THROWBACK THURSDAY: Following The Whispering Road Made Us All Both Storytellers and Gamers

Back at the tail end of 2018, the Tuesday Knights (our tabletop roleplaying gaming group) did something unusual: something that goes against my zealous protection of our precious, limited gaming slots. We played a one-shot. And I really enjoyed it. I mean I really, really enjoyed it. 

I'm still quite adamant that while we are bound to "one gaming session a month" (meaning a maximum of 12 a year, and we rarely achieve that for sundry health, family, and work reasons) I would rather play (or run) something with the potential to become an open-ended "forever campaign".

However, let's flashback to December 20, 2018, and see what I wrote in my gaming log:

This week's RPG session with the Tuesday Knights could, possibly, have proved to be a game-changer.

It was our first exposure to a so-called "storytelling game" - Brent Newhall's The Whispering Road - and I was anxious about getting my head around playing a game devoid of such traditional mechanical trappings as character statistics, hit points, armour class, experience points, equipment lists etc

Instead, our character's were made up of a number of traits (some were personality quirks, others minor abilities or powers) and a "need".

Further taking us out of our comfort zone, there was no definitive setting for the game and it didn't even require a gamesmaster!

Clare, whose game it was, took the role of "Architect", meaning she framed the story and set the scene, while Pete was nominated as "Driver", making it his job to ensure the story kept moving and we didn't get bogged down in rules discussions or non-gaming distractions (not, it turned out, that he needed to worry about that because we all quickly got on board with The Whispering Road).

Beforehand, via our super-secret Facebook group, Clare had nudged us to create a setting for the game: and we cooked up a snow-bound Medieval land (which in play veered between Celtic and Norse) where saints and demons walked the land, and everyone had a pet mouse as a companion.

Our characters were:

• Ceitlen (Pete) - first born daughter of the chieftain, guardian of the clan's symbolic magical shield, whose motivation was protecting the shield and what it stood for (ie. the community);
• Torg (me) - third born (second son) of the chieftain, a trickster and troublemaker, who wanted to prove that he could be as good a hero as Ceitlen;
• Glau (Kevin) - a miserable farmer, gifted with a magical spade and the ability to see the future, who just wanted the snow to stop;
• Master Mouse (Erica) - the custodian of the clan's mice, and a mentor to all, who wanted people to listen to her advice;
• Sister Prudence (Clare) - a nun and fanatical follower of Little St Therese (patron saint of mice), who sought to stem the rising tide of secularism in the village.

After everyone described their typical day in the village, the story began with Glau coming to the chieftain with dire warnings that the snows were getting worse.

The village was whipped up into a frenzy, and, led by an army of mice to clear a path, headed up into the mountains to find the cause of the supernaturally worsening weather.

After being ambushed by dire wolves (not common in these 'ere parts), the bulk of the village were sent home for their own protection, leaving our small group of heroes to carry on.

I stumbled upon an old ruin (Torg, as a "rascal", had more traits than anyone else and these included a couple of doses of "dumb luck" as well as being the group's "magic-user"), from where we headed to an ice cave that actually turned out to be a frost giantess called Midhilda.

Before we knew this, she had rolled a giant boulder at us, which had crushed Ceitlen's shield and shattered it in to three pieces.

While the others were determined to talk to the giantess, Torg transformed into a mouse and started to scuttle up her leg, with a typically Viking-esque bloody plan in mind to kill her (thinking he would be saving the village that way and proving himself).

However, Master Mouse called out to him to stop because they had discovered that she was simply looking for her giant boyfriend Jordmund.

Unfortunately, giants' sense of time isn't the same as ours and we discovered he'd passed through this area hundreds of years ago.

During the conversation, she also revealed that her oversized enchanted sword had been shattered, and Torg suggested that he could magically repair it using one of the fragments of Ceitlen's shield.

Ceitlen, already upset over the loss of the shield (despite Master Mouse explaining to her that it was only a symbol and she was still protecting the community), was initially not happy about this.

But then she came round to the idea and tried to claim it as her own, much to Torg's annoyance. He lost his rag, which - in turn - freaked out the giant (who couldn't handle extreme's of human emotion) and so Master Mouse and Sister Prudence had to calm down Midhilda and Torg.

Assisted by a small coterie of mice summoned by Prudence, Torg then wove the pieces of shield and sword together with some colourful sorcerous hand gestures, and went on to proudly explain that this was also forging a bond between the frost giants and our village.

And, boy, was he feeling smug about all this... right up until the point where Midhilda declared that her new magical sword would be named after Ceitlen.

Torg's jaw hit the floor (and everyone - including me - around the table roared with laughter).

In return, Midhilda handed Ceitlen with a large fragment from her old broken sword, which could be reforged into a new shield.

We all returned to the village, satisfied that our story arcs had been achieved, the magical snows had eased, and Midhilda had opened a new pass through the mountains for us.

Writing up the adventure primarily from Torg's POV and my recollections, I haven't really done the evening's game justice.

It was a surprisingly layered escapade, with everyone's actions dictated by whether they were satisfying their own character's needs or those of others in the group.

When you're not spending 20 minutes on a fight sequence, it frees up time for character development and The Whispering Road was all about co-operation and working together to achieve our goals (even when they were pulling us in opposite directions).

Although I'm not a fan of listening to "actual play" recordings, part of me wishes I'd recorded the evening on my phone to release as a podcast.

From the initial group world-building, through the speedy character creation, right up to the hilarious climax of the story and the satisfying denouement, this really was a game unlike any we've played before.

I've always been fascinated by the simple idea of characters who are related by blood somehow, and the dynamic of Pete's Ceitlen  and my Torg unfolded brilliantly as both of us tried to one-up each other: Ceitlen with her strength and charisma, Torg with his tricksiness.

Unintentionally, as Kevin pointed out, this developed into a perfect Thor/Loki dynamic.

The whole adventure was contained to a single, two-and-a-half hour session, but - because the game was structured into scenes (with prompts for The Architect) and acts - the story we freestyled together really felt as though it came together like a movie.

I backed The Whispering Road on Kickstarter, in early 2014, on behalf of Nick and Clare, thinking it might make an interesting introductory RPG for my godson Alec (it's inspired by Studio Ghibli films, which Clare is a great fan of, and doesn't revolve around killing things that look different to you and then stealing their stuff).

Little did I realise that it would actually serve as The Tuesday Knights' introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Story Games!

I was so impressed by The Whispering Road and the story-crafting techniques the game subtly deployed throughout, as well as Clare's first stint at running a roleplaying game for adults (as opposed to her children).

There were simple dice-rolling mechanics for resolving conflicts (for instance, in a fight the roll would say whether you won or lost, not dictate a blow-by-blow account of the battle), complementing the system's aim of creating a thematic narrative, driven by the characters' needs and desires.

We weren't restricted - or bound - by the rules, in fact they encouraged our creativity and communal storytelling skills.

What's happening to us? Are we becoming New Age gamers? Are we waving goodbye to the Old School Renaissance and becoming Story Game aficionados?

I think it's a bit early to be binning all our d20 rulebooks, but I can definitely see us returning to The Whispering Road.

The evening ended with talks of a 'sequel movie' to our adventure, but, as much as I really liked all the characters the Tuesday Knights had cooked up, my mind was racing towards other settings and environments I'd love to explore via the game's very open mechanics.

It was a shame Simon was unable to make our final gathering of 2018, as it was a grand send-off to another fine year of gaming.

The First Rule of Monopoly Club Is...

Le Mans-themed Monopoly

What some of you may not realise about me is that my gaming interests aren't limited to just roleplaying games and skirmish wargames. Rachel and I also host a (supposedly) monthly Monopoly Club.

Joining us at the table are Clare and Pete, making this a kind of spin-off from the Tuesday Knights (our roleplaying group).

Pete is an insatiable collector of the many, many themed-Monopoly sets and so every time we get together we play a different iteration of Monopoly.

In the three-and-a-half years we've been going, we've traded property and bankrupted each other in the worlds of Looney Tunes to Stranger Things, Indiana Jones to The Simpsons, and Ghostbusters to Jaws.

This week we were playing on a Le Mans-themed board that Pete had purchased earlier this year at the actual Le Mans endurance racing event in France.

Our little group not only keeps a running league table of our various victories (and defeats) but also a table of our gradings of how well produced and how innovative these reskins of the classic game are. 

If you want to learn more about our adventures in board gaming (or just check out some of the eccentric hacks of the classic original board game), then please visit this blog's little sister site: Don't Talk About Monopoly Club (it's the first rule of Monopoly Club).

EPISODE SEVEN: 'Relaxing Cruise' Ends In Cretaceous Chaos

SS Endeavour

After escaping the sinking of Atlantis, Onyx's seaplane - The Wave Hopper - needed serious repairs and so we headed for Bermuda for a rendezvous with our old friend, The Governor (who we'd previously rescued from Nazis and dinosaurs... it's a long story).

We also sought some much needed rest-and-recuperation at The Explorers Club, although they had other ideas.

Oynx decided to stay in Bermuda to oversee the repairs [as Mark, her player, is currently unable to join us for our monthly games] and so, after some socialising with the muckety-mucks of the British colony, we took a supposedly easy job from our sponsors at The Club.

Our task - which was described to us as "taking a relaxing cruise" - was simply to sail to Mexico to collect some Mayan artifacts from the Yucatan Peninsula and then transport them back to New York.

We'd been booked passage on an old tramp steamer, the SS Endeavour, under the auspices of one Captain Redgrave, a most amenable fellow.

Captain Redgrave

Unfortunately - and yet not wholly unexpectedly - not long after we set sail a mysterious swell started buffeting the ship, rising to a violent storm that tossed the Endeavour about so much that eventually all the crew and passengers were knocked unconscious... leaving the ship to drift.

When we all awoke the next day, it was about noon, the sun was directly overhead and everything seemed to have calmed down.

Conversing with Redgrave, though, we soon discovered that the ship's compass wasn't working, and when Buck (my explorer) checked his own that wasn't working either. We even went to the effort of making a third, basic, compass... but to no avail.

After a considerable time passed, we all realised that the sun hadn't moved, meaning navigation was going to be a major issue. [NB. This is a phenomenon, I believe, we first encountered when we travelled through a portal to an alien world in our July, 2021, game].

Further consultations with Redgrave led to a decision to head nominally west (or where we thought west was), with Buck stationed at the prow using his binoculars to sight land.

There was definitely something - small - on the horizon, but it was blurred by a heat haze.

But, at least, it gave us something to head for.

What no one expected was the sudden arrival of a vicious and hungry plesiosaur!

[NB. This was not our first plesiosaur. Earlier in the campaign, Tessie, Lake Tahoe's lake monster, turned out to be one. We met her in our April 2021 game, when we were in an apocalyptic, 1950s story arc].

It's big rubbery neck and terrifying teeth were tearing crew members apart, even while Dick (Kevin's crackshot ex-G-man) was riddling it with bullets... and I was not. Freya (Clare's photojournalist) was getting some excellent pictures but when a couple of seamen went overboard, she led the rescue efforts.

Buck ran back to his cabin to retrieve his hunting rifle, as Freya threw a line to the surviving sailor in the drink, Bob, and - assisted by a couple of other crewmen - pulled him up onto the deck and away from the dinosaur's wrath.

I think Bob has taken quite a shine to Freya. Let's see how that develops.

By the time Buck returned, Dead-Eye Dick had managed to put a bullet in the beast's brain, causing the dinosaur's corpse to slide back into the water.

The Endeavour had taken a lot of damage, but Redgrave was determined to get it to the island ahead of us that had now come into view.

He powered the engines as best he could, but things were not looking - or sounding - good.

To add to our troubles, a couple of smaller plesiosaurs had scented blood in the water and were swimming towards our sinking ship.

When the engines finally gave up the ghost, Redgrave ordered everyone to abandon ship in the two lifeboats.

Bob and another sailor, Smudge, joined us in one, while the Captain and the remaining crew took the other.

Bob and Smudge rowed for their lives as Dick and I tried to provide covering fire for the Captain's boat as the plesiosaurs targeted it.

The second lifeboat was lost with all hands

Sadly there was little we could do and that lifeboat - and all aboard - were lost to the monsters, but their sacrifice allowed us time to make it to the tropical island.

And what a beautiful island it was. White beaches, palm trees, and noisy wildlife in the tree tops.

Buck spotted a trail through the jungle - and then a line of smoke rising in the distance. We were not alone. 

But for all this death and carnage, Buck was buzzing with excitement as he was putting the clues together. Had his lifetime obsession with finding the "Hollow Earth" finally come true? The compasses, the dinosaurs, the static sun, the Bermuda Triangle.

However, as he led the group down the trail, his sixth sense alerted him to some danger... sadly, too late, to avoid the two pair of [Jurassic Park-style] velociraptors that targeted the weakest links in our party: the two battered seamen.

[NB. We first met velociraptors on a mysterious island in our April 2022 game when the plane we were travelling in was forced to land after a tussle with German agents]

We made short work of these escapees from the Cretaceous Era, but Smudge was a goner. Bob, however, earned the nickname 'Lucky Bob' after he fended one off in unarmed combat and escaped without injury.

The trail led to an ancient wall, behind which we could hear the familiar tones of orders being barked in German.

Peering through a crack, we saw Nazi troopers, a submarine (sporting a peculiar dish on its conning tower) in a lagoon, ancient ruins, native huts, and enslaved local "ape-people" being forced to dig for "something".

"We never seem to get a break, do we?"

- Marion Ravenwood, Raiders of The Lost Ark

TO BE CONTINUED...

CAST:

• Buck Hannigan - Me
• Freya Larson - Clare
• Dick Tate - Kevin
• Onyx Jones - NPC

DIRECTOR:

• Pete

Buck & Dick (top) and Onyx & Freya (bottom)

If you want to keep abreast of the action in our current season of Pete's Weird Science campaign (currently using the OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES system from Two Little Mice)
then visit this page to find links to all our previous episodes.

It's A Marathon Rather Than A Sprint: Why I Will Always Champion The "Forever Campaign"

Trawling back through his archives recently, I found myself agreeing with the sage wisdom of Grognardia's James Maliszewski, in his pontifications on a subject near and dear to my heart: the desirability of long-running campaigns.

I've mentioned a number of times on this blog my personal white whale: my dream of an open-ended "forever campaign", which I have long-considered the definitive expression of our hobby (certainly where Dungeons & Dragons-style games are concerned).

Inspired by the early practitioners of our art (from Gary Gygax's Greyhawk via David Hargrave's Arduin to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor), I'd always felt this was how the game was meant to be played.

Characters should live, grow old, and die (either in battle or in the comfort of their own keep) during the run of a campaign, but the world always carries on. Characters have long and storied careers, then retire, raise castles and families, become legends, but the world always carries on. 

The world shouldn't 'end' when a particular adventure ends (unless, of course, it's an apocalyptic adventure such as I concocted for the Tuesday Knights in The Chronicles of Cidri).

Modern campaigns, to me, feel like they have a story to tell and once it's told, it's time to pack things up and move on to another game.

For instance, while I loved playing my human fighter Syr Edvard in Simon's Dungeons & Dragons 5e Curse of Strahd campaign, we knew from the moment we stumbled through the Mists into Ravenloft we were destined to ultimately confront the vampire lord Strahd and try to free the land from his grasp. 

Us and the thousands of other gamers who have - and will have in the future - played through this campaign book, all following roughly the same story.

The details may vary, both in the plot and how the character's react, but, ultimately we all have a single primary objective.

The current crop of campaigns from Wizards are designed to take characters from 1st to 20th level, in a compressed period of time (10 to 18 months of weekly games, I believe), and then those characters go away, and new characters are "designed" (not generated)  for the next book-length campaign.

Ultimately, we are telling the story that Wizards wants us to tell. And that's okay, if that's how you want to play Dungeons & Dragons. And a lot of people do, I get that.

These are blockbuster movies, whereas my gaming interest lies more in the direction of the on-going soap opera, a marathon rather than a sprint.

I look at Robert Wardhaugh's famous four-decade spanning campaign, and the original campaigns I mentioned above, and that's what I want a piece of.

I like the idea of a sprawling, living, setting where the characters create their own story, rather than characters being created for a story.

I, again, cite my own Chronicles of Cidri as a small example of what I have in mind: when I began that campaign (taking over the reins from Pete a few sessions in), I had no end goal in mind, there was no set objective for the characters. A string of events - all driven by the player-characters (knowingly or unknowingly) - led to the final apocalyptic battle and the destruction of the world.

If Clare's character hadn't fallen under a certain curse and then hadn't chosen to trust the untrustworthy Witch of The Woods the campaign - and the world - would have turned out a lot different.

James pulled out a brilliant quote from 'noisms' of Monsters and Manuals:

"We need long campaigns. We need to sit down with the same group of people on a regular basis over the course of years, telling the kind of stories which require concentration and thought and, above all, loyalty; stories which gain their own momentum through peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows, ups and downs and ins and outs; stories in which the events which happen matter because they have a context and a background and an unknown future waiting to be discovered. We don't need the inconsequential frippery of the one-shot; we need time."

However, 'noisms' also wraps up his own commentary on the need for long campaigns, thus:

"Almost everything worth doing, knowing, reading, hearing, feeling or saying in life has the character of being unobtainable via shortcuts except in a form which diminishes both you and it. Why would you expect RPGs to be any different?"

While I have been known to enjoy an odd one-shot as a palate-cleanser, a way to explore new and different rules ideas, I want my players' characters to become enmeshed in their game-world, there to live and breathe, rather than drive one single plot forward at breakneck speed.

In his article, James said:

"A multi-year campaign is, I think, the ideal form of most roleplaying games ... and by "ideal," I don't mean some unattainably lofty goal but rather the most desirable and satisfying version of this type of entertainment."

I realise my time on this Earth is finite, I'm heading towards my sixtieth birthday later this year, and I'm plagued with a host of health issues that fate has foisted upon me.

If I'm lucky I have the time - and energy - left in me for one last, massive, sprawling campaign in the manner I aspire to. 

This is why I remain staunchly zealous (almost certainly to an annoying degree at times) about protecting the Tuesday Knights' precious, monthly gaming slots.

I'm still quite adamant that while we are bound to "one RPG session a month" (meaning a maximum of 12 a year, and we rarely achieve that for sundry health, family, and work reasons) I want to play (or, more crucially, run) something with the potential to become this kind of open-ended "forever campaign".

I'd love to see characters invested in something other than an "overarching plot", putting something back into the game world, be it building a castle or a dam, seizing a crown and struggling with the mantle of rulership, getting married, growing their dynasties etc

There would still be the grand expeditions, the megadungeons to loot, the Big Bads to slay, but between all this the characters would have lives, dreams, aspirations, passions, and growth that might not be measured in experience points, but would certainly make their personal stories more rounded and interesting.

Of course, I realise if I'd just stuck to my guns when we launched the Tuesday Knights, back in 2008, and kept my initial Castles & Crusades campaign going, there's every possibility that I would be running such a "forever campaign" as I dream about. 

But there's no point having regrets over my stupidity back in the day. At least, it was a learning experience. Albeit rather late in life.

I'll let James have the final word on the subject of extended campaigns, quoting one of the founding fathers of our glorious, and occasionally frustrating, hobby:

"Indeed, I'd argue this is the way D&D at least was intended to be played, as Gary Gygax states in the foreword to OD&D: "it is the campaign for which these rules are designed."

THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Whole World Is A Sourcebook!

As a creative, gaming-obsessed, pre-teen I sat in my corduroy shorts in prep school assembly seeking inspiration from the hymns we sang... just what was the to hit/damage bonus of a "bow of burning gold", what effect did "arrows of desire" have and just how fast was a "chariot of fire"?

In 1977, as well as discovering Star Wars, I had been introduced to Dungeons & Dragons and the whole world was suddenly "research material".

Everywhere I looked there were potential magic items or monsters for characters to contend with in dungeons drawn from every imaginable source.

My prep school co-dungeoneer, Tom, even ran me through a D&D adventure based on the first season of The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy (a radio serial he had introduced me to and also had a major impact on my life).

Television and books (particularly the sword and sorcery tales of Fritz Leiber, and a little later Harry Turtledove's first Elabon stories - Wereblood and Werenight) shaped many adventures and characters in those early years; then later comic books became a major source of inspiration as our games moved away from straight fantasy into the four-colour world of superheroes.

From these I still have three comic book standards that I would one day love to weave into a single, long-running roleplaying game: time travel, alternate dimensions, and cosmic entities.

Yet somehow, even in the games I've run for the Tuesday Knights in the past couple of decades, I have yet to squeeze all three of them in successfully; feeling that a campaign needs to progress at a steady pace for a considerable length of time before such contrasting, incredible elements can have their full, desired impact when introduced.

That said, all three feature heavily in The Sailor on The Seas of Fate, the second of Michael Moorcock's Elric books.

Even dreamier, more surreal and more psychedelic than Elric of Melniboné, this 190-page delight had me joining Elric on a ship sailing a strange ocean that linked not just islands, but worlds and planes of existence in time and space.

In a series of three adventures, Elric discovers he is but one face of The Eternal Champion, travelling to the Earth's future with three other incarnations of the Champion (Hawkmoon, Corum and Erekose) to battle two universe-threatening alien magicians; then he finds himself being chased by a Melnibonean sorcerer from history and swept up in a mythical love story; before finally taking a Heart of Darkness-style river journey to the legendary, lost birth place of his people.

These stories continue to leave me breathless, blown away by the absorbing text, the clever imagery and mental stimuli they spark in my enfeebled brain.

It also made me appreciate, perhaps, why I have never successfully tackled such cosmic themes as I desire to in my roleplaying games - they are best left to the master storytellers!

Is The Quest For My Holy Grail of Roleplaying Games Over?

Could a Monty Python roleplaying game be my Holy Grail?

Remember back in February when I swore I wasn't going to but any more roleplaying games just because they looked pretty? And then in March when I did just that, but persuaded myself they would be of use in my planned fantasy campaign?

Well, to quote Britney Spears: oops, I did it again!

This time, I cast the blame squarely on my favourite online gaming store, Dungeonland, and it's current, very niche, and rather incredible sale offer.

As you can see in the picture above, I purchased both Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme Sensible Middle Class Edition and Monty Python’s Head Of Light Entertainment Gamemaster Screen... for a fiver each!

Published by Exalted Funeral, this official Monty Python roleplaying game is, as I understand it, largely a Medieval-set roleplaying game - think Monty Python & The Hold Grail - of extreme silliness.

Do I think I'll ever run it for the Tuesday Knights? I doubt it very much, primarily because - again, from what I've read and heard via online reviews and YouTube videos - it works better for chaotic one-shots than ongoing games.

However, I'm lead to believe that the rulebook is a fantastic source of information for the Holy Grail (and other select Python creations), which means it will almost certainly help me with ideas for the sword and sorcery campaign I've been plotting for a while now.

Also, I've never seen a box for a gamesmaster's screen that's so deep (4cm): I can't wait to find out what's in it and figure out what bits and bobs I could use with another roleplaying system.

Of course, I could have been totally misinformed and Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme turns out to be the perfect system for my 'forever' campaign.

Let's see how that goes...

Back of the Head of Light Entertainment Screen box

EPISODE SIX: Atlantis Found and Lost Again

Professor Kasper Wieloch, the magical trident of Poseidon, and the scary tentacles

PREVIOUSLY ON OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES: Having found the lost city of Atlantis, our heroes pick their way through the abandoned houses and temples, dodge traps and eventually find themselves in an underground amphitheatre. There they come face-to-face with their old nemesis Kasper Wieloch, a unit of Nazi soldiers, and mass of giant, squirming tentacles.

And that's when the shooting started. We were on one side of the amphitheatre, the soldiers and Wieloch - dressed in some strange (Atlantean?) robes and chanting in a language we didn't recognise - on the other.

Rising out of the water in the basin of the amphitheatre was an altar bearing a clearly supernatural trident.

Our heroes (at the bottom) face off against a unit of Nazis and a wannabe wizard

As bullets zipped to and fro, and we were able to pick the Nazis off one-by-one, Wieloch strode forward and grabbed the trident. Much to his obvious shock, he found himself bathed in a crackling electrical field that was clearly causing him incredible pain. 

Freya (Clare's photojournalist) took a pot shot at him, but the field encasing the professor also acted as some kind of shield, deflecting Freya's attack.

Buck (my explorer) and Dick (Kevin's ex G-man) continued to pepper the soldiers with well-aimed shots, but then Wieloch suddenly underwent some otherworldly transformation as his eyes turned white and his facial expression contorted into something demonic.

Hollering in an alien tongue, he appeared to command the monstrous tentacles to destroy the structure we were all in - oblivious of his former allies.

As the ceiling began to fall, the soldiers scattered... heading our way (the only exit now).

Using my keen, hunter's observation [and a Luck point], Buck quickly studied Wieloch and the "force field" around him, and realised that the electrical screen didn't extend to the trident itself.

Taking a deep breath, Buck remembered the killer shot he had taken in Antarctica many months ago [during Pete's previous Hollow Earth Expedition iteration of this game, back in February 2024] to blow up an Elder God, exhaled and pulled the trigger.

The trident exploded into many splinters, the tines fell apart and the shaft cracked, and almost simultaneously - as Wieloch's power waned and disappeared - the tentacles wrapped themselves around the possessed professor and, with sickening rending, popping and crunching sounds rent his body into a million pieces.

My colleagues traded a few more shots with the soldiers, then I barked over the sounds of gunfight and falling masonry that we might as well make a break for it as there was nothing more we could do here.

Pursued by the Germans we raced back over the star bridge - Buck carefully guiding his friends where to safely step - and headed towards the exit.

The Nazis, of course, weren't aware of the animated statue trap on the bridge and we heard their screams as they discovered its lethality. 

Further on and almost out, we tried to jump the open pit trap that was blocking our escape, but we were all tired by then and only Freya got out of the six foot hole with her dignity intact. Both Dick and I managed to hurt ourselves in the fall, but mainly it was our pride that took the most damage.

As we pulled ourselves out, the remaining two Nazis came barrelling into the room. One went straight into the pit and so Dick shot the other.

As the violent shaking of Atlantis - probably caused by the monster that had eaten Wieloch - increased, the sea levels rose, and tremendous cracks appeared in the roads and buildings.

We raced to our waiting sea plane, where Oynx (our NPC pilot) was struggling a bit to get the engines started.

Climbing into the plane, we said: "Oynx, take us home." And with assistance from Dick and Freya, she was able to fire up the twin engines and get the plane into the air.

Behind us, the ruins of Atlantis sank beneath the waves. Leaving no evidence that it had ever been there!

No evidence... except the plain, wooden cup Freya had picked up during our initial exploration of the island.

We had otherwise escaped largely unscathed, but Dick had taken a bullet in the shoulder during that final gunbattle that would leave a nasty scar.

Little did I realise, at the time, that that last Nazi had somehow survived and, of all our group, he had sworn a blood oath against Buck Hannigan to seek revenge for his fallen comrades.

TO BE CONTINUED...

CAST:

• Buck Hannigan - Me
• Freya Larson - Clare
• Dick Tate - Kevin
• Onyx Jones - NPC

DIRECTOR:

• Pete

Buck & Dick (top) and Onyx & Freya (bottom)

If you want to keep abreast of the action in our current season of Pete's Weird Science campaign (currently using the OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES system from Two Little Mice)
then visit this page to find links to all our previous episodes.

EPISODE FIVE: All Roads Lead To Doom

Atlantis

PREVIOUSLY ON OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES: When we last saw our heroes their aircraft was just emerging from a supernatural storm and in front of them lay the lost island of Atlantis!

As Onyx (our currently NPC pilot) banked the seaplane towards the island, we heard, aft, a loud cracking sound in the air. Looking back we realised the zeppelin had been struck by lightning, but - even more terrifying - it was now in the grasp of indescribably large tentacles that had arisen from the water and were squeezing the life out of the German craft.

Piercing the 'energy shield' over the island, we inspected the ruined and abandoned Greco-Roman city as we came in to land in the calming sea on the far side of Atlantis, parking the plane up on the beach so we could go exploring.

Onyx stayed with the plane - just in case we needed to make a hasty exit.

It soon became clear that the city had been abandoned by its populace - suddenly - a long time ago. The houses were falling down, furniture turning to dust, nature slowly reclaiming it all with encroaching vines.

Freya (Clare's photojournalist) was absorbed by the archaeology, while Buck (my explorer) and Dick (Kevin's former G-man) listened out for German survivors and any remaining natives.

Eventually we made our way up a main thoroughfare to the giant bronze gate barring the sturdy entrance to the central temple.

The door of four faces

As we approached, a poem was seen, carved into a wall, which Freya was able to translate:

"To face the sea, you must
catch the rising wind
follow the lesser stars
fear the darkened depths"

This sparked much discussion as to its meaning. We suspected it was a series of clues to solving any challenges we would have to face, But even the first four words took us a while to get our heads round - until Dick suggested it was "face" as in "confront" rather than "look at".

"Catch the rising wind" was clearly connected to the brass door, which was cast with four identical faces, their lips pursed in a blowing fashion (see picture above).

Using my lighter I detected a breeze from the left mouth and the bottom one, then Dick accidentally set off a pit trap when he probed one of the orifices with a rolled-up leaf. Thankfully, the only thing bruised was his dignity. 

After a lot of mental gymnastics, together with our vast selection of skills and feats, we eventually cracked the code and Freya had to suffer the minor embarrassment of putting her lips to one of the mouths and inhaling until there was an audible click and the door dropped down into the ground.

Beyond the vast bronze door was a flight of stairs heading down under the temple. As it was the only way we could go, we descended.

We quickly realised that the wall-mounted crystals were emitting light, some even set in small brass cages that we could lift off the wall and use as torches.

The further we went, we noticed a panorama of bas-reliefs on one side were telling a story: a boy finds a trident in the sea that grants him magical powers; he attracts a following, but as he older he gets corrupted by the enormous power; his followers rebel against him; the rebels kill the prophet and take the glowing trident to the temple; unfortunately calamity strikes and the temple is attacked by giant tentacles.

If this was a true record of the fate of Atlantis, we were very impressed that someone was so dedicated to their work that they stayed on to record the destruction of the city in stone as it fell down around them!

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, so that we were now at sea level, we found ourselves in an enormous cavern, bisected by a bottomless chasm, and crossed by a single stone bridge - that was adorned by three pairs of armed mermen statues.

The pathway across bridge itself (pictured right) was decorated with a panoply of star-shaped crystals, small, medium and large.

Buck thought he'd understood the "follow the lesser stars" clue, but treading on one of the small stars just woke the nearest merman statue. It swivelled round on its plinth to face Buck and tried to jab him.

Eventually, after another lengthy discussion, Buck and Freya were able to figure out what the patterns were (again drawing on their particular fields of knowledge).

Buck was then tasked with guiding his two companions across the cunning trap.

This was very tense [a LOT of dice rolling for me, with my colleagues' lives in my hands], but eventually everyone made it across - although I did stumble at the last moment and had to be pulled to safety by Dick and Freya.

On the far side of the bridge we realised there were no more crystals, but as we continued down the slope it actually began to get lighter.

Soon we entered a partially-flooded amphitheatre. We were just admiring the clear sparkling water when a massive explosion filled the room with dust and debris.

Emerging from the haze came a unit of Nazi soldiers (about 10 at a quick estimate), just as an altar rose up in the middle of the flooded stage - bearing on it a strangely familiar trident.

However, things escalated rapidly, for behind the soldiers came our nemesis, Professor Kasper Wieloch, no longer dressed in his military uniform but wearing arcane robes instead. 

Framing our vision of this vile man, the horrific tentacles from earlier were flailing around... presumably under his control!!!

It's not looking good for our heroes!

TO BE CONTINUED...

CAST:

• Buck Hannigan - Me
• Freya Larson - Clare
• Dick Tate - Kevin
• Onyx Jones - NPC*

DIRECTOR:

• Pete

*Unfortunately it appears that Mark will be unable to join us for the foreseeable future. We all wish him the best and look forward to his return to our table as soon as possible.

Buck & Dick (top) and Onyx & Freya (bottom)

If you want to keep abreast of the action in our current season of Pete's Weird Science campaign (currently using the OUTGUNNED ADVENTURES system from Two Little Mice)
then visit this page to find links to all our previous episodes.

Okay, So Chat GPT Definitely Helped Me Here

I'm currently on a bit of a Greek myth kick when it comes to roleplayng games - inspired way more by Stephen Fry's quadrilogy of classy rewrites (Mythos, Heroes, Troy, and Odyssey) than Christopher Nolan's forthcoming movie.

For years, I've had this little itch at the back of my brain about a game that Gublin and I played a few times waaaaaay back in the 1980's, geared specifically towards roleplaying in the Greek myths.

But, for the life of me, I just could never remember anything else important about it. It was definitely Gublin's book, which explains why it wasn't so rooted in my memory, but I was sure it used cards and had an orange cover.

I know I cast some shade in the direction of AI the other day, but, eventually, I bit the bullet and fed what little I could recall into Chat GPT.

After about a half-a-dozen additional questions and clarifications (no, not a board game, video game etc) and wading through a lot of wild inaccuracies from my AI "assistant|", it finally directed me to Odysseus: Role Play For The Homeric Age.

Light bulb moment!

Written by Marshall T Rose, the game was published as a 32-page book, with cardstock inserts, in 1980 by Fantasy Games Unlimited (who, of course, also originally published Villains & Vigilantes which I would go on to play much, much more).

As soon as I saw the cover (pictured above), I knew I had found another - very small - part of my childhood.

I was also then able to find pictures of combat cards and ship deck plans that came with the game.

I've set-up an eBay search alert for the game, despite reading reviews that generally range from scathing to lukewarm. From what I've seen and read now, Odysseus appears to be an uncomfortable hybrid of clunky wargames rules (that that period was known for) and roleplaying aspirations, without much in the way of support.

No doubt this contributed to our games back in the day never finding their sea legs and becoming any sort of long-running campaign. At that time very little could compete with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in our eyes.

I suspect that even if I can get my hands on a reasonably priced copy of Odysseus: Role Play For The Homeric Age it would be more for the nostalgia than as a potential game for the Tuesday Knights.

One of the deck plans - printed on cardstock - included in the game

The Plot That Got Away From Me

A tunnel of light carried Marigold away from her dying world... but where to?

When my friend Simon stumbled across his old copy of the Heroes & Other Worlds rulebook and posted online about how it brought back fond memories of the campaign I'd run for the Tuesday Knights back in 2014-2016, it got me thinking about that campaign again.

Rereading some of my old write-ups reminded me of the "great plan" I had hatched to tie the apocalyptic ending of that campaign into the next one I was kicking around at that time: a contemporary superhero campaign set in Knight City.

With that game faltering and my realisation that I'm not really a good "superhero" gamesmaster, I might as well share the "big idea" I had for linking our old fantasy game - The Chronicles of Cidri - to Knight City.

The HOW game ended... with the end of the world (the planet Cidri - an alternate Earth - was transformed into a Hellworld by the ancient god known as The Yellow King).

Only one member of Cobblethwaite's Companions (the player-character's party), Marigold Weaver (Clare's character), escaped Cidri's transformation, thanks to a mystical portal the heroes had opened during their final stand.

Marigold Weaver

But that was not the end of the character. I'd decided that she had materialised out the other side of the portal on the world of Knight City, and had taken a job as a fortune teller in the city.

In my write-ups of the HOW campaign, I had "cast" the various player-characters using pictures from TV shows, films etc and trainee sorceress Marigold was represented by Renée O'Connor aka Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Posing as Madame Gold, in Knight City, she set up business in the middle-class to low upper-class residential borough of Fairlight.

Her write-up on the Knight City campaign guide/blog at the time was:

"Psychic to the stars - by appointment only. Generally considered a fraud by most people, Mary Gold is still treated with a great degree of respect by the residents of this borough. She is also one of the few people known to associate with Salem Saberhagen, the mysterious resident of the nearby Saberhagen Mansion."

Madame Gold

There was even a picture (left) to go with the entry, of Renée O'Connor put through a "fortune teller" filter on the Photofunia picture editor.

The "great plan" was then, at some point in the campaign, the new characters the Tuesday Knights would have been playing (ie. superheroes) would contact, or be contacted by, Madame Gold.

She would then warn them of the impending arrival of an apocalyptic Hellplanet (ie. the transformed Cidri, being 'piloted' by the Yellow King) in our solar system.

Part of her prophecy to avert disaster would involve tracking down a collection of "sleeping" heroes and "awakening" them.

These "sleeping heroes" would be the reincarnations of the Tuesday Knights' characters that had died at the end of The Chronicles of Cidri campaign (still with me?)

I had recast all the actors who had been used to represent the fantasy characters in the first campaign as random people in the world of Knight City, totally unaware of their "previous lives".

I'd thought it might have been quite cool if the player's superheroes had somehow come into - innocent, casual - contact with one or two of these people prior to their pivotal meeting with Madame Gold.

Anyway, that was about as far as I had gotten, as I'd planned to firm up details to fit the Knight City campaign as it developed... only it never did.

And my "great plan" never saw the light of day.

But I'm still rather pleased with it.

NB. Some of this multiversal mayhem did, eventually, manifest itself at our table, during Simon's epic 5e Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft campaign (2018 - 2021).

During Lockdown, Meredith, our occasional Antipodean player, returned for a spell (thanks to the magic of Zoom), playing her rogue, Imogen, from the HOW game, who'd stepped out of the legendary mists of Ravenloft to aid our party. 

I seem to recall there was mutterings that she might be a trans-dimensional agent of one of the facets of Baba Yaga, who also appeared (in some guise) in both the worlds of Cidri and Ravenloft.

More Blood and Souls For My Lord Arioch!

Michael Moorcock's Elric may not have been my (post-Tolkien) introduction to the sword-and-sorcery genre (that honour rests with Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser), it was Moorcock's work that truly shaped my taste in reading.

I haven't read any Leiber in an age, but I often revisit the twisted, hallucinogenic, weird fantasy adventures of Elric of Melniboné and The Young Kingdoms.

There's something about the succinctness of Moorcock's early tales of Elric and his soul-devouring sword Stormbringer that I've always found more enchanting than the doorstop tomes so prevalent today.

It was after years of reading Moorcock that I instituted my "Moorcock Rule" (more of a guideline)  that stated that a book REALLY had to work hard to justify itself if it ran longer than 150-200 pages. 

That said, I've never used the Young Kingdoms - nor any of the trappings of Elric's adventures (even Stormbringer, itself) - in my own roleplaying games. 

I don't own a copy of Chaosium's Stormbringer/Elric of Melniboné RPGs (1981 - 2010). I've looked into it in the last couple of decades but those books generally command silly money on the secondary market.

However, in recent weeks, both Goodman Games and Free League have announced they will be releasing games based on this IP next year (after crowdfunding campaigns).

Goodman Games is planning two different iterations: one using Dungeons & Dragons 5e and one using Dungeon Crawl Classics. While I feel the latter system is probably more suited to emulating the demon-fuelled magic of Elric's world, neither of these systems really tickle my fancy at the moment.

However, my interest is well-and-truly piqued by Free League's offering, Legends of Stormbringer, which will run on the Dragonbane engine. 

I know I keep saying I'm out of the buying new games side of the hobby, but to quote Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III:

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

Dragonbane isn't a game I'm particularly familiar with, except from second hand accounts which are a generally overwhelmingly positive... with a few minor niggles about some of the mechanics.

A translated version of Drakar och Demoner, a game system played in Scandinavia since 1982, Dragonbane's definitely been at the top of my "must check out the starter set" list since it was first released in English in 2023.

This recent announcement might be the nudge I "needed" to pull the trigger on yet another game that I may - or may not - run for the Tuesday Knights.

You can read about Free League's forthcoming Stormbringer offering (and a bit about Dragonbane) here.

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.

Twilight Sword On Track To Ship End Of July

Today's livestream by theTwilight Sword authors

It sounds as though Twilight Sword is still on track to ship at the end of July.

In the latest email update for backers of the crowdfunding campaign for the anime and video game-inspired fantasy RPG from games' publisher Two Little Mice, it was stated that:

"Currently we're wrapping up the Starter Set, which should be ready in a couple of weeks. Soon after we'll go back to finishing Lands of Radia, which will be released around the end of May.

"Once the books are ready and typo-free, we'll send you all the Cards, Maps, Sheets, and the rest of the digital aids. We'll make another update next month to give you additional information about the soundtrack, the Alchemy Module, the Solo Mode, and the 3rd Party License."

Although there was little to add at this stage, in today's livestream by the games' authors, Riccardo “Rico” Sirignano and Simone Formicola, they stressed how proud they were of this game and how different it was to their other products, both in design and appearance.

As well as reiterating the planned shipping schedule for Twilight Sword, Rico and Simone added that they were still in the last round of playtests, which would allow them to work further on - for instance - balancing the monsters, but emphasised that the game was "mostly" finished.

Kokkoros! Art by Daniela Giubellini

A pleasant surprise in this week's email update was the inclusion of a link for backers to the 202-page beta PDF of the core rulebook for Twilight Sword.

While this is nowhere near a finished product, it is very advanced and eminently readable.

That said, I very much doubt I'll be posting a full review of the game until I have the hard copy in hand.

Not only is this beta release not the final iteration of the game, but also I'm no fan of reading massive PDF files on my laptop.

At first perusal though, the mechanics of Twilight Sword appear delightfully simple, but with a vast amount of applications, specific effects and modifiers.

I suspect it's a system that's easy to grasp initially, but then will take a good length of time - and actual play - to really grasp all its nuances.

There are definitely some idiosyncrasies and foibles of the setting and system that I'm going to have to put my thinking head on for if I'm going to run Twilight Sword for the Tuesday Knights (which is the intention).

I am, however, convinced that once the physical game has arrived - along with all the extras I invested in through Backerkit - and I've been able to study it all carefully and see how the various elements interact, it'll all fall into place (fingers crossed).

Casting spells, art by Daniela Giubellini

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.