Did Some Gaming

I got a chance to play Call of Cthulhu over this last holiday weekend with family and friends. Man… I can’t even remember that last time I had a chance to play… Overdroid was in town and so he had the Gamemaster responsibilities. This one-off session was alotta’ fun especially because we had some newbies. I own most of the Lovecraft County books that Chaosium has put out, so Overdroid opted for an adventure out of Secrets of Los Angeles. I went temporarily insane but survived so it was all-good.

My Wife is so cool, because she looked after our son while the rest of played...


-Swinebread

The 2008 H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest Starts Today!

And I'm going to miss it. I was a bonehead and scheduled a trip to the beach with the wife and baby right in the middle of this year's Film Fest, but we really do need to get outta town for awhile. Still, I'm sad I'm not gonna be there. This event has grown by leaps and bounds every year; it's truly an incredible thing. The H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest is one of those strange celebrations that keeps Portland wild, weird and fun.

here's the link (which was not working earlier today)

another link if the main link isn't working


-Swinebread

The Chaosium d100 system is at the Printer

cover art

That's right folks, the BASIC ROLEPLAYING SYSTEM is finally going to be a reality. I've been waiting for real multi-genre game from Chaosium for years. They have finally wised up and are providing a game system that's user friendly, like Call of Cthulhu, and is easy to apply to any type of adventure you want to run from sci-fi to fantasy. I've got a ton of ideas that BRP would be perfect for and now I’ll get to make them a reality.

The truth is I love roleplaying, but I hate rules. Rules get in the way of having a good gamming experience, imo, mostly because they are too complicated and so I spend most of my time with my nose buried in the rulebooks rather than focused on the players. The weird need by most game designers to create RPGs with overly complicated rules sets which must be memorized has always astonished me. I think this is the main reason most folks aren’t interested in playing RPGs. If you like legalistic stuff that doesn’t represent any kind of reality then by all means keep playing that way but I certainly don’t have the time relearn an overly complicated rules set, like D&D, every time I want to add something to an adventure or a new addition comes out. Have you looked at the Stat blocks for creatures nowadays? I don't understand half of that crap. Plus, all the rules about levels, experience points and etc, etc just get in the way actually rolepaying, being the character and that’s what I find fun. Roleplaying, for me, is about being in the moment and BASIC ROLEPLAYING will allow that now that it’s not tied to a specific genre. Can you tell I’ve been waiting for this?

This book represents a first for BASIC ROLEPLAYING—a system complete in one book, without a defined setting. Previously, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has been an integral part of standalone games, usually with rich and deep world settings. Due to differences in these settings, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has had many different incarnations. Variant and sometimes contradictory rules have emerged between versions, to better support one particular setting over another.

Chaosium’s BASIC ROLEPLAYING system reconciles these different flavors of the system and brings many variant rules together into the covers of one book, something that has never been done before. Some of these rules are provided as optional extensions, some as alternate systems, and others have been integrated into the core system. By design this work is not a reinvention of Basic Roleplaying or a significant evolution of the system, but instead a collected and complete version, without setting, provided as a guide to players and gamemasters everywhere and compatible with most Basic Roleplaying games. It also allows the gamemaster the ability to create his or her own game world (or worlds), to adapt others from fiction, films, or even translate settings from other roleplaying games into Basic Roleplaying.

Take peak at the character sheet here.


-Swinebread

Calls For Cthulhu

-Swinebread

Elric to Mongoose

There’s an unfulfilled yearning I’ve had for a long time. It was the hope that Chaosium (the guys that publish the Call of Cthulhu RPG) would really support their Michael Moorcock licensed game Stormbringer. It was the first non-TSR game I ever played that I honestly enjoyed and it was also my first introduction to Elric, the multiverse and the Eternal Champion. Well, that’s not entirely true as I had read the Oswald Bastable stories years before but at that time I hadn’t realized their connections to Moorcock’s other works. After playing the Stormbringer RPG, I immediately went out and scooped up and read all the Elric novels. This of course led me to Hawkmoon and Corum as well as the rest of the Eternal Champion titles. The battle between Law and Chaos both in the books and in the game was a fantastic backdrop for the adventures. Also the dimensional and time travel aspects fired me up as I greatly enjoy this type of fantasy.

Eventually, I bought all the Stormbinger game materials I could get my hands on, many from used bookstores. The product line went through many aborted restarts that included a name change to Elric for a while and even a poorly adapted version for D20. Many promised supplements never came out as the line was always thrown on the back burner in deference to Call of Cthulhu. We finally did see a Corum supplement and Chaosium finally put out some of their unpublished but promised books out as monographs (cheap photocopy tape bound books) but the fan base for their Moorcock inspired works seemed greatly reduced as was the enthusiasm for game itself.


Recently, I discovered that Mongoose Publishing acquired the RPG rights to the whole Eternal Champion line including Elric from Chaosium. See the link here. In the end it’s probably a good thing because Chaosium really wasn’t doing a whole lot with it (the biggest missed opportunity of the RPG world in my opinion), plus they had terribly damaged their relationship with Michael Moorcock. Still, it is a little sad as I thought we just might be on the verge of a Basic Role-Playing System Renaissance, Basic Role-Playing being Chaosium’s house system. Elric and Hawkmoon, which are coming out very soon, will be using Mongoose’s new Runequest rules (MRQ) to make them compatible with other game products they publish. This is good as the original Runequest formed the foundation for Basic Role-Playing (BRP) and Stormbringer, although the new Mongoose Runequest rules has been tweaked to make it appeal more to D20 fans.

I’m a little leery on dumping money on these new game products as I have spent a ton of cash on Mongoose’s Conan line only to see it revamped with an updated second addition. This is very much like how many fans were stuck when Wizards of the Coast decided to go from 3 to 3.5 on D&D. But if the past is any kind of prolog, Mongoose Publishing will be putting out a bunch of supplements for the Eternal Champion line, something Chaosium was unwilling or unable to do.

To sum it up, I guess it feels like I was in a relationship where I was never getting what I needed or wanted but still I stayed. Now, that bad relationship is over and I wonder if I should start a new one. I think I'll wait and see. I waited so long for Chaosium to step up to the plate, I guess I can wait a little longer to see if Mongoose’s game is any good before I buy.

-Swinebread

Call of Cthulhu the Silent Movie

Two years ago at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival there was a lot of buzz in the air about a new independent film titled The Call of Cthulhu based on the original 1926 Lovecraft story. This weird horror tale has often been called unfilmable. Usually, the alien god’s name, Cthulhu, gets sprinkled into crappy to mediocre films for flavor but any serious depiction of him or the story he exists in was notably absent. Fans of Lovecraft’s style of horror have lamented the lack of good adaptations of his work and have had settle for merely Lovecraft inspired shows. Well, with the release of The Call of Cthulhu Film in 2005 a tipping point was reached and a threshold passed. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), a media company dedicated adapting his works, presented their two-year effort. I found the project both entertaining and faithful.


What made the unfilmable story filmable was the HPLHS’s conceit of making a silent picture. Here the cast and crew would recreate The Call of Cthulhu as if it had been produced when the original story came out in the 1920s. This was a masterstroke of inspiration in my opinion. The black and white film approach solved many technical problems while evoking the time and space of the short story. Also, Lovecraft’s words didn’t become underwhelming with the delivery by actors but are enhanced with the use of text on the screen. Many places and effects needed in The Call of Cthulhu are created using models and film trickery of the silent era which makes the viewing much more authentic. A few folks have expressed disappointment with the monster Cthulhu in the film but I rather liked his depiction. To me, he looked like a representation of what makes him so awful, plus some bloated CG effect wouldn’t have worked either. In this case representational is better than realistic… how could somebody make Cthulhu, look realistic anyway.

At that film fest in October 2005, I vowed to pick up a copy of the film someday. Well, at the Emerald City Comic Con I did. I watched it again with much joy (and fright). If you are a Lovecraft fan this is the real deal. The Call of Chtulhu finally achieves the desire for a good movie adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s work.

Here’s the Trailer:


-Swinebread