Claimh Solais

Wuthering Heights Roleplaying Game

Damn. I want to try this game sometime: http://philippe.tromeur.free.fr/files/wuther.pdf

D&D Minis- Just Because

I've decided I want to collect up a bunch of giant frogs from the new D&D Minis set and then play a 100 pt warband of all giant frogs. It amuses me and I don't know why.

Battlestar Galactica RPG thoughts

Any GM who decides to run a game set in the Battlestar Galactica universe will eventually run into a question. It's a mystery from both the original and new Battlestar Galactica shows that was never explained but once players start playing in the world, their character should know this and eventually some player will ask.

What happened to all the records of Kobol? Why is that all of the records.....all the stuff about the founding of the 12 colonies is stuff written in mythology and holy books but there is no sign of the great technology and knowledge that the Lords of Kobol must have had in order to send the 13 tribes out into space to settle the 12 colonies and Earth.

Why doesn't Earth have any signs of this advanced people we are (according to the mythology of the BSG universe) descended from?

My idea is this: The Lords of Kobol who founded the thirteen colonies were founding them in an attempt to return to simpler days......agricultural days. They destroyed all of the computers and equipment that had possible led to the problems on Kobol that made them leave and returned to farming and very little accurate records were kept. Eventually this all passed into legend and oral histories were collected and several seperate religions developed on the 12 colonies that told tales of the Lords of Kobol as gods and as technology was re-created and the 12 colonies moved into space and discovered the other colonies and through them confirmed the truth to many of these tales, the religions solidified into one basic religions (doubtlessly with several sub-groups) and the written down versions of oral histories dating back to the original exodus from Kobol were collected into the "Book of the Word."

So, it's all based on fact, developed into religion because there were no solid hard-copy records kept by the original settlers. The only evidence of what Kobol really was were stories told around campfires, scraps of maps and artifacts like the Arrow of Apollo.

This how I will handle it if I ever run BSG again.

Luchtime polls #21: Spinoffs

Lunchtime Polls asks:

This week’s question has no right or wrong answers—just give me your opinion.

What’s the best media tie-in game out there—Star Wars? Buffy? Take a position and explain it. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your opinions!

My first choice should be no suprise to anyone:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer- The presentation is great with lots of color photos from the show. The system is one of my all time favorites. It is a clean, simple system with a lot of room for character customization and growth. The system is very light but manages to capture the feel of combat in the TV show.

The honorable mentions are:

Stormbringer This book gets credit for the excellent way that it added material to Michael Moorcock's Young Kingdoms setting. It fleshed out parts of the world that were barely seen in the book and all of the new settings and material kept the mood and feel of the source material. I've never been a big fan of Chaosium's system (the same used in Call of Cthulhu) but it works fairly well for the setting.

Amber- Not a particularly great system, Amber has a few great advantages that shine so bright beyond its flaws. It is simple. With only four stats and a handful of powers, it allows a player to play some of the most powerful people in a great multiverse of infinite shadows. It is diceless. While I have made and mantain the argument that there are times for randomness, the fact is removing the dice speeds up gameplay, allowing more time for roleplaying and it makes the game a lot simpler to get in to.

The Shadow Knows!

Another half-finished post

Blackmask.com has the original Shadow Pulps available to read for free either online (in HTML) or in several eBook formats. I've downloaded a few and have been reading one ("The Atoms of Death"). I've been a big fan of the Radio Shows for years and collected all The Shadow comic books I've been able to find over the years, but I've never read the original pupl novels.

They are amazing. I've read some of the classic detective pulp writers in the past like Dashiell Hammett (of The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and I've always enjoyed this writing style. I think that one of the reasons I have always liked Michael Moorcock is that he writes in that simple, pulp style. However, I always though that the writers I read were just good because they were the best examples and had never thought that The Shadow, Doc Savage or any of the other adventure pulps could be that good. So far, I've been wrong. The book has been amazing.

Gillian the Vampire Slayer 1.13 "To Hell and Back"

OK, so I found this draft in with a bunch of other half-finished entries from months ago and have decided to go ahead and post what I had rather than sit on it. It's only a few paragraphs covering the first few scenes of the game.

The episode began as the characters were drawing up their battle-plans. In order to stop The Grey Man from releasing the hordes of Stygia upon Earth and still keep from breaking the deal Andrew made with Levistus and damning his soul to hell, they needed to find a way to release Levistus fromhis frozen Stygian prison without opening a hellmouth.

A plan was made and the group waited for George to tell them it was time to act.

The night came. Mr. Grey was beginning another ritual. The group went to catch the ghost-train into hell. My turning to spirit form and riding spiritual horses summoned by Andrew, the group was able to board the train. Working their way to the engine car, Jessica and Eve disconnected the passenger cars from the train while Eric, Gillian, Amy and Gavin rode the train through the portal (created by Mr. Grey) into Stygia. Jessica and Eve jumped off of the train. In the woods, they found themselves surrounded by the impish ice gremlins. A desperate fight followed. Jessica, sensing the Vataran demon nearby, took the fight to him and managed to sink the claws of the symbiote into it, draining it of its lifeforce.

Gillian and her companions found themselves riding a train through a frozen wasteland that eventually led to a city built of ice and bones. The ice below them had mortals trapped in the ice, but strangely the city seemed empty except for a few demons. A large demonic dog-like creature (a "Tusk Hound") attacked them.

Buffy Spell- Calming Beasts

I'm not sure why this one was left as a draft. It was done as far as I can tell. Yes, Amy would know this one by now. I had written it up for a scene in a game where Amy's grandmother was going to use it and then teach Amy how but the scene never happened.

Beast Calming Spell
Power Level: 3
Quick Cast: Yes
Source: Tibetan Buddhist Magic

Requirements: A short incantation said towards animal in a hushed voice. Witches may just say "Be Still" or a similiar command to calm the animal. Caster must find calm center whithin herself and project it as spell is cast.

Effect: This spell can stop a charging Buffalo in its tracks or calm any other animal as well. Character rolls a willX2 roll against the creatures Brains score.

Lesson Learned

I learned a simple GM lesson through the games I ran at this year's Ambercon.

Never submit to run a game that you, as GM, are not excited about.

I ran three games this year out of a sense of obligation. Each of them were not as good as my games usually are. They were "OK." Now, I know that when I run one of these "OK" games that some people enjoy them and I should be able to take comfort in that.....but I want most, if not all, of the players walking out of one of my games saying "wow." I know that is an ambitious goal but I also know I can achieve it. The first Morpheus seemed to have that. The Dreaming City games seem to have that. Brave New Krypton seemed to have that.

It's all about running games I am excited about. This year, I had three that I was not excited over and each one I feel suffered. If the setting or idea is not making me go "wow" then the excitment I have about running seems to die away.

The three problems games and what I feel were the problems:

1- Splinters of Amber (the LARP)- OK, so I volunteered to run the LARP again this year with no clue what I would run. I had had a good success my first year with "Chaosians and the Amberites who Love Them" and while "The Longest Fall" (the "Sandman" LARP) was not as exciting as I had hoped it would be, it still seemed to entertain and I went ahead and volunteered. Well, as the con got closer, I kept waiting for an exciting plot to come to me and it never did. Since I had volunteered to do so, I was obligated to run something and came up with a murder mystery...which I then did not get enough players for. So I came up with the scenario I used......one I am not too proud of. It was mildly entertaining at best....but I guess it was better for the players than no game on Friday night.

2- The End of All Roads- While submitting games to Kris, I remembered that I had promised to run an intro game to Amber this year. She had forgotten the promise but since I had remembered I threw together a game blurb and ran this introductory scenario. Since I wasn't even excited this year to run a game in Amber and did not feel like restudying my elders....and I had all experienced players who did not need an intro to the elders I ran a "fun romp through shadow." Only, it wasn't that fun. It had its moments, sure. It just could have been more. There was little to no intrigue. It was more like sight seeing.

3- Morpheus Drowning- I knew I had little excitement to run Morpheus this year. I love the setting. I just did not have a scenario to run with. So, the game turned into what I consider a very "vanilla Amber" scenario. It turned into a "fix the pattern" situation. I can do better. The game saw little of the Chaosians or the Matrix...the original part of this Amber....that and the PCs of course. Anyways, I may or may not run Morpheis again next year. I have a scenario idea in mind now....a scenario that returns "New Amber" back to the cool setting it originally was.....a setting where players had to naviagate the Matrix and all of it's unusual properties to survive.

The other thing that bothers me is that I have been dying to run Dreaming City again for some while.....and I decided not to run DC because of the "obligation" games and the two other games I was really wanting to run, "Brave New Krypton" and "Battlestar Pegasus."

Bringing Random to Amber

The most sacriligious post about Amber ever.

Guess what? There are times where it could go either way. The PC may succeed. The PC may fail. Either way, it could be an interesting story. Also, if the players start getting the impression that whenever you are going to make a GM decision that could go either way, that you will do what is best for the story then they will begin to take chances that they would not normally take if the chance really was Random.

I was in an Amber campaign that lasted several years and I played an Amberite who was obsessed with figuring out the true nature of realit.....to find "god." In his pursuits, he tried a lot of potentially dangerous things and rarely walked away with a scratch and the worst thing to happen to him was getting knocked out for a little while.

The GM liked my character. The character had a good amount of drama built up between him and the other PCs. For him to just die from one of his insane experiments was not the best thing for drama or the story and certainly would have sucked. However, I knew this. The GM would not kill my character. So, I put it to the test. My character decided to do his ultimate experiement......one that according to other Amberites should have killed him. He summoned up the Logrus.....and touched the Primal Pattern with it.

He woke up a few days later. No harm.

Now, he knew there was a very good chance that he would die but he had to do it. It was his first step in testing if he could somehow walk the Pattern and have both Logrus and Pattern. He went into the very dangerous situation knowing the risk.....but the player knew there was no risk. What did he do next after the last experience "almost killed him." He went back and tried touching it again...hoping that he could stay concious longer this time.

Now there are two main ways to handle this as an Amber GM. 1- The most likely answer if you try this in my game, you die. No chance of living. Hey, you were warned. 2- You survive but pay for it somehow....hopefully something more interesting than being unconcious for a few days.

So, it was that my character, Alex, quit worrying about anything. Twice he had done something that the elders told him would get him killed and twice he walked away.....and with more of his precious knowledge.

This is wrong!

If the player chooses to have their character due something they know is a risk, I have decided they have asked for a bit of randomness in the game. When the low Psyche or Endurance character decided he will try rewriting the pattern and was told before hand that there "is a good chance you will die" and decide that their character will still make the attempt. Well, they were warned. At this point there is a chance.

It's not like the dice-rolling in your standard RPG because the GM is not making the events require a dice roll. The GM gives the player the option to walk away. It's not like the characters are asked to roll to see if they see the poison-gas plants they are about to step on and then a roll to see if they survive the plant's gas. Instead the GM says "If you try to take the shortcut through Fangreen Forest, there is a chance you could end up poisoned by the native gas-belching plants" and if the character chooses to take the dangerous shortcut, I see nothing wrong with letting a randomizer such as dice, cards or the flip of a coin.

This weekend, I kept the chances at either 25%, 50% or 75% and used the deck of cards I had on hand. "You know you only have a 50/50 chance of pulling this off."

"I try it anyway."

I held out the cards for the player to choose from. "Don't pull a black card and you succeed."

Now, more brutal GMs may not have a problem with needing randomizers to threaten the players when they jump into a potentially deadly situation. I do. I want the players to win. The cards or dice? They don't care. Suddenly the threat of losing becomes very real and the player may not take some chances that they would knowing that the decision about there the dice falls is in the hands of someone who wants them to live or the best interest of the story (which usually is not the character dying if there is a chance the PC will die).

This doesn't complicate or muddy the simplicity of the Amber DRPG and generally if one outcome is infinitely more interesting for the game than another, then the GM should not go random. (For example, the PC dying while fighting several minions is not interesting or entertaining, but if he is killed at the hands of a named character, it could make for a ton of interesting story for the surviving characters.) However, when there is a chance the PC could fail at something, I think it would be appropriate to pull out the percentile dice and tell them, "The other building is a far distance from where you stand. If you run and jump you're thinking you only have about a 40% chance of making that jump." If the player chooses to make that jump, that is what percentiles are for.

Battlestar Galactica RPG

Since I was asked how I designed the rules/characters for the Battlestar Pegasus scenario I ran at ACUS, here are the basics of my variation of the Amber DRPG for roleplaying in the Battlestar Galactica universe.

The BSG scenario that I planned was based around a cylon ambush of the most advanced Battlestar in the fleet, the Pegasus. They needed to capture a Battlestar to examine the colonial technology that had been developed since the last war. Commanded by the "legendary commander Cain," the Battlestar was on a patrol of the border with the Cylons about 25 years after the first Cylon war ended.

To make sure that command structure did not make it so everyone spent the game letting Cain make all the decisions, part of the scenario was that a Cylon agent aboard the Pegasus had sabotaged the long-range communications system. Eventually the Pegasus was boarded by the cylons as they attempted to capture the controls of the Battlestar (allowing for people who had a high fighting skills to take advantage of it).

To start the game, I set out and described 6 pregens, The Commander, The C.A.G. (aka Apollo-type), the Hot-shot Pilot (aka Starbuck-type), The Raptor Pilot (Boomer), The Electronic Counter-measures Officer, and the Deck-Chief/Engineer. Each character had been built on 50 points with the appropriate attributes and skills to do their jobs.

The attributes were:
Tactics= Critical thinking and combat tactics
Fighting= Hand to Hand and firearms skill
Piloting= How good a character is in combat
Tech= A characters skill with technology and the sciences

Attributes started at Warrior level and could be bought up for ranking just like in the ADRPG. They could also be bought down to Enlisted leved (-10 pts) and Civilian level (-25 pts).

Skills were bought like powers for Amber. THey represented specialized training in certain things (such as piloting certain vehicles) and would then use the appropriate attribute to determine how good the character is. Unskilled attempts are possible but the characters attribute would be considered greatly reduced.

Examples of skills:
Viper Training (10 pts)- Knowledge of how to pilot a viper as well as the mechanical systems aboard a viper. (Uses Piloting and Tech)

Raptor Training (10 pts)- Same as above for Raptors

Shuttle Training(5 pts)- Same as above for Civilian and military shuttlecraft.

Electronic Countermeasures (15 pts) Knowledge of technology used to jam communications technology, confuse enemy radar, etc.. (Uses Tactics and Tech)

Med-tech training (5 pts)- Knowledge of the use of basic medical tools, how to bandage wounds etc..

Advanced Med-Tech Training (15 pts)- Surgical and advanced medical skills.

Cylon Technology (15 pts)- Familiarity with the technology used by Cylons in the war

The players then bid on choice order for picking the pregens using 50 points. Any unspent points could be spent on buying additional skills and improving attributes. (I believe the top bid was 19 points by Jarrod. He picked The Commander, of course. Second choice went to Tymen for the Hot-shot, third went to Ben for the CAG and the last player, Val, took the Deck Chief.)

Players then picked card for a random power. (All the players except the Commander who had the power of commanding a Battlestar.) The four powers they chose from were:

Tunnel-Runner- This character knows all the little nooks and crannies of the Battlestar.....access tunnels that can be used as short-cuts. Character also gets +20 to fighting when fighting in the cramped tunnels since the character is used to mving in cramped places. (This card was appropriately pulled by Val for the Deck Chief.)

Loyalty- Many of the crew look up to you and are as loyal or more loyal to you than even the commander. (This power was not drawn.)

History Buff- Character has read heavily on the Cylon war and the events of the battles past and gets a +10 Tactics against cylons. (This power was drawn by Tymen for the Hotshot.)

Cylon- Character is a Cylon Agent. +20 Fighting due to superior strength and stamina. Character has the Cylon Tech skill. (drawn by Ben for the CAG)

Players named their character and away we went.

Amber 2.0

I attended GoO's/Mark's talk on the future of the Amber DRPG at Ambercon this Sunday. The short version: Be Patient. He is determined that there will be a 2nd edition of Amber one way or another. However, with GoO's current financial situation and the shaky nature of the industry, they can't afford to spend the money and time on a game which is not guaranteed to even sell out of its initial print run.

The Main rulebook for Amber 2.0 will most likely keep almost everything the same as in the main rulebook for Amber 1.0. Mark sees the main things that will need to be overhauled is the Sorcery/Magic system (no suprise there) and the Artifacts (again, not a suprise). He is also hoping that he would be able to do an Amber Companion book that would include more of the advance character creation systems often used by Amber players these days (like buying Pattern on a sliding scale).

Be patient, folks. It will happen. It just may not be soon.

Deathknell: First Pack

I picked up my first pack of Deathknell minis at lunch. The new figures are nice as always. I got a lot of animals this pack, which should be handy since I don't have many minis for representing animals.

Her'es what I got in my first pack:

Rare: Large Blue Dragon (Very nice fig.)

Uncommons: Dire Bear (A large uncommon! How cool!), Dragonblade Ninja, Burning Skeleton (has a very neat "fire shield" ability that does damage to any creature that attacks it).

Commons: Kenku Thief (No clue what a Kenku is, but I should find a use for it), Timber Wolf, Giant Frog (reminds me of playinf Castlevania: SotN. I always lauged at the giant frog monsters), Celestial Dire Badger (wish I had this back when I was running D&D. Carla's character used to summon a badger all the time).

Dr. Adolphus Bedlo

In case anyone was curious, here is the stats and game description I sent the GM for my character in One Night in Heerat, Dr. Adolphus Bedlo. I added more points later and fleshed some stuff out, but this basically the Doc (with trivia questions at the end)

...........:

Name: Dr. Apolphus Bedlo

Background: Med School drop-out Dr. Bedlo, is well
connected with the mob, since he has been their
underground doc for years, patching up the guys who
get themselves shot and can't go the government-run
hospitals. These days, he does most of the patching
up for Boss Smiley, but has been known to do work for
other mobsters when needed....sometimes at gunpoint.
He's good at what he does....but never good enough to
have graduated. His work often leaves scars and
sometimes infections, but what do you want from a
back-alley doc? He can give you some antibiotics for
the infection, but there are no refunds.

Having been held at gunpoint one too many time, Dr.
Bedlo recently had installed in his body a bomb with
the power to take out a few blocks. It's triggered to
go off on his death. Yeah, he knows that there is a
chance if he dies for him to be revived but he figures
when he goes he will go violently and the chances of
any med-tech getting to his body in time to revive him
are slim enough that he'd rather just guarantee he
takes out the guy who killed him as well. He doesn't
care who else he takes out with him,
because....well.... he's dead. Why should he care.

Yeah, he's a slimeball...a sneaky, weaselly slimeball,
however he has connections.....and his own little
business on the side. You see, he traffics in black
market implants and organs, particularly the high-end
organs you'll findin some of the better government
operatives these days. They are hard to come by, but
he manages to find the sellers and the buyers. (He's
also removed the organs from some of the people that
have crossed Smiley. He has taken very few for
himself but he has enough upgrades to make him more of
a threat than his small frame would suggest.

His chief motivator....his only motivator is greed.
He has almost enough money at this time that he could
retire in confort but still he wants more. It's a
power thing and it validates him. Who he is trying
to prove himself to, noone is sure.

Appearance: His appearances fit him very well: he is
short and small with a large nose, greasy black hair
that is just starting to bald and and a bit of hunch
picked up from years of leaning over the operating
table to remove bullets.

Attributes:
PSY: Cutting Edge +1 (11 pts)
War: Cutting Edge +26 (36 pts)- Mostly due to implants
that increase his reaction time.
Str: Street
End: Cutting Edge +5 (15 pts)

Artifacts:
Dead Man's Switch bomb (2 pts) (Would you consider
this fair for a bomb that can only be used after he
dies but will take out everything for a few blocks and
damage anything else?)

Sleep Gun- An Arasaka design, it sprays a concentrated
blast of a powerful drug that shortly after contact
with the body paralyzes the target. It quickly
dissipates in the air but anyone with a casual contact
will feel a tingling and some numbness. He has used
it on occassion to take out someone who did not pay
and take back the organs/implants and sone additional
organs (heart, liver, etc.) to pay for his time. (2
pts)

Finger pistol- One of his hands is life-like
cybernetic hand with a small one-shot pistol in the
index finger (1 pt)

Personal filtration system- His lungs are filtered due
to his artificial lung implant. He cannot be gassed
(although he could be affected by the Arasaka gas
gun). (2 pts)

Micro-weave Subdermal armor vest and leg protection-
Nothin superspecial, just bulletproof. Does not
protect arms (he needs thos flixible) joints (same
reason) or against the pain of the bullet impact but
it increases the chance of him living through a
gunshot. It also makes him walk a little funny so he
often looks like he is limping. (2 pts)

Servants:
Og and Gog- Who knows where in shadow these thugs came
from but they are large brutish creatures with not a
whole lot of brains. Dr. Bedlo saw the use for
these creatures when he heard about them showing up in
Heerat and managed and arranged to have them attacked
and shot so that he could show up and shoot their
attackers (sadly, he pre-paid them and was not able to
get the money he paid them back from them). He
patched up these out-of-town brothers and they've been
working for him since. They are extremely loyal, but
in case they ever turn on him, he has installed a
small explosive in their head that he can trigger at
any time. The trigger is something he keeps on his
keychain (with a hidden protective cover to make sure
the button isn't hit by accident and that if anyone
looks at his keys they dont see the button and press
it to see what it does. (2 pts, 1 for each of the
two)

Cop Ally- Officer Bruce Dickinson- Crooked cop that
Bedlo patched up a year back. Dickinson has
recently sold Bedlo some implants he stole from the
police evidence lockers. (2 pts)

Mob Support- Boss Smiley's mob actively supports Bedlo
(6 pts)

Corp Friend- Wesley Dodd - Works in the technologies
division of the Arasaka Corporation and sometimes
smuggles Bedlo some of the latest designs while Bedlo
supplies Dodd with some illegal drugs that eases the
pain of his ailing wife, Samantha. (4 pts)

Wealth- Sell-out (6 pts) (he has several dingy
offices/operating rooms around the city that he also
keeps some personal effects, tools and a bedroom at.
The security system is state-of-the-art and will
release a toxic gas if anyone else tries to enter
illegally. He is immune to the gas due to his
filtration implant.

Powers: Sorcery (sort of): he can put temporary one
use implants and gadgets in to his limbs and jacket
that often have effects like that of Sorcery.
Similairly to hanging a spell, he must spend time
preparing the impants. Some he will have on him,
others he will not. (15 pts)

Bad stuff: 6 pts.

This character= 106 pts- 6 pts bad stuff. If you
approve this by tomorrow for the additional 10 pts, I
will put 5 pts in both Psyche and Endurance, if I get
additonal points beyond that I would like to but
either additional mob contacts or a device that opens
dimensional portals to other shadows (but only with
known "coordinates")

Now for the quiz. I took the name for every one of his contacts from existing name source, with the exception of Og and Gog which were NPCs in a Bloodshadows game I ran years ago. How many sources can you name? (Hint: Dr. Bedlo is from an old movie)

Ambercon 2005: 4 days of Peace, Love and Diceless Gaming

I almost did not make it to Ambercon this year. I started getting very sick at work on Wednesday. When I went home, I went straight to bed and slept until the next morning. Thurday, I spent most of the day laying around, hoping I'd start feeling better. I tried to get game preperation done throughout the day but that did not happen.

Thursday Night: Luckilly, I started feeling good enough in time to pack and get to the con on time. Carla and I got there about 5:00. She went out to have dinner while I laid down in the room for a bit.

Slot 1: Le CygneMy first game of the con was Ginger Stamply and Michael Croft's Le Cygne. I was little worried about this one since I was jumping into the second episode of a series game, but I had a really good time. The group of characters did not have very strong motivations for the plot but it was fun seeing how the crew of "The Swan" palyed off of eachother and how my four armed blue woman fit into the cast.

Slot 2: One Night in HeeratThis is the first time I have ever played in any of Chris Kindred's games and I was curious. I had heard quite a bit about him and have enjoyed discussing gaming with him and having him as a player in one of the episodes of Gillian, the Vampire Slayer. Chris seems to let people create their own characters for the scenarios and then tries to create and have players create associations between eachother. He seems to supply little plot and let the chips fall where they may with little prepared. (I do a lot of adlibbing myself, so I can appreciate this. It is not easy.) Having people create their own characters like that and build relations in game give me an idea why so many of his games turn into campaigns. When you build a character for that and build a strong place for him in the world that is all your creation, you want to continue playing the character more than if your character was just a few stats or a pre-gen.

The plot had some fun moments and it had its slow parts. I was disappointed that my character did not get more chances to do what he was built to do, tinker with people's cybernetics and ....be a weasel. I don't think he ever got into a situation where he got to interact much with an NPC but that is what happens when a game has 8 or more players and only one GM. The group of players was really good, so not having any NPCs to interact with wasn't so bad.

Slot 3: The End of All RoadsThis was the first of five games in a row I would be running. In it, a group of Amberite children from out in shadow were called to Amber by a spell, giving them the ability to shadow -walk and the urge to go to Amber. It was fun, although not stellar. I felt a little ill-prepared for the game and I feel it showed. Still, the players seemed to have fun and there were some great memorable scenes.

Slot 4: Splinters of Amber: So, I had to scrap the plot I was originally going to run for the LARP this year due to lack of players. This left me without a lot and I could not think of a LARP plot to run with only 4-5 players. I did not come up with something until the Monday before the con. (Talk about cutting it close.) This left me trying to gather the props and plan the details in a week and after getting sick Wednesday night, I did not complete making the clues I wanted to leave for the LARPers. So, the game was not anywhere near as good as I would have liked it to have been.

The group still seemed to have fun considering what I handed them was basically a puzzle plot with elements of bargaining, since only so many characters could benefit from solving the puzzle and who gains from the solving of the puzzle would be based on the bargains made earlier in the night.

Slot 5: Brave New Krypton: Two games were down and neither of them turned out very good. So, I was really glad to go into this game with a scenario that I know had worked out well before and in a genre I am very comfortable with. I ran the game system-less although I did use a deck of cards to determine initiative order in much the same way as I used it in Buffy at the last game. The card deck initiative went over very well and the scenario was a big success. (The players told me afterwords that they were very nervous when I brought out the card deck but after it started they enjoyed it and felt it fit very well with the genre.)

The characters for the game were Batman, Spider-Man, Magneto and Dr. Fate. In an alternate earth that was invaded and occupied by several hundred survivors of the planet Krypton, the PCs were members of the resistance. After meeting with another resistance leader, Lex Luthor, at a hotel in Livonia, MI (that should have been familiar to the con attendees), a battle in the atrium of the hotel between the group and three Kryptonians broke out. Thanks to Magneto flinging around Metallo (one of Lex Luthor's creations, a cyborg with a human brain and a Kryptonite heart), the group managed to defeat the three aliens and took two as hostages (including General Zod of "kneel before" fame). On the run from the Kryptonians, they discovered and stopped a plan by some Earth scientists, Professor Ivo and T.O. Morrow, to turn Earth's sun red (which would have killed everyone on it) and discovered where Zod was keeping the old leaders of Krytpon after his coup and rescued them so that they could help them stop the General's followers.

It was a blast. This is probably the last time I will run "Brave New Krypton" (having run it at ACNW) but after this I am really looking forward to running another "Elseworlds" game next year.

Slot 6: Morpheus Drowning: I took on extra players at the last minute and with eight players to play with instead of five, I returned to trying to run the scenario as I had originally described it (with two seperate groups) rather than as I had planned it with one group. It really struggled as I attempted to keep all eight players entertained and failed. I also am getting the feeling that Morpheus is getting played out. The Matrix is effectively destroyed at this point and without the Matrix, the campaign loses what made it what it was. I have apparently allowed the players to succeed too well and the New Amber of the Morpheus-verse is now basically like Amber and the game is basically like an Amber game. Even the finale of this game was very standard Amber...and not in the good way. The game had some really fun scenes but it could have been and should have been better. I was originally not going to run Morpheus this year and now I wish I had run my other idea.
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Slot 7: Battlestar Pegasus: I think the system I came up with worked very well and sometime I will try to post my Diceless Battlestar Galactica rules. (modified Amber) The pacing worked out very well, complete with an explosive (but a little early) finale. Kudos to Jarrod who did a really good job playing the legendary Commander Cain and Ben who got to be the bad guy (as a Cylon agent on the Battlestar). They managed to escape an almost perfect trap by the Cylons and return to Caprica and alert the colonies of the coming Cylon invasion. The players seemed to have a good time and were enthusiatically involved with the plot, so I'm calling the game a success.

Slot 8: Hanging Out : I hung around the hotel for slot eight to visit with people and got to see Texorami in action, chat with Michael K. for a bit (whom I haven't talked to in a long while) and had a really neat conversation about game design with Seth B. that has me really exited about returning to work on the Dreaming City.

Overall: Despite many of games not going too well, I had a really great time and am really looking forward to next year. Hopefully, I'll be heatlier next year.

The Last Word

Tolen Mar, a gaming blog that I just became aware of, recently posted this really neat idea for a RPG that uses Scrabble tiles (or other letter tiles) instead of dice and the players creat words with them. It sounds really good, although I can think of very few settings that this would be appropriate. Perhaps a "Literary Police" game? It seems like it could fit in a very unusual, almost abstract world where words are everything. Anyways, go check it out.