Where's All The Roleplaying Stuff Then?

Photo by Nika Benedictova

When I launched this blog last November (with a hefty backlog of material preloaded) it came with the implicit suggestion - if not an outright statement - that Cowboys, Capes, and Claws would be largely a roleplaying game blog.

Well, that was the idea in my head anyway.

There have been general roleplaying posts, but primarily the blog has been - to date - film reviews and trailers, comic book news, wargames bits and bobs, and some coverage of TV shows and my meandering health issues thrown in for good measure.

Those who read my old blogs will know that sometimes I'd tack gaming material on the end of my film reviews (e.g. monsters and magic items that had appeared in the movie, translated into my own old school mechanics), but there has been none of that so far here.

And I'm very conscious of that absence of "added value".

The big thing - and this has been alluded to in most of the gaming-related posts I have published here - is that I simply don't know what system I want to focus all my attention on these days, what game I want to run for the Tuesday Knights (my gaming group).

The strongest contender is Twilight Sword, the anime and video game-inspired fantasy roleplaying system coming soon from Two Little Mice.

The full game is due to be released to backers of the crowdfunder (such as I) in the next few months.

However, a beta PDF of the core rules - largely absent the setting material, which will be in a second book (all part of the crowdfunding campaign) - has been delivered. And I like what I've seen. It's simple, and seemingly elegant, but I'm still not sure if it offers everything I'm looking for in a game.

But then again, does any rules set?

I tried kludging together my own RPG system a few years ago, to cover everything I wanted in a game mechanically, and it turned out to be a Frankengame with an ease of accessibility somewhere in the region of Phoenix Command or Advanced Squad Leader.

While I knew how it all worked and how each subsystem meshed with the others, it would have been a nightmare to explain to our group - especially as we generally lean towards the more "rules casual" approach to gaming.

The rules and themes of Twilight Sword are quite different from my usual offering, but that just needs a mental adjustment upon my behalf, as I'm sure the players will adapt without thinking or complaint - as long it's clear what they need to do.

Therefore, I don't want to start "tinkering" - coming with scenario-specific houserules, new magical items or monsters - until I have the full game in hand (the actual books, rather than the PDFs) and have probably played more than a handful of sessions with "rules as written".

That said, I'm also lining up at a small number of back-up offerings, in case I decide Twilight Sword isn't actually what I'm looking for. The last couple of times I tried to run games at our table (
Shadowdark and Villains & Vigilantes) both crashed-and-burned because I wasn't happy with the way things were shaping up.

Therefore, I really, really want to be certain that the game I choose is the right one before I present my next campaign to the Tuesday Knights.

I have a great deal of lost trust to regain. We only meet up 10 or 12 times a year, so each session is precious and can't (in my mind) be wasted on something that isn't going anywhere.

And this, gentle reader, is why I haven't written anything system-specific on the blog yet. Because I don't have a system to write to.

So, bear with with me, please keep reading the silliness I post (and commenting when you feel so inclined) and one day... hopefully in the not-too-distant future... there will be useful gaming material on the blog.

Along with film reviews and trailers, comic book news, wargames bits and bobs, and some coverage of TV shows and my meandering health issues thrown in for good measure.

CAMPAIGN AUTOPSIES: Will I Ever Learn?

Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash

When the Tuesday Knights came into being I was the de facto gamesmaster, running a deliciously vanilla fantasy campaign in my homebrew setting of Tekralh.

However, I don't feel my gamesmastering chops really began to take form until May 2014 when Pete handed me the reins of his nascent Chronicles of Cidri campaign.

Pete had been running this, for a few months, using the old The Fantasy Trip rules, but I updated that to a retroclone of the system, Heroes & Other Worlds.

I have to confess that the mechanics were rather too "dice pooly" for my liking, but they really worked well in the context of our campaign.

I ran Cidri for the better part of three years, building up to a delightfully OTT apocalyptic climax.

This campaign remains my personal gold standard, a target I now wish to aim for again - and hopefully excel - when I'm finally allowed to return to the head of the table.

The Tuesday Knights' membership has changed a lot since those days, we've lost some people and gained more members, which means tastes have changed as well, but I still feel these "revelations" hold water and I really should adhere to them.

I wish I'd had the foresight to conduct an autopsy on our Cidri campaign when it wrapped, dissecting my thoughts on why it worked, but I think I was just basking in the adulation of my players... and so it never crossed my mind to attempt the kind of surprisingly perceptive analysis that I had with these earlier efforts that hadn't worked out.

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights, but this time with a new rules set (Twilight Sword) and a superficially-familiar fantasy setting.

This will actually be my fifth or sixth attempted campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with my previous games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a large dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horses mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY I: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naïve dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s.

Almost from the start things went wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes had changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire!

I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

SHADOWDARK: I only ran this for one session. The players told me afterwards that they loved it, but something about it just didn't click with me.

At the time I was working on my overcomplicated Frankengame monstrosity of assorted houserules all stapled together with my own ideas from decades of gaming.

As it happened, "my" system and Shadowdark shared some similar ideas. It's just Shadowdark did them more elegantly, more streamlined. So I should have been happy!

To this day, I have no idea why I bounced off of Shadowdark so hard, when - upon initially reading the rules - it felt like such a perfect fit for my style of gamesmastering. 

However, I'm glad I didn't drag this game out and euthanised it before people got too invested in the campaign.

MORAL: If you're going to kill off a game, kill it quickly.

KNIGHT CITY II: Last year - before the osteoarthritis in my back knocked me off my feet for more than six months - I started a new V&V campaign (this time with some houserules to avoid some of the issues we'd encountered mechanically last time).

I provided the players with pamphlets before hand introducing the setting and - hopefully - suggesting the style of game I was hoping for.

But, once again, it didn't take long to realise that we had four players all pulling in different directions. This meant, for instance, that the opening scenario - which should have taken one or two sessions to wrap up - was heading into its fourth month when I had to retire from the field.

At its core, the problems with this iteration of Knight City were exactly the same as before, even though the make-up of the group at the table was different.

Superheroes are such a broad genre that they can mean diametrically different things to different players, no matter how well you think you've spelled out your personal vision.

And a central element of that clash of ideologies lies at my own feet. Over the decades (I've been reading comics since I was a wee nipper, and a collector since I was a teenager), my personal beliefs about what makes a good costumed crimefighter have become so embedded in my psyche that I'm not only unable to clearly explain my "vision" (surely everyone else sees superheroes the same way, right?) but I get frustrated when my players don't automatically share the same "vision"!

Just because it's a beloved reading and viewing genre for me doesn't mean I can run it as an open-ended, forever campaign. In fact, I'm probably too emotionally invested in the genre for me to brook any deviation from my perceived "one true way".

To top that off - again ignoring my mistakes from previous failed campaigns - I'd gone full "Game of Thrones" on Knight City and obsessively detailed every borough, with hundreds and hundreds of locations. Most of which, the players bypassed when creating their character backstories. 

It's almost as if I'd totally ignored every single misstep I'd made previously as a gamesmaster and was trying to crash on regardless.

MORAL: Learn from your past mistakes. Pick a game genre that everyone understands.

What's My Favourite Western Roleplaying Game? The Answer May Surprise You

Despite the many recent posts on this blog referring to Deadlands - and my long-history of fanboying over the game and its Weird West setting - I'm pretty certain my all-time favourite Western roleplaying game system is much the more modest Go Fer Yer Gun!

Written by the prolific games creator Simon Washbourne, and published by his Beyond Belief Games in 2010, Go Fer Yer Gun! (GFYG!) is a "mere" 77-page long, including a character sheet and a copy of the OGL.

Based on the ubiquitous d20 mechanics of a certain fantasy roleplaying game, GFYG! is a streamlined game with easy to grok stats and character classes, hit points, defence class (in lieu of armour class), equipment lists, weapons charts, etc.

As well as the delightfully thematic character classes with their specialised abilities, the game's novel tweaks include only rolling extra hit die for characters up to fourth level, so that guns are still dangeous - and potentially lethal - weapons, even when fired at high level characters. None of your Dungeons & Dragons superheroes here!

There's also statistics for a handful of generic folk and critters, as well as non-player characters, as well as three short scenarios.

While modern Deadlands is full of glossy and colourful art and slick layouts, GFYG! is black and white with public domain illustrations and a basic layout. However, both approaches serve the systems they are pushing.

Of course, the great thing about the minimalist approach of GFYG! is that, should tastes demand it, it's very easy to add elements to the rules. For instance, if I sought to Deadlands things up by introducing the supernatural, magic et al, I could easily lift chunks of my shelved Frankengame almost wholecloth to add into the mix.

On top of all this, a major selling point of GFYG! - should I ever try and convince the Tuesday Knights to trust me running another campaign - is that the "classic" d20 mechanics are easy for any reasonably seasoned gamer to quickly pick up. Even if they're not 100 per cent au fait with the setting, it's one less thing to have to worry about.

PROJECT 60: PIVOT!!!

My parents' copy of A Pictorial History of The Wild West, which I treasure to this day

Honestly, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that in the last few weeks I've dramatically pivoted on my choices for my PROJECT 60 (geeky things I want to have up and running by the time I turn 60 in late 2026).

If you've been paying attention you'll already be aware that my much-talked fantasy heartbreaker/Frankengame is dead and my RPG focus is wholly upon my recently launched Villains & Vigilantes campaign for the Tuesday Knights: Knight City.

While superhero RPGs - primarily V&V - weren't the first I played as a youngling, they were the first where I felt we had the makings of a long-running campaign, thanks to the sterling work of my old chum, Steve (elder brother of fellow Tuesday Knight founding member, Pete).

I've ensured that there are traces of those original games evident in our current setting, Knight City, and some of the rules tweaks I've employed are based upon changes that Steve created four decades ago.

However, it's not just the roleplaying side of PROJECT 60 that has been flipped. While I'm still intrigued by the 16th Century Border Reivers of Scotland and am very happy with the painted figures I have, and large library of reference material, there was always something niggling at the back of my mind.

One of things that had drawn me to gaming the lawless shenanigans of the Border Reivers had been my perception that this was the closest we had gotten to the American Wild West on our island.

But then, if I was so inspired by the Wild West... why wasn't I gaming the Wild West?

One of my techniques for corralling my spiralling thoughts has always been the principle of returning to square one, remembering what first caught my attention.

And this reminded me that, when I was about six or seven, armed with a bag of plastic cowboy and Indian 'army men' figures, and some cool, clip-together Old West buildings and fences, the very first "wargame" I wrote for myself centred on lawless, Frontier gunfighters.

Years before I even heard of roleplaying games, this was a skirmish game where each figure represented a single gunfighter, and they all had access to certain skills, with "tests" being resolved with a combination of normal six-sided dice and "average" dice (my first exposure to 'non-standard' dice... I was hooked from an early age, thanks to the vintage wargames shop on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells). 

My interest in the Old West can be traced to my parents' copy of The Pictorial History of the Wild West, a battered, well-read, hypnotically-illustrated, "true account of the bad men, desperadoes, rustlers and outlaws of the Old West - and the men who fought them to establish law and order."

Young me could frequently be found pawing through this tome, marvelling at the period photographs and losing myself in the stories of Billy The Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday et al. 

Since then, I've always had a penchant for Westerns, and - at the climax of my three-year Scriptwriting for Film and TV course at Bournemouth University - I even wrote a Western film script, inspired by true events, for my final assignment.

During my great roleplaying interregnum - the extensive period of reading, but never playing, RPGs between the end of our old superhero play-by-post game and then the launch of the Tuesday Knights - one of the games that I was really hooked on was Shane Hensley's first stab at Deadlands, the pre-Savage Worlds iteration of his Weird West setting.

I didn't fully grok the overly-complex rules system but I absolutely loved the backstory and the writing of the atmospheric 'fluff' of the setting. 

While, I guess, these might appear quite 'old school' to modern sensibilities, the rules books, supplements and box sets of that original Deadlands remain, in my eyes, some of the greatest RPG material ever produced.

What all this reminiscing has led to - after doing my due diligence and watching a lot of YouTube reviews and 'actual play' videos - is my investment in Great Escape Games' highly lauded Dead Man's Hand Redux.

This is a well-supported game, from a popular company, that most definitely has legs and scratches my itch for a skirmish game even better than the Border Reivers.

Like I said, the Border Reivers project remains ongoing, but it's on the backburner for the moment, while I dig into Dead Man's Hand Redux, turn my hand to painting the plastic buildings (boy, this takes me back to my childhood), and get the miniatures professionally painted.

With the plastic miniatures you get in the starter box, you're able to design your own gang and I already have ideas to base mine on Timmy The Flea and The Hole-In-The-Head gang, if my primitive modelling skills are up the task!

Introducing PROJECT 60

In the middle of 2024, I announced on Facebook - as much for myself as anyone else - that I was launching PROJECT 60.

The primary aim of this overarching idea was that by the time I hit 60 (in a few years' time) I will have assembled and researched an actual historical skirmish wargame... set in the age of the Border Reivers.

Superficially it's a Medieval (Tudor) "Wild West" on the border of Scotland & England (The Debatable Lands), with swords, horses, black powder weapons, lawlessness, family loyalty etc

Bizarrely, it was a random mention of this time on an episode of Antiques Roadshow that first piqued my interest.

I've since been circling this idea - as either a wargame or RPG setting - for several years now, but finally decided 2024 was the time to get stuck in.

For figures and rules I shall be concentrating on those produced by Flags of War, as those were the first I discovered for this little-known period.

While I have yet to fully grok the rules system (at first glance there's an air of Savage Worlds about it that I rather like), one of the joyous things about this game and its setting is that it's very much a skirmish game, for a handful of figures on each side.

So there's no need to invest in hundreds of minis, that would then bust the bank if I wanted them painted up nicely.

It actually turns out that several other manufacturers produce miniatures - and terrain - suitable for this period, but the Flags of War ones are my favourites by far, and so will be my primary focus.

My first batch of miniatures are currently with my figure painter, and I'll let you all know once they are done. 

I've organised the games room a bit, so the table is ready for the miniatures. At some point, I must try to drybrush the model church and graveyard, add some flocking and so on to make it look less plastic.

What's really surprised me, as I accumulated my library of historical tomes about the Border Reivers, is that while there are a handful of factual documentaries about them as far as I can tell there has never been a motion picture made about these characters.

I'm gobsmacked by this missed opportunity, as their stories are full of action and larger-than-life antiheroes, very much akin to the Western cinema that was the backbone of Hollywood in the "golden age" and still produces epic classics to this very day. 

Part of my research has also involved reading the late Robert Low's superlative trilogy of Border Reivers novels, which my old university chum, JJ, sent me when he heard I'd taken a fancy to this period of history.

On the roleplaying front, it has finally struck me (in the last couple of days actually) that the games I fiddle about about with, house rule, and generally rewrite aren't actually being designed for me to run!

What I'm actually doing (subconsciously until now) is creating rules systems and worlds (such as my defunct superhero setting Knight City) that I want to play in, that I want to create a player-character for and have the kind of adventures I've always fantasised as the ultimate manifestation of this marvellous hobby.

This is why I would often get frustrated when I ran a campaign (usually an aborted superhero one) because it wouldn't turn out how I imagined it should. It wasn't that I was railroading the Tuesday Knights towards specific outcomes or trying to dictate the emerging story, but that it wasn't emulating the genre as I perceived it.

Most recent batch of Tekralh booklets - a mix of new and updated material

If you know me on Facebook you will have (possibly) seen posts about my recent work on Tekralh (the name I'm sticking with for my Frankengame), as the RPG strand of my  PROJECT 60.

I've broken the mass of my writing down into smaller booklets, which - at a future date - makes them more cost-effective to edit and reprint.

The building blocks of my Tekralh house rules

And what got me excited about all this again?

Back in March, I ran a single session of Shadowdark for The Tuesday Knights. Everybody said they loved it, but there was something that didn't click for me.

It took me a moment to twig: it was a very good system... but it wasn't MY system. I'm certainly not knocking the multi-award-winning Shadowdark, but several of the things I liked about it were also things I liked about my own Frankengame.

Yes, my house rules are a lot crunchier than Shadowdark and maybe not as easy for people to instantly grok, but I kept coming back to the point that my Frankengame was my game... and, ultimately, if I only get one final shot at running an open-ended, mega-campaign, I'd really like it to be my own baby.

The original Arduin Trilogy - the biggest influence on my DIY RPG ideas

To try and explain what I'm going for with my bundle of house rules (that build off of Newt Newport's Crypts & Things and Matt Finch's Swords & Wizardry), I want to point you towards the main influences and inspirations for Tekralh:

• Dave Hargrave's Arduin - my very first 'postal purchase', from a small advert in the back of White Dwarf, paid for with postal orders (!!!). I have no recollection what drove me to buy this (had I already read the introductory article by Dave in Different Worlds magazine?). But I've never looked back since those original three little booklets arrived at my parents' house. Over the years I went on to buy all the original booklets... and quite a lot of the later material (there's even a new edition on the horizon), but it's the original trilogy I keep returning to for ideas.
• Dave Arneson's Blackmoor - another first for me. After I'd purchased my Holmes' Basic Dungeons & Dragons booklet, the first actual gaming supplement I remember picking up from the Dark Tower in Tunbridge Wells was, appropriately, Judges Guild's The First Fantasy Campaign, a delightfully rough and ready collection of notes from Arneson's ur-campaign, the foundation upon which ALL campaigns that followed were built.
• Gary Gygax's Greyhawk - I've always had an interest in this campaign, for similar reasons to my love of Blackmoor: it was a campaign formulated before the rest of the gaming world knew what "fantasy roleplaying campaigns" were. Sadly, while there are early editions of the rules books that grew out of this available, there isn't the random notes and unfiltered enthusiasm of my first two choices. And, the deepest sorrow is the lack of a true rendition of the legendary Castle Greyhawk. I've seen - and own replicas - of some material, largely courtesy of Gary's co-DM Robert Kuntz. 
• Robert A. Wardhaugh's The Game 

I'm not looking for replicate these games and settings, but I definitely aspire to emulate them... because I want to play in a version of them.

It explains why I've always found myself at a loss when it comes to dreaming up scenarios. I can picture odd set-pieces (which are MOMENTS I'd love to be a part of in a never-ending old school campaign), but creating an actual scenario whole cloth always leaves me at a loss.

And this is why: I can see how a story could start, but I want to be part of the group that discovers how events unfold from there. I ant to be an integral part of the developing story rather than the gamesmaster setting out all the pieces on the board for us to play with.

If you've made it this far you're probably wondering what this all means?

Honestly, I don't know. Even after a year away from blogging I'm still no closer to reaching any definitive conclusions on the gaming front.

I want to play in a game like the ones that have inspired me, like the one I've tried to create, but nothing on the Tuesday Knights docket comes to close to this "aspirational holy grail".