The Biblyon Broadsheet

In a recent blog post about the problem of roleplaying games becoming more like video games, James Maliszewski wrote:

Tabletop RPGs aren’t about reaching 10th level. They’re about entering and exploring an imaginary world through an equally imaginary character. What matters isn’t how many hit points your fighter has, but what you do with them. Success might mean founding a colony, retiring in disgrace, making a terrible bargain with an otherworldly power, or changing the course of an empire. These are the kinds of outcomes that emerge from choices, consequences, and collaboration with the referee and other players, not from ticking boxes on a character sheet. Advancement in a tabletop RPG is ultimately about meaning, not math.

He contrasted this sort of “mechanical advancement” with games that don’t use levels, such as…

…Call of Cthulhu, where the main arc of a character’s life isn’t defined by rising power but by gradual decline—into madness, death, or at best, retirement from delving into the Mythos. He might get better at Library Use or Spot Hidden, but he’ll never become an investigator resistant, never mind immune, to cosmic horror. That’s not the point of the game. Even RuneQuest, though it includes skill advancement through use, eschews levels entirely. A seasoned Gloranthan character is still vulnerable, still mortal.

And finally ends with:

These are the kinds of outcomes that emerge from choices, consequences, and collaboration with the referee and other players, not from ticking boxes on a character sheet. Advancement in a tabletop RPG is ultimately about meaning, not math.

It’s almost an Emily Litella moment. James’s post completely misses one of the biggest advantages of level-based systems: that they aren’t about “ticking boxes on a character sheet”. Most non-level based systems, especially his examples of Runequest and Call of Cthulhu¹, handle character advancement by literally ticking boxes.

“It was the Ides of March, and a woman was the author of the deed—or was she? It was a classic locked room mystery. The doors were sealed and a man was dead… witnesses claimed to see a woman walking away just after the murder… beyond the window of the fourteenth floor. The events of March 15, 1977, were impossible. Impossible, and yet, they happened.”

Yes, Kolchak will be back in North Texas in 2025. The convention runs from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8. I’ll be running Kolchak: The Tall Sister on Saturday morning at nine. It’s a four-hour session as normal. Signups begin March 19 at 8 PM Texas time. Half of the slots will be reserved for free signups, which start April 15.

I’ll have pregenerated characters for all of the familiar Kolchak guest stars, as well as Kolchak and the other office staff at International News Service.

We never really got to see just how International they were. They seemed to be mostly the New York News Service, with a tiny branch in Chicago. Kolchak, however, was very international. His horrors came from Mexico, Peru, Greece, Eastern Europe, Mesopotamia, India, and even London! As well as above and below the world of mortal man.

We will continue to use the Daredevils RPG rules for the game. It’s fairly simple. I’ll explain it of course at the game, but basically you have abilities and you roll d20 against them. The only complicated bit is that abilities are rated on a 1-100 scale; if, during the course of the game, your score hits a zero or a five, your score for rolling against increases by 1. That is, if you have an Anthropology of 54, you’ll be rolling d20 against 10. If you increase it to 55, then you’ll be rolling against 11.

Skills potentially increase if you make a successful roll against them and it materially helps the party. It’s based on the talent that skill falls under. Anthropology is a Scientific talent. So, for example, Dr. C. Evan Spate has an Anthropology of 54 and a Scientific Talent of 10. When he makes an Anthropology roll that materially helps the party, the player can roll d20 against Dr. Spate’s Scientific Talent of 10. If the player rolls 10 or less, Dr. Spate’s Anthropology is now 55.

This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.

The Guardian of Forever. Mirror Universe Trek. The Golden Age of Piracy. The Imperium’s research into the Guardian has destroyed the Enterprise and the Imperium. Righting the timeline requires braving the high seas and… flashing blades!

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be running Flashing Blades again at North Texas this year. The North Texas RPG Con will be from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8. I’ll be running Flashing Blades: l’Entreprenante l’Entreprenante on the Wednesday before, June 4, during their pre-con-get-it-on. It worked well last year; Flashing Blades is a different kind of rpg and makes for a great con start. Sign up here starting March 19, 8 PM Texas time. Note that half of the slots will be reserved for free signups, which begin April 15.

Flashing Blades is a semi-adversarial game. It’s adversarial in the same way that the Musketeers and the Guards were: they enjoyed swashbuckling against each other, and were overjoyed to have such wonderful opponents to test their mettle against.

The basic idea in this year’s adventure is that half of the players will play 1705 Naval officers, and half will play Mirror Universe Trek officers. Potentially, the Star Trek officers will duel each other as often or more often than they duel anyone else! That, however, is entirely up to you.

I’ll be playing fast and loose with the Trek side. I’m an original series fan and, to a lesser extent, an animated series fan. That means that pretty much everything about the Guardian of Forever I’ll have taken from The City on the Edge of Forever and Yesteryear. And pretty much everything about the Mirror Universe I’ll have taken from Mirror, Mirror.

I know there’s a lot of post-original series expansion of the Mirror Universe. I know nothing of it other than things picked up second or third hand from other fans. The Mirror Universe is the evil goateed reflection of the Federation universe. The characters from it are characters that have been immersed in that evil. Some have accepted it, some haven’t, but all have chosen to live with it—they are, after all, still alive.

I can remember seeing the Flashing Blades ad in Dragon back in the day and being fascinated by it. Two fencers angrily crossing swords in 17th century dress, it was such a cool illustration, especially for a Three Musketeers fan. But I never bought mail order at the time, and never ran across the game in person. I was reminded of Flashing Blades recently while visiting the Fantasy Games Unlimited web site for Daredevils information, which they also publish, and decided to try it out.

It’s the same price it was in 1984, albeit no longer as a boxed set.

I ended up running a session of it at the North Texas RPG Con, and it turned out to be even more fun than I expected it to be. I ran The Grand Theater from Parisian Adventure pretty much straight. While there is technically a reason for the characters to be there and a thing for them to find, it’s all really an excuse to get into duels with each other. It’s a great adventure for a convention one-shot.

Because it also contains some new items, a more detailed guide to Paris, and ideas for a sandbox campaign, I recommend Parisian Adventure as an essential supplement to Flashing Blades.

The hardest part of both times I’ve run The Grand Theater is that modern players don’t like to attack each other. They weren’t initially willing to get into duels with fellow players, despite that being upfront in the description of the session. Once one person broke the ice, however, it became a lot easier for others to join in the fun.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a gaming food post. Since I just published A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book a month ago, this seems like a perfect time to remedy that and pimp my book at the same time. The kinds of dishes that are good for making while traveling turn out to be a lot like the kinds of dishes that are good for making to bring to a game.

We alternate between two houses, and we precede each game with dinner. The person who hosts the game usually makes the main dish, and everyone else brings the salad, or the vegetable, or the sweet, or a drink, or the plastic and paper tableware. It’s basically a pot-luck. And so traditional pot-luck dishes are a great choice for game night.

Today, I’m going to present a great bean salad/baked bean hybrid, a slow cooked rice and ground beef, Texas-style cola spare ribs, and a hearty rosemary soda bread that would go well with any of them.

Along the way, I’m going to highlight recipes that are both in the book and that I have brought to game night. I won’t reproduce those recipes here because the PDF and ePub versions of A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book are free to download. Only the print version costs money, and not much.

Besides our general game-night meals, we usually celebrate themed meals four times a year: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and St. Patrick’s Day. Other holidays might get thrown in if game night literally coincides with it, but those are the Big Four holidays we’ve done every year so far.

St. Patrick’s Day is my favorite, and it’s not just because of the green-tinted mashed potatoes our Dungeon Master always brings! One of my favorite quick breads is Irish soda bread. I’ve made several variations. The basic Irish soda bread in the book is probably still my favorite, but some of the others are a tasty variations.

I’ve run several Daredevil games at North Texas using Kolchak: The Night Stalker characters. Jack “Bones” Burton has always been one of the player characters, and he has always been played by Scott Hammonds. Scott noticed the same thing I did about the Kolchak series’s high school anthropology teacher: his background looked a lot like his later namesake, Jack “It’s all in the reflexes” Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. The biology teacher’s dream was travel. He hated working at a high school. He may have slightly—just a little—overestimated his standing in the world. Add in a little military background—in Vietnam before the United States left after the 1973 Peace Accords—and a big mouth, and why not put the two together?

Scott Hammonds himself may have shared a little background with the the two fictional Jacks:

Scott was a Navy veteran, stationed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from 1982 to 1986. He served aboard the USS America as an aviation electronic technician, where he learned the skills that brought him a long and illustrious civilian career in tech and hardware engineering.

If that reads like an obituary, it’s because Jerry Scott Hammonds died on August 4, 2023. Until this year, Scott had been in every Kolchak adventure I’ve run at the North Texas RPG Convention, as well as the only DC Heroes game I’ve run, a Blackhawk game in 2020.

After NTRPGC 2023, he wrote in praise of the games he played, including:

Game 5. KOLCHAK the Wrong Goodbye. Old school Kolchak the TV series game world. Jerold Stratton has run this Kolchak before and I’ve had a blast each time. This was no exception everybody had fun and running relatable TV characters got everyone into character… especially Stephen who ran Miss Emily!!! Kolchak was run well too. Looking forward to next year.

UFO magazines from the seventies and very early eighties are a treasure trove of Kolchak adventure ideas. This isn’t surprising, since Kolchak is set in the mid-seventies and Kolchak’s peculiar logic is very similar to the peculiar logic of paranormal “researchers” of the era. It’s very often conclusion first, data second.

The idea for The Wrong Goodbye (PDF File, 2.3 MB) came from an article in the April, 1980 issue of Beyond Reality about Russian psychic research.

Top Soviet scientists maintain they are well on their way to telepathic communication with cosmonauts in deep space. They warned that if their country masters that art of direct mind-to-mind communication, they could use it for military purposes. Soviet scientific researchers carried out top secret experiments for a two-year period between 1975 and 1977 in which electrodes were placed on the brains of freshly killed rats. The rodents’ brain activity was then recorded. This activity was stimulated when a psychic projected thoughts at the dead animals.

I don’t see how you can read that second paragraph and assume it’s about the first paragraph. If Soviet psychics were stimulating the brains of dead rats that’s a lot more sinister than talking to orbiting astronauts.

Given its already strange implications, I used the article mostly verbatim. All I did was drop the years by two to make the events fit the 1976 year of the adventure. I’m running these annual adventures sequentially so that the repeat characters in the game can reference previous adventures. I’m running them a year or so after the events of the series so that players can reference the series.

I ran this adventure at the 2023 North Texas RPG Convention. It’s mostly a skeleton, but a detailed one. This is the first Daredevils adventure that I made from scratch. The others came from Fantasy Game Unlimited’s adventure compilations. I used the first one, The Body Vanishes almost verbatim, with only a minor reskin to move it to Chicago, update it to 1976, and replace the NPCs with Kolchak’s contacts. The second, The Powers of Dr. Remoux I heavily modified, to the point where all I was using was the basic idea and framework. That basic idea was further influenced by an article in another UFO magazine, and also from 1980!