Gaming

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?

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. Monument Ave.: Denis Leary was born to play an Irish thug; this is the movie where he does it best. Also with Colm Meaney, Martin Sheen, and a bunch of other good actors. Directed by Ted Demme. The Boondock Saints: yeah, that’s Boston for you, with a whole lot of Irish insanity. Good vs. Evil: the tone maybe goes a little bit too far towards the humor, but the image of a rough-edged group of amateurs fighting very bad things stuck with me. The Shield: wrong era, wrong side of the law, right ethos. Whitey’s Boyos are bad men doing good things, while Detective Mackey’s strike team is the opposite. ...

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. All Souls: the best of the non-fiction, in my eyes. It doesn’t directly focus on Whitey, but it’s got great detail about growing up in Southie and it’s very well-written. Read this one for balance: it’s the price paid by Southie residents for the kind of things you read about in Street Soldier. The Kenzie/Gennaro series: an absolutely searing Boston-based mystery series. Dennis Lehane knows the dirty streets of Dorchester, and he writes the grime as well as anyone. If I can get half the feel of these novels into the game, I’ll be happy. (See also his Mystic River, which is not a Kenzie/Gennaro book but which shares their characteristics.)

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?