Thoughts on the Sandy Hook School Killings

Taking a break from geeky topics to reflect on the Sandy Hook School killings. Feel free to move on to more pleasant topics in my blog such as Cthulhu, Stephen King, Dungeons & Dragons, and the like.

Reflecting on the massacre in Connecticut... I'm a proud Massachusetts boy now and always consider myself to be "from" Brooklyn. But the fact is I spent most of my childhood in Connecticut, maybe half an hour or so from Sandy Hook. I'm married to a school teacher. My brother's wife is a teacher. My mother is one. And I find myself writing the words "massacre in Connecticut".

I know there's talk as to how we shouldn't politicize the issue. But all I can think of are nearly thirty dead people, the majority of them children. Children! I read of a teacher who saved her entire class with her own life. My own wife Patty tells me that she thinks as a teacher that'd be instinctive.

I don't want to read about another massacre of kids. I don't want to ever hear how my kids' schools or my wife's school is in lockdown due to a shooter.

Something needs to change. What we are doing today is not adequate to stop well over ten thousand gun-related homicides per year in our country. I don't see how we do that without legislation. Without politics.

I don't think it is too soon. I think it is far too late.

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Fiction Review: "Hearts in Atlantis" by Stephen King (Part 1 - 1960:Low Men in Yellow Coats)

1960:

It was his first real kiss, too, and Bobby never forgot the feel of her lips pressing on his his - dry and smooth and warmed by the sun. It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

1999:

"Sometimes a little of the magic sticks around," Bobby said. "That's what I think. We came because we still hear some of the right voices. Do you hear them? The voices?"

Hearts in Atlantis can be considered his writing on his own generation, the one that came of age in the 1960s. Being born in 1971 I have to confess to not having any personal connection to the 1960s. But, one of King's greatest strengths is in his characters - they are real people with real wants and needs. I think that is what makes his addition of the supernatural to his stories so effective - even in the face of the supernatural we are still dealing with real people.

Hearts in Atlantis is a collection of novellas and short stories. I'll be breaking this into reviews of one or two stories each, depending on the length of the tales. Only the first of the tales is strong in the supernatural but the events that take place there have reverberations over the decades.

There will be some spoilers I'm certain but I'll try not to give away endings - though given the stories are chronological that to some degree may prove difficult.

1960: Low Men in Yellow Coats

The first of our tales takes place in the  town of Harwich, Connecticut, a fictional suburb of Bridgeport. This was something that grabbed my attention having spent the bulk of my childhood my early adulthood in a town just about half an hour away from Bridgeport up Route 8. Under King Harwich is a very real town with the diner popular for parents and kids to go to - the Colony Diner, shades of the Farm Shoppe that later became a Friendly's in my hometown.

Our protagonist is Bobby Garfield who turns eleven on the day the story begins, towards the end of the school year. He is the son of Randall and Liz Garfield. His mother has nothing kind to say about Bobby's father who had the audacity to die of a heart attack eight years previous. That is not an exaggeration - she is indeed very bitter and angry about his dying and in so doing, leaving them. Your father didn't exactly leave us well off.

Bobby is madly in love with a Schwinn bicycle and is engaged in saving up for it. His best friends are John "Sully-John" Sullivan and Carol Gerber. Bobby and Sully are avid baseball players. Carol is madly in love with Bobby, to which he is of course, oblivious, accepting her for a less gushy than normal girl.

To this mix is added a wild card, an elderly man by the name of Ted Brautigan, who moves into the 3rd floor apartment of the house the Garfields live in. Liz Garfield takes an immediate dislike to him, not trusting a man who carries his possessions in paper bags. However, Ted and Bobby become very close, Ted being impressed by the adult library card Bobby received as a birthday gift from his mother.  He latter gives Bobby the gift of William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies which Bobby becomes convinced is the best book he ever read.

The descent of the boys into savagery becomes a recurring theme in both this novella and the later tales in the volume.

"Why'd you do that?" Bobby yelled at the boy in the motorcycle belt, and as the words came out of his mouth it was as if he had heard them a thousand times before. All of this was like a ritual, the stuff that got said before the real yanks and pushes began and the fists began to fly. He thought of Lord of the Flies again- Ralph running from Jack and the others. At least on Golding's island there had been jungle. He and Carol had nowhere to run. 

He says "Because I felt like it." That's what comes next.

Ted is not a normal person. He is clearly a telepath of some sort. Moreover his telepathic ability can temporarily rub off on others after physical combat. Bobby becomes the beneficiary of this on a day he goes to the beach and nearby amusement park on the first Saturday of summer vacation with Carol, her mom, Sully-John and several others. It allows him to win at three-card monte and to share his first kiss with Carol.

Ted quickly evolves into a father figure for Bobby. He also hires Bobby to keep an eye out for "Low Men" - Ted is on the run from people who desire his abilities. These Low Men go on to play a major role in the final three books of The Dark Tower Series, as does Ted.

Ted tells what signs to look for of the Low Men. But in so doing he unwillingly puts Bobby into an adult conundrum. Bobby begins seeing those very signs. What should Bobby do? For most of the book Bobby is half convinced Ted is nuts in his fear of the Low Men. He knows he should tell Ted. But he knows if he does Ted will almost certainly leave and Bobby has come to love the old man.

The book reaches its climax with Bobby isolated from his mother and Sully-John. His mother, the secretary at a real estate office, has gone to a seminar with her boss and two agents. But she should have known better, should have known the lack of character of the men she was going with. The same type of men who would chase a boy/pig through the woods armed with spears in Lord of the Flies. She'd normally leave him with Sully-John but Sully-John has won a trip to a camp near Storrs, CT. (A place where I spent five years of my life as an undergraduate.) Liz hesitantly leaves him in the care of Ted.

Bobby is quite happy at this development but it also becomes clear that Ted is not imagining the Low Men. As Ted makes preparations to leave the stress begins to rip Bobby apart, bringing him to Carol for comfort. However, Bobby and Carol soon have a confrontation with the older and dreaded "St. Gabe's Boys". They manage to escape with adult assistance but the next day they take out a horrible vengeance on Carol, beating her with baseball bats and dislocating her shoulder. Things spiral into a horrible disaster ending with betrayals, a confrontation with the Low Men, and Bobby's final farewell to Ted.

In the aftermath of these events, Bobby is not the boy he had been. His friendship with Sully-John is not what it was. He has turned very violent, the first use of this being to exact vengeance on the boy who beat Carol with a baseball bat and dislocated her shoulder. We quickly follow him through his next years as he descends deeper and deeper into self-destruction.



I'm hoping I've not given away too too much. There is of course so much more than what I've written. This is in many ways a coming of age story but for Bobby this is an exceedingly unpleasant coming of age. He finds himself confronting adult conflicts and adult fears. He learns that adults do not have the answers. Ted tells Bobby about what Golding said of the ending of Lord of the Flies - to paraphrase, it is very well that the adults rescue the children, but who is it who will rescue the adults?

However, it's clear that Bobby cannot stay a child forever. And Ted brings him into a wonderful world. Ted is a supreme bibliophile, introducing Bobby to a larger world and has many conversations with Bobby. The tragedy is the two of them cannot stay together. Would Bobby have been better off had they never met? Probably not, but he would have been far better off if Ted could have stayed.

While Bobby's childhood is firmly set in the sixties, it is certainly a childhood I can relate to. That possession you just have to have. Parents you love but whom you realize aren't perfect or have all the answers. Easy friendships that you'll never know the like of again. That feeling of unlimited possibility that becomes limited by every choice you make.

This is the most "fantastic" of the tales in Hearts in Atlantis. We've got Ted with his telepathic powers, the frightening Low Men, and references to the Dark Tower. But King is adept at suggesting more than he shows. We really don't fully understand the Low Men nor do we understand Ted fully. More will be revealed in the Dark Tower series but in this work Bobby is our viewpoint character (and, to a lesser extent, Carol). In readin this we become reawakened to the world of children. As an adult I can watch how my children can make a huge deal over something small to adults. But it is easy for us as adults to pass that judgement, having lived through our own childhoods, King reminds us for a child how real and immediate other concerns can be. "This too shall pass" means less to someone for whom there has not yet been such a thing as an "average year".

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Gaslight Musings on a New Campaign

I'd done some soliciting recently for a Call of Cthulhu game. A little less than two weeks ago we kicked off our first session. I believe it went pretty well, especially considering some brand new faces at the virtual gaming table.

I'll confess to having mixed feelings about gaming on the internet. There is something really nice about having people around a physical table, the sound of rolling dice, the shared meals. That said I would have a difficult time pulling that off at this stage of my life. And there are some definite advantages to gaming online. The pool of players is greatly expanded - at our most recent game we had players from the American South and Southwest with my brother and I here in Massachusetts. It's allowed me to stay in touch with players who have moved away, whether they continue gaming with me or not.

The past few months have been abysmal as far as keeping to a regular schedule on this blog. Life happens. My wife is working again which is absolutely fantastic for us it does make home-life a bit more chaotic with everyone darting out in the morning and scrambling to get stuff done after work. Add to that Girl Scouts, activities at the local Boys & Girls Club, a wife correcting papers and getting ready for parent teacher conferences, and my life as a software engineer doing one of those periodic shifts into "crunch mode".

I've been doing some fun stuff as well. I've been reading through some Call of Cthulhu materials and have obtained a lot of Chaosium's Gaslight-era products. Though I'd been familiar with it for years (well decades) it is only in the past few years that I've really gotten some serious time in Call of Cthulhu games and I can definitely say it is one of my favorite games. The rules system that powers the game doesn't seem all that impressive when you read it but, at least for me, it plays absolutely fantastically. I'm certain it's not the most realistic engine, it lacks a lot of things that modern games have, but it just seems to work.

I've also been embedding myself in the era. I've listened to some Sherlock Holmes audiobooks and gotten some used (and cheap!) copies of annotated books for works like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've also been able to do some Jules Verne reading, engaging in one of my periodic wishes that I spoke fluent French and didn't have to rely on translators. I've also purchased my first fountain pen - I wanted to experience what it felt like to write with a nib point. I was frankly surprised to discover I really enjoyed the experience - when funds permit there's some fancy ones out there I'm anxious to try.

Though there are only some thirty years separating the Cthulhu by Gaslight decade of the 1890s from the default era of the 1920s there is definitely a very noticeable difference in the way those too eras feel. I get the feeling of being in the transitional period from an older world to our modern world. It is perhaps a stretch to call the 1920s "modern" but in my experience in the twenties one gets the feeling of being at the dawn of our modern world. Sure there's no internet, no cellular phones, no television. But you get the birth of all that, a fast-paced world with fast cars, fancy radios, telephones being relatively common in urban areas, etc. In the 1890s you are just beginning to get there but those sorts of elements have not yet entered the popular culture.

I'm hoping this campaign gets some legs to it - the Dungeon Crawl Classics game I'd kicked off in the spring and summer was great fun but really couldn't get to a needed quorum. I'd love to try it again at some point. And if you feel like joining in, give a holler and we'll see if we can find you a spot at our electronic table.


That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

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Settling Fantasy America

Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it a month ago. Here in the United States the general story is the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth and the Wampanoag tribe had a feast of thanksgiving.

Being the history geek that I am I've done some reading on what the European settlement of America was like. As a gamer, I'd often thought of doing a game along those lines and did run a brief one about a fantasy version of a Viking settlement in a fantasy analogue of Manhattan.

My own research has revealed an awful lot of myths about the European settlement of the Americas. The biggest one in my opinion is that the Americas were an untamed wilderness. The Native American method of using the land was definitely different from the European one but they most definitely made large changes to the land - one of the better known things they did was perform controlled forest burnings.

Where does such an idea originate? Here I'm not particularly authoritative. If I were to guess, I can think of two reasons. The first is it just makes one feel better to have settled in an untamed wilderness rather than squat in land that had been originally cultivated by others. The other reason I believe is how  decimated the native population was after exposure to European disease. Cracked had one of the best descriptions in their article 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America:

There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts. 

In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.

This is something to keep in mind when considering a fantasy game based on the Americas. Suppose you give the fantasy analogue or version of the Native Americans use of real magic - if they have the ability to cure diseases there's a pretty decent chance they'd have been able to keep the settlers/invaders out - or at the very least, make such a settlement a very expensive undertaking. After all, these are the same people who made the Vikings decide perhaps they'd rather go elsewhere.

I seem to recall a few ideas floating on the internet about using elves as a fantasy analogue for Native Americans. What I would prefer to do instead is make the natives of a New World to be of the same races that can be found in the Old World. I believe it makes such people more real - there's a tendency to oversimplify the original Americans - either as magical people who lived in perfect harmony or as savages who lacked the technical know-how to fight off the Europeans. In reality they were people, just like the European settlers were people. Some honest, some deceitful. Some friendly, some standoffish. I believe the "elves=native nature lovers" shorthand greatly oversimplifies an entire group of civilizations. This falls into advice I've mentioned before from James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame - only use non-humans in a fantasy game if there is a very compelling reason to do so. In my Vikings in Fantasy North America game I did actually use dwarfs - dwarfs like those of Norse myth, living within mountains. They were very, very different form the natives, based off of the Lenape Indians and the Viking settlers had a much easier time dealing with the Lenape than the dwarfs.

There's a number of works I've read that I believe give a good foundation of life in North America before or shortly after European settlement. Some of these include:

• Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. An excellent view of the empires and other civilizations present in the Americas. The Incan Empire seems like it'd make for an awesome inspiration for a fantasy civilization - an empire centered around a mountain range, far longer than wide, presenting lots of unexplored places just a few days travel.
• Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Perhaps most interesting is the examination of the decades following the famous "first" Thanksgiving (it's far from the first, but it is the one everyone thinks of). With the outbreak of King Phillip's War we see the son of Massasoit, who helped the Pilgrims survive, led Native Americans into war against the settlers of New England.
• James Horn's A Land as God Made It. An examination of the Jamestown settlement. You quickly see how there is no way the English would have survived without help. And as in Mayflower, you'll see leaders who want to use the settlers for their own benefit against nearby rivals. One interesting fact that came out in my reading of this book - the native's small arms, their bows and arrows, were typically superior to the muskets of the settlers. 

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RPG Review: Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition

I've already done a review of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game. But given I've been a bit AWOL in my blog of late and part of the reason has been prep for a Cthulhu game it seemed reasonable to do a review of one of the older versions of the game.

For me, this was my first exposure to Call of Cthulhu. I received it as a Christmas gift from my parents back when I was in high school in the mid- to late-80s. (Now that I think of it I also once received a complete Edgar Allan Poe collection from my wife - I get some creepy gifts.) This was not my Chaosium RPG now that I think on it - I know I had Ringworld and had also played Elfquest by this point. (Elfquest is another property I'll need to discuss at some point - as I recall it was rather big back in the 80s.)

I really don't know how it was my parents came across this version of Call of Cthulhu - it is my understanding that the 3rd edition was the Games Workshop version and was a UK-based release (though I am pretty certain they bought it from a local Waldenbooks so perhaps it was released in the US as well).

One thing which amazes me is how little the game has changed across editions. I could make a character with this version of the game, published over 25 years ago, and bring him easily into the most recent version of the game. I've also used scenarios from this book for 6th edition Cthulhu games.

Be that as it may, let's take a look at the game on its own merits. It is a hardcover book, a bit longer than a normal US RPG book, with black & white pages with color plates inserted. The book is divided into "sub-books" - basically it's as if the contents of a boxed set were bound up into a hardcover book (though it took me as a new player a little bit of time to figure that out). The "books" contained within are:

• Investigator's Book: Under 30 pages long, contains rules for creating characters, action and skill resolution, sanity rules.
• Keeper's Book: About 50 pages long, rules for the Cthulhu mythos, magic, and introduction on how to run the game. Includes three sample scenarios including the classic "The Haunted House" which has probably begun more Cthulhu campaigns than any other scenario.
• Sourcebook for the 1920s: The 3rd edition generally assumes a 192s setting and these 30-ish pages include information on life in the 1920s. 
• Cthulhu Companion: As I recall, this is pretty much the 2nd edition Cthulhu Companion, with information on the Mythos in Mesoamerica, new scenarios, sourcebook additions, etc. For some reason one thing which really stuck with me was a list of prions in the 1920s, with one sounding like it would fit perfectly in the film The Dark Knight Rises.

As far as rules go, not a whole lot has changed between this and the 6th edition. Books are rated on how well they impart new spells, something later dropped form the game, but aside from that the game has changed more in the form of tweaks and clarifications. It still has characteristics rather similar to games like D&D, ranging from 3-18 in most cases. The characteristics don't make a huge difference, though the Education and Intelligence stats do play a large roll in your number of starting skills. The game still uses a simple percentile skill system with no real difficulty system added to it - though every game I've been in has used various modifiers to indicate difficulties when needed. Though I've needed to use that rarely - generally I assume if you need to roll the task by its nature is already difficult. 

One thing I think later versions of the game do a little bit better is impart the feel of Lovecradtian horror up front. I think that's mainly due to their inclusion of Lovecraft's tale The Call of Cthulhu. Truth be told I was unfamiliar with Lovecraft when I first got the game. I'd just heard a lot about the game from Dragon magazine and other gamers and was curious. Don't misunderstand me - the game does a good job with its atmosphere, I just think later versions do it better. It becomes very clear from looking at the stats of creatures of the Mythos and the sanity rules of the game that this is not a game where you kill the monsters and take their stuff. You're more likely to blow your own brains out in an attempt to avoid becoming an insane slave of some Mythos creature.

As with all versions of the game I feel one of the best things it has going for it is the inclusion of several scenarios. There are some in this book that to the best of my knowledge have not been reprinted in later versions of the game - though I do lack a copy of the 4th edition. Some of the scenarios are quite unusual. There is one featuring a ghoul whose main objective is getting lots of books for his library. Two other scenarios take place in unusual locations - The Mystery of Loch Feinn taking place in Scotland (and would make for a good Gaslight scenario as well) and one of my favorites, The Secret of Castronegro, taking place in New Mexico. This scenario also fits in well with the Mesoamerican Mythos information found in the Cthulhu Companion book.

Like most Chasosium games, Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition has a ton of information within it. You could run a very enjoyable campaign with just this book (a fact true of later versions as well). For modern gamers, the rules have changed very little. However, some of the articles and scenarios which seem to have not found their way to later incarnations of the game remain very usable and worthwhile. While there is no digital reprint of this version of the game available you can get a lot of the unique information from the 2nd edition Cthulhu Companion. The 2nd edition rules had been available from RPGNow but looking now it appears they are no longer there.

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Children's Heroines

I'm the father of two daughters, one aged seven and the other aged ten. They've both enjoyed a fair amount of traditional fantasy and science fiction tales - Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, etc. However both of them have also indulged in a fair amount of what I'd considered to be "girl-centric" literature and videos.

As a caveat, I'm far from being an expert on women's issues and am not a wiz in the social sciences. With that caveat in mind, I have nevertheless tried, together with my wife, to make certain the girls have good female role models. I want them to be able to enjoy stories where a girl or woman protagonist is the hero - where she is not waiting for her prince to rescue her, nor just a "dude with boobs", nor some ultra-sexed object.

Another desire is the stories actually be entertaining. Preferably without sparkly vampires.

Both girls started off with Dora the Explorer. I can still recite the theme song to Dora with ease. I suspect when I am old and have forgotten my name. "I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map!" The television show had Dora going on all sorts of minor adventures but the kids really enjoyed the longer Dora movies where she would have adventures in fairytale land and deal with the Pirate Piggies. I'd view these as primarily "cute" with a goal of providing some education to the viewer/

I think though their interest grew more when they discovered the Barbie Fairytopia movies. Now as a caveat - these are clearly designed to sell Barbie dolls. For those of you who lack knowledge of Fairytopia the initial story is that of Elina, a fairy without wings. She gets teased by the other fairies for her lack of wings. Elina becomes involved in saving Fairytopia from the villainous Laverna, sister of the kind ruler of Fairytopia, the Enchantress. As Laverna kidnaps the guardians of Fairytopia she comes closer and closer to her desire to rule - and she tempts Elina with her greatest wish, having wings. However Elina rejects this temptation and saves Fairytopia - and (spoiler alert) gets rewarded with wings.

It is a simple enough story but one my daughters both greatly enjoyed. It had some nice fantasy tropes such as the magical land, fairies, magic, etc. Sequels deal with other parts of Fairytopia such as the undersea kingdom of Mermaidia. And Elina is not one who uses violence to solve her problems (not to say that a "male" story must have violence either). She often doubts her own abilities but nevertheless does not give up.

Lately my younger daughter has discovered the American Girl series. While a lot of people think of just the dolls with American Girls, there is a strong effort at historical accuracy with the books that are associated with the dolls. They are not fantasy but rather grounded in history - just as a number of RPG-ers I know also double as history buffs. There's got to be a number of people who are experts on the 1920s due to participation in Call of Cthulhu games.  Right now my daughter Jasmine is all about Caroline, the protagonist of a series of books centered around Sackets Harbor along the shores of Lake Ontario in New York during the War of 1812. In the first book Caroline witnesses her father, a shipwright, being taken by the British just after war is declared - and before the protagonists had gotten word of the declaration of war. The books do not alter the historical role of women - Caroline does not strap on a sabre and engage in the life of a privateer. But it does show the great accomplishments women were capable of despite the limitations sexism put upon them. Caroline's mother takes over operation of the family shipyard's without hesitation and during the First Battle of Sackets Harbor stands ready with a pistol should the British manage a landing. Caroline herself finds herself assisting the guncrews as they try to adapt their too-small cannonballs to their cannons - during this she forgets to be afraid despite being vulnerable to British bombardment. But after the event is over the realization of what she has been through hits her.

These novels really reach my daughter as she recently got to meet the author of the books, Kathleen Ernst, at a book-signing and tea party at the nearby (for us) U.S.S. Constitution Museum - any author of a work with nautical action in it in the War of 1812 would find the museum an excellent resource.


To be honest, I never thought I'd find myself being a connoisseur of works targeted for girls. But I'm really hoping to get one of them to join the gaming group at a certain point - I really need new blood. And if you can't recruit them then best to create them. Also, in all seriousness, I want them to be able to imagine their own fantastic worlds where they are not the princess in need of rescue but rather their own strong characters in their own rights.

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Recruiting for a Cthulhu Game

In the summer time my gaming group had played some Dungeon Crawl Classics. The game was great fun but my attempts at using it to add new people to the group didn't pan out - with real life issues we actually seem to have lost a member.

With the group being rather small I'm attempting to switch its gears toward something which handles smaller groups better. I've mentioned previously one of my more successful campaigns has been with Call of Cthulhu and being an investigative game where firepower is of less importance that seems a natural match for where we are presently.

That said I'd still love the opportunity to add a few people to the virtual table (we play remotely using various communication tools). If you'd like to join us give me a shout - you can find links to my email on this blog and you can also reach me via Google+ or the comments.

Let me tell you a little about this campaign and the group in general. As far as the campaign goes it is set in the early 1920s, centering around New York City though we've also had adventures set in New England, South Carolina, and the American southwest. The characters are private investigators or those associated with them. These investigators have focused on the weird. That said, they have also dealt primarily with the periphery of the mythos - cultists. evil scientists and sorcerers, and lesser servitors. In Trail of Cthulhu terms we'd be on the pulp side of things (instead of purist), though I would categorize it as realistic pulp. Violence can solve problems but you'd best have a plan - three people taking on a dozen armed cultists will end badly and even three on three in a fair fight can be dangerous. Ambushes are your friends.

We've been using the 6th edition of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game. We meet every other Monday starting around 7:15 PM Eastern US time and play for 2-3 hours. As far as communications goes we've been using Fantasy Grounds II as our virtual tabletop and skype to communicate. Given the highly investigative nature of the game I have been contemplating switching the rules over to Trail of Cthulhu but wouldn't do that without chatting with the group. (For those unfamiliar with it, Trail of Cthulhu is very focused on the investigative nature of play).

As far as group dynamics go... To begin with, we are not an especially intense group. We're all in our thirties or forties and have families (indeed family issues is a big reason for losing people - when it comes to a choice between family or game, family of course must come first.) We all either live in Massachusetts or have lived there at one point (as the game started face-to-face). We're all involved in various techie industries in way or another. Politically we're all probably left of center. Religiously we're pretty tolerant - we've had Pagans, Atheists, and Catholics at the same table. We all seem to like science fiction and superheroes - not an odd interest for gamers I know... You don't have to match any of what I've described but it does seem fair to give a glimpse of who you'd be at the virtual table with.

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First Thoughts on NBC's "Revolution"

Including audiobooks and comic books, I read a lot more than I watch television and movies so I don't catch a lot of new shows. I was a fan of "Jericho" a few years back, a show about a small Kansas town trying to endure in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange and the collapse of the United States government.  When I first heard of "Revolution" I thought of "Jericho" and decided to check it out.

The premise of "Revolution" is that 15 years ago some event removed power from the entire globe. We're not talking all power plants failed or an EMP fried lots of devices, nothing electronic works. To be honest, this is something I have a hard time buying into - sometimes willing suspension of disbelief is hard. As someone who majored in Computer Science and Engineering I had to take a lot of Electrical Engineering classes and this selective suspension of the laws of physics is awfully hard to swallow. After all if you really suspended electricity you'd die pretty quickly as your nervous system and brain would lose their ability to transmit messages. I know S.M. Stirling did a series with this as a premise, starting with Dies the Fire, though I've not read that series.

For the time being I swallowing my disbelief to see how things develop. The series takes place around Chicago with the main threat being the Monroe Militia which rules over everything. There is a magic gadget that one of the protagonists possesses that apparently can make electricity work again, suggesting there may indeed be something "magical" about the suppression of electricity.

The society that has emerged is one that people familiar with the post-apocalyptic genre will recognize pretty readily - one that has been forced to go back to a medieval level of technology. Firearms still work but the Monroe Militia has banned civilian possession of them. Flashbacks have been showing what transpired in the aftermath of the event that suppressed electricity.

For the time being I'm watching the show. In my opinion it illustrates the challenges in sustaining interest in a setting - it is an interesting setting, but interesting settings are, in my opinion, not that difficult to create. The difficulty is, I believe, in keeping that setting going. This is true whether you are making a book, movie, television series, or RPG campaign. In this case there is obviously a mystery as to why electricity no longer works and the possibility of brining it back. But this seems to be see something that needs to be addressed vs. kept in the background. It's a balancing act - you don't want to reveal or resolve everything at one but at the same time you can't keep your audience - or gaming group - hanging forever. Ideally a revelation or resolution should not close off dramatic opportunities so much as opening up new ones.

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Life After the Zombie Apocalypse

Lurch (in my front yard...)

My last blog post dealt with the decidedly uncheerful post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It's a difficult book to read. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to play an RPG in such a setting. Heck after posting that marked the longest gap between posts I've had on this blog so it must have drained my will to post...

Aside from a few brief Aftermath and Gamma World games I've not done much gaming in the post-apocalyptic genre. Probably a bit too depressing for my tastes. I like intact societies, not remnants of civilization sulking in ruined cities. With that in mind, one "sub-genre" I have given some thought to gaming in is the "Zombie Apocalypse" genre. The basic premise is pretty simple. The dead rise in the form of zombies. Usually they bite people and the people bitten become zombies. I'm far from an expert in the genre but you can find examples it pretty easily - The Walking Dead comic book and television series comes to mind most easily.

Quite a few RPGs have delved into the zombie apocalypse genre as well. The most famous of these is probably Eden Studios' All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG (AFMBE). AFMBE doesn't presuppose any specific form of zombie apocalypse, rather it has rules for designing your own zombies. Lots of AFMBE supplements are pistaches of other genres with zombies added in - D&D with zombies, Lord of the Rings with zombies, Star Wars with zombies, etc.

Beyond AFMBE I have a few other zombie-centric RPGs. There is Hunters Books' Outbreak Undead. I've only recently acquired it so I've yet to form a full opinion of it. It seems dedicated to being a type of survival simulation, with rules about establishing and keeping a home base. This strikes me as something which would be useful in a long-term game.

One of the more unusual zombie apocalypses I've seen is New Dark Age's Unhallowed Metropolis. It supposes that in 1905 the dead begin to rise. Now it is some two hundred years later and society has barely survived the apocalypse. The game is set in a largely isolated London in a "Neo-Victorian" society, kind of a cross between a zombie apocalypse and steampunk.


Unhallowed Metropolis in my mind addresses one of the big problems with the genre, that being the "and then what?" factor. AFMBE is often regarded as ideal for one-shot adventures and mini-campaigns. To me that seems an understandable assumption - it seems likely that a zombie apocalypse game would be very easy to start and be a blast for the first few adventures. But then comes the challenge of sustaining it. If your only challenge is zombies then the game is likely to lose steam fast. AFMBE has a supplement, One of the Living, which is dedicated in its entirety to examining the long-term impact of a zombie apocalypse. Unhallowed Metropolis takes it even further, with society having, at least in pockets, managed to rebuild. The Walking Dead comic book is still reasonably close in time to the outbreak of zombies - I believe it is under two years sine the outbreak. However even there the story has progressed to the point that the zombies, while still a huge threat, are not the only threat and are perhaps less dangerous than other survivors.

If you're looking to run a long term Zombie apocalypse game I suspect you don't need to have an answer to "and then what?" from the start but you need to be willing to answer it and not preserve a status quo.

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Fiction Review: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

“She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”

It is possible that I've experienced a more depressing novel than The Road but I tend to doubt it. The key word here is experienced. The Road is not really a book you read, it is one which you experience.

Just describing the setting itself is depressing. Some ten years ago something really bad happened. We don't quite know what it is. We know there was a lot of fire and a lot of heat. We know that all the power is gone. And the Earth's biosphere has pretty much failed. All the trees and grass are dead. They are still there but they're dead. Doesn't appear that any animals have survived. The beach is littered with the bones of dead fish. The book mentions some migratory birds last seen a few years ago. There seems to be an awful lot of earthquakes in the course of the book. Everything is covered by ash and dust. It's getting colder.

We don't know if the initial disaster killed a lot of people or not. I get the impression it didn't. The houses, supermarkets, and the like have been picked nearly clean. Many of the few remaining humans have taken to eating each other, keeping their prey alive and cutting off pieces as needed. 

The book is written in extremely short prose. The Road makes Hemingway seem positively verbose. The Road also dispenses with unnecessary punctuation like apostrophes and quotation marks. Thankfully McCarthy allowed us commas and periods. Flippancy aside it works. The world of The Road is one of despair and desperation and the prose fits the setting perfectly. 

The story is a tale of the Man and his son, the Boy. We do not learn their names. The Boy was born shortly after whatever catastrophe descended on the Earth, with his mother being pregnant. His mother could not bear this world and took her own life, preferring that to being raped and eaten. 

The Man and Boy are traveling south on the road, trying to get to warmer climate, knowing they will not survive another winter where they were. The road is a dangerous place. While we are told the Man and Boy are "good guys" who are "carrying the fire", the road is full of "bad guys". And we do get to meet some of them. The Man is not being paranoid in his need to protect the Boy. McCarthy shows us clearly what sort of fate could await them.

That said, his desire to keep his son safe makes the Man himself rather brutal. A little googling will show lots of online debate as to if the Man really is truly "good". He doesn't trust others, he doesn't want to help anyone else but his son. I tend to side with him being essentially good - or at least as good as a person can be in this world. He truly loves his son and there are things he would not stoop to - he never considers resorting to cannibalism even as they are starving in points. As a father of children around the Boy's age I definitely empathize with him - I'd like to consider myself an essentially good person but I too would do anything for my children.

However, the Boy is most definitely good. He wants to help people even when doing so might not be wise. His goodness is an aberration in this colorless world and one that you would think would guarantee the death of both him and his father.

This is not a world of heroics. There are no mutant bikers facing off against warlords in the ruins of Nu Ork. This is a dying world. When the Man indicates the bravest thing he's ever done was "waking up" on that day I don't think he is being flippant. Facing another day in such a world is an act of supreme bravery. The Man is no superhero. He is not a deadly shot with his gun, a gun which has a pitifully depleted magazine. He isn't a survival genius, he does the best he can, day after day.

The Road is a mercifully short read and I'll avoid going any further into the plot. I'll freely warn it is an extremely difficult read. You of course put yourself in the place of the Man and possibly his wife. What would I do in such a scenario? Probably die pretty quickly. I actually hope I'd die pretty quickly. I love civilization. I love technology. I'm the type of person who is selling tablets and phones on eBay every few months so I can get the newest one. I love society, I think the social contract is an absolutely wonderful thing. I sense I'd not last long in that world.

But would I check out like the Woman? I don't know. I couldn't leave my children to face such horrors. Could I kill them "for their own good", as an act of mercy? I don't think so. If they were about to be captured by people who would rape and eat them, then yes. But aside from that? I don't think I could.

Most people reading this have hobbies similar to mine. Comic books. Role-playing games. Science fiction. Where does The Road fit in that, despite not being considered genre fiction? It's the extreme end. You couldn't make a setting more hopeless in an RPG. Interestingly, Hero Games' Post-Apocalyptic Hero supplement has a setting clearly based on The Road. I don't think I would ever want to play in such a setting. Maybe there's people who would.

I have a strange fascination with the post-apocalyptic genre. For me it is a genuine horror genre. That might be why some of Stephen King's works such as The Stand and The Dark Tower series fascinate me so much, being a blend of horror and post-apocalyptic fiction. As a child who came of age in the 80s I lived through the last gasp of the Cold War with movies like The Day After and the British equivalent Threads. There was a time in my life where the fear of nuclear war had me making sure I had my sneakers right next to my bed so I could get out in a hurry. Get out to where I'm uncertain...

The genre however often has people building something anew or fighting the efforts of an evil warlord trying to build something horrible. McCarthy gives us no such luxuries. Nothing to hope for but living another unpleasant day on a doomed Earth. An almost certainly literally doomed Earth which may soon be incapable of supporting any life at all. Read at your own risk. You will find it difficult to forget.

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Schedule Disruption of Doom!!!!

I'd originally hoped to be updating this blog on a 3-4 times per week basis. During the summer that was definitely doable but as we've entered the fall with back to school it's clear that I lack time for that.

It's not really that bad a thing though. I've got a challenging job but not one that has 16 hour days or backbreaking labor. The kids are back to school which is a good thing. In really good news my wife, after two years of unemployment and underemployment is back to teaching full-time - and at a better salary than her previous full-time job.

That's all pretty awesome. Hobbies have had to be shoved a bit to the backburner as we adjust to our new schedule. Gamings been on a little bit of a hiatus (hopefully kick it back off in two weeks) and I've been throttling the blog to 2-3 updates per week which seems a bit more manageable.

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Fiction Review: "The Man Who Folded Himself" by David Gerrold

If you have sex with yourself is that masturbation? Just to clarify, we're not talking about yourself by yourself but rather with you from another timeline.

I imagine that's a question few books outside of David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself have had to consider.

I just reread this book on my Kindle. I first encountered it in the early 1990s, buying a copy of it from the UConn co-op as part of my early experience with "good" science fiction. I'd of course heard of David Gerrold as the author of the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles and I'd followed his monthly column in Starlog magazine in the 1980s as he introduced Star Trek: The Next Generation. Rereading a book about time travel twenty years after you read it for the first time, especially a time travel book where the protagonist meets future and past versions of himself, is a rather odd feeling.

The Man Who Folded Himself is a brief book - pulling out my old paperback copy which has made its way from UConn to my parents' house to my first apartment in Massachusetts to my current house I see it clocks it in at 163 pages. It's the type of book you can read in a day or two.

It tells the story of Dan Eakin. And in a sense Dan is pretty much the only character of any importance. He inherits from his uncle a time travel device. The book then plunges headfirst into regions that most time travel stories tremble before - ideas of meeting oneself, changing history, and paradox. Dan quickly learns that he can indeed change the past. He can even change his own past. Though in so doing all he does is create another timeline and another Dan.

The Dans meet each other a lot. They usually get along pretty well. There are get-togethers where they meet up. Eternal poker games, summer parties. Over time some of the Dans become lovers with one another. Some of the Dans are very different from each other, whether in appearance, age, sanity, or other reasons. One pair falls deeply in love with each other. Another loses his mind and becomes homicidal. The book tends to follow just one of these Dans though every once in a while the narration switches to another Dan, especially done to illustrate differences between them - like when one of them loses his sanity. At one point our protagonist and narrator finds himself alone - he's still on a "normal" Earth but he's on a timeline where he can't find any other instances of himself - which makes him feel alone.

Dan experiments with changing history - he does the obligatory killing Hitler. He also experiments with eliminating Jesus of Nazareth and removes Christianity in one timeline. Dan prefers to stay near the his hometime and the resulting world is so alien to him he quickly undoes it. These are big ideas but they tend to get expressed compactly, in just a few paragraphs.

Dan isn't immortal. He's a tourist in the timeline but he tends to stay around the year he first received his time travel device. He forgets that the world around him progresses - the building under construction is always under construction. It's he that changes as he begins aging - as time travel is not a source of immortality. He still lives, just lives differently. He begins associating with older versions of himself. He is shocked to watch one of his selves die of old age.

Over time Dan seems to find more fulfillment as he decides to settle in one time and live a normal-ish life - not that he doesn't go on the occasional jaunt, but he finds a purpose in becoming a part of the world.


The Man Who Folded Himself is an unusual book. It is brief but it covers some enormous topics. Copyrighted in 1973 it deals with same-sex relationships with a boldness unusual for its time. Its protagonist wrestles with the idea of free will. He tries to find love - but what does it say about him that the person he loves the most is himself? Is that healthy or disturbing? The brief elimination of Jesus Christ and all of Christianity is handled in under a page or two.

Any of these things could really be made into an entire mammoth novel - or five-book trilogy. But Gerrold doesn't really provide answers so much as he gives you ideas to think about. Time travel is almsot a toy for all the good it can do - each jaunt creates its own universe, making the jumper the only "real" person in a sense. Time traveling in this setting is very much an act of personal vanity - the rest of people of the universe seems to be just a supporting cast for Dan.


I was about twenty when I first read The Man Who Folded Himself. I'd probably be somewhat horrified by my future self's lined face, grey hair, and middle-aged man gut (to quote Saturday Night Live - "My gut? Well, I'm working on it!”) But I'd probably also be in awe of the fact that I fell in love, got married, and had two daughters. I'm glad I got to experience the intervening years and to have lived through them.


One quick note - the version I read on Kindle is a 2003 republication which made minor changes such as changing Dan's home-time from 1975 to 2005. I'm not too crazy about this change - it only became noticeable once or twice but when it did I found it a bit jarring. I'm not certain if that would be the case were I reading it for the first time.

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RPG Review: Star Trek The Role Playing Game (FASA/1983)

It really isn't my fault that I'm a Trekkie. When I was a preschooler in the suburbs of Syracuse back in the early 1970s my mother would put WPIX Star Trek reruns (all the way from NYC, there was cable tv awfully early in that area) on for me while she made dinner every weeknight at 6 PM. I liked the funny guy with the pointy ears.

My uncle and godfather was the family Trekkie. He took me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Truth be told my 8-year old self found it a bit boring. However in 1982 I absolutely loved Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That was a movie an 10-year old (almost 11 that summer) could appreciate it. Though seeing ear-worms on a giant drive-in movie screen was incredibly gross.

By that time I had my first official D&D group. We used to meet in the Howard Whittemore Library in Naugatuck, CT. One winter I was hanging outside the library waiting for for my parents to pick me up after our game was complete when I ran into the GM of another gaming group - he was carrying with him a copy of the 1st edition Star Trek RPG. We got to talking and I was amazed at the idea of a game based on Star Trek. Up to this point I'd only been playing D&D/AD&D, though I was aware of other games and had TSR's Star Frontiers game - I might have even had Gamma World by then. Truth to tell I can't find for certain when the 1st edition of the FASA game came out. It has a copyright of 1983 but some web-searching seems to indicate it came out in 1982.

In high school my family got a VCR which allowed me to record WPIX's now-midnight showings of Star Trek, plunging me into full geekdom. With that I acquired my first copy of the Star Trek RPG, though it was the 2nd edition rules. This review will be of the 1st edition which I didn't acuire till years and years later.


Let's talk a bit about the 1st edition boxed set then. The Star Trek RPG was a thick boxed set, much larger than the boxed sets put out by TSR. Within it you got a ton of material.

• A perfect-bound rulebook, 128 pages in length. 
• Deck plans of U.S.S. Enterprise and a Klingon D-7 Class Cruiser.
• A book with three adventures and descriptions for the above deck plans.
• A hex map for starship combat.
• Counters (I think - I've never been able to get a copy with them).
• Starship data sheets.
• 20-sided percentile dice

The Star Trek RPG was built around a percentile system .Your character had both ability scores and skills typically ranked from 0 to 100. The character sheet, now that I think about it, looked a bit like a Call of Cthulhu one, with its abilities on top and percentile skills on the bottom. What made this RPG fascinating was its lifepath system. It's not the first game to use such a system - for example, Game Designers' Workshop Traveller RPG used such a system. However, with Star Trek the system was designed to produce your desired character instead of someone completely random. You watched your character go through life before Star Fleet Academy, gain skills at the Academy, go on a cadet cruise, go on various other tours and attend command school, etc. Your character might find himself in the merchant marine when he really wants to be on an exploration starship. But you eventually wind up with your desired character - typically a captain, first officer, or department head on a Star Fleet vessel. 

The game gave you a choice of species, the selection coming from the original (well, only) series as well as the animated one. You could be a human, Andorian, Caitian, Edoan, Tellarite, or Vulcan. Though later supplements dealt with the period of the films and later the 1st seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the game assumed a classic tv series Star Fleet game. Supplements, in addition to covering later periods, also opened up Klingons, Romulans, Orions, spies, and traders as player characters.

The main mechanic of the RPG was making skill rolls - rolling percentile dice and trying to get your score or lower, modified by difficulty - though you wouldn't typically roll for routine tasks. One oddity I found with this system was its use of an action point system - based on your characters Dexterity you had a certain number of action points to spend each round for moving, aiming, shooting, etc. Interestingly, nearly 20 years prior to D&D 3rd edition FASA Star Trek had opportunity actions, giving you the chance to interrupt your opponents. Combat was exceedingly deadly - most characters could not survive a single hit with a phaser set on disrupt. This was not a game to get into a gunfight if you could help it.

The starship combat system was, as were those from many other science fiction RPGs, a type of board game, it was a very special board game. The various bridge positions all had different roles. The captain would give orders but it would be the players who carried them out as best they could - the engineer would allocate power to various systems, the players in control of those systems would make use of that power as best they could and make all the necessary skill rolls. It was a good time - indeed, FASA eventually released the system as its own separate game, a system that still has its fans some thirty years later.

The main rulebook was also loaded with background in the form of history, equipment, details on uniforms, Star Fleet procedures, planet generation, animals, aliens, etc. Today it is easy to underestimate how vital this all was - you couldn't just Google for information you wanted. It wisely in my opinion avoided any attempt at mapping the Star Trek universe. To this day there's argument in Star Trek fandom about mapping the Federation and surrounding space.

The set of adventures was rather handy, especially for those of us used to killing the monster and taking its stuff. As it turns out, Star Fleet did not encourage privateering... The first map was entitled Ghosts of Conscience. This is an excellent adventure that I've used in Star Trek games set in the Next Generation period using the Last Unicorn Game rules. One of those whacky Star Fleet admirals was behind a plan to generate an interphase weapon, using the concept of interphase as seen in the episode The Tholian Web. The players are assigned to a data retrieval of a ship caught in interphase, not knowing this ship was used to test this ill-advised weapon. Can the players piece together what happend? Can they rescue any crewmembers? This was not a black and white adventure. The players are sent in totally unaware of the true nature of their mission.

The second adventure is much lighter, Again, Troublesome Tribbles. As one might guess, it deals with Tribbles (and Klingons), this time at a genetic research station. The final adventure is more of a skeleton, dealing with the players needing to escape from a Klingon D-7 class cruiser.

By the late 1980s my gaming had transitioned from primarily fantasy to primarily science fiction, with a lot of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. We played quite a bit of Star Trek back in my dorm in my earlier years at UConn but by my junior year we just didn't have much time for gaming - plunging deep into my major, part-time work, first serious relationships, etc. 

After graduation in 1994 exploring the new-fangled web using Mosaic I came across one of this incarnation of Star Trek's website, Guy McLimore. He talked about his time working with FASA and the Star Trek RPG. I had the opportunity to have a small amount of correspondence with him, a percursor to the direct contact we have with many gaming authors now in this era of social media. A few years later I moved to Massachusetts and armed with my own storage space for a website from my dial-up ISP I created my first website, a simple site dedicated to the FASA Star Trek game. This got me associated with members of the FASA-Trek online community which in turn brought me into Last Unicorn Games' incarnation of Star Trek. I became a moderator on Don Mappin's FASA-Trek website. A lot of the people I met on that site are now friends through the miracle of social media. My first gaming group in Massachusetts used LUG-Trek. Even though LUG used their own ICON System for their Trek game, the DNA of the old FASA game could still be found - everyone remembered how fun it was to build your character up through a lifepath system. When Decipher took the license and did their own system they still instituted a lifepath system. I've not played FASA Star Trek in years but I've held onto my old books, unlike a lot of other games I've gone ahead and sold on ebay or to places like Noble Knight. It was a game written by people who clearly loved the source material and produced something whose influence is still felt decades later. 

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Thoughts on Historical Gaming

I love history. Living in Massachusetts I enjoy taking opportunity of many of the historical sites available to visit - U.S.S. Constitution, Plimouth Plantation and Mayflower II, Boston's Freedom Trail, Old Sturbridge Village, etc. My family has paid multiple visits to Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg. My Kindle and physical library are full of history books and works of historical fiction.

With that in mind I'm surprised to see how little "historical gaming" I've done. It's not that I've done none - one of my more successful recent campaigns, and one I might go back to, was a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game. But aside from that most of my historical gaming has been more of dabbling than full-fledged campaigns.

I think for me at least a lot of this comes from the desire to "get everything right". On the surface that's a good desire but taken too far it can be crippling. I'm unlikely to run into players shouting at me "Omigod I can't believe you had the King using a fork, everyone knows the fork wasn't in use in Europe at that time. This entire adventure is now pointless!"


Beyond getting past that mental hangup there have been two real challenges for me. The first is one on the smaller level. How does one present the setting? For example, the tavern is a classic location for Dungeons & Dragons adventures. What about in Ancient Rome or Greece? Did they even exist? Were they remotely like how we picture a tavern? And is that even important?

At a certain level, getting some of these details is important. If you're using a historical setting you want to at least get the feeling that the adventure takes place in another time. The balance seems to be between getting the feel of the setting vs. making those you game with suffer for your historical research. Unsurprisingly I've found this easiest to do with those periods closer to modern time. In such cases one can inject little details here and there to make the period feel a little bit foreign but a lot of the concepts we are familiar with today are still present throughout most of the 20th century. For example, an adventure in the 1920s or 30s can safely have automobiles, albeit different ones. Simply giving the name of an automobile no longer even being made but familiar-sounding helps set the tone. Depending on the feelings of the group, showcasing the casual racism, sexism, and homophobia present throughout much of history is another mechanism. Throwing out a few names in conversation that players are sure to know can help. So can the omnipresent flask of whiskey.

I have to confess to being curious how this will go for the next generation of gamers. When I talk with my ten-year old daughter it is difficult to communicate what a non-digital world I grew up in throughout the 70s and 80s - and for much of the 90s as well. There was no internet to get an instant answer. No cell phones. Yes, she knows that was the case. But it is very difficult for her to picture how people got things done. How did we know what movies were playing theaters? What was on television? What did we do if we missed a tv show? How did we know when something was coming out? How did we do any research for papers at school?

Thinking about these questions brings me personally to mind of earlier periods than the 20th century. At this point those types of questions become more difficult for me to answer. What happened when you entered a medieval city? Where would you spend the night? Could you carry weapons? What sort of entertainment was there? In cases like this I think the key is again to get the feel. You're never going to get every detail right. Rather your challenge is to set the stage so that it feels like a different period. A few sprinkles of detail can go a long way to making it not feel like the 21st century. I've found George R..R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series a good inspiration for how to do this. Though the setting is a fictional one, it borrows much from medieval Europe and a few details about the way people ate, how they traveled, etc. really drives home the feeling of a medieval setting.


The preceding paragraphs cover the smaller details. There are also larger details to consider. If, for example, you are playing a World War II superhero game, can the players kill Hitler, if so, what happens? If you are playing a game where the players are portraying the movers and shakers of the setting as a whole then I think the answer has to be that yes, they can have an impact on the history of the setting. On the other hand, if the game is a smaller scale - for eample, using the WWII model, if the players are running mildly super-powered grunts like you might find in the Godlike RPG, then no, it is not likely the players will ever be in a situation to kill Hitler.

This is the same sort of challenge you might find if you set a game in a well-known fictional universe. For example, in Star Wars the heroes are Luke, Han, Leia, and the like. If you set a game in the Star Wars universe, an the players change events? If not, how do you make adventures so that the players do not feel like they are unimportant to the setting as a whole?

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RPG Review: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (1987)

Born in 1971, Star Wars cast a wide shadow on the culture of my youth. There's a joke on the internet along the lines you can tell you grew up in the 70s and 80s in that by the time of Return of the Jedi you thought Princess Leia or Han Solo were hot...

We had our action figures. Our bed sheets. Our narrated storybooks (on vinyl!)  I remember anxiously awaiting the release of the Star Wars Holiday Special in 1979 (note - even at the age of eight I managed to be disappointed).  After Empire Strikes Back there were massive debates as to whether Darth Vader was telling Luke the truth regarding being Luke's father.

After 1983 it kind of fizzled out. There were some odd Ewok tv-movies and the Droids and Ewoks television shows but neither lasted very long. The Marvel Star Wars comic book lasted until 1986.

In 1987 West End Games placed advertisements in Dragon magazine announcing their Star Wars RPG. I was an excited fan - I'd experimented with adapting Star Wars to AD&D without much success though I'd had better success tweaking TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG for it. West End, as I recall, advertised three core products - the main RPG, the Star Wars Sourcebook and the Star Warriors starship combat game. In this review I'll just be talking about the original RPG.

The Star Wars RPG was a fairly compact book, about 140 pages in length, black and white with color inserts. It was illustrated with stills from the movies as well as Ralph McQuarrie concept art. The color was used to great affect, with some memorable in-universe advertisements and propaganda. There really wasn't much in the way of background - it was Star Wars. Three movies, that was it. No expanded universe references. And everyone knew Star Wars.

As far as the rules engine went, it was a dice pool system based off one of West End Games' previous RPGs, Ghostbusters (which had actually been designed by Chaosium, creators of the Call of Cthulhu RPG). I was always a little amused by people who stated a d20 Star Wars RPG must be "D&D in space" - by that standard the original RPG was "Ghostbusters in space". (Though in truth I think it's fair to say it took Wizards of the Coast three tries to get Star Wars right.)

You had six attributes in Star Wars. Each attribute had a set of skills which were based off of it. For example, the Blasters skill was under the Dexterity Attribute while the Starship Piloting skill could be found under Mechanical. Each attribute was rated by the number of dice (always six-sided) that you rolled - from 2D (i.e. 2D6) to 4D. Modifiers could often be found with an attribute rating - you could have an attribute of 2D, 2D+1, 2D+2, 3D, 3D+1, 3D+2, 4D. If you lacked a skill you just rolled the attribute. Having a skill gave you a bonus above your attribute. You rolled against various difficulty ratings or the rolls of opponents.

While there were no character classes the game did make use of templates - starting points for characters which you would then customize. Templates included concepts like Brash Pilot, Laconic Scout, Failed Jedi, Smuggler, Alien Force User, Young Jedi, Wookie First Mate, etc. While they didn't reveal how to make your own templates until the 2nd edition they weren't so complicated that you couldn't figure out the "secret formula" with a few minutes consideration.

The game encouraged cinematic behavior. Multiple actions were easy to adjudicate - for every action after the first you lost a die from your roll. If you would normally roll 5D+2 for Blasters and fired three times then each shot would be 3D+2. Characters had Force Points to allow them to modify fate - spending a Force Point allowed you to double all your abilities for a round. If you spent it heroically you got the Force Point back at the end of the adventure. Spending it at a dramatically appropriate moment - like blowing up a Death Star, you got it back with an extra one.

Speaking of the Force, you could be a Force-user.  Force-users had three additional skills, unattached to any attribute - Control, Sense, and Alter. Each of these skills had lists of powers that could be used with them, with some powers requiring the use of two or three Force skills. The use of the Control and Sense skills also allowed you to improve your ability to hit with a lightsaber, parry blaster bolts, or do additional damage. Force-users were tough to play, resembling low-level magic-users in D&D at first - typically your Force skills would be low - often just 1D, and the difficulties were often high. This, though was in keeping with what we knew of the universe at the time - the only Force-users in the movies were Luke, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Darth Vader, and the Emperor. And it wasn't until Return of the Jedi that Luke, the only PC-like character, truly emerged as a force to be reckoned with.

The game came with a simple starship combat system - it wasn't designed to be a tactical representation but rather covered the types of dogfights you saw in the movies. The Millenium Falcon vs. a few TIE fighters. X-wing vs. TIE fighter.

While lacking a large equipment list, the game did cover all the basics and gave you enough starships to get started. A starting adventure was included - Rebel Breakout - kind of a dungeon crawl through a mine trying to avoid stormtroopers and get the heck out of there while trying to join the Rebel Alliance. There were also several adventure seeds to give GMs ideas on where to go next.


One thing the West End Games incarnation was legendary for was its ease of play. I can definitely attest to that. I received the game Christmas Eve in 1987 and the next morning my brother and I were playing the introductory adventure. I've probably introduced more people to RPGs via incarnations of this game than any other game, including Dungeons & Dragons. But it worked well for long-term play - I've played and GM-ed in numerous Star Wars campaigns. It had some weak points - Force users eventually become quite potent to the detriment of other characters - but it captured the universe of the original movies splendidly. I've found it worked well for small and large groups and in addition to campaign-play made a fine system for a quick pick-up game. West End Games hit a home run with their first at-bat with Star Wars.

West End Games hit hard financial times just before The Phantom Menace was released and the license went to Wizards of the Coast. I think the final incarnation Wizards produced, Star Wars Saga Edition was by far their best version. It was an excellent game but unlike the West End incarnation, it was not a game geared towards novices - nor was it one that encouraged lightning fast play. Now Fantasy Flight Games is taking their turn at making a Star Wars RPG with a public beta going on (one that as of this moment I'm not very familiar with). If the copyright gods could ever align perfectly I'd love for some way to be found to re-release the original West End Games Star Wars RPG in a way similar to the recent Advanced Dungeons & Dragons re-releases. It should be doable - Dark Horse Comics has, for example, been able to republish the old Marvel Comics Star Wars material.

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The Advent of Player Control in RPGs

When I first started gaming the DM was God. You rolled dice. The DM indicated what happened. When the DM rolled the dice it might be behind the screen and you took what you got and you didn't get upset. Now that I think back to it, in 1st edition of AD&D combat tables and saving throws weren't even in the Players Handbook - rather you had to go to the Dungeon Masters Guide.

I'm trying to remember what the first game I encountered that injected some narrative control into the players' hands. I believe it was Victory Games' 007 James Bond RPG, first published in 1983. This isn't to say it was the first such game - I'm willing to bet it wasn't, but I'm pretty certain it is the first that I encountered. In the 007 RPG your success was rated by a quality rating. The game gave each player a certain amount of Hero Points which could be used to shift quality ratings up or down, allowing a player to improve his or her own quality ratings and reduce those of their opponents.

Also in the 007 RPG the difficulty of any given task was rated by its Ease Factor. During certain circumstances, most commonly chases, opponents would get into a bidding war for the Ease Factor. The winner, in the case of chases, could choose to widen the distance or close it but both participants would need to make a skill roll based on the final Ease Factor. This represented the types of chase scenes you would see in the 007 films (or any action story) excellently and allowed players to decide how much of a risk they were willing to take.


I played an occasional game of 007 but the next year saw the release of a game that I got a ton of mileage out of: TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG, introduced in 1984. The mid-80s saw a trend of table-based task resolution where you would roll percentile dice based on your ability and instead of trying to roll under your ability score you would consult a color-coded table to see if you succeeded and if so, how well.

In the Marvel RPG your hero had a pool of Karma points. These could be used to guarantee certain results on the table as well as being used for improvement, power stunts, etc. Your hero's behavior could boost or diminish his or her karma pool.

One additional jump I can think of came in 1996 with TSR's Saga System, used in their Dragonlance Fifth Age RPG as well as 1998's Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game. In both these games the player occupied a central position. The player used various cards to perform his or her actions. What I found innovative at the time was the fact that all resolution was from the player's point of view. An opponent's ratings were static, whether being used for offense or defense. A villain's attack on a player character was resolved as a defensive action against a static attack rating. While neither of these games was particularly successful for TSR, a company by this time on its last legs, I believe the thought process of these games did have an influence on the narrative games of the 2000s and 2010s.

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Fiction Review: "Nine Princes in Amber" by Roger Zelazny

For whatever reason it's taken me forever to really begin reading Roger Zelazny's Amber series of novels. My primarily knowledge of it was from flipping through my brother's copies of Phage Press' Amber Diceless Roleplaying books. My brother raved about both the RPG and the novels. Back in 1999 I picked up The Great Book of Amber omnibus collection of all the Amber novels but I couldn't get into it.

While browsing Audible.com I noticed that all ten of Zelazny's Amber novels were available in unabridged audiobook form, the first five (the original books) narrated by Alessandro Juliani and the latter five by Wil Wheaton. Juliani, probably best known as the reimagined Battlestar Galactica's Felix Gaeta had previously narrated a short story in METAtropolis, a narration I enjoyed, so I decided to give Nine Princes in Amber another try.

I'm probably the last fantasy fan to have read Nine Princes in Amber but just in case I'm not I'll do my best not to give away major plot reveals and spoilers.

The book opens with the narrator awakening in a hospital. That amuses me a little as I seem to recall a guide for writers advising never open a story in such a way. The narrator is amnesic and doesn't even know his own name at first. The book follows him escaping from the hospital and discovering who he is.

One thing I remember from the first time I trie dreading this is being frustrated by the amnesia. Having finally completed it I will say that it is a useful way of gradually revealing the universe to the reader. Moreover, it is not the universe that is being revealed but rather the multiverse.

In the book we learn (keeping things broad) that our narrator is Corwin, a member of a rather machiavellian family with connections to Amber. Amber is the only "true" world, all others, including our own, being shadows of it. We quickly learn that the family is not made up of the nicest or most trustworthy people. They conspire against each other while at the same time maintaining the appearance of polite relations.

Meeting with some members of his family begin bringing Corwin's memories back. While they are far from complete he decides to go to Amber, though he doesn't fully know why. A brother of his joins him in this quest. Their journey takes them on a car ride from one reality to another with various elements of the universe changing as they get closer to Amber. In the course of the book Corwin manages to regain his full memories and we learn why it is he wants to get to Amber and more about his family and the multiverse.

The multiuniversal setting brings to mind later works it clearly had an influence on such as Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and John Ostrander's Grimjack. The influence on Gaiman is especially apparent when one compares Corwin's family with the Endless of Sandman.

Corwin is a bit of a jerk, albeit a jerk who is enjoyable to read about, especially in the novel's first-person narration. His time of amnesia has mellowed him a bit compared to the rest of his family but he is nonetheless a very cocky and self-confident figure, though not so self-confident that he won't withdraw when the circumstances dictate it. The extremely self-confident protagonist is something that seems to have largely vanished - or at least greatly diminished - from modern fantasy and science fiction and is something that I've found I enjoy reading. It's something you'll find in the works of Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Andre Norton, Robert E. Howard, and other classic genre authors. I live in a world where I need to worry about employment, health, being a good husband, and father - to be honest it's nice to read about characters who don't worry about such things. Not the only thing I want to read but sometimes it is nice just to escape.

The novel ends with some resolution but is clearly part of a series with a ton of loose ends that need resolving. I'll probably hold off on reviewing the remaining books individually but rather do a follow-up review at some point of the first five novels.

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