A Quick GenCon Revision

Unable to secure a room under our own means, the storied "lottery" that seems to favor everyone that just probably booked through GenCon organizers the Summer before, the PeryPubber clique's, Steering Committee (the folks with enough money to pay for a nearby, private room), have opted out of attending the convention this year. But that left me with a dilemma, I had about eight people that had opted to help with the LARPS and we still had a free room for them combined with the Steering Committee's events. So while other get-tegethers are being planned, the GenCon schedule has had to be modified into "OPERATION: LARPs-R-Us." The eight people have become six, which actually works out better for the living arrangement. All this said, PeryPubbers are coming on strong, even if all we're doing is Crawlspace.

Thursday 1pm-5pm
Title: "Cthulhu at the Sands"
Description: The Rat Pack doesn't like to meddle, but something about Liberace's next show just isn't right. An event with four GMs, six different sub-plots, and probably some singing-- oh the horror.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 40

Thursday 8pm-Midnight
"Rat-Pack Versus Cthulhu: The Search for Dino"
Description: Things just haven't been the same since Dean Marten got his head bitten off by Dagon. Jerry Lewis has a plan to get him back. Back from where? The moon, where else? An event with four GMs, six different sub-plots, and probably some singing-- oh the horror.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 30 players

Friday 1pm-5pm
Title: "Outbreak"
Description: Something is going to go wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
Everyone remembers where they were when the end of the world started. Would you like to be at Ground Zero of the Zombie Apocalypse? Four GMs and plenty of action. There's going to be a little surprise at the end, the players from a zombie killing event come barging in.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 40

Friday 3:30pm-5pm 
Title: "Extraction"
Description: Something has gone wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
The end of the world has started. Your military team does not have time to worry about it. Your job is to get into the zombie-infested research facility and get the survivors from a scenario called "Outbreak" out of its laboratories.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 10

Friday 8pm-Midnight 
"Rat-Pack Versus Cthulhu: The Sword of Sammy"
Description: Sammy Davis Junior has found the sword of Samuel. Can he save Frank Sinatra from Lillit? An event with four GMs, six different sub-plots, and probably some singing-- oh the horror.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 30 players

Saturday 10am-2pm
Title: "Outbreak"
Description: Something is going to go wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
Everyone remembers where they were when the end of the world started. Would you like to be at Ground Zero of the Zombie Apocalypse? Four GMs and plenty of action. There's going to be a little surprise at the end, the players from a zombie killing event come barging in.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 40

Saturday 12:30pm-2pm
Title: "Extraction"
Description: Something has gone wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
The end of the world has started. Your military team does not have time to worry about it. Your job is to get into the zombie-infested research facility and get the survivors from a scenario called "Outbreak" out of its laboratories.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 10 players

Saturday 3pm-7pm
Title: "Outbreak II: Patient Zero"
Description: Now that the Hensgrove Virus has spread as far as Outer Mongolia, this zombie craze needs to be taken seriously. Let's send in the egg-heads to figure out how to cure it. Just a little problem, zombies are still hanging around.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 20 players

Saturday, 5:30pm-7pm
Title: "Extraction II: After Action Review"
Description: The egg-heads going into Ground Zero, the Hensgrove Biomedical Complex, may have gotten in a little over their heads. Your SWAT team is being sent in to save any survivors from the zombie attacks.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 5 players

As for my single scenarios, those will be ran at Origins and a private Hoot.

Launch into Orbit, SPACERS Core is Out

On Sunday, home sick from work, I decided to get "Book 1: Spaced Out" into the electric sphere of publication. My core rules of Spacers has been finished for a while now, but I was fiddling with it. Mainly the ending part wasn't coming to me. It was during my sick day, that I decided that I wouldn't have an ending to this part of the rules. "Spacers Universe" is still being worked on so I be a bit more wordy in that work.

Awake after a fifteen year nap? We've got a little something.

For right now, there needs to be a set of rules that isn't me handing friends rough photocopies. I have BASHCon coming up in February, where the clique and I have ten "Jupiter Moon" events lined up. JerryTel could probably use a couple hints as to his Stay Alive "Sy-Fy" notes--don't email me about "sy-fy", I already asked him to go with "S-F" or "Sci-Fi". Beckett is jazzed and doing up his own dystopian science fiction setting around those moons, he has some thoughts about the SPACERS rules as is.

The reader does not get a well-defined, elaborate setting, these core rules have always been about how does a role-player do space, and its space opera genre, in simple terms. This might not be the norm for most reading this blog when it comes to SFRPGs, but don't let that discourage you. Take a look at the Types and run through the spaceship and other rules. Find a special Star Trek episode that you like and apply the following work into translating that airing into a tabletop session. You will find that this set of rules works out nicely.

SPACERS(TM)

For role-players wanting more than quick rules, "Spacers Universe" is just around the corner. In this work, the reader is going to find a lot to work with "hard sci-fi"-wise as well as space fantastic, err space fantasy.

What I am Running at GenCon this Summer

Well since JerryTel and Peryton are announcing their events, I figure I might as well.

Thursday, 1pm
Title: "Cthulhu at the Sands"
Description: The Rat Pack doesn't like to meddle, but something about Liberace's next show just isn't right. An event with four GMs, six different sub-plots, and probably some singing-- oh the horror.
Event Type: LARP

Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 40

Thursday, 8pm
Title: "Flotsam Bay"
Description: Like the odd collection of residents, some of the strangest things float up on the shores of this small seaside town. One of those things could prove to be the end of the place.
Event Type: RPG
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 6

Friday, 1pm
Title: "Outbreak"
Description: Something is going to go wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
Everyone remembers where they were when the end of the world started. Would you like to be at Ground Zero of the Zombie Apocalypse? Four GMs and plenty of action. There's going to be a little surprise at the end, the players from a zombie killing event come barging in.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 40


Friday, 3:30pm
Title: "Extraction"
Description: Something has gone wrong at the Hengrove Biomedical Complex.
The end of the world has started. Your military team does not have time to worry about it. Your job is to get into the zombie-infested research facility and get the survivors from a scenario called "Outbreak" out of its laboratories.
Event Type: LARP
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 10

Friday, 8pm
Title: "The Dig"
Description: The town of Grover's Bend has been abandoned for nearly a century. Come be a part of the archaeological team that wants to find out what happened to the place. Does it have anything to do with the witch trials that took place there in 1790?
Event Type: RPG
Game System: Crawlspace
Maximum Players: 6

Saturday, 9am
Title: "Nixon World"
Description: August 6, 1979. Commander-in-Chief Nixon is negotiating with Mao Zhedong for the unification of the Korean peninsula. Chancellor Agnew has authorized the use of Emergency Powers to quell anti-Caribbean war protests in LA, NYC, and most of Delaware. The Presidential Legal Militia (the Plumbers) are investigating threats on the Chinese ambassador's life by forces sympathetic to Mekon (The South Indochina Republic).
Guess where the dimension-traveling crew of the Albatross lands this morning.
Event Type: RPG
Game System: Wobble
Maximum Players: 6 

Saturday, 2pm
Title: "Vacuum"
Description: The largest alien vessel that you've ever seen lies dead in the water, so to speak, just past the orbit of Neptune. This is the opportunity of a life time. The problem is, your ship was hit by the same electromagnetic pulse as well. You are spinning in the void as well. Whoever recovers first could very well win the second Human-Others War before it even begins.
Part Two of "the Goldfish Incident" scenario from last year.
Event Type: RPG
Game System: Spacers
Maximum Players: 6 

Sunday, 10am
Title: "Robot Jazz"
Description: Between the Teapot Despot and the scavenging mutants, being a robot in the post-apocalyptic world is a hard thing to be. And then there are those Soapy humans that you are programmed to serve. Will you ever get out of Junk City intact?
Event Type: RPG
Game System: Glow
Maximum Players: 6

Elvismas 16 "The Edge of the Maumee"

I was supposed to get out at 4pm dammit.  I should'nt even have been at work, I worked Christmas and Thanksgiving. Okay maybe I am just a whiner. We'll luckily, I was no longer expected in Cincinnati at 10pm, Friday but Toledo "sometime," Saturday. Getting off of shift at 6:30pm last Friday was just fine.

Showing up at the start of festivities by jumping into Peryton's video ICONS game "Deathwing" right on time. I finally got to play my Demon/Creeper rip-off, err  homage Goblin. While playing in the wife's ICONS campaign, I am still working out the basic conventions of the systems, so I am trying more than the usual amount of characters per campaign-- So far I am at four (three and a half really). To toot my own, I think I orchestrated a pretty good story-arc with the Professor Hemm/Goblin portrayal here.

On Saturday, we showed up in the TOL, where we met with JerryTel, The Boy, and lil' Mickey (a new guy from Akron). Not too expensive, but expensive enough, beer, Napoleon brandy, fatty snacks (for drinking), and just about as fatty pizza appeared in abundance as I waddled my way through a Wobble proto-scenario for nine hours. Debauchery doesn't quite describe the decadence going on.

As usual, The Boy put my adventure outline for "The Edge of the Universe" to the test of how to deal with uncooperative role-players, while everyone else, including the new guy, showed there their skill at table-top role-playing. I suspect that JerryTel hates my Wobble games, but as a good friend he still sat through the session. Peryton was doing the most awesome "trans-Atlantic" accent ever. Micky_Akron showed his deeper role-player by showing that a Greaser could become a trans-dimensional traveler by applying motor maintenance to the larger universe around himself.

A little after midnight, it was determined that the Tele-Con palace was not good enough for me and my posse for chillings. We ended up at a hotel just on the other side of the interstate of the Cinema Casino of Toledo. I hate to admit it, but by 2am I was sleeping hard while my phone buzzed with about 14 text msgs. At 4am I answered my niece, born just after Elvismas on my 16th birthday (I was there), and let the others wait.

 In the morning, I slept in as long as I could, but there was snow. Peryton was mildly outraged, but I had to remind her, that "Snow loves me."

Sci-Fi, Sci-Fi, and Sci-Fi

As I have said before, I am steadily re-working my S-F RPG Spacers into its second edition. As before, I am at a point where I can read others works and it is such luxury. Over the last month, I've found three. Considering that it's been December, it's like Santa Claus has defeated the martians and has returned home just to come and see me, his favorite 50 year-old adolescent.

If you don't watch this flik every year, the communists win.

The first product I found was Machinations of the Space Princess. A blog, well video blog, review by Bruno Galan prompted me to buy this work. While I had heard of it, the name kind of off-set me, a little too specific for my preconceptions of quality science fiction. All names should be about two words and one of the words has to be a variation of "star" or "space." Well, I am glad that I made the exception. Paraphrasing the author, James Desborough, Machinations strives for the sexiness and sleaze of the films from the 70s while applying old school D&D rules. His premise succeeds in getting the atmosphere right for say movies like Barbarella or War of the Robots, and his rules is capable of handling a big space fantasy campaign like Star Wars.  I really like how the writing is self-aware at one point explaining the promised sleaze, paraphrasing again, says something like "Shouldn't this be for adults? Sure but not really." Rules-wise I find his approach to alien classifications rather fun, think TSR's Star Frontier and take it a whole lot further. Space gaming-wise this is one Godzilla of a work, the more I think about it.

About a week or two later, I noticed Alpha Blue being advertised. Like all the space-ship laden sci-fi movies that came out after Star Wars, this game and its settings strives for sleazy sci-fi as well. It is a wonderfully crafted product. I like its ship combat rules. It's artwork is wonderful. The scenario towards the end has some great pacing complete with an intriguing map.
I still wonder why this book is its own game though. This work can easily be anybody's after 10pm sci-fi event setting for almost any RPG system. If one is looking for the space sexy tease of Lexx and wants to even delve into the more graphic fantasy of say Flesh Gordon or 2001: A Sex Odyssey. As a campaign though, most of the specifics would come in handy in the background.
In terms of rating it, I'd call to it a Loch Ness. Bigger than a Big Foot, very close to the size the of  King Kong, it just doesn't walk on its own.

Just as of last Saturday, I found Scott Malthouse's Somnium Void. Now I have been watching the author post his notes on this setting for his USR (the Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying) System for a few years now. Full disclosure we work together from time to time. I am not the world's biggest fan of the USR, but if he keeps coming out with settings like this one, I am totally going to keep buying them, even run a session or three. Void is more like Battlestar Gallactica (original or new) or Dune in scope than say a full-out gonzo universe like Star Wars. The writing though is beautiful, despite a couple editing slip ups.
The premise will remind the reader of the works of A.E. van Vogt or Samuel Delany, but the character "Archetypes" are pure space pulp. There is definitely some "hard sci-fi" here, though I doubt Malthouse was striving for anything but a good setting for drama and imagination exploration. My initial rating on the work is a King Kong. This may change as I am able to reflect upon it after the first reading.

Adults with their Own Kids

Sometimes as a GM you realize that you're the dude playing music with a dancing monkey not David Lynch or Steven Spielberg. When it comes to adventure gaming, please do not expect a game-master or event organizer to be a part of some village, especially one full of denizens with Masters in developmental psychology.

Run this in a Barny suit at 9am?

First off, adult GMs should know better. Now I don't want to speak for others, but at 1pm I am a little less randy in my speaking habits than I am at 1am. You know, it's kind of biology, the tireder one gets the more hungry, horrific, and horny a person becomes. Everyone in the world knows this, why else are there bedtimes for our kids? Back when I was an adult, I personally always hated sending my kid to bed at a certain time if she wasn't tired, but momma-bear usually wouldn't have it, after 8:30 pm it was time for sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (on low volume).

The "age" slot at most event submission forms really needs some changing. Go where ever you will for a convention and its organizers want to know what age is your event appropriate for. Why do convention organizers not know this? Why don't convention goers not know this?

If I run a role-playing scenario called "Foul-smelling, but Delicious, Pits of the Goddess of Kinky Sex" at 8am exactly how many players should I expect to have? Of the few players that I would get, how many of the "OSR sorts" showing will more than likely have a newborn that needs to be breast fed during the session? Judging from my morning "Hunting Bigfoot" (hopefully much less less risque sounding) scenarios at various conventions over the last two years, the answer is more than a couple. Breast-feeding is a serious consideration that I need to take into account doing early games. The around 1pm, that guy that brought his pre-teen kids to the table after buying tickets for them as well. I even labeled my event "Adult." Now if I run an event "Uncle Tom's Toddler Fun House" at midnight, exactly what crowd am I expecting? Perhaps I am offering to babysit from midnight to four AM for some really outstanding parents? Or maybe I am promising some really devious horror? Which do you think?

I have attended way too many "Adult" convention events in my life to think the label means anything too mature for anybody under the age of 17 should be uninvited. At a recent convention I was watching a group of women down whip cream canisters competing to show how big their mouths were on a Saturday night, while a woman changed the diaper of her six-month old while her husband played with their older son two seats down from me. Why? It was only 8:30 pm, but the show's organizers were all in their 70s and not wanting to be over doing it past 11pm. This young couple next to me were the Standard-bearers for the convention for the decades to come. I think I might be able to find something to fill the 10pm slot, myself, so I shouldn't complain.

When it comes to reading material, the "Adult" barrier for the reader does not ensure any sort of graphic details based off of the understanding of trauma or even much pornography (including the illustrated kind). More than likely, what the purchaser is going to get is a lot really simple puns with words like "fuck" and "shit" not used as verbs. What the author is going to get is usually 70 cents on the dollar and satisfaction that words using like "fuck" and "shit" indicate cleverness. 

So we're here, I'm still stuck with filling out "Age" slots for events and dudes and dames,  go around swearing for shock value. This is because of a certain impracticality where event organizers and game producers have applying movie markets to games. At the same time, most of us deal with, or have dealt, with own children as we see fit.

Old Shanghai RPG supplement

As you might have read, I just recently did a quick study of China from about 1909 until 1949, for potential RPG scenario/setting use. Recently while hanging out at a G+ TSR Gangbuster's community I saw a plug for Tom West's Old Shaghai from Horrido Publishing. Well what a perfect place to start for doing some "China RPGing" as well as the whole East Asian region for that matter? Set in the 1930s, the reader is introduced to vastly reforming world for the city. Japan steps into the role as regional aggressor of the Shangdon peninsula. The British Empire hovers over Chinese territories like a vulture over the corpse of Qing dynasty after its century-long antagonism pays off. The French show their tone-death lack of insight despite continued holdings. The fledgling Soviet Union and its refugees add distinctively even more brutal intrigue. The Americans and Germans kind of look on, at least in the early 30s, pretty much eating peanuts watching colonialism, militarism, and nativism vie for supremacy in the rather lawless city. A much proclaimed "cosmopolitan" city fills the world's newspapers while foreign gunboats patrol the Yangtze Delta and its tributaries. Nothing screams B&W and smoke-filled adventure quite as much this work.



This source book does a pretty good job making sure that the reader gets a good grasp of the city. First its layouts, then its organizations, and then some of the people. West then goes on to work out a couple of scenarios using bits and pieces of the book's elements before moving into some real nitty-gritty details. Throughout the book pages bearing articles from a newspaper, I am not sure if the periodical was real or not, its real articles appear without dates, giving a great atmospheric guide as well as adventure hooks for the DYI GM. It was these details that I found to be the best part of the work, being already somewhat familiar with period and place. Stuff like travel times from various major cites of the Far East via various modes of transportation, really put the cream on the pie for me-- Something about Vladivostok being 11 hours away by plane to Shanghai really kicked in some espionage notes in my head.

This work is very tall King Kong, a couple feet off of its height for a lack of more art and some editing. It is very, very close to a Godzilla. I will be buying more from this author.

China circa 1928

The Far East circa 1937