I owe Simon Rogers some conversation about Mutant City Blues, but I haven’t had time to play it yet. On a readthrough, however, I’m quite impressed – all the usual Gumshoe goodness, plus a creative implementation of superpowers, plus excellent material on running a police-oriented investigative game. The section on roleplaying police interrogations ought to be stapled in front of any police procedural game ever. Which, come to think of it, includes Dark Heresy. ...
“It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn’t have owned up so quickly a few years ago. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You’re creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it.” -- Jon Favreau (original), director of Iron Man (original) So there you go.
We played some Esoterrorists over at Jere’s last night, and it was awesome. I may have some more analysis-like thoughts later, but I wanted to get down some actual play stuff before it faded from memory. One of my questions going into the game was how smoothly the flow of play could work; would it be awkward getting clues? Would point spends work well? Turned out that all that can work very well. Here’s how it played out, more or less.
Not the sole creator of D&D, not the most important figure in the industry, but sine qua non. The original report is here (original). Troll Lords was his current publisher, so this is very unlikely to be a hoax. There’s also confirmation here. Sad news.
Cheap (free) and easy solution: Formulate. It’s nearly perfect for filling in PDF character sheets, since you can save a filled-in sheet as a Formulate document and then use nifty built-in OS X features to print to PDF. For extra geek points, use handwriting fonts: there are a bunch here (original), amid the popups and blinking ads; Chank has you covered (original) if you want to shell out for somewhat higher quality; or go grab the ECF handwriting fonts (original), which I like a lot.
Initial fragments -- place names, etc. Vain’s Rest -- home base of the game. Banegard Tower Drunken Magistrate -- an inn in Vain’s Rest. Secrets -- magic and religion in Tarnished Brass.
There’s a thread over at rpg.net called “Lost Victoriana,” which is actually about the RPG Victoriana, but it got me thinking about a sort of lost history of the Victorian era – a history of technology that dwarves our own, a world of crystal skyships and sophisticated colonies on the surface of Jupiter. The Queen’s Patrol jousts with philosophical criminals who will toast the Queen despite their anarchic ways. Not a steampunk world at all. ...
According to the wiki (original), I put up the prospectus (original) for Orlando Trash on June 6th, 2006. “Mickey Rourke is in this movie. Val Kilmer is in this movie. It’s directed by Michael Mann, or maybe Tony Scott. But it’s not The Hunger. Luis Guzman has a role as a shiftless drifter who erupts into surprising bursts of violence.” Hm. I never did get Luis Guzman into the movie, but in retrospect that was just as well. Danny Trejo made it in. ...
Done as an exercise: Reese Beulay, Roadway Prophet Parent: Hermes Nature: Fanatic
White Wolf put up the Scion demo (original) the other week; I just got around to downloading it. Scion is the one where you play the children of gods in the modern world; it’s not the World of Darkness. They’re going for a Mage: The Hero Defined feel, and not coming up much short as far as I can tell from reading the demo. The system is standard Storyteller, tweaked for heroism. Successes are 7 or more on a ten sider, rather than 8 or more. PCs have a Legend rating, and penalties can’t bring your die pool beneath your Legend rating. And, of course, there are stunt rules. ...