Gaming

GameHole Con was great! I really like the size (somewhere between 5K and 10K people) and the variety of games was good enough for me to play something interesting every slot I wanted to fill. I did not fill every slot. Also S. and I managed to get into most of our games together, which was nice – I was a bit worried about the signup system resulting in us being split. I made sure to hit the process button within a minute after signups opened up, with a populated wishlist, which probably helped. We’re going back next year. ...

People reading this via my blog know I’m a tabletop roleplaying fan; for the LinkedIn crowd, here’s a piece of me that you probably didn’t hear a lot about at work. Unless you worked with me at a video gaming company. I have spent a lot of my life playing tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeons & Dragons and the thousands of games of roughly that style. I was introduced to the hobby by a disreputable dude a couple years older than me in high school, who showed me this game called Tunnels & Trolls, which notably supported solitaire play in the style of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except with dice. I spent endless hours as a solitary kid randomly generating new dwarves, elves, humans, and so on and sending them into dungeons to live or die as the dice demanded. I still have many of the books I bought back then, sitting a couple of yards from me on my shelves. ...

This is not going to be a surprising revelation. I am writing it down because otherwise I will keep forgetting and being surprised when I remember it and so on and so forth. Sometimes I’m slow. The other day I was noodling on a Frontier Scum one-shot I want to run at Con of the North, because I want to start running more games at conventions and Frontier Scum looks really easy to run and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Westerns in the last year. (I will playtest it before I run it in public, no worries.) And I had a great concept about a bunch of scum who get caught between the law and a bunch of people who are even scummier than them, but it wasn’t solidifying. It was a few frames of film in my mind and a couple of NPCs and then… what? ...

I tried some experiments in my Demon Haunted Feng Shui game the other day, and it worked out well enough for me to want to write about them. Love Letters The first one was Love Letters, stolen from Apocalypse World. The concept in a nutshell is one-off character-specific mechanics intended to get people back into the swing of the campaign after a hiatus. For a great podcast on the topic, see Dice Exploder. ...

Miss me? As I sort of expected, I didn’t get a ton of writing done while I was in Dublin, but I made up for it on the weekend of my return. Here’s the current card PDF, updated with a first draft of the Location cards. I also gave all the Characters Locations to start at. I think I’m short on Tour Bus occupants, though. You can see how I implemented the city Locations I talked about. I sort of feel OK about how they read, although I’m both tempted to add like four more and worried I won’t be able to maintain enough variety in the cities. As is I’m giving into stereotypes here and there (sorry, Sicily). I’ll think about it and see how it plays out. ...

As more or less expected, I made very little progress last week thanks to travel and a busy work schedule. I’m sitting in Dublin right now and I’m too jet lagged to figure out how to run the card generator remotely so I’m just gonna copy/paste the three cards I finished into this post. More to come! The Stage If you’re not on the stage, are you even alive? If anyone else is on the stage, are they stealing your thunder? Up close, you can see the wear on the boards and the stains where the ghosts of bands past pissed in the corners. It smells like rat shit and dead dreams. It’s still the only place that matters in the whole entire world. ...

I spent a lot of time dithering about Location cards. According to the SRD (and to the two Desperation games published by Bully Pulpit), “Locations allow the players to form both a tactile and mental map of the setting you have created. They are the first thing players encounter and should strongly inform what is to come. Make individual Locations evocative as well as easy to tie to the People.” ...

OK, that’s properly back at it. I finished up the first draft of all 12 Character cards this week by the simple expedient of blocking out an hour or so, sitting down, and forbidding myself to be a perfectionist. They’ll need another pass – in particular I think I need to amp up the general potential for conflict, maybe give everyone a very stupid goal like Morgan already has – but I like what I’ve got. ...

Zero creative progress this week, but I did manage to get the card layout thingie working so this PDF is the same stuff you’ve already seen except formatted for print and play. Note that the locations listed are repetitive and not useful since I haven’t figured that out yet.

S. and I went back to Orcacon for the first time since the pandemic and had a great time. I played in three games, and she played in two of those, all of which were at the least a worthwhile way to spend a few hours. We also attended a panel, which was so exciting to me that I already posted about it. This post will cover the con in general and the three games I played. ...