Category: Commentary

Watchtower play test reflections

The recent posts about Watchtower were from a one-shot adventure I ran for my son’s gaming group. They’ve been playing (mostly) D&D together regularly for 3-4 years, and it was a good opportunity to test out the rules with a group that had no preconceptions. The players created Talos-class exotics (the middle of the three classes, which is still very powerful). A few things that I learned from this:

* We need to update our skills to reflect the Watchtower world
* Some power stunts are probably too powerful (looking at you, Chronatics)
* Definitely need to write the rules for Prototypes for high tech heroes

However, broadly speaking the system worked as intended, character creation was pretty quick and fun, and the game flowed easily. We’re going to attempt a variant using troupe play, where each of the players creates a trainee (sidekick?) Achilles-class exotic (the lowest class) to be paired with one of the other players, and in this way we get two different Watchtower teams, and the players get to try different powers and power levels.

Two Books on sale at DriveThruRPG

In an attempt to calm this raging passion I have for writing, I’ve begun to embark on putting my books on DriveThruRPG – the pre-eminent site for selling RPGs online.

Testament and Creed are two books of a trilogy of games. Both are set at the end of the world, in the Jude-Christian sense. The Rapture is upon us and in the first book, Testament, the players are witnesses to the Rapture. In the second, Creed, they are part of the problem with their sorcerous ways.

The third book, Rapture, where the player takes the role of an Angelic Being during the Rapture and the Apocalypse, will be written if the other two do ok.

T2000: W+9

After the fire raged through, we took the UAZ through a small town land on the outskirts of Warsaw. The bushes and trees and grass were still burning. I saw a dog, it’s back on fire, screaming as it ran down the road. The metal of our vehicles began to heat and I wondered whether or not I survived the initial blast and maybe I was in hell like my pastor said I would be. We poured water on our ammunition, afraid it might ignite. But, eventually we made it past the fires and I’m thankful that our tires didn’t melt. Fuck that pastor.

(Inspired by scenes of the fires in California. And in my impatience for the new edition. I said to my gaming group I want to play in a game where the spirit of Saving Private Ryan lives. A group which cannot be sundered is fighting to get home in a world that is completely sundered, and righting a few wrongs on the way)

About Frontier and Representation

When I conceived Frontier it wasn’t the way it is now. There was a little collaboration from others and everyone had their own idea what it would become. For one it was Sci-Fi-Done-Right in the science. For another it was a aliens done right. My vision was essentially the standard picture of the Bridge Crew in Star Trek but with one token white face – rather than one or two token black faces. It would be humanity-done-right.

Representation

I stopped working on Frontier for “personal” reasons. You can see I had a multi-year hiatus on all of these creative outputs as my life was too “busy”. But now I return, and I’ve had some education. On actual representation, on the most excluded and marginalised in society and with an expanded background in performance arts and film production, an understanding of what representation means.

Whoopi Goldberg says that when she saw Star Trek she told her mother in amazement “I just saw a black woman on TV and she wasn’t a maid!”

Can you imagine never seeing a face like yours on television? This is why movies like Wonder Woman were important. This is why Reys saga, in the latest Star Wars movies, is important. How can you tell a story when 51% of the population is just a bit part.

Reading

Frontier has a slightly different origin to most stories. It’s meant to be a roleplaying game. But then I thought it could be a movie. And then an animation. And then a video game. At the moment I’m working with a young Kenyan artist to produce art either for the roleplaying book or as conceptual guides for the other media.

I’m currently reading “Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi and I thoroughly recommend it (I don’t read fantasy much but this is good). It’s much more overt in the writing than, for instance, LeGuin’s Earthsea. I’d not really fully digested that Sparrowhawk, Le Guineas protagonist, was not white.

Your. My. Our story.

There are stories to tell. While Frontier is hundreds of years in the future and not of Ireland, it is my story too. It’s about a Western civilisation so caught up in greed and hubris that it almost destroys everything. It’s about a culture we can only dream about – where contribution to society is not measured in how much money you earn (or in how much tax you’ve managed to evade). It’s about a future where humanity has reached out into space, made contact with alien races, established itself in the dark spaces between the stars and saved us all. And a future where I am that token face.

I’ll finish off with this list of names. Characters in Star Trek who had real impacts….maybe you’ll look them up.

Richard Daystrom
Nyota Uhuru
Clark Terrell
Lily Sloane
Geordi La Forge
Emory Erickson
Benjamin Sisko
Kasidy Yates-Sisko
Calvin Hudson
Tuvok
Worf, son of Mogh
Guinan

Brett Devereaux on the Siege of Gondor:

It’s pretty interesting reading. Pop along here for the series.

My reply?

While I enjoyed reading this incredibly nerdy analysis of the battle for Gondor, The author forgets several points.

1. These are orcs. Every prisoner is food. The city of Minas Tirith is therefore a larder even if the inhabitants eat their food stores. The fallen soldiers of Gondor are food. Got hungry and aggressive orcs? Just point them at the enemy. Yum Yum. They’ll eat grubs, rotting meat, drink brackish water – they’re not subject to the same supply lines. And heck, Orcs will eat each other.

2. There is magic. Not only is Sauron a powerful sorcerer but those magic rings the Ringwraiths have also have impressive abilities to enhance the command structure. Orcs ain’t rebelling. They’re literally thrall to the whims of magic. At the back of the 30 mile column is an orc being birthed from wherever they come from and being given a sword and helmet. The column does not end. And heck, maybe magic can summon up rations?

3. There is evil. Sauron isn’t trying to attain control of the bountiful Pellenor Fields, he’s trying to end mankind. He himself is in thrall to Morgoth. Morgoth is evil, Sauron is evil, Orcs are evil. You can’t compare the motivation of land barons in mediaeval times to the motivations of a 12pm tall immortal demigod. And heck, he’s a Maiar, like Gandalf.

ALIENS RPG by Fria Ligan

We’ve run two sessions of the Aliens RPG for Graham, Jim, Mike and Barry and we’ve had a heap of fun. I’ve run the starter adventure (Cinematic) and we’re just a third of the way through the Chariots of the Gods cinematic too. Then, if there’s still interest I have a campaign adventure planned. But to give you a taste of the type of stuff I’m getting up to….

Welcome back…

For the last few months, the lategaming web site has been offline – this has been for a combination of reasons.

  • I wasn’t getting much gaming done
  • I wasn’t getting much writing done
  • I was really busy doing other things (travel, study, work)
  • We caught a bit of malware…..oops

But as things are starting to get on an even keel for everything it becomes possible to kickstart some of this again.

Current work…writing scripts

For the last few months, on top of travelling and attending a bazillion courses, I’ve been writing.

I’ve written five short scripts in the world of THE 23RD LETTER. I’ve written two more in the world of STATUS: REFUGEE. I’ve written one horror script. And I’m looking at writing some scripts based on FRONTIER and QABAL very soon. And there’s one very special property that I would love to pitch to the BBC…

Two of my scripts are going into production in 2017 and I’ll be doing a “mobile phone” shoot of one of my scripts probably over the upcoming holidays.

So, all change.

Where and back again…

It’s been a while since I updated anything here. Partially because of “situation” but also partly because the blog got infected with some malware (the curse of WordPress) and I needed to shut it down. But it’s back now and I’m going to update it a bit more.

Lategaming started out as a game journal with a bit of design and ideas and reviews thrown in. It grew into way more than that and the future holds even more.

I’m currently studying Performing Arts full time in my home town of Lisburn. Over the last 18 months, I’ve attended courses in Photovoltaic Solar Panel Installation and Maintenance (qualified top of my class), Woodworking, VHF Radio operation (qualified), Day Skipper (Tidal) (qualified), Creative Writing, Acting and I’ve been to Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal, the US, Mexico, Cuba, Croatia and sailed a bit of Ireland and Scotland.

I’ve discovered that I don’t suck at acting and I really don’t suck at singing. I was always a good wordsmith but I’ve had that confirmed.

I’ve found myself out the other end of a toxic relationship, at the “stupid idiot” end of breaking someones heart, at the “fuck it, I have to be alive to survive” end of 2015 and my resolution to say yes to new adventure in 2016. 2017 will be a new dawn with at least two active productions of scripts I have written.

I’ll tell you all about my next writing adventures shortly.

So, if you’re still reading this after all of these years, say Hi. I’d love to keep in touch.

Games Development Seminar – Belfast, 14th Sept

Last chance to register for a games technology development seminar here in Belfast.

Wed, 14 September from 10:00 to 12:00 at Radisson Blu, Gasworks, Belfast

The speaker is Paul Durrant, Abertay University’s Director of Business Development. He has been instrumental in developing a range of projects to support digital media IP generation, business start-up, incubation, and skills development particularly in the video games area. He developed Dare to be Digital and Dare ProtoPlay to become significant international events including a partnership with BAFTA to recognise talented young developers and the development of the Channel 4 Crunchtime TV series. He also raised £2m to establish a prototype fund for small games developers and has recently launched a partnership with the Technology Strategy Board to fund novel games applications.

In this seminar, Paul will describe the Scottish experience in digital content, the contribution from Abertay and the funding opportunities available through Abertay which are available to companies in Northern Ireland. In particular, he will describe the Abertay University Prototype Fund (http://prototypefund.abertay.ac.uk/) and the Future Games Contest ( https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/future-games-contest )

Email sent to gaming group

The plan is to have a Plan B game to turn to.

I’m happy to run one though you’d have to choose between:

  1. Ars Magica (campaigns over years, trouple play, multiple characters – what’s not to like?)
  2. Smallville (I’d love to try this out with the Batman legend or maybe
  3. Traveller (No ideas here but sure I could think of something)

I might be convinced to run something like Dr Who again or maybe GODLIKE.

God Willt

Another book arrived in the post that I’d forgotten about. Deus Vult by Mongoose Publishing is essentially playing the bad guys from The Da Vinci Code but back in the Middle Ages. It’s like Ars Magica re-told from the point of view of the Church.

It uses a variant of BRP which will please some but not all. I’ve certainly had a lot of experience with people heavily into BRP – most notably a guy called Neil who maximised the experience point system of the original RuneQuest II by carrying one of every desirable weapon for a battle and swapping as soon as he got an XP checkbox.

I’m enjoying reading it – mostly because it’s a dead tree edition and a lot easier to read than the eBook versions of Clockwork and Chivalry and The One Ring which I received earlier this week.

New Haul: from Cromwell to Cthulhu via Mirkwood

Today I got a new haul of stuff. Some of these were PDF bundles so at some point the dead tree version of the book will arrive in the post.

These are:

Back again

I’ve been on a holiday-and-work-fueled hiatus. Two weeks driving in France and Spain and then two weeks spent helping people access seed funding for new ventures in “digital” as part of the CIIF programme.

The latter has been frustrating because essentially as I am part of the process, I am unable to apply for any personal ventures. It’s not because of any impropriety – it is possible to do these things and remain above board – it’s more because of the perception that it would bring. I am, technically, best placed to design something more likely to be funded. And as it is a competitive fund and I’m paid to help people compete, I’d have an automatic conflict of interest.

On the other hand, it ends up being one more excuse piled onto the other excuses about what’s stopping me doing something. I feel burned out at the moment – the impact of working with the fund (and the companies applying) after a holiday seemed to remove all the good work the holiday had done.

So – anyway – I’ve killed off updates on my Twitter for a while and disabled my ‘work’ blog for the time being. I need to spend some time just repairing myself. Doing stuff I enjoy like reading, writing and sailing is going to make life that bit more fun. Thanks for listening.

The Laundry is here

On Thursday I received ‘The Laundry‘ in the post. The announcement came back in March so I was really excited to get the book in the post this week. I have now spent a few hours reading it (all but most of the rules – which is another flavour of BRP, familiar to any CoC player). The game is based on Charles Stross’ Laundry Files – which is a series of novels set in a world where fighting unseen menaces from beyond our universe is left to a civil service department not dissimilar to MI5.

“The books are Lovecraftian spy thrillers. The best elements from both genres are thrown together with a sprinkling of long lost Nazis, terrorist cultists, other foreign governments wanting a piece of the action, as well as Her Majesty’s Civil Service.” added Cubicle 7’s Angus Abranson.

The Laundry is a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth. Players take the part of Laundry agents, cleaning up the mess after things go wrong or, sometimes, even managing to prevent the manifestation of ultimate evil. Agents have access to the best equipment they can get their superiors to approve, from Basilisk Guns to portable containment grids to a PDA loaded up with Category A countermeasure invocations.

I’ve only read “The Atrocity Archives” so far in the Laundry series (I’ve also read Glasshouse and Accelerando by Stross – they’re more straight sci-fi – the former very similar to Culture novels, the latter very cyberpunk. Both great.)
so I’ve added “The Jennifer Morgue” and “The Fuller Memorandum” to my Amazon wishlist. I’ll be taking The Atrocity Archives with me on my trip to Paris – Lord knows there’s going to be a lot of downtime.

If you’re not sure if you’ll like them, then you can get a taster with some of the Laundry short stories.

Overall, it seems enchantingly similar to Delta Green but without the feeling of hopelessness that comes from being mostly alone in a universe that is cold, dark and hostile. It’s gotten me interested again.

The Final Frontier. No, really.

Ian Sales writes on his blog:

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.
…
As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.

My reply:

There’s a non-sequitur here that adding interstellar travel to a setting takes the wonder out of the universe?

Is science-fiction/fantasy really about the locations? Or is it about the plots and the drama and the characters? I can take MacBeth to the Interstellar Court where the Zanifraxians rule and the Darkness Syndicate seeks to destroy humanity before it can be accepted into the court, but at the end of the day, it’s still MacBeth.

For some science-fantasy it may be important to be in a galaxy far far away but yes, these stories could be set nearer to home – but why restrict ourselves?

My own writing is more about the interactions between a Earth human culture which is as alien to our 21st Century minds as anything I can conjure for interstellar aliens. That’s the sort of stuff that interests me and it’s why I enjoy reading Charlie Stross and Iain M Banks.

Is there a difference between a science-fiction tale of a lone cosmonaut on a supralight scout ship meeting strange new species or a pulp-fantasy take of a Venusian farmboy deciding to join the AetherCorps? Not really. But all of these stories elicit wonder in this reader.

Just because we cannot travel these distances, doesn’t mean we cannot dream these distances.

Setting Riff: Oa versus Krypton

A thousand years ago, on the planet Krypton, there was a technologically advanced, cruel and nihilistic race which carved a vast stellar empire, subjugating thousands of civilisations under their regime. Only one planet managed to overthrow the grip of the empire, Oa, but their rebellion only served to free their own planet.

Their thirst for power eventually cost the destruction of their own homeworld. In the dying moments, one of their top scientists sent his offspring to one of their genetic stock planets in the hope that he would revenge them by breeding a new race of soldiers. The spacecraft travelled for a thousand years until it reached the small blue marble orbiting a yellow sun. The primitive present on the planet were seeded millions of years before and would be almost completely genetically compatible with the offspring. The scientist had not realised that these primitives would had evolved rapidly in their culture in the intervening years. The Kryptonian offspring would fail in his mission, living as one of the primitives, becoming their protector.

But the offspring was not the only survivor. Thousands of their genetically superior supersoldiers had survived the destruction of the planet and were now warlords over the planets they had subjugated reporting to a military command structure engineered to survive a cataclysm – their commanders reside on Kandor, previously a planet not dissimilar to Earth, whose population were also seeded by the Kryptonian war machine.

The rebellion would be slow, it would be thorough and it originated from Oa. Their agents would spread through the shattered Kryptonian empires and recruit forces of rebellion from their own people. Oan scientists had discovered that fragments of the destroyed planet were toxic to the survivors. Each type would cause a different effect, but only one could be used as more than a poison, only one would be able to take the fight to the stars: green kryptonite.

And from these fragments, they fashioned their weapons.

Cold-Blooded Killers

Lizaur on TheRPGSite commented:

Well, the vast majority of RPG has leeengty chapters just about how to kill people, so what do you expect my players do?

Being a bunch of cold-blooder killer bastards, that’s. The fuckers.

Which stands to reason that if you want a game that is violence-free (though not necessarily conflict-free) then you need to reduce the number of pages allocated to killing and maiming in the game. And, to be honest, it also stands to reason that games traditionally appeal to a small section of the population.

The traditional game, D&D, brings you a setting where it is assumed that you will wander the cuntryside, robbing tombs, killing wildlife and murdering other intelligent beings. It’s no wonder that I never liked it.