Judge Dredd RPG - The GROGNARD Files

1D6 UK GAMES EXPO ’18 exposed

I think I’m just about coming back into the real world. Entering the UK Games Expo is like entering a liminal space where everyone is at ease with themselves and their place in the Universe.

Why can’t every day be like Expo?

Last year, it was about playing story games and understanding what had happened since we left the hobby back in the early 90s.

This time it was about running games.

After several anxious days preparing (I’m convinced that RPGs are part of a conspiracy to sell more printer ink), plus significant pre-match nerves the GM muscle eventually kicked in …

Judge Dredd

I ran Better Living through Chemistry, the scenario developed by @dailydwarf for the GROGZINE ’18 (soon to be available on DriveThru RPG). It’s an entertaining ‘Judges on patrol’ adventure littered with witty asides and incident to provide an amusing three hours in Mega City One, capturing the golden age of 2000ad perfectly. This was the third time I’d run the game. Similar to the other occasions, I felt that the system creaked a little. It was a less deadly this time, but no less frustrating for the players who found themselves missing rolls when they needed them the most.

There was some clever play from the Judges along the way, chaotic scenes and an hilarious interrogation involving a pedicure, astrology and surgical tape.

At one moment, words failed me, I wanted to describe a “golden fountain” but ended up saying “shower” despite myself. I don’t think anyone noticed.

HeroQuest

Chaosium’s Ian Cooper is a terrific Games Master. If you get chance to play HeroQuest at a convention with him, then take it, you won’t be disappointed. He works hard to create an imaginative, immersive experience to compel you to engage with the story.

The adventure was a whodunit set in Forint, in the southern continent of Pamaltela. The wonderfully drawn pre-gens were members of masarin Jamader’s household in Garduna, a city of ragtag islands joined by bridges of different design. Blythy was a haughty Agimori sorceress and the rest of us were house slaves in her thrall. The relationship between the characters made for intriguing moments of interplay as we explored the city following a trail of clues.

Forint is to be developed as a future book for HeroQuest, which will allow players who are worried about imposing upon the canon of Glorantha publications: a chance to develop adventures within an exotic swords and sorcery setting. In the theatre of my mind it was Meereen twinned with Camorr written through the lens of Gene Wolfe

A great session. Don’t take my word for it, here’s Neil Benson’s view.

Nights Black Agents

1984, Leeds, England. The miners strike is intensifying, the British Government have recruited deniable assets to pull off a black bag operation: wiring the room where a branch secretary of the National Union of Mine workers is planning a rendezvous with his counterpart from Transylvania, who has promised cash in exchange for … something … something mysterious.

This is the third time that I’ve run Operation: GroundWorm and it’s one of those that has matured the more it has been played. There were some cracking scenes: a chase through the streets of Leeds, ending on the roof of Dolcis, punching the lights out of each other; a great bit of disguise fast-talk, squeezing information from a reluctant community; and finally Harry Reeves, the leader of the crew, finishing off the enemy, while smoking a Benson.

This was one of my high-points of the weekend and provided some food for thought for the forthcoming Episode 21.

RuneQuest

I played The Broken Tower, the QuickStart adventure that was released for Free RPG Day last year. The new RuneQuest Glorantha PDF dropped on the Friday, so I felt a real burden of responsibility to inspire these players to get into the new game. There was a mixture of experience around the table, complete newbies, others who last played the game in the 80s and others who had loyally followed the various iterations.

This was the first time that I had used the shaman. I was a little concerned that the complexity of the character (with its llama mount, baboon fetch and spirit combat rules) would distort the party, but it actually added a great deal to the weirdness and intensifying horror.

I wanted to at least inspire one person to run their own game of RuneQuest: Achievement Unlocked!

Losing a D8

I lose a dice at every convention. This time it was a D8.

We had a list of stuff we while we were there: buying stuff, demoing some board-games and having a proper meal somewhere. The bucket list ended up being a ‘feck it’ list because when were weren’t playing RPGs we were having a really good chat with people we met on the way to doing things.

It was a great weekend, great people and over much too soon.

Next: Expo ScrapBook

virtual GROGMEET 2018 ScrapBook

Last year, we reached a tipping point where we realised that most of our Armchair Adventuring was taking place online. Our never-ending quest to get more people to play games with continues. To support our endeavours we created virtual GROGMEET to complement the annual event in November.

Some of the GROGSQUAD wanted to discover online play for the first time and have the opportunity to play with the GMGMs that make GROGMEET in Manchester such a distinctive experience.

Squadron members from all over the UK plus others from British Columbia, Australia and North America were joined games of Numenera and Maelstrom and others listed below.

Of course the curse of online play bedevilled it with glitches and interventions from real life, but it was an enjoyable event by all accounts.

Hopefully, new gaming connections were made during the event and this is the beginning of more groups forming, because “play’s the thing”. Dirk

There’s more play reports from Neil and Kehaar, and on google plus from Andrew Jones and Andy Cousins.

**WarHammer Fantasy Role-Playing:** A rousing version of Summer Holiday, a bar-room brawl, death and destruction in the opening scenario of The Enemy Within. *Asako_Soh*

**Lamentations of the Flame Princess:** Having climbed into the Butchers through the roof the party encounter a mutated dog in an attached room. Engaging their OSR drive by trying to avoid unnecessary conflicts, they came up with a clever plan which became known as the Norwich Gambit. Their scheme in place they opened doors while keeping out of the beasts reach and felt some degree of cleverness as their ploy worked and the external door was closed behind the dog as it wandered outside. They were later to discover the consequences of that cleverness. *Neil Benson*

**Judge Dredd RPG (GW):** Andy, Mark and Brett – were soon in the middle of a firefight. All three really committed to the game, and inhabited the characters of their Judges really well. (The phrase “Eat Judge boot, creep!” was deployed to much satisfaction.) They were very inventive both in their use of the tech, and in their theories of what the clues they uncovered could mean … (continues)

Screen Shot 2018-04-17 at 00.28.03.png — **Judge Dredd RPG:** Their detection methods were also top-notch, leading me to short-circuit one part of the adventure as I thought their ideas deserved to be rewarded. The big finale played out well (sound effects on roll20 at least worked out very well), although at times I felt I was losing “flow” somewhat – I think that might have been down to the system showing its age, coupled with my inexpert hacking of the rules.
Overall, good fun for me to run again – I had an excellent set of players who threw themselves into the setting with gusto, and Mega-City One remains a great playground for roleplaying. Next time though, I think I might try a different rules system, more geared to pulp action.
Savage Worlds anyone? *Alan Gairey*

**Night’s Black Agents:** 1984, Harry Reeves pulled together a crew; a wheel wizard, box man and wire rat to black bag Frank Holton: a miner with connections in the USSR: “BagPuss is in the building”. *Dirk.*

Screen Shot 2018-04-17 at 00.00.50.png — **Cthulhu Hack**: Good time was had by all. The use of my artwork murals and a trap based portion of the game generated a real ‘adventure game’ feel to play. Cthulhu hack worked well especially sanity erosion to build the players sense of dread and I’ve at least 3 different threads out of the game. All in all a result. *Keehar.*

**HeroQuest:** I had 4 players, with limited experience of Heroquest, so it was good to take them through the character generation system & how contests work. Heroquest is one of those systems that truly opens up through play, rather than reading the corebook- which reveals it’s pearls of wisdom after play.
Highlights included grabbing the heart of Orlanth from a Lunar Demon and then just about defeating that demon mid air in the Otherworld- the first time running the scenario we had had major conflict. All because of a “over-confident” character trait from one PC. *Andrew Jones.*

Episode 18 (Part 2) Judge Dredd RPG (with Marc Gascoigne)

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INTRO A new review on iTunes

WHITE DWARF @dailydwarf “2000ad and Me” a personal reflection on the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic

GAMES MASTER’s SCREEN Marc Gascoigne returns to talk about Fighting Fantasy, EarthDawn (!), The Black Library and Angry Robot. Also, the famous ‘lost’ RPG – Dark Future.

JUDGE BLYTHY RULES an examination of the system and setting of Judge Dredd RPG

OUTRO Details of the GROGSQUAD patreon campaign and an interesting project to document the early years of Games Workshop.

1D6 Spaghetti ConJunction

“What fools we are,” I said to my wrinkled reflection as it stared at me disapprovingly at five thirty AM yesterday. I was off to Spaghetti ConJunction 2a, the twice yearly convention hosted by Pookie, Simon Burley and James Mullen, at the Geek Retreat cafe/ game store in city centre Birmingham.

The early start was brought on by the interminable rail-replacement between Adlington and Manchester. Don’t get me started. Despite getting on the bus at quarter to seven, I still had to run, that’s right, run to get on the train to meet Blythy at eight thirty. A journey that normally takes 40 minutes had taken the best part of 2 hours. Mutter. Mutter. Grumble. Grumble.

There were plenty of games available: Hot War, HeroQuest, Prime Time, Manifold, RuneQuest Mythic Britain, Blades in the Dark, Tales from the Loop and more.

Here’s my report in the usual format: 5 highlights and a fumble.

1 Geek Retreat.

Geek Retreat is in a good central location with amiable hosts who bring your food & drink orders to the table. Despite its lurid signal-yellow and purple colour scheme, it turned out to be a good, simple space for playing. The prices for food and drink reflect its central location, but the quality is good and worth it to support their provision of gaming space.

2 Morning Dredd

I was running Better Living Through Chemistry for Judge Dredd RPG: the adventure that appears in the 2018 ‘zine, written by Daily Dwarf. It’s an intriguing, witty adventure packed with layers of pop culture references, subtle jokes and Easter eggs that went over the heads of some of the younger people playing.

I was surprised that the only awareness of Dredd for three of the six players was the Karl Urban film. This was the first time that I have run the game for 35 years – we’ll go into detail about the actual game in the next part of the podcast – but it went surprisingly smoothly.

The Judges’ methods were questionable, but we’ll leave that to the SJS who are reviewing the case. A spell on Titan is on the cards.

3 Numenera

Over in the corner, Blythy ran a game of Numenera, this is what he said:

“So you’ve never played Numenera before?

“I’ve never played an rpg before actually.”

Gulp. The hobby’s reputation rests on my shoulders… I handed him my dice and he went on to roll two ‘1’s (automatic failure) at once. Great start.

4 Afternoon

A rerun of the Judge Dredd game, this time the group was a little more experienced, with only a couple of players with no knowledge of the comic version of Mega City One. There were some exciting chases, including the Rookie Judge keeping up with an escaping perp, but no resources or skill to stop him in his tracks: bike cannons, rubber ricochet and loud, persuasive shouting all failed.

There were some additional scenes to this version. These players were more tuned into the nostalgia, so I propelled things along to get them to points of interest, rail-roady maybe, but I think there was enough opportunity for them to interact with the scenes and engage with the entertaining set up. The limitations of the mechanics were exposed with this group of more mature players, I could sense the nostalgia wearing off, the rules were found wanting.

Gaz, from the Smart Party, described the GM style as ‘Cabaret’. Not sure if it was a compliment, but it’s the last time I wear a basque and bowler hat to a convention.

5 Raffle

I never win anything, so it was a great delight to win, not once, but twice. There were generous donations for the charity auction from a number of different publishers. I picked up Sixty Stone Press’ ‘Cathulhu – Velvet Paws on Cthulhu’s Trail’ with rules for playing a cat investigator in Call of Cthulhu, and The Midderlands, from Monkey Blood Design which is an OSR bestiary and setting (recommended by Pookie).

6 Paraphernalia

I’m normally a ‘theatre of the mind’ GM, but this adventure came with floor-plans, figures, counters, skull tokens, hand-outs, flash cards and all sorts of props. I was in a muddle. Within 10 minutes, I flipped a cup of tea over everything and remained in a state of flustered disarray for the rest of the day. A genuine fumble.

In the words of Travis Bickle, one of these days I’m going to get myself “organized”.

The rail replacement meant that I was home just after mid-night, but it was worth it, a throughly enjoyable day. Thanks to the three organisers, Geek Retreat and all the players for making it such fun.

Next part of the podcast out soon.

Next month, we’ll be at ConVergence in Stockport.

A year on the GROG 2018

It’s that time of the year when I’m blasting out the e-mithers to all and sundry to wrangle them into gaming action. This year the GROGPOD is exploring Games Workshop’s booming RPG period (in the mid to late 80s), the planned games over the next couple of months will help us get into the GW zone.

I’m running The Judge Dredd RPG at Spaghetti ConJunction and UK Games Expo, which I’m very much looking forward to. @dailydwarf has furnished me with the counters and floorplans he prepared for GROGMEET to replicate the mean streets of Better Living Through Chemistry (the scenario he wrote for the GROGZINE). It has investigation, hard rain, muties and a series of stunning set-pieces; a perfect one-shot.

Golden Heroes was supported by a couple of great scenario packs. The people of twitter selected Queen Victoria and the Holy Grail by Marcus Rowland for my 7 hour slot at ConVergence in Stockport on 10th March. Simon Burley will also be at the event, running his new game Manifold, so I’d better be on my best behaviour.

The Patreons voted last year for us to do a podcast about PARANOIA, so I’m planning a one-shot in the next couple of weeks. Looking at the rules, I’m as baffled by it now as I was back in 1986. Thankfully, I’ve asked for help from none other than Paul Baldowski, who assures me that the computer is not *that* bad.

Last week, I ran a game of RuneQuest for the on-line GROGCLUB which is open to Patreons (play report to follow) and there’s a game of GANGBUSTERS planned for next week (I’ll be running Keehar’s game from GROGMEET ’16). The first ever Virtual GROGMEET was also unleashed. There will be games from the GROGMEET GMs available to play 13th and 14th April. More information will be available next month; follow Patreon for details.

We’ve also been invited to a meet up in Leamington by the Midland’s Massive in September (more details will follow).

CAMPAIGNS

Blythy continues his ongoing commitment to the Ninth World with a continuing adventure of Numenera planned for our monthly face to face game. He’s also coming along to Birmingham and running a game at Spaghetti ConJunction and UK Games Expo (assuming the government manages to hold itself together).

There’s quite a bit of D&D on the slate too. Storm King’s Thunder is coming to its climax as we’ve discovered the location of King Hekaton, so we’re off to recover his glory, restore the Ordining and collect the gold. A walk in the park, when you say it like that. My sorcerer Himo is becoming more emboldened and teleported into the middle of the fray after months of skulking at the back sipping on his hip-flask.

The Wednesday, fortnightly group is now well established after a couple of years, so we’ll probably continue playing together. Blythy has a copy of Tomb of Annihilation, which I bought from Bonhomiegames.uk when they visited GROGMEET. It looked like something that I wanted to play rather than GM, so I handed it over to him.

There’s something attractive about the big-book campaigns available for 5e. They’re rich with encounters and incident, even if the overarching stories are a little flakey. Over at Ed’s Shed, he’s got Curse of Strahd on the night-stand and has promised to unleash it at some point during the year.

I’ve resolved to abdicate from the role of The King of The One-shot and GM a campaign too. In April, I will be kicking off the Two Headed Serpent, Pulp Cthulhu campaign. It’s a terrific, world spanning adventure that will be available to the online GROGSQUAD. Two parties of ~~investigators~~ adventurers will launch simultaneously with Doc RPG (Ian Griffiths) as a second Keeper of Arcane Knowledge. Looking forward to running that for a couple of years!

From the very moment I began the GROGPOD, listeners have been asking “when will you cover Woof-Rough”. I had no idea what they were on about. Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing (WHFRP) passed the Armchair Adventurers by … it looked like too much of an investment at the time and we were locked into RuneQuest set in our home-brew world, drinking home-brew. I’m going to run the first couple of instalments of The Warhammer Campaign for Eddy and Blythy, so we can see what all the fuss is about.

NEW HOTNESS

The Smart Party salivate over the ‘new hotness’ in their podcast. I’ve been introduced to new concepts and ideas over the last 18 months, we need to pushing into new corners of the hobby, to explore all those areas that we missed when we stopped playing for nearly 20 years.

I’ll be running the Night’s Black Agents scenario set in the midst of the British miners’ strike in 1984 for UK GamesExpo. I need to up the stakes (through the heart) following the playtest on GROGMEET eve, it needs a bit of work, but the context of the strike and the ‘Ken Loach meets Jason Bourne’ approach worked well.

Also, Blades in the Dark was my favourite discovery of last year and I’d like to keep the momentum of what we started, I’m keen to see if the Lamp Blacks deduce Phin the Thin is the murderer of their boss. The greatness of the game is that as a GM, I don’t know; I’ll be discovering what happens at the same time as the players.

I’ve bought a gift to myself, Vurt The tabletop Role Playing Game, which is a licensed product using the cypher system (similar to Numenera). Its filled with some fantastic artwork and background information to recreate the post-cyberpunk experience of Jeff Noon’s vision of a near-future Manchester. It’s been fun reading the rule book, not least for its depiction of Bolton of the future as some power-house of respectability. I need to plan in a game at some point in the year.

FATE captured our imaginations, but other than a Jerry Cornelius one-shot, we haven’t taken advantage of its clever resolution mechanics. Blythy has been promising a Robin of Sherwood game using the system, maybe this year we’ll get around to doing it.

There’s lots of old is new projects in the pipeline from various publishers. It’s difficult to tell which will grab our attention and take the traditional ‘August experimental slot’.

As for GROGMEET 18, well last year we had a terrific meet up in Manchester. We’re going to do it again this year on the 10th November. Details are being finalised, but watch this space. Super heroes, there’s going to be super heroes. Bigly.

Another busy schedule for The Armchair Adventurers, but play is the thing.

Dirk the Dice

January 2018

Episode 18 (Part 1) Judge Dredd RPG (with Marc Gascoigne)

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INTRO: Warning, there’s an unnecessary David Bowie impression in this bit, as the Judge Dredd Board Game appeared in Labyrinth.

POTTED HISTORY: (00:05:00) A brief publication history of Judge in RPGs and news of the forthcoming game from EN Publishing.

OPEN BOX (with Marc Gascoigne): (10:44) We are joined by a giant in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy publishing. He tells stories about his time editing DragonLords fanzine , working with Games Workshop and designing Judge Dredd.

DAILY DWARF: (00:48:24) @dailydwarf writes an introduction to some of the great material that appeared in White Dwarf, before the sun set on its coverage of RPGs.

ATTIC ATTACK: (01:07:00) Blythy joins Dirk in the loft to reflect on 2000ad and how it influenced our play.

OUTRO: (01:37:00) Dirk is running Judge Dredd at Spaghetti ConJunction in Birmingham on 10th Feb 2017. Also, there’s news about how to get PDFs of the GROGZINE and the forthcoming Virtual GROGMEET.

1D6 Judge Dredd RPG

… down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Raymond Chandler

Last week, we played Judge Dredd the RPG, published by Games Workshop back in 1985, co written by former Dragon Lords editor Marc Gascoigne with Citadel supremo Rich Priestley. When I trailed this on twitter it generated a great deal of interest – more than any other tweet I’ve ever written in fact – so this is a follow-up play report for all those people who were interested in finding out what happened.

@dailydwarf came out of GM retirement, after a 35 year freeze, to deliver his own scenario Better Living Through Chemistry, as a online, dry-run ahead of its appearance at GROGMEET. It was a chance to stretch some of those muscles that have been dormant and to familiarise everyone with the rules. The scenario will also be appearing in the GROGZINE, so I’m going to avoid any spoilers here and concentrate on some of the experiences of playing rather than the details of the story.

Despite the usual setbacks that inhibit the gathering of grognards – including holidays, family commitments, the under-funding of public services creating staffing shortages, and dodgy online-gaming platforms – we managed to straddle our LawMasters to dispense justice on the streets of Mega City One.

“You’re not very good with your d6s are you?” complained @dailydwarf as I fell short on yet another zinger. Roll one on this table, five highlights from the sessions and one fumble.

“Be careful out there …”

Screen Shot 2017-08-08 at 16.23.13.png

In many ways, Judge Dredd is the perfect RPG set up: you are given missions to resolve, your motivations are straight forward, the setting is rich yet flexible and there’s plenty of opportunity for mystery and investigation. Every session begins with the report sheet of perp activity in the sector, packed with warnings, leads and specific tasks for your patrol as it hits the streets.

There were reports of an air-ship seen in the sector featuring costumed individuals, shouting about treasure … hang on, isn’t that our cast of characters from Storm King’s Thunder?

Mega-City One

Screen Shot 2017-08-08 at 16.20.31.png

Very quickly, we felt like Judges, and adopted our roles very diligently, as we headed out into the wasted areas of sector 170. The scenario was set in the period after the Apocalypse War when the city was coming to terms with the devastation. Our judges were clearing through the wreckage of partially destroyed blocks. It felt like coming home, as this was the classic period of Dredd stories which generated nostalgia for both the game and the comics of the early 80s.

Unlike many licensed settings, the backdrop didn’t feel constraining. The city has been generating stories for 40 years and is richly populated with characters, perps, and imagery that provided instant immersion. @dailydwarf also used a slide-show of specially adapted elements from the strip to illustrate scenes and NPCs we encountered, which made it feel like we were part of a Prog.

Get me back to TEK

Each of our Judges had a role in the team: the grizzled Veteran, the giddy rookie, the hotshot, and I went for the Judge who had been reluctantly redeployed to the streets from TEK division. He was keen to impress upon his fellow judges the capabilities of their kit. In the first encounter he gave an impressive display of ‘high-ex’ bullets from his LawGiver to bring the ceiling down on perps. This was followed by a less impressive display as a close-ranged ricochet bullet hit one of his team members. Whoops, sorry ‘Holy Cremola!’

I’d forgotten about the levels of back up available to Judges and how they can get you out of trouble. There’s always Pat Wagons available to pick up perps, Clean-up squads, Meat Wagons, Med-squads and forensic support for those tricky investigations.

We traded one-liners as the incidents piled on us, we had some great fun with Chemical Brothers lyrics too: “Hey, isn’t that another one of those block bustin’ beats?”

Judge Crunch

@dailydwarf provided his “Dredd-Hack” cut down version of the core mechanics. Most situations are resolved through attribute based percentile checks. Depending on your Judge’s speciality, you may have some Special Abilities that allow for some additional investigative or combat edge over the perps. The combat is crunchy, and goes something like this: roll to hit, roll location (d100), roll for armour coverage if appropriate before rolling for damage. Perps are at a disadvantage as they’re not as souped up as the Judges, but they have the opportunity to strike first with their wild-fire. Judges have to be more measured in the their approach as they need to be able to pass sentence rather than shooting indiscriminately.

There’s a reference list in the Dredd Hack, providing advice on general sentences. I thought 20 years for illegal Boinging (R) was always too steep.

Why does it have to end?

Normally, when it comes to fumbles, I always complain about the interference of the online glitches (1-D-6 passim). I’m not going to this time. Sure, it was a right-royal pain in the arse for some of the time, but most of the time, it worked fine and the confusion, over-talking etc added to the experience as it felt more immersive.

The only fumble about this experience is when it came to an end. It felt like it should be the beginning of an epic campaign. Mega City One is a great setting, the rules are serviceable, the players were switched on, so it was one of those great RPG moments when you wanted to carry on with the characters and have more adventures.

“Hey, Grim, let forever be.”

As for @dailydwarf, his inert GM skills are now awakened, we’re all in for a treat. He’s a natural.