Book Review - Defining a Galaxy

 

I only became aware of this book  a year or two ago, picked it up last year, and finally read it this summer. Bill Slavicsek is one of the names that jumps out at me when I see it on a game because he has worked on some that I really like. He is mainly known for working on the d6 Star Wars RPG - the first one - and that alone would be enough to earn a spot in my personal RPG hall of fame so the chance to read his memoirs, in effect, of working on that one and the subsequent Star Wars games was an easy sell here.

I will go ahead and say it: I was a little bit disappointed with this one. I was expecting or at least hoping for a fair amount of detail on the process of developing that first set of rules and the first sourcebook - which set a pretty high standard and influenced everything that came afterward from names and locations and Star Wars lore in general. It's hard to over-state the impact that sourcebook had on the Star Wars universe we came to know and it's hard to overstate the eye-opening impact those first d6 rules had on RPGs. In this retrospective though I think we suffer from it being written 30 years after the fact - a lot of the details get fuzzy after that much time and I totally understand that but it was a little less than I  had hoped. There's a fair amount of "what" but I was hoping for more "why".

That said this is still definitely worth a read if you're at all interested in d6 Star Wars the game, West End Games,  or in the history of RPGs in general. The stuff about how the game to be, the licensing effort, the ads, and Greg Costikyan working through versions of the rules are still quite interesting. There was time pressure to get a certain amount of material out during the tenth anniversary year of 1987 which is something people may not think about decades after the fact but deadlines always have an impact on creative works like these. 

The research process for the Sourcebook is pretty well laid out and he  does call out how this was before the internet so a lot of it was  physical in-person work at Skywalker Ranch which is also interesting.  There is a long chapter about the various  sections and entries in the book and this is probably the author's greatest contribution to the setting so this is where we get the most information. 

There is some discussion of the early adventures and the Galaxy Guides and this is also rewarding for the true fan. 

Then we move into other work at West End - including Torg - and eventually we get into a move to WOTC and the new license for a new Star Wars RPG. I played a fair amount of d20 Star Wars so this was interesting to me as well. This part of the book runs up until about 2011 and then we close with some notes about subsequent Star Wars  things including Bill's tweaks to the d6 system he made for a con game he ran in 2017!

So there is a lot of good information here. It has a generally positive tone and doesn't spend much time with any personal axe-grinding or disparaging other designers or co-workers - it's a pretty upbeat  account of a career tied very much to Star Wars in various ways. 

I was hoping for a little more but it's definitely worth your time if you're a fan.

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

What's Going On in February

 

In recent weeks I've managed to run two sessions of FFG Star Wars and two sessions of Deadlands. It feels good to be back on track. The Deadlands campaign has now hit 19 sessions and this weekend will be the first "real" session of the new Star Wars campaign. 

For Deadlands I am running "The Flood" and it has gone pretty well even with some player turnover. I had 6 players at one point and we've lost two of those but added one new so we are still running with 5. This means we've had a ton of consistency and in a somewhat more "plotted " campaign that means a lot. Since it is a published run with a definite end I expect we will finish this one up later this year. The players have been really good about respecting "niches" and some of them have created some very memorable personalities. Lately they've been getting into some fun stuff like blowing up an ironclad and participating in the Shan Fan Kumite martial arts tournament. I really do need to put those session summaries together ...

For Star Wars I used the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game - which I had somehow never run, despite owning it for years -  to test out the system with my current group of players. It went over quite well even though the dice are hard to find right now. At the end of that run (which stretched over two sessions because we get sidetracked a lot and were learning a new system) we have a party with some experience and a ship of their own which had traveled to Bothawui - because that's where one of them is from. There will be some party shuffling as some of the characters were pre-gens and I expect those to be altered or outright replaced before we begin but we decided to continue onward from this point instead of starting completely new. I was fine with this as it gives them some grounding in the universe and a potential known adversary for Obligation purposes in Teemo the Hutt if they want to use him.

These guys look more and more like Traveller Aslan to me - anyone else see that?

The challenge here is that we decided to stay with mainly an Edge of the Empire type campaign where most of the campaign ideas I had written up in the past were more rebel-centric or set in the Clone Wars era and Jedi-centric. Right now we have no force users and the preference was to start right around the end of the republic. So, sketchy parts of galactic society right as the empire takes off ... yeah I have nothing written up specifically for that. So a big part of the RPG think-time these past couple of weeks has been how to start things off, where things could go down the road, and what places and groups are significant in this time period. I've spent more time on Wookiepedia this week than I have maybe ever and I have to admit it's been fun. I'll post more on the campaign planning later.

So yes it's been a pretty active January and February and it feels like we are finally rolling consistently again and everyone is invested in keeping it that way. It's a good place to be.

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

The New Star Wars Campaign

 

Well I mentioned something about Star Wars a while back and that did turn into something though not quite what I was thinking at the time. Given our other schedule issues we've restructured things and so for our first non-Deadlands weekend I ended up running the Edge of the Empire Beginner Box ... which I had somehow never run before. 

My thinking was that I wanted to give FFG Star Wars another try but given its very different approach with the dice and all I wanted to try it out with my current group of players before committing to a longer run. So we did exactly that - a tryout! I had 5 players. Two of them used pre-gens from the box, two brought in PC's they had from a prior EotE run, and one had a character from some other campaign. 

It's very railroady as you might expect from a starter adventure and it introduces the major elements of the game system along the way which is what I wanted. I already know we like Star Wars - what I wanted to test out was the system. I haven't managed to run more than about 5 sessions of this one in a row so I really want to see if I can get a sustained campaign going.

I have to say that despite it being about 5 years since I last ran this game it came back very quickly and it felt even easier than before. Maybe I've read and played more games since then or something but I really felt like I grasped it right from the start. The adventure covers skill checks, personal combat, and even some space combat in the finale and all of them ran well which was very encouraging. I used no miniatures and no maps until the very end when I pulled some X-Wing minis off the shelf to show relative positions and add a little flair to things. Some TIE fighters vs. a YT-1300 is a pretty classic moment and afterwards comments were made that it felt very much like Star Wars.

So, test successful! 

Many options were discussed but it was decided afterwards to continue on with some of these same characters in an Edge-style campaign. No definite connections to the Rebellion and no definite force users at this time. We are setting it back before Ep IV in the Rise of the Empire era so that will keep things interesting. 

Definitely more to come.

Interesting Times

 

One of the side effects of the OGL Hubbub has been the explosion of "there are other games like D&D that are not D&D" discussions online. Forums, blogs, YouTube ... I've seen a bunch of them and even though it probably shouldn't it still kind of surprised me. I still assume to some degree that other people are at least somewhat aware that D&D is not a unique thing. We have 45+ years of other RPG's (you know, "it's like D&D but...) and they are easier to find than ever in electronic form, yet so many people seem unaware of them. How?

I get it ... we have a ton of people now who came into the hobby through 5th Edition D&D. It's the only game they've played and it's the one their friends play so it seems like its own thing. I wonder what that percentage is? Say, of all the people who will roll dice for a combat or skill check this month, how many of them would have their minds blown to find out there is a <gasp> Star Wars "like D&D" game? What about Lord of the Rings? Marvel and Marvel-like properties? Is it half? I'm not even saying "played" another game or bought a book or a PDF - I'm just talking about awareness. 

I always thought the big franchises would bring new players in at a significant rate - Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, you know the list. When the MCU started being referred to as "The MCU" I thought it had achieved a big enough status to bring new people in there but apparently not. Who knew the hottest ticket for bringing in new RPG players would be ... the oldest RPG ... again. 

Now that the boat has been rocked there seems to be a lot of interest in broadening the horizons of these neo-gamers. I'm still not sure if it's truly new players showing a real interest or grizzled veterans like me desperately hoping we can break some of them away from the Forgotten Realms and into some of the other awesome options out there. Hopefully at least some of the less-involved are discovering that these exist. 

What's the easiest "other" RPG to drag 5E-only gamers into? The easy answer is something very similar to D&D like Pathfinder or one of the OSR games but I think that's misleading because if it's more swords and spells you're going to get asked at some point "why don't we just play D&D"? My best candidate is Star Wars - pretty much everybody knows at least some of it and it can accommodate a wide variety of campaign styles. Maybe the FFG funky dice edition isn't your favorite but there is plenty of support for d6 still out there and it's pretty easy to grasp and there is still material for the d20 versions if you want to go class and level with it. 

I don't know that I have more conclusions than questions here. It's just been an interesting thing to watch. 

The New Backup Game

 

We just recently restarted the Deadlands campaign that I've been running for the past year. Everyone is excited and the new place adds something to it too. So we mapped out a schedule that worked for everyone - tricky heading into the holidays - and then sure enough someone couldn't make it to the next session. With some advance warning we decided to do something else on purpose as we are really trying to ensure 100% attendance as the campaign heats up. 

So then of course the debate begins - what shall we play? Originally I was thinking boardgames ...  or maybe start a Frostgrave campaign to make things easy for whoever could make it. RPG-wise I tosdsed out the usual suspects for one-off type sessions: ICONS, Marvel Heroic, or DCC. I also threw out Stars Without Number as I wanted to try it out. I have ready-to-go-material for most of those but with no consensus as Saturday arrived it was going to be a challenge to run anything coherent so I decided to just see how things felt once we actually got together. Normally I really really prefer to know what I'm going to run at least a few days in advance but I decided to embrace the chaos and just wing it.  Having experience and a decent library of games this should not be all that difficult ... right?

As it turns out it was not, really. We debated for roughly an hour and somehow ended up on Star Wars, specifically d6 Star Wars. No, it had not been discussed in advance, no I had nothing specific prepared, and no I haven't run it in about 5 years. Great! It is easy enough to jump in and make characters and one of my players has extensive experience with it so he could help with character creation while I scrambled around gathering materials. It's tricky when you have a lot of good ideas but they are scattered across three different systems and the associated binders and computer folders. 

I did not want to just run Tatooine Manhunt again though that would have been an easy answer. I didn't want to run Starfall again either though that's another solid campaign starter. So I ended up falling back on an old idea I've discussed before using an old adventure published for another game which I originally converted to Saga edition but which I later converted to FFG's rules about two years ago. Had I converted it to d6? Of course not! So naturally that's what I chose! This was mostly a feel thing as I feel it works really well for Star Wars and figured it was worth the hassle of not having any mechanical details prepped.

These days I don't need a ton to run most games - a starting situation, opposition stats, and an idea of where things could go - even though I prefer some prep time this is really enough to run a fun game. FFG has printed several nice decks of NPC/monster cards that have all the stats on one side and then some notes on traits and gear on the other and it makes winging things really easy. I have some examples of similar things for d6 but not nearly as comprehensive so adaptations were made. One of the strengths of the system is that it's pretty easy to wing it given the difficulty chart, the standardization of weapons in the Star Wars universe, and the way stats and skills work. 

Despite the rust and the lack of planning we pulled something coherent together and ran for a few hours and everyone was happy with it. We started on a ship under attack and the characters fought their way through the ship to the bridge and then to the escape pods, saving crew people and dispatching space pirates along the way. We ended with them gathering their supplies as a new day dawns on an unfamiliar planet. So now this is officially The Backup Game. If anyone misses then the game switches to Star Wars. Considering a whole swarm of escape pods just ejected it will be easy enough to add new players - they can literally fall out of the sky for a while!  

It was a ton of fun and I am looking forward to how good it will be when I have some time to actually prepare!

Andor - A Longer Take

 

I know it's not been doing well in the ratings but I decided I was hearting enough good things about Andor to take a look and I'm glad I did. There's a proven principle in box office analysis that a sequel movie's opening weekend is heavily impacted by the quality of the prior entry. A good movie can have a bad opening if the previous film was bad, and a bad movie can open well if the prior entry was strong. Word of mouth will have some mitigating effect over future weeks - particularly on a bad entry, which is why you see some movies open strong and then fall off of a cliff thereafter.

I say this because I think this is what is happening to Andor: it's a good show but it follows two series with a mixed reception at best - Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi. Plus it faces the basic question of "who asked for this?" which is something I was asking myself when they first announced this one. Who was out there saying "wow I wish I knew more about this Cassian Andor guy" after watching Rogue One? I love Rogue One but even I never thought we needed a follow prequel series for anything in that movie. I also think that Star Wars fatigue is a real thing and having a near-constant flow of Star Wars shows runs a real risk of making them less special, especially when some of them are just not that good. 

So why is Andor an exception to this? Or, why should it be? Why was I pleasantly surprised?

First up, it is a story about the formation of the Rebellion. Now maybe not everyone cares about that but it's a pretty significant event in  the overall story of Star Wars and 40+ years in it feels like that's something we could spend some time exploring - surely there are some good stories to be told there and some interesting characters to meet along the way. Andor himself gets involved at the lowest level but we also see one of the main agents (who recruits him) and high level subterfuge as Mon Mothma tries to get support from various entities. We also see the lack of cohesion among the various sub-factions such as Saw Gerrera's band and some others that are mentioned. So it's a more complex situation than just "hey we're the rebels" and that could keep things interesting down the road.

Second it's a good look at the Empire taking power. The gradual imposition of restrictions on imperial society. The growing fear and unease among normal citizens. The unfairness of it all shows up in trials and sentencing and the revision of those sentences after the fact. This might be our first good on-screen look at the ISB which was a pretty regular opponent in a lot of early Star Wars RPG campaigns. People are uncertain at best about the Empire as the show begins and it only gets worse as it goes on.

Third it's an interesting look at normal life and normal people in the Star Wars universe. We see corporate security in action and some of what their life is like. We see criminal activity. We see a guy looking for a job. We see a guy dealing with his mother's expectations and concern for his career. We see relationships pushed in different directions both through individual actions and because of Imperial crackdowns. We see some prison life. There's a fair amount of people trying to go about their normal daily business as events unfold around them. It's just an interesting element that has not come up a lot in prior Star Wars media.

The downside is that it does move a little slow for a Star Wars show. There is a lot of setup and while the payoffs are solid there is not a ton of action - early on it's a heist, not a space assault. There are no Skywalkers and no lightsabers and no mention of the force at all. It's much more of a thriller than an action movie. 

I loved Rogue One and it had some similarities so if you hated that movie I suspect you will have a hard time liking this show, but if you liked it then you should give this one a look - it's worth your time. 

Andor Short Take

 

X-Wing - Take 2

 

Our first dive into the X-Wing miniatures game was, uh, a -few- years ago ... and it stuck around as an every-once-in-a-while game for the apprentices and myself but it petered out eventually and the announcement of a 2nd edition in 2019 was a perfect reason to wash my hands of it for the foreseeable future. I'm not usually looking to spend money on a game nobody around here wants to play. 

Until now! I was reconnecting with an old friend and he's been digging in to Star Wars Legions over the past year and that started some old wheels to turning so I decided to check out the current state of Star Wars spaceship games. 

X-Wing is still in its 2nd edition  - current rules etc. are here. FFG was bought out by Asmodee who has moved all of the miniature games over to a different sub-company Atomic Mass Games who do the Marvel game and the various Star Wars miniatures games, including X-Wing. That's all fine as long as they keep making it and right now it looks like it's mostly been in a holding pattern - continuing production of the existing line without much new. That's also fine and word is that some new stuff from The Mandalorian should be coming along any time now so they are looking to the future. 

For the present I was aware there was a conversion kit for 2.0 for each faction back when it released. I did take a look at them and they seemed pretty pricey at the time for a game we were not playing and that's when I decided to let the game go. Looking around now though I was able to find them for a much more reasonable price and that certainly helped. Also I figured that I only needed the rebel and the empire sets as the other factions have flown off as some of the apprentices have moved on. The other upside was that they come with updates for ships I do not have and many 1st edition ships are fairly inexpensive online making future expansion of the squadrons fairly easy. 

So I ordered the two conversion sets and a few more ships and that first picture up top is the current state of things. I have a ridiculous pile of cards and cardboard so I also added some binders to hold the cards at least. I'm still looking at options for the ship tokens and the rest. I'm also looking over the X-Wing app which is where all the points are now kept instead of on the cards. I've heard mixed things about it but I'm going to give it a try. And no, I haven't played it yet - this is all getting it into shape and ready to play and I expect we will get a game in fairly soon. 

After re-acquainting myself with the game I'd say it still has the 3 big advantages I noted years ago:

• It's Star Wars! This is something we all would have killed to have as kids and now that we're all adults we don't have to scrape together allowances or lunch money to play x-wings shooting at tie fighters with the Millennium Falcon!
• It has a relatively short play time. The games we played ... I don't think we ever went over an hour. That's important as it makes it much easier to get a game in when you don't have to devote an entire evening or a whole day to playing it.
• It's pre-painted! It's well-painted! That means it doesn't add to the backlog for all of those other games I play! This doesn't mean I won't ever paint one of these ships - it just means I don't have to. I now have a pair of Firesprays so at least one of them will be getting some custom colors.

So I'm pretty happy to be opening up the hangar again. I hate having whole sets of painted mini's sitting around gathering dust for years so it feels good to shake that off. I'll post more once we have a game or three under our belts. 

Yeah, something like that ...

The Last Month of the First Half of 2020

...hopefully we're almost done with all that ...

Where to begin? Such a weird year. I was actually running and playing in games again and then ... POW! Nope!

Two college kids doing school from home full time, one working more (delivery), one working a lot less (retail).

Friends isolating so the only way we see each other is online. Tabletop simulator is interesting, Lords of Waterdeep is a really good group game, and we've played a lot less of the MMORPG option than I thought we would - even City of Heroes. Thank god for Steam sales, GOG sales, and the Total War series of games, especially Warhammer 1 & 2. I might be a little obsessed these days.

Working from home full time ... I worked from home a few days a week already so all I really did was slide that control over to "max" and have more time to do whatever I wanted to do. It was not a tough situation here, especially compared to a lot of other people.

RPG Talk:

As all of this hit and shut everything down I had decided it was time to push the Pathfinder 2E tryout campaign into something real. I had been running it using Frostgrave as a model for the setting and while everyone was having fun it was not all that conducive to a long term campaign - it's kind of limiting as far as social activity and general downtime fun when you're in a giant uninhabited frozen ruined city and the nearest outpost of civilization is a village like the one  in "Hardhome" in that great episode of Game of Thrones.

I had high hopes for it but quickly realized that by fairly strictly following the structure of the miniatures game's background I had crippled the potential in a lot of ways. Even worse, when I thought through what I could do to improve things it quickly turned into my Phlan campaign with more snow being the main distinction. What can I say? I kind of have a template for running a ruined city D&D game and I didn't really want to repeat myself just yet.

So I poked through the stacks and realized there was a fairly obvious thing to try: What if it's not a ruined city? What if it's a living breathing city full of interesting situations? now I've thought for a long time the next time I ran a city campaign it would be Waterdeep and all of those nice supplements they've put out covering it over the last 30 years. Nope!

They ran a kickstarter a month or three back for a D&D 5E version  of it but if I'm running it for Pathfinder 2E then I don't really need that do I? I can convert from the book that's been sitting on my shelf for 10+ years now just as easily!

So that's the plan for the Big Fantasy Game that I always seem to be running ... well, once the restrictions lift and everybody feels comfortable gathering again. More on this later.

The plan is to run a game weekly but sometimes that's not schedule-friendly so to allow some of my players to lighten the load I'm considering running two games, alternating weeks. For the second game I presented a few options but we settled on Star Wars, FFG-funky-dice-Star-Wars because I want to give it a real test. I'm adapting one of my old ideas so the actual work is small and feels like a lot of fun as I look back through it. Setitng it in the Clone Wars era opens up a nice set of options, including active Jedi types, and with official FFG support material it's pretty damn easy to put together.

Oh and now there's a 9th edition of 40K coming soon too - I'll save that for Friday.

RPG Ripoff - Onderon

One of the things I've been doing during this quarantine extra-downtime thing is going back through some books and movies and comic books that I haven't touched in a long time. last week it was "Tales of the Jedi" - the first one. Reading through it pushed the "that's a cool idea" button pretty hard so I thought I would share it in this post.

The Premise: 
Onderon is a world in the Star Wars universe. It was once a peaceful, idyllic planet populated by simple tribesman. It's moon, however, was basically a 40K deathworld full of savage monsters. At a certain time of year, the atmospheres of these two would touch, and some creatures from the moon (mainly flyers in the book) managed to navigate from the moon to the planet. This went about how you would expect.

The tribesmen were unprepared and had to learn to fight giant flying predators, developing skills and technology - like hunting with bows - just to survive. Over time they were slowly driven together to the point they ended up in one great city where they walled up, built other defenses, and held their own. So you have one huge heavily defended city full of humans, and the rest of the planet is a monster-infested forest-jungle waiting to eat anyone who steps outside.

As they became more civilized there were inevitably people who just could not get along. Criminals were exiled out of the city and early on this was pretty much a death sentence. Some survived though and as the smartest and toughest of a rough bunch they eventually started to build their own society. One of the interesting developments is that they started capturing and taming some of those monsters. So now we have the big defended civilized city while outside the walls we still have a bunch of monsters but we also have the "beast-riders" of Onderon - barbaric types who survive at a lower level of technology with the help of their tamed beasts ... and yes, a lot of them hate the city and its people.

Ripping it off for an RPG campaign:
So ... I'm sure a lot of you who have run games can see the potential here, and it doesn't have to be Star Wars or any kind of Science Fiction game at all! This works just fine as a the setup for a fantasy campaign. The city could be a center of arcane/academic type magic while the beast riders are more of a center of nature/innate magic. The obvious conflict is between the city and the exiles but there could easily be inter-tribal conflicts ... and what if some of those "monsters" are intelligent too?

I can't help but think the writers were familiar with the Dragonriders of Pern books - with nasty stuff dropping out of the sky when the moon gets too close - so we could borrow a premise from those two and say the wider planet used to be inhabited by a more advanced society, maybe some fantasy kingdoms and empires, so there are interesting things to be discovered out in the wilderness.

To start the action we could steal a premise from Fallout and say some vital, ancient device in the city is failing and someone has to venture outside to find a replacement.

Let's mix them up and say that a person is responsible for energizing the lightning field that protects the city when it's attacked and they are dying or dead and someone has to journey to the ancient temple outside the city to become the new wielder of the lightning. 

To me, finding a good reason to leave the city is the key to starting the campaign. We have an interesting situation, but we need a reason for the characters to move around. A lot of this depends on your players:

• Explorer-types will want to poke around anyway. You tell them 99% of the planet is unknown and they will self-motivate and start packing backpacks.
• Power-seekers are easy - legends of ancient power lying out in the jungle ruins - artifacts, oracles, ancient masters of the force/magic/kung-fu - this also fairly easy to set up. 
• Story-folks want to know they're part of a story or making a difference. In the comic books the daughter of the queen of the city has been kidnapped by a tribe of beast riders and rumor has it that she will be forced to marry the son of that tribes chief. Now it does get more complicated than that but this is the main driver for the Jedi in that first story to head out and look for trouble rather than just defending the city from those evil raiders. Rescue the princess is not a new story but it's a classic hook and one most players should be able to see and enjoy. 

Other hooks:

• Ripoff Gladiator and a thousand other stories: Old king is good, the PC's are his friends, he dies, bad king takes over, and the PC's have to flee or are exiled and have to work with what's "outside" to come back, oust the bad king, and set things right again. This sounds like a great setup for a Savage Worlds style plot-point campaign.
• Flip the basic concept around and have the PCs start as tribesmen from outside the city. They get to play around with the jungle and monsters and other tribes right from the get-go with the city as this mysterious "other" place and group. Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad - let it develop in play. An easy way to start this one off is with the "ritual of adulthood" where the characters have to go to a sacred place and do something and return alive to become full members of the tribe. 
• Take it full post-apocalyptic and make it a tech city that survived the great war while the rest of the world is ruined mutant-filled monstrous wilderness. Many of the same reasons for leaving the city apply here too .. and what if in their explorations the PC's discover that theirs is not the only city to survive ... and what if those other survivors are far more dangerous than the mutant tribes everyone was worried about back home? 

You knew this was coming, right?

Long term ... well if you stay more with the original concept that the monsters originally came /are still coming from the moon ... well, someone has to go there at some point right? Once you've explored everything/built an empire/united the tribes/saved the city/rescued all the princesses/hit 20th level ... I mean, that's where you go, right?! The situation implies some kind of manipulation to have a moon passing that close to a planet yet somehow remaining stable and separate ... there's clearly some kind of technology or magic or deity at work - and PC's can't just leave that kind of thing alone. So there's the capstone to your campaign - To The MOON! 

Anyway I can see a ton of ways to use this concept in an RPG. There's incentive for traditional D&D type loot-questing, there's plenty of room for empire-building, and there is opportunity for role-playing everything from personal relationships to political maneuverings and Star Trek-style diplomacy between rival groups.  

Let me know what you think. 

BatRep of the Week: Armada!

Something a little different this week as Blaster and I dig back into Armada for a change:

First, a very casual intro by the guys at Shut Up and Sit Down:

Then another "how-to" with a European Champion:

Then the first of a series covering a normal game of Armada with the same two players:

Greatest Hits #14 - Which RPG has the most inspiring art?

A companion to the prior post, a little bit apart in time...

This is a little tougher because I don't usually distinguish between cover art and interior art - I tend to think a game looks good or it doesn't.

That said, my initial thought was the FFG Star Wars line because it is really well done, consistent across books and lines, and makes for some very pretty game books. I don't know that it's really "inspiring" though. The Star Wars movies and shows and books and comic books and video games are already pretty inspiring and so it's more reinforcing an existing thing than starting a fire on its own. Also, while the illustrations are both numerous and well done they do not generally show you things that your characters might be doing during a game - they're Star Wars pictures for sure, but they are not really Star Wars RPG-specific pictures:

• Here's a star destroyer flying near a planet
• Here's Han Solo sitting at a bar
• Here's a droid peering through some binoculars
• Here's a scout walker
• Here's a couple of characters standing still and looking "at the camera". 

So while they look good they are not really "inspiring" me to get a group together and roll some dice. They confirm the setting but do not really enhance it, in an RPG sense. 

So now that I've talked about what doesn't do it for me, here's one that does: Dungeon Crawl Classics. Why?

• It's all strong black and white art.
• It tends towards a "weird" vibe. You don't always know what you're looking at.
• It shows things that could easily (and maybe should, easily) happen during the game.

It does, for me anyway, build an interest in playing the game as I read through the rulebook or an adventure. Heck, even the maps are more evocative of some lost document than in most other games and yet they remain as usable if not moreso than most others. 

Yes, some of it is the old-school thing which does have a certain appeal to those of us who started in that earlier era. 

But the very unexplored/unexplainable/rough around the edges tone of much of the art enhances the atmosphere of the game. We don't know everything about the setting. We can;t instantly identify every monster that is shown. We don't know why that character looks that way and this other character looks completely different as far as dress, gear, and attitude, and in the game you aren't going to know everything either!

When it comes to art-matching-expected/designed-tone-of-game I can't think of a better example than this game.

One more for the road:

Greatest Hits #6 - The Star Wars Model of Campaign Design

So I did something like this once before and I've been thinking about it again, but this time with a different model. I'll try to use a similar format too. Note that this is based more on the universe than it is the movies themselves.

So, principles of a Star Wars-modeled campaign:

1) The Universe is Known: Some games feature a lot of exploration. This one does not. This actually fits a lot of fantasy campaigns pretty well, from the Forgotten Realms to Warhammer's Old World. The big picture geography is well documented, but one can easily find pockets of "unknown" here and there and some areas are "far too remote" for decent people to care about anyway.

2) Monolithic Stability: Someone is In Charge - of almost everything! Sometimes it's the good guys, sometimes it's the bad, but most of the time most things are controlled mostly by one entity. One of the driving forces of the campaign is to change this.

I'm sure this is all completely fine, nothing underhanded here at all, nope

3) The Pendulum:

• A creeping threat to the existing order is discovered. This is where the game begins.
• This order begins to fray as the threat grows and factions begin to disagree on how to deal with it. Heroes adventure and important figures on both sides are identified.
• Open conflict breaks out and this conflict may go on for years. Heroes and villains do a lot of leveling up during this conflict.
• The old order collapses and a a new one rises. PC's may directly cause this.
• The purge - allies and power players of the old order are hunted down as the new order consolidates power. Heroes pay back old foes or go out in a blaze of glory.
• The interim - Things appear to stabilize. Surviving high level PC's retire or go into exile. 
• The next generation - descendants or allies of the old order begin to gather power and make plans to overturn the new order, beginning the cycle all over again. Roll up your new characters.

4) Generations, Lineage, and Legacy: There's a lot of attention paid to redemption and revenge. Characters may have intertwined family histories or religious affiliations. Enemies may be related as well. There is a little more demanded of the players here when it comes to linking up their characters than in a typical D&D game but hopefully that's what they are looking for. There is plenty of room for diversity in character types, they just need to have some connections. This game will spend a fair amount of time on relationships, so your role players should love it. For your action junkies - well there is a war on...

Once again level based games give a nice built-in progress clock for what needs to be happening in the universe. This is another "finite" campaign in many ways, as there is a planned end point for the game (we won! - or-  we lost!), but it has a huge connection to the next one (or the previous one) that makes them almost a continuous campaign.

There's plenty of room for players to control their own destiny within these larger events, even taking control of some of them as high level characters are going to be leaders in a wartime situation without having to ask for it. 

Also, it doesn't really matter which side they are on! If they go Old Order heck, give them a chance to stop the change - perhaps only to have their NPC leader turn out to be the biggest threat of all! If they don't manage to make the change (hi Mr. Windu!), well, the survivors get to set the seeds for the next generation to carry on the fight. If they go New Order, well, let's hope they win so they can all retire to desk jobs by the time they become the Old Order again.

Among published settings for D&D, well, Eberron is the direct aftermath of a war, possibly headed for another one, and Greyhawk has had a few too.

I haven't deliberately run a game like this yet but I think it has a lot of potential. I'm laying a little ground work for something like this in my 4E Red Hand of Doom campaign as there is a 4E campaign that follows up on the events of this adventure a generation or more later. I didn't plot it out ahead of time but there is the potential there for the future. 

Monday Morning Funny Thing