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...

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. 

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.

RPGaDay: Foundation

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?

RPGaDay: Theme

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.

RPGaDay: Write

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

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.

RPGaDay: Move

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

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:

RPGaDay: Safety

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

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

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.

RPGaDay: Wilderness

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.

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

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.

RPGaDay: Medium

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.

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

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.

RPGaDay: Small

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:

• Cthulhu Dark
  
• Honey Heist
• Lasers and Feelings
• Cyber+Punk, my own Cyberpunk hack of Lasers and Feelings
• Exquisite Crimes Goth Detectives
• Silencers, my own game of incompetent assassins, come to DTRPG Real Soon Now.
  

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.

RPGaDay: Flavor

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.

Made this cake, inspired by the Bake-off title sequence, itself brought to mind by the Great Brindlewood Bay Bake-off.

Still too full of burgers to eat it. pic.twitter.com/SqHM3gyeg1

— SavageSpiel (@SavageSpiel) April 10, 2021

RPGaDay: Throne

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.

RPGaDay: Weapon

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.

RPGaDay: Tactic

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.

RPGaDay: Map

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

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.