Game Shopping: Mythic Game Master Emulator

This play aide was suggested by one of the solo play videos for Forbidden Lands, which you can find here, and it is also a good walkthrough of the game and solo play technique:

It is an interesting product that works with any RPG, and is meant to guide a questions-and-answer style of play that "answers" questions about "what happens next?" Is the princess is this castle? Well, it is the end of level 1-1 so...probably not, but we can check and see. The core of this system relies on creating a question, assigning a probability, adjusting the chance for a "chaos factor" and rolling to see if this is true or not.

For that alone it is a cool product, but there are layered systems for scenes, random events, interruptions and all sorts other story structure generation. Scenes that you setup can be interrupted or altered, changing the expectations of what you had in mind. After a scene ends, you do a little bookkeeping and alter the current chaos factor, the list of characters, and also the story threads that are running (or may have ended).

There is also a framework for a scene and how you resolve one, with sheets to keep track of what is going on, who is involved, and how the story threads come out.

It is an interesting book (and you can get a hardcopy on Drivethru), and I will try to use this along with Forbidden Land's system to see how it goes. It is not a huge book, which I am glad since this sort of thing should be kept simple, and it has a 2-sided page of charts in the back of the book to help you out.

More soon on this when my books arrive and I start diving in to check things out - but it looks cool and a fun addition to solo play.

Game Shopping: Forbidden Lands

Sweden and Free League seems to be hitting it out of the park lately with games like Alien, Mutant Year Zero, and a bunch of others. And I am picking up their fantasy entry, Forbidden Lands, because it looks fun and I saw this solo play video:

Well...you sold me. The simple modern mechanics, old-school presentation, plus the combination of resource management and random tables, in a game designed to have no-prep and with "legacy" elements where the map and world changes based on your play? Stickers to put on the map to make it your world? It can be played solo? Ok, sold. Sold!

The legacy elements are compelling. This actually makes me want to play. With other games, I get a world book, I get a game, and if I do nothing, nothing changes. If I try to change the world, the world book is still out there contradicting me. I know it is a strange position to take, but I do have too many world books that feel like they are forever set in stone.

Worlds Set in Stone

Traditional world books are not designed to change and morph as you play. My Pathfinder and Forgotten Realms world guides feel like worlds carved into tablets of stone, until the next edition comes out and things are changed - and set in stone again.

Some players like exploring established worlds, like sightseeing through Star Wars locations or something. There is a magic to "being there" and I get that. But for solo play, again, like character advancement that I cannot predict, having a world and campaign setting I cannot predict feels like finding a huge missing puzzle piece in my solo gaming life.

This? Want to start a new "game?" Buy the map pack again and change things up, or just print one out and pencil away. The game's world is built to change, which makes everyone's play experience different, but you are also writing lore and establishing the world every time you play.

The only world book I felt invited me to expand upon and build the world was the original Forgotten Realms gray box set (still epic) for AD&D before the NPCs of the world turned into GMNPCs through the books and everything got annoying and overused. That boxed set was such a disorganized mess of notes and articles it felt like an open-ended package of referee's notes you were free to use however you wish.

Stars Without Number, but Fantasy

Stars Without Number does something similar, and also has a similar setup. A galaxy that was cut off and forgotten, and the stars open up and you are some of the first heading out and finding things. Your star-map in that game will become the campaign and lore in your game, based on the random charts and planetary design systems.

Here? Same setup but fantasy genre. Simple rules, a create your world as you play legacy setup, and you can continue to create characters, have players drop in and out, and your world grows the more you play. The game invited you to play it, because every time you drop in and have fun, you are world-building. Even if you lose a character or entire party, that loss is a part of the world's story and you keep going. Create a new group and send them to find out "what happened?"

New Stories and Perspectives

Maybe what happened isn't what you think happened. It is your story, your world. Want to paint the fallen group as invaders who were up to no good? This is your story. If the previous group burned down a forest to kill marauding ent tree-creatures, you could flip the story on its head by creating druids and elves, friends of the forest, and paint that previous group as the bad guys and keep the tale going from a new perspective.

Every party you build, every session you play, builds the world from a new point of view.

Play as a bad guy and start an evil cult and mage tower, along with a marauding army. Conquer an area of the map and build a dark empire. Then turn around to create a force to fight them as heroes to free the lands. Whatever you want to do is cool, every story builds, and things keep changing. Very few games invite you to play as a bad guy, and then turn around and use them as the campaign's bad guys. And maybe, what you played and how you thought it went wasn't the real truth. Have fun with it!

There are rules for building strongholds, so if a group lasts long enough to build one, you could retire them, put the settlement on the map, and transition those characters to NPCs and you just filled out another piece of the puzzle. Your world expands. Use that new settlement as good guys, bad guys, destroy it and make it a mystery, let it prosper or fall into ruin or hard times, put new people in charge because of a plot, or use it however you want.

Have the old heroes drop in as NPCs to help out, hinder, or be the bad guys.

This is quickly becoming one of my most anticipated games of 2021 by far, and I can't wait until it gets here to see if it lives up to the hype.

NOTE: IF you are having trouble printing out the character sheets using Adobe's PDF viewer, try Foxit PDF viewer. I got that to print them without errors nicely.

Game Shopping: MSPE Hardcover

Wow, here is an interesting one:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/994700393/mercenaries-spies-and-private-eyes-rpg-by-michael

The Kickstarter ended a while ago, but there are hardcovers of this game for sale in the wild. Also, they updated the rules with errata and fixes. This one is a buy for me since T&T is one of my all time favorite games and I love the Noir and 50's era of movies and adventure.

Amazon has the hardcover here, but the price currently is above the $55 asking price:

https://www.amazon.com/Mercenaries-Spies-and-Private-Eyes/dp/0940244306/

Would I pay $25 above the asking price for this? I would say yes since this is one of those books that feels like if you don't get it while you can, getting it new later would be a challenge. I know. But considering the T&T 8th hardcovers are reportedly in short supply I am going to grab a copy as a collectors item.

On DriveThru RPG, if you purchased MSPE, you will find the above revised 2019 hardcover in your account as "MSPE_drive_thru_edition_2019.pdf" - with all of the new material and revisions. At the time of this writing you can pick this game up (in PDF) on sale for just under $9 US - which is a great price.

I will play from the PDFs, honestly, but this will be beautiful and stand on my top-shelf with pride. It is strange having the hardcovers but playing from PDFs. The books almost feel like trophies or something. But in case I want to pick it up and read something real, I have it if the power is out and there is nothing else to do.

Game Shopping: Lion & Dragon

This looks like a fun one. Lion and Dragon is sort of a pseudo-historical recreation  of medieval times using the OSR rules. I saw this one and it grabbed my interest instantly since I am a history buff and love when rules are written to enhance the setting.

I have a shelf full of generic RPGs from FATE, GURPS, Genesys, and a lot of "kitchen sink fantasy" D&D clones along with D&D itself. There is a weakness to kitchen sink fantasy like a modded version of Skyrim with too many lore breaking mods. Oh, here are goblins and all sorts of fantasy monsters added to the game! Are they anywhere in the lore of the world? No, but they are cool to have! Pretty soon the world just feels like a lore-less, same-everywhere freeway for a billion unconnected ideas. Everything is here, but nothing has any history together nor any place in the world.

This is why I play Aftermath! over a post-apoc GURPS game. Is GURPS a more-modern, supported, and workable rules set? Certainly, and it can do tons more. Is Aftermath! written to create an iconic, focused experience? Yes, and even though it fails in many areas, it still is the game I go-to and the one remember the most. Same here, this is a setting and rules inspired by a historical setting, and I would be hard-pressed to find something similar (other than buying a history book and slotting in B/X, but that work is done here for me).

Play it Your Way

The game also makes allowances for deviating from the historical norm for inclusion's sake, and it does not specifically bar any race or sex from any social position or profession. It mentions "things were this way" and then leaves it up to you to decide "how they really are" in your game. That is a plus.

I would never be a crappy GM and use the game and history against a player just because they wanted to be something outside the envelope, but the discussion would be started with the players and we could play this as everyday or as extraordinary as the group wanted it to be. I feel that is a fear some have of historical games like this, that they will get into a game and see the book rolled up into a cudgel and used against them. I honestly feel this is more a problem with refereeing and the players than it is with a game or the rules in the book.

Once you buy the book it is yours to play how you want. Your group also needs to talk to each other and be clear about expectations. Some may be okay with playing in a historically accurate setting, and others may want a couple tweaks. How ruthless and brutal are the royals? Is challenging them allowed? How historically accurate are we going to be in regards to topics X, Y, and Z? Ironing these things out rather than using them as gotchas is going to be key for a game where everyone knows what to expect and have fun.

I am used to playing in a Paranoia game, so I am used to a world that isn't always inviting and accepting. I do not see limitations and reflections of period-accurate setting guidelines as limitations. These are things to work within or fight against. The royals may just be the bad guys in a game, should my players choose to be rebellious. If that happens, there is going to be a lot of backstabbing, drama, and the supposed "limitations" of the setting will turn into incredible fodder for villainy and the plot of the game. What is Star Wars without the Empire?

But also, this is a game with the fantastic - dragons, fae, trolls, and elves. If a player wanted to be something outside the realm of this era and historical experience I would embrace it and make it happen for them.

Other Books

Also worth noting are the older OSR setting book for Dark Albion: The Rose war, and a book on evil cults. Both of these look to be excellent resources for the game (even though the setting book was written previously and is more OSR than Lion and Dragon). I am going to pick these up as well to enjoy them. Looking forward to diving into this as a hard copy, and enjoying the PDF. More soon!

Game Shopping: OSE Advanced Fantasy

Some news, the pre-order page is up for those who missed out on the OSE Advanced Fantasy Kickstarter.

https://ose-advancedfantasy.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

I ordered the Advanced Fantasy book set (players guide and referee's book), along with a GM screen. For those new to OSE, the OSE Classic version is more the B/X style ""red box" style of game, while the newer OSE Advanced is more the "1st Edition Advanced" style of game.

So what do I expect? Well, for one, everything that made the 1e Advanced rules so cool, the wide variety of monsters, spells, and magic items, the classes (some of which we already saw with the companions), higher level play, and just the "more more more" feeling of the old 1e Advanced hardcovers.

It will be interesting to see how the ultra-organized OSE authors handle the mass of information, if the organizational style can deal with the metric ton of options and choices and still be approachable and usable. I applaud splitting the books into player and referee, this seems like the first step in making the huge volume of information coming at us approachable and better organized.

I also look forward to the world crafting they are planning, along with art direction. The 1e Advanced rules introduced a whole rogue's gallery of campaign bad guys to the fantasy continuity, from the dragons, demons, devils, psionic creatures, dark elves, giants, and many other factions laid out in the old 1e Advanced monster book. I am looking forward to the art and interpretations of these factions to see how they fit into the world. I am not sure we are getting psionic rules, to be fair, and that seems like an obvious optional addition to this rules set (unless psionics are being handled as one-off special attacks and not available to players).

I am really liking OSE Classic, the organization and artwork are blowing me away the more I read this and I feel Labyrinth Lord's hold on my imagination slip just a little. I don't fault Labyrinth Lord, and it still is a great choice for those diving into B/X, and from what I see there aren't any "system wars" in the B/X community. Maybe I am on the wrong forum, but from what I see in reviews and discussions, the B/X community is refreshingly chill and accepting of what your choice of game is, from Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Old School Essentials, and even Dungeon Crawl Classics - the B/X community is just a wonderful place to be and very open and accepting.

These games are for everybody, the world, and to bring us together at the game table.

Well, when this comes it will come, and now I can't wait. I guess more reading of OSE Classic is in store, and still, this is a wonderful game that is the essence of B/X. I still like Labyrinth Lord for the junk drawer trip down memory lane it is for me, but OSE Classic (and the soon to be released Advanced) and wonderful, modern implementations of a rules system that is itself becoming a timeless fairy tale.

Snow White or Cinderella are stories passed down to successive generations, maybe retold, maybe given a pretty gold-foil book and elaborated upon each time, but the essence remains the same. A warning, because some companies do try to "own" the legacy, but I like to think the world is a bit smarter than to let that happen. B/X is becoming just like these fables, but to the roleplaying world. Maybe one game or the other dopes things differently, maybe one family or person likes this version of the tale or that for different reasons, but that shared legacy of storytelling unites us. To see new writers and creators picking up the torch makes me feel this legacy, and these stories, are in good hands.

Game Shopping: They Came from Beneath the Sea

This? This looks fun! I am a huge fan of B-movies, horror films, retro kitsch, and 1950's sci-fi, so this looks like something I would really enjoy. Ordered and cannot wait for this one to come!

Game Shopping: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition

Oh nice, Savage Worlds is out with a new edition. For our group, this game was eclipsed by FATE and kind of stayed on the shelf - despite being an excellent system that could literally do anything. This is one I wanted to play, but events in my life and my group breaking up kind of put the entire jump to this system on hold in favor of keeping with FATE and D&D 4th/Pathfinder until that story ended.

Part of what got me posting again is I am looking for homes for a lot of my older books, and only keeping what I want. So I am unboxing everything, building some nice sets of shelves to sort through things with, and I am sharing my feelings about over 40 years in this hobby. When I can, I am updating the games I want to keep and looking at a few new ones to fill my time.

Savage Worlds = Super Popular

Some of my previous articles discussing using Savage Worlds to do World of Warcraft are still some of this blog's most popular articles, and the point still is a good one - simulate the flavor of the World of Warcraft experience, rather than converting in thousands of powers, monsters, items, and spells. Design your characters to closely match what you feel a WoW character should be, and given when you played the game this will likely be different depending on if you are still playing or the time you quit. That game changes and reinvents itself every year to keep things fresh, so yesterday's WoW is not tomorrow's.

As long as you are close and get the feeling right, you are fine. Play. Enjoy.

Solo Game?

As a solo game? This could work. It is a more simple framework than a GURPS, and many people prefer this to that game as well, so I could see running some one-offs for myself with the system. Admittedly, GURPS is more simulationist and old-school, but the games are similar enough with this one having a more pulp flavor I could see this one working for a lot of things I am looking at doing.

I wished our group would have adopted this game more, I can see it have solving a lot of the system wrestling we went through with several settings and rules systems. When D&D 4th fell through, we switched to Pathfinder for several campaigns, and moved over to the computer-aided design program for characters. The entire experiment was a bust as I look back, and no one was happy with the system. Pathfinder just wasn't two-fisted fun and exciting, there were so many "rules by interrupt and exception" that to run as many characters as we did, we spent more time tracking, building, and referencing than playing.

Something makes me wish we switched to Savage Worlds and never looked back. That would have solved so many issues. We could have had our actiony, two-fisted, action oriented heroes with as little rules chaff as possible. The less work you have to put in getting to a "place of fun" the better. I could completely see the group of 4th Edition larger than life fantasy superheroes we ran in Savage Worlds, kicking butt, and taking names.

Minor Changes

From what I read the game does not make too many changes from the older edition. They add five default skills for everyone, some skills are combined to reduce the list size and broaden the use of those, some slight changes to chases, and weird science being an arcane background. There are also some layout, art, and presentation changes to clean things up. I am looking forward to seeing this edition and diving in already.

Coming Soon

I am looking forward to getting my hands on the new hardcover soon, and will do an article on it when it arrives. Perhaps I will flip through some of these old 4th Edition characters and convert them over for an adventure or two...you never know.

Game Shopping: Alien

I have read the reviews and watched Youtube videos - this one looks like a winner. The mechanics are a mix between boardgame and RPG, and I want to say it almost feels like a Eurogame in spirit, but a RPG in essence.

And from what I hear, the Xenomorphs are de-emphasized, and there is campaign play. You could play without having the iconic Alien in your game. You could play a one-shot cinematic game. You could make up your own space monsters with a little work and a 1d6 attack table. I could make this a Roger Corman RPG and come up with any silly space monster I want, like a red space turnip with tentacle arms.

I can't wait for this to come - looks incredibly fun, and the production values from what I hear are top notch. Will check this out soon.

Game Shopping: Zweihander vs. Warhammer FRP 4th

 

So...you want to talk grim and perilous? Obviously reading Rolemaster Classic and desiring a more realistic and gritty game, I am going to have to talk about two of today's dark fantasy greats. I ordered both of these and they are coming, so I will be able to compare them soon.

What follows is what I read about them and my though processes on why I chose one over the other.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play: 4th Edition

This was the game I went looking for, because I know Warhammer, own the 1st (and third) edition games, and when you are talking a dark, violent, and realistic game you immediately pick up a classic. And I heard they had a new edition out, how cool! So looking I went for this, and it led me down a path through a dark, twisted woods full of shadows and lurking eyes upon my soul.

And over there in the "customers also bought" section of the product page was barely the sign of another path off the main road towards Warhammer 4th Edition. Some game called Zweihander I never heard of? Nah, it mustn't be anything much. That path looks barely traveled, best to stick to the main road and keep heading towards what I know...right?

Games inspired by are rarely as...good...

Right?

Zweihander

So I peeked down the path, read reviews, and learned some dark secrets. This was developed as a OGR retro-clone of the Warhammer 2nd Edition "style" of game - but even darker. Even more brutal. Unforgiving. A world that not only hates you, but scars you, changes you, and twists you into a dark shadow of yourself. The reviews were glowing, but then again, I heave read lots of glowing reviews of games I own but never play. What makes this so special beyond healing being more difficult and it not being Warhammer?

Many said they would keep using Warhammer Fourth to play Warhammer, because why stray from what works? Some said Zweihander does it just fine. But one review in particular caught my eye. Zweihander can do all that, plus modern gritty fantasy such as countless novels, films, games, and other worlds. It doesn't feel like a Warhammer with the serial numbers filed off of Game of Thrones, The Witcher, or Final Fantasy Tactics. It feels...like a dark and gritty version of those places, worlds, and peoples. It is those places of darkness if you want it to be. You make it into a dark place of your own.

It is dark like Warhammer, without the Warhammer feeling or world. Without the call to battle. Just the darkness. And the despair.

And that opens up...options and possibilities.

Oh...really?

No Armies of Plastic Figures

I love Warhammer - both worlds. The dark and gritty one in the role playing game. And the one filled with giant formations of painted figures standing proud on the field of battle. It always felt to me like the world existed in two realities: a dark one with death and hopeless fear, and another brightly painted and lined up in formation. This always bit our roleplaying campaigns in this world, since we played the tabletop wargame, the roleplaying game saw its share of dwarves on motorcycles with a gunner firing a crank-fired black-powder chaingun on a rear pintle mount. The dark elves showed up with their metal battle garter-belts and whips. Chaos always fielded a massive army like the Soviets in East Germany.

Our games felt like Warhammer Fantasy Battles: The RPG.

They were fun, but grim and perilous went out the window. Those crazy mohawk dwarves showed up, with no fear, and whirled like two-axe wielding dervishes through formations of Skaven. I guess we were still kind of high on the paint fumes of all those figures we had to paint, or in some way we wanted to see those figures come to life in the roleplaying game. We were kids, we didn't know better, and it is a natural urge when the wargaming hobby and the RPG are so closely connected.

And yes you may have started out peasants and rat catchers...but...I am going to be one of those army figure heroes someday, hold a giant banner, hold a heavy bolter, wear my power armor, and...wrong game but you get the idea. We weren't even in the right mindset. We were heroes in a world filled with armies.

With Zweihander there is none of that. You build the world as a dark reflection of your nightmares. You pick the setting. There is no invisible contract that the world can't end as it is consumed by chaos because that would mean hundreds of hobby shops would go out of business and the next version of the rules couldn't be printed. Your world can end. This is your story.

Go Anywhere, Do Anything

The Zwiehander "it can be anything in the darkness" feeling appeals to me. That do-anything, go anywhere, explore the darkness within draws me in. Warhammer with its iconic monsters and setting is always kind of like D&D's cosmology to me now, the Skaven, Chaos, Empire, Elves, Dwarves, Dark Elves, and other icons of the setting are so well-known and set in history they feel like D&D's beholders, Tiamat, displacer beasts, ropers, intellect devourers, mind flayers, and other "product identity" copyrighted creations at this point. I am a fan of them all like I am Luke Skywalker or Iron Man.

But what if I wanted something of my own? Where would I go? It is hard to use Warhammer for generic fantasy because the urge to have the Skaven (tm) show up is too great when using that book. If I wanted to have the "rat people" to be the result of some mad experiment of a alchemist in a campaign my players would smile, say "okay", and roll their eyes because the referee is changing things again and this is a "not Warhammer" using Warhammer rules. Those are really Skaven haha. You know how it goes.

With a set of rules without that established, any monster in any campaign is what I want it to be. Are the rat-people the result of demonic magic? A failed experiment? Pollution? Genetic manipulation? They came from the dark magic jungle of evil across the ocean? Are they ship rats who evolved because of a cursed island and now copy those same sea pirates,. but insane with funny hats and parrots?

My next campaign they may not even show up. They may be something different. They may change size and be tiny rat people. They may be the enemies of the dwarves in another game. The players won't know and they don't know what to expect.

The game is mine.

The darkness is infinite and unpredictable.

A Choice to Make

That appeals to me, because in the true darkness you don't know what terrors lurk - and the nature of the darkness you face is unknown. As a GM, that appeals to me greatly. This is why I went with Zweihander first, and I will look at Warhammer 4th mostly for nostalgia. I love the Warhammer world, but mostly for nostalgia at this point. It will be fun seeing them like old friends.

Also Warhammer 4th is about 360 pages where Zweihander is over 600 - so Warhammer 4th sounds like the tighter rules set for a game, while Zweihander sounds like a novel in RPG form. While I enjoy both, there are times when a concise set of rules tightly put together appeals to me in a mechanical and play sense. I will hold my final opinions for when I see both, but it should be an interesting comparison.

Also, Warhammer was - and still is uniquely British. Zwiehander as I hear is an American author, but a superfan of the dark fantasy genre with new ideas to add into the mix. An interesting contrast.

Especially against the retro-80's Rolemaster Classic standing over there looking like Don Johnson playing Robin Hood. Gotta love that hair and those pastels.

Well, both books are in the mail and more soon.