Non-Blogging

Ugh. This month has just turned into one long work day.

Every now and then I have the odd hour to think about games - and thankfully I got to play a few weeks ago, but then didn't have time to write about it. Perhaps this weekend - as it is a three day weekend in the UK - I will have time to write up running Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess with Patrick and David W, which was interesting and fun and gross to describe in places.

We also played What is a Roleplaying Game? by Epidiah Ravachol, which was a really interesting example of diceless play. Very provocative and has me thinking about nano-games as a starting point for making and completing something, releasing/sharing something. I need to write about the game and about nano-games too.

I have nothing even resembling mechanics, but I do have ideas for Game Chef 2013, which of course I found out was running the day I went away earlier this week for work... Parallel universes, robots with crystal brains shifting through continua to escape from The Man while trying not to lose each other. Something like that.

And then, while playing GHOST/ECHO again I had a few ideas crystallise for a time travel game that has been running around in the background for ages called (for now) SPACE/TIME. Despite the title, it runs on the Apocalypse! So lots to do and lots to write.

At the start of the year I made a commitment to myself to blog a minimum of seven times a month. It's the 24th of May, and this is the first time I've blogged this month. So I'd best get cracking...

Ugh

I'm moving house. This is the second time in my life I've had to do this. The first was moving in when we got married. Now we've bought somewhere; it's taken over seven months to get it sorted, and now things have just suddenly come together and we have a week to pack the house up and find things which we need for the new place.

I've still had time to do some writing about game-related stuff, but just not had time to get it on here. Hopefully over the weekend I'll have the capacity to share some things. I've been enjoying:

• making monsters out of my friends - now with a picture!
• statting up mechs and a knight for noisms forthcoming Pendragons of Mars campaign that we're going to try over G+ - really intrigued by this, especially since an almost throwaway question about mech games suddenly added giant robots to an Arthurian knights game...
• letting my brain relax from running a campaign - but now thinking that I want to get back to it before the summer comes and I try to run Apocalypse World for my nephew and his friends... I have seriously been bitten by the world-building bug with Somewhere North and now Somewhere South... It's like a permanent itch that needs scratching.

So posts to follow soon anyway, probably stats of monsters first, with horrendous ink sketches for some.

Actual Play: LotFP, Somewhere North

December has gone by in a flash, and I've not written on here at all! I disagree with noisms describing me as having an irregular blog - I just haven't written in the last month. I was pretty regular before then. But no matter. I'm writing here and now.

And it seems appropriate to write about the campaign that I seem to be running for Dave and Patrick. It started in the week before Christmas, when I offered to run a festive weird horror setting for them; I had just recently received LotFP (taking advantage of the 50% print discount), and created "the Lodge of Zinternik" - an evil red-dressed toymaker, who delighted in putting life of all kinds into things. The local villagers had heard that he had recently died, so his house on the mountain, and more importantly the conternts, were ripe for the taking...

Patrick rolled up a Specialist (or as he prefers, Artifex), a young adventurer named Kolk, and Dave created a Magic-User, the older gentlemen-rogue Esa-Pekka. Both had to be careful, as they had low STR, and Esa-Pekka also suffers from having a Charisma of 3. But they have their wits and creativity to keep them going.

Zinternik's Lodge was a mix of monsters and traps, and NPC "baddies", some of whom the players turned really quickly. They convinced a pair of halflings hired by "Zinter" to labour in his workshop, and turned some elves against each other; they avoided Dolf, the animated evil stag with a blazing red ruby for a nose and and tractamorphic tentacle antlers, firing at him from the roof of the lodge. And finally they left the Lodge with some mysterious (probably magical) items, and with a promise to Mumble and Crumble (the halflings) that they would help them return to their home in the far frozen north.

And that was that... Or so I thought...

When we mentioned playing again in the setting I updated the map, a few more villages (generated with help from noisms' own random village generator) and a handful of details about the nearest large town. I googled One Page Dungeons and had a quick look for something that could be modded easily. I statted up a few more creatures and things. And I thought about what had happened before, and noted a few interesting things that could be good. And that was it.

In the second session the players decided that their characters needed answers, and set off for a nearby village where someone was said to be very wise, perhaps someone who could tell them what they had found at Zinternik's Lodge. The old man, Hannes, gave them some ideas of the artefacts that they had found, and they set off across country for Rovaniemi, the nearest large town. They were looking for provisions and gear to head on the long road north, back to the home of the halflings.

After a run in with a banshee wolf, and a night of talking with some nomadic reindeer herders, they found the road and kept on for the town. However a small village stood in the way; the village was built in a narrow pass between rocky cliff faces. To go around might take a day or more. To go through they would have to pay a steep toll. This did not sit well with the PCs.

In Zinternik's Lodge they had found a magical scroll of incredible power. A one use Scroll of Indefinite Silence. If the nine syllables on it are read aloud then a permanent silence would fall in a sphere with a mile radius. Everlasting silence. As far as they know this can never be removed.

So, what do you do when some toll-charging villagers have hacked you off? You curse their village to silence. Forever. And off you ride to the town you're headed for...

In town they set about trying to recruit retainers for an expedition to a Dwarven King's Tomb, filled with the undead, Kolk sleeps with a young woman (noisms asks "Does she become pregnant?" The DM rolls and makes a note...) and Esa-Pekka of the Low Charisma ticks off a shady bookshop owner, calling the attention of the town guards. As they make their way back to the tavern they are staying at, one of the halflings runs up and says "I was down by the gate, and a posse of a dozen men from that village have just rode up shouting and asking if anyone had seen you!"

Oh dear...

Tomorrow I'll collect some thoughts about what I'm using and how I'm doing this, and what the setting is like. Anyone interested in seeing stats and descriptions of weird creatures that lurk the frozen north?

Back From Being Away

In my "day job" I am a freelance skills trainer who works with PhD students and researchers in general. I do various things, most of which is to get people thinking about their skills, what they can do to develop them and maybe more importantly how they want to develop them (getting them to reflect on what they want).

This week I was away tutoring on a week-long course in the Lake District. And as a bonding exercise we were all (on the tutor team, and also on my tutor group) talking about guilty pleasures or things that we do for hobbies. And a couple of times I mentioned how much I've enjoyed playing tabletop RPGs over the last year or so (which is when I got into it). On the last night in the bar someone asked me "so what is a tabletop RPG?" followed by "is that the same as LARPing?"

We talked about it for a bit, and she was genuinely amazed at the thought that there was more than one system (i.e., that there wasn't just Dungeons & Dragons). Not in a malicious way, but because it was so far removed from her experience. In talking about it I described tabletop role-playing as

"Collaborative story-telling between two or more people; typically one person will facilitate the game, and the others will take on the roles of individual characters; the remaining one person will take on the role of any other character in the world of the game, and respond to the other players' actions and requests for description about the world; if the outcome of any proposed action is in doubt then typically dice are rolled according to some game mechanism; other materials can be used depending on the type of game; some games require players and the game facilitator to keep track of details of attributes that their characters have."

Or at least I said something close to that. I'm sure it is a trope of people blogging about games to ask, but what would you say to someone who has little to know experience of tabletop role-playing games?

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 5

Last night the Dogs assembled as "Three in Authority" and brought deliverance to the town of Jewel. Brother Paul arrived in town just as Sister Basemuth (Patrick) tried to hold the Steward back from killing a woman who was strongly suspected of being a witch; Brother Caleb (David) meanwhile was in hot pursuit of a man - the witch's brother - who had staggered away despite being tied up and shot in both legs.

After sessions of solving town squabbles and disagreements with local tribes, this was a full tilt into horror, action and exorcism. Brother Caleb tracked down the tongueless brother, Alex, and had to fill him full of lead as he transformed into an unspeakable monster, all triple-jointed fingers, razor teeth and deformed skull. The dice went with Caleb, but it showed up that when it comes to dealing with demons it really pays to have more than player acting against them. Demons/monsters can have a lot of dice in physical conflicts...

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 4

Tonight was a great session. After a week's absence the Dogs (two out of three of them) returned to their duties and straightened things out in the Hope Mission. That didn't take all that long, and they set out for the town of Jewel, hot on the heels of a woman that they suspected of being a witch.

They quickly started making other plans when they found her dead body, strung up in a tree and with the symbol of their faith carved into her flesh...

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 3

After a week's absence we return to the small, isolated Hope Mission. The Dogs had arrived at the end of a day's riding to find that people were scared: the Steward was holding some of the Mountain People in the basement of the Meeting Hall; one of the hunters was claiming he had been stabbed by a Mountain Person days earlier; events had snowballed before they even arrived, and now it seemed like they had only hours before a war party would descend on the town and take back their people by force. What could the Dogs do???

Quite a lot actually...

Work Work Work

Gets in the way of everything. But hopefully means that sooner or later I can have a break. Next weekend I'm having the guys around so that we can play games. It might be Carcassonne, might be Munchkin, it might even be noisms' DMing his Yoon-Suin setting.

Something to look forward to after another busy week of work.

In Which I Fail To Blog

Time pressure, work, maths not working, not making time, yadda yadda yadda.

• The maths has come together for my ammo maths question (or at least partly), so I'll be typesetting that over the next few days and putting it up - along with some thoughts on why this is interesting in general.
• noisms is really knocking it out of the park with his latest blog posts; two in particular have been really good. I really liked his thoughts on Hanafuda cards, and the discussion underneath really seems to have sparked something (in me and in other readers) thinking about using cards in play generally.
• The other post was a bit of AP from the LotFP game that we are both involved with. My nephew and his friend joined us, and last week brought along another two friends. This has really added something to the game, and noisms makes some really interesting observations about differences in play styles.

As I noted in the comments there, I don't think that age is the biggest contribution to the difference so much as the profound difference in culture that exists. If I was my 18 year old self playing D&D with my nephew there would still be a profound difference, because we have lived through such different times - in fact, it feels right to call them different eras.

noisms does make some good points that there might be a broader question here connected with styles of DMing and what they might be used to as well; I can't really comment on that: I've only played under the GMing of noisms and Patrick and I know them both to be fair but lethal, so I know what to expect.

Anyway, more soon. I promise. (and you know what that leads to, right?)