Friday Post Roundup

A few posts of interest for the week or so.

- Grognardia has a brief look at the Victory Games James Bond RPG Q-Manual. A great supplement back in the day, for your Lotus and Aston Martin driving Bond days.

- I love this picture, although it's very RPG and not terribly realistic. Still makes me want to game ASAP.

- Zero traction so far on my Felltower to do list. Everything on there was my entry. Hopefully I get a bite on this from my players, so "What is there to do?" becomes less of a challenge in play.

Diablo: Things I'd Forgotten

Diablo very much influenced Dungeon Fantasy - potion belts with 8 potion slots, hack-and-slash gaming, town is safe, magic items are found or purchased but not made, etc.

There are a few things I'd forgotten, though:

- Quests sometimes trigger new areas in old areas. You might find a crack in a wall that wasn't accessible before when you get a quest, or a chest you can't open until you've met the quest-giver.

- You increase stats, but increasing spells is all about finding magic in the dungeon.

- Unique items are always interesting, even if only useful for a while.

- Mood music is awesome.


Amusingly, some stuff I just remembered - Tab for the automap, arrow keys to move it around, Shift+Click to stand in place and swing, right click to cast spells . . . I haven't played in close to 30 years but I remember the keystrokes like they were yesterday.

And I remember the Battle.net only helm Lightforge . . . which was totally sweet. They said it was only accessible by a lucky drop in the demo version, but it was a hacked item. My friend Ed traded for them and got all of us one each. And me, two, after my first guy was lost in a computer failure. But I digress . . . got to go back to clearing the Bone Chamber . . .

Weekly Roundup 1/17/2025

Another busy week is coming to a close, but I did have time to check these out and recommend them:

- Color me interested by Against the Darkmaster, discussed a bit here. Except I never played MERP, I liked Rolemaster.

- I always wonder about the best ways to do this kind of "vastness." How do you give people a chance to fill in a hex map by exploring the nooks and crannies, yet also show them what they can see far away? Give the rough outline, even the terrain, but make sure it's clearly not explored yet. My mapping vocabulary isn't up to that.

- I stumbled upon this in my bookmarks of things to "read later." Well, it sure is later. But it's an article about a private airforce with outdated but still modern and lethal aircraft. It's the kind of thing that reminds me that in a modern game, when the PCs need to go up against UFOs or flying squid monsters or whatever . . . it's quite possible to get military gear into their hands without putting them into the military. My sci fi games PCs always wanted a private arsenal . . . maybe in such games you could do the same.

Weekly Roundup 1/3/2025

Getting started off on 2025's weekly comments and links.

- Rob has been up to a lot at Bat in the Attic Games.

- I don't include enough corrupt law enforcers in my fantasy games. Not by half. Not after reading this post about some.

- An Acoup post about gold coins? Hell yes. I tend to over-think my coins in fantasy games.

- The first RPG published in 2025? Periapt Games seems to have a good claim on that.

And I posted a fair bit this week, in the lulls around the holiday.

Minis I Don't Need But Want - Evil Geniuses

I stumbled on these on Mark Copplestone's webpage.

I have no need for these guys, but I want to play a game where I need them.

That guy on the left looks like a non-green Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz or a Sontaran's skinny cousin. I can't place him, except as a vaguely Kruschevian type.

Then we have robot Hitler.

And a metal-handed Mao.

Again, I have no need . . . but man, they'd be the best James Bond RPG villians you could hope for if you went for non-canonical bad guys.

Game Inspiration: The Misenchanted Sword

Thinking more on cursed and semi-cursed magic items, here is one book I found inspirational:

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evens


The plot is pretty much soldier stumbled across a hermit, who enchants him a magical sword that makes him unbeatable in combat. It has some downsides - he can't get rid of the sword, for one, and it is only undefeatable from when drawn until it kills someone. Then you have to sheath it and pull it back out before you use it again. Oh, and it has limited uses - not a small number, but a finite number of kills.

As books go, it's not the best book ever. But it's a good one, and the ideas in it are top-notch. There are demon-imbued enemy warriors, practical uses for a swordsman who can't lose (he gets pulled aside for special missions, no front line service for this guy), and lots of little details that make it feel like the consequences make sense.

The sword itself is really a lot like the kind of thing I'll hand out. You want it, but then again you kind of don't, but you'll use it, and your character will be different for it. It's not just a better weapon, it's a different experience. That's the kind of thing I am looking for.

Did anyone GURPSify Hammer's Slammers?

The other day, I was searching the library catalog for Gene Wolfe books. One thing that popped up was a Hammer's Slammers compilation, to which he wrote an intro. I grabbed it, both to read the intro and to read any Slammer's stories I'd missed. There were a couple, surprisingly, and a novel that I missed as well. Lucky for me I didn't miss Rolling Hot, which is just excellent.

That got me thinking, did anyone ever think out what Powerguns would be like in GURPS? They're ammo fed, not battery, but they're energy weapons. No recoil, fire in straight lines, and otherwise act like energy weapons. They tear people up rather than torch them . . . so, lasers? Blasters? Plasma weaponry? I'm fuzzy on what they should be in GURPS terms.

There is a Hammer's Slammers RPG using Traveller, though, on DriveThruRPG. I didn't notice it until now, though.

I'm certainly not going to run a campaign with a Dutch mercenary tank unit using powerguns, but if someone has noodled around on the details of how they'd do the equipment in GURPS I'd like to see a link to it!

Demons of Old & Chains

Ever wonder why GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1's Demons of Old use chains, not pitchforks?

There are a lot of reasons why it could be.

It could be because Sean Punch doesn't like to stick with pure standard iconography when depicting his monsters.

It could be because flails are pretty damn effective in GURPS.

It could be be because pitchforks have poor armor penetration.

Or it could be because of three words:

Ronnie

James

Dio

Let that possibility shine into your life like a rainbow in the dark.

Glen Cook Bundle of Holding

Brief return from my away-from-keyboard status for this one:

Glen Cook Bundle of Holding

If you go for the full version, you get:

- the Darkwar trilogy
- the Starfishers trilogy + Passage at Arms (a Star Fishers side novel)
- the Dread Empire series (including the short story collection An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat)
- Sung in Blood, A Matter of Time, The Swordbearer, and The Dragon Never Sleeps

I spent $25.50 for those. Worth it. Sadly no Black Company or Garrett, P.I. books, or oddly Heirs of Babylon, but either way here you go.

My previous GURPS campaign drew a fair amount on the Dread Empire for my approach to the world. My current character, Handsome, probably draws more than a little from the alcholic, murderously efficient unnamed bowman from the Vengeful Dragon from the story "Ghost Stalk" in An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat. I try to hand out all of the candy to the PCs just like in the ferociously fast-paced The Swordbearer. And the Star Fishers books are just excellent stuff. Darkwar gets a bad rep, in my experience, but it's bleak and good at the same time.

I'm an unapologetic fan of Glen Cook's work. I started with The Black Company and never looked back. This might be a good way in for you, too. Or for me, a way to ensure I can read this while hanging around waiting for trains in Japan this summer. Any excuse to re-read The Dragon Never Sleeps is a good excuse.

Now I just need them to do this for Gene Wolfe!

Handsome's real-world counterpart

Just so you know, token images aside, I see my scout Handsome as looking like a bottom-tusked slightly green-tinged version of this guy:

That's Al Leong. I chose him once it became clear that with Dishonest Face, Born Goon, and a pragmatically blase attitude towards inflicting harm and doing bad things . . . he was a lot like an 80s or 90s action movie henchman. Al Leong is the henchman of henchmen. Handsome is a henchman with a little too much autonomy and free will.

That's not his only source of inspiration - but it's the only source that came after Handsome was created and I started to figure out his particular attitude problem.




By the way, most excellent Al Leong role? Genghis Khan, dudes!

More Monster Seeds: Puddings

Here are two monster seeds for puddings, as requested by an anonymous poster on my previous post.

A Prince of Puddings: Puddings are smart, but not too smart . . . usually. Rarely, a highly intelligent pudding leader will arise. Such a pudding may be responsible for the sudden appearance in very organized packs of puddings in the local swamps. Not just the occasional lost sheep or traveller, but whole patrols of well-armed soldiers have disappeared along the fringes of the swamps. The few survivors report puddings in packs. Could a green prince of puddings be behind them? The local government has put up a reward to encourage delvers to take care of this problem. Complications can include rival groups after the reward, druids who don't want the swamplife harmed, wizards seeking to capture the pudding, and all sorts of non-pudding swamp monsters.

Nothing is Pudding Proof: Puddings are mostly a wilderness or dungeon problem, but occasionally they get into urban environments. They're quick, they're sneaky, they're capable of squeezing into small places, and they're always hungry. A pudding loose in a big city, preying from the sewers on the most helpless of victims - drunks, crime victims, and the aged or young - could do a lot of damage before being found. A "bug hunt" in the city sewers for a canny pudding can be dangerous and exciting. Smugglers, guild thieves, secret societies, and others use the sewers for their own ends, and would rather have a pudding on the loose than delvers on the loose. Their opposition could be subtle and oblique or direct and violent - and the pudding won't take sides!



Prince of Puddings: As a usual pudding, but with IQ 8, Charisma 2 (Puddings only), and Leadership-12. It's not clear how they communicate with other puddings, but all other puddings immediately recognize them as superior beings and follow them willingly.

More adventure seeds?

I'm a inspired to do a few more bonus adventure seeds for monsters that don't have them, in support of this quickie Kickstarter.

Which ones should I do? Dinomen? Electric Jelly? Golem-Armor Swordsmen? Slorn?

Let me know in the comments and I'll do a seed or two for the requests that tickly my imagination!

GURPS DFM Monster Seeds

Remember when we did a bunch of monster-centric adventure seeds for DFM1, when DFM2 was launched?

SJG is compiling them into a book. $1 in PDF, $5 in print. Ends in less than 3 days from now!


Pretty neat. I'd back it except as an author I'll get a copy anyway - re-use of materials, you see.

One seed they couldn't include - for space and for we-didn't-pay-for-it reasons, largely the first I'm sure - is this one. The Monster Seed to Rule them All - Draug Race!

Friday Random Links & Thoughts 4/7/2023

The usual roundup for a Friday.

- My cousin distracted me with a book series, damn him. The First Law books by Joe Abercrombie. Good stuff. People say I like gritty fantasy books. But it's more that I like fantasy books with adult characters with adult problems and adult responses. No offense to every young kid waiting to be whisked off by a wizard on a mysterious quest to save the world, but I'm not interested. The audience for a lot of those books are young kids, anyway, and I haven't been one for a while. I'd rather have flawed adults to read about. Not as much flawless heroes, or heroes with flaws that somehow always work in their favor. That kind of stuff. But with magic, and occasionally spaceships - although with sci-fi I'm even pickier.

Anyway so I'm reading them quickly so I haven't been doing gaming stuff as much.

- I read this post about XP and Murder Hobos of Athony Huso's with interest. I disagree with a bit, here - and I think the plain language of the DMG quote on treasure agrees with me on why that gem should count for XP - but I do like the thoughtful approach to the game as a whole. I tinkered a lot with my XP rules until we found ones that drive the game the way we want it driven. And which drive the choices I want made.

- A friend of mine is doing some nutrition coaching with me, to accomplish a difficult challenge*, and we got to dicussing the psychology of success and failure. To quote him, "When we discuss a plan, you execute. And I mean flawlessly. No one does that. Why is that?"

Ultimately it comes down to knowing my actual emotional need to succeed at it. I know why the goal is important, rationally. I know why executing the plan is important to me emotionally. But it's not the first that matters. I know why learning to be a good manager or learning to fly a helicopter or jumping on a 40" box again would be important, too, rationally, but emotionally they don't matter to me. I know what matters to me emotionally. I bring this up here because I think that's a hugely important hook to have for a PC or NPC. If you know what really drives that person - he's still trying to show his dad he's a real man, she's insecure about her wizardry, etc. That's a useful hook. It's why "I'll show my former colleagues at the University - they called me mad!" is a cliche but works. You know what someone will sacrifice if you know what their emotional need to succeed is.

Sorry if this seems like a humble brag of some kind. It's not meant to be. I wrote this and almost didn't post it because it can sound like it that way, since there is some praise in that question. But it's just a great way to think about characters and their character. It's why the card-based system of personality for Twilight:2000 was sooooo good. It was just two cards, telling you the two whys that drove that NPC.

- James Mal is doing a whole series on Gamma World. Start here.
I love Gamma World, and you can see by the number of posts using that post label tag.



* Basically to cut body fat while retaining muscle while not sacrificing my endurance and strength on the mat or while striking. I'd tried before but it's tricky to know what to do next once the current plan needs revision. Yes, even though I do it for other people professional. Coaches need coaches.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker concept transfer to tabletop

I'm replaying Pathfinder: Kingmaker on two concurrent playthroughs - Molly the Lawful Evil monk, Holgar Carlson the Lawful Good Paladin - to experience the story and the options from two more paths than Otto the Lawful Neutral fighter experienced. One of those reasons is that you get to simultaneously deal with ruling a land and adventuring in that land.

Ruling a territory is often called an "endgame" for D&D and D&D-inspired games. You adventure a bunch, then you grab some money and found a kingdom (OOTS spoiler alert!), and that's that. Or, in the style of very old play, you keep playing but also deal with the upkeep of your kingdom, and delve in dungeons to earn the funds and power that'll help you keep your kingdom intact and growing.

In Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you get the kingdom right away. You need to adventure to keep the kingdom up, and keep the kingdom up to benefit your adventuring. You pretty much rule a kingdom from like, 3rd or 4th level onward.

I think this is a nice campaign approach. The trick is, alternating kingdom-level decisions with adventuring decisions. You need to alternate choices you make for the kingdom - which cost in-game but not out-of-game time and in-game resources - with actual adventuring, which costs you in-game time (delaying kingdom decisions, sometimes) and potentially earns you in-game resources.

This would need some work, but having downtime between delves where you have to decide what the kingdom should do, solve some problems as a ruler would, and make decisions about the direction of the land you rule. Those will also drive adventures, where you have to solve some problems with the sword, the gun, or face-to-face roleplaying diplomacy.

This way you get the effect of rule, but don't get bogged down in the micromanagement of a kingdom and keep those players who'd rather just smite things involved. Yet you tie it all together with the higher-level kingdom stuff.

I'd need to think of how to do this well, but the basic framework for it has existed since back in the day - Gangbusters! is a good example of a place for this, especially criminals. I think this would be a good way forward for our Gamma World game, if we ever play it again. I'd have to think how I'd run this as a GM and see if we can't give it a go someday.

Missing a Leiber Book, Huh

I was going through my books and dug out all of my Leiber Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stuff, because, mostly, I was re-reading old Glen Cook stuff and he mentioned Leiber a lot.

Here is what I have:

I disliked Knight & Knave of Swords so much I don't own a copy. But I also seem to be missing The Swords of Lankhmar. I'm not sure why; I'm sure I owned all seven (two duplicate others) at one point.

I think it's time to fix this! It's not my favorite, but it's sad to see it missing from my collection and not handy to read from when the mood strikes me.

Random Thoughts & Links for 2/10/2023

Here are some links and thoughts for Friday.

- I enjoyed these two looks at a boardgame of the Battle of Poltava. I've long been very interested in Russian history, especially the reign of Peter I, first emperor of Russia.

Battle Of Poltava

Battle of Poltava 1709

Both give a good look at how to use game design and rules to channel a game down a specific path. Historically, the Swedes wanted to bypass some Russian redoubts and assault the Russian main force . . . but units misunderstood their orders and tried to assault them, throwing the plan off and - eventually - helping the Russians to achieve victory. The rules of this game force you to play out that misunderstanding, yet don't essentially force you to lose.

- I love these posts. I especially love how unfair the stats are. You need +1 weapons to hit Iuz, but he can create an Anti-Magic Shell at will which will make your weapons no longer magical . . . so you can't hit him. It's only a fair-ish fight if he decides he wants one, and only as long as he wants it to be.

Let's Fight Iuz

- The March Harrier campaign has begun. And much like - okay, exactly like - my two Traveller campaigns, they feature Vargr and the party almost immediately thumbs their collective noses at local authorities and culture and resorts to crime. My experience with Traveller is this:

"We're running a merchant campaign."
"Okay, we casually resort to crime in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . go!"

March Harrier Session 1
March Harrier Session 2

- I like weird henchmen. d4 Caltrops aids in this.

D100 Henchmen Foibles

- Little things I didn't know. I was re-reading a Glen Cook short story compilation. In it is a short story set in the Dread Empire that he wrote while staying with Fritz Leiber, while Leiber was writing "Swords Against Death." I quoted from The Bazaar of the Bizarre from that collection a week ago. He mentioned them featuring each other's characters in their stories. So is it possible that Zindahjira, the Silent One - described by Aristithorn of Necromnos as "Biggest windbag in the trade" - is Ningauble of the Seven Eyes under a different name? A thin thread . . . I'd be curious to ask Glen Cook that.

Random Thoughts and Links for 2/3/2023

Random stuff for the week.

- Not to pat ourselves on our own backs, but we've played 179 sessions of DF in one campaign. That's pretty long. It's probably one of the longest GURPS DF campaigns, and probably a relatively long-running campaign in gaming terms. Aug 2011 - Jan 2023 and continuing, 179 full-day sessions - probably a good 1500 hours of gaming, or close to. Not bad, I think. Clearly, for all of my tinkering, I don't get too bored with a basic central concept. Good stuff. Just really kind of hit me that it's been a fair bit of gaming while I was writing up some notes on Session 179. I think I was prompted for this because of how much fun that session was. I don't know that my previous game was that fun 179 sessions in.

- I want all of my weird old books to feel and sound like this in my games:

"The sleekly leather-bound gold-stamped books turned out to contain scripts stranger far than that in the books he had flipped outside - scripts that looked like skeletal beasts, cloud swirls, and twisty-branched bushes and trees [. . .] The books dealt in the fullest detail with such matters as the private life of devils, the secret histories of murderous cults, and - these were illustrated - the proper dueling techniques to employ against sword-armed demons and the erotic tricks of lamias, succubi, bacchantes, and hamadryads."

- Fritz Leiber, "The Bazaar of the Bizzare"

That combo of seriousness and humor fits my current game well.

- This post of Erol Otus pictures is old but brings up a question - why isn't there an Erol Otus art collection book? I'm sure WOTC owns a lot of them, but there must be some way to do an Otus art book with all of his weirdness pulled in from multiple sources. I don't have the know-how or infrastructure to do it. If someone does, this seems like such a nice thing to have.

Lazy Blog Post - Erol Otus!

- These ACOUP posts really entertain me. I don't really mind the technological bs in a series like this. I don't expect any knowledge of weapons, tactics, etc. What did let me down about it was that there were big causal gaps. A lot of "You can't get to plot development B from plot development A but here we are anyway." That really got me. So did the occasional nonsensical explanation - people doing things that couldn't possibly result in the ends they sought. I don't love that every fight is a wuxia fight - you can't beat anyone without a flying spinning running wall-climbing reverse strike. But still, it's part of the genre of modern fantasy at this point, just like everyone wears brown everything was an 80s fantasy thing. Still, I look forward to these posts, and they're a good way to learn about actual historical armor, ships, weaponry, tactics, forging, etc.

Delvers vs. Dwellers, Animals vs. Animals

So I'm finishing up Fire in the Lake - the book, not the game - and I came across this quote.

It's remarkably descriptive of delvers in a hack-and-slash, loot-centric game. And sadly, often enough in non-hack-and-slash, loot-centric games, too.

"You'll look at your enemy and these people that you're sort of a visitor to. You'll look at them as animals and at the same time you're just turning yourself into an animal, too."

"Michigan Winter Soldier Investigation," p. 7, Testimony of Steve Pitkin, 20, SP/4, "C" Company, 2/239, Ninth Infantry Division (In Vietnam from May 1969 to July 1969.)
- Frances Fitzgerald, "Fire in the Lake," p. 371

Sad but true . . . delvers tend to be in a situation they don't fully comprehend (especially if there are factions), possessed of the ability and permission to do violence, and regarding all as potential threats around them. Eventually everything gets reduced to "what can they do for us?" and a feeling that anything less than gratitude for the delvers not stomping them is permission to stomp them - even if stomping them isn't the only solution. Like The Black Company, most delver groups in this type of game regard things as us vs. them, even if they nominally owe some allegience to something outside the group (religion, state, group, or alignment system.)

It's sad but not shocking that I'm quoting a soldier at war in a real situation . . . but there is a reason PCs might be designed as heroes but end up with a rap sheet of anti-social behavior.

Random Links addendum!

Geez, I totally forgot these two links for yesterday!

- If someone had this in their backstory, I'd reject it out of hand.

A venomous cobra bit a child, who then bit the snake to death.
So, "Man bites dog."

On the other hand, Raggi and Bruce probably have something like this in their backstories.

- Manhunter: New York wasn't a great game. But it was atmospheric, and I did like the idea behind it. Nothing like being a servant of murderous alien overlords in a post-apolyptic world. It's like being one of the capped in the Tripods series, albiet with free will. This review is a bit negative but it's fun. I didn't realize the eyes took over in 2022. I'd have made reference to that last session when my players encounters flying killer eyenballs!

Manhunter: New York

The game was a bit maddening with all of the mini-games. But conceptually, it felt cool. You can see how annoying it could be here, though.