Adventures in Oz

With the Christmas in July sale going on I thought I would point out that one of my favorites games is on sale.

Adventures in Oz

Ever since I was little, I mean really little, I have enjoyed "The Wizard of Oz".  I can recall being about 4 or so and being frightened of the flying monkeys, the Winkies and of course the Wicked Witch.  I also remember we had this old copy of the Wizard of Oz book in the house and I remembered how different it was than the movie.

Oz is a fascinating place really, and I was amazed the first time I learned how much of it was there beyond Dorothy and her friends. I learned about names like Mombi and Ozma.  I will admit I have always wanted to put a "pumpkin head" in my games largely in part due to "Journey Back to Oz".  In my WitchCraft games we also used to call witch hunters "Dorothies".

I think Oz is a bit under rated to be honest.  It's not the drug referenced lands of Alice or even the purely fantasy of Peter Pan, it is, in a way, pragmatically American.  But it is fertile land as well. It gave us "The Wiz" and "Tin Man" and of course, "Wicked".

So I was thrilled when I heard of F. Douglas Wall's Adventures in Oz RPG.
It is, like the literary Oz, a great game for the younger set. The rules are fast, simple to learn and you can be up and playing in no time at all.  They game is also really, really fun. If you never play it, the book offers a good resource to using Oz in your own games.

The game is simple, fast and fun.

If you have kids and want to introduce them to the world of Role-playing then this is a great bet.  Just like Oz you get a fantastic land that is kid friendly with characters we all know (or at least, mostly know) and like Oz there is a lot more to this game than seen at first glance.

This is also a great game for adults.  I would recomend a game of Oz as a palette cleanser.  There are no Tolkien dwarves or elves in this game, but plent of Muchkins, Winkies and Gilikins.  There is magic, but it's not the same as all the other games you have played.  Plus it is rules lite so Narators and players can get up to speed fast.

All in all this is a great game and worth picking up.

DriveThruRPG Christmas in July

I know it has been 100+ degree out, but DriveThruRPG is thinking cool winter thoughts.
They are having their annual Christmas in July sale again.  The sale begins today (at 9:00am Central) and continues for a week!

They are featuring 25% off hundreds of titles (I found nearly 11,500).

This might be your best chance to get that game you want before GenCon.

Review: Wizard's World (1983)

What can one say about Wizard's World?

Well for starters it could be easily dismissed as yet another fantasy heartbreaker, but I don't think that would be fair really.
Yes it's AD&D roots are showing and there is a lot about the this game that is derivative.  But that is looking at it in 2012.  To look at this game as it was meant to be seen you have look at it with 1983 eyes.

This game offers some interesting twists beyond the typical D&D knock-off.  First I love the art in this book.  Sure there has been better art, much better art, even in books from the same time. But there is such an honesty about it that I enjoy.  And I LOVE that cover.
The attributes are nearly the same, enough that conversions are easy.  The charts all go to 30 which is nice.

Ok so we have a bunch of classes, many of which would drop right into AD&D, OSRIC or what ever Clone you enjoy.  There are a number of fighter-like classes, that honestly only differ a little bit from each other, but that is fine.  Some martial artists, some magic using types, 14 total.  What is cool is there is Vampire class!  Something we won't see again till D&D4 or until I did my own (link).  We have all the standard races plus some new ones, Metamorphic Dwarfs and Demon Halflings.  Honestly the book is worth it just to be able to say "Demon Halflings"!

There are 22 pages worth of spells that go all the way to level 10.
Rules follow next which is primarily about combat, weapons, poisons, potions and the like.   A little bit on magic items.
Monsters follow. There are a few, but almost no overlap between here and what you might find in a typical monster manual for a game.  There are dragons, but very different from what we are used to seeing in "D&D".
Some suggestions for play and threadbare character sheet.

Ok what is good about this game?  Lots really.  If you play D&D or some old school game you would be hard pressed not to find something here to use.  Did I mention the Demon Halflings yet?  There are plenty of monsters and lots of spells.

What is bad?  That is subjective.  If you are not a fan of old-school play or expect full color art then you will be disappointed.

What did I like? Nearly everything really.  I have to hand it to Dan Procter and Goblinoid Games for becoming an old-games preservation society.   This game isn't going to win any awards now nor would it have won any then, but it is a fun trip into the past when many games were little more than a few pages, a staple and your friend's brother to do the art.

At 80+ pages this is packed.

If you wanted to play this system and say use one my of witch classes from either The Witch or Eldritch Witchery then I say you would need an INT 11 and WIL 11.  Choose spells from the witch lists and use those or the WW spell that was most similar.

Games You Never Get to Play

When people talk about influences on their games and gaming life they typically mention the works of Fritz Leiber or Jack Vance or Tolkein or the other Appendix N names.

Not me.  Well, yes I have read those, but they were not biggest effect on my games.

My Appendix N is full of Hammer Horror and In Search Of... and any more dozens of bad-wrong-fun horror and occult material from the 70s.  It should be no surprise then that I gravitate towards games that let me do that sort of thing, Chill, Call of Cthulhu and of course WitchCraft.

But just as I am a product of 70's and 80's horror, there were other things going on then.  Still lots of "leftover hippie shit" as I used to call it.  Zodiacs, crystals, psychic powers.  All the stuff that gets mixed in with magic and the occult, plus aliens, Atlantis, secret societies, Erich von Däniken and all that.

Basically all the stuff left over when you take out the horror and the magic from the big occult boom of the 70's.

What has this have to do with gaming?

Lots!

There is one game I have always wanted to play but doubt that I ever will.

It's not a game per-se but rather a campaign.

The game is one set in the 70s where all the characters are teens.  They are also, unknown to them until the game starts, the children of the first successful alien-human hybrids.  They look completely human, but each one has unique pyschic powers.  No magic, all psychic.  The drama comes in when the teens discover what they are and the government comes in to take them to a secure facility.

So you can see where this gets it's genesis.  There were a ton of shows in the 70s about kids with powers or people being chased by the government.  I want to put it in the 70s so I can avoid cell phones, gps and the like.  Plus it was the last time teens could hitchhike across the US without people calling the cops.   I'd work in mysteries of Atlantis, crystals with magic powers, strange MIB agents, aliens out to kill them all that great stuff.  Setting it in the 70s also lets me bring in "future tech" like more powerful computers and things we use today.

The list of influences of this game go on and on.  Basically I'd go to Wikipedia's Psuedoscience category and pick and choose.

My game system of choice would be Conspiracy X since I can use most of the mythos intact.  The Unexplained would also work well as would a low powered Mutants & Masterminds game.  Something like Damnation Decade, but with more danger and horror, and none of the alt-history.

I'd love to play it or even write it.  But I doubt I'll have the time.
If I were to write it all out I'd call it "Star Child" sounds very 70s.

What games or campaigns do you really want to play but don't think you will?

My New Map!

I got my new map from Banners on the Cheap!

A bit of background.  I was approached back at the end of  June about the possibility of printing up a large vinyl banner for an RPG map.  Consequently I have also wanted a large map of Victorian London to put up in my game room.

Well I went to the website and setup my new map.  All you need is really is the image.  The layout interface is ridiculously easy to use.

Here is the original image I used, 1890s Map of London and here are the results below!

As you can see the map is huge.

The banner itself is 4 feet tall by 6 feet long.  The image I had when printed at it's best resolution would have been 6 feet by 7 feet.   So a good fit really, with some space on the edge.

I might print up Places of Interest (occult locations, the Swift's Home, St. Erisian’s School) and pin them in place.  I'll more than likely use stickers since I don't want to poke any holes in this.




This picture does not do it justice, but the print is very clear, clear as the source image, to the point where I can read the street names.

The color is great.  It really is an absolute gem of a map.

I have not tried it yet with water based or dry erase markers yet, so I can't confirm if those work.
What I do know is I am looking for other maps I have laying around here that I would like to get blown up onto a huge banner like this.   A scale map of Castle Dracula would be awesome.  Failing that, a scale Castle Ravenloft.

My expectations were pretty high and I am happy to say they have been met!

If you want to try them out for yourself then here is the link. I highly recommend them.

Custom Bandit Signs

Read more here:
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-game-room-needs-huge-map.html
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2012/07/london-map-updates.html

White Dwarf Wednesday #24

White Dwarf gets a little bit bigger again in April/May of 1981.  And again we get a great looking cover.

The editorial doesn't get started till page 9, where Ian Livingstone talks about the growth of the hobby. Games in plastic zip-lock bags are a thing of the past and now we get games in boxes with full color cover art.  He notes that D&D alone sold more 500,000 sets.  I am unclear whether these are considered the Golden Age or the Silver Age (I think 1983 is the cut-off most people agree on) but they were certainly the Halcyon Days.

Lew Pulsipher is back with his Part II of an Introduction to Dungeons & Dragons.  Again this reads so fresh to me today that I am going to xerox the whole series and use it with my new groups.

Andy Slack provides the coverage for the other big game of the day, Traveller, in "Backdrop of Stars". This article deals with setting up a Traveller campaign.  So much of this article has been personally ingrained with me on what Traveller is that I am a little surprised re-reading it all these years later.  I didn't know it was separate from the game.  As an aside my oldest got to play some Traveller this past weekend.  He ran into the issues that most of did 30 years ago; characters dying or being so horrible that they were next to useless.

Open Box has some interesting reviews up this issue.  Quirks is an odd little game of plant and animal mutation.  It reads like Pokemon set in Gamma World, but I am sure that is not it (though that sounds cool).  Ian Livingstone gives it 9/10.  Shooting Stars from then giant Yaquinto Publications is a ship to ship tactical space game.  It gets 8/10 from Nick Henfrey calling it "delightful to play".  Valley of the Four Winds (the same as the fiction that used to appear in WD) is a new game from Games Workshop.  It was designed by Lew Pulsipher and is given a 9/10 by Alan Paull.  GDW gives us a new Traveller book, Adventure 3 Twilight's Peak.  Andy slack gives this classic adventure a 10/10 calling it the "best FRP scenario of any kind I have ever seen".  I recall this one as being good, but the best of the best?  Well it has been 30 or so years.

Marcus Rowland presents another new class, the Detective.  This class is very much cut from the same cloth as Sherlock Holmes, but re-crafted to fit the D&D world better.  In many ways this is offered as a "good" alternative to the Thief and Assassin classes; with similar skills, progression and attacks.  The Detective also gets a bit of spells. As a custom class goes it looks pretty solid, but I can never recall seeing one in play even in the wild and crazy days of Jr high where everyone was playing some weird class they found.

Letters has some rule questions for D&D and one on the Fiend Factory from Issue 22.

An AD&D mini-module by Mark Byng is up next.  I do note that it is referred to as a Mini-Module and not a Mini-Adventure.  The Lair of Maldred the Might spans the next few pages and it is layout like a an old tome.

Starbase is back with more Traveller material and an article I remember reading many times.  Laser Sword and Foil was about bringing lightsabers into Traveller.

O.C. Macdonald discusses Alignment in Role-Playing Games.  The discussion begins with D&D and then moves on to AD&D and C&C.  The article generally pro-alignment even if it admits that it adds little to the games.

Fiend Factory falls into the April Fools trap and gives us some joke monsters.  I used to enjoy these sort of features, but anymore I don't find them as funny.  Granted at 40 something I am no longer the target audience of 1981.  So what do we have, the Bonacon which is a cow that stinks. There is an alternate version that is a flying cow.  Llort is a Troll with nilbogism. The todal which is some sort of monster sent to punish evil doers for not doing enough evil. The unique Tali Monster which is so huge it has to be carried by 35 goblins. Finally there is the Dungeon Master, which I am loathe to explain.

Treasure chest renew my faith with some interesting and deadly tricks and traps for dungeon rooms.

News is very interesting this issue.  It is telling us about the arrival of the D&D clones!  In particular the new Expert Set.  I recall seeing the picture back in the day and to me it looked like a metal tin with rounded edges and I thought for sure there were Expert Sets (and Basic Sets) that were metal tins.  Sadly that never happened.   In more back to the future news Yaquinto is going to give us a space game called Demon's Run.  No idea if it includes Sapphic 19th century Silurians or not. 

We have classifieds, and ads till the end.

A good issue marred by some silly monsters.
Lots of space given over to D&D and Traveller this issue, but not so much for the other big game, Rune Quest.

AD&D Reprints

The AD&D reprints are now in.

They are really nice too.

Newer paper that feels thicker, if glossier.  "Gilded" edges.  Nice covers.  These are nice enough to be collectors' items and still sturdy enough to be able to play with them.

The covers are a nice homage.

Gilded pages are always a nice touch.

It might be hard to see here, but the text is not an "exact" copy, there are some minor formatting issues.  The books though have the same page count as before and my quick glance tells me that things that show up on page X in the old books still appear on page X of the new ones.

I also like the ribbon book mark.

This copyright statement and the new ISBNs are the only clue you will get inside that this was not a TSR publication.  Many companies wold have altered the text inside to a degree I am sure.  These pages, even considering they were completely re-done, are the same.

I think we are going to be playing some First Edition here soon!

There is your history of D&D right there.  Original Edition, Basic, Advanced 1 & 2 (and OSRIC), RC, 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder and 4e.  And my new books have a new home.  That is till my kids see them in a couple of hours and they end up upstairs in their rooms.

I am not sure how much of my purchase went to the Gygax Memorial fund, but as long as it was some then I am fine.

Major kudos to WotC for getting these produced.