INTRO We’ve had a great, positive response to the first part of the episode, and a new iTunes review from Steve Race, host of Squadron Chatter, the Unofficial Podcast for Squadron UK RPG.
GM SCREEN (with Simon Burley) Simon Burley returns, to talk about Imagine magazine, his role as a ‘zine editor, his passion for the UK convention scene and the design principles behind his Code of … series of games.
POST BAG We head for birthday drinks in the hubbub of the Las O Gowrie snug and review some of the correspondence that we’ve received
WHITE DWARF @DailyDwarf has written an essay about the articles and scenarios that appeared in White Dwarf to support GOLDEN HEROES.
SHAGGY DOG A long rambling story about the worst game ever.
OUTRO The usual parish notices and thanks to Patreons.
“Any good game can be destroyed by a bunch of knobheads” – I’ll be referring to this in future as Dirk’s Law.
Another fascinating episode, and yes, I may be a bit biased. Great work, chaps
Excellent stuff, you missed one Scenario…
Contagion, Coincidence & Confusion…
And a mention of…The Starlight Pact, a Games Day scenario+article to promote the MInis
Pilcomayo Project is part of a large campaign, Technon is mentioned in both Pilcomayo and Lancelot. the full handwritten campaign sits in a lockup somewhere in LA…
i have run the scenarios as a combined Campaign. in the following order
Pilcomayo Project
Peking Duck
Lancelot Caper
Legacy of Eagles
An Alien Exchange (Crossfire)
American Dream
Contagion, Coincidence & Confusion
Reunion
and Queen Victoria and the Holy Grail.
(Strikeback/Slayground work with a different team)
(the ones i ran at UK Expo exist as recordings, on my Youtube channel, they are noisy as they were recorded at a convention)
They have a natural flow if you use Overlord and Chameleon.
You can also Combine American Dream with C,C&C if you use Eldritch hiding as Jackson Stone.
i used Strikback as the backbone for my 5 part “Shadows out of Time” adventure. including a version of Slayground as MLR said i could use it for Legacy. the time travel team where born out of a throwaway line in QVatHG
Overall the weakest scenario is Peking Duck as its just a fight, But if you give Pirate a repulsion powered flying pirate ship, its..fun. most players steal it and use it. did have one group got shot out of the sky by Frostrom from LoE.
I’m rambling now. great show.
i wonder if Big Jack Brass remembers playing Officers of DICE, at UK EXPO
Contagion Coincidence and Confusion wasn’t published in White Dwarf. I’m bugger end if I can remember exactly which magazine it WAS published in, though.
Excellent stuff, you missed one Scenario…
Contagion, Coincidence & Confusion…
And a mention of…The Starlight Pact, a Games Day scenario+article to promote the MInis
Pilcomayo Project is part of a large campaign, Technon is mentioned in both Pilcomayo and Lancelot. the full handwritten campaign sits in a lockup somewhere in LA…
i have run the scenarios as a combined Campaign. in the following order
Pilcomayo Project
Peking Duck
Lancelot Caper
Legacy of Eagles
An Alien Exchange (Crossfire)
American Dream
Contagion, Coincidence & Confusion
Reunion
and Queen Victoria and the Holy Grail.
(Strikeback/Slayground work with a different team)
(the ones i ran at UK Expo exist as recordings, on my Youtube channel, they are noisy as they were recorded at a convention)
They have a natural flow if you use Overlord and Chameleon.
You can also Combine American Dream with C,C&C if you use Eldritch hiding as Jackson Stone.
i used Strikback as the backbone for my 5 part “Shadows out of Time” adventure. including a version of Slayground as MLR said i could use it for Legacy. the time travel team where born out of a throwaway line in QVatHG
Overall the weakest scenario is Peking Duck as its just a fight, But if you give Pirate a repulsion powered flying pirate ship, its..fun. most players steal it and use it. did have one group got shot out of the sky by Frostrom from LoE.
I’m rambling now. great show.
i wonder if Big Jack Brass remembers playing Officers of DICE, at UK EXPO
Opps it got posted twice, sorry
Brilliant episode.
Another excellent follow up episode, but perhaps not living up to the excitement promised in part one, I was expecting a tale not unlike the Fish Fingers episode, but instead a sad but true story of youthful endeavour cruelly destroyed by life’s unfortunate companions, where we encounter those pimples on the bottom of humanity. Entertaining but thoughtful, a change of pace perhaps, and not quite disappointing.
Simon is doing a great service for the likes of me who is interested in going UK conventions, and his Code Of series looks interesting, similar to another one I came across called Swords and Six-siders. All the best to him. I hope to play more Golden Heroes and clones, it is a good system, not broken, does not need fixing.
A nice in-the-pub discussion, the “oil” of the conversation more than makes up for the background noise, but regarding the lack of advancement and character investment in a game like Golden Heroes – I think this was the general divide between game systems of the era, as a Traveller player I got used to not really advancing my character and actually preferred this way of playing, you could interact with the whole game and not have to wait until you were sufficiently powerful to handle the higher levels, and there was none of the cross matching between scenario and party level making it easier to GM. What is forgotten is the nature of non-levelled games is character death to drive the player on rather than character improvement, you don’t advance but start anew, and with not much trouble as there are no levels, whereas in levelled games the inclination is not to kill off characters and deter the player investment, not to mention creating a headache for the GM on matching them with set adventures, non-levelled games can be more challenging without the real fear and disappointment that might ensue. In games like Traveller there is advancement in the accumulation of “wealth”, which is a two-way street and can be transferred, thus providing a good game by game succession, I’d suggest this is probably true of Golden Heroes.
My podcast software seemed to have corrupted this download, mixing it up with some crappy music, fortunately it was at the end and I don’t think I missed much.
“not living up to the excitement promised in part one,” destroy my confidence even more, why don’t you?
There’s a more articulate discussion of rewarding players mechanically in the latest Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff.
I look forward to playing Golden Heroes again too – perhaps we should arrange something?
My expectations were at fault Dirk, I prefer Fish Fingers to Pie, but it was a nice change of pace. I’d be more than happy to play Golden Heroes (or any clone) again with your crowd, I had a blast last time, and Roll20 worked great for me at Virtual Grogmeet.
Top episode, cheers lads!
Obviously I was a GH purchaser back in the day. Like yourselves I never could get a game off the ground back then. My mates weren’t really into comics, so I couldn’t get them interested. People always think of 60s Batman, or the Spider-Man cartoon. All a bit too Spandex and Pow! for them then as now.
One burning question remains: whatever happed to Pete Haines?
Pete worked for GW for a while. He wrote a lot of their WH 40,000 stuff. I don’t know what he does now. I ran into him at a games convention a couple of,years ago where he instantly created a character for Squadron UK that pushed the system to its limits. It’s a shame he doesn’t produce anything. If you had him for five minutes, a recorded and could get him to talk about games you’d have enough material for a new game. Genius.
Talking of lost games I’d KILL to get my hands on his notes for “Wandering Sword” – his “Conan” rules. Played it once. To say it had potential was an understatement.
Hang on… THAT Pete Haines! We were at GW at the same time. I never put two and two together. Stupid Baz.
Baz – we should arrange to play a supers game together so we can at least get it out of our system!
That sounds like a (master) plan!
This was a superior episode. All good stuff but Blythey’s comment about old games holding up a mirror,to ourselves was particularly deep and resonant.
Thanks guys!
C,C &C, was published in Imagine. I think
Definitely not Imagine. Probably Fantazia.
C,C and C was in Fantazia – I think it was, and I was one of the editors!
OK, so I listened to this one quite late after it was published…
One of the great joys of editing Dwarf at the time was the Golden Heroes articles, and it remains the one game about which I was told by management (can’t remember who) to stop including support material, despite the fact that the game sold more copies every time I included an article or scenario. I guess that memo didn’t get to the new team, which is why something appeared in WD78. I should add that otherwise I pretty much had free choice about what went in an issue.
One of the big regrets was how American Dream looked on publication. It was based on a fabulous piece of Chris Achilleos artwork, which should have been printed large, but ended up tiny. The scenario was overrunning its allocated pages, and Mary Common (production editor at the time, and also behind all those colourful print-obscuring overlays) asked me to cut it. Evidently I didn’t cut it enough… because it’s pretty hard to slim down a scenario. Of course, if I’d been fully aware of the extent to which it was overrunning, I’d have dropped another article to make room and use the artwork to its full effect. I guess it was a problem then of how colour work had to be done for magazines (no computer design, layout and colour separation then), so the artwork went off to be processed and it was too late to do anything to remedy the situation by the time proofs arrived back.
Of course, I also played in Pete Tamlyn’s fabulous Golden Heroes campaign, and that should be no surprise why he was commissioned to write so much. 🙂 The campaigns article illustrated just how he did it, making the game interesting for all of us. I even playtested The Lancelot Caper.
Ian