A Day Late for Conan

Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of
One of the loves I share with most gamers my age is an affection for the character Conan the Barbarian, created and written about by Robert E. Howard and frequently depicted in the Lancer paperback cover art of Frank Frazetta. Robert E. Howard's  Conan: Adventure in an Age Undreamed Of published last year by Modiphius is not the first FRPG treatment of the big Cimmerian, that distinction goes to TSR, nor is it the most widely ever played, that would probably be Mongoose's D20 Conan, but it is a faithful adaptation of Conan's Hyborian setting for heroic play using Modiphius Entertainment's 2D20 mechanic and seems to capture much of the feel of the original stories.
I have wanted to post about this game for a year now and have kept putting it off - until now when I think I have something worth saying. Modiphius's 2D20 mechanics take a little getting used to and seem to take center stage the first few games - all I have gotten to play in the year or so I have had this game. I thought I would wait until the mechanics of the game became more familiar and started to fade into the background, allowing the players to role-play rather than roll play, before I posted my reaction. That is how I prefer to assess a game, but that hasn't happened...yet.
I had a lengthy discussion about this over the past weekend with a friend who indicated he liked the game, especially the heroic nature of play, but that the Hyborian world is a mystery to him. He stated that he just doesn't know much about the setting and the game seems to assume players are familiar with the world. Now to be fair to Modiphius, a good many pages of this volume (50+) are devoted to describing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian world. My friend admits he hasn't read those sections and hasn't read the original Conan stories either. Asking around, I am discovering how few of my current gaming friends have read the work of Robert E. Howard.
The pulp fiction stories of the 1920's and 1930's, including the work of Robert E. Howard, gave birth to sword & sorcery as a genre. In turn, swords & sorcery was a heavy influence on the creation of  the role playing game. But times have changed, tastes have altered and what was once popular and commonplace has become a niche interest (criticized by some for being sexist and racist). I am talking about the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Having read them all as a teen, way before I was introduced to White Box and the hobby of adventure gaming/role-playing, I approached my first experiences with White Box by viewing it as a game where one could play a character something like Conan the Barbarian and have adventures like he does in the stories. As a White Box referee, I drew upon my recollection of many of those stories for game plots and scenes as I described them to my players. I would not be far from accurate if I claimed every adventure game I have refereed these past forty years has drawn upon the works of Robert E. Howard in some way or another. I am also frequently the oldest person at the game table these days and I am increasingly aware that my background is not shared by a majority of today's players.
So I am asking myself, who is the target audience of this Conan game? Are we introducing a new generation of gamers to the world of Conan the Cimmerian, or is the game aimed at us older gamers who grew-up on the Conan paperbacks with those wonderfully engaging cover illustrations? How much play does this game get, I wonder? Browsing the offerings at this year's Origins and Gencon game fairs I don't see anything. I am having a hard time working up enough interest among the face-to-face players in the groups I game with for more than a one-off session. Is it me or is Conan himself slipping off into "An Age Undreamed Of"?

D100 Dungeon

A Reason to go back into the Dungeon!
With his D100 Dungeon Martin Knight has given us a solitaire dungeon crawler that offers about as much fun as a fella can have alone with some dice. This recent discovery has me recalling all the fun I have had over the years since Gary Gygax gave us those tables for random dungeon generation in his Dungeon Master's Guide and thereby opened the door for playing the world's most popular fantasy adventure game solitaire. Flying Buffalo's many solitaire adventures and Steve Jackson's Death Test (Metagaming) and their imitators have been my go-to products for solo adventure gaming these many decades since, but Mr. Knight's Dungeon has caught my attention in a serious way.
D100 Dungeon is a complete game - nothing else is needed except a pencil and d100 and a d6. It is a free download over at BoardGame Geek and I can't recommend this product highly enough. The rules are simple enough for character generation, combat and magic and for running the dungeon adventure itself, but pay attention because this game has a lot of subtle depth in the 52 page print-and-play document. It is mostly b&w with a color cover and one other page you will want in color - the M Maps Table.
The idea is simple and very well executed. A lone adventurer makes many delves into the dungeon underworld, hoping to complete various quests, while accruing wealth and reputation. Character advancement includes improved ability percentages, additional skills, better weapons and armor and more powerful spells. The book is full of random tables for determining everything from dungeon layout to monster reaction tests to spell failure curses. The quests keep the game fresh and challenging. The mechanics are immersive. In D100 Dungeon, Martin Knight takes an idea that has been around since the late 1970s (the no referee RPG experience) and has made a modern product that feels like it builds upon forty years of innovation.
This free print-and-play book represents to me what is best about the online tabletop gaming community - a hobbyist who is sharing his talent and enthusiasm with others who will hopefully appreciate his effort and generosity. I am a fan.

Traveller

The 3 Little Black Books
About the same time I was discovering the White Box Little Brown Books, folks over at the Illinois State University were putting together a game company they called Game Designers' Workshop (GD, later GDW). Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner, Marc Miller and Loren Wiseman started out with hex maps and then produced some very fine game products including the monster game Drang Nach Osten, which started the Europa series of WWII mega-wargames, and Traveller, the first role-playing game set in a science fiction rather than sword and sorcery milieu. Traveller (using the British spelling), is a first generation old school RPG product imitating the packaging (3 digest sized booklets in a box) and philosophy of the world's first published role-playing game. Like the original LBBs, Traveller assumes the referee will make lots of rulings and presents the rules as written as suggestions for play and inspiration, encouraging deviations whenever desired.
Traveller, designed by Marc W. Miller, advertises itself as suitable for solo play and group play with or without a supervising referee. Two six sided dice are all the dice that are needed and most rolls involve adding them together, along with some die modifiers, to get a total. Character generation is an involved life-path exercise that is a mini-game in itself and one where your character can famously die as a result of occupational hazards encountered during the rolling-up exercise. Traveller allows (encourages) the player to advance their starting character through an entire career prior to beginning group play.
Traveller carries a 1977 copyright date. That was before hand held tech and the internet and before transhuman designer evolution theories became a thing, so there really isn't much in the rules as written to cover such, although Traveller is an easy to adapt system. Personally, I don't feel the absence. It is easy to explain away why these are not common in the future...maybe people became bored with their smart phones and social media, or the infrastructure to support such technologies doesn't yet exist in the frontier regions of space where Traveller likes to play. Perhaps a religious or ethical ban prohibits transhuman modifications, or maybe they are common elsewhere in the galaxy, but not where the game action takes place. It's really your choice.
By default, the Little Black Books (LBB) assumes all characters are humans entering military service. Most characters start their first enlistment at age 18 and advance along a career, usually in one branch of the military, rolling dice on a number of tables acquiring rank and money while learning skills and aging, but also undergoing some risk of crippling injury or death during deployments and assignments. The starting character may therefore be quite old by the time the player decides to muster out and take the character out adventuring, especially if the player chooses to put their character through several enlistments prior to starting play. Older characters start with more resources. Advancement during play is quite slow and the character may study a single skill for several years before acquiring an advancement. Adventuring is therefore more about the stories our hero is involved in and accomplishments in the galaxy than about personal improvement.
Traveller uses the roll of two six-sided dice for attribute scores ranging from 2-12. There are three mental abilities - Intelligence, Education and Social Standing and three physical abilities - Strength, Endurance and Dexterity. These abilities may improve with training or decline with aging as the character goes through their career life paths. Traveller is a skill based role-playing game system, perhaps the first such system. Skill with individual weapons makes up a large number of the potential skills which can be mastered. Many of the non-combat skills are quite broad in application such as medical, computer and mechanical. One might use their mechanical skill to repair a broken jump drive or pick a door lock. The computer skill covers mechanical knowledge of computers as well as operating and programming ability.
Traveller is simple, old school adventuring and the combat encounter is assumed to take place frequently. Skill task rolls, including those made with weapons in combat, are success/failure. Combat is fought in rounds, with each participant able to move and attack during the round. Die modifications (DMs), including skill and environmental factors, add and subtract to a basic two die roll and a final adjusted score of 8+ is needed for success. If the attack is successful, damage is rolled and is recorded as a wound by subtracting the amount from one of the physical attributes, Strength, Dexterity or Endurance. Each round that a character is involved in melee, they also accumulate fatigue and when this score equals their Endurance, they may only inflict weakened damage until rested. Death only occurs if all three physical ability scores are reduced to zero.
As an old school game, Traveller draws heavily from the literature which inspires it, the genre of science fiction which frequently includes a description of future technologies and advanced powers of the mind. In Traveller, those futuristic powers of the mind are called psionics and allow travelers to perform feats of telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and other even more fantastic feats. Traveller assumes all PCs are humans and therefore psionic ability is not universal. Not all adventurers have the potential for developing these skills and both early detection and training is required to use psionic powers (which work something like this game's version of magic).
This being a game called Traveller, travel plays a major role in the rules as well. Travel between worlds as well as travel across the surface of a world is assumed to be part of the adventure and the LBBs include rules for the economics of travel as well as the physics of the matter. Traveller has been referred to as "space trucker" and it certainly can be played that way as there are complete rules for buying, selling and transporting goods from one planet to another. (Point-of-fact, that can constitute a character's entire adventuring career and is not a bad way to play this game solitaire.) Navigating the trade customs of various cultures can also provide a backdrop for extensive role-playing (and I assume many Traveller games have been centered around just such drama.) Communication travels at the speed of a starship in Traveller and this important fact makes the vastness of space manageable in game terms. One cannot simply call 911 and get an immediate emergency response. Adventurers are largely on their own.
If exploration is desired, Traveller provides a number of easy to use tables for randomly determining what the adventurers find as they burn ship fuel exploring new planets and charting the unknown reaches of space. Traveller is by default, an outer reaches, fringe area of space game. Traveller spends a lot of ink on tables to create the characteristics of new worlds while saying very little about the known universe. Later editions of the game incorporate the (Third) Imperium setting which is comparable to the best classic role-play published game settings, but that all comes later on. In the Black Box we get possibilities.
One of the aspects I have always liked about Traveller is the approach Mr. Miller has taken to technology in general and particularly starship design. (Maybe I should confess I am not a gear-head.) The standard hull designs and near light speed jump drive hits the sweet spot for me regarding play-ability and detail. The standard hulls have a simple beauty and adaptability which sets them above many of the fantastic imaginings of various game authors and movie visionaries who have presented competing ship designs over the decades both before and since Mr. Miller penned Traveller. Traveller gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.
Traveller is set-up to be the game you want it to be. In that respect, it is both similar to the original LBBs of White Box and because of the nature of space exploration, yet so much more than White Box. As I read through these LBBs, I can imagine using Traveller to dungeon delve on a low tech world with sword and shield (making up the rules for shield use of course). Such an exorcise might be fun!

Entering the Dreamworld

Close your eyes and make it just so
The adventure game or role-playing hobby is about escapism in the same way reading a novel, watching a movie or listening to a radio drama is. It is about laying aside the cares of the day for a few hours and day dreaming. In role-playing it is playing make believe on the table top, usually with friends who share the cooperatively created alternate world or setting in which characters that do not really exist have fantastic adventures. The game gives the participants more control over every aspect of the created, shared make-believe reality than any novel, movie or radio drama could possibly do because it is being created in real time, during the game and perhaps most significantly, cooperatively. That shared experience, the act of cooperating in the creation of setting, characters and action is at once empowering and liberating. Anything is possible, but the unexpected may happen at any time. I think in some ways it may parallel the dream experience.
While dreaming we seem to be in control of our dream selves. We make decisions and react to what we perceive to be the environment surroundings us. Unexpected things may happen in the dream, but we generally choose how we react to them. We are in control, but also not quite...we are both observer and participant. At times we even seem to be able to shape what comes next in our dreams, to will it into happening. Yet we view it all as it unfolds around us, with sound, smell, touch and taste, perhaps even experiencing pain or pleasure. Strong emotions such as anger or fear can remain with us even upon awakening because in the moment, the dream feels very real. Our minds have escaped into the dreamworld.
We can talk about daydreaming - the act of imagining an alternative to reality while being awake as a pleasurable mental escape. Playing out entirely in our mind, the daydream can take us far away to a place remembered or imagined, often a place with some element of strong appeal. It has some aspects of dreaming while asleep, but seems less real and unexpected things rarely occur in a daydream. The shared social experience of group tabletop role-playing takes daydreaming into a collective reality where others talk as if the imagined is actually happening...and it is, at least within our imaginations. It has the potential to become immersive in the same way a book or movie can. The shared game experience can be talked about afterwards and again, as a shared memory, it mimics a "real" experience. It is a thing which happened..."we were all there."
Have fun making some game "memories"!

Some Love for RuneQuest

Something Old...
While visiting friends in South Carolina recently I was given this soft cover volume of RuneQuest 3rd Edition. The Avalon Hill game company published this version of RuneQuest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Until I was handed this book, I had only seen the 3rd Edition in boxed form (Deluxe, Standard, Player and Referee versions) or as two hardbound volumes (basic and advanced) printed by Games Workshop for sale in the UK. The box versions of RuneQuest contained paper cover stapled booklets which quickly shed their paper covers. This is a much more sturdy format of the complete game.
Avalon Hill's RuneQuest attempted to support both a magical history version of RuneQuest alongside Glorantha, the original setting for RuneQuest. Two early releases for the historical RuneQuest were the Ninja and Viking setting boxes. While good products in their own right, folks who had associations with Chaosium's Glorantha anxiously awaited new material for that setting.

The Avalon Hill years started slowly for Glorantha RuneQuest, but once the working relationship between Chaosium, the company who retained rights to oversee (and produce) much of the Glorantha material for RuneQuest, and Avalon Hill became settled in, the partnership produced some fine additions to the mythological setting. Many secrets about the setting was revealed as new products were released. The area of Doraster had until the publication of this volume been simply a place on a map with little in the way of available details. This was true of much of the mythical world of Glorantha outside fabled Dragon Pass and the Prax wastelands.

The Avalon Hill/RuneQuest Glorantha publications covered some old ground in the form of new releases of topics that had seen first light under the RuneQuest 2nd Edition publications by Chaosium, but were now revised to bring the material into line with the 3rd Edition rules and were expanded and altered as the creator's concept of Glorantha was evolving. Glorantha is a place where myths are real (and occasionally become altered over time) and religion plays a daily role in the lives of the player characters and NPCs. Chaos sets at the edge of creation slowly unraveling reality with its taint of corruption and waiting for a chance to destroy everything. As these cover illustrations suggest, the boundaries between men and beasts are often blurred as Chaos works its influence.

Something New...
RuneQuest may be a game designed in the late 1970s, but for some its magical appeal has never faded. Chaosium has republished the classic 2nd Edition material this last year and is currently developing an updated edition of the game titled RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha - a name which celebrates the reunion of RuneQuest and its original setting, the world of Glorantha. Attendees at last year's Gencon had the opportunity to purchase an advance copy of the new rules (sans illustrations) at the Chaosium booth and on May 28th Encounter Roleplay will be streaming play of the new RuneQuest on Twitch starting at 8 pm EST.