Geomorph #59

Today's geomorphs features a rough-hewn series of chambers and rooms including a large temple and an attached hall. The curtain in the temple conceals another passage to the east and there is a spiral stair in the south leading up and out of the dungeon.

Real Life Dungeons: Moscow Undercity

Trey's post about Cappadocia over at From the Sorcerer's Skull got me thinking about an article I read some years back about exploring the "dungeons" beneath Moscow. I'm not talking about the old cliche of gamers exploring steam tunnels, rather I seemed to recall a tale of hard-core dungeonauts climbing through sewers, old subway tunnels, and  forgotten Stalinist strongholds while avoiding rats, drug addicts, gang members, and other denizens. Well, it turns out that the article was in Outside Magazine and can be found here.

The delvers call themselves The Diggers of the Underground Planet. The theatrical exploits described in the article give a sense of what an awesome modern dungeon fantasy game could feel like. The underground doesn't have to be a magical faerie-land like in Neverwhere, though there is no reason that it couldn't be a Mythic Underground in the old-school D&D sense. I'd love to see some creatures drawn by Erol Otus populating underground landscapes like these:

Quoting from the Outside article, here is a great thumbnail sketch of a modern megadungeon:

...as the village of Moscow grew steadily outward over the centuries, it also grew downward. Paranoid czars built subterranean bunkers, supply depots, and enormous vaults in which they stored their most treasured maps and books and jewels. In the 1580s, as he plunged into madness, Ivan the Terrible dug down hundreds of feet to construct his prized torture chamber and then, as legend has it, murdered all the laborers who had constructed it, presumably so no one would know its whereabouts. In the late 1700s, Catherine the Great hired Italy's finest architects to channel the inconveniently situated Neglina River into a vast underground network of brick-lined canals. Over time, sewer systems and subways were installed, not to mention gas lines, electric lines, telephone lines, the full latticework of modernity. The Soviets burrowed even deeper, building secret tunnels and subway tracks, KGB listening posts, and fallout shelters for the political elite, hundreds of meters below the surface.

Additional photo galleries can be found here.

Geomorph #58

Today's geomorph features a fortified entrance in the southeast corner. It's protected by a pit, drawbridge, killzone, and a couple of portcullises. Presumably, there is something worth guarding immediately to the east. Natural caverns connect the other entrance points to the tile and two passages are blocked off by rubble (possibly making for alternate ways around the fortification).

Geomorph #57

Today's geomorph features a central chamber with an extremely narrow bridge over a bottomless (or at least very deep) pit. With downward stair at all entrances to this tile, I imagine that it is at a deeper level of the dungeon.

Space Opera Systems

The next step in preparing for my Moon Soldiers Must Die! one-shot is to decide on what system I'm going to use. While I blog about Risus, it's not a foregone conclusion that I'll end up using it. Risus isn't for every player and it certainly isn't for every game (though it is good for Any Game... weird). I'm also always keen to try out new systems, or old systems that I haven't played much. Possibilities other than Risus include:

FATE
Specifically, some kind of Spirit of the Century variant. I played in a retro SF SotC adventure at a DC Game Day a few years back and it was pretty fun. Not wham-bam fun like I had hoped, but enjoyable enough. I'm sure I could whip up something even better. I've been a fan of FATE since it was just emerging from  the Fudge fan community and I think SotC is a fantastic incarnation of the rules. I love it's use of Risus-like Aspects and the cooperative character generation rules are a real hoot. For a one-shot, I'd hate to spend much time (like more than 15 minutes) on character generation and SotC details rules for filling out your character on the fly during the course of the game - rules that I think can be ported to many other game systems to great effect.  I'm also very tempted to pick up Starblazer Adventures (pictured to the right), which really seems to capture the space opera feel that I'm hoping for (at least as far as reviews, samples, and promo art are concerned). At 632 pages, though, I'm totally intimidated. Probably not the best choice for a game I'm going to run a week from tomorrow.

PDQ
An alternative to FATE and sister-system to Risus is PDQ (and it's swashbuckling cousin PDQ#). I think I've mentioned it before, but I was on a pretty big PDQ kick before I returned to Risus blogging. I love the system as it seems to marry most everything that I love about Risus character generation (Qualities/Fortes are Risus Cliches by other names) with a somewhat more traditional combat system. I say "somewhat", because (like Risus) there are no hit points and you can take "damage" to traits that have very little to do with your combat capabilities. PDQ# adds a wonderful dueling mechanic and it serves as the engine for the excellent Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. The author, Chad Underkoffler, posted some thoughts on using S7S as the basis for a space opera game on his blog and I'd love to give it a try.

Traveller
As a semi-official OSR groupie, I've been feeling the the urge to run an Old School game. Naturally, when considering the space opera genre, Traveller comes to mind. Even though I eagerly devoured the little black books back in the day, I've never actually played the game. That sin of omission of almost enough for me to try running this game using Traveller rules. Alas, I don't think it would be the best choice. If I did run a  Traveller game, I'd want to run it much more like a what I always imagined a real Traveller game would be like. That means random (and deadly) character generation and adventure trading. And since we're already doing adventure trading using Gurps Traveller rules in my Knights of the Astral Sea game). Traveller's going to have to wait just a little bit longer.

Terminal Space
If do I go "Old School" for this game then I'll be using Terminal Space, and excellent sci-fi take on the original D&D rules. What can be said about this game that hasn't already been said in various OSR raves? Albert Rakowski has done something very different and very interesting with a very old set of rules. I'm sorely tempted to test drive them in my upcoming game.

Danger Patrol
On the other end of the gaming spectrum is the completely awesome Danger Patrol, by John Harper. At the last DC Game Day, I was unfortunate enough not to have played in the Danger Patrol event. Sucks to be me because everyone was talking about it afterwords. The indie-style rules zoom in like a laser on the essence of gonzo space adventure. I really would love to play this game. I just don't know if I want to use the rules it for this game. I get the sense that running a Danger Patrol game would be all about Danger Patrol rather than about the setting/adventure that I had in mind.

So, I'm going to be looking at my options as I head into the weekend. Until I make a choice, I'll operate under the assumption that it will be Risus. Regardless of which system I choose, I'll be documenting things in Risus format for the blog.

Geomorph #56

Yes, I've already done one maze geomorph, but after seeing this Maze Maker link that was posted over at Playing D&D With Porn Stars, I had to include another one. This maze was generated using a maze height and width of 8 so that I could get the exits to line up correctly. As a result, the outer ring has a false entrance in the north and a couple of rooms in both the east and the west to fill things out.

Art As Inspiration: Space Opera

Due to scheduling disruptions with our regular group, I've got  a one-shot coming up a week from Friday. It does in fact look like I'll be running Moon Soldiers Mist Die! (or something like it).  I'm totally excited about this. Not only will I get a chance to try out a new genre (Space Opera!) but I'll finally be able to design and play-test that convention game that I've been meaning to run for years.

The first step in preparing for the game is to decide on the aesthetic. The easy choice would be to hit up the excellent and evocative work by Greg Broadmore, the man responsible for Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators.

The reason that this would be the easy choice is because the world of Dr. Grordbort's is entirely game-able in its own right. The Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory, Victory, and the website all present a self-consistent steam-punk and space opera hybrid that is perfect for a tongue-and-cheek romp through the solar system. It's a world where characters have access to over-powered technological gizmos that are only slightly more dangerous to herds of defenseless alien fauna than to the clueless imperialists wielding them.

And while the imperialists might be a little too Victorian for what I had in mind, the alien landscapes are pretty close to perfect. These are the images of Mars and Venus that I remember (or imagine that I remember) from science fiction stories of my childhood. The natives are green and have eye-stalks and the plant-life is bulbous, garishly colored, and just plain weird. 

I also love the look of the rockets ships, rayguns, and other technological doodads. It's not quite as shiny as what you might typically see in Space Opera, but it has a heavy industrial charm just the same. And the rayguns themselves are simply gorgeous (I wish I had a few hundred dollars lying around to buy one of the models for real).

Ok, maybe the easy choice is the best choice. But it still would be a shame to cut off the inspiration of the late great Al Williamson. The piece below is one of many that captures a vaguely similar but decidedly more heroic take on the genre. And perhaps that is what I'm going for? Taken as-is, the world of Dr. Grodbort's is pure comedy gold (and ripe for a Risus treatment), but I need to decide if I want to dial down the silly a notch and instead go for light-hearted and brightly colored adventure instead. 

Ok, I guess the jury is still out. If you've read this far and have any other Retro Space Opera inspirations, please let me know about them in the comments section.

Risus In Your Pocket

Shortly after the Risus Monkey went on a three year hiatus, Jeff Rients (of Jeff's Gameblog fame) created a pocket-sized version of Risus using PocketMod technology. I think I've mentioned it before, but I'm a huge fan of PocketMods. I've been meaning to put together a Risus PocketMod for some time now. Thanks to the tip from RPG Blog II, I now know that Jeff has already done the work for me. Still on the agenda: putting together other PocketMods for things like micro-dungeons and mini-settings.

Geomorph #55

After a wonderful Father's Day weekend, the wife and kids are staying up in Michigan with the grandparents for a few days while daddy gets back to work. I imagined having four solid nights of gym workouts, reading, writing, movie watching, and game preparation. Alas, work kicked my ass today and I'm totally fried. Fortunately for the blog, I find making geomorphs very soothing. Tomorrow, I totally foresee finally getting around to getting to all those cool blog posts that I've been planning while I was away. That's the plan anyway.

This tile features a nice column-lined hallway in the south and some kind of arcane, multi-level shaft just southeast of the center. The north, west, and east entrances to the chamber are balconies above the floor level.

Happy Fathers Day

Happy Fathers Day to all you gamer geek dads passing the spirit of adventure on to your children.

Geomorph #54

Work's been crazy and I'm getting ready for another brief family getaway but there's (usually) always time for a new geomorph. This one features a series of multi-level, interconnected caverns. Note the blocked passage in the southwest and the sinkhole connecting two levels in the northeast.

Geomorph #53

Today's geomorph is another attempt to make the Monkey Map less regular. All the action on this tile takes place in the corners. In the northwest there is a series of small rooms separated by arches. In the southwest is a well in the bottom of a pit in the middle of a sunken room. There is a temple in the northeast with the another secret chapel concealed behind a curtain. In the southeast is a passage with a gaping hole leading down to a cavern.

Future Imperfect

Over at the Risus Talk group, Brent Wolke has challenged himself to produce one 8-page Risus setting per month from now until the Apocalypse (or as long as he can keep it up). He's got a good start on things with his Future Imperfect setting, published on his Engine of Thwaak website. It's a brilliant piece of work featuring Robots that Inherit the Earth. It's polished, well-written, and contains very slight tweaks on the standard rules that really bring out the setting. I can't wait to see what Mr. Wolke does next.

Moon Soldiers Must Die!

 Is this the face of my next Risus game?

The above image is borrowed from Dr. Grordbort Presents Victory: Scientific Adventure Violence For Young men & Literate Women. I've been wanting to run a Retro SF Space Opera game inspired by Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators for years now. With our regular group disrupted due to summer travels, I may finally have the chance.

Google Earth is a GM's Friend

In my Knights of the Astral Sea campaign, the player characters have finally (after something like ten sessions) reached a fantasy world that I have been building for well over a year. Constructed during the heady days of the run-up to D&D 4e, I wanted a setting that would be perfect for what I had imagined 4e could become. When 4e failed to live up to my unrealistic expectations, I was still left with a lot of good material that I wanted to use at some point.

Leaving aside the history and cultural details of the world, the most interesting thing about it for me was the fact that I was going to use Google Earth for the map. While I'm quite capable of designing functional maps, I wanted something with style. Beautiful satellite images certainly fulfilled that requirement. I had also become enamored with the idea of filling in an already beautiful map with cool stuff, rather than starting with a blank slate.

After many enjoyable hours of zooming around the world, I settled on New Zealand as the local setting for the campaign (which is also where my Knights of the Astral Sea Players Characters entered the world). New Zealand has fantastic satellite coverage, a wonderful diversity of terrain, and relatively limited urban development (on the south island, at least). New Zealand also has the side benefit of being the film location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and numerous Sam Raimi television shows (making it really easy to visualize the locales).

Google Earth is more than pretty pictures. Last session, I actually ran the software on my laptop and was able to compute travel times between locations and check lines of site from altitude (useful when your characters commandeer an observation balloon). In the run-up to the game, I superimposed fantasy wilderness and town maps over appropriate real-world locations. More importantly, I used push-pins to annotate specific encounters and locations with game information which I then exported as a KMZ file. If I were even more ambitions, I could insert 3D models of castles and such using Sketchup.

Obligatory Play History Post

It seems like everybody who writes a gaming blog eventually gets around to composing some kind of play history. While the exercise of actually remembering all the games that I played was a fun nostalgia trip, I have very little interest in turning it into any kind of narrative. But in the interest of disclosure, I decided to display my play history in graphical form.

   Key

   E (Elementary School '82-'83)

   M (Middle School '83-'85)

   H (High School '85-'89)

   C (College at the University of Michigan '89-'93)

   DC/NoVa1 (DC and Northern Virginia '94-97)

   CV (Charlottesville '97-'03)

   NoVa2 (Northern Virginia '03-present)

The colors indicate what I have played (blue), run (red), or both (purple) while the intensity/darkness of a color roughly indicates the amount of play (lightest colors indicate a single session).

Obvious gaps in my play history: Traveller, Gamma World, Risus (as a player), more sessions of classic Star Wars, PDQ, and more Retro D&D clones.

Superhero Party: After Action Report

Just a brief followup to my previous post about my son's superhero birthday party...

The party went off mostly without a hitch. Well, as without a hitch as you could expect with a party full of mostly 3ish boys. I guess I should have expected it, but there is a vast difference in the development of 3-year-olds. Only about the half the kids *really* got into the choosing of powers and the Danger Room games. But those that did had a great time.

We started out with a rather chaotic session of costume creation and superhero power selection. To prepare, I was up late last selecting images for all the iconic superhero archetypes. I settled on:

• Paragon (Superman)
• Dark Avenger (Batman)
• Power Ring (Green Lantern)
• Lord of Atlantis (Aquaman)
• Speedster (Flash)
• Archer (Green Arrow)
• Scrapper (Wolverine)
• Blaster (Cyclops)
• Powerhouse (Hulk)
• Battlesuit (Iron Man)
• Web Slinger (Spiderman)
• Super Soldier (Captain America)
• Stretchy Guy (Plastic Man)
• Elementalist (Human Torch)
• Teleporter (Nightcrawler)
• Wizard (Doctor Strange) 
• Mythic Warrior (Thor)
• Science Hero (Tom Strong)
• Alien (Martian Man Hunter)
• Supergirl (for the little sister of one of the boys)

With 13 kids, not every one of these were chosen. The birthday boy ultimately selected Superman, though Iron Man was a close second. His older brother slightly surprised me by picking Green Lantern.

Anyway, once all this kids had arrived and costumed were assembled, I called the League of Superheroes to order and guided everyone to the Danger Room (the playground) where we commenced a series of mostly successful party games dressed up in superhero language. We played dodge the yoga ball, follow-the-leader through an obstacle course, hot potato (with a "kyrptonite" ball), and explode the bombs (balloons). When that was all done, we had lunch and the birthday boy disarmed the cake by blowing out the candles with his super breath (good thing he picked superman).

I never did get to the treasure hunt/mystery game. I've played such games with my own boys on numerous occasions (usually with my oldest pretending he's Indiana Jones), but most of this audience was just too young for it. Still, the party was an overwhelming success and the other parents (many of whom I was meeting for the first time) all were generous with their compliments. I suspect that there will be more parties like this in the future.

Geomorph #52

This geormorph is another attempt to mix things up by using diagonals. In case it's not obvious, the two fireplaces are linked by a secret passage or crawl-space.

Geomorph #51

I'm getting ready for my son's birthday party tonight, so it's a good thing that I had a few geomorphs queued up and ready to go. This one is an attempt to move the focus away from the center of the tile (which should help keep things asymmetrical and organic looking when it comes to the Monkey Mapper). Features include a north-south passage with a cave-in, a room in the east with two elevated statues on raised platforms, and a chamber in the northwest with a well.

Geomorph #50

While rereading Swords In The Mist on my vacation, I was delighted to discover that I had never actually finished "The Adept's Gambit" when I first read the story some twenty years ago. I could only recollect the Mouser's duel with Anra Devadoris in the Lost City of Ahriman. The subsequent adventures in the Castle of Mist were completely new to me. This geomorph is inspired by that location. Note the entry chamber with all sorts of nooks and alcoves and an archway leading to a domed room with ramps leading down in the remaining cardinal directions. The story describes a confusing series of rooms and passages but I was unable to include the low opening in the main room through which the Old Man Without A Beard was peeking (I just couldn't make it it work on the map).

Gaming With Kids: Superhero Birthday Party

I think I've mentioned it before, but my boys are growing up geek. A consequence of this is that my youngest has asked for a super-hero themed birthday party. Well, that party is coming up this weekend and while mommy will be handling the costumes, it's daddy's job to come up with the superhero entertainment.  My current thinking is this:

Origins
Come up with some some iconic super powers and origin stories and have the kids choose them randomly. This could be a card draw, but it would be especially fun if they could randomly pick little objects that represented the powers (like a plastic spider for a pseudo-Spiderman). Mostly, I'll stick to the common superhero powers represented by famous characters. These are young kids and imaginations vary. (Though I gotta say my own boys are quite capable of inventing weird or silly super-powers on the spot. My oldest was Sticky Man for several weeks).

Team Formation
Simple and brief: gather the kids and recruit them into a League of Superheroes or some such. This is where daddy gets to do a little role-playing. Maybe I'll where an eye-patch for the whole Nick Fury effect (though I'd be surprised if any of the kids get the reference).

Danger Room
Here's where I'm a little fuzzy. I'd like to provide a few games where the kids can practice being superheroes. Quite possibly I'll adapt some classic party games and present them with a superhero twist, but  I'm still trying to think of something more interesting. Even better would be games that allow each child to do something that is marginally connected to their superhero power. I'm still working on this and suggestions would be welcome.

Superhero Mission
As the games are winding down, I'll interrupt the action in my Nick Fury persona and inform the kids of the nefarious activities of one or more super-villains (Gorilla Grodd is my kids current favorite baddie). There won't be any direct confrontation because I'm not sure I want to be responsible for introducing the thought of violent conflict to kids that I don't know particularly well. But a villaonous theft with a string of clues is more what I had in mind. It would be great if each child can pretend to use their super-power to advance to the next stage of the quest. Once again, suggestions from the peanut gallery would be welcome. I'm flying blind here, though I've done all of this an individual basis with my own boys.

Sailing Into The Apocalypse

So I've just returned from a week-long sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands. What do I have to show for it other than fond memories, a modicum of sailing skill, a lighter wallet, sunburn, and a week-long beard? Well, hopefully (as far as the old blog is concerned) some gaming inspiration.

Post Apocalyptic Cruising
Inspired partly by bits of John Birmingham's Without Warning, this campaign centers on a group of player characters (friends, family, or both) caught on a pleasure craft in in the formerly idyllic Caribbean when civilization suddenly collapses. The boat is well-provisioned but the mostly-regular folks on board will struggle to make their way in a new and dangerous world. If technology stops working as in Dies the Fire then a roomy sailboat would be a very handy place to be indeed (though the crew will need to learn how to navigate without their GPS). Even if magic returns, the characters will likely need to scramble for supplies (GURPS Y2K-style) and avoid blood-thirsty pirates before they discover and master the new lore.  

Sea Cave Maze
Perhaps the secret to mastering their new existence is to explore a series of water-filled "caverns" made up the the spaces between cyclopean rocks on an inaccessible coastline. The anchorage would be treacherous and characters would have to climb, crawl, and swim through the confusing terrain to reach their goal, all the while avoiding monstrous guardians.

Image of the Baths at Virgin Gorda

Sailpunk Catamarans
Fast-forward a few dozen generations and society may develop into a facsimile of pre-Industrial D&D/Gamma World centered on isolated island city-states far from the the sunken or cannibal-infested mainland. The characters are still sailors, but now they travel aboard wind-punk catamarans with every modern sailing innovation that is possible without electricity or working engines. This is not Jack Sparrow's Pirates of the Caribbean. Imagine something more like Waterworld, but without Kevin Costner, the pee-drinking, and the general suckiness. Actually, assuming magic is involved, a nautical-themed game that borrows heavily from Eberron might be a better model. Piracy and exploration of monster-infested ruins is still very much in the cards, but a Traveller-style game of adventure trading is also quite possible.

Back From The Boat

The Risus Monkey is back from more than a week of sun and sail. I've got a lot of updates in the queue but not a lot of time to post. First on my (blogging) "to do" list is to catch up on on the other blogs that I follow. I managed to steal a few minutes of connectivity when we sailed into cell coverage, so I know that I've missed some good stuff. I want to hit all that up before I dive in with my own content. I expect to start posting regularly again sometime in the next day or so.