Lacuna - Impressions

I've been interested in this game for a while, but it's been out of print for a while, so when it came back into print recently (with a free Lacuna device included, no less!) I picked a copy up.

It's a fun read. Loads of colour, and a cool premise. The rules and setting definitely leave plenty of room for the group to fill in gaps as they want - the game is a mindfuck for players, just from the setting, but running it from the book basically is for the GM too.

I've played a couple of sessions of it, as we've had absences preventing our theoretical main game going ahead. Both went well, with the creepiness of Blue City seeming to be invoked from my descriptions. The main mechanic - the Agents' heart rates increasing throughout the mission up to a point at which they can die - really paces the game well. The urgency it brings to events is fantastic - especially given the fact that Agents can re-roll failed rolls at the cost of increased heart rate. I can see later missions being a lot more cautious when the dice come out (especially as our second outing had the mission fail, with all three agents Ejecting to save themselves rather than stay in the increasingly doomed confrontation with the Hostile Personality).

I can see that the secrets of the game will be interesting as they begin to come out - only two missions in, we haven't really got to that yet, but as the Agents get more proficient I can see that familiarity with the mission structure and increasing amounts of Static will lead to some of the crazy stuff in the book coming out. That of course will lead to more GM improv, as most of these secrets are merely evocative hints pointing in a certain kind of direction. Still, it should be fun.

The Escapement by K J Parker

The final installment of the Engineer trilogy. Ties everything up without too many surprises, in a satisfying manner. I really enjoyed these books and shall be reading Parker's other couple of series soon. They work on a few levels, combining world-building, a little philosophy and an exciting plot. The characters aren't exactly deep but they're well-drawn enough that I got drawn into their trials as the story went along - even a couple of them who were basically terrible people got some sympathy here and there.

Evil For Evil by K J Parker

The second book of the Engineer trilogy, which I liked more than the first. All the characters who seemed to be good at everything begin to lose control of the forces they had unleashed in this story, which seems much more plausible. The story itself begins to weave the characters together much more closely and thus becomes a lot more exciting.

I realised that in some ways Parker is writing about similar themes to those in Pratchett's works (particularly his newer ones) but without the overt humour - there's a certain black cynicism here, still, but the books certainly aren't comedy. That aside, there's a commonality of interest in how societies can be efficiently or corruptly structured and the effects of technological change.

Books Catch-up Post 3

Moving Target (aka Marque and Reprisal), Engaging the Enemy and Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon. The next three in the Vatta's War series. All very good. The only flaw is a tendency to have the characters be a little too awesome, which is forgivable in space opera.

The Guns of El Kebir and Siege of Khartoum by John Wilcox. The next two in the Simon Fonthill series. Both good and up to the standards of the previous novels. Things are beginning to go a little less hard on Fonthill in these ones.

Cretaceous Dawn by L & M Graziano. Adventure story about some people who accidentally time travel back to the time of dinosaurs and have to trek across the countryside to a particular point to come back. Good characters, science side of things is not explained at all (which I regard as a plus - if it is never explained it can't be nonsense), think of it as a superior Jurassic Park without all the waffle about 'Man playing God', chaos theory or kids (although there is a dog).

Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden. Second in his Ghenghis Khan series. Good, and a lot more exciting than the first one, mainly due to this one including Ghenghis beginning to conquer the rest of the world (specifically China).

The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

An absolutely fantastic read. It's superior space opera, told as a chap in a bar recounts the hunt for an ancient artifact to a bard. It takes a little while to get going but I got drawn into it more and more as it went on. The characters are fantastic and Flynn really makes you care about their motivations and histories as the story unfolds. Plus the storyteller and bard have their own little story that comes out in the interludes.

All this has as a backdrop a really interesting world, a celtic-influenced human galactic ("Gaelactic") empire that seems to be the result of a few interstellar wars over a few thousand years. The cultures of each different planet are vibrant and fun (although he does have some annoying dialect used, luckily not to excess), and feel like places that might have developed in the world he describes.

Great stuff. Read it.

The First Wave by James R Benn

The second Billy Boyle mystery, this one is just as enjoyable as the first. A few of the bad guys are pretty obviously telegraphed, but that doesn't really detract from the story as a whole.

Devices and Desires by K J Parker

I enjoyed this more than The Company, possibly because it is drawn on a somewhat larger scale. There's certain common elements - extremely competent characters driven to extremes by various flaws and it is possibly set in the same world.

It tells the story of an engineer sentenced to death for making improvements on a mechanical design, one of the worst crimes in the city-state where he lives (they are the renowned machine-makers of the world). This sets into motion a cascade of events that causes war and destruction, and looks set to cause even more in the following couple of volumes in the trilogy.

I also approve of Parker writing fantasy without magic, monsters and all that stuff. Just people in a different, apparently totally normal world doing their thing. Admittedly, his main characters are almost supernaturally good at everything they do, but only to an unlikely extent rather than an unbelievable one.

Gaming Catch Up - Mouse Guard in Play

I've played three more games of Mouse Guard in the past few weeks. One has been with my wife and daughter, the other two with my regular gaming group.

The family game went as well as the first two, although it was somewhat constrained by bedtime. They had to defend a caravan of parties supplies from some mouse bandits - this led to a fight, which was a great success. They then had to deal with a bluejay trying to steal cake, which they had less luck with. Continues to be fun with a young kid - she had no problems at all with the concepts involved in the conflict mechanics for the fight, either.

For the regular group, we played out "Deliver the Mail" and then a mission to see what some mysterious sightings on a certain road were being caused by

The intricate details of these games aren't really such a big deal - the thing Mouse Guard really shines at is ease of play. You can sit down for 5-20 minutes and come up with some good ideas for a mission, but if you don't have time for that you can just pick a couple of things as you crack open the rulebook at the beginning of your session. The characters' beliefs and instincts give you really big clues as to what sort of things the players want to see, too.

As you play, failed rolls allow you to provide twists to the story, which is a perfect way to elaborate things as you go whenever you have a cool idea for what could happen next. The trait mechanics encourage players to choose to make rolls harder for themselves in order to gain checks to use later (I can see this becoming more common as people play more sessions and begin to really realise the power that checks have), which contributes too.

It ends up with the game seeming to reflect the choices that the group as a whole makes about where things should go, but without anyone having to try really hard to make it happen. I continue to recommend this game!

Books Catch-up Post 2

The Goddess and the Bull by Michael Balter: An account of the excavations at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and overview of what has been discovered about the stone age town there and more generally the region. Lots of information about the people involved in the archeology, too, and a history of the various fashions and arguments that have gone through the discipline (as they relate to that site). Fascinating stuff, reawakened my interest in prehistoric human civilizations.

All the other Vorkosigan stories by Lois McMaster Bujold. Solid space opera with a mystery/thriller (and occasionally romance) twist on them.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. Good, but not stunning. I found this retreaded the story of The Last Colony a little too much for my liking (I realise that he wrote it for a different audience, so this probably is not that big a deal). It did, however, clear up some problems that the other novel had so it was nice to see what was supposed to be happening with those.

Billy Boyle by James R Benn. A mystery novel about a Boston cop drafted in the Second World War and attached to Eisenhower's staff through a family connection. In London, he immediately ends up investigating some unusual goings on. It's a good story with some satisfying twists and a really good main character.

The Magicians and Mrs Quent by Galen Beckett. This is from a similar inspiration as Strange & Norrell, although this story is significantly lighter. It begins as essentially a fantasy take on a Regency romance and takes a detour through gothic too. Not really very serious, but fun and exciting. I am looking forward to the second in the series.

The Company by K J Parker. A group of retired military veterans start up a colony at the behest of their old unit leader. Things steadily begin to fall apart as their old rivalries come up, old secrets are revealed and so on. The fact that the leader has kind of stolen an island off the government is just one of the problems that they have to face. An exellent character study of things falling apart, reminiscent of Fargo (without the jokes about accents).

Books Catch-up Post

I've got behind on book reviews, so here are brief notes on the ones that I have read but not reviewed.

Trading In Danger by Elizabeth Moon. Superior space opera, good characters. Will look up rest of series.

Miles, Mystery & Mayhem by Lois McMaster Bujold. #3 of Vorkosigan omnibus editions. Patchy but overall good. Some of these stories written much earlier in her career, others much later, and you can tell. Later stories are very good, although the contiunity is somewhat stretched (not quite broken, though).

The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Follow up to previously reviewed story about seer's apprentice in Venice who solves mysteries. More of the same. Good, fun.

Mouse Guard: Actual play with family

Yesterday and today we played a couple of sessions of the Mouse Guard RPG as a family - me GMing, my five year old daughter and somewhat reluctant wife playing a two-mouse patrol.

I decided that I'd take them through full character generation, as my daughter is still learning to read, so going through a template would probably be more hard work for her than thinking up answers to the character generation questions. Being impressed by Saxon in the comics, she made up Autumn, a tenderpaw who wants to be the bravest mouse in the guard. The patrol is filled out by Trevor, a middle-aged slacker of a patrol leader, who basically wants to hang around the pub drinking at every opportunity.

Their first mission was the deliver the mail episode from the book. We moved through it fairly quickly to account for a five-year old attention span, but managed to hit all the main points. They failed the pathfinding test and encountered the raven - as a twist on an attempt to use Birds-wise to help on the path-finding check (she wanted to get a bird to give her a ride to see the way!) So the raven decided to try and steal the mail instead, and was persuaded not to via a very definite Loremouse check from Trevor.

They continued to Gilpledge and sorted out Martin, and then had a brief player turn. My daughter had a lot of fun and quickly requested a second game (which had to be put off until the next day). She did sit down later on to draw a picture of her guardmouse.

Today, she insisted we play another game and once we had all the chores done we made time for it. We decided that Autumn convinced Trevor that they should go and get Martin's chair from weasel- territory after all (to play up her desire to be the bravest mouse), so that was their mission for today.

Their first obstacle was to get across a flooding stream, which they did by building a bridge (with two carpenters along, an obvious choice!) However, the roll was failed, so that made all the mice tired.

Next, when they got to Walnutpeck, they found a weasel watching the road for anyone coming along. They tried to sneak past it but failed, and had to run away from it. We decided to use a simple versus test as neither daughter nor wife felt like learning the full conflict mechanics just yet (today's elaboration was the use of traits on top of the basic roll mechanic). Autumn made this roll, eluding the weasel spy and leading the patrol and Martin back to Walnutpeck to pick up his heirloom chair before heading back into the mouse territories.

Another quick player turn followed with Autumn successfully testing to remove her tired condition and Trevor failing (I suspect a late night drinking was to blame!)

Overall, a great success. I've played a few roleplaying games with my daughter previously but this is the first one that really seemed to grab her. This might be partly the age she's at, and I think Chris Petersen's art plays a huge part. Plus, in play, the fact that the mechanics are fairly easy to grasp even for a kid who is just beginning to read (lots of "can you think of a way that you can help the other mouse do such and such?" and things like that). The fact that there's no plain old failure is also helpful, as I feel like rolling and being told "your mouse didn't do what you wanted" would be a buzzkill for her, but being told "well, you built the bridge but now you are all tired out" was okay.

Looking forward to more stories about Autumn and Trevor the brave and lazy (respectively)!

Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

After certain persons close to me going on at some length about Bujold in general and the Vorkosigan series in particular, and one of them lending us pretty much the whole of the Vorkosigan series, I have begun working my way through them.

This first omnibus edition comprises two novels that occur before Miles Vorkosigan himself is actually born, serving mainly to set up the world in general and the formidableness of his parents in particular. It's good, high action space opera. It has some of the flaws you might expect given that description - the heroes are just phenomenally awesome, for example - but accepting these conventions, it is an immensely good read.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Re-reading this was enjoyable, especially given that I had been thinking a lot about Lovecraft (with running Trail of Cthulhu) and it's relationship to espoinage fiction (given the Delta Green connection in my game). Plus, I've been reading a bit of Hellboy/BPRD and thinking a bit about Cold City/Hot War too, so I guess the whole apocalypti/monsters from beyond thing might be rather on my mind right now.

Anyhow, to the book itself... it's certainly raw compared to his later work, and filled to the brim with nerdy jokes about Lovecraft, information technology and spy fiction. Still, they are good jokes and it is a good story. I suspect that The Jennifer Morgue will get a second read pretty soon, too, and I'm looking forward to the third outing even more now.

Kapcon 2009 Report

So, this year I was a leading conspirator in Kapcon's second games on demand event. We had a bigger team of facilitators, with last year's team (me, Steve Hickey, Morgan Davie and Malcolm Craig) joined by Aaron Caskey, Simon Carryer and Gregor Hutton. Everything went a bit more smoothly, with the benefit of having done it all once before, and overall I felt that the room had a more relaxed atmosphere.

The main thing was getting games played - I have numbers for the first five rounds, where we seem to have got 40 people through the room. In fact the games played is somewhat higher than this would imply, because with 7 of us facilitators, we all got to join in games a fair bit too. I think we had four or five games run per round, and a good selection too. Highly requested this year were 3:16, Mouse Guard, and Best Friends. I guess having Mr Hutton present may have accounted for some of that.

As facilitators, we'd made a specific decision to reduce the number of games we each offered and focus on fewer games that we were more excited to run. In the end we each had 4-8, I think. As one of those at the higher end of that range, I think that next year I'm going to aim for no more than 5-6 to offer. More focus, I think, means more enthusiasm when pitching and running.

Anyway, for some specific games...

Round one I ran a game of Mouse Guard. We played the 'deliever the mail' scenario from the book, minus one character, and had a great time. The main mission went relatively smoothly and we had time to do a follow up GM/player turn in which they dealt with the mouse Loretta and her story that had come up after their encounter with the raven and losing some of the mail. A good time was had by all, and I think that session might have sold the game to one of the players who wanted to try it out. I like this game - as GM, the rules really help build the story up as you play.

Round two, I got to play a game of 3:16 run by Gregor. I played a quiet, possibly psycho trooper in what turned out to be a squad of misfits. We almost immediately got pulled off active service due to a variety of screwups and the sarge got caught in Catch-22 by his superior officer. Eventually we got shipped to a trooper R&R brothel planet to work as MPs, which went as badly as might be expected, as we stumbled upon alien inflitrators up to no good. Our attempts to deal with them were hindered by (1) our decision that some innocent alien clams were the enemy and (2) the sargent being infected and mind controlled by a Gongaran ooze. Despite all this, we managed to wipe all the bastards out through the panicked use of lots of strength flashbacks. Take that, disgusting groin oozes! A fun, albeit absolutely disgusting game. Be glad I have left out the details of the Gongaran life cycle.

Round four, was a game of Geiger Counter. We built a science fiction film "New Eden", in which the menace was the breakdown of a utopian Star Trek-type alliance due to the danger of new ideas. Our setting was a frontier base where an alien diplomatic mission was taking place. The overall plot was that some paranoid or possibly just cautious faction in the alliance determined that the alien influence would destablize society, so attempted to destroy the contact at the source. Our characters were people on the base attempting to either escape or deal with either the 'cauterization' faction or the 'new ideas' faction. The aliens also took some part, although their motivations were 'escape from crazy humans' once everything began falling apart. The game went well, with some strong potential survivor characters and some great scenes. I felt that the pacing went as it should, and that Geiger Counter once again shone as a game for this sort of story. Two survivors, one infected with 'new ideas' and both leaving room for a sequel.

Round five was a game of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach which went very well. I had a couple of players who were, I think, new to the style of game (GM-less, one shot) but they were both experienced LARPers, and they soon got into the swing of things. We had a fairly low body count game, but plenty of social sniping and heckling people's formal speeches. Due to a combination of players who were a couple and fortuitous Roach commands, there was also a pretty funny scandalous BDSM affair between their two characters. My own character had a very satisfying arc, in which I pushed him to bring the crazy (he was Roach-possessed from the beginning) but he threw it off before the end, and I had him give up his stuffy university life to become a musician and a better person, having reformed from those dark days of 1919 at Pemberton College. I think that might be the first happy ending I have had for a Roach character!

So, four out of four good games. In each I felt like the intended effect of "introduce people to something they are interested in but might not have given a go otherwise" was met, and wholly or mostly the secondary objective of "and they liked it too". There was also generally a more sociable and fun vibe in the games on demand room this year, which was good. Plus, thanks to Malcolm, we had arranged to have a few games to give away as spot prizes (on a 'you get one entry each time you play, and we draw names out at random' process). It was really cool to be able to give some free stuff to some of the people who had come and joined us during the con.

Comments are welcome. Otherwise, see you all next year!

Mouse Guard RPG: Actual Play Impressions

Just a quick post to note that I played a one-shot game of this on Monday night, with the pre-generated "Trouble in Grasslake" mission from the book. We had a lot of fun, and the game seemed to work in all the places that reading it led me to expect that it would.

We had a few rough areas with certain rules, but nothing serious - they were all things that would be easily dealt with if we had a few sessions of familiarity (or just an actual book to flick through instead of a printed out pdf). We had a major conflict, which ran surprisingly easily given that it's more involved in the reading. That might be partly because a really good early roll made it fairly short, but I think that was pretty minor - the options were pretty straightforward as we dealt with each in turn. Tactically we probably should have all been thinking more seriously but that will come in time.

Most importantly, we had a great time. The mission played out well, with the major plot and main subplot both giving a lot of entertainment. We skipped one of the suggested subplots, which never quite fitted in, so no great loss there. I also mainly hit the mice with conditions as the result of failed tests, because that was what the fiction called for. The one complication that I remember came in the player turn and led to some great drama between the guard mice as an ill-advised action by one mouse became fairly public knowledge.

Overall impressions: fantastic! I am hoping to run or play some more at Kapcon tomorrow.

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod

Well, I made it to the end of the Fall Revolution series again. This one is my second favorite after The Star Fraction. A nice, fairly hopeful end to the series.

The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod

Third in the Fall Revolution Series, this deals with the aftermath of The Stone Canal's events from the point of view of the defenders of the communist Union that controls most of the Solar System. The key question is what to do about the posthuman upload civilisation on Jupiter, that has been generally hostile for some decades and has just changed into a new phase. Our point of view character is a hard soldier who is all for dropping a few thousand comets on the planet and killing them all, but various people she meets along the way are keen to convince her that perhaps one shouldn't just wipe out other civilisations just because they might later be a threat to us?

A good one.

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod

I remember this being the most confusing of the Fall Revolution novels, and it still is on re-reading. It is packed with more ideas than the others, and none seem quite as completely explicated. Still, it's interesting to see the story of a couple of characters you met once each in The Star Fraction played out in full over the course of a couple of hundred years here (this pattern continues in the other books, each is a story that is tangential to that first novel).

Still, there's plenty here to like, and the ideas are fascinating to think about, even if I would have liked to have them developed further in the novel.

The Alchemist's Apprentice by Dave Duncan

A fun Venetian murder mystery/conspiracy novel following the apprentice of a descendant of Nostradamus. Technically it's a fantasy novel, but the magical elements are few and hardly rate compared to the romantic poltical wheeling and dealing of the main character as he tries to solve a murder, in the flamboyant manner expected of a Venetian nobleman (even if his family happens to be destitute).

Light and enjoyable.

Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell

Cornwell's tale of the Agincourt campaign follows the career of a longbowman who gets made ventenar (sergeant in command of twenty archers) during those events. As fans of Cornwell may expect, he has a some diabolical enemies - some English, some French - who he crosses paths with on and off during the course of the novel. The times are brutal, and so is the story, especially his many little revisionist takes on the romanticized version of the story (e.g. Shakespeare's).

Most importantly, contains all the adventure and historical detail that you would expect. Great stuff.