It's been too long since last we played...definitely need to get a new session in soon. But every time we try something comes up! And with the heroes stranded in the wilderness of a distant world, just as its alien slave population rises in rebellion. And what on Rigelian are all those Jedi doing out in the woods? There aren't supposed to be ANY Jedi out there (save the PC of course).

And is Darth Tempos realy really dead?

And will E'Tan manage to get another dark side point?

Yeah, definitely need to play again!

I'm not saying that the PS3 is necessarily BETTER than, say the XBox 360, but it's the only console I own so...although it actually IS better you know...but that's sort of beside the point. The point of this post is that I haven't played a PC game in ages, not since my MoM post I think (which was many moons ago - aka 'ages').

The only computer-related stuff I've engaged in recently has been on my mobile (not  relevant here) and on the PS3. Been doing a bit of The Force Unleashed and Lego Star Wars, the Complete Saga. But more than anything I've been playing Ratchet & Clank! Not sure what appeals so - this is quite unlike the stuff I usually play, which is RPGs and strategy. But Ratchet & Clank is just...great fun. I can't pin it down more accurately than that.

It all started with this game; Quest for Booty. It's the second in a trilogy. I got it for free after Sony got hacked earlier this year, and for wont of anything better to do I started playing it. It's not really a full game. Very short. But packed with fun.

I already owned the last game in the trilogy, A Crack in Time. Got it along with the console last summer. Played it a little, but it never caught on. So it sat on my shelf for a while, until I got Quest. But once I was done with Quest I felt a need to play the first game...first...so Crack has to wait a tab bit longer.

So I trawled through some game stores and finally found the first game, Tools of Destruction. It was used and I got it for next to nothing. Now I've played through it and is ready to go back and finish A Crack in Time. Good times!

Someday, when I'm done with Ratchet and Clank, I might play some real games again :-)

Computer games used to be sooo much better than they are today...well, not really :-)

There are still good games being made, games that have sound and graphics and whatnot that are lightyears beyond what you had ten or fifteen years ago.

Old games can't compete with that. But they can compete when it come to gameplay, at least some of them can. Two types come to mind; simple, but addictive strategy games...and roleplaying games where dialogue and story is the focus, not combat or graphics. The former category includes things like Master of Orion 1 + 2 and Master of Magic. Not very complicated games, but you just can't stop hitting that 'Next Turn' button! And things like Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate might not be much to look at, but the gameplay is way beyond much of what is made within that genre today.

Anyway; the best place to get these old classics is GoG.com - literally filled to the edge with Good Old Games ;-) GoG will charge you a few pennies for the games, but there are some advantages - they generally include ALL expansions, patches etc. for their games, and they are optimized to run on modern-day Windows OS.

You can find many of the same games floating out there in pirated versions - on 'abandonware' sites like Abandonia.com. But why spend time hunting down a torrent, searching for patches, and trying to get it to work on your 64-bit Win 7 if all you are going to save is 5-10 USD? So not worth it. Granted there are many games which will run using DOSBox (a brilliant piece of software!), but others will not. Especially those pesky WIN95 games! Win 3.1 is often better...since many games of that era came packaged with a separate DOS version :-) But still so not worth it!

So go GoG and enjoy loads of fun titles!

I'm pretty much done with MoM for now. It was quite fun for a few hours, but although ever game is different it is also largely the same. Explore, expand, exterminate. Repeat.

Anyway, I found an active MoM forum here: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=56

Also found a fan-made patch for the game - it actually does fix a number of crash issues, plus a number of in-game features: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4211

It made the AI harder to beat and also seemed to make neutral cities and marauding monsters actually mean something. Still, it's a fairly simple game, so once you've found a working strategy just stick to it and you'll win.

Look what I found!

An old classic from 1994...Master of Magic, turn-based strategy game in the Civ family. I had completely forgotten about this game...and how addictive simple turn-based strategy games can be.

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/master_of_magic

It can be yours for $5.99...that's almost nothing. And since GoG.com accepts PayPal you can be playing the game in about 2 minutes - that's how long downloading and installation is going to take you.

I'm currently playing as Moerdred the Death Mage, directing legions of Draconians out of my capital of Kal-Shaitar.

Great fun!

Tonight is Star Wars:  Clone Wars RPG night!

What will E'tan and E Leet screw up today?

Looking forward to it :)

Update to follow...

...every summer I boot up Master of Orion 2 for a few hours of fun!

Now you too can revisit this excellent strategy game too; available for download with the original MoO for next to nothing, ready to go on any Windows OS. The provider is Good Old Games - gog.com - a veritable treasure trove for those of us that like older games.

Actually I run the game from my original game files using DOSBox, my favorite DOS emulator. Perfect for use with your old games that you thought you'd never play again. Or maybe some games downloaded from Abandonia.com

Yeah, yeah. I'm just being nostalgic here, but honestly, some of those old games also provide some excellent gameplay.

I actually got around to watching the Mutant Chronicles movie the other day. It's been sitting on my self for a couple of weeks after I found it in a bargain bin (NOK 49). Expectations were not very great. This looked very much like a B-movie. But hey, it's a couple of hours of sci-fi and at a very low cost. I also know the Mutant Chronicles setting fairly well, although it's been quite a few years since last we met...

Overall I was rather pleasantly surprised. Sure, it was a B-movie. Big time. But I was never bored - at times I was well entertained. The special effects were decent and the action sequences not too bad. And although acting isn't high on the list of the film's strengths the band of unlikely heroes contained a rather interesting mix of characters (which any role-player would appreciate - I liked the Steiner fellow in particular).

Hot Asian Chick - she gets cut in two unfortunately

The story was pretty basic - Evil Machine lands on Earth 10.000 years ago sending forth mutant minions to destroy humanity. Heroic human tribes fight back and seal away Machine. Stupid humans forget about machine and wakes it up, letting monsters loose. End of the world imminent. Ancient religious order the has preserved lore about the Machine steps forth to gather unlikely heroes to make suicide raid to destroy machine and save humanity. Lots of quasi-religious stuff included. Faith and hope - that sort of thing. Not terribly good, but not incredibly bad either.

The films strongest point was atmosphere. It managed to convey a dark and gritty future pretty well. I think they overdid the steam-punk aspect a bit, but that's just me. I don't like steam-punk too much to begin with. But overall they had stayed consistent to a very bleak Sky Captain of Tomorrow/Steampunk imagery.

Where the movie didn't do so well was in the plot department. The basic story was basic and unimaginative, but the actual plot was so full of holes you could drive a car through them. My 'favorite' was near the end when the hero found his old army buddy who had been captured by the mutants six weeks before during their initial breakout...found him being dragged away by his captors to meet his mutating doom inside the Machine...presumably the muties had been dragging the mortally injured man around for six weeks. Rather inefficient...seeing as how they managed to overrun the entire world  - on foot  - during the course of those six weeks, including dragging back hordes of people to the Machine as to make new muties. But hey, maybe the one dragging 'old army bud' had gotten lost in the tunnels? That was daft enough to (almost) ruin the film for me (and it was a completely unnecessary scene too!).

Oh, and there is one more thing. The director took one look at the setting material, wiped his ass with it and then CAME UP WITH SOMETHING HARDLY RELATED TO MUTANT CHRONICLES AT ALL! That was something of a disappointment. It was like watching a 40K movie and have the God-Emperor alive and well and Chaos reduced to just some raving mutants. I suddenly understood why companies like GW protect their IP so vigorously...

In conclusion: If you know nothing about Mutant Chronicles to begin with and have a love of sci-fi/light action and can borrow the film from some one I'd recommend it.  Otherwise I won't recommend it - but I won't warn you NOT to see it. It wasn't all that bad and it's not like you get a lot of movies in that genre.

We did another session of Star Wars the other day. It was great fun. The sensible Cerean E Leet did his best to follow the master's wishes while the impetuous E'tan did all he could to screw up things. Like bringing Clone Troopers to what was to be a peaceful mission. Jumping out of an airspeeder, Anakin style, to attack a pursuing starfighter (good thing he had some Force Points to spend). Charging this Sith warrior, against the direct order of his master, only to botch the attack...go on to be hit twice for lots of damage...try throwing a grenade at her...only to have it returned by a little force push.  Time to run away!

So lookingforward to the continuation...

Please ignore

I'm pretty old-fashioned when it comes to the games I like to play. I do a lot of Birthright, which was published by TSR in the later part of the 90s. I do Warhammer 40K - admittedly Dark Heresy is fairly new, but the setting and the system are both old as hell (meaning I got into them in the early 90s). But it's not like I still play all the games I tried 'back then'. They simply have not stood the test of time.

The hard sci-fi setting 2300AD 'Man's Battle for the Stars' is one game that has - sort of - passed that test. Here is a brief summary in the words of the all-knowing wikipedia:

2300 AD is a hard science fiction role-playing game created by Game Designers Workshop, originally offered as an alternative to the space opera portrayed by the company's leading science fiction role-playing game, Traveller. In fact it was originally titled Traveller: 2300, but this caused confusion as the game used neither the rules system nor the setting of the original Traveller. The game was therefore renamed in its 2nd edition.

Original (revised) 2300AD boxed set

It's an excellent setting that doesn't take too many liberties with physics (no artificial gravity for example), except in the department of translight travel of course. System wasn't too shabby either, except that the combat hart had a few flaws (but those were easily ironed out). What I really liked about it was that it took our own world and history and moved it 300 years into the future, a future that actually seemed plausible (I have some issues with parts of it, but mostly minor issues).

The game, along with GDW, was discontinued many years ago, and the game languished in silence. Hard-core fans kept going, but there was no new material. In 2007 a new edition of the game was released - 2320AD. It's not a reboot of the franchise, because it stays largely true to the old game's background history, technological outlook and so on. It does, however, move the story 20 years forward (no shocker given the game's title) and switches to a D20 system.

The new 2320AD ebook contains 'everything needed to play'.

I'm not sure if I feel that the switch to this D20 system is a good thing. Especially since it's based on the Traveller T20 system , requiring you to buy another game to use 2320AD! And for all it's fortes (I'm a big D20 fan myself) the T20 system isn't even remotely 'hard', but decidedly cinematic and heroic. I do not feel that this is right for a game setting that prides itself on being hard sci-fi.

Traveler T20 - not exactly hard sci-fi!

The thing I didn't like about 2300AD was the lack of action and excitement. I guess that was partially due to my immaturity back then - the 2300AD setting and accessories were probably too much sandbox for me. I had trouble turning this wonderful setting into good adventures. But that isn't the entire story - several of the adventures and accessories were completely devoid of anything remotely resembling action. It was so 'hard' that there wasn't any room for 'adventure'.

Luckily there was another major hard space setting for me to play with - the Alien franchise. Leading Edge Games  (now defunct, but they made several good games back then) developed an Aliens RPG - the Aliens Adventure Game - which was pretty nice. Based on their completely unwieldy Phoenix Command system the Aliens RPG used a much-simplified version of the same system that was actually quite good at combing in 'hard', 'action' and 'adventure'. I actually found my copy during my basement clean-up this spring. Brought mack good memories.

Aliens Adventure Game - Good times!

Developed after Aliens, but before Alien 3, the game went into considerable detail regarding the Colonial Marines, the Aliens, and the worlds occupies by humanity. Much of it completely contrary to what was later revealed to be canon...but some of it was still useable. Since Alien 3 was a crap movie we largely ignored it, but paid rather more attention to the Colonial Marines Tchnical Manual.  It really made sense of the stuff you see in the Aliens universe. Makes it kind of 'hard'. Besides the equipment, organization, and background share striking similarities with that of the 2300AD RPG. So lo and behold, in 1996 it all came together - a mesh of Aliens and 2300AD. Now THERE was finally a setting that made hard sci-fi exiting!

Colonial Marines Technical Manual - Best supplement I ever bought.

It's been a while though. 10+ years. And over the course of those years to world and gaming both moved on. So tht when 2320AD was fianlly released in 2007 it felt very aged. Like a tribute to something old and forgotten, but not a game that I'd like to play. The new T20 system and some of the 20 years that had passes had jazzed it up a bit, making it more adventuresome...but not enough. Not enough for a 2320AD meets Aliens kind of thing.

Yet there is one game that I feel has taken the legacy of hard sci-fi and ported it over to our own time and the memes now prevalent - the Transhuman Space setting by SJG.To me its what 2300AD would be like if it was designed now, rather than back in the 80s. There are other games - and novels - that also adds to the genre, but Transhuman Space is to me by far the most significant.

Transhuman Space - Man's Battle for his Humanity

Which brings me around to my real point. 2300AD was a great setting, but it had it's limitations even back then, and now it feels old and irrelevant. Time to re-imagine the series...which is all the rage these days anyway. Do they come up with anything that's not a remake, re-imagining, follow-up, etc.?

So that's my newest project - re-imagining 2300AD. Well, it's not that new really, it's been on the back-burner for 2-3 years (and will likely stay there for quite some time). That re-imagining will take the good stuff from 2300AD, Aliens, 2320AD, and Transhuman space - something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The end result will be fabulous :-P

...I've had the misfortune of watching a few games now...and when Brazil vs. North Korea was one of the more entertaining ones...France and England in particular has disappointed me (I'm sure there are worse teams out there, but I'll limit my critique to things I've alcutally watched). How is is possible for a country like England to have something like Premier League and then manage THIS!?

Ilary Blasi...married to some Italian footballer...who cares?

Making interesting NPCs is one of the most rewarding, yet difficult jobs the DM has. IMO the biggest difference between a good and bad campaign is in the characters that populate it – fail to produce and properly play good NPCs and no amount of skill in other departments will help make your sessions into successes. Stand-alone adventure are perhaps less reliant on good NPCs, but only to a certain degree.

I'm sure there are lots of different ways to make good NPCs. I use several techniques myself, but there are always a couple of ground rules that I use.

The first is that the character needs to be different and instantly recognizable, has to project some sort of image, bordering on caricature. Why? Because most NPCs only get to shine very briefly – they don't even get fifteen minutes. If you want your players to take them seriously, even remember them for years afterward, you only got one good shot at making them stick. So I always try to make up such an unique 'image' for all my NPCs. Or at least the major ones – I tend to cheat with lesser characters, reusing older characters with only a slight twist or using NPCs from other games anew (but please don't tell).

The second is visualization. A picture is worth a lot of words and all that. It's true. So I usually try to find a fitting picture for the character on the net (there is a lot out there these days, so I'm usually only limited by the time I have available for searching). But visualization doesn't need to be just a picture – internal visualization is just as effective. Describe a character so that the players will immediately associate it with some well-known movie or other character.

The third one is; lay down a foundation, but don't build the entire house in one day. You need to develop at last a rudimentary background, personality and motivation to properly play a character, but you should not fill in all the holes. Firstly it's a waste of time if the NPC doesn't feature much after all (he might be ignored or killed or whatever – and you don't want to 'force' an NPC on the players in an unnatural fashion). Secondly you cannot predict how the character evolves once you start playing him. Once he starts 'living' in the game world things will come naturally to you. One final thing – it's OK to change stuff once you've started playing, as long as you don't do it in obvious ways! Maybe his motivations turned out not to fit – just change them, except if that would interfere with how you've played him so far or what the PCs know.

There are more rules, but they are more like guidelines anyway, so we can take them later...

Instead I'll do a few example from my Dark Heresy game. WH 40K lends itself well to ripping off stuff and caricature. So I decided to play with that a little. Take Ignace the gunslinger for example. He's based on the main character of the movie 'Equilibrium', which contains a lot of neat close-up pistol work, tweaked by giving him a some psychic powers thematically tied to the Equilibrium imagery (he can twist time and space for some really amazing gun and movement stunts).

Two guns, just like Ignace

For imagery I went with a 'bald Asian guy with Asian ninja chick girlfriend' and then added a mutation on top that makes his hair come out, only his 'hair' is actually more like razor-sharp porcupine needles. Should not be too hard to visualize.

I'm Asian too!

For background I went with 'fell in love with Asian ninja chick, ran away from evil ninja clan, and kept running until recruited into the Inquisition' – a type of background which is actually possible to create using my EXCELLENT new character path system for Dark Heresy :-P Once again easy to communicate to players and one that will be remembered – even if it's really bollocks!

We want out hot ninja chick back! No one does f1tish stiletto boots like her!

His personality was initially based upon a combination of cocky Han Solo and a grim Eastwood from some nameless spaghetti, but as it turned out he ended up rather more the former and less the later.

Don't Get Cocky, Chaos Scum!

This might sound a little cartoonish – but it actually works pretty well in play. And he does of course have his daemons to add to his personality...all my NPC have, but that's another story folks!

…it’s been too long since my last post, but life has been hectic. Over at Ruins of Empire we’ve just concluded a major public adventure, which ended with victory over the nasty olde vampire – hooray hooray hooray! Add to that some Dark Heresy blog activity – and another session of Star Wars Clone Wars RPG. Plus RL stuff too boring to mention…

Which brings me around to the theme for this post. It’s about choosing a game system that fits the setting. As opposed to the other way around. IMO there is a big difference there. It will take a while for me to get to the point, but please bear with me…

I started playing Star Wars back when West End’s D6 line first started coming out. For the time it was a very good system that had the advantage of being easy to learn and play. Take a bunch of D6s, roll them and add everything together. The higher the better. End of story. It scaled wonderfully – the more bad-ass you were, the more dice you got to roll. And you could do multiple stuff simply by rolling fewer dice for each action. There were a couple of weak areas, but nothing that couldn’t be tweaked. Except one thing. The bean-counting.  4D6+2. 5D6+1. 7D6. Again and again and again. It gets really tedious really quickly. In conclusion it was an easy and playable system that suited the setting very well. But all those dice…goodbye West End Games!

Next was the WotC D20 version. I never played the original edition; I only got into it after the Revised edition came out. It’s basically the D20 system from DnD with a few tweaks, such as a Wound Point system (like the one found in Unearthed Arcana) and stuff for using the Force, piloting starships etc. I found the system to my liking, although there were some weak spots – the Force was badly done I think, using hit points to fuel you attempts at using it. Made it completely unplayable IMO. Other stuff like vehicles and starship I also think was sub-par. We had a short campaign back when the Revised edition came out, but it eventually fizzled into nothing. All in all was a good system that fit the setting well – a relatively non-heroic campaign set in the Rise of the Empire/Rebellion era.

Then last year my interest in Star Wars rose again as I started watching The Clone Wars animated series and felt a need to cut droids in two…and I also ended up re-playing Knight of the Old Republic and so had an equal need to battle the Sith. By now there was a new edition the Sage Edition – but I didn’t have any of the books and I didn’t know the system, so we started playing with Revised. But years had passed since last time we played and I found the mechanics in Revised really didn’t allow for the swift and heroicaction I wanted – like the one seen in the series.

So we decided to have a go at the Saga Edition instead. Turned out it was more or less what we were looking for. Far simpler and more streamlined. Another take on the Force. Overall much more suited to our style of play. It was also fun to see how Saga edition foreshadowed several developments found in DnD 4E (SW Saga came out between v.3.5 and 4E). But some of the good 4E stuff (yes, it actually exists) wasn’t in there. Which gave me an idea – I’ve never like 4E, not primarily because it’s not neat and logical (just look at the 4E level progression table…let’s see, I get to swap a power…a utility power, oh great now I have to look through that dammed power list…4E is not neat, end of discussion!), but because it is a development in the wrong direction as with regards to the type of games I want to play.

So I had this idea…what if I took Revised edition and Saga edition and elements from DnD 4E and meshed it all together? Mix and match of the best elements? Power cards for Force Powers seemed a good idea…30 levels seemed swell…the Tiers turned into Jedi Apprentice, Jedi Knight and Jedi Master…lots of cool stuff. And you know what? This DnD 4E turned Star Wars hybrid was exactly what I was looking for. It allows us to play fast and furious action with a minimum of fuss, exactly what I was looking for.

Which is my conclusion – if you are to enjoy a game and its setting, then the system used MUST support the kind of stories you want to tell. Star Wars Clone Wars and its heroic lightsaber-wielding Jedi fighting hordes of minions and battling vile Sith champions…it’s quite a different setting that the dark and dismal future of Dark heresy…or the bleak mortality and political backstabbing of Birthright. So from now on I’ll pay more attention to the systems I use than I have in the past.

And I’d like to thank you Lucasfilm, for making something useful come of out of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition!

FIFA World Cup...doesn't belong here you say? I wholeheartedly agree. Although football is a sort of game, it's not one that lends itself well to PbP or PnP play styles. Ergo doesn't belong here. That said I did my time on the football field when I was a kid - was never any good...at least not initially...and when I did start to bloom my gaming and drinking hobbies caught up with me. As an adult I played a little football with my military colleagues, until one of them broke my noes with his elbow back in 2006. That was the last time I touched a football in anger. After that I rolled a little ball with my son, only he IS pretty good, so that at age 9 he's really catching up with his old man. So I better stop with I'm ahead! Hmm, played a bit of football manager games on the Amiga - maybe I should get into that again? Nah, too little time.

At any rate - I'll undoubtedly watch a few games...watching Kongsvinger - Moss itwo ubscure 'Elite' teams from Norway) is not my thing, but I can actually enjoy a game at the World Cup level.

England's Peter Crouch lounging in the sun