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Originally posted on Monster Darlings:
Many of us know the joy of describing a complex dungeon and watching our friends studiously attempt to chart it out on graph paper, in many cases distorted by the “picture-telephone effect.” And mapping out a dungeon can be serious fun for a DM. But sometimes, adventurers want to explore…
Reading about flat characters in E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, I have just been reminded of one of the things that routinely frustrates me in David Weber’s work. Weber likes trying to make characters who should essentially be flat, more or less caricatures intended to draw up conflict or drama or comedy (or maybe they should be comic but he refuses to use them in that way, making them painfully comic instead… more on that later). But instead of accepting that these characters should be flat, he tries to flesh them out. He tries to make them round, and make me care about them. Nine times out of ten, he fails.
Dogs in the Vineyard is an indie RPG created by Vincent Baker; it has an unusual set of dice mechanics for its conflict resolution, and as part of that it encourages players to take turns shaping the game’s narrative. While it certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I have had a lot of fun with it.
It’s also highly moddable, much like other Vincent Baker games (Apocalypse World being a prime example). While the DitV sourcebook describes a Wild West setting full of civil and religious strife, I’ve heard or seen others using the system to play in mafia-based story lines, Star Wars settings, feudal Japan, or even The Matrix. And Baker hacked his own system to tell horror stories, in Afraid in the Vineyard.
So of course someone decided to modify things a little further to turn it into a storytelling system that would allow you to play in a classic zombie movie. Sadly, while they’ve playtested their zombie hack, the ruleset that I was able to find online is nowhere near final.
I’m going to cobble something together from those notes as best as I can, and when I’ve done that I’ll share the result with you. If you’re already familiar with DitV and Afraid, maybe you’ll enjoy taking a look too?
Today’s post is brought to you by the caffeinated musings which have distracted me from my homework and encouraged me to write world background material instead.
The setting of For The King! is largely lacking playable non-humans at the moment. There are a few dwarves or elves who might be somewhere in the realm of Duval, and there are some gnomes and halflings and others scattered around, but most people, in most places, are human. The orcs and half-orcs mostly live to the northwest of the kingdom, generally part of the large nomadic tribes which roam through those sections of the Trade Lands. Heck there are centaurs too, but they generally stick to the lands northeast of the kingdom of Duval, and don’t have much direct contact except with traders who venture out onto the northern plains.
And yet there are remnants of dwarven architecture throughout the center of the kingdom of Duval, and historical records definitely suggest that they used to live in the area. So… where have all the dwarves gone?
Like it says in the title, this week’s flash fiction challenge is to create characters and convey them in 250 words or less. I’ve had a few knocking around in my head recently, and I decided to let two of them out. I’ve already written stories about both of them before, which you can find (amongst others) right here.
Hello everyone! This week I’ve set aside time to spend with my brothers, which means lots of role playing games and storytelling and laughter and yelling (also probably more food and booze than usual). But because of all that, I’m unlikely to have much for you here. I’m certainly unlikely to have full-scale reviews or such. I’ll return with the usual stuff by next Monday, no worries.
But while I’m not writing as much about things, here, have a few tidbits!
Dying Light is a fascinating game: it has gameplay that I find fun and engaging, but a story and characterizations which so far repel me. It is definitely fun playing with other people, running around the zombie apocalypse at high speed, leaping from building to building, and getting lost in the warrens while hungry monsters chase me. But every time the story progresses, I shudder and feel that ugly cold spot in my belly; why the hell does the POV character have to be a tool? Why do they have to make the villain choices they do? Why did they think the misogynist themes would be worth including? Why do I feel certain that the “strong female character” they’ve created is just going to be damseled within the next few missions? For that matter, why are there two or three women survivors in the tower, and everyone else there that I meet is male?
As someone who loves and is fascinated by stories, I’ll probably keep watching the story cutscenes all the way through. But that may just make me angrier and angrier about their writing choices. It’s a good thing that the cutscenes are skippable and basically won’t matter in the long run.
On the other end of things, we have Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance, which I just finished. The first time that I picked it up I bounced off the main character’s narration (a first for me with any of Bujold’s books). But when I started it this time I fell in and couldn’t climb out… which is about what I expect from Bujold at this point. She really is fabulous. I’m going to leave my paeans of praise for another post, when I can give this book it’s due, but if you like the other Vorkosigan series books be sure to keep at it with this one, even if the start is a little disorienting. It’s worth it.
Okay, that’s all for now. Enjoy yourselves.
The above image may not look like much, but it is actually amazing. It’s the product of a brilliant set of GMing tools, too good to pass up. This site (http://donjon.bin.sh/) offers you a random dungeon generator, with settings for party size, level, hall layout, shape, room size, and more. It gives you easily legible maps with mouseover text notes, and downloadable “secret-free” versions for your players. Other sections of the same site offer more random generators than I can shake a stick at, ranging from inns and magic shops to weather, treasure hoards, and encounters. It’s not perfect since it’s all pretty, uh, random, and you’ll want to edit features to fit your settings and stories… but it’s amazing when it comes to giving you rapid access to otherwise fiddly information for barely any effort. I do still want the ability to edit generated maps without having to convert them into some other system or format. But I’ve had so much fun playing around with this for the past few days, and it’s given me piles of ideas. Suddenly, almost all the prep work that I usually don’t like doing for D&D can be offloaded onto this, and that inspires me. If you run games and tell stories of any sort, check this out. It’s too cool to miss, even if you never end up using it yourself.
Once again, I find myself investigating the cosmological background of the setting I’ve most recently created. I was reading through the Dungeon Master’s Guide again, reading the section on planes near the beginning, and I’m in that usual place: somewhere between excited and miffed. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to change the things that haven’t excited me.
I’m comfortable, for the most part, with the material the DMG offers on things like the Astral and Ethereal planes. I’m more okay with the DMG’s ideas for the Shadowfell, the Feywild, and the various elemental planes. I’m not very happy about their ideas for the Outer Planes. I have some rewriting to do; let me tell you why.
This weekend was a good one for gaming. On Saturday I ran a last minute seat-of-the-pants adventure involving a great deal of bullshitting, and on Sunday I continued to run a standing campaign based on the material I started posting about last fall, in the setting I’ve been writing about this spring. I had a great time with both sessions.
I’m not going to tell you much about the campaign, since that would potentially expose spoilers, but I absolutely have to share the basic setup of the Saturday game with you. You remember whothefuckismydndcharacter, right?
Because we had very little time to set up and run the game, I decided that the players should roll down the line, which is to say that they had to roll their ability scores in order without being able to shift them around and spend too much time thinking about what they were going to be. Then Spaige whipped out whothefuckismydndcharacter and got “a fucking sentimental Human Warlock from a cavern without echoes who is a recovering cannibal.” I immediately decided that people could rearrange their ability scores as long as they shifted them to match a randomly generated character from that site. Two of our players (Thom and Whitney) were hardcore / lucky and both rolled down the line AND used the random character generator.
The party ended up with an elven wizard, two warlocks (one human, one half-elven), a rock gnome rock bard, and a dragonborn barbarian. The party’s wisdom scores were (I believe) 6, 6, 7, 8, and 12, with the barbarian as the wisest party member. The lowest charisma score for the party was 14, and most people had 16 or higher. Marvellor the Shit had a 20. How did he end up with a name like that? Well…
As the first few people figured out who their characters were, everyone decided that the PCs should start at 3rd level and that everyone would need an epithet of some sort. We made a joke about the gnomish bard rocking out, and so he quickly became Duane the Rock, rock gnome rock bard. The dragonborn barbarian, who had once survived a cookpot (it said so in his backstory), was described as having proportions like unto a Red Delicious; he’s bigger up top than down low, but he’s all around larger than he really should be. He came to be known as Horgrin the Vast. Spaige’s human warlock took the Great Old One pact, and was thus able to communicate telepathically (Spaige, seriously, I still want the fluff you came up with for that demon-tainted cave of the cannibalistic thought-collective, it was great), so she became Chathi, the Last Disciple of Silent Whispers, or Chathi the Last for short.
Whitney still needed an epithet and was randomly generating her character name (she got extra bonus points, because she randomly generated everything including wizard her spell list), but she quickly realized that her name was her epithet. She ended up playing The Gart, which was perfect because it continued the tradition of four letter epithets.
By this point people were starting to get a little cracked out and/or drunk. Thom showed up late and generated his character as quickly as he could, randomly generating the name Marvellor for his half-elf warlock, but was stumped for what to call himself until we pointed out that he needed a four-letter epithet. Thus was born Marvellor the Shit, and his less impressive imp familiar Bixby the Crap.
Together these hooligans decided to search out a treasure as yet untouched by the adventuring group which had touched (more like scarred) all of their lives. There’s so much that I’m skipping over, like the beautiful way in which they connected the fragments of backstory given to them all through the random character generator, but suffice to say that they had reason to despise and outdo the people who had ruined the lives that they once led. As such, they journeyed into the land of Kraskya, the ancient and ruined city, and promptly fought a large number of things that they were hilariously ill prepared to face. And despite the fact that high charisma types and people with enchantment and deception spells rarely do that well against the undead, they triumphed.
Of course, we left off while they were still stuck underground, more or less trapped by a very very large number of skeletons, but I’m sure that will be a good story for another time.
Hell, courtesy of Dante.
Last time I kept mentioning someone that I decided to call the Most Powerful Devil (MPD), without ever going any further into who or what that was. But I’ve come up with more background for them since then, and in so doing I’ve also come up with more details for the game-world as a whole.
So, today I have a stupidly simple calendar (though I haven’t yet bothered to give the months names), I have a better idea of what the afterlife looks like (I’ve totally tossed out the basic alignment-based fare in favor of something a bit more complex), and I have a name and backstory for the Most Powerful Devil. I think you’ll like this stuff. Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 