Rank Your Top 10 Campaigns

A couple months back Martin over at Treasure Tables passed along this nifty idea from Don Mappin, the Abulia Savant. Don proposes ranking the top ten campaigns you've played as a tool for self-analysis. After compiling and ordering your lists, do you see any trends? Below are my top ten. I omitted World of Alidor from consideration. I'm having a helluva good time, but I don't feel I've played enough of it yet to be able to meaningfully compare it to my other gaming.

1. Bandit Kingdoms - mid 90's D&D 1st/2nd edition hybrid, rotating DMs (player & DM)
2. Wild Times - my ongoing D&D 3.5 game (DM)
3. Dave's Krynn Campaign - 2nd edition AD&D, ~'89-'91 (player)
4. Known World Campaign(s) - Mentzer Basic/Expert D&D, on and off from ~'83 to ~'91 (DM)
5. Unnamed Call of Cthulhu campaign - 1989 or so (Keeper)
6. Sue's Pickup Game - D&D 3.0, 2005, ongoing? (player)
7. Home Team - originally Heroes Unlimited, later Mutants & Masterminds 1st edition, '03-'05, ongoing? (GM)
8. Ultra Force Omega - d20 Modern, 2005 (GM)
9. Retro D&D Campaign - AD&D 1st edition, '02 or '03 (DM)
10. Mekton series - Mekton Zeta Plus, ~1997, rotating GMs (player & GM)

So what trends do I see? It's no shocker that D&D dominates the list. As much as I like a whole bunch of other genres and systems, I'm a D&D man first and foremost. I'm surprised that pretty much all my recent campaigns made the list, except for my Traveller fiasco. As much as I pine for the gold ol' days of Basic D&D, my games seem to be getting better, not worse. That's good. I GM or share GMing duties on 8 of the 10 campaigns that made the top ten. I tend to be a DM first, player second. Conspicuous by their absence are all the various HERO System campaigns that occupied much of my gaming for the first half of the 90's. That could very well be 'anti-nostalgia' at work, because I've soured considerably on the system and at least some of those campaigns involved my one rather buffoonish attempt at courting a gamer chick. Pendragon was the other big game of this period. Unlike HERO, I could see myself taking another stab at that, if I didn't have 5 D&D ideas and Traveller already on my campaign to-do list.

I'm also pleasantly surprised that 3 of the four OGL-era campaigns I've been involved with made the list. Some days this new stuff feels like hard work, but I'm slowly starting to see the dividends of chugging along. Heck, just this week for the first time I made some high-level 3.5 NPCs from scratch, with no computer assistance. A year ago I wouldn't have even tried.

And my one Mekton campaign just barely slipped onto my top ten. I'm not sure what that means, but it sure has me thinking.

here, have a robot

I modified a standard iron golem using Mike Mearls's Monster's Handbook from AEG. Monster's Handbook was published during the 3E era, but I still find it pretty useful. And it's got the Godling prestige class, which is fun.

The design was intended to fit the look of this Heroscape robot. I've got a pair of these guys and I was itching to use them.

Robo-Guardian
Large Construct
Hit Dice: 24d10+30 (162 hp)
Initiative: –1
Speed: 20 ft. (4 squares)
Armor Class: 30 (–1 size, –1 Dex, +22 natural) touch 8, flat-footed 30
Base Attack/Grapple: +17/+33
Attack: Slam +28 melee (2d10+11)
Full Attack: 2 slams +28 melee (2d10+11)
Space/Reach: 10 ft./10 ft.
Special Attacks: Gas Nozzle, Grenade Launcher, Electro-Rod
Special Qualities: Construct traits, damage reduction 15/adamantine, darkvision 60 ft., immunity to magic, low-light vision
Saves: Fort +8, Ref +7, Will +8
Abilities: Str 33, Dex 9, Con —, Int —, Wis 11, Cha 1
Skills: —
Feats: —
Environment: Any
Organization: Solitary or gang (2–4)
Challenge Rating: 16
Treasure: None
Alignment: Always neutral
Advancement: 25–54 HD (Huge)
Level Adjustment: —
A Robo-Guardian is 10 feet tall and weighs about 5,000 pounds. It cannot speak or make any vocal noise save for the occasional meaningless beep, nor does it have any distinguishable odor. It moves with a ponderous but smooth gait. Each step causes the floor to tremble unless it is on a thick, solid foundation.

Combat
Gas Nozzle (Su): 10-foot cube, cloud of poisonous gas lasting 1 round, free action once every 1d4+1 rounds; initial damage 1d4 Con, secondary damage 3d4 Con, Fortitude DC 19 negates. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Grenade Launcher (Su): As per flamestrike, but half the damage is untype instead of holy. 8d8 damage, Reflex DC 20 for half damage. Useable 3 times/day. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Electro-Rod (Su): As per lightning bolt. 10d6 damage, Reflex DC25 for half damage. Useable at will. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Immunity to Magic (Ex): A Robo-Guardian is immune to any spell or spell-like ability that allows spell resistance. In addition, certain spells and effects function differently against the creature, as noted below.

A magical attack that deals electricity damage slows a Guardian (as the slow spell) for 3 rounds, with no saving throw.

A magical attack that deals fire damage breaks any slow effect on the Robo-Guardian and heals 1 point of damage for each 3 points of damage the attack would otherwise deal. If the amount of healing would cause the construct to exceed its full normal hit points, it gains any excess as temporary hit points. For example, a Guardian hit by a fireball gains back 6 hit points if the damage total is 18 points. An iron golem gets no saving throw against fire effects.

A Robo-Guardian is affected normally by rust attacks, such as that of a rust monster or a rusting grasp spell.

Construction
A Robo-Guardian’s body is sculpted from 3,000 pounds of pure iron, smelted with rare tinctures and admixtures costing at least 25,000 gp. Assembling the body requires a DC 25 Craft (armorsmithing) check or a DC 25 Craft (weaponsmithing) check.
CL 18th; Craft Construct, cloudkill, geas/quest, limited wish, polymorph any object, flamestrike, lightning bolt, caster must be at least 18th level; Price 200,000 gp; Cost 100,000 gp + 7,000 XP.

Ah, so there's a name for it

Thanks to ENworlder Rystil Arden for helping expand my vocabulary of gamer jargon:

Oberoni's Fallacy states that no game material can ever be unbalanced because the GM can rule 0 it. Baloney. Of course you can Rule 0 it, but that is not an acceptable excuse to apologise for blatantly unbalanced material in the game products you pay for.

In case you're out of the loop, Rule Zero is the term given to the basic premise that the GM is the final arbiter of his or her game. I first saw it in print labeled as Rule 0 in a Guardians of Order product, but the idea goes back at least as far as Gygax and Arneson.

Back in town

Howdy, folks! I just got back in town from a couple days in Kansas City, where I was lacking in internets. I would have told you all ahead of time, but after the one time someone called the cops after reading my blog* I've become a bit more circumspect in what I say here. Flying to Kansas City via O'Hare was the exact opposite of a good time. The only good thing I can say about it is that I had plenty of time to read the books I had brought. I started out with Lallia, book #6 in E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series. I recently learned that this series had a lot of influence on the development of Traveller, so I picked up a couple of old paperbacks. Turns out this Dumarest stuff is some pretty good adventure fiction with some cute space opera trappings and the backstory of the Odyssey added for good measure. And Lallia in particular is a pretty grim look at a down-on-her-luck free trader. I'm going to scour the used bookstores around here to scare up some more in this series.

I also read Almuric, which was Robert Howard's go at planetary romance in the vein of Barsoom. Excellent, excellent book. It had all the trappings I associate with the planetary romance genre overlayed with Howard's over-the-top barbarism. If you're the kind of person that likes Howard's Conan, Almuric ought to be your huckleberry. As Stan Lee would say, "'Nuff said!"

My third book, Paul Naudon's The Secret History of Freemasonry, turned out to be a snooze-fest. Normally I'm up for this sort of thing, having been into the whole Templar/Masonic/Jesus/Vampire/UFO/Merovingian/Illuminati thing years before The DaVinci Code made it cool. But whatever zest might have been in the original French text has been drained away by an entirely pedestrian translation or else this Naudon fellow is the most annoyingly pedantic writer on the subject since ol' A.E. Waite.

I didn't have any big plans for what to do in Kansas City while not in my training seminar, so I spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the TV. I caught most of Spider-man 2, so that was cool, and I watched Revenge of the Sith for the fifth or sixth time. I paid fourteen bucks to watch Chronicles of Narnia on the hotel PPV system and fell asleep about 20 minutes in, I think. I don't think I saw any actual Narnia before I conked out. I also saw a couple episodes of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! and some Power Rangers. Hey, stop laughing! That's fun stuff! I seriously need to run a sentai based game some time, maybe as a one-shot.

So anyway, I'm back home. Even if it was only a couple days this trip has been kinda rough. I've never been gone this long from my wife or daughter and none of us enjoyed being apart.

*For the details, read this old entry and the first comment to it.

How not to Mod a Board

Citizens of the Imperium had gotten a bit more flamey than usual recently, but nothing that couldn't be ignored for the most part. But apparently moderator MJD has had it up to here and he's not going to take it any more.

Topic: READ THIS NOW
As I said some time ago, I do not have time to police these boards and right now I'm the only moderator.

If you want to have personal arguments and hate each other, just go do it somewhere else. I do not appreciate having to waste my time moderating a board that's supposedly a friendly forum for adults.

Yes, I'm annoyed. I've been here before and it seems that courtesy towards me has been forgotten along with manners in general.

By flaming one another, some people are making work for me. You want me to police flame wars or produce Traveller materials? Choose.

As much as I don't like the modding at RPGnet sometimes I don't recall a moderator over there attempting to hold the whole board hostage. I'm not sure how effective this threat of withholding Traveller material really is going to be. As far as I can tell MJD is Martin J. Dougherty, the Traveller d20 guy. I had to figure that out myself because user MJD has no sig or anything to indicate that he probably owns the board. So if the guy really wants to threaten to stop cranking out T20 stuff, I'm not sure how effective a motivator that's going to be for all the folks who hang out at the various non-T20 sections of the board.

But more importantly, I'm trying to figure out why this guy is modding the board at all. With over six thousand member accounts, you'd think that someone would be able to take on some of the modding duties. I don't understand why that isn't a possibility. Yet those aren't one of the options available to us. MJD gives us the Lady or the Tiger. There is no "C: none of the above" for us to pick. I dunno, maybe the guy is just venting at the prospect of actually having to mod his board. But guess what? Message boards have moderators for a reason. Human discourse, especially on teh intarweb, is a messy business. Once many years ago I was asked to consider modding a board and I turned it down flat because it's obvious to me that it is a thankless, unforgiving task. There will always be drama on message boards and someone will always have to handle it. If MJD doesn't understand that he doesn't just need an assistant moderator, he needs someone to take over the job completely, thereby allowing himself to get back to writing his T20 stuff.

BTW, I heard that they restored the search function over at RPGnet, if anyone cares.

Pride & Shame

Today I celebrate a little, because I now have a credit in a published RPG project. Over the last 10 or fifteen years I spent some time on the edge of the line between the hobby and the industry, occasionally playtesting or looking over manuscripts for people and whatnot. But until now none of those projects reached fruition. My first actual published credit is in a free fan PDF, but I'm still very happy to see my name listed among the contributors. The name of the project is Hekatoteratos, the new monster book for Mazes & Minotaurs, the retro Bronze Age fantasy rpg from Olivier Legrand. I blogged about M&M previously when talking about what I call apocryphal games. My four contributions to Hekatoteratos are the Attack Kelp, Carnivorous Cloud, God-Shadow, and Hooded Horror. Click here if you want to download a copy of Hekatoteratos for yourself. The name of the book is pidgin Greek for "100 monsters".

The name of this post is "Pride & Shame" because I have a bit of a confession to make: I've never played M&M. I'm the first to harp upon commercial products that seem to be written by people with no firsthand knowledge of the game. I will offer a mild two-pronged defense of this indefensible hypocrisy. First of all, making monsters in M&M is easy, fun, and mechanically sound. You can whip up pretty decent monsters in much the same way someone with no play experience can build fairly acceptable Classic Traveller spaceships. Second of all, it's a free PDF for a free game. If my four critters suck I will offer a full refund to anyone who requests it.

Passing on Ptolus

If you follow the D&D scene in any way beyond keeping up on Wizards stuff, you've probably heard of Monte Cook's Ptolus. This upcoming product is a zillion page mega-module/campaign setting from Malhavoc Press, one of the few d20 design houses I truly respect. But I don't plan to get Ptolus anytime soon, and today I'm going to talk about why.

First of all Ptolus is a 'city of adventure' type setting. City adventures have a fine pedigree going back to the original Conan stories, but urban settings don't speak to me the way rural environs do. That's why my Greyhawk campaigns tend to keep the eponymous city off-camera. I'm much more interested in the green fields of the Wild Coast or the Bandit Kingdoms, or the pine forests of the Thillronian Peninsula. The Shire has always been my favorite part of Middle Earth, even though I'm no hobbit fan. A big stinky quasi-medieval city is hardly worth defending, but my good guy PCs will fight and die for a green and pleasant land. (And the modernized-by-magic cities that have become popular in recent years just turn my stomach. ) You can probably chalk up this attitude as the psychic residue of a happy childhood on a farm. In my mind a city is a place where you go and do things and then come home. The thought of spending most of a campaign in a city just does not sit well with me.

My second concern is that although I like several products from Malhavoc Press, I'm not sure it's the place to go for setting material. Truth be told, vast swaths of Arcana Evolved's flavor text leaves me cold. I can totally work with the implied setting built around the the mechanics, but the actual setting stuff just falls flat. Heck, it's almost an admission of the inherent weakness of the Arcana Unearthed setting that the newer version included a metaplot update. I'm still quite fond of AE. Heck, I think my next fantasy campaign will be AE-powered. But it speaks to a flaw in the setting when I keep looking for other settings in which to set my campaign. Some days I seriously consider kludging Arcana Evolved's classes and races into Northern Crown or Harn or whatever-setting-catches-my-eye-today. I'm a lazy bastard of a DM, so I don't normally go looking for extra work like that. Now, AE and Ptolus aren't one and the same, but my reaction to AE's fluff does not set me up to feel confident about buying Ptolus.

Finally, there's the price. One hundred and twenty bucks. Yes, this product is monster-sized and yes, it is Monte Cook's magnumn opus. But come on. I am not spending that much money for one friggin' RPG book. Not when I look at what else that $120 could buy me. I could buy 3 Eberron hardbacks and 3 of the 4 modules out for that setting. Or if I wanted to give Monte Cook my money I could buy all three Iron Heroes hardbacks, the three PDF modules for IH, and the Iron Heroes Battlebox and only spend like 7 bucks more. Or I could get everything I want but don't have yet for Arcana Evolved, spend less than $120, and still get two books and a slew of accessories and PDFs. Or I could hit eBay and purchase some seriously overpriced out-of-print stuff, like the old Tom Moldvay module Seren Ironhand and the Spinward Marches Campaign for Traveller. Or I could buy both Northern Crown hardbacks and spend the other 70 bucks on Harn crapola.

I guess the real issue price-wise is that I don't normally spend a hundred bucks at a single pop on RPG stuff. Even the $80 asking price on Amazon is more than I normally blow in one outing. The shiny new hardbound editions so prevalent in the industry are just barely within reach of my comfort zone, and then only one at a time once in a while. Otherwise I'd already own those two Northern Crown books. Call it stinginess, call it sticker shock, call it whatever you want. But $120 or even the $80 sounds too much like real money for me to be blowing it on one big piece of gamestuff. That same $120 might last me a year bottomfeeding for out-of-print stuff on eBay.

Sometimes I like to convince myself that I'm Average Joe Gamer Guy. I play the Dungeons & Dragons just like the kids and generally get along with other fans in the hobby. But this tendency towards Super Deluxe Editions and World's Largest Whatevers is making me feel like trendsetters in the industry are going in one direction and I'm going in another. It's weird to feel alienated from your favorite hobby.