This should give you an idea....
;)
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
B is for Best Gaming Memories
I have a feeling that I might not have had the greatest gaming experiences, when compared to other people. Often, our campaigns were long on prep, and fell apart a couple of weeks in. There’s only a few campaigns I can ever remember that lasted for more than 2 or 3 sessions. However, as with everything, I still have a TON of great memories about the campaigns I played in.
• My favourite campaign was a Twilight: 2000 campaign, run by my friend’s older brother. It was the longest campaign I ever played in, lasting a couple months. It was also a BIG campaign, at one point having almost a dozen players, but usually having about 8 regulars. We would get together in small groups once or twice during the week, but we would usually have a massive game once or twice a month on Friday nights, where we would play for 6-8 hours while jacked up on Slurpees and junk food, before crashing for the night, then getting up the next morning to go downtown on the bus to pick up our new comics for the week. How my friend’s brother managed to juggle this campaign, I’ll never know, but he did, and it was fun. It was sort of Free City of Krakow, but it went beyond that, with our group turning into a group of arms dealers and mercenaries. It ended up with our group chasing a red-headed psychopath across the Polish countryside, and him gleefully trying to destroy us. One of the player’s went through FOUR characters over the course of the campaign, as the running joke became his characters blundering into booby traps, and getting their legs blown off. It also featured my character misunderstanding a situation, and killing a bunch of a local warlord’s troops as the rest of the party negotiated a deal with him, then having to stash the bodies in our LAV and trying to escape before anybody noticed them missing. The climax came when, as we closed in on the big baddie, he blew up the bridge we were driving over. Half the party died, mostly because they kept trying to dive back down to the sunken LAVs to get their gear, and drowning. Good times.
• Another of our epic campaigns involved a truly massive 16-played AD&D campaign. All I can remember about the campaign is it was two groups – my friend’s older brother DM’d one group of his friends, who were characters trying to save a kidnapped princess, as well as my friends and I, who were another group a week behind the first group, trying to save them from the baddies going after them. There was a crazy overriding plot, but we never got to the end game of this campaign.
• Another memorable campaign was a Top Secret campaign. My friend’s brother (again) was gamemaster, but unbeknownst to us, his brother was playing a Russian double-agent, and the whole campaign was us trying to find Russians, while he tried to assassinate us all. I am proud to say I was the last character to get assassinated… I ended up in a mountain cabin with the double agent, and the real Russian agent, when a bunch of Spetsnaz ski-troops showed up to pop me.
• I once played a character who was a Drow named Cevek (pronounced by me, at least, as suh-VEEK). I played the character as not knowing common very well, so I said everything in character phonetically. This pissed off the rest of the players, who started to call my elf Honda (figure it out). It didn’t end well.
• One memorable Traveller campaign featured my Aslan getting his dewclaws ripped out when he used them to try and anchor himself from getting sucked up by a giant vacuum tube, and then causing a TPK when we took over a starship, but put the two characters with no navigation skills on the bridge, so when they called for help on the ship PA, we were met by several marines in power armour with Gauss guns. It ended… messily.
• The BEST time I ever had playing an RPG was the summers when I played AD&D with my cousins at the cabin. There was about 8 of us (including two girls!), and one summer, we worked our way through The Saltmarsh series over the course of two months. It was GREAT fun. Another summer, we were playing when my mom’s uncle, a Catholic priest, came by and watched. He got right into the game, and even inadvertently gave away a foe that had us stumped (we kept shooting at two glowing eyes in the dark, and wondered why we were having little to no effect, until he said “Aha!”, and mimed a third eye on his forehead… that’s when we figured out we were fighting two cyclops).
• Running my friends through the first Dragonlance module, when an unfortunate roll on the wandering monster table resulted in the group of low level character meeting the black dragon within 4 minutes of starting the adventure, and getting completely eviscerated by it.
Of course, there are other memories (like, the Traveller campaign where I was forced to play a useless belter because he ACTUALLY SURVIVED THE 11+ SURVIVAL ROLL… TWICE), but these are the ones I remember all these years later. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t necessarily the best campaigns… in fact, most of them weren’t that spectacular at all, when compared to the epic session write-ups I see today. But they were FUN, and that was the most important part.
• My favourite campaign was a Twilight: 2000 campaign, run by my friend’s older brother. It was the longest campaign I ever played in, lasting a couple months. It was also a BIG campaign, at one point having almost a dozen players, but usually having about 8 regulars. We would get together in small groups once or twice during the week, but we would usually have a massive game once or twice a month on Friday nights, where we would play for 6-8 hours while jacked up on Slurpees and junk food, before crashing for the night, then getting up the next morning to go downtown on the bus to pick up our new comics for the week. How my friend’s brother managed to juggle this campaign, I’ll never know, but he did, and it was fun. It was sort of Free City of Krakow, but it went beyond that, with our group turning into a group of arms dealers and mercenaries. It ended up with our group chasing a red-headed psychopath across the Polish countryside, and him gleefully trying to destroy us. One of the player’s went through FOUR characters over the course of the campaign, as the running joke became his characters blundering into booby traps, and getting their legs blown off. It also featured my character misunderstanding a situation, and killing a bunch of a local warlord’s troops as the rest of the party negotiated a deal with him, then having to stash the bodies in our LAV and trying to escape before anybody noticed them missing. The climax came when, as we closed in on the big baddie, he blew up the bridge we were driving over. Half the party died, mostly because they kept trying to dive back down to the sunken LAVs to get their gear, and drowning. Good times.
• Another of our epic campaigns involved a truly massive 16-played AD&D campaign. All I can remember about the campaign is it was two groups – my friend’s older brother DM’d one group of his friends, who were characters trying to save a kidnapped princess, as well as my friends and I, who were another group a week behind the first group, trying to save them from the baddies going after them. There was a crazy overriding plot, but we never got to the end game of this campaign.
• Another memorable campaign was a Top Secret campaign. My friend’s brother (again) was gamemaster, but unbeknownst to us, his brother was playing a Russian double-agent, and the whole campaign was us trying to find Russians, while he tried to assassinate us all. I am proud to say I was the last character to get assassinated… I ended up in a mountain cabin with the double agent, and the real Russian agent, when a bunch of Spetsnaz ski-troops showed up to pop me.
• I once played a character who was a Drow named Cevek (pronounced by me, at least, as suh-VEEK). I played the character as not knowing common very well, so I said everything in character phonetically. This pissed off the rest of the players, who started to call my elf Honda (figure it out). It didn’t end well.
• One memorable Traveller campaign featured my Aslan getting his dewclaws ripped out when he used them to try and anchor himself from getting sucked up by a giant vacuum tube, and then causing a TPK when we took over a starship, but put the two characters with no navigation skills on the bridge, so when they called for help on the ship PA, we were met by several marines in power armour with Gauss guns. It ended… messily.
• The BEST time I ever had playing an RPG was the summers when I played AD&D with my cousins at the cabin. There was about 8 of us (including two girls!), and one summer, we worked our way through The Saltmarsh series over the course of two months. It was GREAT fun. Another summer, we were playing when my mom’s uncle, a Catholic priest, came by and watched. He got right into the game, and even inadvertently gave away a foe that had us stumped (we kept shooting at two glowing eyes in the dark, and wondered why we were having little to no effect, until he said “Aha!”, and mimed a third eye on his forehead… that’s when we figured out we were fighting two cyclops).
• Running my friends through the first Dragonlance module, when an unfortunate roll on the wandering monster table resulted in the group of low level character meeting the black dragon within 4 minutes of starting the adventure, and getting completely eviscerated by it.
Of course, there are other memories (like, the Traveller campaign where I was forced to play a useless belter because he ACTUALLY SURVIVED THE 11+ SURVIVAL ROLL… TWICE), but these are the ones I remember all these years later. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t necessarily the best campaigns… in fact, most of them weren’t that spectacular at all, when compared to the epic session write-ups I see today. But they were FUN, and that was the most important part.
Friday, April 1, 2011
A to Z Blogging Challenge: A is for Advanced D&D
I decided to do this blogging challenge because I find I sometimes need a kick in the butt to get going. When I do post on my blog, it seems to be in fits and spurts, so hopefully this will lead to me regularly posting some thoughts, or maybe even getting me motivated to finally get a campaign off the ground.
Most of my posts for this challenge will focus on the prospective campaign in my world of Haume, that I am planning on creating. Some of the posts will be a little more general, simply having to do with role-playing games. Since this blog was created primarily as a gaming blog, I will stick to that for my posts. I already have a list of what I’m going to cover, but since I like to change my mind a lot, I’m not going to warn you in advance (it’s a SURPRISE!).
For my first post, I’m going to talk about the game that I have invested the most time in my gaming life on – Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I was first introduced to the game when I was in grade 4. I was a bit of a social outcast at school, so I fell in with the other social outcast. My friend had an EXTREMELY active imagination – he had a HUGE collection of Micronauts toys, but he had convoluted storylines for all of them, which meant the entire time I knew him, I never got to play with Force Commander and Oberon, because Baron Karza had trapped them in a “prison”, so they stayed locked in a little box, out of the storyline. I would go to my friend’s place on the weekend, we would listen to the radio adaptation of Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS on CBC Radio, and play RPGs. My first version of AD&D was heavily house-ruled – the characters were created to correspond to various action figures he owned, and it was less of a game, and more of a story-telling tool.
Eventually, we finally started to actually play the game, more or less the way it was intended. The first campaign was mostly the Player’s Handbook, DMG and Monster Manual, with us running through modules. My friend DM’d, and I was the only player… I would run one or two of my own characters, and my friend allowed me to run a couple of his characters (while reserving the right to veto anything I did if he didn’t like it…. It’s a LONG story). One of the characters I created back then, the mage Lekon (who will be described in a later post) is still alive today. We pushed through most of the big modules… I clearly remember our adventures in The Expedition To The Barrier Peaks, as a vegepygmy almost killed Lekon, and a later foray through Descent into the Depths of the Earth, where a kuo-toan’s spear thrust criticalled Lekon, leaving him with a permanent limp. I seem to recall us going through the G series as well – actually, I think we did G1-2-3, D1/2-3, and stared Q1 before becoming bored and leaving Lolth behind. I also remember going through the Ghost Tower of Inverness and the Secret of Bone Hill.
Even though, my first rule set was Basic D&D, because my parents figured I should probably start with something a little more “Basic”. While my first few years of playing in elementary school were exclusively Basic and Expert (including running a D&D Club at lunchhours at school), by Grade 6, I had received the DMG and PHB as Christmas presents. Then, when I went into grade 7 in a new middle school, I met Scott, who would prove to be one of my best friends. Scott and I were part of a core group of about 6-10 (depending on the day and game) gamers, plus his older brother Dave had a group of about 5-7 gamers he gamed with.
Over the next 6 years, I played in an awful lot of memorable campaigns (which I will talk about next post), with an awful lot of different systems, but the one we played most often was AD&D. Scott and I would bounce back and forth between DMing campaigns, and often we would both play in his brother’s games as well. AD&D was the systems we always defaulted to. There was a time when we probably had most of the three core rulebooks memorized, and could make an entire party and run adventures without even having to consult a book. Scott and Dave also had a large collection of Dragon magazines, which we used to expand our games as often as possible (Winged Folk were a favourite Dragon idea we ran with often… that, and the Archer class).
As we continued through high school and into university, our game group waxed and waned. I went to different high school than Scott, and managed to find a new group of gamers to fall in with, but our core group still played regularly. After a couple years though, people started to move away, and other interests (sometimes, even school!) took over. Our core group waned down to me, Scott, and our friend Jon. We caught on with another gaming group, but our exploits became fewer and farther between. Eventually, as everyone moved away (myself included), I stopped gaming altogether.
Through it all though, I always kept my AD&D books. I have every 1st edition AD&D book, and I have almost all the first edition modules. It is my “go to” edition if I am playing with other gamers. I have a some of the AD&D 2nd Edition stuff, but I never really felt it was “different” or “better” than 1st edition. Maybe I never played it enough to see the differences. When 3rd Edition came around, I was out of gamin, but I still got ahold of the 3 core books. I liked parts of it, I HATED parts of it (don’t get me started on how needlessly complicated monsters and combat became with this edition), but it didn’t really mean much to me. I have no desire to pick up 4th Edition, especially after perusing the D&D Essentials box set. For me, if I say “Let’s play D&D”, chance are I mean 1st edition AD&D.
Most of my posts for this challenge will focus on the prospective campaign in my world of Haume, that I am planning on creating. Some of the posts will be a little more general, simply having to do with role-playing games. Since this blog was created primarily as a gaming blog, I will stick to that for my posts. I already have a list of what I’m going to cover, but since I like to change my mind a lot, I’m not going to warn you in advance (it’s a SURPRISE!).
For my first post, I’m going to talk about the game that I have invested the most time in my gaming life on – Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I was first introduced to the game when I was in grade 4. I was a bit of a social outcast at school, so I fell in with the other social outcast. My friend had an EXTREMELY active imagination – he had a HUGE collection of Micronauts toys, but he had convoluted storylines for all of them, which meant the entire time I knew him, I never got to play with Force Commander and Oberon, because Baron Karza had trapped them in a “prison”, so they stayed locked in a little box, out of the storyline. I would go to my friend’s place on the weekend, we would listen to the radio adaptation of Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS on CBC Radio, and play RPGs. My first version of AD&D was heavily house-ruled – the characters were created to correspond to various action figures he owned, and it was less of a game, and more of a story-telling tool.
Eventually, we finally started to actually play the game, more or less the way it was intended. The first campaign was mostly the Player’s Handbook, DMG and Monster Manual, with us running through modules. My friend DM’d, and I was the only player… I would run one or two of my own characters, and my friend allowed me to run a couple of his characters (while reserving the right to veto anything I did if he didn’t like it…. It’s a LONG story). One of the characters I created back then, the mage Lekon (who will be described in a later post) is still alive today. We pushed through most of the big modules… I clearly remember our adventures in The Expedition To The Barrier Peaks, as a vegepygmy almost killed Lekon, and a later foray through Descent into the Depths of the Earth, where a kuo-toan’s spear thrust criticalled Lekon, leaving him with a permanent limp. I seem to recall us going through the G series as well – actually, I think we did G1-2-3, D1/2-3, and stared Q1 before becoming bored and leaving Lolth behind. I also remember going through the Ghost Tower of Inverness and the Secret of Bone Hill.
Even though, my first rule set was Basic D&D, because my parents figured I should probably start with something a little more “Basic”. While my first few years of playing in elementary school were exclusively Basic and Expert (including running a D&D Club at lunchhours at school), by Grade 6, I had received the DMG and PHB as Christmas presents. Then, when I went into grade 7 in a new middle school, I met Scott, who would prove to be one of my best friends. Scott and I were part of a core group of about 6-10 (depending on the day and game) gamers, plus his older brother Dave had a group of about 5-7 gamers he gamed with.
Over the next 6 years, I played in an awful lot of memorable campaigns (which I will talk about next post), with an awful lot of different systems, but the one we played most often was AD&D. Scott and I would bounce back and forth between DMing campaigns, and often we would both play in his brother’s games as well. AD&D was the systems we always defaulted to. There was a time when we probably had most of the three core rulebooks memorized, and could make an entire party and run adventures without even having to consult a book. Scott and Dave also had a large collection of Dragon magazines, which we used to expand our games as often as possible (Winged Folk were a favourite Dragon idea we ran with often… that, and the Archer class).
As we continued through high school and into university, our game group waxed and waned. I went to different high school than Scott, and managed to find a new group of gamers to fall in with, but our core group still played regularly. After a couple years though, people started to move away, and other interests (sometimes, even school!) took over. Our core group waned down to me, Scott, and our friend Jon. We caught on with another gaming group, but our exploits became fewer and farther between. Eventually, as everyone moved away (myself included), I stopped gaming altogether.
Through it all though, I always kept my AD&D books. I have every 1st edition AD&D book, and I have almost all the first edition modules. It is my “go to” edition if I am playing with other gamers. I have a some of the AD&D 2nd Edition stuff, but I never really felt it was “different” or “better” than 1st edition. Maybe I never played it enough to see the differences. When 3rd Edition came around, I was out of gamin, but I still got ahold of the 3 core books. I liked parts of it, I HATED parts of it (don’t get me started on how needlessly complicated monsters and combat became with this edition), but it didn’t really mean much to me. I have no desire to pick up 4th Edition, especially after perusing the D&D Essentials box set. For me, if I say “Let’s play D&D”, chance are I mean 1st edition AD&D.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Thinking again
As always, the beginning of the school year leaves me with little time to get anything done. I have been doing some thinking. I like the idea I saw on another blog about mages being able to use magic swords at a certain level, because that satisfies my problem of allowing mages to use swords, without making a big deal of it. I have also been contemplating saying that all starting PCs have to be classed humans, and making demi-humans even rarer (and only possibly allowing them as PCs at later levels). Still thinking. I have also been pouring over a lot of old Judges Guild stuff, and seeing if I can fit some of that stuff into my world (specifically Caverns of Thracia and Tegel Manor).
Friday, August 20, 2010
JB at B/X BLACKRAZOR
If anyone who reads this can get ahold of JB at B/X BLACKRAOR blog, tell him I can't access his blog anymore, as it says I am not invited to read it anymore. Tell him to shoort me an email at matrix27(at)mts(dot)net
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
More thinkerating
As always, even with the advice of Rob Conley's How to Design a Fantasy Sandbox, I found myself paralyzed by inaction. So many choices! But then, I realized.... if this ever gets off the ground, it is going to be with a small group of newbies. So, don't overthink this. I decided to make life easier. Since I am going to use Keep on the Borderland, I'm just going to make a map of the are around the keep... I'm not even going to worry about a continuent, or anything like that for now. The Keep, I'm going to put a (mega)dungeon in the "cave of the unknown", expand some of the wilderness encounters, make a nearby town as a base, and just add some stuff around that locations (I'm thinking of using Rahasia in there too, or maybe some of the stuff out of B1-9).
Oh, and I made one more decision. I'm going to use B4... but instead of it being located in a desert..... it's going to be located in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.
Yes, I've been reading too much Lovecraft again. 8)
Oh, and I made one more decision. I'm going to use B4... but instead of it being located in a desert..... it's going to be located in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.
Yes, I've been reading too much Lovecraft again. 8)
Saturday, August 14, 2010
The Religions of Haume - a sneak peek
I've decided to call my sandbox world Haume. ;)
I started drawing up the religions of Haume tonight. I still need to do some work on the demi-humans, and the Fallen, but this should give you an idea of where my head is at.
Non-human deities:
DURRAK, "The Father" --> deity of the dwarves; maker of the world
AELEISHA, "The Mother" --> deity of the elves; goddess of life, magic and beauty
CAELIS, "The Child" --> deity of the halflings,; patron of innocence and wonder
The Thousand Saints
Humans don't have "gods" they have "saints", although functionally, there is very little difference between them. The theory is the saints were once mortals, who transcended their earthly bonds. Some of the important ones:
Saint Acca of Hexham --> patron sain of magic-users
Saint Scholastica --> patron saint of sages
Saint Edward the Marytr --> patron saint of lost causes
Saint Seraphina --> patron saint of healers
Saint Maximus --> patron saint of battle
Saint Finbarr --> patron saint of thieves and liars
Saint Amberyl --> patron saint of love
Saint Andrei the Iconographer --> patron saint of artists
Saint Xenon the Righteous --> patron saint of justice
Saint Margaret the Barefooted --> patron saint of the destitute
Saint Abundias --> patron saint of farmers
The Venerable Saint Bede --> patron saint of the elderly / wisdom
The Fallen
These would be the "bad guys". Again, most of them are thought to be ascended humans, but no one is quite certain of some of them...
The Dark Knight
Lady Midnight
Saint Opportuna --> patron saint of greed
Saint Abadios --> patron saint of murderers and thieves
Saint Helen --> patron saint of lust
Saint Dismas patron saint of envy
The Spirit Realm
This will be for those who worship nature, in all its incarnations. I'm also toying with having these guys tied into my idea of using ancestor worship somehow...
The Old Man of the Woods
The Lady of the Lake
The Dark Hunter
Old Crow
Howling Wolf
Thunderbird
The Cat of Kayseer
Brother Bear
The Merman & the Mermaid
The Stones Who Speak
I started drawing up the religions of Haume tonight. I still need to do some work on the demi-humans, and the Fallen, but this should give you an idea of where my head is at.
Non-human deities:
DURRAK, "The Father" --> deity of the dwarves; maker of the world
AELEISHA, "The Mother" --> deity of the elves; goddess of life, magic and beauty
CAELIS, "The Child" --> deity of the halflings,; patron of innocence and wonder
The Thousand Saints
Humans don't have "gods" they have "saints", although functionally, there is very little difference between them. The theory is the saints were once mortals, who transcended their earthly bonds. Some of the important ones:
Saint Acca of Hexham --> patron sain of magic-users
Saint Scholastica --> patron saint of sages
Saint Edward the Marytr --> patron saint of lost causes
Saint Seraphina --> patron saint of healers
Saint Maximus --> patron saint of battle
Saint Finbarr --> patron saint of thieves and liars
Saint Amberyl --> patron saint of love
Saint Andrei the Iconographer --> patron saint of artists
Saint Xenon the Righteous --> patron saint of justice
Saint Margaret the Barefooted --> patron saint of the destitute
Saint Abundias --> patron saint of farmers
The Venerable Saint Bede --> patron saint of the elderly / wisdom
The Fallen
These would be the "bad guys". Again, most of them are thought to be ascended humans, but no one is quite certain of some of them...
The Dark Knight
Lady Midnight
Saint Opportuna --> patron saint of greed
Saint Abadios --> patron saint of murderers and thieves
Saint Helen --> patron saint of lust
Saint Dismas patron saint of envy
The Spirit Realm
This will be for those who worship nature, in all its incarnations. I'm also toying with having these guys tied into my idea of using ancestor worship somehow...
The Old Man of the Woods
The Lady of the Lake
The Dark Hunter
Old Crow
Howling Wolf
Thunderbird
The Cat of Kayseer
Brother Bear
The Merman & the Mermaid
The Stones Who Speak
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