Gaming

The 2005 Origins Awards nominees have been announced. The nomination process was very different this year (original); in each category, a jury voted on the nominated products in order to select five nominees. Some of the results are fairly interesting. At first glance, I can’t say I think the process was a success. The Best Role-Playing Game category is fairly heavy on the retreads. In particular, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game is not a new role-playing game by any definition. The Authority RPG is borderline. A new edition of GURPS seems reasonable — oh, but of the five jury members for this category, two of them were Steve Jackson Games staffers last year. Well, OK, then. And there’s no wholly new product among the nominees. Surely at least one of the five top products from last year was fresh and new? Best Role-Playing Game Supplement, which shares the same jury as Best Role-Playing Game, has two GURPS supplements on the list of nominees. Gotcha. I will say that I agree that all the nominees I’ve read on the list are very good. Um, but there are six nominees listed, and the rules say there should be five. I can’t really claim expertise on the other categories, so I won’t comment on them. The full list of nominees is in the extended portion of this post, for the curious.

Read this first. I spent a while pondering this one during my vacation, and I think the system is a modified Feng Shui with revamped templates. Not as many hit points, to get it more gritty — possibly even a wound system. Steal the madness meters from Unknown Armies and turn them into corruption meters and you’re good to go.

Yeah, someone wrote fanfic about my RPG character. This goes in the hall of fame next to getting asked to autograph one of my books at a con, you betcha. Even if I did have to cajole Ivan into it.

For the interested: the Whitey’s Boyos character sheet. Comments welcome. Warning: contains language.

“Whitey’s Boyos” movies and television shows include the following. There are other obvious candidates; if you haven’t seen every gangster flick Scorcese ever made, well, you’re like me because I haven’t seen Gangs of New York yet either. But you know what I mean. These, however, are the direct influences and recommendations. Mystic River: not as good as the book, but still very very good. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon were on fire. ...

The reading list for “Whitey’s Boyos” looks something like this: Black Mass: the canonical book about Whitey Bulger and John Connolly. This is where you get the basic history. Boyos: a gritty novel by an ex-Southie gangster. Not brilliant but pretty propulsive, and for obvious reasons the author has a good feel for the Southie underworld. Street Soldier: in a similar vein to Boyos, but non-fiction. Not as well-written and some have questioned its veracity, but I enjoyed it. ...

My Boston Angel campaign will, of course, be called Whitey’s Angels.

Green Ronin’s new Black Company worldbook makes me want to run a five session game during which the PCs lose. Gritty fantasy, city under siege, that sort of thing. What can you do before you die?

In a futile effort to save Chris, show off for Brant, and feed my own ego: Texcatlipoca Has Come From The North: a companion game to Huey Long’s Men of Action (original), set in AD 1000 or so in the Yucatan. Brave Byzantine warriors and their Viking allies battle the hordes of the god-king Quetzalcoatl. It uses D20 psionics rules, either Mindshadows or the WotC offering, depending on which is better. No magic. Plenty of Cathars. ...

Yeah, every now and then we like to dump out campaign ideas we won’t run. 1. Aztlan Chrome — near-future cyberpunk set in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez metroplex. Assume a de facto independent state in that region, extending all the way to San Diego/Tijuana, with very little federal control on the part of either Mexico or the United States. The tech is sufficient for wired reflexes; i.e., money can provide you with a definite advantage in a fight (which is really the core ethos of cyberpunk gaming, right?). The Ciudad Juarez serial killer (original) is on my mind as I think about this setting. So is the five solid hours of Los Lobos I listened to last night. So is The Shield, but I’m not sure if that’s for antagonists or protagonists. Could be either, really. ...