Where does the time go?

I like noisms' "generalised lament" about the amount of time that he has to run/play games (and write about them as well) - obviously not the fact of the matter, but the situation resonates with me a lot. I wonder about how things are going to change when I become a dad in a few months time. Will I be able to play in a weekly game? (nevermind run one) At the moment I am barely able to run a LotFP campaign once a week; in principle I am taking part in noisms' excellent Pendragon of Mars campaign, but in reality I'm either away or busy. I've taken part in two sessions.

Ah well! I can sit here and weep for my lack of time or I can start to think, like noisms about the five games I would want to run or play:

• Chatting after games night yesterday I realised that I would love to play some more Cyberpunk; I really enjoyed the game that we played about eighteen months ago in alternate Soviet Cyberpool.
• Apocalypse World. I'd love to play it, I'd particularly love to run it (I was hoping to run it for my nephew and his friends this summer, but think I will be too short on time).
• I've read a lot about Monsterhearts in the last few months and it really intrigues me... I might have to pick it up soon...
• Avarice Industries is an RPG that I supported on Kickstarter. It's a bit Cyberpunk-y with the twist that the big corporations (one of which the players work for) have technology that creates anything. You can ride a dinosaur to work or have a bag with dimensional pockets. Big Problem: it was due in April 2012, and it's still (as of July 2013) not here. I've had bits and pieces of pdfs but nothing playable... AP stuff that was shared looks really interesting.
• Homebrew Dogs In The Vineyard in modern day setting with zombies. I bloody loved running Dogs, we played about five sessions and it was a joy to prepare for and play. While playing it I was struck with the idea of the Dogs being able to do what they do because they have the final say about what is right and wrong (by virtue of being Followers of the King of Life). I think this kind of theme could transfer well in a zombie game; people acting as they will because there are no courts or authorities to say otherwise. I act, therefore I'm right. Started making some notes about this some time ago and tagged them with "zombies".

It's Camp Nanowrimo month and so I'm spending time writing 31,000 words about games and game resources. So hopefully, like noisms, I will find my 30 minutes a day to connect with a hobby...

Making a Dungeon

After recent fun experiences playing both noisms Yoon-Suin setting and Lamentations of the Flame Princess with Patrick DMing, I've been thinking about (eventually) running something a bit old school myself.

I'm trying to come up with my own homebrew dungeon and have some ideas for (hopefully) novel traps and situations; I'm wondering what people would recommend doing/thinking about when creating a dungeon. There are great resources out there of course:

• I got Vornheim a few months back and am really enjoying that.
• noisms linked to this guide to putting a mega-dungeon together, and that seems pretty cool.
• When I get it (maybe for Christmas), LotFP will help me put some numbers to things.

But nevermind those: what do you think is important to think about when designing a dungeon? Are there particular tropes that should be followed? And are there cliches that should now be avoided?

Games Night: Yoon-Suin Obituary

noisms has already pretty much covered exactly what happened last night in Yoon-Suin, although there are a few points that I want to clarify, before I get on to talk about Eki Ulele.

With Eki Ulele eventually recovered, they pressed on, and discovered the treasure of the Feathered Men: 800 gold pieces in metallic urns. These urns, coated with poison, nearly killed the foolhardy Eki Ulele...

I was far from foolhardy! noisms described the urns as being covered in a thick, clear gel or oil. I scraped some off with my knife, looked at it under the light. Sniffed it, dabbed a rag into it to see if it was corrosive in some way, I think I tried burning it to see if it was some intense flammable agent. Finally I very carefully dabbed the tip of my little finger into it.

"Roll a d20," says the DM.
"7."
"What's your save against poison?"
"...oh come on!!!"

At the end of the session, Eki Ulele's death mirrored his life: he wanted to be more than a magician or wizard, he wanted to be other than a slug-man, bound by his caste and his father/mother. Despite being high-born, he had a rage against the unhuman and the inhumane, the treacherous and the despicable. And yes, somewhere along the way he decided that the Jack Bauer approach to getting information from NPCs was 100% legit.

Eki knew Read Magic, Read Languages and Charm Person: only the latter ever really worked, and even then it was used to charm opponents to lie down on the floor while he stabbed them through the back of the neck. He liked to talk, and his strange relationship with the world meant that he would veer wildly from acts of cowardice to acts of courage. He was about three-quarters of the way towards levelling up, and was desperate for more hit points and an offensive spell.

His death, in a bizarre and random encounter after successfully giving his friends time to make their escape was exactly in keeping with his life: short, strange and utterly unpredictable.

Games Night Redux

A few days ago I forgot to include a few things from our Yoon-Suin game that had really tickled me. Patrick, in writing about the game that he is DMing and which my nephew is a player in, reminded me of the importance of great lines and player strategy that come out in play, and which really should be recorded.

Here are some notes I made from last week's game; apologies if they make little sense to anyone else out there. They were perfectly reasonable at the time.

Patrick, thinking like a giant lungfish (whose stomachs were filled with silver pieces): "I'm so hungry, have you got any coins?"

(honestly, why am I even posting this, why would anyone care??? I had to hold my head and pinch by brow to stop myself from crying with laughter at the feeding habits of dungeon dwelling lungfish)

Eki Ulele, my slug-man magic-user, has a reputation for going all red mist-y around the edges whenever someone tries to get one over on us. His standard reaction is to burn the village and salt the land with the widows' tears. When the others talked him down from killing an unarmed prisoner it made me realise: "I'm like a slug Jack Bauer!"

noisms, the DM, as we set forth on an improvised bamboo raft across a dungeon lake: "You float off into the Dark Sea of Doom."
Everyone else thinks: "I've made a huge mistake."

Patrick's PC, Anil, is a cleric who serves Manpac (rearrange the syllables); Manpac is apparently the god of mazes, the eater of ghosts and his servants chant wakka-wakka-wakka as they do his work. When Patrick exclaimed "fear the might of Manpac" I thought I was going to die laughing.

But here's the thing: the repurposing of Manpac is AWESOME. If I was a cleric in another world, another time, I can totally see "the God of Mazes, the Eater of Ghosts" as a being who is to be feared and obeyed.

And Games Night is tomorrow.

Games Night: Yoon-Suin

noisms has already written about one aspect of last night's Yoon-Suin escapades, the loss of our devoted teenage retainer Dev. We all miss him very much. It was a strange sort of evening, our initial plan to get back to the dungeon and take some names was thwarted by running into some bandits.

We killed several of them easily enough, but a few escaped on horseback and another was our prisoner for a short time before he escaped as well. We know the name of the bandit leader, and perhaps we will have to do something about him sooner or later, but it was decided that we should push on to Sangmengzhang.

Some dwarf skeletons in armour nearly killed one of the PCs, and so we retreated out of the dungeon to rest up for a few days. We went back in, where we were promptly attacked by a horde of cockroaches. Escape on a flimsy raft across a deep lake of glow-in-the-dark jellyfish worked well; as we reached the far bank we tried to take out some giant lungfish that were stirring in a cave. Even this was beyond us, but eventually they ran and we licked our wounds.

For two minutes, until a giant slug oozed out of the lake and chased us into a corridor. Thank heaven for doors.

I'm beginning to find out more about my character. Eki Ulele is a slug-man magic-user. He has 3HP when at full health (more on this in a second), and the spells he knows are only borderline useful most of the time - although Charm has worked out quite well. He tends to think quickly, is more often than not an optimist (at least with others' lives). He is prone to rage and violent acts against unarmed opponents, possibly as an overcompensating reaction to his caste - his desire to adventure is atypical for slug-men - and possibly as a result of his upbringing, having a father-mother who was utterly indifferent to him.

I'm almost halfway towards levelling up, and next time we really need to find some treasure to make that happen. I did some back of the napkin maths and realised that an attack by someone with a d4 weapon has a probability of nearly 30% of knocking me out (if not outright killing me). For someone with a d6 weapon that probability jumps to almost 40%. Given that most things we meet have attacks at that level (at the moment) this is very, very bad.

Games Night: OD&D/Yoon-Suin

Last night we had another trip to Yoon-Suin, ably DMed by noisms. Patrick, Whimsy and I headed for the dungeon with three retainers to soak up some of the damage. We were cautious at first; we had arrived at the entrance to the dungeon in the late afternoon, and so our plan was just to have a quick explore so that we could get the lay of the land, see what the entrance was like, get a feel for the place.

Then we met the hostiles.

noisms described them as humanoid, grey-skinned, red eyes, dressed in rags and with long, lank hair: there were a lot of them, and they attacked in groups, armed with spears, clubs and slings. There were three or four skirmishes in all; they tried to flank us several times, but we were always able to stay one step ahead of them, more or less.

In the end, we killed all of them, but not without paying a price: we lost Patrick's character Damodar.

Damodar was awesome. He was always stood at the front of a fight, always keen to jump in; his INT stat was low, but Patrick played that really well by having Damodar ask naive-sounding-but-clever questions. Being the only fighter in a party of magic-users meant that he had to be the guy at the front; plate mail can only do so much, and Patrick effectively played the odds all night: hit after hit from slings, spears and clubs didn't connect, until they finally did.

Luckily, once we had killed all of the creatures in that party, we were able to "rescue" a 1st level cleric that Patrick was frantically rolling up. Damodar and one of the retainers were buried just outside the entrance of the dungeon, and the next day we decided to head back to Silaish Vo to lick our wounds and rethink our strategy.

It's my first time playing a magic-user, and I hadn't realised just how restricted options were in terms of combat: as a 1st Level I have only one spell as well, and none of my options are offensive in nature. I just about killed some of the grey-skins with my staff, and I had wits enough to make flame-bombs from flasks of oil. I'm hoping that I can level up (safely) over the next session, and possibly start the path towards offensive capabilities.

Having more than three hit points would also be handy.

Games Night: OD&D in Yoon-Suin

It was games night on Tuesday, and me, Patrick and the Whimsybomb-man met up with noisms at the Scythe to continue our adventures in a setting that noisms has been toiling away on for years. Yoon-Suin is a strange place, humans and demi-humans live side-by-side in the city of Silaish Vo, it seems corruption is everywhere and magic is loose and free.

Patrick and W's PCs are a human fighter and a human magic-user; I am a Slugman Magic-user (look here for noisms' pictures of slugmen) - in this setting that essentially gives me a caste-style bonus, as slugmen are more highborn than humans. This comes out in the way that I roleplay him a little as Hugh Laurie in Blackadder.

Yoon-Suin is very fresh as a setting. What do I mean? We don't know what the world is like. noisms has it all on paper and in his head. There are no orcs and goblins that are a bit Lords of the Rings-ish. So far we've fought humans, moths and been really careful around scorpions. The small creatures are really scary and deadly from what we've seen. We captured an immortal man-beast, the Old King aka the Mad Eunuch, and took him to the Guild of Sages. We found a man made of clay, and ran away as quickly as possible when we got the distinct feeling that the DM was telling us we were extremely outclassed.

The Eastern feel to the setting is also really great. Silaish Vo in description reminds me of a mix of Mos Eisley, Hong Kong, perpetual street markets, and bizarrely it makes me think of William Gibson's work, but I can't put my finger on why...

This is the first campaign I've played using OD&D too. Great so far, reall enjoying it. At first it was mildly frustrating that as a magic-user the only weapons I am allowed are daggers and staffs. Now I'm starting to think more tactically - in fact, while this might be my character's first adventure, he has probably had to deal with miscreants and adventurous incidents in the past in order to get to Level 1. So he must have come up against this, being in a position where he has a spell and a knife and that's it. And he survived.

Maybe thinking about that I can figure out how to continue to keep him alive...

Next Games Night: more Yoon-Suin!

Some thoughts on a Time Travel RPG

I've been thinking about how a time travel tabletop RPG for some time now, wondering how it could be put together in a neat way without being burdensome in terms of rules. noisms is responsible for two provocations that started me thinking about it. The first was introducing me to Microscope, which works really well in terms of role-playing and world-building, and which has the neat mechanism of populating a worldline with cards that put things in historical places.

While playing it I thought about how the end result was really neat, but that if you took a picture at the end you might not have a clear picture of the timeline of the player actions (i.e., the order in which the group put things down). A simple way around this would be to just number the cards as they come in to play. That was the first seed which went in to my mind.

The second thing that noisms did was talk about Continuum on his blog:

Part of [what makes Continuum compelling] is all the talk of time-travel combat: trying to "frag" your opponent by making him cease to exist due to historical discrepancy. And undoubtedly, a large part of the attraction was the air of enigma surrounding this apparently excellent but impossible-to-possess gaming grimoire.

But he went on to say that there were plenty of reviews and notes out there from people who had played the game that it inevitably lead to a kind of railroading. Not so much Doctor Who as the Time Tunnel by the sounds of it: instead of exploring the whole of time and space to explore you have to contend with a "mission" at a particular instant. Again, I have not played Continuum, but having played RPGs that have been presented to me more as "story games" the idea of this described game doesn't appeal all that much.

But it did spark a couple of ideas... (continued after cut!)