YOU are that old.

New Fighting Fantasy? By Ian Livingstone? Yes.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain? Yes. We are that old.

Set in Titan? No. Boo.

Still, zombies. But aren't they sooo last year?

<thanks to Lloyd of Gamebooks>

p.s. I voted for Escape From Zombie Castle...

Narrative Compensation

Have you been injured in a trip or fall? You could be eligible for compensation if you lost more than 1d6 HP per 10' fallen.

"Take note of what I say - the players use narrative in order to compensate for the rules. Do you play Warhammer 6? You could use narrative to compensate for the rules. Do you play Warhammer 8? You can use narrative."

This, one of the Golden Rules of all wargames and roleplaying games.

Heroquest TPK

C was missing from last night’s game night, so we played Heroquest rather than continuing our WFRP2e adventure. S played the Evil Wizard, and chose to begin with the first adventure of Return of the Witch Lord. The Barbarian, played by D, died in the first room we entered (“this is a game for kids, right?” he asked), from which poured seemingly endless undead and two Chaos Warriors. While he was doing his loincloth and sword thing, my Elf and A’s Wizard fled into a room from which there was no escape. The Elf held the doorway, running out of Body Points when there were just two Skeletons, after which the Wizard went hand-to-hand with the putrid foe, and won! The Wizard then wandered the board, with just one Body Point left, searching for traps, searching for treasure, until there was nothing left to do but open another door. More Mummies! Despite my suggestion that the Wizard attempt to lead the slow Mummies on a chase, leaping a pit trap (which he would have a 50% chance of surviving), which would kill, on average, half of his pursuers, the Wizard bowed to the inevitable and stood toe-to-toe with the ancient Nehekharans. And died.

Your Adventure Ends Here.

No, we didn't even get close to his front door. We died in his Porch of Doom.

Though it doesn’t say so, I think that the heroes you bring to the fallen city of Kalos are meant to be a little more experienced and tooled up that the straight-from-the-box-heroes we ran. Nevertheless, according to S, the Evil Wizard, there were just a handful of monsters left on the map when the Wizard finally died. If we’d played with the Dwarf, and made some slightly different decisions, we might just have scraped through to the Gate of Doom.

Thinking about number of players and level suitability got me thinking about early D&D modules, which were often recommended for relatively high numbers of players. Given that I've most often played with 3-4 players, these modules couldn't be used at the recommended levels without some careful thought. More, I'm not sure I'd want to play with 8 or so players. One, that's too many to fit around a table - and it's a recipe for a cup of tea going crashing all over character sheets at the least. Two, it's far more likely to be difficult to GM - not only are some players and their characters going to melt into the background, but splitting the party makes plenty of in game sense, and that can be a big headache for a GM. What do people think are the optimum number of players? Does this vary between games? What about multiple characters per player (a solution I'm not keen on)? Is it all down to producing sufficient meatshields?

Karak Angaz Miners' Welfare

I've just put the static grass on the base of the last Slayer for my Dwarf Blood Bowl team - the Karak Angaz Miners' Welfare. They're a mix of Dungeon Bowl plastic linesmen, a bunch of very old metal, and two more contemporary Slayers. Okay, still to paint is an old metal version of Barik Farblast, and I've still to pick up a Deathroller...

Still to come; earning a living in BECMI D&D and in WFRP1e, and more pictures of miniatures that I started painting months and months ago and have only just got round to finishing.

Save Me From Skyrim!

Please.

Someone.

I got Dwarf King's Hold for Christmas,

a 40K Steel Legion squad,

a bunch of Bruegelburg miniatures,

a whole load of Dragon Warriors books that I bought myself.

But I also got Skyrim, so those all remain largely untouched. It is much better than Oblivion. In the same way that crack is (apparently) much 'better' than cocaine.

Someone help me. Please.

The First D&D Ever Sold

The other day I noticed the name of an academic colleague in the list of playtesters for a Mongoose Runequest book. When buying up a cache of out-of-print (but soon to be in-print again) Dragon Warriors books from a comic shop, I started to talk about the art of Jon Hodgson, who, it turns out, used to work there. And it also turns out that gaming and the small-press comic scene also overlap - whodathunkit?

Greg Stafford's story of how he came to own the first copy of D&D ever sold stretches credulity a little, though. Two giants of gaming, linked, in gaming utero, by a belt buckle catalogue.

RPG isn't working

As unemployment edges toward 3 million and we all face significant cuts in our standard of living over the next few years at least, I thought I’d escape to fantasy. But it is difficult to earn a living there, too. Over the next few posts I’ll consider the ways in which a few RPGs deal with living expenses, and ways of earning a living that aren’t glorified murder and robbery. Some of the economies implied by the equipment and price lists and suggested wages simply do not work.

Of course, unemployment rocketed after the Tories won this election. The Saatchi's should be shot in front of their families (Top Gear defence invoked).

I’ll start with Mongoose’s ‘new’ bargain ruleset, Legend. Legend uses silver and copper pieces as the standard units of currency, with 10cp=1sp.

On page 111 we have a list of food and lodging for those on the road, i.e. short term lodgings, whether a flop house or a private room, and food bought in inns and taverns, or from street vendors. These range from 3cp a day for poor standard, through 1sp 5cp for average, to 7sp a day for superior food and lodging.

According to the table on page 85 of Legend, jobs such as Temple Assistant, Librarian, or working in the Militia, for example, can all be expected to earn you about 2sp a day (some of these come with free food and / or lodging), making it perfectly possible to maintain a decent standard of living even if you rely on more expensive short-term rented lodging and buy food in inns and taverns. It would be impossible to maintain a ‘superior’ standard of living through the kinds of employment listed here (except by being a lucky gambler or a good burglar). Some of the jobs, of course, pay far less – a manual labourer can only expect 3cp per day. Nevertheless, it is possible to see how people maintain some kind of standard of living according to the implied economy.

However, page 85 of Legend also has a table suggesting that PCs should spend a proportion of their ‘personal wealth’ to maintain a certain standard of living, ranging from 10% for ‘subsistence’ to 100% or more for ‘ostentatious’. The preceding page notes that ‘the terms used are relative to the amount of money the Adventurer has available: ‘luxury’ to someone with only a few silvers in their purse might be taking a bath once a week. To someone with several thousand, it might be taking a bath in asses milk every day.’ While I get that wealth is relative, I don’t get how an Adventurer, whose personal wealth will fluctuate much more than a regular person, can maintain what they might call ‘luxury’ simply by spending 80% of their personal wealth. After a successful raid they might have hundreds of silver pieces, AND after a spell of lean pickings, when they are grubbing in their purse to find a handful of copper pieces. Even if it did make sense to say that a person who only knew a nearly empty purse would see their 80% living a luxury, to suggest that an Adventurer would makes little sense.

And that is before we ask whether personal wealth includes loot, or just the income from employment in spells of ‘down time’. Because, if it includes loot, 1000sp stolen from the Sherriff’s strongbox will maintain a ‘luxurious’ standard of living for an indefinite period of downtime for the price of 800sp. This is true whether the downtime is a month of so of carousing between raids, or a year long spell of semi-retirement until the heat has died down.

I expect that some of this will be expanded in the forthcoming equipment guide, Arms of Legend. But until then, Legend has a system that allows PCs to spend months in downtime between perilous adventures, taking part in an abstract, but still sensible economy.