D&D And Me Volume 4: The 2nd Edition Stretch

 2nd Edition was around from 1989-2000, when 3.0 dropped.  An eleven year stretch, currently second only to 1e, 1977-89.  As I mentioned before, 2e was my jam in High School, seeing as it came out the year I started my Freshman year.  Fittingly, for my personality, I was the final class to be able to say they started High School in the 80s.  This was a very formative time for me as a gamer and as a person, my high school and first round of college years.  I got married during 2e's tenure, so one could say I literally grew up with 2nd Edition, and all these years later I still love it.  I have grown to appreciate other versions of D&D on their own merits, of course, but 2e is tied with Basic (BX or BECMI) as my favorite D&D.

  Now, 2nd Edition had a lot going for it.  Personally, I loved the original presentation of the Monstrous Compendium, in a big three-ringed binder full of monsters each of which had a full-page or more entry.  In practice, one needed a lot of those little hole reinforcement stickers to keep pages from coming out, but in theory one could add pages to their binder, like the Forgotten Realms and Kara-Tur packs I purchased.  Along with 2e came the brown leatherette splatbooks.  The Complete Fighter's Handbook, The Complete Wizard's Handbook, etc.  Books for Demi-Humans, books for setting-specific classes like Ninja and Shi'ar, books from the green historical line, like Rome, and Charlemagne's Paladins.

  THIS was 2e.  It went everywhere and did everything.  The Realms, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Spelljammer, Planescape, even my favorite setting of all time, Mystara, got some 2e support.  And yeah, Ravenloft.  My other favorite setting.  It's no wonder we had such a blast with 2e, as there was so much of everything to inspire and inform our games.  Too much, from TSR's financial standpoint.  But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.

  To me, 2e was everything I had wanted in a Dungeons & Dragons game at the time.  The rules we often see as clunky in hindsight were fine for those of us who grew up with 1e and Basic.  In fact, they were a genuine improvement in many cases.  All the support materials were just icing on the cake- and a crap ton of icing it was.  But then something happened that really upset me, and to this day I'm only partially sure why.  2e got a facelift, and I hated it.

  The core books were reformatted and given a new trade dress in 1995.  Gone was the natural progression of cover design from the 1e redux to 2e, these new "black border" covers just felt... off.  And the interiors?  Ugh.  Gone was the iconic artwork of the original run of 2nd Edition, and the new layout went from the friendly blue and black to a more aggressive red and black.  The font styles changed to a less readable style, and on the whole made the entire corebook line look closer to what the later Ravenloft-themed stuff looked like.  It just felt... wrong.  Now, the art isn't bad, at all.  Both covers were done by the legendary Jeff Easley.  But the tone of the art was... different.

Now, I'll admit if someone jumped into AD&D at this point, they wouldn't have been so used to the previous presentation.  So this just might be my age and my prior D&D experiences predisposing me to dislike, nay, loathe the black-border redux.  But this wasn't all- the reprints of the splatbooks changed to a cheaper cover, no longer the faux leather of the original issues, the reprints felt less awesome and in hindsight, maybe a harbinger of TSR's financial woes.  To this day the only reason I own any of the black-border "2.5" books is because they have been given to me.  I have never bought one of my own accord, and at the time of this writing I feel I never will.

Why do these updates offend my sensibilities so?  You got me.  I mean, I have something I like in each and every edition of D&D.  Of this one I can say, well, it's 2e, and it includes any errata that had been compiled at that point.  But above and beyond that, I just really feel repelled by this incarnation of the game, and was doubly sad when the commemorative hardcovers were released using these versions of the book interiors.  Second Edition is blue and black, dammit, and if there's not the Elmore painting of the proud dragonslayers just inside the PHB, it's wrong.  Now that I'm looking at the covers and the interiors side-by-side for this article, I do see something I can put my finger on.  The first version looks bright, optimisitc, action-oriented.  The second looks dark, desperate, and gritty.  To be fair, Dungeons & Dragons can be both, sometimes in the same campaign, or the same adventure.  But flip to the interiors, and that theme persists.  The art and interior design of 2.5 is more subdued, and made harsher by the red chapter and section titles and borders.

So, even as 2nd Edition waned, and Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, and I finished my AA and ended up unable to pursue my Army career due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea, I still clung to my high school version of AD&D 2e in what might have been my first expression of unreasonably hostile grognard-ism.  I can say that at age 45 I realize I am being unreasonably judgey about what is essentially a cleanup and re-release of one of my favorite versions of D&D.  There's nothing rules-wise wrong with it.  But the look?  The feel?  All kinds of wrong.  At least to me.

2nd Edition's tenure brought me so many things I love about D&D, though.  I read the 2e splatbooks for fun, they had so many great ideas that were executed with more or less effectiveness.  The Priest book even had some kits that were explicitly less powerful than the average Cleric, which I found neat.  I mean, not everyone is a hammer-wielding, heal-casting badass.  Kits allowed some great fluff and options to keep the base classes from feeling samey.  And the settings - holy crap the settings.  SO MANY SETTINGS.  My favorites to read were Ravenloft, Maztica, and Al-Qadim.  Sad thing is, I've only ever met one other hardcore Al-Qadim fan, and none who liked Maztica.  So Ravenloft is all I've ever gotten to really run.

Here's a problem with my burning out on 2e due to my prejudice against the 2.5-themed products.  I missed out on some truly cool stuff.  Decades later, in 2019, I discovered Jakandor.  This mini-setting flew under my radar as I was abstaining from buying stuff with that 2.5 look.  It was an attempt to turn some AD&D tropes on their head, and it succeeded.  I devoured it as part of a web project I was involved in (that crashed and burned) and discovered that I had really missed out on a cool bit of D&D history.  I've looked back to see if I missed anything else cool.

When I met my wife in 1997, we weren't playing AD&D, we introduced her to tabletop roleplaying with West End's Star Wars.  She wouldn't make a D&D character until 3.0 was a brand new thing in 2000.  So that sort of sums up the end of my 2nd Edition Stretch.  It was, and remains, a favorite of mine, though I am struggling with my blind spot for its closing years.

31 Character Challenge Part 31: Gangbusters B/X

Prohibition. It's one of my favorite periods of American history to study.  When we lost our collective minds and instituted a massive attempt to legislate morality and created of our law-abiding citizens a nation of scofflaws.  Flappers, G-men, bootleggers, bathtub gin and speakeasies.  Chicago typewriters, hits, smuggler's row, "I would advise yas ta keep dialin', Oxmyx."

I first played TSR's Gangbusters in High School.  I loved so much about the game.  First of all, it allowed players to be on the other side of the law.  Sure, you could play cops and G-Men, both of which were a lot of fun.  And you could play private dicks and reporters, both also with tons of potential for adventure.  But holy crap you could play the gangsters.  You could manufacture, transport, and sell illegal hooch.  Run a speakeasy. Set up a numbers game.  Build a criminal empire.  And I loved every minute of it.

Recently, my friend Glen "Ol' Man Grognard" Hallstrom told me there was an OSR version of Gangbusters in the works.  I love games built on the OSR engine, so I was intrigued.  This led me to Mark Hunt's Gangbusters B/X.  This is a rework of the original Gangbusters RPG based around the 1981 Moldvay version of the D&D engine.  You know, the one we all played back in The Day.

So, let's throw on a fedora and grab a tommy gun, and make a character for this new old game.

Character Creation

Like many games based on the Old School Renaissance, we start by rolling 3d6 in order for Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma.

• Strength: 11
• Intelligence: 9
• Wisdom: 11
• Dexterity: 11
• Constitution: 8
• Charisma: 9

 Pretty average.  The option exists to swap two points of Strength, Wisdom, or Intelligence for 1 point elsewhere, but our stats are so low already...  Let's move on.

Our class is going to be Street Smart.  As a Street Smart character, this PC will have a bonus to striking from behind, and the Nimble Fingers, Move Silently, Hide, and Word on The Street skills. A d4 for Hit Dice, I roll a 1, and modify it by the -1 for low Constitution.  So... 1 measly Hit Point.  Now I'm thinking of a dozen Basic D&D characters I've played.  Gotta play it smart to stay alive.

We choose an alignment, the choices are Law Abiding, Neutrality, and Dishonest.  Since we're going to probably work as a gangster, we'll go with Dishonest.  We roll 3d6x10 for starting money, and end up with $130.  Random rolls say we speak French in addition to English, and our nickname is "Lucky."

For equipment, we'll buy some typical clothes (AC5), a hip flask, a revolver, a blackjack, and we'll keep the rest of the money ($65.50) for future uses.

The Character

Frank Leroux never used his given name, Francois.  The Boys thought it was "too French."  The day that G-man's bullet was stopped by a half inch wide strip of metal in a car door was when they forgot all about "Francois" and started calling him "Lucky."

Lucky wasn't strong, like the boss' enforcers.  He wasn't as smart as the idea men and the accountants.  But what he was, was Lucky.  He was sneaky, he could find things out. He had informants that could get him the word on the street.  And when it came to taking people out- sometimes you didn't need to be tough.

Today, Lucky spends his days at the boss' most profitable speak.  He listens, he finds things out, and he helps the boss in ways the other folks can't.

My Thoughts

Gangbusters B/X has a couple of advantages over the original.  The OSR engine means the mechanics of the game are automatically intuitive to many players.  It also means tons of material for other games using the engine can be borrowed and plugged straight in.  Want to do supernatural roaring 20s?  Borrow spells, undead, and ghosts from any number of products based on the early D&D engine.  I dig that quite a bit.  Want to do your own version of A Piece of The Action? Grab Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition to roll up Koik and Spocko and Gangbusters for Oxmyx and Krako.

The only thing missing from Gangbusters B/X are the many subsystems in the original Gangbusters that I love so much.  So I asked the author about that- and it's coming in the Expert set, due out soon.  So Gangbusters B/X will mimic the original Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons by having two rulebooks, one basic, and one with more advanced information and rules.  I'm looking quite forward to the release.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31 Character Challenge Part 30: Behind Enemy Lines

 

World War II.  Possibly the most studied conflict in the history of mankind.  I remember when The History Channel was nothing but wall-to-wall WWII documentaries.  The Hitler Channel: All Hitler, All The Time.  So it's only natural that there are a few roleplaying games out there that cover good old WWII.  Many of them add non-historical elements, like Weird War II with Nazi "Wehrwolves" and Gear Krieg with dieselpunk mecha.  But FASA's Behind Enemy Lines is not one of those.  This game intends to be a "straight" WWII roleplaying game, by default from the point of view of an American US Army soldier.

The game has a sort of lifepath character generation, and with its 2D6 task resolution it's hard not to see a bit of Traveller influence in the game.  It has some very wargame-y elements, but that's to be expected of a game where the main setting is the conflict in Europe.

I have to admit that I have rolled up characters for this game many times, but I have yet to actually run it.  I've owned it for decades, but never found a group that was interested in playing WWII "straight."  No supernatural elements, no mecha, no nothing.  Most players I've talked to felt it was far too grim, too easy for characters to catch a stray bullet and die horribly.

I think this game is in a genre where I'd stick to playing the dice as they fall, rather than my more modern mode of saving character deaths for dramatically appropriate moments.  No, in a WWII game the grim brutality my players have always feared is probably pretty appropriate.

Without further adieu, lets' see who got drafted.

Character Creation

 We begin by determining our physical characteristics.  They are Strength, Endurance, Weapons Handling, Agility, and Stamina.  All but Stamina are rolled on 1D6+4.  Stamina is then the average of Strength and Endurance.

• Strength: 10
• Endurance: 10
• Weapons Handling: 7
• Agility: 5
• Stamina: 10

Well, Agility crapped out, but the two sixes right off the bad help. Rolling on the 2D6 table tells us our character's weight is 170-180 pounds.

Now we roll for background skills, but we have to figure out if our character came from the city, or the country. 4, our character is rural.  So we'll roll to see if he (these characters are universally male) picked up useful skills before basic training.

We now have a level 1 Rifle skill, a level 3 Pistol skill, Drive at level 1, and a level 2 Swim skill.

Now, for basic training.  Our Rifle skill comes out to 4, First Aid at the maximum of 3, level 2 Hand-to-Hand skill, and level 1 skill in Bayonet, Rifle Grenade, BAR, Bazooka, .30 machine gun, 60mm mortar, and submachine gun.

Now we determine how experienced this character is.  We roll an 8 and are a Private First Class.  Our character has seen action only at Normandy. He has 1 Combat Experience point, and 5 acquired skill points.  We'll spend 3 on a level of Rifle, and 2 on another level of First Aid, qualifying our character to be a medic.

Jot down gear, and this character is ready to play.

The Character

Charlie Carlisle grew up in the small town of Taylor, Texas, son of a farmer and one of six children.  Charlie and each of his siblings worked hard helping keep the farm afloat, with Charlie being the only member of his family to have graduated High School, with Charlie spending late nights trying to help his younger siblings do the same, then waking at dawn to help his father with the chores.  That was the way things were until Sunday, December 7th, 1941.  News from outside Texas didn't travel terribly fast most days, but by Sunday night even the sleepy little farm town was abuzz with news of the Japanese attack.

Charlie had a talk with his father, a veteran of The Great War, and set off for Austin the next day, to enlist in the US Army.

Basic Training was educational, but not too tough for a boy whose body had been conditioned to hard work.  Like most boys in the country, he already knew his way around firearms, and knew how to drive the family's Ford pickup.  These skills came in handy, and he was made a PFC aboard the ship taking him across the Atlantic for the invasion of Europe.  Then the waiting started.  Training, training, training.  Practice and more practice.  Some units invaded Sicily, Italy. And still Charlie waited with his unit.  Drills, field problems, waiting.  Waiting.  Then one day, the paymasters paid the men in francs.

D-Day.  Charlie had never seen so much vomit, and hours later he had never seen so much blood.  The whole thing was a blur of sound and motion, blood and water, men and machines.  When the whole thing was finally over, God knows how long later, and he and his company caught their breath- there were just over half of them left.  Charlie's own squad had lost their squad leader and both BAR men.  He wondered why he'd ever wanted to hurry up and invade.  But here he was - in Europe.  He joined the Corporal who now led his squad in pissing on a burned out pillbox.  So much for Fortress Europa.

Now begins the long road to Berlin.

My Thoughts

I'm currently watching Band of Brothers with my son.  We've also watched Saving Private Ryan together.  I wonder if I could use Behind Enemy Lines as a teaching tool, to pick up some WWII history by walking students through some of the scenarios soldiers lived through.  I doubt I could do a better job than Spielberg or Hanks, but the idea that the students could choose their own paths and see the outcome might be worth looking into.  I'm reasonably familiar with both US and German squad-level tactics and unit compositions, and could bone up on specifics without much trouble.  I mean, I spent way too much on a graduate degree in military history, I might as well put some of it to use.

This could also be interesting to play D-Day in the same "character funnel" style as Dungeon Crawl Classics, rolling up, say, four characters per player and seeing who survives hitting the beach.  Rather than an irreverent kill-fest, the point would be to show the players just how horrifying the real thing was, again, make it an educational experience.  Role playing games have a potential to allow us to step into the shoes of people we are not, and in some small way place ourselves in situations we have never experienced.  Perhaps this would be a worthy goal at some point.

31 Character Challenge Part 29: Twilight: 2000

 

Ah, Twilight:2000.  See, kids, when I was your age, we were sure there would be another World War, and it would be with the Soviets.  So sure, in fact, that when we were doing our schedules for sophomore year I decided to sign up for our pilot program by which we would take Russian via satellite.  I thought it would be a useful skill in a military career.

I had read and owned some books for the first edition of Twilight:2000, but we played the 2nd Edition throughout High School.  The original 2e came out in 1990, which was my sophomore year coincidentally, but the original had been around since 1984.  The Steve Venters artwork for the vehicles in the first edition vehicle guides alone was worth the price of admission. I can skill see the Cadillac Gage Stingray tank with "Pink Cadillac" painted on the side.  Also, the M1A3 "Giraffe" style tank, and the LAV-75 that never was.

Being in Marine Corps JROTC at the time, myself and most of my game group were keenly interested in games with military themes.  Robotech was a favorite, Battletech of course, and even our Star Trek games had a distinctly Nicholas Meyer feel to them, more Navy than most Trek films or episodes.  Twilight: 2000 was a shoe-in when the revised edition arrived at King's Hobby Shop.  We were all in.  At this point in time, GDW was developing their own house system, which eventually appeared in Traveller: The New Era, Dark Conspiracy, Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, and of course, Twilight:2000.

It's kinda fun that in the Version 2.2 explanation sheet, GDW refers to the revamp of their house system as the D20-system.  GRIN.  But this version we played quite a bit of that summer, and into the mid-90s.  So this is the version for which I'll make a character.

A neat thing about T2K is it uses a very Traveller-esque system of lifepath in 4-year terms, and skills that are picked up along the way.  Go too old, and age starts to take its toll.  Unlike Traveller, you can't die before the game starts, but you can accrue radiation and combat experience.  If you choose to create a civilian character, every tour there is a die roll to see if war breaks out, and when it does, you're drafted.  This occurs so all the characters can be in Kalisz for the start of the campaign.  So that's what we're going to do.  I'm going to make the character I was when I joined the State Guard, an academic working in higher education and then the balloon goes up.  Let's see how that works out.

Character Creation

First, we choose a background and native language.  American, and English.  Rolling a d10 to see if I speak any other languages, I end up being fluent in only English.  Now we roll for attributes.  There is a point-allocation option, but you guys know the drill.  If it can be random in this series, it will be.  The attributes are Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Education and Charisma- very Traveller-esque.  Rolling is 2D6-2 for each, re-rolling any snake-eyes results.

• Strength: 8
  
• Agility: 5
  
• Constitution: 1
  
• Intelligence: 10 (Wow.  I rolled a 3 and a 12 back-to-back)
  
• Education: 3
  
• Charisma: 4
  

 Now, we select four background skills.

• Spanish: 2
• Computer: 2
• Ground Vehicle (Wheeled): 2
• Unarmed Martial Arts: 2

Well.  We hit my first problem.  We can't go to undergrad college, because we rolled an Education of 3.  So... I guess we're enlisting.

In Basic we pick up the following skills:

• Armed Martial Arts: 0
• Autogun: 0
• Grenade Launcher: 0
• Ground Vehicle: Wheeled 1 (up to 3)
• Small Arms (Rifle): 2
• Swimming: 1
• Tac Missile: 0
• Thrown Weapon: 0
• Unarmed Martial Arts: 1 (up to 2)

We go to Armor AIT and pick up the following skills:

• Autogun: 1
• Ground Vehicle (Tracked): 2
• Heavy Gun: 2

Promotion: Yes!  With the INT bonus and 10 on the die,  we move up to Specialist-4.  Yeah, when this was written, it was still SP4 rather than SPC.  I used to get shit when I'd write my own rank as SP4 decades after it was changed.  Anyway, we get one contact, and I rolled to see if it was foreign, and it was not.  For secondary activity, we take CON+1.  The war does not break out this term.

Term 2: Sticking with the Army, and taking night classes. Term 2 gets 5 skills.

• Heavy Gun: +1=3
  
• Autogun: +1=2
  
• Ground Vehicle (Tracked): +1=3
  
• Mechanic: 1
  
• Observation: 1
  

Promoted to Sergeant!  Huzzah.  That means we pick up a level of Leadership, Instruction, and Persuasion from NCO school. Another military contact.  +1 EDU as Secondary Activity. War does not break out.

Term 3: One more Army term and we can go to college! 4 skills for Term 3.

• Autogun: +1=3
  
• Mechanic: +1=2
• Observation: +1=2
• Small Arms (Rifle): +1=3
  

Promoted to Staff Sergeant.  One more military contact.  +1 EDU as Secondary Activity.  Our soldier is now 29 years old, and wants to get out to go back to college- but a die roll of 2 means war breaks out.  So much for that.

Term 4: War breaks out.  Automatic promotion to Sergeant First Class (the book calls it Platoon Sergeant, but it hasn't been called that since the 50s.  Platoon sergeant is a billet now, rather than a rank and a billet.) 3 Skills.

• Observation: +1=3
  
• Navigation: 1
  
• Small Arms (Rifle): +1=4
  

 Roll for promotion: nope.  Contact: US military. Secondary Activity +1 CON.

Now we finish things up. 1D6 for Initiative yields a 5. 5D6 for Rads = 15.  The character is now 33 years old, so must roll to avoid losing a point of Agility.  Roll 1D10, if it's less than the current attribute, lose one point.  5 rolled, 5 Agility, it stays where it is.

We calculate the derived attributes, like throw range, load weight, personal weight, and how many hits we can take to the various parts of our body.  We get the US Military basic load- and would have a vehicle if we were making a group of characters.  But as a solo character, no vehicle for us.  So I guess we are a tanker without a tank.  We get $5,000 worth of scavenged equipment per term in the military, so that's $20,000 worth of stuff. It just so happens that the game values a HMMWV at $20,000 exactly, so we just stole one from somewhere.  Finding fuel?  That's a problem for the day after... erm... The Day After.

The Character

TC's Log.  Stardate- Today.

 

  This will be the final entry, since there's not a single chance we're getting the parts we need to get the turbine running again.  Not that there's fuel if we did.  We're taking everything we can salvage, and the engineers are going make sure the rest isn't useful to anybody.  The few tanks that are running will pick our track over for spares before that.  But it's a damn shame.

 

  I'm feeling all Charlton Heston when he saw the Statue of Liberty.  We saw some of the flashes, some of the mushroom clouds, way off in the distance.  Had our company been where they were supposed to be, we'd probably be glowing in the dark right now.  For one glorious moment, our lack of fuel worked in our favor.  The Green Weenie blew right by us this time like the Angel on Passover.  But yeah, they did it.  The sons of bitches pushed the button, and here we are.

 

  The front... is gone.  The Colonel has no idea what the hell we all do now.  He said he's not throwing good troops in after bad and rolling us into a radiation zone with no clear idea of the objective, now that the objective is a glassed-over crater you can use to make Hot Pockets. He's got less than half a battalion left, and of those we're mostly running on empty tanks.  In empty tanks.  With empty tanks.  It's that kinda situation.

 

  They're talking about taking those of us who are suddenly dismounted and folding us into the mech infantry, we've even been handed some scrounged rifles and carbines and one guy as a Kalashnikov he picked up somewhere along the way from an Ivan who won't be needing it anymore.  We've got food for about a week, two if we're careful.  Water's plentiful, but we gotta make sure it doesn't make the Geiger counter go clicketty clack.  We just need to-

 

  OK, just finished a quick and dirty talk with Top.  Our illustrious First Shirt wants me to take a Humvee and see if I can link up with 2nd Battalion, who were behind is about 20 miles last we checked.  So I guess it's me, my crew, and a Humvee.  Fuck it, we're totally snagging our Ma Deuce before someone else does and bolting it to this Humvee somehow.  Division said we're on our own.  So here we go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31 Character Challenge Part 28: Mighty Protectors

 

Villains and Vigilantes was like Champions in my 80s gaming group- we'd all heard about it, but none of us had played it.  Despite both being popular games beloved by the grognard community, for some strange reason neither ever caught on with any of us, so I didn't try either until I was much, much older.  As of this writing, I've played one extremely shaky and uncertain game of Fantasy Hero, and five extremely awesome games of Mighty Protectors - which is the title of Villains and Vigilantes 3.0.  What was the difference?  Well, for starters, all my Mighty Protectors games have been run by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the original creators.  That attempt at Hero was me not knowing any of the rules.

Mighty Protectors has a very interesting history getting to market.  To sum things up, authors Dee and Herman had to fight for the rights to their own game, which were being squatted by the former publisher.  A long legal battle ensued, with our intrepid writers at long last emerging victorious.  I missed out on the initial Kickstarter, but jumped in as a late backer.  After all, this was RPG history, a classic game coming back from its original authors.  But I needed to get some experience with the game, and how better to do that than with those same authors?  So, at North Texas RPG Con, I jumped into games run by each of the two, and had a great time.

Mighty Protectors has some really interesting mechanics, if I had to pick one to call out as the most awesome, it's the ability to use Power to reduce injury.  This just seems so appropriate to a comic book game.  So, Power represents the juice many heroes use to power their abilities, but it also represents a pool of resilience and will even for those heroes without Power-consuming abilities.  That means when an attack hits, a hero can reduce that damage a certain amount determined by current Power in exchange for spending an amount of current Power.  This makes heroes able to take the kind of punishment we see in comic books before they start taking severe or debilitating injuries.  I really liked that this was an elective ability for all heroes, regardless of their power portfolio.  It just made things feel suitably super-powered.

My very first game of MP I played Shutterbug, a young hero very much in the vein of Spider-Man.  I had a blast.  We were playing what I now know to be a classic adventure module for the original V&V, Crisis at Crusader Citadel.  Come to find out, once I got the book in my hands, there's an amazing comic book reality decades in the making for Mighty Protectors.  It has its own history and cosmology, its own aliens and races, its own pantheon of heroes and villains.  And a rippin' good one.  I had such a great time on this game, that I selected Shutterbug from the pregens the next time I played, too.  I also had the opportunity to help shape another group's Mighty Protectors campaign.  Jeff Dee had a situation where he needed to determine what occurred "off screen" to his group's game, so he dropped by a Royal Dragoon Guards meeting (He and Manda are part of our Home Guard) and let us play the offscreen characters.  It was really bitchin' to get to play such an epic battle against a powerful monster, but even cooler to know that our exploits would have a direct effect on other characters in the campaign world.

So far, I've only played pregens, all of which are iconic characters in the Mighty Protectors universe.  So let's dig in and make a new character.

Character Creation

You folks know how I have a nostalgic love of random things.  Random lifepaths, random events, random ability scores.  Mighty Protectors has a robust system for generating random characters as well as a point-buy system for building custom characters to order.  My dice are itching to go, to I'm going to go completely random and see what sort of character comes out the other end.  Power Level is our next choice, we'll go with Standard.

Birthplace: Local.  So the character is from wherever the campaign introduces them, in this case, somewhere in the US on Earth.  We'll go with Austin, TX, because... Austin.

Species: Human

 

Culture: Modern

 

Age: 12 (I rolled double 1s.)

 

Gender: Man

Biological Sex: Cisgender

Attraction: Straight

(I love that they have separated gender and biological sex, I have several players for whom this is a very affirming thing, which it is in general.)

 

The Basic Characteristics in Mighty Protectors are Strength (ST), Endurance (EN), Agility (AG), Intelligence (IN), and Cool (CL).  Each Power Level of campaign has an array of scores set for it, and a random die roll places that array of scores.  Sour 18 goes in- IN.  16 in CL, 14 in ST, 12 in AG, leaving 10 for EN.

Now that these are set, the wonderful Excel character sheet (available HERE) does the work of calculating the stats that are based on the Basic Characteristics.  Carrying capacity, Base HTH damage, Save numbers, etc.  Rolling for weight, we get 80lbs (12-year-old kid) and that yields a mass of d3.

Now, we roll for Background.  Roll three times, and keep two.  Let's see what we get.  Accounting/Finance, Commercial Art, Psychology.  Hmmm.  For a 12-year-old, let's say a parent was an accountant, and the character himself did fan art and sold it online and at conventions.

 

Now we roll for Motivation -  Glory Hound.  Sounds about right fort a 12-year-old.  Wealth starts at d4, Luck roll at 10-, and then we roll for Origin.  Mystical Training.  This just got even more interesting.

Now we roll two Offensive Abilities, two Defensive Abilities, and two Miscellaneous Abilities.  Here we go:

Natural Weaponry

Force Field

Non-Corporealness

Density Change

Mental Ability

Telepathy

Out of this six, we pick four Core Abilities.  Since we're training in the Mystic Arts, we'll take Force Field, Non-Corporealness, Mental Ability, and Telepathy.  Each of these receives 20 CP.  Now to roll two random Weaknesses.

Phobia, and Low Self-Control.  Both sound appropriate.  Let's take Low Self Control at -10, allowing us to put 10CP into Density Change.

 

We're ready to rock and roll.

 

The Character

Jimmy Malcolm was a twelve-year-old geek for all seasons.  Stunningly intelligent, and a voracious reader, he avoided the trap of focusing all his time on academic pursuits.  He loved the outdoors in addition to his books, and loved to camp with his family.  One weekend on a trip to the lake, he came across an old leather backpack lying near the shore in a stand of trees.  Opening the pack to check for any indication of who its owner was, Jimmy found nothing but a large hardbound book that reminded him of his older brother's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals.  He kept the book, and took it home.

 

Within days, Jimmy had taken to devouring the old book with every waking hour he could.  After school he eschewed his Atari and comic books to read more of the strange contents of the volume.  And as he read, he began to understand - everything.  The world was surrounded by an arcane fabric that could be manipulated by those who knew how.  And Jimmy knew now.  He could visualize every single word of the book he had read, every book he had ever read,  and his first attempts at weaving spells showed real promise.  He could protect himself with a shield, he could throw bolts of force, he could walk through walls and read people's thoughts.  Though this last wasn't always pleasant.

Just weeks short of his 13th Birthday, Jimmy had mastered the contents of the book.  He knew he had powers now- and he'd been a fan of superheroes all his life.  The time had come to be one.  He took on the name Kid Kinetic, for his ability to wield force fields and force bolts.  He applied for a superhero license, and watches the mailbox each and every day.

My Thoughts

OK, so, I loved the random creation process, but it did leave out one concept in Mighty Protectors that is incredibly awesome.  Vehicles.

The Super Vehicles in Mighty Protectors are built on points, with an integration of modular spaces called "system spaces", each space having a function and filling a spot on a floorplan of the vehicle.  The end result is each super-vehicle ends up with a deckplan of sorts, helping players imagine the layout and size of their vehicles.

 

You can do pretty much anything with this system from motorcycles to jets to flying carriers.  It's fun to read through the list of things possible with vehicles, and wondering why the designers of the USS Enterprise didn't splurge the 5 CP for "Won't Explode" on all the bridge consoles.

I will say that I found the complexity level of Mighty Protectors to be far less to my eye than most supers games that use a point system.  I also found that combat runs more smoothly in MP than in a couple of other supers games I've tried.  Again, I love being able to trade Power points for absorbing damage, it just seems like a neat way to wear down a hero slowly, allow them to take heroic amounts if damage if they are willing to trade away the juice with which their powers operate.  Risk/Reward in a game is always fun.

This is a game I'd like to explore more, and try my hand at running.  It's going on my (admittedly long, thanks to the pandemic) list of games to run when I can get at a table with folks again, or at least through Zoom or Discord.  This game is quite a bit of fun to read, and the universe created by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman is a pretty cool place to visit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31 Character Challenge Part 27: The Lone Wolf Adventure Game

 

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1989.  There I was, sitting in Algebra class at Round Rock High School.  Mr. Sikes class.  He was a good teacher, but a little too trusting.  He'd let us grade each other's homework, and as he called role we'd call out our grades.  OF COURSE we all made somewhere in the 90s, with an 88 or so in there for veracity.  But then again, maybe he knew the test scores would tell.  And they did.

Why do I bring up Algebra?  Because I largely got through that class due to Joe Dever's Lone Wolf adventure books. Mr. Sikes was very patient, and would explain things multiple times to the folks in the class who just didn't get it.  I usually had it after the second go-round, and was bored out of my mind for the rest of class.  Enter Lone Wolf.

The Lone Wolf books were an analog version of a text adventure game.  More than just a choose-your-own-adventure, they had a simple game system in them relying on a random number generator going 0-9 and some boolean variables.  Like "Do you have the Kai discipline of Tracking?  Go to 200.  If not go to 195." Or "Pick a random number from the table.  On 0-4 go to 200.  On 5-9 go to 195."  In the back of each novel there was a random number table - close your eyes and drop the eraser end of your pencil to choose.  Or use a d10.  Or use the RND function on your calculator.  I still have both the d10 and the calculator.  There was a character sheet in the back of the book for recording stats, equipment, and combats.  It was just what I needed to get me through. And- when you finished a book in the series, your character got to add a new discipline for the next book.

Years later, Mongoose Publishing dropped a Lone Wolf RPG in two flavors, one used basically the same system the old books did.  The second used the d20 system, as this was the early 2000s and the OGL/d20 phenomenon was going strong.  I own both versions, but never got to play them.  A decade later, I came across an absolutely gorgeous boxed set at Ettin Games in Humble, TX- The Lone Wolf Adventure Game.  This offering from Cubicle Seven is beautiful.  The art is extremely evocative of Joe Dever's Kai Lords and world of Magnamund.  The contents of the box smack of quality, and the system, I was gratified to find, was nearly identical to the books and the earlier Mongoose version.

So what is a Kai Lord?  It's important to know, since the boxed set assumes all your characters are going to be one.  Kai Lords are... Jedi Rangers.  Sort of.  They are a monastic order of men and women who learn powerful disciplines that are part skill, part psionic or magical ability.  Weaponskill and Tracking on the mundane side, Mind Over Matter and Mindblast on the magical side.  So, warrior-monks of a sort, identifiable by their distinctive green cloaks.

So, what does it take to make a Kai Lord for The Lone Wolf Adventure Game?  Let's find out.

Character Creation

Creating a Kai Lord is very straightforward, no more complex than it was in the game books, really.  The first thing we do is determine Combat Skill and Endurance.  The box includes a random number table you can flip a coin into, or you can just roll a d10.  I'll be rolling a d10 since I'm working from the PDF at the moment.

 

Great.  A zero.  That means our Combat Skill is the bare minimum of 10.  And a 2 for Endurance, giving us a total of 12.  Not the beefiest Kai Lord ever.

 

Next, we choose our five Kai Disciplines.  This character is not a fighty type,  so we're going to concentrate on choices that play to our strengths.  Camouflage, Sixth Sense, Animal Kinship, Mind Over Matter and Mindblast.

Starting Equipment is next - Green tunic and cloak, check.  Backpack, belt, and leather pouch.  Check.  Rolling for Gold Crowns... zero again.  10 Gold Crowns to start with.  One map of the Lastlands.  Now we pick five items from the item list.  Let's see... Chainmail Waistcoat, Helmet, and a Shield to help keep from getting killed, and a Dagger for utility, and a Meal to keep fed.  Five items.  Done.

Ooh!  We get to roll randomly for a name.  This is optional, but since we love random stuff in this challenge... Silent Dancer.  OK, that kind of fits the skill set, and the lack of focus on combat.

And that, dear readers, is that.  It's absurdly simple to create a Kai Lord for this game, which makes it a great game for a one-shot, or for new players.

The Character

As a young child, her name had been Marren, but she entered the Kai Monastery as a refugee, orphaned after a savage attack of Mountain Giaks had killed most of the adults of her village.  A small group of Kai Lords had arrived and saved those who had survived that long, leading them back to the Monastery after burying the dead.  Some children went to live with relatives, but Marren had no such family.  She was alone, and elected to stay with her rescuers and learn the ways of the Kai.

The training was hard, and it was obvious she had no real aptitude to become a great warrior.  She could hold her own, but many of the other initiates were so much more capable with a weapon.  One day during practice, a tall boy with a sure sword disarmed her and backed her into a corner.  In desperation, she reflexively lashed out with her mind and knocked the boy unconscious.  Her Kai Master knew immediately that she should be trained in the mental arts, and save the martial for later.

She learned how to disappear into the forest, how to calm and communicate with the animals, and her mental acuity developed at a prodigious rate.  By the time of her initiation, she was known for her prescience, her stealth, and her ability to move things and shock opponents with her mind alone.  She was given the name Silent Dancer, and assigned to the patrol and protection of her old home province.  She has been taught that revenge is not the Kai way, but should she see any Giaks mucking about where they do not belong...

My Thoughts

It is extremely cool to rediscover this world from my youth.  I had many of the Lone Wolf books, and even Joe Dever's first Freeway Warrior book, which had similar mechanics but a Mad Max vibe.  There's a phone app with the original Lone Wolf books that saves your information and progress.  Which is cool.  I've been playing it with my daughter as part of her reading time.

So, this game is awesome.  It's fast, easy, and the setting is pretty neat.  It also has a built-in reason for the PCs to work together- they're all, by definition, Kai Lords.  Now, there is a sourcebook with lots of other options - my favorite are the Dwarven Gunners of Bor.  Black Powder Dwarves are always cool.  Right?

The possible issue is long legs in the campaign. Leveling up means learning new Kai Discipline, which will eventually lead to the variation and differences in PCs becoming thinner as everyone masters every discipline.  Once a Kai Lord has mastered all 10 disciplines, they become a Master, and may go toward learning the MagnaKai Disciplines.  But in the meantime, the characters all move slowly toward having the same talents.

As I said earlier, this is a great product for introducing roleplaying to new folks.  Even kids.  It's simple, only uses one kind of die (if any!) and is quite narrative.  I also find the artwork extremely nice, and inspirational to the source material. 

31 Character Challenge Part 26: Boot Hill

 

Boot Hill, 3rd Edition.  This came out when I was in High School, and while westerns weren't a genre we played at all at the time, there was a catalyst to suddenly sparking our interest in six-guns.  It was a film called Young Guns II.  We'd all seen and loved the original Young Guns from 1988, and the sequel hit my sophomore year, along with a new edition of what I later learned was a TSR classic.  So we scored a copy of Boot Hill and did some cowboy shit.  It didn't last as long as our Ranger-heavy Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition campaign that followed the Kevin Costner Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves film, but hey, it was fun.

The original set of Boot Hill rules, much like early D&D, was sort of like a wargame with the seeds of a roleplaying game hiding out in there.  Almost any time you reduce a wargame unit to a single person, you invite roleplaying.  Hell, I've even imagined roleplaying scenarios in my head while playing Galaga or Choplifter! at the arcade, so it's not hard to see how Boot Hill followed the footsteps of D&D and became an RPG by its second edition, which came in 1979.  The bulk of the rules were on movement and combat. The third edition was the first time it actually called itself a roleplaying game on the cover, though people were playing it as one for years.  One interesting artifact of this period is the first edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide had conversion rules for Boot Hill characters into AD&D.  Anyway, Steve Winter took over with the 3rd Edition and turned it into a full RPG, and that's the edition I played.

Character Creation

Characters in Boot Hill have five attributes- Strength, Coordination, Observation, Stature, and Luck.  Coordination is basically Dexterity, Observation is for alertness and perception, and Stature is sort of a fame stat. 2 is wretched and 10 is average, 20 is the highest possible.

Scores are generated by rolling 2d10 and looking up a modifier. Like Gangbusters, the table is weighted to avoid truly crappy results, with a natural 2 being modified up to a 7.  There are three methods for generating the stats, roll in order, roll and arrange, and roll 8 keep any 5- in order.  I'll go with the first method, roll in order.  My rolls are: 10, 12, 3, 11, and 13.  Looking up the modifiers, that comes out as follows:

• Strength: 13
• Coordination: 14
• Observation: 8
• Stature: 13
• Luck: 8 (Luck is divided by two and rounded up, so 15/2=7.5, up to 8)

I really don't like that Observation, but the Luck score might help make up for it?

Now, here's something interesting.  Skills.  The beginning number of skills a character has is based on their total attribute points.  Add them all up, and reference a chart.  Characters with low attributes get more skills to help balance them out, and characters with high attributes get fewer.  Weapon skills are rated upward from 1, and work/craft skills are rolled in the same way as attributes.  This character's total is 56, right in the middle of the chart, starting the game with 7 skills.

Our character was a telegrapher in the Union Army during the Civil War, so we're going to take Telegraph, Surveying/Mapmaking, Stealth, Orienteering, Riding, Scouting, Pistol, and Brawling. 

• Brawling: 1
• Orienteering: 11
• Pistol: 1
  
• Riding: 14
• Scouting: 12
  
• Stealth: 16
  
• Surveying/Mapmaking: 12
  
• Telegraph: 14
  

On a natural 20, our character is ambidextrous.  8, nope.

Starting funds and equipment?  On page 98 it says:

For example, the Judge should provide each player with an inventory of his character's cash on hand, equipment, animals, possessions, hirelings/associates/friends/ and so on.

So... I guess it's up to the Judge, Boot Hill's term for Game Master.  This character is complete, then.

The Character

Scar Andrews was just happy nobody was shooting at him anymore.  At least, not on a daily basis.  Formerly Corporal Wilbur Andrews, Military Telegraph Corps, Scar was content to head West and find himself an occupation that involved a lot less gunpowder and a lot more cash.  Scar found himself following the expanding telegraph lines and getting a job with Western Union and a roaming troubleshooter.

Unfortunately, the "shoot" part was more common than Scar would like.  Not as bad as the war, but having grown up back East in a city, the frontier was decidedly less civilized.  A one-eyed telegraph man was the last person anyone would expect to be taking up his shooting irons in defense of a town, but that's exactly what happened.  A gaggle of former Confederate soldiers descended on the town he was visiting and proceeded to take what they wanted.  They took money, they took booze- when they tried to take a woman unlucky enough to catch their attention, he stepped in with his service revolver and killed two, driving the other three away as they had no idea how many "law men" they were facing.  This earned Scar the thanks of the town, and the ire of the bandits when they heard they'd been chased off by a single ex-bluebelly with the element of surprise.

 

The town being between Marshalls, at it were,  Scar Andrews decided he couldn't stomach leaving the townsfolk to the tender mercies of the raiders should they return.

My Thoughts:

We had a torrid love affair with Boot Hill 3e, and then moved on.  I didn't do much Wild West gaming after that for a decade and a half.  Then I discovered Deadlands.  Played a bit of that.  Like Shadowrun but in the Old West.  Magic, steampunk-ish elements.  As for pure Western action, it's just been Boot Hill and a little GURPS for me.

Now that I've gone back and re-familiarized myself with Boot Hill, it makes me wanna rewatch the Young Guns movies and Unforgiven and run a Western one-shot.  I have several Boot Hill modules.  Hell, I should have run the Ballots & Bullets module back during election season!

Seriously, though, this isn't a genre I have played a lot of over the years, but it is one that many people enjoy, and I'd gladly play in or run Boot Hill if a group were interested.  I have happy memories of the games of this I did play, which were vastly outnumbered by D&D, MechWarrior, Shadowrun, etc.