Subplot Kudzu

Got the last of the votes in on the prospectus - or at least the last I'm willing to accept - with some unexpected results.  I sent the prospectus to thirteen players; two responded that they weren't interested in 2013, three never got back to me. That left 8 players. 

Of those, five (!) voted Mech & Matrimony as their first choice: two - Asha and Emily - as their sole first choice and three - Tom, Jim and Diane - as one of a spread of similarly voted games. I was flabbergasted by the response for what last round was such a niche game, but am more than happy to buckle down and finish work on the system and setting. Expect more notes of etiquette for corset and chain gun over the course of the year. 

For the remaining three voters, all three of them 0'd out Mech & Matrimony, and two - Karen and Rachel - put Gaslamp Melodrama as their first choice. Since the third has a solid, if not not first choice game, and the only other point of overlap was a) the other Gaslamp game and b) a worse voting for the other players made it clear that Gaslamp Melodrama was the right route for the other two. So sometime in the near future I have to make some tweaks to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer game for character creation purposes - which should be easy - and then work out the exact location of the game and crime for which our protagonist's parents were accused. I'm seeing this as taking place in the Balkans, in the political no mans land between Techo-Tsarist Russia and the Baron's realms, so it's both familiar to the players and just different enough so that I'm not treading all over the published works.

I'm trying to lay my hands on extra copies of the 3.0 core rulebooks - Players Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual. I know it's my preferred Fantasy system (I don't like the changes to 3.5, and 4.0 doesn't do it for me.) Does anyone have copies of the 3.0 books they don't want anymore? Specifically the Monster Manual and DMG, since I already have a spare of the PHB and got copies of it for all of my regular players.

Amusing bit from the last two Arabian Nights D&D sessions.

( Player Fail behind the cut.  )


Next Month? trek through dinosaur infested jungle!

XX) The Red Wolf Conspiracy: kriz1818  loaned this one to me a couple of weeks back. I've had this long standing ida of running a fantasy game set entirely on a huge sailing ship, so the idea of the book - political events on a huge sailing ship - had some appeal. Alas, I walked away from it two thirds of the way through as the central character suddenly became unforgivably stupid*. It's my first unfinished book all year, so I'm not counting it as having been read, but I still wanted to comment on it here.

51) Conan, the role playing game: That's to drcpunk  I have a copy of this and BY CROM it is good! It wholeheartedly and unapologietically embraces the dark, corrupt world of Conan. There's a bare-breasted slave girl drawn into the page boundaries, and no warning to the reader that the world can be a little seamy and little racist. The rulebook make all of the races of man equally valid for play - the Picts, the people of the Black Kingdoms and the other non-Hyborian (i.e. not white) races of Conan's world areall presented as fair game - and since no culture comes off looking particularly good Conan's personal distaste for some of the races (which I remember being a touchy subject in the introductions of my 1970's reprints of the Conan tales) is washed away. The rules themselves are a very nice rendition fo the d20 mechanic designed for lots of fighting men, with sorcerery being (relatively) slow, powerful and corrupting, but with rules that make Sorcerer a valid class choice.

Some things that stand out in the rules?

• a nice breakout of parrying AC vs dodging AC, with an armor-absorbs-damage game mechanic that isn't too intrusive.
• rules for money that state that anyone with more than 50 sp immediately squanders half of it on high living every week. Once a month you are able to ue that squandering as a circumstance bonus on some sort of research, but otherwise you're heroically pissing your money away, just as Hyborian Age heroes should.
• lots of combat related feats and combat moves that anyone can try ripped straight from the Conan stories. I'm usually a rules light GM when it comes to "can I try this" but I know many players need to have a list of their options laid out for them, and to my mind this system gives them just enough.

Honestly, if I had owned this book at the start of the Emirikol game that campaign would have had many of these rules incorporated in it. I'm looking forward to pitching something in this rules set at some time in the future.

* Not entirely true - the central character suddenly became a PC whose player couldn't realize that his actions had consequences. After spending three years as a tarboy (apprentice sailor) on the ships of the country which conquered his homeland, our hero ha clearly been circumspect and deferential enough in complaining about how his people were treated to not be stabbed and thrown overboard. As we move through the novel, he continues to act in this fashion, until he is face to face with a *really important person* who, while he was instrumental in the conquest of ou hero's country, could have him killed without a moment's hesitation. So our hero mouths off to him. Everyone is shocked, and all the NPCs explain to him in various degrees of patience that this just isn't done, that the *really important person* is in a position to do our hero an enormous amount of good, that our hero has other reasons for needing to stay on board, and that he took his life in his hands doing that. Our hero nods. The *really important person* talks to him again, taking a placating tone that is very much out of character, and our hero MOUTHS OFF TO HIM AGAIN. And gets flogged, stripped of his status as a bondsman (meaning he can get grabbed by slavers) and thrown off the ship.  Once in port he follows the advice of someone who has always wished him ill and gets himself captured by slavers. At this point he is offically too stupid for me to care about, and I don't want to see the polt deformations required to get him back on board the ship. I have no idea why Robert V.S. Reddick decided to take this little side treck - just to show us the scary slavers he'd been aluding to earlier - but it was enough to jolt me out of the book.

I just reread all 7 volumes of GG over the last week and something occurred to me: with the overlapping schemes and ever-changing loyalties, a Spark's natural toughness and presence and the overall uber-competence of the characters, there isn't a reason to invent a new GG RPG. Just run it in Amber.

I feel like a dolt for not thinking of this sooner.

Lucrezia, Klaus, Bill, Barry and others are all members of the previous generation, while the PCs are Agatha, Gilgamesh and their peers - active, changing the existing dynamic but not as powerful as their parents, and constantly trying to naviagate between the previous generation's plans and learn their secret history. The existing stat mechanics work fine, as long as you replace Pattern with Spark, perhaps charging it at various levels (15 pts = weak Spark; 30 pts = Spark; 50 pts = Strong Spark) so we can see the differentiation between the pie throwing spark in the circus, Slepneir O'Hara and Gilgamesh Wolfenbach. I'd probably add in the process I had in the primus game for bidding on positions of power to determine the strength of one's starting house, etc.

Hell, it would be easy.

thismustbetheplace just finished her epic, 8 year Spelljammer PBEM - actually she ended it early because the energy was waning and we weren't sure we'd make it through the remaining 4 years of plot (! and she accuses me of overplanning!)

I'm going to be sorry to see it go - I' ve been playing Emmett Half Man for a long, long time now - but I'm now in the mood of enthused anticipation for the beginning of her next campaign. I'm playing a Gnome Bard with lots of Alchemy skill, the kid of Jack of SAll Trades, social lubricant character that Emmett really wasn't. My big problem at the moment is coming up with a name. Being the only Gnome player character I'm planning to continue the Emirikol convention of Hungarian being the Gnomish language (it makes everything sound like a real language rather than made up sounds), but the GM had indicated that the human populace normally had last names that indicated personal or family profession.

The Hungarian words for Chemist are either Gyógyszerész or Vegyész.

Either - but certainly the former - would be a right bitch to type on a regular basis. So we'll see if we stick with that naming convention.

I'll likely be doing more formal write ups for A&E and to e-mail to the players, but I wanted to touch on a few things with my LJ readers.

My goal for the campaign is to present the players with a series of encounters which are puzzling but consistent, and can usually be approached either through combat or thought & experiment. Some will be purely one or the other, but most in most cases the players actions and reactions will determine which path things take. Since it is, so far, just the 6 PCs in a world otherwise empty of name-giving (i.e., intelligent) races, I don't have any NPCs on the scene to voice an opnion (or, alas, force more characterization and role playing, but they're doing pretty well with that and everyone is laughing a lot, so it's all good). In many ways this is the most purely simulationist game I've ever attempted. I expect a narrative to form soon enough, but for now it's just "we poke the world like this, what does it do?"

My task here is complicated because one of the players, ashacat , actually has her masters in biology and two others (at least) have much more wilderness experience than I do. I am gratified that so far they have found no sweeping cause for complaint, and Ashacat actually complimented my presentation of a diverse ecoweb. My task is aided because the EarthDawn setting is, in many ways, pretty scientific. Yes, there's magic, but the magic is predictable and rational: I can introduce the fact that griffins' wings are infused with elemental air that lets a 300 lb creature take flight and the players can accept that as being logically true, and then question how the muscle structure of a hexipedal creature would operate and what parts of the beast would make for the best eating. This is a huge boon when the players - taichigeek  in particular - are approaching the game with a 21st century scientific mindset. They find a poisonous snake or plant and his archer (skilled in survival,. hunting and herbalism) wants to find a small animal on which to test the toxin to learn its effects and if he can convert it to some rational use. In some fantasy settings I'd slap this sort of thing down for being out of synch with the genre, but for this sort of game it fits right in.

I'll put up some key moments from the game later, but I wanted to get that thought out there.