Lestrades_Game

 Into The Odd   Look at this book, it has these stupendous art house collage on its cover and strewn across the interior. It looks like a coffee table book or something you’d find in the back room of Ye Old Rare books shoppe. I wanted this book, it got it and now I am disappointed. A microcosm of our consumer society right there.   In to the Odd contains three things; a rule set, an adventure and some setting material. Two of these things are ok, but perhaps slightly miss the target, one is awful.   The rules system: There has been a trend in modern indie RPGs to take the husk of 70s D&D and strip it down to the essentials. The 70s game was many things, it was a resource management game, it was a maze exploration game, it was a combat game, it was a push your luck game and it was an improv encounter solution game. In to the Odd says this last element, the encounter shenanigans, is the game. The actual game rules are a few paragraphs on two pages. Ea...

  Vaults of Vaarn – Leo Hunt ~2022   The following table tells you most of what you need to know about Vaults of Vaarn, an indie TTRPG released in limited edition hard back in 2022-23. The underlying chassis of the game is Ben Milton's  Knave rule set, a riff on D&D basic and modern gutted down to 7 pages of tables and a core system. My general view with short page count games is you get what you include pages for. You can strip down the rules but situations that occur regularly in game will need to be bridged by the GM and players. In short I think the modern trend of ultra-light games is with a few exceptions ill judged. Vaults of Vaarn is an exception for two reasons.   First it is loaded with great tables. Tables that bring its dying earth Vancian, Wolfe-ian setting to life more than any pages of background or lore could (why do people like lore so much?). Long-time RPG fans might say this looks like Gamma World, or even Metamorphosis Alpha, and the...

 This is a play perspective rather than a book review. The majority of RPG 'reviews' are really book reviews and are generally not that helpful. Do you like pretty art? Do you expect chapters on character generation and background lore? Yes you will like this game, and almost every other RPG in print. I've played a few sessions of the One Ring with a fairly novice GM and skimmed the rule book. All sessions have been online. Its OK., there's your summary.  I'll layout my sandbox, then give the negatives and end with the positives in case anyone reads this wanting to justify their purchase, or future purchase. I have a wargamer mindset. This does not mean I think every game should have a CRT or crunchy minis rules for combat, quite the opposite, but it does mean I expect there to be a strategy game in an RPG book, and one that a GM of modest ability can bring out. My view is that the vast majority of RPG products completely fail to achieve what Gygax and Arneson did i...

I went over to Manchester this past weekend, a tree fell on my motorbike and knocked out the low beam (high beam still works fine though weirdly), but more importantly I joined in with an invasion of blighty. Kriegsmarine and Royal Navy make moves as the game designers and control team look on. Mega-games have become a bit of a bigger deal over the past year. The London based organisers, centred around a Jim Wallman, have come up north twice now, I played in the Italy campaign game in Leeds a few months back (I will throw together an article on this at some point) and now I served as the German 8 th corps operations officer for an invasion of Britain in 1940. Operation Sea Lion was planned by German high command after the campaign in France but never launched. This game looks at a what if, with a few historical realities papered over a little to make the invasion a little more feasible. The game involves about 60 players in two teams, who have to essentially lear...

I periodically turn my rpg session notes into something more publishable. Below are links to a short adventure I wrote and a campaign locale. First up, a Lovecraftian romp through a statue on the edge of a volcanic island; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B39t62uIctG3aWJad3BmVlk5a2c/view?usp=sharing Its a bit linear, but its supposed to be a short adventure. I've tried to channel as much Lovecraftian weirdness as I can into it. Second up, a city in the dark of the Underborea; https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B39t62uIctG3SEFHbk5JZi1UelU&authuser=0 This is more of a campaign setting. The wider Underborea has sections of mega dungeon and hex crawl. This is meant to act as a plot trigger and base camp for the players. Both are written for the rpg Astonish Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea, by Northwind Games, which has become my fantasy ruleset and setting of choice.

My world building with Gimp continues. I've had a couple of cracks at putting together a city map and now having something that will probably get into my campaign. It is still a work in progress but it at least looks interesting. The concept is to have a city built on the back of a giant crab. This has some novelty to it, evokes the weird fantasy vibe im shooting for and allows for lots of interesting rationals in the world detail. For instance the city has a massive rain collection system to generate the needed water. To put this together I got a photo of some spiny species of crab, used the magic wand to select everything non crab in the image and remove it. I then dragged the contrast way up and darkened the crab to get a silhouette of the crab. I then used the path tool to design in the roads and then the buildings. I added in some of the spines in grey as these will be hollowed out to form some of the bigger buildings in the city. The background is a bi...

Making good maps is an easy way for someone with little to know art talent like me to make ones adventures look good, and perhaps even publishable (Will send some to fanzines at some point).  I've been steadily learning the ropes with GIMP. This is a bath house I'm constructing for my current Astonishing Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea game. I need to create a good pattern fill for the pools, and probably design some more objects to give the map a more populated feel but the structure is there. I very loosely model it on some historical floor plans;

One of the committee at my gaming group is clearing out some old games from the cupboard, he gave me one of the copies of Cyberpunk 2020, so I decided to throw together a one shot and run it. Here's the ground floor map of a down market retail hall I created. There were two other floors. I've been having a lot of fun with gimp lately. Cyberpunk 2020 definitely brings the 'Punk' aspect out better than any other games, or even films in the genre I've encountered (Gurps Cyberpunk, Deus Ex, etc). If you read the books (which in my experience of RPG players very few read anything other than Game of Thrones), you'll find the protagonists are often petty criminals, down and outs and those on the slide. CP 2020 really nails this, its about survival on the ruthless streets more than high tech espionage. Neuromancer and When Gravity Fails both have heavily flawed low life leads (both great books). Stylistically it bleeds its age. Tech has wires and grunge, and cha...

With the rise of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) has come the rise of Fanzines and Magazines. I've had a read of Fight On!, Gygax Magazine, Footprints, & Magazine, Nod Magazine, Knockspell, Crawl!, AFS, and Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad. In this post I’m going to give a quick run down and critique of each of these. Fight On!; I start with Fight On! because its my favourite and I think probably the best. Edited by IG with the help of Calithena and others, this fanzine gives you between typically 80 and 130 pages devoted to Old School roleplaying mostly focused on D&D Basic and OSR games that use a similar rule set.  About 70% of the content is material such as dungeons, cities, monsters or adventure hooks you can drop straight into your game.  Of particular note is the material from Gabor Lux who writes these vivid heavily appendix N adventures. There are on running features such as community mega dungeon that is added to with each issue. The other 30% or so is opinion...

I've started GMing a campaign using Mutant Future by Goblinoid games. My campaigns usually only last 2-6 sessions and we are now two sessions in. I've seen many of the games mechanics in action and feel comfortable committing my thoughts on the game to the screen. I say I am using Mutant Future rather than running or playing it, because like many older school RPGs experiences and interpretations of the rules of the game will vary widely from group to group. Equally interpretations of the game setting can vary a lot. I'm not really that into the Fallout, Mad Max, dudes with sharp bits of metal and tentacles protruding from their bodies type of post destruction world. I either like the very grungy A Roadside Picnic, Stalker, or Metro 2033 type world with grimy guys climbing around in rain coats and cheap anti radiation suits with sawn off shotties, or a more low fantasy approach like Nausicaa Valley of the Wind (A great Manga/Anime). For this game I decided to set it in a m...

We had whats called the GIAG this weekend, or the Give It A Go. In this case people were giving roleplaying games ago. I prepped and ran a game of Paranoia. I picked up a copy of Paranoia 1st ed of Ebay about a year ago and had been looking for an opportunity to inflict it on the unsuspecting ever since. Welcome Trouble Shooter! Your Loyal Service to Computer will be rewarded! Remember Traitors are everywhere! Paranoia is a comedic sci fi roleplaying game that puts the players in position of being police grunts in a cold war totalitarian society that lives in a huge underground complex governed by an insane computer. Conceptually this is an easy game to run. Each player is a member of a secret society and a mutant, both of which are treasonous to Friend Computer (the GM). The players must work together to complete a mission, in this case restore power to the Marine Facility, whilst hunting for traitors (each other). What results is lots of, well paranoia, followed by mindless...

I spent some of my time on NYE this year playing the much belated second session of  Burning Wheel RPG campaign I've prepared. I only have two players, which is rather atypical for a Fantasy Swords and Sorcery style rpg, but with Burning Wheel this works quite well. Burning Wheel is a game where the relationships and development of the characters in narrative rather than statistical terms is the focus of the game. The key system that makes this game exceptional, and very innovative back in 2002, is its beliefs, traits, instincts method of defining characters. Really since DnD player characters in rpgs have been primarily defined by numbers as far as the game rules are concerned. The innovation Burning Wheel brought in was to have the player define a belief, or goal that defines their character, and then more detailed character traits and reactionary instincts to go with it. To give an example, one of my players has a squire character that is masquerading as a knight. So within t...