Lestrades_Game

  I had intended to cover my reading on this blog as well as games, but not really gotten around to it despite reading a fair amount. So I am going to have a quick run through a few items in this post;   The Dispossessed: Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) – This is great, one of the best SF novels I have read and surprisingly so. I had read some of her young adult fantasy a few years back, The Wizard of Earthsea and its followers. The Dispossessed is very different beast, an allegorical story exploring leaving a hippy collectivist commune to engage with the capitalist – communist split world. Being a Sci-Fi novel the commune is colony scraping by on a desolate moon and the imperial world the eden below. A physicist, Shevek, betrays his own anarchist people to return to the mother planet on a quest to heal what divides them. Of course reconciliation is harder than anticipated due to the differing world views and entrenched prejudice. Le Guins' skill is in her character building and ...

  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...

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...

Ingredients; 4 netrunner starter sets (randomly generated using a program called netseal;http://www.runners-net.com/) 4 proteus boosters (also generated using netseal) A ton of netrunner cards with which to assemble the generated sets from. Android Netrunner now dominates the 'hotness' column on Boardgamegeek.com, and seems like its going to be a permanent fixture. I have about 800 netrunner cards, mostly acquired in one trade a couple of years ago for a copy of Core Worlds. The question in my mind for a while has been, should I flog off the whole set and buy into the new version? I prefer the early 90s campy cgi art and I'm tight fisted so I figured I'd try and breath some life into my cards by building a cube. What is a cube? For the uninformed, in collectable card games (Magic the Gathering) you can play what is called a draft. This is when you all buy a bunch of sealed booster decks, open them, and then pass them around in a circle. Each player takes a ...

No post for a month, then three in one night! Its 1977, Marc Miller has just released the Sci Fi RPG Traveller, which will set the standard for all Sci Fi games to follow, and GDW, the company Marc works for release Imperium. A board war game in the Traveller universe. I picked this up of a guy in the next city from mine for 5 wigwams. Deal since this sucker normally goes for at least four times that on ebay. Its a pretty mint game too. This is a space opera board game, and its very asymmetrical. One side is the Terrans, the earthlings, the future us. The other is the Imperium, a massive conglomerate of alien races. The Terrans are the upstarts rebelling against the Imperium, and the much embattled Imperial regional governor has to put down this insurrection. This is one thing you get from older games that seem less common in the new, genuine imagination. I like Twilight Imperium as much as the next nerd but the back story for that game is very old hat compared with Chadwick and M...