The Old School GM

Split Personality Disorder, Part 3

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:05:11 -0700

I’ve set up shop at unpossiblelabs.tumblr.com. Basically I’m pulling all of my gaming-related stuff under the Unpossible Labs umbrella:

Website - where I post PDFs and other things you can use in your game
Tumblog - where I post useless commentary and other miscellanea.
I’m also fairly active on the RPG StackExchange, which is freakin’ awesome.

When will the madness end?

Summer is for Trying New Games

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:55:12 -0700

My little gaming group has tried Spirit of the Century and Apocalypse World in recent weeks. Spirit of the Century is a clever, fun game, but I couldn’t get into it because 1920s/30s pulp just doesn’t do it for me. For whatever reasons, I’m not drawn to the setting. Apocalypse World is an astounding game because of how it focuses on story and interpersonal relationships. It’s also difficult to build a campaign around precisely because it’s so story-driven. So we’ll probably wind down AW after a couple more sessions.

That doesn’t mean either game was a waste of time. Far from it. Spirit of the Century has one of the best sections on gamemastering of any RPG I’ve come across. It’s fantastic material for any GM, and I highly recommend it. The FATE mechanics also provide some interesting food for thought, particularly as to how player characters can be built in a way that naturally reinforces their in-game cooperation. Apocalypse World taught me a few tricks about managing threats to player characters. The whole concept of a Front is something I’m going to use in other games.

As we start moving into fall and winter, we’ll be settling into campaign mode again. There will be fewer vacations and other disruptions once summer disappears, and something about the colder weather makes the idea of a more solid, consistent game appealing. I’ll start up my Eclipse Phase campaign again, and we’ll also get Dungeon World going. After a while it looks like Matt will fire up a One Roll Engine game set in the Ars Magica world.

Rotating through these games as we move into winter should be a blast, even more so because we experimented this summer. I feel like I’ll be a better GM for having run a few sessions of Spirit of the Century and Apocalypse World.

Form-Fillable Eclipse Phase Character Sheet

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:12:15 -0700

I finally got this one dialed in and ready to go. It’s a landscape oriented, two-page form-fillable PDF. Say that ten times fast.

You can snag it at Unpossible Labs and it is, of course, free.

Unpossible Labs

Sun, 27 May 2012 10:13:52 -0700

Unpossible Labs:

I’ve decided to put this tumblog on indefinite hold, and focus my limited RPG time on Unpossible Labs. Right now it’s just a (small) repository of materials for Eclipse Phase, but I have plans to gradually expand it.

Overheard At A Coffee Shop This Morning

Sun, 27 May 2012 10:09:18 -0700

Guy #1: So are you getting a tattoo or are you going to be chickening out and staying with the normals?
Guy #2: I was thinking about it and decided not to since I didn't want to fall in with the normals.
Guy #1: You just chickensh!t that's all you are. Afraid to get something and staying with the conformed.
Guy #2: I was thinking about it and thought that if I got a tattoo I'd just be conforming and a part of the normal now. You have a tattoo, those two over there have tats, and she does as well... just about 90% people in this place have tats on display. So, I figured If I don't get tat and piercings I won't be conforming to the norm... so whose the one that's conformed now?

--
Love this. Here's the thing: If you think getting inked, or dressing a certain way, or getting your hair cut a certain way makes you superior in some way, consider the number of great thinkers and subversives who have changed the world even though they looked just like everyone else. Appearance has nothing to do with anything but fashion. If you want to be radical, change your inner self and make things happen.

Yambo Ouologuem

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:54:26 -0700

jessnevins:

Reporter: “Are Africans fundamentally more violent than the rest of the world?”

Ouologuem: “I would like to think that Africa excels in everything. But, unfortunately, after the Hundred Years War, Stalin, the Inquisition, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, et cetera, I am afraid that we poor Blacks, we underdeveloped Africans, lag behind the rest of the world.”

Pure win.

Time is What Limits the Popularity of Tabletop RPG

Thu, 17 May 2012 22:10:31 -0700

It’s hard enough keeping walls around Friday night, which is game night for me. As a game master I need to spend additional time during the week prepping. When life gets unruly, as it has for me of late, there is no time for prep. I’m in that situation this week; because I’ve not been able to prep, there will be no Eclipse Phase on Friday.

That’s no big deal, because we’ll likely be playing Burning Wheel instead, and the guy who runs the game is a fantastic GM. I am excited to be at the table as a player. But I am dispirited by the fact that I’m not going to be able to run Eclipse Phase. Why? Because I am invested in the game.

I have devoted hours and hours to reading the game books, absorbing the rules, learning as much as possible about the game world, mapping out scenario concepts, creating NPCs, and so on. Time is my most precious commodity, and I don’t want it to go to waste. I also don’t want to pass up the opportunity to turn all of that effort into something wonderful, something unique and enjoyable for me and my friends.

This is not a new phenomenon for me. Ever since I graduated from high school I’ve had that feeling as a game master. I love running games. I want to facilitate marvelous, immersive, awesome game sessions. Yet for every hour of time at the table with the other players, I’m spending another hour in one form of preparation or another.

One could argue that I just need to get more efficient at prepping. That’s a fair point; I’ll be the first person to agree that I could use improvement. Still, with most games you still need to devote a fairly sizable chunk of time to prep, no matter how good you are at it.

The conclusion I reach is that time, in particular the time the GM must spend prepping for a game, is the largest obstacle to the growth of the tabletop RPG hobby. The game master is the lynch pin; without that person, there is no gaming group, no reason to buy game books (other than to read and collect without playing, and I suspect a fairly large percentage of RPG consumers do this).

There are a host of indie games that make it easier for a GM to throw together a quick game session. But regardless of the mechanics, to create the kind of immersive game that gives players that special feeling of engagement that only an excellent roleplaying campaign can provide, the GM has to put the time in up front. Still, some systems definitely make prep more difficult.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the opaque and arcane rules system of D&D is one of the single biggest obstacles to growing the hobby. I am not bashing D&D. It’s what got me into tabletop RPG, and I understand that for many gamers it is the game that fits their needs best. But to newcomers, D&D presents a barrier to entry. A non-gamer walks into a game store, sees the dozens of thick D&D books, and thinks, “My gawd, this is going to take me ages to comprehend.”

Sure, there are many preferable alternatives one could throw at a newcomer. Call them gentle introductions: Basic Roleplaying springs to mind as a good example. But everyone knows that D&D is the tabletop RPG. Ask a non-gamer to name a tabletop RPG, and you’d likely draw a blank. Then ask them if they’ve heard of D&D. To non-gamers, D&D is tabletop roleplaying.

It is my belief that as long as D&D is the game by which tabletop roleplaying is judged by the outside world, it will always remain a niche pursuit. It simply requires a time investment that is too great for all but the most devoted; even people who buy the books and want desperately to play more frequently are constrained by the amount of time it takes to prepare for a session.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The death of the tabletop RPG has been announced several times in the nearly three decades that I’ve been playing. Yet here I am still playing most Friday nights, with a small but happy crew of like-minded gamers. Perhaps tabletop RPGs will always be tottering on the precipice, and GMs will always wish they had more time to prepare.

Last July I toured the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation,...

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:50:46 -0700

Last July I toured the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, which is this incredible armor (tank) museum tucked away in the hills above Silicon Valley. They have dozens and dozens of tanks restored and presented in three massive warehouse buildings. I’ve been too lazy to title most of the 80 shots I took, but if you’re into tanks, you’ll be able to identify most of them.

"Brigitte Bardot is the assassin!"

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:15:02 -0700

Several days ago I sent a teaser to my players to get them curious about our Friday night Eclipse Phase session. But by the time the end of the week rolled around, the three of us were all pretty wiped out from work and various other things. We eased our way into the game session, all of us suspecting that we might not be able to finish the brief adventure I’d planned.

As fate would have it, we managed to pull off a fantastic game session. Our two intrepid heroes were tasked by Firewall with stopping an assassination at the exclusive orbital hab of an absurdly wealthy playboy who also led a double life as a strong supporter of Firewall. Derivative, I know. But if it works, it works.

The gazillionaire, a man by the name of Sharpan Wisla, was famous for his exclusive parties, to which only the cream of the inner system could ever hope to attend. The people who show up at Wisla parties are hypercorp executives, famous artists and actors, powerful politicians, and so on. The theme of this party was 1950s entertainers, the idea being that each attendee would have to obtain a morph of a famous screen actor, musician, dancer, or comedian from that era, and impersonate him or her for as long as possible.

Firewall had strong reason to believe that one of the guests would be out to kill Wisla. Killing him would not do any meaningful long-term harm to him as a person, but it would affect his influence. If he were killed, particularly during an exclusive event such as this, it would make it more difficult for him in the future to mix and mingle with the elites, and carry out his secret agenda of maneuvering the wealthy and powerful into assisting Firewall without knowing they were doing so.

Wisla’s security team was suspect, so the player characters had to go in alone. Another odd twist: the premise of the party was strictly enforced. No mesh access or other information transmission beyond good old fashioned human interaction would be allowed. The security system inside the hab monitored this continuously, and anyone disobeying would be bounced out of the party.

Furthermore, Wisla did not want the party disrupted. He did not want to know who his Firewall protectors would be. Part of the fun of the party lay in not knowing who was who, so while Wisla had a guest list, he did not know how each guest would be morphed.

The players chose to show up as Steve Reeves (the muscle man who played Hercules), and Jimmy Stewart. The adventure was a fascinating mix of the players attempting to suss out the motivations of the characters they encountered as they chatted with a host of alter egos ranging from Frank Sinatra to Sophia Loren and James Dean to Kim Novak. We had a lot of fun with it, and as you might expect in a party of high rollers, there was a fair amount of debauchery.

The whole while, the players were narrowing their suspect list down. It looked for a while like the Indian actress Nutan was the assassin, but at a critical moment, Brigitte Bardot pulled a straight razor on Jimmy Stewart, who fled in terror, screaming out, “Brigitte Bardot is the assassin!” The ensuing scene is difficult to describe in detail, but it wound up with Sophia Loren in custody and Bardot in a huff stomping off with Marlon Brando.

It was only later, as Steve Reeves and his new friend Marilyn Monroe watched Elvis tear into a second, blistering set, that Bardot took a leap toward the stage, straight razor in hand! Muscle man Reeves managed to stop Bardot in time, and he and Stewart took Ms. Bardot and Ms. Loren back with them to their Firewall handler, who would determine exactly who these two really were, and why they would want to kill Wisla.

All in all, it was great fun. I’m thinking of writing up the setting and some of the characters as a loosely-defined scenario that any Eclipse Phase GM could use (with any of dozens of 1950s icons being the assassin or assassins).

The Atlantic has a collection of 53 black and white photos from...

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:43:44 -0700

The Atlantic has a collection of 53 black and white photos from the New York City Municipal Archives, ranging from the beginning of the 20th Century to the 1930s. Good stuff for Call of Cthulhu, Spirit of the Century, et. al.

A teaser I sent to my players last night. We won’t be able...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:33:51 -0700

A teaser I sent to my players last night. We won’t be able to play until next Friday, but I like to keep them interested. For this session, the PCs will be sent to an exclusive masquerade party in the private hab of one of the wealthiest inner system oligarchs, where they will attempt to ferret out an assassin before she strikes.

I could have obtained some more appropriate 1950s fonts, but it was late last night and I admit I was lazy.

How (And Why) To Mine An Asteroid

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:01:41 -0700

How (And Why) To Mine An Asteroid:

THE ASTEROID 16 PSYCHE IS ESTIMATED TO CONTAIN 170 MILLION TRILLION TONS OF NICKEL-IRON, OR ENOUGH TO SUPPLY OUR GLOBAL NEEDS FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS.

The Klein Termination

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:03:00 -0700

For our 12th Eclipse Phase session I mixed up both my gamemastering approach and the flavor of the game a bit. So why not experiment with how I present the summary of the game session? This is a series of snippets designed to give you a feel for how it progressed:

Martin Wallace Flynt (in Octavia, floating above the surface of Venus)

There is no such thing as a “bad” Morley Watlins party. S/he sometimes throws parties that are not up to her usual high standards, but then again, his standards are so high that even a party s/he might deem a failure would be a colossal success in anyone else’s book. One of the Warhols recently dished in City of Ether that Morley spends two months recouperating from the last party before s/he can even start thinking about the next.

Anyway, although it’s all been done before, s/he never does it the same way each time. The novelty never seems to wear off. So here you are, down in The Spine, in the swirling, pumping midst of a Morley Watlins “thing”, trading bons mots with a very clever young seductress from Fairhuit Station. Already three or four assignations have taken place, and a couple of Sylphs are doing rather amazing things with their… wait… you’re receiving an encrypted inbound… .

Your muse decrypts the message. It’s from Smyth, your Firewall handler. You’ve never met Smyth. You just receive missions from Smyth, and feed Smyth mission debriefs when it’s all over. Who is Smyth? You may never know.

Proceed immediately to Dock 17A. A small Wayfarer-class orbital shuttle will be waiting. The shuttle pilot is a member of your team. The other team member will meet you in the shuttle.

Ambrose Webster (in Octavia, floating above the surface of Venus)

You often find yourself here when you’re not working. The Cloister is possibly the smallest bar on Octavia. The decor is garish, the brew is of questionable heritage, and the clients tend to keep to themselves. Someone programmed the service bots with a preference for the sounds of chanting Benedictine monks, so there’s always a weird, low droning noise in the backround. The Cloister is the kind of place you’d expect to find down spindle, but it’s here on 35, in the Basket, tucked between an Uncle Leo’s Pervatorium franchise and a high class mod clinic.

It’s been a while since your last gig with Saldor Protection Services ended. Guarding the pampered children of hypercorp bigwigs isn’t exactly stimulating work, but the pay is decent. So you were mildly disappointed when the daughter of one of said bigwigs blew off Venus and created all kinds of trouble for everyone. There were investigations. There was an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny from Morningstar intelligence. Because SDS was guarding the Cyrene girl when she bolted, the hammer came down. There were indictments. The company was dissolved.

In order to keep up appearances, you’ve been looking for gainful employment in the most rudimentary way, all the while praying for a mission. A Firewall mission. A way to escape the dreary, humdrum life of a security drone in a ‘stat floating above the toxic Venusian surface.

Tonight there are only a half a dozen people in The Cloister, and Lala the info broker is holding court with a couple of off-planet noobs. By the look of them they’re Lunar, all dangling earrings and metallic clothing. Half of what she’s feeding them is garbage, but she’s just goofing. Despite her rep, she would never give anyone the kind of false info that would get them killed. Unless, of course, they deserved it.

You’re about to order up one last drink when you get an inbound. Hmm… it’s encoded… .

Your muse decrypts the message. It’s from Smyth, your Firewall handler. Maybe there is no Smyth. Maybe Smyth is just the name used by a group of inner sanctum people way up the Firewall food chain. Whatever. It’s a mission. You need a mission.

Proceed immediately to Dock 17A. A small Wayfarer-class orbital shuttle will be waiting. The shuttle pilot is a member of your team. The other team member will meet you in the shuttle.

For Your Sins, A Mission

The trip to low Earth orbit was uneventful. Never having worked together before, Flynt, Versace and Webster spent most of their time occupied with individual pursuits. The unspoken rule in situations like this applied: Until you’ve been briefed, it’s best not to reveal anything.

Time was of the essence, so the three strangers didn’t even leave the shuttle upon reaching what was quite possibly the system’s smallest orbital habitat. The briefing arrived in the form of a quaint anachronism – a data stick delivered by hand. The mission was simple, if suicidal: Fly the shuttle through a supposedly safe gap in the Earth quantine, make it on foot to a Russian port city, infiltrate an ancient iron and steel works, and assassinate Walter Klein, a genius Firewall agent who had gone rogue. Oh, and do all this before he used a repurposed VK-355 Velociraptor air defense mech to fire modified scramjet missiles equipped with nanobot-armed warheads at a secret Firewall orbital surveillance hab. Fail and Firewall’s extensive surveillance network would be exposed to anyone paying attention to Earth orbit, meaning pretty much every faction in the system.

Welcome Home

The craft buckled again. Versace’s voice was a bit less panicked now. “I think we’re past the worst of it.” A ripping sound tore through the cramped vessel. Then he slumped in his seat, his head bent unnaturally to the left. A small hole appeared in the cockpit, just above the command console. Red lights flashed. A soft feminine voice announced, A structural breach has occurred. Loss of oxygen. Please take action.

Webster grappled with the five point harness that kept him safely lashed to his passenger seat. After a seeming eternity, he broke free. As the craft tumbled into the Earth’s atmosphere, it was buffeted by yet another close explosion. His head smacked against the hull. He dove for the pilot’s chair and clung to it, clawing at the harness that tightly held Versace’s now useless body.

“Get him out of there!” yelled Flynt. “I can try to land this thing!” Webster worked Versace’s harness frantically as the craft continued to twist and gyrate seemingly at random. Finally he managed to haul Versace out of the way. Flynt grimly pulled himself into the seat and strapped two of the harnesses in place, while Webster leaped back to his own seat. Versace’s body bounced around the tiny cabin in a macabre dance. Please take action.

Wordlessly Flynt shut off the alert system. They’d die sooner from hitting the ground at terminal velocity than they would from air leaving the cabin. Thankfully they were in atmosphere. While he knew nothing about flying in zero-g, Flynt had qualified as a pilot many years ago, when Earth was still teeming with people. The AR instrumentation was unfamiliar. On the viewscreen he saw bolts of blue and red flashing past, evidence that the killsats weren’t content with the damage they’d already done.

As he moved his hands across the virtual instrumentation, intuition and old memories took over. He gained control of the little craft, leveling it out and pushing the nose up. The surface temperature gauge shifted from red to orange, then disappeared. But they were still coming in too fast. They were screaming in toward a sea of gray, and altitude readings were confused, probably because the instrumentation array had taken a hit. Flynt reached for the mechanical lever to the left of the seat, disengaged the trigger lock, and punched the button. Immediately the craft jerked upward, as three giant parachutes deployed above. “Brace for impact!” Flynt yelled.

Snow and Fire

A quarter moon exposed nothing but gray. No trees. No plants. No animals. Just an endless expanse of ice and snow under angry clouds. Webster had shambled through waist-high snow, making only a couple hundred meters for an hour’s effort as he hauled an unconscious Flynt over his left shoulder, when a multirotor hunter-killer drone arrived to investigate the wreckage.

Cuts and bruises covered both of the agents. Webster popped his head out from under his invisibility cloak. His right shoulder was still dislocated. The pain was nearly unbearable, but he knew if he tried to fix it now he’d probably pass out. That drone wasn’t going away. It began following the deep groove their exit had carved into the snow.

Webster shifted his weight as he aimed his launcher at the drone. He blinked tears of pain from eye and squeezed the trigger. In a flash, the drone went down, angrily spitting fire as it spun out of control. With a spray of snow it died.

A Ray of Sunlight

Even underground parking lot was a frosty white tomb. The ice and snow had invaded every last centimeter, accruing over the years until it was no longer a blanket covering the detritus; it was the shape of the landscape, and the things under it were only the faint outlines of what had been. They kept searching for something, anything they could use to get to the iron and steel works in time. It was now daylight, and a brief radio message from Mr. Smythe indicated that the wily Klein was now expected to be launching the rockets on an accelerated timeline.

Wandering in the middle of what must have once been a busy thoroughfare, Flynt absentmendedly kicked open the door of a long-dead passenger bus. Lo, a motorcycle sat in its belly, fueled up and in working order. After some initial trials, the two agents rode off to the southeast, toward their target, pushing through the ice and snow on specially-modified wheels, grateful for their unseen benefactor.

Up Close and Personal

Webster could tell it had been a direct hit. He didn’t know who fired, and he didn’t know exactly what had been hit, but the wrenching, grinding sound told him a mech was about to go down. Then it lurched around the corner, two stories tall, raking the dead buildings across the street with assault cannon and flechette rounds. From the beaten zone, a lone rocket fired.

Not waiting to see the results, Flynt and Webster scrambled around the corner, autocannon fire following close. The mech was down but not out, and it continued hunting them down even as it tried to eradicate the threat from across the street.

The Wolverines

Only four of them. They’ve lost so many, even in the past few months, yet they keep fighting. Flynt shook his head. It was almost impossible to imagine. The thought of attempting to leave never even crossed their minds.

The small group of smelly, scruffy resistance fighters laughed and joked as they led the Firewall agents through a long forgotten sewer. It was big enough to walk through standing, and there was nothing nasty in it that hadn’t been frozen ages ago. Viktor got serious for a moment. “Klein is dangerous. He has sensors all over the place. You’ll need a diversionary attack. We’ll provide it.”

Webster looked at the other three Russians. They nodded grimly. Andropov, who hadn’t said a word in the three hours they’d been making their way through the sewers, left no doubt. “He took Vanya and Jacob, and when we finally got them back, they weren’t the same. He’s evil. He must be stopped.”

Walter Klein

Defiant to the end, Klein stood his ground. He had to know that another hit would take him down. He had to know that once this morph died, all that would be left of him would be a backup sitting in a data bank on an orbital hovering over Luna. He had to know that those three years of hardship on Earth, all those days and nights ducking TITAN remnants, searching through the nooks and crannies of a dead world for lost technology, was for naught. He had to know that the cause of his sudden descent into insanity would never be known.

The echoes of distant gun battles raged in the background. His two implacable assassins stood before him, bloodied but still firing. He tried to get off one last shot, but before his finger could make one last squeeze of the trigger, he was ended.

Aftermath

Just how much of a presence does Firewall have on Earth, wondered Webster. And how many agents need to die in order to keep it a secret? Viktor had told him that he knew of two Firewall teams, both much larger than their little three (make that two)-person operation, that had been wiped out trying to eliminate Klein.

He shrugged and stepped into the egocaster. They certainly do think of everything.

kgthunder: To be honest, this movie has always pissed me...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:49:05 -0700

kgthunder:

To be honest, this movie has always pissed me off.

There are the obvious reasons (uh… wtf happened to the badass powered armor suits from the book? is a good example), then there are the not-so obvious reasons. Unless you’ve read the book, you wouldn’t know that the entire movie is basically a way to belittle the political philosophy of the book, painting Heinlein’s vision of a future in which only those who have given something to their society could vote as a warmongering fascist state.

It’s fine to disagree with Heinlein, but obtaining the movie rights just so you can crap on the book is deceitful. It’s using copyright and trademark to bend a work of art into a parody of itself.

Photo

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:33:29 -0700

Russian Post-Apocalpyse Paintings

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:10:08 -0700

Russian Post-Apocalpyse Paintings

angelophile: (Source) The funny thing is, I just watched a...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:08:40 -0700

angelophile:

(Source)

The funny thing is, I just watched a Sean Bean movie two nights ago in which he actually lived. I won’t give away the title, for those of you who haven’t yet seen it.

clockworkdisaster: It really bothers me that our society looks...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:18:30 -0700

clockworkdisaster:

It really bothers me that our society looks down upon those who take the time to read, think upon what they’ve read, and attempt apply that knowledge.

Amen.

I’d like two, please. One for me and the family, and one...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:34:58 -0700

I’d like two, please. One for me and the family, and one for joyrides on the weekends.

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:09:38 -0700

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual:

Bradley W. Schenck’s Retropolis is astounding, lush, beautiful, and immersive. I love dystopian futures just as much as the next person, but Schenck’s optimistic, hopeful creation is intoxicatingly enticing.