Going, going, gone....

I started my love affair with miniatures as early as my fifth year of life. After
my mom gave me a pack full of plastic army men, there was no going back.
Discovering scale models when I was about ten was the next logical step. Role
playing games followed next as my tactically-minded crew got down to hashing
drag-out fights which continue to this day.

In 1998, I got into Warhammer 40k big time. I was single and had some money to
burn so I decided on the most expensive, figure-intensive army then: the
Imperial Guard. At one time, I had about 100 mostly pewter-metal figurines on
the table marching to crush any foolhardy rival general who dared to presume
that humanity’s legions were a walk-over in a stand up fight. I recall lovingly
painting practically all of these figures.

These tinmen made guest appearances in all my various games, gracing the combat
tables of Traveller, Fading Suns, Gurps, D&D and Mutant Future.
Alas, time flies and it’s time to wrap up affairs here. My tanks and combat vehicles
had since been sold off and today, the tinmen’s turn to be bought off has
arrived.

I never thought parting with my collection would be occasioned with a profound sense
of loss. Though I never experienced an amputation of a body part (and never
hope to do so) I feel like a large piece of me was just hacked off.

Ouch.

Rain rain and rain

It's seven in the morning and the sky is pouring. By this I mean forty days and forty nights variety of tropical torrential rain. It's been like this since the other day. What many people take for granted is the appalling state of urban drainage we have here after years and years of corruption and neglect. Every little bit of rain (which is pretty much unavoidable this time of the year) results in flooding. This gets to your car, your house, your things and pretty much brings everything to a standstill.

I have a meeting with a minor government agency in a flood-prone area and I'm having doubts even if my SUV will survive the trek. Oh, and did I ever mention the traffic jams that will inevitably result? They are giving out anti-pneumonia shots in the office and boy, do we really need this stuff the way things are turning out here. Somehow I keep wondering if people should really be living like this.

Times like this I feel that living in the third world is an adventure in a medieval fantasy world. At least it isn't post apocalyptic..yet.

Maybe this is why my recurring inspiration for my current mutant future game has a lot to do with tropical rain and jungles.

I can't wait for the week to end so we can proceed to session 6 of the Southeast Asian Mutant Future. Upon a player's urging, I cobbled together the MF encumbrance rules as written with the elegant point system found in Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing thereby (hopefully) simplifying things in this regard. we'll see soon I guess.

In the midst of a lot of stuff

Life has been very busy and exciting of late. I have so little time to update my blog and I am very much aware of the fact that I have a tremendous backlog in terms of after-action reports and other related musings. Between work, family life and the occassional gaming session, my days and nights are jam-packed, but I have so far stayed true to my personal commitment to thrive and not just to live.

Events are catching up with my wife and I and decisions have to be made soon. I'm just so thrilled to move on with our lives after waiting for the right thing to happen.

On the gaming front, I'm happy to note my Southeast Asian Mutant Future campaign has been progressing into its fifth session by last Sunday. I've been scribbling down my copious notes and will be posting the account of our mutant ne'er-do-wells who are now in the midst of trying to break into their default starting town which is besieged by Moro Mutant Pirates. They recently just survived the Re-Energizers module and are currently dodging freelance mutant marauders allied to the Moro Mutants. It certainly isn't easy for them they have to keep moving while lugging 120 pounds worth of scavenged radioactive batteries which they are trying to smuggle into the surrounded defenders of Barrio Santo Cristo.

Keeping in consonance with the tenets of old school gaming, I lifted the restrictions on characters each player can field. With our NPCs, the party is now up to 15 effectives and counting.

I plunked in the 'Shields Will Be Splintered' houserule, as well as some handy houserules by fellow Mutant Lord Malcadon on increased melee combat plusses due to Strength. Adding some sniping rules and other assorted bits on firearms all served to turn the game a tad deadlier. Judging from the players' reactions, the verdict so far is that Mutant Future is one deadly game.

I'll be making an effort to post more, given the constraints of real life always hanging over me. What little free time I have is often eaten up by reading up all those interesting bits from other people's blogs.

Have a great week everyone!

Good bye chips and junk food

What is it about players, soda and chips?

I just got my blood test result and my cholesterol rating is too high to be normal. Hence, goodbye salty, trans-fat laden chips.

Argh! Watching my players gorge on this is pure pain.

Preparing for the next one (and a little house cleaning)

It's still an rpg-less existence for me as of this point. I recall coming across something someone wrote sometime back which sounded somewhat like "Peace is just an interval wherein nations prepare for the next war."

No, I don't wish for war but I guess one way of looking at my rpg-less existence as of now is that it is nothing more than down time in preparation for the next gaming spasm I'm hoping to initiate soon.

I had a Twilight 2000 Gurps one-shot set up last month but some near-catastrophe here at work scuppered that well and good. One very enlightening (if not pleasant) effect of that experience was that I happened to get to know more about the maturity level and values held by my players. Looking back, I guess it now comes to no surprise to me when I learned that at least one of them nursed a grudge against their umpire for having cancelled his game (yet again) in the interest of coping with problems at work and family. Well, to this I can only say "Too bad." I'm too old and too busy to even dignify such an attitude. If I never had any difficulty blowing off a bratty player who didn't get what he or she wanted in my game, I figure I wouldn't have much difficulty either in blowing off a bratty player who can't understand that most of us folks have to work for a living in order to enjoy the privilege of having passtimes such as this gaming thing we do.

Maybe it is time for me as our group's umpire to do some apparently long-overdue housecleaning.

In the meantime, I'm catching up on my reading list of great gaming inspirational reading. I'm also endeavoring to catch up on what's been going on in the blog accounts of my fellow gamers.

Our gaming group (or at least those who I believe count at all) are scattered to the four winds for the moment- but I've seen this happen before. We'll get back together again - and with a vengeance!

For a little stress release, I've linked up with my airsoft buddies and shoot a lot of 6mm bbs on weekends. This, coupled with some World War II re-enactment goes a long way to keep my spirits afloat. Much of the stuff I've re-experienced (and am learning for the first time) here will sure make an appearance in my future games.

All this, I know will eventually be put to good use very soon....

The New Generation

Apologies for a fairly long lull in posting. I’ve been downed by a bad cough and cold and am only just recovering now. I foresee that I may not be able to continue with this week’s scheduled game on Friday, what with the need to take things easy and more work that’s come in. On top of this, one of my legal assistants suddenly resigned, leaving us with a lot of backlog.

There’s always next week, so I hope my players bear with me on this. It seems I don’t get sick as much as I used to but when I do manage to catch a whiff of a bug the effects tend to be, well, debilitating.

As I spent most of the weekend just sleeping and resting, I was awakened yesterday afternoon by my four year old son, Joshua who grabbed a book from my bookshelf at the head of our stairwell at home. My son then sat down right in front of me and opened the book with great seriousness. He went on to start relating to me what he believed the book was about. With my brain still emerging from sleep and fuzzy from the meds I had to ingest, I remembered him talking about animals and sick creatures. He went on for about fifteen minutes and started counting the pages of the voluminous tome as well.

I finally could not restrain myself and, ambling over to Joshua, checked out what book he selected for that day. On earlier occasions, he pretty much did the same thing with my copies of Anderson’s ‘Young Flandry’, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s tales and ‘Germany’s Luftwaffe Ground Divisions’ by Osprey books.


Naturally, yesterday was quite different. As you can see in the enclosed photo, Joshua’s selection for Sunday afternoon was my very much dog-eared edition of Bruce Streling’s Schismatrix. Unless I am mistaken, I picked this one up during a trip to Melbourne, Australia in May 2000.

I’d like to think my kid is on the way to reading the great classics of SF and history. Who knows? Is it too far fetched to wish that this can get him started on this ‘gaming thing’ his dad is so gaga about?

Toxicity continues

Having returned from an out of town trip, it seems my health has taken a turn for the worse. I had been complaining of chills and slight fever brought about by an incipient cold even as early as Sunday night at the beginning of the week. Going out of town thereafter didn't help. My cold is now a painful cough and I've been prescribed some meds and rest by the medics. Unfortunately, my presence is needed at work as we have some deadly deadlines to fulfill. I'll just have to keep crossing my fingers while rolling on my Willpower and Constitution - hoping for a critical roll and not a fumble to get me through the day.

As a slight aside, it has always been my habit to ask for a window seat when taking a plane ride. This normally provides me a view outside which goes far to alleviating the tedium of a long monotonous trip inside a commercial jet. No matter how much I've seen it, I love to look down on mountains, rivers, roads and other terrain features rolling right on below as we speed towards our destination.

Maybe it was the slight grogginess that hit me but on the trip out, I kept mentally superimposing hex grids on the mountains, rivers and plains that rolled out from under the plane. Could it be that some cosmic high stakes role playing game is being waged out there somewhere beyond our space and time reference and that our world is merely a hexmap of the powers that be?

Strange thoughts. I need my medicine... and rest. Glorious rest.

Hurried post on the top of a toxic week

Last Friday's game was a blast, with more Mutant Future weirdness and hack and slashing in healthy doses. It's a toxic week for me, I'm headed out of town tomorrow and won't be able to run the game this Friday night. We'll be continuing with our usual post-apocalyptic madness next Friday night. In the meantime, I'll be posting xps and an after-action report asap.

Have a great week ahead everyone!

We Aren't Alone

A recent post in A Paladin in the Citadel, a blog I regularly follow, dealt with gamers and bloggers in the place you live in. Speaking for myself, I was under the impression that gamers are a rare breed in my city and most of them do not maintain blogs. Now, I not altogether sure if I was correct in believing so.

I crave your collective pardon if this post takes on a self-serving aspect but I could not help but say something about what recently appeared on The Armchair Gamer. Until recently, I didn't even know my friend Alex actually had a gaming-related blog of his own. This changed when I received an email containing a series of questions posed by my friend, the results of which, were expected to form the basis of a series depicting various experiences and backgrounds of game masters known to him. I have Alex to thank for introducing me to Fading Suns back in 1998. We had a lot of wild, wacky and fun games with a relatively large gaming group that called itself The Herd. A large balance of the players from the Herd never played rpgs before but they took to gaming with a vengeance. They were fun times indeed!

In case you are wondering, Alex was referring to yours truly when he posted the responses of a certain GM Bobby in the above-mentioned post. My apologies go out to him as I fear that my responses were less-than-coherent as I was in the midst of shifting mental gears at the time I sent those out, right at the end of a toxic workday.

Most significantly, the responses gathered by Alex from his fellow game masters here in Manila brought home to me the fact that there are more people who engage in and endeavor to promote role playing games than I originally led myself to believe. This is a very good thing, and I am glad to be proven wrong in my belief that I seemed to be the only one who was doing this in our third world paradise.

I'm also very glad to see that my friend Adrian, whom I've lost touch with for the longest time is still running games in the grand style.

Although we local gamers don't necessarily have the same styles, experiences and preferences in gaming, I firmly believe that Metropolitan Manila can always use another good gamer, or a hundred, anytime. Speaking from experience, things have progressed considerably from the old days when we all had to share one tattered, sacred copy of the AD&D Player's Handbook and cobble up our own polyhedral dice cobbled up from cardboard filled with wax (!) after the soft plastic ones from our basic D&D boxed set died in action. And I look forward to even better gaming days ahead for our gaming community out here knowing that we are not alone.

Looking at things from a truly world-wide perspective, I've come to realize that the same thing is true as to the community of gamers existing all over right now. If there is good thing I picked up from the experience of trying my hand at maintaining my own gaming blog is that I met a lot of decent, intelligent and interesting people who all share a passion for this gaming hobby of ours. It is a realization that constantly provides me a lot of joy, comfort and considerable satisfaction. It makes me proud to have met them and to have learned so much from them.

Advisory- This Friday's game

This goes out to my players - I confirm that this Friday's game is at Justin's place. Henry's school is temporarily unavailable due to a PTA activity they scheduled for this Saturday.

The exact address has been sent out to each of you by SMS texting. Please let me know if there are directional or transport problems. Shall we start at the same usual time (7.30 p.m.)?

A Colossal Waste of Time?

Sometime back, I listened to a podcast from All Games Considered on old school gaming. It was pretty interesting and went far to validate a lot of things about the hobby I knew about or suspected that I knew about. Listening to these podcasts also works for me as it makes my daily morning exercise walks a great deal less monotonous - not to mention lifting my spirits as I seem to have to be reminded periodically that I am not alone in my interest in this hobby and a big community of awfully decent and intelligent people out there share all of this with me.

A line from one of the speakers caught my attention at that time, specifically her remark that she entered the hobby relatively late in life on account of her father's adamant belief that role playing games were a 'colossal waste of time'.

Hearing this brought a smile to my lips as many of the people I grew up with shared this belief. For the record, I think they still do to this date- they just learned to watch their mouths more carefully in my presence.

Speaking for myself though, I can't deny how this interest in role playing games went far to help me out in real life.

I can't exactly remember if it was during one summer break in the eighties, late in high school when, finding myself doing nothing at home, I decided to leaf through the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Eventually, I found myself reading up on waterborne adventures and various sea travel/combat rules none of us ever used before. While none of our gaming group really applied any of these rules, this suddenly got me interested in the peculiarities of maritime travel. Before the week was out, I started reading up on the concepts of longitude, latitude, knots, and other peculiar terms such as starboard, port, fore and aft.

I didn't think much of this at that time and just added all this to what others tended to dismiss as othewise useless bits of interesting trivia I tended to accumulate in my brain.

Fast forward to the nineties, a year after graduation and I land my first job in a firm which handled, amongst others, maritime litigation. One day, the partner-in-charge is giving me a rundown on the nature of the cases I'll be assisting him from here on. He gets to the part about Safety Of Life At Sea, charts and distances.

"Oh you mean nautical miles," I answer, getting on with the discussion. I could see he was pleased as he didn't have to spend so much time lecturing all these all over again to the newbie.

When we got to collisions and allisions, it was my turn to say, "Oh right, the starboard side of the vessel, not the port side."

I guess it was the right thing to say as he looked quite pleased and asked me 'how I knew all this stuff.' At that time, I felt that maybe it was going to be alright working in that firm.

Happily, it worked out for all of us- and it was alright.

The point I'm driving at here is that this interst of ours in gaming opens doors for many of us into a wider and more vibrant world - and many times, we don't know it has happened, until after the fact. I firmly believe that no experience, no matter how trivial is wasted in this life. Everything happens for a reason - the reason just manifests itself to us when the time and circumstances are right.

Taking the time to read up, prepare for and attend games does take up blocks of time from our already hectic lives. This said, I can't say this is all a waste of time. At the very least, the experience of hanging out and gaming with people you consider your friends is always a welcome activity which goes far to regenerate one's spirits and renew one's strength- thereby enabling one to cope with the ever-present pressures in life. If I could put the good I get from gaming in a bottle and market it to the world at large, I wager I'll make myself a crapload of money to enable myself to retire in style.

So in the face of the oft-repeated belief that this gaming life of ours is a colossal waste of time, I say: Game On! I'm a Gamer and I'm proud of it! My kids will be gamers too and I'll be proud of them as well.

I'm sure you all have similar stories where your experiences in role playing games have served you in good stead in the real world and served to advance you in 'real life'.

If so, I'd sure like to hear them.

By the way (I almost forgot this)- that podcast from AGC I linked to above also includes an interesting review of Mutant Future too!

Regrouping

I've just come up for air to post this short one. I'm happy to report our Friday Mutant Future session of 5 February was, as usual, fun and led to an unexpected turn of events. People came late and Max Plissken, Nikos' tech savvy pure human was killed in combat against Security Droids.

This should tide us over for sometime as we won't be gaming this Friday, the 12th.

I'll be posting an account soonest. I'm just getting spread a bit too thin these days between real life and other lives. That, and my $1,000+ worth of PDF books finally came in from my contribution to the Haiti Gamers' Relief through Drive Thru RPG. My eyes feel like they're going to flow down to my chin but I'm a happy camper.
Amongst the most useful items for me are the Mutant Future compatible Creatures of the Wasteland books which will see much use in the next few games coming up.

Have a good week everyone!

Apologies

Apologies to the readers of my blog. I've been out a lot on account of real world concerns and a return to work, work and more work. Gaming-wise, we just concluded our Mutant Future dungeon crawl in the lairs of the Buggems and while the penultimate adventure session had its' moments I'm rather pleased to report that all characters made it through alive (although some only barely). I'll be posting an adventure account asap.

To my players, I'm hoping that we can continue with our regular scheduled gaming this Friday as I'm slated to leave town by the end of next week - hence this means no Mutant Future next Friday, the 15th.

Seasons greetings!

As I type this, it is 10:58 p.m. in my clock, December 24. My eldest kid is happy after tearing into his' and his baby brother's christmas presents. I guess it is early enough to wish you all a Merry Christmas! May we all have a blessed year ahead of us without any fear.

Here's to a lot more good gaming for us all!

The Five Fingers, terrain and encounters

My gaming is rather curtailed until after the 25th, what with family obligations and real-world activities all competing for space in the final run-up before Christmas day. Plus the traffic situtation in the city I live in is just horrendous. Christmas season in my city always brings the inevitable choking of all roadspace with cars, cars and more cars. I guess I'm just witnessing the inevitable result of a government that consistently failed to implement a (1) rational urban planning system and (2) a workable family planning program since I was a little kid.

Pardon the rant above, I just needed to get that off my chest. This is not the point of this post.

I'm halfway through my much used, dogeared and tattered copy of The Five Fingers. This book is essentially one long wilderness crawl by a group of seven of the baddest bad-ass fighting men in the Southeast Asian theater of war (ok, ok so I'm over-simplifying this and stating it in D&D terms). I did not post this to debate the veracity of The Five Fingers as a military account (I recall an old argument to this effect in the Twilight 2000 forums sometime back). I posted this to relate it to my current gaming experience.

What really hit me was that the seven operatives of The Five Fingers practically walked from Northern Thailand, through most of Laos, part of North Vietnam and ended up just inside the Chinese border - then they walked back again, down to South Vietnam. Nothing stopped them: not the horrendous jungle terrain, the massive tropical rains (I've seen all that rain and dengue fever living here in the tropics) and the multitude of tribal mercs, enemy regulars and anybody else with a gun who happened to get in their way.

Without meaning to denigrade the book, reading it for the nth time made a part of my old school mind see the parallels between the Five Fingers' trek to and from China as a massive, difficult wilderness hexcrawl. Suddenly, looking at the map of the Five Fingers' route to China at the beginning of the book made me imagine a hexgrid superimposed on it. Yes, the book really had a lot of great qualities which made for a very absorbing wilderness trek in the old school tradition.

The NVA, Pathet Lao and tribal merc patrols they would collide into and promptly exterminate reminded me so much of wandering monsters generated on a DM's die roll. More signficantly, what impressed me was that the Five Fingers' biggest enemy was the terrain itself. Mountain ranges and ridges had to be crossed. Dense wooded slopes had to be penetrated. Grasslands of razorgrass, rain (and leech) swollen streams, malarial jungles, muddy slopes - name it and they encountered it.

This got me thinking that maybe I'll be modifying my Mutant Future encounter tables to include environmental and terrain obstacles and challenges. Now that I'm pretty much re-immersing myself in old school gaming, I am beginning to realize how absorbing a wilderness hex crawl overland can really get - and the terrain itself can be the biggest, baddest adversary.

Game is on this Sunday

This is sent out to my players who are enjoined to read this and fail not under sanction of law:

Game resumes this Sunday, December 13, 2009 1-6 p.m. at Henry's. Please confirm your availability. I am introducing a few more houserules which I will take up with you briefly before the game. Barring any upsets in our schedule, I hope you see you all then.

A little facelift

You may notice that I've given my blog a few changes here and there. I'm learning how to use the different functions available in the dashboard menu. It's still pretty early and rudimentary for me but I guess I'm learning more as I go.