Esoteric Murmurs

So damn predictable.

2011-10-14T11:22:00.003-04:00

Still waiting to see anybody take notice of a post on the forge without the comments instantly turning into "hurr they are using terms I can't be bothered to understand they can't possibly mean anything by them they must just be using them to sound all smart and stuff let's go take their lunch money on the playground."

Like everybody who plays roleplaying games isn't using a big pile of terms that would be opaque to a random person overhearing them who couldn't be bothered to ask what they meant.

Auditing the thread for Forge-specific terminology:

Vincent's original post, as far as I can tell, did not include a single word of Forge-specific terminology!

Neither did the first reply by Judd.

Eero used the words "gamist" and "coloring" in his very long post.

Vincent's second post used the phrases "Step On Up" (another term for "gamist" or "playing for the sake of exciting challenge" and "Story Now" (another term for "narrativist" or "playing to see what story happens"). The context might have made these clear to someone more inclined to think than to whine.

Callan uses no forge-specific terminology in his reply.

Nor does Vincent in his third post.

Eero uses the word "narrativist."

No forge terminology in James Nostack's post.

Ron refers to an "old, incomplete, Color-first project" in passing.

Vincent's next post had no forge-specific terminology in it.

Callan's had none.

James Nostack's had none.

Vincent's next had none.

Ron's talks about "Color" a lot but his post mainly is talking about how Vincent's expectations, which were not fulfilled, might have been unreasonable, since he didn't take certain obvious steps to help make them happen. (This is ironically similar to what some commenters of Raggi's such as Jeff Rients said, that if the atmosphere of the game is supposed to come into play in a game like this, that the GM must take more of a hand in making that happen, and can't rely on the book enforcing it like it does in some of Vincent's games).

Ron's next mentions the word "Color" again.

Vincent uses the word "color" again. Someone reading thoughtfully would probably have grokked what it meant (atmosphere/look/feel/attitude/style/colorful details) long before this. He also uses the word "framing".

David Berg's post had no forge-specific terms.

C. Edwards uses "color" and "fruitful void."

Ron's next post has no forge-specific terminology.

Vincent's post has no forge-specific terminology.

Geez, it's almost as if people at the Forge are speaking English rather than some crazy Forge jargon designed to keep other people out and make themselves look all fancy. They're just trying to think about things and figure out how things work, why they worked out the way they did, and what that could mean.

You wouldn't know that from the comments on Raggi's post though. Advice: if you post on the Forge about anything, watch out for your lunch money. You've marked yourself out as one of those smart kids who thinks they're better than the other kids and needs to be taken down a peg on the playground.

My OSR bretheren, I like you and I like what you're doing. But why do so many of you have a chip on your shoulder about the Forge?

Holy crap, it's going down.

2011-09-24T22:52:00.001-04:00

Liz Danforth is auctioning off one of her most iconic pieces: The Summoner from Tunnels & Trolls fifth edition.

All I can say is I wish I was rich.

Yet Another "Hey This Reminds Me Of Sorcerer" Thing

2011-08-24T16:25:00.003-04:00

(It doesn't quite seem to fit right in this post; to view it better you should probably click through to YouTube.).

People designing Sorcerer demons without realizing it

2011-08-17T00:31:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine, who doesn't game at all, was talking about how he wanted to get a license plate for his motorcycle that said MOLOCH because it has double headlights, and reminded him of the owl from Bohemian Grove that the conspiracy nuts say is actually the god Moloch.

Then he IMs me this:

>yeah, moloch would be a good name for a money pit motorcycle that begs you to
>break the law mercilessly without care for your own safety or that or others.
>Selfish indulgance

HOLY SHIT, he's got the Need (constant maintenance) and the desire (mayhem or maybe corruption) right there in one sentence.

Sanchuniath

2011-08-10T18:43:00.003-04:00

Played Sorcerer with Ron Edwards and Konstantinos Rentas at GenCon. This is Chuni, my character's demon. She's a porn star, with a very dedicated following, one of whom threatened to ruin my character's nice middle class suburban life in the hopes of getting to meet her.

Thing with demon porn stars is, some need to be paid in blood instead of cash.

"And people say I'M stuck in the Seventies!"

2011-08-08T11:02:00.003-04:00

--Ron Edwards, realizing that I was using icosahedrons numbered 0-9 twice as d10s.

(Hey, you can still find them at Gamescience if you dig around!)

Hey Old School Renaissance Dudes

2011-08-07T11:02:00.001-04:00

I found you an artist.

Ed posting cause God forbid I work on things I'm being paid to work on

2011-07-13T11:14:00.013-04:00

Ron has a post up where he talks about some games about religion he's working on, and talks about a "type" of gamer who came from a religious background. I first heard him discussing this on the Walking Eye podcast.

I've been going back & forth about how much I fit into his typology, and thought I'd post here rather than drop what is basically just personal musings into a forum thread about his game.

Here it is with comments interspersed:

The following points aren't intended to describe any single individual, but two or three per person do seem to show up again and again among the role-players I've been thinking about.

i) A strong tendency toward rebellious-looking attire and hair, frequently hippie-pagan but also sometimes punky - and completely divorced from the original political context in which these looks originated.

My hair is long, but I don't think it's rebellious-looking. My attire is more "slob" than "rebel." I would probably look like an extremist in 1960. By the time I was born, in 1969, all the rebel value had worn off long hair eons ago. I do in fact have far left politics, as it happens. But it's got nothing to do with my hair. So yeah, I don't know whether to say this one applies. I'm saying "no" in general but giving this one a 10% "yes" rating cause I do in fact have hippie hair and I don't think of it as a political thing.

ii) A strong tendency toward prudishness in RPG content once you get past the original rebellion of playing RPGs at all. It's a weird kind of Victorian prudishness, though, perfectly accepting of extreme porn when it's "in its place," i.e., available in private and quite distanced from anything resembling ordinary or public human interactions.

Partially. Depends on context. I think "prudishness in RPGs" is the default among most of the people I've played with, historically, but that's not always so anymore. Calling this one 50% cause the tendency is there in my gaming history, it's just not always in play anymore.

iii) A strong tendency toward saving and helping others especially in anonymous masses, often in the full assumption that one knows exactly what to do and think better than they do. (i.e. despite breaking with one's natal church, retaining and even elevating its presumption of secret spiritual insight over that of humanity; i.e., not joining the ignorant mass "down there" but rather elevating above the church to a third plane of super-insight)

I dislike elitism. However, I do think that most people including me could use a lot more "saving" and "helping" than is available to us in our society. (Far left politics, remember?) I don't think I have secret knowledge that makes me one of the few people who can do it though. But I think it should be done. So... I don't know, I'm giving that one a 25% application.

iv) An overwhelming need, even anxiety, regarding being liked, as opposed merely to operating in one's own terms and letting being liked find its own level.

Oh FUCK yes. HUGE problem of mine. 41 goddamn years old and I still am stuck with this bullshit. True and I hate it. 200%.

v) Bright as hell, full of ideas, but often choked-up and anxious when it comes to implementing them.

Nope, I have no ideas. Doesn't apply. (Or does it apply because I'm so choked up and anxious I have given up on even having ideas anymore, and strangle them in the cradle?...)

vi) Surprising tolerance for militarism in details and even in full-blown political content, both in fiction and in life, to the extent of occasional fetishism and not recognizing military criticism or satire.

Jesus, no.

vii) A very strong commitment to a new name representing their break with their old upbringing, whether legally changed or a username or whatever.

No, never been able to stick with an alias or username or whatever for very long.

Oh, here's the intro:

For a couple of years, I've been thinking a lot about how many of the role-players I've met in the last decade had strict religious upbringings. Many although not all of them come from the American evangelical tradition. Maybe "strict" is misleading; I've found that people will say, "Oh, it wasn't strict" and go on to describe hair-raising guilt trips and routine practices which are best described as behavior-mod indoctrination. In fact, I don't mind telling you this up-front, the main thing I've found is that many role-players flatly lie when it comes to admitting how they were raised in these terms. Or they deflect into what might as well be a lie when they go on and on about their current free-thinking atheism or exceptionally fuzzy feel-good alternate church, as a way of not actually saying how they were raised.

I was going to address this point before I posted, but I don't think I can. My family's relationship to religiousness and irreligiousness was a complicated one. My father's side of the family had no religious inclinations whatsoever; they were a prosperous working-class-risen-to-middle-class family, whose highest aspirations ran to vacations and appliances and hobbies. Stable and soulless. My mother's side of the family were the children of a rural truck driver missionary's kid, and a woman from a very strict Calvinist family who went to church twice every Sunday; the family as a whole stayed working class, with very few having very much money; there was drama - divorces and remarriages; religiosity in the family tended to be concentrated in a few intense women, from whom it extended to everyone else. My mom was unusually intellectual and intelligent among her siblings, and transmitted the family's faith to us in only a very kind and thoughtful manner -- but we *were* sent to Christian schools, which were a whole constellation of influences on their own, with a variety of different emotional and social tenors. (My father was physically and, increasingly, mentally disabled by hydrocephaly, which went undiagnosed most of his life until CAT scans became common and one was done to him. He died in a nursing home when I was 19. Because of this, his influence on me in religious and other matters was much less than my mother's.)

It's complicated, as is clear even from that bare and brief overview. (And in that, I've only described influences on me, not my own response to those influences -- whether and when I accepted or rejected them.) So I don't know if I'd qualify for a "strict religious upbringing" from Ron's point of view, but I'm probably a lot closer to that than I am to his own completely secular upbringing.

BTW, the ironic "God forbid" in the title was a total accident -- I wasn't trying consciously to be clever at all. :)

Oh snap, SAT style

2011-06-16T23:10:00.001-04:00

Best analogy-style review of a generic worldbuilding RPG EVAR!

Thirty One Days of T&T with KSA

2011-05-11T00:07:00.003-04:00

Ken St. Andre at T&T Delver's Tales is undertaking a "d31 blogging challenge," doing a piece on a given number in the rules and history of Tunnels & Trolls and Trollworld, each day of the month of May. He's a day behind as of this writing but it's a lot of fun -- well, it sure as hell is for an old T&T nerd like me.

Following Ken and Liz Danforth on Twitter and blogs and stuff, I sometimes feel like all the gaming I've done since Tunnels & Trolls was a waste of time, and I'd be happiest just going back and playing that again. I mean, if I actually played roleplaying games instead of reading and talking about them. (Wait, I can't write that anymore! I do play an RPG regularly; I've been dealt into a very old house-rules-original-D&D campaign in Iowa City. I just don't do much in it because it's an old world and everyone else involved knows it much, much better than me, and everybody's mostly higher level than me and more powerful than me, so I kind of sit back and watch, a lot. I imagine that will change eventually but right now I'm shy and quiet.)

Watchers and Ghosts?

2011-05-05T17:01:00.003-04:00

Looks like some new and interesting things are happening over at the Year of the Dungeon!

Three Millenia Old D6

2011-04-15T00:10:00.006-04:00

Reading the book "Did God Have a Wife?" I came across a report of an excavation of a 9th-century-BC d6. It is exactly like the ones we use today - the layout of the spots is the same, and the layout of the sides (with opposite sides adding up to seven) is the same. The design of the modern d6 is known to be almost three millenia old. Not only that, according to "Life in Biblical Israel," this may be an example of the type of divining dice known as "Urim and Thummim." The Urim and Thummim were 2d6? Holy crap. No... Holy craps. (Thank you. I'll be here all week.)

Tony and the Worm...

2011-03-22T01:06:00.003-04:00

Mr. Tony Dowler is inching closer to releasing The Purple Worm Graveyard, a Dungeon World adventure for which I did some pleasantly disturbing art (NSFW). If you aren't following his blog, what's wrong with you?

Nine Delvers In Amber

2011-03-18T01:41:00.003-04:00

Learn the tale of the first ever (as far as I know!) Amber roleplaying game, largely undertaken by (snail) mail, created by Ken St. Andre, while in correspondence with Roger Zelazny. And how it affected the production of the cover of City of Terrors. From Liz Danforth's blog.

Amber references were *rife* in places like Sorcerer's Apprentice (which also carried a number of original Zelazny stories!), but I was a kid and didn't have access to much of a bookstore, and didn't know to look for Amber in the library, if it was even available there, so most of it went right past me. It's only later on, late in high school I think, I got ahold of the Amber books, in the form of a hardcover collection that I was given by a friend of the family who devoured science fiction books from his book club like candy, and gave them away when he was done (unlike candy, I guess).

Chroniclers of the Old School ways take note -- this woman tells good stories. :)

Support Fiendish Plans And Hot Elf Chicks

2011-03-10T14:26:00.002-05:00

This is not of course an "old school roleplaying" blog, just a blog written by old, old roleplayers. Hell, one of us regularly runs and plays 4th edition D&D. But I can't help admiring the Underdark Gazette's fiendish, if sexist, plan to increase visibility of the Old School Rules movement by means of hot elf chicks. (Or hot chicks of whatever demihuman persuasion you prefer.)

So -- consider this a standing offer from me, Ed, of your very own hot demihuman chick drawing for anybody looking to participate in this fiendish plan on their own blog.

Unless I'm in an artistic slump, in which case the drawing may be delayed, or may kind of suck. But lately the muses seem to be with me.

E.g. Stolen By Gremlins

2011-03-09T01:19:00.002-05:00

So Jeff Rients dropped a couple spells in his blog, and as I read it I knew I had to draw at least one -- the Face of Terror. Took me a long time to figure out how to draw it so it was clear (to me at least) there was a theft going on; turning the action 90 degrees so the figures were clearly separated did the trick.

Don't think for a moment I didn't consider a Brood of Sin illustration too. But this was enough creepiness for one day.

Some more demons.

2011-03-08T16:11:00.002-05:00

Remember these guys? I did a couple more.

Interview with Jeff Dee and Jack Herman

2011-01-18T14:18:00.002-05:00

And if you don't hear the names "Jeff Dee and Jack Herman" and immediately think "the creators of Villains and Vigilantes" then what is wrong with you? V&V is probably the single game which I have played and GM'ed the most of in my entire life.

Check it out.

Spam from Tunnels & Trolls's Favorite Outlaw, James Shipman

2010-10-26T16:29:00.006-04:00

Having unfortunately done business with James Shipman, Thief of Art and Tunnels & Trolls Content, in the past, my email was apparently on his list.

He spammed me today, and -- silly boy -- cc'ed everyone else he was spamming with that particular email (a couple dozen out of 150 addresses, alphabetically "e" through "h"), so I could do a "reply all" to everyone on his spamlist.

This is what he sent:

Hello
Everyone,

Welcome to
the Outlaw Press Tunnels & Trolls E-mail Sales. If you wish to opt out of
our free monthly e-mail featuring New & Old T&T items, just return this
e-mail with the words “Remove Me” in
the subject line and we will smite you from this list.

We are open
to all suggestions, including rule / articles discussions and may include them
in future e-mails, or even publish them in future issue of The Hobbit Hole
magazine. If you would like to see a specific T&T items profiled here, let
me know.

OP
Publisher,

James ~

BRAND NEW T&T ITEMS:

Special: A couple years ago we purchased the rights to Deliamber’s Delight and
Andy promised us it would be a multi level series. Below is the second solo in
the series and there are still two more levels to go. As always, Andy Holmes is
a great solo writer and we expect great things from the final two solo’s in the
series.
DELIAMBER’S DELIGHT – LEVEL TWO (Full Solo): Cost: $14.00

Written by A.R Holmes, but published in the USA by Outlaw Press as a 24 page full
sized solo, and the 2nd in the series. This solo previously appeared
in The Hobbit Hole #17. “When you discovered the way down to Level Two of this
dungeon, your heart leaped with joy and excitement. Now you do not feel quite
so euphoric. The door opened easily, and you have stepped through and entered a
circular chamber, from which a single corridor, directly opposite the entrance,
extends into the gloom. This dungeon level is lit here and there by torchlight,
constantly casting eerie shadows within the tunnels and chambers, which could
hide any number of ghastly creatures.” Suitability:
One character of level 1 to 3 with no more than 50 personal adds. Pre-generated
character provided (No). Blank character sheet provided (Yes). Kindred type
used in this solo (Any). Class type used in this solo (Any). Magic Matrix (No).

BEST SELLING T&T ITEMS:

TUNNELS AND TROLLS CAMPAIGN SETTINGS (T&T settings): Cost: $18.00

Within this 6-by-9 sized, 216+ page, bound Campaign
book you will find; Campaign Setting #1: Gamma-Trollworld–Have you ever wanted
to play Tunnels & Trolls in a true post-apocalyptic setting? Now for the
first time ever you have the chance to do so, with two ready-to-run GM
adventures (Truck Stop Blues & Death Dwarves Attack) and one mini-solo.
Campaign Setting #2: Superheroes Power Trip–BAM! Power Trip is an all new hard
hitting, mind bending, super power flinging, action oriented thrill ride of a
T&T Supplement that is fully Tunnels & Trolls 7.5v Edition compatible.
It also comes with two ready-to-run GM adventures. Campaign Setting #3: New
Khazan–Now have the chance to play (and GM) in a true sci-fi setting using the
Tunnels & Trolls rules. It has been written in a way to be easily
compatible with all editions of T&T. The New Khazan Supplement doesn’t just
leave the GM with nothing to start with. Included in this rules supplement you
will find a Solo and a GM Adventure to help you jump start your very own
T&T sci-fi campaign (on any number of planets).
TUNNELS AND TROLLS CAMPAIGN SETTINGS
#2 (T&T
settings): Cost: $14.00

Within this 60 page, 6-by-9 sized, center stapled
book you will find; Campaign Setting #1: Adapting Discworld Characters With
Tunnels & Trolls Character Generation–Yes, there are trolls, dwarfs, a
sapient pear wood chest, an orang-utan and assorted other misfits but the human
character is the most common on the Discworld. Campaign Setting #2: The
Discworld Meets Tunnels & Trolls–The setting that follows is not intended
to reveal the Discworld to the uninitiated. Rather it is aimed at regular
visitors to Pratchett’s wonderful world who wish to add a little of that land’s
own magic to their T&T games. Campaign Setting #3: Ice Age Setting: Clan of
the Cave Troll–The following setting discusses a radically different setting
for your Tunnels and Trolls campaign. The characters in this game are Ice Age
adventurers (hunters) owing allegiance to clan and tribe as they struggle for
survival against the elements and creatures of a still earlier age.

NEWLY REPRINTED T&T ITEMS:

TNT ZINE Nos. 15-18: Cost: $12.00

This is the
most influential Tunnels & Trolls fanzine ever printed. It was published by
Ken St. Andre back in the 1980s. Within this 54-page 6-by-9-inch
black-and-white book with center stapled binding, you will find a reprint of
issues Nos. 15-18. The articles included in this book are: The Abolition of the Wizards’ Guild, Pointblank Perfection, Wizard Guilds in T&T, Children in
Tunnels & Trolls, The Wizards’ Guild in Lingusia, A Savage Killing,
A note to human readers of TnT, Batsignals, Character Conception, World
of Power Trip, Superheroes and The Quick Fix. Just because it is so
rare, TnT is a must buy for T&T collectors who may otherwise never get to
see Ken’s TnT Zine.

TNT ZINE Nos. 25-26: Cost: $11.00

This is the most influential Tunnels & Trolls fanzine ever printed, and its very last
double issue to come out. It was published by Ken St. Andre back in the 1980s.
Within this 32-page 6-by-9-inch black-and-white book with center stapled
binding, you will find a reprint of issues Nos. 25-26. Included within its
pages are the following articles: More Lore of You Know What, Dungeon of the
Gray Lords (This T&T Dungeon is extremely tough – for character levels
7-12), and Fantastic Fantasy Book reviews. Just because it is so rare, TnT is a must buy for T&T collectors who may otherwise never get to see Ken’s TnT Zine.

MURDER ON THE LATONA / HEDRIEN ELIXIR (Full Dual Solo): Cost: $16.00

Written By Tim Labor. This is a new full length
nautical solo. It is 88 pages, printed in a 6 by 9 sized bound book format. “Breathless
and drenched, you cross the threshold of Galutha House. Your elf friend Jurl,
supported by his wizard compatriot Churang, Molaton of Masatl, and the birdlike
Giko, a khodaga from Hamon’s Lair barely draw the attention of the seaport inn’s
jaded clientele. After a few ales and plates of fish stew you regain your
strength and renew your efforts to find a ship to take you north. “Captain
Redslate,” the bartender points to a surly dwarf in the corner, “He’s the best.”
“Not rare enough!” Servants cringe as they place plate after plate of spring
lamb in front of Redslate’s blood-spackled beard. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Suitability: 3rd to 5th level character (One character).
Pre-generated character provided (Yes). Kindred type used in this solo (Any).
Class type used in this solo (Any). Magic Matrix (No). Hedrien’s Elixir: “Emeralds
worth 1850 in gold… 2000 if you fence them in Masatl. It’s the easiest money
you ever made,” the oily voice of the wizened dwarf wizard, Grappa, wheedles as
he shuts a small wooden box containing the emblem of the house of Khatau. From
behind him on a bed in the crude Crabbe Inn, Lord Hedrien emits a pained wheeze
as he clutches a pendant engraved with an arcane symbol. Those gems could solve
a lot of problems…” Suitability: 1st
level or newly-created character (One character). Pre-generated character
provided (Yes). Kindred type used in this solo (Any). Class type used in this
solo (Any). Magic Matrix (No).

ESCAPE FROM GA-‘TYR (Mega Solo): Cost:
$18.00

By Tim Labor. This 6-by-9-inch solo is huge at 100
plus pages. “You thought the sleepy seaside village of Haro’s Port was the safest in Ilesia, but the shockingly violent sack of the town by pirates shortly after your
arrival proved you completely wrong. The evil band, under the command of the
inexperienced but brilliant rogue Kasatar, a former Ilesian lieutenant, was
cruel and virtually unstoppable. You were bound, blindfolded and beaten until
sleeping potion could be forced down your throat. That is the last thing you
remember.” This solo is heavily illustrated throughout. Not only is it a
Tunnels & Trolls solo, but it has also been designed for used with both the
D20 System and RuneQuest. Suitability: 1st level (One or two characters). Pre-generated character provided (Yes, 6 pre-rolled characters). Kindred type used in this solo (Any). Class type used in this solo (Any). Magic Matrix (No).

SORCERER’S APPRENTICE MAGAZINE
ARCHIVE No. 1: Cost: $16.00

This 36-page 8-by-11-inch full-sized center stapled book with full-color (inside and out) covers is the complete archive of the long out of print magazine Sorcerer’s Apprentice No. 1. The magazine has been scanned and reproduced exactly as it was printed.
Inside it you will find Kingmaker (a T&T solo) by Mike Stackpole, Firearms in
T&T by Ken St. Andre, Know Your Foe 101 by Mike Stackpole, Weapon
Experience by Gregory Courter, Heroic Fantasy by Ken St. Andre, Midnight
Sun (a poem) by Karl Edward Wagner and Brother to Ghosts by Robert E. Vardeman. If you were to find the original publication on E-bay, it would cost you well over US$100. It has been reprinted in such a way that if you wish to do so you can easily remove the first and last two pages, leaving a perfectly reprinted Sorcerer’s Apprentice No. 1 magazine.

NOT YET RELEASED T&T ITEMS:

The Hobbit
Hole #19 is still being put together, so some things may change before it is
printed.
THE HOBBIT HOLE No. 19:

This issue is 80-pages in length and features covers by Jeff Freels. REGULAR FEATURES: Of Hairy Feet and Taters…
Editorial – By James L. Shipman II. T&T ARTICLES: A Monkey Throwing Stones at Monsters – By Paul Ingrassia,
Kindred Dice: Fantastic Armies – By Ken St. Andre & James L. Shipman, Ken’s
Original Trollworld / Khazan Map – By Ken St. Andre, The Hierarchy of Trolls –
By Bill Ferrero, The Wizened Wizard’s Wrath – By Bill Ferrero & David O’
Donnell, Exotic Mounts – For when a horse is just not… – By Justin T. Williams.
SOLO / GAMING: The Depths of
Kerak-Ban: Level 8 – By Gianmatteo Tonci
(A Tunnels & Trolls GM Adventure — The Hidden Treasury), Figurine of the
Death Goddess – By David Eber & James L. Shipman (A large Tunnels &
Trolls Solo for all the major kindred types), Rage Over Rjeng-Hang – By A. R.
Holmes (A mini-scenario for Tunnels & Trolls role-playing within a city). FICTION: Monsters! Monsters!: (Agents
of the Death Goddess) – By Ken St. Andre (This follows the adventures of Gnnarggh), Grumlahk’s
Fish Tale – By Jeff Freels (A short but exciting tale of Grumlahk’s fishing
adventure), Monsters! Monsters!: (Agents of the Death Goddess) – By Ken St. Andre (This follows the adventures
of Pnak). OTHER: Comic: Comic: Troll
Trouble, Comic pg47 – By James L. Shipman, Comic: Starfaring – By Paul Hogan, Troll Limricks: – By Trollhalla People.
New T&T Dice

Based on the game rules Kindred Dice: Fantastic Armies – By Ken St. Andre & James L. Shipman

PAYING & SHIPPING:

For all USA customers, shipping is FREE! You simply PayPal the total to this e-mail (Hobbit_King@Yahoo.com) and your items will be shipped Priority Mail. Large orders will be shipped slower.

For all OVERSEAS customers, please add $13.00 for shipping. Total your order, and then add $13.00 for shipping. Most overseas orders take from 7-14 days to arrive
(just as guess). This is the only rate offered with overseas orders.

Note: Some items can sell out (if all of you order the same item), but all items will be restocked within one week and shipped immediately. Every order sent to us will be filled and shipped. We also offer Tracking ($1.00 extra) for any USA customer. Tracking is not available for overseas orders. Special packing with added cardboard can be added to items shipped if requested.

Some of you on this mailing list are Hobby Shop owners, and we do appreciate your large orders. Discounts will continue to be offered when purchasing 5 or more copies of each item.

All items profiled here, new or reprinted are in mint condition when shipped.

This mailing list has 149 members as of this e-mail, all of whom are T&T fans
and have purchased something from Outlaw Press. You can also read this in the attached MS Word file.

An Official Publisher of Tunnels & Trolls.Outlaw Press Inc.

This is what I sent to everyone *except* him:

Everyone, things to think about before doing business with James Shipman of Outlaw Press:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=483885
http://eposic.net/blog/archives/298
http://falckart.blogspot.com/2009/12/stolen-art.html
http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/outlaw-press-aka-jim-shipman-is-a-big-crook/
http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/outlaw-pressjim-shipman-sinks-to-demented-pathetic-new-lows-in-art-theft-scandal/
http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/outlaw-press-thieving-update/
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-from-outlaw-press.html
http://unclebear.com/2009/12/putting-the-outlaw-in-outlaw-press/
http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/269217-outlaw-press-stolen-artwork-accusations.html
http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=11324399&postcount=843
http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=1998

I found this one especially interesting at http://eposic.net/blog/archives/298

Ken St. Andre
Phoenix, Arizona, 85008.
September 8, 2010

James,

I received your package yesterday with some surprise. Received six copies of the revised Gristlegrim Dungeon. This dismays me, as I told you to quit publishing it back in January of this year when I broke with you. If this parcel was an attempt at a reconciliation between us, then I appreciate the effort you took, but I reject it. Our friendship and partnership is broken and done forever. I do not wish to collaborate on Gristlegrim or any other project with you. Not now! Not ever again! You had no right to add your material to my work. You have no right to continue publishing and selling it. Please stop!

James, you no longer have any right to publish or sell my works. We have no written contracts. We have no formal accounting of royalties. Your habit of sending money and or copies of the items is no longer good enough. Any informal agreements we may have made in 2009 and earlier are terminated on my side of the deal. I no longer wish to associate with you, either professionally or informally.

Find some other outlet for your creativity. Leave me, and leave Tunnels and Trolls, alone. I am rejecting any further association with you.

I hope this is clearly understood. Do not publish anything with my name on it as author. Do not presume to collaborate with me on my projects. Do not keep attempting to infiltrate trollhalla.com under false names–you are banned and unwelcome on that site. Do not attempt to rewrite the history of Tunnels and Trolls on Wikipedia or any other online sources. Do not send me money. Do not send me product. I do not want it from you. However, I am under no legal obligation to send back things that arrive unsolicited in the mail. I won’t waste the money or the effort to send them back. I am not interested in theatrical gestures. I simply wish to terminate our association and to move on with other things in life.

I hereby reclaim my rights to anything I ever gave you to publish. In particular, I assert my right to the novel Griffin Feathers which consists entirely of my own work with some input in the short sections of the book from the members of Trollhalla.

I am forwarding the “royalties” that you sent me to Jeff Freels, the artist whose work you have re-used to illustrate this version of Gristlegrim. He deserves compensation for his work.

James, I am not angry at you, and I do not hate you. I simply will not associate with you ever again. For several years we were, I thought, very good friends. Outlaw Press did a lot for Tunnels and Trolls. You know why that time has ended. Let it go. Move on.

James, I will be publishing this letter in open forums on the internet, so that all the world can see how I feel, and how I react to what I can only believe are attempt s to manipulate me and to gain control of Tunnels and Trolls. If you have no ulterior intentions, then forgive me for being suspicious, but I no longer feel that I can trust you.
James, you have your own unique style of creativity. Please go and do your own thing, and stop messing with me and with Tunnels and Trolls.

Sincerely,
Ken St. Andre

Please, anybody who's reading this who knows how to get ahold of anybody who Shippy may be ripping off here (including the estate of Karl Edward Wagner!) please send them a copy of this email or a link to this blog.

15 games in 15 minutes: Ed Edition

2010-10-20T14:13:00.003-04:00

"The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen roleplaying games you've played that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

1. Tunnels & Trolls
2. First Edition Gamma World
3. First Edition Top Secret
4. Villains and Vigilantes
5. Fantasy Hero (first ed.)
6. Traveller (little black books)
7. Ninjas & Superspies
8. Talislanta (various editions)
9. NightLife
10. The Fantasy Trip
11. AD&D
12. Space Patrol / Star Patrol by Gamescience
13. Runequest (when it was still Glorantha)
14. Call of Cthulhu
15. Sorcerer (which stands in some way for the whole indie thing, but is also one of my favorite manifestations thereof)

Joe, you want to chime in?

Post worth reading by JBE

2010-09-16T14:00:00.003-04:00

Julia is awesome as usual, being called upon to defend her game from people who criticize her game without actually knowing much about it... as usual. The whole thing ended well though, with the initial poster showing up in the comments and being quite cool about everything in the end.

(Julia's note "please remember I’m a real person, not a swine" reminded me of the fact that the so-called "RPG pundit" is apparently still alive and still a terrible person. I hope one of those two things changes ASAP.)

Gen Con 2010

2010-08-10T00:38:00.006-04:00

So I went! I had a great time. Contrary to original plan, I didn't actually do any Games On Demand. (Slept too late for the 10 AM session both days. Got there 20 minutes late for the 2PM one once, and nothing was open; people weren't obviously playing games I was super interested in. So I didn't end up making it the next day, since I really wanted to be in the dealer room that afternoon.) Did play Apocalypse D&D / Dungeon World with Sage, who's working on extending it from Tony's work. Rocking good fun. Drew one of the characters. By my own standards for my work, the drawing was kind of mediocre, but everybody acted like it was Picasso, which was a great reminder that evaluation of artwork is relative. (No worries about a swelled head -- I was surrounded by incredible art all over Gen Con.)

Met cool people like Sage, Shannon, Paul, and Daniel, who I played that game with. Got to talk a bit with folks like John Harper, Matt Wilson, Matt Snyder, Ron Edwards, and at least briefly talk to other cool people like Vincent, Nathan Paoletta, Keith Senkowski, Luke, Thor, and Alexander of Burning Wheel, Emily Care, and probably a few others I can't remember. I'm grateful to know such a great bunch of people, even through the internet and the occasional con sighting.

I had a lot of fun with my posse -- we had a smaller group than usual, and it was just me and 4 other guys in the room, all of whom are awesome folks. Had a great time on the ride down talking to Robb and braving storms, walking around with Jason, Greg, Dave, and sometimes getting to see Pat, Pat, Mike, Mike, and other less plural folks. Saturday night at Buca di Beppo's was great -- we ordered less than usual, spent less than usual, but were at least as satisfied as ever. I think substituting individual long island iced teas for those who partake, instead of bottle after bottle of chianti for everyone, probably helped. Driving back with Greg and Dave was great. Dave had a series of 200+ gigapan-style photos from New York that I helped stitch together over the weekend. I took a few pictures at Gen Con myself, not a ton. Left my camera in my room on Saturday, which is costume day -- bit of a bummer. Oh, highlight of the con -- we had a kitchenette in our room, and Robb made some delicious breakfast skillet mix stuff the first morning. There were complaints about the bacon smell lingering in the room, but for the record, I did not mind one bit.

We roomed at Staybridge Suites, which is a number of blocks from the convention center, and inbetween the two is the Factory That Apparently Only Manufactures Sparks.

I bought the following hotness, which is a fraction of what cool things were available but was enough for now --

Apocalypse World. I was legally required to buy this because I attended Gen Con 2010 and like indie RPGs. There was no way around it.
Magic Burner. Adventure Burner would have been even better, but it sold out before I could get to it.
Mechaton. I have kids, why don't I own Mechaton?
Poison'd! Why not? It's cheap and I didn't buy it last year.
A copy of the blue-cover Holmes Basic D&D rulebook, which is the first one I ever played with.
An AD&D DM's Screen, with the beautiful artwork from Dave Trampier on it.
A copy of Monsters! Monsters! which Flying Buffalo/Blade just reprinted, and which I've wanted for ages.
An old copy of The Space Gamer with lots of info about Tékumel, and an interview with M.A.R. Barker.
Some more Gamescience dice, some more Death Dice from Flying Buffalo, and some extra dice bags.

That's all I can think of right now. There's a lot more I'd have loved to do, but I enjoyed it all. What a great trip.

M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel-Clairvoyance

2010-06-15T09:50:00.001-04:00

Great story about M.A.R. Barker at Grognardia.

You mean you're going to teach me how to have THE REAL POWER?

2010-05-26T14:25:00.002-04:00

So somebody awesome going by the moniker "Blackie the Blackball" retro-cloned the D&D Rules Cyclopedia under the title Dark Dungeons. And yes, the flavortext example character is called "Black Leaf."

Dedicated to All My Old School Renaissance Homeboys

2010-03-23T00:46:00.005-04:00

New T&T Fanzine

2010-03-03T20:01:00.002-05:00

Rising from the righteously immolated ashes of Outlaw Press, the T&T fan community brings out -- for free even! -- TrollsZine!

I'm gonna have to start spewing some fan art in that direction.

Via Dr. Rotwang.

FreeRPG Blog Loses It (Entertainingly)

2009-10-13T09:32:00.003-04:00

After a year of enthusing about other people's free games, Rob Lang of the Free RPG Blog can't take it anymore, and chooses a target to let out all the venom he's been holding back:

Icar - a dreadful vat of excrement
Icar by Rob Lang is a free science fiction roleplaying game set in a bland, plagiarised future. The fat of other genres has been scraped off and boiled in a stinking vat to produce a stock kitchen sink Sci Fi. Unintelligible rules, disparate formatting and penis inspired space craft are wrapped in a deceptively colourful cover. As we will discover, if you paint a turd then what you end up with is a painted turd.

YOU'RE poorly written!*

2009-09-02T11:42:00.007-04:00

UPDATE

Found a thread on "Naked Came the Gamer" on therpgsite. Discouraging, depressing. I don't follow the Old School Renaissance community closely enough to realize the absolute contempt with which so many of them regard Forge folks in general and Ron in particular (he's their favorite bete noire, but by by no means the only one).

I just don't get it. Why the hatred? Why the loathing? It's not mutual. Indie gamers tend to regard OSR folks with admiration, if anything. But a lout segment of the OSR just turn vicious when the topic of the Forge and its spinoffs comes up. Er, I meant a "loud" segment. Freudian typo.

Even though the essay challenges the OSR, the challenge is based on the premise that what they are trying to do is valuable -- the challenge is whether they are going to follow through on their valuable endeavor with integrity. (Whether or not Ron is correct about what "integrity" consists of here, the point is that he's saying "you're doing something awesome! Are you going to follow through?")

I just don't get it. If you just read the OSR threads you'd think that this was a longstanding rivalry and the Forge guys go around dissing them, likewise, crowing about how awesome forge games are and how much everybody else, including the OSR, sucks. But that never happens. There are a lot of asshole forge folks, and they say some real jerk-ass things, but pretty much always to and about each other. They don't, as a community, have a contempt for any other community of gamers. If anything they have a contempt for the traditional model of distribution.

Why the asymmetry?

END UPDATE

Ah, reaction to Ron's article in Fight On is beginning. In my blog reader today was a piece by James Maliszewski at Grognardia, which complained that other OSR people were getting upset about it, rather than doing the proper thing and quietly shrugging and writing it off as "poorly written and nakedly self-serving." No pun intended I guess.

I like Grognardia a lot, and was kind of disappointed that that was the level of engagement he displayed, but I don't know what else I expected. Grognardia's reaction to Carcosa was exactly the sort of thing Ron was complaining about.

James Raggi was called out directly by Ron, and in his response he simply tells Ron that Ron is mistaken about the nature and purpose of the changes in his work, that in fact Raggi agrees with Ron, basically, on all counts, and wouldn't do what Ron complained about him doing. So that's interesting, he didn't say "Ron, you're totally wrong! I was right to do that!" he said "Ron, you're totally right about everything except what you think I did, I didn't in fact do that, because I am on the same page in the first place!" That's actually a very positive way to disagree.

Ironically the comments to Raggi's blog, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, are much more full of snotty hating than the ones in Grognardia.

Interesting stuff all around; I hope to see more. Maybe I'll have to find some fora where they're discussing it.

Of course, I'll be really geeked when somebody actually buys S/Lay w/Me in response to all that and starts publically hating on or digging my artwork.

* the title of this post is an inside joke which as far as I know will make exactly one reader of this blog chuckle. Hi Dave!

UPDATE: Grognardia's well over 119 comments now, including some thoughtful stuff, positive and negative, and bucketloads of stupid. James M himself does not contribute at all to the stupid in the comments, to his credit, and insists that only a very small fraction of Old School Renaissance folks know about Ron and the Forge, and only a small fraction of those dislike them. It's just that they're very loud people.

As far as I know, there are no loud Forge people hating on neo-grognards, nor spending long comment threads railing against caricatured boogeymen of them, so there's some asymmetry there. Seems a pity. The two groups sure seem to have a lot in common to me.

S/Lay w/Me Actual Play - Asad at the Monastery.

2009-09-01T13:06:00.006-04:00

OK, I wrote this up over several days, so it may not flow very well. So much happened during that short game! And every bit of it seemed important to write up! So here we go.

------

Joe and I sat down to try S/Lay w/Me last night. Joe was "you," and I was "I" in Ron's terminology (which causes a bit of "Who's On First" syndrome when you use it in reference to a real life situation: "I'll be 'you' and you be 'I'.") That is, Joe was the quasi-player, and I was the quasi-GM.

Joe chose the "young warrior, fierce and feared, but my hair is grey," but changed the hair to white. He's an olive-skinned fellow from a desert land, with strangely white hair, and has a scimitar. (Originally rapier, retroactively edited to scimitar cause it made more sense. We did a couple of those little retroactive edits in the course of the game where it made sense.)

He also chose the "clean, clear air of the mountains," for the setting, and for the goal, "to ring the bell in the monastery, to rid himself of a curse..." he was going to go on from there and work out what the curse was and all but I told him I thought all we really needed was "to ring the bell." He wanted a name for the monastery in these Himalayan-like mountains, and I suggested "Leng?" We went with that. In my mind, that probably fixed the character of the inhabitants of the monastery...

I came up with a Monster -- the Yeti, which was at least as much spirit as flesh, mainly red eyes in the windy darkness and sharp claws. (It attacked Singly, Savagely, With Deceit, and.... um, I forget the other adjective choice.) And a Lover -- Aita, a shaman, a tiny woman, Mongolian in appearance and dress, wearing various charms and fetishes made of feathers and fur, and surrounded by spirits. Her desire for Asad was "innocent, forbidden, open-hearted, and knowledgeable."

The location was a series of plateaus and mesas connected by ancient bridges of stone or rope. Somewhere out there is the monastery of Leng, presumably. The area where things start was a broad shelf on the side of a steep cliff, with a semi-wild garden and trees covering it. There was a pool by the cliffside, formed by a stream cascading down the cliff. There were sigils carved on either side of the waterfall, and trees on either side.

Joe had Asad arrive out of the mist by a rope bridge, and walk through the garden, up to the pool and waterfall. At the very last second he saw the previously unnoticed Aita before him, sitting on the grass, in a meditative position. The wind blew the grass around her in a circle, as if she were in the center of a vortex, a ring of breezes. (That was how I imagined her to be "surrounded by spirits" as I'd jotted down.)

They spoke, and there were some locked eyes and there was some alternating shyness and fascination from Aita. She offered him food, showing him how to crack open the pods growing on the nearby trees. He asked who she was, and she explained she was a shaman and protected the people of the area, from the danger whose name she would not even speak. She offered him a necklace with a feather on it to protect him from the creature. He let her put it on his neck -- another awkward lock-eyes moment -- which was unusual for him, letting a stranger get that close to him. When that happened the vortex of spirit-winds circled round them *both*. When he inquired further about the creature, she asked him to be still and listen... and when he did, he could hear far away, under the noise of the waterfall, under the noise of the wind, a faraway roaring, that sounded like a mix of a huge animal and a person filled with pain and rage.

That noise would never leave his consciousness for the rest of the tale, while the Yeti lived.

Aita explained that even visualizing the creature could provoke it and summon it to them.

I think the above was two or three Goes.

On Joe's Go, he had Asad ask her how to get to the Monastery, and had her lead him off.... which began the Match, since he was taking action toward his Goal.

They traveled several bridges and went up high above the tree line and found a plateau with a huge, sprawling building on it, the size of a village -- the Monastery of Leng. In front of it was a deep pool, with stepping-stones leading across it to the front door, making it kind of like a moat. There was a gong to ring, and they rang it, and to the front door came a creepy little monk.

He agreed to take Asad into the monastery, but refused to let Aita in without "purification." She seemed to know what he meant by that, and agreed to it, suprising him. She took off all her clothes and submerged herself in the ice-cold pool, rising out again and dressing again while he leered. Then she dressed again, with Asad giving her his cloak, and they went inside.

They were left alone while the Creepy Old Monk went to get tea. During this time they talked, and Asad asked her why she stayed here, and she explained her spirits were the spirits of these mountains, that she was bound to them and they to her, and they were her life. He pointed out that there were mountains near his home to the south too, and perhaps she could get to know some new spirits. In doing this he pissed off her spirits, and earned a die for implying he would take her with him.

The Creepy Old Monk offered them tea, and Aita refused. He insisted, pushing the cup back (despite it being a hot cup of tea and her near freezing), and he pushed the cup back toward her again. Finally her spirits knocked the cup over, angering him. Asad insisted they get moving, so the Creepy Old Monk took them down a corridor, to a door, opened it up, and let Asad walk before him into a gray room... whose floor was a Tulpic illusion. Asad fell fifty feet down a pit, into the darkness, and heard the door slam above. And up there the Creepy Old Monk was clutching the protective fetish feather he had snatched off Asad's neck as he fell.

He was in a cave and felt a biting wind, like spearshafts of ice through him. The roar was overwhelming. The Yeti was here. It barrelled up to him and slashed him across the leg with its claws, wounding him. He attacked it with his scimitar and found it barely noticed his blows. Finally he sought an escape, and found a narrow stairwell that the beast couldn't follow.... which led to an opening onto the cliff face... and another stair to the plateau... and there he was back at the outside again.

And he could see an angry circle of winds writhing around the grounds. (Aita's been separated from her spirits? Very bad news.) He approached it and it attacked him with its feeble power -- whipping at his clothes. He spoke to it angrily and talked it into blowing underneath the door and opening the bar behind it. It did and they went in "together," man and spirit-wind-vortex, after Aita.

Asad found himself a monk to talk to... The monastery as a whole was stone rooms and corridors with a spiral pattern, so that everything curved eventually towards the center. Joe pointed out to me that the description of Asad was "fierce _and feared_" and I might want to include that in people's reactions to me. I played that up in the young monk's reaction -- Asad scared the piss out of him. "Where is Aita? Where is the shaman woman?" The young monk said, "woman! No woman passes these halls..." "Not even if she has received purification?" He looked shocked. "But after purification comes... punishment..."

Soon Asad was following a terrified young monk to the Chamber of Punishment. They came down a corridor to a door locked from the other side. There was a window grille through which Asad could peer and see a small auditorium, like a Victorian operating theater, with a slab in the center, and on the slab was Aita, stripped naked, on her knees, her head chained low, her arms chained up and pulled cruelly behind her. A sequence of progressively more horrible implements of torture was laid out before her, with an empty space at the very beginning, where had lain the cat o' nine tails that the Creepy Old Monk was carrying as he walked around her, leering again. The seats were filled with monks of all ages, watching with seeming detachment.

The everpresent roar was getting louder, behind Asad, and he heard the young monk scamper back along the corridor and die at the hands of a hungry Yeti. So ended my Go with the action of the monster.

I thought there would be a fight with the monster here, but I was wrong. Asad shrugged off the Yeti behind him, letting it eat its victim, and beat his way through the door into the Chamber of Punishment. He unsheathed his scimitar and lopped off the head of the nearest monk in the audience. Then he felt the Red Rage descend, and all was a blur till he found himself in a room full of decapitated monks, with one living monk in front of him -- the Creepy Old Monk, whom he had carved up a bit but not killed.

He snatched the keys from him and held them up for the wind-spirits to take and unlock Aita, which they did, and surrounded her again, protectively. Asad gave her his cloak again, and she wore just that for now. Asad snatched back the feather-charm, which the Creepy Old Monk still had. They contemptuously left the monk behind, and went out into the corridor again, which the Yeti had deserted.

They spoke and it was established that Asad needed to go to the center of the Yeti-haunted monastery to ring the bell, that the charm wouldn't last that long in the monastery -- the protection from the Yeti would run out. Aita declared she would follow him to the center of the monastery, but that she needed to find a place alone to speak with her spirits first.

They found a storage chamber full of grains given to the monks in tribute, purple cloth such as their robes were made of, and the like. Asad guarded the door and she spread out a cloth on the ground and knelt down to commune with the spirits.

She told them she was unbinding them, that they were free and she was free of them, they could come or go as they pleased. They freaked out and created a small tornado within the storage room, laying waste to everything within, all around her, nad then disappeared... and all was quiet.

"Asad?... Asad, will you come to me? I am alone. For the first time in many years... I am alone."

And Asad entered the chamber and barred the door, and Embraced the Lover.

When they left the chamber, she had fashioned a (classic pulp magazine cover girl style) shift or tunic out of some of the monks' purple fabric and a rope belt.

The monks' chanting was everpresent, and mixed with the sound of the monster's roar. They were linked.

They made their way towards the center of the monastery, where the Bell was located. All through the monastery they found monks chanting, deep throat-singing chants, with their hands in mudras resembling claws. They were summoning and strengthening the Yeti to defend the monastery. They all ignored Asad, and he them.

I'm a little fuzzy in the memory as to exactly how things went next, but soon Asad and Aita were almost to the bell room, and the Yeti attacked, slamming Aita against a wall and knocking her out cold with a splatter of blood against the wall (killing her? the dice had yet to decide whether she would live...).

Asad fought the beast again with his scimitar, putting all his heart and soul into wearing it down, to little avail, taking hits from the claws... Through the next arch he saw the Bell itself, in the center of the monastery... in a great round room, the floor covered in sand, the bell a tube of metal on a dais...

The sight of his goal gave Asad strength, and he started to prevail, when...

The Creepy Old Monk limped from a corridor nearby and walked up to the bell. The Creepy Old Monk bared his arm and cut his own palm with a dagger, and let his blood drip on the bell. and the bell vibrated along with the roar of the Yeti and the chants of the monks.... And the blood, by the power of the bell, gave form and flesh and strength to the Yeti, and the tide of battle was turned against Asad.

The Yeti knocked Asad to the ground and held him down, its claws holding him to the ground by the neck, like a pitchfork... It raised its other claw to strike him the death blow...

And a vortex of angry wind spirits kicked sand into the face of the now-enfleshed Yeti, shocking it so that it pulled its claws away from Asad and he got away free.

Asad himself sprang to the bell and the Creepy Old Monk, and dashed the latter to the stone dais, cracking his skull like an eggshell. (I'm getting fuzzy on the order of events, that might have happened shortly before or after this.)

As the Yeti loomed over him, Asad stood over the bell and Established Mastery Over the Goal (as mentioned in the rules -- got a die there and his Go ended) by cutting his *own* palm and bleeding over the bell.

On my Go I responded:

As the blood fell on the bell a new spirit arose, Asad's own soul-form, and it gathered to it the sands (Asad, a man of the desert...) and even as the yeti was born of spirit and mist and snow, a Djinn arose from Asad's spirit and the sands... Asad's consciousness blurred and wavered, and as his body fell he awoke in the Djinn's body, and faced the Yeti, Monster to Monster.

And the Yeti tore into him, rending the sand with the force of the ice and wind. The Yeti was on his home turf, strengthened by the old monk's life force, and even a Djinn was no match for it...

I *think* this was where the match ended. I could be wrong. But I think that was it. I took a short break for a phone call and Joe added up the numbers and chose: * attaining the goal (free), * saving the life of the Lover, * killing the Monster. He did not choose to save his own life, though because he got the Goal he didn't die, he was badly wounded.

Anyway...

Then began the Red Rage. But in Djinn-form the Red Rage took physical form -- an unquenchable fire in his heart, which fused the very sands into molten glass, so that instead of a Sand-Djinn, he became a Djinn of glowing, molten, pure crystal -- transparent magma.

The Molten-Glass Djinn destroyed the Yeti, and steam and the smell of burnt flesh were all that was left. Across the monastery, the chanting monks who had sustained and strengthened the Yeti ended their chants and drooped forward, blood dripping from their nostrils and eyes, dead, to a man.

And then Asad as the Molten-Glass Djinn turned back to his body, and his consciousness fstarted to flicker back and forth between monster-self and man-self, and through that haze the man-self stood up and with great difficulty struck the bell a clear, loud blow, and in that instant the curse was ended.

(This was another slight retroactive edit -- we had this happen without the bell struck at first, and then shortly thereafter we realized it ought to happen *because* the bell was struck, so we decided that was how it happened.)

The Djinn and the man were severed, and the djinn, fifty feet tall, strode out of the monastery, leaving clouds of billowing steam in the snow behind it... and it began walking back to the Desert Lands, and many a legend tells of the time that the man made, as it were, of ice glowing with fire, strode through the mountains surrounded by hot clouds, its glow reaching up into the heavens.

For the curse had always been the Red Rage, and that rage was now no longer a lurking presence in his heart but a beautiful, elemental Djinn.

Asad lost consciousness and awoke in the care of Aita, at her spring, where she'd carried him back with the aid of her no-longer-bound spirits. The first blow from the Yeti to his leg had lamed him, and without the rage in the depth of his heart to push him on, it would cripple him. But it mattered no more -- without the rage his warrior's ferocity was no longer necessary. He could just be a man now, not a warrior, fierce and feared. He was no longer burdened with the curse.

Asad stayed with Aita in the mountains, ending his story as part of the game.

=======

some notes -- so much of this seems as if it would have been planned out beforehand, but not a damn bit of it was. I was astounded at how well it all held together and cohered. Both Joe and I have read Graham Walmsey's "Play Unsafe" chapter on reincorporation, and its source material in Keith Johnstone; I'd recommend either or both as good background in how to do a game like this well. But I was pretty blown away by some of the reincorporation Joe did -- he way he reincorporated the freed air spirits as a help to him during the final fight? most of all, how he made the Red Rage he'd come up with during the fight in the chamber of punishment into the curse he was here to rid himself of, and making the split into Man and Djinn into the manifestation of the ridding of the curse? That was stellar.

I was surprised to find myself creating Aita as so innocent and shy. I wouldn't have expected myself to do that, given the sexy nature of the game, but it was what came to mind and it worked beautifully. Perhaps it was in overcompensation for that that I pushed kind of hard to get her naked, and even in bondage, at the insistence of the creepy old monk (who in retrospect I suppose is my evil lecherous avatar in the story... good thing he got what he deserved!).

I felt kind of bad making the whole monastery kind of creepy and evil. Like Alec Baldwin and the Dalai Lama were going to go shout FREE TIBET and kick my ass. But it's the way it came to me. I blame Lovecraft. (The "whole monastery creepy and evil" thing was unexpected to Joe too... he expected the old monk to be the monster in disguise.)

Overall the whole game was a creative high at a level I haven't experienced in a while. Several times during the game I restrained myself from whooping and hollering at how awesome it was.

I know this kind of awesome isn't exactly unknown in well designed story games with creatively engaged players. But I just don't get to play such very often, and it was a big deal to me.

Well done Ron!

Whoops! Adam Black is just down the hall.

2009-08-16T01:11:00.002-04:00

If you got here by following the web address given for Adam Black in the S/Lay w/Me game book, smack Ron upside the head and click here.

(I KID. I'm glad he got it out for GenCon, even if it wasn't in time to proofread it thoroughly enough to catch the mistaken URL....)

(And S/Lay w/Me kicks ass and has a bunch of my art in it too. Woot!)

Brief Danger Patrol

2009-07-18T02:05:00.006-04:00

I printed out Danger Patrol and brought it along to the "Car Wash" tonight, and actually got to run through a scene of it. Players were Dave VanDyke, Matt "Kub" Kubiak, and a fellow whose name I forget, I had just met him; he was a boardgamer but hadn't tried RPGs before. Robb and Jason had some important video games to play and couldn't be bothered; to be fair, that's kinda why they show up in the first place, not to play hippie games.

Dave and Kub chose randomly (semi-randomly -- Kub drew Alien Professor and I suggested he might want to swap Alien out cause it's kind of a DIY style) and we ended up with Max Powers the Psychic Professor, and Vance Granger, the Two-Fisted Explorer. (TODO: ask Dave the other player's name; it was mentioned once but it went right out of my sieve-like brain.) Our third player, the one who hadn't played RPGs before, chose a Robot Commando named THGHUS (pronounced "Thuggus").

I gave them the teaser, then asked for "Previously..." and we got some setup involving Max uncovering a Neptunian assassination plot, and THGHUS and Vance getting into some trouble with the Neptunians in a rescue plan that got complicated (somehow involving Vance and a Neptunian princess...)

So cards for all those things went out on the table. I explained that we were probably only going to do one scene tonight but all those were available for future scenes, or adding to the existing scene.

Following the suggestion in the rules I cut down the number of crimson apes by two since we had only three players -- TOTALLY unnecessary. "Three hits, no roll" powers are freaking BADASS, and they waded through the threats fairly quickly, even after I decided that the apes turned out to be six-hit threats after all, not three.

It only took two rounds.

First round: the Professor uses his telekinesis to remotely steer the damaged rocketcar to safety (Danger: he landed it on the only nearby surface -- a tanker of rocket fuel! -- safely). He also plugs into the currents controlling the malfunctioning traffic controller system using his gadgets and brings them back into sync. Two threats gone. Like that. (He got a second action because he used a power token for the first.)

Then THGHUS got out his hidden weaponry and lit up the immediately threatening ape, only wounding and angering it, and ending up with the ape hanging off of his robot body which was hanging from the fin of their rocket car by a damaged arm! (only Bashed, no major damage, but still, you could see sparks flying and stuff.)

Time for Vance. Vance is an Explorer, and knows a thing or two about crimson apes. He climbed down THGHUS's body to get eye to eye with the creature. After fending off some wicked blows by the ape, he hit it with a dominance attack -- essentially a staring and screaming contest, or something like that -- which forced it to acknowledge him as alpha. (He made him wear the Cone of Shame, if you will.) The now-docile ape climbed the poor robot's body and sat meekly in the vehicle, just as...

The one remaining ape, who'd been ignored all this turn, dropped onto the car and smacked poor Powers upside the head. (Reduced Hit!) Ape Two was pretty angry to see what had happened Ape One... after all, Ape Two had been the ORIGINAL Alpha. (Danger!)

The next turn though, that ape had no chance. Professor Powers came up with some rubber science about the metal implants in the backs of the apes' heads (which we hadn't noticed up till that point) and how they'd be adversely affected by the currents in the navigation system, which he'd already gotten under his control (3 free hits on an ally's attack for rubber science!). This added to Vance's two-fisted haymaker, so that just as he cold-cocked the ape, the thing's implant went haywire, sending it into a twitching frenzy and making it an easy target for THGHUS's weaponry.

We cut it off after one scene, though we briefly discussed what the interlude scenes would probably have been and where it would go from there.

Fun little game considering I had to do zero prep beyond what was done for me in the rules. There was no discernable difference in play experience between the experienced gamers and the complete newb, except for one point where he got a little caught up in scanning his powers list and it had to be pointed out that he could do anything he darn well pleased, what was on the sheet was just stuff he got an extra bonus for doing.

If I was going to do this again, well, I'd probably pile on the threats a bit more. But maybe the players just got lucky. Or maybe two turns was fine for an intro like this, and if they kept on going, they'd have felt the impact of the power tokens they'd spent pretty soon.

Anyway, yay! I got to run a game!

Some Demons

2009-07-11T14:27:00.006-04:00

I've been mulling around an idea for a Sorcerer game.

Inspiration: certain cartoons with humanoid demons and such in them. David Trampier's "Wormy," anything fantasy by Vaughn Bodé, James West, maybe in a more serious vein, old children's book illustrations (Arthur Rackham, Sidney Sime).

Demons (aka imps) are little projections of id-charged ectoplasm from another universe, who can be brought into ours via various ancient rituals. The rituals, and their names, are all old school and traditional -- magic circles, abracadabra, names from the Goetia, the whole nine yards. But the demons, once they're here, have quite modern tastes and attitudes. They tend to be a bunch of little vulgarians, perhaps with Needs for boozing or getting high, cult movies or gambling, sating themselves at all-night buffets, or what not. But of course they're bursting with arcane power.

I'm thinking of two different kinds of Sorcerers, primarily. The NPCs are going to include a bunch of pretentious sorcerous weenies, people you love to hate. A grim gothy sorcerer lord, an ancient bearded cultic badass, and so on. The PCs are going to be primarily ordinary schmucks who happen, by design or by accident, to have gotten access to the old traditions of sorcery and gotten involved with them. It'll be kind of like "play yourself as a sorcerer," but not literally yourself, just the sort of person you might know and hang out with if they were real.

So besides the contrast between the freaky old rituals and the down-to-earth imps would be accompanied by a contrast between the earthy demons and the annoying NPC sorcerers.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this for a while, and started doing a little demon concept art last night.

Blood Red

2009-07-11T09:43:00.002-04:00

Do you like art depicting chicks in chainmail? Battle babes? Warrior women? Witches? Demonesses? Of course you do, so go and check out James West's newly revamped Blood Red Comics.

S/Lay w/Me

2009-07-05T18:04:00.003-04:00

I'm really looking forward to getting this game at GenCon this year:

[S/Lay w/Me] The back-story and earliest playtesting
[S/lay W/Me] The Lion, the Wretch, and the Woman
[S/Lay w/Me] the Lover and the liquids

Update: buy S/Lay w/Me here.

Lady Blackbird - Session 2

2009-07-03T19:18:00.001-04:00

The details of the Lady Blackbird game I ran last week are starting to get hazy, so I'd best try and get something written up.

We started with the gang arriving at Nightport and breaking up into several groups. Snargle stayed behind on the ship to work on some security issues. Kale took his mysterious package for delivery and payment. Lady Blackbird, Naomi, and Vance went to meet with August Cross, the information broker.

Kale rented a rickshaw and rode to the estate of Giovanni Canter to deliver the package. The man had no idea who he was, who Harwood was (Harwood was the guy who hired Kale to deliver the box back on Haven) or what was in the box. Upon opening it, a metallic, clockwork monkey was discovered. It came to life and killed Canter and his bodyguard with its razor sharp claws. Kale decided he wanted this monkey so he could examine it closer, and through some clever tactics, and a bit of luck, disabled it with some wire deftly inserted into a hole in the clockwork creature's chest. He quickly loaded it back into the box, emptied Canter's safe and dashed back to the waiting rickshaw. He decided to go to his favorite tavern and celebrate a bit before heading back to The Owl.

The Lady, Naomi and Vance met with Cross at his fancy office. It turned out, he didn't accept money, but only traded in secrets. He knew who all of them were, what with the bounty on them and all. He wanted to know how a Stormblood like Lady Blackbird had come to be intimate with a Fireblood like Uriah Flint. He had also demanded secrets from Naomi and Vance, and they agreed, though he told them he would gather his payment from them another time. They were in his debt. He wrote something on a sheet of paper, placed into an envelope and sealed it with wax. It would lead them to a man who knew how to navigate the Remnants and find Flint. After leaving, they started off to Vance's favorite tavern, when they were ambushed! The ambushers were all human, except for the large, trollish arm that grabbed Lady Blackbird from the shadows...

Snargle, back on The Owl, was busy setting traps and crawling around through the air ducts. He got a visitor: it was Violet! He was freaked out, but let her on board. She wanted to warn him that Noah was on the warpath. She told him he needed to get the rest of The Owl's crew together and get out of Nightport now! There was a lot of awkward conversation, and an even more awkward hug, and Violet left. Snargle ran around the ship, preparing for the worst. Then it arrived. Noah and his hired thugs showed up. Snargle cut all the lights on the ship and prepared himself. He got several of the thugs with his traps, and the others, he ambushed from the air ducts. In the end, it was just Noah, who was very jumpy at this point. Snargle lured him into the mess, and pushed him into the small, walk-in fridge, slammed and bolted the door. As Noah watched through the tiny window, Snargle changed his shape into something vaguely Noah-like. He walked out to the gangplank and looked down at the rest of Noah's men. Could he trick them?

The Lady, Naomi and Vance were surrounded. A Shadowblood troll had just grabbed Lady Blackbird and was dragging her back into the shadows. Vance used his Warpblood to teleport Lady Blackbird to safety (?) on the top of a nearby lamp-post. Naomi confronted the troll. She'd fought trolls before, and made quick work of him, pounding his skull into pulp. Kale stumbled across the scene, heading to the same tavern as the Captain. He grabbed the rickshaw from the rickshaw boy and ran to help the others. Lady Blackbird summoned up a strong wind to clear a path for Kale. She jumped down from the lamp-post and she and Naomi started running to the ship. Vance hopped in the back of the rickshaw and Kale grabbed ahold of it and started running. Vance laid down some suppressive fire to keep the thugs from following or getting too close.

They got back to the docks to find The Owl surrounded and Noah walking down from inside the ship. Snargle, pretending to be Noah, hoped that the Captain would not shoot him without asking questions first. Everyone got onto the ship and Vance walked up to Noah/Snargle and realized right away that it was Snargle... the goblin was not very good at making a perfect shape-shifting disguise, so his "Noah" had a goblin-ish skin tone and Snargle's yellow eyes. Noah/Snargle told the men to stand down. He was going to have a meeting with Captain Vance. The Owl closed up and took off.

Snargle quickly and snivelingly told Vance what had happened and begged not to be shot. Vance told him there'd be no shooting. At this point there were a couple of refreshment scenes, but I can't quite remember the particulars (maybe some of the players can pipe in and help me out.) There was some history set out between Vance and Noah having served together in the Imperial Navy. I also remember a nice little exchange. Kale was being cagey about what was in the box... he was loathe to tell anyone about the clockwork monkey until he had a chance to examine it.

Kale (to the Captain): I would never endanger the ship.
Snargle (sotto voce): What about the crew?

Vance let Noah out of the freezer and they had a nice talk where the Captain let Noah know he was their prisoner for the time being. Noah was not happy, but resigned to his fate. He was locked up in the extra berth.

The note from August Cross was opened. It contained a set of coordinates. Snargle looked at them and was concerned. They were up. Way up. Like, up near the edge of where the atmosphere was. He'd never flown so high before. The Owl could handle it, it was just... strange. He had no idea what could be up there. So up they went, through the cloud-deck and above it. Eventually, the clouds were far below them, and they saw something queer: stars. The sky above them was dark, and stars flickered. Everyone was glued to the portholes.

Then as they approached the coordinates, they saw something. A chunk of rock. On that chunk of rock: a lighthouse, with its light sweeping through the dark sky...

More to come after the next game in two weeks.

Demons of Finlay

2009-06-23T23:17:00.001-04:00

I really want to play in, or run, a game of Sorcerer for which which these are the illustrations.

Lady Blackbird - Session 1, Part 2

2009-06-08T19:45:00.002-04:00

Lady Blackbird - Session 1, Part 2

We had taken a break and started up again with a refreshment scene. Captain Vance and Lady Blackbird were in the galley (with Naomi lurking nearby, keeping an eye on Cyrus) drinking some tea. There was polite palaver and some apologies. Eventually the rest of the crew joined them and they discussed the next step.

Fuel was still low. Snargle was pretty sure they wouldn't make it to Haven with what little they had. Kale suggested they try and contact Noah who was likely in the area. Snargle seemed a bit dubious. Noah, we discovered, what the captain of The Kestrel, another smuggling ship. He had a bit of history with Cyrus and The Owl. Most recently, The Owl had taken over a client from Noah, and a rather lucrative contract. When they had last met, at Nightport , there were words and blows exchanged, but as Cyrus pointed out "no one got shot". Snargle sent out a coded signal to The Kestrel, and they waited.

Eventually, they were contacted, by Violet, the pilot of The Kestrel (insert non-stop "Violet-the-pilot" comments here). It turned out that Snargle had a bit of a crush on Violet, and Paul really played the shy Snargle to the hilt. There was an awkward conversation between them until finally Cyrus showed up, got Noah on the wireless, and they got down to business. The Owl was hauling some spirits from Olympia, in particular several barrels of 120 year old brandy, and six bottles of Ambrosia wine. Cyrus was willing to trade those for some fuel. Noah seemed amicable to the trade and they agreed to rendezvous in a few hours.

(It wasn't until the drive home after the game that I realized we had a burgeoning, perhaps one-sided relationship between and goblin and human named Violet... where had I heard that before? Oh yeah, the sample characters from The Shadow of Yesterday. I swear, I didn't plan it. I just grabbed one of the names off the list. I think Snargle has a better chance than Oliphant though... at some point, I don't remember exactly when in the game, Violet agreed to meet up with Snargle someday, for a drink maybe.)

The Kestrel showed up and hovered next to The Owl and the ships lowered their gangways to each other, and the captains met outside. Cyrus noticed that Noah seemed to have more thugs/muscle on his ship than he'd had before and in fact brought three of them over to The Owl, which was sort of against the smuggler's code. They inspected the goods but Noah seem dissatisfied. He hinted that there needed to be more in their trade... he wanted the Lady Blackbird!

(I have to admit, I took this idea from Paul. He made an off-handed comment about how it would suck if there was a bounty out for Lady Blackbird. I thought to myself "it would suck indeed... for you guys!" So yeah, bounty on Lady Blackbird, and The Owl too I guess.)

Cyrus played dumb, and stalled, while Snargle, who'd been listening from the bridge, called Lady Blackbird and Naomi in their berth and warned them. The two snuck to the gun turret and crammed themselves in. Noah's thugs searched The Owl, finding some of the smuggling compartments, but they didn't find the women (they were not the sharpest of goons). Noah was not happy, but took the wine and brandy and left, but warned Cyrus that he'd be keeping on eye on him. Everyone on The Owl breathed a sigh of relief when The Kestrel flew off, after giving them their much needed fuel. Snargle said bye to Violet.

Finally, they made it to Haven. Lady Blackbird, Naomi, and Cyrus headed off to the Boarshead Tavern, where the Lady was to meet her contact, Silas Quinn. He told them that there had been some trouble in the Remnants, some sort of pirate civil war. Uriah Flint was there, but the way to his hold was hidden. He suggested that she travel to Nightport, and find a man named August Cross, who was an information broker. If anyone could help her, it was this man Cross.

In the meantime, Kale had been going to various shops, buying supplies for the ship; food, parts, and other necessities. He also met some of his underworld contacts and took a job. There was a box, locked, about four feet long, by two, by two. He was to deliver it to a certain person in Nightport and would be paid handsomely, and in fact, got a chunk of change upfront. Kale decided not to mention this job to the captain until they were on their way. I assume Snargle was daydreaming about Violet during this time. Actually, he was fiddling with the ship, but I'm sure daydreaming was involved.

The ship was en route to Nightport. It was night, and everyone was in bed. Snarlge was in his hammock-like bag in the cockpit, and was awakened by a blipping sound. There were ships on the sonar! Three of them, closing fast! He shouted over the com and everyone scrambled, dashing to the helm. The three ships were The Kestrel (naturally), The Raven, and The Sparrow (these last two ships were captained by associates of Noah).

Snargle hailed The Kestrel, and a rather apologetic Violet answered. Cyrus demanded to talk to Noah, but Violet said her captain had nothing to say, and cut the transmission. Cyrus ran to the turret, and prepared for battle. He targeted The Sparrow's bridge, and the 37mm blew a hole through it. The Sparrow started to sink, and Cyrus hailed Noah, saying if The Kestrel and Raven, didn't back off, they'd follow The Sparrow down to the Lower Depths. The ships backed off, and Noah again warned that he'd be keeping his eye on Cyrus. The two ships headed down to try and rescue The Sparrow. The Owl continued on its way to Nightport. That's where we wrapped things up for the night.

So later this month we're going to meet up again and see what happens when the gang gets to Nightport. Gotta say, it was a helluva fun game. Everyone really got a chance for their character to shine, and there was some crazy-cool action.

Lady Blackbird - Session 1, Part 1

2009-05-30T13:59:00.007-04:00

Last night I ran a session of Lady Blackbird. What follows is an account of the game.

I had five players, so all the roles were taken. Lady Blackbird was played by Randy, and really did a lot with her Stormblood abilities. Tammy played Naomi, and was scary. James took the roll of Captain Cyrus Vance, and played him with panache. Chris was the sneaky and clever Kale, and Paul was Snargle, and really brought the funny to the table.

They started out in the brig of The Hand of Sorrow, in cells with electrified bars, while two somewhat disinterested guard played cribbage nearby. Plans were hatched, and the cribbage playing of the guards was constantly criticized by Cyrus. Snargle changed his color to match the metal bulkhead. He then squeezed between the bars and jumped up to a steam-pipe that ran along the ceiling. He dropped down next to the control panel that electrified the cells and turned off the juice. Then many things happened at once.

Kale picked the lock of the cell he and the Captain were in, and Cyrus dashed out towards one of the guards. Naomi kicked the cell door off its hinges of the cell holding her and Lady Blackbird. She dashed out, grabbed one the guards and snapped his neck. Cyrus, using a length of chain from one of the bunks in the cell (Naomi was kind enough to tear the chain from the bunk for him earlier) rushed the other guard. Sadly, Snargle thought he was being helpful by tripping the guard, who fell at Cyrus' feet and under the chain's swing. The guard then gave the Captain ye-olde-groin-punch, and drew his rapier. He never go a chance to use it, since Naomi came up behind him and snapped *his* neck. Yikes.

The Captain hatched a plan of escape. Snargle and Kale would wear the guards jackets and be leading to their commanding officer. He knew a way up to the upper deck of The Hand of Sorrow that should be lightly patrolled. Kale was working on booby trapping the door to the brig, using some wire to electrify the door, when the communication panel in the room crackled, asking for Private Bell, now being played by Snargle. The goblin altered his voice and answered. He was told, by Captain Hollis, to prepare the prisoners for transportation. Troops would be sent down momentarily to escort them to interrogation. It was time to go!

Cutting through the galley, and down some nearly empty corridors, the group made their way up to the deck of The Hand of Sorrow About two hundred yards away was The Owl. Between them and their boat was a platoon of troops practicing marching drills. Behind them, another platoon doing fencing practice.

Lady Blackbird summoned up a bolt of lightning, and blasted a fuel depot on the other end of The Hand of Sorrow, hoping to cause enough of a distraction to let herself and the others slip unnoticed to The Owl . Well, the best laid plans... She indeed blew up the depot, but the lightning got a bit out of control and surged in all directions, with her at the epicenter. Not terribly subtle. Then an alarm went off. Prisoners had escaped! Uh-oh. Plan B was enacted : run like hell to The Owl!

Running and jumping over prone troops (with Naomi carrying the exhausted Lady Blackbird, and Cyrus hobbling along with his groin injury), they finally made it to the boat. The four men guarding The Owl prepared to do battle, but the Captain shot two of the men dead and ordered the other two to hook up a fuel line to The Owl, which was almost running on fumes before they were captured. As Snargle pulled The Owl away from the larger ship, the fuel hose disconnected and sprayed flammable liquid all over the deck of the Hand of Sorrow. A well placed ricochet shot by the Captain ignited it, and they were off!

Snargle dropped The Owl down underneath The Hand of Sorrow and set course back towards Haven. Then a dozen small blips appeared on short range sonar. Imperial Dragonflies! (I see the Dragonflies as being very similar to the "flaptors" from Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky.")

The Dragonflies opened fire on The Owl. Kale modified the engine output to create a huge trail of black smoke, while Snargle tipped the nose of the boat down, diving towards the Lower Depths. The Captain manned the 37mm. Eventually, with The Owl skimming across the surface of the Lower Depths, the number of Dragonflies dropped to two (Lady Blackbird had joined the Captain in the cramped gun turret and had sent strong, short gusts of wind at the smaller craft, forcing them to fall back, or crash into each other). Cyrus was having an impossible time hitting the last two with the cannon. He pulled his two pistols out, and with Lady Blackbird's help, using her wind magic, he took out the last two Dragonflies.

Flush with victory, Cyrus turned to Lady Blackbird and kissed her on the cheek. She drew back and smacked him across the face, and climbed down from the gunnery turret in a huff...

OK, that's enough for now. More coming soon!

From the Good Causes Dept

2009-05-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

If you are so inclined, go help a brother out.

Arcus and the Eyes of Chaos

2009-05-19T20:29:00.002-04:00

With Ed over this past weekend, another session of Barbarians of Lemuria was played. Another nice, short game, clocking it at about 2 1/2 hours.

Arcus Thaal had traveled to Oomis for a bit of trading (he is a merchant these days) and met up with his old friend and mentor, Tarune. Tarune, who had taught Arcus the trade years ago in Satarla, had retired to Oomis, and owned a rather nice manse in the heart of the city.

The two caught up, laughing about old times. Tarune said that he had a little job, and that it was fortuitous that Arcus had arrived in Oomis when he had; he needed someone he could trust. A client had hired Tarune to find the lost temple of Malfasgiar of the Eleven Eyes, the Lady of Chaos, and retrieve the 11 rubies that made up the eyes of her statue.

Arcus, along with the laconic guide, Larn, trekked into the Jungles of Qush on kroark-back. After a few days, they found the temple. Arcus entered via a crack in the domed roof, and all was going perfectly; he'd found the statue and the rubies, as well as an offering bowl filled with uncut black diamonds. Then the Grooth arrived...

They had ambushed Larn outside the temple and was dragging him into the temple. Arcus had scampered up the rope and was dangling near the ceiling. The leader of the Grooth noticed the Eyes of Malfasgiar missing and began shouting. He looked up and saw Arcus, who held up one of the Eyes for the brute to see, and with a wave and a smile, exited through the hole in the roof.

Arcus ran across the roof, towards the entrance. He had noticed a bunch of loose stones when he had climbed up earlier, and now pried them loose. As the Grooth ran out of the temple, he pelted them with stones, taking out over half of them. He then swung down into the temple, rapier in hand. He was outnumbered, but his swordplay was too much for the uncouth savages, and they were handily dispatched. Larn was merely unconscious, and when he came to, the he and Arcus quickly left the temple.

They returned to Oomis several days later. Tarune and Arcus celebrated far into the night. Eventually, Arcus stumbled off to bed, but he did not sleep long. He was awakened by Jalandra, Tarune's lovely slave girl. She seemed frightened. She was there to warn Arcus that her master was insane, and that he had sent an assassin to kill Arcus. As if on cue, the shuttered window smashed open and a man, dressed all in black, wielding a Kir, jumped in.

Arcus disarmed the assassin, but the man was nearly as deadly without his knife as with. Eventually Arcus got ahold of his rapier and stabbed the assassin through the heart. Jalandra quickly told Arcus that Tarune was in league with the Yellow Druid who secretly ruled the city, and that he was gripped by the Madness of Morgazzon. He was now performing some dark ritual with the Eyes of Malfasgiar. She begged Arcus to take her with him, away from house of madness

They dashed down the hall, and looked down from a balcony into Tarune's study. The man was standing in the center of a magic circle. Eleven of his servants were lying dead around him, and on the breast of each one was one of the Eyes. As Arcus and Jalandra watched, the bodies melted and warped, wrapping around the Eyes, and transforming into eye-tipped tentacles. Arcus tried to use magic of his own to plant the Kir he had taken from the slain assassin into Tarune's chest, but a tentacle of Malfasgiar swatted it aside. Cursing, Arcus jumped down off the balcony and started cutting and slashing his way towards Tarune. Finally, he stood just outside the magic circle, and his friend turned towards him, madness and hatred in his eyes. Arcus knew there was nothing he could do, other than slay his old friend, so he did.

The remaining tentacles burst into flames, catching the books and shelves and tapestries in the study on fire. Arcus grabbed one of the Eyes (figuring if somehow the other Eyes survived the fire, no one would be able to perform the ritual again) and climbed back up to Jalandra, and the two of the escaped into the pre-dawn.

Three days later, they were on the galley Arcus had chartered, in the Gulf of Satarla. Jalandra had a confession for Arcus; she was the daughter of King Keldon of Oomis. Her father was under the spell of the Yellow Druid Ilkthar. The Druid's staunchest ally, Tarune, had wanted her, so she was given to him. She wanted nothing more than to find a way to overthrow the Druid and save her father. Arcus said he would help her in any way he could. They sailed off towards Satarla...

So once again, Barbarians of Lemuia delivers the goods. Another fun little scenario. I was a little concerned that the combats, especially the fight with the Grooth would be too tough, but Ed played smart and sneaky so it worked out perfectly. I'll have to start scheming up the next game. I wonder if it should be Arcus trying to help Princess Jalandra save her father. Hmmm...

Flex Mentallo vs. Watchmen: Bet On The Muscles

2009-03-05T19:23:00.002-05:00

(This is double-posted from my boring non-gaming blog here.)

A few months ago I happened upon a torrent of the comic _Flex Mentallo_ by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It's a mixed-up, trippy, postmodern superhero fable, twisted and kind of beautiful. I enjoyed it.

Not until reading this essay did I consider that it is also a kind of rebuttal of Watchmen, the Dark Knight, and all such Dark, Gritty Superhero Comics.

As Comics for Serious quotes:

"Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism."

-The Hoaxer

I dig Watchmen, I do. I'm gonna have to go see that movie, despite the fact that I virtually never see any movies. But in the back of my mind is going to be Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery.

The thing about Flex Mentallo is that acknowledges all the cynicism, it faces it squarely -- reading the endnotes in issues 2 and 4 gives as a history of the fictional Flex Mentallo comic as cynical and messed up as anyone could possibly come up with -- and it walks straight through it with a smile on its face and hope in its heart, to the other side.

I'm actually not a huge comics dude. I probably know multiple people who have literally read hundreds or thousands of times more comics than I have. I haven't ever written or drawn my own superhero comics, in the main, but I have come up with many superheroes, because one of the roleplaying games I played a lot as a kid was Villains and Vigilantes, one of the earliest superhero RPGs. And reading Flex Mentallo, and watching it name-drop dozens and dozens of nonce superheroes, gave me that feeling of the excitement of coming up with characters and villains for V&V and Champions back in the day. There's something special there, some kind of magic creating them.

I'm thinking of the self-consciously cheesy/retro game Jim and I ran in college, my character Phantom Fighter with the ability to phase out like Kitty Pride, and his martial arts telescoping staff/nunchuks... The Villainous Doctor Crime... and back much earlier, when I was in high school, maybe even middle school, my brother's streetwise martial artist, Archangel .... I remember getting out How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from the library, and drawing endless heroes, animal-powered, semi-robotic, flying, diving, armored, armed, magical, mutant, scientific, alien, interdimensional.... All that stuff came back to me reading Flex Mentallo.

Maybe it's the traces of fever I think I still am running today, from the flu that won't go away. Or maybe there's really something there.

Who wants to play some V&V?

Starving Artist Needs Gigs

2009-02-06T19:15:00.002-05:00

Ed here. I need to look for sources of extra cash, and every little bit counts; illustrating the cover for Thy Vernal Chieftains was helpful and if there is anybody else out there who needs to buy some art, drop me a line. edheil at fastmail dot fm.

Arcus Against the Black Druids

2009-01-06T21:44:00.001-05:00

The other day, I finally got a chance to run Barbarians of Lemuria with Ed, and what follows is a run-down of the game. First off, I have to say, that it was pretty awesome. Really a breeze to run, and a lot of fun.

Ed made his character, Arcus Thaal, a former noble from Parsool. He had begun dabbling in magic, much to the chagrin of his Tyrus-born mother, who disowned him. For a few years he led a hard life as a thief, eventually turning to a more honorable profession, that of merchant, and settling in Satarla, specializing in the finding and selling of antiquated and magical curios.

The game started with Arcus being hired by a lovely noblewomen, Alastriona. A package had come to her by ship from Urceb, and had been stolen by a group of thugs, the Blood Shadow gang. She desperately wanted the package back, was offered Arcus quite a bit of gold.

He went undercover in a tavern in the seediest part of Satarla, and making use of his carousing trait, made contact with the thieves, pretending to be interested in buying strange and/or mystical items. They set up a a midnight meeting at the gang's hideout.

When he arrived, all the thugs had been beaten and knocked out. In the back room of the hideout, he found out why... a woman, a thief, had beaten him here. She had the package and took off through a window. Arcus realized that he had seen her earlier at the tavern. Had she been there too, trying to find out where the package was? Had she overheard him making a deal to meet with the Blood Shadows? Also, he was able to give a name to her face; Zaydara, a well known thief of both treasures and hearts.

He chased her across the rooftops of Satarla, keeping her in sight, but making sure she did not know he was following. Finally, she entered an inn, and he followed her inside. She was not in the common room, so he assumed she was upstairs. He confirmed this with the landlord while renting a room for himself, right across the hall from her. He planned on waiting until she was asleep, then break into her room and steal the package back.

After some time, he went upstairs to his room, and through her door he heard the crack of a whip and a muffled cry. He kicked the door to her room in! There she was naked and bound and surrounded by... Black Druids! It appeared that were getting ready to torture and kill her. Arcus would not allow such a lovely lady, even a professional rival, to die at the hands of those foul Druids! He waded into the room, cutlass and dagger in hand, cutting them down quite handily, using hero points to turn successes into mighty successes.

After freeing her, Zaydara told him that the leader of the Druids, one that the acolytes had called Adranath Va'al, had taken the package to the docks, where a ship awaited to take them away under the stealth of night. The two of them made their way swiftly to the docks. Along the way she explained that she had been hired by someone else to find and steal the package, but she had no idea that the Black Druids were behind it.

They found the boat in question and snuck aboard. The lead Druid, Adranath, came from below deck to talk to the captain. This was their chance. Arcus summoned up magical fire and set the sails on fire, causing a distraction, while Zaydara, cudgel in hand, started fighting the sailors. Arcus leapt into action, rushing Adranath Va'al with his blades. The Druid was too quick for him and side stepped his attack. The Druid then called upon the foul name of Tharungozoth, and a dozen shadowy tendrils, tipped with obsidian curved claws appeared around Arcus, cutting and gashing him. Things were not looking good for Arcus.

Then he got a brilliant idea. Since the Druid was too quick for him to hit, he decided to take the Druid, at least temporarily, out of the picture. Again calling upon his arcane arts, he caused the mast of the ship to swing at the Druid, hitting him and knocking him from the deck of the ship into the cold water of the bay. With the leader of the Druids gone, Arcus took care of the acolytes and the rest of the sailors. He and Zaydara left one standing and told him if he wanted to leave the burning ship alive, he would get the package that the Druids had brought aboard for them. The man complied and they all got off the ship, which was now completely ablaze.

Arcus thought to tell the city guard that there was a Black Druid in the water and to apprehend him, but when he scanned the dark water for Adranath Va'al, there was no sign of him. Had the Druid drowned, or had he escaped? Arcus had the feeling he had not seen the last of the Druid.

He and Zaydara parted ways, and Arcus promised to bring her a portion of his payment for all her help that evening. The next afternoon, Arcus called upon Alastriona at her home, where he discovered that she was an alchemist. She showed him the contents of the package. It was a silvery-green metal tablet; the Tanshazgar Tablet. Actually it was only one part of five. She had another of the tablets. When they were all brought together, and the code they were written in was deciphered, it was said to tell the secret of making the mythical metal, janium. The game ended here, with Arcus and Alastriona sharing a passionate kiss...

Whew. That was the game, basically. I'm sure I skimmed over some minor stuff. Again, nice and easy to run. Of course, I've read over the rule book several times, absorbing the setting. Also in the last three weeks I've read the first three of the Thongor books, as well as the first two collections of the Savage Sword of Conan comics, so I've got the genre crammed into my brain.

TAW's Blog: The Ancient Art of Stabbing People

2008-12-14T10:49:00.001-05:00

A largely programming-centric blog takes a diversion through a long historical look at the practice of stabbing people.

Relevance to gaming goes without saying.

AI vs TCS: Old School Lispers vs Traveller Grognards

2008-12-13T17:15:00.002-05:00

I remember reading about Trillion Credit Squadron in the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society back when I was a kid, playing Traveller (well, mostly rolling up characters and subsectors and buildng and mapping ships, but still). The idea is: you get a trillion credits to create a naval squadron using the rules in Traveller Book 6: High Guard. Then the squadrons beat on each other till one is left standing, in an apocalyptic battle. People from all over could submit their squadrons. I guess it was play-by-mail or something?

Anyway, Artificial Intelligence researcher Douglas B. Lenat decided to use TCS as a way to work on artificial intelligence in a "real" domain, that is, the computer had to compete with humans. He was working with heuristics, ways to take shortcuts to solutions across the immense and unnavigable search space of possible answers to questions. Humans use heuristics; up until that point computer AI work had mostly focused on brute force travels through search space, but the limitations of that approach had become very apparent. But brute force is conceptually easy and heuristics are hard to understand and optimize.

Anyway, he had the computer run a gazillion simulations of the TCS, starting with ideas about how to win that *he* provided, but with those ideas gradually supplanted by experience in simulated combats. Eventually the computer had evolved its own ideas about how to win, and they were... unorthodox. The computer had learned how to break the system: make a large number of tiny but very heavily armored ships, and count on outlasting the enemy -- be able to lose dozens and dozens of ships and still have enough left, when the last enemy ship is worn to the ground, to win.

He crushed the competition in 1981. In 1982 they changed the rules at the last minute, hoping to throw off the computer, but it still dominated the game. Finally they asked him not to compete in 1983, saying if he did they would shut down the game after that, I suppose because they were frankly sick of watching this highly effective but boring and annoying strategy keep on winning.

The whole story is well worth reading.

Little did I expect to find a story about original edition Traveller on the Programming Reddit. (Note: some of the Redditors find the story dubious, on the grounds that if that shit worked we'd still be using it today, and that hype-filled stories about AI were the order of the day back in the early-to-mid 80s, and the hype seldom panned out. So... grain of salt. But it's still a great story.)

Old School Art: Curmudgeons and Dragons

2008-12-10T00:52:00.003-05:00

I don't remember on which of the three or four retro-RPG blogs I saw this on, but you have to check out Curmudgeons & Dragons, which is a sketchblog of art in the glorious style of '70s-era D&D.

The art has a particular kind of quasi-amateurish (but in fact very well done) style that captures both the imagination and the wistful memories of games gone by.... Steve Zieser goes on my Favorite Artists list now.

Sweet St. Cuthbert, he even illustrated the Limed-Over Skeleton of the Abbot. Now there's a phrase I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

Acts of Evil

2008-10-27T23:53:00.001-04:00

Me: If I keep thinking about the Acts of Evil game I played on Saturday, thinking it was really cool, wishing I could play more -- cause I really enjoyed playing a sociopathic occultist bent on chthonic godhood -- should I be worried?

My wife: Uh.. maybe?

From the Tweet and Rein*Hagen Academy of Latin

2008-10-10T17:01:00.001-04:00

"Bios Ex Nihilum, latin for 'Life From Nothing'"

No, it isn't. Bios isn't even Latin, and the Latin phrase for "from nothing" -- a fairly common phrase because it comes up in theological discussions of creation -- is ex nihilo.

Game designers: the fact that you have a dictionary of a language doesn't mean you can construct actual meaningful phrases in that language, especially if it's a highly inflected language.

Googling around I find that there's a World of Warcraft guild called "Ex Nihilum," and the phrase occurs in the lyrics of a song by noted Latin scholars Gorguts, who also seem to have studied at the Tweet and Rein*Hagen Academy of Latin...

Nihil appears in Latin in two forms, the indeclinable, and a second declension neuter form nihilum. The latter can only appear in the ablative case (nihilo) after the preposition ex.

You want to put Latin in your game and all you've got is a dictionary, or vague, half-remembered High School Latin? Give me a call, I'll do my best to help.

Generally True In Games Too

2008-10-01T09:08:00.001-04:00

Tunnels, Trolls, and Stars

2008-09-06T18:37:00.001-04:00

Haha! I got me my 4th edition T&T, which I shall revere even as the neogrognard D&D'ers revere their little brown D&D books. And Starfaring! 1977 and 1976 respectively. Huzzah!

To come: fun facts about T&T 4th edition.

Plunder!

2008-09-03T12:34:00.001-04:00

I just did a small logo design project for a friend fool enough to trust it to me, and picked up a few dollars on Paypal. Rather than ale and whores, this time I spent it on classic T&T-related material from Outlaw Press.

Specifically, Starfaring and the 4th edition of Tunnels & Trolls.

There is an amazing amount of cool stuff for sale at Outlaw Press! Wow! T&T variants for superheroes and post-apocalypse gaming, tons of adventures, fiction, all kinds of crazy things.

Good stuff.

My Craft Project

2008-08-30T23:36:00.004-04:00

Stopped at Michaels Crafts on the way home yesterday...

Green flattened marbles: $2.99
12mm googly eyes: $0.89
Glue-Gun stick: $0.50
3:16 threat tokens eyeing the players with a monocular, baleful glare: Priceless

Terra- F*ck Yeah!!!

2008-08-30T14:39:00.005-04:00

Ran a second game of three sixteen last night. (First game was a one-player with Joe a couple weeks ago, which I haven't written up yet.) There were a group of five people at Dave's house that night; when the time actually came -- after a couple boardgames were done -- two were willing to play; the other three had gotten deep into playing video games. Of the two willing to play, one left right after character generation because that was when his video-game-playing ride was leaving, so we were down to one, while two remaining people played video games.

This sort of thing is why I don't get to run a lot of games with this group, eh? RPGs, especially weird RPGs such as I might bring over, are absolutely the lowest possible priority.

But that's OK, I know that one-player games work fine, and Dave was into it. Dave's character Cutthroat became Sergeant Cutthroat (FA 5, NFA 5).

The game started a bit slow, because I didn't have a lot of interesting ideas for what was special about this mission (good or bad). It was Silicon beings in an Asteroid Belt. (Random roll after I rejected a couple previous rolls as being inappropriate for a first planet.) The gist of it was that you can't blow up an asteroid belt, nuke it from orbit, or whatever else, cause it's already an asteroid belt. You just have to go rock by rock by rock, killing the silicon lifeforms. So they'd deployed every damn trooper they had, rock by rock, spreading out around the whole belt.

Cutthroat's squad was dropped on a large asteroid, a few km wide, highly crystalline, like a geode turned inside out. No aliens apparent at first; they made their way into a cave and the first attack began.

The aliens were crystalline humanoids with "wings" consisting of fans of curved crystal shards, which they could use to fly in the solar wind. They could attack with the crystals, they were ridiculously strong and could throw troopers against the hard crystal walls, and there was one more attack that was revealed at the end.

One-player games, despite the fact that there are only five threat tokens, have proved to be hard as hell, the two times I ran them. I think part of it is that neither time did the one player take a really high FA. And if you don't have a really high FA, and you start out with a few failed rolls, or low successes, you get wounded FAST. And if your opponents have Armor, as these did, and your first success is wiped out...

Things went really badly in that first fight. REALLY badly. Wounds: A mess. Wounds: crippled. Armor: ticked.

The last round of this encounter the troopers had fallen back into space using the small ion jets on the Mandelbrite, regrouped, and made a full forward assault, guns blazing, straight against the Crystal Angels. Complete fucking failure. Combat drugs! Another fracking failure. All this over one threat token! ONE threat token had brought Sgt. Cutthroat to the brink of death! There were four to go!

To survive, Dave called on is weakness: "Feels Nothing." He described a situation in training where another trooper had freaked out and attacked some fellow troopers, and Cutthroat had gunned him down... and kept shooting... and kept shooting. OK. So the weakness seemed to be he doesn't necessarily give a damn about his fellow humans. Much like the "psychopath" thing in the example.

We decided that because he Felt Nothing he did not call off the attack when it went horribly wrong, and his entire squad got picked off one by one by slicing angel-feathers, he just kept on going and going until in one assault he was grabbed and thrown against a sharp crystal structure, causing his onboard computers to freak the hell out, desperately kicking in internal repair procedures trying to protect atmospheric integrity, and flooded him with painkillers, causing him to pass out. (Wound level back up to: A Mess.)

He woke up on a slab inside the asteroid, with arcs of crystal over him. His guns were in a case on the far side of the cave. There were several of the entities apparently "talking" amongst themselves somehow, discussing him. He was still in his armor, and therefore, alive. And alone.

He wanted to bust out and surprise attack them. Dominance roll didn't permit that, but he did get mutual surprise. He managed to crack off one of the arcs holding him down and improvise it into a piercing weapon. The dice were finally kind to him and he managed to take one down by piercing its "heart center" with the crystal shard... He hurled it at another and the creature (using its Armor to ignore the kill) absorbed the shard onto its body and went on the attack against Cutthroat with it, like a giant claw! I think maybe he got down to Crippled again at this point...

He managed an NFA roll to get past them and free his guns, and finished them off, filling the interior space of that cave with floating crystal fragments that were once aliens. As they died, the light went out in the cave -- it had been illuminated by their own bodies. (2 threat tokens down)

End of encounter. Now he was on his own inside the tunnel system of the asteroid. (Medikit time! Up to A Mess.)

He was going to hunt down the rest of these diamond bugs, dammit. He made his way through the caves... and found them deserted and dark, or as dark as silica in the sunlight gets. Like they'd all abandoned it. But we wanted another encounter... we rolled for dominance and got an Alien Ambush.

So he made his way to the surface again, through another tunnel... lookin for the damn bugs. And as he crawled out of the tunnel, he was enveloped in pure burning blinding light. The armor went into full panic mode as its heat compensators failed one by one and Sgt. Cutthroat started to cook inside his own armor... The remaining aliens from the rock were hovering in formation between the rock and the sun, and had formed a giant Fresnel lens with their wings and focused sunlight on him, like a magnifying glass on an ant.

His options exhausted and again Crippled, Dave called on Sgt. Cutthroat's Strength. Flashback: previous mission. They're on a jungle planet, and ambushed by arachnoid aliens who shoot webs down out of the trees and yank troopers up to their deaths faster than they can figure out what's going on. Sgt. Cutthroat is Cool Under Pressure and leads the way in incinerating the web structures in the trees and frying them like so many tent caterpillars. Flash Forward. Ignoring the heat, even as it builds to near lethal levels, he grips the crystal surface with the mandelbrite's boots and calmly draws a bead on the hostiles, one... by one.. by one.. by one.. by one... till instead of a point of horrible heat and light in the sky where they were, there's a bright stardust of fragments...

And he calls in with confirmed kills for the rock, and signals to the deployment ship that his squadron is ready for return. He manages to collect a few victims of that first horrible assault who were merely comatose and floating in their armor in space... and heads back to the ship.

He increased his HTH to 1d6 reflecting the brutal combat where he broke out of captivity.

He tried for an increase on his long range slug rifle to reflect the last attack, no luck.

He did not try for promotion. Because he used a weakness he would have been eligible for demotion if another PC had targeted him for it, but there were no other PCs. (I understand how this works now -- using a Weakness is kind of a dick move because it saves your ass and leaves the rest of the squad in danger. That's why your fellow PCs would target you for demotion over it.)

He got a respectable handful of medals. Increased his FA. And that was that.

Wow! Good little game. Single player games seem to be brutal, and drawn out if you don't have the FA to reliably take down aliens quickly. Note to self: if I get in any more single player games, recommend a high FA. :)

Nice to notice also that he used EVERY resource he had in this situation and barely made it out. Every wound level short of death, on every encounter, even after the use of medikits; his armor was ticked; he used Combat Drugs, a Weakness, and a Strength. Makes me feel like I did my job as GM. :)

UPDATE: he didn't use every resource -- he didn't use the E-Vac. But that's mainly cause I forgot it existed and so didn't tell him it was an option.

Forge vs. Work

2008-08-25T14:14:00.001-04:00

I have really just not been paying that much attention to the Forge for a long time now. I'd drop in on Story Games, I'd chat with people who dig the games, get info second hand about what was going on, but I've just been kind of out of it. I don't know when it started but it's gone on for a long time now, like, maybe a couple years.

So now I'm off the wagon. The prospect of reading the details of the Under My Skin game that Ron, Rob, and others played at GenCon, whose images I'd seen on Story-Games, was one thing that sucked me in. There were some others, I don't remember. But I find myself following thread to thread, delving back in time, story to story, watching people explain things to each other and work out ideas, and talk about their play, and where to go...

And I'm digging into old threads I never followed the first time around, and picking up ideas for how to run and play Sorcerer, trying to figure out whether my one-sheet idea ("Impiety") is doable and how it'll be doable.. Learning how to run the Pool well and how not to...

Just a few threads here and there but it's so damned addictive, I have got to put this shit aside while I'm at work... but you open one and it refers to three others, and I just have to see what's in those three others, and I pop 'em open in another Firefox tab and keep reading...

I'm so off the wagon.

I think I've maybe... matured? I don't know, do you still mature when you're 38? Aren't you supposed to be done maturing? Let's say I've grown a little in knowledge and perspective since the last time I was really paying attention, and things mean more to me now than they once did.

How to Host a Dungeon

2008-08-22T22:16:00.002-04:00

It's a Friday night and what am I doing? Sitting at a crappy card-table playing How to Host a Dungeon, the solo game of dungeon creation. Damn you Tony for making such a cool and addicting game! *shakes fist*

This is what I have so far:

A cluster of natural caves, some filled with horrific primordial beasts and others with a vile plague, lie waiting to be discovered...

A clan of dwarves, the Stonesplitters, began mining the rich vein of gold hideen deep beneath the earth, and for several years, their civilization thrived. They even built a great hall for their king, Naraz. But from the bowels of the earth, magma erupted forth, forcing the dwarves to abandon their mines and homes, and in their haste, leaving behind their greatest treasure, the Crown of Naraz...

A group of monsters moved in: antlings, goblins and a rakshasa. The antlings discovered the Crown and added it to their treasure, but an exploratory group from the Castle Halwn encountered them, and both groups were slain. The goblin clan grew for a while until a group of earth devils moved into the neighborhood and squashed them like gnats. The rakshasa spent most of the time going around eating everything she could find: an ooze, an ettin, adventurers, a giant slug. Then she hit a part of heroes that were too much for her. Granted, she took them down too, but her reign of dungeon snacking came to an end. An owlbear moved in, promising more monster on monster smackdown, but just at that time the earth devils accrued enough treasure to trigger the end of the Age of Monsters... and I had to stop playing.

Oh, I wanted to keep going into the Age of Villainy, but no... must escape the lure of the dungeon...

GenCon 08 Odds and Ends

2008-08-18T18:03:00.002-04:00

A few notes here mostly for myself, cause I come back to entries like this months and years later, to help remember how things went...

I got a tiny bit of Sorcerer demo with Ron, cause he was demoing for somebody else and grabbed me in. Cool, cause I still want to run it sometime soon.

The guys playing Storming the Wizard's Tower kept the whiskey flowing all night. Rock.

Late nights watching the olympics (well, sometimes just watching Jason, Greg, and Robb watch the olympics cause I wasn't seated in view of the TV)

Demo of Fisherman's Wife from Julia Ellingboe herself, woot!

After the whiskey-fied game of Wizards Tower, chatting with the group, watched Julia hammering an icepick through copies of her game at 1 AM so she could do the stitch binding. Note to self: never piss off Julia, chick looks sweet and innocent but carries a hammer and an icepick around

I gotta start ordering my own stuff at Buca's rather than joining in the huge family size portions, it's delicious but I'm too old anymore to eat that much food at one sitting -- poor use of funds

Some things which seem fun and cool to do once, and then fun to repeat cause you did them before, you don't necessarily have to do them again a third time just for the sake of doing them, you can go do something else with your time. Like, I didn't snap pictures of cute costumed gencon attendees or go to MacNiven's and eat haggis this year.

Some things you do want to do again and again.

Took the utterly awesome HDR picture of the facade of the Indiana Repertory Theater that I knew was out there waiting for me to take

Met and talked to some new people, got to know some people by sight whom I knew only by name, and vice versa, got to re-meet some cool folks I've known for a long time

Tony Lower-Basch was really apologetic not to know me by sight, which was way silly, because we'd only met once before at a time when I was one of dozens of people he'd demo'ed Capes to; I mention it only because I'm always pleasantly surprised at how many people do remember me and are happy to see me in the indie games group; it's definitely a group of cool friendly people who like and care about the people who are interested in their games. There are still a ton of them that I don't really know at all yet, which means there are many gencons of meeting cool people to go.

It was the mildest (heat-wise) Gencon that I can remember.

Photo: Joe and Paul, playtesting

2008-08-18T17:46:00.004-04:00

Bonus points if you can find Matt Snyder and myself in the picture.

Gaming at GenCon 08 part 2

2008-08-18T16:44:00.001-04:00

Onward!

Friday night I had a tough choice; Paul Czege had invited me to playtest Acts of Evil, but my friend Dave VanDyke had gotten intrigued by In a Wicked Age on the way down to Indy, and thought we could scare up a game that night while other folks in our party were having fun boardgaming. I went with my homeboys and Paul allowed that maybe we could do the playtest Saturday, which was very cool of him. By this time I'd gotten in touch with fellow Esoteric Murmurer Joe, who I hope will post his own report.

At first it looked like the guys might not be willing to set aside their boardgames for IAWA, which would have been frustrating, but Dave helped make it happen, and soon we had me, Dave, Joe, Matt "Kub" Kubiak, and Greg Bush ready to play In a Wicked Age. The oracle gave us some very grabby elements and some more oblique ones, and we managed to weave them together. We did a mostly good job picking Best Interests, though Greg's character, a spirit of the lower air, wasn't really directly connected to specific characters, which I think led to some boredom on Greg's part; he left the game about 2/3 of the way though. The other characters included a tyrant king (Joe), his 7th queen (Dave), who believed she too, like the first six, would be executed for not producing children, and so had sent for the palace guardian (Kub) from her own land to spirit her back home; but who had just learned that she was carrying the child of the King's chief huntsman (NPC), a fact which was known by the king's concubine (NPC). All of this involved a harvest festival which the King had banned, to everyone's disappointment, especially the spirit of the lower air who loved celebrations, and the proprietress of a wayhouse where the Queen had planned to meet the Guardians (concealed by the celebratory crowds).

Long story short, the story was spun on its head by the fact that Joe took, as the King's Best Interest, "to believe his wife is faithful to him." I thought that I would demolish this Best Interest at the beginning of the game when the concubine attempted to destroy the queen by revealing the secret to the king, but by the end of the game the best interest was in place, because the King had executed the concubine (on the pretense that she had lain with the woodsman) and slain the woodsman with his own scimitar, and had received the Queen back without speaking a word of the business, and the Queen had accepted the offer rather than run away with her Guardian, and she never spoke a word of it either, to the King... So the only people in the kingdom who knew of the adultery, besides the silent King and Queen, were dead. And the King had an heir.

Outstanding, just the kind of grand, violent, messed up story that IAWA is supposed to produce. I was really happy about it and told the story of the game (hopefully tolerably briefly) to basically everybody I talked to at the con.

Saturday I got up very late; took some time in the dealer room, and sooner than I liked, found that the day had passed and it was evening. No time for Games On Demand; I was going to Buca di Beppo for the traditional Saturday Night Gencon Pasta Feast in the Pope Room. Talking to Paul I found out it would work out to play at about 8:30, and Joe was up for it. So cool -- something could happen.

I left Beppo's by about 8:45 (doh!) for the Embassy and found Joe and Matt Snyder there with Paul. We started a game of Acts of Evil which took place in two places and times -- a big box store called Price Castle which is Wal-Mart if David Lynch were the store manager, and the Impressionist-era Paris art scene. I got to see the system as it stands -- I won't go into details on an unpublished game, but Paul has solved the biggest issue of the earliest versions of the game, where "Acts of Evil" had tended to turn into "Acts of Pointless, Vicious Squalor." Now there's some focus and interest to it, despite the evil.

Anyway, after about an hour and a half, Matt stopped and asked if Paul was hitting the issues that he was concerned with, and Paul wasn't so sure; he definitely wasn't hitting the mechanics he was hoping to test. We broke the session and started talking about what was up -- it turned out that we had indeed run into the problem that Paul saw as the final stumbling block to finishing the game, so we could talk about it from a point of view of specific examples; we discussed that baby to death for the next two and a half hours, with Ralph Mazza dropping in to help kibitz. Many solutions were proposed; none totally satisfactory. When we had all packed up and were heading away in the wee hours, Danielle met us and we briefly went over what was up one more time, and I repeated the inchoate feelings about the nature of the problem (I had a clear metaphorical idea of what was wrong and how it had to change but no clear idea how that metaphor could be translated into reality); I gave a silly, radical idea on how things could change, and Paul replied with a pause, and a very slow and distinct, "huh." Danielle brightened and said, "That's a good sound!!" Paul came back with his idea of what he thought I'd said, which was a considerably more crazy and radical idea than what I'd actually meant... and he seemed to have something bubbling in his head. So cross your fingers. Something's brewing in Paul's brain; I hope it's the thing he needs.

After Paul and Danielle left for the night Joe and I stopped to say hi to John Harper, who was in a big group of people, and he broke off to talk to us and we ended up shooting the shit into late, late into the night, about 3:30 or so. Got to learn about the current state of Stranger Things, and his plans for his next game.

That was it for gaming at GenCon 2008 for me. I think four games (Wizard's Tower, Lacuna, In a Wicked Age, and Acts of Evil) is a pretty awesome step forward after no full length games last time. I enjoyed meeting all the people I did, put faces to some names I hadn't before, and I'm already missing it and wanting to come back next year.

Maybe this year I can hit some con or get-together in between, like Forge Midwest or something.

Gaming At GenCon 08

2008-08-18T11:23:00.001-04:00

It was a good Con. One of the things I've wanted to do that I haven't done in previous cons is just plain play. I love being there, I love meeting cool people, checking out new games, being out as one of a group of rowdy nerds pretending they're still in college together... But I haven't really done much play in the past. This time I wanted to play.

Thursday night I went to the Embassy Suites. I had done that a couple times last year; in both cases, everybody was already busy gaming; once I'd sat down and had a good talk with Paul, and another time I had just sat down and read all the way through my newly bought copy of Dictionary of Mu. This time, I started looking around and it looked like it might be the same thing all over again -- lots of games already in progress, nothing to join -- but then I happened on John Harper. He said "hey Ed! I've got somebody who wants to meet you!" -- and introduced me to Tony Dowler, cartographer extraordinaire. (Besides enjoying his work in the unpublished Stranger Things and similar places, I'd come across it linked on MetaFilter before!)

Tony was about to join John, Matt Wilson, his friend Brandon, and Vincent Baker in a game of Storming the Wizard's Tower, an in-progress game of Vincent's which was his personal answer to monster-fightin' old school D&D. (Paul Czege on encountering us playing the game, asks Vincent: "are you ever NOT designing something?" Vincent: "uh... no.") They invited me to join, and that was my first game of the con. So it had begun! This time I was gaming!

STWT worked well for what it was (we got our asses handed to us but it was very fun play). I don't particularly need what it is -- if I wanted something like that, I'd probably go with Tunnels & Trolls, which for me holds all the nostalgia value and is light and enjoyable and good at being what it is (no need to reinvent it). It was fun getting pissed off by those jerkface Swamp People, and fighting our way down to the Crow Mother under the river...

Friday I found my way to the Games On Demand room, and Mike Holmes was there, and hooked me and a few other players up with Graham Walmsley, whose book Play Unsafe had been so important to me (both in itself, and because it had introduced me to Keith Johnstone's Impro). I was glad to meet Graham; he had just been running Poison'd for a group and asked us what we were interested in. After bandying a few things about we came up with Lacuna, which was great because I knew from the book that Graham really dug it, and I knew next to nothing about it, which was perfect.

English comedian John Oliver starts his act in America with the warning, "because I speak with an English accent, everything you are about to hear will sound slightly more authoritative." That phenomenon worked to good effect with Graham in Lacuna, where you play an agent, always in communication with the mysterious voice of "Control" (the GM -- Graham) who has sent you into the game world to carry out a mission. In our case it was an assassination, and our target was given to us only as a mysterious photograph.

One particular thing sticks in my mind as bringing out the extremely paranoiac atmosphere of Lacuna. Agents are assigned names by Control (and we put those names on little cards in front of us) -- we were Tapper, Miller, Hooper, and Black. I was Hooper. Early on in the game, I got a message from Control, informing me that the name "Hooper" had been reallocated, and I was now Agent Haywood. A bit later, we managed to trace the identity of the person in the photograph, whom we were to assassinate. His name was Hooper.

It was a good game. Graham's love for the game was clearly evident, and my fellow agents were inquisitive and interesting. Agent Miller especially, whose real name eludes me, was a lot of fun, because he brought to the table a very "special ops" attitude, like a tough and canny mercenary, not a creepy intelligence agent; I kept thinking of him as Brian Van Hoose from Knights of the Dinner Table, playing the fictional espionage game "Hacknoia," watching the mission go horribly wrong and always trying to stay on top of the situation, out-think everybody, and keep in control as best he could.

I'm going to post this now and add to it later.

Blast from the Past

2008-08-10T22:03:00.002-04:00

Vincent on IAWA, March 2008:

I don't do any world creation stuff at all before character creation and I try to keep a tight lid on backstory during character creation. The philosophy's very much "we start HERE and go forward."

Me (well, rules ideas by me, written up by Steffan O'Sullivan) in 1992:

Instead of creating characters before starting the game, create them as the game progresses! [...]
The players start with most of the character sheets blank - simply write out a brief sentence or two describing the character in a general way. ("Jeb is a surly dwarf, a good fighter, who is out to make a name for himself as a mean customer - and pick up some loot on the way. He likes to talk tough, and doesn't care much for halflings")
As the character is confronted with challenging situations, the player must decide the level of the trait in question...

Ah, here's some of the original discussion...

(In my "dream system", characteristics would not necessarily be listed in terms of ability or power, on graded scales of any time. They would be whatever properties defined the character, whether useful or not, and gave him a place in the story. They would accumulate during the story, and not be spelled out beforehand (though they could be planned, they needn't be)... But I'm not sure in how much detail such a thing can be done...)

I'm not trying to say I anticipated the Forge a decade earlier (elsewhere in the thread SOS points out that some of what I'm saying sounds very Over The Edge-ish, so it's not like nobody was publishing these sorts of things already at the time), but more that it's not too surprising that certain Forge directions and designs seemed so cool to me when I discovered them.

I was reading Umberto Eco at the time, and the idea of characters being defined and created moment by moment by the text in which they existed was bopping around my head...

Out Of It, Missed Things

2008-08-10T21:16:00.001-04:00

I was never really deep into discussions of RPG design and play and theory at El Forge and Story Games and all, but there was a time when I followed them. I haven't for a long time. For whatever reason I find myself starting to again.

This is mostly Chris Kubasik and Vincent talking about In a Wicked Age and Sorcerer; I think I was directed to it by some other Sorcerer-related threads on Story Games, which I followed because I was interested in CK's plan to do a how-to-play-sorcerer book.

It sent me to this one, which is about how in indie RPGs people often fall off the other side of the GM fiat horse, and don't let the narrative affect the rules, other than just to set up opportunities to use them. My impression is that many of the older-school Forgies take "just plain roleplaying" where you establish consensus on the imagined reality just by talking it out and agreeing on it absolutely for granted, but many Forge-inspired designs and many Forge-inspired players seem to leave that behind, and just want to think about the mechanics as a closed universe, and this leads them to misunderstand the ways in which games like Sorcerer and In a Wicked Age and others depend on that narrative consensus to make the rest of the rules make sense.

CK:

I think this is really strongly tied to what Ben Lehman's fictional elements for strategic choices thing, or Emily's story capital thing. At it's heart, I think it's about where the play rides on straight Baker-Care principle- the fiction says this, and it makes sense to us, as a group, that the following results should happen.

Though I think a lot of folks conflate that with the usual cop-out to dodging broken rules or fiat-y behavior, which historically has been the case for a lot of play, instead of being used in conjuction with the mechanics & cues.

That thread bounced me back to this Forge thread about Sorcerer combat and character death and lack thereof.

So... I wonder if I can track down a game of Sorcerer, IAWA, or Poison'd at Games on Demand or the Embassy Suites this coming week.....

1983 Interview With Ken St. Andre

2008-08-03T20:25:00.001-04:00

Stumbled across this awesome interview, available on the Fiendish Board Games site.

On T&T's silly spell names:

**** 'em If they can't take a joke! I still feel that the T&T spell names are as good or better than any others on the market. They are descriptive and amusing. There is a rationale for them being slightly silly. And besides, they are a game mechanism, like saving rolls, not an integral part of the T&T world.

On the future of roleplaying (as of 1983):

Nothing ever dies out. There are still blacksmiths for gods' sake, and people who wear armour and knock each other off horses with sticks. People are still playing the same crude board games they had in ancient Egypt (*JH ..and calling them Kensington and charging a fortune for them.) No, FRP won't die. But the golden age is already past. It will become less and less important, The true future of the art is in computers, and the true money also. Which is why Flying Buffalo has been trying hard for the last 4 years to get Coleco to come out with the computer version of T&T. Role playing games may be increasing in popularity and viability in England, but they are over the hill here.

On the possibility of a T&T Monster Manual:

Monsters! I think the Fiend Factory in White Dwarf is absolutely ridiculous! I'm against Monster Manuals! Bestiaries, yes, manuals, no! I'm enthralled and delighted when someone makes up a new monster and springs it on me in a game. I only encountered purple death hippos once, but it was great!

On trolls turning to stone when struck by sunlight:

Some do, some don't, At any rate, it isn't a permanent change. Trolls regenerate, so by the next night they would overcome the damage of being turned to stone and would gain mobility again. However, all my trolls tend to avoid direct sunlight, using a large parasol if necessary to go about by daylight.

On the lack of religion & clerics in T&T:

There has been a good deal of criticism of the lack of organised religion in the T&T rules, but I happen to believe that the world would be a lot better off without most of its organised religions, and that's the kind of place I wanted for my fantasy adventuring.

On whether you should design your own RPG:

Yes. The main pleasure of FRP is that of creation - creating a character, creating a world, creating a game system - it's all the same high. If you can create a better game system, more power to you! On the other hand, everyone should have at least one copy of Tunnels & Trolls, if only to give you an example of how it's done (or a bad example if you are a D&D person)! And no one should be afraid to try someone else's system. You may get some ideas!

The hell?

2008-08-02T18:24:00.005-04:00

How the hell did I make it onto an RPG Motivational Poster?

You can't post NUTTIN on the Inter Net without some crazy dude making it into a motivational poster!

/me subscribes to Mutant Foursome now...

Art that Takes You Back To Another Time

2008-07-30T12:51:00.001-04:00

Jeff Rients linked to Malcadon's deviantArt gallery. Mr. Malcadon is apparently illustrating the Gamma World retro-semi-clone Mutant Future.

Gamma World is the second RPG I ever owned (after Tunnels & Trolls) and has a special place in my heart, so I think Mutant Future is cool.

Malcadon's art is hard to classify. Because a lot of it is simple pencil sketchwork (sometimes even on blue lined paper! Now THAT takes me back to middle school) it has a very amateur, fan-art vibe to it, but if you go through the whole collection you'll see that behind the often amateurish look and adolescent glorying-in-violence-nakedness-and-weirdness is a good grasp of anatomy and proportion, perspective, composition, color, and all kinds of good art stuff. So there are layers here.

As a matter of historical fact, the original Gamma World never had this kind of DIY look -- it was largely slick-as-hell David Trampier inkwork. So putting Malcadon on illustration duty for Mutant Future isn't an accurate homage to Gamma World in particular, but it's very much an appropriate shout out to the late 70s. Malcadon's no Trampier (who is? Tramp was one-of-a-kind) but his work is often reminiscent of David C. Sutherland, for example.

(Note -- when I talk about "amateurish look" I'm trying to be descriptive, not judgmental. I'm talking about a style, not a level of skill. Just want to be extra clear on that.)

Thank You Rondo

2008-07-28T23:11:00.002-04:00

Thanks to a gift from Rondo, Mesmerator of the 65th Quadrant, I am now prepared, should I need to run Encounter Critical at any time.

Thank you Rondo!

Warrior and Wizard

2008-07-28T12:36:00.001-04:00

Chris Goodwin is producing a retro-clone of The Fantasy Trip called Warrior and Wizard.

That is sweet. The Fantasy Trip was always an awesome, tight little system. A lot more in common with my beloved Tunnels & Trolls, say, than with D&D (though TFT is comparatively rules-heavy). It seemed a shame to me that TFT drank the Champions kool-aid and morphed into point-based GURPS.

Plus Wizard had the creepiest cover EVAR.

Apparently the first version, which I never saw, was not so obviously the product of a bad drug trip.

Player's Handbook Demon Moonlighting

2008-07-25T10:32:00.001-04:00

I was reading an old Dilbert book yesterday and ran across this strip.

Is it just me or is that the first edition AD&D player's handbook cover demon?

Brow ridges, horns, mouth shape, teeth, nose, arm position...

(Hotlinking to Grognardia's copy of the image here... it's all on Blogger's servers, right?...)

dA

2008-07-23T19:23:00.001-04:00

Ed (moi) now has a deviantArt account. Not much there yet.

And Adam Black just got one too! Much more stuff there.

UPDATE: I just added 38 more images. Yow!

Did I mention Joe has a dA account too? :)

"I Don't Speak Dragon"

2008-07-20T12:20:00.002-04:00

This post contains spoilers for The Keep on the Shadowfell, though not many. Consider yourself warned.

The other night I ran my second game of D&D 4. I'm running The Keep on the Shadowfell, with some changes. The big thing is that I'm scaling the encounters down in power a bit since I only have 4 players. The first game I ran I did not lower the encounter levels and it was rough. It was just the kobold ambush encounters, but they were overly harsh.

The characters are:

Bram, human wizard; Lyssa, eladrin cleric of Corellon; Ander, dragonborn rogue, found as a hatchling by halflings and raised by them; and Ivy, human fighter.

I used the "missing mentor" hook and personalized it by saying that Douven, the mentor, was Bram's uncle, and that his aunt Greta wanted Bram and his friends to find her husband. They went to Winterhaven, encountered the aforementioned kobolds and befriended some locals, most notably Valthrun the sage.

Ander, the dragonborn rogue really got to shine this time around.

The group were heading to the dragon burial site that Uncle Douven was thought to have gone to. Once at the location, they heard many voices, and Ander snuck up to the site. It was a group of human thugs led by a gnome.

(I had decided to remove the guardian drakes and add more human rabble.)

Ander was on fire with his stealth and athletics, sneaking and sliding down the slope into the burial site, but he stepped on a large dry branch, giving himself away. The jumpy gnome shot at him with his crossbow, a warning shot. Things were looking bad for Ander. A fairly large group of club wielding thugs surrounded him. Then he started to shovel the BS.

He told them that he was on a pilgrimage to visit the grave of one of his ancestral dragons. The thing is, Ander's bluff score is pretty crappy, +1. But, he pulled off a great roll and the gnome was not insightful enough to see through Ander's lies.

Ander knelt down next to the grave and began chanting in draconic. Bram, the wizard, knows draconic (Ander determined during his bluff that the gnome did not know the language by saying something to him in draconic and the gnome giving him a blank look). Ander began covertly telling Bram how many opponents they had, how they were armed, etc. Brilliant! Bram then used the Ghost Sound cantrip to relay this info to Ivy, who then whispered it to Lyssa.

Lyssa, our high perception eladrin, heard the gnome tell one of the thugs to kill this chanting fool so they could clean out (they had found what they were looking for), so Ivy shot the gnome with her short bow and all hell broke loose

It was cool and tense with Ander surrounded by thugs trying to bluff. The whole time he had a shuriken hidden in his hand, just waiting to throw it. In fact, once the shit went down, in one turn, he unleased his acid breath, killing two of the humans and using the shuriken to kill another with a throat shot.

The halfling slinger. who had been hidden the whole time finally revealed herself and started raining sling stones down on the adventurers. She did quite a bit of damage, and eventually escaped unscathed. Now I have a foe that might be back someday to try and get revenge on the group.

The gnome was shot a few times by Ivy, then Bram unleashed his Flaming Sphere, frying him. Lyssa finally finished him off with her Lance of Faith while he tried to escape.

Uncle Douven was rescued and the group has a few clues about the Cult of Orcus and the rift of the Shadowfell, but first they have been asked by Lord Padraig of Winterhaven to help stamp out their kobold problems, which is where they will start next time around.

All in all, I think this session went better than the first one. The first time out, I was trying to juggle and teach the rules, and rushed through things to get to encounters. This time I took it slower, had a lot more interaction with NPC's. Also, lowering the difficulty of the encounter helped a bit. The PCs still were taking some serious damage, but it wasn't completely overwhelming.

I'm really looking forward to the next game.

Roger That!

2008-07-17T17:07:00.002-04:00

This makes me want Danger Patrol even more than I already did.

OD&D as the Gom Jabbar

2008-07-04T15:07:00.001-04:00

Geez, I've been really digging the whole "retro-roleplaying," back-to-Old-School-OD&D movement, but if it encourages this sort of shit, if that's the attitude that people involved bring to the table, count me out.

It's like a bad parody of a Frank Herbert character.

Holding up old school OD&D as some kind of paragon of deep creative human activity, for the few true humans among us, who rise above all the rest (he didn't quite get around to using the word "sheeple") and shun mere "fun" because we want to work HARD for our gaming DAMMIT! FUN IS FOR THE WEAK AND FEEBLE OF SOUUUULLLLLLLLL

Nillapleez.

Via Retro Roleplaying, who linked it mostly approvingly, via various google searches on Labyrinth Lord and Swords and Wizardry.

Grognardia on Player's Handbook Covers

2008-07-01T10:44:00.000-04:00

Grognardia has begun a series on the history of art in D&D with discussions of three Player's Handbook covers: understandably, for a blog called Grognardia (but I think he justifies this assessment cogently), he considers the AD&D PHB cover the Best Cover Ever; he moves on to the revised cover of the same book, which came out I guess in 1983? -- and moves on to the 2nd Edition cover.

I was never a real grognard in the sense that I played old school D&D for any extended period of time; I played Tunnels & Trolls. However, I did own the AD&D books, and I had friends who played D&D who I played with sometimes. And I guess I bought mine pretty early and so did my friends, because the oldest AD&D art is what I associate with AD&D. I couldn't have told you what was even on the "revised cover" AD&D players' handbook, and 2nd edition D&D -- well, I was never a big D&D fan to begin with, and by the time 2nd edition came out I was playing other things.

So not out of loyal old-school grognardism, but just from being out of touch, my mental idea of what D&D is is extremely old school (but not ultimately super-old school, because while I owned a copy of white-box OD&D, I bought it as a curiosity, not because I knew anybody who played it).

Ancient Roman D20 for sale, $18,000 - Boing Boing

2008-06-13T10:41:00.000-04:00

I WANT.

Kevin Andrew Murphy sez, "I knew that Lady Puabi of Ur had d4s for the game boards found in her tomb, but it turns out the Romans had d20s and a nice green glass one is currently up for sale at Christie's. Only $17,925, for the gamer who has everything."
[From Ancient Roman D20 for sale, $18,000 - Boing Boing]

We lost Erick. :(

2008-06-10T17:12:00.001-04:00

Erick Wujcik Passes Quietly

Beloved role-playing game designer, Erick Wujcik, passed away Saturday evening, June 7, 2008. He died from complications related to pancreatic and liver cancer. Kathryn Kozora, his sweetheart of over 30 years, and other loved ones were at his side.

Grognard's Challenge -- Ed's Answer Sheet and Results

2008-06-04T00:06:00.001-04:00

Answers here.

Holy crap, the majority of my educated guesses were correct, giving me a final score of 41 out of 50.

Diagnosis: "40-49 I suspect you're probably wearing D&D underoos right now. For God's sake, put on some pants!"

Wrong answers marked below with the Sign of FAIL.

1) : C

2) : C (guess, 2nd guess: A)

3: B

4: C

5: C

6: A

7: E

8: D

9: C (a guess, having ruled out A and B, and probably D and E)

10: B (I first thought A, but wasn't A in module B2?)

11: C (total guess) FAIL

12: E (total guess) FAIL

13: A

14: D

15: A (total guess) FAIL

16: A (total guess) FAIL

17: D

18: A

19: E (mostly a guess)

20: C

21: D

22: C (ruling out E and D, all the rest seem unlikely, Jorune seems too late, EPT seems slightly too early, but the genre is close to correct... let's say C) FAIL

23: C (total guess)

24: C

25 : D (total guess) FAIL

26: E

27: E (educated guess) FAIL

28: C

29: B

30: C

31: E (I said A at first but something is nagging at me telling me it's E, despite the relative publication dates of the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements)

32: B

33: E (vague memory/mostly a guess)

34: C (mostly guess, after ruling out some of 'em) FAIL

35: B

36: D (guess)

37: B

38: D

39: D (mostly guess)

40: D

41: C (mostly guess)

42: A

43: E (nigh-total guess) FAIL

44: B (semi-guess)

45: E (mostly guess)

46: C (ruling out A, B, and D)

47: D (Guess, after ruling out B, C, and E)

48: C

49: E

50: D

Grognards' Challenge

2008-06-01T17:59:00.001-04:00

If you've been a gamer for more of your life than you've *not* been a gamer, you MUST take Jeff Rients' trivia challenge.

Of the 50, I'm 100% certain of my answers to 28 of them, have reasonable guesses for 9 of them, and am completely in the dark on the remaining 13.

Naked Catgirls Are Cool Again

2008-05-19T18:18:00.001-04:00

James V. West is drawing them, and that's good enough for me.

Ruzalia and the Prince of Ardova: A Tale of Ribaldry, and Intrigue

2008-04-28T20:41:00.002-04:00

Went to Okemos again to visit Joe, and the first order of business was to find out what happens next with Ruzalia.

I was going to use consciously improv'ed GMing again, as I had last time. Having enjoyed Play Unsafe, I had gone one step further and had bought a copy of Keith Johnstone's Impro, the Bible of improvisational theater, and Graham's main source for Play Unsafe. I was about halfway through Impro at the time, having just read the part about narrative structure.

This is an important part for me -- the idea that you can make stories whole by a two-movement process; first, spinning out ideas, then, connecting all the dots you've painted. Expansion and contraction, opening and closing, to a point of literal closure.

I had no idea what was going to happen this time; I'd tossed around some vague ideas in my head but none of them made it into the game.

So what happened?

We very much wanted this adventure to happen in a city. Ruzalia is kind of a Gray Mouser-esque figure in some ways, and we wanted to put her back in that environment; also, the rules of TSOY make it very hard on an isolated character -- it's impossible to refresh your attribute pools without human contact, and that was killing her last time. (Nearly literally killing her.) So this one was going to be about people.

Joe brought to the table the idea that she'd paid for a few months at a tavern called the Dancing Goat (its signboard: a satyr leaping) with the loot from the tower in the last adventure, and was taking it easy. He also had the idea that she would be exercising her storytelling skill, and that she was going to use it to impress a woman in the audience, whom she had identified as a magician -- establishing a relationship with her, so that she would have someone to teach her three-corner-magic Secrets in the future. (It turns out Ruzalia is bisexual. Hey, why not?)

At some point in this process I threw out the following:

- A group of bearded, burly men in the corner, led by an older guy, always talk politics. They always shut up when certain people come into the tavern -- the pattern of who they shut up for is not yet clear to Ruzalia.

- A young guy named Benido, who's reasonably good on the guitar, accompanies Ruzalia when she's storytelling. (Uninvited.) He's got a pretty obvious crush on her.

- The mage is named Ilona, and seems rich and well-dressed. She's blonde, which is unusual except for amongst the nobles in Maldor, but she doesn't quite look like a typical Maldoran noble; something foreign about her features.

Ruzalia's tale is something she composed herself, the Ribald Tale of the Prince of Durillo. Durillo is a principality just to the north of Ardova, and a political rival. Ardovans have a rivalry with Durillans, and a low opinion of their morals and habits, comparable to England's rivalry with France. (And vice versa, of course.) The Ribald Tale is worthy of Chaucer, and dwells unflatteringly on the Prince's predilection for well-endowed goblins.

The tale is well received, and Ruzalia joins Ilona at her table, bringing some Ammenite rice wine, and gets to know her. It turns out that Ruzalia's description of the Prince of Durillo is pretty accurate... and Ilona is a former lover of his! [Aggressive and improbable reincorporation on my part. Sue me.] Ilona had grown tired of his increasingly perverse habits, and fled Durillo.

Ilona is receptive to Ruzalia's advances, but insists she has other business tonight -- at the palace. Ruzalia manages to make her forget her other business [successful Savoir-Faire roll], and they retire to Ruzalia's room, where their newfound friendship proves quite exhausting. And Ilona proves quite vocal. (Everybody in the Dancing Goat is going to be looking at Ruzalia a little oddly from now on...)

The next morning, Ilona leaves Ruzalia a bracelet with her signet on it, telling her that it will get her into the Palace if she wishes to visit. Then Ilona leaves for the Ardovan palace, an errand which she says she cannot delay any longer.

OK, what have we got out there now? 1. Ilona and her newfound affection for Ruzalia, 2. Ilona's urgent journey to the palace, and her history in Durillo, 3. the old burly guys in the corner talking politics, 4. Benido, 5. Signet jewelry gets you admission to the palace in Ardova.

Wow. Lots on the table. Will it all be pulled together by the end of the adventure? That's how the story-improv'ing works. Expand then contract; create then reincorporate. Right now we're just creating.

With all this over we had kind of a quiet spot. Nothing impelling immediate action. Ilona was gone; the Dancing Goat was very quiet. Ruzalia took the day off to recover from the previous strenuous night. That evening she noticed that the guys in the corner who talk politics weren't there at all. That was the first time she'd seen that happen. Odd. And now that she remembered, they'd shut up when Ilona was there.

The next day, OK, enough lazing around. Time for Ruzalia to do normal Ruzalia things, whatever those are.

Well, she's a treasure hunter by trade. So she went to Ardova's market district, to Antiquarians' Corner, to talk to the old antiquities traders she sells treasure to, and buys treasure-maps from. She asks her best customer, Maimonides, about the guys in the corner of the Dancing Goat, the ones who talk politics. He recognizes them by their descriptions. The older man who seemed to be the leader is Aramón, a former captain of the palace and city guard. The others are all former guardsmen, who had been removed from service at one time or another.

Hm. Perhaps sinister chaps. Plotting revenge for being let go?

Ruzalia considers paying a visit to the palace, using Ilona's signet bracelet.... or at least scouting out a part of town she's basically never been to.

Soon we find her in the more noble sections of town. This is Maldor, so we don't have gleaming marble buildings in perfect condition; the difference between the rich center of Ardova and the poor outskirts is that in the rich center, the glorious buildings have been crudely repaired wherever they are blasted and broken, whereas in the poor section they're just inhabited the way they are or else torn down for building stones, which are used to make smaller, rough buildings.

She finds herself sticking out a bit, in this part of town, in her lower-class clothes, and realizes she'll never make it into the palace dressed that way. She's still fairly well heeled after her last adventure, so she decides to upgrade her wardrobe. She finds a dress shop and convinces/pays a very surprised and skeptical tailor to make a dress immediately... And she walks out of the shop resplendent in finery. [New element: noble dress, and blending in vs sticking out]

Which gets her into trouble. One of the city guards from this part of town was following her before she entered the shop, and watched till she left, and he lays hands on her and accuses her of the crime of dressing above her station.

He himself has hands laid on him from behind -- It's Aramón! Aramón is not someone you mess with, he's built like Brain Blessed, and intimidates the guard into leaving Ruzalia along. She casts a divination on him to find out his general disposition.... and gets the answer "Protective," which surprises her. [Reincorporation: Aramón]

He walks Ruzalia back to the Dancing Goat and they confide in each other. She finds out that he and his little coterie are all royal guards who have been fired, one by one, after being accused falsely of various crimes by agents of the Chamberlain (never trust a Chamberlain!). Aramón has taken it upon himself to keep informed about the politics inside the Palace, trying to find out what's going on. Hence the discussions about politics all the time. They have clammed up whenever anyone who had, or seemed to have, palace connections, and whom they didn't trust, appeared.

Anyway, one by one their informants within the palace have shut up or been expelled, they're in the dark about what's going on in the palace, and they've become increasingly certain that a coup is in the works. (They're all loyal to the Prince, who's young and not necessarily very wise, but a good guy by their standards.) At first they thought that Ilona might be involved, perhaps as part of a plot from Durillo, which is why they'd clammed up around her and not shown up the next day, but some frenzied intelligence-gathering on their part was able to rule that out. Now they have no eyes, ears, or mouthpiece inside the Palace, and they wish to get a warning to the Prince.

Aramón and Ruzalia having joined the rest of the group, he asks Ruzalia, hesitantly, if she would be able to get in touch with Ilona, and perhaps get a message to the prince through her. She agrees to try... for a price. (She's got the Key of Glittering Gold and is getting hooked on the feel of fine clothes.) The men agree to her price and pay it beforehand, give her a scroll with a blank seal with the message inside, and she sets off for the palace.

[OK, threads are beginning to be drawn together. We're closing in. We've accounted for the men in the tavern talking politics, and connected them to the Palace, and given them an interest in Ruzalia, and flipped them over from menacing to benevolent.]

Getting into the palace is fairly easy. She shows a butler the token, and he takes her to a room where she waits for a few minutes. He comes back quickly and looks extremely awkward and embarrassed, and leads her deep into the palace, and opens a door for her and stands aside. Inside she finds the Prince of Ardova himself, and Ilona embracing him... both naked, in a bath.

And Ilona invites her to join them.

[OK, we now see that Ilona's got something of a prince fetish, and while the Prince of Durillo might have been a bit too out there for her, she's making herself quite at home with the Prince of Ardova... reincorporation: Ilona as an ardent devotee of pleasure; debauched nobles]

"Business before pleasure, I'm afraid," says Ruzalia, and she explains her mission and gives the prince the scroll. He breaks the seal, reads the contents, and turns white. He's connected the dots between what's in the scroll and what he's seen in the court lately and has concluded this is going down tonight, that he is possibly minutes away from assassination.

He, Ilona, and Ruzalia quickly plan an escape. They need disguises... Ilona summons the uncomfortable butler from outside the door and explains that they need two maidservants' uniforms and one manservant's, to fit the three of them. She explains that they're going to play a game that they play in Durillo, called "The Naughty Footman," and that they'll need at least an hour undisturbed to do so. The butler reaches epic levels of flusteredness but obeys. [Reincorporation: debauchery among nobles, especially in Durillo; clothes allowing one to blend in or not]

Ruzalia has the clever idea that Ilona use the Living Morph Secret to switch genders between Ilona and the Prince, since either would be recognized in the palace as themselves. She obliges, and soon Ruzalia, the Prince(ess) and Ilona the Footman are escaping the palace at great speed, Ruzalia greatly regretful that she has left her new dress behind!

They make it back to the Dancing Goat, and Ruzalia dresses in some of her old clothes and provides Ilona with one of her tunics... But she's got no men's clothes for the Prince... Till she slips downstairs and gets Benido, who is about the Prince's size, to bring over a change of clothes -- "Ssh! I'll explain later!"

[We've reincorporated Benido! Yay!]

Once they're all dressed again they come downstairs to meet Aramón and his men. The Prince embraces Aramón and they all pledge loyalty to the Prince. He declares them the new, true, and rightful Royal Guard and everyone races back to the Palace, and basically the prince invades his own palace.

They begin securing the palace, sorting the guards swiftly into the ones they trust and the ones they've stripped of their weapons and armor and sent packing. Ruzalia and Ilona think this is going too slow... they exchange glances and slip off to find the Chamberlain themselves!

They find their way to his rooms and only have to disable one guard on the way... [Following Play Unsafe's suggestion: "don't put gratuitous obstacles in the way of success just because things are happening too quickly... Let the players succeed, and play out what happens when they succeed"] They find the Chamberlain in a council-chamber, with two guards of his own. He's a man in his late 40s, looking like something between the Evil Prince and the Evil Count from Princess Bride.

Ilona attacks the guards with flaming hands while Ruzalia takes on the Chamberlain in a bare-knuckle brawl, which is the final battle of the adventure (using TSOY's Bringing Down The Pain rules). She wins. :)

In the denoument, she is offered a Title (Lady Ruzalia) but turns it down; she is instead given an Honor, awarded the name of Defender of Ardova for her efforts, and a sigil-jewel of her own is carved, giving her access to the palace should she choose to return. Oh, and she's richly rewarded in glittering gold. The Chamberlain is tried for treason and no doubt executed; Aramón is restored to his position as captain of the royal guard.

[And all the pieces are brought together. Well, I could have brought Maimonides into it a little more; he was kind of a turning point, where the adventure had started to leave her behind but she found her way back into it by means of learning from him who Aramón and company were. It would have been even better if I'd found a way of getting him back into things but to be honest I'd forgotten about him completely by the end.]

In Impro, Keith Johnstone says that many writers make the mistake of looking forward when they're stuck; they should be looking back at what they've already done to find out where they're going; this is advice which is also reflected in the Story chapter of Play Unsafe. It works!

I kept a page of very quick notes on everything that had happened, and whenever I was unsure where to take things next, I scanned over what we already had for ideas on where to go.

I did kind of a lot of plotting; set the direction for the adventure in many ways, which might have come across as railroading if it had been done beforehand, but, Joe will correct me if I'm wrong, I think that since everything I did grew out of things that he initiated, one way or another, and I didn't come to the game with an agenda of where I wanted it to go, any railroading effect was negated.

I mean, if he hadn't brought in Ilona and the Ribald Tale of the Prince of Durillo, which happened in the first minutes of the game, what would be left of the adventure? Everything grew out of the interaction of those story elements with the group of men in the corner talking politics, which I'd spun into existence out of nowhere at the very beginning as well.

So I'm definitely digging this improv-GMing thing. Hats off to Graham for getting me into this stuff. I've never GMed as much as I might like, because I never prepare anything I'm really enthusiastic about. This is fun.

It'll work better with some roleplaying games than others, of course. It'd be difficult to improv up a well-made Champions villain, for example.... careful construction is kind of the point of that. And even with TSOY I had to make allowances -- you're supposed to give experience points for the players participating in certain Key Scenes, which the GM comes up with beforehand. Well, I hadn't come up with anything beforehand, so I had to decide as they happened which scenes were awesome enough that they ought to be Key.

But I enjoyed this game even more than the last one, and the last one was pretty fun. It's still kind of amazing to me that I didn't know any of this was going to happen before it started taking shape during the game, and yet it hangs together into a unified story.

Good times.

Local Comic Shop Guy Shot

2008-04-27T13:11:00.003-04:00

UPDATE: People are raising money to help out.

Friends of a comic-book store owner shot in an apparent robbery said they can't understand why the shop would be a target.

David Pirkola is in critical but stable condition in a local hospital, said Stephen Jahner, who owns Apparitions Comics and Books with Pirkola.

"People open comic stores because they love comics and are lucky if they can make a living," Jahner said. "It's not like we ever have a lot of cash in the store. It's just unbelievable."

Kentwood police said a man entered the store at 2757 Ridgemoor Drive SE around 7 p.m. and demanded money, shot Pirkola and fled.

Jahner said Saturday he has known Pirkola for decades.

"He's just a sweet guy, one of the nicest people you'll ever meet," he said. "He's the kind of guy you want watching your back."

[From Friend: Comic store owner critically hurt in shooting - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com]

That's where I buy Knights of the Dinner Table and PvP every month. There are few places I can think of less likely for a robbery an shooting. I heard about this late Friday night in the news and I still can't believe it. Dave's a totally nice guy. Robbing a comic book store? Robbing Dave's comic book store? And shooting? And now Dave's in the hospital in critical condition for a gunshot wound? It's terrible and it doesn't make any sense.

Ruzalia by James West

2008-04-15T22:06:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I contacted James West (author of The Pool and The Questing Beast, as well as an artist for Trollbabe and The Shadow of Yesterday) about doing a commission for me of my character, Ruzalia, from The Shadow of Yesterday game that Ed's been running. Man, did he come through!James has got some great new stuff out there. Here's a sampling of it:

Zoa Space Fantasy: A kick ass space/fantasy comic.

The Wizards of Ur: This a blog that James does with several other like-minded artist, where they share art and other interesting stuff.

Blood Red Comics: WARNING: This site is not work safe. A gallery of swords and sorcery women. Also linked from this site, is his "grab bag sale." Basically you give him some cash and he sends you a random piece of art from the site. So far I've gotten these ones:

Sword Maiden and the Beast
Howzit Going

So yeah, cool stuff. Check it out.

It's Like When Weird Al Mocks Your Song

2008-04-01T00:08:00.004-04:00

A threshold has been crossed. For the first time in the history of the comic, Knights of the Dinner Table characters have been depicted playing a Forge-Forged, indie RPG -- to wit, John Harper's Agon, which was reviewed in their monthly indie RPG review column.

Damn. Indie RPGs have arrived.

Congratulations, John Harper.

Of course it's the Black Hands playing it. That little dysfunctional family is at each other's throats no matter what they play. :)

Nostalgia: TFOS

2008-03-26T21:25:00.002-04:00

While digging through my game closet tonight, I stumbled across my three different editions of Teenagers From Outer Space. Man, that game really brings back some memories. It was one of the first games I ever played with Ed way back in 1987. 1987? Man, I feel old...

Tucked away inside the first edition were a bunch of characters, so I thought it'd be cool to scan some of the drawings Ed did back then and post them. I hope you don't mind Ed.We have, from, left to right: Mikrontin (Mike) Benizok (played by me), Jamison B. Zwuulii (played by Glenn), and Marvin Thpthpthpthpthp (played by Kev). Marvin had the best Trait ever: Scarf w/o Barf. Ed, I can't remember, did he get naked when he got big?

MLWM Boing Boinged!

2008-03-11T15:58:00.001-04:00

My Life With Master: "As seminal to RPGs as Frankenstein was for literature" - Boing Boing:
Boing Boing posted a link to a short review of My Life With Master by Greg Costikyan.

This is up there with Slashdotting TSOY, IMHO.

Ruzalia [TSoY]

2008-03-09T19:21:00.002-04:00

Here is a drawing of Ruzalia, my character from The Shadow of Yesterday game that Ed ran, and previously blogged about. Ed did the drawing, I did the digital coloring.

I Played The Shadow of Yesterday.

2008-03-09T00:58:00.000-05:00

I got to play TSoY today. Actually I ran a game of it. I was over at Joe's for the day, and we'd been talking about playing it for a few weeks. He'd made a character named Ruzalia, who's a treasure hunter and adventuress with a little knowledge of three-corner magic.

There were a couple of "will this work? How will this work?" issues. First off we wanted to try out TSoY, which we never had before, and get used to the rules. Second off, well, I'd bought Play Unsafe a month or so ago, and I wanted to try improv-ing the GMing, consciously using the techniques he suggested. If I could do that, if I could make a good game of it, I thought, I could start doing a lot more GMing, and worrying about it a lot less.

It was a smashing success, from my point of view.

Here's the story, a bit of an overview:

Ruzalia had bought a map to a ruined tower from back before the Skyfire, in Old Maldor. Odd, because as far as she could tell nobody knew of such a thing and it's not the sort of thing one would miss. Perhaps it'd been destroyed. She took a roundabout way to get there to avoid the skirmishing bands of ratkin and the local baron's roving bands of warriors, fighting the ratkin and goblins of the area and raiding villages in the other baronies...

She found out quickly why the tower was unknown. In the time of the Skyfire the earth had cracked open and a chunk of it settled deep down, making a canyon, taking the tower with it. Now the top of the tall tower was below the level of the land around it, in a deep rift.

The minaret glowed strangely in the moonlight as she made her way down to it... she broke into it and found that it had a central open shaft under the minaret, with rooms all around it and stairways leading up... she went from room to room, lifting valuables as she went, and realize on the way up this was a wizard's tower. The very top level, under the glowing dome, was one huge laboratory surrounding the central open shaft, with a catwalk leading to a circular platform in the center of the shaft, like something out of Star Wars. But with a magic circle inscribed on the platform. A wizard's tower, untouched for 300 years, since the skyfire!

She started investigating the lab, and amongst the many wizardly accoutrements, she found... an orrery. Then she noticed something strange... if this orrery were made before the skyfire, before the creation of the moon, and untouched since then in a deserted tower.... Why did it have a globe to represent the moon? ... a globe which looked like it was newer than the rest of the mechanism?

She gazed at the central globe, a complete map of the world of Near -- knowledge that had perished, or at least become obsolete, since the time of darkness... She was seeing something the knowledge of which was beyond the greatest scholars of this age. She looked at the far side, away from Maldor... and it had been defaced, a great hole beaten or burned into the metal globe.

OK, it's going to take forever telling the tale at this pace. Soon she heard someone coming, she hid, that someone was a wizard-robed fellow who went and started meditating in the central platform, contemplating the glowing dome... She cast Know Capabilities to find out his greatest skill/ability... and it was... dah dah DUN.... PAST LIVES. Yep. He was an elf. Oh shit. (Elves in TSOY can be rat bastards. Even at their best they're kind of like Vulcans but less huggable, if you get my drift.)

Soon she met Tantalus, who lived or at least worked here, and who was apparently quite mad. It emerged that he had converted the dome of the tower almost completely to opal, through the power of meditating on it, and he believed that once it was complete, cosmic, world-spanning power would be his. (Nonsense, right?) He was at first peremptory, and then when he learned she was a magician, well, he tried to be charming, with limited success. It was clear he valued his privacy utterly, and wanted to make sure nobody else would disturb him. When he took her hand she divined his mind, and found that -- unsurprisingly to her -- since he had established that she alone knew the location of the tower, he was going to kill her.

And so began the fight. She used Scrapping, and he used an ancient Elven martial art involving joint locking and takedowns, an Elven Jiu-Jitsu or Aikido, if you will. Here we went nuts with the game system, Bringing Down The Pain, and both he and Ruzalia got torn the hell up with Harm. Joe spent Ruzalia's Vigor pool much too quickly and was left with no resources, and honestly because I didn't have much perspective on it I set Tantalus's stats way too high to give her a reasonable chance at him.

He got her to the central platform and tied hand and foot, and made ready to sacrifice her under the glowing opal dome, at the moment the moon was perfectly overhead (as indicated by the orrery). She started at him again, fighting bound hand and foot, trying to kick him off the platform (which would have been awesome if she'd pulled it off wouldn't it?). Another hard fight (Bringing Down the Pain) ensued, with both of them getting harmed even worse, but he prevailed, knocking her head against the stone platform and knocking her out... just as the orrery ticked past the critical moment at which he had wanted to kill her. Drat!

She awoke naked, suspended from the ceiling, in a cage in the laboratory, with Tantalus off meditating again in the center, doing his thing. Presumably until it was another propitious moment for sacrifice.

Her escaped involved some wit and some luck. There were an unusual number of rats about just now... there had been rats before, it had come up before in the game, but there were a lot of them. She befriended a couple by sharing with them the crusts of bread that she had been left in the cage.

Not long after that... the rats brought friends. Ratkin! Ratkin had entered the tower! And it was their rat friends she'd befriended! On the strength of that she got them to open the cage, all the while signaling them to be quiet. She whispered to them about the terrible danger posed by the elf who was currently an inert, meditating form lying under the dome... and snatched back her clothes and boots and knives from the ratkin who had grabbed them and were about to try them on...

More and more ratkin were showing up through the door, and none were heeding her advice to GET THE HELL OUT before the elf snapped out of his trance... they were far too interested in the many, many shiny things the laboratory held! So she ran down the stairs herself...

Passing ratkin after ratkin heading up the stairs. It turned out one of the ratkin skirmishing bands had followed her here, by tracking and by scent -- remember those ratkin bands? -- and had decided to despoil the tower themselves... dozens.... a hundred perhaps? She shoved past them all as she heard a fight break out up in the lab, ratkin squealing, Tantalus cursing....

She got out of the tower and headed for the hills as the dome on the tower glowed bright, flickered, and cracked... pieces collapsing into the tower... ruined... taking the top floors of the tower with it.

She high tailed it to the city she'd last stayed in, Ardova, hoping to cash in on what she had managed to loot from the tower before things had gone so far south... As the rest of the treasures of the tower were distributed amongst all the Ratkin in this corner of Maldor, little by little, in a thousand little skirmishes...

And Tantalus? What of Tantalus? Well.... Perhaps he's still about. You can't kill a named NPC in TSoY outside of a Bringing Down the Pain contest, and Ruzalia definitely did not kill him in any such contest....

So I'm going to be writing up a proper character (NPC) sheet for Tantalus soon.

Not a bad little game for improv, I thought.

You know how much of that I'd made up beforehand?

I had the idea of a ruin sunk deep in a chasm in the ground, from the time of the Sky Fire.

That's it. The rest was developed in play.

Probably the biggest moment where things started to really fill in for me as a GM was when I described the Orrery (it seemed a natural thing to find in a wizard's lab) and had the idea that it had been modified to include the moon. It was only then that I decided the tower must still be inhabited, and only shortly thereafter that I decided its inhabitant was an elf.

The whole thing with the dome came from my describing the tower for the first time, thinking of it as something Roger Dean might paint... that blue glow became important to the story only later on when I brought Tantalus into it.

I played Tantalus following some of the suggestions on "status" in the Play Unsafe book.

I also took care to reincorporate as much as possible; bring things back in that had come in before, especially to provide answers to mysteries or problems.

Why is the elf here? Well, because of the blue glowing minaret I'd described before.

Why didn't he kill her when he got the chance? Because of the aforementioned orrery -- he wanted to time her death precisely for ritual purposes.

How could she escape from the cage? Well, the rats I'd mentioned before as being in the tower were some help, and the ratkin I'd mentioned as being in the area, at the very beginning of the game, became a huge part of it, which bookended the story perfectly; ratkin on the way in, ratkin on the way out.

All together it made a good, reasonably coherent story out of the whole thing.

That's enough for now. I'm up too late writing this. That wasn't every single thing that happened in the story but it's a good overview, especially from the point of view of the improvisational process.

My verdict: The Shadow of Yesterday is fun and playable. The World of Near is pretty interesting. And Graham's ideas in Play Unsafe are really helpful for straight up improv-ing a good game from next to nothing.

I'd feel confident improv-ing games in the future. Because honestly, this was a much better story than I could have come up with by planning it. Everything fit perfectly in a way that I don't think it would have if I'd sat there plotting it all out beforehand. There's great power in improvisational GMing, and I want to do more of it.

And Ruzalia's a pretty cool character, and I did a couple drawings of her to Joe's description after the game.

Rock on.

Time to sleep now.

"How best to experience weird fantasy in a [D&D] campaign?"

2008-02-27T22:17:00.001-05:00

KNIGHTS & KNAVES ALEHOUSE :: View topic - How best to experience weird fantasy in a campaign?:
My fave is the Otis/Elmore rule, personally. :)

Via Jeff's Gameblog, to which I am apparently addicted.

The Thief, Black Leaf, Did Not Find The Poison Trap, And I Declare Her Dead

2008-02-27T15:23:00.001-05:00

See Jeff's Gameblog.

Satan is no match for Ron Edwards.

I played a game!

2008-02-23T02:40:00.000-05:00

I played Star Wars (D6 -- there can be only one) tonight, with about a bazillion people.

Schedule:

10:00 PM - everybody's shown up by now.
10:30 PM - by now everyone has characters done (most of us had made them a week before)
11:45 PM - people are done socializing and being the dorks we are and the game actually begins. Scene is set. Background is given. Mission is set out. We decide how to tackle it.
12:30 or so AM - First encounter: bunch of stormtroopers show up and we start a combat. (Well, technically I started the combat, by refusing to actually hide as opposed to taking cover but keeping my gun out and aimed at them as they came down the stairs...)
2:00 AM -- combat ends with an AT-ST coming in as backup and dropping gas canisters into the area, after we beat the stuffing out of the stormtroopers, so we run away. Out of game time; skill points are handed out.

I played as maximally combat-monstered a character as I could -- a bounty hunter, with maximal blaster skill for a starting character (6D). But I never actually hit anybody in combat, at all.

Once it was because of a really bad roll, but after that it was mostly just that I went after all the stormtroopers in initiative order (which doesn't change from round to round), and I kept getting stunned-for-the-rest-of-the-round every combat round before I got a chance to act. (Once by a grenade thrown by a fellow player that he didn't throw far enough, the rest of the time by the stormtroopers.)

Sometimes when you're doing the indie game thing you get all nostalgic for traditional games, but stuff like that is a little reminder of why people decided to try to reach out in different directions.

For all that, I had a lot of fun just being with the guys and playing. I'm really glad I did it, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Being in a room with a bunch of people you like, rolling dice and imagining things is fun, even if your character can't actually do the things he's supposed to be really good at, and you accomplish very little throughout the course of the evening...

But traditional RPGs definitely have their downsides.

Unmasking the "Christian Wright"?

2008-02-12T20:24:00.001-05:00

Christian Wright's Games Review Weblog, to which the redoubtable Paul Czege pointed me, is a remarkable site. It would seem to be a series of reviews of games written by an American Fundamentalist Christian gamer, on a quest to warn the world against immoral, corrupt games, and champion morally upright games.

There are some mighty strange things about this blog though...

First, there is the odd coincidence that while the author betrays no particular familiarity with the indie games scene, two of the six games he reviews are indie favorites.

Second, there is a rather improbable story about how he got roped into playing My Life With Master (only to quit partway through, full of righteous indignation). And the review of My LIfe With Master taken as a whole conveys a very complete picture of the scope, rules, and purpose of the game, despite the fact that Mr. Wright's personal views on it are completely off the mark. By reading the story of Mr. Wright's encounter with the other players you actually get a complete review of the game, almost as if through the literary device of the unreliable narrator.

Third, there seems to be a strange obsession with English culture:

[RE: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay] It seems also to be a trait of English roleplaying games to present the world in as dark and horrible way as possible. It seems to me to be a common theme in English games that even good must be painted in dark shades...

[RE: SLA Industries] It is quite obviously English in origin, having the stamp of anti-Americanism that seems to be considered ‘cool’ on the other side of the ocean.

So we have a narrator who is an American Fundamentalist gamer who keeps commenting with distaste on English taste. I don't know about you, but I don't know of any American Fundamentalists who think of England as especially decadent. Or who think of England much at all.

Fourthly, despite his being an American gamer who is disgusted with all things English, he uses quotation marks like the English do -- single quotes, not double -- and he uses English spellings and words like "behaviour," "colour," "realise" and even "whilst."

Finally, and most importantly, his writing contains some moments of comedy gold which could never be unintentional -- with regards to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay --

In terms of the characters you can play, there are many positive choices in the game: demon slayer, friar (a mendicant monk who dedicates his life to God), knight, priest and witch hunter to name the more obvious ones. Then there are career choices which are either morally suspect or simply repugnant: Wizard, outlaw, thief, assassin, grave robber and scientific scholar.

Oh yes, positive choices such as demon slayer, friar, knight, priest and.... witch hunter! (rimshot ) or morally suspect and repugnant people like wizards, outlaws, thieves, assassins, grave robbers and.... scientific scholars! (rimshot)

Once the parody becomes obvious it gets kind of fun. The narrator loves Dogs in the Vineyard but doesn't at all understand the moral ambiguity involved; he loves Hunter the Reckoning without realizing that the hunters are supposed to be creepy. He disapproves of SLA industries, while directing you pruriently to the naughty pictures on page 171. He explains the "scenes of reaching out in love to the villagers" rules in My Life With Master, while explaining that he never asked for one himself because it offended against his sense of the proper role of the GM. And he suggests you avoid directly exposing yourself to the works of the 'writer' (note Brit single quotes) H P Lovecraft (note Brit tendency not to put periods -- er, full stops -- after the initials) -- as if Lovecraft's own works were a Necronomicon of sorts.

And of course his name is Christian Wright.

So we've deduced that the author is a Brit, probably English, indie games nerd who also enjoys horror like Call of Cthulhu and SLA Industries.

The game's afoot! Suggestions, insinuations, or confessions as to who is behind the mask of Christian Wright are encouraged in comments. Dissemination of this challenge to more widely-read gamer blogs is even more encouraged.

Two for Two

2008-01-30T17:56:00.001-05:00

This month, Knights of the Dinner Table magazine's Indy Game Scene review was of Gregor Hutton's Best Friends.

It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

2008-01-12T00:35:00.000-05:00

A guilty pleasure of mine is Knights of the Dinner Table. It's the only comic I buy and read faithfully every month. The fictional and real versions of Hackmaster are all neo-old school. Advanced D&D Goes to Eleven. And the columns and letters pages tend to be discussions of gaming which read as if they were transported forward in time from 1983. "Poison -- Should Neutral Alignment Characters Use It?" That sort of thing.

Anyway, I was reading this month's and it had a column I'd never seen before. Entitled "The 'Indie' Gaming Scene." And it contained: an enthusiastic review of The Shadow of Yesterday.

You can't escape the indie.

Sad News About Eric Wujcik

2007-12-24T00:07:00.001-05:00

From http://www.erickwujcik.com/:

This website is dedicated to Erick Wujcik, game designer, writer, artist, originator of ideas, thinker and kind soul. Friend to countless people and an inspiration to thousands upon thousands more.

He is one of my dearest friends, so it is with a heavy heart that I report Erick Wujcik, age 56, is dying of cancer.

The site makes it sound like Erick's situation is much more dire than that of Alexander Cherry, who last I heard (last week) was still fighting hard, in considerable danger but by no means beyond hope.

Erick made a big difference in my gaming life, starting with the fun Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the wonderfully deranged Ninjas & Superspies, and then of course there was this little article, in Shadis or something like that, where he talked about the nutty idea of "diceless gaming"...

He will be missed.

The King of Life never burdens you with more depleted uranium than you can carry.

2007-09-27T21:49:00.001-04:00

Lore "Slumbering 'Brunching Shuttlecocks' Lungfish" Sjøberg mentioned some off-the-wall RPG ideas in his blog, and commenters including myself pointed him at many and various indie RPGs. He just grabbed Dogs in the Vineyard.

Your initiatory conflict: hold a depleted uranium beholder statue. The stakes: are you crushed by the 11-hit-die aberration?

[The Emperor's Heart] Love and Death in the Imperial City

2007-09-15T20:50:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I ran a play-test of Chris Chinn's new game, The Emperor's Heart. The report of the play-test can be read here. It was pretty cool game, and I look forward to trying it out again soon.

You Scratch And Scratch And Then You're a Cyborg

2007-09-07T16:42:00.002-04:00

OK, the fact that everyone involved in this story is plumb stark raving nuts is sad, but man, this is an awesome article.

Remember the phantom disease people were complaining of a year or two ago, Morgellons, which dermatologists insist is really "delusional parasitosis"?

This dude has it figured out. It's nanotech.

The preliminary findings were disturbing. Morgellons appears to be a communicable nanotechnology invasion of human tissue in the form of self-assembling, self-replicating nanotubes, nanowires, and nanoarrays with sensors.

Other nanoconfigurations associated with Morgellons disease carry genetically-altered and spliced DNA or RNA. The nanomachines which precipitate Morgellons thrive in alkaline ph conditions and use the body's bio-electric energy and other (unidentified) elements for power. There is evidence that certain of the tiny machines possess their own internal batteries as well. The Morgellons nanomachines are configured to receive specific tuned microwave, EMF and ELF signals and radio data.

At this point, why this is happening is anyone's guess. We do know that Morgellons is commonly found in all body fluids, orifices and often even hair follicles, and are believed to routinely achieve total body systemic penetration.

If these findings are correct, and Morgellons is nanotechnology capable of taking over biological systems, the question remains whether or not these nanomachines were the result of an accident, or a deliberate release with the intention of infecting people for some unknown purpose.

It is almost as if Morgellons is in the process of reconstructing people into an entirely different life form; a cyborg-like creature, both biological and machine. As well, with the reports that the Morgellons nanomachines are capable of receiving radio signals, this could indicate that each infected person/system would be able to communicate with other Morgellon sufferers, creating the potential that each person would be like a single brain-cell of a larger, artificial intelligence.

That is AWESOME.

Actual Play: InSpectres West Michigan

2007-09-03T00:31:00.001-04:00

Posted not because InSpectres is, like, in need of feedback or playtesting or anything, but because I get to play little enough that just about anything is worth an Active Play post.

Joe ran InSpectres on RPG Day in our little NotGenCon weekend. It was a pretty simple, standard game, but we had fun.

We made characters one by one, and ended up with a bookish PhD candidate/dropout desperately in search of a way to make money off his 9 years spent researching Akkadian Arcana or whatever, an Emasculated House-Husband whose daughter Addison just went to school and now he doesn't know what to do with himself, a Grease Monkey who contributed a big-ass van with the InSpectres logo airbrushed on the side, a dot-com survivor Techie, and an ex-world-famous BMX stunt biker (who finagled us the official InSpectres Lamborghini that the bookworm uses to drive to the library for research).

We decided to be local, and became the first InSpectres franchise in West Michigan. Set up our offices in the former offices of CyberNet Inc, which we imagined were huge but deserted and bereft of every possible item of value.

The initial interview was with the local media. I -- the bookish academic -- had volunteered to be the CEO of our franchise, so I got to put on my smarmy public relations face and look good for the media. Everybody got their place in the spotlight, especially the ex-stunt-biker, Pietro, who the female interviewer recognized and, upon recognizing him, focused on to the exclusion of all others. He's so dreamy!

Then it was time to meet the client. A stereotypical Italian businessman came calling; apparently he was in the process of opening a new Italian restaurant downtown named Guido di Beppo's, and, though it was nearly complete, suddenly his contractors had become spooked and were refusing to enter the place. Though details were vague it was a clear case of paranormal infestation and a job for InSpectres West Michigan! He gave us the key to the restaurant and we were on our way.

My bookish fellow went to the library to research the history of the place, while the others headed down to case the joint (the Techie, Mac, was carrying a big semi-functional Spectre Detector he'd jury-rigged himself, which had a bad habit of causing nearby electronic equipment to sputter and die...)

I took the first Confessional: "It seemed a harmless idea at the time for me to separate from the group, but I'd forgotten how twitchy Ben [the greasemonkey] could get when he's, well, unsupervised..."

It all began when Ben drilled a big ol' hole in the wall to see if the walls were sound, peeked in, and saw an eyeball staring back at him. He screamed like a man who's gone wading in Lake Michigan and has just been touched by the bloated corpse of a sailor who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and floated down through the Soo Locks to collect souls.

I won't go on through all the manifestations (demonic Pope Head anyone?) but it cost the party a lot of Stress Dice and melted the biker's comped iPhone. They had to drill through a spectral door which, when compromised, dissolved into a huge splatter of blood which drenched poor twitchy Ben. The Emasculated House-Husband, Gordon, was the only one relatively unfazed by it all, because as he said, he'd changed diapers containing scarier stuff than anything he'd seen in the restaurant.

Meanwhile my bookworm, Michael, had found out that the property had once been an abbatoir, but it had been forcibly shut down in about 1912. Checking the newspapers from the period, he found that front-page stories from that year, starting at the time the restaurant was shut down, had been cut out of the newspapers in the library's archives. There were big holes where some big story had been, that everybody wanted to forget about...

Long story short, we did get the name of the guy who owned the abattoir then, he was still alive in a nursing home in St. Joseph, MI, way on the other side of the state. We headed over there and there he was, an evil, evil old man, kept alive at the age of 100+ by some force of devilish hatred. We confronted him about what had happened at the abattoir back then and of course it came out that he had a Sweeney Todd operation going on there that spiralled out of control, and it ended up with most of the population of the city having eaten human flesh, hence the ripping-out of the newspapers -- everyone wanted it forgotten.

There was a big supernatural confrontation, where Ben's player kindly repaid my "twitchy" by giving my character "balls of steel" -- the old man's spectral cleaver-wielders waged war against us but we prevailed through the zaptastic power of the Techie's weaponry. The old man was banished to his final reward or something (he disappeared) and we ended up retrieving the one Evil Cleaver which was the source of his power and exorcizing it with a ritual that Bookworm Boy had handily cooked up.

Guido di Beppo's was saved, we were treated to a feast in the Pope Room (we all sat scrunched up on one side of the table with the Pope Head turned in the other direction) and we got our ten Franchise Dice, plus one from a Confessional I think... which barely replaced what we'd spent and taken in Stress Dice. A couple of us, I think Gordon and maybe Pietro? voluntarily kept the Stress rather than tax the Franchise too bad, which is an interesting development.

Overall, a really good little game, worked well with a fairly large group, we got some good use out of the Confessional (though I kind of hogged it), and the mechanics did their job well. I would really like to follow these characters up in another game, but getting everybody together again is kind of an iffy proposition. Might be able to swing a game with a small subgroup of the characters, and since I have a copy of InSpectres myself, maybe we can make it happen...

Maxim: Gen Con! Sex! Is funny! Ha ha!

2007-08-30T23:41:00.000-04:00

Nerd Sex Video Funny - Maxim Online Video Channel:

Popping up on the social bookmarking sites is this "Nerd Sex" video thing, which is supposed to be a funny video from a Maxim magazine interviewer about nerds and sex at GenCon.

I'm willing to laugh at myself and other gamers, and I wondered what the hell they could have found to say about sex and GenCon, so I checked it out, but there's really nothing to see. The interviewer tries to get various gencon attendees of various degrees of dorkiness to talk about getting laid at GenCon, and most of them look at him like he's an idiot, and when prodded, joke about it.

Plus there's a woman who was slipped a quasi-romantic come-on note by some guy she'd gamed with.

I was really ready to laugh at this if there was comedy, but I was disappointed.

Come Not Near To Me, For I Be Indier Than Thou

2007-08-25T15:26:00.001-04:00

Joe pointed me to a very hot thread on Story Games where the initial poster seems to think that a lot of "indie" game designers and fans sound too much like MC Frontalot...

soundly situated in obscurityland
famous in inverse proportion to how cool I am
and should I ever garner triple-digit fans
you can tell me then there's someone I ain't indier than...

and if you're slow on the uptake, I'll lay it out
hipsterism is a religion to which you gotta be devout
must be seen as in between unpopular and hated
or else get excommunicated

I'm not a regular Story Games poster so I'm going to indulge myself by spouting off here instead. The whole discussion is, if you want a diverting free-for-all, entertaining, and if you don't, tedious.

My favorite replies were from Matt Snyder, Tony Lower-Basch, Judd Karlman, and Christopher Kubiasik. I liked what Andy K and some others had to say, but I thought they made the mistake of wasting too much time on the issue.

I guess bottom line the problem is the many meanings and connotations of the term "indie." It can mean...

Creator-owned and controlled
Non-traditionally distributed
Created with a consciousness of GNS Theory
Consciously Narrativist
Created by people who post on the Forge
Sold at the Forge Booth at GenCon
Non-broken with respect to creative agendas
Cool and hip
Part of a special community of creative rebels
Having a delicious Creme Filling

One could try to define it better, but one can't force others at gunpoint to use one's favorite definition. As long as value judgments and identity issues are wrapped up in a term like that people are going to get bent out of shape over it. So it goes.

UPDATE: the thread continues apace, and with each post I read of it, I lose a few more brain cells. With a few exceptions, the authors of which don't need me to tell them they're exceptions.

I think this kind of thread is what forced Ron and Clinton to reorganize the Forge to try to minimize such wankery, the alternative being gnawing their own legs off.

UPDATE UPDATE: I almost posted the following to the thread, but stopped myself:

I'm wondering if Ron or others ever regret his choice of the domain name "indie-rpgs.com" -- cause I think if he'd gone for something uglier like "creator-owned-rpgs.com" such threads wouldn't exist.

As far as I'm concerned, the only meaning of "indie" which is relevant to the "indie rpgs" movement which stems from the Forge is "creator-owned," because that's what Ron meant by it, and Ron is the one who by his choice of domain names attached the word "indie" to the community.

If that's not what the word "indie" means to you, then fuck the word "indie." Don't use it.

[Breaking the Ice] Xavier and Tricia: Funky Monkey and El Bandito!

2007-08-22T22:10:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, Ed came over and we decided to fire up Breaking the Ice. My memories of the particulars may be be a bit hazy. I have the word webs and the character sheets, so maybe that'll help.

I started out with brown as my color, and had such interesting connecting words as chocolate, dirt, monkey, guitar and furniture. I should point at that our switch was that my character was a programmer, and Ed's was an office drone. Last time I played the gal, so this time, it was his turn. We set the game in Chicago, as per regulation.

I ended up with Xavier, who was a CAD furniture designer by day, guitar player in a funk band by night. He was honest, had a bit of a sweet tooth, liked to hike, and had a tattoo of a monkey. He also had an over zealous, stalker-ish fan. As a note, Ed and I had just watched a mini-marathon of "Flight of the Conchords" that I had TiVo-ed, and had Mel on the mind. If you know the show, you will nod and smile, if not, sorry.

Ed chose turquoise and ended up with stuff like ocean, jewelry, shiny, southwest, and tex-mex. His character, Tricia, was introspective, a fan of horror movies, made jewelry, liked flying kites, and worked for a restaurant chain, El Bandito! Tricia's conflict was that her office couldn't do without her. She basically, over the years, had been given more an more responsibility, but without promotion or higher pay. We had a lot of fun filling in information about the fictitious El Bandito! coming up with a mascot, commercials, and jingles.

Ed came up with the idea that one of her coworkers was the drummer in Xavier's band, and that they had met after a gig, and kinda hit it off. They agreed to meet at a park and she said she liked kites. If Xavier brought the kites, she'd bring lunch. So I described how Xavier had gone to a hobby store and bought a half dozen kites, from the cheap dowel rod ones, to slick, fighting kites. They ended up putting together the cheap ones, having fun until... crap, I can't remember the particulars, but Xavier ended up getting really pissed and just letting off a long stream of obscenities, just as a friend of Tricia's happened by, with her young child. Oops. I'm pretty sure that as some point Tricia got a call from work, as it was a very common theme throughout the game, her never getting a moment of rest. I remember them having lunch at a band shell, and he playing her some songs on his uke that he'd brought along. We ended the date with a few points of attraction, no compatibilities, and a few new traits: "Curses like a sailor" for Xavier, and "Friends hate Xavier" for Tricia.

The second date was kinda cool. Ed suggested that the date take place over a series of IM sessions. I came up with the idea that his band was on a long weekend tour out of town, playing in some clubs in Michigan. We had wonky internet connections, her getting work calls, him beginning to have doubts about being in the band. It was an interesting way to have a date, and I wish I could remember more about it. I know that they finally got some compatibilities: day job conflict, and love of old Motown songs. I seem to remember he wrote her a song, recorded it on his laptop, and sent it to her. Her conflict even dragged in the drummer/coworker who had to go to a Grand Rapids El Bandito! and help them get their computers working.

The last date was a night on the town. Xavier told Tricia that he'd quit the band. It wasn't going in the direction he wanted, and it was just a hobby for him anyway. After dinner, they were walking along Lake Michigan, when the "fan" showed up, upset that he had quit the band. Tricia stepped up and talked to the girl, and told her that the drummer/coworker kinda liked her. That seemed to placate her. Then Xavier and Tricia walked and talked about her job, with Xavier giving her some advice, telling her not to let her bosses take her for granted, etc. She got a frantic call from the office and told them she was busy and to call the bosses. Needless to say, the next call was from the bosses, and she put the smack down on them. She had demands, and they gave into every one. Starting that Monday, she'd be getting paid more, have the title of district manager, and have assistants. We ended the date with them going back to Xavier's place, and dancing to a song by Marvin Gaye.

In that last date, they scooped up three compatibilities: comfortable asking for help, night walks in the city, and dancing. I know at some point he showed her the monkey tattoo. The ended up with five attraction and five compatibilities. We decided that they'd stay together. For the life of me, and cannot remember when they fell in love with each other. I really need to take notes on these things! I think I decided that Xavier fell in love with Tricia when she stood up to her boss, showing her strength and determination. Ed, maybe you remember how it was for Tricia.

We had a little epilogue of the two of them hiking in northern Wisconsin (earlier in the game he had told her about hiking with the dad), sitting down to have a picnic lunch and him playing a song for her on the uke...

One thing that was interesting was that I used pretty much every trait I had, and even added a few, but Ed ended up with a couple that Tricia never used, or even came up. The making jewelry and horror fan for instance. I guess that happens some times. Once again, a good game of Breaking the Ice. This game is pure gold.

Next up, another game of Shooting the Moon. We played it last year, using the Talislanta setting, which was very cool, but I would like to try it again, maybe with just a modern world backdrop.

GenCon 2007 Notes

2007-08-22T09:17:00.000-04:00

It was an incredibly low-key GenCon for me, and that was fine with me. I didn't actually do all that much of anything, but it was a break from normal life, I got to meet some new people, learn new things about games, buy some stuff.

I didn't get to actually play any full length roleplaying games. I didn't sign up for any. I never happened to come by Games On Demand at a point where games were beginning rather than in full swing or ending, and the couple nights I dropped by Embassy Suites I got there too late to get into any of the games there.

I did play a full-on Engle Matrix Game (the Jack the Ripper beginner's game) with Greg and Pat, usually dragging FiL in as referee. It was fun, and I can foresee some future matrix games.

My take on Matrix Games: awesome for simulation, crap for RPGs. I have bubbling in my head the idea of doing simulations of things like presidential elections (including the upcoming one?...) with Matrix Games.

I demo'ed a lot of things: a horror game Ron Edwards was pimping hard called Dead of Night, Seth Ben-Ezra's crime game, Dirty Secrets, Emily Care Boss's alien contact game Sign In Stranger,Tony Lower-Basch's Capes, Tim C. Koppang's Hero's Banner, Atarashi Games' Panty Explosion, demoed by one of the creators, Matt Schlotte, Vincent Baker's Poison'd! and Matt Snyder's 44. I also got a nice Burning Wheel combat demo at the BW booth. Virtually all of these games had very good demos.

I didn't buy a ton of games, but I was pretty happy with what I did get. Two items I really wish I had picked up but didn't (I'll have to order 'em) are Capes and Poison'd!. One thing I got that I really wasn't expecting was Judd Karlman's Dictionary of Mu. It's a kick ass setting for Sorcerer & Sword.

I met Ken St. Andre again and bought a couple new Tunnels & Trolls adventures, and the old Circle of Ice Pocket Adventure.

I got to say hello and chat briefly with a number of Forgefolk, met John Harper in person for the first time, saw Clyde Roher but never got to buy him that root beer... saw Lxndr but every time I saw him he was very busy GMing one thing or other... But on Thursday night I did catch Paul in the Embassy Suites and got to talk with him for a while; catch up on where he's at and get the skinny on the state of the indie world from his point of view. That was a lot of fun.

Oh, I almost forgot. My prize purchase was from the auction store: a copy of the original, three-book Arduin Grimoire ruleset: The Arduin Grimoire, Welcome to Skull Tower, and The Runes of Doom.

And I challenge anyone to come up with a cooler trio of titles for fantasy game books, ever.

So it was a good con. Incredibly low-key for me, but good.