Collateral Damage Issue #2: Super Shenanigans at Camp Hammond
Welcome again gentle reader to the continuation of this amazing series chronicling the exploits of the West Coast’s newest Super Hero team: Collateral Damage” powered by the all new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying technology!
Featuring
The One Man Army (AKA TOMA): A Sino-Arab mutant that can multiply in seemingly unlimited numbers. Prone to get into a lot of trouble but he has plenty of hands to handle it.
The Great Gregory: A man that can see exactly one minute into his immediate future. Bored of scamming casinos and doing clever magic tricks, he seeks a more “interesting” lifestyle as a hero.
The Magnificent Nightcrawler: Not quite the exact same lovable swashbuclking teleporter mutant from Earth-616, but pretty damn close.
Tsunami: Adorable Idoru-like water-controlling nuclear physicist whose links to her former humanity are tenuous at best.
Previously…
The members of the soon-to-be-formed Collateral Damage met in a seedy L.A. aquatic acrobatic circus where Nightcrawler and Tsunami got attacked by a band of ninjas led by the Silver Samurai. Learning to work together surprisingly fast, our heroes evacuated the place, flooded the whole theater and turned it into a gigantic Taser, making short work of the ninjas and the poor heavily armoured samurai.
As the police took the villains into custody, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in charge supervising the new team announced that they were flying to Stanford Connecticut for their official Hero training…
Pain of Publication Review: “Dinocalypse Now”
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, actually getting work done, reviewed Low Town and Alloy of Law, and finally about writing knowing full well you are going to revise.
Background
Spirit of the Century is a successful and well-regarded gaming line done by Evil Hat Productions. Only being vaguely aware of the original game, I believed it was about airships during the turn of the century time. When given the opportunity to review a complimentary advanced review copy of Spirit of the Century original fiction by Chuck Wendig, I leapt at the opportunity. I was curious how I would perceive it knowing little about the license. Simply put, I was impressed. With Wendig’s mixing of pulpy goodness and a dash of panache, he effortlessly cooks up an exciting story set in the Spirit of the Century universe that stands on its own without knowing the original book. [Read the rest of this article]
Defeat Your Invincible Enemy Using This One Weird Old Trick
I just finished Mass Effect 3. As you may have heard, there is some controversy over the ending to the game (which I will not spoil). I loved the game, as I did its predecessors, but I too thought the ending wasn’t up to par. The ending to Mass Effect 3 is not what I’m here to discuss today. Rather, I’m here to discuss the beginning. You find out in the first 15 minutes of the game that an unstoppable alien force has taken over Earth, is working on conquering the rest of the galaxy, and nobody has a military strong enough to beat them. Under normal circumstances, everyone would be completely hosed. However, somebody found some plans for some doohickey that can turn the tides of war (somehow), and you spend the game rallying all the peoples of the galaxy together and trying to build this thing, unsure if anything is going to turn out OK even if everything goes as planned.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Find, Find A Magic Amulet
In both fantasy and science fiction, it’s a fairly common theme to pit unlikely heroes against impossible odds. In very few circumstances do we said unlikely hero train and practice for years to become strong enough to beat his enemy — in many cases, the fan has been thoroughly defecated upon and the problem needs to get solved as soon as possible. That means something really unusual needs to happen in order for the good guys to win.
Sometimes it means the hero finds some hidden source of strength that he can use to beat the enemy. This might be some magical item he goes questing for, or getting in touch with his inner golden hypermullet monkey powers. It may be a matter of surviving long enough to find and gain the help of someone who is strong enough to win. A twist on this is defeating an otherwise unstoppable foe by exposing and exploiting a weakness. If the bad guy always wins because he’s invulnerable, getting the Sword Of Cuts Everything No Takebacks Infinity is going to be necessary to beat him. The protagonists could foil the plans of an evil nobleman who keeps sending troops and assassins to kill them by exposing him to someone who can strip him of power.
The common thread to these things is that the good guys can’t win on their own. There will be no straight fight that ends in good times. Another way has to be found. This can be a good thing or a bad thing for a story (or an RPG adventure). [Read the rest of this article]
Steve Townshend on Adventure Design Podcast
Mike Shea of Sly Flourish and Steve Townshend, freelance WotC designer and trained actor, discuss the ins and outs of great adventure design in this most recent Critical Hits podcast. Listen in as Steve gives his three top tips for good adventure design, discusses how to draw players into the story, gives ideas on making your players love your NPCs, and discusses improvisation tips for being an active storyteller at your table.
Steve Townshend on Adventure Design (67 minutes, 69 MB)
[Download MP3 Version | Podcast Feed | iTunes Link]
Steve’s work:
Chatty’s Mailbox: Playing Castle Death for First Timers
This week, reader Franky B sent me an email about my Castle Death RPG. I found that publishing it and my answer would make for a great Friday post.
Here’s the email, paraphrased from French:
I love your articles, especially those where you share your game sessions. Your last series on Castle Death blew my mind. I’m the father of a soon-to-be 10 daughter and I think that she would love to play this kind of game with me.
Never having been a Game Master, I’m not sure I’d be able to run the game with just a blank piece of paper and a D6. Do you have any kits, books, maps or something similar to suggest that could help me jump start things? Since this would be a first experience, I feel it has to be very cool, or chances are it will be the only time. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty on Creativity: Muting the Judge and the What If Exercise.
Creativity Away From the Judge
Creativity is a strange, untamed beast. The mental process to generate ideas is a fickle one. I agree with author Stephen King when he says, in his essay “On Writing,” that ideas are not created but rather recognized and combined in one’s mind. Ideas are as much about opportunity (being receptive and available) as they are about the willingness to use them creatively.
The obstacles that people have when trying to come up with ideas are many and covering them would go beyond the scope of this blog post. In the technical/scientific/geek circles I travel in though, I would probably say that the greatest idea killer is “The Judge,”* that state of mind where ideas get discarded before being given a fair amount of consideration.
Ideas have no practical values, they are just glimpses of possibilities, most of which eventually get discarded. The problem with that is that judging ideas takes a lot of “brain space”, the same space that you need to generate ideas in the first place. In essence, people who evaluate and discard ideas as they are presented to them create a creative chokepoint that slows, and often kills the creative process.
Ideas are easy for me. I like to think it is because I can stem my internal judging process until after the point where I’ve had enough time to jot down enough ideas to start moving on to the next creative stage. Also, like many other things in my life, I’ve tried to make a game out of my creative process to motivate me to create more.
My favourite one remains the “What If” game. I’ve discussed it a few times before but I thought it would be fun to explore it in more detail here. [Read the rest of this article]
The Swag of Yore
These people understand.
I was born in 1975, so I got to spend the entire 80′s fully cognizant of the gigantic vortex of awesome I was daily marinating in. Once the entire Star Wars trilogy, He-Man, the Thundercats, and Ghostbusters came into play, my imagination was pretty much stocked. There are certain part of my childhood that, after knowing some history, I can’t believe existed. For instance, we had a D&D Saturday morning cartoon and we could walk into most toy stores and pick up official AD&D action figures and monsters. In the 80′s. During all the Satanism scare WTF.
Today, we have D&D merchandise, but it’s much more limited in scope. What happened?
Called Shot: Gamers?
Either my parents didn’t know about all the D&D/Satanism hullabaloo in the 80′s, or they rightly dismissed it as stupidity. Either way, my brother and I had lots and lots of D&D stuff to play with. Oddly, though we did have a Red Box set, I don’t think I ever actually played the actual D&D roleplaying game with my brother until my late teens. Had lots of adventures in the Forgotten Realms? Battled evil monsters from the Monster Manual (though we didn’t know it)? Yes, both of those, and lots.
The strange thing about the cartoon, the toys, and a lot of the other random D&D stuff we had was that it really didn’t feel like it pushed you toward playing the tabletop RPG at all. I remember seeing the occasional ad for the games, and the toys shared the same art style and graphic design as the later AD&D books, but they weren’t marketed as supplements or anything directly game-related at all. They were toys, and games, and books with an awesome fantasy flavor.
Sometimes, liberties got taken from the original source material. For instance, Lolth appears in the D&D cartoon as less of a dark goddess and more of an evil lady who tricks people and turns into a gross spider with the face of an angry Winona Ryder.
Sometimes the material was true to the books but only those familiar with the books knew it. I always thought the Acrobat and Cavalier were strange class choices until I read Unearthed Arcana a few years later. The really bizarre thing is that the D&D cartoon was cancelled the year UA came out — previously, those classes had only appeared in Dragon Magazine and the D&D cartoon. Today, we have D&D Insider for these things. Back then, all we had was a magical teenage pole-vaulter with a fur bikini and an awesome perm. And Ralph Malph.
Marketing Tie-Ins
It seems to me like D&D was being marketed to a much broader audience than gamers back then. Though I’m absolutely certain someone will prove me wrong within nanoseconds of writing this, it doesn’t seem like D&D gets a lot of spotlight time outside of gamer circles. Which, on the surface, is double extra weird because, back then, D&D was owned by TSR (a game company) and now WotC is owned by Hasbro (a much larger toy and game company).
These days, we have tabletop games, board games, and videogames. And belt buckles. Now, don’t get me wrong. I want a D&D belt buckle. But I long for my favorite game not to occupy a niche I have to explain to people. (At least, in the 80′s, all you had to explain was how you weren’t casting real spells using your immortal soul as the currency of the damned. I don’t like explaining things, OK?)
I do not have a marketing degree, nor do I have any idea what WotC could do to put a Dire Chicken In Every Pot™. (P.S. I get royalties if that gets used.) What I do have are desires and silly ideas.
Let me get this out of the way first: I cannot believe that we’ve had 4 blockbuster movies about sparkly vampires and werewolf emotions and the best Dragonlance movie I can get appears to be the product of a compromise between two warring animation houses that couldn’t decide on 2d or 3d. We can shrink Sean Astin to hobbit-size, we for damn sure can shrink Ryan Gosling to kender-size or just hire Snooki or something. (Maybe Gosling’s body but Snooki’s voice? Gotta get the kender-taunt just right.) Technology has finally invented Benedict Cumberbatch, so he can voice Lord Soth too when he’s done with Smaug.
Obviously, I’d grant my son all the D&D swag I had as a child and more. I want my son to be able to buy a Sword +5, Holy Avenger in a toy store, and have it glow unless he steals something or lies to me. I want to buy big, cool plastic monsters right out of the Monster Vault. I want a plush owlbear. I want good quality D&D cartoons (rendered in either 2d or 3d but not both!) and I want him to be able to tell tales of the Forgotten Realms and Eberron and Dark Sun like I tell about Eternia and Thundera and Cybertron. I also hope their plots hold up better than the cartoons of my youth but that is beside the point.
Those of you who’ve attended Gen Con probably know how fun this is: I want D&D themed food, especially at fast food places. I want to eat the McIllithid and drink Sahaugin Shakes. I want Beholder Bites. I want Fries +2. I want themed cups, and I for damned sure want cool Happy Meals with neat monsters and treasure. C’mon, I still have fond memories of the Astrosniks. Give me an Elemental Princes of Evil Happy Meal. I wanna see all the crazed soccer moms who used to hoard Beanie Babies lining up for days trying to get the elusive Cryonax figure.
Tears Shed For Decades Of Swag That Never Were
Eh, who am I kidding? I would have hoarded it just like the other stuff I actually did hoard and the majority would likely have the same honored place in my closet and crawlspace. But it really would have been cool and I do hope we see a few tendrils of our favorite game snake out into the mainstream.
Thinking about how vastly different D&D’s marketing approach has become over the last 30 years has really intrigued me (and may warrant a future article in which I am not full of crap). If you are chock full of this info, please let me know so that I may mine the contents of your brain.
Until then, I will wait for the day I can buy an Otiluke brand refrigerator.
Photo Credit
Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 3
No actual orks were harmed during the writing of this post
Welcome back to this last post of a short series featuring my son Nico and I playing a simple d6-based RPG I created called Castle Death. In Part 1, I described the game’s core rule and character creation. In Part 2, we started playing and created new mechanics to complement the game experience. Today we follow Nico’s adventure as he start interacting with the game’s setting more.
The Implied Setting of Castle Death…
…is nonexistent. I made the title up as I invited my son to play the game. It could have been “The Caves of Xenu”, “The Moon Temple of the Dinosaur God” and even “Lords of the Mecha Dance Hall.” Anything that will pull a 10 y.o. from World of Warcraft to play with his old man/woman is a fine excuse. In fact I think I’ll use one of those next time.
Meet Pit Trap Mac
Chatty: Okay so you’re in a corridor that links the pillared halls of sculptures to rooms deeper in the dungeon. A very strong smell of food and spices permeates the area. There’s a big square hole that takes up the whole corridor ahead. There are doors on both side of the corridor before the pit.
Nico: Do I roll the dice now?
Well not all the time, you actually have to explore and describe what you try to do before stuff happens.
Okay, well then I’ll go see what’s in the hole. Can I roll now?
(Laughing) Sure, roll the D6. (He rolled a 4, meaning a somewhat positive outcome… that gave me an idea). All right, so you see this smiling face with a goatee staring up from the bottom of the pit. He says “Heeeeey Buddy! How you doin?”
I’m doing fine! What are you doing in the pit?
Oh this? That’s nothing, just a temporary thing while I rest up my sprained ankle. Gee listen amigo, you wouldn’t happen to have some rope hidden in that loot bag of yours right?
No I’m sorry. I don’t. Do I know you?
Know me? Haven’t you heard of me compadre? I’m Mac, legendary adventurer®, slayer of slayables and looter of lootables!
(And thus was Pit Trap Mac created) [Read the rest of this article]
Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 2
In Part 1, I described how I sat down with my 10 y.o. son Nico and prepared, in mere minutes, a RPG session using a very simple game mechanic:
Whenever you wish to perform a task whose outcome is uncertain, Roll a d6. On a 6 you succeed with great success, on a 1 you fail horribly. All intermediate results are interpreted based on the ongoing story.
The Adventure Begins
I took my pad of graph paper and flipped to an empty page. On it, I drew a very large rectangle taking about 3/4 of the whole sheet and put a set of double doors on one side. I then added a sinewy path leading from the castle to an out-of-scale village.
Chatty: All right, Bersork makes his way to the Castle’s entry, the huge double door seems to be barred from behind. What do you do?
Nico: Can I force it open?
Sure, roll for it (he rolled a 3), ahhh I’m sorry but it apprears you aren’t strong enough to open it…
I use my axe to break it down. Can I roll again?
Nah, you’ll get the door “open” no problem but you’ll alert the whole place, are you ok with that?
O The Tangled Webs We Weep, When Breathe We Don’t When Go To Sleep
Ever since I was a wee lad, I’ve always had really vivid dreams. On occasion, this translates into really vivid nightmares, which sucks mightily. Usually, though, it just means I’m going to have a good story to tell come the dawn. Well, that is, until I found out I had sleep apnea. Turns out, one of the side effects of stopping to take a break during sleep to not breathe every few minutes is that you never really leave REM sleep — causing incredibly vivid dreams. Getting a machine to help with that provides me with a lot more energy during the day, but I only get a tiny fraction of the WTF I used to reap each night. This week, however, my sinuses have decided to clog up everything, making it really hard for my machine to blow air down my throat to keep me breathing normally. And that meant it was SHOWTIME.
It all started off fairly innocuously. I was at my parents’ house, waiting to go to a weekly board game night at the local community college with my dad. I really wish this existed. It was like a little mini-convention, but everyone there was really laid back and the lights were low and it was really mellow and it made me feel like how adults looked to me when I was a kid. I say this never having gone there in the dream, just remembering it, because my dad was taking forever. I was getting impatient enough to wander around the house, which apparently had become the Christmas village in a department store since I’d moved out. After pacing a few times around a few snowy gumdrops, my dad decided it was finally time to go.
When I was very young, probably 5 or 6, I read an article in Parade magazine called “You Can Control Your Dreams”. I didn’t really understand what it was trying to tell me to do at the time, but the concept that I could take a bad dream and decide to take it in a much better direction was extremely appealing to a little boy who would sometimes wake up terrified in his parents’ bed not knowing how he got there. I tried to control the nightmare I had that very night — Darth Vader had taken over the playground at my school, and several Imperial Stormtroopers had their blaster rifles pointed at me. I made it so their blasters could only fire Finger Pops. I was ecstatic. However, that was about as far as I could take it, and I soon woke up all freaked out as Vader and his men were about to get me.
So it was from then on. I’d get a little nudge, but not full control. I’ve managed to erase tornadoes from nightmares, only to have the storm continue or find another threat emerging. I’ve managed to summon the Sword of Omens to smite my nemesis, only to find it’s made of plastic. Having a useless power is almost worse than being completely helpless.
So it was that my dad was finally ready to go, but instead of going to the Community College Weekly Mellow Game Con, we went to K-Mart. I think we were going to go buy a swingset, and we were in a really bizarre truck that had the engine in the back, no windshield or doors, and pretty much exposed you to all the elements. I think it had seatbelts. I remember being very keen on making sure of that. It was wintertime in the dream, so I wasn’t real happy about riding in this truck to begin with. Fortunately, we somehow found ourselves having the argument about riding to K-Mart in front of said K-Mart, so we just sort of went in. (Arguments as an alternative source of clean transportation energy?)
I can’t tell you what shifted in the dream just then, but I noticed something odd in the dream. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever it was, it shifted everything toward the worse. I became aware of the fact that the FBI was coming for me, because I’d mistakenly hacked into a server somehow and looked at a secret file that I didn’t understand. I remember my conscience being clean, it all being just a big misunderstanding, but knew they wouldn’t see it that way. They were coming for me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw my son happily running around the lumber section of the K-Mart, and I cried knowing I wouldn’t get to see him grow up.
I heard someone pull up outside. For a moment, my heart rose, thinking it was my mom come to pick me up and whisk me away. It was the police, and they had replaced my dad with an agent meant to act in his stead wearing a weird leisure suit. Weird Leisure-Dad explained what was about to happen to me, disingenuously pausing to call me “son” every few seconds, and then a Clearly Evil person in charge showed up. I apologized and cried. He laughed and had me stand on a large couch cushion. “For science”, he said. I didn’t understand. Shaking his head, he declared the experiment a failure, and told me to go sit on a nearby porch swing. I noticed it was rusting and ready to fall apart. ”For science,” he gestured toward the contraption, leering cruelly.
I’ve seldom been happier to wake up.
Even today, I haven’t mastered lucid dreaming. On the rare occasion that I realize I’m dreaming, I’ve usually got about 15 seconds before I wake. I’ve had people suggest looking upward and spinning, scrambling the dream somehow and putting you in control. That makes me dizzy and in a dark, dangerous place. I used to try pushing my temples in to wake up. That was a nice thought, and it got me dream-killed a couple times.
The other fun part of sleep apnea? Sometimes it comes with sleep paralysis. That’s when you wake up (or think you do), and you can’t move, and you can’t breathe. Sometimes, your brain is still in dream-mode, and the stuff my subconscious makes when I’m scared ain’t nice. I’ve dreamt or hallucinated so many ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and packs of ravenous wolves coming to claim my paralyzed body that I feel like I’ve really stimulated the supernatural economy over the years.
I had a really mild bout of sleep paralysis that night, as well:
I felt like the bed was at a 45 degree angle, and I was slowly sliding off, only it never stopped. I figured out I was dreaming and calmed down a little when the aliens from They Live were holding a potpourri party.
Shortly thereafter, I drifted back to sleep to find myself in a world under attack by aliens. Or tornadoes. Or energy trees. This part was extremely chaotic. It was like watching a sci-fi movie where I really had no control over what was going on, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I was there or watching it. What I do remember is a bunch of guys dressed like the Ghostbusters giving each other high fives like they’d saved everyone and a bunch of government types sneering at them and calling them losers.
Then, I felt it again. The same shift I’d felt before, only less subtle. More deliberate. I saw something gold skitter past the corner of my vision, but then it was gone.
The shift wasn’t quite as traumatic this time out. Well, for me anyway. Suddenly the tone of the dream is pretty mellow and most everything is rebuilt. I’m driving around my small town making sure every building and structure has a colorful kite or enormous hair tie stuck to it. Apparently, this was how the aliens were defeated. The scene cuts to a ruined house, where one of the Ghostbuster-type guys is milling about when he finds one of the female scientists featured prominently in the earlier movie-action part. Then he says “so when did you find out you were pregnant?” and then her belly suddenly goes from zero to “we better go shopping at Target right now“. This didn’t seem particularly unusual to either of them, but as a father I wondered where they would find a duffel bag to hurriedly pack with a bunch of things they will be completely wrong about needing at the hospital later.
Then, I feel that weird shift again. Then, I see a gnome in full plate mail, gold and glittering, drop from the sky to land right in front of me. He hands me something purple. Then I wake up.
I woke up knowing full well what the gnome had given me.
He was an agent of the GM running my dream. He gave me a plot point. Apparently, my subconscious runs Cortex+.
I’d like to think this was all an elaborate night-long multi-dream joke my subconscious played on me, but more likely it just sort of progressively interpreted some earlier stuff into the golden plot-gnome. Either way, my son looked very strangely at me when I woke up laughing.
Photo Credit
