Rumor Mongering

According to IGN (and if you read it on the internet, it must be true...) then these guys



will be appearing on a big screen near you (or small screen if you just download it, I suppose).

It'd be cool. Especially, if, as the rumor says, Christopher Nolan will be in charge of managing all the lead-in movies the way Iron Man et al. are leading up to an Avengers movie.

It'll probably end up being BS, but a geek can hope.

More musings on a Maritime Campaign

The basic setup would be to make a big old map with lots of rugged coasts, peninsulas, straights, fjords, etc. along the borders, then several archipelago throughout the middle. I imagine using 4 or 6 sheets of hex paper for the sea maps, including a few Bosporus/Dardanelles/Pillars of Hercules type narrow straights dividing some sea areas from others.

For archipelagos, I plan to just transpose the layouts of some real world ones--the Caribbean islands, the Aegean, parts of Indonesia or the Philippines.

The mainland coastal areas will have Greco-Roman, Norse/Celtic, Middle-Eastern/East African, Meso-American, and maybe Chinese/SE Asian and Sub-Saharan African type regions. Various islands may have similar cultures, or may be totally bizarre or unique.

I plan to mine any sort of nautical source material--Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, the Vinland Sagas, Sindbad the Sailor, any sort of pirate stories, Captain Nemo, etc. Whether it be literature or film, I'll likely steal it. So Nemo, Jack Sparrow, Jason, and Sindbad will likely all be running around and encounterable.

I'm thinking now, start all characters at around 8000 XP, so Fighters are at Hero level, and making each player role up 4 or 5 characters at the beginning, who are all on a 'hero ship' similar to the Argo, and give them a macguffin quest that will lead them to explore the seas until they find whatever they're after, sail home, and take out the king who sent them on the quest in the first place to get rid of them. This way, everyone's got a few extra characters on the ship if someone dies. And they can pick up more replacements if they land in ports.

Visual Appendix N of my 11 Year Old Self

I wrote a while back about some of the books that inspired my earliest gaming, back in 1984-85. Here is a look at some of the movies, TV shows, and video games that inspired me. Since pictures speak louder than words, it's a literal look:

Tarrantino, Brooks, Gilliam

A few years back, when I was in Japan, I was part of the Ebisu Gaming Club. Founding member, in fact. It wasn't as pretentious as it sounds, actually. I came into contact first with "GMSteve" and then "Angryman" on the WotC message boards. They both lived in Tokyo and wanted to game, I was close enough, as was my friend Gene. So the 4 of us would get together once a month on Sundays for 7-8 hour game sessions, mostly of RPGs (and primarily d20 games, as we were into them at the time) but board games or other things too. A few other people would join on occasion, and Gene finally moved back to Canada and a fellow named Tim took his place.

We went through lots of short RPG campaigns. We'd start off with a bang, then fizzle out shortly. d20 Conan ended on the 3rd session when Pete (Angryman) got drunk on mead while DMing and suddenly poison-weaponed Picts were swarming everywhere and TPK. Our Eberron campaign died after one too many too-tough encounters nearly wiped the party of characters we were heavily invested in and didn't want to lose. My d20 Future Aliens/Predator game was meant to be short, and we actually completed it and then moved on to other things. We tried out a "narrative" game Steve was working on, in several incarnations, but it never seemed to go right.

By the end, just before Steve found out he'd have to move back to the States for his company, he was heavily into the Forge's creations but also jonesing to get back to some BX D&D--which finally broke me of the d20 craze and made me realize that BECM was what I really wanted to play.

Anyway, we often discussed just why we had so much fun but couldn't keep at one game/campaign/system long enough to really get into it. One day, Steve offered the following assessment:

Steve's gaming style was Quentin Tarrantino. He liked it cool, edgy, and violent.

Pete's gaming style was Terry Gilliam. He liked it weird and funky.

My gaming style was Mel Brooks. I liked it odd but humorous.

Yes, my Aliens/Predator game was filled with some of the most tense moments in our gaming, but also with the most silly and gut-busting funny ones, too.

I think I've lost that Brooks charm lately. I think I need a bit more "Stupid" in my "Retro."

So anyone else out there got a style similar to a movie director?

Musings on a Maritime Campaign

Initial thoughts on running a campaign where the PCs are all sailors on a ship of some sort--

Lots of useful modules out there. Isle of Dread, Drums on Fire Mountain, War Rafts of Kron, not to mention being able to stick land-based modules on some island somewhere.

Just give the players lots of rumors, and let them sail around the sea until they find something interesting. Could be really easy, and really fun.

A New Hope

Last night, I brought my Wizkids Pirates of the "X" game to the Board Game Group. It was the first time I'd brought it, and the first time to play for everyone else. During the game, Alex was busy thinking of ways to modify the game, and I showed him some of the alternate ideas my old group in Japan and I had come up with.

I also mentioned that the little cardboard ships would be great for a maritime D&D campaign. Alex mentioned that there aren't rules for that (he played lots of 2E, and I think they all ended up in one of the numerous splatbooks for that edition). I said that Classic actually has some fairly decent rules for sea-faring, and he got interested.

If I shift my sandbox to a mysterious Aegean/Caribbean type setting, I think I could get him to play...

Technology in gaming

James M over at Grognardia has an article about computers in Traveller. Star Frontiers, from that year of awesome computing 1981, suffers from the same problem.

Last year, though, I came across the concept that will reconcile the Star Frontiers computer rules with the way modern computers have far outstripped what they appear to do.

What's called a computer in Star Frontiers is an AI machine. Something like I'm using right now to type this blog post is just a piece of tech, and falls under the Technician's skills--like chronocoms, polyvoxes, etc.

If you need to reprogram, repair or deal with an intelligent machine, you need a Computer Specialist because they're just SO complex. That's also why the most powerful ones are as big as a house. It's still not very "realistic" but it seems to answer the question of why the rules work the way they do.