RPGaDay: Couple

I saw his hair across the dance floor at the office Christmas party.

"Who's that?" I asked my co-workers, expecting to hear that he was someone's partner.  Instead we were forcibly introduced.  We spent the next four hours exchanging humorous cat stories, and finally he invited me to his D&D game the following evening.

Over the years we've both played and GMed a lot of games.

I played in his D&D 3.5 campaign, and later in his Pathfinder campaign that later became known as the Player Massacre of 2010.  (Anyone who tells you that these versions of D&D aren't deadly just aren't trying.)  He is now not allowed to have custom monsters with five or more words in their name, after we were subject to the fiendish albino vampire winged drow and the giant exploding poison zombie snake.

He played in my Scion campaign, where he completely by accident manged to make a character so hard to hit that any enemy that was remotely challenging for him would have completely flattened the rest of the party, and who seemed to be operating on some kind of flow chart.

We both played in a game of Rogue Trader, where he played the captain and I was the navigator.  Channelling Zapp Brannigan, he referred to my character as 'Lucious Lucretia'.  Together we managed to be some of the most virtuous people in the 40K universe by only committing genocide once.

I played in his Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, where we were a chrome metal band called Doomcow and I dump statted INT, meaning that my character was too dumb to realise just how horrible the things happening around her were.

He played in my Victoriana game, as an upper class magician, in the game where we learned that the most useful person to have around in Victorian London is a pre-Raphaelite artist. Right now he's playing in my Liminal game, once again playing a wizard who specialises in wards and gets suspiciously respectful any time the Council of Merlin get mentioned.

We don't always play together.  He doesn't really do the convention thing, and we don't like all the same games - he's far more into games with big robots than me, while I'm much more interested in Call of Cthulhu than him.  But most of the time our tastes line up pretty well, and between tabletop RPGs, video games and LARP, we've spent most of the last twelve years gaming together.

Being part of a gaming couple is wonderful.

RPGaDay: Forest

Forests in RPGs tend to be dark, wild places, filled with giant spiders and other random encounters.  But when I think of a forest in the real world, I think of the Forest of Dean.

It's weird to think of a forest as a hive of industry, but that's what the Forest of Dean used to be.  Logging and charcoal burning on the surface, mining for iron ore underneath.  About the only wild thing about the place is the wild boar, who are still mentioned on the random encounter tables that you can find placed around the forest.

(I'm sure there's a proper name for those boards that isn't 'random encounter table' but I started calling them that about ten years ago and it seems to have stuck.)

So why not use the industrial forest in your games?  Perhaps a symbiosis has formed between the dwarven mining colony and the elven forest settlement, pooling their resources to create iron to trade with the human city.  Caring for the forest doesn't have to mean fanatic hatred of anyone who harms a tree.  Carefully managed felling and replanting, managing game populations and removing invasive species could be far more interesting.

The modern day Forest of Dean is a popular tourist destination, with attractions including Puzzlewood, Clearwell Caves and the Sculpture Trail.

The first two are both used for filming, particularly sci-fi and fantasy.  Rey's fight with Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens took place in Puzzlewood, and episodes of Doctor Who have been filmed in both locations.  If you're looking for interesting location imagery for a game, there's plenty to be found here.

And then there's the sculpture trail.  There are seventeen current statues, plus several more that have been decommissioned, and they're a mine of inspiration.

Observer

Where does this staircase go?  What happens if you climb it?

Dead Wood

Who is buried here?

Melissa's Swing

This aeolian harp invites you to sound its chimes by climbing into its swing.  What does it summon?

Grove of Silence

The plaques on the trees command silence.  What might happen, should you choose to disobey?

House

This is fine.

For more of these, see the Sculpture Trail website, and some more photographs.  These bizarre structures could show up in a fantasy forest, but could just as easily be part of a Call of Cthulhu investigation.  For a modern day game, the sculture trail itself could form part of the plot.  What if a new sculpture appeared and nobody knew where it came from?

That's me inspired.  I hope you are too.

RPGaDay: Tribute

Sometimes I get to the end of a game, but feel there's a little more that needs to be said about my character.  Maybe I feel the need to capture something that wasn't part of the game session.  Maybe (quite often after horror one-shots) I want to show a little of the aftermath of the game's events.  So I write these things.  A tribute to someone who I enjoyed pretending to be for a while.

I've just finished playing the Kult: Divinity Lost scenario, Island of the Dead.  How much sense it will make to anyone who hasn't played this adventure (or who didn't end it the way we did) I don't know, but if you know Kult, you'll have an idea what a horrible experience the characters have been through...

...

Amber's fashion blog has a lot more than a thousand followers now.  She's done every chat show she can think of, and her face is on magazine covers worldwide.  There are rumours flying that Netflix will be buying the TV rights to her story; rumours that she knows are true.

It will, of course, be a work of fiction.

The real story she has told to nobody.  Not her therapist, who knows she shot two men in the head but not what Anne showed her in the cave.  Not Jennifer, who has her own traumas without having to carry Amber's too.  There are only two people who know the truth, and she hasn't spoken to either of them since they got home.  Because if she talks to them, she won't be able to hide behind the makeup and the clothes and the performance she gives to the camera.

Amber sits surrounded by pictures of herself, and the photo she's staring at on her phone is no exception, but it's not her face she's looking at.  They all ask her about Jennifer, and all the others she helped rescue.  Nobody asks her about the one she couldn't save.  Which is lucky, really.  She pushes the phone away before her hot wet tears can splash down onto it.

The nightmares are getting worse.  The drugs she's been prescribed don't seem to be helping, and the temptation to go out and find some that do is getting stronger each day.  She doesn't know how many more times she can bear to watch Simon die.

She wipes away the tears, taking a smear of mascara with them, and reaches for her phone.  A few hairs get brushed into position before she takes the selfie.  Hashtag bad day.  It's barely been uploaded a few seconds before the notifications start.  She ignores them.  They're just another part of the illusion that is her life.  Fake lashes, fake tan, fake stories, fake friends, fake smiles, all plastered on in the hope that nobody will see what's real.

What is real?

She picks up the phone, disables notifications, and stares at it.  It doesn't fit with her image.  Amber's followers know she's not interested in some stupid little kid, just because he was on the plane with her.  But she remembers kind words, and moments of vulnerability.  Maybe there's some way she can turn this to her advantage at some point, but right now she just wants a friend.

And as she makes the call, it occurs to her, maybe he does too?

BurritoCon 5

It's a long drive to Manchester from here, which is why I've never been to any of the events hosted at Fan Boy 3: poor travel-to-game ratio.  But in this year of virtual cons, that's not a problem.

Game 1

I was up bright and early (by my standards) on Saturday morning for my first game: Tales from the Loop.  While I'd never played it before, I've played enough Fria Ligan games to know how the system worked, and we'd all sorted our characters out in advance, so in theory it should have been easy to dive straight in.

In practice, Google Meet decided it didn't like running in my Firefox browser and gave me video but no audio.  After poking settings and finding nothing helpful I switched to Chrome, my theory being that Google would make more of an effort to have their product working in their own browser.  Thankfully I was right, and off we went.

There was an obvious question of why a bookworm, a jock, a weirdo and a rocker were all choosing to hang around with each other, but when we described our characters and their problems it soon became apparent that we'd bonded over all having lost a parent.  And I soon started to realise what's so special about playing a kid.  There are things you can't do because you're a kid.  But there are also a whole bunch of things you can get away with, because you're a kid.

Playing in 1986 was also an experience.  I don't remember 1986 particularly well, but between what memories I do have, the amount of 80s movies I've seen and having just finished series 3 of Stranger Things I feel like I've got a reasonable grasp on the time.  So many times I found myself looking at something, thinking 'I should take a picture', then reminding myself that camera phones are not yet a thing.  The camera I had in 1986 took 35mm film and it would take several weeks to get the pictures back.

Tales from the Loop is a wonderful game, an excellent implementation of the Year Zero engine, and something I'm keen to play again some time.  Credit has to go to Blythy, for doing a superb job running it, and my fellow players, Bud, Kaye and Craig, for being the best friends my wannabe teen detective could wish for.

Game 2

In the afternoon I ran my Liminal scenario, Mother Said I Never Should.  Having previously run this at The Good Friends of Jacks-Con Elias, I was keen to see how this would differ from that outing.

The first difference is that we were down one player due to a family emergency.  Fortunately the character he'd chosen was not the one that's essential to the plot concept.  Tech delayed things again, with people having trouble connecting to Discord video chat, and I made the decision to switch AV over to Google Meet - making sure to open it in Chrome, of course.

Once again, Discord did its job as a dice roller and handout distributor.  Liminal is such an uncomplicated system to run that the bells and whistles of a VTT aren't needed, and the Sidekick bot handles the dice perfectly.  Taking inspiration from a game run by Paul Mitchener himself, I now barely roll dice when running this game - mathematically I don't think it makes a different on an opposed roll whether I roll the attack or the player rolls defense, and it's far more fun to put it in the players' hands.

Seeing the players create new and interesting characters based on the brief backgrounds provided, and then proceed to find new ways to approach the situation, making different uses of their various talents, was an absolute delight.  I've pitched this scenario for two more conventions already and I'm very much looking forward to running it again.

Post-Games

I believe BurritoCon traditionally ends with a trip to the pub, so the Mitchester Arms was temporarily opened for post-game chat.  Like the bar at the Good Friends of Jacks-Con Elias, this added back in a little of what's missing in virtual conventions, giving me the chance to talk to people outside of the two games I was in.

Reflections

This was a well organised event with suitably chosen time slots to allow for meals.  An evening slot could potentially have been added, but with GenCon on the same weekend, quite a lot of people had other plans.  Or were just tired out.  The upcoming convention The Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff 3 has three slots so it'll be interesting to see how it compares.

There seems to be a lovely bunch of roleplayers in and around Manchester, and getting to play with them has been a delight.  It's only a pity that when things finally return to some semblance of normality that BurritoCon will once again be too far away for me to realistically consider.

RPGaDay: Vision

I haven't played much Call of Cthulhu, and when I have it's mostly been one-shots with pre-gens.  This was an exception in that I was making my own character for once.  I made a pathologist, because doctors are fun, and into the mysterious house the three of us went.

How exactly I'd forgotten to put any points into Spot Hidden, I don't know.  Inexperience with the system, I guess.  My other half was playing a detective, and had a good score in it so I wasn't too worried about us missing stuff.  And so it went.  Every clue that could be found, he found and I remained oblivious to.

Again, we were playing Call of Cthulhu.

Whether it was a creepy moving painting, a mysterious shape in the darkness, or a strange noise from outside (I'd also forgotten to put any points in Listen), I remained happily undisturbed as the rest of the party's sanity crumbled around me.  The haunted house threw everything it had at me and I consistently looked the other way.

While I don't recommend playing Captain Oblivious in a Call of Cthulhu game (after all, uncovering clues and solving the mystery while your mind slowly unravels is what the game is all about) it was an entertaining experience and gave us all a good laugh.  And the best horror games I've played are always the ones that give us all a good laugh.

...

The thing about Warhammer games is that even with a very respectable score of let's say 45, you're still going to fail a lot of the time.  However, probability had no meaning aboard the rogue trader ship Statistical Anomaly.

That wasn't its original name.  Captain Tiberious Skarsgard initially named it Enterprise.  It got its new name from the way that despite being a slow ship that was meant to take a long time to get through the warp, it consistently emerged from the warp several days before it left, requiring the crew to keep detailed diaries of their movements to avoid causing a temporal anomaly.  But it could just have easily been based on the way that nobody on that ship, despite extensive training, was capable of using the ship's sensors.

Accordingly, any time we needed to know what was going on outside the ship, we all went and looked out of the windows.

The Path to Eden, episode 3: Go West

"Only time for a short one today," Chronicler Venno told the assembled crowd.  There was a faint murmur of disappointment, but not so much that he couldn't speak over it.  "Do you remember the day the ground shook?"  Enthusiastic nodding followed.  "And poor Rodney Rubble got killed by falling rocks while out clearing ground, and Boss Briktoria warned us that it was a punishment from the Seven Sisters for spending too much time working on the croplands and not working hard enough on the temple.  So once again, a group went to explore outside."

"There were rumours of a building to the west called the Alexandra Tower that surely had to contain many amazing things, perhaps even relics of the Seven Sisters.  So Lenny, Zippo and Katin set out to find a path to the tower.  They made sure to rest well beforehand.  Lenny had hurt his back clearing rubble for the croplands, Katin had got lost looking for good land for planting, and both Lenny and Zippo had attempted to read the journal they had found in the bird's nest, but found it made their brains hurt too much.

With Katin and the one-way-needle-pointing-device in the lead they left the safety of the Ark behind and ventured out west.  Soon they found the ground beneath their feet changing, becoming wetter and wetter until they were wading through marshland.  Katin warned everyone to watch out for evil fish in the water, but when they did see signs of life it was a woman emerging from the mouth of a dark tunnel.

Katin called out to her, but she answered in words that none of them could make out.  Was she a threat?  They weren't sure, but then she bent double, as if in serious pain, and lay face down in the water.  They decided they should try to rescue her.  Lenny fished her out of the water, and Zippo bandaged her wound.  Katin expected it to be a bite from a fish - after all, one of the sacred texts had an entire chapter on fish, so they were clearly important - but Zippo thought it was a cut, not a bite.

The mystery continued.  The woman wore strange purple coveralls, of a material none of them had seen before.  Her hair was neat and blonde, her skin was strangely smooth, and she showed no sign of any mutation.  She carried a bow, made of another strange material, which Zippo promptly handed over to Katin.

With the woman stabilised, they decided to do some further exploration, heading into the darkness of the tunnel.  Katin had had a good sniff of the woman, who had a weird chemical smell, and concluded that she had had come from the other side of the tunnel.  But beyond that, it was hard to say.

Fascinating as the mass of rusting vehicles leading out of the tunnel was, they finally decided they should go home.  Katin had identified a low level of rot, but not something they wanted to stay out in for long.  The strange woman was now awake, and after some more attempts at conversation they finally managed to make out enough words for a brief conversation.  She was very confused and seemed to have lost her memory, not even knowing her own name.

They checked her clothes, just in case her name was written on them, but unless her name was 'machine wash', which seemed unlikely, there was nothing of help there.  The final conclusion was that she was probably some kind of gift from the Seven Sisters, and that they should take her back to the Dawn Vault so that the chroniclers could talk to her.

There was some argument back at the Ark, when Boss Briktoria insisted that the strange woman should be brought to the shrine, not the Dawn Vault.  After all, who could she be but one of the Seven Sisters themselves?  Lenny was confused, because surely there were already seven sisters, with Briktoria being one of them, so did this mean there were now eight sisters?  But after some discussion of the sacred texts, things started to make sense.  This smooth skinned, blonde haired, bow carrying woman who spoke in a strange tongue could only be one thing.  An elf."

RPGaDay: Thread

After thinking about the word 'thread' until it lost all meaning, I eventually came up with this take on a classic horror trope: an NPC to throw into an urban fantasy or horror game.

They assure me that Morgellon's disease is psychological.  The threads emerging from the sores on my arms are not growing there, but are simply fragments of my own clothes adhering to the fluids that ooze out of me.  I wanted very much to believe them.  I complied with all the treatment.  I told them, truthfully, that I understood.  They cleaned the sores and covered them with dressings, and I went home.

I decided to leave the dressings on for a week.  A week would be enough time for the sores to heal, and even if I was wrong about that, I would see them clean of threads.  All would be well.

I lasted five days before the itching became too much for me.

I ripped off the dressings, ready to dig my nails into my flesh and rip out the itch by the roots, but my hand was stayed but what I saw there.  The sores had healed, but protected from the outside world, the threads had grown again, forcing their way through my skin.  My screams attracted my sister, who found me desperately trying to pull them out, my nails raking through my skin and blood staining the bedsheets.

She made me stop, but at least now she believed me.  Nevertheless, my next attempt to deal with the problem sent me straight back to the psych ward.  I mean, I had to go to A&E first, but that's where they transferred me afterwards.  I'm not sure what the official diagnosis is, but I'm complying with all the treatment.  I've heard them say I'm responding well and I'm a good candidate for a prosthetic.

And it seems to have worked.  No more threads.  I'm feeling pretty good about things, and I think they will let me out soon, so long as my sister takes me in again.  She told me off for ruining her chainsaw, but I think she meant it in a loving way.

The trouble is that I know the truth now.  They tried to make me one of them, but I found out in time, and I don't think they're going to like that.  I wanted to check my sister each time she visited, to see if they've got to her, but I know that will just mean I end up staying here longer and I need to be able to help her.  It only takes one bite, after all.   But I know what to look for and I'll be ready.

And she's just arrived to take me home!  I can see her talking to one of the nurses.  I'm worried though.  She's got a dressing on her leg, and I just heard her tell the nurse about getting bitten.  She thinks it was a dog.  I know better.  But it's OK, because I know how to fix it.  My sister had to promise there wouldn't be a chainsaw in the house, but I know there's an axe in the shed.

I don't think I'm going to be at home for very long.