19th Level

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! - Dr. Raymond Stantz, Dr. Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddemore, Dr. Peter Venkman I think every "Top N" list needs at least one or two "WTF?" entries. Yes, I am absolutely serious, I put West End Games' old Ghostbusters  near the top of my Top 19 list. Funny story. At least to me. When Wizards of the Coast first released their Star Wars RPG there was a lot of criticism about it being "D&D in space" due to using the d20 rules. While the d20 incarnations weren't my favorite (though I do think they got it right near the end of their license with Saga Edition), I always got a chuckle out of that criticism. By that standard, West End Games old Star Wars RPG, much beloved, could be considered "Ghostbusters in space"....

Based on the West End Games Adventure by Scott Haring et al. Cast of Characters: Ethan Sharp, smooth-talking wheel-man Mike Slade, brawny brainiac Wednesday, September 11, 1985. Brooklyn, New York. 7 AM. The Brooklyn Ghostbusters had just moved into their headquarters in Kings Plaza mall. They had had quite the moving celebration, with the extended staff joining them - though come to think of it, they weren't there for the heavy lifting...  Slade and Sharp had retired to their bunk room after a healthy diet of takeout Chinese food and questionable recreational beverage. True by a strict reading of the law their lease might look unkindly on their sleeping in the mall. But once you have unlicensed particle accelerators as part of your kit a little lease violation was a small thing. Slade woke first and noticing the phone off the hook he replaced it and immediately received a call from Fred Lunt of the Yum-Mee Food Palace on Ocean Avenue - it turned out they h...

I submitted my first GitHub pull request for Roll20 this evening - an update to the Ghostbusters character sheet to support ghost characters (making this Ghostmaster's life easier). As I did so I reflected on how much remote tabletop RPGs have changed over the years. The first time I ever had to do remote gaming was after a player moved away but wanted to stay in the group. We wound up using a webcam that either pointed at us or at the physical tabletop and generally trusted him on his rolling. We tried a variety of early virtual tabletop tools but we found they suffered from problems like doing too little (why not just use Skype?), were too complicated (performing surgery on my router settings is not a fun activity), and too specialized for a given game or set of games. As my gaming group grew more dispersed the ability to use a virtual tabletop became more important. We had a lot of early success with Fantasy Grounds and I'd certainly have no objection to using i...

Just because the  Ghostbusters  RPG is a bit on the humorous side doesn't mean I don't do some homework. Our game is set in the 1980's and based in Brooklyn, NY. Though I lived in Connecticut throughout the 1980's, I still had family in Brooklyn and spent many summers there. With that in mind, a few decisions have been reached. The team is based in the Kings Plaza Shopping Center, the mall that was closest to my grandparents old house. I've many memories of my grandfather looking for a parking space as there was no way he was going to pay money to park at the mall... Through a little eBay scouring I managed to snag a copy of a map of Kings Plaza, circa 1990, a few years after the game is set, but good enough for gaming our purposes. Below is a so-so scan of the map - the document is a bit too long for my scanner to accept it so I'm resorting to a phone-camera-scan... I've not been to the mall since around 1998 or so but I imagine many of these store...

Summary In early August 1985 the Brooklyn Ghostbusters were nearing the official launch of their franchise. Doctor Mike Slade was down in Washington, DC, receiving mandatory EPA training for the proper and environmentally proper containment of ghosts. A possible office had been located in a vacant storefront in Kings Plaza. Physicist Billy Robertson and grunt/romance novel cover model "Chilli" had joined Ethan Sharp in the main office. They'd been nervous about opening a franchise so close to the main headquarters. but given they'd yet to actually see Venkman, Spengler, Stantz, and Zeddmore outside of VHS training videos. They'd seen Janine Melnitz, who forced them to answer the phone at the firehouse... A call did come in - "Ghostbusters! Help us! Our television sets turn on when we're not there! We can't see Dallas or Miami Vice! The landlord won't help us! We're the tenants, and we pooled our money, and you can have it all! Just ...

Ghostbusters has a "ghost die". It is the predecessor to the West End Games Star Wars RPG's wild die.  In Ghostbusters the ghost die is rolled as part of all tests. If your skill gives you five dice, four will be normal dice and one is a ghost die. On the ghost die the six is replaced by a ghost. If you roll it something unfortunate happens (and the roll counts as a zero). You still might succeed, but if you do something went wrong. Now the odds of something unfortunate happening being one in six is actually rather high, but since Ghostbusters is a humor game, it is appropriate for the genre... With that in mind, in our most recent Ghostbusters  game the characters had the ghost cornered in the basement of an apartment building. Zap. Success, but with a ghost die. OK, the ghost is caught in the trap but... a fire has broken out. We'll just use the water tank to put out the fire... Oh dear, a failure with a ghost die. The fire is now an electrical one... A...

After some initial training at the Ghostbusters HQ in Manhattan, our bold Ghostbusters have been asked to relocate and open up their franchise. It certainly has nothing to do with them nearly burning down the apartment building at 66666 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn (writeup for that forthcoming). Our game has been established as taking place in 1985 - it's now August of 1985 in our game. The team is officially opening their franchise in Brooklyn. There's two prime pieces of real estate up for consideration. There's the Miami Vice route of living off a boat at a pier - perhaps in Sheepshead Bay (my grandfather and I used to walk to Sheepshead Bay from his house on Avenue W). And then there's the possibility of opening the franchise at the Kings Plaza Mall. Though as another member of the group has pointed out (also born in Brooklyn, left at an early age, but still had family there), parking is a royal pain in the ass at Kings Plaza. Sheepshead Bay Kings Plaz...

With out group due for at least a few sessions of Ghostbusting, there's some important decisions we need to make - when and where is our franchise? A little background - the premise of the Ghostbusters RPG is the characters have their own Ghostbusting franchise, located wherever the group chooses to place it. After all, the key to being profitable in Ghostbusting is in the franchise fees... There is also the matter of when. The RPG assumed "the modern day" but it's worth noting that that represented the mid-1980's at the time the game was published. Our previous session took place in the mid-1980's in New York City. The idea was the original Ghostbusters were not in town and it fell to our heroes to fill in for them. We'll be figuring out the "permanent" timeframe and location for our game in our next session. My best guess is we'll go with modern day New York City - given we're located along the eastern seaboard of the United S...

I suppose it's a good sign that my favorite session over the past year is also the most recent - a Ghostbusters  game. Like I mentioned in the writeup for that session, we've been having some hiccups with attendance of late - real life and all that. Icons has been a bit tough to keep going with variable turnout. I'd been thinking about perhaps Star Wars D6 in the autumn and the groups been talking about Ghostbusters what with the new movie... So we figured a one-shot might be in order. We thought we'd only have three players plus GM (our group is five plus GM) but as it turned out we only had two but had one of those "what the hell let's go for it". It wound up being a ton of fun. What worked? To begin, I think we were all in the right mood for a something a little bit silly and everyone just dove into character. It didn't help that two out of the three of us lived in Brooklyn once upon a time, really helping with the accents (and the third ...

Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! - Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer With some attendance issues over the past few games we've been doing some gaming experimentation of late in our gaming group. I was able to play in a Monster of the Week  one-shot and last session three of us did a game of Ghostbusters (I GM-ed this one). I'm not sure if it was a matter of the session, the game, the mood we were in, or alignment of the planets, but the Ghostbusters game was a ton of fun (so was Monster of the Week for that matter). I knew we were going to to Ghostbusters in advance so I had some chance to prepare getting a R...

"I guess he's going to Queens - he's going to be the third scariest thing on that train." I'm not certain why but the reboot of Ghostbusters  is a bit of a target for people who like using terms like "feminist SJW". So I'll air my own prejudices - I'm probably what most people who hate "social justice warriors" would consider a "social justice warrior". With that out of the way, how was the film? I'll put it in the category of a lot of fun but not a masterpiece. It has some tough competition - the 1984 Ghostbusters is a comic masterpiece and it is difficult to conceive of a picture standing up to it. Overall, the original clearly remains superior but I don't feel the new film has anything to be ashamed of. The basic plot is similar to that of the original - straight-laced physic professor Erin Gilbert is up for tenure when a ghost book she cowrote years ago with her childhood friend, Abby Yates, gets p...

In the early 2000s one of the complaints I recall about Wizards of the Coast's d20-based  Star Wars RPG   was it was simply "D&D in space" vs. the previous Star Wars RPG as put out by West End Games. While I had a number of fun Star Wars games using the d20 versions, I have to confess to a bit of a preferences for the West End Games versions. Though in a sense, you could have called that game "Ghostbusters in space". Alas, my copies of Ghostbusters suffered in the regrettable basement flood several years ago triggered by the kiddies forgetting to turn off the bathroom sink. Oops. I've managed to reassemble some bits of it and hypothetically speaking there might be some scanned copies out there. Of course with the new movie coming out I saw a copy of the original RPG going for $3000.00 on Amazon. I'm thinking some automatic pricing algorithm is going a little loony right there... Anyways, recently flipping through the original version of the...