This was a piece of artwork I made for my Amber campaign a while back:
Showing posts with label Gaming = Art = Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaming = Art = Life. Show all posts
Sunday, February 27, 2022
A Very Confusing Map
Monday, December 7, 2020
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Plotlines
Two weeks ago, one of the PCs of my Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign managed to peek inside Dworkin's studio and see what he's been painting lately. Rather than just describing them to him, and paused there for the night, and made digital mockups of them between sessions. Those who've read the novels will understand some of the above, but I'm afraid I can't explain the inexplicable here, as it's plot relevant/revealing. The devil is in the details. Spoilers!
Worth noting that these digital collages utilize some components that are found images. I did very little of the freehand drawing behind all this, because I had to crank out 6 compositions in time for tonight's game session. I feel this constitutes fair use under the notion that it's transformative and presents the components in a new context.
Friday, December 25, 2015
Playing Against Types
It feels really good to get back into LARPing. It was an integral
part of my life back in the day, and the new post-divorce, post-depression Rolfe is trying to get back in touch with better days and old accomplishments.
So I'm playing in two LARPs these days, both of which share a venue and a large segment of their player base. (I also attended one session of a third LARP, but it has a scheduling conflict with one of the other two, and at this point I'm invested enough in my characters to be certain where I'm staying.) Finding the courage to go to the first session was difficult, and the courage to walk back into that room of strangers a second time was even harder, but I stuck through it and now I don't regret it. Each week is more fun than the one before.
Honestly, I've never liked the concept of Changeling as much as the darker more angsty takes on the WoD. I'm big into pathos, character drama, and greek tragedy. I'd played one or two sessions of Changeling back in Albuquerque a decade ago, but it never really hooked me. Given my druthers, I'd have joined a Vampire game instead.
But this October, Changeling was the only LARP I thought I was going to be able to play in. (Vampire LARPing really only feels right after the sun sets, so it starts late, and I was working ungodly early mornings at the grocery store.) Expecting this to be the only RPG on my plate (at least as a player) for a while, I made myself a therapy character. I'm playing a grumpy, masochist Troll, recently returned to the world from some horrible self-imposed exile that nearly destroyed him. I carefully picked Flaws that would allow me to vent in-character about the emotions I was feeling out-of-character; through him I get to unload sour statements about love and betrayal. He is quick to anger, but also a slave to his romantic and chivalrous nature; scarred by dozens of half-remembered previous lives of heart-break, and now actively seeking his own death. He's a ball of cynicism and banality, and frankly the other characters ought to be steering clear of him because that shit is dangerous in changeling.
He is completely out of place at that game, and that was kind of the point. I was going to a game to force myself to be social again after years of being a recluse, so I specifically built myself a character that could stand in a corner and glower whenever the prospect of interacting with humans or making new friends was just too damn scary for me.
My hope is to give him a big ol' arc. The whole point of the character is to maneuver him along a transformation, and through it convince myself that my own return to the world is entirely a good one.
Since the entire cast of the LARP is playing crazy over-the-top fey, I often find myself relegated to the Bud Abbot / Zeppo Marx / Rowlf the Dog straight-man support role. I didn't have much to connect me to the plot, and my bristly armored portrayal often meant I was left standing moody in a corner when it would have been more fun to be center stage. The character is cooler on paper or in theory than he is in practice. Before long, I came to regret those character decisions, as my defenses became a prison. I was in danger of isolating myself from both plot and people until it stopped being worth my time to attend the game.
Luckily, after a few sessions there, one of my fellow players asked me to join the Werewolf chronicle that meets at the same location. Excuses to decline came right to the forefront of my mind, but I somehow found the courage to disregard those thoughts and accept her invitation.
He knows nothing. His experience is limited to what a wolf knows, and I play him with an open-eyed sense of wonder and curiosity that would be perfect for a Childling in the Changeling game. Pretending to have never had nor used _hands_ before, asking ridiculous questions and clarifications because basic human concepts confuse me, playing the timid omega of the pack who now suddenly qualifies finds himself an alpha at the same time he learns there's so much more out there in the world than he as simple wolf ever dreamt; all these things are hilariously fun. Here I'm not the dour straight man, I'm the scrappy sidekick comic relief. Everyone else is playing a darker character at Werewolf than at Changeling, but I've personally flip-flopped that dynamic. It's really fun.
And boy has this character's arc been a breeze to get rolling. A few weeks ago I was a bewildered cub in a fox frenzy; that persona is quickly being warped by curiosity and experimentation and his confidence just bloomed at the end of last week's session. I had no Tribe in mind when I made this cub, I just built a young wolf as a blank slate. Questions and events have pushed him to Tribe Uktena, and his whole personality emerged organically out of improvisations with the other players. He's still young and innocent, perhaps even foolish, but he's also just starting to find his strength and develop some ambitions of his own. Assuming I don't get him killed (the combat system can be brutal, and I nearly died twice in the first turn of my first fight) first, I think this little pup has a bright future ahead of him.
The weird thing (for me as serious introvert) is that I'm engaging with an entirely different subset of the player group in the two different games. The tiny handful of people that have broken through the Troll Grump's shell at Changeling, are a very different (and much smaller) group of players than the young Uktena Cub pesters and riffs off of at Werewolf. I'm enjoying the later game more, but it's also enhancing the former game by way of contrast. The combination is encouraging me to be more social out-of-character as well, since I'm quickly growing to know and like the majority of the player base. Being quiet and stand-off-ish comes naturally to me, but my little cub pretty much demands to be played as a very social animal who wants to engage with everyone. So I'm just letting the character lead me, and I think that process is doing me a world of good.
So I'm playing in two LARPs these days, both of which share a venue and a large segment of their player base. (I also attended one session of a third LARP, but it has a scheduling conflict with one of the other two, and at this point I'm invested enough in my characters to be certain where I'm staying.) Finding the courage to go to the first session was difficult, and the courage to walk back into that room of strangers a second time was even harder, but I stuck through it and now I don't regret it. Each week is more fun than the one before.
Changeling: The Dreaming
Changeling is the lightest, happiest version of the World of Darkness. It's the same world as Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith, Hunter, etc, but the PCs are fay beings infused with imagination and just generally much brighter and more optimistic than the protagonists of any of the other WoD game lines. Characters within the setting struggle to overcome mundane banality, not the murderous hunger or raging inner beast of Vampire and Werewolf.Honestly, I've never liked the concept of Changeling as much as the darker more angsty takes on the WoD. I'm big into pathos, character drama, and greek tragedy. I'd played one or two sessions of Changeling back in Albuquerque a decade ago, but it never really hooked me. Given my druthers, I'd have joined a Vampire game instead.
But this October, Changeling was the only LARP I thought I was going to be able to play in. (Vampire LARPing really only feels right after the sun sets, so it starts late, and I was working ungodly early mornings at the grocery store.) Expecting this to be the only RPG on my plate (at least as a player) for a while, I made myself a therapy character. I'm playing a grumpy, masochist Troll, recently returned to the world from some horrible self-imposed exile that nearly destroyed him. I carefully picked Flaws that would allow me to vent in-character about the emotions I was feeling out-of-character; through him I get to unload sour statements about love and betrayal. He is quick to anger, but also a slave to his romantic and chivalrous nature; scarred by dozens of half-remembered previous lives of heart-break, and now actively seeking his own death. He's a ball of cynicism and banality, and frankly the other characters ought to be steering clear of him because that shit is dangerous in changeling.
He is completely out of place at that game, and that was kind of the point. I was going to a game to force myself to be social again after years of being a recluse, so I specifically built myself a character that could stand in a corner and glower whenever the prospect of interacting with humans or making new friends was just too damn scary for me.
My hope is to give him a big ol' arc. The whole point of the character is to maneuver him along a transformation, and through it convince myself that my own return to the world is entirely a good one.
Since the entire cast of the LARP is playing crazy over-the-top fey, I often find myself relegated to the Bud Abbot / Zeppo Marx / Rowlf the Dog straight-man support role. I didn't have much to connect me to the plot, and my bristly armored portrayal often meant I was left standing moody in a corner when it would have been more fun to be center stage. The character is cooler on paper or in theory than he is in practice. Before long, I came to regret those character decisions, as my defenses became a prison. I was in danger of isolating myself from both plot and people until it stopped being worth my time to attend the game.
Luckily, after a few sessions there, one of my fellow players asked me to join the Werewolf chronicle that meets at the same location. Excuses to decline came right to the forefront of my mind, but I somehow found the courage to disregard those thoughts and accept her invitation.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse
I took a very different approach with my character here. Grumpy and quick to anger would have fit Werewolf better than Changeling, but by this point I really wanted something else entirely to get me out of my shell. I ended up playing a Lupus Cub, a young wolf who knew nothing of werewolves (or humans) until his first change (which happened at the first session I played this character). What a joy this character is!He knows nothing. His experience is limited to what a wolf knows, and I play him with an open-eyed sense of wonder and curiosity that would be perfect for a Childling in the Changeling game. Pretending to have never had nor used _hands_ before, asking ridiculous questions and clarifications because basic human concepts confuse me, playing the timid omega of the pack who now suddenly qualifies finds himself an alpha at the same time he learns there's so much more out there in the world than he as simple wolf ever dreamt; all these things are hilariously fun. Here I'm not the dour straight man, I'm the scrappy sidekick comic relief. Everyone else is playing a darker character at Werewolf than at Changeling, but I've personally flip-flopped that dynamic. It's really fun.
And boy has this character's arc been a breeze to get rolling. A few weeks ago I was a bewildered cub in a fox frenzy; that persona is quickly being warped by curiosity and experimentation and his confidence just bloomed at the end of last week's session. I had no Tribe in mind when I made this cub, I just built a young wolf as a blank slate. Questions and events have pushed him to Tribe Uktena, and his whole personality emerged organically out of improvisations with the other players. He's still young and innocent, perhaps even foolish, but he's also just starting to find his strength and develop some ambitions of his own. Assuming I don't get him killed (the combat system can be brutal, and I nearly died twice in the first turn of my first fight) first, I think this little pup has a bright future ahead of him.
The weird thing (for me as serious introvert) is that I'm engaging with an entirely different subset of the player group in the two different games. The tiny handful of people that have broken through the Troll Grump's shell at Changeling, are a very different (and much smaller) group of players than the young Uktena Cub pesters and riffs off of at Werewolf. I'm enjoying the later game more, but it's also enhancing the former game by way of contrast. The combination is encouraging me to be more social out-of-character as well, since I'm quickly growing to know and like the majority of the player base. Being quiet and stand-off-ish comes naturally to me, but my little cub pretty much demands to be played as a very social animal who wants to engage with everyone. So I'm just letting the character lead me, and I think that process is doing me a world of good.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Catching Up With The Summer Of Extremes
It has been a while since I blogged. Life has been far more complicated than usual, and gaming has been in "feast or famine" mode this summer. 2015 has been terribly extreme. The good parts have been really truly
wonderful, but laced between them has been some absolutely crushing bad
news for my personal life, from which I haven't completely recovered.
Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.
Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway), but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level. For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.
I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.
Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.
On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s). So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.
First was the unending stream of games that was GenCon. I lost count of how many dozens of people I taught how to play Colonial Horror / Dark Gothic at the Frog booth. It was quite a few, many of whom went on to buy the game. In the evenings I hung with new friends on the Frog team, playing card games over drinks and slowly processing all the crazy new emotions just barely contained inside my head. Jason and Scott Hill (the brothers at the core of Flying Frog Productions) are two of the most generous people I have ever met, and they made us all feel like family. Hotel, airfare, food, con tickets -- all paid for, and all I had to do in return was spend my days teaching people how to play a game I really enjoy. I got my quota of much-needed fun that week, that's for sure. And for several weeks before that too, as the fine folks at Flying Frog have been inviting me up once-a-week for the past few months to help playtest upcoming Shadows of Brimstone expansions (many of which debuted at GenCon). That's been a series of very cool experiences. It's rather amazing just how well they treat their volunteers.
One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!
The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.) This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.
It was my first year as Area Coordinator for the main room at Dragonflight, so I had a lot of responsibilities... and yet, it felt like less work than the previous year. Last year, we'd had a big computer problem, and I'd been "Johnny on the spot" retro-converting us back to a paper sign-up system when the website went down. That was grueling work, but worth it to keep the convention running in spite of tech failure. This year, I pushed to just use electronic/online for pre-registration leading up to the convention, and have paper sign-up sheets prepared in advance for the events. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and it all went really smoothly. Smoothly enough I was free to actually play a couple games during the convention. (Meanwhile, Sarah had similar impressive success at the Registration booth. Go, Sarah!) Multiple people have told me that this was the smoothest running Dragonflight in over a decade, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Attendance was up 25%, but numerous people actually said it felt like it was down a little from last year because the lines were so short and it was so easy to get into a game or find a table. I went to a lot of trouble engineering the flow of the ballroom to make it feel that way, and I'm thrilled it paid off so well. Go me again!
That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year. And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment.
Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.
Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway), but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level. For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.
I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.
Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.
On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s). So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.
 |
| Apparently, I felt very strongly about that card. |
One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!
The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.) This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.
 |
| Dragonflight ballroom, on a slow morning hour. |
That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year. And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
How To Host A Societal Collapse
I spent most of yesterday playing a game called How To Host A Dungeon. It's part board game, part drawing experiment, and part tool for designing a D&D dungeon or campaign.
It's made by a local game designer here in Seattle, but you can pick up the PDF right now via the Bundle of Holding for a cheap price along with several other GM-ing goodies.
To play How To Host A Dungeon, you roll on a series of charts that give you loose instructions on what to draw. Following that guidance creates a map, or more accurately a series of maps, of successive layers of civilization and tunneling in a fantasy kingdom. Empires rise and fall, wandering monsters move in, and in the end either an intrepid band of heroes braves the dungeon to slay the big bad, or some horrible monster conquers the world. It's pretty cool pass-time, essentially a pen-and-paper analog to Dwarf Fortress. Sort of Dungeon Designer meets Blank White Cards.
Rather than just post my rather cluttered map from yesterday (rife with beginner's mistakes), I figured I'd actually take a few hours to generate a spiffy new map using Pixlr, a free online photoshop-like drawing toolset. Putting it in layers allows me to save my progress at many stages, and simplifies the process for when one in-game civilization collapses and a new one builds over their ruins.
History of
Year Two – Kharsoum founds the Colony
of Silaa. This leaves too an unstable slaves to nobles ratio, and
the city falls to Revolt. (As a side note, this is destined to happen
to any Dark Elf starting city that isn't directly attached to a
mineral vein. Even if it is, you'd have to interpret the Colony rules
as applying to the City in order to avoid an early Revolt. I'd be
willing to do so, but I didn't realize how badly the first city gets
screwed by not being attached directly to a mineral vein. Dark Elves
neither plan for the future nor play well with others.)
Leyban assumes the mantle of the
capitol (though technically this should have happened later in the
turn, and I accidentally jumped the gun), and builds a great memorial
tomb for what bodies are recovered. Temples and Shrines are
constructed in Leyban and Silaa in attempts to appease "Dame Chaos",
their fickle goddess.
It's made by a local game designer here in Seattle, but you can pick up the PDF right now via the Bundle of Holding for a cheap price along with several other GM-ing goodies.
To play How To Host A Dungeon, you roll on a series of charts that give you loose instructions on what to draw. Following that guidance creates a map, or more accurately a series of maps, of successive layers of civilization and tunneling in a fantasy kingdom. Empires rise and fall, wandering monsters move in, and in the end either an intrepid band of heroes braves the dungeon to slay the big bad, or some horrible monster conquers the world. It's pretty cool pass-time, essentially a pen-and-paper analog to Dwarf Fortress. Sort of Dungeon Designer meets Blank White Cards.
Rather than just post my rather cluttered map from yesterday (rife with beginner's mistakes), I figured I'd actually take a few hours to generate a spiffy new map using Pixlr, a free online photoshop-like drawing toolset. Putting it in layers allows me to save my progress at many stages, and simplifies the process for when one in-game civilization collapses and a new one builds over their ruins.
Getting The Lay Of The Ground:
For the initial rolls of Primordial Pre-History, I rolled up an Underground River with several caves (I kept rolling the same entry), plus some Mithral veins on the far right of the map, and a series of dangerous natural caverns bearing plague, magma, and a mysterious prophecy of societal collapse. This map has some serious potential. | ||
| Legend: Brown is dirt or rock. Blue is sky or underground river, depending on placement. Pale orange is the interior space of a cavern. Everything else is labeled if you zoom in. It's not much to look at yet. |
I'm a little worried about the tight
clustering of the Mithral to one side of the map. In my other game I
found all the action for the first three Ages happened right around
the minerals, making it very crowded while the other half the map was
left empty. This was problematic when working on a single page paper
map, but I think it's not an issue if using pixlr layering (or the
tracing paper approach supported by the rules).
 |
| The pink circles are groups of Dark Elf Nobles and Slaves. |
I name the starting civilization The
Three Houses of Kharsoum, not realizing how quickly that number will
be rendered inaccurate. The only other time I played I began with
Dwarves, and they ran a great many turns with a significant dynasty.
This time, I'm starting with Dark Elves, who seem a bit a less
stable. (Just for fanboy fun, I've chosen to render all their
constructions and tokens in a purple and pink motif marginally
reminiscent of Games Workshop's Dark Elves.)
History of The Three Houses of
Kharsoum The Great City of Leyban:
Year One – The City of Kharsoum
founds the Colony of Leyban, which prospers and tortures. This is a
straight forward (but ill-considered) start, where the overpopulated and under-supplied
City flails about trying to establish itself.
The purple line across the bottom of the screen is the underground road that the Dark Elves use to travel to more distant places.
Year Two – Kharsoum founds the Colony
of Silaa. This leaves too an unstable slaves to nobles ratio, and
the city falls to Revolt. (As a side note, this is destined to happen
to any Dark Elf starting city that isn't directly attached to a
mineral vein. Even if it is, you'd have to interpret the Colony rules
as applying to the City in order to avoid an early Revolt. I'd be
willing to do so, but I didn't realize how badly the first city gets
screwed by not being attached directly to a mineral vein. Dark Elves
neither plan for the future nor play well with others.)Leyban assumes the mantle of the
capitol (though technically this should have happened later in the
turn, and I accidentally jumped the gun), and builds a great memorial
tomb for what bodies are recovered. Temples and Shrines are
constructed in Leyban and Silaa in attempts to appease "Dame Chaos",
their fickle goddess.
I decide to use the Named Treasures optional
rule because it's flavorful and fun. Silaa, still being prosperous
and rather distant from the troubles at Kharsoum, produces an
exquisite Mithril Veil for the goddess statue in their shrine. Leyban
is a little moodier and worried about slave revolt, so they
commission their best artisan to craft the The Great Flail of
Melancholy.
An exploratory shaft is dug from Leyban
towards the surface. With the “Fate” cave and the magma chamber
hanging over their heads, I decided to choose a random room to start
the exploratory tunnel from. They had about a 50% chance of it
leading directly to death, but a lucky roll bought them another turn
and dig up towards the river instead of somewhere more dire. The
tunnel couldn't quite reach the river this turn, so I made it curve,
because I liked the idea that the Fate cave would be subtly
influencing them as they dug.
Year Three – I forgot to have the
City raid the Rebels and convert one of them back into Slaves at the
end of the previous turn. Adding that, plus the Nobles and Slaves
from the “summer” part of the turn pushed Leyban over the
critical population limit. With this trigger in place, their decadence and depravity causes the
collapse of their civilization before they could build the late-stage
specialized buildings (Arenas, Breeding Pits, or Re-Animation Tanks).
The may have dodged the “Fate” cave, but they were still doomed
from the start.
Last time I played, my Dwarves stuck
around for seemingly forever, covering the map. The Dark Elves were
fecund and prolific, but they burned themselves out in less than 3 turns. Good note that the game players very differently in subsequent sessions with different starting civs.
(Minor tangential gripe – the game calls
these civilization turns' “years”, but I think they'd work better
conceptually as “generations”. As neat as the turn-of-the-seasons mechanics is, it only took 3 years to increase the population 5-fold and make the entire journey from founding to collapse into decadence. That's a bit fast, even for Dark Elves.)
 |
| Where did all the Elves go? |
Dark Elves are sloppy housekeepers.
When their civilization dies, they leave behind the named treasures
from the Temples, plus 1 extra generic supplies/treasure token per
city or colony. They also leave behind a bunch of Feral Slave Beasts
in the slave pens. I'm pretty sure these are supposed to be monsters
and draft animals, not desperate victims of slavery, so I made a
different token for them to distinguish them from the rebel slaves
(who were, for the record, in no way inconvenienced by the collapse
of the civilization that had previously held them in bondage).
The Great Disaster:
 |
| Oopsie! Dame Chaos must have broke something. |
When the first civilization collapse happens,
time passes and you roll on The Great Disaster table. I rolled up an Earthquake. The
earthquake made a series of natural caves and tunnels that are mostly
random. The player has some control over them – the two main lines
are randomly generated, but you have more control over the little
spurs that branch off of them, and just how jagged or straight you
want the lines to be. But given the rolls, there was no way the
earthquake wasn't going to breach both the magma and the river
tunnels. So then you have to make decisions about how (and if) the
lava flows and the river is diverted. I chose to not kill or destroy
anything left on the map, because at this stage you want lots of plot threads and contenders.
While I was at it, I adjusted the
horizon line to go with the Earthquake. Any excuse to make it not
just a boring old horizontal horizon is a good one. (The rules provide random horizons, but I rolled up the most minimal one at the start of this session.)
At this point, I'm about ready for
the arrival of the Surface Kingdoms and the start of the Age of
Monsters. It should be an interesting run going forward, as there's
few good treasures clustered on one side, at least one mining site
that's still accessible for Delvers (the rules are a little iffy
about whether or not the others can be mined again by new races), and
some significant peril in the form of wandering monsters and those
still unopened death caves. I've run out of free time for the day,
though, so it'll have to wait (probably until next week). Link to second play session post.
Digging In and Getting Invested
It's a little tempting to reclassify the
Elven Rebels a "Delver Group" so they'll have a shot at prospering in the next Age. Officially, they're just Wandering Monsters, and as such are unlikely to survive for long. I
may fudge their status when I get back to it, depending on which parts of the map
generate random monsters in the next phase and just how crowded it
gets. Gotta support the underdogs. Honestly, the game is better if
“you've got a dog in this fight” and are invested in what
happens. It stings a little to watch your favorite civilization meet
its fate, but that's kinda what the game is all about, and you could
always fudge die rolls if it bothered you.
In my game yesterday, a
come-from-behind Lawful Sphinx defeated a hobgoblin tribe, two
extraplanar invasions, a very stubborn owlbear, a voracious ancient
wurm, and series of adventuring parties to eventually conquer the
realm. There were at least a dozen die rolls that could have killed
her off, and probably should have, but she won out against all odds.
(Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Paint Og
- It had been a really long time since I last broke out the paints and canvas
- "Cubist" is not on the Og word list
Monday, May 16, 2011
Driving Your Players Crazy
Lately, I've been having a lot of experience with PCs going bonkers. There's a couple different ways to handle it, depending on what your goals are.
In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.
My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.
Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).
Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.
What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.
Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.
To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.
As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.
"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks. "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."
So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.
One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.
Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.
So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.
In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.
My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.
Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).
Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.
What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.
Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.
To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.
As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.
"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks. "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."
So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.
One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.
Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.
So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.
Meanwhile, one of my other PCs is busy having The Last Supper with Christopher Marlowe and Derren Brown, but that's a tale for a whole other blog post some other time...
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
D&DD
Hadn't seen this in a long time, and it still makes me laugh. "So you're walking through the dungeon-forest..."
Dexter's Laboratory - D & DD
Vezi mai multe video din Animatie »
Dexter's Laboratory - D & DD
Vezi mai multe video din Animatie »
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Dreams In The Witch House
My Trail of Cthulhu game is chugging along full speed. We're four sessions in, and 3 of them have been fantastic (the initial session was a little wobbly). Last night, I had this lengthy dream about the campaign, just a dream about how much fun the campaign is. A dream about the excitement and energy of the campaign. It was one of the best dreams I've ever had, but words can't seem to do it justice.
It's weird that we're enjoying it so much, because Life is starting to imitate Art... in some fairly eerie and un-enjoyable ways...
It didn't stop there.
If this were a horror DVD, we'd be at the point where the viewer shouts at his TV:
It's weird that we're enjoying it so much, because Life is starting to imitate Art... in some fairly eerie and un-enjoyable ways...
- In one session, her investigation took my wife's PC to Arkham Asylum, where a rather creepy patient started stalking her, and had to be beat up and sedated by the orderlies.
It didn't stop there.
- In two of the sessions, there have been appearances (fleeting glimpses out of the corner of the eye) of The Black Man - an incarnation of Nyarlathotep with ebony skin but Anglo features, and dressed all in black from hat to cloven foot. When I'd described him, I'd added the detail that his eyes were extremely blood shot, as if the darkness were trying to occlude the only light color on his entire body. In one scene, I'd also described him not in the formless wizardly robes Lovecraft mentions, but in fashionable (but all black) attire for the period.
If this were a horror DVD, we'd be at the point where the viewer shouts at his TV:
"Quit reading the creepy book, you idiots! It's not a source of clues to what's going on, it's what's causing your situation! Dumbass unbelievable characters - no one in the real world would keep poking at the bear like that..."I'm pretty sure we're gonna keep playing Trail of Cthulhu, despite the way life keeps imitating the game, and the very in-genre implication that such parallels will only grow worse over time. I guess that means horror films aren't that unbelievable after all.
Friday, October 5, 2007
The Transitive Property of Gaming.
Gaming is an Art. Sometimes, with all that math, it becomes a Science. And it's certainly my Life. Therefore, since A=B, Science=Gaming, and Art=Life, we can logically infer that we all live in a SciFi Utoptian Paradise where there's nothing to do but sit around gaming all day. Right?
That's certainly my plan. And I have lot to ramble on about. I keep thinking about gaming-related things, and not posting them on my other blog because I don't want to overwhelm that cool multi-person blog with a bunch of crap that's not on-topic.
So that keeps resulting in me posting my various gaming ideas in a variety of gaming-related forums and wikis. When I want to reference them again months later they're hard to find amidst all that crap, or they've been edited by some other gamer with a completely different concept of what makes gaming fun. And you lose the ability to claim anything as your intellectual property. Not to mention all the flame wars and rules lawyers that plague gamer forums. Uck.
So I decided to do something about it. I'm setting up a seperate blog, The Transitive Property of Gaming, where I can post those things when they hit me without it burying the uninterested in RPGs, card games, and the occasional weirdworlds mod. I'll continue to post in Repeated Expletives when I have something non-gaming-related to blather on about - which is pretty often. I am nothing if not long-winded. After this cross-blog almost-duplicate post, all my gaming stuff (at least 95% of it, anyway) will stay in this realm. Politics, Legos, High Weirdness, and other like topics will live in Repeated Expletives (and here's fair warning: Repeated Expletives is neither politically correct nor family-friendly, visit at your own risk), along with the posts of a bunch of buddies from the good ol' days.
That's certainly my plan. And I have lot to ramble on about. I keep thinking about gaming-related things, and not posting them on my other blog because I don't want to overwhelm that cool multi-person blog with a bunch of crap that's not on-topic.
So that keeps resulting in me posting my various gaming ideas in a variety of gaming-related forums and wikis. When I want to reference them again months later they're hard to find amidst all that crap, or they've been edited by some other gamer with a completely different concept of what makes gaming fun. And you lose the ability to claim anything as your intellectual property. Not to mention all the flame wars and rules lawyers that plague gamer forums. Uck.
So I decided to do something about it. I'm setting up a seperate blog, The Transitive Property of Gaming, where I can post those things when they hit me without it burying the uninterested in RPGs, card games, and the occasional weirdworlds mod. I'll continue to post in Repeated Expletives when I have something non-gaming-related to blather on about - which is pretty often. I am nothing if not long-winded. After this cross-blog almost-duplicate post, all my gaming stuff (at least 95% of it, anyway) will stay in this realm. Politics, Legos, High Weirdness, and other like topics will live in Repeated Expletives (and here's fair warning: Repeated Expletives is neither politically correct nor family-friendly, visit at your own risk), along with the posts of a bunch of buddies from the good ol' days.
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