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August 27th, 2007
12:38 pm - GenCon Indy 2007 Report
So I went to GenCon Indy the weekend before last, and I finally finished up my convention report. My trip this time was marred by a few outside factors: problems with my flight coming in, a room with very nice roommates but a bit too small, and losing my wallet on the final day. I was also nervous about the Indie RPG Awards, which went off fine on Friday -- though I always feel like I could do more for them. Here is the full report:
"GenCon Indy 2007 Report"
I was even more disappointed with the con organization this time -- starting with my first event which turned out to be five blocks away from where is was printed to be in the program I had just been given. It was nice to meet lots of people whom I had only encountered online, and I had a good time on Saturday, but I am ambivalent about going back.
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August 21st, 2007
10:23 am - 2006 Indie RPG Awards Posted
So at GenCon on Friday, the Indie RPG Award winners were announced. The full listings of everything is available on the Indie RPG Awards list:
http://www.rpg-awards.com/2006/
I'll include the short form below, though. It was a very tight race for Game of the Year this time around -- though there were clear leaders in Supplement of the Year and Best Production. Incidentally, Spirit of the Century also won the Silver prize for "Best Rules" in the ENnie Awards this year and the Ogre's Choice Award for "Best Roleplaying Game". Burning Empires won "Roleplaying Game of the Year" at the Origins Awards. And Zorcerer of Zo won Ken Hite's Outie Award and the KublaCon Award for "Best game that doesn't include elves or vampires".
EDIT: Here's Fred's pictures from the awards ceremony.
2nd EDIT: I also added a text page with all the comments and scores, unedited, for completists.
Indie Game of the Year
1) Spirit of the Century [with 51 pts]
2) Burning Empires [with 44 pts]
3) The Zorcerer of Zo [with 43 pts]
Others (in order): Lacuna Part I (second attempt); Don't Rest Your Head; A Thousand and One Nights; Shock: Social Science Fiction; Faery's Tale; The Shab-al-Hiri Roach; In Harm's Way; Agon; Cold City; EABAlite; Mortal Coil; Hearts & Souls; Roanoke; Covenant; six gun assassins
Indie Supplement of the Year
1) Dictionary of Mu [with 110 pts]
2) Push, Volume 1 [with 52 pts]
3) Steampunk Musha [with 28 pts]
Others: The Wushu Guide to Wyrd-Fu, Stuff!, Kwaidan
Best Free Game
1) JAGS Revised [with 49 pts]
2) EABAlite [with 34 pts]
3) Mexican Standoff [with 33 pts]
Others (in order): Unistat; Simple20; Beat the Clock; Inntil vi synker; Chimaera; Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan; Battleaxe RPG: Reforged Edition
Best Support
1) Burning Empires [with 52 pts]
2) Spirit of the Century [with 46 pts]
3) The Zorcerer of Zo [with 19 pts]
Others (in order): JAGS Revised; Hollow Earth Expedition; Wild Talents; Cold City; Faery's Tale; Agon; Don't Rest Your Head; EABAlite; Dictionary of Mu; The Shab-al-Hiri Roach; Lacuna Part I; Covenant; Stuff!
Best Production
The winner, with 100 points, was:
1) Burning Empires [with 100 pts]
2) Spirit of the Century [with 29 pts]
3) Dictionary of Mu [with 24 pts]
Others (in order): Lacuna Part I; Hollow Earth Expedition; Agon; Wild Talents; The Zorcerer of Zo
Most Innovative Game
1) Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl [with 38 pts]
from Blue City (second attempt)
2) Don't Rest Your Head [with 30 pts]
3) A Thousand and One Nights [with 26 pts]
Others (in order): Shock: Social Science Fiction; Agon; Mortal Coil; The Shab-al-Hiri Roach; The Zorcerer of Zo; Spirit of the Century; Shooting the Moon
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August 3rd, 2007
10:49 am - Indie RPG Awards Voting Begins
The voting period for the Indie RPG Awards has officially begun for games released in 2006, to be presented at GenCon Indy in just a two weeks. After a week, I'll add up the votes. The winners will be announced at 3PM on Friday, August 17, at GenCon seminar event SEM00076.
This year we have 44 games and 15 supplements registered. That's the most games ever -- compared to 39 games in 2003, 41 games in 2004, and 29 games in 2005. You can check out the full lists (in order of registration) at Indie RPG Awards 2006.
All of the voters should have received links to the new voting form that I set up -- please contact me via info-at-rpg-awards-dot-com if you haven't received your link. Also, the emails I had on file for the following people bounced:
- Evangelos Hugo Paliatseas
- Kenneth Douglas Woolsey
- Golgotha Kinslayer
- Scott Mitchell
- Justin Dagna
- Gary Pratt
- William A. Rae
If anyone has info on how to contact them, please let me know.
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July 23rd, 2007
01:44 pm - Podcat Chat on the Indie RPG Awards
So I had a talk with Paul Tevis Have Games, Will Travel, which just came out as part of his podcast episode #96 talking about the Indie RPG Awards. Sadly, I'm rather embarrassed about it. I'm not used to speaking in a format like that, and I'm afraid I blathered a bit. I feel I emphasized various sidetracks rather than having a central thrust to my side of things.
Basically, I get a sinking feeling at the thought of being unable to edit it like I do written posts. All of which is mostly kudos to Paul and other podcasters, whose work I respect more now that I had to deal with trying it out.
The main points I wanted to get across were the diversity of the games represented in the Indie RPG Awards, as well as some facts I didn't have handy. I did not manage to rattle off the actual winners for the past four years. There are 82 people on the list of approved voters -- a wide list of independent RPG publishers. Each year they vote in the process, with three votes in each category. In order of year from 2002 to 2005, the winners have been:
Best Game: Dust Devils, My Life With Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris
Best Supplement: Charnel Gods, JAGS Have-Not, Monster Burner, Jihad
Best Free Game: Nicotine Girls, FATE, The Shadow of Yesterday, Perfect20
Best Production: Children of the Sun, My Life With Master, a|state, Artesia
Best Support: The Riddle of Steel, FATE, Burning Wheel / Monster Burner, Truth & Justice
Most Innovative: Universalis, My Life With Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris
I think it's an interesting mix, and I look forward to the votes from this year. Reminder for voters: voting will start on August 1 and go through August 8. The awards will be presented at 3PM on Friday, August 17, at GenCon Indy event SEM00076.
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July 19th, 2007
04:49 pm - End Game April 2007 Mini-Con Report
So I had two big blocks of gaming this past weekend. The first was the quarterly mini-con at EndGame in Oakland, California -- cf. the End Game Minicon page. I had signed up to a Truth & Justice game and a Spirit of the Century game, but the T&J game didn't get any players. Instead, I played Dogs in the Vineyard (GMed by Carl Rigney) in the morning slot and Liam Burke's game Dog Eat Dog in the afternoon slot, followed by running my SotC game in the evening. I went there with my friend ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) martinemonster, who is visiting the U.S. from Norway and stayed with us a couple of days. (I had met her at Knutepunkt 2005 in Norway). I've put a full report up on my webiste as:
End Game July 2007 Mini-Con Report
I was a bit disappointed at the lack of T&J, but everything I played was fun. Dogs with Carl was solid as always. This was a low-key run where no shots were fired and there were relatively few conflicts -- notably between PCs.
The new part was playing with Liam and Dog Eat Dog. It is a game about colonialism, particularly reflecting Pacific islands where the colonials had overwhelming power. Any player describes the results of her characters actions, but the one colonial player has the power to judge how tokens are awarded and power to win in conflicts. After each scene that the colonial player is in, the natives add a rule which they gain tokens for if they follow it in later scenes.
This run had the feel of a playtest where there was a lot of focus on the draft rules and some feedback about them. It was interesting that in discussion afterwards, one player disliked the unequal power dynamic -- whereas I thought that it was very much the point of the game.
I had seven players for my Firefly/Serenity SotC game, with Liam as the extra player since I did have a seventh pregenerated character. My run went more smoothly this time, and I drew in more expertise with the system including a lot more compels on character Aspects. Also, I added stunt explanations to the character sheets, which helped. I played with variant rules to speed up conflicts, where each hit takes off as many boxes as its margin.
All in all, a good time.
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May 8th, 2007
01:55 pm - Initial Thoughts on Burning Wheel
So as I mentioned last time, my Hârn group tried out Burning Wheel last time we played. We did a one-shot adventure -- the convention scenario "The Sword" available on the BW downloads page. We're preparing to play a BW campaign set in Hârn, game-mastered by Jim, and we're doing two one-shot adventures to introduce us to the system. Jim lead off with some discussion of the system, but I've put off commenting until now.
Jim gave comments by email, which were addressed to the others in the group but I think are fairly intelligible to others. Our group consists of Jim, David, Dennis, Daniel, and myself. (And Elliot has played with us earlier.) For the BW one-shot, Jim invited a new player, Mark, whom he had met online. I'm giving his comments below:
Jim Chokey wrote: - As a group, we learned a *lot* about BW mechanics an how they work in practice, including the mechanics for Duel of Wits, Fight!, armor,and injury. We even dabbled a bit with Artha, resources, rules for helping, etc. We didn't always get everything right... but I think we accomplished a lot in a session for which the primary intent was 'get to know the rules'.
- I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly scripting went once we got the basic hang of it. It's an unusual mechanic, but I thought it actually worked pretty nicely in both the Duels of Wits and the Fight!. Except for some of the positioning results when we were trying to have a three way fight, it wasn't at all clunky-- and I think it added a really neat element of drama/surprise to the game.
- I was surprised by how quick Duel of Wits is as a mechanism for resolving conflict. I really enjoyed seeing you guys actually 'play out' disputes and make specific points in character.
- There was a lot of great drama-- and humor-- resulting from in-character actions. (The Elf falling to his knees and weeping while the Dwarf brought out his keg o' nog at the sight of the sword was great. I think both of those actions probably would have merited an artha award if this had been 'actual' play with developing characters.)
- The Die of Fate as a formal mechanic. I don't know if I made this overt but I used this random mechanic on several occasions throughout the game to determine what's what with situations that weren't clearly outlined or developed. "Can the door be barred on the inside? Hmm... I don't know... the module doesn't say-- let's roll a Die of Fate.... a 1... yes, there is a bar."
- Finally, there's two things that weren't specifically BW related, but I wanted to mention in the 'great' category anyway:
- David's saintlike patience while two DoWs and a long Fight! went on, none of which involved his character. Thanks for being a good sport in a sub-ideal situation, David. At next session, though, I think you we need to make sure we give you a character who can't be sidelined, no matter what, so that you get more chance for some hands-on action.
- Mark: He knew the rules as well as anyone, if not more so. Plus: He's polite. He played a good dwarf. He's well groomed. He's not socially inept. Is he really a gamer? Welcome to our group, Mark!
Some things that I would consider to have been 'not-so-great': - David getting sidelined for most of the adventure. If I were to run this again, I'd make some changes to prevent it from being so easy to pay off the Roden, which essentially removes him from the occasion. Or, I might tinker with his beliefs to make sure that he had his own interest in the sword.
- Trying to run our very first Fight! as a three-way battle. This was not so elegant and was probably a less-than-ideal way to introduce ourselves to the Fight! mechanics--- particularly positioning.
- Some sub-ideal calls on the part of the GM on how to resolve certain issues in the game--- , such as when Robard (the human played by Dennis) wanted to sneak up on the fighting dwarf and Elf. I'm not going to beat myself up over it, as it was our first session with pregenerated characters in a one-shot, but I do feel that there are some things that I should have handled differently.
- No Daniel! (We knew you couldn't make it, of course... but we missed you anyway.)
Some random thoughts and observations-- that aren't necessarily good or bad-- but which stood out in my mind... or which occurred to me since the game - Armor! I think we were all a bit surprised at what the 'all-or-nothing' armor rules meant in practice, especially after being used to HM, where armor basically cushions blows. Similarly, the VA 'Versus Armor' rating of weapons makes a big deal... as does the ability to use great strikes to increase the VA of an attack. (When reading the rules, I had thought, "Two actions, just to get a +1 on VA? What a rip? But now, I see the advantage of that."
- Beliefs, instincts, and traits: I think we got a glimmer of how these can work in driving a game's action forward, although I think the instincts/traits may have played second and third fiddle in this particular scenario with these particular characters. Once we create characters of our own who we're familiar with-- and with instincts/ traits we've chosen-- I think they'll come into play more often.
- Duel of Wits stakes: An interesting thing about DoW is that, players are required to state the 'stakes' in advance (ie. this is what happens if I win, that's what happens if you win)-- but that, in most cases, the winner will have to make some sort of concessions/ compromises to those stakes, since he will almost certainly have lost a few points.
- Except for in the DoW, I think we (and I include me in this) were not so explicit about 'stating intent' in connection with action as the game calls for. At the same time, I think that stakes may not always have been as explicit as the game calls for. In the next session, I think we may want to consider to trying be more up front about specifying PC intent and stakes.
- A curious feature of the game is that disadvantages are, in most cases, more disadvantageous than advantage dice are advantageous.
- The rules to BW are really crunchy-- and there are a lot of them. I think we have to be prepared for the fact that, at first, we may forget about some of them in the course of play... that's just going to have to be the way it is until we master the rules.
- Similarly, there are some points in which rules procedures are not 100% clear in the book. I'll be happy to be the 'point man' in trying to figure out on the BW forum what the experienced BW gurus think the right interpretation of the rules procedure is.... , but I think we also have to be prepared to accept that we may just have to come up with some 'house guidelines' for how to handle certain things.
There were also some more specific rules questions following this.
In general, I'd agree with Jim's points. We did this session explicitly examining the mechanics as a curiousity -- and the session ended up a little more competitive and more crunchy than is typical for our games. In principle, we're used to HârnMaster which is fairly complex -- but I'd been frustrated by a number of problems with those rules and how we'd be tripped up even after years of (admittedly on-and-off) play. My initial thoughts on Burning Wheel: - The armor is counter-intuitive in that the success (and degradation) of armor is independent of how much damage the attack does. This suggests that if someone has a lot of armor, besides Great Blow to get the Versus Armor bonus, you might want to ping him a lot with low-damage attacks to wear down the armor.
- Presenting hit locations was odd. I was reasonably fine with presenting arms, which suggested putting them up to block. Torso as a default also worked fine. However, presenting legs to a sword blow evoked a rather... acrobatic image.
- I found it a little unesthetic to write and erase multiple times on our scripting sheet. I'd prefer either something like card choice or a sheet where we don't erase.
- I kicked ass in the two Duels of Wits by virtue of overwhelming elfy stats, and we were agreed it was fun. Still, I was a little concerned that they might grow old as a regular thing. I think we'll just have to see on that count.
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May 3rd, 2007
02:47 pm - Best Free RPGs of 2006?
So the Indie RPG Awards have come to the end of their official registration period. There are 32 games (and 11 supplements) registered -- compared to 39 games in 2003, 41 games in 2004, and 29 games in 2005. However, when I review the list, we're a bit short on free games. I think it's a bit natural that people aren't as pushy to promote free games since, well, they don't make money on them. But the Indie RPG Awards do have a special award for Free RPG, so I'd really like to get some more of them onto the list. So I'm extending things a bit to look for more qualified free entries.
So I'd like to ask people to give suggestions and pass the question around -- what were the best Free RPGs of 2006?
You can comment or post on the Indie RPG Awards Registration Form. I'll put some suggestions in comments as I think of them.
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April 24th, 2007
09:50 am - New Games This Weekend
So I had two games this weekend, both starting off new things for two of my groups.
So one of my groups had finished up an Amber DRPG campaign game-mastered by zdashamber a few months ago, and we played a few one-shots but are now starting a new campaign. So Saturday evening we did brainstorming and character creation for Dragons of the Yellow Sea -- a campaign that I'm GMing set in 1860s Korea of the world of Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels. It is a parallel history of our world where there are domesticated dragons. We talked about the background, who the PCs would be, and then created characters using a variant of Spirit of the Century. I had a modified stunt list -- mainly that "Drive" (cars) and "Pilot" (planes) were replaced by "Seamanship" (ships) and "Airmanship" (dragons), and modifying the "Mysteries" stunts to fit with shamans rather than turn-of-the-century psychics.
Overall, I think everyone's excited about this, and we liked all the ideas going in. I'm going to have to do a bunch more to prepare, but it's all interesting material. There's certainly an aspect to GMing this campaign which is connecting to my cultural heritage as a Korean that I've largely been distant from.
The other group just finished up a Call of Cthulhu campaign that I had been game-mastering, and on Sunday we did a one-shot adventure using Burning Wheel -- the convention scenario "The Sword" available on the BW downloads page. We're preparing to play a BW campaign set in Hârn, GMed by Jim, and we're doing two one-shot adventures to introduce us to the system.
This was mostly all about learning the mechanics. The larger lesson that I took from it was that I get competitive with this sort of mechanical environment, which I think I have to avoid. It occurs to me that in that group, we've generally been pretty cooperative as far as role-playing, and then gotten out our competitiveness in our tradition of having a round of Liar's Dice at the end of the session.
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April 5th, 2007
11:14 am - Gatherings I'm Missing
I thought I'd put in a mention about gatherings which I'm missing.
Nerdly Beach Party was last weekend, but I wasn't able to attend. It sounded like a lot of fun, and I'd see about trying to be at the next gathering.
The End Game April '07 Minicon is this coming Saturday, and I also won't be able to attend because the Call of Cthulhu game I'm in scheduled on top of it.
I am keeping up with indie gaming in my own groups, having played 1001 Nights with my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group last week, and With Great Power... with my GURPS guys last week and this week. No play reports on those yet, though.
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March 27th, 2007
10:29 pm - Indie RPG Awards Covered in Dragon #354
So, my thanks to Michael Fiegel, who covered a bit on the Indie RPG Awards in Dragon #354. (Alongside coverage of chadu's Zorcerer of Zo game and edible dice.)
Mark Delsing posted a picture of the mention in a Story Games thread, "Dragon #354 features some indie".
So that raises the stakes that this year's GenCon ceremony needs to live up to.
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February 5th, 2007
01:42 pm - Dead of Night Stuff
So I have posted some material for Andrew Kenrick and Merwin Shanmugasundaram's pocket horror RPG Dead of Night, timed with when my review came out on RPGnet.
RPGnet Review of Dead of Night
I've also posted some notes for the game on my website, as:
Dead of Night Notes
This includes a simple character sheet form and some inspirational stuff (the cliche list from the book, and a film list of classic monster movies with some comments).
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January 31st, 2007
09:30 pm - Ken Hite's Outie Awards for 2006
Apropos of my recent post on The Games of 2006, Ken Hite has posted his Out of the Box for January 2007 with his world-famous Outie awards -- as already discussed on Story Games as "Outies", and by an ecstatic chadu as "I've Got A Golden Ticket".
Best New RPG
Honorable Mentions: Tim Gray's Questers of the Middle Realms, Merwin Shanmugasundaram and Andrew Kenrick's Dead of Night, Robin Laws' The Esoterrorists, and Patrick Sweeney's Faery's Tale.
Second Runners Up: Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, and Leonard Balsera beef up Spirit of the Century and Bill Bridges' Promethean: the Created.
First Runners Up:Fred Hicks' Don't Rest Your Head and Brennan Taylor's Mortal Coil
Winner: Chad Underkoffler'sThe Zorcerer of Zo
Best Licensed Thing of 2006
Honorable Mention: Jon Zeigler's GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars.
First Runner-Up: Mike Pohjola's Star Wreck Roleplaying Game.
Winner: Luke Crane's Burning Empires.
Best Sui Generis RPG of 2006
Second Runner-Up: Shreyas Sampat's Mridangam (found in Jonathan Walton's journal Push)
First Runner-Up: John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors
Winner: Jason Morningstar's The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
Best Supplement of 2006
Honorable Mention: Rob Schwalb's True20 Sorcery and Steve Long's The Ultimate Skill
Second Runners-Up: Judd Karlman's The Dictionary of Mu and Monte Cook's Ptolus
First Runner-Up: Robert J. Toth's Damnation Decade.
Winner: Will Hindmarch's Requiem Chronicler's Guide.
Best Retread of 2006
Honorable Mentions: Dave Pulver's GURPS Bio-Tech and Chris O'Neill and Dan Landis' Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition.
Second Runner-Up: Bruce Cordell and James Wyatt's Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.
First Runner-Up: John Chambers' Exalted Second Edition.
Winner: Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon 5th Edition.
Most Improved Retread of 2006
Winner: Greg Stafford's The Great Pendragon Campaign.
Most Blatant Plugs of 2006
Dubious Shards and Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana
(Minor technical complaints about this Out of the Box posting... It's mis-titled as "1/25/06"; it's attribution looks wrong; it's missing a bunch of links, and it doesn't appear in the OotB Section Page.)
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January 22nd, 2007
10:21 pm - Saturday Games in Oakland
So I played in three games on Saturday in Oakland as part of the second KueiCon organized by Ben Lehman and Chris Chinn.
Basic D&D
When I got there around 11, Ben was DMing a game of Basic D&D, with Chris and Alexis playing -- they all noted that they wanted to start with something simple and brainless. They were nominally clearing out tunnels they had found beneath their family farm, and Ben was I think rolling up random room contents. So I rolled up a character and joined them. I had a dumb (Int 4) cleric at first. We headed into the dungeon several times, and then ran away. After a bit others started arriving and also rolled up characters. So there were several sallies where we usually had at least a few people killed. I survived two combats, ending up unconscious at 0 hit points. I was rescued and recovered, but then was killed in the next one. I then rolled up a halfling who was much more effective. We went for a hour and a half or so before we quit for lunch.
My main impression was that at least this version of Basic D&D (one of the red-cover versions) is a poorly organized book. I'm pretty familiar with the concepts, but I had to page flip constantly to find key rules like what my armor class was, etc. For example, it referred me to page 59 for alignment, and I eventually found what they were referring to on page 55. Character creation was quick, with the significant exception of buying equipment. Offhand, I think that even given the goal, this could be done much better.
Face of Angels
After going out to lunch, we split into two groups to play octaNe (by Jared Sorensen) and The Face of Angels (an RPG in development by Clinton Nixon). I went with the FoA group, which was being GMed by Ben -- with players Alexis, Michael, and myself. This is a playing-card-based game where each player has a hand of cards and resolves conflicts with the GM. There is a formal process of stakes setting where each side proposes stakes.
The setting was that we were all graduating from high school. The year was determined by the average of the year that each of us graduated, which we determined was 1992. The average was dragged down mostly by me as the oldest by a good chunk. I'm 37, while Michael and Alexis were just out of college, and Ben is late twenties. We decided to play in South Bend, Indiana -- two hours North of Chicago, and a formerly rich spot that has been in decline for a while.
I played Terrence Brown, a flamboyant theater geek. His family was poor, but he covered that well -- picking out the fanciest clothes from second-hand stores and so forth. Mechanically, he was a Jack (specialist) with his specialty being Acting. Michael played Parker B. Lewis, the rich kid whose card was Queen (supporter). Alexis played Sarah Williams, a raver girl who dealt drugs to make ends meet whose card was King (leader). She had a single mother and several siblings, but she did well for herself.
We each defined one ally and one enemy for ourselves, then the GM defined one additional relationship for each of us. My first ally was Laura Krauss, a friend since kindergarden and a theater techie. My second was Brandon McTavish, a rich kid who hated him and was currently going out with Parker's sister Stacey. I added that I had stolen his girlfriend Amanda Lewis, who was an actress he lead with. Ben added Amanda as an ally for me. Michael had his father Philip as an ally, his sister Stacey as an enemy, and Ben added Brandon (my rival) as an ally. Alexis has her dealer Bob as an ally, Laura as an enemy (whom she had been best friends in grade school with), and Ben added Samantha as an enemy (whom I forgot). We all noted that we were the pretty kids at school -- and we agreed that we all knew each other and went to the same parties, but didn't really hang out with each other.
So we started with a party at Parker's house. We started with Sarah and Laura talking, trying to make up their differences. Sarah apologized, but also convinced Laura to take some E, to show that she didn't think she was too goody-goody for Sarah. After playing a conflict, Laura agreed and took the hit. Brandon wanted to spike the punch with LSD, but Parker convinced him not to -- and instead just spikes Stacey's drink. Laura then came asking me to drive her home. While I was away, Sarah went and hit on Amanda who protested but submitted to some groping.
At this point, the event happened which gave us superpowers. Everyone at the party had a mass hallucination (or was it?) of a giant eye descending from the sky, and all fell asleep. Michael picked as Parker's superpower the ability to understand and speak every language ever. Alexis picked as Sarah's superpower the ability to give people delusions similar to schizophrenia. This started out questionable -- but came out as extremely dark particularly as they were assumed to be permanent. I originally picked the ability to run and jump at super-speed. I had some doubts about this and pondered instead doing a self-transformative power -- but Alexis and Michael supported the original idea as a "classic rather than cliche".
Around this point, we realized that we had forgotten a step, which was writing out secrets on the other PCs. The other player could later determine if the secret was true or false, but got a bonus if they accepted it as true. My secrets were: (1) that Parker's dad was a money launderer and that Parker knew, and (2) that Sarah's mother had had an affair with Bob and was pregnant. However, as it turned out, none of the secrets were played in-game.
From there, we started to split up and have separate adventures. A few random comments here: - Terrence was nearly run off the road by Brandon. He crashed, was crippled in the accident but was saved by Terrence and Sarah. He was babbling about the flames talking. This was our first hint of the major villain of the piece, a secret worldwide conspiracy called "The Voice of Fire".
- After the next day at the party, none of the PCs ever saw each other again, though Terrence and Parker had a phone call much later.
- Fitting with his flashy side, Terrence decided to become a superhero, costume and all -- calling himself Thunderbolt.
- Sarah became a major drug dealer in Chicago, and at one point played her Super-Trump which implied one of five major side effects. Taking a cue from the limit that she could affect up to a city, she took Ben's suggestion that she made the entire city of Chicago catatonic.
- After the Chicago disaster, the President blamed Thunderbolt -- and the conspiracy decided to stage a coup putting Terrence as President in his stead, against his best efforts.
- Parker was contacted by monks who knew about the Voice of Fire. He came in contact with a sentient language and mastered it, then used it to subvert the Pope and tried to take control of the Catholic Church. The conspiracy stopped him from converting congregations by engineering a revolt, but he controlled the hierarchy.
- Eventually, Parker and Terrence coordinated to wipe out the Voice of Fire, and were successful.
- Meanwhile, Sarah had been running for her life after accidentally wiping out Chicago. She was beaten up and left for dead by some people, but then happened on a cult gathering after being turned away from the Mexican border. There she found Brandon now considered a prophet, and took him out.
And that's about where we left it.
A few comments on the mechanics... We had one significant change, which was that the person who accepted the stakes was the one who played first, rather than the person who initiated the conflict. Playing first is a major advantage, so giving it to the initiator strongly discouraged free play because the first person to declare a mechanic conflict had a major advantage.
So we all agreed that this was a bit skimpy because we were trying to get through all the acts in around 6 hours, and we had little contact with each other or with most of the connections after the first act. Still, there were two things pulling us away from each other and our high school connections: (1) the game starts at graduation, so we're splitting up; and (2) the system encourages a more global scale. So we made these allies and enemies based on our high school lives, but they got left behind. Ben thought that with some more time, we could have found a way to reconnect to these -- but I think it would be nicer if we didn't have to invent ways to reconnect them from scratch.
So the sequence took us from around 1PM to 7PM, and Alexis had to go. So we saw her off and went out to dinner, then returned later for the evening game.
1001 Nights
After dinner, a few people left and the remainder of us discussed what we wanted to play. We had a few options but settled on Meguey Baker's 1001 Nights. I had brought some character sheets for this, so we distributed them and all worked on coming up with characters. What we came up with was this:
- Chris played Sabik, a 14-year-old guitar player, who was always asked to play silently in the background at court functions. I don't quite remember his ambition.
- Dave (?) played Jalal, a 30-something assistant tailor. His ambition was to have a day off.
- Michael played Zara, a 19-year-old librarian for the harem library. Her ambition was to be recognized as a scholar.
- Ben played Rihana, a 16-year-old poor courtesan. Her ambition was at first to feel the touch of silk, but then he changed that to sleep with the Sultan.
- I played Cassim, a 9-year-old hostage crown prince of a kingdom conquered by the Sultan. His ambition was to be stripped of his title.
I think everyone was quite happy with this. We ended up telling two stories, with a few wrapper scenes in between. The first story was about an evil prince who had captured a woman with a perfect, godly song. The second was about a knight and a scholar who met in the desert. After that, Zara and Rihana both achieved their ambitions.
The stories went very smoothly. I had particular fun as Cassim, who was not terribly mature and would always ask questions like "I wonder if there there monsters?" and "I wonder if they were attacked by monsters?" and so forth. Michael and Ben collected the most dice, though.
The one downside was that it was a little awkward coming up with the wrapper scene where we tell stories to each other -- because our characters, though all in the court, were from such different backgrounds. I tend to think that it would be better to first agree on a group template of sorts -- i.e. how we get together to tell stories -- and then created characters.
Conclusion
Good fun had by all, I think, and bonds helped. I was not impressed by the Basic D&D we played -- but I remain thoroughly impressed by 1001 Nights and think The Face of Angels has a lot of promise.
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January 16th, 2007
12:54 pm - A Long Weekend of Gaming
So I had a long weekend of gaming.
Friday night was a playtest of the new Land of Og system with my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group. We're doing a few one-shots while we think about what campaign we're going to do next. This was good fun (or, as the cavemen say, "Bang Bang Thing").
Saturday was the EndGame Oakland mini-con, where I played in three games: playing in a scenario of Robin Laws' The Esoterrorists run by Brian Williams, then game-mastering a scenario for Greg Porter's Macho Women With Guns, then playing in a game of Gregor Hutton's Best Friends as run by Carl Rigney. In all three of these games, I was playing with Paul Tevis (of Have Games Will Travel), who suspiciously picked all the same games as me. He just posted about it as "Calling It A Mini-Con Makes It Sound Small". There were some disappointments here, but still good fun.
Sunday I game-mastered another session of my ongoing Victorian Call of Cthulhu campaign based around John Tynes' supplement, The Golden Dawn. Here they have finally hit head-on to the premise of his scenario Sheela-na-Gig and the legend of King Arthur. I am not running the scenario straight, but I love the concepts within it. This has gone very well and I'll write more about it soon.
Monday was a board-gaming day which my friend Emily hosted for the Martin Luther King holiday. I played Klaus Teuber's Entdecker, Blokus Trigon, Andreas Seyfarth and Karen Seyfarth's Thurn and Taxis and finally the recent En Garde card game (from Slugfest games).
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January 11th, 2007
09:29 am - Indie RPG Award Nominations Open
So, the Indie RPG Awards Site has been re-vamped with a new look, and the nominations for the games and supplements released in 2006 have been opened.
Just go to the site and click on "Register" to send in info on your favorite Indie RPG or RPG supplement of 2006.
I'd like to start some sort of blog or forum for announcements regarding the awards, including threads for each of the newly nominated games and supplements(). I rather like LiveJournal, so I could create a community or account here, but I'm not sure what would be most appropriate.
EDIT: Aargh! My apologies. Having directed people to the form, I immediately updated and broke it by mistake. The form should be working now, though. (9:30PM PST)
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January 8th, 2007
05:10 pm - Indie Game Sales in Oakland, CA
So on the Story Games board, Chris Hanrahan of Endgame (a gaming store in Oakland, California) posted a thread on "A full year worth of sales..." where he reported on his overall numbers.
There he reported that his story games (i.e. indie RPGs associated with Indie Press Revolution or the Forge) had about $6,200 retail worth of product, roughly 13% of his total role-playing sales. The top seller was 37 copies of Dogs in the Vineyard, which compares very favorably with 10 copies of True20 or 12 of Shadowrun 4th edition.
He also reported that RPGs as a category in his store were up 24% from 2005, which is a hopeful sign. He does note that there has been a lot of promotion of indie games. However, contrary to what those opposed to indie games might say, the promotion doesn't appear to have hurt the sales of other non-indie games. He was skeptical of the numbers from Comics & Games Retailers (as reported on by Ken Hite in his 2005 State of the Industry back in March, say). It will be interesting to see how their numbers for 2006 come out.
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December 6th, 2006
01:01 pm - Tuesday Dead of Night Tryout
As mentioned in my previous post, I ended up running a game of Dead of Night yesterday, by Merwin Shanmugasundaram and Andrew Kenrick, and published by Andrew's company Steampower Publishing.
So the situation was that at the last minute, the GM of our GURPS supervillains game cancelled. So I invited the other two players, Jesse and Peter, over for some random sort of gaming. I had previously GMed a WWII soldiers game using Greg Stolze's NEMESIS, but I was not interested in that. I suggested Dead of Night as an alternative. I briefly explained the rules, and they were clearly set on playing the monsters. So I suggested two of the five pre-written scenarios with multiple monsters -- and the picked the first.
To summarize non-spoiler-y first, we had a bunch of fun, and it absolutely lived up to its claim as a pick-up-and-play pocket roleplaying game. I used a scenario and monster stats from the book, printed out character sheets, and we wrapped up the adventure in around two hours. I had previously reported on two quick games I played of DoN in my End Game April 2006 Mini-Con Report.
An important difference here was that the players were playing the monsters. Thus, I read them both the complete background and overview of the book scenario -- whereas playing humans in the con, a big part was figuring out what was going on. They copied in the monster stats from the book. So there was virtually no hidden GM-only information here. I also thought it went better than the con games, though I did have a controlled set of players whom I knew.
( Warning: Spoilers ahead for the DoN scenario )
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November 28th, 2006
06:29 pm - Favorite Indie RPGs, pre-millenium
A little while ago, I was pondering my own history with independent games. In grade school (through '87), I generally played D&D or Champions -- though we'd often fudge the rules a bunch or outright toss them.
However, when I got to college at U of Chicago in Fall '87, my first exposure at the student Games Club there was to a system called "Spellcrafter" developed by Richard Garfinkle. It was a homebrew in that it was published simply as a spiral-bound copies at Kinko's. However, it was a nicely laid out and illustrated book -- and he later came out with a Gamemaster's Guide mostly with advise in addition. The system was a hit-point-less mechanic with a generic contest variant that included decreasing the opposing attribute ("wounding"), and it went to the next degree from Ars Magica by having three categories of magical proficiency: shapes, substances, and manipulations.
Through college ('87 to '91), we played several Spellcrafter campaigns as well as lots of Champions and Ars Magica and a few others, though often with a long list of house rules. In grad school at first, it was similar with systems including Amber, AD&D for the adventures Ravenloft I&II, and more Champions along with others.
Then from reading Usenet newsgroups starting around '93 or so, I got started on published independent systems, including David Berkman and Andrew Finch's Theatrix, Greg Porter's CORPS, and Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge. I then started on variants out from this and many of my next games over the next few years were homebrews only loosely based on published systems. I originally called my Star Trek campaigns (in '94 - '95) a variant of CORPS, but I soon wrote up my rules in LaTeX as their own system.
Moving to California in 1998, I was introduced to another indie system, Bob Portnell and Guy McLimore's Simply Roleplaying as well as Russell Impagliazzo's "Strange Brew" system. I wrote up a minimalist system for my Water-Uphill World game, and an RQ variant for the Vinland campaign. However, I also got started on the Buffy RPG system played as written, and also kept up some published systems, including GURPS, Champions, and a brief try of D&D3.0.
I started reading The Forge in '03, which introduced me to many new games. I've tried out Shadows in the Fog, My Life With Master, Soap, Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, Don't Rest Your Head, and others. Most of my gaming was still non-Forge-related, but it did influence me by piquing my interest in playing games as written and the RPG community. Post-Forge-contact, I more often played games which stuck to the system as written (at least initially), and my house rules were more minor.
I am still disappointed that many people use the term "indie" to mean only a subset of 21st-century games, as I expressed earlier in my post on "The meaning of 'indie RPG'". I've added a wiki page for the term "TheoryTopics/Indie RPG" on the Theory Topics Wiki. However, on the wiki principle, please feel free to revise and add commentary on alternate definitions if you disagree.
So for the comments: what are your favorite pre-millenial independently-produced RPGs? My list includes CORPS, Theatrix, and Fudge -- as mentioned earlier. I'd also strongly consider Thieves Guild, Macho Women With Guns, The Morrow Project, Time and Time Again, and Spookshow.
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October 26th, 2006
12:44 pm - Inspectres Wednesday night
So I played Jared Sorensen's Inspectres last night -- hosted by Albert and Nancy from the nascent Silicon Valley group, along with other players Jason, Peter, and Pat.
We chatted a bit over the game. It was conceived as closely based on Ghostbusters, mixed by being a Silicon Valley startup company instead of a New York service company. However, starting with a suggestion from Nancy, we came up with an alternate setting. We instead came up with a branch of the British East India Company in the northern Kashmir region in British colonial India -- roughly 1870. After play started, I suggested that we could officially be a weather station, which we went with. The PCs were: - Nancy played Louisa Lewes, the one allowed "weird" PC, who was the ghost of an Englishwoman who had died in the Great Fire of London in 1666, cursed to walk the Earth as a ghost. Her official position was "Branch Historian" -- though really she was a spy, or more properly, a spook.
- Jason played Professor Henry Forsythe, an academic of nebulous background whose position was "Branch Naturalist".
- Peter played Carlton Phipps, an upper-class dilettante along the lines of Bertie Wooster. He headed the branch, with the title of "Inspector General".
- Pat played Dr. Hamilton Shumm, a medical doctor from Boston, whom we jokingly suspected of being German.
- I played Colonel Stopford Kenilworth, an old ex-Army colonel crossed with Jack Palance (in City Slickers and other films). He was born in 1798 and thus was over seventy, and was ridiculously grizzled and tough. (He thought of the others as "spook", "snob", "fop", and "quack" respectively.)
The setup was that we were sent to investigate an unseasonal plague of locusts. Now, Inspectres is set up so that by successful rolls, we as players are going to come up with the explanation the mysterious clues which the GM presents at the start of the scenario. It doesn't seem to have much strategy, since the threat is purely GM-assigned Stress rolls. There is a resource management aspect to the game, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of effect.
There were a lot of funny bits, though nothing too over the top. My favorite bits were when Pat accidentally referred to the "burgomeister" of the local town, whereupon we all stared at him as clearly a German spy. The contrast of foppish Carlton Phipps and the Colonel was the most over-the-top, and the funniest, I thought. The Colonel regaled with stories about how he had been trapped in the Crimea and had been forced to eat the locusts when all their food had been gone. Then later when the group was trying to make their way through the locust swarm, he narrated that taking up the rear, he had somehow gotten a sweet-smelling branch which attracted the locusts -- meanwhile the Colonel up front simply said "What terrific luck for us. It's like they're attacted away!"
It was a little tricky balancing different explanations which we came up with along the way. For example, Nancy specified that there was a perfectly natural explanation for the locusts according to her research. Still, we later uncovered a (Tsarist) Russian plot which nicely wrapped together a bunch of previous bits we had come up with.
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October 17th, 2006
04:44 pm - First Taste of Don't Rest Your Head
So on Sunday we had two people missing for our regular Amber game. So instead, we tried out Fred Hick's Don't Rest Your Head. zdashamber ran a short game for me and whumpdotcom, a test for a game she's running at AmberCon NorthWest.
There are reviews on the official site. I haven't read the book yet, so these are just my reflections on first play. My capsule description would be that it's urban fantasy in the vein of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, with PCs who have gained superpowers as a result of their acute insomnia. The game mechanics are narrowly focused on balancing between madness and exhaustion. You can tap into your insomniac powers but risk madness, and push any action at the risk of exhaustion.
It is a grabby concept, and we ran with it. Bill's idea was that he was a TV executive, Larry, trying to keep alive a parallel to Saturday Night Live. He can't sleep worrying that his precious series will get cancelled. Running with that, my concept was a new writer named Joel brought in from L.A., who doesn't want to sleep because his best ideas come when he's been up for ages. Larry's madness power was casting -- to transform people around him to fit a one-line concept he tosses out. Joel's power was the dark side of comedic writing: he could see people's guilt. Each of us defined a stress-inducing event that kicks off the adventure. Larry saw a ghostly TV show mocking him by a long-dead peer whose life he had ruined. Joel's girlfriend left him, complaining about things which he had no memory of.
The setting was that we found our way from our homes in New York into "Mad City", an urban fantasy realm described in the book. There's a potential weakness that the PCs are entering into a totally unfamiliar realm which is too big to explore area by area. Thus, they're largely at the mercy of NPC directions -- which can feel like being lead around rather than exploring. My suggestion to Madeline was that besides having powers, the PCs should start out knowing some secret which none of the NPCs know. To me, the insomniac angle brings to mind movies like Marathon Man, Into the Night, and After Hours -- or the television series 24. It's a little tricky to organize, though.
The mechanics seemed pretty simple, and almost the same for all characters. PCs are distinguished by their powers rather than numeric stats. There is an immediate reward/penalty system based on the success roll, similar in theme to Dogs in the Vineyard. The good part is that you're tempted to either go mad or crash and fall asleep by drawing in extra dice. The questionable part is that you're encouraged to make simple rolls against easy targets, since that helps you recover. (The Dogs mechanic has a similar feature that lets you power up quickly by compromising in minor social conflicts -- but that's fitting in a way.) In DRYH, you can keep going indefinitely as long as you get enough easy rolls under your belt. As you start to tire, you actually power up but get closer to crashing. I found it a little hard to conceptually grasp this, but then, it's supposed to be a surreal and disorienting genre.
I think I'd need to sit down with the book for any more comments, though. I'll make another post to talk about reward systems.
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