Blog information – Mister Monster's Workshop

October plans

October is upon us, and it’s becoming all the more important to escape the cold winds of seasonal depression by warming ourselves by the wholesome fires of Roleplaying! September turned out to be a rough month for me, professionally and privately, but my blogging actually went really well. I got everything done that I meant to get done, and I actually got a ton more reactions and contact with fellow 90s RPG enthusiasts than I’ve ever had before. I guess maybe I’ve finally managed to find some other old fogeys who are nostalgic for the stupid awesomeness and awesome stupidity of our formative years. Either way, it gives me a much-needed warm feeling inside. Muah! Muah! Love you, folks!

So what will October bring? Well, my five readthroughs will continue:

In the Dragonbane readthrough, we continue with the second part of the Path of Glory campaign as we pass through The Gates of Power into a dwarven kingdom that is not as abandoned as it first appeared. Black magic, hideous monsters, and even more flavours of wight are ahead!
We’re actually going to dungeon crawling in the Paranoia readthrough as well, because now it’s time for Orcbusters, the one where the creators decided to see how they might do stereotypical fantasy in their setting and system. Not sure that was the best idea, but we’ll give it a fair shake.
In the Torg readthrough, we have reached the end of the Relics of Power campaign, and the players will be exploring The Forever City. The Cyberpope makes his best showing yet, while Thratchen and Doctor Mobius both seem to be having an off day. In the end, very little will be explained, because this is 90s metaplot and every mystery must be followed by an even greater one!
In the Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough… would you believe, another dungeon crawl brought on by another apparent compulsion to see how a non-D&D game would handle a D&D-ish situation? This month is starting to feel like it’s got a theme… Anyway, in Awakening: Diablerie Mexico we’ll get to see what a Gothic-Punk dungeon looks like (… yes, your mind immediately went there, didn’t it? Shame on you!) and how the writers might over-legalise the concept of diablerie.
The Deadlands readthrough, finally, is also rather Gothic, though of course in a maximally unsexy way. The time has come to explore the Harrowed in Book o’ the Dead. They are tragic undead antiheroes with creepy-cool powers and an evil side that will all but inevitably consume them. Yeah, it really does feel like Deadlands is doing Vampire while Vampire is doing D&D, doesn’t it?

There will also be a bonus post – I sat down and read the first edition core of Dragonbane‘s sci-fi equivalent, Mutant, last week. I’m not starting a full readthrough of it, but my thoughts on that one will be appearing this month.

I am still not going to be posting any installments of my ill-advised Daggerheart readthrough, because I hate Daggerheart and Daggerheart hates me, but to postpone it for another month I am going to post my impressions of another actually good roleplaying game, Shadowdark. After this, I will get back to the candy-coloured piece of crap. Honest. Another post of it is already written and scheduled, though I’ve realised that I’m going to need to go over it and reduce the amount of psychotic ranting a little – Daggerheart brings out the worst in me…

The work on the Monstrous Mishaps Quickstart Story will continue. I actually managed to catch up last month, so this month I’m hoping to stay the course and write up two more scenes. Let’s see if I can think of some suitably silly encounters on the plastic-duck-filled river.

The World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign I’m running seems to have hit stride nicely, and I hope to keep writing up the sessions as we play them. As for the Shadowdark play-by-post I’m planning… well, I got a little done on it last month, but it sort of ended up at the bottom of my priority list. I’ll see if I can’t get another dungeon together for it, though.

Finally, I’m going to try to read and write up posts for City o’ Gloom for Deadlands, Adventure Pack One: Black Duel & Beauty and the Beast for Dragonbane, Silver Angel for Shadowrun, The GodNet for Torg, Clanbook Gangrel and Storyteller’s Handbook for Vampire, and The Book of the Wyrm for Werewolf. And (sigh) 20 pages more for Daggerheart, because I do need to make some headway there. It’s a lot, but I somehow managed to pull it off last month. As usual, note that these aren’t posts that will go live this month; I like to have a buffer, so they’ll be scheduled for last December and early January.

I’m still not 100% sure that this is a pace I can keep up indefinitely, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now, I am covered until mid-December, and this month I should also catch up on my World of Darkness reading, so that I have a post written up for every one of the books I’ve read in order. I figured out rather too late that I needed to write up a book immediately after finishing it, see, because otherwise I forgot what was in it and had to read it all over again, so for a while now I’ve read two new WoD books and one old one per month. But that, at least, won’t be an issue anymore.

September plans

So it’s officially autumn, my favourite time of year. And, probably not coincidentially, the most Gothic one. It’s cold and dark enough to feel properly melancholic, but not so much that you have to bundle up. Let’s face it, it’s all but impossible to feel like a tragic antihero while wearing ear muffs!

I have various plans for the month of September, some of which I will definitely get done (because they amount to just pressing Publish on something I’ve already written), others which are more what you’d call aspirational. For the former, I can promise:

First up, the Dragonbane readthrough continues with The Dead Forest, the first installment of the much-beloved The Path of Glory campaign. Expect the usual combination of pastoral whimsy, shocking lethality, and me bitching about overpowered NPCs.
The Paranoia readthrough heads into orbit in Clones in Space, as the game abandons even the pretense of being semi-hard post-apocalyptic science fiction (or at least a parody thereof) and embraces pure schlock (and the parody thereof). There will be bug-eyed aliens. With monocles.
The Torg readthrough charges on with the Relics of Power campaign as we enter its second part, The Possibility Chalice. There’ll be more ancient temples, more killer robots, and a visit to the damp but enchanted lands of England.
The Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough sadly hits its first sour note in The Player’s Guide. Fair warning – I will complain, I will whine, I will piss and I will moan, because seriously, guys, this thing is awful. Still, it is the one that introduces the four Independent clans, so there’s at least some smidgen of interest.
Since discovering that Twilight Sword is actually quite good, I’ve come to consider the stunning possibility that not everything published in later years need, in fact, be garbage. Testing that theory, I’ve lined up a few semi-modern games to sample, starting with Mörk Borg. Prepare for some Heavy Metal insanity as we try to parse the game’s idiosyncratic presentation and see if there’s something playable underneath it. If nothing else, it lets me stall having to read more of Daggerheart.
The Deadlands readthrough seems to be well-received so far, and this month we hit some red meat with The Quick & the Dead. This is the general setting book for the game, going over the alternate-history America and detailing a number of mysteries, plots, and nasty creepy-crawlies that the players can get involved in.

Those are the certainties. I will also attempt, but can’t actually swear to, the following:

The work on the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart Story shall continue. Not only that, but since I missed one update last month (I had a work conference that interferred with my creativity), I will try to make three this month. They will include a visit to the law firm of Connive, DeSieve, Bamm-Boozle & Harris; the efforts to restore the players’ raft while the Haunting afflicting it actively resists such efforts; and a nightly raid from the players’ rivals trying to mess up said raft.
I will be making preparations for running a play-by-post of Shadowdark, and will try positing my efforts here. I’m very fond of the game, but this will be my first time running it – and of course, its entire philosophy of play is kind of brutal and goes against my every soft-hearted instinct. We’ll see what I can come up with.
As the World of Warcraft: the Roleplaying Game campaign I’m GMing on Sundays will hopefully continue, I will also be doing game prep there. I’ll try to bring you up to speed on the campaign so far and then offer my thoughts and ideas on encounters and scenarios.

I will also be doing some work that won’t be visible here for a while, since if I get it done it just goes into the pipeline to be published later. For the record, though, I plan to read and write up posts for: The Great Maze for Deadlands, The Heart of Darkness for Dragonbane, The Cyberpapacy for Torg, Hunters Hunted and Clanbook Brujah (first edition) for Vampire: the Masquerade, The Way of the Wolf for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and the first edition core for Shadowrun. And 20 more pages of (aaaarrgggghhhh) Daggerheart, which will include the section on (gaaaaaahhh) safety tools, so I’ll be ranting mightily about that. All in all, I’m setting myself a hectic schedule and I’m not sure I can pull it off, but, well, might as well aim high and see how far I can get, I figure.

So that’s what’s coming, what might possibly be coming, and what’s probably coming but not for a while. Stay tuned!

Plans for this blog

I’m not quite sure how we ended up here. Near as I can tell, it went something like this:

I started this blog to plug my eternal work in progress, Monstrous Mishaps, and to prod myself into working regularly at it. I also wanted somewhere to document my then-obsession with porting everything and anything to the Powered by the Apocalypse framework.
In the pursuit of the latter, I did a deep dive into all things Warhammer 40,000 while I worked on my Dark Heresy port. In the end, I got sort of grimdarked out and wanted a palate cleanser.
Arbitrarily, I decided to make a port of Aberrant. And since I figured that Aberrant was one of those games that had a weak core book and needed its entire run to make sense of, I decided to just get all the PDFs for it and read it from start to finish.
I ended up hating Aberrant with a fiery passion, but at this point it occurred to me that since getting the full run of a game in digital form had gotten so easy, I could just get all the PDFs for a game I actually liked and do a full readthrough of it. I started with Torg.
And then things sort of snowballed, and I ended up starting a full readthrough of the entire World of Darkness, and of a ton of other games besides, and then followed six months of frantic reading as I tried to digest several decades of roleplaying supplements all at once. I… may have a slight tendency to overdo things.

So that brings us to today, when I’ve decided to sit down and try to bring some structure to it all. In particular, I need to admit that I can’t read AAAAAAAALLLL THE THINGS!!!! but need to decide what to focus on, at least for starters. So:

I will continue to work on the quickstart for Monstrous Mishaps, and try to make a post every two weeks to chronicle my progress. I need to get this thing done at some point, if only for the sake of my self-respect.
The Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough (which will eventually become a general World of Darkness readthrough) will continue. I am not at all confident that I’ll ever be able to finish it, because at a conservative estimate it will take me over 15 years, and I just don’t have a 15-year attention span. But so far I’m making good progress, and I hope to at least make it to the start of Changeling: the Dreaming, that game being a particular favourite of mine. Expect continued monthly installments, to transition to twice-monthly installments by the end of the year as we hit the start of Werewolf: the Apocalypse.
The Deadlands readthrough I’m going to try to stick with, and expand with its companion games once I get to them, though I’ll admit to being on slightly shakier ground there. I love the craziness of the supernatural elements, but I’m less enthused with the cowboy stuff that’s the mundane foundation. We’ll see.
The Paranoia readthrough will, I think, have to end with the first edition, or at least get put on the back burner. Judging from the unenthusiastic stats I’m getting, no one is particulary interested in reading those entries, and honestly, I’m sort of lukewarm on it myself. I love the humour, but again, I’m just not thrilled enough with the gun porn and space age stuff that it’s parodying to enjoy wading through the nitty-gritty details.
The Dragonbane readthrough will continue to the end of the second edition, but after that it might be slowed down considerably as well. Again, I’m not sensing even a tiny bit of an audience here, and honestly I can see why – it’s really just standard fantasy for the most parts, only interesting to me because it was the one I started out with. Shame about missing some of the later adventures, which were sort of insane, but there’s just too much humdrum stuff around them.
The Torg readthrough, despite likewise not being a crowd-pleaser, will however continue to the bitter end! The game has a managable number of reasonably short books, and what’s more, I think it’s an underrated classic and I’d like to contribute to it being remembered more.
That leaves me with two holes to fill if I want to continue at the current pace. I am still considering. The Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying games have the attraction that I think more people would be at least somewhat interested in them, and of course they were in some sense what started the whole thing and I’ve already read a bunch of them. On the other hand, they’re kind of… not very entertaining or well-written? A sexier option might be Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which would also keep some old-fashioned fantasy in to replace Dragonbane, but it does mean starting fresh. As for the replacement for Paranoia, I am sort of torn between Rifts and Shadowrun. I feel like the latter is more polished, but the former has more personality. Both of them are also kind of daunting, with supplements in the hundreds. I’ll have to think on it.
The Daggerheart readthrough will be finished if it so kills me. Which it might. FROM HELL’S HEART I STAB AT THEE, YOU OVERRATED PIECE OF CRAP! I will, however, continue to stall by doing writeups of new-ish games I actually like in place of new Daggerheart installments, but when I can’t find one of those it’s time to expose myself to another dose of my personal kryptonite, smarmy smugness.

So that’s where we’re at. I hope some of you will enjoy what’s coming. Please like, share and subscribe, etc, etc, and so on and so forth.

Welcome

Well, hello there.

This here is my blog, on which I talk about all the roleplaying games I write on. There are usually a fair number of those, because I absolutely do not have the powers of concentration to stick to a single project. I offer very little guarantees about what the post will be about on any given week; it’ll be whatever shiny thing caught my attention just then.

Some of the games will be new rule sets for existing game settings, because I have strong feelings about what rule systems should look like and what they should be aimed to accomplish, and hardly anyone else seems to share those feelings. I’ll make those rules available to anyone who wants to have a look at them. Right now, my five projects are Mummy: the Resurrection, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Blue Rose and Dark Heresy, but doubtless I’ll start fiddling with others before long.

There is also the ambition – but please don’t hold me to it – to work more on my own original games. The main ones I have cooking are Monstrous Mishaps, a comedic urban fantasy game running on a diceless system I am quite proud of; Heroes of the Ice Age, a low fantasy game set during a time of encroaching glaciers and hungry sabertoothed tigers; and Starlight Dreams (name subject to constant change), a game of divine power that might not be quite as absolute as you were given to believe. I have some plans to sell those once I get all my ducks in a row (but have you ever tried herding ducks? They’re freaking impossible to get in a row!), so hopefully there will eventually be some links to drivethroughrpg here.

So there you have it. Mostly, this place is just an excuse to log whatever I’m fiddling with at the moment. If you find something to interest you here, though, nothing would please me more! See you around.