Thirty Days of D&D, Day 7: Favorite Edition

I might not have a definitive favorite edition,
but I feel this D&D ampersand
is the most iconic.

If we go by my postings, my favorite edition of D&D would appear to be 2nd edition. That may be true given much of my gaming took (takes) place using that edition. By the format of games I'm playing (via Play by Post) the rules are the right system weight. There's enough gristle for players to sink their teeth upon in order to have their rules sheets reflect their characters with a degree of specializations and skill development but the use and interaction of those elements does not bog down the already sluggish pace of PbP (or PBeMs).

Yet, I've also spent a number of years solely playing 3E/3.5E games, also through PbP/PBeM. I have no problems with games of that era or it's recent derivatives like Pathfinder. It takes a certain mindset to get into, but it is not difficult for me to get into. Likewise, a recent interest in and exploration of OSR games reveals they're compatible enough with my 'new school' notions of D&D that I wouldn't have much difficulty giving them a try (or AD&D (1E) for that matter, unless modified OA counts).

I've limited opportunities to play and I count any instance where I get to game to be a favored activity. If I could feasibly try all the editions I would, they would all be my favorite edition as long as I'm playing some form of the game. I see the composition of the gamers and the general premise of the game more important than the rules. I can adapt to quirks of rules throughout the editions and similar games. What would throw me off more would be a poor game setup, either a group of disruptive or mismatched players, or a weak premise. The former part of that statement would hold up a game no matter the edition. The latter part is relative, I could be in the mood for a simple dungeon crawl one game or really desire an deeply interlinked game of cloak & dagger style intrigue the next. What's important is finding games that interest you and playing them or at least discussing them, which is what I take  as the purpose of this blog challenge.

Beyond the Wall: Self-Taught Mage Playbook

As the other bloggers work on their portions of the Beyond the Wall blogfest, I figured I would get a slight jump start myself and roll my character’s attributes and characteristics according to the Self-Taught Mage playbook. I’m generally a slow writer and it takes quite a while for me to mull over new ideas enough to produce something legible and coherent. Best I lay out the character traits revealed by the rolls now so I can start the process, break it up into more easily wrangled pieces. 

The first category deal with the character's childhood, broken down into more specific questions to be answer by the dice rolls. My set of specific rolls for this section can be found here: http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4071720/

Question 1 provides details about the characters parents and what the character learned from them or by living with them. I rolled a 7 on a d12 (total number of choices), which states “Your parents ran the local inn. You grew up meeting many travellers and hearing their tales.” Additionally, with each piece of the character to emerge from these questions and rolls, the character gains something, in this case, +2 Cha, +1 Int, +1 Dex, +1 Wis.

Note the starting base ability scores for a Self-Taught mage are 12 for Intelligence and 8 for everything else.

Question 2 is how the character distinguished himself as a child. Roll of 4 on a d8, which says “No secret escaped you.” Gain: +2 Int, +1 Dex.

Question 3 is about your other friends in the village aside from fellow party members. Rolled 1 on a d8 yields “Laboring with the blacksmith took your mind of your troubles.” Gain: +2 Str, +1 Cha.

At this point, the character found an old tome of magic and began learning from the book. Becoming a level 1 Mage, the character gains Sense Magic and Spell Casting as class abilities, in addition to the skills Ancient History, and the cantrip Mage Light. What else does the character learn from his experiences as a fledgeling mage? Several more questions answered by dice rolls will give us hints. Those roles on the character’s experiences are here: http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4071721/

Question 4, who wrote the book of magic? Rolled a 4 on a d6, the answer is “The head of a secret order from long ago.” Gain: +3 Wis, Skill: Politics. Interesting, actually all the options are very evocative. The only problem I see here is the beginnings of skill redundancy from previous trait options, characters could conceivably get the same skill offered twice. The full game text may have a resolution such as a bonus if the character ends up with options giving them the same skill twice. I’ll have to check on that, but it doesn’t affect this character.

Question 5 is what sort of mage was the book’s author, more so the mage archetype, magical style or school, rather than his position or occupation like above. Rolling a 1 on a d6 gives me “A clever illusionist. You learned the following magics: the spell Greater Illusion, the ritual Wizard’s Mark, and the cantrip Glamour Weaving.” Gain +2 Cha and spells mentioned.

Question 6 says a spirit of Chaos was drawn by the characters power. How did he fight it off? Also this is the part where one of the party members is involved in the character’s history. Each playbook has a section like this involving the player character to their right on the table. In my case that is Pearce’s character, the Witch’s Prentice. Rolling a 5 on a d6 results in “You stood behind the wall of your power until it grew weak. The friend on your right learned a lot from your brave stand, and gains +1 Int.” Gain: +2 Int, Spell: Mystical Shield.

The final question deals with a real wizard from the south passing through the village when the character came of age and what the wizard though of the character. This could set up a potential mentor, a rival, a villain, or other NPC. A result of 4 on a d6 is “He was amuse by your first steps towards learning magic and taught you a trick.” Gain: +2 Cha. Ritual: Unseen Servant. Some of the other options provide rituals, others result in items like a staff.

The next few steps involve compiling all this information into a character sheet with some additional stats derived from ability scores or from being a level 1 Mage. The character gets equipment and fortune points (more on this later) and the character is good to join his friends on an adventure beyond the walls of their village.

Each player is allowed an opportunity to exchange one of their roll results for another option of their own choice within the same section. I will reserve that until after all the players have rolls posted and we’ve had time to look ever everything. I’ll probably only do this to maximize connections with other characters or otherwise enhance conflict potential for this character.

The tentative stats for this character are Str: 10, Dex: 10, Con: 8, Int: 17, Wis: 12, Cha: 15

I will have an additional bonus from the player on my left, Brett who is the Would-Be Knight, due to both characters sharing a situation arising from Brett’s character history. We have barely begun and already we have emerging memorable events and personages connecting us to the village and each other.

Obscure RPG Appreciation Day: Conan the Roleplaying Game (TSR 1985)

S&W Appreciation Day (and before that Basic Fantasy RPG Appreciation Day) may have set some balls rolling. Today is Obscure (Fantasy) RPG Appreciation Day. I’m always up for more appreciation of tabletop roleplaying games. They are fascinating things, little (or sometimes major) quirky artifacts of game design that should be played with, analyzed, taken apart, and put back together (I’ll settle for just playing these games at the least given the volume of games out there).

As organized by the Mesmerized by Sirens* blog, Obscure RPG Appreciation Day is confined to RPGs published between 1975 and 1989. As much as I want to participate, the topic is out of my league. I didn’t get into RPGs until about a decade after that cut-off and it would be about another decade before I started to really accumulate games. Suffice to say, all the games I own are firmly of the “modern” advent.

Err ... wrong game.

What’s a new school gamer to do? Nothing I guess. Then I remembered David “Zeb” Cook recently auctioned off a bunch of his old gaming stuff. It was mostly the usual D&D stuff to be sure, but amongst them were some interesting items such as WIP manuscripts for games like Star Frontiers. One of the items was a shrink wrapped copy of Conan the Roleplaying Game by TSR published in 1985. Until this point I had never seen this game before. I was aware of the D&D modules based on the movie franchise and the more recent d20 based Conan RPG by Mongoose. A quick search also reveals a GURPS Conan, but this 80s TSR game had its own system, a chart based system. Seems such systems were in vogue during the mid-80s. I believe the Pacesetter games and TSR’s Marvel Superheroes also used charts (and in a way AD&D in the hit tables as well, come to think of it). Charts are cool.

Closer ... but wait, what? The Darkness!

Conan RPG was a short-lived affair, one boxed set and three adventure modules. Probably didn’t sell well and never had a huge publication run. Copies of this game and associated modules are a bit hard to find, as far as I can see, and expensive, definitely so last I looked. Now in truth, I don’t actually own this game, given the aforementioned uncommon availability and cost. That’s okay, there’s a retroclone for that (and this is something I can say with increasing regularity nowadays as more obscure games receive the retroclone treatment).

With the blessing of Zeb Cook himself, Mark Krawec has reimagined and restated the rules of the system (scrubbing the IP) into a retroclone engine dubbed ZeFRS (Zeb’s Fantasy Roleplaying System). Available in on site HTML, PDF download, and even RTF (Rich Text File) for your own formatting and hacking. It’s even one of the systems available with the Legends of Steel campaign setting from Evil DM Productions (other systems paired with the setting are Barbarians of Lemuria and Savage Worlds). That’s right, the system is actually utilized in a new property.

There we go!

With a retroclone to distribute, this relatively obscure system is far from dead, but even the retroclone is still fairly obscure. I haven’t heard much about it and it’s been out since around 2007-2008. Aside from the Legends of Steel release, it hasn’t been implemented in other products as far as I know. Even then I knew of Legends of Steel from the designer interviews discussing the Barbarians of Lemuria version.

I appreciate Mark Krawec and the other contributors to the system, with David “Zeb” Cook giving his nod or go ahead, compiling the ZeFRS so newcomers like myself can have a version of the game to try out without having to track down a print copy of the original. Having a retroclone raises the profile of games that simply don’t exist in useable (gameable) quantities after they’ve been out of print for decades.

* I highly recommend blogs like Mesmerized by Sirens, which covers the lesser known games of the hobby. For people who haven't been following tabletop RPGs since their inception, in particular the wild first two decades, it's like going through history books in the library to discover entire civilizations and historical periods I had no prior cognizance of. Some of the games covered are the definition of "lesser known, forgotten, obscure or neglected". In all likelihood, I will never lay hands on a copy of such games, thus following the exploration of such games from those who have access to them is quite educational.

Ventures Beyond the Wall

A few weeks ago, Rob Barrett started posting on G+ about Flatland Games’ Beyond the Wall & Other Adventures.* It is an OSR type game, a neoclone that models the YA bildungsroman** fantasy genre, inspired by Lloyd Alexander and Ursula K. LeGuin. Though I’m not well versed in the direct inspirational sources of this game, the concepts are classics of the genre and were instantly recognizable to me.

From Rob’s discussion of the game, what immediately struck me was the interesting collaborative party creation system. Each player chooses an archetype, instantly familiar to fantasy RPG players and fans of the genre. In round robin fashion, players create their characters based on their respective archetype playbooks, which determines their stats and skills, but furthermore influences their characters' backgrounds, relationships, and aspects of their companions. Everyone is connected to at least two player characters and some NPCs. Character creation even results in a complete home village.

While I’m still new to the OSR games and have limited experience with RPGs outside of D&D and recent descendants, I don’t recall a fantasy RPG with character creation done in this way with an emphasis on building interconnections culminating in a starting hometown. The playbooks are brief but extensive. Browsing through them never felt restrictive but rather creative, as I saw the possibilities they hold for each archetype and subsequently each character. Even if two players pick the same playbook, their characters could turn out very different due to the rolls they get on the charts, divergent upbringings, their own histories, separate goals, mentors, and adversaries.

Rob asked for participants in a shared mini-setting design exercise who will run through Beyond the Wall & Other Adventures character (and home village) creation process. Participants will detail their contributions on their blogs following the round robin style as if we were seated at a virtual table. Suffice to say, this is right up the alley of the intents of this blog, gaming chatter, setting creation, the whole nine. I can’t wait to see how this turns out in actual practice.

Things began to move this week once we gathered six participants to form our party. We’ve already decided on playbooks over G+ and will start the full process in the order we signed on to participate. Check out Rob’s blog post detailing the process and order: Beyond the Wall: It Takes a Crowd to Source a Village. The participants, their blogs, and respective chosen playbooks are:

+Rob Barrett of Vargold: The Wolf-Time is creating a Dwarven Adventurer.
+Brett Slocum of The Eye of Joyful Sitting Amongst Friends is creating a Would-Be Knight.
+Henry Wong of The Campaign Expanse is creating a Self-Taught Mage.
+Pearce Shea of games with others is creating a Witch's Prentice.
+Anthony Simeone of Once More Unto the Breach is creating a Young Woodsman.
+Mike Lizardi of Fear No Darkness is creating a Halfling Outrider.

* Beyond the Wall & Other Adventures is available at DriveThruRPG, best thing is it has free support materials in the form of more playbooks in two sets, Nobles and Demihumans. In total these playbooks outnumber the ones offered in the main book. They offer a good preview of the character creation system.

** German, the language has a word for everything you wouldn't expect it to have.

Second Chances or More 2E

Being a fan and player of AD&D 2E I’ve been a bit disappointed the edition often gets skipped over by the gaming community at large, whether mainstream, OSR, indie, or what have you.

The rising juggernaut of Pathfinder champions the spirit of 3E/3.5E. Their support includes volumes of gorgeous full color books, ample primary and third party publisher support (probably the best in the industry), competent and convenient digital retailing, and print distribution with increasing prominence in many brick and mortar stores.

It can be argued the forthcoming 13th Age is a divergent adaptation of 4E using the OGL. It has a growing community and we will see how well it fares when its released into stores giving all gamers outside of the pre-order folks or convention goers a chance to look at the system.

OSRIC, one of the earliest OSR games, claims direct descent from the ideas offered in AD&D (1E). Other games emulating earlier pre-Advanced versions have supplemental and companion books (S&W Complete, LL AEC) easily scaling up the basic systems to approach AD&D. All these games are reaching out to their audiences and in some instances making headway towards new player-bases. Their growth is made evident by the response to Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day and other indicators, such as Wizards’ reprinting earlier editions in premium or collector formats.

Where does 2E fit into this? There’s not as much activity as far as I know. Two games always pop up when I search for a 2E ‘retroclone’. Both have been around for a couple of years, but none of them have reached the self-sustaining critical mass like some of the other OSR games have (third party adventures, subsystems, genre variants). One is For Gold & Glory and the main website hosting it appears to have expired.

The other is Myth & Magic and my personal experience (or lack thereof) goes back to Late March, Early May of 2012 with the conclusion of a very successful Kickstarter project. Things were looking up. The supportive community helped the game complete a crowd-funding project with an abundant surplus. Maybe this was the catalyst a 2E-style game needed to gain traction with the gaming community.

I mean, in their DIY scrappiness the OSR games have found ways to gain solid footholds in traditional distribution channels and were always adepts at digital distribution — and self-publishing, and crowd-sourcing, and print-on-demand, all the publishing hot topics that have several industries dizzy, giddy, and panicky from the whirl of activity — always pioneers to begin with.

At the time, the next pioneering wave seemed to be Kickstarter as it was riding off the high of its first mega-projects. It was THE platform with which to launch a creative project and games in particular. It was essentially self-publishing ground-zero, not just self-publishing which other platforms could do, but came prepackaged with expanding an audience as well.

Well, I joined that herd and I can say the experience was especially unmemorable. I promptly forgot about Myth & Magic in the midst of more exciting and better updated projects. Not that New Haven Games didn’t update, I just found a lot of them didn’t raise my interest beyond the surface level of "Oh, that’s nice to hear". Others were focused on the Game Master’s Guide Kickstarter, which I didn’t bother backing as other things again seemed more interesting at the time.

I neglected this project until reading Tenkar’s Tavern updating on the progress on this and the developing history of trouble facing this project, a history which had skipped over my head entirely due to my absence of attention. Previously, I had downloaded the direct upload of the Players Guide, but the password locked PDF annoyed me and I never went beyond a skim of the table of contents. I missed the RPGNow coupons for the regular PDF as it was sent along with the flood of Kickstarter update emails. I have those emails turned off. By now New Haven Games had grown silent and non-responsive, so my request for another coupon is not likely to be heeded.

In a recent update, we at least know the reason for the lack of communication. In the face of mounting pressure from the project and real life issues, the project creator blanked out. The whole situation, what was once a positive experience, became an unpleasant weight.

You know what? I’m perfectly fine with that explanation. Having experienced similar situations and pressures, and falling flat on my face, I can understand. Glad to hear the designer realize it and claims he’s taking steps to resolve the remaining issues with the project. I hope to get what I backed for, sooner rather than later. We’re coming up on a full year now for a project that already had a draft and now a completed PDF but seemingly no where near completion in terms of physical goods. Tom Ryan, the one-man show behind New Haven Games also admits to making a publishing miscalculation choosing the print option of glossy pages. Art for one of the supplements is going to be non-existent and shipping is going to eat into the GM Guide funds or he has to pony up the difference. Doesn’t help that postal rates rose. Another stumble in the long line of slip ups, but publishing dilemmas have plagued far more experienced and well organized projects than this one.

One thing Tom said in his update, "Myth & Magic is likely doomed now because of my mismanagement of the campaigns", may hold true. Honestly, 2E may not be the most popular of D&D editions and a 2E retroclone probably doubly dubious in its position. With the extent of problems disrupting it, M&M may very well be dead in the water. The thing with retroclones is they have to reach out to a large enough segment of the gaming community to warrant groups adopting the rules, at least for gamers like me who play solely online in either PBeMs or PbPs. I don’t have a tabletop group I can convince to play a retroclone they’ve never heard of. Convincing a GM online to run a retroclone he’s never heard of is even more remote.

Funny thing is right around this time last year when Myth & Magic seemed like it would rekindle 2E’s flame, I joined an actual 2E game with members of my group left over from a shuttered 3E game. It’s a lot of fun and probably the best time gaming I’ve had in years. So do I really need a retroclone? Probably not.

What else is right around the corner, a year after Myth & Magic’s funding? The WotC produced official AD&D 2E premium reprints. Not only are 2E books easy to find in used bookstores, flea markets, or eBay, we’re going to have a set of brand new reprints available in May. Steve Winter already received his copies (some of the first off the press) and posted a picture on his Twitter account. They’re handsome books. I may get them just to support 2E.

Let the Games Begin!

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day has arrived!

While the focus of this event is on the ideas presented in the system and the directions people take them, what’s a shindig without some actual *stuff* to go with it. Two places are running a one day sale during this occasion. One is Frog God Games and here’s what they had to say about their offer:

"Frog God Games has discounted their entire line of Swords & Wizardry products for 1 day only in celebration of Swords & Wizardry appreciation day (April 17th 2013). The discount is good for 25% off S&W Products but you must use coupon* code SWApprDay on April 17th 2013 at check out.

*The coupon excludes items less than $1, S&W Cards, Pre-Orders, and Subscriptions."

Follow the link below to see what strikes your fancy.

Link: http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/products.html

Of course the core rules and all sorts of other goodies can always be found here for FREE: http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/?page_id=18

***

Another place running a sale is the D20PFSRD store. They’ve been very supportive of Swords & Wizardry, putting up the open game content of the S&W products on their site along with their SRD of Pathfinder open game rules and mechanics as well as Mutants and Mastermind. The wonders and convenience of technology. D20PFSRD’s promo code is: SWAD252013. Link below to the corresponding products:

Link: http://shop.d20pfsrd.com/collections/swords-wizardry-appreciation-day

The Swords & Wizardry SRD is available FREE, searchable and indexed online at: http://www.d20swsrd.com/

In the beginning …

Welcome to The Campaign Expanse.

'What's with the name?' would be an apt question to answer in order to establish the primary focus of this blog. I’ve wanted to start a gaming and general geekery blog for some time, but through the course of various obligations and distractions never initiated one with the proper time or effort. A recent set of influences has provided me the impetus to finally try my hand at blogging.

Part of the reason for the long delay to action was a muddled sense of purpose. What would I post about? The thought brewed for some time before I looked back and realized the topics I gravitate towards through my years as a gamer (and geek of other media) were the campaign settings. I like to read about them, discuss them, try them out and play in them, buy the setting guides, examine the different versions, even study their publication history, and when the opportunity arises add to them.

My fascination with settings and worlds was quite obvious, I'm surprised it took me this this long to express, but there was never a need to reflect on something meant for fun, since the objective of fulfillment overrides most requirements for objective scrutiny. As a nod to the campaign settings that inspired me when I first entered the hobby, this blog takes its naming cues from the campaign accessories, regional supplements, and most obviously the campaign expansions of the classic campaign settings.

While I will write about the concept of settings and the settings themselves here, it will certainly not be the sole subject. I've collected an assortment of different game systems, adventures, and other books over the years and continue to increase my library. Expect the usual random thoughts, reviews, product hauls, as well as posts on other non-gaming topics, though I will keep to things of interests within related genres and fandom.

One of the more recent games to enter my library is Swords & Wizardry. My exposure to the OSR community and retro-clone type games is limited. Although I have electronic copies of the more prominent OSR games (because they’re free, why not keep the main PDF for reference), Swords & Wizardry is one of the few OSR games I have acquired a print copy. Thanks partly to Kickstarter and partly to Frog God Games who I previously purchased Pathfinder materials from. Crowd-funding may be a source of many posts for this blog as I have several products derived from these sorts of projects or due from such projects. Come to think of it, this blog just became a lot more interesting due to that thought alone.

A major reason for finally getting a blog off the ground is the upcoming Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day on April 17th. The growing list of blogs and overall energy of the S&W and OSR communities is infectious. Since I have a perfectly good copy of Swords & Wizardry in hand, I figured I would finally crack open the book. For Sword & Wizardry Appreciation Day, my perspective will be mostly as a 'newish school' gamer looking at an old school style system for the first time, 'newish' since I started at the end of 2nd edition (and still play the system), but spent most of my time in 3E/3.5E and more recently Pathfinder. Then again, by now with 5E on the way, everything is 'old school' in some sense. Everything under the many suns of the 'verse is fair gaming.

H