Off the Shelf: M-Space

There is a video by Black Lodge Games (https://youtu.be/umTGzLa-QyI?t=5170) where they talk to the creator of Mythras, Lawrence Whitaker, and the game M-Space was mentioned as being one of their breakout success stories of a game using the Mythras Gateway license.

The M-Space game is said to simulate anything from Star Wars-like science fantasy to "hard science fiction" settings. I don't know if I would include Traveller in "hard science fiction" anymore, since it has leaned into the pulp adventure side of the genre these days, but it still could be on the fringes.

M-Space was also described as "liminal," as in a state of transition between states, and even a liminal space. The entire look of the game is liminal, which is a perfect presentation for a science fiction game, to capture those moments in-between, the quiet snowfall on a city a million light-years from Earth, as people go about their business in the day-to-day.

What is here is here, and what is now is now.

It is almost "anti-corporate" science fiction in a way, the perfect "blank paper setting" that does not rely on Alien, Star Wars, Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, Firefly, or any other of a million licensed IP properties sold to us like Twinkies, Pizza Hut, or Cheerios as "the future." Even science fiction roleplaying games do this, with Starfinder and its Muppet-like races cavorting about, Traveller with its Imperium, or other games with their "this is not Alien" sort of settings.

Everyone is either trying to "sell a vibe" or "copy someone else."

In a sense, it is a more challenging design goal to come up with a "blank sheet of paper setting" for science fiction than it is to copy someone else's look and feeling. M-Space does that perfectly with its liminal presentation, creating an actual "blank state" world where anything could happen.

This also has that "Tales from the Loop" feeling of the everyday mixed with the fantastic. That game also has these liminal qualities, where the everyday is blended with the strange in a seemingly normal world that is not all that normal after you spend a few moments taking it in. But to the people there, everything is normal, and nobody is walking around with their mouths open, saying, "Whoa!" every five minutes. This isn't a Hollywood movie, and we aren't stupid.

Things in liminal worlds "just are" to the people there. While they may seem fantastic to us as observers in this world, to the characters in that world, they are just a part of everyday life.

This is why liminal art and concepts make for such a strong science fiction presentation. They invite us to "cross over" too and experience the other world, where everything around us seems normal and everyday. This is not a comedy, space opera, puppet show, licensed IP experience, Star Knights, space federation, or pulp adventure reimagination.

While M-Space could be any of those, it "clears the lane" for you to fill all that in yourself. Even the structure of the universe is undefined; this could be anything from "near space" science fiction between the Earth and Mars with a handful of space stations and colonies, or "far flung" science fiction in a million inhabited worlds in a sea of stars of unimaginable size and population.

Like a 4X space game where you set the universe size to something far too huge for you to manage and end up with ten thousand worlds you need to micromanage, this game can give you that sense of overwhelming magnificence where you realize the universe is too expansive for you to wrap your mind around and consider the individual places.

But the game can also take place on Earth and a single Mars colony, a narrow simulation of a single place and moment in time in a giant universe, but a very narrowly focused area and situation.

M-Space is both definite and infinite at the same time.

This is that liminal quality.

So, why play this when you have GURPS Space? This is harder to answer. M-Space is Mythras, that 3d6 stats and d100 skill resolution, Runequest-style game that blends the familiar qualities of 3d6 D&D with the early-era TSR d100 games like Gangbusters, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret. The Runequest style "mixed 3d6 and d100" system is what D&D and the TSR games should have morphed into, using all the polyhedral dice, but ditching the d20 versus AC for to-hit rolls, and adopting a more simulation-oriented approach.

Mythras is the perfect blend of B/X D&D and the early-era TSR d100 games.

It eclipses and goes far beyond BRP and the Runequest-style d100 systems, becoming something of its own. This is where D&D should have gone instead of morphing into the video-game-like D&D 3.5E.

Once you know this, Mythras becomes something very familiar and very special.

GURPS is a 3d6 system like Champions, and does a fantastic job at being anything it wants to be. Where any given Mythras game needs to be rewritten to support a genre, GURPS does not, and it plops down on the couch and says, "Yup, I can do that" like a John Belushi-type character out of a Saturday Night Live skit. The humor lies in GURPS repeating that line for any profession someone in the skit suddenly needs, whether it's a plumber, electrician, beautician, hair stylist, psychologist, doctor, physicist, or any other profession. The punchline is that the character doesn't look like they are that, but they actually are, despite their outward appearance.

M-Space is the Mythras version of liminal science fiction. It is the physicist who wears the lab coat, tie, and pocket protector. It wears thick glasses and carries a clipboard. This was designed to "do that" and has that look we expect. We can play GURPS and "just have everything," but there is a comfort in the familiar that puts us in a particular frame of mind. We can expect "GURPS stuff" to happen in GURPS. In M-Space, we really have no clue.

GURPS also requires a knowledge of the "GURPS way," such as knowing all the special combat options and rules, which give you all the cool attacks and options. In M-Space, "combat specials" appear during fights, but can be communicated with a simple player handout. However, the entire game operates on a percentage-based system, allowing a new player to navigate with a character sheet and minimal rules knowledge.

What is your chance to "do science?" It is the percentage on the character sheet. In GURPS, it is N-minus, but you need to know modifiers and 3d6 probability, plus a lot of point-building experience for creating characters. With M-Space, it is simply "roll scores, write down secondaries, and assign a pool of points to skill," allowing you to start playing, which is trivial for new players.

GURPS will allow for a greater and more in-depth roleplay experience with its advantage and disadvantage system, and this is a strength of the system. M-Space and Mythras are B/X evolved, foregoing internal point modifications for internal factors, but this is ultimately replaced by a universal system for passions, which drive motivation. The passions system in Mythras and M-Space replaces the need for mental advantages and disadvantages in GURPS. It is not as tightly defined and specialized, but it is a more flexible and modifiable system that evolves with the character as play goes on.

GURPS is a box of generic Legos that you can assemble into anything you want.

M-Space is the box of Space Legos, and a blank sheet of paper on which any science fiction story can be told.

It is the familiar.

Yet different.

Mail Room: Dark Places & Demogorgons (OSE)

I guess the official Stranger Things crossover products for D&D are sort of a nostalgia and "fandom product" for the TV show? For my money, why not play a rules that actually existed in the 1980s, and as the high school kids who could actually be in the show?

5E is not what they were playing in the show, nor is the modern version anything like what we played in the 1980s. If we had 5E in the 1980s we would have called it "a kids game" and "too easy." The word for it would be "lame" and we would have seen all today's censorship and revisionism as "our parents writing the game for us."

We were Gen X. Go figure.

We mowed the lawn and let ourselves in when we came home from school. We cooked our own meals because mom worked. We were self-sustaining survivalists in the Cold War nuclear age, but we still have the best music.

Dark Places & Demogorgons came out with Old School Essentials compatible version of the game, and this is amazing. You could play this as its normal self, a sort of  "small town beset by strange monsters" game, or you could go whole hog, grab a copy of the OSE books, and have the kids actually venture forth in a real OSE world, adventure there, and then have to come back home for homework and dinner.

You could play the "D&D cartoon" style game with this, and have the players keep their 1980s classes, yet venture into a complete fantasy milieu. The entire story could be about the small town becoming a "nexus between worlds, and more do a Lion Witch and Wardrobe and Narnia campaign with these books as your starting point, and OSE serving as the "extra world."

This is the ultimate "1980s" expansion for Old School Essentials ever written. This also captures the spirit and feeling of the TV show and much of the 1980s nostalgia perfectly, riffing on TV, movies, and trends of the time. As a jaded Gen X'er - I approve of this game, and it is the best way to try to communicate to today's players what that time was really like.

Nobody had a cell phone in their pocket, you had to find a phone at someone's house, a pay phone, or as a business to use theirs to make a call. If nobody was home, nobody answered. Lines could be disconnected. Phones could be unplugged. There was no "commercial internet" only small, independent, in someone's basement text-mode BBS software you could dial into with a modem and a Commodore 64 (welcome back). You had to save programs on tape or 5 1/4" floppies (170K of storage, and up to 144 files). Printers were tractor feed dot matrix. It was Unix and not Linux, and that was only for mainframes and corporate systems. We had the VCR and video stores.

Nerds were NOT cool.

If you just want supplementary lore for Stranger Things, stick to the official D&D books.

If you want to actually play a game set in the 1980s just like the TV show, get these books. They are a bit pricey these days, but well worth it as the premier books in the genre, and ones that put in the work and let you play as iconic teens from the 1980s in a fantasy and horror setting.

Off the Shelf: Mythras

Mythras endures. This game is beloved. This is on a level of fandom and loyalty that I have not seen, and the people who swear by this game seem to be increasing. The community is also vocal in their support of videos and blogs, consistently wanting more.

Mythras is a game that will not die.

Despite how much noise 5E 2014 and 2024 make, the whole OGL thing, Pathfinder, Shadowdark, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, people pass those by and stick with Mythras. They grasp this game, they don't let it go, and they stay here. There is a core, devoted fan base to Mythras like there is for GURPS.

This deserves another look.

There is something here I am missing.

This is going back on the shelf. 

Off the Shelf: EZD6

EZD6 was sitting in a storage box in the garage, and I thought about it, and went to find it, and there it was. The smaller games, like Old School Essentials, Index Card RPG, Shadowdark, and all the other A5-sized games are special. The design and fun that goes into these far outweighs games 100 times their size, the six shelves of 5E books I have are a waste of time and money.

All of that can be done with a few A5-sized books packed with fun.

Old School Essentials? Great game, iconic.

Index Card RPG? Amazing game, classic. Any setting, any world, grab and go.

Shadowdark? Better than all of 5E, this is D&D.

EZD6? Instant classic. Pick up and play fun.

I have a few A5 games that are hard to follow and don't have that "discipline of ideas" that many designers force themselves to have. Size does not mean greatness. But size forces designers into greatness, and those who lack design talent will fail spectacularly and be shown clear as day.

An 8.5x11" book can hide tons of sins and poor design.

An A5 book will shine a light on a horrible design. 

What is special about EZD6 is that I could put this in my pocket with a few dice, head down to the bar, and play it with complete strangers. This is so easy to teach and play, you don't even need 5 minutes, just start playing, tell people what to roll, and then run the game in a 30-second start window. This is the ultimate "pick up game" to play at a convention or a casual social situation.

Shadowdark is not even this easy. There is prep needed, like a premade character and a bit of explanation. EZD6 is the way to go with people you just met, or have the hesitation about gaming or "getting involved" with anything. You throw down dice, ask people to pick an archetype, and get started. Even magic is "say what it does" and allows for ultimate creativity at the table, and there are no "spell lists" for people to sift through.

Magic "just is" and it is a wonderful thing. Let people summon a "swarm of cannibal hamsters" of they want. Or fill the hallway with pink balloons to slow the goblins down. Let people use their imagination! It is magic, not paid-by-the-word contractor filler text meant to beat down your imagination and drain wonder from your soul. EZD6 gets magic and that sense of wonder where most other OSR games stumble over themselves to endlessly repeat 50-year-old spell lists.

Magic should be magical.

Not a well-known list meant to limit your creativity.

These small games have more thought and design put into them than the 1,000-page games. They do more, have more options, and are far better experiences. What they don't have room for forces them to only include the best options, eliminate filler, and deliver the "best of the best."

I only want the best ideas in my games.

I don't want page after page of garbage. 

Again, if I am playing with people I just met, who know nothing about the game, who never opened the book, do I want to tell them "make crazy and fun something up" or "here, read this book, all these first-level spells, and find something to cast?" It is a no-brainier most games do not have the brains to even think of.

At that bar with people I just met and never know?

EZD6 will be the game we will play.

Crafting the Perfect 5E Replacement, Part 14

Old School Essentials is so hackable. Hacking a game is the heart of old-school gaming. I am free to modify this and make it mine. I have already reviewed numerous books for this system, and the classes are so easy and expandable that this serves as a quick and simple 5E replacement.

I am done with 5E and our AI overlords. The 2024 game is 100% crunch now, with all mechanical rules in place, and it is a war game, not a role-playing game. There is a current crop of designers working on the Seattle games that focuses on tactical rules and tightening everything up, and you see this also in Pathfinder 2E, Draw Steel, and other games. I don't want to have to "spend actions" on the most trivial things, and leaving some decisions up to referees is a good thing.

And I don't want role-playing to be just a miniatures game.

There is no room left for interpretation and imagination in these games. Our imaginations are being ruled and regulated to death. The entire world is trying to reinvent Warhammer figure battles, but with a small party and in a dungeon. Every little thing needs a rule.

 

Add the Index Card RPG (ICRPG) to our 5E replacement toolkit, and you'll have a fun book to enhance our modded game. Index Card is a far better narrative game than even Daggerheart or Cypher System. This has the advantage of speed, ease of play, and the right level of abstraction to get the point across.

And like Cypher System, the challenges in ICRPG are rated on a d20 target number, reduced by special gear or training, adjusted by difficulty, and rated with a "hearts" of difficulty to overcome them.

It also revolutionizes abstract play while keeping the familiar d20 mechanics intact, far better than Nimble 5e, and without needing to mess around with the broken 5E damage scaling.

And it is a small book, able to do any genre or setting with a straightforward set of rules, portable, easy to reference, and it can also work as an add-on book for OSE (or any d20 game), offering novel ways to up the tension, present challenges, and resolve interesting situations. The encounter design in ICRPG is far better than Cypher, in that it gives you tips on story architecture and room design.

• D.E.W. = Danger, Energy, and Wonder.
• The three T's = Timers, Threats, and Treats
• The three D's = Damage, Disruption, and Duration
• And various types of encounter structures for rooms.
• 10 are given, but many more are possible.

ICRPG is far more mechanical, interactive, and environmental than Cypher, setting up each "room" like a board in a Zelda video game to solve and navigate through. Where Cypher embraces the traditional RPG, ICRPG embraces a board or video game, much like Shadowdark's tight, board-focused play style.

If you are playing Shadowdark and looking for an excellent narrative game that doesn't require hundreds of pages of rules, can be played in any setting, and doesn't require a complete Daggerheart approach, consider ICRPG. In fact, playing ICRPG will make your Daggerheart and OSE experiences much better, since you will begin to understand the mechanical environment and structured encounter design.

ICRPG trains you to become a "board designer" for video games, a skill few modern games teach. These skills are directly translated over into any game you use them for, but ICRPG builds a game around them. And the book is small, portable, and packed with fun.

I wish Wizards knew how to write "small games" these days. The indies are killing it, while traditional publishers are mired in the shelf-breaking collector's market.

Sorry, games written for collectors can't be played. 

I like the small books that pack a lot of information. So many of today's games are bloated, expensive, terrible masterpieces of paid-by-the-word bloat and excessive, overwritten rules. If it takes 1,000 pages to present your game to me, you are wasting your time. It is obvious these designers do not know how to deal with limitations and simplifying rules to they become iconic, simple, and classic.

Once you "go simple," your mind is freed from these bloated hot-mess games that take up shelves of space and force you to defend their sunk costs. You will never play it all. They are preying on the collector market and the whales. The games are not even written to be played.

You are free to mod and change things in a small, one-book game. Or two.

You are far less dependent on the enlightened game designer royal class with smaller games.

Your life is arguably better. 

YouTube: Modern Villains are Pitiful and Impotent

A great video today on the "nature of evil" and why a lot of modern fiction (and games) fall short. This one is a must-watch, and when you apply this critical thinking to role-playing games, you will begin to see where a lot of today's games go wrong.

This is also why alignment is important, and why every "misunderstood" monster can't be a player option.

Please watch this one, it is long, like, and subscribe. This thoughtful, introspective, and compelling content helps us move forward in our hobby and gives us inspiration to write truly great bad guys.

SBRPG Redux?

SBRPG was so far ahead of its time. When we wrote this we sent a copy to the Library of Congress, so this book is in a place future generations can enjoy it. It is probably stashed away in some warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant by now, but it is there. This is probably the only other copy in existence out there, since the few players I contacted said the book fell apart on them and they don't have a copy. I found four copies in a box in my garage, and that is all there is to this.

I am keeping a journal as I re-read these files and making notes of what could be improved and clarified. Would I ever release this "as is?" No way, the art sucks really that bad. A no-art version, maybe, but that will take a bit of work stripping all that out.

When we wrote this, we were looking for a system that played like we played, an almost kinetic, live-action, fast paced, mostly theater-of-the-mind, hard-hitting, action-movie simulator mixed with a JRPG. The threats got big, but you got even bigger. You could make ten attacks with a dagger with one die roll and clear a room of orcs in one turn.

It was that awesome.

We had power design, class design, and everything design. You did not need to cheat and multi-class since you just designed the class you wanted at the start of the game, and then we piled improvement points on you by the bucket-full so that you could go from cool to damn straight fantastic.

Balance?

Oh, the enemies leveled up with you. A level 14 rattlesnake could wipe the floor with you and poison everyone in the group a few times each, choke someone out with a constriction attack, and use mind control on someone else. All in one turn. With as few rolls as possible.

The d20 was a joke.

3d6 was our holy trinity. We made those dice work for a living.

This wasn't pedantic, war-game-style, "oh, my tactical combat," think about fairness, King's rules role-playing. This is like John Wick slapping the crap out of 5E and urinating on its corpse before walking out of the building and having it explode behind him.

Today's games are too concerned with being "rules for life" as written by the "privileged elite game designer class." The players who play modern games are looking for the nanny-game, a set of rules which they can use to beat others into a submissive class of servitude and obedience. Today's players buy a game they can use to use as a social stepping ladder to prove they are better than everyone else.

And today, games are a front on a larger war for ideas. They are conquered ground for ideologues. Part of me loves SBRPG since it was written in the "time before today" when we were not in a constant state of war, and stupid things are fought over as a litmus test.

And we gave this up for D&D 4E. It was a hard time in our lives, and we needed to crawl back into the "mommy's womb" of Wizards and be coddled for a few years, but we made it through. And Wizards tried to eliminate the OGL back in 4E too with the GSL, which is still a terrible license. You can't buy happiness, nor can you buy solutions to life's problems. We never made the jump to 5E since we saw how badly the ranger sucked in the 2014 books, and we knew that entire edition was going to be a disappointment.

The 2024 edition strips all the "soft role-playing" abilities out of the every class, like special ranger knowledge's that only a real DM could adjudicate, and substitutes everything for a mechanical bonus that an AI DM could use. If you are out there raging against AI art and still playing D&D, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing.

D&D 2024 is "AI D&D" and it sucks.

SBRPG was cool. It filled a time in our life from 2005-2015, the second greatest decade since the 1980s, where we needed one set of rules for that awesome, kinetic, live-action play we needed. Other games were too much "in the weeds" with maps and figures, and while SBRPG could be played that way, this was more slap-you-in-the-face awesome than all the other games we tried or played before. 

Oh, and it was written during the height of "bro-culture, extreme sports, butt rock, and monster energy" and that magical time in the world when our minds were still free and people could be honest without being looked down upon by our Internet social-score minders, the people in the cars yelling at their phones, the constant online judgment by bots and strangers, and overseas "departments of social warfare" running asymmetrical battles on our way of life by proxy and overseas tech firms pumping toxic ideas into social media every second of the day.

For us, this was the last game of that second golden age.

Gaming has been lost since then.