October 6

Kickstarter – Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game

Originally released as a softback book with a campaign supplement that followed soon after Delta Green for me combined two elements I really love; the Cthlhu mythos and the conspiracy genre.  Where games like Dark Conspiracy and Conspiracy X both shine in their own niches, only Delta Green brought the mythos bang up to date.  It is a very different beast than Cthulhu Now which was the official modern day sourcebook for CoC and it taps into the idea that aliens have visited Earth using spaceships.

Now they are releasing a stand alone game which builds upon the work that has gone beforehand and it really does stand on the shoulders of giants.  There are various pledge levels available, enough to suit each persons pocket.

April 1

April 1st – The Silly Season

With the 1st of April once more upon us I had to find out what the latest practical jokes were being offered to the internet.

It seems that the rapid expansion of the world wide web has led to April 1st being used as a media circus to promote things that sound plausible enough to be real but are utter hogwash.  You would think that people would be able to search online to verify the facts being presented to them but that doesn’t often appear to be the case.

Which made me wonder, what if some of these ideas could be real?  Take any one you like from the current crop or an event from the past and present it in your game world as a truth, then you have something to expand upon your campaign.

What if spaghetti was in fact grown on trees and harvested for food?  Think of the fun you could have when the crop is threatened with a beetle that likes to eat a food staple.

What if there was a translation system for pets that enabled you to talk to the animals?

How about an army of pigeons that classify search results?

I used to purchase a popular American tabloid and I mined that for campaign ideas for Dark Conspiracy and Conspiracy X; some of the articles were very inspiring indeed.

Plenty of campaign fodder there to spice up a dull session

March 23

One year on

So it’s been a year since I started this blog and I’m pleased with how it’s turned out so far.

Once I started I realised how much I missed writing for pleasure; most of my penmanship has been dull technical stuff that while serviceable isn’t something that I can point to and say “I did this”.  Which is  very unlike this blog my main outlet for my creative urges although  my muse seems to be driven by my sickness, something that I find very amusing.

I thought it was also time to expand upon my origin story that I first mentioned here, while searching through a box of books it turns out that I had accidentally deceived you all and my first purchased RPG turns out to be the basic edition Marvel Superheroes RPG.  I purchased in 1986 while on holiday after being driven to find it by the amazing adverts in the back of the Marvel comics I was reading.

I think I forgot about buying it as I never seemed to know what to do with it or how to get other people interested.  Bear in mind this was before the days of the internet and gaming magazines in the UK were had to get hold of from the local newsagent.

What really grabbed my interest in gaming was a programme I saw on LWT back in the early 80s called “South of Watford” and presented by Ben Elton.  I remember watching him go to the Games Workshop store in Hammersmith and talk to the store manager before later on playing some D&D.  Five years later I would be in that very store and buying my first games.

Games Workshop then was a different store, one that sold other peoples material and long before the advent of the Games Workshop hobby which is what they’re best known for these days.  In those days you could pick up a licensed copy of Runequest, Traveller or even Call of Cthulhu.

Moving behind the screen.

After being a player for a short period of time I decided to try being a gamesmaster and looking back on those days I think it was my sheer enthusiasm that kept me going.  I was at one point gaming five nights a week running a different game each night with a different system.  It was during this time that I started to understand what I liked to run; science fiction piqued my interest more than fantasy did and I loved the four colour superhero genre.  Much Traveller and Marvel Superheroes was played along with a side dish of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Critical Miss years.

It all started simply enough with an open call for players at a local comic shop; the owner knew me and the people organising the event and  I decided to turn up and try to play with a different group of people.  Let me tell you those first few weeks were a great time, we all brought games down to play and since we never really that organised you could never count on the same group of players for each game.  I took my chances and dusted out Paranoia second edition and over the course of several weeks I ran through the published adventures I had bought.  The players had fun trying to kill each other and deal with the game forms a friend had photocopied.

Slowly the group started to crystallise from the raw elements we threw at it, after a few months we lost a player and the venue; we found a new home in a building owned by the father of another player and we played in that cold cramped warehouse amongst the boxes of paper.  Summer came around and then we started to lose players until by the following October we were d0wn to a handful and we moved once again to my place.

I found myself running more games and with a stable group we could try to play campaigns together.  I was now playing twice a week with two different groups and this became once a week when the two groups melded together.   We lost more players as well; one went off to university, one moved away and one left for personal reasons I won’t go into here.

It was during this period I broke out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and embarked upon the Enemy Within Campaign.

The present.

I’ve been playing with another group of friends online using Roll20 and that’s what caused the genesis of this blog back with this first post . 

 

 

 

March 14

RPG Blog Carnival March 2015 – Best GM Ever

RPGBlogCarnivalLogoSmall

The subject of this months Blog Carnival is Best GM Ever and is being hosted by Creative Mountain Games

Over the years I’ve only played with a handful of gamesmasters, some of whom have been very good while one or two I haven’t got along with as we have very different ideas and playing styles.  I would like to think of myself as a good gm and that is something one of my players was telling me after each session; his feedback was really good and I’ll admit is was something of an ego boost for me.

So it is hard for me to pick out one specific GM and say they are the best overall since each have had their own unique ways of doing things.   One of my friends managed to create such a spellbinding atmosphere, it was almost like being hypnotised and we were rudely snapped out of this state when a door in his house suddenly slammed shut; I don’t mind admitting that I jumped out of my seat when that happened!

During the Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 Night City Blues campaign there was one particular session that really sticks out as I managed to weave two or three sub-plots into a scenario along with the main plot for them to discover and I received some very positive feedback about that.

When it comes to crafting my own scenarios I tend to go with the three act model as this works really well for me and gives room for creation of sub-plots.  This style also works if you decide to play a pulp based game and I cribbed plenty of advice from the Lester Dent Master Plot formula, if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read and I was able to use this advice to create a random pulp adventure generator.  I’d like to share it with you all, but as it’s based upon a few commercial products I can’t as not only would it violate copyright, it could also hurt the sales of them.

 

 

October 22

Twilight 2000 Must Be Eaten

Or All Flesh 2000 🙂

While looking for the pdfs of Dark Conspiracy I got from the Bundle of Holding I came across the pdfs of Twilight 2000 I purchased a little while ago.  I bought them with the intention of running it with the group as I thought it may make a change of pace from what we’d being doing beforehand.

Then I remembered what happened the last time we’d try to play it.  Jonny Nexus had bought two copies of the first edition Twilight 2000 reprint volume and cut one up as a players guide for us to use and one copy for himself.  We proceeded through character creation and my PC was abysmal to say the least, he failed to make any of the front line roles and had to settle for being a mechanic in a support function. We ran through the initial encounter and had started on finding out about Operation Reboot when the game took an unexpected turn for the worst.

I managed to identify the person we were looking for as Jonny had given us his photo from the adventure and left his real name on it and not the alias; which didn’t help; things went from bad to worse after that and we lost interest in this game and it was forgotten about; until Jonny moved.

Rather than shifting stuff he no longer wanted he asked us if there was stuff he had that we wanted and after pawing through his stuff I found the Twilight 2000 books, maps of Poland he’d bought, figures and dice.

With all this stuff in hand and the recently found pdfs I wondered about spinning the game slightly.  I was thinking of using the background material I had for Twilight 2000 and combining it with All Flesh Must Be Eaten, so Operation Reboot would have dealt with animating the fallen soldiers and having them fight on.

System vs system.

I propose to use Unisystem to drive things, perhaps with the Band of Zombies book to handle some of the crunchier side.  I’m also trying to decide whether or not to use a fixed amount of cash for the players to acquire their starting gear or a package system found in Spycraft or even to allow them to have an amount of equipment based upon their encumbrance thresholds which is how Twilight 2013 does it.

I may not be able to run this with one of the groups but it never hurts to have an idea or two on the back-burner.

Which gear system do you think I should use?

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October 12

Dark Conspiracy fanzines

One area that Dark Conspiracy shone was the free fan created resources for it.  There were two free downloadable ezines available to read.

Demonground.

DEMONGROUND: Reflections of a Darker Future is a fanzine dedicated to supporting the genre of Modern Horror in roleplaying games.

The first nine issues were dedicated to Dark Conspiracy and later issues would cover a broader range of horror games.  Demonground seems to have stopped publishing over a decade ago.

Protodimension

Protodimension Magazine is a fanzine devoted to the wonderfully creative world of conspiracy horror role playing. It’s about the worlds.

This is a spiritual successor to Demonground and carries on the work laid down by it.

There is also one final area of support, a fan based website :http://darkconspiracytherpg.info/

 

October 10

Top 10 rpg list Number 2 – honourable mention

After publishing the post about Top 10 rpg list: Number 2 – Call of Cthulhu I realised I had forgotten the honourable mention, so rather than edit the original post I present to you a bonus post:

Honourable mention:

Dark Conspiracy

I had previously mentioned this game twice before, most notably in the #RPGaDAY post http://www.generaltangent.com/blog/2014/08/28/rpgaday-day-28-scariest-game-youve-played/ .

I have often regarded this as a forgotten classic of the day, what I loved was the background.  This was a world teetering on the brink of collapse; ecologically ruined areas, society divided into a class structure of the have and have nots.  Cities had effectively vanished and controlled by the corporations.  In some ways it is a bit like Cyberpunk for the attitude but the rest of the game exudes a 1930s depression era setting.  Technology has stagnated and even a simple thing like a telephone is the purview of the idle rich.

The game has gone through three editions with the first edition being the one that I purchased, a gorgeous black and white softcover book with some fantastic colour cover art.  Stylistically this is where I think the game shines; if you have a world that has become black and white then using a monochrome book does set the tone.  After GDW closed their doors, the game was licensed for a second edition which tidied up a lot of the information scattered in the first edition books and divided it into two players guides and two games-master guides.  The Master edition of the players and GMs books were slightly longer and had extra material.

There is currently a third edition published by 3Hombres Games I have as yet to give it a good read.

Character creation.

The first and second editions of the game used the same system that was derived from Twilight 2000 Second edition and while clunky in places it did give you an idea of your characters background.  Shortly after first edition appeared so did a GM screen with a booklet called the PC Booster kit and this gave you expanded backgrounds and migrated the game to the D20 system which was being used by Twilight 2000 v2 .  The booster kit also gave more information on the social classes so you could play the ultra rich nomenklatura, the middle class Mike or the lower class prole or if you desired it the rogue android.

Careers.

There were a wide range of occupations your character could take including the Cyborg Escapee, Doctor, college student, plus a bunch of military types imported from Twilight 2000.

Background.

Apart from what I mentioned above, there is a little more to the background that needs mentioning.  Humanity wasn’t alone; there were alien races that were working to subjugate mankind, entities from parallel dimensions bent on global domination and dark beings from Earth’s past.

Lester Smith also had a wry sense of humour when he wrote the book, there are a few Easter eggs to look out for, including the sunglasses that are popular among monster hunters.

Combat.

This section was also taken from Twilight 2000 and in the first d10 version of the game had an interesting rule for shotguns, you rolled a number of six sided dice and you got a hit for each 6 that came up.

Adventures.

There were a few published and they weren’t bad but a couple of misunderstandings did arise, the curse of American English I suppose 🙂

If you get the chance to pick this game up its worth a look but the system may seem very dated.

August 28

#RPGaDAY Day 28: Scariest Game you’ve played

The scariest game I ever played in was the old Game Designers Workshop classic Dark Conspiracy 1st Edition.  A near future horror game involving all sorts of strange going ons but tied together with a relatively consistent background.

I vividly remember this one game session becoming more and more engrossed with the atmosphere being set by the GM that it became almost like being hypnotised; our collective consciousness focussing on his voice more and more until someone in the house banged a door which made us all jump out of our seats.

I’ve never experienced anything like that since.

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