Circle of Dar Janix

This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. One of the things that I want to accomplish during the social isolation period, is to play some of the RPGs that have been sitting on my shelf for years. Many of these have never been played, others have not been played for years. Iron Crown Enterprise's (ICE) Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP) fits into the latter category. I have written before about how my start in the RPG hobby came through game books in the '80s. My favorite of these were the Tolkien Quest books (sometimes called Middle Earth Quest). Like most game books, they came with a rule set that allowed for combat and some exploration, I honestly always felt that the Tolkien Quest books had a better defined system than most. They also came with tables in the back to allow the books to be played as solo adventures for MERP. Of course my friends and I did not know what that was, or even what a RPG was when we picked the gam...

Session 12 started with the characters heading off to Coyn with two goals. They intended to meet with Tamaron Pol, the rebel contact for the drug deal and force Lud Chud's deal on him. They also wanted to explore the second ancient pyramid to get another data point for their Dyson sphere search. Coyn is home to a proud warrior race, kind of like space Klingons (errr). They arranged to meet their rebel contact in the alien quarter at a bar. As they approached the bar they were surprised to catch sight of Braddock drinking with Nills.

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 ...

The party returned to Elrood after escaping from Derilyn and met with Paz Nor to pitch him on the spice deal. Paz Nor did not seem pleased with the deal they had struck with the rebels. To recap, they accepted spice in return for the weapons they smuggled onto Derylin. The party would get 10% of sales for transport and Paz Nor would get 10% of the sales for use of his distribution system. The rest of the money is to be delivered to a rebel agent on Coyn. Because of the large amount of spice and its high street value, both Paz Nor and the party stand to gain many, many times the value of the weapons from this deal. Paz Nor insists that they meet with Lud Chud, head of the crime family, to explain their actions.

In last week's session of Edge of Empire, the party decided to run some guns to the rebels on Derilyn. The party's loyalties are starting to get muddled. They are made members of Lud Chud's crime family, they joined the local rebel cell, there is at least one member (Kal) studying to become a Jedi, and one member (IG-13) that is a droids' rights advocate. These are just the loyalties that they have made public to each other, there may be other, secret loyalties that have not come out yet.

The party began session 9 huddled in their camouflaged ship, recovering from their battle with the pyramid droids and the Imperial Special Forces. The giant beam was still firing through the lens on top of the pyramid, so they decided to determine where it might be pointing. After some discussion Tarn, the smuggler, informed them that since the planet was rotating, and all of the heavenly bodies involved were moving in relation to each other, they would only be able to determine a series of planes swept through space by the beam on which the Dyson Sphere could lie. They would need to find the other two pyramids and see where the beams intersected in order to determine where the Dyson Sphere was located. 

Since the group is pretty stable, I thought I would take the chance to give a quick rundown of the party members: Neelo: a mechanic Anoon: a twi'lek politico Kal: a Mandalorian marauder Tarn: a human smuggler IG-13: a droid assassin  Lockett: a human scoundrel Sal: a hired gun Caitlin: a slicer Caitlin and Sal are the most recent additions to the group and I realized that I do not have all of their character details, even though they are late-comers to the group they have been good additions both in person and in game. The game plays very well with eight players, it really helps that everyone is very professional. We have a lot of fun joking around at the table, but all of the players are always ready to go when their turn comes up. I do play a little bit looser with the rules to keep things moving, but the game seems designed with this in mind.

On the way back from Merissee the party talked to Mia and determined that she felt that The Seekers had been responsible for her kidnapping. When the party returned to Elrood they learned that students and the robot mining union were rioting over the recently revealed bugging of the union office. The party decided to spend this session working off their debt and took a job from Paz Nor to fix a fight for the Arena Battles Championship. Paz Nor wanted the Elrood System Champion, Starchild, to defeat the current Galactic Champion, Karl Bruno. 

A few years ago I purchased the Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games. These games are both set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe, and share a common system that is a close relative of the earlier editions of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system. Both books are very well produced, as expected from FFG, and are massive RPG tomes topping out around 400 pages each.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, on of my goals for this year is to run a Rifts campaign. I intend to play it straight, I am not planning on running a tongue in cheek, campy Rifts campaign. I am planning on running a serious, well thought out Rifts campaign. I already had this goal in mind when I went to GenCon. At that point, based on what I had heard about Rifts over the years (and my own minor personal experience), I was not even sure that was possible. I picked up Rifts Ultimate Edition at GenCon and I have read through it, the Gamemasters Guide, and the Adventure Guide, as these were recommended to me as the core books (along with Rifts Magic). After reading them, I think that this is a sound recommendation and I would repeat it for others interested in getting started in Rifts. Below are my first impressions of the Rules and the Setting:

Below are the listings for my eBay sales

My Edge of Empire group did not get to meet last week because I was sick, but we were back in full swing this week. The group was focused on rescuing Mia and Zann from the Loag assassins that had kidnapped them at the end of the last session. They were concerned that her visions indicated that she was force sensitive and she might fall into the wrong hands.

I started playing 4e at release. I ran Keep on the Shadowfell and a few adventures of my own before my group moved on. I did not touch it again for a few years until I moved and it was just about the only game in town. I played in the Crystal Caves Encounters campaign and enjoyed it. Recently I was a player in a 4e campaign at my FLGS. I know there are a lot of people out there that hate 4e, I am not one of them. I see each version of D&D as a tool for running different kinds of games. 4e was a decent tool for running a lighter game than 3.x and was easier to introduce new players to. But it isn't the best tool I have for this kind of game. There were several games released in the 2000s that aimed for this same slot in my collection, and quite frankly Savage Worlds fills the slot better than 4e. I would go as far to say that Savage Worlds is better 4e D&D than 4e is. The dilemma I have is that 4e is much more popular than Savage Worlds. It is far easier to find a 4e ...

The way I have structured my Star Wars: Edge of Empire campaign at my FLGS is based on my observations about the way that in-store campaigns tend to go. I find that there is usually a large turnout for the first few weeks and then the numbers tend to drop off a bit. You may actually see all of the people who show up that first week throughout the life of the campaign, but there will be a core that will be there every week while the others drift in and out. I find that by the end of week three I have a pretty good idea who will be in that core group of players. I structured my campaign with those observations in mind. I decided that I would go fairly linear for the first few weeks to maximize action and keep a fast pace. Running a plot driven game instead of character driven game for the first few weeks also makes it easier to deal with the fairly unstable player base during that period. After a few weeks I move towards a more character driven format. I try to set up at least...

I purchased Hollow Earth Expedition a few years back at GenCon, and I have had a chance to run it a few times in the intervening years. I picked up all of the books that were available at the time, the core book, Secrets of the Surface World, Mysteries of the Hollow Earth, and the GM's Screen. I really like the Ubiquity system that it uses, the game moves fast and players have a lot of freedom to describe their actions and try off-the-wall things. That said, the actual Hollow Earth Expeditions setting is pretty generic pulp. I understand that this is on purpose, and I do not fault them for it. But, there is little here that I could not get from an hour or so on TVtropes (do not click if you do not have the time). This raises the problem that while I like the system, I have a lot of generic systems, and the setting offered is very generic here. The Ubiquity system has some clear advantages over both Savage Worlds and GURPS, it is much lighter than either. It has the same pul...

A few weeks ago I decided that I needed to reduce my RPG collection significantly. I just have way too many games, many of which I know I will never play. In fact the entire area under the stairs of my house is full of RPG books are the shelves in my office. Due to the nature of my career path, I expect to move a few times over the next few years, so we rent. This means we move on a fairly regular basis, and I am starting to haul around too much stuff. I have decided to cut my collection by at least half, but I have a feeling that I will wind up cutting more by the end. The following is a series of posts I have done on the Fear the Boot forums so far. I will be continuing the series here.

As I gathered my resources for my OSRIC game I couldn't help but notice something. There are only two books, both out of print, by a major publisher. The City State book is by Sword and Sorcery, I am pretty sure they are White Wolf. The Gygax Names book is by Troll Lord and I am not even sure they qualify as a major publisher. The setting is coming from Goodman Games, some of their stuff is available in B&N so I guess they could be major. But, Points of Light II is written by Rob Conley so it keeps its small community cred as far as I am concerned. Everything else is self published in some fashion. Written by people whose blogs I read. I get a lot of use out of the Names book, so it was hardly purchased for this campaign. The City State book has been sitting on my shelf for years, I just saw a chance to use it (maybe, if needed). So every single dollar, minus printing costs, spent on this game went right back into the gaming community. Those dollars stayed in gaming. They didn...