DOOM II is one of the first games I ever owned. I think it was mailed to me as a freebie when I first got a subscription to PC Gamer magazine in the mid-1990s (I can’t remember my exact age at the time… definitely younger than 15). Before then, I’d subsisted on demo disks (i.e. actual floppy disks sellotaped to the front of games mags), a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 that came bundled with our family PC (my dad, my brother and I spent ages trying to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge in a Learjet), and the original SimCity pirated from a mate.

I had dozens and dozens of free shareware games and demos, and I’d even written a couple of games myself in QBasic (including some rubbish text adventures and a couple I programmed following instructions in an old book called “BASIC Computer Games”; I made a working version of Hammurabi, and definitely had a bash at coding Super Star Trek).

So, I have fond memories of playing DOOM II (and, later, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood) in the ’90s. I don’t think I ever played the original DOOM, and had always just assumed that, because it was a sequel, DOOM II improved on the original in every way. I knew it had more guns, more monsters, more levels… so it must have been “more better”, right? [Read more…]

Apparently I’m posting every couple of months now. That is… not great. Especially as I actually have quite a lot I could be writing about; my gaming life has been booming. I’m now regularly DMing a sandbox campaign of ACKS for seven players. I’m also a player in a 5e game, and have even managed to squeeze in several sessions of Delta Green.

I’ve also been digging into the history of tabletop gaming a bit more, including its literary influences (I now have copies of Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock on my shelf next to H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti). I even managed to get my hands on a second-hand copy of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide from 1979 (albeit the orange-spine reprint), and it’s a veritable treasure trove of esoteric little rules, tips, and tricks for the budding DM. It’s also a hot mess in terms of organisation and (I would guess) actual use at the table.

Yet what prompted me to finally write this was a discussion about failure. The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, a most excellent podcast focusing on Call of Cthulhu and horror-related roleplaying games, recently released an episode about “embracing” the “joy of failure”. [Read more…]

I put together an edited version of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse character sheet, including a couple of changes:

– Added a “Spells & Magic” section, for recording both spells and magic effects / items / curses, etc. I made it as large as I could, because magic effects can be complex.

– I removed the Magic-User and Cleric pentagram things (they looked cool, but my players rarely used them), and replaced them with the “Languages” section.

– Added a section for recording “oversized” items.

– Merged “Properties” and “Investments”

– Changed various spellings to British English.

You can download the character sheet here. [Read more…]

I’ve put together a character sheet for the Delta Green tabletop RPG, designed for use in online Google Hangouts games. It should also print nicely for offline play (remember to turn off grid lines in the print settings, and to set the margins to narrow).

Here is a link to the sheet. You will need a Google account to use it. The link will let you make a copy of the sheet in your own Google Drive, which you are free to edit / use / print. You can tab between the front and back of the sheet at the bottom of the page. [Read more…]

Blimey. Has it been two months already? I’d meant to update this blog much more regularly than that. By now I’ve actually finished prepping the campaign and have already started running it. In fact, the first session was this Monday.

So, why didn’t I update the blog? What happened? Well, my players is what happened. I had grand, pretentious plans to run a Medieval French-styled megadungeon campaign in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, using Isle of the Unknown and Castle Gargantua. It would have been equal parts La Chanson de Roland and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

However, my players had other ideas. We’ve been playing LotFP regularly for almost two years now, and there were lots of little things they didn’t like about the system. They grumbled at the “race-as-class” thing (personally, I think less is more, and would much prefer to just remove demihumans altogether). They really liked the idea of more class options and mechanical bonuses for their characters (which I’m really not a fan of, but hey). They wanted to move into high-level play and command armies, which is something LotFP doesn’t really support (we tried using the mass combat rules from A Red & Pleasant Land, but it fell a little flat; they wanted something crunchier).

In fact, it turns out my players don’t really like the kind of old-school horror play I get weak-kneed over. The idea of playing nameless nobodies dying ignominiously in a long-forgotten tomb doesn’t interest them; one player complained that a high lethality campaign would stop him “connecting” with his character and make him feel like he was playing “cannon fodder” (which is, btw, madness. Jools and Jops were the very definition of cannon fodder, and I loved those little fuckers). I don’t really care about connecting with a character. I much a prefer roguelike (or Dark Souls) approach to roleplaying games, with the focus being less on story and roleplaying, and more on player skill and the capricious whims of RNGesus. [Read more…]