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.

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.

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.

pic.twitter.com/IdkzuRotS5

— Scott Vanden Bosch (@scott_v_b) May 5, 2021

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.

Playing Cortex Prime for the first time with a bit of help from @AllRolledUpUK bit trays. pic.twitter.com/xK6XWAMvG8

— SavageSpiel (@SavageSpiel) May 9, 2021

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.