The Square Deal Saloon

Started a new RPG campaign just recently. The setting is more-or-less that of Shadows of Brimstone meets HBO's Deadwood. Two of the PCs collectively own a house-of-ill-repute in a boom-town, somewhere in the New Mexico Territory, just down the road from the smoking crater that is Brimstone. There's another competing saloon and gambling den in town, and a number of weird supernatural hijinks afoot. The other PC is one of their regular customers, who happens to work at the Telegraph Office.

For the first session I made some incoming Telegraph props. One was an actual message for one of the PCs, but the others are essentially plot coupons and nuggets of important information about sub-plots and opportunities, that the Telegraph Operator PC is obligated to make the rounds and deliver. It's working pretty well, as the PCs basically get to eavesdrop on everything going on in town. I made the community bustling with plotlines, colorful characters, and mysteries. It's meant to be layered and sandboxy, with the PCs getting to decide what things they want to stick their noses into, and whose pockets they wish to pick. So I've arranged all my subplots on a color-coded calendar (the first session is Wednesday, March 9th, 1887) that tracks how each storyline will progress if the players do nothing to interfere. I'm hoping they'll interfere frequently and with gusto. They seemed to love it, which is good, because I'm prepared to add a couple more Telegraphs each session for foreshadowing, character development, and clue-delivery.

The mechanics are a blend of Savage Worlds and the Drama System from Hillfolk, with some custom mechanics to emulate parts of Brimstone, and a few cool ideas lifted from other games I like. During character creation, I had the players choose from several small "fill-in-the-blank" quizzes I had prepared. Their answers to those questions let them define things in the town, name NPCs and establish relationships to them. Each of the quizzes had some mechanical benefit that it unlocked. For example, there was one that said: "There's a group of bandits causing trouble in the region. You used to ride with them, but had a falling out." It then listed two of the canonical Infamous Bandit Gangs from Shadows of Brimstone, and had the player choose which one they'd been part of. Then it said "someone in town knows your secret past. Who are they, and can you trust them?" It then gave a bonus on Guts and Riding skills, as befits someone who used to ride with a bunch of train-robbers. The player who chose this card was effectively embracing a western trope, getting a connection to something that's part of the official setting, and then given carte-blanche to invent and ally or foe in town. It worked great. We ended up with a really cool interlocking web of NPCs and plotlines.

I'm running this game at a friends' house, because one of the players is allergic to my cat. So I needed a good way to bring the game with me that doesn't involve me hauling the rulebooks to Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Hillfolk, and Shadows of Brimstone with me every week. So, I popped over to wikidot.com, and made myself a new GMing Notes wiki. It's a closed/private wiki, so I can just bring it up on my iPad.  All the most important rules are on there now, along with pages on every location, every NPC, those Telegraphs and other visual aides to show the players, and that color-coded plotline calendar that keeps me on top of what's likely to happen when. It's working pretty great thus far. I'm liking it enough I've begun adding my note files for my other two active RPG campaigns to the same wiki, so I'll have one highly-portable campaign database for all my future games.

Flying Frog Productions

On International TableTop Day last weekend, I ran a bunch of demos for Flying Frog Productions at Uncle's Games at the Crossroads Mall. I taught 14 people how to play A Touch of Evil: Dark Gothic that day, and Uncle's sold out of copies of the game I was running. It felt kinda good, resonating back to my time running a game store years back before we moved out to Seattle. I clicked well with the Flying Frog staff and volunteer team, and it sounds likely that Scott Hill from FFPwill call upon my services as a volunteer for future demos and events. So that's a pretty exciting development for me.

Yesterday at home, Sarah and I played another fun game session of Shadows of Brimstone (also by Flying Frog Productions). For those who are unfamiliar, Shadows of Brimstone is a big, RPG-like cowboys-vs-cthulhu dungeon-crawl dice-fest miniatures-based board game with really great character- and world- building, and lots of variety and replayability.  If that sounds like fun, you should go buy it now, because it really is the best of the dungeon-crawl genre. (Believe it or not, this is my really trimmed back, dialed-down-the-fanboy version of this post. The rough draft was painfully exuberant and about 5 times a long. Seriously, it's one of my all time favorite games.)

As I looked over my tally sheet where I record missions we'd won and lost, I realized that my wife and I have played about 30 sessions of Brimstone so far (maybe more as I realize today that there's at least two sessions we didn't write down on that log). Since most of our games have been with 4 players and lasted around 3 hours, it amounts to well over 350 "man-hours" of entertainment split between us and the various groups of friends we play it with. When we put up the money for a "Minecart" level pledge on the SoB kickstarter, it felt risky. My wife and I are not rich. We'd never spent that much on a single game before, let alone a game we hadn't even played yet. It was a big leap of faith, but luckily the game turned out to be great. I have _so_ gotten my money's worth already.

Shadows of Brimstone is already fun and engaging, and it's just gonna keep getting deeper and better as the expansions roll out later this year. I've talked to Jason and Scott at multiple conventions (I've pretty much been stalking them at their booths at PAX and ECCC ever since Brimstone was announced), and I'm very excited about everything they've told me is coming up. New characters, decks, monsters, missions, and whole other worlds. So many good treats in store for us! Here's a BGG thread I started about some of the cool stuff that they told me about at ECCC. I meant to cross-post it here at the time, and just got too busy to do so.

Ogwood

Germ of an idea: Run an RPG one-shot in the setting of HBO's Deadwood, using the rules from Og.

 Here's your (insensitive and horrible) word list. You've been warned.

• Dead
• Wood
• Fire
• Water
• Whiskey
• Beer
• Drunk
• Medicine
• Cowboy
• Injun 
• Chink
• Doctor
• You
• Me
• Horse
• Pig
• Gun
• Gold
• Money
• Cards
• Pick
• Axe 
• Dance
• Vote
• Kill
• Ride
• Mine
• Snatch
• Whore
• Mother
• Fuck
• Fucker
• Fucking
• Fucked
• Up
• Bastard
• Cock
• Cunt
• Sucker
• Indignity
• Shit
• God
• Damn
• Ass
• Piss
• Motherfuckingcocksucker
• Truth
• Gratis

Everyone gets their preferred version of the F-word for free, plus a randomly-chosen assortment of other words.

What, you're still here? That was the joke.

Okay, fine, let's pretend I'm serious, as I really do enjoy a good game of Og now and again. Instead of being stupid cavemen, the PCs are fuckin' drunken cowboys. So you use the existing Og rules with a few simple modifications. You'd rename most things, and have to create a few mechanics. Eloquent Caveman becomes Cussin' Cowboy (or perhaps Fuckin' Wordy Cowboy), for example. And it might be worth creating a new class for Sober Cowboy who never forgets how to do things, though I'd strictly limit that class to one PC per campaign.

You'll need twice as many words per character, so 2d6+4 per PC, and the Fuckin' Eloquent Cowboy gets 4 more than anyone else rolled, plus all 4 versions of fuck on top of that. PC's names are of course not on the list, but I'm sure you'll come up with nicknames from your word list.

You have guns, so damage is 1 for a punch (2 for Strong Cowboy) and 1d6 for a gunshot, reversing the default Og unfairness (where Banging isn't nearly as good a Strong). That's a much faster and bloodier combat system too, and all the more so because there's no 40-Unnnggh T-Rex's to deal with. All of which is okay as the length of combat is at times somewhat unfortunate in Og. Replace your dino and mega-fauna monster list with miners, cardsharps, goons, saloongirls and railbarons.

The hardest part would be making the economy work. Og has no economy, but Deadwood is all about the gold in them thar hills. So you let gold buy guns, property, booze and whores, all of which need mechanical benefits. Guns = damage boosts, obviously, and the others could all be mechanisms for restoring Unnnggh, or might give some other bonus (like adding +1, or rolling two dice and keeping the better one). Giving them all mechanical benefits gives the PCs something to fight over, which is kinda the point. So these resources need to be limited and tightly controlled by the GM. The system becomes crunchier than default Og, but characters die so fast once the guns come out that I don't think you'll really feel the heft of the crunch. Some groups will have so much fun cussin' up a blue streak that they won't ever roll the dice.

I just thought up the marketing pitch: "No use big words, fuck Og."   :)