ScottVee Gaming

I went to visit my brother Jon this weekend, and since he and his son were starting to play D&D together, there was a lot of D&D discussion, and for gifts I brought two new D&D books.  That was pleasant.  I'm glad the gifts fit in with their current levels and campaigns.  I went with the Humblewood campaign setting and the amazing Goodman Games big book of the Isle of Dread (history of the module, talks with the creators, conversion to 5e, and bonus items).  So: D&D is back. A bit later, he mentioned that he had something cool to show me.  Completely unexpected: he pulled my original D&D books from the early 80s out of his box of old gaming books.  Sure enough, those were them.  The bindings were wrecked from those years of use (almost weekly sessions from 1980 to 1985).  He showed where I had added two little stickers to the covers, and I had to agree, those were hilarious, and exactly the kind of thing Young Me would have don...

Continuing my previous post of retro "2-1/2 D" games from the 90s, I was able to get Moraff World running in DOSBox at a usable size by hitting Alt-Enter for full-screen mode. After playing for another hour or so and finally dying, here are some tips and observations: The main hazards are the unmarked pits ("chutes") that drop you down to lower levels where you are less likely to survive.  As soon as I fall into a pit, I look for the nearest ladder back up, but sometimes fall down another pit before I can get there.  Once you have found a pit, it stays on the map as a "*" symbol.  I ended up down on level 10 as a level 2 PC, and it did not go well. One time I fell down a chute to a room with no ladders or doors.  You can bump into walls to look for secret passages, and sometimes walk right through the wall.  But when there are no exits at all, you have to hit D to dig a hole in the floor.  This is pretty funny, with some text messages to entertain you....

This popped up on one of my feeds over the weekend, and wow, I had to grab it.  It says 26 books for a recommended $25 or pay-what-you-like, but most of the "books" are multiple volumes of content. The Humble Bundle Call of Cthulhu Pack should keep me reading for months.  I don't have any players I could run through these eldritch horrors, but I have always enjoyed reading sourcebooks and scenarios as if they were their own genre of fiction, which in many ways is true. This deal ends in 5 days, so I'm not sure if any readers will see it in time, but it's worth noting on my stream of events in my gaming life.  I still have some of the CoC first edition books, and ran some pretty scary nights of fun back in the day.  Which reminds me of this true story ... "Stake Thy Neighbor" I don't know if you remember that old Salem's Lot miniseries from about 1980 where dead Danny Glick floats up to that kid's second story window and starts tapping with h...

This is another dungeon runner.  You make some PCs and start in the City where you have the usual choices.  Go into the Dungeon any time, where you are a small blue box moving through hallways and getting into fights.  I don't mind minimal graphics.  Sometimes, that's a charm. The class system in this one is interesting: everyone starts as a Nomad with all stats set to 1, and each time you level up you get a "+" button to update one stat.  You change to a real class by leveling up to the required stats and going to the Guilds area to switch.   The City My team made it to level 5, and now exploring level 1 is too easy, most of the foes can be taken out with two clicks.  You just have to keep an eye on your hp bars running low.  Bring lots of the red life potions to heal.  I've been to parts of level 2 and 3 and it's more of the same layout with some different foes.  Still no rhyme or reason. I got one of my PCs up to Dexterity 7 so he cou...

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs...

I was tinkering around in a game called Moonshades, which I would classify as a "semi-3D" dungeon crawler.  The scenes have 3-d elements, but they are fairly static.  You can walk (forward, backward, left or right, or turn left, turn right) to step one chunk at a time through a maze.  Fight monsters, take their stuff, level up your characters.  I find these relaxing, and really enjoy the highly creative names for the hundreds of items.  These modern games have some amusing cheats, like having teleport pads in every main encounter area so you don't have to walk all the way home through every level just to get to your drop chest.  I have also heard "two-and-a-half d" for these. While this is a fine game, with plenty to fight, and lots of abilities and spells to learn, and even some crafting, it got an old memory stuck in my head. So last night I was trying to remember one specific game from the 90s, a really early game of this type.  It was a DOS game wi...

Here's a title I was really looking forward to.  It's a huge game, 25 gigs of downloads.  I just picked the default fighter character to avoid getting bogged down in details right away.   The game world is gorgeous.   As it claimed, it was the first major orthogonal map world using the Pathfinder system.  I really should be enjoying it more, but I'm a sandbox guy and an explorer at heart and you start off stuck in one particular castle in one particular story.  I picked up some NPCs along the way, mostly because I have no idea how to remove them from my party. There were some fine choices of UI, like using the Tab key to highlight all items in the scene that you can interact with.  But using the old WASD keys (or moving the mouse off the side of the screen) to scroll the view is clunky.  When traps appear or combat comes up, it automatically pauses to let you make choices, which is nice.  Actual voices performing the dia...

As much as adventuring is the obvious heart of D&D and other RPGs, sometimes my mind just wants to take it slow and settle down for a while.  Sticking to my current study of the old T1 Village of Hommlet over in the Greyhawk setting, it clearly focuses on the things you need to know for the encounters facing you.  And after those quests are done, you are expected to move on to other towns in other modules.  But what if you stick around?  What if you want to just follow some of the NPCs through their lives?  Can the town itself evolve over time? First, the NPCs listed in the module are all living in moderate luxury with no mention of clutter or mess or farm animals, each with about a hundred GP tucked away.  Their little treasures sound so out of place.  I suppose they were just added to boost the treasure-to-xp total you can get while in town.  The goal of the module is to get 3 or 4 players from level 1 up to level 2 or 3.  ...

I watched almost an hour of videos last night about DM experiences with the Village of Hommlet.   Partly to refresh my memory, and also because of how interesting it is to me that some of these little booklets hold so many memories for so many people.  Since that was the first real "home base" village in RPG history and it was the starting point for the big Temple of Elemental Evil series, it is certainly an iconic location in fantasy gaming history. It is now considered to be located in the Greyhawk campaign setting. This video was all about how a DM should prepare to run the module, and the host showed a ton of content he posted on World Anvil to get all the information just one click away, including an extra illustration of the Inn he commissioned, and hand-outs of the actual menu.  I guess we do have to optimize the content a bit, and there are a variety of sites and tools to help do it.  It's funny how the map has all the buildings nicely numb...

I have been reading articles on the Vaults of Pandius again.  That's the big hub of Mystara (an early D&D campaign setting) fan content, ranging from half-baked ideas and unfinished notes to some very detailed scenarios, home of Threshold Magazine and links to tons of top-notch maps by Thorfinn and others.  On the odd side, when I did a search for a Mystara map of a specific area, I got a bunch of links to items on Etsy where people took those classic, recognizable maps and slapped them on a bunch or random products -- phone cases and such.  I seriously doubt that any f these "crafters" owned any of these images or cared who did own them.  We're living in a world where people just steal images left and right to try and make a buck for themselves. Aside from that, Mystara is such a playable world.   It has always struck me as the official D&D game world as far as the tone goes.  It started off as the "Known World" way back in the Isle of...

Over lunch of Saturday, Doug & I were talking about various versions of D&D, and for a while he was explaining how 4th Edition spawned off Pathfinder.  I got the Pathfinder beta about 2 years ago, groaned at how dense it was and it had no sample adventure to try, and tried reselling it with the stacks of game books I list on various groups from time to time.  Somehow, when I checked facebook later that day (which I hardly ever do anymore because it has become such a flood of ads), there was an ad for a Humble Bundle of ... you guessed it ... 28 Pathfinder books in PDF format for $30.  Technically, it was $25 or pay what you want, and I don't want to be the cheapest guy on the planet, so I always click the second or third payment amount button on these.  I don't know how the webz knew it had come up, but sure, $1.50 went to some charity and I got about 1000 more pages of PDFs to clog my brain.  It was a little misleading, though, since some o...