24 May 2025 Thinking about sci-fi

     In all my years of playing and running TTRPGs, I have never run a science fiction game. I have played Star Trek (mostly in the 80s, but just again recently), and we played a brief Gamma World game in high school. We also played a short-lived MCC game which ended in a spectacular nuclear explosion. I used to have Star Frontiers, and I remember goofing around with ship battles, but that was at least 40 years ago. So no sci-fi game for Miguel, which is strange because I fucking love science fiction. So. Much. I don't read it as much as I used to, but it still takes up a lot of room in my imagination. Golden Age, Silver Age, New Wave, military, space opera, all the things. Movies, books, comic books, tv shows. Love them all. 

    I've been kicking around the idea of a science fiction campaign for awhile, but I haven't seriously sat down and started to plot one out. That's not 100% accurate: about 15 or 16 months ago, I began to kind of sort of build one out, but I abandoned it pretty quickly...and now I don't actually remember why. So there are several paths I'm thinking about.

Path One: Traveller. This is the original OG science fiction game, and I have never played it. There are numerous iterations and versions, and me being a greedy, dragon-sick game whore, I would happily buy everything I can get my greedy little paws on. It's a huge ecosystem, and those who play it speak highly of it. It is also supported on Foundry VTT, which I am reluctantly considering since there are way more games available than there are on Roll20. Do I really need another game? Of course not. Will that stop me? Not for one second.

Path Two: Stars/Cities Without Number. I don't know too much about this system, but it's available on Foundry, and people really seem to like it. I think it was inspired by Traveller, but it's more of a d20 system (vs. Traveller's d6 system) so it would be more familiar to my group and I. My buddy Z is pecking away at a SWON game currently, so it's probably better if I stay out of his lane, but I do have the core book, and it looks good.

Path Three: Starcrawl/Purple Planet/Evolved/Mutant Crawl Classics. Goodman Games and its third party publishers make all kinds of crazy shit, and I admit that there is a certain appeal in a gonzo game using campy-ass science fiction as the inspiration. Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Heavy Metal the Movie. Battle Beyond the Stars...such fun insanity is available to put the wind beneath my wings. There isn't really any VTT support for these systems (maybe Mutant Crawl) but DCC is not hard to run at all. 

Part of what I need to consider is who would play in a game like this. If it's my normal five players, the wacko-bird game would be a blast. If it's a smaller number--Z, Cheese, Dennis--it could be a more sober game. I'll have to keep thinking about it, but this is all percolating in my brain as I stare down 10 weeks of summer vacation coming up in less than a month.

Addendum: just as I was thinking about this, I imagined using Star Crawl to run the Star Trek Mirrorverse and have them go to the Purple Planet. That's how my brain works. 

18 May 2025 Kickin' It Wicked Old School

    I follow a guy on Youtube whose channel goes by the name The Joy of Wargaming. I don't remember how I found him; probably when I was following--with both fascination and horror--the BROSR phenomena a year or so ago. One of his video series is about playing 2nd edition AD&D solo, and how to generate hex maps for exploration...and down the rabbit hole I went. 

    Like many others in this hobby, I have become interested in the older expressions of how these games were played, which is ironic since I used to actually play the old ways because I am, essentially, old. I remember being frustrated by AD&D's combat when I was young (say, back in the early 90s); it felt like chopping down a tree: hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, hit, hit, so I started to futz around with different systems and write my own game called 'Mike's Quest,' which was a combination of Chaosium's BRP--the only other system I knew-- and D&D. I never finished it; I do remember making spell cards, creating a combat system (by 'creating' I mean stealing the parts I liked best from BRP and AD&D), and writing a long hand version of the new rules (which I still have in a notebook downstairs). But then life happened: I graduated from college, joined the military, got married, and started playing 3rd edition in the late 90s and early aughts. We played as much as we could for a time, all of us balancing wives and children and jobs and geography, but it wasn't until 2019 that we picked it up again with any regularity. The fifth edition was all the rage, the online components of TTRPGs were (and are) astonishing, and we were off to the races. My struggles, experiences, and criticisms of this new (well, not so new anymore) edition of D&D are well documented. Summary: well-designed system, works great, I don't like the game.

    So OSR I am. Come at me, bruh! As T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." Yesterday I spent several hours using an almost 50 year old book--The Dungeon Master's Guide-- to generate a random hex map, which I then colored in with Crayola colored pencils. I used the random encounter tables to populate the hexes, then the Dread Thinganomicon for some additional ideas. That's it. Two books, some dice (albeit some online dice), some pencils and a blank hex paper. I spent hours doing this, and I was astonished at how my imagination just kicked into high-gear. The story, or the setting, or the potentialites, whatever you want to call it, emerged from these simple tools, and now I have a mini-world that I am excited to continue to work on. "New does not mean best..." --Slipknot

    I realized yesterday that I have been making my job as a DM and an adventure designer harder, not easier, by buying and reading so much stuff. And there is a lot of stuff: world books, source books, campaign settings, mini adventures, design books, modules, websites, podcasts, Youtube...the amount of material is a frigging raging river, and I have dived into it and swam, trying to keep my head above water, for almost six years. None of this is bad or wrong: I love this hobby, and there is so much new and shiny stuff to buy! (I am also at the point where I have the financial resources to buy, literally, whatever I want to, whenever I want to, ad infinitum). But in so doing--in the buying and the reading and the using--I have strangled my own imagination. One of the things Jeffro Johnson--a lead figure in the BROSR movement--said that has really stuck with me is this: you only need three books to play this game for the rest of your life: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. That's literally it. 

    Now, to be clear, I like modern mechanics like ascending armor class, advantage and disadvantage, luck points, critical hit and miss tables, etc. Those innovations make the game play better for sure, and I'll continue to use them at my table. But so much of the other stuff is just a distraction from the simplicity of the system (say, the Siege Engine in Castles&Crusades) and my imagination. So for my next trick, I am going to reduce the number of resources I have at hand; strip it down to core books and a few other things I like a lot (The Lazy DM's Companion, The Tome of Adventure Design) and see where it takes me. 

    What's old is new, my friends. Embrace the Old Gods! 

5 May 2025 Game Update

 Greetings people who read this blog (i.e. me)! It's been a few months, so here is an update on all the game goodness taking place in my sad and pathetic exciting life:

-I am on session nine of a Castles&Crusades campaign with three players (Dennis, Dan, Ed). They are level two. I have set it in Blackmoor (northern Greyhawk) and sandboxed the whole thing. When I was home on leave for three months, I had a lot of time to work on my games, so I created a bunch of encounters, NPCs, a few factions, and keyed a bunch of encounters. So far, so good. The system works well. Unlike 5e, it feels dangerous, and the game is evolving as we play it. Me like. C&C doesn't have a ton of support on Roll20, but I am resisting moving over to Foundry simply because I don't want to have to learn an entirely new VTT (more on that below). 

-We did play a short Star Trek campaign with Dennis as GM on Foundry. We used a 2d20 system, which was new to all of us. It was based on dice pools; the more d20s you rolled, the higher the likelihood of your success. It was fun. A little crunchier than I like, but we had a good time playing. Unfortunately, about 2/3rds of our players treated it like D&D instead of Trek, so it went a bit off the rails. I think Dennis was a little frustrated. Star Trek is pretty niche, and if you aren't into it, the game doesn't work as well as it could.

-We are currently playing DCC with Ed in the GM's chair. It's a funnel, and it is quite funny. Running 20+ 0-levels on a VTT is no joke, but Ed is rolling with it (and believe me: we have significantly less than 20 guys left right now!) DCC is a fun, crazy game. We laugh a lot, which is great. I don't know that I'd use this system long-term (although I did run a Sword&Sorcery game for about six months), but it's always a good time. 

-Dan is preparing to return us to the world of Middle Earth using the modified Free League 5e rules. There are limited races, very limited classes, and virtually no magic available to players so it feels quite different than normal 5e. The action economy is still the same (reaction, action, bonus action); the skills are basically the same, and the whole thing works well with all of the superhero shit sanded off. Dan is great at running Tolkien's world, and we are all looking forward to playing again. The stakes got pretty high at the end of our last campaign in Moria, so I am curious to see where it leads us going forward.

-I have been kicking around different systems, seeing what I like and what I don't like. C&C is a good sweet spot between 'not too hot' and 'not too cold' regarding crunch. It is pretty flexible; you can add or subtract certain things (critical hits, for example, have a wide variety of possible mechanics) and the siege engine is both elegant and simple. Very good game. I do find the monster stat blocks to be overly complex (not near what they are in 5e!) but so far we are having fun, and will continue to do so. As I said above, my victims players are only level 2, and they are adjusting to a more OSR-style of play (like retreating when they are too injured or getting their asses handed to them). 

-I am currently looking at Old School Essentials and Shadowdark, two recent systems with the later being the sexy new beast on the block, while the former takes the old B/E/X game and updates for modern play. I like them both a lot, and they are supported on Foundry (OSE is on Quest Portal as well). The longer I play these games, the more rules systems I read, the more I want simplicity, and both of these games are much more simple than C&C or 5E (or BRP, really). I have found that setting up on a VTT is a tedious, and it often gets pedantic with tactical combat. I may move toward more narrative games in the future, but I'm not sure all of my crew will like them.

So that's me, State of the Nerd in May 2025. As I tell my wife, think how much money I'd be spending if I was playing golf!