[Operation Game Collection] Call it Might Call it Magic, But When 3D0 Buys Them it Will End Tragic.

  Yes.  Today I am talking about a massively long running RPG and SRPG series known as Might and Magic.  It has never been the most popular or talked about yet in some form the IP has repeatedly been going on since the mid 80s on nearly any game platform possible.

  Its a quirky little series so let's see what I have and even some actual screenshots of games to show you all what it looks like and how it evolved.  (Well the core series anyhow.)

(As always click for larger if you want.)

Shall we start at the start?  Sure!  The original Might and Magic which I sadly only own digitally outside of the nice manual and Macintosh addenda was the first.  Its really primitive but it is a mid 80s Apple II RPG of the Wizardry style "Blobber" genre that took the basics of Wizardry and its DnD roots and made its own thing with a massive overworld (see the printed out megamap there!) and multiple towns and dungeons to explore.  Where many RPGs of this style kept to DnD conventions Might and Magic balanced the more powerful spells with a material component, food to be eaten if your party rested, and massive massive attribute increases which would become a hallmark of the series.  

Back then it was kind of nice only needing 2 key presses to choose a spell as opposed to a code.  And like many old games I get, this one has some writing in it.  Bad for collector value good for emotional value.  The game was played.

Back in the day you had to map.  A good game showed you how to do it.  Might and Magic wanted to be a GOOD GAME.  They even mapped the full first town to show you what yours should look like.

If I am gonna party like its 1986 I am gonna use an automapper program.  And Where Are We? is one made primarily for playing the old Might and Magics via Dosbox.  (It covers a few games now and there are a few similar ones for various games that are free before you get fancy with paid ones like Campaign Cartographer.)

Combat and magic in the first game is very much a text screen and practically memorizing the spell list.  This program negates that little issue while adding a number of other Quality of Life features such as seeing various character status infos and the like that even the later NES port failed to have.  (Its prettier but it is showing even less information on screen at once.  And sadly the PC Engine CDROM version is Japanese only.  And the translation crowd has to redo Final Fantasy 4-6 for the dozenth time instead.)

Oh you do get to see a pre combat encounter picture but.. its not exactly good.  (The NES monsters are ADORABLE though.  I still want a copy but I am cheap and this little thing we are dealing with in early 2020 kind of makes money tight.)

The Macintosh version at least improves with mouse control and giving you more on screen party information and a little sound.  Sadly you won't be using the above automapper with it.  

It does look a lot nicer overall in spite of just being high resolution (for the time) black and white.

Again I do a little internet printing to make my life easier but now I have a legitimate physical copy of Might and Magic 2 with its nearly 160 page manual and clue book.

While Might and Magic 2 on PC does improve the graphics a lot its still not really up to late 80s 8 bit snuff.

The Where Are We program doesn't seem to show as much.  And this sequel has a built in automap as your crew can learn skills that allow for an automap or a smaller on screen minimap.

(No images at the moment but the Mac port is in color and its a bit nicer looking.)

The Genesis port is clearly the way to go.  It looks a lot better and again shows you the info you need.

Even the enemies look nicer more or less.  

 The next 3 (ish) games in the series all use the same basic engine.  And I am lucky enough to have one of them in a super rare and expensive Turbografx 16 SUPER CDROM edition.  And a really big cluebook for these 3 titles.

 A nice CD size manual to help you along plus another of the lovely maps that come with these games.  Sadly no cloth radness of Ultima but it still is nice.

 Sadly the 4-5 (Known as World of Xeen because they are effectively 2 games later combined onto one CDROM and are meant to be played together to get the complete game.) box back just avoids showing you the game in action and it just shows some monsters.

 The series is still not quite showing the correct amount of info for gear in game so if nothing else the clue book is fantastic for that.  The maps in here are more or less just ones from the in game mapper with maybe a little extra annotations.

The game doesn't exactly take itself all too seriously but 3 and especially Xeen get pretty goofy and jokey.  Your party members will do funny faces at various status effects and now it is virtually hiding info from the players on a numerical basis.  Monster name colors change as they take damage just like your party.

Not having to remember spell names helps a bit in the wizard department.

Xeen looks a little nicer but not to any serious degree.  

 Then we get to the Win 9x era of Might and Magics where 3D0 more or less owned the original company (New World Computing) and pushed them to shove a game out every year or so which lead to 6-8 being the same game engine but tweaked a little (sometimes even copy pasting elements between games!) and 9 being a fully 3d engine but largely considered to be in an Alpha Build state.  

 Sadly I don't have 7's manual in a physical form.  But as some of the prices show I got these clue books or manuals super cheap.

 And an anthology release buy on Ebay got me all 4 maps but sadly manuals are PDFs.  The physical copy of 9 above is where some of these things not from a retro shop came from.  I like what I have played of a patched 9 but I can see why others might not.

6 in action.  Sadly the party have to be all humans in this one.  This is where the weird real time or turn based combat thing the series would have until 10 started.  3d world with 2d monsters and such.

A stock version of 8 which obviously did some tweaking but is more or less the same engine as 6 and 7.  In 8 you start by making one character (including Vampires and Minotaurs!) and hire various folks as you explore.  It helps one not spend an hour or so rolling up a full party and ease into it.

The Celestial Heavens forums have lots of links to various fan made mods and patches which sometimes are all but required to get the Win 9x titles rocking on a modern PC.  And even in the starting area my Minotaur character is already finding nice attribute buffs to be a more powerful moocow.

9 could have been great with another 6 months or so.  The graphics are fully 3d and can be pretty great for the time.  

That time was about 20 years ago but I care more about interface and core gameplay than I do graphics, audio, or story.  (Not that I mind some nice looking or sounding games but I care more about a good playing title more than if its got bloom lighting or something.)

10 was mostly a digital purchase by the next owner of the IP (Ubisoft) and went back to fully turn based step movement gameplay and its the only one I have completed of the main series. 

Unfortunately I only have these two screenshots as I haven't had the game installed or am willing to go through that much effort just to show you how it looks.  But I really like it.  The Might and Magic fanbase isn't as keen on it however.  

Yet maybe you want more proper turn based Blobber play and the more real time nature of the more modern titles doesn't appeal to you nor dealing with Ubisoft nonsense to play X?  Well Sword and Sorcery on Steam might be for you.

Old school play heavily inspired by the first two Might and Magics but now with modern Quality of Life features!

Some pretty decent in game art!

It is an indie game yes but it looks good enough for me.  The guy behind it has done a lot of modding and tweaking over the years.  It didn't remotely look like this when I first played it.  Same basic game but the interface and such was way different.

Proper turn based combat the way I like it.

How it used to look.  Somehow like the 10 images I had this uploaded to Facebook.  I am kind of surprised some of the thirstier images the artist drew for monsters I didn't have saved to mock but I guess I like skeleton pirates?  

And now the spinoffs!

 These are all various forms of action games.  I have not played any of them but I do want to play Dark Messiah because its mostly about killing things using PHYSICS.  Stress relief via kicking Orcs off high ledges and dropping chandeliers on people!  Plus look at the prices.  Didn't cost me much.

 And their backs.

But the longer and possibly more popular than the main line game is the Heroes series, many of which take place in the various game worlds of that series.  (And its predecessor Kings Bounty.  Which itself got a series from a different company that had some assistance from the original creator!)

 I don't have the 2 newest Heroes installments nor most of the King's Bounty series.  But I have plenty of Strategy RPG fun.  (More strategy than RPG in the Heroes, more a balanced mix in Kings Bounty.)

 Get heroes (usually multiples in Heroes, single in Kings), fight hordes, build armies, crush your foes.  Or in my case get owned heavily because I put in a fan mod to 5 here.

 So all of these skelliemans die.  And once in a while I have a giant skeleton dragon.

  Well that is what I have for this long running series.  It isn't my favorite franchise but I have some fondness for it since it does go back to my Commodore 64 days.  Lots of them are available pretty cheap on ebay or Steam so maybe check it out and see if either the RPGs or the strategy games are your thing.  Lots of us have little else to do besides feel sorry for ourselves so why not find a new favorite?

Stay safe out there folks!  If not for yourself for other people!

On the Matter of Abuse

  Well folks this isn't a thing I felt I would ever be posting at my mostly dead blog about nerd crap nobody reads but as someone who is messed up myself due to second/third hand abuse from awful people I think I have to speak up and spread the word so that others won't be hurt by similar things and maybe a little less pain and hurt are put forth in this world.

  Let's start with a very harrowing link about abuse that links to the reports of abuse by another on Facebook to read if you want and to also learn about the abuser who has long been known to harass others online whenever his name or possible behaviors come up:

https://m.facebook.com/VivkaCriesWolf/posts/2478145012257909

  Because of said stalking he is almost certain to have done which has also included outing people in the LGBT space I am not directly listing his name here though it is well listed by the brave women whose stories I have linked to above.

  Do not accept abusers or let them get away with it.  While yes it is very much a HE SAID SHE SAID deal nearly all evidence over the years points out to his awfulness.  And we should probably not purchase anything he creates and both believe and support the survivors who not only got away from him but were brave enough to come forth with what is all but certain to be the truth.

  These sorts of monsters need to be stopped.  Together we can and maybe show the world this sort of cruelty and evil won't be tolerated.

(Operation Game Collection) Dungeons and Dragons: Original Edition and Friends!

  Ah.  The original RPG.  The game whose inception can almost be credited with creating the "Adventure" Games market as we know it today.  (I call it Hobby Gaming but the other term works fine.)

  See back in the late 60s to early 70s a bunch of miniature wargames nerds in the midwest were making their tiny niche products and sharing and evolving them as best as they could with the technology and networking available for the time as opposed to our modern and more interconnected methods where an idea from Russia can be translated into English in hours and spread all over the place to be morphed into something else in Japanese ow what have you.

  Well some guys got together, smooshed miniature wargames together with a more freeform style of play and RPGs were born!  Dungeons and Dragons is (sadly) the Alpha and the Omega of it all, largely being the main RPG of the English speaking world for about as long as I have been alive.  (Almost 41 years now.  OH GOD I AM SO OLD WHY HAVE I WASTED MY LIFE ON DUMB NERD CRAP?!)

 (No Pathfinder's short run as king doesn't count because it is basically DnD 3.5 with a couple of tweaks.  Which is the only reason anyone cared about it.  DnD players seem to have issues playing anything other than DnD ruleset RPG Fantasy genre games.  Only a massive departure like 4th edition, the previous publisher (TSR) being shut down for a year, or Games Workshop levels of customer abuse seem to make the game take any form of noticeable hit in popularity, most of which is short lived.)

So, let's see what old books full of rusting staples I have for the first RPG as we know it?

(As is my wont, feel free to click most images for a larger one.)

 It took me many moons to get my "White Box" reprint set from the late 70s-whenever they stopped printing them in the 80s for a sub 100 dollar price but I eventually got it for like 50 bucks shipped.  It merely looks like the box got ran over multiple times.

 And what you got inside of the box!  Three softback stapled books and a set of reference sheets.  So even as early as 1974 we were getting cool box sets full of goodies and books in conveniently digestible booklets as opposed to these terrible monster coffee table books we have now.  

(To be fair the Iron Kingdoms core rulebooks could probably knock someone the hell out if swung hard enough...)

 And this is what the books looked like inside.  As we generally know, the rules don't make a whole lot of sense and all but require house ruling, made worse given how few examples there are in the booklets.  Not ugly in general though.

 Well ok, the art is mostly AWFUL inside these things.  But keep that last statement next to the swordy man.  We shall see it again in this post.

 If you want a retro laugh, here is the price TSR had for things in the mid-late 70s.  Given that no ADnD books are listed this is a 1976-early 77 price list.  For inflation fun purposes as of this writing One 1977 dollar is worth 3.85.  While I do not completely agree with inflation dealies like this, it gives one a ROUGH idea of things.  So a 10 dollar set then is worth 38 bucks or so now.  Which is kind of close I guess?  But a comic book at that timeframe was about 40 cents then, or worth 1.55 now.  As opposed to how much most comic books cost now which is FOUR DOLLARS.  Yeah.  Inflation is kind of a troublesome thing.  You can't just say WELL IT WAS  X DOLLARS THEN AND SHOULD STAY THE SAME NOW but you can't go the other way either.

 The sheets have lots of the charts you would want in a suite of loose sheets inside.  

 But unlike today where expansion products are designed to be bought for your game whether tabletop or electronic from the start and nigh unusable without them, back then they were merely cool options and add ons.  Much of what would become standard core elements of DnD long term first appeared in these books, more Greyhawk than Blackmoor.  

And yet even the Thief in Greyhawk is whined about by some idiot purists as being where DnD went off the rails.  I will talk about that later in the post..

 One of the first published adventures for DnD was in Blackmoor!  The legendary Temple of the Frog which is closer to what many JRPGs on consoles do (as well as oldschool Ultima) where both Sci Fi and Fantasy were combined and worked together as opposed to the more stringent division so many nerds seem to insist on nowadays.

Because nerds are dumb.

 And the next two supplements!  Eldritch Wizardry is a collection of more epic stuff for the game.  I have the little censor thing there because while you don't actually see any nipples on this picture THAT WAS DRAWN BY A WOMAN BY ALL REPORTS some people now as back then were rather puritan and OMG TEH CHILDRENS about it all.  To be fair I don't much see the point of the image being there but nerds gonna nerd I guess.  

Swords & Spells was basically a replacement for Chainmail which was the set of miniatures wargame rules Mr. Gygax and Perrin had made that was one of the initial default combat rulesets for DnD now that they discovered not too many people were using Chainmail for their DnD games or miniatures period!

(I also do not have the fourth supplement to Original DnD as it tends to go for much more than I want to spend for a mere historical artifact I have no real desire to actually PLAY GAMES WITH.  And a semi recent deluxe ODnD rerelease WOTC did?  Yeah I wasn't paying that when I am merely missing one book, awesome box or not!)

(I would also be remiss as to say I am missing an Avalon Hill boardgame that honestly serves no real purpose other than being a map board DMs could use to run overland campaigns on.  Which is a cheap thing to buy but.. I am not sure I really WANT it, you know?)

 Eldritch Wizardry added in some now legendary magical artifacts.

 Swords & Wizardry is merely only worth getting for the really cute art in it, with the images basically being miniature models on their bases getting up to adorably amusing shenanigans.

But as the game spread throughout the English speaking world the mixture of semi amateur level writing and the sheer oddness of this new game would cause it to not just be people teaching it to others and sticking more or less to the styles of play the creators intended.  People who simply weren't into Adventure Gaming would start picking it up and trying to self teach it to themselves and then their friends.  And like the Telephone Game things would be "Lost in Translation".  So an educator named Holmes would convince TSR to let him make a set of starter rules to ease folks in.  (Again something that would basically become a fixture in the market.)

 The very first Basic Set!  This rulebook, dice, and tutorial adventure would help to introduce unconnected and antisocial nerds of the mid-late 70s how to play this weird new game!

 The hobby and industry was in fact so new that TSR couldn't even source enough of the funny dice people would need back then so they made chits you cut out and drew out of a cup to get you by!

 And even Gary Gygax got into the tutorial scheme with The Keep on the Borderlands which is a now legendary adventure module.

 The main book looks VERY similar to the design of the then in development ADnD and in fact is some weird hybrid of Original and Advanced, kind of ending up as it's own thing.

 Obviously things are evolving and the company is becoming more and more professional.

 You can see in this edition of the module it is full of things of use and help for a beginning RPG player, even including some explanations of odd terminology most people wouldn't know back then or now!  And plenty of reference material and advice through the book to help you understand how to do this game stuff.

 LOOK AT THAT FAT WIDDLE STIRGEY-WIRGEY!!  WHOSE DA FATTEST BWOOD SUCKA?  IS IT YOU?  YES IT IS!!  :3   Anyhow, you can tell this is the Holmes edit version by the stat lines you can see as in entry 64.  This module will show up again when BX/BECMI DnD would be born in the early 80s.  But that is a tale for another time..

Now we must get into a hot topic.  THE OSR which stands for Old School Renaissance/Revival.  With 3rd edition and later 4th changing much of what the Original through 2nd edition DnD rulesets had as sacred cows, these aging people who refused to move on now had access to each other through the Internet.  Add in the Open Game License which gave people the ability (with limits) to basically redo and rebuild early DnD and modern advances in desktop publishing and we had a storm of people both reviving, adding to, and enhancing the editions they preferred as they formed communities dedicated to it.

 This has lead to things like fans making free fanzines and enhancements like this small one designed to expand the Holmes Basic set into a fuller featured RPG that doesn't really require anything else for those who have decided HOLMES EDIT IS MY GAME AND THE ONE TRUE D UND DEE and want to just run it and not really go beyond.

You see, this is one thing with the OSR.  Many of them sadly have their heads shoved firmly up their own asses, insisting whatever version of DnD they grew up with is the only good one.  This has lead to such inane things as the dismissal of even the Greyhawk supplement for Original DnD, or anger over the BECMI DnD over the BX one even if they are 95% exactly the same in rules and charts.

It gets even more absurd with AD&D and 2nd edition.  This is why people keep getting into smaller and smaller niches of Internet Echo Chambers where they just encourage more "partisan" forms of thought.  And I REALLY need to cover this sort of partisan thinking on consumer products in a post all to itself.  So let's just say people like to get a bit too invested in a memory that is probably not even entirely real.

But for our purposes, ODnD got it's own rather well regarded rewrite called Swords & Wizardry.  Being three formats with varying levels of adherence to the ODnD rulebooks and expansions, it makes the original books both unnecessary but even allows people to play for FREE.  And thanks to Print on Demand services like Lulu you can have reasonably priced physical copies!

 I have more properly covered Ruins & Ronin a few years ago here: http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-corner-rpg-review-of-ruins-ronin.html and a bit more about Swords & Wizardry here:  http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2009/04/retroclones-primer-and-swords-and.html  .

Sadly I never did get the game beyond that one play session and the RPGsite became such a miserable and hateful place I have left it far behind.

For a free or inexpensively purchased physical product, Swords & Wizardry looks quite good.  I actually printed out the entire rulebook.  Of course as these ongoing projects tend to do, things have been updated and improved which almost makes buying a physical version or wasting ink and paper printing them out kind of pointless.  Luckily modern portable phones and tablets are fantastic for holding PDFs to read and use on the go.  (And laptops of course.)

 There are even a lot of great fanzines you can either download for free or buy such as this one, Knockspell!

 Knockspell is more or less for ODnD primarily, while the other big paid fanzine

 Fight On! (Told you that would come back!) is more ADnD focused but still heavily supporting the original.  Fight On! has far more issues out than Knockspell and even will release massive collated editions like the first four issues combined into that one massive book to the left.  

 Again, our modern technology makes these fan driven projects look better than even the pro ones they were inspired by.

Yet the best thing is not merely when fans remake the old rules as an excuse to shove in their house rules or make them as a way to rationalize releasing new adventures and support material for sale.

(Some claim it is because the older books are difficult or expensive to find which is honestly incorrect.  Between RPGNow/DrivethruRPG, Ebay, and WOTC's own reprints only the ODnD we are covering here is expensive to acquire in some legitimate form.)

Some folks take the OGL and make all new games, like one of my favorites:

 X-Plorers is basically retro DnD but Sci Fi oriented and with some modern touches to make it FUN.  Sadly it never seemed to take off and just got spread from publisher to publisher and mostly just farted out.

 See?  All one really needs for a quick and fun Sci Fi RPG!  It works so well I made some posts allowing you to use it instead of more complicated and boring RPGs like Mechwarrior or Prime Directive or Gurps.

If you want to see more about it and some of what I came up with:  http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-corner-review-of-rpg-x-plorers.html

 http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2010/01/x-plorers-rules-by-me-for-you.html

This ought to give you something to go on.  (I had quite a few early 2010 X Plorers posts but I think those two links are enough to start you on your path!)

  So there we go!  My Original 1974 White Box/LBB DnD collection!  Eventually I will get those two final products I mentioned above and more of those fanzines but I am mostly set!  I have the Dragon Magazine Archive CDs somewhere around here which is full of support material for early DnD and the RPG download site I mentioned above sells some of the third party support material as well such as that from Judges' Guild.

  But....  ODnD really isn't my jam.  I like it for being fast, light, and flexible but it is too confused and scattershot, plus it not being the system of my rose tinted nostalgia goggles.

  Whenever I move on to the next DnD Game Collection post I might cover it eh?