How did it get into the library?

1 Deliberately entered via a spell, such as summon library. If the creature is not of the appropriate type/level to cast the spell on its own, someone cast it for them. 25% chance in this case that the passageway is still accessible somewhere on the level.

2 Born here

3-6 Made here (1-2 recently 3-6 in ages long past, now best forgotten)

7-8 Wandered in accidentally through a spontaneous entrance from one of the usual places. (1-3 old section of a mundane library where no one's been recently 4 wizard graveyard 5 magic forest 6 anywhere constructed with or with furniture made of wood pilfered from a magic forest (or stone pilfered from a wizard graveyard)*) 10% chance the passageway is still accessible somewhere on this level.

9 It's always been here

10 The PCs are somehow responsible

*not a recommended building material

Two Offbeat Places to Die Horrible Lightless Deaths

The Underworld. Not the "mythic underworld," but the literal, place-where-dead-folks-go underworld. You might head down there to get information lost to all but the dead, make sure an ancestor's spirit has been properly appeased, or even retrieve someone who ended up there accidentally. (If the lord of the underworld is, like Pluto, also a god of wealth, you might have more traditional reasons as well.) Alternatively, character death might be the beginning of the campaign. You're trying to explore the place's geography and social structure, find old friends, relatives, and ancestors, and figure out where your place in it all is.

The Infinite Library. Mortals can't come up with spells on their own. All the spells that ever have been and ever will be known are buried somewhere in a dark catacomb that follows only the twisted logic of magic. "Researching a new spell" is a matter of piecing together from surface world research what you can of the laws of the place to make your best guess of where the effect you want might be found, and then diving into that deadly maze to retrieve it. (This is, I should note, more a twist on noisms Planescape Borges thought, brought on by Jeff's latest spellbook musings, than a truly new idea. Less scholarly arguments, more deadly monsters and traps guarding the occasional cache of scrolls, but still.)

The Angriest Little Ornithopter

On Thursday night I played Magic: the Gathering. Learned a couple of things.

• If one guy starts calling them "articrafts," pretty soon everyone will be.
• If you have nine lands and Untamed Might in your hand, then clearly your only choice is to play it on your partner's Ornithopter. Hereby dubbed "The Angriest Little Ornithopter."
• Three teams of two players is a ridiculous format. The game was like two hours long, and at the end we got to that stupid point where everyone has like eight lands and two cards in their hands.
• My deck is way too defensive. Was running green/blue with big critters, mana accelerators and a lot of control to clear the way for those critters. I liked the idea and have even gotten it to work a couple of times, but in bringing the deck down from the 60 card limit I'd built it with and the 40 card limit I'd just found out I'd played it with, I took out too many of the high-cost cards and ended up with a deck that frustrated people until the endgame and then couldn't do much itself. No good.
• Deck building is hard. Absolutely the most interesting part of the game, but I'm still getting the hang of defensive/offensive balance, combos, and how to find the right mana curve for a given deck. Nevermind that I haven't yet actually played all that much Magic, so I'm really still getting a handle on how to judge the relative values of the cards themselves.
• For instance, I hadn't realized until tonight how useful Glint Hawks can be. I hadn't fully made the distinction between "discard" and "return to your hand" for some stupid reason, until one of the other teams used it to play Contagion Engine twice.
• I'm pretty sure infect isn't quite as good as this group thinks it is. It is good, but more importantly, it's a fairly straightforward strategy to assemble. It takes a little more thought to put together a non-infect deck that's equivalent to it. That might still be a big enough advantage to let it dominate casual play, but as far as I can tell the main use infect sees in tournament constructed is for creature removal, not as a serious attack on the player.
• Why the heck wasn't the rule "15 poison counters to win" in two-headed giant before Friday?

Hot Shirtless Men in Cages Welcome You to the OSR

Forget hot elf chicks. I tend to agree with Zak that we already have enough (straight) guys in the OSR as it is. Besides, everyone knows that when it comes to sex, nothing says "old school" like bondage. And nothing says "bondage" like classic Trek!

More pics of Shatner (sadly, not always shirtless and/or in handcuffs) can be found at the ever-excellent Jeff's Gameblog. Be sure to stay for the random tables, including the Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom and the classic Carousing Mishaps table.

No cages this time, but there is a giant snake! The two best things about old school D&D, both in one picture. If you want more of this kind of classic, pulp and Frank Frazetta-inspired goodness in your gaming, you can't go wrong with old school.

For more information about the pulp fantasy roots of D&D, including the parts of the genre it emulates besides giant snakes and slavepits, be sure to check out Grognardia. Though, frankly, if you've got giant snakes and slave pits, what more could you ask for?

Classic old school Erol Otus bondage! Foul enchantresses! Fates worse than death!

Of course, these days the best work being done along these lines can be found in the fine publications of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Make sure to check out Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, LotFP's house system, if you're looking for a new spin on the old rules. For those of you who are more about painful and gruesome than cages, per se, LotFP also publishes a really excellent collection of nasty adventures compatible with Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, and pretty much anything else D&D-derived.

Finally! I promised you cages, so here you are with cages. Containing none other than Graz'zt, the demon prince of sex. Wait, no. That's not right. There's no sex in D&D. Nope. (A 3.x-era Anne Stokes piece, but really, how much more old school can you get that Graz'zt? Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, people.)

Unless you're Playing D&D with Pornstars, (NSFW) like Zak Sabbath, who here in the OSR basically is the demon prince of sex, as well as the demon prince of art, cool hair, and sweet city maps.

Last but not least, some slavegirls in chains for those of you who'd rather see hot chicks in cages than hot shirtless guys.

For more information about using slavegirls (and guys) in your games, your best bet is probably Trollsmyth. It's also the best place for horrifying giant spiders, so if he tries to recruit you for his online Labyrinth Lord game, don't believe a word he says otherwise.

The New Game

Right. So. It's Ye Olde 3.5 Edition D&D. Eberron. The players are Snakeheart, who was in the Traveller game and the LotFP game as well as a few other random things I've run over the past couple of years, Munchkin, for whom the LotFP game was her first introduction to D&D, and Dangerfox, who'd played a session of Vampire: the Masquerade before this but is otherwise new to RPGs. (The names are not internet handles or blog names. This is honestly what I call these people. Their real names are boring, so I improved them.)

Munchkin is running Mirithia, a halfling druid ("You insulted my dinosaur!"), Snakeheart is running Waywocket, a gnome bard ("Break his legs!") and Dangerfox is running a warforged fighter whom the other two currently refer to as "Mr. Huggable," although they've gone through a handful of other options already and are pretty sure that won't be the one they settle on ("I'm going to start developing a personality now.").

We've had two sessions and they've both gone pretty well. I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to achieve my aims in this exercise. I'm not, honestly, even sure there's going to be another session. We've missed the last couple of weekends due to spring break and musicals and just life in general, but we're at a good place to pick it up next weekend and I'm hoping we'll get at least a few more sessions in before the end of the semester.

My reasons for deciding to go back and run this system that I've sworn off for so long -- I've threatened to sell my books on more than one occasion, as I possess a number entirely unreasonable -- are fairly simple. For whatever reason, the games I've been trying to run over the past few years haven't worked. They have been, in places, fun, but they've too often been too intensely frustrating for me to justify my continued participation in the activity. I didn't want to just quit, so I thought -- I'll go back and run the game the way I remember doing when it was fun. The old school method, if you will.

Frustration with roleplaying is, incidentally, a big part of why this blog's been unusually quiet lately. There have been a couple of times in the past six months or so when I have very nearly sworn off the hobby entirely. I haven't been having fun with running games, and I've been getting involved with other activities -- board games, anime, actually being a player for once, and just lately even a bit of Magic: The Gathering. Add in that I've finally discovered how to have a social life that doesn't entirely revolve around D&D, the job finding and school finishing business of senior year, and a few life-related odds and ends, and yeah, quiet.

Still. At one point I really enjoyed running games, and if at all possible I'd like to enjoy it again. And if I am going to end up quitting, I'd like to be dang sure that the whole thing really doesn't work for me any more, and not just that what I've been doing lately hasn't been quite right.

I have a few hypotheses for why the old ways worked for me and the new ones (which are in fact the old ones) haven't, some relevant to this game, some not. I'm pretty sure that part of it was simply that 3.5e, in high school, was the game that everyone knew, intimately, past the point of needing translation. That's obviously not the case now, with a batch full of new players, but this campaign is beginning to bear out the usefulness of other, more translatable points of style. Among other things, I like having a handful of race class combos to hang characters on, it's handy every so often to be able to drop a combat encounter on the gang to give me some time to think, and the skill system is a decent safety net when I'm not quite sure how to respond to what the players want to try.

A lot of it, though, is simply the nostalgia of the thing. I miss these books. The 3.5e tomes, the silly looking, wannabe-spell books whose covers clearly aren't nearly as cool as something with actual art on them, are D&D to me. I'd missed that, and while it's not the same as it was, I'm glad to have something like it back for a bit.

Apostate

I'm running a 3.5 D&D game. Why am I running a 3.5 D&D game?

It's an abiding mystery. Sometimes the call comes, and you just have to follow it.

2010 New Year's Resolutions in Review

The end of another year means, among other things, it's time to look back at last year's New Year's resolutions.

Go to GenCon
Success! I posted the first and second parts of my GenCon review back in August, so I won't go into too much detail here. Needless to say -- fun. Getting it set up was, at times, frustrating, but I managed to rescue it from real life relationship drama and see the thing through. Some of the best four days of my life to this point.

Read 15 Fantasy Novels
Failure! I did read the Kushiel series and loved it, and I'm partway through A Princess of Mars, but that was about it. I've got The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Forever War sitting on the shelf (or, actually, in a box with all the other stuff I brought home from college for break) but I never got around to getting through them. This was partly because this summer was much busier than the one that preceded it -- four to five nights of gaming a week, plus a full time internship -- but that's not an entirely satisfactory excuse.

Blog About Every Game I'm In
Failure! I did write about every campaign I've been in but I didn't post much about Trollsmyth's games for great whacks of time, and I'm not even sure I mentioned when I dropped the group game. Or when the 7th Sea game ended, for that matter.

Let Someone Else Run the Summer Game
Success! Someone else in the group almost did run a game, but it ended up not happening, partly because I complained about it. Which was, in retrospect, probably uncalled for. But then, so was my trying to play d20 again.

Finish, Run, and Publish my Social RPG
Failure! Well, kinda. Basically what happened is that I decided that this turned into an entirely different project. It's not likely to see publication, largely because I've picked up a couple of other, better opportunities to get something published over the past year -- more interesting projects, and more rewarding publication avenues.

All in all, not too bad a year. Two unqualified successes, two unqualified failures, and two kinda sorta's puts me somewhat behind where I found myself in the last New Year's review, but on the other hand -- This year has been weirder, busier, and less RPG-focused than last, and none of those are entirely bad things.

Death to All Who Inform Me of Cool Things!

From the comments on Trollsmyth's latest post, among similar sentiments:

"The smell of marketing arouses in me the lust to kill."

From Wikipedia:

Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.

In other words: Marketing is figuring out who might be interested in your product, where to find them, and how best to explain your product to them. It includes advertising, but it also involves establishing and maintaining relationships at all different links of the chain of interaction between the producer and consumer of a product.

Or, in other other words: Marketing is not lies and voodoo mind control. Marketing -- or at least, good marketing -- connects you with stuff you'd like but might not otherwise have known about. Please stop embarrassing yourselves.

Where Did All My NPCs Go?

I had this frankly rather bizarre revelation the other night. I think I've mentioned on here before that the last couple of games I've run just haven't been fun. I couldn't figure out why, and it was bugging me, because I used to love running games and lately it's just been an exercise in frustration. I still haven't, really, but I have a pretty damn good suspicion, once I realized --

I'd stopped building my games around interesting NPCs and what they were up to.

The Traveller game? NPCs were all stock figures. Made up on the spot, didn't have much in the way of motivation. I thought that was how "sandbox" worked, for some reason. The players moved around too much for them to get interesting, anyway. The LotFP game was all dungeon crawl. There were a handful of NPCs but they were a side note, not driving the action. That wasn't where my design was coming from. Is This Foul? was all about PC interaction and scheming, which was great, but it meant there was almost nothing happening on my side of the screen.

This is weird. Back in the day, my games pretty much all started out with, "Okay, here's this dude and he's trying to..." and then somehow the players would get tangled up in whatever it was. Or not, but there was always something going on in the background like that. Basically what I did between games -- what kept my interest -- was explore various character issues and figuring out how they were going to change their plans in response to whatever dumb thing the players had done this time. A lot of the work I did between games never came up in game, and didn't need to. Figuring out how the long-lost prince felt about his brother who was probably never going to get involved with the game didn't make a difference one way or another to the PCs quest to get that prince to the ancient sacred volcano (long story), but it gave me something to do in between sessions, and it kept me tuned in to what was going on in the campaign.

One of the things I've come up against lately is that I do not think in dungeons. If I don't specifically sit down and think, "What this game needs is a good location-based adventure," I won't build them. Trollsmyth builds them naturally out of his campaign's situations. Somehow, sooner or later, a social or political problem will lead to a dungeon crawl because that's what he reaches for to solve particular kinds of problems. I don't. They're not in my blood. That's not how I was raised, as a gamer.

What I do think in is relationships. There's a lot of stuff that I struggle with coming up with, either on the fly or in prep. I can do it, and do it well, but it's exhausting. New monsters, interesting treasure, weird things for the critters to be doing, just events in general -- it takes time, it takes mental effort. Even personalities, histories, secrets, motivations can be difficult. But relationships -- ah, that's another thing entirely.

You put me on the spot, and I can tell you:

This wizard guild is run by a guy who loves evocations. He's straightforward, not particularly principled but he doesn't lie or manipulate. At least, not for business reasons -- He's got two lovers in the guild and they each know about each other but pretend not to, because both of them have other lovers as well -- one is in the guild, the other is a member of the town guard so she's really in the closet about it because all the other wizards would make fun of her for dating someone so mundane. He's in charge because most of the guild likes him; the guild hasn't exactly prospered under his leadership, but he's affable, and leads with a fairly light touch and lets them get on with their work.

There's a significant minority who don't respect him, feel he isn't as skilled and subtle a magician as their leader should be, and that he hasn't done enough to advance their power in the world. They're led by a somewhat humorless man who's well-respected for his power within the guild by disliked and distrusted outside of it; the boyfriend of the leader's first lover is also a significant player in that faction, and he's probably more dangerous. He's not likely to lead any coup given his own precarious personal situation, but he's also much friendlier and personable than the leader of the faction, and not much worse of a wizard; he's likely to end up the de facto leader of the guild if it's significantly destabilized for some reason.

Five minutes, easy, and I've got myself a whole adventure.

What I'm coming around to that this means that there are certain kinds of games that I basically can't run. Episodic? Out. Mission-based? Out. Picaresque? Sadly, out. Likewise, I can't run anything that's entirely player driven, even when I've got great players and they'd love that kind of thing. I probably can't run a megadungeon for any great length of time, at least not without doing some unusual things inside it and around it. I almost certainly can't run a true West Marches style game, and I might not be able to run that general sort of large, irregular player base game.

If I'm right, anyway. And I hope I'm right. I'd much rather think that there are certain kinds of games that I'm always going to have trouble with than that there's just some mysterious something that's keeping me from being able to enjoy running games anymore. I can run a pretty kick-ass game with a few good NPC schemes to play with. Or at least, I used to be able to.

A Few Points of Clarification

I want to make clear: I respect Grognardia and most of what James Maliszewski writes there. I wouldn't have linked to him or taken the time to respond to his post if I didn't. I take issue with the specific comments he made because of the atmosphere they encourage. Furries get flack from everyone, I personally don't feel any need to add to it, and I wish more people felt the same way. The anger in that post was triggered more by the comments than the post itself, which, yeah, isn't entirely fair to Maliszewski because his comments section is usually a mess anyway.

They Came First For the Furries...

I suppose going "Ew! Ick! Furries!" isn't quite as troglodytic as going "Ew! Ick! Gays!" but it's pretty dang close. Seriously, people. There are folks out there who like pictures of foxgirls and catboys. There are folks out there who like dressing up as pandas and unicorns. There are folks out there who like roleplaying as otter-kin and lizard-folk. There are, as far as I can tell, rather a lot of them. I've yet to understand why this is a problem.

I know, I know. The fur suits. The yiffing. The stuff that the nightly news and Law & Order and all that other junk that normal people with nothing better to do use to fill their lives hold up to tell us, "This is weird. These people are not okay. Be normal." So sure, go ahead. Freak out about a couple of pictures in a roleplaying manual because it's "adult entertainment." Then go back to your basement and pretend to be an elf, secure in the knowledge that you're safe, because you've done your part to shun the wrong kind of weird people.

What We Mean by "Social Interaction"

There's been a flurry of furious activity on Trollsmyth's blog about how you should use rules to frame the game's core activity. I've been reluctant to step in, because I know exactly what he's talking about and it'd just come across as his solo player jumping in to gang up on people who disagree with him.

Still, there's been some confusion about just what he means when he says "social interaction," which is something I hope I can clear up.

First, yes, all roleplaying games are fundamentally about social interaction to some degree or another. When we say "social interaction" we're talking about in-game behavior. In most games, the main in-game activity is combat or investigation or something else adventure-y. We're talking about a game where the equivalent to a boss battle is a big fancy party -- or, heck, even seeing a character my character has a significant relationship with for the first time after being separated for a while.

Second, it doesn't mean "social combat." When I sit down with a cleric and a Rakshasa to talk about boys, I'm not trying to convince either of them of anything. I'm trying to figure out what the cleric wants out of a relationship (because the fundamental issue at hand is "which boy?") and find out more about the boys from the Rakshasa (because she's known most of them longer than we have). Almost all the conversations we have in that game are like that. We're trying to solve a mutual problem, uncover an issue, or work all the angles on an idea, rather than convince someone of something or another.

Or, sometimes, just chatting. Here's an example, very slightly edited from the original log to make it more readable:

I lean out over the parapets. "Nice night."

"Gorgeous night," agrees Reswet.

"A blue night," says Seban, joining the two of you. "Sometimes the Sea of Fire burns hotter than at others, and it turns blue or purple."

"When do you find these things out?" I ask. "I swear, you already know more about this place than I do."

He chuckles. "We actually talked about it at dinner. I've never seen the Sea of Fire. I hope to soon, but the others have said we hardly go to that part of the city."

I nod. "Mostly, what, the docks, and the industrial parts of the city? Azer, fire giants, and so on?"

Reswet nods. "I've been to the Merchants' District once, but only briefly, and never anywhere close enough to see the Sea."

Yes, I think this is fun. I spend 4-6 hours a week on this stuff. I'm a freak. I kind of consider the solo game to be practice for real life socialization, that's how crazy I am.

Third, this is a style of game that doesn't always work so well at the table, and the very immersive, hyper-focused variation on the style that Trollsmyth and I have developed pretty much only functions in text, as I think the above example makes fairly clear. There are a lot of little things about text that help support this style of game. It's easier to stay serious and focused for long periods of time, for one, though the biggest is probably that it's much easier to separate player and character. If you can't see how roleplaying in text could be more fun than doing it in person, you're not likely to have any interest in the kind of game we're describing.

There are a lot of games that could be described as focused on "social interaction" that would handle social mechanics fairly well, or even require such critters. For instance, the phrase might describe a game that was mostly about politics -- talking to people to get them to do things. There's no reason it couldn't apply to a game that was played at the table with more than one player. If you've got more than one player, you've got varying levels of interest in all the activities of the game, including talking to people, and at the table you're going to have different comfort levels with "talking in character" and otherwise exercising your social mojo.

In such a game, I'd probably want my players to have some social mechanics at their disposal. Probably not "you roll and the king agrees," but certainly something like D&D's reaction mechanics, reputation mechanics, perhaps rules to allow players to gather "dirt" on their foes with dice rolls, that sort of thing. In that kind of game, the game would be "what do we want, who can give it to us, and how do we push or pull them into doing what we want?" Playing out how that happens wouldn't be crucial.

In the solo game, though, the point is the relationships and how they're affected, so the little details of how everything plays out are important. Little jokes between lovers, accidental allusions to secrets my character is keeping, that sort of thing. Most mechanics we could use would be, at best, unnecessary, and at worst would replace the stuff we find most fun. Unfortunately, the terminology we have available doesn't really make distinctions that fine, and these are all types of games that are unusual enough that there aren't clear categories for them. Even "a game focused on social interaction" is unusual in itself, never mind all the variation within what those words could mean.

Pendragon

If I'm thinking about picking up and running Pendragon, does it matter what edition I go with? I'd prefer having an actual copy of the book to PDF, but it looks like even the latest is rather badly out of print so I'm probably going to have to get an electronic copy no matter which one I pick. 5th looks fairly good, and it was written by Greg Stafford, so am I safe just picking it up? Or is this one of those games where the later editions polish all of the heart out of it?

Here's What I'm Working on Now

DREAMLANDS MAGIC

Dreamlands critters have a whole soul.

- can't divide soul from body

- can't invest soul into objects

(permanent and temporary)

Those who work magic tend to have a handful of innate abilities that they can always access.

- Improve & expand abilities through meditation and adventure

- Exploration of the quality of their souls and themselves

- Use of these abilities leads to exhaustion rather than insanity

- Restored through rest, meditation

Sometimes special ceremonies?

Ending Another Game

After some thought I've come to the conclusion that the main reason I had as much trouble with the game on Friday as I did was that I didn't really want to be running that campaign in the first place. I was just doing it because I felt like I should. That's a lousy reason to be running a game, and it leads to lousy, short-shrift DMing. So I'm taking another break.

Not 100% sure when that's going to end. Or if it will. The last three games I've run have been frustrating, painful, and ended before they were intended to. I'm pretty happy with the gaming I'm already doing, and as long as that continues, I'm not sure running my own would be worth the potential for more frustration.

Now, that hasn't stopped me from starting to fiddle with a setting for a new campaign -- or rather, another campaign, since the planning for this one significantly predates the game I was running this semester. But I'm not entirely sure that this one will ever get run, and if it does, it will at least be very, very different from the kinds of games I've been trying to run. The "next game," if there is one, will almost certainly be online, via text chat, and it's only slightly less likely to be a solo game. It's probably going to be a system of my own invention, and it won't have many, if any, dungeons in it.

For now, though, I'm content to scribble. I'm also planning on doing more of a number of things that, lately, I've been thinking I'd much rather spend my time on than running the tabletop game. I've got a couple of fantasy novels to read, some drawing to do, and Settlers of Catan and Texas Hold 'Em to play, never mind the "regular" socializing that I'm finally starting to get the hang of. I'm going to do my best not to obsessively analyze and try to figure out "why" the games haven't been working. If an interesting setting comes out of my scribblings, I'll run another game. If not, I'll keep playing in the two games I'm already in, and find some other ways to occupy my time.

Why I'm Not Going to (English) Grad School

I suppose I haven't ruled out law or business school entirely yet (though law school is basically off the table for now), and I might end up getting a Masters or something in another discipline, but I'm absolutely not going further with my major discipline, English. I love English -- as an undergrad. But I don't have any interest in teaching, if I was going to write as a career it'd be speculative/commercial fiction rather than MFA fiction/poetry, and, well...

So I'm reading A Princess of Mars. Haven't gotten very far into it yet, but in the first couple of chapters he deals with some hostile natives of both an earthling and Martian variety. So I'm sitting there pondering the broader cultural narrative that these depictions of native people fit into, what statements the overall work is making as opposed to the specific character, what points of view the work is privileging and what it's trying to shut down, and how complete that process is. I took that class last semester and I've already forgotten the relevant terminology, so that should tell you something.

I do enjoy this kind of thing, and I can have fun talking about it. I'm not one of those people who complains that now I know deconstructionism I "can't turn it off," because I can't "turn off" thinking about stuff no matter what tools I have to do it with. A Princess of Mars isn't actually a very good book to do this with, of course, at least out the bits that I've done so far; with straightforwardly negative depictions of a group like that pretty much all you can do is comment on what it means that Burroughs can grab this group and present them as straight up bad-guys without a whole lot of modification. I'm hopeful that the handling of the natives of Mars will provide some counterpoints to that initial sequence.

But my basic approach to the whole thing is "intellectual toy." I'm at least as interested in the technical aspects of how Burroughs is telling his story as I am in any of the literary criticism buzzwords I can attach to it. I'm more interested in just reading the damn book than I am either of those two things. I can enjoy a good bit of lit crit, but then I get bored and want to go find something else to do.

A lot of people with similar interests and academic proclivities don't feel this way; they take these ideas very seriously, think about them a lot, and feel that they're making an important contribution to the country's political and intellectual discourse by studying them. Which I don't think is untrue, exactly, it's just not my attitude towards those ideas at all. I can't summon the necessary passion, or maintain the long term interest. They're toys. And not even particularly engaging ones at that.

Frozen

Have you ever just completely frozen as a DM? Sat down to play, with notes that a week ago you were sure would be more than enough to run a session, and just stared at them, thinking, "I have no idea what to do with this. This makes no sense. I can't do this," for a full five minutes, while your players make awkward conversation?

My All-Women Campaign Kicks Off

So! That game. First session went fairly well. One of the players was expectedly late, one was unexpectedly late, and another didn't show up as well, but we still made characters, came up with some starting backstories, and played enough for them to decide on and prepare for their initial expedition into the wild.

Currently the roster consists of:

Helene, Elf 1 -- Exiled from her people for reasons currently unknown.

Sister Amalia, Cleric 1 -- A native of the port city to the north, Kythrea, who left when her researches led her to the cult of the archangel Inara, Lady of Morning, one of the many such cults banned by the city's Sorcerer-Tyrant.

Skeltinath, Fighter 1 -- Another native of Kythrea, who abandoned the city's petty tyranny in favor of freedom! And also treasure.

Sun, Fighter 1 -- A mermaid princess who sold her voice to a sea-witch to become human, so she could avoid the responsibilities of mermaid princess-hood. She's since had a bit of a hard time in human lands, and is prone to starting fights with shady men in bars.

I printed out an extra copy of the character creation info (the first 30-something pages of the PDF) which helped quite a bit. Especially since the Lamentations of the Flame Princess book starts out with a handy, step-by-step explanation of what to do in character creation. I probably should have also printed out a couple extra copies of the equipment list, so that everyone could have had one to peruse. At some point I need to get around to making a list specifically for Stormwatch, or whatever town they spend the most time in, that includes some items from And a 10' Pole. But for now I'm too lazy for that.

They ended up deciding that they hadn't known each other before they arrived in Stormwatch, and all met in a tavern, the Unquiet Cat. I pointed out that, all being women travelling alone and looking for adventure, they actually all had a fairly good reason to seek out each other's company, and they seemed pretty happy with that as an explanation for why they ended up at the table together. I'd handed them each a few clues to some of the adventuring site's I'd outlined in my notes, and they chatted about that and eventually decided to go for the one that Sun had heard contained a huge, possibly cursed, ruby. Then they picked up some extra equipment for the expedition, and we're all set to start the next session off with some dungeon-delving.

They seemed a bit hesitant about how exactly to begin -- only Sun and Helene spontaneously shared the clues they had -- and I probably nudged them a bit too much in response because I wanted to get that section figured out and out of the way before we wrapped up for the night. In the future, I'm going to try to give them more time to work things out on their own, and give them time to dither a bit if that's what they need to do.

Sun also started a fight with a guy in the bar, which gave us the opportunity to demo the combat system. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to orchestrate a slightly more involved combat, with more of the group involved, and to particularly to get to the point of someone being "knocked out" so they could see how easy it is to get to zero hit points. But they'll figure it out fairly quickly once they get into the dungeon, and several of them do have enough old school D&D experience to know at least that combat is pretty deadly.

Next time: the mysterious ruin of Phra Chedi Nam, which may or may not contain a giant cursed ruby!

2010 Gen Con Report Part 2

Here’s the second round of bullet points from Gen Con. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this time.

• Talked about the disappointing Wizards booth in the podcast. I'll add that we saw the thing in the dealer hall, decided that couldn't possibly the entire Wizards presence, and went on a quest to find an official location where you could find the books, equivalent to the Paizo display. Nope. If you wanted to browse a 4e D&D book at Gen Con, you had to find one of the game or book store booths that was carrying a few copies.
• I would have strangled the True Dungeon referee if it had been an actual tabletop game (too many "guess what I'm thinking!" puzzles) but the environmental dressing was cool enough that it was worth putting up with a bit of frustration. I was also able to get the two extra tickets I had available on account of scheduling lameness to new players at the last minute, so kudos to the True Dungeon staff for managing the waiting list system well enough to allow that. Coolest touch: the dragon was guarding a huge pile of actual True Dungeon tokens.
• Roger the GS runs a mean game of (mostly) D&D. Another one where I was quieter than I could have been, but still managed to contribute despite that as the party mapper. This one is going to get its own post, since I have a lot of notes to write up from that game.
• I completely forgot about the Dune boardgame. For serious.
• The board game hall is one of the best parts about Gen Con, and another spot I'm going to spend more time in the next time I go. The frantic, grudge-based, not-entirely-serious style of playing Settlers of Catan advocated by the college students in the group (me, my brother, and one of my old players from high school) amused Trollsmyth, who was used to people who are actually focused on, you know, winning.
• "Maraschino cherry, courtesy of Gen Con." I really don't know what the explanation for this was. Some guy came around handing them out. My brother and I both felt strongly that accepting would have broken every rule we've ever learned about food and strangers. Unfortunately, Trollsmyth did not prove our thesis by hallucinating.
• Trollsmyth also got some free stuff that was actually cool. The Men In Black GM’s guide and the Hawkmoon Player’s Guide. I think.
• We played Outdoor Survival! We all died! Seriously, this game is a lot of fun, and fascinatingly close to the Moldvay/Cook rules for wilderness exploration. You move on the hex map at a rate determined by your condition, with more difficult terrain taking more points of movement to enter, you get lost by occasionally having to roll a d6 to determine the direction you move on the hex map, and there’s an optional rule that lets you roll “random encounters” in addition to the basic hazards of starvation and dehydration. The basic version of the game generally ends when you get trapped in an area that costs more than your current move to get out of and then starve to death.
• I didn’t buy much, but I did pick up a couple of pieces of Beth Trott art. Still need to get that framed so I can hang it up on my wall when I get back to school.
• Oh, and Game Science dice. Which are awesome, and awaiting hand-inking.
• I did really enjoy getting the opportunity to flip through some old game stuff from the 80s at some of the used bookstore type booths in the dealer hall. Felt kind of old because the books I started on are now only in the used section, stacked next to the AD&D hardbacks. Trollsmyth laughed at me.
• The 2010 GMs Jam was surprisingly interesting. (If you missed it, RPG Circus has the video posted.) I’m usually not much into the whole “GMing advice” genre -- getting to focused on “advice” contributed to one of the worst games I ever ran back in high school -- but I went anyway so I could meet up with Zachary Houghton and other RPG bloggers, and was quite glad I did. The focus the session had on social issues was both telling and encouraging, since in my experience those tend to be more significant and more intractable than any matters of technique. The opportunity to hear about other people’s games and the kinds of problems they were having was fun, too. The early discussion was dominated by people with too many players, which made a number of the panelists very jealous. Overall the thing drove home just how lucky I am in my current gaming situation, with a DM who fits my own gaming preferences very well, and vice versa, and both of us with enough time to game 3+ times per week.
• I want to go again, but I’m not absolutely, 100% it’ll happen next year. That depends on a number of factors, not least of which is where (and if!) I end up getting a job next year when I finish school. But it’s definitely something I’m going to do again, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

New Campaign!

Starting up a new one tonight. The system is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players are all women. One is completely new to roleplaying, another has hung out with roleplayers for a while and played a single session of Exalted, two were in my Traveller game but haven't done any roleplaying outside of that, and the last was in my Traveller game and now also plays in Trollsmyth's group game online.

Should be interesting.