Circle of Dar Janix

This is a game about herding sheep Video Games: I have logged about 45 hours in Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky over the last few weeks, and I am really enjoying it. I believe this was originally an early 2000s PSP release, but I am playing the PC port. This game is right up my JRPG alley. It is in the early PS1 style, kind of like Grandia. The world building is excellent. While there are not as many books to read as in an Elder Scrolls game, the ones that exist are more focused on relevant information. This allows the game to feel like it is set in a bigger world. I also really enjoy the combat system. While it remains firmly in the traditional turn-based JRPG mold, it adds just a touch of Final Fantasy Tactics inspired strategy. While there is a bit of anime goofiness, it is not too heavy handed. I also started Persona 4 Golden on my Vita. I loved Persona 5, so I have been really looking forward to this one. Stars Without Number: I am looking for a few more players...

I once again have let this blog lapse for over a year, mostly because the communities I used it to  interact with largely faded. One of the groups that I game with now has several people who write  gaming blogs, so I am incentivized to pick it back up again. GenCon has always represented the  beginning of the gaming year for me, so returning with a recap of that event seems fitting. GenCon has changed a lot over the last few years, both for me personally, and as a whole. I have  noticed a positive shift in the demographics to a younger, more diverse crowd. The convention has  also expanded its support for families, and “cons within the con” like Contessa. On the whole, it is  a bigger, better, and more interesting convention. For the last three years, my wife and daughter  have come with me, and there is plenty for them to do (my wife is not a gamer). Along with the change of bringing my family, the con has changed for me personal...

The TridentCon schedule and preregistration is up. I am running Stonehell using Castles & Crusades in the first two slots on Saturday.

I will be running two sessions of Castles & Crusades at TridentCon , on October 17th, in Severna Park, MD. I will be running in the 9-1 slot and the 1-5 slot. Both games will be set in Stonehell dungeon and will be part of my persistent campaign there. You will be able to play in either of the games or both. I will start both sessions at the steps down and they will be free exploration. I have done this several times at conventions in the past, and it worked very well. Plus, as my version of Stonehell is persistent, you might be able to make off with treasure and deny my regular group the XP! If you are in the area, come out and play.

On Sunday, I took my daughter to the Skyline Caverns, about an hour from my house. To a certain extent the whole setup is a tourist trap. In addition to the cavern tour, they have a dragon themed mirror maze, and a small train ride. There is a large gift shop, which mostly sells junk and the inevitable polished “gemstones”. All of that said, it is a very fun tourist trap and a great place to take a three-year-old. The mirror maze and the caverns themselves are of interest to this blog. I you have never been to a mirror maze before, it is a maze where all the walls are mirrors. This creates the illusion that the maze is infinite and creates enough confusion that the maze feels much bigger, and more complicated than it actually is. At first a mirror maze feels like one of those dungeon tricks (like spinners, teleporters, or sloping passages) that are neat in theory, or in a Wizardry game, but come unglued at the table. But, I do think that you could make use of a mirror maze in a du...

I always love reading other accounts or people playing Stonehell to see how they compare to the sessions I have run. Jens D. has a nice recap on The Disoriented Ranger .

Favorite RPG Setting If you have read my previous answers, it should come as no surprise that my favorite setting is Star Wars. I am not going to go on about it again here, I have run two campaigns to completion in this setting and loved both of them. I can actually be more specific because both of those campaigns were set in the Elrood Sector, the subject of one of WEG's Galaxy Guides. The great thing about the Elrood Sector is the level of detail at which it is described, each planet gets a few pages, some hooks, and a few characters. There is enough there to build a campaign around, but not enough there that it becomes cumbersome to remember it. In fact, while both my campaigns were set in the Elrood Sector, they were two very different versions of the sector. I should mention two other settings in which I have run a lot of game sessions, Stonehell and The City State of the Invincible Overlord. I don't think it is a mistake that these are both very limited set...

Before I embark on my Stonehell customization project, I need to think about what tools I will need. I have divided them into three categories, these categories each include both physical tools and processes I will use for content creation. Content generation tools Content management tools Quality control tools "Content generation tools" are pretty self explanatory, they are the tools I will use to create the content that will go into the dungeon: Graph paper: I still do the rough draft of everything by hand. I am not really sure why, it is very inefficient, but it is how I work. Pencils Drawing templates Writing journal Geomorphs: Some I will steal from other places, some I will make myself. I actually shouldn't need that many, I am leaving levels 1 and 2 untouched and they will have the most real estate. Treasure tables Dungeon tables Random dungeon generation procedure: I started talking about that here Monster books: I have plenty A dungeon d...

So, how do I go about planning my Stonehell customization project? I already have a good first pass at a high level definition of my goal: A customized version of Stonehell dungeon that is consistent with the history of my campaign world and reinforces careful play and resource management. I will need to sharpen that as I go, but it will serve to keep me pointed in the right direction for now. I can't talk about the history part yet because my players have spent the last several sessions almost stumbling on some big reveals. Some of my players read this blog, so I don't want to spoil anything. I can discuss the play style of my group though. My current Stonehell group consists of people who either work in, or are students in, the science and technology area. There are both professionals and skilled tradesmen in our group. I am a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. As you can imagine, my group has a very methodical play style. They carefully explor...

There is a reason that I cannot start on the Castle Whale right now, I already have a megadungeon project I am working on, my ongoing Stonehell game. I have been running Stonehell for various groups since early 2010, and I have kept a persistent dungeon through every session. That means that there have been a lot of changes to my version over many sessions, especially in the first two levels. While the physical layout is mostly the same, most of the original room descriptions have changed as a result of player actions. Recently I have started changing the dungeon further by adding my own sub-levels. These sub-levels have introduces an interesting wrinkle to my dungeon, history. My current campaign world does not have much history. It is a mixture of parts of my old campaigns and commercial products. The "civilized" continent has only its major port city, The City State of the Invincible Overlord, detailed. I brought Judges Guild's classic city over from a Castles ...

I have continued to run Stonehell since my last post here and have continued to use Castles and Crusades to run it. While the group has not met regularly we still have managed to get several good sessions in, and have even added a player. I am happy with this, as I now live more than an hour from the rest of the group. Last weekend I ran two sessions of Stonehell at GenCon. I took a different approach than I have in the past when I run Stonehell at a convention or other "one shot" situation. In the past, I have had a prepared adventure that is set in Stonehell. My thought process was that players at a convention would not be interested in undirected exploration. It turns out I was wrong. In both sessions I offered the players a choice, they could either start at the top of the steps and begin exploring, or I could use a prepared adventure set in the dungeon. Both time the players made the unanimous choice to just start exploring. There wasn't even any real discussion ...

Tomorrow I will be running a Swords and Wizardry game at my local gaming store, High Tide Games. This is the same store that I run Edge of Empire in every week (last weeks play report coming soon). hopefully I will be running the game for many of the same people. I billed the game as Basic D&D on the stores calendar, because I assume that the awareness of the Swords and Wizardry name is not very high. I will be using a heavily house-ruled version of S&W that I like to use at conventions. I draw heavily on Akrasia's Swords & Wizardry house rules , as well as various other house rules that I have picked up over my years of OSR reading, and many that I have developed myself. I am thinking about posting these rules, the problem is, I have no idea where I got half of them anymore, and I am not sure if they are all Open Gaming content. I may post them after further investigation. The players will playing in my long-running campaign world that contains my Castles and ...

I am going to attempt to revive this blog. Law school is taking less of my time now that it is drawing to a close, and I have a lot of stuff built up that I can write about. I also have some projects that I have started working on that I will cover here. They are all intended for my personal use, so I will offer them here for anyone else who wants to tinker with them or comment on them. @ttack: A stripped down version of early fantasy role-playing games that will emulate the play in a roguelike. It will focus on random item identification, random dungeons, and solo/referee-less play Inspired by my latest read-through of the LotFP Referee Manual, I have decided to make up a list of unique monsters. I want to shift the enemies in my game away from the standard roster and move towards the unique and mysterious. These will be monsters to be used rarely, that will be completely unknown to the players My own detailed wilderness exploration rules. There is likely a long wilderness trek in the...

I have sent in proposals to run two games at DexCon in July. I proposed running the gatehouse from Stonehell and my own mini-sandbox city. Both using Labyrinth Lord

I recently was asked in a comment if there was enough gold in Stonehell to support the training costs in OSRIC for gaining a level. According to the OSRIC rules it costs 1500 gp per level to gain a level in training costs. I am using the entourage system in my game so there are 4 players but each also has a dedicated henchman. I would like for there to be enough gold on the first level for all of the primary characters and main henchman to advance to level 2, even if some of the henchman don't get enough XP until later. This means there will need to be around 12,000 gp. Some notes about my calculations: 1. This includes only the first level of the dungeon even though we also are playing the above ground areas. 2. I am including only treasure. I am not including the gold gained by selling weapons and armor taken off corpses. I am assuming that most of this goes to equipment, supplies, hirelings etc. 3. I am not including obscure things like selling natural resources to an alchemist....

The second session of my OSRIC game went very well. While creating characters was a pain the first week, the game plays very well. I only went with the OSRIC rules for now with the optional shield rules and entourage system in place. I did not add in weapon speed or weapon v. AC. Combat moved fast, by my count we got in six different combat encounters. We started the session off with the characters getting off the boat from The City State of the Invincible Overlord in Magnus Aquila, the colony city. They didn't hang out in town very long because the place was a mud-ridden, depressing dump. They hired two torchbearers and a boat and headed for the dungeon. That's right, there were 4 players, each with a primary PC and a favored henchman, and two torchbearers. If you are keeping score at home that makes a party of 10 characters, and we managed to get done 6 combats in about 5 hours of playing. When they arrived at the Stonehell canyon they dove right into exploring. They decided ...

Two weeks ago we had our first OSRIC game session. The players created characters to take on Stonehell dungoen. Since we are using David Bowman's Entourage system from Fight On! #2 I had each player create two PCs one of which will be their main character and the other will be their Loyal Henchman. I pretty much want to leave the world open for the players to create as much as possible so I was happy to see them start filling in the racial details as we made characters (female dwarves have beards!). It has been a long time since I had a group make up 1st Edition Characters and I forgot what a pain it was. Character creation requires a total of 8 die rolls (6 stats, hit points, starting gold) for most characters, but it still takes almost as long as 3.5 until people get familiar with the system. The problem is the race/class combos and the non-universal stat bonuses. Not only do the stat bonuses vary from stat to stat, they also vary from class to class! AAAAARRRGGG! This problem wa...

With my OSRIC campaign starting in just a little more than two weeks, it is time to nail down what will be in from day 1. Rule Set: OSRIC. I think that for the group I will be playing with this is the best rule set. They have all played 3.x and have come to expect a certain level of complexity. This will let me keep that while being much easier for me to run. It also gives me a lot more room to mod the game than 3.x does, I can tailor it to this group. XP for gold and exploration will be the primary advancement mechanisms. The Group: Looks like I will have 4 players. I have, to some extent, played with all of them before (maybe not 1). One member is part of my original gaming group and we go back to middle school and Mentzer. His wife will also be playing with us, she played in at least one of my 3.5 Monster Feature games (I think the one with the Kraken). I played with the other male player in a Shadowrun game last year and I think his wife also played in it. It is possible I met her ...

I am halfway through reading Michael Curtis's Stonehell and it has ruined me. I have always hated reading dungeon adventures, and now I will hate them twice as much. Nothing irritates me more than having to flip back and forth between the map and the entries. It makes it very hard for me to enjoy reading map heavy modules, even campaign settings. I keep getting yanked out of the flow by having to flip back. It will be even more irritating going forward, because I now know that IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! If he has done nothing else with this book, and trust me he has done other stuff, Mr. Curtis has set a new standard for how dungeon adventures should be presented. Each chapter starts with a map of a whole level of the dungeon. There is also a brief discussion of the level and a list of all the monsters, with stats, on the level. This is followed by four sections, each detailing 1/4 of the level. Each of these sections starts with a more detailed description of that quarter...

I pre-ordered The Dungeon Alphabet and ordered Stonehell today. These are both from an author, Michael Curtis, whose work I have enjoyed online and in magazines. I also ordered WHFRP 3rd edition today too. I think Stonehell will show up first and I can't wait to see it. Since I will be running my first megadungeon soon I hope it will be helpful.