Distinct Lack Of Progress Report

Of Gods And Men?

Of Men And Gods?

Hmm. I dunno.

Still haven't decided on a system. Ideally I'd come up with one myself and create my own small-press indie game thingie, but I'm not a system head.

Something where Gods are specialists and mortals can be more generalist. And possibly have Drama Points or the like in higher measure, although I want them to be able to stand proud rather than rely on player narrative trickery.

Of course, this only matters if we have Gods and mortals in the same group - the idea's big enough that either or could also work.

A God being able to do something superhuman and occasionally useful, maybe? Like, say, Jack Harkness's serial immortality. Or Thor's ability to hit things really hard and take similar damage, obviously useful in a fightin' game but not uniquely so.

Maybe everybody gets An Amazing Thing that they can do, be they God or mortal. After all, with a group of four or so, this doesn't seem unreasonable.

Unspeakable!

John Tynes kicks off The Unspeakable Oath's first podcast.

I didn't start with D&D and I sure don't want to now.

In fact, I didn't play it for over a decade after starting. By which time I was jaded enough to be baffled by why anyone would want to play it. Classes and levels? THACO? (It was the THACO era.) Armour that makes you dodge rather than, say, reducing damage? Why are people driving Model T Fords?

I'm rather less adamant about that nowadays. But when someone asks how to start on RPGs and some people insist D&D is the only option I can be heard to tut disapprovingly.

I can kind of see that.

Why everyone wants to have sex with vampires according to Cracked.

When I Am Through With You There Won't Be Anything Left

... is the theme of Damages, which got more 'mundane' as it went along but was for season one at least a positively nightmarish portrayal of a controlling, manipulative vampire of a boss. There was nothing supernatural about her or the show (although it had some borderline prophetic dreams and a hallucination or possible ghost) but she seemed utterly inhuman at times. It felt like a full-on non-psychological horror story was about to happen.

So, how creepy are your monsters? Would your Vampire prince kill someone he'd treated like a friend to preserve the power of someone more useful who he doesn't like? Do your "cleaners" ever get the shakes as they wait for their prey? How many skeletons do they have in their closets, and what would happen when one surfaces? Who is the real monster?

Monster As Mystery

Prompted by this, which was prompted by a post elsewhere in turn...

When is a monster not a monster? Is it defined by normal monster stats? "If it has stats, we can kill it..." Or is it made up entirely of special rules and effects? Arm-wrestling a Weeping Angel won't go well for most people, but how about sword-fighting?

Some things are clearly better left off the normal template.

Little Fears takes this in an interesting direction - normal characters have a normal array of stats, but monsters are defined only by how scary and dangerous they are and what their powers can do. That would be a way to go for a game with no canon-fodder monsters where everything is rare and threatening, or for 'unique' monsters in a more regular monster-filled game.

I imagine Of Gods And Men will be pretty directly fighty, but it could have some monsters defined only by what they do as well.

The Universe Is Slightly Different

I see this summer's big DC Comics crossover is about how The Universe Is Slightly Different, complete with one hero being the only real-universe person to know what's wrong and that it must be fixed.

Not the same as The Evil Mirror Universe, The Universe Is Slightly Different lets you rearrange characters, resurrect dead ones (and kill off current ones) with abandon, try out variant power sets and team combinations and costume designs and show a bunch of What If...? ideas all at once and possibly interacting. It lets minor characters take the spotlight in ways they never normally would, allows a bit of experimentation by players and GM, can possibly leave some aftereffects when everything else goes back to normal if an interesting enough idea comes from it, and generally ends with a big battle with not the normal sides fighting each other over the reality-fixing MacGuffin.

It can certainly make for an interesting session or two of a weird enough ongoing game. Players get to play other ideas they had for their characters, or ideas you had for them (which you should discuss with them first) and ideally somebody gets to freak out about how much better their alternate life is. (Last time Marvel did this with House Of M, the trap was that everyone's life was better.)

I admit I love this. Did it in The Watch House as well as a parallel universe and a Days Of Future Past post-apocalypse nightmare world and a fairytale land and a fourth-wall-breaker and a time warp. (And I'll note that Supernatural has done more than half of them since. Nice to know I have fans...)

About the only obvious ones I missed were "the Nazis went back in time and won WWII!" (which would be a bit off-topic and I already got Milli to fight Nazis once) and "the secret magic is out in the open so the heroes are famous!" (which... hmmm...)

Any game with a sufficiently high Weird Level can benefit from occasionally looking sidelong at it, asking what the essentials of the characters and setting are, and what happens if you change some of the details.

For added amusement, the "one hero being the only real-universe person to know what's wrong and that it must be fixed" can be the only player who doesn't get advanced warning of the change, if you trust your players not to mind the temporary bait-and-switch and to go along with the joke.

Of Gods And Men: teaser trailer ideas

A dozen lightning bolts striking the same spot.

Scientists looking at strange atmospheric readings.

A glowing figure emerging.

A group of people running from something monstrous bursting out of the sand.

An army of skeletons marching on New York.

Outdriving a giant on an open highway.

US Army Rangers in a running battle with orc-type archers.

A God standing between a group of humans and a vast lizardy monster.

Of Gods And Men

Dragon versus helicopter.

Of Gods And Men: Odin Versus Zeus

Of Gods And Men has reached the crucial "buying a notebook" stage, still without a rules system or a decision about which pantheon(s) to star.

Of course, I'm holding off partially because so much of it is window dressing - the Norse and Greek/Roman pantheons both have wise white-bearded shapeshifting kind-of-an-asshole father gods, hotheaded superstrong sons who make good superheroes, a race of giant enemies, bloodthirsty undead and lots of monsters in general.

Going Greek would give it a bit more distance from being a straight Thor-if-it-was-a-standalone-setting game, but I like wolves and witches and swords with threats of bodily harm as names a bit more.

I should probably get around to watching the Percy Jackson film.

V20

V20 is out for preorder. Fantasy Heartbreaker Rose Bailey has things to say on it. I'm awful tempted... but I'm still going back and forth on going to the Grand Masquerade where there'll be a slightly-different-cover edition, and no mondo shipping cost.

Hopefully I will reach a decision before both versions sell out completely.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

Sethra007 asked From Start to Finish: How Do You Design A Campaign? so...

As Giles advises Buffy, we feel our way.

I generally have a length in mind. "Six weeks, like usual" or "an academic year and then I'm done, tops" or occasionally "this could run and run!... probably six weeks like usual but hey." I generally have a beginning, some things to go in the middle, and something resembling a likely end.

An elevator pitch, since this is for a games society where pitching at the start of the academic year is the traditional method of getting new players. Old players will also be consulted / strongarmed. Online contacts will be prodded to comment as and when I blog about my vague forming ideas.

Come up with a grandiose title and some "poster" blurb. Design a poster of some sort.

A system that fits, with or without tweaking, and a setting made up or grabbed from somewhere.

Buy a new A5 notebook which goes in the pocket of my book bag for noting stuff I think of on the bus or hanging around the society rooms.

Doodle. Also prod around Google Images and Deviantart for stuff like the visual references I have in mind.

Arrive ready to accept players, and grit teeth in case such do not materialise. In the event that they do, run game. Adjust throughout based on player input or new dumb ideas that distract me.

"An accomplished hunter who can shape-shift into a bird of prey."

This idea thread got a couple dozen different takes on a purposely short character concept in a couple days, some impenetrable statblocks but some characterised and flavourful.

And in my case, I kinda want to do something with the character I knocked together, a mildly elfy ranger-wannabe part-time-eagle in a Buffy game.

The Last Province

It was half my lifetime ago now that I had a least a review in every single issue of The Last Province, an RPG magazine started in this very city. It was a brief thing, a year punctuated by going to the editors' flat to type reviews directly into their computer, because after issue 5 there was an attempted deal to get onto newsstands and that fell through.

But I can still point to it and say "I was there".

That my brother illustrated an Over The Edge article by Jonathan Tweet as well as my page on M.R. James, that I got review copies of things which I was more polite about because they were review copies, that I probably would have gotten a proper article into issue 6, that the cover feature for issue 5 actually appeared in Roleplayer Independent issue 8 instead (grr) and that at the launch party I stole a briefcase nuke.

Arcane Magazine. No, not THAT Arcane Magazine.

Sandy Petersen has his own personal Weird Tales.

(Weird Tales is owned by someone else... and obviously Arcane lapsed long enough ago to just be a painful memory for some British gamers.)

Of Gods And Men, Provisional Game Idea

Okay, it seems Of Gods And Men is becoming a viable thing in my head.

Dunno what system to use... supers, or kinda-supers like Angel or something. I want people to be as viable as superbeings, and not just in small armies of crack special agents. I'd like Jane Foster to be as playable as Thor. (Or Frodo and Sam to be as playable as Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli, to use the other-thing-I'm-modelling-mentally examples.)

The magics are all couched in magic-y terms, although if a lab gets hold of a magic sword they can analyse it and find interesting readings. Magic has a presence.

Whether to use existing pantheon(s) of gods or make something up like the Scion Atlantean pseudo-gods... I lean towards real ones that have been somewhat misrepresented, so players can bring some of their own mythology-fu to the table but I can always go "actually..." and change something if needs be.

Norse would be a bit "hey I'm running Thor!" Not that I'm denying that, of course.

Maybe British mythology, the shifty Celtic gods, Bran the Blessed, Gog and Magog, the fighting dragons... stuff like that. Although I might borrow from Thor and Gaiman and go for the big wide open spaces of America as the backdrop instead.

Certainly something that lets me have the army fighting orcs.

Dragons versus helicopters, because that's always fun.

I've set foot on this ground before, notably in The Watch House Season Six when I had an elf witch trying to revive a dragon and a horde of goblins to destroy humanity, but there it was a secret magic setting so it stayed hidden, at least until the dragon attacked King's College Chapel. Here it would be more superheroey and get out in the open pretty fast and stay there.

Of Gods And Men

The inevitable consequence of seeing Thor...

A game not so much of urban fantasy as urban myth. A Lord Of The Rings level fantasy apocalypse breaking out now.

Not unlike Scion but focusing on rarer and less uber characters, and the people around them as well. Optionally including unfailingly polite secret agents.

Game Of Thrones, episode one and... hmm.

I watched the start of Game Of Thrones cold, not having read any of the books and having just seen some of the preview plugs here and there, as well as a bit explaining how you can just read a summary of the Wars of the Roses and add the occasional blue-eyed zombie or the Predator-looking things they serve.

And also That Review where the writer suggested (A) this is Boy Fiction of no interest to her and (B) it includes sex to attract women and (C) so is fantasy in general and women don't like it.

And no, it doesn't support conclusion B or C. But if she only watched the first episode, I can see where conclusion A came from. All the women we see are defined by their husbands or families, and one of them is pushed into an arranged marriage with Conan after being told by her brother he'd give her to the whole tribe, "all forty thousand men and their horses too, if that's what it took." Had she responded "I don't see you volunteering" I would have cheered.

In this day and age, the lack of equality in what is not actually a historical piece is rather surprising. I am assured this develops later, but for now I just have to trust that Arya Stark (age nine) won't prove to be the only female character to wield a weapon in the entire series.

(Second episode edit - they get more to do, which is nice, although all that they do is not necessarily.)

Relevance to gaming? Well, y'know, big fat fantasy saga, has its own game, now on TV. Need more? Well, okay...

How much fantasy can you put into history, or vice versa, before it turns into alternate history, historical fantasy, or some other subgenre?

This question has come up for me before, when I talked about running Dark Ages: Vampire and one of my circle of potential players expressed concerns that, as I'm a history nerd and he isn't, I might get too caught up in the historicity. A fair concern, since it was the real-world horror and madness of the Fourth Crusade that made me want to try the game in the first place. And then how far do you bend things? Female troops on the Winterfell Wall? Or at Constantinople? Elves at Helm's Deep? Or Agincourt? I don't mind, but someone else might. DA: V comes pre-bent, of course, having been made to accommodate vampires and other things hiding from the candlelight. But everyone draws the line somewhere different, so it's good to talk this through before a player rebels against the restrictions already-fictionalised history places on their choices... or your Arthurian game turns out to be Alien Versus Pendragon.

The Good, The Bad, And The Murderhobo

(Murderhobo, shortening of "Murderous Hobo", is RPGnet's neologism for spring, referring to rootless PCs who kill things and take their stuff with no moral dimension.)

So there's a thread over yonder Are the PC's a force of good? from a long-time RPGer who has never seen a game where the PCs aren't a bunch of self-serving pragmatists or out-and-out psychokillers.

If this were the case with me and gaming... I would likely not be gaming. If I want to see wall-to-wall self-serving pragmatists, I have politics for that.

I have no interest in a murderhobo game. I've had and seen a thankfully small number of players bring the murderhobo to games where it doesn't fit, and these tend to be game-killing disasters that are only entertaining as GMing war stories. This is one of those make-sure-we're-on-the-same-page things.

I've played the odd emotionally dead PC here and there, and run games that are about questionable morality, but they're about that, not defaulting to it. My default setting is trying to do good, and hopefully succeeding more often than not because my universes tend to be on the side of good.

The difference between "grim and dark" and GRIMDARK

Grim and dark: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

GRIMDARK: "... And it's a big black hobnailed boot. With steel toecaps. Which have spikes. And the spikes are chainsaws. And they're ON FIRE."

Need a Star Trek setting?

Bryan Singer has one lying around spare.

Complete with episode titles lifted from The Second Coming.

And featuring a character called The 76th Distillation of Blue. Who you just know would be the breakout star.

Federation set in the year 3000 changes a bunch of stuff and doesn't change a bunch of other stuff, in order to have a familiar but more futuristic setting. Something I did when I pitched a Star Trek game set merely a century after TNG, as an excuse for explosions and phaser fights and aliens being kicked in the face.

Hey, I'm a Kirk baby. I want bright colours and running around and monsters and things that go boom. If Doctor Who can do it so can Star Trek.

(And as for The 76th Distillation of Blue, I was going to have Mr. N, a V'Ger-probe-style shifting column of light who speaks in humming tones, as the science officer. Deal with technobabble by literally making it a background hum.)