The Draw of Real Life Sessions

"Why I am writing this script, when I should be role-playing it?" John Greiner, paraphrased.

This past weekend was one great table-topping RPG festival. While I didn't go to Con on the Cob, a local favorite party/gaming con, like Beckett, the gaming was abundant. Since Friday evening at 9pm, it has been a pretty full RPG schedule for me. When I haven't been working on writing RPG material, the games have come and found me.

On Saturday my Icons game "Crosshairs of Thrill-Kill" began. Peryton, Curtis, and Wylde (Charlie Wylie) jumped right into super-heroics in the nightclub scene of Marvel City. Peryton's Citrus Shocker got hip again by hanging with the newer super-powers Disco and Land Shark. JerryTel didn't show up to fill out his Groovy Lad creation, so I used him as an NPC. Now while superhero plots are simple, I was very happy how my broad and very detailed notes made the setting feel lived in. Also, Wylde and I spend chat-room time together talking about gaming in general and often enough his characters. The back-stories we developed worked wonderfully. By the end of the session I introduced 18 NPC heroes and villains, mapped out a city still in my head, and had a great dance scene. Things went really well.

Sunday evening, I finally met Beckett's intimates Todd Pressler (the Todd) and John Greiner (John G) as we met to play in Zak Smith's A Red and Pleasant Land (RaPL) using the Dungeon Crawl Classics rule systems. This was my first session, the second for everyone else. This campaign actually started out with a discussion between Beckett and myself where I kind of challenged him to show me how the work, RaPL, can work as a tabletop piece. The session went swimmingly, but I haven't been convinced yet as to the campaign working.

Well, anyway, I haven't posted a blurb in a while, so while I need to be working on Crawlspace scenarios, I've been goofing off with the best.

Crawlspace: Going Meta

This weekend off was meant to be spent finishing up my Crawlspace scenarios for Halloween this season. I've been dealing with cat drama instead. One productive thing I did do was go to Cinema Wasteland. Not that I got much writing done, but I was able to attend a panel entitled "Killer Bees, Blood-thirsty Vampires, and Elvis" where actress Suzanna Leigh regaled the audience with her working in horror movies as well as some other points in her career. Normally I get impatient and know just when one of these panels should end, but this one ended too soon. Mz. Leigh is a great storyteller and has some great yarns to spin. Not sure if you've noticed but I do like me tale-spinning.

Hearing her experiences on the sets of her productions got my mind working out some new angles for Crawlspace scenarios. The sessions should have some "behind the scenes" color. A cranky director making to much ado about nothing. A microphone slipping into a scene and the Character getting to use it as a weapon. Going a little "meta" as they say, the whole premise is already, I know, but I am slow learner.

Wobble: SPACE-GOATS

This species of alien beings gets used quite a bit in all of my settings, including formal mentions in Glow and Spacers. Special thanks to Trevor Hudgins who first let me play one in his own post-apocalypse setting. I've been a fan ever since.

The Akebbarik, also called "Space Goats." Despite a lack of hair, these humanoids' heads resemble that of goats. Most encountered cultures are interested in trade and commercial transactions. Amongst themselves they call all human-like species, including humans, "Xylon-kin."

They appear in all of the Mu Verse's continuum calling themselves "The Trading Empire." For the most part they are friendly to the Earth and its inhabitants. They are very profit-driven though and may be working with anybody, including those that could be planning some pretty nefarious things.

Akebbarik (Space-Goats!) Quick 75-325
Great space navigators.
Knows a lot of other space-faring species. 

Online RPGing for Sept-May Plans, 15-16.

As some of you already know, the Atlantis Saga will resume at the end of May 2016. It will continue until the last of August. If it needs to go on from there, plan to hold off until the Summer of 2017. Sorry folks, my sagas just don't plod along come hell or high-water, timing as well as determination is important when crafting tales with the highly improvisational element of role-playing.  If I don't feel like swimming, I was going to say "wear a swim suit" but that has never stopped me from swimming, I reckon that you don't feel like RPGing underwater.

What this allows me to make some room for scheduling a couple of boutique RPG games for the Icons superhero system.

One is the glamour-filled world where image and dynamic action come together to have made such comics as Dazzler and the Teen Titans pop up back in the 80s. There is going to be plenty of existential angst of youthfulness as well as a great night-life. Not to mention the music that had been rocking us in our boots since we were in diapers.

Wanda Dazzle, AKA the Sparkler, has gone missing.

The Cross Hairs of Thrill-Kill 

 (A three part scenario spread out over the wet and cold months)

Wanda Dazzle, AKA the Sparkler, of Marvel City's super-powered night club scene has gone missing. The Scrap Pile's Disco must travel in from Beta City to re-assemble the Glam Squad. Will the super-speedster Groovy Lad jump back into the scene? Will Warhol's ultimate creation, Andron, the Android, be awoken from dreams of electric sheep to help out?
A street-level adventure, with plenty of great action and a decent beat. Up to four players needed.

The other is something akin to the Hulk without all the love of radiation. And I get to explore a bit of mystical super-hero setting.

The colors are all wrong.

Touching Chaos
(A two part scenario, meant to start in October and be done in November)
Despite Professor Hemm's warnings, the Thaumaturgical Society of Tripod City want send a dream astronaut into a piece of the Chaos Dimension just for a couple minutes. Can you help out  Darkshade and Citrus Shocker if things go wrong?
A Kirby-meets-Ditko tale of sorcery and superpower. Up to four players needed.

If you're interested in having a slot email me at "Laggy At Butter Flavored Dot Com" with either title in the name.

Spacers, Just Another Universe to Go

The last couple of days a certain illness has had me away from the project that I wanted to be working on. But I have been able to put the time to use reading the rough_er_ draft of Spacers: Universe. One of the contributing artists, Bradley K. McDevit (Mikk-D, from now on), has been plugging away at one of the section "covers." Here's a the roughest draft that he has sent me to preview over the last week.

A sketch cover to the "Era of the Rocketmen" section

Of course I saw some parts that I want to rewrite, this "quick and easy" sci-fi game is now about 157 pages long before art is added and the formatting has been completed. But something else occurred to me. I have posted my play notes from table-top sessions throughout the sections. It would not be too hard to include some play stats and make the notes into mini scenarios. Imagine that. the "quick and easy" space game with quick play sessions already included.

After typing up scores and scores of handwritten pages dating back from 1997 and onward, I kid you not, I had thought of this idea until re-reading the work. I am definitely more a percolating coffee-maker than an expresso machine.

This is going to add some more time, but I'll definitely be happier with the product overall.

End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse

It had the Crabb working on it!

We have a household saying, "A little bit of zombie goes a long way." But the rest of the world loves the stuff almost as much as folks east of the Danube love dill, so we get to keep seeing more movies and reading more material about the shambling dead as the dutiful fantasists that we are. When I came across Fantasy Flight game book The End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse, I glanced in its general direction not much else. Then I remembered that Christine Crabb mentioned that she had been working with the game-makers for some time, though she never could hint at what she was editing for them. Well, I opened up the book and there her name was. So I had to buy it, and it happened to at a newly discovered, for me, local area gaming store which didn't specialize in Magic tournaments-- indeed there was a D&D group setting up as we shopped.

Now the Crabb wasn't the only person in the "Credits." There was Andrew Fischer as the Game Designer, and a whole slew of others that mentioning would turn my enjoyment at writing this blog into work, anybody that I missed can yell at me later. The book itself is about 140 pages long, broken down into three main sections (excluding the intro and index), Playing the Game, Running the Game, and Scenarios. The interior art is really rather excellent, and the cover decent enough for a zombie game. The book itself was printed in China, which is a major drawback to me as a dude that likes homegrown games being about growing the home not overseas investment-- sharing ideas with other creative sorts from overseas is wonderful, products produced in grossly corrupt regimes to increase profits is, once again in my opinion, tacky.

The game mechanic is one color six-sided dice based on Character stats and "positives" versus other color six-sided dice derived from "negative" factors rolled against each other. The pools of dice nullify one another with the higher results reflecting success or failure. Failure results in the accumulation of Stress, as well leading to trauma and death both physical and, interestingly enough, mental. The running section is quick notes for how a GM can handle her games and the designer's, maybe the writer's, Tim Cox, thoughts on campaign length and Character advancement.

The scenarios are the parts which I enjoyed reading the most. Each is broken down into two subdivisions of during the breakdown and afterwards (the Apocalypse and the Post-Apocalypse). "The Night of the Meteor" deals with slow shambling zombies and throws in every dead creature as well, as if squaring the circle between Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead feature movies with steroids. "No Room in Hell" still has the shambling dead, this time without the undead farm animals and rats, which I think most established zombie GMs, like JerryTel and The Boy, will be most comfortable. "Pandemic" is the "new-rabies" virus where the fast zombie has a few "primes," think the vomiting meth-heads from 28 Days Later, sprinkled around. "It Ends with a Whisper" works in the traditional zombie from folklore, the undead slave, into a luddite take over of the world using a fictitious voodoo as its secret weapon, complete with zombi-masters.  Topping things of is "Under the Skin" where a parasitic infestation is the cause of the zombie outbreak, getting folks into the mood for gas-masks and moon-suits as well as parodying governmental approaches to recurrent disasters-- this one is the cleverest of all the scenarios, in my book.

Overall, the work is a King Kong on the "Smurf to Godzilla" scale of the Portal, a group that I hang out with talk about fantasy-based products with. The artwork inside the work is very nicely chosen. The authors took a well-established sub-genre and worked in new angles instead of deconstructing or rehashing the work of others before them. Each of the scenarios, both parts, are well worth the price of the material.

I bet my friends are so proud when I yell to them in public.

The next parts of the series, I will gladly read. Though I will do that on PDF, sorry game book distributors, I like supporting the American printing shop.

7th Edition T&T Still Stings

I am currently in the process of writing possibly my last T&T scenario ever. While I am one to get sentimental, I am not actually felling that way about this yarn. What I am kind of amazed at, is the experience convention within the game rules. Okay, the mechanic states, paraphrasing, that when an attribute hits a new tens digit in select attributes that this becomes a higher "Level" for that character.  Now even a person as dim as I am knows that makes for a lot variability among Character-defining statistics. What I didn't exactly realize, was how the levels of gaming, at least on the table-top were changed.

While generating characters, PreGens, I noticed something. Using my own tables of developing sets of numbers for very specific ranges, still rolling dice, for eight sets of eight values, things got numerically amazing. I wanted "24" as a mean, but the dice wouldn't stop. What I got was something in the 50s at the top, something a bit lower than 24 as the mean, and a whole lot of decent T&T balance. I decided that I would decide the character's Kin (D&D Race) after the results.  Let's look at a few of my results.

Str 16 Int 15

Con 23 Wiz 14

Dex 39 Cha 18

Spd 19 Lk 36

Str 36 Int 15

Con 12 Wiz 24

Dex 9 Cha 31

Spd 17 Lk 26

Those are the two "mean" PreGens. Here's a couple of others.

Str 56 Int 5

Con 52 Wiz 4

Dex 19 Cha 31

Spd 6  Lk 16

  

Str 36 Int 25

Con 22 Wiz 24

Dex 29 Cha 21

Spd 27 Lk 26

These would fall into the "medium" of results if I remember a couple of math classes correctly. I have been rolling 4d6, dropping one, and using the TARO rule to develop these stats.

Now, a mathematician is going to say, "What'd you expect." I am going to slap him and remind him that I used to fight bullies wanting his lunch money back in '82. I'll also point out, that a "3rd Level Character in a 3rd Level Adventure for T&T"  is one bandersnatch of task to work out in tabletop terms.