The Young Nerdhood of Studs Lonnigan: Dragon Magazine

Of course, I started with Dungeons & Dragons, just like everyone else. I found a set of old red-covered D&D books in my aunt's basement, abandoned there by my much-older cousin, and that was pretty much the end of it for a life of quiet dignity.

I don't know why I started buying Dragon mags specifically. They were reasonably priced and well within the range of a young nerd's allowance, and offered a wide variety of supplementary material - Almost all of it for D&D, but of course at that point I was only barely aware that there were other options. The then-current issues often focused on the arcana of Second Edition which was strange and baffling to my first-ed mind, and so I skipped over them and went straight to the back catalogue. Of these back issues, I favoured the Halloween and April Fool's editions, which offered opportunities for horror and comedy gaming, strange, alien ideas at the time.

One particular Halloween issue (1994, to be precise) was the tipping point. There was an article on resurrection magic and its impact on the imaginary world - In particular, how it fucks around with the quasi-medieval milieu that, as mentioned, is D&D's default arrangement (The King is dead! Long live the King! The King is back!), and how, given the hefty but by no means impossible cost of magic, for wealthy merchants and the like being assassinated was closer to a fine you had to pay than an actual corporal punishment. Pretty standard stuff by the standards of modern gaming, but it blew my young mind because it presumed a few things: An internally consistent world, and actually working out every possible impact and effect of the changes of that world.

Another article, which it turns out came from six months earlier (1994 was a good year, I guess), enhanced this idea with an article breakdown of a short series of books and pamphlets of what I would later refer to, with much gleeful elbowing and knowing looks, as "controversial knowledge". Specifically, these materials conveyed Thomas E. Bearden's spectacularly loopy theories about how the Soviets were totally developing Tesla technology, guys. In addition to the usual Tesla fun, Bearden's version of the tech kicks physics in the balls in a whole new way, as any energy transmitted through hyperspace is massively magnified through pure magic*. Thus, by transmitting nuclear blasts through harmless-looking transmitters, the dastardly Reds had access to planet-cracking bombs with no need for satellites or missiles! And shining a flashlight through hyperspace creates lasers! And the devil is in my water supply! This was my first encounter with CK, but even to a 13-year-old, the author, Gregory Detweiler, was a bit too credulous (although come to think of it, he was probably just adhering to TSR's general "please, please don't sue us" attitude, which they held for pretty much the entire 90s**). Anyway, this set off a lifelong fascination with crazy guys and their vanity-press frothings, a fascination all the more enabled by my later discovery of Kenneth Hite and his whole rich galaxy of WTF. As for Detweiler, he went on to write Blood Brothers, the greatest idea for a Call of Cthulhu supplement ever***.

The Reviews section was another favourite, as it was often written by Rick Swan, whose breezy manner made them more interesting than a lot of the (usually ponderous) regular articles. Swan had done a lot of freelance work on Paranoia and it showed in his writing style. The reviews tended to make everything sound great (although nothing was ever quite as good as good old TSR**** products), and it was through that column that I learned about this crazy game called Over the Edge where "PCs can be anything from Green Berets to talking cats". Of course, it was also in the review column that I found my first mention of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so in a sense it's Rick Swan's fault that I spent a lot of 1999-2001 statting up fomori and not realizing what an absolute knob I was being.

And finally, in the pages of Dragon I had my first real glimpse of how awful gamers could be. My gaming groups had had our fights, our games had been cancelled on account of rules disputes and nerd drama, but I had assumed that was us and our youthful inexperience - Surely real gamers didn't have these emotional freakouts. In Dragon, in the Forum and Judges' Guild columns, I learned that it never really gets better, it only gets sadder. Judges' Guild was people writing in for Official TSR Rulings on rules questions, and you could tell that behind every one there was a seething argument about how my halfling totally would have survived that green ooze pit if my dick DM hadn't rounded up for encumbrance, and now TSR themselves are going to show him he's wrong so nyah. But even that was relatively mild compared to the Forum section, in which the overpowered/underpowered nature of the cleric was endlessly debated in multi-column screeds, as were other weighty issues like gaming outside your gender. Yeah. Exactly like an internet forum. Nothing ever changes, it seems.

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* Actually, there was a technobabble explanation for why the Laws of Thermodynamics not only don't apply but appear to be actively reversed in hyperspace, but it's about as convincing as everything else Bearden wrote.
** If the words "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri"  mean nothing to you, you dodged a bullet.
*** A series of short, light-hearted adventures based on classic horror movies, from teen slashers to silent films. I know, right?
**** Hey remember when the internet loved spelling it T$R? Man, that never got old!

NGE CCG: OMG WTF ASL

Giant Monsters and Emotional Abuse, Now in Card Game Form!

There was a full-on, playable collectible card game based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll let those of you familiar with that series pick up the shattered remnants of your exploded heads, before we catch up the unenlightened.

NGE is an anime show that often gets fulsome praise these days for inverting the expectations of the viewing audience. It started as a fairly straightforward teenage-boy-pilots-giant-robot show with a lot of (literally) arbitrary Judeo-Christian-Freudian mythology as set dressing, and then took a headlong dive into psychological fuckery, high weirdness, and ultimately the creator more or less directly telling anime fandom as a whole to put on a non-dragon shirt and leave the basement for God's sake. Of course, as certain observers have pointed out, this message was somewhat diluted by the creators' willingness to pimp out the series for a wide variety of collectibles. tie-ins and relaunches, many of which involved heavily sexualized incarnations of the two pubescent female pilots, colour-coded for your convenience as red (dominant) and blue/white (submissive). The demands of crass commercialism and creepy anime fandom aside, NGE managed to squeeze out a pretty decent boy-becomes-man story viewed through the funhouse mirror of animoo.

The NGE CCG, one of the tie-ins relatively light on both crass and creep, is actually startlingly faithful to its source material. Relationships between characters are key to gameplay, and six of the main characters from the series are arranged in a pentagon plus the three Evas (aforementioned giant robots) below, creating something like a Tarot layout¹.  Every card title is a line from the show, spoken by a character in the relationship matrix - Ordinarily, each character can only speak one line per turn, though as in all CCGs, rules are flexible things. Cards can be played both for their normal effect, or flipped over for another line that can be used to either attract or harm a character. In the former case, the targeted character is "grouped" with the character who spoke the card - in the latter, they're either broken out of whatever group they're in, or if alone, are "downed" (injured, sunk into a deep pit of despair) until someone says something nice to them and gives them the strength to carry on and keep fighting (this is anime, after all)². Characters who are downed can't speak cards, and pilots who are downed can't pilot Evas and fight Angels (the giant monsters drenched in aforementioned Judeo-Christian mythology).

Another interesting rule is the "Draw points" in the upper right corner. Rather than drawing one card per turn automatically as in Magic, you draw a number of cards at the end of the turn equal to the total draw points of the cards you played. Most cards are worth +1, including all cards played as attract/harm lines³. Particularly powerful cards are worth 0, and devastating ones are worth negative draw points, requiring a player to discard cards. Since having no cards in hand at the end of a turn eliminates a player, this serves as a rather severe limiting factor⁴. It's an oddly roundabout way of doing things, and keeping track of total draw points looks like a pain in the ass, but the suspense of instant elimination unless cards are shepherded very carefully could save the system.

The CCG is also faithful to its roots in that the victory conditions vary - Each player chooses a particular consummation card to start, and although consummations are tied to particular characters, a given character has several consummations (reflecting various goals they had over the course of the series). Victory is achieved by first reaching a particular gamestate (two characters are grouped together, a certain character is downed, you defeat an Angel) and then flipping the victory card over and achieving a different condition. The sheer variety of win conditions means that, particularly for the first "level" of victory, it's not a zero-sum game - One action can easily fulfill multiple win conditions. Although Angels have to be defeated (an undefeated Angel forces the active player to discard cards, hastening their end as mentioned), their defeat is often only incidental to the ultimate goal of the game, which again works well for a show where the giant monsters often took a backseat to the main character's torturous and mindfucky relationship with his father, his fellow pilots, and pretty much everyone he met.

Is it any good as a game? No idea - despite an entire cardset and rulebook being translated and made available online, I haven't yet gone mad enough to try printing the whole damn thing out and negotiating the fan-translation on the cards (See the card above - it's powerfully evocative of the feel of the show, but what the hell does it mean? Does Shinji's group break up? Are cards attached to him discarded? The rulebook offers no assistance). It remains a mysterious enigma of odd rules and Mysterious Japanese Game Design, waiting for the day I lose my sense entirely and attempt to print and play. For the time being, I'm quite content just to know that it exists.

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1. And heap another layer of symbolism on there, whynot.
2. Rei Ayanami is the only character who automatically recovers from being downed every turn. It's a big old spoiler to explain why this rule exists, but it amused me to no end.
3. Again, except for Rei, whose attract/harm lines are worth 0. And again, hee hee hee.
4. Although logical, since a player with no cards has no means of getting new ones.

Why I Like Orpheus, or: I should just rename the damn blog "Why I Like"

The logo was bullshit, though.

Orpheus is neat in a couple of ways. First off, the setting was one of those simple concepts that breeds a whole host of possible adventures and ideas: A cryogenics company¹ discovers that their resuscitated clients have been having out-of-body experiences and, crazier yet, have been interacting with ghosts. Developing the technology to enhance this effect, they make it more or less reliable (it works best with people who've had multiple near-death experiences and thus have "loose souls") and set about resolving the issues of the recently-deceased for cold hard cash². Or, as the game's elevator pitch sums up, "the kid from The Sixth Sense opens a Ghostbusting business".

There's more to it, of course, the usual mysteries and oddities of the world - there are rival ghost-resolution firms, a street drug called pigment³ lets users see and even interact with ghosts, nobody has met a ghost more than about five years old, ghostly activity is definitely on the rise, and you often run into spectres who've turned Full Monster and seem to have a hivemind going - which segues into the other cool thing about Orpheus. Most games try to play down whatever metaplot they might have- there's all this stuff, and maybe something is gonna change, or maybe not, no pressure There are two very good reasons for this, one financial and one creative. The financial is that having an end in mind sets a limit on the number of sourcebooks you can produce, which in turn limits the amount of money you can make on a particular line. The creative is that most gamers are going to create their own game using bits and pieces of the given setting, so you want sourcebooks that present them with options rather than a didactic now-this-happens arrangement, because those sell better. Okay, so they're both financial reasons.

Orpheus says phooey to all that. There are six books in the line⁴ and that's all you get. Each book pushes the plot forward with some Big Fucking Thing that happens, increases the power level, introduces new threats and stuff, and reveals some more secrets. And after the sixth book, you're done, finito, that's it, go do something else. The authors love using a movie metaphor for this - Starts with a premise, twist, rising action, twist, climax, - all that screenwriting stuff. And on the page, it works pretty well overall, although I'm still reading through the metaplot as a whole. This may well be the first RPG line that was planned from the beginning with a specific end in mind - not just the end of the GM's particular plot , but an actual end to the line as a whole.

This is ballsy⁵ and I like it. It was, I think, Robin Laws who pointed out that your average gamer is going to have a relatively tiny amount of time to play in - Even assuming a perfect every-weekend-for-a-year game, you're still looking at maybe 150-odd hours of actual play time, to say nothing of chargen, rules disputes, freak-outs, holidays, nerd drama, booze runs, etc etc et fucking c. In most RPGs, you can easily own entire books that will never even see partial use. A game that you only have to have six books to run, ever - One hardcover corebook, five softcover supplements - seems a welcome alternative, and players only need⁶ the first half of the first one.What's more, the lack of formal material meshes well with the setting - it's our world, but with ghosts. You can come up with plots just by grabbing a newspaper and plugging in restless dead.

Of course, for all its coolness, it's still an OWoD game. It has splats which divide up the ghosties into a set of predetermined types (which is good for the 'scientific paranormal' element of the setting, but come on, seriously?). It has mechanics for fucking everything, including the always-irritating "one power per level, always the same power" thing which makes the ghosts even less individual. There's even an attempt to tie the game back into the Wraith: the Oblivion metaplot⁷ which I admit I find endearing in a let's-not-lose-touch-after-graduation way (Also, WtO's drab, oppressive, bureaucratic netherworld that everyone hated? They blew it up. With nuclear fucking bombs. Talk about blurring the line between "cool" and "paint-eater retarded"). If I were to run it - and as enthralled as I am by the setting, I don't think I can run a game with this kind of time commitment in my current uncertain-future situation - I'd probably adapt it to FATE or some similarly freewheeling system. But the very fact that I am tempted to run it at all says a lot. Come on, who doesn't want to be ghostly Ghostbusters?

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1. Technically, I guess they'd be a suspended-animation company, seeing as their process doesn't involve freezing people alive or bilking the terminally ill out of their savings. Well, okay, they do have the right to invest your finances until you come back, but the point is that the process works - you actually will come back, probably.
2. The game never outright states that they hassle James Randi first, but come on, wouldn't you?
3. That name rings hollow to my ear for slang, and the alternative - Black Heroin - is way too easy to confuse with actual black tar heroin. If/when I ever run the damn game, I'd probably just call it dye - short, cute pun, keeps the whole coloration thing (which continues with a ghost subtype called hues - pigment users come back as hues, who are a lot more vulnerable to monsterization).
4. Well, there are six official books. Some mad bastard made a 135-page fan sourcebook for the game, even going so far as to copy the design of the official books. There's a half-formed thought here about the limited run of the game encouraging people to create material rather than wait for the Man to provide the final word. Of course, the flipside of this is that once the run is concluded, that interest and the accompanying material vanish into thin ether - the Project Flatline site that created the fanbook is gone, and a google search for "Orpheus RPG fan site" returns bupkis.
5. And they know it, and they never shut up about it. The air of self-congratulation around this admittedly really good idea is part of what makes Orpheus, the last of the Old World of Darkness games, a microcosm of the whole OWoD, along with the metaplot which ends in a gigantic fucking apocalypse, the gothick trappings (occasionally juxtaposed hilariously with heavy-duty military hardware), the insistence on both "roleplaying" and minutely defining said roleplaying in both text and mechanics, and the writing that gets tiresome after a chapter or so. Oh, and of course there are fucking LARP rules.
6. Or should that be "only get to use"? The great D&D3 sin of arming every player with a million mechanical options for their character still irks me, but that's a post for another day.
7. Wraith is gonna get its own W.I.L. one of these days, but it deserves its rep as a game that's interesting but a pain in the ass to play. Another thing Orpheus gets right is that ghosts should be haunting our world, not off in their own not-quite-an-afterlife doing baffling and alien things for a hierarchy nobody living knows anything about. And hey, I mentioned Wraith without bringing up my all-time favourite "terrible idea" supplement, Charnel Houses of Eur- dammit!

Why I Like Small World

So I bought Small World¹, because it's terrific (hence the W.I.L.), and I also bought the various expansions because, as I've alluded to before, there is a hole in every gamer's heart that can only be filled by having every single possible bit for his chosen money sink². Thankfully, this was all less traumatic to the pocketbook than it could have been, thanks to the good people of Meeplemart, their reasonable (and Canadian!) prices and their startlingly fast delivery. Meeplemart: For when you simply cannot function until you've spent $200 on completely unnecessary Arkham Horror figures³.

Anyway, now that we're done polishing Meeplemart's tackle, on to polishing Small World's. Small World is a game with a spectacular amount of cardboard. There are two boards (with different maps on each side, so you can play with anywhere from 2 to 5 players), there are mountains, there are a bunch of cardboard Race⁴ banners with Generic Fantasy's Greatest Hits on them (You know Orcs, Halflings, Elves and the rest, although the expansions mix it up a bit with such examples of European cultural sensitivity as Gypsies and Pygmies⁵); there are a bunch more power banners, which are marked with adjectives like Flying, Peace-Loving and Marauding, and which fit into a groove on the race banners; there are troll holes and fortresses and dragons, and there are a shedload of little cardboard armies to punch out. Fortunately, the game also gives you a fancy little storage tray for the armies in the main set, and one of the expansions has another for all the ones from the other expansions. We're talking serious cardboard here.

The reason for all this is also the strength of the game: the Basic Rule. To conquer a territory, you need 2 armies, plus one for every bit of cardboard on it, including other armies. That's it. Oh, there's more to it than that - every race has its own power, and the special powers which combine with those, but once you get the Basic Rule you have a good 90% of the game well in hand.

Gameplay consists of buying a race (six races are doled out and given random powers, and as each is bought, another is added), taking over whatever territory you can with it, and taking victory coins equal to your occupied territories, plus bonuses from your race and power. Then other races come along and mess with you. Eventually, your guys will be killed off (when you conquer using the Basic Rule, one of the conquered armies gets discarded, the others get spread around the conqueree's remaining territory) or be spread out too thin, or just get boring, and you can put them into decline so they can continue making sweet victory coins for you while you get a whole new set of assholes to wreck shit up. Whoever's richest at the end of the game wins, just like in real life.

You may have noticed that the Basic Rule has no randomness to it. It's a sheer accounting measure. That's intentional - SW is, as barely mentioned above, from The Europes, which makes it one of those sneaky bastard well-polished Eurogames posing as a brash randomness-besotted Ameritrash game. Except that if you don't have enough troops to take one last territory at the end of your turn, you can roll a die to get temporary reinforcements. And that there's a power that lets you roll it too. And that there's a lot of randomness in how random races are linked to random powers and then arranged in a random order of cost ⁶. The Usual Suspects squabble over what this means and whether and how to remove Demon Unpredictability from their perfect equations, making for another fine example of how Taking It Too Seriously mucks up the fun.

And the game is fun, and fast, and surprisingly complex for all that it uses an icky-poo die. The satisfaction of trouncing an enemy gives way to the misery of being trounced in turn and then to the deliberation as to whether to go for one more landgrab, or put your race into decline and pick a new one next turn. Some power/race combos are legendarily good(/broken), others kinda suck, but they're all different and novel and influence strategy in complex ways. It's a game of Civilization in an hour, and without those crazy-ass wonder videos. So it's a wash, really, but it's a damn fine wash.

Finally, a word on customization. The base game has a black race banner and a blank power banner so you can make up your own, like Illuminati cards. The expansions add some more (and the expansions are largely made up of player-submitted powers and races. As I've said before, every gamer is a game designer). And the game itself inspires ideas at a phenomenal pace - My first game at 7 AM, on Boxing Day with no sleep and a beer in my hand, I was already crawling with ideas. Even the crusty BGGeeks, when they weren't figuring out how to replace the game's only source of randomness with bonus extra-dry strategy, produced some nifty print-and-play expansions. Truly, Small World just keeps getting bigger.<sup>7



1</sup> And in doing so managed to drunkenly break my vow not to buy any more games until I had a job like a real boy.

² Well, not every single bit. I left out the Tales & Legends action deck as a paltry attempt to prove that my dissolution was incomplete, like a drunk intentionally leaving the last swallow of his beer in the glass because that proves he's not an alcoholic.

³ Seriously, the game comes with cardboard standees and bases which have never failed me. All these figures are going to do is make your monster chits look ridiculous running around all Flatland at the 3D-realized feet of your investigators. And then Fantasy Flight comes out with a line of monster figures and oh my God that's brilliant.

⁴ I'd do some bog-standard grumping about how race is incorrect and they should really be species banners, but you can't fight the moonlight or the tide of nerd inertia. Inerdtia. Gygax called 'em races, they're races.

⁵ Those actually are races, which just goes to show. Although there is always that book that White Wolf put out about Gypsies being a separate genetic lineage of magical tricksters. I think it was just after their book on playing the ghosts of Holocaust victims, and just before somebody asked them what in the living fuck they thought they were doing.

⁶ This sentence is more or less just me trying to break my roommate Matt (of Fiasco badass mail-order bride Natasha and homeless cuckolded murderous gay dude fame). For reasons unknown, duder has a broom up his ass about the use of "random", not merely in its use to refer to wacky-loopy-freak-the-mundanes shenanigans (which is, of course, despised by all people of character and spirit), but its use to refer to anything which is at all dependent on anything else. Which leaves us with, I guess, singularities and the Primal Chaos?

⁷ UNBEARABLY TWEE FINAL LINE EXPUNGED. WE APOLOGIZE. TRUST US, THOUGH, IT'S A PRETTY FUN GAME.

On owning a Munchkin expansion

One of the very few objects I brought home from San Diego Comic Con (a trip more inspired by bravado and impulsiveness than spare money and sense) was an expansion for Munchkin, which I won besting a few dumpy balding dudes and at least one eight-year-old in a demo game. I don't care for Munchkin, generally - it's fiddly, in the sense that victory is very dependent on who gets what cards when, and its forcibly relaxed play style often paradoxically leads to embarrassing taking-it-too-seriously squabbles. God forbid you play for more than bragging rights - The final game of the con, a round of Munchkin played for a box of games the size of a man's torso, degenerated into the kind of miserable autism-meets-Roberts-Rules-of-Order pissing match that makes me seriously consider giving up boardgames altogether. Hell, I don't even like the art - Dork Tower is generally irritating, and I'll probably never forgive whoever decided they should ditch the realistic* art of Mag-Blast in favour of waaaaacky cartoons**. What I'm saying is, it's low on the list of games I'd like to own, somewhere below Talisman and far below Kill Doctor Lucky, maybe a touch above Bohnanza***.

And yet, as I sit here with this expansion on my coffee table, I'm seriously considering getting Munchkin at some point in the future****. It's an absolute marketing masterstroke: For a fifteen-dollar investment, Steve Jackson Games have somehow made it seem reasonable to lay out forty bucks for a game I don't even like, to say nothing of all the other expansions I could sell myself on the logic that I already own the main game. One wonders how this could apply to other fields and products. Are there any other situations where a cheaper supplemental object is given away free, in confidence that it is entirely useless without the more expensive original? Can you sell a man a rice cooker by giving him the vegetable steaming tray*****? Is this a board gaming only thing? (The videogame equivalent - giving someone a free game to try to get them to buy a new system - falls victim to a much wider difference in value, plus a digital object is just way easier to ignore.)

I'm trying to give it away so it can haunt me no longer, but here we see another beautiful element of the SJG marketing engine - Those who actually like the game will, most likely, own many of the supplements for it, including the very one I'm trying to fob off on them. So, until I can find a taker, I'm forced to regard it with the mounting discomfort of an automatic collector with a perceived hole in my collection. Well played, Steve Jackson. Well played.



* and, if memory serves, Twilight Imperium-based

** The thinking, I guess, was that there was a disconnect between the art and the actual gameplay (which, for the uninitiated, included actually saying "Pshhewww" and "Badaboom" as you played laser-blast cards, or else they didn't count). What they glossed over was that said disconnect was the crux of the game's humour. And but so we get yet another bit of nerd media being self-consciously wacky because how else could we possibly know it's supposed to be funny?

*** My distaste for Bohnanza is a whole other mess, to be dealt with at a later date.

**** You know, once I have any money at all. Turns out, going to San Diego? Expensive as balls.

***** Or better yet, letting him win it. The mental attachment to something acquired through perceived toil must be all the more powerful than merely getting it. This isn't just a box of useless cardboard I can easily throw out, it's a trophy. Except that a trophy doesn't imply you should buy a bigger, more expensive trophy to justify it.