'But I don't want to go south!'

I recently picked up some of Ian Livingstone's First Fantasy gamebooks from eBay. These were intended as introductory gamebooks for younger readers, but I thought they might make for good stories to read to my daughter(s) - my three and a half year old is into Star Wars, the Princess Bride, the Neverending Story, and playing with the Heroquest miniatures, so...

And we had a bit of fun, skirting a two-headed giant, investigating a race involving immensly fat people (complete with belly wheels), but then the book insisted that the only way to proceed was to return to the previous junction and go south. My daughter had already rejected this option. 

'But I don't want to go south,' she said. 'I told you I didn't want to go south!'

'But that's the only way the book will let us go...' I said.

She shut the book and climbed down from my lap.

Actually, in the wake of receiving my Kickstarter copy of the new edition of Blacksand, I also plumped for copies of the Heroes Companion and the Crown of Kings. These three books have got me excited about Titan again - and you might have seen that Titan is close to my heart. I'll probably do some kind of review of the books at some point, perhaps comparing them to their counterparts in the original FF/AFF range. But for now I'll say that while The Crown of Kings is a pretty nifty conversion of the Sorcery! gamebooks, it will need to be a bit of tweeking if you are to accomodate 'willful' players unwilling to accept 'gamebookey' constraints on their action, be they three and a half or thirty five. I don't blame the admirable Graham Bottley, reviver of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, for the presence of these gamebook 'relics' - he was probably correct to err on the side of caution, ensuring the preservation of the character of Sorcery! series. But with a few changes here and there, when my gaming group finally reconvenes (Hand, Foot and Mouth has cancelled this evening's session), we might find ourselves brawling with Red-Eyes in Khare, Cityport of Traps!

Old School Aphorisms

Søren Kierkegaard, on the development of players characters by play, and emphasising that 'story' is something made after play:

Life can only be understood backwards... but it can only be lived forwards.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, on eschewing railroads for more sandbox-y play (with an emphasis on exploration):

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. 

Both pinched from the University of York Vice-Chancellor's speech, celebrating 50 years of my alma mater. They weren't talking about Old School gaming, and neither was the VC. Can anyone else do violence to the thoughts of long dead thinkers by recruiting them into the OSR?

Hex Maps as In-Game Artefacts

The Second Empire of Humanity was dominated by Law. Angels lived deep inside the ziggurats, directing the affairs of humanity, motivating the Empire to civilise the heathens and bring order to the wild and weird beyond borderlands. Within civilised lands, Law demanded that the lands and people of the Empire were categorised and recorded. A key institution in this project was the Imperial School of Cartography, which instituted the model, maintained to this day, of idealised depictions of the nations of the Empire.

Something like this:

It is a shame that the Gazetteer series (and, actually, a lot of the BECMI D&D range) were not built to last - hardcovers were for the 'serious' AD&D gamers, it seems. Loose soft covers, unwieldy, if beautiful, hex maps - every time I dig something out of my box of GAZ goodness, the small tears grow a little bit bigger...  

Hex maps are wonderful gaming tools. They allow GMs and players to abstract movement and exploration to a level perfectly suited for sandbox play. More, they present the perfect foundations for a variety of sub games - domain management, trade, and war, for instance. It seems a pity, therefore, that when a player sees maps such as these, he or she sees them as objects that disassociate them from his or her characters in the game world. Thinking about this while on a lung busting run in the gym - incline up, heart rate at dangerous levels - I figured; 'why not make the hex map an object that exists in the world, so that when players consult a hex map (or fill one in, when mapping the wilderness ala The Isle of Dread) they can imagine that their characters are seeing the world abstracted in a similar fashion.'

[Of course, the production of hex maps that evoke these classic designs is within the reach of everyone, thanks to Hexographer.]

Harryhausen Tribute

So, Ray Harryhausen has died, a man who helped shaped the visual imagination of the fantastic for several generations. Not just what the fantastic should look like, but also how it should move - if I ask you to picture an animated skeleton, chances are the image in your mind will be moving as if it were animated by Harryhausen.

Now, countless better obituaries (see the BBC or the Guardian (which carried a couple of other pieces too [one, two] and a 'life in pictures' feature) than any that I would write - 'he lived a long life, his creations were extremely influential, and he was respected by most and revered by fans', - have been published - and plenty of bloggers (Warlord Paul and Telecanter, for example) have posted their own tributes to the influence that Ray Harryhausen  has had over their gaming imagination. 

So, having painted up some Harryhausen-esque skeletons, I decided let a bit more of Harryhausen's influence work its way into my gaming. I dug through my big box of bendy plastic fun, aka my Reaper Bones Vampire package, looking to find something else with echoes of the work of the great man. And I found this:

A GORGON! Armed with a bow, too. The details don't show up too well when the white plastic is bare, so...

A quick undercoat (despite what Reaper say, the Bones still benefit from some kind of priming) using Privateer Press' Menoth White Base, and then... 

... a liberal application of Vellejo Black Green Game Ink, and we can actually see what we're working with.

Umpteen different shades of green later (plus some Elf Flesh and Ogryn Flesh wash to give the upper body and face a bit of 'life') and we have a near finished miniature.

And here she is, based up and with the backing of a boy band's worth of Harryhausen-esque skeletons.

[Incidentally, for those of us Old School/Oldhammer bloggers with younger children (and a subscription to Lovefilm), the 'Claymation Story Book Classics' is actually a collection of very early Ray Harryhausen work - my daughter loves them, though I find them more than a bit sinister. But then I know what else moves in that manner, don't I?]

Balls!

So, nearly three weeks ago I wrote:

"As much as we might moan about GW, hidden away on their website are some classic miniatures and, while 'forgotten' games such as BloodBowl, Necromunda, and Mordheim might not get much support in the way of new stuff, the range of miniatures still available for these 'abandoned' lines is impressive. Snap them up before the moulds break!"

The instruction in the last line in now more urgent than ever. According to Epic Addiction (where I arrived, via Porky), "GW are cutting all metal production as they switch over to fine cast, and have let it be known that once stocks of Epic, BFG, Necromunda, Warmaster, Mordheim, Inquisitor run out, then they are gone for good." I'm not sure what this means for the Warhammer Fantasy and 40K Collectors' Ranges, but I can't see the full ranges currently sold being converted to Finecast.

I guess the real loss here will be the end of Epic and Necromunda. As nice as some of Mordheim miniatures are, generic fantasy figures are ten-a-penny (not quite literally, but Reaper Bones comes close), and while it's not my thing, there are a couple of decent-looking 6mm fantasy miniature ranges. And I suspect that BloodBowl might live on in Finecast, but even if it doesn't, fantastical football miniatures are in pretty good supply. For all these games, playing with miniatures from other manufacturers will hardly dent the experience. But while there are a whole bunch of generic sci-fi miniature ranges, few possess the same aesthetic as the Necromunda range, which more than anything in the current 40K range capture the Rogue Trader 'vibe'. While the Epic miniatures aren't quite as characterful, any manufacturer can supply Orcs and Dwarfs which capture something sufficiently similar to the aesthetic of Warhammer fantasy. Outside of some Russian or Chinese IP 'pirates', you won't be buying 6mm Space Marines or Eldar Grav Tanks.  

Which has changed the priorities of my gaming spending over the next few months, to say the least. I was never much of a 6mm man, though I did own Space Marine and bought a few 6mm Squats back-in-the-day, and it is a bit late to give into the temptation to game large-scale 40K tank battles. So, is it unwise to blow a chunk of your redundancy payment on a whole bunch of Necromunda miniatures? 

Hurry Up Harryhausen

The Reaper Bones arrived last week. A box full of bendy plastic miniatures. I decided to set to work straight away - at my own slow pace - and painted up some of the undead. Why undead? Well, they're easy to paint, using only a pretty limited pallette and there is no requirement that you attempt to bring the faces 'to life'!

I think they look pretty decent - the SKELETONS have a very 'Harryhausen' look about them - and it is certainly difficult to tell that they are made of bendy white plastic when painted up. Not so much though when you hold them, or waggle the end of the skeleton's spear - which waggles free and easy. Some of the models arrived quite bent, but this can be fixed with a dunk into very hot water, straightening the bent piece out by hand and dunking the straightened bit into cold water. I didn't even try to remove the mould lines, for three reasons. 1) Apparently, the material from which Reaper Bones doesn't file easily - and given how flexible it is, I'm happy to take the word of others there. 2) The point of miniatures this cheap is that they are gaming pieces. Nice looking gaming pieces, worth spending some time painting, but not worth investing in hours of effort to ensure that a ZOMBIE has a shoulder smooth as a baby's bum. And 3)  I've got bloody hundreds of these things to paint.

So what's in the big box?

A whole mess of miniatures. I'm starting painting the smallest stuff - the level 1 stuff, so to speak. The undead, then some GOBLINS (the classic kind, not the Pathfinder grinning munchkins), then some 'vermin' (swarms of RATS, SPIDERS and so on), and a small pack of KOBOLDS. But as you can see there are some more impressive monsters in there too - including a GIANT, though I'm not too impressed by his female counterpart, who appears to have that back problem that fantasy females tend to suffer from. You know, the lower back problem that leaves them sticking their arse out all the time! There are also townsfolk, some sci-fi miniatures (including a squad of what will work nicely as a Planetary Defence Force / Adeptus Arbites for 40K-ish games), a few bits and bobs of dungeon 'furniture', and endless varieties of Fighters, Elves, Magic Users etc - some overblown, some more modest in their 'awesomeness'. Not a bad haul.

So far, I'm pleased. If your tastes run to Forgeworld resin, then there isn't much for you in Reaper Bones - though I will say that the material handles bigger monsters better than it does things like a skeleton's spear. However, what I am getting from Bones is the urge to churn out painted monsters for my players to face (and I have some damn fool idea of painting up enough miniatures to handle the monster distributions on my random encounter tables), and psychologically, the cheapness and the 'obviously-not-collectors-items-or-for-winning-Golden-Demon' nature of these miniatures has me painting quickly.

Would I pick up more? Almost certainly, though it won't stop me buying lead, old and new.

A Hundredweight of d100 Fantasy

I bought (.pdf, have you seen the shipping costs that Chaosium quote for transatlantic shipping?!) the new version of Magic World, which is basically a reprint of Elric! stripped of it Moorcockisms. And very nice it looks too; a clean, relatively simple d100 fantasy game. The first supplement, Advanced Sorcery, is due soon - again it is largely a reprint of Elric! material, in this case The Bronze Grimoire. 

Chaosium should note* that they are selling .pdfs of Elric! on DriveThruRPG for a couple of quid cheaper, at current exchange rates, than Magic World. And, of course, that nothing short of free is quite a cheap as Legend, which itself is basically a reprint of Mongoose RuneQuest II stripped of its Gloranthaisms. And speaking of Elric, with Legend you could run the Mongoose version of everyone's favourite albino (outside the one played by Mel Smith in The Princess Bride), as all(?) their Elric of Melnibone stuff is on DriveThruRPG for less than £10 a book...

But as Brian Butterfield would say, "that's not all". So, what do we have on the d100 fantasy scene at the moment? Well, we have OpenQuest 2e on the way (I backed the IndieGoGo campaign, and am looking forward to seeing the improvements/additions that Newt Newport has made to this system). Slightly more complex than that, we have Magic World from Chaosium. An extra level of complexity is added - mainly by virtue of its 'faction' system - by Renaissance (now available in a Deluxe form), built on OpenQuest and Legend. One level more complex again is Legend, with its Combat Action 'economy' and system of Combat Manoeuvers  And then we have the big boss of d100 fantasy gaming, RuneQuest 6, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet, though I expect it to be stunning, if I bit too much for my current tastes. 

I own OpenQuest (and soon will have a copy of 2e), Magic World, Mongoose RuneQuest II and Legend, and Renaissance (in the free SRD and hardback Clockwork and Chivalry 2e form). I also own the Basic Roleplaying 'big gold book', will probably buy RuneQuest 6 if it ever appears with a UK supplier, and have a number of out-of-print d100 fantasy systems (I particularly like my GW-produced RQ3 books). With all these extant systems, and given the fact that many of them are OGL (and those that are not appear keen to licence third parties to produce supplements), this is a vibrant, lively time for d100 fantasy gaming.

Well, if there are many other gamers are as daft as me, willing will buy umpteen different versions of d100 fantasy, of course the d100 scene is vibrant! I can't quite decide which is my favourite d100 engine for fantasy gaming (which is yours?). "No, really?", I hear you say, shocked. "I had no idea that you suffered from gamer ADHD", you gasp. However, the intercompatibility of these systems - and the nature of the d100 system itself - not only its modularity, but the simplicity and consistency of the mechanics - means that GMs can pick and choose the best bits from each of these systems. Sadly(?), between Magic World, OpenQuest, and Renaissance, there is little need for Hammerstein! as yet another d100 system. But hopefully this flowering of d100 fantasy systems will stimulate the production of d100 fantasy adventures and other supplements for use at the table. 

*Hopefully, if Chaosium did take note (though given that they don't even notice e-mails, it seems) I'd hope this would not mean an end to the sale of the classic Stormbringer/Elric! .pdfs - we wouldn't accept other kinds of books being deliberately kept out-of-print, and the resurrection of out-of-print gaming books is one of the great success stories of recent RPG history - or an increase in their price, but rather a more reasonable .pdf pricing structure at Chaosium.com.

[Extra: Of course, this is not the limit to d100 fantasy built on a BRP(ish) chassis. In the pipeline are both AEONS, built on the D100II SRD, and Classic Fantasy (originally a BRP supplement) is being rewritten as a 'Legend compatible' complete game.]