Monthly Archives: April 2011

Masks of Nyarlathotep Session 2

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We started off last week down two investigators. Their players were called away by real life, so Ms Harlow and the good minister could no longer aid in the pursuit of Jackson Elias’ killers. That left Professor von Fasselstein and his assistant Sophie, Mr Ryan and Mr Spadowski — that’s my barnstormer — to pull together some of the strands tripped over so far: not only the murder of Jackson, but any connections to the Carlyle expedition.

To that end, we found ourselves moving toward the surviving Carlyle, Robert’s sister. But apparently tooling up in a roadster to the Westchester home of a very rich person is not the done way of making a social call, so the group finangled its way into attending a war widows benefit Ms Carlyle organized.

That’s all we really got done that evening. It was a lot of faffing about with social and societal conventions. You can’t call up a psychoanalyst or lawyer on the weekend. Not even the state medical board. And even when you do get hold of them on Monday, they’re not going to be terribly helpful. Patient records and treatment notes are typically kept from the avidly curious onlooker’s eyes.

Personally, I found myself constrained by two concerns: the perennial foil “that’s not what my character would do” and an uncertainty about whether the situation warranted extreme efforts. Sure, we could have burgled the exports shop to rifle the paperwork, but it didn’t seem to me that events had accelerated to an importance or urgency where vigilante break-ins were justified.

Jackson Elias was murdered, yes, but that’s what police are for. And that does remind me, I don’t know if we’ve interacted with the police at all, having stumbled upon a crime scene. At the very least, it might behoove us to attempt to piggyback their own investigation, if unofficially.

In summary, we’re in a weird space where none of the player characters are exceptionally well-suited to a situation like this, but we’ll try because damnit, we’re player characters and the GM’s got a big, fat book on top of the core rules. And that counts for something.

Role-Playing and Board Game Garage Sale

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The time has come to weed the game library. Behind the jump you will find role-playing games, board games and card games I would like very much for someone else to own. Generally speaking, it’s all older stuff, so if you’re looking for titles from the 90s and early 00s, this might be the sale for you.

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The Beast is Dead

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George R. R. Martin implies he’s finished A Dance with Dragons.

To put that in a personal context for myself, the first novel, A Game of Thrones, published just before I began my freshman year of high school. The most recent volume, A Feast for Crows, came out in 2005. That was the first year I attended Carnage. The book hit the week before the convention.

In fact, I saw Feast for Crows at Carnage. We were playing a GURPS Banestorm adventure when Chuck strolled up and handed one of the players a copy. She squeed a bit. I think that was the first time I encountered the series at all.

Selling Things Always Has That Pang of Time and Money Wasted

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I’ve participated in this tabletop hobby in some form or another for just shy of ten years. That’s not a long time in many gamers’ estimation, I suspect. But I seem to have made up for that brevity by diving whole-hog into the ancient art of accumulating too much damn stuff to do with the hobby.

The time has come for a reckoning. I’m going to start a roleplaying and board game garage sale in the coming weeks. Preparatory to that, I went through my shelves to note everything of which I wish to be rid. I surprised myself at the things I suddenly decided that I no longer wanted to stare at.

Last week, I woke up one morning knowing I didn’t really care if I owned the full line of Unknown Armies. As I rifled through my shelves, I realized that yeah, I have no use for the Changeling: the Dreaming books scavenged from eBay and used book stores.

I have no idea if anyone else has any use for these books and games, but it seems more productive to at least put them out in the world, rather than hang on to them and become increasingly depressed by the physical ties and impediment they constitute.

Soon the time will come to put up the list and notifications in various places this stuff is up for grabs. Not right now, but soon.

“Beast Man” of Vermont Glimpsed!

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What is this critter? And what's that hump-like thing?

Squatchdetective.com has an investigation going on a trail camera in Vermont that picked up some sort of furry/hairy-ish thing. It could be a Green Mountain bigfoot or maybe one of the “wild men” prowling an abandoned side path of the Long Trail.

Whatever it is, it’s hungry. The investigation page reports the nearby apple tree was cleared of fruit in the days before the camera was installed in order to find out just what was so assiduously helping itself.

If the beast men of the silent hills were driven down to the lowlands to feed, they must be hard up to settle for apples. There must be any number of pets and livestock open to predation, if the beast men lack the gumption to go after humans in their own territory. Or maybe it suggests the life cycle of the creatures: the young, such as what that hump in the picture might be, feed on plant matter. The hunger for raw meat comes with adolescence, peaking and carrying on through adulthood to dotage.

[Via Cryptomundo.]

[Scions of Time] And We Bid You Good Night

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Photo by Josh Burker.

The Scions of Time convened for the thrilling conclusion to the adventure begun in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Star Children, in which a 1970s counter-culture rock band possessed a seemingly undue influence over a steadily growing number of citizens of New York City.

As the alien Star Child declares the invasion would begin, a purple light suffuses the night sky. Lighting fixtures shine over-brightly and explode, radiating outward from the precinct. The city streets take on an unearthly guise, illuminated only by the strange purple light radiating from the night sky with no apparent source.

Challenger and his companions attempt to avoid the psychic invasion of Earth by running verbal rings around Wolfbrother. This keeps him non-plussed for a moment, but the effect of his grand declaration “The invasion begins!” becomes clear as they detect the footfalls of thousands of people marching in lockstep, converging on the precinct. Stacy keeps Wolfbrother at bay with the menacing application of hair-curling tongs.

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Prepare for the Coming of Geek Week Game Night

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Brennan barters games for a ride back to Burlington from Langdon Street.

Once again, Langdon Street Cafe in Montpelier throws its doors open to the nerdly set for Geek Week 5.0, a five day celebration of all things geeky. The Geek Week Game Con, an fixture of the event, takes place Wednesday, April 27th.

There will be a board game library, of course. As Ben Matchstick tells us over at Green Mountain Gamers: “There will be a lot of goodies for RPGs and board gamers. Dominion, Catan, Bananagrams, Agricola, and tons of others. You got it, bring it! There’s also an arcade machine emulator that will play over 4000 old school arcade games, just for that throw-back feel.”

As for role-playing games, Ben himself is planning a Gamma World adventure. I’m going down with Fiasco and InSpectres in hand. I don’t know if we can gin up characters and finish a game in three or so hours, but I’d like to give a shot. I know enough role-playing-friendly folks in Montpelier that we should be able to reach critical mass easily enough.

[Broken Spokes] Keeping Magic Simple, Stupid

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I think I may have been looking at this magic system swap-out for Broken Spokes from the wrong angle. At its root, this is about making life easy for me and the players. Rather than learning the complicated interactions GURPS‘ magic colleges, spells and their prerequisites, a realms-based system should be about presenting a significantly shorter list of things to remember, with the decanic modifiers as an add-on that players can benefit from and learn as needed.

With the goal of making this easy for everyone in mind, is it really sensible to go about building a whole new array of realms, or welding something from Mage: the Ascension to the Cabal setting? After all, the spell colleges as written are actually kind of a cornerstone of the cosmology of the Four Realms, in that the decans are wellsprings of form that trickle down to the material world.

Even if I don’t necessarily agree with the divisions of the colleges — Protection and Warning? Really? — it’d certainly be easiest to take them as written. They’re already mapped to the decans for me, after all.

And in the spirit of that apocryphal quote from George Patton, why not just do it? At worst, I don’t like the way they play and then I move on to one of my alternate realm schemes, right?

Addendum: Saturday afternoon, I started putting a reference document together, pulling options together from across the pages of GURPS Thaumatology. It is more than a little dizzying. There’s a fair bit of flipping back and forth through the flexible magic chapter, referencing tables in the appendices — which I am not looking forward to recreating in a word processing document — and being distracted by potential options: “Hm, do I want to add the threshold limitation to this system? That could be fun.” I’m going to stick with keeping it simple for now; spending fatigue points ought to be a sufficient brake on the wackiness.

Hail, Miskatonic

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My Miskatonic University pennant, installed for the consternation of passers-by.

Propnomicon, maker of fine Cthulhiana for some time now, recently wrapped up another prop package, this time featuring ephemera from stately Miskatonic University. In addition to an embroidered patch and cloisonné pin of the school seal, field notebooks and postcards of campus landmarks, the highlight of the package was no doubt the red and white Miskatonic pennant, which you can see displayed to the left.

A Miskatonic pennant was something I’d sought for quite a while. Just as I resigned myself to having design and fabricate my own — based on an old Vermont pennant dating from the same era — the announcement went up that the next prop package would include one.  I jumped on board immediately. There were production delays and shipping gaffes that required the application of a steam iron, but at long last, I am the happy owner of my own emblem of Miskatonic pride, which I now have in my office window at work, so everyone can have no clue from what school I graduated.

Now the pennants are out there, true alumni of M.U. can get the full effect by waving their pennants while singing the alma mater, Hail, Miskatonic, also courtesy of Propnomicon.

Masks of Nyarlathotep Session 1

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Last week, I got in on the ground floor of the sprawling Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Previously, the group had played through a couple one-off scenarios, but I wasn’t able to make the scheduling line up properly. So I was glad to be able to skate in at the last minute with the rough notion of a Great War veteran turned barnstorming pilot, who eventually became named Jake Spadowski.

I’m embarrassed to admit I suffered some sort of systems crash shortly after we started playing. I don’t know if it was a lack of food or a surfeit of unhealthy, pizza-related food, but it pretty much did me in for the evening. In combination with my usual reticent nature when first role-playing with a group and a brand new, hazily sketched-out notion of a character and I wound up not having much to contribute to the action.

Happily, Dan’s German professor carried the evening ably. Someone’s bestest friend ever died, there was a brief interplay with the perpetrators, we followed business cards and receipts and all that fun stuff.

That’s about all I have to report for the evening. Sad, isn’t it?

Next time my brain shuts down like that, I hope I have the presence of mind to get up and walk around the room for a bit, rather than slowly sliding down the couch in a drowsy heap. That can’t have been a good first impression.