Draft!

Headed out to my friendly not-so-local gaming store on Friday (the closest one doesn't do Friday Night Magic) and came back with a deck that looks like this:

Creatures:

1 Blade-Tribe Berserkers
1 Ezuri's Archers
1 Goblin Gaveleer
1 Immolating Souleater
1 Kiln Walker
1 Molder Beast
1 Ogre Resister
1 Oxidda Scrapmelter
1 Spin Engine
1 Training Drone

Artifacts:
1 Accorder's Shield
1 Barbed Battlegear
1 Flayer Husk
1 Strider Harness
1 Horizon Spellbomb

Other Spells:
1 Act of Aggression
1 Beast Within
2 Burn the Impure

1 Concussive Bolt
1 Lead the Stampede
1 Whipflare

Lands:
1 Copperline Gorge
5 Forests
11 Mountains

Sideboard:
Apostle's Blessing
Evil Presence
Gitaxian Probe
Golem Foundry
Mental Misstep
Mirran Mettle
Mirran Spy
Mutagenic Growth
Phyresis
Rally the Forces
Ruthless Invasion
Shriekhorn
2 Victorious Destruction
Withstand Death

This actually isn't the deck exactly as I played it; at the end of the night I accidentally shuffled my side-board in and thus lost the original configuration. This version is actually rather better than the one that I actually ran, with which I did okay -- the first match I got completely rolled over twice, the second I won twice, and the third I lost one, won the second, and then lost the third.

This was the second draft I've been to and the first with the full New Phyrexia/Mirrodin Besieged/Scars of Mirrodin lineup (the first was all Mirrodin Besieged), so I got somewhat confused and overwhelmed and wasn't able to keep track of what I'd already picked and what I wanted to pick as well as I wanted to. I didn't pick up nearly enough creatures, and probably not enough artifacts/equipment considering the number of other cards that required them to work well. I also passed up a chance to pick up an Alpha Tyrannax halfway through the third pack, which was just silly. I don't even remember what I got instead.

I'll be heading out another one of these Friday's fairly soon, probably to check out the other FNM option within driving distance, and my plan then is to try out some manner of mixed infect strategy -- probably G/W, G/B, or G/U, depending on which color gets me the best infect creatures and removal, and whether I can get some good-with-infect-type support cards. Otherwise -- R/W aggro!

One odd thing I noticed was that no one I played against used Phyrexian mana the whole game. Neither did I. Act of Aggression showed up late in the game when it did show up (and I really hadn't gotten the hang of using it yet anyway), and that was really the one thing I was thinking of seriously using. I probably should have put Apostle's Blessing in my main deck, but I had enough low-cost cards as it was.

Everything You Thought You Knew About Me Is a Lie

I don't normally share much about my personal life here, but considering that it means I'm going to need to update my blogger bio:

Incidentally, I'm almost exactly the same age as 2e D&D.

Omox, The Gold Planet

Omox is a strange planet, its geography dominated by great black and amber metallic plains and mountain ranges, scattered with both vast fields and isolated monoliths of living crystal. Its atmosphere is fine and clear in the highlands, but pools in yellowish, murky mists in the lowlands, and here is mildly toxic to creatures from most other worlds, though its residents have mostly adapted. Its ecology would be bizarre by earth standards, and largely revolves around the magical vibrations emitted by the planet's crystals. The human residents food supply is mainly artificially grown, though they do consume some native life forms as delicacies.

More than anything else the Gold Planet is known for the strange and fantastic powers to be found there. The world is often the best place to aquire strange magical and technological wonders, whether wrested from its ruins or devised in its laboratories, and many wizards and sorcerers journey here to study the strange magical effects of the world's crystal resonances. It is also famous for its colleges of wizardry; the world's particular specialities are divination, enchantment, and transmutation, but only illusionists and necromancers are more commonly trained elsewhere.

The grand city of Spire, Omox's only major settlement and the only Veklo settlement of any kind, is dominated by a caste system, with the Veklo nobility at the top, civilized Akkadi warriors just beneath them, the common mass of Veklo making up the majority of craftsmen and traders on the third rung, and the Satra at the bottom as common laborers. A significant portion of the planet's Akkadi live in settlements of their own, despising the weak city-dwellers who have let themselves become the Veklo's puppets, as do bat folk and ruby golems. Most gnomes live in Spire or another human settlement, but outside the social organization of men.

Very few members of foreign human races call Spire home. They exist entirely outside of the caste system, and are therefore only officially tolerated as ambassadors and traders; a small permanent mixed population of Meo, Mekheni, and Hrungir does the work that the Veklo consider too unclean even for the Satra.

The Akkadi are significantly less xenophobic, and for this reason the vast majority of the planet's non-gnome demihumans make their homes in Akkadi citadels and tent-cities. However, foreigners of any kind are not significantly more common among the Akkadi than with the Veklo; the Akkadi cleave tightly to their interpretation of their gods, so only those individuals who find Akkadi religion appealing last long among them. Curiously, the relatively atheistic elves are among the most successful at living among the Akkadi; those who embrace the Akkadi warrior culture find it easy to attend to the appropriate rituals, even if they have little use for the gods they are nominally devoted to.

The Veklo primarily worship Vortoth, as a deity of medicine, music, and writing, (Healing, Knowledge, Magic, Rune), Koth Anos, as a judge of both the dead and the living (Destruction, Death, Law), Kushrieth, as a mistress of fertility and agriculture (Animal, Plant, Community), Andor, as both a maintainer of machines and a minor trickster figure (Artifice, Charm, Protection), and Rashwidir, as their primary war goddess (Glory, Nobility, War). The Grand Temples of Spire train many clerics of these five deities, as well as some dedicated to their own Omox (Knowledge, Magic, Law, Sun), although the Lord of Narrow Lines plays only a very minor role in their own religion.

Omox is a much more central figure in the worship of the Akkadi, who see him as a god of noble conquest, and hold him up as the ultimate example for the Akkadi warrior to follow (Glory, Law, Nobility, Sun, War). They also hold Vortoth in high esteem as a sort of divine "support staff" for the conquering Omox (Healing, Magic, Travel, Trickery), Silvaria as a goddess of survival in the wastes (Sun, Travel, Water, Weather), and Koth Anos as a patron of assassins (Death, Destruction, Trickery). The wild Akkadi are one of the few places in the worlds of the Star Lords that play host to communities of paladins, devoted to Omox.

The Satra venerate Kushrieth as a goddess of the household, primarily through wild, days-long orgies (Healing, Charm, Madness, Plant). The bat folk worship the night sky and the west wind. If gnomes or ruby golems have any religion of their own, they keep it to themselves, though the gnomes do give offerings to the cults of the Veklo.

The Veklo are habitually suspicious of most cults of Silvaria and Andor, because Spire serves as one of the great centers of the spheres' slave trade. The Veklo tend to purchase slaves for functional reasons: there are occasionally jobs that are beneath noble Veklo, but cannot be trusted to free Satra, or which require more intelligence than the Veklo consider the Satra capable. They also occasionally purchase slaves as subjects for experimentation, and while the Veklo claim to despise the ends to which slaves are used on planets like Vortoth and Merrikerr, the depraved tastes with which they characterize the Red and Violet planets are not unkown among them. Furthermore, the Veklo are reknowned for their skill at training slaves, and many a slaver brings his most valuable prizes to the Gold Planet for a time before eventual sale elsewhere.

The Akkadi own slaves as well, though they are more likely to capture their own. They tend to choose slaves for aesthetic reasons, and most Akkadi captains own at least a small harem. The bat folk occasionally keep slaves, mainly as tools to interact with humans through. Ruby golems, on the other hand, have very little use for other races in any capacity. Gnomes vary greatly in their adoption of the practice: some appear to have trouble understanding the concept, while others own far more than even the most aquisitive Veklo.

Tip of the Hat to Bioware

It's rare to see so clear an example of "not getting it" in the wild as this complaint by a straight male gamer about Dragon Age 2. It seems to boil down to "a male character flirted with me and it made me feel icky."

Bioware, however, gets it, which is why the link. They're now a company that says, flat-out:

"The romances in the game are not for 'the straight male gamer.' They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention."

That's pretty okay by me, and I hope they do well because of it.

Current RPG Projects

Go-Anywhere, Play-Anywhen Megadungeon Binder. I had one of these but I've misplaced it and I've got a better idea of how to put the notes together for it now anyway. I want to be able to run one-shots for random people as needed, and I'd love to be able to run a semi-regular large player group game, and this would fit both purposes. (Simultaneously, even.) Still trying to decide whether to go with the underworld theme or the infinite library theme.

The Moleskine Notebook Game. I've owed Trollsmyth a solo game for a while now, and I've sort of slowly been scribbling notes into the notebook in question for it. The big thing that needs to happen is I need to sit down and really figure out what I'm doing with the magic system, and then the rest of it should come together. Unfortunately this one is still probably going to have to sit on the back-burner for a while.

Pathfinder. I've been really impressed by the Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide and I want to give this version of my erstwhile system a shot. Bunch of ideas floating around here, basically around four themes. (1) There are a bunch of crazy subsystems and supplements I never got to use in my first 3.5e go-round. Psionics, The Book of Nine Swords, some of the bloodline stuff from Unearthed Arcana, and a few others. (2) I've got a couple of setting ideas that would fit really well with some 3.5e/Pathfinder specific stuff -- sorcerer bloodlines in particular. (3) It might be nice to make a fairly "normal" D&D-type fantasy setting for once. (4) Dang, if sword & sworcery isn't rad. Not sure yet exactly what combination of all that I'm going to end up with.

This is, of course, not including the game I'm currently running or the several games I'm playing with Trollsmyth.

Why are you idiots in the underworld?

For the underworld megadungeon, in case one of the players makes the mistake of asking, "So, why am I here again?"

1 Grandmother is angry at you again. Your mother/spouse/roommates are fed up with all the howling and banging so you have to go figure out what you did this time and fix it.

2 Little brother's cat died. You've decided to find and trap its wandering, tortured spirit for him so he can "learn about life."

3 Accidentally killed your girl(and/or)boyfriend. You feel kind of bad about that. Go find him/her so you can properly lay them to rest, or at least say "sorry."

4 You've grown up all your life with stories about some treasure hidden by one of your ancestors. After a couple years (days) of searching, you've given up finding it on your own, and are determined to find the old coot so he can give you a map.

5 Last week your cousin showed up with some really great pearls that s/he said were from the underworld. Convinced that girl/guy you've been kind of sweet on to go with them to Moon Dance. You're going to go down there and find something better, damn it.

6 You're bored, and otherwise sort of useless.

7 You're pretty distractable, and some joker told you there were shiny things down there.

8 Your older brother stole one of your favorite possessions and says he hid it in one of the odd passageways. You're not sure you believe him.

9 One of your friends died in a freak carp accident and you're actually kind of sad about it. Go find him so you can say goodbye.

10 The cats have been acting really strange lately. Your great-aunt says that means a malevolent spirit of some kind has been bothering the halls of the family dead. You're either the oldest sibling or the stupidest, so it falls on you to go clear it out.

11 You owe money to the mob. This is the fastest way to get it without doing any real work, and even if you don't get it, maybe going down there will convince them that you're too scary to mess with anyway.

12 You want to be a mighty hero, and you're looking for ancient warriors to learn from. It hasn't occurred to you yet that it might be better to look for warriors who haven't gotten themselves killed yet.

13 The local temple needs the poison of a ancestor-touched spiny toad to complete the initiations of their latest batch of acolytes. Somehow you've been drafted into catching a few for them.

14 You want to catch a spirit for a familiar. If you're not a magic-user, you'll just catch a rat or something and call it your familiar.

15 Spirit blossom grows down there. You want some.

16 Someone owes you money and the bastard ran down into the underworld to hide from you. You're tempted to just let him get eaten by spirits, but he's owed you that money for a long time, dang it.

17 You have a question that you desperately want answered, and you haven't been able to find a solution anywhere in the surface world. The last person you talked to said a particular ancestor or spirit might have the answer.

18 Zombie outbreak got the dead all riled up. Take some rice, holy water, and the severed head of the sorcerer responsible down there and calm the lot of them down.

19 You found a skull and you don't know whose it is. Now you need to go find its owner so you can make sure it's not a restless murder victim or something.

20 You're dead, Jim. 50% chance you've noticed.

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?