Monthly Archives: August 2009

Dogs and Cats Living Together

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James Mishler’s post, The Doom of RPGs: The Rambling, downright gives me chills. What he describes about how adventure gaming will change seems so eminently plausible.

The best case scenario seems to be that longtime enthusiasts, invested in that particular mode of play — around a table, using printed material — hunker down and stick with what they’ve got. It could be the new iteration of roleplayers sticking with the game they began with — Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in the day, some other, equally large 800 lbs gorilla today — relying on whatever books they can scrounge up.

After all, tabletop games give one of the best return rates on leisure money around, compared to competition like a movie or a video game. As James says at the end of his post:

Like baseball, once you buy a bat and a ball and a glove, you’ve got everything you ever need to play the game a thousand times over; heck, my father still used the glove he had when he was a kid when we threw the ball around when I was a kid!

Whatever your game of choice is, once you own it, you’re good to go. That is one of the go-to arguments for the dissenters in discussions claiming that RPGs are over-priced. Dollar for dollar, spending a certain amount of money on an RPG book pays off better in terms of hours of entertainment than a number of movie tickets or video games bought with an equivalent sum.

Unless, of course, it’s an ebook Amazon pulls back without warning, or it’s so shoddily bound that the pages just fall out in a rain of wood pulp. But when does that ever happen?

[GURPS Horror] The First Session

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Last Sunday, we had our first session of the as-yet unnamed GURPS Horror game in which the main characters work for a clandestine agency in post-war Berlin, picking up — or off — Nazi scientists who delved into matters Man Was Not Meant to Know. After the session recap are some thoughts about the experience I’ve mulled over since then.

The Story So Far

Joe Fratelli, the weird science engineer, receives his instructions from a live drop and boards a train to Heidelberg the next morning. In the compartment, he meets his assigned partner, a German of undetermined background named James. Discussing the assignment to find a scientist by the name of von Waller who’d recently been sighted after an absence of nine years, the two discover a child eavesdropping on behalf of an unidentified party. Joe delivers a swat on the ear to send the urchin on his way.

Trying to investigate the club where von Waller was sighted, the pair are stymied by the lack of the password. Surveying the establishment’s patrons as they come and go, James takes an indirect approach and mugs three inebriated fellows as they stumble home. He eventually elicits the password from the most drunken of the three. Their wallets’ contents go into the assignment kitty.

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[Mage: The Suppressed Transmission] Electric Sea Moss Acid Test

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Mage: The Suppressed Transmission is a Mage: The Ascension campaign I ran from the summer to winter of 2005 at Quarterstaff Games. I think of it as my first “real” campaign and present my session reports, mostly written just after the action, exactly as they are, excepting the occasional corrected typo.

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“In the Next World, You’re on Your Own.”

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Following in the footsteps of the late Demonground, Protodimension Magazine is a new quarterly zine offering a grab bag of adventures, plot seeds, fiction and house rules for a variety of horror and supernaturally-oriented RPGs. The first issue, which you can find here, hit the site the other week.

Content runs the gamut, including some of the less-recognized horror games like Unknown Armies, so it’s nice to see representation for more than the big apes of the horror genre. I admit I only skimmed the issue, looking more closely at the stuff I recognized and found interesting, but that’s the point of a zine, really: pick out the stuff that grabs your attention and leave the rest. I did like those blueprints for an alien spacecraft. They’ll come in handy if I ever get around to running a Conspiracy X game.

In short, if you’re interested in the modern horror or conspiracy genres, page through Protodimension and see what they’ve got. The layout designer very thoughtfully arranged it in landscape format, so it’s easy to read on a computer monitor.

Ghostbusting and You

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The cover of an orientation brochure for new GBI employees.

The cover of an orientation brochure for new GBI employees.

Here’s another quick screenshot of something I whipped up in Open Office for this Ghostbusters adventure that so thoroughly dominates my brainspace lately.

Sometimes, I need to reassure myself that yes, I have spent plenty of time and thought working out the game itself, so making something like this isn’t just a method of procrastination by focusing on an inconsequential element at the cost of ignoring the real work waiting to be done. But yeah, I know I’ve got something good here.

Playtest next Thursday!

[Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em] GURPS Fantasy II

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The Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em series charts my attempt to read all the books in my gaming library that crept in over the years and went overlooked for too long.

Adventures in the Mad Lands is a fitting subtitle for Robin Laws‘ bizarro campaign setting, published way back in the day. A Stone Age subsistence culture struggles to get by in the Mad Lands, which are also populated by a pantheon of lunatic gods who at best can’t control their divine abilities and at worst will either turn hapless folk into terrible monsters or just outright kill them. Add in a civilization of immortal sorcerers drowning in ennui, the various abominations touched by divinity and neighboring people who just don’t get the mindset of the Madlander culture and it makes an interesting read, going into a substantively different cultural mindset, built on certain assumptions and necessities.

One of the overarching themes of the setting is definitions of humanity. Madlanders define a monster as something lacking an element of humanity; thus, beings like the skinless and heightless are inhuman because they lack one or more of those characteristics that Madlanders, humans, possess. In contrast, the soulless, those immortal sorcerers, think of pretty much anything that isn’t one of their own to be an animal. It ties back to that idea of cultural preconceptions.

I really liked this world. I think it would be a hard sell for a lot of players — thus leading to the common remark that the Mad Lands are an ungameable setting — because the default setup is everyone plays members of a Madlander village, struggling to subsist and avoid the attention of the gods. The fact of possessing strange powers, often one of the attractions of playing in any RPG, moves that person away from the Madlander definition of human. It’s a huge sea change from the mindset implicit in many roleplaying games that having powers or unearthly abilities is a desirable state.

GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands is out of print, but it can be purchased in PDF form from Steve Jackson Games’ e23 site.

Visual Inspiration for a Bright Changeling Game

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Photo by prettyhowtown. Used with permission.

Photo by prettyhowtown. Used with permission.

I say without irony or deprecation that these pictures over on sun moon stars rain from the Bristol Renaissance Faire would be fantastic visual inspiration for a game of Changeling, either The Dreaming or The Lost varieties, depending on the look one wants for their game. It’s a bright version seen in these pictures, but it doesn’t cross the line into “bear in a waistcoat carrying a balloon” territory, either.

The original Changeling was one of those tabletop games that benefited most from the particular strengths of LARPing, because it inspired players to come up with excellent costumes. I remember seeing a picture of one woman who contrived a pair of faux goat legs for her Unseelie satyr and another who came up with a very cool ray gun ‘n goggles look as a nocker.

Part of it probably has to do with the central premise of Changeling that there’s a second layer of reality on top of that which everyday people see, the chimerical reality of the Dreaming — although there’s argument to be made that it’s more real, or maybe more true, than the more obvious world. Knowing that, the guy with a red bandanna and goalie stick isn’t just a hockey player out of season, but he takes on a new dimension as a redcap armed with a cudgel.

Lake Morey Resort Sells Out for Carnage

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It came across the Northern New England Gamers mailing list the other day: Lake Morey is sold out for Carnage 12 this November. In confirming this, convention board member Dr. Nik went on to say, “Game submissions are up and so is attendance!” So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

Fortunately for those of you who waited too long, Dr. Nik also mentioned Carnage is looking into making arrangements with nearby hotels and bed & breakfasts. You’ll find the list in full behind the jump, or you can read the message yourself on NNEG — registration is required to access the list’s archives. Continue reading →

Who Gets to Make My Decisions?

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In the midst of a discussion on RPG.net about how one would run Chaosium Publishing, if handed the keys to the kingdom and a large pile of cash, one poster made the following remark:

After you’ve done “Your uncle dies, leaving you with the most unusual…” and “A former colleague sends you a telegram with cryptic news…” you start repeating yourself when it comes with ties to connect characters to scenarios. Once the squamous start showing up and the tentacles are poking around the corner, there’s very little other than roleplaying and the “gaming contract” to keep Investigators involved – the sensible and tactical decision would usually be to get out of Dunwich as quickly as possible. There’s very little mechanical reason for the Investigators to behave as pragmatically as possible.

My kneejerk reaction was “Well, yeah, roleplaying is the point.” It is, as part of the typically unspoken gaming contract, up to the player and GM both to give characters strong reasons not to make the safe, obvious choices, like hopping the last train out of Dunwich.

Then I ran across this post on The Spirits of Eden, where Wyatt talks about how Wizards of the Coast presents the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons as allowing more roleplaying because out of combat abilities aren’t defined by skills like Profession and Craft.

And I realized, good grief, this is the same discussion that has recurred time and time again for years: is it the game’s job to tell the player what happens, or the player’s job to use the game to see what happens? In other words, are there mechanics for determining a character’s choices, like morality in the World of Darkness games, or is it all up to the player’s inventiveness?

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[Mage: The Suppressed Transmission] The Lady’s Court

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Mage: The Suppressed Transmission is a Mage: The Ascension campaign I ran from the summer to winter of 2005 at Quarterstaff Games. I think of it as my first “real” campaign and present my session reports, mostly written just after the action, exactly as they are, excepting the occasional corrected typo.

This is the session report I originally posted to RPG.net in 2006. It’s amusing to read that cast list again, because that was the highwater mark for number of players attending. After this session, as the game wore on, only Evan and Henry’s players would see it through to the end. I have no idea if this was because I was a bad GM or the players just weren’t interested, but it seems to me I must have had some effect on their decision to leave — often without even saying so. Continue reading →