There’s a tradition at the overnight LARP camp where I work, one that has been carefully nurtured by my friend Zach, of playing RPGs when you’re not busy LARPing. Zach has run a wide variety of games at camp, but in the past few years he’s used Old School Renaissance games almost exclusively. I think I’ve finally discovered why.
Tag Archives: RPGs
Commence Radio Silence
I will be busy this week, running a larp at The Wayfinder Experience’s staff week. I’m afraid that this means that I’m unlikely to post anything this week. I know I’d only just gotten back into the rhythm of posting twice a week, but don’t worry. I’ll be back. Until then, enjoy yourselves, and maybe check out the beautiful cyberpunk hack of Lady Blackbird, Always/Never/Now.
Zombies in the Vineyard: a DitV hack
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?
World Building: Where Have All The Dwarves Gone?
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?
World Building: Making The Outer Planes Better
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.
Shenani-games: Random Character Generation is GREAT
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.
What I Usually Write, or, Responsibilities to One’s Audience
More or less what I grew up with.
I love adventure fiction. It’s makes up a large portion of what I write, probably because it’s what I grew up reading in books and creating in role-playing games. When I don’t write adventures, I still generally use the climactic structure to resolve the primary tensions of the piece. Unless I feel like experimenting, I don’t usually do the “unfinished story” thing and leave such tension unresolved. But you probably already know this, so why the hell am I telling you?
World Building: The Hells of Errant Souls
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
World Building: Magic, Demons, Angels, and Devils
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
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.
Fistful of Wits 