#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 14 – Favorite Convention Purchase

Everybody was at Gen Con this time last year, so for those of us staying at home, participating in #RPGaDAY, the next few days were all about conventions. I haven’t been to a convention since the writing event last year, so my answer to today’s topic last year, “What’s your favorite convention purchase?” hasn’t changed. Here’s what I wrote last year:

Today’s #RPGaDAY topic is “Everyone is at Gen Con except you, so what’s your favorite convention purchase and can I get some more salt for your wound?” Gee, thanks.

We’re probably talking RPG-related purchases here, so that’s really going to limit my choices. Most of the time when I have a purchase at gaming convention, it’s a boardgame of some type. RPG-wise, the only contenders I can think of are the Star Wars: Age of Rebellion Beta or The Armitage Files for Trail of Cthulhu. AoR was a Beta game and I haven’t played it and I have the full release; my online gaming group played a bunch of Armitage. So the winner has to be the latter.

The Armitage Files is a neat setup for a campaign (and I’d love to actually run the campaign to completion one day). Letters and objects arrive mysteriously, describing future events. The Armitage Group, a few investigators of the unknown at Miskatonic University, implore the PCs to investigate independently. Each of these letters has four or five threads the PCs can follow–they choose to follow up with something going on at the yacht club in Kingsport instead of with the astronomy club that travels up the Miskatonic Valley. Do they get a chance to investigate the amateur astronomers? What if a new letter shows up during their investigation? What if that letter talks about investigating the death of one of the PCs?

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Each of these potential threats have certain people and organizations and places associated with them. Each of these elements come in three flavors: helpful, neutral, and insidious. For example, a businessman might have connections to the Order of Dagon, a member of a masonic organization waging secret war against the darkness, or just a person with plenty of powerful connections. This person is given three or four different physical descriptions and has six alternate names, letting you use the same “statblock” a multitude of times, generating several different people with differing outlooks.

armitagefiles2Your game will be different from anyone else’s. In my game, the amateur astronomers were innocent dupes, manipulated by a witch. In your game, the seemingly-benign group could have a secret inner circle full of cultists. Who knows?

The first half of the book is all about the files and various elements your Mythos Investigators may encounter. The second half are photocopies of the actual letters, so your players will have to decipher the handwriting which, as is apropos to a game with a Sanity meter, can get a bit crazy. Better still, Pelgrane Press offers a color PDF for download to give players the full effect.

Running this campaign requires the players to be proactive, instead of reactive. In order to fully prepare for the game, the players need to read over the file and tell the GM which line of investigation they’d like to pursue so the GM can come up with something. If you want to run the game, I strongly recommend reading Rick Neal’s Armitage Files play reports. ((Due to the nature of the product, there may be spoilers at that link, but they really may not be spoilers. Consider them quantum spoilers.))

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 13: Favorite RPG Podcast

Readers, I need your help.

Today’s question is “What’s your favorite RPG podcast?” Thing is, I don’t listen to RPG podcasts. I stopped listening a while back—I’d usually queue them up for trips and listen as I drive—but we haven’t taken long drives with just me and the wife in the past few years. I would sometimes listen when commuting in to the PR agency or to the university, but now my work commute to work is “go down the stairs, ’round through the kitchen, and to the office.”

I’ve asked on my social media accounts (twitter and G+, really) a few times for podcast suggestions, but very few came in. Perhaps you have some suggestions?

cover170x170Here’s what I’ve got in my podcast app: Shut Up & Sit Down, The SnakesCast (From Snakes & Lattes), 99% Invisible, and RadioLab. Things I’ve liked in the past, all now over: Out of Character (Pulp Gamer/Seelie Studios), The Sons of Kryos, The Durham 3, and Hudson & Gaines. I’ve also given Welcome to Nightvale and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff a whirl (even though I’m meh on the Cthulhu Mythos).

Commonalities in the things I like: Well-edited, directed/guided discussions with co-hosts or a main host and guests. Or, in the case of 99% Invisible, Serial, and RadioLab: hosts that tell stories. Check out the TEDx Talk with Roman Mars below that shows how he integrates his hosting with pre-recorded bits.

What I have now, gaming-wise, are podcasts that feature boardgames. No RPG stuff. ((I have a few episodes of The RPG Academy downloaded, but those are the Roll20 episodes to get a better understanding of that gaming platform.))

What do you recommend?

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 13 – Most Memorable Character Death

A year ago, I wrote about the Most Memorable Character Death in one of the games I ran. Half the time I tell this story, it’s a “dumb player” story; the other half of the time, it’s my “worst GMing moment” story. From a game running standpoint, it’s one of those moments where I reevaluated how I run games and it actually made me a better GM. The Most Memorable Character Death hasn’t changed in the past year, nor do I think it’ll change in the future. ((I don’t normally kill player characters. That’s weak sauce.))

Let’s head back several years to just after Shadowrun 4th Edition came out, to Fort Worth/Dallas, the largest sprawl in North America, just as rush hour is about to start….

The mission is to find someone in protective custody and make sure they don’t testify in an upcoming trial. The time is late afternoon on a workday, about four: rush hour traffic is starting. While two members of the team are way over in Fort Worth and one is way up north in Denton, the fourth decides she’s going to break into the target’s house (in central Dallas) and snoop around. She does this without telling anyone on the team; when one of the runners calls her while she’s on the way to the target’s house – basically to give her a chance to let the team know what’s up – she says that she’s “got something to do” and will call her back later. So there we are, with a solo runner about to break into a house that is under police surveillance. No plan. No backup.

I should point out that there were several problems with this player leading up to this.

I really didn’t want to have infighting or inter-party conflicts, so I told everyone that I wanted to have a game session where we spent time creating characters together. She showed up with a fully created character, a cop that’s trying to redeem himself. There was a lot of stuff in that character to justify screwing over the other runners. And she played the character in a way that hosed the others: not sharing intel with others and other things like that. So this really wasn’t a surprise.

She gets to the neighborhood, walks around the block, and sees that the backyards in the neighborhood are all fenced in (brick walls, really). The target’s house is three houses in. She decides to scale the fences, and hop backyard to backyard until at the target house. Okay, climb check, I say. She rolls. Fail. Rolls again. Fails. Rolls again. Fails. Rolls and finally makes it into the first yard. After three of these fences, she’s in the back yard. Okay, there’s a sliding glass door that leads to the kitchen. You can see the wooden stick that is used to keep the thing shut. She decides to shoot through the glass to knock the bar off. Do you have a silencer on that pistol? No. Bang, miss. So she shoots again and the door shatters. ((When she finally got inside and started looking around, I asked what she was looking for. You know, like hidden matrix files, or perhaps information about a close relative or friend she could follow up on in case the target gets in touch with them, or maybe a surveillance camera watching the place whose feed the runners can follow back to whomever has the target. Something. Her response: “I don’t know.” Seriously. Absolutely no fucking plan whatsoever.))

Let’s just cut to when she’s running away on foot from the police in a residential neighborhood, coated in neon green marker paint courtesy of a police drone. ((Her amazing plan of escaping once the police were entering the house: Exit through a ground floor window to the street, walk up the block, cross over, and come back down the block on the other side of the street so she just appeared like a curious onlooker instead of actually getting away. Anyway, that’s when the police drone tagged her.))

Now, coated in glowing green paint, running up the middle of a residential street from police officers that are chasing her, is when she calls the runners for back up. The nearest runner, up in Denton, would have been 45 minutes away if it wasn’t rush hour. But it was. From the time of the initial phone call to the attempt to run away from the police on foot, about two hours of real time had passed. Everyone at the table was just watching in stunned silence at the slow-crawling train wreck, unable to do anything.

So, after she was captured, the player was gleeful – she reminds everyone that her character had photographic memory and knows a lot about the other runners. She’s looking forward to the next session where the runners will have a daring rescue on a police station to spring her character before the cops get her to spill the goods on the crew.

Instead: the runners hack into a garbage truck, ramming it into the police car she’s being transported in, killing everyone inside.

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