Delta Green / Nemesis

I've been gathering material to run a Delta Green campaign using the Nemesis rules.  The One Roll Engine rules look like they'll make for a pretty deadly game and the Madness Meters offer a different kind of insanity experience from BRP CoC's Sanity system.

I've found the Sanity system in CoC leads to a death spiral that rapidly leads to an unplayable character; not a great design for a campaign game.  The Madness Meters used in Nemesis offer a gradual hardening of the psyche that leads to various forms of sociopathy, along with the gradual onset of various other mental disorders.  See?  Much more entertaining!  It's a little more complicated than that, but it does seem to allow for a little more variety and playability in the gradual slide toward psychological entropy. 

The combat system offers limited hit points, non-lethal and lethal damage, hit locations and a variety of light tactical options for players.  It's interesting, but lethal.

Nemesis has a somewhat unfinished feel and it was never released as a for-profit publication, but it does have the essentials that you can use to build your own horror game.

So far I've gathered material from a series of posts converting various Cthulhu-mythos spells to Nemesis and I've begun assembling conspiracy material for cults and organizations working behind the scenes (much of it from The Fairfield Project and The Yellow Site).

There are a few good Delta Green scenarios floating around out there, Night Floors is definitely weird and creepy, you can use source material from Insylum to get the background for the Carcosa stuff.

You can find the spell conversions here.

Mythos creature conversions (WIP).

House rules for Nemesis/Delta Green (WIP).

James Maliszewski update and a bit about being human

James Maliszewski, a well-known blogger and designer of material of OSR gaming, has been conspicuously absent from his usually daily blog posting.  His Kickstarter project for Dwimmermount megadungeon project hasn't been updated and people are in a tizzy.

Many people, chiefly people who have backed the Dwimmermount project, were bitching and complaining about not getting their updates and so on, which was understandable given that they'd paid money to back the project.

He has posted recently that he going through a difficult, existential even, crisis and has simply said that everything else will have to wait until he has gotten through this.  I wish him well.


Now that James has made a lengthy, deeply personal, announcement about what is going on with him and asked for patience, people are still bitching.  Not only is it uncharitable, it's downright heartless.  He's not a corporation, he's not even a big company, he's a guy who writes and the gaming side of his life is something that he does out of love.

To the folks who are pissing and moaning and calling him irresponsible and other nonsense: have a little shame. It's not all about you, hounding or denigrating him is not going to get you what you want.  Have patience with people when life deals them a shitty hand, and hope that when the day comes that you need patience and understanding, someone will cut you some slack.

Health and luck to James, I hope he weathers this shock well and comes back to us soon.

Barbarians of Lemuria

Finally broke out Barbarians of Lemuria over the Christmas holidays and ran a session for four of my old gaming buddies. We played a scenario called Crimson Shoals set in Howard's Hyborian Age.

 The scenario was written by Garnett Elliott, who has written a number of BoL scenarios set in Lieber/Lovecraft/CASmith/Howard style settings.

Crimson Shoals is short, but about the right length for a one-shot game or part of a campaign. The pregenerated characters are authentic Howard Hyborian Age anti-heroes and each of them has interesting details in their brief back-story blurbs.

We had a blast playing the scenario. BoL is a great little system with a lot of flexibility and I hope to get more experience with it this year.

EDIT:  I should add that Crimson Shoals, and a bunch of other stuff for BoL, is available on the Strange Stones blog (see blogroll at right).

Codifying "Player Agency" is bad.

Random Wizard's post about simplifying calculations got me thinking about the d20 mechanic.

Using the same mechanic for everything (the d20-roll-high) is one of a few things that I took away from the d20 system as a good idea.

 I still think that they let the whole feat and skill thing get out of hand, though, with 3.0/5. They tried to make everything a skill or feat instead of keeping it fast and loose. Codifying too many things can actually rob the players of "agency".

Fair and flexible adjudication of the game is a better plan. And it makes the person running the game feel less like a robot and more like a participant in something fun, a shared experience.

My Secret Shame (well, one of many)

Your results:
You are Will Riker

Will Riker 85% Spock 72% James T. Kirk (Captain) 65% Chekov 60% Geordi LaForge 60% Worf 60% Deanna Troi 60% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 60% Mr. Scott 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Data 41% Mr. Sulu 40% Uhura 35% Beverly Crusher 15%

At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Tekumel

I've acquired a copy of Gardasiyal: Adventures on Tekumel, and I've been considering trying out a game of Tekumel to see what it's like.  I've been doing a lot of reading about the setting and what people who've run it have to say.

It does sound interesting, so a long-time gaming buddy and I have got the notion to go through character generation as a test drive.  I've also been reading Dave Morris' Tirikelu rules for Tekumel, they look concise and seem to have the flavour of the game built-in, perhaps they'll work better than Gardaiyal.  We'll find out soon.

Fizzle

The fall gaming thing fizzled out after a few weeks, largely my own fault -- I simply didn't have the energy to put into it.  We played a multi-session one-shot of Stuart Robertson's Citadel of Evil mini-module using the Swords & Wizardry White Box rules.

Everyone had a lot of fun and it was great to rediscover the joys of playing an rpg that fit into less pages than the character generation section of many "modern" rpgs.  Seyoung, my wife, had never played a role playing game before; she had a lot of fun and thought she'd enjoy more.

We had started generating characters for Traveller (Classic) and were ready to begin, but it kind of got lost pre-Christmas.  I'll have to see about firing it up again sometime during the summer for a session or two.