HackMaster!

I've been playing HackMaster not often enough since CONduit '03 when I got to play my first game. Of course I had a bit of interest before then, but I wanted to play some before I decided if I liked the game or not. While on our honeymoon in Vegas late '02 (I do know my wedding date...) the new Mrs. decided that we should visit every single comic book store in town. I'm not going to argue with that! At one store the HackMaster PHB caught my eye. It took about two minutes before I was hooked. Just read the disclaimer and the section on dice etiquitte and you'll see what got me.

After CONduit we started out our own group. Actually we started two groups, but one has since been de-activated since my wife really hasn't GM'd yet. She'll be starting up a game this weekend though! Hoody Hoo! I get to play some HackMaster!


It has been slow going so far as most of the players who seem interested are invloved in other games/long standing groups and finding time to game is difficult. I probably haven't been too helpfuk in that regards as I have tried too much to be accomodating to every player. For a while when it seemed that Saturday morning was the only available time for everyone I arranged for a 9 AM game with an 8 AM free breakfast for everyone. To get ready I had to be up at 7 and I made sure to have lots of pancakes/french toast, bacon/sausage, milk/juice/coffee ready to go. That didn't last long. Now we are just running a game on our schedule and if they want to play, come on by. If not, we aren't going to hold our breaths.

One thing we also did, partially for bragging rights at conventions, is come up with a kick-ass banner for our gaming group. My wife did the artwork which I scanned in and colored on the 'puter. Using an old display rack from Fred Meyer, this thing stands about 5 1/2 feet tall and is topped with a giant black d20. On the bottom we hand streamers signifying every con out group's members have gone to. As I'm experimenting with posting pics to the blog, here's a shot of the artwork:
Another thing (or two) of interest might be the skull stickers that HackMaster GMs sometimes put on their GM screen to signify the number of PC deaths they have managed to rack up. Jolly and the boys over at Kenzer & Company (the guys who publish HackMaster) use them in their home games and put them "out there" for everyone else to use. They have a fairly easy coloring scheme which has been udated a bit by our British players. Using their conventions I made myself a master set of skulls:

In this example, the green background signifys that the PC dies due to a trap. The fact that the skull is blue means that the PC was subsequently raised (why shoudn't the GM get credit for the kill?), while the X stands for a Total Party Kill and the T means it happened at a tournament.

My wife thinks the skulls are just a bit too much and asked me to touch up something else for her. On so many levels I think what she wants is so wrong, but at the very same time I love it as I think it does a better job that the skulls. Judge for yourself: