Mazes and Minotaurs Website

Mazes and Minotaurs website containing both the original 1972 and 1987 rulesets. 

FB Link

Not to be confused with the 1982 tv movie, Mazes and Monsters, but I'd play a crossover game in a heartbeat. 

Temple of Evil Boardgame

Wizkid Website

FB link: Temple of Elemental Evil, as a boardgame?

Savage RIFTS: Do the Rules Make the Game?

We played the shit out of RIFTS. In retrospect, that was the only way to play it. The whole thing was a masterclass in nineties awesomeness where you could happily mash together anything and have it still make sense in context. The premise of the ame was that a world-wide nuclear war creates so much death that the resulting psychic fallout re-opens the dormant, magical ley-lines that crisscrossed the glob. And where those lines crossed, extra-dimensional Rifts opened to allow anything to cross through. That was the whole point. Wanna play a psionic, cybernetic Elf? On RIFTS Earth, that was strictly amateur hour. 

Put this in the pilot seat of a mecha made of alien dragon hide, and you're getting closer. 

It was awesome.

It also had some of the worst rules I have ever played and we played it for years. I ran campaigns that lasted for months, I played in dozens of my buddy's games, we created spin offs (one was a fighting game we simply called Arena) ... and after all that and I could not even begin to tell you how it was played. We usually just rolled what we thought was best. I do remember that mega-hit points were called MDC, player characters were called OCC and RCC (big on acronyms), and that skills were percentile rolls, and that my main character was a four-foot round, teleporting circus acrobat that could summon a blazing psionic sword and I am absolutely not kidding about that. 

Show this to a member of my old gaming group, and they will cut you.

Things came to a head when we realized that even basic combat would take entire game-sessions to resolve, consisting of endless rounds of dice rolled in a race to see whose 6D6x100MDC mega-rockets would deplete the opponent’s 200,000MDC armour the fastest. I think the last straw was a fight were we realized that the entire battle was played out as two mega-alien-cyborgs standing five feet apart and just unloading nuclear missiles at each other.

Like this, only boring. 

The rules were clearly too fecked to play anymore, but by this point we'd spent thousands of dollars on supplements and had racked up some crazy gaming stories to bore our spouses senseless with when we get together for summer BBQs. So what did we do? One (clearly sexless) month, a buddy and I came up with a conversion system that took the glorious hot mess that was RIFTS into the relatively streamlined rules of our other main game; WEG D6 Star Wars.

Then we played the new system and it actually worked. In fact it worked better. WEG system has to take into account Jedi and Star Destroyers and Ewoks, so the system already has rules for scaling up or down, and this had the side effect of making humans and other 'squishy' (RIFTS' actual term for non-superhuman races) characters a playable option, probably for the first time since the game was published.

According to the official rules, this happens exactly six seconds
after you choose to play a regular human character. 

I think we played it for about a term. While it was fun, something about it just wasn't RIFTS. By streamlining the rules, the gonzo quality that had been part of the game was gone. It wasn't conscious decision, we just kinda stopped playing it and eventually none of my RIFTS books survived my cross country move.

Why bring this up?

According to the rumour mill RIFTS is going Savage Worlds. But will it survive? Just how linked are a game's world and it rule-system? Will new players even care that it used to have a completely unworkable rules system? Will it still feel like the same RIFTS to veteran players? This is going to be a very interesting development to watch.

Rare and Out of Print Roleplaying Games on Facebook

I have started a Facebook group to celebrate old games. 

On Being a Gaming Hipster

I was expressing some unkind thoughts on the new Star Wars trailer when The Wife called me a 'Geek Hipster.' She was trying to illustrate the fact that all my geek interests are at least 20-30 years out of date ... 

.... so obscure as to be almost non-existent,

The Middleman

No Heroics

... or both.

Blake's 7

Wizards and Warriors

She isn't wrong, but what I was really lamenting was the lack of anything NEW in geek culture (I know I'm generalizing here, so go easy browncoats). Even the current glut of super-hero films and tv, while surprisingly good in some ways (and terrible in others), are often just re-tellings of comics that I read a kid. There is also a cold marketability in these things that I find off-putting, and this is coming from one of the generation who spent every Saturday morning for 14+ years watching six hours of toy commercials.

Then I saw my game shelf, which looks something like this,

The difference is that while I feel that mainstream pop culture has started to eat its own tail, the gaming industry is producing new games almost every week. I watch kickstarters and read reviews and am constantly amazed by what is produced. So why don't I collect them instead of older stuff? I think it comes down to three reasons.

The first one is that I don't have the time to play with group anymore. I moved away from my old group and I've been to busy to find another group. As much as I might like to, there isn't much point in hoarding Pathfinder materials unless I had someone to play with. 

The second is cost and storage. When you're younger, it seems easier to blow your paycheque on movies, and DVDs and new games. When you have a mortage and a car and bills, that seems to get harder and you begin to become a little more discriminating in what you collect. And despite some pretty massive purges, I've still got boxes of books, toys and games in the garage that I need to sort through. 

Finally, there is pure nostalgia. I'm generally not a fan of rose-coloured reflection, but I like re-reading, re-exploring old game books. There was an anything goes quality to the rpgs in the early days that lasted up until sometime in the mid to late nineties when irony and /to-the-xtremeness/ became the norm. By then, the original gamers were too old to spend Saturday nights in their parents basements or form D&D clubs at school. Besides, did you know they had this thing were you could use your computer to call other computers? It wasn't until (the corrected date of) 2000 when D&D3 was released that the hobby experienced any sort of renaissance. Only now the designers knew what they were doing; the concepts of what made an rpg had already been mapped out and people are now more conscious when they tinker, restore, stretch or ignore those established elements. While it has produced some amazing stuff, the spontaneity feels gone. 

Or maybe I'm just old.