Category Archives: Games

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ProgCore is Coming

For years, a whole bunch of my friends kept telling me that I needed to meet Todd Stashwick, because we would be fast friends who share a ton of extremely nerdy interests. Todd is the dungeon master for an ongoing D&D campaign a few friends are part of, and he runs these really great one shots set in a world of his own design, called The Dark Age of Theer.

Our paths never crossed, I think, because they are parallel to each other, and there wasn’t ever a reason that they would link up … until Todd was cast as Captain Liam Shaw in Star Trek: Picard. For Ready Room, I get to watch all the finished episodes long before they are released (I will now pause to receive your envy. Imagine my hands are on my hips and I am beaming) and from the moment Todd came across my screen, I was like “Holy shit this guy is incredible and I hope I get to interview him!”

I mentioned this to some friends, who happened to play D&D with Todd, and that’s when I realized that the guy so many people were telling me I should meet because we are spiritual siblings and the guy who I freakin’ LOVED in this show was the same guy.

Fast forward about a eight months, and Todd invited me to play a one-shot set in his Dark Age of Theer, at his house, in his Nerd Lair (which is almost identical to my game room, down to the arcade cabinets and vintage 80s nerd toys). It was incredibly fun, so when Todd asked me if I wanted to play another session with the same character in the same world, but this time we’d do it in front of a bunch of Trekkies on the Star Trek cruise, of course I said yes. It was super fun, especially watching Michelle Hurd discover and fall in love with D&D, in real time.

Todd’s campaign setting, The Dark Age of Theer, is

… a fantasy game world designed by Todd Stashwick and David Nett specifically for ProgCore-style play. It is built to feature the Three Pillars of Wonder, Mystery, and Danger, and to offer fertile ground for any fantasy roleplaying game, as well as stories told in other mediums. In this Dark Age of Theer, magic is rare and met with fear or wonder, the ruins of a majestic, ancient civilization mock all with their horrible grandeur and tempt adventurers with mystery, and dragons are terrifying symbols of the unknown. Its denizens live in wonder of the ruins of ancient power all around them, their lives are defined by all that is mysterious and unknown, and danger lurks around every corner.

The Dark Age of Theer is part of what Todd calls ProgCore Fantasy:

ProgCore Fantasy is a style of play, an agreement between players and game masters, that focuses on recapturing those breathless moments of early play. It’s about intimate, ephemeral experiences for players and characters alike. It’s about how you feel when you’re playing the games you love. ProgCore Fantasy is system-agnostic: it does not ask you to learn a new game, or switch from the game you love, only that you agree to pursue the Three Pillars of ProgCore Fantasy: Wonder, Mystery, and Danger. 

The ProgCore Fantasy style is grounded in the intimate fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s: movies like Rankin & Bass’s The Hobbit, Dragonslayer, Legend, Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, and more; books by Tolkien, LeGuin, Zelazny, Leiber, and others; the music of Yes, Styx, King Crimson, Queen, Rush, and others; the art of the Hildebrandts, Michael Whelan, Alicia Austin, Erol Otus, Roger Dean, Bob Eggleton, and others. We see ProgCore Fantasy as an opportunity to take what’s beautiful from this golden age of fantasy art and media, discard the systemic prejudices endemic to the era, and use it to tell stories from myriad perspectives. We’re putting new wine in old bottles.

A lot of these influences inspired me when I was developing Titansgrave (just add in some Thundarr the Barbarian) so you can probably imagine how excited I was to explore the lore and details of the setting. And if you can imagine that, you can probably imagine how excited I was when Todd told me he was planning to develop The Dark Age of Theer into something pretty epic, with a team of extraordinary collaborators, and would I like to contribute to it as a writer?

Fuck yes, I would! I get to write some fiction, develop some lore, and add it to the legends that shaped this world.

ProgCore: The Dark Age of Theer is “A Multimedia Fantasy RPG Experience: System-Agnostic Sourcebook + 5E Compatibility, Actual Play, Original Soundtrack, Animation, & more”. It’s a wonderfully ambitious project that I’m so excited to be part of. If you’re interested, you can find out more details, including how to back it, right here.

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a post about video games

On my Tumblr Ask Me thingy, someone asked if I played online games.

As it turns out, I’ve been enjoying a wider than usual variety of games, and was just this week thinking about posting a little blog about it. So I answered:

I am so old, my formative experiences with video games were all single player. When multi-player online arrived, it was text-based MUDs (I helped run one, when 28.8 was fast) and that was all the social interaction I ever needed.

Put another way, I prefer my gaming to be quietly alone, or couch co-op with one of my kids. I have found every single online multiplayer gaming community to be so toxic and unwelcoming to new players, I honestly don’t know how anyone can endure that shit to get to the good stuff, but like I said, I’m old.

For the last year or so, I’ve split my time among:

  • NHL 22 Create a Pro. Blaine Gretzky is in his 8th season of a game that was never intended to be an RPG, but EA vastly underestimated how far a weird nerd will go to make that happen. (What’s up, #Blainiacs?)
  • Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m in the final battle of my second play through because there is no such thing as too much Karlach. But I took a break because I loved the Fallout TV series, so…
  • Fallout 4 has been my jam for about a month. I loved New Vegas so much I have played all of it I think three times, plus I did all the DLC in a weekend awhile ago. But I never played 4, because I was playing RDR2 or something when it came out, and I never got around to it. But I saw that it was part of the Playstation Plus thing, so I’ve been playing the hell out of it, and I’m completely obsessed. The world is so much bigger than I expected, and I love building, maintaining, and putting disco balls into all my settlements. I have no idea how far into the story I am, but every night something new and fun happens when I play.
  • And, finally, Stardew Valley. I am years late to the party, but I wanted something gentle, slow, and meditative for the change of pace from all those other things. I actually came to it because I wanted something like Animal Crossing that wasn’t Nintendo-exclusive, and it was like 4 dollars on Steam. I think I have 40 or so hours in it. I’m about to start my first Fall season, and I fucking FINALLY caught a fish. I love how it forces you to pick one or two things to do each game day, so I’m like, “Well, we’re clearing trees and rocks today, then I’ll water the garden and go to sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll take gifts into town.” And so on. It shouldn’t be as satisfying as it is, but it just works perfectly for me. I never would have expected to love this kind of game the way I do, but I’ve been experiencing some major growth, change, and healing, recently, which has opened up so much more space for activities.

Thanks for asking. It’s always fun for me to talk about stuff like this long after everyone has lost interest.

I’m not the only nerd who is asked a very simple question like “Coke or Pepsi?” and is still talking about the history of RC Cola an hour later, right? It can’t be just me.

Please say it isn’t just me.

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Write, you fool! [Arcade Games] [Bagman]

A couple years ago, I gave myself this challenge to post something new to my blog every day in the month of December. I liked the alliteration of Daily December and I needed to practice the discipline of creating and posting something new every day.

At the time, I hoped it would sort of revitalize my blog, which had taken a back seat (in a vehicle that was parked in a garage across town) to social media and the like. I hoped I would be inspired to keep writing in the new year, maybe get that vehicle out of storage and drive it around town.

But I felt like all the effort was for nothing. I wasn’t creating to satisfy myself; I was posting to create content. Eww. Gross. And the numbers on my blog didn’t move at all. Hardly anyone commented, I didn’t see an influx of returning or new readers, and when January rolled around, I remember thinking, “well, thank god that humiliating waste of time is over.”

Until just recently, I didn’t see any value in the exercise. Like I said, the goal was to generate interest by posting new content every day. And I didn’t hit that goal, because generic content isn’t what people came to my blog to read (and it isn’t what I like to write). I wasn’t all that interested in what I posted (though I love the Blades of Steel post I did, and still laugh when I think of calling my team “The Los Angeles Los Angeleses” as they played the “Vancouver Vancouvers”) and the old adage “When you are interested, you are interesting,” has an equal and opposite adage “When you aren’t interested, you’re labored, or trying too hard.”

You can see — I can see, rather — the very meaningful difference between the two. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I get why I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I went about it in a way that was unlikely to deliver what I was looking for. Lesson learned.

Yesterday, I saw that my friend John gave himself a Daily December last month, where he wrote about a different comfort movie every day. He said it was to get that daily writing muscle stretched out and warmed up, because he has two novels due this year.

I don’t have anything due, at least not right now, but I do have some things I want to finish and release this year, and the muscles and discipline I need to use them have been neglected while I’ve been focused on mental health therapy and complex trauma recovery for much of the last year.

I’m not ready to commit to daily posts. I’m going to do daily writing (I’ve written this over the last six days), but I don’t know for sure that I’ll have something to publish every day. I’m not going to pressure myself with expectations. I’m going to start out with weekly posts from a list of topics that interest me, in the hopes that I will be interesting when I write about them, as well as looking forward to the creative process involved.

Inspired by a lifetime of RPGs, I made a table featuring all the different topics that are interesting to me. I’m going to roll on the table, and use the result as my prompt.

Today, my rolls landed on Classic Arcade Games: Bagman.

Okay, here we go.

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my biggest rpg surprise of 2023

Someone on Reddit in r/rpg asked what the biggest surprise of 2023 was for us.

This is the kind of thing I enjoy talking about, so I thought I’d share it here.

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The biggest surprise for me this year was finding my way back into the depths of my library.

My first RPG was D&D Basic in 1983, and I’ve played ever since, tons of systems. I love it. It’s even part of my job.

But somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to pick up a module, some rules, a sourcebook, whatever, and just read it for the sake of reading it, to enjoy the prose, the box text, the illustrations, the fiction, unless I was going to play the game.

So I have entire shelves in my library that are filled with RPGs I haven’t read, but “want to play someday.”

This year, I read an AMA here from Stu Horvath, and someone asked if it was normal to just read RPG materials for fun, with no intention of playing them. He observed that there was nothing stopping anyone from doing just that, and for some reason, that’s what I, a 51 year-old Ur-Gamer from the Old Times needed to hear.

It was late in the year, but since then, I’ve gone through maybe a dozen of my books, some of them various flavors of D&D, most of them indie RPGs, all of them games I don’t think I’ll ever play, but *intensely* enjoyed reading.

The pandemic delivered a metaphorical (and practical) TPK to my group, and I don’t know how quickly or easily I’ll be able to assemble a new one, but when I do, it’s going to be one hell of a game, because I have all these new ideas and inspirations in my head, from reading systems and adventures I’ll probably never play.

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When I was in my teens, I read every GURPS sourcebook I could, cover to cover, losing myself in the imaginary worlds they represented. I loved those things as much as I loved any novel. I read all the FASA Star Trek RPG sourcebooks, because I wanted to know everything I could about the imaginary world I lived and worked in. Also: blueprints. So many wonderful blueprints.

I’ve recently read The Skeletons (the players are the undead who guard a tomb that is defiled by adventurers), Maschinezeit (what if dead spaceships were possessed by Lovecraftian cosmic horrors and you went to one, anyway?), Mothership (in space, no one can survive), and about half of The Lost Mine of Phandelver (5e starter box) because I hope to run it in the new year for a small group of friends.

I have shelf after shelf of books from popular systems, indie systems, out of print systems, loved and hated systems, and 2023 was the year I stumbled into permission to read them on my terms, rather than reading them to prep for a test.

Maybe 2024 will be the year I played more RPGs than I have in a long time.

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the post about assassin’s creed and baldur’s gate

At the beginning of summer, as I was nearing the end of The Witcher: The Wild Hunt, I asked the Internet for a game recommendation that would tick some very specific boxes for me, including open world, entertaining combat, some crafting, all that stuff I loved about The Witcher.

My friend Will texted me and said “The answer to your question is Assassin’s Creed: Origins. I know you’re going to look at every recommendation you get, because you’re a nerd like that, but that’s the game you want to play.”

We call sharing good, insightful ideas like this with each other, “Wil(l) thinking.” Of course, he knows me that well and of course he was right. It only took an hour of Assassin’s Creed: Origins for me to know I was going to be spending quite a bit of time in ancient Egypt for the near future.

So in late July, I while I was playing it, I wrote this on my Facebook, and for some reason I didn’t post it here. I think it’s pretty entertaining, so allow me to correct that right now:

I was playing Assassin’s Creed: Origins last night (61 hours in, level 31. Not sure how far I am into the story) and I tamed this hippo, because I thought it would be amusing to have a giant hippo waddling around with me.

I have this cool chain assassination skill, so I like to wait for Romans to ride by in a line, grab the one at the end and follow up with the one in the middle before any of them realize what’s going on. More often than not, the one in the front keeps on going and doesn’t notice his two buddies aren’t with him.

(SIDEBAR: Unless you want to kill an entire village, don’t poison the corpses. I’m real sorry about that, formerly-populated tiny village against the mountains.)

But last night, the guy in the front turned around and threw a spear at me … which REALLY PISSED OFF Harriet the Hippo, who charged the guy, knocked him off his horse, and proceeded to murder the fuck out of him.

So I’m like, “Harriet, you are such a good friend! Thanks for helping me fill the streets with the blood of my enemies. I’m going to set you free to celebrate!”

And that’s when I discovered that Henrietta the Hippo has two states: tamed and aggro. I was like, “Here you go,” and she was like “THANK YOU NOW I WILL MURDER YOUR FACE TO DEATH!”

I want to tell you that I ran away and climbed up a tree or something, until she calmed down and went on her way. But we all know that wouldn’t be true, and Bayek needed some hard leather to upgrade his armor, anyway.

So I thanked Henrietta the Hippo for her service and her sacrifice, looted the corpses, and went about my business.

Every villain is the hero of their own story.

So I finished the story about 10 hours ago, and since then, I’ve been running around the map, as a massively overpowered Bayek with a flaming sword and everything, Leeroy Jenkinsing my way across the world. I’m hunting the Phylakes, and have two left.

Hey, speaking of those guys, here’s a fun thing that happened. I was trying to draw a Phylake away from a populated area, so I could focus on him and not risk his allies showing up to distract me. I mean, I’m just trying to cut his head off with my flaming sword and honestly who can blame me he and his friends have been hassling me for literal months. GOSH.

I pull him into a field, and hit him in the face with an arrow that does not do nearly as much damage as an arrow to the face would do. But considering I climbed all the way up a mountain and then fought a bunch of Romans without pausing to catch my breath, maybe I can just agree to suspend my disbelief for a minute.

He comes at me in his fancy chariot, and I’m like “Yeah, buddy! Get ready to be set on fire!” and I roll out of the way, slash at him, and set him on fire. It was so great, until the grass I was in also caught on fire, which then caught me on fire.

Thinking quickly, I ran out of the grass, did the STOP DROP AND ROLL I’ve been preparing for my whole life, and jumped up onto the top of a … something with a grass roof.

This Phylake dude is super mad that I set him on fire (fair) so he starts throwing fucking JAVELINS at me (also fair). I switch to my secondary bow, a predator bow that is both on fire and able to be controlled by me in a first person view that is so much more fun than I thought it would be, I wish I’d bought it earlier.

I target the Phylake, and lock on. As I track him, the fire on my bow catches the roof on fire. Which catches me on fire. Which kills me.

I’m not saying I didn’t deserve all of it, because I was clearly the aggressor, but I will say that when I respawned, I put the fire weapons away and fought this dude with a spear, a pair of fuck you up swords, and poison arrows.

When I defeated him and looted his corpse, I got a Legendary flaming sword, because the universe has a sense of humor.

Okay, so I’m pretty much wrapping that up and looking for something new, which turns out to be Baldur’s Gate 3.

I haven’t played one of these CRPGs since the late 1900s, and I didn’t like it at first. It felt so different from the games I’ve been playing for the last twenty years, it took about 30 hours, spread out over a week or so, for me to understand how Baldur’s Gate 3 wants to be played, what kind of game it is. From the camera controls, to the turn based combat, to the very real consequences for every single thing I do, it’s just nothing at all like the Assassin’s Creed and Witcher RPGs I’ve played this year.

It took me all this time to stop trying to make it Baldur’s Gate: The Witcher’s Assassin Redemption, and actually play Baldur’s Gate 3. I did a TON of savescumming while I failed over and over to inderstand that this game will not to reward my choice to be a Murder Hobo at level 2. Instead, it rewards commitment to character and class choices, role playing, and careful battle strategy. It’s just as fun as being an OP Murder Hobo, but it’s much more satisfying. When I get through a difficult encounter or challenging series of role playing choices, I feel the same kind of accomplishment and joy I’ve gotten both of the times I rolled Critical Successes in my life.

Put simply, it’s the most faithful recreation of playing D&D I’ve ever experienced with a CRPG. It reminds me of everything I loved about the OG Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout: 2, but it’s refined by time and has clearly learned from all the great Bioware games. I just love it.

I love it so much that last night, I realized I need to start setting an alarm for my bedtime, because if I don’t do that, I’ll sit down when Anne goes to sleep to “just play for a little bit”, and the next thing I know it’s 2am. That’s also something I haven’t experienced since the late 1900s, and WOW does it turn out I’m a lot older now than I was then, and my body has comments when I stay up too late.

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