19th Level

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu  is probably my favorite RPG. It has a system very well matched for its genre and it realizes its genre fantastically well. It's definitely an old-school game - in many ways it is a living fossil - you could take an adventure for its 1st edition from the 1980s and very easily use it with the most recent 7th edition, converting things on the fly. If you come from a D&D background, the rules are pretty easy to pick up (I'd argue that Call of Cthulhu is easier to pick up than D&D). But there are other ways to play a game of Lovecraftian horror, and reasons you'd want to go in that direction, depending on what you are looking for in a game. Call of Cthulhu  is very traditional, giving players minimal narrative control. Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu  injects a laser focus on investigation, insuring that no game comes to a halt because of a failed skill roll. One can see that Trail had an influence on the 7th edition of Call o...

I was updating my backed projects on Kickstarter with projects I've received and I decided it was time to do an update as to what projects are way overdue... First, the good news. There were some Kickstarters over the past several months that I finally received overdue rewards on. These include: The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes Cthulhu and Zombie Mugs and Cups Production Run! The Dracula Dossier - I'd actually received almost all of the rewards ages ago but there was one final reward, The Hawkins Papers , which recently arrived, closing this out. Pelgrane kept the backers well-informed as to what the issues were and their statuses. Blue Rose: The AGE Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy  - Like The Dracula Dossier , I wasn't particularly worried about this one. I've had the PDF for a while and was kept well-appraised as to what was going on. Next, the products for which I've not yet received the full set of awards and are considerably ove...

I first encountered Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar in the 1980s in the pages of TSR's Deities & Demigods book for AD&D followed by their Lankhmar: City of Adventure sourcebook. I had a pretty difficult time finding collections of Leiber's stories - my recollection is they either were out of print or not at my local Waldenbooks, in these days before Amazon. It was shortly after I graduated college that White Wolf released a series of hardcovers compilations that I finally managed to read all of the stories - and it's been an awfully long time, it might be time for a reread. Lankhmar has found its way into a number of RPG properties. TSR released a number of Lankhnar products - AD&D wasn't a horrible match for the setting but I feel it needed a bit more tweaking than they gave it. Mongoose Publishing did two versions of Lankhmar for RuneQuest but to be honest, I was less than impressed by those efforts, though I think RuneQuest is a very good match for the s...

High Rock Press currently has a Kickstarter going for Darren Watts's  Golden Age Champions . You should go support it. It needs about $5000 more over the next two weeks to reach its $20,000 goal.  I'll offer my own reward... Assuming no hiccups in my regular gaming, I'll run a Golden Age Champions campaign and write about the experience. It should make for interesting reading as while I've read a number of Hero products and played in a few games in college, I've never run a Hero game. Champion Complete  peels away many layers of complexity from the 5th and 6th edition Hero games - fine games, but games whose crunchiness really started loading up. My impression is that while Champions Complete  is based on the 6th edition of Hero, it seems to be closer to the 4th edition in complexity (the version I played a few times). I've got some Golden Age maps of Port Henry to break out - the Earth-38 version of Port Henry of course. High Rock Press did a gre...

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die... - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" It's about two and a half years after the original target date, but at long last the physical copy of Call of Cthulhu  7th edition arrived at my house today. I thought about doing a video unboxing but I'm not much of a video recorder. So let's walk through some snapshots... Here's the box with a nice little book covering up my address. The poor box seems like it has been through a lot... Clearly Chaosium took some of the early reports of damaged books seriously. Either that or they shipped me a box of ca...

Hey look more stuff to distract me! I came home today  to a pair of packages, one with the new Tunnels & Trolls Deluxe Edition and one with The Dracula Dossier , a campaign for Night's Black Agents. My experience with Tunnels & Trolls is fairly limited - I've played a few one-off games way back in middle and high school. It's a game that looks a lot like D&D, with a series of stats that are generated by 3d6. It has a small number of classes - warriors, wizards, and rogues are the big three. Warriors and wizards are pretty self-explanatory. Rogues are anyone else - they can learn to use magic, they can fight decently well. There's also the warrior-wizard, a class really difficult to qualify for (but one I saw a lot of now that I think of it...). The Deluxe Edition is expanded from this baseline with more difficult-to-qualify for classes. Unlike classic D&D stats go up over time - they go up a lot. Since wizards used to expend strength to cast spells, y...

Like a lot of gamers, I support a lot of Kickstarter projects. Most of the projects I've supported have come through though I've had a few busts. I was going to make this a Google+ post but it kept getting longer and longer until I realized I'd pretty much written a blog post. This is a bit of stream of consciousness, so don't consider it a detailed analysis. I'll get the bad news out first... Accepting I've lost my money on two Kickstarters. As far as percentages go it's not horrible - like I said, most projects I've funded have either delivered or at the very least stayed in communication - special credit to Autarch to pulling off Dwimmermount in the face of the author vanishing on them. The lost causes are Todor Minev's "Cthulhu and Zombie Mugs" (yeah, kinda goofy) and Jess Nevins' "The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes". The Encyclopedia is especially disappointing as I was in it for just digital delivery of i...