Christmas Day at the Matinee!

The World's Greatest Christmas Band will be at the Matinee in Akron tonight at 10 pm. Come to the show, tell me you saw this blog post and I will buy you a beer!

Missile Toe at the Akron Art Museum

Missile Toe, the World's Greatest Christmas Band, will be playing the Akron Art Museum on Thursday, December 17th at 6:30 pm.

Be there, it will be fun!

And relatively family friendly...

Own a piece of Alternate History!

The Design Mechanism are selling their last copy of the never-quite-published RuneQuest 6: Adventures in Glorantha on ebay.

There auction is on ebay right now and as of 8:15 pm on 12/13/15 is at $617.00 with 5 days and 19 hours to go.

Tonight at Annabell's!

Missile Toe, the World's Greatest Christmas Band, returns to Annabell's tonight!

We are the final of 4 bands, so we will be playing stupidly late.

Come see us if you happen to be awake.

Runequest confusion

So I would like to introduce the group I am playing D & D(TM) with to RuneQuest and have  RQ be our 'B' game. Or our 'C' game. Whatever. It's hard to get people together and having smaller B & C games, with D & D as the A game.

I like D & D(TM!) as a concept, and I had forgotten how vivid it could be until we started playing again, but the mechanics and the whole class-and-level thing are not so good.

Back in the day I really loved RuneQuest, the mechanics were super-cool and felt 'realistic' to me. We pretty much ignored Glorantha and I was out of the hobby by the time all the  super cool Glorantha supplements were out.

I wanted to introduce a B or C game at least based on RuneQuest, if not RQ itself. I had read RuneQuest Essentials and found the thing pretty complicated. Cool, but I had trouble wrapping my head around the combat sequence after years away from all of this nonsense.

I picked up Magic World and the Advanced Sorcery supplement, and thought about using that. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside after the Chaosium / Moon Design merger / return of the Great Old Ones.

So I though either RuneQuest or OpenQuest. The simplicity of OpenQuest is appealing, but the cool combat effects in RuneQuest are even more appealing.

But now it looks like the current RuneQuest is doomed and will be replaced by something else from Chaosium, and be explicitly set in Glorantha.

Which I don't find that appealing.

RuneQuest 6 will continue under a new name from The Design Mechanism sometime next year.

I really don't want to introduce my friends to a game system with the caveat "By the way, this is all going to change next year." That makes for a hard sell.

The Design Mechanism's announcement is here on their forums.

Chaosium's annnouncement is here on their blog.

I play bass in Missile Toe, the World's Greatest Christmas Band.

Here's a flier for our next gig:

Runequest 2 reprint kickstarter

I have never Kickstarterted before, but I pledged $30 for the reprint of the original Runequest rules. For nostalgia's sake, I guess. I am not actually running a game at the moment.

But I was hooked when I saw the mockup with the "And may Arachne Solara bless and protect this book."

The Kickstarter is here.

The really cool, but I don't think I can even remotely afford to do it if I want to stay married stretch goal is a copy of the original playtest notes. Which look like this:

Way cool, but not worth getting divorced over.

Suddenly I worry about orbital mechanics

So I'm coming up with background for my eventual Magic World / RuneQuest / BRP campaign and I have this idea that the world of the game has two moons - a day moon and a night moon that were both cut from the body of the Titan whose heart is the World and who both only appear during their respective parts of the 24 hour cycle.

Then I think - man, what would the orbital mechanics of that look like?

Getting dragged back into it

We moved into our current home two years ago. I had been out of the role-playing game thing since 1988, yet I had a ton of games and game-related stuff that I kept moving with me. Between not wanting to move them ever again, and some changes in my job that made me worried about my cash flow I decided to sell off my gaming stuff.

And sell I did. Gone were my copies of the D & D Holmes Basic set, Gangbusters, Top Secret, Call of Cthulhu, Thieves World, a bunch of microgames, Panzer Blitz, Worlds of Wonder, Runequest and many more. (But kept my 1st edition AD&D and the OD&D white box)

And selling this stuff off made me interested in what was going on in the RPG market. I started reading blogs and found a couple of books on the subject.

And then I started playing D & D again, the current version. The rules seem less weirdly arbitrary than the versions I played, but I'm not a fan of the class and level system and 'armor makes you harder to hit' combat. That just seems goofy to me.

So I'm thinking about running something again. My rules of choice back in the day were Runequest and other Basic Roleplaying derived games. I picked up the Basic Roleplaying 'Big Gold Book', Magic World and the Advanced Sorcery supplement and like them a lot. I've read Runequest Essentials and it seems to be the best iteration of those rules I have seen, but have not yet sprung for the complete ruleset. But seriously thinking about it.

I've got some notes on a campaign, and already tried making up a new monster which ought to be here somewheres. I wonder if I have time to actually put something together. And who would play if I did? We already have lots of scheduling issues with the folks I play with now.

The Fleshpecker

Here is the Fleshpecker, an avian monster for Magic World, Basic Roleplaying, RuneQuest and related games.

Fleshpecker

The Fleshpecker is a large (hawk-sized) carnivorous relative of the woodpecker. It is known for plucking the internal organs out of it’s prey via repeated attacks with its bill. The Fleshpecker’s modus operandi is to anchor itself to its opponents with its claws and then peck the life out them and eat their tasty internal organs..

Characteristic	Roll	Average
STR	1D3	2
CON	1D4+2	4
SIZ	1D2	1-2
INT	2	2
POW	2D6	7
DEX	3D6+15	26

Move: 2 (10 flying)

Hit Points: 3

Damage Bonus: -1D6

Armor: None

Attacks: Claw 60 % 1D3-db (bleeding)

Peck: 65% 1D4 (impale)

Skills: Dodge 60%,Search 60%

The fleshpecker will make two claw attacks at it's DEX rank in an attempt to grab its opponent. Each claw that hits will stay locked on until the Fleshpecker flees or is knocked off.

Once both claws have grabbed the opponent, the Fleshpecker makes 2D4 peck attacks starting 5 DEX ranks later, with each peck occurring 1 DEX rank after that. If the Fleshpecker is not dislodged, it makes 2D6 peck attacks each round after it has grabbed onto its foe.

The Fleshpecker cannot dodge while both claws are grabbing a foe.