Planet Amidha

 

Amidha

Single Star System. White Main Sequence type F

System Features: Volatile gas Pockets and Ion Storms

9 orbiting planets

1: Rocky Planet - Barren - Giant - 15 Moons

2: Rocky Planet - Barren - Large - 4 Moons

3: Rocky Planet - Barren - Small - 0 Moons

4: Amidha - Rocky Planet - Swamp - Medium - 2 Moons

5: Gas Giant - 24 moons

6: Ice Giant  - 22 moons

7: Dwarf Planet

8: Ice Giant - 26 moons

9: Ice Giant - 20 moons

Planet Amidha

Size: 5 

Atmosphere: 6 Standard

Hydrographics: 8

Population: 8 100 000 000

Government: 7 Balkanisation No central authority exists; rival governments compete for control. Law level refers to the government nearest the starport.

Law Level: All weapons and all armour are banned. 

Starport: D Unrefined Fuel and limited repair. Birthing Cost 50 Creds.
Tech Level: 8

Bases: No.

Trade Codes: Ri, 

These entries are all very dry so far. At some point I want to go back over these and add in some illustrations and mood boards and some more cultural concepts to try and give each planet a bit more flavour than just forest, desert, snow etc. I think it might have been better to do that to begin with but I feel like this is the initial brain-fart stage and going back over them and fleshing them out is for later. Plus a lot of details will develop through play. It’s also possible that I’ll try and make them a bit more alien and a bit more whimsical than just analogous to Earth biomes.

So, Amidha is my Dagobah, I guess. A gloomy swamp world. Louisiana and Indonesia on a planetary scale. Not that I would describe either of those places as gloomy. I’m thinking more of Dagobah in that sense, I think. Gnarled trees and dense foliage alive with fauna. Mud huts and half-submerged ancient stone temples. Once again a white, main sequence star which we shall pretend is harmless. It is a planet with a variety of polities and very strict gun control. Maybe there have been terrorist incidents and the Starport has been forced to crack down.  Its trade code is simply ‘Rich’ which feels odd. I’m not sure that that works with how I see the planet. What could it export other than brackish water and alligators? I imagine that it might be heavily agricultural with an abundance of swamp flora and fauna to export. It doesn’t fit with the trade table but I think Agr is a better fit than Ri in this case. Maybe that’s the reason for the strict gun control. Maybe there have been organised crime issues with the planet able to mass produce a controlled substance and the various political bodies seek to control it for themselves. You might have a Dune situation where the substance grows only in a particular region (we begin to see the short-comings of the single biome planet trope) and it is an impoverished region constantly being fought over by the various political bodies like South America. Or maybe, it’s an incredibly wealthy region like Saudi Arabia is with its oil. That would explain the Ri code. I guess the difference being whether the substance produced is deemed illegal or not.

Planet Aksu

 

Aksu

Binary star system. Aksu A: Red Supergiant Type L. Aksu B: Orange Main Sequence type K

System Features: Solar Winds and Funnel Clouds

6 Orbiting Panets

1: Rocky Planet - Barren - Large - 3 Moons

2: Moth Rocky Planet - Terrestrial - constant rain - Medium - 2 Moons

3: Rocky Planet - Barren - Giant - 27 moons

4: Rocky Planet - Swamp - Medium - 3 moons

5: Gas Giant - 27 moons

6: Gas Giant - 21 moons

Planet Moth

Size: 4

Atmosphere: 6 Standard

Hydrographics: 8

Population: 8 100 000 000

Government:6 Captive Government. Government by an imposed leadership answerable to an outside group. A colony or conquered area.

Law Level: No weapons except shotguns. No open carry.

Starport: C Unrefined Fuel, reasonable repair facilities. No bases. Birthing Cost: 300 Creds
Tech Level: 6

Bases: No

Trade Codes: Ri

Aksu is a binary system with a red supergiant and an orange main sequence star. Moth, itself is lifted wholesale from Alan Dean Foster’s For Love of Mother Not a pip and Flinx prequel. It’s a drab, grey, ringed world but the ring has a sizable gap either side, dividing the ring into two separate fans making it look like delicate wings and the whole planet like a Moth, hence its name. The surface of Moth is Earth-like but the region we see in the book and the defining feature for my setting is that it is constantly grey, gloomy and raining. It has a standard, earth-like atmosphere and I imagine it to be a planet of markets. Vast sprawling hives of market stalls and traders and back alleys. Maybe this is the place for the setting where anything can be bought for the right price. Its tech level is 6, which suits the ramshackle nature of the place that I imagine. In the book, Moth has a monarchy but according to my dice rolls, Moth here has a captive government. I’m not sure what to make of that. Obviously a local polity has installed a puppet leader (no reason that can’t be a king as well) but who and why? It’s on the edge of the map so maybe another world off the page has invaded, perhaps a small, expansionist pocket empire. Not sure. It’s not likely to have a huge impact on the setting so I’ll leave it for now. It’s more interesting than every planet being a free and fair democracy. The Starport is C which, given the population and the fact that it’s a trade hub, if off the main route, that sounds okay. Trade code is simply, ‘Rich’. Not sure what to make of that either. Perhaps that’s the reason for the puppet government. Previous governments were fragile, volatile and simply bad for business. Perhaps it’s Moth’s own guild masters who have installed the puppet government in order to keep the economy safe. 

The fact that I’ve given Moth a different name from its parent star, Aksu, makes me think that I should do it with all the primary planets.

The system features here are Solar Winds and Funnel Clouds. Not sure what to make of the Funnel Clouds. Perhaps they are a feature of Moth.

The Planets

 For generating the planets I obviously use the Traveller world creation system but I also use a handy little quick generator by Morrus at EN World.  I quite like this. It’s a fun, simple way of generating the outline of a star system. I had to cheat a bit, though as the star creation is weighted toward red stars and I wanted more yellow main sequence stars, simply because each of my main planets is an earth-like biome and so, whilst they don’t need to be exactly the same as our Sun, they need to be similar. I have made some exceptions where it would make the planet more interesting. Also, with gas giants usually having around two dozen moons in the Morrus generator, there is more real estate to set adventures on than I imagine I could ever need in a campaign. So I created the system using the Morrus generator and then picked a planet in the system to be my hero planet and statted it out using the Traveller world creation, cheating a bit in places as I’d already decided on each planet’s dominant biome. Also, as unrealistic as it is, I want most, if not all the main planets to have a largely Earth-like atmosphere. PCs might need a mask or environmental clothing for some but on the whole, they should be habitable without a vacc suit. At the moment most main planets share the name of their star (or vice versa). I can’t decide if it would be more or less confusing to give them separate names. Let’s work through them for now.

The Morrus Star System Generator can be found here:

Morrus Star System Generator

So let's look at the first star alphabetically:

Adana

Single Star System. White Main Sequence Type F

System Features: Spatial Anomalies and Psychic Phenomena

8 orbiting Planets

1: Adana - Rocky Planet - Desert - Small - 0 Moons

2: Rocky Planet - Water - Giant - 13 Moons

3: Gas Giant - 16 moons

4: Gas Giant - 19 Moons

5: Rocky Planet - Icy - Large - 1 Moon

6: Gas Giant - 28 Moons

7: Gas Giant - 25 moons

8: Dwarf Planet

Planet Adana 

Size: 3 Small

Atmosphere: 5 Thin

Hydrographics: 0 Desert

Population: 4 10,000

Government: 4 Representative Democracy

Law Level 3: Military Weapons and Flak armour banned

Starport D - 20 Cred berth, Unrefined Fuel, Limited Repairs.

Tech Level: 6

Bases 0

Trade Codes: De, Ni, 

This is going to be my Tatooine. It has a single, white, main sequence star Type F. I imagine stars like this probably give off huge amounts of radiation and would likely sterilise any planet in its orbit but we’ll handwave that and say that it doesn’t. Adana is, however, going to be very hot, desolate and sandy. It has a thin atmosphere, due to the paucity of water and plant life. Also, due to the harsh conditions of the planet it has a low population of around 10,000. Probably mostly employed in and around the starport or on scattered ranches farming livestock, water or crops, maybe even sand-whalers. They have a representative democracy, so I’m guessing it would be a collection of farming cooperatives and officials at the starport and there would be a government meeting hall at the Starport itself. The Starport was a C which I wasn’t sold on. This is a podunk backwater with a very small population. I want all my major planets in each system to be at least a D. Starports E and X are reserved for the minor planets and moons. I think a D suits this place much better so I changed it. There are no bases here, which is fair enough and its trade codes are Desert (obvs!) and non-Industrial.

Other than the starport change I’m quite happy with that. The star system generator also created other planets in the system that are predominantly ocean and ice but I’m ignoring them as I already have an ocean and ice world. I imagine that there might be small mining settlements on each but otherwise they are inhospitable and not worth visiting most of the time. Morrus also randomly generates weird phenomena in the system. There’s a lot of repetition, sadly but this system has Spatial Anomalies and Psychic Phenomena. I don’t know what I’ll do with those yet and I might well ignore them, but they might make for interesting quirks upon entering the system. Echoes of ancient technology.

Creating my own Traveller Universe.

 I’ve long had a whole jumble of ideas in my head for things I would change about the Traveller setting should I run my own campaign. I hesitate to claim they would be improvements. Many of my ideas would have Third Imperium fans snorting and sneering in derision, but they are changes that appeal to me and, hopefully, any prospective players. I thought it might be interesting for folks if I jotted down my thinking here as I fumble through my ideas and try to make them work.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the Silk Roads, the trade routes that criss-crossed Europe and Asia stretching from as far east as China and as far west as Italy and even Denmark. I’ve long wanted to create a sci-fi setting that has a similar feel. To be fair, that’s pretty much how Traveller works anyway. Space is the desert, the planets and their starports are the caravanserai, relatively safe stopping points along the route. Still, I liked the idea of a long chain of stars (with offshoots) that connected a distant alien Empire (probably Zhodani or Aslan) to the Human Empire.

I drew out a map using an extremely long row of Traveller sector maps and dotted in several dozen stars. Then it occurred to me that the chances of my players ever visiting more than, say, a handful of them was very unlikely. Also, you can very quickly run out of ways to make planets unique, so limiting the number in the campaign is, I think, a good idea. Part of Traveller’s original campaign philosophy was to explore a single sub-sector which only had around a dozen planets. Indeed, some terrific advice I heard from Bob Loftin of the SAFCO Traveller podcast was to, when beginning a campaign, just stat out three planets and go from there. Also, I've always said that I'd take half a dozen thoroughly fleshed-out planets over several hundred that were just UPPs any day.

So I cut my map right down to one single, small section of the route in the centre.

As I say, fewer planets makes it easier to make them unique and for that, I like the Star Wars idea of the single biome planet. It’s completely unrealistic but you always know exactly where you are. If you’re in a desert, then you’re on Tatooine. Snow? Hoth. Orange clouds? Bespin. Of course that’s not so cut and dried now but that’s because the Star Wars universe has expanded exponentially. I like it as a concept, though.

Another idea I like is the Caravanserai. The small settlement alone in the desert that acts as a resting place, watering hole, shelter from the elements and a place to trade, meet and make deals. I like the idea of a station being a linchpin in the chain of stars as well. It’s the only way to get from one part of the chain to another.

I moved this back and forth for a good long while. I wanted the gap between stars to be 7 parsecs so that all ships had to stop at the Station en route but it meant that there had to be a four parsec gap on one side of the station and the chances of the players or anyone else having a J4 ship are unlikely. So then I made the entire span a J6 gap with a J3 gap either side of the station. J3 ships are also rare for PCs but possible. In the end I shortened the jump to the station to two parsecs either side because most common ships are J1 or J2. This means that a J4 or 5 ship can make the entire journey in one go but they are very rare and there are no J6 common ships. So the vast majority of ships can make the jump to the station but would have to stop off at the station to refuel and it’s reasonable to assume that the players would have a J2 ship. Indeed, they would have to for the setting to work at all.

As I drew the map, it felt more and more obvious that the station should really be the home port for the PCS. It’s the most unique part of the setting and is central, so I’ll probably start them there.

The station, I imagine, would be huge. Like an O’neil Cylinder with sprawling urban areas and arboretums and hive-like levels of varying quality of life. Very much like Babylon 5 or the Citadel in Mass Effect.  It would also have fully artificial lighting as there would be no local star.

So with this in mind, I grabbed a couple of blank sector maps and I dotted in the planets, making sure only two of them are within J4 or 5 of each other so that the station is essential to most starfarers crossing the Expanse. I named the planets after settlements along the eastern Silk Roads, named the void after the formidable Taklamakan desert through which a sizeable portion of the eastern route passes and named the station, Caravanserai. All horribly on the nose but it’ll do for now.

On the Human Empire side (South West) we have Osh (an asteroid belt settlement), Kucha (Forest (Endor/Kashyyk)), Ankara (an ocean world), Adana (Desert (Tatooine/Arrakis)), Aksu (Rainy - I imagine like Moth in For Love of Mother Not by Alan Dean Foster), Kashgar (Jungle (Yavin 4)) and on the Zhodani (or Aslan) side (North East) we have Urumqui (Snow(Hoth)), Hami (Mountainous), Jiuquan (Arid rock Corrosive atmosphere (Venus), Tashkent (Gas Giant with Bespin-like floating cities) and Turfan (Mushroom World). I might well swap some of these around. For example Jungle and Forest are similar so I might swap Kashgar with, say Jiquan. I’m not sure.

This year I have mostly been playing...

Lots of my tabletop gaming friends have been blogging their gaming year in review and whilst I didn’t consider it, Chris ‘Dirk the Dice’ Hart of the Grognard Files asked if I was going to and I thought perhaps I might, even if it’s just a cathartic exercise for my own benefit.

I started the year playing Mutants and Masterminds and I did not like it. It was mostly my fault.

After DMing D&D5 for a year at my local club I decided to take a break and play for a bit. The only game not booked up before it was even advertised was M&M being run by one of my previous players. The other players from my previous group, also having nothing else to sign up for also joined the M&M group.

The GM had created a really quite fantastical setting that weirdly felt disappointingly mundane when we interacted with it. He kept having his villains escape and return which is admittedly very much in the vein of comic books but made the process of taking them down feel utterly pointless and futile. Combined with things like putting a sprawling, complex map of a villain’s lair on the table and then locking every door and having nothing of interest behind them once they were forcibly unlocked.

However, that said, I might have enjoyed the experience more had I not railed against the idea of superheroes and created a thoroughly miserable anti-hero which I instantly disliked playing. That was stupid and childish on my part and I have to own that one.

I should have said that this isn’t for me and left but I felt really bad for the GM. It would have felt like a personal insult. This was compounded by the fact that the other players did leave, almost immediately. It then turned out that it was intended to run over two blocks, so six months. I could have cried when I found out but still couldn’t bring myself to leave because I felt like the GM, despite his failings, had put his heart and soul into it and I would have felt awful.

So we plodded on with two new players and the occasional rando. Needless to say, I was utterly relieved when it finally ended.

The system itself, I’m not keen on either. It’s horribly slow and clunky and the character sheet is bafflingly unintuitive. I had a list of powers with numbers but had no real concept of just how powerful they were. I just couldn’t get a handle on my character. Superhero games to me should be fast, frantic and cinematic. M&M most definitely is none of those things.

Conversely after this I then started running Call of Cthulhu at the club.

Sometime during the period of playing M&M it occured to me that I enjoy running games more than I do playing them and resolved from then on to keep my playing to one-shots rather than get involved in campaigns.

Also, my New Year’s Resolution for 2019 was to avoid buying new games and concentrate on playing the ones I already had. So, with this in mind I decided that the next couple of years would be spent working through my shelf either finally playing games I own for the first time or games that I’ve not played for decades.

First one out of the bag was Call of Cthulhu. I traded the Day of the Beast with Lee Carnell a couple of years ago, having been alerted to its existence by Ed in the Shed on the Grognard Files.

I decided to run this as my first game of this new period. It worked out brilliantly. It was a little nerve-wracking to start with. On the first session, I asked if anyone had played CoC before and one guy, without looking at me, pulled his shirt sleeve up to reveal a Chaosium Elder Sign.

This one tended to act all aloof and disinterested when we first started each session, giving me the distinct feeling that I, as a keeper of Arcane Law was being judged for my competence. Adorably, though, once we got into the meat of a session and the mystery kicked in, he seemed to forget his ‘too cool for school’ persona and got quite invested. He did drop out about half way through the first block citing work commitments but then, without saying a word seemed to join another group a few weeks later. This didn’t bother me. My CoC KoAL-ing style obviously wasn’t for him and that’s fine. Everyone else seemed to really enjoy it.

It became obvious at one point that there was no way the campaign was going to be wrapped up in one block (3 months) so I asked if everyone was okay carrying on into a second block and remembering the situation I’d been in earlier in the year made it absolutely clear that if folks wanted to move on there would be absolutely no hard feelings. To my delight, everyone stayed and we managed to wrap the campaign up just before Christmas. Despite my concerns early on, they were an absolutely great bunch and they are apparently staying with me for the next block starting in a couple of weeks which is Classic Traveller. I just hope they enjoy it as much.

The Day of the Beast campaign itself is great fun and a few people pointed out that it is very pulpy. Despite using CoC 5th edition rules, I did run it kind of pulpy and for the first half took it easy on the players worried that constantly cycling through characters due to death and madness might put them off. I regret it now because if anything, doing that might have actually spoiled their experience of CoC.

There were some jarring plot holes and some toe-curling railroading but it was always met with good-natured eye-rolling and grins and they set off after the plot like seasoned roleplayers.

I might be peaking too soon, but the second block is almost certainly my gaming highlight of the year. Bless them.

Commemorative 'coaster' I made for the players of the Day of the Beast campaign.

There were of course cons during the year. Being quite poor I have to limit my con attendance and even then, the two that I do attend have to be done so as cheaply as possible. This usually involves me driving up and back in a day to avoid hotel costs, taking sandwiches and only window shopping in the trade hall. Having to do it in a day prohibits a lot of northern cons, sadly and so I have to keep things southern. Two cons stand out in that depressingly short list and I attend them both: UK Games Expo and Owl Bear and Wizard Staff.

I’ve got UK Games Expo down to a fine art now. I know exactly what time to set off to get there in time for the morning RPG slot, I know exactly how long it takes to tour the trade hall, which means I know exactly what time to book my afternoon RPG slot for and what time I’ll be getting home that evening. Like clockwork.

This year the morning slot was a demo game of John Carter of Mars using the Modiphus 2D20 system. I have a love/hate relationship with 2D20 - or more accurately a like/hmmm relationship. There’s so much about it that I like but I can’t help feeling whenever I play it that it could probably be simpler and more streamlined. That said, as a player I find it perfectly playable and the session was good fun with a great bunch of players. It was quite railroaded but I don’t mind that so much with a con one-shot.

I then toured the trade halls in baking heat, meeting up at the FSide Games booth with a very sweaty and clearly suffering Carl Clare who kindly gave me a Flames of War starter set he no longer wanted.

Playing John Carter with Ian Cooper and Sintain and other fine folk

The afternoon session was a bucket lister. I finally got to play in a game run by Dirk the Dice from the Grognard Files who ran an obscure 80’s counterculture game, Psi World. Also at the table was Doc Cowie, Bud from Bud’s RPG reviews and Andrew from RPHaven whom it was also a pleasure to sit at the table with for what turned out to be an hilarious and quite surreal couple of hours. This session is often remembered for Doc Cowie’s heroic plumbing skills but often forgotten is the fact that it was Bud’s driving (or more accurately, crashing) skills that actually saved the day.

Home by 9:45

My other con of the year was the Owlbear and Wizard Staff.

This was my second OBaWS and I decided to run a game again. I was a little apprehensive as I’d run Space 1889 using Savage Worlds the previous year and whilst many folk had appreciated my model-making skills, I got the distinct feeling that the game didn’t go down terribly well with the players.

It was mentioned in the aftermath of the first one that there was a high demand for D&D and so, I decided that I’d offer a D&D game this year and turned to one of the first modules I’d ever run way back in 1984 and that was Round the Bend scenario from Imagine Magazine. It turned out, unbeknownst to me that Neil the Old Scouser had actually run it the year before and so I was able to consult with him on the best way to update it.

It involves a gang of Half-Orc thieves being miniaturised by a wizard and sent down his laboratory sink plug hole to retrieve a lens of minute seeing. Once again, I put my crafting skills to good use making a vertical battlemat from card and nervously set up for the players. I needn’t have worried. We had a blast. They got into their characters, the scenario is a good mix of combat and tricky situations and one obstacle was resolved in an unexpected and highly entertaining way. They were a good bunch and I’m hoping that next year’s will be as successful.

Round the Bend vertical battlemats with ridiculous animal for scale.

Both times I’ve been to OBaWS, I’ve run afternoon slots just in case I’m late arriving (not being able to stay over the night before) and in the morning slot I’ve played and this year I finally got to try out Pendragon. It was run by Gaz from the Smart Party podcast and involved a little bit of Lovecraftian shenanigans. Gaz did a top job and I liked the system but I don’t think it’s for me. I’m not a fan of low fantasy really and Pendragon is as low as it gets. Still, it’s another ticked off the list.

In amongst the con-going I’ve done other bits and pieces. I’ve been a crewmember on the USS Thunderchild in Matt Broome’s Star Trek Adventures campaign which he’s been running via Roll20. It’s been a blast. As previously mentioned I can’t decide if I like 2D20 or not, I’ll gush about it one minute and then pull faces at it the next, but it’s perfectly playable and I much prefer it to the previous Star Trek RPGs. Matt’s campaign has been fun, departing - in true Star Trek fashion - from the established timeline with the destruction of DS9 and the fall of the Alpha Quadrant. It’s given me a chance to get a feel for the game in action and I’m planning on running it at the RPHaven club later in the year.

I also got to run a one-shot of The One Ring as well at Firestorm Games in Cardiff. It took us 8 months to actually organise and it was quite a railroady scenario and I struggled with the combat rules a bit but I got the feeling that everyone had fun and generally approved of it. Again, I want to run a campaign at the RPHaven club some time soon.

Trying to fathom the combat rules - pic courtesy of Andrew Jones

Alongside all this I started running a club at the school I work at. There was already a fledgling Warhammer club when I first started there in 2018 and this has grown around 300% with the intake of this year’s year 7s. We were doing Kill Team but that’s expanded now to full 40K and Age of Sigmar. We’re also running X-Wing and next year I hope to also throw in Gaslands and some historical games to tie in with the curriculum.

The club in full swing under the watchful eye of Commandant Gutsquelcher Ellis.

Toward the end of last school year I tried starting an after-school D&D club too but gave up after I’d had to cancel it too many times.

Once we came back in September both myself and my colleague, Carl who runs the Warhammer club went full time and we were better able to manage things. I used the school DT facilities to make scenery and I also started up a D&D lunchtime club. I didn’t want to run the club at lunchtime but I ended up with so many kids wanting to play that I had to split them into different groups. Also many of them catch a bus home after school so lunchtimes is easier. 30-40 minutes may not seem like enough to really get into a game but the priority seems to be dicking about, so they don’t mind if we only get one fight or social interaction in and it’s also giving them a taster. I know several of them play at home on the weekends.

A modular catwalk system following the video by Wyloch

Destroyed buildings cut from MDF on the school laser cutter.
I really must paint them at some point.

One of the highlights of running the club was that last summer, two of the boys won the Kill Team regional and we got to take them to Warhammer World for the regional playoffs which was a real treat as I’d not been since just after it opened way back when.

The regional playoffs in full swing at Warhammer World

We also took some of the boys for an end of term trip to the Warhammer shop in Cardiff where they put on a game of Age of Sigmar for us and I was finally won over.

Dwarves vs Orcs - sorry, Duardin vs Orruks!  

 I’d been quite sniffy about it up until then being an Old World fan but the game they put on showed me that it was still the same fantasy mass battle game it had always been and I really enjoyed it. I’ve since read the new simplified rules too and really become a convert. So much so that I ran an updated version of the Ziggurat of Doom at the club recently, replacing the ziggurat with the Stones of Blood!

Six brave Stormcast Eternals defend the 'Stones of Blood' against waves of Skaven and other horrors.

Another rather delightful turn that came from running the club was the fact that I was asked to go on the last but two episode of Meeples and Miniatures podcast to talk about it. That was fun and during the show, one of the hosts, Mike Hobbs asked if folk could donate unwanted bits and pieces to the club and both myself and Carl have been blown away by the generosity of the show’s listeners. Now we just need to find somewhere to store it all! :D

This year I also started re-collecting Skaven, having sold my rather substantial army some fifteen years ago, thinking I’d never play again. I spent the last couple of hours of 2019 assembling Stormvermin and I’m hoping to field them a lot next year.

In tangential gaming news I was asked, once again to provide the logo for this years Grognard Files Podcast meetup, 'Grogmeet' and was delighted to recieve some goodies in return. One year I hope I can make it to the actual con.

Honorary Grogmeet swag 

And I think that’s everything. Until I sat down to write this, I hadn’t realised what a packed year it had been. Next year, my plan is to run more games at the RPHaven club in north Cardiff. Starting with Classic Traveller, then The One Ring, Star Trek Adventures and finally Runequest Glorantha. The school Warhammer and D&D club will continue and hopefully grow again with next year’s year 7 intake. I’m also hoping to attend UKGames Expo again and run something at OBaWS again.

I plan to continue growing my Skaven army but also want to buy enough World War 2 Soviets to be able to finally play Chain of Command. I’m also quite keen to give the new Battletech a go if I can only get my hands on a copy of it.

Time will tell.

My rather disappointing Free RPG Day (that turned out not to be so disappointing after all).

Ready to play Star Trek Adventures: Biological Clock

Today was international Free RPG Day and our local friendly game store, Rules of Play hosted a sort of ‘play-on-demand’ event at ‘The Gate’ community and arts centre in Roath, Cardiff.
Five days ago in a fit of reckless abandon I volunteered to run Star Trek Adventures, specifically the fabulous, Biological Clock scenario by Fred Love. I’d attended the event last year but as a player in Andy Jones’ Runequest Quickstart game. This year I thought I would try my hand at GMing. It is, after all, a laid back event and it would be a good dry run for my stint at the Owlbear and Wizard Staff in Leamington in September.
Five days of furious map-making, paper model making, trips to the printers, reading of the rules and scenario and copious note-taking ensued and by 11:30 this morning I was ready.

It didn’t start well. I got to the venue by 11:55 but couldn’t find anywhere to park. I drove round and around but it was a hellscape of resident permit holder parking as far as the eye could see. I eventually found unrestricted parking at Roath Field just over half a mile from the venue and walked it.
By the time I got there it was 1pm and everybody was already well into their games with every table pretty full as far as I could see. There was only one table left. A long one with two women sat at the far end drinking coffee and clearly not part of the event. At the other end I set out my bits and pieces, dice, pencils, character sheets, phaser, tricorder, space ship etc and sat there, waiting, looking at Twitter. I was fully prepared to have no players if I’m honest. The event, as I’ve said, is very laid back with no real GM registration and no booking system. All one has to do to run a game is declare that you will on Rules of Play’s Facebook page, show up on the day, set out your stall and see if anyone’s interested. I was fully prepared for nobody to be interested at all.
What I wasn’t prepared for was for my players to be a dad with two four-year old kids.
‘Is this Star Trek?’, he asked, having clearly been sent over by the game coordinator. My heart sank. However, he’d clearly brought his kids along to play games and by volunteering to run a game at a promotional event, I feel I’d essentially declared myself an ambassador for the hobby. The very worst thing I could possibly do at this point would be to turn him away claiming that it’s too complicated for his kids. Without batting an eyelid, I said, ‘Yes. take a seat.’ It wasn’t a problem, I decided. I’ll simply dump about 80% of the rules and keep it mostly to talking with some very simple dice rolls and that should make it kid friendly. I explained to the dad that that was what I’d do and we got into it and to be honest, they were as engaged with it as I think four-years olds could be expected to be and things were going okay. However, about half way through a couple of twenty somethings sidled up to the table and asked if there were any spaces. Now what was I to do? My task was to try and balance the game now so that it was simple enough for four-year olds but gamey enough for twenty-somethings. I was juggling a bowling ball and an egg and I can’t honestly say that I managed it very well.
They all stuck it out until the end of the scenario and succeeded in brokering a truce between the Opterans and the Kavians. The scenario couldn’t have played out better, really but because of the simplicity of it we barreled through the whole thing in about an hour and a half. I was disappointed at the way it had gone and decided to call it a day but then, realising that there were still two and a half hours left of the event, I figured I could reasonably run it again. I reluctantly reset the table and sat there for ten minutes but it became apparent that no-one was looking to join a game and I was starving so I decided that I would chalk it up to experience, clear away and go home.

Running the game for the dad and his kids was great. I did have to throw most of the rules out of the window but it was fun describing the various situations to them and seeing how they reacted. Despite my initial disappointment, that part was actually very positive. If I have any real regrets it’s partly that I still haven’t got to really run a game of Star Trek Adventures properly, but the issue that is troubling me more than anything else, was that the couple who joined us half way through had not played a roleplaying game before and I’d hate to think that they were in any way put off the hobby or, indeed, Star Trek Adventures by participating in a  pretty ‘bleh’ example of it.

Anyway, I must point out that none of this reflects badly on Rules of Play or The Gate who put on a really successful event, I think. I will definitely do this again next year but I think I need to run something that is not only an open-ended pick-up game that folk can dip in and out of (as opposed to a story based game where you really need to be in it from start to finish) and something that can be nice and simple for kids but at the same time, crunchy for adults. I think a straight forward D&D5 mega-dungeon crawl might be the way forward. I’ll give it some thought. I have a year.

On a much more positive note, however I got to meet Andy again and as I was packing up, one of the event organisers commandeered my table to lay out all the freebies and I got first dibs, acquiring a pretty decent haul, I have to say. I tried not to be greedy and only nabbed stuff that I thought I might actually play or be very interested in reading.

Overall I got Kids on Bikes, Wrath and Glory: Blessings Unheralded - the new WH40K rpg quickstart, Starfinder Skittershot (I know it’s Space-Pathfinder but I’m strangely attracted to it), Tunnels and Trolls Adventures Japan, and Call of Cthulhu - Scritch Scratch by Lynne Hardy (and friends). That’ll keep me occupied for a while :D

A pretty decent haul.

Supplemental: After writing this and linking to it on Twitter, the Dad of the two kids (one of which was eight, not four - oops) got in touch to say how much they'd really enjoyed it and that his son was now wanting to watch Star Trek. I was totally blown away by this and it made me realise that far from failing, I'd actually done something really positive. It made me re-read this post and wonder what exactly what it was that I found disappointing about the event and I have to confess that really, it's just that my pre-concieved expectations of what my players would be wasn't met and that's absurd. The fault is entirely with me. I really enjoyed running the game for the little ones and I'd do it again in heartbeat (but with a much simpler rule set). I still feel bad for the couple that joined us later and I hope that they weren't put off but knowing that the kids really enjoyed it, balances things out, I think.

The Blagger’s Guide to DMing or ‘Just have a go and don't worry about it’

Bradley Clopton (c) 2014
OffWorldDesigns.com 2014

I saw a link on Twitter the other day to an article asking why many new players were reluctant to take up the mantle of DM (I can’t remember where it was now, sadly). To me the answer was obvious and it’s something that’s been bothering me for a while.
Youtube shows like ‘Critical Role’, ‘Shield of Tomorrow’ and ‘Acquisitions Incorporated’ have done more to invigorate and recruit new blood to the roleplaying hobby than anything else in the last forty plus years and I’m very grateful for that. The hobby, I think has never been healthier in popularity and diversity. However I’ve also sensed a creeping idolisation of their DMs. Alongside this, I’ve noticed a great many blog pages given over to articles on how to be an ‘awesome’ DM. These factors have, I fear contributed to the romanticised myth of the role of Games Master or Dungeon Master as some form of high art. It’s easy to see how many newcomers to the game might look at Critical Role and say, ‘Well, I’m no Matt Mercer.’ and leave it there.
Watching Matt Colville on Youtube once, he read out a comment from his chat channel, ‘How long do I need to play D&D before I should consider being a DM?’ He was quite rightly flabberghasted and said without hesitation, ‘No time at all. Jump in and have a go.’ And this is, really the essence of this post.

DMing is a skill that we learn by doing. I’ve reached a stage after thirty-four years of playing roleplaying games, where I’m reasonably comfortable with what I am doing as a DM and that’s only happened very recently. Am I a great DM? I don’t know. Is there a measurable scale? All I know is that my players enjoy themselves and, in my experience it’s hard for folk not to enjoy themselves when you’re sat around a table with friends laughing your socks off regardless of the DM’s ability.

I did go through a period of doubting myself and in retrospect it wasn’t entirely my fault. I DM’ed for my friends when we were teenagers partly because I loved the idea of creating the world, creating the situations and the story and being the only player at the table who knew what was really going on. Also because my friends were lazy buggers who couldn’t be bothered with the prep. Was I a good DM? No. And that’s not false modesty, of course I wasn’t. I barely understood what I was doing but my friends and I had an absolute riot and kept going for years. At some point, during those years,  they were working their way methodically through a nonsensical generic dungeon, room by room when suddenly they encountered a creature of my own making, the humanoid, flaming ‘Combustians!’
‘Combustians?’ Sneered one of my players, rolling his eyes. That was it. That was the exact moment where I realised that I could no longer just throw any old thing in and it’d be okay. That was the moment I realised it was possible to be a bad DM and I found myself riddled with pre-game stage fright for years after that. What if this game was another ‘Combustians!?’ I would ask myself, nervously.
Looking back however, ‘Combustians’ weren’t the issue. I was young, I was trying to come up with something unique that they hadn’t encountered before. I thought it was a cool idea. My players disagreed and ridiculed me for it. That didn’t make me a bad DM. It was a mistake. That was all. They were still having fun and, honestly if they didn’t like it, they could bloody DM for a change. No? Didn’t think so.
Quite simply we’d reached an age where my games, my dungeons and my plots, would need to be a little more sophisticated and that’s fine. I learned by doing. I wish I’d realised that back then and just moved on (I’d also have just glared at them across the table like it was their fault).

Okay, so you’re willing to give it a go but the rules and the campaign sourcebooks are daunting and overwhelming. Here’s the big secret: You don’t need to know all the rules. As a DM of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition I don’t know all of the rules. In fact I know very few of them and that works fine. Let me see...I know how a combat turn works. How to roll for initiative and what needs to be rolled to hit. I know how to fairly decide on a difficulty number for a skill check. I probably know a handful of more rules but that’s about it. I don’t know all the race and class rules or how every spell works. As far as I am concerned, that’s my players’ responsibility and they can tell me when I need to know. Sometimes there’s a rule that nobody at the table knows. Then we pause for a second and look it up. No problem. Now we know it for next time (and if it’s going to take too long, I ask one of the players to look it up whilst I continue). You might think that that would break the immersion and spoil the atmosphere but honestly, alongside the table chatter, TV, movie and games console discussion, play theorising, Monty Python quotes and general goofing around, it really doesn’t.
It is fair to say at this point, however that whilst you don’t need to know all the rules, you should really have a solid handle on the core rules or the players will find the goalposts moving on them and that will confuse and frustrate them. That’s a big no-no.

Campaign settings can be daunting too and, again, you don’t need to know it all. In fact my advice, particularly for Dungeons and Dragons is don’t bother.
As a new D&D DM I wouldn’t do anything other than mini-dungeons until you’ve got the hang of it and then worry about the outside world later and even then, start with a simple village and work your way out. Even then you can start with the ubiquitous equipment store and fill in the village later.
I started off the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign in the Forgotten Realms but then wanted to run the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign, The Enemy Within. Trying to fit the rivers and towns of the Empire into the Sword Coast was challenging (I managed it, though. I changed Bogenhafen into Daggerford and went from there) and if I’d kept the setting more vague then I’d just be able to make it up as the characters expand outwards. Let the scenarios dictate the geography rather than vice versa.
So, start small and work your way out and don’t overwhelm your players, and more importantly yourself with a myriad setting details. They can come later, if at all.

Another thing that I feel is important is that it’s not just on the DM to provide a great game. The DM is just another player at the table and you all have a responsibility not to spoil it for everyone else.
As a DM, if I feel that I have screwed up, then I will fess up, talk it over with the players, give them a ‘bennie’ if necessary and try not to do it again.
However, I also have a personal rule when I sit down to play (as opposed to DM) and that is that I always try to make the game as fun for the DM as they are trying to make it for us. The DM is playing too so why shouldn’t they have fun as well? So, what does that mean? Well, quite simply forgive them occasional rules discrepancies. They’re only human. Play along with their plot a little and don’t roll your eyes if it’s predictable. Allow yourself to be railroaded sometimes. Don’t try and scupper the campaign deliberately just to prove a point. In the immortal words of Wil Wheaton, ‘Don’t be a dick.’

So, in summing up:

    DMing should be fun, not a nightmare. Roll your sleeves up, jump in and have a go.

    You’ll definitely screw up a few times but that’s okay and you’ll learn from it.

    You don’t need to know all the rules, just the core ones.

    You don’t need to know the entire setting, start with a mini dungeon and work out.

    Players have a responsibility to make the game fun as much as the DM does.

    As a player or a DM, don’t be a dick.

    There’s nothing wrong with ‘Combustians’, Adrian. F**k you.

Ultimately, it’s a game. It’s meant to be fun. Nobody should be expecting you to be Matt Mercer. Just have a go and enjoy it.

The Big Adventure by Zazb
https://zazb.deviantart.com/art/The-Big-Adventure-200969352