Ghost Hackers is now on DriveThru

So, some of you may remember that last year, around the time of the release of the new Ghostbusters film, I put together a little game of ghost hunting using The Black Hack, called it Ghosthackers, and made the file available here.

Well, the cover, as you probably know if you've seen it, stood to be a bit problematic if I ever wanted to more "officially" release the game.  So, I did what anybody in my situation would do:  I asked a talented friend to do something for me for free!  With new art for a front and back cover and a little bit of internal tweaking (oh, and a space in the title), the game is now available for download (free!) on OneBookShelf.

You can click here to find it on DriveThruRPG!

Traditionally, I've hit up my buddy JR Mounts for this kind of thing (see, for example, In Bleakest Midwinter...), but I figured I should spread around my abuse of friendships, so I contacted my friend Timothy Paul, an Indianapolis artist that I was lucky enough to meet when I went to GenCon a couple of years ago.  I think his stuff his just awesome (you should check out his Facebook page sometime to get an idea of his style)...some of his surreal work looks like it should be on the cover of Dungeon Crawl Classics modules, in my opinion.

At any rate, I'm very grateful for his help and am making a mental note to make sure I abuse his friendship make use of his talents in Light City before he's snapped up to do too many other art projects...!

The first annual Monstrous Matters year-end awards...

...because I may as well pretend like my opinions are that important!

2016 is about to close out.  Here are some random reflections.

First, the non-gaming stuff:

WTF Event of the Year - The United States Presidential Election

I get that some bad stuff went down this year.  The entertainers who died got a lot of coverage.  On the world stage, the situation in Syria is pretty depressing.  And on a personal level, there was a tragedy in my hometown that people in a community that small aren't used to dealing with.

But when people around here talk about 2016 just needing to end, I can't help but think that a lot of it comes back to the U.S. election.  For what it showed us about American politics.  For what it showed us about lingering division in the country.  For what it showed us about the power of media (which we'll be sorting out for a long time to come).  And from my perspective (although certainly not from the perspective of a number of people I know and love), for the outcome.

Seriously, America.  What in the actual fuck.

There's really not much to say that hasn't been said many times over.  From where I stand, this was clearly the event that dominated the year.

From @DungeonsDonald.

New Song of the Year - Michael Bublé's "Nobody But Me"

Now, on to a happier note.  I'll admit that I don't really hear enough popular music to make a truly educated choice here, but when I hear a song that blows me away like this one did (and in such a genre-agnostic way), it oughta be recognized:

I couldn't find an easy link to the performance on The Tonight Show, which is the one I first heard, and which actually got to feature Black Thought of The Roots in the rap breakdown (rather than the trumpet solo above, which is also great), as on the album.  If you can find that one, it's definitely worth checking out!

Song That Would Have Been New Song of the Year, Hands Down, If It Had Been Released Several Months Later - Kendrick Lamar's "Alright"

Thank you to Atlanta community radio for letting me hear this song.  I make no claim to the emotions expressed therein, but I know they held a lot of power in the political climate we experienced this year.  It's also just a great song.

And now, for the games!

New Game of the Year - The Black Hack

In the OSR community, new games drop on a pretty regular basis.  It's kind of what we do, and it's a trend that lends itself to spreading one's attention all over the place.  So, when a game like David Black's The Black Hack comes along and gets people brewing and buzzing with such a central focus, it's worth paying attention to it.  Heck, I couldn't resist hacking it myself.

It also works as game, and it's a lot of fun!

RPG of the Year - Lamentations of the Flame Princess

James Raggi's game of Weird Fantasy is one of the real success stories of the OSR.  My buddy Ted has been running an awesome campaign using a bunch of the published LotFP adventures, which has helped to keep me connected to roleplaying in a busy year and given me a pretty good feel (I think) for the game's themes.  Check it out (you probably already did, long ago)!

Non-RP Game of the Year - Bohnanza

Yeah, these are just personal awards, so this one takes the prize by sitting idle in my game collection for about 15 years before making a leap to family favorite when it was pulled out of the closet on a whim this year.  I think this one has great potential as a "gateway game."  You gotta love "The Bean Game!"

Bohnanza on BGG

So...there we are!  Despite some struggles earlier in the year, and the stresses of the fall (as noted above), I have to say that I've actually had a pretty outstanding end of the year, and I hope you have, too!

Big thanks to all who have stopped by this little blog and become friends over the course of 2016.  I really appreciate being a part of your community.  Best of luck to everyone, and I'll see you in 2017!

Playtesting The Stack Hack (Part 2)

Or, The Continuing Adventures of Sir Mulligan

Here is (finally) the result of my initial playtest of card-based dungeoneering for The Black Hack.  The first post can be found here, but to quickly summarize:

(1)  I took a stack of CCG cards - mostly locations from Tomb Raider and monsters from Magic: The Gathering - and shuffled them together to form a "dungeon."

(2)  I made a simple, level 3 character (Sir Mulligan) to send into the dungeon (attempting to obtain the Vitality Salve).

(3)  I saw what happened.

Here's how it went (with apologies for my low-quality pics!)...

Sir Mulligan entered the first room (an Open Cavern) to find no enemies waiting for him.  He did, however, find a mystical grub (that would be a Butod from the Survivor CCG) and ate it to gain +1 to STR for the day.  Good start.

Mulligan could continue in any of three directions.  He headed north only to hit a Dead End.

Luckily, the room was empty, so there were no hindrances to heading back into the Open Cavern and moving east.

The Narrow Crossing found there was a bit more dangerous.  Drawn before the room card...

Four minotaurs would be tough to face.  However, there was a random event before combat - some destruction at the hands of the storm god Keranos...

This Intervention dealt 3d8 damage to Mulligan; a pretty good roll led to losing just 8 total, which wiped out his armor for the time being.  It also killed three of the minotaurs, leaving just a single (weakened) Mogis's Chosen to fend off:

Now, most of the minotaurs in the dungeon have haste, which I decided would give Mulligan disadvantage on initiative rolls.  Not the case with Mogis's Chosen, however!  Mulligan was able to take care of him with a single action and continue moving east.

(At this point, it occurred to me that I should use a token of some sort to mark Mulligan's current location.)

Mulligan entered a Hidden Corner, only to find...

That's pretty blurry, I know...it's two items, the Claw of the Cave Bear (boosts damage) and a Refreshing Elixir (restores health), guarded by the standard minotaur grunt, a Younghorn:

The Elixir indicates that another card is to be drawn before we take actions.  If it's another room, I'll shuffle it back in.  It could be another item or enemy, though...

...and it turns out to be the Vitality Salve!  This was the goal of Mulligan's quest, so he faced off with the Younghorn, and...

...actually defeated him pretty easily.  Mulligan didn't even take any more damage, in fact, and so he gathered up his loot...

...and headed back to the entrance.

Mulligan brought the Salve to his fallen comrade, as instructed.  He still has an Elixir and Claw of the Cave Bear to aid him on his next adventure.

What I Learned

This first test was actually pretty fun(!) but ended up being way too easy.  I know that the nature of this exercise is going to keep the difficulty variance rather high, though, so it'll take some experimentation to see how common this outcome is.

Also, it didn't occur to me until after the event that maybe a saving throw should be possible for events like the Intervention of Keranos.  Whether that should be for PCs only...or for all creatures...I'll have to think about (and welcome any outside thoughts!).

Sir Mulligan should be adventuring again soon...

Playtesting The Stack Hack

Or, Introducing...the Adventures of Sir Mulligan

I was able to take a few minutes recently to get in some quick playtesting of the card-based dungeoneering idea that I mentioned I'd like to try for The Black Hack...the adventure card game type thing that I've codenamed The Stack Hack.

It was really just a little proof-of-concept exercise, to start things at a very basic level and see how I can build them.

I rolled up a quick character and advanced him to Level 3 (seemed like a good level for the enemies I had in mind)...

The Defender is just a Warrior variant that I'm using...simplified from the TBH version (which may not be necessary, but I'm trying to do this as simply as possible...).  Basically, the Warrior loses the healing surge and drops to a d8 hit die in exchange for frontloading some HP.

To make the rooms of the dungeon, I grabbed a handful of the "vanilla" (nothing special to them other than maybe being a save point) location cards from the Tomb Raider CCG:

Then, I pulled some monsters from the one Magic: The Gathering challenge deck that I got from the Theros block.  The challenge decks are complete decks that essentially "play themselves" according to a set of rules, allowing you to play solo against them or team up with friends.  I have the Battle the Horde deck, which pits you against an army of minotaurs, like this guy:

The challenge decks are really a play on the casual MTG variant known as Horde Magic; this group of minotaurs seemed like a great place to get some ready-made, standardized enemies.  To fit TBH, I decided that I would treat the minotaurs' Power values (3 for the Goreseeker) as their HD when they attack Sir Mulligan, and their Toughness (2 for the Goreseeker) as HD when Mulligan attacks them.  (Just about any MTG creature ought to be useable this way.)  I decided that the Haste ability (which in MTG means a creature can act a turn earlier) would give Sir Mulligan disadvantage when rolling initiative vs. them.

Ten total minotaurs, in five varieties (with a majority being the very basic Minotaur Younghorn) sounded like a good place to start.

There were a couple of other alterations made to streamline for the card game.  I'd like to deal with damage to monsters in terms of d8's only.  That is, rather than rolling for damage, I'll just treat a monster with 2 HD of toughness as going down after two hits from my character (a reason to have variant classes that only deal damage in multiples of d8, by the way...).  I would ignore armor values for monsters and simplify the mental math of damage dice by just doubling the value of their power HD and using a die of that many sides.  So, for example, the 3-power Goreseeker above will deal d6 damage.  I won't have any monsters over 6 HD in power for this adventure, anyway, so it'll max out at a d12 for now.

So...what else should be in the dungeon?  This card from the Battle the Horde deck seemed like a good target:

The quest would be for Sir Mulligan to invade the lair of the minotaurs and retrieve the Vitality Salve in order to revive a fallen comrade.  I decided that if the Salve came up in the first two rooms, it would get shuffled back into the dungeon deck to find later.

I filled out the dungeon with a few health boosts, including this one from the MTG deck...

...and added in a "magic item" that might be fun to come across (this one's a number booster from the Tomb Raider CCG):

Finally, I grabbed two "event" type card from Battle the Horde to be a extra surprises that MIGHT occur.  Here's one of them:

(That "3 damage" from Keranos, God of Storms, would actually be 3d8...easy to track for the minotaurs and something that would have a pretty big impact on Sir Mulligan.)

So, with everything gathered, I sleeved all the cards and shuffled them together to form the dungeon deck.  This first run would have 31 total cards...14 rooms, 10 monsters, 2 events, and 5 items (including the target of the scenario).  A few practice shuffles demonstrated that the proportions might be decent.  The plan was, when moving into a new dungeon room, to turn over cards from the top of the deck until a new room card was hit.  This room would be placed in position, and everything turned over before reaching it would be what was found in the room.

Ah...so how did it work out?  This is already running kind of long, isn't it...?  I'll get the results posted soon...

Monster Monday: Ghosthackers

Double the value* in this post!  First of all, here's the highly anticipated** and critically acclaimed*** RPG Ghosthackers, released into the wild today in anticipation of the new Ghostbusters film that hits theaters this week.  GH is (another) hack of David Black's excellent The Black Hack, with inspiration from the old West End Games Ghostbusters RPG.  It's as unlicensed as a proton pack and absolutely free in digest form (ready for booklet printing!).

Click here for the PDF from Google Drive!

EDIT:  And now, there's a version of the game featuring art by my buddy Tim Paul.  You can click here to get it from RPGNow!

Also, it's Monster Monday!  I like to take these days as a chance to stat up a beastie of some sort, so today, I'll take a quick look at everybody's favorite green ghost, the incomparable Slimer..."statted" (however minimal that has to be) for TBH-styled games...

Slimer
aka Green Ghost, Onionhead, Little Spud
Class 5 Full Roaming Vapor
HD 3
Attacks: 1 slime (d4 damage)

Slimer has undergone a surprising amount of character development for an ectoplasmic entity.  While gaining recognition as one of the Ghostbusters' first adversaries, he goes on to become essentially a pet, and later a true member, of the team.  Officially, he is allowed to freely roam as a part of the Ghostbusters' paranormal research.

As his name suggests, Slimer is known for the pale green ectoplasmic goo he leaves on solid matter upon moving through it.  He is able to physically interact with such material at will.  Usually, only supernatural means such as spells or magical weapons are able to harm Slimer, although some technologies such as proton packs also have this capability.

Slimer has a voracious appetite.

* Still not actually a lot of value.

** By me.

*** By my Mom.

More TBHacking...

Continuing with my brainstorming on The Black Hack...

I'm a BIG fan of card games.  They're what brought me into the hardcore gaming hobby, and there's still very little in the world of gaming that I enjoy as much as getting in a few rounds of Magic or playing a game of Bohnanza with the family.  I've long looked for a good way to blend my love of OSR roleplaying with my love for slinging cardboard.  The simplicity of characters in TBH (especially the lack of a need for stat modifiers) has triggered a hope that the key lies therein.

I know the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is pretty popular these days, and I'll look at its setup for some inspiration, but a bigger influence comes from a less likely source:

Believe it or not, the old Tomb Raider CCG is a really good game!  It can be played solitaire (here's a pic of a completed solo game)...

...and includes exactly the sort of cards you'd expect from a tomb delve dungeon crawl based card game:

(These Tomb Raider pics were all snagged from BoardGameGeek, by the way!)

Basically, you have adventurers, the places they go, the stuff they use, the stuff they face, and the things that happen along the way.  All of this seems like it could fit nicely into a TBH shell!

Now, it may be evident from my Underground Elemental Beastfighting posts that I also enjoy laying out playing cards.  It's fun.  It's relaxing.  And it seems like a great way to build this thing I'm working on from the ground up.  Here's what a PC might look like:

Level and name at the top, damage and HP at the bottom corners of the picture, abilities and stats below.  Equipment and spells prepared can easily be handled by separate cards.

I'm also using some alternatives to the original three D&D (and their related TBH) classes.  So far, I'm going with Defender, Caster, and Healer...all of which are conveniently designed such that if you take the average of their damage and HP values, you get nice multiples of five...which will be really convenient when it comes to damage counters.

There's a lot that's still up in the air about how dungeons will unfold, so I'm experimenting a bit.  I think I could enjoy the rather roguelike experience of letting the setting be revealed room by room with cards like this:

...BUT I'm still iffy on a lot of questions that naturally emerge...like how many separate decks need to be involved.  It'd be outstanding if a dungeon could be found in a single deck, so I may need to play around with letting each card have a room, a monster, AND an item.

(That dungeon artwork, as I'm sure you already know if you're familiar with his work, is by the incomparable Dyson Logos, specifically a tiny portion of his map for the Orcus Pit.  Check out his stuff...you won't be disappointed!)

I'll post more here at the blog as this idea moves along.  I'm just glad to get the first few steps of TBH idea #1 out of my head and onto the digital page!

Oh yeah, one more thing...I mocked up a cardback, too:

I do like the ring of "the Stack Hack," so that's at least the working title...

I guess I've finally been bitten by The Black Hack bug.

I didn't get it for a while, but now that I've given it more attention, I understand why David Black's The Black Hack is the current hotness in the OSR.  You just can't help but read the thing and want to (1) play it, and (2) hack it to bits with your own ideas.

While I don't even devote the time I "should" to other gaming projects I have going on...well, while reading TBH, I could feel my brain bubbling over with stuff that I "need" to put down on paper.  I guess gamer brains are ridiculous that way.  So, here's step #1 of thought #2...hopefully I'll have the (reasonably complete) follow-up posted before too long...!