Eight Ultramarine brothers met for Remi’s 50th and kicked some arse!
https://zerolatencyvr.com/en/experience/space-marine-vr
Thirty minutes of pulsing action, as our two teams swept chaos before us.
In the mood for some Wrath & Glory or earlier FFG RPG games now!
My Black Hack based ‘Heroic Fantasy’ game continues to see play online and in the real. In the background I’m continuing to develop it, and consider where I might take it in the longer term.
For now, it has been good to get the game running with a character sheet on the Foundry VTT using the Custom System Builder. Foe templates and some light background lore and we are cooking for some more RPG action!
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| Heroic Fantasy running in Foundry VTT |
The core game has had a recent text refresh, with some minor sentence improvements, page reference updates, and a few spell description improvements. These are available in a v2.02 PDF. The changes are minor, but if I find there are any more changes, then I will also update the physical books.
A recent DrivethruRPG review was very welcome, and energising for my recent developments.
We have just had a great weekend of RPGs and company at our twentieth Furnace Convention in Sheffield at the Garrison Hotel. To celebrate this milestone we arranged some merch in the shape of emblazoned messenger bags from our accomplished trader friends ‘All Rolled Up’ and a separately sourced dice tray give-away to all attendees. Dom did such a great job pulling all that together!
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| Dice Trays, Bags and ARU supermodel |
In many ways, Furnace is shaped by our venue, which we have stayed with for our twenty years. There is a really good understanding between our event and the hotel staff. We are a regular feature for them, and we work very well together to make the weekend as enjoyable as possible for everyone that attends. This year, due to changes in the flow of hotel business, we had an opportunity to multi-function use the large restaurant area, in addition to our more usual venue rooms. This large space opened up the convention with eight more large round tables in an airy and well lit space. This year, the ‘Mess Hall’ became the convention hub for our traders, bring & buy and raffle. It worked brilliantly!
This extension to our space afforded us an opportunity to expand our registration to ‘about 100 people’, which was extremely satisfying. I was beyond delighted to see the enthusiastic sign up for the event from regulars, returners, and a good number of very welcome newbies. Of course, this enlargement needed a complimentary number of games to fire the event to life across our five sessions. Our attendees responded by filling our schedule to the brim with, I think, 74 adventures from an astonishing 58 games. Everything from 10 Candles, Alice is Missing, to Legend in the Mist, Daggerheart, to Draw Steel and the Cosmere RPG and everythingish in between. We even had two games of D&D 2024.
We pre-book all games at our conventions. GMs get priority picks based on the number of games they offer, and then we open out to everyone working through preferences slot by slot to get the best fit we can, so that everyone knows who is playing where. I say ‘we’, by which I mean Elaine, our games Tsarina, who worked considerable magic to produce our more extensive schedule this year. I often hear that the convention ‘runs smoothly’, and that’s true in good measure to the beating heart of our game scheduling. Thank you Elaine!
Our regular traders, Patriot Games and All Rolled Up, were in attendance. It’s so good to be supported by both of them, providing a rich shopping experience in amongst the games and socialising.
I ran three games. ‘Legend in the Mist‘ – a very lovely ‘rustic fantasy’ using tag phrases instead of numbers and a charming resolution mechanic. It’ll be a big game for me for years to come. Its scalable versatility has me thinking of all sorts of future places and possibilities. ‘Coriolis‘ – a Middle Eastern inspired space opera set on a giant space station, solving a mystery of a stolen statue. This was a last minute game to help with GM dropouts, and enjoyed the interplay and enthusiasm from my players. ‘Cepheus Universal‘ – a classic Traveller style SF adventure as the ‘pirate bait’ plan went explosively awry. What might next year bring?
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| Pirate Bait – one of my games |
I played in two great games. JohnO’s atmospheric ‘The Harrow’s Scar’, set north of Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD. My energy was somewhat low, but enjoyed the game a great deal with a background amusement that, unlike my other players, I genuinely had no idea about Cthulhu lore at all. JonR’s sumptuously presented ‘A Box of Old Bones’ using the venerable Dragon Warriors game. The system is very 1985, but good fun nevertheless. Blingtastic game full of imagery, props and a steady hand on the setting. I picked well!
I was glad to receive some canny feedback from our attendees during the event. We have introduced a feedback and action log to make sure we capture, record and agree what, if any, actions we need to undertake in time for our next outing. We want to both listen and act. One of my favourites was a word of congratulations that we had managed to grow the convention, and yet retained the warm and inclusive Garricon feel. Thank you, that was generously given and warmly received.
Today, I’ve paid some conventon invoices, updated the convention accounts, created a Garricon feedback action log, analysed the games offered at Furnace, and just about finished this blog. I was asked how much work goes into running the convention and realised that I didn’t really know. A monitoring timesheet is unlikely, but I reflect that, allowing for the main well oiled processes, the many small tasks over the year will amount to a significant amount of time. I enjoy much of it, and there is a particular reason why this is so.
There was a moment during Jon’s richly realised Dragon Warriors game, when I turned to one of my fellow players and co-organisers, Dom, and pointed to the ‘Mess Hall’ area behind us, full of gamers engrossed and exclaiming in their adventures and said, “Dom, look. That’s why we do it…”.
Let’s do it again shall we?
I was inspired by the extended conversation on Che Webster’s Roleplay Rescue with Anthony, aka ‘Runeslinger’, from Casting Shadows. I’m a regular listener to Che and recommend you check out his podcast here:
https://shows.acast.com/roleplayrescue
I’ll try to summarise the excellent conversation. The hobby has trended over many decades to be described as predominantly a structure to tell stories together. The touch points for this include the White Wolf storyteller games and Monte Cooke’s Cypher system. This narrative experience is seen as the primary goal for the process of play. We play to tell stories. The concern expressed in the podcast conversation is that roleplay game play is actually about other things, particularly the inhabiting of created characters, alternate antagonists and experiencing a believably constructed fantastical alternate world through their eyes. Story will, or course, inevitability emerge through the conversation and process of play, but this is different from the active and ongoing construction of either a predetermined fiction, or the managing of story beats to create a satisfying story.
Is the older, perhaps more traditional, mode of play a dwindling twilight view of story as by-product, as opposed to the main product of the game? There is a pervasive caveat that much of this is about preference, style and a shifting perspective in styles of play that strengthens and enables a player to inhabit their character and live their life in the shoes of another. You will find a more structured view of the ‘story divide’ in Anthony’s blog:
https://castingshadowsblog.com/2025/05/31/the-accidental-lie-in-rpgs/
One of the great features of the conversation was the return to original sources, a choice selection of games over the years to investigate the language being used to describe what roleplaying, in the context of the roleplaying game book you were holding, was actually all about. Taking inspiration from this I decided to pick up FGU’s Chivalry and Sorcery 2nd edition boxed set from my shelves. The C&S text is a powerful pull for me personally. In the rollercoaster of life, the text became a source of comfort when things were going through a difficult phase. Reading the game again brought a strong reverberation of the past and some appreciation of the intervening years.
So, heading back to a 1983 publication date, with already a corpus of text on the subject, how does C&S now describe a roleplaying game? Well, considerably different to the 1977 1st edition, as we now meet the ‘Gamemaster Storyteller’. This is chronologically well in advance of anything written in the White Wolf Storyteller games. Did the shift to RPGs being, principally, or even in principle, story telling exercises happen even earlier than supposed? Here are some short elements from the early C&S chapters ‘On Being a Gamemaster’. There is also a subsequent section entitled and On Being a Role Player’, however the balance of the text is weighted much more to the heavier role of Gamemaster.
A Gamemaster needs to be a:
Put in dramatic terms, the Gamemaster is a combination Playwright / Director / Stage Manager / Producer / Actor. Put another, perhaps more frightening way, the Gamemaster is Fate, God and Everyone Else besides the Player Characters in the fantasy world. GameMastering is a great responsibility, but it is not as difficult a task as it appears if the Gamemaster knows the material, is organised, and has prepared himself beforehand. Indeed, it is an immensely satisfying experience.
Each of these sections are then given greater exposition, with a lot of interesting takes. The text is, of course, rooted in a slightly earlier age, but I think it does a good job of describing a trad GM who has ‘a sense of duty to their players’. After all, if you have 8-10 players, you really need a ‘Caller’ to stop there being so many voices all at once. Ah yes, them warr days.
The storyteller GM is what I recognise in most trad GMs for the past forty years. Apply the rules well, play the game, create a story structure, allow the players to respond and make their own stories, weave them together to create a shared narrative that arises out of collaborative play. If there is a divide, then my old favourite sits on the emergent side, where story is developed as play progresses, with as much emphasis on game and situational resolution for its own sake.
It was nice to go back to the text, though my initial excitement for something more radical wasn’t really there in the detail. I didn’t really think it would be.
Is the term ‘storyteller’ and ‘storytelling’ misappropriated by modern texts? Do we actually all mean the same thing?Do those terms need to be ‘reclaimed’ for the more mainstream emergent story, the narrative created through character driven play, perhaps guided by adventure design, but diverging as the group create their own pathways? I’m not sure it does. The vast majority of my play experience of forty years has found us telling a story, it just generally formed as a byproduct of our chaotic play. The personal character arcs combined or clashed to give a group outcome. Some of our stories were better shaped than others, but they were all fun, because the play was the thing.
Not that there is anything wrong with a game that is more obviously designed so that a playing group can create a compelling story, sometimes within a set number of sessions, as the main artefact out of the experience. If that is what a ‘Story Game’ is, then even after all this time I have played very few. I have really enjoyed DramaSystem games ‘which privileges the exploration of narrative over other design goals..’. Even here, I have only played Hillfolk as one shots, where the game is actually designed to create an improvised narrative over longer form play.
Perhaps I am wary of the notion of a divide, because I have only played on one side of it, so that the apparent wall seems relatively inconsequential? Is the divide an ephemeral mist of loose taxonomy not actually carried through into actual play experience? Or, perhaps, even now, I need to get out more? Perhaps I need to run for the hills?
The Traveller science fiction RPG was first published on 22nd July 1977, so my continuing forever game is soon to reach the important milestone of a 50th anniversary. I anticipate something of a formal celebration from the current publisher, Mongoose, and broadly across the Traveller playing community. I’m delighted to discover that an old University friend, who I have kept in touch with, and who used to run Traveller for me when it was taking its very early developmental steps in the early 1980s, is planning a celebratory anniversary weekend game for us, using the classic Traveller rules. I’m looking forward to it already! This has prompted me to return to the orignal text to remind me of the few minor differences between the original game and the iterations that I play today: the modern 2d6 system of Mongoose Traveller and Cepheus Engine.
I had one of those heart sinking moments when I realised that I could neither locate my original Starter
set or MegaTraveller books. After a plaintive search into the surface regions of my store cupboard, I had to accept that they have, at least for now, become lost in jumpspace. So, without batting an eyelid, I went onto DrivethruRPG and grabbed a copy of the Traveller Book, both in PDF and physical. This is the 1982 rendition of the game, which is drawn from the 1981 refresh of the original 1977 three little black book release. I think that will prove to be ‘classic enough’, and it will be great to have a physical copy on the table when we play. If I need to get down with 1977, with starship ranges in miles ratjher than kilometers, then electronic copies are available here. If you want to play along for free then there is the Facsimile Edition, which is a tidied up ‘1981 version’ of the three black books. A vast trove of Ancients artefacts are available at Far Future Enterprises. I may yet delve into the treasures, but for now I have what I need.
In the chasms of gaming time, I have allowed myself to forget how different ‘Classic Traveller’ is from the versions I play today. On reading the Traveller Book text, several key aspects immediately struck me, resonating with my resurging memories of the game I played back in the day. Here are my immediate reflections.
Classic Traveller doesn’t have a standardised task system. Different modifiers and target numbers apply to each skill area. Jack of Trades provides an actual skill level in certain Referee controlled situations. As there is no unified task system, the effect of a character’s skill, or lack thereof, needs to be checked with the skill text. Attributes have different effects, or none at all, for each of the skill areas. I have played with unified systems for so long, I had forgotten that Classic played as it did.
In the basic game, characters would muster out of their services with very few skills, taken from a much smaller skill list. The ‘Gun Combat’ skill is per weapon, though everyone gets the skill at zero. I remember the hilarity of starting an epic adventure with a character that had Admin-2 and Liaison-1 (and Gun Combat-0).
Skill training is over a four year block, which provides a temporary level, only to be cemented over a further four year programme. Crikey.
Armour provided a minus modifier for a hit, with each type cross referenced with the weapon list to get the effect. In our early Traveller game we used elements of the seperate boxed Snapshot game for our personal combat. This seemed like a sophisicated upgrade even then. Although mechanically, the game plays out differently, the recognisable core delivers a deadly combat system that encourages other solutions to problems, or a swift return to the quickly generate a new character.
Having skimmed the original core game, I then poured through books 4 to 7, each of which significantly increase the skill totals for characters, and introduces additional skills, all of which are now standard in the later versions of the game. Instinctively we moved our games forward with the incremental releases of these books. We moved with Traveller as it developed. It remains a quetion to someone Refereeing a game of Classic Traveller, to check if they are using Mercenary, High Guard, Scouts and Merchant Prince.
For me, this return to the original text reinforces the seminal importance of the release of Digest Group Publications’ ‘Universal Task Profile’ in 1985. I remember looking at this new standardised process for resolving tasks and immediately saw the profound benefit it would bring to the way the game plays. All subsequent versions of the 2d6 line of Traveller games use the principles of the UTP, helping to modernise the game, whilst keeping close to the core of the original text.
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| The UTP as adopted into MegaTraveller |
Of course, the core of the beautiful game is all there in Classic Traveller, but I was surprised how different it felt, how early and formative, which of course it had to be. Classic is often touted as the simpler start to the game, and I found nothing in the original text that supported this notion. Not that the game is complex to play, it just lacks the honed norms of more modern game design. Some will prefer Classic to the modern expressions, it is just a matter of taste. Whether you are playing Classic, MegaTraveller, T4 and 5, Cepheus or Mongoose Traveller, you are always recognisably playing Traveller, such is the strength of the core design and the clever adaptation over the years.
I’m currently enjoying Dom’s Mongoose Traveller Jägermeister Adventure, and will return to play the Drinax adventures in September. My forever game continues, whichever dice modifier or task profile used. The game ages better than a character on the ageing table, it has such good genes. As I commence my eleventh four year term around the sun, I reflect that I’m lucky to have found my forever game.
We had a fantastic weekend at LongCon this year. I just wanted to mark the Tales from the Lone Lands game we played with a few photos.
The core of the game was fully supported by the ‘Tales from the Lone Lands’ adventure book and of course the excellent ‘The One Ring 2nd Edition’ from Free league. As the game’s Loremaster I had all the material I could need to provide an exciting and strongly emblematic set of five sessions over the weekend. We played out the majority of scenarios 2-6 in our time together, paced to ensure a suitable climax that drew a satisfactory conclusion, tieing some of the threads together that had been hinted throughout. It was the quality of the core game and adventure book that persuaded me to offer to GM on this occasion, perhaps backed by my long adoration of Tolkien’s work.
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| A long preparation |
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| Figures, Lore and Custom Dice Trays |
The game also re-ignited my figure painting, picking up a series of excellent figures from Renown Gaming. Alex and Kari painted the heroes and 3D printed some amazing dice trays that really lifted the table presentation! I painted some of the orcs and other foes. Carmel painted a brilliant dragon, and Neil helped by providing a range of other figures that featured prominently in play.
Our session zero was conducted on Role.
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| An introduction and session zero on Role |
I lost two players on the way to the event, which was a great shame, but that left a company of four to tackle the growing shadow in Eriadior.
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| Play at the table |
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| The Heroes |
We built a company for a while, to shape the weekend for each of us and play a good game. Although I was tired, I managed the format pretty well, which has encouraged me to offer again another year. It’s good to know that I still have the weekend marathon GMing in me! The weekend and game was made by the excellent play from each of us.
We are half way around, already. Time to take a look at the gaming year so far and reflect a little on the games that are getting actual play, and those that I have poured the energy and joy into as a GM.
Here is the breakdown of my 87 games so far:
The larger numbered games reflect campaigns, some of which are ongoing. I’m having such fun with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition, it’s a real gem. I’m playing in an ongoing campaign, which inspired me to take a look at the game in more detail, and there is a lot of detail. Though there is a lot of depth to the game, it lies beneath a clever and simple d100 test mechanic at the surface, all set in a rich and murky world, full of adventure. I’m now running The Enemy Within campaign, and have hit some convention high notes presenting one shots to people new to the game. I hope there will be much more play of this wonderful game.
Next weekend is LongCon, a tabletop RPG convention where you play through a single mini campaign. It’s going to be full on! On Friday I will set-up the temporary curtains in our main room, to shade the players from the bright sunlight, we want them in good shape in service to their masters in far away mountains and towers.
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| A couple of orcs, ready for the weekend fun |
I have also bought a couple of USB chargeable camping lights, that I hope will open out the potential of using the veranda as a gaming area for one of the groups. Another purchase is a rubber safety strip to enable a power cable to go from one wall to the gaming tables area without creating a tripping hazard.
In addition to the practical organising, I’m also running The One Ring, with a series of adventures set in Eriador in the Third Age. I have some more prep to do, but it is shaping up well for the weekend. Every time I return to this game I find that I am hugely impressed with the way it conveys the mood and tone of Tolkien’s stories and setting. In a way, this really is the game that I should be playing, set in a place that has inhabited my mind for 53 years.
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| Characters and dice for the game |
There is, of course, too much material in the excellent ‘Tales from the Lone Lands’. I have already done some pruning, but will leave the exact shape of our story to the weekend itself, allowing the players to breathe and fully inhabit the game. Hopefully, and hope could be in short supply, I’ll be able to give a satisfying arc, with a good sense of a journey to a heroic end.
More generally, I hope that LongCon will continue to thrive. I love the all weekend game format the most, both as a player and GM. What will LongCon 2026 bring?!
It’s really nice to have an opportunity to run some of my Heroic Fantasy for the Thursday Nighters. We chew through a range of games on our shelves to get some interesting variety of games for short form play. The game is very light, based on a Black Hack chasis and then embelished by me with a rich D&D fantasy wrap.
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| Adelheid – Dwarf Warrior |
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| Tarakos – Half Orc Barbarian |
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| Aeryndel – Elf Paladin |
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| Our initial setting |
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| Battle across a chasm |
My main worry is that my players will find the game too light, without the mechanical grit provided by other games that we enjoy, such as Pathfinder and Warhammer Fantasy. There seems a certain charm to the game in play, with combat moving along at a decent pace, despite the Manes Demons multiple attacks. The Barbarian red mist beserk ability was great fun, causing Tarakos to surge forward, even when all immediate foes were vanquished.
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| Heroic Fantasy in full flow on Foundry VTT |
I’m making some side notes about the way the game performs as we play, to see if there is anything I want to add to a short expansion document that I have already started. A larger consideration would be to publish the setting, which would be great fun, but something maybe for next year.
I’ve been reading the reaction to the arrival of the new ‘Old World RPG’ from Cubicle 7. One of the threads has been a criticism that the current Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition (WFRP 4e) is low powered, producing less than heroic common folk that can barely wade through the considerable filth, smeared across the swelling underbelly of the Empire. Although I can see where that criticism is coming from, like many RPGs, you only really need to start characters at a more experienced level to manage this, and the ability to do so is baked into the system. Before long, your character is starting to feel capable, with some talents and significant advances in a range of attributes and skills. Even starting Savage World Novices are a bit on the weak side.
Of course, part of the tone of the game is to be ordinary folk in extraordinary circumstances, set in a grounded and messy world. I think that WFRP 4e does a remarkably good job of delivering that experience, whilst giving extensible head room to lift player characters out of the mire and into a somewhat more heroic tone of play. The unnecessary proliferation of meta-currencies help to give player characters a considerable edge over their fellow citizens. The game isn’t High Fantasy, and therein lies a refreshing change.
Which, neatly, brings me to the other strand of criticism I’m seeing about the current WFRP 4e: it’s overly fiddly rules. Bring me back to my Warhammer 1e or 2e experience is the cry. Although I don’t know the earlier editions, I have enjoyed the new Zweihander Reforged, which delivers a ‘Grim & Perilous’ game with a simpler set of rules. So, I acknowledge this criticism and recognise that, for many, the new Old World game will simplify the rules and get a game going where the current one is just too much. WFRP 4e is also a fluid game, in continuous development and re-expression, with a growing line of extension books that revisit elements of the rules and build out careers and talents into yet more detail. It’s a lot.
The proliferation of Warhammer RPGs creates a rich set of options to explore the worlds of 40K and Old Empire. I’m completely happy to see this, without any understanding of the business efficacy of the strategy. Further, I am looking forward to playing a good number of them. My brief experiences of both Wrath & Glory and Soulbound were excellent. Cubicle 7 produces highly approachable games that know exactly what they are doing and what the table play is about. I hope to play the Old World RPG at some juncture.
However, as a GM and game buyer, I need to pick a game line and devote time to it. Much as I am tempted to ‘have them all’, I don’t think that is particularly sensible. I know that I will get diluted, perhaps to the extent that I take the stunned or paralysed condition, and whirl around uselessly, not really using any of them.
So, for me, and right now, I plan to double down on the existing WFRP 4e game, buy some more tomes and continue to run it. After all, I have a growing reputation as a skilled ‘clunkmeister’, running involved and fussy heavyweigths in an approachable fashion, so that others don’t have to!
PS: I happen to really love WFRP 4e for what it is and think it plays great.
