#RPGaDay: Day 8

8. What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2 hours or less?

Answer: I don’t have a good answer for this one. There are potentially a lot of games out there I haven’t played that would facilitate this, but I haven’t heard of them. The average game of Monopoly lasts at least two hours. I think this boils down more to a style of play or particular type of adventure/mission. If the idea is to “finish” the session at place of relative resolution in 120 minutes, you’d either need to present a small-scale, compact challenge or something incredibly straightforward and potentially deadly. Something like the characters start the session captured in a house/stronghold/dungeon and they need to escape before “x” happens which will kill them if they haven’t escaped.

Alternate question: What do you look for in a review of an RPG?

Answer: I’ll answer an alternate question today too since I didn’t have much to offer for the regular question. What I want out of any review of an RPG are the following:

• A detailed description the genre or setting of the game is given and how similar or distinct it is from other games in that genre/setting.
• Ideally, the reviewer has read through the entire book/product, if not actually played a session or two, and can point out interesting details.
• In a video review, I like to see a flip through to get a sense of the layout and the frequency and nature of the artwork.
• I want to hear about how complex the core mechanics are. How much crunch is there?
• How long does it take to create a character? Is there a ton of depth? Too much?
• How much mileage will I get out of this product? Is this a run-once-and-never-again module, or is this a campaign setting that will provide hours/days/weeks of gameplay?
• The reviewer should be able to be critical and considered even when giving a positive review.
• Finally, I want to know how much it costs, what formats it’s available in, and where I can get it.

My favorite reviewer is probably Questing Beast. I think he pretty much does everything I mention above in a brief and articulate manner. Here's his review of Maze of the Blue Medusa.

#RPGaDay: Day 7

Question 7: What was your most impactful roleplaying game session?

Answer: I'm interpreting this question's use of "impact" as the most formative. Not necessarily formative in the sense of being first, though in my case it was an early experience. The session I most remember running was the module B7 Rahasia early on in my gaming. It was the first real adventure I ran with friends beyond random dungeon crawling devoid of story hooks and purpose. It was impactful at the time, not just because of the fun we had, but because of how much I learned running it.

The tropes we take for granted as part of D&D were still new and fresh to me, and something like an exotic elvish cult brainwashed by an evil cleric seemed wild beyond my imagination. The bone golem, the three witch sisters, the creepiness of the entire temple - all of it has stayed with me. It showed me what an RPG could be and set a standard I tried to hold myself to. This module doesn't get very much attention as the Basic series generally gets forgotten about after Keep on the Borderlands, but to me, this one's a classic.

#RPGaDay: Day 6

6. You can game everyday for a week. Describe what you'd do!

Answer: This is probably going to sound lame to a lot of people, but if I could game for a entire week I would run a group through the Queen of the Spiders series. I never owned them back in the day and it took me a while to collect them. By the time I had them all I had been out of gaming for about 15 years. I've always felt like I missed out on a gaming rite of passage that so many people had experienced. Using my week of gaming to finally experience it for myself would be a great way to check that milestone off my list. I don't own the proper Queen of the Spiders super-module, but I have the Against the Giants 3-in-1, reissues of the three individual, monochrome Giant books that came in TSR's 25th anniversary box, the full-color reissues of D1-2 and D3, and the final Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

As it happens, the series works out perfectly by taking one module a day for the whole week.

Day 1: G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
Day 2: G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl
Day 3: G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King
Day 4: D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth
Day 5: D2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa
Day 6: D3 Vault of the Drow
Day 7: Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits

I'm sure I'd be exhausted by the end of the week, and there's no telling if the group would make it all the way through. This series is the quintessential railroad adventure with one module leading into the next along the prescribed story line. You could almost lay blame for all bad story gaming at the feet of this colossal expedition. At the same time, there are so many classic touchstones to these adventures including the introduction of the Underdark, the Drow, and real interplanar gaming.

YouTuber, Captcorajus, has a great breakdown of the series with several videos giving a good critique of the things that work and those that don't. As he points out, this railroad kind of ends in a bit of a trainwreck, but he offers some great ideas to make the series as a whole live up to its potential. I'd love to take a crack it.

#RPGaDay: Day 5

5. Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

Answer: I've been looking forward to this question all this week. Nothing inspires you to pick up, buy, and play a game like a great cover. The spirit of a game is more than just a visual representation of the individual elements and mechanics involved. A game's spirit is a visual manifestation of its inspiration.

My pick isn't a current game. In fact, it came out over 35 years ago. And yet, for me, the artwork on this box and its red book captures the essence of the game better than anything else before or since. There's been a lot of talk around "weird fantasy" in the OSR community the past few years and what that term means. Erol Otus' beautiful, evocative painting epitomizes that mix of sword & sorcery with strange otherness that perfectly defines the original, weird flavor of D&D. It's a vision I've chased ever since and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone. I think a good deal of the nostalgia and romanticism of the OSR can be found directly in this image. The eerie, magenta dungeon, the subterranean dragon, and the two bold adventures may not actually represent your typical D&D game, but in my opinion it is suffuse with the spirit of the game.

My honorable mention might go to the cover of Frank Mentzer's Basic red box. Again, it's so immediately associated with the game, a touchstone for so many like myself playing in the 80s. It, too, is such a great, iconic cover. Artwork for most modern games typically don't inspire me with their heavily-muscled superhero bodies. Either way, we can all agree that a PDF can't do a great cover justice like a physical book or box can.

#RPGaDay: Day 4

4. Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

Answer: None. This past year has been a slow journey back into the hobby. I'm finally going to run my first game in years in three weeks. I've played in a few one-shots over the past couple of decades, but I never made the time to start gaming again. This past year was the first time in years that I wasn't playing music in a band which meant playing a game with other people - instead of just looking at my books - finally became a possibility. Finally after talking my coworkers' ears off they convinced me to bite the bullet and name a date to play. As one of them said, my hobby had become too much of a hobby.

I'm excited to be back in action soon. I've got a half a dozen books from Lulu showing up tomorrow which should fuel the fire. Hopefully 2017/2018 will see me playing a bunch of new games.

#RPGaDay: Day 3

3. How do you find out about new RPGs?

Answer: Today’s question is pretty straightforward and has a relatively easy answer. Thirty years ago my answer would have been that I found out about new games from Dragon magazine, my local game shops, and friends’ older brothers.

Now I chiefly find out about games from YouTube channels I subscribe to: Runeslinger, Dark Age of Role Playing, Ivanmike1968, Questing Beast, Eric from Bloat Games, Old Man Grognard, Samwise Seven RPG, among others. As lame as it sounds, Amazon’s algorithm has also helped me find the kind of games I’ve been excited about. I found out about Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord just trolling for old modules. The fact that I find out about new games chiefly through YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook has given me pause.

Since I’ve come back to the hobby I’ve noticed the kind of games I’m interested in are not often stocked at the local shops. The couple of game stores I’ve been in recently seem to feature shelves full of the two big heavyweights (5e and Pathfinder) like Coke and Pepsi in a convenient store. A lot of the small press OSRs I want to check out are usually available only through print on demand which I guess means it’s not profitable for my local brick and mortar to carry it because not enough people are interested in it.

Even though I’m getting information through these large corporate platforms (YouTube, Amazon, Facebook), it’s being disseminated by the RPG community itself. This online community has made me realize that I’m not the only person looking for something outside the standard Coke and Pepsi choices and that’s made a huge difference.

Here are some of my favorite YouTube videos that have turned me on to new games recently. Thanks guys!

#RPGaDay: Day 2

2. What is an RPG you would like to see published?

Answer: Day two of this celebration gives us maybe one of the best, most telling questions. Most of us are gamers, but very few of us are game designers. It asks us to plum our imaginations for the type of game we dream to see in production.

This question can be interpreted in a few different ways. It might be a kind of system or a hybrid of systems that you enjoy playing. It might be a game from an underserved genre or a particular milieu. It could be an IP that you think would make a good game. It might be something that hasn't been in print in ages and you'd like to see make a comeback.

My pick is a bit of all the above. I would love to see the nearly completed Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium actually get released. I know the classic board game has a legion of devoted followers, but I always thought that universe would be perfect for an RPG.

Here's a link to an old Gizmodo article with some of the details about how the game almost came to be, before Hasbro killed it. It sounds great, but like Jodorowsky's Dune, it remains something that will forever remain in the what-could-have-been category.

Maybe someone's actually made a Dune RPG and I'm just ignorant of it. If anyone knows of such a game or a decent hack please let me know.

My back-up answer is super nerdy, and I might actually have a solve for it. I think an RPG based around the setting of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet would be amazing. I'm guessing I might be the only person in the world looking to play it, however.

It's an immediately pre-WWII setting based in the Egyptian city of Alexandria where Western ex-pats and spies wage a war of intrigue and secrets amongst clashing religions, cultures, and politics. Nothing is what it seems and the narrative changes depending on the point of view the story is told from. I'm thinking about looking at using Hollow Earth as a way to approach it. We'll see.