Mad Gaming Madness

I was going through older files I'd put together years ago for a home game, and came across my Religion document. I was going to have quite a few real-world religions, represented in a fictionalized context in a sort of "multiversal collision." Anyway, among the religions was an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian church. I had been inspired by this thread on the Paizo boards as well as a series of discussions on the HârnForum on adding early Christianity to fantasy games. I never ended up running the campaign, which is just as well. I'm more interested in theological navel-gazing than anyone else I play with, and the extra effort to make something plausible would have been wasted. In fact, it is wasted just sitting on my hard drive, so here you go.

Wired.com has a great article on an enciphered manuscript from a secret society that has recently been cracked with the use of computer-aided linguistics. Interesting read!

I found this extremely insightful post about trust issues that can crop up in gaming, and wanted to bookmark it. Then I thought, why not share it here? (via nerdwerds )

This year, I originally started with something different, a modular starport sheet with associated Visio file, so you can make starports in minutes. In my sci-fi home game, this is something I need that I've always intended to make; I thought the One Page Dungeon Contest would spur me to finish the idea. Unfortunately, I didn't really have an adventure in there - it's basically more of a GM tool. And the contest is for a "Dungeon," so...

I like to have a lot of pre-gens for the D&D Next (040213 Playtest Packet) tables I run at the local hobby shop, because sometimes everybody at the table wants to play a martial character (and that should be allowed so that we can see whether or not it works in playtest) but there's only a couple in the packet. So, I went through and made as many unique pre-gens as I could earlier in the week. Sorry if they look rushed.

Apparently, they published all of the 2012 One Page Dungeon entries in one handsome volume ! I'm thrilled! There's some great stuff in there!

So, I've been doing a bit of work with D&D Next lately, since I run D&D Encounters at the FLGS and the new module can be converted to work in either D&D 4e or the new D&D Next playtest. Every single player at my store opted for D&D Next, so I need to get up to speed on my familiarity and comfort with the system. With that in mind, I present a few options for cleric PCs. I'd love to get them playtested.

Much like last year, I ended up with some additional materials after I was through with my submission. In this case, I made up a business card and the label to a Rescue Ball* package. I figured I'd post both the .pdf files and the images so that GMs can use them with the adventure, or edit them with details specific to their campaigns.

So, this year I've decided to go sci-fi. It's not just that my home campaign is sci-fi and several others I'm involved in are sci-fi; it's that I think there's a distinct fantasy bias to the entries that limits the usefulness of the one page dungeons. Since the easiest way to diversify is to start with my own entry, that's what I'm going to do.

Well, this year's One Page Dungeon Contest snuck up on me again. I'd checked back in March, but I guess I was too early. Now I have only six days to get mine done. I had a number of ideas last year that I put down some preliminary notes for, but of course my current submission follows none of those ideas. I've decided to do a sci-fi themed encounter, mostly because none of the ones I've looked at in the current year's crop are sci-fi and I think that will make it stand out more. Of course, the whole point of last year's Wilderlands of Dire Omen submission was to have a framework in which to put other one page dungeons. I've not abandoned that concept, but I will push my current fantasy-themed effort to the back burner and try to finish it up for next year.

I've been gaming since 1982 or thereabouts, so it should come as no surprise that I began with D&D, then in its first edition. Although it's not my go-to system (that would be Hero System, the mechanics for the Champions RPG), I've tried all of the editions since. The most recent iteration is not my favorite flavor of D&D, but I have to admit it works mechanically better in some ways than the editions that came before: the combats move faster, and an attempt is made to balance player options.

Here's an interesting contest: design a game that will still be played in a Thousand Years, interesting in a number of ways. For one, they give three examples ( Chess , Tag , and card games ), but card games played the way we know them are relatively new. Still, an interesting challenge. Society changes so much over the course of a thousand years, how can you anticipate what's going to be popular?

As I said in my last post, I'm a big fan of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting from Judges Guild. I also loved the old Arduin setting by Dave Hargrave. Both of these settings were classic fantasy settings created by big fan readers. In the old days, we didn't have the kind of exclusivity of setting you get nowadays -- you could easily imagine Luke Skywalker setting foot in Middle Earth and going toe-to-toe with Elric and Stormbringer, or some other gonzo conglomeration of properties. Eventually, the lucrative aspects of licensing properties became important to the rich guys, and they made it difficult to create this kind of thing. But for a while, you could see it happen. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series got this treatment a lot; if you've ever wondered why they never did a movie or TV show, it's probably because they saw that licensing the property would not be exclusive, since Anne was nice to her fans and let them semi-officially publish derivative works. H...

Well, here's a link to my submission for this year's One Page Dungeon contest : the Wilderlands of Dire Omen. NOTE: This is the updated version that fixes the problems I had with formatting the PDF. This is what I had intended to submit to the 1PD website!

The year before last, I became aware of an interesting phenomenon known as the One Page Dungeon. The idea is simple: instead of a whole book of keyed encounters and a suite of maps, a 1PD tries to make do with just a simple map and key. Most of the text in a standard adventure is superfluous, goes the argument -- monster stats, historical background, and the like can be found in various supplements or generated on the fly, and usually change with campaign or gaming system. At its core, the 1PD tries to distill the essence of an adventure scenario to its essential elements: the map and a key. The idea originally came about during the development of one of the megadungeons in the 90s. A forum member proposed that the contributors should produce their dungeon section on a standardized 30x30 graph with a key on the same page. The idea evolved quite a bit, and then a few years ago a contest was announced. I didn't manage to get in on it in 2009, and I missed the cutoff in 2010 by days...

Way back in the Stone Age, I went to DexCon 3 here in New Jersey in 1994. (I still have the t-shirt with its great Phil Foglio illustration!) In the dealer room, I saw a weird sort of die in the bins. It was like a d20, but bigger because it had 30 sides. Thirty! I was still pretty new to convention gaming, and splurged, buying three of them. They came with a leaflet from Lou Zocchi with a d30 table for generating some random something or other; the chart has been lost to the ages, and the details escape me. And they've sat in my dice bag for a decade, since other than the one chart, I had nothing to use them with. Fortunately, that has now changed! I came across this post on Dave Larkin's blog, and it's got a bunch of stuff to use them with! He even has started an Order for d30 enthusiasts; it's probably the most prestigious honor I can hope to attain! Of course, now I can't find any of the dice I bought oh-so-long ago...

The knight surveyed his chances. The undead hordes surrounding the castle had effectively bottled him in. The original hordes of Gaunts had been supplemented by a pack of ghouls that had followed the six-armed skeleton warrior. They feasted on such corpses as they found and howled bone-chilling dirges at the walls. The warrior who seemed to command this unholy mess seemed to be content to set up camp and wait them out.

I've run a Hârn Hero game over the last few years that's been popular with my players. For those who aren't familiar with it, Hârn is a setting created by N. Robin Crossby. Originally produced by Columbia Games, the setting concentrates on the island of Hârn on the planet Kethira. Hârn is an island about twice to three times the size of Britain. Climate-wise, it's a good fit as a fantasy version of Britain, with several competing kingdoms and tribes of barbarians. The fact that the island is to the northwest of a large continent called Lýthia merely strengthens that impression.

I've had another blog for some time now, on LiveJournal. Since I only have the one set of thoughts, I'd kind of thought of holding onto my Blogger journal until I had a use for it. Well, I thought of one. I've been concentrating more on my regular life in LiveJournal. It occurred to me that I've got a lot of gaming stuff that goes on in my life, that might be entertaining for some people. I enjoy reading my friends' gaming blogs, after all. So, what better use for a blog named "Mad Gaming Madness" than to put some more Gaming on the Web?

So, this is my blog. Fifteen years ago, when I first got onto the Internet, I saw people who used it as a forum for discussion and philosophy. I remember thinking, "I need to get me one of those." And it only took fifteen years for me to get one! Procrastinator, my name is. A word as to the title. I'm a gamer, and my friends and I get together on a weekly basis to play games. Sometimes, though, not everyone can make it. Rather than just twiddling our thumbs, those of us who can, get together and play board games or card games, or whatever. We call this "Mad Gaming Madness." Yes, that's right, because it happens so rarely, we had to come up with a name for hanging out like normal people ... Anyway, I look forward to sharing my inane thoughts with you people. See ya later...