In honor of that New Zealand flick I’ve been reading about in all the popular newsmagazines, we’ll mashup The Hobbit today. It’ll be kind of a relief to do a story that has something that more or less resembles the typical adventuring party for once. It’s one of those big adventuring parties I remember from massive sprawling college AD&D games, but it’s still an adventuring party.
Category: Memes
Unduly influenced by Passion, for better or worse, this week’s Monday Mashup is going to be the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You can do it straight, as an evocation of faith; you can do it cynically, if you’re that kind of person; or you can say “Geeze, that’s too close to the line, I’m not gonna do this one.” I figure if it’s OK to express one’s faith by making a movie, though, it ought to be OK to do it in an RPG. (Also, I didn’t answer WISH 75, so this will have to do.)
WISH 76 asks:
A lot is made of the role of the GM in a game, but what is the role of the player?
I’m not really sure if I can answer that one, since so much depends on the game. The single most important trick to master can be summarized as “support interaction,” which covers a lot — sharing spotlight time, making your character sticky, and so on. Most other stuff depends on the game, I think.
Some games really are GM-driven, and I don’t actually have any problems with that. Sometimes I want to be a spectator. Not often, but sometimes. Some games, the role of the player is to be tactical opposition. Some games, the players help drive plot.
Idle question: is the GM playing the game as well? Shouldn’t we call him or her a player?
Our mashup for the first of December (did you remember to say “rabbit” three times?) is Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It’s all about man versus nature, with themes of ecological awareness and man competing with man as side dishes. Great book, even if there’s controversy about what exactly happened up there.
WISH 74 is all about dreams and hopes:
Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?
I’m not an Amber player anymore, but I’d still kind of like to see Rebma… no? OK, I’ll come up with three others.
First off is a two in one, since the reasons I want them are similar. I would like to see the promised Heresy RPG. The background was cool and the card art was superb and I like games that use the Christian mythos quite a bit. Heretical cyberpunk hit all my buttons. I want Anoch’s Mystick RPG for similar reasons; the cards hinted at a dense intricate background which played to my love for conspiracy.
Mind you, in both cases I expect I would have been disappointed. It’s unfair to expect game companies to live up to my inchoate dreams, and neither of the sourcebooks would have been 500 pages long.
In lieu of these sourcebooks, I hang around people who make up cool conspiratorial stuff and that scratches my itch. I also read Eco novels. It works out OK for me.
Second: Trinity. Lots more Trinity. Preferably written by me, but really, any Trinity would do. In particular, I really sorely wish I’d gotten to work on the full-size aliens supplement. I wanted to write the Coalition chapters so badly. (Pause for a moment of self-indulgence.)
Since the supplement probably isn’t happening any time soon, I make up my own Coalition material, which bears a certain resemblance to what might have been published.
Finally, I’d like to see a D20 Modern Fantasy supplement, adapting the D20 Modern rules to fantasy usage, preferably from WotC. I’m pretty sure that D20 Modern characters are a bit weaker than characters of equivalent level in D&D, but I like the D20 Modern approach to classes somewhat more than I like the D&D approach. So a supplement which presented a beefed up set of classes would be vastly appreciated. Alternatively, of course, I could just start everyone at third level. (Tip of the hat to Gamma World D20 Modern.)
The Monday Mashup returns with Hitchcock’s Psycho. This is another one that almost has to be a one-shot, unless you wanted to make Norman Bates an ongoing master villain — which is an interesting idea, now that I think about it. But I’m going to be thinking one-shot. There’s an insane villain, obsessed by someone who doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s a lonely location.
Now, do you cast the PCs as Marion Crane and helpless prey, or do you cast ‘em as the post-death investigators? I’m inclined to think the latter, although that turns it into a police procedural… which is in and of itself interesting.
My approach follows.
Happily, Game WISH is back. Today’s question:
Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?
It’s kind of a hard question, because I don’t tend to think of characters in those terms — so when I say I’d like to play Paul or Clarice more, it’s not because I think their stories were unfinished per se. It’s because I want to find out what happens next. In Paul’s case, I’d like to see him leading an adult superhero team. I’d like to find out if he can continue to be the force for good he thinks he could be. And I like playing him. In Clarice’s case, well, she’s just fun to play. I guess her story is about done; I like thinking of her hanging out in 1850 training a bunch of little genetically engineered Ascended ninjas.
That said, Cian really deserves more play and he’s the only character who I really feel missed out on a full lifespan. I had to move to Boston in the middle of that campaign, and there was a lot of prophecy around Cian. I’d really like to know what happens to him, and I don’t have any idea, which is perhaps the most irksome part.
I’m going to miss Monday Mashup this week (and be light on general on blogging). A family member is in the hospital with something fairly serious and I a) can’t focus on blogging and b) don’t have as much free time anyhow.
I’m feeling musical again today, but this time we’ll go for a specific song rather than an entire musical oeuvre. Our mashup of the week is "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin.
Now, I’m no Led Zeppelin expert, but I read that song as describing some significantly transformative events. I’m pretty sure the lady in question is making bad, materialistic choices. And I think we have a few Tolkien references. Seems like that ought to be enough to work with.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
For Mashup number fifteen, we’ll return to the classics of science fiction. Our subject today is the Foundation Trilogy, Asimov’s soft-SF series of psychohistory, galactic empire, and barbarianism. I’m more interested in the original three books than the multitude of sequels, but suit yourself for your mashups.
The core concept of the trilogy is Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, with which Seldon predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire and manipulated events so as to minimize the time before another Empire would rise. Add in the backstop that was the Second Foundation — and don’t forget the psionics — and you have a lot of material to work with.
Oh, and this is your sporadic reminder that there’s a game meme announcement mailing list. The only traffic on the list is announcements of new game meme posts; right now it’s just me and Ginger’s WISH.
Now, on to my Mashup.