Sunday, April 28, 2024

28 April 2024 Castles&Crusades: Hard(er) to Play Online

 I really do dig Castles&Crusades. It's old-school with just enough crunch to make dice rolling meaningful, but without the character bloat/power creep that infects D&D 5e, or the kind-of-silly-swingy magic of Dungeon Crawl Classics. There is definitely a learning curve, but C&C seems like a great game to sit around a table with, and run a long campaign. 

Problem is, I play online, and in order to do that, the game needs to be well supported. C&C has some support on Roll20 (my prefered platform) but not enough. There is no character builder, for example, and no way to import characters from Troll Lord's online character creator. There are no rollable tokens for monsters, which is a huge ass pain. 

So, once again, I am going to put this beautiful bastard aside. It makes me sad.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

23 April 2024 Still Waiting to Play and Future Game Ideas

 Due to logistics--people travelling for work, vacations, Bruins play off games--we haven't been able to get the DCC S&S game up and running yet. I have the sandbox all built out to the point where I am forgetting things that I already wrote. I have all of the main locations populated with NPCs, descriptions, and 'action' prompts, so we'll see where this all takes them as they wander around. Players always do things I don't expect, but I am hopeful that it will all feel seamless once we begin. But, as the old saying goes, "if you want to hear God laugh, make plans." 

I ordered myself two new books--Path of the Planebreaker by Monte Cook Games, and an older supplement titled Beyond Countless Doorways. Both of these books deal with the planes, and planar travel and adventures. Just as I've wanted to run a desert-themed campaign for a long time, I have a plane-jumper kicking around in the back of my imagination as well. Even now, early days, I am thinking about what rule set I would use to run it. Not 5e (which, to me, breaks down past Tier I play). Not DCC, although that's a simple enough system to work with. Maybe Dragonbane, or maybe Castles&Crusades. I have a long time to think about it since I haven't even started my new campaign yet! 

Other things kicking around in my head:

-A Call of Cthulhu/Ten Candles mash-up with a zombie apocalypse.

-A Star Crawl/Mutant Crawl Classics science fiction game that feels a bit like the old Heavy Metal Magazines and movie.

--DCC Lankhmar, which I have quite a bit already done. 

--I have two huge Castles&Crusades campaigns just sitting on my desk.

--I have a Dragonbane campaign that came with the boxed set.

--Somewhere deep in my brain is a classics campaign, like a Greek and Roman thing, with a little help from Odyssey of the Dragon Lords

28 February 2026 Lent and Drinking from the TTRPG Firehose

      I have a buying problem. I buy too much TTRPG stuff. I see things, I get Dragon Sickness, and then I purchase them. Sometimes I'll...