Broken by 2014

So anyway, 2014 broke me.

Between the PhD deadlines (which I failed and now have till May to pass), the four hour daily commute to a job I desperately tried to get out of (and failed - here's looking at you year two at Peach Pit U), and the black hole of mutual loathing that my marriage has become, I don't know how I am still breathing, let alone sane.

The first causality of this real life implosion was, of course, the gaming and blogging that is my escape hatch and release valve.

2015 has been much kinder. I've had a relaxing trip to an onsen spa, my little boy is the love and light that keeps me going, the wife is treating me human again, the job wraps up in ten days so I can concentrate on getting the degree done, and I played a game of the new Star Wars miniature rules.

I have a backlog of posts that will have to wait until the degree is done and I am off the academic hazing hamster wheel. This is first priority. Expect regular blogging to resume after that, along with gaming, hopefully.

Hope you all are having as much good fortune in the new year as I have enjoyed thus far.

PS* I tried to read 5E but the prose is pretty languid and pedantic. Days like these I miss High Gygaxian or Mumbly Mearls.

Obligatory 5e Thoughts

Downloaded it, haven’t read it. May never considering my lifestyle, or may get to it when degree ends/new job is found/child goes to college/7e comes out. It joins the untouched treasures on  my hard drive. This post is merely for traffic and contains little news, just some late night mumblings followed by futon crash for a few hours before 6am Japanese train rush hour.

Lots of internet stink about this thing. Goes both ways:

HOORAH!!

The big corporate gaming monster listened to the OSR and dialed back from 4e, then gave it out free!

BOO!!

The big corporate gaming monster has mesmerized the OSR with its own tricks, and the ‘game’ is incomplete. (I know about the updates, just stating current events)

HOORAH!!

WotC put in an ohmyglob actual reference to LGBT gamers and ushered in an era of explicit gender issue acceptance in gaming. Having seen LGBT friends go through the shitty wringer our society puts them through, this makes me more interested in 5e than I would have been otherwise.

BOO!!

Homophobe trolls are beating collective chest about ‘gayed up’ game (see response to AiCN’s review for typical example), which essentially amounts to a choice that gaming groups have been making for 40 years. Anonymous douchenozzle bigots are getting far more attention than they deserve.

BOO!!

Some internet meanies have taken the opportunity to beat up on Zak S, who consulted on 5e, and has the very LA habit of speaking his mind in the most confrontational/condescending way possible.

HOORAH!!

Half the OSR has rushed to his defense, ironic for a pundit who doesn’t particularly need it.

HOORAH!!

Hopefully the impending success of 5e will breathe life into some other old games the deserve a major revival.

BOO!

Fat chance.

Oyasumi nasai.

T MINUS THREE, WHO’S IN ON MARCH MADNESS, & TWILIGHT 20XX

WHO’S IN ON MARCH MADNESS

“There is no such thing as bad publicity.” – Brendan Behan

It looks like word is getting around about March Madness. Talyman notes that it has exceeded the D&D challenge in dullness of questions, and that the cool kids do not do blog hops anyway. I never considered myself cool, ditto this blog, which besides being uncool by nature, has been described as mixing “fantastic content with headache-inducing graphics in a way rarely seen in this day and age.” LOVE IT! That was precisely the vibe I was going for, so I am glad someone is paying attention.

Talyman’s comments have also inspired me to make a list of blogs which have expressed interest in participating in the challenge:

Mesmerized by Sirens

Barking Alien

The Savage Afterworld

What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse

The Other Side

The RPG Corner 

Crit This 

Timnits & Trolls (who has gone ahead and finished the challenge already! BRAVO!) 

Tower of the Archmage 

Swords & Dorkery

d20 Dark Ages

Semi-retired Gamer 

Wine & Savages

If you plan on participating and want me to add you to the list, drop me a line.

TWILIGHT 20XX REBOOT SEED

I’ve always had a soft spot for the game Twilight 2000, not for the somewhat clunky mechanics, but instead for the tight adventures and attractive portrayal of a non-fantastic apocalypse. No zombies or rifts, just things falling apart and lonely soldiers trying to get back home.

But the game had one major flaw – it was dated incredibly quickly, both in terms of geopolitics and technological advance. When it came out way back in 1984, no one could have predicted that its US-USSR nuclear exchange scenario would become moot with the dissolution of the Soviet empire a scant 5 years later. Similarly, the splatbooks of the latest military gear look antique in a world where DARPA is rolling out power armor, drones make daily strikes in the heart of Pakistan, and both the NSA and Snowden showed us how laughble the ideas of privacy and security are in the age of Wikileaks.

In this light, I've whipped up a little transmission that would set the scene of a reboot of the game, Twilight 20XX, in a projection of our own dystopic world. A projection that (hopefully) will turn out to be as laughable as the original premise of Twilight 2000.

Enjoy.

United Nations Secure Transmission

Helmund province, Afghanistan

<<Begin Transmission:

We’re the last ones here at base, and we’re bugging out. I’m not giving details, as all communications have been compromised. Another group tried to get through by way of our ‘allies’ in Pakistan. They took the best APCs and gear here and went last week.

Word is they never made it across the border. So we are gone.

Our orders are to stay put, but that is a death sentence. We’ve got a few locals on our side, thankful for some of the infrastructure and education we provided. They’ve given us supplies and, more importantly, hope of a way out. We’ve got some local translators who want to come, and some stragglers from the UN office and independent contractors.

When the House of Saud went down, the world as we knew it ended. We’ve waited long enough for evac, and it’s not coming. We figure that although everyone has oil reserves, the way the climate has gone out of whack they need it to survive the winters. Most of us are North American, and we figure Alaska and northern Canada are OK with woodstoves and an endless supply of wood. That is our objective.

In some ways, this place is better than it was, in some ways worse. The locals burnt their opium fields to grow food, but the Taliban muletrain hasn’t been affected. It just switched from hauling arms and opium to potatoes and child brides. People either are too busy surviving to care about us or want our heads on a pike. Time to go.

We’ve all seen the news about how the Muslim Brotherhood swept into the power vacuum created by the Arab Spring and turned off the oil. They’ve restored the Caliphate, just as Hitch always knew they wanted to, and plunged us all back into the Dark Ages. To tell the truth, I think a lot of the hillpeople here won’t know the difference.

So we’re out. The goal is to get to some US bases in Asia - that is if China doesn’t roll over them with her oil reserves in the next few weeks.

Wish us luck, and hope to see you back home.

<<Transmission End

The Buzz

Seems there is some good buzz about the challenge....

HERE

Blog mod

I just added a cloud of topics on the right to help readers navigate the blog better. Figured I'd better do it before this thing became unwieldy.

30 Day Challenge 1 & 2

I initially wasn’t going to get into this 30 day challenge, but the posts I am working on (2 scenarios & some minis rules) are taking longer than expected, so here goes. I may post 2 or 3 at a pop as I have things to do these days, but it should be good for a laugh.

1)      How did I get started roleplaying?

Although I had read RPGs earlier in the 80s, I didn’t have the mental development (i.e. I was a space case) or the group of friends necessary to get seriously into gaming until the end of the decade. In 1989, I was 19 and had just failed out of uni, was working at a crappy convenience downtown midnight to 8 am to make the measly extra 50 cents an hour for fighting off robbers and serving trannies coming out of the gay bar (NB: no big deal for me as I had solid LGBT friends and went to gay bars myself, but the boss & clerks were homophobes and so I was happy to get the extra money). I had an uber-cool, death cookie girlfriend named Naomi who looked a lot like Death:

Anyhoo, Naomi would disappear every Sunday into a room with three guys for hours, and wouldn’t talk about what went on. Of course, I got jealous and demanded to see what was happening in there. Were they making porn? What was the secret?

They were playing D&D, of course. The girlfriend was a Valkyrie, Mike played a Dwarf, Damion a Wizard. I rolled up my first character and was in.

2)      Favorite Race?

That first character was an Elf, and without a doubt, Elf is the race (or class) I gravitate towards. That sweet combination of fighting and spellcasting is just is so much more compelling than a fighter who is toast against the arcane or a mage who can never get his hands dirty. My first character carried two swords (NB: although the first Drizzt Do’urden book supposedly came out in 1988, it didn’t get to my town for a few years, so not a clone of him, although possibly very Elric inspired), had no name I can recall, was chaotic and got banned from the game after 1) setting loose some bone golems, then locking the other PCs in with them (thank you Haste and Wizard Lock), and later 2) setting afire a library we were looting and escarping before the dry papers created a firestorm taking out the other characters.

OSR Backwaters & Hidden Byways

Ever notice that the OSR has some hard to find backways and forgotten byways? 

Usually OSR Planet is my gateway site to the OSR (since Eternal Keep went… strange), and after some link-wandering I find myself in uncharted territory. It’s like that old Sesame Street cartoon where the kid went for groceries and stumbled into progressively alien neighborhoods, then had trouble finding her way back home.

 

A loaf of bread, a stick of butter…

False Machine is one of those sites. Sometimes it shows up when I surf, sometimes it doesn’t. The content is good and has really wowed me. Ditto Elfmaids & Octopi, who now is in the fold of OSR Planet so to speak and more accessible.

This is another great thing about the OSR. Some of us sign up for sites like OSR Planet, some don’t; some publish for pay, some free, some not at all. Some would call themselves an OSRite, others not.

And that’s cool. It would be a drag if we all set up identical shops on the main drag and lost the joy of stumbling into hidden corridors and unused alleyways.

That’s what the games we play are all about.

Blog Disclaimer - Don't Believe Half of What I Say

I’m quite happy to be getting some feedback on this blog recently. Posters have been intelligent and courteous.

Which is all you can ask for.

Still, I’d like to put out a disclaimer about this blog:

Don’t believe half of what I write. I know I don’t.

I’m not here to fight, I’m here to articulate my version of the game, just as everyone else articulates theirs. Blogging is a pseudo-creative way to be pseudo-social and keep my spirit alive as I slog through a bottleneck of RealLife ™.

So don’t take anything herein too seriously. I don’t.

Better late. Always better late.

That’s it, the OSR is dead.

The names are almost worn away on the marble mausoleums of long lost blogs like Chogwiz, Society of Torch Pole & Rope and Rustmonster Ate My Sword. Grognardia is a shadowed presence on the hill, rotting timbers giving way to empty rooms. Ravaging trolls sally forth from the Caves of YDIS to harry the few remaining farmhouses like Tao of D&D and Pornstars. The Eternal Keep has dropped its portcullis to adventurers and now drills strange and savage warriors in its courtyard. The psychedelic strains of Cyclopedean and Strange Music have vanished leaving an emptiness ringing in the air. Only merchant princes like LoFP and Goblinoid travel the land freely selling their wares.

The fiefdom of Blogger lies in disarray.

OSR v.2 carries on in a new dimension, on the strange planes of G +, where once I traveled to adventure in Ur with A Horrible Night to Have a Curse, but was driven back by the cacophony of voices ever calling out.

As always, I am late to the party. A day late and a dollar short.

Just the way I like it.

So now I throw open the Tomb of Tedankhamen, from whose musky depths once a week I will issue forth…

Something.

Scenarios for my first gaming love, Stormbringer. The old, unbalanced, unhinged beauty that still holds my heart. And Cthulhu, her dark twin.

Philosophy on why and how I game, and how this sits besides my 40 something life. Musings on fitting gaming onto an already full plate. On how to make our shared worlds work so that we all come away from that Cheeto encrusted table smiling.

Art just a step above that which I scribbled on my middle school notebooks waiting to get back to the Moorcock or Asimov novel in my bookbag as soon as class ended.

Drafts and idea from my heartbreaker, Iceships and Inuit. And yes, I am serious. As a son of frozen Labrador with Inuit blood in my veins.

Fiction born from my frenetic inner world pushing back against the demands of impending age, fatherhood, and professorship. Just as it pushed me to write 300 verses on my other digital demesne, Cro Magnon Poetry.

System free adventures with a quirky sense of style and story.

Into this once great, half empty land I venture, to hang out my shingle and enjoy the quiet life and occasional passerby after 5 years of passing by the shops of others like Jeff and Gorgonmilk. Thanks to those here and gone who greeted me warmly at their doors, apologies to those who felt my lurking presence unwanted.

Welcome to the Tomb of Tedankhamen.