22 December 2025 Random TTRPG Musings

 22 December 2025

    Yesterday was the first official day of winter. It is cold and dark. I have nothing to add about that.

    I had been working on a Castles&Crusades adventure, but I never felt that good about it (even as it was coming along fine). I find the system to be a tiny bit vanilla, to be honest, and the market is teeny-tiny if we ever wanted to actually sell things. Then, I started working on something for BRP, a system I really like, but found it a tad too crunchy for my taste re: writing. Playing, sure, but writing? Then, I took what I was writing for BRP, switched it over to DCC, and let my imagination loose. The system is incredibly easy to work with (you can see the comparison of a BRP stat block vs. a DCC stat block below, both for the same creature, a ghoul), and it brings out the absolute crazy in me. As a life-long fan of Sword&Sorcery, Appendix N books, and Weird Tales, DCC scratches a deep itch in my brain for just my plain fucking gonozo imagination. Space-horror! Sci Fi-fantasy! Mix is all up in a pot and see what comes out! So fun!

31 December 2025 Populating Hexes

    Been doing a little bit of world building/hex population over the last week or so. I've been working on a DCC scenario called "Old Gnaw: the Ravages of the Corpse God," and I needed a point of reference, so I threw together a map using the '9 Villages' method I learned from Keep on Crawling. Basically, you throw nine dice on a piece of paper, circle where they land, and use those points as villages/settlements on your map. That's what I did, and the results suggested a long river to me (since most of the dice were kind of on in row along the top half of the paper). Thus, Korg's Valley was born. Once I had the river placed, I filled in other features--mountains, woods, a swamp, some hills. The names are as bog-standard, barebones as you can imagine, and that's okay. As Carl Sagan wrote, "Before you bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe." I am not going all J.R.R. Tolkien here: this is good enough for me right now. I started writing a small bit of background, too. Nothing crazy, but the geography suggested a story to me, so I am fleshing that out a big, too. I like having a map to look at, even if it looks like it was done by a 6 year old.  

Next, we have a bit of (very rough) hex generation using Shadowdark. I did a bunch of rolling and populating, and ended up with a river that leads to an ocean with a jungle and a bit of desert, too. Two areas of caves--one safe, with a tribe of barbarians, the other unsafe with a hermit. A town on the river is risky, and is run by a malevolent sorcerer named Skalvin. Mind begins to churn. Story begins to emerge.

Finally, I used the good old Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979 to generate some hexes. I came up with a desert that lead to a plain, then a marshy area with a pond, the ruins of a city (!), followed by another marshy area with a pond. The tale begins to emerge from the concepts that are completely randomized. 

The point here is to show that randomization can lead to good, creative ideas. This is a way people could play (and did, back in the old days): procedural D&D. The world, and the story, emerge from the dice. I could see doing this at a table just to see how it goes, and to see what happens. It would be an incredibly slow game (I could actually play this by myself if I wanted to), but it would be...interesting. 

 

7 December 2025 Science Fiction

 7 December 2025: Science Fiction

    I love science fiction. Love it. I didn't read too much of it as a kid. I read Dune in high school (I think I read it twice) but I can't remember any others. Ray Bradbury, which is really more fantasy than sci-fi. H.G. Wells, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Other than that, not much. For whatever reason, in 1991 when I was a senior in college, I decided I wanted to get into some science fiction, but I wasn't sure where to start. I was a big Dan Simmons fan at the time--horror being my main jam in those days--so I picked up his (then) new novel Hyperion and had my mind thoroughly, utterly, completely blown. Hyperion remains one of my favorite books of all time, not just because I found the story and the concepts incredible, but because of the experience I had while reading it: sublime. Transcendent. Consciousness expanding. It was remarkable.

    After that, sci-fi was on the menu. I read some of the classics--Foundation, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe a few others and enjoyed them all, but I was still more into fantasy and horror. I met the science fiction author Samuel Delaney, whose writing I find unreadable, but who was a kind man, and generous with his advice about what to read as a newbie to the genre. I discovered William Gibson and Neuromancer, and sort of fell in love with Molly Millions. 

    It wasn't until 1996, when I was living on Diego Garcia while in the Navy that I truly hit my sci-fi stride. We had a small but mighty library on the island, and for some strange reason, there was an incredible selection of science fiction books available. I'll never know how the books got there, and kept being replenished, but the choices were remarkable, and I read them voraciously. I'm talking a novel a day voraciously. I did the deepest of deep-dives and read science fiction until my eyes bled. I discovered John Wyndam and read his major works (The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes), for example. There was a series called Science Fiction Masterworks, and I read a bunch of those. David Brin, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Brian Aldiss, Jerry Pournelle, Philip K. Dick. David Weber introduced me to military science fiction, which lead me to Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Hadelman's The Forever War. I read Ursala LeGuin's gentle science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness), C.S. Lewis's theologically infused Space Trilogy, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. John Scalzi! Jack Campbell! Becky Chambers! Octavia Butler! The many, many, many anthologies put together by Gardner Dozois. I read science fiction like a starving man entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was, and is, awesome. 

    But what I've never done is run a science fiction TTRPG. We dabbled a little in Gamma World back in high school, and played a good amount of FASA Star Trek (and more recently, the Modiphius version). I had Star Frontiers, and maybe even Traveller, but I never played either. So all of this is a long way of saying, I am thinking pretty hard about running a science fiction game. I'm a little burnt out on fantasy, and I'm never running Call of Cthulhu again (love the game. Sick of playing it). Me brudder and I recently considered Troll Lord Games' Amazing Adventures, but found it a bit too pulpy for our tastes, I just bought the entire M-Space collection from from Frostbyte Games, which is for BRP, so we'll see how that goes. Once I finish my rough-draft of The Runes, I'm heading out into the vasty deeps of space.

5 December 2025 Amazing Adventures vs. Basic Role Playing

 5 December 2025 AA vs. BRP

    Last night my brother and I had a conversation with our good friend Dan, who we have been role playing with since way back at the beginning, in 1984 when we were all in high school. We were making a video so that we can learn how to make Youtube content for our (eventual, hopefully) gaming company Wicked Place Game. It was a lot of fun to traipse down memory lane and remember the great adventures of yesteryear, and the halcyon days of spending a Saturday afternoon flipping through old Dragon Magazines, or reading the AD&D Players Handbook for the umpteenth time.  Wonderful memories.

    We had a lively discussion about gaming systems, picking apart the things that we like and dislike about many of them, and generally nerding out about TTRPGs. As Dennis and I think about creating content for our nascent gaming company, there has been some disagreement between us about what exactly we should be working on. Little brother is firmly in the Castles&Crusades camp, and with good reason: the game system is well-designed, we've played it and like it, the company is great, and they give us a 50% discount when we buy things! All solid reasons. I have been a bit hesitant, though, because in my observation, the footprint of the game is much smaller than other systems we like, so it's a very small pool to swim in should we go in that direction. Other games (not including 5e, which none of us are interested in) like Dragonbane, Shadowdark, and (we think...) BRP have larger audiences, more eyeballs, more dollars, etc. It is notoriously hard to find information about games sales, so much of what we are talking about is supposition based on anecdotes (like how many game-related materials are available on Drivethru RPG, or how frequently games are discussed on websites like ENWorld, or how many members there are on a Discord channel). It's hard to know where the energy is outside of 5e and big guns like Daggerheart and Draw Steel. 

    No game is perfect. For example, I prefer unleveled games (BRP) but I don't love skill systems (therefore AA). Both systems are supported on Foundry, but neither on Roll20. BRP is probably much bigger than AA re: a community of players, but both are tiny compared to something like Shadowdark, which itself is fractional when compared to D&D. Both of these systems are old (C&C is 20 years, BRP is 50!) so game mechanics have modernized and changed a great deal since then. I have tremendous affection for BRP, but I do love the Troll Lords. It's hard to know what to do, but at this point, all of this is a passion project: we are doing what we like in hopes of one day (maybe...) monetizing it somehow.

    I have become bogged down in writing my C&C module. It's been a bit of a slog lately. It might be that I'm a little burnt out on fantasy in general, which is mainly what my group plays. I don't want to run Call of Cthulhu again; I love that game but I am done with it (I've written about this elsewhere). So...what, then? A horror game that's not CoC? Some kind of multiversal sci-fi game? I'm not sure. I might need to switch it up a bit.