Biblyon Broadsides

Gods & Monsters news and old-school gaming notes.

Gods & Monsters Fantasy Role-Playing

Beyond here lie dragons
Biblyon, Highland
Wednesday, March 16, 1994
Jerry Stratton, Ed.
A Kolchak Christmas at North Texas 2023—Tuesday, February 28th, 2023
Carl Kolchak: Kolchak, holding a microphone and his signature portable tape recorder in Las Vegas.; Kolchak: The Night Stalker; Darren McGavin

They say the only perfect murder is the random murder. It’s the Christmas season in Chicago, and police are certainly stymied by the seemingly random killings the press has dubbed “The Christmas Murders”. Will Kolchak and his loose band of night stalkers solve the mystery? Choose a pregen from many of the guest stars who appeared on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series.

I’ll be cracking open Daredevils again for The North Texas RPG Con in 2023. This year’s adventure is “The Wrong Goodbye” and takes place over Christmas of 1976. It’s currently scheduled for Saturday morning at nine.

Here’s the TV Guide version:

Carl Kolchak and guest stars investigate Chicago’s 1976 Christmas murders.

All the old favorite guest stars and regulars will be available. Kolchak himself, of course, and if you’ve ever felt like letting loose a barrage of abuse at an abusive reporter who can’t understand why nobody believes him, Tony Vincenzo is also available.

A lot of the fun with a game like this is roleplaying the television roles: Vincenzo, or Pepe Torres, or Paula Griffin, or Kolchak himself. The Kolchak television series is often rerun by oldies television stations. In my area it’s currently running on MeTV. It looks like you can also stream it free on NBC. The two movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler are harder to find.

Here are the current pregens:

How fast did early D&Ders advance their characters?—Monday, January 23rd, 2023

“There are a few semi-secondary sources that give estimates for advancement rates—and it’s rather remarkable how widely they differ. This is even though they all date from a time post-OD&D-Supplement-I, when in they’re all using basically the same monster XP chart and treasure tables.”

Basic D&D

When I wrote Experience and Advancement in Role-Playing Games, I focused on the mechanical elements of character advancement. That says nothing about the player perspective of how characters advance.

In his latest blog post, Delta collects three statements—two from actual rulebooks—about how quickly Gygax, Holmes, and Moldvay each expected players to see their characters go up in level. Advancement from first to second level, for example, varies between 2-½ adventures (Moldvay) to 9 adventures (Holmes). That’s a pretty big difference.

These differences will reflect more than just a difference in each writer’s vision of how quickly players should see their characters advance. They’re going to reflect different visions about all sorts of aspects of early gaming culture: how often players gamed, how long each session took, even what the definition of an adventure was vs. what a session was!

Critical (fantasy) race theory—Wednesday, April 20th, 2022
Talk about Critical Race Theory: Evil wizard: Let’s talk about your racism…; sorcerors; wizards, magic-users; memes; racial hatred; critical race theory

I created this blog specifically to segregate my political and other (currently, vintage food and vintage computer) blogging from my game blogging. Sadly, some very egregious politics has been blundering around in gaming over the last several years and it’s starting to come to a head. I’m crossposting this on my main blog because it’s as much about the resurgence of virulent racism as it is about gaming.

One of the things that has always interested me and seems never to be explored in games is how having real, definite races of people would affect the imaginary differences we’ve made up in the real world. It seems as though having truly different fantasy races ought to make it obvious how ridiculous man’s tribal hatreds are today. The same ought to be true of the discovery of truly alien races.1

I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently Shadowrun 2E handles inter-human racism the same way I do in Highland: the new creatures are so obviously different that humans in these worlds no longer view each other as different. Inter-human racism is gone. In Highland, there’s the added change that the cataclysm jumbled up cultures so drastically that cultures are no longer associated with skin color.

In reality, I suspect that this is wishful thinking. It is easy to be disappointed by the resilience of such racism in the real world, and it’s hard to say that it would not remain resilient even in worlds like that of D&D or Shadowrun. When self-described anti-racists make claims that are right at home among slavers, it’s difficult to be optimistic about any impending end of racism.

This is especially true when people complain about it being “racist” to name a player character’s fantasy race. There has long been a weirdly racist attempt to analogize human races to fantasy races. But in games such as Dungeons and Dragons where the rules of the game make it abundantly clear that fantasy races really are superior and inferior in various ways, this conflation of real-world and fantasy is blatantly racist. Players and pundits who make this equivalence are accepting the racist belief that some human races are superior and some are inferior.

Kolchak is back, baby! At North Texas 2022—Sunday, March 27th, 2022
Carl Kolchak: Kolchak, holding a microphone and his signature portable tape recorder in Las Vegas.; Kolchak: The Night Stalker; Darren McGavin

“Now, here, are the true facts.”

It’s the fall semester at Illinois State Technical College. Carl Kolchak and his loose band of night stalkers investigate strange happenings as the school’s sports team breaks record after record. Choose a pregen from many of the guest stars who appeared on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series.

I’ll be cracking open Daredevils again for The North Texas RPG Con on Thursday morning of 2022’s convention. This year’s adventure is “The Big Creep” and takes place at Illinois State Technical College in the fall semester of 1976.

Sign up is live starting Friday evening, April 15, at 8PM Texas time! Note that it currently says the game uses the “RPG” rules. That’s because Tabletop Events doesn’t have Daredevils in their system yet.1

Here’s the TV Guide version:

Carl Kolchak and guest stars investigate strange happenings at Illinois State Technical College.

If you’re a Kolchak fan you may remember ISTC from the Demon in Lace episode. Both student journalist Rosalind Winters (“You hear about that kind of thing all the time. There’s probably a hundred of those tablets around.”) and Professor of Archaeology Dr. C. Evan Spate (“It seems to be some sort of religious rite, or maybe even a form of recipe.”) will be available as pregens.

As well, of course, as all the old favorite guest stars and regulars. Kolchak himself is available, and if you’ve ever felt like letting loose a barrage of abuse at an abusive reporter who can’t understand why nobody believes him, Tony Vincenzo is also available.

Blackhawk: Blitzkrieg at North Texas RPG Con—Saturday, March 28th, 2020
Blackhawk (DC Heroes): Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk X-F5F Skyrocket sketch from the DC Heroes RPG adventure Blitzkrieg.; DC Heroes; Howard Chaykin

Update April 13: signup is now live.

If you’ve ever wanted to play DC Heroes, or play in DC Comics’s World War II setting, I’ll be running a Blackhawk game at North Texas on Thursday, June 4.

They are the subject of legend, the Blackhawk Squadron… a heroic group of fighter aces sworn to protect the Allied nations against the insidious Axis powers.

Now, the Squadron must penetrate Nazi-occupied territory for a crucial rescue and reconnaissance mission. The outcome of World War II hangs in the balance as the Blackhawks struggle against time to rescue American prisoners-of-war from a German factory… and discover what mad weapon the factory produces.

DC Heroes is an easy game to play. A little more difficult to run, but I’ll be handling that end of things. There is little in the way of powers among these characters, of course, as they’re all human pilots. Characters such as Stanislaus and Weng, and to a lesser extent Hendy, stray into superhero-level attributes or skills, but they’re still standard human skills, just amped up.

Of course the Blackhawks often face Nazi super-science—from the war wheel to flying tanks, to giant mechanical insects. But they defeat it with genuine human ingenuity, the killer instinct, as historian Victor Davis Hanson might say, of free men in the defense of liberty. What Epaminondas did to the Spartans, and Sherman to the Confederacy, Blackhawk and his pilots do to Nazi Germany: penetrate its tough outer shell to expose the weakness inherent in any slave society, any society that denies free speech and free expression.

Which is a lot deeper than this adventure gets, fortunately. There will be fist fights, gun fights, and, if you play your hand right, an aerial duel against an unbeatable and deadly foe.

First Level Magic-Users are Useless—Thursday, January 16th, 2020

“That betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how early editions of the game are played. Basic, 1E, and to some extent 2E emphasized the problem-solving skills of the player, over the in-game-power skills of the character.”

Believing that once a character’s special abilities on the character sheet are done, there’s nothing left to do, is a very modern attitude and ultimately alien to the original aesthetic of the game. — Greyhawk Grognard (First Level Magic-Users are Useless)

Great tips for game masters—Thursday, January 9th, 2020

“… if there are no stakes, then there’s no real victory… The best campaigns are based on the players interacting with the environment, and if they have no real choice, then there’s no real interaction.”

These are great tips for any game master, not just Dungeon Masters. Regarding the first tip, “don’t fudge”, I’ve long come to the point where I prefer not to use a shield to hide die rolls. It’s both a lot harder to fudge die rolls when the players know what they were, and it’s a lot more exciting to see how close the monster came to succeeding or failing.

House on Crane Hill at North Texas 2019—Wednesday, February 13th, 2019
Belle Grove through cypress: Belle Grove Plantation in Louisiana, seen through cypress branches.; haunted houses; House on Crane Hill; Belle Grove Plantation

The sky is grey toward the sea. The water beats steadily against the high grass, and a low mist rolls across the waves toward you.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

Recently, you have each been contacted by Dr. Jean deMontagne, some of you directly, some of you after a friend recommended you, to take a seaside vacation at Delarosa Manor, which the locals call Crane House, forty miles up the coast from Crosspoint between King’s Head and Jackson Village. You should set out on Monday, November 2, and thus arrive on November 3 or 4.

This is a working vacation. Dr. deMontagne asks that you search the house for a small, brass coffer once owned by Louis Merrikitt and marked with two strange symbols. He offers you ten shillings each to compensate you for that small task, and he offers another hundred for the coffer, should you find it. He tells you that the manor is yours for the month of November as you wish, although the actual task should take no more than a day or two.

House on Crane Hill is a haunted house adventure inspired not just by Shirley Jackson’s amazing story but also by her many imitators1, some good, some bad, and some horrorble. I have been fascinated by haunted house stories ever since I read the Hell House rip-off in Werewolf by Night back in the seventies—a comic I still read from time to time. These stories don’t just hint at a fundamental weakness in reality. They shove it down our throats. It took a long time for me to get around to reading the source for them all, but once I read The Haunting of Hill House I was hooked on Shirley Jackson, too.

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