Actual Play - Shock: It Makes Stuff Matter

So, the other night me, Make Tea Not War, Hix and talula played a game of Shock: Social Science Fiction.

We hadn't planned what we were going to play before we started, so the evening began with a discussion of various options before we settled on Shock:. We began the world-building process, discarding quite a few options until we settled on this world:

• Issue: Technological Unemployment
• Issue: Personal Relationships
• Issue: Authentic Emotion
• Shock: Immortality
• Shock: Drive Repression (that is, government controlled and drug enabled repression of 'unsafe' emotional drives in the population).
• Praxis: Spontaneity/Routine
• Praxis: Sincerity/Artifice

The characters were:

1. Robert Thoms, a drive control officer recently made redundant due to the introduction of nano-cloud monitoring. Antag was Naomi Michaels, his ex-boss. Unemployment/Drive control.
   
2. Campbell Soup, an 80 year old spinster with a controlling nuclear family. Antag was her sister, Tomato. Personal relationships/Immortality.
   
3. Victor, a rock star looking for any kind of meaningful relationship at all. Antag was Vaughan, a music journalist. Personal relationships/Drive repression.
4. Lamar, one of "the first hundred" immortals, craving novelty. Antag was the first hundred. Authentic emotion/Immortality.

As you can see, the initial setup was no without some lighthearted touches. In fact, there were notably more jokes involved in the character creation than my summary suggests.

The evening was getting on, so we opted for a very short set of stories (10 Antag credits). This allowed us three scenes for most of the Protags (Campbell's story goal was so crucial in the second scene that all the credits got spent then).

And then we got started.

Immediately, play started getting interesting. Thoms began as he came home to announce his unemployment to his wife and son, with Naomi there to monitor his emotional responses and ensure he stayed under control. Melissa, the wife, was accepting of the change as she was a happy citizen with drives under control. His son took everything - including the news they must move to hive 7 - just as you might expect a five year old to so. This quickly became quite intense, as Thoms tried to hold it together.

Next we went to the Soups, and discovered a tightly bound, dysfunctional nuclear family set to remain as a unit forever (given that they were immortal). The joke names of the sisters give you some idea of the kinds of manipulation the parents indulged in. Campbell was breaking the news that she wished to go on a date with a man, and this led to all kinds of unpleasantness.

Victor's story began with a publicity interview with Vaughan that resulted in a clip from the new album being broadcast live and immediately getting trashed by critics and fans. This was the start of Vaughan's campaign against the rock star that sie obviously hated.

Lamar began pacing his house in ennui, forced to take part in a weekly poker game that may have been going on for centuries.

The next scenes built strongly and emotionally for Thoms, Campbell and Victor as they dealt with these issues and the consequences of that first scene. This culminated in the third scene with an angry outburst that had him sent for 'reconditioning' to deal with his 'unsafe emotional drives'.

Thoms was next dealing with life in the hive after their expensive apartment and his son's rebellion and unhappiness. Campbell's boyfriend came to visit and this triggered an explosive conclusion to her story as she ended up rejecting both her family and the boyfriend to find a life that actually suited her.

Lamar's story turned into a mystery as several other old immortals had disappeared. Excited to be investigating it, he broke out of the normal ways of doing things and eventually found a secret club of super extreme sportspeople (his introduction into the group was to bungy-jump 3km down into the crust of the Earth).

Victor turned things around, using Vaughan's hostile actions and publicity to ultimately craft an album that contained some real emotions and became the anthem of people in the hives. In a nice touch, the album referenced the other three stories as part of the 'real emotional' stuff that built it (universal surveillance was one of the minutia).

The thing that struck me, playing this game, was the way that Shock makes these stories matter. Even with the comical elements in character generation, the moment play gets going you care about these people. The collaborative world-building, and the way that conflicts get defined by the issues and themes that you built in, really comes home. You basically can't get away without making a statement about what you want (or want for your character).

And it gets to you, too. I had my Antag throw a huge pile of dice on to end Campbell's story, just because the conflict summed it all up. And I felt bad, rolling that pile of dice, because I wanted Campbell to escape this toxic little family unit, but Tomato was fighting that all the way.

Hix had to make a similar call for Thoms - his final conflict was him trying to make his son happy while Naomi wanted him to break down so she could have him reconditioned. And he threw all his dice on Thoms' side, just letting the character be emotionally brainwashed in order to preserve the family. That was powerful stuff.

Victor's album, that included these stories, was a great way to top it off (although maybe a little cheesy), but it really did seem to sum up a feeling of hope for this stagnant society of people living without any 'dangerous' emotions.

It was a great game, fun and moving (I felt kind of emotionally drained afterwards, even).

The Hell Screen by I J Parker

The second Sugawara Akitada novel, but set later in his career than the fourth.

This was not as compelling as the other two I have read, with one of the mysteries telegraphed so much that the only surprise was 'when will the characters work it out?'

On the other hand, the characters and historical detail are just as good as the other novels. Although not quite as good, it's still very good.

Chronicles (one) by Bob Dylan

Dylan's autobiography is an odd kind of book. I wasn't initially grabbed by it, but he sucks you in with his lyrical musings on his history, where his songs come from and his thoughts on this or that musical tradition.

Agon by John Harper

Another new game, this one is set in the mythic Greece of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's also a competitive game, with all the player heroes gaining Glory for every successful roll made (and even for just rolling highest on your side of a conflict).

Character generation is fun, and seems perfect to capture the kind of character that you see in Homer. You get an epithet (with associated bonuses), for example. There's also a section in which you challenge each of the other heroes in a contest of some kind, the winner being owed an Oath from the loser (more on this later).

The basic system is very tight. It seems like it's moderately complex on the surface and has some deeper stuff once you learn it. There's some nicely balanced rules that highlight tensions between succeeding yourself and ensuring the group overall does well (e.g. any time you help another hero, you get a temporary impairment in the ability you used. And they owe you an Oath too, whether they like it or not).

Oaths are a nice touch. If someone owes you an Oath, you can call it in any time to make them help you in a contest, heal you in an interlude or follow your orders in the positioning phase of a battle.

The air of mythic Greece is evoked well, with the stories being essentially parallel to the Odyssey, as your hero band journeys from island to island after the war at Ilium. The gods are present, and they give the heroes quests that must be completed. Monsters and strange peoples inhabit the islands, so there will be plenty to fight.

Your hero will gradually gain fate points, too. These will lead to greater ability in general but eventually you hit the end of them and the hero is retired. What happens to them depends on the amount of glory they earned. They are finalized on the score sheet and you create a new hero. Yes, I did say a score sheet. It's explicit purpose is to record which hero was the best. There's also a sheet for great deeds, so you can keep track of things like the highest roll made, most damage done, etc.

The GM (here, Antagonist) has a big pool of Strife points to build opposition from. There's also a big section on building islands and quests, that looks like it will make Agon a good low-prep option.

Overall, looks fantastic. I spent a lot of time many years ago reading the Iron Crown Enterprises Mythic Greece supplement, and never played it. Well, never very successfully. Agon looks like it should deliver all the things that old game promised by failed to.

Wild Talents Actual Play

We played the first session of our Wild Talents Cold War game last night.

The rules worked pretty much as expected - solid, traditional mechanics.

Play went not so well, with our heroes going kill-crazy when the defection they were arranging began to go off the rails. Next session, escorting a family of three through 100km of wilderness while being pursued by the Czechoslovakian secret police and maybe the army too.

Another experiment of mine seems to have worked well - I determined power level randomly, so we have characters with vastly different levels of superpowers. Despite this, everyone got plenty to do throughout the mission. So that's all good. This was helped by the player who got the maximum possible picking a fairly basic damage dealing plus hard to kill package, rather than going for "I can do everything" which would probably have overshadowed the others. The players with less points opted for more generally useful or oddball powers, that seemed to provide plenty of opportunities to do stuff nobody else could.

I'm looking forward to Control debriefing them, too. I'll probably kick off with "What the hell do you think you were doing? This isn't the damn war anymore!" and build up from there.

Spirit of the Century

This game has been generally regarded pretty highly, in particular as a low-prep pickup game, so I finally decided I should get a copy. Getting it out of the package was a little intimidating - it's a big book for a pickup game!

Getting into it, it becomes clear that the size of the rules is not going to detract from the ease of play. The core conflict mechanics are very simple. There's a number of special systems for certain situations (groups of mooks, car or plane chases, etc) but these are nicely self-contained and not inordinately complicated.

Character generation is absolutely inspired. You basically build up a character by answering some questions about each stage of their life and then picking aspects (more on these later) that go along with that. Then you get to the bit that makes it - you name novel your character first appeared in and write the back cover blurb. Then pick some aspects. Then you get to guest star in two other novels (and likewise, you get some people appearing in yours), adding a bit about your character to the blurb and gaining another aspect. Very cool stuff! (Aside: this one guy posted on Story Games about his group going one further... look and be awed)

So your character gets defined by skills, aspects and stunts. Skills are your basic things that anyone can learn. Stunts are the super pulp abilities you have, and there's a nice big list of them that looks to cover almost anything you might want (the stunts list is just under 100 pages long).

Aspects are player defined phrases that work as an advantage or a disadvantage in play. Basically, you can spend a Fate point (basic 'I do cool stuff' currency of the game) to get a bonus from an aspect. The cool new thing here is compelling an aspect. This normally occurs when the GM does it - basically saying 'your aspect X means you now do Y'. You then get to decide whether you do Y or not. If you do, you gain a Fate point. If you don't, you have to spend one. This seems like it's going to be pretty cool in play, given the big temptation to do the thing that will complicate your character's life in order to get the points. Nifty.

Then the book goes on to the advice section. A whopping 100+ pages of advice on how to run the game, how to run it without preparation, pulp story structure to use, some rules stuff and setting details and a sample adventure.

That advice on running the game is some of the best and most thorough that I've come across. It's packed deep with cool ideas, how to cope with this or that situation in play, how to remain focused on the characters and plenty of other stuff that you'll need in the game. Although it's focused on the pulp action that Spirit of the Century is all about, a lot of it is more widely applicable.

Overall, very cool stuff. I look forward to playing it.

Rashomon Gate by I J Parker

This is the first (I think) of the Sugawara Akitada mystery novels (I read and reviewed Black Arrow a couple of weeks back).

This one is also fantastic. Great characters, a good mystery and loads of fascinating historical (or plausibly fictional) detail.

Microcosm

Levi Kornelson has written this introductory roleplaying game Microcosm to be distributed by blog meme. There is a quiz at What roleplaying genre would you be great at? which suggests how to play it for maximum enjoyment, too.

From a quick read through, it looks like a nice system for creating solid situations that the whole group wants to play. The mechanics come down to 'pay for what you want to happen' using a store of tokens, and giving tokens from the store to people when they do cool stuff to replenish the store. I am considering using it for a one-shot game night I have coming up, with a couple of people who are fairly new to roleplaying games.

Here is my quiz result:

You scored as Comedy. You know funny, and you know how a joke unfolds while it’s being told. Put that along with a willingness to crack wise, and the ability to stay on course even while you’re doing it, and you’ve got a few of the central skills that a player needs to excel at comedy-based roleplaying. If you’d like to put these skills to use right away, you can click and download Microcosm. It’s a free, introductory roleplaying game. If you decide to go for it, remember the awards on the left; those are ones your group may want to use. Action 75% Comedy 75% Tragedy 50% Horror 33% Romance 33% What roleplaying genre would you be great at? created with QuizFarm.com

Beast Hunters Update

I got the physical book version of Beast Hunters in the mail today, and thought I would mention that it is a beautiful book. The art and layout - which looked good in pdf - look fantastic in print.

Britain BC by Francis Pryor

Very good, easy to read book on all human prehistory in Britain. I learned a lot of things that I didn't know previously, and his speculative takes on why people built things like henges are interesting too.

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre

Another Le Carre classic down. This provides an interesting portrait of the life of the "perfect spy." It's an cynical look at what might drive someone to live a life of total deceit.

Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls by R S Downie

A murder mystery set in a Roman port in second century Britain. Intended as the first of a series, there are two main characters, although one - the legion doctor implied in the title - seems to be the main detective.

In this story, he inadvertently gets involved in the mystery due to his bad luck to be on duty when the corpse is brought to the army hospital. He then ends up buying a native slave (who, it turns out, ends up being his crime-solving partner).

Both the doctor, Ruso, and the slave Tilla are interesting characters. Ruso is appealingly cynical about most things. The author also seems to be trying to get revenge on petty bureaucracy with her description of the way the tyrannical hospital administrator runs the place (to Ruso's great disadvantage).

Well worth a read.

Fade is complete

Game Chef 2007 ends in a couple of hours, and I have finished my entry:

---

FADE
As the Palace fleet approaches the new star, something that hasn't happened in hundreds of years, the fragile alliances and agreements between the Palaces are increasingly coming under strain.

You are a citizen of one of the Palaces, one that's currently at war.

And you're not just any citizen.

Your friends and neighbors don't know it, but you are a spook.

You are an elite agent trained to use drugs to destroy and create memories. This is how wars are fought in the Palace fleet.

The front lines of the war are memories, and enemy spooks will remodel yours if you let your guard down.

In a society without violence, power is the ability to change your enemy's mind.

---

You can grab a copy to read or even playtest here.

As a contestant, I will be peer-reviewing several of the other contestants games over the next few weeks. I'll post about them here.

The Mission Song by John Le Carre

A good story, with a well-meaning but somewhat naive protagonist trying his best in a very bad situation in the East Congo.

The Black Arrow by I J Parker

A samurai solves mysteries! Well, not quite. Sugawara Akitada is a nobleman and courtier in eleventh century Japan, and he solves mysteries. He's trained as a lawyer, but also knows all the other skills of the upper classes.

In this novel (midway in the series) he gets sent with his retainers and family as governor of a frontier northern province (the war with the Ainu people is ongoing at the time). A murder on the day he arrives leads to various sinister plots.

It's a really good read, with lots of interesting historical detail (in this case, about a part of Japanese history I wasn't familiar with) and well-drawn characters.

Thoroughly recommended.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre

I'm going to be reading a bunch of Le Carre novels as research for my Cold War espionage superheroes game. This is the first.

Good. Bleak. Terrifyingly bleak. I guess this was what the height of the Cold War felt like.

Beast Hunters by Christian and Lisa Griffen

I just pre-ordered this game, and got a pdf download to read while waiting for the printed version to be finished and mailed out.

It's got a few really interesting things going on, mainly that it's a two-player roleplaying game. The intention is that you take turns playing your hunter characters while the other player creates challenges for you. There are rules in there for play with more people, too, but it reads like it wouldn't work so well as with two.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The big crash left a lot of dangerous magical creatures around, and the player characters are Beast Hunters for a tribal nation - responsible for defending their people from these nasties. The setting details are evocative without being restrictive, throwing you a bunch of peoples and describing various areas. All are given some cool stuff but left open to each game filling in the rest.

Character generation is well done. You build up the character as you invent different stages/areas of their lives - parents, tribe, enemies and finally your beast hunter training. At each stage you give yourself some traits and resources related to that part of your life. You give each a description and category (physical, mental or social) as you go, then allocate numbers to each at the end.

When you begin a session, you set up an adventure. The hunter player (in discussion with the challenger) determines: the goal of the adventure ("slay such and such a beast" or "make peace with an enemy tribe", etc). Then pick the adversity pool and limit. The challenger spends this pool in challenges to make things tough for the hunter, and the limit is how much they can spend at one time. So the hunter decides how long and hard an adventure they want, basically.

Play begins and ends with a salute, and this is explained as a nigh-mandatory feature, likened to a salute or bow at the beginning of a martial arts bout. The idea is that in-game the players should be working hard to challenge each other, just like sparring.

Then you begin roleplaying freely. This continues until the challenger decides that you have reached a point where the obstacle ahead is interesting enough to go into a full challenge, rather than be played through by negotiation. Their limited budget also affects this decision, of course. Hunters can also ask for a challenge if they want one.

Going into a challenge, there is an initial negotiation phase after the stakes are worked out but before the dice come out.

1. Solution: The challenger describes the situation, and specifies the domain (mental, physical or social). The hunter then describes their plan to deal with the situation. The challenger can then give in (if the plan was really cool), elaborate the situation, or go directly to dice-based conflict resolution.
2. Elaboration: The challenger asks questions about the plans, points out flaws and asks how the hunter will deal with them. The hunter explains and specifies a trait they are using (this is an advantage later in conflict resolution). The challenger again can give, move to the next stage, or go direct to conflict resolution.
3. Complication: The challenger throws unexpected complication(s) into the mix, messing up the hunter's plan. The hunter reacts and explains how they will deal with the new situation. The challenger then decides whether to give or move to conflict resolution.
   

The challenger's decisions are also complicated by the fact that it's more costly in adversity to move to conflict resolution early. On the other hand, the hunter gets more the further you move through the phases. It seems like the intention is that almost all conflicts should move through all three, and moving to conflict resolution is really for when the challenger is stumped for ways to break the hunter's plan. Giving up, in contrast, is a recognition that the hunter has covered everything so well that you think they deserve to beat the challenge.

The dice based conflict resolution system is pretty cool. To start with, the challenger buys stats for the challenge (traits, resources, and damage boxes/hit points). The conflict system involves taking turns, each side picking a maneuver every round. The maneuvers look to offer some interesting tactical options - taking a turn to activate a trait for advantage later versus denying use of a resource to the opponent versus causing damage versus maneuver for advantage versus cause a special side effect to the main stakes. Plenty to do, and it should all give a lot of stuff to make cool narration from - especially taking into account the different fields of conflict. It also looks like it will give a cool build-up of maneuvers and activating traits leading into a climactic flurry of action as the conflict goes on. Awesome.

Character development occurs in two ways.

Firstly, you get reward points for beating challenges that can be spent to build up your normal stats.

Secondly, and more cool, is the reward for beating beasts when you go hunting them. When you first beat a particular type of beast, the Beast Hunter elders give the hunter a magical tattoo using the beast's blood. This gives the beast hunter a special ability or extra always-on bonus, setting them apart from normal people and more as a Buffy-like superhero/defender. The tougher the beast, the more powerful the tattoo.

There's a section for how to be a good hunter player, how to be a good challenger and how to set up adventures. The advice here all looks solid. There's also some special rules for beast hunts and a big section on the various nasty beasts that are out there. They're all interesting - not quite traditional monsters, and they have various tricky special powers for hunters to deal with.

How the game plays is a little difficult for me to imagine from just reading the text, so I'm not exactly sure how my impressions from reading it will map to actual play. Quite possibly the things that are most striking in the text will not be the same as the most striking parts of play. I have a feeling the conflict resolution stuff will be really awesome once you internalize all the options, for example. It just feels like there's more there than you can pick up from a single reading. There's a long example of play at the end, which covers three different challenges and shows a few different ways to play them out.

Lastly, the art, layout and general feel of the book is great. The text is sprinkled with the tribal-style beast tattoos and primitivist style pictures of the world of the beast hunters. The titles are in a matching style font, but the text is clean, bold and very readable in the pdf.

Supernatural (series one)

I just finished working my way through this series on dvd.

Boy howdy, it's good!

The show follows a couple of brothers who are monster hunters. Their dad has gone missing chasing some creature and the wayward brother who left home to get away from that life is pulled back in.

The show starts as a monster of the week style, but as the series goes on a fairly compelling plot is built up. It's fairly uncompromising horror, too. The stuff they fight is creepy, nasty and often gory. The writers don't go as crazy as usual when working with existing stories and traditions, which is nice.

What makes it work is the very, very good actors playing the brothers and excellent scriptwriting. The direction is generally good, hand-held camera/horror movie style. There's plenty of nods to horror classics all through the series, as well.

The relationship between the brothers (and their absent father's influence) is convincing and interesting. A lot of the dynamic is built around the fact that the younger one, Sam, left to go to college instead of continuing the family tradition of hunting monsters, while Dean stayed on helping their father. They do a lot with this, not all of it obvious.

At the end, they have perhaps the most intense series-end cliffhanger ever. Lucky I didn't watch it when it first played, as the wait to see what happened next would have been very painful.

A Rare Political Post

No Right Turn pointed out this online petition to urge some serious action on climate change. Check it out, preferably sign it too.

The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross

Number 3 in the 'Hidden Family' series, this one is good but unsatisfying. It feels like the first half of the next novel in the series, rather than a standalone story.

Game Chef Time!

This weekend is the beginning of Game Chef 2007.

This year the contest is longer (two weeks and an extra weekend rather than one and an extra), but otherwise looks like it will be the same madness as usual.

Well worth trying if you have any interest in designing a game at all.

Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher

This brings me up to date with all the Dresden Files novels that have been published so far.

I really enjoyed this one, although it changes the formula a bit. Dresden ends up spending more time dealing with the fallout of the last few books than solving new mysteries. However, I found the building up of the varies crises and repercussions of what has gone before were dealt with in a really interesting way.

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

Somewhat different to Scalzi's other novels that I've read (Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades), this one has more humour and less action. It's also a little more coherent and paced better, a pretty natural result of his writing improving, I guess.

It's your typical science fiction diplomatic/espionage thriller about averting an interstellar war using a sheep. The hero is a guy who has the job of giving bad news to aliens for Earth's State Department.

I can't say any more without spoiling the story, so instead I'll just advise everyone to go read it.

Light Dragoons by Allan Mallinson

This is not a further Matthew Hervey novel but a history of the British Light Dragoons Regiment (really more about it's antecedents, as it was formed in 1992).

It's an entertaining read, following the various postings and actions of the units concerned from the earliest forerunners in the 17th century. Anecdotes, regimental legends and the letters and journals of soldiers are scattered through as well.

The Final Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries Session

We finished off our expedition in this week's session.

High points included:

• The discovery that the schwimwagen was in fact a flugschwimwagen (it had a deployable hot air balloon).
• Dinosaurs.
• Zombie dinosaurs.
• Ancient engravings of a sordid nature being set aside for detailed study, later, alone.
• People falling into traps with long slides leading to (variously) a tyrannosaurus pit, the death-cult's prison and the temple's ritual chamber.
• Disguising ourselves as death cultists to infiltrate the big ritual.
• Upon being challenged by a Nazi (they were working with the death cult), the response "You're damn right I'm not supposed to be here!*" followed by a punch in the face.
• A huge fight in the temple as the crystal skull manifested a body as the avatar of their god (or something).
  
• The triumphant ripping the skull off the body to stop the ritual, and success!
• "Fluffy", the dilettante, achieved his heart's desire - a perfect cup of tea. I don't recall the details of how the crystal skull enabled that. Stef, can you fill us in?
  

Once again, we had a great time.

There are still some flaws with the game, which I expect will be ironed out as playtesting and revision continues. The thing that struck us most strongly this time is that it is really too easy. Even the toughest hazards were able to be beaten if you make an effort to use all the resources at your disposal (and this will be even more true playing the game a second time, and knowing what sort of descriptors you can choose for maximum effectiveness). This also meant that our final scene, although epic and funny, did seem a little anticlimactic - I don't think anyone had used more than half their rolled dice before we beat the hazard.

* Or words to that effect, anyhow.

Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

I've now caught up to the point of Dead Beat, the first of these I read. Just like the last couple in the series, this one builds more into Dresden's world. You also learn a lot more about his past, in the course of his solving this mystery. More good stuff.

Flow

This game is beautiful and compelling. There's no point in me reviewing it - go to the site and try the flash version.

Death Masks by Jim Butcher

The next Dresden novel rocks along with a good plot, great action and some cool new characters. He's definitely hit his stride in this series, they seem to get better and better.

The Scent of Betrayal by David Donachie

Next in the Privateersmen mysteries, they find themselves imprisoned in New Orleans (then under Spanish rule) for a piratical attack that they chanced upon the remnants of and told the authorities about.

The plot deals with their working out what the story behind the attack was while being (gently but firmly) kept under surveillance.

It's a good story, although perhaps a little wilder than some of the others. According to the author, one of the more outlandish aspects is true, however. So maybe this kind of thing did happen.

Summer Knight by Jim Butcher

Book number five in the Dresden Files sees Dresden caught up in an incipient war between the fay courts of summer and winter.

This is the book in the series I enjoyed most so far. It doesn't have as much setup as most of them do, getting to the action pretty quickly.

The story also rocks along without pause and has some neat stuff about the (wizard's) High Council on Harry's case (due to the fact he pretty much started a war between the wizards and vampires in the last book). The politics and mythology of the fairy courts is really well built up, too.

Actual Play Report: The Committee For The Exploration Of Mysteries #2

After a couple of game cancellations we finally got to play the second session of The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries.

We had one player swap (one person who missed the first session, coupled with another who can't attend for a while), but that didn't seem to be an issue in any way.

We also had a new revision of the rules, which notably streamlined a few of the rules and led to a more fast-paced game. There are still a few areas to be addressed, but nothing as notable as in the previous version.

As is typical for us, things were still pretty silly, but the group found a good vibe very quickly and the game seemed to help keep everyone's jokes and crazy hazards in the same place.

The group escaped from Berlin by pitting the death cultists against the German army and making a run for it in the confusion (or something like that). We then took the prototype schwimwagen across the Atlantic and began our trek up the Amazon. Hazards along the river included:

• Piranhas and anacondas
• Nazi spies and death cultists found to be working together while we rested in a city.
• A Nazi attack on a cup of tea (and, of course, the rest of the expedition).
• A lost temple in the jungle, filled with death cultists, snakes and ancient traps.
  
• A village of friendly natives, who were inadvertently insulted.
• For the cliffhanger, the slalom of death - a dangerous gorge we had to drive the schwimwagen down while being assailed by death cultists and other difficulties.

This session we made more of an effort to add a reflective narration after each hazard. This was a good idea, and added a lot to the game. I can't recall if these are mandatory, but if not they should be. Even a quick witticism before the transition to the next hazard adds a nice closing element to the scene.

We still messed up a few rules (pointed out to me by the author via email afterwards), but none of them were serious.

We thought that hazards seemed a little easy. Even when you end up facing a moderate hazard with a weaker attribute, it's usually possible to work in some descriptors and give yourself a good chance of beating the opposition's roll. I'm not sure if this is just luck - we did have some failures and people running out of time this session - but it might be a problem.

Overall: Once Boyd has finished polishing this game, it's going to be a keeper.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

Number four in the Dresden Files series deals with lots of ghosts and vampires. It's a decent novel, and begins to build up some of the bigger plots that come up in the next novel and are still going on in Dead Beat.

This one is decent, but the influence of the old World of Darkness games seemed especially pronounced here. This is not entirely bad, but it's not good either.

An Element of Chance by David Donachie

And here's number four in the Privateersmen mysteries. In this volume, the Ludlows find themselves in the Caribbean, dealing with some strange goings on (murder, piracy, spying).

They also make an enemy of a Royal Navy captain who illegally impresses many of their crew, and spend the book trying to get them back. Pender, Harry Ludlow's servant and the third protagonist in the series, is one of them. His story while he's away from the Ludlows is also a good one (mutiny, murder).

Medieval Lives by Terry Jones & Alan Ereira

A nice, quirky history book. It looks at people in medieval times and attempts to show how they were basically just like us in most ways. The authors also want to show us that the received view of the middle ages is not really representative of any time or place in history, and that things kept changing all through those centuries.

Each chapter picks a type of person and goes over their lives, illustrated with interesting individuals and events. The discussion generally also roams over various other topics related to monks, peasants (or whoever the chapter is about).

The book is companion to a TV series, which I may also have to look out for.

A Hanging Matter by David Donachie

Number 3 in the Ludlow naval adventure/mystery series, this one deals with various dodgy dealings involving smugglers in the English Channel.

They get caught up in some murderous events and then have to work out what the hell is going on as well as defend themselves from evil smuggling gangs.

Another good one.

RL lessons from WoW

So this guy wrote a list of things that World of Warcraft teaches you about how to run the rest of your life. It is funny and kind of true.

Read-through Review of Wild Talents by Dennis Detwiller et al.

I got my special preorder edition of this in the mail a couple of weeks back. It's a gorgeous full-colour book, great layout and fantastic art by Christopher Shy and Sam Araya.

The system is solid. It's the same One Roll Engine as Godlike and Nemesis, probably here in it's fullest and most polished form to date. It's basically a general superhero game, with an emphasis on fairly gritty superheroes in worlds with a lot of super powered people around.

The introduction states up front that they aren't providing any 'how to roleplay' advice, as they expect only experienced gamers to buy a copy.

After that, it dives right into the resolution system, character generation and power selection. All good stuff.

Next is a chapter by Ken Hite on building cool alternate super worlds. The discussion focuses on different aspects of superhero stories and how to design the game world to fit the ones you want to be important.

There's then a sample timeline for the default setting, one that builds on the world of Godlike and takes it through to 1992. It's a good setting, with cool stuff in history all the way and a interstellar threat and brand new world government forming in response. The Talents of World War Two have been superceded by 'Wild Talents': also humans with powers, but without the same limitations that the Talents had.

Finally, there's a sample adventure. It's set in the 1970's and has a cool street-level super-vigilante feel.

Overall, it's a good supers system for what it is. There's little beyond the effects of superpowers, combat and basic task resolution system in the book. The willpower rules give a little bit of psychological mechanics, but it's even simpler than the Call of Cthulhu sanity rules.

I'm looking forward to playing this, for the mayhem and danger of it. Nice.

Read-through Review of Nemesis

I'm thinking of running a Lovecraftian horror game soon, so I grabbed the free Nemesis rules that Dennis Detwiller, Greg Stolze and Shane Ivey.

Essentially, the rules take the ORE mechanic from Godlike and Wild Talents, add the Madness Meters from Unknown Armies, and adjust them for roleplaying in a Lovecraftian mode.

The game is presented pretty much as a rules set alone. There's no 'how to play' section, no 'GM advice'. There's a brief introduction setting out the overall game, then you get dropped straight into the conflict resolution system, take detailed looks at stats, skills, madness, combat, guns and armor and some ways for stuff to kill characters.

Then the game details building characters, which is on a fairly simple point buy system. This chapter includes a few sample spells and supernatural abilities, suggesting that adversaries can also be built using the same system.

Finally there's a chapter that has stats for some critters out of Lovecraft. They're some old favorites: deep ones, ghouls, serpent men, shoggoths.

So there's not a whole lot to review. I've played enough Godlike to know that the system is solid, especially as this version takes account of the Wild Talents playtests and development, which I know smoothed out a few bumps.

The addition of the Madness Meters is great, I've thought from the moment I first read Unknown Armies that these are the way Call of Cthulhu's sanity loss rules ought to be. In Nemesis, the isolation gauge is omitted - a fair choice, as it is less relevant to this sort of story than it is to Unknown Armies (it's also the one that I remember being least obvious in play, even in that game).

How will it play? We're into the realms of speculation here, although I do have plans to run something soon. From my experience of Godlike, I can be assured that the action parts of the game will be fast paced and brutally dangerous. The madness meters really give a good roleplaying handle on mental breakdown, too. The more detailed view of what is happening to the psyche makes playing out these changes more organic than sanity loss in Call of Cthulhu ever seemed to be. The rules are lean, focused, and mean. They should create some good game.

Fugitives of Chaos by John C Wright

A very strange book. Part two in a series about a group of teenaged godlings who have been imprisoned in an English boarding school staffed with other mythological beings and gods. Apparently the first book was about them discovering their powers, and this one deals with them attempting to escape from the school/prison and discovering part of the role they were destined for (that the imprisonment was designed to prevent).

It's exciting and the world is interesting. It comes across as a lighter Gene Wolfe or more whimsical Tim Powers novel.

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher

This is the second Dresden Files novel. As you might guess from the title, this one involves Harry dealing with werewolves (although I was surprised how many he managed to fit in).

All the novels have suffered from a slow start and some excessive explanation of Dresden's world at the beginning, and this one is perhaps worse than the other two I've read. This one is a bit more action-oriented and less character focused than the others, as well.

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling by Gideon Defoe

As those of you who have read the first of Defoe's pirate books might guess, this is very silly. This time the Pirate Captain and his crew accidentally buy a very expensive new ship and are forced to hunt down Moby Dick for the bounty that Ahab has placed on the whale's head.

But really, it's all just an excuse to make lots of jokes about the school-boyish pirates, pop culture, Melville's great novel and so on.

Lots of fun.

While checking on the spelling of his name, I discovered that a third Pirates book is now out, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Communists. Golly!

Playtest Report: The Committee for Exploration of Mysteries by Eric J Boyd

The regular group ran this last week. We're planning three sessions, so number one was brainstorming, character generation and the first part of the journey.

We placed the Committee in London, and pretty quickly decided that we wanted to fight a lot of Nazis and find the source of the Amazon. There should also be dinosaurs.

Our list of hazard ideas went smoothly. I was going to type it up but apparently it got left at the game venue - Stef, try and rescue it for next session!

We then decided that the main points on the journey would be Nazi Germany, the Amazon, and a lost city at the source of the Amazon. The secret is 'a crystal skull of doom'.

Next we made up characters. Our cast were (with the attributes given by other players):

• Sinister Poe, gentleman thief. Daring high, good all-rounder. People refuse to gamble with him, he's good with a knife, he has a gammy knee and a trained cat called Twinkles. His desire is to gain eternal youth.
  
• Donald "Fluffy" Dermont, socialite. Charisma high. He is chased by creditors, has demanding aunts, is a crack shot with his father's Webley and is an amateur pilot. His desire is for a good cup of tea.
  
• Reginald Sutcliffe, county cricketer. Charisma high. He is stalked by a sports reporter, secretly chases the dragon, has poodle boots (game group in-"joke") and is reputed to have bribed umpires. His desire is to open for England at Lords.
  
• Washington Smythe, ex-Marine, smuggler, trapper. Daring high. Once worked as a bearded lady, never harms a woman, was an artillery spotter and has torn enemie's throats out with his teeth (we don't know how many). His desire is to retire and never be called on again.
  
• Dr Matthew Abernathy, Professor of Archaeology. Genius high. He carries a jar of beetles, smokes disgusting cigars, is quite the ladies' man and his tenure is under threat. His desire is to gain a peerage and thus his sweetheart's hand in marriage.

We then set off for Germany, to discover clues as to the whereabouts of the crystal skull and steal a prototype schwimwagen in order to drive to the Amazon. The first hazards where minor - passport troubles, Twinkles going missing, an aunt inviting Fluffy to dinner with Goebbels. Then things got going with an assassination attempt, Smythe stealing the schwimwagen, a bomb, Abernathy dealing with a suspicious Nazi librarian and a ludicrous chase scene as we attempted to escape Berlin with apparently the entire army in pursuit.

Our cliffhanger happened as a Nazi superhuman, almost defeated, transformed into multiple copies of herself as we fought on the schwimwagen, driving hell-for-leather towards the sea.

As that short summary implies, the action was great and often ludicrous.

I'll go into some details of the rules now, and how they worked.

Character generation was great fun, especially adding traits to the other characters. However our group - never the most serious - did add a few that were silly or disadvantageous. Perhaps an instruction to aim for things that are good or bad situationally would be useful? Or maybe it is just us. The fact that the mission is brainstormed first also adds something - you know the sorts of things you are to face and can bear that in mind.

The way scenes work is that the person whose turn it is explains how the group got from the last scene to where they are now, and what that is. They state what they want to do next and then their opposition player (picked randomly at the session start) thinks up some opposition for them. Play goes on until it comes to a conflict. Then dice are rolled, so that the opposition total is known. A three-minute timer is started (in theory a sand-type eggtimer, but we only had an electronic one). The protagonist pushes forward a die, adding it to their total and narrating what they did. Then the opposition player narrates a complication. This is repeated until the total is reached or the timer runs out.

This use of the time limit adds an urgency to the narration that worked really well. All the narration came out fast and snappy, and when your mind blanks briefly it makes it all the more exciting. The tension added is perfect for this pulpy Indiana Jones style game.

There's some more complex rules for group resolution, unexpected hazards and end of session cliffhangers, but the essence is the same and they work just as well.

The other major piece of the rules that I have not yet mentioned is the acclaim economy. Acclaim points are your score and also allow you to be better in play (or hinder the others). This is fine, but I found there were too many things to keep track of about Acclaim. For example, you invest points in ideas on the log sheets (our Berlin sheet has 'Death cult', 'Schwimwagen', 'superhuman', 'Nazis', and 'Parking warden'). If people reuse these concepts in their narration, both of you get Acclaim (but there's a choice of how to gain it each time this happens). You gain or lose Acclaim from meeting or failing challenges. You gain Acclaim when two other players laugh at your narration or raise a glass to you.

I found that this often got left out or slowed the pace of the game. I can see why the rules are all there, but I feel like a streamlined version would help the game move faster. Personally, my preference would be to remove the Acclaim related to ideas on the log. Maybe players could reroll one of their dice if they narrate in one of the listed ideas? That's a little less significant, but probably easier to do (and do fast) in play. The log then becomes an ideas sheet that gives you some advantage when ideas are reused (which seems to be the objective) rather than something to use tactically (yes, Daniel, I mean you and your 'Nazis' there).

Despite those small issues, this is a great game. Look out for the published version (I'm not sure what the timescale is going to be, of course).

Kapcon 16

My experiences at Kapcon this year was a little truncated - I only got to the first two sessions each day, and skipped the live game. I found that the lack of tiredness made up for the missed gaming - this was the first con that I came out of feeling fine (as opposed to having my voice gone and so tired I need Monday to recover).

Session one - Full Light, Full Steam. This game went well, but not fantastic. I tried to use a few of the rules that probably should have been dropped for a convention one-off. A couple of players didn't like the way I set up the first scene, as it seemed to block certain options (a fair point, in retrospect). However, once the action kicked off, we got into it and everything went well. The dice system is fantastic (although everyone seems to take a while to get their head around it). There was little use of thematic batteries in checks, but I think this was mainly because the group was moving so fast. Nobody stopped to try and pull more advantage out, they just kept going (to their disadvantage, a couple of times).

Session two - The Gilman House. Zak was running a lot of old scenario contest entries, and this was a Call of Cthulhu one. It was nice to be in one of Zak's games (it seems like years since last time I played one). The scenario was good, although a couple of things bothered me. Firstly, my character had basically zero interest in or connection to the mystery (and I think a couple of the others were similar), which meant that I spent a lot of time goofing around until the monsters actually started appearing. Secondly, the scenario seemed to rely on the player characters doing one or another magic ritual. The only two characters who had mythos/occult background also had extremely low POW score. When it came to the crunch, then, they kept failing their rolls and things went very badly. The group had fun, though, and Zak kept things moving all through. It was, however, needlessly mean to have the two of us who survived arrested for the murder of the others.


Session four - Prime Time Adventures "Ward X." Hix hosted this PTA session, with me and two other players. We had time to develop a show, play one episode, and plan the series that would have been. Hix did a great job guiding the brainstorming, especially as it seemed like the group had quite divergent TV tastes. Narrowing down to something we all liked took some work, but we ended up with a supernatural forensic medical drama. We played through an episode in which a woman was suddenly struck blind. It turned out, after all the investigation, to have been ghostly brain parasites combined with a miscast magical spell. The patient survived with only some recurring invisibility(!). I loved this one section where, after successful brain surgery to remove the parasites, we decided that we needed to reintroduce them before lifting the spell on the patient to save her. The scene between the new doctor on the team and her friend the neurosurgeon was fantastic. He was completely sceptical and was only won over grudgingly. Great stuff from Helen and Hix that scene. I am sad we can't play the rest of that series (or watch the show).

Session five - InSpectres: Helsinki. I ran a game of InSpectres next. It was a great group and we rocked. We picked Helsinki as a place mainly because of someone's story about how students there dress for pub crawls. The franchise dealt with a family home demonic infestation (old graveyard, demonic transmission via phone line); a dimensional rift (mad scientist, inter-dimensional war prevented by homoerotic wrestling); and finally a mysterious smell in a restaurant (the Dark Lord, Satan, was turning people into demonic chickens via haircare products).

A good Kapcon. Huzzah for the organisers and all the people who played games with me. You were great.

The Diamond Frontier by John Wilcox

Another Simon Fonthill novel, sending him and Jenkins back to South Africa to help a woman they befriended in the Zulu War. This one deals with a British war against another African nation and tensions with the Afrikaaners.

Still good adventure stuff, with a nicely cynical thread in the way the main characters think of Britain's military and general imperial project.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

First of the Dresden Files novels, of which I read Dead Beat a little while ago.

A bit more raw, as you might expect from an earlier novel. Still fun and exciting.

Also better in that it does not include the baggage of six other novels I hadn't read yet.

Curry by Lizzie Collingham

A history of Indian cuisine, focusing on the way that the rest of the world influenced its development at some points, and how it influenced the rest of the world at others. The book is surprisingly deep, covering a lot more history than the concept suggests.

Very interesting. She also includes some recipes, all of which are interesting and many of which look really good as well.

The Road To Kandahar by John Wilcox

Second novel in the Fonthill series, and it sees him blackmailed into remaining in the army (by the one senior officer who likes him, no less) and sent to Afghanistan to gather intelligence on the forces arrayed against the British there.

It is good. Nice to be reading this while preparing to run Full Light, Full Steam, too, as the issues that both works address are similar.

Actual Play Report: Full Light, Full Steam - A Cruise To Mars

This weeks' game was a run through of a Full Light, Full Steam situation that I had built to run at Kapcon in two weeks. This meant the objective was mainly to confirm that I knew the system well enough to run it and to check how it played with people new to the system.

I didn't end up giving much time for situation engineering. The game saved me here, as the instructions gave plenty of ways to build up from your inspirations (in this case, just the thematic batteries of the characters) to an engaging situation. I was helped by the author's description of doing the same thing himself which he posted on the website, too. I was also somewhat restricted by the short game description that I had already submitted to the convention organisers. This had been intentionally brief, of course, but did tie me to Mars and set up expectations for natives, pirates, anarchists and foreign agents to be involved. Including all these elements was very easy.

I'm very pleased with the situation engineering system. In particular, the 'complicating cogs' and 'elaborating cogs' parts. To start with, you list inspirations - things that you believe the players are interested in having the game include. Then you come up with three key conflicts based on these inspirations. For each conflict you then list simple cogs - an antagonist, a victim, a setting and two more of any sort.

You then complicate the cogs by picking pairs from different conflicts and combining them, e.g. the victim in conflict 1 might live in the town that is the setting of conflict 2, or be the antagonist of conflict 3. This process of complication really helped the half-formed ideas for the situation come alive. In particular, when you complicate simple character ideas, the two sides that the character has subsequently can be a lot of fun to think about and play.

The next step is to engage the player characters. Here you allocate one complicated cog to each of them and link them directly. The links might be thematic, historical or social relationships. This helps tie the player characters more firmly into the situation and appeared to work well in play (although I did drop the ball on at least one character finding out about their link, mainly due to running out of time).

The last piece is elaborating the cogs. Basically this involves putting some abilities and thematic batteries down for the non-player characters and elaborating the effects of settings and props. Settings and props can give certain kinds of bonuses and penalties, decided at this time, and possible complications that may occur are listed. This is quite fun and the effort expended in little things (like deciding a Martian canyon had ancient native monuments, for example) added a lot to play.

That gave me a good setting, so I'll move on to our play. Explaining the rules was quick and easy, although the spoils scrips caused some confusion (who passes the scrip, who signs it, etc). I'll have to explain this more carefully in a convention setting, but once people got the hang of it things went fine. The setting has lots of neat grabby elements, and everyone quickly got into that side of things. I'll run through the play here, but it's intentionally vague as some of my readers may end up playing this quite soon.

The first scene, mainly at the governor's mansion, had the crew trying to gather information about their mission and being rebuffed by the governor who claimed nothing unusual was going on. The discovered that others in town didn't agree and that the problems they had been sent to fix were real. This scene went on longer than it should have, I think, and I should have pushed more information at the players. We pretty much missed one of the three conflicts entirely, and this scene was where it should have been played out. This might be a game, like Dogs In The Vineyard, in which it's a better idea to instantly reveal the mysteries and let the player characters sort them out, rather than focus on investigation.

Action was spurred on when the Commander sent the landing skiff back to his ship to get a detachment of marines. The skiff spotted something suspicious in the desert, investigated, and the survivors made it to the colony. Our heroes set out and, in an epic battle, defeated the bad guys. Huzzah!

The conflict resolution system works very well - nice and elegant. The system of taking voluntary demotions to charge your thematic batteries for later is fantastic in play. The non-player character equivalent is even more fun (and not, I think, mentioned in my review after reading the game the first time). The gamemaster can give a non-player character promotions by declaring what their thematic battery is. The other players can then force demotions on that character later, when appropriate. This also was fun in play.

Overall, a fun session. As mentioned above, we went over time and didn't actually resolve all three conflicts. I regard that as a success - I always prefer to have too much situation to risking not enough. I'll probably drop a few things for a convention setting. One of my players suggested that spoils scrips be used just for scene control, and ignore marking spoils gained (your experience points, basically). Aside from that, most of the issues were associated with it being the first time.

As a last comment, I may take my own game Devil & the Deep off the backburner now. I think that Full Light, Full Steam pretty much gives me the game I was trying to build there.

Britain in the Middle Ages by Francis Pryor

A nice, somewhat idiosyncratic, history book. The author focuses on the things that he personally is most interested in, which gives a different take than a typical book about the middle ages. He talks a lot about daily life and the things we know about that, in particular. On top of that, his style is very good.

His general theme, to the extent that the book has one, is mainly that the middle ages weren't quite as barbaric as they are generally made out to be, and I think he argues that case pretty well.

He also has a fair bit to say, in asides, about the conduct of archaeology in Britain today. This is not something I really care much about, but had some interesting tidbits in there.

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher

I have heard a few good things about this series, The Dresden Files, especially with a scifi channel series based on them coming up. So I picked up this one the other day.

The books deal with Harry Dresden, a wizard and sort of private investigator in Chicago. It's a lot of fun, with a good action packed story and some interesting characters. At first I was a little sceptical, as some of the introductory chapters are a little cutesy and filled to the brim with people and baggage from the previous books in the series (this is number seven or so). All this becomes pretty much irrelevant once the action starts, as it's a good mystery and lots of exciting magical fight scenes.

Recommended. And I shall be seeking out the rest of the series, too.

The Horns of the Buffalo by John Wilcox

Another series of good historical military adventures! Huzzah!

This series is about one Simon Fonthill, an infantry officer . It's set in the 1870s and this first novel has him drawn into the Zulu war, specifically the battle of Rorke's Drift.

It's a good story, and the fact that the period is mid/late Victorian rather than Napoleonic is a nice change.

An Act of Courage by Allan Mallinson

The next, and currently last of, the Hervey books. Very good.

Development Playtest Report: Last Stand

My current main project is Last Stand. This is a game about modern day benandanti, intended to have a feel reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - concerned with a group of friends tasked with defending the community the live in.

The setup involves defining a bunch of things about the town and people that the good walkers (player characters - that's a transliteration of the original term) know. Key details are the numbers allocated to stats, choice of a single magic power and the animal form that this good walker takes in the dream battles.

The gamemaster gets to do this all for the witches that live in the town also, although so far I have done this on the fly as required.

Character generation has been problematic so far, with a little much creativity required on a fairly blank slate. This seems to be difficult and probably the game needs more direction in this area. This was particularly pronounced in the second playtest, aimed at testing a one-off including character generation for Kapcon. It doesn't look like that idea will fly, so I'll be writing pregenerated characters for this, as usual.

The other problem I had in both games is that the current rules lend a lot of structure to certain types of scenes which tends to mean they are aimed firmly at a particular goal, often detracting from the quality of play involved. I'm not sure how to address this. Partly this is because I'm pretty sure the main reason was general tiredness and lack of inspiration on my own part, and maybe from the rest of the group too. It might be that a more relaxed attitude, and letting things play out naturally, will be all that is needed. On the other hand, there are definitely some gamemaster preparation elements that could help too, and I may need to make sure that these are supported (e.g. have a list of names for new townsfolk who are met in play, more guidance about the effects of battles on real life).

I've said all that without introducing the overall shape of play, so I'll finish off with that instead. The good walkers all start after a defeat in one of the nighttime battles. Defeats manifest in real life as personal and community wide misfortunes based on the type of challenges that were lost. Play begins with scenes of normal life in which the good walkers must deal with this fallout and perhaps try to mitigate the damage done. Once this is played out, a night battle occurs and the good walkers must defeat the witches in surreal challenges. After this is resolved, play returns to real life and the consequences once more. When play begins a definite end game is also decided upon - if the good walkers are not successful soon, the community will be destroyed or corrupted by the witches, and the endgame condition is basically how close to this point they are as the story begins.

The bits that worked really well in play were the battles and direct followup scenes, so maybe the best idea is to start with a battle instead of just after one... hmm...

Rumours of War by Allan Mallinson

The Matthew Hervey series continues to get better in this novel. I'm not sure if he planned this all along, but Mallinson fills much of this novel set in and about 1826 Portugal with Hervey's memories of 1808 Portugal (the retreat to Corunna, in particular).

This feels kind of like a copout - an easy way to pad out a series - but not actually because it's bad or anything. More because it felt like he'd intentionally started with Hervey well begun on his career, that these early years were not so important. On the other hand, the naive Hervey of 1808 is definitely interesting to compare to his world-weary self of 1826.

Nintendo Wii - First Impressions

So, we decided to get one of these. Gaming consoles are a strange new adventure for me, having never liked the controllers, I never owned one before. The Wii's motion-sensitive controllers are what attracted me to it, and they are pretty damn cool.

We've had a lot of fun with it, even though we are just on the tutorial games that came with an extra controller and the bundles Wii Sports games. Not much to these, but the controllers make them a lot of fun even so.

The Daughter of the House enjoys the cow-racing tutorial, which is played by tilting the controller. She can't quite manage it alone yet, but she's getting there. Myself and Make Tea Not War have been enjoying the tennis game, although I personally find myself just as bad at it as I was at actual tennis, as far as I can recall. Oh well.

The selection of games available is still fairly slim and, from reviews, it seems like few of them really use all the controllers' potential. We may be waiting some time for that, I suppose.

The Sabre's Edge by Allan Mallinson

Further adventures of Matthew Hervey, now Captain and in India and Burma in 1826. Still good stuff.

Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel GIlbert

An interesting and thought provoking study about the nature of happiness and why people are terrible at deciding what to do to improve their lives. Probably ought be mandatory reading for basically everyone (even if it's not 100% true, it's still worth exposing your decision making process to criticism of this sort, I think).

Filed as:

• books
• review
• psychology

The Cowboy Dog by Nigel Cox

An extremely strange but absorbing novel. In many ways similar to the comic Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks, it is a myth of a bit of New Zealand that doesn't actually exist.

Specifically, it's about a young man who grew up as a cowboy on the volcanic plateau of the North Island. But it's not the plateau we actually know - it's a chunk of the US Southwest circa 1910 or so, just smack in the middle of what is otherwise a normal contemporary New Zealand.

The story itself is about growing up and revenge, the kind of thing you might hear in a Johnny Cash song (and those songs get a lot of references in the book too).

Filed as:

• books
• review

A Regimental Affair by Allan Mallinson

The third story about dragoon Matthew Hervey. The series seems to get better each novel - no more simple, heroic adventures. Instead, the stories illustrate the complexities of the times (in this case circa 1817).

Hervey is also a thoughtful observer of what is going on around him, and this becomes more the focus of the stories. The social side of life is also important, taking up much of the novel.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• historical_fiction

Out Of Eden by Stephen Oppenheimer

This is an explanation of the latest findings on how and when people colonized the world. It's interesting stuff, and a lot was new to me.

However, the author doesn't really do it justice. The book has more detail on various genetic markers than I think necessary for a lay audience. Certainly I found that the level of detail detracted from the central findings rather than illustrating them. He also uses the terms 'son' and 'daughter', as well as names (Cain, Abel, Seth, Krishna), when discussing these genetic markers. I am pretty sure that what he means here is that these 'sons' and 'daughters' are descendant lineages from common ancestors. However, the metaphor is pushed pretty hard and sometimes it appears that he might be talking about literal parent-child relationships.

So, interesting but a bit difficult in places. Worth reading if the topic is of interest.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• science

Any Approaching Enemy by Jay Worrall

This is number two in yet another Napoleonic naval adventure series. It's definitely ahead of the pack, though. The characters are interesting and the dialog is great (and often hilarious, especially between Captain Edgemont and his wife who is a pacifist).

Well worth looking up if you enjoy this sort of story - possibly up there with O'Brian. And on that subject, a certain Lieutenant Aubrey makes a short cameo appearance in this novel, which is quite fun.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• naval_adventure

Honourable Company by Allan Mallinson

The second book about (now) Captain Hervey has him appointed aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington and immediately sent to India on a secret mission.

Happily, he turns out to be absolutely terrible as a secret agent, making his general competence at everything else bearable.

The story itself involves intrigues between some Indian states and the British East India Company, which our hero (needless to say) ends up in the middle of.

Good stuff all round.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• historical_fiction

Actual Play Report: OctaNe

Well, we played OctaNe the other night. It worked pretty much as well as it looked like it would.

It played out as a pseudo-Sergio Leone post apocalyptic western as our heroes - a High Plains Drifter, an Ultra-vixen, a Rock and Roll Witch and a Fast Food Ninja all chased a mcguffin around, trying to prevent it falling into the hands of Big Liz the gila monster queen and her army of midgets. A few memorable extras turned up, such as an alien sheriff and Satan. There was also a nice sequence where the mcguffin turned a lazy old dog into a cyborg laser-eyeball death beast, luckily hit with a nullifier ray before it destroyed the Earth.

Comedy delivered: check.
Preperation needed - zero: check.

I recommend this game. At least for psychotronic film fans.

Filed as:

• rpg
• actual_play
• octane

A Close Run Thing by Allan Mallinson

Huzzah! Another good Napoleonic military adventure series!

This is the first in a series about Matthew Hervey, an urbane cavalry officer. This novel generally introduces him and ends with him at the battle of Waterloo.

A generally good read, although Hervey is so supremely good at almost everything that I did not really find myself concerned that he would not come out on top in the end. Of course, in these stories that can be generally taken for granted in any case. But Hervey has none of the brutality of Sharpe or the complete obliviousness to certain areas of Aubrey. Still, the story is gripping and often fun. And his ability to know about almost everything and do almost anything is amusing as well.

The story also reflects Hervey's gentlemanly nature in the detail of battles presented. Mallinson is notably less graphic in his descriptions of battle and the effects thereof than most authors of similar novels. This is not to say that terrible scenes do not occur, but they are not quite as gruelling as some of the battles in the Sharpe novels, for example.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• historical_fiction

How Invention Begins by John Lienhard

This book is a study of technological invention, looking beyond the stereotyped heroic inventors at the wider streams of change that led to various key technologies. The main case studies are flight, steam power and printing.

Lienhard discusses a lot around each of these topics, building a larger case about the nature of invention and technological change in general. On top of this, of course, there's also the stories of all the other people involved in the same technologies, who didn't quite make it, or improved things afterwards, and so forth.

His concluding discussion deals with the way education and the ideas about invention have changed, and suggests a thought-provoking thesis that the way we think about these now encourages further change. I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but it's an interesting idea.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• history

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Yet another re-read*. Probably my favorite of the discworld novels, this has a lot of neat stuff going on in it. The basic story - a convicted conman forced to go straight by Vetinari in order to reopen the defunct post office - is fun, and the various subplots and themes are all very interesting too.

* I was ill last week, so ran out of unread books, you see.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• fantasy
• humour

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Another re-read. This is one of the better of his early books (being only the eighth discworld novel). Fun, and interesting to see again how the watch characters were originally introduced.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• fantasy
• humour

Provisional Review of Full Light, Full Steam by Joshua BishopRoby

Note: provisional review means that it's not really thorough. The game's not out yet, so I'm working from reading the pdf that I got for preordering. It's also too long for me to effectively read the full pdf, so this is really just general impressions.

Full Light, Full Steam is a steampunk game about the alternate-Victorian Royal Astronomical Navy. This means, in short, that you fly big spaceships around the solar system, helping maintan Britain's Imperial assets.

The setting is all good stuff. It brings to mind all the good stuff from the old game Space: 1899, as well as an 'expedition to Mars' one-shot I ran a few times several years ago. The setting chapter is good fun, with all the information presented as excerpts from in-game handbooks and magazines.

What sets the game apart from most is the extensive work to make what the players want to do be the center of play all the time. There's a chapter on 'The First Session' that goes over various social issues to consider before getting started on character generation. It's all good advice, although I suspect most gaming groups will be able to move through these pretty quick (probably not even needing to explicitly address some of them).

Characters get various stats, the most important being three 'thematic batteries', each a descriptive word or phrase (e.g. 'rake' or 'mad inventor'). These are used to focus play. Most straightforwardly, the player can 'charge' a battery any time by taking a roll penalty that reflects the battery. Later on, you can use the charged battery to give you a bonus in another situation that reflects it.

I'm also very keen to try the situation engineering rules. Basically, play situations are built by the GM using 'cogs' - individual characters, settings or props - that are built with reference to characters' thematic batteries (and a few other sources of inspiration). This system is all done in a lot of detail, and looks like fun. Also, everyone can join in here - it's not just the GM whe has to do all this work.

The last unique aspect I want to mention is the 'spoils scrip'. Every player starts with one of these, a strip of paper basically. Whenever you make reference in play to another character's thematic battery, you pass it to the relevant player and they sign the paper. You then gain 'spoils' (kind of experience points) - more if this is their first signature on the scrip this scene. The scrip also restricts scene changes - scenes can only end once everyone has signed a scrip or you pass it to someone for a character who isn't present (allowing you to jump to a scene about that character).

Those are all interesting ideas, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they play out. The other thing that really stands out is that this game is just packed with advice on how to play. It all reads as good advice, although a lot of it may be old hat to a lot of gamers. Like Dogs in the Vineyard, Full Light, Full Steam is carefully written to tell you how to play. However, the latter is more like a full (period) technical manual.

I'll follow with another review once I have the paper book in my hands (probably in a month or so).

Filed as:

• rpg
• review
• full_light_full_steam
• sf
• steampunk

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

This was a re-read. Still a great book. The ideas aren't really as interesting as those in Singularity Sky but the story is at least as good.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• sf

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

This is a totally deadpan oral history of a global war against zombies that is allegedly going to happen in 5-10 years or so.

Brooks claims in the introduction that he as chief researcher for a UN research group measuring the costs of the war, and that this is a supplementary volume showing the human stories he encountered along the way as he interviewed people worldwide.

The book is structured to illustrate the development of the zombie problem, starting with small outbreaks in China through to the humanity's global fight to survive and eventual success. The story occurs half in the interviews and half in what they imply in the gaps.

Brooks has done an excellent job of capturing both the style of real oral histories, and creating interesting, often compelling, characters and stories. He lets a few jokes in here and there, but they're for the reader - as far as the narration goes, they are just straight facts of life.

As an aside, reading this made me aware of an important aspect of why I find zombies a fascinating horror genre. As I sat there thinking 'what would I do if that happened to me?' and realised that it is exactly that. The appeal of zombies is:
1. You can think about what you would do if it happened - tactics, tools, where you would go, etc.
2. It will never actually happen. NEVER.
Combined, those certainly make zombies a lot more fun to consider than (for example) climate change, major earthquakes or flu pandemics.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• zombies
• sf

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

This is Pratchett's latest, the third of his stories about Tiffany Aching. It's a bit more mature than the first too, although obviously still aimed at teenage readers.

It's also a good story, with lots of fun bits. At first the various doings of the witches seemed a bit uninspired, covering the same ground he's been over before. However, the story soon kicks off and any feelings of sameness I had were left behind.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• fantasy

The Line Between by Peter S Beagle

This is a collection of short works. I normally stay away from these, but Beagle is such a good author I decided to give it a read. The cover blurb focuses on the fact that it includes a story that is a sequel to The Last Unicorn. This, however, is one of the least interesting stories in the collection (it's still good, but it feels like no more than an epilog for the other book).

Most of the stories are fantastic, and several hilarious. A couple of examples, to whet your appetite:
- Gordon, the Self-Made Cat is a fairy-tale style story of a mouse who - upon hearing of the ecology of cats and mice - decides he is damn well going to become a cat instead. So he goes off to cat school determined to be the best cat in the class...
- El Regalo is a story about a 12 year old girl who finds out that her 8 year old brother is a witch. It's a nice, modern, fantasy tale. And, unlike Harry Potter, they act like kids really might when they get to do magic stuff.
- Mr Sigerson is a story Beagle wrote for a collection about Sherlock Holmes' missing years. It works due to the narrator - the conductor of a small town orchestra that Holmes joins while incognito. They end up solving a mystery (of course) but what makes it work is the narrators instant and total dislike for Holmes. They are intentionally similar dry intellectual types, and their interaction is wonderful.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• fantasy

The Hell-fire Clubs by Geoffrey Ashe

A tour of anti-moral and hedonistic groups and philosophy that centres on the famous Hell-fire Clubs of 18th century Britain. Ashe looks at a number of related (or just similar) groups that defied public mores, generally in order for the members to have lots of sex.

In some ways it's a little disappointing - given the legends associated with the groups, the reality is somewhat unimaginative and tawdry. However, there's still a lot of interesting stuff in here.

Filed as:

• book
• review
• history

Read-through Review of Cold City by Malcolm Craig

Cold City is a very cool game. It has the characters playing members of a multinational group in 1950 Berlin, tasked with hunting down remnant monsters created by the Nazis.

The setting is neat, with lots of good information about the state of Berlin at the time. The monsters in the book were perhaps a little uninspired, but that is easily sorted out by re-reading some Hellboy or Tim Powers' Declare. This might also be simply a matter of taste.

The system seems like a solid conflict resolution system. One nice touch is that yoiur traits must be neutrally worded and can be positive or negative, switching due to fallout from conflicts (for example). There's also a system to measure trust between the players, pretty much a second generation of the trust mechanics in The Mountain Witch.

Character generation is really good - I particularly like that you have to choose your stereotyping of the other nationalities as part of it. Each character also has a national and personal secret agenda, a convert goal that pretty much defines an endgame for them if they achieve it.

Filed as:

• review
• rpg
• cold_city

Read-through Review of Don't Rest Your Head by Fred Hicks

Don't Rest Your Head is a very cool little game which feels like it's a mashup of the games Dead Inside and Unknown Armies and the film Dark City (those are all listed as influences, coincidentally enough).

The setting is that the player characters are insomniacs who have, for some reason, crossed into a nightmarish world of half-waking half-dreaming fantasy. Character generation starts with answering a few questions that are half building your chracter's history and also huge flags for the GM to hang stories off. You then define an 'exhaustion talent' and a 'madness talent'. These are super powers, the exhaustion one allows you to do something normal supremely well and the madness one allows you to do any crazy magic thing you want.

There's some listed areas and inhabitants of the Mad City (as this area/state is known) but I found them better as inspiration than as something to be used unchanged. In fact, my biggest problem with the game is the obvious missing question for each character in generation: "What is your Nightmare?" It seems that having each player define whatever is after each character would work better than fitting them into the machinations of the nightmares in the book. That shouldn't be taken as a harsh criticism - it's both easily dealt with and minor given the overall quality of the game.

I absolutely love the system. It involves various colours of dice. The GM gets a colour for 'pain' dice. Players have to have different coloured 'discipline', 'exhaustion' and 'madness' dice. Now, players always roll their discipline and exhaustion dice and may optionally roll as many madness dice as they wish. The GM rolls however many pain dice as are appropriate to the difficulty of the conflict. Low rolls are successes, and the highest success count wins. The cool bit is that the type of dice with the highest showing roll matters too. Whatever that is dominates the situation and has effects in terms of narration and fallout. So there are two axes of resolution - success vs failure and 'how it happened'. I think this will be very cool in play, causing spins on narration that add a lot to play.

The other mechanic is a steady spiral down. The characters are going to steadily be gaining exhaustion and madness. Too much exhaustion and they fall asleep and become prey to the nightmares. Too much madness and they become a nightmare themselves. Gaining these scores generally occurs when that type of dice dominates after a conflict. It is possible to buy back your discipline and end the game back as a normal person, too, but it looks hard (and relies on another economy of hope and despair coins that I don't have a handle on after just one read through).

There's some brief, but good, advice on how to put sessions together based on the way each player answered the questions during character generation. They make a very good set of flags, and Hicks teases out how to use each to the best effect.

The other thing worth commenting on is the graphic design - it's fantastic, really pushing the game's feel at you all the way through.

Very cool game. I'm aiming to try this one out quite soon, possibly even tomorrow.

Read-through Review of OctaNe by Jared A Sorenson

OctaNe is a game inspired by psychotronic film, with a basic setting of crazy post-apocalytic America.

Mechanically, it's a simpler version of InSpectres (no surprise there). The basic setup is fun, funny and gives you plenty to work with. The character archetypes are awesome. There's a good discussion of different styles of weird films and how to customize the game for them.

There isn't much in the way of GM advice (although really I suspect the game only needs a strange starting point and then the characters will drive it).

Overall, delivers what the cover implies.

The cover, by the way, has a badass mofo driving a hot rod with a lady samurai, monkey and luchador as passengers. Behind them a huge explosion has destroyed their pursuers.

Filed as:

• rpg
• review
• octane

Read-through Review of The Princes' Kingdom by Clinton R Nixon

The Princes' Kingdom is an adaptation of Vincent Baker's Dogs In The Vineyard. It has a very different slant, however. It's designed for play with children. As such, it takes out a lot of the more adult content of Dogs (e.g. sex and theology) and replaces it with a fairy-tale setting.

The characters are young (ages 5-12) princes and princesses in a fantasy kingdom, Islandia. They have been sent out on a boat by the King to travel from island to island in the kingdom, to prove whether they will be fit to rule when they are older.

The island creation section is simple and brings into focus issues of government, law and order, and colonialism or diversity. However, the basic idea is the same as in Dogs - the GM creates a bad situation and the player characters have to decide what's wrong and sort it out.

The text and mechanics are simpler than Dogs, clearly to make it more accessible to younger readers. This doesn't look like it will detract from play one bit. And adults will find this fun too, even if it is designed for play with adults and children (family play, really).

Now I just need to wait for my daughter to be old enough to try it...

Filed as:

• rpg
• review
• the_princes_kingdom

Zatoichi (the Beat Takeshi version)

This is a wonderful samurai film. The cinematic style is breathtaking, especially the highly stylized swordfights. The story is a fairly simple revenge tale, but even with so Takeshi plays with our expectations as he introduces characters - nobody is quite who they seem.

It seems like it is Takeshi's homage to Kurosawa (or maybe all samurai genre films).

Recommended to all fans of samurai films and westerns.

Filed as:

• film
• review
• samurai
• beat_takeshi

Off Road by Sean Murphy

Surprisingly awesome comic. It has a simple setup - the narrator's friend gets a new jeep. They grab another mate and go offroading. The comic just follows them as they get crazier and crazier and do stupider and stupider stuff. The humour is fantastic, I laughed almost from beginning to end.

It looks like the events described are only slightly fictionalised from the real things that happened to inspire them, which I suspect is why it is so cool.

Filed as:

• comics
• review

Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks

Really good, weird and multilayered comic. Deals with issues of parochialism, the comics industry, oddball characters and personal relationships (not things you would normally see all mushed together like this).

I think I need to read it through at least twice more to really get it.

Filed as:

• comics
• review

The Eagle In The Sand by Simon Scarrow

This next episode in Scarrow's series about the two centurions is just as good as the others, although disappointingly short. This time Cato and Macro are sent by Narcissus to be his expendable spies in Judea. They end up caught in various plots involving Romans, Christians and Syrians. All good fun, although perhaps a bit more formulaic than the others.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• historical_fiction

Concrete: Killer Smile by Paul Chadwick

This is the first Concrete collection I was disappointed with. The story is about one of Concrete's friends being kidnapped and ends up being a fairly uninspired rescue story. There are certainly places where Chadwick is writing about the kind of issues that I really enjoy in these comics, but they are neither as profound nor as interesting as in the other collections I've read.

Filed as:

• comics
• review

Drowning & Falling - Actual Play

We played a short game of Drowning & Falling last week.

It worked fairly well, but not quite as intended. I suspect this may be about evenly due to (1) the idea being funnier to read than play and (2) that the group was not totally invested in the game.

The one notable problem was that challenge creation is a little confusing at first, and people had some trouble with that. It's also not clear whether a single character has to defeat each challenge or if every character except the challenge creator's does (we played the former).

Verdict: better parody of dungeon crawling than Munchkin, but requires more work.

Note: text version available free from the downloads section of the official page linked above.

Filed as:

• rpg
• actual_play
• drowning_and_falling

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen

This is a study of the general rise of irrational thinking (especially political and economic thinking) over the past few decades. Wheen has some great examples of this, plenty of passages which made me boggle at the craziness of people.

I was hoping that there would be a little more depth to it, though. There's no real analysis of why this might be happening. Nor is there any suggestions as to what might be done to deal with it.

Quite good, not unmissable.

Filed as:

• books
• review

The Sun: A Biography by David Whitehouse

Not really a biography of the sun, this is actually a history of solar science. It's a good one, accessible and interesting. Recommended.

Filed as:

• books
• review
• science
• history

Scurvy Dogs by Andrew Boyd & Ryan Yount

A very strange comic about some old fashioned Carribean pirates living in the modern world. Funny. Includes a pirates versus monkeys storyline, too.

Filed as:

• comics
• review
• pirates