From the WW LJ: Another idea that’s coming up evolved in a similar way. As I’m writing this, first drafts have already started trickling in for the tentatively-titled New Wave Requiem, which is a historical book for playing Vampire in 1980s America – think of it as Requiem for Rome meets Miami Vice. It all started as a joke between myself, Joe, Russell and matt about taking cheesy 80s vampire movies and making them into SASs. I tried to put the idea aside, but it kept gnawing at me for weeks. Finally, I wrote up a very rough outline for it, and gave copies of it to everyone involved, as well as Rich for his perspective. There was a lot of side conversations about focus and logistics and how it would look and read, but I never once heard “That idea will never work.” It’s not a new idea (it’ll technically be the fourth historical Vampire book we’ve done), but it’s a different kind of “historical book,” and absolutely an idea that would never have flown as a traditional hardcover release. It’s another experiment, another step away from what’s safe and solid for us, and I’m excited as hell to see how it turns out. ...

This isn’t my technique; I’m stealing it from John Harper’s posts on Story Games. But it’s cool. What you do is this. Buy the following items: Mod Podge (original). This is the glue and the finishing surface. The gloss version is working for me but you may want matte. Bag of circular cut outs. “Cut outs” is craft jargon for “little piece of wood.” You want the 1" diameter version. 1" paper punch. That one is cool because it’s easy to see what you’re punching – other models are top-down, so you have to contort a bit. Little dinky foam brushes. For the Mod Podge. I hear you can use cotton swabs for this too, but I’m a geek, so I like specific tools. You can get all this stuff at a craft store locally, which is faster than Amazon, plus no shipping charges. ...

I begin to have a sneaking suspicion that my tabletop gaming inclinations are back. In full force. The old school D&D guys (you know, the people playing first edition AD&D or blue box D&D or whatever) are way into the megadungeon (original) concept these days. Big massive dungeons with dozens of levels and hundreds of rooms that can contain an entire campaign. Or multiple campaigns. And when I say “way into,” what I mean is 30 page threads about dungeon mapping and design considerations (original). I’m talking an entire forum dedicated to megadungeons. There’s some serious thought going into this stuff – people theorizing, diagramming dungeon layout to determine the linearity or lack thereof of a dungeon, so on and so forth. ...

Unexpected, but here it is. What follows is a list of RPGs which, in my limited and human judgment, are frequently used as (or maybe just recommended as) rules toolkits: i.e., the mechanics are used or tweaked to run games in genres or settings other than those presented in the rulebook. For some games, like GURPS, that’s sort of a gimmie. If you like a system, but you just use it for the setting(s) it was written for, italicize it. If you like a system and it’s one of your go-to tools for running games in random settings, bold it. If you like the game world but don’t care much about the system, leave it alone – you wanna identify the systems that you can practically teach from memory. Copy to your own blog and repeat as desired. If there’s a game you’d bold that isn’t listed, add it. (I like Unknown Armies a ton, but it’s not one of my generic systems, so I wouldn’t add it.)

Sadly I’m not going again this year, for good reasons involving schedule and finances, but that’s OK. It will not stop me from considering the lineup at length. The ticketing is wild this year. The festival starts this Thursday; tickets go on sale tomorrow. The schedule only came out like Friday. Make your decisions quick. I’m thinking next year I just choose a week and trust in fate for the movies. Or go for two weeks. Mmm, two weeks. Here is the volume. Here is the pump. Here is the dance floor. Do what is right.

In the order I feel like talking about them. On Sunday, I bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is my first guitar game! It is in a sense a trial run for Rock Band, or rather Rock Band 2, because I won’t play Rock Band on a console that doesn’t give me downloadable content and we only have a Wii at present. It seems prudent to find out if I like the genre before getting all ambitious. ...

I also played some D&D 4e. Tom runs a nifty game, plus it’s always fun playing with new peeps. Rock on, teenage love triangle, rock on. I’m trying to decide if my Felix is crushing on Geoff. It seems likely. That link there is a good description of the game and I agree with all of the points made therein. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a remarkably movement-oriented system. Most of our fights were in clear space, and by the end of the game I was just moving thirty feet every turn, because I wanted to tag enemies with my Curse and you can only do that to the closest enemy. The one fight where my back was to a wall, that made me sad. Playing a Warlock is like playing a GEV with a howitzer bolted to the top in Ogre. Zip zip zip. BOOM. I very much regret the failure of my 5d8+1d6+6 bomb single-turn attack sequence. ...

Wanted sucked rocks. Here’s a list of the good: Set pieces: the skyscraper assassination, the sunroof bit, the keyboard across the face. Angelina Jolie’s performance, which was surprisingly nuanced and subtle, especially at the end. The Russian thriller-verging-on-horror aesthetic: the knife fight in the denoument. Timur Bekmambetov bringing in his Russian homeboy Konstantin Khabensky to play a supporting role. Curving bullets. And the bad: That’s not a plot, Timur. That’s not an American accent, Wesley. Blurred choppy confusing action sequences. And I like fast cuts. Misogyny to beat the band, lovingly preserved from the original comic. No wasting Terrence Stamp, please. What the hell? The rat bit? That makes no sense. Come to think of it, the weird recuperation pools kept changing, too. After all that talk about how assassination can be moral because it saves lives, the train? Excuse me? The scales balance poorly. There were way more blurred choppy confusing action sequences than there were excellent set pieces. If the action had been all good, I might have forgotten about the lack of creamy moral center. However, none of the victory conditions were achieved. Pity.

After too much time spent poring through forums for D&D 4e character sheets, I wound up with this one, which worked out great in play. The form-fillable version, by some new Adobe magic, allows you to save your filled out sheet. Handy. The landscape one found here is also very nice – much more compact – but not form-fillable. Plus I really liked the power card holder on the previous one. Yeah, I assembled it. Rubber cement and scissors and all. It’s handy. ...

This is just another one for the hopper. The system and setting is Over the Edge, with a minor setting tweak; the D’Aubainnes are not quite as powerful in international terms as they are in vanilla OtE, so they need to worry more about maintaining a delicate balance between the USSR, China, and the United States. The campaign framework: there’s a United States consulate located in The Edge. The D’Aubainnes are not currently allowing the United States to have an embassy in Freedom City, although Russia does have one. All PCs work for the consulate, whether they’re American citizens or local employees. Preferably mostly the former, I think. Obvious archetypes: the consul himself, who could be a bright young kid looking to make his name at State, or a cynical veteran, or someone being punished for a screwup elsewhere. The CIA rep under cover as an agricultural attache. The press attache/PR spokesman/cultural activity organizer. (“Hey, kids, wanna learn baseball?”) The US citizen who sought and was granted asylum in the consulate but can’t return to the States for complex legal reasons. The local working as a secretary. ...