Aiee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge!

On Sunday, I went up to That London to go to the Power Up! exhibit at the Science Museum, prompted by reading about Orlygg's visit... except I didn't go until Monday for unimportant reasons I won't go into.

(I went and ate spicy paneer chapati wraps in the park instead.)

On a scorching day pushing past 35° Celsius, I did what I always used to do on hot summer days, and went into a dark room to play computer games!

This is only half of it!

It's debatable whether Power Up! is truly an exhibit at all, but I don't suppose it matters. For an old fart like me it was an exercise in nostalgia, playing games from my youth on the original hardware, and for youngsters -- of which there were not many, as it was a school day -- it's an opportunity to see where computer games came from, and that there is fun to be had with the older systems.

This was a pleasant surprise. A version of this -- I think the Mark 6 -- was my first console.

It was £12 for a day pass, which isn't terrible for a London museum and by my rough count I played around 27 games, so that's money well spent I reckon. Yes, I could emulate all of them, but it was good to play on the original hardware and I got the chance to handle some consoles I have never seen in the flesh before, like the 3DO, NeoGeo, or WiiU; there is something of a thrill to experience them for the first time, but perhaps I'm just a big saddo.


Aside from the N64 controllers almost all having that distinctive loose thumbstick, all the hardware was in excellent condition, and I wonder where it all came from. It's a brave collector who would donate their vintage console to be handled by thousands of grubby mitts, and I can't imagine the Science Museum itself has a stack of old SNESes in a back room. That said, the Amiga CD32 had its launch at the Museum, so it's possible that the machine there was indeed owned by them!


I have only a couple of minor criticisms. There were a few notable omissions, such as the PC Engine and any handhelds that weren't produced by Nintendo, and not all of the games were the best showcase of their machines; are we really saying Frogger is the Commodore 64's killer app?

(I would also have loved to see a Wondermega or "tower of power" in the flesh, but those are the nittiest of picks.)

Otherwise, Power Up! is an interesting if superficial look at the history of computer gaming, but also a great day out if you're a fan of computer games.

Arbitrary score: Blast Processing out of MOS6510.

Your humble correspondent, having completed Sonic 2, entirely legitimately, honest. (And no, no idea what happened to my hair.)

Last weekend I again endured the pernicious lottery that is Southern Rail and visited my friends Courtney, James, and Liam in That London. You remember them; they were the ones who strongarmed me into running them through The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh back in April.

Once again they had requested that we play "some D&D" and so in the days running up to my visit I pondered what adventure to run for them. I considered Barrowmaze, inspired by Mike Evans' recent delves, and I almost went with Eyes of the Stone Thief, as I don't know if I'll ever get that to the table otherwise.

(I pondered using the opportunity to run another playtest of CUFFS SHRIEK, but we also played Mansions of Madness and Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu over the weekend, so I think it would have been too much of an eldritch thing. Yes, that is a clue to the subject matter.)

In the end I decided that the most sensible thing to do with a couple of days until Play Day was to rewrite Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch. Which I did. On the train on the way up.

It didn't turn out too bad for a frenzied bit of last minute scribbling. The original caverns are quite linear, which is perhaps no surprise from a solo gamebook from 1984, so I Jaquaysed them to make exploration more interesting. I switched some of the encounters around, or changed their context, added some new ideas and dropped others. The original SNOW WITCH is quite playful and talkative, at least in comparison to most gamebook villains, so I wrote her to emphasise that aspect and make her less of an End Boss; alas, while I wanted to include the bit where she forces YOU to play a sort of scissors-paper-stone game just for fun, I ran out of time and couldn't work out how to include it. Next time.

Highlights of the adventure included:

• The player-characters discovering the footprints of a YETI and almost deciding to turn around and go home. This would be within ten minutes of starting play.


• The player-characters deciding that a cauldron full of yellow liquid was a potion that turned people into YETIS, because it was impossible that it could be anything else. In fact, it was a potion of cold resistance but their idea is too good for me to not use somewhere.


• The unexpected cheer that went up around the table when I semi-accidentally gave my Baldur's Gate II character John the Bastard a cameo as Generic Dwarf Prisoner #1.


• Liam's thief finding a pair of spiderclimbing boots and using them to run onto the ceiling of caverns to shoot at SNOW CULTISTS, safe from reprisals...


• ...until a summoned ICE DEMON flapped its stubby wings just enough to get within claw range of the thief's head...


• ...leaving the other two adventurers -- once the ICE DEMON was killed -- with the interesting problem of how to loot recover their deceased comrade's corpse.

Last time I played with Courtney, Liam, and James, I noted how they seemed to think everything in the adventure was significant and it proved to be the case this time too. They seemed to regard the adventure as a closed system in which every item had a use and every encounter had a purpose; the SNOW WITCH's necklace had to be a key to unlocking something and couldn't be normal jewellery, for example. I don't think there's anything wrong with that approach but it's not how I design or run adventures, so I feel there was a bit of a clash there.

If there was a clash, it wasn't serious enough to ruin the game, and I think everyone enjoyed the adventure, even though the Snow Witch escaped and Liam lost his character just before the end; I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to killing off player-characters and as such I don't believe I'll ever be a true Old-School Gamemaster, but the players seemed to be made of sterner stuff. They were cautious and clever and didn't try to fight everything, and while they also didn't find every treasure or uncover every secret, the player-characters emerged from the caverns with a big pile of gold and other loot. I don't think they gained a level, but they got close.

As comfortable as they are with old-school gameplay, I don't think this group of friends is that fond of old-school rules. Labyrinth Lord is a fine game and I chose it because it was a close match for the type of thing they wanted to play, but during the game they expressed frustration that their characters were rubbish in various ways, or that only the thief could detect traps, or that sometimes they had to roll high and other times they had to roll low, and so on. I've shattered at least one tooth as a result of excessive gritting due to descending armour class, so I understand their discomfort.

As such, next time we play I think we will use a different ruleset, but I'm not sure what that will be. I think it should be something simple, that feels like D&D but maybe isn't D&D itself. D&D5 is a possibility, but it may be too fiddly for this group. I've also got my eye on The Black Hack, but I dislike the roll-low core mechanic so I'm pondering a hack -- The Black Hack² perhaps, or The Hacked Black Hack -- if I can make the maths work.

Any other suggestions -- not Torchbearer -- are welcome; I've got some time to look around as I won't be up in the glittering capital again for a couple of months at least. Also, if there's interest -- and if it's legal -- I may post my remix of Caverns of the Snow Witch, but it needs a bit of a tidy up first.

Back at the end of January I did the most grognardy thing I've ever done and ran The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh using Labyrinth Lord. I did this because some friends had been nagging me suggesting that I run a game for them for years; I was reluctant because I'm nervous enough running games for my regular group -- I always assume they hate the games I run -- so being responsible for a group of new players' first experience of role-playing games was terrifying.

Truth be told, I don't think it was their actual first experience of rpgs; I suspect that at least one or two of them had a go at some point in their teens, but close enough.

Like me, Courtney had read the Dragonlance novels as a child and, like me, she was unaware at the time that they were connected to a game. Later on she became a bit of a fan of Final Fantasy XII -- my favourite of the series and one I wouldn't have played if Courtney hadn't told me how much fun it was -- and Skyrim. All in all, she had quite a bit of useful background.

Liam is a bit less geeky than Courtney but became a big fan of Baldur's Gate II after I circulated it among my friends, so he came to my game with a basic understanding of how D&D works. He also loves Dark Souls, so I should have killed his character off in some brutal fashion.

James expresses his geekiness through obscure electronic music and James Bond films, so he was perhaps the least familiar with the topoi of D&D but he was the only one who had played a tabletop rpg in recent years, having played Fiasco, although he considered it a party game rather than an rpg. I should ask him how that happened.

I selected Saltmarsh in part because they wanted Forgive Us but I thought it was a bit cruel for the first time out and I didn't want to put them off, and in part because I played D&D about three times before 2008 so I haven't been through any of the classics. Selfishness wins.

SPOILERS follow for an adventure released in 1981, in case you're the sort of deviant that hasn't played it.

We played over two days, one session in the evening and then, after a break for essentials like sleep and breakfast, a shorter session the next morning. We didn't do the second half of the adventure with the Boat of the Lizardmen™; we ran out of time and even if we hadn't, the player-characters' actions in the first half made it difficult to continue.

After exploring the house and discovering the caves below, they picked off a couple of sentries and got rid of Sanbalet and his gnoll hench-, er, gnolls. Then, instead of fighting the other thieves, the party went into business with them, taking over as heads of the smuggling ring! They then went back to Saltmarsh, told the town council that the smugglers had been driven off, and collected their reward for a job not well done. That's the kind of cynical, self-serving behaviour I expect from my usual group of immoral bastards veteran gamers, not newcomers. I wonder what that says about human nature?

They also thought everything was significant. For example, there's a book in the house's library, The Magical Properties of Gemstones, that is just a bit of loot to sell at a later date; the players decided that it was important and relevant and every time they found a jewel later in the adventure they would stop everything and ask if it was in the book and what its magical properties were.

That's not a problem; it shows they were engaging with the game and the setting details and that's a good thing, but it was also a bit odd, because I've had players fixate on insignificant details before but not to such an extent. Perhaps the players were trying extra hard because it was their first proper adventure, perhaps it was the influence of computer gaming, or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps I should have asked. Maybe I did. It was January and I have trouble remembering last week.

I do remember that they had fun -- so did I! -- and we'll probably do something similar next time I visit them in That London. If they want to stick with D&D, we may try D&D5; it's not my favourite but it does give low level characters a bit more oomph, wizards are a tad less rubbish, and it's easy to run. Sticking with D&D -- or fantasy at least -- would also give me a chance to try more of the classic adventures I've missed.

All that said, what I'd love to do is unleash Call of Cthulhu on them.

Iä!

I have some friends up in That London. I have known them for years; we all met at university and we stayed quite close even after my life went wonky for about a decade. They are good friends and I always have a space on their floor when I visit.

They live in one of the trendy parts of the glittering capital, but they are also a bit geeky, and as geek culture has become a bit trendy in recent years, it was perhaps inevitable that they would get sucked into gaming somehow. It was board games that got them; of course they have Cards Against Humanity, but they also have Settlers of Catan and Small World, and the mighty King of Tokyo, because everyone should own a copy of King of Tokyo.

I've been to Draughts with them a couple of times and taken the opportunity to push other games on them; it's only a matter of time before one of them gets Lords of Waterdeep. I feel no shame; games are great.

Now and then they've asked about role-playing games, and the subject came up again the other day as we tried to play Dark Souls over Google Hangouts. Don't ask.

One of my friends grew up reading Dragonlance novels but had never played Dungeons and Dragons; another -- her husband -- loves Baldur's Gate and Dark Souls and knows that these games are based on a common source; the third -- his childhood best friend -- has been playing Fiasco with another group of friends, but I don't think they are aware of the larger family tree of which that game is a branch.

They are all three primed and ready, even if they don't know it. Dragonlance Friend even has a copy of Labyrinth Lord that I bought for her a few years ago alongside Dragons of Despair; in hindsight not one of my better gift ideas.

One day soon, then, I will run a role-playing game for them. It will probably be some form of D&D, because it seems appropriate to start at the beginning -- although a big part of me wants to run Call of Cthulhu and "The Haunting" -- and if so, it will probably be Lamentations of the Flame Princess, because it's my favourite simple version of the game.

Ah, but what do I run for them? I do love LotFP, but I think I should start them with something more traditional, rather than Kult in the seventeenth century. You can't get more traditional than Keep on the Borderlands, but I'm after something that can be played to a decent conclusion in one afternoon or evening. I also know that lots of player-character deaths is traditional, but I'm also after something that they have a reasonable chance of completing without getting disgruntled. I want them to come back for more!

This is where my own experience isn't useful. I started with Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu, and played almost everything other than D&D -- and Vampire; to this day I have not played any proper White Wolf games -- so I don't have the background to know what's a good adventure for beginners.

It's over to you, internet. Is there a good starting D&Dish adventure out there, one I can unleash on absolute beginners, albeit beginners with some familiarity with the general idea of role-playing games?