The Other Side blog

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Witches of Oz

F. Douglas Wall over at "There's more to Oz than the Yellow Brick Road" has a post up on Witches in Oz.

He mentions me in it and it is, obviously, something right up my alley.

I have mentioned before in a few places that the Wicked Witch of the West was one of my first witches. She was the one that started this whole mess to be exact.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2011/11/having-wicked-time-in-oz.html
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2012/07/adventures-in-oz.html
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2012/08/what-was-your-childhood-monster.html

Pop by his blog and have a discussion with us on witches.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

First up: Yes. I know I owe you all a Part 2 of the OSR is Dead. But many of you made a lot of the points I was going to.
I also know I missed White Dwarf Wednesday. I was away from my machine all day.
So instead a drive by post. With pictures.

So here is my Gen Con 2012 haul. I also picked up some things here for my kids.

Here we have all the books, minis (love that Gelatinous Cube) and swag.

I picked up a way cool game, Monsterhearts (pdf), that I want to talk about in much detail later. Also my new ConX 2.0 book, Zenner cards and screen.

I got my two copies of Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord and Jason Vey's Amazing "Amazing Adventures". Again, I want to talk about that one in detail too. I picked up a replacement GURPS Horror (lost it years ago) and GURPS Castle Falkenstein.

I got some of the "Drow" D&D dice bags. And a bunch of older d20 books on magic.

Minis. I got some dragons (well my kids did) and some other minis. I love that huge one. It is a statue of some sort. In my games it will be a Death Titan.

Some books for my games. The Dragon (Mongoose) and Dragonlance is for the 3.x game, Faith & Avatars and the Dragon Mag Annual are for the 4e game. Rokugan was just because it was a buck.

Finally I am replacing my worn out Pokemon backpack for a real gamer bag.

And a full set Drow dice. We all got some and had to go to all the D&D events to get them. They are very cool. My wife likes hers because they are purple. All her dice are purple.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Is the OSR Dead?

So I made some interesting, though not entirely new or unique, observations.

The OSR, as a Movement, is Dead.

This is the point of view of Tavis Allison who gave a talk about the OSR at Gen Con this past week. Tavis has the street cred to back up his claims too, author of The Mule Abides blog and the Adventurer Conqueror King game system.

Though he has his reasons, I think I am looking at something slightly different.

I am not talking about the lack ENnies or even representation at Gen Con.
There was the the OSR Publications booth, which was great.

I am talking about the OSR as a movement. If the stated goal* of the OSR was to get old-school style gaming back into the hands of gamers, then one only needed to go to the Wizards of the Coast booth and buy a copy of the 1st Ed AD&D books, or listen to their keynote address about the availability of older products, or go play D&D5.

(* lets be honest here, no one ever stated any goal of any sort)

If the goal was get products to go mainstream, well the OSR Publications booth was a good step in that direction. George Strayton of the Secret Fire RPG was an industry guest of honor at this past Gen Con as well. Castles and Crusades (one of the earliest Retro Clones in my opinion) never seemed more popular.

So if the OSR as a mission was get "old school" products in the main-stream, then that goal has been met.

The movement then is dead. Why? Well if the "R" mean Revolution, Revival or Renascence, then the goals have been achieved. Old School is back.

The OSR as a community or even as a loosely affiliated publishing movement will live on. Much like the Indie Press Revolution (who, to be perfectly honest, does everything the OSR could do and does it well).
There will still be sites and blogs that support old-school play. They existed before the OSR movement and will (in some form) afterwards.

I fear though that for many that the "R" stood for "Resistance" as in the alternative not because they liked old school play so much, but because they hated the "new school" of 4e or even 3.x. Well for them I fear the battle wages on and it will never be won. TSR is never coming back to life, WotC owns D&D and there are many that enjoy the newer games.

In any case the OSR will change. Not because it wants to, but because it will need to to stay relevant.

I will have to post on this topic more in a bit.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Gen Con recap: The name of the game is "D&D"

I did something truly special this Gen Con. Something that I would love to repeat.

I played D&D with my family through the entire Con. One of the things I wanted to do with my boys was to play the history of D&D with them. I didn't get into every game I wanted, but I got in enough to make it count. I also wanted my wife to join in so she could give her unbiased opinion of the games. I have learned to trust her judgment on many, many things over the years.

Part of the plan was that any XP, gold or magic the boys got in the games they could translate that over to the special 1st Ed Game we were playing at night.

We played a D&D4 game on Thursday. It was a fun game where we all played Dwarfs. The DM was great and he played well with the kids. Thursday night I had a game of my own to play (which I'll discuss later).

Friday was our Castles and Crusades game. I REALLY wanted to play this one after going on and on so much about C&C a while back. I picked up my new copies of the 5th printing of the Players Handbook and Jason Vey's amazing Amazing Adventures. The game we played was also a lot of fun. Again we had a great GM...er Castle Keeper, and in this we all played Assassins. My youngest loved it.

Friday night we rolled up characters for 1st Ed AD&D!! They rolled up two each, and these are the children of the Dragonslayers (their current 3.x game). That took us till midnight since I had to look a lot of things up and we were sitting on the 2nd floor of the JW Marriott and everyone had stop by and comment on what we were doing.

Saturday we played D&D5/Next. If I would have known we were making characters I would have gone into it with a different mindset. But it worked out well and character creation was a snap. Really. It only took me 30 mins to do my character and help out my wife and two kids. I playtested the Warlock and I like it so far. The game itself was fast, I mean really fast. I am going to come back to that in a sec in fact.

Saturday night we played AD&D 1st ed. I had the boys go on a quick adventure into Castle Quasqueton from B1 In Search of the Unknown. The boys had some great rolls and they even took out some orcs, zombies and a group of kobolds. The boys made their objective (which happened to be a on sheet of paper I wrote on when I ran this in college around 1988-9 or so), find a missing witch (Marissa) and bring her back. I hinted there was an evil cult at work (cause that was what I was doing in 88) and the boys ran with it. Now this cult is "infiltrating" the lands and they now have to put a stop to it. I might run with that.

Fighting the Kobolds
Quite by accident one of the common elements in the D&D5/Next playtest and my AD&D game on the same day was the party (6 and 5 characters respectively) fought 4 kobolds. The combat for each ran very, very similar. In both cases it was fast with hit points flying everywhere and characters on the verge of death. I can say that in at least this respect D&D5 is closer to old-school play than 3 or 4 was.

It dawned on me at one point or another while playing Saturday night. I was playing AD&D. With my boys. At Gen Con! I play a lot of D&D with them and I have played a lot of AD&D over the years, but this felt special. This felt like the best thing I could do then and there.

I have no idea what I am going to do with D&D5 when it comes out. At this very same Gen Con Wizards of the Coast had announced that D&D5 would not be out till 2014. That is a very good year in my mind. Still gives us time to play some 4e AND be out in time for the 40th anniversary of D&D.
WotC also announced that previous editions would be made available again via e-book format of some sort.

There were copies of 1st Ed for sale at Gen Con and we all also picked up a full set of D&D "Drow" dice.

For me there is no debate. D&D still reigns as king at Gen Con.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Back from Gen Con!

I am back from the "Best 4 Days in Gaming" and I am still riding a gamer's high.

So much to talk about and share.I'll have to get my thoughts collected and share some posts with you all soon!

Celtic-themed Games

I have really been reading a lot of games based on real world myths, and mostly Celtic myths. There are a lot of good ideas in these games, but none that felt perfect to me. I am still looking though!

Slaine the RPG of Celtic Heroes

Mongoose has released their 2002 OGL game, Slaine to PDF for what I think is the first time ever.

To begin with this is NOT a game of generic Celtic myths and heroes, this is a game for the 2000AD comic Slaine which borrows a lot from Celtic myth, but takes a number of liberties as well.
It also diverges from it's SRD/d20 3.0 (NOT 3.5) roots. So when reading, keep this in mind.

The book is very typical of a setting-type book.
We start with a number of classes. These have all be re-flavored to fit the mythos of the world better. So Tribal Warriors and Witches join the ranks of Druids and Thieves. Also we only have 3 races, Human, Dwarf and Warped-Ones (humans changed permanently by their interactions with the Beast Folk).
Next we come to skills and there are some differences here than the d20 norm.
We also get a new honor system. Enech: Honour and Reputation is used to tell the value of a warrior (his Sarhaed or Honor Price). It is also used when someone it wronged or challenged in a battle. In a lot ways it should be more important than XP. Tied to this are weirds (fate) and geas (taboos).
A strong collection of feats are presented. Including the fabled Warp Spasm and Salmon Leap.

Goods and Weapons is next and it deserves a careful read from the player. Afterall you might know that 3 gold piece is worth 3 cows, but that won't help you when all you have to barter for your new sword are chickens and pigs.
Combat is given special attention. In particular we get one on one combat, chariot combat and larger army combat. Useful for any d20 game in truth.
Magic and Spells are handled in a very different way. With each spell costing EP. Details are given about how gain and get EP for magical use.

We get some information on Slaine's world including the mythic version of the British Ilses (Albion, Alba, Cambria and Eriu or England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland respectively).
There is a section on adventures which includes some very interesting Prestige Classes.
We also get a run down on the Goddesses and Gods of the Tir Nan Og, and the bestiary of normal animals and more fantastic monsters.
Campaign ideas and notes.

All in all a good book if you are a fan of the comic or in Celtic myths in general. My only disappointments in this is some of the art is a low res scan and it looks very pixelated, the other is that there is no character sheet included. The character sheet for Slaine was one of the nicest ones from early in the d20 craze.

Bardic Lore: The Fachan
Celtic myth and lore is full of strange creatures. Some that don't quite have an analogue anywhere else. The Fachan is one such creature. Their might be similar creatures in other myths (I bet the Japanese or the myths of India have something like this) but none I can recall off the top of my head. This book gives us the background on the Fachan, 3.x style monster stats and some ideas to use it in your games. There is also a Fachan NPC and some notes on using the beastie as a character race. All in all not bad, and then when you consider the price then it is great.

Bardic Lore: Ogham
This is a well researched guide on Ogham, the written language of stones often seen near ancient Celtic settlements. This product blends historical findings with mythology to give us something very cool indeed. New ideas for Druids and Bards using Ogham are included along with a new feats, skill uses and revised spell lists. What is nice is the chart of the Ogham characters with sounds, English letter equivalents, and tree names. A lot of research went into all of this and the quality shows. Don't take it as a historical treatise on Ogham, but it is a great tool for a game. Nominally d20/3.5 but really the most of it can be used in any game.

Treasures of the Sidhe
Not a bad product. 45 new magic items of various degrees; most I thought were fine. It lacks art a lot of art, but for under 3.00 you are getting a lot of magic items and 1 new monster. Great if you are running a 3.x game bases around the Sidhe or the Seelie/Unseelie courts.