19th Level

Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. By this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.  Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land  introduces the term "grok" which is a bit difficult to understand - I've always viewed it as a full and total understandi...

 I don't blog a whole lot about systems but when going over some older games and adventures I've picked up lately I came to the realization I seem to have a lot more luck in games that have a certain level of simplicity to their rules - especially the D6 System and BRP-based games. I always get a kick out of the fact that the Chaosium team that wrote West End Games' Ghostbusters RPG is made up of people who had major roles in developing RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu , and Pendragon , all three of which are BRP-based games. While the two systems are fairly different from each other, they both have in common a very straightforward and unobtrusive system. I've explained games like Ghostbusters , Star Wars , and Call of Cthulhu  in minutes to new players. I'm the last person in the world to preach the virtues of "one true system" - or even "two true systems" for that matter - I've got some Gumshoe and Fate in my future I'm pretty certain,...

Geez all this obsession with perfection... Perfect game for me. I'm going to answer this one partially and revisit this one when it comes time to mash-up two games. My perfect game would be a modified version of Pendragon. It has a number of things that I really like about it. First of all, it has a rules set I really enjoy - though it is d20 instead of d100 based, it is still a BRP system. Very easy to understand and visualize. I also really like the generational play of the game, with each adventure presumed to take place over a year and your character not expected to make it to the end of the game, whether dying of natural causes or of violence. Related to that, Pendragon treats wounds very seriously, harkening back to the state of medieval medicine, in a way that few games do - it is possible to be victorious in battle and then die of your wounds. There's a few things which prevent this from being a "Perfect" game for me. First of all, I have to confess wh...

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" "In his house at R'lyeh , dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." One of my more enduring campaigns of late has been a Call of Cthulhu game. In a nutshell, Call of Cthulhu is a roleplaying game based on the works of the American horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Along with Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft can be considered the founders of American horror literature. It is difficult to imagine a Stephen King without an H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft described the premise behind his works rather well in a letter that accompanied his submission of his short story "Call of Cthulhu": Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form-and the local human passions and conditions and standards-are depicted as native to o...