RPGaDay 2019: 1 First

I’ve written before about the blue box Dungeons & Dragons game; I now know it to be the fourth printing of the Holmes rewrite, which included a copy of BI—In Search of the Unknown, and a set of chits that completely and utterly failed to capture the excitement of rolling platonic solids.

My step-father bought the game for us, no doubt intrigued by the concept; he was a sword and planet fan and one of the first things we bonded over in our nascent relationship was fantasy and sci fi books. I remember our first game: we had been handed character sheets, and in front of us was several Dixie cups full of chits (I know, sexy, right?) and he began narrating the adventure. We were at a door. It opened into a dark hallway…and then he said, “hold on a second,” and started flipping through the rule book.

We waited patiently. Where were we going to go? Mom was dealing with the other two kids, who were five and seven years my junior. I asked if I could see one of the books that came in the box. I was told no, because he needed both of them to run the game.

This was intriguing. I watched as Paul flipped through the rule book, and then consulted the module, and back and forth for several minutes. Then he got up, lit a cigarette, and took the rule book with him, saying, “Just a minute. I think I forgot to do something…” and he walked into the other room, muttering.

And that was my first Dungeons & Dragons game.

Two weeks later, I casually migrated the box into my room and began my examination of the rules. It was fascinating in the extreme—I had never seen a rule book laid out in that particular style or typeface. It looked different. It felt different. The artwork was a little messy, but also evocative.

The section I read more than any other in the book was the example of play. That, I thought, was where our game went off the rails. I didn’t know what to say, and Paul didn’t know what to do. I tried to match up the cross-section of the sample dungeon with the sample layout and of course, none of it was supposed to match anyway, but it kept me from playing that much longer until I did.

That summer, my other step-brother, from my father’s re-marriage, came back from Boy Scout Camp with all kinds of life wisdom and a new thing: he’d been playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Not the basic stuff; that was for kids, Jack. For hard-core gamers only. It only took a couple of weekends before I was hounding my mother to buy me a Player’s Handbook.

I can still hear it in my head, like a voice over an old-fashioned telephone… “It’s HOW MUCH?...for a book…? What’s this…that game you never played? I know, Paul bought it, but…and this is for what, again…Mark, we’ve got dice at the house…I don’t know…Okay, but you’re paying me back for this…”

My copy of the Player’s Handbook was $18.00, from B.Dalton  Booksellers in the mall. By Christmas, I’d acquired copies of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide ($24.00, NOT on sale), and bought a set of Armory gem dice. Mom said, as we were picking up Christmas paper wrapping, “I hope you play the hell out of that game, because that’s all the money I’m going to spend on it.”

The next day, I conned a ride to the mall, where the hobby shop was located. I bought the most recent issue of Dragon Magazine with Christmas money, and I bought a module, too: The Tomb of Horrors.  I was hooked. There was no going back.

RPGaDay 2019 is Nigh!

In a bold gesture that is sure to backfire on me, I have decided to participate in the 2019 RPGaDay blog challenge. It's pretty cool, even if I screw it up, and I urge you to check out the across the board postings that will occur.

Here's the official daily map:

We start tomorrow! See you there!

Dice Delve: Halloween Comes Early

I give Q-Workshop a lot of grief, mostly because I want them to be better than they are. Their designs are lovely and also many times indecipherable to the naked eye, which makes them a bounty for collectors and an eyesore for gamers who harbor more practical considerations.

That said, I was quite taken with their Top Drawer Dice Kickstarter, which featured a set of dice with a Halloween theme, Halloween Pumpkin dice. This was one of five total sets of interesting dice, some of which were clearly aimed at specific games, and some of which were just cool. I didn't mind some of the other designs, but the Halloween-inspired designs were, to my way of thinking, the clear and only choice.

Well, they came in, and I had a chance to do an interesting side-by-side comparison with another set of dice, also with a Halloween theme, produced by Bescon. Side-by-Side! Head-to-Head! A Grudge Match to end all Cage Fights! Carnage Mayhem! Ah HAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

Okay, maybe not. But here's my breakdown for those of you with an interest in all things October-y.

Dice Delve: Tarot Dice As Big As the Ritz

One of my table top RPG peculiarities is my separation between creation and play. To wit, I have a very different set of dice at my desk for when I'm thinking up cool things to foist on my unsuspecting players. This differs sharply from the dice I use when I am running games at the table, which tend to be more thematic or associative.

When I create, I use various special dice as inspirational items/desk toys/impartial arbiters of chaos and doom. Dice like my various skull dice. My arrows of chaos dice. My favorite d20 dice in the whole world. Things like that. I even have some Rory's Story Cubes in case I want to just wing it, usually as a thought experiment.

This is from the picture on Amazon that shows off the dice.
Missing from the photo is a sense of scale.

Of course, that's not all in my Thinking Kit. I have coins, tokens, cards, and other objects to fiddle around with. It's not a set thing; I trade bits and bobs out often. But I almost always have a tarot deck in the box, if not nearby, because I love the symbolism that's front-loaded on the cards. I've even got a deck that is reminiscent of stylized fourteenth century pamphlet art, which is perfect for D&D.

I don't use the tarot in games; only when I'm creating something. Well, that's not quite true; I wrote a set of rules using the major arcana that I turned into a fortune-telling system (really, an adventure generator). It's very robust, but it's also very specific, as I have only used it in my Introductory Campaign. But I love me some tarot symbols.

So, when I stumbled, quite by accident, across Tarot Dice, from the now-defunct company, Tarotocy, Inc, I nearly broke my arm reaching for my wallet. And for only twelve bucks, too! Here are thirteen 13 d6 dice, each with symbols representing random major and minor arcana. You also get rules and a play mat for doing actual tarot readings, but let's be real, people: I'm just here for the dice. I had to have these.

So, what did I get?

Dice Notes: Beating a Dead Horse (literally)

 After the last post, I had hoped to start talking about some aspects of my 5th edition campaign that may be useful and/or instructive to other DMs, but then something happened that curtailed all of that: I got my order from Infinite Black's second Kickstarter, Elder Dice: Unspeakable Tomes. This was a huge relief, tantamount to the scratching of an itch in the middle of your back, as their Facebook page has been dominated with posts from people lamenting that they haven't gotten their dice yet, followed by another post from someone who ordered one of everything, proudly displaying their new wares and cackling like the mentally deranged. For variety, as a palate cleanser, someone would jump in and post a picture of a crushed shipping box, with the notation, "But the dice inside were fine!"

A couple of people voiced concerns or complaints, and the devoted rank and file set upon them with pitchforks and Internet Sarcasm, in disproportionate ratios, and while I had always intended to talk about my dice when they came in, I resolved not to post my thoughts on their Facebook page, because I have no desire to get into a slap fight with anyone at the moment. Besides, as of this writing, it's all academic, anyway. I'll explain later. For now, let's talk about my dice and what has generated so many words of concern about good design.

Dice Notes: Some Friendly and also Unasked-For Advice

There is always a dice project on Kickstarter, it seems, and most often, more than one at a time. If you are dice-happy, or worse, dice-drunk, like some people I know, this can be both heady and frustrating. Mostly because we all have bills to pay, and people to feed. I've tried eating dice, and it just doesn't work.

I am no stranger to buying interesting dice. However, I'm seeing some...trends, let's call them, that are not just making me crazy, but also really dampening my interest in funding an otherwise great idea. In some cases, I think these are poor decisions based on a lack of experience and/or graphic arts training, and in other cases, they are just things that I personally don't like. I'll try to let you know which is which.

In any case, I'm not randomly throwing people under the bus. I really want your project to be a success, to be something interesting to add to the hobby, to be something I can partake in. I'm not being mean for the sake of being mean, nor am I trying to be funny at the expense of someone's hard work. I know these are all labors of love. And having been on the other side of the manufacturing process, maybe I can offer some constructive criticism.

Without any further explanation, here we go:

Lankhmar: An Appreciation

I mentioned this before in my litany of stuff I used to play, but I wanted to drill down on this because I'm going to be talking about campaigns and how I run them and why I run them the way I do. It's mostly because of Lankhmar: City of Adventure.

Back in the 1980s I was a good li'l consumer of TSR's stuff. I kept up with new releases, back when you actually HAD - TO -  KEEP - UP with stuff; there was no button to click, no page to "like." You had to remember to call the hobby shop or the bookstore once a month. You had to read magazines and actually look at the ads. You had to look on the backs of modules for lists of other products. You had to talk to human beings in meat-space. You had to beg rides to the mall (or gas money, when you could borrow the car).

There is a reason, terribly misguided, why some older neckbeards feel a predatory sense of ownership and do that Gatekeeper thingie; it's because they are resentful that they had to do everything that I just rattled off and modern day gamers simply watch YouTube and get much better intel on what's new, and what's coming out.

I am not saying I agree with Gatekeeping tactics, because I don't...but looking back over that list, I understand where some of the ire comes from. Still, it was the 1980s. We barely had cable. There was no internet. Our brains could handle the strain of thinking about stuff we liked, I assure you. So their anger isn't really at new fans, or girls. It's at step-father Jeff who used to call them "fairies" for reading J.R.R. Tolkien and for not taking them to the mall when he clearly wasn't doing anything but sitting around eating Fritos and drinking Busch beer all day..."private contractor," my ass...