Adventure Burner not so hot

I really wanted to like "Adventure Burner" it being the final book to complete my set of "Burning Wheel" (at least for now). It has been a bit of a "Unicorn" having missed out on it two years ago at Gencon. I spotted Thursday and put on my list of things to pick up, but wanted to scan the whole hall before committing. When I came back Friday it was "sold out". Therefore when I spotted it Origins a few weeks back, I snapped it up. It being one of the few purchases I made at Origins I had high hopes (see prior post for the Old School bust at Origins, of course at its heart Origins is a boardgame convention). Unfortunately Adventure Burner did not meet the standards of the other Burning Wheel books. Most of the other books have been thought provoking with a lot of open endedness, and hooks for adding in (Magic Burner is my favorite). Not Adventure Burner, Three adventures, a bunch of NPC to specific to be of much use, and rules errata for the main book (which should have been its own internet download, but may account for the high sales rate at Gencon). And the introductory adventure, the worst of the worst, an ugliness know to my old school buddies as the "loot fight".
*Spoiler*
A scenario of four adventurers uncovering a magic sword a dwarf, an elf, a mage and a ratman, each with his own use for the item. Can it be solved via wicked roleplaying, to avoid mass interparty slaughter? No according to the scenario this is not possible. Even though they suggest a reasonable solution in their explanation, they also explain that all the NPCs will act like dicks to prevent it. Their soultion the so-called "test of wits"(more like nit-wits) a dice rolling contest leaving one player the victor and every one else to go home crying, and not involving any actual thinking on anyone's part. All in all a sadistic adventure designed to give players a railroad ride down the mindfrack express. If this what your offering as an introduction, I'm giving your game a pass. I like my roleplaying about adventurers banding together to overcome the trials of a hostile world, not carving each other to bits. The other adventures? A small village were the guy who summons you to help actually wants to sacrifice you to his evil god (not one of my favorites), and a reasonably straight foward micro-dungeon which is far too short (Tony Dowling's map is however the highlight of this book).
*end spoiler*
 No other adventure hooks, no broad campaign settings, no dialogue what makes a good adventure anyways, just these. After reading this I had to go back and reread the other Burning Wheel books and see if I had missed the inner darkness in these as well. Nope, they are solid offerings and expansive in nature. I think the Burning Wheel mechanics are a solid game system (although the baroque style makes them a little hard to understand), and I actually think having character motivations makes for roleplaying opportunaties. However, I think that substituting "roll playing" for roleplaying and letting the dice descide how you act on you beliefs is a bad idea (might as well play a real dice game like craps and park you brain at the door). It is for advocating this sin that I must give "Adventure Burner" the thumbs down. Burning Wheel can be played just fine without it (OK you might want to peek at the rules revisions, but skip the rest of it).

I go down the well

OK, OK so I finally weakened and signed up for the Rappan Athuk Kickstarter. You can climb down the well too, but you better hurry because the Kickstarter ends Monday July 2nd 4:59pm EDT. I always swing hot and cold about these things. Giving money to strangers for things they haven't produced yet is risky buisiness. I am so glad that She-who-must-be-obeyed talked me out of funding Greg Stafford's "Hero Wars" as that game came out nothing like I wanted. I did sign on with Wolfgang Bauer for Halls of the Mountain King, but found the waiting for him to get it done torture, and found the concept of having to pay extra to comment on the procces a bit absurd. Although I like Wolfgang's stuff, I am happier buying it when it comes out instead of signing up in advance, besides bragging rights for collectable .pdfs is a bit limited (it's not like your friend are going to spot them on the virtual bookshelf and ask). I also signed up for Bill Webb's Slumbering Tsar. That was close to two years of waiting agrivated by having the installments show up for sale on Drivethrough RPG slightly before I got the e-mail to pick up my prepaid copy. However, he did actually send out the hardbound copy last month. So why did I sign up for this one?

1. I like Bill's stuff (I have been using the old Necromancer modules in my home game for several years)
2. Bill has a proven track of delevering on his promises (see Slumbering Tsar comments above)
3. There's too much cool swag added to the kickstarter to pass up
4. She-who-must-be-obeyed is still asleep and will never know...

So in my moment of weakness I have signed up to re-buy a dungeon I have purchased twice already. Am I signing up for your kickstarter? Not unless I have bought stuff from you before and liked it, you have a proven track record of finishing stuff and delivering it close to ontime, and 800 of my internet friends jump on first to drive the swag pile into a irristable heap.

P.S. was severly temped by the hand drawn maps, but it was a litte too much chedder for me to swing

Dungeon Crawl Classics the good, the bad, the funky

Just picked up my copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics. Although I did not find it at a booth at Origins, as I had hoped for (Origins was pretty much OSR deprived, I only found one booth with much OSR stuff), my local game store got it in the next week. My reaction is a bit bittersweet. I think it is a perfectly playable game, many people will have a great hoot with one-offs using this system. However it incorporates a large dose of random lethality that will inhibit long term character development, and leave many characters, not retired but so gimped up as to be no fun to play. The good is that it is a large book at a reasonable price, it is published under the open gaming license (yay!!! that's a big plus in my book) and play could be a hoot. The bad limited character classes and few options to make them unique (although this is typical OSR), your character could explode,  randomness instead of game balance (more on this below). The funky, using different size dice instead of changing target numbers, arcane check charts for casting spells. Both these ideas are definitely out-of-box thinking, but look like they'll work.

Thing that worries me the most is the randomness. Randomness in itself is not bad. However random tables with small but finite catastrophic occurrences tend to tilt out of balance quickly (subject to both the long tail and black swan events for you economic statistic junkies). Those players who always role well will prosper under this system, folk like with often sub-average luck are screwed.

Carcosa!?

I have marked this review with the chess symbol for gambit (!?). I picked up Carcosa the new hardback edition up at my local game store. It falls to me being employed and relatively well payed to buy stuff at the store to ensure that our Thursday night table does not given to the Magic players, so I am always on the lookout for small press stuff, the owner knows this and stocks things other than mainstream. I found the writing very inspiring for those interested running weird Lovecraftian game. I am not enough of an affectionatio of the Cthulhu mythos to know how much information is new to this book and how much comes from the novels, but this book exudes eerie creepiness. However, the Thursday night crowd was disappointed that the book was marked with an adult content sticker due to human sacrifice themes rather than actual sex. It is nicely illustrated with pen and ink drawings and different sections of the book are tinted with grayish green and purplish pink. I can  definitely use the monster list, and think the spacee alien weapons, and random robot tables may come in handy as well. I am less down with the Sorcerer class having to haul around a large quantity of different colored human sacrifices (there are 13 different colored human races including the new colors of jale and ulfire, as well as dolm which is a combination of ulfire and blue). There is also the problem that the Socorer has a significant risk of being eaten by whatever he conjurers and the monsters are going to bash his skull in long before he completes his 5 minute ritual. The random roll-up table for what sided dice to roll for your hit dice seemed overly chaotic, even though I did understand the authors statement that actually gives the party a shot against those 59 hit dice, because the monsters could be using 4 sided this time. I doubt I will be using the campaign map or the sample single hex sandbox, but some of the encounters from these may sneak their way in to other things I run. Luckily for me the author has given permission to use his book any way I see fit. In summary not a good pick for those on a limited budget, but filled with ideas to riff off of; "Old schoolly" in the way of the Ardiun Grimoire and the Book of Ebon bindings.

Diablo III so far

Well finally exorcised the installer demon and got the game running last night (it took downloading the installer files from a third party site). Unfortunately it is playing like a dumbed down Diablo II. My favorite character class (Amazon) is missing, and rather than have a skill tree my Barbarian seems to have Hobson's choice for skills (at this level you get skill x take it or leave it). Not sure what Blizzard was thinking, but I think they may have jumped the shark on this one.

Doom of future past

Well I was going going to post about Journe comparing the first edition to later ones and provide some links. Being one of the few people on the planet with a first edition Journe, I can do that. She-who-must-be-obeyed picked me up a copy for my birthday at Gencon when it first came out. Most of the awesome Miles Teves artwork (the best thing about Journe) has been reproduced in later editions. The less said about the awful Journe computer game the better. Then I thought I'd post about writing about my own roleplaying game (I am going to write one real soon.or not); how I thought that classes, feats, powers, and skills were a bit redundant; and how my game would have only skills and powers. She-who-must-be-obeyed suggest using a skill tree, so I hunted up an image of that weird sphere grid from Final Fantasy X (my favorite skill tree, you can be anything you want, its just going to cost you). I will post my dungeon based on the maps in the book "the Complete Valley of Kings" once I get them drawn. I was going to post She-must-be-obeyed notes on Arthurian campaign setting based what we know about dark age Britian, but she tells me her 30 pages of handwritten notes are not ready yet. I did dig out Dungeon Masters Guides for 1st, 2nd, and 3.5 editions so she could work on her random treasure table table based on stuff found in dark age hordes. Unfortunately the copy of Diablo III I picked up at the Gamestop yesterday is calling "play me, Play Me!, PLAY ME!!!" so none of this other stuff will get done for a while....

Boy did I call it. Past midnight in Ohio and I still haven't gotten past the setup bug. Guess I should have blogged instead.

H is Halls of Undermountain

O.K. so I am not really doing the alphabet thing, I am lucky to to post once a week let alone 26 posts in a month (By the way I did think the Tekumal project was doing an awsome job with their alphabet post introduction to the world of Empire of the Petal Throne, but then they have a big weatlh of marterial to draw from). I wanted to instead post my review of the new 4th edition supplement "Halls of Undermountain". One might think that this yet another attempt by WoTC to cash in on past glories by slapping the name of some old favorite on random shlock to boost sales (Witness the re-release of "The Tomb of Horrors", yes the tomb is in there but its EMPTY!?). However  "Halls of Undermountain" is actually pretty good and somewhat true to the end-of-first edition orginal . It contains the entire first level of Undermoutain and 79 keyed rooms for encounters (unlike the little tiny piece of undermountain detailed in the 3.5 edtion "Return to Undermountain). It even has RANDOM TABLES to fill the rooms which are not keyed. Although I have not yet pulled out the old first edition boxed to do a room by room comparision, the new encounters do include many mysticaly wacky but deadly tricks and traps that are characteristic of the first edition. Unfortunately it also contains some of the "no, you can't dissamble the trap and rebuild to use it against montser, because it only works in this room, Why? because the DM says so." I found so objectionable in the first edition. It has also gone back to a old school format for presenting the encounters, by simply giving a page reference in the monster vault for each monster in the encounter (thank God, if they had tried to lay out 79 enounters with a battle map and detailed stat block for everyone this book would be 500+ pages and weigh a ton). For those who like plot there are three adventures strung together. However, these plots are accomplished by roaming the dungeon, and there is very little to keep the players from wandering off on their own. Unfortunately once they hit fifth level their ability to wander down to the 2nd level is limited, because this supplement only cantains level one. Given WoTC production schedule, I will have to wait a least six months for 2nd level, and probably and enternity for the twisted caverns of level 4 (I have been waiting for the twisted caverns ever since they decided to jump to 5th level in the second boxed set, I suppose I could write my own twisted caverns since there is actually part of a map in "Return to Undermountain", but I have always wondered what Ed Greenwood put in his.) All in all I think that "Halls of Undermountain" is one the best 4th edtion supplements I own, and I am eagerly awaiting the chance to try it out on some unsupecting victims er. I mean players ;)