Month: April 2008

“Do people still go to cons?”

This year, Q-CON celebrates it’s 15th year.

It was sixteen years ago that I finished the ‘market research’ of conventions in Ireland (via Gaelcon and Warpcon – and getting illicit copies of their after-con reports from by Bothan spies). This was while I was the President of the RPG society, Dragonslayers.

It was a year later that I proposed the convention to the then-committee and we modify the constitution to create the “Convention Director” post and run a convention Q-CON 1 on a wing and a prayer. I organised the Megagame and ran games in 5 game slots that weekend. I got real tired.

For Q-CON 2 and 3, I took the mantle of Convention Director and in the face of promisers (who never deliver) and naysayers (who you should ignore) and no-confidence supporters (who stab you in the back) it was moderately successful. I burned through any good will I had built up and alienated people who didn’t even know me.

So why would I consider running a convention again?

Because someone asked me to?

Yeah.

WotW: Earth – The Second Launch

“Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on Earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.”

Chapter One “The Eve of the War” – The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

Roughly two years after the arrival of Martians on Earth, a second series of ten “shots” are fired from the surface of the red planet.  Is this another invasion?  Was the first invasion actually that, or was it just a scouting mission?  Now that we have had two years in which to come to terms with such technology has been left behind, will that make it any easier for us to communicate with inter-planetary cousins?

The Second Launch is a set of ideas, guidelines and scenarios for GMs to allow them to generate that same sense of wonder, awe and terror that the original landings created.  Here are some questions that will be answered:

  • Where do the capsules land?  Was England an accidental or deliberate target?  If they landed somewhere remote, would they have had more time to adapt and be ready?
  • What weaponry will they bring to bear?
  • Will they have some kind of protection against our microbiology?
  • Will they be able to multiply when they get here?
  • Do they have Earth-bound help?
  • Can we talk to them?
  • Can we kill them?
In running a WotW: Earth campaign, the GM has the opportunity to create a rich and dark atmosphere, based on the late 19th century society, and its science, in which the game is set.  To let the characters create their backgrounds, encounter some of the strangeness created by the Aftermath, and come to understand the world as it is now.  Then to put that world back into danger by giving them an enemy that is known but yet unknown, and terrifying in either capacity.
The Second Launch forms part of the War of the Worlds: Earth game book.

“I don’t have any choice, somebody has to save the world”

I’ve been reading a lot of old comics this week.

There’s been a recent thread on RPG.net about creating a setting where Superheroes conquered the world.

This, along with other memes, was part of what I was working on with the Watchtower game.

When I first started writing my own superhero settings for the Marvel Super Heroes game, I started with Zenith. This was the name of a team of superheroes based in the UK (and years before Zenith the superhero started in 2000AD). The original lineup was Metalon (strongman), a Minddancer (telepath) and Shatter (telekinetic). As time went on, the lineup changed. Metalon and Shatter stayed, but they added Aura (telepath), Scorch (pyrokinetic), Sentinel (energy manipulator) and Synapse (speedster). It was around this time that I started writing my own fiction around these characters which turned into my first and only attempt at a novel. As I was about fourteen, it needed some work, needless to say.

Zenith stayed with me for around 3 years until they lost their government funding. Synapse died, Metalon and Sentinel left and a new group called Apocalypse Inc. started, funded by the rich but probably insane Hemlock (snaffled from Jack of Hearts, Marvel Premiere #44). Additions to the team were Stasis (Healer) and Nucleon (radiation controller). There were also villains from the time: Tantrum and Hysteria, Skybreaker, The Red Menace, Lillith. This was all using the Marvel System.

I started writing my combined UK background for superheroes, including the WW1 supersoldier, Yeoman, his modern day clone, Lionheart, Lancaster, Vitesse, Prodigy, La Feu, Striker, Plasma, Blaze “Death!”, Frost, Nano, DeathMaster, Deacon, Schreck.

Not long after I started playing in Jeremy’s game and this introduced the Zombie Squad to my cosmology. The lineup, as I recall, was Sergeant Strike (scrapper with a force field), Demon Motorbike guy (it had a graser too), UnderGraduate Von Doom (you know, ruler of small country, but before he got his doctorate), Stick (a martial artist) and Baron Samedi (voodoo loa). They fought giant robots, travelled to Ravenloft (where we recruited Strahd) and other places and annoyed an ancient evil a million years ago in a place a million light years away which immediately started pursuing them at light speed. And should have arrived…just…about…then. I don’t remember fighting it. I think we may have changed game. Or left the group. I don’t remember. We used Jeremy’s homebrew system for this game.

The next superhero game involved the Protectors. These individuals: Glitter, Warhead, Download, Quill, Inferno – faced off a weather manipulator in Colorado and that was the only game we played. We used the ill-fated Heroes and Heroines for this.

After that, we had quite a few one-offs until I got a few friends together, wrote a backstory for the US involvement in the world and started my first Watchtower game. This was really the first superhero game that I placed in the USA. The Watchtower was an organisation that spanned the US with approximately 40 offices across the nation. They had quasi-legal status with the US government though few actual legal powers but a good relationship with the Federal government made crime-fighting a lot easier. The San Francisco team had recently been killed by a bloodthirsty voillain known as Bloodrage and they were recruiting new members. They were Jade Dragon (Alan), Atomic III (Gavin), Bullet (Iain), Ebony (John) and Ivory (Aidan). Gavin’s second character, Wraith, debuted when he let Atomic III go mad. Aidan’s second character, Quickening, replaced Ivory pretty soon as well. Most notably they eliminated (yes, that is a euphemism for killed) Bloodrage and defeated ARES. the US Supersoldier. They also witnessed first hand the issues with FORTRESS and why time-travel is bad.

This involved creating a whole background for the US as well. This was “The American Dream” and had luminaries such as Atomic I, Lifeline, Moon Boy and others I don’t remember. World War 2 superheroes and their unfinished legacies.

A few years later, we continued with the New York Watchtower. Again it started with a recruitment drive where Balance (Paul), Yellowfist (Gavin), Indigo (Aidan) and Skyhook (Rob) joined up with other existing members (Red Shift, Psiren, Jack White) to bolster out the membership. There was a conspiracy afoot to extend the reach of the Watchtower globally though ‘conspiracy’ often has negative connotations. This was the beginnings of an “Authority” level campaign which is why I permitted the monstrously powerful characters that the players had. e.g.

  • Yellowfist, a modern-day Native American shaman gained his powers by channeling spirits. In theory he could do anything but he only had Falcon and Bear at the start.
  • Skyhook could move huge amounts of stuff around with the power of his mind. This includes a TK gun platform as well as being able to lift huge amounts.
  • Balance has absolute control over matter – being able to shape almost any amount at will and being able to transmute other amounts.
  • Indigo, a high tech hero, had teleportation abilities which could place objects on the outskirts of the solar system.

The “plan” was that they would have the opportunity to step into these roles. Yellowfist as the infantry, with Skyhook as artillery, Balance as the engineers and Indigo as recon and supply. Sadly they only got round to cleaning up the oceans before, due to real life, we had to split the group.

I’d still like to continue that game, in theory, with the same or different characters.

This finishes some of the cosmology for my superhero games.

New Downloads

Some people were looking for them so I’ve put some downloads on the books page:

Wildtalents fanzine 1 60K PDF
Wildtalents 3 fanzine 1.5MB PDF
Wildtalents 5 fanzine 373K PDF
23rd letter character sheet 22K PDF
zombi character sheet 86K PDF

If there’s anything else in particular that people are looking for, please mention it and I’ll see what I can dig up. Please note that this wildtalents fanzine was something I was doing nearly a decade before Wild Talents (the superhero RPG) was released.

Man vs…

The topic of conversation this morning in the car was the substance of plots. Traditionally, we have plots which are Man versus Man (and yes, I intend to keep the male pronoun because anyone who would be sensitive to it likely has stopped reading a long time ago).

Man versus Man
This describes the quintessential struggle, the stuff of legend. Good versus evil, human versus alien, hero versus monster, rebel versus tyrant, civilised man versus the savage; the most accurate description might be the struggle between two directed intelligences. These games are easy to play because the adversary is present and real. They have motivations and malevolence. They are Hans Gruber to your John McLain, Lector to your Starling, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man to your Venkman.

We fight them because they represent the things that are wrong in this world, and they are flashy, obvious wrongs – whether they’re stealing millions of dollars with a funny accent, killing Gary Oldman or trashing Manhattan (although we’re unsure that killing Gary Oldman is a crime). We feel a sense of satisfaction seeing them put down (even if we know they may return).

Man versus Nature
Some of the best adventure stories are those told from the point of view of a single protagonist where his conflict lies not with the righting of wrongs or the marching of armies, but in the struggle against nature itself. Whether you’re weathering a Perfect Storm, trying to survive the Day After Tomorrow or even just making your way through a post-Zombie epidemic Dawn of the Dead, the environment you are in is challenging enough to make a compelling story.

One of the memes of Zombi, was that the walking dead were not your enemy, other people were your enemy. This was borne from every movie:- you can hide away in your fortress and the mindless zombie hordes can beat upon your door but it requires intelligence to breach your defenses. This isn’t to say that nature cannot be a harsh enemy. It is mindless but merciless. It can be witnessed when you travel from place to place, be it the cold of the snow-bound mountains, the drought of the desert or the cold emptiness of the vacuum.

Man versus Self
If religion is to be believed, we struggle with this every day. When we consider physical attraction, we encounter the most base ‘animal’ parts of ourselves. The acknowledgment that another human is attractive goes back to our pre-sentient days and when we continue on our way, we have successfully mastered the animal. This extends obviously to the personal wars against addiction, fetish, desire, greed, sloth and rage. We control ourselves and, as a result, these ideas are possible to play out in a game.

These were most recently examined in the World of Darkness games by White Wolf: I interpreted them as Lust (Vampire), Rage (Werewolf), Pride (Mage), Sloth (Changeling), Envy (Wraith). Though these games it was possible to spend a lot of time engaging in ‘versus self’ gaming as the player articulated the internal struggles of their personal demons. They are the Louis in LeStat, Hulk’s Banner, Star Wars’ Han Solo.

The State of the RPG Industry

An article on MSNBC writes about the woes in the RPG market:

“Wizards does not reveal sales figures, but Pramas estimates the overall market for traditional role-playing games at $30 million annually.”

When I first read this, my immediate thought was ‘piffle!’ and that it was a vast underestimate of the market.
Okay. Let’s take this apart.

  1. Wizards doesn’t release sales figures but we have to assume that Wizards is being honest when it says it’s got 300 people on staff. 300 people multiplied by a minimum wage salary of $20 000 is 6 million dollars. But if we assume that people are earning more than that but only a third of them are working on traditional role-playing games (as opposed to board games and card games) and we add in the cost of printing and shipping books, we kinda should keep that figure constant. That’s a huge section of the market gobbled up by Wizards if Chris Pramas is right.
  2. Chris Pramas works for a competitor to the traditional role-playing games department at Wizards. Green Ronin has a photo of 9 chunky people (one of which is a woman, the rest seem to be very hairy) and I think we must assume that they’re earning $60K each? You’d hope. That, plus the costs of printing etc, must drive the revenue of this company to a million dollars or so?
  3. A few lot of years ago, James Wallis told me over a very nice vegan meal in Cork that the industry had a problem. The market was not very large and you had several large-ish companies fighting for scraps and really, no-one was making any money. Which is why, I think, he decided to go elsewhere. What does this mean – people with talent shouldn’t waste their time trying to write RPGs if they can do anything else well.
  4. If the $30 million dollar estimate is right, you can see why Wizards made the land grab a few years ago with d20 and OGL. It was an overt, aggressive move on their part and it created a monster and, due to the economies of small grabby companies and the lowered bar to entry, it really damaged the industry as the market was flooded with Wizard’s d20-branded crap. Small companies, including Green Ronin, saw it as an opportunity to land grab as well. Boom, thousands of shit products hit the market and the consumers did what they do best. They bought them, they read them and they felt burned.
  5. This all serves really to further label the market as the ‘D&D market’ which is a misnomer. I definitely see a lull in the market. Our local club seems to have all the same people, they’re just older and fatter. I don’t have any visibility of QUB Dragonslayers any more and don’t know what they’re doing from day to day. Does Pramas have any real knowledge of the PDF games market. I’ve spent more on RPGs in the last year (PDF and dead tree) than I had in the five years previous.
  6. As a comparison, World of Warcraft is estimated to pull in $1 billion a year by itself. Yes, it’s the largest of the MMOs but it’s not the only MMO out there.

So what’s with the future of gaming then? MMOs are going to be more accessible even though they are more expensive because they offer some social elements with the instant gratification of ‘pretty things to look at’. I admit I’ve been tempted to try WoW and City of Heroes but I always stop myself. I don’t want to sit, sequestered in a room and try and schedule hours of gameplay with my significant other. I like to get out with the guys, sit in a room with other people and have it as my night out. The social side of things is much more important than the quick hit of a game.

From a business point of view, the gaming market is always going to be hard to estimate. There’s no easy way to estimate the number of gamers out there as some of them never interact with anyone outside their own gaming group. And the people who run homebrew games? From an industry economy point of view, they may as well not exist.

Comparisons with other hobbies must be made. We’re not really in a sporting hobby. There’s a thriving market for people who play football, who go scuba diving, who surf or sail, climb or whack balls with sticks. We’re the trainspotters, chess players and stamp collectors. We have to establish and embrace that we’re not cool, we’re not the masters of the world and it doesn’t really matter. We’re not affected by the doom and gloom headlines of the mainstream press. Even card games have some respectability, wargames even more so. It doesn’t matter what you look like – from lardass nerd to malnourished goth – you play role-playing games, you’re a dork.

And would it matter if the RPG companies folded?

I think not.

Site refresh

Bear with us while we engage in some site jiggery-pokery.  Those of you who subscribe to the feed shouldn’t notice any difference.  Also it’s a bit harder to tell who wrote what post at the moment, but that’s OK by me – it makes it look like I’ve written more!

OREs Magica

I spent some time at work today thinking about things that could be done with the ORE system. I admit that I’ve not yet had the chance to really test it in anger

Part of this is to kick a bit of life into the forums at Project Nemesis as well as the ones at Arc-Dream especially seeing as July brings us Wild Talents second edition.

OREs Magica is a terrible pun on Ars Magica, one of the best RPGs of all time. In Ars Magica, the players can be Grogs (the peasants and footsoldiers), Companions (nobles, ‘adventurers’ and ‘special’ characters’) and Mages. The background is ‘Mythic Europe’ which, to be honest, can be as ‘fantastic’ or as ‘mundane’ as you like. I quite like the “turnips and boils” of low fantasy contrasted with the Magic of Ars Magica.

OREs Magica takes the background of Ars Magica and plonks it onto a ORE-based system. I don’t have Reign yet but I’m guessing that the Reign system works much the same (though they have the concept of Expert Dice which are a little like Hard Dice.)

Anyway – the thought I had was that you could easily replicate the Techniques and Forms of Ars Magica onto the ORE system.

The Techniques (or Verbs) of Magic are:

  • Creo,
  • Rego,
  • Perdo,
  • Intellego,
  • Muto

The Forms are:

  • Animal,
  • Auram,
  • Aquam,
  • Corpus,
  • Herbam,
  • Ignem,
  • Imagonem,
  • Mentem,
  • Terram,
  • Vim.

e.g. Curdus the Fire Mage has 3d in Creo and 2d in Ignem. To create Fire, she rolls 5D. One match is needed minimum and the height of the roll dictates the intensity of the flame. The Width of the roll can indicate speed or skill. She also has 1d in Perdo but no dice in Aquam, therefore she cannot “destroy water” without additional, outside assistance. The most common assistance is Vis.

Vis is the purified essence of magic as extracted from magical things. To convert, for instance, a Magical Bull’s Heart into Vis requires two rolls; the first being Muto Animal and the second being Creo Vim. A failure in the first roll may be attempted again. Failure in the second roll means the Vis disappears in a dramatically appropriate way. Success in both rolls means a number of points equal to the width of the Creo Vis roll are extracted from the heart.

But why do we need Vis? Every Mage wants more Vis. Why? Because Vis has some very special properties. Each point of Vis that is expended in a Magic roll can have one of the following effects:

  • Each point adds a single dice to the Magic Roll adding to Techniques and Forms. This means that you can perform pretty much ANY magic if you have Vis to help.
  • Each point adds a year and a day of permanence (in the Ars Magica book, adding Vis makes something permanent but I never liked that.) After the year and a day, the magic wears off. This has some serious repercussions for Longevity Potions and magical constructs. It won’t affect a house built with magic if the structure itself is sound.

The maximum amount of Vis that may be used in any activity is equal to your Vim score.

To do any more on this I guess I’ll have to buy Reign 🙂 Okay, I’m convinced!

WotW: Earth – The Computational Analyser

“In the Spring of that year I had the good fortune to visit my friend, Mr Askell, at the Royal Society where they were pursuing development of a computational device using the research of intellectual giants who had gone before. Bright young scientists to’ed and fro’d with metal rods and some articles salvaged from the Martian machines. This device, Askell explained, could perform complex mathematics faster than the most talented idiot savant and I watched in awe as nothing particularly exciting seemed to be happening. “This,” Askell explained, “is the future”.
In the background I could swear I heard the tuts of the luddites of the Royal Society making their opinions known.”

The first Computational Analyser was built in Manchester University in 1900. It drew scientists from afar to view the processes which ran it – whole orders of magnitude faster than Babbage’s engine due to the salvaged Martian technology which powered it. What a Babbage Engine could perform in 3 minutes could be calculated in 3 seconds on the Analyser.

The building of the device was originally opposed by both the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. However it was funded entirely by the Royal Navy and by 1903, there were six analysers in Britain and a further two had been shipped to the Americas each with a full maintenance crew of twenty.

Supporting Links:
Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Thomson’s Differential Analyser
Cynical-C