Category: Gaming

Gotta remember to do Game WISH next week, if I have time, which I might not, since I’ll be at Dundracon and other West Coast points all weekend and my weeks are innnnnnnnsane!

After getting Sorcerer (which I will talk more about at some point) and reading Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition (ditto), I got all fired up to write up a little discussion of using the former to run a game set in the environment of the latter. Then Rob MacDougall beat me to it, so I just posted my thoughts in the thread he started. Man, I’m getting some good gaming out here.

Weird gaming idea of the day:

You hand out character sheets that are folded up like origami, and instruct the players not to unfold them. They start out with the stats and skills and self-knowledge that are visible on the outside. At various points in play, you instruct them to make certain unfolds. New information is thus revealed, and put into play.

If you wanted to randomize things a little, you could use a cootie catcher, but I’m not sure the associations are right.

I think you’d want to use the concept for an amnesiac game, of course. Looking beyond that, though, there are other possibilities. It’d be an interesting way to simulate bursts of energy, maybe… hm. Actually, in some ways this is just a weird mutation of the click-base concept. The other primary influences are Sandman: The Map of Halal and a con game I played in once where we had a base character sheet for our stats, and an overlay character sheet which changed depending on which personality chip we plugged in.

If I knew origami I could develop this idea. Alas.

I went on a mini RPG binge this weekend, and wound up with quite a bit of good stuff, but the gem of the lot was Charnel Gods, by Scott Knipe. It’s a PDF supplement for Sorcerer, and it’s so good it prompted me to buy that game, but it stands perfectly well on its own; at five bucks, there’s no excuse not to buy it if you’ve got any interest in — but I’m getting ahead of myself and reaching for the conclusion already. Tsk.

So what is it? It’s an innovative and original take on the pulp fantasy genre. By pulp fantasy, I mean stories like Conan and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane books, and Scorpion King on the lighter end of the genre. Charnel Gods is not light; it’s a grim world in which the heros bear the blasphemous Fell Weapons and battle the Nameless Ones, because the Old Gods are dead and can no longer fight. Magic is almost non-existent, with the exception of the Fell Weapons. The battleground — the world itself — is formed from the corpses of the gods, which are the only barrier between humanity and oblivion.

Not light at all.

The game is designed to be episodic. The heros are more fated than any White Wolf character, but the rules include a mechanism for inheritance; after each epoch ends, and each epoch will end, another will form atop the corpses of the gods and new heros will take up the Fell Weapons. This structure permits wide variation of genre inside the basic theme, and ameliorates feelings of futility, which is very elegant. Now that I’ve read it, it’s only natural that opening up the possibilities for the campaign also relieves the potential depression inherent in the setting, but I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own. Pay special attention to the maps of the sample epochs, by the by.

The balance of lost humanity (unavoidable for a bearer of a Fell Weapon) and impending doom of the epoch is masterful. The two downward trends are wholly separate and unrelated, except insofar as the Fell Weapons were created to battle that doom, which provides for excellent contrast. There are certain ambiguities about the setting which I won’t spoil, but which heighten that contrast. There’s a bit of the cliche in the ultimate weapons created to battle evil which corrupt the wielders, but I think that’s muted by the fact that the weapons weren’t created for humans. It doesn’t fly as a parable for nuclear weapons, for example.

That sort of elegance permeates the book. Another example: we all know players are gonna read the rulebook. So in Charnel Gods, knowledge of the Fell Weapons and the Old Gods and the rests is one of the things that separates heros (I should, perhaps, be saying “protagonists”) from the rank and file. Another: in Sorcerer, sorcerers can sense the Humanity level of other sorcerers. So in Charnel Gods, there’s a really good reason why the heros would want to do this. The economical synergy between rules and setting is very impressive.

As I mentioned, the game’s intended for use with Sorcerer. I think you could use it as a standalone, with whatever ruleset your heart desires. This may be blaspemy, but you could even pound D20 into working — perhaps by using something like the rules in Mutants and Masterminds. I don’t think stock D20 would work; since Charnel Gods is a low magic world, most of the D20 balancing methods would be absent. Something like Over the Edge would be great. You’d just need to include some sort of Humanity mechanism, since that’s essential to the setting.

It’s five bucks. The layout and art are really nice. I’d have paid $15 bucks for it and not felt ripped off. Go buy it.

I was musing about pulp settings the other day. Off the top of my head:

It’s the 1930s, and the Romany have taken to the skies. After the Hindenburg disaster, the public shied away from hydrogen dirigibles; but Paulo Pettersen, the sort of engineering genius who comes along once in a generation, believed he could make the vessels safe enough. What’s more, he convinced quite a few others of the same, and la! Before anyone realized it, the Romany flew, rising up above Europe in first a dozen and then a hundred great silvery balloons.

The second part of his genius idea, you see, was to provide a place for the gazhe to do the things they couldn’t do down below. Gambling, women, privacy — and luxury, for those who had the money to spare. Why not? If Bugsy Siegel could build a paradise out of desert, surely the Romany could build one out of air.

It worked, and within a few years the skies of Europe were the playgrounds of the well-off… and the hunting grounds of the political services of Europe’s nations. After all, the dirigibles were a much more convenient neutral ground than Morocco.

Paulo oversaw it all with a benevolent smile, which hid a worried frown. The inspiration for the flying nation was not his alone, as it happened; his wife, Zigana, was a seer. It was she who’d guided Paulo to success — and it was she who’d foreseen the coming clouds.

All historical and cultural inaccuracies are mine (and yeah, I slipped some dates here and there for the sake of fiction). In fact, anyone who takes anything in this as solid history should be gently mocked until cured of the habit.

OtherWorld Creations has, as it were, bitten the bullet: it’s the first D20 Modern scenario set in Iraq. Man, they gotta be hoping that when this sucker hits shelves it feels both relevant and not overly painful.

I guess stuff along these lines sells well enough, since Holistic Designs did well enough with Afghanistan D20 to warrant Somalia D20. Historically speaking, GDW made a mint on their Desert Shield Factbook, but lost most of it on their Gulf War Factbook. Loren Wiseman attributes the good sales on the former to being the only available book on the topic at the time. “The second was ‘just another Gulf War Book.’”

Bad taste? Enh, not inherently tasteless. Depends on how it’s done. I’d find an adventure in which the PCs bayonet hordes of Iraqis to be tasteless, but I’d find an adventure in which the PCs bayonet hordes of hobbits to be kind of tasteless too. More so the former, admittedly, since it’d more directly cater to real world unpleasantness.

But really, you just never know when you’re doing modern scenarios. A few years ago, Greg Stolze wrote an excellent adventure called “Fly to Heaven” in which a terrorist attempts to crash a commercial airline into the middle of Chicago. There’s some Stolze commentary on the whole question here.

Actually, it occurs to me that since the book has been announced, there’s nothing stopping me from saying “Hey, look at this, I wrote part of it.” So there you are.

Yes, I am a diehard wrestling fan. I have an old LJ post about this which I think I will dig up soon.

I picked up Engel, the new D20 game from White Wolf, over the weekend. Wait, that’s not true. It’s actually from Feder und Schwert, a German gaming company, and White Wolf’s Sword and Sorcery Studios is publishing it over here. Also, it’s not a D20 game per se: it doesn’t have the D20 logo, so strictly speaking it’s just an OGL game that happens to use the D20 mechanics. But they’re not allowed to say so. In Germany, it was apparently published with the D20 logo and also had a set of Tarot-based mechanics, which we don’t get here. Have I mentioned lately that WotC’s licensing scheme is somewhat complex?

Anyhow, it’s a pretty cool setting. It’s 2654, plagues and disasters have traumatized the Earth’s biosphere, and the Lord of the Flies dreams horrible insects into life. Only the Angelic Church — led by an undying Pope — stands between the wreckage of Europe and the demonic hordes. But five orders of angels have been sent to assist humanity in this hour of need.

Technology is outlawed, but still pursued by the secular leaders of Europe. Feudalism has returned. The Church is the most powerful institution in Europe, but by no means the only center of power. Feder und Schwert have avoided the trap of one-dimensional settings; it’s not just the Church against the baddies, and there are those who are not aligned with the Church but are also not evil.

I like the images of a drowned world in a dying age. In some ways, it’s very Dying Earth. The world is clearly near an end, battered and bruised by centuries of pain, and everyone finds their own way to avoid thinking about it. Some resort to decadence, some resort to the Church, and some find peace in surrender.

The translation is top notch; some Euro game translations (Agone comes to mind) have great ideas weighed down by turgid English, but Engel flows very well. The prose strongly conveys the feeling of the world. The excellent maps probably helped a lot there; the endpapers are a map of flooded Europe, and they really drive home the sense of a world less than once it was.

There is a strong metaplot, some of which is not revealed in the main book. I think it would be pretty easy to ignore it completely, though, so I didn’t find it objectionable. Feder und Schwert is one of those companies that wants to tell a story with their RPGs, though: they’ve published Engel graphic novels and CDs. It might well get in the way of the game at a later date; be warned.

I think using the D20 mechanics was a good choice. Most of the book is background, which doesn’t hurt because the D20 rules are simple to explain and mechanically solid. I would have liked to have seen the Tarot-based system, but I’m sure I’ll find a recap of ‘em on the Web eventually. There’s very little divergence from the basic D20 model here. Engel uses the same classes as does D&D, plus five more classes for the angels themselves. Angelic powers are treated as skills (a really nice touch), but you fuel them with your own hit points (another nice touch which makes good sense in the setting).

On the down side, there are very few sample monsters. This is a pretty serious lack; sure, you could adapt any D&D monster pretty easily, but I kind of want a good set of adversaries in a stand alone game. Since campaigns will likely center around angels, we need to know what they’re combatting. In general, in fact, there’s a lack of information about the Lord of the Flies. He’s around, he’s doing bad things, but what exactly? Well, that’s murky.

There is, by the by, a big secret at the heart of the setting. I’m going to cut that off into the extended entry, for the sake of anyone who might want to play the game. I do think that if you’re intending to be a player (rather than a GM), you don’t want to know this, and I am generally pretty casual about such things.

Overall, it’s a buy with the caveat that the backstory of the world is not complete. I think the promised book on the Lord of the Flies will complete the backstory sufficiently, and I’m willing to wait for it on that basis, but I could be wrong.

The latest entry in Key 20’s 12 Games of Christmas series is Bloggomancy, a school of magic for Unknown Armies. Yeah, it’s what it sounds like. Both amusing and fairly playable, albeit a little slanted towards LiveJournal. Easy enough to fix that, though.

Mind you, it says you can get a major charge for writing a new weblog/journal client. That probably ought to be revised; I’m not a programmer, and I could crank one of those out per day if I wanted. Easy fix: you only get the major charge if more than 500 people use it regularly. That also fits the theme of the other major charge gathering methods.

In a fit of something or other, I picked up Hero Designer the other day. My longest running Hero character is Emoticon. Here he is by way of Hero Designer. For comparison, here’s the old version. The latter is from Fourth Edition, and Hero Designer is a Fifth Edition product, which explains the differences in pointage. Hero Designer is, all in all, pretty slick. A bit slow because it’s written in Java, but that makes it cross-platform, which means it runs on linux now and I can use it on my Mac when Apple releases Java 1.4. Neat.