Biblyon Broadsides

“It was the Ides of March, and a woman was the author of the deed—or was she? It was a classic locked room mystery. The doors were sealed and a man was dead… witnesses claimed to see a woman walking away just after the murder… beyond the window of the fourteenth floor. The events of March 15, 1977, were impossible. Impossible, and yet, they happened.”

Yes, Kolchak will be back in North Texas in 2025. The convention runs from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8. I’ll update this post with the exact details once the schedule is finalized, but at the moment I’ll be running Kolchak: The Tall Sister on Saturday morning at nine. It’s a four-hour session as normal.

I’ll have pregenerated characters for all of the familiar Kolchak guest stars, as well as Kolchak and the other office staff at International News Service.

We never really got to see just how International they were. They seemed to be mostly the New York News Service, with a tiny branch in Chicago. Kolchak, however, was very international. His horrors came from Mexico, Peru, Greece, Eastern Europe, Mesopotamia, India, and even London! As well as above and below the world of mortal man.

We will continue to use the Daredevils RPG rules for the game. It’s fairly simple. I’ll explain it of course at the game, but basically you have abilities and you roll d20 against them. The only complicated bit is that abilities are rated on a 1-100 scale; if, during the course of the game, your score hits a zero or a five, your score for rolling against increases by 1. That is, if you have an Anthropology of 54, you’ll be rolling d20 against 10. If you increase it to 55, then you’ll be rolling against 11.

Skills potentially increase if you make a successful roll against them and it materially helps the party. It’s based on the talent that skill falls under. Anthropology is a Scientific talent. So, for example, Dr. C. Evan Spate has an Anthropology of 54 and a Scientific Talent of 10. When he makes an Anthropology roll that materially helps the party, the player can roll d20 against Dr. Spate’s Scientific Talent of 10. If the player rolls 10 or less, Dr. Spate’s Anthropology is now 55.

It’s a neat little system that acknowledges the roll of talent without relying on it.

The Guardian of Forever. Mirror Universe Trek. The Golden Age of Piracy. The Imperium’s research into the Guardian has destroyed the Enterprise and the Imperium. Righting the timeline requires braving the high seas and… flashing blades!

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be running Flashing Blades again at North Texas this year. Details aren’t completely finalized; when they are, I’ll update this and link them here, but the North Texas RPG Con will be from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8. I’ll be running Flashing Blades: l’Entreprenante l’Entreprenante on the Wednesday before, June 4, during their pre-con-get-it-on. It worked well last year; Flashing Blades is a different kind of rpg and makes for a great con start.

Flashing Blades is a semi-adversarial game. It’s adversarial in the same way that the Musketeers and the Guards were: they enjoyed swashbuckling against each other, and were overjoyed to have such wonderful opponents to test their mettle against.

The basic idea in this year’s adventure is that half of the players will play 1705 Naval officers, and half will play Mirror Universe Trek officers. Potentially, the Star Trek officers will duel each other as often or more often than they duel anyone else! That, however, is entirely up to you.

I’ll be playing fast and loose with the Trek side. I’m an original series fan and, to a lesser extent, an animated series fan. That means that pretty much everything about the Guardian of Forever I’ll have taken from The City on the Edge of Forever and Yesteryear. And pretty much everything about the Mirror Universe I’ll have taken from Mirror, Mirror.

I know there’s a lot of post-original series expansion of the Mirror Universe. I know nothing of it other than things picked up second or third hand from other fans. The Mirror Universe is the evil goateed reflection of the Federation universe. The characters from it are characters that have been immersed in that evil. Some have accepted it, some haven’t, but all have chosen to live with it—they are, after all, still alive.

I’ll have pregenerated characters and an easy cheat sheet for handling duels.

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!