Monthly Archives: July 2009

Lebanon, NH Board Game Nights

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Triple Play, Lebanon, NH’s local game store, serving the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire along the Connecticut River, has begun hosting regular board game nights. Rod Sheldon reported on Northern New England Gamers that the last meet-up, on July 8th, had seven players, so they are clearly building a following.

The next session is tomorrow evening, July 22nd. To find out more about that event, or upcoming game nights, you should check out Triple Play’s message boards or the NNEG mailing list.

New Character, New GM

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Sunday afternoon, I went to a character creation session for a horror campaign meant, in part, as a playtest of the new edition of GURPS Horror. It’s set in postwar Berlin, with the characters being members of a shadowy extra-governmental agency intent on keeping the worst of Nazi scientists from being recruited by either the Americans or the Russians. There will be, I’m told, Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

So naturally I made a weird science engineer. The details have yet to be fully worked out, but this is what I’m seeing: Joe — or maybe Frank; whatever I choose, it’ll be a good, hearty American name, as he’s the first generation of his family born in America and they wanted him to assimilate as quickly as possible — started out in Brooklyn, became an auto mechanic, taking night classes on the side. On joining up after Pearl Harbor and going through basic training, he was assigned to the Engineering Corps. From there, bad luck put him in what became a clean-up crew for the oddest phenomena and mad science experiments in which either side of the war engaged.

Being a clear-eyed rational American, naturally Joe — or Frank — is certain every phenomena is ultimately explicable. So part of the reason he works for this shadowy agency — and, in part, why they picked him — is he’s compelled to dig to the bottom of the pseudoscience these Nazi loons promulgated. In a game of eldritch horror, this can only end badly. But at least it’ll be a good chance to test out whatever madness rules this new edition of GURPS Horror has.

I only just met the GM last week, after answering an ad on the local game store’s online bulletin board. He seems an okay fellow. It’s hard to tell from only two meetings, but I’m optimistic. The real truth will come from play. I think our play styles can mesh, but he’s more crunch and accuracy-oriented than I typically like to play. As long as the action keeps moving forward, I think things will be okay.

RPG Geek Goes Into Open Beta

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A couple weeks ago now, the staff of RPG Geek announced the site’s passage into open beta. RPG Geek seems to be a cousin, if not outright sibling, of the megasite Boardgamegeek.com. If Boardgamegeek.com’s format and content is anything to go by, there will be a steadily torrent of pictures, component scans, play aids and feisty discussion about every aspect of roleplaying games and ways to play them.

People interested in participating in the open beta should visit the site’s Google group. Once accepted there, you get access to the beta site. It looks pretty much just like the original Boardgamegeek, except a lot of the front page content is related to roleplaying games. Right now they’re expanding the database of titles and people, uploading cover scans and sorting out the bugs cropping

What this means for RPG.net’s Game Index, which fulfills a function very similar to Boardgamegeek in the RPG arena, remains to be seen. The Boardgamegeek brand has a lot of internet cred among its adherents. (It also has a fair bit of anti-cred in other online communities, I’ve learned in the last couple days.) A portion of the future user base for RPG Geek will certainly make the jump from Boardgamegeek, but by no means all. So a significant portion of RPG Geek’s community will have to come from other sites like RPG.net, ENWorld,  TheRPGSite.com, Story Games and The Forge, most likely.

[Thanks to The Escapist for the tip-off.]

Carnage 12 Needs GMs

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Carnage's 2009 logo, in keeping with the non-theme "Nothing But Carnage."

Carnage's 2009 logo, in keeping with the non-theme "Nothing But Carnage."

Extra, extra!

The second call is going out across the internet — via outlets like Green Mountain Roleplayers, Northern New England Gamers, Unity Games and more — that Carnage, Vermont’s longest-running game convention, is still looking for GMs to run board games and roleplaying games.

Dr. Nik, the roleplaying game field marshal, writes, in part:

GAME MASTERS! Our Success Depends On You! This year, for Nothin’ But Carnage, we ask all of you, past, present and future, to channel the inner gm and run a game at Carnage 12. We’ve missed a lot of you, dust an old game off and bring it back, develop that idea, or learn that new board game you picked up. We want you to be a part and help continue to make carnage great. For those of you who have yet to experience running a game at carnage, please take an opportunity to come to Carnage 12 and bring a game or 2 to share. Carnage offers complimentary registration to play in any other games if you run in 2 slots, and we try to extend the love and honor that you deserve. Step on over and run a game in the Lovecraftian Resort of Lake Morey!

Meanwhile, Rod Sheldon seeks still more board game mavens to show off their own skills at teaching and moderating board games. There’s an updated version of the board game wish list on a news post on Northeast Wars’ site, taking into account games they’ve already booked.

Nothing But Carnage runs November 6th – 8th in Fairlee, VT at the Lake Morey Resort. The hotel, while large, fills quickly thanks to early bird reservations, so you may need to inquire with the Carnage staff about overflow accommodations.

Game masters looking to run something should get their events in by August 5th. That’s the final deadline to be included in the pre-convention book mailing, which is pretty key for getting advance notice about your game out to the playing masses.

[Adventure!] Journey into the Inner-Earth

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Flashback! This was originally posted to RPG.net in March of 2006, recounting my experiences running an Adventure! one-shot as part of a series of “RPG try-out” games at the local game store, Quarterstaff Games. Once a month for three or four months running, one member of the group would run a one-shot of a game they wanted to teach and other people in the group wanted to learn.

All told, we played five sessions before mud season / spring arrived and everyone realized, “Hey, we can do stuff outside in the evening now!” We began with a two part Iron Heroes session — two parts because it ran way over-long and everyone liked how the system worked enough to keep going — Shadowrun 4th Edition, a homebrewed fairy tale game and, to close it out, Adventure!

This was, for me, a very singular moment in my experience as a GM. Everybody was on and, after a little encouragement, got into the feeling of a pulpy, Indiana Jones-style adventure. It helped me realize that yes, I could run games and yes, people did enjoy them. This was a huge boost to my ego after spending time on various convention scenarios that wound up attracting no players whatsoever.

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[Tuesday Board Game Night] Dominion

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Tonight, I mixed two of my favorite things about Tuesday board game night: Dominion and playing games in Muddy Waters. Why I like Muddy’s is easy: it’s a generally relaxed atmosphere with homey decor — lots of exposed timber beams and brickwork — an eclectic selection of music and enjoyable refreshments. Dominion is a little trickier.

See, I tend to go for games with a strong theme that appeals to my own tastes, or a sense of humor. Arkham Horror is a prime example, as is Frag. Dominion has a medieval theme of nobles, villages, artisans and what-not that could be scraped off the game mechanics and replaced with anything. Take this reskinning to a zombie theme for example. So it’s rarely mechanics that enthrall me, but the theme or backstory of a game.

Dominion is different. In the end, it boils down to using your starting cards to buy other cards, which have various abilities, allowing one to go beyond the basic “play one action, buy one thing.” The game reminds me of Fluxx in that regard. So as a player builds their deck of cards, they’re not only looking for abilities to work in synergy, but resources to buy new cards, as well to stockpile victory points. Victory point cards do nothing but add to one’s score at the end, so there’s a balancing act of having enough points to win versus the danger of clogging one’s deck with cards that don’t do anything useful during the game.

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All Games Considered

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All Games Considered is a podcast based out of Louisville, Kentucky. Like the name implies, they cover all sorts of games, albeit with a strong lean towards roleplaying games because, hey, that’s how the hosts roll.

The content tends to be a grab bag of commentary on new games and aspects of gaming, like the on-going “Mags the Axe School of Gamemastering” series, press releases, and interviews from convention hall floors — thanks to their location in Louisville, the hosts tend to get around to both big and small conventions; I’m mildly jealous. They also have recurring segments from contributors, actual play reports from the RPG Buffet group, captained by now-host Mags, and Games You Never Heard Of, with correspondent Ben Balestra talking about just that.

When I first began listening to All Games Considered back in, golly, 2006, it was mostly because I liked they covered a broad range of topics, always coming back to RPGs. As time has passed, though, this curious fondness has grown. The hosts are all friends in real life and it shows in their banter. That camaraderie is mostly why I keep downloading new episodes, as my hunger for news of the latest and greatest slackened appreciably since the latest ultimately isn’t all that different from the oldest; they do things differently with similar results.

But that’s another post. All Games Considered is a solid gaming podcast with a strong cast of hosts who bring their personalities to the table, but don’t let that overwhelm the conversation. They have an impressive back catalog to sample from. Being the kind of “live in the now” person I am, however, I’ll recommend you download whatever episode is newest when you visit their site and give that a try.

Addendum, July 16, 2009: The same day this article was originally posted, AGC announced they had been nominated for an Ennie Award. If that’s not a sign of quality, I don’t know what is.

Council of Five Nations XXXII

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The call has gone out for Council of Five Nations XXXII. Last night, Dave Cheng posted an email to, among other places, the Green Mountain Roleplayers email list, saying in part,

Hello Northeast Gamers,

About 1,400 of you have either already received or will soon receive a bright orange postcard from us.  Orange is the color of Autumn, and of Council of Five Nations.

It happens every year around this time; the Schenectady Wargamers Association starts cranking up the Council of Five Nations machinery once again.  This year will be our 32nd Council, one of the longest-running Adventure Gaming conventions in the world.  Please block-off October 9, 10 & 11 on your calendars.

Dave goes on to underline the need for GMs to run games. Council plans on hosting 125 – 150 events over Columbus Day weekend, which takes quite a few people. As a way of saying thank you to people volunteering their time and energy, GMs get free admission to the convention, as well as swanky GM-only T-shirt embroidered with the Council logo. Folks interested in GMing at Council this year should check out the event submission form. The deadline is Sunday, July 26th, so get those idea furnaces burning.

Council is also sponsoring a tour of the Saratoga battlefield, “cited as the turning point in the American War of Independence.” It’s Friday afternoon of the convention, so you’ll be back in time for the 7:00 PM game slot.

Today the Page, November the Tabletop

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Screenshot from Google Docs.

Screenshot from Google Docs.

Here’s a quick peek at the beginning of my GURPS Ghostbusters adventure The Lurker in the Limelight, for Carnage this fall — can you tell I have a long development cycle?

For a while now, I’ve been writing my convention scenarios as though they’ll be published in some form. It helps me focus on the process and really work through possible chains of events if I act as though someone other than me may read and try to use it. I rarely actually write one start to finish, but it helps me get started and pointed in one direction.

Part of this tendency to writing an adventure out formally has to do with how super unprepared I was when I first started doing convention games — at a time when I had never GMed at all, no less. If anyone at Bakuretsucon in 2003 had actually wanted to play Adventure! or WitchCraft, I’d’ve been in deep ca-ca.

At this stage, most of what you see is a rough outline that I’ll fill in later, with names and greater detail as necessary. The list of characters, for example, is just to give me an idea of personalities and who’s filling what role in moving the action forward. “Football jock” will become something more substantive, but for now, I get the idea of their motivation and what good they are fighting ghosts.

Some day, I really will finish one of these, with a proper ending and everything, to a degree that I feel comfortable publishing it on the web. Given how readily the ideas are flowing for this one, The Lurker in the Limelight could be the one.

Shadows Over Innsmouth

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Most of this was first posted to RPG.net’s Other Games Open forum. What you see here has been cleaned up and slightly modified.

So I’ve had Innsmouth Horror, the latest expansion to the Call of Cthulhu-based board game Arkham Horror, a couple weeks now. This expansion incorporates characters, places and events from one of Lovecraft’s most well known stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I’ve skimmed through most of the cards and had two play-throughs. Lost both of them, and only got a real taste of the expansion in the second — the first play centered more around teaching the game to a batch of newcomers.

First off, the whole expansion is brutal. The new Great Old Ones are phenomenally tough, which I don’t necessarily disagree with, since the situation should be dire if you’re trying to take down a Thing Man Was Not Meant to Know with a tommy gun and magic knife. I just don’t know if I agree with Old Ones who interfere with investigators as directly as, say, Quachil Uttaus, who’s going to devour somebody outright sooner or later.

But beyond the new Great Old Ones, there’s the rotting burgh of Innsmouth itself. The townsfolk are out to get you. A lot of the encounters there involve the investigator getting beat up, jailed or otherwise harassed. Once the doom track passes the halfway mark, the locals declare martial law; investigators need to start making Sneak checks just to avoid summary arrest. The more sensitive the location, like, say, the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s headquarters, the harder it is to avoid getting caught. Once you’re in jail, there are a wide variety of nasty options that await, including beatings, devouring and being forced to drink strange, transmuting liquids.

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