Author Archives: Rick Neal

Let’s See What Happens, Part Three: Sandboxes

By | | What's he playing?
5 Comments

So far in this series, I’ve given an overview of how I develop storylines out of a campaign, and I’ve talked about the Secrets Deck. Now, it’s time to discuss Sandboxes.

Sandbox is a term we use in games to indicate that the players can pretty much go anywhere and do anything they like – they set the agenda, they choose the direction, and they go. This is a little bit ingenuous, though; they may get to go anywhere, but it’s anywhere on a list of places that exist in the game world. They can do anything they like, but in-game situations and out-of-game rules constrain those actions to a degree. Sandboxes aren’t completely player-driven, much as we may like to think they are. They’re a menu of options that the players can choose from.

That said, it’s important to have a wide range of options available if you don’t already have an idea for where the campaign is going. This will allow a broad spectrum of experiences for the players to choose from, and let you experiment with different tones, moods, themes, and techniques to find what works for the players ((I’ll talk about this in much more depth when we get to the Watch Their Eyes post.)), and what works for you. There’s an added advantage (to my mind) of having a wide array of things in your Sandbox – it makes the world feel bigger than the characters, and more alive.

So, how do you build a Sandbox game?

The Nature of the Sandbox

Two games that I’ve run that have had great success with Sandbox-style play are The Armitage Files and my Fearful Symmetries DFRPG campaign. The type of Sandbox in each campaign is structured differently, and you need to decide up front which kind of structure you’re going to use. In The Armitage Files, the Sandbox consists of a set of documents liberally sprinkled with references to people, items, events, and places that are not explained, but sound mysterious and intriguing. In Fearful Symmetries ((And any DFRPG game that goes through the setting-building section of the game.)), the Sandbox consists of a list of locations, threats, people, and themes.

Really, the type you choose is going to depend on – and determine – what type of campaign you’re playing. The default assumption in Cthulhu-based games is that the PCs are investigators seeking out mysteries, so it makes sense for the Sandbox to be constructed of rumours, clues, and hints. In DFRPG games, the default assumption is that the game takes place in a given city ((Though this is not necessary, and is addressed in the setting construction chapter.)) that the characters know fairly well, so it makes sense for the Sandbox to be constructed from people, places, and groups in that city.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course. In fact, they can’t really be exclusive. You need some concrete things in a informational Sandbox to give the characters something to grab hold of in order to kick off an adventure. And you need informational things in a geographical Sandbox to let the characters know where the cool stuff is happening. But the balance between the two is important to consider.

Let’s take a look at a video game example to illustrate one end of the spectrum. Oblivion is very much a Sandbox game, with a strong geographic ((Most CRPGS work on a geographic slate. It’s certainly easiest to conceptualize in that medium, and allows the programmers to scale the difficulty of the opposition by geographic area.)) focus. Yeah, you get information to follow the main story along, but you also spend a fair bit of time just wandering around the countryside, stumbling across random dungeons ((Seriously, what’s with all the dungeons littering the countryside? Why does every little cleft in the rock open into a vast underground network of caves filled with monsters? Shouldn’t someone be doing something about that?)), and cleaning them out.

The Armitage Files highlights the opposite end. Aside from the assumption that the game is set in Arkham, Massachusetts, there is very little concrete or geographical structure to the Sandbox. The occasional reference to a specific place – Kingsport, Zurich – is still just an informational cue for the game. Most of the clues could lead the characters anywhere.

Most campaigns deal with going somewhere and doing something. If  your Sandbox is primarily geographic, then characters will be going somewhere to see what’s there. They will look at the map ((Or whatever equivalent you have in the game.)), and say, “We go to Bitter Creek. What do we find there?”

If it’s primarily informational, then characters will be going somewhere to do something specific. They will look at their information and say, “We head to Bitter Creek to find the missing prospectors.”

In either case, it could wind up with the same adventure – searching for missing prospectors – but the hook in is different.

Determining how much of the Sandbox is informational versus geographic will shape the ways the players interface with the game fiction, and say certain things about the campaign. So devote some thought to where you want to set that slider.

Putting in the Toys

When you have decided on the nature of Sandbox, you need to fill it. There are a couple of ways to do this:

  • Solo. This is the traditional way to design a campaign. You sit down with your blank Sandbox, and think up all the stuff that goes in it. Pros: You get to put in exactly what you want, the players don’t know any of the secrets. Cons: You are limited by your own creativity, you have to do all the work.
  • Collaboratively. This is the default in DFRPG. You and the players sit down and populate the Sandbox together. Pros: Less work for you, you get the advantage of everyone else’s creativity, players get invested in the game. Cons: You don’t have complete control of what goes in, the players know secrets, requires the players to agree to participate.

I have to say, I’ve become a huge fan of collaborative setting building, mainly because it gets the players excited about the world and it puts in things that I never would have considered ((Baba Yaga in the sewers of Dublin, for example.)). That said, it does require that the players be good about separating player and character knowledge.

Whichever way you do it, it is vitally important not to do too much detail work ((That way lies madness. No, really. Madness.)). You never know what is going to be important at this point, so you may wind up wasting hours – days, weeks – fleshing out things that never get touched in play ((I’ll talk about this more when I get to the Discard Liberally post.)). Not only will this frustrate you, spending the time will delay the start of the game. And if you’ve taken the collaborative approach, every day you spend tweaking the things the players helped you come up with, their attention and enthusiasm will wane just a little bit more.

So, go high-level. Add a city to the Sandbox? Write two or three sentences about what the city is and what it means to the game. If you’re using a Secrets Deck, make sure you come up with at least one secret for the thing. For example:

Belys is a prosperous city-state ruled by a collection of genasi noble houses. It evokes the Thousand and One Nights Baghdad feel crossed with Renaissance Venice, with wondrous magical devices for sale and convoluted politics and scheming behind the scenes. This is the foreign city that becomes the characters’ home base in the Paragon Tier.

Secret: The mystic power of Belys is based on an arcane machine that imprisons a legion of djinn and efreet, harnessing their energy for the use of the noble houses.

That’s more than enough to go on with. Now I know enough about Belys to seed some hints in the rest of the game, and to improvise if the players suddenly decide that they really need to go there now! 

If you’re putting lots of elements in your Sandbox – and that’s really kinda the point, after all – coming up with just this much for everything is going to be more than enough work. I recommend tossing in a few evocative references with nothing attached to them for developing later – the ruined tower of Asterys, Kraken Bay, the Rookery, whatever sounds cool and fits in the campaign. That way, if you have a good idea after the game starts, you have something to attach it to.

The nature of your Sandbox – it’s place on the geographic-informational continuum I made up in the topic above – will determine what sorts of elements you put in it. If the structure is primarily geographic, the elements are mainly going to be places, with some people and rumours thrown in. If it’s primarily informational, then you’re going to have a lot of clues, rumours, hints, and people with information, with a few places and items thrown in. Mix and match as required for your vision of the campaign.

Showing the Sandbox to the Players

Once the Sandbox has toys in it, you have to show it to the players. How you do that is going to depend on what sort of Sandbox it is, and the forms the toys take. If the game is primarily geographic, you may want to hand them a map with the various locations labeled on it. If it’s informational, you might, for example, hand them a mysterious document with a number of unexplained but intriguing references.

If you’ve done setting creation collaboratively, the players will already know a fair bit about the Sandbox. In these cases, I often just type up and flesh out the notes we came up with at the setting creation session and distribute that to the players ((Less any secrets I’ve thought up in the meantime. I mean, the players need some surprises, right?)) as the setting bible. It’s important at that point to have a discussion with the players about segregating player knowledge from character knowledge, but so far I’ve found with my players that their involvement has made the setting cool enough to them that they will happily ignore anything their characters shouldn’t know so as to have the fun of finding it out in play.

The point is, of course, to let the players see what options they have. You don’t have to give them a look at all the elements in the Sandbox, but they do need to see where a few things are, and get an idea of the scope and nature of the setting so that they can start making decisions. I mean, yeah, you can plop them down in the middle of nowhere with no map and say, “Where do you go from here?” But that initial decision, being pretty much totally random, is meaningless to the players, and to the characters ((Not to mention that it undermines the notion that they have free choice in the campaign, because they can’t see that their choice makes any difference.)). You need to give them some context and structure to complete the buy-in and make the game matter. You need to give them some sort of map, even if it’s just a blank sheet with a dot that says You Are Here, two dots marked Sweetwater Gulch and New Zion, and a line connecting the three points marked Road. Now they’ve got real, meaningful options.

Setting the Agenda in Play

Okay, so you’ve got your Sandbox all set up, and you’ve shown it to the players. What next?

Now, you have to start structuring the actual adventures. In a broad range of choices, it’s easy for the characters to become paralyzed with indecision about what to do next, so you have to point them subtly ((And sometimes not-so-subtly.)) towards the adventure. The best way to do this at the beginning is to constrain their choices.

Yeah, that sounds like a bit of hypocrisy after the whole bit about building in choices and making sure the choices are meaningful, but hear me out. Traditionally, RPG adventures initially place the characters in a reactive role: something happens, so the players have to respond. A stranger in a bar needs help, so he asks the PCs to go into the dungeon. A socialite is murdered, so the PCs have to find the killer. The supervillain is robbing a bank, so the PCs have to stop her.

It can take some training before players will actively set their own agendas and seek out adventures. They need to see that they have the power -  the agency – to set the agenda, and you may need to lead them to that realization gradually. So, start small, dropping pointed opportunities rather than outright adventure hooks: instead of the bartender telling them that some punks have stolen the bar sign and the PCs have to get it back, just have the whole bar be surly and upset, and let the characters figure out why that is and decide for themselves what to do about it. It’s a small step, but it will eventually lead to PCs telling you what they want to do in the next adventure ((While this may feel odd to you as a GM at first, embrace it. It lets you focus your creativity on what happens in the adventure, rather than on what the adventure is. Relax and let them boss you around.)).

Even if your characters are used to setting their own agenda in games, you still want the choices to be a little limited at the beginning, just to help them get into playing their characters and interfacing properly with the campaign and setting. Leave the big choices for later in the game.

Now, once the players start really taking the lead in setting the agenda, you will sometimes find they have a tendency to deliberately try to surprise you, or put one over on you, or fake you out. This is an artifact of the adversarial-GM fiction that I’ve talked about before – the players “know” the GM is out to get them, so they have to trick the GM in order to win, whatever winning means. How do you deal with that?

Easy. Ask them not to. Tell them that, while you’re totally cool with them setting the agenda, you need a little prep time to make sure you have interesting things for them to do. If you talk to them about it reasonably, and play fair with them ((This is, of course, an important point. Don’t screw them when they do what you ask them to.)), they will be more than willing to be honest and upfront with their plans, so you can make plans of your own.

Which brings me to…

Being Prepared

The beauty of the way Sandbox games are structured is that you don’t have to build in a lot of depth before you need it. You don’t have to have thirty fully prepared scenarios ready to go at a moment’s notice, just one. As long as it’s the right one. That’s no more than you need to prepare if you’re running a more traditional campaign, where you as GM set the agenda and dictate the adventures, but it has the added bonus of being something you know the players and characters are interested in because they chose it. They have choice, you get to flesh out that choice to make it cool, then they get to play through it and make the whole thing cooler.

Now, making sure you have the right adventure ready is very much a matter of communication with the players. For the first adventure, I talked about constraining the choices available to the characters, and I gave a couple of reasons. There are other reasons, having to do with preparation: if you limit their choices, you need to prepare less for that first adventure. I recommend building just one adventure, but have a couple of different ways into it. Yeah, this is a bit of a cheat ((I don’t like inflexible rules in anything, including running games. I will use any tool I need to in order to build a play experience the players enjoy, even if it means I have to lie, trick them, and cheat behind the scenes. I will do what I need to do to bring the cool.)), but it gets you playing and pulls the characters into the game. Then, at the end of that adventure, ask them what they want to do next.

Couple of important points about that:

  • Ask them at the END of the adventure. This gives you time to prep the next adventure based on what they want to do.
  • Force them to a decision. Don’t bully, but make them choose something specific so you have a starting point for your prep work.
  • Get them to commit. If you’ve put in a month’s work on an adventure that they’ve said they want, and they show up at the session, and say they’ve changed their minds, I think it’s allowable to strike them in the head with something heavy ((Disclaimer: Maybe I don’t really think this. But when it happens, I want to.)). Make it clear that their choice is binding, and if they come up with a better idea at the start of the session, defer it for a later adventure.
  • Make sure you accept their decision. Point out options, offer opinions, but don’t try and make them choose something they don’t want. Once they’ve chosen, don’t try and weasel the adventure around to something else. Don’t use the adventure to punish them for not going with your idea. Basically, don’t be a dick.

When they’ve told you what their plans are for the next step, prepare the adventure based on that. I don’t pretend to know what kind of prep work you need to do for your game – that varies from system to system, and from campaign to campaign, and from GM to GM – but spend that time trying to make the characters glad they chose the option they did. Pour coolness on the idea, throw in some neat twists and surprises ((But, as said before, don’t weasel it around to a different adventure.)), make the opposition interesting and engaging, and do what you need to do to make the adventure rock.

A crucial part of preparing for a Sandbox game is keeping track of what happens so it can inform the rest of the game. In a linear game, this is pretty straightforward, but it’s a little more complicated for Sandbox games. Take notes, and leaf through them when you’re prepping adventures to see if there’s anything interesting that you can call back up to add some continuity. Make sure you don’t lose the name of the NPC that you made up off the top of your head but has now become important. Keep track of any surviving villains and not-quite-extinct plots and conspiracies, and any extinct NPCs or cities or helpful organizations. This becomes invaluable when it comes time to start pulling the threads together for the emergent storyline that the campaign generates.

No matter how much you prepare, though, you’re going to wind up having to wing it from time to time, so make sure that you’re ready for that, too. Keep an encounter or two salted away for when you need to send in the ninjas ((Whatever the ninjas happen to be in your campaign.)), and try and tie these encounters into other aspects of the game. Using a system that is easy to improvise in – GUMSHOE and FATE, for example – means that you can get a lot of mileage out of a single encounter, while systems that aren’t quite as easy to improvise in – D&D, for example – may mean you need to have a couple encounters ready just in case. If nothing else, sending in the ninjas gives you a little bit of breathing room to cope with the unexpected player choice that prompted your little panic attack.

When you do improvise, it’s even more important to take notes to keep things straight. If you haven’t tied the improvised section into the main plot before, take a good postmortem look at the notes, and figure out how it’s related after the fact. It helps build verisimilitude. Not that it has to be tied to the current main plot; sometimes, it can be fun to throw in an alternate storyline to see if the characters ((And players – this can be very confusing for players, so be cautious.)) can figure out that there’s actually two different things going on at once. Or, it can be a hook into a new adventure, showing up a little early.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

That’s about all I have to say about Sandboxes. The next emergent storylines post will show up within the next couple of weeks, and I’ll talk about Watching Their Eyes.

Feints & Gambits: The Boys of the Old Brigade

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
4 Comments

This last session was interesting. We added a new player to the group ((Welcome, Jen!)), and we spent the first part of the evening creating her character.

I wasn’t sure, going in, what the best way to do this was. I had considered holding a separate session just to create her character, inviting some volunteers to fill in the guest-star roles in her novel phase. But when Jen got me her character concepts, I didn’t get to reviewing them for a few days. By the time I did, the next scheduled game session was coming up in less than a week, and I didn’t want her to have to miss a session just because I was slow getting back to her.

So, I told her to come along to the session, we’d get the character done first, and she could join lay that night. It worked very well, though I made a couple of little adjustments to things.

Four of the other players were able to make it. That gave us a nice group for brainstorming Aspects and the other co-operative bits of character creation. I wanted to link her character in with the broadest group possible, so I was less random with the guest-star phases of the novels than I usually am, making sure that each of the other players had a connection with the new one.

The rest of character creation went pretty quickly, because Jen had already roughed out her powers and skills. We needed to have a discussion about the potential hazards of Cassandra’s Tears ((Generally, I hate powers like this. Predictive powers tend to offload a bunch of character responsibility on to the GM, and that’s not fair. Cassandra’s Tears has the additional problem of no one believing prediction, including the other characters. This makes for a great plot device in a book, but is a pain in the ass for an RPG. The rules for Cassandra’s Tears help bypass that, using declarations, but it’s still a more… challenging power than a lot of the others.)), but Jen had established in the various phases of character creation that Safire, her visionary artist, had learned not to try and tell people about her visions, but instead just try to be on hand in the right place at the right time to prevent the disasters she foresaw ((Think Spider Robinson’s short story Fivesight, from Time Travellers Strictly Cash.))

I ran into another little problem, here. The hook in for this adventure relied on one of the characters who was not able to attend ((One player canceled at the last minute. Sick wife. It happens.)), so I needed to rework how the characters found their way in to the plot. Fortunately, Cassandra’s Tears provided me with an easy way to feed a few clues to Jen’s character – she saw a vision of rebel ghosts marching through the streets of Dublin. This sent her off to find Kate at the Long Room library, and give her a book about Irish soldiers. Kate was already somewhat concerned about the ghosts in Dublin, so this little bit of oddness got her worried. She called Aleister to meet her at the Silver Arm.

Meanwhile, Firinne was buttonholed by Elga, the Winter Warlord. She told Firinne that she was looking for an old fairy stone, wrapped in gold wire, hung on a silver chain. Elga told Firinne that she expected Firinne to tell her if she found it, and that time was running short, though she didn’t explain why. There was the suggestion of reward, and the the implication of a threat, but nothing overtly stated. That sent Firinne off to the Silver Arm to get some help.

Kate had heard legends of the fairy stone ((With an Epic Lore roll, she had heard pretty much everything about the stone.)). According to what she remembered, it was a stone that allowed one to see and interact with ghosts, and vice versa. There was even some rumour about it giving the power to control ghosts, but given the state of ghosts in Dublin after the necromancer’s death curse, she didn’t know if that would have any effect.

Further investigation uncovered rumours that Sean Miller had made some inquiries about such a stone. Miller had split from the IRA after the Good Friday Agreement, and was currently trying to gather the muscle to fulfill his own personal vision of Irish rebellion. They managed to track him to Kilmainham Gaol, which has a reputation for being haunted, but were chased off by ghost snipers on the roof.

Retreating and regrouping, the gang decided to see if they could enlist the help of a different ghost that they had encountered previously: Padraig Pearse. Safire managed to use her ghostly contacts to trace Pearse – right to the gates of Kilmainham Gaol.

And that’s where we left things.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
1 Comment

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

The last Storm Point session was pretty much a wash. We hadn’t played in almost two months, summer scheduling being what it is, and spent most of the evening socializing rather than playing. We even had to stop the combat partway through when we wrapped for the evening.

The group made it through the secret door and into another oddly-shaped room. They entered carefully, mindful of traps, and everything went dark for a second. When the lights came back up, there was a duplicate of each of the characters standing near them. And, of course, the duplicates attacked.

The fight is tough. The monsters that are being used as the duplicates ((I’m not going to say what they are, yet, because the fight is ongoing, and at least three of my players read my blog.)) are well-chosen, and quite effective, even when I forget one of the powers. The mechanics for seeing if players attack their intended target or an ally have caused a couple of bad moments for the group ((And if they didn’t know that this adventure was The Tomb of Horrors, they would have been calling me out for such a dick move. Because they know what the adventure is, they take the boning almost in good humour.)), but I’ve been a little less stringent with that than I might, because it is a nasty thing to do to the players.

But at the end of the evening, we’d only got through three rounds of combat, and none of the enemy had been dropped, yet. I took a picture of the battlemap, and we called it a night.

I’m hoping for one more session before my Ireland trip, which should finish this encounter. After that, I expect one or two more sessions to wrap up the adventure. Then it’s on to the city-state of Belys.

From the Armitage Files: Emigrant, Montana

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
Leave a comment

Note: I’m really falling behind on my posts. Expect the next few to be somewhat shorter than usual until I catch up, then a big, long one for the Sandboxes post.

**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

After dealing with Carsdale and the SOSI last session, the investigators decided to follow up the connection to the Montana bank robbers in the document. Solis had already done some investigation via telegram, locating three fortune tellers that may be connected with the Fuschack-Donlands gang – one in Billings, one in Bozeman, and one in Emigrant. Seeing as Emigrant was mentioned directly in the last document, they decided to go there, first.

We played a bit with the journey to Emigrant – talking about the money it took to rent a plane to fly into Montana, then the long truck ride to Emigrant, through the sterile, denuded landscape of the state in 1936. I talked about the the barren fields, the heaps of cow carcasses every so often, and the run-down, abandoned-looking farms ((It’s nice when the actual state of the world can be used to enhance the feeling of horror in a game. Well, maybe not nice, but interesting and useful.)), giving the characters the feel that they had very much left behind their familiar stomping grounds.

The town of Emigrant was, I decided very much a remnant of the previous century, looking more like an old west town than what the characters were used to back east. There was a bar and a boarding house and a couple of churches, some houses, and a few businesses, along with a rail spur.

The investigators got rooms at the boarding house, ran into a close-lipped bartender ((He knows which side of the bread the butter’s on. If he talks to outsiders about locals, the locals will stop coming in.)), and went for a walk around town after dark ((Which allowed them to meet the sheriff, who escorted them back to their lodgings. Strangers wandering the street after dark are not wanted in this little town.)). Finally, they plied the gossipy landlady at the boarding house, and found out about the fortune teller, who had a small shop across town.

That night, Moon used the book they took from Carsdale to try and block the dreams of water and monsters from Roxy’s mind. He also suffered another time-slip, with the night seeming to last forever. Eventually, he went to Solis’s room to see if he could wake him. He did, and when Solis opened the door, he saw not Moon, but the yeti-thing that Moon had described to him previously ((When Moon was in Rot Tal, Jahraus showed him that that’s the way people look from outside the normal three dimensions.)) Cue the gunshots, wounding, and Stability checks.

I believe that’s also when the fifth set of documents turned up.

So, next morning, the trio went out to talk to the fortune teller. She denied any connection with Fuschack, but suggested that the nearby ghost town of Aldridge might be a good place for such a gang to hide out. She also told Moon’s fortune, which left him strangely comforted, it seems, despite her rather unsettling pronouncements.

That’s where we left things for the evening. I believe the plan is to go check out Aldridge next, but I may be misremembering. Oh, well. I’ll find out soon enough.

 

 

New Centurions, Issue #12: King and Castle

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
4 Comments

We picked up our game where we left off last time, searching the underground installation in Provence for some clue as to the whereabouts of Dr. Methuselah, and the source of the ancient robots. We quickly found another room with robots in it: some more pawns, another knight, and a huge rook.

The robots activated and attacked when we tried to open the door on the far side of the room, and proceeded to try and take us apart. Widowmaker used her forcefield to keep the rook off us as we took apart the other robots, but then the door opened and the King came floating out.

Now, I’d been doing a little bit of gloating, I must confess, about how S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was immune to the mind control ((Being a robot, and all.)) of the illithids during the invasion storyline, so I really should have seen what was coming. This King robot, which commanded the other robots, attacked me in my weak spot – my Mind – and took poor S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. over. I threw off the robot mind control for a panel, using my hero die, but completely flubbed my intended attack on the King, and resigned myself to going back under his command next panel.

Fortunately, the others noticed that the King had a glowing crystal attached to the back of his head, and… forcefully removed it. All of a sudden, he stopped fighting us, told the remaining robots ((Including the rook. The rook was nasty.)) to stand down, and released me from his control. Then he took off his mask, revealing a cadaverous human face behind it.

Turns out that this was the creator of the robots, himself essentially a cyborg with dead flesh. He had built his army of chessmen to aid the war effort against Germany, but something had gone wrong during his construction of the bishops, and he didn’t remember anything after that. What he did remember was how his wife had died, and he had tried to convert her to a cyborg like himself, but wound up with a Queen that had no more will and mind than his other creations.

With his help, we figured out that Dr. Methuselah had been retrieved from this installation by a group of agents that included at least one super-powered individual who could teleport and wasn’t Nightshade. They seemed to be able to control the King through that glowing crystal and, through him, the rest of the robots. As they left, the teleporter said something about the Mountain being grateful for his help ((This, of course, got my conspiracy theory lobes spinning into speculation about the Assassins, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and Templars, and so on. Don’t know if any of that will turn out to be applicable, but that’s where my brain went.)), and took off with the still-immobile Dr. Methuselah.

Checking the dates of things, we found that the shut down of the King’s facility occurred at about the same time as the Centurions had vanished, and super-heroes had generally disappeared all those decades ago. And that the reactivation of him and his army coincided with our discovery of the Century Club HQ in Manhattan. This was our first confirmation that whatever had happened in 1936 ((Is that year right, Clint?)) was world-wide, and not isolated to the United States ((This was corroborated by the fact that the King had sold a few hundred hover-sleds to Russia, and they didn’t see service during WWII, any more than the King’s robots or any of the German advanced inventions that the robots were built to counter.)).

We decided then to go check out the Century Clubhouse in Paris ((Which Clint hadn’t prepared for. But the man’s good; he was able to give us something to investigate, interesting things to find, and some challenges to overcome, all right off the cuff. If I hadn’t known what the subtle signs of GM surprise look like – from having experienced them so often from the inside – I wouldn’t have known he hadn’t set this up in advance. So kudos to Clint!)), to see if there were any clues there as to what had happened. When we located it and found the secret entrance, we discovered that, like we had done in Manhattan, some new heroes had discovered the headquarters and moved in.

Unlike in Manhattan, these heroes all seemed to have been slaughtered in an attack on the clubhouse. The place was torn up, and bodies were strewn about, dressed in super-hero costumes. Any records had been either removed or destroyed. We found a hidden lab that seemed to be untouched, with an isolated computer, showing that someone had been investigating genetic origins of super powers, which we decided would be best removed and examined at our leisure.

That’s about where we left the game. We’ve got the ID from one of the bodies, and we’re looking at following up on that next game, then we’re looking at investigating some of the other Century Clubs in various cities, to see if we can uncover more of the mystery of what happened to all the heroes just before WWII.

GenCon 2011 – Home

By | | What's he playing?
Leave a comment

I’m home. Laundry is laundering, I’ve had a shower in my own shower, and I’m about to head to sleep in my own bed.

The trip back was uneventful, and we made pretty good time. Border crossing was painless, and the torrential downpour that hit us on the way into Winnipeg stopped long enough for us to get into our respective homes with our precious purchases intact.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello at the Con, and to all the folks who had nice things to say about the blog. And thanks again to Scott Glancy and Jarred Wallace for treating me so well at their booth. Same time next year, gents.

Now, I’m going to bed. Work tomorrow. And the (ir)regular posting schedule will resume in the next couple of days, starting with a New Centurions post, and followed closely by the next emergent storylines post.

Good night, all.

GenCon 2011 – Day Four

By | | What's he playing?
Leave a comment

Back in Rochelle for the night. It’s our traditional stopping point. It means we should get back to Winnipeg around 9:00 tomorrow evening.

Sunday is always a short day for me at the Con, because we like to leave Indy around 2:00 in the afternoon. I took my leave of the booth around noon, to go say goodbye to everyone and then get my bags packed and loaded into the car. There was a little bit of scampering around, logistically speaking ((It involved the delivery of some catnip Cthulhus. Probably best if you don’t ask.)), but we made it onto the road in good time, and hardly even got lost leaving the city.

Normally, we stop for dinner at Bob Evans in Bloomington on the way home, but this year, we didn’t. We had a different goal.

See, some years ago, we found this amazing little restaurant with the best calzone we had ever eaten. Unfortunately, we have since forgotten where it is. Even which town it’s in. And what it’s called. But we have been hoping to find it again.

This year, when we checked in at Rochelle on the way down, we asked the woman working the hotel desk. She suggested Vince’s Pizza, which sounded right to me. Thus, we spent the time down in Indy dreaming of that perfect calzone. And so we skipped dinner at Bob Evans, to make sure we were good and hungry when we got to Vince’s Pizza.

We were good and hungry, partly because I, idiot that I am, left the flyer we had picked up on the way down to Indy, which featured the address, in my bag at the hotel, and I couldn’t remember precisely where the place was. We drove around a bit more than was really funny, and stopped at two gas stations to ask for directions, and finally found it.

It was not the place of the legendary calzone. Instead of the low stucco, porticoed building we remembered, it was a little red-and-white wooden building with a tiny, tiny parking lot.

Still, we decided to go in and give it a try, because Pizza Hut, Little Caesar, and Burger King did not really appeal. Besides, the parking lot was full of people coming in to pick up pizzas, and rushing away. We figured it must be good.

Inside, it was the kind of simple, homey, family restaurant you often find in resort towns: nothing fancy, but clean and friendly. I ordered a calzone, being fixated on the idea of calzone, and Clint ordered the manicotti. We also ordered beer nuggets ((These, it turned out, were deep-fried pieces of pizza dough with marinara sauce for dipping.)), because we figured it would take some time before the calzone and manicotti were ready, and we were hungry.

So, there we sat, staring at this veritable mountain of beer nuggets, and Clint says, under his voice, slightly awed, “She should have warned us.” The pile of golden-fried little ((Note: they were not really that little. This is poetic license. Actually, it’s an outright lie. They were big.)) bits of dough would pretty much have filled a gallon bucket.

We had come nowhere near finishing them – and had started speculating on how good they would or would not be tomorrow – when our meals were brought out, and we realized we were doomed.

Clint has been saying he feels evangelical. The food was a life-changing experience. I no longer care about the half-remembered ((And possibly mythical.)) calzone of yesteryear. This is the one true calzone. I tried a little of the manicotti, and it was also amazing.

I don’t know how, but Clint finished his plate of manicotti. And the meatball. And half his garlic bread. I had no such luck with the calzone, and was able to eat maybe half of it. The other half sits in the fridge in our hotel room, singing softly to my soul ((The beer nuggets are singing backup harmonies.)) as it waits to fulfill its purpose tomorrow.

Vince’s Pizza has become our destination for dinner, both going down and coming back from GenCon. Clint and his family are heading down to Chicago in a few weeks, and he has decided to change their route so that they come through Rochelle for dinner at Vince’s.

It’s that good. And here’s some semi-documentary evidence:

GenCon 2011 – Day Three

By | | What's he playing?
1 Comment

Saturday is always the longest day. Usually the busiest, too. I am tired.

I didn’t get a whole lot of time to wander the hall today; what time I took out of the booth, I spent going over to Games On Demand, hoping for a chance to try Technoir, but I wasn’t able to hit it at a good time to get in a game ((This is most definitely not the fault of the brave souls manning the Games On Demand room; they are doing heroic work, matching people up with games and getting them playing. I should have been trying Thursday and Friday, not leaving it until today. Oh, well. The vagaries of manning the booth.)). There’s one more chance tonight, but I don’t think I’ll make that – the last Games On Demand slot starts at 8:00, and I still haven’t had dinner.

I did manage to find some dice bags – nothing special, but functional – for the dice I bought yesterday. I also grabbed a great shirt from Sigh Co.

The only other purchase I made today was of some music CDs by Water Street Bridge. This morning, the band led a little procession into the exhibitor hall, and one of the band members came by later in the day, and we did a little chatting. Then I got to watch them for a few minutes as they performed in the convention centre and I was heading back to the hotel room. I like their sound, so I bought both their CDs. I look forward to listening to them.

I’ve been reading through The One Ring, and really enjoying it. The system seems simple and fast, but still capable of a substantial amount of variety and depth. The feel of the game really echoes the source material – this set focuses on the area between the Misty Mountains and the Lonely Mountain, the land traveled in The Hobbit – and the characters you can play are mainly from that area, with the addition of Hobbits.

Character creation is a series of choices, starting with choosing which of six cultures you come from, and moving through various other decisions to customize the character – motivation for adventuring, background, special traits, skill selection, etc. At the end of it, you have a character who is very much a part of the world. It looks pretty good.

The dice mechanic is pretty innovative, using 1d12 and a variable number of d6s, each marked with a few special symbols in addition to the numbers ((You get a set of the dice with the game, and they’re quite pretty.)). You always roll the d12, and add a number of d6s equal to the skill rating of your character for whatever you’re doing, total the numbers, and compare to a target number. There are few flavourful little quirks to this mechanic, based on the special die symbols, but it’s all quite straightforward.

Another neat thing I’ve seen is the Fellowship system, which actually gives mechanics for things like keeping each other’s spirits up during dangerous missions. The premise is, unlike in many fantasy games, the group of characters is more than just a random assemblage of adventurers – they all mean something to each other. Again, this is nicely reflective of the source material, and very cleanly implemented.

There are a few other interesting mechanical bits: rules for Hope, Endurance, Fatigue, Shadow, and a few other things, that do a great deal to make the game very different in feel from other fantasy games like D&D. I haven’t finished reading through the system, yet, so I can’t tell you about combat, or what I hear is an interesting travel mechanic. But I’m working on it.

Visually, the books ((There are two of them in the set: The Adventurer’s Book and The Loremaster’s Book. Loremaster is their name for GM.)) are very colourful and attractive. There are two maps included that are also very nice. I’ll probably have a longer post on this subject sometime soon, possibly after a playtest.

That’s it for me, tonight. I’m obviously not going to make it down to Games On Demand in the next ten minutes, so I guess I won’t get a chance to try Technoir this trip. I’m going to go get some food. I’ll leave you with one picture tonight:

GenCon 2011 – Day Two

By | | What's he playing?
Leave a comment

Two days down, two ((Well, one and a half, really, as we leave at noon on Sunday.)) to go. Working the booth can be tiring, and the concrete floors are not friendly to one’s feet. Still having fun, though.

Last night, I had planned to grab a bite to eat in the restaurant in the hotel and read The One Ring. That got a little sidetracked when a surprise GenCon attendee ((He’s here in sort-of secret, but I guess it’s okay to mention that it’s Fred Hicks, as he wasn’t hiding at the Con today.)) tweeted me, and I wound up inviting myself along to dinner with him and Justin Jacobson at the Weber Grill. It was a nice dinner, with good conversation and good food, and I’m really glad they let me crash their dinner. Thanks, guys!

Up early again this morning and down to the exhibitor hall. I swear the walk there gets longer and longer. The day featured a long period when I was alone in the booth, with Jarred out at a seminar, and Scott running a game. That can get kind of hectic, but though the crowds were a little heavier today, and business brisker than yesterday, it wasn’t anything too bad.

This year, Jarred has brought an iPad and software to keep the inventory, act as a cash register, and process credit cards. It’s a big hit with me, and makes running things in the booth a whole lot easier. The only downside is that there’s only one iPad with the software and the card swiper ((From Square. There are lots of booths using it; it generally seems to be a hit.)), but that’s manageable in the small booth.

The big news today is that Margaret Weis Productions has announced a new Marvel superheroes game. Well, actually, it sounds like several Marvel superhero games, centred around events like Civil War, Annihilation, and Age of Apocalypse ((I have to admit, I only know what one of those things is. Shut up! I’m more a DC comics guy!)) – a total of sixteen books in the next year ((I’m not sure if that means in 2012, or between now and next GenCon, but either way, that’s a whole lotta books!)). The idea is to use Cortex Plus, tweaked for the feel of each particular bit of the Marvel universe they’re covering. Given the way they handled The Leverage RPG and The Smallville RPG, I’m really excited about this announcement, and I want all the books right now, please.

I made it over to Fantasy Flight Games today before the line got stupid long and picked up The Miskatonic Horror Expansion for Arkham Horror and Elder Sign, about which I know practically nothing. But Cthulhu and FFG have yet to steer me wrong, so…

The rather short line I had to wait in got even shorter, because they had a few people with iPhone ((I think they were iPhones. Couldn’t swear to it, though.)) set-ups like at the Apple Store to run credit cards. Seeing that, I decided to pay by card, and got out of there in good time.

I also finally found the IPR booth – it was hard to see, honestly – and picked up a copy of Dungeon World and The Shab Al-Hiri Roach. I’ve been waiting to pick up Roach at GenCon to get the cards with it, and got an even better surprise: the version I got comes with a plastic cockroach, as well!

The other thing I picked up was a set of red, black, and white dice for playing Technoir. Now I need to find a suitable dice bag to put them in. Oh, and also try and get over to Games on Demand ((Wherever that is. I need to put some effort into finding out.)) to try and play the game.

Met a couple of nice people today. @DenaghDesign came by and we chatted for a bit about our respective Dresdenified Dublins, which was fun. It was good to meet him face-to-face, instead of just following each other on Twitter. I also got to meet Jenn ((You know, as I think about it, I never did find out if the woman I met was, in fact, Jenn; she was wearing the Jennisodes regalia, and accepted my compliment about the podcast, so I just assume it was her. But then I think back to the whole bit where I mistook Steve Segedy for Jason Morningstar last year by making assumptions, and I wonder. If you’re the woman I met at the Pagan Publishing booth, and you’re not Jenn, please accept my apologies.)) of the Jennisodes podcast. When I told her that I enjoyed her podcasts very much, she gave me a card, and a badge and a panda die, which I thought was very nice of her. So, thank you!

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been following the live tweets from the ENnie awards, and The Dresden Files RPG has, so far, won three ENnies: Silver for Best Production Value, Gold for Best Writing, and Gold for Best Rules. Congratulations, folks! They are well-deserved awards ((Though I admit to some bias.)).

That’s about all I’ve got to say. I’m going to leave you with one picture tonight:

GenCon 2011 – Day One

By | | What's he playing?
Leave a comment

I’m feeling a lot less tired than last night, so this post may be less terse than the last one ((My friend Sandy sent me e-mail to tell me I seemed tired from my last post. She worries about me.)).

According to what I hear, the attendance here is about 35,000, which is about 20% higher than last year. The dealer hall has been moved ((It has, in fact, been moved to the farthest part of the complex from our hotel, which was chosen because of its proximity to the previous dealer hall.)), and seems bigger, so the crowds seem a little thinner. At least, that’s my impression.

Anyway. Here’s a picture of our booth (711) before the hordes descended on us this year.

Things moved pretty quickly once the doors opened at 9:00 for the Very Important Gamers. I heard that Cubicle 7, who are sharing our island, were going to have a limited number of copies of The One Ring, so I ducked around the wall right at 9:00 and bought myself a copy. As you can see, it’s very pretty. I’m going to be reading it tonight.

I missed out on hitting the Fantasy Flight Games booth before the line got stupid long, so I’m going to have to try that tomorrow. I did manage to make it down to Pelgrane Press and speak with Robin Laws and Simon Rogers, both of whom said some nice things. I said some nice things to them, as well; I didn’t buy anything, because I’ve got all their current stuff already or preordered. I also finally got to meet Clark Valentine face-to-face, and that was nice. He came by as I was talking with Cam Banks at Margaret Weiss Productions, gushing about Cortex Plus, and we had a nice, geeky talk. Cam gave me a copy of an intro adventure for the Dragon Brigade game, which looks pretty cool, but was understandably tight-lipped about the big license announcement they’re making tomorrow ((“It’s not Star Wars,” he told me, grinning. Of course it’s not; FFG just announced that they have the license.)). Both Clark and Cam had some nice things to say about this blog, so thanks for that, guys.

I also tracked down Outrider, which company Rob Donoghue had mentioned on his blog, and grabbed their books. They are very nice people, and they’ve got a nice deal on at the con: both their games at $40, instead of $50, along with a nice d6 (the only die you need to play), and .pdf versions of the games. Stop by and check them out.

I didn’t make it down to IPR, mainly because I couldn’t find it. I’ve tracked down where it is, now, so I’m going to make it a point to get there tomorrow. I’d also like to get over to Games on Demand to try out Technoir.

Oh, and if you haven’t heard, Fiasco won the Diana Jones Award this year. It’s a well-deserved victory, though all the contenders were strong games. Congrats to Jason Morningstar and Steve Segedy at Bully Pulpit Games.

That’s about all I’ve got to say for today; I need to go find some food and then do some reading. I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of neat people who came by the booth.