Category Archives: Dungeons and Dragons

February 3, 2018 · 5:19 pm

Setting the Scene

As a rabid Dungeons and Dragons player, I have labored for years to build up my collection of miniature figures.  Now, like the action figures and the dolls, the collection is growing so fast it may eat the house.  So, in order to play with them and get some use out of them, I built a cardboard castle, complete with grid for playing D & D.  It is a scene that can be used to play the game, but it is also a place to display my collection.

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Toy companies have recently started putting out collectible miniatures in an almost D & D scale.  They only cost about a dollar apiece.  That makes them cheaper than candy bars.  And I am diabetic, so I can’t buy candy bars.

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I like to position them in my D & D background and take pictures of them, even though DC Superheroes are not D & D figures.  I can work them into the story of the next RPG sessions.  Batman is a paladin.  Aquaman is a sea-based druid.  Wonder Woman is an Amazon.

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Adam West Batman is really, really cool.  Wham!  Pow!  Sock!

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Killing a dragon is a big event in a D & D campaign.  And I can do that now with miniatures.

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The Flash can rescue Jessica Rabbit from a mad goblin in the Skull Plaza.

So, I reached a point in setting the scene for the game that it has become almost cinematic.  And I like taking pictures of it as I continue to play with all  of it.  Forgive me.  I will forever be twelve years old in my head.

 

 

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January 27, 2018 · 4:15 pm

Return of the Star Wars Figures

On a previous Saturday I admitted to the crime of using 12-inch action figures to play the Star Wars role-playing game.  The Dungeons and Dragons RPG world was horrified.  You are supposed to use scale-appropriate metal miniatures.  How can you simulate combat without small figures on a grid?  I have to confess.  It was via x’s and dots on graph paper.  But we didn’t use the action figures to represent ranges and lines of site in combat.  And one of my players was my niece, an actual girl.  So, I guess, to be honest, we were actually playing with dolls.

But it helps to have a lot of dolls.

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Emperor Palpatine, Snow Trooper, Obi-Wan, Jar Jar, Quigon, Droid Soldier, and home-made Mace Windu

We started play after the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy.

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Wicket, Imperial Walker, Astroboy (What’s he doing there?) Darth Vader, Little Anakin, and Boba Fett.

We got creative with stories.

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Jango Fett, General Grievous, and Admiral Akbar

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Anakin Skywalker

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Robot from Lost in Space, R2D2, Slave Girl Leia, and a Green Orion Slave Girl Dancer from Star Trek

So there is evidence available to my offspring to help them have me committed to an institution.  The truth is, these are not even all of my Star Wars Dolls.  So this morning’s confession session is now at an end, though all of the horrible truth is not yet revealed.

 

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January 20, 2018 · 3:57 pm

Making Metal Miniatures

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Being a sort of amateur artist with extremely artistical tendencies, I naturally love to paint. My daughter also likes to paint.  So one way to combine our love for sloshing colors on stuff with paint brushes with our love for playing nerdy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons is to buy and paint our own miniatures to play with in the game.  I used to do this a lot when I was a single goofer with time and money on my hands, so I have boxes and boxes of painted little people and little critters made out of lead or pewter or plastic.

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When doing these dastardly deeds of nerdling paintery to little metal people, we have to choose how we are going to go about it.  Different paints work in different ways.  I like to use brightly colored enamels like the Testors stuff I have used since the 1960’s.  The Princess prefers acrylic because it is less permanently messy.  Once you laminate your fingertips with enamel, you have to wear blue and green and brown on your hands in school for most of a week as it wears off.  Acrylic is less socially mortifying, in that it is removed more easily as a water-based paint. Even after it dries on your hands, it still comes off with a little scrubbing and you don’t have to use turpentine.

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Finding new figures to paint is not as easy as it once was.  You used to be able to locate such things easily in the nearest comic book shop or game shop.  Hobby Lobby and Michael’s used to have sections where you could find the figures as well as the paints.  Now that those things are becoming extinct and increasingly rare, you have to take advantage of serendipity.  We discovered a magically preserved and timeless game shop in a dying mall next to the movie theater where we recently went to watch Jumanji.  I bought the elves above in that shop from the young elf running the place all by himself.  An elf bard with a fiddle and bow, and another elf with a crossbow.  I also found two exquisite sculpts of children which I haven’t even removed from the card yet.  All that is left to do now is argue over who is going to paint what.  And that can be a difficult thing.  I am older and cannier than her, but she outweighs me by ten pounds.  The decision has not been made yet.

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I am finishing this essay on painting nerdling painter-deeds with a look at two finished works from my glorious nerd-painting past.  Ganser the Wizard of Gansdorf is actually painted in acrylic, while Anya the Amazon is painted in enamel.  I did them both in the 1980’s.  We shall soon see if I can still do as good as I used to do.  And if the Princess can match me or surpass me.  It is not actually a contest, but I still hope I win.

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January 13, 2018 · 3:48 pm

Representing Star Wars RPG People

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Traditionally, D&D-type role playing games are played with miniature figures to represent characters and npc’s on the battlefield.  But when the kids were small and we started playing Star Wars RPG I didn’t have the proper figures.  So. to visualize characters, we used what I did have plenty of, dolls… err, action figures.

I told you who the player characters were a couple of Saturdays ago, but let me remind you.

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Princess Moreno, represented by the Barbie dressed in Emperor Palpatine’s robe was the leader of the adventuring group, and the player character of my niece, who was available back then because they lived in the Dallas area too.

Juba Jubajai, Jedi Guardian, was the muscle-brained power of the group.  He was my oldest son’s player character.

 

 

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The sidekicks and NPC’s that rounded out the group were Hrowwuhrr, the Princess’s loyal Wookie companion, and Keebo Kloohorn, the Rodian minstrel, quick of wit and poor at shooting.

 

 

 

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Of course, there were numerous other people you run into in an adventure, like Jedi-trainer Master Link Conn (played by an Abraham Lincoln Presidential action figure) and Barrabas the space pirate.  I customized some.  Luke Skywalker and Han Solo played a lot of them.  And others were only present in our imaginations.  For a brief little while, it was a quaint and happy gaming experience to play Star Wars with dolls and dice.

 

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January 6, 2018 · 4:29 pm

Master and Padawan

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At their heart most of my stories, including role-playing game stories, are about being a teacher.  In the Star Wars role-playing game, that manifested itself in the Master/Padawan relationship.  According to the rules, a Jedi character becomes a Master at experience level ten.  For Number One Son’s Jedi character, Juba Jubajai, that happened in the middle of a deep space adventure.

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At the time the adventuring group was traveling in space in an interstellar tug boat, in trouble with both the enemies of the Republic, and the Republic itself for their actions on the planet Naboo.  While traveling incognito in deep space, they came across a battle-damaged ship that was mostly wreckage and had no life signs.  But as they investigated the ship, they found two children frozen in carbonite and still alive, even though the ship had been destroyed thirty years before.

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The children were Trad and Verina Paddox, heirs of a noble house in Tapani Sector that had been reported assassinated years ago as aggressive House Mecetti had forced their noble family to give up most of their planetary holdings and killed their parents.  Tracking down folks that it would be safe to return these children to was next to impossible.  They ran into folks from House Mecetti with a shadowy agenda that probably included erasing the two children from history and existence.

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Wraith was a scarred and ferocious agent for House Mecetti that seemed intent on finding out everything he could about the children.  He had several run-ins with the adventurers and shots were fired.  At one point he was seriously wounded by the Wookie.  But he didn’t give up, and was apparently impossible to kill.

During the struggles with Wraith, Verina began exhibiting force sensitivity and immense power that needed Jedi training.  So they located a friendly Jedi who seemed to overlook the adventurers’ wanted-criminal status.  This dippy and jovial  Jedi was named Jean D’Ark, who continually joked around, but would ask clearly inappropriate questions followed by a quick, “Never mind!”

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He naturally became Nevermind, or the  Nevermind Jedi.  They began treating him like a jolly old uncle.  It was assumed that he would train Verina as a Padawan and take charge of the children.

Fortunately, more than one character turned out to be the opposite of what he seemed to be.  Wraith returned from the dead to reveal that Nevermind was a dark Jedi with Sith ambitions.  He was working for Darth Sidious and the evil parts of House Mecetti, and intended to kill the children.  Wraith not only revealed the plot, but helped Jubajai to drive the dark Jedi off.  So Master Jubajai began teaching Padawan Verina Paddox.  The player characters adopted the children and began to fight to reclaim the children’s birthright, leadership of House Paddox and possession of the planet Pelagia.

It is satisfying to tell stories where the teachers are the heroes.  But, of course, role-playing games are on-going stories, and there is always more to tell.

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December 30, 2017 · 5:31 pm

Star Wars, the RPG

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After getting married in 1995, there was a long break from the playing of role-playing games.  I had to wait for Number One Son to reach an age where he understood enough about things to enjoy a game where telling a story together was the main thing.  He was aware of Star Wars through the fourth movie, The Phantom Menace, which we saw together in the Austin area where Grandma and Grandpa Beyer lived.  Then, after the next movie came out, The Attack of the Clones, a role-playing game from the 80’s was updated and I bought the rule books in local game shops.  Number One Son and Closest Cousin began playing with me whenever we had the opportunity.  We even played during our tent-camping trip to Niagara Falls.

Closest Cousin was basically a young girl in her Disney Princess phase when we started playing. So she chose to be a noble.  She wanted a Princess Leia-type character, and she created Princess Moreno D’ark to fulfill that need. Number One Son wanted a more action-oriented character, one who could solve problems by whacking them with a light saber.  So he created Juba Jubajai, a gung-ho space marine sort of Jedi guardian.  We chose to play in the Clone Wars era because that was where I had the most resources in book form and related most closely to the movies they had recently seen and loved.  I had a bunch of other old 80’s Star Wars game supplements that I could adapt to fit into the game universe we were using.

Of course, two people is a little short of a full adventuring party, so we recruited some good NPC’s to fill in.  We had to have a Wookie.  So Hrowwuher became Princess Moreno’s devoted sidekick.  He could blow stuff up whenever the Princess’s negotiating and problem-solving skills failed to keep the group out of trouble.  Keebo Kloohorn was a musician and often supplied the sneakily supplied game-master’s hints to keep the adventure on track.  He was also sometimes the character used by Number Two Son, but at a mere five years old, the game rarely held his attention long enough for him to really be playing.

On upcoming Saturdays, I will recount a few of our memorable adventures in the Star Wars game realm.

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December 23, 2017 · 3:45 pm

World Building

Part of being both an RPG gamer and a science fiction writer is the need to put together entire worlds and cultures that don’t exist anywhere in the universe outside of my own imagination.  It is a big and complicated process.  I used to create entire illustrated information pages to capture the world in simple form for future use.

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If you can read the small print, you will find that much of the detail about Planet Dionysus and it’s associated planets is very complex.  The planet was a home base for the Evil Dr. Nathir, a geneticist who experimented on people and animals to give them chloroplasts and other plant-like organs to remove the need to eat food and add the ability to regrow themselves from cuttings  and regrow any missing parts.  His evil plant people with a taste for violence and mindless destruction permeated the entire jungle society.

Many of the people are of Arabic Earth descent and have deep ties to the use of psionic mind skills.  Shtaraqatl, seen above as a young adult and as a boy, is a good example of that.

Dionysus was also one of the planets involved in the invasion of a negative alternate dimension.  The portal opened to invade the other dimension was a two-way doorway that yielded more invaders from the other side than the evil Nathirites sent to take over and exploit the Scion Dimension.

Another important pair of planets were the worlds of Mantua, in the Classical Worlds, and Jargoon, home of the Perfect Knights.

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You can see that I not only established the worlds and their cultures, but I had to lay out the entire planetary solar system, including moons, gas giants, orbiting out stations, and anything else going around the system’s sun (or suns).

One of the results of the work I did planning out all these game worlds in the 1980’s is the ease with which I enabled myself to write science fiction stories later in life.  I had notebooks full of entire planets, their people, their governments, and a cornucopia of worked-out details to use as settings.  I hope to live long enough to make use of them all.

 

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December 16, 2017 · 3:18 pm

Teachers in Space

This is another in my continuing series of Saturday night D&D posts, though it was written on Saturday morning and contains no Dungeons and Dragons information whatsoever.

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The Space Bear was a travelling space ship/school.

You see, in the early 1980’s, I got in trouble with Baptists for playing Dungeons and Dragons with kids from school because… well, demons and dragons are evil, right?  Apparently even the imaginary ones in games and illustrations. So I turned my attention to science fiction games.  Traveller was my rule system, and all science fiction was my campaign.  And then in 1986 Ronald Reagan and NASA decided to blow up the first teacher in space aboard the Challenger shuttle mission.  So, my Traveller game became less about “explore and conquer” and more about “teachers in space”.

gaijin1234aGed Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids.  He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings.  He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal.  He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good.  The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.

Junior Aero, a former student and the adopted son of Ged’s deceased brother Hamfast, grew up and became a player character himself. He taught psionics, being a telepath who could talk to computers and robots that were self-aware.  His wife, Sarah Smith Aero, also became a teacher.  She and Junior had twins, a boy and a girl, both genetically Nebulons, and both destined to be students aboard the Space Bear.

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Of course, you may have noticed a K’ung Fu sort of thing going on in the illustrations I am showing you.  That was because one time as Ged was in dinosaur form and fighting with a ninja swordmaster, he won the fight by eating the ninja.  His shape-changing power then absorbed all the muscle memories and martial arts training of the ninja he ate.  So, his students would not only become psionic masters of mind manipulations, but ninja warriors as well.

 

So, whether they liked it or not, my Traveller players had to learn to teach their skills to others, lead students through complex adventures and problem=solving situations, and basically do themselves a lot of the same things they saw me doing in school all as part of a role-playing game.  You see, that was one of the main dangers of playing role-playing games on Saturdays with that kooky English teacher in South Texas. The danger was, you might actually have to learn something.  Although, most of them probably didn’t realize that that was precisely what they were doing.  They thought we were just playing games, or junk like that.

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December 9, 2017 · 3:53 pm

Home Base

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When you play role-playing games in outer space, like Traveller, it really helps to have a home base.  For my players in the 80’s and early 90’s, that was the planet Gaijin.  Gaijin was an Earth-like planet with numerous archipelagos and far more ocean than found on Earth.  It was also given to much more tropical weather, never really growing colder than temperate zones in Fall.

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The population of Gaijin was made up of a blended race descended from both Japanese explorers from Earth and the very human-like lemon-yellow-skinned people known as the Sylvani.  The Oriental/Alien culture made it very easy for player characters to find training in martial arts and ninja skills, as well as well as the mind and body skills of Psionics that were illegal within the Third Imperium.  The original group of player characters found shelter and training in the Palace of a Thousand Years, the place destined to produce the White Spider of Prophecy.

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It was, of course, the leader of the adventuring party, Ged Aero, who became the White Spider.   He was born in the Imperium, but together with his brother, Ham Aero,  and the rogue Trav “Goofy” Dalgoda, they settled in Gaijin’s capitol, Kiro, and established a school for psionic ninjas.

Ged was himself a gifted psionic shape-changer, able to become any creature or person whose DNA he had tasted or absorbed through his skin.

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Ged’s biological daughter, Amanda would later succeed him in his role as Master of the White Spider Dojo for Psionics.  She was herself a quite gifted telepath and ninja warrior.

Many different player characters arrived on Gaijin to let their players experience the life of a space ninja.  These are just a few of them.

As I am sure you can tell by this, a lot of different kids played the game with me over the course of a little more than a decade.  Some of them weren’t terribly creative (Luke Bloodstone was going to be Skywalker until I talked him out of using that name).  Some of them liked other things immensely too (Vince Niel was the captain of the Rock and Roll Starship and had to have a crewman named Nikki Sixx).  Some characters like the idea of massive wealth on a planetary scale (hence the fact that the Marchioness was a noble and owned an entire planet that was not Gaijin).

But this particular home=base planet would become a center for adventure and eventually the inspiration for my novel Aeroquest.

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December 2, 2017 · 3:12 pm

Time Travellers

In role playing games I was always willing to go where no other game master has gone before.  Such was the case with the role-playing game Traveller and the matter of time travel.  No rules existed in the rule book to cover time travel.  But I didn’t let that stop me. I made them up as we went along.

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I got a boost when one of my players wanted to create a character based on Dr.Who.   The British series played on Friday nights on PBS in the 1980’s.  But that particular player, though very creative, was not a precisely cerebral type of kid.  He spelled it “W-H-O-E”.  So, forever after, we referred to the character as Doctor Hooey.

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Good old Hooey was always getting the group into impossible situations that took a great deal of thinking to get out of again. He had a penchant for crashing time machines.  And when he got the destination right, he would get the time wrong on the year, century, or millennia.  And when he got the time right, well, what do you know?  He got the place wrong.  The players never seemed to realize that I was taking them to planned adventures no matter what the dice rolls supposedly said.

Many such adventures would encounter weird and wild characters who would inevitably also become time travelers, whether fellow travelers for the sake of goodness and light, or as recurring villains.

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For example, Brech was a student space ninja traveling through space and time with the teacher characters among the players.  And by time traveling, they ran afoul of the Revenant, a time-traveling cyborg assassin who stalked the players for accusations of serious “time crimes”.  The cyborg turned out to be young Brech’s future self.  Which proved lucky.  Brech was able to establish a psychic link with his future self just as the cyborg was about to execute everybody, and Brech thereby turned a deadly enemy into an ally.

We tended to adapt movie characters who were time travelers into important NPC’s, and they did not all come from the Dr. Who show.  The characters shown above were Doc Brown from Back to the Future and Professor H. G. Wells.

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When I stole characters from Dr. Who, like I did with Lady Romana here, I tended to adapt them totally to my own game universe.  Romana was nothing like her TV counterpart.  In fact, only the name was the same.

We soon had so many time-traveling characters in their different time machines that we had to organize it all.  This we did by founding the organization known as the Time Knights of Gallegos.

And we needed a leader to coordinate the various initiatives through time and space.  For this we chose a specific NPC, the boy super genius, Ryan Beowulf.  He was a charming super-brained perpetual ten-year-old who worked with his own future self, the thousand-year-old Time King Beowulf.

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Traveller, it seemed,  was never more fun than when we were free to go rock and rolling through both space and time.  We had some harrowing adventures and even made use of my own vast storehouse of useless historical knowledge that can wow ’em in the moment and make them wonder why they needed to know about that upon further reflection.  Time traveling, like fez’s and bow ties, is cool.

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