Castles & Crusades: Reforged (OGL Free)

https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/UdtYMs1

Troll Lord is celebrating OGL-free books and giving away a PDF of the 10th printing of Castles & Crusades Player's handbook - but you must sign up via the above page. This is a limited-time offer before they roll out the Kickstarter for the three core books, which are OGL-free and forging their destiny.

The link above came from Troll Lord's official Facebook page, which is legit.

The OGL disaster succeeded in balkanizing the hobby; good job, Wizards. Maybe they wanted to divorce their legacy, non-digital players, and go after the mobile gaming market. In that case, they succeeded. Tabletop D&D is dying. Even though it is still huge, like a dying whale, the time it takes for significant things to die can be pretty long. They are going to mobile gaming, and D&D has had its time in the sun.

C&C is my game; even without the OGL, the best parts are still here.

Old School Car Wars

We only had calculators back in the day. We did not have Excel, spreadsheets, computers, cell phones, or the Internet. We designed these cars by hand. Columns of numbers down a sheet of paper, sums and totals, points of armor, notes on weapons and accessories, and a grand total at the bottom, making each design fit into a cost and weight budget.

Pencil, paper, and imagination to create dreams.

The tables were covered with maps and counters. We laid large sheets of posterboard over the maps to ensure the counters weren't disturbed and picked them up carefully and slowly each day. We wanted to return to the game as it was tomorrow.

The games went on for days, with the story of each car a little plotline running through a massive battle with 12, 24, or even 200 cars on the board. By the end, the wrecks covered the battlefield, and those tough, lucky, or smart enough survived. The battles took hours to complete, 30 seconds of play, or days for massive battles. We had lists of who went next and handled them down the line. Special counters to track conditions like fire and lost tires.

This was the long summers in a poor Appalachia household with no Nintendo and no Internet, as they did not exist at that time. The Atari 2600 was a dead console, and there was nothing to do but go outside or play Car Wars all day.

We played Car Wars all day.

This game is in my blood.

Every other game faded away. AD&D and Mystara died. New games paled in comparison. There was no BattleTech, nor was there Warhammer. Just Car Wars, Star Frontiers, and a little West End Game's Paranoia. We made our own roleplaying game to go with Car Wars, a Traveller variant that seamlessly meshed with the board game.

We had pencils, paper, colored pencils, and magic markers to make our counters and maps. We covered poster boards in huge maps, laying out our grids and planning the maps with rulers, drafting tools, and drafting French curves. Inking and coloring them. those hand-made maps took weeks to plan and create, but they were ours and cool.

I still have them.

It also helped set me up for a lifetime of learning in science, math, engineering, and creative problem-solving. It taught me the value of seat belts and the importance of driving slowly on dangerous roads. It taught me how to be aware at night, how to drive defensively, how to be responsible and budget for the things I want, and how to deal with adversity. It taught me how to know when a battle can't be won and to bow out before things get too bad.

The honor of accepting a surrender. And expecting the same mercy in return. And when to know there would be none.

This was life.

And life was Car Wars.

Appendix N vs. Harry Potter

I feel this generation could care less about the classic 1970s fantasy books like the ones in Appendix N. Every 5E book I watch feels influenced by either Harry Potter or anime.

I have to ask myself, with 5E, does 1970s fantasy matter anymore?

It is a sobering feeling coming to this conclusion, which influenced my decision to rid myself of all my 5E books. I was never really into Harry Potter (which is like a bible to this generation), and I do like anime, but not in my tabletop gaming.

Did Harry Potter kill Appendix N?

My 5E and Pathfinder 2 books felt like they were talking to an alien audience. I did not care for the art, which was all too disconnected, floating on the page, and too happy fluff. The content was overwritten and bloated, and it felt like pay-by-the-word filler.

The books weren't speaking to me.

Even if some were written for a more mature audience, the inconsistency between the core rulebooks, which looked like YA comic books, and the darker-themed books like Inferno or Dante's gave me this horribly inconsistent, food-at-a-low-quality buffet feeling (with a few great entrees) that turned my stomach.

There is a reason Dragonslayer was created. The game has a strict art requirement and consistent style. I can get into the feeling and vibe of the game. Shadowdark is the same way. Reading the book makes you want to play what it is showing you. Free League does an impressive job in terms of art and direction.

Shadowdark is amazing. This is what 5E should be instead of the narrative superhero game it turned into. I greatly respect this team and what they managed to do, fix 5E and bring it back to its roots. The original designers of 5E have yet to learn how bad it has gotten, and a patch 2024 release by Wizards will not fix the bloat and fatty mess the game has turned into.

Shadowdark is emergent storytelling based on fear and tension.

5E has strayed so far away from dungeons that it feels like it has become a FATE-style story game.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is fantastic in terms of art direction, even though the styles vary widely - they all fit that old-school theme. This is also the game that holds Appendix N to be the inspiration for the hobby it should be. But do those 1970s fantasy books speak to people who create 5E books?

With my old-school games and classic modules, I know they speak to me.

And I can't say the presentation of 5E, Open 5E, or even Pathfinder 2 excites me. This may change with Tales of the Valiant, but I grow less hopeful knowing the mess of books I already have.

I can't play 5E without feeling like I am forcing myself to like it. The system works at low levels and worsens at higher levels, like 4E's broken promise. Level Up A5E addresses the problem, but I feel overpowered and bored at level six even with those rules. And I need more than a broken promise to give 5E shelf space.

But Appendix N is the heart of the hobby, and it feels irrelevant today in many of the newer games. Harry Potter was so huge, developmentally, to so many that I am begging to wonder if the earlier classics are being forgotten, and the trends in gaming are more inspired by Marvel, 3D animated movies, and anime than anything the hobby started with.

Kickstarter: Adventures Dark & Deep, 2nd Printing

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brwgames/adventures-dark-and-deep-core-rules-2nd-printing

Adventures Dark & Deep is doing a second printing, and they have a Kickstarter out. I have the first printing, and it is an excellent AD&D-style throwback game, with a ton of speculative material, extending the experience to include items that were discussed but never implemented. From the Kickstarter page:

This second printing incorporates numerous errata, expands the material with new classes like the blackguard and skald, and centaurs as a player race, and makes many other improvements to the original three books. In addition, the original three books have been consolidated into two; the Core Rulebook and the Core Bestiary. Everything is being comprehensively re-edited and re-organized to make it much easier to use. 

The Kickstarter includes a core rulebook and monster book, each at over 500 pages, and a total of 900 monsters included at $90. It is a great deal, and if you are an AD&D diehard looking for a game that respects the old while adding what could have been, this is a great game for you.

Hero System Basic Rulebook

At 138 pages, the Hero System Basic Rulebook is more of a superhero roleplaying game than most dedicated superhero games. This is a low-cost introduction to the full-blast Hero System., and the differences are described in a paragraph in the book below:

BR differs from the full HERO System rules in just one major respect: the amount of details, options, alternatives, and minor/special rules available. The core mechanics of the two systems — how you make an Attack Roll or a Skill Roll, how characters take damage, and so forth — are identical. But where the HERO System might include ten paragraphs and four special Power Modifiers to explain a particular Power and provide ways for gamers to customize it, BR probably only has a couple of paragraphs. It leaves out a lot of the detail and options of the full HERO System. The intent is to pare the HERO System down to its most necessary rules — that way you can easily learn them before diving into the more complex, but much richer, rules of the full system.

A good example is the Change Environment power, a 3/4 column of rules in the Basic Rulebook; the full rules are 4 pages for many unique situations. I could run a superhero campaign with the Basic Rules and never need the complete rules. As it is, the basic rules are more complete and powerful than many full superhero games.

One thing I love about the Hero System is that conversions are stupidly simple. Instead of converting, you design the item as a power source. All weapons and items are created as powers. Do we want a laser pistol?

RKA 2d6 (30 points), AP (+1/4); 37 active points; OAF (-1), No Knockback (-1/4), 20 charges (2 clips max) (+1/2). Total: 21 points.

And any superpower can be designed into an item. So you can have flash grenades, ESP helmets, luck potions, tangle guns, holographic illusion projectors, mind control rings, powered attack claws, and anything the power system can do can be designed straight into an item. I am calculating the points; you don't need to go through that for "found items" that you pick up; this is just a convenience if someone wants to use that laser pistol in a character design and also to know the relative power level of the device compared to others.

This makes games like Gamma World or Fallout in Hero System infinitely more fun since the devices of the ancients can go way beyond what they have in the books, and they can have all sorts of strange and wild effects that nobody expects - along with side effects that can be designed as limitations. And your mutations are also essentially superpowers.

It is all one power system, go to town designing.

And if you always wanted to, you could just say an item "is what it is" without designing it.

In this sense, it is a better design framework than GURPS since everything in the world is designed using the same system. In GURPS, you will have characters on one system and other items on another; nothing is unified and straightforward. Here? It is easy. The entire system will be unlocked once you learn how to design a power.

The Basic Rulebook is capable of running many games and conversions. There is also a great PWYW introduction to the system here. Also, for those who complain about all the math, this game isn't for you. I see a lot of complaints about math-heavy games like this and GURPS, and frankly, if you aren't willing to put in the work, plenty of other games out there may suit you better. This is the same with all the reading needed to play Runequest; if you don't want to put the work into learning about people and cultures, you will miss out, but there are always alternatives.

Sometimes, I like a game to be more complex since those who want to love and play the system will put in the effort. The community will be smaller but more interested, engaged, and knowledgeable.

Hero System is one of those games. If you buy into and learn it, you can design any other game imaginable using the same framework. It scales from gritty, low-level street heroes to cosmic superheroes.

It is a worthwhile game, and the design system itself is a hobby in its own right.

Off the Shelf: HERO System

As I went through my storage boxes, I pulled out the set of HERO System 6th books I got during the pandemic, but I needed more time to play. It got put into storage last year. I got them out because I played a lot of Hero System 4th with my brother, and we liked the system enough to run it as a fantasy campaign. We also used it for our superhero system in the 1990s when we abandoned the heavily censored AD&D 2nd Edition. What is old is new again, with 6E being rewritten to avoid upsetting people; the old rule of every even version of D&D sucks is still true today.

These days, I would never use this to play Marvel or DC, and I would likely stick to the official Champions universe. Steaming service media companies have killed all the legacy superheroes. The death of Marvel and DC isn't about politics; it is a lack of self-control at the highest levels that allows directors and comic book writers to do whatever they want. You see it in many of these newer superhero movies; they are passion projects and self-inserts by the creators and have nothing to do with the original source material.

So, if Marvel and DC are dead, why play superheroes? The costumes?

I don't have an answer to this question. Another part of what killed superheroes is that everyone co-opted the model. This is like the overuse of wirework and bullet time after the release of the Matrix movie, and you see it today with those dumb "180 flip shots" that movies do, where they flip the screen upside down in some cheap visual candy.

D&D is superheroes. The D&D movie was a superhero movie. 5E-based games are superhero games. Story games are superheroes. Every genre is a superhero genre these days.

Today's tabletop characters are overpowered, never die, push enemies over, and larger-than-life figures. They walk into any situation and "boss" it. All media is superhero media. Any form of escapist entertainment is superhero entertainment.

Do we even need the superhero genre anymore?

I honestly don't know.

Are capes and costumes enough? Or is that just marketing and cosplay?

I play games grounded in realism, like Basic Roleplaying or GURPS. They give me a mental break from everyone being over-the-top and invincible. I am tired of the superhero genre these days. It has turned into a junk power fantasy, the same everywhere, and the entire message of the genre these days is this semi-fascistic "power makes me right" theme. All that matters is power, getting more, and using it to prove you were right in the first place.

There is no responsibility for possessing power anymore. Power is just a tool that validates your point of view. That may be what my HERO System game is about: the vast tide of "power makes right" versus a few still holding onto the old ways and them all destroying the world.

We will see.

Off the Shelf: Call of Cthulhu

I had this game stored and never thought I would return to it. However, my recent interest in Runequest led me to dig it out, and there is a reason this is the second most-played game behind D&D.

Horror games are fantastic.

5E absolutely cannot do horror.

The Alien RPG by Free League is my other horror game, but nothing beats the Lovecraftian classics. Nothing will come close to this game, except maybe Vaesen by Free League. But these are world-ending horrors, Cthulhu himself and other society-eating, world-crushing, madness-incusing things from beyond the veil of reality.

This does modern-era gaming and the 1920s, just like its superset sister game, Basic Roleplaying. CoC has the madness rules, ancient lore, the artifacts, and all the spooky horrors that turn a seemingly ordinary small town in the middle of nowhere into a frightening experience of sheer terror.

The beauty of this game is that any situation can be played entirely normal, and then when the world turns upside-down, what was once safe and familiar becomes a no-man's land of strange cosmic horror.

I once had a scenario in a small Nebraska town where the investigators investigated a series of mysterious cattle deaths. They had a packed town hall meeting in the local church, which dragged on into the night. A small group got tired of the pointless meeting and said there was no threat. It was wild dogs, and they left to go to their cars.

When the meeting ended, the first out discovered the group that had left, sans heads, lying in the street.  They never made it to their cars. The clouds in the sky were strangely moving like snakes.

And all the guns were in the general store three blocks away.

And the only one with the keys to the gun safe was lying in the street. Oh yeah, you are screwed, and those guns will not likely do you any good.

That was a long night.

Until they realized what was under the church.

No X-card is saving you. You saw the sign-up sheet's "what can happen" reverse safety tool and agreed. I am an old-school "eff-er" DM. I will happily bore you, twist the situation on its head, make you fear for your lives, and then unfairly pull the rug out from under you. I will replace a party member with a doppelganger and never tell the player until their character bursts open into gory tentacles.

If I pull things back or say, "I'm sorry," I am not doing my job. People who play with me come to enjoy a specific type of no-limits experience. This is like popping John Carpenter's The Thing into the Blu-Ray player.

You are in a horror game.

This is what you paid admission to see.