Medieval Mayhem: An Old-School D&D Project

In my most recent blog entry I talked about the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons that started it all and why I love it so much. So I might as well share some ideas I have for a project that is directly related to Original Dungeons & Dragons.

The project is an experiment that I call "Medieval Mayhem" and it is somewhat inspired by the rise of YouTube videos detailing people's RPG campaigns, the most prolific being Critical Role.

Medieval Mayhem is an idea that takes inspiration from previous ideas I have had for RPG fan fiction stories. However, it is somewhat different from other attempts I have made.

It is essentially a story presented as an actual campaign journal for OD&D, complete with character sheets, recorded dice rolls, and everything else that entails. It is not a heavily pre-scripted narrative and it is largely run in an open-ended and improvisational way, much like the old D&D campaigns of yore way back in the 1970's and early 1980's.

However, Medieval Mayhem also serves another purpose as well. The "in-game" events of Medieval Mayhem also serve as information for a custom OD&D setting that I am working on and will develop within the context of this project, before refining into a "proper" campaign setting compatible with the mechanics of Original Dungeons & Dragons.

Medieval Mayhem will be using only the Three Little Brown Booklets from the OD&D box set.

I may possibly incorporate the materials from Chainmail and the four OD&D supplements as well, although I am not sure. If I do incorporate Supplements I-IV, it would be in an incremental fashion.

Expect more material for the project known as Medieval Mayhem very soon.

Some Thoughts on Original Dungeons & Dragons

It's been a while since my last blog post and so I decided I might as well make a new one and let you guys know I'm still alive and well.

So, for this particular blog post I might as well talk about the classic that started it all, the 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons, which is one of my favorite RPG's of all time and the very first RPG ever made (unless you count Braunstein)

Original Dungeons & Dragons is one of my favorite games and is tied with the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for my favorite version of D&D overall. However, unlike most old-school gamers, I'm a millennial (born in 1993) and was introduced to D&D and the RPG hobby through the revised third edition of the game (D&D 3.5) way back in February of 2007, when I was thirteen years old. However, my Dad was an old-school gamer who cut his teeth on AD&D First Edition and like me, was a huge fan of Second Edition AD&D.

In fact, Second Edition is his favorite version of the game and is one of mine as well.

I'm actually planning a weekly AD&D Second Edition game pretty soon with some of my real-life friends but I digress.

So, I'm sitting here in my living room listening to The Dubliners and drinking Mello Yello as I type this newest entry to my blog, and I have been thinking about ideas for a theoretical old-school D&D campaign using only the original White Box rules from 1974. That's right, the Three Little Brown Booklets themselves. I recently purchased the official PDF's of OD&D's core rules, along with all four of the supplements and Chainmail as well and I'm looking over the original rules and they are awesome.

I previously have had experience with Original Dungeons & Dragons via OSR retro-clone games like Swords & Wizardry and Full Metal Plate Mail, but having the actual original rules themselves is even better in my personal opinion.

Overall, I love Original Dungeons & Dragons and find it to be one of the best old-school games because it is the epitome of Old-School, it was the first RPG ever published and it revolutionized not just tabletop gaming, but other forms of gaming as well. It is a very versatile game system.

Ostensibly, OD&D is a medieval game with a lot of Swords & Sorcery and High Fantasy elements, drawing heavily from the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Tolkien. But that is just the initial setup to help serve as a springboard for nearly any type of campaign you want to run, especially if you are a creative Game Master.

The four supplements of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, and Gods Demigods & Heroes are excellent additions to the game, which when added in their entirety with the OD&D White Box rules, make the whole game a rough draft form of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Edition, which makes sense given that AD&D 1E was originally intended as a compendium of all the stuff that OD&D had accumulated from the supplements and magazine articles throughout the 1970's.

But even with just the core rules, which seem to be bare-bones compared to later editions of D&D, you can run a lot of different games in different styles with the proper minor tweaks. The seemingly minimalist style of OD&D is also one of the game's greatest strengths, making it loose enough to be flexible and easily compatible with Rule Zero add-ons and other fan content.

Even the core rules alone mention some stuff that seems out of place compared to later versions of D&D, but would also make the game very interesting. Stuff like Robots, Androids, and Martians and the like.

Overall, I have some good thoughts on OD&D and expect more posts about it on this blog very soon.

8-Bit Chivalry: Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy

So, it should be obvious that old-school Dungeons & Dragons was a colossal influence on video games, and directly led to the concept of the CRPG genre of video games (short for Computer Role-Playing Game or Console Role-Playing Game) and one of the greatest and most triumphant examples of this influence is the extremely popular Final Fantasy franchise, a series of Japanese video games and one of the most popular and long-running examples of the RPG video game genre.

While later entries in the Final Fantasy series would follow in a more science-fiction influenced direction, particularly from Final Fantasy VII onward, the early games of the 8-Bit and 16-Bit eras were very much done a more traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy more reminiscent of other popular fantasy works, most notably Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, it is often rumored online that the very first Final Fantasy game was originally intended as a direct licensed game based on D&D.

Not much evidence exists that suggests that Final Fantasy I was initially intended to be an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons video game, but one thing is certain and that is the people at Square responsible for Final Fantasy I definitely were fans of D&D. The influence of the world's oldest tabletop role-playing game on the Final Fantasy franchise is most prevalent in the very first entry into the series, with several tropes that may seem weird to fans of the more modern games in the series, but would be very familiar to anyone who played D&D in the 1980's, or is a fan of the Old-School Rules movement within the greater hobby.

Hell, even more modern D&D players may pick up on some of the D&D influences in Final Fantasy.

First off, while every subsequent game would use Magic Points (MP) for casting spells, Final Fantasy I had a more Vancian-style magic system of spells per day that took up a number of spell slots, and could only be replenished by resting at an Inn or camping in a tent or cabin.

Gee, I wonder where I've seen that before? (sarcasm)

Second, a lot of the classes are based on early D&D classes. Most notable are the Monk (called a Black Belt in the original NES release) which is the typical martial artist familiar to D&D fans, along with the mages. Much like in Dragonlance, there are three types of mages: Red, Black, and White.

However, unlike Dragonlance, the colors are not indicative of alignment but of the kind of spells used. White Mages are healers, essentially a rendition of the Cleric class in D&D, they even are restricted to only using blunt weapons like hammers and staves, while Black Mages cast combat spells and Red Mages use a mix of both spells but not to the same extent or proficiency as either White Mages or Black Mages.

Other tropes is the presence of Bahamut, the Dragon King (based on Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon) and enemies such as the Evil Eye (essentially a Beholder with the serial numbers filed off) and even some throwbacks to OD&D such as robot enemies like the infamous Warmech and the Flying Fortress at the game's end being a futuristic sci-fi space station (later renditions of Final Fantasy I would make the Flying Fortress a more traditional fantasy castle and either remove or downplay a lot of the sci-fi elements in the late stages of the game)

My favorite Final Fantasy game is Final Fantasy XV (Noctis is my man-waifu), but the more I learn about Final Fantasy I and its ties to D&D, the more I want to make a D&D or OSR campaign inspired by it.

I might even make my own campaign setting as an homage to both Final Fantasy I and early D&D.

Waifu vs. Zombies: The Soundtrack

Here's a "just for fun" blog update about the ideal soundtrack for a game of Waifu vs. Zombies and given the 1970's-inspired style of the game, I figured it would be appropriate that such a soundtrack would consist largely of hits from the 1970's (with a few songs from the 1960's as well) and without further to do, here is my picks for the soundtrack to Waifu vs. Zombies.

1. King Harvest: Dancing In The Moonlight
2. Edison Lighthouse: Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes
3. The Archies: Sugar Sugar
4. Elton John: Crocodile Rock
5. Brewer & Shipley: One Toke Over The Line
6. The Stampeders: Sweet City Woman
7. Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising
8. John Denver: Take Me Home, Country Roads
9. The Steve Miller Band: The Joker
10. Stealer's Wheel: Stuck In The Middle With You
11. David Hess: Wait For The Rain
12. The Dillards: Copperfields
13. Dusty Springfield: Son of a Preacher Man
14, Jim Croce: Bad Bad Leroy Brown
15. The Who: Pinball Wizard
16. Seals & Crofts: Summer Breeze
17. Simon & Garfunkel: Homeward Bound
18. Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama
19. The Allman Brothers: Ramblin' Man
20. Queen: Fat Bottomed Girls
21. The Bee Gees: Jive Talkin'
22. Don McLean: American Pie
23. Blue Oyster Cult: Don't Fear The Reaper

Waifu vs. Zombies: A New RPG Project

Wow! It's been a very long while since I've posted anything on this blog at all. I figured it's about time to remedy that right now.

Anywho, real life kept me somewhat busy during the months of June and most of July and I sort of forgot about this blog. But I am now returning to it. And I figured I'd announce a new and ambitious project on my part. A new project that at the very least, would be a nice campaign to run and at the very most, an actual published OSR RPG, albeit one of  a different sort.

The game is titled Waifu vs. Zombies and it is an homage to both old-school anime and old-school zombie fiction. The two main zombie works that this game is inspired by are George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil (1996) although I am taking influences from other zombie works as well, including Night of the Living Dead (1968), Day of the Dead (1985), Resident Evil 2 (1998), High School of the Dead (2010), DayZ (2013) and the cheap Italian zombie grindhouse flicks of the 1970's and 1980's such as the Zombi series.

Another major inspiration for the game is the classic Stephen King post-apocalyptic epic The Stand, as well as the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons.

The premise is that the game is a survival horror sandbox RPG where the PC's are survivors of a slow-moving zombie apocalypse in the United States circa the late 1970's and early 1980's, with a focus on the Eastern United States, specifically the Mid-Atlantic and Central Appalachia, though your campaign could be set anywhere within North America to be honest.

The initial goal of the game is to explore and survive, with an endgame scenario of rebuilding civilization and managing a domain or settlement, similar to the endgame scenario of OD&D.

If I can save up enough money to commission artwork, I would have anime-style artwork. But it would resemble the anime of the 1980's rather than more modern anime franchises. Think along the lines of the general art styles found in stuff like Saint Seiya, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, Angel Cop, Ranma 1/2, and the original Mobile Suit Gundam,

It would be a very dark and violent game, but also a hopeful one. Because if your characters manage to survive long enough against the zombies, bandits, and the elements of nature, then maybe they can rebuild society and make a fresh start of things, Rebuilding civilization and rescuing civilians would be emphasized heavily alongside survival.

The mechanics are another question. It would be an OSR "clone" system under the OGL, but rather than use an old TSR-era version of D&D, I am thinking of heavily modifying the open-license Anime SRD for this game. For those not in the know, the Anime SRD was released alongside the d20 System version of Big Eyes Small Mouth back in the early 2000's.

Waifu vs. Zombies would be an OSR game of a different sort.

Because when there's no more room in Hell, the weebs will walk the Earth.

The Renaissance Fair's In Town!

I apologize for the long gap in between blog posts, but hopefully this one will more than make up for the delay, because for this post, the Renaissance Fair is in town!

Now, let me preface this post with the statement that my interest in Renaissance Fairs and the culture surrounding them is very much a newfound one. I've only ever been to one Renaissance Fair-type event ever in my life, and it was a very small Medieval Fair event in Salem, Virginia back in around 2012 or 2013. The venue was okay but very small and mom-and-pop, not like the large carnival-like events that most people associate with the Renaissance Fair and the subculture surrounding it.

Mainly it was a bunch of small vendor tents and some people in period costume, not that much in terms of events or grandiosity. Now, that's not to say I didn't have a good time at the event, because I did. It's just that it was a small and localized affair, that's all.

Though I did buy a cool Tarot deck from there that day, so that is always a bonus.

But I mention the concept of the Renaissance Fair because I am interested in the scene as of late, and I do want to discuss how it is tangentially related to the main subject of this blog, which is role-playing games, of course.

The early history of Dungeons & Dragons has always been fascinating to me, it is what drew me into the OSR movement after all, and I really like the game as it existed in the 1970's and early 1980's. It is sort of worth mentioning that according to Gronan of Symmeria, an RPG Pub user and one of the surviving playtesters of Original Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1970's, D&D was apparently never meant to be an accurate simulation of Medieval society or even "Medieval-Authentic" fantasy, which should be obvious to anyone, but the interesting part is that D&D was supposedly partially influenced by the early Renaissance Fair culture of the 1960's and 1970's, taking on the more idyllic and whimsical view of Medieval and Renaissance Europe and combining it with the more obvious influences of High Fantasy and especially Sword & Sorcery fiction. And that caught my attention.

Most Renaissance Fairs fit into one of two categories. Either they are devoted to a very specific and idealized view of Elizabethan Britain, usually basing their aesthetics and culture off of 16th Century England or Scotland, as opposed to Italy or France, where most of the great innovations of the Renaissance actually took place.

Or they are a generic blend of Medieval, Renaissance, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and sometimes even fantasy tropes put into an idyllic and whimsical setting that is primarily focused on entertainment. In these Ren Fair settings, you may find a hodgepodge of Medieval and Renaissance archetypes, a collection of anachronistic stuff such as Vikings, Pirates, Belly-Dancers, Knights, or even fantasy archetypes such as Elves, Faeries, and Wizards all in one place, where fun and enjoyment is placed before adherence to historical accuracy.

I'd assume that any influences that Ren Fair culture may have had on D&D probably came from the latter category.

I wouldn't mind running a D&D game in the near future with the whimsical and idyllic view of Medieval and Renaissance archetypes often found in Renaissance Fairs, along with the slew of anachronisms blended together and of course, the fantasy elements as well.

Ideally, the best system for this type of game would be Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, either First or Second Edition, at least in my opinion.

Battle Century G and the Mecha Anime Genre

I apologize for the brevity of this post, but I have had a long day and I don't have much time this evening. But despite being busy, I promised a friend of mine that I would do a post about this and so i will.

Despite being a huge fan of anime, I'm a total newbie to the Mecha genre, even though that is one of the more popular anime genres out there. My only real experiences with it are the timeless classics of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gundam Wing,the latter of which I recently began to rewatch on Hulu.

See, overall, I know very little of the genre and its conventions and tropes.

However, a good friend of mine has introduced me to a tabletop role-playing game called Battle Century G and I've skimmed through the System Reference Document and I like what I see. Thanks to this friend, I have even got a chance to talk to the creator of Battle Century G, who has since given me free PDF copies of the full version of his game, which I will be giving a full and in-depth review of in a later post. For now, I will be discussing the base system and my first impressions of it.

The SRD is just the core mechanics and does not contain the setting fluff of the main game itself, but that is fine with me because I generally prefer to make my own settings anyway. From the first impressions of the game, it seems that Battle Century G is primarily focused on Mecha, but can be used for nearly any form of Military Sci-Fi. You could use the system not just for Mecha battles, but also for infantry, tanks, vehicles, and the like. Overall, I like that sort of potential.

The system itself is a point-buy system that has provisions for both pilot characters and the giant robots that they pilot. According to the game's creator, the goal of Battle Century G was to create a rules-medium system that had enough crunch to be a decent combat simulator and not just some story-game, but not be so heavy that the game becomes needlessly complicated.

In that regard, I'd say that he succeeded in creating a solid rules-medium system. Now, I have not gotten a chance to actually test the rules out myself, but based on what I have read, it seems good enough for me.

I'd personally love to use Battle Century G's mechanics for something along the lines of either a general Military Sci-Fi game involving an Alternate History where the Cold War never ended, or use it for an Army Men-themed campaign where the PC's are sapient toy soldiers, complete with tanks, vehicles, helicopters, and even more sci-fi stuff like robots and Mecha. I'm picturing something along the lines of a cross between Small Soldiers and Gundam Build Fighters in terms of style and theme.

While I currently have no plans for a Military Sci-Fi or Mecha themed campaign for the time being, if I ever get that urge to run something along those lines, then I would definitely use Battle Century G as my main system for such a thing.

Once I do an in-depth read of the full book and play the rules for myself, I will make more in-depth posts for both of those things.