Google+ Pickup Games (And Getting Some Conan On)

Back in my days behind a coffee-stained editor's desk in the smoking post-industrial hole that is Detroit, I would frequently pack six solid days of jagged stress around the high-tide parts of the editorial cycle.

As soon as that unremittingly bleak long winter would break even a bit on a morning off I would jump in the car cleats in hand and drive over to the freakishly great soccer fields erected for the city's brief World Cup moment in the sun. Without fail there was always enough critical mass of other stir-crazed players to get a full-teamed game on. Those games went a long way in keeping me sane those eight years.

Plugging away this morning at a balance-sheet analysis of the Google+ gaming boom, one of the greatest strengths (for me) just jumped right off the page: the ability to drop in or run a game at just about anytime of the day or night with less than a couple hours notice.

I don't think I need to spell out the advantage of that to this audience over much, I would hazard a guess that the single biggest X-factor holding many of us back from playing tabletop rpgs as much as we is that ugly beast called Adult Life Scheduling interfering at each and every turn. Having the ability to waltz into a pick-up game, not surprisingly is just an amazing boon, another perhaps unintended, but welcome outcome of the energy around Constantcon.

The only wrinkle I have encountered is that we are still fumbling around with how to actually run these games. To date, the sessions I have played in have been campaign-like games where the GM is clearly trying to spin out something less fleeting and ephemeral. I have had a blast playing them, but with my own standing commitments to running the Domain Game II and EPT Jakalla sessions really make me a kiss-and-dash-on-the-first-date kinda guy.

Punchline: it would be really sweet to have actual one-shots hand-tailored to be played at a moments notice.

Here's my part, I am going to put together 1-2 one-shots specifically designed around the TSR Conan rpg. A game that seems pitch perfect in supporting episodic, action-packed, lite sessions with a small cast (say like 1-3 players).

Here's your part, tell me what you want if you were going to play in said pick-up (better would be design some pick-up games of your own, but I am fresh out of pithy exhortations for the morning.)

Namely:

1. Show of hands of people who want to play. Good also to say your rough windows of opportunity if you know them. Encircle me on Google+ if you haven't already, or set up a dummy account and do so if you are all shy like.

2. What would you prefer playing: pre-gens (based on actual REH or imaginary characters) or swaggering S&S ne'er do wells of your own?

3. Would you prefer playing a session based on actual REH stories or something completely original? (The question really is whether you think you'd know them to well for them to work with a few twists.)

Game on?

Nostalgia

Nostalgia began life in the Baroque era as an entirely different animal than how many think of it today. 

Apparently desertions, suicides, and sudden deaths were so common among the many homesick Swiss mercenaries who fought their way across Europe that it was called the “Swiss Illness”, a disease that supposedly came on with a preoccupation with strong feelings for the mountains of home. Nostalgia, a Greek compound formed by adding  algos (pain, grief, distress) to nostos (homecoming) was coined in 1688 by a physician to describe the malady. 

Later it would get mixed up with Romanticism in particular with it's connections to natural landscapes and spiritual senses of homeland.

As a rpg blogger who steers toward the moldy oldies, I bristle at the charges of nostalgia that get bandied from time to time. Bristle, not because it's not true, but because it is. I bristle because it's confused with shoddy old sentimentality, the sugary sap we have all been trained to by our maudlin, self-obsessed culture. We fetish youth and the new, to the point that we are encouraged to piss away later years basking in an afterglow labeled at your local Walmart as “nostalgia”.

But when I look at my own return to the hobby the welter of things I brought back with me are just more complicated than that. Truth be told there were indeed hefty doses of golden-edged memories, and the joy of reconnecting with the physical artifacts of the game. That sudden charge when flipping to that first page of the Holmes book, undeniable.

But if you have followed this blog—and have winded through all the wool gathering and yarn spinning of my more personal entries (self-indulgently the ones that made the blog experiment truly worthwhile to me) and some others—you'll note a preoccupation of mine to try and pick at the all deeper feelings and thoughts that swim around these games of fantasy.

On some days the game really is just a game, a folded up board and some dice that I pull out to have a good time. On others, the quiet moments when I am designing some new piece of the setting or just day dreaming it goes over to that thought train. How do our thoughts and feelings about religion color our fantasy pantheons? When is D&D? 

Much of it is tinged with that older nostalgia, a longing for some other place both real and imagined that was close once and now feels far. Isn't that one of the essences of fantasy as much as the Weird? That bittersweet holdover of Romanticism? Cyclopean crumbling ruins, the seeking of long-lost treasures, the vanquishing of ancient evils?

It's my birthday and as I walk into the first years of so-called middle age, these trains come naturally. The hell with it, let's game.  

Search for the Emperor's Treasure

Desert Scribe's wrap-up today of our Search for the Emperor's Treasure game session reminds me that I have been remiss on my own post.

Back in the hoary day, I was a complete sucker for any game Tom Wham signed his name to. I played the crap out of every single game of his I could get a hand on. Admittedly some of those game were profoundly silly--and dare I say crudely simple--such as Snit Smashing or that one whose name eludes me where you play gods literally dropping sentient critters onto a planet to see if they go splat or stay alive to sing your praises.

But others were all around great games—rollicking beer-and-pretzels game fun, always touched by the whimsy of Wham's illustrations and quirky design. For me Search for the Emperor's Treasure, tucked into the center spread of Dragon magazine issue 51, was the best of 'em, a slam dunk.

Basically it was either OD&D or B/X-flavored D&D (depends who you ask) on a board. Each player takes the role (and in a great Whamsian touch the most experienced player picks first) of a fighter, cleric, magic-user or elf, complete with goofy backstory.

Each player is ostensibly questing wilderness and dungeon crawl style to find the treasures of the Emperor scattered and hidden around the handsome Darlene-drawn map by Evil Sorcerers (tm), but in suitably D&D grubbing form that's only a fig leaf for the real object of the game: Treasure full stop. The player who ends with the most swag wins.

There are options for making the game cooperative and party based or even more competitive with player vs. player killing. The former ruins the point, the latter--while Wham explicitly warns against using--actually adds some game balance by helping curb players from exploiting the game's biggest design flaw, the tendency to just march over to one of the sites that give higher odds for treasure finds and just camping there turn after turn.

(I would also recommend mucking around with some kind of house rule that limits either the amount of turns or total treasure that can be mined out of a particular site).

Making Your Own Copy

Thumbing through a super cheap Ebay win of that issue—affordable because hair-tearingly it was missing the game section—made me hungry to play it again.

Fortunately, I found that putting together my own copy was surprisingly easy. Here's how I did it.

I started from a PDF copy of that issue of the Dragon (drop me an email if you want to know how to get a copy, legal of course) and then explored some print-on-demand options. Office Despot has a service (Kinko's offers a similar process)  in which you can upload a PDF or other file here and they will print to specs at your local store.

After you upload the files, only select the three full-color pages for the maps and counters. Blow these up to 11 x 17 inches (this will make a larger play surface, though you will lose some resolution) and choose full-color copies.

Now I didn't do this but in retrospect would have made the game much more attractive, select a durable card stock paper to print on. Send it off to your local store and definitely, definitely make sure to call that location to make sure they don't muck it up—I assure the copy-monkeys will do so 6 out of 10 times if you don't. Typical turn around time is a few hours.

When you get the copy, cut out the margin on the maps first aligning them to fit over the overlapping half inch of duplicated images, tape them together. Cut the counters, play cards, and other bits sorting them by type. Throw the encounters, arms, and treasure counters into separate coffee mugs, dixie cups, or whatever you have handy for drawing of chits.

Et voila, you are ready to play.

They look surprisingly sedate for people in the process of
repeatedly siccing a dragon on my poor Elf. 

Expanding the Game

If you want to expand the game with a few more options, mosey over to Wham's site and find a reproduction of the play cards for the dwarf and “hairfoot” characters added in the Best of Dragon Games version. Boardgame geek has a few rules variants and other freebies worth downloading here.

If you prefer the alternative map in that second edition--a non-Darlene hex map that could be cut up and moved around a la Settlers of Catan--an enterprising sort could use the jpg image here and print up a copy. (While it looks fun, I couldn't forgo the aesthetic and nostalgic appeal of the original.)

A Brief Interruption of Business as Usual

Under a rock? Look here then.

Editor's Note: the wonders of the Internet, there is already an entire blog dedicated to this meme. 

Conan: TSR's Lost Game

Two days journey, north of Kulalo, off the Black Coast....Up the river Zikamba...through the Valley of Darkness you'll find a Ruin, ancient and nameless. Whatever cult of man lived there, they are long vanished and only dead men guard it's treasure. In my youth when I still had eyes to see, I worked as a sailor on a ship that went into the Black Kingdoms bringing back hoards of Ivory.

A jade crocodile with emerald eyes as big as a man's hand. The natives talked of in whispers after their tongues were loosened on our skins of fortified wine. The ruins are thought to be cursed by the locals and are forbidden entrance. A village lies just to the south of the ruins along the River.

So went the lead up up for the one of the more rocking—and rare—chances to actually play a rpg, in this case an obscure “Silver Age” entry, the Conan rpg designed by Dave “Zeb” Cook. Between that evocative opening set up by my buddy and GM Scott in Seattle (aka Scalydemon), the chance to play the brooding REH Pictish hero Bran Mak Morn (pictured above in that Jeffrey Jones cover), and the fast and furious fury of the session, I was impressed by the game.

It was a grudging respect admittedly. I had quite simply never heard of it and when Scott floated some barebones description at first I had a fair share of skeptical internal groaning. A color-coded Marvel Superheroes-like unified resolution system? Groan. Skill-based system with point buy? Groan, groan.

It felt also strange to think that TSR could have put an entirely new fantasy rpg game in 1985 without me ever noticing. My first thought was it must have been as big as a steaming pile of offal as that other TSR turkey of the time, the Indiana Jones rpg.

Back then, even with the drift that would lead me out of the hobby picking starting up, I tended to still be highly focused on things revolving around that ill-fated company. Dragon magazine was the first periodical I ever had a subscription to and receiving that rag in it's porn-like plain paper wrapper was a cherished monthly ritual.

But that's exactly what happened. Sure I remember the release of the much disdained (even by my friends at the time) modules featuring the muscle-bound Governator of California, but the game itself until last year I had heard nary a hide nor hair about. This morning I (virtually) flipped through all the issues of Dragon from that time, outside of a short blurb in upcoming products in a single issue not once did it grace an article—let alone a promotional ad. Strange.

Perhaps TSR decided that it didn't need to create a competitor to its own monolithic entry into fantasy roleplaying game; ran afoul of IP restrictions; or simply got lost in the mismanagement and excess of post-Gygax TSR. There is a backstory there that I have yet to hear. (And would be worthy the telling, shot-in-the-dark plea to the Internet cough cough).

Cover art from Boris Vallejo

The tragedy of its obscurity is that it's a fast-paced, mechanically-elegant, mercifully-lite Swords and Sorcery game. It quite simply played very well--and had any number of elements that jived with my prissy sensibilities.

Although it has skills, called “talents”, they are thankfully short, immediately sensible, and completely lacking the subjective mental skills that I tend to grognardly despise as cheap substitutions for player skill. (You know the kind, the “Persuades” and “Sees” and others that were replete even in my favorite Chaosium games of that time).

The sorcery system is dangerous to its user (magical talents increasingly raise an “obsession” score), open-ended and mysterious in a satisfying way. To gain spells you must not only design your own but must quest through Hyboria for scraps of time-forgotten eldritch books and arcane objects to make it happen.

And best of all is that it supported a wider range of crazy Howardian action antics. The system quite naturally lends itself to kicking over tables, grappling/tossing ape-beasts down yawning pits, jumping over the backs of opponents to stab them from behind, etc.

In other words, some good shit.

You will note the frequent use of the present tense back there, it so happens thanks to the beauty of this free-wheeling age that this game is not only kept alive, it's kept alive as a virtually untouched freebie. Called Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System (ZeFRS) it's pretty much the most faithful retro-clone around as it's virtually the same system verbatim only lacking the explicit Conan IP property (still owned by anyone but the Howard family, Gigantacorp...err Conan Properties).

If you haven't acquainted yourself with the system a quick mosey over here to the ZeFRS website can set you up at the right price.

Woodgrain Box

With heavy heart I note that my erstwhile friend and co-designer, Brad of Crushing Skulls, has released pages from his “perfect” retro-clone game, Bludgeons & Flagons aka the Woodgrain Box, a project we have been working on diligently for upwards of half a week.

Why the sadness?

While my nom de guerre and artwork grace the pages of that "game", a wholesale and ruthless attempt by that jackass has usurped that great and open-ended enterprise developed in my mother's basement.

Do not be fooled, Gentile Reader.

You will note the heavy hand of his soul-crushing, anti-OD&D agenda—and the fact that he has released this game without my permission and explicitly stated that he will drop my credit and all royalties in future editions, merely adds to the scurrilous nature of this so-called “game.”

Please stay tuned for the release of Adventures in Firetrucks--a true roleplaying experience not to be missed, one that reflects the fun and creative energy of the original Ebonheath campaign.