A Very Confusing Map

This was a piece of artwork I made for my Amber campaign a while back:

It's basically a map of the universe. No, seriously. There's tons of plot points and clues hidden away on it, but the signal to noise ratio isn't great, and there's not much of chance of anyone correctly interpreting any of them. The campaign is still in progress so I'm not likely to spoil it here any time soon.

5 Parsecs Console

 I figured that if I'm playing this much Five Parsecs From Home, I might as well fancy-up the landing page for the campaign on Roll20. Didn't last more than a couple minutes before the Chief Engineer spilled engine oil all over the consoles. 

 

Yig at Amaranthe

 A bit of world-building that I put into a handout during Session 11 of my current Amber Campaign.

This note arrived on the leg of one of Julian's messenger birds. The bird was dying, shot by one of the silver-headed arrows that Nix had given to Julian yesterday.  

(Nix is one of the PCs, the son of Prince Julian. The day before, Fiona had provided Nix with silvered arrows and asked him to give them to Julian without saying they were from her. Nix called Julian, and found him at just that moment being attacked by Werewolves, so the arrows were quite helpful.)

The blood on the note makes it hard to read, but it seems to say either "Yig it Amaranthe" which doesn't make any sense at all, or maybe "Yig at Amaranthe" which makes only a tiny bit more.

The handwriting is not Julians, but it is the handwriting of one of Julian's staff. Sir Tucker of House Bolero, who is a scribe and falconer in Julian's employ and often handles his messages.

Two facts known to Nix, that might help make more sense of this:

1) Amaranthe is the name of Nix's mother, who has been dead for many years. She lived in a cottage deep in Forest Arden during Nix's childhood.

2) As an academic from Oberon's Loupe, you know that tradition holds Yig (or Ygg) is the name of a tree that once served as a border marker at the limits of Amber's reach. There's an old poem that Nix read in Oberon's Loupe some years ago, about the creation of the sea routes between the Golden Circle Kingdoms during the Gahmery-Karm war. Off the top of his head, Nix can remember a few lines:

"Oberon's fleet in Hepania woke,

with beams of bone and sails of blood,

Oberon's fleet in Wallahall broke,

and Yig did sprout from wrecked wood."

Scholars who have analyzed the poem, and compared it to what is known of Royal History in that era, say that Yig was a tree that at furthest point south that Oberon's fleets traveled in that war. When a quarter of the fleet was dashed upon the rocks by a terrible storm in the shadow world of Wallahalla, Oberon interpreted it as a sign that there was no point in pursuing conquest any further south. Indeed it would be impractical to support fleets that far from Amber. This set the practical outer limits of the Golden Circle. There was a large oak growing at the on the rocks at which the ships were thrashed, and Oberon declared it the marker beyond which no captain should try to sail. The final boundary of the Golden Circle actually ended up several worlds north of that point by war's end, closer to Amber. Today, Hepania is part of the Golden Circle, but Wallahall is not.

There's another reference in one of the travelogues Nix has read, written centuries after that poem. It says that inhabitants of the world of Wallahalla worship a mighty red-leafed tree called Yigg, which they also call the World Ship. Things that are real cast shadows all about, so things done by the Royal Family of Amber are reflected in myriad shadow worlds. As a result magical trees appear in the myths and legends of a hundred worlds at least, and are often named something along the lines of Yig, Ygg, Yigga, Yggr, Wgga, Yrrda, Yggdrasil, Vggdrssil, etc.

D&D Maps

 The following is a snapshot of the Roll20 landing page for my current irregular D&D game. 

 

We'll be playing a bunch in the next few days, and then probably not again for months. This tends to be a holiday game, as that's the only time all the players have days off in common.

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.

Mnemelos Notes

I was sorting out an old harddrive today, and stumbled across this madness:

That was a scan of a prop I made for a LARP I was briefly running. It's the notes of a raving madman, a Narcisist from the Continuum RPG. Those weird mathematical symbols followed by numbers are what is known as Mnemelos Coordinates. They define the cosmological location of parallel worlds, and the energy/vectors needed to reach them.

The prop was not, however, made for a Continuum RPG campaign. It was made for a Changeling LARP that had a lot of cross-pollination from other worlds, settings, and fandoms. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have a scan of the flip side of the document, which contained mostly more insane rambling, along with some functional universe mapping and magical sigils. You can see a little of it bleeding through the paper. I wish I had the other side, but one of the players kept it. It's been a couple years now, so it's very unlikely I will ever see that prop again.  :(

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.

Dear Boss

Yesterday I mentioned props I had handed out in my Nights Black Agents Dracula Dossier game, and it dawned on me that I'd never shared the letter the PCs had been sent by Jack The Ripper, whom they accidentally freed from Cross Angel Cold Storage.

Most of it is in fonts because I was lazy, but I told them to imagine it was all hand-written, and that the group's Forgery expert could identify 2 of the 4 handwriting patterns as matching the "Dear Boss" note and the "From Hell" letter. Either it's the best forgery he's seen in the Ripperology field, or somehow both of those letter writers are still alive. It's less directly actionable than the prop in yesterday's post, but it was still pretty fun.

Just Lettin' 'Em Talk It Out

I ran another session of Night's Black Agents: Dracula Dossier yesterday. I'm going to brag a little bit. It was the least amount of work I've had to do as a GM at the game in possibly forever, and it was amazing. Two of the players were running late, so rather than dive into the plot, the other players just started in talking in-character and planning for the next op. This lead to them reflecting on some of the props I'd given them in a previous session, and suddenly they found themselves deeper in character discussing the ramifications of a letter they'd intercepted. The other players showed up, and they had to bring them up to speed on it. This started a whole new round of debate and even philosophical discussion, as they pieced together the frame of a plan on how to bring the fight to the enemy. I didn't have to do anything. For over 4 hours they bantered back and forth, with everyone super-engaged and excited.  I played one NPC, for about 30 seconds, near the very end of the session when they decided they wanted to phone a friend. Other than that it was all them. And they enjoyed it so much, everyone kept complimenting my GMing and the depth of the world I'd created, as I mostly just twiddled my thumbs.

Now, to be fair, I did a ton of work before and between sessions to set this up. I worked out the rules of what vampirism is in the game world (as NBA provides a toolbox for the GM to design their own unique take on what the evil in the world really is). I built a huge roster of NPCs each with their own agenda and timelines and loyalties, and let that simmer in the background. And then I dangled tantalizing clues about the true nature of things before the players eyes in the form of some nifty props.

Without the context of everything that's happened in the game, this probably reads as maddeningly obtuse, but my players were able to decipher it enough to hatch a scheme to turn Rasputin, Paracelsus, Graf Orlok, Jack The Ripper, Mina Harker and a Moroccan Djinn named Aisha Qandesha against Count Dracula. It's going to be epic.

Hard Drives Full of Ripper Letters

SPOILER ALERT: May contain tree nuts and spoilers for Night's Black Agents / Dracula Dossier.

Last weekend's session of my Night's Black Agents / Dracula Dossier campaign went smashingly well. We started with a battle between a group of PCs and Mina Harker on a helicopter. That led to a controlled crash that everyone survived thanks to quick thinking and aggressive point spends on the part of the players. They hoofed it north from the wreckage to cross Hadrian's Wall and the old Scottish border beyond it, having come to the deduction that Mina might be stronger on her native English soil and might have a hard time crossing a border uninvited.

Feeling a bit safer on the other side of the wall, they decided there was finally time to bring the newest Player Character up to speed on what she'd gotten herself into. So they broke out the Adversary Map and summarized each person, place, and organization on the giant interconnected web of strings and suppositions. This gave me a good feel on what parts of the mysteries the players had understood and internalized well enough to retain despite the two long breaks that have disrupted the campaign. Which meant it also pointed out to me which bits of the mystery were too vague or obfuscated for their own good, and the handful of important clues they had either forgotten or undervalued. So then I chimed in with some refreshers and emphasis where needed. I know I've beamed about it in many previous posts, but I'm just going to reiterate my love for NBA's Adversary Map, the Dracula Dossier's main prop/resource, and other organizational tools this game provides. Most detective RPGs with a long-term ongoing metaplot would have been irrevocably scuttled by the long dry spells that were caused by everyone's busy schedules and some out-of-character drama. That this campaign has bounced back twice pretty much effortlessly is a testament to what Night's Black Agents / Gumshoe System brings to the table.

 We left off this session with the PCs just starting to prep their next Op. They feel responsible for unleashing Jack the Ripper on the modern world several sessions back, so they are planning to track and target him next session.

In preparation, I spent a few hours tonight making Jack the Ripper props for the game. All new letters From Hell to be the trail of breadcrumbs for the Player Characters to detect and follow. Once the PCs find them, I'll post some here. Tangential to that, I just gotta say, the stuff that accumulates on the hard drive of a horror-game GM or DM can get pretty damn crazy at times. Sometimes anxiety-brain questions the wisdom in making and storing such madness, even though it is clearly for gaming purposes.

Mapping Your Adversaries in Night's Black Agents

As mentioned last time, I've recently started my third Night's Black Agents campaign. Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite mechanics in NBA, a mechanic which builds you an awesome in-game prop as you go.

I'm talking about the Adversary Map. You know that crazy photo-and-thread "murder board" of suspects, victims, leads and connections that shows up in many a detective film. It is to Night's Black Agents what sheets of graph paper were to old school D&D. I love it. You hand the players some push pins, surveillance photos, and colored yarn and ask them to start mapping out the opposition.

It's not just a prop, it's also a mechanical reward. At the start of every Night's Black Agents mission the PCs get bonus points (that can be spent to improve die rolls) based on the connections they have successfully drawn between the mission's target and various other assets and locations in play. This is genius.


For one thing, it perfectly captures the feel of the genre. The PCs are basically trying to identify and pick-apart a giant conspiracy, and this provides some truly excellent immersion into that mindset. Having used this now in multiple campaigns, I can't imagine running a "detective genre" game ever again without using it.

Along with that oh-so-tasty immersion in the setting, it also helps the players visualize what they are up against. The existence of this player-built map forces the PCs to have an ongoing dialog about the clues they've gathered and the avenues of investigation still open to them. It's a mystery game, so you want the players to take it seriously and try to figure out the big picture. The Adversary Map provides a guiding structure for those efforts, and it's damn awesome that the game rewards that good behavior in play.

More importantly, it gives the GM a clear image of what parts of the scenario the players have actually figured out, which bits have them stumped, and where they have drawn entirely the wrong conclusions. It helps the GM nearly as much as it helps the players, because it brings to your attention the parts of your mystery where you're being too successful with your plotline obfuscation. Sometimes, you hear the players talking about some random photo tacked to the Adversary Map and it brings to your attention a red-herring you didn't even mean to drag across their path. Armed with that knowledge, you know which plotpoints still need associated clues or thematic reinforcement, and can figure out how to rearrange things behind the scenes to improve your game.


I tend to enjoy running complicated and mysterious plotlines, and fully-fleshed sand-box settings with lots of nuance and considerable PC freedom. When a GM does that, though, you always run the risk that players will feel overwhelmed, or get mired in the detail. The Adversary Map generates a big-picture view so you've always got some common ground to start from. It also keeps people from focusing in on one small subset of the plot or setting to the exclusion of all else, because they get a subtle weekly reminder that there's a lot more out there on the edges that they haven't explored yet. Should the players get stuck anyway, it's an easy thing for the GM to point at two or three different pins or photos and say "if you start shaking the clue tree in one of these spots,  I guarantee you something interesting will fall out". That's a little heavy handed, so I wouldn't do it unless they'd really hit a wall, but it's nice to know that you've got that option hanging on the wall to refocus them if the PCs are feeling lost or caught up in analysis paralysis. I love this this mechanic. It's both an immersive tool and a safety net for when I get too clever for my own (or my players) good.

7th Sea Maps and Tokens

Earlier this year I ran a short 7th Sea campaign via the Roll20 online interface, so I needed to whip up some tokens and images. The campaign ended earlier than intended (less than half a dozen sessions, IIRC) for scheduling reasons, so rather than let it all go to waste, I figured I'd share some of the props I made.

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Maps and Locations:

We'll start with a world map of Theah. This one is cobbled together from two very similar maps. The political map of Theah from the front of the 7th Sea Player's Guide, and the geographical map of Theah from the front of the 7th Sea GM's Guide. Each was individually available as a file from the publisher, I just melded the layers into a single image that had the names of forests and mountain ranges and yet still had the capitals and the national boundaries clearly marked.

Most of my actual campaign took place on a mysterious jungle-covered island where the PCs were stranded (think 7th Sea meets Lost). This was the basic backdrop map image I used as they explored. Two mountain peaks, miles of shoreline, and plenty wild uncharted jungles that could be hiding anything (such as poor abused photoshop brush plug-ins, see below).

While it's still "island shaped", I did my best to make it fill the rectangular screen space of Roll20 without wasting a lot of area on empty blue open water. Dead space would be wasted opportunity, and I planned the map to be pretty crowded once the island was fully explored.

Individual ruins and other points of interest were represented on that map by little icons that I dragged and dropped over it. For example, when the PCs found an old Porté Gate that had gone disused for so long it now was dangerous and had a telltale reddish glow, I placed this little image on the appropriate part of the map. On Roll20 I had the map scaled up and the icon here scaled down.

When the players moved to an actual site, I'd switch to either a local map or an image of what they saw.

On page 14 of the Explorer's Society splatbook there's this captivating picture of a bizarre Syrneth tower that really I wanted to use for the game. Over Roll20, you can't just hand the book around to show it off, so I scanned it, deleted the surrounding text, and added a little color and texture. The result is to the right. They explored that for a while

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Character Tokens:

The PCs are shown here in red-bordered tokens for moving about the map. (Again, the tokens were usually shrunk down much smaller, and the map was always much bigger on Roll20. Also worth noting, I didn't create any of the art for these tokens, I just googled images and dumped them into tokentool.)

The PCs were a Giselle Roux (a Montaigne Porté mage) and Vadim Verekai (the only surviving twin from a pair of Ussuran circus acrobats). These PCs were associated with the Explorer's Guild, which was how they ended up on the mysterious island in the first place (their ship vanished after their arrival, resulting in the temporary stranding).

NPCs:

There was a relatively small cast of characters, given that they were stranded on a deserted island for most of the adventure.  I wanted to get just the right image for each character token, so I made up several and then chose the one that best captured the concept when shrunk down to map marker size.

Here's some vodacce characters, including a fate witch I never used, and 4 different dark and brooding vodacce men that I eventually picked from.   I used one of them for the cruel Bosun of the ship they arrived on who was also stranded on the island with them, so there'd be at least one pain-in-the-ass but mostly grudgingly trustworthy character that they couldn't just kill without there being consequences.
Next are tokens for two Vestenmannavnjar women. One of them I used as a crazy woman, named Githrun Thithransdottir, who'd been stranded on the island for years before the PCs arrived. The less-crazy token didn't get used at all.
The crazy viking lady was usually being chased by Ghouls; the island had quite a few of them. If there's an actual illustration of a Thean Ghoul in a book somewhere, I haven't seen it, and nothing useful comes up in a google search. They're described in the GM's guide as roughly grey carnivorous apes, rather than the undead humanoid that the word usually brings to mind. They're basically just another wild animal within the setting, albeit one that is known to attack humans in the middle of the night. I wanted them to straddle that line between intelligent and monstrous, mostly mundane but just a touch feral and alien. So I stole art from an old school Magic: The Gathering card (Barbary Apes from Legends) that I thought caught close enough to the right feel. This art wouldn't have worked for Ghouls on mainland Theah, but it was just fine for a remote island.
The other major NPC was a "fish out of temporal water" character who'd been not just stranded, but somehow preserved within the old Syrneth tower (pictured above) for hundreds if not thousands of years. He was dressed as a servant from Old Numa, and spoke in an oddly accented version of the old academic tongue.

The PCs set him free, and I was slowly hinting that this was a big mistake... like he might be a willing servant of Legion, or been a Bargainer himself, or a skinwalking Syrneth murder-monster, or just the unwitting victim of some old curse or enchantment... but the campaign ended early (for out-of-character reasons) so they never got find out what he was exactly, nor try to put the genie back in the bottle. Suffice it to say, lots of creepy things happened in his presence. His name was Nymphidius Curio Maior, but in the player's defense they didn't learn his full name until after they broke him out of the ancient prison machine.

Old-School Conspiracy-Mapping with Night's Black Agents

I think I need a bigger corkboard. Here's what my Night's Black Agents PCs have uncovered of the conspiracy as of session 3 (and that third session was only about 2 hours of play). Mostly stolen from The Zalozhniy Sanction: Russian mafiya in the top and left, undead in the the middle and creepy locations below that, plus a subplot or two over on the right. NBA's mechanics actually give the PCs bonus points for every piece of string linking people or places.

When non-gamer visitors come over they see that wall and immediately start asking if I'm investigating a murder. (Note to the surveillance team in the white van that's always down the street: It's all just a game. I promise.)

No Use Matrix Tables, Play Og!

I just signed up to run a session of Og: Unearthed Edition at the Dragonflight convention next month. I'll also be GMing it this weekend for a group of friends from my wife's workplace.

I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen.  Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.

I'm also currently toying with the idea that a sheet of black construction paper and an old Icehouse set makes a good simulation of the table with the matrix of control crystals from the inside of a pylon in Land Of The Lost. The idea is to present the players with the sort of intellectual challenge that makes D&D gamers groan and start asking to short-circuit it with an Intelligence check... knowing full well that as cavemen, they'll just smash the device with rocks and clubs. It's your classic unsolvable puzzle situation, but this time no one has any delusions about needing (or being able) to actually solve it. I mean, I did work out a puzzle for it, but I'm not expecting the players to actually solve it, and the plot won't bog down regardless of whether or not they do. No use smart thing, play Og!

Recent Ogsomeness

Just a typical day in the land of Og:

Here you have sleestacks about to sacrifice a caveman on an altar to their unholy alien god. Behind them, several more neanderthals ride up in a flinstones-style car, while a phorusrhacidae (giant flightless carnivorous "terror bird", here played by an oversized dodo miniature) and an allosaurus watch on. The weird lump in a net next to the tirepile in the foreground is yet another hominid "hero" bound and awaiting his chance to be sacrificed by a lizardman priest. Yep, perfectly average day for our prehistoric ancestors, just dripping with verisimilitude.

I've run two games of Og in the last two weeks. One session had 4 players, 3 of whom had never played an RPG before. The other session had 7 players, 2 of whom I had never met before. Both games worked bangingly well, and I've been asked to break out the game again next month.

This is a big step up in Og-GM-ing frequency for me; I usually run the game about once a year. Mainly the long cooling-off cycle was because coming up with genuinely funny plotlines is hard, and the only alternative to running a truly funny scenario in Og is to dare to run its' bare-bones ass-backwards stupidly-simple d6-only retro combat mechanics.

Anyone who's ever read those rules thinks "OMG, this system is horrible! It's too limited and it takes forever to kill anything. I don't want to ever run this part of the game, so I'll just avoid all the fights and it'll be much better."

Those people are wrong.

True, the system is ridiculously light, and the fights are all rigged against the PCs, and it takes far too many hits to kill anything of importance, and your character will probably forget how to attack three times before the combat is done... and that's what makes it so awesome. In both of these recent sessions I had multiple combats running simultaneously on different parts of the table, and the pacing was still smooth and speedy. Seriously, if you've avoided big fights in Og because it seems like the combat system is made of un-fun, you're doing your players a disservice. Break out the biggest ugliest plastic dino you can find, and let them fail miserably for an hour or so. They'll laugh themselves to death.

As you can tell, I GM Og with a lot of props close at hand. It's an RPG where characters have extremely limited, damn-near-useless, vocabularies. This results in the "party", such as it is, scattering to the winds every chance they get. There is absolutely zero tactical planning and next to zero in-character cooperation. So I load the game down with as many WYSIWYG props as I can, so that everyone understands where things are and can judge for themselves just how screwed they are. (For the record, it's "very" screwed. Just sayin'.)

Towards that end, my wife and I have thrown together a few custom props for Og.

Props are a caveman's best friend.

From left to right:

• D&D minis make fine cavemen. Ghouls, ghasts, taers, quaggoths, morlocks, poorly-equipped orcs, etc. Anything brutish and almost-human works fine as long as it's underdressed. I use a mixture of species for the PCs so they're easier to tell apart.
• Land of the Lost references a plenty: 
• the little crystal-matrix table I made from sculpey, in scale to the pylon and the cavemen.
• the larger translucent crystal is from an icehouse set, and not to scale, but I sometimes use them to represent the pylon's matrix in-game.
• the construction-paper pylon has little foldable flaps that let change it from open to closed formation as the fickle whims of fate demand.
• My lovely wife made the excellent sculpey nest. I plan on using it every time we play. You can never have too many dino (or terror-bird, or pterodactyl) eggs.
• "You Go Bang Food" are four of the cards I use to assign vocab words at random. Rarely do the words empower fully-formed sentences like that.
• The doedicurus (5000lb spiky-tailed armadillo) is made by Safari Ltd, whose line of very fancy megafauna and dino minis can be found at all your better toy stores. (I shop Top Ten Toys in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.) If your budget is tight, most thriftstore toy departments will have some truly wretched hand-me-down plastic dinos that will work just fine, and the teeth-marks merely add to the authenticity.
• The framework of a sculpey flinstones-style car I made yesterday just before heading to the game. It fits four cavemen in comfort.
• My wife made a series of little sculpey flames useful for noting where the campfire is, which caveman set himself ablaze this time, and what portions of the jungle are currently being consumed by the wildfire.
• She also crafted the stone wheel and it's too less-than-perfect prototypes to match the illustration of the "Build" skill from page 12 of Og Unearthed Edition. Stupid cavemen.

The crawling chaos; the plush abomination; Gnarly Hotep!

Sometimes all that hard work and sacrifice really pays off, such as shown above when the lizardfolk managed to summon up their foul god, Gnarly Hotep via an offering of caveman blood. Ia, Ia, Sleestack Ftagn! (Apparently some people spell it "Nyarlathotep", but he'll always be Gnarly Hotep to me.)

The crappy plastic trees and rocks in the backgrounds of my various pictures came in 2-dollar bags of plastic dinos or green army men. They are absolutely horrible, but they do the trick. They also get caught in my long hair every time I lean over the table to move a mini, so apparently I need to pack a pony-tail holder in my box of dinos and terrain.

Thanks to the in-character Draw skill, you can also sometimes ask your players to contribute props mid-session. Last night, one character was searching for beloved possession that had been stolen by the sleestacks. He was using Explore or Forage (I forget which) to search his tribe's cave (because the lizardmen who abducted half his tribe clearly weren't the main suspects in his infallible caveman logic) for the missing item, and rolled a "1".  Something caused him to forget how to search... so I turned to another PC who had the draw skill, and asked her to draw the dirty pictures that had distracted him.  You ready for the state-of-the-art in cave-painting porno?

NSFW Og Porn Alert!

Og Porn: Doin' it mammoth-style!

Yep, I run a classy game.

Roll20 is pretty cool (and my Scion campaign is a little creepy)

Of the four campaigns I'm currently GMing, only one of them is face-to-face. The other three all use Roll20 as an online host so I can game with friends in other states.

Roll20 is a pretty cool set of tools for running RPGs over the net. It's got audio, video and text chats, dice rollers and customizable tools (decks, charts, tokens, API scripts, etc) for automating your mechanics, and a virtual table top with live-updating for your maps and tokens. I'm pleased with it. It's still not quite as good as running a game in person, but the tools are good enough to almost consider using them instead of dice and minis at the tabletop. If you're going to be running a game online for some reason, I strongly recommend Roll20.

Here's a partial screen shot from yesterday's session.
The setting is Scion, but the rules are FATE. Tracking down a lead, the PCs broke into a Museum after hours. So I grabbed a map I found online of the Chicago Field Museum, and slapped it down on the virtual tabletop. The Curator of Antiquities had an eyepatch, so clearly that meant he was evil. :) They eventually caught him performing a creepy ritual with the bodies of mummified children, about which I had prepared a virtual handout with some disturbing images.

TROOPS: Cloud City

Last night I ran a one-shot based on the cool old Star Wars fan-film TROOPS. This was the second time I'd run such a game, but the last time was way back in February of 2009.  For last night's reprisal, I moved the game from Tatooine to Bespin. Filmed live on the platforms of Cloud City.

Here's a link to my post about the old game.  For those unfamiliar with the general TROOPS concept, here's a link to the very entertaining video that inspired this madness.

We used the classic d6 system, with the PCs assembled quick and easy via the game's template system. The PCs were mostly Stormtroopers, plus one contract Bounty Hunter (an Ewok of all things) and a probe droid operating as embedded journalist / camera crew. Surprisingly likeable PC Stormtroopers, as in the video, with completely dysfunctional shady NPCs. "All NPCs are Guilty - Otherwise they wouldn't be NPCs." A few of the PCs were reprised from the other scenario two years ago, but any who got promoted had since been busted back down to no more than junior officer status so it would still feel like TROOPS.

This time I ran them through the background events of the last third of Empire Strikes Back, explaining why the 'Falcon's hyperdrive is deactivated, how C-3PO got shot, and what kind of trouble you can get into when someone's severed hand lands on your back porch.

At the start of every scene, I handed a random PC a short written script. This was their narrative monologue to the camera, used to set up and lead in to the next scene, and establish background details. For example, to start the session, I had someone read:

We’ve just been recently stationed out here on Cloud City in the Bespin system. I know, you’ve probably never heard of it, neither had I. It’s one of those fly-by-night corporate towns, mining Tibana gas out of the sky. Not sure you can even call that mining, it’s more like sucking. Can I say that on TV?

The local governor is kinda shady, 'cause the place is almost small enough to not be noticed. He’s not even enrolled in the Mining Guilds, and he owes a lot of back taxes and gambling debts. Anyhow, the citizenry aren’t too pleased with the way he’s running things, and there’s been some disturbances as a result.

That’s why we’ve been called in, to bolster the local police force.

Sometimes that ruffles a few feathers with the local big whigs, of course, but in the end everyone agrees quality of life improves once the Empire gets involved, and that’s what really matters. 

"Cloud City, Bespin, 7:00 am local-time" scrolled across the screen. Then the camerabot turned to another one of the TROOPS, who said (read from the telepromter, no doubt) this:

We’re responding to a call from the local Port Authority, seems they need a bit of help here.

There’s a ship that came in for repairs, had a malfunctioning hyperdrive or something, Put it in to dry dock at the local shop, and there’s some sort of animal problem. I’m guessing the owner left his pet on board, and forgot to tell the mechanics.

Normally, this sort of thing would be handled by Animal Control, not by the Emperor’s Finest, but apparently these here Gas Giant planets don’t have much in the way of wild life, so this town doesn’t actually have an Animal Control Guildhouse.

Looks like that fellow over there works here, we’ll start by asking him if he knows what kind of animal we’re looking for.

So the PCs enter the shipyard, where a pissed-off mechanic is bandaging his hand. He explains the owner of the ship has a real menagerie on board, some big fuzzy thing, a bunch of droids, and whatever it was that bit him. For a couple minutes I managed to imply it was Chewbacca that bit him, which was a total miscommunication red-herring. The players were wondering what the guy did that would provoke Chewie to attack, but had to proceed as the arrogant Imperial pigs they were.

The Imperials head over to the ship to check it out. One officer leans into the open hyperdrive port and bangs on it to scare out whatever the animal is, and ends up with a Mynock wrapped around his helmet.  There's a couple more in the engine block, and they start flying around.

It wasn't much a challenge for armed and armored troopers, but I broke out the Star Wars miniatures anyway and dipped our toes in a combat system none of us had used in a long time.. The first two Mynocks went down in the very first round, but the third one was surprisingly resilient. No one could get a decent damage roll on it, and a missed shot with a "1" on the wild-die left the NPC lying dead on the floor.

After the Mynocks were dealt with, the PCs put a "boot" on the Falcon's hyperdrive, broke one of it's tail-lights to justify a few extra tickets, and searched the holds. They confiscated the boxes full of money that Han was going to use to pay off Jabba. Aside from a little trouble with that little zappy ball that Luke used to practice his sabre work in the first film, the scene wrapped up without incident, and without the PCs ever meeting the main characters from the movies.

Next scene. One of the PCs reads:

This part of town has a bit of a reputation as a “red diode district”, if you know what I mean. That is to say, prostitution, mostly droid-related.

We’re just gonna do a little sweep through the neighborhood, mostly chase off the hookers and johns. Let them know the Empire is here now, and that sort of thing won’t be tolerated anymore.  They shouldn’t be out on the streets lookin’ for droid love, that’s what the Twi’Lek Dancing Girls Guild is for.

Of course, if any of the pimps, hos, or sexbots get uppity with us, we are authorized to use whatever force we deem necessary. That’ll send a message, loud and clear. To protect the decency and social welfare of the city, of course.

This lead to a small scene with an "obvious prostitute", I said as I placed a minature R4 astromech unit on the tabletop. When they eventually blasted the sexbot, it responded in the typical R2D2 method, rolling back, head spinning, and dozens of tools and attachments popping out of all the hidden compartments. So now the corridor is littered with vibrators. They question the other nearby bot,  PI-MP, who claims to know nothing about "that slutty little bitchbot".

"You want me to backhand her for you officer? I'm fluent in over 6 million forms of bitchslapping."

Surprisingly, PI-MP doesn't get blasted. He managed to convince them that he was innocent. Some random protocol droid came walking in at that moment, and PI-MP pointed at him. "Look, that's gotta be the pimp you're looking for officers. Look how much bling-bling he's made out of." So they let PI-MP go, and blasted poor C-3PO who just happened to wander in at the wrong time.

Meanwhile, the dirty little Ewok bounty hunter wasn't at all interested in cleaning up the prostitution of Cloud City. Since we were in a bad part of town, he went looking for other entertainment. Before long, he was involved in some illicit gambling with a bunch of Ugnaughts and Jawas, playing some high-stakes game called "Utini!" As their game wrapped up, his fellow little people said they were off to some big protest that was going on.

Which lead right into this scene:

There’s a lot of labor disputes going on lately. Not being affiliated with the Miner’s Guild, the local government is ill-equipped  to deal with it.

An informant told us that there was going to be some sort of protest going on, an attempt by the workers from “Deck Twelve an’ a Half” to unionize or something.

On the one hand you want everybody to be able to speak their mind and improve their lot in life, but at the same time... well, we all know that protests are often just the first step towards Rebellion and lawlessness. We’re gonna see if we can’t get them to disperse, kinda nip that in the bud before it gets too troublesome.

Ah, jeesh, look at all those little guys. They’re kinda cute. Hope we don’t have to disintegrate them. Set for stun.

I got out an actual map for this one, and set up a big cluster of ugnaughts, ewoks, jawas, and various short droids in a picket line. They were complaining about the working conditions on deck 12 & 1/2. Poor lighting, no safety railings, and the terribly low cielings. "First off, who are they trying to kid here? We all know deck '12 & 1/2' is really unlucky number 13. Secondly, why the low ceilings? Are they trying to say we're short? Just because we're not 2-meter tall freaks doesn't mean that some of us don't get claustrophobic! And what did Baron Calrissian do to 'improve' our lot in life? Longer coffee breaks and freakin' door to the brain of Moff Malkovich. I don't think even Moff Malkovich wants to see what happens inside Moff Malkovich's brain. I sure don't!"

Lucasfilm purists might complain about my bizarre choice to work in numerous references in this scene to Being John Malkovich. I know, it was silly, and doesn't quite fit in the Star Wars universe - not even the Expanded Universe. Just like the cameo by Tom Servo in the background in the TROOPS film, so I feel justified. And lets be honest, it's not like you would have been any happier if my references were to Willow or Howard the Duck, so cut me some slack.

The PC Imperial Officer starts making rolls of his command skill, threatening to blow up the protesters if they don't disperse. This gets rid of most of the crowd, except one little power droid who stands his ground shouting "Gonk no, we won't Go(nk)!" Time for some good old fashioned police brutality. The PC AT-ST Pilot chose to have her walker kick the Gonk Droid off the platform. She failed, with a dismal low roll and a spectacular "1" on the wild die.

So now the AT-ST scout walker is lying face-down on the terrain (a parked Imperial Shuttle on the platform, as a matter of fact) and the badly damaged Gonk droid is ominously whistling as if it's going to blow.

It ain't easy justifying this much SteamPork.

That's not nearly dire enough, so I chose that moment to have some of the other protesters return. Including several ugnaughts in a mecha war machine. I put my "Uggernaught" miniature on the table. I've been itching to use this mini in a scenario ever since I opened it in a booster of Star Wars minis a couple years back. Look at that thing, ain't it just ridiculously cool? Usually hard to justify, but this was no doubt the perfect game for it.

So now the PCs are pinned between the fire of a crazy ugnaught death machine, and the whistling overload of a malfunctioning power droid. Now that's drama!  :)

While most of the squad was pinned down, one of the Troopers did manage to use the cover of the buildings on the map to advance without incident and take out the rebel ugnaughts by means of a well-placed grenade. The whistling Gonk droid on the other hand was beyond their ability to multi-task, so most of the PCs took wounds from shrapnel damage that penalized their rolls the rest of the night.

The PC Imperial Officer went to fetch a change of uniforms, and came back with a new mission (and thus another of my short scripted monologues).

We’re responding to a possible domestic dispute. Neighbors called, said there’s a lot of yelling and the sounds of dishes shattering coming from one of the homes here.

I don’t expect too much trouble, though, as you can tell we’re in a nice part of the city. They’ve got a beautiful view of the bottomless shaft, there. That’s a doozy.

 If need be, we can take one or both of them down to the Detention Center till they sober up or calm down.

Dispatch says its the address is the home of one of the local city administrators, so chances are they’ll quickly calm down just to keep up appearances. These local government types are kinda slippery like that.

As it turned out, the home was that of Mr. and Mrs. Lobot. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Lobot was Lando's right-hand man on Cloud City. The bald guy with the computer sticking out of his head who follows Calrissian around, wordlessly directing lesser minions. He holds a position of importance, but he's very formal and not a particularly warm or communicative individual. So, it's no surprise that his marriage is a bit strained. Probably works late nights and weird back-room business deals with his shady boss in gambling dens and strip clubs. Who's to blame Mrs Lobot if she suspects her husband is secretly some sort of mob boss?

Lots of hysterics follow. The place has been trashed. She's in tears, crying and screaming, and he's standing there stoicly telling the troopers that everything is under control. Amidst all her sobbing, they eventually figure out she keeps repeating "it's on the balcony!" There the PCs find a severed hand. Mr Lobot swears he had nothing to do with it, that it must have fallen from somewhere further up the bottomless shaft. Mrs Lobot, however, is certain it's some sort of creepy mob signal, like waking up with the head of a Bantha in your bed.

While they're all out on the balcony trying to sort things out, the rest of a body falls past them. They look upward, and see this narrow promontory extending out to the middle of the chasm. There's someone else up on the damn thing, too, some black-clad Emo kid. Cut to narration:

We’re heading up a few levels, there’s a crisis situation, looks like a Jumper. It’ll be our job to talk him down.

We don’t get these suicide calls too often since most citizens of the Empire are so darned happy. You sure do see it more often out here on the Rim, though.

I remember a couple of planets back, there were these Jumpers just hanging from the ceiling! Hanging there. Wouldn’t come down. Stayed up there so long, they caught their death of cold.

Man, that place sure was chilly. C - O - L - D! You can ask my wife. On a frosty night,
laying in bed, I still say to her “Well at least I’m not back on Hoth!” I’ll remember that place for the rest of my life.

Hey, if you forgave a Being John Malkovich reference, I figure you won't mind me stealing a Bastogne line from Band of Brothers.

In the movie, after Luke throws himself off the ledge, Vader just heads back to his Star Destroyer like its no big deal. That of course is not what the PCs find when they get up there, though. No, I have a "fine tradition" in my TROOPS games that every session must end with a Drunken Darth. So Vader's out on the far end of this narrow ledge over a huge pit, all sad and depressed because his son just jumped. The Ewok bounty hunter walks out there to talk him back in. They end up sharing a few drinks - all those buttons and switches on Vader's chest plate are controls to his built-in minibar.

"I'm not a bad father, am I? I know I wasn't ever really there for him, but lots of people have workaholic absentee dads, right? That's no reason to shout 'you're not my father' and jump off a cliff, is it? I mean, it's not like he didn't know I exist, I left him with family after all. That's better than I had. You know what my mom told me? She said my daddy was a magic space virus!! You know what that does to a kid? Teaches him his mommies a damn liar, that's what it does! So at least I didn't lie to him like that..."

The Ewok tries talking him back in off the ledge, but without a lot of luck. In retrospect, I should have called for some sort of social roll to give him a shot at success, but it was a surprisingly complex scene and I was pretty deep in character, so I dropped the ball there. Not that I wasn't pleased with how it all turned out.

He's out there, waxing suicidally, and would rather down a six pack and a few bowls right here at the cliffs of doom than go back to work or blow off steam at some nightclub.

Someone suggests that the one female Stormtrooper in the squad try to coax him back to safety. She's rather reluctant, because the other time we played this, he made her be his date to his High School Reunion... and let's face it, Darth Vader is kind of a dick. Speaking of which, it's not long before she's ordered out on the ledge, pole-dancing on that vertical pipe or antennae or whatever the point of those weird bits on the bridge to nowhere are. This took a fairly difficult climbing & jumping roll, especially in the armor, but as it turns out she was up to the task.

As Vader is talking about what a great kid he had before he threw himself off the ledge, the PC Imperial Officer steps forward with their evidence baggie from the previous scene. "This son of yours, was this his by any chance?" he asks, handing Vader the severed hand.

I tell everyone that this is too much for Vader, and he feints. Everyone should roll initiative. I'll roll 3d6 for when Vader falls, only people who roll higher than him can act before he falls off the ledge. The first PC to act is also the only one who's too far away to do anything more than shout. The next two PCs try Brawling rolls to grab Vader, but fail and have to make a Dex check to keep from falling with him. The Ewok bounty hunter attaches a grappling hook to Vader, but there's some doubts as to how well a lone Ewok can belay the descent of a rather tall human in battle armor carrying a well-stocked wet bar. Yet another PC rushes out on to narrow promontory to try and grab him, and they also fail, this time with a "1" on the wild die.

Time for some final narration, this time improvised, by the GM:

There's a scraping metallic sound, and the camerabot pivots to see several bolts of the superstructure pop as the narrow platform buckles under the weight. With a sudden lurch, the entire promontory breaks loose and tumbles far down out of sight, taking Vader and the whole squad with it.
"TROOPS was filmed live in Cloud City." The theme music plays as the credits roll. "Bad Droids, Bad Droids, whatchyagonna do?"...

So I guess technically that's a TPK, but I've never seen a group quite that unanimously happy with a Total Party Kill before. TPKs don't usually get applause and laughter.

4th Ed on 9/11/1984

I recently played in a 4th Ed D&D one-shot that had superhero and 9/11 themes. Ra's al Ghul and Prince Namor were up to no good at the World Trade Center, endangering thousands of lives, and mix-and-match crew of PC superheroes from the Marvel and DC worlds had to save the day. It was 9/11/1984, because the GM wanted to use versions of the PC's (Captain America, Batman, Wonderwoman, North Star, Black Canary, and Invisible Girl) from the 80's prior to the 90's power creep that affected some of those characters. I played in this game at GwenCon.

The GM had never run 4th Ed before. I had never played 4th Ed (but have read the 4th PHB and DMG) before, and one of the other players had never role-played before. We were playing 18th-level characters. Despite that hefty set of self-imposed hurdles, I was definitely impressed at how smoothly combat flowed. It's hard to imagine similar results from 18th level characters and first-time players in either 3.x or 2nd Ed D&D. 4th is really sweet, and easy to pick up.

A quick aside: This experience left me kinda wondering why I'm bothering with Savage Worlds - 4th's rules are far tighter, and character creation / advancement appears to be less fiddly than in SW. But that's a topic for another time - and rather similar to what I was griping about last week.

That said, it certainly wasn't a perfect gaming experience. The game was basically two fight scenes, with a very brief bit of narration between them. This was a big shock, given that the GM (Dqniel) had run an absolutely awesome Cthulhu scenario at GwenCon 2 years back. Because of the skill he'd shown in crafting and running that adventure, I was expecting a lot this time. I anticipated getting to role-play a bit more and roll a bit less. I had my hopes up - especially after seeing the jawdropping prop he'd made (see below).

Of course, what you get out of an experience is based in part on what you bring to it. I don't check my email too often, so I missed out when he sent out the pregen characters for us to choose from. As a result, there wasn't much of a choice left for me - I got stuck playing Black Canary. I've never read a comic with her in it, and didn't know a thing about her, so had there been more role-playing opportunities, I probably would have stalled out. Lack of knowledge on both character and system was a big handicap for me. My bad - there's definitely things I could have done to enhance my enjoyment of the game. I was playing a sort of monk-ish build, and didn't really know what my combat role was. In retrospect, I think I was a Striker. A tiny bit of homework on my part prior to the game would have done wonders.

Speaking of wonders, Dqniel brought something to the game that was the gaming equivalent of one of the 7 Wonders of the World. He had a 6-foot-tall scale model of the World Trade Center. He's a graphic designer by trade, and so had assembled this breathtaking foam-core and cardstock model of all the various towers. Hands down, it's the coolest single prop I've ever seen in gaming. I can't say enough positive about it - I really wish I'd brought my camera. This prop more than made up for whatever minor gripes I may have had about the pure-combat plotline (which wasn't really pure combat either, to be fair, as there was a vital skill challenge in the midst of the second fight).

UPDATE: I found a photo one of the other GwenCon attendees put up on the web. Check it out here. He or she put a caption saying it's a 4 ft model, but I think that's selling it short. I'm 6ft and change - my eyes were maybe two inches over the tops of the towers, so I'd guess the towers about 5'3" or so. The aerial on the roof of Tower #2 reached up pretty close to the top of my head, IIRC. I sure don't think I could be overestimating by more than a foot. The photo, nice as it is, doesn't do it justice. The big towers just look white or uniform light grey in the picture. Dqniel had used Illustrator, and the panels all had grids on them to give the proper wall-of-windows skyscraper effect. Much more impressive in person then on film/screen, I'm afraid, but at least this gives you an idea what we're talking about.

One last bit of praise for Dqniel - the man has patience and tact. There was a player who kept wandering away from the table, disappearing for 5 to 20 minutes at a time. Expecting that if his turn came round while he was still gone, he'd just hold his action, and get to take a turn almost instantly upon returning. Dqniel handled himself with a lot more composure than I'd have managed if some ...person... tried that at my table. Had I been GMing, the second (maybe third) time he wandered off without saying anything, I would have dropped him from the game. When he came back, I'd have said "sorry dude, you failed a save and died". I know, it's harsh. But by the end of the 4-hour block, I wanted to scream at this player - he was repeatedly disruptive and disrespectful. Dqniel kept his cool, though, didn't let it phase him at all. Buddha would have been impressed.

Lego Batman at GwenCon

My favorite game at GwenCon this year was Lego Batman. It had a great balance of goofiness and challenge, played wonderfully with tropes and expectations, and was just a delight to dive into.

The setting was a city that had outlawed superheroes. The Comedian was dead. Sounds familiar, right?

Except this city was Gotham, and The Comedian was a former sidekick of The Joker, a sidekick who'd gone on to become a hero of his own. The Joker, you see, was one of the outlawed Superheroes. We were all playing characters mostly known for being villains that Batman battles against - but in this alternate reality, we were the heroes. Our backstories were just a little different to fit that as well - they paralleled various superhero backgrounds. I was The Joker. My parents had been killed on our way home from the circus as a child, so I grew up to become a crime fighter, wearing a costume styled after the most terrifying thing I knew - circus clowns. I didn't get to read the other PCs backstories, but bits came out. The Penguin developed his super powers after being bitten by a radioactive penguin, etc.

The Comedian was dead, having seemingly been drained by a vampire bat, then thrown off his balcony. So I loaded up my clown car full of the old superhero gang, and started the investigation. Much hamming-it-up ensued. Before the night was over, the Bat had also kidnapped my current sidekick Eddie "The Riddler" Nigma. Our attempts at a rescue were nearly blown by the psychotic showboating of a Scarecrow that clearly had elements of Rorshach in him.

Not that I can complain about psychotic showboating. At the scene of the crime, where the police rushed to the decision that The Comedian had killed himself, I did a little psycho showboating of my own. A pretty lengthy performance, the Joker wearing a little black pillbox hat and black veil, wailing like a bereaved widow. Eventually, when the police wouldn't do anything, I took matters into my own joy-buzzer-laden hands. "The mask is it's own protection", I told them, and then got in Commissioner Gordon's face. In fact, with a few good Taunt and Intimidate rolls to back it up, I managed to make the good commissioner pee his pants on Gotham TV.

Mechanics either were True 20, or were based on True 20. I haven't read True 20 in years, so I'm not sure how modified it was. But it was fast and simple, easy to grok and worked really well despite the frequency of opposed rolls. I just may have to go take another look at True 20, 'cause this was pretty sweet. I'm not used to anything d20-related having an elegant and robust set of social mechanics that use the same basic rules as the combat system, but it was a beauty the way it allowed for the confrontation with the Commissioner.

Did I mention this was LEGO Batman? Tim Beach, the GM, went above and beyond by making a set of awesomely intricate lego models for the various locations and vehicles. No doubt many of the vehicles were published lego models, but the most important bits were Tim's own creation. I wish I could show you The Comedian's apartment and the building it was part of. Fully detailed, with all sorts of tiny details like little lego faucets and toilet. It must have been weeks worth of constructing. It was an extremely cool prop - almost cool enough to make me regret that we were playing such over-the-top characters, I'm certain there were clues and details we missed because we were too busy riffing. We were chewing the scenery instead of analyzing it.

And then there was the scene at the Superhero Bar. He made this bar model, complete with "sidekick shack" out back. The bar had more than 30 figures in it - all outrageous and awesome. I could only identify about half of them. Villains from DC and Marvel, badguys from Harry Potter, one of the Emperor's Royal Guard from Return of the Jedi, Amelia Earhart for reasons that boggle the mind, etc. Mr Danger-To-Himself-And-Others (that's Doc Ok to you, kids) was the multi-armed bartender. We were holding a wake to remember our dear friend The Comedian. In the middle of the ridiculous wake scene, me standing on the bar trying to eulogize the deceased, the Batmobile crashed through the sidekick shack.

This lead to a watery chase to that falling-apart waterfront lab from Spiderman II (where Dick Grayson was holding poor Eddie Nigma hostage), then an aerial chase from there to the BatCave. In the midst of it all, I ended up leaping from Earhart's biplane onto one of Batman's flying toys. I managed to cling on to the outside, and made him crash. Meanwhile the rest of the group trashed the BatCave and beat up his Butler. Or maybe I was fighting the butler? It's hard to tell when they're wearing the same costume.

It was a delight to behold. A cornucopia of fun. So much going on, on so many levels. Thank you, Tim, for running the best game of a really good con.

Wushu Tools

I'm now convinced a good Wushu game could use a couple of props / tools:

1. A scoreboard (or tokens?) to keep track of the current threat level. Keeping the remaining potency of the mooks secret doesn't really add to the drama as much as I would have expected it to, and having a 'ticker' the PCs can see encourages them to describe actions corresponding to the relative threat remaining. More importantly, a fight with Mooks and a Nemesis gets tricky (it seems like they'd stack, IMHO) - the PCs can easily forget to count the Mooks when anticipating how many defensive successes they're gonna need. With large attack-pool-to-chi ratios, the game is somewhat unforgiving of such mistakes.
   
   
2. A Dry Erase Mat. At the start of the fight, the GM makes a very vague and sketchy map - practically blank. Whenever an action (from a PC or NPC) improvises a terrain detail into being, you sketch it in quickly. This makes it easier for everyone to come up with wicked stunts and actions. The trick, however, is that only one person (probably the GM) should be in charge of modifying the map. If everybody can draw stuff it'll quickly become a miniatures game. The idea is to just have a map, and it gets updated if something major changes or a detail gets filled in. You want people imagining the action, not concentrating on how to best rearrange miniatures. The action takes place in your head, not on a board.
   

Conveniently, both needs could be addressed by a single battlemat.