Category Archives: Hobby Musings

The d12 Decimal System

The Girl and I moved into our current house just under a year ago. Some of our initial choices in where to put things have never been fully satisfactory. Yesterday, we began implementing a plan we’ve been discussing over the past couple of weeks.

The RPG library – which occupies approximately 60 shelf-feet of space – was previously sorted alphabetically. As part of a larger furniture rearrangement, it is now arranged by genre. This is still not entirely what I’d like, but three-dimensional bookshelves only support usable organizational schemes in two dimensions and are wholly unsuited to a rapidly-searchable multi-attribute tagging system.

Still, it’s probably more rational than sorting 40 years of RPG accumulation autobiographically.

Table Tents

Just a quick note here to give credit where credit’s due and to remind myself of a cool table hack. At CharCon 2025, GM John brought dry-erase table tents for his players to use. Requested information was character name and archetype/class, player name, and any outstanding flaws or hindrances that John might need to take into account during play.

It’s a little thing, but it helped with immersion because I didn’t have to struggle for PC names, and it helped build a sense of community when John was able to consistently refer to every player by name.

Con Report: CharCon 2025

This was my second consecutive year of attendance at CharCon, a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, WV. My 2024 report is here, and most of my observations about the venue, vendors, and surrounding area remain applicable for 2025.

As noted last year, the venue is shared with a science center. Some clever individual in the con staff made the decision to put the cosplay tables (and photo backdrops) right at the main entrance so all the kids (and their parents) coming to the science center could encounter the cosplayers as soon as they hit the doors. Bonus points to the Twi’lek X-Wing pilot and whoever brought the life-size remote-controlled R2-D2.

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Con Report: RiverCityCon 2025

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: RiverCityCon, despite the name and host city, is not a successor to RiverCon. Whereas the latter con (and its shorter-lived successor, Conglomeration) was a general fantasy/SF con with a gaming track, RiverCityCon is a board game con that wedges TTRPGs into the cracks around its founders’ main focus. It’s a Louisville-based spinoff of the older Lexicon, which, as the name suggests, started in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago.

Because it’s in our city of shared origin, the Louisville Gaming Mafia used last year’s inaugural RiverCityCon as a found-family reunion. We put it to the same use again this year, and as far as that goes, it satisfied our purposes adequately. Absent that, as a con fitting my own purposes, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it.

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CCC2025 Final Thoughts

Well. That was a thing.

I’ve written 31 characters in 31 days before. In truth, I don’t think I’ve ever run a convention LARP that didn’t have a pre-gen death march as part of my prep. Those efforts were always single-system and single-setting, though. This was rough, and I know my quality was rather variable across all the entries. It was much more of a time suck than I thought it would be, too. When I’m writing LARP pre-gens, I estimate a minimum of one hour per character, and I suspect I exceeded that in this project.

Was it rewarding? Yeah, to a point. But that point was sometime in the 20s, when it turned into a slog and all the fun sort of evaporated. I had to force myself to grind out the last eight or ten. While every system I used is something I’ve played or run at least once, most of these required at least some degree of refamiliarization before I could start building.

Will I do it again? Enh… maybe? I have a limited amount of creative energy these days, and part of my rationale for taking on this project was the fact that I didn’t have any other creative projects in the hopper when I committed to this in late December. For future years, we’ll see what else I have going on.

Since I like indexes, here’s an index of every system and character for this iteration:

1 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness – Kabu, California Coyote Ninja Avenger
2 – Star Wars – Anastasia “Convor” Glaux, Reconnaissance Starfighter Pilot
3 – 7th Sea – Gervais Fournier, Reluctant Porte Sorcerer
4 – Spycraft – Isak Eriksen (code name Svallin), Watcher on the Baltic
5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante
6 – Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian
7 – Mage: The Ascension – Gordon Armstrong, Cryptid Preservationist
8 – Wraith: The Oblivion – Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World
9 – Changeling: The Dreaming – Gökhan Karga/Silver Mhachkay, Goth Bard
10 – World of Darkness: The Hunters Hunted – Neville Grimes – Eighteen Wheels, Both Barrels, and Exodus 22:18
11 – Demon: The Fallen – Tom Hartman/Viatiel, Darkness on the Edge of Town
12 – Legend of the Five Rings – Iuchi Masuyo, Reluctant Yojimbo
13 – Shadowrun – Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator
14 – Stargate SG-1 – Staff Sergeant Jared Ingram, Interstellar Weatherman
15 – MechWarrior – Sao-shao Aleksey Sokolov, Electronic Warrior at Large
16 – Blue Planet – Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert
17 – Dark Conspiracy – Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic
18 – Cyberpunk 2020 – Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster
19 – Adventure! – Ainsley McTavish, Heiress of Secrets
20 – Aberrant – Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer
21 – Trinity – Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer
22 – Conspiracy X – Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset
23 – Exalted – Jarlath Shonida, He to Whom Borders Are as the Morning Fog
25 – Eclipse Phase – Hackbird (Sequence C15.5359j), Dataspace Predator
25 – Palladium Fantasy – Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms
26 – Earthdawn – K’Jal Mirrorlake, Questing Nethermancer
27 – Feng Shui – Athena Cheng, Maverick Cop
28 – Twilight: 2000, first edition – Sergeant Murray Vinson, Cavalry Raider
29 – Twilight: 2000, second edition – Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)
30 – Twilight: 2013 (aka Twilight: 2000, third edition) – Lieutenant Commander Owen McNeil, M.D., Horse Surgeon
31 – Twilight: 2000, fourth edition – Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars

Con Report: CharCon 2024

CharCon is a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, West Virginia. I’d attended it once before, many years ago, but that was just a one-day trip out from Lexington with Tracker7. This was my first full-weekend trip. As the con’s web site points out, it’s within easy driving range of several Appalachian and Appalachia-adjacent cities:

The TL;DR is that I’m quite impressed with CharCon. With about 600 attendees, it’s on the smaller side, but it fits very well into its available space. The con staff did an amazing job of shoehorning a robust gaming offering into the place. I didn’t catch any of the other programming but they offered a showing of the Dungeons & Dragons movie on Friday night and a locally-produced documentary on West Virginia escape rooms on Saturday afternoon.

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“Stand by for PC knowledge.”

As I restart Kaserne on the Borderlands, one tweak I’ve made to my GMing style is in how I provide information to my players that their characters should reasonably have. There’s little fun for anyone to find in me saying, “your character knows __.” It’s narration without player agency.

When I had in-person gaming groups, my usual solution (when I remembered to do it) was passing a note or pulling the player out of the room for a moment. Discord enables me to do the latter with multiple channels, without anyone having to leave their chair, and I do still use it for things that require a conversation. In the last couple of sessions, though, I’ve begun using Discord direct messages for shorter infodumps. This gives the player a written reference (something I’ve found is helpful when I’m imparting domain knowledge that’s more in the PC’s lane than the player’s) and lets them rephrase (or elide…) it in a manner appropriate to their character’s persona.

The cautionary note here is that I need to say, “stand by for PM,” before I start typing. Otherwise, the sudden GM silence is a bit awkward and can leave people wondering if we’re having a(nother) comms failure.

Spruance Leader

A couple of years ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Dan Verssen Games’ Spruance Leader (I’m linking to the Boardgame Geek page rather than DVG’s product page because the company… um… doesn’t have the greatest web site). We promptly adopted a pair of kittens, which are not really compatible with big boardgames that need to stay set up for days for protracted campaign play. Between that and mental health haze, the game’s been sitting around unopened for the year and a half since the Kickstarter delivered.

I’m currently living alone while the girl and the cats and I work through the phases of our cross-country move, and I had the foresight to bring my DVG solo games along with me. After watching a couple of actual-play videos, I broke out Spruance Leader this afternoon and set up a first campaign and mission.

Things were getting hot in the North Atlantic. My task force’s first assignment was to go after a Soviet ASW task force operating off the Norwegian coast between Ålesund and Bødo:

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Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.

Like the Back of Someone Else’s Hand

This morning (that being the morning I’m writing this, not the morning of its scheduled posting), I was scrolling through the Pathfinder 2e subreddit over breakfast and ran across a post asking why readers prefer PF2 over rules-light systems. Several someones made the point which I would have made if I were going to comment: that different game systems are different tools for achieving different storytelling experiences and outcomes.

The comment thread that prompted this post, however, was this one, in which the OP expressed surprise that someone could be capable of running more than one game system without getting rules crossed up.

I had a bit of an “oh, sweet summer child” reaction to that. It never had occurred to me that this might be a problem. I’ve been collecting accumulating TTRPGs since my childhood in the early ’80s and studying and running them semi-regularly since the early ’90s. Each one still occupies a measurable amount of my brain. While I can’t claim to be able to run anything 100% off-book, the RPGs for which I could play or run tomorrow without much fumbling, unfamiliarity, or pre-session review are, off the top of my head:

  • 7th Sea (original)
  • Dungeons & Dragons (5e, 3e as a stretch)
  • Feng Shui (either edition)
  • Legend of the Five Rings (original through 4th)
  • Shadowrun (2e and 3e)
  • Spycraft (original and 2.0, including Stargate SG-1 as an intermediate member of that line)
  • Trinity (original)
  • Twilight: 2000 (v2.2 and v4)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade (original through Revised and 20th Anniversary)

At one time or another, I’ve spent enough time at the table for each of these to develop a decent familiarity with the mechanics. I can make a spontaneous rules call at the table and be fairly confident that my off-the-cuff decision will be consistent with the game as written. Of equal importance, I also know each of the settings (or genre assumptions, in the case of setting-less games like Spycraft) well enough to improvise plot and the world’s responses to the PCs’ actions.

In a pinch, I also could do passably-good GM work with the rest of the original World of Darkness (strongest in Wraith: The Oblivion, weakest in Changeling: The Dreaming), Dark Conspiracy, Earthdawn, Star Wars (WEG or FFG), and a good cross-section of the Powered by the Apocalypse family.