Silver Lake, Star Wars, & Where I've Been

This post will probably take a lot of time to write... My gaming this year has been fairly limited. The one consistent thing I've been doing, however, is running The Silver Lake Chronicle, a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign (running on the Introductory Kit rules) that just had its "season finale" a little over a week ago. I've been writing the session summaries and posting them on the blog whenever I have the time and energy; go ahead and take a look if you're interested.

Running this "game" (really almost entirely RP-focused, as one might find in a MUD) has been interesting in a few ways. First, every session after the second has been entirely online, using Discord's text chat and a very nice dice-rolling bot called Dice Maiden. The disadvantages to this are the greater difficulty in conveying tone, and the amount of time that is eaten up just with writing responses (even with my reasonably fast typing speed); the advantages are the greater ease of "assembling" everyone (no transportation or parking issues), and the ability to fiddle with my descriptions and dialogue until they're just right.

Since the season finale, I've been planning two separate games: an online D&D game using For Gold & Glory (the AD&D 2nd Edition retroclone), and a face-to-face Star Wars game using the original West End Games rules... along with some nice vintage Wizards of the Coast prepainted miniatures that can range to absurdly low prices here. Apologies for the low quality of my cell phone camera, but here are the minis I've gotten so far (the only one I already had was the Wookiee soldier).

So darn cute! :3

Finally, I've applied for graduate school (library science!), I'm planning to move in with my girlfriends sometime in the next year, and I've tried to become more active in spiritual and political spaces; the latter two are somewhat outside the scope of this blog, so I won't go into detail about them here. What I will mention is that I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with how much control G**gle has over my data, so don't be surprised if I make a post sometime before moving explaining my plans for future blogging and journaling. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment if you need to get in touch with me. That's all for now!

Thief Skills in AD&D (1st and 2nd Edition)

So, given my renewed interest in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, I've been looking at other sources for rules. My current document of house rules is pretty short at this point - and to be honest, I'd like it to stay that way for as long as possible, especially considering that I still haven't assembled a group of committed players. I might even temporarily remove the helmet rules, at least until I can learn whether the majority of my players would enjoy that level of granularity (and especially since I'm not using encumbrance yet).

But where rules sources are concerned, my primary pool is the variety of "official" 2e products (like the Player's Option books), as well as Justen Brown's excellent 2e retroclone, For Gold & Glory. I'm also drawing a lot from the first edition of AD&D, which has some useful bits that were removed in 2e for no good reason that I can think of. A big example is the random encounter tables; while I can see why they might be culled a bit in view of the trend towards story-gaming in the 1990s, removing them entirely is just asinine. In the past, I've used the encounter tables from B/X, with good results.

Back in the Ring

Well, it has been a while since my last post. This semester was rough on both me and most of my players, to the extent that I didn't get to run anything for over a month, but I just finished the comeback session of my AD&D campaign. Despite all of us being a little rusty with the rules and mechanics, and one of the four players that showed up having to leave before the session proper, we all had fun. I even have that endorphin rush that accompanies my best runnings; while I wouldn't count this one among my best, it was pretty good considering all of the factors that were arrayed against it. (Plus, the pizza this time was excellent... and one of my most regular players recently started working at the nearest pizza joint.)

This campaign in particular was one I've been itching to get back on its feet. According to the notes of one player, the last time we played it was in June. 😧

However, I used the intervening time to do some work on the rules. My goal throughout was to streamline and organize the rules as much as possible, while still leaving the majority of the content in the Player's Handbook valid rules-wise. Some of the changes I've made include:

• Simplifying the equipment lists a great deal. I used the equipment tables from the Rules Cyclopedia (and some from the Cook & Marsh Expert Rulebook) as a baseline, only adding extra items where absolutely necessary. I removed a lot of extraneous weapons from the "standard" list (the bloated ones from the PHB can still be used, if a player insists), as well as removing a lot of armor; there is now only one armor type for every AC value (from 8 to 0).
• Organizing the spell lists by class. Clerics (and paladins), druids (and rangers), and illusionists all use the spell tables from the AD&D1 Players Handbook, while mages (and bards) use the spell tables from the Expert Rulebook; this does mean that they do not have a finalized list beyond 6th level yet, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
• Adding the assassin and monk from The Scarlet Brotherhood as core classes, while removing all specialist wizards except the illusionist. This leaves a total of 11 classes - three for every group except wizards. I'm considering adding another wizard class to balance it out, but I'm not sure yet.
• Adding Comeliness as the seventh ability score; it's rolled like any other score, but will increase or decrease when Charisma does. It basically functions as described in AD&D1's Unearthed Arcana.

I also tried out the method of awarding experience by damage, detailed by Alexis Smolensk here; it worked well for my fighter and thief characters when the party fought a displacer beast, but the druid (who only got in one hit) came up short. I'm considering combining this with the optional rules for class-specific experience awards in the AD&D2 DMG, to allow some additional reward for difficult non-combat tasks.

Finally, I stayed up until 3:00am last night (Friday) creating a custom character sheet, incorporating all of my house rules. Both my players and I were very pleased by the results; I'll try and post it sometime soon after I add a page for henchmen and animal companions (the current sheet fits everything else on two pages).

Hopefully, getting to run will give me some inspiration for additional posts. I'll be traveling out of town closer to Yule/Christmas, but until then I'll try and whip something up.

(P. S. I used For Gold & Glory as my rules reference, and my PHB and the one owned by one of my players was used by them. For the most part, it worked; I'll definitely be using it instead of my stack of 2e core books going forward, at least for running at the table.)

For Gold & Glory: First Impressions

My copy of For Gold & Glory just arrived in the mail today! It arrived much sooner than expected, which is fortunate since I'm planning to get my AD&D game back on its feet in the next few weeks. I'm looking forward to having a single-book rules reference to use in-game, and I'll likely post a more in-depth review of it once I've actually gotten to use it as such.

For now though, I can comment on its physical quality. I opted for color hardcover, and even then the price was just over $25.00 USD (including shipping). It uses matte paper, which doesn't show off the art as well as glossy (and some of the art - mostly drawn from Renaissance and later paintings, as far as I can tell - is very good), but it looks like it'll take pencil much better. Since I'm using this as a reference guide, and it's not a vintage or rare item, I will try to overcome my compunctions and make some notes of my own! It's also quite easy to read, being in my absolute favorite format: serif font, somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 pt, two-column layout.

More to come! (...at some point)

(Unrelated note: I'm so glad for the new, larger mailbox that was decided on after the previous one fell over in a storm. The whole book fit in it easily!)