Posts Tagged ‘ravenloft’

Or 11 Games every gamer should play before they fail their saving throw vs. death

This post was inspired by the post on Dane of War’s blog now on Geekcentricity.

In alphabetical order are eleven games that I think are really worth your time and money. These are all games that I have played on a regular basis, and have reasonable knowledge of. They cover several different genres and eras.

7th Sea – excellent Swashbuckling fun and writing a last minute review for Valkyrie got me a foot in the door of writing.

Call of Cthulhu / Delta Green – The best post gothic horror game(s).

Conspiracy X – If the X-Files had been an RPG this is the game it would have been

Deadlands (original system) – Had great fun playing this and loved its slightly quirky system.  Keeping to just ten games forced a difficult choice and this didn’t quite make it so I decided to go with 11 instead.

D&D 3.5 (Specifically Ravenloft) – My favourite incarnation of the most famous RPG ever. 2nd Edition with the annoying bits sorted out.

Hong Kong Action Theatre (1st Edition not the BESM version) – With or without the meta game elements this is a very cool martial arts Role Playing Game. It might not have had Feng Shui’s graphic design but I found it played and ran both smoother and faster which for the genre beats artwork hands down.

Over the Edge – If one game has made me think harder and longer about how RPGs should work and how settings should be put together I can’t think of one. One day I will run a game set in San Serriffe using Over the Edge.

Paranoia –The first RPG I ever played. A rarity – a comedy RPG that works.

SLA Industries – I can’t really explain it but something in SLA speaks to me – it’s probably the subtle, subversive, dark Britishness beneath its surface.

Strange Grogge (Wessex Games) – This excellent, small press, fantasy Swashbuckling game is great fun.  Plus you get both an RPG and a skirmish wargame in one book without one compromising the other because the rules are so simple.

Tunnels and Trolls – The other classic fantasy RPG.  Do I really need to say more?

Reserve: Legend of the Five Rings – This would have made the list if 7th Sea wasn’t on it already. Unfair of me really. Brilliant game and setting but I’ve made it sit on the bench.

My 7th Sea feature review was my first article for Valkyrie. Its one of my favourite games of all time. At university I took a course on fire relating to building design. So when I was talking to a ‘zine (that I don’t think ever appeared) about 7th Sea articles and they were planning other articles about a major fire it seemed an interesting subject for me to tackle. I wrote it, sent it off and I can’t find any record of hearing about it (or the ‘zine) again. Shortly afterward AEG pulled their support from the game. So 6000 words on 7th Sea and fire sat unused on my computer.

Earlier this week a thread on the Fraternity of Shadows website started about city fires on the Domain of Dread. It reminded me of the 7th Sea article and I’ve begun converting it, where appropriate, to Ravenloft. The Ravenloft version isn’t all ready yet but I thought I’d post the 7th Sea original tonight with the first part of the Ravenloft adaptation with d20 crunch following as I find time.

Why do I write what I call reviews?

The short answer: Because it helps me think about my own writing.

The long answer:

I used to write what I’ll call proper reviews, they’d appear in Valkyrie and Ragnarok.  My review of 7th Sea produced at short notice got me the writing gig with Valkyrie so even though reviewing wasn’t what I’d set out to do I thought it was important to carry on and do the best job at it I could.  I’d think long and hard about them.  I’d spend hours carefully reading a product (and if possible playing it).  I’d consider the presentation, the content, the quality of the writing, the cost, its originality, production issues and a hundred and one other factors.  I’d try and give a balanced and fair assessment.

Then I had a run of what I will call issue reviews.  A publisher wasn’t happy with a review because I wasn’t their target market so I couldn’t apparently understand their product.  A book I reviewed that was ok but not exceptional and had a flaw won an award after sending high value goodie bags to the voting panel.  Having been asked to review a product for a magazine I’d not written for before I was told the review wouldn’t be used as they’d just signed a big advertising deal with the publisher and they didn’t think it was favorable enough.  Which was funny because I’d really worked hard to find good things in a product that I know retailers couldn’t sell.  It stank and it sat on game shop shelves.

So I stopped writing serious reviews.

I’ve been asked to occasionally for magazines and websites.  It might be good self promotion and get me some writing opportunities but I’m just not interested in running into the political side of  it again.

Now what I label as reviews here are more after action reports.  I try not to spend too long on them (although some still take a couple of hours to write).  I try to keep them personal – they are after all just my personal opinion.  I use the review label as a convenient way of lumping them all together to make them easier to find.  Maybe someone will be saved from wasting a turkey or will enjoy my insight.  I hope so because they do get a reasonable number of visits and visitors seem to spend time reading them.

Still that doesn’t explain why I write them.  I don’t see them as a great self promotion tool.  I write them to help me think about my own writing and game design.  By thinking about a Doctor Who episode or a film sometimes I see how to improve my own work.  I wrote about Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire and I knew where the script I’d written had gone wrong (using silly names and anachronism).  I’ve still not worked out what to put in their place but I think the script is tighter and funnier now without them (although one character is still called Snot because it just fits).

Sometimes the best thing happens.  I’ll get a good idea.  Not a simple rip off of someone else’s concept but a genuine tangential idea.  That moment when you’re watching something and you think you know what’s going to happen and then something else happens.  Sometimes those original ideas can take on a life of their own.  For example recently I had watched a Doctor Who episode and was writing up my thoughts.  That’s when I had a Good Idea^TM.   I’ve had a bad guy (originally a Darklord for a Ravenloft domain) floating around for a long time that I could never find a way to spin a story around and while I’ve been writing that review I now know how to make them work.  The only problem I have is they’d be fun for a Ravenloft adventure but they also fit in with a Dirk Dangerous story I’d got floating around.  I don’t suppose I can get away with using the same idea twice

I’ve just spent the evening messing around with Vue 7. Nothing really to show from tonight but I made the yet to be titled picture above last night. I’ve resized it for the web from a larger, print quality render and cropped it a little too. The ship is from Cornucopia 3D and the Water Dragon from Daz. Vaguely inspired by my long since finished nautical Ravenloft campaign.

Since I seem to be back to more regular blogging a quick post for tonight…

Put the finishing touches to the second in a series of article for Ragnarok earlier tonight. One of those times when looking over some old stuff you get a fresh look at it and realise what it was lacking. In this case it needed more villains, more humour and less high powered good guys. Hence why one 20 page article has spawned two eight page articles and left material for at least three more articles of a similar length.

Also knocked out a two page first draft of some Ravenloft ideas and sent them off to the Fraternity of Shadows.

I’m having one of those weeks where I just seem to be constantly juggling projects…

I’ve almost finished Dirk Dangerous and the Giant Balls of Doom. I’ve been retooling some of my old Ravenloft adventures for a more recent version of D&D. I’ve been answering questions about Vue 6 Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting. I completely failed to put a lighting rig together for Monday night. I’ve the first interview for the Vue News blog down to final edits. I was trying to make some materials for Vue that simulate a heat haze effect. I picked up a book on Shanghai to help me research the real world parts of NitS. Oh and to top it all off I’m back to learning C# development at work. I’m just glad it’s a bank holiday this week end – maybe I’ll catch up a bit.

… He won’t be expecting us then.

A line from one character when friends of mine when playing the original Ravenloft adventure. I wasn’t actually there but I’ve heard it so often it almost feels like community property. I’d played the same scenario back in college so it made sense to me. Back on the 1st I said that I’d been tinkering with my old Ravenloft notes for no good reason. Except now it may not be so frivolous as I may have a couple of players for a game of D&D. Trust me to set that up a couple of months before 4th Edition hits the shops but at least I’ve plenty of material to fall back on and its not like 3rd Edition is a bad system.

So tonight I’ve been picking out a set of appropriate monsters I may use. Like picking a colour pallet for an illustration or a web site I find having a small set of monsters to work with gives a more satisying feel to a campaign than using any old monsters that take my fancy. The adventures end up with a stronger linking theme and can take on a more personal feel for the players. Not to say I won’t throw a monster from out of left field if I think the players have gotten into a habbit of dealing with a particular way. I think of it as the Boromir strategy after Shaun Beans’ great line in Lord of the Rings "They have a cave troll".

I’ve also been devising outlines for four villains. I always like to have four villains on hand. One will be thrown away pretty quickly when either I don’t like them or the players just don’t act like they are scary or villainous. One will probably be defeated early on to give them a false sense of hope and progress. One will appear to be bad but will get munched on by the other remaining villain. Which will leave the last one standing of the four: in Buffy Speak the Big Bad.

After a couple of years of writing more fiction than gaming I’d forgotten how much easier it is to put stuff for a game together. Anyway it looks like I’m going back to the castle and there is every chance it’s night.

I was doing some tidying up and sorting out over the weekend when I came across the files of notes from my old gaming campaigns I ran at University. Leafing through them was a bad idea as I found the Ravenloft campaigns I ran for several years as introductory games for freshers. Some would say Ravenloft wasn’t the best setting for new role players to start with but I always found it worked. Its low magic level and focus on humans rather than a polyglot of fantasy races made it easier to get new players of AD&D 2nd Ed started without a lot of the clutter and confusion. Best of all though it was easy to tell them what the world was like: think of a Hammer Horror film.

Anyway back then access to computers for frivolous, none academic work, was difficult to get so pretty much everything except the odd hand out is hand written. All of my maps and diagrams are hand drawn on tracing paper with ink mostly with my Rotering 0.2mm pen which was my favourite for design work because I didn’t tend to end up having a sheet covered in nasty ink marks.

I came across my reworking of the Ravenloft world and for no good reason started redrawing it on the computer. I’ve no really good reason for doing this other than finally I can have the whole map visible at once and I can see how some of the bit it was hard to draw or change by hand go together. My swapping round of some of the domains not for thematic reasons but to put similar ecosystems and climates together. Replacing the shadow rift. Increasing most of the areas by a factor of ten, although keeping some domains almost at their original size. Bringing more of the domains in to the core to add new regions and make the sustainability of the whole world more believable. Anyway two evenings and most of Sunday later I’m pleased to say the old hand drawn version seems to have held up to the passage of time.

The down side is I didn’t write the lighting tutorial I ment to or work on any fiction and since I don’t expect to run a game any time soon its pretty much lost time… like when you take a 10 minute shower and when you get out an hour has past.