Hey Man, well this is Babylon

With this “little idea,” the game mechanics enforce plot progression. At the beginning of each scene, the GM or Group of Players sets what they feel is a good progression rate (aka “Plot Crawl”) for the plot in this particular scene. This number determines how many successful tests/conflicts/challenges/rolls are necessary before the scene-specific plot is advanced.

Whenever the GM crafts a scene, he should have a purpose for that scene: meet this NPC, learn about the missing children, steal the Ambivalent Chalice of Hagrablogg, learn the lost fifth technique of mastery. When he decides on that scene purpose, he should craft a set of important “plot items” relevant to that purpose. He can do this in advance, of course, to better prepare. For example, if the PCs need to learn about the missing children, he could set the following plot items:

1. There has been a rash of missing children in the town.
2. The children were all males of Vandrikan blood, born in the dead of summer.
3. They are all connected to a midwife named Taegi Lews.
4. They were taken to an old mill in a part of the woods that no one visits anymore.
5. They were kidnapped by Borgel Grouse, who intends to have them possessed by the Night-Children of the Wood.
6. The Night-Children have no intention of being controlled, and will kill Borgel and run free if he completes the ritual.

Now, instead of just having the PCs run loose and free through this old village looking under loose stones and chasing red herrings for hours, he can set a Plot Crawl score for the game. This allows the players some sort of free-form exploration, while still ensuring that the plot doesn’t get snagged by accident. There could be a single number for each plot item, or he could vary it between different items on the list.

For example, let’s say the party has come to this village in the early evening and is tempted into getting a room at the inn for the night. The GM has set the first item’s Plot Crawl at 3. The players negotiate for room prices (1 skill-based challenge) and mingle with the locals to gather some local info (2 separate role-playing challenges). After the third such challenge, the GM inserts the plot in the form of a local mother rushing into the common room looking for her missing son. Plot Item #1 has now been introduced.

Now, the players react to this. Ideally they’d begin to investigate, talking to the woman, calming her, getting more info from the locals, investigating, etc. The GM has set the next plot item at a Crawl of 7, so after seven more challenges and/or conflicts, the next plot item is somehow introduced into the game.

And thus the rest of the plot flows, provided the Players bite the hook and follow suit. This method of plot progression may at first seem forced and a bit “railroad-y” at first look, but in truth it allows a game to progress far more organically. Instead of basing the advancement of the plot on predefined encounters, and waiting for the players to bite the scripted hooks you’ve laid out for them, you can just bring the plot to them, inserting the required elements at the right time in order to ensure the pacing that is right for your games. I imagine this would work very well at convention games, too.

Warning: this post contains spoilers for the show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Read more

I’ve got this gigantic digital drawer-full of little one-off game ideas that I have a feeling I’ll never get around to using. To that extent, I’m kicking off a new category of posts called “Little Ideas” so that maybe someone out there can find them useful to their own games and ideas.

So let’s get this all started with…

Line!

This mechanic encourages players to seek the input of other players during “big moments” in the game. Each player is given an amount of “Line Coins” which they keep in front of them at the game table. During moments of game play in which the player is uncertain about what their character should say or do, they can instead say “Line!” in the fashion of a stage actor who has forgotten his lines. The other players can then choose to submit what they think is the most awesome thing that character could do or say at that moment in the game. The acting player picks the best one, and awards the Coin to the player who submitted it. These coins can then have some special in-game effect, be it geared towards advancement, in-game empowerment, narrative enhancement, or another aspect of player boon.

I just spent a large chunk of the morning backing up long-unused SQL databases and then cleaning them off the web server. Specifically, most of the old Reality Merchants data is now gone, leaving only the RMG blog, photo galleries, and now-defunct GYGO Wiki pages still operational. Most of these I’m just keeping around for nostalgia’s sake, although I do harbor the notion of running another LARP event or three under the Reality Merchants banner sometime in the future.

While backing up the data from various private wikis I’d been using to work on my own game design, I ran across the prototypes of both the “BMF” core LARP rules system and the 2nd Edition Streetwise LARP rules from which the former were derived. These triggered long-dormant chunks of memory regarding plans and design goals, and I already can see ways to kickstart them back onto their journey to exist and become tangible things. It’s time to convert them all into Google Docs. Perhaps a near-future project will involve me finally getting the Streetwise LARP into print, possibly even for free…

Deleting all this data and cleaning up my server has worked as a sort of “sounding of the death knell” for a prior chapter of my life. It’s one more vestigial limb of my East Coast existence that I’ve now mostly managed to amputate. The Reality Merchants had some good times, and we met some amazing people through our events – hell, for a while, I was actually engaged to a woman I met in a, ahem, fairly “controversial” event that we organized. From all my time in Atlanta, I can honestly say that I have more wild and crazy memories from the Reality Merchants crew than from any other source or venue, however great they may have been.

My life has been forever marked by those people, and I plan on keeping those galleries online and operational for as long as I possibly can.

Next in the other of business: setting up a cart & commerce system on this site. Why? For pre-orders, silly…

I spent the entirety of last night re-writing the core Palladium Fantasy RPG 1st Edition dice system to make more sense. It’s called KnownWorld, and it’s awesome – it actually makes the Palladium system *gasp* playable. Check it out here!

Also, aside from the bonus points system this has nothing to do with my previous post on the Palladium system. In fact, all of that can pretty much be trashed, as I doubt I’ll ever use it in light of this awesome new re-write.

As some of you may know, I have a strange nostalgia-driven soft spot for the Palladium Fantasy RPG first edition rules. I actually cut my noobie gamer teeth on that system, and despite its many flaws, I can’t help but love it. Well, recently I’ve found myself frequently musing about it, and thinking of ways that I could play it (read: GM it) without pulling my hair out. Its rules are antiquated, but I think they can be simple and fun and provide the foundation for some really character-driven games, if only some minor modifications were applied to them. So, to that effect, I’m throwing up these sets of house rules, one designed by me just now, and the other found online. Read more

As some of you may know, coming up next March (the 26th through the 29th) is Gamestorm 11, AKA “Portland’s Premier Gaming Convention in Vancouver.” I’ll be there running games, and I believe I’m even getting a special guest badge. Sweet! Anyway, after some initial consideration, I’ve put together the very first tentative schedule of the games I’ll be running:

“[Indie Hurricane] Cannibal Contagion: The Unitologist Gambit”
What: A game of horror, madness, and violent survival. This game is based on the dark futuristic setting of the recent hit video game “Dead Space.” Familiarity with the franchise might be useful, but is not at all necessary, and there will be no spoilers of the events of the actual video game.
When: Friday Evening (6-ish?)

“Fallout: T Minus Ten…”
What: An action-packed romp through the setting of the Fallout games, using the Savage Worlds rules for Fast, Furious Fun.
When: Saturday Afternoon (noon-ish?)

“[Indie Hurricane] Cannibal Contagion: The Jesus Camp Massacre”
What: Your parents sent you away to Youthpastor Cody’s Righteous-Awesome Revival Camp. Now you just have to survive the weekend…
When: Saturday Evening (6-ish?)

“[Indie Hurricane] Classroom Deathmatch”
What: Classroom Deathmatch, by the book.
When: Sunday Evening (6-ish?)

I’ll likely spend most of the rest of the time chilling out at the Indie Hurricane booth, pimping a variety of awesome games to passers-by. Maybe I’ll have some one-buck prints of QUAD and a few ashcans of Cannibal Contagion as well. I’d also be up for facilitating a Cold City game some time if there’s interest, but I don’t plan on scheduling one officially. But who knows – I’m currently starting to read a very much Cold City-inspirational book by Tim Powers, so by the time I’m finished with it I will quite likely be all “OMG I HAVE THE BEST IDEA EVAR” and sign up for another slot.

This weekend, I met with a handful of players to discuss creating the setting for a new campaign.  I sent out some feelers last month about a new campaign idea, in which we meet once a month, and each time we meet we play for 8+ hours.  I was glad with the number of interested responses, and after getting some initial arrangements set up, we had our first session of setting design and basic character planning this past Saturday evening.

The basic format of the campaign was the only thing laid out initially: all the characters are crewing a large high seas sailing vessel in a “fantasy” world, sent on an extended voyage by one or more major financial and/or governmental interests.  Each character will have their own personal agenda in addition to whatever missions serve as the driving purpose of the voyage as a whole.  That being laid down, we put our brains together and designed the specifics of the setting itself, with each player having equal say over aspect they desired or wanted to avoid.  I was extremely pleased and impressed at how well we all worked together.  The absolutely wonderful results of our design session are outlined below. Read more

This past weekend at a local GoPlay! event, I got the chance to play in a one-shot session of a nifty little game called 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, which was written by Gregor Hutton. It was a fun session, and I figured I would get back into the spirit of game session logging by writing some “actual play” thoughts on my experiences with this system. Keep in mind that I don’t own a copy of the rules, and I’m writing this review from my memory and my game notes alone, so I might get some terms and rules mixed up. As such, this isn’t a “review” as much as an introspective play report.

Also, while playing this game I noticed a lot of similarities, play-wise, that it shared with Cannibal Contagion. Apologies in advanced if I make frequent comparisons, but that’s where my mind is, and their similarities really helped me put the game into a few perspectives, which I appreciated.

Setup:

All I originally had heard about the system from various folks was that it was “Starship Troopers: The Movie: The Game” – meaning, space marines murdering space bug with full-on bloody space action. In space! I love space, it’s awesome, and so was 3:16. Nick Smith (co-author of Classroom Deathmatch, one of my favorite games ever), assembled this session, with three total additional players (Myself, Joel, and Evan). He laid the basic premise out pretty effectively, and since said premise was simple enough to understand, we easily jumped right into character creation. Read more

Some lunchtime thoughts…

If you’ve played monster video games and you’ve watched monster movies, then you’re probably quite familiar with the way that a good many of them build of the danger levels over the course of the experience. Rarely does the biggest and baddest monster just pop right out at the beginning of the movie or game. Instead, the heroes frequently have to overcome obstacles which start relatively minor, but which progressively and even exponentially increase in potency. In video games, for example, the bad guys get increasingly gruesome and more dangerous (I almost mistyped this as “gangrenous” there, but I guess that would work too) as the stages progress, and thrown in every few measures is an exceptionally strong “boss” type of menace.

One of the major features in Cannibal Contagion of which I am particularly fond* is the way the game implements this concept of “threat escalation.” Specifically, three game mechanics work to facilitate this, namely the Adversity Tokens, the Crazy-Go-psycho Meter, and the Infection tallies. As the session progresses, players should notice a definite increase in the inherent danger of the scenario. The Adversity pool increases by an increasing amount of income, allowing the CiC to throw bigger and badder Threats at the Survivors. As the characters call upon their madness and adrenaline to perform greater deeds, they spiral ever closer to the bottom of their sanity, towards that inevitable breaking point. And of course, since this is a zombie game, the threat of becoming one of them shambles ever so steadily closer.

As the game is played out and these three mechanics roll along, you can visibly observe the increase in threat and danger, and I love this, so very, very much. Each time I see it in action, it fills me with glee. So now that I’m working on a follow-up game using the same basic system of game mechanics (think: Shoot Em Up: the Movie: the Game), I’m currently mulling over some different methods of threat escalation. Obviously the Madness and Infection mechanics wouldn’t apply, because they are specific to the zombie genre, and rarely-if-ever present in gun-fu sh’mups. So what, then, could serve as that mechanic?

Perhaps a system of fucked-up meta-morality, a form of karmic retribution that the player knows is just around the bend, and the more bullets they fire and the more people they kill, the closer they get to that destiny? Or maybe some form of Shadow, a haze of disassociation that degrades the character’s connection to society and reality? Maybe a Weariness sets in; the more people they kill, the less they even care about “all of this,” the less “their mission” matters to them any more. Or instead, a mechanic that represents some kind of reward, a Payoff, a Score that will only be dramatically timed into the game when the appropriate number of bullets have been fired in an appropriately bad ass manner.

Hmmmmm…

* and by “fond” I mean “really damn proud”