Tetsujin no Llama

After quite some time of intending to but completely forgetting about it, I finally got over to DriveThruRPG to buy the PDF of Judges Guild's 1978 landmark work, Ready Ref Sheets . This work from the dawn of RPGs, a mere four years after the publication of the original D&D and two years after the white box I learned the game from, has been called the first GM aid. And it is, if not the first, then at least one of the earliest works aimed at GMs but wasn't an adventure or location description (those being heavily overlapping categories at the time). I remembered it fondly from years and years and years ago as a fascinating source of gaming-related riches. On the other hand, I haven't really looked at a D&D volume in the past decade, haven't played in two, and haven't played this particular archaic version since before leaving high school, and for my own gaming needs, there would seem to be very little going for it beyond nostalgia. So how does it hold up? ...

Turns out I've got rather a lot to say about a rather short piece. Specifically, the Car Wars vignette in Pyramid #89 . It's all in general pursuit of world-building, but there's probably as much world-building going on in this one as all of my previous vignettes put together. Four out of the five locations make glancing reference to notable aspects of the world of the new Car Wars , so there are some significant bits of history and culture to tease out there. The fifth...well, that was mostly just me amusing myself. There's also a certain amount of--pardon the expression--reality in there. In figuring out where to put the various arenas, I looked at a lot of maps, lists of roadside attractions, locations of current sports venues, and other such materials. Each place has a definite location in the real world, sometimes to the point of using existing buildings. Here's where everything came from: Big Swede Arena: Parking garage at the Emeryville Ikea. We went the...

I just got news earlier today that an old friend and fellow gamer died unexpectedly last night. He had been, so far as I know, in reasonably good health and was only perhaps a year older than me (which is grown-up, but not old enough that dying is an expected short-term outcome), so we're all rather in shock. I'll be talking to friends about this more, but since this is my gaming blog, I'll talk about him in a gaming context. Al (I'll call him Al here; you didn't know him) had a tendency to get into...predicaments. Well, he was one of several people who did that, but with him, it was usually unintentional. In one of our early fantasy campaigns, he took a memorable hit to the head with an axe, taking absurd amounts of damage but surviving. In our long-running space mercenaries game, his character took another memorable hit to the head. With an antitank rocket. I think he survived that one as well. Good armor, that. But for me, at least, the most memorable gaming ...

...yeah, I got nothin' for this. OK, maybe a little. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 2: Epic Treasures is the result of my suggesting, around the time I was finishing up DFT1, that if we're going to have #1 in a series, it's just polite to have #2 in the pipeline as well. The Powers That Be agreed, and here we are. I think the "Making It Epic" section in the introduction, discussing approaches to take to big treasures, may be the most important and reusable part of the book. Big treasures should go beyond mere bonuses (though, certainly, there are a few things which are all about the mere bonuses in there a page or two on). The GM has to consider scope in different ways, several of which I suggest, and each item in the book has a power in some way related to those criteria. For example, the Marvelous Crab is about freedom of movement and, to some extent, freedom from resource management. It's not a fantasy tank. And despite calls from multiple playte...

So, yeah, I found the imperial Chinese civil service interesting enough to write a substantial article about it . This is very much about a social technology: the cultivation and staffing of a bureaucracy capable of administering a major empire. For China, this involved several prerequisite and accompanying technologies: a well-developed body of philosophy to serve as the basis for exams, a population wealthy enough to support a population of scholars providing the necessary human resources, reasonably inexpensive writing media, and a physical infrastructure of dedicated testing facilities.  I wrote a couple of paragraphs which I ultimately cut, partly for space (I went rather longer than projected on this one) and partly because I didn't think they quite fit. But for anyone interested, here they are: Senior Scholars Persistence in the face of repeated failure in the exams posed certain problems for administrators. The nominal age of retirement from the civil service was 7...

Well, I did say that I'd have something up about the relationship between Guilds and Boards and Curia in a few days. It turns out to be a surprisingly DN-heavy issue (my article and Stoddard's on Back To School ). Between Guilds, Boardroom and Curia, Mass Combat, and City Stats, GURPS has a lot of different ways of describing organized entities, suitable to various purposes. It's interesting how both Bill and I demonstrate that, coming at the question from different directions. And another Car Wars piece in this one. My only regret is that the Brandon Moore art isn't available in a publicly available place, so I can't link to it.  He's really quite good.

I've been the beneficiary of a recent wave of GURPS-related reviews, notably for the new book . The common thread is about how it nudges the Dungeon Fantasy line in the direction of social complexity, world-building detail, and more non-combat interactions. This leaves me thinking that I wasn't clear enough about the book's intent. I mean, yes, it does point in that direction for those who want it, but the objective I had was, basically, weaponizing social connections. Rank is a power-up. ARs allow adventurers to get their hands on some extra gear or other benefits at the beginning of an adventure, and guilds can send them on adventures where they get to keep all the loot. Apparently, the postmodernists were right about the author's intention and interpretation not being definitive. Anyway, I have some additional thoughts about Guilds and it's relationship to Boardroom and Curia. I'll try to get those out there in the next few days.