Archive for the ‘Role Playing Game’ Category

I wrote an article on heist movies, You’re Only Supposed to Blow the Bloody Doors Off!!! , for Valkyrie issue 25 several years ago. I’ve been working on game ideas related to that and to a detective based game for quite a while either as a role playing game or as a wargame. I’ve been struggling to find a way to resolve the problem of finding a clue hanging on a single dice roll. While I like Gumshoe system’s solution of no random chance to finding clues I don’t think it would work well in a wargame setting where players are pitted against each other.

Well tonight while I was watching Have I Got News for You an idea came to me and I’ve got three pages of scrawled notes. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll type them up and they’ll make some sense…

Since I seem to be back to more regular blogging a quick post for tonight…

Put the finishing touches to the second in a series of article for Ragnarok earlier tonight. One of those times when looking over some old stuff you get a fresh look at it and realise what it was lacking. In this case it needed more villains, more humour and less high powered good guys. Hence why one 20 page article has spawned two eight page articles and left material for at least three more articles of a similar length.

Also knocked out a two page first draft of some Ravenloft ideas and sent them off to the Fraternity of Shadows.

… He won’t be expecting us then.

A line from one character when friends of mine when playing the original Ravenloft adventure. I wasn’t actually there but I’ve heard it so often it almost feels like community property. I’d played the same scenario back in college so it made sense to me. Back on the 1st I said that I’d been tinkering with my old Ravenloft notes for no good reason. Except now it may not be so frivolous as I may have a couple of players for a game of D&D. Trust me to set that up a couple of months before 4th Edition hits the shops but at least I’ve plenty of material to fall back on and its not like 3rd Edition is a bad system.

So tonight I’ve been picking out a set of appropriate monsters I may use. Like picking a colour pallet for an illustration or a web site I find having a small set of monsters to work with gives a more satisying feel to a campaign than using any old monsters that take my fancy. The adventures end up with a stronger linking theme and can take on a more personal feel for the players. Not to say I won’t throw a monster from out of left field if I think the players have gotten into a habbit of dealing with a particular way. I think of it as the Boromir strategy after Shaun Beans’ great line in Lord of the Rings "They have a cave troll".

I’ve also been devising outlines for four villains. I always like to have four villains on hand. One will be thrown away pretty quickly when either I don’t like them or the players just don’t act like they are scary or villainous. One will probably be defeated early on to give them a false sense of hope and progress. One will appear to be bad but will get munched on by the other remaining villain. Which will leave the last one standing of the four: in Buffy Speak the Big Bad.

After a couple of years of writing more fiction than gaming I’d forgotten how much easier it is to put stuff for a game together. Anyway it looks like I’m going back to the castle and there is every chance it’s night.

I was doing some tidying up and sorting out over the weekend when I came across the files of notes from my old gaming campaigns I ran at University. Leafing through them was a bad idea as I found the Ravenloft campaigns I ran for several years as introductory games for freshers. Some would say Ravenloft wasn’t the best setting for new role players to start with but I always found it worked. Its low magic level and focus on humans rather than a polyglot of fantasy races made it easier to get new players of AD&D 2nd Ed started without a lot of the clutter and confusion. Best of all though it was easy to tell them what the world was like: think of a Hammer Horror film.

Anyway back then access to computers for frivolous, none academic work, was difficult to get so pretty much everything except the odd hand out is hand written. All of my maps and diagrams are hand drawn on tracing paper with ink mostly with my Rotering 0.2mm pen which was my favourite for design work because I didn’t tend to end up having a sheet covered in nasty ink marks.

I came across my reworking of the Ravenloft world and for no good reason started redrawing it on the computer. I’ve no really good reason for doing this other than finally I can have the whole map visible at once and I can see how some of the bit it was hard to draw or change by hand go together. My swapping round of some of the domains not for thematic reasons but to put similar ecosystems and climates together. Replacing the shadow rift. Increasing most of the areas by a factor of ten, although keeping some domains almost at their original size. Bringing more of the domains in to the core to add new regions and make the sustainability of the whole world more believable. Anyway two evenings and most of Sunday later I’m pleased to say the old hand drawn version seems to have held up to the passage of time.

The down side is I didn’t write the lighting tutorial I ment to or work on any fiction and since I don’t expect to run a game any time soon its pretty much lost time… like when you take a 10 minute shower and when you get out an hour has past.

Prosaic plot twists, stilted dialogue, unbelievable characters, outmoded attitudes and sinister bad guys who are rotten foreigners to boot! No not the latest sequel from Sylvester Stallone but the 1938 Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes which I’ve just been to see at the Liverpool Philharmonic an action, comedy thriller from another time. I enjoyed it, although not as much as the people in the row behind who may have drunk a little too much before coming to the show. The quality of some of the model work was excellent, even by today’s standards and would embaress some computer graphics work I’ve seen in modern films. The plot suffers because many of the original twists and turns have since been reused so often that they have gone beyond cliche. Still I suspect that Miss Froy might give Bond or Bourne a tough time in a fair or an unfair fight.

If I ever get round to doing new work on Under Stairs Over Stairs an adventure in the style of The Lady Vanishes could prove to be fun.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to post about the passing of Gary Gygax. I came to role playing just as 2nd Edition AD&D took hold so many of his classic works past me by. However the hobby he was one of the founders of has been an influence on my life along with many others and for that I mourn his passing. Clearly I’m not alone…

• Dark Dwarf
• John August
• Steve Jackson
• What is Aegis Prime?

A couple of cartoon tributes on…

• XKCD
• Order of the Stick

And finally more obituries than I was expecting…

• The Guardian
• BBC
• The Independent
• The New York Times
• The Times
• A second shorter article from The Times
• Wired

A month ago I posted a beta version of a simple models house for wargamers and role players. I’ve had some feedback on it: a request for chimney stacks, variations of the ends and an extension for the ends. I’ve also added some assembly instructions too. I’ve posted the first of the PDFs this morning (25mm House Model) and I’ll make the other PDFs over the next few days and upload them as I do.

Update: These models are now available free from the impworks web site cardboard buoings page.

I started work on a set of simple, cardboard building models using pepakura originally for Serious and Organised but which, like Serious and Organised, I’ve yet to finish. A discussion on the SFSFW mailing list kicked me into finishing a simple one of a house. It can either be used as a single, semi-detached house or by putting several together a terrace. I’ve got additional bits that can be used to customise this model in the works including chimney stacks and extensions for the ends and rear but I’ve not textured them yet. I’ve made versions for 28mm, 25mm and 15mm gaming and I suggest printing them on thin (160gms) white card for use. Assemble the walls together first, then add the roof and finally add the base. You can leave off the base if you want as they are reasonably rigid without it.

Download the PDF of the models:

• 28mm House Model
• 15mm House Model

Any comments or suggestions either drop me an e-mail or leave a comment on my blog.

Update: The 25mm model is now out of Beta and available free from the impworks web site cardboard buoings page.

Not a huge amount of cop (or other stuff done) today. Spent the morning at the eye clinic and the rest of the day in a darkened room recovering. What I can’t figure out is why every time I go there I come away with a bad back. Did do a little bit of polishing or Serious and Organised.

More robbers than Cops tonight really. Just finished watching The League of Gentlemen which arrived from Amazon today. Not the situation comedy but the film from 1960 that the series took its name from in which Jack Hawkins and a hand picked crew of ex soldiers stage a bank robbery. The focus is on the build up to the main heist and builds the tension gently along the way. The ensemble cast are nicely drawn by a cast including Richard Attenborough and Terence Alexander. The score is in the style of classic British war films and some of the montage sequences also remind me of the sequences found in 1940s war films.

But this is a film with its feat planted in the 60s. I’d only seen it on afternoon TV before and there were some subtle cuts to the version I’d seen before. Jack Hawkins swears, we see the dirty magazines one of the crew is selling for a living and their are oblique references to one of the crews sexuality. While not a laugh a minute comedy there are humorous moments. The League of Gentlemen certainly isn’t a gritty social commentary. I’ve always thought the ending is a little rushed and the outcome a little weak however the process of getting there is enjoyable.