High Trust

Okay, read this first.

Now look this over:

Are you with me so far?

This reminds me of a systemless adventure published in issue 10 - 'The Cowboy Issue' - of Adventure Gaming magazine back in '82, "The Big Horn Basin Range Wars RPG Adventure." The adventure was based on a fictionalized Johnson County War, perhaps best known to gamers of a certain age from its retelling in the famous movie flop Heaven's Gate. I would guess that it would be barely recognizible as an "adventure" at all to many gamers: it's a bit of background, some locations such as ranches and towns, and the non-player characters - some historical, most fictional - who inhabit it.

And that's it.

The simplest summary can be boiled down to, 'In this place and at this time, some folks are ranchers and lawmen, and some folks are cattle thieves. Have at it!' There's no presumption about on which side the player characters will be found - a plausible case for joining either side can be made, really. No scenes, no programmed encounters - heck, no encounter tables at all.

I didn't see this until about a dozen years ago - we relocated many of the non-player characters and locations from "Big Basin Range Wars" from Montana into our 2e Boot Hill campaign in New Mexico, as can be seen on our campaign map - but it struck me that it's a campaign setting, a small sandbox, rather than what most gamers of my acquaintance would ever call an "adventure."

It's setting-as-adventure, which if you go back to the ur-hobby is what most "modules" - what we had before the hobby advanced the notion of "adventures" - really were, and it's still my first approach to preparing to run a roleplaying game. My current Flashing Blades campaign - which is slowly, sadly failing, I'm afraid; more on that another time - is a ruritania in the south of France in 1625: for it I developed some locations, a bunch of non-player characters with their vocations, avocations, and relationships, and some history, and turned the adventurers loose in it. It ticks many of the "high trust trad adventure" boxes and it most closely resembles the modules of my youth.

Pardon the Interruption

So, after blogging more between April and June than I did in the previous nine years combined, and then doubling that amount with a blogging challenge in August, I dropped off the radar again. Real Life can be an annoying distraction from one's hobbies, but between preparing my results from two studies I conducted over the summer, submitting a conference lecture proposal, and being contracted to work on a political campaign in addition to running my play-by-post Flashing Blades campaign, unfortunately RBE fell by the wayside.

Fear not, Dear Readers, I have lots of stuff in the pipeline and after the first week of November I plan to resume blogging at least a few times a month. More FB exegesis and house rules, plus a couple of responses to stuff I read recently are in my draft queue and I look forward to fleshing them out and polishing them to at least a dull gleam.

Thanks for your patience.

#RPGaDay2024 for 27 August: Marvellous miniature

Today's prompt: Marvellous miniature

I loved the concept of the Ral Partha three-stage mini: a set of three minis that represented your character's arc from wet-behind-the-ears novice to practiced journeyman to supreme master.

There was always one small problem, of course.

Whose character survived to high level?!

And this wraps up my participation in the #RPGaDay2024 challenge, a few days prematurely. I'm heading out of town for at least a week to the wilds of Idaho, and a combination of limited time and even more limited Interweb access means I'm tying a bow around this one right here.

#RPGaDay2024 for 26 August: Superb screen

Today's prompt: Superb screen

There can be only one.

#RPGaDay for 24-25 August: Triple-double!

Saturday's prompt: Acclaimed advice
Sunday's prompt: Desirable dice

Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their bases of operation - be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time stricture pertains to the manufacture of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters, and likewise number their days of game life. - "TIME IN THE DUNGEON," 1e AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 37

So, like a dozen years ago or so, I started theming my dice to whatever game I was playing at the time, based on the color scheme of the cover of the box set or rule book - yellow and orange for Boot Hill, black, white, and red for Traveller, purple and red for Chill. When I started planning a new Flashing Blades campaign, it was time to put together a new theme.

Kinda like the way these turned out.

If you're looking for some really spectacular dice, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the incredible creations available at Cassiopeia Dice - some terrific videos on her Twitter feed.

#RPGaDay2024 for 23 August: Peerless player

Today's prompt: Peerless player

Let's call him Rich, 'cause that was his name.

I met Rich at The War House FLGS in Long Beach, talked old school roleplaying games, and exchanged phone numbers, with an eye toward maybe playing sometime. When I learned he loved 2e Boot Hill but never played any of the published TSR modules, we decided to run a campaign linking the five adventures together. Rich was a USAF veteran wtih a good job in upper management, a family guy, and a big Wild West buff. We were different men outside of gaming, careful to stay away from politics by mutual understanding when we got together to play. As gamers, we were sympatico.

The campaign ran for a couple of years, and we'd just about made it through the last module when Rich informed us he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2018. The cancer metastasized to his liver and gall bladder; his treatment was confined to relieving symptoms, and he was given six to eight months to live. It would be great to say he outlived his prognosis; instead he was gone by the middle of October.

Some people play with an established 'friends' group, but I tend to find new groups for the campaign I want to run each time, rather than relying on a set cadre. I'm glad I do, because I might not've met Rich otherwise, or played in one of the most memorable campaigns of my life.

#RPGaDay2024 for 22 August: Notable non-player character

Today's prompt: Notable non-player character

One of the few features of 3e D&D I really like is giving monsters character levels, a quick and simple way of making any monster unique, or at least different from its peers. I mentioned this on a forum twenty-odd years ago - probably EN World or the pre-Gleemax Whizbros forum - adding that this was somethig I'd liked about 1e AD&D as well. Demihumans, liches, lycanthropes, and vampires as described in the 1e Monster Manual may include character levels along with their given abilities. As a referee, I took full advantage of this to create interesting encounters with which to challenge and bedevil my players.

Enter Vlad Tolenkov. Appearing in Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits as one of Lolth's allies, Vlad occupies a castle in The Nightworld, a sunless realm located in an alternative part of the Prime Material Plane imediately beyond a portal from the Demonweb. In addition to his powers, Vlad is also a 15th level magic-user, with all that entails.

I first started refereeing toward the very tail end of 1977, using our kit-bashed 'edition' of D&D - the Holmes blue box, the 1e Monster Manual, Blackmoor, and The Arduin Grimoire - so right from the giddyup I'd used AD&D monsters with character levels, but seeeing a vampire magic-user in an official module almost three years later was still pretty cool to teenage me.

This whole concept of monsters who were once human, or human-adjacent, touches on the notion that the most dangerous and terrifying creatures lurking in the dark places of our imaginations are funhouse mirror images of ourselves - the horror of Jordan Peele's Us, for example, leans in hard on this. I suppose Nietzsche's, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," applies here as well. Monsters who were once human, or are similar to humans in outlook, increase the range of motivations available in presenting the challenge - they can even imply a familiarity.