19th Level

Though I began gaming in the 80s the 90s proved to be very formative in my gaming style. I absolutely ate up story-based games like Vampire: The Masquerade  as well as the story-based style seen in D&D 2nd Edition products. One of the frequent elements of that style is not letting the dice get in the way of the story. I'm not going to bash that gaming style - I had a lot of fun gaming that way, playing through the Forgotten Realms Avatar-trilogy of adventures and managing to have a great time, despite its strong element of rail roading. It's a style and if everyone is having fun with it then there's nothing wrong with it. One of the dangers with that style is players can turn into spectators or actors for a story designed by the GM (or a pre-packaged adventure). You'll have villains who absolutely cannot be killed in the first encounter, events that must happen no matter what the players do. One of the innovations I've seen over the last decade is game sy...

"Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic!" - "Turjan of Miir", the first story of  Mazirian the Magician (aka The Dying Earth ) Earlier this week the worlds of science fiction and fantasy lost one of its greats, Jack Vance. One of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon, in an article about him in the New York Times Magazine , referring to him as "the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle’ or ‘The Dragon Masters’ had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he’s Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there’s this insurmountable barrier.”  Searching the web will reveal more about him than I could hope to capture in a single blog post. I came to his work relatively late, in my mid twenties shorty after moving to the Boston-area. But in a sense I'd been familiar since I beg...

March and April were such good months for blogging, But not May... I remember when I was in college I used to think how great it'd be after graduation and all the free time I'd have. And truth to tell, the amount of free time I had prior to kids was pretty cool, though I did work at a computer start-up for a few years of that... May does tend to be a busy month in my family, with the school year approaching its end and both daughters being born in May. Plus I have a project at work nearing completion and have been working many, many late nights as a result of that. As one might imagine, gaming and blogging has been pushed to the backburner. There's been some fun stuff during all this time - two young ladies having their birthdays is a good time (though our eleven year old is now taller than her mom...) I've managed to start an ACKS game, something I'll certainly be blogging about as it progresses. Managed to make it to a pair of movies - Iron Man 3 and Star T...

One thing I've noticed is the D&D products of the 1970s seem awfully different from the material produced now. Not totally - looking through the material that companies like the Judges Guild and TSR produced, adventures have always been popular. (Though the adventures of the day were a lot more open/easy to drop into a campaign.) But what I see is a lot of products designed as resources for Dungeon Masters. You had your Monster & Treasure Assortments and Dungeon Geomorphs. Judges Guild produced a gazillion products with dungeon and wilderness maps, random encounters, etc. As I'm prepping my first "real" sandbox style game I have to confess I see the utility in them. Not knowing precisely what the players will do has me going through my not inconsiderable gaming library (stretching, if not back to the 1970s, at least to the 80s - when a lot of those old products were still in print). Lots of adventures I've used in the past seem just perfect for locat...

Continent Map. 24 miles per hex. Click to enlarge. It's been a little quiet here over the past week as I prepped for my new ACKS game. I thought it might be interesting to share the results, both in terms of general interest and as a resource for my campaign. Starting Points Unlike most fantasy RPG settings, ACKS does not have a pseudo-medieval setting as its default setting. Rather it is set in a period called "Late Antiquity", a period more commonly referred to as the Dark Ages. The Roman Empire had fallen - at least the western half of it had. The eastern half endured for another millennia, with its periods of growth and decline - at one point managing to reconquer much of the western empire. New nations came into existence, though it should be noted our idea of a nation is a rather new one.  For my setting I am making my Roman analogue the Corrin Empire. It still exists, though in a much reduced form. Several of the nations on the map nominally owe it al...

Boston Marathon Explosions Photo by Aaron Tang, used under Creative Commons Pretty much the whole world is aware of what happened in Boston this past week. It began with a bomb going off in Boston and ended with a manhunt that involved multiple shootouts and the entire area shut down. I've lived in the MetroWest suburbs of Boston since 1996, living about 30 miles away from the city itself. Being born in New York City I have to be honest that my sports allegiances remain those of my youth - the Mets, Giants, and Knicks. Yet my wife and I have grown to love the city and its surrounding area. (And I was most definitely rooting for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees in 2004.) Being a history buff, especially that of the American Revolution and early national period, I love the fact that Massachusetts celebrates Patriots' Day, commemorating the start of the American Revolution with the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Part of the celebration of Patriots'...

A second post in one day. Eek! My earlier post  today for Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day was more on the practical side. I wanted to provide the community with something that might be handy in their games. I'm probably most proud of the idea of short-duration scrolls. What I was looking for was a way to give the magic-user a little extra while not unbalancing him, either at low levels or high levels. With scrolls that don't last indefinitely no magic-user is going to stockpile them and assigning a cost to them will make sure they aren't used flippantly. But it gives low level magic-users just a little something extra while still keeping them rather delicate at low levels. For this follow-up post I wanted to reflect a bit on the Swords & Wizardry game as a whole. I've never been at the core of the "Old School Renaissance" - I've played and run lots of games, old and new, and bear none any particular ill will. Some I have more fun ...