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.

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...

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

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!

Earlier this week I finally had the opportunity to sit down and do some PnP roleplaying. That doesn't happen often enough. At any rate it's an old game that I started last year, but we haven't played that many sessions. I think only six so far, and two of those were pretty short and the first one we spent mostly making characters.

For once it's not grim and dark or fantasy. It's Star Wars. Clone Wars. Influenced rather more by the animated series than the (crapcrapcrap) prequels. We started playing using the Revised d20 rules. I think they are pretty good. Very DnD v.3.5. A few tweaks though, but largely the same.

We considering a switch to the Saga edition instead. Saga is something of a cross between DnD v.3.5 and DnD 4E. You can see some of the features from 4E in there, but not all. The result is a much simpler game than the Revised edition, which is mostly a good thing since we want to focus on story and action for our brave Jedi rather than bean counting. So we are presently considering making a transition to this edition. Probably will, but with some tweaks.

The two PCs are Jedi Apprentices. The human Jedi Guardian E'tan is to young, too brash and too quick to fight. His companion is the much more stable Cerean Jedi Guadian E Leet. Together with their Master, her Padawan and two other apprentices they adventure across the galaxy and get into trouble - usually involving Separatists. I'll write more about them later - the point of this post is to attach the first scenario we played: Mission to Arcuuna.

Who doesn't love Battletech and MechWarrior? I certainly do. Never did play much of the tabletop mini game, but I certainly did my fair share DMing MechWarrior back in the day. I also played a couple of MechWarrior games for the PC, and found them entertaining enough.

Last summer (2009 thay is) I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was to be a MechWarrior computer game reboot. If you have a look at some of the footage released you'll understand why (there was a couple of neat live clips involving a Warhammer and an Atlas, but I can't seem to find them anymore). At any rate there was some legal trouble and when I had a look again today there wasn't really a lot to new stuff to be learned. Maybe it died before it was born...

At about the same time there was an announcement that the aging MechWarrior 4 would be released for free download. It never happened either. But you can find plenty of torrents out there, so no worries. The reason I mention this is because I actually ended up playing it, finding that it had an active modding community that had put out several expansions. And even after I got tired of it my then-eight-year-old son continued playing. Customizing mechs and then blowing up stuff - what kid can resist that? So now I can check off MechWarrior on my list of things-a-father-should-teach-his-son :-P

Yesterday I cleaned out a room in the basement. Part of that included going through some old boxes that haven't been opened in YEARS. It turned out the be a veritable dragon's hoard. Old game stuff forgotten for a decade or more. I'm sure that some of them will feature here eventually. But first things first - literally.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain was the very first 'roleplaying-game' I ever played. In the mid-80s or so. It was in Norwegian, but the cover and the contents were the same (only it didn't say '25th Anniversary Edition' - obviously). Me and my brother must have played through it a gazillion times (we also had The Citadel of Chaos and the Forest of Doom). Me, I even tried to draw a map out of it, going down ever possible route to learn ALL the secrets of Firetop Mountain (already you can see why I became a DM).

But that's not all folks! I also found a 3rd party DnD 3E adventure based upon the Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I'm so going to find some old-time Fighting Fantasy Fans and actually play the game. Using the Pathfinder RPG (more about that later). And here I had completely forgotten about you...welcome back Warlock!

Adeptus Astartes. Space Marines. Angels of Death. They have many names, but you know you've always wanted to play one (if you're into role-playing that is). Now Fantasy Flight Games is putting out the Deathwatch RPG that enables you to play as a Space Marine using the same rules (more or less) as Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader (which could be a good or bad thing depending on your relationship with said system).

I'll certainly pick up a copy. Always loved those Marines. Not sure I think the Deathwatch makes a lot of sense though. If you didn't know the DW is a group of Marines under Inquisition command and control, hailing from a variety of Chapters out there. It's not hard to understand why GW made up the Deathwatch in the first place - to let gamers field their favorite Marines from several different Chapters within the same squad-sized units. Makes sense from a wargaming/painting point of view, but I have a hard time making it fit within the rest of the 40K universe. So I've done a little retconing in my games - the Deathwatch is just a term for any Marine unit attached to the Inquisition (any part, not just the Ordo Xenos) as auxiliaries.

At any rate; to celebrate this occasion, let us join in prayer (and you can substitute anything you don't like for 'Xenos'):

To be Unclean
That is the Mark of the Xenos
To be Impure
That is the Mark of the Xenos
To be abhorred
That is the Mark of the Xenos
To be Reviled
That is the Mark of the Xenos
To be Hunted
That is the Mark of the Xenos
To be Purged
That is the fate of the Xenos
To be Cleansed
For that is the fate of all Xenos