Monday 20 December 2021

First Time Playing: Twilight Imperium

I don't talk about board games as much as RPGs on here, for the simple reason that this blog started in late 2019.  Many RPGs work well online.  Board games, not so much, at least without spending money.  Accordingly, I haven't played many recently.  But last week I did venture outside briefly for a friend's birthday, to play Twlight Imperium.

I tend to think of board games as coming in three categories.  First there's the classic, 'family' games that people who aren't board gamers play.  Things like Cluedo, Scrabble and Monopoly.  There's nothing wrong with these games (except Monopoly, there's a lot wrong with that) and I always enjoy the family games of Trivial Pursuit at Christmas.  Or did, pre-covid.

Then there's the board gamers' board games. The kind of thing you'll find in the trade halls at UKGE and Spiel.  Things like Ticket To Ride, Pandemic and Dominion.  The kind of thing I liked to play when I was regularly playing board games.

And then there's the big ones.  Games where you can't just say 'fancy a game?' after dinner, or rock up at the board game club with it in a bag.  These games need planning.  You need a committed group of people, a long period of time set aside for play, and substantial table space.

Of these games, Eldritch Horror is the one I'm most familiar with, requiring the whole of my six person dining table and often spilling over onto side tables, and at least four hours for a 3-4 person game.  But even Eldritch Horror is dwarfed by the monstrosity that is Twilight Imperium.

Before I even got to the game, I had some homework to do.  Fortunately one of our hosts is something of an expert, and provided a handy video:

Factions were selected via a random draw.  Having no particular idea what any of my options meant, I went for the Arborek, because plant people are fun.

I arrived at my friends' house to find their table almost completely covered.  From past D&D games I know that table will fit ten people at a push.  There were six of us playing, with just enough room for some drinks in addition to the game components.  This is not a game I will be buying, simply because I do not have a sufficiently large room in my house to hold the size of table required for this game without removing all other furniture.

We sat down, chose starting locations, then switched seats so that we were all sitting near our home systems.  And the game began.  And while some aspects were confusing, like how production works, it rapidly became clear that the actual turn structure of the game is very clear.  Pick strategy cards going round the table, starting with whoever has the speaker token, then take actions in the order of the numbers on the strategy cards.  To begin with I was a little unclear on how exactly actions worked, or how many rounds happened during the strategy phase, but by the end of the first phase I had it figured out and was prepared for rather more effective play.

Taking a full phase to actually figure out how to play would have been a massive disadvantage, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the group were fellow beginners and took about as long to work out what was going on as I did.  As it was, we remained fairly even, and at the point where the one resident expert crushed us all as expected, we were all pretty close together on the victory point track.

It's clear that the faction you play significantly affects the game.  The Arborek's unique feature is that they can't produce infantry in their space dock, but can produce them from other infantry.  Once I had that part of the game figured out it was clear that my best strategy was to swarm all over the galaxy, dropping infantry on every available planet and build up and build up.  My infestation served me well; I ended the game on six victory points, and was on the point of achieving nine, had the resident expert not ended the game just before we had the chance to achieve more objectives.

I'd heard this game takes a long time to play.  No kidding.  We played for nearly twelve hours.  Twelve hours.  But twelve hours that flew by, without a moment of boredom, with only brief pauses to keep ourselves fed and watered.

I have one criticism of the game, and that is that it's a tricky one to socialise around, simply because it's so physically big and requires so much attention.  One of the other players was someone I know on Twitter but was meeting in person for the first time.  I still don't really feel like we've properly met, because he had the furthest away seat at the table and interaction was minimal.

That said...

It's the biggest of the big board games.  It requires space, time and organisation.  It requires doing homework in advance if you're playing for the first time.  But it's completely worth it to play this incredible game.

Monday 6 December 2021

Matrons of Mystery

The first copy of Matrons of Mystery out in the wild has been sighted, so it seems like a good time to reflect on this project.

This all started with a general dissatisfaction with Brindlewood Bay.  Its mystery system is one of the best examples of game design I've seen in years, but for various reasons, when I thought about running some games inspired by the British cosy mystery TV shows I'm so fond of, it didn't really work.  Sure, you can run it without the void mystery aspect, but that's quite a chunk of the game to cut out.

So I decided to change it up a bit.  It's not a long rulebook, and hacking PBTA is pretty much a tradition at this point.  I changed things, and changed things, and changed things...

Until I realised that what I had wasn't Brindlewood Bay any more.  It was its own cosy mystery game, using the mystery system from Brindlewood Bay (which Jason Cordova has generously granted permission for other people to use) which meant I now had my own game.

Playtesting began.  I started off using the adventure 'The Great Brindlewood Bay Bake-off'.  Three games and a lot of imaginative biscuit creations later, I was confident I had a solid foundation and began assembling my disparate notes into a single document.

How was I going to get this thing out there?  I initially planned on doing a kickstarter.  It would be nice to get it properly edited.  (I've seen some absolute horrors from games that weren't edited.)  A kickstarter would allow me to pay an editor and maybe get cover art and stuff as well.

But the more I looked into it, the less I liked the idea.  I realised that what I actually liked doing was writing and running the game.  Kickstarters take work.  You've got to do budgeting, to work out what your costs are, how much Kickstarter take for their cut, how much you're going to have to pay in tax for this one-off payment and so on.  I didn't want to do any of that stuff.  I just wanted to write my book.

So ultimately editing got done by the group of playtesters I'd assembled, who pointed out typos and made helpful suggestions.  Taking all their feedback on board, I was finally happy with the end product.  I made my own cover using a royalty-free stock photo from Pixabay, and found a few line drawings from the same site to sprinkle through the text.

Now to publish it.  I'd formatted my Word document in line with Lulu's requirements, as they were easy to get hold of and easy to follow.  With an actual in-person convention coming up, I knew I needed a physical copy in my hands, so I submitted the files and bought a single copy.

Image 

The cover was a little darker than I wanted (a side effect of making my cover image in RGB rather than CMYK, I later learned) but other than that it was perfect.

For RPG passing trade though, I really needed to get the game onto DriveThruRPG.  I signed up for a seller's account, and by way of practice, published my one-page RPG Silencers.  But when I downloaded the requirements for print-on-demand files, everything suddenly got a lot more complicated.  It talked about layout tools I didn't have.  I re-installed Scribus, this being the one I had actually looked at before, and rapidly remembered why I'd never bothered installing it when I changed computer.  I opened up their template and was then entirely unable to add my own actual content.

But the black Friday sales were on, and Lulu were offering a 30% discount.  If I couldn't figure out DTRPG, I could at least make it available somewhere.  I tried to figure out what to do about that cover image - how to make it brighter without losing the colour palette.  But ultimately I gave up.  The cover was fine, and I should not let perfect be the enemy of good.  I could fiddle with colour balance for ever, or I could press the button and let people get their discounted copies.  So that's what I did.

I will put the PDF version of the game on DTRPG in the not too distant future, as I know I can meet those requirements, and maybe eventually there will be a POD version there as well.  But for now, the book is available to buy and that's what I really wanted.

I've had a wonderful time writing and playtesting this game, and I hope everyone who picks it up has just as wonderful a time playing it.

Monday 22 November 2021

First Time Playing: The Dee Sanction

The Dee Sanction is a game of 'covert enochian intelligence' - or in other words, supernatural spies in Elizabethan England.  It's a rules-light system taking inspiration from The Cthulhu Hack, and sees you playing people with a small amount of occult knowledge, saved from the gallows in return for using your skills in defense of the Queen.

What none of this makes clear is just how funny this can be.

We used the pre-generated characters.  I picked Grace, a former scholar with a passion for geometry, now living on the streets.  With what knowledge I have of the Elizabethan period, including sumtuary laws that restricted what clothes people were allowed to wear, I concluded that Grace had been a student at a university, but was forced to leave at around 16 or so when it started to become apparent that in addition to practicing heretical magics, she had also been illegally wearing trousers.

I would say that set the tone for the game, but honestly the others were already there.  We rapidly began to wonder if Dee had been scraping the barrel when it came to finding agents for this particular mission.  The alternative - that we actually were Dee's best agents - was too horrible to contemplate.

The system is very light indeed.  Just three stats, a simple method of adjusting difficulty, a couple of special abilities, plus an 'unravelling' resource that works a lot like sanity in Cthulhu-based games.  Like many modern games it takes the approach that failing a dice roll doesn't always mean failure; sometimes it means success but at a cost.  There's just enough there to make for interesting results.

Our hapless quartet set off on the introductory adventure, 'Lost In Translation', a title that having played the game, seems to contain more layers than I anticipated.  Sent to retrieve a relic from a remote farmhouse, we found ourselves dealing with inclement weather, strange behaviour, and one very persistent chicken.  Ultimately we did retrieve the relic, and more, but at the cost of most of the party.  I suspect the fact we were intentionally playing a one-shot resulted in the GM taking a more deadly approach than normal, but new characters look pretty simple to make.

While the game might have started out comedic, I'd have no hesitation in calling this a horror scenario, and I'm sure it could be played straight (at least with a different set of players.)

My thoughts after playing this is that this is the kind of game where a bit of knowledge of the time period isn't essential to play, but can certainly be an enhancement.  England was in an interesting position at the time, both politically and religiously, but it's also fun just to play up the small details like the aforementioned sumputuary laws.  As someone with strong interest in history, this game holds a strong appeal.

Overall, The Dee Sanction delivered a delightful combination of comedy, horror and history, and I very much hope I'll get to play it some more.  It's well supported with additional adventures and hopefully still more to come.  Perhaps it's time I started spreading the word?

Sunday 21 November 2021

First Time Playing: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a game that didn't grab me when I first heard about it, largely because I couldn't figure out what it was for.  Most games have some kind of elevator pitch that sums it up, like 'space western' or 'modern day urban fantasy' or 'investigative horror' which tells me pretty quickly if it's something I want to know more about.  TSL didn't seem to have that, so it was hard to find the appeal.

I finally did find the appeal when a game pitch went up at MK-RPG for a game entitled 'The Three (Thirsty) Musketeers.  Now it made sense.  Swashbuckling and romance!  Having grown up watching Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds I was absolutely willing to give this a go.  Unfortunately only one other player was interested, and we all felt that two was an insufficient number of musketeers, but I was now interested.

So a group of people from the Good Friends of Jackson Elias assembled to give this game a go.  We were invited to pretty much create the setting from scratch.  We unanimously agreed on the idea of being space pirates and decided we were going to do a heist.

Slightly more complicated was picking playbooks.  Like most PBTA games, TSL uses playbooks with a set of archetypes, each having their own special moves.  This is one of the things that initially put me off the game, as I couldn't really relate to the archetypes, especially without any context to fit them into.  With some actual context (space pirates!) to work with, they were a little less confusing.  I went for the Trickster as I could see how she could fit into the pirate crew with her deception based skillset.  I could then work from there in making sense of the rest of the playbook and how it worked.

I found a lot of constrast here with two other queer-friendly PBTA games, Monsterhearts and Dungeon Bitches.  Both of these have much more defined themes: high school supernatural romance for the former, traumatised dungeoneers for the latter.  I had little trouble coming up with a character for Dungeon Bitches, and could probably do the same with Monsterhearts if I didn't absolutely refuse to play anything focused on teenage romance.

With our setting and characters sorted out, we proceeded to the heist, taking place at a society wedding at a mansion on a private asteroid owned by a billionaire socialite who I suggested we name Ellen Musk.  All the rich people would be bringing valuables that would get stored in Ellen's safe, and we could use the wedding as cover for our crime.  We went in with very little plan, in the great traditions of Blades in the Dark, figuring that the actual heist was less important than the relationships we made along the way.

The hardest part for me was getting into the romance mindset.  Romance as a literary genre is something I just plain don't like.  (I've been known to accidentally pick up crime novels that turned out to be romantic crime novels and then spend half the book yelling at the protagonists to stop kissing and solve the goddam murder.)  But I'll happily watch a good rom-com, or the thematically similar friendship movie, so I do technically know how it works.  It's just a very new thing in RPGs for me.

But I got there in the end, and the heist went off in dramatic style, ending with us absconding with the entire safe, a pirate from a different crew, and the bride.

Overall I found this a challenging game to play.  The themes are unfamiliar, the lack of a standard setting makes it hard to contextualise, and the mechanics are a little confusing.  But it also forced me to step outside my comfort zone, think about characters in a different way, and ultimately roleplay something really fun.  Challenging but worthwhile.

Accordingly, I've backed the kickstarter for this game's supplement, Advanced Lovers and Lesbians and will pick up the main book at the same time.  And here's hoping one day we'll assemble sufficient musketeers.

Monday 15 November 2021

ConDensed 2021

I wasn't really sure until a few days before that ConDensed was actually going to happen.  Turns out I'm not the only one.  This event was originally planned for November 2020 and booked well in advance, and the venue, Billing Aquadrome, has changed hands since then.  At least four times.  Most recently, six weeks ago.  It's only thanks to one of the organisers doing a site visit between then and the event that we actually had the use of the indoor venue and didn't have to share with a children's disco.

But by the time I arrived on Friday morning, we had a venue, and if the staff were a little surprised to see us, at least they were there to sell us coffee.  Since my house is about 10 minutes from site, I decided to volunteer to help with the set up, and soon found myself setting up the board game library and sanitising the gaming tables.  Then I spent some time on the reception desk checking people in and selling them game tickets, which was also a useful way of hearing a lot of people's names.  Some of which I even remembered.

The problem with RPG conventions, of course, particularly for someone with mild face blindness, is that there's an awful lot of middle aged balding white men with beards and glasses and it's really hard for me to tell them all apart.

Game 1 - Matrons of Mystery

I decided to kick things off with a game of Matrons of Mystery.  Four people signed up to be old ladies solving murders, and soon the death of a bellringer was escalating into utter chaos, ultimately resulting in the crime being pinned on one of two co-conspirators while the other got away due to the machinations of one of the Matrons.  Certainly an ending I didn't expect.

This was the first opportunity I'd had to run the game in person, without the aid of a virtual whiteboard.  I used wipe-clean cards from All Rolled Up and dry wipe pens in a variety of colours to display suspects, clues and secrets, and while it does mean you need a reasonable amount of table space, it works well.  The different colour pens really helped, making it easy to quickly count up how many of each type of thing were on the table.

Game 2 - Matrons of Mystery

I have a scenario that's set early in the morning at a roleplay convention, so of course I had to run it in the 9am slot on Saturday.  I had four players signed up again, but one person wasn't well so we played with three.  Since he'd been a player in the previous night's game, at least I knew he wasn't missing out completely.

Mystery solving went rather quicker this time, and I suspect the number of players is a factor here.  Three player games do seem to wrap up faster than four player games, possibly due to needing less time to give everyone the spotlight, and possibly because there are fewer people coming up with solutions at the end.  None of which is bad, of course, but it is interesting to note.

It seems like people had a lot of fun with the two sessions, so hopefully there'll be some interest once I get it onto DriveThruRPG.

Game 3 - Black Code

I had originally planned to play Casting the Runes with CJ Romer on Saturday afternoon, but since nobody else had signed up and there was no sign of CJ either, I jumped into a game of Black Code since there was still a space.  Probably a good thing I did, since one of the signed up players seemed to be missing too.

Black Code is a game I'd been wanting to try out for quite a long time.  A cyberpunk game that's focused more on the transhumanism side of cyberpunk than the hacking side.  I was dubious of the system, which seemed complicated from what I'd read, but in practice turned out to be very easy to get my head around.  The archetypes were appropriate to the genre and the setting was imaginative, with some variations on the standard cyberpunk city that I wasn't expecting.

All in all I was thoroughly impressed, and will most likely pick this up at the next convention I go to.  The biggest trap most cyberpunk games fall into is taking too much influence from Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, and this one's pitched it just right.  Whether I can persuade my home group to play it, I don't know, but it's worth a try.

Game 4 - Call of Cthulhu

When I saw there was a space left in Matt Sanderson's game, The Blue, on Saturday night, I jumped in.  People have been talking about how great it is online, and I've played with Matt enough times to be sure of a good time.  Even if this was the first time in person.

The venue was pretty full on Saturday night, and with a group of six players plus GM, we were spread out enough that it was difficult to hear each other.  So we decamped to the static caravan that two of the group were staying in, and played there.  I'd never been in one of the static caravans before, so didn't really know what to expect, but there was a roomy lounge with plenty of space for the seven of us to sit comfortably.  Cups of tea and coffee were provided, and the game resumed.

We were a team of divers, surveying a newly appeared blue hole to find out if it was suitable to be marketed as a tourist attraction.  It won't be a surprise to any Call of Cthulhu fans that the answer was an emphatic no, but I certainly wasn't expecting the reason why.  As always, a great game, and worth staying up significantly past the official end time for.

Game 5 - Starfinder

After the late night on Saturday, and given that there was nothing on Sunday morning that I felt desperate to join, I decided to have a bit of extra sleep and arrived just in time to observe the silence for Remembrance Sunday.  It took me a long time to decide on a game for the afternoon, but I finally settled on Starfinder.

I don't have much of an interest in organised play, so ignored most of the Pathfinder Society and D&D Adventurer's League games on offer, but this particular game not only offered pre-gens, but also had one of my favourite PC party concepts: a band.

The other two players had already sat down at the table, knowing where they were going, and had picked the lead singer and drummer for their characters.  I had a choice between an Ysoki technomancer keyboard player and a human engineer bass player.  I took the engineer, because it's that long since I last played Starfinder that I have no memory of how magic works, but figured I could probably manage the engineer.

We were on our way to a concert, where we were going to perform and finally make it big, when our ship broke down and we had to land at the space motorway services and figure out a new way to get to the show.  With a guiding principle of 'what is the most metal thing we can do here?' we somehow made our way to the stage and into fame and fortune.

While there was another game slot in the evening, I had my own online campaign to run on Sunday night, so headed home to get ready.

Reflections

This is a convention I really wanted to succeed.  While this was the first event, it was run by the same team as ConTingency, so they've had a lot of practice in this kind of thing.  Numbers were apparantly around 150, which is excellent for a first event, especially given that we're still in a global pandemic and a lot of people still aren't doing face to face conventions.  The last I heard before I left was that we'd raised £1000 for charity as well.

Diversity looked pretty good, at least by the standards of RPG conventions.  With the convention organisers all being women, I could be confident that I wouldn't be the only one there, which is always reassuring.  Despite the usual dominance of middle aged balding white men with beards and glasses, three of my five games had other women in, and in Matt's game we actually outnumbered the men.  There's still a long way to go but things are getting better.

Despite some issues with the other people using the site hanging around in the venue, it was pretty well suited to gaming with plentiful tables of a suitable size to sit a group around and use a battlemap where required.  Free wifi and a bar available at all times were an additional bonus.  The staff were very friendly, and I got the impression they enjoyed having us there.  While the static vans apparently weren't quite up to the standards of the park used for ConTingency, they seemed pretty nice to me.  While a little more choice of food would have been nice (I ate far too many chips) it was very convenient not having to go anywhere, and there were other options for people who didn't mind leaving the building.

Going back to a face to face convention was exhausting.  I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the Saturday night game, and I'm glad I cut down a bit on Sunday.  With ConTingency being significantly longer than ConDensed, I'm going to have to be careful to pace myself and not overdo it.

But ultimately, I had a wonderful time, got to play some amazing games, talked to old friends and new, and really hope we'll be doing it all again next year.

Wednesday 1 September 2021

Dolphin and Octopus: Seduction

GM: A beautiful female octopus is at the entrance to the den.
Dolphin: Oh!  Oh!  You should try to seduce her!
Octopus: Are you sure?  You know I don't have your charisma bonus, right?
Dolphin: It'll be fine.
Octopus: Well, if you're sure.  I change colour to something pretty and offer her a nice shell.
GM: Go for it.
Octopus: <rolls dice> Oh no.
GM: Critical fumble?  OK, she scoops up a tentacle of silt and throws it at you.  Roll to dodge.
Octopus: <rolls dice> Ow!  I try to flee.
GM: She throws more silt.
Octopus: <rolls dice> And again!  Dolphin, this is all your fault!


Thursday 26 August 2021

RPGaDay: Simplicity


I could talk about simplicity in game design, but everyone else has already done that.  Instead...

Simplicity!

As an occasional amateur costume maker with absolutely no skill in pattern drafting, I'm a big fan of Simplicity costume patterns.  They do a number of licensed patterns for Disney and DC, but they also do some things that are legally distinct while at the same time hauntingly familiar...

Simplicity Pattern 1009 Misses' Fantasy Costumes from Jaycotts Sewing Supplies
Nothing familiar about these dresses...



A completely original elf.

So obviously these are fantastic for LARP.  My elf's party dress is modified from one of Simplicity's totally original medieval dresses that definitely aren't a rip-off of Arwen's dresses in LOTR.  My husband's vampire character wears a coat that's totally just a coat and not a John Constantine copy. 

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/8101zffsseL._AC_SL1500_.jpg
Pictured: a man who is definitely not John Constantine.

Simplicity (and other commercial patterns like McCalls and Butterick) are a great way for amateur sewists to make something cool and unique for their character.  You can copy the original colours and details to make a cosplay, but you can also mix it up with different colours and combinations to make your character your own.  This applies just as well to tabletop games.  If you're stuck for a character idea, taking an existing character and adding your own twist is a great way to start.

They also demonstrate how things can overlap.  Elements from pattern 1010 are used to create dresses inspired by both Tauriel from the Hobbit movies and Daenerys Targaryen.  Where things overlap well, games can do the same.

Scum & Villainy is a game I love to run Firefly in.  While it does have its own setting, what its writers also did is note the overlap between three different settings: Firefly, Star Wars Rebels and Cowboy Bebop.  And the end result is a game that you can use to run any of those settings.

There's a Terminator RPG on its way.  If you read my quickstart review you'll know I didn't think much of the system, but I still backed the book.  Because just like I use the official Serenity RPG for useful material for running my Scum & Villainy Firefly games, I'm hoping I'll be able to use it to run Terminator games using my favourite dark scifi RPG, Alien.

Wednesday 25 August 2021

RPGaDay: Foundation

RPGaDay

Most years on the run up to Christmas I see an image on facebook about how when Rihanna releases a lipstick everyone rushes out to buy it but won't buy from their friends' small businesses.  This annoys me for three reasons.

First, this is inevitably about some multi level marketing business, not an actual small business.  Second, I do support my friends' small businesses.  I've bought a bunch of mini painting stuff from friends with gaming shops, and skincare from a friend with her own hand made cosmetics business.  And third, bringing things to the subject at hand, the reason people rushed out to by Rihanna's Fenty Beauty range isn't just because it's got her name on it.  It's because of this.


I'm not a habitual make-up wearer, but for the occasions when I do want to wear it, I'm lucky enough to be a colour where pretty much every high street brand makes a foundation that's more or less OK.  A lot of people aren't, especially people of colour.  Rihanna's aim with Fenty was to cater to everyone, regardless of skintone, and that's why people rushed out to buy it.  She made makeup accessible to everyone.

So what's the connection with RPGs?

First of all it's a reminder of the benefits of diversity - not just in the players, but in the available games.  The foundation I use, available in six shades of beige, is like the D&D 5e of makeup: ideal for some, good enough for others, but far from a universal solution.  Different people have different wants and needs, and having a bunch of different games out there means more people get to have fun.

One of the most baffling things I've seen on Twitter is people complaining when a new game isn't exactly what they want to play.  Fate of Cthulhu not having a sanity mechanic springs to mind; there were people who seemed actively offended that it did something different to Call of Cthulhu.  Personally I enjoy sanity mechanics so wasn't particularly interested in Fate of Cthulhu, but one game not having them doesn't stop me playing the many others that do.  There are people who don't like sanity mechanics and this game is for them.  Complaining about it would be like complaining that Fenty shade #430 doesn't match my skin.  Gaming should for everybody, but individual games don't have to be.

(I say baffling.  Of course I know where it comes from.  When you're used to being the target audience and everything catering to your tastes, it's easy to conclude that something that doesn't is bad, rather than just not made for you.  See also: the entire history of video games.)

And second, if you're appearing in videos or live streams, even if you've never worn makeup before you might want to wear some for the camera.  Bald headed men, in particular, have mentioned filming difficulties when the lights reflect off the shiny bits of their scalps.  A bit of matt foundation and/or powder will sort that right out.  And if you're having trouble finding a suitable shade to match your skin, maybe try Fenty?

Tuesday 24 August 2021

RPGaDay: Theme

RPGaDay

Matrons of Mystery has instructions on how to write an adventure.  The first one I tried to write was a bit of a struggle.  When I saw the adventure one of my playtesters had written, I realised that that was because I'd failed to follow my own instructions.  I tried it again, and this time got it right.

Step one is to pick a theme.  Everything else flows from there.  So I've been wondering how much this applies to my scenario writing in general.

Most of my Liminal scenarios come from some specific piece of geography or history and thinking about how that might interact with the Hidden World and what problems it could cause.  But at some point, a theme will become apparent that helps put the details together.  Sometimes the theme is that piece of history or geography; sometimes it's something related, even if the link is a bit tenuous.

Alien as a game has pretty strong themes of its own, and making use of them has proved useful in writing my scenarios.  Both my scenarios have started in the same way: by looking up some obscure bit of nature, and figuring out how Weyland Yutani could attempt to monitise it, and how that could go wrong.  Keeping my scenarios tied into this theme of rampant capitalism is how I try to keep the games feeling like Alien without necessarily having to include xenomorphs - backed up, of course, by an excellent system.

I would really like to write adventures for Kult.  Given that starting with a theme and building on seems to be an effective way for me to work, it's about time I gave it a go.  Matrons of Mystery is pretty much the opposite of Kult, but the lessons I've learned from it can still be put into practice.

Monday 23 August 2021

RPGaDay: Write

RPGaDay

One reason I GM as well as play is because I love to write.

I didn't love writing too much as a small child, because it took so long compared to reading.  Writing was something that actively got in the way of reading because after I'd read something, I was then made to write about it before I was allowed to do more reading.

Five year old me would be quite surprised by today me.

Long before I'd even heard of RPGs, I was writing fiction.  Mostly short stories; I like being able to tell a whole narrative in a compact form.  (I like reading them too; some of the largest books on my shelves are anthologies of horror, thriller and crime short stories.)  With most TTRPG adventures being a similar length to a short story, one might wonder if writing the one prepares you well for the other? 

And the answer is...kind of.

While it might not appear that way on the surface, writing adventures for TTRPGs is a very different business to writing fiction.  When I write fiction, I'm writing a story where I control all the characters and every aspect of the narrative.  Writing an adventure, I control very little.  So what I write isn't a story; it's a situation.  In my previous post that's what I was doing.  The situation may incorporate a story, in this case Rihanna's bloody revenge against a scheming accountant, but that's not the story of the adventure.  It's just the events that have lead to the current situation of a house where a horrific murder took place and a group of people who want to pay it a visit.  The story is going to depend on what they do when they get there.

I've definitely played in games where it felt like the GM had written a story rather than a situation.  I still enjoyed them, since they were good stories, but part of the fun of TTPRGs is the feeling of being part of the story, and of having an active effect on how things go.

Coming up with the situation is close to the best part of adventure writing for me, because it flows smoothly, similar to fiction writing.  The bit I have to do next for that Kult adventure where I start thinking about scenes and events is going to take much more work.  But the best part of all is when I get to a point in adventure where the only thing I have to write is 'See what happens.'

RPGaDay: Trap

RPGaDay

With hindsight, it may have been a mistake to attempt RPGaDay in a month where I also had a three day convention to participate in.  Anyway, trap.

The obvious thing is to talk about traps in D&D like games but since a) I rarely run that kind of game and b) rarely use traps when I do, let's go for a different kind of trap.  The musical kind.

Rihanna ventured into the trap genre with the controversial Bitch Better Have My Money, accompanied by this bloody violence and nudity filled video.  Music videos are getting increasingly sophisticated, often being short films in their own right.  This video, seven minutes long, starring Mads Mikkelson, and with its own IMDB page, is a fine example.  Movies and TV shows often inspire RPGs, so why not music videos?  Trap in particular, with its overall dark tone, feels like a good fit for horror.

The game system that springs to mind for this video is Kult.  The story is a revenge fantasy.  Rihanna has been cheated by her accountant, and reponds by kidnapping and tormenting his wife, before returning to his home to murder him and get what she's owed.  The influence of Yesod, archon of the principle of avarice, is easy to see here in the actions of the accountant.  Not just cheating Rihanna, but every aspect of  his life is an act of worship to Yesod.  But his actions are having an influence on Rihanna as well, driving her towards Inferno.  Powerlessness and rage have left her susceptible to the will of Samael, death angel of the principle of vengeance.  Ultimately his influence has guided her to carry out the events of the video.

So with the higher powers defined, at least one threat immediately appears.  The accountant's house, site of the murder, now lingering on the borders of Inferno.  A strong draw for a PC party made up of people who met on a true crime forum.  Their actions could free the place from Samael's influence (albeit at the risk of placing it into the hands of Yesod) or drag both it and themselves into Inferno for good.

Music videos aren't something I initially thought of as RPG inspiration, but I've got a pretty good basis for a scenario there, and one I'll probably expand on further.  If trap isn't your thing, there's a whole world of music out there.

Wednesday 18 August 2021

RPGaDay: Move

RPGaDay

Today I will do the obvious thing and talk about PBTA, not least because that's what I'm using for my own Matrons of Mystery game.  But first, Pathfinder 2e.

One thing I'm enjoying in PF2 is that my character has a list of skills, and then there's a list of actions you can take using those skills.  The actions mean there's more of a focus on the actual thing you're doing, not just which skill you're using to achieve it.  It's an extra level of crunch to think about, but if you're not into crunch then boy have you picked the wrong game with PF2.

The basic moves in most PBTA games seem to be more or less equivalent to actions.  They're not the only things you can do in the game, but they're the things that require interaction with the rules, usually in the form of a dice roll.  I wonder if calling them 'actions' instead would cut down on the misunderstandings about this aspect of the game?  Probably not.

The water gets muddied by other moves though, particularly the stuff that shows up on playbooks.  My Killer in The Sprawl, for example, had a move that let her use her Synth attribute instead of Meat for violence.  And that doesn't feel like a move.  The Soldier has a move that lets them pick more of the favourable outcomes when negotiating taking a job.  That doesn't feel like a move either; it's making them better at a basic move.

So while I very much like moves as a concept, I also very much dislike when they subsume a bunch of different concepts that would be called different things in most other games.  But of course, the great thing about writing your own game is that you can do it your own way.  Matrons of Mystery has a set of moves, PBTA style with different success levels, but for other aspects of the game I took inspiration from the approaches in Fate Accelerated Edition and the occupation die in Cthulhu Dark.

This wandered a bit.  I guess what I'm saying here is that while jargon is annoying and unhelpful, moves (or actions, or whatever else you choose to call them) are a useful and fun way of thinking about a game system.

RPGaDay: Supplement

RPGaDay

I don't buy a lot of supplements, but I'm more likely to buy them for games I GM than games I mostly play.  Pax Londinium, a supplement for Liminal, was an excellent buy.

As a GM, what I really want from a supplement is ideas, and this book has a ton of them.  It introduces new factions to the game, like the Hidden, inspired by Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and Queen Rat and her horde of wererats (possibly also partly inspired by Neverwhere).  It also expands considerably on existing factions, going into a lot more detail about the Mercury Collegium and providing a number of NPCs that can be introduced into your campaigns.  And it sets up a number of potential conflicts between all these factions that could easily provide the basis for an adventure.

It includes both broad and narrow features.  There's a whole section on what London is as a city, what makes it distinctive, what themes you can use to make your adventure rooted in London.  And then there's things like an occult bookshop that's actually totally mundane.  I've used that shop for adventures unrelated to London, putting their name on a carrier bag to tip off the players that an NPC knows nothing of the hidden world despite his pile of 'magic' books.

And there is something for the players in there: a new school of magic.  But crucially it's one that fits in with the existing character options.  An interesting choice that gives you some different abilties but which doesn't overshadow anything else.

In short, if you're a GM running Liminal, and are thinking of using London in your campaign, this book is a must-buy.  And it's available in hardback or PDF.

Take a look inside with Bud's RPG Review:

Monday 16 August 2021

RPGaDay: Safety

RPGaDay

When it comes to safety tools, the x card and lines and veils both have their place, but I'm personally a huge fan of the content warning.  Being able to have a hard stop at any time if something comes up is good; avoiding it coming up via a pre-game discussion is better.  But particularly for convention one-shots where tailoring content to the players is rarely possible, nothing beats being able to self-select out of a game before it even happens.

Back in January I was pitching games for A Weekend With Good Friends and had the following conversation (names removed):
Me: Please can substance abuse and cannibalism be added to the content warnings for The Toxic Jewel in slot 6?
P1: now you're just marketing your scenario...
P2: I shall now view any scenario that doesn't include cannibalism and substance abuse as a failure

I've occasionally heard edgelord types complaining that content warnings 'spoil the surprise'.  I've never found this to be the case.  While the players in The Toxic Jewel all know that cannibalism is something that's in the scenario, what they don't know is who, when or where, so it's just as much of a surprise as if I hadn't mentioned it.  And the added bonus for me is that I can be reasonably confident that the people playing are going to enjoy this part of the scenario as the content warning meant they knew what to expect.

Because content warnings aren't only a safety tool.  They're also an enjoyability tool.  Content warnings let me avoid games that would be unsafe for me, but also let me avoid games that wouldn't be fun.  The teen romance aspects of Monsterhearts, the...everything of World of Darkness - knowing what's involved means that that seat can go to someone who'll have a good time with that content, and that's better for everyone.

Content warnings aren't a perfect solution.  After all, people are complex, and may not even be aware that a certain type of content is a problem for them until it actually comes up in game, which is why the x card is still important.  It puts me in mind of rollercoasters.  On the ground under a rollercoaster when it's in motion is an incredibly dangerous place to be, and YouTube has plenty of horror stories about what happens when the trains hit people.  Rollercoasters have safety features like emergency braking to stop the trains if there's someone under the track.  But they also have tall fences to stop people getting close to the track when the ride is active.  The x-card is the emergency brake, while the content warning is the fence.  You need both, but using the latter significantly reduces how often you're going to need the former.

This is an extremely imperfect analogy, and a better one might be having the track clearly visible so coaster wusses like me don't accidentally end up on something with inversions, but my point is, content warnings are a win-win.

RPGaDay: Flood

RPGaDay

The obvious thing to do here is talk about Things from the Flood.  Shame I've never played it.

Mindstar Rising is a sci-fi novel by Peter F. Hamilton, and unlike a lot of Hamilton's books it's possible to lift it using only one hand.  It has two sequels of similarly reasonable size, so if you're interested in getting into Hamilton without first taking up weightlifting, it's a good starting point.

The setting of Mindstar Rising is England in the near future, where global warming has had a significant impact on the climate and landscape.  Specifically, significant areas of the country have been flooded by rising sea levels, and Peterborough is now a seaside town.  What's left of the country is suffering the aftermath of collapsing financial markets and ten years living under a tyrannical communist government.

This book came out in 1993.  Aside from the fact it's more likely to be fascists than communists at this point, this book just gets more and more plausible.

The titular Mindstars were a unit of soldiers bioengineered to give them psychic abilities.  The lead character, with powers of intuition and detecting emotions, now works as a psychic detective, and the first book is about him working for a corporation beset by industrial saboteurs.  So obviously I think this would be an absolutely brilliant RPG setting.  The theme of investigation gives a solid framework to build a campaign around, and the dystopian setting feels simultaneously fantastic and close to home (plus it's always nice to have a modern day game set somewhere outside the US).

So the question is, which system to run it with?  It's a sci-fi setting, but one that doesn't fit into a neat category.  It's pretty close to cyberpunk, but not in a way that works with classic cyberpunk RPGs - hacking, implants, etc. aren't what it's about.  It's certainly not space opera or space western, the sub-genres where psychic powers do often show up.  Not a spaceship in sight.

A generic system like Fate or Savage Worlds could probably handle it well, but the game I'd look at first is probably Judge Dredd.  While it's a very different setting in many ways, it's got the key elements of investigation, a dystopian future, and psychic powers, so should have everything required to create a Mindstar character.  However, since I haven't read any of the four Judge Dredd RPGs, I don't know how tied into their setting they are.  So rather than risk having to do a lot of conversion, perhaps a generic system is the way to go?  Simon Burley's The Code of the Spacelanes works with Judge Dredd, so if I ever decide to run a Mindstar one-shot and haven't picked up a more suitable system by then, that's likely to be where I start.

RPGaDay: Think

RPGaDay

A big part of writing RPG adventures for me is reading stuff until ideas fall out, but I really shouldn't neglect the part that is just pure thinking.

In the before times, my primary thinking time was my commute.  A good hour and a half each day when I couldn't actually do anything except listen to podcasts, and if I wasn't in the mood for a podcast, the time was often spent just thinking.

Queues were another great thinking opportunity.  My Alien adventure, The Toxic Jewel, was largely written while queuing at Taco Bell.  A Christmas adventure that I really should finish before next Christmas, was also largely developed in the queue at Taco Bell.

Here in the end times, where I no longer commute, nor queue for fast food, it's getting increasingly difficult to find thinking time.  My brain has not been informed of this, however, and sometimes insists on doing its thing anyway, meaning that I've frequently found myself trying to get to sleep, but unable to do so because my brain insists on running through plot points for an RPG scenario.

So what do I think?  I think I made an excellent choice buying my husband a lot of fancy coffee for his birthday.

Thursday 12 August 2021

RPGaDay: Wilderness

RPGaDay

Bit of a weird one this.  As fellow Brits have rightfully pointed out, Britain doesn't exactly have much in the way of wilderness besides some bits of Scotland.  Last year I wrote about forests, and how the forests I'm familiar with are sites of industry and tourism, not wilderness.

Actual wilderness requires looking further afield, and by chance I recently learned about the Nahanni Valley, in Canada's North West Territories.

Virginia Falls, Nahanni NP

It's spectacular. And terrifying.

And by 'terrifying' I'm not talking about the normal reasons I'd find a place that's accessible only by boat or flying boat to be a scary thought...

In 1904, two brothers named Willie and Frank McLeod headed into Nahanni Valley in search of gold.  They found some, but due to boat trouble, didn't manage to bring much back.  The following year they headed back - and weren't seen again until 1908 when their brother Charlie went looking for them and found their two headless corpses.

Nine years later in 1917, Martin Jorgensen went prospecting in Nahanni Valley.  He sent word back that he had struck it rich, but when people went to look for him they found his hut burned to the ground and his headless corpse.

In 1945, the body of an unnamed miner from Ontario was found in his sleeping bag without, as you might have guessed by now, his head.

Not every death in Nahanni Valley ended in a headless corpse.  Others included burning to death, flash freezing, and just plain disappearing, along with tales of mysterious white figures roaming the area, and a woman seemingly possessed as she ran naked across the landscape.  All the same, the place did pick up a number of nicknames including 'Headless Valley'.

Realistically, it probably all comes down to some combination of murder and local wildlife.  All the same, mysterious white fairies with a penchant for decapitating anyone who tries to steal their gold is one hell of an adventure hook. 

RPGaDay: Trust

RPGaDAY

If you want to see trust in the RPG sphere, take a look at Kickstarter.  It's also a great place to see trust being broken.

When Free League put up a kickstarter, and it's for something I want, there's no hesitation.  It's a pre-order, effectively.  It'll show up, when it says it will.  The only exception has been the Tales from the Loop board game, but given that board games have had even bigger pandemic-related manufacture and distribution problems than RPGs, I'm not surprised it's been pushed back, and it's still on track to show up this year.

But then there's the companies who went too far on the stretch goals.  John Harper springs to mind; the actual Blades in the Dark book was delivered within a reasonable timeframe, as far as I know, but the stretch goals are another matter.  Scum and Villainy is sitting on my bookshelf right now, but the one I was really excited about, Null Vector?  Well, I've given up being excited about it.  I'll buy it, if and when it ever appears, but I certainly won't be trusting anyone - especially not John Harper - to deliver a list of stretch goals like that again.

Zinequest also affected my level of trust in kickstarters.  I back three zines during Zinequest 2020.

  • The Black Pyramid, an adventure for Mothership.  The PDF was in my inbox on 9th April, barely a month from the end of the Kickstarter, and physical copies were going out not long afterwards.
  • Mycelium and Other Horrors, a set of incursions for Trophy Dark.  This took literally a year to deliver the PDF; 16th February, the anniversary of it funding.  Physical copies took even longer.  The nine months they'd allowed for delays was nowhere near enough.
  • Space Seeds, a set of encounter ideas for sci-fi games.  The PDF was due in June 2020.  In May, a few pages were released.  I'm still waiting for the rest.

These three radically different experiences have made me a lot more cautious in my Zinequest 2021.  I backed...checks notes...no zines.

And then there's Leviathan Rising, which ran a kickstarter in 2019, and have only just sent out the books.  Not that that's made anyone happy.

What I've learned from this is that trust on Kickstarter is a fragile thing and easily broken.  I plan to run a kickstarter myself for my game Matrons of Mystery, so I need to make sure I hold onto that trust.  Accordingly, when the kickstarter launches it will be after I've finished writing the book, and I'll have a basic PDF copy ready to send out immediately, even if it is the unedited version.  And if there are any stretch goals, it'll be for things like art, not physical things like dice.  I've got to give people every reason to believe they can trust me to deliver.  And then prove them right.

Tuesday 10 August 2021

RPGaDay: Medium

RPGaDAY

While there's nothing inherently wrong with the size chart from D&D/Pathfinder, it can make it rather hard to talk about things.  Particularly things that are medium.

Björnsson Arnold Classic 2017

Here, for example, is Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, a.k.a. Thor, a.k.a. World's Strongest Man 2018, although probably better known in nerd circles for playing Ser Gregor Clegane, The Mountain that Rides, in Game of Thrones.  Standing at 6'9" and weighing 397–441 lb, I would not hesitate to describe him as huge.

But by D&D standards, Thor here isn't huge.  He's not even large.  Despite being fifteen inches taller than me and three times my weight, he is still firmly in the category of 'medium'.  In fact, if you dig up the old height and weight charts from D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder 1, 'medium' also encompasses his co-star Peter Dinklage at 4'5" and 110lb.  'Medium' is doing a lot of work here.

So how exactly do you indicate to players that they've encountered something of Thor-like proportions?  It's been an issue in our games.

"You open the door to see a huge werewolf staring back at you."

"Holy shit!  How did it get through this narrow doorway?  How is it fitting under that low ceiling?  Is that room it's in even fifteen foot across?"

So the solution we've come up with, when we need to describe a medium creature of exceptional size, is to describe them as 'really medium'.  Sure, maybe being attacked by a really medium werewolf doesn't have quite the same impact, but it's certainly made things a lot clearer.

RPGaDay: Stream

RPGaDAY

It's a different experience, being on a streamed game.

It makes me very aware of what I look like.  For the Coriolis game that I'm currently in, we're not using cameras except for the GM, so that's generally not an issue, but all the other streamed games I've been in have used cameras, and I've made a conscious choice to wear makeup for them which is not somthing I normally do.  Now I'm more used to it (and also have a series of videos on my own YouTube channel where the only makeup I wear is a bit of powder so the light doesn't reflect off my face) I'll probably not bother for future streams unless I'm doing a costume.

Doing a costume is fun.  I've only done it for the Highway of Blood streams, because it seemed like a laugh to wear some 1970s style makeup and accessories for the occasion.  I wouldn't do it for a longer game (and Highway of Blood did go on longer than anticipated) but for a one-off I think it adds something to the experience, hopefully for viewers as well as for me.

Being streamed also adds a bit of pressure to be entertaining.  There's an extra group of people out there besides the gaming group, and they aren't having the fun of actually playing the game.  If I want them to keep watching, then things need to stay interesting.  Fortunately most of my streamed games have been with players where we play to each other's strengths.  I have fond memories of the Mutant: Year Zero game where Pookie and me were interpreting everything through the lens of Lord of the Rings.

I have considered streaming games myself (other than video games, which is a whole different thing) but ultimately it's an extra thing to have to think about on top of actually running the game.  So for now I'll stick to appearing on other people's channels as and when I'm invited.

On which note, if you want someone for a stream, I'm available.  More for one-shots and short games than for long campaigns.  Get in touch.

Saturday 7 August 2021

RPGaDay: Small

RPGaDAY

I'm getting increasingly fond of small games.

While I certainly enjoy the massive full colour hardback style of game, there's a lot to be said for the smaller games.  The ones in trade/digest size are lighter to carry and faster to read, and generally a lot cheaper to buy.

Some of the books from the small section of my collection include:

  • Liminal
  • Don't Rest Your Head
  • The Sprawl
  • The Dee Sanction
  • Bedlam Hall
  • Scum and Villainy

A fine selection of interesting and varied games, which will only be expanding as further kickstarters arrive.

And then there's the even smaller games.  The one page and two page RPGs, that might seem simplistic but with the right group and the right adventure can bring as much to the table as a bigger game.  Very small games that I'm familiar with include:

Links included as these games are either free or extremely cheap.

These tiny games can be a little more challenging to play, as there's so little framework for either the players or GM to work with.  I probably wouldn't use one of these to introduce a new person to roleplaying.  But for anyone else, the speed at which you can get up and running is exceptional.

So as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to RPGs, small is beautiful.

Friday 6 August 2021

RPGaDay: Flavor

RPGaDAY

Oi! We did this one last year!

OK, OK.  You know what goes really well with RPGs?  Cake.

Cake is a convenient dessert, requiring only one hand and no implements (although sometimes it's best to have a fork on hand.)  It normally comes on a plate, or at a minimum, a paper napkin, thus helping keep it off your character sheet.  At worst, it's likely to shed a few crumbs, unlike the mass of sugar liable to fall off a jam doughnut, and of course there's the plate to catch them.  Served neither hot nor cold, it will happily wait for a convenient break point for serving.  And of course it's delicious and comes in a huge variety of flavours.

I'm making a birthday cake for my husband tomorrow, and he's requested this one.

Chocolate mayonnaise cake with raspberries and ganache

For the cake:

  • 275g self-raising flour
  • 225g sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 200 grams mayonnaise
  • 4 tbsp cocoa powder
  • 225 mls boiling water
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 180º C, 350º F, Gas Mark 4.

Line an 18cm cake tin with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.

Put the flour, sugar and baking powder in a large mixing bowl.  Stir in the mayonnaise and beat until it looks like breadcrumbs.

Combine the boiling water and cocoa powder and stir until it's free of lumps.

Add the cocoa mix and the vanilla essence to the mixing bowl and stir until it's smooth (no beating required.)

Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for about an hour.  To test, insert a skewer into the middle and pull out.  If it comes out clean, the cake's done.

Leave to cool.

For the ganache:

  • 200g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
  • 300ml double cream
  • 2 tbsp sugar

Put the chocolate in a large mixing bowl.

Put the cream and sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until the sugar is all melted/dissolved.

Bring the cream to the boil then immediately remove it from the heat, pour it over the chocolate, and whisk until it's thick and glossy.

Leave to cool until it's thick enough to spread over a cake. 

Assembly:

Split the cake in half.  Use a cake wire if you have one.  Otherwise, find some objects about half the height of the cake, put one either side, and use them as guides as you slice through it with a large bread knife.  If the top half of the cake breaks into two or three pieces at this point, don't panic.  We can fix it.

Spread a layer of ganache over the bottom layer of the cake.  Replace the top layer, using ganache as glue to stick any broken pieces together.

Spread the rest of the ganache over the top of the cake (and the sides if you have extra).  Cover the top with raspberries, pointy end up, starting from the middle and working outwards.



RPGaDay: Throne

RPGaDAY

If there's one book I'd really like to see turned into an RPG, it's Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed.

 There's a tendency for fantasy novels, and by extension, RPGs, to be set in a very European feeling world.  (Something similar applies to sci-fi, which is frequently set in space-America.)  Even when games like D&D and Pathfinder have stretched things to some more international feeling settings, the standard fantasy races of elves, dwarves and so forth, are fundamentally European.

So it was pretty exciting to read a fantasy novel that's not based on Europe at all, but has its roots firmly in the Middle East.  The author is an Arab American, of Lebanese and Egyptian descent, and based his work on Islamic and pre-Islamic Arab mythology.  And that means everything is different - the environment, the religion, the politics, the monsters, the character classes as it were...

Because this book could absolutely be turned into an RPG campaign, where five adventurers set out on a quest to save the world from an evil sorcerer while political intrigue happens in the background.  And there's enough of an exciting world there for countless more adventures.

Adventures which the author is either not getting round to writing due to his busy schedule as a comic author (I think he's still working on Miles Morales) or has written but can't get published (I'm not in a position to know.)  Either way, if someone would pick up this IP for a licensed RPG we'd have a really exciting new setting to play in, and maybe an incentive to get the rest of the trilogy out there.

Wednesday 4 August 2021

RPGaDay: Weapon

RPGaDAY

My favourite D&D/Pathfinder weapon is the staff.  Sure, there are more exciting weapons out there, but it's hard to beat the good old long stick.

First of all, it's cheap.  A PF2 staff will cost you absolutely nothing, while the D&D5e quarterstaff will only set you back 2sp.

It's also easy to use.  As a simple melee weapon, pretty much anyone can use it.  It can be used one or two handed, and does a respectable d8 damage in its medium two handed form.

Both of these make it a solid choice for many starting characters, but best of all, you can have a lot of thematic fun with it.  Where did you get it?  What kind of wood is it made from?  Is it wood at all?  Characters from different areas could have staves made of mushroom, seaweed or cactus.

Particularly in Pathfinder where it has no cost, there's nothing to stop you finding interesting staves all over the place.  In one of our Pathfinder games, we killed a giant spider, and my halfling sorcerer immediately switched out her wooden staff for one of the spider's legs.  It was just the right size, and by pulling on the tendons, she could make the end twitch disturbingly.  That spider leg stayed with her for the entire campaign, and when she reached a level of fame where her likeness was carved as a statue, it depicted her with spider leg in hand.

Tuesday 3 August 2021

RPGaDay: Tactic

RPGaDAY

Here are some tactics I use when signing up for convention games.

Start with research.  Even for a sign-up-on-the-day convention, there's usually a list of games published in advance, so I take a good look and start thinking about what I want to play.  Then it comes down to making a list of priorities.

Here's how I choose games to put on the list.  In no particular order...

That new thing I'm excited about

There's always a new game, and convention one-shots are a great time to try something new with no commitment beyong the 3-4 hours to play it.

The tried and tested game

Sure, I've played it plenty of times, but that's because I love it!  I can be confident of a good time with this one.

The tried and tested GM

I've played with this GM enough times to know it'll be entertaining.  Even if it's not my top choice of game.

A great title/blurb

I've no idea what it is, but after that introduction, I want to find out!

With list metaphorically in hand, it's time for the actual sign-up.  Obviously the best tactic here is queue-jumping - by which I mean offering a game myself.  This normally gets me one free go at game sign-up before everyone else gets let in.

But the most important tactic is to be flexible.  I'm not always going to get into my top choice of game, and that's not a bad thing!  Often it's lead to some really fantastic games that I'd have missed out on if I got my top choice..

All of this assumes that the convention is being well organised, with advanced sign-up, or a muster for sign-up.  But I have been to a convention where the games were barely organised at all.  So I had to come up with a new tactic that morning, which was to hang around near Simon Burley until a game happened.  Which it did.

Monday 2 August 2021

RPGaDay: Map

RPGaDAY

A few months ago, I played a game of the new Hellboy RPG.  It was newly kickstarted at the time, but a sample adventure was available.  I thought they'd done a reasonable job, given the limitations of the 5e system, which certainly wouldn't be my first choice for Hellboy, but there was one thing about the adventure that we really got stuck on, and that was the map.

Stylistically, they'd done a great job.  Whoever the artist was, they managed to make a map that looked like it came straight from the pages of a Hellboy comic.  No, the problem with this map was something far stranger.  Toilets.

It can be painfully obvious when an adventure set in the UK has been written by Americans, and this was no exception.  All the players were Irish or British, and very familiar with the kind of 18th Century building this was supposed to be, particularly where plumbing is concerned.  This house had so many toilets.  So many toilets.  An absolutely unreasonable number of toilets.  To the point where we could hardly focus on whatever it was that BPRD had been sent to this house for, because round every corner was yet another goddam toilet.

I'm strongly in favour of including toilets on RPG maps.  Far too often I've found myself looking at a dungeon or a spaceship and asking myself where anyone goes to relieve themself.  I always include toilets on my own maps.  But there's a limit.  A point where toilets cease to add realism to a map, and instead merely add questions.

Several months later, when I think about the Hellboy RPG, the first thing I think about is toilets.

RPGaDay: Scenario

RPGaDAY

It's that time of year again and I'm already late. Better get to it.  Here's how I write a scenario for Liminal:

The Concept

This can be anything really.  For Liminal scenarios I normally find it in history and geography, and it often shows up quite unexpectedly.  More than once I've been reading a wikipedia page about a location, and something has jumped out at me.

The Problem

Next is some kind of problem that the PCs are going to have to solve.  'Missing person' and 'missing item' are both solid options for Liminal; 'murder' if you want something a little darker.

The Structure

I use a combination of two structures.  One is the one recommended in the Liminal book: Background, Hook, First Location, Second Location.  I normally start by writing the background, and see what that suggests for the rest.  The other is the five room dungeon: Entrance with guardian, Skill/roleplay challenge, Setback, Climax, Reward/revelation.

The trick to combining them is to remember that they in no way have to happen in this order.  The first three rooms in particular are well suited to being shuffled around.  In a Liminal scenario, getting into a fairy realm or ghost realm is likely to fit the 'entrance with guardian' concept, so that room sits nicely at the point where you transition from the first location to the second location.

The NPCs

And now, name everyone, because some character being completely irrelevant to the plot does not mean that the PCs won't insist on talking to them.  And have stats ready, even if it's someone straight out of the book.  Page numbers by the name are a great idea.

And that's about it.  But there's also a pitfall to be aware of, which is set pieces.

So you've got this image in your head of some fantastic scene, that's awesome and dramatic and thematic, and you can't wait to narrate it and see the players' reactions.  But there's a problem, and that problem is the players.  Because they can, and will, mess it up.

You could try preventing the players from influencing things, and just have the NPCs do their thing.  The set piece happens - but now the players have no agency and are just along for the ride, and that's no fun for them.  So they need to be involved, and you need to be ready for them to do entirely unexpected things.  Just the other day I was playing a scenario where there was supposed to be a big car chase scene on the motorway - except one of the players* listened to the GM's explanation of what needed doing, and went to the narrow guage railway at a children's amusement park instead.  The resulting chase scene happened at around 7MPH.**

So one thing I always try to keep in mind is that the players have agency, and my scenario has to be robust enough to handle that.

* Me.  It was me.
** Kudos to the GM who handled this very well.

Sunday 9 May 2021

North Star 2021

As a fan of sci-fi games, what could be better than an entire weekend of sci-fi games?

Game 1: Tales from the Loop

Four kids dealing with serious problems at home went out on Boxing Day 1984 for a snowball fight with their friends, and somehow ended up getting recruited as Time Police, helping prevent an incursion of killer robots from the future that strangely didn't look anything like the killer robots from the future in that new movie that none of us were allowed to see because we were only thirteen.

I was lucky enough to get into another game with the same GM I played with at ConTingency.  My previous choices of Bookworm and Computer Geek had already been claimed, so concluding we could probably use a character with social skills, I went for the Rocker.  A quick google told me that Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry had come out in 1984, and she was ready to use inspirational quotes from the lyrics in the cassette liner at any moment.

The 1980s is always a slightly weird era for me to game in, since I technically lived through it, but don't actually remember very much.  Fortunately the internet is there to fill in some of the details, and the GM's liberal use of handouts does the rest.

The most notable thing about this game though, is that we used Roll20 for the A/V and it actually worked!  I can no longer claim a 0% success rate.

Twister Sister - Stay Hungry.jpg
Fair use, Link

Game 2: Alien

My own adventure, CSI:Weyland Yutani, has been a long time in the writing but I managed to push myself to get it finished (even if that did mean I was still tweaking character sheets between the morning and evening game slots.)  As the name suggests, a murder mystery, although of course it also included the kind of body horror that an Alien game calls for.

With this being the first outing for this particular adventure, I wasn't sure how it was going to go.  My three act structure was a bit off, with act 1 going on significantly longer than planned and acts 2 and 3 blending together, so possibly I need to tweak the agendas to fit with that.  The players were also reasonably lucky with their panic rolls, meaning the panic spiral never really kicked off.

That said, while I don't think it delivered quite as much horror as I'd hoped for, the mystery solving aspect seems to have landed really well.  Clues unfolded at a reasonable rate, and when the team departed, all rather surprisingly alive, they'd got the answers they were looking for.

I put some extra work into the Roll20 implementation for this adventure, using a base map I made on Dungeon Scrawl and implementing a card deck to use for initiative and a rollable table for the monster's attacks.  The thing I had most trouble with was the card deck, which kept telling me that I didn't have enough cards to deal to everyone despite the fact that I clearly did.  Adding people to the turn tracker was also not particularly fun, and I guess I need to figure out if there's a way to streamline that (although I did appreciate being able to add the monster in more than once to allow for its multiple attacks.)

The work in running an Alien scenario is extremely front-loaded, so now I've got the adventure and VTT set up all sorted out, it should be fairly simple to run it again once I've figured out how I want to tweak it.

This is fine.


Game 3: Mothership

I'd never really thought of Mothership as a comedy game before, but thanks to the Scott Vanden Bosch artwork the GM was using, I wasn't surprised when it turned out that way.  The general incompetence of Mothership characters ended up contributing admirably to the slapstick tone.

In addition to the random output of the character generator, the GM also gave us a few character details.  My character, Magdalena, had a general disatisfaction with the way guns don't make cool noises in the vacuum of space.  So when the adventure started with us visiting a clinic to get cyberware installed, I naturally had her pick the 'Loudmouth' - an internal recording and playback device that can be used at high volume to stun people, but more importantly, could be used to record a variety of music, sound effects and so on, which could then be played back throughout the mission.  Team members hearing gunfire could feel reassured that the fight had gone OK when they heard Magdalena's victory music playing.

I don't like Mothership for space horror as much as I like Alien, because I think the randomness gets in the way sometimes, and the low skills mean people who should know what they're doing are frequently highly ineffective.  But it turns out all of that makes it pretty much spot on for space horror comedy.

Game 4: Hammerheads

My first time playing Cortex Prime.  Like SWADE, this seems to be the latest iteration of a game I previously disliked, but which has now sorted itself out and become fun.  While I don't think I completely grasped the rules, the basic concept of assembling a dice pool and choosing two results to keep wasn't too complicated, and with a skilled GM to keep us on track, things went pretty smoothly.

Smoothly mechanically, anyway.  With a game inspired by Thunderbirds, we were obviously going to be dealing with some kind of disaster, and the adventure's description involving 'Prehistoric Park' was all the motivation I needed to give it a go, as we found ourselves faced with not only hoards of angry dinosaurs but a significant number of disgruntled humans and a malfunctioning time portal, all of which we had to find a way to deal with.

By the end of the adventure we'd killed significantly more dinosaurs than my character had been planning on, discovered the many uses of an ice cream van and its contents, and even slightly expanded our knowledge of paleontology as we found ourselves pursued by what another player described as 'badger pigeons'.

How exactly Cortex Prime works for adventures whose premise is not Thunderbirds + disaster movie, I don't know, but for this it works well and makes for a very funny adventure, full of surprises.

Reflections

This time last year I thought we'd be playing in person again long before now.  I'm glad the Garrison conventions have managed to adapt, but I still hope that next year we really will be playing in person.  I've met so many lovely people at these events, and North Star feels a bit extra special because of that unique sci-fi focus.  I hope I feel ready when it's time to step out into that brave new world.