Inspriational Imagery

This is so awesome it hurts! Is it a trap, or just an interesting doorway? A gateway to another dimension, or the maw of a gigantic demon? Who can say?
Check out more of his art here.

Miniatures Monday

Deep beneath the earth, the Crimson Sorcerer searches for arcane treasures!

Miniatures Monday

Behold the fury of the cave troll!

Inspirational Imagery

This image from the old Grenadier "Dungeon Explorers" set, really captures what I think of as an old-school dungeon in a way that graph paper maps rarely do. Note the winding stairs and the multiple dark passageways leading to parts unknown. What dangers lurk in the shadows just out of sight? And who are the two people at the bottom of the steps? Advanced scouts or rival adventurers seeking to snatch the treasure from our intrepid heroes?

Miniatures Monday

He is the baddest hombre in the west. He is.....Manchego, the cheesiest gun in the west.

Miniatures Monday

A terrible picture of a terrible troll!

Imagination Gaming

Back in the day, much of gaming happened in our minds. Tabletop RPGs we to a great extent designed this way. We had thin rulebooks with poor artwork, some dice and maybe a few poorly cast miniature figures. There wasn't much else to have early on, so we had to imagine, based on our GMs descriptions and our own imaginations, what the dungeon looked like, what the orcs looked like, etc. Sure, most everyone had some common basis for things like orcs and dragons, but everyone "saw" things in their own particular way. The game happened in our minds and to some extent was a personalized experience.
Things were much the same with early computer games. Due to the limitations of computer graphics in the late 1970's and early 1980's, imagination played an important role in the enjoyment of early computer games for many of us. We weren't a square on the screen, we were and adventurer! Those weren't badly designed ducks on the screen, they were dragons! The dungeons of Wernda weren't glowing static lines, they were dank stone chambers. The computer presented representations of the world. It was up to our imaginations to flesh them out and add life to them. It was a grand time. But of course, times changed. Things "improved" in the computer world, and I'll admit that going from being a square to a 30x30 pixel vaguely humanoid shape was pretty nice. Even in the tabletop world, things got "better". Better sculpting gave us more detailed miniatures. Artwork in our rulebooks improved and we got color! Things were great.
But the computers didn't stop. Graphics kept getting better, games kept getting bigger and more involved. As things got more realistic, the need for imagination lessened. When a dragon looks like a dragon, there isn't much need to imagine that it looks any different from the way that it is presented on the screen. tabletop games were falling behind.
So tabletop games worked to keep up. Rules became more detailed, artwork became even more realistic and polished. Combat became more tactical and terrain came into more common use. Tabletop roleplaying games tried to look more impressive, but there was still a lot of imagination required for the tabletop experience.
Computer games are fairly ubiquitous these days. Tabletop roleplaying games are not. Kids these days don't need to imagine what their fantasy worlds look like, they already know, and those worlds look the same to everyone.

Free: Swords & Wizardry Whitebox Edition

Old-school goodness, can be yours for the low, low price of free. :-)

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Miniatures Monday

This week's installment of Miniatures Monday features the heroic barbarian doing what he does best.

Welcome to Miniatures Monday

One of my plans for the new year is to paint more miniatures, so I've decided to start posting the ones that I complete in 2010. My goal for the year is 52 miniatures in 52 weeks. I doubt that I will achieve such a lofty goal, but I'm going to give it a shot. So, welcome to the first installment of "Miniatures Monday"!

I thought that it would be fitting to give some love to the lead and start with an old-school miniature from the Grenadier Fighting Men set.

Be careful what you wish for.

It seems that a lot of folks tend to laud Paizo and damn Wizards of the Coast, some even going so far as to profess the hope that WOCT will fail. to those people who wish for WOTC's death, I say, take a look at the Pathfinder rulebooks and the Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. WOTC prints their books in the United States. Paizo print Pathfinder in China. Now this isn't a xenophobic "Buy American" rant, and I'm not saying that one is any better than the other, but rather just that the impact of a company failing can go far beyond the company itself.

The Legend of Manchego!

Gary Sent us. No, seriously, he did.

It's hard to believe that Gary Gygax has been gone for a year. Sure, Gary Gygax has been gone for a year now, but the games that he created live on in one form or another. I know people who claim that Gary had long since become irrelevant, but I think that's crap. He was the driving force in the creation of a hobby that I continue to love 30 years after I first head about the game during an all night ice storm on a January Boy Scout camping trip. He was always gracious and quick to answer my silly discussion board questions, and he loved the hobby that he helped to create. If there is an afterlife, I hope that Gary's found a nice table in an out-of-the way corner with Don Kaye and Tom Moldvay to sling some dice. So go out there and roll some dice, talk in funny voices and pretend to be elves, dwarves, gnomes, or whatever you're in to. And don't forget, when you meet the goblins, tell them that Gary sent you. ;-)

The Rules vs. the Game

I've spent a lot of time lately looking over rule books trying to pick a game system to run, and it's finally stuck me that I've been going about it all wrong. I've been looking at rules and really not thinking about the game. The rules are NOT the game. The rules are a framework around which the game happens and spending too much time over-thinking the rules can kill the game.

Now I've never been much of a slave to the rules. In fact I don't much care for the rules. Oh sure, I buy a lot of rule books but in the end, the rules don't much interest me. I'm far more interested in the sense of atmosphere that a game creates with me. Of all of the games that I've ever played, the only one that I would truly say I "knew" was D&D way back in the day. I could barely remember the multiplication tables, but man did I know D&D. I had the combat tables committed to memory. I knew the saving throws for all the classes. I barely needed the books for anything except to provide inspiration, and they did that in spades. The artwork and the writing, while considered by many today to be substandard, still evokes a sense of wonder that I can't find in many other places.

Time passed and I played and ran other games. Gaming culture shifted and I found myself looking for rule-sets that would allow me to tell the types of stories that I wanted to tell. And that's where I fell off the boat. Role playing games are many things to many people. Lots of folks especially today really want to tell deep stories with interesting characters, and that's great for them. I used to want to do that too, and in fact I still want to but now I write fiction rather than try to turn my games into my fiction.

My idea of gaming isn't about a gamemaster telling his story, it's about a bunch of people finding out what the story is and having fun while they do it. The story may be deep and interesting, but it may just as easily be a story about creeping around an ancient ruins and looting the hell out of everything they find. They key is to get a group of people and have fun playing a game.

Games for Old-school Dungeon Crawling

I've put together a quick summary of three retro style games that I think work best for old fashioned dungeon crawling.  This is just designed to highlight their similarities/differences and is in no way intended to be a review or criticism of any of them.  I've placed them in alphabetical order so as not to indicate any preference by order.

Castles & Crusades

Overview:  A D20-light version of AD&D.  It follows a number of the current D20 conventions, while trying to stay rules-light.  There are no skill lists, just class skills.  Armor class is handled in the modern ascending format.  It is a race/class based system with all classes open to all races.  It's rules-light in today's terms, but is less a retro clone than a pared down version of D&D 3.5 with AD&D sensibilities.

My Assessment:  Probably the best choice for 3.5/4e players looking to scale back the complexity of their games while maintaining some familiar connection to the rules that they know.  A good game from a good company, but the most complex of the games discussed here. 

Labyrinth Lord  

Overview:  A retro clone of the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert D&D rules from 1981.  Race and class are not treated separately.  Dwarves, elves and halflings are their own class, with dwarves and halflings basically being fighters and elves being fighter magic users.

My Assessment:  A great choice for folks who cut their teeth on Moldvay and Cook and are after a classic dungeon crawl experience without a lot of overhead.  A nice complete package and free to boot.

Swords & Wizardry 

Overview:  This is for the most part a cleaned up, better organized version of OD&D (Original D&D).  It actually comes in two flavors, regular Swords & Wizardry and Swords & Wizardry White Box Edition.  The regular version includes that later stat bonuses for strength and dexterity and constitution , while the white box version retains the original idea that only charisma has any direct bonuses.  Demihumans are, in keeping with the OD&D rules, more limited in level progression than in Labyrinth Lord or Castles & Crusades.  

My Assessment:  Jump into the wayback machine and see how the grognards played D&D back in 1974-79.  Probably the best choice for people who want to house-rule their games a lot.  The rules found here adhere most closely to the old-school "guidelines" approach.  The Erol Otus style cover of the regular edition and that it's freely available are pluses too.