Monster of the Week: Completed

You might see a little more activity here, as Monster of the Week is now complete and in print. You can find out more at my Generic Games site, if you want to check it out (or buy a copy). It's also listed on the Un-Store at my page there. Both of those end up going to me for fulfillment.

I'm working on a Lulu.com edition as well, which will have less crippling shipping to large chunks of the world. The Lulu version will be (a) thinner, due to thinner paper stock and (b) the internal print quality is not so good. Still, there's no reason not to make it available.

There's quite a lot coming up that I might talk about here.

• I need to write a scenario for this year's Fright Night convention. It's going to be Monster of the Week: Medieval, so I'll be hacking my game a bit to make that work. The characters are not going to be quite so suited to dealing with monsters as in the basic game, for a start.
• I'm going to look at making a Monster of the Week demo kit: a mystery or two and partly pre-generated hunters to get people playing right away. That will go up as a free download when it's done.
• Get some serious planning done for my game of The One Ring. I'm using a bunch of the Tales From Wilderland adventures, but I'm getting to a point where the characters' own goals will be driving things. In particular, two of them have a need to go deep into Mirkwood to investigate certain things, and that's going to be tough for them. I guess I should do a decent review of the game as well. Short version: it's very good.
• Get an adventure ready for ConFusion next month. I'll be running Monster of the Week with one of the mysteries that I'm writing anyway for the IndieGoGo funders. Efficient!
• I have a few people who I owe stuff-reading and comments to. Now I'll actually have time to do some of that.
• I should give you all an overview of books I've been reading, as there have been a few good ones. Expect that soonish. 

Rather Late Kapcon Report

This year at Kapcon, I was running the games on demand room again. That meant lots of playing stuff.

Monster of the Week - Zombiefest 2012: I took some people through one of my draft mysteries that's going in the collection for fundraisers. It's a zombie outbreak at a death metal festival, and went just great (it got played twice more by other groups over the convention). The team had a Snoop, and they had a Ghost Facers style youtube show. A Wronged, Flake, and Mundane rounded out the team. For some reason they immediately decided one of the metal drummers was behind events, which led to much hilarity but little mystery solving. A fan set them right before the end, and they even enchanted a baseball bat for the drummer from Celestial Laceration to help them fight off the undead.

FreeMarket: By request, FreeMarket came out. The MRCZ was a little unfocused at first. Then there were some hijinks with a guy hired to death one of them, which they spun into a popular blog that swept the station by storm. For a little while anyway. We had a lot of fun with smileys and frownies, too.

Fiasco - De Medici: I really wanted to play this set, and got a group of people who were keen to join me. We had a lot of fun with our five terrible characters. We were all terrible, and the tale involved blackmail, assassination, a bastard babe, adultery, a fake relic trade, and the Inquisition. It ended well for nobody. I did have a lot of fun with my dashing mercenary captain, who died in perhaps his only selfless act (trying to rescue a soldier of my company from the Inquistion's dungeon).


Psi*Run: Uneven, but basically fun. The runners caused an immense amount of carnage and discovered some unexpected details about their pasts. In future, I plan to approach this game with a much stronger GM style than I am used to these days.


3:16: Kapcon Sunday morning is usually a time when I need to go for something crazy and easy to run. 3:16 is a natural for these situations, and the marines kicked arse on one operation before being almost TPKed in the second: if only the corporal didn't have a strength left [shakes fist]. But he did, so he saved the day and the 3:16th in the final battle. Pity about the rest of the squad.


Monster of the Week: Sophie and I ran our double feature that got cancelled for Fright Night. The games played great and the hunters used the parallel stories to create some neat bits. I got one member of Sophie's team for a while, and the Divine teleported back and forth a few times. Plus there were some great phone conversations between the hunters: one I recall had a hunter in my group phone one in the other team. I called across the room "Hey, Expert, your phone rings" and we interrupted some kind of fight aftermath. In between them fighting ghouls and vampires off, and saving someone from bleeding out, we got the reply "it goes to voicemail". And both teams defeated their respective big bads, so huzzah! But the Divine on my team also destroyed the wall between life and death, to begin the Apocalypse (this was his mission on Earth). Everyone was a little deflated when he did that.


Fiasco - Fiasco High: Last session, after the prize giving, and everyone was strung out and crazy. We played with six, as there was an extra player who didn't get into any other game. This was my most hilarious and disturbing game of Fiasco yet. We had sports rivalry between Chad and Brad, murderous identical twins, an out of control Chess Club, and various shenanigans to ensure that there was way too much beer at the party after the prom. In the end, we ruined the prom and most of the characters ruined their lives too. Fantastic!

Monster of the Week: campaign update

Monster of the Week campaign at IndieGoGo.



I’ve got the next draft of the game done, and it has been sent off for editing. I’m in the process of updating the playtest files to match the changes, so funders and other playtesters can expect to see that in the next few days.

We’re only $143 off the first bonus goal, and $393 off the second, so please spread the word!

I’m particularly excited about the custom dice now – I’ve been exchanging emails with Chessex about them. They’re amazingly helpful and friendly, and have made up two prototypes for me. I really want to get to the $1500 level so that I can get these made up for you all.

Here’s a picture of one of the prototype dice, so you can see why I’m excited.

Monster of the Week campaign update

Monster of the Week campaign: going very well at over $1000.


Next stop, the Summoned hunter playbook and then custom monster dice. 


There's an update on the campaign page with the image I plan to use on the dice: Monster of the Week on IndieGoGo.

Monster of the Week: Preorder/Fundrasier is live now.

So, if you want to help see it read and look the best it can, check out Monster of the Week on IndieGogo.

Oh, I Forgot To Mention The New Johannes Cabal Novel

I have been greatly enjoying the Johannes Cabal books, and the third one - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - just came out. It's just as good as the previous stories. Recommended to everyone, if you don't like these you must be a bad person.

Here's Some Good Books I've Been Reading

First, Monster of the Week relevant works. I seem to have been on a bit of a monster hunting reading binge recently.

I absolutely love Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series (Child of Fire, Game of Cages, Circle of Enemies). I really like the guy telling the story, a chap called Ray Lilly. [Astoundingly mild spoiler] He got involved in some nasty magical events and was recruited by the Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers dedicated to killing all the other sorcerers who endanger the world. It's a pretty grim series, as Ray was a semi-professional criminal before all the magic and stuff. That and the fact that magic can be used for some very scary purposes. The action and mystery side reads a bit like Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, and the spells and magical creatures are terrible and awesome. Recommended if you like the sound of the Dresden Files, but with all the cute stuff removed.

Also good are Mike Carey's Felix Castor books. These follow a London exorcist in a world where the dead have come back - ghosts, zombies and werewolves are all becoming more common. As a detective, he's as hard-boiled as Ray Lilly. The stories are generally a mystery centered around a ghost problem, although usually not in a straightforward way. As the series has gone on, it has also built on what's gone before (both in the novels and in Castor's backstory) to add more depth to the world. There's a very detailed sense of Castor's London as well - it feels like Carey might have paced out the places that chases happen, that sort of thing. The mysteries are pretty grim here too. Recommended for the same reason as Connolly's books, above.

Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International is another good one. Not as good as the other two, but good. It's in much more standard techno-thriller mode, with lots of guns and violence and a thread of libertarian "anything to do with government is bad, anything to do with private enterprise is good" in there. But the basic monster hunting ass-kicking action is great. I haven't read the other two books in the series yet, but plan to get to them soon.

In another direction completely, Harry Sidebottom has a good historical adventure series set in Roman times. They follow what the afterwords explain is a historical character - a Roman general originally an Angles from past the German frontier. It seems like the historical record is just a few mentions for the guy so there's plenty of room to add adventures, and Sidebottom has done a great job doing so. He also manages to fit in a lot of historical details as the story goes on. Recommended for anyone who likes reading Roman historical adventures.

Quick Game Review: Blowback

The regular game had one missing and one sick but present, so we did a one-off of something we hadn't tried. It was Blowback, which is an unofficial game of Burn Notice.

We quickly put together a couple of ex-spies and their civilian friends, and I threw together a pretty basic plot. Character generation is simple, but I think we went a bit too quick. Additionally, two players isn't really enough for the game. I suspect the sweet spot is 3-5 players plus GM. Maybe we should have gone with a single professional and single civilian with just the three of us there.

The mission worked well, although we stumbled on a few of the rules. I really liked the way that you do a section of preparation and intelligence gathering, then make a plan and execute it, quite separately. The four skills the game uses even have totally different effects in each phase, which adds a lot to the feel of things.

One of our rules errors was one that made things a little easy for the agents, so I think we didn't get quite the feel of things going out of control on the operation that I suspect is what normally happens.

Overall impression was positive, but that we picked a bad way to try it out. Recommended if you want to play a game like Burn Notice or find the idea of the innovative preparation/operation mechanics intriguing.

Fright Night V - 29th October, Wellington

Any local horror gaming fans, check out Fright Night V. A small convention of horror gaming for Halloween.

I'll be there running one half of a Monster of the Week double feature/crossover.

Review: The Fiasco Companion

I am a huge fan of Fiasco, and it's one of my go-to convention/one shot games due to its simplicity and the way it almost always generates great play. So getting the new Fiasco Companion was a no-brainer for me.

The book is mainly filled with advice - some general and some specific, such as convention play advice or how to build your own sets.

I used the advice on convention play yesterday, and it was all good. Those two games got into gear a bit quicker than I was used to, and both were really good fun.

There's also four new sets included, and a softer version of the tilt/aftermath tables that can be used for games that are aiming more at "comedy of embarrassment" rather than "death and mayhem". One of the games I played yesterday was "Regina's Wedding" using the soft tables, and it was really good fun. It definitely captured a lighter but still hilarious feel (it was a bit like a wedding version of "Death at a Funeral", indeed we even included a naked drugged character who would have been played by Alan Tudyk).

Overall, the Companion is a solid chunk of new stuff for the money and anyone who plays Fiasco regularly is sure to get their money's worth out of it.

Read-through Review: On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon

On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon is a short comedy game by Ben Lehman. The players are mud dragons, sort of like the swamp dragons in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, if they could talk and make up unlikely plans.

It seems like it's going to produce a funny one-shot, with plenty of random tables to seed your silliness, including one that generates the plan that your dragons are trying to pull off. So you may find yourself in the big city, opposed by a group of humans, hoping to get some candy and respect, and your plan involves really loud farting noises.

Your dragon is rated on things like laziness, patheticness, etc. When you need to roll, you'll be trying to overcome one of your vices and be more like your noble draconic ancestors. Generally you will not.

That sums up the game, I'd say. It's short, and what's there has plenty of fodder for creating your own stupid little dragon hijinks. Long term play is not really a thing, but I suspect it will be a great one shot, or game for off nights. I will certainly take it along to run at Games on Demand type events, too.

If the setup sounds good, I'd advise grabbing a copy, especially given the "pay what you think it's worth"option for the pdf.

Kindle Update

Okay, so it's six months down the track - how is the Kindle now you ask? Fantastic. It's now got to the point that I actively avoid paper type books.

It's small enough to carry almost everywhere, the battery is essentially unlimited (I have had it run out of power once, mainly because I forgot to charge it for about a month). It has effectively unlimited capacity (I think mine has around 200 books in it at the moment, using ~10% of its memory). It's pleasant to read and has boosted my reading speed a bit (I'm not sure why, though).

Downsides: it's no good for stuff you need to flip through (gaming pdfs, reference books, that sort of thing), and on the paperback sized model you might as well just not bother with pdfs (my phone is better).

If you are sitting on the fence, I heartily recommend getting one.

Here's Some Good Books I Read Recently

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Gritty, fun fantasy that makes a point of putting a big (or little) twist on each fantasy cliche in it. Grim but entertaining, maybe halfway between A Song of Ice and Fire and The Black Company stories? Logen Ninefingers (or "The Bloody Nine") is my favorite character in fiction for some time, a terrifying barbarian champion who is getting into middle age and just over all the fighting and nonsense. He's great.

And I finally read George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, too. Spurred on by the TV show, I suppose, although after the books I didn't feel quite so keen on watching it (possibly because so much stuff had to be cut). In any case, good but with some flaws. He's way to keen on adding point of view characters, something I'm not keen on in general. The sex and violence also grows tiresome. It's all so... sordid. And written just a little bit too larger than life to be believable.

Moving away from fantasy novels, I also really enjoyed James Gleick's The Information. It's a bit of a whirlwind tour of information theory and the way information has become more important through history. Lots of great stuff, although I felt it tailed off a little abruptly when he got to the present day.

Walter Jon Williams has a sequel to This Is Not A Game, called Deep State. It is better than the first one, and the first one was great. I recommend the pair of them to everyone interested in science fiction, gaming's growing intersection with the rest of life, and technothrillers.

My Games Site

Site is now back at the expected address, genericgames.co.nz.

Monster of the Week on Twitter

I just set up an account for sharing news and info as I gear up to into open beta testing. Go follow @MotW_rpg if you want to stay up to date about what I'm doing.

There's a button to mash on the righthand sidebar, too.

Monster of the Week update

I've been working pretty feverishly on Monster of the Week (the Apocalypse World hack edition) for a while now, and it's currently solid enough for playtesting. Currently there are three games going, only one of which has me involved.

It's a game of ass-kicking monster hunters, inspired by Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fringe, The X-Files, Hellboy, BPRD, The Dresden Files and stuff like that.

As a teaser, here's a look at the Divine hunter class book.

I'm keen to get it out to other playtest groups, so if that little bit of info sounds good let me know at mike.sands@genericgames.co.nz and I'll let you at the playtest files.

Time & Temp

I've played a couple of one-shots of Time & Temp over the past few weeks, enough to have some stuff to say about it.

Firstly, it is a fun and funny game. The combination of characters who aren't really good at anything with difficult to solve problems and time travel is just great. The system works smoothly, although it takes a few minutes to get into the swing of it (and I did make one major error in the first game, although it was easy to correct in hindsight, and it didn't detract from the game).

Coming up with scenarios is fun too! As the GM (General Manager) you really just need a time and place and something anachronistic to go on. My two games have been about the Dodo Liberation Front (eco-warriors going back to defend the wildlife of Mauritius from sailors) and a Norwegian supremacist who had gone back to the 13th century to create a high-tech Norwegian world empire. In both cases, the temps made good use of their "skills" to prevent both problems.

As GM, you do need to look over the paradox and challenge rules very carefully - there are a few things that aren't described very clearly. Check out the game's website - Ravachol has written an FAQ and some examples that help a lot in the understanding. I recommend checking those out too before you run a game.

Overall, great game - I really look forward to playing some more (and seeing what happens in an extended run).

Actual Play: Lamentations of the Flame Princess/Tower of the Stargazer

In my Monday group's usual holiday season tradition, we are trying a few one off in the lead up to Kapcon. Last time it was a Monster of the Week playtest, this week we did a bit of old school renaissance with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, using the introductory adventure Tower of the Stargazer.

The game certainly brought back a lot of nostalgia, and I thought that the rules lived up to their promise from reading through - everything was fairly streamlined and intuitive (at least compared to actual old school D&D or the old school rulesets that pretty much just recreate the old rules. It also had a lot more flavour in the character classes than Dungeonslayers (our only other recent foray into this style). Dungeonslayers is a fine lightweight set of rules, but it felt a little flat to us after a few sessions.

Anyway, we got some characters rolled up - one player taking two after I mentioned that multiple characters and/or hirelings might be a good idea. The fighter also bought a dog - obviously a terrier given its low rolled hit points!  So we had the Pants siblings (cleric of the Mist Goddess and specialist - that's a thief to the rest of us), a halfling and the fighter and dog. No hirelings, as they ran out of money but maybe there'll be some next time.

I basically set them up with the beginnings of a Western Marches style game, with a small village and nearby military fort on the border of The Empire, with only rumours and ruins beyond. The key rumour (given to the two siblings played by one player, because he put his hand up when asked "who has a wizard as a parent?") was a story about a place constantly hit by lightning containing lots of treasure and magic. This is about the most obvious lead in to The Tower of the Stargazer that you could have.

I'll hold off on anything spoilery about the adventure, but we had fun as they explored. They searched and tried this and that, finding lots of weird stuff, some treasure, some odd magical things, some monsters and a fair chunk of the story behind why it is all there and like it is. We got about half of the place explored in the evening, with a natural cutoff as they needed to retreat back to town in order to (a) heal up and (b) flog off some loot. I was happy to see the dog get the first kill of the game, and they narrowly avoided any of the party being killed (there were three or four chances that someone could have died, and the halfling only made it by 1 hit point on one of them).

Good fun, overall. Not sure if I'm ready to commit to a full on old school campaign, but I certainly want to see them explore the rest of the tower and maybe we can come back to the characters for some of the other adventures later on. Death Frost Doom also looks pretty cool, and Hammers of the God too. I should mention that I really respect Raggi's adventures, because they provide places that (from reading) look really cool to explore, they're really dangerous adding a big sense of caution, and for the GM there's  a good story as to why the place is there, why things are like they are and how all the little elements fit in. The sense of logic to each place really makes them work for me, and gives you a good base to improvise extra details off when you are running it. They're fun to read, and this one was more fun to gradually reveal as they explored it.

I bought a Kindle!

Kind of on impulse, kind of due to a confluence of suggestions and the current exchange rate, I bought myself a Kindle ebook reader. It turned up in the mail last Tuesday and I've been reading stuff on it happily since then - except for a now quite obsolete feeling paper edition of The Fall, received as a birthday present (note: not quite as original as The Strain was, but just as exciting).

The text is very readable, and seems to be somewhat easier on the eyes than an actual book (and much nicer than an LCD screen). I've been reading faster using it, maybe because you have to do less work (no movement of pages, etc). It has the obvious advantage of being able to hold ~3000 books in a package that is about the size of a paperback, except much thinner and slightly lighter. Another nice service is that many of the Amazon books have a free sample, allowing you to read the first chapter or two of something for free to decide if you want to buy it.

Disadvantages are that the "instant delivery" of new texts makes it easy to spend a lot of money, and that some books are restricted by region, meaning now and again I am prevented by publishing restrictions from giving people money in exchange for their goods. I assume that the publisher and author would actually like me to buy their products, but it seems that some confluence of dumbness prevents this. The screensaver is also a little annoyance, as you can't customize it at all and some of the images aren't so great (particularly the creepy picture of Emily Dickinson.... eek!).

Oh, and it's not going to be any use for pdf game texts, something I would quite like to have available in this format. I think that the ideal electronic device for these is a few years away (or maybe just too expensive - I'm looking at you iPad).

Overall, I recommend the thing. It is good, and means I don't need to worry about getting more bookshelves quite as soon as I might have.

Gaming Update

Not much to review over the past few months, but I did jut buy myself copies of Time & Temp, How We Came To Live Here, Dead of Night and some Trail of Cthulhu scenarios. Expect reviews of those texts soon and reviews after play some time later.

I'm still MCing one game of Apocalypse World and playing in another. This is a fantastic game, and I highly recommend it. Even if a post-apocalyptic setting doesn't really do it for you, it's worth a serious look. In play, it generates really great, emotional character stuff all the time. As an example, one of the advancement options is "create a second character to play as well as your first one", something I have done in the game I'm playing in. The new character comes in somewhat disconnected to the existing characters and story, of course, and he spent two sessions as an outsider, really, to the things going on. Then, at the end of that second session a few move results suddenly brought him right into the centre of everything that is happening (specifically, some responsibility for causing the apocalypse and a hint of how to repair the world). It's awesome stuff, now he's got a huge plan to save the world ahead of him. The abilities of the characters to change the world (even just the local part of it) make for great play, as much when you fail a roll as when you succeed. So play it!

I didn't mention that I got my boxed set of FreeMarket in early August. It's pretty! The game is the same, so no news there, but the components are lovely. It looks like they even have some copies left, so if you were thinking about grabbing it there you go.