Hey Man, well this is Babylon

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Been a damn busy week. Not enough time for blogging! So here’s my weekend update, a day late.

First, a link. Check out Universal Dead, a new low-budget web series about zombies. It’s… not bad. Not bad at all.

For the last few days I’ve been going back and forth between Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol. My current goal in Dragon Age is to play as a solo Archer Rogue + Dog combo for as long as I can manage, outside of the few spots in the game where other companions are forced upon you. I’ve always been a fan of odd “challenge runs” in video games, and I figure this one would be called the “Post-Apocalypse” DA run – survivor + dog, in other words.

Alpha Protocol has been fun. I see a game series in the making here, and this one’s a good start. It reminds me a lot of the original Mass Effect – awesome in many ways, but marred by some rather aggravating design choices. I’m only a few hours in, though, so I’ll save my full decision for a later time after more hands-on experience with it.

I met a few awesome folks and sold a few more copies of Cannibal Contagion this past Memorial Day. Guardian Games hosted their second annual “May of the Dead” celebration, and I was there pimpin’ my game and hanging out with my fellow nerd. Had some great talks with a fellow from the local chapter of the Zombie Squad, and ran a hilariously fun session of my game for a new crew of survivors. Thanks for playing, folks!

I’ll close this post with some thoughts on video game trailers. First, read this article. Go ahead, it’s a good read. Watch all the trailers.

Done? Understand that I get where the writer is coming from, and I whole-heartedly disagree. I want actual game-play footage in my video game trailers, goddammit. Without actual gameplay footage, I might have made the mistake of purchasing any number of generic “guns plus one cool trick no one else does” first-person shooters. I want to actually see how this game is different. You can take a shitty game, give it an awesome story, and fill the trailer with so many awesome cinematics and popular industrial tunes and the consumers won’t know the depth of your deception until they pay for it and hate it, because you never showed them the actual game.

I want to see the game. I don’t give a rat’s ass about marketing cinematics which most likely won’t even be in the final product, and probably look better than that product will, too. Yeah, that new Deus Ex trailer looks cool, and shows us a wonderful cyberpunk world with a compelling story. SO did the trailers for Neocron. Remember how much that game sucked?

This weekend’s gaming holds much promise. Starting tonight, I’ll be making my sixth attempt at running a Burning Wheel game. For the past few months, I’ve been running a “meet when we can” adventure campaign set in the Palladium Fantasy setting. Until now we’ve been using the KnownWorld house rules posted elsewhere on this site. However, I realized that as the game progressed, it was being played (at least by me) more and more like Burning Wheel, so I finally made the call: we’re switching. After I ported over all the characters (which was surprisingly simple), tonight we’re giving it our first go.

I am extremely hopeful. This will be my sixth attempt at getting a Burning Wheel game going, each of the priors being stymied by any number of organizational or game-idealogical setbacks. This time, it seems most everyone is on board. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow night, the gaming continues with my first ever all-girls game night. I know a surprising numbers of lady gamers who rarely, if ever, get a chance to play. I figured this would be a great opportunity to get them together and let them play without dealing with “The Dudes” who usually grace the table, myself excluded. And given my own *ahem* tendencies, I am slightly less part of that latter crowd than most. I’ll be kicking it off with a one-shot of Cannibal Contagion, with the hopes of gauging their individual gaming styles while having a plain old good fun time. It’s my hope that this can be a semi-regular thing, maybe even allowing me to get my feet wet running 4E for the first time.

Also, Mass Effect 2? Fuck. Yeah.

I’ve released the first two chapters of Cannibal Contagion as a free PDF preview download. These two chapters cover the introduction to the game’s concepts, setting it all up, and character creation.

Click here to download it!

It’s pretty spot-on, I believe. Check it out on RPG.net.

“Cannibal Contagion is an enjoyable game that stays true to the design goals. It’s fun, easy to pick up, and has some very nice features for player interaction and character conflict. The scope, of course, is quite narrow both in terms of what characters can and can’t do and the environment they interact with. Others elements are inevitably dealt with a lot of hand-wavin’ and impromptu rules; the game is about “comedic survival horror” and not really much else. It is firmly located in the beer-and-pretzels one-off genre of games and should be seen in that perspective, which it achieves admirably.”

Thanks, Lev!

From now until either the first run of books runs out, or September 30th 2009 (whichever comes first), I’m offering Cannibal Contagion as part of a special package deal. For a grand total of $25, you can get both the print book and the digital PDF, shipped to you anywhere in the world for no shipping cost. This is actually a better deal than what I was initially offering for the print version alone, so get it now while supplies last!

I’ve commissioned a whole mess of custom Cannibal Contagion button-pins to distribute at the upcoming PAX 2009 convention in September. The lovely lady making these buttons has shown me a lot of examples, and so far the designs are looking totally awesome. In fact, here’s a teaser, taken from my personal favorite piece of internal art.

Do you own one of the first-print numbered editions of Cannibal Contagion? If so, drop on by the forums and let me know!

Wanted to post about a couple of minor updates for Cannibal Contagion. First off, I realized that the Gear cards were missing a very important item: Slot Cost! The Gear Cards in the printables pack have now been properly updated to reflect this.

Also, I whipped up some simple “Survivor Cards” to be used as alternate Character Sheets. These 3×5 index card-sized printables can replace the character sheets in any game, and I’ve found they are useful for more “serious” games in which the hokey font styles of the core sheet might otherwise be distracting. They don’t have a spot for Gear, though, so I advise using the custom printables in combination with them for maximum efficiency.

As always, all downloads can be found here.

Aaron at Geek in the City has posted what I believe is the first-ever online review of my game.

With hyper action and frantic role-playing, Cannibal Contagion is the perfect game for the player that just wants to have some balls out undead fun.

Wow! Thanks, Aaron!