As God and Heinlein intended.....

SpaceX launched several Orbcomm Satellites in their return to flight today. And SpaceX added a little something special.

Landing video

A rocket today landed on its tail as God and Robert Heinlein intended.

Congrats to everybody at SpaceX.

Additional Note:
One valuable thing about this is that by being able to return the first stage to land, the engineers will be able to examine the rocket without it having been dunked in seawater. Seawater is highly corrosive so this will be a big boost for SpaceX and others in improving the quality and performance of rockets.

Making GURPS more approachable.

+Douglas Cole wrote a nice post on a Introductory GURPS  over on Gaming Ballistic which is a part of larger debate on the SJ Games forum on how to grow the fanbase of GURPS. Douglas has links to the relevant threads in his post.

Since the early 2000s it was apparent that Munchkin was rapidly become way more successful than GURPS. With the number of employees that SJ Games could reasonably have it quickly became apparent that GURPS would get the short end when it came to development time.

Eventually new products started being released as a pipeline for PDFs was established. Then the success of the OGRE kickstarter happened and that was that for a while. Now the PDF product line has been re-established and release are now coming out on a regular basis.

All of this understandable and GURPS could have weathered it. However GURPS is now no longer the market leader when it come universal generic toolkit RPGs. Games like Savage Worlds and Fate have successfully taken over much of GURP's niche in the larger industry. GURPS still up there as shown by the few market surveys but Fate and Savage Worlds have performed just as well or better. Remember at one time GURPS was counted as the fourth or fifth most popular RPG in the industry.

Now some argue that the reason that GURPS suffers from being too complex and baroque. My opinion what propels Savage Worlds and Fate is not simplicity but a variety of approaches. Yes a lot of Fate and Savage World products have a minimalist approach but there are lot of products that have rules subsystems that are very detailed like Starblazer Adventures for Fate.

And because GURPS has been resource starved it doesn't enjoy that variety. There been attempts like the excellent Dungeon Fantasy line, Monster Hunters, Starships, etc. There are some very interesting alternatives buried in the issues of Pyramid. But in my view these efforts are not enough. To much of the PDF releases take the easy route and cater to the interest of the fanbase or the authors. Yes they are still uniformly of high quality but that that route leads to GURPS become a specialty product like Harn, Tekemul, or Glorantha.

The foundation of my opinion is the fact that when my group  ( +Tim Shorts +Dwayne Gillingham ) started group, we used the 2nd edition boxed set. In in the course of time we gave our original copies to other gamers in our area and got new copies. This was very successfully in roping in other GURPS players. But starting with 3rd edition this approach did not work.

Now why is this? In my view the 3rd edition were a definite improvement while keeping the game largely the same. The same with the 4th edition rules being an improvement over the 3rd edition rules. What 2nd edition had going for it was presentation.

Then as it is now the vast majority of roleplayers play D&D styles fantasy campaigns. Maybe not with the D&D rules but there are orcs, dungeons, dragons, and the lost. True alternatives are few and far between. With GURPS 2nd edition it was very clear how to run a D&D style fantasy campaign from the core rulebook. Yes you could run science fiction campaigns but the various list were obviously skewed toward the fantasy genres.

The other thing was the fact that while 2nd edition had a fantasy skew wasn't D&D with a different set of rules. It was deadlier, more realistic, and above all you could easily see how to make the exact type of fantasy character you want to play. Partly because while GURPS 2nd had all the lists that 3rd and 4th edition had there were far fewer advantages, disadvantages, and skills you had to root through to understand how to create characters and run the game.

Buried under the all the lists of GURPS 4th edition is still the same game that 2nd edition was. So it seems to me if you want have GURPS be more approachable then make a new presentation of GURPS core with similar details to that of 2nd edition.

Now GURPS 2nd edition had some flaw, you had to buy a separate book for magic. Granted it was only 64 pages and not that expensive compared to buying the three AD&D 2nd edition hardcovers, but it still didn't make for a complete fantasy RPG. Why? Because GURPS pretty much always had a problem with monster manual. Something that dozens of other game system could manage GURPS never could quite manage. Yes at the tail end of 3rd edition it a really great collection of monsters but scattered across a dozen books. The original bestairy and Fantasy Beastiary were pretty poor in my opinion especially for fantasy. Today the DF line has some excellent monsters but again they are scattered among several products. My view is that that what GURPS should is make a GURPS Complete Fantasy books with all the elements that other Fantasy RPG including a decent listing of monsters, magic, and treasure.

But it should try to ape the OSR and come out with a GURPS D&D clone like Dungeon Fantasy is. No what is should do is embrace the fantasy that was in 2nd edition. A world of 100  to 150 pt characters struggling to survive on adventures to win fame and glory. Where are monsters but their human foes are the worst enemies the adventurers face. That way GURPS Complete Fantasy will have a distinct niche to call it own. Then the DF line will then serve as support for people who want to go into a maze with monster inhabiting room filled with treasure. GURPS should not stop there but come out with GURPS Complete Space, and GURPS Complete Horror.

Now I started advocating this several years ago. Since then Sean Punch and the stable of GURPS authors still kept on producing good material. Among those material was a article in Pyramid about pointless GURPS. This article builds on the ideas of the GURPS Starship and turns into options for character creations.

GURPS Starships works by given spacecraft 20 slots and presenting list of options to fill those slots. Each of those options are built with the unpublished GURPS 4th edition Vehicles as well as the basic hull. But GURPS gamers doesn't see those points or the details. Each option is listed with how many slots it takes up so all you have to so it keep adding stuff until you fill up 20 slots. A far simpler task than what GURPS Vehicle has the gamer do with volume, and mass.

Sean Punch's article in Pyramid does the same with characters. It offer several lists for Attirbutes, Backgrounds, Occupation, etc. Pick from a handful of lists without any worry about the calculating the exact amount of points. The result is a complete GURPS character. Best of all if you have a player who wants to go the traditional point based approach you can let him do that and it work just fine. So I would based the character creation of the GURPS Complete line around this pointless system. Then offer a designer note PDF detailing the point breakdown of the options for gamers who like the traditional points based approach. Like Ascending AC for classic D&D, I view pointless + notes as a win-win for the entire fanbase. The same thing that been done in the past but presented in a more approachable form.

Last I don't see the resource shortage for GURPS easing up anytime soon for SJ Games. They are going to have to decide whether they want to have GURPS be a niche game for at least the next decade or open GURPS up and let the fan base direct the future of GURPS via a open content license. Personally what I would recommend given what we know Steve Jackson feelings is to give GURPS a license similar to the OGL but with the restriction that it can only be published at one site with SJ Game taking a royalty out of every sale.

Whether that site is Warehouse23 or a special arrangement with RPGNow/DriveThruRPG is up to SJ Games. But restricting it to one site would allow them keep control of the third party market even with a otherwise open license to produce content.

So what is the situation for my group now. Well we have turned to Green Ronin's Fantasy Age and currently exploring the possibilities of that system. We like the fact it is 3d6 roll high. The stunt die system over a nice way of handling critical. It is somewhat skill based although it does have classes. It allows for deadly combat but still give a place for D&D style monster. I will do a fuller review later on.

I really do hope SJ Games figures out a better way of making GURPS presentable.

Majestic Wilderland Monster Stat Block

So we been trying Fantasy Age by Green Ronin and have a lot of fun. When +Tim Shorts ran his adventure he liked their idea for a stat block and figured out how to make using his word processor and desktop publishing software. Then he got my draft for the monsters section of the Majestic Wilderlands RPG I am working on. A week later he suggested that I come with a stat block format for the monsters and items I was creating.

Groan.

My first major publishing gig was adapting Judges Guild's Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor to DnD 3.5. And I grew to despise creating 3.5 style stat blocks. For Scourge of the Demon Wolf I came up with a one line stat block similar to how TSR formatted their stat blocks in ADnD 1st edition.

But on further reflection I realized that Tim had a point.

For example I don't think this is particularly clear.

It wasn't a major problem with Scourge because the stat blocks were mostly for NPCs and there were only a handful of monsters none of them with a complicated array of abilities.

So I mess around and finally came up with this which Tim liked.

Which I feel is a lot easier to use as a reference during play. And one of my major selling points for the Majestic Wilderlands RPG is that it focuses on usability at the table as opposed to being just a reference for prep.

And it is not without precendent in classic DnD as the first edition Monster Manual also had a multi-line stat block for each entry. So with this done, I went through the monster and did a second pass at editing along with reformatting all the stats into the above format.

You can see a sample selection of monsters in PDF form here.

In general what I did was went through the Swords and Wizardry text and turned any description of abilities into a item on a list. Most monsters are the same as how they are in the Swords and Wizardry core rules but reformatted. I also came up with new flavor text for most monster to reflect how they exist in my Majestic Wilderlands. I like Tim's idea of harvesting monsters so most monsters have something of value that can be harvested including the magical substance known as viz.

I did make some changes to how Swords and Wizardry, I turned percentages into a d20 roll with the same odds as they were all in 5% increments anyway. I did away bonuses and minuses to saves and attacks in favor of DnD 5e style favored and hindered rolls. (Favored = take the best out of 2d20, Hindered = take the worst out of 2d20). Also if a monster has memorized spells I gave them a typical list of spells. I included one of the Lich's stat blocks in the PDF as an example of that.

Sometime I had a new intrepetation of a classic monster. I included an example of that in the sample PDF for Ceiling Lurker, Piercers, and Trapper Beasts. I re-imagined them as variations of land dwelling manta-rays who can camouflage themselves as stone or natural surfaces.

So now I am back to working on NPCs using a stat block similar to the one I came up for monsters. Note also this is what I call my lunch hour project where I bust out the laptop and get in a half-hour of writing while eating lunch at work. So it will be another few weeks for the next installment to be done and a few months before it's complete. My hobby-time at home is filled with completing paid map projects like the City-State of the Invincible Overlord and others.

Computer Crash

Generally I do my own assembly of the computers I use. Starting in 1989 I had a succession of computer that I upgraded with bit and pieces over the years. One thing I learned is to do is store my creative stuff on multiple hard drives along with off-line backups. First Floppies, then CDs, USB Flash Drives and now I added a 100 GB of Google Drive into the mix.

Well last week the hard drive where I store all my programs died. I tweak my setup to work the way I want it to work so I hate when this happens. I have to reinstall everything and dig out serial numbers and passwords and so forth and so on. The only silver lining is that my working folders are on a separate hard drive and my games are on a third hard drive. And with Steam I already have everything downloaded so the first time I run a game it will install what it needs and I am off playing!

Well I decided this was a good time to do the upgrade to Windows 10. It was quick and easy. Has the fastest boot time I seen of any windows version to date. It also seems to be able to do this to the point where it actually connected to the network. Windows 7 got you to the login quickly but sometime it took a few minutes to finalize your network connection.

All my old drivers work including some off-beat one I use for my Wacom Tablet and 3D Mouse. For those who are interested the Table I use when I do maps and want to draw rivers, coasts, and roads. It has absolute positioning so it wrote more like a pen on paper than a mouse on a screen. The 3D mouse I use for when I run Orbiter Space Simulator or the Kerbal Space Program. I have a Logitech Joystic for attitude control. I use the 3D mouse for translation as it has not only up and down, left and right, but push in and pull out. (And twist, and it tilts four ways but I don't normally use those).

One thing I really liked about Windows 10 is that you can have two different images for dual monitors. I have one normal monitor. The other monitor is rotated 90 degrees into portrait mode. I can write or edit and see a full page at a time. 

Here what the new background looks like.

What you do is copy all the images you want to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows
Do a multi-select by selecting one of the images and then select the other while holding down the CTRL key.
Then right click and select Set as desktop Background.
Then will have multiple images for multiple monitors.

How I made a Dungeon Part I

On October 3rd I ran a Fantasy Age adventure for my friends Tim, and Dan. Another friend unfortunately wasn't able to make it due to being sick. The general idea is that we get together about once a month to play RPGs and board games face to face. This time it was my turn and after talking about it, I agreed to run a Fantasy Age adventure.

Fantasy Age is intriguing to use as we are looking at an alternative to GURPS. Because Fantasy Age uses a 3d6 roll high system and has a moderate level of detail for combat and character, we have been giving it and Dragon Age a whirl. One nice thing about Fantasy Age/Dragon Age is how they handle "criticals". When you roll you use two dice of one color and one dice of another color. That third dice is called a stunt dice. If you roll a success and two of the three dice numbers match, then you are eligable for stunts. Stunts can do extra damage, allow for increase effects, and a number of other benefits. Stunts are prices in stunt points. The number of stunt points you get is based on the number rolled on the stunt die.

Outside of this the system has a lot of similarity with playing with 3.X/d20/Pathfinder with 3d6 and starting at 3rd level. But where d20 provides options through feats, in Fantasy Age it is the stunts that mixes things up. After playing it a couple of times, I find myself liking it. The cost in game play is limited to looking up costs on a short table. It adds a lot of unpredictability and tactics without complicating the rest of the system.

So now I have to prepare an adventure. I elect to keep it simple and run a dungeon underneath the City State of the Invincible Overlord. The hook as such is that during a recent revolt an entrance to a forgotten sanctum of a powerful mage was uncovered by the crash of a blue dragon. The plan is to start out the players at the famous Seahawk Tavern on Regal Street, subject them to a riot/tavern brawl, discover a map clue to the sanctum, have the dragon crash, and they find the entrance. A bit heavy handed but I felt since this was a one-shot, for now, it was a decent way to get the party to the entrance of the dungeon.

This series of posts is about my efforts to create the dungeon.

First off the concept. My view is that dungeons are like any other locales in having a history and a reason for being. In this case, the dungeon was the sanctum of a mage (think 16th level) from two centuries ago. That it has been looted in the past but not completely. What left is the equivalent of a 1st level dungeon for Fantasy Age.

The mage, Aldrous was a member of the Guild of Arcane Lord in City-State and an opponent of the Guild leader Salm-Lorin who eventually became an Overlord of the City-State. Salm-Lorin is known to history as the Tyrant and his reign was looked on as a dark period in City-State's history. The consequence for the dungeon that part of Aldrous' preparations for his final confrontation, which he lost, was sealing the entrance so it couldn't be found except by him.

However I decided the dungeon would have a second entrance to the sewers which was the reason it was able to be looted in the intervening years. The sewers always been a big part of my City-State campaigns so I figured they should be incorporated.

With that in mind I decided the Dungeon will be in two parts. One would be an abandoned barracks area connected to the basement entrance and that it would be mostly stocked with vermin. The back half with the sewer entrance was the actual sanctum of the mage.

Next Post will be on how I designed and drew the map.

The One where I get GUMSHOE

My friend +Tim Shorts is a big fan of GUMSHOE and used it effectively to run a fun supernatural campaign using the Esoterrorists rules.

And I never really got the point of the system. The campaign yes but not the system we were using. The who "find your clue automatically part" was throwing me off. I understood the problem caused by missed dice rolls when running campaign around solving mysteries however GUMSHOE's solution was going completely over my head.

Then I found that Pelgrane Press had a System Reference Document under the Open Game License. It is stripped of any setting or genre specific reference and lays out the system in a way that I finally got it.

The key was this sentence on page 28

Assuming that they look in the right place and apply appropriate abilities to the task, GUMSHOE ensures that the heroes get the basic clues they need to move through the story.

Now I can see how the character can still miss a clue or even only score a partial success. You still have to be in the right place with the right ability. Got it.

One thing I found useful in recent years is to learn how to play and referee systems that are out of my usual range. I find that broaden the range of techniques that I can bring to bear on the campaigns that I run with the systems that I like best (GURPS, Hero System, ODnD, Traveller, etc). One of my weakness is running procedural mysteries like the ones found in Sherlock Holmes.

GURPS Mysteries has a lot of great advice and is probably the best book on the subject in the hobby. Given that people like Robin Laws was involved I though it was important to figure it out.

And I am glad I did, as it solidifies my thoughts on the subject and reinforces what I been developing over the past decade for my sandbox campaign. Basically I assume a certain level of competency if the player has the skills or the levels and will deliberately give more information about a situation than otherwise would be called for by a strict interpretation of ability/skill rolls.

That failed rolls on an attempt doesn't mean automatic failure. There will be a negative consequence like it taking longer or something break. I reserve utter failure to critical failures like rolling a 1 in DnD or a 17, or 18 in GURPS. I use the traditional succeed/fail if the character in a time critical situation like combat.

My day job involves supporting customers using my company's metal cutting machine. I observe that utter failure to solve a problem or implement a feature are very rare. Where things differ is how long it takes to solve a problem or to implement a feature. That the best employees at where I work are able to solve things faster because of their high skill in a particular area. So for me the skill roll is more of a question of "How long does it take the character to do X." Then a utter failure.

As for GUMSHOE the system is a bit too lite for my taste, but I find the advice on structuring investigations and mysteries very useful to stand alongside what is said in GURPS Mysteries.

Blackmarsh and ACKS

Koewn over on the Crowbar and Brick blog is writing a series of post on using Blackmarsh with Adventurer, Conqueror, King.

I pointed out that I have this Map available if he needs more room. If you use Dwimmermount swap out the southland rectangle out for the Southland of Dwimmermount.

Click for full size