Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Thanks to Jake Richmond, Ben Lehman, Mike Sugarbaker, and Joe Streckert for participating in the first-run playtest of Project H66, aka the Motorcycle Samurai game. Last night I got to see the First Founding and the character generation rules in action, and initial thoughts are mostly positive. Definite Success!

Initial player-established War details were wicked awesome: The war is an “undeclared foreign war” against “massive hordes of unwashed primitives.” Despite their side’s use of “rolling dreadnought tanks with massive 100+-member crews,” the war was ultimately lost, the home economy across the sea ravaged, and the soldiers were all stranded there with “nothing to go home to.” The locals are usually known by their derogative nickname, “the shitweeds.”

The First Founding featured four soldiers in a moment of crisis: The war is lost – do we follow the suicide charge orders, or do we retreat to live and fight another day? The Sergeant tried to convince everyone that this charge was their destiny, their duty as soldiers. The Recruit dissented, having a family back home, but was quickly insulted by the Sapper. This provoked the Recruit into lashing out, which spawned a vicious explosion-heavy fight between him and the Sapper. The Recruit ultimately took the Sapper’s head, but the fight was so traumatic that he then simply fell to his knees and wept as The Enemy ran him down. The Sergeant and the Veteran, meanwhile, finally agreed that this was indeed a waste of their lives, and they rode off into the night, retreating from the charge.

This resulted in their Pack’s First Founding being colored by the following three grabs: Desertion, Regicide, and Survivors. Ouch.

Character creation was next. Sarge and the Veteran remain in the pack today as Den Mother and Trail Blazer respectively, along with a new Leader (the Road Captain) and a Masked member from the local populace (The Enforcer). A nice variety of Bikes and Fighting Styles were chosen, although the group’s off-road capability is very, very limited.

Following that the players laid out the actual details of the Pack itself. Calling themselves the War Pigs, they all wear masks styled after demonic boars, which are required attire when astride their bikes. The leader’s command icon is an old bleached skull from a massive pig-monster which once almost wiped out the entire Pack. Called The Boar by the pack, each member has also secretly given it its own name that no one else knows. This skull is mounted as a standard on the leader’s chopper, and frequently adorned with trophies from fallen enemies. Attaching these trophies is called “feeding the Boar” and one of the Pack’s taboos is that the Boar must be regularly fed, or bad things happen to them. They ritually partake in copious amounts of drugs, frequently going on peyote-like spirit quests, guided by the Boar. They don’t care about hairstyles, as long as their facial hair is curled into Boar Tusks (one of them even has similar facial tattoos). Finally, they have a taboo against sleeping in the same bed twice, unless they are “on furlough.”

Their prospect-initiation ritual is rather gruesome. Upon being first allowed to ride as prospect, the newcomer must wear a mask made from an actual boar’s face, tanned and stinking. This mask must be worn until he makes his first solo kill of a marked enemy of the Pack. There was also discussion of the Prospect having to eventually stew and eat the mask, but I’m not sure if those details got hammered out and committed to Pack law.

I look forward to seeing The War Pigs in action in the coming sessions.

Post-Session Musings

The default “suicide charge” First Founding scene seems to work well enough, but I’m thinking it might not be fully apparent that committing to the charge doesn’t necessarily mean the characters are doomed to die. Believing that they are might factor into their decision.

The basic conflict mechanic worked out well, but needs some in-the-face clarification. I need to make a cheat sheet and print it on the character sheet itself, just a quick bullet list of things to consider (like the two ways in which Ki can be spent for bonus cards).

Some dragging aspects of the Pack Creation system were very immediately apparent. Sacrifices were too many, and took too long to come up with and then write down. Going forward, I’m changing it to a stripped-down, more group-inclusive process: define one sacrifice for yourself, and one each for the guys to your left and right.

There are too many initial Grabs. Revision: First Founding survivors get two free Grabs (those they inherited from the first scene). All characters get one free grab attached to each of their three Trappings (Role, Style, and Bike). The Pack as an entity itself has three Grabs as well, established at the end of the First Founding. Undecided if players can then nominate one last bonus Grab for the player next to them.

Also, the Rank bidding system is confusing and ultimately unnecessary. I’m stripping it out and replacing it with simple group discussion.

I’m in something of a High Nirvana era of personal gaming enjoyment. I feel that there are more awesome gaming opportunities around me than ever before in my life. Tabletop, Video, Design, it’s a veritable cornucopia of exciting play. Let’s review!

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful. Read more

I’ve very recently been lucky to land myself a place in two separate Apocalypse World games, as a player in one and the MC of the other.

The first one takes place in the small holding of Sludge Pump, an age-old water treatment plant that is now a fortified fountain with some hard-ass raiders inside it’s concrete walls. I’m taking on the role of CJ, a tough sumbitch gunlugger with an old west code of gunslinger’s honor. The two other primary players on the scene are a hocus named Dust and an angel named Key. Dust leads a rabble of filthy Armageddon-obsessed psychopaths, while Key does her best to keep folks alive while she plays at pulling the strings of internal power. So far, it’s set up to be something of a violent go at the game’s themes.

The game I’m actually MCing has been named “Graceland of the Wasteland” by the players, and it fits very well. I’ll go ahead and post one of the player’s basic notes here: Read more

This past weekend I had the unexpected pleasure of running a last-minute session of the new Warhammer Fantasy RPG – the 3rd Edition boxed set from Fantasy Fight Games, to be specific. The folks over at Gnome Stew have an excellent “unpacking” article on the game, with lots of pictures of its juicy innards, so I’ll skip that part and get right to the fun.

I’ve had this for a couple of weeks now, and have been itching to give it a test run. I wasn’t expecting to break it out in full game mode so soon, having only read the player book and most of the GM book (and not even touching the magic books yet). But when the call came in, it was the first thing that popped into mind, and in hindsight, I think it was a great idea. Despite none of us having any real experience with it, the end result was a very positive one. Read more

These past two weekends, I had the good fortune to play in several sessions of a godsbedamned fantastic board game called Last Night on Earth. I’ve been told by a handful of people that this game went out of print, but everyone and their undead grandmother seems to be getting brand new copies of it lately, so I’m unsure if that scarcity is in fact true. Either way, come hell or high water, I’m getting myself a copy of this.

I first got to play it at Guardian Games last weekend during the May of the Dead zombie celebrations. I only managed to get int a couple of turns, because I was busy dealing with Cannibal Contagion and socializing with a lot of awesome new people. But the few turns I did play quickly seduced me into wanting more.

An old gaming buddy of mine was in town this very past weekend, and we all met up at a friend’s house last night for an evening of beer and board games. As a nice stroke of good fortune, someone showed up with this game in tow, and we got in two good six-player sessions of it before I had to leave. There was a lot of stumbling here and there as we got used to some of the more specific rules, but for the most part, everyone took to the game very easily and we all had a blast. I figured I would take some time today and write up a review-like post on my experiences. Read more

(cue the slow bass drum and Mr. movie Guy)
Wisconsin. 2009. Early Summer…

A boy who struggles to quell his inner sins and reach a more glorious light…

A girl who bears his child, born from a love that can never be…

An athlete who cannot deny the truth of his Self…

An outcast who torments herself as punishment for not fitting in…

A boy whose imagination would be his greatest undoing…

A martyr who would defy the world and stand up for her beliefs – and her love of another…

The chaos of fate threw these teenagers together, to claw their way out of The Jesus Camp Massacre.

This past Gamestorm (GS11) was host to many wonderful moments of gaming, and I am proud and delighted to say that one particular game rises above all others of my recent memory in sheer awesomeness. That session was the Jesus Camp Massacre, a demo game I ran of Cannibal Contagion.

This post has taken me a long time to get up for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I keep coming back and re-editing and re-writing it. It has to be perfect – the session was just that awesome. So now, several months later, I’ve decided to re-write it one last time, and come hell or high water I will be posting this AP review today. I’ll warn you all now: This review will likely offend some people. Read at your own risk. Read more

One of the most unexpected joys of this past GameStorm was a pick-up game of Quad on Saturday night. Started initially as a way to pass the time while waiting for rides home, this game turned out to be one of the several comically hilarious moments of the con.

It all got started after the fabulous-amazing Jesus Camp Massacre session of Cannibal Contagion. After leaving the scheduled gaming room, I ran into Nick and Gilbert, and we all three had about an hour to kill. I blurted out “let’s play Quad” without thinking, and a few moments later we had started on in. After a few minutes of deliberation over what number-generator to use – for some reason they were both hardcore against using dice right then – we settled on a deck of cards. The built-in random scenario generator quickly laid out the basics:

• Setting: Ancient Earth (we decided Egypt)
• Location: An Institution (we decided a Temple of Training)
• What starts it all off: A natural disaster (we decided on an Earthquake) kills all the priests in the temple leaving only two survivors

The characters were created quickly enough, each being only a small list of good and bad Merits. One was a fairly inept acolyte conman, the other was a Pariah being beaten for the crimes of heaven or some such. I like to call them Harold and Kumar, as their dynamic was equally hilarious.

Once the core scenario’s conflict was established and the characters introduced, we quickly went to town. Nick and Gilbert were both experienced story-gamers, and thus took to the game’s mechanical concepts quickly. Within a few minutes, the mechanics were in play and more conflicts were introduced. I think for the purposes of the Pick-Up style of game play, the simple mechanics worked very well to move the game quickly along.

The temple guards took both the characters into protective custody, and one of them quickly managed to convince the guards that he was the Chosen One and the other character was his faithful Companion. A series of Sacred Rites of Testing were then undergone, which included eating (and stomaching) terrible foods, surfing the back of alligators while blindfolded, an epic game of Madden BC-199, and more. My favorite of the trials was definitely the game of Five-Card Draw, played with giant stone slab cards carried on the backs of teams of slaves. Each time a card was discarded, the stone was smashed to bits and the slaves carrying it were thrown to the crocodiles.

And there was much death by crocodile in this game. From Nick’s character’s lost arm to the gobs of sacred virgins they fed to them post-coitus, the crocodiles played an unexpectedly crucial part in the session. In fact, at the very end, when Gilbert’s character castrated himself to prove that he was in fact the REAL Chosen One (claiming the title by default, as he prevented Nick from winning), he was then fed to the crocodiles to appease the angry gods.

Within the span of an hour, we had run a pretty damn awesome game session, consisting of at least a dozen hilarious conflicts and a large handful of scenes. For me, the hardest part was actually coming up with the Seven Sacred Rites, but once the game started moving along, those came pretty easily too.

All in all, a damn fantastic session, one which all three of us have laughed about many times since.

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

I’m currently playing catch-up on my logs of the new “Strangelight!” campaign. It’s set in the Iron Kingdoms, and uses the Savage Worlds rules. I’ve already posted the premise of the campaign elsewhere, so I’ll save the internet a tiny bit of space by not re-posting it here.

We made the characters way back around the end of November, but only just recently started actually playing the game, as the holidays and various familiar commitments prevented us from being able to meet again after character creation.

• Drake as “Mishka Starov,” a Kossite ex-Widowmaker who deserted the army after seeing many ghostly visions of his possible future deaths
• Emma as “Rosalynd Hutch,” a Caspian Arcane Mechanik, recently graduated from the Mechanikal Studies school of Corvis University
• Robert as “Gregory Vascalho,” a Tordoran ex-watchman, fired for sticking his nose in places where the bureaucracy felt it didn’t belong
• Robin as “Captain Branduff Scully,” a Thurian river smuggler in search of his missing eye, which was stolen along with half of his soul by a wicked imp
• Ryan as “Quinlan Bralazzi,” a Rynnish Noble Wizard with a secret hobby of Infernalism and a sour attitude toward his lessers

In our first session (four or so weekends ago), we introduced all of the five main protagonists. All of them had been contacted through various means by a wealthy Magi from Five Fingers named Unger von Grendelbach. The Magi had recently acquired franchising permission from the Ceryl-based Strangelight Workshop, which focuses its efforts on the investigation and sometimes eradication of supernatural hauntings. Von Grendelbach sought out the five characters for his own reasons, and all of them accepted his offer. Read more

Last night I played 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons with some folks here in town, getting my very first actual play experience with the new system from Wizards of the Coast. All the guys were spot-on fellas, and I had a lot of fun. Yes, I do look forward to playing again, too. Can ya believe it? Anyway, here are some of my thoughts on 4th Edition so far, and some of my mixed reactions to the game. Yes, there is a good bit of griping ahead, but like I said, I do hope to find out more as the system unfolds. Read more