Reading tonight

I’ve read a fabulous article about Opium which dictates why we should blame the British Government for the modern drug cartels. Not to mention toe futility of the War on Drugs.

Hypocrisy at it’s best.

Also an interesting one about Onanism and how it relates to the general pessimism in Christianity from the New Testament because the kingdom of God was nigh.

Essentially, don’t be a wanker as the world might end.

WotW: Earth – Bows against the Lightning

“Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six yards above the hood. … Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to dodge, the fourth shell. The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal.
“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.”

– The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells

Of all our vaunted technology, only the efforts of the modern artillery seemed to give the invaders any pause. Even our mighty Navy, though effective, found itself helpless at sea while the marauders burned and poisoned their way through the countryside.

Even so, a battery of six guns was no match for more than two of the Martian Fighting Machines. We would always strike from surprise and the Martians, once alerted to our presence, would strike back with their terrifying heat ray and destroy the entire battery. We found we were outclassed in several areas. The Martian heat ray was deadly accurate, quick to re-orient and could fire multiple bursts of deadly invisible phlogiston in quick succession. In comparison, our artillery, field guns and cannon, was slow to reload, sluggish in movement and, perhaps worst of all, woefully inaccurate.

“The Heat-Ray is certainly capable of dealing death – melting lead, softening iron, incinerating wood and cloth and searing flesh to ashes. When used, it handles as a man might handle a searchlight – playing over it’s targets for a split second before moving on, ever in search of victims to blacken and twist.

It is limited in several ways and as a result we must play to our strengths and be well aware of the limitations of the enemy. The Heat-Ray is quick, deadly and implacable. But it is also limited in range and can only fire within the line of sight of the Martian in the hood of the fighting machine. With camouflage, surprise and God’s help, we will be able to take on perhaps as many as four Fighting Machines at once with a minimum of casualties.

Our field guns have a much greater operational range and we estimate the artillery teams can fire as many as three times before the Fighting Machines come within operational range. We can also operate from the safety of an indirect fire location – behind a hill for instance. This gives us additional protection and opportunities to lay down fire upon the enemy.

With this tactic, we can effectively resist the invaders.”

This tactic, of course, was soon abandoned as quickly as the artillerymen abandoned their guns at the sound of the terrible howl of the Fighting Machines. England, and indeed the rest of the world, belonged to the Martians.

Welcome…

Welcome to the oceans in a labeled can,
Welcome to the dehydrated lands,
Welcome to the self police parade,
Welcome to the neo-golden age,
Welcome to the days you’ve made.

– Welcome (to the future), by Hawkwind

If some smart bugger can’t make a game setting out of this in 24 hours then I don’t know what the world is coming to.

Separated Dad at Christmas

The arrangement today is that I’m getting my kids at around 8 pm and having them for the next 4 days. After a morning of catering for my nephew and being excited for others as they regale me with tales of delight on the faces of their little ones, I can’t help but feel a little sore.

Going to avoid this morning and time-shift Christmas morning by 24 hours. And wait for updates from the ex on how much the kids like the presents I got them.

Frantic….a week to Christmas..

I’ve been writing a lot on the WIKI recently and quite a bit in prepared posts for sending out later this week maybe. Most of it is is WotW: Earth stuff with one little diversion into game design theory.

I’m writing alone at the moment, real life having intruded with my co-writers. I’m not sure if they’ll be back but that’s cool. I’m just sorry there’s not much content on here while I get my own articles written.

It kinda coincides with a dry period in gaming too. Still haven’t managed to finish off things with either kinnygraham’s game or with my own Zombi game. Hopefully the new year will be slightly less frantic.

Gaming and the Real World

It’s definitely a little crap when both of your gaming groups have to cancel due to the Real World encroaching. It does leave me with a slightly deflated outlook for the rest of the week. Especially as I was really looking forward to it today, having had a visit to the dentist and 3 work-related exams earlier.

Leaves me wondering about other methods of gaming. Do I start searching for a good MUSH again? I’ve not been able to find one in my most recent forays into the world of online gaming. Do I get myself embroiled in World of Warcraft? Or City of Heroes (now available to us Mac Users through the wonders of BootCamp)? Do I try and recruit an online gaming group via Skype? Or Second Life?

But then what if the two gaming groups did manage one week? I’d potentially end up with 3 gaming sessions a week and I know I just couldn’t cope with that. I’m no longer a young man.

My weekends, traditionally the source of morning, afternoon, evening and night (ahem, late) gaming are now completely sacrosanct and to be spent entirely with the kids. I only have the nights of the rest of the week to fill and not only do we tend to start a bit later (as the group manage to weave their way across Belfast to wherever the game is held) and we tend to finish a bit earlier (because, you know, work in the morning and all that…plus the long journey home.) It was very different when everyone in the gaming group lived within 2 miles of the house we were gaming in and half the group lived in that very house!

I guess this is why I have memories of older gamers turning up to conventions with boxes and boxes of games and selling them off. It may not have been that they were done and dusted with those games, it may have been that their adult life just couldn’t support the dedication needed to be a game addict. I have boxes and boxes of games, some even unread, scattered across the province wherever I can store them. I still live in some small hope of finding somewhere where the many boxes can be re-united under one roof and that I might even find time to organise them, you know…. Do I do it alphabetically? Or by genre? Or by game? And then within the genre? Alphabetically or Chronologically? It will take a lot of thinking to be sure. (and some may note that I may be painting myself as a bit of a Rob Gordon character here, and who wouldn’t…and many will tell you I am the most vain man in the world.)

My gaming life, my Hyde is unfulfilled. As the doctor says,

“…and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.”

WotW: Earth – Progress

I don’t know if anyone is even reading this 🙂 Certainly doesn’t look like it in the comments.
I’ve got two more WotW articles on the back-burner. About the actual technology, machines of war, recovery of civilisation and what we were left with afterwards.

I’ve not written a jot on system yet. Will likely re-use one of the myriad systems I’ve already published in some form or another.

WotW: Earth – The Red Men

The tragic story of a face-eating fungus on Youtube and another about mind-controlling fungi has pushed me to write a little about the Red Men.

“The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the stream in patches.”

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

Of all things, a man’s home is his castle and such was our affrontery at being attacked by distant alien intelligences in our own homes. That they had travelled millions of miles in order to exterminate our way of life was taken by some to be a sign of extreme malevolence. I, on the other hand, presume their opinion of us to be quite different. Indifferent to our plight they came to destroy and plunder, treading roughly on the ant-hills of our civilisation.

In hearing the scope and magnitude of their plan, we must recognise they have come to disrupt everything – planning all but the most meticulous details and it is in those details that we eventually found our salvation. The plans they saw through to fruition go far beyond jets of black smoke, the unstoppable heat ray and the red weed which still stymies our agriculture.

If reports are to be believed, it was in Shepperton where the first of the Red Men appeared. He attacked two women who were walking along the canal and could only be subdued by two men from a passing barge who claimed his skin was dark and oily and he took “a lot of hammering” to break his grip on the women. When the civil defence militia arrived, there was a large crowd around what seemed to be a heavily waterlogged and extremely rotten corpse. Though there was much damage to the head, the body was identified as one Albert Hargreaves, a part-time labourer in the village who often operated Shepperton Lock when the Lock-keeper wasn’t about.

The body was shipped to London and reports were few and far between but one alleged witness reported that “even though old Bertie was dead, you could see things wriggling under his skin”.

Advanced examinations brought forth a dread warning for everyone to steer clear of any sign of brown scum upon the water and report it immediately. The scum was the spore clump of a fungal fruiting body which had infected poor Bertie. With their alien hyphae forcing themselves through his flesh and interfering with his mind, Bertie must have been driven insane. Weeks later, when the women who were attacked came forth with their story, one was adamant that the thng which had once been Bertie Hargreaves was pleading with them to help him and not attacking them as previously thought. One can only imagine his horror as his attempts to find help were met with violence, swift and deadly.

Shepperton spent weeks under quarantine but no other cases were reported there. What is known is that the Brown Fungus invades the human body and spreads quickly, attaching hyphae threads to nerves and through muscles. This process is extremely painful as the hyphae eat the protective myelin from the nerve sheaths causing jerking, threatening-looking spasms. Eventually the threads reach the torso where they start to build their fruiting body for spore production and the threads then travel north to the brain and drive the victim to water, for this is where the terrible spores will break free. The hyphal elongation of limbs is common, dissolving bone and leaving a flesh-wrapped fungal tentacle and as the fruiting body grows, the torse swells to enormous proportions, as does the skin surrounding the skull.

What I do know is that the Ministry of Science and War have samples of the fungus and they have been testing them on animals and humans to see what remedy can be found. The spores could be anywhere, or indeed everywhere by now.

Egalité

In a newish blog, 10 by 10, they opine about the potential lack of balance in superhero games. I mean – Superman and Batman teamups? How does that work out? One can chew through steel, the other can…um…buy hotels with spare change…

All said, having either as an enemy would be A BAD THING®.

Anyway, on 10by 10 they have a video from a couple of very funny British comedians. So go look on this blog post and give 10 by 10 some trafficy goodness.

Of course, in my superhero games there’s plenty of opportunity to equalise power but if one guy wants to forego all of his points and just have “a BMX” and skill in riding it when everyone else is a son of Krypton, then you gotta give him what he wants and then TELL him that he can’t really be involved in the fight against Galactus’ heralds becaurse, frankly, tere isn’t a BMX jump that high.

Are you compelled to make allowances though? I say yes – because the time to make objections was during the character generation process. You should have spotted it then.

spam apam soam saom?

I get a lot of SPAM. Never mind the amount that gets grabbed by my ISPs filters (which are raised one level of strength every year or so), I commonly have 300 or so that make it past the ISP and into the Junk Mail filter of Mail. There’s 50 or so that make it past the filter too.

This is one that made it through. It’s advertising something….I don’t know what, but the filler text below it (designed to defeat filters) read as follows:

Suddenly I was daunted! After the first turn, the group will have found shelter from the zombies – and one of you will be dead.
Please, give me some feedback! Single zombies will go down with one or two shots, but there are rules for entire hordes as well. You are the captain of a squadron of Regs, Regulators that regularly patrol the city to keep order, eliminate Dreg criminals, and destroy Zombie invaders.
Any amount is appreciated. Even worse, the city is infested with the living dead, the Zombies, who have somehow found a second life due to the radiation of the nuclear-devastated wastelands which surround Anakron. Thanks to everyone for all their help making our site what it is today.
Among many, a young Squire came to the King’s aid. One of you, perhaps more then one of you, is a psychic with devastating and terrifying powers. In the meantime I hope that you enjoy Phantasy Star: Ragol’s Curse.
A timer such as a stopwatch or hourglass is also needed to play.
well only if you don’t die. Your characters are normal people, caught up in an abnormal struggle for survival.
Wires and pipes crisscross the sky, the only evidence of a futuristic setting, they hold up the city like the strings of a marionette.
The game’s set wherever you’re playing the game – and whatever you can see around you right now is allowed to be described as being in the game. After crashing to Earth, the UFO is transported away by sneaky FBI agents. You can design your own guns, cars are free form, and a number of optional rules are provided.
A timer such as a stopwatch or hourglass is also needed to play. The Master of Orion rpg includes material from all three Master of Orion games.
So, they asked me to run a game for them. This should prove useful to RPG designers by allowing them to split their mechanics up into bits.
The game supports GM-centered play and heavy Force usage, but without the black curtain.
I purposed the Adapt A Computer Game Into A Tabletop RPG challenge as an attempt to bridge this divide.
In Grey World, you will find both.
Quarters and pennies may be used as tokens in the RPG, or a pen and paper can be used to keep track of the various game components.
Combinations of directions and buttons appear on the screen in time to the music.
The Chosen, undead servants of a dark god, have walked the Earth for nearly a hundred years. United they can retake the Cabal that serves that god by force and regain their former position of power as the Cabal’s supreme leaders. It uses a dice pool system of resolution, a wound chart tracking how quickly you can run, and lets you push yourself to the limit – at the risk of turning on the other survivors.
Just select the ingredients you like and discard the ones you don’t. If anyone buys the infant bodysuit, please take a picture of your kid wearing it and post it to the forums. Its my hope to do this professionally sometime in the near future, so its your chance to help an aspiring author.
Things are always easier to do if you can split them up. There is no setting per say, but there are a few suggestions in the added work.
Exactly who is this criminal the guardsmen keep mistaking you for? but it might consume a lot of your time to play!
Never in here will specific RPGs be discussed at length; this is a column about RPG mechanics as a whole.
Roll the dice, make a choice.

I’ve read some of it before. Some of it is from here and a quick Google will turn up the rest.

Taken as a whole, as a genre mashup, it seems like this random spammer might have hit on something…

WotW: Earth – Here is the News

“At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time–a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication–the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page.”

In the weeks following invasion, the news organisations of the world were quick to find their feet. Not only are stalwarts like The Times, The Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail recovering but there are a plethora of independent news-sheets making their rounds in London. Most of them carry sensationalist headlines and in many cases can be obtained for free from their various hawkers.

Telegrams, of course, provide our international news. While the Martians had decimated the telegraphic communication infrastructure in England, they had not seriously damaged the links across the Channel or the Irish Sea. News from Paris flooded in about their own invasion and soon after we heard reports from Dublin, Berlin, Geneva. It seems odd now to think that it was easier to get news to Paris than it was to get news from Manchester or Edinburgh, but that was the way it was until the lines were again restored, a process which would take months and not weeks.

In every town and district, you will find notice boards with entreaties, offers, wishes and promises. Everyone needs some sort of help, be it help to find someone, needing help to rebuild, not wanting to travel alone in these dark days. There is certainly no reason to be idle and perhaps even less so now than before – I wonder at the actual worth of my savings considering the world came so close to ruin. How much is this paper worth?

All said, a good wage can be had for a fast runner in these times. Better still if he had a bicycle, can handle a horse or has an encylcopaedic knowledge of the train timetables. Information now, much more than before the invasion, is a valuable commodity and with millions of people worldwide displaced or missing family members, News has become the new currency.

Writing elsewhere…

A few days ago, a d20 supplement author had a little kvetch about getting bad ratings on RPGnow. One of his reviews was very constructive, the second was written by someone new to Earth Languages. He was a little down and claims it almost made him quit writing.

As you can see by the thread, some of us volunteered to help Colin realise his setting idea (which wasn’t more than a page of background and 10 d20 D&D classes) into something that could be called a supplement. We’ve started working constructively on the product, tentatively titled Permafrost 2.

I don’t do d20-based stuff as a rule but I’m happy to be writing some fluff for it. You can see my current contributions on the thread (or leap to them directly here, here, here and here.

I’m enjoying writing prose for the sake of it. I’m still doing stuff for the other books on my menu (though I do need to do a bit more on Viride and WotW: Earth) and for stuff on the wiki. I finally found a game that I wanted to invent on my Faust book (a velum-coloured notebook with a cover that looks like an old edition of Goethe’s Faust). Reception has been pretty good so I’m going to continue to write while it’s still fun 🙂

Villains, Aren’t We All: Evil and the Gaming World, Part 4

It’s funny how things in your life can dovetail so nicely when you’re working on a project. I just finished rewatching Episode III of the Star Wars saga, and it really hit the nail on the head regarding perspective having everything to do with alignment. Especially near the end, where Anakin is so certain that he is out for justice and peace and to save the life of Padme… and yet, he’s just slaughtered younglings in the Temple, single-handedly executed the separatists, and assisted the Dark Lord of the Sith in turning the Republic into an Empire seated in the hand of the Dark Side of the Force. Evil? All point of view at that point, isn’t it?

While we’ve talked about Evil in rping, playing and playing alongside compromised characters, really it’s the GM in the hot seat whenever someone decides to play a character that doesn’t “play well with others”.

When an compromised character is in the mix, it opens up a whole other realm of solutions and courses of action that your general vanilla characters wouldn’t dream of doing. As a result, you have to be a bit more prepared for the creativity and the consequences of that wider battery of choices. The same scene that would leave principled characters scratching their heads are nothing for a character who has no compunction about “aggressive negotiations”. It does tend to keep a GM on his/her toes.

Sometimes over the course of a game, a character might start out principled and, through events and experiences, take a turn for the worse. I’m not much of a babysitter of alignments as a GM. I’m just really big into consequences. I’ve also made it a habit of lobbing the phrase “You can be bad, and you can be stupid, but bad and stupid get you dead.” And sure enough, evil characters who make stupid choices find themselves quickly in tough situations or reconsidering that alignment or getting smarter by the minute. But no… I figure characters are like people. They make their choices, they have their consequences, then they either stay their course or realign. As a result, I don’t fret much over it.

When I have dealt with alignments, it was primarily in relation to classes such as clerics and paladins who had to curry favor, or when experience was tied to roleplaying a character well. My favorite way of dealing with alignment in all cases save cleric- and paladin-like classes is to let the players do what they will for a few games and then assign them their alignment based on what I’ve seen them do. But if you’re going to be rigid about it and pick an alignment and base your character around that alignment… well, I’ll make you live up to it.

I don’t like characters knowing anything about each other in advance unless they have concurrent histories that precede game time. We don’t get that special treatment in real life, and frankly, it’s just too much fun to watch the principled characters do something to trip up the unprincipled ones (and vice versa). Makes my life far less difficult when the conflicts and challenges are self-created within the player troupe.

What I do find I have to do regularly with Evil player characters is get them to cultivate some depth to their creation. The psyche of a diabolical or even simply selfish character is a landmine map of places you just don’t want to step. There’s always a lot of potential for both intimate development and later redemption, should the character end up on that kind of path. But because we rarely get to exercise our Evil sides in real life, there’s tendency to play Evil characters rather flatly (or as I mentioned above, rather stupidly), and that gets boring quickly for both player and troupe and GM.

I don’t think I’ve ever restricted someone from playing an Evil character. Like I said, I’m all about consequences. From a GM’s standpoint, an Evil alignment isn’t a carte blanche for mayhem and madness. And I will certainly allow the other characters to take your ass out without even a NPC “Maybe we shouldn’t…” to mitigate their lynching urges. It’s a risk you take when you play out of bounds. But then, that’s why a lot of folks play Evil characters anyway. It’s a walk on the wild side.

My job as a GM is to show you just how much of a jungle is still out there.

When Life Interferes (or, “Damn It, I Meant To Blog Today”)

So, I’ve been a bad, bad girl about my blogging lately. I’ve not been flogged yet — not that that would motivate me one way or t’other — but damn if I don’t have a bunch of stuff to post about. However, that’s just adult life, isn’t it?

It was so much easier when I was sans l’enfant, and free to ring someone up on any given night and say “Hey, feel like killing shit?”. Can’t really do that anymore. God forbid, I actually have to SCHEDULE my entertainment time. That’s about as bad as pencilling in a date for sex. But we won’t talk about that.

I suppose I miss the days when things were a little less hectic. At the same time, roleplaying in my adult years seems more… necessary to me than it did when I was young. Back then, gaming was frivolity, something just cool to do, another bit to throw out there about my personality that (in all honesty) was great for attracting smart and geeky and imaginative guys. Now, though, gaming is serious fun, total down-time from all the responsibilities that come with the whole adult-with-kid-and-job-and-mortgage shebang. I think I enjoy it more, maybe just in a different way.

A local rping group just tagged me to come along with them. Old AD&D. Gotta see if I have time. I was thinking about running a “Winter Blues” parlor game campaign for the cold months with some friends. That’s the other thing about being an adult… damn if you don’t have to choose what’s worth your time and what you just can’t manage.

I’ll be back on the posting horse this evening.  Reverse cowgirl and all.  I promise.

1st Transatlantic Setting Design Challenge

This post on Story Games I find quite exciting. A month to design a game, using a previously published system? And the additional commitment of having to also be a judge.

As a commenter on that page put it:

“It’s the exact same situation as Game Chef or 24 hour RPG — feel free to draw on old material, but the contest is about writing and presenting new stuff, not dusting off your hoary old setting.”

I’d love to do this. But do I have the time?

Review (kinda): Zombies!!!

Tonight we didn’t play Zombi, which would make that the second week in a row. Instead, we played Zombies!!! which made a small amount of difference. Less plot, more frantic backstabbing.
This is therefore going to be a little review. We played Zombies with the expansions for the Army Camp, the Mall and the University but to be honest we played for 3 hours and didn’t get anywhere. The turns got a bit slow with 5 players but it was funny. The tiles dealt out a twisting map and the cards and dice rolls gave us plenty of opportunity to move, establish grandiose plans and in some cases, execute them. Paul managed a great combo, sadly depriving me of some excellent toys and leaving us neck and neck at the end before he scooped the victory from me (Bastard!).

It was an excellent filler for this week and the only issue is that you need a LOT of table space.