Edition whoring; fifth and seventh; and things unseen

So we've lived to see a fifth D&D and a seventh 40K. Who'd have thought it, back in 1974 or '87?

I've been reflecting. The more editions, the more I think the magic, and the truer quality, was in the first, in OD&D and Rogue Trader; and the more I think that after any new thing appears, if we love it, the way to honour what it represents is to carry on truly developing, to push the limits in corresponding ways, not just rework.

The Return of the Jedi and/or the Rise of the Galaxy

I'd think that in a leg of western history that looks heavily shaped by and for the internationalist, disaffected and atheist 'nerd' with a moderately idealistic view of nature - I'm generalising and conflating a bit - the Ewoks would be more popular.

After all, they're an ungainly, galactic everyman, underdogs who come good, mastering a tyrannical aggressor with their own tech, even taking the first steps in a new paradigm.

And if not absolutely popular, at least relatively, compared with, say, the Jedi, presented as physiologically favoured, aristocratic alpha warriors not so much seeking progress by intelligence as led by an abstraction to restore a presumably established religious order.

Why this dissonance? Is it just the Jedi having more readily identifiable individuals, or traditional hero figures? Or is it the personally empowering mysticism of the Force, or the Jedi access to not just spiritual but worldly power? Or is it something more subtle..?

Fifth edition thoughts - the depriving background?

A quick comment on a piece of fifth edition D&D.

At first I was generally positive about the idea of the so-called 'background' - the personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws. Now I'm not so sure. It seems more gimmicky as time goes by, more predetermining of narrative as if establishing the characters for the first chapter of a novel, a set narrative, rather than supporting an exploration of another world - and ourselves - wherever it leads; and a shortcut avoiding the need for fuller player engagement, or further restricting player freedom.

Why play to someone else's prewritten background if you can decide one for yourself or start vague, as light as in a DCC funnel, or with a single word or less, and let specifics emerge in play, based on choice and the elaboration of the world in the interaction between players and GM, and characters, factions and landscapes? I'm genuinely curious as to the justification. Surely not just to save more of that increasingly precious time..? If so, I've got a suggestion - do less. None of us have to do everything we're sold.

Dragons & Dungeons

I wonder how different the world would look today if 'D&D' actually stood for 'Dragons & Dungeons'?

Maybe no different. The typical module might be creature-focused rather than site-based. But the cascading consequences of even that fine change, in minds across the lands and down the years, could have done odd things.

Expected inquisitors (1) - Inquisitor Badnut, Xenocog

A natural element of the 40K setting is the Inquisition, a kind of 41st millennium NKVD, or early KGB. Trouble is, inquisitors aren't always as weird as they could be given their reach and the wide-ranging role they have, and their recent codex isn't what we might have expected of any post-RT approach, or even a sixth edition version of the institution.

So this will be an occasional series just for inspiration, adapting some homebrew ideas for rules-light roleplaying to suit the mainstream wargame, but for no edition in particular.

Inquisitor Badnut, Xenocog

Struck by a shokk attack gun in the depths of Bea IV, Inquisitor Mercutio Rex found himself with all or part of a snotling literally on the brain. Initially believing himself possessed, but failing by apparently freak chance to take his own life, he came to accept his debilitating fate as the will of the Emperor and a gift in the struggle, refusing surgery and turning his training to communion with the creature. The ceaseless scratchings, whispers and roars have lent the inquisitor a knowledge of the Orkoid mind and allowed him in the years since to usurp the overlordship of multiple warbands, gaining great fame as a warboss while turning base greenskin drives to the work of the Emperor as well as Gork and Mork, for he acknowledges their power too, and invokes them. In the meantime reproductive spores have passed into Badnut's bloodstream and proven mutagenic, enhancing his constitution and improving his luck still further. His former colleagues are divided in their counsels. Is not the Ork a mighty ally? Perhaps by this means may the green tide finally be turned..? And all the while the spores which escape in his breath, perspiration and, yes, his foul soils sow the seeds of the Waaagh! in the very highest of imperial inner sancta...

Possible wargame rules, various editions: +1 T, but -2 Cl or -1 Ld; may take up to 75% Ork allies, or Orks as battle brothers, with Badnut and any retinue affected by the Waaagh!

I'll post more as I write them up. In the meantime, take a look at the grimdarkling detail project: Lasgunpacker has a massive 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 800 options to my relatively poor 400.

As for roleplaying 40K rules-light, you could start here, and there's a simple ruleset here.

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Review - Stalker

I don't do enough reviews these days so I've decided to post my thoughts on intriguing things as I find or revisit them. Anything relevant to the blog that seems worth looking at.

Here's a classic to start. Incredibly, John Till at Fate SF just posted his own review of it.

Stalker (1979)

A film adaptation of a Russian SF novel, Roadside Picnic; directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

One man leads two others into a mysterious, militarily quarantined Zone - an overgrown ruined landscape, possibly struck by a meteorite, possibly the site of an extraterrestrial stopover, a form of roadside picnic - hoping to reach a chamber believed to grant wishes.

This is one of the most old school D&D films I've seen, without being related to D&D in any overt way, and it has a rich, dense terrain that might surprise and inspire wargamers too. The central location - the landscape of the Zone - is arguably at the heart of the film.

Wolf tickets and pack tactics, and man's best friend

A fairly well-known blogger who withdrew from the online community after a problematic Kickstarter has started posting again. Not everyone seems to have noticed yet. Those that have noticed seem divided, and some seem to think it inappropriate he's back at all.

I'm not going to defend what happened, partly because I don't know all the details - and who does? - partly because a solution was found to move the project forward regardless.

But precisely because none of us do know all about it, and because rumour can take on a life of its own, and because the herd mentalities are still a factor in human behaviour, even ours, I would say we should slow down. I'd guess most of us agree that legitimate criticism is reasonable, even healthy, but witch hunts aren't. In our hobby, we know that.

It's not just a bit of harmless fun either. Gaming seems to be a big part of the life of this person and has been a source of income in the past, possibly a major source. If we do stigmatise now, we may even prevent him earning a living in the only way he readily can.

Gaming is no totalitarian system. Ever heard of the wolf ticket? We don't have the right to judge who eats. If you're not ready to forgive yet, or just won't give a second chance full stop, don't read his posts or buy any of his products. Just step back: live and let live.

The same with Mike Nystul. He's not a punchbag. Maybe he messed up, but he could well be homeless now. How long should he suffer? And who decides? If we don't know the whole story, we can't be sure it won't one day happen to us, despite best intentions.

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Choose-your-own-annihilation and cheese with peas

Pegboard left an interesting comment at Faeit 212 yesterday. Here's the essential part:

Tzeentch book has a table on every page. You start by rolling a d6 per page number and comparing it to the table. Your army then takes that many hits. Your opponent gets that many models back. If you roll an even number, you go back a page, odd, forward a page, roll more dice and then your opponent gets the special rules haywire and feel no pain.

It's a joke of course, presumably aimed at GW and a certain thinking on randomness and fun, but there's a radically conservative idea in there. Wargaming and roleplaying have long used tables for resolution, but they've fallen out of favour in the mainstream even if a business model based on large books of rules hasn't. Games like DCC still get good mileage, and there are the funky system-neutral tables at the The Dungeon Dozen.

Imagine this: a choose-your-own-adventure-style book of tables for use at the table, for gaming without randomisers like dice, but with more potential effects and less linearity, at least as many outcomes as table entries. Choose your action, check for contexts and apply the results, maybe jump. But not Student's-t-like distributions: there could be nested tables, option trees and 2D or 3D charts, even close-the-eyes-and-point pictures.

Petty Gods and trivial concerns

With the fair range of readers this blog seems to enjoy, from various areas of gaming and beyond it, not every reader with a potential interest might know about the status of the Petty Gods project.

Short version: Greg Gorgonmilk is taking over and calling for submissions old and new.

Long version: Petty Gods was a project inspired by Blair here at Planet Algol and set moving by James Maliszewski here at Grognardia. The idea was to source descriptions of obscure gods with game stats suitable for old school fantastical roleplaying. In simple terms, a bit like The Unknown Gods meets Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. There's an example here. Entries were sent and art created, but it seems layout was never finished.

Grognardia is one of the oldest blogs associated with the OSR, a movement of gamers interested in early forms of roleplaying, and especially early Dungeons & Dragons. For a few years the blog was one of the major hubs, a source of information, reflections and arguably revisions on the early years of D&D and tactical roleplaying as a whole. A significant part of the structure of current thinking in the OSR, and therefore quite possibly also the next official edition of D&D, may well lead back to, or through, one or more of James' posts.

James has been quiet for some time, apparently for personal reasons, leading to debate on the exact status of his as yet unrealised Kickstarter megadungeon, Dwimmermount.

It also seems to have contributed to a fin-de-siècle sense the OSR is out of steam, but this analysis seems not to recognise the breadth and depth of the movement. To judge by the response to Greg's first post, compared to James' say, the concern looks off the mark. It's a transfer: not an end, more an End. Petty Gods seems to be a rallying point.

Once again then: Greg Gorgonmilk has stepped up and is now accepting submissions.

If you feel this old school aesthetic and have a petty god worthy of praise, or can draw one, you can play a part. Start a religion, get published and change history in one move.

Update: A stop on gods for now, but various items are still needed - see Greg's sidebar.

Update: Greg has just linked to what he's calling Original Petty Gods, the first edition.

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The lit darkness - John Blanche and primeval parents

Two rather stunning thoughts struck me yesterday. I'm almost certainly not the first to think either of them, but given they're both related to gaming, and to each other in some way too, I thought I'd discuss them here. They concern living links to the past and future.

OD&Ds in 2013, and a brief history of the early game

Brendan and I are having a discussion over at his blog, Untimately, about a rerelease of Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D), and the value this has. You might be interested, especially if a favourite game or faction has ever been left hanging, as with some GW IP.

Old school tactical roleplaying - a simple core ruleset

It may be the best time since the mid-1980s to start playing in the expansive style of the early tactical RPGs, and a new golden age for production and play.

That said, there are still barriers to entry. The range of rulesets, supplements and ideas emerging from the OSR and beyond can be overwhelming, and references to past work and debates on fine points can be confusing and may be discouraging potential players.

This post is an attempt to offer a simple starting point. Purists may dislike it, but it may help the interested potential player grasp the whole and grow the hobby. It's not a full system, more a distillation of themes and a generalisation for the early leaps. I'm using a similar approach with a drop-in campaign at a local game store and it's helping no end.

All we really need to know to get playing is how to create characters, how to explore, how to perform actions and how to resolve encounters, so that's what this will cover.

Towards a new model army?

Many of us feel that certain areas of wargaming can be pricey, some areas increasingly and unreasonably so. A handful of posts from the past few days suggest ways forward.

• James S at Warp Signal proposed the not-so-alien notion of army sharing...

• Matt Plonski at Apocalypse 40K described wargaming online with Vassal.

• The guys at Dark Future are reorganising their blog to highlight work in the wider community like tutorials, reviews of alternative bits and conversions.

• Loquacious at House of Paincakes followed up the OGL post and wondered about extending community licensing to other game systems and settings.

• For 40K especially, Tales of the Maelstrom posted a lead-in for tomorrow's festive meet-up, blending Rogue Trader's use of a GM with wide group play.

Interestingly, BoLS this week posted some homebrew, which I think is the first time in a good while. It's a full mission, like those Creative Twilight produce, possibly a step into a new golden age, and Loken reminded us of the first and its magical Lords of Battle pdf.

All your base are belong to someone

Fans of the d12, as well as game designers and worldbuilders, and anyone interested in getting a fresh perspective on a key assumption of today's world, might like to read this article on dozenals and the idea of shifting from base-10 to base-12...

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Seeing Tolkien's Long Defeat

If the six books of The Lord of the Rings gave three films, and the one of The Hobbit will give three too, what next? If Jackson et al. follow Lucas/Disney to push for a third trilogy, there's no lack of sources.

Most obviously "The Scouring of the Shire" was left out last time. By this rule of increasing bloat, could this one chapter be stretched over three more? It's not hard to imagine a spin-off mini-series, just one with less emphasis on the 'mini'. How about those Adventures of Tom Bombadil? He was also left out.

But why? What justifies such major removals? Is it as simple as overlong running time? After all, Jackson's LotR was three long films and special editions. Pacing is a better argument, but Tolkien left them in. And rightly so I think. To my mind the Scouring and Tom Bombadil are more or less the heart of it all.

Bombadil especially. Have a read of this overview if you haven't seen the arguments.

If so, maybe that's why both were cut, as supposedly unfit for a 21st-century audience.

What could that mean? There's plenty at this post from earlier today, on zombies too.

Tolkien once wrote: "I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'", and we have Galadriel verbalise the thinking in the fiction, or rather in the generally recognised fiction: "together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat." Really?

Why all the gloom? My reading of Bombadil suggests Tolkien did see, maybe even see, past. As he wrote of Bombadil: "he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely." As his Goldberry says: "He is."

Look at the feel for landscape Tolkien has, in fine distinctions. He sees the wood for the trees, and surely saw the cycles, the flow of atoms. It may be that if we spend too much time worldbuilding, a demiurge of sorts, we see a little further than the paradigm, even if we have to use the language of that paradigm to communicate this and to understand it.

If Spinoza was a bee, what is Tolkien? And what are we? Who's your Bombadil? We get to choose, and happily Jackson has given us space to do that so far, although if he has Stephen Colbert playing him (we don't know yet), it may go from one extreme to another.

So which Bombadil are you making, know it or not, as Tolkien's long defeat rumbles on?

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Words for worlds (1) - working past dwarves in space

Many people are likely aware of the IAU decision a few years back to create the new classification of dwarf planet, which reduced the 'full' planets in the solar system to eight and added five dwarves: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. Not everyone was happy, not least with the definition going beyond intrinsics to cover orbital clearing.

Beyond this issue, there's also the problem of division into comets and asteroids, bodies at Lagrangian points, the extra terms like 'minor planet', 'trojan' and 'centaur', transitions from gas giant to star and the challenge of reflecting relative size of moons and planets.

If there are more large worlds in the outermost reaches of our system and billions around other stars or travelling between them, these problems in classification could get worse.

To see if it can be helped based on existing terms, here's a simple two-term approach to core body type. The first word covers construction, the second mass. Here 'dwarf' shows only intrinsic aspects: its mass and hydrostatic equilibrium. Two words are coined: troid, from 'asteroid' and 'planetoid', for bodies of a mass below a dwarf, and mid, for stars and planets between the extremes, which seems fair but not too prosaic, has long roots and could be a nod to our geo- and heliocentric exceptionalism. The word 'planet' is optional.

1. ice / icy          1. troid
2. rock / rocky       2. dwarf
3. gas / gaseous      3. mid  
4. stellar            4. giant

As far as I can tell, it covers the core forms. Gamers will see immediately it's set up like two 1d4 tables so it could at least be used to generate locations for gaming. One or two purely conceptual results could make for interesting sci-fi experiments, like 'stellar troid'.

I think it's clear how it works. Using this approach, rather than teach children that Earth, Mars and Pluto have one or more 'moons', we'd say Earth is a mid with a dwarf, Mars is a mid with two troids and Pluto is a dwarf with five troids. It's still simplified, but less so.

With it our system gains lots of secondary dwarves, and if we're talking status that feels fair to worlds like Titan that may be home to terrestrial life's nearest neighbours. It sees our system become, as far as we know, one stellar mid, two gas giants, two ice giants, four rocky mids, I think 24 mainly rocky dwarves, and the oceans of ice and rock troids.

Various more extrinsic elements can be shown as extra terms, the most obvious being:

1. [primary / secondary / tertiary etc.]   1. [orbital / eccentric [dominant]]

                      2. Langrangian

                       3. interstellar

Halley's Comet then becomes a primary ice troid, or - more fully - a primary, eccentric, dominant ice troid. The adjective 'interstellar' still covers those so-called 'rogue' planets.

Who can see the problems with it?

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Warhammer xK and wargaming almost before war

There was a post at Kings Miniatures last week suggesting GW cuts prices by 50% and that we list what we'd buy if they did to encourage them.

I've been wondering what I'd put on a list at 50% off, but I haven't come up with anything yet. The Lord of the Rings line is there, but why drop into 25mm from 28mm and not go to 15mm, or better yet 6mm? For sci-fi and 40K at 6mm, check out the new not-titans from Steel Crown Productions.

Building on a discussion with Snord at BoLS, I don't much dig GW's heroic 28mm style any more. I think it looks odd. The bits can be useful though, and we might only now be learning how useful. Ork hands, say, can look simian on naturally proportioned humans.

I know I'm not alone in this, so here's another hypothetical. If GW's style is falling out of fashion, what else could the rulesets be used for? What if the settings got old?

To mention another discussion at BoLS, I recently joked some of the Dystopian Legions miniatures could inspire a Warhammer 20K, set 10,000 years further back from the 30K of the currently fashionable Horus Heresy. What about playing a Warhammer 2K in our near past or future, or c. 0K with ancients? Would the ruleset be up to the job?

That got me thinking about earlier periods. How about -40K? Or -400K? Have you ever seen a ruleset for wargaming or roleplaying encounters between early humans? This kind of thing. Various posts at The Subversive Archeologist - like this one - suggest plenty is still up in the air. Early human miniatures are relatively thin on the ground too.

If you have anything like that up your sleeve, you might want to read Lo's current series at HoP on getting new ideas out there, which is now up to the subject of self-publishing.

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Appendix OSR (2)

I've been reading The Secret History of Star Wars on a now mysterious Marcia Lucas and thinking.

Thinking it's another good text for that reading list.

Thinking we may think we create, and do, but not so much as we might like to think we do. We can hold worlds in our heads (with art or miniatures to help maybe, and numbers etc.), but mostly these are variations on this world even when they're not.

And how well do we actually know this one..? Or each other's version? Do we even know our own?

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Ambient random

Here's a quote that jumped out recently, from a text I linked to at the panspermia post.

Cosmology in the oldest lands radiated from the priestly classes, where, charged with religious power, the priests and magi who were able to understand the patterns politicized space to a great extent, often deciding public policy using one or another astrological method.

It got my attention for a different reason than you might expect. Not for the changing role of space agencies or the secret space missions or the contenders, or the recent big SF on the silver screen, even if all of these seem to make space a source of power now too.

Using dice or maybe a deck to produce so-called random numbers is, when you think about it, a bit weird. Why such artificial, physically complex systems? And building on the interview with Loquacious, when there's so much deep intricacy out there, they're a real sledgehammer. And impractical: they help to limit tabletop games to the tabletop, even without miniatures or other components, and maybe mean ever more components.

And why play so many games indoors, or sitting down, or in a fixed location? Moderate physical activity is healthy, oxygen too, and sunlight. In rules-light games in which the dice or cards are the big hindrance, why not ditch them and look for another system?

Dust-offs & Debunking

In the first part of what looks like being a long and intriguing series, Rob Kuntz at Lord of the Green Dragons has this to say about the rather fashionable - maybe advantageous? - efforts to reconstruct 'correct' approaches to early RPGs:

The more you vest in "this must be the way it is done, because Rob, or Dave, or Hargrave, or EGG the Magnificent," did it that way, you have reached the dead end of creative and spontaneous thought and action, the very essence of the original game as composed for creative individuals.

But that's just, like, his opinion. Right? If you need help with a get-out, it could be the understanding that what the creators of D&D gave us wasn't an RPG, but a wargame.

If you want an OD&D primer, Von is doing an overview at HoP, with 1, 2, 3 parts so far.

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