Hey Man, well this is Babylon

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

We’re now two sessions into the Project Dismember, and the game is kicking ass. While I have yet to bring into play any moments of intense emotional what-the-fuckery, the game is building some heavy steam and moving along at a fantastic pace. There’s a good balance between comedy and “oh shit,” and the times I’ve opened things up to free-form role-playing have filled me with glee.

I’ve started up a campaign wiki and game log over at Obsidian Portal. There I’m keeping records of various house rules and setting details, as well as a running tracker of who has died so far, when, and how.

Last night had one of my favorite quotes of the campaign so far: “Randy, roll the dice to see if you beat your wife.” Yeah, this game is moving along very nicely.

In order to get ready for the Project Dismember game,
I’ve hammered out four new sets of house rules for use in running zombie survival campaigns with Unknown Armies. I was initially using the RPG.net forums to work on them, but I’ll move them here for collection and further updating.

Included are the following five sets of House Rules:

• Relationships add skill-modifying percentages to your character to use when relying on, helping, or working against other characters in your team.
• Infection is a mechanic for tracking the spread of the zombie infection after you are exposed to it. It is implemented like a new Madness Meter, with some unique modifications.
• Hordes are my attempt to transform the core Unknown Armies Riot mechanics into an effective representation of the infamous Zombie Horde.
• Fortification rules allow the survivors to work together to locate, acquire, and enhance hideouts and safehouses.
• Scarcities are a way to implement the danger of dwindling necessities, inspired by the core Madness Meter mechanics.

Read on for the details! Read more

“Merry Christmas to All, now you’re All gonna Die!”

This coming Thursday night will be the first session of a five-part December-only mini-campaign, which I have entitled “Project Dismember.” Currently the roster is full for the first session, but I want to post the details here to share the setup. I’m really looking forward to this one, and have been deeply immersing myself in zombie fiction since deciding to throw this thing together.

What: Project Dismember is a five-week tournament-style open-story role-playing experience. You and your friends must survive not only the overwhelming desolation of the zombie apocalypse, but your own dark sides as well. When the dead walk the earth and feed upon the flesh of the living, when a single bite is all it takes to turn your best friend into your worst enemy, who can you trust? What will you do to stay alive?

When: The first session will be hosted the night of Thursday, December 2nd, starting at 7 PM, at my place. We’ll play four-hour sessions each time, ending around 11 PM. Five full sessions will happen, with the last night taking place on December 30th.

Who: You! I have open room for up to 10 players each night, on a strict RSVP roster. See the Rules further below for details.

Other: There will be prizes given based on a combination of character experience and longevity. The short of it is that the longest-lived characters who went through the most shit will net their players rewards. These will be books, gift cards, games, and other items of nerdly or even monetary value.

I’m asking a $1 buy-in for each night of the game you play. Since I’ll be spending real actual money to acquire several possible prizes, I think this is pretty fair – and to be quite frank, I would gladly pay a GM a dollar a night ro run a bitchin’ game, if it kept the group together and assured a good time for all.

I’m currently also planning on audio-recording these sessions, and releasing them as MP3s on my blog.

THE RULES:

• For this tournament, we will be using the core dice mechanic from the game Unknown Armies, with all of the magick stuff stripped out and thrown away. It is a relatively simple and elegant core mechanic, and allows for some realistic and very, very deadly combat.
• There will be special mechanics for earning character experience primarily through three avenues: Survival, Teamwork, and “Meta-Betrayal.” This third involves you taking an active interest in the flaws of other characters, and inserting in-game situations in which those flaws will come to light and be challenged. Should the specifically affected character(s) accept those challenges and overcome, then both of you receive the experience.
• I have maximum room for ten players each night. Starting with the first session, any pre-existing players will be given first-pick placement for the following sessions. There’s one catch: when your character dies or gets turned, you are out of the game as a player. You can still hang around and provide an audience, and even give suggestions to the GM (me) on ways to screw with the others, but you are out of the prize lineup. Additionally, if ever you have to miss a session for any reason, your character is killed or turned, no exceptions. If there are open player slots, new players can drop in and take a place in the game, as new survivors encountered in the story. New players most certainly can have a go at the prizes, too.
• I will function as a hands-off GM. My role will be that of antagonist and world-setter, and nothing more. There will be no plot or meta-story other than the ones you create with your own characters. My job will be to make their lives miserable, and make them suffer horrible, disgustin, ignoble fates. Players will have enhanced story control through the activation of other characters’ nagative traits, using them to create bad situations for experience.

So it’s all up to you. You can work together to survive. You can resolve your differences, ignore your fellows’ flaws, get past their twisted pasts in order to survive as a team. Or you can throw your fellows to the wolves and take the prize for yourself.

Yesterday I met with Nievita and Chris to start up some face-to-face dialog on my ideas for a new game based on the Unknown Armies rules. The basics of the game are that the characters are all connected to each other through some kind of journalistic endeavor, and are soon immersed in a world of twisted conspiracies and “alien” agendas. I’m so far quite pleased with the results.

The first thing we laid down was the nature of this “journalistic endeavor” I was insisting upon. Thanks to a suggestion from Nievita, we quickly and unexpectedly all agreed: the characters are all part of Anonymous. That idea instantly stuck with me, and spawned a plethora of ideas for plots and content.

We’re using the Unknown Armies core mechanics, but not necessarily the cosmology or magick paths. I’m heavily inspired by the old Nightbane game, so there will definitely be themes of “otherworldly alien darkness” in this game. Both of the character concepts presented so far will definitely work with this, but I’ll resist posting them until they’ve been developed a bit further.

Looks like the foundation for something awesome!

- NPC

Bitches and Roses? Huh? Read here for the low-down.

Bitches

• Bethany and I have just started part two of our Resident Evil marathon, and are now playing through the collector’s edition of Resident Evil 2 on the Playstation. This is so far lots of fun, and would actually qualify as a rose if it weren’t for the godawful controls. See, in playing through the REmake on the GameCube, I got used to my favorite survival horror control scheme, in which I use one of the shoulder buttons to move forward and the stick to turn. I’ve been using it for years in other games, and love the fact that it doesn’t disorient me. But RE2 lacks this option, and additionally it also lacks a “quick-turn” button, which has become so invaluable to my Resident Evil experiences. Grrrr. Otherwise, this is a pretty great game.

Roses

• #1: I’ve signed on a pair of artists to illustrate the interior of the Cannibal Contagion book. Their work is amazing, and I look forward to posting some sneak previews in the coming days.
• #2: I’ve also signed on another amazing designer to illustrate the book’s cover and draft a game logo. Again, I’ll post more as I hear it, but goddamn, this excites me.
• #3: Getting to play Castle Crashers with Chris, Sam, and Kevin, and then collectively nerd-rage afterwards over a wide variety of geeky conversation topics.

Hopes

• I’m meeting with three players tomorrow to get a new Unknown Armies campaign started, and I do hope it goes well.

Back around the turn of the century I lived as a renter at the Psi Upsilon fraternity house on Georgia Tech campus. They had weekly house meetings, and a common feature of each of these meetings was a little round-robin venture they called “Bitches and Roses,” wherein each attendee got a moment to say something they were happy about and something they were upset about, be it relevant to their life or whatever. Each person would give a “bitch” which would be something like “studying for the goddamn finals sucks!” and then follow it with a “rose” such as “i wuvvs my hot nerd girlfriend!”

I’m going to continue that tradition here, and hopefully keep doing it every Monday. Additionally, I’m adding “Hopes” to the list, to catalog the things I’ve got in the works, or the desires I’ve hopefully got coming to me just around the corner. So without further ado, I’ll kick this off.

Bitches

• My roommate heinously sprained her ankle and had to go to the emergency room Friday night, right before our much-anticipated night of zombie-murdering. She’s in a lot of pain, and it makes me sad.

Roses

• Thankfully, she wasn’t too incapacitated that we weren’t able to pick up our plans Sunday. We finished Resident Evil (Gamecube Remake) yesterday as Jill, and it felt good. Sure, we used a walkthrough, but that’s only because we’re on something of a tight schedule. We need to be able to finish the series in completion before the new one rolls out next year, and we’re both quite aware that the October releases of Fallout 3 and Deadspace will heavily impact our playing of the other titles in the franchise. Go Team Hotness!
• A second one! Saturday we had a fucking fantastic six-player game of Twilight Imperium (3rd Edition). That’s the most epic game I’ve been in yet, and I’ll be uploading pictures soon. Special kudos to Sam, who despite never having played before kept tied with the highest score right to the end.

Hopes

• I want a weekly game again. I’m really inspired for a street-level Unknown Armies game focusing on members of a small zine (maybe grass-roots, maybe political, maybe even poetic). The game would take place, as they say, “20 Minutes into the Future” and be very inspired by Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Strange Days, Max Headroom, and Dark Angel. Of course, I have to find players first, so likely this concept will change drastically once I get them. But regardless, I really want to run a street-level UA campaign with some element of journalism uniting the people.