A New Blog...

A new blog. I almost called it a guy blogging about old school games, but thought the descriptor of my age was better, and the one about what type of games was too limiting. I want to point out that this whole gaming blog is mostly going to be about old school, pen and paper role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, but certainly not limited to them. I will write about other types of games too, but mostly not computer or console games. I spend a lot of time with computer games, but my tastes run to strategy games there, mostly. I also play the occasional board game, and I used to play a lot of hex-and-counter style wargames (or conflict simulation games, if you prefer).

I don't know how often I will update this blog. I am aiming for once or twice per week, but I've fallen short of that goal in the past.

I like pen-and-paper RPGs. I played a lot of AD&D, 1^st and 2^nd editions, and I played 3^rd edition D&D too. I didn't much care for it. I started gaming back in 1980 or 81 with the Holmes Basic set, and I got kind of set in my ways. I played other RPGs back in the day too, even some not produced by TSR :) These days though, I am mostly about the old school games and their retro-clones. The OSR rekindled my interest in gaming. Previous to discovering the OSR “movement”, I had played some old school AD&D (and some Cyclopedia D&D) with my kids, and I played a lot of computer strategy games. Civilization, Crusader Kings & Panzer General were among my favorites. I have some other games I loved that probably bear mentioning, in no particular order, Avalon Hill's Up Front!, Axis & Allies, Star Fleet Battles, Risk, TSR's Dawn Patrol. So I'll probably mention them, and the other games that I wanted to play a lot of but never got around to for one reason or another, like West End Games' Star Wars RPG, or the Pendragon RPG, the Legend of the Five Rings RPG.

I honestly don't really expect to gather any readership, but it'd be nice I suppose. I am mostly writing to get myself back into the habit again, and I might just as well write about the things that interest me from day to day, and that is my gaming hobby.

Currently I am kicking around an idea, really a riff on an old idea I had back in the early 1990s, for a D&D* campaign. The elevator pitch is basically the Roman Empire meets the Age of Exploration- with magic. I like the fantasy genre, probably because I spent my formative RPG years playing mostly D&D; so “with magic” is almost a given. Oddly, I mostly design low magic type settings for my games. I also like history (and majored in it in college) mostly ancient and medieval (my minor was medieval studies) and anthropology; so I tend towards the D&D standard of creating new settings with cultural paradigms I know, Romans, Vikings, Celts, Mongols, et cetera, then tweak them with new geography, different neighbors (including fantasy races), and, of course, magic.

I did a similar campaign with my buddy Darryl as a co-DM back in the 90s. I actually played with the girl who I married for the first time that day, as Darryl ran the inaugural game session, so that would've been about September of 1990. I remember now because I had the idea for the campaign on the flight home from Gencon that year- the only year I ever went. Darryl ran the first game, it went well, then Jamie came along and sucked the fun out of the idea (for me anyway) by talking about how he wanted to play a ½ Ogre, and how a more “standard” D&D campaign would be more fun for everyone. I now know that he was wrong, but at the time, his relentless multi-hour onslaught on my campaign idea crushed my will to run it. We never played that setting again.

This particular time I am riffing on this idea, I am thinking about just using real world geography maybe, then having an alternate history where the Romans hold the west against the barbarians, then (with the aid of magic) expand until they reach the new world. The new world is going to be full of tribes of savage humanoids, which rather invokes the mind set of the Spanish conquistadors I think. Start in the Caribbean, kind of a “safe” zone, then have them expand out like Cortez or Pizarro. I could use all kinds of things like the fountain of youth, or El Dorado as plot hooks and adventures. Sound cool? I am not really sure what to do with the non-human PC races (Dwarf, Elf, Halfling), although I could bring back my old “Sons of Vulcan” concept (from an earlier version of this campaign idea) where all the Dwarves are actually born to Human mothers, and raised by the priesthood of Vulcan. They are all male too- hence “Sons of Vulcan”. Whether it is an actual divine event that some Humans give birth to Dwarves or is just a magical mutation, who knows? Maybe Elves and Halflings then are simply members of tribes from the new world that have allied themselves with the Roman explorers? Why is the western hemisphere full of humanoids? I'd guess some sort of massive magical event “irradiated” that half of the world, and maybe magic exists in the world because of it. Of course, it wouldn't be one of my campaign settings without some sort of chaos rift or other planar manipulation, so that's got to make it in somehow too. My fantasy needs to make sense to me, have it's own internal logic, so I can present the world with some degree of verisimilitude.

OK, enough for today. I have got a cold that's beating me down pretty hard right now, but I wanted to get something started here before we got too deep into the new year.

*Or any other RPG, when I say D&D, it's my mental shorthand for really any RPG, but mostly actually AD&D, 1^st edition, or the B/X variant of D&D, but it might mean GURPS or Savage Worlds, you never know. System is mostly unimportant, but I do prefer D&D and it's derived games, simply because I am most comfortable with the rules. Also, I sometimes use footnotes, so any readers should be aware and prepared.