Graph Paper Games

The Red Hood's gang of re-furbished C-listers The general consensus among my kids is that they want me to continue to run a superhero campaign, but are getting a little sick of the rules-light system Bash!  (always with the exclamation point in the title).  So I'm considering re-tooling the campaign with new rules, if not resetting the entire story.  Because Bash! was supposed to be a "beer and pretzels" game to get me by until the next big thing, I hadn't bothered going too deep, plot-wise. So right now, I'm thinking about the foundation for a new supers game, and what's on my mind is Brian Michael Bendis' run on The New Avengers and the several iterations that followed, up through the "Siege" storyline.  This isn't too surprising since it is Bendis' work that formed the core of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, which I ran for a long while. Bendis began his arc with the "Breakout" event in which Electro is hire...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my last session of Bash had not gone as well as I liked because my single story, which I had hoped to fill the entire session, had ended prematurely.  So this time I decided on a slew of smaller subplots and just adjust accordingly. It was a good thing, too, because I ended up having a full boat: all nine players in the campaign showed up for this session.  Of note (to me, at least) was that this was the first session in a very long time where we played back in the basement game room of my house.  I'm not sure I've been down there since I separated from my wife six months ago.  For that matter I also made my classic pulled pork for dinner, so the whole thing felt like Old Home Week for me, and that's a good thing.  Now how did the gaming session go? Prologue: Quick, to the Bat-Fax! The New Defenders have defeated Stardust, but are frustrated to find a groundswell of support for the murderous alien, especially from a Super...

There are times when I think to myself, "you know, you could have done a better job being a GM that time."  Last Friday was one of those times. In my defense, after literally having no one show up for the previous June session, I went from having four, to three, to two, then back up to four people signed up for last Friday's session.  When it was down to two, I scuttled the whole thing and stopped planning.  Then, literally the day of the gaming session, two people pop up as planning to attend, and I'm scrambling for content. And with a game whose dice mechanic can be as jammy as Bash can be, that meant that we were done way earlier than I thought, and I didn't have much in the way of fallback material.  Like I said, a less-than-superlative job there. It reminded me why I dislike doing "story" style gaming, because there is always the issue of timing: sometimes you get four-fifths of the way through the story and you've gone way long in the se...

Wow, it has been six weeks since my last post.  Well, a lot has been going on.  A ton of person transitions, some vacation time, etc.  But that's not what this blog is about. Over the last six weeks, my friend John wrapped up his West End Games Star Wars campaign.  I'll admit that I wasn't in as many sessions as I might have liked--another consequence of my many responsibilities these days.  This campaign started as a closed game with a limited number of players but slowly creeped up to around seven or eight.  That's on the high side, and a lot of overlap between certain characters started to show (e.g. who flew the ship). In the final episode the GM decided to split the party.  This is always a gamble, and I'm not sure if it paid off.  This wasn't the fault of the GM, but rather the fickle hand of fate (and some decision making on the part of the players).  The first half managed to handle their scenario in a very brief period of time, ...

I was looking over my blog posts and thought, "I haven't written since March ?  Did I even run something this month?"  And sure enough, I had, but had not written a gaming recap. I suspect part of that was because it was a brief gaming session that didn't move the needle a lot except introduce the group to the archtypical Evil Billionaire Genius Supervillain and throw down with a bunch of supervillain flunkies (the eponymous Vicious Circle).  What was good about the session was some solid roleplaying with the villain and some very clever group tactics in the combat.  That's to be celebrated. I'll confess to a certain amount of ennui regarding the campaign, however.  Maybe it's all the other stuff going on right now, but I'm not really fired up.  I can tell when things are bad when I end up just recycling plots and swiping NPC's from the back of the book.   Bash!  was always meant to be sort of a pick-up, get-me-through-the-divorce kind of RPG ...

My daughter wanted me to run a Bash! session just for the younger members of the group.  She likes her PC, the Lioness, who happens to be a trained martial artist tasked with hunting a group of supernatural villains (similar to Daredevil or Iron Fist from the MCU, or Sara Lance from Legends of Tomorrow).   So, what fun high-stakes adventure with mystical overtones can I possible reconfigure for a superhero episode? I went with arguably the greatest episode of The Real Ghostbusters  animated television show, "Ragnarok and Roll." Jilted boyfriend turned supervillain Jeremy. If you need the rationale as to why "Ragnarok and Roll" is one of the best episodes, this blog post does a good job making the case.  Fun side note: it was written by James Michael Straczynski, who would go onto do Babylon 5 .  I went with the general skeleton of the plot: morbidly depressed Jeremy decides to use a magical flute to not summon Ragnarok (as in the cartoon), but Fimblevi...

I haven't been doing much on this blog for lots of reasons (including major life changes), but it isn't as if I am doing nothing  all this time. My gaming group played their third session of the game Bash! a few weeks ago, a game session that introduced an mysterious NPC group of metahumans (aka the Miscreants), an evil corporation (Kort Technologies, which only now I realize sounds like the Blue Beetle's Kord Technologies.  Damn.), and a handful of villains including Hot Rox, Brute, and Gunfire. Gunfire is the latest NPC swiped from the book The League of Unfortunate Superheroes , the first entry from their modern section.  Gunfire was a DC comics character, part of the company's desperate attempt to catch up with Image and the Iron Age of comics with their "Bloodlines" event that introduced a slew of violently-named gritty "heroes." Gunfire had the curious ability to shoot energy blasts from any object, meaning he could turn a wooden mal...

I've been talking for a while about starting a superhero game now that the previous "home game" of D&D had wrapped up last year.  For a while I had been planning on running Champions, mostly because I thought it would be fun to run a game that meant so much to me as a college student and might promote long-term play. But as it turns out (to the surprise of few) Champions was difficult to teach and difficult to make NPC's.  Between the holidays and a bunch of stuff at home nothing was happening and the game seemed to be stalling out.  But then I found Bash, a fairly simple supers RPG that was easy to teach and easy for me to make villains, etc.  Two weeks ago I ran a test session of Bash, using 1940's WW2 characters. It was a big hit, and suddenly the WW2 session, the PC's the players had been trying to build for Champions, Bash, and the book The League of Regrettable Heroes  all jelled together into what appears to be the first session of a campaign. ...

I had the chance to follow up with several of my players who were present for the one-shot I ran last Friday of Bash! Ultimate Edition .  Many of their insights matched my own (submitted in no particular order): It's a very easy game to pick up.  The one-rule mechanic of X times 2d6 for effect with X being an attribute or a power, usually between 1 and 5 was pretty simple to grasp.  It also made play pretty quick, even with the six players that I had. The dice mechanic is jammy.  "Jammy" is a term that has somehow made into my gaming group's lexicon, meaning that there is a lot of swing in terms of results.  This is especially true because when you roll doubles of any kind, the dice "explode" and have you roll a third die to add to the total.  If it also matches the others, then it explodes again, etc. For example, if you have an Agility of 3 (low superhuman) you can get a result of 9 (two 1's would explode on the roll, so a 1 and 2 is the lowest ...

With all the craziness going on right now, I took some good advice and set aside complicated plans for long campaigns but instead ran a one-shot of Bash , a fairly rules-light superhero RPG. I also took a break from the norm by setting it in the Golden Era of Comics, with the PC's being a group of patriotic superheroes called The Defenders who are called on by FDR himself to battle the Third Reich.  They are led by American Wonder, with his teammates Pyre, Cosmo, Nitro, Haute Couture, and Blind Fury.  By the time the session was done they had battled Nazis, Tiger tanks, and eventually the Nazi's top-secret weapon, the supervillain Ubermensch!  Thankfully they were not alone, being joined at various times by the stubble-jawed Sgt. Brick  and Pat Parker, War Nurse (along with her Girl Commandos)! Pat Parker, War Nurse is an actual comic book heroine from 1946, depicted here in a bit of fan art. Bash is a pretty fun, easy system that my group picked up right aw...

A bit of a benchmark for the blog--500 posts about RPG's and associated topics.  It's good timing, because I'm about to retake the GM screen in my group and kick off a new campaign, namely Champions. It's been a long time since I ran this game, and a big change for the group.  My plan is to commit to doing a six-session "mini-series" as a test run for the game.  At that point I will take stock, talk to the group, and then begin to either plot out a larger campaign or change gears and go with something else. Before that, however, I'm doing a "victory lap" with the 5E campaign by running one more session of that game.  For awhile now it's been run by the other Rob, but when he wrapped up his adventure arc there was still a PC plot thread left dangling.  In the past I haven't sweated those too much, but this was a big deal for this young player (the first PC she's ever made) so I'm coming back to D&D for the sole purpo...

Last month I reviewed Cold Steel Wardens, a superhero RPG seeking to emulate the good parts of the Iron Age of comic books. I feel like I read the game enough to write a review, but since then this game has been sitting on my nightstand, constantly drawing me in to reread it.  There's a lot that is compelling about this game, and a few things I'm having a lot of trouble getting past, both of which is probably what keeps me coming back to it.  (Note: I have a similar relationship with Rifts .) One of the things I really like is the way that the rules support investigating play.  There's a skill for canvassing an area for information that is different than the one you use to interrogate people or the one you use to research stuff online.  The GM section of running investigations is excellent and I'll likely port it into any similar game I run. I like how the game handles realistic combat and injuries.  Not really something you'd see in most supers RPG's,...

Just to get terminology straight, I'm talking about the Iron Age of comics, an era distinguished from the Gold, Silver, and whatever the current age is supposed to be called (I've heard "Modern," which is doomed to inaccuracy in a few years, and "Electrum" which might be an inside-baseball joke among nerds). The Iron Age is roughly defined as beginning sometime in the early 1980's and ended around 1996 with the bankruptcy of Marvel Comics, although vestiges of its influence still kick around in the comic book universe today.  The high points of the era are often cited as works like Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns  or Alan Moore's Watchmen .  The low points are often associated with names like Rob Liefield.  Hand-in-hand with the Iron Age was the collectibility craze of comic books with speculators and comic book companies simultaneously engaging in a mutal delusion that comic books of that era had tremendous value apart from reading them...

I supported the Kickstarter for the new sourcebook detailing the history of Aaron Allston's Strike Force campaign.  This is an update and expansion upon the 96-page classic tome Aaron Allston's Strike Force  which came out in the early 1990's, and like the first book essentially outlines not only the major plots and characters of the eponymous Champions RPG campaign (which continued past the early 90's for another decade).  The campaign became a world in which multiple campaigns were spun off and included an estimated 48 players.  The core Strike Force campaign had over 260 sessions to its name. And that sounds epic, literally and figuratively.  And in that regard, while it seems highly unlikely that I could ever come close to that, there's no harm in trying to get even a fraction of that.  My longest campaign probably had about a tenth of that number of sessions.  Why not try again? It's worth noting that Allston apparently played many years twice a...

As I try to pull together the gazillion threads of thought in regards to what I want to run next, the second and fairly obvious thing to consider is whether I want to run a superhero RPG again. There's a lot to things that suggest that a supers RPG would be a good option.  It is really, really simple to justify the rotating cast of characters , particularly if you are building the game around a large group of PC heroes who are in a "Justice League Unlimited" kind of situation.  As I try to set up a schedule for the other two RPG's my group is doing, I'm acutely aware of how different everyone's schedule is, and the unlikelihood that everyone can make every session. Perhaps the biggest selling point of the genre is that it is a personal favorite of mine .  I'm less likely to burn out I suspect if I am really enjoying the game.  This is a double edged sword, however, because I'm what Aaron Allston called a "genre fiend" when it comes to sup...

A new edition of Strike Force with new information and a physical book too?  You know I'm all over this.  And you can too by clicking here . For those who haven't read my many blog posts about the original sourcebook, it was a journal of a Champions II campaign run by Aaron Allston for years.  It included PC's and NPC's, a timeline of the campaign, and some invaluable advice for running a campaign, especially a long one. The new book isn't just a reprint of the old one, but rather features new information regarding the campaign based on notes from its participants.  Best part?  Aaron Allston's estate is getting a portion of the proceeds. This has been fully funded, so I'll let you know when the book arrives.

Recently, a member of my gaming group named Rachel started running her own game, a zombie-apocalypse campaign using the FATE rules.  Initially I thought this would like "the Walking Dead" but Rachel has interposed weird cults and alien minotaurs (all of which are excellent) which is far afield of what you'll find on the TV show. I asked Rachel at the onset why she chose a zombie game, given that I had never heard her express enthusiasm for the genre, she said it was exactly because she didn't care for the genre very much.  She doesn't care for brutality in entertainment, or a proliferation of firearms in gameplay.  Her argument is that she would not want to experience the world as a player, but could somehow tolerate as the GM because she knew the players would enjoy it. It seemed really cockeyed to me, because I would think that if you didn't love the game world you were creating, it would become burdensome to continue to be the navigator and adjudicator ...

What's this?  Actual content?  Here are two villains that have appeared in my side campaign using Prowlers & Paragons, the duo of Fox and Howl. Fox art by Phil Cho Fox began her career in a special forces unit before leaving to pursue a career as a private mercenary.  She was hired on by the Secret Empire, and now has been tasked with locating passengers from TransGlobal Flight 246 who may be manifesting metahuman powers.  Fox has no powers herself, but relies on her training and cutting-edge gear. Edge 12 Health 16 Traits Athletics (Martial Arts) 8D Command 4D Stealth 7D Streetwise 4D Thievery 6D Armor (Item) 5D Blast (Item) 10D Dazzle (Item, 3 charges) 8D Ensnare (Item, 3 charges) 8D Strike (Blocking, Item) 10D Perks Ally (Boss, Secret Empire) Lightning Reflexes Gear: armor costume, blaster pistol, flash grenades, tangle grenades, shock gloves Flaws: Secret (Identity), Serves Secret Empire, Wanted Howl art by Phil Cho Howl rem...

Tonight I trotted out Prowlers & Paragons for my kids to run them through a quick introductory session.  It worked out well, although the dice were all over the place.  Mac played Kroxigor , a monstrous reptile-man while Macy played Menagerie , a shape-shifter. Kroxigor (illustration from Arkhamverse) Kroxigor was one of the passengers on TransGlobal flight 246 which was attacked by the mysterious chemical gas.  Menagerie was actually a dog in the hold of the plane, now able to turn into a human.  Another passenger, a petty criminal, also gained powers which he used to burgle the nightclub where Kroxigor (prior to his transformation) was working as a bouncer.  In trying to stop the burglar, Kroxigor turned into his reptilian form and with Menagerie's help managed to recover the money, even though the burglar escaped using his elongating powers. art by Phil Cho Need answers about what has happened, Krox and Menagerie seek out Dr. Tom Gilcrest, th...

So I've been noodling around with the idea of doing a supers RPG campaign, possibly using Prowlers & Paragons, my most recent lightweight supers RPG purchase.  It's like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying with balance. In terms of the campaign itself, I have been thinking that it might be interesting to provide a kickoff event that could serve as a shared origin and the beginning of plot gears turning.  But how to share that with all the players? So I made this player handout.  I had to look around until I found a good picture (from a Flash comic book) that I could Photoshop to show the airline flight.  I'm still using Distinctions from MHR to help the players get a handle on certain things, like NPC's or campaign locations. Now, to see how the game works...