September 14, 2006 at 11:30 pm (Roleplaying)
Looks like Beyond the Mountains of Madness isn’t the only classic game book being reprinted this year. Iron Crown is releasing Rolemaster Classic, a cleaned-up version of Rolemaster 2nd edition!
Rolemaster 2nd ed. was the system of choice during much of my early gaming years, and I have fond memories of it. I tried to keep up with the later editions of Rolemaster as they were published throughout the late 1990s, but my enthusiasm for the game slowly waned. I’m not sure if I just got dumber over the years or if Rolemaster got more complicated, but I swear, some of the later Rolemaster editions managed to take rules that I already understood, and make me stop understanding them. I’m sure somebody out there understood how the heck combat rounds worked in the Rolemaster Standard System rulebook, but it sure wasn’t me.
I haven’t cracked open my old RM2 books in many years–mostly because I’m afraid that I’ll find them incomprehensible, and that would confirm the “I got dumber” theory. But when the reprinted version hits store shelves, you can bet I’ll be standing in line, making my saving throw resistance roll vs. Purchase More Unnecessary Game Books.
Kudos to Iron Crown for reprinting an old favorite.
(And while we’re on the topic of the Good Old Days, just this week I picked up the new d20 Dark*Matter sourcebook, also a reprint of a classic game book. 2006 is shaping up to be an awfully nostalgic year.)
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September 13, 2006 at 12:08 am (Gamemastery, Horror, Roleplaying)
In my last post, I lamented that my youthful days of marathon gaming sessions were probably over, and resigned myself to a roleplaying future consisting largely of one-shot games and very short campaigns. But there is a part of me that secretly hopes against all odds that one day, a wealthy Patron of the Arts will shower me with so much money that I can quit my day job and devote all of my energy to running one monstrous, many-years-long roleplaying campaign.
I already have the book that I’m going to use to run that epic Campaign to End All Campaigns. It’s a sanity-blasting 400+ page Call of Cthulhu campaign called Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and it’s one of the best gaming reads you’ll find. I have no idea what would happen if I actually tried to run this beast, in which the PCs take part in a long and almost certainly doomed expedition to Antarctica. Based on this guy’s experience running it, I suspect it would both be awesome, and would permanently cure me of the desire to play another roleplaying game ever again.
I exaggerate a bit, I suppose. But still, I would love to run BtMoM sometime. What’s prevented me from doing so to date is simply the vast amount of time that would be required to run it; it’s not the sort of campaign you want to start and then drop partway through. Also, having read through it a few times, I’m not sure how even the most benevolent GM could get the PCs through the first half of the campaign alive, let alone all the way to the bitter end.
I mention this all because Chaosium has announced that they’re reprinting the long-out-of-print BtMoM in a nice (and nicely expensive) hardcover, and that’s got me salivating to once take this down off the bookshelf and fantasize about running it. Running such a thing would be my crowning achievement, and a worthy way to go out.
It’ll never happen, of course… unless you, dear reader, are a wealthy Patron of the Arts looking to finance the last hurrah of a bitterly aging gamer. I’ll try to keep my hope alive while I await your offer.
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September 9, 2006 at 7:05 pm (Personal Musings, Roleplaying)
Over the last few years, I’ve slowly forced myself to accept the fact that the Good Old Days of Roleplaying are more or less over for me. I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever again game with quite the frequency and intensity that marked my roleplaying game sessions in high school. And that’s OK, really; being married and having a job offer certain perks that 24/7 D&D marathons do not.
But last week, I came pretty darn close to temporarily reliving those halcyon days of gaming–it wasn’t quite as crazy as a typical high school game session was, but it came close enough that the ghost of my high-school self, smiling down from on high, must have been pleased.
The game was Warhammer Fantasy Role-play (the relatively recent Green Ronin edition), the player was my friend Mark from high school, and the campaign was (a shortened version of) “Ashes of Middenheim.” We played for much of Friday night, most of Saturday, and a good chunk of Sunday afternoon–pretty impressive for a couple of married adults with actual responsibilities that they should’ve been dealing with instead of sitting in the basement pretending to be dwarves and elves.
It was a blast, and there were plenty of opportunities to reminisce about the days of yore:
- Something about mapping out battle scenes in a windowless basement and being periodically interrupted by a female calling down to remind us to eat really took me back to the good old days… when we gamed in the basement and were periodically reminded to eat by mom.
- Warhammer has gory critical hit tables… just like good ol’ MERP and Rolemaster! Warhammer’s tables are much smaller than the sprawling, many-page combat tables in the Rolemaster rulebook, but do outdo the competition in one respect: one of the critical hit results instructs the player to just make up a gruesome critical hit description himself. I don’t know what this says about Mark, but this invariably resulted in his enemy’s decapitation.
- There was even one of those Great Gaming Moments–the kind where you call everybody to witness your die roll so that you won’t be accused of making it up. In a truly amazing series of die rolls, Mark–while confronting the Final Bad Guy, who was scarily tough–scored the mother of all critical hits. In Warhammer, if you roll a ‘10′ (the maximum result) on a damage roll after hitting your opponent, there is a chance that you can roll another d10 and add the result to the first die roll. You repeat this until you roll something other than a ‘10′. Four ’10’s later, Mark had accumulated enough damage to insta-kill the big bad guy that I’d carefully crafted to present an epic challenge for his character. That had us both grinning like… well, like nerdy kids playing D&D in their parents’ basement.
All in all, it was a lot of fun to be able to devote the better part of a weekend to a roleplaying game. Among other things, it let us play out a longer story to conclusion, rather than being forced by time constraints to run a short one-shot with little in the way of character development or storyline complications. There’s already been talk about making this an annual event. All I have to do now is make it through another long year of work and real-life responsibility…
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