Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Recovering from vacation

recovering from disney vacation. playing on mog tonight after missing two sessions. last session ended on a cliff hanger...

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Of Swords & Wizardry

It's Swords & Wizardy Appreciation Day. On this day it's only fair to share one of the best evenings I ever had and Swords and Wizardry was part of it.

My family has always been into playing games, cut throat multi-board games of scrabble have been played into the wee hours, Diplomacy was played way back in the day, and Dungeons and Dragons was a regular part of our household for years. My father had been a regular member of my D&D group for decades.

One day back in December of 2009 my regular D&D game was cancelled becasue of a bout of scheduling-madness but my oldest son was really in the mood to play some fantasy RPG. I broke out my printout of Swords & Wizardry White-Box edition, and a level of the dismal depths and we rolled up characters using my variant races of Pygmy, Amazon and Cyclops.

The most unique part of the night was who the player were: my teen age son, my 14 year old son, my 12 year old daughter, my wife, and 5 month old son. The baby played a Pygmy cleric that could only speak the pygmy language and by convenient coincidence my wife played the only member of the party able to communicate with him. Of course my baby boy couldn't read, write or roll dice at the time but he got involved by the emotion and excitement of the group and was involved. He got into the fights and amusingly enough argued with my wife at one point over the course of action in the game. It was a magical evening for the whole family made possible by Swords & Wizardry.

Lot's of people play games as a means of escape, relaxation, intellectual challenge, but they are also a time to get together with people to build friendship and family.  Thanks Swords & Wizardry.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

My personal gaming history has become a tiny part of other folks games.

Thanks to the SRD and my submitting monsters when folks wanted new monsters for various old school retro games a small piece of my personal gaming history has become a tiny part of other folks games.

The Gump and Leper Zombies were first written up for my D&D campaign played back in 82-83. This was an epic period of D&D youth for me. We played D&D once or twice a month on Sundays and the group included family members, co-workers of my father, and school-mates of mine. The Leper Zombie was a written up to be a considerable undead problem that was still defeat-able at low levels with limited resources.  The Gump was inspired by a mutant monster from one of the Hiero's Journey books and served as meant to be a threat between ogre and troll in power. Leper Zombies only have to be hinted at and some of my old timers still shake and groan, and Gumps get a recognition of "oh yeah, these guys".

They live on here in the S&W SRD
Gump
Leper Zombie
they could be in thw Swords & Wizardy Monstrosities book as well, I'm not sure as I haven't seen that work but it's shown as the source on the S&W SRD page.

and here for the Basic Fantasy RPG
The Basic Fantasy Field Guide to Creatures Malevolent and Benign

If anyone has ever earned a few experience points fighting one or lost a loyal henchman of player character to one I'd love to hear about it.