Category: Commentary

An update and also “Under Development”

These are the games I’m currently working on – as in trying to spend an hour every night writing something, anything. Some nights are more productive than others. I’m only hampered my Black Macbook being pinched by my partner because she has more important stuff to do but hopefully before the end of September that will be resolved when I take delivery of a brand spanking new 17″ MacBook Pro.

It’s a much better machine for working on at night anyway because it’s got the whole glowing keyboard thing which means I can tap away at night without the light on.
My only distraction so far really (apart from her indoors) is Battlefield 2142 which is proving to be a lot of fun and I’m slowly but surely getting better at playing it as I get used to the health dispensers and the ammo dispensers. I need to practise more before playing against real humans and also need to get learning the maps! I’ll also be able to play it on my new laptop which will be a real relief considering the discomfort in my back after hunching over an iMac while perched on a stool with my head cocked to one side due to the sloping roof in the little side room.
Without further discussion, here’s what I’m working on.

“6” – previously named CONTROL, “6” is a modern espionage game framework. The initial background is Cold War era, British Secret Service (MI6) with a setting more familiar to readers of Le Carre or Deighton than Fleming. Release planned before December 2007.
“Solar Racer” – a sports-focused sci-fi RPG set in and around the dangerous sports of zero- and microgravity vacuum racing. Complete background for the world post 2200 and guidelines for pimping your racer. Steals a lot from an earlier game I wrote but never finished called “Airtight”. Maybe it’ll see release at some point as a supplement for ‘Racer. Release Spring 2008
“Time Killers” – a series of one-off adventures. Each scenario includes rules, pre-generated characters, setting and scenario. Basic premise is the players are time-travellers tasked with “fixing” some bloopers in time. Each scenario should take 2-4 hours which is perfect for those of us who find ourselves with a minimum of prep time or have a free slot at a convention.  Release of first scenario, December 2007.

Proof of the Matrix: The Roger Paradox

To be honest it eludes me…how anyone could hold a baby in their arms and be drunk in by their tiny eyes, heart softened by their tiny fingers closing around your own elephantine digits…

….and then call the wee boy Roger.

I never knew any kids called Roger when I was growing up. But I meet people called Roger every day.
It justifies the opinion that we really are living in The Matrix. Everyone we know around our age was created at that age, as memory began.

There were never any infants called Roger. Ever.

Top 10 Roleplaying Games of All Time

Just to confuse matters, these are in alphabetical order but to my mind they represent the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to roleplaying games.
Amber – The godchild of Zelazny’s novels, Amber brought us some really innovative methods of determining hierarchy and conflict resolution in a diceless roleplaying system. Re-defining the player character as a “godlike being” among tiny humans while also making them juniors in their own hierarchy.
Ars Magica – The definitive fantasy/Mythic Europe game brought us Troupe Play – the idea that you would maintain multiple characters in a single game. This concept has since been applied to almost every genre. Ars Magica still leads the way in running a Mythic Europe game out of the box.
Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu – One of the first games where the ability to hit someone was not the primary focus of creating a character. It was the first time it certainly when more people were interested in creating characters as “professors” and “archeologists” rather than “fighters” and “magic users”.
CyberPunk – What did it do for us? In such a combat-heavy game, it got us seriously thinking about initiative, armour, the damage that guns inflict and also how playing a bona-fide X-factor applicant (Rockerboy) was a real option. It also gave us Netrunning and helped us realise that a Netrun was really boring for the rest of the players.
Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) – redefined the super-hero RPG genre by presenting the most flexible, most configurable game system of all time without compromising simplicity. Talk about a game that refuses to die!
Pendragon – a shot in the eye for recent indie games which attempt to force immersive roleplaying by pigeon-holing players into restrictive roles. You play a knight. That’s it. Not a priest or magic user. Playing a rogue is right out. Not only that – it pays to be a Paladin. It’s essential to your progress to act like a knight.
RuneQuest – the champion of Basic Role-Playing and also shouldering Glorantha, one of the most popular culture-game settings out there. It helped re-define the role of the magic user (in essence, everyone is a magic user) and gave real depth to the relationship between gods and their followers.
Skyrealms of Jorune – my personal favourite as a culture-game setting which stretched the imagination as to what could be really familiar as well as superbly alien. Not everyone could take Thriddles seriously but the background, a web of secrets, was enticing and rich, richer perhaps than any other man-made background.
SLA Industries – a relative newcomer but in spite of the not-entirely-shocking revelations near the end, we had some of the most involving gaming in this setting which, on the face of it, did more for trivialising murder than any other game. It was the first and last game to successfully meld horror and sci-fi.
Vampire – love them or hate them, White Wolf brought a much needed influx of people into the hobby and some of them remained. We’ve not seen a change in the market since to the same scale and it would be unlikely anyway. Vampire taught us that a game could be about humanity and character and not just about wearing black leather trenchcoats, mirrorshades and strapping a katana to your back.
WFRP – takes a lot of rap for being a game for losers – by this I mean, the game setting kinda reinforces even more than CoC that you cannot win. Even if you do find the demon possessing the guy who is on the throne, tomorrow you’ll catch some horrific disfiguring disease and die anyway.

These are mine.

What are yours?

Racer

For the last forever, Aidan and I were working on a new game. It started out as an idea for a videogame based on racing through courses around the Solar System, such as skimming the rings of Saturn or around an asteroid with an irregular spin. The idea was exciting – at least to us.

Lack of time and money killed the idea but we did a lot more work on the RPG and board game. I concentrated on the mundane stuff. We’ve not had much time to work on it recently but I’m hoping for release before Xmas 😉

Spy games …

Over the last few hours I’ve been watching episodes of ‘The Sandbaggers’ – a Cold War spy thriller TV series which aired in the late 70s and early 80s. Twenty episodes were made and though it was not popular at the time, it is one of the few TV shows I’ve seen with truly intelligent dialog. I bought the series on DVD from Amazon and I’m working my way through the second season right now.

It doesn’t paint a glamorous picture of espionage in any way.

Back in the olden days I GM’d TOP SECRET/S.I. and I have copies of DELTA FORCE and the James Bond RPG. Of course, more often when I run an espionage game I use The 23rd Letter for lots of reasons.

This makes me want to write two games. One a Cold War thriller and the second a post WW2 supernatural/low power superhero game…

More than this – I’d give my right nut for a co-worker.

(Just noticed this thread on RPG.net)

SeaFarers

As I mentioned before, we’re losing our Pendragon GM to the greener pastures of London and I was quite enjoying playing rather than being the GM which is why I’m not rushing in to start up either the Zombi game or continue the WatchTower game (which would need Gav back anyway as we’re down too many players).

A couple of months ago, Paul mentioned he’d like to run a fantasy game which started out small and built up big, reminiscent of my Ars Magica game from the early 90s where I started all the players with Grogs to allow them to get a flavour for the region before allowing them to have a Magus or Apprentice.

So, over the last couple of days we’ve been building a background on the WIKI, making a new game system and writing snippets as well as generating characters and personalities, gods and towns. I’ll dispense some of the stuff I’ve written here on the blog too for public consumption.

SuperMunchkin

As most will know, I’m an RPG-slut. But we’ve had some upheavals recently with people coming and going due to really crap reasons (getting married, moving out of the country, etc).

So we played a card game.

Super-Munchkin only took about an hour to play with three players so it’s decent enough for evenings when no-one has anything prepared. We only got a third of the way through the event deck so there was probably room for a couple more players.

I’m wary of card and board games obviously being an RPG-slut as I mentioned, and doubly wary of a card game which makes a farce out of superhero-gaming – the genre I like most of all.

It’s a fun game, not perhaps as fun as Zombies!!! but worth a look. It only takes a few rounds in the game to go from donating free cards and assistance to other players, to bargaining for cards and treasures to then deliberately hamstringing them. Kinda goes against what we claim is part of the spirit of the RPG (teamwork etc) but it’s just a bit of fun, right?

Would I recommend it? Maybe. The original game, Munchkin, was perhaps a little more groundbreaking and some of the cards are a little but stupid but as I said, we only got a third of the way through the deck as Paul trounced us and got to level 10. To extend the game, had we thought, we should have  insisted on level 20 being the end of the line. but simply doubling the level required is more likely to triple of quadruple the amount of time it takes to play (as level goes up as well as down).

We’re recruiting…

Due to life and circumstance, I’m looking for a couple of extra people for our weekly game sessions. The Monday night/TTN group needs at least one person maybe two, the “various nights call of cthulhu” group needs only one.

So where are all these gamers?

RPGPundit puts it well.

…today, the average parent doesn’t fear RPGs will turn their child into a satan worshiper; the average parent fears that RPGs will turn their kid into a mouth-breathing basement-dweller who they’ll have to support well into their 30s and who will suffer from a host of psycho-social disorders, as well as lifetime virginity.

This might explain why there seems to be a dearth of gamers. I admit, had I not been totally busy on the weekend of Q-CON XIV that I might have tried to recruit.

The Quiet Time

We’ve not posted much in the last couple of weeks. This has been for a few reasons:

  1. Real life has got in the way of roleplaying
  2. Real life has got in the way of writing about roleplaying
  3. We’ve been talking about direction …

#3 is probably most interesting. We were working on a few ( 7 or 8 ) games at a very high level, and we have about 30 ideas that are a few lines long which could become interesting games in their own right. Up until now, we’ve had no real concerted strategy for producing a game.

Now we do. We’ve selected a game, we’ve thrashed out the content and now we’re doing the hard work of creating it. More information will be made available as we get closer to having something finished.

A hatred of self and the games that do it.

How many games put you in the role of playing Ordinary Joe?

Not many.

A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about:

Originally Posted by The RPG Cliche List
Nephilim Law. In modern-day occult games, mortal humans are considered to have the same intrinsic worth as cattle. (So named for Nephilim, a game that is particularly blatant about this.)

Now, Exalted isn’t a modern-day occult game, but you can definitely view it as an anti-humanistic game: in the setting, the various Exalted are the important people in society, and mundane human beings are nigh-irrelevant.

Apart from Nephilim (which Lesley refused to play because she valued the lives of the humans in the game), there are heaps of games which treat the rank and file of the world as nothing but cattle.

The thread at TheRPGSite derails nastily into accusations of racism and a lot of debate about whether the issue is with player characters given their powers or player characters who earn their powers. Those aren’t the issue at all.

The issue is more how the game empowers the players and how thy are encouraged to treat humanity in game.

Nephilim treats humans as disposable underwear. Their incarnations destroy the lives of those they inhabit. And they’ve been doing it for centuries. This provided an issue for many people. The alternative was to inhabit a Thermos and not interact meaningfully in the game (or become a Dr Theopolis-style advisor)

Vampire dehumanises the brutality and violation of feeding in allowing a player character to have a “Herd” score where they can treat humanity like a fast-food restaurant. The designers are at fault as they lost the “tragedy” of the Embrace and the Hunt and chased the gothic-punk “everyone wears leather trenchcoats and hide Katanas up their sweaters” market.

In Exalted, the players are encouraged to become a super-elite. This is based on my interpretation of the Exalted rulebook. You exalt and the game changes into something like Godzilla versus Mothra. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of humanity.

SLA Industries creates inhuman combat monsters who fight contract killers – serial killers with advertising – both of whom take very little notice of the rank and file of humanity. They’re bullet-catchers. They’re incidental damage in the firefight. They’re categorically tragically killed by passing Fire Engines. It’s crap being Joe Ordinary.

I must say, I’m not keen on the idea of humanity hate. I think there is a lot of it owing to the idea that gamers are mostly maladjusted teenagers who want to play out power trip fantasies. It’s sadly true.

Back in my teens I was really uncomfortable playing games set in Northern Ireland. It was just a little close to home. You’re a being of power – do you take a side in the Troubles? And the one game we did play had one player work out his revenge fantasies on people who bullied him in school. Healthy therapy? I doubt it. It felt unclean and voyeuristic. Brr.

Are there many games where you play normal humans? Zombi would be one. In The 23rd Letter it probably pays to be a normal human.

From superheroes to Knights errant.

Last night we decided to give The WatchTower a rest as we’ve lost Yellowfist for a couple of months due to his impending martial marital duties.

Thus ensued a discussion about what to play instead. A long discussion.

We eventually settled on Pendragon. Paul is playing a Roman Christian from Dorset. Rob is playing a Saxon from Silchester. And I’m playing a Cymric Christian from Lindsey.

My character, Uwain, a stocky Northerner is overshadowed by his bearlike Saxon friend and his Roman friend in terms of family glory (he starts with 15 whereas the others start with hundreds). He’s also the only player to start without a proper warhorse. He is, however, the better swordsman, lancer and horseman of the three and has gained some reknown for his valor.

At the start of next session, we journey to a tournament…somewhere…for something…

I bought a White Wolf game this week

I was doing my six-monthly browse through the stacks at Replay in Bangor and as usual found myself not wanting to leave without parting with some cash. It wasn’t due to the intrusion of the proprietor who helpfully inquired if there was something he could help me with (wow, it was kinda irritating), but because I like to support my local game store. The plight of game stores is legend.

So this is why I find myself with a copy of the main book from White Wolf’s latest line: Scion

Scion Hero is about people finding out they are the sons and daughters of gods long past. To their credit they include a good description of the pantheons they think would be fashionable (Norse, Japanese, Aztec, Egyptian, Voodoo, Greek) and if the company’s past is anything to go by there will be new pantheon splatbooks out in the next few months as well as some net-pantheons created by rabid fans.

It’s not a bad book, ideal for the generation of low powered heroes along the lines of Hercules, Perseus and other offspring of the gods. Of course I’ll never get around to playing it having neither the players nor the GMs available even though it’s a low level superhero game.

Scion Hero is the first of a series of books which continues in June this year with Scion DemiGod which will be covering the more powerful scions – I suppose it might be the equivalent of the D&D Expert or Master set if Scion Hero is to be considered the Basic set.

I’m not mad struck on the layout but then this is the first WW game I’ve bought in a long time. The art ranges from very good to “uh, what is that meant to be” which isn’t to say any of it is bad.

It’s a lot of fun to read too.

Heroes

Heroes is a lot of fun, one of the two series that I can be bothered watching (the other is The Dresden Files).

Of course, they just revealed both Eric Roberts and Malcolm McDowell on staff. I’m sorry guys, but I realy don’t think this is going to turn out well for anyone. Eric was over the top and a major reason why the recent Dr Who film was such a stinker. And McDowell, whether you see him in Star Trek Generations or Tank Girl is just the same over the top villain.

If you HAD to cast them, why not break with tradition and cast them as the good guys?

Art:

northerain is the blog of the artist behind Bloodsong Media. I like his stuff which he describes as:

My style is more or less based on existing photographs. I use those to paint over them in photoshop. Since they’re not sketches, it’s impossible to do it in black and white.

Sounds perfect for both The 23rd Letter and what I also envisaged for Qabal. And I am interested in finding out what this image is about.

Diddlysquat is dead

Mark notes that Diddlysquat is dead.

I didn’t know much about it, to be honest but reading the testimony of specky I’m reminded of lots of the silliness that went on within Crucible Design.

In the end, projects like this are fuelled by a small core of people (usefully termed schemers and collaborators.). Everyone else is pretty much surplus to requirements but as these types of projects tend to be started by friends, people can be a little over-cautious about being honest here. Allowing a project to slide (or worse fail) because you didn’t want to hurt the feelings of someone who isn’t contributing seems silly on the face of it. But we all do it (at least those of us who are human have).

The most annoying thing, when a project is failing or when someone is being asked to leave a project, is the tendency for some to be passively obstructive (or even actively destructive). I’ve seen this in the RPG industry as well as in The Real World. Failing to fulfill promises again and again, blame-shifting, becoming upset when duties are removed and yet, when the deadline comes, their inactivity causes the deadline to slide. Problems like this plagued our fanzine WildTalents and seriously delayed the production of every single book we ever published. And when I stopped propping people up, when I stopped doing the extra work to make things happen and when I refused to give credit where it was not due, then Crucible Design stopped producing books.

Q-CON, another project I invested hugely in (I did the preliminary research, coving everything I could from WARPS, got the budget for Q-CON 1, got the people together, ran Q-CON 2 and 3) was always beset at the start of the year by people who had ideas but no intention of implementing anything or completing anything. It meant that with 2 weeks of preparation (after 6 months of failed investigation by two people), I was left alone to run the convention and pull together the Star Trek Megagame. I had to rely on real people with real commitment to fun to get it done (and a wave goes out to Colin and Lesley on this one). Sure, we pulled successful profitable conventions out of nowhere but it wasn’t without a committee that was so supportive that they had a vote of no-confidence in my ability to run the convention which failed:- probably more to do with the individuals not wanting to have to take over…

When relations break down within a project, it’s best for everyone and best for the project if you take the steps to cut out the chaff. I wish I’d done it with Crucible wayback when but even now I find it hard to do probably because I’m not the git everyone thinks I am.

Really.

Now, identifying the difference between chaff and rot is difficult and I dont think anyone gets it right. Chaff are just people who serve no useful purpose. They probably slow things up because in a democratic committee you have to ask everyone’s opinion. Chaff won’t kill you but they may bore you.

Rot are much worse – these guys are scheming against you and against the success of the project. These are the guys who will plot with junior members of the team and do their best to make sure their name is at the top of the list of every success and nowhere to be seen in the event of a failure. When you’re presenting your work, at a convention or whatever, they’re usually the first out with the pen when someone asks for a book signing.

In my experience, the speed at which someone gets a pen to sign a book at request is inversely proportional to their contribution to the book and you can be pretty sure that if someone has their pen out before you ask then they likely were responsible for delays in the product rather than actually being productive.

Thing is: if you’re a team leader then you already know who the chaff and the rot are. Be honest with yourself.

Bit of a buzz on these days

I’ve been writing a lot more these last few days – ironically not much on the two tasks I have been given – but plenty on other stuff which I shouldn’t be doing. I got some new books as well which I hope to tear through and get reviews up as soon as possible.

Maybe it’s because I have a lot more time these days to wallow in self-pity … read and contemplate the world.

Hm.

Renaissance Magic

The Guardian has a book review on De viribus quantitatis (On the Powers of Numbers) penned by Luca Paciola, a man who was a personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci and who is considered not only the father of modern (double entry) accounting but also one of the leaders in magic tricks. The book covers mathematical puzzles, tricks, proverbs and verses and codes.

Don’t try this at home…

For washing your hands in melted lead

Take cool well water and soak your hands for a while; then shake them, you can put them in a pan full of melted lead over a flame, and it will not cook you. It is even better if you put some ground rock alum in the water … to the uneducated … it will appear to be a miracle.