Gaming

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. ...

IFMapper (original) 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.

The character questionnaire for “Whitey’s Boyos” (name still tentative, suggestions welcome) follows. The context: Whitey’s squad of demon-killing hard-nosed bruisers has around for nine months or so now. A couple of the original members have died; there have been a couple of new recruits. The player characters are the entire squad. They are not expected to have jobs outside the life — Whitey pays a generous stipend to people willing to risk their lives fighting demons. ...

First things first: Indianpolis is not big on the wireless access. The nearest Starbucks to the convention center is in Conseco Fieldhouse, and while it was a pleasure seeing Larry Bird’s arena, they did not have wireless. If you’d been around Saturday morning, you’d have seen me warwalking down the street trying to nail down one of the maddeningly unstable wireless connections emanating from sixth floor apartments. I had no luck. ...

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. ...

Are you playing Button Men (original) — online (original)? Why the heck not? It’s free.

[The following is a note to myself. Really.] The telegram says this: Telluric ectoplasm projector discovered STOP Located in San Francisco STOP Controls still mysterious STOP Daring agents needed STOP Come at once STOP The Zatarin Agency is located in the basement of a townhouse in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. Above it is the Zatarin Floral Service, and above that is Paul Zatarin’s residence. Mr. Zatarin is a moral man and a first generation immigrant who is immensely proud of his adopted country. As such, when he discovered the telluric ectoplasm projector in the basement, he immediately wired Max Mercer for advice. ...

Weird idea, while drifting off to sleep: A Lexicon of Lost Hollywood. Each entry is a movie review of a movie that was never made; each movie review must refer forward and back to other movies. You can make up actors and directors and screenwriters if you like, but they cannot be entries: they will always be defined only by the reviews of their movies. Or, if you wish, you can use the stars that we know. ...

I’ll have a formal Actual Play post at the 20’ by 20’ Room later, but right now I just want to say that Dogs in the Vineyard (original) rocks hard. Whoa, but that’s a strong game with a beautiful clarity to it. At first glance it maybe doesn’t look like the setting and the system are so tightly linked. But they are, maybe not so much in the details of place and time but certainly in the moral certainty aspect. The key aspect of the system is the ability to escalate: the ability to slap down a bunch more dice and say “I’m willing to go this far to make this thing happen.” That is reinforced by the moral correctness of the player characters and creates a very powerful dynamic at the table. ...

Andrew Hackard (a member of the Role-Playing Game category jury for the 2005 Origins Awards) notes that Lumpley Games didn’t submit five copies of Dogs in the Vineyard, so it wasn’t eligible for an award. Given that, I gotta back off some of my criticisms of the awards this year. Who knows how many submissions actually qualified for the voting?