Franco v Colbert Tolkien Smackdown II

Steven Colbert is awesome.

Awesome Comic Books Artists Drawing Stuff on a French TV Show from the 70s

 Here are some of the best comic book artists ever on a French TV show where they collaborate on a drawing.  

In this one Druillet amazes me as always with what pours out of his pen.  Hogarth is wonderful, and who can resist John Buscema drawing Norrin Radd??



 I've always loved Moebius and Neil Adams, but it was Joe Kubert who blew me away here.

In the Weeds of Game Design

I've been working on my previously mentioned and untitled Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  I'm well into the weed in a few areas, but I also have some really daunting work ahead of me.  Game design is a bizarre and sometimes painful process.  As was indicated in my last post, the game is definitely heading in an old school simulationist direction right now.  It feels to me like an unholy combination of Runequest, Top Secret/SI, AD&D 1e, Rolemaster, Stormbringer, and Palladium Fantasy.  I've also stolen a few "new school" ideas from games like Burning Wheel (which I feel like a spiritual successor to some of the games above).

Right now there are sixteen professions and working through those is taking longer than I thought.

And the magic system is a bit of a mess right now.

And so it goes.

Simulations & Dragons (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and do my own Fantasy Heartbreaker)

There is an ancient tradition of people trying to do the their own Fantasy Roleplaying Games.  For much of the early years of our hobby this consisted of people trying to do D&D "right" or more even "realistically."  Examples of this particular design path include games like: Runequest, Chivalry & Sorcery, Harnmaster, Palladium Fantasy (1st Edition), Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many others.  Even my beloved AD&D 1st Edition can be seen as an outgrowth of this impulse in response to the original 1974 D&D Boxed set.  I've always been attracted to these more complex games, and the idea of simulating in great detail my own fantasy characters and the kingdom they live in has always been a powerful draw for me.

To that end, I've started tinkering with my own game system that definitely draws inspiration from these types of games.  Right now it consistes of a mass of notes in a notebook, but it's edging up on eight or nine pages of rough notes right now.  I've no intention of publishing this for sale, but maybe I'll make it available as a free pdf eventually, and I don't really know where this is going though.  Conceivable, I could wake up tomorrow and decide this is a terrible idea.

Right now I'm excited about though.  I'll post more about it if I continue to make progress. 

Old school simulationists unite!

Heritage's Knights & Magick now available from The Gaming Gang

Heritage Model's Paint and Play sets Caverns of Doom and Crypt of the Sorcerer were formative games in my introduction to the hobby.  A friend of mine got Caverns of Doom the same Christmas I received the Moldvay Basic Set.  A few years ago, I got interested in trying to track down copies of the games and while I did manage to locate the rules--alas, I don't own the actual miniatures that came with them.  In the process of all this, I remembered seeing ads for other miniature sets Heritage produced like Merlin (which written written by Greg Stafford) and Knights of King Arthur.  However, I also learned that Heritage had produced a more extensive miniatures rule set called Knights and Magick.  Now I've always been interested in minis, but I didn't really own any until I started buying D&D Plastic minis a few years ago.

Despite this lack of real metal minis I became really intrigued by this little rule set.  I realized that I really wanted to check it out, but sets of this game were pretty pricey on the secondary market.  One of the issues surrounding the game was figuring out who actually owned the Knights and Magick IP.  Heritage Models went into bankruptcy in the mid 1980s, and their miniature lines were sold off to a number of companies (including Reaper).  Apparently, what happened is that Heritage didn't bother to sell the rights to the rules of Knights and Magick to anybody!  That means that the only people who could claim rights to the game was Heritage Models, and they no longer existed as an entity.

Enter the guys over at the Gaming Gang podcast who spent some time talking to Heritage's former IP holders and asking them if they minded if they went ahead and made the Knights and Magick rules available again.  Nobody seemed to care, so they've taken the plunge.

So Knight and Magick is now available as a PDF for $12.95.  They also have physical copies available from Lulu.  Moreover, they're planning on producing a new edition of the game later this year!

Check out their pages:

http://thegaminggang.com/2013/01/knights-and-magick-classic-miniatures-rule-set-back-in-print-here-at-tgg/

and here:

http://thegaminggang.com/2013/02/knights-and-magick-now-available-as-sofcover-hardcover-or-coil-bound-books/

Adjudicating Combat in OD&D

The apparent lack of an initiative system in OD&D is something that I've been thinking about recently.  This might be obvious stuff to seasoned OD&D players, but my perspective on this has shifted a bit recently.  I think I was looking at the game too firmly through the lens of what came later--rather than seeing what may be suggested by the rulebooks themselves.  So here’s my thoughts on OD&D and Combat.

We can see that various later editions tried to deal with this issue by instituting various solutions such as tracking initiative by Dexterity rating (Holmes) or by rolling a d6 (AD&D, Moldvay).  Both of these approaches can be extrapolated from Men & Magic.

However--the whole point of the referee is to adjudicate these kinds of situations!  So with that in mind:

First, the referee looks at situational factors like surprise.  Does it seem likely that any of the participants are surprised?  Is there a chance that the PCs may be alerted in some way?  How do we determine this?  The referee adjudicates the situation FAIRLY based on situational factors.  That is, I think, the default system implied by the OD&D rulebooks.

Second, assuming that combat has been joined--what happens next?  Who goes first?  Well how fast and skilled are the PCs?  (this is where Dex becomes a factor as it indicates in Men & Magic)  Are there other factors that need to be accounted for?  If the PCs are heavily armored Dwarves using heavy axes fighting a group of Orcs wearing leather armor and armed with lighter short swords and crossbows--might the Orcs gain initiative?  Or what if one the players is so quickly decisive that she immediately declares that her PC is charging the Orcs and yelling the ancient battle cry of the Dwarves?  Might this PC gain initiative before the Orcs even if the other Dwarves do not?

Other factors such as weapon reach etc. can also be factored in through adjudication.

If it looks like it’s a too close to call--you can always fall back on the d6 as a "tie-breaker" as Holmes suggests.

Other factors such as additional strikes (ripostes etc.) can be adjudicated as well.  In this regard I'd use Chainmail as a guideline as to situational factors that might play into this.

The referee or the players makes attack rolls as usual with the DM adjudicating the effectiveness of hits etc.  Use d6 or variable damage here as you will.  One of the main jobs of the referee here is to make combat vivid and exciting.  Don't just drone on about hit points lost--give us some real description of what's happening!  D&D combat is very abstract, and it is up to the referee here to make it sing.  Season with whatever level of gore you and your players are comfortable with.  Bad things happen when people hit each other with sharp pieces of metal!

This approach really comes out of OD&D's wargame roots but it also veers close to what's today called "freeform."  The referee has as many tools as they want here.  Lots of folks might feel like they're flying without the net of the rules here--to that I say: Welcome to OD&D!

Lots of folks have obviously seen the advantages to this approach which was lost to one degree or another in all later iterations of the game.  Indeed, so many people complained about this to TSR that they felt they needed a more solid rules based edition that didn’t leave so much to the referee.  Thus Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was born.  I love AD&D but there’s something very freeing in all the open spaces of OD&D.

Large Size OD&D Campaign Hex Map

Here are a few pictures of the hex map I made up for the OD&D campaign I was running a few months back.  I've had the Armory hex paper for about seventeen years.  Figured I might as well finally use it for a big sandbox game.  We played about seven sessions of this before moving on to our current (and super awesome) Amber game, but I'd like to go back to the sandbox OD&D game at some point.

I included the rulebooks we're using for size reference in one picture.