Business Casual For a Martian Warlord - Part 2

I had originally planed on only making the characters for the Nine Worlds game, but since we had some time, I thought it would be best to get right into the playing out a few scenes, and get a feel for the system, and I'm glad I did.

I started a scene, and decided, with approval of the players, to have Scopas (played by James) and Cohen (played by Randy) be together. They were on Mercury, and both had reasons to go to Hades. Scopas wanted to make sure the shades of his friends would be together -- he reasoned that since one had committed suicide, they might not be able to be together. Perhaps that one was in Tarterus. Cohen had a Muse for transporting a Thanatoi agent and his cargo safely to Hades. I figured what the heck, they are both going the same way...

Next, Randy set the scene. Things were going fine until Cohen announced that they would be making a stop on Mars for supplies. Actually, he was smuggling arms to New Sparta. They were approached in Mars aetherspace by a Marian port authority ship, and were boarded. Ah, conflict. Would they find the hidden contraband? Turns out they did, but the conflict was a real nail-bitter, as Randy and I tied for Fate. The first tie-breaker was a tie. As was the second! The third card allowed me to win, but only barely. They Eclipse was being escorted down to Thracia. Things were not looking good.

James was up and said that Scopas had a contact on Mars, a warlord in fact, named Celeus. He had done some courier work for the warlord in the past, and thought he might be able to help. Scopas and Cohen were escorted to Celeus' estate in Thracia, and met with the warlord. It was in this scene that I coined the phrase "business casual for a warlord of Mars." I was trying to describe him and that is what popped into my ridiculous head. Another conflict. Basically, both Scopas and Cohen wanted to convince Celeus to help them, worded slightly differently, and the warlord did not want to get his hands dirty in their little affair. Once again, Randy and I tied for Fate, but I beat James. First tie-breaker... a tie! Second? Tie again! We were both sweating, and he was sure he was going to get hosed again, but he pulled it off.

The narration was pretty interesting. Scopas, who lost, had been using Arete, and Cosmos to boot. He was trying to use the truth, create a logical case for why Celeus should help them. It fell on deaf ears. Cohen on the other hand, went the Hubirs route, creating false documents, and a magically glib tongue. The warlord was all ears. He totally fell for it.

Another interesting thing... when I was stating out Celeus, the idea popped into my head that he should have the Muse "See the Free Spartan League Succeed." Yep, the warlord was secretly working against Ares. Randy worked into his narration that Cohen let it be known that the weapons were for the League The warlord assured him they would be delivered. His Muse was resolved. And he won a few points which he put into a new Muse "Deliver telluric weapons to Celeus." Holy crap! So in two short scenes, he went from smuggler/explorer to subverter of Ares rule. I approve. The Eclipse and it's crew was released, and that is where we ended for them.

Next up was Amaris (played by Tammy.) We started with her arriving in Arcadia after traveling by foot for many days. She had to see Artemis, convince her to help get Amaris' centaur friends back. She went to the Primarch's temple, but was turned away by the priestess-bureaucrats. Their Lady could not be bothered, they said. Amaris, being the raised-in-the-wild-child that she is, challenged the priestess to a duel. If she won, they would take her to see Artemis. She succeeded and was taken to the Primarch's inner temple.

Artemis was sitting on a bench, fletching some arrows. Amaris pleaded her case, begging the Primarch to help track down those that took the centaurs. Artemis was sympathetic, but said that if they were off-world, it would hard for her to help. She had to defend Luna, and could not spare the resources. Conflict time. And wouldn't you know it, Amaris won. We were all pretty shocked. Her fate was one point higher. Artemis was moved by the girl's story, and saw a bit of herself in Amaris. She promised she would do what she could... at that point it was pretty late, so we stopped for the evening. Tammy actually resolved two Muses, and is now sitting on some Valor.

First game, one of the characters gets into a conflict with a Primarch, and wins. Damn. Another character is working against the interests of another Primarch. I love this game.

And here I was at the beginning of the game thinking "What should I do? I know, I'm gonna stat out a kraken. Yeah, maybe we can have that kraken that killed Scopas' friend show up." All I had to do was sit back and let the players hand me some nice and juicy conflicts. Oh, mind you, I'll be keeping those kraken stats handy. It's a long way from Mars to Hades after all...

We only get to play once a month, and decided that we would try and get some playing in next month at Gen Con while we're there. Maybe Ed can join in, eh?

Business Casual For a Martian Warlord - Part 1

Joe here. Wow, I haven't posted here since December. Sorry Ed for making you do all the work!

Last night, I started my new Nine Worlds game. My group had just finished a season of Primetime Adventures, and I was ready to try running something different. I'd have been itching to do some 9W for a while. I had only planned on doing character creation, but we finished pretty early, so we ran a few scenes. Holy crap, it was awesome. I'd run some 9W with Ed quite a while a go, but this was the first time with multiple players, and it really was something.

First off, for the characters:

Cohen (played by Randy) - He was originally from Earth, spent some time teaching at the University of Delphi, and now runs a cargo/smuggling aethership, called the Eclipse. He is searching for the lost secrets of the Cyclopes telluric weapons.

Scopas (played by James) - He is a former freelance courier from Mercury, know for his speed. Recently everything fell apart... one of his partners was killed a kraken and their spouse, his other partner, committed suicide. He wants to see that kraken slain, by his own hand, and be sure that the shades of his partners are together for eternity.

Amaris (played by Tammy) - She was born and raised in the wilds of Luna by a clan of centaurs. They were recently attacked and the centaurs not killed were kidnapped, taken off-world. She wants to find out who took the only family she's ever known from her and free them, preferably with help from Artemis.

Lots of connections, good muses, place to go, creatures to kill. My mind was abuzz with ideas, so we started. It just so happened that Cohen was heading to Hades to transport a Thanatoi and his "cargo." He took on another passenger, Scopas, who had his own reasons for going to Hades...

More coming!

Downtown Milwaukee Is Sinking

Seriously. Insert your own "years of stress from fat gamers at Gencons past" joke here.

D20 Old School

Last night when I went to play D&D with some good local friends, I actually scrounged together a sack full of dice and brought it along. This seemed like a big step, for some reason.

When I got there I searched for D20s and I only found two. They were both the old-fashioned "0-9 twice" D20s. One of them (the oldest) had one set of 0-9 inked in in green, and one set in red -- green indicated 11 through 20, of course. The other had 0-9 twice with a tiny plus mark engraved next to one of the sets of 0-9.

I rolled the latter and got a 1+, or 11. I was like "OK, 1, with the plus, that's eleven..." and I got a bunch of hootin and hollerin' about these crazy fancy new age dice with a plus on 'em like a fudge die or something. (I've got a bit of a rep as a Forge nerd among these guys.) I tried to explain about the old 0-9 twice dice, which serve equally well as percentile and twenty-sided, and which were de rigeur before ten sided dice came out and usurped the role (roll?) of percentile dice from the icosahedrons.

They were all "yeah whatever" and the conversation went to other things, but -- is it really that old school to use 0-9 twice dice? I mean, I remember when ten-sideds first came out. Is it so unheard of to use the old kinda dice anymore?

Do these kids today know *nothing* about how "back in my day we used icosahedrons as percentiles, ten-siders, AND twenty-siders, and we LOVED it dammit! Uphill, both ways!"?

hoo boy.

Liz at the Forge

Liz Danforth, my favorite fantasy artist EVAR since I was like TEN YEARS OLD, shows up on the Forge, and her first post is a reply to one of mine. How cool is that? (Joe pointed this out to me.)

Of course, she'd posted to a really really old thread, and woke it up, and people started replying, so Ron had to come in and put the smack down on the various posters. It's kinda funny cause he's simultaneously Mr Stern Moderator, and a google-eyed Danforth fanboy like myself.

Fun Photoshop Contest

Check it out.

A few faves...

Good gravy, I'm kind of amazed I actually get the Tubeways one.

Pardon my way clumsy use of images in a blogspot blog. I'm just pressing buttons here and hoping.

EDIT: Joe here. Sorry Ed, I had to kill those images. They were driving me crazy!

More UncleBear Linkage

Apparently somebody's going to be publishing RuneQuest again? How does this relate to the existing Hero Wars/HeroQuest thing? And they're doing Lankhmar too? Just in time for the comics and movies and republished books? Huh. I'm not sure how to react to that. I thought HeroQuest was Glorantha now.

Drama At Palladium Greatly Exaggerated (By Palladium)

Why do I care about this? I don't know. Palladium's in Michigan, and I've lived here in Michigan most of my life. I have a soft spot for some of the old Palladium games, freakish as they are (Ninjas & Superspies, TMNT, maybe Beyond The Supernatural, and the original tiny Mechanoids booklet). Also I am a sucker for tabloid scandal. If the blog hadn't already made that clear.

Anyway, Uncle Bear has more on the Palladium crisis. Turns out (unsuprisingly) that this wasn't actually that recent, that at least as far as the Law is convinced, he was off by a couple orders of magnitude on how much was stolen from him (5 figures instead of 6 or 7).

I wonder if he was thinking of Mega-Financial-Damage-Capacity instead of plain old Financial-Damage-Capacity?

Go read if you care about this stuff. Uncle Bear's always a good place to go for mainstream game news.

Empires

I don't know much about Iron Empires; Burning Empires looks cool to me because there aren't enough good sci-fi or even space opera type games out there; but the thing I can't get over about it is that in addition to the glorious painting type illustrations, there is this awesomely cool sketch on the PDF of the Table of Contents.

I don't know why that geeks me the heck out, but it does.

Spoken Like A True Benevolent Dictator

Ron writes:

This is where I lay down the law for participating at the booth. By signing up (that is, by paying Luke), you are agreeing to all of the points listed below, plus whatever I forgot but remember or decide later.

Awesome. I laughed.

K.O.

How do people get knocked out from a punch? The Straight Dope answers.

If you want to knock somebody out, apparently, you have to get some fast rotational motion in there -- a really swift blow to the jaw is the thing, not something heavy dropping on your head.

If you're writing simulation-y rules for pugilism, take note!

A Highly Unfortunate Distinction

There is site called "Perverted Justice" which performs the admirable service of exposing sexual predators who hit on children in regional chatrooms. Reading it is a combination of fascinating and completely nauseating, with a side order of righteous indignation and schadenfreude at their being caught and exposed.

Anyway, the character who has been voted #1 slimiest predator ever is 34 year old Paul from Chicago, aka "fleet_captain_jaime_wolf" on yahoo. His transcript is a nasty glimpse into the universe of a pedophile into dominance/submission stuff.

Why do I bring it up here? Check this shit out. (At this point he has gotten what he thinks is a 13 year old girl to refer to him as "master.")

fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:29:15 PM): Do you play role playing games?
sadlilgrrl (6:29:24 PM): i used to play a mud master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:29:36 PM): I see... What else?
sadlilgrrl (6:29:55 PM): i try to write some master but im not very good
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:10 PM): Youwill get better... I write for RPGs...
sadlilgrrl (6:30:34 PM): like dungeons and dragoons master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:40 PM): Yes, like D&D...
sadlilgrrl (6:30:47 PM): thats a really cool game master
sadlilgrrl (6:30:52 PM): i get confused by the dice tho master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:53 PM): Do you play it?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:00 PM): I will explain the dice...
sadlilgrrl (6:31:02 PM): i try to master
sadlilgrrl (6:31:15 PM): i had a book on a vampire type game like that master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:27 PM): Oh? Good... Vampire the Maskerade?
sadlilgrrl (6:31:33 PM): yes master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:42 PM): I used to work for White Wolfe...
sadlilgrrl (6:31:56 PM): is that the publisher master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:32:03 PM): Yeppers, it is.
sadlilgrrl (6:32:32 PM): thats really cool master
sadlilgrrl (6:32:38 PM): you must be really really creative master

I'm not even going to quote where the conversation goes immediately after that, but eventually, after we find out that Paul prefers Macross to Gundam, we get this:

fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:58:40 PM): Have you seen the movie "Underworld", yet?
sadlilgrrl (6:58:42 PM): my friend hillary left it at my house master
sadlilgrrl (6:58:43 PM): no master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:58:50 PM): Oh? You should, when you can.
sadlilgrrl (6:59:11 PM): okay master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:59:37 PM): Did you know that "Underworld" stole some of my ideas? (*blinks*)
sadlilgrrl (6:59:44 PM): no master
sadlilgrrl (7:00:06 PM): what did they do master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:00:23 PM): Well, in Vampire the Mascerade, you know how Vampires & Werewolves are enemies, right?
sadlilgrrl (7:00:42 PM): yes master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:10 PM): But, I had to idea to base an adventure around a Vampire who falls in love with a Werewolfe...
sadlilgrrl (7:01:36 PM): even though they hated each other master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:50 PM): Even though their people did....
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:55 PM): Look at Romeo & Juliet...
sadlilgrrl (7:02:01 PM): oh okay master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:02:34 PM): THink about it, doomed love is the best form of love. (This comment scares me.)

(Italicized bits are the reaction of the Peej volunteer playing the part of the 13 year old.)

So anyway, he's apparently a former writer for White Wolf, and wants his new massively underage sex slave to play RPGs with him. Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Anyway, he got busted and is now immortalized both on PeeJ and the Illinois sex offenders page.

There's no particular point to this post, I just was goggle-eyed seeing the juxtaposition of nerdy gamer and predator. Had to share.