Category Archives: Games

World Building: Magic, Demons, Angels, and Devils

Posted on by Henry

Back in November I wrote about a new RPG campaign that I had cooked up, a game that I’ll refer to as For The King! for lack of a better name.  If you are currently playing in or are going to play in my 5th edition D&D campaign, you might want to be careful with reading this post.  If not, feel free to read this early-concept campaign overview.  I’ll avoid saying things here that could be too spoiler-y, but I plan to explore the nature of magic, demons, devils, and other such inimical forces.  Your character might or might not have access to this information.

Based on the first few sessions that I ran for my brothers, I already know that the setting allows for angels and fallen angels, though the latter are more like Remnants from In Nomine, powerful supernatural beings from other planes who have had some part of their greater nature stripped from them by intent or by accident.

Angels and their derivatives are all essentially moderately self-willed fragments of the god they serve, and might be thought of as something like having a god let its fingernail clippings (or maybe severed finger?) go off and do its bidding in the world.  A bit like some kind of overpowered intelligent celestial dandruff, I suppose.  But I don’t know off the top of my head how to make demons and devils work, and I don’t just want to sign on to the metaphysics presented in the 5th ed. Monster Manual without some editorial input.  I’d much rather doodle in the margins and make their setting fluff more thoroughly my own.  So read on for sweet lore! Continue reading →

A Red and Pleasant Land: Old School RPGs through a Looking Glass

Posted on by Henry

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My itinerant laser-show friend arrived unexpectedly this week, and as such it was immediately time to play RPGs.  He brought a copy of A Red and Pleasant Land, a Lewis Carroll inspired setting and rules supplement for the system Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and we all thought that this was so cool that we totally had to play it.  We got somewhat distracted by character creation because we’re a bunch of nerds and it’s fun coming up with details about our fictional selves, but I’m really looking forward to playing with these characters.

I can’t tell you that much about the game yet, since I haven’t really gotten much of a chance to play, but I can tell you this: Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a little bit like a more metal version of original DnD, and A Red and Pleasant Land is a far more metal version of Carroll’s visions, chock full of murder, bloodthirsty vampires, and wars.

If you like the idea of playing a stripped down and often lethal version of old-school Dungeons and Dragons, something that will force you to think your way out of your various predicaments (because your stat line and the game systems surely won’t save you), you should check out Lamentations.  If you like the idea of doing that in a fabulously lethal Wonderland, and possibly wandering the world as an Alice (yes, “the Alice” is a class, and from what I’ve seen she’s totally amazing), then you should check out A Red and Pleasant Land.

Ok, that’s enough for now, I’m afraid the time has come for me to go back to seeing my visiting friend before he disappears onto the road once more.

Flash Fiction: Robin’s Songs

Posted on by Henry

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Chuck Wendig has a blog called terribleminds, and on the 9th he posted a Flash Fiction challenge.  The prompt: write a 1000 word story about a character created by this random D&D character generator.  My prompt turned out to be a “suspicious half-elf bard from a sheltered upbringing who is lactose intolerant.”  I really had no idea how to work in lactose intolerance, but I think I’ve succeeded.  Check it out below the break!

***

Robin looked up from her book, absentmindedly pushing a strand of hair behind her gently pointed ear.  The little cluster of red feathers that she kept tied at the end of her hair rustled against her shoulder.  She gave the innkeeper a second-degree smile, the one the Enlightened Brethren had taught her to use for disarming the suspicions of others.

Continue reading →

Tombs=Raided, Hearts=Won; Tomb Raider Rocks

Posted on by Henry

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I don’t usually wish that I paid more for a game.  But I liked Tomb Raider so much that I almost wish I hadn’t bought it on sale.  I want the people who made it to know how much I liked it, and I want them to put as much high-quality work into making the next one as they put into making this one.  Because there’s a next one.  I mean, even if I didn’t know that Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming, I wouldn’t have any real doubts (except, I suppose, if the studios involved fell apart or lost the rights, which would be terrible).  The end of Tomb Raider left it clear that Lara is nowhere near finished with being the awesome badass which she’s become, and that makes me very happy.  Watching the announcement trailer for the new game has reduced me to a quivering pile of enthusiasm.

Why am I so happy about all this?  Tomb Raider is a brilliant game, and does things with story-telling that remind me why games are such a fascinating medium in the first place.  It’s an adventure novel with audience participation, a new entry in a genre that I love, and it evades the problematic trappings that spoil so many other adventure stories for me.

Ok, spoil is a strong word.  I love adventure stories enough to enjoy them despite their frequent problems, but being able to enjoy one that isn’t so inherently problematic is a breath of fresh air.  It doesn’t hurt that this particular story is extremely well written, with characters who feel like real people, and who share history with each other that seems fitting and unforced.  It’s a little bit like someone crossed Tintin with Indiana Jones, turned the tone dial to ‘gritty and a bit bloodthirsty,’ and then put you through the Bildungsroman of Lara Croft as she goes from untested and unconfident archaeologist to self-assured and competent survivor and adventurer, hellbent on keeping herself and her friends alive.  Wait, no, that’s almost exactly what it’s like.  It’s glorious.

Look, you don’t have to take my word for it.  You can play the game yourself.  But if you want to read more of my thoughts on the topic, including the few reservations I have, please be my guest:  Continue reading →

Godseat, a Wayfinder Adventure

Posted on by Henry

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I should note, I have no idea whether or not this game will actually be chosen for use by Wayfinder.  In fact, I still have to finish writing it and submitting it.  I think it’s a pretty cool concept, and it experiments further with some of the player vs. player mechanics that I explored in the 2014 Staff game (along with my excellent co-writers, you rock).  In the interest of not spoiling you for anything, I’ll refrain from telling you too much about the flow of game.  Instead, this post will give you a brief overview of the setting and what the game is all about.

A Brief History

There are many gods and godlings, but there is only one Most-High.  The Most-High reigns over all from the Godseat, the Throne of Supremacy, the Seat of Knowledge, the Bringer of Good Tidings and Ill News.  Whichever being sits upon the Godseat is acknowledged as the ruler of all, but no one being can sit upon the Throne forever.  The prayers of faithful worshippers, and their propitiations, may sometimes elevate a new being to the Godseat, replacing the previous Most-High and beginning a new reign.  There are some times, perhaps once or twice a decade, when the cycles of the moon and the stars and the seasons coincide just so, when the prayers and rituals of worshippers take on special power in the area around the Godseat; these times are known as the Nights of Ascension.

Long ago, before the Years of Ruin, Continue reading →

Pairs

Posted on by Henry

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There’s something brilliantly simple about Pairs.  This is probably because it’s a very well designed pub game, from the experienced designers at Cheapass Games.  Pairs is in some ways a departure from the style of their other games, but it shows their collected experience: it’s a snappy game with simple rules that pushes you to go big or go home and gives you quick excitement with good replay value.  It rewards you for smart play, yet it’s just random enough to make flirting with risk a rewarding experience, especially when you can force your fellow players into even riskier territory.  Succeeding in Pairs means balancing your untenable position with your knowledge of the deck and the mental states of your fellow players, and somehow staying in just long enough for someone else to crash and burn first.

While the composition of the game’s deck is very easy to understand (there are ten 10’s, nine 9’s, eight 8’s… all the way down to two 2’s and one 1), counting cards has been actively discouraged by means of a few careful tweaks: each deal starts with five cards being dealt off the top of the deck into a burn pile, all cards removed from play during the game are discarded face down into the burn pile, and a cut card is used to cover the bottom of the deck in order to restrict player knowledge.  Players gain points (a bad thing) when they are dealt a card matching a card they already have in their hand, and all players play with open hands.  Points are tracked by leaving cards you’ve scored visible in front of you, separate from your hand.  Because of how the deck is constructed, you have a roughly 50-50 chance of being dealt an 8, 9, or 10, limiting the amount of time that you can last in any given round.  But it’s possible to fold before you are forced to take points, scoring any one card in play instead of risking being dealt a higher value pair.  The moment you score, regardless of how you do it, you discard whatever remains of your hand.  This means that by folding you to both avoid taking a high value card (e.g. by having a matching 10 dealt to your hand), and deprive other players of opportunities to score low-value cards (either from your hand, or from whatever you picked elsewhere in play).  In play, this means that players’ turns cycle quickly around the table as players choose to either fold, accepting that they will take some points, or hit, accepting risk for the chance of taking no points at all.

Once you’ve taken points and your hand has been emptied, you check to see whether your score has passed the threshold set for your number of players (31 for two players, 21 for three, [or 60/(number of players) + 1, with a minimum of 11 for 6 or more players]).  If you haven’t lost, play continues and you are dealt in once again starting with your next turn, while you hope desperately that someone else will lose before the game gets back around to you.

All in all, rapid and easy play combine with just enough chance to make Pairs an excellent game for laughing at your friends.  If you’re looking for more easy pickup games or pub games, check it out and enjoy scrabbling to take as few points as possible while everyone else does the same.

Cooperative Fireworks Puzzles: Hanabi

Posted on by Henry

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Try this: set off a totally awesome fireworks show without every being able to look at your own hands, relying instead on what your friends tell you about what your hands are doing..  I can’t say that Hanabi is exactly that in game form, but it does a good job of approximating it.  It’s can be difficult, but that very difficulty also makes it rewarding.  Sometimes, of course, you misunderstand what others are telling you and everything blows up in your face.  Read on for more detail.

Continue reading →

I return!

Posted on by Henry

Hello everyone.  I’ve been visiting family and recovering from travel for the past two weeks, but I’m ready to resume my regular schedule.  I have a few thoughts to share with you today (disparate rather than cohesive), but first I have some exciting news: I have been accepted into Simmons’ MFA in Writing for Children (and Young Adults, but that’s not mentioned in the title).  I think I mentioned this before, since I used the elements of Last Days of Loneliness that I shared here as part of my writing sample for the application.  If you haven’t read those, have a gander at parts 1, 2, and 3.  I’m not sure what this will mean for my posts in the future (I’ll start classes in January), and it may result in a slight change in content or length.  On the other hand, I might just start posting things that I write for my classes, so that you can read them too.  No worries, I’m sure I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, thus perpetuating my deliberate misuse of common phrases.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with cool science news, reality has continued to establish the premises of the setting I created for Alison McKenzie‘s flash fiction contest (my entry is here, and some additional tooling around with the setting can be found here).  Specifically, we now have drugs (for rats) that allow for nerves to reestablish themselves (or communicate?) through intervening scar tissue.  It looks like an acceptable approximation to human nerve regeneration is en route.  This comes on top of the already existing heart-in-a-box organ preservation technology, so, you know, we’re really not that far from having chop-shops after all.  Goodness, I hope that’s false, chop-shops are scary.

As is often the way of long trips, I consumed a good deal of media while I was gone.  I finally saw Edge of Tomorrow and In Bruges, I showed Pacific Rim to someone who’d never seen it before, and I watched too many movies on planes (including A Fault in Our Stars, which I think merits some attention here, and Epic, which didn’t particularly impress me).  I read some books too, though mostly I spent time with my lovely family, enjoyed playing with my nephews, and played lots of games.

At some point I’ll have to tell you all about the card games Hanabi and Pairs, but first I should mention that I ran the opening to my new campaign for my brothers; it went over excellently, despite me leaving all my campaign notes at home, and the game ended with one of my brothers in tears after a particularly emotional scene.  His character, a paladin on the edge of death, had a moment with his god that deeply effected my brother.  I was very happy with the final result, though I was a little anxious beforehand because we all thought his character had died for at least a few minutes (and my brother wasn’t especially happy about that).  Before you ask, no, I didn’t handwave him back to life: he finally remembered he had “inspiration” (a D&D 5th ed. mechanic that allows you to roll twice and take the better of the two rolls), and used it to evade his otherwise-final death.

Ok, now that I’ve set myself a large number of reviews to share with you, I’m going to leave it here for today.  Next Monday I’ll be back to the regular schedule, and I’ll probably start by talking about one of the things I’ve mentioned here today.  Until then, I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying your early December!

Behind the scenes of the new campaign…

Posted on by Henry

Monday’s post gave a taste of the game that I’m preparing, but didn’t go into any details about what would follow.  That was intentional.  If there’s any chance that I’ll run this game for you, I strongly suggest that you don’t read what comes after the break.  If you want to see some of what I’ve come up with, and maybe a bit of how I came up with it, read on.

Continue reading →

A new campaign in the works…

Posted on by Henry

This post is only going to include non-spoiler material, appropriate for the opening of the game.

You (the players) are the King’s officials, expected to enforce his decisions, act in his interest, and carry out his wishes in the wider Kingdom.  Mostly drawn from the wealthy and noble classes, the King’s officers are expected to outfit themselves out of their own pocket and see to their own expenses.  There are always a few exceptions to the norm of “wealth and privilege,” since an individual’s skills and qualifications for this particular job are far more important than their bloodline, but exceptions are likely to have an interesting story for how they became one of the King’s officers without the usual entrée.  In many ways, you might think of the King’s officers as Musketeers with a little less in the way of Alexandre Dumas.

The game is set in the Kingdom of Duval, and begins with the players being sent from the capitol city of Duval to the backwater county of Mont Mondal.  Count Xavier of Mont Mondal was recently imprisoned for treason against the throne, when he broke his oath of fealty.  He was executed along with many of his closest companions, and the executions have created quite a disturbance at court.  One of his companions, the wizard Castanedra, fled back to Mont Mondal on the same night that Xavier was taken prisoner: you and your compatriots have been tasked with capturing her and returning with her in your custody.  You have also been instructed to raise the county’s levies and send them to the capitol, to join with King Mander’s other forces already mustering for war against the Kingdom of Meius to the east.

While thoughts of war on the nearby eastern border weigh heavy in everyone’s mind, how are you and your companions going to run this powerful wizard to ground and bring her back to Duval?

Other things that people from the Kingdom of Duval would know:

-Meius and Duval share a border that runs through an agriculturally rich valley.  North and south of the valley the terrain becomes increasingly hilly and mountainous, leaving only one clear passage between the two kingdoms.  While the kingdoms have a long history of trade with each other they’ve recently suffered through a series of trade disputes and feuds, and there are now frequent border raids which have further angered each side.

-Count Xavier (that’s pronounced “Sh-avier,” more or less) had a meteoric rise to match his catastrophic fall.  He was ennobled and granted County Mont Mondal a little more than ten years ago, and he and his companions were widely recognized as having done a great deal to make Mont Mondal actually livable for Duvalians.  Xavier and his companions drove out a large clutch of magical aberrations which had claimed the land as their own, and then kept the local bandits in check.  While his breaking of his vow of fealty clearly put him in the wrong, some people have even gone so far as to say that they wish the king hadn’t had Xavier and his companions executed for their treason.  Not that they’re likely to have said as much to the king.  The king, after all, is known to have a bit of a temper.

-The city of Duval is slowly being surrounded by the many thousands of soldiers who have answered their liege-lords’ calls.  The various levies have been joined by a few mercenary companies looking for work, and their spirits are high as they prepare to fight against Meius.  The king’s armies only wait for a few more levies (like those of Mont Mondal) to join them before marching against Meius in the east.