the target

The second episode of Dollhouse. Now there is an episode that Joss wrote. <grin>

killing time ... and goblins and orcs and ... storm giants?

At least one good thing about recent events is that they have forced me into doing some more work on the modifications I've been making on the various games I'll probably never get to run. There is my old-Runequest/Glorantha campaign, this time using a modified Ironclaw system, although, truth be told, it's actually getting closer and closer to the Usagi Yojimbo variant of this game system. Now I really like this system for a reasonably realistic but still reasonably heroic game, such as Runequest should be. And whilst I'd love to run a vanilla Ironclawe/Jadeclaw game, I feel that most of my potential players would ask embarrassing questions like "where does wool and milk come from?" Actually I don't really mind Runequest at all. The Basic Roleplaying System that drives Runequest and it's many variants is still one of the best game engines around. For a second generation game, it featured third or fourth generation mechanics (depending on how you count these things). Admittedly we often referred to it as Limbquest because it was very easy to lose a limb with insufficient healing. There was a reason why pirates had hooks for hands and peg-legs. Now back in the day I had three D&D games. The first one was effectively set in a shared world and essentially consisted of deathtrap dungeons. Events outside these dungeons consisted of a sort of armed neutrality between the various gamemasters (who had actual characters in the game milieu and who could be killed – if you managed to find the weakness/secret that was hidden in each of the dungeons). I think an example of the nebulous outside-events was the intercontinental ballistic fireball fights between two of the magic-using gamemasters (when you decide that the reasons that wizards build towers so as to get line of sight on their rival, you are at an entirely different power level from the standard D&D game. Then again, I don't think Gods, Demigods & Heroes had come out yet, so we had little to compare it to, and surprisingly the campaign was reasonable well balanced for a Monty Hall campaign. It worked. And still gets ressurected at times. I didn't feel like extracting Dark Moor (and no, I didn't actually realise where I might have purloined the name from until many years later) out of the context of the world it was set in, so my second campaign was, again, another megadungeon. This time under an island (water table? non comprende!). The island was fairly well detailed, but the rest of the world existed off-stage. Player characters would arrive at the island seeking the dungeon. Whilst the inhabitants of the island weren't as conspicuous about it (no stalls selling "I survived the dungeon T-shirts", Elvish restaurant ["We Serve Elves"], tour guides, map sellers ["guarenteed 100% authentic"] or Dwarven Steam Carousel), they knew what was underneath the island but also knew better to disturb it. Given that most players eventually overmatched themselves (this was back when D&D was a game where you can and did die), they probably had good reason to. They never did mention the main entrance though. And no one really went looking for alternative entrances, so everybody laboriously lowered themselves down the well to get in via one of the upper cisterns that the town had tapped for fresh water. The third campaign was still essentially a sandbox campaign, although it had much greater extent, and built upon previous actions. It also lasted several thousand years of game time, since it actually consisted of micro-campaigns set within the larger world context. Depending upon the amount of time that passed, the events of previous micro-campaigns were either history or legends or totally lost to history. Each player was a single karmic line though, and was free to use knowledge from before (past life memories). There is only one game left in that campaign, after the world was effectively destroyed by a player's mad grab for power, and that will never be run now (the player whom I wished to run it for is dead, so the story of the paradox of Hellsgate will never be told in camera). There was a half-finished fourth campaign, concerning the Exiles from the third campaign finding Refuge (and Haven and Sanctuary) in the Faerie lands beyond the Sea of Lost Souls, that will probably never actually be used, although I really do like some of the ideas I came up with for it. Anyway the reason I mention this is that I've been reading lots of the D&D grognards blogs and getting all nostalgic. And the last game system was my modified game of Dungeons & Dragons. Actually I have about three seriously modified versions of the game (one of which, Enhanced Donjons & Direwolves, is now a lot more playable that I've got a d14 [Hmmm]), although I've been messing with the latest version. This one is probably not as clean mechanically as ED&D, but captures the pulp sword & sorcery feel that I was looking for quite well, while still being quite recognisably D&D. Always meant to test it sometime using a published D&D adventure to see if it would work. And no, it's based on 3rd edition (as a point of congruent evolution Blue Rose and True 20 took many of the same approaches I did), although mine is (hopefully) much simpler (no explicit skills, for example). And no, I've barely looked at 4th edition. I'm put off by what seems to be a heavy emphasis on combat (in the sense that your character is defined explicitly by the combat abilities). And the use of the battlemap both knocks players out of character (suddenly there character is there on the map, rather than they being the character) and shifts the game heavily back to being player vs gamemaster (which I don't really like for many reasons), rather than character versus world. Additionally I find the interplay of the various options very off-putting for what should be a simple game. I'd much rather play Melee/Wizard. Simple, fast, and you don't really mind dying (games of this sort should always have the risk of death I find). Then there are the many idea in all the other games I have. From the idea of running a fantasy game using Over The Edge (in one proposed version, quite literally), because of it's clean and simple character generation system, or trying to capture the player-generated combat options inherent in the card-based duelling systems from Lace & Steel, to the magic system of Castle Falkenstein (in fact I was thinking heavily of a modified resolution system that treats the entire combat (or other extended action) as attempting to build a viable set, so the progress of the duel, rather than being tracked by external factors, is implicit in the play of the cards).