State of the Blog

 

It's raining dice over here!

It seems that my gaming drought is over! The flood has come and I find myself inundated in gaming of all types. Magic: the Gathering, D&D 5e, and a plethora of Games Workshop stuff is being played on a regular basis.

As I’m sure many game bloggers can attest to there is something about actually playing the games we love that reinvigorates us and instills the desire to write about the hobby more than ever. At least for me at any rate. This year alone I’ve already written more posts than in the past two years combined!

It feels good to be playing and writing again. My life has seen a lot of changes over the past few years as I transition into a new career. In a couple of months, I should be starting my new job and I’m sure that will impact this blog and the gaming. But one thing is certain, I will always be back.

Another thing that’s become clear to me is that while I love sharing stuff about what’s going on in my life about games I play or stuff about gaming in general, I still have the desire to create something of my own. Something to share with the gaming community. The DIY crowd has (and continues to) put out amazing products. At some point in the future I need to add my own opus to this great body of work. When I do, I plan on previewing my work here first.

Till then expect to see more of my game reports and the rest of my Temple of Elemental Evil posts and anything else that comes up along the way!

The Way of Kings: The Gamer Archive

I’m back after another long hiatus of the blog. As I went through some of my favorite blogs I noticed I’m not the only one who has had a dearth of posts in the past while. Life has a way of sweeping you up and putting blogging on low priority. Not to mention that it’s difficult to write new and interesting content. I don’t want to be one of those blogs that just rehashes what everyone else is saying.

Shadows Over Innistrad is a great expansion!

What have I been doing game wise? First, on the RPG front I have done nothing for as long as I can remember. I have the 5e PH but I haven’t even really done anything with it. I’ve still been playing Magic: The Gathering quite a bit. The new Shadows Over Innistrad set has been pretty awesome. I managed to win first place at the pre-release tournament at my friendly neighbourhood game store! Magic has been my go to game since it is fast to play and finding a group of players is easy.

 

Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower

My local game store is also big fans of Warhammer. I’ve tried a few times now to get into miniature war games. I’ve picked up the start of a fantasy orcs and goblins army, and 40k Blood Angels. I have yet to play any actual games with them yet which is a bit frustrating. Lastly I picked up two Games Workshop board games. Deathwatch Overkill and Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. I’m very excited to get those put together and get some play time in. I’m not making any promises here, but I hope to write up a review of these games when time permits.

Deathwatch: Overkill

Finally, on the reading front I just finished rereading the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight and I’ve now started on Brian Sanderson’s epic fantasy series The Way of Kings. Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a fun read. It’s not without its faults but I still enjoyed it. I don’t really understand what people have against Dragonlance. I think over the years, now having more distance from RPGs has put a few things in perspective for me. I no longer really understand the polarized nature of gamers. That is to say that as I’ve browsed various forums I’ve noticed this tendency for gamers to really come down hard on settings or games that they think suck. I don’t really see it as a healthy thing for the nerd community. But that’s probably a blog entry for another day. The short of it, be kind to each other fellow gamers.

Why all the hate?

As for Sandersons’s Way of Kings. Holy Shit. This is a great read. I can see how Sanderson was chosen to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The dude can write. His worlds are interesting, though the magic in this world has elements similar to his Mistborn series. I think that you could probably make many comparisons to the Way of Kings and the Mistborn series, yet each is also distinct and entertaining in it’s own way. Either way the book has been excellent and I highly recommend it.

Books 1 & 2 of The Stormlight Archive, do yourself a favour and read it.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to Alternity

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
                                                                                 -Isaac Asimov

I managed to get a good bit of reading done over the Easter weekend. During that time I had this strange compulsion to take a fresh look at some of the older gaming books in my library. I guess that makes me some sort of RPG antiquarian.

So as you can probably figure out already this post is about the Alternity game line. TSR's now defunct generic modern/science fiction RPG came out in 1998 about the same year I got into gaming. I remember seeing the ads for it in Dragon Magazine and thinking it was a pretty neat looking game. There was a handful of reasons I never played this game.

Primarily I think this was because despite Star*Drive and Dark*Matter settings it seemed to try and push it's generic nature as its primary asset. Personally I had never read/watched a lot of sci-fi to figure out what to do with all that freedom. For some reason that I still don’t quite understand theres just something about fantasy and D&D that is just intuitive. Modern/Sci-fi gaming seems to suffer from this inherent weakness of expectations of how to satisfactorily play shit out. This is probably the reason why fantasy rpgs have always, and will continue to always dominant over modern/science fiction ones.

Secondly the rules seemed fairly intimidating to me at the time. In fact D&D 2e was already pushing my comfort level as far as rules went. Which is to say I had very little to none. If it had not been for people who already new how to play, I never would have figured this shit out. Not to mention fantasy was the bread and butter of my gaming group at the time. Meaning that if we were ever going to play Alternity it would be incumbent upon me to learn the rules and run a game.

Then in 2000 the d20 system and D&D 3e took the world by storm and swept me along with it. Strike three your out Alternity. For a long time my interest in almost any other rpg with the exception of maybe Heavy Gear or Call of Cthulhu was next to nil. In fact it was really only the arrival of D&D 4e that snapped me out of my misguided and stubborn love for all things d20.

At roughly the same period in time that Wizards of the Coasts acquired TSR they also picked up the license for Star Wars. This was pretty much the death knell for the Alternity game system and Star*Drive. As for Dar*Matter I'm sure the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu had a hand in making sure that line got the axe as well. Essentially the philosophy was that if it didn’t help sell the core d20 books it wasn’t sold by WotC. Additionally WotC didn’t want another space opera setting competing with Star Wars sales. I mean its just good business sense.

So 15 years later I've gone back to these books. Mostly I was looking for material I might be able to steal or adapt for the mythical Digital Dark Age campaign I hope to run one day. Part of it was as I said previously this strange nostalgic urge to revisit something from my gamer past. A chance to visit fleeting memories of that time in my life when things were just a little more simple than they are now.

The end result was that I came away inspired by much of what I read. No longer did I see an overly complicated game system. Though perhaps not as streamlined or as intuitive as d20, there are some innovative and interesting mechanics none the less. A Skill based system, degrees of success, and a neat way of going about handling modifiers. I'm sort of amazed that this game hasnt had a retro clone based off of it.

The Star*Drive campaign setting was also pretty interesting to read. Where as before I saw a boring generic space opera setting I could now instantly see a the possibilities for a campaigns that could be set there. Now I find myself wishing that I had collected all the books for this campaign setting a little bit at a time while I had the opportunity and spare cash to do so. Alas, hind sight, as they say is 20/20.

My prediction is after D&D 5e is finally released, combined with the lack of attention that d20 Modern got during the 4e era and the dumping of the Star Wars rpg license we may just see a new version of Alternity down the pipeline. Or at the very least a repackaging of Star*Drive and/or Dark*Matter.

Now With More Pac-Man

I just added a new Pac-Man widget to the bottom of the blog. I know how could I deny my readership such a valuable widget for so long ? What kind of self respecting game blog is worthy of the name with out it ! So read the blog, stay for the Pac-Man.Oh Zombiecowboy you crazy!

I'm Going To Be A Writer

"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says "you are nothing", I will be a writer."

-Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo

It's a Trap Tuesday

Innsmouth Porn

By Cribs from deviantART

No word of a lie. I was checking out my Blogger stats and one of the keywords for finding my blog was Innsmouth Porn. Dude. That's just messed up. So I felt obliged to rectify that particular situation. So there you go you filthy pervs. Enjoy your Innsmouth Porn.

My Lovecraftian Menstrual Cycle

I've been on a Cthulhu kick lately. This seems to happen on a regular basis. I seem to suffer from some kind of horrid Lovecraftian menstrual cycle. When it hits me I feel a crawling in my gut, a cold shrivelling of my balls as they retract inside me, and a feverish hammering in my head that threatens to tear the womb of my imagination apart, and bleed horrible half-formed mutant ideas on the floor. These ideas reek of rotten fish and non-euclidean geometrical dimensions, slick with the after birth of knowledge mankind was not meant to know...

Gross. I know. Being me is hard.

This most recent bout was brought on when I made a few RPG purchases at my favourite PDF one stop shop Drive Thru RPG. I picked up from ARC Dream Publishing:

• Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity
• Delta Green: Eyes Only
• The NEMESIS RPG.

Now my mind is on fire with ideas that I would like to share in the coming days in the form of sperated blog posts. So what can you readers expect ?

First up Delta Green. I'd like to do a review on each of the PDFs DG:Targets of Opportunity, and DG:Eyes Only. Secondly I had some thoughts and ideas on how I would go about setting up a Delta Green campaign.

Secondly I wanted to write about Call of Cthulhu and the Escape from Innsmouth campaign. Why and what does this have to do with anything aside from being Lovecraftian ? Well I'll get into that in it's own blog post. The short answer is that because Delta Green has it's origins in the Raid on Innsmouth. Whenever I think of running Delta Green my thoughts invariably come back to Escape from Innsmouth. Now I have some ideas on how I would like to run this and things I would do to make this a totally awesome and memorable campaign.

Lastly the NEMESIS rpg (A.K.A the horror version of the one roll engine game system, or Dark ORE). The system is free and I'll let you know what I think of it, and how/why I plan on using it in the future. I will also cover horror roleplaying in general, my experiences with the genre in the past and what I'd like to experiment with in the future.

The ultimate goal here is to provide other GMs with ideas that they could use to run there own games, and provide some useful information. Some of this is me trying to document some experimental ideas I want to try out. All in all I have a good 3 to 6 blog posts lined up here that should be useful to others as opposed to me talking out of my ass here for the sake of hearing my own voice.

In the mean time pass the Elder Sign strength Midol. I'm feeling another wave of cramps coming on of the Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young variety. 

Lazy Sunday - Lo Pan Style

I found this video over at Advanced Dungeons and Parenting. Being a fan of the oh so classic film Big Trouble in Little China (and really who isn't?) I just had to share it. I found it pretty funny, your milage may vary. Have a gnarly gnarlington Sunday.