My Development Blog For...

PacifiCon 2009

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:49:31 GMT

Evidently ConQuest is dead and it's long live PacifiCon now. It was all Cthulhu all the con as I ran a game of Call of Cthulhu (Toteninsel), and played in games of Call of Cthulhu (A Black Brothers Production, Here There Be Tygers, and Once Men) and CthulhuTech (Nemesis).

[post @ my personal blog...]

The (Mis)adventures of Lt. Mason A. Schufeldt

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:06:22 GMT

Just finished reading The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, about the designer of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and serial killer H.H. Holmes. It was readable but overrated (I wanted more with the "Changed America" and didn't get it), but I was happily struck by a few scant words on the fate of poor Lt. Schufeldt of the US Army:

Time was so short, the Executive Committee began planning exhibits and appointing world's fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schulfedt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair, "a family of twelve or fourteen of the fierce little midgets."

Followed by...

Meanwhile young Lieutenant Schulfedt had reached Zanzibar. On July 20 he telegraphed Exposition President William Baker that he was confident he could acquire as many Pygmies from the Congo as he wished, provided the king of Belgium consented.

Unfortunately...

Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies. Lieutenant Schufeldt was dead, of unclear causes.

I don't know which fills me with more inspiration, the idea of Lt. Schufeldt meeting his fate in an African jungle as he comes upon a tribe of cannibalistic pygmies worshipping a tongue-faced god, or said pygmies making it to Chicago after all to serve "long pig" to fair-goers in between Tesla's electrical exhibit on one side and Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show on the other side.

Children of Earth and Curse of the Yellow Sign

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:35:29 GMT

This is a joint post to my gaming livejournal and my personal blog, due to the cross-topics being discussed.

This week, I saw that latest (last?) Torchwood series, Children of Earth, and read the first act in the Curse of the Yellow Sign series for Call of Cthulhu. I expected one to be marginal and the other to rock, and was surprised on both fronts. MAJOR SPOILER WARNING for those that continue...

Torchwood defines the term "uneven." When it premiered three years ago, I had expected a darker, adult take on the Doctor Who mythos, one where humanity faced the same kind of otherworldly threats as the Doctor but had no Time Lord know-how or status to succeed without loss and sacrifice. Instead, Torchwood saw "adult" as an excuse to inject more sex and violence into the mix, while maintaining the goofy cheese of the new Doctor Who series. There's nothing wrong with trashy sex-&-gore (see the current HBO series True Blood), but British have always been able to inject a dark and unsettling political subtext when they made adult sci-fi. Torchwood failed in this, and could never elevate itself beyond cheese-tastic in those all-t00-few moments where it was more than adequate. Yet, in its latest series, Children of Earth, it finally became something more.

The first three episodes of the mini-series were effective, with its murkily-seen alien antagonist and hints at a horrifying exchange of children in the past. Then, with the fourth episode, Children of Earth ramped up the horror in a brutal and intelligent manner, as political leaders sat around a table and slowly descended into a moral hell where not only would children be given over to the aliens, but it would the "right" kind of children (first the illegal aliens, then the poor, then all those but the politically-connected). Even in its absurd trappings, that scene is frighteningly realistic, and, as with the best sci-fi, more about our present than anything fantastic. Then it gets even darker in the finale, where a political figure who was in that room murders his family and commits suicide rather than watch them turned over to the aliens and live with his complicity in the act. And then the usually cheesy Captain Jack pulls the switch to sacrifice his own grandson in the only chance humanity has to end the alien threat and save the 10% of the world's children that would otherwise be handed over. Both are unimaginable crimes, made all the more horrifying in that they were also absolutely reasonable things to do in that situation, carried out by "good" men.

On the other hand, we have Curse of the Yellow Sign: Act 1: Digging for a Dead God, a Call of Cthulhu scenario by reknowned game designer John Wick. As its title suggests, it's only the first part of a trilogy of scenarios, so this individual product is rather thread-bare: nothing particular of the Hastur Mythos appears, and the scenario doesn't end with any kind of conclusive climax. Indeed, there are no set events in the scenario beyond introducing the characters to the plot. What does exist is the premise: the setting is sub-saharan Africa in 1939, and the characters are German SS personnel working on a covert operation to mine diamonds when they unearth something alien and malevolent. While that alien prescence exerts a sanity-damaging influence on the characters, there is no plan to foil, ritual to carry out, Gate to close, or cultists to slaughter. All that is likely to happen in this unstructured game is that the characters will carry out acts of depravity and violence until... well, I guess everyone decides they've had enough and call it a night.

That actually appeals to me, as I've been thinking about running a "sandbox" game to work out the railroad-y tendencies I'm worried might be prevalent in my GM style. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be running Digging for a Dead God for reasons that became apparent after I'd finished Children of Earth. You see, the reason Children of Earth was so effective was not that horrible acts happened, but that it was good people carrying out those acts, honorable and empathetic characters forced into a very dark situation. Yet in Digging for a Dead God, you've got Nazi player characters (mostly), so that when they murder and torture and fall into darkness, there's hardly any moral distance from which they have to fall. I am a great proponent of the kind of personal horror Digging for a Dead God is trying to attain, and I definitely agree that CoC needs more of that than yet another ritual to disrupt; but if you play scumbags, there's no room for personal horror when all the story asks them to do is engage in scumbaggery.

I could probably avoid this if I changed the characters from Nazis to something less intrinsicly evil, but it means nothing if I simply file the serial numbers off to make the characters mercenaries or put them in another setting. I would have to establish the characters as intrinsicly "good" (ie. likely to be upset about putting villagers in a hot box) and still create a situation where they would be doing the kind of actions they are in the written scenario. In other words, I'd have to write a completely new scenario, and considering how little there is in Digging for Dead God (literally, you're Nazis, you torture Africans, and a dark god whispers to you - that is pretty much it), it just wouldn't be worth it. So, while I will probably pick up Act 2 of the trilogy (I do want a sandbox game focused on personal horror), this first part does nothing for me, except reinforce why Nazis make for lousy player characters.

Music for Gaming: 8mm

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:29:18 GMT

This would probably make a great soundtrack for a horror game. The heavy use of Middle Eastern-sounding music would also make it good for games set in that area. The more incidental-sounding tracks are generic enough to be used in any modern time period, whether that be the '20s or the 2000s.

The House
(Mychael Danna, 2:05)
Setting: Middle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern (i.e. 1900s-today)
Mood: Creepy

The Call
(Mychael Danna, 1:44)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Noir

The Film
(Mychael Danna, 1:10)
Setting: Middle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Creepy

Cindy
(Mychael Danna, 0:57)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Noir

Missing Persons
(Mychael Danna, 4:46)
Setting: Middle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Action
Period: Modern
Mood: Any

What Would You Choose
(Mychael Danna, 3:12)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Noir

Hollywood
(Mychael Danna, 2:52)
Setting: Middle Eastern
Vocals: Some
Scene: Atmosphere
Period: Modern
Mood: Ritual

Unsee
(Mychael Danna, 1:20)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Creepy

Dance with the Devil
(Mychael Danna, 5:37)
Setting: Any
Vocals: Some
Scene: Action
Period: Tribal
Mood: Ritual

The Third Man
(Mychael Danna, 1:17)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Atmosphere
Period: Alien
Mood: Creepy

Loft
(Mychael Danna, 1:57)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Action
Period: Ultramodern (from today to futuristic)
Mood: Tactical

I Know All About...
(Mychael Danna, 1:41)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Creepy

366 Hoyt Ave.
(Mychael Danna, 1:46)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Creepy

Scene of the Crime
(Mychael Danna, 5:53)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Suspense
Period: Modern
Mood: Tactical

Machine
(Mychael Danna, 3:31)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Creepy

Rainstorm
(Mychael Danna, 3:50)
Setting: MIddle Eastern
Vocals: None
Scene: Action
Period: Modern
Mood: Horror

Home
(Mychael Danna, 1:32)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Investigation
Period: Modern
Mood: Noir

Dear Mr. Wells
(Mychael Danna, 1:49)
Setting: Any
Vocals: None
Scene: Pathos
Period: Modern
Mood: Bittersweet

This may not include every track on the album, as some of them don't work as background music for gaming. For an explanation of how I define the terms for each field, see here.

Music for Gaming

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:44:43 GMT

In the process of transferring over my MP3's and other music files from an old desktop to a new one, I lost some of the info I'd inputted into the Itunes entries for the files, forcing me to go through them one by one. I've built up a library of music files categorized for game use, mostly instrumental scores from movies, TV shows, and video games broken down by genre (usually Soundtrack), grouping (usually Score), subroupings (definitions added on to grouping based on the geographic origin of the music), scene (what kind of action is going on), setting (what time period the music is good for), and mood (the kind of emotions the music tends to inspire). Right now, these are the fields I've built up:

SUBGROUPINGS: African, Asian, Caribbean, Celtic, Eastern European, French, German, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Native American, Oceanic, Russian, Soviet, Spanish

SCENE: Action (usually a combat scene, but can be any kind of intense effort), Atmosphere (not for any definite kind of scene), Investigation (mysterious background), Pathos (trying to evoke a particular kind of emotion), Suspense (tense and more immediate-sounding than Investigation)

SETTING: Alien (weird and definitely abnormal sounds), Any, Baroque (somewhere between Medieval and Modern), Fantasy (like Medieval but with a more mystical sound), Medieval (anything that evokes a period of the European Middle Ages or older), Modern (any time period from the early 20th century to today), Pulp (like Modern but evoking a distinctly adventurous and heroic attitude), Tribal (primitive and/or ritualistic sounding), Ultramodern (could be of today but also futuristic-sounding, probably techno), Western (evoking the feel of the American Old West)

MOOD: Any, Battle (background for large military conflict), Bittersweet (like Melancholy but not as hopeless), Creepy, Festive (evoking a celebratory scene), Horror (sounds inspired by absolute terror), March (like a military column or caravan, something that denotes movement), Melancholy (softer and less immediate than Horror but in the same vein), Mystical (otherworldly background but not necessarily frightening), Noir (evoking dark foreboding, usually uses horns), Ritual (steady beats, chanting), Sentimental (hopeful background), Tactical (like Battle but on a smaller scale, could be used for any kind of intense action), Triumph (uplifting, epic tones), Wonder (also epic but specifically of a wondrous nature)

So what I'm going to start doing is posting the data I built for each album, one at time, no more than one every day or so. Hopefully, this might be of some use to people who use music to set the scene for their games.

KublaCon 2009

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:08:58 GMT

It's saying something that I had such a good experience at this year's KublaCon, because it had no business being anything other than a complete clusterfuck. The con staff scheduled and re-scheduled my two games around so much that I was completely stressed out by the time I ran them and had to deal with players showing up to the wrong room or two hours after the game began. Yet, the games I played in and the players that attended my games were so good that I can honestly say that this was one of the few conventions that was a consistently enjoyable experience.

KublaCon was the first game convention I ever attended, and has always been my favorite among the Bay Area cons. Even though I don't really play boardgames, miniature games, or card games, the fact that KublaCon maintains a solid balance of different kind of games means that most everyone there finds what they are looking for, creating some kind of shared karmic consciousness of geek Nirvana that buoys the spirit. And then there's the hotel: walking into the DunDraCon hotel feels like putting on a stained trenchcoat, while at the KublaCon hotel, with its beautiful atrium and bright architecture, you always feel like a perfectly normal adult, even as people walk around in leather LARP outfits and scream "KUBLA!" every five minutes.

The House that Jaeger Built (Call of Cthulhu)
The game I played on Friday evening was run by Jack Young, who I've played with many times but only as fellow players, and I was as impressed as I suspected I'd be with his GM skills. It was probably one of the two or three best con games I've ever had (I'd count the other two as a Delta Green game by mygamethoughts and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game by Todd Furler). Like me, Jack is a prop whore, and had a Nazi document handout that puts to shame anything I've put together for my WWII-era CoC games. The setting was rather like Delta Green as an openly-known government agency, and I played a Russian-born FBI driver/martial artist. As I've been recently wasting my life playing GTA 4, this meant I get my inner Niko Bellic on, and I had a blast doing it. Jack did a great job building everything to a desperate climax, and the players were all engaging. Great start to what would be a very good con.

Oh Brother, What Art That? (Trail of Cthulhu)
On Saturday morning, I came into this game thinking it would be the Coen Brothers movie as an inspiration, only to find that most of the characters were taken directly from the film. As I let the other players choose their characters, I thought to myself that any of them would've been great so long as I didn't have to play Pete (the John Turturro character), as the film character's defining traits were being obnoxious, loud, and argumentative: exactly those traits that bad role-players bring to the table when they are at their worst. Sure enough I ended up with Pete, and while it was balancing act to try to stay true to the character without becoming tiresome to the other players, I think it worked out okay. It was definitely more comedic than horrific, but that's what I expected based on the source material, and the game was a tremendous amount of fun. A definite favorite moment was when, during a gun-battle with monstrous cultists, Pete, having hidden in a bush, walks out, sets the bush on fire, and proceeded to try to impersonate the Cthulhoid god to get the cultists to fight each other. Another great game where the players were all solid and the GM was very much on their game, I was also impressed with the ToC system. Combat this time did finally feel lethal, and while I'm still not going to say it is better than CoC, I'm ready to admit that it is it's equal.

Toteninsel (Call of Cthulhu)
I submitted this game to be run at 6pm for 6 hours, but the con staff asked me to reschedule to 8pm. These changes didn't make it to the con booklet, which meant mass confusion for awhile as I thought I would be running at 6pm, ending with much gnashing-of-teeth as unpaid and unappreciated con staff apologized for mistakes that were really out of everyone's hands. Jeannine showed up with the Cthulhu-shaped cupcakes she had made at 6pm, so we got to have some much-need and de-stressing time together before my game actually started. I had forgotten about the cupcakes by then, but when I did hand them out in the middle of the game they were a very big hit.

Now everytime I've run Toteninsel, it's gone well, and this was no exception. The players were all great, and I got to game with a friend who I hadn't played with (or really seen) in quite awhile. This was the first time that the paranoia elements between the characters got played up, and while this derailed things as one side of the table was sent on a wild goose chase, we were able to bring the story about to what I think was a satisfying end for all. There was however one major exception in the fact that, while Toteninsel usually runs no longer than 7 hours at the most, this time it ran for well over 8 hours. That wouldn't have been bad, had my game began when I wanted at 6pm; but, starting at 8pm meant I didn't get them done until 4:30 the next morning and I didn't hit the sack until 5:30. Still, the fact that nobody nodded off, all were involved (if tired) right up to the end, and everyone left happy, tells me that the game was a success.

The Last Flight of the Cathay Clipper (Call of Cthulhu)
Having not waken up in time on Sunday morning to make the LARP I signed up for, I got screw by the scheduling bugs again when I was told that I would running my next game at 6pm instead of 8pm as I had thought. This meant that I had no afternoon game to play that wouldn't conflict with my schedule, so I spent my day in my room writing up a new character for the game (to replace what I always felt was a rather boring PC). My third time running this scenario was not so charmed, although I consider the first half of the game to have been absolutely spot-on perfect. The players were completely into it, roleplaying their characters with glee and wit, and everything was an absolute joy, Once again, I forgot to bring the Cthulhupcakes until mid-game, when they were another instant hit (everyone tore out their cellphone cameras before commencing to munch). And then the game entered the "mortal danger" phase and dice began rolling and everything kinda fell to shit. The pace, which up till then, had been solid, slowed to a crawl as the players got bored, and I felt powerless to change things, mainly because whatever part of my brain that handles improvisational creativity had been fried by too little sleep from late night GMing and too much aggravation from con scheduling. Some of the players expressed (with honesty and not sympathy) that they had a really great time, and I don't think it was a total disaster, but it was almost worse for me because I feel I had created a really special gaming moment in that first half which should have ended in that rare complete success. I think what I have in this scenario is a good introduction with interesting characters, but the antagonist and climax really needs to be taken back to code so that the horror becomes more visceral than rolls against Sanity and Hit Points.

The Case of the Misplaced Magician (Call of Cthulhu)
My Monday morning game was run by an old friend of mine, and was a straightforward but satisfying murder mystery. I don't know if he'll run it again and, even if he did, I doubt that anyone who would plays it would be reading this, but I'll still be brief to avoid spoilers. I was worried about playing in an investigative game on a Monday morning, when I am always so burnt-out that all I really want to do is punch things, but, after a slow but very short start, the pace picked up and remained exciting right through to the finish.
Despite what happened with my Sunday game, which I think counted more as a flawed success more or less, I can still say that every game was fun as hell. Somehow, I lucked out in playing with skilled GMs and, most surprisingly, sets of players filled with exceptional role-players who got into their characters as well as being friendly and witty. No one was That Guy at the gaming table, and I was grateful that I never had one of my own That Guy moments. I hope ConQuest turns out the same, with the caveat that it would be nice to play at least one game that wasn't Lovecraft-related.

Fundable for Keith Herber's Widow

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:44:00 GMT

Keith Herber, one of the leading authors that created the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game in its formative years, passed away yesterday. Simply looking over the listing of his work at Pen & Paper RPG Database shows how much he has added to both CoC and this hobby as a whole. What stands out for me from that list are his work on the 1920's Investigator's Companion and Escape From Innsmouth, both of which set the standard of classic Lovecraftian roleplaying gamebooks.

It was a shame that Herber died just as he was getting back into publishing CoC material for his new imprint at Miskatonic River Press. I didn't know Keith beyond a few discussions we shared on the yog-sothoth.com forums, but he always struck me as an intelligent, informed designer, one that got what CoC was all about and why it could be such an satisfying game to share with others. A fundable has been set up for Keith's widow Sharon at http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2009-03-14.8857145180 - I have contributed some money and would appreciate it if others who have enjoyed Keith's work would donate any small amount, which will go to defraying the costs of any funeral expenses that Mrs. Herber may have to endure.

Professional Competence and Insane Effort

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:53:02 GMT

In my last post, I tried to address the charge that characters are too incompetent in Call of Cthulhu by granting more points to spend in the BRP point-buy character creation system on characteristics and skills. Another way to deal with the problem* might be in using one or both of these house rules:

Professional Competence
To create characters that are more likely to be more competent at their occupational skills than those who studied the same skill as a hobby, each character assigns 8 occupational skills (which must be at a professional level of 60%) that they can flip-flop once per scene. The player can flip-flop as many times per scene as they choose, but only once in a scene on a particular skill. So a doctor with a Medicine of 63% can flip-flop a roll of 85 into 58 once during a scene, and then cannot flip-flop their Medicine skill again, but they can still flip-flop their other occupational skills (First Aid, Pharmacy, etc.) once during that scene. If the occupation has less than eight skills then the player can assign as many hobby skills as needed to bring it up to eight.

This is obviously based on Unknown Armies' obsession skill mechanic, where you can choose one skill to flip-flop. I set the number at 8 skills because that's how many skills are assigned to most of the occupations listed in the 6th edition CoC rulebook. I required that the skill be at 60% or higher so that players still have an incentive to place a proper amount of points into their occupational skills. For the math wonks, at 60% skill flip-flopping increases the chance to succeed to 83%, it increases at 70% skill to 90% chance, at 80% skill to 95% chance, and at 90% to 98% chance; so, it still rewards having a high amount in a professional skill (60-80) but doesn't require characters to be Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes with a bunch of 90% skills to be reasonably competent.

Insane Effort
In the spirit of Insane Insight, this rule allows a character to become so obsessed with a task that they lose all focus on reality but become much more likely to succeed at the effort. A player can flip-flop the result of any skill roll in exchange for losing 1 Magic Point and risking 1D6 points of Sanity. If a character goes insane as the result of an Insane Effort roll, they become fixated on succeeding at the task for the duration of the insanity or until brought back to sanity through psychoanalysis, drugs, and other treatments. Insane Effort cannot be used on Sanity checks, and can only be used in situations where the character is likely to develop a fixation on the task.

I don't know how they plan to do Pulp Cthuhu, but this is the mechanic that I'd use to create that setting. It puts it in the hands of the players if they wish to trade high-competence for less Sanity, and seems like it would establish a mood where the characters are both good at what they do but are still falling down the SAN loss death spiral. The big problem I see with this rule are in the Magic Points. I like using MP because, in my experience as a player, they are so rarely used, and because it creates a resource pool to keep the option in check. In truth, it's the SAN loss that would probably keep this rule in check, as anyone who tries to use Insane Effort more than 4 times in a scene will go crazy. I might fiddle with the refresh rate of Magic Points, so that they return at the end of a session or an adventure rather than every 24 hours, but I'm not sure.

* Please note that I don't think this is really a problem of mechanics so much as perspective. A game where characters bumble around and often can't succeed at their skills is in keeping with the way Lovecraft often (but not always) presented his protagonists, and the classic rules fit for the classic game. I just think that CoC is big enough to encompass a greater variety of characters and stories than just the source material itself, and I like these options as house rules when the Keeper wants to try something different.

Adventures in Character Creation

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:25:37 GMT

In between creating characters for my DunDraCon game and another to play in an 1890s campaign, I've been doing a lot of character creation with Call of Cthulhu, and it has not been a happy experience. A common complaint about CoC using their traditional Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system is that characters are almost always incompetent bumblers, constantly failing underskilled rolls with even the most menial of tasks. I think a lot of this comes from a wrongheaded approach to the rules, where Keepers call for skill rolls in situations that should be an automatic success unless the player rolls a 01 for a critical failure, or when, outside of combat, a failed skill roll is interpreted as a complete failure rather than simply less than a full success (i.e. your failed Spot Hidden roll may still give you the clue necessary to get to the next scene, but it doesn't give you all the clues that could have alerted you to the cultist ambush in that next scene). That said, characters created under BRP do end up as poorly-skilled even for an average person, which might be okay if you're trying to play H.P Lovecraft in a Lovecraftian game, but less so when you want to break out of that mold and play an even slightly competent and well-rounded human being, much less a WWII commando. So I am going to try to create a typical Our Darkest Hour character from just the basic CoC rules (the ones in the 6th edition book) and those in the Basic Role-Playing book, and see if I can come up with a system that works. Here is the character I am trying to create:

Lieutenant John Doe, US Army
Intelligence Officer, OSS/Delta Green (30 years old)

STR 11
DEX 11
CON 11
SIZ 13
APP 11
POW 11
INT 13
EDU 15 (+1 for age)

Hit Points: 12
Damage Bonus: +0
Sanity: 55
Occupation Skills: Conceal 60%, Fast Talk 60% , Handgun 60%, Other Language: German 51%, Other Language: French 26%, Persuade 60%, Psychology 60%, Sneak 60%, Spot Hidden 60%
Hobby Skills: Electrical Repair 40%, Hide 40%, Library Use 40%, Listen 40%, Navigate 40%, Sub-Machine Gun 40%, Rifle 40%, Occult 40%

This is already a much-weaker character than what I'd assign to players at a convention (I like PCs to have a core set of competent skills, with three highest skills set at 90%, 80%, and 70%) , but I'm trying to see if even the most basic kind of ODH character can be created under the existing rules. Lt. Doe has the base professional level (60%) in his occupation skills, and the mid-range skilled amateur level (40%) in his hobby skills. I have only used the skills listed in the 6th edition CoC rulebook, ignoring vital skills like Tradecraft, Cryptography, Signals/Radio Operation, Demolitions/Explosives, Military Science, or Etiquette, and there are absolutely no personal skills that differentiate Lt. Doe from any other cookie-cutter intelligence officer (like a skill in Art: Saxophone because he's a jazz enthusiast or Craft: Cooking because he likes French cuisine). He can speak one language as a native (German) and another well enough to understand and be understood (French). And finally, his characteristics are all at the exact average under the dice-roll system of CoC (rounding up). Yet even this most basic character is unable to be created under the rules in the 6th edition rulebook nor under the "normal" option of the point-buy system in the BRP rulebook.

Under the point-buy system in the BRP book, you have 24 points to spend on characteristics in a "normal campaign", with all characteristics starting at 10 except EDU (which the book never says where you start off from except that it is a "GM decision"), with STR, CON, SIZ, and APP costing 1 point, and DEX, INT, POW, and EDU costing 3 points. It costs 21 points just to bring all of Doe's stats to their average level in CoC except for EDU. And if I do start EDU at 10 like all the other stats, it would cost another 12 points to bring that stat up to average. So, to even get an average CoC character from the point-buy system would cost 9 more points than what is allowed in a normal campaign, and almost all of what is allowed (36 points) in a "heroic" campaign. That is, unless I just start everyone's EDU at 14, which may be what the author is encouraging, but even that means I can only create an almost absolutely average character in a "normal" campaign and anyone with more than one slightly (very slightly if it is DEX, POW, INT, or EDU) above-average characteristic will instantly have to be below-average in one or more other characteristics.

Then we get to where this really falls apart: skills. Under the 6th edition CoC rules, you have EDU x 20 to spend on occupational skills, and INT x 10 to spend on everything else. To get even the basic level of professional competence in the 8 skills I assigned Doe as occupation skills (that's actually conservative for some published templates, which have as many as 12 skills in an occupation), it would cost a total of
400 points. To get the middle of the "skilled amateur" level in his hobby skills would cost 195 points. That means he must have at least an INT of 20 (to get 200 skill points to spend on his hobby skills), with a subsequent minimum EDU of 20 to get the 400 points to spend on his occupational skills, leaving a whopping 5 hobby points from INT to spend on one and only one skill that makes Doe a more well-rounded character than just his job. Now this is impossible to begin with under the 6th edition rules, as INT cannot be higher than 18; so, even if I rolled the stats, I could never get this build no matter how good my luck was with the dice. And at the "normal" level of the point-buy BRP rules (which does allow characteristics up to 21), assuming that I do start EDU at 14, it would cost 48 points to raise INT and EDU to 20, leaving me to cannibalize Doe's STR, DEX, CON, SIZ, APP, and POW down to 7 with only 8 points left to bring one or two of those up to average level. So I could create Lt. Doe with these skill levels in the "normal" BRP point-buy, but he'd be so 4F I doubt they'd even let him into the OSS.

There is a solution in the BRP point-buy, which is to bump everything up to "heroic" level, where characters start with 36 points to spend on characteristics and use EDU x 25 and INT x 15 for skills. Under this level, Lt. Doe would need an INT of 13 and an EDU of 16, which costs 15 points (again, considering I set starting EDU at 14, which is not written in the damn book) leaving him with one less point to get the 12 points Doe needs to get the average STR, DEX, CON, SIZ, APP, and POW listed above. Even under the "heroic" level, Lt. Doe will still have to be less-than-average in some characteristics just to get the most basic cookie-cutter skills a WWII-era spy would have.

To get an interesting, competent, and average character under the BRP point-buy system, I have to kick-it-up to the "epic" level of BRP, which give characters 48 points to spend on characteristics, and EDU x 30 and INT x 20 to spend on skills. After spending everything for the build above, Doe's player would have 24 points left to spend on characteristics, 50 points left to spend on occupation skills, and 65 points left to spend on any skills the player chooses. Assuming the players splits those 24 characteristic points evenly, Doe could end up with STR 14, DEX 12, CON 14, SIZ 16, APP 14, POW 12, INT 14, and EDU 16 with an extra 80 points for occupation skills and 85 points for any skills.

But the problem here is not that BRP or CoC doesn't provide high enough characteristics. It's the same damn problem I've always had with character creation in CoC: too few skill points to spend on too many skills. Remember that I built Doe only with the skills listed in the 6th edition rules, and adding all the skills necessary for most WWII-era spies in all the other books would require at least another 200 skill points to spend on them. And characters shouldn't have to be running around with absurdly high EDU and INT scores to justify decent competence in the variety of skills that make up a well-rounded character. So let's try that:

Lt. Richard Roe, US Army
Intelligence Officer, OSS/Delta Green (30 years old)

STR 11
DEX 11
CON 11
SIZ 13
APP 11
POW 11
INT 13
EDU 15 (+1 for age)

Hit Points: 12
Damage Bonus: +0
Sanity: 55
Occupation Skills: Fast Talk 80% , Handgun 70%, Other Language: German 51%, Other Language: French 26%, Persuade 60%, Psychology 60%, Sneak 60%, Spot Hidden 90%, Tradecraft 60%
Hobby Skills: Art: Poetry 40%, Cryptography 40%, Demolitions 40%, Electrical Repair 40%, Hide 40%, Library Use 40%, Listen 40%, Military Science 40%, Navigation/Land 40%, Parachuting 40%, Sub-Machine Gun 40%, Rifle 40%, Occult 40%, Signals 40%

This build costs 21 points for characteristics (assuming that EDU starts at 14), 470 points for occupation skills, and 434 points for hobby skills. While Roe has the same average characteristics as Roe, he is significantly more competent (although not overly so) in certain skills and has a greater variety of skills.

So my own method for character creation would be to give 48 points to spend on characteristics, but start EDU at 10. Starting characters have EDU x 35 to spend on their occupation skills, and INT x 35 to spend on any skill they choose. Under this build, Lt. Roe has all his characteristics as listed above (with 15 points remaining, which depletes quickly when spent on DEX, POW, INT, or EDU). After spending for Roe's skills, there'd still be 55 points to spend on occupation skills and 21 points to spend on any skills, enough to make him further competent or well-rounded, but not some kind of "epic" superhero.

The Objective

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:14:03 GMT

So you know how I was saying there haven't yet been enough works to build a fictional tradition about our current wars in the Mideast so that inexperienced spuds like me can use it as background with any legitimacy. Well, that's already changing:

I'll admit that if I didn't know it had a slightly better pedigree, I'd think was just another bad Sci-Fi Original Movie based on the trailer. Still, the film looks very Delta Green-ish, especially as I've always been more interested in the military-espionage side of the background, and have been disappointed that Pagan remains focused on the tired X-Files law enforcement material. Maybe Targets of Opportunity will change that.

Games I Will Never Run: The Ten Thousand

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:22:49 GMT

The PCs are a group of American soldiers in modern-day Iraq, not special ops but regular Joes (and Janes), reservists waiting for their tour to end. They are close to that date when their unit is suddenly ordered to assault an insurgent stronghold 70 klicks north of Al-Hillah. The unofficial word is that the bad guys have access to some kind of biological weapon which they plan to release on Baghdad, and there are a bunch of black ops eggheads attached to the PC's unit as escort for a rumored counter-agent codenamed ANABASIS. That's all the PC's know before they launch the assault, the insurgents release their weapon, and everything everywhere literally goes to hell.

The PCs wake up in an abandoned Battalion Aid Station or in the smoking remains of a crashed medevac chopper. Their last memory is of a bright light emanating from the insurgents' complex and the eggheads opening the ANABASIS container. Whether it is a hospital orderly feasting on the open skull of a wounded soldier or a medevac pilot stumbling around with unnatural purpose after being decapitated by the chopper's main rotor, it is immediately obvious that the dead no longer stay dead and crave the life of the few still remaining alive. They seem to be temporarily immune to the virus, perhaps due to their proximity to ANABASIS when it was released. Once they flee their immediate surroundings and are able to raise communications, it becomes apparent that the Virus has reached everywhere in the world. Out of the 150,000 American troops deployed in Iraq on land and sea, there are perhaps 10,000 left alive. They are alone, surrounded by both the undead and whatever hostile insurgents who have not been "infected", and whatever contact they can make back home is sporadic, dying, and full of bad news. But there is an American destroyer waiting at Trabzon, free of infection and waiting to pick up any survivors that make the long march to the sea.

For those that didn't catch the references already, this a zombie game based on the march of the Ten Thousand, a group of Greek mercenaries that were left stranded in the middle of Persia in the 5th-century BC, having to march through hostile territory back to the sea after the Persian leader who hired them died in battle. Their story was chronicled by the Greek general Xenophon in his work Anabasis. I figure this to be an All Flesh Must Eaten game, but any zombie-friendly system would do. As for the source of the virus, it could've been an old Soviet experiment found by the Taliban and smuggled out of Afghanistan for maximum carnage in Iraq (or you could just ignore the Anabasis references and set the game in the Hindu Kush); or the ANABASIS package was the actual culprit, a designer virus targeting genetic markers American intelligence identifies with "insurgent ethnicities" as a final attempt to "win" the war, with the "insurgent stronghold" being GRAY FOX types impersonating terrorists to place the blame on Al-Qaeda; or a lost ritual to Ubbo-Sathla found by insurgents among the rediscovered annals of the Hashshashin... whatever floats your boat.

And as for why I'll never run it... well, some might consider it in bad taste as hundreds of thousands to over a million people have died in that war, and continue to die to this very day. I rather do, but more honestly, I'd never consider it because, if I were to run this at a convention, there's a decent chance there might be an Iraq War veteran or two at the table. I'd feel very uncomfortable, not so much for using their personal history as the backdrop for a silly zombie game, but moreso because everything I'd have to say about the environment, what kind of resources would be available, to just how characters might react in certain situations, would be obviously bullshit. I can roleplay an orc because it doesn't exist and exists only in fantasy. I can roleplay a Nazi because there are acceptable cinematic examples of Nazis and a screen of "fantasy" can be placed between the real Nazis and the face-melting Tohts (with that screen being moved as close to or as far from reality as your historical awareness and sensitivity allows). But there just aren't enough cinematic versions of the Iraq War to play against... yet.

DunDraCon 2009

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:31:14 GMT

It was a good con, with only one game where I didn't have fun (and that was entirely my own fault). I picked up Pagan's new Mysteries of Mesoamerica in the dealer's room, and snagged a book on artifacts for the Masterbook Indiana Jones RPG system and the Weird Wars: Blood on the Rhine occult WWII game. Food was dirt-cheap, as the only time I paid more than five bucks for a meal was when I left the buffet table for nearby restaurants. There was an odd snafu where the power went out in the hotel just hours before my game started on Friday evening, but power was restored in time and I suffered no setbacks (though several folks got shafted as the game shuffler database was corrupted). Here's what I played:

Last Flight of the Cathay Clipper (Call of Cthulhu: Delta Green) - My game here, and it went well. Most of the players were in high spirits before the game ever began because they were happily talking about playing in Toteninsel, the Nazi zombie game I've run at previous cons: that felt really good. I don't think Last Flight is as good as Toteninsel (which is why I'll be trying to run both at KublaCon) but the players told me they had fun and I think it went pretty well for such a complicated scenario (if the characters realize who is behind what, things can get easily derailed). Much as I did with Toteninsel I'll be doing some more tweaking as I run this at future cons.

Midnight Train to Georgia (All Flesh Must Be Eaten) - I fucked myself up at this game. I was tired (3 hours of sleep after finishing so late the previous night), grumpy, and (due to personal reasons I won't go into) feeling very sensitive about playing my usual role of "marginalized buffoon". So when I fell into that role due to a combination of roleplaying my character's hindrances and my own personality, I got pissed and committed "suicide by zombie" by charging into the old folks' home full of the undead. It was petty and a disservice to the GM, who had created a solid AFMBE game. The low point of the con for me.

Bite The Hand That Feeds (Hunter: The Vigil) - Good game system (combat feels slow, but only in comparison to BRP and that's pretty fast), good GM, interesting story (mundanes, connected with law enforcement either by profession or personal relationships, encounter werewolves as part of urban gang warfare), and decent players. My only criticisms are minor and peevish: first, the cell structure and conspiracy nature of Hunter was hidden deep in the background, and this was more a generic World of Darkness game with mortals than anything else (but it was good, so who cares); second, one of the players, who was up till then planning to play an ultramacho violent ex-cop suddenly turned into a prancing and limp-wristed caricature right out of Queer Eye from the Straight Guy as soon as he decided to play his character as gay, which was slightly disturbing. That said, I like the mechanics and feel of the game, though I'd be hard-pressed to say it was better than the BRP system of Call of Cthulhu for this kind of thing... equal to, no problem, but not better.

Thoth's Dagger (Pulp Adventure) - Without a certain incident, this would have been a fine game and it was for the most part. The system was written by the GM, and it consisted of percentile skill checks with results divided between whether the roll fell into all, half, or one-fourth of the skill chance. The pulp mechanics used points that could provide +5% to the roll, which was not as exciting as the mechanics of Cinematic Unisystem, Adventure!, or Spirit of the Century, but it there was enough derring-do and crazy stunts to develop a proper pulp atmosphere. The adventure was taken from an old published Call of Cthulhu scenario, which worked so well I should try doing the same thing with Trail of Cthulhu or Spirit of the Century. However, all this was soured when the GM handed out characters: while he didn't put a gun to their heads, he essentially forced the one of the two female players at the table to run the single female character. This would not have been quite so bad if it weren't for the fact that said female characters seemed to have no appreciable combat skills, her sole special ability was to heal characters with her kiss, and she was (maybe played as, but more likely written as) a gold-digging slut. I still had a lot of fun hamming up my character, and people laughed and had fun at the table, but that one thing makes me feel uncomfortable when I think back on the game.

The Curse of the Enemy (Witch Hunter) - For some retarded reason, when I read the description for this game in the con booklet, I thought it would be a Hunter the Vigil game set in 17th century New England with two-fisted Puritans fighting Indians and monsters in the forests. And, despite getting it completely wrong, it actually kinda was - the game has nothing to do with World of Darkness, despite using d10 dice pools, Vices and Virtues governing Damnation that leads to an evil PC, and a wound track instead of Hit Points... in other words, it was WOD. And we did play puritanical monster hunters, but Russian ones in the California wilderness during the early 19th century. It brought the horror, as all but one of the characters had either gone evil or was left dead at the end of a very tough last encounter, and despite none of us knowing the rules, we had all pretty much mastered them by night's end. Good game, decent system, nuff said.

Always Faithful (Savage Worlds) - This game was essentially Starship Troopers mixed with Warhammer 40K, where the characters were Space Marines rescuing a missionary colony by killing every GA (Godless Alien) in sight. We were each assigned a squad of marines, engineers, medics, etc. depending on our speciality, and I pulled the infantrymen, who I named Fireteam Elminster as I was playing a Vin Diesel-ish muscle-bound geek with the quirk of "Always talks about their D&D characters". After "Diesel" and his NPC marines "Drizzt" and "Bugbear" got taken out in the second round, we promoted marine "Gelatinous Cube" to PC status and I carried on with my last two marines. I was impressed with how easily Savage Worlds handles large-scale combat, remaining relatively quick (there were eight players with each controlling a set of five NPCs, and the intro combat lasted about two hours) while giving enough tactical options to still feel battlemap-friendly. The game kind of petered out after that first combat, but it was fun.

Le Loot - Mysteries of Mesoamerica is as awesome as I suspected by skimming through it, with a significant amount of background material (which also nicely focuses on both historical facts for campaign verisimilitude and Mythos hooks to actually create the campaigns to begin with) and two decent-sized scenarios. It also helps that it's chock-full of Blair Reynolds' artwork, which, along with that of Trail of Cthulhu's Jerome Huguenin, really captures the decripit oppression of Lovecraft's work for me. The other two books I bought were okay, but mainly gotten because they only cost a couple of books and might be strip-mined for maps and handouts.

All in all, I had a good time, and got into plenty of decent (if not awe-inspiring magnificent) games. There is an Endgame mini-con coming up, and then there'll be my first and my favorite - KublaCon - in May.

Endgame Mini-Con January 2009

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 10:21:24 GMT

Long time no post, I is the suxxor, etc, etc...

This year's Mini-Con at the game store Endgame in Oakland was pretty good. I accidentally ended up in two Spirit of the Century games, didn't get into the Call of Cthulhu game I tried to sign up for, and instead played in a very CoC-esque horror game (i.e. pretty much everyone died in the throes of insanity). I also dropped some ducats on Pagan Publishing for one of their latest releases.

The Demon Run (Spirit of the Century) - A very humorous high-octane adventure of a whacky spaceship crew trying to win an interstellar race where the the winner gets bragging rights on a galactic reality show and the loser gets vaporized into debris (by a mandated time of the slowest ship being detonated remotely every half-hour). This one was played entirely for laughs, which I got into the spirit of by running my mad scientist as Walter from Fringe. We didn't use a lot of Spirit of the Century rules, but that was pretty much beside the point as everyone at the table was an experienced SotC player and we were all really just trying to make each other laugh, to which we succeeded admirably.

City in the Skull (Spirit of the Century) - I didn't plan to sign up for this game, as it was another SotC game run by the same GM. These Mini-Cons are often the best (and sometimes the only places in the Bay Area) to try out uncommon games, so I like to keep my schedule varied; and, I didn't want the GM to get the idea I was stalking him. Yet the Endgame staff inadvertently signed me up for both, and I was glad as this was a blast. The scenario used the standard pulp-era setting, and I played an Iraqi driver/pilot/assistant to an archaeologist who'd unearthed a crystal-containing skull that ended up as a portal to the Plateau of Leng. I got to crash-land a seaplane, machine-gun a pterodactyl, and listen as my Iraqi accent quickly degenerated from an understated Sayid to a campy Apu. Although it was a great deal of fun, I kinda feel bad as I went into the game intending to play my character straight and not get all outrageous. Ever since I listened to the first episode of the gaming podcast Narrative Control and found out that a GM felt I nearly ruined his Wilderness of Mirrors game because I played my role too campy, I've been trying to see if I could tone myself down when it calls for it, and have yet been unable to do so. Do I have fun going a little off the reservation and injecting humor into my characterizations? Yes. Does everyone else at the table have fun when I do that? They seem to, and I often get compliments on it. But unfortunately, I can't shake the nagging feeling that I'm spoiling other's fun.

The House on Raven Hill (Basic Role-Playing) - I failed to make it past the waitlist for a Call of Cthulhu game, and was heading for home when I ran into my regular gaming bud Matt Steele and was informed that I had indeed not played in the game he was running that evening. So I took part in that, a B-movie grindhouse horror game of teens and young adults with dark secrets trying to spend the weekend at a creepy house in the Arizonan desert, with the last one surviving to end up with the keys to the manse. It started slowly and I was worried that we wouldn't reach an ending before the store closed, but things kicked into high gear in the last hour and then satisfyingly went off the rails as doors started eating some while pictures abducted others. Good times, and it was nice to finally see the full-bore version of the new BRP system in action, with all the bells-&-whistles the collected rulebook adds to the venerable guts of CoC.

Loot - I picked up Final Flight by Pagan Publishing in the hopes that it would provide some useful rules and inspiration for my upcoming DunDraCon game, which will also involve a pre-WWII era passenger plane and cthulhoid horrors: not so much with the rules, but it did give me some ideas for my game. It's ten dollars for all of 28 pages, which leaves little meat on what seems a pretty barebones scenario. Nevertheless, the scenario, although straightforward, looks solid, and I ended spending more that day on some teeny-tiny excuse of a crab salad at a froo-froo restaurant near the store. I also skimmed through Pagan's new Mysteries of Mesoamerica, which looks really REALLY good. Its respectable pagecount is split in half between real-world data on Mexican and Central American religions, archaeological exploration, and Call of Cthulhu linkage, and the other half consisting of three short but well-detailed scenarios. That and the copious amount of Blair Reynolds' gorgeous and evocative art made it very difficult to not simply buy it there and then, but I figure I can wait till DunDraCon as that's only three weeks away.

All in all, it was a very fun con, and I was glad to hear that Endgame plans to do four of these a year now. I was rather surprised at the almost complete lack of Good Omens people, who normally populate the Mini-Cons but this time, besides a few, I didn't really see them in attendance as GM's or players. Still, there were enough good games and plenty of solid players, and, the truth is that, on a consistent basis, this was probably the best group of players I've gamed with at a con in quite awhile.

ConQuest 2008

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:04:47 GMT

I'm actually unsure about what the proper name of this convention is anymore (all the con materials referrred to it dually as PacifiCon and ConQuest). Another change was the location, which moved from a nice Marriott in Burlingame to an equally-nice (if maddeningly laid-out) Marriott in Santa Clara. Yet the biggest change was in the con itself, which has finally seemed to regroup from the change of ownership that rendered the RPG section of the con as amateurishly ad-hoc. Having gotten at least the illusion of a game-shuffler system with advance sign-ups like DunDraCon and KublaCon, as well as holding all the RPGs in their own seperate rooms, there is now no systematic difference between ConQuest and its more established brethren. About the only thing keeping ConQuest from reaching a similar level of greatness is for more GM's to attend and run games, and I feel that'll will grow in time.

I almost didn't attend ConQuest, even though I was scheduled to run a game. Jeannine had me take her into the emergency room the night before the convention, having suffered from a nasty cough for nearly a week. It turned out to be nothing serious and we both eventually agreed that I should go ahead to the con, but making sure that she would be well without me took most of Friday. This, as well as two games being cancelled abruptly on Sunday, meant that I only got into three games for the entire con, including my own:

Lost Temple (Call of Cthulhu) - This was one of those CoC games where you spend the first four hours putzing around just role-playing your characters without much advancing the plot and then race through the last two hours in an attempt to reach some abbreviated climax. It certainly wasn't a bad experience, and I myself have been guilty of allowing the pacing to get out of control. In fact, I would have mostly enjoyed this game if it wasn't for a kid - couldn't have been older than maybe 14 - who was acting his age.

Toteninsel (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green) - This was the sixth time I've run Toteninsel, twice for friends and four times at conventions, and, after running it one more time next weekend, I will finally be retiring my Nazi zombie scenario. It ran very well, going into directions I've not seen before, and most of the players seemed thoroughly satisfied at games' end. The lone dissenter voiced concerns in mid-game that the characters seemed completely doomed and without any hope of success, an odd sentiment considering we were playing Call of Cthulhu; but once we'd reached the end and it became obvious that I'd always intended to provide the characters with some kind of dramatic control over their ends, he seemed mollified. The rest of the players were all absolutely top-notch, and it was great to finally run the game for Steven Kaye, if only to watch his face light up with recognition everytime he caught the little nods I placed back to Lovecraft's original stories. About the only real downer was that the same kid who played in Lost Temple was there at my table, and he unfortunately chose to play the most complicated character in the scenario.

The Dragon Warriors of Xim (Cartoon Action Hour) - This is completely unlike what I normally play, but I did so since it was run by my friend Patrick who I've not played with since I left the gaming group we used to share. And it was pretty much a blast, as Cartoon Action Hour is a very nice simple system that creates just the right kind of cinematic action for the genre: 80's-era Saturday Morning action-figure cartoons. This game was based on the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, with me playing the football jock as a teenaged Matthew McConaughy that usually sounded more like a stoned Dean Martin. Perfectly light for a Monday morning game, the only knock was that the game again had a kid at the table - this time an eight year old. Now in all fairness, the game sounded like the perfect thing for kids that age, and the kid was often less annoying than his own father, who was also at the table and had a hard time getting into the over-the-top feel of the genre. Still I don't attend conventions to game with eight-year olds.

I want to make a big rant about how kids shouldn't always be allowed at the game table in cons, or at least how there should be a watershed (i.e. 8pm and later games) where the GM's have the option to state that the game is adults only; but, the truth is that I've seen just as many asshole adults at cons as I've seen immature kids. And ultimately, none of this is the fault of ConQuest. Indeed, if any con deserves these "problems" it's DunDraCon, with it's inane "family friendly" policy that states that games, even when labeled as "Mature Themes", must allow kids of all ages at the table and tailor the game accordingly.

Purchases-wise, I didn't buy as much as I expected to, only picking up the new edition of Daniel Harms' Encyclopedia Cthulhiana and White Wolf's Hunter the Vigil game. I'd hoped that Hunter would be more like Delta Green-lite, all the monster-slaying with less of the overarching conspiracy; unfortunately, a closer reading reveals that the book is basically a giant primer on a whole nest of various conspiracies. I took a long look at Pagan's latest, a scenario called Final Flight, but I couldn't justify spending $10 on a book so slim and so lacking in material.

Anyways, to sum up: good con. I look forward to next year's ConQuest, something I haven't been able to say in many years.

I Know What You Didn't Do Last Summer

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:19:41 GMT

So here's what I did:

Volunteered at San Francisco City Hall to help people of all sexual orientation get married as should be the right of all. I didn't get to do anything fun like officiate marriages but it was an extraordinarily moving experience. I have never seen so much happiness in one place at one time.

Handed out pro-Obama flyers and tried to register voters at San Francisco's Gay Pride parade. Jeannine got a horrible sunburn, I got called "daddy", people complained about Obama's stance on FISA, a couple people laughed about still being bitter about Hillary, one guy wished he could vote for both Obama and McCain, and another tore up the flyer as he yelled he'd never vote for a nigger. Still, a lot of people were pro-Obama and Jeannine succeeded in registering a couple of folks, which seemed remarkably impressive to the organizers.

Spent weeks hunting for houses now that they're available in the Bay Area at prices even a middle class white-collar worker saddled with a deadbeat husband can afford. Unfortunately, though the prices are low enough our finances aren't strong enough to manage the downpayment, so I...

... spent more weeks hunting for rental homes now that we can afford a better place closer to the City than Concord. We're focusing on the Berkeley Hills, Albany, and San Francisco until April of next year, when we'll open it up to the greater East Bay.

Played some games at Good Omens Con 2. I kinda fucked up a Jedis in the Vineyard game (Dogs in the Vineyard played in the Star Wars Universe - it's surprising how much more appealing that system is when you're not playing Mormon theocrats enforcing Christian dogma like out of W's wet dreams) when I brought too much absurd playing a cannibalistic Ewok Dark Jedi. Had a great time with that though, as well as playing an evening game of Feng Shui.

Here's what I didn't do:

Write anything for Our Darkest Hour. I am teh suxxor.

Maintain my regular updates for this blog (obviously).

Go to ConQuest... almost. I'll be posting on that shortly.

Here's what I plan to do:

Get back in the saddle on Our Darkest Hour. I have really fallen down on the job here and need to restart my efforts in every field: with my research and my writing on both the chronology and the Karotechia chapter.

Find out something to run for DunDraCon. All of my gaming ideas at the moment are tied up in scenarios that go beyond the limits of the eight-hour one-shot, so I might end up running nothing at all.

Put together something to run at the October Mini-Con at Endgame. These things have been a hell of a lot of fun for me and really want to run there, but the four-hour time limit makes it difficult.

Start updating my damn blogs again.

D&D 4th Edition... hypothetically

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:10:05 GMT

So let's say that I have a "friend" who may have hypothetically downloaded the illegal PDF's of the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, because said "friend" thought spending over one hundred dollars to check out a system they're very unsure they'll ultimately use is an absurd waste of money (although I am sure this "friend" would be very willing to pay out for the hardcover books if this "friend" ends up running more than a single one-shot of 4th Ed). And said "friend" may have spent the last couple of days reading through the Player's Handbook, and skimming over the rest. What might this "friend" think of the new system?

A tentative "meh". Not a "meh, this thing sucks but maybe there's a glimmer of hope here" but more of a "meh, the system works but the feel is all wrong for what I want to do with a fantasy setting although there is enough interesting stuff to make it worthwhile to edit it into what I want from it."

PROS

The core system is very streamlined and intuitive, and should be easy enough to pick up within a single session. I know this from experience based on the 4th Ed games I played at KublaCon.
Characters of all classes have a deep set of abilities that allows everyone to have an almost equal hand in combat, meaning that no one need sit by the sidelines waiting to heal characters or for the combat to end to recharge their spells.
The dynamic of healing surges, action points, and the difference between at-will, encounter, and daily powers all combine to create a game that gives players a great deal more tactical control over how their characters carry out their action, and this should trickle-down into some degree of narrative control.
The model of "points of light in a world overrun by dark forces" makes for a more interesting campaign setting than the usual "you start in a tavern and go from place to place killing things and taking their stuff".

CONS

Although the core dynamic is simple and easy-to-learn, it is instantly burdened with the plethora of special conditions that power many of the feats and powers. Even with just the core books, there's a lot to keep track of but it should be easily manageable; however, once WotC begins bloating the system with splatbooks, I'm sure that is going to change.
That deep set of abilities for all characters also means that no class feels as special as it did in previous editions. When most if not all characters can stand well in combat, heal others, etc. it becomes easy for the characters to become faceless and homogenized based on their stats alone. That last bit is why I don't really think this is much of a con, but I can see it being a culture shock for veteran D&D players.
Based on my experiences at KublaCon, it is very difficult to bring a character to a final death as long as they are near still-living comrades (particularly ones with healing powers) and not fighting against unusually bad odds (and have no way to run away). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the system balances it out by making enemies with greater-than-expected hit points (unless they are mook-like minions) which bogs combat down into a long slugfest of attrition.
The art is still the angular "SCA gone wrong" with lots of buckles fetish motif of 3rd Ed, rather than the pseudo-medieval Tolkienesque look of past editions. I list this as a con as I really like the Tolkienesque look, even if it is done-to-death.
And my biggest con: starting characters are simply too powerful. I don't mean in stat terms, which is neither here-nor-there, but in terms of their status in the bad-ass hiearchy. A 1st level character in 4th Ed has almost as many powers, feats, and abilities as a starting character in Exalted, where the characters are meant to be superhuman combat monsters capable of levelling whole cities and punching the moon with their big toe. Whereas in previous editions, you were meant to be, at best, a veteran soldier or a novice spellcaster not too long from their bumpkin village roots, in 4th Ed you begin as a great hero with fantastic abilities. Now I suspect in play this does not seem so, as the low-level antagonists also have high hit points and access to superhuman feats; but that actually only makes the situation worse for me, as now you have characters that only look like ultimate bad-asses that end up taking forever to slaughter a measly kobold or two. I like the idea of starting small and building oneself into a paragon full of wonders, but 4th Ed wants to skip that part and get directly into the bad-assitude. That's not necessarily a bad thing (and, as some folks on web forums have pointed out, makes 4th Ed a good choice to revive the old Birthright campaign setting), but that's not really what I've been looking for.

So all in all, "meh"... hypothetically.

ODH Update

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:46:31 GMT

Not a lot of progress made over the past couple weeks, due primarily to KublaCon and the usual post-con lethargy. I spent all last week working on my scenario for the con, the con itself took all of the Memorial Day weekend, Tuesday was my weekly Shadowrun game, Wednesday I tried (and failed instantly) to start a regimen of diet and exercise, Thursday I got caught up in reading new comics and watching the Lost season finale, Friday I was lazy and watched Atonement (probably a good novel but pedestrian and pretentious as a film), and yesterday I was enthralled by coverage of the Democratic Party Rules & Byways Committee. In between all that, I did organize the Karotechia rough draft into a position where I can begin writing, which is what I plan to do over the next week. I am going to be more realistic, and set a goal of completing at least one of the pre-Karotechia sections (Ariosophy, Thule Gesellschaft, Ahnenerbe) by next Sunday.

My secondary goal will be to write up my Toteninsel scenario for publication. I don't plan to put it up anyplace other than the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website, but I do want it to be written in such a way as it'll be most useful for anyone that wants to run it.

KublaCon 2008

Wed, 28 May 2008 19:46:29 GMT

This past weekend I attended KublaCon, one of the three main gaming conventions in the Bay Area. It was mostly solid, with one major hiccup. The only loot I snagged from the dealers was some dice (and a few glow-in-the-dark zombie minis from a boardgame supplement I won, having thrown away the rest of the game). I played in two demo games of the forthcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, another demo of the forthcoming Hunter: the Vigil game from White Wolf, a game of Rippers from the Savage Worlds system, and what was advertised as a "modern supernatural" LARP which seemed entirely like Changeling.

Toteninsel (Call of Cthulhu): This was the fifth time that I ran Toteninsel, and here it ran really well in the face of dodgy odds. Every other time I've run this Nazi zombie survival horror adventure (think Where Eagles Dare meets Resident Evil), I've inclued a "Mature Themes" disclaimer in the booklet description. This time I left it out for wordcount limitations, which resulted in nearly half the players being quite young (mid-to-late teens). Two of them were absolutely cool and played their characters very well, but one acted closer to their age: breaking off the group, quick to violence, disinterested in their character's background except what weapons he has, etc. Nevertheless, the scenario ran really smoothly, and this group was among the first to really touch every area of what was happening and discover all of the dark secrets of the Island of the Dead. The players were top-notch, and everyone seemed to have a quite-awesome time, such that I've decided to run it one last time at ConQuest (or Pacificon Game Expo, or whatever the hell they're calling it now).

The Druid’s Grove (Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition): I never play D&D games at cons, but I wanted here to get a look at the forthcoming 4th ed. rules, and, because I succeeded in that, I can't really describe this game as a failure. Oh, but the GM tried to make it so, arriving nearly 20 minutes late to his own game. There was no role-playing whatsoever, just a series of combats, where I did get to try out a tiefling warlord. The warlord class is interesting, with distinctly MMORPG roots that has powers meant to buff other characters and move them freely into better tactical position. I can see this being a quite powerful and fun character once it has some kind of "push or pull" power against enemies. Although initially the role-playing role of the warlord looks like the leader on the battlefield, it's actually more of a team cheerleader, at least at 1st level. This was the first of two D&D 4E games I played at the con, so I'll get to my impressions on the rules later.

We Who Would Do The Hard Things (Hunter: the Vigil): I can't really say much about this game as it was a demo and I signed a NDA, but I can say that it was deliciously politically-incorrect, especially when my character [CENSORED] the [CENSORED] with her [CENSORED] through her [CENSORED]. After this and other nWOD games I've played at cons, I am quite impressed with the viability of using the system to run anthropocentric campaigns. I am also particularly interested in this new Hunter (which is supposed to premiere at GenCon) for reasons I can't get into without violating the NDA. Great game, great GM, great players: this and the Rippers game on Monday really made the con for me. I ended up winning a copy of Werewolf: the Forsaken, but seeing as how I'm never going to play that game, I decided to give it to the player that ran the leader, as I know that to be a very difficult role which often leaves less opportunity to go drama queen and hog the spotlight.

Keep on the Shadowfell (Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition): My second 4E game of the con, this one was better run and completely accomplished its goal of introducing the system, almost too well. The scenario, published by WoTC as both a quick-start demo and the intro scenario for new 4E campaigns, is meant to take characters from 1st to 3rd level, so there was no way we were going to finish the game's narrative at a satisfactory point. This was fine with most of us, who were really just there to test the 4E rules anyways; but it was still an exhausting eight hours, as we moved from one kobold-killing bloodbath to another. Here I played a dragonborn paladin, a mini-dragon without wings, which gave me some healing-based attacks but was pretty much just a fighter with the word "Holy" in the title of my attack feats.

After both games, I lean mildly positive towards 4E. The 3.5E vets suffered a lot of cognitive dissonance in the game, but 4E really is just an evolution of 3.5E, a high-crunch system where a very simple set of basic mechanics are made complex through conditional modifiers set by the environmental conditions and the powers/feats/spells of the individual combatants. These conditions are still vague and open to ~~rules-lawyering~~ interpretation in 4E, which slowed both games even with the minimal rules of the quick-start. There are some differences in 4E, especially that every character class now has something effective to do in combat at all times, and characters begin play at near-Exalted bad-assitude. And the game is no more complicated than 3E was when it first came out, although it absolutely demands a battle-map so it might be rougher on the GM end. However, the social mechanics are virtually unchanged and the new "action points" are simply a marginal combat buff when they could have been so much more. So D&D remains what it is: a crunchy system that encourages rules-lawyering that still benefits from a solid support base and an easy-to-understand buy-in from novice gamers. If anything, I was less impressed by the Keep on the Shadowfell book, which sounds like a pedestrian hack-&-slash.

Golden Gate (LARP): I'd had such a good time at ConQuest last year playing my first LARP that I decided to try this one as my second, and boy was that a mistake. The game was billed simply as of the "modern supernatural" genre, involving an outbreak of weirdness in San Francisco that had driven a bunch of disparate types into an abandoned building as people fled the city. The first problem was of my own making: I was drained by eight number of hours of kobold homicide, and not in my best mood to be Mr. Friendly as the hall filled with the other players, all of whom seemed to be close friends and I was not: so I started out feeling awkward. The next problem was that it took the GMs over an hour to hand out characters and I was at the bottom of that totem pole, requiring me to sit in my awkward drained silence for forever. When I finally did get my character, I was told that, because it had taken so long, the break given before the game started to allow us to read the background material would be extended; but that was not entirely true, as I discovered when I returned (early) to find the GMs already breaking people into groups and leading them into the room.

Another issue was that a key part of my character's background had been written incorrectly on my sheet. I pointed out to a GM that this created other inconsistencies in my background, which the GM didn't think was important enough to get clarification on until I pressed him. It turns out he was right, because ultimately nothing in my character background was important, as the character itself was utterly inconsequential, not simply to the plot, but to the other characters as well. The players were either Fae of the Seelie or Unseelie Court, human mages who had brought the Fae into our world through a gate in Golden Gate Park, human scientists interested in what was driving everyone mad (hint: it was the Fae) in the city, or National Guard troops come to quell the rioting. I was among the troops, which consisted of a lieutenant, two sergeants, and three privates, one of whom was moi; so, I started out as a lowest ranked of the group which was most unaware and least likely to understand the phenomena. Now I didn't let this stop me, and I did have a decent time running around trying to figure out what was happening. And I do think I did a decent job of it while staying as much in character as I could, but ultimately there was little I was in a position to do with that knowledge unless my superiors were willing to act on that information, and act aggressively as we were all so much more out of the loop than all the other groups. Still, because no plans were made and/or followed up on, we ended up as NPCs in a story meant for others. I can accept a character that starts out with little consequence, putting the onus on the player to meet and mingle to find purpose in the story on their own (and I tried desperately to do that); but, because of the military chain-of-command structure of my group and general pecking order between the groups themselves, I couldn't just run off without wholesale abandoning both my group and the character as written for me.

This really was just a Changeling LARP where only a few human characters (the mages) had an impact on the story, and I cannot understand why the GMs didn't list it as that (the Fae aspect of the characters were certainly never hidden). I appreciate all the hard work these GMs must put into these LARPs, and I don't expect them to make every single character full of RPing goodness and that there is no way to add NPCs into the mix without assigning them to actual players... but this was an awful experience. Not so much while playing the game, as I did "make my own fun", but rendered so in the after-game synopsis when it became obvious that the GMs never had a role for us nor much interest in what we did, save for how we might complicate their plot for their more important characters. I left the game feeling like I'd been jerked around, completely dissatisfied, and wondering if it was just the size of the game (35 players vs. the 18 in the LARP I played at ConQuest) that dictated that some folks were just going to get short shrift. This has honestly soured me on the LARPing experience, and although I will probably try at least one more LARP down the road, I really hope this particular LARP is not the norm.

The Haunted Harbor (Savage Worlds: Rippers): I signed up for this game as a mistake, as I thought the GM was another person who had been highly-recommended by my roommate at the con. This turned out to be a most fortunate mistake, as the GM was really good (less fortunate as it turns out that this'll be one of his last cons in the Bay Area as he moves to the East Coast). Monday games have always been more miss than hit, as everyone is too tired to role-play and there is a general ambience of winding down in the air that makes it hard to keep up the enthusiasm so vital to a good game. We had no such problems here, as the good mix of players coupled with the fine GM rolled well with the Savage Worlds system, whose "fast and furious role-playing" tag is well-deserved. Rippers is a Victorian setting concerning Masonic-style lodges devoted to studying and eradicating supernatural threats through steampunk technology, occult magic, and good old fashioned cold steel. Its a very cool setting, although like most Savage Worlds background material it doesn't seem as well-fleshed out as I'd like. Still, this reminded of all the reasons I really like the Savage Worlds system, and after the mind-numbing kobold slaughter and the chain-jerking LARP experience, I really needed this game badly. About the only bad thing I can say about the game is that I'm once again conflicted over whether to run any itch I get to do a fantasy campaign using D&D 4E or the in-all-ways-but-support superior Savage Worlds.

So in summation: D&D 4E is mostly more of the same (both good and bad), Hunter: the Vigil looks awesome (without violating my NDA, I will say that all Delta Green fans with any fondness for the nWoD system must check this game out), not all LARPs are fun, Savage Worlds is still a kick-ass system that I wish had more thickly-realized campaign settings, and KublaCon remains my favorite. Now on to GOcon in July!

ODH Update

Sun, 18 May 2008 20:40:38 GMT

Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter in the Dark have been added fully to the chronology, but I punted on the rough draft of the Karotechia chapter. As I got into it, I decided that it was silly to write a rough draft quoting almost verbatim the Karotechia information in the Delta Green books, as I'm going to have to rewrite all that anyways. Instead, I'm going to try to make a full-out and proper rough draft, consisting of all the research and most of the ideas I've developed on the Karotechia. This is a much more ambitious undertaking, but I hope to get the early sections on Ariosphy, the Thulegesellschaft, and the Ahnenerbe done in the next couple of weeks.

Speaking of which, next weeked is KublaCon, so they'll be no update till the following Sunday, June 1st. I don't expect to get much work done this coming week, as my time will be entirely focused on prepping my scenario for the convention. Still, my goals for the following week are to get those early sections of the Karotechia written into a rough draft.

ODH Update

Sun, 11 May 2008 18:58:05 GMT

I spent this past week mainly organizing stuff. I transferred my chronology (which currently starts in 1855 with the arrival of the Green Men of Agartha to Japan and ends in 1969 with the opening of Club Apocalypse in New York) into MS Excel, which is not the best format available but does allow me to filter the 916 (and growing) entries. I've also started go through my Karotechia notes, which are a complete mess. I wasn't able to add Whisperer in the Darkness to the chronology, but I hope to get that done this week. In addition, here are the other goals for the next week:

Continue working on the chronology. Besides Whisperer, I'm also hoping to add The Haunter in the Dark.
Continue organizing my Karotechia notes. I think I might be able to complete this task this week.
Write a rough draft of the Karotechia solely from material in the gaming books. I might be able to add the extra material from the fiction as well.

In the next two weeks, I'll also be doing some serious edits to my convention scenario Toteninsel, which I will be running at the KublaCon gaming convention in Burlingame (just south of San Francisco). This will be the last convention I'll be running it at, and when that's done I'll edit it for non-pregenerated characters and put it up on the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website.

ODH Update

Mon, 05 May 2008 05:37:44 GMT

Confession time: I have not worked on Our Darkest Hour, the WWII sourcebook for the Delta Green setting of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and the purported purpose of this blog, in months. I haven't talked with anyone at Pagan Publishing about the project in an even longer span of time. I am not even certain if anyone in the initial team is still working on the book, as we have not discussed the status of our work since last year.

This project has been vaporware for years and by all standards should either be tabled or put into the hands of more efficient writers, but I've put far too much work and effort into it to just leave it at that. So starting today, I'm going to begin making a weekly update every Sunday on what work I'm doing and where I plan to be in the process by the following week.

Yesterday, I began working on ODH in earnest again, doing some editing to the master chronology of both factual and Mythos events I've been developing. I was in the process of adding events from Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness to the chronology when I left it off, so that's where I'll begin again this week.

My goals for this coming week are to add that story completely to the chronology, and then get to work on adding The Haunter in the Dark. I also hope to get my Karotechia notes in order so I can begin working on a proper writeup for the organization. In terms of research, I will also return to reading The Master Race by Heather Pringle, which I only half-finished some months ago.

Actual Play: The Dresden Files RPG

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:15:00 GMT

Last night, I ventured out to Endgame in Oakland to take part in an alpha-playtest of The Dresden Files role-playing game, coming sometime later in the year or early 2009 from Evil Hat Games. The game is based on Jim Butcher's series of novels about occult investigator Harry Dresden, which was adapted into a short-lived television series for the Sci-Fi Channel. While my wife Jeannine is a big fan of both the series and the books, I only know it from the TV show, and my interest in the game lies mainly in the fact that Jeannine would be very interested in playing it.

The alpha-test was set in modern-day San Francisco, where the Summer Court of the Fae and the White Court of Vampires abide by a shaky truce that divides the occult underground of the city between them. Our group of heroes are brought in by different factions to investigate the murder of a group of Fae on the old naval facility in Bayview. I played Won "Johnny" Chin, a diviner/gunman for the Hung Moon Ghee Kung triad, who I played as a Zen killer in the mode of Chow-Yun Fat. I even managed to manufacture a gunfight with Italian mafiaso where I released a dove before drawing my pistols. Much fun. I believe audio from playtest will eventually be made available here.

The game mechanics are very similar to Spirit of the Century, also using Evil Hat's FATE system. I've come to achieve a healthy respect for SotC, but it's taken me more than a few games to really understand. This is my greatest concern for The Dresden Files rpg, as I'd expect that its license might allow it to become as popular as Eden Studios' Buffy the Vampire Slayer books. The rules in the SotC book are formidably dense and spread out in a confusing layout for GM's, and it can be equally difficult for novice players to get the whole system of compelling Aspects to affect fantastic maneuvers and other crunchy bits of SotC. I'm also not exactly sure that this system is a proper fit for the source material: pulling off amazing feats as a pulp hero works great in SotC, but nothing in the TV series really fit that genre. The TV series hewed much closer to film noir, where protagonists grappled as much with their inner demons as the (often literally) physical demons that threatened them. I understand that The Dresden Files rpg will have very significant social conflict mechanics, so that might bring the game closer to its genetic genres, and, for all I know, the books may be much pulpier than the TV series.

The SotC-stye mechanics also kept the game moving very quickly, although some players were unhappy that the magic mechanics took too long. Personally, I thought they worked okay, although there didn't seem much opportunity for failure, overbalancing magic within the system. Otherwise, the game played very loosely, rather too loosely in my opinion as the GM had little more than a couple of NPCs and a vague idea of a plot for the entirety of the scenario. This shows that the finished rpg will make a good pick-up-&-play game in the hands of the right GM; but, while I appreciate players having some narrative control, I also like my GM to have a proper "presence" in the game and have at least a skeleton of a narrative of how our players will get from Point A to Point B. All that said, I think that was more a function of this GM's particular style than anything hard-wired into the code of the game itself.

Bottom line for me is that I can see the game working, but the "SotC mechanics packed into an occult investigation game" felt rather square peg into round hole to me. This may have been because I don't have a grounding in the books, because my first (and establishing) experience with FATE was SotC, because we didn't use enough social mechanics to see the genre-specific value in this system, or simply because this was an alpha-playtest. Ultimately, I'd want to read through all the Dresden books (I have Storm Front next in my reading queue), see the finished product, and play in a convention game or two with other GM's before making anything near a final decision on the system. And even then, from what I can see, I'd still buy the book for its massive Dresden-universe background material alone, and just run it with something like Unknown Armies or Savage Worlds if the system doesn't catch my fancy.

Trail of Cthulhu: (Not) A Review

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:45:54 GMT

I was a player in two playtests of Trail of Cthulhu, and now I've GM'ed a game, this past Saturday with my monthly group in San Francisco; so I feel I've explored enough of the system to make some kind of judgment. However, after the debacle that resulted with my negative review of Secrets of Japan and a respect for what the authors of Trail of Cthulhu are trying to do, I'm not going to make a review. I'm simply going to leave it at this: this game is not for me.

All of the players in the Saturday game said they had much fun, but everyone agreed that the system was flawed. I've always felt that the investigative mechanic works, although it runs a bit dry in practice. My biggest concern from the playtest was that the players were never in much danger from death or insanity, but this was solved by using the optional caps on Health and Stability given in the book. That said, while I do think Trail of Cthulhu works systematically, it doesn't do anything for me that Call of Cthulhu does equally well or better for my sensibilities.

I will say this though: I don't think The Kingsbury Horror, the scenario given in the book, does a very good job showcasing the strengths of the system. The philosophy behind the GUMSHOE system is not just that clue-gathering should never become obstacles to the narrative, but also that the fun in investigative games is not the actual gathering of clues but what the characters do with those clues and what they mean. There is never any explanation for why the antagonist(s) in The Kingsbury Horror are committing the murders, so it really ends up boiling down to getting the clues which lead to an abrupt climax with an almost anonymous villain(s). I do admit that this kind of unsatisfactory scenario design is also endemic to many (if not most) Call of Cthulhu games (hell, I've run more than my share of this), but since the GUMSHOE mechanic works mostly as "there's clues and you always get them", that should cause Trail of Cthulhu to emphasize the "why" of the scenario rather than the "how".

Trail of Cthulhu might end up more satisfactory for me if I could take greater agency by running a scenario of my own design. Here I went from being a player to running it, but I was still running off a canned scenario. My problem is that I don't feel comfortable running something (either for my friends or for hapless strangers at a convention) that I'm not 100% sold on to begin with. So I'm probably done with Trail of Cthulhu, although I am glad I bought it. At the very least, it has caused me to examine the importance of investigative design in my games, and there is a lot within the system (the Preparedness skill, how Mythos madness is handled, Ken Hite's descriptions of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the division between Mythos-weakened Sanity and mundane-shocked Stability) that I want to homebrew into Call of Cthulhu. So I would encourage any and all Cthulhu-philes to check it out and give it a fair chance.

Endgame Mini-Con Spring 2008

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:43:18 GMT

Yesterday I attended the Spring Mini-Con at Endgame, a gaming store in Oakland. These mini-cons, which are run periodically throughout the year, host three 4-hour slots of RPG sweetness, focusing mostly on indie games. This year I only took part in two games, as I'd been up too late the previous night for there to be any hope of making the morning sessions.

Red-eye Flight (World of Darkness) - This game had originally been listed as using Spirit of the Century rules, but when the con organizer corrected that typo, I decided to stick with it as I knew the GM to be top-notch. It was a good call, as this was a very fun game, packed with roleplaying and suspense even though the whole thing lasted only about three-&-half hours. I don't have much experience with nWoD, but what I've seen of it has been pleasant. The mechanics are clean and simple, and, although I somehow manage to forget the rules shortly after playing them, they remain very easy to pick up once the game gets going. The game itself involved a passenger flight being possessed by ghastly apparitions, where I played the 15-year-old female gymnast/physics student overachiever - a stretch pour moi, but it was fun to change things up.

The Bad Man Over Your Shoulder (Don't Rest Your Head) - This was my first time playing DRYH and I was impressed. I had a chance to read the entire book in between my afternoon and evening games, and it strikes me mostly as a cross between the film Dark City, a steampunk version of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and Carcosa. I was a little worried in reading over the mechanics, which seems confusing and cumbersome in the book; but, in play, they worked very well, and were picked up easily. We played very young children brought over by "The Bad Man" who sought to eat us and our loved ones, and only two of us made it out of the Mad City (my character, with his Superman cape, turned into a monstrous superbeing while fighting off the monsters come to devour his sleeping friends). I can see how the game can be brutal, and I'm eager to pick the book up and maybe play around with using it as alternative mechanics for Call of Cthulhu characters when trapped in a Dreaming state.

The next mini-con at Endgame will be the Good Omens Con in June. I would encourage anyone in the Bay Area around that time to check it out, as these things have consistently been a blast, full of interesting games (many with systems not often run at the larger conventions).

Gender, Race, and Historical Realism in RPGs

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:10:03 GMT

I've been sluggish this week, which means I've barely started reading through Trail of Cthulhu, which, by the first eleven pages (sluggish may be an understatement), seems pretty good. That eleventh page has a particularly striking section on occupations and gender in the period (the 1930's), where the author Kenneth Hite rolls off statistics on female employment (or lack thereof) back then before adroitly dismissing their relevance:

This means exactly nothing for players of Trail of Cthulhu. The default option (and the publisher's assumption) is that if you can suspend your disbelief sufficiently to imagine giant betentacled monstrosities, then a female doctor should be no problem.

It always seems that when gamers focus on historical accuracy, they do so mostly to preserve stereotypical attitudes of sexism and racism (and the minutiae of gun manufacture, but that's for another post). Very little thought is given to the complexities of these attitudes, to the differences between private thought and public demeanor, or how these attitudes are actually translated into action (for example, how an anti-Semite could end up marrying a Jew). Even less thought is given to how these attempts to preserve an often ill-researched model of historical accuracy ("women were always subservient back then" or "blacks were always disenfranchised") affect party dynamics, creating a bad gaming experience for others. And it should be remembered that the whole point of all this is not to, for example, completely simulate gender politics among upper middle-class academics in 1930's New England, but to have fun.

I'll grant that some verisimilitude must be preserved to maintain a suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the experience. I've had my own little history tantrums when trains appear in Lhasa, Tibet in the mid-1930s, or when a Shinto chaplain is assigned to an American submarine during WWII. However, as Hite well points out, if you have more of a problem believing in Edith the female police detective than the squamous horror that was once your Uncle Winthrop, you're letting your peeves get in the way of your fun. Hite also points out that the movies and fiction of that period were full of strong, independent female protagonists (which were also full of minority protagonists, raunchy sex and other adult themes); so, if the racists and sexists believed to be everywhere in early twentieth-century Western culture could suspend their disbeliefs, why can't modern gamers?