#fgu

[lisik01]

[vintagerpg]

Lotta folks have been waiting a long time for this one: Villains and Vigilantes! This is the revised edition, from 1982, but the game originally came out in 1979. Both editions were published by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

V&V, I believe, is the second superhero RPG, but the first to make a big splash (Superhero 2044 came out in 1977, but its main contribution was really inspiring the creation of Champions), though it never really took off the way Champions did, perhaps because of FGU’s spotty support. It’s got a lot of things going for it. For one, character generation starts with you, the player. You’re the superhero’s secret identity. You then roll for your secret origin and random powers and skills (the rules say the GM can opt to let players pick, or modify these often-bizarre combinations of powers, but that seems less fun, honestly, and more in the spirit of the super-noodly Champions and GURPS Supers). There are weaknesses, of course, and guidance for costumes; all told the power and character generation takes up 20 out of the 48 pages.

Another thing going for the game is Jeff Dee’s dynamic, comic-trained art (Dee co-designed the game with Jack Herman). You don’t really get a sense of it in the core box, but the supplements have a really deep understanding of comics and how they work and what makes them entertaining (and funny — they’re called funny books, remember?).

There is some odd stuff, like the five-page summary of the penal code. And the game mechanics…were definitely designed in 1979. Much of the system feels very D&Dish. Roll a d20 to hit! What doesn’t feel like D&D, like the four steps of tables players need to check to find out the to-hit number they are looking to beat, is extremely cumbersome (though they probably influenced the Marvel universal table). Contemporary reviews had a habit of calling V&V an excellent beginner game, which makes me laugh, because it took me at least ten minutes to confirm the combat roll used a d20.

Still, a classic, and well-deserving of the status.

[oldschoolfrp]

Space Marines, tactical ground combat game for sci-fi miniatures by A Mark Ratner -- This is the 1980 2nd edition by Fantasy Games Unlimited with Jeff Dee's cover art. FanTac Games first published these rules in 1977.

In the past few days Games Workshop has sent another round of cease and desist letters to 3D sculptors, many of whom were making full scale 40K costume parts. They are of course within their rights to make those claims over specific designs and names, but I'm always reminded how aggressively they used to go after anyone using the words "space marines," claiming to have invented the concept and the name.

[empire-of-thieves]

St. Catherine's Monastery in D&D

I discovered a very cool monastery, St. Catherine's, which is in Egypt and on the Christian pilgrim trail -- it is said the descendant of the Biblical burning bush can be found there. Anyway, it's a neat example of a walled monastery.

But how to D&D-ize it? The monastery only vaguely follows a square plan, and especially in a VTT like Fantasy Grounds, staying on a grid of 5' squares is easiest.

Below is my take on the monastery. For scale, the cistern is 20x20. This corresponds approximately to the size of the real St. Catherine's.

[fairytellerxo]

Favorite Guys Under 25: 1/?

Ethan Dolan

[vintagerpg]

Back in 2023 when we did the podcast episode on Dragon Magazine #1, I expressed surprise that Lin Carter had a byline in there for the expansion to a wargame called Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age (1975). Soon after, a listener found a copy and sent it to me, and here it is! (I’ve lost your name, but remind me if you see this!)

This is one of Fantasy Games Unlimited’s very first publications (alongside a game about gladiators). I don’t have the knowledge required to evaluate it on the merits as a wargame, but I do think it’s an interesting bit of crossover between gaming and lit, being a game that converts the world of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian into game terms. Carter was a prolific writer and editor of genre fiction, and I think he deserves much of the credit for the creation of “fantasy” as a marketable genre, thanks to his efforts with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy imprint from 1969 to 1974 (he was instrumental in bringing Lovecraft to a wider audience during the same period). He also wrote a lot of Conan stories and Howard pastiches. I’ve long wondered if he ever encountered fantasy gaming and here is my answer!

Carter notes in his introduction that though Howard’s original stories created a whole world over time, they weren’t written with that notion at the forefront, so there are gaps and contradictions. This meant Carter and his co-designer, FGU founder Scott Bizar, had to make up new material and generally massage Howard’s facts into a cohesive whole. Carter’s explanation of this very much reminds me of Bill Slavicsek’s discussion of the process behind the writing of the Star Wars Sourcebook for West End’s RPG and the subsequent creation of the Expanded Universe. I am sure that Royal Armies is a very early example of converting an imaginary world into game terms.

[vintagerpg]

Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) was one of Fantasy Games Unlimited’s staple games. I’ve covered it previously — it was originally a D&D-like that aimed for more realistic simulation of the medieval world. It has a reputation for a sort of ridiculous level of complexity that isn’t entirely unearned; I certainly wouldn’t want to run it. But I do think the logic behind its systems is mostly sound, even if the philosophy doesn’t do it for me.

This, of course, is a big part of what makes Saurians (1979) so hilariously delightful. The core experience of C&S is so centered on recreating a plausible medieval world that a sourcebook devoted to “Dinosaurs & Intelligent Saurian Races” stands as a real outlier in the line. But this is intentional on the part of the authors, who were annoyed at C&S being dismissed as a “historical” game. Their larger argument here is that real playing of roles requires detailed worlds to draw from, and that those worlds should also inform the mechanics of play. They aren’t wrong, really!

The book is 170 pages of monospaced type (thankfully not shrunk, as with the main C&S rulebook). Illustrations only show up in the beginning, scratchy sketchy things, some of which are direct lifts of Charles Knight paintings. They quickly give way to page after page of tables that I am mostly unable to parse. There are dinosaurs, of course, as well as prehistoric mammals, and an elaborately detailed race of dinosaur people called the Hss’Taathi, whose society is portrayed with as much detail and nuance as the medieval-style kingdom Arden (1979), published the same year. There are also crocodile people called Kulun’Ssaatha, who get less robust treatment. And the authors propose that the world of Saurians can interact with, say, the world of Arden, through dimensional gateways (caused by space/time weakness in the wake of supernovas). I believe this amounts to the first serious published presentation of the multiverse concept in RPGs, which is pretty neat.

Correct me if I’m wrong! D&D presents the idea of a multiverse in the Players Handbook, and I am pretty sure there is some mention of similar in early Arduin books, but I can’t think of an actual instance of two separate worlds being connected that is earlier than this. The closest I got is X2: Castle Amber in 1981?

[vintagerpg]

I looked at Flashing Blades (1984) a while back — it’s one of only a handful of swashbuckling Musketeer RPGs out there (it’s basically this and En Garde! until 7th Sea showed up, I think, and 7th Sea sorta feels like a stretch). Parisian Adventures is, well, it’s right there in the name. In addition to the four scenarios, there are some expansions for Paris that probably should have been in the original box set — a selection of exotic items, a short guide to the city and a 20-entry rumor mill table that is essentially an array of further adventure seeds.

The adventures are short and sweet. One involves the mystery of a missing (kidnapped) fencing master. Unraveling the mystery is no difficult task, but seems satisfying — it ends up in the catacombs beneath a church. The second scenario involves recovering stolen secret documents from a theater. Of course, whichever faction the players belong to (say, the king’s musketeers) have to beat the other faction (the cardinal’s men) to the quarry. Backstage brawls and accidental participation on-stage are a given. I can see this one playing out in glorious Technicolor in my mind’s eye.

Scenario three is about foiling an assassination while participating in a marksmanship contest. That one is probably the weakest of the group. The final scenario is a farcical scavenger hunt for presents for the mistress of one of the player characters; the primary dangers are being pelted with cabbage or becoming intoxicated. Also easily envisioned on the big screen.

Oddly, the art credits for the whole book are given to the Bain Sidhe Studio, which seems to consist of four folks including someone named Matt Wagner. Surely, not that Matt Wagner? This is the earliest example I can recall of farming art duties out to a studio, which is kind of interesting. I like the interiors, but boy, the cover leaves a lot to be desired.

Nope, I take it back. It is that Matt Wagner, but he didn’t do any of the art here, at least that I can tell. It mostly seems to be Neil Vokes, Bill Cucinotta and Rich Rankin, all of whom have their own comic credits. Wild!