Mage: the Awakening, Actual Play 3

This week’s game also starred Martin and Yuuko, the same characters from last week.  I won’t go into too much detail on this report, but I will be putting up the highlights.  If anyone’s interested in asking further questions feel free to post on my comments and I’ll answer them and hopefully clear up any questions

The 80’s taught me how to play #5: The Antihero

Antiheroes never really came into their own until the 90’s when violence and depravity started becoming popular in the comic book industry with Dark Knight and other Iron Age comic heroes such as Spawn.  That being said, there’s a certain, nicer kind of antihero that came out during the earlier decade…

The 80’s taught me how to play #4: The Specialist

The 80’s is full of specialists… in fact, I could theoretically cop out and give the entire G.I. Joe team here and claim them all to be specialists, but where’s the fun in that kind of lazy thinking?  So let’s pick a different series and character that exemplifies this trope:

The 80’s taught me how to play #3: The Wingman

Sorry for the late article, I’m currently swept up in the midst of a very busy workweek, so my blogging is already starting to slip. That being said I’m typing this out between work documents and hopefully the end result is still readable.

In, any case… the Wingman! I’ve harped about this guy already in my Hero Spotlight article, and it still stands as one of my default character roles whenever I play a game, but all of that has to come from somewhere right? Well, let’s take a look at another childhood cartoon hero that fits this role…

The 80’s taught me how to play #2: The Lone Wolf

Here we go again.  Lone Wolves have been discussed before, but how do you make a Lone Wolf that’s a vital part of the group without losing his coolness?  Well, we look back again to the 80’s and dredge up another artifact from my misspent youth:

The 80’s taught me how to play #1: The Leader

Being born in 1980 put me right smack in the middle of a time when Western animation was in full swing, coming up with all sorts of great shows with all sorts of awesome characters who would eventually influence the games I ran and the characters I played.  I figure there should be a lot of people out there of my generation who can relate to this as these are the heroes we looked up to, the villains we reviled (and secretly loved), and the stories that we eventually wove into the games we ran.

And so today, we start off with the the one 80’s cartoon character that defines Leadership in my eyes:

Mage: the Awakening, Actual Play 2

brain spiders, anyone?

After 6 weeks of Radio Silence, I finally got back in the saddle and ran the second session of my Mage: the Awakening campaign.  I’m behind schedule but I’m accelerating the timeline so that I can wrap stuff up by the end of January or so.  This week, I had only 2 players, but they tackled a most interesting threat…

RPG Books I own (or have owned) but have never used

I think that in the life of every GM, a few books will come out that you ended up never really using.  Whether by virtue of a bad purchase (along with the accompanying Buyer’s Remorse,) or the fact that you’re the only one who actually liked it in your group.  Even with the advent of the net and the easy availability of reviews regarding pretty much anything, we still get stuck with books we’ve never used or have only used once, before banishing them to the far corners of the bookshelf.

So far, here are the RPG books that I’ve gotten but have insufficiently used

• Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed - I keep hearing good things about this book, but I have not once been able to run a campaign with it.  I managed to get some of my group to try character generation, but it ended there.
• Adventure! – White Wolf’s pulp game had everything in spades, but like most of my efforts to run the pulp genre this one went up in smoke.  To be fair I ran at least 2 sessions for the ill-fated “Z is for Zeppelin!” campaign
• Engel – Another White Wolf book that fell under the radar.  The setting is fantastic, and the whole religious post-apocalyptic setting (and the lovely little plot twist inside) is great… but the D20 implementation failed to impress.
• Werewolf: the Wild West - Shamans and Werewolves who revere the spirits.  I picked this off in the old “Devil made me do it Sale” when they first released Demon: the Fallen.  I’m a sucker for westerns, but I’ve yet to successfully run one.  When I tried to run this all my players opted to play Mages in a western setting instead… and that didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted to either, but that’s another story.
• White Wolf Dark Ages Series – The Dark Ages series for oWoD rocked.  I loved the moodiness of Dark Ages Vampire, adored Dark Ages Mage… and was kind of put down by Dark Ages Werewolf.  I would have gotten Dark Ages Fae to be honest, but by this time I was out of college and looking for a job to pay for my books.  Sadly I was not to run any of these games, but maybe if I convert them to nWod…
• The Red Star RPG from Green Ronin – I loved the Red Star Comic book.  The stories, magic and technology blew me away, but I was never able to get the game take off primarily due to the stigma against the D20 implementation in my group.  Ultimately I had to sell this book off to someone else.
• D20 Modern – the Layout sold me on this book, but the rules made me sell it off.  While the ideas presented were cool… the rules felt too clunky to be a true “Generic” modern day ruleset.  I liked where they were going but they didn’t go far enough.

Ultimately my number of books unused hasn’t quite reached the same number as the books that I have used, thankfully, but if anything at least they make for good side reading and perhaps a source for mining ideas.  I’m curious actually to hear from other RPG gamers, especially GMs who have similar dead weight cluttering their shelves…

We’re already in a Cyberpunk World

If anything the Philippines is already a Cyberpunk Setting.  We’ve got all the elements for a cyberpunk world, though not necessarily in the way that most people would imagine it to be.  While it’s true that stuff like flying cars, invasive cybernetic body part replacement and other technologies are still way beyond anyone’s grasp.  The Philippines is already pretty close to the crazy dystopia that people in Cyberpunk settings always talk about.

Old School is New School

Taking a break from my standard multi-part series posting for now to rest my brain.  Work’s been pretty hectic, and the recent drought of games for the past few weeks have left me wondering about what my next campaign is going to be.