RPGaDAY 2024

RPGaDAY 2024 is coming in August!

Swans, White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity

Quiet evening in listening to Swans as recommended back in the first edition Storytellers Handbook for Vampire: The Masquerade, as a sort of prep for Last Dance.

Star Trek Adventures

Started Star Trek Adventures with the long term TTRPG group (after last playing late 2017, I believe) and I still think there’s at least one too many ways to boost rolls. Starfleet officers being really competent is cool and apt but I wish it could be done with fewer modifiers. Does the second edition streamline this?

(Using Commander Melnyk from the 2024 challenge, with one change in Value replacing “Protective” with “Never do something you know is wrong” as it was a bit overlappy with “Stand by your people”.)

A Quiet Place Day One

A Quiet Place Day One is worth seeing in cinemas for some widescreen big moments, some emotional little ones, and being reminded of how much noise a cinema full of people trying to be quiet will make.

Content note that it inevitably draws from September 11th. (But probably more from SF movies drawing from September 11th.)

Lupita Nyong’o should get all the genre film awards and should really be up for another Oscar but, y’know, genre film.

I had to get a pizza afterwards.

Trailers included a thriller at a huge kid-friendly female pop star’s tour and a horror at a huge kid-friendly female pop star’s tour... hmm.

Have now gone a week without a game session. Boo.

Today is my birthday - give me entertainments!

Today is my birthday - give me entertainments! on RPGnet.

Batman: Caped Crusader trailer

Batman: Caped Crusader teaser trailer. Happy birthday to me!

Birthday 2024

I feel like I should have a good Today Is My Birthday prompt request this year.

Maybe in-universe entertainments?

Our Brilliant Ruin

Our Brilliant Ruin corebook PDF is now available free. Having funded physical copies, with assorted supplements on the ay and plans for the likes of audio plays.

Running the norm

It would be nice to get someone else to run a regular “big modern city” Vampire game at the local TTRPG society so I’d feel more free to run one in the Roaring 20s or the French Revolution or the mess of modern Russia or...

Currently running Last Dance as a chill hangout movie with some vampire-related drama, and I can tweak the settings of standard games a bit by upping this clan or that faction, but it would be fun to go with something other than a Camarilla city with a distant Ventrue Prince and the like as well as major changes in the night-to-night setting.

Though never for all that long, as I do like the juxtaposition of the mundane and the monstrous.

Nosferatu teaser trailer

A merry Christmas to me.

Don't go wandering off

Still not sure about playing the first officer or the science person in Star Trek Adventures next. The person who stops the captain wandering off and getting in trouble, or the person who does the most wandering off and getting in trouble?

Vampire Antediluvians as Doctor Who monsters

Now that Sutekh has returned to Doctor Who after forty-nine years and that’s longer that the entire history of Vampire: The Masquerade, which other clan founders could get stomped by some nerd in a box?

Marched for Pride, saw a couple people from GEAS.

Free RPG Day 2024

Free RPG Day 2024. Angry Robot in Leith taking part.

We're going on an adventure!

Yes, The Sister Boniface Mysteries, Mark Heap would have been an obvious but solid choice for the Doctor.

Summer

It is the summer solstice. I am having ice cream. I am also putting on another layer.

Session Zero, Part One

A sketch of the setting, some partially made character sheets and a new player being cool with not playing one of his character ideas who might never meet the others. Taking the win!

Nocturne update

Decided to run a summer Vampire: The Masquerade game on Saturday, starting tomorrow, now have a folder of fifty NPC pictures (admittedly quite a few recycled) so while I haven’t really nailed down what the game’s about that should do for the first couple of sessions.

KiwiRPG Week 2024

KiwiRPG Week 2024 starts this weekend!

Summer game update

oh no there’s only three

Update update: I appear to have five players, all I believe new to me and all but one I believe new to the game.

Summer game

Probably Vampire. Could do Buffy, or Star Wars, or...

But less than three months and a quick deadline, might as well recycle.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne

Vampire: The Masquerade is a storytelling game of personal horror, playing as people drawn into a society of monsters hunting in the shadows of a world that looks like our own. Knowledge of the system and setting are not required, the system is straightforward and the setting is full of mysteries.

Many vampires hunt around cities’ nightlife, so much so that they back some clubs themselves. And what do they do when their hunting is threatened?

Yes that’s deliberately vague so I can run one of several options.

Curseborne

Curseborne Ashcan launched as of Onyx Path Con.

The Curseborne panel mentioned Mike Flanagan’s Fall Of The House of Usher, Concreate Blonde’s Bloodletting and Unsolved Mysteries when I asked for inspirational media suggestions.

They note that you can rebel against horrible families or lean in. (My takeaway from the Actual Play premiere was that two of the five PCs are annoying people and one is a monster without their monstrous powers. Happy to see this is not a requirement.)

Onyx Path Virtual Con 2024

Tonight at 5pm EST. Curseborne is real!

Alan Moore knows the score

It is 2008 and there is a trailer for a motion comic of Watchmen emphasising its accuracy.

It is 2009 and there is a trailer for a live-action film of Watchmen emphasising its accuracy.

It is 2024 and there is a trailer for an animated film of Watchmen emphasising its accuracy.

The Fringe 2024

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe brochure out and the results you've all been waiting for:

Macbeth 5, Hamlet 2.

(Also a Hamlet at the Proper Festival, but that doesn’t count towards the score.)

Also, Call of Cthulhu AP (sold out, extra tickets pending) and seven other RPG shows I could find easily, as well as a murder mystery party and an interactive musical called NPC. Just one Werewolf game I can find.

Buffy Revamped is back too, a version of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James (dunno if it’s the same people as Casting The Runes last year)...

Kyle Marquis's BLADE

Reacting to the Blade director news, Night Road and Book Of Hungry Names writer Kyle Marquis:

Any mid urban fantasy author could bang out a decent script for this in a weekend. You even have Tomb of Dracula for the storyboard. The entire Hollywood production system has fallen apart.

You can get Jason Carl, the Matt Mercer of fangy bitey stuff, and have him do a four-hour 1-on-1 actual play with the Hunter: The Reckoning rules, you trim it a little, and you'll have a great script.

Tight 90, no origin scene, just Blade solving a vampire mystery. Opening fight, vampire boardroom for plot-backfill, Blade finds a clue, cool set with a fight, back to the vampire boardroom, next location's a chase, talky well-shot scene (romance?), kidnapping/explosion/twist, final fight. Done.

I am available to direct BLADE

As Reactor puts it:

“IT’S A DUDE KILLING VAMPIRES WITH A SWORD WHAT IS SO DIFFICULT HERE???”

RPGnet's future

RPGnet’s new owner might be an issue. He claims he won’t but we’ll see. If somewhere new has to start, I’ll be there.

The War Of The Rohirrim

First look

In ancient days, only the King of Rohan was allowed to have a nose.

Helm Hammerhand and his noseless family

Welp.

Branch Riders

Branch Riders, from the Bodhana Group and friends at Onyx Path, a game of connected universes trying to work together, for players age 8 and up with guides for parents, teachers and others using roleplaying.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle bigger trailer

Official Showcase Reveal which seems to show in-engine footage but the big narrative chunk is not gameplay.

(I hope Tony Todd turns out to be a good guy in the end.)

Setlist adventure hooks

Not gonna try an adventures from song titles for all forty-five tracks from the Eras tour, but could probably do eleven tracks from the albums represented.

I could do the nine song Paramore support set, but have done quite a few of those already.

Eras

Great show, apart from the stadium venue. Not sure how people who do live sport cope.

The Support Act

How would your PCs cope with opening for a bigger star?

GEAS summer games 2024

I can. Should I?

The generational culture thing of your setting

Listening to the bass line from Taylor Swift performing the Eras Tour four miles away. What is the biggest culture thing present in your setting?

Elections and all. How do you play that? It is a game for some...

D-Day

On this day eighty years ago, D-Day, the beginning of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Star Wars: The Acolyte

Star Wars: The Acolyte

As soon as I saw her reaction I thought...

V5: City Of Angels 1.18

How did tonight’s Vampire: The Masquerade session go for my character?

“If you wanna cut my head off, now’s good.”

TTRPGs for Palestine

TTRPGs for Palestine bundle at itch, 643 PDFs for $10 to Medical Aid For Palestinians. Top billed game Wanderhome is normally $25 by itself.

Godzilla: King Of The Contractors

Some days you wake up with a stupid idea and you have to get it on paper.

Godzilla punching the top off a building,
but a sign shows it's scheduled for demolition today
and he's wearing a hard hat and hi-vis.

Godzilla in hard hat and hi-vis sitting and having a sandwich.

My next Marvel multiverse

Taking part in a Marvel comics alternative universe draft for the first time in years -

(Currently juggling three ideas, one which already gets a mild tweak. (And tempted to do WWII Resistance Supers Kicking Nazis In The Face as a side project.))

I went with the Spidey spin... Spider-Woman and the Web.

And now I'd be tempted to do it as a game.

"Alright, let's do this one last time."

"The squad were going to blow off the science field trip, but since Flash had dumped Kelly last week she didn't want to go anywhere with him, and my lab partner Peter was really keen on the whole thing so we went. And then Flash shows up to try to make a point to her. She's not having any of it, Peter steps in so he shoves him out of the way, I step up to tell him to back off - and then I feel this sting on my hand. This spider just dropped off the supercollider thing and bit me."

"I wake up in hospital the next day, and I feel - actually, I feel great. Like I could jump up to the cheer pyramid from a standing start. Then a car backfires outside and I jump up and stick to the ceiling."

"Peter figures out that I now have spider-powers, and says 'hey, you could go fight crime like the Invaders', and sure, that sounds kind of fun. Until he gets shot by a bank robber while I'm chasing after his accomplices."

"It stopped being fun. It became a serious thing. I went into criminology in college, did gymnastics instead of cheer... still ended up with an archenemy in one of the sororities... I think half the campus kind of knows but nobody asks me about it."

"And now I've been doing this long enough that I have a team. Which feels like this great responsibility."

"My name is Liz Allan, but the Bugle insists on calling me the spectacular Spider-Woman."

(OOC: Liz Allan was an early member of the Spider-Man supporting cast, starting as an unnamed extra in Spider-Man's origin story, so she just missed out on going to that fateful science exhibit and ending up as Spider-Woman. Partially because Gwen and (in the first What If...? story I ever read) Betty have all gotten the bite...)

Spider-Girl (Peter's daughter) as the baseline for a close costume.
Marketing will want something more distinctive but we'll workshop it later.

Track Dogs

Cymera Sunday and I got a chance to playtest Track Dogs, a PBTA game of tramp steamer style crews on a train over a future Earth dominated by great forests with weird technomagical stuff in the depths. (This example: finding a particularly large flying/burrowing shark.) The main variation from most PBTA games is a sheet for the train, and simple resource tracking (one fuel per zone of a trip, one supply per crew member per trip) for journeys.

Cymera Quiz tabletop games round

My tabletop games round at the Cymera quiz got a collective “ahh” of trivia-learning interest for one answer and not the biggest “boo!” of the night. One out of two ain’t bad.

1. Name the Discworld boardgame that gave its title to the 34th novel in the series?

2. Which of these book series was based on a roleplaying game before having a roleplaying game published afterwards? The Expanse, The Laundry, Rivers Of London, The Wheel Of Time?

3. A version of Genevieve Dieudonne, hero of Kim Newman’s Anna Dracula, first appeared in the pseudonymously published novel Drachenfels, based on which wargame setting?

4. Betrayal, Imperium and Spice Harvest are the subtitles of board games and expansions based on which novel series and its adaptations?

5. The Fifth Season roleplaying game is based on which trilogy of novels?

6. Name the alternative history board game based on the art of Jakub Różalski?

7. Ghouls Of The Miskatonic is the first novel based on which board game, itself based on an existing fictional setting?

8. Dragonlance was the first book series based on which roleplaying game?

9. Which science fiction author developed his historical wargame rules Little Wars after joining Jerome K. Jerome in shooting toy cannons at toy soldiers?