Greg Rucka outs himself as a gamer

Perhaps not a huge surprise as he's a comic writer as well as a prose author, but still. He talks about Space 1889 in the commentary for his steampunk adventure webcomic.

Time Loop!

SFX on twelve Groundhog Day episodes.

This was mentioned in the Six Staples Of SF/F Series but it seems rather apt to go over it again...

This would be a tricky one to do at a gaming table.

Obviously the PCs are the ones aware that time is looping (or most of the PCs, if some of the players are game enough to go along with playing ignorance).

You'd need a lot of notes for what the "Whoa, déjà vu..." moments are, and probably a big dramatic rocks-fall-everyone-dies ending to the day for them to fight against rather than the go-to-bed-in-a-bad-mood example of Groundhog Day itself.

They'll try various solutions and mad ideas, you'll have to consider what carries over for them if anything... and someone's likely to try the "let's make everything perfect" trick.

Doctor Who listed because, well, yeah.

The Worf Effect

So-named on TV Tropes for one of its most frequent victims, a new character appears and flattens a character who is reputedly a badass to prove how dangerous they are. It happens to Worf enough that his badass-ness looks pretty questionable, but used occasionally it can be pretty effective.

But generally not on player characters.

Where a PC is built to be really good at something, there's a good chance (not 100%, but good) that the player will be annoyed if someone trumps them in it. They'll go after the offending NPC and pour any roll-boosting resources they have into hammering them into the ground.

So maybe ask first. "Is it cool if Ubervillain knocks out Brickman?"

Having a new threat demolish an enemy they've had trouble with can work as effectively and doesn't step on the PCs' personal shticks.

The Birth Of The Legacy Of Frankenstein

Iain Lowson interviewed on the origins and influences of Dark Harvest.

Who Am I? The Mysterious Past, AKA Plot Hook #1

The thread I refer to here about character-centric games also concerns a PC with amnesia, where the player asked the GM to come up with her backstory. A player saying "can you give me a mysterious past?" can be a chore, but it can also be one of the best darn plot hooks you'll get. If it’s good enough for Luke Skywalker, River Tam and Jason Bourne...

Of course, it's up to you (with or without some input from the player) to make this interesting.

Back when White Dwarf was about RPGs, issue 75 had an article about mystery in games, including PCs being mysteries to each other and even themselves: "The classic example is the character with no parent(s) - who are they? This poser is not very interesting if player characters aren't special - he may be the heir to... a baker's shop!"

The trick is knowing how far to go. This can vary with the game, the genre, the character and the player.

An amnesiac character in Vampire suggests dark secrets, possibly removed from her mind deliberately, an absentee sire, as well as the potential shock of meeting those who knew her as a mortal... or indeed learning she has not been a mortal in a lot longer than she thought. Doctor Who has its own variety of possibilities. A high-fantasy amnesiac could also discover that her memory loss was mystical, but is less likely to be appalled by what she learns. The heir to a baker's shop would suit Warhammer but not Star Wars, but not everybody who says "can you give me a mysterious past?" wants something as big as "no... I am your father."

One option would be to sketch out some possibilities, perhaps in deliberately vague terms, for the player to consider.

Of course, all this makes the revelations a surprise to the player as well as the character. This makes for more natural reactions, but there's a lot to be said for the player being in on the joke. They'll often make things far worse for their character to be more entertaining if they know what the "worse" would be.

Character-based games, an ideal, and an issue

A thread on the White Wolf forums (here) concerns three Vampire players whose characters don't mesh. I've been there. When running Vampire at college, there was rarely a reason for the PCs to be in the same room, and as such rarely a reason for the players to either. Especially when the PCs' reasons sometimes clashed, so the players wanted to advance those in secret.

Some is fine - some is great, in fact. I was always happier with character-centric plots than mission-based games. I'd love to play a game as character-heavy as that at times. But there are limits. About a quarter of an average session, say. More than that and you should look at Skype. (Happy 20th birthday, World Wide Web!)

Gen Con 2011 reports

I'm not there. But I have agents abroad, relaying information. And, y'know, RPGnet.

So far, we've got the FFG Star Wars announcement, MWP doing a Cortex+ Marvel game, a big White Wolf docket including a paranormal romance book for Vampire, a new Mummy game and the never-finished Convention Books for Mage: the Ascension, Delta Green apparently to become a standalone game... looks like there's some interesting gaming times ahead.

Star Wars RPG System IV: A New Hope?

FFG have the licence for Star Wars hobby games.

This'll probably mean a big lots-of-nice-plastic-minis game like Descent at some point. Maybe chasing around the Death Star, with lots of cardstock corridors and white plastic Stormtroopers, temping me to buy it even if I never play it?

And it might mean a shiny Dark Heresy type RPG. Or a lots-of-little-bits-for-players-to-lose game like their variant of WFRP. Still, it wouldn't be the first time Star Wars has been attached to a system I don't get or want.

It's also the most hacked licensed setting, seems like just about every game gets the "can you do Star Wars with it?" test at some point. I've played it in first and revised edition WEG, first edition d20, Feng Shui, Cinematic Unisystem, boffer LARP, non-boffer LARP...

What about Star Wars makes it the benchmark setting for adventure-ish RPGs? Well, for me, it's up there Lord Of The Rings and above the likes of 2000AD, Marvel and DC, Doctor Who and Star Trek as the myths of my childhood. And unlike Middle-earth, I feel like I can do it justice. I don't have to describe the setting as evocatively or thematically as JRR Tolkien, just sketch it in and get to the action as fast as George Lucas. Back when George was fast.

The Star-Spangled Man With A Plan!

Damn it Marvel, you got me with Thor, now after Captain America I want to run a pulpy WWII Golden Age superhero game.

I figured this was possible - after all, my one year of Adventure! had Rocket Man as a PC and I felt I could go back and do more there - but yep, darn it, totally worked.

I've followed war before (most successfully in The Stars On Fire, following the PCs from first contact with a hostile alien race to nuking their battle station, in a grim Galactica by way of Elegiac Halo Adverts sort of way) so I know the setting works, with PCs generally as irregulars (and possibly out-and-out oddities like Cap) doing commando raids and entangling with NPCs on various sides so it's not just mission after mission after mission...

And of course I've given some PCs the chance to fight Nazis - in The Watch House itself I grabbed the chance while Milli was in Hell, while in Doctor Who Series A I had a slightly more nuanced approach with good and bad German soldiers, a heroic traitor and, yes, some out and out mad scientists Hellboy would be happy to clobber.

But there are always more Nazis to fight.

The End

So I saw Harry Potter 7.2 last night. Wizard School's out commmmpletely!

How many series have you brought to a definitive end? Most games fizzle at the end (sometimes the middle) of an adventure, with a plan to maybe go back which doesn't actually work out.

Putting a cap on things if you don't have a real intent to go back seems like a good idea, but it's pretty rare in gaming. A lot of games seem to get cancelled mid-season with no warning, so their final sessions lack finality.

In my case as a GM I can say I've really managed it four times, and only one of those was over an academic year long, the others having been built to run for one year and stop conclusively. And one of them ran half a year due to... events... but I still managed to pull a final session together.

I could have ended The Watch House at pretty much any season finale, and pretty much expected to end it at the end of season one, but we kept on going.

I had a theoretical end point, seven seasons like Buffy itself, complete with the Watchers' Council being destroyed halfway through season seven as it had been on TV, but was rather surprised to actually get to it.

And by the end I knew it was time to wrap things up, knock things down, kick things over...

The whole season had been billed as the final one, the last Big Bad was as big as I could make it, and I emailed descriptions of trailers with the James song Destiny Calling and the verse "tell us when our time's up, show us how to die well, show us how to let it all go..." playing over the PCs going into battle.

By this time the Buffy Season Eight comics had started but while I've joked about an equivalent I'd need to get several players around a table who haven't been at the games soc for a couple years. So this was to be it, the end, and I'd built towards it for most of the season.

I had The Battle Of Hogwart's partially in mind (as much as The Battle Of Pellenor Fields and The Battle Of Sunnydale High) but I messed up and made the most tactically useful location a field outside the city, rather than having the final conflict smash up the heart of the setting. Ah well, can't have everything. It would have meant rather too many people in Cambridge seeing a horde of vampires lead by Death itself attacking King's College, anyway...

We were so far from let-the-dice-fall that we'd discussed killing one of the PCs fairly openly for a few weeks before, because somebody had to die along with potentially rather a lot of friendly NPCs and of course the villains. An interesting way to play, but not for everyone and not to be used very often.

For various reasons it took about three months to get that final session organised with everyone there. But we managed it, in the end, and I think we can be proud of that. It was absolutely worth the wait.

A definitive ending (with or without loose ends, a Blake's Seven style TPK, or just the players and PCs taking a moment to consider the possibility of going on) really does give a game a stronger set of memories than a final session with no hint of impending cancellation.

Democracy in action

Go vote in the ENnies!

... "Happy Birthday Robot" seems like the runaway success, and I hadn't heard of it at all until now. Apparently it's a story game for kids and families. Which is cool.

There's always more to learn.

Some medieval portrayals of St. Christopher show him with the head of a dog.

yeahbuhwhat?

I tripped over this fact in a thread about annoying out-of-genre character names in RPGs. It's a reminder that years of study of a period still won't give you a full picture. There's always something new (and possibly very strange) to find out about.

An icon of a saint with the head of a dog would weird out a lot of horror or urban fantasy PCs, and these images could be used directly as handouts in something like WFRP or Werewolf... and that's without actually meeting a priest who looks like an Alsatian under his hood.

When Geek Worlds Collide

Coming soon: Knights of Badassdom, in which fantasy LARPers have to stop a succubus accidentally summoned through a spellbook bought as a prop.

(Portrayals of gamers on screen skew heavily towards LARPers becase they have far more visual interest than people sitting around a table rolling dice. See any news report about a gaming convention for examples. See also cosplayers versus everyone else at Comic Con.)

Having genre savvy characters deal with genre threats (even to the point of the players playing themselves as PCs) is fairly common, because hey, we're genre savvy so it's easy to reflect in-character.

I never had gamers appear in The Watch House (even though Cambridge has a biannual RPG convention) but I did have references to authors drawing ideas from Buffyverse reality. I'm tempted to set a Doctor Who adventure in a parallel world where Doctor Who is a hit TV show...

How many friendly NPCs is too many?

If you can't name them all without checking your notes, as player or GM, that's a good sign you have too many.

Populate the staff of a Superhero Agency, a recent thread on The RPGnet asked for suggestions to add to the roster of a superhero secret agent support team, and this reminded me of something a wise man (hello Dave!) once said, about how James Bond works for MI6 but he only interacts with about three people from this organisation staffed by hundreds. They all have strongly sketched in personalities and they're memorable. Having a different briefing officer for every adventure, and a different member of Q Branch, would dilute the flavour of the setting.

Give the organisation a boss, with some interesting eccentricities and foibles, and a small number of other NPCs just as broadly drawn.

A large organisation might have specialists on call for specific weird situations. If they can be reached as soon as the PCs need them (directly or by phone or the like) this can result in the PCs using "call a specialist" as a crutch, rather than, say, going in and trying to defuse a bomb themselves with no demolitions training or tools like adventuring heroes are supposed to. So it often helps to strand the PCs away from direct contact with backup. Or if that feels too forced, just limit the availability of specialists from the get-go.

Delta Green, for example, lets PCs work as members of government agencies, but as they're working an unofficial and illegal agenda they can't call in too many favours. Angel has the organisation rules, where the GM and players decide what resources they have - and since you can limit the points they have to spend, the bigger a group is the less PCs will matter to it.

If the PCs know in advance they'll need a specialist for a mission, that can bring an NPC into the party - feel free to characterise them pretty broadly. And if you need someone to be killed to show how this week's monster works, they're always a good choice...

There's also the possibility of an NPC full-time member of the party. Avoiding the horrors of the GMPC and making ure they don't hog the spotlight, this character can be very useful. You can fill a gap in the skillset of the group, possibly taking over a necessary but unwanted role like getaway driver, and it gives you a direct voice in planning (and arguing, and making jokes) in-character, and it's someone you can hit with plot devices as much as you want.

No magic-user among the PCs? Well, the local witch might be friendly, but she can also mess up at just the wrong moment bringing in magical problems the group wouldn't otherwise suffer, has her own agenda, and would make an interesting wedge in the relationship between two PCs...

Playing the thing you'd normally be fighting. In a horror SF game.

Russell Bailey brings us The Bugs - 3:16 as murderous inhuman hordes made from suicides.

This takes me back...

40 Buffy Episodes Based on REM songs by Kammerice. Currently actually 39, so I threw down the gauntlet with one whole title.

Who's Who

Over on t'Whoblog, I mentioned the old World Of Darkness portrayals of Rasputin in the context of Celebrity Historical episodes. On the whole, these tend to "print the legend" as in Westerns, as Mark Gatiss put it when talking about his depiction of Churchill.

So how to portray real people in other games?

An urban fantasy or horror game like World Of Darkness might focus on the strange mysteries of history, where someone like Rasputin seems fair game, but the third-party Call Of Cthulhu adventure "Secrets Of The Kremlin" which had Stalin actively studying the Mythos seemed a bit tacky. (To say nothing of one of those Rasputin appearances being in the same book as vampire Himmler, since quietly ignored.)

Of course, this is the real(ish) world, and care must be taken to cause offence in some cases.

Teaming up with the President in a superhero game? Or possibly Prince William, ace helicopter pilot? Heroic portrayals can be pretty amusing. Conversely, use of real "villains" makes me twitch with discomfort.

Beyond our history, some fictional settings have detailed enough backgrounds that you might have stories of modern, historical and legendary figures ready to go. "So who's this Conan guy anyway?" You could add characters the PCs would know about, but it's more involving if the players recognise them as well.

I can imagine historians in fantasy worlds arguing about portrayals of ancient heroes. That "Know, O Prince..." opening has always made me wonder who's talking, and to whom.

And if the PCs are ever flung forward in time, they'll probably be rather surprised by how history remembers them. "We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero!"

Er...

I just clocked up my 35,000th post on RPGnet.

Explaining why if you have a katana, you should have a trenchcoat too. It's the required concealment level.

Need 220 plot hooks by HP Lovecraft?

Really.

Some of them are rather short: "Hideous sound in the dark."

Not all are likely to be much use: "Phosphorescence of decaying wood — called in New England "fox-fire"."

Lovecraft being Lovecraft, a couple of them are cringe-inducing.

Others might be more viable: "Daemons, when desiring an human form for evil purposes, take to themselves the bodies of hanged men."

And there's at least one that's appeared in Buffy...

The (X) Musketeers

How much can you change a setting before it becomes something else?

I just saw the second trailer for the new The Three Musketeers and it looks (a) barking mad and (b) not much like The Three Musketeers except in basic outline, as its big standout action scene involves airships firing broadsides at each other, a mere century and a half before the Montgolfier brothers' first flight. It looks more like the counterhistorical slam-all-the-most-fun-eras-together setting of 7th Sea than anything.

As a historian, this might bug me, but it does it with a big goofy smile on its face. It isn't presenting itself as a historical drama (like Braveheart to pick my least favourite example) any more than X-Men: First Class is the true story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After all, The Three Musketeers itself didn't really happen.

But anyway, if I signed on for a swashbuckling game and there were century-early airships, or voodoo turned out to actually work, I'd want "this is going to be a bit mad" to be signposted fairly early. Which showing airships firing broadsides at each other in the trailer achieves. And equally, I'd want to be able to swash said buckler in this new situation, and be able to swing from airship to airship as readily as swing from regular ship to regular ship. The setting may have gone wonky, but I can still get my swashbuckler on and be useful in it.

(7th Sea does bug me, but mostly for plundering the good bits of history and divorcing them all from context by putting them in a non-Earth setting... and making pirates a supplement...)