A beautiful day of 70 degree weather, blue skies and the promise of summer! With so many projects piling up I thought a quick random musings post would touch upon various items and issues more than an in depth blog post.
- In Search of Andraax. Our first podcast has now been out for a week or so. While I’m generally pleased with the content, the sound quality and editing could be much better! I’m working on that with a new, quality microphone, better scripting and episode prep etc. I have another episode recorded and in the process of scheduling 2 more recording sessions. As mentioned, I hope this will be monthly podcast! Now that we are on Apple podcasts, we are reaching a much wider audience!
- Making a Sandbox Setting. Over at Grognardia, James has a post up on “sandbox settings” which is worth the read. I’m curious how long term RM/MERP players feel about the topic; ICE products has always steered towards sandbox material versus adventure paths. In fact, some past criticisms of Terry has been the lack of adventures in his books, although he usually includes at lease one long epic adventure path is most of his material. For older players, trend seems to have tipped back to sandbox material. This may be due to the fact that older GM’s are comfortable with open ended environments, but don’t have the time or inclination to put a lot of time into detailing a setting. I’m of the mind that Rolemaster/RMU needs ready to play adventures with pregen characters to facilitate new players and groups. Personally, I rely on the SW sandbox since I don’t have the time or inclination to design my own world.
- The LONGEST CAMPAIGN? If you have ever done google searches for Shadow World content you might have encountered references to the Kulthea Run Logs from a campaign at MIT. I’ve been picking away at this material, but it’s impressive the ground it covered and the scope of the game sessions–428 to be exact! I’ve run some longish campaigns, but that’s more than impressive. I’m hoping to connect with the GM, Derrick Kong, but both his linkedin and facebook are seemingly abandoned for quite some time. It’s worth a look, but Derrick took his group through a significant portion of Terry’s creations.
I’m glad that the sound quality will improve. Otherwise, the first episode was interesting and enjoyable.
As a younger game master, I was also bothered by the fact that there weren’t complete adventures in the style of D&D from ICE. These would have made things much easier for me as a new game master. Over time, I got used to it and developed my own style. However, I would still have liked to experience complete adventures later on. They capture the spirit of the world much better. This is evident in Terry’s Grand Campaign. Even though it was incomplete, reading it helped me understand much better how he envisioned it as a living world. And nowadays, as a game master who’s back in the game, I would also appreciate having a few ready-made adventures. In Germany, the 13 Mann Verlag recognized this quite well. There were some adventures released alongside the publication of the core rulebook.
Thanks for the feedback. For the 1st episode none of us had quality microphones and it was recorded on a single channel. I also didn’t edit out a lot of the talking over each other just to keep it from sounding too polished and curated. We want it to sound like a game session around the kitchen table!