Gaming in 2024

 

The Summary Chart

I've played my last game in 2024 so it's time to do the annual summary. I played 58 session in 2024, which  is an increase of 10 on last year. Face-to-face sessions increased from 11 to 23 this year, mainly as TravCon and LongCon came into the mix. Aside from those two conventions, it was the usual Revelation, North Star and Furnace that I attended (and helped run).

My most run game was Achtung! Cthulhu, with 21 sessions that I ran on Roll20, bringing me to a total of 25 in this campaign. We should conclude Shadows of Atlantis in January 2025 if all goes well. After that I'll step away from 2d20 for a while, as I've played it rather a lot recently. 

My most played game was Trail of Cthulhu, with another 13 sessions on Eternal Lies, which brings us to 38 sessions if my notes are right. We've been playing this since 2021 and it continues to delight me. As a player, this is my favourite gaming experience this year.

The Stormbringer (Tripod) game of Stealer of Souls and Black Sword was a high point of the year for me as I ran it at LongCon, the full campaign across two days! I won't say more as there are a couple of earlier posts on this the blog, except it was probably the most fun I had as a GM.

Traveller comes in next with a mix of scenarios and settings, all since October 2024. I've run three and played one and intended to run more in 2025. I have the Jagermeister Adventure and I think that would be a nice short campaign after Shadows of Atlantis.

The only other game that got more than one session was City of Mist, a perennial for me at Revelation (and 2025 won't change that either).

I finally (after twenty years plus) ran The Dying Earth at Furnace and enjoyed it a lot. Not sure if I will run it again, but that's a long term itch scratched. 

I also had a fantastic game of Cartel using the Berlin 1980s hack at Revelation. I was nominally running it, but it was all the players plotting and backstabbing each other's characters that made it for me. 

I also had a fun time at North Star running Across a Thousand Dead Worlds which mirrors Fred Pohl's excellent Gateway series perfectly. The players were mostly familiar with the source so it made it work really well!

All in all, a great year of gaming.

31 December 2024

	58	38	20	23
Game System	#	GM	Play	FTF
Achtung! Cthulhu (2d20)	21	21	0	0
Trail of Cthulhu (GS)	13	0	13	0
Stormbringer (Tripod)	5	5	0	5
Traveller/Cepheus	4	3	1	3
City of Mist (PbtA)	2	2	0	2
Candela Obscura (BitD)	1	0	1	1
Cartel (PbtA)	1	1	0	1
Impulse Drive (PbtA)	1	0	1	1
ATDW	1	1	0	1
Alien (YZE)	1	0	1	1
Fall of House Prosh	1	1	0	1
Coriolis - the Great Dark (YZE)	1	0	1	1
Star Trek Adventures (2d20)	1	1	0	1
Old Gods of Appalachia (Cypher)	1	0	1	1
The Zone	1	1	0	1
Revolt	1	1	0	1
Liminal	1	0	1	1
Dying Earth Revivification Folio	1	1	0	1

Traveller - The Far Horizon experience so far (spoiler free)

The VTT at the session's end showing the mission planner

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of running Far Horizon, a Traveller/Cepheus Hard SF scenario using Zozer Games Orbital 2100 setting (itself a prequel to Hostile). The set-up is that the characters are the crew of a deep space explorer. the Far Horizon, which has already been the first ship to reach Pluto, and has now been diverted to intercept a rogue planet that is wandering through the edges of the Kuiper Belt. The crew have already been in space for two years, and this will add an additional year before they get home, making the full mission around five years.

There's a crew of twelve, a mission of flight crew, engineers and mission specialists. They're all highly educated and cross trained. This means that practically you need to run the scenario with a degree of troupe style play; the main difference to my past experience of this is that the characters are all full developed.

When I pitched the game on the Gaming Tavern, it was more popular than I expected, and I had enough people to fill two games. Once I pitched dates over the holiday, we ended up with six players, so I knew that this would likely push the AV on Roll20 to its limits.

I shared the characters details and tried to ensure that each player had a character that was likely to go on the away mission and another who would stay in the ship. I created a set of character portraits with artflow.ai just to give people a feel for the crew. 

Montage of the crew, created with Artflow.ai

After that it was pre-work putting the game on the VTT. Initially, I considered using PlayRole, but decided I wanted a bit more capability so stuck with Roll20 (which is a bit like comfortable shoes now having run Curse of Strahd and Shadows of Atlantis on the platform). There's a lot of information on the ship and the planet that I wanted to make easily available. However, that came with a challenge; there were several items that could only be populated once the characters had successfully completed scans and investigations. So this led to the need to build handouts that the players could amend.

The whole scenario is up against a clock, as the velocity of the rogue planet (named Tartarus to fit with the underworld theme of the mission to Pluto and Charon) means that the Far Horizon only has a 96-hour window to explore the planet. Stay any longer, and the voyage home will either be delayed or impossible. There is no hope for rescue. The light lag for a message to reach Earth is 5-hours. It will also take a similar amount of time for a message to get back, so there's a minimum of a ten-hour delay for any communication with Mission Control. It's analogous to sending memos by post rather than phoning someone.

So, twelve characters, ninety-six hours and a whole world to explore.

The scenario tries to address the challenge of this by having a list of key tasks and setting success criteria (or KPIs as one player put it). This had to be an editable form. 

I was also concerned that we'd lose track of who was doing what, where and when. This was when I created the mission planner sheet. Effectively, it was a table with the characters across the top and the 96-hours broken into hour long chunks. It did feel a bit spreadsheet-like, and reminded me of planning engineering work during a shutdown when I used to be a project engineer, but it was very effective. Fortunately, I had several players who were minded that way and happy to work on the sheet.

The scenario's nature does seem to drive a very task and organisation focused approach rather than a character-led one. Team members are allocated to tasks and events ensue. I have tried to light encourage more getting into character, but I think that the nature of the game means that the players have switched into 'solve the problem' mode. That said, I'm enjoying it immensely as they puzzle out what's happening. We don't have the crew of the Prometheus here, we have a group of scientists, engineers and flight crew working together to explore deep space. It feels like a technical space mission, and I felt echoes of 2010 and Rendezvous with Rama.

Other decisions I made were to copy some of the key rules from Cepheus Universal (which is based on Hostile) for environmental hazards onto the VTT to reference quickly. This helped immensely, as fatigue is a risk for the crew in this kind of mission, as are misfortunes involving space suits.

Roll20's AV was struggling despite one of the players not making it, with drop outs. I do know that I had issues with the connection on VirginMedia yesterday (it may be super-fast but it can be choppy). I think we will use Discord for Audio next session, so need to remind myself how that works.

So next session. I was optimistic that this would finish in a single session, but everyone seems keen to find out more. So far we're had a bumpy landing, hazards from ice, a failing space-suit and computer complications, but some quite significant discoveries which will change the face of human knowledge.

Finally a hat tip to Paul Elliott at Zozer Games; I had some queries about the scenario and he was kind enough to respond and sort them out.

Until the next session!

31 December 2024

Far Horizon (PDF) on DTRPG

Far Horizon (print + free PDF) on Lulu

 

WOTB - GSOR 1008 - Mastery - Oasis Palms

 

https://youtu.be/LoI4QbnchpM?si=78LGA1KID8ydALvR

1,575 XP, 3,590 dmg, 240 blocked, 802 assisted, 3 kills

WOTB - Chieftain Mk. VI - Mastery - Mines

 

https://youtu.be/Kkr936xqc8I?si=CNY4U972DsxHTVNS

1,638 XP, 4,593 dmg, 2,790 blocked, 2,342 assisted, 2 kills

Traveller - Genesis of an Idea (Spoilers for 'This Fear of Gods')

 

The original idea

I'm trying to get the BITS website active again (which is proving a challenge as the main website file for Rapidweaver appears corrupted). Doing this has needed me to pull out my old computer as it has the website building software on it. While my 2008 vintage MacBook (unibody, aluminium, 8GB RAM, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, SSD) is slowly doing file actions in an attempt to recover the data, I'm mooching around apps I've not used in years. Most of the web access is severely limited due to age of the browser which means certain challenges in getting data moved. One of the apps I've been looking at is Circus Ponies Notebook, something I long since dropped for the ubiquity of Evernote.

While looking in my 'notebook', I found a whole pile of adventure seeds, one of which was my first attempt to get the idea for the BITS scenario "This Fear of Gods" on a page. The ideas spun out of a number of things, including memories of Andre Norton's Sargasso of Space,  especially with the Forerunner's reference. Looking at these notes, the final scenario didn't end up that different from what was written here!

Synopsis: A University research ship carrying out deep space observations stumbles across an alien artifact. In examining the artifact, the team manage to activate it. It sends a signal, and implants a psionic urge into the crew. They return to their base to assess the situation and establish where the signal was aimed. A mission is sent to investigate target. When they emerge from jump, a powerful tractor beam will pull the ship down from orbit. They find themselves in a graveyard of dead ships, and go to find the source of the tractor beam. This involves the discovery of a near dead alien race, which attempts to take over their physical bodies using advanced psi-medical technology. Unless they prevent this happening, aliens will re-enter into space and start to move to infiltrate Imperial Society.

Ref: Backstory is plausibly linked to the Ancients, but not obviously. It does including nanotech, but not in an obvious way and limited so it cannot be used by the players in the future.

Setting: Probably the Marches, but possibly an adjacent sector. The Abyss Rift may well be
a good location.

The scenario has been run multiple times (probably in the hundreds) in playtest and has sat on my hard drive in 95% format for far too long. I do need to get it to print more formally.

28 December 2024

This is Free Trader Beowulf

This is Free Trader Beowulf

This was my main present from the better half, a landscape format coffee-table book which explores the history of Traveller. I found myself looking at projects I'd worked on (predominantly BITS) and having a huge nostalgia rush. It's titled after the iconic text quote on the cover of the original Classic Traveller box set, a short fiction piece that set the whole feel of the game.

The book even leans into the (slow disappearing) Mongoose reputation with a typo on the spine ("Free Trader Beowilf").

I'm looking forward into digging into this over the next day or two; spending time with my forever game is always a pleasure. So glad this was created.

It does lead me with a dilemma; one of the potential projects I was going to do was to revamp the BITS website this holiday, which may have involved a complete move to a different platform, but now I realise that the references in the book all have hard URL inks to pages on the site. If I rebuild, I will break them!

Merry Christmas all.

25 December 2024

WOTB - ST-62 Version 2 - Mastery - Yukon

 

This one kind of grew out go nowhere...

3,470 damage, 2,590 blocked, 57 assisted, 2 kills, 1,318 XP

https://youtu.be/UxYI6GfWBhI

Babylon 5 - Back to Season 1 (2258)

 

The Season 1 Cast

In case you've not come across it, Babylon 5 is a science-fiction series set in the later 2250s aboard a large diplomatic space station built to try and engender peace between the various polities and alien races. Run by the Earth Alliance, it's a crossroads in space. Ultimately, it will fail in its objective but out of that crucible a better future will emerge. The series ran for five seasons and ended up with several spin off movies and TV-series. The show has a harder-SF flavour than Star Trek. The show's creator pitched the series to Paramount; they rejected it but it was almost certainly an inspiration for Deep Space Nine which premiered just before Babylon 5. I much prefer Babylon 5.

One of my favourite SF series is Babylon 5. I've watched it fully at least three times (when it was transmitted, when I got it on VHS, when I got it on DVD) and recently I started to rewatch it on the HD stream from Amazon Prime. I picked it up reduced during the Black Friday events, only to find out the week after that it's gone on Prime for free. I'm not regretting it though.

The remaster to HD has been sensible and not letter-boxed the 4:3 print, although there are some widescreen elements (most notably the titles). The CGI may have been cleaned up, but I'm not certain on this. It certainly looks like a work of its time but still looks decent. Photorealistic, it isn't, but it works well.

Possibly the only disappointment is that the various TV movies etc haven't had the HD treatment, and the Gathering (the pilot) is missing from Prime (paid or free).

It's sad looking at the cast photo (along with the missing folks like the Jerry Doyle and Richard Biggs) and realising how many of them have subsequently passed away. I'm also going to call out Michael Hare who completed the series when going through a mental breakdown that only he and the show runner JMS knew about. I always liked his performance; he portrayed a compassionate, honourable but ultimately damaged man well.

The show is extremely clever in the way that it lays its trail of breadcrumbs out, and ends the first 21 episodes with the tables being turned over by events. I love the nascent relationships between G'Kar and Lando Mollari, and the undertone of menace. Of course, the initial threat appears to be the growing 'Home Guard' fascist nationalist xenophobic movement on Earth, but there are hints of more once Mr Morden arrives at the station.

If you've not watched this, it's a great chance to do it now. This season builds the characters and purpose of the station, and ends with the plot starting to accelerate.

A bonus to me is that my eldest (17) caught it a couple of episodes in, and has been hooked by it.

I left the show last night as 2259 started, and I'm sure we'll be back for more later this week.

23 December 2024

Traveller - The Encyclopaedia of Dagudashaag (Signal-GK)

The Encyclopaedia of Dagudashaag (front cover)

Signal-GK was a long running Traveller Zine from the UK which, amongst other things, explored the Dagudashaag sector of space. It was packed full of interesting plot ideas and lore that a Traveller Referee could draw upon. As a disclaimer, I do have one very short article in one of the Signal-GK issues and I did work on the aborted project to regress the sector back to Milieu Zero.

A few years ago, Jae Campbell (who published Signal-GK) and several others turned all the zines into two fantastic PDFs; one was for everyone to use, and the other was a referee's supplement. These are distributed and available for free. You can find more details here including links to download both files on the  Argushiigi Admegulasha Bilanidin (aka Traveller Wiki, Imperial Encyclopaedia).

A chunky volume

I decided that I wanted a hardcopy to use and reference, so started setting up a project on Lulu. I hacked the two files together, and built a cover up using the basic templates and Affinity Designer to create the PDF. The end result is a 432-page standard colour hardcover.

The back cover

Overall, it looks good in print. I did end up using standard colour because although the majority of the book is black and white, colour is used in maps and as accents.

Page example with subsector map in colour

The 'Secret' Referee's section.

Some more examples with art.

I've ordered Jae a copy of this now it's worked out. He's kindly given me permission to print additional copies so long as they are not done for profit (ie they remain a free product except for the manufacturing costs). I suspect a few of my Traveller friends may be interested in this. At the moment, a copy for the UK costs around £30 including print and delivery. For me this was £30 well spent.

21 December 2024

Flavours of Christmas

 

The Dark is Rising

I'm presently indulging myself in listening to the BBC adaptation of Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising", a story that has always captured the feeling of a Christmas laced with darkness. The book itself had a huge impact on me in my first year at secondary school, around the same time as I read "The Lord of the Rings", and its one that I return to every now and again like Alan Garner's "The Weirdstone of the Brisingamen". The BBC adaptation is near perfect, set in 12 short episodes. It's atmospheric and evocative, and I wish that they'd done some of the other books as well.  You can find it here.

I discovered this through the book; the podcast came much later.

The Box of Delights

Another story that evokes Christmas for me is John Masefield's "The Box of Delights". This one came to me courtesy of the BBC TV series back in 1984. It has many of the flavours of "The Dark is Rising"; Christmas, snow, combined with evil and magic being afoot. Susan Cooper's tale is a little more hard hitting, but the "Box of Delights" isn't afraid to scare. The BBC has shown the series again this December and is releasing it on Blu-Ray. I still have a set of DVDs for this, which replaced my VHS copy. 

I read the book much later; it was satisfying fun, with a style aimed at a slightly younger audience than "The Dark is Rising" but enjoyable all the same.  Reflecting on the original transmission date, I was first introduced to these around the same time.

Winter's Tale

Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" evokes similar feelings for me although I came to it a couple of years later. It tells the tale of a young Irishman, Peter Lake, as he attempts a burglary against the backdrop of a snowy winter in New York sometime towards the end of the 19th Century. In the house he finds Beverly Penn, a young heiress, and they fall in love. Surreal, beautiful and haunting, this is a love story as much to the city as the protagonists. Again, it magic and fantasy bleed in, leaving a feel of the surreal. I haven't reread this as often (indeed, I'm still gutted that my early edition hardcover disappeared somewhere with someone in the past) but every time that I do, it brings the same feelings and joy.

If you look for the book these days, you'll often find it titled "A New York Winter's Tale", named after the film adaptation which starred Colin Farrell, Jennifer Connolly, and Russell Crowe. This was done well, but like all adaptation, it differs from the original (although it captures the intent quite well).

I also quite like dipping into the MR James ghost stories at this time of year, both the books and the various BBC versions which are quite satisfyingly done.

What media evokes this season for you?

21 December 2024

WOTB - Forest Witch - Mastery - Himmelsdorf

Forest Witch Mastery - it really is a bully.

4,339 damage, 535 assist, 1830 blocked, 4 kills, 1,475XP

https://youtu.be/SzwXNsAioS0

Ghosts of SF RPGs past

Like comets, they keep on coming back after a long period in the outer darkness.

About ten years ago I got rid of several complete game systems that I didn't think that I'd be playing again any time soon. Much as I loved them, I just couldn't see them getting to the table fast. 

They were:

• Blue Planet v2
• Fading Suns 2e
• Transhuman Space

Blue Planet I quickly got buyers regret and bought it all back after a couple of years, although that's in the 'to sell' pile again. I absolutely love the setting, and the first version of the Synergy system was okay, albeit very 1990s and fiddly. I mentioned previously my excitement at the upcoming release of Blue Planet Recontact, excitement driven by having play tested and enjoyed the new edition. So why am I selling the previous edition again? Quite simply because I have all the books in PDF, need the space and realise that I don't actually need hard copies. I plan to run this and Dr Mitch will hold me to that!

Fading Suns was always the slightly dark not-Dune, not-Warhammer and very different. I'd always struggled to get people to table for it, but I liked the setting. When I was doing the cold hard take on things, I sold it on. However, recently First Age and I were talking and I ended up picking up pretty much everything that is in print for the new fourth edition at a steal on eBay. Unfortunately for First Age, I pulled the trigger on the 'buy-it-now' before he did, although he's regularly reminding me that he will take the books off my hands. That may well be an opportunity that he gets if I don't really get on with what I'm reading at the moment.

Transhuman Space was the odd one out. A standalone GURPS game, it explores transhumanism in the near future when humanity has spread across the solar system. It's packed with decent writing and loads of ideas but I could never grok how to run it. Unlike a lot of other games, ideas didn't spring up easily, the issue being the setting not the mechanics. It was one of those rare games that I liked (well, aside from GURPS* as an engine) but just couldn't work out what to do with. I don't think that I was the only person who had that issue with it. Anyway, it came up for a steal on the Bundle of Holding so I snagged all the PDFs. Skimming them, I may use them for a source of ideas, but I can't quite see myself using it as is.

So there's a trio of games that I've stepped away from, which have come back to me over the last year. Have you ever stepped away from a game but then regretted it? 

18 December 2024

* I don't mind the point design or 3D6 mechanic in GURPS but the use of American Imperial measurements does my head in...

WOTB - Fanrïk - Mastery - Fort Despair

 

Fanrïk Mastery on Fort Despair in World of Tanks Blitz

3,340 damage, 4 kills, 1,055 assisted, 1,512 XP

https://youtu.be/fI5OI0HUPR8

WOTB - Vz.55 - Mastery - Mines

Sometimes in all goes right. Unexpected Mastery in Vz.55 on Mines in World of Tanks Blitz.

5,694 damage, 1,631 assisted, 350 bounced, 2 kills, 6 damaged, 1,619 XP

https://youtu.be/REgSuHxdN48

Blue Planet Recontact - looking good

Looking gorgeous.

Possibly my most anticipated game for 2025 is the final offset print version of the new edition of Blue Planet, Blue Planet Recontact. The team producing the new edition just shared the picture above on Kickstarter in an update. It's not the final offset printing, but preparation for a POD version on DriveThruRPG. However it just shows how gorgeous this looks. The interior is just as good, as they've shared sneak previews of that too and now there are PDFs available to backers.

I did some playtesting on this edition and then revisited it with a follow on scenario at another convention. It plays really well, and the Synergy systems is similar to that in Blue Planet v2 but thoroughly modernised. I do intent to offer an episodic campaign once the final books arrive. One of the things they added in this edition was a set of campaign frames to make it easy to kick off a game (as the level of lore in Blue Planet often had people wondering how to go at it). I ran the Red Sky Charters frame and it felt like the kick off to a TV series.

I do recommend this as a great product; there's enough in these two books for more than one campaign, it's beautifully created and very unique.

Recommended!

8 December 2024

Traveller - Geomorph cache (great resource for SF roleplaying games)

 

A fantastic resource for SF roleplaying

I just wanted to give a shout out to Eric Smith's site where he has converted and hosted Robert Pearce's fantastic Starship Geomorphs as transparent PNG or higher resolution PSD files so you can use them with virtual tabletops.

The site is here.

If you've not come across Geomorphs before, they're modular tiles that you can tesselate and manipulate to build a map (or in this case a deck plan for a starship or installation). The site includes links to the original PDF files as well.

I did find the site pretty low bandwidth when I downloaded the files, but definitely worth a visit. 

7 December 2024

The Starship Geomorphs book

Travelling to the Motherlode

A motherlode of scenarios to plunder...

I'm edging back into Traveller, my forever game. Running two new scenarios and playing another at TravCon left me with an itch that I'll continue to scratch over the Christmas break when I run the Far Horizon (Orbital 2100) scenario with Cepheus. 

Listening to First Age's recent musings on Traveller on his podcast left me wondering why I've really not played or run the game for a while, and also why I've not picked up more of the current Mongoose line.

The not running or playing is probably more easily explained than why I haven't picked up much of the new material released. Effectively, I've played in two big campaigns (Eternal Lies and Shadow of the Sorcerer for Conan) since the pandemic and ran two others (Curse of Strahd and the current Achtung! Cthulhu Shadows of Atlantis game). With work, I don't really have time to do more each week than play in one and run one game. But what about conventions?

I've tended to shy away from Traveller recently at conventions as I've been exploring other systems. When that's combined with the lack of TravCons, it's really easy to just not run it. The daft thing is that running Traveller is easy for me; like comfortable shoes, I can just slip into it and go. I've tended to use conventions to run something that I may not run elsewhere, or to run something fun and different like the linked Star Trek Adventures TOS and TNG games that Dr Mitch and I did at North Star.

My reticence for purchasing Traveller material recently has a number of factors at play. I've been reluctant to pick up the updated core rulebooks for Mongoose Traveller 2e (202x) on because they started coming out not long after I had finished collecting the core books for Mongoose Traveller 2e (2017). Mongoose has started to focus on quality and the end result is that the books are towards the high end of pricing. As I'd hardly used the previous cut of 2e, I didn't really have the urge to pick up the same game rules again. I suspect I will at some point, but I've no urge right now.

I haven't tended to pick up the campaigns and adventures as I don't like the writing style of one of the go-to authors Mongoose use, although I've seen loads of positive comments about Pirates of Drinax and others. I know my friend Tom has run a fantastic campaign in the setting. I don't like the more detailed sector books that Mongoose produced (caveat - this is based on 1e) because they provide too much detail for me, having a lack of spaces to breathe. If you've ever seen the GURPS Traveller books, I prefer what was done with Rim of Fire rather than Beyond the Claw.  There was also the matter of the amount of changes and ignoring of previous printed canon (which could easily have been addressed with search of PDFs).

I have picked up some compatible material; Cepheus Universal (which feels like a cleaned up and condensed version of Mongoose Traveller 1e with all the supplements in a single book), Hostile and Orbital 2100 have all found their way onto my shelves. I also purchased all the Scoundrels of Brixton zines, and more recently The Jägermeister Adventure  from Moon Toad, all of which are really nicely constructed.

However, I realised that a lot of my interest has been drawn to another game that has echoes of Traveller; Mothership. It may be a percentile based system, but it has a similar format to Classic Traveller's Little Black Books, and some fantastic scenarios, both in-house and third party. Although Mothership was built to play science-fiction horror like Alien, it works fine in the same niche as Traveller, and increasingly there seems to be a wide selection of third party books that aren't pure horror. When I read them, I start to mentally translate them into Traveller, and I know a lot of them could be picked up and run off the cuff by an experienced referee. 

I see more experimental, exciting material coming out in this space that's worth exploring, and I'm happy that it is. There are new riches and ideas to be plundered; a veritable motherlode.

Anyway, the slow gravitational pull of my forever game continues, and I find myself musing on trying to run Hard Times, or The Jägermeister Adventure, or perhaps even The Flaming Eye.

Happy Travelling.

7 December 2024

Why my next campaign won't be using 2D20

Last Night's 2d20 game

I've been playing 2D20 for a while now; First Age ran Conan and I followed up with Achtung! Cthulhu which is wending its way towards a conclusion, most likely in the new year. I've also had flirtations with Star Trek Adventures (1e) and Dune along the way. 

I'd consider myself competent enough running the game now, but I do find that the fiddly differences between the games a little frustrating. The core mechanic is sound and I quite like the meta-game elements like threat and momentum and fortune points, even while I wish that the application of them was consistent between game systems.

I do have Dune 'Fall of the Imperium' which looks like a fantastic campaign (I reviewed it here) but I don't think that it's going to be what I offer next, as I'm feeling fatigued with the 2D20 engine. I think I've played too much of it recently. I will potentially offer Star Trek Adventures at North Star next May if Dr Mitch and I come up with a third part to the 'Echoes' game we ran previously, but I've no other definitive plans at the moment.

Although I like the core mechanics, I do find that the games struggles to really threaten the characters. Across the 20-odd sessions this year, there's probably only been two that have felt that I was putting them in any form of peril; I know that Achtung! Cthulhu is meant to be pulp derring-do, but sometimes it seems to either assume that the characters haven't really developed or that they need to succeed with relative ease. However, I do suspect that the feeling from the other side of the screen may well be a bit different and the players may well have been feeling higher threat levels.

My feelings on this aren't anything to do with the way that Shadows of Atlantis is constructed, despite my previous moaning. I do think that this is a different and interesting campaign which I've enjoyed running, despite the challenges with the writing and structure. 

I will return to the game engine, I just feel that it's time to step away for a bit. 

You can have too much of a good thing.

3 December 2024

Books in November 2024

 

November's reading - cover collage.

Seven books and 2,841 pages in November. Two non-fiction, one roleplaying and the rest fiction. Apparently I'm down by one book but up 32% on pages on October. I'm on 92 books and 28,240 pages in total for the year so far.

The first non-fiction book was Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera, which explores the impact of the British Empire on Britain. Absolutely fascinating and demonstrates that our multi-cultural society is a reflection of the way we went about conquering large swathes of the globe, and we can't really step away from that. It also explores around the strange way that the UK ignores the British Empire in its school curriculums. Recommended.

The second non-fiction book was Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton. This explores the history around the occupation of Berlin at the end of the Second World War and then follows the story through to just after the Berlin Airlift. It's part of my ongoing reading around this space, and will definitely inform any games of Cold City that I ever run! Again, recommended.

The roleplaying book was the Faded Suns Character Book, the second core book for the game. I did find this heavy going as there's loads of lists, but the system itself is pretty simple. I may post some comments about this in the future once I've read the GM's Book.

I re-read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Alan Garner) and enjoyed it as much as ever, describing as it does one of my favourite places in my home county with a cracking tale of adventure. 

I enjoyed Francis Spufford's alt-history Cahokia Jazz, set in a world when much of the Native American cultures haven't been wiped out by disease. It presents as a murder mystery, but it also explores the ways that the colonial immigrants to the USA set about wiping out native cultures and influence. An enjoyable story, well worth exploring.

Service Model is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest. I can't believe how prolific he is. The story tells the tale of a robot valet trying to find purpose when his master dies in suspicious circumstances. It expands out to explore the collapse of society in a story that had me hooked.

Finally, I read Jeff Noon's Vurt, which was recommended to me by my friend John. Partly cyberpunk, partly, partly weird reality, the book drew me on all the way through a surreal tale of adventure. I'm still not a hundred percent certain what happened, but I definitely enjoyed it. I will look up the sequel.

Overall, it's a toss up between Cahokia Jazz and Service Model as my favourite new reads.

1 December 2024