I see the white, but not the wolf.

White Wolf's site is new and improved. I presume the front page illo will change from time to time. Currently the community is toplined, making the forum look more important than the news or the shop which seems like an odd design choice, but I like the lack of busy.

Let's Go To War

RM Bailey's thoughts on 3:16 make for interesting reading even if you haven't had the game's creator on either side of the GM screen. (Check me out, I'm part of the Hobby Elite. Ahem.)

And as a follow-up, psychic warfare rules.

Outcasts

Nothing to do with the Nationals (most gaming thought yesterday went to coming up with someone or something for Buffy to fight at Conpulsion, and the votes are still open there)...

Last night saw the second new genre show in a week start on terrestrial UK TV. (The first is Marchlands, a slow-burn haunted house story.)

Outcasts concerns a human colony on another world, as the first ship for five years escapes from a sketched-in partially nuclear apocalypse. A colony small enough to potentially know everyone around.

It's low-key SF, with one practical Big Idea and in the first episode only one surreally SFnal thing hinted at, a disease whose first symptom is "a halo of light" around the victim's head, like it's affected the body's electrical field or something. (My version would be 87 times madder, with Earth being trashed by Gamma World style Final Wars with mutagenic bioweapons turning everyone in Brazil into vampires and things.) But we've got room for interpersonal drama, heroic explorers, formerly heroic explorers gone Kurtz and the odd weird SFfy thing. Sounds gameable to me.

The Nationals

The Student National Roleplaying And Wargaming Championships (hereafter The Nationals) are a rather strange thing. A convention that's all about the games - where you play tournament games. Wargames with your own armies, card and board games with your own decks or off-the-shelf, and tournament RPGs arranged by genre or system category.

I've been there on and off since 1998, when it first came to Glasgow after years shuttling between Bangor and Loughborough. (The prize for winning is the opportunity to host it next year.) And my first time out wasn't that great, but enough of us had fun that we went all the way to Bangor (Wales, not Maine) next year and we were off.

I eventually GMed in 2007 after Edinburgh came third but the winners didn't want to do it, and again in 2010 after Heriot Watt came within two points of winning and the winners didn't want it. Both times I failed to get an applicable category to run Buffy going and ended up doing the Action And Adventure category, doing Adventure! one year and Uncharted style modern pulp using Hollow Earth Expedition the next.

But this year, the category I suggested, Urban Fantasy, is the most popular category. So I can run Buffy just fine. And with no pressure at all to do something good. (gulp)

I'll try and keep a development diary of sorts going here, so you can see what goes into a convention game, specifically a tournament game where "be the last to be killed by the TPK dungeon" isn't a viable option for scoring.

Wish me monsters.

Time Spies!

Thinking about making a New Wave Requiem trailer got me to thinking about a Victorian Age Vampire trailer which got me to thinking about where I could swipe imagery from and I thought Victorian films, horror films, Victorian horror films, Doctor Who episodes, flashbacks in Buffy and Angel... Alias, like the Requiem one? No, Sydney never went on a mission involving time travel... Hmm...

So I immediately started thinking of a superspy series with time travel as the exotic background.

There's never been a show exactly like that, the closest I can think is Time Cop. There's a TVTropes page called Time Travellers Are Spies but it's about time travellers being mistaken for spies because they act suspicious.

GURPS Time Travel has a fleshed-out setting along those lines, with two competing futures trying to make themselves real, so maybe something to think on. I may come back to this one.

"Where do you get your ideas?" "Sainsbury's!"

(The above quote from Russell T Davies.)

While looking for who I'd swiped a Buffy character idea from, searching through my saved-from-RPGnet Word files I looked at Inane Campaign Ideas By Title for the first time in a goodly couple of years, and The Vampire Queen Of Dark Moon Station caught my eye.

A shoo-in for a space-spanning genre clash like Doctor Who but it could be a superhero hook or something for Infinite Macabre just as easily. Taking that idea and running with it in various directions could lead to as much variety as Black Swan starting on the same page as The Wrestler.

In fact, the only time I ever have trouble coming up with ideas is when I actually have to fit them into a specific game. Which is why, for example, that a year running a military SF game with one alien species, no psychics or time travel or anything like that resulted in me having enough ideas that I couldn't do in it to sketch out a season's worth of Star Trek. And why I could run The Vampire Queen Of Dark Moon Station in tomorrow's Doctor Who game, but I just had a space station last week so I should probably leave it for a while, and I need an idea I can use tomorrow instead of thinking about it...

Primeval, some hints from Gar Hanrahan

From Primeval - Any Thoughts On The Soon-To-Be-Released Game?

The manuscript is done, more or less, so I can pop back here and give a few more details.

1) The book takes a toolkit approach to the setting, breaking it down into elements (PRIMEVAL=time anomalies + dinosaurs + secret conspiracies) and then building a campaign out of those elements. So, you've got the ARC as your default framework, but there are three other sample setups (dinosaur safaris for the super-rich, little village under siege by dinosaurs, WWII special forces).

2) It's using a slightly tweaked version of the Doctor Who system - 95% the same, but some Traits have been changed, there are no special powers, and the system's a bit more lethal. Initiative's changed too.

3) There's a special subsystem to handle 'temporal damage'. Basically, if you change the timeline, you accrue temporal damage as a group. The GM rolls to see what effect this damage has. You may get lucky, and find that the damage has no effect, or it might stick around and stack with next week's adventure, or you end up jumping timelines and erasing people from existence.

4) Monster behaviour has its own rule system, too; different creatures have different reactions and special attacks.

No Future For You

"Cyberpunk destroyed science fiction.

Science fiction was about man's potential. Science fiction was about how man could reach out and touch the stars. We could be better. We could be worse. All we needed was the technology.

Cyberpunk was not that. Cyberpunk said man would be the same damn bastard he always was, he'd have the same problems he always did, and worst of all? He'd still be happy with it. In those days, cyberpunk was arcologies and AIs. Built-in shades and monomolecular razor-wire.

Seems a little silly now, right? The technology didn't turn out that way. But the world did. Technology is pervasive and invasive and amazing and all it has done is made us more who we were before.

Sound like the World of Darkness? It should."

As of four minutes ago, Mirrors: Bleeding Edge and - edit - Infinite Macabre, Russell's cyberpunk and Chuck Wendig's space opera mini-supplements for The World Of Darkness, are on sale.

The naming of characters

Warren Ellis expounds on names, meanings, subtexts and stuff.

The example choice of Birch will be of interest to Vampire players.

Aaagh, it's nine weeks to Conpulsion

Conpulsion. It's nine weeks to it. Aaagh.

So about time to come up with the all-important "hey you, play my adventure" pitch blurbs. They have to be short, pithy, relatively accurate, and for games I'll be able and ideally happy to GM in two months' time.

Compare last year's, including my Doctor Who epic and Buffy Versus Godzilla.

I only have to come up with one game to GM this year, as one of the events this year is IRN GM, in which you get three GURPS setting books at random on Saturday and have to run an adventure using bits of all three on Sunday. So that's my Doctor Who adventure sorted probably...

So I dunno, Buffy or Adventure! or somethin' on Saturday.

While leaving room to play Gar's Primeval demo hopefully. The Laundry game with Charles Stross there will probably be rather busy.

Licensed settings, metaplots, things like that.

This started as a TWH game theory post, became personal and bloggy, and extracted the game theory bit from the personal and bloggy bit...

One of the tricky parts about playing in a dynamic setting like an ongoing licensed universe or a metaplotty RPG is not knowing what the creative types are going to give you next, and whether you'll like it. This leads to a fair number of folks who consider metaplot slightly less appealing than the Black Death, but I've never had a a huge issue with it.

Partially because in The Watch House I cheated.

I didn't start the game until after Buffy had concluded on TV, so I knew all there then was to know. And seeing the mid-season cliffhanger in season seven would throw a big old spanner into my game design, I made the game a period piece... by five years. This meant not referring to movies or music out at the time (with some very occasional cheating) and having five years to run the game until, as I joked, I'd have to hit that mid-season cliffhanger.

And the game promptly ran for six years...

And yes, the influence of the canon setting changed the game a lot, but I'd had years to think about how it would, to decide who the cliffhanger affected, what effect the final Big Bad would have on things, how big and bad my own final Big Bad would have to be to be worth the fighting, and time to connect a PC to something unexpected just to make her player squee.

But wait, there's more.

For the last two of those years, Buffy Season Eight was coming out in comics form. I took it as canon, but not having happened yet. About the only reference ahead I made was that the castle in Scotland was a Watcher fall-back position. Effectively I treated it as a supplement where the metaplot hadn't hit yet. I also joked that I'd only run TWH S8 if I could find a willing illustrator. But, of course, the damn thing went and gave me ideas...

New York across the multiverse

Fantasy maps of New York varying from the slightly eccentric to the downright peculiar.

Got a reality-goes-askew game? Try the tourist map of Nieuw Amsterdam as a handout and see how the players react...

Right then. Playing Icons and running Doctor Who, as the brand-new player looked like she'd be keener on something lightish than something darker than the pits of Hell.

Give me an idea...

I just hit 34,500 posts on the RPGnet forum. (In my defence, it's been running for nine years. And that includes play-by-post games.)

This is the post in question, 13 in 1001 Things to Find After the Fantasy Apocalypse.

"Animated skeletons. Who can talk in eerie whispery voices, and remember the apocalypse in greater detail than anyone alive, and are quietly working to prevent it happening again."

Which I rather like. It's really creepy yet at the same time oddly encouraging.

I love these jam sessions in general, of course - people throwing out adventure hooks, visuals, leitmotifs and jokes. My favourite run was Iron Roleplayer where everybody got one ingredient like "Skeletons" or "Cats" or in one case "Rain" and had to make adventure hooks for it. I came up with Adventure! and Buffy ideas for just about all of them, and used the odd one here and there.

T minus 4 days

So, on Sunday I find out if I can get enough players to outnumber me at the table for the rest of the academic year.

My Vampire idea has sat idle since October, and while I'll offer it, it really needs players who are up for Big Emotional Episodes. And really more than about twelve sessions. Look at me, planning for more than twelve sessions! Maybe I'll let it sit till next year, rather than shelving it like most games I offer that don't get any custom.

Doctor Who in the afternoon. Nothing complicated. Simple episodic adventures, bit of character-background stuff if the players want it, maybe one Big Emotional Episode, end with a big explosion and possibly a funny dance. The Time Lord player from last year is available and keen... although he would also like to run Icons. Fiiiight!

Dune, the one day RPG

Now 49 pages of the supplement that never was is freely available.

"Buffy in pain, story more interesting. Buffy not in pain, story not interesting."

One thing I like to see in games is emotional responses other than anger, greed, fear and that heroic sense of great responsibility.

The Watch House, like Buffy itself when she fell for Angel, became more than a fun little Monster Of The Week series at around the point when the hero's player offered her up for heartbreak, by suggesting she fall in love with one of the other PCs. We made sure this was cool with the other player, and he further complicated matters by having him kick off a relationship with an NPC who could otherwise have been the hero's best friend. This emotional side ran through the game, creating a whole lot of angst and pain for the characters - which the players by and large gleefully participated in and acted to worsen, resulting in two of the PCs becoming seasonal Big Bads and more. It remained optional - a couple of the PCs were largely romantically untroubled throughout the six-year run of the game - but it informed a whole lot of the game.

Steve Darlington (who I hope isn't having to be evacuated from Brisbane as I type this) once wrote this article on Star Wars and it reflects my thinking on the setting well. One thing mentioned in passing in the section "The Characters Must Be Centre Stage to Everything" is the possible emotional weight of things. Granted, the films only really managed this in The Empire Strikes Back, but "No... I am your father" still packs a massive punch. I'd love to try a Star Wars game with moments like that as well as the more-often-done-in-Star-Wars-games moments of giant spaceships exploding and lightsabre battles. (The lightsabre battles in the original films are all big emotional scenes, something only Revenge Of The Sith really manages.)

I've played and run plenty of Vampire games over the years that didn't really touch on the Kindred's angst, pain, romance or much anything else except the political paranoia, and I was never entirely happy with them.

Of course, it's easy to lay it on too thick. I just watched Star Trek: Generations again last night, and killing Picard's family offscreen to make him feel a bit more vulnerable really sounds a bum note. (And not just because the Nexus as vaguely explained could have let him go back three days to save them, and phone Riker to stop Soren before the story gets started.)

Some games don't fit this. Some gamers don't want this. I wouldn't make it a big thing in an Indiana Jones style Adventure! game, for example, and the main emotional push of the Galactica-style military SF game I followed The Watch House with was "gloom".

Best to check in advance if you're going to do more than a little of this. The new Doctor Who is full of big emotional episodes, but the old wasn't so much, and there are plenty of classic fans who aren't happy about that...

But I wouldn't want to run a Buffy game, for example, that didn't have room for heartbreak as well as awesome fight scenes and one-liners.

Take that, Monopoly!

Including work by folks like James Wallis, The Boardgame Remix Kit sounds like a good idea.

Nightlife

So, I followed an ad link on RPGnet... sometimes that happens.

In this case, it lead to Nightlife - The Series, a mockumentary about gamer geek wannabe vampire hunters. It could potentially be amusing.

"D&D is a perfect vehicle to be able to sit down and train about what you're going to do in high stress situations..."

I knew D&D fans were out to get us. ;)

Not to be confused with NightLife the RPG... about vampires and stuff.

Being Human

Happy New Year!

Now, unlike my last post of last year, there isn't a Being Human game on the way... as far as I know... and I did ask Angus about it...

But anyway, it's a more well represented area in gaming land anyway, with the second-biggest RPG around being Vampire. I'd probably go with something a bit lighter for a game where there's just the one vampire PC, to follow the show's example. Not much need to differentiate, and not many superhuman powers on display. Pretender maybe, since it doesn't put much emphasis at all on the action side of the genre.

You'd need to think about how the setting works - unassuming vampires, outcast werewolves, an afterlife like an immigration centre where it would be easy to show too much.

And of course, get in now before the American version.