one bar open that night or they all get arrested and share a cell. For the most part, I just demand that all the characters start off in the same city. That's usually enough.

Once you've got 'em all grouped up, make something happen that they all can find a reason to care about or at least be paid to care about.

Bandits attack. The well is poisoned by goblins. Plague sets in. Rumors of fantastic unguarded wealth. Just whatever. Anything to get the ball rolling. Everything else can develop organically from there.

What is important is to get a head full of ideas, all swimming round yer brainbox in a thick stew. Then ladle it out to your players and add hot sauce as needed.

Mass affects roleplaying (see what I did there)

I'm playtesting a friend's system.

I've been wanting to run a Mass Effect game.

There's no official Mass Effect table top game.

There's a ginormo-metric-shit-ton-load of official Mass Effect information.

Said friend's system is setting neutral.

Copy Pasta, don't fail me now.

Really, the only question is: "How much information do I shove at my players?" Complete information is really too much, vignettes are really too little.

I think I'm going to throw it all at my players and see what sticks.

Stats, stats, stats

If there's an individual who can challenge Gygax in the title for Most Influential, I would argue for Tolkien.

Despite the former's apparent disdain for the latter, the author's works informed and defined fantasy roleplaying, in particular my own early games, in a way which precious few other can claim.

Yes, there are others whose names loom large in Appendix N, but in high fantasy games, at least, Tolkien reigns.

To that end, I found this supremely interesting.

Should it be used as a concrete guide for worldbuilding? Nah. But it's frakk'n neat.

Shadow Delvers, part II

So I'm not really running an ADnD game at the moment.

The only thing I am running is a playtest of a good buddy's homebrew game, it takes place in modern day New York City (which none of us know anything about) and is basically Sherlock and Watson meet Batman where Batman is a spoiled brat who fights crime for kicks, Sherlock has a serious heroin problem and a pronounced limp, and Watson is strong-arm British ex-pat and ex-con.

So far, they've been solving mysteries that have all had a paranormal connection, with the help of Egg Shen. Think Call of Cthulu meets Big Trouble in Little China.

Anyway, this lack of pressure for me to create content for my original campaign world has, of course, got me thinking about my original campaign world and formulating (read: stealing) ideas for it.

So, shadow delvers, dungeoneers, adventurers, whatever you want to call them.
They're not your average nutter, they're worse.
They think it's great fun to wriggle themselves into holes in the ground in search of some dead king's tin cup.

And there's plenty of places for them to crawl, I don't mind telling you. You see, way back when, the old kings of Viroof used to bury their dead in tombs like the heathen dwarfs. All along the Southron Road, the countryside is littered with cairns and mounds to some minor chieftain or favored gilly.

But they've all been picked over a thousand-thousand times, and no delver is interested in them anymore. There are deeper, darker, more dangerous and more profitable graves to plunder. Usually on the western side of the road. Between the highway and the mountains, or carved into the living rock, you can find the places where no one has been stupid enough to enter since the place was sealed.

They're often difficult to find, your best bet is to find a good guide, a seasoned woodsman from the area. He'll know the places where moss and turf and tree hide ancient masonry. The places that animals avoid, and the places where he dare not spend the night. A good woodsman will know all the signs that point an old grave.
He'll charge to take you out there of course. The best guides will bring a wagon with them, and you'll have to charter that too, but if you're lucky, your guide will be a good cook as well, and should you manage to not get killed inside the dungeon, you might have a decent meal waiting for you at the campsite.

Shadow Delvers

I've been reading the book Shadow Divers about deep sea scuba divers trying to identify the wreck of a German World War II U-boat off the New Jersey coast and it has me thinking about the parallels that a DM could draw.

Wrecks are often found by fishermen, who will sometimes trade the locations of the wrecks to charter boat captains.

The locations are jealously guarded and the wrecks themselves are dangerous locations that sometimes hide great treasures for those brave or stupid enough to dive them.

It' an easy comparison to make, but an interesting one too. I've already sketched an idea in my head of what it would look like in my home campaign. Perhaps I'll post that later...