Flying Buffalo at DunDraCon 37

I went to DunDraCon 37 with my wife and oldest daughter on Saturday, and we had a great time. This is the first DunDraCon I've been to for a very long time. My first DunDraCon was #4, and unless I'm mistaken the last one I went to before this was #5!

Since then the con has moved to San Ramon, CA. I've been seriously thinking of going for many years since moving back to where it's within reach. But each year I was either already committed to something else on President's Day weekend, or didn't go because I was under the impression that it was a longer and more arduous trip than it turned out to be.

But it was just over 2 hours drive, and not so bad a drive at that, at least not when we went.

Flying Buffalo
Rick Loomis, of Flying Buffalo, has mentioned in several places online that he'd be going to DunDraCon this year. Since I'd been involved in both the Ace of Aces Kickstarter and the Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls Kickstarter as a backer, and he'd promised a free die for stopping by the booth and saying, "hi", that was more or less my first stop once we got registered for the con.

I was surprised as how small the dealer's room was, but the vendors that were there all had plenty to show. So it was sort of a small but high quality set-up. The main thing I missed was the wide variety of small startups that I used to see at cons years ago. I guess they all live on the internet now.

At any rate, Rick Loomis was there with a Flying Buffalo display. I didn't get a picture because I was too distracted at that point, and by the time I thought of it, the time had gotten late enough that the poor people manning booths had been set loose by the closing of the room.

However, I did get my free die (I picked out a black and red one with a skull), and I bought a copy of Nuclear War and a copy of Monsters! Monsters!

Nuclear War
Nuclear War was one of the first "unconventional" games I ever played. I have a copy of Nuclear Escalation, which can be played stand-alone but it works better, IMO, as an expansion to Nuclear War. Now I have my own copy of Nuclear War. When I was much, much younger than I am today, I recall that I always wanted to get the Saturn booster rocket for my warheads. Because having the biggest booster is just, well, cool.

Monsters! Monsters!
Monsters! Monsters! is the original "reverse dungeon" RPG. I had a copy years ago, along with my copies of the older versions of the Tunnels and Trolls rules. Unfortunately, MM has failed to turn up in my searches through my stuff over the past couple of years, even though everything else did turn up. So I decided to buy another copy.

Now that I have, I expect my original will turn up.

I have hopes that the success of the dT&T Kickstarter might lead to a MM Kickstarter. I'd like to see the information in MM reorganized so that all the info on a given monster is in one place, a bit more detail on some of the monster abilities, and, of course, more monsters and more art.

Truthfully, it's not hard to just play a game of MM with just the T&T rules. But it's fun and a bit easier to sell a group on an MM campaign if you've got a dedicated book for the purpose.

Nuclear War Extras
My wife wanted an "I Love Nuclear War" bumper sticker for her car (Rick threw that in for free), and my wife was extremely pleased to discover that there's a Nuclear War spinner app featuring Claudia Christian. She's a big fan of Claudia's, so she's looking forward to putting that on her new Android phone when it arrives.

DunDraCon in General
That was just the start for us. We had a great time at the con, which I'll be going into in further posts. Back home today, I'm reading my way through Monsters! Monsters! again, and looking forward to breaking out Nuclear War on our holiday day tomorrow.

Free RPG Posted: RoonVenture (RoonQuest 31st Anniversary Edition)

Just Take Me to the Game, Already

About 31 or 32 years ago, I took a new book along with me to read. Now, I really should have been sociable, I was accompanying a friend to a dog show that he'd been shanghaied into going to with his mother and sister. There wasn't much for him to do except sit around all day, and I was theoretically coming along to keep him company and make the day pass a bit faster.

I had just purchased a copy of the role playing game Runequest, however, and I brought my new book along. The book was very well written. It's as engaging to read as a novel, to be honest. Unfortunately that left my friend Barry sitting around while I was rudely enjoying it.

Never one to let a good bit of boredom go to waste, Barry started writing his own game. He called it RoonQuest (gee, I wonder where the inspiration for that came from?) He made it an RPG parody, and put in a fair bit of silliness. Pretty soon I noticed him chuckling to himself and drawing some very funny drawings. I offered to let him read Runequest if he'd give me a look at what he was up to.

He was rolling along with what he was doing at that point, and refused. Now I was the one who was miffed. Barry was working away on something fun without me! I kept reading Runequest, but I kept looking over at Barry to see if he was ready to divulge what he was up to.

Some time later we did end up trading. I thoroughly enjoyed RoonQuest, he seemed to enjoy reading Runequest. I started writing up things to add to RoonQuest, and did so while he kept reading, for a while, then we were both working side by side on RoonQuest.

A year or so later, I ended up actually running a campaign using our game for a rules-weary gaming group in another town. At first, the game was used to fill in time while we were waiting on the real DM to arrive (he was often somewhat late, and many of us started the party early.) Later, though, the group decided they'd like to have RoonQuest as their regular game for almost a year, with about a year and a half of play time in all.


At present neither one of us can find a copy of the original game. I'm pretty well convinced I've got the copy that I used for that campaign salted away somewhere, I just haven't opened the right box in the garage yet.

However, partial copies and source code from my attempts to build a computer game around it have turned up. Using that and our memories, I've put together a new version of the game, renamed "RoonVenture" to give us a little more elbow room for defining ourselves in the presence of that other game, now available in its new edition from Mongoose Publishing.

I've posted our new game, RoonVenture, on my website as a free PDF download.

If you do end up playing the game, please let me know how it goes. If you post anything about it, even if you totally rip us a new one, send me a link.

Thanks!