Corebooks and Supplements: The Cart Before the Horse

I have a knack for acquiring expansions and supplements to games before getting the core elements themselves. It started back in the days of voraciously devouring TSR’s Dragonlance novels without ever realizing they were tied to a game at all, let alone a roleplaying game or what that constituted. Despite the fact the local Waldenbooks — this was back in the days before Borders came to Burlington; Waldenbooks was the place to go for the widest selection of Dungeons & Dragons-related stuff, outside of Quarterstaff Games, which I wasn’t aware of at the time.

Somehow, in the midst of my paper route-fueled mission to buy and read every Dragonlance novel I could find, I bought the AD&D Player’s Guide to Dragonlance Campaign Setting. I didn’t get the part about it being a player’s guide, nor understood why it was completely different in form and design. Reading it, I also remember a sense of puzzlement over why the information in this encyclopedic-like book was subtly different in places from what I knew to be correctly related by the novels — that the novels routinely contradicted each other was another, separate source of mystification to my eleven year old self.

Weekend Breakdown

Blimey, I had a busy weekend of gaming and gaming-related activity. In particular order — that is, chronologically sorted and neatly placed in nested lists — this weekend, I:

• Carb and protein and fat and oil-loaded at Handy’s with the Lafayette, featuring country-fried steak in sausage gravy with eggs and hash browns, before going to:.
• Playing board games at the Fletcher Free Library with a host of new faces, namely:
  • Two rounds of a mix of Dominion and Dominion: Seaside; the second being a draft sort of affair after a monstrous game in which the Thief drove everyone to scrape for points, for lack of money.
  • Chrononauts, which was delightful and unpredictable as always.
• After that, I booked it down to Rutland, where delicious Russian food — apparently the solution to making cabbage taste good is cook it in as many different kinds of meat as possible — was had before launching into a Savage World of Solomon Kane one-shot set in where else but 17th century Russia.
• Got home in Burlington around 1:45 in the AM, giving me a solid five and a bit hours of sleep before:
• Heading off to the wilds of western upstate New Hampshire — i.e., just across the Connecticut River — to discuss convention doings.
• Arrived back in Burlington around 5:00 PM for my first fondue experience, sampling The Kung Fu Mummy and thoroughly enjoying Mystery Science Theater 3000’s lambasting of Future Wars, with its hand-puppet dinosaurs of variable dimensions.

I really intend to do a write-up of the Solomon Kane game, which was drop down hysterical for most of the time, thanks to the liberal application of vodka, beer and wine to the participants, but the whole weekend’s run together so much, I don’t know if I can do justice to any single element of it.

Shambhala

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/CkUGN7oVdH0njz2PCnyvmw

The ancient kingdom of Mustang, in present day Nepal, mirrors stories about hidden kingdoms in Asia, like Shangri-La and Shambhala. National Geographic has an article about a series expeditions to Mustang in recent years. In caves carved into sheer cliff faces, investigators found wall paintings, religious texts and human remains.

Researcher Broughton Coburn is quoted saying that hidden valleys “were created at times of strife and when Buddhist practice and principals were threatened . . . The valleys contained so-called hidden treasure texts.” A remote location like the cliffs of Mustang could be just that kind of refuge for dangerous or threatened knowledge. The article notes that not only were Buddhist texts found, but also those relating to Bön, an earlier tradition that died out after the spread of Buddhism.

[TotalCon 2010] Call of Cthulhu: Curse of the Betrothed

Dice, character sheet, notebook and duckie. What more does a hardy investigator need?

Call of Cthulhu beckoned me on Saturday morning. It’s one of those games that inspires as many different interpretations as there have been of Lovecraft’s mythos in general. Pulp adventure with tommy guns and dynamite, a gore and splatter fest, psychological horror, or metaphors for a weird Rhode Islander’s views on society, race and class; I’ve seen them all proposed and explained. My own Call of Cthulhu experience is limited to a handful of GMs, however, so I wanted to take a plunge into unknown waters.

As it turned out, this particular Cthulhu GM, Bob, not only had a practice of running daylong campaigns, but also had a dedicated following of players who sign up for all his games. I’ve let myself be put off by that in the past, but I’ve also played some exceptionally awesome games after pushing through that hesitance. After all, if the GM gets repeat players like that, they’re doing something right.

Happy GM’s Day 2010

March 4th is GM’s Day — “march forth,” geddit? — a time to give recognition to the hard-working game masters who put the time and energy into creating the imaginary worlds in which our characters run amok — and, in the convention world, care enough about their game of choice, role-playing, board or otherwise, that they’ll teach it to a table of strangers.

He's Gary Gygax and he is *roll roll* . . . pleased to meet you!

The idea for a day to recognize GMs came up back in 2002 on ENWorld. Gary Gygax’s passing on the same day in 2008 cemented the date . Now it’s become not only an occasion to thank one’s GM — possibly with the purchase of role-playing books, as RPGNow would like you to do, given their massive sale; so massive, in fact, I’m having difficulty finding anything I want amidst the torrent of niche material — but a day commemorating the role-playing hobby on the whole and remembering its proud parents, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The hobby wouldn’t be what it is today, or maybe even exist at all, if not for Gary, Dave and everyone else who participated in the conception of Dungeons & Dragons.

I plan to mark the occasion with game night in the traditional sense tonight: friends getting together at someone’s house for food and tabletop fun. It’ll be board game tabletop fun, in the shape of Age of Empires III, but still. And this weekend, a Savage World of Solomon Kane one-shot in Rutland.

One of these days I will get on the ball and have something really appropriate planned to run on GM’s Day, or get the local store involved or something. TARGA’s International Traditional Gaming Week isn’t that far off. If I’m industrious and persuasive, I’d like to get some people together for an old school dungeon crawl. There’s no dearth of dungeons and retro-clones to utilize, after all.

Thanks again, Gary and Dave. You invented a truly unique hobby, which I and so many others love dearly.

Android: The New Angeles Blues

Sarah and Alex have a pretty good idea of what they're doing.

Android became a running joke in my group of game-playing friends. It had a reputation online for being complex and bit-tacular, which seemed wholly deserved from ogling the back of the box. The theme, noirish detectives competing to prove their hunches about a murder in the futuristic city New Angeles, with all the hints of Blade Runner that carries, enticed us all. But no one was willing to take the plunge and buy the game. Being frugal young people, we like to try a game out once or twice before throwing down. We are, as a rule, not early adopters when it comes to board games.

So it became the go-to name for a game for which no one was about to front. “Oh, it’s so-and-so’s turn to buy something. Go grab Android.” Then we kept promising we’d jump on the first demo available, waiting to see it crop up on a convention schedule somewhere. Alex came the closest, planning to try it out at TempleCon last month. He wound up only keeping an eye on the group playing it; they began before he got to the game room, Alex related, and were still going after his own party got through three or four plays of several games. That longing glimpse motivated him, I guess, because Alex ordered the game a week or two after Templecon. After another week of digesting the rule book and Universal Head’s player aid, we broke it out one Sunday afternoon.

[Tuesday Night Board Games] Red November Redux

I dropped by Quarterstaff after work tonight to check out what everyone was playing. Imagine my surprise to find a boisterous group of seven or eight clustered around Red November, of all things.

Apparently, last week’s half play was enough to convince Jon to get a copy of his own. And that right there is evidence of the power of a game night and why they’re beneficial to the game stores who host them.

The First Convention

Check out these photos from the first science fiction convention, Nycon, in 1939. They had no idea what they were starting, did they?

Snappy dressers, too. Imagine if broad-breasted suits were still the norm at conventions today, rather than the melange of witticism-bearing T-shirts, cat ears and jerkins. I’m a big fan of dressing for comfort — and you need comfortable clothes when you’re clustered around a table in banquet chairs of debatable comfort for four or six hours at a time — but I also recognize that outward appearances influence people’s opinions. When WCAX did a story on Bakuretsucon a couple years ago, what did they use for their bumper tease? A shot of the older gentleman wearing cat ears, natch. Hardly surprising, but still a cheap shot.

The Stone Chamber

The round hills of Vermont roll across the landscape. Their raiment changes with the season: summer green, autumn red, winter white and springtime drab, but the hills themselves are as constant as anything seems to one possessed of a human lifespan. They are as close-mouthed and inscrutable as their inhabitants, not prone to sharing their secrets with just anyone who happens by.

But dotted here and there in the hills are oddities, stone chambers built into hillsides and hidden from casual view by foliage. Typically rectangular, they are lined with flat blocks of limestone or shale, the chambers give no indication of their function. Tradition holds these chambers were here when the first Europeans arrived, but they hardly fit with what is known about native Abenaki practices. In fact, surviving Abenaki oral traditions are conspicuously silent on the topic of the stone chambers.

Modern scholars maintain the chambers are surviving traces of long gone, unrecorded dwellings, probably storage rooms meant for keeping goods cool. Any instances of a chamber doorway aligning with sunrise or sunset on an astronomically significant date like a solstice or equinox is pure coincidence or wishful thinking on the part of the observer.

Shows what they know.

The Door to Otheryear

A realityquake is a quantum event. The raw stuff of space and time rips asunder. One section of reality drops below another as one tectonic plate subducts below another in an earthquake. And, as may happen, elements of that submerged strata may find their way to the top of the covering layer, incongruously out of place.

Read an RPG Book in Public Week Begins Today

Today marks the start of the first Read an RPG Book in Public Week, an effort from WJ Walton of The Escapist to promote and normalize role-playing games in everyday settings. As Walton says:

The point is to make the roleplaying hobby more visible, to get it “out of the basement” and into public areas where more people can see it. This will make others more aware of the hobby – some may ask you what your book is about, giving you the opportunity to explain the hobby to them. A few of those may be interested enough to try it themselves. Former gamers may see what you’re reading and think about the great times they used to have with roleplaying, and possibly even try it again.

I have my own funny hang-ups about being overtly nerdy in public. Patches on my bookbag? Fine. Wearing a convention badge when going out to eat? I waver about 50-50 between taking it off and leaving it on. But I get squirrelly when it comes to reading a role-playing game book anywhere less isolated than my favorite reading rock by Lake Champlain. Even when I do my adventure writing at Muddy Waters, it’s on a plain old laptop in an innocuous Open Office document.

We’ll see if I can get the gumption up to break one out at Muddy Waters some weekday evening, say. I’m working my way through The Unexplained at the moment, and there’s still an unhealthily tall stack of other supplements demanding my attention. Fortunately, if I don’t find the nerve, I can try again in July and October. Yes, Read an RPG Book in Public Week is a tri-annual event, because the hobby needs the positive exposure, frankly.

But please, like WJ Walton says, don’t “freak the normies” with Kill Puppies for Satan or World of Synnibar. Role-players have enough of a undeserved bad rap without giving people valid ammunition.