#RPGaDay2026 - Day 16 - "Composure"

 Day 16 of #RPGaDay2026 is "Composure," something players and characters have in spades when they don't really need it.  

27 years ago.  College.  The group was still young, but we were navigating the storylines in the B1-9 In Search of the Unknown.  They had chosen the jobs to recover a religious artifact from one Elwyn the Ardent.

No one anticipated the dragon. 

Everyone expected to roll up new characters next Saturday, not be saved by some random goddess Thendara and forced to solve some curse in a mysterious land called Haven. 

There were a few fun moment (See Dag from Day 7) but the group was disorganized and confused, even with hints.  

And this is where Rolf Wolfsblood, Barbarian of the Galmar plans, member of the adventuring party since session 1, finally kicked into glory.

The group had ever-so-wisely split up, Velandro the cleric and his group having tough encounter after tough encounter.

The other group, led by Rolf,  found a very un-barbarian sitting room, set for tea.  Annoyed that there had been no sign of the ruby and the group was becoming even more lax and incompetent than usal Rolf went on a rant,   He kicked chairs, chucked a plate, started screaming at his fellow adventurers. When he grabbed a tea cup to gesture drinking tea like some weak "civilized" human, he was shocked to hear the cup talk in Thendara's voice

Three crystal notes
Two Silver Statues
One ruby sword
All will smash the Demon's Eye
And lift the curse.

Rolf was delighted to notice that the other party members heard the voice too.  He wasn't as crazy as Echelon and his stupid wolf, Pathfinder, who he claimed he could talk to.

Ultimately, Rolf's group met up with Velandro, while Velandro's group was in a running swordfight with a red robed humanoid and a racial mix of minions.  The party reunited and the battle continued to move, right into the throne room.  Dozens of statues of Haven's citizenry stood inside, including an obvious Princess Argenta (and Sir Ellis to Velandro).  Sitting on her throne was a ruby that was at least the size of Rolf's gigantic fist.

With the fight going poorly, the barbarian slew hobgoblin in front of him and ran away!  Most were so overwhelmed by the attacking forces that they didn't notice.

Rolf raced to once of the bedrooms.  There had been a harp there.  Harps make notes!  His muscles barely strained as he lifted the instrument off its base and ran back to the battle!   Upon entering the Throne Room, he held it to the floor and played as many combination of notes that he could find. Some arrangement that he played must have work, for the ruby shattered into a thousand pieces, the evil human and his minions fled, and the still-intact statues reverted back to their living forms.

The barbarian had quietly observed, picking up clues, and just when things looked like they would fall apart for could, he saved the day. 

The curse had been lifted.

The lone picture of Rolf (actually a painting) has been lost to time.  Here's mix of him and apparently George 'The Animal" Steel (Nightcafe)

Alternative Question: One thing that will cause a character to lose their composure?

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 15 - "Endurance"

Day 15 of #RPGaDay and "Endurance" can go into so many directions.

I immediately thought of Hackmaster and the rules I didn't use, combat endurance being one of them. 

The 4th Edition of Hackmaster, the actual license for Pre-d20 D&D for Kenzer and Company, with a overtly healthy dose of parody and over-seriousness.  

And it's my favorite FRPG of all time. 

Fun fact: for a game with giant Gummi Wurm monsters, swiping dice over autographs for good luck, and a critical hit chart that requires a d10,000 , there are only a handful of rules we avoided.

Level Training:   There will be a post this month regarding the millions of gold heroes need to do anything in D&D/AD&D, but with most of low-magic/low-gold games, paying excessive amounts for gold and spending excessive amounts of time for training never appealed to me.  I applied most of the fringe benefits (free skills/skill points).

Threshold of Pain:  Great concept.  If anything alive takes a certain percentage of damage from a single attack, they're incapacitated.  A great concept that ensures that high-level characters or big monsters can still be swiftly neutralized by a lucky, high-penetrating damage roll from a smaller foe.

Except it's another stat I need to keep track of for eight players and the same in camp followers... plus the actual monsters themselves?   No thanks.

And I'll retract my combat endurance answer to start this off.  I avoided Fatigue Factor: rolls to stave off exhaustion in combat.  Essentially, the longer you fight, the more tire someone can be.  Again, much of this is the purview of the GM, and the only fatigue I try to gauge in combat is player fatigue. 

The Alternate Question:  How would you organize an endurance session of your favorite game?

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 14 - "Regard"

 Day 14 of #RPGaDay, and I'm grateful for the alternative question for the prompt "Regard."

"What is a game held in high regard you have yet to play?'

... and I'll add the obvious disclaimer, "... that I WANT to play?"

Honestly, that last part turns a short list into a tiny one.   Maybe Castle Falkenstein, with the journals and playing cards...

But... during my epic weekend at Historicon, Flagbearer Games had a booth, and I did pick up the basic book for Nations and Cannons the Revolutionary War setting for 5e.  

I mean, after weeks and weeks of ad copy during the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast  (YourDadWillLoveThis.com !) I finally succumbed.  And in a gaming group with a social studies teacher, two history degrees, and a guy who re-enacts as the hated British, we might get bogged down into minutiae, but we just might have some fun doing it. 

Alternative Question: What is a game held in high regard you have yet to play?

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 13 - "Strain"

Day 13 of #RPGaDay and I'm feeling the pressure, perhaps the "Strain?"

If cheesy line about pressure creating diamonds, what does strain create? 

Hemorrhoids.

And I'm the king of being the pain in the ass for my players.

Because I like continuity, I like bringing one-off scenarios, or flavor text back.   Not everything, but just enough to remind the players that the characters' actions have influence in the world, if not outright consequences.  

But as I ponder options to talk about strain with my Monday night gaming group, the winning answer came from the guys who experienced it all happen: "When Echelon and Talis ran a barony..."

Day 8 I talked about Echelon and Steve.    Two strange bedfellows who became the best of friends until each died. The whole barony thing is where it started. 

Spring Semester '99 - College - a few of the players are locals, they'd like to continue the campaign.  I set up a whole wizard from another dimension, trying desperately to go back home.  While the party visited the capital city, Talis wisely set up rooms at a local brothel.   For the last session of the semester, Kannex the Wizards researched too well, transporting him... and everything in the brothel back to his home world of Talislanta.

For the summer, we converted our AD&D 2nd Edition characters to Talislanta and went on a series of missions exploring the realm, but also getting more components and MacGuffins for the return journey home.

I had left Talis, Echelon, and their friend Brutus the Gladiator standing right outside the vanished building. 

What the rest of the summer group didn't realize was that I ran two additional sessions for Echelon and Talis' players.  

They returned to their established base outside of Eding... then they remembered why they left in the first place. 

• The Talislanta wizards, Kannex?  He was trying to help the group stop a wedding to the local lord that had been infiltrated with a race of spider-people doppelgangers.  (Seriously, read Ballad of the Pigeon God... it makes sense, but its weird...).  Let's just say that wildly different magic systems resulted in spell failure and spell explosions often. 

When he wanted to fireball a group of spider people charging the altar... a reasonable response and rolled a max critical success.  

His well-weighed response, causing minimal civilian death or property damage essentially nuked the entire ceremony, guests included. 

The battle turned to healing, hunting down rogue spider-people, and putting out the fire at the Blue Wizard Inn, the only inn in-town. 

The good news was the spider-person bridge was killed.  The bad new was many other guests of high status... including Lord Athelstane himself were killed!  

In the aftermath, the leader of a rival adventuring party, sent a runner to the capital, and essentially declared martial law in the village, taking charge.  

The disaster in the center of town, the deaths of many essential villagers just a few weeks before harvest,  and the ncompetent rule of "Prince William" set the stage for a rough autumn.

• The threat of famine for the winter.
• Tornados and storms threatening what was left of the town.
• The secret BBEG revealing himself to be the brother of the king... and Talis had slept with his daughter. 
• An uprising by some of the surviving peasants.. for all the wrong reason.  They torched the manor house and sent Prince William and his non-so amazing friends scattering.
• Columns of fire descending from the sky (it was a good things, but horrible optics). 

It was Talis and Echelon who kept people fed, purchased extra supplies, rebuilt essential equipment and fought off the various threats to this village.

... And if they didn't do it, they had the benefit of a collection of NPCs that had become their friends help them.  

Winter would be harsh, rations meager, but the village would survive...

And to make the wild session end on an ominous note, it was uncovered that the Chateau D'Echelon, there base of operations was still under a loan, and that individual, one Mister Nebuchadnezzar Tinpenny, was within rights to call in the entire loan, due to a number of "Act of God" contingencies in the agreement. 

We left our duo nearing the due date on the first day of Yule, and them plotting how to commit enough heinous acts on the moneylender and his well-earned good squad... and I left them hanging all summer until we reconvened on move-in day, Fall Semester, for a wonderful reunion, no one had seen coming.  

Strain: So far, what is the heaviest set of RPG things you have carried to play?

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 12 - "Loss"

 This past weekend, driving up four hours to see the kids, I vacilitated between the latest episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, a full album listen of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' The Dukes Of Alhazred, and venturing down the Billboard Top Hits for 1992, trying to figure out where things went wrong musically at the end of high school.

Well before Time of Your LIfe by Green Day infested every college, high school, and kindergarten graduation, there was a well documented groundswell of Boyz II Men's End of the the Road, with everyone arms over each other's shoulders swaying.  

Yes, some of us might have been drunk.  No, there weren't any Kindergarten graduations around my area... 

But that did bring up today's #RPGaDay2026 prompt, "Loss", in a "In Memorium" sense. 

In reality, "What character loss had the biggest impact in a campaign.

We could talk about the deaths of Talis and Echelon from my 1998-2000 AD&D 2nd Edition campaign.

We could mention the mysterious death of pilot Tarrie Proleck in our Star Wars d6 campaign.

The sudden and tragic loss of most(?) of the Earthworm babies being held by "Squiggles" in Gamma World.

We might even throw in the disappearance of noted parapsychologist, Dr Nathaniel Millheim in the waning days of the Masks of Nylarlathotep portion of our Call of Cthulhu campaign. 

But to me, the biggest change that affected the game was the disappearance of Dr Clarence Pittleman.

Noted Scientist

Gadgeteer

Telekinetic

Sentient Talking Coffee Bush

A scene from campus (L to R,  Pittleman, Grover, and  a Trustee)

Dr Pittleman was run by Nate, or Norm the Dwarf and Dr Nathaniel Millheim fame.  The character in our RISUS Illuminati University (IOU) game was the glue that kept plot lines going.  

RISUS was always the "holiday" system.  So simple to learn, so easy to make a basic character, that we would normally side around the bonfire late in our "Day of Sloth" (Labor Day Eve) picnic and roll six siders on makeshift tables until we couldn't read the results.  

Dr Pittleman was there for many years... until a bad Skype connection and Nate came back on, Pittleman MIA, but a new character Scissorhands John hitting the stage.

And soon thereafter, Nate stopped showing up to the Monday night games.  IOU is still a fill-in game, complete with teenage Roman Legionnaires, middle-aged talking astronaut chimps, and a real-life person called Buckshot Calvert..  

It's still fun and zany. 

But no one has scienced the fuck out of something, and despite most of my d1,000 chart of IOU plot hooks filled up and ready to go, it's just not the same. 

Squiggles and the babies.

Most things end. What is one RPG loss you still feel?

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 11 - "Tact"

 Day 11 of #RPGaDay and we revisit a often used prompt: "Tact"

My first thought on this one?  There's always a charming character or two in each campaign, but very few that would be tactful.

It's mostly a collection of misfits and warriors, warriors and misfits.  

The requisite diplomatic and negotiating missions are there, with decent success.

But then I think of Sonny Helianthus the 10' tall mutant sunflower in my Gamma World game. 

He's pretty direct, still learning why human subtlety is important. But he's has a much more important trait that lends him to today's post.

Sonny puts the "Tact" into Tactical... Nuclear... Weapon

Sure, he's a reliable member of the Restorationists.  Sure, he can figure out how most devices work, without people dying.  Sure, he's the level-headed four-armed voice of reason.

But after 144 sessions, he's been involved in not one, not two, but THREE detonations of nuclear devices.

An inadvertent self-destruction sequence as they investigated "Level A Inc"

The underground detonation of the Iron Society compound, and their leader, The Mutant Master, just above the Koto Dam. 

And most recently, upon discovering a living metal facility, surrounded by Hoppers, he uncovered, and accidentally set off a small device in the petrified woods a day's walk from the Glow Lands... and no one knows the wiser, except him. 

It could be a fault in Sonny's personality, or it's the high probability of atomic weapons in the printed material I've been using.  

Alternate Question: A character made great by having or not having tact

#RPGaDay2026 - Day 10 - "Secret"

Day 10 of #RPGaDay2026 and they drop "Secret" on us.

I'm a full-time GM, secrets stay locked up in my brain, many forever.   Here's three that live in my head, rent-free, everyday... because I'm the GM.

"Why are there of no weasels in Gamma World?" 

I spoke of this regarding Day 2 and Sneaky Pete.  

Why is Terval Sit the most powerful, but most reclusive wizard in Marakeikos now? 

Despite getting thoroughly trashed at the end of the Hackmaster Burning Trogs Rule! campaign, notes from the Burning Trogs Redux state the immense power and magic item collection he's acquired while being the resident magic expert in Mutumbo's general store in Verge...  If the group does get back together one more time, Terval is going to be a big deal... for unknown reasons.

Why is Tarrie Proleck's soul voice the computer on the Pretio?   

In our Star Wars d6 campaign, some say he was left for dead, others claim he slinked off to die after a shootout in a casino went horribly wrong, but Pretio pilot Tarrie Proleck is dead.... until the ship's computer developed a voice and it's personality mirrors a confused Tarrie.  

Why are things in your Gamma World campaign so much weirder than in the actual (very weird) campaign setting.

Let's just say a more worldly group of players might pick up on plotlines and certain critters/events, and I'm grateful for it. 

Alternate Question: A secret you hope comes out about a character?