Campaign Law and Other gaming, Miscellany.

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I was originally asked to write one chapter (World Building) of the upcoming new edition of Campaign Law for Rolemaster Classic, I am now significantly contributing to two other chapters (Peoples and Campaigns). Appropriately, the Rolemaster Companion I wrote some sixteen years ago, with a cover price of $14, now sells for $100 USD. I recently finished playing a Rolemaster PBeM run by Luther Martin set in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age (I played a Dafarian mentalist named Xanana). Now he wants to start a PBeM set in Middle-Earth after the Hobbit, but before the Lord of the Rings. I shall have to revive my lovesick Halfling, Paul McGann. Iron Crown also had a 'remembrance contest' in honour of Gary Gygax. I submitted "A Tale of Two (Rolemaster) Paladins", which I am sure grailchaser could correct me on some of the finer details.

This is quite a big week for me in hanging out with friends in the shared imaginary space of roleplaying games. Thursday evening (D&D 3.5, Fantasy Australia), Friday evening (Swordbearer Castofan), Saturday day (AD&D1e, Norman Britain) and Sunday day (L5R, Ainu Nezumi) is all going to be taken up with ham improvised acting and dice rolling. This is on top of recent events such as an increasingly notorious Easter Sunday GURPS Bunnies & Burrows game (complete with players in rabbit ears). Although without amusing images, I must say the last two retro-AD&D Norman Britian games has been enormous fun (visiting hell, stopping Arachne's revenge against the Gods). In the HeroQuest Glorantha game I narrate, the players have been doing some crazy things, such as winning wars, playing cupid and planning seductions; improvised storytelling at its best - all's fair in love and war.

The past weeks haven't all been fun and games however.. I've spent a fair bit of time working through the implementation of subdomains on DNS and Apache with a PHP/MySQL site; not for the first time Debian Administration has come to my aid. National PornographicGeographic informs us that apparently sex was invented in Australia. Finally, ctudball alerts us to the disaster that is the refusual to separate church and state in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I take the opportunity to, once again, break Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act; and I incite others to do.

Comments

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To be fair Phenoix Command didn't even pretend to be a roleplaying game. It was a combat system that could be incorporated into an RPG if one so desired.

Rules light and narrativist, eh? What does that mean for your use of the Hero System? ;-)

I was gaming last night with a person who other group played 10 sessions of Champions: "Never Again!", he declared, "We're now using Marvel SH".

I cannot work out what they did wrong.

[curufea.livejournal.com]

It's a compromise to my D&D friends - a step from effect simulation to cause simulation and effect special effect. However - I hardly ever GM anything these days. When I do - I prefer PBeM over like GMing if I can get it, due to time contraints of players, and just because I'm naturally quite shy and have an easier time of it if I have a chance to think through responses.

I've only been in a superhero game once - and that was based on Mystery Men. Although I have a lot of superhero genre books for the Hero System (which you can see on my LibraryThing catalogue) - I've never actually used them. Mind you, I bought Champions when it was Champions, the Hero system came later. I mainly like the simplicity of it, and the ability to simulate far more things.

It's simple to simulate a new power, new magic item, or invented spell - the rules exist and give you hard guidelines to go by as to how to simulate things in their system. Other systems - not so much.

A major failing of GMs to Champions is using all the rules with players who have very little experience with the system. Usually they've been on D&D for so long, they can't even remember what it is like to learn something new.