Metatopia - AIR

I have written a fair bit about AIR because it was the game that really wanted to come out earlier. You see I played a game that promised me something, and then didn't deliver on it at all. I wanted a game that was able to tell a ghost story in space, because that sounds like something amazing.

What is it, or the Elevator Pitch.

Exactly what I said, you're playing a ghost story in space. You wake up, something has happened to the space station. You need to get off to survive, but something on the station wants you dead.

The Slightly Longer Pitch
This game is a rather antagonistic relationship between the players (Victims) and the GM (Captain). The goal of the Captain is to kill the Victims, as nastily as possible. The Victims want to get to the escape hatch and survive whatever it is that is trying to kill you.

Much like Geasa though, there is an element of co-operation at the beginning. During the setup the Victims and the Captain will build parts of the ship, and then build in a very indirect way what the Ghost is. You'll do that with keywords on the Downwards Spiral, which the Victims must go through in order to make it to the Escape Hatch.

What does the game do, how does it work?
It's the most boardgamey RPG I've ever done. The players are moving on a map, as well as on the spiral. There's a constant recognition of where you are at all times, but no knowledge of where the ghosts are and what they're going to do.

I want to bring that to the mechanic, so you're uncertain at all times what's going on. What happens is that the Captain rolls a certain amount of dice and assigns them to methods of how you can deal with a problem. The player will then roll and assign dice in an order on how they're going to try to get past a problem.  When that's done everything is revealed and the player gets to see if they succeeded or not.

There's a fair bit of book keeping on the part of the Captain, but I don't know if it's a hindrance.

What are you hoping to get out of Metatopia for this?

The mechanic still needs some work, I think it's fun but there are ways it could be more fun and scarier. It needs to really survive contact with other people, to see if it's going in the right direction. Surprise, because there's probably going to be something brilliant that comes out of people playing it. You can follow the AIR label in order to find the playtest sheets and document if you're interested in seeing what it is before the convention.

Metatopia Upcoming Projects

With Metatopia only a month away I figure it's a good time to start talking about what I'm going to bring to that convention, what the game is, what the goal is, and what I hope to get out of the convention.

RPG Review Recess - Marvel RPG Civil War

Now, I will tell you something you already know. The set up for how the Marvel RPG books are done is amazing and is backwards to so much of the advice that I have gotten over the years.

That advice? Adventures don't sell. Write them, but give them away for free because no one buys an adventure.

Well, Margaret Weis Productions is set up to completely and utterly destroy that concept with their Marvel Civil War. Inside you'll find an adventure that will take you months to complete, seriously it will take you a couple of months to complete and what a set of wonderful months it will be. If you haven't read the comics, or at least checked out the timeline on wikipedia or something, then let me explain briefly what this is. Civil War is the arc of stories that deals with the Marvel Universe's Extension of the We're Scared of Mutants Act (Paraphrasing) to the We're Scared of Superheroes Act. It breaks down into anyone with any weird powers, no matter how they got them, needs to register with the government so they know where they are at all times. This causes a schism to occur between super heroes and a fight breaks out between the pro and anti-We're Scared of Supers Act. I'm not really going to talk about that more, if you want more go look it up. It's not like this knowledge isn't readily available.

What I'm going to talk about is the book, which comes in two flavours. The super flavour which comes with all the rules so you don't need to have picked up the basic rules in order to buy this game. Of course, for those of us who did you can pick up just Civil War as well. This is great on so many levels because it provides people with options. I know I was grateful for it when I picked up the base game that they were going to let me not buy the base game every time I bought a copy of the book. It's great, and while it's awesome it isn't the design for every game I have to repeat that it's absolutely perfect for this game.

The content of the book is amazing as well.  It gives you the feel of Civil War without actually having to play Civil War exactly as it is in the books. I will admit I was uncertain how they were going to do that when dealing with iconic moments in the book without them being those moments in the book. The answer to that is by giving you the outline of the moments and giving you tips on how to use them to fit how you've decided to take the characters you've chosen to play rather than the characters that were in the setting. Instead of Spiderman revealing himself as Peter Parker, you get Ms. Marvel revealing herself to the world as Sharon Ventura. Why? Because you have a player playing Ms. Marvel who thinks this would be a great thing to do, and the rest of the players think it would be awesome to try to talk her out of it, or stop it from happening because they don't want her to go over to the other side.

There are pages, and pages, and pages, and pages of this kind of material and how you can set it up for your game. Pick the pieces you think are interesting, do what you want and make the story change for you. Here's what can happen, and here are the characters as they are in Civil War. I read the book, and couldn't wait to see how things were turned and twisted depending on the situation.

It's just brilliant. You should get it, now. Even if you don't play it, as something to check out a great design.

Ultimate Free RPGs - Because Stealing is Caring

So, this is a post inspired by Ryan Macklin who was inspired by John Harper. Instead of putting out what's the must play games for designers, or ... whatever John Harper said because I didn't look that far back, I have a question for the few, the proud, etc.

What would you consider to be three free RPGs that you would recommend to people as some of the best free RPGs that are out there and why? Now, you don't have to have played them or even liked them, but what ones do you think people need to read.

Here are my three.

1. Warrior, Rogue, Mage
This is one of the tightest free fantasy games out there. It doesn't have a setting so you can drop it anywhere, and it's got a great premise in regards to how your characters are made. You're just basically made up of how much of a warrior, rogue, or mage you are. Any skill stuff that you do is based off of that, and for a traditional RPG it's so fast to plug and play that it's a great introduction game for a lot of people. They've got a pile of supplements, and you should check them out.

2. Metropole Luxury Coffin
One of the best cyberpunk games ever made that you might never have heard of.  The link for the game is in the review over at the Free RPG Blog, but it's great because it's not about doing all the cybercrime that you'd find in something like Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Tech Noir etc.  No, it's about the every day existence in a world where your credit is the only thing keeping you from being dragged off to the work camps. You and the other players are all living at the Metropole Luxury Coffin and you're all working on schemes that will help you get enough face time to get out of that dive. It's totally the cyberpunk version of the Trailer Park Boys. It has rules for fashion people, fashion!

It was the winner of the Cyberpunk Revival Project on 1km1kt.

3. Eclipse Phase
Now people might feel that this is a bit of a stretch, but Eclipse Phase is licensed under Creative Commons. That means you can get many copies of the book for free, they provide a bunch of epub formats on the website and have lots of different places you can pick it up. That said, if you like it buy the product because that's how they can keep making more stuff. What they're doing is allowing you to check it out before you buy, and you should the stuff is damned pretty.  That being said, they're really the only Transhumanity game out there, and they do a damned good job with it which means it's probably going to be the only Transhumanity game for a while.

Consuming is Creating or Why am I reading Game Books I'm not really gonna play

I have a giant pile of RPG books in my home. I'm sure I don't has as many as some, but I tend not to buy everything a game system puts out. I'll have a sourcebook here or there if it interests me, but for the most part I really just like buying the main book and seeing how they deal with introducing the world, the mechanics, all the kind of fun stuff. I do this because reading what other people are doing is perhaps the best way to actually get past any blocks that I'm having.

This has been said a million times before, and it will probably be said a million times afterwards but this is me saying this right now. If you're currently having problems with something in your game, stop and go out and play other games, read other games, cut the pages out of other games and eat them. Whatever you really need to do to help your head get through that problem, because otherwise you're going to beat your head in wondering why you can't figure something out.

Case in point for me, I've been bouncing that Being Human game in my head for a while now an how things were going to work out hasn't come together yet. There have been a few hit or miss things but nothing really helped pushed that dynamic between that drive the be human, and the desire to be the monster. I knew that I wanted a Wyrd, a breaking point that made you break the things you cared about but got stronger for it. I just didn't know how you were going to get towards that Wyrd, and a lot of other things. Just wasn't coming so I stopped worrying about it and started just reading other stuff.

I read Matt McFarland and Michelle Lyons-McFarland's curse the darkness, I read Ryan Macklin's Mythender, I reread Joe Mcdaldno's Monsterhearts, and I read Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sempat's They Became Flesh. These games all kind of helped form some ideas in regards to what I wanted to do. Now did I take the mechanics there and go "I'm going to use this!" No, I didn't. However, just some concepts and ideas that might work when modified for Being Human (because that's a better working title than Worst Enemy).

To be even more specific, I read They Became Flesh and enjoyed the idea of locking dice. Now I threw out the double mechanic because there's not a finite amount of dice in Being Human, you'll roll ... something (see, haven't figured out everything yet) something but any 1s that show up are going to be the things that get locked into your Wyrd. That doesn't mean you can't use them, but it's a physical representation of how close you are to going over that edge and pushing yourself closer to that edge of being a Monster.  Of course the thought process was a lot more like this.

"Okay, so doubles lock?"
"No, that doesn't make sense, maybe just 1s then."
"Yeah, that makes the tension exist without the finite amount of dice, every time you roll there's a chance that you will get closer to your Wyrd without guaranteeing it."
"Okay, what makes up a roll, damned if I know but I think that works better."
"Yeah, got to have that space for failure and 'Aw shit!'"

But you get my point, this comes from pulling in all this extraly awesome creative works and letting them rattle around in my skull for a while.

Just another little piece of straw on the back of the "You need to consume to create" camel.

Dice Tests - People with far more dedication than I have

Now there are dice, and then there are dice. If you've been around you've seen the Game Science booth, with their dice methods, and how they're more reliable, etc.

Anyway, the real cool thing is that someone decided to take some dice and try to provide some actual data.

Check it out over at the Awesome Dice blog. Now it's just a very small sample, one of each type of die rolled 10k times but that's about 10k more than I would have done. They've got some interesting findings, now only if we can find people who can reproduce it.

Fan Expo 2012 - The Post Con Recap

Fan Expo happened, and while there was the usual snafus with badges and stuff it was the best run one I've been at, which isn't saying all that much.  While I love the man who runs the gaming section, the convention as a whole has frequently left me feeling that this is the Red Headed Stepchild of the convention. Yeah, sure you're there and yeah it might be a draw but whatever really.

That being said, there was still plenty of good times to be had. The RPG room was full and always jumping.  The Board game area didn't have a moment that I looked in where it wasn't full of people doing stuff. It's good to see it growing.

I did some awesome panels, which I'll probably steal a page out of Malcolm's book and do them one at a time. I did a panel on doing your own game, the state of the industry, and board game design with some awesome people.

However, the games.

I ran one game of Critical!: Go Westerly and another of Geasa.

Geasa was amazing, I was a little nervous because there were some younger players who first asked me, "Okay, so like what level do we start at" which is usually the sign of death. Not that they can't be great players, but when you fall asleep at the table during the creation part of the game ... usually that's a giant flashing neon sign that just says, "Oh shit."

The game set up ended up being a space exploration unit. The explorer, the captain, the medic, the engineer and the science officer all go down to this planet, after some hiccups on the way which caused the explorer to yell at the rest of the crew, putting him on the wrong foot. Eventually they hit the surface of the planet and after one crew member dies exploring a lake they find this fish. With some Fae shenanigans in the way they end up plugging the fish into their engine, which powers the entire ship better than what was already there. Of course, this meant that they needed to control the fish because the captain saw it as his way to owning his ship and being filthy rich, the scientist saw it as her ultimate discovery, the explorer saw fame and fortune, the engineer saw it as an opportunity, and the doctor had a mission to discover some new life.  They killed many people to secure the fish, to the point where they couldn't really trust each other and were waiting for everyone else to make their move to eliminate the competition.

After all, those who control the fish ... controls the universe.

Critical! was our adventure You All Meet In a Tavern and it's always funny to see how different players react to playing this game.

No one killed any kobolds, though the wizard was chomping at the bit to do so.
Angelique managed to kill two Fairies with one blow by throwing them into each other, which then covered the Dwarf with Fairy dust ... so he began to float. They tied a piece of rope around his foot while he was screaming "Nobody drags the dwarf!" at them.

We even had a musical number ... or two. I got the player playing Mabel to write them down because sharing really is caring.

Mutiny
When the first mate
Throws you overboard
To the sharks. (Oh Lord!)
That's caaaaaaalled a mutiny.

When the bilge rats
Try to tie you down,
When you've run aground
That's aaaaaalso a mutiny.

If you hate your crew
And they hate you too
They might hatch a plan
And try to M-U-erder you!

But if you take the time,
To keep your crew in line
With a keelhaul now and then,
You ... will ... be ... fiiiiiiiiin!

Needless to say he convinced Ailee that she needed to take her skeletons, her organ, and her story to the theatres of Westerly. It took some convincing, but it ended up being hilariously awesome.  So, after poking the dwarf balloon a couple of times she made her way, with Mabel, to begin discussing plans for the musical.

Fun times had by all really.