V20 trailer

On Youtube to mark the general release of the PDF.

Compare the Requiem trailer I made last year and you can see I'm using the same DVD library. I could have gone more different, but I likes it.

(Indeed, thanks to the "vampire" episode I could probably cut a Vampire trailer together entirely from Alias. Cities at night, dark streets, boardrooms and ballrooms. There's a fair amount of imagery overlap between vampires and spies, especially superspies mingling with high society. It would lack Nosferatu, though...)

V20 Companion open development has kicked off.

The Last Beat Of My Heart

Jess Hartley on Strange, Dead Love

Jim Henson

Today's Google Doodle marking Jim Henson's 75th birthday with digital puppets created by the Henson Company.

I talked a bit about how you might reflect his ideas over in t'Whoblog, but I thought I'd talk a bit more here as well. His "will this work, try it and see" attitude ran through his work, from seeing The Muppet Show when I was a kid, learning with Sesame Street, seeing films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth when they came out.

I've been involved with puppetry here and there, and it's definitely affected my storytelling, writing, and of course my GMing. Everything from reinterpreting mythologies to a bit of Brian Froud in some character art.

And above all the desire to entertain. Because...

"When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for... the storyteller."

There will always be a place by the fire for you, sir.

This year's theoretical games

Adventure! (or Hollow Earth Expedition) in World War II... or now.

Vampire: The Requiem - or V20 in theory but I'd rather have the two-standard-books version of the latter to actually take to a gaming table, though. My Masquerade always looked fairly Requiem-y anyway.

Supers, probably Icons.

Emergency fallback Doctor Who like the last two years.

That's about it, plan-wise, really. Depends on players.

The Grand Masquerade

That longer post I promised ya.

V20 is heavy. Really heavy. Really pretty too. And a nice minor update, a "Revised, Second Edition" with things like the Tremere being more susceptible to Blood Bonds and the Gangrel animal features normally being temporary and the Toreador weakness making them obsessed by beauty rather than frozen in awe by it.

The print-on-demand or Now In Print version will be two books, which might well be more handy session-to-session, certainly more than the limited edition super-shiny version signed by about twenty people which I don't want most gamers getting their grubby paws on. So hopefully that'll get into FLGSes and I can buy it there.

No Big Huge Announcement this year - Onyx Path and Mummy The ? were both known about already, and the big presentation at the Succubus Club was about the fashion styles being planned for the MMO, rather than something like a gameplay demo. It was cool though, and you should have heard the collective groan when the Brujah guy jabbed himself in the cheek. And it did slyly reveal that the seven classic clans would be the only ones available to begin with.

Tim Bradstreet was very cool all round after sitting by him on the flight from Atlanta to New Orleans (which was the flight after the one I was supposed to be on, so I lucked out there). I'll have to let him know how much the original VTM portfolio he gave me goes for at the Conpulsion auction. In like seven months time.

I bought one for myself too, naturally.

I played a tabletop Requiem game, then went to the MMO Q&A, where I got my question answered... How are they dealing with night? Since it's Vampire and Mortal in the main, it'll be night all the time.

The chat panels got me all nostalgic about New Bremen. There'll never be one that big again, as it was The Official Moderated Chat, and eight years after it closed all the others seem to live in its shadow to some extent.

I stopped myself prodding Rose about Requiem too much, instead chatting quite a bit about Buffy and Doctor Who and Cavaliers Of Mars. A bit about Never Let Go, and of course some direct Requiem talk, about Strange, Dead Love and how Mirrors and Dance Macabre go to make Requiem Second Edition in suitably toolkit-y form.

And, Dracula bodypopping. (Heads Will Roll, on the Succubus Club playlist)

The Grand Masquerade

A lengthier report to follow, but for now...


Hello Russell!

Hello Ian!

Winning the "it's a small world" category, the Spanish couple who organised the V20 Europe collection campaign made a trailer with people from... Embraced in Edinburgh.

With any luck I will soon have a new facey-book photo.

V20 is enormous.

The Gangrel animal features weakness is now temporary.

Tim Bradstreet is made of win as well as the widely-known awesome.

At 3.51 this morning I saw Dracula bodypopping to a song I know from glee.

... Life is strange sometimes.

Hello from the Grand Masquerade

I will have more to say next time I post, I imagine.

In the meantime, Matt M McElroy is compiling a book of essays on Vampire: The Masquerade and held this page up to me specifically. :) So expect to see some early ramblings here and then a sharpened up version there.

Miracle Days and when everything changes

101 Different Miracle Days. It hasn't reached 101 yet, but we'll see.

SF premises that would be wonderful in some ways but could totally mangle the world.

Of course, you have to consider the effects on the players' characters. Does the miracle tie in to the special powers of a PC?

For example, how would it alter play as well as the world in general if everyone affected suddenly developed telepathy? Including the PCs, so now you have to deal with near-total knowledge on the part of the PCs? Or excluding them?

This is definitely something to think about before starting a plot along these lines. As well as the world, changes to humanity as a whole would affect the PCs, changing them from what the players originally envisioned. Reassuring them that this is temporary will help in most cases, but not all. Imagine something like The Midwich Cuckoos - "Immaculate conception. For every woman able to bear children. All at once." Then consider the players of female PCs. That could have effects far beyond not being able to die for a few months. The more deeply it affects the characters, the more problematic it may be.

Army Of Ghosts doesn't touch anyone physically until the Cybermen arrive, but we see how it affects society, in some cases deeply affecting people. That one step away might make it less troubling, although it could still hit raw nerves.

When something changes the setting profoundly, and doubly when something alters the PCs themselves, you have to make sure the players will want to take this on board.

Critical Miss 11

After five years, Critical Miss returns. With features on James Wallis's almost legendary Cop Show RPG, convention reports from back in the day, absentee players, and an improvised board game called Yes I Sank Your Fucking Barge after one of the great legends of Warhammer.

Star Trek

Star Trek is 45 today.

It's been sequelled, prequelled, rebooted, cartooned, ripped off, referenced, RPGed rather a lot. Not least by me ol' mate Dave, who has been GMing the Decipher version (a game that was in dire need of a playtest) for my Friday group on and off for almost two years.

But with so much of it out there, in different series and styles and universes - Siskoid's running review count stands at 1419 for episodes, movies, comic issues et al - what people mean when they say Star Trek is pretty variable.

Dave's current game is very much inspired by his favourite series Deep Space Nine - that era, practical issues on a frontier, a tough little ship, a crew heavy with war veterans, a new section of space opened up after the fall of an empire in the Dominion War with a smallish number of major races and a lot of war secrets, religious fanaticism and opportunistic use of religion as Big Bads. But we've still had time for a Q episode and the one where we found the wreck of our own ship from a few hours in the future.

Conversely, the idea I had to GM was in the style of the new movie, a rollicking space opera with a lot of fighting and arguing and snogging and colourful uniforms and gigantic explosions. And that's Star Trek too.

Who wants what was the core of Federal Space by Shadowjack.

I won't ask you to wade through all 433 replies to, but I'll just show you this, explaining why we keep going back there.

Gosh I had no idea.

Nationals 2012, Day -222

Apparently they have 25 GMs for the Nationals so far. And need twice as many.

Yikes.

I do wonder if it will be as busy in Cardiff as this year's Sheffield event. How many GMs did that have in the end?

Pretty much every Nationals adds some categories. Some run, some don't. Some that do are never seen again. Next year, they have several ideas. I believe Pirates! has already been kicked into touch, with a reminder that apparently there used to be a Swashbuckling category. Naturally that was the one I liked most of these changes. Of course I'd happily run Doctor Who, but I'm not convinced about giving it a category of its own.

Of course, I'm looking at this from a perspective of not getting eight (eight!) people to run my "Film & TV" category in 2007, having Urban Fantasy only start in 2011 and fill up immediately, and wanting to do it again. Possibly fitting Doctor Who in there as I considered well before giving it a category was suggested. But not if that category's going, naturally. (Grrr.)

I get a bit obsessive about categories. This is because having been to the Nationals almost a dozen times, I know it can be all players have to go on when they get to the table. And if I sign up for Category X, I don't want something that really belongs in Category Y. It might be fun, but...

Not that any of this really matters, ultimately it's the wargames categories where the points are. But hey, I want to give the people something like what they want.

Game Table Team-Up

Turns out the only comic I actually bought on New DCU Launch Day was issue 1 of Angel & Faith from Dark Horse and Mutant Enemy. (I probably would have bought the new Batman or Action Comics, and have some others tagged for interest, but never mind.)

Angel and Faith have only worked together briefly on-screen, so while giving them a shared byline makes sense due to their connection, it still looks slightly odd on the cover.

Which, inevitably, got me thinking...

What do you do when you only have a couple of the players from the group? Not enough for the regularly scheduled adventure. Assuming you have enough warning not to be sitting there with the adventure ready and wondering where everyone is, you can put a bit of focus on the players and PCs you have.

Would the PCs work together successfully without the others there? (Hopefully the players would...) What can they do in a crisis when the others are unavailable? How much of an "odd couple" would they be?

Then hit them with an adventure that brings out the best and/or worst of them, possibly hauls up any conflicts between them and generally lets them air things they wouldn't with the whole group there.

The Universe Is Slightly Different - But Why?

Following on from The Universe Is Slightly Different, we reach the end of Flashpoint and the start of the reboot-in-some-places-renumbering-in-others-try-not-to-think-about-it DC Universe.

One thing I didn't discuss last time was reasons why the universe is reshuffled. Obviously it has to be some pivotal event right at the start of the change, or several events changed deliberately, to have such wide-ranging effects.

i.e. not really what Flashpoint did.

So yes, come up with a solid reason which makes sense, even in a Butterfly Effect kind of way. A central change or changes where the connections hang together logically. If this reader's first reaction is "but that makes no sense!" then it's not a good sign.

Oh well, it did lead to some amusingly wonky not-very-parallel alternative scenarios like "Alaska, Land Of The Undead".

Pilot Season

I just got back from seeing the pilot of Once Upon A Time. It's a very low-key urban fantasy, apart from some big “wow” flashbacks to the storybook world most of the cast hail from, with nothing much fantastical bleeding into the real world... yet. Still, the people who have been trying to adapt Fables to TV must be spittin’.

But anyways, it got me thinking about recruiting for games, taster sessions, connected or unconnected one-shots and stuff like that. Round these parts (these parts in this case meaning GEAS, the university games society) games run by the academic year, and the first session every year is generally given to one-shots.

I seem to be in a minority here because I tend to run one-shots of the same games I want to run from then on. This seems logical to me at least.

“That was fun, are you running it next week?”
“No.”
“...”

But how much do you put in an intro session, “sizzle reel”, pilot, whatever? Pregen the kinds of PCs who’d star in the game generally, or focus on something else in the setting?

For example, when I tried out my Heroes-y plainclothes supers setting Next Step, low-grade superhumans on the run from sinister government agents was the obvious way to go as that’s what the game would have been about.

But for The Stars On Fire, a military SF game that starts with just-about first contact, should I put that in the not-necessarily-canon intro session? Well, I never ran an intro session for that one, but if I had I’d have done one of the previous contacts where (almost) nobody survived. The game started with the PCs finding one survivor in a wrecked ship, who could have been a PC in the imagined “prologue” game.

Way back when, The Watch House replicated Buffy accidentally a bit more than intended, when in the first session I discovered that generating four characters can be done in half an hour, and needing a plot I stole one I didn’t intend to use. When I lost one of the original players (grrr) and picked up a couple more (yay) next week, I reset with the canonical first episode. Had I actually been planning something like that, I'd have run a Buffy one-shot in that slot instead.

Equally, you want it to be a fun one-shot in and of itself. So my theoretical Buffy one-shot would have involved plenty of monsters, very possibly a BIG monster, and probably the TV characters for ease of use. If I’m running a game like a TV show, the intro week one-shot is less likely to be a “first episode” pilot than a big blow-the-budget standalone episode of the show. More The Christmas Invasion than New Earth. A reasonable taster of the show, but tending to have more monsters and explosions than an average episode.

Genre Awareness, Or Lack Thereof

This page comes from the first issue of Warren Ellis's run of Secret Avengers. Note the character descriptions.

Have you ever been in a superhero game like that? Have you ever been in a superhero game not like that?

I've seen my share of players and characters who stick out like sore thumbs. Generally this is a most significant issue in genre-simulation-y games, which are the kind I run. But then all games have genres, even if they're genres that only exist in those games, and I'm as out of place in a classic dungeon crawl as classic dungeon crawl styles are at my table. But hey, I know that.

Maybe it's because I've played a lot of superhero games, but these seem particularly prone to That One Player. Perhaps because "superheroes" is purposely all-encompassing, in terms of tones and styles as well as powers and backgrounds.

I've had some out-of-kilter PCs in Buffy but I've never had someone try to play a costumed superhero, whereas I've seen plenty of plain-clothes vigilante PCs in superhero games that were meant to be four-colour.

I've seen game-crashing moral dissonances in several games (some which killed games in one session flat) but I've rarely seen a superhero game that didn't have any.

It seems some people hear "you can play anything..." and not "... that would fit into this comic." And so we get 90s antiheroes in retro-60s games, uberbeings in games about street-level heroes, murderous vigilantes in city-sponsored rescue teams.

So yes, bit worried about offering super-y games this year. But fortune favours the brave. And the bold.

Sort Of Progress Report

Okay, still drawing a blank on a system for Of Gods And Men and it might need a particular mix of players, so might go more straightforward and do WWII Adventure! instead. Something I can do pretty casually by comparison.

Also, dinosaurs and planes.

Beware The Moon!

And today is the 30th anniversary of An American Werewolf In London. Which isn't all that gaming related, but is awesome.

And today is the seventh anniversary of the new World Of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem.

Which I'll run tabletop someday, I swear.

Adventure! Tenth Anniversary

... is also today!

Gratuitous fanart!

Ten years (admittedly mostly in the first year, alas) of fighting the Ubiquitous Dragon’s unstoppable minions, stopping Doktor Zorbo’s quest to destroy the surface world, teaming up with Houdini to discover the secret of the Screaming Skulls, uncovering the Holy Grail, hiding the Holy Grail, wielding the Spear of Destiny, punching Nazis before everyone was doing it, strapping yourself to experimental rocket packs while diving out of a zeppelin, influencing later Dramatic Editing systems and being the game I wanted when I bought the Indiana Jones RPG when I was twelve.

Thanks to Ian Watson for the reminder, and thanks to everyone who got that game in my hands, and everyone who played it with me.