Sunday, July 16, 2017

Games camp begins Monday!


Summer Games Camp is back!


For the next two weeks, 25 middle school students plus a squad of volunteers, who range from 10 years old through college-aged, will be getting together at a local high school for a daily six-hour dose of board games and RPGs.




This is our sixth year of the program and it has really found its place alongside summer courses on robotics, cake decorating, and computer game design.  The program is self-funded (vs coming out of the school district's budget) and attracts a variety of students who generally learn about it through word of mouth.










My oldest wants to run Curse of Strahd retrofitted for B/X D&D. She's offering players a set of 10 pregens to choose from, and she asked me to sketch out their character portraits on some of the excellent Labyrinth Lord character sheets put together by Evan at The Border Princes and Mike at Fear No Darkness.




Sketching these out, it was fun to speculate about which characters will be chosen by players, which passed over, who will survive, and who will end up as wolf-chow or drained dry by vampires.








I also appreciate her choice of character classes -- vampire hunter, priest, wolf trapper, and burglar are right there in the mix -- she's come to understand the Frank Mentzer Basic D&D rules that she first learned the game with as a toolkit and point of departure, not something that constrains how she runs the game at her table.


I can hardly wait to hear her daily after-action reports!





Tuesday, July 4, 2017

A Collector?

I really enjoy old, out of print gaming supplements (adventure modules in particular) and few things are as delightful as coming across some old RPG swag in a used bookstore.

Recently I grabbed these for about five bucks each.


Now normally I can justify a purchase with the knowledge that I'm always on the lookout for a fresh adventure setting or interesting plotline (in the sense of unusual setups, unique challenges,  or distinctive NPCs who have compelling motivations).

Treasures of Greyhawk fits that bill and has a clever puzzle or two (incidentally the Robin Wood cover art also appeared years before it was used here a a Dragon Magazine cover--my very first issue in fact). 

In the case of The Rogues Gallery, however, there isn't even a chance that I'll use the lists of NPC stats.

Image result for brain collectorNo, I bought it for the art and to look over the original AD&D characters (at least one version of them) played by Gary, Erol Otus, Rob Kuntz, David Cook and others.

I guess that makes me ... *shudder* ... a collector.


Where does that particular rabbit hole end?