Gaming in 2011

It's the second birthday of TPK, and I'd like to thank you for stopping by to read my thoughts on all things gaming.  Last year at this time we (Morgue, Cam , Gareth and I) had just released The Aotearoa Gambit to support some of the real heroes of the Christchurch earthquake (by the way, it's currently on sale).  It remains something I'm proud of, although it's hard to believe it's been a year since we worked on that.

At that time I set some goals for the next 12 months, and I thought I'd better check in and see how much progress I made against them:

1. Continue to run my Kingsport Tales campaign.
Alas, this I failed to achieve.  Other campaigns took precedence and Kingsport languished.  I'd love to return, and plan to try and recapture some of that old Kingsport magic with the slow burn of 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness' later this year.

2. Run Masks of Nyarlathotep – Pulp Edition.
Check.  It was great fun - my thoughts on the campaign are here.

3. Run a Rogue Trader mini-series.
Check.  I'm in the middle of running Lure of the Expanse right now, my thoughts on it are here.

4. Run a Superhero mini-series.
Check. I ran Reverie for a great group of players, and posted about it here.

5. Attend upcoming Wellington tabletop roleplaying conventions.
Check. I attended, and ran games at Day of Games, ConFusion, Fright Night and Kapcon.

6. Write and publish EPOCH
Partial check.  I've almost finished the first draft of my character-driven horror roleplaying game, but there's still a fair ways to go before I publish it.

7.  Write and submit a scenario for Fear Itself
Nope,  this remains something I'm interested in doing, although I'm currently pouring all my thoughts and creativity into EPOCH, and it seems hard to imagine spending any time on a horror game that wasn't EPOCH as it represents my best efforts in this genre.

8. Write and submit another scenario for ICONS
Nope.

9.  Write and submit a monograph or scenario for Call of Cthulhu
Check.  I wrote Sundown a Call of Cthulhu Adventure of the Old West to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Call of Cthulhu.

So how about the next 12 months?  Well here are my goals:

- Finish and publish EPOCH
- Write a good selection of scenarios for EPOCH
- Run the Call of Cthulhu campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness
- Run the Warpstorm Trilogy, a Rogue Trader campaign
- Attend upcoming local tabletop roleplaying conventions
- Write and publish my Call of Cthulhu resource
- Write and possibly co-run a zany disco based game with Mike

What about you?

One Year Old Today

Today TPK turns one!

Over the last 12 months 45 posts have been made here including reviews of games, actual play reports, ‘con reports, promoting published materials and my own musings on the nature of gaming, and how it can be improved. A total of 178 comments have been made to challenge, support, edify or inform these posts. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of the discussion, or even just idly skimmed the material.

The most viewed post? Oddly, One Night as A SuperVillain – Part 2, weighing in at 147 views, with Kapcon 20 - Part 2 the runner up with 107 views. In total so far TPK has had around 3,500 page views.

My favourite posts have been those about the nature of gaming, particularly in a 'con setting:

Ante Up

Out of the Box

The Art of the Pitch
Player Activation

The GM Toolkit

So looking ahead, what for the next 12 months? Well it’d be a brave person to predict this blog will continue at the same pace, but my gaming goals for the next year are:

- Continue to run my Kingsport Tales campaign.
- Run Masks of Nyarlathotep – Pulp Edition.
- Run a Rogue Trader mini-series.
- Run a Superhero mini-series.
- Attend upcoming Wellington tabletop roleplaying conventions.
- Write and publish EPOCH
- Write and submit a scenario for Fear Itself
- Write and submit another scenario for ICONS
- Write and submit a monograph or scenario for Call of Cthulhu

What about you?

Be A Hero

Last week I wrote an adventure for ICONS – Adamant Entertainment’s Superhero Roleplaying system. This wasn’t something I’d planned, or even considered, before doing it - I’ve played just one ICONS adventure, and never written up a supers adventure before. However, during the e-mails about setting up the RPGNow Bundle, Gareth-Michael Skarka suggested that we produce a “Be a Hero” New Zealand ICONS adventure with proceeds going to Christchurch earthquake relief – an idea I thought was fantastic!

On Wednesday the 23rd I visited Morgue for a brainstorming session, and left his place with a draft outline. We wanted something over the top (4-colour) which dealt with New Zealand in a way that was authentic and respectful, and also fitted within the genre. The feedback from Gareth was that our draft outline was a little ambitious for the time available. So, on Thursday I sat down and wrote the first draft, condensing the action to a single region and two scenes. Morgue kicked into high-gear on Friday fleshing out the characters and providing system details, then it was on to Cam for editing and the Adamant team for art and layout.

Our finished product, The Aotearoa Gambit is now available from RPGNow and DriveThruRpg, with all proceeds going to real New Zealand heroes who were in the thick of the Christchurch Earthquake response – St. John’s. Thanks to Morgue, Cam Banks, Dan Houser and Gareth-Michael Skarka for making this happen.

BE A HERO

Adamant Entertainment is proud to present an adventure for ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying produced especially as a charity fundraiser for St. John New Zealand.

St. John New Zealand are volunteer first responders and health care providers, currently operating the remaining welfare centre currently operating in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. This 25-page ICONS adventure was written and edited by New Zealanders Dale Elvy, Morgan Davie and Cam Banks, who join Adamant Entertainment in donating all proceeds from this product, in perpetuity, to St John New Zealand.

The Aotearoa Gambit is a fast-paced adventure which takes place in New Zealand (Aotearoa) and after some initial scene setting, presents the players with 3 possible encounters, which they can choose to resolve in any order. Each encounter is structured to have possible alternate solutions, other than brute force, and also to increase in difficulty if not resolved immediately, making some tough choices for the heroes. These encounters should ultimately lead to a final scene which features a showdown with the main villain – an encounter which will determine the fate of an entire nation!

New Zealand RPG's Represent!

Just taking a moment to celebrate some of the fine New Zealand roleplaying games that have recently been published. First up The Silver Kiss of the Magical Twilight of the Full Moon by Jamie in which four players play teenage best friends. Two human, two supernatural…somethings. One human falls in love with one supernatural and it’s basically a hilarious emo pastiche of Twilight and similar books/movies/TV shows. Buy it here.

Next up is Al Shir-Ma, A 66 player LARP co-authored by yours truly. Al Shir-Ma is a Live Roleplaying scenario set in a fantasy world loosely based on the 1001 Arabian Nights. The players take the roles of important people in the town, the court, leading merchants, prominent townsfolk, and assorted visitors and travellers. There are strong threads of political intrigue, magic, romance, duplicity and revenge running throughout the game. Available from RPGNow, drop me a line if you'd like a review copy. Here's a scenario I can highly recommend having had a really great time play-testing it for the Morgue. A diabolical contest is underway, and the unwitting heroes are all that stand between the villains and the ultimate prize! Can the heroes withstand being drawn into … The Mastermind Affair? Written for the highly entertaining ICONS supers system and availble now at RPGNow. Then it's on to The Black Hart of Camelot by Ryan Paddy which is a live roleplaying scenario for 24 players set in the legendary age of King Arthur, bringing together the lords and ladies of the tales for a gathering that will shape the fate of the Kingdom of Britain. Get it from RPG Now. Finally, you have to check out Monophobia. Almost a decade in development, Monophobia is a collection of Call of Cthulhu adventures for lone Investigators (and a willing Keeper). Written by Mark Chiddicks and Marcus Bone, two veteran Call of Cthulhu Keepers. Get it from the Unbound Book now. So get out there and support some great Kiwi titles!

A Player's Tale

This week I spent a fair bit of time playing in some different RPG’s. Here’s a brief snapshot of the week that was;

On Monday I helped playtest Morgue’s forthcoming superhero adventure for the ICONS system. I had previously created a character by rolling superpowers randomly (love that old-school, V&V feel) and decided on the basis of rolling plant control, animal control and the ability to excrete toxins that I would be the ‘Green Man’ and environmental avenger and super-hippy. It was a pretty wild time, and I must give nods to my fellow heroes for having some great laughs. Our team was entirely dysfunctional with two fairly straight characters (Slade played by Norman and Salamandress played by Jenni) and two kind of lame, oddballs (Robo-Zard was played by James and was particularly memorable for his stalker style antics involving Salamandress) and me of course.

Other than a fondness for the characters, I was reminded just how much a GM has to try and continuously reinforce the role of the game world’s reality and provide some kind of basis for normalcy in an old school supers outing. It can be a continuous and exhausting process depending on the power level of the Supers and the creativeness of the players. Perhaps it’s the difference between a campaign, or long-term game over a short run, but If anything, I think that it reinforced that I prefer super games which deal with origin stories and bring a focus on ‘real-world’ pressures on super characters, over short run, four colour adventures.

On Tuesday I played my ‘Brutal Scoundrel’ in my regular D&D campaign. It’s been several sessions since the TPK and I like the other PC’s, but it seems that we might have to change party roles around and introduce new characters soon in order to replace our ‘healing role’ which was left vacant after a player left the game. We continue to explore a gigantic city cast out of time and magically sealed, overrun by demons, fey, frog-locks, bugbears and many other assorted nasties. The number of factions involved has made me concerned that we may once again find ourselves betrayed and TPK’d but I guess time will tell.

Last week we were ambushed by bugbears who referred to us as 'noobs', which I guess is true, but certainly made me feel like it was a very long road ahead. Without any bushcraft capabilities, and obviously being at the low end of the power scale in this setting (or else it'll be a short campaign) I pondered whether there was any point in trying clever strategies or trying to do anything but blindly walk into one encounter after another and hope that we can beat it. After all, everything else in the setting is likely more powerful and more in tune with the local environment than we are, so unless the GM is willing to give our ideas and plans a credence that defies the perscription of our level, he or she is unlikely to let us gain any real advantage over the NPC's.

We have our first actual serious, non-combat, interaction with NPC’s next week and it's possible the group will shatter and fragment when given the opportunity to find different motivations . I think that from this game I took away the need to use pace appropriately in order to try to reveal a story of this scope.

On Thursday I played Dr. Ivan Borkovsky, a Czech Archeologist on expedition to Meso-America in 1914, in Call of Cthulhu. We spent almost the entire session making characters (well, talking about making characters and other things) and finding our way to an ominous and largely undiscovered ancient, overgrown Mayan city. Fortunately my fellow explorers were sufficiently outlandish in their antics that my Dr. Borkovsky was actually fairly buttoned down, despite my outrageous accent (I guess that balances out my Green Man mischief on Monday). The group is heavily armed, but on the basis of the scenario build-up so far, I fear that Dr. Borkovsky is unlikely to live long enough to publish his paper on the lost city…