No man is an Island, ………….

Posted on August 29, 2012 by hurcheon

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, you’ll see that if you head a couple of posts back, about te dividing line between copying and inspiration. This crystalised for me this week when I started rereading a book. I won’t name it, but I remember that, when I read it the first time, I was struck with the resemblance a major portion of the setting had to something I had read years before.

That may or may not have been inadvertent,. The author claims it was definitely based on the other work, but it had been inadvertent, and it was possible, but rereading it got me thinking. What is the dividing line between inspiration and theft? Is the Law being used to restrict use of works far beyond the original intention.

An analogy.

Making dinner. I had leftover tagliatelle. I had the notion of doing a Tagliatelle Salsicca. Now, I’m sure it’s a standard recipe somewhere in Italy, I’ve no doubt seen a recipe someplace, but I’ve only ever had it in DiMaggio’s in Shawlands. Salsicca has a tomato based sauce, and we’ve had to many tomato and meat meals this last week.

So, I cooked the sausages, with mushrooms, garlic, onions and a leftover half of a green pepper, finely chopped, but I covered it in a pepper sauce, not a tomato one.

So, I was inspired by a product from another, is it a derivative work, when the end product has a different flavour, even if most of the ingredients were the same?

Famously there are only supposed to be a limited number of story plots in the world, the flash the author puts on them, the details and the story telling make the difference, so any one story can resemble another, but where does the boundary between similar and rip-off lie.

A couple of decades ago, a famous author got into trouble when he published a set of short stories, of which the headline one had a twist they’d read in some short stories they had judged. The reply was that “this was the author’s version”.

I wrote a short story in June. It’s my story, but I had been describing the L Sprague de Camp story “The Hardwood Pile” to my wife, and that set me onto the path of my story. it is different, and not just because mine lacks the easy humour and engaging writing of L Sprague de Camp, the events, result and participants are different, but it was inspired by, no two ways about it.

Am I a shameless rip off artist? I would say not, not that time anyway, the famous author had a tougher job justifying their story.

Role-playing games. It’s long established that ideas are not able to be afforded the restriction of copy-right, only the implementation. That is why RPGs after TSR’s original D&D exist without paying royalties to Hasbro. There can be arguments made about “derived works” if the product was too similar to the original, but the successors rarely went down the same path as D&D so escaped.

Even D&D, it could be argued, was not born out of the ether with total originality. Personalities in imaginary lands had existed in wargaming previous to D&D, as had fantasy wargaming, so there were roots there.never mind kids just saying “I’m Tarzan, you three are poachers. Let’s play”

Ideas can be patented. Wizards of the Cost patented turning a card sideways to show it had been used. Now personally I think that is a silly patent, but at least it illustrates the point. Without that, I could publish a game that turned a card sideways, as long as I used original text to describe that.

With a patent, I have to licence it from, now, Hasbro, and pay a royalty. This brings us closer to my worry. There is a media giant that made a lot of money reselling public domain and out of copyright stories. It then used its influence to have the length of copyright extended to protect its works far beyond sanity.

None of us exist in a vacuum, bereft of other cultural influences. To quite Phil Kay “No man is an island, unless his name is Madagascar”. Funny joke. We are all connected, but even that joke depends on a familiarity with Milton’s “no man is an island”, even if you don’t know who wrote it or in what context. That media giant is in the US. The US exports its rules on patents and copyrights around the world via WTO negotiations, so the chilling effect on our future culture is being chilled.

The Law is being used to pull the ladder up behind those who have made a success out of shared ideas and culture. Only officially approved and licenced works will be able to get wide distribution, and we will all be poorer for it.

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Large Print and “Old Skool”

Posted on August 21, 2012 by hurcheon

It might just be me, but for a while I have been aware that I do not like reading text which is printed on top of a picture or heavily coloured/patterned background. The reason t might just be me is that my eyesight is so awful. I find focussing on normal text bad enough, but with the extra interference> Nah. At the moment I’m looking through Chivalry and Sircery 1st edition, photoreduced! Tiny, tiny font.

Meanwhile we have calls around the Hobby for “Old School” RPG rules, which seems to equate to a Class and Level system like AD&D1 or more constrained, but along that line.

However my idea of “Old School” is a bit older than people looking to AD&D 1e or 2e. It goes back to games like original (Not Basic) D&D and Tunnels and Trolls. RPGs were still finding their feet, people were exchanging ideas in fanzines or groups were making their own homebrew solutions to perceived problems or gaps.

So here is where I pull those two separate ideas together. It is time for a true Old School RPG, no, that’s not quite true, it’s time for an RPG in the spirit of the Old School, simple, loose, fun but cleaned up and with a coherent system. No d20 for this but percentile for that.

However, a lot of these “Old School” games, like Pathfinder or Hackmaster before them, are huge. Lots and lots and lots of details, classes, monsters and spells. not this. Keep it classless as possible, streamline it, because the book will be big, because it will be clearly laid out, large print black text on white pages, because those that remember the “Ols School” when it was brand new, are getting old and decrepit.

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Back in harness

Posted on August 1, 2012 by hurcheon

The story I mentioned is finished, you can read it if you want to here Dear Green Place (you can sign in with facebook)

There are lots of other stories. The idea was.

  • – Your home town
  • – Horror stories
  • – At least three deaths
  • – “New” monster (no Universal Horror classic monsters)

feel free to read through and up/down vote as you see fit.

A much BETTER story (IMHO) is this one (curses, not by me) Drip, Drip, Drop

One thing nicer about writing fiction compared to adventures for RPGs, is not trying to consider every weird and wonderful thing the characters might do and take account of it. And still not guess correctly, leaving the poor GM in schtook.

Still and all, back to the Arthurian thing

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Hiatus

Posted on July 23, 2012 by hurcheon

The Arthur book is still plodding along, after a reformat to text so that Dropbox and various devices make working on it easier, but there is a hiatus on as I am trying to write a short horror story.

The brief says “no established monsters” so no werewolves, vampires or mummies. Luckily after a bit of swithering I have an idea. I can’t claim TOTAL originality, as the idea was inspired by another story, but I’m doing different things with it and using a different mythology. Everything inspires something I suppose. Tolkien’s take on Lord of the Ring’s being the story from the hobbits’ point of view inspired an idea to do a story from the viewpoint of a character at the periphery of the action. That sort of “inspired by”.

As discussed on earlier blogs I often run my games so that the characters don’t know everything going on around them. I seem to have a thing against “helicopter generalship”

While trying to think something up my mind wandered through myth’s, legends, books, RPGs and even half-remembered ‘zines from when I was young. It got me wondering, how many folk into their fantasy stuff are like me, they started with myths and legends and then graduated onto reading fantasy and playing FRPGS.

Or is the prevalence of Fantasy in print, film and games now short circuiting myths and legends, are they no longer so widely read.

If someone wants to commission an exhaustive poll, analyse the data and let me know the results, that would be grand

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Going backwards to go forwards

Posted on June 29, 2012 by hurcheon

A bit of a glitch this week. The main file, which hadn’t been backed up in a few days, developed a fault where each line had a page break after it. I suspect that is because I work on different machines with different OSes and different software. I know from the past when I used to write a Diplomacy Newsletter that the same version of MS Word on different machines could SNAFU the formatting.

SO. A fair bit of time wasted just cleaning up the text and some thoughts to myself. In an ideal world I would use IAwriter on my iPad for text. It’s nice, works and I have it. I bought Pages for some formatting, but it doesn’t do tables. Or, if it does, it doesn’t take them from Word 2003 and it doesn’t do ODT.

Tables now. There is a thing. SO! That got me thinking about my addiction to tables. Common enough in RPGs and wargaming. Even in my websites I tend to use tables for formatting in a way that is NOT what you are supposed to do, that’s what CSS is for, is it not?

SO then. Text is text. The first thing to do is to get the information down. Whether it is scribbled in a notebook, often my first stab, then into a file. Only when you have it all in the file should you be doing the format thing. I suppose I waste time tweaking the format rather than get on to the actual work.

A job for this weekend then. Get the file. strip out the table formatting, put it into simpler. “old school” paragraph like bits of information. Nothing more complex than a TAB, and as few of them as possible. An example. Instead of

Name Where found Description
Wyrm Desolate places Wyrms are an adaptable creature, anywhere where they can secrete themselves when they sleep yet come out and head to more populous places for prey is to their liking. After feeding the become torpid.
Wyrms have no wings and cannot fly, and, despite legends, do not breathe fire, though they do drip a venom from their fangs which withers vegetation that it falls on.

This

Name          Wyrm
Where found   Desolate places
Description   Wyrms are an adaptable creature, 
              anywhere where they can secrete 
              themselves when they sleep yet 
              come out and head to more populous 
              places for prey is to their liking. 
              After feeding the become torpid. 
              Wyrms have no wings and cannot 
              fly, and, despite legends, do not 
              breathe fire, though they do drip 
              a venom from their fangs which withers 
              vegetation that it falls on.

even this may be too fancy

If nothing else, it will let me put in a bit more flavour text, rather than trying to cram everything into the restricted space of the field, and moving columns around and tweaking the font and all the other distractions that mean I am not actually creating.

 

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Review – “Irrepressible!” by James Desborough of Postmortem Studios

Posted on June 19, 2012 by hurcheon

Obtained from RPGNOW
Price $3.99 PDF or $6.99 Print on Demand from lulu.com

“In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order, but the phoenix can fly only when it’s feathers are grown. The four worlds formed again and yet again, As endless aeons wheeled and passed. Time and the pure essences of Heaven, the moistures of the Earth,and the powers of the Sun and the Moon all worked upon a certain rock – old as creation, and it magically became fertile… Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it then came a stone monkey… The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

As soon as I saw the name of this RPG I knew what it was about. That is the place the 1970s Japanese TV series ‘Monkey’ has in my brain. When it was on, I missed the first couple of episodes, but it didn’t matter. I soon picked up on the story. A boy monk was travelling to get some scriptures in the company of some rather powerful demons, if a bit prone to silly human failings. This one word evokes a lot of memories of when I was 14-15, watching ‘Monkey’ and of course, the ‘Water Margin’. A silly bit of martial arts fun after the all too serious and worthy “Kung Fu” of a few years earlier.

I got a collection of the stories from the long lost Grant’s bookshop in Glasgow (where I’d also bought LoTR and it was a great diversion on the way home from school) and those stories were just a sample of the many that Wu Ch’eng-en had written about the elderly Tripitaka’s Journey to the West (India) to get a full set of scriptures.

His companions were spirits under punishment from Buddha, seeing redemption from punishment. The titular monkey who represents unrestrained thought and who had outraged Heaven and nearly fought it to a standstill, two former officers of heaven fallen from grace and in the form of monsters and a dragon punished for filial impiety. They get into various scrapes, and lessons are learned, disasters met and enlightenment sought. The stories were written in the Ming Dynasty, but set in the earlier T’ang dynasty of the 7th Century.

But serious themes about the human condition, temptations and redemption, although referenced in the series took second place to colourful fight scenes and demons and the FUN!

If you haven’t seen it, try and get hold of the 1970s TV series starring Masaaki Sakai called, simply “Monkey”. If you call it “Saiy?ki” and you aren’t Japanese, I may have to slap you. Watch a few episodes to get the feel, practice the slightly breathy style of the narrator. Go to this site http://www.greatsage.net/ and watch the wee video on the front page for how to call up a flying cloud, we all did at the time.

Adventures in this universe should be a mix of peril, a terrible threat (though possibly served with inept minions), human eating demons (that’s demons who ate humans, though in the world of Monkey humans that brutalised demons did exist), demons that want to be human, vampires, ghosts, treasures, trickery, humour and a step on the path to some greater goal. If you can work in a misguided or evil Taoist magician or spirit so much the better.

So. Here is the game. System light as anything, so one for people to have fun with, not for those who need an airtight system to protect them from the players/GM. CHaracter driven not only in the role-playing sense, but the attributes are character driven, rather than physical. They are paired positive/negative e.g. Charity/Selfishness. You can use these as the basis of skills when making a skill check.

A nice touch is that, should you seen to enlighten yourself by moving towards the positive of a pair, if that attribute is negative, initially you reduce your effectiveness until you start building up the positive side of a pair. You have to unlearn bad habits after all.

Skill checks are by random draws from a bag, so you’ll need some coloured beads. One evil and the rest good. The author suggests black and white respectively, but I would suggest red instead of white, as red is lucky and white associated with mourning. He also refers to the West meaning Europeans but, of course, the West is also India which is the spiritual goal of the whole quest. 😉

The system of paired positive/negative character attributes is very stealable by the way, I have a thought for a Film Noir game based around it, and it should focus the players on their character’s character, rather than the physical abilities as so often happens.

The system very much suits the game though, and the emphasis is on the light style of the TV show as opposed to the original work of Wu Ch’eng-en. So cod accents, silly feats and grumbling about doing the right thing, or tricking you’re less bright brothers to help you, definitely the order of the day. THIS IS MEANT TO BE FUN. Yup. A bit of terror, a bit of laughter, some peril, a moral and character lesson, but FUN!

There is a handy list of proverbs to chuck in if your own imagination fails you, and a random magic item description table, though the GM will have to rule on what the power of the North Weeping Drum is. Whatever it is, I bet it will be misused. Bound to be.

The book itself is fairly large print and easy to read, and, though there is a short section on the gods, there is little about Chinese culture. Really I’d recommend immersing yourself in one version of Monkey/Journey to the west first. I’d also put the character generation before the system, but it’s far from fatal.

If you are stuck for ideas, or want to be a bit more accurate in your description of Chinese Society, then an easy intro would be the Judge Dee stories of Robert Van Gulik, which are written as if Ming versions of stories set in the same T’ang time and you can plunder some of the supernatural there for more ideas for your group of Pilgrims to encounter. I’d also recomment the three books by Barry Hughart “Bridge of Birds”, “The Sotry of the Stone” and “Eight Skilled Gentlemen”

Two sentence summary?
If you like Mythic China and can have friendly fun, play this game. If you see RPGs as a competition, don’t.

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Reviews from the Past – 02 – Violence

Posted on June 16, 2012 by hurcheon

Violence
The Role-playing Game of egregious and repulsive bloodshed.
By Designer X (Greg Costikyan)
Published by Hogshead Publishing under their “New Style” Imprint

First things first. This isn’t a game. It looks like one, it’s got rules and everything, and there is a humour to the writing of the sort that usually has reviewers joining in to show that they are able to appreciate the joke, lots of “talking directly to the audience”. Except that the humour is of the blackest kind and this still isn’t a game, or at least, not one I’d want to see played.

At the grossest level this is a set of rules to role-play Dungeon bashers for the dying years of the 20th Century, Bikers, Street-Gangs and Junkies who, instead of slaughtering Orcs and casting fireballs to gain treasure, murder single mothers, beat up grannies and rob houses, probably to make enough cash to score your next load of drugs.

The production quality is generally fine, cardstock cover, luridly illustrated containing 32 pages, the printing is clear two-column text, though on a couple of pages the ink is smudged. The interior art is also of a piece with the game, being dark, violent and “image” laden. By the way, that cover comes supplied with 19 cut out experience certificates, of which more later.

The system (tart that I am, I was asked to actually discuss the game) is simple enough, roll characteristics on 3d6 for Strength, Threshold of Pain, Constitution, Intimidation and “Everything Else”. You can agree a certain level of characteristic that, if you get below, you can reroll and you can adjust slightly by taking “disadvantages”. You get Hit Points and Pain Points based on your Constitution and Pain Threshold, some money, not a lot as you are the bottom of the food chain, or at least a bottom-feeder, and points to spend on skills. The skills all have a starting value of “3” and you can raise them to a maximum of 18 by spending 1 point per skill level. To use a skill the GM would decide how difficult the skill is, the harder to do the more faces on the dice and you try and get your skill level or lower. E.g. if you had a skill of 6 in “Locksmithing” and the Lock was “Hard”, then you’d have to roll a D30 to see if you succeed or not.

The system is very rules light, a fast play system where things like “Tactical Movement” are best ignored. Instead the rules discuss Drugs, (finding, what they do to your skills when you’ve used them, Addiction and withdrawal), F***ing (because your characters are not into flowers and chocolates, they are more likely to rape, which is more about power than sex), Monsters (the rules breaks them down into “Decent, Law-Abiding Citizens” and “Pigs” of various sub-varieties), Treasure (Cash, Credit Card or item to fence), Adventure ideas and other staples of Role-playing games.

And that’s the point, or at least part of it, that’s where the humour comes in. I said this wasn’t a game and despite the rules it isn’t, it is a satire on games, the games industry and the society it exists in. It would be comforting to dismiss this as “American Society”, but we have some of the same problems on this side if the pond and it would be self-deluding to be smug about it.

The narrative that the author adopts is full of comments that show a contempt for the gamer public, whom he sarcastically portrays as an overweight mass of sweaty (usually male) inadequates, trying to convince themselves that they are indulging in high art when instead they are usually playing glorified smash-and-grab raids with a little light murder on the side. From the introduction.

“Dunnigan [Jim Dunnigan, head of SPI] had the industry dead to rights when he said that games that sold were always about NATO, Nukes or Nazis. Or rather, he was only wrong because he was talking about wargaiming; the basic sensibility remains.” And later “Enough with this high-falutin’ crap about playing a role or telling a story … Here vile reader you shall find what you desire. Violence of the most degraded kind.”

And from the character Generation.

“Choose a gender. In reality scum like you are almost always male, but go ahead, play a female character. One with big boobs, no doubt.”

The gamer is further portrayed as a slavish consumer of any old junk, sorry, essential game aids, that the companies choose to sell, including the wide variety of trademarked accessories from dice to in-game snacks. I think he’s making a point here but in case there are any lawyers out there I shan’t draw any exact comparisons. In fact the game takes this brand loyalty and consumerism further in that you can gain extra points for your character by either bribing the gamesmaster or sending money by verifiable means direct to Hogshead. Furthermore your “experience points” are represented by certificates which you must buy. No certificates, no character progression.

The satire opens up into areas of Urban culture as a whole, given the prevalence of games like “Quake” and “Unreal” or whatever the latest multi-player gore fest is. These things deny humanity to their victims, they’re just sprites right? And before the RPGers get smug, one of the monster types is “orc”. Why, to make a point, about how the characters rarely if ever, role-play encounters with the Orcs (To paraphrase, “Hey dude, just passing through, apologising for disturbing you but have you seen other Orcs, who you might not personally know, pass by here carrying a couple of human kids away?”). Instead it’s fireball and hack.

Not a lot of this is new. The first essay on the GM actually putting depth into “monsters” is over 20 years old, but it is the first time I’ve seen an essay like this marketed as an RPG and sold as such. The question is not to judge it as a game, but does it make its point. After reading this will people be affected to reconsider their lives, their approach to gaming and the casual attitude to violence when they do. Will gaming companies stick by their advertisments, “all you’ll ever need”?

Sorry, I don’t think so. The people who will appreciate the humour and the irony will, like myself, be able to convince themselves that “it’s not about me, even if I do do the occasional monster-bash, I can stop it any time I want.” Yeah. Right. There are those who will take it at face value, and want nothing to do with it, like my local game-store owner who will get it in if asked, but will not stock it normally. He’s not known for being overly sensitive, so it was a bit of a surprise.

More worryingly, there may be those who will try and play this as a straight game. No matter that he has disparaged guns’n’ammo afficianadoes, or pointed out the problems with drugs (e.g .the possibility that you’ll have the opportunity to form a close romantic bond with your cell-mate), there are people decadent enough to try this. They’ll think it’s k3wl, sorry cool, and proof of how close they live life to “the edge”, there are a few sickos out there who are so jaded that they’ll try it. They’ll probably wear a lot of black too, but so do a lot of quite stable people. Although the humour is there, and it is extremely funny in places, I think that ultimately it miss the target and that the issue of role-players attitudes to violence and crime in games is better handled by John Tynes “Powerkill”, ironically also published by Hogshead.

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Something for nothing and your clicks for free

Posted on June 14, 2012 by hurcheon

I understand the arguments on both sides of the piracy debate, even the one about “pirated copies” not necessarily being lost sales, because often the people getting them that way are doing no more than flipping through them and having the ego-boost of collecting them, a bit like collecting stamps almost. My only proviso on that is, if you use it, like it and continue to use it, buy it from the folk who wrote it. If your argument is “it’s like a demo” then fine, like the demo, buy the product.

This isn’t about that. This is about the attitude to prices of PDF products. Again, I understand the anti-arguments on cost. I have made them myself. The cost of printing is transferred. If you try and get it printed professionally, some places won’t do it, believing it to be copyright infringement, and sometimes they are right. I remember when a set of Fantasy Wargame rules I like come out in a new, PDF only version. That price was certainly way too high, but I am considering more reasonably priced products.

A friend of mine recently produced some Ancients Wargames Rules, Augustus to Aurelian, and charges the outrageous sum of £12 for the rulebook, army lists (or guide to be honest) and quick reference sheets. This is a PDF product, meant for reading on a computer or tablet (there is a special iPad version) and represents two years worth of work. It is not a shoddy document either. It is professional looking with some of Phil’s own figures illustrating it, and he is no slouch with a paintbrush.

However I have seen him decried for this price, PDFs should be cheaper goes the cry. I disagree with that as a blanket statement. PDFs should be charged for at a FAIR price, and in my (admittedly biased) opinion, it is a fair price for what you get.

Another call has been for it to have been printed, and I admit I wish it had been for sale through a route that allowed for Print on Demand, but the cost to print this by the traditional route would have been at least £20,000. Assuming that with markups etc the unit price for the set was at 35% of retail (£4.20) that means Phil would have to have sold 4,762 copies to have broken even (at that £12 price). Never mind advertising and shipping to distributors. Even at a more realistic printed price of £25, again discounting shipping, that is 2,286 copies just to break even . That is a lot for a speculative venture on a new set of rules.

He’d make more money hawking hairs from his beard to use as paintbrush bristles.

So, what do I take from that. One, gamers are cheapskates. We all are in one way or another. I am parsimonious with figures. I’ll try and get an army to do different jobs, not just because of cost, but also because I don’t have the time to paint as I would like.

However, cheapskates though we be, we should think about being fair. These things don’t just grow on trees, people put in time and effort. If we don’t like it, we don’t have to buy.

Having said that, I still like freebies. Free RPGs and Free wargames that people do for the love of it. I haven’t got to grips with this game yet, but I’m passing it on cos it might be good. Epic Wargaming, free rules and terrain

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Reviews from the Past – 01 – The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Posted on June 5, 2012 by hurcheon
“The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen”
ISBN – 1-899749-18-7 UK£ 3.95 US$ 5.95 (at time of publishing)
Copyright 1998 Hogshead Publishing Ltd.
Authorship denoted as being by Baron Munchausen

The scene

The shadowed and dim studios of elijiah Hogg, scrivener and publisher of ill-considered  vanities and games reviews. Enter the Earl of A_____, a well favoured gentleman clutching a sheaf of papers.

“My Lord, you honour me, please be seated.”

“I do honour you, Hogg, and don’t ye forget it when it comes to the matter I present to ye now. A review of this Continental Flummery ‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Muckhwasen, no, Munchausen’ that some London mountebank has seen fit to print”

“I have heard of this work, my Lord, and it would be my pleasure to publish your musings on it. If I could, most humbly though not obsequiously (too late), enquire as to how it came into your possession. It is said to be as rare as rosewater at a reunion of the League of Gamesplayers”

“I shall tell you that, and more, Hogg, but first dispense with that inferior claret you ply your authors with and bring me the decent stuff.

“As to how I obtained it, when all known copies were locked in the grasp of the colonials is not a simple matter to relate. Suffice it to say that it was smuggled in by a man that I retain, hardened by years in the Galleys of the Turk and cynical to the trends of the Collectable Tarot Industry.

“When at last I obtained my copy I have to confess to having been momentarily surprised, for whereas I was expecting a smaller document typical of the Jacobin pamphleteer I instead found myself with a larger beast, in area at least, the page count is but 24 pages. The cover was of a thin but serviceable cardstock coloured and overlaid with an engraving by some modish fellow by the name of Gustav Dore, whose futuristic daubings also inhabit the interior of the document.

“It becomes hard to describe the system without revealing it in its entirety, but I own that I am equal to the task. To call it a role-playing game is true only in the loosest usage of the term. Like “Once upon a time” before it, it is a game of story telling, wherein the players tell each other (hopefully) short stories about phantasmagorical exploits that they purport
to have had.

“Unlike Mr. Wallis’s oeuvre, that of his ancestor employs no cards to drive the action, but the competitive element is retained. Players have the opportunity to challenge each other’s stories on points of fact, with coins as the stakes, with but two provisos. The first being that the extinction of the storyteller is not asserted. The second is that the veracity of the story is not challenged. This is done by speaking the challenge and making a wager.

I give you an example. Should someone say to me,

My Lord A_____tell us of the time you introduced Loch Ness Monster to
Court Prester John

then I would be obliged begin thus.

“Good Gentles, it was not in Scotland that I encountered the Monster,
but in the Kingdom of Naples, where that Caledonian Behemoth was as part
of his Grand Tour ?”

“If my memory had failed or I had found myself parched and wearied by the day’s travel, then I must pay a forfeit to the company. To aid the inspiration there are over two hundred opening challenges that might be employed.

“And should some lout be ill-mannered enough to doubt the incident being related,

“But wait Lord A______, surely the creature in question would not travel
to Naples, for Loch Ness must perforce be a body of fresh water, whereas
the Mediterranean is as salty as brine.”

then the raconteur has three options.

  • “Imprimis – He can call the knave out to a duel, of which more anon.
  • “Secundus – He can clarify the point of confusion in the cur’s thoughts, or expound upon the points raised. The challenger can acquiesce or repeat the challenge. The challenge is the subject of an amount of wagering, with the winner naturally claiming all.
  • “Tertius – He might, hard as it is to believe, admit to eing in error. The speaker naturally forfeits the wager.

“It will not have escaped your damn, clerkly attention that I mentioned duelling earlier. This should not be done lightly, but if it is done then it may be settled according to dictates of the Code Duello or instead to a less deadly but no less cunningly vicious contest steeped in ancient lore. The winner of two out of three passes of blade or wits is adjudged to be the
victor in the duel.

“At the end, when all have delighted the company with their most extraordinary adventures, all of which are true, then the group should vote for the raconteur who’s story has been the most entertaining.

“Now, Hogg, I see questions forming even in your weaselly eyes. I have said that this game is more a parlour game than one of these ‘Role-Playing’ buffooneries. It becomes hard to admit but there are some gentlefolk whose imagination is not their most noted attribute, even in the League of Gamesplayers. Those for whom spontaneous recollection of amusing anecdotes is an unknown art should perhaps avoid this game, for they will not get the most out of it.

“In addition, the full enjoyment of the game involves circumstances it might not be possible to create in the home, for example the purchase of a round of drinks for the company, but the enterprising gentleman should not find the provision of adequate substitutes difficult., else they were best not playing this game.

“To conclude, it is is a fine diversion for good company, and is easily learned, but the more straightforward and prosaic folk would not enjoy it.”

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It wasn’t a disappointment

Posted on June 3, 2012 by hurcheon

Last week was the UK Games Expo. One of the things about that was C&S Essence was up for a “Best RPG” award. I didn’t get it (Airship Pirates did) but that was never a surprise. Goven other entrants like “the One Ring” my simple RPG which started out, even in this second version, as something to be given away, wasn’t a contender.

The nomination was flattering enough.

I had had a revamped and reformatted version of the rules. I had added the non-human character stuff because I had it and tested it. I used some clip art to space things out. Ideally I would have used some art from Mike Gilbert, but I couldn’t get permission from his widow.

However, as soon as Steve had said that he thought it was worth charging for, I thought “EEEK. Better put more stuff in”, so the Darken background got in there, and the adventure and the quick skirmish wargames rules. These were all things I had in my files anyway. Stuff I had been working on, that were tweaked and refreshed before adding.

I had forgotten how much stuff I had created that hadn’t seen the light of day thanks to projects folding or delays for one reason or another. Vis Imperium Victorian II will benefit from the work done on Rocket Jocks, since the mad science in that, in part, covers Victorian times.

There is research, as I mentioned before, that is finding its way into the next Apocrypha, which I am wondering if I should turn into an actual supplement.

What I am saying is that nothing is wasted. If it doesn’t work out, fine, file it away. maybe in a few months time, or a few years, soemthing you are working on may require research you already did, and you can return to your unpublished notes to give you a head start.

Speaking of which. Sometime this weekend I want to recreate parts of my old website, get some of my wargaming articles back up, but here now, could I do them in the blog. A job for tomorrow or Monday.

Posted in Chivalry & Sorcery, RPG, Writing | Leave a comment