#RPGaDay

So, we're coming up on year two of #RPGaDay. Can I manage another full month? I guess well see.

The list, from originator David Chapman, is below (thanks to +David Odie for pointing it out, as I don't have the Facebook.) Once again, they're a broad mix of topics, some of them very open to interpretation. A few of them might prove difficult, in which case I'll ask for topics again.

I guess I'll see you in August.

Dominance and Submission

So, a thing I've learned from submission guidelines for online speculative fiction zines and podcasts is that people don't want me; or more accurately, I suspect, that people want people who aren't me, rather than specifically not wanting me (or people like me.)

To explain in terms that are less self-consciously and deliberately inscrutable, what is commonly and unhelpfully referred to as 'genre fiction' is clearly aware of being something of a bastion of white, male privilege and is keen to change its image. Check out pretty much any set of submission guidelines and they will include a note that the collection is keen to promote increased diversity within the SF/fantasy/horror community, and that they either welcome with especial favour works by female, queer, trans, disabled, coloured (or rather colored, since most of them are in the US) and non-North American authors (I guess from my perspective one out of six - being somewhere between 1/8 and 1/16 Indian really doesn't count as coloured - isn't the worst thing in the world,) or positively encourage works with female, queer, trans, disabled or coloured protagonists and non-North American settings (which ties in to some stuff I've talked about before.)

I find it an interesting privilege check, since my natural first reaction is 'hey!' I mean, it doesn't seem entirely fair that I have to pay for centuries of cultural dominance which never did me any good. Of course, on any kind of consideration, it has done me good. I may be barely able to make my mortgage, but I live in a country which still (just) has top-notch social healthcare and I've only been stopped at customs once, probably because I'd been working on a dig and my skin had browned to the tone referred to in the law enforcement handbook as 'dodgy foreigner tan'. Anyway, it also reinforces my determination to write more stuff set in less exclusively Euro-inspired cultures.

Rather more encouragingly, I'm glad to say that sexy vampires seem to be being calved off into their own little niche and are invited not to apply for the kind of magazines I'm looking at.

On the downside, the best paid periodical I've found actively discourages puns. Oh well.

Blood Bowl - Team Manager

Tuesday night's game night featured a couple of games. First, I took a turn Overlording in Descent. This confirmed a couple of suspicions about the first few games: 1) Don't mess about killing monsters, head straight for the objective, and 2) goblins can just fuck off. My main remaining question is 'how much are the players supposed to know?' Honestly, it makes a huge difference how much information they have on how hard different monsters are to kill and what powers they have. I have a sort of knee jerk reaction that there ought to be a screen, because of the RPGish elements, but from a board game perspective it makes more sense for there to be openness.

Looking at this spread of cards and tokens, I did wonder if some of the bits
were missing.

To round off the night, we played a season of Blood Bowl: Team Manager. Based on the popular GW fantasy American football board game (itself set in a fast and loose analogue of the Warhammer Fantasy Old World, in which a vastly increased interracial harmony has apparently been achieved by channeling all of the hatred and intolerance into a massively violent sport in which barely functional sociopaths of all races line up to compete in a formalised skirmish which may or may not involve a ball, depending on the match) and produced by Fantasy Flight, it has an unexpectedly restrained array of cards and counters, but on the other hand, there are expansions.

The basic set has six teams, and each player starts with a set deck of 12 starting players, a mix of high and low value cards, with each team having different strengths and weaknesses (Dwarfs are tough, Skaven and Chaos cheat a lot.) Play begins with each manager drawing six players, and the first manager (beginning with the youngest, then rotating around the table each 'week') drawing a Spike! magazine card and a number of highlight cards equal to the number of managers. The first of these is either a special rule which is in play for the week, or a tournament; the highlights are the matchups in which teams compete.

Play rotates around the table, with each manager in turn placing a player from their hand against a matchup or tournament (two teams can compete for each matchup, any number in the tournament.) As each player is placed, their skills may be used to pick up the ball, tackle opposing players, or replace cards in your hand (another strength of the Skaven, as I learned.) Some players also cheat, and this is a non-optional skill, requiring a cheat token to be placed on the card.

The dwarfs are dominating this matchup. It looks like the Black Orc is going
to attempt a tackle, but it can't knock down the Runner and that Blocker is
worth a surprising amount knocked down. Beardy bastards (not that James's
Grudgebearers beat my Skaven on Tuesday or anything.)

Once all players are committed, matchups are resolved. Cheat tokens are flipped, and may add fans (victory points,) add extra star power, or get the player sent off, removing them from the matchup. The first manager then counts up the star power on each side (players, plus cheat tokens, plus 2 for holding the ball) and the highest total wins (although there are usually rewards of some sort for all.) Rewards may be fans, a draw from the star player decks, or from the staff and team upgrade decks. Later weeks are similar to the first, but with the added variety of whatever upgrades have been added to each team.

Like many FF games, it's a bit of a struggle to get the hang of it on the first time through, but week on week it becomes more intuitive, and it's actually a lot of fun. I did astonishingly badly most of the way through, but clawed back an impressive stack of points in the closing rounds and got to feed a Beastman to my Rat Ogre, so that was fun.

Descent 2nd Edition

Yesterday, I managed to catch up with some old friends I don't see enough of anymore for a board games evening, wherein we ate pizza and played Descent: Journeys in the Dark (second edition), a sort of Fantasy Flight updating of the classic Advanced Heroquest concept.

Descent is a scenario-based game with a modular board consisting of about 25-30 sturdy, reversible card tiles. On one side of each tile is a dungeon section, on the other is wilderness. Coupled with entrance and exit tiles and a range of connectors and 'dead ends' to cap off unused junctions, these can be assembled into who knows how many possible variations. Each scenario - the game provides plenty, but you could easily write your own - has a map showing which tiles to set up, and what other bits to include.

Naturally there are bits, it's a Fantasy Flight game. The bits which you set up on the board include, but are not limited to: Search tokens, Objective tokens, Villager tokens, Lieutenant tokens and monster miniatures.

There are also hella cards, but we'll get to that.

As an Advanced Heroquest descendant, Descent includes actual plastic minis in the box. There is one for each of the eight hero characters, and a whole bunch of monsters. For reference, assuming you don't paint them all, the heroes are dark grey, the regular monsters tan and the boss monsters red. Aside from the goblins, there's little chance of mistaking the monsters for your characters, however, as the rest of them are all either spiders or simply immense. They are pretty nice miniatures, and those what paint could probably have a good time just gussying them up to look extra shiny on the tabletop.

Down the middle: Movement, Health, Endurance and Defence.
At the bottom are Attributes. On the right are your ability
and your feat.

Each hero also has a card detailing their abilities (each monster has the same, although theirs are half the size because they pretty much just move and attack.) In addition to a picture, the card gives the character or monster's movement rate (in squares), health and defence (represented by a die or dice,)  and any special abilities. Heroes also have endurance and attributes, and a special heroic feat that they can use once per encounter.

The game can be played with up to five people: One Overlord, controlling the dungeon and the monsters, and up to four players, each controlling a hero. The base set has eight heroes in four classes - fighter, scout, mystic and healer, I think they were. You aren't supposed to double up classes, and you customise your character by picking one of two decks of starting equipment and skills for their class (scouts, for example, can be 'thief' or 'wildernessy type'*.)

The hands at the bottom indicate how many hands are
needed to equip the thing. They're all left, indicating
that heroes in Descent are probably southpaws.

Once you get into the game, there are cards for searching, cards for further equipment, cards - and matching tokens - for being stunned, immobilised, poisoned or something else; possibly cursed. The Overlord gets a deck of cards that he draws from once per turn and that can be played to do bad things for the heroes or good things for the monsters. Rather than just killing everything in sight, you have an objective for each mission, which typically feeds into the next encounter in the scenario.

In play, each hero has a turn, followed by the Overlord. Each model gets two actions, which can be chosen from options including, but not limited to, move, attack, search and rest. Heroes can also take extra movement or use some skills by accruing fatigue, limited by their endurance. Resting clears fatigue, and is a more important action than you might think, because you build up fatigue at quite a pace and once you hit your endurance it starts becoming damage.

Dice, dice, baby!

This being a fantasy quest game, combat is the meat of the thing, and is done with dice. Each weapon allows you to roll the blue die and one or more of the yellow and red power dice. As you can see from the picture, each side contains a mixture of symbols: numbers are range, and a ranged attack has to accumulate enough of this to reach the target. Hearts are damage, while the lightning bolt is a surge, which can be used to activate special abilities (usually increasing damage or range, although Jon's character's hero ability meant that we could spend them to heal, which was very important.) The defender rolls one or more defence dice - brown, white or black in ascending order) which are marked with shields which cancel damage. Damage is your goal, but attacks may have other effects; in particular 'stun' was very important to us in the intro games, allowing us to tie up big opponents while we whittled down the little attackers.

This is a later and larger scenario than we played, with the
heroes in  a strong defensive position, yet simultaneously
screwed.

A key difference between this and Heroquest (Advanced or otherwise) is that the entire dungeon and its denizens are laid out to begin with, which means that everything starts to converge on you early. In addition, there is often something you have to stop happening which means that the slow and steady kick-and-search approach is rarely practical. This makes for a pacy game, as the heroes hurry to wrangle the Overlord's forces.

As an observation, fuck goblins. They run like greased pigs, can't be blocked, and invariably need to run somewhere in the scenario, which is something that you basically can not stop from happening, as they tend to be in and out of your line of sight in a single turn, or to have done what they needed to do before you can even get to them. Fuck those little bastards.

Ahem.

A final aspect of the game is progression. Heroes gain experience which allows them to buy additional skills from their class-type deck, and any equipment they pick up from searching can be retained or sold for gold which can then be used to buy more equipment. This is matched against Overlord XP and more powerful monsters and decks of Overlord card to create escalation.

On the basis of the first few scenarios, Descent is a nice little game with a lot of room to grow, even without the inevitable expansions. We - the players - won through the first few scenarios, but it was a close run thing (and mostly happened due to a) blessed stun lock, and b) James forgetting his trap cards during our turns,) which is pretty much what you want in a game like this.

* One of these two may not be the official name on the cards.

Rook City Blues

Forget it, Jake. It's Rook City.

The first full update of the Sentinels of the Multiverse computer game is Rook City, bringing a spiffed up dynamic interface along with four new villains, two new heroes and two new environments. The Villain decks in particular each have a unique variation which alters the pace and strategy of the game significantly.

The Chairman is the ultimate crime boss of Rook City, a shadowy figure protected by his Operative and a network of criminals. As the handler for all of his gangs, the Operative plays out lesser Underbosses at a rate of knots - many of whom also play out other cards - and hits heroes as villain cards go down. The Chairman is invulnerable until flipped, and then smacks anyone who strikes him, making him hard to whittle down.

The Matriarch makes the card progression in the Chairman's deck look slow. Her minion cards (mostly corvids, some other birds) just keep playing, and while all relatively weak she attacks heroes each time one is destroyed and there are cards in her deck that play every Flock card back out of the trash, just to fuck with you. One of the nice things about the deck is that the Matriarch's nemesis, Tachyon, has one of the most effective cards to use on her.

Drug-fuelled super serial killer Spite is the Wraith's nemesis (the Chairman, the other obvious choice, is paired with new hero Mr Fixer.) His deck is mostly made up of drugs and victims. Victims can be rescued, if not destroyed first, and placed under the safe house card, dealing damage when Spite flips. The drugs make him tough to kill, however, and he heals each time he does damage or destroys a victim. I find him especially tough as I have to quit when he destroys one of the Lost Child victim cards.

The last villain is Plague Rat, a mutated drug dealer who can infect Heroes with his vile plagues and drive them to attack one another. He's not too hard a kill, but overbuffed heroes will quickly start beating one another down.

The Chairman and the Matriarch are tough; like, really tough. Spite and Plague Rat are just regular nasty.

The first hero is Expatriette, gunslinging daughter of Citizen Dawn. She's a damage monkey, and her deck gimick is a mixture of Gun and Ammo cards; the latter attaching to the former for one-shot bonuses. Her 'use one power for every gun you have in play' is potentially hilarious; as long as Spite doesn't have his 'take damage when you use a power' drug in play.

The second is Mr Fixer, janitor and kung fu master, who thus combines Style and Equipment cards which modify how he does damage with his basic 'punch you in the face' power. He is only allowed one of each, so he is more about choices than buff stacking.

Finally, Rook City brings out the scum of the streets to harry your hard-working heroes, while the Pike Industrial Complex is all about the Vats, universal buffs and prospective bombs all.

To add a further challenge, Mr Fixer and Expatriette each have a variant to unlock, and the update adds a new Legacy unlock, America's Greatest Legacy.

Tools of the Trade - Roll20

Most of my current gaming is online, as a result of a scattered friend base, limited budget and the demands of childcare. I started out doing this sort of thing over Skype or Google Hangouts, using various online blackboards for illustrations until I stumbled onto Roll20 (which I have mentioned before in terms of seating plans.)

Screenshot from the virtual tabletop for Operatives of CROSSBOW (the rebooted series*.) Due to non-tech issues, games often start late or not at all, hence the link to a video about ROM: Space Knight in the chat window.
The map of the zoo is legitimately for the game.

Roll20 is a virtual tabletop, designed to provide a user-friendly interface for online gaming. The bulk of the screen is the map, with a sidebar which can be switched between chat window, asset library, journal, jukebox and decks and tables tabs. There is also a dropdown bar for switching between your map screens.

Features

The Map
The heart of the virtual desktop is the map. Key features for Roll20 include:

• Layers - You can place any image or object in one of three layers. Anything in the map and background layer is locked in place by default, while tokens and objects can be moved freely as needed. There is also a GM overlay, allowing the GM to add notes that the players can not read. Objects can also be popped between layers if need be (say by keeping a tap icon in the GM overlay until it is set off or detected.)
• Grid - The grid is highly customisable, allowing square and hex arrangements.
• Fog of War - You can hide the map and then reveal rectangular or custom areas as the PCs explore. This is especially fun if you hide a monster in a space you are about to reveal.
• Ping - Click and hold and you mark a ping for other players to see. I can not count the uses we've had from this as an alternative to 'over there. No, I mean there, by the thing.'
• Draw and type - You can also use the space as a straightforward whiteboard.

Chat Window
A little extraneous when using voice chat, but this does provide a good place to share links, and also incorporates a dice roller (including Fate dice.) It also has a 'whisper' function for note passing.

Assets
The asset library contains an array of free-to-use images. There are also paid images, which tend to be higher quality, but you can live without them if you're on a budget. In fact, there are a fair few premium features which a less penurious GM might want to check out. I can not speak for the features, but I certainly don't begrudge the makers a paid option.)

Journal
Provides a place for handouts and character sheets, although I use a wiki for a lot of this.

Jukebox
Plays music from an eclectic selection to all players; pretty neat, and I really ought to get a credit sequence organised some day.

Decks and Tables
Highly customisable content for card decks and roll tables. Potentially a godsend for OSR-type games or systems making heavy use of cards.

Bugs

The Map

• Snap-to-grid - I haven't found a way to turn this off, and it means that if you use a hex grid in particular there is a good chance of people jumping into walls when you move them. It can also play silly buggers with the scaling.

Voice and video chat
There is an inbuilt chat system, but we've not managed to get it to work yet. Instead we used the Hangouts integration, which is fine except that it limits the screen space available for the map.

Conclusion
I find that Roll20 has greatly enhanced my online gaming experience, not only by clarifying positioning, but by providing a central focus for the group on to of our various videopresences. It's not a perfect product, but it's pretty good for the no money I pay for it and I might consider checking out the premium features if I were wealthy enough to do so, but not wealthy enough to just travel more.

* Basically, Operatives of CROSSBOW got 'rebooted' once I'd got a bit more experience with Fate Core under my belt, less like Battlestar Galactica and more like Witchblade season 2 where they rewound time and did things differently.

No Rest for the Wicked - When Angels Fall

This weekend was my first field LRP experience, crewing in a No Rest for the Wicked event at Castle Featherstone near Haltwhistle.

The Castle is in many ways an awesome venue, but it is right up in the borders, in the middle of nowhere and it's an old (but not ancient) listed building. Since I was up there with +Ian Porter this meant that there were significant access issues for him, as well as a four hour drive (of which I slept two either way.)

We arrived on Friday afternoon and helped with prep before briefings and dinner. I was a largely silent partner in the Inquisitorial meeting, since I didn't have much background on the business at hand, but it was quite fun just watching +Rob Collins heave to as the Lord Inquisitor and I had provided some of the IC paperwork that +Jamie Smith was given (including the encrypted copy of Wordsworth's Daffodils that he painstakingly decoded. I played Inquisitor Daedalus of the Ordo Malleus as a grumpy, slightly puckish veteran, largely because I knew my other main role was going to be a complete stiff.

I asked +syen iess's PC to look into whether the Lord-Militant (Ian's main NPC) had been cursed or hexed, but in retrospect I was way too oblique and by the morning word was going around that he was making deals with the forces of chaos. Oops.

I largely failed to bring that other character in on Friday, as I was too tired to drum up the confidence to break in on PC conversations. Huge thanks to +Timothy Edwards for providing someone for my self-entitled failure to bounce off. We blamed the weather on the 'harmonic convergence' and moved away from the windows at one point.

Towards the end of the night I was in the crew room while a group of crew ran through the ritual I wrote up for their cultist NPCs. They didn't stick completely to the script, but if I'd realised that they were going to perform the ritual rather than have people turn up the notes, I wouldn't have required the victim to be 'clad in naught but skin' in the first place.

On Saturday my rubbish politico basically got rolled on by the PCs. First the Inquisition got heavy with local politics (my guy didn't have the leverage to fight this, but the outraged response from the other noble NPCs was excellent) and then, having made the first selfless decision of his life, he was arrested because someone told one of the Lord-Captains that he was trying to steal her thunder (+Hazel King has made no bones about her PC's motivation, but I share Rob's disappointment that we just didn't have time to run the arrest as a linear.)

This took him out of play from the afternoon on, so I played Daedalus again for a bit. Finding evidence of heresy he joined a snatch raid to arrest another of the planetary nobles, inadvertently shifting the mission to a live capture. I promptly handed her over to the Ordo Hereticus, who failed to give a fuck as they seemed to be distracted trying to take control of a planet, or something. This was just part of the whole socio-political sector of the game swinging wildly off book; two of the three candidates for planetary governor ended up arrested on the PCs' orders and there were serious plans to cosh the third and take her off-world for her own protection. I don't think any of their dark secrets were actually unveiled, largely because no-one actually felt the need to get a handle on them.

I switched to my third NPC, an adventurous Navigator, for the Navigators' party, which had some culinary grotesquerie (gummi worms in advocat) and lots of cool storytelling; we ended up comparing the death cults which seem to spring up in the bowels of the 40Kverse's vast voidships with embarrassing regularity.

I had planned to go to bed after that, but instead I ended up dressing as a fishman and menacing players in company of a ratman and a giant lobster. How I managed to ambush PCs in that suit I do not know. Also, the head came off as I did my last death, so they carried it away with them. The whole thing was the highlight of the weekend for me, even if it did leave me knackered the next morning. Pictures of this will follow as soon as I get them (+Ben Brown - Catriona has a lot of pics; could you pass on my email?)

On Sunday I played Daedalus again, and finally got some PCs to bring me things. Sadly not an actual daemonhost - I think they took those to the Hereticus and they were already dead before I could spirit them away to the maximum fun chamber - but I did get a partial host and a set of notes. I also got to bring a heavy bolter to a party (explaining 'it looks like it's turning out to be one of those sorts of party.')

And then home, which took a long time (drive, plus a couple of hours on train and bus) but ended with a series of notes from +Johanna Scott-Bennett reminding me to look after myself.