Author: matt

Gamer. Writer. Dad. Serial Ex-husband. Creator of The 23rd Letter, SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO, ZOMBI, Testament, Creed. Slightly megalomaniac

Episode Six – 28th October 2000

The team was immediately dispatched to intercept the intruder who seemed to be a humanoid waterspout, heading towards the land. Debate ended fruitlessly with the humanoid who called itself “Ocean” and a short battle ensued – Yellowfist, Balance and SkyCrane providing the muscle, Psiren and INDIGO the recon. Eventually a psychic targetting from Psiren enabled Yellowfist to strike at the source of the ocean manipulation, knocking him out.

The episode ends with the team holding onto Ocean and wondering what to do with him. If they turn him over they know for sure he’ll disappear into the depths of Fortress, never to be seen again. And what’s to be done about the several thousand miles of pollutants along the shores of North America?

Episode Five – 28th October 2000

“Any other business?” was the last words of the meeting spoken before the polished teak of the conference table began to dribble onto the floor into a congealing mess. The wood grain, melting and flowing like and oily slick. The assembled team, everyone minus Balance, had the same word on their lips “Balance”…the marble floor of the conference room began to sag and spill into the basement below and even the walls of the room seemed to curve inwards as if the massive weight of the building was pushing down upon itself.

The effect began to fade as soon as it appeared with only two notable clues. Both, impressions of some of the Ten Commandments, appearing on solid surfaces.

Balance returned to the WatchTower to find the place in disarray and assisted the technical teams in reshaping the walls and surfaces back to what they should have been. He had to endure some interrogation as he was not only the solution but the prime suspect. It was apparent however, that the WatchTower was under attack.

And it was not over, either.

As soon as the last block of marble was fixed, there was another attack. This time a series of bursts of psychokinetic energy which caused a constant 1 mm/sec movement of nearly everything within WatchTower. There was more prperty damage as fixed objects tore free from their housings and every few minutes there was a massive burst which smashed wood and bent steel.

Still under attack, there was a more pressing concern. Reports of sewage and pollutants washing up on shores across the eastern and western seaboards had been a minor news story earlier and Red Shift had investigated. Now it was the most important thing as a humanoid figure was spotted at the edge of the pollution belt, heading for the Eastern Coast of the US. As the most capable team on the East coast, WatchTower NY was deployed….

Out of Character

A couple of days ago I wrote about and got some very interesting comments about how this is relevant to games.

On the Story Games forum they talk about Improv Theatre and how drama and story is made up of those things which are unusual or out of character as long as there is context and justification.

Meserach writes: “The story in which the otherwise devoted nun kills a baby for no reason at all other than the shock value? Sucks. The story in which the otherwise devoted nun kills a baby, but surrouding material gives us some insight into why? That could be a good story.”

Mark W writes: “In my experience, some people have this notion of character that really doesn’t extend much beyond the “pick two keywords and play them out no matter what” style.”

Like, say, “Lawful Evil” or “CareGiver/Curmudgeon” (because I might as well piss off the D&D folk as well as the White Wolf folk in order to get the most hate mail).

In the WatchTower game there are things happening in the background that I want the players to start moving forward. We’ve just started the creation of the B-Team, named so because they’re the second wave of heroes for WT-NY. After this, the players will make more characters (in a few weeks time), but this time playing the part of the conspirators behind the scenes. It’ll be an interesting roleplaying challenge for some and also an opportunity to add justfication to the actions which have gone before. That will mean giving away some of the plot, but the plot has to be player driven.

I remember back more than a decade to an Ars Magica game I ran in Dragonslayers. At one point we had 11 players and half of them had two characters. And one in particular, played by John D, was given an artifact that when activated would give him the power of a Tenth of Hell. The activation was an old curse which, in order to enact, he had to gather the right hands of thirteen friends. The character did this, betraying thirteen comrades and escaping suspicion due to John’s silver tongue and then decided not to enact the curse after all. Too risky apparently. These were the actions of an ostensibly good but perhaps selfish or power hungry character. His character’s arrogance was that his comrades (grogs, companions, other wizards) were beneath his contempt and he used them. When it came to the ultimate justification of the character, his courage failed. This was a bigger, badder thing than he. And he feared to raise up what he could not put down. It made his evil actions which were out of character all the more tragic when it was made apparent that his primary trait was cowardice. I loved it. It actually made the story. I do feel a bit sorry for the one armed bowman previously known as “the best archer in all of Christendom”. Them’s the breaks.

Heroic imaginations

This is probably more suitable for infurious because it’s riffing off Guy Kawasaki.

Nurturing a heroic imagination takes five actions:

  • Maintain constant vigilance for situations that require heroic action.
  • Learn not to fear conflict because you took a stand.
  • Imagine alternative future scenarios beyond the present moment.
  • Resist the urge to rationalize and justify inaction.
  • Trust that people will appreciate heroic (and frequently unpopular) actions.

Heroism: Not just for people who have a spandex fetish

Look out of genre for ideas.

This thread on TheRPGSite looks for some ideas about how to populate a story based on the theme “Traveller: it came from jumpspace!. Some of the ideas are very good while some of them are little more than a re-telling of Alien.

Look outside of the genre. Watch some movies which are not typically sci-fi. I’m sitting watching The Great Escape as I write this. It’s filled with great scenes. What about Hidalgo? What about The Chronicles of Narnia? Misjump creates breach and characters are forced into a world where time moves differently. And where there are strange alien creatures. And a war.

I could even make a plot out of this.

So, some examples from the horror genre.

Watch “HP Lovecraft’s From Beyond”.
With the jump drive as “the machine”. The jump drive malfunctions and everyone feels ill, on edge, skin sensitive to touch. If you have psychics on board they start to broadcast their nightmares. The creatures which exist in jump space are finally able to catch up with this static ship which is trapped half in and half out of jump space. These creatures can be seen as ghosts and are able to flow through the solid walls of the ship. Close to the drive however they are not only visible but solid and attack. Anyone who spends too much time in the presence of the jump drive starts to be affected…and THEY become the monster prowling the ship…

Watch Carpenters’ Prince of Darkness.
Jump drive fails and people start dying – one kills himself by drinking sealant fluid, another kills herselfby bathing in a technobabble energy vortex. There isn’t anything evil here but the flailing jump drive has attracted the attention of something unspeakably alien which is sending it’s base desires. It can drink sealant fluid, it bathes in energy vortices. We pick up on it’s base desires and emulate them. It possesses a couple of NPC crewmembers and uses their minds and eyes to explore the ship, taking time to dismantle equipment and people just to see how they work. Eventually it will become bored and move on or perhaps it will take a liking to this brave new universe and try to cross with the help of it’s possessed souls.

Watch 28 Days Later
Take the example given about low berths being used to transport animals. Think how dangerous an angry chimp or even the ships mascot could be. Give the mascot psychic powers and heightened intelligence and watch it save those who were nice to it and murder those who were nasty to it. Watch how it takes some people and reduces them from being thinking feeling individuals and lobotomises them into becoming animals fueled only by hunger and fear….

Action is character

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Action is character.”

A few years ago a friend of mine came up with the theory that we often play our polar opposites in games. The players under scrutiny here were myself and himself and our characters were a honourable charismatic paladin and a sneaky cutthroat backstabbing rogue. I disagreed at the time but missed out on the bit where he was calling me a sneaky backstabbing rat in real life. I’ve never been clever with that sort of thing.

Aidan remarked the other night that he believes more accurately that we play characters we would like to be. This kinda still leaves me as a sneaky rat but at least this time I wish I was a paladin.

On the other hand, listening to F. Scott Fitzgerald, we define our character by our actions. This is kinda obvious but it’s good of old F. to help us with making it into an interesting soundbite.

r-Maps (and being ahead of the curve)

There’s a lot of talk of relationship maps.

I’ve been playing with the idea of an r-map for gaming for use as a player aid for a while. It really started to surface when playing superhero games in order to try and keep up with the number of NPCs and subplots that were going on. Later, in Ars Magica, it helped when we had troupe play in effect and every player had at least two characters. Otherwise I’d have gone insane. The thing about r-maps is that they depict the society around the character such as this r-map for NPCs in Amber. That said, I think an r-map showing only the public moods and behaviours would be entertaining.

Now…where was I. Yes.

In Qabal, an r-map was necessary for every player, because Qabal was all about troupe play. The first draft I did of this was circa 1996. I liked the imagery of it because the Tree of Life looked very much like a relationship map and I was quite pumped by that idea. Add to it a card-based mechanic inspired by Blackjack 🙂 using Tarot cards and you had what I thought would be a lot of fun. Likewise in the game currently known as “Illusion”, a relationship map is necessary for the PLAYER to keep track of his multiple characters and his relationships to them. How he perceived them. Same mechanic, standard playing cards but less connection to the Tree. But still a beezer idea.

The difference being that a character sheet then appears more like a series of circles with interconnecting lines and the content of each “circle” is the entire character sheet for that individual. For NPCs, they would be much less detailed obviously and tend to be around the edges until adopted by a player (see, another cool mechanic).

More on sexism and racism in games.

More on New Horizons the game that is going to put racism and sexism into every pulp game. I’m going to have to buy it because …

Alexandria2000 writes: Or if they ARE mentioned, it’s in a stereotypical way that makes my teeth ache. So hell yeah, gimme a chance to inject a little reality in the pulp. Stop ignoring the people I want to play because ‘reality and history were boring and sad.’

Surely you mean to add a little fantasy and unreality into the pulps.

That said – there were stories which were indeed sympathetic. The standard pulp hero is ideed a white man, but he often relied upon other racial and sexual achetypes to get things done and more often than not, treated them as equals even if society did not. I’m beginning to see this supplement being an opportunity to put reality in and I’m really thinking that’s the last thing we want to do. Reality is and was bigoted and ugly.

You have a choice. You either make race irrelevant so someone can play a female asian hero who leads the charge against the darkness (and thus rewrite the genre and change history) or you include reality and run the same character and spend half your time smacking landlords and officials about for their lack of modern sensibilities.

Said like that it seems like a petty revenge plot.

Episode Four – 27th October 2000, PM

Skycrane and Psiren arrived safely on the rooftop of WatchTower and were greeted by a concerned INDIGO and the team Paramedic, Robert. Nothing could be done about Skycrane’s smouldering flesh and Robert quipped that it might “clear up in a day or so”. With them, of course, was a bundle wrapped in a red fore blanket which was revealed to be Stephanie Butler, a marketing Exec from Manhattan. She claimed to have been snatched from the street by this red blanket and that left INDIGO looking puzzled at Skycrane. Psiren, at this point, was still unconscious and could add no testimony. Stephanie Butler was detained under the Dangerous Superhuman Felons Act for 24 hours of observation.

Meanwhile, across town, Balance and Yellowfist were flitting over the rooftops and touched down on a busy backstreet. While attracting a lot of attention, they slipped over to the building they were interested in and noticed that the padlock was missing. Entering the warehouse they found boxes, racks of more boxes and a lift shaft leading down…they investigate the lift and Yellowfirst takes a liking to a mini-forklift and starts to wonde rout loud about whether he should have large heavy, forklift-sized , bladed weapons. Forklift in one hand and superpowered priest in the other, Yellowfist starts to descend the lift shaft into darkness.

Meanwhile across town Skycrane and INDIGO set off for the building, eager to provide backup to their companions. They arrive in a split second due to the T-Jump capabilities of INDIGO’s AMP suit and quickly start to descend into the darkness after Yellowfist and Balance.

At the bottom of the shaft, they find and start to explore the tunnel with a special shield composed of steel, made from the very air by Balance’s unearthly abilities. Along that tunnel they find a passage, smooth surfaced, made by man’s hand which leads them deeper into the ground. INDIGO scouting ahead finds that the tunnel opens into a roughly hewn chamber and inside are four superhumans and nearly thirty of these rag-tag denizens of the darkness.

Yellowfist and Skycrane enter quickly and begin to subdue the superhumans who they identify as Sewer, Killerwatt, Gridlock and Asphalt. These superhumans are subdued easily but the denizens start to attack and only stopped by the quick judgement of Balance who steps in and burns them with his searing, invisible Penance Blessing. The team then set about securing the supervillains. Gridlock was slain by the denizens and Sewer escaped by they have KillerWatt and Asphalt in custody. Not a bad innings!

Once this is done, the team start to investigate the remaining roughly carved tunnels. There’s something else out there, an oppressive psychic presence, but try as they might, they cannot track it down…

The scene ends with the team returning to WatchTower with much to think about and some new captives. They’ll have to put them somewhere….

[Above is a true and accurate recollection of everything that you remember.]

sometimes you have to wear your work clothes to the doctor

SXSW covers “Confessions of Superhero” which shows the strange and seedy world of superhero lookalikes…

We see Joe McQueen demolished by the heat inside his colossal Hulk costume — on a record 106-degree day, it’s a brutal 130 degrees inside the emerald-tinged mass of foam … Superman chugs milk right from the jug; Wonder Woman roots in her glove box through the open window of her car as valet parking guys check out her ass; Batman takes a smoke break.

Here’s the link at SXSW’s site and a review at WIRED DOT COM.

Lastly, here’s the web site of the film. Wonder Woman is kinda hot!

Systems

A posting on RPGnet asks us to describe our homebrew systems. I ended up describing mine thusly.

  • Maths-easy 2d6 comedy with either a manga/anime/mecha or zombie holocaust backdrop
  • Qualitative success using 0-3d10 to create a crunchy yet narrative system which can be considered both rules-lite and “a gun game” with a backdrop of psychic powers and government conspiracies dating back to the start of the 20th Century.
  • Card-based Blackjack-inspired mechanics with backdrop of both Stage Magic and Real Magic. Yes, that game. The one I’m infamous for not finishing…
  • [EDIT: Rules light, coarse skilled d6 mechanic – happy now?]

It’s a fun thread, some inspiring stuff in there.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Literally.

It’s always been a frustration to me that I can’t draw.

Jared and I have debated this a few times during my forays to Paris. Nightfall had the advantage of having DavA, Chippy and Stuart. Lucky bastards.

I need artists for WotW, I need an artist to help me with the imagery for Viride and I think we could do with a concept genius for Status: Refugee. The vision thing is easy but translating that vision into the brain of another who has not been there for the inception is very difficult.

My friend Paul, a graphic designer and branding specialist of some note, suggests I:

start hanging out in the art college.. without looking too pervy..lol

Hm, that’s not going to work.

He also says:

is it better to write around images or should images come from story?.. better to team up with a artist and work together.

That’s the problem. I don’t know many artists. And without hanging out at the Art College with a bag of sweeties, I’m not likely to find any. There’s certainly none in TTN that I can see.

Back to the scribing board for me, I guess.

Episode Three – 27th October 2000

Things started off innoculously enough as Donna the receptionist watched the rank and file of WatchTower New York file into the conference room. Jack introduced a new staffmember, Yellowfist, a Sioux warrior who embodies the totems of both Eagle and Bear providing him with superhuman strength and the power of flight.

Red greeted him warmly as did Psiren and Balance though there was some palpable resentment as Skycrane realised that there was a contendor for “mightiest man in the universe”.

The subject moved from the contentious “Sanction Zero” to the events at Liberty Island three days earlier and how the latter might relate to the recent advisory about Smog, Sewer, Asphalt, KillerWatt and Gridlock. What was Squall doing on Liberty Island?

RedShift was dispatched north to the site of a reported fish kill, something he wasn’t thrilled about while the remainder of the team moved to the roof of the building where Balance fashioned a sturdy two-metre wide silver plate from the air, much to the amazement of the rest of the team. Though it was a little unsteady at first, Skycrane effortlessly lifted the plate into the air and the team stepped onto it before winging their way across the city to Liberty Island. Much more dignified than being carried or suspended in mid-air by SkyCrane’s TK.

As they landed safely on the grass, Balance evaporated the silver plate, secure in the knowledge he would be able to summon it up again should they need it.

They spent the next couple of hours interviewing the security staff at the Island until a chance comment caught Skycrane’s trained ear. There were TWO ways to get off the island other than through self-powered flight? The boat was obvious but on further investigation it was revealed that there was a cargo lift and train that tunnelled under the Hudson. At last, a lead…

The team descended in the lift, inspecting the rooms as they went by and checking the status of the generator room. In the cargo basement they could hear the gentle booming of the Hudson above them and a dark tunnel stretched east towards the city, unlit because the only thing to go in or come out of it was an automated train.

Skycrane, impulsive as ever, grabbed a halogen flashlight and sped off down the tunnel. As his lamp dimmed in the darkness, Psiren gasped and began to worry. There was something in the tunnel. Something….hungry…

Psiren’s screams echoed down the tunnel and Skycrane turned on a pin and began to speed through the darkness and burst out into the basement warehouse where Psiren was visibly panicking. She took a long stare down the corridor and shrieked “They’re comingggggggg”.

The next few minutes were a blur of activity as a rag-tag group of men and women burst from the darkness of the tunnel with teeth gnashing and claws raking the air. Yellowfist swatted one and Skycrane bulldozed a group of them with his TK-Ram. They were not just normal humans as they seemed to easily shake off the powerful fists and TK-Rams of Yellowfist and Skycrane.

In the midst of the panic stood Balance, who was holding back from the group as the horrors approached. He could feel something in the darkness, something reaching for him, peeling back the layers of his brain and stroking the contours of his mind with blackened hands. In an attempt to rid himself of the dark and forbidden evil, he let slip with his most devastating attack, right at his two comrades, Yellowfist and Skycrane. A pyrotechnic display of excited atoms and the inner fire from a billion molecular bonds breaking down came from the two as they were immediately assailed by this terrible death-ray effect and eventually Skycrane sagged to the ground, bleeding from every pore. Yellowfist grunted and gritted his teeth through the pain as his Bear-Totem roared within and at that moment his mind was made up. He scooped his team in his arms and summing the Eagle, flew up the lift shaft to safety. Skycrane revived seconds later, though weak from the microfractures in his cell membranes and they waited and watched as their assailants began to scale the walls of the lift shaft.

Seemingly recovered, Balance held out his hand and began to seal the top of the lift chamber with his matter molding powers but not before Skycrane grabbed one of the attackers and hoisted him above where he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness by Yellowfist. Trying to take him outside revived the thing and each time they had to beat him into submission.

To resolve this, they wrapped the unconscious form in a fire blanket and Yellowfist and Balance resolved to travel to the other end of the tunnel and seal it shut as Skycrane took the unconscious Psiren to WatchTower for medical assistance.

What to find?

Insulting the conservatives

Morfedel writes:
“I think its because my conservatives watch Fox news because they (and I) feel that many other news media are liberally slanted. And of course, when you do that as a retreat from “other news sources,” then your news source you do watch is attacked, it comes off as an attack against you as well.”

Only if you’re a dickhead.

Am I being harsh? Everyone else in the world knows that FOX is pro-Bush, pro-War and pro-Conservative (for those of us outside the US, a US Conservative is a extremely right wing individual. Even the liberal left in the US makes the Tories in the UK look like turnip-eating socialists).

It is bizarre that FOX provides The Simpsons.

But to take someone saying “Fox is crap” as insinuating that means “You are crap” shows some deep seated insecurities. It would be different if the individual had said:

Anyone who watches FOX is a weak minded fool with nothing but a pucker on his lips for The American Presidential Rear End

Unborn Ghosts

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

— Richard Dawkins, excerpt from Chapter I, “The Anaesthetic of Familiarity,” of Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998)

Watchtower: Just in over the wire

++++ADVANCE NOTIFICATION ++++ WATCHTOWER EYES ONLY++++

Five superhuman individuals have been contracted for operations unknown in East Coast North America, most likely New York. All operatives in the East Coast region are to collect information and relay to WatchTower Central Services Command.

Codenames

  • Sewer (powers unknown)
  • Gridlock (speedster)
  • KillerWatt (electricity generation)
  • Asphalt (solid material shaping)
  • Smog (powers unknown)

KillerWatt

  • Real Name: Helen Schultz
  • Occupation: Burglar, hired assassin
  • Citizenship: USA, has criminal record
  • Known colleagues: Squall, Hellstrike
  • Powers and abilities:
    KillerWatt is armed with an insulating uniform with embedded battery
    packs. She is able to control the flow of electricity in her immediate
    area and has trained extensively with this ability.

Asphalt

  • Real Name: Eugene Benjamin
  • Occupation: Hired assassin
  • Citizenship: USA, has criminal record
  • Known colleagues: None
  • Powers and abilities:
    Asphalt can reform his body into an asphalt-like substance which
    affords him superhuman strength and resistance. He also has
    limited control of other surfaces and materials.

Gridlock

  • Real Name: Richard Carter
  • Occupation: Hired Assassin
  • Citizenship: USA, has criminal record
  • Known colleagues: None
  • Powers and abilities:
    Gridlock can change the speed of himself or others. He usually
    uses it to make himself into a speedster and, at the same time,
    slow everyone else down.

Sewer

  • No information found.

Smog

  • No information found.

++++