Good Wayne

Monday, April 18, 2005

Feeling RPG-ish

I saw Return of the King again Saturday night (not to mention Shaun of the Dead on Friday—2 movies in one weekend? Somebody pinch me).

Tine hadn't seen the last Lord of the Rings movie, so I borrowed it from my brother and it's a solid 3 hours of fantastic action. Having never read the books, I can definitively state it's the best version eva.

Watching it I recall how I felt the first time I saw; Damn, if I don't miss playing Dungeon & Dragons. (I know that Tolkien is pretty responsible for the whole rise of D&D and that the character create the archetype for any self-respecting D&D party.)

I spent the rest of the night surfing around the web for related material.

When I found Dungeon Crawl Classics, I can't tell you how nostalgic it made me feel. I used to go downtown to the local comic book store just to browse through their module section and decide what I was going to spend a month's worth of allowance on.

I even surfed back to Wizards.com to see what the core books were selling for, contemplating if I could afford to invest in them again (also, I bit unclear, are the new D&D rules 3.5 the same as the open-source d20 thing? Or is that something completely different?)

The whole thing had me longing for the days when we would spend the whole weekend playing some RPG without much care for anything else. Even the later years at college where it was just a few hours on Sunday night.

Me, Leebone, Neil, and Rick—glorious Rick, who had a noble fighter character, but he himself lacked any kind of social grace. No matter what happened, Rick would attack. Lee and I always played some kind of mage. Usually with a thief thrown in for good measure.

We played in the Dragonlance universe for a while and that has it's own special charms. Including 3 moons that dictate what kind of magic is more powerful. There was a moon-cycle chart to keep track and when a grand conjunction came to pass, it was a time to rock the casbah.

One of the best things about Neil's Krynn was illusions were *real* unless disbelieved. Which required an active disbelieve roll. So lesser creatures were generally screwed. Illusion could be one powerful spell.

Man, I really miss it sometimes.

Anyway, after spending a few hours rolling around the internet, I came to the conclusion that I was being an idiot. There's nobody to play with, plus I have trouble with time-management as it is right now.

I still might buy a module from those guys, because I'm stupid like that, but it'll probably get read and stuck in with the rest of my stuff.

I also found Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies. Which could be neat, if it did a good job of explaining the whole RPG thing to non-dorks in a way that actually made it sound cool.

On Sunday we began clearing out the barn. We had stored everything there last January ('04) to make room for the work on the house. The kids all had bins of stuff and it was a little like Christmas, except you were opening stuff you already had and some of it was broken.

TheBoy really made out, because Mike had a bin full of toys that he was probably already too old for when he put them away the first time. A year and half is a long time for kids. Mike was 11 when he store them. At 13, they're baby toys.

Oddly, Tine and I had almost nothing out there. But the one bin I did have was full of my RPG stuff. Actually I had two. One of just gaming books (almost all GURPS) and another with a hodge-podge of books, notebooks and other supplement stuff. Strangly, I couldn't locate my actual D&D books, although they'd be woefully out of date - I bought them back in the early 80s. Heck I think I have a 1st edition Monster Manual.

Much to Tine's dismay I brought in the books bin (I think if I had tried to bring in both, she would have tied me down and set them on fire). At least the GURPS books are tidy and not a tornado of scraps of paper.

I didn't really get a chance to look at them, but I have more than I originally thought I did. There has to be at least 25 books in there (and most of them Sci-Fi related). One of my favorite is BlackOps, where you get to take on the part of a secret government organization that hunts down paranormal activities and blows the crap out of them. Kind of a mix of the X-Files, Ghostbusters and Rambo.

Although GURPS Steampunk should come in very handy for my little Floating Isles BrikWar scenarios.

posted by Evil Wayne | 1:52 PM

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