Veronica Monsterhearts - Playtesting Notes

Well, got some Veronica Monsterhearts playtesting done. Little playtesting done, but the character creation stuff gave me some thoughts.

1. Need to make everything immediate to the players. You just don't make it up and go, you have to make the city and I have to come up with that. Everything that's coming up is heavily influenced by 5 Fires, but I really don't want to just cut and paste that. It needs to fit this game, and not that one. However, that's the city creation that I'm enamoured with so it's going to be there.

2. Need to look at the scenes and how to frame them. There was a bit of panic about setting scenes with little or no direction on how to start them. I kind of did that in Geasa but I think this might be something that needs a little bit more direction since it's using AW.

I was directed to look at Murderous Ghosts but I didn't enjoy it too much when I read it the first time, but I'm sure that there is something there but I really don't want to do that.

3. I think I'll have to revisit the casefiles again, mainly because they need to be cleaned up a little bit and try to think about how to incorporate scene setting moves into them. No clue how I'm going to do that but that's there.

I think those are the three things I need to look over again, and then give it another playtest.

Gen Con 2014 - The Good, The Bad, and The Other

Everyone is already done with their Gen Con write-ups so I figured it would be time to get around writing mine. It was a great convention on the whole personally, professionally it was just kind of okay but I didn't really push for any kind of interaction in that way so that's way more on me than it was on the convention.

Anyway, onto the events that I ran!

1. Critical!: Go Westerly: Growling Door Gates

We had a great little time here running this scenario. The idea is that they're trapped inside a White Griffon Tavern that has been sucked into a different dimension, a demonic dimension. They end up finding out that it's a demon reform school and have to stop the graduation ceremony before it rips into the fabric of reality.

The Good:

It was a funny game. There was a bit where one of the players is like "I'm going to steal gold from another player" and I usually let that go the first few times around. If they keep it up I tend to give them something else to worry about, and if they can still find a way to get a gold steal in then it just makes it actually funny.

They got stuck on the language that the demon gave them. The demon, Gog, kept telling the players that Gog was a bad demon. It was a great moment because I didn't elaborate and they had to spend time figuring out if Gog meant evil or just bad at being a demon.

The Bad:

Again, it devolved a little bit into the "I'm going to steal from you, no I'm going to steal from you" which is fine because it was contained and we moved on.

The Other:

I had the same father daughter team who has played one game of Critical at least once every year. It's always great to see them, and they always bring something fun to the table. This time the daughter ran head long into a large battle with demons and was the first person to ever actually get knocked out in a con game of Critical ever.

But it was a glorious way to get it.

2. Dime Stories: Varmit

Well, I had written about 7k words for this encounter for Joe and then when I tried to access it my phone, which was supposed to have unlimited data, had no data and I couldn't get to it. Thankfully I had an understanding of the highlights of the module and so I just kind of ran with it. I'm sure I ran it wrong but as long as we keep the story moving and kind of get it right then all for it.

The story is about a small town named Varmit and the module is supposed to give you a couple of options. I ran with the corrupt mine foreman, with the local law enforcement having an issue with an escaped convict brother out in the wilderness.

Another moment of awesomeness was that I got to play a game with Matt and Michelle for the first time in quite a few years. There were always attempts but this is the first one we managed to have happen in a while. You can read what Matt thought about the game on his blog.

The Good: 

The story flowed well. The players were good, for the most part, at keeping the story going and understanding that RPGs kind of need the players to bite on some hooks. They did, and the ending really wasn't the easy one which is good because they could have forced the issue. Hell, one player did try to backstab them all and got away with no one the wiser.

The Bad: 

Look, if you're upset because the game is getting off topic there are ways to do it that are both friendly and polite. We all understand being in a game where it goes kind of sideways for a bit. We just had a player who was leaving the game because of time and so we had that "after player leaves conversation" and one guy really soured the mood for everyone at the table.

Seriously, you can be like "Hey folks. I get the conversation is good, but could we get back to playing the game?" That works just fine.

The Other: 

You reckon'?

The problem with any type of western is that you'll end up trying to do "that" accent. I tried hard not to go too deep into it, mainly because I'm a french canadian with a raspy Gencon voice even by this stage of the game, but also because it's really easy to turn it into a "making fun of" voice which I don't want to do.

The aforementioned guy who soured the mood once said the words "you reckon'" at least five to six times in a single sentence.

3. Daedalus - Icarus Falls - When the Wax Melts

There isn't going to be a section here because the game didn't go off.

However, I was the only person sitting at an empty table in a room full of people with full tables. As far as a feeling goes, that sucks a hell of a lot.

I had people show up like 35-45 minutes after the game started but at that point I was dealing with the whole impostor syndrome that shows its ugly head at times like that.

4. Daedalus - Icarus Falls - Tribute

I told myself that this game, I was going to run it no matter how many people showed up, or how late they showed up. I ended up with one person and you know what? Ended up being a damned good time.

Basically we worked out that he had been working for Crime Boss Zidane, and his contact was a young Zenedine. A bunch of children had been taken by a local gang called the Bangers. They had cobbled together enough tech to give them a kind of cybernetics. It was all exoskeletal, because cyberwear isn't a thing in Daedalus and I had a single Ninja Tech who was busy trying to figure out what was going on.

The Good:

Man, the Alarm thing worked wonderfully. I threw it up in a situation with a lot of tension, and it just raked it up a little bit more.

The Bad:

One player made it hard to really see how anything would go in a group.

The Other:

Hilariously, he only failed a single roll. Everything else was either 7+ on the rolls let alone the bonuses.

Anyway, it gets me excited for that project when it comes down the pipe. I still have to go over the document, because I know for a fact that I'm probably missing a section on the revolutionary groups but that said it's looking like a fun game.

Fan Expo 2014 - Panels and Game a Go Go

Gen Con is behind us, and Fax Expo is in front of us. If you're going to be in the downtown Toronto area next weekend you'll be able to hang out and talk about things because there are plenty of panels here.

Friday
11:00 am - Room 709 - Finding Your RPG Style Panel
12:00 pm - Room 709 - Kicking Off your Campaign Panel
03:00 pm - Room 703 - Publishing your RPG

07:00 pm - Room 709 - Geasa: An Evening of Curses

Saturday
11:00 am - Room 709 - Finding Your RPG Style Workshop
12:00 pm - Room 709 - Kicking Off your Campaign Workshop
12:45 pm - Room 705 - In the Game of Boards you roll or you lose

02:00 pm - Room 709 - Gaming by Storm (1 hour blocks, I'm running 2 games of Critical! and 2 games of Marvel)

Sunday
11:00 am - Room 703 - Pathos and Probability Curves: Writing Adventures
04:45 pm - Room 705 - State of the Industry

01:00 pm - Room 709 - Critical!: Go Westerly: Growling Door Gates

RPG Book Club - How We Came To Live Here

A few weeks ago, after months of planning, we had our first RPG book club meeting in June. I know it's late to the game for this, and I'll have more to write about later but I need to play catch up for now.

Basically a bunch of friends decided that we had a whole shit-tonne (that would make them metric, for the record) of games that we didn't play and wanted to at least try them once. That lead us to listing a bunch of games that we had and talking about which ones we wanted to play. We really only had 2-3 hours to play them so we knew we weren't going to get a whole session done but we wanted to try it out anyway.

The first game we played was How We Came To Live Here by Brennan Taylor from Galileo Games.

The game is set in a fictional land set using First Nations in the South West of the US as the foundation, and personally, with my limited knowledge of the American South West, I think it's probably the best example of what you can try to do as not a member of a community and try to make a game of it. Let me explain why:

1. The game is about people:
You play people who are living their lives and trying to carve out their existence. None of this stoic warrior nonsense, none of this weird saying magic person crap. It's about the cultural norms and how people deal with them. It's about love and relationships.

2. The game is only about the people:
Very explicitly it says that you should not, at any point in time, play the game where white people show up and try to settle the land. There are monsters in the outskirts of the world but they aren't the focus, the people are and that's great because that's where the center is.

3. The game admits that it might fuck up:
Right at the beginning, and you get a sense that there was an effort of understanding, research, and an admittance that there might be something that was missed and an understanding that there is a level of respect needed for the game.

That said, we ended up playing a pre-set up adventure. I think it went well, though it's been long enough that I don't remember too much about it. There were Snake Outsiders, and a love triangle, and some people trying to get what they wanted by letting others get taken out by the Snake People.

I was playing the Outside GM, Kate was playing the Inside GM and Rachelle, Rob and Erik were all playing their characters.

What I thought was awesome about the game.

1. No matter what you do, win or lose a conflict, you get something to spend on having an effect on the game. You can spend your conflict dice to change rules of the world, affect other people positively or negatively, change your relationships, or even upgrade your social standing. It's fucking brilliant and after one round of it I love the idea behind it because it made every single conflict meaningful. You were doing something, well there were immediate consequences that you had to deal with.

2. It felt immersive an familiar at the same time. There were conflicts between parents and children, quite little moments where others were trying to subtly affect things so that they could get the relationship that they wanted. It was great because there was a lot of things going on, and they felt really important to the story.

I'll try to get these done faster, it's been a busy few months all around.