I Be Sucking At Regular Blogging Lately

There's just been a lot going on, so I've taken a brief break from blogging - as well as participating as much social media. I blog because I enjoy it, and feeling like I have to put up a post every couple of days kind of takes that enjoyment out of it. In the next few weeks I'll be getting back into my normal routine, but until then there are changes afoot.

Gotta Lot Of Catchup Questions

I kind of slacked off, so I'm doing a few days of this non-D&D blog challenge all in one shot. I'll break it up with some images so it's not too boring.

What non-D&D monster do you think is as iconic as D&D ones like hook horrors or flumphs, and why do you think so?

I would say Cthulhu, but its just iconic period and not only in relation to RPGs. If I were to take a close second, I'd say Ducks from Glorantha. They're such an odd species to have around, but anyone who reads about them remembers them.

It's hard to take any character seriously when you imagine they sound like Donald Duck

What fantasy RPG other than D&D have you enjoyed most? Why?

I'd love to say Exalted...I really would...but I've enjoyed reading the books far more than I have the times I've played it. So that honor has to go to Palladium Fantasy (1st edition). We played the hell out of in high school as our first non-D&D fantasy game, and I have a lot of good memories of it. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s we had a nostalgia kick and I picked up the second edition...and we didn't enjoy it nearly so much. It was partly because of changes made to the system to make it compatible with Rifts and partly - well, fuck, it was just the system.

Yeah, the kobold looks whimsical now...

What spy RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

If we're going for only "spy" rpgs, I'd have to say 007. We played some Top Secret as well, but I really had fun playing 007. I don't remember a thing about the system though, or my character, other than his agent number was the one that always dies in the movies (006 maybe?).

What superhero RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

I've not played many superhero rpgs, mainly because it's not my forte. I've played Champions a handful of times and didn't enjoy it much, but before that we played a lot of Marvel Superheroes in junior high and had a blast. It was my first introduction to adjective-based attribute descriptions (I still remember one of the levels for Intelligence...Feeble maybe...had the text "Has trouble with doors"). One of my best friends in junior high was way more into comic books than I was, and having him as a player in the game helped tremendously. I used to scour his Marvel Universe books for characters, and still remember all kinds of details even though I've never read the comics.

No one was surprised when I took an interest in VisiCalc 

What science fiction RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

In some ways, science fiction RPGs have traditionally been more in my wheelhouse than fantasy games. It's really a toss-up between CP2020 and Mekton, both of which we played a lot. I've run so many different games using Mekton, and we had Cyberpunk games that lasted for years. 

For some reason I always think the one on the left has an afro.

What post-apocalyptic RPG have you enjoyed mot? Why?

Tribe 8 which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog or my posts. Why? Because of this:

He has such a jaunty little hat...

When NPCs Lie

This is an interesting article on research into using natural language for NPCs in video games, specifically things like trade, gossip, and lying (which unfortunately is hardly mentioned, even if it's in the article's title). This subject has always intrigued me, because of this phenomenon I've noticed among players:

Players nearly always believe the NPCs. As a corollary, when they do decide to distrust an NPC, it's nearly always the one they should be trusting

It leads to some very interesting developments, for sure, as an NPC can spout off nearly any sort of complete nonsense and the players will follow it right into a trap or worse. I'm not sure exactly what causes it but I suspect part of it is something I've also observed as a player:

GMs who never have their NPCs lie

Once a player comes to expect that NPCs will always be truthful, they're completely unprepared when they're not, and often skew the other direction by never trusting an NPC again.

It's possible that my experience is atypical and most GMs portray believable NPCs who don't exist only to infodump on the players. I mean, one of the most cliched pieces of advice ever for GMs is to give NPCs personality. Right? Right?

But just in case my experience is one of the more common, the article points out some great things about interactions with NPCs - namely, that NPCs who gossip and can use that relatively meaningless talk to make determinations about how much they trust the PC (or not). It doesn't mean that unimportant (or even important) NPCs should be full of all kinds of deep conversation. Quite the opposite, actually. Time to drag out those old rumor and gossip tables and let the NPCs just say some random shit mixed in with the crucial bits the PCs need to hear.

What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?

Day 5 of the non-D&D blog challenge

This is a loaded question, because I think it has a lot more to do with who was first out of the starting gate than anything else. Any game that amassed the following that D&D had, was a reasonably decent game, would have made it and crowded out the other contenders. D&D was the one that would become as big as D&D in that case. It set the stage for what was expected of a role playing game - had it been a Pride and Prejudice inspired game, we'd have a hobby with very different priorities than we have today.

With that being said, given society and culture at the time I'd think it would have to be another fantasy-type rpg that would have become as big - and I'd put my finger on Runequest over any of the other contenders such as Tekumel. Runequest was accessible, had its own style, and could have easily become as popular as D&D became.

What other roleplaying author besides Gygax impressed you with their writing?

Day 4 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge

Gygax never impressed me with his writing...it just never clicked. So I guess my answer is, "Quite a few".

Since I'm not really part of the OSR community, nor do I play OSR games, I don't know how much of a pedestal Gygax is put up on. I acknowledge that he is, for all practical intent and purpose, the father of the roleplaying hobby. I was starstruck in the way that only a teenage nerd can be when I met him at a convention in the late '80s. But my experience sitting down with Mike Pondsmith for something like 45 minutes at a convention was a much greater influence on me. The authors who have impressed me is a long list and growing, and include - in no particular order - Kenneth Hite, Robin D. Laws, Fred Hicks, Josh Mosqueira, Marc Vezina, Greg Stafford, Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen, Cam Banks, David Pulver, S. John Ross, and many, many more.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D?

This is for Day 2 and Day 3 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge, since I got nothing done yesterday.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D? How was playing it different from playing a D&D character?
This is kind of hard for me to remember. I DM'd a lot in the early days, and didn't get a chance to play much. There are two candidates though, both of which were probably about the same time (late junior high/early high school). My parents had friends who would often watch me when they needed a sitter, including when they took trips that I didn't go on. They had a daughter who was quite a bit older than me, and she had a boyfriend who played rpgs. He was really big into the 007 rpg, and I played a short campaign with him one summer. He also bootstrapped me into grokking Traveller, and I remember running a few sessions for him. There was also a guy who was a grade or two older than I who lived in our neighborhood, and I played Call of Cthulhu with him. So it was either 007 or Call of Cthulhu. How playing the character was different...I couldn't tell you. I remember the CoC character more than the 007 character. I created the character with the intent that he would be unhinged. It was, perhaps, my first brush with intentionally doing something that might harm my character (SAN loss from reading tomes and going toe-to-toe with Mythos creatures). He eventually went completely mad and I lost him as a PC, but for that brief time he was a M1911 in one hand, spellbook in the other type investigator.

Kinda like this.

Which game had the least or most enjoyable character generation?
Mekton II had the most enjoyable character creation, because of the novelty of the Lifepath. It was one of the few games where I would create a character just to roll on the Lifepath tables. A close runner-up would be Traveller, for the same reasons. Having the mini-game include uncertainty made it fun. For least enjoyable, I gotta say Hero. I spent three days making a character for a Hero game once and I think I came away from the experience with less of an understanding of the process.

What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played?

So, I just found out about the non-D&D March blog challenge. This one might be quite a bit more relevant to me.

The first rpg that I played other than D&D was Star Frontiers. Technically it was the third rpg I owned, since I was given the Traveller boxed set shortly before I got my hands on Star Frontiers. This was back when you could get rpgs at Toys 'R Us, which is likely where I got mine. Oddly enough at the same time there was a Sears Outlet close by my parent's house that also had rpgs - I remember seeing Universe and Lords of Creation there at one point - so it may have come from there.

It was the Eighties...this was considered exciting

I grew up on a cul-de-sac with a handful of kids that had lived there their entire lives. My parents moved in just after the condominiums were built, and I was young enough to not remember the previous place we lived. All of our families knew one another, and I had made my best friend when I was five years old - Richie - who was also the one that I taught D&D to.

Then there was Melissa Broadway. Her and her dad were relative newcomers to the neighborhood. I don't think the sisters that lived next door, Missy and Heidi, liked her very much. But I was in love with Melissa from the first time I saw her. She was lanky and tomboyish, with dark hair, and we got into all kinds of trouble together. We played action figures, she played a game called "kingdom" with Richie and I where we each had a "kingdom" with borders and a ruler and an army, we got into dirt clod fights at the construction sites nearby, heck I think I even played dolls and "house" with her. We also played Star Frontiers.

I remember playing it with just her and also with Richie, but I can't quite remember the characters. I want to say that Richie's character was a dralasite, while Melissa had a Yazarian. I know that we played through the published modules - while I created and stocked a lot of dungeons for D&D, Star Frontiers was off the beaten path enough that I never considered creating my own adventures for it. Because of that, Melissa moving away a year or two later, and starting to get into Traveller, we stopped playing Star Frontiers once we go through the published modules.

Tabletop RPGs Are A Poor Environment For Immersion

Immersion comes up a lot when discussing RPGs, typically in response to this style of game making it more difficult or easier for one person or the other to experience it.

The thing is, RPGs are a really poor choice for an immersive experience. I know that we've been told that this is something that's at least a byproduct of role playing, and it's desirable, and for a lot of people is a goal. And it's not a bad goal, either, and it's no reason that if your intent is immersion to not at least try. But at the very least, one has to recognize the odds are stacked against someone who wants to minimize breaking immersion.

Now, before people get out their pitchforks and torches, give me a chance to explain. Most immersive experiences that non-gamers are familiar with - say a movie or a book or a video game - are relatively solitary and internalized affairs. You get so wrapped up in the experience that you feel you're really there and forget about being yourself for a little bit. Sure, there might be things that bump you out of it - phone rings, the kids get too loud, the computer/console crashes - but overall the number of things that you have to interact with to sustain immersion are minimized.

Also, this is not a diatribe against immersion, nor in any way meant to invalidate, belittle, or otherwise tell people for whom its important that it's a pipe dream, doesn't exist, or anything else. It's just a short examination as to why rpgs actually wind up not being the perfect environment for it - in spite of most common thought that immersion is a natural outgrowth of playing rpgs. You have to work at it, in large part because of the activity's format. In some ways, perhaps more, this may be more commentary on why you can't get away from metagaming.

First, we have the game part. You need to interface with the rules in order to play the game. Granted,when  game systems "fade into the background" - often as much through familiarity as elegant design - it makes immersion easier. Some people can get immersed even when the system is front and center. But rules and game systems are still artificial, and require bringing an internal process (the immersion) out into an artificial framework. While mechanics can certainly help in certain ways, they can cause a disconnect much more often. I still strongly believe that you actually can't design a system to support immersion - you can accomplish any number of other goals that might help support it, but it's a corollary instead of the primary result. Compare this with, for example, a PC game. While you still have to wrangle with controls, they tend to get out of the way a lot faster than rpg mechanics do - and they're easier to manipulate if you have the money and inclination to go with nonstandard control schemes that can be reconfigured to support playing the game better (i.e., any number of input devices from Razer).

Next, you have the inherently social activity of RPGs. I think that this has a bigger impact on creating a flawed environment for immersion than the rules do. In order to interact with a group of people, you again have to externalize a purely internal process. So now we have two external filters - the rules and the expression of character - to deal with. Again, the social group can do a lot to build up immersion but there are just as many ways (if not more) that someone can do something that pulls you out of "the zone" (for whatever measure of "the zone" that there is for you).

Finally, we have the environment. You can turn down the lights and sit down with headphones for a movie or a video game or a book. You can get yourself in a comfortable and quiet place. Not so with a group activity like an rpg. I mean, everyone could be in really comfy spots in a space with lots of atmosphere to play an rpg (and this is totally a good idea), but the environment is still a shared one and not a private one. That's another ding against an rpg being an ideal place to bring the immersion.

Does that mean that immersion doesn't exist or isn't important? Nope on both counts. But those things that are working against it don't necessarily affect other elements of play. You can enjoy all of the other elements as they are even if the mechanics are wonky or the players or environment are distracting. The traditional structure and mode of playing RPGs simply wasn't designed with immersion in mind and this goes a long way toward explaining explains why it can be so difficult.

Well, I Can Find One Thing To Be Motivated About: Grouchiness!

There was a thread on that one forum asking if Evil Hat was having trouble printing things or publishing things or doing stuff. I got dressed down for my response being "rude", because my response was basically, "Two products that seem to have fallen by the wayside haven't had any recent updates...so? There's all this other shit going on." After which, a few people chime in with wonderment about how anything gets written with all of +Fred Hicks' G+ posts, or that dice must be time consuming. I predict (given my last response to +Michael Moceri) that things will get silly quickly.

My grouchiness with the subject of the thread wasn't really the title ("What's Up With Evil Hat?") or the wording (having "trouble" putting out products), despite how I worded my own response. Of course the post was totally non-controversial and just an innocent question and apparently OP can't Google. My grouchiness is over the fact a lot of the time, gamers can't just accept that sometimes their favoritest most-bated-breath-waiting product will never see the light of day or isn't the biggest priority for the publisher.

Now, maybe I'm spoiled - I used to be a Palladium player, and do you know how long I waited for the Old Kingdom book to come out? For PFRP 1st-fucking-edition? So long that I hadn't even thought about it until just now. Waiting a couple extra months for Atomic Robo is a walk in the park by comparison. I can understand queries about the status of products. I can understand - given the Kickstarter failures out there - wanting to know how something is doing that is now five months late and the creator decided that they needed to clear their head by going to Nepal or something.

Maybe I'm overreacting as the nerd-rage in me builds and gives me a false sense of the motivation and energy I've been lacking lately (I bet it's going to be hell to come down from...I might wind up listening to The Smiths on repeat for maybe 15 whole minutes). For a moment though, let's suppose that Evil Hat just up and decided to drop both products the poster was inquiring about completely (it was the Paranet Papers and Atomic Robo, by the way). Not saying that this would happen, or this is what is happening (because honestly I don't know and I'm not going to ask). Now let's suppose that those two products were put into the pipeline at the time because they were the best choice, given the company's success at that time. Then all of a sudden, the company is catapulted into a new level of success by a super-successful Kickstarter and whole new avenues of potential product lines open up including new books, board games, dice sets, cards, etc. Then throw in some hiccups that would throw a project off its Gantt chart even without any of the the other stuff going on, and we have an understandable situation where a couple products could slip under the radar.

Not that nay of this is anybody's business but theirs, but given they're firing on all cylinders otherwise - it's certainly not an indication of "trouble." Come back and ask again when they've gone the route of DP9.

A Complete An Utter Lack of Motivation

I have been struck with a lack of wanting to pretty much do anything. It's an unshakable ennui regarding virtually everything. It's infested pretty much everything, from work to other projects that I know I want to do or activities I enjoy. I started replaying Thief: Deadly Shadows after finishing the first two, and found that I really couldn't get into it. It crashes whenever I try to move into one of the areas I need to get into...and I have zero interest in trying to fix it. I have a Tribe 8 game that I'm trying to prepare for, and which I want to start regardless, but I can't bring myself to finish the prep work. There's a ton of personal matters I need to attend to, but I'm just not getting around to them. I already know some of those things are contributing to my listlessness. I'm kind of slouching toward a time in the near future that a lot of things hanging over my head will be resolved, and hopefully that will help me break out of this.

In the meantime, I'm not sure how exactly to shake it aside from forcing myself to work on various things - which knowing me will backfire. So, I figured I'd list the things that I really wanted to do but just can't give two shits about right now:

• Fate Core (but possibly FAE) Thief-inspired fantasy world.  Seeing a lot of similarities between what I was planning in Will Hindmarch's excellent looking Project: Dark doesn't help motivate me, even though I know that it's not going to kill my project.
• The science-fiction setting I pitched for ADX.
• A Silhouette-like retroclone system, possibly for a re-imagining of a Solar System-based setting with mecha.
• A Fate Core adaptation of The Laundry.
• Coming up with something for Onyx Path's writer's submissions.

Maybe I just need to take a couple mental health days, sleep a lot, reinstall Dishonored, and find some inspiration somewhere.

My Metric For Presenting In Character Or Out of Character Knowledge

I highly, highly dislike overly artificial "firewalls" as +Topher Gerkey put it between in character and out of character knowledge. Yes, I expect that for the most part players will refrain from blatantly using their own knowledge to the detriment of everyone's enjoyment of the game. But, conversely, I expect that they won't stubbornly refuse to use it when it adds to the game.

As an example, since I'm gearing up for Tribe 8, is how I've seen portrayals of characters in post-apocalyptic games finding relatively common objects like flashlights. Usually it goes down as the GM describing the object in vague details, like "It's a metal cylinder with a piece of glass set in the end." and sitting back while Twenty Questions ensues and the GM tries to lead them astray from the real answer as much as possible. If asked to draw it or show a picture, the GM hems and haws and doesn't want to because they know the players would immediately figure out it's a flashlight.

Look, just say it's a fucking flashlight. The players should be able to roleplay their characters figuring out how it works. The words, "What is this weird metal cylinder with glass set in the end?" should be coming from the players and not the GM trying to play some kind of lame game of Charades.

So, to that end here's a quick flow chart of how I make these kinds of decisions:

A Summarily Bad Idea

So I saw a post where someone suggested that the GM customize the way that something is described to the "intelligence" of the character. So if you were describing something to a player of a really dumb character, you'd use simple terms. If it was a very intelligent character, you'd load up the detail.

This is like reverse "firewalling", the act of putting up a strict barrier between in character and out of character knowledge. I think this is a bad idea on a number of levels. Setting aside the idea of tailoring information to a specific result, like for an awareness of knowledge roll (you roll poorly, you only get something vague - but if you roll well you get additional detail), the player should be the one deciding how they will parse the descriptions into what their character understands, and have their character react accordingly (and, incidentally, this is one of the reasons I believe it's impossible to completely separate IC and OOC knowledge, to the point where I don't even actively try).

Do really want the GM to talk to you like this?

I can foresee a multitude of misunderstandings and conflicts being caused around the table as a result of this. Plus, it simply seems like way too much work for too little gain. What do you leave out or include when the intelligence or whatever scores are very close to one another? Where's the cut off between talking to the player like they're a simpleton vs. just describing something normally vs. Niles Crane? What do you do when the game doesn't have a measure or attribute for intelligence?

So...tailoring the information given to a specific metric? Pretty much standard practice, I think. Tailoring how the information is given to the receiver based purely on in-game characteristics? Not really seeing how this is a good thing - unless someone can convince me otherwise.

Not Quite A Proper Blog Post

I've rearranged things slightly. There is now a page called Documents, Conversions, Hacks, House Rules that contains links to all of the documents and whatnot that I have shared in Google Drive. A large part of it is for Fate Core/FAE and includes all three Fate Tribe 8 conversions (Fate Core, Strands of Fate, and Spirit of the Century) as well as an assortment of other hacks. I figured it wasn't clear that the links to these that lived at the top of the blog weren't actually labels, plus the page calls out some specific things rather than just linking to the Google Docs folder. As I add more, I'll update the page as well.

I Started The D&D 40th Anniversay Bloghop Challenge...

But I just couldn't finish it. There were too many that would have wound up being, "See previous entry", "I don't know" or "Meh." So I'm going to turn this last post into a "What I've Learned From D&D" post.

I've never played anything other than BECMI in grade school and junior high, 1e in high school and a smattering of a few 3e sessions because my buddy needed another player. Never touched 2e, and I bought the Rules Cyclopedia but we never got a game going. I went through the nearly mandatory "D&D sucks so bad, play a real rpg" phase, but got over it. I went through the total nostalgia phase. As of right now I have no strong opinion  one way or the other about classes, hit points, armor class, saving throws or anything else. I really don't like alignments, but that's a personal preference and not anything against morality systems. If I were to play D&D again I'd likely pick Neutral and be done with it.

Looking back on my early play experiences with D&D, they're so far in the past that I really can't say how much different I play now. I was 10 years old when I started, so obviously my games were very sophisticated both in play and content. Certainly, with my love of games like Fate Core, I've transitioned to a more narrative focus - but from my perspective that's been a long-term tweaking of my play preferences and not any kind of transformation. Piecing together memories of various games, I can see that I took away from D&D an appreciation for figuring out the best way for the rules to serve what was going on within the game. Making rolls against ability scores and finding new uses for saving throws in lieu of having a skill system come to mind. The rules didn't cover every single situation, so we extended them as best as we could in a way that made sense.

Yet even those experiences, while interesting from an academic perspective, don't eclipse what D&D ultimately gave me: a common vernacular and cultural identity, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. In the end, I think the lifelong fun is the single biggest thing D&D has given me.

SilCore House Rules

As promised, I've uploaded a cleaned up document with some of my SilCore house rules. These got reasonably extensive play, and worked out pretty well for our group.

SilCore House Rules

I believe the complexity rules in this document are the prototype for one of the Complexity house rules that I wrote for Aurora.

What's interesting to me is how I latched on to a couple of concepts before really knowing what they entailed. I've talked about how I kind of halfway implemented "success at a cost" in Silhouette by having fumbles actually generate a result (instead of being treated as zero), just with the addition of a complication. For example, a character who fumbles a Firearms roll might still have a high enough roll plus modifiers to hit the target but their gun jams, they find out they're out of ammo, etc. The same thing happened conceptually with these house rules for Flaws - I saw that there should be some narrative currency attached to Flaws, rather than simply receiving character points for them. I just didn't have the context of something like the Fate Point economy to recognize the design pattern.

Also, the mechanism of sacrificing dice for effects is one that SilCore touched on only in terms of "deception attacks", but it's one that I had thought was a good axis beyond simple result modifiers even before that. It ties into my love of dice mechanics being used to "unpack" data about how something happened in addition to how well. Successes, margin of success or failure, the overall quality of the result, those are things that I like to see in dice mechanics. Justin Bacon has a good series called Dice of Destiny along those lines that I've mentioned before.

From the perspective of a 90's-ish, dice pool styled retroclone (which has been bouncing around my head a bit) I'd want something similar. It would just be a matter of doing it without counting successes, doing pairing of values, or any of the other dice pool tricks I've seen that I personally find distracting. I'd actually almost lean toward a "roll and keep and keep the highest" system, where you roll x dice and keep y based on some measures, and then take the highest from there. For extra detail, maybe there would be a small picklist of qualities that could be attributed to each die depending on the kind of roll. These wouldn't be fixed before the roll, the player would be able to choose after, "This die represents how fast I did this, this die represents damage done, this die represents knowledge gained". They also wouldn't be part of the base resolution mechanic - again, make the base die roll as quick to parse as possible.

This is definitely an avenue I'm going to be pursuing more in future posts.

That '80s Game

So Google+ had some kind of '90s meme that started, and thinking back on all of this stuff made me realize that 30 years ago this year I entered high school. While the '90s were my golden age of coming into my own (and not remembering most of it), the '80s were for me every bit the formative period depicted in The Goldbergs.

The '90s: Dazed and confused doesn't even scratch the surface

Being born in 1970, my biological decades are perfectly bracketed by the calendar. For me, the '80s wasn't just about puberty and awkwardness and discovering music that to this day I insist is the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. It was a complete transformative period.

From a very early age, I was fascinated by mechanics and game play. When I was a lot younger, I used to make my own board games. When coin op arcade machines hit and became all the rage, like most kids I used to save up quarters (i.e., tip over my dad's recliner to claim the change that had fallen out of his pockets) and hit the Stop 'n Go every morning before school and the pizza place after. A lot of companies started publishing cheap little guidebooks for various games. I'd actually take the maps and diagrams from those books, grab some markers, poster board, and construction paper, and make board game versions of the arcade games.

So at the beginning of the 1980s when I started playing Basic D&D it launched a parabolic arc of gaming experiences peaking in and just after high school. I quickly branched out to Star Frontiers and Gamma World, followed by Traveller, then Chill, Star Ace, Call of Cthulhu, Elfquest, Runequest, James Bond, Top Secret, MERP, Villains and Vigilantes, you name it. These experiences led to some interesting contrasts. I played Mekton, but not Battletech. I played Cyberpunk, but not Shadowrun. I played GURPS, but not Champions. By the time I graduated high school in 1988 I was already buying games that I read but never had time to play.

I also started to go to conventions when I was 15 or 16 - at first supervised day trips, but once my dad realized that there was little chance of me getting in any serious trouble I was arranging to go for the entire weekend with a group of friends. I learned a ton about financial planning, budgeting, and overall restraint from going to those cons. At least once, by the last day of the con we had eaten all of the food we brought, spent our last cent, and were forced to eat pickles from the condiment bar and drink tiny cups of water while waiting for my dad to come pick us up

By the beginning of the '90s, I had started to slow down quite a bit. I was clubbing, going to shows, having overly complicated and dramatic relationships, hanging out in coffee houses philosophizing and smoking too much. I still bought games and read them, but in greatly reduced volume. My gaming settled around a few mainstays: CP2020, Mekton II (and then Zeta), the occasional game of V:tM. I started adapting and reusing rules a lot more. Interlock with parts of Dream Park grafted on for fantasy games, for example. But with BBSes starting to connect to USENet, along with the first presences of dedicated gaming forums on AOL and CompuServe, I was able tap into the wider gaming world and absorb more information on trends in rpgs, rules, theories, etc. But all of that had been built on a foundation that I laid down in the '80s.

So, while the '90s were a pretty cool time (my sons were born in the '90s), the '80s were definitely more my time, in terms of diversifying my gaming and personal growth.

If You Are A "AAA Pro-Video Game Developer", It Means You Write Code

This is a belated response, of a sorts, to a thread on ENWorld started by a poster named Gorgoroth in which he lambastes the idea of the "damage on a miss" mechanic in D&D Next (and I guess it appeared in 4e, I don't know).

This post is not about the "DOAM" mechanic. Rob Donoghue already did a breakdown that, from my AAA Database Developer eyes, looks good enough.

Instead, I want to highlight Gorgoroth's arguments that he is somehow especially qualified to be put on the pedestal of tabletop gaming design.

In particular, these quotes:

As a pro game developer with over a dozen AAA games to my credit (go ahead and ask me for my CV, and I will share it with you, Mike), I have identified, based on both your own design goals, and my general game design and debugging experience, as well as 25+ years of D&D on top of that (which qualifies me eminently better than 99% of your survey recipients) with GWF:

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?352516-Open-Letter-to-Mike-Mearls-from-a-pro-game-dev&s=d4a00883a7d16f717f6b2056a55151e3#ixzz2sZBSywga

and

The opinions about game rules by pro game developers should be taken more seriously. That's what expertise means.
When people start paying you six figures for your game dev skills, call me.

and

CRPG devs routinely make six figures, and the work we do is far, FAR more complicated, widely-scrutinized, analyzed, profitable, and generally pertinent to more people than D&D could ever hope to be. Keeping things simple is not merely a worthwhile design goal for us, it's an absolute necessity. Which is why I recognize Mearls as a pro, and see eye to eye with him in most ways.

First off, this guy needs to comprehend that the similarity between the implementation of video games and tabletop rpgs, from a nuts and bolts perspective, starts and ends with the word "game". Conceptually, there might be some cross-talk between the two fields (as evidenced by the folks who migrate to the video game industry to video games), but that doesn't really make his "game design and debugging experience" specifically something that makes him a guru that everyone must follow when it comes to tabletop game design. Again, there's some osmosis between the overall function of a developer of any stripe, but the game part of it isn't nearly as portable as he thinks.

Second, there's the "I makes the big money and my work is important" bit. Does this mean that game developers should listen to me about how wrong their tables are organized because I'm a highly paid database developer? Should I write an open-letter to R.Talsorian Games about how they need to normalize their tables (which, btw, the tables in Mekton Zeta are near impossible to place into a normalized database - I've tried). Because the analogy between database tables and reference tables is about as solid as the one between video game mechanics and tabletop rpg mechanics.

It shouldn't need to be said that, no Gorgoroth, I don't take you seriously.

Too Many Things To Write About

Work and home have conspired against me, and I haven't found time to blog about a few things that have cropped up.

The first is an interview with one of the people involved with FATAL, James Hausler, with a lively discussion posted on RPG.Net. I haven't had a chance to listen yet (apparently it's four hours worth) and some of the commenters on RPG.Net have been delving into the specific details of the interview. What's interesting to me is the guy's apparent off-loading of the "bad" parts of FATAL (not the parts you'd think) while taking credit for the "good" parts (also, not the parts that you think).

While digging around for some things (like a mention of a "secret" page on the former FATAL website that allegedly demeaned various either sexual conquests or people who had rejected sexual advances) I stumbled across this thread about what looks like a roleplaying forum for something called "Hot Wet Planet". I was pretty awestruck by the responses of the author to the criticism. I have some parallels to draw between Hausler, Arisama from the Hot Wet Planet thread, and Mykal Lakim from Dark Phoenix Publishing but haven't had a chance to fully gestate those thoughts.

Add Raven S. McCracken and we'll have a complete set!

Hopefully in the next few days I'll get a chance to play some catch-up and get some other gaming-related stuff done.

Treasure Chest Friday

I had a lot of gaming material that I developed in the early-to-mid-90s go up in smoke. I didn't have any kind of cohesive back-up scheme, basically jumping from failure-prone floppy disks - which were usually the primary copy - to a hand-me-down tape drive that took too long to write to and even longer to read from, to burning things on CD when I remembered. A bunch of my backup CDs eventually got written to a hard drive  and then tossed. Or rather a RAID array, which is what I decided I needed for a "real" backup strategy. That RAID array eventually had a failure and I wasn't able to recover anything off of it. Also when I had my own domain, I did regular backups of the content but what I neglected when I downloaded everything prior to cancelling my account was the database that had the CMS content. Between those two failures, I lost everything.

Needless to say, I am now a diversified backer-upper. Cloud and multiple redundant drives, mainly.

So imagine my surprise when I was going through folders looking for tidbits for my Tribe 8 game that I ran into a few fragments of my past gaming life. It's spotty - some house rules for SilCore, a write-up of Titan for Jovian Chronicles, some trade good cards for Tribe 8 that I'm not sure where they came from, and a few other things. I have some clean up to do (the house rules are in a mind-map and I no longer have the application that generated them), but I'm going to be posting things up as I process them (and find more).

For the time being, here are two of the gems:

• Titan - A write-up of an alternate Titan for a Jovian Chronicles game that I was going to run. It was actually to be the beginning of alternate write-ups for the entire solar system, tweaking things out to take advantage of discoveries that occurred after JC was written.
• Trade Good Cards for Tribe 8 - I have no idea where these came from.
• Spirit of Vimary - My original Spirit of the Century hack for Tribe 8. I previously only had a partial, corrupted copy of this - this one is from what I can tell the final. I never had a chance to playtest it, but it completes my trifecta of Fate conversions for Tribe 8.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 5

I honestly have played very little D&D, I mostly ran it. That means that over the course of a couple years, the small group of players that I had got themselves up to whatever the maximum level was as we moved from Basic to Expert to Companion to Master (I'm not sure we ever did Immortal). However, I did play in an AD&D game where I played a Paladin named Felice who, after the class appeared in Dragon Magazine, became a cavalier. She was inspired by the iconic paladin picture, as well as another one that I can't find that I think had a fully armored female paladin on a horse (it was possibly Elmore or Caldwell).

You know the one

Felice made it I think up to 18th level or so. The DM wasn't nearly as much of a douchebag as a lot of DM's I've heard about regarding paladins. She strove to maintain her code, followed all of the rules, and stood up for what was actually right. We even had the "you find young evil creatures" dilemma, which if I remember right was dealt with by putting them in the care of the church. The debate that followed was along the lines that half-orcs could be good, so if the creatures we found - orcs I believe - were raised by the pious they could learn to control their chaotic tendencies and be good as well. Either way, Felice refused to hold them accountable for their parent's evil and insisted that she would slay anyone who hurt them (and, by that time armed with a holy avenger and probably at least +3 plate, the threat wasn't idle). For 14-15 year olds, this was pretty philosophical stuff.

The other factor about this character that probably stands out is that she was a woman, especially considering that I was a teenager. There was some disagreement about whether or not a woman could be a paladin, until I pointed out Joan of Arc (I was a moderately erudite kid). Ribbing ensued about wanting to play a girl, but the DM - who was older - okayed it. Felice was my first real encounter with "character concept". I had envisioned the character as a "her", I had inspiration from a book I was reading with a strong female character (it may have been one of the Julian May books, who did have a character named Felice, but I'm not sure), and my ability rolls had set me up for a paladin. I likely would have made a female whatever regardless. In the end, to me it didn't matter if the character was a he or a she, and I didn't see any issues with being male and portraying a female. Of course, it probably helped that she was a paladin - it allowed for me to sidestep any potentially (for my age and maturity level) squicky issues about romantic entanglements, and I'm sure that I mostly portrayed her as a dude with long hair and boobs. Miraculously, our group also dodged the bullet of any players or DM trying to introduce any problematic behaviors or situations as well - my experiences with perverted (or just plain sick) players wouldn't come until after high school.

Group Resources in Fate Core Tribe 8

This was a small addition I made to the Resources rules for Fate of Vimary that I felt was general enough to go here. Note that it uses another slight tweak, namely that characters have fluctuating Resources scores as they use and gain Resources. This Extra allows for the group to have a Larder that they can use to draw resources from.

Typically the group will have a community pool of resources, known as the Larder. These Resources can be used in place of personally rolling against resources when the Larder can be accessed, at the expense of depleting the group’s reserves. Having a Larder is slightly more bookkeeping, so it may not be desirable for all groups, but fortunately most interactions with it would be done either between sessions or during session startup, etc.

The Larder has a Resource rating equal to the median of the group’s Resource rank - in other words, the middle between the minimum and maximum. If the lowest Resources within the group is 0 and the highest is 4, the Larder is Resources 2. The Larder has a stress track with two stress boxes with an additional box added at Resources Average(+1) or Fair (+2), or two more at Good (+3) or greater. In addition, the Larder has three Consequence slots. On the chance that the Larder has Resources of Superb (+5) or higher, it gains an additional mild Consequence slot. The Larder’s Resources do not fluctuate when the individual group member’s Resources fluctuate, although it might increase if members of the group permanently increase their own.

The stress and Consequences for the Larder work slightly differently than a character’s stress and Consequences. Whenever a character needs something that would call for a Resources roll, and they have access to the Larder, they can use the Larder’s Resources instead. This can be used to directly take a specific needed item from the Larder, as well as to create advantages prior to an expedition or journey. The roll is made using the standard difficulty for obtaining the item or creating the advantage. If the roll succeeds, then an amount of stress equal to the value of the item is marked off the Larder’s stress track. Once the stress track is filled, the Larder’s Resource rank drops by 1 and all stress is cleared. If in a single “transaction” the stress would overfill the track, the Larder takes a Consequence equal to or greater than the overflow. Once Resources reaches zero, the Larder is depleted and has to be restocked. Stress can be “soaked” by instead taking a Consequence of equal or greater value than the stress. Consequences represent a specific shortage within the Larder, based on what the characters were trying to do. For example, preparing for a Joanite attack might result in the mild Consequence Running Low on Ammunition or Limited Food and Water.

Restocking the Larder must be done from the Resources of the individuals contributing to it. Typically this is done using teamwork, with the character with the highest Resources rolling and every other character with Resources of Average(+1) or higher contributing +1 to the result. The difficulty of the roll is Fair(+2), and each success restores one rank of Resources. All Larder Consequences must be cleared before the restock attempt can take place. If the roll is successful, each character reduces their Resources by 1 for the remainder of the session.

If There Was A Little Dust, Please Pardon It

After some consideration, I have deprecated my Tribe 8-specific blog, Dreams of Flesh and Spirit, and imported all of the old posts here. I turned off the feed during this process, to eliminate the possibility that I would suddenly jam over a hundred posts into other people's feeds.

You know you miss these stupid things

All of the posts from DFS are tagged with "Dreams of Flesh and Spirit", as will all other Tribe 8-related posts that I post here.

I made the decision mostly because having to worry about which blog a post should go on, or feeling the need to duplicate posts between the two, just isn't going to work out. I do this because I enjoy it, and I want to continue to post whatever random thing comes to mind.

So, let's welcome the new DFS posts to Aggregate Cognizance. But don't make them too welcome - we don't want them to get complacent.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 4

For this post, I'm supposed to tell the tale of the first dragon that was slain playing D&D.

The problem is, I can't freaking remember. It's been over 30 years, and there's just no way.

Piecing together memories of how our adventures played out, and the fact that I got the boxed sets kind of in pace with characters levelling, I'd have to say that officially the first dragon would have been while playing through X1, Isle of Dread. There might have been a white dragon before that, but the memories are just too damn fuzzy.

Looking at this (awesome) walkthrough map, it was most likely a green dragon because that's what's shown. But it might not have been.

I mostly remember dinosaurs, lots of dinosaurs

So, this one is going to have remain a mystery for the ages.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 3

Going back to Keep on the Borderlands being part of my experience when I first starting playing D&D, the Caves of Chaos were the first dungeon that I ever ran anyone through.

This map brings back memories, but it's missing the pencil marks and crayon

The memories are pretty hazy about how it actually went down, but I do know that at the time we didn't have any real concept of "out of character" knowledge. Having run through the map so many times when we were playing D&D "wrong", my singular player knew everything pretty well - where the orcs were, where the treasure was, where the secret doors were. It was a total cake-walk, but the one thing that was different were the interactions with NPCs and monsters. I now had the notion that the other characters were supposed to be played....that they could take their own actions, that the PCs could talk to them. It wasn't Oscar-winning stuff, but it was something. This, combined with following examples from the rulebook, meant that not every monster was necessarily fought - some were tricked, some were avoided (because before we thought you had to go to every room in number order - true story!). Playing D&D right also meant that now characters were leveling up, and started us down the path of maintaining some kind of continuity. Since I was writing a lot at the time, I think this was the beginning of writing down our character's adventures as fiction, as well as taking various D&D modules and writing fictional accounts of other characters.

But the one thing that looking back at all of this has reminded me is that we really did play to have fun, rules-be-damned. There wasn't any kind of "Well, even when I was eight years old we role-played and we did everything right." Fuck no...we played using OOC knowledge, had totally stupid implausible things happen, fudged die rolls, and did damn near everything that most adults (even me) would consider "bad gaming." And we had a blast doing it.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 2

So, as I said in the first challenge post, I was "introduced" to Basic D&D by the next door neighbor kid. In a way, he's the first one I introduced D&D to properly because he was who I played with once I actually figured out what the fuck was going on in that crazy game. We replayed through Keep on the Borderlands, properly, although I don't remember what his character was. I do remember that we eventually came to the conclusion that losing characters sucked, so once he rolled up his third or fourth - an Elf I believe - he was able to get that character through subsequent sets up to Immortal. By that time I had branched out into other roleplaying games - including AD&D and Traveller. Unfortunately, divergent paths once I got into high school (plus a number of other factors) meant that I started playing with other people.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge: Day 1

I haven't touched any flavor of D&D in a number of years, but I figured that I'd throw in for this one because it would be interesting to revisit some memories.

I was introduced to D&D - specifically the Basic set - by my next door neighbor and childhood best friend, Richie. He had gotten the boxed set for Christmas (I want to say 1979 or so), but he was a couple of years younger than me and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had heard of the game, even seen it a couple of times in the used science fiction bookstore my dad used to take me to called The Magic Door. He had never been willing to shell out the cash for the game, but I did have some experience with a number of microgames that he had bought me. So when Richie asked me to help him figure out how to play, I figured (in my 8 or 9 year old way) that I had a handle on it.

We were pretty wrong, and it took until I got my own set when I was 10 or 11 to actually figure out how to play and what was going on. In the interim, we drew on the maps and tried to play it like a boardgame. We "played" through Keep on the Borderlands over and over again. I don't remember anything about what characters we used. In all, it was a pretty abortive attempt by a 9 and a 7 year old at trying to puzzle out Basic D&D on our own.

Major Campaign Milestones: When Bigger Is Better

When a Fate Core game reaches a major milestone, it's a big deal. This is the time when the campaign's skill cap goes up, refresh increases, or even character's High Concepts change. It's the wrap up of multiple arcs, and oftentimes that means the game world (provided the next campaign will be in the same world) may change as well. This is all pretty well covered in Fate Core, so I don't have a lot to add to it.

If you think about it, though, changing a campaign aspect is a pretty profound thing. It's just a few words. A short phrase maybe. But going from:

When The Stars Are Right

to:

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN

is freaking huge. The world is pretty much over, and just because some words changed.

So the next time I hit a campaign milestone, given of course that it's appropriate, I'm going to try to practice changing the campaign aspect in the smallest way that gives the most impact. It's really easy to succumb to the urge to keep adding aspects to the campaign - I think it's a lot harder to just change one and have it reflect all of the changes you want in the setting.

Short Order Heroes

I first became aware of the Short Order Heroes Kickstarter shortly after I started getting more involved on Google+, since +Jesse Butler had somehow made his way into my RPG Circle (and, at the time, he was local to me - although we never had a chance to meet in person). I thought it was a really awesome idea, but it came about at a time I really couldn't sink any more money into Kickstarters. The Kickstarter was really successful, and I always thought that the cards would be super useful and liked the style of the art.

Now, he's running a contest to give away a set to someone who posts about it and what they'd do with it. This is my entry. First off, I'd give it a proper review, which would include inflicting it on my girls as a stand-alone game. I'd probably even post their opinions (or even a video of us playing). Next, I'd use them to help generating NPCs for a couple of Fate games that I'm planning and I'd probably post them here. Finally, I'd do my darndest to get to Gamex or Gateway (whichever one Mr. Butler can get to) and thank him personally.

Metagaming Is Good (There I Said It)

Or, at least, it can be good and is often not only unavoidable but desirable. It just has to be handled correctly.

When discussing issues of "metagaming" I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that playing role playing games is always, to some degree, about the metagame. Regardless of how hard any particular player tries to avoid it - and I don't see why anyone would - it's still there. It kind of comes with the territory and the reality is that you are a human being portraying a character in a game. At the end of the day, every decision is a player decision no matter how much the player wants to wrap it in "character decision" wrapping paper and put a bow on it.

In the scope of Fate Core, it definitely requires a little more "meta" thought than many other games, at least from the perspective that some of the rules the player is engaging (namely, Fate Points and aspects) aren't directly tied to the character's attributes, abilities, etc. Yet a lot of the complaints I hear about this are tied to a play style that I honestly can't figure out why anybody would engage. In essence, that the players only ever engage the aspects and Fate Points at a purely mechanical level, apparently void of the context that they are being used in. They apparently place them front and center of what the game is about, instead of...well, what the game is actually about. When I see this, I begin to wonder, "Is that actually how they are playing it? Instructions are just being issued with absolutely nothing hooking in to what is going on within the game, with the GM and players just pulling things out of their collective asses with only regard for the mechanical benefits and not what actually makes sense?" Because, even if that's not how they're playing the game, it's the way that most people I've seen who complain describe it.

For me, the flow of any roleplaying game has always been about what makes sense, what would follow from doing this or having that event happen. The system has always been slaved to the imaginary space in our heads, not the other way around. Fate's no different. So in the case of just engaging aspects at a mechanical level and pushing the "Fate point economy" to the forefront of the game, yes it does strike me as "bad" metagaming. I can see why anyone would be put off by it. I'm put off by it - regardless of what game we're talking about. It's detrimental to the game and the story. And to be clear, when I say "story" I am talking about (to use +Robert Hanz's words) "the stuff that the characters do, and how the world changes and reacts" rather than "the preplanned story the GM wants to tell". To me, while it is jarring to hear someone say, "I make a Fight roll" instead of "I punch the guy in his face" - it's not nearly as bad as only ever saying, "I invoke aspect X to get a +2".

Part of the reason for this is because aspects naturally flow with the language of what is happening within the game. To me, they demand to be used as seamlessly as possible. Their influence on the game is about what the characters are actually doing with them, and not how they can be manipulated from a mechanical perspective to do things. From that perspective, that's the good kind of metagaming.

Aspect Magic, Part 2

In my last post, I went gave an overview of how aspect magic in my fantasy setting works from a game-perspective. I've since had some time to somewhat solidify how it works from a system perspective. Essentially, anyone can use magic simply by taking a Lore stunt, and Sigils are created by making a Lore roll. The Sigils have to be created somehow, whether they are drawn, etched, painted, built into, etc. an object or character. So far, so good.

The Mark from Dishonored

The base difficulty comes from the scope of the Sigil. The scope is essentially what kind of aspect the Sigil is - boost, situation, character, High Concept or even game aspect. It's also possible to use Sigils to grant stunts. Once the scope is determined, the exact aspect or stunt that the Sigil represents has to be determined. From there, how has to be decided - does it add an aspect to the thing that bears it, does it modify or replace an existing aspect, or does it remove or nullify an aspect? These base actions can be summed up simply as addition, alteration and removal (replacement is actually removal and addition combined). There will be some other factors that go toward the difficulty, mainly the quality of the Sigil itself. The more permanent or well-crafted the Sigil, the more potent it has the possibility of being - a Sigil scrawled in charcoal on a piece of paper isn't going to hold up as well as one carved into stone and inlaid with silver. Sigils can be created from nearly anything that can be used to make a pattern, from a bundle of shaped sticks to a tattoo to an engraved amulet to architecture. A well-crafted Sigil is one of the most effective ways to increase the Sigil's Resonance.

Prototype Addition Sigil - this would have to be modified based on the exact effect

Example modified Addition Sigil to add flame to something. While this would be completely functional it's very basic and doesn't account for Resonance modifications. The actual Sigil would likely have embellishments and other more varied elements. For the astute, yes this is inspired by Chaos Magic.

Resonance is a measure of how the Sigil reacts with other aspects - namely those of the person utilizing it. For Sigils that operate somewhat independently of a character - say, a ward on a door - Resonance applies to that object. The base Resonance is determined by the scope of the Sigil, and can be modified by both how well the Sigil is created and how complex the user is aspect-wise. There are techniques for increasing Resonance, and a failed Lore roll can be turned into a success by decreasing it. Whenever the Sigil is activated, the character (or GM, if the Sigil is static) makes a Resonance roll. Failure means the Sigil works, but there is a side effect. I'm still deciding exactly how that works, but most likely it would be a choice between a compel on an aspect or one of the character's aspects altering the effect of the Sigil in an unexpected way.

That sums up the basics of what I have so far, and I'm definitely a lot closer to a workable system with a few tweaks.

Review: Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook

This is a followup to my review of The Laundry RPG.

The Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook is a sort of player's guide to The Laundry. It adds a ton of options and bells and whistles to player characters in The Laundryverse and, by extension, Laundry games overall. Like the core rulebook, it's well-written and put together and chock full of good information.

Pretty much every base is covered by the additions: new character professions, training courses, additional information on how to navigate the Laundry bureaucracy, expanded weapon and equipment lists, and guidelines for playing atypical Laundry characters ranging from non-humans to clueless civilians, and character templates. The equipment lists I kind of glazed over (as I typically do) - they appear complete, and have a couple of cool little widgets, a bunch of firearms that should satisfy gun-bunnies, but their inclusion or lack thereof isn't a selling point for me.

The biggest appeal for me in this book is the first chapter: Tradecraft. This is something that I was chomping at the bit for when I finished the main rulebook. This is really, really good stuff that covers everything from how to keep an identity, gather information, recruit informants and agents, various ways of signalling and passing messages (with a great reason why the Laundry sticks to older methods such as dead drops), and field operations such as tailing, evasion, surveillance, etc. The section incorporates the occult elements and tactics The Laundry employs seamless with the time-honored traditions of spycraft.

My second favorite chapter is Black Budget, Red Tape which adds some more detail to navigating the bureaucracy surrounding The Laundry. There are even Bureaucracy Random Encounters to drop on unsuspecting players. They are intended to make things a little livelier (especially when failing the check on one of them requires that you return to the office to fix it).

The new training courses hit the mark with the kind of corporate training that I've seen (such as "Achieving More With Less", "Aspiring to Senior Civil Service" and "Managing Changelings") plus military training courses and (of course) occult courses such as "Eschatological Countermeasures" and "Occulinux Installation and Use." There is also a small selection of Special Instructor Courses, dealing with specific oaths, rites, and books - these are courses you can sign up for (they're assigned) and the cost doesn't come out of your departmental budget. They of course cost SAN instead.

The chapter on Weird Characters is one of the ones least likely by me to get any use, but it is nice to have a "template" to put over an existing character if you need to turn them into a Gorgon or a Residual Human Resource (aka zombie, but HR doesn't want us to use that term anymore - it's insensitive). Parallel Dimensional Refugee characters are interesting - basically they're people who have slipped through from a similar dimension. Fringe meets the Laundry makes Walter Bishop's form of crazy a lot more ominous.

Likewise, Outside the Laundry has some pointers for running non-Laundry campaigns, such as civilian paranormal investigators, independent sorcerers, or just plain cultists. Unfortunately, a lot of it can be distilled down to 1) avoiding the Laundry because if they catch up to you, it's pretty much over or 2) coming up with contrived reasons the Laundry is looking the other way. The options seem somewhat unsatisfying to me (at least at the moment), and I know that I'd rather just play a straight Laundry game. There are also more details for playing agents agents from other OCCINTEL agencies.

Join the Black Chamber! Kill, and become host to, unspeakable horror!

The final chapter gives a brief summary of The Laundry during different eras. An Eighties campaign would probably be pretty cool - while computing power wasn't anything near what it is today, but they were still potentially dangerous and we didn't have ubiquitous cell phones, or email, the Web, etc. In a way, it had the beginnings of the truly dangerous stuff without a lot of the technology to fight it.

The book wraps up with print-outs of various forms (such as the Incident Report Form  - SBB1C, Sorcery Licence Application, and Reality Excursion Assessment - SSB2) plus a copy of the Official Secrets Act of 1916 and a blank warrant card. The forms aren't intended to be something players are forced to always fill out, at least not without a good reason (having your line manager come and dump a stack of forms on your desk is probably the opening salvo in a round of bureaucratic maneuvering).

I don't typically buy every supplement for game lines unless I really like them, and usually there are a couple that I think are pretty much essential. Vimary Sourcebook for Tribe 8 is one of them, as was Scavenger Sons for Exalted. I tend to be partial to gazetteer-style books over "Look, new whiz-bangs!" books. I'd place the Agent's Handbook somewhere midway between Absolutely Essential and Nice To Have. There's a lot of good information, and the book is well worth the money. But the mileage you get out of it is is going to vary - you could run an Laundry campaign and not use 50% of the book. But the 50% that you do use is going to serve you well.

Aspect Magic, Part 1

This is a very short overview of the magic system that I'm developing for my Fate Core fantasy world. I don't have a lot of the mechanics down, and actually have a much longer description that I'm not going to go into (yet).

Basically, magic use ties directly into Fate Core aspects. Not just that when you cast spells you can declare aspects, but the very act of using aspects is magic. Aspects are a fungible thing that actually exists in the metaphysics of the game world. For the time being they are called Aspects (with a Capital A) within the game world, but I'm leaning toward something like "Virtues". It's kind of similar to the concept of Plato's Forms, but not quite - an individual's aspects are their own independent metaphysical thingies, and not shadows or copies of some higher form. All of the aspects that make up a thing, whether it's an object or a character, are interconnected to one another - and those aspects are connected, indirectly, to others around them. I've described it as My Little Relationship Map: Aspects Are Magic (or, alternately, Magic Is Aspects). Normal aspect use and using magic to manipulate aspects comes from the same source - the difference is that using magic, you can bend or break the rules.This may sound a bit like metagaming the metagame, and in some ways it totally is.

I've been revisiting my write-up on Sigils for this. This is leading me toward this style of magic (called Evocation as a working name, but may change because that doesn't quite fit) being worked by inscribing Sigils on to things. The Sigils take common forms, that are customized when they are inscribed for the exact effect and the nature of the aspects involved. That takes it kind of full circle, because this whole exercise is to create a magic system for the fantasy setting I'm working on that supports my inspirations in the Thief video game series, Dishonored and other similar worlds.

Thief Glyphs, from Thief: The Dark Wiki

I've already gotten a number of really great suggestions for setting it up, but for the time being I don't have a lot of details. Right now it's moving toward something similar to Tolkien's magic or the True Names of LeGuin's Earthsea novels (but with a slight difference, because here we're actually changing the aspects instead of trying to compel them - no pun intended - into doing something).

The bucket list for the fiddly bits so far is:

1. You can't create something from nothing.
2. "Deeper" aspects (possibly those things that affect the core aspect, or high concept) result in more powerful magic. Thanks to +Teo Tayobobayo's post on "flat" vs. "round" aspects, I kind of have an angle on this.
3. There is possibly an indirect, metaphorical element to how magic is done. Not sure how far I'd go into concepts of contagion and similarity (as I was initially kind of avoiding them) but in the end it might look something like that. Thanks to +Nick Pilon for suggesting that.
4. Powerful magic resonates more strongly among any connected aspects. In the end, it's not that much risk to light up a magic crystal at the end of a staff. But creating The One McGuffin Artifact is something that can result in really big changes. Similarly, the more complex something is (i.e., the more aspects it has) the better the potential to do "great works", and the more risk there is of resonance among the connected aspects.
5. Any side effect from this resonance is taken on somehow (more than likely, as a Consequence) by the caster.
6. Part of magic use is understanding the connections between various aspects. In this way, magic is predictable and repeatable. It's the potential for failure that leads to unforeseen side effects. It also leads to cool scenes with scholars who keep constellation charts - but instead of stars, it charts aspects.

I'll be posting more design-type ramblings as I continue to develop the concept.

Design Journal - Climate (Or How I Learned I Just Didn't Care)

First, I'm not going to be posting any climate maps or anything similar, because honestly I started out pretty strong and then just fucking gave up.

January surface winds and pressure. It's probably wrong. Don't tell me if it is, because I don't give a crap

Basically, I got through portions of this guide on mapping climates and when I got to a particular point, I decided I had enough information to just wing it. Part of that was the realization that there are good parallels that can be drawn with continent placement on Earth - for example, the northeastern most continent is about the same location as Europe, so it's probably not too far off to map climates on the eastern coast to Europe at the same latitudes. The size of the main continent (which, by the way, is about 60% of the land mass of the planet), the odd shape of the landmasses and the lack of significant land masses in the upper latitudes of the southern hemisphere would seem to throw a lot of complication in to the mix (from what I can gather there would be a continuous band of high pressure over the southern oceans year round). I don't have the patience to try to figure out detailed climate for every region in the the whole world.

In the end, with some creative airbrushing and a few extra gradient layers I whipped up, this is what I wound up with:

I know it doesn't look much different than the last one, but there's shading there trust me.

What I learned from the whole process is that while it's nice to have a good overall feel for how climate works, unless you have the patience and inclination (I don't) there's little reason to put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out. That probably will rub a lot of world building types the wrong way, but honestly I'm going to be zeroing in on one region and forgetting about most of the rest of it for quite some time.

Right about there...

So, aside from the pretty much standard advice on desert placement, some rough idea of ocean temperatures and maybe surface pressure, I'd say my best advice on gauging climate is to take a look at similar locations on Earth, make some educated guesses, and then make the rest of it up. Maybe after a while, if I can justify the expense, I'll get something like Fractal Terrains and try to have it automatically generate rainfall and climate or whatever. But nobody should hold their breath.

This really should be me motto for anything I do gaming-wise

I did come up with an interesting technique for the pressure gradients in the first map, driven by my near pathological aversion to hand drawing anything. I was able to adapt this tutorial to generate a layer with a bunch of contour lines, then select the ones I liked and cut and paste them. In the end, they look hand drawn - just not what they would look like if they were hand drawn by me (that red arrow in the image above? Took me four tries before it looked anything like an arrow - I'm a writer, not a drawer).