And Now For Something Completely Different

I'm participating in another blogging challenge this month, the 31 Day Character Creation Challenge - I opted to make a classic Traveller character each day for the month of January, to populate an encounter table in one of the modules, Beltstrike.

Next year . . . Flashing Blades? A chateau and neighboring village could be fun.

Postmortem

I come to bury my Flashing Blades campaign, not to praise it.

It's been over a month since the last in-character post and while one of the players disappeared from the site altogether back in mid-October, three of four remain active on other forums at RPG Pub, so it's safe to say this campaign has fallen and it can't get up.

It stings, not gonna lie. I started prepping this setting when I ran FB more than a dozen years ago and I put a lot of work into it, and therein may lie the problem. I asked for feedback when things slowed down and only one of the players responded, so I'm left to conjecture, but I strongly suspect I simply bored them to the point of losing interest.

One of my goals when I run a historical tabletop roleplaying game is to capture the feel of the period and I think I just overwhelmed them with exposition, such as lengthy conversations between non-player characters explaining, frex, court jurisdiction in the setting.

This is the sort of stuff the players in my last campaign enjoyed, so it may just be a mismatch between styles; I'm not sure if play-by-post made this more or less problematic. It feels to me that pbp makes this easier because the pace is by necessity more desultory but perhaps not.

I would've appreciated more feedback, to be sure. This is an exception for me, and I hoped to learn from my mistakes, but c'est la vie.

So, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, Sainte-Argène-sur-Barmie. You remain one of my favorite settings, and hopefully your promise may yet be realized at some later date. My blogging pace slowed as the campaign wound down, but I still have a list of topics and some half-written posts to finish, so please continue to check in for more swashbucklery content in the new year.

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.