lategaming

I have a list that is rapidly growing of things to post here, but for some reason this is on my mind just now, so…

When I was growing up, roleplaying was that weird thing you did afterschool that no one was entirely sure wasn’t some form of devil-worship.  The stigma seems to have abated some as the years have passed — thank heavens — and I’ve been glad to see more parents allowing or encouraging their children to take up rping.  It’s a good compromise between the old pasttime of books and the modern advent of video games… all the adventure, not so solitary, a bit of risk, and no vegging out in front of the tele.  Yes, good solution.

One thing I’d really like to encourage GM’s to look at is the extraordinary possibilities of using roleplaying as an educational tool.  I’ve done this a number of times with some youth groups in various areas where I’ve lived, and always with astounding results.

Roleplaying is a wonderful vehicle for relaying vital facts and information in way that is anything but boring.  I’ve created roleplaying sessions (using White Wolf’s easy-peasy char-gen modified to hell and back for flexibility’s sake) designed to throw teenagers back into mythological Ireland, bringing them face to face with all the wyrds and wilds of a superstitious world.  All the info I gave them was accurate.  Names of haunts and heroes, and we used a map of Ireland for navigation purposes.  I got compliments from a couple of parents because the kids picked up Irish mythology books at their next round at the library to prepare for the upcoming gaming sessions.  If they could reference me a truth about the time period or a figure from history when something was encountered, I gave them marks for experience.  I had some rather avid little readers on my hands.

I’ve also used rping as a way to help teens prepare for tests on eras in history.  History, unless you just love history, can be a bone-gnawing, sleep-inducing subject.  But if you take that same history, get youth involved in making characters from that time period, it can change their interest level drastically.  When they have to answer questions such as “Where did my character live?”, “What did they wear?”, “How big was my family?”, “What did my dad do?”, and so forth, they’re learning a multi-level approach to history which ensures comprehension.  Roleplaying requires investigation of social, economic, political, artistic, and religious movements.  Anytime you get more than one facet on the jewel of a period in history, you have a better grip on its worth.  You can take rote facts and drop them into “newspaper clippings”.  You can have war casualty figures delivered via courier.  There are endless ways to make history come alive for kids through roleplaying.

I haven’t even touched on the possibilities of using roleplaying situations to help youth confront issues of loyalty, peer pressure, death, jealousy, and more advanced human ethics in a controlled situation.  But it’s all there.  I would really like to see more teens roleplaying.  And more GM’s willing to cater to that age level.  Roleplaying may be immense fun, but it’s also an arena where learning, even for us adults, never ends.

The most difficult character I ever had to play was one drawn from a stack of manila folders in a gameroom in Astoria, Oregon. It was a one-nighter session — not my usual brand of poison, but I was a girl in a room filled with guys and Guinness, and anything becomes more palatable with Guinness. I was rather pleased to have made the cut. Out of 20+ interested applicants in the game, six of us actually got to participate. Didn’t dawn on me until years later that my participation may have had nothing to do with my… er… literal participation. I wasn’t very clued in back then.

The GM had a basic AD&D adventure planned. Normal character classifications… none of this hybrid, super-specialized, “Well, in this supplement, you cross a mage with a ninja” craziness. One-night only. Goal? Survive until 2 am. Simple.

Um, not.

Probably should have taken it as a warning sign that we didn’t need to bring anything with us and all efforts to pitch character ideas were brushed off rather nonchalantly. The confusion was rectified when we walked in to find the folders sitting neatly in the middle of the table along with a note: “Choose one”.

I wasn’t as courageous back then as I am now, so I sure didn’t take the first pick. But wasn’t willing to be out of control long enough to take whatever was left. So, I have to say, I did it to myself. Third folder of the six picked up. And I wasn’t happy with what I saw.

First of all, let me just say how much I truly dislike playing fighter class characters. I know you need them, I know they’re important, and I’ve owed my paper-hide to fighters many a time over. So, it would be just my luck to get a fighter. That wasn’t the kicker though. My intelligence and wisdom scores were.

I don’t remember if my INT was a 6 and my WIS an 8 or the other way around, but I don’t think it mattered in retrospect. I was your typical all-brawns, no-brain brute force, and I was pissed (which probably helped the character portrayal). For good reason, too.

See, I’m usually the character in the party that takes stock of everyone’s gear, calculates the approximate trajectory of a grappling hook in a west wind, and comes up with the thing the GM never thought someone would do. I take a particular pride in being a pain in the GM’s creative ass. That’s right, it’s messed up, and I’m sure it has everything to do with a need for vengeance for every time a brilliant player did it to me. Oh, and I like watching smart creative people squirm. (This is going to come back and haunt me, I swear).

The conundrum was how to take my naturally smart, cunning self and dumb it down to fit the character. I don’t know how to act generally brainless despite my knack for peopling my life with good examples of the trait. And coming up with great ideas is part of the joy of gaming for me. So… what to do?

I kept my great ideas. For every situation or choice we faced, I allowed myself my naturally cunning response — and kept my mouth shut while I rolled a d10. Anything less than an 8, and that idea never saw the light of day. God forbid I roll a 1 or 2, because then I had to come up with something STUPID on purpose. If I managed something above an 8, I spit the idea out. I was a veritable Forrest Gump of insight and ingenuity. Most of the time everyone wanted to pour MiracleGro into the cavity where my brain should have been, and occasionally, I was an accidental genius. The hardest thing was biting back all those wonderfully creative ideas because “my character wouldn’t have been able to come up with this”.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the “Here’s your character!” trick on a few groups I’ve GM’d for. Some folks eat it up. Others, you give them a well-developed character and it’s like telling them to climb inside a locked box. What I learned from my tough little rping experience is how hard it is to put aside your ego and the things you’re good at in order to play something truly, and how attached we get to our strengths. I really began to appreciate my talents more after that session. There’s nothing like feigning “not having a clue” to make you glad you have more than several.

So… what was your most difficult character? And what did it teach you?

Congratulations — you’ve managed to rustle up a handful of players, maybe even titillated them with a hint of what’s in store for them. You’ve slogged through the char-gen process and, like horses held too long at the ready, the characters are chomping at the bit for what’s waiting for them down the road. Now, my friend, it’s all on you.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” And that axiom holds true as steel in the arena of tabletop gaming. Setting the scene for your players, especially the first scene, is as vital to the flow of a night’s gaming (or a year’s campaign!) as good directions are for someone who’s never been to your house. If you take nothing else seriously that first night, it better be this.

There are all kinds of “how-to”s out there on how to create a great scene. How to describe, how to set up, how to think like an inhabitant of that world, how to yadda-yadda-yadda. So rather than recreate the wheel, I think I’d like to discuss the psychology of creating a good scene and what’s really at stake when you are at the cusp of a new session. These are the things I’ve found most important in creating the proper mindset for myself as a GM. Being aware of these has helped me write better scenes and get things off to a better start than any simple “how to”.

Always Remember:

You Are Their Eyes. And their ears. And their hands. You have total sensory domination over the characters. Seem intimidating? Don’t let it be. Get drunk on it. Our senses are the most direct line to our most primitive emotional states. Your characters (in a playing sense) are born the moment they enter this new world, and their first experience will be touching this environment to which only you hold the key. Controlling what your players experience sensually in an opening scene determines whether or not the characters feel like this new world is a benevolent or hostile or indifferent place. While there is such a thing as “being overly descriptive”, you can usually be quite forgiven for being a tad verbose in an opening scene. Choose your words carefully, for they are your sole arsenal. Descriptives issued in embellished, high-gothic style tend to disassociate characters from their humanity; the suspension of reality is quite intense, but for supernatural thrillers, such a veil between the real and the not-to-be-believed is welcome. Descriptives that are earthy and rugged tend to flesh out characters quickly because they call on our own sensory memories. Where you walk the line between the down-to-earth and not-of-this-world is up to you. But the path you take and the way it touches the characters’ “physical” forms can and does determine a lot of the mood of your game.

You Are Their God. Kind of. For now. Keep in mind that this is, literally, the last moment you will have these characters completely in your control. From here on out, they will begin to shape this world you gave them to their liking. Such is free will, and it’s a bitch. Anything you want put in place — be it a mood, a theme, whatever — do it now. It’ll stick. And it’s your last chance. Use it wisely.

You Are Their Mirror. It’s important that you develop your scenes as well as (if not better than) you develop the interfacing NPCs. For one, the setting of the game is a character that gets nonstop, uninterrupted playtime constantly with every single character. Putting time into your backgrounds, descriptions, and details is well-worth it when you consider the amount of “stage time” the scenes themselves get. Also, characters, especially newly created ones in the hands of inexperienced players, have to have something against which to test themselves. Until they actually develop far enough to have interpersonal conflict or to avoid knee-jerk personality blunders, your scene is their mirror. Setting an eerie tone lets the player explore their character’s courage, stoicism, rationality, superstition. Setting an easygoing tone lets the player stir up their character’s wanderlust, curiosity, ambition, knack for finding trouble. Anything you do gives the character something to bounce off of and begin to discover themselves. It is, literally, the first opportunity the characters have to see themselves, through the looking glass of whatever your imagination conjures for them.

You Are Their Door. Everything a player comes to see and understand about this world is through the aperture of you. If you keep too much detail to yourself, they might never “get in” to your world. If you lay the door wide open, they might see too much. Neither of these is a bad thing, just be aware of how each is useful. You might shut that door and brace it shut with only a crack of light and understanding showing, make them work for what they discover, and their efforts to gain fluency in your vision will weave them in tightly. You might let them in full and overpower them, forcing them to draw back and narrow their scope, instilling in them a sense that, no, they are not indeed “paper gods” here. It’s all about perspective. You give them the truth you want them to have. They will call it sacred or heretical in their own time once the gold proves real or the gilt flakes off. And, my, isn’t that fun?

Setting a scene is solely your responsibility, and you just have to own that one. The scene is the partner with which the characters must dance, and you (most of the time) get to choose the music. You can’t blame your characters for being wallflowers if their date doesn’t show. You can’t blame your players for lack of interest if their dance partner doesn’t seem interesting, coquettish, and a suitable match. Take your scene and style her down to the curve of her lashes and the cut of her dress, breathe her into life and make her alive and responsive. The scene might follow the characters’ leads in time, but initial chemistry is vital. Make it spark. Leave them breathless.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

This isn’t about Roleplaying, Sci-Fi or Gaming in general.

I’m angry.

This is regard to a complaint raised against the North and West Belfast Health and Social Services Trust regarding the treatment of one of their patients, a young adult with special needs.

This young man is under the total care of the Trust as he is, judged by their own care professionals, to be incapable of looking after himself. As such, he relies on the Trust to provide the basic care and human dignity that we all would come to expect.

As it happens, this organisation is failing in it’s care of this individual and therefore most likely failing in it’s care of other individuals in his circumstances and these people, our brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers and children, deserve much better.

For example:

• This young man relies on the Trust for his laundry services. He is active in the Choral group in the institution and the uniform required is a white shirt. He owns a white shirt. For the performance, he was in a creased shirt and was wearing socks and underpants belonging to another individual in care. The Trust, like a 5 year old with jam on their hands, has no explanation for this. His family are upset about his best clothes being destroyed by the hospital laundry service.
• The young man is incapable of completing his own personal hygiene tasks and is assigned a carer for assistance. He was apparently supervised shaving and yet looked unkempt and had nasty cuts on his face from the disposable razor he was forced to use. He owns an electric shaver for his personal hygiene but again the staff were unable to account for it. Or his electric toothbrush.
• He was repeatedly struck by other patients in the facility. He informed the staff but despite staff supervision, no-one was a witness and no staff member reported such abuse. But one staff member witnessed him being teased and struck by another patient to the point where his glasses were broken. And nothing was done. He’s had teeth knocked out by other patients and again, nothing is done. I will, for the sake of decency, not go into the multiple claims of sexual abuse and interference he has received while under the care of the Trust.
• Because of his restrictions on movement outside the facility for his own safety, his family have provided him with a playstation, numerous portable music players and a portable DVD player. I, myself, bought him an iPod last Christmas and marked it with his name in indelible marker. The portable DVD player has gone missing and staff claim there was never such an item in his possession. The staff also claim that he had “an MP3 player but not an iPod” and it too has gone missing. These items were all left for checking by hospital electrical maitenance for safety checking.
• His lack of access to his family for birthdays, family events and special occassions (for example, to celebrate his religion, to attend the christening of his nephew or his father’s 60th birthday) has been a constant sticking point with his famiy and they have repeatedly brought the point to his incarcerators who refuse him access to these needs.

Is it public policy in the UK National Health Service in Northern Ireland to treat those with special needs worse than we treat the common criminal? Criminals have rights regarding assaults, care of property, laundry service and religious and social needs. Isn’t it the case that if he had killed someone, he’d be out for good behaviour by now? Wouldn’t there have been a public enquiry by now?

These events were investigated by Mrs Eileen McLarnon, a Senior Nurse Manager at the Hospital. It is my supposition that she must be good as a nurse, because she sucks as a private investigator. But I understand the need to cover your own back and the backs of your co-workers.

Frankly, I’m disgusted and this after reading the letter from Paul Ryan, Director of Planning/Deputy Chief Executive on behalf of Professor Richard G Black, OBE, Chief Executive of the Trust. I’m horrified that this is the state of the NHS today. Absolutely disgusted.

You do not deserve the word ‘TRUST’.

North and West Belfast HSS Trust

Phone: +44 28 9032 7156
Fax: +44 28 9082 1284

Tonight at TableTopNorth, I decided to eschew my plans of running 2300AD because, simply, the setup is massive and I don’t know my players very well. They seemed to want an action game so I dug out a copy of Zombi, one of my own games, and decided to force them into some hot undead action.

I decided to set it in late August of 1999. Mere weeks after the first recorded rising. Things were about to get ugly in the city (which the players decided was Kansas City) and the police force has been tasked with covering it up. They know the dead walk but there’s a pogrom on talking and desertion has meant that the City has had to hire private security companies to fill in.

Througha combination of impro and planning, the players made up two characters. Jim Buin, a combat cameraman who spent years with the troops and has a recurring nightmare of Mogadishu and Frank Connor, his wealthy socialite anchor. They were dispatched to riots in town by the Head of News, Gaylen Ross. They’re given a official TV van and a big camera.

In town, they fast-talk their way past a dumb uniform cop and find their way through the detritus of a deserted downtown to a riot scene. Ducking into an alley they encounter a half-corpse and decided to scale a fire escape to get a better view of the riot. Once upon the roof, they shoot a live feed of the police containing rioters, rioters who are under attack by another mob and to their horror they realise that this second mob are attacking, biting and eating the rioters!!!

They watch in horror as a pair of SWAT vans arrive and 16 SWAT troops disembark, take up positions and summarily execute the rioters and the second mob. They’re horrified and try to escape but are apprehended by two SWAT cops who try to bring them back to their Lieutenant, a stressed out guy who will do what it is required to keep this shit under wraps. They encounter the still-moving other-half of the half-corpse…which is killed immediately by the SWAT officers (and gives the players the hint that head shots are where it’s at).

While one of the officers is absent, they subdue the other, take his pistol and escape into the alleys with gunfire ringing in their ears. At one point, Jim breaks left and Frank breaks right. Frank reaches their van and tries to drive quickly though he’s clearly panicked and drives the can straight into a grocery store front. He’s concussed but rescued by Jim who throws the van into gear and gets them the hell out of there.

While heading back to the city, they call in and Gaylen tells them to get out of the city. She’s leaving the station now with her fiancé using the traffic helicopter and suggests they do the same. They divert to the local gun store to find widespread looting and the gun store locked. Frank rings his father who suggests they make tracks to his ranch, 40 miles outside the city. They turn the van around and hit the freeway…Jim makes a call to an old army buddy who tells him to get out of the city and he’d call when he is in a position to give him a sitrep.

…40 miles later they’re pulling up the long drive to the Connors Ranch. They open the front door and Frank is horrified to see the lobby is awash with blood. Jim immediately activates the centra locking on the van from his remote. Frank stumbles into the hall and spies his father, obviously injured, feasting on the remains of his younger brother. His father drops the body and starts to approach Frank and Jim. Jim fires warning shots at Mr Connors but he keeps coming, a murderous look in his eyes. They start to back away and Frank, already established as a rich but incredibly unlucky man, feels an icy hand on his shoulder - his father’s wife, Missy! Already blue from the rigor, she attacks him immediately. Jim, empties the pistol and hits nothing but air and nicks Franks ear and starts to run. Mr Connors is still approaching and Missy grabs Frank’s arm and bites down hard, taking a lump of flesh and gobbling it greedily down. Jim aims carefully and with a careful shot, takes Missy down with one shot to her temple, showering Frank with blood and gore. They back away from Mr Connors and make their way upstairs to his study where Frank says there are rifles and pistols. They’re watchful for the other members of the household - Frank’s sister Lucy, the two stablehands, the maid… - and once in the study they start ringing the other phone extensions in the house to see who answers. José, Ricardo and Lucy are in the stables! And unhurt!

They secure the rifles and the pistols as Mr Connors starts to pummel on the door so they slide out onto the roof and drop to the ground and run to the van and load up. As they start the van, they notice Mr Connors and another walker coming out of the house. They wait til they are close by and BAM! reverse the van over them. They step out of the van and Frank shoots his father’s undead corpse a couple of times and, true to form with his bad luck, also manages to shoot out a tyre in the van. He also notes for the first time that there is blood pumping out of the bite wound on his arm….

They make their way down to the stables to find José, Ricardo and Lucy who are very happy to see them and Jim immediately gets the two men to change the tyre. Frank’s arm is still bleeding profusely and Ricardo uses his animal nursing skills to suture the wound and bandage it up.

Jim rings Gaylen. She’s about 450 miles north but needs to refuel and the only place is a small airfield about 60 miles away from the ranch. they decide to meet up. She tells Jim that the dead are walking, they kill and eat people. Those they kill, get up and kill. Jim looks at Frank very closely….

And we finish up with them loading into the van….and heading for the airfield…..

Syndicate…

As mentioned earlier, it started out as a psionics ruleset for a sci-fi corporate espionage game called Syndicate which was masterminded by John. Syndicate was never published and indeed never went beyond a couple of dozen pages of brainstorming materials. I adapted some material from some of my earlier attempts at game backgrounds, mainly one called 8162AD where superhuman psychic investigators were sent to fight terrorists and criminals on an interstellar stage. But it went nowhere so…

Espers

This was the first working name for the game. I got it from “The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester who goes strangely uncredited in the Wikipedia article and I reckon Bester’s work had a lot to do with the film Minority Report (2002) but I digress. It fit and I used it.

Right up until 2 days before we went to print, which was weeks and weeks after we’d started marketing the book.

Cease and Desist

Came the email. From some guy called James Hudnall. Remember this was before Wikipedia, before Google. This was early 1996, the dot-com boom wasn’t even there. Turns out he’d authored a comic book called Espers back in ‘86 and he thought we were ripping him off. Our local comic shop had never heard of him or it. So we had to decide. I certainly didn’t have the money to fight a battle just for a name that neither of us owned, so I took the easy route and spent an evening thinking up new names. And one of them stuck.
I eventually got hold of a copy of one of his Espers books and was quite happy that the name was the only similarity. They’re superhero comics, not comics about shadowy psychic conspiracies. They’re more Marvel/Image than Warrior/Vertigo if you know what I mean. Anyway, we changed the name and I don’t regret it one iota.

The Project Sourcebook

This unfinished work came out of a couple of years of writing part-time by half the team. Now I’m glad it was unfinished and unpublished (though it was released as a PDF for a while). It needs rewritten, heavily edited and heaps more content added.

Now?

The 23rd Letter will be back on sale in the US with a couple of distributors. I’d like to hear from people who know of it, or who liked it. Or just if they read about it on this blog. I’m kinda upset that we’re not in the wikipedia article for Psionics (roleplaying games) but I’ll get over it.

LONDON (Reuters) - Police on Thursday charged a woman on terrorism-related offences for possession of a computer hard drive loaded with operating manuals for guns, poisons, mines and munitions.

To be honest, these criteria would qualify half of the roleplayers I know for internment. It was my ex-wife who said, “Guns, the more you learn, the more interesting they become.”

Police said the charges against the woman were connected with the arrest last month of a man caught at Heathrow airport in possession of a night vision scope and a poisons handbook.

Aha, okay, these guys were up to no good. Though I’ve been to a game convention with a telescope and a Cocktails book….

Police said among the items on the hard drive found in her possession were the Al Qaeda Manual, The Terrorists Handbook, The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle, The Firearms and RPG Handbook, a manual for a 9mm pistol and a manual on how to win hand to hand fighting.

Again, up to no good. Of course, the RPG they mention here is “rocket propelled grenades”.

You can read the full story here on Reuters but oddly not the BBC News site….

When we started out, we thought of several names for the company. One was Aes Dana Publications and another was Apocryphal Games. We played with FarTooReal, considered LeannanSidhe and with a group vote, settled on Crucible Design.

We had a list of games (and supplements) we were going to produce:

Syndicate (plus ‘World Conquest’ and ‘The System’)
Cabal (plus ‘Not Alone’ and ‘Ordo Magnus’)
Frontier (plus ‘Traders Tales’ and ‘The Ant Hill’)
Awakenings (plus ‘High Seas’ and ‘Opus Dei’)

plus some that never made it past initial ideas such as

Silver Star
$uper$
Empire of the Stars
Apex
Corsairs
Tir na’nOg

I initially did a lot of writing for Frontier and Syndicate and a lot of reading for Cabal. We played $uper$ a few times and I ran a game of Empire of the Stars once as well.

The first time I wrote anything for The 23rd Letter was when I started writing the psionics rules for Syndicate which was subtitled “ESPace”. I was more interested in the psionics stuff than I was in the whole game, to be honest.

So…some time later, when none of the games listed above seemed to be completing, I wrote a separate background for this game about psychics and presented it to the group while at WARPCon one year. It was met with amazing resistance until I explained where I saw it going and what it was. It wasn’t one of the super, epic full-colour hardback games we planned to make - it was something however to turn Crucible Design from a group of people who thought about writing games to actually having a product. Eventually they agreed and we started working on the first edition by adding background materials and I laid it out on a UNIX workstation running Frame.

Boom. We had a game.

All of the games we eventually made were done like that. Little side games I was working on which were polished and finished so that we’d have something to publish!

With a start, Kruse sat up and rubbed his eyes. The close confines of the safe house were weighing on his mind. He glanced over at Jimmy and instinctively reached for his pistol. He was too far gone, too unstable for this kind of work. It was just too dirty. Kruse could probably take him in his sleep and wouldn’t that be a better way to go than impaled on the claws and beak of something….unearthly.

He felt his bile rising and choked it back. The noise caused Zoe to stir and he saw light glint off her eyes and knew she could see him. Then her eyes closed and she fell asleep again - the traffic was only starting to build and the quiet drone of the cars sounded like sea upon a distant shore.

Confident they were both asleep, he rose and went into the bathroom and stripped off his wet clothes. He took a towel and mopped the urine from his seat and then went to rinse himself, his clothes and the towel. In the shower he fantasised briefly about Zoe and Mrs Dengler and then remembered the unearthly thing. That killed his thoughts and he dried himself quickly.

Broken sleep and nightmares punctuated his stay in the safe house. He remembered waking, bedclothes sodden, as a child with only his blankets to protect him against the encroaching dark. He remembered a figure at the bottom of the bed, looking shadowlike over him. Until his tenth birthday he’d been an infrequent bed-wetter, a nervous child. And he could feel the shadow over him. Even here.

He had been chosen for this life, he had not chosen it.

The Shoals are small, rocky outcrops that lie far from the Citadels and other large rocks in the deserts of Viride. Among these smaller rocks and shallow sands are small settlements. Populated by people from the Citadel as well as Sandsmen and Outcasts, they provide essential links between citadels and a place for the weary desert traveller to rest though they have little to offer but meagre food, drink and accomodation. They are, without exception, hospitable. They have no formal social or family structure - people come and go as they please.

Though their situation is precarious, living without the protection of the great rocks and constantly in danger from greyfish, bladeshell and a host of other vicious predators, the Shoals are a welcoming community, their primitive huts built upon foundations of rock and suspended with dried and oiled sandvine so that they do not touch the shifting sands and become prey to greyfish. The sands around the shoals are often too shallow for larger bladeshell hunters.

A shoal will often have a small farming community attached to it which will provide them with a ready supply of greyfish meat and all the sandvine (and precious water) they need. These farmers are typically burned almost black by the glare from the sands and are reputed to be extraordinarily stubborn folk.