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Modular: My Favorite “Do It Yourself” Products for Roleplaying Games

Modular: My Favorite “Do It Yourself” Products for Roleplaying Games

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MERPThose who know me a little more than as an infrequent contributor to Black Gate Magazine might be aware that I once aspired to be a writer of fantasy stories and novels, even publishing (for a short time but longer than average life expectancy) a small press magazine with co-editor and lifelong friend Nick Ozment. A few years into my forties, however, roleplaying games have utterly subsumed my creative life. I’m currently gamemastering four games: my home game, the very first roleplaying game I ever ran in my young life, Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP); another MERP game, this one using full Rolemaster rules (2nd edition), via play-by-post (PbP) in a G+ community; and two Modiphius Conan 2d20 games, one via PbP in a G+ community and one (same format) in a Facebook group. This last one is being conducted with Bob Byrne and Martin and Xander Page and is the subject of a new Modular series helmed by Mr. Byrne. In preparing my observations on Modiphius’s licensed Conan property, I have been thinking deeply about various… I suppose I shall call them “styles” of play. Using what I consider two fairly representative rules sets of what I mean by play “styles,” I have done a pretty extensive breakdown here. I expect I also shall have occasion to write about different styles of play in the midst of my experience with the 2d20 playtest. Right now, though, I want to talk about what can be termed the OSR (Old School Revival) — perhaps more accurately referred to as DIY (Do It Yourself) — resources that I most appreciate and are the most often used in my MERP games. Specifically, these resources help me come up with content and develop my fantasy world.

There are a number of “adventure generators” — perhaps more accurately described as “idea machines” — out there. I’m sure all of them are fantastic. You can download one for free from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea at its website Hyperborea.tv. Nearly all of the products and producers that I’m going to mention in this article offer one. Even Conan 2d20 has one, though the focus of that generator, due to the nature of play that Conan encourages, is a bit different, and I expect I will analyze this at length when I get to that portion of the official playtest series. These “adventure generators” almost certainly are evolved from the “story creators” that Ozment once told me that the early pulp writers used, sometimes flicking spinners rather than throwing dice. Hey, modern GMs are under almost the same kind of pressure as those pulp writers were, though instead of needing to churn out words for pennies to put meat on the table they need to come up with an idea quick, tonight, before the players come over expecting to be wowed and entertained. Pre-made modules can do the same thing, of course, but they have to be studied first, details have to be remembered, and sometimes they just don’t work with the ongoing campaign in the way that a few randomly generated elements can result in truly inspired serendipity. All of the products I’m about to profile I own and use in PDF.

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Heinlein Across the Waters

Heinlein Across the Waters

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The Green Hills of Earth and Robert Heinlein-small

One of the things that I love about collecting old paperbacks is the surprises they sometimes contain. You just never know what you’ll find. It’s almost a Forrest Gump box of chocolates kind of thing.

For example. I live in Germany, and several years ago I won a Lin Carter paperback on eBay that contained a business card from a used book store in Columbus Ohio, near OSU, called the Monkey’s Retreat. The very same Monkey’s Retreat that I’d frequented back in 1984/85. So suddenly thirty years later, I’m pulling one of their cards out of a paperback sent from Essen. I have always wondered how that paperback made its way across such gulfs of space and time. I mean, 30 years and thousands of miles. The reality is probably mundane, a G.I. leaving it at his girlfriend’s apartment and having it end up on the table at a flea market, where a dealer snatched it up for a few Pfennigs.

There was another time when I found — inside an old Scholastic Book edition of Bernhardt J. Hurwood’s “true horror stories” — a lovely little hand drawn initiation to a young girls birthday slumber party. You can read about that one here.

But the latest surprise trumped all the others, and came as such a shock that it drove me out of the comfort of my warm feather bed at 11:00 P.M. on a chilly Bavarian night to spend the next few hours sending messages, doing research, taking photos and making scans.

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Tell Me A Story: When does the Disbelief Get Too Heavy to Suspend?

Tell Me A Story: When does the Disbelief Get Too Heavy to Suspend?

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Tell Me a Story-smallI’m going to pause in my Podcast ramblings to ask a question: When does inaccuracy pull you out of the story?

I have unusual parameters on that one. I’m a Classicist by training, which means I know far more than is healthy about the Roman Empire and Greek Civilization ca 100 BCE. But I can usually set it aside, especially for movies. “Gladiator” remains one of my all time favorites. My first piece of writing for Black Gate was a review of Clash of the Titans, and I had good things about to say about both versions!

In other words, my expectations on historical accuracy are low, especially when the movie is going for “fun”. The more seriously it takes itself, the more likely I am to give it hell for screwing up. If you want to see me apoplectic, as me about The DaVinci Code.

On the other hand, some things drive me up the wall. For example, I was recently re-listening to Blood Rites, book six of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files.

Anyone who lives in Chicago is already nodding.

Butcher originally wanted to set his story in another city, the story goes, and his publishers required him to set it somewhere better known. He picked Chicago, despite not knowing the city at all. Which isn’t a problem for the most part.

Until you get to a scene at the climax of Blood Rites in which an important even takes place at Wrigley Field. It’s after dark, late in the evening. And Harry Dresden stops to remark how eerie the whole place is. The giant, empty, acres-wide parking lot. The silence. The ghostly nature of a place made to be full when it is completely empty.

That sound you just heard was the needle scratching across my mental track.

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Modular: Take Command of Star Trek Adventures

Modular: Take Command of Star Trek Adventures

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Star-Trek-The-Command-Division-Cover-No-LogosFans love Star Trek for different reasons, and when a fan moves into gaming within the Star Trek universe, those reasons usually inform the type of character they want to emphasize in their games. Do they want to be, like Spock or Data, the science officer who can coolly reason through any problem that comes up? Do they want to be the medical officer who saves lives while chaos erupts around them? The security officer who goes hand-to-hand with a Klingon warrior? The engineer who can make any technological miracle into reality? The hotshot pilot who can maneuver through any cluster of asteroids? Or the Captain of a starship, in charge of herding together all of these elements as they explore the distant unknown regions of space?

A handful of games have been versatile enough to cater to all of these types of fans. The video game Star Trek Online just celebrated its 8th anniversary, and it has a diverse style that allows easily for group or solo play, where players can create characters and take missions that interest them. There are missions that are mostly story-driven diplomatic missions, and some that are primarily about shooting the bad guys, either on ground away missions or in starship combat.

Last August, at GenCon, Modiphius Entertainment released the public version of their tabletop roleplaying game Star Trek Adventures. I’ve been running a group through since December 2016, when the game came out in a public playtest, and have been really pleased with it through all of the transformations into the official release. The system does a great job of allowing for diverse characters and capturing the feel of an episode of whichever Star Trek series is your cup of tea. (Earl Grey, hot, of course.)

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Modular: Dead Suns Adventure Path for Starfinder

Modular: Dead Suns Adventure Path for Starfinder

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StarfinderDeadSuns4Last fall, the game publisher Paizo began releasing their line of Starfinder products, taking their Pathfinder setting into a distant science fantasy RPG setting. In addition to the main Starfinder Core Rulebook (Amazon, Paizo), they also began releasing the Dead Suns Adventure Path. With four of the six Dead Suns books now out, it’s about time to look back on what they’ve released to see what all the series has got to offer for fans looking for material.

Paizo’s Pathfinder Adventure Path books have long been a staple of the company’s product line. It provides a broad campaign of adventures across six 92-page books, each released on a monthly schedule. In addition to the adventure, each book contained setting, culture, and religious information, a Bestiary supplement, and original fiction.

Dead Suns continues that tradition in their Starfinder campaign setting, with the only significant difference in format being that these books are released on a bi-monthly schedule, so it takes a year to release the full Adventure Path as opposed to the two Adventure Path schedule for Pathfinder. Starfinder is on a less aggressive production schedule than Pathfinder, without associated Player Companion or Campaign Setting resources released monthly, so the Adventure Path provide supplements to the two hardcover Starfinder supplements slated for release each year. (The Alien Archive was released in the fall, and the Pact Worlds setting book is slated for release this month.)

As the first Starfinder Adventure Path, Dead Suns is a planet-hopping quest through the Pact Worlds, as the players get their own starship and begin following the clues across planets, running afoul of massive corporations, space monsters, undead starships and necrotech, and the troublesome Cult of the Devourer, as they uncover the secret behind a lost superweapon.

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The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot

The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot

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The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot title card

Those who complain that today’s movie obsession with sequels and spinoffs is different from yesterday’s Hollywood should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch Dr. Goldfoot and His Bikini Machine. If you don’t remember this epic, Vincent Price at his feyest played Dr. Goldfoot, modeled after Bond supervillains Dr. No and Goldfinger.  “My aim is diabolically simple. I am going to control the world. I have invented the ultimate in ultimate weapons, the one weapon that can positively destroy man: woman.”

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Mythic Landscape: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

Mythic Landscape: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

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Weirdstone_of_BrisingamenHalfway through my recent reread of Alan Garner’s 1960 debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, it became clear to me that the true protagonist was the land, not the ostensible ones, sister and brother Susan and Colin.

Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, England, is the name of both a village and a great sandstone cliff “six hundred feet high and three mile long.” For Garner there’s a connection between land and myth, artistically at least, that is deep. His depiction of a land of rolling plains littered with farms and woods, riddled with thousands of years’-worth of mines makes it easy to see the svart-alfar, the “maggot-breed of Ymir,” boiling out of the earth. There’s something deeper than that, though; something that reaches beyond mere physical for Garner. It’s as if the land itself bred those stories and they are intertwined with it intimately and inextricably. Just walking the woods and rises around Alderley Edge, they can be felt pushing themselves up from the earth and traveling along on the backs of breezes.

Before the story proper begins, Garner recounts a true legend of Alderley Edge — that of a farmer from the village of Mobberly and the strange white-bearded man he meets on the way to market. The farmer hopes to sell his white mare at market in Macclesfield and when he agrees to sell it to the bearded man instead, he is shown a secret cave protected by an iron gate and filled with treasures. Inside sleep 140 knights, each, save one, with a perfect white mare by his side. The wizard, for that is what he is, tells the farmer why the knights are there:

“Here they lie in enchanted sleep,” said the wizard, “until a day will come — and come it will — when England shall be in direst peril, and England’s mothers weep. Then out from the hill these must ride and, in a battle thrice lost, thrice won, upon the plain, drive the enemy into the sea.”

In payment, the wizard tells the farmer to take whatever gold and gems he can fit into his pockets. He does, with unexpected and dire consequences for the future.

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Boskone 55: Con Report

Boskone 55: Con Report

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They set off together with a blithe sense of wrongdoing

This year, Boskone 55 was our third Boskone ever, and we had a frikkin MARVELOUS time.

No, I’m not using the Royal We — although  that is still a (perhaps unfortunate) habit of mine. At present, I am talking about myself and writer Carlos Hernandez (AKA “Doctor Husbandpants”), in whose august company I now traipse to most conventions. Kind of like our fridge magnet says (above).

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

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Cover by Wilfred Jones
Cover by Wilfred Jones

Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 and died on December 15, 1947.

Machen had a strong interest in the occult and published his first poem, “Eleusinia” when he was 18 years old. He struggled as a writer before seeing more success in the 1890s, including the publications of his story “The Great God Pan” in 1894. In the early days of World War I he published the short story “The Bowman” which described phantom bowman from Agincourt called upon to help the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. The story entered into popular culture as an actual description of the battle and led to the folklore around the “Angels of Mons.”

Machen originally published “The Coming of the Terror” in The Century, an illustrated magazine published from 1881 to 1930, although it grew out of Scribner’s Monthly, which dated back to 1870. The story was part of his longer novel The Terror and has rarely been reprinted only its own, only seeing print in 2003 in the Chaosium collection of Machen’s story’s The White People and Other Stories and that same year in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.

“The Coming of the Terror” feels a lot like one of the stories H.P. Lovecraft would begin publishing five years later, but with significant differences. Machen’s tale of mysterious deaths during the Great War slowly builds from reporting on the crash of an airman who hit a swarm of pigeons to the seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances in a small village in Wales. The deaths lead to paranoia that the Germans have somehow managed to attack the English countryside undetected, either using a strange new weapon or by infiltrating the citizenry.

While Lovecraft cites Machen as one of his sources (and Machen mentions the original village of Dunwich in this story), “The Coming of the Terror” really isn’t Lovecraftian in nature. Machen doesn’t use excessively purple prose to describe the sinister events occurring around his Welsh village of Porth. Furthermore rather than being witnessed by a single individual, the effects are widespread. Everyone is aware that something is happening, and the fact that the newspapers refuse to report on it just make the conjectures that much more horrific. Machen allows events to build slowly, from a single incident to several, their relationship to each other only explicit because they are all taking place in the same story.

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