19th Level

The past few months and years have been busy and I'm finally starting to see things loosening up. I've completed my last graduate class and endured a mercifully brief bout of unemployment. I'm at the point of feeling able to actually plan out a bit more ambitious game. Most of my thoughts are in the Chaosium-family of games. The most likely is probably a continuation of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu  game, which began at the end of World War I and has reached mid-1921. I've some of the original players but, as is typical for Call of Cthulhu , none of the original characters are active. One is still around but after sanity and luck-blasting adventures, has retired from active adventuring. I've toyed with a global-spanning campaign like Masks of Nyarlathotep  but find myself thinking a lot about focusing the game on Boston - certainly with forays into the wider world as appropriate. Frustrated with the lack of an official Boston supplement for Call of Cthulhu ,...

Today's game just barely meets the criteria of being a game I've played, having only played a few sessions - but I loved those sessions.  King Arthur Pendragon , originally published by Chaosium (and kinda sorta having found its way back to Chaosium, the long way round). Pendragon  is a game about playing knights in legendary England, as seen through the legends of King Arthur. Its biggest influence is Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. You typically build your character, assumed to be a knight, by first building his grandfather's and then father's history. The game itself is designed to follow your characters for decades - indeed it is expected your character will die in the course of play, either in battle or through old age. Every session is designed to advance your character a year. Finding a wife and getting an heir is therefore of prime importance for your character. Pendragon uses a variant of the BRP system as seen in RuneQuest  and Call of C...

As a fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, I'd love to see an RPG published that captures this series. There's a few Age of Fighting Sail RPGs out there, but I haven't yet found the "perfect" one. I'd want something that captures the feel of life at land and at sea, the social aspects of the era, and provides for exciting ship combats. It would need to manage the advancement of characters while also having a way to keep a group together. It would need to handle the passage of years, though for gaming purposes I'd be fine with it also making the year 1813 last as long as it needed to, much as Patrick O'Brian did. And it would need to appeal to people who aren't perhaps a tad obsessed with the genre. I keep thinking that Pendragon  could be reskinned for this purpose. A game that expects a campaign of many game years. Perhaps living long enough to see your son take your place might be a bit much, even with a long 1813, but one ...

Most RPGs have aging tables, typically for long campaigns, where a character's ability scores over time. Often there's a bit of a balancing act where older characters tend to have more experience and influence, at the cost of diminishing ability scores. In games like Pendragon , your first character is pretty much doomed to die - even if he survives every battle, the length of a Pendragon campaign spans multiple generations. One of your first goals in Pendragon is to have a son and heir who will take over upon the death or retirement of your first character. I've had a few rude surprises over the past few years as I've entered my mid-40s. As my optometrist predicted a few years back, my improving distance vision was not a good sign but rather one that my near vision would begin declining. I'd reached the point where I'd find myself removing my glasses to read really small print. I'm now wearing progressive eyeglasses which improve my reading visio...

You have read that Muad’Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The dangers were too great. But Muad’Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Gurney’s songs as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and—of course—the Duke Leto, whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked.  Dune  by Frank Herbert Right now I've got a decent Icons game going and with the summer semester at Brandeis having kicked off I'm likely safe from jumping into a new campaign for at least a little while. But I do have time to think about possible campaigns. With the new season of Game of Thrones on I've been thi...

A few days ago I'd mentioned how my perfect game would be some variation of Pendragon, adapted for a setting I preferred over Arthurian. When I wrote that I was thinking how very much I'd love to see some variant of Pendragon used for playing in the setting of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The passions and traits rules are perfect for modeling the interesting yet flawed characters of the setting - Ned Stark's stubborn honesty, Tyrion's inability to keep his mouth shut, etc. Moreover the system for large-scale battles, managing houses, etc. would fit the setting very well. I'd also not throw out Green Ronin's effort in their Song of Ice and Fire RPG. The house creation rules are very appropriate to their setting, with the possibility that all characters are part of the same house as opposed to Pendragon's default assumption of each character being a landed knight.