LRG Blog

Delegate or Die: Holding Your Gaming Group Together

7th August 201914th May 2020

As some regular readers might recall, last year I got a roleplaying group together with the ambitious goal of playing twelve different games over the course of twelve months. I’d gotten the idea from a podcast I used to listen to called Dice of Doom, but the real driving force was the fact that I have so many games I’ve never played. I post daily to an Instagram hashtag (#bensshelf) that features a different rpg book that’s been collecting dust on my shelf for years (along with my usually dour face) and I’m into the 40s at this point with a ton of my collection left to go. Getting the group together wasn’t the hard part, though. As different as the idea was, I found enough people who were into it to give the concept a try. We actually did pretty well for a few months, getting through three games featuring multiple sessions with the odd one shot or two along the way.

About four months in, however, life intervened. Due to unforeseen financial circumstances, I ended up having to take a second job and that pretty much killed my schedule flexibility. To be honest, I could have kept it alive, but I had to choose between my gaming group and my writing group. In retrospect, I’m not sure I made the right choice, but at the time, it seemed like a no brainer to focus on the writing group. The worst part was I had big ambitions for the gaming group, even going so far as to develop a podcast to accompany it. While the production values weren’t the best, I thought the podcast was pretty good for what it was trying to accomplish and I really enjoyed producing the series.

The moral of this story is that it’s really hard for a group of adults to keep a gaming group together. There’s just so much happening in everyone’s lives that unless a few people are committed enough to keep everybody else on board, the whole thing will fly apart. In some respects, it’s like trying to get a band together. The concept always sounds great in your head, but it’s a massive logistical pain in the ass once you try to make it happen. Most of the time, the burden of organizing a group falls upon the gamemaster’s shoulders, which sucks because this is also the person who has to do the most work during the game. I suppose it would be easy enough to offload that responsibility onto someone else, but it never quite works out this way. If I were planning to organize another gaming group in the future, I think one of the first things I’d try to do differently is delegate some responsibilities. Who’s making the head count to be sure who’s coming and who’s not? Who’s making sure food and drinks are available? Who’s keeping track of what happened in each game? This is all minor stuff, but little logistical things tend to add up and make life more difficult than it needs to be.

Managing a gaming group is real challenge that most gamers completely overlook. Poor communication is usually the biggest culprit for groups falling apart. Sometimes it’s just the uncertainty that causes everyone to drift apart over time, but in other cases it can lead to genuinely bad feelings. For most people, a gaming group is, at best, the fourth or fifth most important thing on their agenda. It’s a luxury hobby that can soak up a lot of time without much obvious benefit beyond simply enjoying yourself. Is it any worse than playing 18 holes of golf on a Sunday morning? Probably not, but there aren’t many gaming groups getting their session out of the way before noon on a weekend either. For most of us, the prime time for gaming interferes with social obligations for younger people and family obligations for older people. I’ve always thought that a weeknight is an ideal time for a gaming group to meet for three to four hours, but I’ve never found anyone who agrees with me on that count.

If there’s some advice I can impart here (both for myself and others), it’s to be realistic about what everyone wants out of your group and how you’re going to manage it. Don’t be afraid to be honest about setting expectations and assigning responsibilities. For gamemasters, you have to be willing to let go of some control if you don’t want to wind up managing absolutely everything about the group. Just because you’re in charge of the game once play begins doesn’t mean you also have to coordinate when and where to meet or sort out the menu. In addition to communication and flexibility, you also have to be honest with each other. If you don’t see yourself being able to stick it out for more than a few weeks, say that up front rather than slowly fading from the scene. I’ve certainly been guilty of doing this, mostly because I want to be involved even though I have very real conflicts in my schedule that prevent me from fitting in a gaming group.

Anyway, now that my work and financial situations are stabilizing a bit, I’m beginning to have thoughts about organizing another group. The 12/12 Project fizzled out around this time last year, so maybe nobody will notice if it picks back up after a year-long hiatus…

General Gaming

The Best RPG Book Ever

7th August 201914th May 2020

Earlier this year, I started running an Instagram hashtag featuring the covers of roleplaying game books sitting on my shelves (#bensshelf). Some of these books aren’t much more than glorified décor because I’ve never played or sometimes even read them. But there are a select few I’m not only quite familiar with, but have a meaningful emotional connection to my life.

This week, I featured a game that I have rather strong feelings about: Vampire: The Masquerade.

Now, I have to be very precise here. When I talk about this game, I’m referring specifically to the Second Edition hardcover released by White Wolf Publishing in 1992. This is an important distinction because the Revised Edition released in 1998 is a very different beast for reasons I’ll go into later. The Second Edition is, in my opinion, the best roleplaying game rulebook ever published. No other game combined a great concept, compelling writing, evocative artwork, and top tier production values as well as this book.

From the very beginning, Vampire: The Masquerade (VtM) is a game that sucks you in and doesn’t let go. I remember seeing the book on the shelf at a Waldenbooks (that’s an old mall-based bookstore chain for you younger folks out there) in the late 1990s and being immediately drawn in by the striking cover art. I knew it was a game because it was in the roleplaying game section, but the cover made it clear that VtM was somehow different from the other games on the shelf. When I opened the book and flipped through a few pages, I started to get a sense of just how different it was from its contemporaries. I’d been drawn into fictional game worlds before, but VtM presented a world that felt more real, more dangerous. It’s a bit of a cliché now, but at the time, VtM really did feel like a roleplaying game for mature gamers. This wasn’t a game about exploring dungeons or fighting hordes of orcs; it was a game about fighting the monsters of our inner nature. The world was dark, scary, and exciting in a way that even the gritty cyberpunk games of the 1990s (Cyberpunk 2020 or early Shadowrun) simply couldn’t match. After reading VtM, other games felt silly by comparison.

Presentation was a big part of the game’s appeal. The rulebook had an austere black and white format that put artist Tim Bradstreet’s work front and center. Bradstreet’s art forever cemented the look and feel of the World of Darkness for me. The images in that book are burned into my mind, and the rest of the book’s artwork felt like it was of a piece with Bradstreet’s style. This was a common trend in games back in this era. In the same way that Brom helped define the aesthetic of Dark Sun and Tony DiTerlizzi established the look of Planescape, Tim Bradstreet created a memorable vision of VtM that the series would never quite be able to recapture in later years.

The game’s setting was also unlike anything I’d seen in a roleplaying game. Vampire society was complex and shot through with political intrigue and bizarre traditions. It was a game about relationships and internal conflict rather than kicking down the door and taking all the treasure. For a teenager struggling with identity and social pressure, VtM was a dramatization of a world you already understood to some extent. The way the game incorporated various forms of vampires from fiction guaranteed that you’d find a vampire clan that appealed to you on some level. Each clan also loosely embodied a philosophy, which helped to make VtM a game about bigger ideas as much as personal identity.

Of course, in retrospect, the rules for VtM were a hot mess. The game used a success system with d10 dice pool, so you wound up rolling fistfuls of dice and tallying up successes against your opponent. It was simple, but clunky. And the way the game handled vampire powers was both inspired and terrible. On the one hand, it did a great job of explaining how the powers worked and what they could do. The actual implementation of those powers, however, was kind of a disaster. If you knew what you were doing, it was quite easy to create overpowered characters that took advantage of the rules to basically do whatever they wanted.

Now, this isn’t an entirely fair criticism of the game. The real problem was that VtM was never supposed to be a rules heavy game where you relied upon your character’s stats to accomplish your goals. Unfortunately, that’s basically how every roleplaying game of that era worked. Players accustomed to years of adversarial gaming in Dungeons & Dragons understood that optimizing your character to take maximum advantage of the rules wasn’t just a good idea, it was how you were “supposed” to play the game. That worked fine in a game like D&D, where you were locked in a physical battle for survival at almost every turn. But VtM was supposed to be a different type of game. Sure, you could game the rules to create a super character, but doing so would rob you of the core experience the game was trying to provide. It wasn’t a game about surviving against all odds and vanquishing your foes, it was a game about personal horror and social interaction. Creating super characters that could circumvent any challenge by leaning on the rules kind of defeated the entire purpose of the game. In order for that system to work effectively, you needed a certain type of player who wasn’t interested in the traditional form of character building and a gamemaster (or Storyteller, in VtM terms) who wasn’t afraid to crack down on players for exploiting obviously unintended loopholes in the rules.

Unfortunately, things kind of went downhill after Second Edition. By the time the Revised Edition came out in 1998, the game was already losing much of its original character. The artwork was more of a mixed bag and the game fell into the fatal trap of explaining too much of its lore, robbing it of the sense of mystery that made it so compelling in the first place. Where the early World of Darkness was a grim and scary place with deep shadows, it evolved into something resembling a conventional fantasy setting weighed down by a ponderous amount of backstory and detail that every player was expected to know. As player options expanded with each release, the core experience became diluted. By the early 2000s, VtM felt less like a game of gothic horror than a comic book superhero game featuring vampires. Instead of embracing the roleplaying concepts the original game emphasized so strongly, players built superpowered characters who bashed each other over the head with the rules in an effort to be the star of the show.

To its credit, White Wolf realized how far the game had strayed from its original concept and did a hard reset in 2004, discontinuing VtM and replacing it with Vampire: The Requiem (VtR), which tried to return the game to its gothic horror roots. While many longtime fans were angered, I always kind of liked VtR because I appreciated what it tried to do. As good as VtR was, though, it didn’t quite have the same magic as the original incarnation. In some ways, the game’s moment had passed. Vampire: The Masquerade was a game that came along at just the right time and tapped into something about 1990s culture that resonated with its audience in a way that VtR didn’t. It’s a good game, but it feels more calculated and self-aware than early VtM. There’s an honesty and integrity to the original VtM that is simply impossible to replicate.

While various versions of VtM have been published over the last decade by Onyx Path Publishing, none of them have the same resonance for me as the Second Edition rulebook. If I ever make good on my repeated threats to run an old school Vampire game, I’ll almost certainly be dusting off my twenty year old copy of Second Edition and tell the players that anything outside that book is strictly off limits.

Sometimes it’s good to stick to the simplicity of a classic.

News & Updates

To Sail the Crimson Seas…

7th August 201930th August 2020

In a recent post, I talked a bit about the somewhat rocky road I’ve taken to working on publishing my own roleplaying games. One of the chapters in that story was the development of a pirate RPG called Crimson Seas. Yesterday I cobbled together my various design notes and draft text into a single document that can serve as a basis for playtesting. I can’t really say what prompted this effort (and it was an effort, believe me), but I thought it might be worth reviewing how I ended up getting to this point.

Crimson Seas grew out of a short story I wrote called “La Tierra de la Sangre” back in 2006 or so. I can’t remember what prompted me to write a pirate story, exactly. Maybe I was inspired by the pending release of the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Anyway, the story is an alternate history pulp adventure in which the Aztecs have resisted Spanish conquest and have fought back by constructing massive stone pyramid ships that keep afloat by way of blood sacrifice. I enjoyed the concept so much that I planned to write a series of such stories and use the setting as the basis for a roleplaying game. That didn’t work out so well initially. I started a second story, but never finished it (an exceedingly rare situation for me, by the way). After sketching out some initial ideas for the RPG, I started graduate school and didn’t have the time to devote to it any longer.

I came back to the game shortly after The Walls of Dalgorod was completed. My initial design work got pretty far. I had the basic rules system in place and worked on a prototype game book detailing character options, spells, and an entire miniatures-based ship combat system. But the game only existed in my head. I couldn’t really playtest it in any way. The first big moment came when I tried to run a session at a local gaming convention. After playing around with some pregenerated characters, I realized that the rules system had some crippling flaws that rendered the game almost unplayable. Panicked, I literally rewrote the game overnight, completely overhauling the basic dice mechanics and how characters worked.

In retrospect, I got lucky. The convention wasn’t heavily attended that day and I didn’t have enough people sign up for the game to merit running the session. Thankful for the reprieve, I started working on fleshing the game mechanics out more thoroughly, adding situational rule after situational rule to address every problem that came up.

It was at some point while writing a section of rules to determine the “pull” strength of various sized whirlpools that I realized I’d gone very far afield from the type of game I wanted to make. By that point, I was playing and reading more games than when I started the design process. Crimson Seas was supposed to have been a “simple” or “rules lite” game, but somewhere along the line it had transformed into a crunch-heavy monster, with rule after rule after rule for every possible scenario players might encounter. After all that work, I’d created exactly the sort of game I hated to run as a gamemaster.

In a flurry of frustration and minimalist inspiration, I scrapped everything and threw the few aspects of the game I thought were worth saving into a series of redesigned character sheets. While I’m not particularly fond of the Apocalypse World rules system, I love that game’s approach to character sheets. “Powered by the Apocalypse” games put all of your character creation decisions on the sheet. When you start a game, you look at a series of options for your character, make a few choices, and you’re ready to play. The new Crimson Seas sheets followed this design mandate, discarding the game’s original “classless” character creation system for a more rigid, but still flexible Role system that slotted characters into a series of specific archetypes that made sense for an open seas piracy game. I was really happy with the way they turned out and I felt like I’d solved a huge conceptual problem with the game.

So naturally, I set the sheets aside and didn’t work on the game in any serious way for two years.

Even as recently as a week ago, the idea of dragging Crimson Seas out of mothballs and working on it again seemed unlikely. I can’t really explain why I started looking at the files again yesterday other than I hate to let hard work go to waste. Looking through the prototype game text, I’d forgotten just how much I’d actually finished. I started sifting through files and thinking about how they would mesh with the most recent rendition of the rules. At some point over the last year or so, I wrote up some very basic outlines of a new dice mechanic that I felt had some promise. While the old rules went in a very simulationist direction, the core ideas behind them were always very simple, so a lot of what I’d written could be brought into line with the new system. A lot of what I wrote back then had to be scrapped, of course. At one point, I caught myself trying to adapt some old mechanics to the new system and had to ruthlessly delete things to avoid going down that road to needless complexity again.

The game still has a long way to go. It’s in a very liminal state now, with some aspects that are very well developed and other core mechanics existing in very abstract, untested form. As a far more ambitious game than Hounds of the Tsar, Crimson Seas will require a lot of playtesting and refinement to get it closer to a polished, publication-worthy state. I think it can get there, and I’m still intrigued enough by the setting and the spirit of the rules system to want to guide it through that development process.

In any case, it will be fun to see where the game ends up after its already lengthy voyage.

News & Updates

The Long Road to the Last Redoubt

7th August 201928th June 2020

So, Last Redoubt Games…

Maybe it’s best to start at the beginning. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for over twenty years, going back to the time I somehow convinced my mother to buy me a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons “Red Box” starter set (the Mentzer version with the sweet Larry Elmore cover) at a yard sale. I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. That box set included a single-player starter adventure that introduced you to some of the basic elements of the game and then provided a basic starting adventure for a multiplayer game run by a game master (or, in D&D lingo, a Dungeon Master). Since I was an only child living outside of town, I didn’t have a group of friends at the ready to play, so the game kind of collected dust on my shelf after I played through the initial adventure.

My real introduction into roleplaying came when a guy in my marching band squad in the ninth grade turned to me and asked me if I’d heard of a game called Shadowrun. I was, in fact, familiar with the game because I knew about the recently released Super Nintendo game that was based upon it. He and a friend of his had recently ordered a copy of the Shadowrun rulebook and suggested that I join them for a game session when it arrived. We got together with yet another friend to play a game called Underground, which was kind of a bonkers sci-fi dystopia where the players are down on their luck mutant war veterans making a living on the mean streets of a cynical post-capitalist society (think First Blood crossed with Taxi Driver crossed with Blade Runner crossed with Total Recall). It was a weird game session that saw my character literally blown to bits in the first ten minutes (and carried to the hospital in a beer mug and a used condom), but I had a blast and I’ve pretty much been hooked ever since. In addition to playing Shadowrun, I ordered Earthdawn, the recently released fantasy game from the same publisher (FASA Corporation). My high school gaming group changed composition a bit throughout the years, but we played a lot of Earthdawn. Even when I moved to another state while I was in college, a few of us would still play every time we got together (Sadly, we took a hiatus from Earthdawn a few years ago, but that’s a rather sensitive subject for another post).

That’s all a long way of saying that I’ve always been drawn to roleplaying games. Almost from the very beginning, I was the person in my group running games and coming up with adventures. In high school, my dream job was to be a writer and game developer for FASA or White Wolf Publishing (who at that time published the World of Darkness game line). By my first year of college, I was devoting a lot of thought to creating roleplaying game settings, fleshing out entire worlds that could be used as the basis for entire game lines. Much of this was a byproduct of the era. Roleplaying games in the 1990s focused HEAVILY upon setting and story. Even D&D was featuring game lines like Dark Sun and Planescape, which established evocative new worlds with intricate storylines that were advanced little by little with the release of each adventure module. I played a lot of FASA games in those days, so I got a hefty helping of this style of game development from Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and Battletech. I had more setting material for Shadowrun and Earthdawn than I could ever hope to use in a single campaign, but I couldn’t get enough of those worlds.

My first game I tried to develop was…um…bad. Known at various points by the awful title “SoulQuest” and name of the setting, “Ranchess,” this game was…well…an attempt at something. All kidding aside, the setting was important for my development as a writer because it was the first thing I actually tried to use as the basis for a novel. I still have a crate of notebooks somewhere in my house with the first thirty or forty thousand handwritten words of this first attempt (Bits and pieces of it have actually survived to live again in other projects, some of which might yet see the light of day). As a game, though, it sucked. I don’t remember how much of a rules system I had sketched out, but I quickly abandoned the idea for another game that I started working on in the early 2000s. That game, Dark Earth, actually got quite far along. I had a prototype rules document, complete with various races, classes, and abilities written out in rather exacting detail. Since I didn’t have a gaming group at the time, playtesting never got off the ground and I eventually decided that the rules were too similar to other things I’d seen anyway (there was an attempt to convert it to a d20 system at one point as well).

A little over ten years ago, I wrote a short story called “La Tierra de la Sangre,” which features a magical, swords & sorcery alternate history of the Caribbean in the Age of Piracy. Partially inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I envisioned a setting that drew heavily upon both actual history and a madcap mashup of historical “could have beens” such as the Chinese continuing to establish naval dominance in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Vikings gaining a firm foothold in northeastern Canada, the Aztecs repelling the Spanish with massive stone warships powered by blood sacrifice, and so on. I thought the setting was a natural fit for a roleplaying game, so I set about developing a rule system I thought was pretty unique. The resulting game, Crimson Seas, felt like it fit a niche I hadn’t really seen filled and I had high hopes for publishing it in some form as digital publishing for rpgs had become so much easier by the early 2010s.

Last Redoubt Games was the name I came up with for this publishing venture that never got off the ground. The name itself is a reference to “The Last Redoubt,” the foreboding pyramid fortress featured prominently in William Hope Hodgson’s brilliant but obtuse 1912 novel The Night Land. Unfortunately, Crimson Seas didn’t withstand the rigors of my own close scrutiny, much less playtesting. By the time the game got to a playable state around 2014 or 2015, I’d started gaming more frequently and I came to see that Crimson Seas wasn’t quite as groundbreaking or as interesting as I’d thought. Even worse, the more I worked on it, the more it started to resemble the types of games I didn’t particularly like in the first place. I eventually scrapped everything and laid out a plan to totally redesign the game.

But I never got around to it.

Sometimes you work on something for so long that you just can’t go back to it again. Maybe I got burned out or maybe I came around to the idea that the concept itself wasn’t all that great. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, I never went back to rework the game into something usable. In the meantime, though, I started developing a few new ideas into fully-fledged game concepts. One of them was inspired by the video game Helldivers, which my son and I became obsessed with about two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s essentially Starship Troopers, with the players in the role of elite soldiers being dropped down to a planet to perform some super dangerous mission deep in enemy territory. For my son’s birthday party, I thought it would be fun to make a tabletop miniatures game version of Helldivers for him and his friends to play. We didn’t get around to playing it, so the idea sat in a notebook until last year when I started tinkering with it again. This time, however, I actually got a group of people to sit down and play it. This kicked off a playtesting process that saw the game, now called Archangels, change dramatically. The first major change was the elimination of a gamemaster player. Originally, Archangels required one player to control enemy units. In the latest version, enemy actions are totally automated by way of a card system, so every player can concentrate on strategy and coordination with their teammates rather than bookkeeping enemy stats. While it still needs a bit more refining, Archangels is feeling more and more like a finished game and I’m starting to let myself think about things like researching how to produce game components, how to organize a Kickstarter, how to commission artwork, and how to do graphic design. It’s a daunting but exciting prospect.

Since Archangels is a bit of a complicated project, I thought it would be a good idea to put together something simpler that would help me establish an identity for Last Redoubt Games. My taste in roleplaying games has changed dramatically from when I was younger and had more time on my hands. While I used to enjoy books that gave you page after page after page of rules, character options, and setting detail, today I appreciate games that are simple, flexible, and to the point. A book like Dragon Age from Green Ronin Publishing is fantastic and I love it, but sometimes I want the simplicity of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which provides no specific setting material and a very simple set of rules. The two games that have had the biggest influence on me in this regard are Into the Odd by Chris McDowall and Ghost/Echo by John Harper, which focus heavily on getting into the game as quickly as possible and not getting bogged down by requiring players to master extensive rules mechanics to get the most out of a game.

The result of all this brainstorming is a game called Hounds of the Tsar. Based on an idea for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game I never got around to running, the game sees the players take on the role of Oprichniks, who were ostensibly the secret police force for the Ivan the Terrible in late 1560s Russia. While I intend to run a number of playtests myself, I decided to make the prototype version of the game available for anyone who wants to give it a try. The draft document is only about fifteen pages long and provides enough information to get a basic campaign off the ground, but gamemasters and players will have to fill in some gaps if they want to stretch things beyond a few adventures. Some of those omissions are intentional. I want the game to be open-ended enough for groups to create their own unique material. Too often roleplaying games condition players to do everything strictly “by the book” and they become hesitant to make up their own rules when the situation might demand it. While Hounds of the Tsar will almost certainly add more material to provide players with a toolbox for incorporating their own ideas into the game, I don’t anticipate adding much in the way of specific rules or content. For the time being, the game is what it is, and I’d need to have some pretty compelling and overwhelming feedback to make me want to change that.

You can view and download a PDF copy of Hounds of the Tsar here. Read it, play it, and let me know what you think. I’ll have a little more to say about it in the coming weeks, so keep checking in here or the Last Redoubt Facebook page for updates if you’re interested in how this little project pans out.

News & Updates

Welcome to the Last Redoubt

28th July 20197th August 2019

This changeover has been a long time coming, but there’s been enough progress with this little side project that it finally made sense to move LRG out from under the umbrella of my personal website and into its own space.

For the time being, there’s not a lot of new material here, but I have transferred all of the downloadable games from the old website. After mulling it over for quite a while, I decided to keep these games easily accessible and not “gate” them behind a sign-up form. My hope is that people will enjoy the games enough to keep checking back here to see what’s going on with LRG and want to be a part of the future.

For now, feel free to browse the existing games. If you want to reach out with feedback on any games, you can send all comments/suggestions to pyramid@lastredoubtgames.com.