Saturday 31 December 2011

Griffin Mountain: The Story So Far...

It's been fun playing Runequest again after so long away, and nice to introduce a couple of new players to the classic setting of Griffin Mountain.

Griffin Mountain for those poor souls amongst you who haven't heard about it, was the first large campaign pack produced by Chaosium for Runequest 2nd Edition. It was originally put together by Paul Jaquays and Rudy Kraft as an alternative to Glorantha and then adapted and rewritten with Greg Stafford to place it firmly in Greg's game world. One nice feature of the book was the three authors giving their own story of how they came to create it. The setting is a bit of a 'cheat', in that it looks like it was never played out as a whole campaign before publication, though Greg Stafford says in his intro that he did use it as part of his ongoing Dragon Pass game.

Wednesday 28 December 2011

Statement of Intent

This blog will update anyone interested about my current projects and RPG games, as well as acting as a repository for gamey links and materials, and, who knows, maybe a bit of fiction if I feel brave enough.

Things on the Go

G+ Griffin Mountain Campaign
A great success so far with half a dozen players happily ambling round the wilds of Balazar getting themselves ever more deeply involved in the politics of the Citadels. A couple of the players are new to Glorantha, but they have quickly found their feet in a confusing world. This is very much a sandbox game,  but so far I have dangled sub-plots and adventure hooks and used the mechanism of being in the Citadel guard to assign outright missions. I have high hopes that we will reach what I regard as the 'ideal' sandbox state where the players will develop their own goals with regards to the background material and setting and generate their own adventure ideas.

Tékumel Tournament
Tékumel is one of the best RPG settings there is, but gets relatively little actual play. There has been a resurgence of interest of late due to its origins in the days of Old School gaming, and some actual games using the original Empire of the Petal Throne rules. These rules leave something to be desired and the games so far have been exotic dungeon bashes. I am hoping to be able to take the players of these games to the 'next level' so to speak and immerse them more in the baroque aspects of Tsolyáni culture.

I am struggling a bit with a suitable rules set at the moment; I definitely want to update OEPT's magic rules, and I definitely want some kind of game-mechanical way of introducing the concepts of Noble Action and measuring Social Status, but my current draft has run away with itself and I am scrapping the lot and going back to basics.

The aim will be a tournament, sets of different players going through the same adventure and being scored on how they do against the social and natural environment in which they find themselves (and possibly each other for the more skulduggerous types). I have a spare copy of Barker's The Man of Gold I will be offering as a prize.

The Expanding Universe
And if all that wasn't enough I would like to start a Traveller pick up game based on a new cooperatively designed setting.

The nice thing about G+ gaming is that you can start a game at the drop of a hat, just see who is online and at a loose end and in no time you have a game on the go, in whoever's favourite setting with whatever player characters can be shoe-horned into the rules set in operation. Chatter on G+, reports of missions in the most popular dungeons, between session map sales and banter is all great stuff, and I hope to take it a bit further.

The game background will be sketchy, and the map will be all but blank, but participating GMs and players will fill it in as they go along, writing their additions up on a Wiki. When you generate your PC, you invent a homeworld for them and give the planet a name and some basic details. As the background gets fleshed out, starting a new game will be a matter of looking up a place, current adventure hooks, dragging in a few established NPCs and you are off, anyone can come and play and add to the material available.

I intend to retain overall editorial control, but only to chuck out bits that jar against the groundrules of the setting (No giant robots! No friggin' wookies!) and try and keep some kind of consistency.

Now does anyone out there know how to set up a private Wiki?

Enough blathering, onward, upward and outward into the Expanding Universe!