Qalidar Basic

So, this is out now. I just wasn't happy with the Quick Start thing, so I turned it into "Basic." It'll also be available in regular game stores this fall.

There'll be no more reboots of abridged Qalidar rule books from here on. If I put out any more rules material between now and the complete rules, they'll be supplements for this one, like maybe an adventure that has a few more levels worth of progression in the back - stuff like that.

What I'm actually planning to do, though, is move forward with the real thing. Oh, and finish that novella. Sooo close, now.

Read the sales blurb and buy it here:
http://www.qalidar.com/adventures/qalidarresistancerpg-basicbook

Meandering Monsters

I got this in the mail last week and have since tried everything I could think of, even to the point of compiling and publishing a bunch of my old short stories, to put off the review I promised to write. I hate reviews.

And, of course, you won't take my opinion seriously anyway, because Jerry's my friend. If you have other reasons for not taking my opinion seriously, I'd rather not hear about it. Anyway, maybe some of the stuff I tell you about what's inside will still be useful.

Volume 1 of Lorian Darkshade's Guide to Meandering Monsters contains a few new monsters for Tunnels & Trolls, some scenarios featuring those monsters, and a small assortment of magic items and spells. Each section is introduced with a vignette about an encounter with that creature, narrated by the eponymous Lorian Darkshade. There's also a map showing a small section of Jerry's campaign world.

The art by Mike Hartlieb is excellent. He's a friend too, though, so... yeah, more bias. Here, just look at the cover. If you like the cover, you'll like what's inside. There's also some of what I think is clip art, which is professional-looking and fits the tone of the book.

When I first opened up the book, I was disappointed that there were only three monsters (five if you count the sub-categories of the lizard man entry) but that's because I hadn't thought about what the real goal of this book was. It's not a "monster book," really. At least, it's not the kind of monster book most RPG'ers are used to. The monsters themselves aren't really the point here. What he's really providing is an assortment of cool ways to use those monsters.

In Tunnels & Trolls, all you have to do to make a monster is pick a number and give it a name. Here's an example: MR 75 Gleipichtorger. There, I'm done. That's a new monster I created just now. Of course, any halfway competent GM will have other details in mind, and the current edition of the game also offers "spite effects," which... okay, I don't want to explain all that stuff. Doesn't matter, anyway. The point is that, more than any other role-playing game I've encountered, T&T relies on very basic stats combined with improvisation to make its monsters come alive. That can be an advantage. If I'm used to decompressing my stats from that one number and, in the middle of an adventure, I invent the gleipichtorger, I can toss that sucker right in without missing a beat.

On the other hand, it doesn't give you much in the way of inspiration. Sometimes you're trying to throw something together, you're busy improvising everything else, and you want some creative stuff that's already been fleshed out. That's what you're getting here. For one thing, Jerry has done all the math for you. All the numbers that you would normally derive from that MR have been included in the entry. He's also included spite effects and added his own mechanic, triggered disadvantages, as well.

More than that, though, the vignettes give you a feel for how delvers might perceive these creatures, and the adventures give you a feel for how they might fit into the world. Even if you don't use any of that stuff directly, it's the kind of thing that makes the creatures come alive, and fires up the kind of the daydreams that turn into adventures of your own. Sort of "imagination fuel" I guess.

Speaking of imagination, what you need to do now is that imagine that I have artfully summed up this article here, perhaps even offering a final insight that challenges your entire worldview. Remember, you're really impressed with this post. 

Get your copy of Meandering Monsters here:

• Print - $8.95 on Amazon
• PDF - $4.75 on DriveThruRPG

Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers

Behind this gawdawful cover are the following short stories, all by me:

• Starshadows in Sideways Time: In the far future, a space ark fleeing the dying universe is assaulted by mysterious alien entities.
• All Your Friends Are Monsters: Two medieval warriors escape a gladiatorial slave pit with the help of an ally who might be more dangerous than their enemy.
• Turmierre Returns to the Sky: Horgic and Charn meet their benefactor and discover the purpose for which they were freed.
• A Bad Habit: An enhanced agent in a world of government-controlled supermen begins to explore new abilities.
• Its Own Place: A traveler’s entire reality begins to unravel after encountering an occult ritual.
• Mister Blue Sky: An emotionally scarred super-powered hero and her friends go up against a quirky magical menace with the help of a famous otherworld champion.
• The Man Comes Around: Unfortunate hikers are caught up in the battle between an alien scientist and the villainous Covenant.
• Misfits and Mistakes: In the midst of an alien invasion, competing factions of super-powered beings struggle to claim one powerful but unpredictable resource.

Print for $9.99

Kindle Format for $0.99
CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Carnage 2014 Events

I've submitted my games for Carnage 2014:

Shadroc's Last Stand 
5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
Friday Night 7pm-11pm
The necromancer Shadroc has tormented you for most of your careers, but not anymore. Realizing he's no longer in control, he turned and fled. He slipped past you in Dyvers, led you into an ambush in Nulb, framed you in Gradsul, and you've all agreed never to speak of what happened in Westkeep. Now you've got him cornered. He's hiding out in a hellish mountain valley pocked with noxious geothermal vents, and he has nowhere else to go. That's a good thing, right?

Stetsons Are Cool
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space
Saturday Afternoon 1pm-5pm
After the war criminal Magnus Greel's escape almost caused a catastrophic double nexus collapse, further development of Zygma beam technology was banned and all signs of its use carefully monitored. You've been sent to a primitive settlement in the wastelands of nineteenth century America because a new Zygma projection has been detected, and the dusty rat-hole of Scurl's Hollow is its only stable endpoint.

A Strange Shootout in Silver Springs
Qalidar: Resistance
Saturday Night 7pm-11pm
Gunfights aren't common in this out-of-the-way Ozark Mountain settlement, but that ritzy new resort establishment up on the hill has attracted some strange customers. The fact that a bunch of folks were shooting it out last week is odd enough, but some of the bodies were even odder. They say one of them had some kind of stubby horns or something, and reflective plates fixed right in over his eyes, if he even had eyes. And that other one - well, the constable whisked his body off right away and won't talk about it, but old Skip Simpson from down by the bluff says it was bent up all wrong, and it smelled like tar.

Other Peryton Gamers events can be found here (eventually). As always, while I think I'm likely to get these slots, check the program to be certain of the final time and date.

Finding Me at Gen Con

If you're looking for me at Gen Con this year, a good place to start would be one of the events I'm running or at the Peryton Publishing booth, one of many listed as 1317. Here's a map (click to enlarge):

You can find the original, non-perytonized version here.

Dice Blather

Like a lot of gamers, I have way more dice than I carry around. I usually take my little purple bag for myself and, if I'm running games at a convention, I'll bring a "loaner" bag with a few sets of dice that I wouldn't be too upset to lose. I have another bag full of d6's that I bought specifically for Tunnels & Trolls, but I usually end up relying on what's in my regular bag. This being the case, I'm sure it's no surprise that I occasionally switch around the ones I'm carrying.

I bought a nifty set of iridescent Chessex dice at BASHCon this year, and that one went in right away. I had a couple of sets of Zocchi dice and various pip-faced d6s in the bag with it. I've bought a lot of Zocchis over the years, mainly because the gem dice are pretty and, when I first started buying RPG dice, that was what the hobby shop carried. Back then I didn't know, and later I didn't care, about the whole super-duper precision edge randomness thing. Most recently I had a set of glow-in-the-dark ones and a really nice-looking pale green ("peridot" I think) translucent set in the bag.

The Zocchis didn't feel right rolling with the new ones, though. The sharp edges seemed fragile next to the tumbled ones. The dice felt lighter too, almost hollow. I don't know if they really are lighter - I certainly didn't weigh them - but I couldn't shake the impression. The numbers started to bug me. I had never really noticed before, but, next to the large, bold, numbers on the tumbled dice, the numbers on the Zocchis looked anemic. Maybe that's another precision balance thing.

I decided that I like tumbled dice with numbers that are really easy to read. I know, crazy, right? I dug through my collection and found some translucent Koplow dice from a tube that I took home when I had my shop (nostalgic for obvious reasons). I also grabbed the ones from that boxed set they made when 3rd Edition D&D first came out (nostalgic for reasons I'm not going into right now). I kept a couple of the souvenir d6's I had been carrying around - an Elder Sign one that my regular Aqua Teen players gave me the first time I ran it and the complementary die from the most recent BASHCon. I also kept my solid metal blue and silver d6's in.

So, there's the new line-up. Who would've thought I could write a post this long about rearranging my dice?

The Call of Spandex

I've been playing Champions Online to chill out here and there. It's fun, but mostly I'm either playing with strangers or solo'ing, so the plots I come up with to blend in with the game's built-in scenarios are all just me. For someone who's used to real role-playing games, that's not always satisfying. So, given that we recently found a way to play more often locally, I thought maybe it's time get back to pen & paper style superheroing.

My first love among super-hero RPGs was Villains and Vigilantes. It's one of my first RPGs, period, for that matter. It was only after V&V showed me what these games could deliver that I really got into Dungeons & Dragons. I still love V&V as a player. As a GM, though, stat-building for all those characters and taking all those combat formulas into account during play is a daunting task.

I used to play a lot of GURPS Supers once upon a time. We had a long-running campaign with all kinds of interlocking plots and conflicts. There were even a few spin-offs. If V&V stats are daunting, though, the prospect of slogging through GURPS again is terrifying.

I've heard there are some interesting offerings using the FATE system, but I hate all things FUDGE, so I didn't see much point in looking at those. I'm also not terribly fond of Savage Worlds. Maybe someday I'll talk about my reasons, but probably not. I wouldn't have even brought it up if I hadn't wanted to say something about why these popular choices weren't considered.

Mutants and Masterminds got more than a brief look. It's a well-constructed game, based on mechanics I'm familiar with, and I already own a copy. There might even be a GM screen somewhere in my house because Tom was going to run it one year for... I don't remember why. It seems like a very unTom-like thing to do. M&M is a little more fussy than I wanted, but it stayed in the running until the end. If you want satisfying comic book hero rules, after all, there's always going to be some complexity creeping in.

The original Marvel RPG from the 80's looked okay. I might have given it more consideration if I had ever owned a physical copy, and if I hadn't gotten really excited about something else before I got around to it. I had also picked up the more recent Marvel RPG by Margaret Weis Productions at Gen Con a couple of years ago. After a read-through, I didn't much like the look of the fidgety dice conventions and nothing else really grabbed me, but I admit I never gave the game a fair chance.

I toyed with the idea of making my own super-hero game out of Tom's TACK system, or finishing the one Michael was developing, but either of those would be a lot of work, and I've already got plenty to do. Finding another job for myself is not at all what I had in mind. Maybe someday.

And then there's this little gem, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game: SAGA System, which had been gleaming quietly on my shelf, virtually untouched, for years, along with three roster books. Mike & I had both picked up the game in 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts, tried a few fights, and liked it. It was particularly impressive that the Captain America versus Ultron test felt quite a bit like something that might happen in the comics (as opposed to, say, Cap being disintegrated in the first round or having powers beyond what you'd expect). And it was fun. We both talked about running some sessions with it, but our group was kind of sputtering out, and it was hard enough just to keep the D&D campaign going.

So that game got shelved. Life and gaming moved on and I didn't think much about it until this weekend. When I picked it up this time to check it out, I couldn't even remember how it worked, beyond, "cards." They pack a lot of different uses into those colorful cards, all on top of a simple and brilliantly flexible system that makes it really easy to deal with the kinds of surprises that are bound to come up in a wild super-hero action game. Every time I flipped through the book thinking, "I wonder how they handle..." I found myself smiling. Often the answer was what I was hoping it would be. Just as often, it was better.

So yeah, when my turn comes up to run something in our little get-together, I'm going to have them pick out characters from the books for a quick trial run, to get everyone (including me) more comfortable with the rules. After that, assuming all goes well, I figure I'll let them decide if they want to pick a character for the actual campaign or make one. I'd kind of prefer they make one, but it seems kind of scroogy to run Marvel Super Heroes and then tell people they can't play a Marvel character.

Okay, so, yeah. Done blogging. Ready to play now.