|
Post by bigjackbrass on Sept 4, 2008 12:49:14 GMT -6
Well, I've finished the three stories from Dragon and they're actually rather enjoyable. A dark elf hero! and yes, a hobbit called Boinger. Nothing spectacular, but they're decently written and far superior to a lot of the other gaming fiction I've slogged my way through over the years.
With my taste for Ye Olde fantasy novels piqued I started on Quag Keep. A couple of chapters in so far and... uh, I'm reserving judgement until I finish it...
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Sept 2, 2008 11:51:48 GMT -6
Does anybody know if there is a comprehensive list of things that got changed between the two printings/editions? Not quite a comprehensive listing, but there has been discussion of the "lost rules" over on Citizens of the Imperium.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Sept 1, 2008 15:17:40 GMT -6
There are several J. Eric Holmes stories in The Dragon...I think it, and JEH's stories in general, are worth checking out: they're certainly not high literature, but they are fun reads Thanks for the issue numbers. As it happens, I do have access to those so I'll have a read of the stories. As for being high literature... well, I like a change of pace as much as the next man.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Sept 1, 2008 12:19:45 GMT -6
That's exceptionally kind, thank you.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 31, 2008 13:45:41 GMT -6
*much snapping of fingers*
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 26, 2008 10:19:53 GMT -6
Sadly I can't offer a personal opinion, but if it's any help Rick Swan had this to say in The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games:
Lost Conquistador Mine, featuring a quest for a secret gold mine, is not only the best of the Boot Hill supplements, it's also the best Western adventure ever published.
Swan used to write a lot of reviews for Space Gamer and Dragon.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 23, 2008 15:49:43 GMT -6
That's a fair distinction.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 21, 2008 4:21:34 GMT -6
I've never read it, but J. Eric Holmes' novel The Maze of Peril is often mentioned as an early D&D book. Anyone here familiar with it? I do have Dr. Holmes' non-fiction Fantasy Role Playing Games but have never seen a copy of Maze. It actually seems to still be available from the publisher (odd, considering the vastly inflated prices on the second-hand market!) as you can see on their website. Unfortunately, ordering means mailing a cheque or postal order usable in the USA, which makes things a bit trickier for those of us in Ye Olde Englande, so I'm hesitant to go to the expense and trouble of doing so if the novel is a complete crock. Then again, it's tempting if only because one of the characters is called "Boinger the halfling."
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 21, 2008 4:13:49 GMT -6
I am right now reading The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe. Michael Cule, who features in the book, is still an active gamer and shows up on RPGnet quite often. Most people probably remember him as the Vogon guard from the old Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 21, 2008 3:52:50 GMT -6
The lack of any real guidelines for awarding experience points in the original set tells me that XP was at first meant to be awarded by the referee using pure judgement. As such, XP could be awarded for anything that the referee felt fairly increased the player's "score." It's interesting that Empire of the Petal Throne specifically excludes XP awards for anything other than killing monsters and finding treasure, even going so far as to state that magic-users get no XP for casting spells. I wonder if this was an attempt to avoid a perceived ambiguity in D&D?
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 20, 2008 9:49:40 GMT -6
There were also fanzines produced in the US; some of them are mentioned in early Strategic Reviews, and David Nalle did a review article on a bunch of them in Dragon #50, IIRC. Issue #50 it was. Mind you, since the first 'zine he covered was Abyss, edited by, um, David Nalle, I was unsure for a while as to how objective the reviews really were! A&E was something of an enigma to me when I first got into gaming, not knowing what an "APAzine" was. It sounded like a very odd way to put together a publication, but so many people talked about how wonderful it was. I never did get hold of a copy back then. British 'zines, on the other hand, were considerably easier to obtain and could usually be found, dusty and unsold, stacked in a corner at the local games shop. Looking back, I was definitely in something of a gaming backwater...
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 17, 2008 12:27:49 GMT -6
Kane, Karl Edward Wagner's warrior-wizard. Not the easiest of characters to depict in D&D terms (though I've seen it tried several times) and about as "multi" a multi-class character as can be imagined
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 10, 2008 13:27:15 GMT -6
This is an intrinsic element of Tunnels & Trolls and I've never been able to resist carrying it over to D&D. For one thing I find it helpful in regulating the amount of XP and helping characters who are not combat specialists. Since I've never liked the idea of giving experience awards for treasure it makes sense to reward characters - and particular behaviours - in another way.
Still, I keep the awards relatively small and try not to toss them out too freely, 50 XP being my default for such things, and these are (depending on circumstances) almost always individual rather than party awards.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 10, 2008 11:06:47 GMT -6
I spent many an hour typing away on my Acorn Electron computer trying to complete Twin Kingdom Valley... and never succeeding. It was an interesting text adventure with pictures, rather than an arcade-style adventure with moving graphics, ported across to just about every major home computer format in the UK in the mid-eighties. Many of the NPCs wandered off and carried on with their lives rather than always being in one spot, waiting for you, so sometimes it was hard to crack the puzzles even if you knew what to do. There was also Countdown to Doom, again on the old Acorn, a text-based adventure about a crashed ship on an alien planet, the twist being that you had to complete the game within a certain number of turns before your ship falls victim to the corrosive atmosphere. Funnily enough I just finished running a Traveller scenario based on pretty much that idea. I played this one so often with the same couple of Jean-Michel Jarre cassettes on my stereo that I forever associate certain of Jarre's tunes with parts of the adventure. A few links, for the interested: Twin Kingdom ValleyCountdown to DoomAnd the venerable Acorn Electron
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 8, 2008 13:02:43 GMT -6
As I understand it the magazine is put out by Wolfgang Bauer; he has cropped up on a few podcasts lately talking about it.
Ah... A quick search reveals the unsurprising web address of koboldquarterly.com which does appear to have contact details, Rainsford, if you wanted to write to them directly.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 7, 2008 7:26:28 GMT -6
Like several others here I find it difficult to choose just ten, particularly in any meaningful order; and of course so many of my favourites have already been mentioned. The Hobbit, of course; various Vance and a multitude of Moorcock (I have three shelves bowing under the weight of his books alone).
One more recent title which impressed me was Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover, a dark and at times rather brutal fantasy story with a science-fiction twist and lots to say about morality and the nature of entertainment. It also presents an absolutely superb idea for a game, playing actors transported to a "fantasy" world whose exploits are shown in our world as action adventures. Mr Stover is apparently working on the third in the series, but he's not the most prolific of authors, it would appear.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jun 8, 2008 10:39:57 GMT -6
I'm with the "not an error" side on this one, I'm afraid. It seems entirely consistent with the game EC pretends to be for it to include such a rip-off name, rather than it being applied as a title.
Of course, some games do betray a later mindset: Hollow Earth Expedition, set in 1936, features a big game hunter who has travelled to Zimbabwe, quite a feat considering that the Empire of Great Zimbabwe disappeared in the seventeenth century and the modern country of that name was not founded until 1980.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on May 23, 2008 15:34:38 GMT -6
He hooked me with The Bug Wars when I was but a lad. A sad loss.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on May 11, 2008 13:12:15 GMT -6
Ah, Traveller. One of my great RPG loves Few games really threw the doors open for adventure to me like Traveller did, and the various sub-systems in the rules practically work as games in their own right (character creation, for instance.) The CD-ROM collection, mentioned earlier, does have a few issues with fuzzy, inverted and even missing pages, but even so it's a bargain and well worth getting, likewise the CD-ROM collection of the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society magazine. Most of it is perfectly fine and very often the problem pages can be fixed by using duplicate information from one of the other publications on the CD-ROM. If I may be forgiven a slight plug here, RPGMP3.com has just released the first of three audio recordings of a Traveller game, free to download from the site (you may need to register on the forum) or from the RPGMP3 Community podcast feed on iTunes. I GMed the sessions, so blame me for the occasional flub with the rules...
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on May 7, 2008 12:51:35 GMT -6
I tinkered with using T&T for Tékumel gaming some years back, but in the end decided that the flavour of the system changed the feel of the setting a bit too much. It's very easy to come up with stats, which is handy, although I didn't progress very far with adapting the magic system.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 10, 2008 10:55:01 GMT -6
I wish that I could recall the name. This will now drive me crazy all day long Would that be Treasure Trap you're thinking of?
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 6, 2008 6:19:41 GMT -6
V&V was probably the only major FGU game that my friends and I never got around to playing. Indeed, I didn't own a copy until a few weeks ago when I picked up the rulebook on eBay (although it's actually still in print, like much of the FGU catalogue, and stocked by shops such as Leisure Games) because I have so many supers games that I somehow never got around to buying it. Golden Heroes was our supers RPG of choice back in the eighties.
Reading it now is very interesting and I'm planning to run a game soon. The character generation relies on the GM deciding how his players should be statted up! I'd always assumed that playing yourself but with super powers would have involved the sort of quantifying exercises that Greg Porter used in Time Lords, but instead it's a case of saying, "Well John, I don't reckon you have more than a 9 in Intelligence..." and then presumably ducking for cover.
Combat is clunky, no two ways about it, but the idea that different active defences affect various attack types in different ways is superb, albeit not as smoothly presented as one might hope.
More than anything, the rulebook exudes the sort of sheer joy of gaming and boundless possibilities for adventure that I find sadly lacking in a lot of current games; and this isn't nostalgia on my part, because I had never read the book before. It's cheap, it's silly and it looks to be a huge amount of fun. Sounds like a winner to me.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 13, 2008 15:25:31 GMT -6
A bit erratic, really. Combat involves cross-referencing numbers on a chart that looks considerably more complicated than it really is (a bit like the Chaosium Resistance Table would be if the results looked like fractions), but there was an optional system to streamline fights. Flanking, different types of weapons and various modifiers were covered, the various classes and sub-classes have their own skills (such as analysing potions for Alchemists) and there are such cunningly disguised creatures on the monster listings as "Balro" and "Ehnts"... ;D It's basically a percentile interpretation of D&D in many ways, which is why I think it didn't really catch on as it fell between the two stools of D&D and RuneQuest. Unfortunately although you can find copies of the rulebook on Abebooks and occasionally on eBay the supplements - arguably the best feature of the line - are trickier to find and prices are surprisingly high; I still can't find Goldchester in hardback (which is hardly essential but the paperback version I have just doesn't match the rest, you know? ) for example, nor the Judge's Screen. The average DM might find a few interesting ideas in the core book that are worth stealing, but I'm not sure whether the game as a whole is worth the investment in time and effort to run. I find myself liking it... but I can't explain quite why. It just seems to have that effect on people!
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 13, 2008 11:44:29 GMT -6
Remember this one?
Published in 1978, with a second edition coming out in 1981 from Reston Publishing, it has a reputation for being a mediocre game with rather good support material. Certainly the adventures and solos, such as Goldchester: More Adventures in High Fantasy, stand today as good examples of their type and are clearly better than the standard fare produced circa 1980. Cover art on the Reston editions steadily improves, from what may be the single poorest cover painting I've ever seen for any book (High Fantasy) through to a Steranko piece (not his best, but Steranko nonetheless) on Wizards & Warriors.
The rules are a strange mix of clunky and old-fashioned (even in 1978 it was possible to seem old-fashioned, after all) and oddly innovative: the four character classes start with the usual fighters and magicians, but the other choices are beast masters and alchemists, leading to some intriguing options for an adventuring party.
I've been trying to play this for a while now, but getting my group to play older games is like pulling teeth, despite one of them having started back when I did and enjoying many of the same systems. Any thoughts and recollections about High Fantasy among the members?
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 6, 2008 5:42:28 GMT -6
En Garde! was a game I first heard about through the book What is Dungeons & Dragons?, but for years I could never find a copy. In the late 1980s it was picked up by Small Furry Creatures Press and published to go along with a PBM game that the Small Furry Creatures themselves, PEvans and Theo, were running, which led to a small revival in the UK. The new edition is clearly very close to that one, rather than the small format GDW original.
As an RPG I find it lacking in several areas (Flashing Blades or Lace & Steel handle the swashbuckling a bit better, I feel) but it really excels for play-by-mail and even solo play. For a game of its vintage the elements of social interaction and advancement are quite innovative, and even though it can be a little dry in places I always thought it had a certain tongue-in-cheek charm, probably due to constantly arriving to visit one's mistress and finding another PC doing the same thing! Bits like that are really missing from games like D&D.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 8, 2008 17:20:27 GMT -6
If you have the book handy, what's the page count? I had occasion to think of the Tri Tac games, and that brought to mind TMP -- and its (at least in my memory) relative brevity. The 3rd edition (which includes the role-playing supplement derived from the Chaosium system) lists 66 pages, although it's actually 70 since the numbering doesn't actually start at the beginning of the book... Still pretty slim and packed with information by the woollier standards of current game books.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 27, 2008 15:06:31 GMT -6
Nice to see Blackmoor getting its own section. Well deserved, I'd say.
Alas, my own copy of First Fantasy Campaign was sold about fifteen years ago when I moved from the USA... and I certainly didn't get $100 for it back then! It's a charming and very useful book, but some of the prices reached on eBay have been practically obscene. A legal PDF of the product would be very welcome.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 9, 2008 12:42:16 GMT -6
Since there seems to be a bit of a dearth of them I've just uploaded one of mine to www.rpgsheets.com where you can find it in the "Other/Misc" section. From the drop-down menus choose "Other/Misc," then "Custom" and then enter "petal throne" in the text search box. Let me know if you can't find it! It's saved as an Open Office file, since that's free and easily available.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 6, 2008 13:30:59 GMT -6
The Different Worlds edition has a couple of minor differences to the original. The Illustration on page 16 of the original rulebook (I'm looking at the PDF version at the moment) showing the siege of Purdimál is absent, for instance, and of course there is an additional introduction in the DW book, written by Dave Arneson.
To the best of my knowledge there are no differences in the rules or body of the main text.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 28, 2008 16:50:55 GMT -6
I've found that worlds like Tekumel work best when the players are given just a bit of knolwedge, just what they need to start off with, and then new knowledge is introduced with every new adventure. That's certainly the way I'm running things these days, after an earlier attempt to drop players a little too heavily into the thick of things. The Guardians of Order Tékumel book has some nice touches aimed at easing both players and GMs into the setting, such as the "Five things you need to know about X" sections, and there are plenty of little bits of fiction to put matters in context, so I'm using that book as a sort of edited sourcebook to go along with the EPT rules. I don't think that it's the volume of material that is the problem so much as the way it is presented. Ideally Tékumel could have used a grand campaign leading players from the Foreigners' Quarter right through to the heights of political intrigue at court. With no such resource available I'm working along similar lines myself (and so far, so good.)
|
|