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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Thoughts on Digital Hobby Products

At GenCon a few days ago Wizards of the Coast indicated they would again be making the back-catalog of older edition products available in "electronic format".  This doesn't indicate what that digital format will be - i.e. will it be pdf, epub, mobi, require a live internet connection, etc. This got me thinking about the nature of digital gaming products in general.

First, a little about my gaming library. I've been gaming since the early 1980s. That's an opportunity for a lot of gaming products. Prior to having kids expanding shelf space wasn't that big an issue but with these little people in the house I began putting rarely used gaming products into basement storage crates. With the advent of tablets I've begun preferring digital products over physical ones. I still buy the occasional gaming book, particularly for core books of games that I play or plan to play. I initially tried using a Kindle DX to read gaming pdfs but the performance of the Kindle DX just wasn't adequate for this purpose. I later switched to using an iPad and then later moved onto Android. My main tablet currently is a Google Nexus 7 (I'm a techie who makes frequent use of trade-in opportunities and eBay to help support the habit). Though the iPad gives a larger screen I've found I tend to prefer the 7-inch tablet size as being more comfortable to hold for a longer period of time. It's not just my gaming products that I prefer digitally I also prefer ebooks over regular books and have been making extensive use of Comixology and the Nook App for comic books - for the first time in years I know what comics are coming out on any given Wednesday...


With regards to pricing... There's a pretty strong contingent in the gaming community that believes that gaming pdfs should be free with a physical book - or even free in general as an incentive to buy the physical book. As someone who considers the physical book to be optional that is a bad business model for someone like me. As someone who makes a living in the software industry I'm dependent on people paying real money for something that is purely digital. Therefore I have absolutely no objection to paying a reasonable cost for a digital gaming product. Should a company price a gaming product as high as a physical book? In all honesty, that's a choice for the gaming company. Though I don't think anyone is out to get filthy rich in the gaming industry, one of the goals is still to make money, if for no other reason than to have enough money to make more gaming products. I've read arguments that the cost should be drastically reduced as there is no physical product involved and thereby no printing costs. This is certainly true though one must keep in mind that it certainly costs money to store a digital product - I don't know how sites like RPGnow charges vendors but I imagine it is either a percentage or a fee based on storage used - or some combination of the two. Plus the best pdf products are well bookmarked and linked within, something you'd not need to worry about in a physical-only product - at least not as much. Moreover I want the people making a product to make a decent amount of money - if they can have a higher profit margin on a digital product, more power to them.

This isn't to say I dislike companies providing a pdf for free with the purchase of a physical product. It's a nice deal and for me it often will get me to consider getting a physical copy of the book as well, especially for a core book. But I think it would be incredibly unwise for a company to offer a digital product for free unless they are doing so to drive the sales of other products of their line.

Some companies have gone the opposite way, something that I myself consider regrettable. For one reason or another they provide only physical books. I think this is a missed opportunity. Some do it out of fear of piracy - that seems to be what spurred Wizards of the Coast to remove al their D&D pdfs several years ago. There is speculation that this is the reason that Cubicle 7 has stopped providing pdfs for their One Ring game. It also appears that sometimes licensing restrictions prevent this - this is apparently the reason that even when Wizards of the Coast sold D&D pdfs, they never sold any for their Star Wars RPGs. Apparently doing so would interfere with the rights of some other company as it would apparently be considered akin to a video game (if my memory serve correctly).


I've mentioned pdfs a lot above but truth be told, the pdf is not really the best format for a gaming product. It's a great way to show just what the printed product looks like but given different screen dimensions for tablets and computer screens it is not always ideal. Of course if you are also producing a physical book it is a lot easier than also formatting your book for a common ebook format such as epub or mobi - especially if you want to do your product justice - I have seen a number of gaming products put into an ebook format that look terrible - bad formatting, unreadable tables, lost illustrations.

I do think that any format needs to be as platform-independent as possible - in other words, not designed to work best with a specific kind of tablet. iPads have the best tablet penetration clearly, but they are not the only tablet and it is always uncertain how long the dominant player in any industry will persist. Two years from now the Microsoft Surface might pull off a coup and become the dominant tablet player. So I'd hate to see any digital solution be focused on any one platform.


My last thoughts are on digital rights. The first thing this brings to mind is DRM. This is designed to provide companies with protection from piracy. While it may provide some protection, in all honesty DRM only prevents casual piracy. A quick web search will reveal that you can easily get programs which will allow you to take pretty much DRM-ed media and remove the DRM from it - this includes ebooks, pdfs, password protection on docs, hidden watermarks, etc.

It also means to me that you should greater rights as a purchaser of digital content. Often you only have the right to use the digital content and that right can often be taken away without giving you any recourse. For example, with my copy of X-Men: First Class blu-ray I was able to get credit to also get a copy on Amazon Instant Video. Today however if I try to play the movie I get the message "Video currently unavailable." This is a restriction put on Amazon by the movie studios, one I consider to be extremely short-sighted - of course this is the same industry that fought the rights of individuals to record movies and tv shows with their VCRs.

Similarly, it is unclear what will happen, for example, if Marvel ends it agreement with Comixology. What happens to a person's library of Marvel Comics? Ideally you'd still be able to access it but not purchase anything new.

The technology is still new but I do believe that owners of digital content need to respect purchasers of their content. You'd not accept a DVD that stopped playing once premium cable got the rights to a movie. Similarly a company's attempt to protect itself from piracy should not turn reasonable tasks into a chore.

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Jules Verne Translations That Don't Stink

Shortly after I graduated from college R. Talsorian published their fantasy steampunk RPG, Castle Falkenstein. Having missed out on Space: 1889 when it first came out this was my first steampunk RPG, though I had been exposed to the genre by Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine (a novel which, though I though I found the setting compelling, I did not particularly care for - must reread some day).

Jules Verne was one of the authors in the inspirational reading section of Castle Falkenstein. Heck, the game also made him into France's scientific advisor, having him responsible for their massive Verne Cannons which formed a sort of nuclear deterrent. 

With that in mind, one Sunday afternoon I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore my new girlfriend (now my wife of nearly 16 years!).  On a whim I decided to pick up a Jules Verne novel. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That night I started reading it, never having read any of his works before but having vague memories of the Disney adaptation of that work. I did not care for it at all. I found it boring, the dialogue awkward. Trying again - at least the Verne books were cheap - I picked up A Journey to the Center of the Earth. (I just realized this was about a year before amazon.com went online - you pretty much had to go to bookstores for your books. It was a nice bonus that Barnes & Noble had coffee bars...)

Move forward to early 2001 when I pick up GURPS Steampunk. It too talked about the awesomeness of Jules Verne. However it also specified which translators you should look for. Curious, I picked up the Naval Institute Press' 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea/Completely Restored and Annotated translated by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. And it made a huge difference. I learned what a shoddy job the original 19th century translator had done. Dialoge compressed into summaries. Scientific research done by Verne horribly mistranslated. Much of Verene's humor removed. And anything offense to the United Kingdom removed or changed. With that in mind I began pursuing newer translations of his works. I learned what a masterpiece From the Earth to the Moon was and I journeyed up The Mighty Orinoco River. I haven't come close to completing my reading of Verne but I have made a habit of grabbing good translations when I find them so I have them in my library. With the advent of ebooks many of his books are also available digitally but that presents a problem - sites like amazon.com and bn.com tend to separate the newer translations from the old ones, meaning you have to go through a lot of work to find the right one. Here's a hint - if it is free or 99 cents it is probably not a good translation.

You could run an excellent 19th century game using Verne's works as your primary inspiration. Heck, every once in a while I wonder if it'd be worth it to learn French to read them in their original tongue. 

I'd like to offer people some tools to find the better translations. First, there are some specific translators to look for. The two who translated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea above, Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter, are two of the best Verne translators, sometimes alone and sometimes as collaborators. Other translators to look for include Stansford Luce, Peter Schulman, Edward Baxter, Sidney Kravitz, and William Butcher. 

There are three publishing houses who have been putting out a number of excellent Jules Verene translations. First is Wesleyan University Press' Early Classics of Science Fiction. They have published translations for:

• The Begum's Millions (Verne, Jules, Stanford L. Luce, trans; Arthur B. Evans, ed; Peter Schulman, intro and notes)
• The Mighty Orinoco (Verne, Jules; Luce, Stanford, trans; Evans, Arthur B., ed.; Miller, Walter James, intro. & notes)
• Invasion of the Sea (Verne, Jules. Edward Baxter, trans.; Arthur B. Evans, ed. and introd.
• The Mysterious Island (Verne, Jules. Sidney Kravitz, trans.; Arthur B. Evans, ed.; William Butcher, introd. and notes.)
• The Kip Brothers (Verne, Jules. Stanford L. Luce, trans. Arthur B. Evans, ed. Jean-Michel Margot, intro and notes)

The University of Nebraska Press' Bison Frontiers of Imagination is another source of several excellent Jules Verene translations. Unlike Wesleyan University's titles I have found a number of these as ebooks. Their catalog includes: 

• The Golden Volcano (translated by Edward Baxter)
• The Chase of the Golden Meteor
• Lighthouse at the End of the World  (translated by William Butcher)
• The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (translated by Peter Schulman)
• The Meteor Hunt (translated by Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller)

The third publishing house is Oxford University Press' Oxford World Classics. Their website is a bit confusing but these are readily available at most online bookstores (with ebooks for some of them as well). All were translated by William Butcher.

• The Extraordinary Journeys: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (appears to be out of print)
• The Extraordinary Journeys: Around the World in Eighty Days
• The Adventures of Captain Hatteras 
• The Extraordinary Journeys: Journey to the Centre of the Earth 

There are also some translations which don't fit into a series but are still worth picking up. I'll provide links to the US amazon.com store but they tend to be available elsewhere:

• The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (translated by Walter James Miller) - sadly out of print but usually not too hard to find
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea/Completely Restored and Annotated (translated by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter) - from the Naval Institute Press
• Amazing Journeys (translated by Frederick Paul Walter) - the link is to the Kindle version, available physically as well. This is an omnibus containing translations by Walter of Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Circling the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, and Around the World in 80 Days.
• Paris in the Twentieth Century (translated by Richard Howard) - a fairly recent find, this is I believe the only English translation

Robin Williams travels through time and takes Jules Verne for a trip...

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RPG Review: The Ghost Tower of Inverness

For whatever reason, I don't think I played C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness more than once or twice. Part of the reason, now that I think of it, is my grandmother needed the picture of the seer within it as a model for the Halloween costume she sewed for me - my grandmother was quite the seamstress but not particularly familiar with the fantasy genre.

The Ghost Tower of the title refers to the central tower of the castle of the dreaded wizard Galap-Driedel. The entire  Castle Inverness was magically lifted "from the very foundations of rock upon which it rested." Within the central tower was said to be the "Soul-Gem" which "dragged the souls of men screaming from their mortal flesh and trapped them within its many facets." When one day the wizard failed to return an angry mob (presumably with pitchforks and torches) stormed the castle and tore down the central tower. Though on fog-shrouded nights the central tower can supposedly still be seen (a "ghost tower" if you will).

The default background for the adventure has the Seer of Urnst persuade his duke to employ adventurers to retrieve the Soul Gem. Obviously this is something which can easily be adapted to fit any campaign. Originally meant for tournament play, the pregenerated characters have interesting backgrounds, primarily being criminals who go on this quest in return for amnesty. Escorted to the ruins of Inverness they are given an amulet which will teleport them back once they retrieve the Soul Gem.

The first part of the adventure involves the ruins of the castle and the dungeon beneath it. There are four parts to the dungeon, all leading to a locked central chamber. Each of the parts will give them one fourth of the key to the central chamber.

The dungeon has classic D&D wandering monsters - Rust Monsters, Gelatinous Cubes, Ghouls, etc. However what makes it memorable is its numerous puzzles. There is a room where stepping on a certain part of the floor teleports a monster into the room. Another room has 16 bugbears standing in stasis, a stasis which is broken upon certain conditions. Perhaps most memorable is a chess room where the players find themselves as a chess pieces.

Upon gaining access to the central room the adventurers travel back in time to when the central tower existed, with the rest of the adventure taking place in the tower.  The tower consists of chambers dedicated to the four classical elements, air, earth, fire, and water, with dangers and monsters appropriate to the elements. There are also some funky gravity shifts such that one level is upside-down in relation to the other levels. Finally our bold adventurers reach the Soul Gem and must retrieve it while avoiding getting their souls trained.

One thing worth noting is this adventure has numerous handouts providing pictures and illustrating various rooms in extra detail - not to the extreme that Expedition to Barrier Peaks would later do, but still rather useful.


While the adventure requires a lot of leaps of logic - accepting all the logic puzzles, the time travel, the bizarre environments of the tower, etc., it is in many ways a classic dungeon crawl. Designed for mid-level parties, the greatest challenge is not really the monsters but rather the dungeon itself, where sharp thinking greatly reduces the risk to the adventurers. The dangerous dungeon brings to mind the Lankhmar story "The Jewels in the Forest", originally entitled "Two Sought Adventure".

How would this work as an adventure today? Obviously it still makes a fine AD&D 1st edition adventure and no real work would be required for 2nd or original edition versions (or their clones). Similarly it would fit very well with games such as Adventurer, Conqueror, King System; Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing; and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Adapting them to later editions would certainly be doable but likely with a lot of work to properly balance the encounters.

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Story-Based Adventures

Both my current and immediately previous campaigns could be considered "old school" campaigns. Right now I'm playing Dungeon Crawl Classics and my previous campaign was of Call of Cthulhu, something of a living fossil in that despite being in its 6th edition it is very close to the game it was when it started.

Despite this I don't necessarily consider myself to be an old school player and this blog has discussed newer games in addition to the older ones. I've enjoyed both flavors.

Reflecting on this has made me think of the transition from old school to new school gaming. In the 70s and early 80s most adventures, at least for D&D, had the slimmest of plots. There was typically a dungeon and sometimes there was a bit of a plot and reason for you to go there but these were usually easily changed. In his Grognardia blog, James Maliszewski has referred to this transition as the Hickman Revolution. Tracy Hickman wrote the Desert of Desolation series of adventures which had a stronger plot than previous D&D adventures - though even at this point I would say that it would be awfully easy to discard much of the background of those adventures. For those unfamiliar with this series, it was expected that the adventurers would unleash a fearsome Efreeti on the desert, later free a Djinn and finally seek out the Tomb of Martek as a way to re-imprison the Efreeti. However, the adventures were centered around fascinating locations that were very easily pulled out of their plots and adapted to other plots - a trap-infested pyramid, an oasis with various factions, a sea of glass, pocket dimensions, etc.

What would probably be considered the tipping point is Tracy and Laura Hickman's Ravenloft. Published in 1983 the adventure was at the time incredibly revolutionary. It featured maps that to this day gamers remember with fondness. It featured a memorable villain with an extensive backstory - Count Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire who diverged from standard game stats And it featured a variable plot - usually playing cards as a type of tarot reading to decide Strahd's objectives, his weakness, where he could be found, etc.

While Ravenloft featured an important villain, I believe the adventure kept a reasonable balance - while the DM was encouraged to play him intelligently and keep him alive as long as possible, he was definitely designed to be beatable. It did have a regrettable ending which gave the PCs the opportunity to watch events unfold, something that would become more common with time.

However, this opened the floodgates into plot-based adventures. Shortly after came Dragons of Despair, the first of the Dragonlance adventures. It featured pregenerated PCs you were strongly encouraged to use, PCs and NPCs were protected from death by an "obscure death rule", and there were certain things players were just not allowed to do. This isn't to say people didn't play the adventures or enjoy them. But it did indicate that a change had indeed happened.

This isn't to say every adventure was a pseudo-novel. But truth to tell, some were. Looking back the biggest offender would be, in my mind, the Avatar series from the Forgotten Realms, featuring the PCs watching gods battle it out with one another.

I think that points to the danger of story-based adventures. Everyone has there own preferences and there are some who just don't care for that style of play - truth to tell I tend to prefer location-based adventures as they are far easier for me to adapt. But... if one is to make a story-based adventure I think the key is to make it without "one true ending" and to avoid at all costs making the PCs observers - the PCs need to be stars, not observers, not puppets.

One adventure I think did this exceptionally well was the an adventure published in the same year as Ravenloft - The Assassin's Knot. Sequel to the location-based adventure The Secret of Bone Hill had the PCs trying to unravel a murder mystery with the Baron of Restenford assassinated, apparently by someone from the nearby town of Garrotten (what in the world would an assassin be doing in a town called Garrotten...) There is no requirement the PCs succeed in their mission and the adventure covers what will happen if they fail. Heck there's nothing to stop them from making a deal with the people behind the assassination. Garrotten was a memorable town, with the suspects being interesting NPCs, useful for other purposes beyond a murder mystery. If you didn't want the murder mystery there was still a lot you could do with the adventure.

While TSR was producing story-based adventures for AD&D 2nd edition they would find themselves facing what I imagine was the first real challenge to their dominance in the gaming industry. 1991 would see the release of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade. Vampire was a strongly story-based game - heck the entire game line was called the Storyteller System. The PCs were vampires with a humanity system designed to show how close they were to giving into the beast within them. Vampire typically assumed the PCs were at the bottom of the social ladder of the undead with limited ways of advancing - this allowed the PCs to find themselves as pawns of ancient vampires and could unfortunately turn them into observers - something I believe is the greatest danger of any RPG. That said to this day I'd jump at the chance to do a Vampire game. But as a wiser and older GM (err, storyteller), were I to run such a game I'd be certain to keep the PCs as the stars of the story.

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RPG Review: Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul

I've a confession to make. Every time I think of the title to this game I keep visualizing it as "Villains Fowl" and expect something out of Howard the Duck...


With that mental image now in everyone's mind, let's talk about Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul, henceforth written as CC&VF. I've talked about the difficulties I've had in running a good superheroes game. Or more to the point, a good comic book superheroes game, one that feels like something out of comic books. For example, Wild Talents is an absolutely awesome game but what it excels at is, at least in my experience, more of a gritty superhero universe. The Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy would fit in perfectly in such a game as would Alan Moore's Watchmen. Where I've had problems is in trying to emulate the genre conventions of your typical superhero comic book. For example, having a story where Batman and Superman adventure together as equals. Managing a game where a fragile empath somehow manages to avoid getting slaughtered in a fight with the Incredible Hulk.


CC&VF is a game clearly designed from the start around those conventions. It is built around a system of traits. What is a trait could for? Whatever you want it to be. Traits can be things like powered armor, flight, super-intelligent, world's greatest detective, utility belt, trick arrows, spidey sense, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry, former Green Beret, super-cute, iron will, excellent with cats, etc. When building characters, you decide what traits you want. There's various modifiers to these traits to make them more or less useful in certain situations. If you've played the various FATE RPG games they bear some resemblance to aspects.

Now it's important to talk about resolution. For the most part a trait is represented by a value which is your bonus to a d12 roll - pretty much all resolution is by rolling a d12. But... traits are also defined by how often you can use them before you start adding detriment dice. For each detriment die you roll another d12 but you keep the lowest value. By default you start adding detriment dice after the first use of a trait (on a per scene basis - detriment dice go away after every scene). Some of the advantages to traits delay the accumulation of detriment dice. Some traits start off with you rolling extra d12s not as detriment dice but as bonus dice (you keep the highest d12 roll). Sometimes the bonus dice get bigger before reaching their peak and switching to detriment dice. Other times you start off strong an then start diminishing. Here's some examples of possible rolling combinations, with positive values above 1 representing bonus dice and each negative value representing a detriment die:

• 1 / -1 / -2 / -3 / ... (the default)
• 1 / 1 / -1 / -2 / -3 / ...
• 1 / 2 / 3 /  -1 / -2 / -3 / ...
• 3 / 2 / 1 /  -1 / -2 / -3 / ...
• 2 / 1 /  -1 / -2 / -3 / ...

You are encouraged when purchasing traits to make them linkable to other traits, allowing you to combine the bonuses - though at the cost of counting as a usage for all the traits used together.

What I like about this is it encourages the action you see in comic books. Very rarely does a superhero in comic books constantly use the same power the same way. But in most superhero RPG games you'll find characters using the same power the same way round after round. The mechanics of CC&VF strongly discourage that behavior.

You can use traits both to attack and to defend. What sort of trait can you use to attack? Whatever you can justify. What sort of trait can you use to defend? Whatever you can justify. A doctor could, for example, use her knowledge of human anatomy to know precisely where to strike. A wise-cracking wallcrawler could annoy his foes. You are not attacking health points, mental health, etc. You are trying to defeat your opponent in a contested roll. If you do you deliver a setback - though if you defeat him by a lot you might take him straight out. With four setback tokens you are out.  What is out? Up to you. Someone defeated with witty banter might not be able to any more interaction or just doesn't care anymore. Someone in a fistfight is probably knocked out.

Like lots of games you have the ability to modify the action - this is called Editorial Control Points. This allows you to do things like reroll, get rid of setback tokens, get a one-use trait, have an ally show up, break the fourth wall, etc. If a weaker superhero (i.e. one built with less points) adventures with a stronger one then you get extra ECs. This reminds me a bit of how Eden Studios' Buffyverse games handled different types of characters.

Unlike most games, CC&VF discourages traditional character advancement in most situations. It encourages changes to costume, rearranging your traits, etc. to reflect how different creative teams interpret characters differently. By default, combat is always non-lethal though the game does have rules for those wanting to introduce deadly combat as seen in all those 1990s antiheroes...

What's the book like? It is a color illustrated book, 164 pages long. It's only available in PDF. Unfortunately it is not bookmarked - I greatly prefer bookmarked PDFs as they make reading on my tablet much easier and save me the trouble of modifying the PDF file myself... The rules themselves are presented fairly well though I do think they could perhaps be tightened a little bit - the book does begin with a Chapter 0 that gives an extremely high-level overview, something very useful. However there are some times where there's a concept being mentioned before it has been full explained. In some senses this is unavoidable - in a book that covers character generation first, you are going to need to talk about things that modify the standard task resolution system before plunging into that system. Continuing my comparison with Wild Talents I think Wild Talents is one of the best examples of a game which gives you the basics in a very succinct way. Don't get me wrong - CC&VF is not some undecipherable book - far from it - but there is some room for improvement and/or touchups.

As far as tone goes, it is clear the author, Barak Blackburn, and the rest of the creative team, love their superhero comics. The various cliches of those comics are features which this game embraces. I suspect for some people this will make the game absolutely awesome - I'm in that camp. On the other hand, if you're one who needs to know precisely what powers are capable of doing, this is probably a game you might find frustrating.

Spectrum Games has made a name for itself as a company which excels at genre emulation - not just making a game with characters for a certain genre, but rather making certain the game is representative of the genre itself, with all the tropes and cliches that implies. I can safely attest that CC&VF positions itself well as a game for emulating comic book superhero stories.

Disclaimer - I'm friends on Facebook and Google+ with Cynthia Celeste Miller of Spectrum Games, who did the editing and graphic design for this game. I don't think that influenced my review at all but felt it worth pointing out in the interests of full disclosure.

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The Fine Art of Combat Avoidance

The Art of War
(Source: WikiMedia Commons)

"He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight."

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I've seen it mentioned on other blogs but I got to experience it myself in last night's Dungeon Crawl Classics game. It is something of a lost art to have characters not plunge into every encounter.

Starting with its 3rd edition, D&D is geared towards balanced encounters. This doesn't mean that an encounter is easy. Rather it means that for any given encounter the Dungeon Master has a pretty good idea what sort of challenge the encounter presents. Moreover, in a bit of meta-gaming, your typical player will know that any encounter is something that the party can reasonably expect to defeat.

In my earlier gaming days this was not always the case. First of all the idea of balance wasn't quite so prevalent in the games which I played. If you were trying to build a reasonable encounter you'd have to eyeball it, there were no real metrics as to what was reasonable aside from the experience point value of the monster(s).

Scene from New Line Cinema's
The Fellowship of the Ring

Moreover, there was less an expectation of balance. There were times when players were expected to take the better part of valor. This is itself in keeping with a lot of the fiction that inspired D&D.  One situation which quickly comes to mind is early in The Fellowship of the Ring when the hobbits hid from the ringwraith which was looking for a hobbit with the name of Baggins. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar series Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser make more than one ill-advised trip to the Thieve's Guild and are fortunate to survive the experiences.

In last nights DCC game the zero-level characters faced the most challenging encounter prior to clearing out the entire dungeon. Though a small dungeon, I'd designed it to be a little less linear than what my players and I have gotten used to. Fighting a giant which had just escaped its imprisonment took a painful toll on the party. The group, already well reduced from its peak of 24, was down to around 8. Though that was the most challenging encounter and they were victorious, they could not afford any more major combats. That lead to some creative handling of encounters. Having been slaughtered by a freeze-ray firing statue, upon re-entering the room two characters went down low and worked to topple the statue. Finding themselves in a room consisting of a broken walkway ten feet above the cavern floor, a floor covered by animated skeletons, the players found a way across without risking a fight with the skeletons. Though the gap was over 25 feet they used their iron spike to secure their rope in the cavern ceiling and swung across the gap Indiana Jones style. Its not how I thought that encounter would go but it was a nice surprise.

Having survived the Shrine of Pluto our heroes have at last reached 1st level. And these are probably the most hardened 1st level characters I've ever seen.




Note - At this point we'll be evaluating what's next for the group. We might go back to Call of Cthulhu but I've a hunch we'll continue DCC. Though the zero-level funnel adventure was fun I think the players are going to want to be able to play some more powerful characters. If that's the case we'll also be looking into how to add new folks in response to a few queries I've had. Though it'd be a pity to deprive those characters of the fun of a funnel adventure...

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Fiction Review: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

"Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."

- Voice in Shadow's Dream, American Gods by Neil Gaiman


I've been on a bit of a superhero kick over the past few weeks. While that's certainly one of the things I wanted this blog to be about, it seems an appropriate time to segue back towards fantasy. A good way to do that would seem to be with a writer who has made that very journey. Initially known as a comic book writer, most notably for his landmark Sandman series, published by DC Comics from 1989 to 1996. I'll likely cover that series at some point in this blog. Around the time of the death of Superman stories I had begun tiring of superhero comics - it was around that time I discovered Sandman. Though the series had already begun it was one of the first series which regularly collected its previous stories into paperback and hardcover volumes. The Sandman comic wasn't a superhero book but rather a fantasy one.

American Gods was published in June of 2001. One thing which amazes me is how long ago 2001 seems. Back then I was on my first cell phone, a monochrome Nokia with a pull-out antenna. No email.  We had high-speed internet at home but not everyone did - lots of people still had dial-up or no internet access.  I mention this because this is probably one of the last times when a novel set in modern times in a 1st world country doesn't need to explain why someone isn't always connected.


On to the story itself. I can usually give away a bit more plot without big spoilers but given a large part of this story is wheels within wheels within wheels I'm going to err on the side of caution. On the surface, American Gods is the story of Shadow, a man who begins the story near the end of a term in prison for armed robbery. He's the sort of guy that tends to just go along with things. He's a tough guy, not an idiot, but pretty content to go along with the plans of others. Not a really bad guy but far from a saint. In many ways he doesn't seem to stand out.

After his release his plans for resuming his life before incarceration almost immediately go awry. He falls into the employ of a man named Wednesday. Though man is perhaps not the right word, as we learn that Wednesday is a god. (And those familiar with mythology might well be able to piece together who he is - it's certainly not something Gaiman hides from the reader.) We learn that gods are dependent on belief and worship. As a result the old gods are not what they used to be. But there are new gods, gods of technology, money, the internet, pop culture, etc. And they do not seem to care for the old ones.

Wednesday takes Shadow with him as he tries to gather the old gods to his side. We see Wednesday is quite the con-artist in his fundraising preparations.

A large part of the novel has Shadow away from Wednesday, being held in reserve. He spends time working in a funeral parlor with some former gods of death and a subplot takes place in what appears to be a perfect midwestern American town.


Much more would give away too much. But let's talk about what the book feels like. America often gets discarded with its lack of "history" compared with Europe. American Gods takes that idea head-on. It features Native American deities who would disagree with America's lack of history. Moreover, we see it as a place where people from all over the world take their cultures to and in turn are shaped by the American culture. Similarly gods from all over the world, from India to Scandinavia to China find their way to America. America is a place where people and gods can be reborn and find new identities.

We also find mystic and holy places in America. They are not the shrines one might find in Greece. Rather they are tourist stops like the House on the Rock and Rock City.

One of the themes I find in this novel is the need for Shadow to start taking actions, to make choices. He needs to break away from his "just going along" personality and become his own person.


A common theme I find in Gaiman's work is the idea that just under the surface of what appears to be the normal world is a fantastic one. You can wind up drinking coffee with Odin. Anubis can find a place for himself in the United States. There are sacred spots in America.


These are concepts which could work well in some urban fantasy roleplaying games, with players taking on roles ranging from near-forgotten gods to their mortal agents. I've seen games like Nobilis touch on themes like this. Though at first glance this doesn't seem to lend itself well to "old-school" play I can see ways where it might be done - giving the players a chance to determine what gods they serve, how they best serve them, how they react to their opposition, and what goals they pursue. It's not a "dungeon-crawl" sandbox but that's not the only type of open campaign. And of course in more "modern" games it is easy to see players taking on the role of these gods.

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Personal Note

Been a little lax in posting this week. It's been a rough week. My wife, who has been a partially employed teacher (some long-term sub positions but nothing permanent) for two the past two years received an offer only to have it rescinded.

This is a brutal, brutal economy for people in the public sector.

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