The GROGNARD Files

Last weekend it was virtual GROGMEET and by all accounts, a good time was had by all who attended. Thank you for the GMs who hosted the games and to the players who took part.

Here are some of the stories from the GMs:

My virtual Grogmeet

Sam Vail:

The planning for my games began in January at our gaming weekend on Tenby, hosted by Dave Paters. I ran Strontium Dog for the first time in 20 + years and I remembered how much I enjoyed it and how much fun we had playing. So I decided to create a new adventure for virtual Grogmeet.

However, my first game of the weekend was scheduled for Friday evening where I was to run my Pendragon homebrew. Set in 1963, the Agents (knights) were investigating a mysterious death of a young Jewish University student from the London School of Economics. The trail led them to the dreaming spires of Cambridge University, where more information and a package drop led swiftly on to London via Cambridge train station and then on to Salisbury. Visiting a packed Italian restaurant, the Agents were able to follow the package to Porton Down where a shoot-out occurred in the rocket testing facility and the sleeper cell of Nazi scientists were apprehended. The players, Andrew, Howard, Mike and Clarky were great and after a slow start, picked up the pace and the action to finally defeat the Nazi’s and defuse the bomb. “It’s either the red wire or the blue wire.”

My second game was on the Saturday evening and was my Strontium Dog scenario called, ‘Jelly Manelly’s done a runner!”. My players, Mark, Andrew, Alister and Rob got into their mutations and the system pretty quickly and although I had already run that scenario a couple of times already, it seemed to take a different direction from the start. From the Anglian Everglades, to ZinZan Station and then to the planet Zamboo, we saw our Mutant heroes locate and capture their prize.

My final game was as a player in Carl Clare’s game of Ghost in the shell using the FATE system. Carl had captured the Mango feel brilliantly and as usual he had meticulously prepared for any direction we wanted to go. My fellow players, Jon, Tom and Ty were all deeply invested and having Tom, an experienced FATE player, really helped the game run smoothly. We went through the investigation and captured Herr Doktor in the final encounter. Awesome fun.

This was my second Virtual Grogmeet and an incredible time was had. Meeting new people was great and playing with some old familiar faces was a lot of fun. Thanks to all my players and GM for throwing themselves into the games with such gusto.

Sam

Great session of Ghostbusters on the first night of Virtual Grogmeet with players Kaum @rolistedpod , playing Dr Sylvia Townsend, historian,  Alister @awdscrawl playing David Bellamy, College gardener, Jon @jonac943 as Derek Trotter, College Porter,  Chris @theschwerpunkt as Colin Eliot, Physics DPhil student, Graham @graham_r_smith as Professor Adair, leader of the Ghostbusters and parapsychologist

The adventure was set in the Oxford of 1985, with the players starting a new franchise of Ghostbusters based out of Balliol College.  The scenario began with the characters celebrating St Scholastica’s Eve and starting their first meeting of the franchise, but was interrupted by the sight of a young Boris Johnson falling from his room and crashing into the stones of the quad. The brave Ghostbusters unravelled a mystery of jealousy and revenge, mourned over a murdered Nigella Lawson, concussed a dark sorceress with a tin of custard creams, and fled from the inn of the returned ghost of a medieval landlord, John of Barford, who was determined to wreak revenge on the scholars of Oxford. The adventure ended with the bells of the churches peeling out, weakening the spirit as the Ghostbusters firedup their proton packs forcing Barford him into a containment field.  

A good days work ending with a pint of real ale with Inspector Morse.

@Asako_Soh

Same again next year?

As an addendum to Episode 35 and our guest Paul Fricker’s interview, this is a quick overview of Demon’s Drawl, the fanzine that first gave him his lucky break.

First launched in July 1983 Demon’s Drawl was produced for a couple of years before transforming into Telegraph Road. The energy behind the zine was editor Jeremy Nuttall who was based Congleton in Cheshire and it originally emerged from the Chaos Tribe Fantasy RPG Club. Overall, it has the appearance of a collaborative effort with ‘a team’ of contributors who are diligently acknowledged in each issue. The list of participants include some familiar names: David Robinson and GROGSQUAD regular Nick Edwards.

The overall tone of the zine is ‘sensible and committed’ as it lacks some of the fripperies that marked the zine-scene of the time. The resources for its campaign world of Galadra are serious minded, inviting contributions from the readership to create “a consistent, good and believable” world.

At its peak, it had a print run of 400 copies with 80 subscribers, which confirms Nick’s theory that this represented the entire active fandom in the UK at the time and that one in four of them were producing their own ‘zine.

The tone of the ‘Let us talk’ letters-pages debate about ‘Classless Systems” is representative of the general earnest approach: “what happens if I don’t want to play a character who falls within this strict categorisation?”

Most articles were inviting participation by adopting a conversational rather than an authoritative tone. It’s a great example of where the RPG gamers who wanted to push the boundaries of what they were playing could have a space to share ideas.

The editors clearly had an eye for talent too – they must have spotted something in Paul’s contribution: subtle shades of cosmic horror and a precise articulation of the human condition.

* If you want to see more, check out the Patreon only GROGLOCKER at the end of next week.

Dirk the Dice

The date has been in my diary for months, but I’d left the prep for WinterCon 2020 too late. It’s a new meet-up hosted at Fan Boy Three in Manchester and organised by Newt Newport as an off-shoot of the monthly Go-Play Manchester (home of the one-shots).

As part of my pledge to play a different Post-Apocalyptic themed game every month in 2020, I had pitched Gamma World (first edition) and the first module The Legion of Gold for my submission: both are available on drive thru rpg, as is the game upon which it is based (Metamorphosis Alpha which can lay claim to be the first ever, mass-produced, SF RPG).

Reading the game this week I realised that it is not really aimed towards one-shot play. It encourages hex-crawling through the desolated waste-lands of post-devastation America and furnishes the GM with encounter tables and examples of artefacts and creatures/ flora and fauna that can be found when PCs explore the map. The Legion of Gold provides a pre-populated area for the PCs to explore with three ‘mini-adventures’ (the supplement is of really good quality compared with some of the TSR material of the time).

How could I transform it into a one-shot? I decided early on that it needed more to it to make it pop, so I turned to Baz Steven’s King of Dungeons to introduce some explosive elements:

• I knocked down the bonus threshold and was generally more generous with the application of positive modifications in the player’s favour.
• Advantage dice, crits, fumbles, escalation dice and standardised target numbers were imported from King of Dungeons. As were, montage scenes (to cover the travel through the hex map) and the guild bonds

If you’ve played Gamma World in the past you’ll know that one of the features of the setting are the ‘Cryptic Alliances’ (factions that have developed following the apocalypse). We started the session by randomly generating a Cryptic Alliance (their very own guild) thus the Union of the Pure Mutant Animals was born – their symbol was an ‘animal’, so they became mutant-humanoid otters. Yes, it had to be otters. Their enemies were the Badders (this randomly generated the foes for the final encounter).

Part of the fun of Gamma World is creating characters by generating mutations, some of them favourable, some of them disadvantageous. I decided to give the players a character sheet that was a ‘playbook’ format that would allow them to choose aspects of their character.

Generating 5 character sheets in the style of a playbook turned out to be a time-consuming task. Each one took about an hour, so I had an early start (4.30 am!) to get up and finish them off!

It was worth it as it turned out to be a fun session that included toxic belching, waist-coats, a land-pedalo in the shape of a swan and clever use of a phillips-head screwdriver. I had ‘Mad Max written by Edgar Rice Buroughs’ in mind, but it was a bit more gonzo. I will definitely play it again (with the King of Dungeons elements) as it makes a good con game. It also proves that King of Dungeons is effective as a framework that can be overlaid on vintage d20 systems to fire them up a little.

Hero, just for one day

My daughter Amelia came along to play her very first RPG. This was either her attempt to ‘try new things’ and discover the world of role-playing games, or a clever attempt to legitimately avoid revising for her exams: you decide.

She chose to play Black Panther alongside my Wolverine in a game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (using the Cortex Plus system) hosted with aplomb by Guy Milner. He always does a great job of plainly explaining the system and framing the session in an engaging, easy to follow manner.

He had his work cut out with Cortex Plus as it is a quirky, dice-pool system with some interesting bells and whistles to complicate matters (plot points for the players to bump up their dice or activate effects, and a doom pool that allows the GM to bring in reinforcements, or, if they have 2 d12 they can end a scene).

I thought the system worked really well as a superheroes mechanic as it allowed us to narrate our actions and build up a dice pool based on the effects deployed from the character sheet. It’s a gamey game that works best at emulating comic strip punch ups : rip apart a T-rex with adamantium claws? I don’t mind if I do.

Stability affects physical and emotional states and once effected, it adds another dice into your opponent’s dice pool (which is neat). “Wolverine is a sensitive soul,” I said to Amelia.

“You’ll have no problem with that, you cried like a baby all the way through Little Women.”

Yeah, thanks for that, don’t you have some revision to do?

E.N. World Poll

To make a fantastic day even better, the news came through that we came top of the Top ‘Talk’ Podcasts of 2019 in E.N. World’s forum. The GROGNARD files joins The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, the winners of last year’s 1st poll, in the Hall of Fame. It’s a ‘just for fun’ poll, but it’s really reassuring that people are listening and enjoy the podcast enough to take the time to vote. Thank you to the GROGSQUAD for mobilising.

The GROGPOD has had a fantastic year and it has been good to collaborate with other podcasts that have done well in the poll too: we are always grateful to Baz and Gaz at The Smart Party for their encouragement and helping us discover different facets of the hobby that we’ve missed, they have helped to boost the GROGPOD profile by inviting me to a panel at UK Games Expo and to a couple of round-table discussions; we also worked with Red Moon Roleplaying to produce the brooding, intense Actual Play of Stormbringer and appear live on stage with How We Roll and Scott from The Good Friends of Jackson Ellias for a memorable Call of Cthulhu recording, live in front of an audience.

We’ve got at least another 12 months in us and we’ll continue to do the best we can.

In many ways, this isn’t a gaming podcast, it’s a convoluted means of reuniting everyone who attended Marillion’s Welcome to the Garden Party on 28th June 1986 at The Milton Keynes Bowl.

Thanks for your support.