After the past week of taking a vacation and stressing over two Typhoons that decided to visit the country one after the other, I find myself struggling with something to write about. I think this is just inertia at work, and my brain desperately needs to get warmed up before I can start churning out good articles again.
That said let’s do something quick and easy: Lists!
And for today, let’s take a quick look at Games I’ve yet to play (but desperately want to):
- Mage: the Awakening – But wait, pointyman, don’t you already run a Mage game? Well yes, but I’m eager to actually be on the playing side of things for once. I’ve had a chance to play the new Mage once before, but that wasn’t a very long campaign either.
- Changeling: The Lost – Ever since I’ve had the chance to play Changeling: the Dreaming under (the now Canadian) Zugzugtheorc, I’ve fallen in love with the concept of changeling. The new title’s excellent writing, provocative themes and sheer amount of awesome crammed into the book doesn’t hurt either. For kicks, I might actually translate my old Sluagh from C:tD to C:tL to see how well it translates.
- Geist: The Sin-Eaters - White Wolf’s latest intrigues me. With a new kind of supernatural that hasn’t been done before (like Promethean), this “Storytelling Game of Second Chances” strikes me as a remarkably positive tone as opposed to the defaults of some of the others like Vampire: the Requiem. Definitely something I’m curious to play.
- Spellbound Kingdoms - I was intrigued when I first saw this game, and even now I find the ideas espoused to be original and possibly quite fun… now if only I can get someone to run it for me.
- Deadlands Reloaded! - I’m a sucker for Westerns, and pulp supernatural stuff. Deadlands is chock-full of both. I’d play this at a drop of a hat.
- Fantasy Craft - I’ve been all over the system up down and sideways of this game. All I need now is a GM to come up with a good campaign setting, and I’ll have a character within hours.
- HERO System Supers – 5th edition, Revised or 6th Edition, I don’t really mind either way. The last time I’ve actually played in a Supers campaign was so long ago that I’ve forgotten most of the plot. Time to rectify that situation.
- Eclipse Phase - I don’t know a thing about the system of Eclipse Phase, but the idea of Troubleshooters for Transhumanity has my interest piqued.
- 7th Sea – Talk about late to the party. This game came, conquered and went out of print long before this blog even started, but I’m still stoked to trying this game out.
Each and every one of these games offers something different, and something interesting for me as a player. Each one of them inspires me to build characters (something that I might be doing again soon with more Play This Character! articles on the horizon.)
October 7, 2009
Er… well, the deadlands game didn’t come to complete fruition today as 3 of 4 participants weren’t feeling completely well, me included. The session was funny, if a little strange as Dr. Stein awakens under the care of a doctor hired by Lord Nathan and Lash, two of the group’s most dangerous opponents.
Amos and Lady Noir, anxious to leave, realize that they had lost a companion, and Amos hatches a plan to try and rescue the good doctor. The plan took an interesting turn the moment it involved trying to get a group of mercenaries to impersonate the team to get Lash and Nathan going in separate directions.
At this point the players and myself were showing signs that we were too fatigued to really give our best in the game so I called it a night. As much as the Deadlands game would have been fun, I have to consider the fact that if they’d continued, all parties might be making some weird slip ups.
March 8, 2009
Deadlands enters the last half of play and the stakes are getting even higher. After several weeks of travel, they’ve reached Memphis. Alice got off the boat, off to meet her contact, thanking Amos for the trip, with an agreement that she’d be back after her task. That said, the game turned into quite an interesting turn of events.
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March 1, 2009
Deadlands continues with the team finding the wreckage of a river boat on their journey up the Mississippi to Memphis. Seeing the ship, Amos and crew decide to investigate, first drawing out a corpse of an affluent looking person before noting a strange metallic object under the water. Amos and Cookie decide to swim down to retrieve the artifact, ending up on a tussle with a strange fish/man hybrid that Dr. Stein perforates with his super gun.
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February 23, 2009
Five weeks of Deadlands, and we’re moving into the much delayed Character-centered sessions. This week’s session centers on Nines “Nine Lives” McGee.
The session opens on the ship with Nines leading the team towards a small settlement of Native Americans, to look for the shaman named “Plays-With-Fire,” who was meant to give him more information about the black case that Nines had with him when he began his new life as a captain.
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February 16, 2009
Click to See RV's Deviantart Page!
Lookie, art! Rick (the player of Nines “Nine Lives” Mcgee, Huckster and Captain of the Amos as well as the leader of the Crew of Nine) put up this piece of work up in his Deviantart page. Click the picture to see his Deviantart account and a larger version of this pic!
Anyway, on to the play report…
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February 8, 2009
This week’s Deadlands game was a less structured session as a result of the non-attendance of one of our players, the man behind Shea “Shenanigans” O’Bannon, who was probably unable to make it to the game due to RL concerns. That said, I had a chance to work on getting a different session off the ground, and hopefully address some of the player feedback asking for more character development.
That said, my approach to this session was slightly less structured than usual, breaking out of the “Heist” setup that I had established with the first 2 sessions. This time the Crew of Nine gets to go off on shore leave in Baton Rouge and perhaps spend some of their hard earned money. I figured it would be a good idea to shift the initiative to the players this time and see where they’d go.
Nines went to talk to Samantha, the widow of Amos, the kindly old man who owned the river boat that Nines now travels in. Along with Lady Noir and her brother Sebastian Wayne, they called upon the widow, to deliver a gift and made further arrangements to insure her proper care.
Lady Noir on the other hand got an invitation from a certain Mister Bartholomew West, a Texan from her past, a former customer who meant to invite her to the State Ball as his escort. Lady Noir accepted gracefully, and was looking for an enjoyable party.
Dr. Stien on the other hand, had met up with Dr. Chaos (of the previous heist) eager to see Dr. Chaos’ invention, the Pneumatic Man. Dr. Stein was introduced to the only working prototype of the line of Pneumatic Men, the one known as Paul Pneuman. He was given permission by Dr. Chaos to take Pneuman out for a spin, and off they went to explore Baton Rouge without any clear objective in mind…
That is of course, until they stumbled up on the drunken sailors… drunken sailors that were rather obsessed with stories of a strange ghost by the swamps, a ghost that left men dead, burned into ashes.
On a whim, Dr. Stein and Pneuman headed off to collect anyone to join them in their ghost-busting expedition. Nines and Cookie get dragged into it, and they eventually run into and manage to put down a strange corpse that appears to be on fire. The animated corspe could shoot flames, and was taken down with a valorous charge from Dr. Stein astride his newfound friend, Pneuman.
Their return was met with another complication however when they Nines’ return led him straight to Lash, his twin brother, and Texas ranger, who swore to catch and bring Nines to justice. Lady Noir was on her way to the ship as well, just in time to see that Lash had held Lizzie, the ship’s pilot hostage.
A second combat broke out here, with Lady Noir surprising most of the other players on the table as she began to take a called shot after called shot from the shadows, protecting her identity while neutralizing Lash’s men. Nines avoids being taken hostage with a risky teleportation, which brought on the ire of the Manitou, which threatened to knock him out.
With the opponents routed, Nines and crew gather their belongings and assess the damage and losses, just in case Lash did something dangerous that they hadn’t seen.
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Play Analysis:
I’ve been thinking of how to change the tone of the game a little to improve character moments. Unfortunately I have a feeling that I was ill prepared for this session and while we did manage to give the combat system a workout, it was still just that bit more annoying that I couldn’t hold on to a solid narrative.
I’m putting double the thought and planning for game 4 in order to make sure that I get to find that elusive balance between challenges and character moments.
February 1, 2009
My campaign’s only 2 sessions old and I’m already looking under the hood and checking to see if everything’s running right. I’ve been told sometime before that I do far too much thinking about how I GM, and frankly, I can see why they feel that way.
Right now I’m really happy with how Deadlands is running, the Savage Worlds system is nigh invisible in play, only showing up a bit when it comes to combat. It’s because of this invisibility that the players and myself as the GM end up paying a lot more attention to what happens in the story.
It’s a golden opportunity for me to actually work on my story skills as opposed to my tactics. And so I’m currently working on my next session this weekend, taking notes, researching a location, and putting in as much as I possibly can given my busy schedule.
So far player feedback has been generally been positive, with a request for more character moments. I can’t argue about that request and so I’m currently plumbing my mind to come up with enough situations and interesting NPCs to do the following:
- Engage Character Backstory – Each of the characters has a backstory that can be milked, there are unresolved issues that can and should come into play in order to further their individual storylines.
- Play up Character Strengths - Challenges oriented against character strengths play up their abilities, and make them feel that their characters count. No sense in throwing a saloon girl in a wrestling match after all…
- Generate new plot hooks - As with most of my rpg sessions, I try to find a way to keep it generating plot hooks, unresolved npc issues, secret agendas and recurring villains are all good for this sort of thing.
This kind of calibration is vital to my personal take on running games, by keeping a pulse on the game by drawing feedback from players every session, I answer the question “What do my players want?” and can configure the game differently per session to keep my eye on the sweet spot and keep the game enjoyable for it’s 12 session run.
January 27, 2009
The second week of Deadlands rolls around with another harrowing adventure starring the Crew of Nine! Fresh from the victory of the Mardi Gras Float Heist, the team is then recruited by an old Mad Scientist contact to take on another job with higher stakes!
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January 25, 2009
Campaign structure isn’t actually something that most people put a lot of thought about.. especially if it’s a freewheeling ongoing campaign with no definite deadline. However, our gaming group is currently working on a rolling cycle of multiple “short” campaigns, of about 12 Weeks, or 3 Months long. This, along with splitting my group across 3 GMs running simultaneously gives players a chance to pick which game they want to run in, and yet still get a chance to play in 4 different games in a year.
That said, my current Deadlands: Reloaded! campaign just kicked off last week and is moving on to game 2 tomorrow. I’ve been looking at my current plan, and I’ve got some measure of an outline in place… and so Spoiler-Free here’s what I’ve got in terms of campaign Structure:
- Total of 12 Sessions.
- Divisible into 4 story arcs, of about 3 sessions each
- Each Story Arc should escalate the metaplot forward
- Each Story Arc should include a single session dedicated to playing up a character’s backstory and / or personality
- Each Story Arc should have a few scenes dedicated to developing secondary NPCs
These are my primary milestones. Scattered within these (which I can’t display just yet) are annotations as to Villains, challenges and other things I’m intending to throw at them. With any luck once this is over, I can actually go and review this structure and fill it out as we go, resulting in a completed campaign structure and outline that I can review, as well as my rationale for each session and what I was hoping to achieve, and if I was able to do so.
January 23, 2009
