GMing the Craig Oxbrow (and other local GMs) way

Volunteered for a GM tips and tricks chat. I... guess I have some?

Besides having some names prepared in advance to avoid calling all your background characters Bob.

I may mention sounding board characters...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, BOOM! 2

Issue 1 of the BOOM! Buffy reboot established a lot, while issue 2 introduces a bit more, continuing the setup, and plays a bit more with various expectations.

Mage: Eclipse

Eclipse is an alternate post-Storm now for Mage: The Ascension, to be the setting for a LARP from Jackalope, and maybe elsewhere.

Beware the Sideways Men.

Did some pitching and proofing this afternoon. Feel accomplished.

Oscars 2019

I am happy with some Oscar results. Not so much others.

What’s up, danger?

Happy with that one.

From The Dust 19

... is called Look Alive.

Tender is the ghost...

Okay, so, the Tender intervention lead to an escape room in New York (based on an Egyptian tomb, possibly the official Vampire: The Masquerade escape room) and following a security-style feed on Twitch, a loop of a CG image of water at a dark pier.

And a bunch of new missions, named after ghosts and related things from Japanese mythology, with a lot of Christian historical answers... and also Earthbound...

Next up, an event in San Francisco on March 21st, as revealed in this threatening email from the Tender CEO to a thrall...

My first Slayer observation

My first Slayer observation: A Buffy spinoff book about a character who has never met Buffy but resents her deeply makes for a pretty fun dynamic, as I flick between being on her side in this story and hoping she learns a bit more about certain circumstances.

Slayer

It is here. I am reading it. Can I get back to you later?

(While you wait, video intro with Kiersten White)

Age Of Sigmar RPG cover

The cover shows that the Age of Sigmar RPG will have quite a variety of characters to start with. Stormcast! Deepkin! Sylvaneth! Gryphound! Gonna need more hordes of the accursed undead.

The very first Buffy books

In preparation for Slayer coming out here tomorrow, I went right back to the beginning with the first four Buffy tie-in novels.

Spoilers for out-of-print twenty-year-old books to follow:

100 years of horror and fantasy magazines

The Garden Of Orchids, first published in Germany in 1919, may well be the first horror and fantasy magazine, featured in Open Culture. Thanks to bhu at RPG.net for the link.

What's your emergency?

Idly considering a Storytellers Vault book on emergency services other than the police - hospitals, firefighters, etc. Sadly Inferno is already taken as a title.

The Storyteller returns

The best place by the fire is still kept for... The Storyteller. Neil Gaiman seems like the sort of person who could do that.

Sounding Board NPCs

Something I often put in games, and see in some others as well (Alice in the V5 streaming game Blood On The Thames, for example) - NPCs who can join in conversations at the PCs’ base of operations, and will listen to plans and provide feedback in-character. Even if there aren’t many support NPCs around, this one can be very useful. They usually support from the back, offering advice rather than direct help. It could be a friend, a mentor, a superior officer for a group of irregulars, or something like that. As played by me, they’ll often add to in-character chat and jokes as well.

In The Watch House, the student Watchers’ tutor Escher and the witch Emma played this role as well as other functions, and the demonic contact Sullivan and even the future Ethan Rayne to Milli’s Giles Marty sometimes would as well.

In From The Dust, Monique is Bonnie’s fellow night-shift waitress at the diner, a job Bonnie has kept up despite becoming a vampire, and her and the coterie’s check on how badly they’re maintaining the Masquerade around humans. Her main contribution is her doubtful expression.

Emily Cheeseman

#VisibleWomen on Twitter is always a good place to find genre art. For example, this time, Emily Cheeseman. If I ever do a fantasy epic type of game, this will depict one of the legends of the realm.

Rose Bailey on Relics

on RPGnet.

Nationals prep begins properly

Fifteen or sixteen players for three GMs. So five PCs for Sounds Like Hell, maybe six one day of the two.

Hollis is designed to lift right out, so he gets NPCed. Livia is designed to lift out pretty easily too, in the event of a player dropout.

Now to figure out what they’re doing.

The Great Work begins once more

Nationals category confirmed. Urban Fantasy. Home.

Now to find out what the other three(!) GMs are planning for it.

Edit: now two, with a 5/5/6 split instead of 4/4/4/4 which feels a bit low. So we have Matthew with Monster Of The Week, and a GM I don’t know with Torg Eternity. And me with... oh, you know.

From The Dust 18

And we have title drop.

Wraith 20

I have Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition. Players, be ye warned.

I ran Wraith once, and it was the best game I ever played at the Nationals thanks to careful connecting of the pregen PCs.

Darker Days Radio

Congratulations to the DDR team on 100 episodes!

I think this line's mostly filler

Someone just figured out that Irish text used in 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' is about a bus lane opening in Dublin

from entertainment.ie

I am an easy shill

Hard Times by Paramore is in Happy Death Day 2 U fine I’ll go see it

In case I have to do another quiz

Which came first, Bobbie Draper in The Expanse (books or TV) or Bobby Draper in Mad Men?

Razorline

Something got me thinking about Razorline, the short-lived 90s Marvel imprint created by Clive Barker.

Three of the four titles that came out were magic-based, but the lead team book was more SF-ish, though still in a Space Magic kind of way.

Hyperkind had a group empowered by alien contact and human consciousness, and feels kind of like a Fantastic Four for the 90s, with a diverse group, a flying zapper as the Torch-like main action hero, a super-thinker, an illusion-psychic and a none-more-90s swords-for-hands Wolverine-type as the Thing equivalent. Their main hook is as a legacy team for a group of legendary heroes who have now been totally forgotten.

Ectokid features the son of a ghost and a human, able to interact with both living and ghost worlds. It’s pretty good fun. I swiped a few things from it when I briefly ran Wraith: The Oblivion. Which makes me wonder what the never-started Wraitheart was about in particular.

Hokum & Hex was the wizard book about basically the worst Sorcerer Supreme ever.

Saint Sinner was the most obviously Barker-y, a Vertigo-ish plain clothes and heavy inks series about a man possessed by both an angel and a demon. He reused the title for an unconnected TV movie a few years later, the most prominent cultural artefact of the run outside of the comics - plans for an Ectokid video game ended when the whole line got canned before any of the series reached double figures.

Contorting Your Continuum

In the Trinity Continuum, everything is true. If you want it to be.

This Person Does Not Exist

AI creating often-believable composite photos. Thankfully prone to glitches like mismatched eye reflections and misaligned teeth, as well as background errors including other people in the source images... but for how long?

And big enough that you could save them and shrink them down for really anonymous NPC visual references.

Thanks to Tim Knight for the link!

(Edit: Ironically enough, this post has attracted spambots.)

I (heart) gaming

IIRC, the first Propulsion 24-hour gaming marathon was fifteen years ago today.

(I ran a TWH special. The one where they save a fellow student from a fertility sacrifice in the style of The Wicker Man with a bit less singing.)

Opportunity

Trinity Continuum: Aeon headcanon: By 2123, Opportunity Rover has pride of place in the first museum on Mars.

Ian A. A. Watson adds: Sojourner's there too, for helping astronaut Mark Watney signal to NASA so he could get rescued by the Karigian twins.

And I add: Curiosity is now one of the presenters of a popular science show. Among other things, it sings Happy Birthday to young viewers.

Tolkien Teaser Trailer

The first look at Tolkien, and yes of course it visualises some of his creations in amongst the straight biopic stuff. Since he always denied direct allegory of his war experience with the Rings series, he would probably not be delighted.

And I see what you did there with the gold logo with the O appearing first too.

(I wonder if it will include the time he and C.S. Lewis went to a faculty New Year party as polar bears despite it not being a costume party.)

Howard David Ingham's games PWYW

Howard David Ingham has put the PDFs of his games to Pay What You Want. This includes The Shivering Circle, the light folk horror game written during the We Don’t Go Back project at Room 207 Press and illustrated by Adrian Barber.

Warren Ellis LTD

Warren Ellis has a new blog. (He also has his weekly newsletter, which I have posted from before, especially the lovely “hold on tight” messages at the end.)

From The Dust 17

In which we see what Bonnie angry looks like.

Historical accuracy

I am glad to say that I didn’t have a webpage like Captain Marvel in the 1990s.

Tender is the night

Meanwhile, it seems that Paradox are up to something ARG-ish... a dating app for finding a soulmate, or... a kindred spirit for a late night bite...

(Bonus point for the Hardware clip link in one of the Trust No More articles.)

V5 is here!

My Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition bundle has arrived. I am sure my players will hate the official dice after a roll or two.

Does your gameplay fit your theme?

I was recently reminded of the ZX Spectrum game Ah Diddums, in which you play a teddy bear trying to use building blocks to climb out of the toybox to comfort your baby owner.

You might think from the description that this would have a kid-friendly difficulty level.

You would be wrong.

Taste My Name

I know someone with lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, which means she can taste names. She mentioned this on Twitter a while back, and is now world famous. If you want to know what a name tastes of, she now has a consulting page on Unbound. The answer may put you off naming your baby.

-G+

Hmm. Must rearrange my links column to do something about the huge gap left by the end of G+.

UK RPG writing for Comic Relief

Introductory RPG sets and new games and adventures for more experienced GMs on RPGnow, all profits going to Comic Relief.

A hidden identity game about finding Skrulls

News from io9 Gaming Shelf includes Captain Marvel: Secret Skrulls, a hidden identity game. I always like it when a game style gets matched well to a subject like this.

Not coming to a gaming table near you any time soon

Dungeons & Dragons

Attorneys At Law

A Salubri Meets A Tremere

Hopefully coming soon to an Actual Play thread near you, the From The Dust comic strip “A Salubri Meets A Tremere”.

It doesn’t go the way you might expect. It certainly didn’t go the way I expected.

Purl, from Pixar SparkShorts

A new initiative from Pixar, SparkShorts begins with Purl, about not fitting it in at an industry dominated by guys being guys.

Super Bowl trailers

Collected here, including Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel.

(I am delighted that the montage of heroes grimly preparing for action under a gloomy sky includes Rocket Raccoon, and they don’t make anything of it.)

I also suspect the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark teasers will traumatise a generation. I believe the trailer for Us was linked rather than shown?

From The Dust 16

... will be titled Three Confessions.

Groundhog Day!

To celebrate, consider a previous article. Or watch something like... I dunno, the new series Russian Doll.

Into the Bowieverse

Duncan Jones suggests why make a David Bowie biopic when you could make the animated adventures of Ziggy Stardust? And suggests Neil Gaiman write it and Peter Ramsey direct it.

The Warriors

40 years ago today, The Warriors come out to play. Can you dig it?

Late 70s New York was a pre-gentrification post-apocalypse mess, but even there gangs like the Baseball Furies were a slight exaggeration. But only in their dedication to shtick, judging by this map of gang names and turf from 1974. (Did the Pure Hell and Pure Hells share a common foundation?)

Jeremy Hardy

Jeremy Hardy, a tribute from Mark Steel.

Virtual LARP

The first official Cyberpunk 2020 LARP, from the makers of The Night In Question, includes online-only tickets, and the Net part of the game will affect events in the meatspace game happening in Texas.

Frankencrime!

Frankenstein, a CBS pilot about a detective whose quirk is... he was brought back from the dead by Frankenstein.

And just days after the DARK UNIVERSE shuttering.

February!

We have achieved it not being January any more!