#RPGaDay Day 10: Favorite Tie-in Novel/Game Fiction

I'll avoid the "cheap" answers like citing Marvel Comics or The Dresden Files, which were adapted to RPGs after the fact, and pick this one: I love Ravenloft and Soth was one of my favorite Dark Lords. Heck, most of the Ravenloft novels were great to me. I could easily have said "I, Strahd", "Vampire of the Mists" or even "Mordenheim", but I'll give this the nod.

There's other stuff I liked more, mind you: The Drizzt novels spring to mind...but they only served to show me how limited Dungeons and Dragons was, and how badly it failed at the product TSR was trying to sell at the time.

You know what? The Ravenloft game stuff didn't mesh with the system very well, either. I'm changing my vote back to my original one:

The Buried Tales anthology made me long to play in Pinebox, TX, and I'll finally get to do that with East Texas University. Buried Tales it is.

#RPGaDay Day 9: My Favorite Dice

Not my oldest dice by any stretch, but I have become very fond of these Deadlands Dice I bought last fall. I make it a point to use them exclusively when GMing Deadlands Reloaded.

#RPGaDay Day 8: Favorite Character(s)

I could name a few of these, and they are all actually NPCs (given how little I actually play).

Tanjlock Sarlon is a Wood Elf Fighter from AD&D 2nd Edition who ultimately came to be known as much for his mental instability and his "road to Hell being paved with good intentions" as anything else. The art above is from my friend and partner in crime, Johnnie Johnson, for what is intended to be an illustrated novella series featuring Tanjlock.

Bully, The Bull That Walks Like A Man was an NPC in my Necessary Evil game and the first NPC that, when I killed him off, nearly set off a riot at the table. My players were FURIOUS. When he showed up later as a Super Drone, they were furious a second time, but one of the PCs managed to wrench him from his brain washing and bring him back to their side. He will be migrating to comic book form in my upcoming PALADIN: AGENT OF KRYPTIC comic.

Lastly would be Former US Marshal Ezekiah Joseph Kidd, my first Deadlands character. He began as an ugly, self righteous US Marshal who ultimately became Blessed and gave his life in pursuit of stopping Ravenites from doing bad, bad things. After I took over as GM of the game, his deputy (one of the remaining PCs) made it his life's mission to find Kidd. When he discovered Kidd was actually dead, he invoked the blackest of magic to return Kidd to life against his wishes.

Kidd is not presently slated to appear in any fiction.

#RPGaDay Day 7: Most Intellectual RPG I Own

It features Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Edison and the legacy of Nikola Tesla. It even has specific subsystems for scientific brainstorming in game!

Pretty sure it HAD to be this or Low Life.

#RPGaDay Day 6: Favorite RPG I Never Get To Play

I'm taking "play" to mean "GM", as I rarely play and I'm okay with that...and, again, I'm giving two answers instead of one, but there's a good reason for that.



Like the TV shows, the RPGs can be taken separately or complimentary with each other (in fact, my actual favorite combo is Angel combined with The Magic Box supplement for Buffy). These RPGs hold a very special place in my heart, in part because I love the shows to death, and in part because the larger Buffyverse line holds my first RPG writing credits (including a Buffyverse related article for Eden Studios Presents vol. 2 and an additional writing credit on Angel). Three times I have attempted campaigns (one a Buffy playtest campaign, one an IRC based online game and one an Angel game), and each time they just never "clicked", even though I was super enthused and everyone said they were having a great time. I even prepared a fourth campaign, which could be best described as The Dead Zone meets Friday the 13th The Series meets Beauty & The Beast, but we never even made it to our first session. I had grown quite adept at getting the Cinematic Unisystem to do the things I wanted it to do.

I still have all the Buffy books, all the Angel playtest files, and occasionally poke around them and get ideas, but I know better than to go down that trail again *sigh*.

Actually, The Angel RPG led directly to my Savage Worlds obsession, in a funny story. I caught wind that the Angel GM screen was on clearance at a game shop and when I went in to pick it up, I saw Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition. I had traded away my original Savage Worlds rulebook (I just HATED it. The rules were bad, the characters were all the same and there was NO flavor. Yeah, I was every guy I've argued with since), but I had seen all this buzz on the internet about the Savage Worlds settings and I figured $20 for the screen I wanted (but would never use) plus the Savage Worlds rules seemed like a good enough deal...and grew hooked on Savage Worlds.

Probably one of the reasons I can't get a Buffy/Angel game going *now*.                                                                    

#RPGaDay Day 5: Most Old School RPG You Own

I reckon that Heroes Unlimited 2nd Edition by Palladium is the most Old School RPG I own, with the weird subsystems and random charts.

It was sent to me as a review copy, but I actually struggled that hard to find anything good to say about the book. In a nutshell, I don't like the Palladium system and I think this is a horrible supers game. The sensibilities and aesthetics feel a tad more "old school" to me (whatever that means) than FASERIP does, so it gets the unfortunate nod.

#RPGaDay Day 4: Most Recent RPG Purchase

So this is one of those questions that could be answered a couple of ways, so I'll answer it a couple of ways.

I backed the Wield Kickstarter by John Wick and had the PDF on my computer, but at Glitchcon this weekend, I ran into Mr. Wick and opted to go ahead and purchase the physical copy...so, technically, it would be Wield by John Wick. (For those not familiar with Wield, you play a magic item with plots and schemes who controls its wielders - played by other players - who also have their own plots and schemes). That said, merely picking up a physical copy of a book I already own digitally may not "count", so I'll also answer with:

My other most recent purchase - and the one that was not just a physical copy of a product I already owned - which has not shipped yet (to my knowledge) is Dragon Age Set 3 by Green Ronin Publishing, and the boxed set that will complete the initial Dragon Age run (before Ultimate Edition's release, anyway).

See? Told you I've moved on from D&D (but not necessarily fantasy).

#RPGaDay Day 3: First RPG I Bought

No, AD&D2e was not the first RPG I ever bought. Though I did wind up with an extensive collection of AD&D2e books for a while, I used my friend Jeremiah's corebooks for a spell before I bought my own. Actually, the first RPG-related purchase I made was not, in fact, an RPG...but a supplement? Why? Because I was in the 7th grade and ordering out of a catalog in a comic book and didn't know the difference. What did I purchase?

What can I say? I was a huge X-Men fan and had no idea, from the catalog, that this was not a standalone game. I started piecing it together once I got into RPGs (I'm sure one of the books in this boxed set says something to that effect, but I confess that I did not read every word, in part due to disappointment once I realized there were no rules for actually playing inside, though I did devour all of the obscure character bios).

Shortly after I discovered my first full-fledged comic and game shop (the now-closed Fantastic's in Tahlequah, OK), I made my second RPG purchase:

Fantasy is nice...superheroes have always been my first love...and, as I have proven on multiple occasions in my supers games (like many others before and after me have), the genre is tailor-made for you to dive right in with all your favorite horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and whatever tropes.

This version of Marvel is no longer my preferred method of supers roleplaying but, unlike AD&D2e, I still own (pretty much) all of my Marvel stuff (some of the cutouts got lost after the boxes basically disintegrated on me).

The games I actually ran with this system were, again, largely horrible...focusing more on who I had fold-up figures of than anything coherent, but I did once develop a sprawling campaign with multiple mini-campaigns that focused on different areas of the Marvel Universe (like Unity X, the young mutant group in Oklahoma mentored by The Beast and The Sideliners, a team of C-List heroes who had ties to the X-Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four and SHIELD, and routinely became embroiled in cosmic conflicts way above their pay grade).

Even when I moved on to Marvel SAGA, most of the non-Marvel characters in those games (PC and NPC alike) were originally created in this system and converted. Ask around the gaming community and it's hard to miss the impact this game had on a TON of people.

Make mine Marvel!

#RPGaDay Day 2: First RPG I GMed

I alluded to this in yesterday's post. It didn't take long for me to read the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monstrous Compendium, and soon I was scrawling together a world to put my friends through.

Being a fan of Greek myth, a medusa emerged as an early adversary, and I loved beholders far too much to not wheel one of those out early. Looking back, I was a pretty horrible DM, but I think I definitely improved over time, but I suppose my players would be better suited to answer that than I would.

I had too many "frustrated novelist" moments as a teenage DM, but those are pretty well under control now (what with actually working as an amateur writer). That said, I did learn early on that I vastly prefer the GM side of the table, and function almost exclusively in that role these days, just like I did back then, when I didn't even own these books...and AD&D2e was NOT the first RPG I bought...

#RPGaDay Day 1: First RPG I Played

Around 20 years ago, or so, I got into RPGs when I started high school and found people with actual common interests and not just me pretending to care what other people liked so I could fit in. My friends Jeremiah and Steve had both played versions of Dungeons & Dragons in the past, but everyone was a lapsed gamer now, but I was so intrigued that I bugged Jeremiah into letting me borrow his AD&D2e books and dove right in, eagerly devouring everything. Soon we had a revolving group with multiple GMs and characters switching in and out like crazy...but my first actual RPG experience with something resembling coherent rules was a one on one game DMed for me, before I took over the reigns as DM and scarcely ever relinquished them.

AD&D2e still holds a special place in my heart. I loved the support material (still own select chunks of it), and it is still my favorite version of D&D...I just no longer have a passion for Dungeons & Dragons.

Still, this blog probably would not be here, right now, without that book posted up there.