#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 8 – Favorite Character

by ThomasNo Comments

Again, not a good topic to revisit, as I typically run games instead of play in them. ((Maybe I should rethink this whole “Last Year” concept. Nah. I’ve got some good stuff coming.))

So last year today on #RPGaDAY, a subject that really is called “Tell me about your character”.

I’ll try not to bore you.

I play in games very rarely. Since picking up that boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons, it seems like I’ve always been the GM. There were a handful of characters I actually played, usually thieves in the pseudo-European magical medieval fantasy games due to my dislike of the Vancian magic system D&D and its imitators favored. ((It’s probably why I’ve never read any of Vance’s books, too.)) As those few moments of being on the other side of the DM screen drifted away into the hazy past, I really only recall two or three characters worth mentioning. They all do the right thing, but wind up suffering for it.

The most recent character I played was doomed from the start.

There’s a Shadowrun adventure called Missing Blood. In it, the heroes come across a private investigator who fell hard for a girl he was trying to find. He never met her, but investigating her, he was exposed to everything in her life, including what she looked and sounded like. He was hit by the love but, hard. In Missing Blood, the runners get some information from him, head off to be heroic adventurers and eventually find the girl, but she’s the victim of a cult and in the middle of a week-long possession ritual that was impossible to stop. ((I’m greatly oversimplifying the situation.)) She was gone, partially consumed. After the mission, the runners could return to the P.I. and decide what, if anything, they would tell him.

My last character was that investigator. Except I had him go on that mission with the runners, found the girl halfway through her transformation to an Ant Queen, and got her out. And she’s been kept in magical stasis for the past two years in his basement. And he loves her.

There was never going to be a happy ending for Daniel.

Either he saves her and she wakes up and doesn’t know who this guy is or he fails and she arises as an Ant Queen.

That’s my favorite character. Creepy, doomed Daniel. Even if given the chance, I would never go back to playing that character. His story is over. ((What happened? In the end, she was threatened, so he dropped the magical stasis on her; she was consumed by the Ant Queen spirit, and — through a sympathic link that insect shamen and queen spirits have — he knew she loved him. It might not have been her any more, but that love was all that Daniel cared about. So I guess it was a happy ending after all.))

tl;dr: I guess I really like Hamlet.

ants

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 7: Favorite Free RPG

by ThomasNo Comments

Today, on #RPGaDAY, our writing prompt is Favorite Free RPG.

It’s still Lady Blackbird. I didn’t even need to think longer than a few seconds about that one.

Well, see you tomorrow.

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Oh, wait. That’s not 500 words.

What I like about Lady Blackbird isn’t one specific thing. There’s a lot of great moments in those few pages of game material:

The opening. You’ve got a situation that throws the protagonists into peril, reading like a Republic Movies serial opening as it scrawls up the screen. It’s a wonderful technique and a throwback to the film serials that, due to being short movies that were designed to bring people back to the theater week after week, heavily imply near non-stop action and cliffhangers. ((It’s not a coincidence that George Lucas used the same technique in Star Wars back in 1976, followed by one of the most memorable openings to a movie. Go back and watch Star Wars and see how long it is until the first or fourth line of dialogue is uttered. What happens before that? Dire peril.))

The implied setting. We don’t know much about the setting: just enough to hook us in, not enough so the players at the tables get to flesh out the world. Anything as simple as what the imperial guards on board the Hand of Sorrow are in your game: Clockwork soldiers that need winding? Men in suits of armor with blasters? Women in caped Prussian uniforms weilding electro-sabres? To what the words “Imperial Expansion” implies on the map, or that slavery is outlawed on Haven — does the Empire have slaves, or are they fleeing from the Free Worlds? To the barely-mentioned-in-the-game Sky Squids, featured on a diagram of relative sized that shows how small your ship, The Owl, is, in comparison. Especially how it would easily fit in the tentacles.

The characters. Aimed at each other with secret ((Secret to the characters, not to the players.)) goals and desires. “Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king?” the game asks. “If they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?”

The character sheets. Right there are all the rules you need to play the game. The top half, your character. The bottom, the rules summary: how to do things, how to improve your character. It’s crazy clever how much game there is in that little space on the character sheet.

The refreshement scenes. You get to refresh your dice pool by takign a breather with another character, which drives the roleplaying, but there’s this fantastic line slapped at the end that really made our game of Lady Blackbird an awesome game: Refreshment scenes can be flashbacks, too. That single line opened up the world and let us explore the space. We flashback to when Vance first met the Lady. We see the Lady’s life before her engagement. We can experience Count Carlowe’s and Uriah Flint’s power over the common folk. We can even jump back to a quiet moment at the beginning of the journey and watch Naomi and Kale steal a kiss.

When my group played, we ran five or six sessions. We made it to Flint’s base and by that time, no, she didn’t want anything to do with the scoundrel. The Owl, destroyed, the Lady, she took command and stole Count Carlowe’s ship, fleeing into the blue with her crew. A happy ending after all, but probably not the one your group would have.

Lady Blackbird: still a masterpiece.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 7 – “Do you own a copy of Nobilis?”

by Thomas3 Comments

Last year, today, our question is What is the most intellectual RPG you own? ((aka “Who has a copy of Nobilis?”))

Most intellectual RPG? Man, that’s worse than defining “old school” from day five. Are we talking about a game that makes you feel smarter than people who don’t grok what you’re reading? Or a game whose writing is rated above a sixth-grader’s vocabulary? A game with lofty ambitions or goals to make you a better person and reflect on the real world? Perhaps an agenda-filled RPG? How about the most pretentious game ever?

Let’s face it, most RPGs are pretty dumb. You make a character and her or she or it does stuff, usually through a liberal application of violence, in order to, um, get stuff. The writing may be slightly better than these little posts I’ve been making, but the largest word I have used so far in this screed is “intellectual”, which was part of the question prompt, so that’s not saying much.

256px-Nobilis-coverSo, do I have a copy of Nobilis around here?

Nope.

Drat.

The closest thing I own to that is the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer game.

Huh.

Think.

Work, Brains. Work.

Look, most RPGs are pretty smart. You create a whole world out of thoughts, man. The people who live there come straight from your brain! Their motivations, their goals in life, their stupid, stupid mistakes they’re still paying for after all these years have sprung from your imagination. Even if you’re playing HOL, Macho Women with Guns, or Nobilis.

RPG_HoL_coverIn that case, I’m leaning towards a generic RPG, one that gives the game players the freedom to do anything. The big questions I have for a generic RPG are: Can this game do horror? Can I do a Star Wars game that feels like Star Wars in this game? (Also related: Can I do a Shadowrun game with this game?) Can I play comic book superheroes with this game? It doesn’t matter if I have to get a supplement or sourcebook to slot in a new play mode, like picking up GURPS Horror or GURPS Supers to make it work. But I don’t own GURPS proper. (Just two sourcebooks: GURPS Mysteries and GURPS The Prisoner).

I’m going with the Cortex Plus game line from Margaret Weis Productions. If I have to pick one, and only one, game in the line, it’s Smallville. Not only does it allow for all those game styles ((seriously, go find Smallville and use it for a fantastic Star Wars game)), but the Cortex Plus system allows for the players to create things in the world, getting their brains involved in the shared world. This thing in the world didn’t exist until this player thought of it. BAM.

MAGIC.

Is that still your answer today, Thomas?

Yeah, I think so. I’m tempted to look at Fate Core and use that for everything, but Leverage is probably the best Shadowrun game out there. And as much as I like Fate, it doesn’t do horror that well. I’d also recommend Primetime Adventures, but that doesn’t do action in a satisfying way. Cortex Plus is a base game system that can do a lot. It’s like starting with a roux, some rice, and chicken stock and winding up with shrimp etouffee or a spicy gumbo, depending on what you add. ((I’m also loathe to recommend the various “Powered by the Apocalypse” Apocalypse World variants, despite loving AW. While they take on the same base, they are all starting to blur together to me right now, seemingly just swapping out names for basic moves and adding a new custom move here or there. There’s a superheroic variant that I’d like to see — With Great Power, I think — but I’m more interested in seeing what the Sentinels Comics RPG, developed by some of the people behind Cortex Plus, is going to do in the superhero space. Wow. Serious digression.))

I worked on the Firefly RPG, which uses a different iteration of the basic rules that Marvel Heroic Roleplaying used and they’re both fantastic games. Leverage and Smallville both have the same basic similarity, but different executions — heck, I kind of want to play Star Wars, Smallville-style.

I would wager the Cortex Plus game system would be more popular if the license was truly open.

Aside: I’m working on sourcebooks and supplements for Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, the new game from the creator of Nobilis, so I’ve got that partially covered.