Platonic Solid

After a first look through of the combat system in the Dungeon Masters Guide, I boldly went to the gaming table thinking that I understood how to run things. Boy, was I wrong. Well, not necessarily wrong, mind you. But I froze up pondering potential corner cases in the system. Thank goodness that it was just a test encounter because the game ground to an absolute halt. I wasn't anywhere near confident enough to start make rulings since the intent was to run things according to the rules as written. Determined to learn the way of 1st edition, I trawled the major old school forums looking for clarification. I didn't find a whole lot of specific advice but I did find some pointers. One such pointer was to ADDICT which is short for the  ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® INITIATIVE AND COMBAT TABLE . Don't let the name fool you. It's not just a table. It's a step by step explanation of first edition's combat system with examples. It's a well done resource and it...

Under the Christmas tree, I found a stack of AD&D 1st edition reprint books; the Dungeons Masters Guide, Players Handbook, and the Monster Manual. I started D&D with Moldvay Basic & Expert and never owned any original 1st Edition AD&D books so it's neat looking through them and discovering what so many have been talking about for so long. Now I know where Papers & Paychecks came from. Anyways, my first impression is quite positive. So much of the game is already familiar but so much of it isn't. To me, it sure seems like 1st edition AD&D is old school Dungeons & Dragons with the switches and knobs purposefully exposed. In a way it makes me feel like I did when I first discovered D&D. I know that I'll play it and that I'll love it but it won't be as written. Heck, without a few more readings I'm not even sure if I know the rules. That's part of the fun. Is it just a sense of nostalgia talking? Maybe. Probably. It's no...

We're getting ready to kick off a Castles & Crusades campaign. The two PCs are sole survivors of a destroyed mercenary company called the Twilight Company. The adventure will be driven by their attempt to rebuild the company from scratch. This means that they'll have to delve into dark places for loot to finance their endeavors. The plan is to run from low to mid levels with Fields of Battle used to resolve the big stuff.

Recently, I picked up Fantasy Dice  and we gave it a whirl, but before getting to that, a bit about the game itself. As presented, Fantasy Dice is a generic system that you can play historical or gritty fantasy right out of the box. It also provides all kinds of switches, knobs, and advice for shaping the system to not only fit but to also to help build your setting. The advice's intent is easy to intuit because there's an internal consistency woven throughout the game. The task resolution system is pervasive. Use it to sneak away, engage in combat, cast a spell. Now, you may be thinking that such an approach may sound boring. But trust me, it's not. The game uses the full spectrum of normal polyhedrals: D4 through D12. Your character's attributes determine the number of dice you roll while your skills specify the type of die to roll. Roll the pool and take the highest vs. either a target number or vs an opponent's roll. There's more. You can dynamically...

I normally don't post up about sales or what-not but this one's too good to pass up if you're a Castles & Crusades fan. The Trolls are putting on a big sale for the release of the 5th printing of the C&C Players Handbook. Print: http://tinyurl.com/74sosrk PDF: http://tinyurl.com/43gdxjf I picked up: Black Libram of Naratus Engineering Castles Fields of Battle CKG Screen All for around $10! The Black Libram is new to me as is Engineering Castles. I already had the Fields of Battle box set but wanted it as a PDF. Same for the CKG Screen.

Well, not for profit but for research. Yes. Research! Kinda anyways. Since the release of RuneQuest 6, I've had the feeling that it and Burning Wheel cover a lot of the same conceptual territory but obviously as different game implementations. I wanted to blog a bit about it but my BW-wise is a bit rusty and needs polished back up before I can put pen to paper or even fingers to keys so we've kicked off a  Burning Wheel Gold  mini campaign to get back up to speed and to have some fun along the way.

Last Thanksgiving, I ran a WhiteBox Swords & Wizardry game for my niece and nephew. It was a huge success. I recently had the opportunity to play with them again. They were very enthused about playing but had a little difficulty getting back into the groove. I took it as an opportunity to try a little experiment. What would play be like with another system? I sifted through my collection looking for a game that would be a good match for them. I've got some great games that I know like the back of my hand but they would be a bad fit since the kids really wanted to do character creation. I found it. A few years ago, I tried running Wushu, but for one reason or another it just didn't work out. A tickle in the back of my mind told me to take another look - that it might be just the thing that I was looking for. Scanning the book, looking for just enough bits to get character creation started I liked what I saw. Plucking several index cards from the office organizer, I he...

Run, don't walk on over to Grim and Perilous to check out the upcoming release of  ZWEIHÄNDER! From the site: ZWEIHÄNDER Grim and Perilous is a dark fantasy role-playing game, loosely based on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay tabletop system.    Set for release in autumn of 2012, ZWEIHÄNDER embraces the dark and gritty nature of old school RPGs of yore while simultaneously providing many modern advances found in today's roleplaying game industry. The finished product will be "world-agnostic", universally adaptable for any low or dark fantasy campaign (similar to GURPS). I have little experience with Warhammer and its Old World so I really can't compare the Grim and Perilous artwork to its inspirational sources but I can say that the look and feel that we've seen so far reminds me of The Riddle of Steel . That's a good thing.

As soon as I saw that RuneQuest 6 was available I rushed over to RPGNow and grabbed a copy. I wasn't disappointed. The first impression was that I was looking at an artifact of history. I own Mongoose Runequest 2/Legend and really like them. RQ6 just feels different. I somehow get the feeling that it looks and feels like the RuneQuests of old even though I've never ever seen an actual copy of the older rulesets. There are no discernible bits of Glorantha in RQ6 other than hints in the runes and rune magic. The presentation covers a wide variety of fantasy games but skews toward cinematic grittiness. For the first time reading a D100 game I get a Burning Wheel vibe. Players have lots of codified combat options, getting hurt is a dangerous thing, and willpower is meaningful. Individual character motivations (passions) are meaningful and characters at least in part learn from failure. It's one of the most complete rulebooks that I've seen in a long time, once again, ...

I've been finding myself chomping at the bit for the release of Runequest 6 . I already own both versions of Mongoose Runequest, Legend, and the big gold BRP book so why the interest in 6? To be honest, at first I wasn't intrigued but I've come around. Back in the day of shopping for RPGs at Walden Books I don't know if I ever saw Runequest on the shelf. I think I remember an ad or two in Dragon Magazine which helped build for me a sort of mystique for the game. When Mongoose Runequest 1 was released I was on the lookout for a gritty fantasy system. I loved it while some long time Runequest fans battled it out online. On top of enjoying the game for itself, Mongoose Runequest exposed me to other D100 games. When the big gold book from Chaosium was released I scooped it up to build on the MRQ game that I was running along with OpenQuest. I wasn't disappointed. A few years later, Mongoose announced that they were re-releasing Runequest and they did a heck of a j...

After dinner we picked up right back up where we stopped... Cole knew that they needed more bodies to build the ranks and with having no luck recruiting in the village he called in some favors from his army connections. The new recruiting roll went very well. Instead of rolling low for success we use the roll-high option with 15 as the base target number. As GM I adjudicated the great roll using the margin of success (> 15) as a rule of thumb. The result was that Cole now had a small host of warriors at his command one of which became a named PC - Edmond, a soldier who has seen much of the world. The rest were treated as henchmen of sorts in the classic D&D sense. AFF2 makes this incredibly easy to do: Skill 7, Stamina 7. With their ranks swollen, the original cadre of adventurers are now confident that they can take the hall and expel whatever dwells there. They split up into two asymmetrically sized teams. The smaller team took the side entrance that was tried earlier ...

With me working extra long hours we haven't played anything in months. It got to the point where I said, "That's it! We're playing something this weekend!" That got the thumbs-up so it was a go. What to do. What to do... We have a really neat game world under development that we started playing in with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and continued under Dungeon Crawl Classics. At one point we even used Microscope to help us build the game world's mythology. Which, by the way, is a really great way to do it. With the setting determined I needed a location. Fixing that that was easy. I used the random dungeon generator found in the AFF2 book. Instead of creating a dungeon I created an abandoned great hall where the roof had begun falling in creating obstructions and pathways. Stuart Lloyd  posted a comment to one of my Dungeon Crawl Classics posts about porting the idea of The Funnel to Advanced Fighting Fantasy.  It's pretty nifty and qui...

Dungeon World is up on Kickstarter . It's a great game so head on over and check it out.

If you've been around for a while you may have noticed that I've spiffed the place up a bit. I kept putting off theming Platonic Solid because I had to learn how Blogger did things and I already had tons of stuff like it on my plate. One day last week I woke up and the old look finally got to me. It had to go. So, I jumped in with my trackpad and keyboard in hand and voila! There's still some tinkering to be done but so far, so good.

I recently picked up Honor + Intrigue  which is based on the game engine found in Barbarians of Lemuria.  Instead of playing a barbarian who crushes those in his way to hear the lamentation of the women you play a character who hums a baroque tune that dances around the glissade of flashing steel. I'm a fan of Barbarians of Lemuria and even though it does sword and sorcery just about perfectly I don't run it often because I like combat systems that provide a bit more tactical oomph. Honor + Intrigue deftly provides that and more. It's got fencing schools and maneuvers that build on top of a tactical advantage system that really makes combat hum. We've only run a couple of test encounters but the game has gotten two thumbs up. It doesn't hurt that I met my wife on a fencing strip. Our real life experience helped us get up to speed rather quickly. Terminology never got in the way. In fact, it helped. The plan is to run a mini-campaign of 3-5 sessions. Where it g...

When playing Dungeon Crawl Classics it sure feels like it. Last night we sat down and did a test encounter with Gareth the woodsman turned 1st level warrior and a new character, Henrik a 1st level cleric. Both were played by my wife. I randomly determined the opposition force and it came up 5 dark creatures of chaos. The exact same composition as what killed three 0-level characters in a single round in the previous session. Uh oh. How would it go this time with just two 1st level characters? Turns out that Gareth's new warrior abilities are difference makers. The boost to initiative and the attack die, even though it is only 1d3, allowed him to take the fight to the enemy versus trying to manage the situation and hope for the best. You really appreciate that 1d3 because you didn't have anything like it before. We even had our first mighty deed of arms. One of the dark creatures was disarmed by Gareth with a stroke of his blade and left to totter till it was the last...

In a previous post I introduced the 0-level PCs who were part of the game; Thorek the dwarf, Gareth the woodsman, Saul the cobbler, and Mithra the alchemist. The second session was non-stop survival by the skin of their teeth. The 1 HP cobbler was the game changer who once again stepped up saving his party's bacon. It was amazing. At the end the entire party was low double digit XP away from hitting 1st level. It looked like all of them were going to make it. But then we played the third session. The mission of the third session was to make their way to a clerical order named The Haligesith. They're a growing power in the area and must be warned about the strange going-ons along the old forest road. After a night resting up in a roadside temple they set out fresh. The day starts out a little cool but sunny. Daylight passes virtually uneventful except for when they got twisted around on a side road. It all started to look the same. As the sun went down so did the t...

I finally got around to playing Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics last night and I gotta say that it was fun. The first time I read the game I was turned off by some things. No, not the weird dice. I loved that idea. I was instead turned off by the 3rd Edition-isms so I tucked it into my hard drive thinking that DCC would remain a curiosity. For whatever reason the game came up in conversation and we decided to give it time at the table. Of course we started with the funnel; 4 characters run by a single player, my wife. They are: Thorek the dwarf, Gareth the woodsman, Saul the cobbler and Mithra the alchemist. Hit points ran the full gamut, from 1 to 5. Gareth the woodsman knows Thorek the dwarf who knows a guy who has a map for sale. Saul the cobbler and Mithra the alchemist are kin who set out to adventure for the legendary wealth that's "out there". They have a meeting set at the road house on the old forest road. Thorek who has known those who have set abroad ...