Been Busy With Work - Hang Tight Folks We Have Something Good in the Works

I couldn't help quoting the home page message from the Gygax Games Website. 
Been busy with work so I've been neglecting the blog.

I want to talk about my "Legends of Early Greyhawk" campaign in future post and a few other ideas that I hope I wrote down somewhere because the details have slipped my mind at the moment. 


Started running "Council of Thieves" for my Pathfinder group a couple of weeks ago as scheduling has put a pause if not an end to my Legends campaign.  So looks like its more Council tonight.

In other news I'm taking a bit more of a fascination than usual with the Ongoing Campaign section from the Dungeon Masters Guide. The Six Guns & Sorcery and Mutants & Magic conversions for Boot Hill and Gamma World respectively have always interested me although I've never played either game. This looks like the seed of the what would evolve into the multi-genre roleplaying system, Dangerous Journeys being the stillborn fruition of this concept for Gygax (Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying had already been doing this for some time). Mythus was the only genre published before TSR sued GDW for ownership of the system. Unhallowed, a horror genre was partially written but never published. 

I find that the d20 system takes much inspiration from this concept and the multi-genre idea seems obvious now, but look at the DMG Ongoing Campaign section and the genre mixing idea is present although the unified system idea seems to be several years down the road for most designers and publishers at that time.

A notch or more

I was reading about character death in the CKG and there was a part on WW1 flying aces and counting kills. This was given as an example of what not to do with your player's characters as a CK (DM/GM/Referee). But as I thought about this I find that its the perfect thing to do to your GM screen. I proposing putting a red dot (although I might print skulls) on the player side of the screen for every character that dies. This is great especially for d20 where balance has taken the danger out of adventuring. The more dots you have on the screen the more the players feel they have to get serious about what they are doing. 

Deals on C&C and bringing more players to the table

Troll Lord Games is having a sale on some items until Thursday.
If you have at all been interested in Castles & Crusades I suggest you check it out.


Of particular interest is that "Of Gods & Monsters" and "Monsters & Treasure of Aihrde" are on sale as a set. I would also suggest pre-ordering  C&C Complete, a boxed set of Players Handbook, Monsters & Treasure and Castle Keeper's Guide. That will pretty much get you a complete set of C&C Books. 
Also take advantage of the free PDF offer for the latest issue of Crusader.


As per my previous post I think that C&C, as a rules light game, has the potential to bring more new players to the table. Although I do play Pathfinder I find it somewhat bloated. Rolemaster comes to mind here, lots of crunch at the expense of playability. Although Pathfinder is a great improvement over D&D 3.5 its still d20 and suffers from the rules bloat style that Monte Cook brought over from his time at I.C.E. (the developer of Rolemaster).


Lets look at Pathfinder in relation to targeting new players. I think that the 3.5 OGL obsession with game balance and focus on cool abilities to create cool characters is much too complex for new players. Players could and should make their characters cool with back stories and deeds. Also I really think its going to take more than the religious use of "her" and "she" in the rule books to attract new female players. I personally think that "crunch" or rule mechanics are a sub-interest in RPG gaming and have been emphasized in RPG development to cater to what is an inevitably shrinking male demographic. This being said what Pathfinder has going for it, especially for new female players (this is in addition to its inclusive language use in its rule books) is a cool setting (Golarion, a setting created to include several fantasy/sci-fi type genres with alluded reference to settings in the RPG tradition) supported by interesting NPCs and locations in their adventure path publications. To me it seems obvious that Pathfinder is doing so well not because it has a great set of rules, its because it has a lot of cool new support material.


In order to assist anyone who is interested in getting involved in some of the Pathfinder materials with a more agile set of rules check out this article from the Goodman Games forum on conversions to C&C.