Awhile back, I mentioned my involvement in a project called “Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero”. It’s an illustrated paperback anthology of cyberpunk-styled stories, combined with an audio soundtrack for each story. It’s an ambitious project, featuring a lot of extremely talented writers and musicians. Some you’ve probably heard of – Ed Greenwood, perhaps. Or Keith Baker. Or Robert Randisi. Or Ari Marmell. And a slew of others.

I’m happy to say that “Foreshadows” is no longer something that’s a hypothetical. It’s rather real, and in my admittedly biased opinion, quite impressive. Jeff LaSala, John LaSala, and a slew of other fine individuals involved with the Very Us Artists did an outstanding job of turning a very cool idea into a very cool reality. “Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero” is the kind of project that one can call completed, and is available for purchase in either physical dead tree format or virtual format.

Or, put another way:

For buying the print version, click here: http://www.veryusartists.com/store/?category_id=86

For buying the iPad/Nook/Kindle version, click here: http://www.baenebooks.com/p-1612-foreshadows-the-ghosts-of-zero.aspx

If you’re a fan of some of the authors mentioned above, or just a sci-fi/cyberpunk fan, I highly recommend picking up this collection. Give it a chance, you won’t regret it.

Apologies for not updating this blog of late.

Life has this funny way of getting in the way of blogs sometimes.

Also, truth be told … this blog was originally intended to be my own personal little soapbox on gaming, and writing. And I haven’t really had much to report lately about either topic, for the last few months … at least nothing that I’ve felt is worth blogging about.

In terms of writing, I don’t really have anything going on at the moment. The companies and publishers who I’ve worked with in the past haven’t particularly wanted or needed my services for awhile, and my efforts to work for new companies and publishers haven’t panned out. I wrote a lot of words over the past two years or so – some games, some stories, some novels – and I’ve received a significant number of rejection notices over the past couple of months for nearly all of them. I’ve never really been one to let a single rejection get me down … but when a lot of different editors all start telling you essentially the same thing, and it’s nothing that can really be “fixed” … well, it’s probably a sign of something. A sign of what, I’m not exactly sure. But it’s a sign.

The editorial beatdown’s been a bit humbling, and – for the moment – has left me rather uninspired. As such, I’m not really writing anything right now. The few projects I’ve been tinkering with have been put away, stored on their metaphorical shelves for safekeeping. I’m certainly not “finished” with writing, but I do think I’m taking a break from it. Whether it’s a short break or a long one, I’m not sure yet.

So on the writing front … I don’t have all that much to say.

On the gaming front, things are incredibly good, but I don’t have anything particularly new or – in my opinion – interesting to offer. I’m currently playing in a D&D 4E campaign that I’m enjoying immensely, and I’ve starting running a Gamma World 4E campaign that’s working out nicely so far. I like parts of the 4E game engine, I don’t like other parts of it … and I’ve already discussed both sides of that coin ad nauseaum. I’ve realized that I happen to like older, simpler gaming systems, but I doubt very much I’ll be running those sorts of games anytime soon. And I don’t feel like endlessly rehashing the “old games vs. new games” argument in these posts.

So, much like with the writing … not much to say right now.

So if you don’t see any updates for awhile, don’t worry. I haven’t gone anywhere.

When I have something worth discussing again, I’ll be back here, with some new posts.

Until then, I hope your own muse treats you well, and wish you the best of luck in all your creative endeavors.

PART TWO: Cake Frosting’s Awesome, But It’s Better With Cake

So, in the past year or so, I’ve gotten involved with three gaming campaigns – I’m a player in a D&D 4E game, and I’m also in an Exalted game … and most recently, I’ve started running a Gamma World 4E game as well. And all three, to be honest, are great. I enjoy playing in them immensely … in no small part because the combat in both games can be spectacular. In the Exalted game, I play a character who’s a cross between Bruce Lee and Sherlock Holmes, and the wuxia-styled fights he’s been in have been fucking epic. In the D&D 4E game, I’m playing a minotaur barbarian who races around the battlefield like a madman, slamming opponents into each other, taking out multiple opponents with a single swing of his axe … again, epic. And the Gamma World combats have been lots of fun as well.

I’ve been pretty vocal about how my main issue with the older game systems I’ve played (like 1st edition AD&D) is that the combat’s limited. As mentioned before, for most melee combatants, the fight boils down to “I hit it with my sword” – no chandelier moments, unless you start houseruling things. This certainly isn’t the case with D&D 4E, or Gamma World 4E – there’s plenty of options, and plenty of exciting ways of doing things. And as for Exalted … not only can characters swing from the chandeliers, it’s expected – and not only is it expected, it’s also expected that your character’s going to rip the chandelier from the ceiling, bludgeon one opponent with it, then start throwing the crystal shards hanging from what’s left of it around like darts …

So, combat for these more modern games … I like their complexity. I like the options.

Sort of.

(You knew there was going to be a catch, right?)

So, you hate the blahness of “I hit it with my sword”. That’s not an issue in the games you’ve just mentioned … so what’s the problem?

Well … this might not affect every gamer out there, but as I’ve gotten older, my available time for gaming has diminished appreciably. I look back at the games I played in high school and college – there were times I gamed two, maybe three times a week! – and I shake my head and smile. Especially because much of that gaming turned into all-night gaming marathons, where we’d start rolling dice at sunset and keep going until sunrise the next day. At this point in my life, for the majority of my gaming friends and myself, between work, family obligations, and that annoying contrivance known as ‘real life’ … squeezing in just about any time for gaming can often be a challenge. I’m kind of proud of the fact that I can usually squeeze in one game a month, on rare occasions two. And those games tend to be just a few hours – a session’s maybe 5-6 hours if it’s on a weekend, and 3-4 if it’s after work.

Why does this matter?

Well … as the DM of my D&D 4E campaign wrote about in his blog, combat in 4E – and in Exalted – take a lot of time. It’s a natural enough consequence, I suppose – when you have lots of options, and the ability to do lots of really cool things that affect both friends and foes on the battlefield, that takes time. Figuring out what powers to use, how they can be used in conjunction with other characters’ powers, the effects of those powers in terms of movement and conditions … I don’t think any single action takes a particularly long time, but when there’s combat taking place in an interesting environment, against a lot of opponents … it adds up. A lot.

I kept track of the time spent on combat the last time I ran Gamma World – we played from roughly 2 PM to 8 PM, with an hour for pizza, and an hour for just general kibitzing … similar, I’d imagine, to a lot of gaming groups. So, four hours of ‘serious’ gaming.

Of the two combat encounters we had … one was an hour and a half. The other was an hour and forty-five minutes. Three and a quarter hours, simply for fights … and forty-five minutes left for ‘everything else’. And this is with an experienced gaming group, where there’s a minimum of flipping through rulebooks, and where most people have a pretty good grasp of the rules.

I’ve found that the same applies to my D&D 4E game – love running my minotaur barbarian, but the majority of most game sessions is pure combat. And in my Exalted game … we play after work, between 7 and 11. Again, once you factor out the pizza and the fine art of bullshitting between good friends, combat eats up most of the night.

So what’s wrong with this?

If you like combat-centric games, then, well, nothing. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you have tons of time for gaming, then, well, nothing. If I could play the way I used to – until sunrise, without worrying about inconveniences like a job – I don’t think I’d mind so much. But with gaming time at a premium – it matters.

For myself – and for a bunch of the folks who I game with – combat should be a part of the game. It shouldn’t be the game. And in many ways, that’s what these various campaigns feel like – combat, with a sprinkling of ‘other stuff’ tossed in there. Yes, it’s possible to have a combat-free session of Gamma World, or Exalted – and maybe there will be one, at one of these sessions – but it doesn’t seem possible to have a short combat session. Once it starts, you’re really in for the long haul.

It’s partly my gaming philosophy, for lack of a better term. When I first ran games, back in my misspent youth, the games focused mostly on exploring and investigation. And there were plenty of opportunities for pure roleplaying during that time as well. The exploring, the roleplaying, the investigation … stories would develop from all these interactions, and somewhere in there, there would be some combat, to resolve an issue, or as a means of furthering what the characters wanted to do, or where they wanted to go. The combat punctuated what was happening. It was the cherry on top of the sundae, or the frosting on the cake.

And when handled like that, I always felt the combat meant more to the players. Yes, sometimes they were just fighting a random goblin tribe … but sometimes, they were fighting the evil overlord, who they’d learned about from talking to a baroness, or a merchant, or a sage … and sometimes, they’d even talked with the evil overlord, without knowing his dastardly plans. And so, when they finally met up with the overlord, with swords drawn … there was context to the fight. It meant something, and it often meant something pretty cool.

Can you still do that in D&D 4E? Absolutely.

But you’ve got less time to do it. Much less. With so much time spent on the combat, there’s far, far less time for the exploring, the investigation, and the roleplaying … and to my way of thinking, it’s not as much fun. You’ve got the tastiest part of the cake – the frosting – but not much cake. And in my opinion, the frosting’s just not as good without the cake.

So … what to do?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’d love to find allowing the best elements of the types of games I like – one with fast-moving combat, allowing for more investigation/exploration time … but with options allowing a cinematic style of combat and the oft-mentioned ‘swing from the chandelier’ moments. Spirit of the Century is a game I’ve purchased but not yet played that I think will let me do that … but I have yet to put it to the test.

In the meantime, despite my reservations about D&D 4E, Gamma World 4E, and Exalted … I’m still enjoying those games a lot. And more importantly, I still enjoy playing those games with my friends.

Which, in the end, is a best reason to play any sort of game in the first place.

PART ONE: Swinging From the Chandeliers

In my early years of gaming, I never gave much thought at all to game design. For the most part, I simply followed the rules of the game as they were in the rulebook, or as they were explained to me by my fellow gamers at the table. And, for the most part, they worked. I don’t recall too many instances where I stopped to think “boy, it would be great if the rules explained how that worked …” or “what? The rules say WHAT??? Wow, that’s fucked up …”

Probably the first time I gave the matter serious consideration came when my gaming buddies and I were playing in my friend Eric’s epic “Paris” AD&D campaign. Set in a stylized, fantasy version of medieval France, the campaign had a distinctive “Three Musketeers” flavor to it … and our characters really went for the jugular when it came to heroic exploits. We weren’t just trying to do heroic things anymore, as we had in earlier campaigns – we were trying to do heroic things in dramatic style …

… which often didn’t fit the rules of 1st-edition AD&D.

There came an encounter one evening where our characters snuck into a gala ball. Our characters stood atop a balcony, overlooking the nobles dancing below … and the main villain stood among them. Naturally, he spotted us, and sent his minions up to dispatch us with swords. While some of our characters decided we would hold off the guards (I recall the straight, narrow staircase being ideal for a lightning bolt spell), my friend John decided that his character wanted to do the following:

“I want my fighter to leap from the balcony, swing from the chandelier, and drop in front of the villain … and attack him with my rapier.”

In other words, a multi-part action, using a game with rules that didn’t clearly define “actions” – we were well before later D&D conventions like minor or movement or standard actions here! – where finding applicable rules, was, well, a bitch. Jumping from a balcony, and successfully grabbing onto a chandelier? Swinging from said chandelier, and landing in front of the villain, without falling, or tripping, or dropping a weapon? And then attacking the villain?

The rules didn’t really cover anything like that. There wasn’t anything that we could really use to approximately it, either. As noted in my last post, combat in 1st-edition AD&D normally boiled down to “I hit it with my sword” for fighters. Doing something exciting and epic – something cinematic – meant a lot of creative houseruling, or cobbling together some strange things using the existing rules, or a combination of both. There certainly weren’t any clear guidelines on how to do things like swinging from chandeliers in combat.

After a bit of arguing (Eric started by saying what John wanted to do simply wasn’t possible, which we – i.e., the gamers at the table – didn’t like) and some compromising … we worked out a solution. I don’t remember the exact scenario, but I think it had something to do with the thief/acrobat tables from the original Unearthed Arcana, and then John needed to make some sort of saving throw to avoid falling damage, and roll under his Dexterity to hang onto the chandelier and land in the right spot … and he needed to roll a natural 20 on a d20 to hit the villain. All in all, it was four successive events, each with low odds of success, all in a row, to do what he wanted.

He did it. All of them. Including rolling the natural 20.

It was a pretty memorable moment – hell, a great one.

Which is why it stuck in my mind … and why I’ve often thought of that, when working on various campaigns and game designs in the passing years since then. Every time I read the rules for a new game, I think: Would this rules of this game allow a chandelier moment?

If the answer’s “no”, that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for playing the game. After all, my old gaming group worked through it quite nicely for 1st-edition AD&D, where the answer was obviously “no”. But … it did require a good group dynamic, with a very good DM, to put together a ruling that satisfied everyone at the table. Not every group has that dynamic, though – hey, I’ve sat at many of those tables! – and depending on the group, sometimes “let the DM houserule it” is a shitty way to resolve things like swinging from the chandeliers. Given an option, I’d rather have rules that explain things – or provide guidance for explaining things – that put things solely in a DM’s hands.

In recent years, I’ve been playing a variety of newer games – Exalted, D&D 3.5 & 4E, and Pathfinder – where the rules are far more detailed. And they certainly allow for chandelier moments – hell, the rules of Exalted outright encourage over-the-top, cinematic moments! There’s far fewer times in any of these more modern games when an attack boils down to “I hit it with my sword” – there’s usually some sort of feat, or power, or character option that allows that character to do something above and beyond simply trying to hit and roll damage. Maybe it’s letting a character interact with the environment. Or apply some sort of conditional affect to a friend, or a foe. And things tend to be more clearly defined in the modern games (such as delineating specific actions as free/minor/movement/standard), so even if a player wants to do something not obvious in the rules, there’s more solid guidance for figuring out how to do it.

So … does that mean if a game allows a chandelier moment, it’s better? Or, at least, more preferable?

To be honest – and to my surprise – in my opinion, as of right now, the answer’s no.

Or, to be more specific, the answer is “I want it to be yes … but I haven’t found the right game yet, where yes is the answer.”

Why?

Two words: Cake frosting.

… and that brings us to our cliffhanger.

I hope you’ll stay tuned for Part Two.

Most of my gaming in 2010 has revolved around D&D 4E. Which, to be honest, has been a pleasant surprise. I’ve enjoyed running it, I’ve enjoyed playing it, and I’ve embraced a lot of the elements in it that I didn’t think I’d particularly care for when the 4E rules first came out (healing surges; the distinct tabletop-tactical nature of the game, with its emphasis on positioning, all the character classes having “powers”, and so on). It’s a well-designed, fun game.

I don’t particularly like it better than D&D 3.5, or 1st/2nd Edition AD&D … it’s simply different. Just because I like chocolate ice cream, that doesn’t mean I automatically must hate raspberry swirl … just like liking 4E doesn’t mean I have to suddenly dislike every other version of D&D. They’re different flavors of the same basic thing – a game of swords & sorcery, with some common themes and terms and rules … and some days, I’m more interested in one particular flavor than another.

This past weekend, though, a few people from my regular D&D 4E group couldn’t make it to our gaming session. So, rather than cancel … the remaining folks at the table (myself included) decided to play a 1st-edition AD&D adventure. Rick Maffei – our esteemed DM – offered to run us through “Training Ground”, an adventure he’d written many moons ago that he’d gotten published in the pages of Dungeon Magazine. We gratefully took him up on the offer, and yesterday afternoon we found ourselves assembled and rolling up some characters for the adventure.

Part of the day – for me, anyway – was sweet nostalgic fun. I loved being able to flip through the pages of my old 1st-edition AD&D Players’ Handbook again … it’s the same one I’ve owned for twenty-five years now, and it’s fun to still be getting use out of it. And it’s fun to dip back into a game I used to play on a weekly basis, if not more, and still remember all the little ins and outs of the game. I rolled up a magic-user (not a wizard, dammit, a bloody magic-user) and had entirely too much fun picking spells … and remembering what all the spells did, including the ranges, the effects, and so on. For me, 1st-edition AD&D is kind of like riding a bike … it doesn’t matter how much time passes between games, picking it up again is easy. Compare that to the rules struggles I still have occasionally with the newer editions of the game (wait, does doing that draw an opportunity attack, or not?) and it’s easy to see why I have an admittedly biased soft spot for 1st-edition AD&D.

The adventure itself was a lot of fun. “Training Ground” is a clever dungeon, laden with traps and puzzles … it definitely owes a tip of the cap to the older Gygax philosophy of dungeon design. As we played it, though, I found myself thinking wow, there’s no way you could replicate this in 4E. Once this thought struck me, I made a few little notes as the adventure moved along, comparing the two systems.

I’ve written – probably ad nauseum – about the differences between the various iterations of AD&D/D&D over the years, in this blog and in other places as well. But this was the first time I’d gotten an opportunity to play both 1st-edition AD&D and D&D 4E. So rather than go over what I always think the crucial differences between the two games are – you know, just from reading the rulebooks – I thought I’d note instead the big differences I noticed from actual game play. (And these big differences aren’t necessarily the ‘important’ differences, whatever they might be … just the ones that visibly grabbed my attention.)

1. Game speed in 1st-edition AD&D – holy crap, is it quick.

We played “Training Ground” for a little over six hours, and that included rolling up a brand new group of 7th-level characters and a break for pizza. In that time, we went through close to a dozen encounters. Most combat encounters – some of which went seven or eight rounds – didn’t take longer than fifteen minutes. Our longest encounter was a puzzle that relied on the players’ wits, and didn’t involve any dice rolling or rules mechanics. This amount of time playing the game (without the character generation) is fairly typical for our group, and having run some of the 4E games at that table, there is NO WAY a 4E game could even come close to that number of encounters in six hours. NONE. My general rule of thumb has become “plan on three combat encounters, maybe you’ll run four if you’re lucky … and it’s possible you’ll only squeeze in two”. It was shocking how swiftly everything moved in 1st-edition AD&D, and how much I felt like I accomplished in a short amount of time. (It also reminded me of just how I’d been able to finish some classic modules in only a night or two …)

Of course, this speed is mostly due to …

2. Character options – kind of limited.

I played the magic-user, so at times I would be the guy at the table pondering what to do – specifically, what spell to cast. But the players running the fighter and the thief really didn’t have much to ponder – if something attacked, they hit it with their swords. Or ran away. And if something looked like a trap, the thief examined it. Otherwise, most actions came down to asking the DM “can I do this?” – and the DM either saying yes or no, and providing whatever information was required based on that decision.

On the one hand, moving through the adventure quickly and getting a lot of things accomplished was awesome. On the other … well, for the fighter, there really wasn’t a lot to do besides “I hit it with my sword” – over and over and over again. Simple and repetitive. Contrast that to a 4E fighter, whose position on the battlefield might make more of a difference in terms of things like flanking or granting combat advantage. Or for the player running that 4E fighter, figuring out whether using Rain of Blows would be a more advantageous combat power to use against a given group of foes than Tempest Dance. I happen to think making those sorts of tactical decisions in 4E is a lot of fun, far more fun than the monotony of “I hit it with my sword” … but that comes at the price of game speed. Essentially, all the players in the 4E game have “become the magic-user” – instead of only a few gamers at the table weighing up options at times, now all the gamers are weighing up options, all the time.

I don’t think one’s particularly better than the other. But it’s interesting to watch those two elements – character options and game speed – and how they balance out.

3. More explicit player involvement in the gaming environment.

Not that players aren’t involved in their environment in 4E, it’s just, well … different.

When your character looks for something – in particular, something hidden – in a modern version of D&D, odds are your character makes a Perception check (or a Search check, if you’re playing D&D 3.5). If successful, whatever’s hidden gets found. If not, whatever’s hidden stats hidden. And it doesn’t get much more terribly involved than that.

In 1st-edition AD&D, without the mechanic of a “Search” or “Perception” mechanic, it’s a little more arbitrary. (Yeah, thieves have a “Find/Remove Traps” skill, but even if you use that in place of a Perception check, you’re limiting searches to a single character class.) It’s more of a give-and-take between the players and DM, rather than a game mechanic. In “Training Ground”, the players would listen to the room description, and then try various things out. There’s a statue of a mage with a wand? Perhaps a character tries to move the statue, or look behind it – or underneath it – for treasure. There’s a stone pillar in the middle of the room? Perhaps a character checks it for seams that reveal a hidden panel.

Now, yes, the same exact things can be done in 3.5, or 4E … but in my experience, they’re often trivialized to the Perception or Search check. A successful check often reveals a lot of information without the players really describing what they did to find that information – they’re not stating how they searched something, or how they moved it. They’re just picking up dice and rolling numbers. And a failed check can mean a shrug of the shoulders and doing something else, rather than being persistent and trying something else. (“The column doesn’t have any panels? Okay, I check the base of the column … and I’ll try to move it too.”)

I personally found the 1st-edition AD&D environment to be more interactive, for lack of a better term. And I liked the give-and-take between players and DM over the more mechanical feel of skill checks, though I concede that if that give-and-take sucks (ours certainly didn’t!), it could lead to a worse experience.

I found myself thinking of the next 4E game I run … and thinking that I might make the DCs for some Perception checks a bit higher than normal – but only if the players state something along the lines of “I search the room with a Perception check”. If they state the manner in which they search the room, then the DC would drop accordingly. That might be a good way to compromise and emulate what I liked from the older game in its newer incarnation.

Anyway.

Just a couple of quick musings.

Thanks to Rick and the rest of the gang for a fun 1st-edition AD&D game. It was a blast … I’m looking forward to doing it again somewhere down the road.

And I’m also looking to the next time we pick up the dice for our regular D&D 4E game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Gamma World material to write …

Declaration of Interest: Today’s blog will talk a bit about the latest “Age of Cthulhu” adventure, “Horrors from Yuggoth”, written by Adrian Pommier, and published by Goodman Games.

I’ve been lucky enough to know Adrian for a few years. I’ve worked with him on a few of the Goodman Games “Dungeon Crawl Classics” tournament adventures for GenCon, played in a terrific D&D 3.5 campaign that he ran … and more importantly, consider him an amazing DM/GM, an amazing gamer, writer, and game designer, and a really good friend.

In short, I’m biased.

With that being said …

… “Horrors from Yuggoth” is a fantastic adventure. And if you’re a “Call of Cthulhu” fan, it’s a must-have. In regards to the “Age of Cthulhu” line, it’s the best so far – and it's better than my own two contributions to the line as well.

Why?

A few reasons.

For one … for me, “Call of Cthulhu” isn’t just about horror, it’s about weird. And fantastic. I’m happy with the way the horror aspects of my own “Age of Cthulhu” adventures came out, but I suspect I rather fell short on the OMG WTF factor. “Horrors from Yuggoth” … well, it’s got walrus-men, for Crom’s sake. And twisted medical experiments. And a good half-dozen more moments that will twist your brain into a Möbius strip. It’s not just creepy, it’s outright weird. And in my opinion, that makes it a Very Good Thing.

“Horrors from Yuggoth” is also what I’d call a brave adventure. One of the opening scenes features a balls-out crazy sequence, something incredibly bold and brash, worthy of an Indiana Jones movie … and something that potentially could kill the entire group of player characters, before the adventure has a chance to get rolling. I read that particular sequence and shook my head, with more than a little bit of envy and admiration. If a crazy – and potentially lethal – s sequence like that popped in my head when writing an adventure, I’m not sure I would use it. While it’s awesome, I’d be worried about what could possibly go wrong with it. Adrian doesn’t worry. He trusts that the players are going to be resourceful, and figure things out, and be, well, heroic. And save the day.

Adrian runs his campaigns the same way, and that optimistic faith abounds in Castle Whiterock, the mega-adventure he co-wrote with the esteemed Chris Doyle … it’s an attitude that I wish more adventure authors had, having faith and trusting the players to succeed, no matter what the odds. It’s an attitude I wish I had … and something I’ll try to keep in mind, the next time I write a new adventure.

Finally, “Horrors from Yuggoth” incorporates a lot of real historical events into its fictional pages. I spent quite a bit of time researching “Shadows of Leningrad”, tyring to make all the historical details as accurate as possible. (It’s a task easier said than done, let me assure you!) Adrian, though, took that a step further … and managed to weave into actual events and incidents into his Arctic-bound “Age of Cthulhu” adventure. The famous Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen, the disappearance of the Airship Italia – they’re woven into the adventure, and in ways that not only look effortless, but natural. They aren’t jammed onto “Horrors of Yuggoth” as an afterthought, but blended into it seamlessly, and that adds quite a lot to the adventure.

Anyway … it’s an adventure I enjoyed tremendously. I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed playing it … and if I can, I’ll enjoy running it again.

If you like the game “Call of Cthulhu”, I highly, highly recommend “Horrors from Yuggoth”. You can pick up a copy of the adventure at your Friendly Local Game Store, or a PDF copy from places like RPGNow. You’ll have a blast, and you definitely won’t be disappointed. You might lose a little SAN in the process … but then again, you usually do in a good “Call of Cthulhu” adventure.

Just remember, though: watch out for the walrus-men!

Ed Greenwood – author and creator of the legendary Forgotten Realms campaign setting – wrote a great cyberpunk story, one that you’ve never read.

Keith Baker – author and creator of the almost-as-legendary Eberron campaign setting – also wrote a great cyberpunk story, also one that you’ve never read.

Sound interesting?

What if I told you that either Ed Greenwood or Keith Baker would be willing to write a cyberpunk story specifically for you?

READ ON.

Both Ed’s and Keith’s stories are part of the forthcoming anthology Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero. This anthology features nineteen stories of cyberpunk-styled dark science fiction. It also features a connected nineteen track album of songs, with each story intertwined with one of the songs on that album. The project is a massive collaboration and labor of love, created by hordes of speculative fiction authors and musicians, and will be published in the not-too-distant future by Blindsided Books.

If you’re a gaming fan, some of these authors and musicians you’ve heard of (the aforementioned Messrs. Greenwood and Baker, Ari Marmell, Don Bassingthwaite, Jaleigh Johnson, Nicolas Logue, among others) … and perhaps some will be new to you. (Probably myself, among others.) But the end result, no matter which authors you know, and which you don’t – a book nineteen very cool tales of cyberpunk splendor, accompanied by a damn good soundtrack.

In order to help get this anthology published, Blindsided Books is running a fundraiser, in order to ensure that this project not only becomes a reality, but is a magnificent, kick-ass reality when it finally hits your bookshelf. Details for the fundraiser are located HERE:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vua/forging-foreshadows

So if you’d like to help this project along, and read Ed Greenwood’s cyberpunk story … or Keith Baker’s, or Ari Marmell’s, or any of the other extremely talented authors involved in this complilation … please consider making a donation. There’s some pretty cool incentives to donate a nice chunk of change – as mentioned earlier, Ed Greenwood or Keith Baker will write a short cyberpunk story for you … provided you’re willing to be a patron of this fine project. (I’ll write one for you too, but somehow I suspect the services of Ed and Keith might be in higher demand than mine!)

And if that sort of patronage is a little beyond your means … that’s okay! But please consider donating a dollar, then. Or two, or five. If a whole bunch of people contribute just a little bit, it’ll go a long way to making Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero one of the best science fiction projects to come out in quite awhile.

Foreshadows: The Ghosts of Zero has been a labor of love, created by a lot of pretty amazing people.

We'd love to have you join us, and help take this anthology to the next level.

Thanks for reading. It's not usually my style to overly promote the projects I'm involved with, but I thought this is a project worth promoting. There's too many good stories and too many good songs written by talented people I like and respect not to promote this. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product, when it finally comes out … and I hope you will be, too.

And if you choose to donate, no matter what amount, or even just spread the word about this project … thanks again!

I picked up “Deathwatch” a few weeks ago, which is the Warhammer 40K RPG featuring the most kick-ass of the kick-ass in the WH40K universe – the Space Marines. This is a game I’ve dreamed about since the late 1980s, every since I first spied my first WH40K miniatures set in a hobby store. Many of my D&D games at the time featured “weird, horrible unnamed monsters” that were an excuse to slide minis of Harlequin Warriors and Tyranids onto the gaming table. I even took a stab myself at writing a Warhammer 40K homebrew RPG, using the WH40K miniatures rules and the original Warhammer Fantasy RPG … it didn’t quite work. So I’ve been waiting about twenty years for this game to come out.

And now it’s in my hands.

I was fully prepared for this game to be one of my many shelf queens, to be loving read many, many times and then finally slid onto a shelf, never to be actually played. Which, at this point in my life, I’m fine with, depending on the game – it just means I’m more judicious about the games that I buy than I used to be. But this is something I really want to run, so I thought about presenting this to a few of my old gaming buddies.

Problem is, there’s only three interested in playing the game. And a squad of three Space Marines? Doable, but … well, ever tried playing a D&D game with just three characters? The limitations of what three characters can do gets exposed pretty quick. Deathwatch doesn’t seem quite that bad (it’s not like players will be screaming shit, why didn’t anyone make a cleric! anytime during the game), but I couldn’t wrap my brain around adventures for such a small group of characters.

And then, this morning, the obvious – also known as Occam’s Razor – struck.

Why not let them play two characters apiece? Six Space Marines should work beautifully.

Obvious, I know. But it’s been a gaming mindset for the past couple of years, at least for me – one player, one character. No exceptions to that rule … except, upon further review, I realized that wasn’t a “rule” at all.

Oddly enough, when I first got into gaming, this wasn’t the case at all. In my friend Eric’s old “Tunnelworld” AD&D campaign, which I’ve talked about in earlier posts, I had a total of five characters, all being played in the same campaign – they weren’t replacing dead characters. Most players had about the same number, if not more. With one or two memorable exceptions, we didn’t play all the characters at the same time, though. It was usually one character per adventure, occasionally two.

The house rule was simple, especially around the time the game evolved into everyone having multiple characters, since our characters had taken over an abandoned keep as a base of operations. Once you picked a character (or two, as the case might be) to head off for an adventure, that’s the character you played until you returned to the main group, and can switch only then. You couldn’t switch characters mid-adventure. (“Oh shit, we need a thief! I’ll send my paladin back to the Keep and bring in my thief instead!”)

The main reason we did this? Oddly enough, so we could follow one of the rules – namely, training. In the early editions of AD&D, leveling up characters meant you had to go train with a teacher or mentor for a significant amount of time – weeks, maybe even months – before your character could reap the benefits of that new level. This wasn’t a problem when our characters were all basically the same level. However, as characters died – and low-level characters took their place – suddenly, certain characters weren’t leveling at anything close to the same rate. And when my friend John’s druid lucked out with a deck of many things and suddenly jumped several levels ahead of our other characters … it meant that in game time, his druid would be away for months in training.

So the original need came simply from that. One character, off training? No problem. Play another. And how multiple characters got used in the campaign by the players (myself included) evolved from there.

In later games, we got away from this philosophy. This partly came about because our groups reached sizes I can scarcely believe today – and we gamed on a weekly basis, too! My RIFTS campaign had eight players at one point, while a different AD&D campaign of Eric’s had twelve players! So multiple players with multiple characters, at groups that size … it got kind of unwieldly.

Also, the gaming groups I belonged to at the time got more into the “White Wolf” mentality of roleplaying (this was the early- to mid-Nineties); the emphasis of the games became “playing in character”, with far less emphasis on tactical combat. You know – the overused phrase “role-playing, not roll-playing”. Somehow it got decided that playing multiple characters would be a bad thing, since juggling too many characters with varying personalities wouldn’t work. In hindsight, I don’t know that this notion was necessarily correct, but it’s what we went with anyway.

In thinking about it now, I think that allowing players to run multiple characters in a campaign is a good option to consider when starting up a game. I don’t think I’d use that option for every game, but I’d consider doing it for some. For example, I’m playing in a D&D 4E campaign right now, that features five players. The game’s designed around five characters being optimal, and there’s enough crunchy options to keep track of with one character, never mind two. And training isn’t an issue anymore (ta-da! You’re fifth level, here’s your new powers!) so I think it’d be overkill to allow multiple characters.

But a game, like Deathwatch, with only three players? Having six characters running around shooting Orks and Tyranids is a hell of a lot better than three.

It’s an option under consideration. In any case, I'm looking forward to Space Marines shooting things and blowing them up. Two, three, six, whatever.

So if it fits your game, fits your players, give it a try. Sometimes having multiple personalties goes a long way!

I’ve been dabbling with D&D 4E as of late.

I’ll be honest … the initial choice, to be honest, was not my first. There’s a number of other games I’d rather be messing around with at the moment, most related to the older versions of D&D, not the newest. But given the interests of other players I game with, D&D kept coming up as the option du jour – it was what other people wanted to play, and while it wasn’t my first choice (or my second), I still like 4E. So, I bit the bullet.

The current gaming group is comprised of a bunch of veteran gamers and a few fellow freelancers (Rick Maffei and Ken Hart, among them!). I’m not quite sure how we latched onto this, but we came up with the idea that Rick and I would run two simultaneous 4E campaigns. I’d run one for a few sessions, then Rick would run his for a few sessions, and we’d alternate accordingly from there.

My own first sessions as DM were interesting – they probably deserve their own post – but suffice it to say that while I didn’t dislike running the game, it did mean shaking off a lot of rust as a DM, and getting a table full of people more acclimated to a (relatively) new gaming system, namely 4E … myself included. There was a lot about my own adventures that I thought could’ve been done better in hindsight. Not a bad thing, just … well, let’s say I’m looking forward to my own next sessions so I can put some of the lessons learned into practice!

At the end of my own first “campaign arc”, it was time to start Rick’s campaign. Which was something I very much was looking forward to. I rarely get to game as a player at this stage in my life, so any opportunity to do it … awesome. I also think that collectively as a group, the players at the table had gotten familiar enough with some of the nuances of 4E that the game was starting to run smoother. Based on some e-mail discussions being batted around prior to Rick’s first game, we’d also finally gotten familiar enough with the system to go beyond combat just started, what do we do? to one of the strengths of 4E – namely, how does my character work most effectively with the rest of the group? Synergy in 4E is an awesome thing, and by the end of my last session, I felt like everyone was getting comfortable with it. I felt pretty sure we’d be working well as a team in Rick’s first game.

And so … time to make a character. Something I’m not familiar with, at least not lately.

I’d spent some of our BS time during one of my games discussing Players’ Handbook 3, which I didn’t like very much on first perusal. One of the things I hated was the inclusion of the minotaur as a character race. I just don’t like the idea that in the name of “parity” and “balance”, the minotaur character race is weaker than the minotaur monster, and is limited to some pretty wimpy (IMO) bonuses. +2 to Strength? Gee, thanks. They just seemed, well, lame to me.

Besides, minotaurs are monsters. And you just didn't play monsters in First Edition. Or Second Edition. It was something I never did, never wanted to do, and anytime I ever heard about someone doing something like that, I thought it was pretty dumb.

So I couldn’t see myself ever playing one.

So, off to the Character Generator on DDI. Being the grognard I am, I promptly crank out a dwarf cleric, then an elf wizard. Both look pretty good! I look them over, trying to decide which one I want to play …

… and I realize the answer is neither.

Here’s where I’m a grognard hypocrite. I like the idea of classic stuff, but if you give me new and shiny shit, I want to play with the new and shiny. I’ve played elf wizards, and dwarf clerics. Been there, done that. I like new stuff. Much as I can bitch and moan about “I liked things better the old way” – and a lot of times, that’s absolutely true! – it doesn’t mean I always like old or “classic” stuff. Sometimes trying out new stuff is good, too. It’s fun to step into unknown territory with the shiny new stuff and see how it works.

So, no elf wizard. No dwarf cleric. What to make?

I think about the dumb minotaur. What would a good minotaur character look like? I think about it enough that I decide to trying making one, if only to prove to myself how ridiculously lame minotaurs are as a character race.

So I make a minotaur barbarian. I look it over when it’s done.

Holy shit, he’s really good!

How good?

Our first adventure in Rick’s campaign took place this past Sunday. Suffice it to say I had a tremendous amount of fun, as did all the players at the table. Ken does an outstanding job of recapping the action here, but I’ll just say I’m really looking forward to playing my new character Tarthon – the minotaur barbarian – again next month.

I still feel like quite the gaming grognard. I keep eyeing the old Basic D&D module of “The Lost City”, and I want to run it again someday. I’d like to give Labyrinth Lord with the Advanced Edition Companion a proper test drive. And I have these odd ideas of running Star Frontiers as well.

But in the meantime, I’m playing a minotaur barbarian in D&D 4E and having a blast.

Gotta love the shiny!

Apologies for the long absence ... had a lot going on lately. Still do. And gaming, at the moment, isn't really a part of that at all.

However, I'd be totally remiss if I didn't mention that tomorrow was Free RPG Day. Some great stuff - new, and for free - from some great gaming companies. Did I mention it was free? So hopefully your Friendly Local Gaming Store is participating, and you can go check things out there (and support your FLGS while you're at it.)

Myself, I'm looking forward to checking out the Warhammer 40K Deathwatch offering from Fantasy Flight Games, and the new Dark Sun 4E adventure from Wizards of the Coast. (Always loved Dark Sun ...)

Oh. Right. And some guy wrote this for Goodman Games.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Happy Dice Rolling!