Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’m looking to get a handful of local Portland-area people together in samurai armor to take some photos in a modern urban setting. I will buy you dinner and drinks, and give you some pocket cash for an hour or two of your time.

Specifically, I am trying to do a quick series of promo shots for the upcoming Motobushido Kickstarter. The photos will only be used as part of the requisite promotional video on the kickstarter page, and will not be included in any actual published material aside from that video.

Lemme know if you have the armor and are interested!

(Eek! I wrote this a few nights ago but forgot to set it to auto-post. So it’s a bit late. My bad!)

This past weekend was Gamestorm 2012, which I like to call “Portland’s Annual Gaming Convention in Vancouver.” You can read about the convention in my post history and on its own website, so I’m just gonna skip on ahead to the highlights.

For me, the biggest and most awesome parts of the weekend were the two first-ever public playtests of Motobushido. I finally got to put my newest creation in the hands of total strangers who had never heard of it before. The results were pretty powerful: after two full sessions of play, I walked away not only with pages of rules tweaks and updates, but with some damn fine gaming memories as well. I found it interesting to see how the same basic scenario idea was so drastically altered between the two different groups. I’ll definitely be fleshing that one out a bit more and including it in the core book.

Aside from those demos, I really spent most of my time at the Indie Hurricane booth in the Dealer Room. I met some great new local gamers, and had some good discussions about gaming-related ideas that opened my mind to new perspectives. Some thanks and acknowledgements:

• Many, many thanks to Hans Otterson for the rides to the convention.
• Even more thanks to Joel Shempert for making the Indie Hurricane booth run smoothly, and for putting the whole effort together.
• Thanks to the guy at the FaceEater booth for finally teaching me how to play this game. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more games with my local pals.

I walked away with some cool swag from the GM Gift Room – namely a copy of Feng Shui, which I’ve been meaning to grab for some time now based on the recommendations of many. And of course, after the con, there was much sleeping.

I’m really eager to build some new semi-regular game-nights with those of you that I’ve just met. Let’s make this happen, folks!

Now presenting the final of my three original commissioned concept pieces for Project H66. This one’s a return to…. you know what, I’ll just let is speak for itself.

Combined with the other two concept pieces, I am confident that Rick has perfectly illustrated the game concepts as they exist within my mind. In fact, these three pieces have, in return, given me far more inspiration for the project than most of the previous media sources from which I’d been drawing (samurai movies, mostly).

I’m still neck-deep in this game’s pre-production process. Playtesting is sporadically underway, and while the process is slow, it is certainly gaining momentum.

The continually awesome Rick Marcks has given me the second piece of artwork for Project H66. This one showcases the second of the two main art styles I’m hoping to involve in the printed book.

Again, apologies for the watermark.

For a while now, I’ve been enamored with the idea of the motobushi each having an array of special empowerments at their fingertips, abilities which would let them bend certain rules to their favor in particular situations. While I’ve developed a hefty array of these powers, I’ve been struggling with the proper method for bringing them into play without totally destroying mechanical balance. After last night’s second playtest, I think I’ve finally figured it out.

One of the game’s main themes involves investing current power into future options, and the choice between what works right now and what might work in a few moments. I’m going to keep with that theme when implementing maneuvers. Instead of just being able to activate them left and right at will, or placing artificial “only once per shindig” limitations upon them, I’m going to require that players actually use cards from their hand to activate them. Each maneuver will have an Activation Rank, starting at 10 and going down with character advancement. By sacrificing a card from your hand with a face rank higher than the maneuver’s activation, you can use that maneuver’s ability.

This enhances the strategy behind the conflict, and should hopefully work nicely with the innate risk vs reward setup. Players will have to choose between holding onto the higher cards for use against their opponent, or investing them into their maneuvers for immediate effect.

Now it just remains to be tested.

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.

This man looks like he is up to no good. No good indeed.

Thanks to Rick Marcks for delivering this piece of undistilled awesome.

(Watermark-free images will likely be available in the future.)

EDIT: I’ve updated the image for a much less overwhelming watermark.

Work has begun on a new version of Cannibal Contagion. Ultimately, I’m writing a book that is more in line with how I actually run the game. The mechanics make a bit more sense, and the book will be at least a hundred pages slimmer, and likely more. I learned a lot from creating the first edition of this game, and I intend on using those lessons to create a more approachable product. As much as I love reading that book, I realize that there is just so much unnecessary text, and for new readers it is not the most immediately understandable game.

So in the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more updates on this, but for now, I’m about two days into the revision and already over halfway done with the text. This time it’s a lot easier to write, because I’ve run this game so many times using the newer streamlined rules that they just make sense. This should be good.

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

Now that I’ve finished (and rage-quit) A Dance With Dragons, it’s time to get back to the idea mill for Hagakure ’66. Now I want to talk about the First Founding, and introducing players to the game with a bang.

One very valid concern that was raised during a recent design-jamming session is related to the very nature of the motorcycle pack. In this game, the characters are all members of an outlaw motorcycle gang, and along with that membership come several assumptions that could feasibly be made about their natures. With this game I am envisioning play going back-and-forth between scenes involving exploration of setting and situation, and scenes involving motorcycle samurai action – y’know, sword duels and motorcycle races and all-out gang-on-gang warfare.

Given the typically rugged, brutal, take-what-you-want-by-force nature of the typical outlaw gang, the question was poised: what is to stop the gang from just rolling into town at the beginning of the scenario, putting everyone to the sword, taking what they want, and leaving, without taking the time to explore and network? Read more