Monthly Archives: August 2015

#rpgaday2015 day 13 – favourite RPG podcast

Roleplaying, , ,

I was going to skip this one because I don’t listen to podcasts, and thus having a favourite RPG podcast would be a little odd. However, in writing a similar paragraph to begin day 14, I realised that wasn’t quite true.

I listen to Dead.FM, which isn’t an RPG podcast but does feature updates about the Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors roleplaying game. So that kind of counts.

There’s also Nearly Enough Dice, which I don’t listen to but I was featured in an interview on. My five minutes of fame talking about No Rest for the Wicked at Conpulsion.

#rpgaday2015 day 11 – favourite RPG writer

Roleplaying

Day behind on this one – didn’t have much energy for blog posts, and I didn’t prep this one before hitting a field for the weekend.

I’m not sure what to say about this one. I don’t really have a favourite writer. I can name several, and say that they’ve done work I admire, but I’m not sure I can say that any one of them wrote something so profound it made me go “they’re my favourite RPG writer”.

So, to name a few: David Hill, Chuck Wendig, Stew Wilson. These are people who I know write good work, and who I have bought into projects knowing that they’re in the teams.

David Hill’s work on the second edition of Changeling: the Lost has made me want to play it and abandon the original entirely and that it isn’t ready yet actually aches a bit weight loss supplements that actually work.

Chuck Wendig is not only a fiction author, but he’s been involved in some of my favourite bits of work in the White Wolf games including WoD Mirrors and Geist: the Sin-Eaters.

Stew Wilson also worked on WoD Mirrors and Geist: the Sin-Eaters, as well as working on Shadows of the UK which has some of my favourite fluff text including the homage to some local Edinburgh residents.

In the Footsteps of Giants

LRP, Me, No Rest for the Wicked, , , , ,

Overall, a great weekend. Event 8 of the 9 events we’ve run for No Rest of the Wicked, and the eighth that I’ve attended.

Many positive points:

  • Getting paggered by Phill on a combat run because I ended up between the crew and the players as they tried to escape was frustrating and fun at the same time. There’s (now) a realisation that I forgot I could VANISH out of that situation, but being picked up by a player instead of being the one picking someone else up was an interesting change.
  • The banter between Jaxx and Orpheus was awesome
    • Crumpets are crunk!
    • She’s got a gut full of dynamite and a booty like POW!!!!
  • Jaxx dying after Orpheus specifically told her not to led to the interesting RP post-resurrection of “what was the one thing I told you not to do?” “you told me not to fall over.” “and what did you do?” “I went boom.” “and then you fell over.” “in lots of pieces.” “but you still fell over and I told you not to do that…”
  • Engaging with PCs was good. I managed to get into the post-timeout social RP on both nights, and that was a lot of fun. I kinda wish I’d swapped to Trysten, but being there as Orpheus was a lot of fun, and I wanted to do a complete costume swap for Trysten to minimise kit confusion.
  • “Symmetrical circles with no corners” – enough said
    • Working out how you can have a non-symmetrical circle with corners that’s still a circle
  • The labyrinth and the astral fight encounters were amazing
    • Sneaking/dancing around as Or-fae-us (the half-Harlequin, half-Spectre illusion) was fun
    • The reaction from players as the Aressiyans powered up their EL wire simultaneously was brilliant – it’s like I planned it…
  • The zero-crew encounter that just kept going. 9 players and me in a closed room as they poked things and investigated what they did. That was fantastic.
  • Using Pyro’s fiery explosion to light my cigar
  • Pancakes!
  • Arborian frisbee
    • Tree climbing!
  • Getting some good feedback about my prototype deck timer app was pretty awesome as well.

Some negative points:

  • Not being able to get time off work meant I didn’t get there till after time in and it was nearly 9 before I actually hit the field.
  • Apparently I need to make Orpheus and Trysten look more visually distinct as a few people didn’t realise I wasn’t just playing Orpheus on Sunday even though I’d completely swapped kit
    • Orpheus: Eye bionic, black tactical vest, black combats, pistol on left thigh, armour, shotgun
    • Trysten: Arm and neck plugs, black bracers, black sleeveless shirt, black military jacket, pistol on right thigh, buckler and power sword
    • Rob’s suggested that switching to the velvet jacket rather than the plain one might help, but I’m looking for more suggestions on how I can switch it up and create a more visually distinct image for the pair of them
  • Having players wanting to do stuff and not being able to run anything for them because there’s no crew available is incredibly frustrating
  • Didn’t get much chance to get someone to hire some Knight Titans looking for some action
  • I’m running out of coherency to write good things about the event!

#rpgaday2015 day 10: favourite RPG publisher

Roleplaying,

So.. I don’t really know on this one, but I suppose the answer is pretty obvious: Onyx Path. I say it’s pretty obvious because I have this tendency to buy every nWoD core book they release, and there’s no setting they’ve produced that I dislike (even if I do have a stack of books still to read on my shelf).

I have other preferred publishers, but none that I follow to the extent that I do Onyx Path, and none that I support to the same extent. So it definitely seems pretty obvious what my answer here is.

Probably still in Dundee at time of publishing. Presumably knackered.

 

#rpgaday2015 day 9: favourite media you wish was an RPG

Roleplaying, TV,

As it happens… most of the media I wish was an RPG actually is an RPG already. Strange how that happens, really.

However, I’ve been watching Dark Matter and it struck me that it would make a good RPG scenario. A bunch of people wake up with no memories, just instincts and ingrained skills, and have to figure out who they are and who they want to be – not always liking the answers they find.

Maybe I’ll run that scenario one day.

Still in Dundee running No Rest for the Wicked.

 

#rpgaday2015 day 8: favourite appearance of RPGs in the media

Roleplaying, Videos, Web series, , , ,

My first thought was to highlight the entire “The Gamers” franchise by Dead Gentlemen and Zombie Orpheus Entertainment. But then I realised I could do better than that, and so I present: Natural One.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLTtpi7gJO7XNV6hMpBZrXuOqq0yDM3yE8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Natural One is something I Kickstarted along with its sister feature Humans & Households. Both are set in the same setting as “The Gamers” (to a degree). In “The Gamers” and the subsequent features, the worlds they explore are always fantasy ones, and Natural One changes this up by doing a cyberpunk adventure in Shadowrun.

It’s a different team behind the scenes, with familiar actors like Scott C Brown and Christian Doyle providing the background link to the overarching series while they bring in a new cast to explore this very different story.

If this serves as the gateway that gets people exploring Dead Gentlemen’s work (including the “The Gamers” franchise, Demon Hunters, Syphilitic Ninja Vampires, and more) then I’ll take that as a job well done.

Funny thing: when this is posted, I’ll actually be in Dundee running No Rest for the Wicked. Because just talking about roleplaying isn’t enough.

Fantastic 4

Films

So I saw the Fantastic 4 reboot on Tuesday and it was… not good. It had potential, but they scuppered it and it finished unsatisfyingly.

A brief breakdown of the film (contains spoilers):

  • The Set-up: Reed Richards is established as a child genius working with his best friend Ben Grimm to build a teleporter out of scrap junk and N64s. They present the upgraded version at a school fair, where they meet Franklin Storm who invites Reed to join the Baxter Foundation where he meets Sue Storm, Victor Von Doom, and Jonny Storm.
  • Reed, Victor, Jonny, and Sue work together to build the real prototype dimensional shuttle. When they finish it, they do a test with a living subject (chimpanzee), and the Foundation board decides to get NASA involved from here on out.
  • Victor, Reed, and Jonny get drunk and decide to go across on their own and be the first dimensional travellers. They pull Ben in as well and the four of them cross over to the other dimension. Things go wrong, they get blasted with alien energy, Victor gets left behind, and Sue has to manually initiate the return from Earth. The shockwave of the return destroys the equipment and transfers energy to Sue.
  • The military takes over, taking everyone into custody for study. Over time they develop suits that allow Sue and Jonny to control their powers. Reed escapes the facility and works on his own to try and find a cure for their afflictions.
  • The military captures Reed, brings him in to finish their new quantum gate, and send a team to the other dimension where they find Victor – still alive.
  • They bring Victor back where he promptly kills everyone he meets and goes back to the other dimension, opening a large gate that starts sucking everything through – with the aim of destroying Earth.
  • Reed, Sue, Jonny, and Ben go through the gate, avoiding the matter-to-energy conversion field and start fighting Victor. They get their asses handed to them.
  • Reed noticed they can’t beat him on their own and suggests they work together. Instant change in results, and they send Victor into the energy stream and destroy the gate, presumably killing him before returning to Earth.
  • Having saved the world, they then blackmail the military into giving them a private facility in the mountains.

So. It built up pretty well, and had me asking good questions – it had me interested in the film – pretty much right up until after the “one year later” part. After that, things went downhill. Sue found Reed effortlessly, Ben took Reed down effortlessly, Reed fixed the quantum gate project effortlessly, the Four took down Doom effortlessly once they started working together, the Four effortlessly got the military to cave to their demands. It just lost all sense of dramatic tension.

I mean, sure, the good guys are always going to win, but they don’t have to win so easily. It wasn’t good storytelling, and it was a poor show all round. No one left that cinema excited, no one was eager to see if there were post-credits scenes (there weren’t any – just a message about how the film secured 15,000 jobs and took over 100,000 hours to make), and there were cries of dismay as people started shuffling out.

My recommendation? Don’t spend any money on it, and don’t feel any need to see it.

#rpgaday2015 day 7: favourite free RPG

Roleplaying, ,

So, my favourite free RPG. I thought about this for a while, and the choice I came to was CJ Carella’s Witchcraft. This is actually a game I paid for, and I own most of the supplements, including the sequel game Armageddon: the End Times. After the release of Armageddon (I think), Eden Studios released Witchcraft as a free PDF for anyone to download and play. I prefer my hard-copies, but a free game is a free game.

Witchcraft was one of the first tabletop games I ever played, and it’s stuck there as a favourite. The Unisystem rules within it are still some of my favourite mechanics – so much so that I proposed that the Isles of Darkness use the Unisystem resolution mechanics instead of the MET ones, but that didn’t go anywhere.

One of the things I like about it is how it handles magic. Psychic powers are an expression of your will, and as such they don’t go wrong – they either work, or they don’t; the downside is that they’re more limited in what they can do. Invocation draws upon the knowledge of centuries to create magical effects of mythic potential – if you can draw enough power and don’t accidentally blow yourself up. Necromancy works similarly to Invocation, in that you’re drawing in essence to deal with ghosts and there are consequences for getting it wrong, but my memory is a little hazier on Necromancy. There are other disciplines in the supplements, including advanced versions of the basic Invocations, were-creatures, vampires, and more.

It’s a game that handles urban fantasy[1] well, and once you crack open Armageddon, it has a meta-plot as well – one with global consequences. I’d say other people thought it handled urban fantasy well too, as the Unisystem was adapted for the Buffy RPG, the Angel RPG, Conspiracy X (an X-Files style game), All Flesh Must Be Eaten (zombie survival), Terra Primate (Planet of the Apes), and more.

 

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ I don’t really like the term urban fantasy, but it’s the one that’s coming into use for describing the vague genre of “modern-day situation with magic/aliens/other”

#rpgaday2015 day 6: most recent RPG played

Empire, LRP, Roleplaying, , ,

So, this is another one of these where I can break it down into LARP vs tabletop.

The most recent LARP I’ve played is Empire by Profound Decisions. That was a mere two weekends ago in Spernal. Empire is a fantasy LARP with a lot of features I like in the game and a huge range in scope with people being able to play just within their own group, within their nation, or within the entire Empire with a other sub-groups you can get involved in as well. For myself, I’m getting heavily involved with the Shuttered Lantern (one of the mage orders) and the Military Council (the council of Army Generals) as I take steps to organise military scrying across the Empire. My next event is already part-planned as I try and organise exactly what I’m doing and who I need to speak to.

The most recent tabletop RPG I’ve played was a Deathwatch game run by Rob. It kinda trickled out of existence as these things sometimes do. It was followed by the last tabletop game I ran (Black Crusade) which has ended up trickling out of existence in a similar manner.