James Wallis, poster boy for the health benefits of vegetarianism and one of the nicest blokes I know now has his own blog. James will always be welcome at my table. I do mean dinner table because it would be WAYYYY too intimidating to have him in a game…
This post on Story Games I find quite exciting. A month to design a game, using a previously published system? And the additional commitment of having to also be a judge.
As a commenter on that page put it:
“It’s the exact same situation as Game Chef or 24 hour RPG — feel free to draw on old material, but the contest is about writing and presenting new stuff, not dusting off your hoary old setting.”
I’d love to do this. But do I have the time?
Not really sure whether I’m pleased or depressed….
But Qabal and The Project Sourcebook didn’t make the grade for this list on RPGnet of Legendary Vapourware even though it’s 9 pages long!.
Of course, they’re too wrapped up in wondering about FRUP (which, in the tradition of the very best vapourware, is back under development.
I hate the fact that I’m crap at drawing. I can describe stuff but I’m finding more and more that I want to find a concept artist. I want to have some images to post with the content I’m writing.
I’m nto quite at the stage where I’ll post something onto RPGnet and I’m not sure how it would work out with that most dreaded of things “payment”. I’d like to talk to someone about it and see what we can do….
Jeff Rients writes about 5 old games he feels were overlooked. While I can agree with the ancient (James Bond, Lords of Creation) and the venerable (SpaceMaster) and perhaps even the weird (SenZar - though I always thought it was an internet joke-meme) I was shocked and surprised to see number 5 on his list was … ZOMBI. Go read and give appropriate linkage willya. Jeff’s blog is one of the blogs I read with my morning cereal and it was very cool to see something I wrote just there. I was interested in the “5 old games” article anyway and BOOM, he surprises me with this nugget!
He also liked the name “SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO” and sometimes I feel fortunate that I never completed the script for SpaceFleet HyperDimensional WarFortress 44 which I think was only mentioned in WildTalents 3 as:
“Taking SNCC to the stars, SF44 brings you the background for the Archon War. The rag- tag remnants of a hundred worlds now follow the banner of Earth to grind the Horde under their Meka-Tek heels. New rules include starship and zero-G combat. New races and new guns!”
Anyway, Thanks Jeff, for the review, the walk down memory lane and the description of LoC, which I’m going to chase in the IntarWebbage.
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…..
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Wired writes: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work.”
They then got dozens of their favourite sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers to write six word stories (and a couple of graphic artists too). The results here are at least fun, at most stunning.
It reminds of the difference between short books and fat books, glossy hardbacks and matte softbooks, amateurs versus professionals, and little obscure cult games ranked against the big boys (I mean seriously, who can take on D&D?).
Anyway, I was inspired to play around with this. Some of them ended up being just fun, some of them thought-provoking. I don’t know how many of these would class as stories in and of themselves.
I went to two games shops in Paris and spent a little too much on books.
I got some English language RPGs and could hve bought more - there’s heaps of dead-tree books that I’ve never heard of and I know there must be hundreds of electronic versions that I’ve just not the time to look at.
I picked up some french language RPGs as well which has proved to be eminently readable.
The Authority RPG
Tekumel RPG (and I got namechecked in it!)
Hard][Nova RPG
Te Deum RPG (French language mediaeval religions wars)
Apocryph (French language religious wars in modern day)
In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (cos the SJG one was “Lite” or PG13)
As it happens my friend Paul, who has a career interest in history, also ordered Te Deum this week. I have an inkling his French is better than mine 
Sadly I missed Salon de Jeu, a big games convention which started on Friday and ended today. If I’d known it was on I’d have made the effort.
Reviews of these games to follow….
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