Monthly Archives: November 2010

Feints & Gambits: Armless

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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This past Saturday was the inaugural game session of my new Feints & Gambits DFRPG campaign. We’re running this game quorum-style, so that we play as long as three of the six players show up. For the first game, we had four players ((The holiday season always makes scheduling somewhat more challenging, what with everyone’s family commitments.)).

I spent the first half-hour or so making sure everyone was up to speed on the game system, and answering any lingering questions about characters and mechanics. I’ve gotten pretty good at giving a condensed overview of the FATE system in about fifteen minutes; I expanded things here, because we’re looking at a long-term campaign, and I wanted to make sure that everyone had a decent grounding, so they understood their options.

First games of new campaigns are tricky things, I find. You need to take things easy as people get up to speed on the system and what their characters can do, but you also want some interesting stuff to happen so that the players get hooked and want to keep coming back. So, that means finding exciting action that is still fairly simple, mechanically speaking.

The collaborative city-building can really help get things rolling, because the players are already anxious and interested in playing in the setting they’ve built, and finding all the cool stuff they put there. And in finding all the neat little connections and secrets that have grown from the basic groundwork. There are already things they care about, and they already have some enemies and allies, thanks to the story phases of character creation, so really it’s just a matter of picking and choosing.

My objectives for this session was to give each of the four players a chance to do something interesting and special with their characters, and to wrap up the adventure in a single session ((Though the repercussions are probably going to stretch out longer than that.)). When I build adventures like this, all I generally do is come up with the situation – who, what, where, and why – and then I expose one bit of the resulting situation to the characters ((Of course, the bit I expose to them has to be something that impels them to take action.)). After that, if I have a fairly solid idea of the situation, it’s pretty easy to properly adjudicate character actions and let them choose their own path to resolving the situation ((This approach works far better in games where it’s simple to come up with stats and challenges on the fly – like DFRPG or Trail of Cthulhu – than ones where it’s more difficult or time-consuming, like D&D.)).

The result, I find, is a fairly organic structure that responds properly to character actions, and leads to character-directed action, rather than set-piece encounters ((Though, to be fair, I usually put together a page or two of stats and notes that I can turn into interesting set-piece encounters on the fly, because those are fun and exciting sometimes.)).

That’s what I did this time.

Things started out with the characters showing up at The Silver Arm, the local supernatural pub, to find no music, and everyone being very quiet. Turns out that the pub’s sign ((A silver armoured arm and hand that hung outside above the door.)) had been stolen, and the owner, Macha MacRuad, was furious. She wouldn’t let anyone even talk about it in the pub.

That got everyone motivated to go find the sign. They managed to trace it to a house in a pretty run-down neighbourhood that was being used as a clubhouse by the Snowbirds, the Winter Court gang that hung around the Millennium Spire. Stealing the sign was apparently a new move in the ongoing games of one-upmanship between the fey courts. The Summer Court gang, the Sunshine Boys, were rumoured to be getting ready to snatch the arm themselves.

A little bit of scouting found them a way in, and Kate had a couple of good veiling potions for her and Rogan. Firinne was able to use her glamours to veil herself. That left Aleister, who wasn’t all that sneaky. He set himself up in a sniper’s nest across the street with a paintball gun, and acted as a distraction.

Things went pretty well at first, with Aleister drawing out most of the gang members and the other three sneaking in through an upstairs window, thanks to a convenient shed ((Placed by using a Burglary declaration while casing the building.)). Things turned a little south when the gang used some pixies to find Aleister and he had to leg it out of there, and the folks inside the house found that there was still an ogre left on guard.

We got to some action here, though, interestingly, not a one of the characters tried to attack anyone. Aleister’s goal was not to beat anyone up, but to lure them away from the clubhouse to give the other three time to find the arm. The three inside knew they were completely outclassed by the ogre, so they just wanted to grab the arm ((Which had been nailed to a block of wood and turned into a lamp.)) and run like bunnies.

They all managed it, though Aleister was completely overwhelmed by the gang members ((Ganging up on someone and spending an exchange or two to use maneuvers to layer on the Aspects is a devastating tactic.)), and wound up conceding the fight – he had the gang members kick the crap out of him and dump him in the Liffey. Inside the house, the veiling the characters used kept the ogre from effectively targeting them, and then Kate threw a handful of iron filings into his face to keep him distracted. Rogan tripped him up with a chair, and Firinne swapped the lamp for a manikin’s arm that she had glamoured up to last for a few minutes ((She also left a taunting note, being a trickster-style changeling herself. THAT’s not gonna come back to bite her, at all. Good use of a compel, I thought.)).

So, they got the sign back, got Aleister to the hospital, and called it a night.

Over all, I think the game went quite well, and everyone seemed to have a good time. It was fairly light, and everyone took to heart the dangers of violence ((Especially at their power level.)), but they’ve also made some interesting choices about the sides their on, and there’s going to be an ogre Snowbird looking for a certain witch with payback in mind.

Yeah, I call it a win.

Fearful Symmetries: Kirchoff’s Fall

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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We picked up the Fearful Symmetries story this session with Emeric and Izabela interrogating the captive White Court vampire that Amadan had acquired for them. The prisoner knew that he’d been left to twist in the wind by Lukrezia Malvora and the rest of the family, and that his only hope of escaping with his life was to give his captors what they wanted. He bargained as well as he could, though his position was hardly one of strength, and secured the promise that, if the information he gave to Emeric and Izabela helped them catch up with Lukrezia, they would set him free, as long as he promised to leave the city and not come back.

He didn’t know where Lukrezia was, but he offered his best guesses, saying that the best bet was that she had gone to Mstetice, the little village where Marta ((Marta was the maid who had raised Izabela, and really the only member of her family in Prague that she cared about.)) lived.

Now, I had decided going in that, given the White Court predilection for complex plotting and working through intermediaries, that the end-game for the Malvora storyline was going to be all about hard choices and mitigating damage, rather than out-right success or failure. And to simulate that Lukrezia is more intelligent than I am, with a vast experience in messing with people, I cheated a little, planning-wise ((This is a basic technique that is advocated in Amber Diceless Roleplaying, to help you play the elder Amberites, who are smarter, sneakier, craftier, and better prepared than you will ever be. I call it cheating, because it’s a tactic designed to outflank the characters, no matter what they decide to do, removing their ability to cleverly counter or prevent the plot. As such, I use it very, very sparingly, because it’s not fair to rob the players of cool. I only really use it when I have a different sort of cool in mind for this particular game session. And I try not to be heavy-handed, even when I do use it.)). Basically, I worked out a few different plots that she could have in place, with the understanding that I would use whichever one seemed best when the characters caught up with things – and by best, I mean whichever one put the characters in the toughest position.

The basics of the thing were going to be the same: the White Court was going to do its level best to destroy Mstetice and everyone in it.

The simplest version of the plot was that the characters were going to be too late getting to Mstetice, and find that it had torn itself apart with rioting and murder. The players bypassed that by deciding to travel through the Mittelmarch ((Which is what the inhabitants of Bohemia in 1620 call the Nevernever.)) in order to get to Mstetice in an hour or so, rather than in two days.

It was a little sloppy of me, but I hadn’t actually thought of them doing that ((Yeah, in retrospect, it’s a pretty obvious tactic, but sometimes you just miss stuff.)). I asked the players to give me five minutes, and came up with a simple sketch chart for the trip through the Mittelmarch – just a few nodes with single-word descriptions like Fork, Valley, River, Ridge, and the like, with some connecting lines and decision points.

As I said, it only took about five minutes to rough it out, and then I asked the characters how they were doing things. They found a place in Prague with similar enough resonance to Mstetice ((In New Town, which is actually fairly peaceful and prosperous under the mayor’s leadership, despite the shadow of war cast over Prague. Quite similar to the feeling in Mstetice. Though Amadan warned them to avoid the New Town Square, with the haunted clock.)), and Izabela opened a way to the Mittelmarch.

I improvised the actual encounters along the trail to Mstetice, which wound up being an interesting challenge for me. See, I based things on ideas from myths, legends, and fairy tales, but I needed to avoid using the actual fey, because the borders of Faerie have been closed by the Queens. So, I put some strange things in, and figured I’d worry about what they meant if the characters actually investigated and paid attention. In keeping with the mythic theme, I decided they needed to pass through three challenges ((They actually faced four challenges, but didn’t pass through the ferryman challenge, so that doesn’t count.)) to reach their destination. The path they chose took them to:

  • A stone table heaped with dried fruit and clay bottles. They didn’t eat anything there, but instead left offerings of their own. I told them to put the Aspect Sacrificed at the Stone Table on their sheets ((This is an idea that I’m playing with, based on reading a bunch of other games, including Leverage, Apocalypse World, and similar things. I didn’t know what the Aspect meant, but I wanted to leave a hook for myself to use later, once I figured out what it meant.)).
  • An old ferryman who offered to take them across a river in return for their names. Emeric gave his name, but Izabela refused, and asked if she could give him something else. He asked for the secret that Odin had told her, and she refused that, as well, so they backtracked to a trail they had seen that led to a bridge over the entire canyon they were traveling in.
  • Spirits fighting a battle for possession of the bridge for their respective kings. The battle always ends with them all dead, then starts again if a living soul tries to cross the bridge, and the spirits try to persuade the newcomers to join their side and tip the balance. Emeric and Izabela tried reasoning with them, but had no luck ((They were very simple spirits.)), so Izabela used her magic to distract and confuse them while the pair escaped.
  • A giant shrike and another horrific monster ((That I made up on the spot as the big, honking THREAT after the shrike proved unequal to the task.)) that attacked while Izabela was trying to open a way back to Mstetice. Emeric took care of the shrike in very short order – one strike – and so I had a big, undefined monster start moving through the trees toward them. They managed to get through to the mortal world in time, and then Emeric held the beast off while Izabela sealed the rift.

They returned on the hill overlooking the village, and saw a large military force camped a few miles beyond it. Fearing the worst, they rode down to the bridge, and spoke with the folk there, to find that it was a Catholic force, and that the town had agreed to surrender at dawn. Izabela and Emeric agreed that was probably the best course, and took some time to cast a locating spell to try and find Lukrezia again. The spell pointed them to the Erlking’s Throne, so they set out.

At the menhir, they had a moderately unsatisfying meeting with Lukrezia, where she promised to leave Prague, to harm none on her way back to Italy, and to never return. Izabela and Emeric then promised not to pursue her ((Emeric threw in a promise of vengeance if she broke her vow, free of charge. He’s generous that way.)). The power of the place was such that the oaths were bound very tightly around everyone involved.

And that’s when Lukrezia told them that Kirchoff had left her service when he was told that they were leaving Prague, preferring to stay and exact his own vengeance on Izabela for the loss of his arm. He was back in Mstetice.

By the time they got back to town, things had gone to hell. In an incident inspired in my mind by the Boston Massacre, the fear in the villagers and the soldiers had spilled over into violence, two dozen soldiers were dead, and the rest were slaughtering the villagers and razing the village.

We ran into some difficulty at that point, because I hadn’t described the scene clearly enough, and we had to go back and change some things as the characters tried to do things that they though should be possible, but that I thought were suicidal. It was frustrating for both sides, because they couldn’t tell what their options were and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t see the available options ((Miscommunication is the underlying problem of most difficulties I’ve ever encountered in gaming. After all, rpgs are entirely exercises in structured communication.)). We solved part of the problem with a quick sketch map, showing why charging the bridge was a bad idea, but that there were other avenues of approach.

They got inside the village, and found the captain of the occupying force unwilling to listen to these two civilians who’d shown up out of nowhere after the villagers had – so he thought – engineered a trap for his men ((Weird, huh? There’s no trust anymore.)). Things escalated, and again got a little frustrating, and again it was my fault.

See, Izabela and Emeric are very powerful. But an army unit of three- to four-hundred men was too much for even them. The only question was how many the pair would take with them. I kept trying to impress this on them, to show them that, even though they were tough and powerful, fighting the whole army here was suicide. And Clint finally said, “So, what, we’re just supposed to run away and let the rest of the village get slaughtered?”

Wow. Of course not. No, these are heroes. Heroes with a personal stake here. I stood there with my mouth open for a second, then handed them each a couple of Fate Points, and said, “No. You’re right. Sorry. But fighting the entire army is suicide. What are you going to do?” And then I stopped trying to tell them how they were going to fail, and helped them find a way to succeed ((This is, I think, a very important lesson that I learned. If you want to run a heroic game, never penalize the characters for being heroic. Instead, look for ways to reward it.)).

Kirchoff was, of course, hiding in the church steeple, and with a couple of muskets and a few grenadoes. They ran him down and killed him, cleansed the captain and the inquisitors of his influence, and negotiated a withdrawal from Mstetice for the Catholic forces ((I decided that, this early in the Thirty Years War, this kind of atrocity hadn’t become commonplace yet, and the captain was wracked with guilt for what he had allowed to happen. It both allowed me to get the army out of there and showed that there were reasonable, honourable men on both sides of the war.)).

The heroes had saved about half the population of Mstetice, including Marta and her family, but the miller who was the de-facto mayor was dead, and so were a lot of other people. Very much a mixed victory for the pair. Still, it wrapped up the White Court storyline ((For now, at least.)), and took Kirchoff out of the picture, so I figured it was worth a Major Milestone.

Now I’m interested in what they plan to do next.

The New Centurions, Issue #5: Street Festival Fracas

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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Last Saturday was scheduled to be our re-start of my friend Clint’s awesome Shadowlands D&D campaign, which has been on hiatus for a few months. However, because both GM and players found the last session of New Centurions to be somewhat frustrating, Clint wanted to run one more session, so that we wouldn’t end on a low note ((Which would probably mean we would never come back to the game, which would be a shame.)).

One of the things he did to address the issues of the previous session was to have us all discuss and come to a consensus as to what type of superhero game we were playing. After a little bit, we decided that it was essentially Bronze Age, with some drift into Silver and Iron ((Discussion of the ages can be found here, though wikipedia uses the term Modern Age instead of Iron Age.)) at either end of the spectrum. Basically, what we decided was that the world is somewhat dark, but the worst excesses are off-stage, and the heroes are noble examples of what people can be. Honour and justice are important, and heroes don’t kill.

That discussion alone was a huge help in getting everyone on the same page.

The rest of the session was a long, wild combat, trying to stop the heist of a truck full of (stolen) electronics during a street festival. The mob, which had originally stolen the electronics, was using the street festival as cover to move the truck, and our nemesis, Lady Crimson, was going to take it away from them.

Clint set things up in a very interesting manner. Lady Crimson used some hired help ((Mostly patterned after the villains in Big Trouble in Little China.)) to distract us while her main muscle stole the truck. It almost worked, keeping us tied up dealing with the flying Chinese sorcerer, his conjured giant foo-dogs, grenades thrown into the crowd, and the weird orangutan monster, while the Five Dragons snatched the truck.

We managed to keep the truck from being stolen ((And S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. had it impounded for suspicion of trafficking in stolen goods, completely negating any gratitude the mob might have had for us.)), and we also captured Lady Crimson. She eventually told us where the stolen briefcase we needed to find was, in return for turning her over to a military official of her acquaintance ((Who ran a Suicide Squad type of black ops team, it seems.)) with a promise that she leave the city. We got the money back to La Familia, who delivered it to the Gambinos, who in turn promised to keep the lights on in La Familia territory.

And then the Gambinos sent someone to our secret base to let us know they had appreciated our help, and hoped they could count on our co-operation in future ((S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. is not pleased.)).

Over all, the session was a great success. Clint made sure we had clear objectives and could find a path to achieve them. The objectives conflicted at times, but that’s completely fine – it’s great, in fact, because it means we had to make some interesting choices. The key was that we were able to pull together to decide what to do, and then do it. It was pretty much all combat, except for a little wrap-up at the end, but that was good, too, in light of the previous session being pretty much action-free. It made a good balance to the previous session, and left us on a high note. We all had fun, and are looking forward to playing some more New Centurions.

But we’re also looking forward to getting back to Shadowlands in a couple of weeks.

The Real Story of the Spell: Cooperative Thaumaturgical Preparation in DFRPG

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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So, as you know if you’ve been following my blog, I’m starting a new Dresden Files RPG campaign. In fact, the first session is this coming Saturday. The past week or so, I’ve been helping my players get their characters finished up, and thinking about how I’m going to run this game.

One of the challenges I’m facing is that I’ve got two Thaumaturgists in the game. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but Thaumaturgy, when it happens and you pay attention to it, can take over the focus for a significant amount of game-time, and with two Thaumaturgists, I’ve had some concerns about whether that will force the other characters into the background ((I don’t really think it will, but it’s something to be aware of, so I can make sure it doesn’t happen.)).

Why? Well, because when someone decides on using Thaumaturgy, they snag the GM’s attention while they work out complexity, make up the Lore deficit, and then do the actual casting, possibly dealing with the fallout or backlash ((Details on all this stuff can be found in these two blog posts.)). That can eat up a good chunk of time for every spell they cast.

And it occurred to me. One of the biggest time sinks in using Thaumaturgy is the preparation phase -  the time when the Wizard was trying to make up the Lore deficit with maneuvers. The player spends some time looking over his or her skill list, trying to see what skill will work to put a maneuver on the spell for that all-important two-shift bump to Lore, while everyone else looks on, maybe making suggestions, maybe having side conversations, maybe wandering away for a bit.

But nowhere in the book does it say that the Wizard is the one who has to put the Aspect on the spell ((I fully expect that many of you were there ahead of me. Sometimes, little observations like this can take a while to make it to my brain.)). In some ways, it’s strongly implied – the examples all talk about Wizards making up the Lore deficit on their own spells. But some of the things you can do to add that Aspect are not necessarily things that need a Wizard.

The main thing with spellcasting in the game is that, mechanically, it is complex enough to require attention, but all the interesting bits happen narratively. That’s why there’s a sidebar stressing the importance of telling the story of the spell – making the preparation and casting of the spell interesting and involving. So, it makes sense that, in a game where you have several characters, that a person casting a spell would rope in some of his or her buddies to help with getting things ready.

So, send your cop buddy out to check the crime scene for blood – the sympathetic link you need to the creature that killed the schoolboy. Get your rich friend to buy you the amethyst you need to powder for the ritual. Send four other folks out to specific points on the map to act as the other points of your pentagram. Get that scholar in your group to look up the proper form of address for Sumerian royalty so that the ghost of the king will talk to you. They’re probably better at these things than you, anyway.

Does that sound like cheating? I mean, you’ve got Mediocre Athletics, so you get your pal with Superb Athletics to climb the cliff face to get water from the spring in the sacred cave. How is that fair? You’ve just co-opted someone else’s abilities, right?

Fair doesn’t enter into it, in my opinion. What you’ve done is taken a character who would otherwise have been sitting around waiting for his or her turn, and you’ve given him or her an opportunity to show off what that character is good at. And the GM can throw in a bit of interesting business with the whole thing, like maybe having to dodge a rock slide or leap over a crevasse, to throw a little bit of the spotlight on that character ((Remember that thing I said back here about helping each other find the cool? Well, here ya go. Concrete example.)).

In fact, if the spell is important enough ((This bit is vital. You don’t want to waste this schtick on every little spell that should be cast without any roll. Save it for when it’s something big and cool and important.)), you can have entire sessions that revolve around the preparation for a spell. Maybe the group needs to sneak into a secure place to work the ritual. The entire process of sneaking in can be a session, adding either a single Aspect that’s needed to the spell, or even adding a whole sequence of Aspects as people deal with things during the stealth mission to make sure that things go off without a hitch.

Like what? Well, how about Security Monitors Spoofed, Guards Rerouted, Doors Barricaded, Approaches Under Surveillance, and The Perfect Spot all working to give the spellcaster enough time to work the ritual without interruption?

It’s all about dramatizing the preparation ((This is something I’ve been doing sort of half-consciously, but not explicitly enough, in the Fearful Symmetries game, with Izabella’s investigation of the curse on Gold Lane. So far, she’s racked up four Aspects of the spell: Bound Angel, Anchor Points, Christian Magic, and Curse of Unsleeping. She’ll be able to use these Aspects to help her craft the ritual to unravel the curse when she makes up the Lore deficit.)) and involving the entire group. It’ll bring the story of the spell front and centre, and give everyone a hand in crafting it. And that just makes the game better.

It gives everyone a taste of the magical cool that is the Dresdenverse.

From the Armitage Files: Sideshow

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

I was faced with a bit of a game quandary last week. I really wanted to keep the momentum going after the great time the group had doing the city creation for Feints & Gambits by having the character creation session follow close on its heels. The date of November 13 got bandied about, but I had an Armitage Files game scheduled for that night. And given that the last time we got together for Armitage Files, we playtested The Big Hoodoo ((Short, non-spoilery review: you will want this adventure when it’s released.)) which, though fun, meant that we had been away from the ongoing Armitage Files storyline longer than I liked.

We came up with a compromise: Feints & Gambits character creation Saturday night, Armitage Files Sunday afternoon. As a thank-you for my Armitage players being willing to move the game, I also made dinner ((Lamb stew and soda bread. Did I mention I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Ireland lately?)) for the crew.

But the whole week was pretty crazy, and I had next to no time to prep for the game. Add to that the fact that I didn’t really know what the players wanted to pursue after the last adventure until Saturday afternoon, and even then they sent me two possibilities, and I was really feeling the time crunch. So, after everyone left on Saturday night and I had the stew in the slow cooker for the next day, I threw together a quick outline for one of the possibilities. In the morning, I threw together an outline for the other.

Now, this is far less prep than I usually do for a game. Even with the improvisational nature of this campaign, I really like having a solid outline ready when the game starts, even if I change it or abandon it during play. But no time for that; I was going in half-blind.

I want to talk about a couple of spoilery things – not necessarily for other campaigns, but my players probably shouldn’t read what I’ve hidden behind the tags here ((Yeah, Michael, that means you. I know how much you love it when I do this.)).

Spoiler

Okay, I really wanted to throw in a completely mundane bit this session. The group has been dealing with nothing but supernatural threats since the game started, and I really wanted to mix it up, because that way, they will wonder about other stuff. And it’s always an interesting change of pace. So, the outlines I bashed together for the two things they were interested in following up – the strong men at the carnival and the American Preservation League – were both completely non-mystical, though no less dangerous.

I also wanted them to come away from this with a win. The last few sessions have been very downbeat, with the players feeling like they’re not making enough of a difference, and even losing ground. While that may be in keeping with a Lovecraft story, it’ll kill a roleplaying game pretty quickly. So, I had things set up to resolve pretty easily if the characters grabbed the right threads, probably in a single session.

With those ideas in mind, we hit the ground running. The group used their various investigative abilities to track down the correct carnival and where it was heading next: a little town Bliss Corner, Massachusetts ((I know, I know, it’s not really a town, it’s a part of Dartmouth. But the name sort of leaped off the map at me, and I had to use it.)). They loaded themselves into a train and went down to check things out.

They arrived in town a few days before the carnival did, and scouted out the fairground and the town itself. Roxy passed herself off as a photographer doing a feature on carnivals – photographing the fairgrounds before arrival, during setup, during the carnival, during teardown, and after it departed. That got her close while the locals hired by the advance crew were cleaning out the weeds and tall grass, but the roustabouts wouldn’t let her on the lot during setup, for fear of accidents ((So they said, anyway. The group immediately suspected ulterior motives.)).

On the first night of the carnival, they paid their quarters, and went in to see the sights. I drew a lot of the description for the carnival from the excellent HBO TV series Carnivàle ((Which I’ve always thought would be a good setting for a DFRPG campaign. Or Unknown Armies. Yeah, that’d work.)), talking about the various games, a few rides, the sideshow tent, and the hootchie show in the back. They had a good time wandering the grounds, sampling the food, and riding the Ferris wheel. They spotted one of the roustabouts who seemed to be following them, and Roxy got a good picture of him from the Ferris wheel before they went to check out the sideshow tent.

Now, they had figured that this was the heart of the mystery, because that’s what it said in the documents, but I felt it was time to start them questioning assumptions about the accuracy of Armitage’s notes. So, they got in without any problem, and saw the contortionist, the fat woman, the sword-swallower/blockhead, the duelling strong men, and the half-human boy. This last one really creeped them out, and they figured that this was the weirdness that they would need to investigate and understand.

When the show was over, they were hustled out into the midway again, and the roustabout who had been following them knocked Roxy down and stole her camera. Moon and Solis gave chase, but Solis fell behind quickly, and the roustabout shouted, “Hey, Rube!” to get the rest of the carnies to get moon off his back ((There was some fun roleplaying here as Moon mistakenly assumed that Rube was the name of the big guy who had knocked him down, and kept calling him that. Considering that Rube is a derogatory term among carnies of the time, it kept making everyone angrier at Moon.)). The men were ejected forcibly from the fairground, and Roxy followed under her own power, sans camera.

Now more convinced than ever that there was something going on there, our heroes crept back in the middle of the night as the fair was shutting down, and hid in the trees and hedgerows lining the fairground, spying on the carnies after hours. They witnessed a meeting where the trouble they had stirred up was discussed, and the roustabout who had stolen the camera – Mitch was his name – was pretty soundly bawled out by the barker. The half-human boy, now dressed and pretty articulate after his beast-man show, suggested smashing the camera to satisfy Mitch’s worries about a picture and dumping it outside the fairground in case the police came looking for it. If things got tense, the carnival would pull up stakes early and head on to the next stop.

Everyone agreed to that, and it was done. Roxy, suspecting a trap, snuck back in the early hours of dawn to retrieve the camera from where it was dumped. She had made a Photography spend to get the picture of Mitch, so I figured that meant she would still be able to recover it, which she did. A Cop Talk spend revealed that Mitch was actually Garland Mitchell, last surviving member of the Red Clay gang of bank robbers, on the run from the feds.

That’s where we wrapped it up for the evening. Now the players have a couple of weeks to figure out what to do next, and so do I. I had expected to wrap this up in a single session, but now I have the time to expand the adventure and flesh some things out.

Feints & Gambits: This Is Who We Are

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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This past Saturday was the character creation session for the Feints & Gambits campaign that I’m starting up. After a little bit of schedule juggling, I managed to get all six players in the same room for the session, which is vital for the DFRPG character creation to really shine ((The game sessions themselves are going to be quorum-style, with a minimum of three players. That should make scheduling easier.)). Start time was delayed slightly by the Santa Claus Parade ((Tied up traffic in the downtown area, and several of the folks were coming across town.)), but we got underway around 8:00, so we were able to wrap things up by midnight.

I had a little surprise for the players, as well: I had burned a little of the midnight oil, and managed to get the setting bible for the game completed and printed for them. So, as they walked in, I handed them each a copy for their very own ((Those of you who might be interested in seeing the finished document, it’s up on our forum in .pdf format here.)), which they seemed to like ((And then, of course, Sandy found a typo within two minutes.)).

Everyone in the game knew the basics of character creation, either from the playtest or from Spirit of the Century, so there wasn’t a lot of set-up that I had to do. We jumped right in, following the phases in the book, and sorting the characters out. Along the way, we had some discussions about different parts of the game: Aspects, Powers, Stunts, Skills, and the like, as players had questions.

Once again, the group character creation really shone. The group brainstorming about Aspects, discussion of character motivation, clarification of background, all of it really fed the whole process. I know that at least a couple of character concepts changed and clarified for the players, and I think everyone came away with a character that was made better by the input of the group. And it was really great to see the players getting more interested in, and more excited by, their characters.

Now, if you read over the setting bible, you’ll see that the fey are a really big factor in supernatural Dublin ((Of course they are! It’s Ireland, for crying out loud!)), and they came up a lot in the character creation, as well. Pretty much every character has at least one encounter with the fey in their background. And these encounters are never good. Why am I commenting on this? Well, because it’s really showing me what the players want in the game. They don’t like faeries, so it makes sense that the fey courts are going to be frequent opposition, or at least complications, in the game.

This is such a useful tool for the GM. After all, we’ve got four different overarching threats in the setting bible, but the players all zeroed in on the fey courts. Not Baba Yaga and her crew. Not the political situation. Not the Church-sponsored strike force. The fey courts. It’s showing me what they find most interesting, what they think is the main theme of the game, and how they look at that theme. Rich, rich fodder for building scenarios.

Not that I’m going to focus everything on the fey courts. I mean, the city creation session comes up with so much stuff that I’d be an idiot to ignore everything but one aspect of it. But it does mean that the fey influence is going to be prevalent and pervasive. And most likely annoying for the characters.

I took a little extra time swapping around the novels for the guest-star phases to make sure that the net of connections spread wide enough. I wanted to make sure that everyone got two different guest stars, and guest-starred in the stories of two different characters, giving them connections to four of the six characters in play. It just makes it easier to draw everyone together if the network has more connections.

So, who are the characters?

  • Aleister Usher, Venatori Guardian
  • Kate Owens, Wiccan Seeker
  • Rogan O’Herir, Were-Cat Stalker
  • Firrin O’Beara, Changeling Social Engineer
  • Nathaniel O’Malley, Angry Irish Spellslinger
  • Mark O’Malley, Irish Mystic Hacker ((Not hacker in the computer sense, you understand. Hacker in that he tinkers with the ideas and rules of magic, mainly looking to circumvent them.))

Once the character creation phases were done, we talked a little about what the next steps were. The consensus was that everyone wanted to stop for the evening, and to assess the more mechanical bits of character creation – Powers, Skills, Stunts, etc. – on their own, with me answering questions and providing advice via e-mail. So that’s what we did.

So far, I’ve seen at least preliminary builds from three of the six players, and they all look good. I’m getting excited to run the game. In fact, I’ve scheduled the first one for two weeks from the character building. That should, I hope, get them moving on finishing up the characters. I think I’m going to be doing some playing with the Glass Bead Game, as suggested by Rob Donoghue on his blog, to put together the first session.

It’ll be fun.

New Centurions, Issue #4: Now What?

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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Last Friday was the latest session of our BASH superheroes game, run by Clint. I have to say that I think everyone – players and GM alike – found it a little frustrating.

For a change, though, it wasn’t the system. In fact, I think that the system ran pretty smoothly, and generally got out of the way of the adventure, when it wasn’t making the adventure possible. It also wasn’t the adventure itself that caused the problems, nor anything that Clint did.

No, what I think we’ve run into now is the fact that, after four sessions, we’re finally able to start sorting out what our characters are and can do – something that generally happens in the first couple of sessions of a game. What with the system change and the tweaks and the growing cast of players, we’ve been resetting our experience with the game pretty much every session. Now that we’re somewhere fairly stable, we’ve gotta start figuring out who we are and how to make our characters work.

What was so frustrating about this game? Well, we couldn’t seem to advance the plot, is what it comes down to. As players, we couldn’t find a clear path forward, because we kept flailing around in different directions. We uncovered some clues to things, but many of them pointed us to the problem of the sinkholes that started the game. While useful, and the two things may be linked in some manner, we couldn’t find any connection between those events and our main mission – to retrieve the suitcase of cash before the time limit expired ((Speaking as someone who GMs a lot, I know how frustrating it is as a GM to see the players floundering. Judging the clues is a tough call, because the GM sees them in context, but the players don’t. What may seem like a complete giveaway to the GM can still be completely opaque to the players. Kudos to Clint for keeping things moving at all.)).

So, the session was spent interrogating criminals, exploring old theatres, trekking through sewers following trails of black blood, negotiating with mob bosses, and hitting up contacts. All these things were interesting and valid aspects of the adventure, but they felt like what they were – five characters pulling in different directions, flailing around to find a loose thread to pull on in order to unravel the mystery. In fact, near the end of the session, we realized that we had no hope of solving things within the time limit, so we wound up going to a mob boss and negotiating an extension, and that, to me, felt like a failure.

Again, I want to stress that this is not anything anyone has done in the game; it’s not anyone’s fault, and it was still a nice evening out with friends. But I really think we need to get a handle on what our characters are, and what the game is, to make sure we get the enjoyment out of playing that we expect. And that’s something we’re all going to have to work at.

I also want to point out that there was a lot of neat roleplaying in the session, and some great character development. Despite our frustrations, I think we all had fun. The only thing really missing was a sense of accomplishment. I think if we can get a grip on the characters, and get focused on what we want to accomplish in the story, the game will take off in a big way. It’s the fact that we’re four sessions in, and every session feels like we – the players and GM – are fighting an uphill battle to find the fun, that leads to the frustration.

And, at the end of the session, we still didn’t have a solid line on where the stolen briefcase was. Just a lead to someone who might be able to get us to someone who might be willing to tell us where the person who snatched it is. But first, we have to talk to the gang who has us looking for the briefcase to let them know we got them an extension on their payoff, at the low, low price of an extra 50k. I’m sure they’ll understand.

This session didn’t go all that well. Next session will be better, because we’ll figure things out.

Three Hundred

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Wow. We’re at 300 posts. Wow.

In a lot of ways, I’m surprised that the blog has lasted this long. I’m surprised at how much I still enjoy writing for it, and I’m gratified how many people come to take a look every day.

I’ve been looking over the stuff I’ve been writing the past 100 posts, and – unsurprisingly, really – much of it revolves around The Dresden Files RPG, which, if you folks recall, is the reason I started writing this blog in the first place. I had also intended to talk more about other things on my mind – books, movies, TV, etc. – but this has turned into a gaming blog first and foremost. Which makes sense; gaming is my primary hobby, after all. But it’s nice that I’m hitting post 300 at the same time I’m starting a new DFRPG campaign with a lot of the players from my original playtest. Feels like coming full circle.

But It’s nice to see that there are a number of you out there who have become regulars, here. And it’s nice to see that references to this blog are showing up in other forums. Hell, who am I kidding? It’s better than nice; it’s a huge stroking for my already-inflated ego!

Really, though, it’s just very gratifying to me that there are a growing number of readers out there who seem to be interested in what I’m posting here. Thank you all for coming by and leaving the occasional comment.

It took me about a year to get the first hundred posts up, and then about another year for the second hundred posts. It’s only been nine months for this third hundred – I’m obviously blogging more frequently and regularly, and that’s a good thing ((Mostly, anyway. I’ve been kind of neglecting some of my other writing in favour of keeping the blog up to date with my games. Gonna have to think about how to handle that.)).

As is usual, I’m going to show a few stats from the past 100 posts.

  • 300 posts (obviously)
  • 24 pages (no change)
  • 10 categories (up 4 from post 200, and heavily reorganized)
  • 336 tags (up 28 from post 200 – I created roughly 67% fewer these past hundred posts)
  • 1,013 comments (up 533 from post 200) ((And the winner for getting comment #100 is Karla! Congratulations! You win… nothing, I’m afraid. But thanks for the comment! EDIT: This should read comment #1000. Sorry about that, folks!))
  • Average of 267 hits a day, including RSS subscribers ((The big bump, of course, was when I did the DFRPG Q&A series last February. But still, that’s some significant growth over the last 100 posts.))
  • The U.S. accounts for roughly 62% of my hits, with Canada in second place at 18%, and the U.K. in third with 8%. Australia, and Germany each have about 2% each.
  • Winnipeg, my home town, is the city giving me the most hits, at 5,795.
  • Total number of hits since April 2009: 60,664

Yes, that’s right. Total number of hits has quintupled over the past 100 posts. That’s absolutely amazing to me. And, while the boom has ended, there are still a fair number of folks who keep stopping by.

Thank you all for that. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting. Thanks for coming back.

Tomorrow should see the start of the next hundred posts.

Hope you like them.

Fearful Symmetries: Fireworks

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Last Friday was Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. One of my players pointed it out to me ((As if I needed to be told. I’ve read V for Vendetta!)), and I told her that I knew about it, and had planned some explosions for the Fearful Symmetries game we had planned that night.

Because I had.

We picked up the game with our heroes having moved to a bolt-hole provided to them by Zuckerbastl to keep them out of Malvora sight. Emeric had recently learned how to change the appearance of his human guise ((By way of a stunt we cooked up and the expenditure of a point of Refresh. I knew he wouldn’t hang on to a Refresh Rate of 2 for long!)), and Izabela used her biomancy to change her appearance to that of a young man. Thus disguised, they decided to carefully try and pursue their path forward.

Emeric made the rounds of his network of contacts in disguise, bringing them word that he was going to be unavailable and out of sight for a time, and that it might be safer for everyone to distance themselves from him and thus avoid the worst of the Malvora attention. He also went to see Reverend Nicola at the chapel on Petrin’s Hill, to thank him for the blessing he had received ((Which had proved very helpful against the Arkady.)). The good Reverend offered to bless him again, which Emeric accepted.

Izabela, meantime, went back to Gold Lane to continue her investigation of the curse surrounding it, which seems to have become a bit of an obsession for her. She found that there were mystic anchor points to the spell around its perimeter, sunk deep in the ground, so she used her Sight to get a better idea of what sort of thing she was dealing with. I described a web of chains of various metals, inscribed with arcane symbols, rising from the anchor points into the air above the centre of Gold Lane, with smaller, finer chains leading to barbed hooks sunk into the flesh of the inhabitants. In the midst of the chains, hovering over middle of Gold Lane, was a giant humanoid, wrapped in the chains so as to be almost obscured. It had vast, shining wings stretching out from its shoulders, and a huge sword of fire ((I was going for a kinda Final Fantasy look to the whole thing, but not too obviously so.)) – apparently, another angel tied into service.

Now, this hit her pretty hard with the mental stress, and she got to keep her Third Eye open an extra round to look at it some more. When she finally got her Third Eye closed, that’s when I had Kirchoff ((Who I had elevated to Named NPC after he got away from her last session, albeit minus an arm.)) pop out of the shadows and hit her with his Incite Emotion power. This caught her pretty much blindsided, and she took another hefty hit in the brain, sufficient to inflict a consequence, before she even spotted him. At that point, though, she pulled the gloves off and blasted him with force. He took the hit, but it didn’t put him down, and he scarpered again.

She headed over to the Goblin’s Brewery for a bit of a rest and refreshment, which is where Emeric currently was, talking with Amadan, who seemed to be in good spirits, even buying food and drink for his guests, and hinting that he had the line on a wager that he was expecting to pay off. Emeric asked him to put the word out that he and Izabela had left town, but Amadan proposed that, instead, he would put the word out that the pair were hiding in the cellar of the house where Amadan had rooms, so that they could set up a trap.

This worked, sort of. Izabela wrapped the room in a ward that would prevent the fear abilities of the White Court from being effective, and they settled in to wait. Some time after midnight, the attack came, but it was indirect – the vampires set fire to the building. Emeric extinguished the fire with his pyromancy, and the pair of them went cautiously upstairs to see what they could see. When they got to the second floor, a grenado came flying in through the window.

Izabela swatted it back out and high over the city, where it exploded ((See? Fireworks!)), and they both went to the window to try and see where it had come from, and thus both were fired upon by the snipers set up across the street. These snipers, not wanting to face these folks head on, took off across the rooftops, escaping pretty quickly.

They’d had enough, now. They headed back across the river to the Malvora manor, where the guards were arrayed in the yard in front of the house. Not bothering with subtlety, Emeric set the house on fire, and Izabela threw a whirlwind into the guards to clear their way to the house.

I didn’t want to turn the hunt through the burning house for Lukrezia Malvora into a dungeon crawl, so I switched to a very narrative approach for this stage. They made their way through the place, shooing out the mortals, killing the vampires (about a dozen of them), and eventually finding Lukrezia’s bedroom. Lukrezia wasn’t there, but they found her hidden closet full of blackmail information, including a file on the Valdstejn family.

They were pretty much at loose ends at that point, so they went back to the basement to retrieve Kirchoff’s arm – which was, of course, missing. But Amadan had a surprise for them: he had caught them a White Court vampire, and had it strapped to a table.

And that’s where we left it.

C4 Report

By | | What's he playing?
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Last weekend, I spent Saturday and Sunday at the Central Canada Comic Convention, demoing games for Imagine Games and Hobbies. It was a fun time, with lots of folks coming by to look at, talk about, and try out the games we had on display.

I brought a bunch of games ((At this point, I want to mention that I managed to pack everything into a Paladin Mission Pack and a Paladin Mission Go Bag, that I got from Darkthreads. These packs are amazing – they hold a ton of stuff, and are very easy to carry, as you’d expect in bags designed for special forces. If you’ve got a bunch of stuff to carry, I heartily recommend them.)) to show off: Castle Ravenloft, Talisman, Beowulf The Legend, Fury of Dracula, Arkham Horror, Zombie Dice, Cthulhu Dice, Fiasco, and Monty Python Fluxx. So, of course, the first game I wound up demoing was one that I hadn’t heard anything about, or knew anything about.

This was the Resident Evil Deckbuilding Game. A group of folks came over specifically to try it out, Imagine Games having got a preview demo copy, and Pedro said, “Sure. Rick, figure it out and teach it to them ((Thanks again for that, Pedro.)).” Fortunately, the game was very similar to Dominion, with a few wrinkles – less interaction with other players, and a mechanic for fighting zombies, of course. It took about half an hour to get things set up and running – and about twenty minutes of that was to sort out the various piles of cards.

But we got through that, and the people who played said that it was a pretty good game. I got called away once things were running to do some more demos.

I ran a huge number of Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice games – they’re just about perfect games for demoing at cons, being fast, easy, fun, and flashy with the colourful dice. A surprising runner-up for demos was Monty Python Fluxx, which again runs pretty fast – about half an hour – and is a great deal of fun.
A bigger time investment was Castle Ravenloft. It took about fifteen minutes to set up, and we ran through the introductory scenario with five players in about an hour and a half. I ran it on the easiest setting, and am glad I did, because it will chew up the characters and spit them out. Still, the group managed to recover the Icon of Ravenloft and survive, though it looked touch-and-go there for a bit.

I also managed to talk a couple of people into a demo of Fiasco that turned into a whole game. We used the Southern Town playset, and wound up with two cousins competing to sell their grandfather’s civil war memorabilia to a German businessman, with my restaurant owner inserting himself as greedy middleman. Things went to hell pretty quickly ((Of course they did. It’s Fiasco.)), and it all ended in a fiery explosion and jail time. We managed, by staying focused and moving quickly, to get through the game in a little more than an hour.

I also set up Arkham Horror for a big game on Sunday, but only one of the players who signed up ((This year, I decided to do sign-up sheets for a few sessions, to allow people to schedule a time to play, if they wanted. It was not a huge success. No one signed up for Castle Ravenloft or Fiasco, but I wound up running a session of each at different times. Four people signed up for Arkham Horror, but only one showed. As I said, not a huge success, but we still got a lot of gaming done.)) for the session showed, and that’s just not enough to make a good game. So, I apologized, and the player went back to the Gamma World table, which was running great guns.

So, all in all, a busy, fun weekend. Glad I’ve got this weekend off, though. Two busy game weekends in a row is too much for an old guy like me.