CIOASIISAG Part 18 - AD&D 2nd Edition - Part 1

April 27th, 2008 by Brack

So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.

AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80’s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.

Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50’s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.

The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).

The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing - I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.

However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.

Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.

I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.

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CIOASIISAG Part 17 - MERP

April 20th, 2008 by Brack

I think I’ve covered all the games my first gaming group played. If I recall any others I’ll have to come back to them. And so onto the first game I played when I joined my second group - MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing as it was known in its unacronymed form.

MERP was created by US company Iron Crown Enterprises, using a simplified version of their Rolemaster system to create an RPG for the lucrative Tolkien licence. I’ll go into Rolemaster (and it’s sci-fi cousin Spacemaster) later, let’s just say the cut down version of the rules was a good move. ICE’s fortunes were pretty much tied to this game, when the license was withdrawn in ‘99 the company only lasted another year.

Due to my lack of interest in Tolkien, I suspect some of the appeal was lost on me. However that also meant I wasn’t ever going to argue “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKED IN THE BOOKS!”. The first session I played involved a bunch of hobbits goofing around in some wizard’s tower. We didn’t play it that often, the GM for the game moved onto AD&D soon after I joined in.

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CIOASIISAG Part Fourteen - Top Secret/SI

February 15th, 2008 by Brack

Top Secret/SI was the second edition of TSR’s not particularly popular spy RPG. The SI stood for Special Intelligence, a fact I am only just learning today. My sleepless nights are now over. I believe our teenage gaming group played this a grand total of three times, all of which I remember as being fun. It was just that we tended to be fickle in our tastes and we still tended towards the old Games Workshop wargames. We played one game using the standard rules, which was very much in the James Bond / Man From UNCLE mold. You played agents of ORION battling the evil espionage group WEB, it was all very sixties spy movie-like, girls, gadgets and glamourous locations.

Then, the other two games were using the adventure settings books they had brought out for it. “Agent 13” was the first, a setting recreating 1920s and 1930s pulp adventures. I’m not sure if this was based on the novels by Flint Dille (GI Joe/Transformers) and David Marconi (GI Joe/Enemy of the State/Die Hard 4.0~!~!) that TSR printed, or vice versa.

The second was F.R.E.E. Lancers by Jeff Grubb, that was plain nutty. Grubb, who’d been behind TSR’s Marvel RPG, spot-welded super powers and cyberpunk onto the espionage genre, resulting in a gloriously goofy mess. I can’t recall the details, but I do remember it being great fun.

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CIOASIISAG Part The Thirteenth - Judge Dredd RPG

January 29th, 2008 by Brack

Now I’m moving into the realm of games that other people ran in my teenage gaming days. Though I did buy myself a copy of this later in life (and sold on ebay for a tidy profit year or so back).

Judge Dredd ran on a set of rules that were kind of WFRPG-lite, and similarly your starting character was pretty useless at everything. However that didn’t really matter, as being a Judge you were still better equipped and skilled than most NPCs you’d encounter. The game really caught the mood of the comic, and for a while was probably the closest thing to an encyclopedia of the Judge Dredd world. Mid-Late 80s Games Workshop had a similar sense of humour to 2000AD and the license was a good fit (though 2000AD was still a little more punk, whereas GW was new wave of British heavy metal). It originally came out as a boxset, later reprinted as a hard back book. Despite it’s all round ace-ness at being Judge Dredd, we never really played it that much, and I only ran it with my later gaming groups on a couple of occasions. It’s a shame as I believe the guy who had it also had the “Slaughter Margin” adventure, which I remember as being a critically acclaimed piece of RPG writing at the time.

Mongoose have a Judge Dredd RPG out nowadays, but I don’t know if that’s the old version updated, or something totally new.

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CIOASIISAG Part 12 - Cyberpunk

January 4th, 2008 by Brack

I picked this up from a RPG shop way out on the outskirts of Peterborough, the name of which I forget, but I remember it had a specialist doll shop round the back run by the owner of the RPG shop’s wife. It was pretty much the only place to get really indie RPGs in the immediate region. Even Boston and Lincoln wouldn’t have the sort of curios this shop had.

And that was what the 1st edition of R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk was. It came in a box with 2 six sided dice and two books. One which had the character generation, background and general rules. And the other was Friday Night Firefight, a standalone set of combat rules that Cyberpunk used. And it was quite the eye opener. Unlike other games I’d played this combat was short and nasty. Even more brutish than WFRP, which was always tempered by how hard it was to actually hit things. Here, hitting things was easy if you were close to the target. And getting hit by a bullet really hurt. And getting hit by lots killed you. This wasn’t a cinematic combat system, there was a definite sense that if your character got into a fight at any time, there was a chance you weren’t going to walk out.

And it felt very punk too (at least compared to later editions), the paper it was printed on was rough, the layout’s clear, but very ghetto in their design. The edge of the pages of my copy hadn’t been properly guillotined. It felt like a zine, especially compared to the slickness of a GW product or the strangely quaint TSR house style. It kicked off a trend for Cyberpunk-ish games, quickly being overshadowed by the luke-warm watered down Cyberpunk of FASA’s Shadowrun (ELVES? THEY AREN’T PUNK!), until the release of more professional Cyberpunk 2020, which is bone-fide classic tabletop RPG and was a deserved success (though it fell afoul of rule bloat through various supplements about 5-6 years into it’s life, which signified the end of it’s lifespan).

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of William Gibson, but I was a big fan of Repo Man and the sourcebook mentioned that as a cyberpunk film. And an article in Fantasia magazine argued that Cyberpunk was dead and that Repo Man was the only true cyberpunk film. And so my games tended to be influenced more by that film, the first Mad Max film and crime dramas than anything from Neuromancer. Indeed the world of the original Cyberpunk RPG was much closer to our own, than later editions which were closer to Gibson’s ouevre and more noticeably - Bubblegum Crisis (the book “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads” admitted that the setting of Cyberpunk 2020 was animemetal, rather than cyberpunk. Good book btw, if you were to run Cyberpunk, that’s the one book you should get alongside the 2020 rulebook. My brief look at 3rd Edition gave me the impression of a poorly laid out, poorly illustrated Snow Crash influenced game. OK this long aside has finished, carry on).

R. Talsorian is still around today, but a shadow of it’s former self, in part due to the RPG market and in part due to head honcho Mike Pondsmith’s Xbox related job. I’ll get to some of their other games later on, as there’s some beauties in there.

Addendum: I also recall our teenage gaming group would on more than one occasion plan what we would do in the event of an apocalypse, and the ensuing collapse of civilization. This kind of thinking also made the dystopia of the Cyberpunk world appealing. I’d like to think this was because we’d grown up in the 80s and had seen things like the BBC’s adaptation of the Day of The Triffids at a young age. But I suspect it is just something all kids do at some point. After all Nostradamus, occult nonsense, being a goth, witchcraft and the like tend to popular among teenagers. Is thinking about doom and gloom entertaining at 14?

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CIOASIISAG Part X - Conan RPG

November 5th, 2007 by Brack

And now I’m getting games I played in that first gaming group, but didn’t own. So these posts will be noticably shorter.

We played this once and all I recall was it involved the most massive dungeon map I can recall seeing, being as it was drawn on sheets of chip paper (we gamed on Sundays in the restaurant of the Fish and Chip shop my friend’s parents owned - “The Crispy Cod”). Ah the nostalgia of that chip shop smell, R-Type arcade machine, playing imported PC-engine games and chip shop buns filled with nice and spicey nik naks and/or refreshers fizzy sweets!

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CIOASIISAG Part 9 - Marvel Super Heroes

November 3rd, 2007 by Brack

These are probably the RPGs I’ve run the most, and written the most material for a campaign for. Which is astounding considering how poor the actual rules are.

Obviously the pull of these games to me was the Marvel license. I’d liked Marvel comics as kid, starting with a Spidey/Ghost Rider UK reprint as a treat as a kid after having to go to London for various tests (the other treat being a Battle Of The Planets transfer kit). Then various second comics picked up in school fairs/jumble sales and the occasional present from my grandmother. Finally there was the UK printing of Secret Wars, Secret Wars II and Spider-Man and ZOIDS.

I kind of forgot about them when I went to secondary school, until WH Smith’s started getting US Marvel comics in. Which coincided with when I got into RPGs. So TSR’s licensed Marvel RPG was a natural draw.

Now the rules were based around this colour coded chart. You rolled percentile dice, the cross referenced the roll on the chart against the value of the statistic you were using. They used this system on various other non-D&D games that TSR released at the time. One of the Gamma World editions used it as did their Conan RPG and Star Frontiers. Possibly the Indiana Jones RPG too. I don’t think Top Secret/SI did, but I could be wrong. I’ll look it up when I get to that one.

Some people liked this system, but I found it a pain. I dislike games with unnecessary work, and cross referencing two numbers on a chart definitely count as too much work. But I still kept hacking away, trying to get a decent campaign going, because I had such Marvel love. And this really was a game for Marvel lovers.

It was essentially OHOTMU the RPG, particularly the Advanced version and it’s supplements. Most of it’s supplements were vast depositories of statistics for Marvel characters both prominent and obscure. And on top of that there were the Gamers Guide To The Marvel Universe books that at the time were arguably better than the information provided by Marvel at the time. At one point I had all but 5 products published in this line (I’ve since disposed of a lot of that material via eBay) and here’s the products I’d recommend if you were interested in playing:

Marvel Advanced Set - The core rule book. The rules aren’t particularly clear and you’ll end up winging a lot of it. Plus there’s not that much scope for character variety.
Ultimate Powers Book - An expanded character creation book. You’ll end up rewriting the character type table, as frankly it’s barking mad, but the range of powers and the rules to use them are expansive.
Realms Of Magic - This was for the Basic set, but the magic rules in the Advanced are, if anything, even worse than the Basic’s. This supplement completely replaces the magic rules and makes them workable.
The MT Modules - This was a 3 part time travel themed campaign by Ray Winninger. A great adventure with a superb meta-gaming climax.
The MX Modules - This was a 4 part campaign based on The Nightmares Of Futures Past story from the X-Men. It’s clever trick is to set the adventure in your hometown. Of course this trick works better when you are in America. I had to pretend Spalding was in Massachusetts when I ran it.
Deluxe City Campaign - This is the only supplement that actually gets around to telling you how to run your own campaign. I think TSR must have thought you were only going to play their published supplements.

Most of these can be downloaded in PDF form for free at MarvelRPG.net

It should be said a lot of my criticisms of the game are in hindsight, back when I started playing I was a lot less critical of game mechanics and more interested in settings. But I do think those flaws held me back in every getting a campaign really off the ground in my first gaming group. I’ll talk about my long-term Marvel campaign when I get around to talking about the SAGA rules Marvel RPG, but here’s some teenage brain spill about the characters we created at secondary school.

AXE-MAN - This was the first character I created using the Basic set. His power was that his hand turned into an Axe. I was 13, this seemed cool to me then. I believe he was a mutant and that his background was that he had been asked to join the X-Men but was thrown out for being too cool.
TWISTED SOULS - This was the superhero team that my players in my first group came up with they were:

MR MYSTERY - a robotic Rorschach clone, with Hank Pym powers
ACE OF SPADES - a mystic swordsman
TWISTER - a mutant with wind based powers
and there was a Captain Marvel-type whose name I forget. The twist was that he was a cat who turned into a human superhero.

THE WRESTLER - a teleporting wrestler
MEK-A-NEK - a blatent copy of the He-Man character
ALIEN SKATER - The HR Giger creation. BUT ON A SKATEBOARD!

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CIOASIISAG Part 8: Ghostbusters ~ A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game

October 18th, 2007 by Brack

Here’s another game that passed from hand to hand. So much that there are parts of the copy I own that I have never seen, lost somewhere in the recesses of Lincolnshire, never to be seen.

This for my money is the best RPG based on a licensed property. Yes, better than West End Games other, more popular game that was based on that other more popular film series. It’s written by the people responsible for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. This is the key to it’s greatness. As good a representation of the mood and ideas of the first Ghostbusters film in game form, it is also a wonderful parody of the Call of Cthulhu game. That second part wasn’t obvious to me straight away as it was probably another 3-4 years before I played CofC.

The rules are nice and simple, and if you want to play the characters from the film you can be playing it pretty much straight out the box. It had a bunch of adventures with it, plus ideas for a whole lot more and a handy bunch of off the peg NPCs for all occasions.

There’s an adventure you could buy for the game that I played as a player that I enjoyed greatly - “Ghost Toasties” - mainly for the fact it involves fighting the spirits of cereal packet mascots.

There was a second edition to tie into Ghostbusters 2, but much like that film it looked like it sucked a lot of the fun that made the first so great. Ghostbusters 2 is awful, and it boggles the mind that people still clamour for a third. Did you people see Evolution? Have you heard the commentary on the first film where Ramis and Reitman discuss Aykroyd’s mind boggling insane/awful original concept for the film? I am certain a third film would be a bad idea.

Now, on the other hand, a proper release of the Lorenzo Music era Real Ghostbusters episodes (which can be tied to the RPG via way of Larry Ditillio and CofC) would be good idea.

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Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems Part 7: Stormbringer

October 9th, 2007 by Brack

As I mentioned before, I got Paranoia free through a White Dwarf subscription as GW got rid of their stock of their UK printings of US games. Also offered was Stormbringer, which a friend got. I think I played this once or twice as a player. There was an adventure called “Madcap Laughs” in White Dwarf that we played through. Eventually through various swaps, it ended up my possession (I think I still have it today).

I’ve neglected to mention so far that this is a RPG based on the Elric novels of Michael Moorcock. And that I’ve never read an Elric novel. I remember borrowing a Corum novel from the library around this time, and not being overly keen. I’ve since come to realise that I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy in the world. But despite my vague ignorance of Moorcock’s work (though I think I’ve read some of his comic work since) and my disposition towards fantasy, I got some decent games out of this. While not being familiar with the source material, the themes appealed to me at the time, having been exposed to them via other creators who had been inspired by Moorcock (mainly Grant Morrison).

And the game mechanic is a nice one. It’s the pared down version of the Runequest rules that were used by Chaosium for various games such as Call of Cthulhu (more on which later), combined with a magic system centred on the summoning of various entities, and the binding of said entities. There’s a scenario in the rule book that would be a key adventure in my second groups’ games, based around a cosmic gambling parlour. I now wonder if my fellow GM in that group, Barry, had taken to heart the bizarre random occurances in said adventure, as the games he’d run for years to follow were heavy with items and situations that created hundreds of unpredictable events. Stuff, like halls of mirrors where each mirror would have a different set of random effects for the person looking in it. He must have spent ages writing up chart after chart of this stuff.

Annoyingly we kind of lost contact with the chap after he said he was moving Cardiff, he then rang me a week later, while I was out, saying he was actually living in Edinburgh. And as he never left me a number, that was the last we heard of him.

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CIOASIISAG Part 6: Warhammer Fantasy Role Play

September 19th, 2007 by Brack

An obvious choice really given the Games Workshop-centric introduction I had to roleplaying. Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, or WFRP as was the ugly acronym, was a role playing game extrapolated from the rules and background of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle wargame.

And boy could you tell.

The rules mechanisms were mired in it’s origins, full of cumbersome modifiers for combat, yet fairly simple for everything else. Combat early in the game was quite deadly, if anything actually hit you. Later in the game, combat was still quite deadly, it just tended to be over quite quickly as you and what you fought were better at hitting things.

What it did well was the background.

Set in a fantastic version of Renaissance Germany, the mood of the game was close to Call of Cthulhu with a dash of Stormbringer. The characters were the common man (or dwarf or elf etc…) invariably set against cultists worship chaos gods. The game boasted a huge range of character professions the players could move through, later professions more familiarly the heroes of fantasy fiction, but starting professions included such lower class positions as Rat Catcher.

The approach of battling chaos cults was reinforced by the Enemy Within campaign that GW released to support the game. Rather than the dungeon exploring and monster killing you’d find in a D&D adventure, the focus was more on detective work and political intrigue.

I ran this game a fair bit with my first gaming group and briefly returned to it with the second group of gamers I was part of.  It was ignored by GW for a long time, indeed when White Dwarf stopped publishing WFRP material was around the time our interest in tabletop gaming was overtaken by an interest in Japanese videogames. WFRP was eventually revived in 1995, before dying again in 2002, and then revived again in 2004.

I still have a copy of the first edition, even though I can’t have played it for more than 10 years.

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