lategaming

This isn’t a link blog, but these are very fun.

Zombie World News

“ZombieWorldNews.com is , as far as we can tell, a departure from other Zombie sites. Instead of the reader being a spectator, we hope to draw you in through a dynamic, ever changing scenario, that you can just read and enjoy, or jump right in and contribute to yourself. The main focus is on the world wide impact and reaction to a credible Zombie virus. How countries deal with it. Become insular, close borders, increase security, quell panic, fear and paranoia, even make arrangements for undead disposal. We also want to touch on some often overlooked aspects of a Zombie rising. Such as, how do you cope with shooting someone? For most people it would not be like a shooting gallery. It would be horrific. Is there remorse? These were people, friends, neighbors. What is the personal toll? The psychological effect.”

The Zombie Squad

“Q: What is Zombie Squad?
A: Zombie Squad is disaster preparation community.
We focus our efforts towards promoting the importance of emergency preparation awareness and working with local communities around the globe to teach them what is needed to survive whatever crisis may come along like natural disasters or man made disasters. Our mission is to make sure you are prepared for any crisis situation that might come along in your daily life which may include your home being invaded by the undead menace. Zombie Squad also supports other local and international disaster relief organizations/charities. Check out our events page for the latest charity event we have coming up.

From onegoodmove we have Stephen Colbert on the tragic death of Captain America

One of my friends, Gav, mentioned the Civil War storyline. Cap represents the forces of liberty and Iron man is a defense contractor. I can’t help but think that there’s a writer in Marvel’s hallowed halls who’s sick of the current government situation in the US. But that’s dangerously close to satire and reality so let’s change the subject.

I’ve always liked “patriot” characters. I’ve never managed to make an Irish one though, I’ve always ended up with British super-patriot heroes. Some of them (Yeoman, Lionheart, RUCman) have become staples of my superhero backgrounds. A lot of this is because I was always an avid reader of Captain Britain.

Some of these characters I have a lot of empathy for.

Yeoman, the hundred and forty year old WW1 hero who shows no sign of failing health and yet who is possessed of the most desperate ennui. But he’s a knight of the way and his shoulders are broad and he still has a long way to go.

Lionheart, the modern clone of Yeoman, full of Thatcherite reason and lately New Labour sincerity. Violent and aggressive, just like the general populace.

RUCman, short-lived in terms of the campaign but oft remembered. This superhuman attaché to the RUC has left the shackles of the government since the change of the organisations name to the PSNI. PSNIman doesn’t have the same ring….

They repurposed I-90 into a massive people-processing line, putting you through checkpoint after checkpoint. This one for DNA scan, the next one for ID verification, the next for health assessment–the list seems endless. You stand under the afternoon sun, sweating (is the sun getting hotter already?), shuffling with the line and lugging your allocated 50 kilos of personal belongings that you quickly stuffed into a backpack.

Your first real glimpse of a K’toaran is when you get to the destination allocation desk. You’ve seen them on TV, but that’s different. Seeing one up close is kinda … freaky. You try not to stare at the big flat head–does this thing even have eyes?–as the big, sewage-colored alien silently offers you a token with one of its many hands. You take it and trundle on, a little shell-shocked. Maybe the extra hands are what make the K’toarans so efficient. Maybe the big head contains a really big brain. Or maybe it’s just because they seem to breathe out their ears.

You turn the colored token over in your hand. It’s made of a dull red metal and shaped like a house, and stamped in some language you can’t read. You shuffle off toward the next checkpoint. Not too far ahead of you, where the toll booths used to be, are the Bridges. It looks like someone built a Roman acqueduct across the highway and put a different world in every archway.

Last checkpoint.

Another K’toaran takes your chit and puts it in a brown blob that you assume is a computer. It spits out a wrist-band made of that same dull red metal which you strap on. The word “REFUGEE” is embossed on it in several languages, some of which you don’t recognise.

A warm, female voice comes out of the blob. “Please ensure you wear your wrist-band at all times. In addition to carrying all your identification and biological data, it maintains your credit balance and any other information needed by your adoptive government. Please follow the red line.”

Looking down at your feet you see a red line painted on the ground leading to one of the archways. As you approach, you can see a room through the Bridge, much like a waiting room at a hospital or a government office, with people sitting half-bored, half-expectant on moulded benches. You take a deep breath as you have one last look at the Boston skyline, then step through the Bridge to your new home.

On another planet.

BBC News Northern Ireland writes:

A man accused of a stealing underwear from a shop in a knifepoint raid believed he was a female elf at the time, Belfast Crown Court has heard. He told defence counsel Anthony Cinnamond that within his small social circle he had been participating in a game known as Shadowrun. The game was set in the future and the assumed characters were criminals, he said. He told the court his character was a shaman, or magical elf, who carried a small Japanese sword as a weapon.

That’s really quite embarrassing. (Thanks to Graham for the heads up and no, I don’t know this guy). Here’s more coverage of the same event

and The Ordinary Boys came on the box. I was amazingly struck by the similarity between Samuel Preston and the late great Troy Tempest.

The difference being that Troy Tempest could probably survive a comedy game show without crying off.

At 9 am, the doors to the conference room open and a motley crew of individuals file in. At the head of the table sits Jack White, the marble-faced CEO of WatchTower New York. Clockwise around the table we see Father Julian Devon (later to be known as Balance), Jason also known as INDIGO and three new individuals. The first introduces himself as SkyCrane (though you can call him Ben), the second calls himself Red Shift (speaking with a deep Southern accent) and the third as Psiren. It becomes apparent that Skycrane can lift huge weights with the power of his mind and fly and he quickly slots into the role of the team “Brick”. Red Shift claims to be “fast, too fast to see proper”. Psiren claims to be a telepath and empath and that she can become the communications backbone of the team.

Father Julian looks confused but is assured by White that everything has been sorted out with his Bishop. More on this later.

The team are informed of the plans for WatchTower. They will be the primary team operating out of TriBeCa. The second team will be operating out of the WatchTower NY training facility in the Catskills. They are also informed of White’s intentions to construct a WatchTower franchise outside of the United States through a special Sanction Zero which has been proposed by the United Nations. He refuses to elaborate at this time.

After this briefing, the team is introduced to Nicole Menshikov, the Public Relations Executive. Her job is to help the team settle into their new role, manage relocations and cement public identities and ensure that private identities are protected. She criticises INDIGO for his lack of insignia, questions Father Julian about his codename (which he eventually relents to, with Balance) and discusses the facilities available to WatchTower staff for keeping identities private. The meeting finishes as the group start to chat among themselves with Psiren finishing questions before they are asked which some find irritating.

The last thing they do is look up the now-deceased Squall. Known accomplices including two superpowered miscreants known as KillerWatt and HellStrike.

As lunch Approaches, Father Julian invites Psiren, also known as Alice, to lunch at Liberty Island. His gesture is more investigatory than complimentary and they spend time walking around the island. He and Jason bring a multimeter and test various objects in the environment. He’s looking out for any signs of Squall’s accomplices.

Psiren is able to detect empathic impressions from the area and she elucidates her feelings on the region. Suspecting collusion, Jason flashes his WatchTower badge at the head of security, a short, balding man called Lopez. He promises to fax over the duty roster for the 24th. The group also resolve to obtain schematics of Liberty Island. There must be something beneath….

I commented to Matt the other day that the last time I actually *played* in a game was when he ran the original WatchTower game in 1998.

This got me to thinking that although I’ve read a lot of games, and I’ve played in a lot of campaigns, I haven’t really played lots of games.  Here’s the total list, from memory:

• Advanced Heroquest
• D&D
• Marvel Super Heroes
• MERP
• SLA Industries
• Torg
• Traveller
• Vampire

While I’ve played a much larger range of games, those are the only ones which fulfil the these criteria:

1. I’ve been a player (as opposed to GM)
2. I’ve had a character that advanced in some way (levels, experience points spent on skills, etc.)

(This, incidentally, has led me to a discovery about what I like about gaming … more in a future post).
If I look at it from the perspective of games that I’ve GM’d where my players would then fulfil these two criteria, the list would be even shorter:

• D&D
• SLA Industries
• Pendragon

I think this is because I’ve had a tendency to run long campaigns that I’ve really enjoyed (as has the group), and so there’s been little impetus to switch game.  Pendragon is especially good for this as the game is designed for long running campaigns.

I’d be interested to read about other people’s experiences, as players and as GMs.  Write a comment, or post in your blog with a ping/trackback.

Here’s a simple system that would get a WotW: Earth game up and running. Before I go into the details, here’s what was going through my head as I designed this.

1. WotW: Earth is set in turn-of-the-century England
2. Player characters are likely to have a base set of skills which can probably default to stats
3. Highly technical skills don’t really exist, and science is still the realm of the wealthy
4. Skills matched career very closely, and people generally had one career
5. My feeling (from reading what Matt has written) is that this is a game about normal people in an abnormal situation, so there won’t be much difference between the characters

And now the system …

Read the rest of this entry »

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places.

“I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light. “

The pit at Primrose Hill was the largest outpost the Martians secured in Britain and perhaps the world. Their fighting machines collected the materials from their cylinders and brought it to this pit so they start the construction of new machines. Handlers, refining machinery and buildings dot the landscape of the newly turned earth and their trails, dotted with powdered metal and the bones of their victims, weave an intricate web of snail trails.

Lofty towers affording observation of the surrounding countryside and armed with the dread funnel from which smoked the Heat-Ray. The land approach of the pit was of blackened turf and charred ruins of houses, tree stumps and the wreckage of anything that dared come near.

Now, the work of exhuming the dead and giving them a decent burial has occupied hundreds of men and women, eager to work for food, over the last weeks since the defeat of the Martians.

Inanna Jones writes a bit about this sexism thing here on the IrishGaming livejournal:

So generalising remark: women look for more depth.

I disagree with Inannajones. I think both men and women look for depth. The depth is just in different seas.

There is a group of guys who look for cheesecake art. They like the hawt Drow femmes and they think that Larry Elmore is a god. They are in the minority and seldom are over 18.

So, what’s with “women look for more depth”?

I don’t know what InannaJones looks for precisely, she says:

I play RPGs fundamentally for the sake of a damn good story and being able to be personally, intimately part of that story. I love being a hero, love solving mysteries, love being part of a living, breathing, 3+ -dimensional fantasy world. In my experience, both sexes are allowed to do that equally well.

Okayyyy…..that’s what I like about gaming. I love the story, I love characterisation, I love putting on an accent, I like making twists and turns in a plot and I love it when my players react as their character rather than as a player. As a GM I have to play believeable male roles as well as believable female roles. I have to play hearty heroes as well as vile villains, of both sexes and of variable sexual preference.

She continues:
I have never found RPGs or the RPG culture to be particularly sexist.

On the same post, deannawol writes:

If anything, the cute, fluffy, romantic “for women” games would piss me off. But that’s just me.

It would piss me off too. And I’m not even a woman.

What pisses me off more is being called a jerk and an asshole by an ignorant bigot who knows nothing about the hobby and assumes that just because we’re debating whether there is sexism in the hobby, it must mean that there is sexism in the hobby and anyone who says otherwise is the white, heterosexual, male oppressor.

This is a conversation for the pub, or a convention panel. And if any women want to look at the games I have in development here and on the LateGaming private wiki and talk about whether I am making a game with inherent sexist bias then I’m interested to talk.

It seems I agree with InannaJones.