Biblyon Broadsides

I’ve run several Daredevil games at North Texas using Kolchak: The Night Stalker characters. Jack “Bones” Burton has always been one of the player characters, and he has always been played by Scott Hammonds. Scott noticed the same thing I did about the Kolchak series’s high school anthropology teacher: his background looked a lot like his later namesake, Jack “It’s all in the reflexes” Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. The biology teacher’s dream was travel. He hated working at a high school. He may have slightly—just a little—overestimated his standing in the world. Add in a little military background—in Vietnam before the United States left after the 1973 Peace Accords—and a big mouth, and why not put the two together?

Scott Hammonds himself may have shared a little background with the the two fictional Jacks:

Scott was a Navy veteran, stationed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from 1982 to 1986. He served aboard the USS America as an aviation electronic technician, where he learned the skills that brought him a long and illustrious civilian career in tech and hardware engineering.

If that reads like an obituary, it’s because Jerry Scott Hammonds died on August 4, 2023. Until this year, Scott had been in every Kolchak adventure I’ve run at the North Texas RPG Convention, as well as the only DC Heroes game I’ve run, a Blackhawk game in 2020.

After NTRPGC 2023, he wrote in praise of the games he played, including:

Game 5. KOLCHAK the Wrong Goodbye. Old school Kolchak the TV series game world. Jerold Stratton has run this Kolchak before and I’ve had a blast each time. This was no exception everybody had fun and running relatable TV characters got everyone into character… especially Stephen who ran Miss Emily!!! Kolchak was run well too. Looking forward to next year.

“It’s a shame that we use so many extant terms from places like creative writing and theatrical improvisation in order to describe the act of table-top role-playing games. We do have our own jargon, but most of it is fun, whimsical, and more than somewhat esoteric. Or, to my chagrin, it’s borrowed from the video game industry—which wouldn’t exist in its current form without D&D in the first place… What we do at the gaming table is neither fish nor fowl.”

“Conversely, a game doesn’t have to resolve itself, doesn’t have to answer every question, account for every hanging plot thread… If you read a novel and it swung focus around like a typical D&D game, you’d throw the book across the room within a few chapters.”

A sample Daredevils character sheet, this is Carl’s long-suffering editor, Tony Vincenzo.

Yes, I will be running another Kolchak game at North Texas this year! It will be Saturday morning at 9 AM.

“January, 1977. Record cold temperatures have scientists talking about a new ice age. Cold in Chicago is nothing new; neither is cold-blooded murder. But what happened in Chicago that January was so unprecedented, so outrageous, that even now I fear to reveal the chilling truth.”

I’m excited about this game. I ran a test version for my local group at the beginning of the year. One great scene involved former gang member Lila Morton and Romany fortune-teller whose brother is a martial artist Maria Hargrove protecting 74-year-old Ojibwe shaman Charles Rolling Thunder from chupacabra (their word, not mine) in downtown Chicago in January!

There are a lot of pregenerated characters available; you can choose from most of the regulars and many of the guest stars of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series:

• Ryder Bond (Firefall)
• Jack Burton (Primal Scream)
• Emily Cowles (Regular cast)
• Leslie Dwyer (Mr. R.I.N.G.)
• Janis Eisen (The Energy Eater)
• Jim Elkhorn (The Energy Eater)
• Paula Griffin (The Werewolf)
• Maria Hargrove (Firefall)
• Carl Kolchak (Series lead)
• Ali Lakshmi (Horror in the Heights)
• Monique Marmelstein (Sporadic cast)
• Lila Morton (Chopper)
• Charles Rolling Thunder (Bad Medicine)
• C. Evan Spate (Demon in Lace)
• Agnes Temple (Bad Medicine)
• Pepe Torres (Legacy of Terror)
• Ron Updyke (Regular cast)
• Tony Vincenzo (Regular cast)
• Bess Winestock (They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be…)
• Rosalind Winters (Demon in Lace)

If you’ve been to a previous game, you’ll have the opportunity to continue the same character.

While the listing has it as “77 Lost Worlds”, we’ll be using the Daredevils rules from Fantasy Games Unlimited. “77 Lost Worlds” is the first in the list, and used to be the default entry, with no option for games not in the list, which Daredevils is not. It used to be that you could see a lot of games under “77 Lost Worlds” that were not using that system.

I’ll be running a game of Mark Pettigrew’s Flashing Blades at 6 PM Wednesday at the North Texas RPG Convention this year. There will be pregenerated characters among the King’s Musketeers and the Cardinal’s Guard—and maybe a few odd men out—working together and competing for the spoils of victory in the famous Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris in 1637!

I’ve had my eye on Flashing Blades for a while now. But a combination of finally reading Cyrano de Bergerac and browsing through old Dragon magazines—and seeing the ads for this game—convinced me to pull the trigger and buy it from Fantasy Games Unlimited.

I’ve owned En Garde for decades, and have only played it once, at North Texas. It was fun, and Flashing Blades looks like it will be even more fun. (It looks like someone is running En Garde again this year.)

An English spy has stolen French naval documents, compromising France’s strength on the seas! More importantly, the King’s Musketeers and the Cardinal’s Guards are vying to restore the documents and capture the spy before their rivals. Get ready to swing from the chandeliers, fight the Cardinal’s guards—or the King’s musketeers—and outwit the enemies of France in Mark Pettigrew’s game of adventure, intrigue, and… flashing blades!

I’m going to be honest here. As simple as this adventure is, we will probably not finish it in four hours, although that depends on how many people sign up. The adventure is just an excuse to get into brawls, cross blades, and throw furniture around.

I’ll have more information here later, but (a) there’s no need for you to know the game rules, and (b) pregenerated swashbucklers will be provided. So if you’re in on Wednesday night come in and cross swords!

They say the only perfect murder is the random murder. It’s the Christmas season in Chicago, and police are certainly stymied by the seemingly random killings the press has dubbed “The Christmas Murders”. Will Kolchak and his loose band of night stalkers solve the mystery? Choose a pregen from many of the guest stars who appeared on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series.

I’ll be cracking open Daredevils again for The North Texas RPG Con in 2023. This year’s adventure is “The Wrong Goodbye” and takes place over Christmas of 1976. It’s currently scheduled for Saturday morning at nine.

Here’s the TV Guide version:

Carl Kolchak and guest stars investigate Chicago’s 1976 Christmas murders.

All the old favorite guest stars and regulars will be available. Kolchak himself, of course, and if you’ve ever felt like letting loose a barrage of abuse at an abusive reporter who can’t understand why nobody believes him, Tony Vincenzo is also available.

A lot of the fun with a game like this is roleplaying the television roles: Vincenzo, or Pepe Torres, or Paula Griffin, or Kolchak himself. The Kolchak television series is often rerun by oldies television stations. In my area it’s currently running on MeTV. It looks like you can also stream it free on NBC. The two movies, The Night Stalker^• and The Night Strangler^• are harder to find.

Here are the current pregens:

“There are a few semi-secondary sources that give estimates for advancement rates—and it’s rather remarkable how widely they differ. This is even though they all date from a time post-OD&D-Supplement-I, when in they’re all using basically the same monster XP chart and treasure tables.”

When I wrote Experience and Advancement in Role-Playing Games, I focused on the mechanical elements of character advancement. That says nothing about the player perspective of how characters advance.

In his latest blog post, Delta collects three statements—two from actual rulebooks—about how quickly Gygax, Holmes, and Moldvay each expected players to see their characters go up in level. Advancement from first to second level, for example, varies between 2-½ adventures (Moldvay) to 9 adventures (Holmes). That’s a pretty big difference.

These differences will reflect more than just a difference in each writer’s vision of how quickly players should see their characters advance. They’re going to reflect different visions about all sorts of aspects of early gaming culture: how often players gamed, how long each session took, even what the definition of an adventure was vs. what a session was!

I created this blog specifically to segregate my political and other (currently, vintage food and vintage computer) blogging from my game blogging. Sadly, some very egregious politics has been blundering around in gaming over the last several years and it’s starting to come to a head. I’m crossposting this on my main blog because it’s as much about the resurgence of virulent racism as it is about gaming.

One of the things that has always interested me and seems never to be explored in games is how having real, definite races of people would affect the imaginary differences we’ve made up in the real world. It seems as though having truly different fantasy races ought to make it obvious how ridiculous man’s tribal hatreds are today. The same ought to be true of the discovery of truly alien races.¹

I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently Shadowrun 2E handles inter-human racism the same way I do in Highland: the new creatures are so obviously different that humans in these worlds no longer view each other as different. Inter-human racism is gone. In Highland, there’s the added change that the cataclysm jumbled up cultures so drastically that cultures are no longer associated with skin color.

In reality, I suspect that this is wishful thinking. It is easy to be disappointed by the resilience of such racism in the real world, and it’s hard to say that it would not remain resilient even in worlds like that of D&D or Shadowrun. When self-described anti-racists make claims that are right at home among slavers, it’s difficult to be optimistic about any impending end of racism.

This is especially true when people complain about it being “racist” to name a player character’s fantasy race. There has long been a weirdly racist attempt to analogize human races to fantasy races. But in games such as Dungeons and Dragons where the rules of the game make it abundantly clear that fantasy races really are superior and inferior in various ways, this conflation of real-world and fantasy is blatantly racist. Players and pundits who make this equivalence are accepting the racist belief that some human races are superior and some are inferior.

“Now, here, are the true facts.”

“You’re going to need a lot more documentation.”

It’s the fall semester at Illinois State Technical College. Carl Kolchak and his loose band of night stalkers investigate strange happenings as the school’s sports team breaks record after record. Choose a pregen from many of the guest stars who appeared on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series.

I’ll be cracking open Daredevils again for The North Texas RPG Con on Thursday morning of 2022’s convention. This year’s adventure is “The Big Creep” and takes place at Illinois State Technical College in the fall semester of 1976.

Sign up is live starting Friday evening, April 15, at 8PM Texas time! Note that it currently says the game uses the “RPG” rules. That’s because Tabletop Events doesn’t have Daredevils in their system yet.¹

Here’s the TV Guide version:

Carl Kolchak and guest stars investigate strange happenings at Illinois State Technical College.

If you’re a Kolchak fan you may remember ISTC from the Demon in Lace episode. Both student journalist Rosalind Winters (“You hear about that kind of thing all the time. There’s probably a hundred of those tablets around.”) and Professor of Archaeology Dr. C. Evan Spate (“It seems to be some sort of religious rite, or maybe even a form of recipe.”) will be available as pregens.

As well, of course, as all the old favorite guest stars and regulars. Kolchak himself is available, and if you’ve ever felt like letting loose a barrage of abuse at an abusive reporter who can’t understand why nobody believes him, Tony Vincenzo is also available.