Psychotronic Gaming: Status Quo is the Enemy

   A key element of Psychotronic Gaming is that change must occur. 

  There is a tendency for campaign settings to remain static, especially mass-produced settings - the same king is King of Kingdom X; the same Cleric is Theocrat of Y; the same dragon menaces trade along the coast of Z; etc.

  This seems very close to how comic book continuity morphed from a tool to allow better storytelling into a straight-jacket that suffocates innovation. In Marvel Comics the Fantastic Four always got their powers about 17 years ago and in DC Superman made his debut as Superman about 10 years ago - forever.

  If you want your TTRPG campaign to last you CANNOT do this! Change is as critical as keeping strict time records!

  Here is an example from Seaward.

Common Elements of Epic Adventures

   Returning to more frequent blogging after a critical illness, I hope that you remember that I was just starting a series on Epic Adventures before I was taken ill. This is what is often called a 'setup post' - I am discussing what I will be discussing in future articles.

  In reviewing the common elements in the various epic adventures I have played in or run I have identified a few common elements they seem to share. To wit:

1) The player characters are neither new nor high-level. What I mean is it appears that the 'sweet spot' of the most epic adventures involves PCs of 4th to 8th level. Competent but nor overwhelming.

2) Treasure is not a primary motivation. While there is almost always a lot of sweet loot involved after the adventure is over, the motivation for the adventure is never primarily treasure.

3) They involve large numbers of characters and/or NPCs, usually enough combatants to make mass combat a necessary element of play. 

4) The stakes are high. 'Failure = guaranteed TPK' is usually the minimum threshold for an adventure to be epic.

5) The outcome is unpredictable. Even if the PCs do everything they can to stack the deck in their favor no one, including the DM, is sure who will win.

6) They involve NPCs familiar to the players. Not as universal as the others, this seems to make it easier for an adventure to be epic.

  Over the next few weeks I will be blogging nd podcasting about these individual elements.

Slowly Turns the Tide

   Back when I started this blog almost nine years ago (hard to believe!) I had never really combined the internet and RPGs. I hadn't ever gone to an RPG forum (and now post about once a year on HERO Games forums). I hadn't ever done much, if anything, on Facebook RPG groups. Heck, I had no idea what Dragonsfoot was until a month before I started this blog! I had made a Google+ account and found out that there were a ton of RPGers there, started this blog, and perused some of the internet's RPG resources.

  There were plenty of blogs and many of the good ones are still around, and have been joined by new good ones. G+ had a ton of good discussions. But I was disconnected from a ton of gaming at the time. I was clueless that the Forge was ever a thing and didn't know how weird people could be, although I learned fast - it is long deleted, but when I did a review of the free 5e PDF and concluded that the free PDF didn't include all the rules I received death threats in my comments. Not tongue in cheek, either.

  But 95% of my online RPG experience has been terrific, with 4% meh and 1% totally messed up. Nice ratio.

  But there is one odd thing to me. When I started writing here a lot of what I was writing about was seen as radical, weird, and impossible. Back in 21013 when I wrote about how I essentially require all players to have and use multiple characters each the G+ crowd concluded I was loopy. Same results from the same year when I discussed strict encumbrance as needed. And my discussion of the centrality of disease rules, parasite rules, strict time records, henchmen, hirelings, sages, and so on. Likewise, when I rejected RPGs being about storytelling and discussed 'emerging narratives' versus pre-planned there has always been a ton of push-back. My instance that alignment, encounter checks, and on and on and on all had a lot of dissent and few supporters. 

  This varies a bit. Why? Over time as I keep mentioning these things and explaining why they are important with examples more and more people have come to agree with me. And many of them spread these ideas on their own, convincing others. 

  Slowly, but seemingly constantly, the ideas and concepts I learned in the '70's and early '80's are spreading again. Convinging people to try the old ways again. It took 7 years but I finally convinced someone to play AD&D 1e ("it is unplayable!" they repeated told be for more than half a decade) and now they call AD&D 1e "how to really learn to play D&D".

  I see the future as less Restoration and more just Original.

The WASP War, an Atlantaverse Update

 Strap in, folks, this is the summary of 8 years of roleplaying. Back in 2013 I started a new Champions campaign with my oldest sons and many of their friends. They players have changed and everyone followed my 'every players has multiple characters' rule, and we ended up with multiple games with multiple GMs in a shared universe, so there have been a LOT of PC heroes! The 8 years of real time have equaled about 8 years of game time, for various fun reasons involving session timing. Because of a statement made by a player in 2014 we started calling this sprawling shared shared campaign the Atlantaverse.

  When I started the campaign I made a new, unique setting of an Earth like ours that had minor history divergences in 1801 and 1908 and a major one in 1938. By the time the first game started in-universe in 2013 the Atlantaverse had superheroes, supervillains, mages, aliens, and trans-dimensional visitors. The United States in-universe is a parliamentary system with 3 major and 7 minor political parties. And so on. All told with the contributions of players and other GMs the Atlantaverse grew so big, so complex, and so interconnected that my licensed setting book will be released in 2022.

  But one of the antagonists in the Atlantaverse, the first villains they ever faced, is WASP. WASP is a mysterious international organization that combines organized crime, terrorism, radical ideology, and cybercrime. Their uniformed agents are about on par with the soldiers of standing armies but armed with bleeding-edge weapons, allowing them to go toe-to-toe with any conventional forces and win.  Their elite troops are bionically and genetically enhanced and have even better armor and weapons, making them equal to low-level supervillains. Divided into cells that make it virtually impossible to attack the organization as a while WASP has been a thorn in the side of the heroes from literally Day One of the campaign. Their secret origin is available to my patrons on my Patreon page (see the sidebar).

  So the players all agreed that their long-erm goal was to take down all of WASP. This weekend, they succeeded. This is a summary of what the in-universe press calls the WASP War.

Epic Adventures: A Few Examples

 I spoke with a number of players, both those currently active and those from the past(!) about adventures they felt were epic, the sorts of adventures yu still talk about years later. They all pretty much agreed on a list of the most epic adventures, which follows.

New Blogging Arc - Epic Adventures!

   By special request I am doing an arc on epic adventures. To prepare for this I have spent a few days talking to current and former players about the adventures they felt were the biggest, baddest, and most epic. From them I have picked a few examples and will use them to describe how you can run the sorts of sessions that players talk about 30 years later!

  To pass this along I will start with a few posts and podcasts about examples of epic adventures. Then I will discuss the elements I think are required to make an epic adventure. Then some discussion of the options that can take the epic to the unforgettable. Finally I will wrap up with a live Q&A about adventure design. 

  Stay tuned for more details!

Play report: Blackstone

   On Black Friday we had a long, involved session set in Blackstone, my AD&D 2e Players Option campaign, which is 14 years old ('the new campaign').

The party:
Disco (6th level fighter, master of the battle axe) [Alex]
Joan (6th level cleric, front line fighter) [Jen]
Albrecht (6th level mage, creator of the School of Healing) [Jack]
Alazne (7th level thief, assistant guildmaster of East Port) [Sam]
Lawrence (6th level mage, master of Song magic) [Nick]