Category: Role Playing Games

Posted in: Community Service, Role Playing Games, Star Trek

Charity on two fronts

Written by TardisCaptain
Two RPG guidebooks for better play.

Today two things happened that made the season better. I received an unexpected surprise and I had the chance to give to a good charity.

If you recall from an earlier blog post, I talked about The Power of Gaming and how gamers on the RPG.net forums have been helping each other out by participating in a “Secret Satan” (a play on the Secret Santa name) gift exchange. Well apparently the copy of Mutant Crawl Classics wasn’t the only gift coming my way. A package arrived in the mail containing the two books shown in the photo above. The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide and The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide both by James D’Amato. Also included in the package was a note that my “Secret Satan” had picked up extra copies of these books in anticipation of gifting to an RPGnetter and that there were two packages coming. Thank you for these gifts. One of my geek kids has already flipped through one of the books and was impressed by what she quickly saw. I plan to read through these books and I’ll write up a review for a future blog post.

Cyrstal Allen as D'nesh on Star Trek Enterprise.
Crystal Allen as D’nesh on Star Trek Enterprise.

Actress Crystal Allen has been in many different shows including Supernatural, Boston Legal, Star Trek Of Gods and Men (a fan film) and Star Trek: Enterprise. The photo above is her as the Orion Slave girl D’nesh. She has been doing something that I think is really wonderful. She has been making home-made meals for medical personnel, firefighters and first responders who have been serving us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently she is running a GoFundMe page to raise $2,000 to cook healthy meals for these frontline warriors for the holidays. She’s even willing to send an autograph to supporters. I would have picked up her autograph at a convention anyway, but donating to a good charity inspired me to jump at this opportunity. If you are so inspired, click on the link and see if you can help Crystal reach her goal.

Posted in: Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games

Prepping for the Character Creation Challenge

Written by TardisCaptain
31 Day Character Creation Challenge
Feel free to share this image on social media to spread the word.

So the gears in my mind started churning last month and it came up with the Character Creation Challenge. I am so looking forward to this event. However I don’t want to jump in without being prepared. So I’ve been making sure that all of my books are where I can get to them (there are still a few I’m trying to unpack out of boxes). I have my dice bag in my desk. I even created a spreadsheet for each date in January (with the day of the week) and a tentative game scheduled for each day. This way I could spread out the games (so I wasn’t doing D&D 3.5 one day then D&D 4th edition the next. But I could schedule the games I’m familiar with on busier days and games I’ve never created a character for on weekends. I’ll probably be still adjusting the schedule if flexibility is needed.

Just recently I created my first couple of characters for an upcoming Star Trek Adventures campaign that I’ll be playing in. I won’t do a review of the game now, but I’m really glad I did a trial run before creating a character for the #CharacterCreationChallenge. Now I’m debating if I should do trial runs for some of the other games I’ve never created characters for or if I should just go in cold. About 2/3rds of the games I’ve got listed on my spreadsheet I’ve created characters prior (or it’s generic enough like the D20 system that I have a good idea what to do). This is another internal debate I’ll be having up until January 1st. It will be interesting to see how this Character Creation Challenge unfolds.

Posted in: Role Playing Games

The Power of Gaming

Written by TardisCaptain
Mutan Crawl Classics rule book
Mutant Crawl Classics by Goodman Games.

Today I experience the power of gaming from multiple sources. And as readers of my blog know, I get excited by the power of creativity.

The picture you see above is the latest role-playing game that has been added to my collection. It was sent to me by another gamer that I don’t even know. On the RPG.net gaming forums gamers put together a “Secret Satan” (a play on words of Secret Santa) gift exchange program to try to brighten someone’s day. And believe me, with the way 2020 has gone, we could use all of the brighter days that we can get. I was amazed at how many people responded to the forum post wanting to participate. This surge of goodwill excited me and I signed up. I was assigned a “victim” and given enough details to send them a gift with a cap of $40 to spend. Luckily my “victim” had done some research and provided some Amazon links to possible gift ideas. One of these was selected and the gift was sent. I may have messed up because I let my “victim” know who I was (I thought that gifts sent via Amazon had the sender’s name attached). But it resulted in a nice thank you note for the game that was delivered.

I had also provided a list of possible gift ideas. Mutant Crawl Classics by Goodman Games was one of the items on my list. I had recently purchased the Dungeon Crawl Classics in PDF format from a Humble Bundle sale and I had been pretty impressed with the quality of the work put into the game. So I thought that the companion game, MCC, would be an interesting read. A delivery from Amazon was made today and the excitement of not knowing what was in the box added to the thrill of seeing MCC when the box was opened. There were cheaper games on the list so my “Secret Satan” went the extra mile to make this holiday a special one. (tips hat) To my “Secret Satan”, I thank you. I hope you had just as much fun with your gift (what ever it was) as I did with mine. I also want to give a shout out to the organizers at RPG.net who put this together. This is where I felt one of the surges of energy today.

The second surge of energy came from the Mutant Crawl Classics book itself. It did remind me of when I read the Dungeon Crawl Classics rules on PDF, but there was something more about this game. I couldn’t understand it for a moment until I realized that I was physically holding a brand new RPG book in my hand. The new book smell and feel was there. When I opened it up, I could feel the energy coming from the creativity (both writing and artwork) contained inside. I really want to play an MCC game now. Thank you Goodman Games for your work on this.

Until I get a chance to actually play, I will be adding Mutant Crawl Classics to my list of games for the Character Creation Challenge coming up this January. This way I will have fun creating a character and learning some of the rules in the process.

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