Intrepid Adventurers at MGD2

Some logistics to churn: The total turn-out for this one-day free game-a-thon was somewhere around 40-50 people, with no pre-registration and a request from the event organizers asking for referees to submit events. Event listings were just one-line announcements (see the Madison Games Day blog), so it was a free-for-all to attract players.

Chad Thorson and myself showed up at Noon, and appropriated a table. We then attracted players for an OD&D session using Labyrinth Lord, with character generation in five minutes and then a quick dive into Under Xylarthen’s Tower. About three hours in, we ended the session after dispatching the white apes, and the acquisition of a magic sword.

After a break for pizza, we resumed with the same group of players for a session of Empire of the Petal Throne. The Band of Heroes was sent off to discover more about ancient devices under Fort Pu’er and ended up on a Tubeway Car jaunt across Tekumel. Ice temples, Ssu, and King Griggatsetsa were all encountered, before ending up in Avanthar.

Things broke up around 9pm, as the organizers shut things down about then.

Some lessons learned:

1) Having a referee and at least one player makes recruiting more players easier. Having Chad ready to play broke the ice for the rest of the players, so I was really happy we had coordinated things.

2) Running several different games is more work than it might seem. I had originally planned on running Classic Traveller in addition to OD&D and EPT, and I ended up with four book bags of gaming material – all of which were heavy. It would’ve been much easier to run the same game three times and leave the other stuff at home.

3) Having flyers and swag to hand out is a Good Thing. I had a table display and a bunch of flyers, several copies of Microlite 74 v.1.1 in booklet form as swag, and One Page Old School Primers. They ate it up.

More of a write-up can be found at The Sandbox of Doom. The next Madison Games Day 2 will be sometime in January; we might have two sets of events to run there.

ENWorld is reporting on a letter received from Gail Gygax regarding the Gary Gygax statue:

While I can’t tell you all the details of the memorial – if approved – will be great – the few people that know the concept are wild about it – so I am excited.

For those of you going to GaryCon in March 2010, I’m sure this will be a huge topic of discussion.

Black Blade Publishing is now being stocked by Noble Knight Games -  if you can’t find them at your FLGS, try Noble Knights. Black Blade is the publishing company that is adapting some of Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classic modules for 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Expeditious Retreat Press are having their annual sale. This is a great time to pick up some fantastic items for newer and older editions. Brave Halfling Publishing also announced an updated compilation of their “Delving Deeper” series for Labyrinth Lord.

There was quite a bit of “unearthed arcana”  from Gary Gygax being talked about the past fortnight. First, Randall at retroroleplaying.com shared his discovery of some Gary Gygax articles dating back to 1976 in PDF scans of an old wargaming “fanzine” – Liasons Dangereuses. The blog Beyond The Black Gate shared a link to an essay written by Gary in 2001 about how the author Jack Vance influenced Dungeons & Dragons. And from the blog Grognardia comes another discovery of a 1975 article by Gary in a European wargaming fanzine which goes into some detail about the famous Castly Greyhawk and its dungeons beneath!

Another interesting find from the early days of D&D was an interview by the site Gaming Brouhaha about a Dungeons & Dragons summer camp held annually in the early 1980s. The subject of the interview, Ben Robbins, has released more pictures on his site from the camp. Imagine what would have been said if this camp had been in the public’s attention during the D&D hysteria?

If you are a Traveller fan, this will interest you – rare Traveller fanzines are being given away by the Retro Roleplaying blog. The blog’s author, Randall, has a fundraiser going for his wife’s medical bills due to skin cancer. He is giving away some very rare items – take a look at the announcement and help out if you can – it’s for a good cause.

As part of the TARGA mission to support traditional, older roleplaying games, we’d like to start providing resources and links to useful information, mailing groups and downloadable content. We are a Big Tent to all genres, so the resources can be wide and plentiful. Those resources can be found on our wiki – feel free to join and add and edit resources that you may know of!

http://www.traditionalgaming.org/wiki/index.php/Game_Resources

An interesting recent development for Mythmere Games has been the licensing of the right to produce a Swords & Wizardry miniatures line to Center Stage Miniatures. On the heels of that development comes the following announcement of a competition:

Center Stage Miniatures has licensed the right to produce Swords & Wizardry miniatures, and they are running a contest for Knockspell Magazine readers! Write up the best new monster and Center Stage will sculpt it and put it into their Swords & Wizardry line. Here are the rules: (1) it has to be a monster; (2) it has to be roughly human-sized; (3) the description has to be in Swords & Wizardry format; (4) the winner has to sign a contract allowing Center Stage to produce the minis for as long as they want to. There’s not a money prize, but it isn’t every day you get to see one of your own creations immortalized in metal.

How to enter the contest: send your monster description, in Swords & Wizardry format, to centerstagehobbies@yahoo.com, attention Matt Solarz, who is the president of Center Stage Miniatures. Center Stage will judge the entries, and the winning entry will be sculpted and sold in the Swords & Wizardry line of miniatures, as well as being published in the magazine. The monster description will also be printed on the packaging for the miniature, with your name as author. The first contest runs from September 1, 2009 until December 31, 2009. Fire up your creativity and make some monsters!

An excellent opportunity for anybody who would like to see a monster from their imagination immortalised in the form of a sculpted miniature! Best of luck!

You can read the details here, but in a nutshell:

James E. Raggi IV of Lamentations of the Flame Princess publishing has generously offered to develop an entire issue of his Green Devil Face for benefit of TARGA. James has given TARGA the right to print issues if we wish, to use the content for TARGA specific games or sell issues at conventions for our benefit.

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of thing that TARGA is looking for from publishers and retailers. If you have a product you’d like to share with us, please contact our “PR guy” at mail.rpgblog@gmail.com.

Goblinoid Games just released an update to their fantasy role-playing game Labyrinth Lord (LL), and they’ve updated their website. A new feature of the site includes the Labyrinth Lord Society, a group aimed at promoting and demonstrating Labyrinth Lord. LL is very similar to the B/X Basic D&D game from the early 1980s.

Fight On! has just released Issue #6.  Fight On supports all types of traditional roleplay gaming. There’s something here for sci-fi fans, Empire of the Petal enthusiasts, gamers who want to explore a dungeon of blocks and a continuation of the Fight On megadungeon. This issue’s cover is the prize-winning color art by Mark Allen, which won the recent Erol Otus art contest.

Four publishers of old school adventures have gotten together to offer a “Sampler PDF bundle“. This is a perfect resource for introducing old and new players alike to some traditional D&D gaming.

• Brave Halfling Publishing OSRIC adventure: People of the Pit by Alphonso Warden
• Expeditious Retreat Press OSRIC adventure: The Lost Keys of Solitude by Joseph Browning and Suzi Yee
• Goblinoid Games Labyrinth Lord adventure: Idol of the Orcs by James Boney
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure: Death Frost Doom by James E. Raggi IV.

This bundle can be purchased from YourGamesNow or RPGNow.

Megadungeon.net, the free resource for old school style megadungeons has recieved a recent update – the Fungal Forests.

Design your own monster and have it made into a minature! Mythmere Games announced a Swords & Wizardry Miniatures Contest – details can be found here.

Traditional tabletop RPGs get some mass media exposure courtesy of a new column in The Escapist magazine, a video game periodical. Columnists Chris Brackett, Monte Cook, James Maliszewski and Allen Varney are sharing writing duties.

TARGA is almost a year old, and with that, we’ve started taking active steps to organize a new mission and focus on what’s important – “getting butts into chairs” at traditional, older roleplaying games. After a series of meetings and blog posts and email list exchanges (see our TARGATalk email list), we’re focused on YOU, the traditional gameplayer and traditional Game Master. That means we want to help you organize games, events and spread the joy and love that you have for your game – no matter what the genre is!

Do you want to run an old sci-fi game like LBB Traveller, StarFrontiers or Encounter Critical? Do you want to run post-apocalypse Metamorphosis Alpha or the new “clone” Mutant Futures? Do you want to run an OD&D, Red Box Basic or 1st Edition AD&D game? Then TARGA wants to help you!

Our focus for the next 6 months is going to be promoting convention games, local game store events and gaming groups. We want to help you with prebuilt, exclusive adventures and content from OSR publishers. We want to help you with fliers and ideas on how to run your events. We want to give you the tools you need to succeed.

To that end, the TARGA wiki is starting to come alive. Right now, we have a list of TARGA events and some ideas coming about for regional/local coordinators to trade ideas, help and experiences. That’s what we’ll use the wiki and the TARGATalk email list for.

How can you be a part of this? Quite simply, run a TARGA event. Put “butts in chairs” and run an awesomely fun game! Hand out a TARGA flier that promotes Old School. Share your stories on the TARGA talk and add information to the wiki. Contact us here at the blog, or drop me an email – chgowiz@gmail.com – because I need your ideas. I can’t do this all myself, it’s going to take all of us to share our love of the old games and the newer retroclones to get interested players into the fold.

We’ve got a lot of cool plans, like a “Living TARGA” campaign setting for the 3 main roleplaying genres, but that doesn’t mean you can’t contribute your own ideas and games – old western RPGs, 1920s gangster games, strange world games – if it’s an old traditional RPG, or a newer rewrite in the spirit of the older games, we want to play it!

Score one for Traditional Gaming! Swords & Wizardry took the Silver ENnie Award (2nd place) for Best Free Product! Michael Shorten was on hand to represent Mythmere Games on stage and accept the award on behalf of Matt Finch.

Congratulations are in order for Matt and to the many contributors and fans of Swords & Wizardry!

Related link: http://www.ennie-awards.com/this_year/results.asp

The excellent traditional adventure role-playing game Swords & Wizardry has been successfully nominated for an  ENNIE award in the Best Free Product category. This is great news for anybody interested in the revival of traditional adventure games, raising the profile of the movement and a sign of recognition in the larger community of a style of gaming that was until recently becoming increasingly marginalised. TARGA would like to extend its wholehearted congratulations to Matthew Finch, Mythmere Games, and everyone else involved.

For anybody not in the know, Swords & Wizardry is a simulacrum via the Open Game License of Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974). There are two versions, one (Whitebox) adhering more closely to the original rules than the other (Core Rules). Like its venerable predecessor, Swords & Wizardry is a very minimalist game that encourages participants to create their own rules variants based on the same basic model and rules structure. If you have not already, we heartily recommend that you download a copy (it is free, after all) and get a game going!