Category: Gaming

Spirit of the Century (which is cool, buy it if you like pulp gaming) has an interesting character generation system that reminds me a tad of Lexicon. Hm, Wikipedia has failed yet again; there’s no page for Lexicon. That one, I might actually fix. Anyway.

Spirit’s character generation is a group activity that ensures pre-play connections between characters. I think it can be played out in blog entries. Let’s try it.

Comment here with:

A concept. Pulpy concept. It’s the 30s.

A name. Pulpy name. You know.

Then write up your character’s youth, from birth to age 14. (You were born in 1900, by the by.) Talk about your character’s family’s circumstances, the size of your character’s family, how well he or she gets along with his or her family. Where is your character from? What region? How was he or she educated? What were your character’s friends like?

Also, write down two Aspects which are tied into the events of the character’s childhood or the character’s upbringing. What’s an Aspect? It’s a tag that helps explain who a character is; it’s stuff you wanna see in the game. “Aspects can be relationships, beliefs, catchphrases, descriptors, items, or pretty much anything else that paints a picture of the character.” Quick Witted, “You’ll Never Catch Me Alive,” Raised by Wolves, Champion of the Golden Temple, etc., etc., etc.

Sorkin D20.

Classes: Leader, Advisor, Star, Writer, and Technician.

Toby Ziegler is a dual class Advisor/Writer. Sam Seaborn was a Writer, but in season 4 he decided to multi-class to Leader. The control room guys in Sports Night and Studio 60 are Technicians. Nancy McNally (the National Security Advisor) is dual class Technician/Advisor.

Danny Tripp is a director, which I think means he’s a dual class Advisor/Writer, emphasis on the Advisor. Hard to say, though.

Opinions: do vampires (specifically, Vampire: the Requiem vampires) leave fingerprints?

Also, what are the odds of rolling 25 ten-sided dice and not getting anything above a 7?

The Trinity Players Guide is available for free over at DriveThruRPG. It’ll only be free till April 20th, so pick it up now. Cause I wrote the section on the Orders, and it’s pretty decent.

Oh, OK, Rob. Our Canadian overlord talks, and we listen.

Unplumbed Ephemeral Circus genre time. The Empire is decaying. It has always been decaying; it will be decaying for millenial. Nobody remembers the time when it was not, except perhaps the positronic computators that remain. They grind equations into dust for purposes that were set back when the Empire was bright. It is rumored that a man knows how to change those purposes; that legacy was passed down in his clan from mother to son, from uncle to niece, and cannot be used until the time is right.

The Court is glorious. Under the masks, it is horrible. It’s a trap: the truly competent maintain the rusting machinery of the Empire elsewhere. Those attracted to power vanish in the byzantine complexities of Court etiquette. (The universities teach courses in it, of dubious value.)

The barbarians are at the stargates. The imperial armies are funded by patrons, who have varying motivations. One donates to the Crown for the sponsorship of a Legion — it is not legal to have a private army. Good Legions will be picked up by other patrons if their patron falls, which reduces the ability of the patrons to control their sponsored troops. Some patrons seek status; some are altruists; some are fanatics. The campaign is the defense against the barbarians. Military SF, but not David Drake’s style. More Asimov, but lush.

I’m running out of elliptical titles for posts about awards. Ah well.

Um, yeah, the Origins Awards. I didn’t game much this last year. That won’t stop me from commenting, though!

I see, among the Best RPG nominees: five licensed games. Well, four; I don’t think it counts as a license when the same person is writing both the original text (Artesia) and the RPG. Four out of the five use existing systems, with varying degrees of adaptation to the world.

No Dogs in the Vineyard.

There’s a lot of creativity in every RPG, licensed or not, original mechanics or not. I can’t believe that a bunch of licenses based on existing mechanics represents the most creative stuff the industry has to offer, though.

So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly.

Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral.

I have never been adverse to layering a touch of the horrific into my settings.

Let’s say that the gears of the difference engines, when layered as closely together as they must be in order to achieve the necessary efficiencies, attract visitors. Angelic and demonic alike? That’s sort of cool. Actually, that’s really cool, since nothing says angels are going to approve of the Queen.

I’m almost lifting from Dark Inheritance here, but it’s a cool setting. I can pull the Brotherhood of the Iron Rose, the Eight Heavenly Dragons, the International Geographic Society, and the Promethean Order wholesale, so I will. Drop the godgenes, drop the titans.

I believe that this consequence is not widely known. In fact, the Engines are only just now getting big enough. Characters should be people who have some sort of relation to the Engines — whether people who live nearby, mechanists, members of the House of Engineers? (Our third legislative body, occupying an uncomfortable slot between the House of Lords and the House of Commons.)

Huh. Sure. Angels/demons manifest as mechanicals, a la the Turk. But with … well, I’ll save that.

Doodle, doodle.

IFMapper is pretty sweet, if you’re wanting to map interactive fiction. I’ve tried a few mappers over the years, and none of them had a sufficiently low degree of friction for me to keep using ‘em. IFMapper is nicely painless.

I no longer need to come up with my own RPG campaign ideas. E.g.:

“The PCs are futuristic ninjas in a large corporation who, with their bare hands, fight corporate wrongdoers for gold in the Renaissance.” Sure, I can run that. The ninjas don’t get to bring their technology back and… the time machine went bad, so the plot arc is them trying to save money to bootstrap technology so they can rebuild.

“The PCs are mystic lawyers in New England who, with captured animals, fight aliens for purposes of fulfilling prophecy in the near future.” Yes. Yes they are.