#RPGaDay 2015: Day 3 - It's a new dawn, it's a new game

Prompt: Favourite new game of the last 12 months

This one is tricky, because I don't buy a lot of games, and I've already talked about Goblin Quest. Also, this could be read as specifically new releases, rather than just new to me, in which case... Well, again, it's really just a couple of Kickstarters.

Favourite game that is new to me is No Rest for the Wicked, a Warhammer 40K LARP run by friends with a commercial sensibility. It's interesting, because it's a system in flux. Pretty much every application brings up new issues and there's a lot of revision and rewriting, but without much fuss or complaining about how it's ruined now or how the changes are ruining player X's game; just reasonable critique and comment. It's refreshing to see.

Gratuitous kit shot!

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A little more on topic, and separate from yesterday's discussion of Kickstarters, I'm going to consider what prompts me to buy - or more often these days want to buy - a new game.

I'm a sucker for presentation, I won't lie. It's not just that I want a game to look pretty, I want to be able to find things. Layout and structure matter, and important rules shouldn't be hard to locate. I hated the Ascension LARP core book because it was so badly structured I could barely find anything and I have the same problem with Stars Without Number (although in fairness, that's the free edition, so I don't think it's had the editorial love the full release got.)

I'm interested in system, but not obsessed. Setting is more important to me, and it was - for example - the setting of 7th Sea that turned me off the game, the anachronism stew making for a less satisfying dish - to me - than the more nuanced intrigues and anti-establishment capers that I might hope for from a swashbuckling game. Similarly... but I'll talk about that tomorrow.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 2 - This is my quest...

Prompt: Kickstarted game you are most pleased you backed

This is a goblin bard, or possibly just a
goblin with what I will charitably call a
lute. I'm not sure there's a difference.

I don't usually schill, but I pushed the Kickstarter campaign for Goblin Quest. I can't imagine I pumped the total more than a few quid, since a lot of people I know are on first name terms with the writer, but it's the principle of the thing. Partly I backed it because I like Grant Howitt as a writer, but the concept appealed to me, and far more than the core game the idea of a flexible party game that could be adapted to oh, okay, I was totally in it for the idea of 'Sean Bean Quest', a rules hack about many incarnations of Sean Bean trying to escape the Bean curse which inevitably kills them before the credits.

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But enough of Goblin Quest, for now at least; let's talk Kickstarters. What do we - or, let's be honest, what do I - want from a Kickstarter?

Well, first up, I want a book. I am very unlikely to back based on a PDF, or even a tonne of PDFs of older material. If I back a game, I want to know I'm going to get something physical, with pages I can turn instead of scrolling. This means that I tend not to back projects that don't have a mid-tier option for the book and more or less just the book, although I may see if someone I know is backing and ask them to add in an extra copy of the book

I'm also more interested in extra game material as stretch goals than extra goodies, and I want a sign that the makers are reasonably aware of their risks and liabilities. I knew that GC risked non release given the number of stretch goals, but was enthused by Grant's openness about having absolutely no idea how he was going to cope with some of the promises, especially Sean Bean Quest.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 1 - The Shape of Things to Come

Prompt: Forthcoming game you are most looking forward to

The simple answer to this one is the World of Darkness 2nd edition releases in general, and Awakening in particular, because although I will probably never play them it is fascinating to me to see how they address issues which the IoD discovered in play, and how they change the mechanics of the game to clarify the setting.

I don't care how clearly it's a rhomboid jellyfish,
I'm sticking with pyrasquid.

I also find it interesting that they were not originally touted as second editions, but as the [Antagonist] Chronicles. The initial pitch was that these were almost subsets of the main game, assuming certain metapoints in a way that The World of Darkness assiduously didn't. It was clear from The God Machine Chronicle/The World of Darkness Second Edition onwards that the mechanics were being drastically overhauled; not in a way that entirely worked for LARP, but then it wasn't supposed to, and the prospects for TT were good.

Awakening especially impresses me because it seems to be making tangible strides towards a game engine that specifically models the purpose of the game. Routine magical defence no longer inhibits your ability to do other things, because the game is about exploring mysteries, and you can't do that if you're scared all the time. While secrets need work to uncover, you no longer need a significant effort to just see the weirdness around you, because the game is about seeing the weirdness. Routine stuff is no longer allowed to get in the way of the point of the game, is what I'm saying. It's a move away from simulationism - not that WoD was ever hardcore simulationist - towards a more narrative focus. It's there in the very core concept of the new game: You are a mage, and mages investigate mysteries, they don't pussyfoot around wondering if they dare drop their sights or their armour, and the best way to encourage players to just get in there is to make it so that they don't have to.

I strongly suspect that Awakening 2nd edition would be completely impractical for live play, but then I don't play live age anymore.

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New editions are always a thing in gaming; a chance to do something new with an existing property; a chance to correct mistakes, iron out the wrinkles and get rid of that one thing that makes you cringe each time you read it. The original WoD games were pretty rough and ready, and Vampire and Werewolf were being revised even before half the games were in first edition.

What should a 2nd (or later) edition do?

1) Develop substantially on the previous edition.

Seriously; there's no point in producing a new core book for small changes; well, no point except grafting and gamers are hard to squeeze; not because they're canny, but because so many of them are skint. Now that a book comes in at £30-£50 print and £15-£30 PDF, we're careful with our money, so we're not just looking for substantial change, we want development; for the new product to build on the other rather than just having change for change's sake. It should tighten what is loose, clarify what is vague and in all ways address existing concerns to make the game more playable.

2) No exploding metaplot.

White Wolf's new editions laboured under the weight of metaplot. Much of it was ignorable, but later Mage editions in particular were cumbersome with it, to the point of hamstringing a number of factions by incorporating elements which established that in the grand struggle to establish the nature of reality, there were PC splats that were just plain wrong.  It was also unstoppable; there was never anything the PCs could do about the metaplot.

Similarly, the new version of WFRP - not the boxed set; the one before that - revised the Old World setting into line with the current Warhammer Fantasy Battle background; more epic, more heroic*, less grubby. I liked the world grubby. Of course, then they blew the new version up and replaced it with the Age of Sigmar, which is pretty much WFB turned up to 40,000. I doubt that an Age of Sigmar RPG could go much more than a few sessions, although it might be fun while it lasted.

3) Continuity of concept.

Again, coming back to Mage the Ascension, the final edition made traumatic changes to the nature of the underlying ontology that kind of rendered all previous material moot by establishing an objective reality.

4) Lack of repetition.

A big part of the continuity thing is that the new edition should build on, rather than replacing the old. Back compatibility to keep your old books as a worthwhile investment and a live resource does wonders.

So, in summary, a new edition should build on the old, not knock it down and start again or mutate it out of all recognisable shape. It should improve, and should be playable with the older material with no or minimal hacking required. I'm pretty sure that Awakening 2nd doesn't do all these things, being a massive do-over, but c'est la vie. I've never been fond of ideals, I guess.

Look for the hashtag #rpgaday for more RPG a Day thoughts.

* Although saying that, it did massively reduce the number of magical items floating around the world.

GUMSHOE One Sheet!

Pech Merle caves - horror of the natural world!

I have an entry in the RPG Geek GUMSHOE One Sheet contest! It's a little thing about alien squid beasts in French caves, and troglodytes playing the role of landlocked Deep Ones.

I'm quite pleased with myself, not necessarily because I think it's a winner, but for getting it done and posted.

Infernal Relics

Shit be getting mystical, yo.

I think it's fair to say that the longer any comic remains in publication, the weirder it gets. It's not surprising then that the second big expansion for the Sentinels of the Multiverse computer game is... a bit out there, even by Sentinels standards. As with 'Rook City', the 'Infernal Relics' DLC brings in all of the new cards from the expansion box of the same name: in this case 2 hero decks, 4 villains and 2 environments.

The heroes are the Argent Adept, a magical musician (or musical magician) and Nightmist, a sorceress made of fog. AA has unfortunate initials and a deck built around combos. He has some one-shots, but mostly his cards are Instruments (a specialised form of Equipment) or Ongoing cards of one of three types, Rhythm, Harmony and Melody. His intrinsic power is used only to activate the powers of the musical cards, while the instruments allow him to kick off multiple musical effects. Nightmist meanwhile has a very particular and fiddly card set. She has a number of powerful Relics, but the bulk of her repertoire is Spells. Each of her cards has a sparkly red icon with a number; when Spells are played, the top card of her deck is revealed and its number determines the magnitude of the Spell effect; and usually the damage she inflicts on herself to use it. Potentially incredibly powerful, there are a lot of gambles in playing Nightmist.

Each of these heroes brings their own nemesis to the table. AA's is Akash'bhuta, an insane extradimensional earth mother goddess determined to destroy all existence and opposed by the Virtuosi of the Void. Her deck builds 'Primal Limbs' which do her attacking, but damage her once destroyed. If that sounds easy, you should note that she has a stonking 200 health to deplete. Nightmist's archenemy is also an outsider to the universe; Gloomweaver, a demonic loa worshipped by degenerate voodoo cults. Gloomweaver rocks a combination of Zombies, Cultists (who are swapped with trashed zombies when destroyed), Relics and Voodoo Pins, a nasty new card type that attach to a Hero card and do horrible things each turn. He is nowhere near as tough as Akash'bhuta, but like the Chairman/Operative he quickly generates a wall of mooks, so you spend a lot of time riding herd.

The remaining villains pair up with heroes from the basic set. Fanatic's nemesis is Apostate, a black-winged, long-haired, shirtless angel-dude ripped from the fevered imaginings of a thousand anime fangirls. Many of his cards are Relics mirroring Fanatics, in particular his personal sword, but he also has a demon horde to call on. Finally, the Ennead is a set of nine villains, of whom only five (or possibly one per hero) are played each time. Each member of the group is a human possessed by one of the Heliopolitan Ennead, and each has an effect that triggers when certain cards are played from their deck, which can lead to quite painful chains of extra plays and damage effects (or healing; they heal a lot, so everyone jumping on one of them at a time is a good strategy.) Beside the Ennead themselves, they lack ongoing cards, and play mostly one-shots.

The environments are Gloomweaver's Realm of Discord, which plays Distortions to change the rules of the game, and the Tomb of Anubis, an Ancient Egyptian complex full of traps and tests and killer mummies.

There's a lot to get to grips with in terms of alternate mechanics in 'Infernal Relics', but overall the new challenges aren't as horrific as those of 'Rook City' and variety more than difficulty is the selling point. This makes it a better addition for a casual gamer like me, although perhaps less satisfying for those who find the game as is lacks bite.

Impressively, the drive for increased complexity and variation has not affected the strengths of the game, and the four-colour artwork and thematic deck construction remains excellent.

Mad Props

I miss having a printer, although I don't think I ever produced anything quite
this pro.

A friend recently posted on her blog about game props, which are things that I have missed creating since I stopped playing tabletop and pub LARP.

I used to do a particularly good line in newspapers, first with MS Publisher, then just in Word or Open Office, churning them out for Isles of Darkness games long after people stopped paying attention to anything but the crossword. A key lesson for anyone hoping to use props and in-character news to plot drop: Be sure that your game and your PCs are such that someone reading about stuff will be inclined to a) care and b) do something that c) isn't hiding. Not that hiding wasn't necessarily a fair reaction in some cases, but it became a grind trying to get anyone involved in anything. "Why should we care?" was the question often asked, and "because I spent all this time writing plot and making newspapers" didn't seem to satisfy.

It's kind of surprising that it took as long as it did for the
internet to fill with motivational poster parodies. My goal for
my next post is now to work in a 'Keep Calm and...' variant.

Social LARP is a bitch for motivations, and while I miss the people I don't interact with as much, as a GM I'm much happier working in a more mission-oriented milieu. Social games are basically a stewpot of characters with intensely personal motives all of whom want you to provide something that will appeal to them in particular, even though they may not have told you what those motives are and may not, in fact, play regularly in their game. I don't think it helped that more than once people got stung chasing plot that turned out to be a trap, or just more than the people who went off could handle. I hear the post-reset IoD is doing better, and I suspect this is not unrelated to the fact that it is new. Everything is exciting again, everything is possible, nothing has been written in the expectation that some titan might turn out to deal with it and wherever the PCs go, they are probably the first to have gone there.

This also means that props like documents and newspapers aren't just plot drops, but a way to explore this new world and see what is happening beyond the social space. At the arse end of a six year chronicle, no one really wants to know what's going on outside their well-defined and well-described spheres of interest and influence, but with a new game, characters are looking for niches and opportunities. It's an exciting time to be a propmaker.

Seriously; so much envy.

But that's the IoD. My current jam is Conflict Resolutions 40K game, No Rest for the Wicked, for which I have volunteered to do some rather more virtual propmaking in the form of wiki writing and setting creation. This includes an expansion on the original sector map to fit in everything that has been mentioned in game, although having seen the picture of the actual map, I am filled with shame for daring to aspire to rewrite it.

In the end though, wikis only partially fulfill my need to create props, but then again one of the advantages of LRP is that you get to do costumes. I have a bunch of stuff to do for No Rest, including but not limited to:

• Sewing a cassock - probably this weekend - which my girlfriend is then going to embroider.
• Transforming a cool little belt buckle into something slightly more tech looking.
• Modding my Nerf guns to look less like orange plastic (major future project).
• Adding annotating bookmarks to a borrowed copy of the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer.

But what I have been working on already is my core accessory for every character - the notebook. Each of my characters has a notebook, partly because I need to write down reminders, but also because I find it helps to focus them. I had a flip-open book for my werewolf cop, a little black book for my social fixer, and a fat book in fancy binding for my serious academic. What began as a purely practical choice to keep separate notes for each character evolved into something approaching my LARP signature.

This I'm kinda good at.

For No Rest, I have a handmade notebook I bought in Edinburgh years ago for a PC who died before he got to use it, which needs to contain his collection of scriptures and sermons, as well as scientific notes on various flora and fauna (including half a dozen uses for toad sweat) in addition to any space for in-game notes. I'm really quite proud of it, and desperately hope I don't get greased my first game out.

Props matter, in tabletop as well as live games. Thinking about it, I ought to do more for my online game. Since I don't need to print anything I can just prep the documents and mail them out. I enjoy making them, and it tends to be more accessible than a simple description. If you're running a game, you should give serious consideration to providing props. They're not for everyone, but if you enjoy making them then your players will love getting them.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game

To be clear, this is the US import, not the UK
version. TARDIS cookie jar, racks of CDs
and Andrew not included.

On Friday night, we introduced a new board game to the repertoire, in the form of a version of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game sufficiently old that it treated Tara as a minor support character and only went up to Season 4. Props though, because it was in sweet condition given age and usage; that's some quality game manufacturing.

In the spirit of the infamously difficult Army of Darkness board game, one player controls the baddies (determined by Season,) the others the heroes (Buffy, Willow, Xander and Oz.) Each hero has their own tray, a long card strip with spaces to place cards representing Help (allies), Weapons (most of which seem to be wooden objects which allow an insta-kill staking attempt,) Artifacts and Research (mostly spells, but also sewer maps allowing fast transit.) Characters are moved around the board by rolling dice, which are pretty standard six-siders, but with the 1 on one and the 6 on the other marked with a moon which progresses the oddest time track ever (I can't find a decent-sized close up, but it basically runs from the new moon to the full moon, then back through the waning phases until sunrise.)

The villain player rolls a die to see how many of the master and minion monsters can move in their turn. Characters move and then take an action, which can be searching for artifacts (one in each corner of the board,) drawing a regular card (in appropriately marked spaces,) or trying to smack the person next to you if they aren't on your side.

Each character has their own strength and weaknesses, which are not balanced (purposely; in a four player game, one player controls Xander and Willow.) Heroes (apart from Oz) can be sired as vampires (mechanically, this functions as the equivalent of the heroes stake option, and requires a specific villain card) and, if sired, re-ensouled with the appropriate spell. Buffy is tough, Willow has lots of magic dice, Xander... is basically likable, since it isn't Season 6 yet, and Oz is fundamentally indestructible. He's only an uber-badass during the full moon phase, but there aren't many monsters to match him (pretty much Veruca the bad werewolf, I think,) and every time he switches form in either direction, he basically heals all his damage. He also can't be one-shotted with the 'Sire' card; he's badass as all get out.

This character tray shows that a) other editions had more playable characters, and b) Giles is a fucking badass.

We actually had a surprisingly good game, beating the Mayor without losing a single character (although things looked very bad for Xander, who was saved by hitting the victory conditions from near certain death at Faith's hands.) We also didn't take out any of the minions, going straight for the Box of Gavrok (or as the card mistakenly insists, Garvok.)

There is a UK version which is a sort of double-blind Cluedo*, which is one of the weirdest concepts for a Buffy licensed game I can think of.

* Or Clue, for Americans.