7 December 2025 Science Fiction

 7 December 2025: Science Fiction

    I love science fiction. Love it. I didn't read too much of it as a kid. I read Dune in high school (I think I read it twice) but I can't remember any others. Ray Bradbury, which is really more fantasy than sci-fi. H.G. Wells, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Other than that, not much. For whatever reason, in 1991 when I was a senior in college, I decided I wanted to get into some science fiction, but I wasn't sure where to start. I was a big Dan Simmons fan at the time--horror being my main jam in those days--so I picked up his (then) new novel Hyperion and had my mind thoroughly, utterly, completely blown. Hyperion remains one of my favorite books of all time, not just because I found the story and the concepts incredible, but because of the experience I had while reading it: sublime. Transcendent. Consciousness expanding. It was remarkable.

    After that, sci-fi was on the menu. I read some of the classics--Foundation, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe a few others and enjoyed them all, but I was still more into fantasy and horror. I met the science fiction author Samuel Delaney, whose writing I find unreadable, but who was a kind man, and generous with his advice about what to read as a newbie to the genre. I discovered William Gibson and Neuromancer, and sort of fell in love with Molly Millions. 

    It wasn't until 1996, when I was living on Diego Garcia while in the Navy that I truly hit my sci-fi stride. We had a small but mighty library on the island, and for some strange reason, there was an incredible selection of science fiction books available. I'll never know how the books got there, and kept being replenished, but the choices were remarkable, and I read them voraciously. I'm talking a novel a day voraciously. I did the deepest of deep-dives and read science fiction until my eyes bled. I discovered John Wyndam and read his major works (The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes), for example. There was a series called Science Fiction Masterworks, and I read a bunch of those. David Brin, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Brian Aldiss, Jerry Pournelle, Philip K. Dick. David Weber introduced me to military science fiction, which lead me to Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Hadelman's The Forever War. I read Ursala LeGuin's gentle science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness), C.S. Lewis's theologically infused Space Trilogy, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. John Scalzi! Jack Campbell! Becky Chambers! Octavia Butler! The many, many, many anthologies put together by Gardner Dozois. I read science fiction like a starving man entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was, and is, awesome. 

    But what I've never done is run a science fiction TTRPG. We dabbled a little in Gamma World back in high school, and played a good amount of FASA Star Trek (and more recently, the Modiphius version). I had Star Frontiers, and maybe even Traveller, but I never played either. So all of this is a long way of saying, I am thinking pretty hard about running a science fiction game. I'm a little burnt out on fantasy, and I'm never running Call of Cthulhu again (love the game. Sick of playing it). Me brudder and I recently considered Troll Lord Games' Amazing Adventures, but found it a bit too pulpy for our tastes, I just bought the entire M-Space collection from from Frostbyte Games, which is for BRP, so we'll see how that goes. Once I finish my rough-draft of The Runes, I'm heading out into the vasty deeps of space.

5 December 2025 Amazing Adventures vs. Basic Role Playing

 5 December 2025 AA vs. BRP

    Last night my brother and I had a conversation with our good friend Dan, who we have been role playing with since way back at the beginning, in 1984 when we were all in high school. We were making a video so that we can learn how to make Youtube content for our (eventual, hopefully) gaming company Wicked Place Game. It was a lot of fun to traipse down memory lane and remember the great adventures of yesteryear, and the halcyon days of spending a Saturday afternoon flipping through old Dragon Magazines, or reading the AD&D Players Handbook for the umpteenth time.  Wonderful memories.

    We had a lively discussion about gaming systems, picking apart the things that we like and dislike about many of them, and generally nerding out about TTRPGs. As Dennis and I think about creating content for our nascent gaming company, there has been some disagreement between us about what exactly we should be working on. Little brother is firmly in the Castles&Crusades camp, and with good reason: the game system is well-designed, we've played it and like it, the company is great, and they give us a 50% discount when we buy things! All solid reasons. I have been a bit hesitant, though, because in my observation, the footprint of the game is much smaller than other systems we like, so it's a very small pool to swim in should we go in that direction. Other games (not including 5e, which none of us are interested in) like Dragonbane, Shadowdark, and (we think...) BRP have larger audiences, more eyeballs, more dollars, etc. It is notoriously hard to find information about games sales, so much of what we are talking about is supposition based on anecdotes (like how many game-related materials are available on Drivethru RPG, or how frequently games are discussed on websites like ENWorld, or how many members there are on a Discord channel). It's hard to know where the energy is outside of 5e and big guns like Daggerheart and Draw Steel. 

    No game is perfect. For example, I prefer unleveled games (BRP) but I don't love skill systems (therefore AA). Both systems are supported on Foundry, but neither on Roll20. BRP is probably much bigger than AA re: a community of players, but both are tiny compared to something like Shadowdark, which itself is fractional when compared to D&D. Both of these systems are old (C&C is 20 years, BRP is 50!) so game mechanics have modernized and changed a great deal since then. I have tremendous affection for BRP, but I do love the Troll Lords. It's hard to know what to do, but at this point, all of this is a passion project: we are doing what we like in hopes of one day (maybe...) monetizing it somehow.

    I have become bogged down in writing my C&C module. It's been a bit of a slog lately. It might be that I'm a little burnt out on fantasy in general, which is mainly what my group plays. I don't want to run Call of Cthulhu again; I love that game but I am done with it (I've written about this elsewhere). So...what, then? A horror game that's not CoC? Some kind of multiversal sci-fi game? I'm not sure. I might need to switch it up a bit. 

14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

 14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

    We have been playing DCC for about six months now, and it is gonzo-fun for sure. Our big group is five players and one GM (Mr. Cheese), and all we do is laugh our assess off. The rolls are so swingy, the magic so weird, and the monsters so bizarre that it all makes for a fantastic beer and pretzels sort of gaming experience. I have run this system twice: once in a sort of catch as catch can, episodic game where I was just learning the rules (we played some home brew and the module "The Well of the Worm," which was fun. The second time was a longer campaign set in Hyboria, using the DCC: Lankhmar rules; it, too, went well, ending in an epic TPK. 

    So I like the system a lot, and I hope to run it again. Hyboria is still wide open, but I was thinking about something a little bit different as well. In my head I have a Call of Cthulhu game that begins in the real-world and moves into the Dreamlands, something I did do a few years ago using the CoC 7e ruleset. It was one of my favorite campaigns that I've ever run, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. With that said, the reality is, I have played Call of Cthulhu too much. I have found the end of that game. Don't get me wrong: it's a wonderful, wonderful game; it is the game I have run the most, I think; even more than Dungeons&Dragons. But after 44 years, I think I am Cthulhud-out. It's hard to keep the game fresh after all this time, and it is impossible for my players (and me) to avoid metagaming. 

    But I was thinking...what if I used the DCC rules instead of the CoC 7e rules, to create a campaign like what follows: the game begins during the Great Depression, and is set in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky or West Virginia. The players are all normal things: doctors, cops, whatever, who for reasons are going to investigate strange doings in the hills and hollers. There is a ton of super spooky lore in that part of the world, so a few horror-themed adventures would be totally fine (and mechanically easy) to run. The big threat is a snake-handling Christian cult that is being influenced by an actual entity from another world, in the Shudder Mountains of...somewhere. The multiverse. Players would be drawn into the Shudder Mountains and take on their fantasy personas-- much like the Eternal Champion, or like Lovecraft's Dreamlands. On that side of the multiverse, they are a dwarf, or an elf, or a fighter, whatever. They would explore the Shudder Mountains, and adventure there with the Big Bad (a snake god like Yig or Damballah). Weird, horror-infused fantasy. At times, they would pop back and forth between worlds. 

    Shudder Mountains is based on the works of Manly Wade Wellman and his Silver John stories, which I love. The author of the source book, Michael Curtis, loves those stories, and wrote a really unique campaign setting which I think is great. I also have been digging Old Gods of Appalachia, a horror podcast set in that same part of the world. This may be be a thing I try and do sometime. I think it would be a blast. 

     

11 November 2025 The Runes: Design Journal (2) (plus 5e and DCC!)

 11 November 2025

    Veterans Day, so no work for me today. As a veteran myself, I find this is a nice day to reflect on my own service from 1993-1997 (a long time ago now), as well as the service of my family. My great grandfather, Michael Joseph Reilly, earned his American citizenship when he emigrated from Ireland and joined the USN during World War I. The next generation, my grandparents, served in WWII, while the next generation--my dad and my uncles--served during Viet Nam and the first Gulf War. Then my brother, myself, my sister in law, and my cousins served. Most recently, my nephew Connor! That's five generations of veterans over the past 100 years, and that's something to be proud of.

I have been banging away at The Runes. It is a disorganized mess, but progress is happening. There are a lot of questions I have about how to organize this thing: monster stats in the back, or in text? How specific vs. general do I need to be re: how events unfold. How much detail is too much? How polished does a first draft have to be? Does any of it even make sense? Hard to know. I'd like to have a workable, edited draft of this thing by the beginning of summer, so that's my goal. Once I have a student teacher (starting in January) I'll have a lot more time to work on it. As it is, I am picking away at it here and there. You can see my amazing hand drawn maps below. They are, literally, good enough for now. 

We have been playing a DCC campaign with Mr. Cheese as our GM. It's a bonkers game, and I think that's the point: the system itself leads us toward funny, chaotic experiences. There are so many tables, and so many out of pocket results that weird shit happens all of the time. I admit that DCC brings the freak out in me; my imagination just goes haywire and I say and do bizarre things (like my breast-feeding male cleric, Otto). It is a fun experience for sure, but I do think that the built in randomness of the game engine makes it more funny than serious. We laugh our asses off, everytime we play! 

Which brings me to my next point: having messed about with various systems now--D&D 5e, Dragonbane, Star Trek, Dungeon Crawl Classics, BRP, Castles&Crusades, and Cthulhu 7e--I have come to the conclusion that the system can drive the vibe of the game as much as the GM and the players can. DCC, for example, has swingy magic (and swingly rolls in general) baked into the pie so that the unexpected happens all of the time. You are one roll away from disaster or triumph regardless of your actions and choices. My wizard, Cal, either throws biscuits or nuclear bombs when he uses magic missile. It's a crap shoot every time. In Dragonbane, the monsters were tremendously difficult because they always hit, and oftentimes more than once.  Because it is an unleveled game, combat felt dangerous. Because there were limited spells, it felt...I don't know, fey. It was fun for sure, but the engine made the game feel a certain away (or at least that's how I experienced it). I ran it with a bit of a fairy tale vibe on purpose, and the system led itself in that direction. 

Castles&Crusades has an OSR ethos: characters are generally weak, progression is slow, powers and abilities are given sparingly, and the whole thing feels like player thinking is far more important that player character features. We've been playing it for a few months now, and I've noticed that my three players are playing more thoughtfully than normal, because they have to! They've had to retreat a few times, which is unprecedented in my gaming experience. It's a good system to play with experienced people because they really need to stay focused on what's happening. The system is not going to protect them.

Which brings me to 5e. 5e is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room. It is the system that an overwhelming, vast majority of people play now. While I might be hammering these stats a bit, according to the data I've seen, between 12-15 million people in the US play Dungeons&Dragons, and 80%+ of them are under the age of 40. Old heads like my friends and I make up a vanishingly small part of the TTRPG hobby, and our memories of the earlier version of D&D, especially 1st, 2nd, and BECMI, are not widely held by the majority of those who play these games. Those crazy kids are all playing the most successful, and most popular iteration of this game: 5th edition Dungeons&Dragons.

Having run two campaigns (one didn't go well on my end, but my players had fun) and played in 2.5 (two regular, one modified Lord of the Rings variant), I found that 5e was not to my liking (I am confident I wrote about this before).  But as I thought about it, and as I had a great conversation on ENWorld with other people who love these games as much as I do, I realized my dislike for 5e is a me issue, not a game issue. I joke with my brother and say in my best stoner voice, "You can't play 5e with a 2e mindset," but it it turns out, that's true! 5e is designed to be a high-fantasy, heroic RPG. Characters are powerful, and have a lot of options, very quickly. It is a wildly different game than earlier iterations, and it does what it sets out to do well. Comparing it to older versions, or OSR variants, is unfair to the system: it doesn't want to be those things! So 5e isn't less than or worse than; it is its own thing, and it's good. It works, people love it, and I need to stop being a grouchy old man about it. Over the past six years, I have amassed so much stuff, a lot of it 5e, and I hope to--at some point--play it. Maybe it will be a Lord of the Rings campaign, or maybe I'll dip my toes back into Kobold Press and Midgard. We'll see, but my days of complaining about 5e are done. Things change. 

13 October 2025 The Runes: Design Journal (1)

     I am working on a module--I don't know what else to call it--for Castles and Crusades. It is set in the After Winter Dark campaign setting, but it is more specifically an area detailed in Marbeline Coast expansion. To summarize: there is a citadel on a small island controlled by a faction called the White Wizards. An enemy wizard--a part of a dark order called the Paths of Umbra--is trying to infiltrate the citadel from below in order to steal magical knowledge and search for a powerful, forgotten McGuffin. Part two of this adventure will be more of a sandbox set on a nearby, larger island that continues the story. As I am writing the content, I am also creating a bit of a Dungeon Master/Castle Keeper/Game Master primer for a new player that explains certain terms and ideas for someone who may be unfamiliar with them. 

    I keep telling myself two things: first, this is just a rough draft, and will probably undergo significant revisions when there are other sets of eyes on it, and second, I have never really done this before, so struggle is to be expected. I am finding it hard to do! Having a story in my head and translating it to playable content is freaking difficult. There is so much to do, and I am constantly concerned that I am overwriting it (i.e. putting in too much detail), or that it makes no sense, or that it is organized incorrectly. I think it's the organization that's proven to be the hardest part. For example, do I put NPC/monster stats in text, or do I put them in an appendix at the end? And how much do I try to keep this story generic vs. Aihrde-specific? Pros and cons to both things. The endless details are relentless. Where exactly is the hidden passage, and how will the PCs find it? What if they don't pick up any of the breadcrumb trails...then what? How should the tone be? It's quite a learning experience for me, and very humbling.

    So far I've probably written 20+ pages of material, and all of it without maps to help guide me, which is a whole other complication. Calgon, take me away!

October 2nd, 2025: Notes on the Passing Scene

 Not too much going on, game-wise, so a few observations on what's what:

-I am slowly working on a module for Castles&Crusades, tentatively titled The Runes (so imaginative). It is set in the After Winter Dark campaign, and it takes place on the Isle of Arwonal. An evil wizard (the Paths of Umbra) is attempting to reconnect two mirror runes in hopes of bringing a raiding force through the forgotten paths below the isle's magical library in order to kill, steal, and cause chaos. I'm pecking away at it a little each day. It's slow going, but I am making progress. 

-Last winter, in the depths of boredom and despair, I bought all of the core rules for Old School Essentials. Beautiful game; based on the old B/X ruleset from the late 70s, early 80s. It sat on my shelf, untouched, so I said to myself, "I'll never use these" then sold them to Noble Knight Game for store credit (significantly less than I bought them for). Been thinking about those books, and that system lately. Started poking around online. Looking at stuff. Wanted them back. Needed them back. My precious. Re-bought them. I am dumb, but I think I'm going to mess around with them and learn to play solo, which a way of playing that's more technical than running a normal game with other people. Stay tuned! My takeaway here is that I am spending a lot of money on things that I don't really want, or selling things that I do really want to get more money to buy things that I don't really want. So either keep the things I buy, or stop selling the things I buy. Or, learn to sell on Ebay so I can break off of Noble Knight's teat. Something. (Addendum: Great video explainer about this game and its origins).

--Thinking I might try to go solo on this game and see how it runs. Last may I did some table generation using the old AD&D DM's guide and had a lot of fun, so we'll see how this feels. 

-It's been hard to keep the Sunday game going. Just...stuff gets in the way. We've played maybe 50% of the time since the beginning of summer. I am very much enjoying the game, as are my players, but we've had difficulty making it work due to schedules. Tuesday night game (now Mondays) is solid. Ed is running DCC right now, then LotR up next with Dan.

-I just finished reading a book, West Marches Campaign Playstyle Guide Book (which is part of what got me all OSE-adjacent), and I am still trying to figure out what that would look like with my group. Here is what's confuzzling me: you begin and end in a 'town' (the safe space). Each individual session is like a one-shot: you start, your travel, your adventure, you return. We play for two hours at a time, so what if they aren't done with what they are doing in that time period? And: how do I, in the game, make them leave where they are to return to their safe place? That feels super arbitrary. Or, so I just set the expectation at the beginning of the game that what they are doing in game time is being run by what we are doing in real-time? I think it would feel technical, which is a very different style of play. I'm not sure how it would go.

20 September 2025 C&C Live Play: Witches and Frogs

20 September 2025

    We had a live game today at my house with my brother, my nephew, his girlfriend, and our friend. It was a lot of fun. We played about four hours (maybe a tad less) and I was reminded, again, how much I prefer playing in person vs. online. We continued our C&C campaign--Barrowgate--and did a kind of side-quest where one of the story's loose ends was...well, hacked off. Witches! Bullywugs! Giant toads! A blindheim! Good fun had by all.

    I have slowly been pecking away at the Aihrde module I'm working on, but I find it mentally hard to switch between worlds. I'm designing in both Aihrd and Greyhawk (Blackmoor), neither of which is super familiar to me (I ran in the Forgotten Realms for decades), so it's a bit of code-switching for sure. My brother says we should just switch to Aihrde through magic, and I think I'm going to do that, with maybe a trip through the Demiplane of Dread along the way.