Tag Archives: Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Before diving into Forgotten Heroes, I thought I’d post an update on the TSR Indiana Jones miniatures I started back in April. I’ve finally completed the set, having painted all the characters from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I’m actually quite proud of that, as completed projects are a rarity in the Angry Piper’s basement.

Let’s start with the bad guys. L-R: a Thugee cultist, Mola Ram, Chattar Lal and the Mine Guard.

Kind of a lame bunch. Chattar Lal was the quickest miniature to paint in the entire set, for obvious reasons.

I’m pretty happy with Mola Ram, the cultist and the guard. Chattar Lal I could take or leave. He’s a pretty shitty miniature.

Onto the heroes: Indiana Jones (painted back in April), Short Round and the insufferable Willie Scott.

I hate the Willie Scott miniature, and not just because I hate Willie Scott. It’s a terrible facial sculpt. I’m certainly not happy with the paint job, but underneath the paint that’s her face. It looks every bit as puffy and misshapen bare as it does with paint on it. This miniature was by far the miniature that took longest to paint, mostly because she sat on my desk untouched for weeks, but also because I kept trying to fix her face until I realized I can’t; and I hate the miniature anyway, so why bother anymore?

Short Round’s jacket is painted navy blue, but it looks black here. Weird. Anyway, he was a quick paint job.

I’ll likely never play with these miniatures, but I figure there aren’t too many people who have a fully painted TSR Indiana Jones miniature set, and I’m one.

Now, onto Forgotten Heroes. I am scrapping my original idea and moving on to something else. Now I just need to comb the ‘clix boxes to see if I can find a suitable base miniature.

The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG; or, I’ve Officially Lost My Mind.

Folks haven’t seen hide nor hair of me around here (or anywhere else on the Internet) for almost three months. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been busy painting miniatures, specifically a dragon or two, but I can’t say that, because I have painted a total of four miniatures this year, and none are dragons. Instead, I have been mostly playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (at last), and writing scenarios for RPGs I will likely never run or play. Case in point: The Adventures of Indiana Jones; published by TSR in 1984, which is when I bought it at the tender age of 11.

The TSR Indiana Jones RPG has a bit of a reputation, and it’s for being a piece of dogshit. I find that assessment a tad harsh, but it is not a good game by any means. It’s got some serious problems, most infamously the lack of a character creation system. Players take on the roles of Indiana Jones and his friends. Since the game was published shortly after the second Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy’s friends are made up of his companions in the first two movies (sadly, no Henry Jones, Sr.). Marion Ravenwood and Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Willie Scott and Short Round from Temple of Doom. I guess TSR thought five characters wasn’t enough, so they also included statistics for Jock Lindsey, the pilot from the beginning of Raiders (“There’s a big snake in the plane, Jock!”) and Wu Han, the waiter from Club Obi-Wan who gets shot amidst a cacophony of champagne corks almost immediately in Temple of Doom. Both these characters have maybe three lines of dialogue and less than two minutes of screen time in their respective films, but either one of them is preferable to playing the insufferable Willie Scott.

Herein lies the problem. The question rapidly presents itself: who wants to play a game about Indiana Jones and not play as Indiana Jones? What person is going to want to devote an evening of roleplaying to playing Willie Scott? Not too many people, judging by the dismal sales of the game at a time when both TSR’s boxed games and the Indiana Jones IP were both extremely popular. There was even a TV commercial about them.

The game had a few published adventures, but two of them were just the first two movies adapted as RPG adventures. (How fun!) The game was designed with miniatures in mind, and both the core box and all the published adventures had cardboard, trifold miniatures of characters, NPCs, and even scenery. There was one box set of metal miniatures released as well, and they’re pretty hard to come by (I have them).

So what are the other problems? Well, in addition to no character creation, there’s no character development, either. Indiana Jones and friends will always have the same statistics and know the same languages and skills no matter how many adventures you play. Skills are pretty basic, yet there are skills in the book that no player character has. There’s no mechanic to learn a new skill or language, or use one you don’t have (unless you roll a Lucky Break, which is a 5% chance of success).

The boxed set contains a rulebook, a character dossier booklet (the cover of which doubles as a battle map for miniatures), and a GM screen. You can get away without using the battle map or the miniatures (we never did), but you need everything else to play the game. Several important tables only appear on the GM screen and are not printed in the core rulebook (who knows why?). This means, of course, that if you’re looking for this game on the secondary market, it will be unplayable unless you have a complete game. No getting away with just the rulebook.

So what’s GOOD about it? Well, not much. I recall running it a few times, but with only one player (who played Indy, of course).The introductory adventure is meh and somewhat problematic (it takes place in Africa and features a villain named Solomon Black who is, of course, Black; as well as some questionable depictions of tribesmen), but it does a good job of teaching the rules. It’s designed for one player and one GM and is presented in chapters throughout the rulebook, each one focusing on the preceding relevant rules section. There’s also a pretty interesting chase mechanic in the game that uses a chase flow chart to simulate random twists, turns, dead-ends and hazards. I don’t think we ever used it, but I’d give it a go now, maybe even for use in another game. That’s about it.

TSR lost the license to this game fairly quickly and the game didn’t last long. Nothing was released after 1985, and I don’t think it was ever supported in Dragon magazine. No (legal) PDF exists, and the game isn’t available for download at any of the usual sites. It’s a dead game–until now. Last week I dug out my boxed set and had a look through it. I even found one of the old adventures I wrote as a teenager (Indy goes looking for an old Spanish galleon). Then I got inspired, and for the past week and a half, I’ve been writing a NEW Indiana Jones adventure for use with this game.

To be clear: no one I know (besides me) still owns this game. No one I know (besides me) is producing any content for it. No one I know (besides me) likes anything about it, if they know anything about it at all. And finally, no one I know (besides me) actually wants to play it ever again. No one is asking for this. And yet I’m still working on it, and loving every minute of it.

There’s one word for that: crazy.

My Latest Dumb Idea

Few of us get to be what we wanted to be when we grow up. When I was 5 years old in 1977, I saw Star Wars. I wanted to be a spaceship driver. (My father still has my 5-year-old voice on tape saying so.) Then a few years later, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark; and I wanted to be an archaeologist. Not because I had any interest in the ancient world or the people that lived in it, but because archaeologists used bullwhips to swing on things, and that was what I knew I was meant to do.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll turn 48 years old. There’s still time.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve re-watched all the Indiana Jones movies before they’re due to leave Netflix at the end of the year. I haven’t seen some of them in a long time. Raiders is still the best, followed closely by Last Crusade. Temple of Doom wasn’t bad; and it was better than Crystal Skull for sure. As far as that one…it wasn’t as terrible as I remember it; but it sure wasn’t great, either.

Throughout this re-watch, I began to wonder…how much does a bullwhip cost? Well, settle down, amigos, because this is one rabbit-hole I went down so you don’t have to. Here’s what I discovered about bullwhips.

Bullwhips come in lengths from 6 feet to as long as 16 feet or more. The shorter the whip the easier it is to crack; the longer the whip the tougher it is to handle. Nowadays, the best whips are made from kangaroo hide (whip-cracking is pretty big Down Under); but they still use cowhide, too. Many modern whips are made from paracord. My eyes glazed over while reading about plaits and the “belly” of the whip; I gather it’s important stuff but I didn’t really care. The more plaits a whip has, the more pliable and responsive it is. In other words, the better the quality; kind of like a thread count in sheets. 16 plaits is better than 12, is better than 10, etc.

The general consensus is you get what you pay for, and a decently-made beginner bullwhip will likely cost you around $150 USD for a 6′-8′ whip, $250 for anything over 10 feet. (One thing is certain, the cheap whip I use when I dress in my Catwoman costume won’t work. Enjoy that image.)

So, I got to thinking about the practicalities of buying a whip.

I’m 6’1″ tall and I have plenty of backyard space, so I would likely try my hand at an 8′-10′ whip. Anything smaller and I would probably whip myself (which is apparently something you better get used to doing, especially in the beginning); anything larger would require Herculean strength that, at my advanced age, I sadly no longer possess. As a general rule, I don’t believe in buying cheap shit; for example, when I needed a reciprocating saw a couple of years ago, I bought the good one. A worker is only as good as his tools, after all. (In my case, my tools are usually much better than my level of skill would require.) In other words, I’m looking at spending about $250.00 USD to start this new hobby of mine; i.e. the hobby of whipping stuff.

I began to look at whips, and research whip manufacturers. Based on my recently acquired expertise and on the opinions of anonymous (but no doubt wise) Internet whippers all around the world, I dismissed inferior (or what I considered inferior) whips outright and homed in on the good quality bullwhips; the ones that must be better because they cost more. If I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it right, damn it.

As my collection of unpainted miniatures proves, resisting impulse buys has never been a strength of mine. But I generally pause when I’m about to spend over 200 bucks on anything. I decided I’d sleep on it. I did, and by the next morning I had pretty much forgotten about my whip obsession completely.

At least until about a week later, when I was shopping on Amazon, and this blue paracord bullwhip popped up in my “suggestions for you based on your browsing activity” window. I thought nothing of it, believing I was alone. Until…

“What’s that?” I heard from behind me.

“Nothing,” I said. I suddenly felt like I got caught watching porn.

“Why are you looking at whips?”

I shrugged. I resisted the urge to turn around. The silence was deafening. It seems an answer was expected. I began to wish I had been caught watching porn instead.

I sighed, and it all came out of me. I confessed the whole thing. I blabbed about how my re-watch of the Indiana Jones movies led to my new bullwhip obsession, which led me to research buying a bullwhip, because I know could get really good with one and that would be cool, and I’ve always wanted to be an archaeologist and…”

“Oh, please.”

Two words. That’s all it took.

That was when I began to reconsider the whole bullwhip purchase; to think about a better way to spend $250.00.

I thought about the utility and practicality of becoming a bullwhip adept. What do you use a bullwhip for, really? I mean, Indiana Jones is quite skilled with his; but I suppose that there may be a bit of creative license there. Am I going to whip someone? No. It’s not exactly a weapon ideal for home defense. You can’t swing a bullwhip in the house (I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to, even if I could); and unless I’m attacked in my backyard by someone who is taking their sweet time approaching me, it’s not a good option there, either. Can you really swing on a whip? Probably. The initial swing would be fun, but getting your whip untangled from the ground is probably going to be more of a pain in the ass than the trip was worth in the first place.

Whips make a loud noise. That’s about it. I have to assume the novelty of making a loud noise will wear off quickly, probably the first time I injure myself. And self-injury is pretty much assured. Whips hurt; that’s why being flogged is generally considered an unpleasant experience.

So, knowing what I know about me, here’s what would have likely happened had I gone ahead with this:

I would have gleefully uncoiled my new whip and tried to crack it. I would do this until I cracked it successfully, or more likely until my arm got tired or I cut my own flesh. Then I would either get bored or get upset, depending on whether I cracked it or cut myself. I would put the whip down and not pick it up again. Occasionally, I would glare at it, remembering that I spent two hundred fifty dollars on it.

That would be a really fucking stupid thing to do, so I’m not doing it.