RPG a Day 2020, Part Nine – Light and other minor spells

Posted on August 9, 2020 by fakedtales

Back when I ran AD&D I kind of stumbled into good bits of DMing from time to time. Not always and I didn’t really know to weaponise them as much as I should have, but I had my moments.

Potions were one of the first things, where I’d write in the Dungeon Master’s Guide what colour each potion was and the group would have to figure out what they did. They could identify them or test them on someone (to help this, each potion had 1d4 uses).

A spooky potion

Anyway, this is about light. Ages before “Okay, what does that look like?” as a common mantra, I would ask that about people’s magic. Light and Magic Missile were my favourites. I didn’t really know the limits of Light and I didn’t really care to. When a player cast it, I asked how it was created and what it looked like. For one player they would have the tip of their staff glow. Another had an object he touched, which could be a players’ sword or someone’s eyes. One had glowing fireflies around them and some would just say, “I don’t know, it just gets brighter” and you know what? That’s fine too.

Gandalf, using a light spell

Magic Missile would often get aspected to whatever the theme of the magic user tended to be. It could be a lesser version of their more favoured spells (a little fireball, for instance). Flying skulls was a favourite. Most of the time they’d be some kind of glowing balls of light or fire.

Magic Missile!

Even in a more traditional game, it’s definitely worth asking what the special effects of magic look like. It also means player innovation can shine with problem-solving using the minor differences their special effects might bring, like the magic-user casting Light on someone’s eyes.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Eight – Shades and Other Props

Posted on August 8, 2020 by fakedtales

I was running a campaign of the Cubicle 7 Dr Who Adventures in Time and Space RPG when my group started to get a real habit of using props to represent their characters.

Not this hammer, but another, similar hammer.

It started with a hammer, as we had one laying around and The Student (our Time Lord) had a cosmic hammer instead of a sonic screwdriver. Steve, the player of The Student, kept it around and was fidgeting with it a lot. Shaun, another member of the group, started out playing a pre-career David Bowie until he felt he needed to change it up. He took on the role of a gambler from the future who was on the run from debt collectors. To represent how different his character was from the last one, he reached around for something to use. We didn’t really use miniatures as I’ve been a big theatre of the mind person for years now. He grabbed some 3D cinema glasses as we had a small stack of them floating around, despite never remembering to take them the few times we watched a 3D movie. That became his character instantly. He wasn’t just a gambler, but he was a gambler with hi-tech sunglasses he never took off whether he was indoors or in the 16th century. People treated him a little oddly for it, but it was an affectation encouraged by the prop. We also had a time agent who’d had all memories of his successful missions wiped and his time traveller wrist thingie (I forget the name) broken so he could travel through space but not time. He kept looking at his watch as his equivalent to the shades. Finally we had Parker who didn’t have anything, but that suited his character. Parker was a big old scoop of vanilla ice cream with no real traits or desires other than to watch action movies and order take-out, making him the perfect straight man to the rest of the cast.

Also not the same sunglasses, but a completely different pair entirely.

As a further note, I like the idea of some kind of representation of characters in games. I don’t really use miniatures on a grid or anything, but if folks want to bring them along to represent their characters then that’s cool. After a game of Monsterhearts at Dragonmeet by the fantastic Richard Williams, I copied his idea of putting a bunch of actors and models’ headshots onto index cards and using those as character pawns. Even better, rotating the same stacks meant a kind of meta-continuity between them where folks would begin to associate some characters with certain roles. I feel having a physical prop like a pair of sunglasses, gloves (I’ve had that happen before) and other items as some kind of reminder of the character to be an evocative tool. For Shaun, wearing the sunglasses meant we knew we were talking to his character.

Some of the Periodic Table of Evil from our Masks game.
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Seven – Couple’s Roleplaying

Posted on August 7, 2020 by fakedtales

My partner doesn’t really do roleplaying games. She’s played The Quiet Year once with my writing group, although she reckons that’s not really a roleplaying game. Then most recently there’s Fall of Magic which again is RPG-adjacent enough for me to get away with. I think the game of Fall of Magic was a little too wacky with two very odd, very different crab singers, but I can hopefully get her to try it again. Lockdown’s tricky for that, as our lodger is the only one of my regular roleplaying group who didn’t get on with it.

The lovely map from Fall of Magic

One of my favourite experiences of roleplaying with her was during Grant Howitt Day. During Battle Wizard Hats, she made a wizard who was… fine. One of the players had repeatedly narrated her actions for her and halfway as a grudge she made a Spreadsheet Wizard. As a man in deep romantic love with Excel, I of course approved. To be honest, a Spreadsheet Wizard felt pretty much in keeping with the level of oddness and fun which Grant Howitt games are known for. She managed to use her magic far more effectively and seemed to be far more comfortable, even if some of it was out of spite. It was nice to share my hobby with her, even briefly. I’m already blessed with a partner who plays board games with me so much (and cursed with never being able to win a game of Scythe or Lords of Waterdeep against her). I’m also pleased she’s managed to tolerate me talking about RPGs so much over the years. Hopefully at some point in the future I’ll be able to get a game of Good Society and possibly Warmer in the Winter arranged, which she’ll be up for joining.

Some of the hats from Battle Wizard Hats
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Six – The Endless Forest

Posted on August 6, 2020 by fakedtales

In the troupe D&D 3.5 game my group ran, I hit a turning point when I realised I was back to being a Forever GM and the sole person running the game. I had to do something more with the campaign to make my mark and signal that this was the start of a new era in the campaign. My brother had was visiting occasionally at weekends and joining in with the group’s game. He was a good, if slightly feral roleplayer, often forced into leadership roles and often demanding of their acknowledgement as the smart one of the group.

He returned briefly and made an elf ranger called Thorn. Thorn was an elf ranger with high charisma and little else going aside from wanting to romance the monk character of the player who always played anime women. That’s another story which started out creepy and ended up kind of adorably (they adopted a kobold).

Creepy trees

Anyway, the forest. I would use a forest as a kind of pitcher plant for adventurers in the future, but this was my first go. The group had to head in for a reason I can’t even remember. Recovering an artefact or something similar. They set out, did their usual bickering and eventually found a massive forest which was evidently the adventure site. It was creepy enough at first, as the forest seemed to go on far more inside than out. My brother’s character went out ahead to scout and we had a break. At that point I told him the following: He had been replaced and not to worry as his character will be fine, he’ll even earn XP like the others. He was a changeling who served the forest, which ate adventurers. It needed people split up and isolated, taken into the lower places where it could work on them.

Thorn suggested splitting up the party and to go with the evil magician of the group, Servus, played by Steve. He was a high elf blood mage, frail and sinister. Steve and Alfred were good friends, so when Thorn said he’d protect Servus, Steve believed him. When they were going through the wetter, wilder places and Thorn said he’d be able to keep Servus’ spellbook safe. When it was handed over, Thorn stabbed Servus in the back and left him to die in the woods before turning into a flock of birds.

The others didn’t fare much better. The monk, Astarte, climbed a tall tree and at the top could only see endless woods and giant birds watching her. Down at ground level were undead adventurers, their faces covered with flat metal plates, their bodies moving in ways no longer caring about moving like humanoid bodies should.

Eventually they found one of the ways down the bottom. I put on the Silent Hill 2 Soundtrack, which still evokes these scenes in myself and some of the others. Astarte was caught and nailed to a table, barely able to fight off the undead adventurers and get out. Eventually they found Servus and the real Thorn.

It was a little clumsy in places, but it was a good shot of horror in a D&D game, it changed some of the characters and their relationships. Later on I’d experiment with a very different kind of endless forest in Dungeon World which ended up much worse. I’ve more recently found this horror easily found in Trophy Dark, a story game which is specifically a tragedy about adventurers going into a forest that doesn’t want them there to take something which doesn’t belong to them. I heartily recommend it if you want this kind of horror game.

Beware the stag man
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Five – Touching Tributes from Players

Posted on August 5, 2020 by fakedtales

I’m going to preface this by saying there’s no reason for players to give gifts, it’s not something I encourage or demand, but it’s really lovely when this kind of thing happens.

I started hosting fortnightly community RPG nights for all of 2019, missing one week and deputising one player to run in my stead for that time. It was fantastic and at the moment we’re still all social distancing, so I’ve had to move my sessions to online spaces instead.

At the end of 2019 I was sent a Christmas card from Alex, one of the players who’d been in the community nights for a long time. He mentioned about how much he’d loved his time in that space, which was really touching, a good sign that the nights were doing exactly what I’d wanted. Then there’s this dolphin pen:

Dolphin pen!

Yep. It’s pretty special. Michał and Joanna brought it for me, saying they felt it fit my running style, which… yeah. They’ve got me there. It’s made a great pointy stick at the dolphin end, and I’ve made sure it gets used in games like Pasión de las Pasiones.

Pasión de las Pasiones is fantastic, check out the quickstart

At GenCon UK I was running a game of Spycraft in what was pretty much a massive tent in a Butlins. There were only two players and this being Living Spycraft they both came with Snoop characters. When there was a power cut, they both left without really saying anything. I sat there, not really sure what to do but busily making notes for my home campaign. They showed up, having gone to their chalets to bring beer. I’m not even a beer fan, but it was a really nice gesture, so I drank with them as we waited for the lights to come back on and to play through. Out of the games I ran that weekend it was one of the most fun, and the kind of mission where two Snoops and a briefcase full of legal documents won the day as effectively as a group of bikers and combatants. I miss Spycraft, and would love to see a Forged in the Dark version one day.

One of my Living Spycraft adventures, found pretty much only through web archives.
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Four – Vision as a great narrative prompt

Posted on August 4, 2020 by fakedtales

“Okay, what does that look like?” is a question which has become a constant in my games. I love it as a prompt and I’d only really noticed that I keep asking it recently.

In some RPGs you start to get that thing of, “use whatever skill, just roll something,” but that’s not great. As an example, in Trophy Gold one of my players asked about checking out a statue of Saint Hester for anything untoward. He had ‘Gods’ as a skill, but also ‘Trances’. He originally said whether either of those would do, so I said they would but he’d need to tell me which one and explain what searching the statue looked like as there would be potential narrative consequences. Gods could be knowing how the statues are carved, what the symbols mean and whether anything interesting’s there. Trances would be sitting, meditating and trying to get visions about something out of place.

Games like Blades in the Dark are great for that sort of conversation. As the GM can’t ask for an action roll, it’s up to the players. If they ask for something potentially quite unorthodox you can always ask what their action will look like to sort out the settings for the position and effect. Action rolls are a negotiation in BitD, so the narrative needs ironing out a little just to know where you stand.

Finally there’s the glorious, “What does that look like?” when a player character messes up an enemy. “What does it look like when you destroy this skeleton?” lets the player know they can go hogwild with how to describe what they’ve done.

So if in doubt, ask your players what the thing they’re doing looks like, whether it’s to ascertain better what they’re doing or to add flavour & grounding. I mean, asking players in general is fantastic and should be encouraged, but this in particular has become a mantra for me of late.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Three – Plot Threads

Posted on August 3, 2020 by fakedtales

Peter Molyneux, famous video game designer and hyperbolist, mentioned a kind of ‘trail of breadcrumbs’ when talking about Fable 2. The idea was that it would be a sprinkling of golden glitter which directed you ahead to your mission, so you wouldn’t focus too much on a minimap instead of the world itself.

It’s a little tricky trying to do the same with RPGs. I’ve run games so long I’ve been accused of being a railroad GM, but I’ve also run games with such an open sandbox that players sit around, unsure what they’re supposed to be doing.

I’m not 100% sure of the right level of visibility of the breadcrumbs for groups in general, although your players can often help. I had a real problem in my Tremulus campaign. The default setting is a small town and it suggests that players have characters who are fairly recently returned to the town, having originally been from there. We had one player who followed that remit, while the rest made basically vagrants. One was a hobo, another was a travelling conman who played at seances until he stumbled upon a real one, then the third was a gravedigger who lived in his van and did have a relative he was a bit distant to. The system gets you to generate a bunch of plot threads for local mysteries and then hopes the players will solve them.

The problem with this game came when the player who followed the remit left the group. Everyone else was wondering why they stayed in the town and why they didn’t just leave. The worst thing was they were right. They didn’t have any motivation to stick around. I called in a ringer as a player, who I briefed on my problem. He made a local boy who’d left and come back to play politician. Getting that buy in just from one player was fantastic. It meant he could pull the others in as people who weren’t really known or accountable. He was tied into the mystery, as was the aunt of the gravedigger.

It’s a tricky thing to do right. I love bringing players in to help, but that’s only one way of helping try to lay out the threads seamlessly. Personally I’d love to hear what other people have done with their plot threads to keep players following the breadcrumbs.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Two – How I Changed a Campaign Many Times For Better or Worse

Posted on August 2, 2020 by fakedtales

Change is today’s theme. I’m a fickle GM and there are a few systems which I’ve grown tired of. Mainly D&D, admittedly.

I ran a troupe D&D Third Edition game for a little while. That sounds contradictory, but when I say ‘ran a troupe game’ I mean that. It started out with everyone running a session using the many d20 system adventures I’d bought and not read, but their stamina ran out. Most of them hadn’t run games before, so fear often took over. When they tapped out I ran more and more games until it was just another D&D 3.5 game I ran. I had two groups and three campaigns. I’d grown sick of it and once it was just me running it, I switched over to the Unisystem as the All Flesh Must Be Eaten zombie RPG had a fantasy system. It was great, but I chickened out as there were no methods to balance the game and I still believed that was a relevant factor in games. I then abandoned the troupe game and resurrected the old ‘main continuity’ campaign with Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play Second Edition (WFRP).

WFRP was great. I did have to fudge some things, by converting the characters and fake running them through progression to a spot where they went from their humble origins to their much more competent evolution. The world suddenly got a lot darker, to fit the style of WFRP. Mud, blood and shit-flecked. It’s been the best thing which happened to that campaign with some brutal moments and all the weirdness of a campaign I’d run since I was 16 and didn’t know any better. I’m probably going to drag my notes out when I run DIE sometime.

My later experience with switching systems was great at first but fell apart.

My ‘gritty BSG style reboot’ of my old campaign world basically took tropes and elements from the old campaign but nothing more. I loved Spycraft and the Fantasy Craft RPG was taking so long to come out, I decided to run D&D 4th Edition.

I ran a season in 4E and I enjoyed some of the combat mechanics, but it felt like the story and drama weren’t serviced by the system. Between season one and two I switched to Fantasy Craft, which was fantastic. I’d had enough time to learn the system and prepare what was going on. The group were fleeing their hometown which had been destroyed by the undead and dragons. I knew roughly what they were doing so I could manage the clunky GM-facing rules. The players adored their side of the rules and it was understandable. Compared to the other d20 system games it was more open, allowing more than just fighting in combat, having good companion rules and even a system for a court case which nearly broke the team apart.

Fantasy Craft was great, but as the game broke into more of a sandbox, there wasn’t any easy way of coping with that. I was going through a phase of loving the New World of Darkness, which was a great toolbox. I converted the game to that in time for the midpoint of season three and used the Changing Breeds book to deal with the animal totems the PCs were imbued with. There was a problem here. That book sucked. It was really unbalanced, and there were… other problems. We had some great sessions and the plot grew to some insane levels, but it was difficult trying to cover for the issues Changing Breeds had.

This is where things get shaky. I changed over to Fate for season four. Things escalated to a massive level. There were armies being gathered for one massive battle including wooden war-mechs and a cloud of dragons with blade-breath raining murder on the people below. Fate Core was on Kickstarter and looked fantastic. I fell in love and realised that as we needed less feats or merits giving fiddly little bonuses, but big iconic moves and things which impacted the narrative. We needed Aspects. This was, in theory, great. One problem was the conversion, which I tried getting the players to do, figuring they’d know what they’d want to be the core of their characters. One of them had incredible analysis paralysis with Aspects, let alone Stunts. Another player spent about 30 minutes after each session in a back and forth about how Fate didn’t work. We had our epic battle, closed out the season and sadly never managed to pick up for our final six-session season as one of the players moved out of the country.

I don’t think returning to Fantasy Craft could have been better as high level d20 always made things more fiddly. Returning to WoD wasn’t really an option. I still believe Fate was a great choice, but badly executed by me. Maybe changing over to WFRP 2E would have helped, although the characters were near superheroic by that point. I remember pondering Exalted, but then converting things from Exalted’s themes to Fallen Kingdoms’ would have been a nightmare. I guess my advice here would be that if a conversion is needed, open dialogue with the group if good, as is making sure what everyone needs from the game and what the system is capable of providing.

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RPG a Day 2020: Beginning A New Campaign

Posted on August 1, 2020 by fakedtales

The topic for day one of RPG a Day is ‘Beginning’. I’ve written about starting out as a roleplayer before, so instead I thought I’d talk about starting a new game.

There’s something magical about starting a new campaign and the primordial fire we get to play with in session zero. As time’s gone on, I’ve tried not to build too much beforehand when I’m running a game. A logline, a pitch for the group. I try to offer a few different potential games to play, remembering the trinity of:

  • What is the game about?
  • What do characters do in the game?
  • What do players do in the game?

Once a game’s picked, I tend to do a dash of prep. A few names, a few places, some ideas about the big dramatic beats which can change later if necessary. That’s all fine and standard. The magic comes later, when you add players.

I started out running games very much with stories I wanted to tell, but as time’s gone on, I’ve learnt to leave empty spaces. What do the players want to experience? How can we make it together?

An example is the Wall campaign I ran using Dungeon World. We started out with the world. I had a bit of paper with a wall a thousand miles long, with a capital city at the centre point. Beyond it, only desert and demons. I asked each player to add a landmark, a civilisation and a mystery, doing the same myself after each of them had a turn. That loaded the world up with interesting things we all pitched in, then we were ready to make characters. In making the characters, the players were asked a lot of questions, like what it meant to be a paladin in the world, where people learnt magic and so on. By the end, we had a world which we’d all contributed towards which felt deep despite only having existed for a few hours.

Since then I’ve done things like use The Quiet Year by Avery Alder to map out the backstory of a community in Apocalypse World. I’ve found games like Beyond the Wall, which builds this sort of thing in the system itself, or Masks. Masks has a couple of questions about the backstory of the characters and then questions everyone answers about when the team came together. I love that, as it helps establish not only why everyone’s already in the group, but also potential threats for the future.

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A Quick Update – Reclaiming My Productivity

Posted on April 23, 2020 by fakedtales

There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment with lockdowns and such, so I’m at the point where I’m trying to push forwards.

I’m still working full time, which is good. My workplace is pretty much prepared for us to work from home indefinitely which is proving distracting at times, especially with paying too much attention to catastrophising about the world. I’ve found that my anxieties about getting old and still not having published much at all is taking back over, so maybe that’s a sign that this is becoming normal for me now.

I’ve got a few irons in the fire and I need to focus on getting them done. So I thought I’d process this all out loud (kind of) and publicly here. This was I’m not only showing you what I’m doing, I’m making myself publicly accountable as doing this, and possibly giving folks some ideas.

First of all, I have a lot of projects, so I’ve started a Trello, and I’m trying to keep things cut down a bit and point me in the right direction.

trello

I have some work I still wants to do for Who Dares Rolls, some of which I need to find my notes for, some I’m fine putting off for a bit as I know I’ve got a bunch of things in the pipeline there already and can prioritise other things. Mistbirch Mythos’ proofread has a deadline of November as that’s when NaNoWriMo starts and is as good of a deadline for a novel proofread as anything.

Emma and I bought a day calendar to hang up in the kitchen and put stickers on when we did writing-based things. It stopped pretty abruptly at the start of all this, so I want to try and get that going again. Basically anything at all writing-based counts, whether it’s searching for artists, editing or making words. I found that in previous years I’ve had issues recording progress with editing as it rarely adds many words and sometimes removes them, which looks odd on a word count spreadsheet like the one I keep. I’ve also modified that to accept a general ‘I’ve done editing’ note on the far end as something to keep my combo of days when I’ve written going.

Lightning Banner 4

Lightning

Ah, the big project. I’ve noticed that the rolling Amazon KDP license ends on the 26th, so I’ve decided to untick that option and look into using places like Itch.io to host the first novella as well. I’ve been apprehensive about promoting it for a couple of reasons. The cover’s not great. I love Nathan Paoletta, the logo he made and the support he gave. He went along the design specs I asked for and was cheap, too. Still, I’d rather go a different way so I’ve made new covers for all eight novellas. I’ve been concerned about the cold open of it and that I literally used ‘not like other girls’ as a phrase there. It turns out on rereading it that I didn’t, but I still had some changes to make to fit the later novellas. I’m giving it a very quick skim before compiling the version with the new cover. I’ll see where else it could be hosted, as well. I figure the more coverage the better. I’m also still dabbling with the idea of a comic version, but that’s not my main priority.

Speaking of KDP expiring, the Cuckoo anthology is also expiring in June, so if I can sort out Lightning Episode One then I’ll do the same with this.

 

Amnesiac City

At the moment I’ve been having some help from Matt Hardy at Mad Robot in my artist hunt for this. I’ve got the first three issues scripted and some sample scripts to send out to folks. It’s still something I’m not incredibly confident with, but with some help I’m getting there. I’ve put off starting scripting issue four yet, but I’ll get there.

 

Explosion High!

I’ve broke the back of this, as I revisited my old version which was a bit too 2000’s era webcomics. It started as a webcomic, so that made sense, I guess. Now I’ve got a lot more energy into it, a larger plot going on, but in the background of individual issues with a couple of fun stories within them. I made a bunch of extras when scripting the first story of the first issue and now I love almost all of them which might be bad, given how joyously deadly the school is. I’ve been adding to the Explosion High! revamped series bible today, along with making the light pass on Lightning. You can see the shocking lack of productivity and my writing day combo meter here:

sheet

The number next to the date is how much I’ve written this year so far. The ‘1’s are when I’ve added to the word count or edited something. Again, I’ll be trying to make that combo meter go up more in the future.

I’ll hopefully be posting more here about the upcoming changes to Lightning Episode One, or any comic news, or indeed chattering about games.

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