Convention Season On The Horizon!

While the rest of the US is preparing for Thanksgiving and Xmas, I've got other things on my mind, namely two conventions in the first six weeks of 2015 and the four games I've signed up to run.

First up is Chupacabracon in Austin.  Last year was its first time out of the gate and they did a fantastic job.  This year looks to be bigger and better (though I'm a little concerned about the venue).  I'll be running two DC Adventures games: "Justice League Unlimited: The Return of Lex Luthor," and "Young Justice: Apokolips Now!"  The latter is a game I first ran at OwlCon a few years ago that I'm extremely proud of.  The former is an all-new one that I'm currently writing.

Then, in early February, we've got OwlCon.  I'm running a Shadowrun 5th ed. session called "ShadowRErun" that pretty much exists as a title and general premise at the moment.  I plan on getting that written over my xmas break (the latter half of December), as it's going to be a pretty major undertaking. 

The last game is ICONS Assembled Edition, "ICONS of the Multiverse."  I'm taking characters and settings from the awesome Sentinels of the Multiverse card game and adapting them to ICONS.  It's gonna be a hoot.

So, that's how I'll be spending the rest of the year.  What are your plans?

The Initiative: Superhero RPG Appendix N Challenge

I found out about this from Age of Ravens who got it from Barking Alien, who said:

I challenge you, the Superhero RPG GM, and/or player, to list between 5 and 10 Superhero comic books, and 5 to 10 Superhero live action or animated shows or films, that typify your style of Superhero RPG campaign.

Minimum is 5. Maximum is 10. This means you have to really think about the ones that best embody the type of Supers gaming you prefer. Who's up for the challenge?

Saddle up kids, this is gonna be fun!

(My favorite moment from any of Marvel's "Initiative" Books. It seemed appropriate.)

 Comics:

First and foremost, Bill Willingham's Elementals: It's a comic I can't extricate from supers gaming, because I'm a weirdo who started reading comics so he could run supers games. My first supers game was Villains & Vigilantes and Willingham's Death Duel With the Destroyers was the first adventure I ever read.  Also, he was one of the first writers to really look at the "Supers Meet the Real World" idea years before Watchmen.  While I don't always run games in that style, I do have a strong need for internal consistency and well thought-out settings.

Second, Bob Haney's utterly INSANE run on The Brave and the Bold in the 1970s.  Oh. My. Zod.  This comic was utterly and completely bonkers and I mean that in the best way possible.  The tone shifts between crazy stuff (vampires, extraterrestrials) and utterly mundane threats (heroin smugglers and hippies), all featuring special guest stars who often violate established continuity (usually in wonderful ways).  For instance, at one point, Batman teams up with Wildcat, who was strictly an Earth-2 guy at the time.  NO EXPLANATION IS GIVEN.  As world-renowned Batmanologist Chris Sims put it, the whole thing seems to exist in it's own Haney-verse.

So, if I love internal consistency and well-thought out settings, what am I doing here?  Mostly, I'm reminding myself that comics are supposed to be fun and that the mad, beautiful ideas of superhero stories seldom roll out of immaculately built worlds.

Third, Kurt Busiek's amazing Astro City.  This is the book that got me back into comics when I'd given up on the medium in the 90s (yes, I was in danger of becoming the worst of all supers gamers: the one who doesn't read comics anymore).  It probably rates higher in many respects, but I'm putting it here because it's just about a perfect synthesis of the first two: a setting that manages to feel consistent, a setting with the weight of history, but a history that has to take Moon Men, Lava Kings, and life-sized sentient Barbie dolls into account.




Number four is Geoff Johns' run on JSA. Back in the day, I loved Roy Thomas' "All-Star Squadron" and "Infinity, Inc." (in fact, I've got a sketch of Liberty Belle and Firebrand from the Squadron on my wall that I commissioned from Jerry Ordway back in 1985). I loved the sense of history and legacy those comics brought to the table, and always felt they got a raw deal in the Crisis.  Over the ensuing decades, DC attempted to bring back the JSA, but never got it right. Finally, in 1999, they took one more stab with James Robinson and David Goyer at the helm that got things off to a good start.  For my money, the book really came into its own when Geoff Johns took over the helm.  I'm the first to shake my fist at his many excesses in recent years, but there is no doubt his run on the book spoke to my heart and affected me as a GM and as a writer.  In fact, my sole published adventure to date ("Sins of the Past" for ICONS, you should totally check it out) is pretty much one long love letter to Johns' JSA.

Number five is Legion of Super-Heroes.  I'm not going to confine my love here to a single run, as there is so much good throughout the history of the comic.  I loved the pre-Crisis LSH, the post-Crisis, the Reboot, the Clones, even Waid and Kitson's nutty kids.  I love big sprawling casts and cosmic scale adventures and for that, you gotta have the Legion.

(But let's be honest.  Levitz's stuff was the best.)



Six is New Teen Titans.  The first fifty issues or so, up through Donna Troy's wedding to that horrible perv.  I got into comics when NTT was about a year and a half into its run and the first issue was still affordable enough to accumulate a complete run (which I sincerely wish I hadn't sold many years ago).  "The Judas Contract" is still my gold standard for long-term plotting and payoff, and Deathstroke is still my ideal smart supervillain (the dude figured out Batman's secret ID, yo!).  I've never been able to pull off an epic reveal like Terra's heel turn, but someday, it could happen.



Hmmm...that's a lot of DC stuff.  Let me switch gears...

Number seven: Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker's Immortal Iron Fist is a masterpiece.  It takes the craziness of superhero existence and mixes in a deep love for kung fu cinema and even fighting games.  When I play supers games, my favorite archetype is the Martial Artist, and their Danny Rand's adventures are among the most gameable I've read in comics.  It's a superhero book that didn't just impact my supers games, it carried over into other action genres as well.

Number eight:  You know who's really great at crazy comics stuff?  Grant Morrison. I know, right?  Yeah, New X-Men was effin' brilliant. For a GM, it's a great lesson in looking at this vast canvas of a setting, finding the parts you want to use, saying "screw it" to the rest, and then twisting and turning it to fit your particular vision.  Also, leather jackets look cooler than spandex.  Also, also, weird is good, in small doses.

One more, so I can say I came in under ten.  Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America.  I have a deep love for super-spy games, having run a few and aspired to even more.  Brubaker's Cap, while marred by the unfortunate events of Civil War remains a brilliant superpowered techno-thriller.  If you want to see how to take a character who is bright, shiny, and decent put into the dirt with the worst of the worst and still shine, here's your example.  It's one of those runs I go back and read over and over again.




TV/Films:

Hoo-boy.  This is gonna be hard to pare down.

The first and obvious choice is Batman: the Animated Series.  I remember coming home from work every night and watching it on VCR.  When it moved to Saturdays, I had a reason to not sleep in.  How much influence has it had on me?  Well, I wrote a sixty page campaign guide for a city called Meridian that was completely inspired by B:tAS's Gotham.  I've written extensively about running a supers game in an "animated" style and the work of Messers Timm, Dini, and Burchett was ground zero for my love of animated supers.

Superman: the Animated Series is number two. Everyone has their definitive takes on characters.  This is my Superman.  From a gaming standpoint, it offers so many things: how to handle extremely powerful characters, how to use guest stars to build a world, and best of all, how to create epic threats and yet keep the human element relevant.  Also, when in doubt, raid Kirby.  If you're gonna swipe, swipe from the best.

Numero tres:  Justice league/Justice League Unlimited: Are you sensing a trend here?  If Superman taught me how to build the world out, JL/JLU taught me how to handle that virtual cast of thousands.  It got me off my ass in the lull after my son was born and got me running a supers game again.  It also gave me one of my best ever convention one-shots, "JLU: The Return of Lex Luthor," which I'll be running again at this year's Chupacabracon.

Fourth goes to The Specials.  Yes, really, a low-budget superhero comedy about a team of third-raters who's biggest moment is finally getting an action figure deal.  Whose leader, The Mighty Strobe is a self-righteous ass with his marriage on the rocks.  Well here's the deal, true believer.  That little low-budget superhero comedy has more heart than the entire live-action Batman franchise.  And the director/writer, some nobody named James Gunn really nails some essential truths about superheroes.  For those lessons alone, it's always part of my toolkit. Also, it's pretty hilarious and quotable.

Number five is Superman II.  I can't tell you how many hours I spent watching the fight scene in Metropolis, trying to figure out how to make my Champions battles that epic.  Sure, they were dwarfed by later mayhem (and mocked roundly in Superman Returns, much to its discredit), but at the time, that was the apogee of what a superpowered fight should look like.  Also, Christopher Reeve, dammit.




 

Justice League: the New Frontier is my sixth and final pick.  The comic probably could be the tenth on my list, but I knew I'd put the animated film here.  The dawn of the Silver Age, as only Mr. Cooke can bring it. It's everything I loved about the earlier animated series, combined with one of my favorite eras of comics, but with a weight and maturity I don't see in the other works. It's also basically a set-up for a fantastic world to come that we only glimpse.  If I ever run a game where the PCs are basically at the beginning of the superheroic age, I'll almost certainly build the early sessions in a similar way to the structure of this story, if not the specifics.

I could go on, but I've been working on this for nearly two hours now, and picking from the Marvel Cinematic stuff is going to be simultaneously difficult and dishonest because I really haven't run something that was influenced by them.  That said, I love them all, even Hulk.

So, if you're reading this and you're also a supers gamer, consider the gauntlet thrown.  Pick it up and share your own.

Back This Game!

I don't push a lot of Kickstarters on this blog.  Generally, the stuff I back has a strong enough following that I don't feel like my voice really adds anything to the mix.  But once in a while, a product comes along that I'd be really sad if it didn't fund, Chill 3rd Edition is just such a game, and maybe I can get someone's attention about it.I could spend a thousand words telling you all the whys and wherefores about why I think you should back it, but honestly, it comes down to this: 

• I love Chill.  I played the hell out of the first edition (one of my games even introduced me to my first serious girlfriend). 
• I didn't care for the second edition so much, but lots of folks did.  
• There hasn't been a new edition of the game in ages, and the primary folks behind Groaning Door are awesome creators with one hell of a track record.  
• If this game doesn't fund, it would be a crying shame and I will sic The Mean Old Neighbor Lady on anyone who could have helped and didn't.

Top Secrets

Lately, I’ve been in a mood for espionage.  I’ve had a low-grade thing going thanks to Ken Hite’s “Night’s Black Agents,” one of those amazing games I’m probably never going to get to run.  Then, someone on RPGnet put up an amazing breakdown of all the conspiracies in the module that came with the game, which hit my nostalgia buttons hard.  After that, I read Greg Rucka’s new novel Bravo, which really got my fires going and led to me watching “The Sandbaggers,” which is probably the best espionage show ever produced.  And thanks to the glorious 70s goodness of that show, the next thing I knew, I had my old copy of “Top Secret” out of storage.

OK, truth be told, it’s an old copy, and it’s mine, but I actually bought it pretty recently, having lost/sold/misplaced my copy of the hard to find second printing (more on that later) some years ago.  I found this one at North Texas RPG Con, sans box, for six bucks.  I may have done a little dance. Reading through it was a fantastic flashback: TS was one of the first games I bought and really went nuts with.  I went to high school during the Cold War, and TS had a sense of realism that D&D couldn’t match.  Though, in retrospect, much of what we did was either commando raids, or PVP games in the blood-soaked streets of Sprechenhaltestelle. 

For the uninitiated, “Top Secret” was published by TSR in 1980.  The system is, honestly, a mish-mash, incorporating percentile ability scores, derived characteristics, and a rudimentary skills system (Areas of Knowledge), stapled to a class and level system (where Class doesn’t really do anything except determine your experience table and a few mission bonuses) that uses a firearms combat system derived from “Boot Hill” and a hand-to-hand system that combines diceless maneuver resolution with random damage.

It’s a mess.  A grand, glorious mess.  It’s a blast to play, even if lots of things don’t make sense.  The expansions (mostly in Dragon Magazine, later collected in the “Top Secret Companion”) added multiple layers of additional detail along with some good bits, like a system for using and improving Areas of Knowledge.  A second edition came out in 1981, which included two new forms of hand-to-hand combat (sword and knife fighting) but was otherwise identical.  Unfortunately, both editions used the same box and trade dress, so the only way to tell them apart is to look.  Which is why finding an unboxed one was such a great moment.

But, like I said, it’s a mess.  And while I love the Old School style of play, I’m less enamored of rules systems that are all over the map.  I suspect running it would quickly drive me nuts.  And so, I found myself retrieving my “Top Secret S/I” stuff from storage as well.

“Top Secret S/I” (I think the S/I stands for “Special Intelligence”) came out in 1987.  It was a complete re-design of the game sharing little more than the title and the overall theme.  It retained percentile attributes, but added a point-buy skill system (modified by career, which forced you to channel your skill purchases into specific areas).  Clearly a product of later generation game design, TSSI was also clearly intended to work as a generic modern action game, as the “Agent 13” pulp sourcebook and the “FREELancers” low-level supers/cyberpunk supplements showed.  But it was, in its own way, still a very clunky system. The costs of skills, for example, operated in tiers, with a cost to buy the skill initially, a cost per level for the first few levels, and higher costs for higher levels. Realistic? Maybe, but it was also extremely tedious.

The skill resolution system also left a lot to be desired.  Depending on difficulty, a skill might be reduced by ½, or simply suffer a -5, -10, or -20 modifier without a lot of rhyme or reason.  Given other contemporaneous systems (GURPS and Danger International) which both handled the genre more cleanly and easily (and for GURPS, that’s saying something) there just wasn’t a lot in the rules that demanded to be played.

Some of it was that the game just didn’t feel the same.  “Top Secret” agents felt grotty and vulnerable, like characters out of Cold War fiction.  TSSI characters felt like they belonged in a superspy show, like “The Man From UNCLE.”  In fact, the ORION vs WEB conflict set up in the boxed set and carried out through multiple adventures and supplements feels very much like an 80s updated UNCLE story.  In short, it wasn’t the same gritty game as the previous version.  For some this was undoubtedly a feature, but for me it was a bug that kept me from ever running it seriously.

It’s worth noting that TSSI had a ton of supporting materials, and despite my misgivings, I actually own all of them.  Some of them are pretty good.  “Commando” gives the game the full-on paramilitary treatment and introduces a brilliant mechanic (“Friction”) that represents the inevitability of a mission going bad.  “Brushfire Wars” is a book of adventures specifically for “Commando.”  The “Covert Operations Sourcebooks v1 and 2” by John Prados provide a tremendous amount of history and context for real world espionage but no game materials.  And lots of folks swear by the “Agent 13” sourcebook, though it doesn’t really do it for me, probably because “Justice, Inc.” is my pulp game of choice.

In the end, I don’t see myself running either game in the future.  But it’s made for some lovely reminiscence.

Hey, I Made a FATE Guy!

(Technically, I made an FAE character over the weekend, but this is my first FATE Core character)

After a couple of weeks of world-building and a somewhat contentious character-creation session (we had some confusion about the follow-up phases and who gets what Aspect when), we're just about ready to go.  We're using FATE Core with a few skills renamed (Data for Lore, for instance).  Anyway, here's my dude.

Name: Newton Bohm

Description:  Multiethnic male.  Height 164 cm, Weight 75 kg.  Eyes brown, hair black.  Normally shows a rather distracted expression unless focused on a problem, at which point he becomes focused to the point of monomania.

High Concept:  Unlicensed Cog
Trouble:  Ur-Obsessed.

Other Aspects:
I owe Harlan big time.
I have seen The Universe.
I can think my way out of anything.

Skills:
Data (Great +4)
Notice, Computer (Good +3)
Empathy, Will, Pilot (Fair +2)
Shoot, Stealth, Burglary, Investigate (Good +1)

Stunts:
I’ve read about that! (Spend 1 Fate point to use Data in place of any other skill for one roll or exchange)
Danger Sense
Indomitable (+2 to defend from Provoke attempts related to intimidation or fear)

Refresh: 3

Physical Stress: 2 Boxes
Mental Stress: 3 Boxes

Adventures:

“Brain Man”
There’s a reason Cogs are banned from Boa Sorte.  Even Cogs with no Guild standing.  It’s not like I was counting cards, mind you, I was counting EVERYTHING.  Long story short, some very unpleasant people took a distinct dislike to my activities.  If Harlan hadn’t “taken a shine” to me, I’d probably be in orbit without the benefit of an environment suit.

“Harlan’s Head-Huntin’ Expedition”
My fortunes tied to Harlan, I accompanied him and Professor Bobo, a most curious fellow on a search for the head of a massive Ur statue. According to the good Professor, whilst attempting to translate an Ur inscription, I was subjected to a large-scale memetic infection which attempted to overwrite my central nervous system.  I prefer to believe I achieved a small measure of enlightenment regarding Ur mind-sciences.  It was the closest thing I’ve experienced to the Cognetic Mindweb since my dismissal from the Guild. I have seen the underlying fabric of the Universe and I will see it again.

“The Azure Expedition”
When Professor Bobo informed me that there were probably Ur artifacts on Azure, I fairly leaped at the opportunity to accompany him and his bodyguard, a small rabbit-like (and extremely violent) alien named Jack.  As matters turned out, my brilliant intellect and Jack’s propensity for sudden lethal violence made an excellent pairing in light of the incredibly hostile native fauna.

Double Header Weekend

Yesterday, I ran more of "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" for the guys.  They survived the siege of Greenest and have bluffed their way into the camp of the raiders.  High points include the single combat, which went longer than I'd expected, and my loud, ADHD fourteen-year-old telling one of the other players to tone it down a notch.

Today, I kicked off the playtest of Dresden Files for FATE Accelerated Edition.  I freely admit I got into the playtest via nepotism.  That said, I am committed to do it justice, so even if I'm not a FATE guru now, I'm intent on getting there.  Most of my players are in the same boat, but we're all big fans of the source material.

With that in mind, we sat down and established our setting details, opting for Houston (since it's where we live).  We came up with a couple of initial aspects ("Winter lasts one week," "The most diverse city in America," among others), and then characters.  We ended up with a White Court Wizard who's spent far too much time in the Nevernever, a human who rejected his Changeling heritage, and a Houston cop who's trying to balance her True Faith with unwelcome knowledge of the supernatural.  I also wrote up the owner of a local magic shop (Tex-Arcana) they can use as a base of operations, just for fun.

That done, we managed a short combat-heavy encounter rooting a Red Court vampire and her minions out of an abandoned mansion.

I'm not going to get into the rules stuff.  Suffice to say, what we did certainly felt right.  There are a lot of rules we still need to play with but it was a good start.

Three Games In Four Days

The #rpgaday challenge is done, but I don't plan on going back into stealth mode just yet.  Over the past four days, I got three games in and I figured I'd talk a little about those.

Saturday, I GMed D&D 5th Edition for my son and the guys from the Mutant Future game (our Mutant Master is about to go on paternity leave and I don't want the band to break up during our downtime).  I used Horde of the Dragon Queen, and got about halfway through the first chapter.  The PCs consist of three pre-gens from the Starter Box: the Dwarf Cleric (Father Mungo), the Halfling Cleric (Nit), and the human longbow fighter (Arenher), along with a high elven monk my son came up with (Erdan Feyfist).

All of the group are experienced gamers.  None of us had played 5e.  From a DMing perspective, I really like the game. It's easy to run, and very easy to eyeball stuff and make rulings on the fly.  We got through six combat encounters in four hours, while learning rules, role-playing, and problem-solving.

The module is great.  It feels like 2nd edition Forgotten Realms, and that makes me happy.  My only complaint is that Wizards didn't make the monsters from the Appendix in the book available online.  I've gotten to where I rely heavily on PDFs when I GM, and I hated having to flip to the back of the book for one set of stats while I had everything else printed out on paper I could mark up.

Sunday, we (my son and I) went to my buddy Greg's D&D 4e game.  This is a long-running campaign that started at 1st level and is currently 16th.  I played my El-Adrin Swordmage, Rashid, and my son guest starred as our party's follower.  We beat up a lot of drakes.  Rashid briefly ran out of hit points but got better.  Good times.

Last night was the last part of a brief Dragon Age game I've been running for the Tuesday Night Crew, while our Pathfinder GMs are on break.  This was the third part of the adventure in the first boxed set.  Introducing the guys to Dragon Age has made for an interesting diversion from the usual d20-derived games.  By the end of this session, they were fully embracing the stunt system and generally acting like Big Damn Heroes.

My game ended a bit early, so we spent the last hour spit-balling ideas for our next game, a short FATE-based space opera.  It appears we will be Shadowrunners in space, more or less.  I think my character is going to be a Combat Accountant.

#rpgaday Thirty One - Challenge Complete!

Favorite RPG Of All Time

I'm just gonna say, it's probably in one of these pictures.  Probably.

(Not the complete accumulation, there's more in the garage, but this stuff is in the house for a reason, theoretically.)

#rpgaday Thirty

Rarest RPG Owned

Probably that weird game I mentioned back on day eleven, Treasures of the Third Reich.  I mean, I’ve never found anyone else who’s even heard of it, much less any mention of it online.

But if you’re talking about something from a known publisher, either my first printing Call of Cthulhu boxed set (now signed by Sandy Peterson), or my first edition copy of Boot Hill, both purchased new.

#rpgaday Twenty Nine

Most Memorable Encounter

There have been many great one, as well as some embarrassing ones (Troubadour vs. The Gourmand).  Two of the best were courtesy of the game GM, my buddy Greg.  Greg is one of those rare souls who has the means to buy lots of toys and the generosity to share them.  Pretty much all of the minis my Tuesday and Sunday crew play with are from his stash.  When he ran our epic 3.5 Forgotten Realms campaign, one of the capstone adventures included that massive Collossal Red Dragon mini Wizards put out a few years ago.

Even more amazing is the game at his house, which allows him to haul out his massive Master Maze collection.  I'm not a huge fan of 4e in many respects, but it is a terrific tabletop battle game, and playing in a fully WYSIWYG dungeon, with proper minis, is freaking awesome.

So to salute Greg, my most memorable encounter was an epic dungeon battle recorded in my Flickr Album "Dungeon Crawlin' Fools."

Thanks, Greg! 

#rpgaday Twenty Eight

Scariest Game You've Played

I have no clue.  I don't get to play horror games, so the opportunity for scary really doesn't arise that often.

Unless you mean that time I was vaguely concerned for my own life and limb while playing a game. But that's more a thing to look back and laugh about.

#rpgaday Twenty Seven

Home sick today, hoping I can kick this cough that's kicking my butt.  So, while I'm waiting to call into a meeting I still need to attend, here's today's entry:

Game I’d Like To See A New/Improved Edition Of:

Well, three of the ones I’d have listed last year are already getting new editions (Feng Shui, Chill, and Unknown Armies).  ICONS Assembled just came out, and I’m so over the HERO System, I don’t think there’s anything to be done with it that would bring me back.

In my perfect world, a new, fully-licensed and expanded Buffy/Angel product line would be pretty sweet. Though I’d settle for just the sourcebooks that were previewed before the license expired.  Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I recently acquired the preview chapter of the unpublished Sunnydale book.  Oh, what could have been...


Or Castle Falkenstein.   I’d love a hardback line of those books.