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.

#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.

#RPGaDay2024 for 21 August: Classic campaign

Today's prompt: Classic campaign

Classic PUBLISHED campaign? The Giants campaign for 1e AD&D. Just well thought out with terrific locations and a fun backstory. I got to experince the modules as both a player and a referee.

Classic AD HOC campaign? Our 2e Boot Hill campaign a few years back, in which we strung together the five published modules for the game as a single camapign set in southeast New Mexico c. 1873 to 1875.

Classic HOMEBREW campaign? Merchant princes with LBB Traveller - started with a free trader and worked our way up to a 2K or 3K dton hauler plus a patrol escort for security. Our last trading mission brought home close to a billion credits profit!

#RPGaDay2024 for 20 August: Amazing adventure

Today's prompt: Amazing adventure

Released in 1979 by Phoenix Games, The Lost Abbey of Calthonwey is my favorite published adventure because it does so many things well. The abbey and the dungeon beneath it are thoughtfully designed as both an intriguing environment to explore and a space for adventure. It leaves open the possibility of further adventure with undefined lower levels upon which the referee can expand. It has a terrific backstory that allows it to be dropped into a homebrew campaign. It's filled with non-player characters with motivations and relationships that reward players who didn't take Charisma as a dump stat.

What makes it stand out for me is how the design of the abbey itself reflects the events of the backstory. Spaces built for a purpose by the brothers are re-purposed in ways that are interesting and make sense. This is a really big thing for me, as it adds a feeling of history to the location that doesn't involve timelines or pages and pages of exposition - it's something the adventurers can see in front of them rather than having it read to them. I'm not sure how much I did this before Lost Abbey, but it's been something I include when designing a feature in a setting ever since: how has this place changed since it was built? what are visible clues to its builders and their intended purpose?

#RPGaDay2024 for 19 August: Sensational session

Today's prompt: Sensational session

The next one. Always the next one.

#RPGaDay2024 for 17-18 August: Two-fer Again!

Saturday's prompt: An engaging RPG community
Sunday's prompt: Memorable moment of play

The RPG Pub is my go-to for gaming-talk and more recently running a Flashing Blades play-by-post. It's a good mix of useful site features, outstanding moderation, and a critical mass of posters who aren't completely full of crap.

My most memorable moment of play is only dimly remembered: my first character was a fighter, playing blue box D&D, and he got punked by an orc or something. That wasn't the memorable part, clearly. What's memorable to me is the feeling of grabbing the dice and making a new character, to keep exploring the dungeon. It was in that moment my lifelong conviction that adventure games are about the setting, not my character, took hold. Adventurers come and go, but the dungeon remains.

#RPGaDay2024 for 16 August: Quick to learn . . . or not

Today's prompt: Quick to learn

Honestly, I got nothin'.

So let's go to the alternative topic generator. For the 16th, the alternative topic is Dungeon, and I roll an eight: Present an idea for a Random Encounter.

Dungeon. Random encounter. Okay then.

First, I need a random encounter, so I'll go to the tables in the back of Flashing Blades. One of the dungeons - and yes, there are more than one - in my campaign is located in the basement of the hôtel de ville - city hall. I roll a 5; the encounter is with a Lawyer and a possible Patron. The offered patronage is a 7: "The Patron wishes to have a message taken to someone in a dangerous position (a prisoner in the Bastille, perhaps, or a soldier on the front)." Perfect.

Next, what's the story of this encounter? I grab a handful of Rory's Story Cubes - since this patronage is about delivering a message, I grab the Voyages collection for inspiration and roll the following: Amoeba, Spectacles, Puzzle Piece, Map, and Domed City. Oh, this could be good.

A procureur - procurator, a legal professional like a solicitor - named M. Bondurant approaches the adventurers with a proposition: he needs a prisoner in the dungeon to look (Spectacles) at a document and confirm whether it's genuine or not. If it is, the procureur believes the document will be exculpatory when presented to the magistrate, but the gaolers will not let him see his client, by order of the consuls - aldermen. If the adventurers can get the document to the prisoner to confirm its provenance - bribing the guards is trivially easy - Bondurant will be very grateful; a small satchel of louis d'or and free legal advice will be offered for their trouble. If asked why he cannot see his client, Bondurant will claim that one of the consuls holds a petty grudge against the procureur from a previous case.

The aforementioned document is a key to a map (Map) in Bondurant's possession. The key is written in a code (Puzzle) that only the prisoner, a renegado - corsair, or pirate - named D'Enfer can decipher. The map is to a city in Barbary (Domed City) where a great jewel stolen by D'Enfer is hidden and it's Bondurant's intention to retrieve it; he also intends to double-cross D'Enfer and leave him to his fate at the hands of the consuls.

Somewhere in here is a disease (Amoeba) - in the dungeon? in the corsair city? - that presents a threat to the adventurers, or D'Enfer, or Bondurant, or everyone. Will D'Enfer share the contents of the key with the adventurers? Will the renegado attempt to double-cross Bondurant by enlisting the adventurers to recover the jewel? Will the adventurers try to put one over on both the procureur and the corsair?

#RPGaDay2024 for 15 August: Great character gear

Today's prompt: Great character gear

I'm a bit obsessive about playing dress-up with my characters.

I want to know what they wear, what it looks like, what it's made of, if it's patched, embroidered, previously owned, how it changes with the weather and the seasons. I want to know about their accessories - jewelry, hat bands, knife sheaths, spurs, baldrics, kerchiefs, plumes. I want to know what's in their pockets - a whetstone, a pack of chewing gum, a jackknife, a pocket comb, a string of rosary beads, an engraved silver matchsafe, an old love letter.

And truth be told, this goes beyond just clothing. My Flashing Blades character has a "library card" - the index card on which I keep track of all the books in his collection. My Boot Hill character ordered custom saddle, boots, spurs, chaps, and gunbelts, all with embossed crescent moons in honor of his last name, Luna, and when he received a charro suit as a gift, the silver conchos were moons as well. My Traveller free trader captain designed his crew uniforms including the patches for his ship and his trading company; the same logos were painted on the ship and its air/raft, and on the walls of his office in his cabin.

A big part of what immerses me in a setting is material culture, "the aspect of culture manifested by the physical objects and architecture of a society." I love authors who tell me Arbuckles is the brand name on a sack of coffee beans, or directors and set dressers who put bottles of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda in their characters' hands. It draws me into the world, brings it to life, makes it real, and a bit of obsessive styling or collecting does the same thing for my characters.

#RPGaDay2024 for 14 August: Compelling characters

Today's prompt: Compelling characters

As a player, I'm very strongly a Develop-In-Play guy, letting characterisation emerge through the events of the game rather than trying to have a strong sense of who my character is right from the giddyup. That's a little tougher as a referee, especially with my emphasis on intrigue - a big part of my prep is creating a social milieu for the players to explore - so my approach to non-player characters is a bit more like many gamers approach their own player characters.

So what are my basics for creating non-player characters with whom players are likely to interact?

• Relationships: characters have spouses, children, siblings, close and distant relations, coworkers, friends, romantic partners, allies, rivals.
• Goals: characters have personal preoccupations, avocations, ambitions.
• Strengths and weaknesses: characters have abilities and deficiencies, insight and blind spots, mastery and inexperience.
• Quirks: characters have hobbies, interests, habits, 'a distincitive way of looking at things.'

It doesn't take much to do this, honestly; because of my extensive use of random reactions and morale rolls, my goal is to "prep to improvise," so often just the non-player character's basic attributes - and I lean heavily on generic characters for this - plus a couple of tags or keywords or something can be enough to help maintain consistency in characterisation.

In my experience, non-player characters should feel like real people living in a real world, and my prep and referee roleplaying is toward that end.

#RPGaDay2024 for 13 August: Evocative environments

Today's prompt: Evocative environments

Way back when I came up with random dueling locations - I present to you these fields of honor . . .

This Field of Honor
F is for Field of Honor
Yet Another Field of Honor

#RPGaDay2024 for 12 August: RPG with well supported campaigns

Today's prompt: RPG with well supported campaigns

There are many roleplaying games out there with literally dozens of campaign modules.

Flashing Blades has exactly one. But it's a corker.

An Ambassador's Tales by game designer Mark Pettigrew put the player characters in the service of a French diplomat and agent of the Cardinal (Richelieu or Mazarin, no matter), and together they travel the length and breadth of Europe in the service of the King. The adventure sees the player characters visit Habsburg Austria, the Serene Republic of Venice (at Carnival, no less), Spain, the Dutch United Provinces, and finally England.

There's a lot to like about this adventure - action, intrigue, terrific locations, three-dimensional antagonists - but my favorite part is the potential rewards the adveturers may receive at the end. The campaign fulfills the promise in the core rules that social and professional advancement shouldn't come exclusively from die rolls. Characters may receive promotions, be knighted, and earn gold as a result of their efforts in the service of France, and it's something I keep in mind as I run FB, looking for opportunities for someone to step in and send a character to the head of the class.

#RPGaDay2024 for 10-11 August: TV and One Shots

Saturday's prompt: RPG you'd like to see on TV
Sunday's prompt: RPG with well supported one-shots

What roleplaying game would I like to see on TV? Traveller, except I already have Firefly. Flashing Blades, except I already have Zorro. Boot Hill, except I already have Deadwood. GangBusters, except I already have Boardwalk Empire. Chill, except I already have The Night Stalker. Top Secret, except I already have The Man From UNCLE.

So I guess I'm good.

I'm gonna admit I'm not exactly sure what a "well supported one shot" is - how much support does a one-shot adventure need, anyway? I'm guessing they mean games supported by one-shot adventures, in which case I would have to say Traveller leads the pack - and I'm not just talking the incredible run of "classic" little black book adventures, as outstanding as they are. If you've never seen Michael Brown's "2D6 SF Adventures," you're in for a real treat.

I should also mention the adventures for Flashing Blades. A handful of adventures come with the core rules and the High Seas supplement; there are also two volumes of short adventures plus one campaign adventure - more about that on Monday. Like the "classic" Traveller adventures, the adventures for Flashing Blades expand the world and provide the referee with reuseable non-player characters, organizations, and locations - while Traveller's adventures give you starships bases and labs and planets, FB give you taverns and theatres and villas and fencing salles and forts, and they take you to Venice and Spain and Florence and the Netherlands and the Caribbean. FGU packed heck of a lot of refereeing material in its adventures, for which I'm personally very grateful.

#RPGaDay2024 for 9 August: An accessory you'd like to see

Today's prompt: An accessory you'd like to see

A dozen years ago I picked up a book, Barmi: A Mediterranean City Through The Ages, which traces through lavish illustrations the development of a fictional city somewhere on the western Mediterranean littoral. As someone who works in land use planning, I was immediately enthralled, seeing a Stone Age settlement transformed through the years to a modern city. I was also intrigued by the possibility of using Barmi as a ruritania in my Flashing Blades campaign - it took some years, but that's the campaign I'm running right now.

Barmi is in fact only one in a series of books on fictional cities around the world: Lebek, in the Low Countries; San Rafael, in Central America; and Umm El Madayan, on the coast of North Africa, each tracing the development from pre-history to the modern day.

Around the time Honor + Intrigue came out, I was approached about working on some setting-neutral city guides for swashbuckling roleplaying games. I declined - this is my hobby, not my vocation - but if anyone was to ever take on a project like that, for any adventure game in any genre, really, these books would be extraordinary models on which to base them: a timeline of evolving city maps, punctuated by illustrated details about construction and daily life.