Kapcon 2014 review

Kapcon this year was mainly games on demand for me, plus two rounds of adventure squad, the new family event run by me and another parent/gamer.

Round One: Torchbearer (Three Squires). Pitched as "D&D but with a focus on packing," I got a keen group. They got about halfway through the intro adventure, getting some decent loot and closure from the place. Everyone was interested and engaged, and it was a lot of fun.

Round Two: Black Stars Rise beta (Renovation). This was good. A little slow to start but once I had a handle on the weirdness and everyone had their character's sorted, it rocked. The slowly growing awareness of the alien weirdness that had targeted them really worked. Top marks for our doctor, who tried to burn down the building a couple of times in the middle of the game. Finally everyone else came around to his point of view and they blew the whole place up (they worked out that the place had been built as a beacon/summoning portal). Solid, but needs more GM advice - a bit of guidance about how to approach each set and also more about building interesting weirdness. Watch this one.

Round Three: The Quiet Year. This was not my first choice, but the game left for the final three people in games on demand. It was a quiet and thoughtful game, without any post-apocalyptic weirdness. Just people in a hard place trying to get along. I still love The Quiet Year.

Round Four: Torchbearer (Skogenby). One returning player, and a bunch of others keen to try it. It was a crazy ride as they managed to score a fair bit of loot until finally meeting their match with one the big bad under the hill. They left the dwarf underground, possessed. Still fun! I think I might be getting the hang of running it.

Rounds Five and Six: Adventure Squad. Games for families (specifically 5-12 year old kids with their parents present) was a bit of an experiment but went well on the day. I ran a homebrewed Hogwarts game in the first sub-round, then returned to it for the second half. Next I did a homebrew/streamlined D&D game with J V West's adventure Howler, which is short and admirably creepy and weird. The kids generally enjoyed themselves, and I hear that one wants to run his own games already, so the experiment was definitely a success. I did find that running games for kids was both different to what I'm used to and much more tiring! Also played were Hero Kids, Golden Sky Stories, Mice & Mystics, and King of Tokyo.

Round Seven: The Regiment (Mission Boston). An energetic final round as we played this awesome SNAFU of a mission. We didn't do too badly, destroying a few German positions and one bridge with the loss of only a few of our own squad (all the PCs survived, although separated at the end).

Overall, a fun and relaxed Kapcon this year, and I was pleased to get in some play of Black Stars Rise and Torchbearer. I would have liked to play Sagas of the Icelanders and Life On Mars (I got my copy from a group kickstarter at the con - looks lovely!).

Oh, and Fate

One major omission from the previous list of games was the Fate Core kickstarter stuff. Fate Core itself is a great update of the system, but I'm especially interested in Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE). FAE strips the system down even further and looks like it will hit a sweet spot of simplicity to run and play.

Plus, the campaign generated a stupid amount of extra content.

I've been reading through the two volumes of worlds, and there are a few that look like great fun. Fight Fire, Jason Morningstar's firefighting drama setting has looked great right from his early development notes, and the finished version is full of cool stuff. There are a few more that also look neat, and they all bring some new ideas to inspire your games even if you don't use them as-is.

Green Ronin added a Fate Freeport book which includes a full Fate/D&D mash-up, as well as a bunch of fantasy pirate goodness.

And, as they have always done, Evil Hat have made the Fate Core system open content so you can look at the rules for free. Technically it's pay-what-you-like, but that still gives you the chance to try it for free.

Arise!

Time to write some stuff here again! I'll kick off with some quick reviews of all the games I've got since hollowpoint. There's quite a lot of them, especially with the Kickstarters from earlier.

Starting with the most recent and following in the order of me remembering them:

• Owl Hoot Trail takes a stripped down D&D based system and applies it to a fantasy western setting. Lots of great flavour in the classes and the western-ified versions of hobbits, dwarves, elves, and goblins. A good chunk of the book is devoted to a meaty introductory adventure that looks to have a good two or three sessions to kick off your game. I haven't played this yet but I can't see anything that will break in play, and I intend to get some play arranged as soon as possible. 5/5 (provisional).
• I got my pretty hardcover of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rules & Magic book from the IndieGoGo campaign last year. It is very pretty and nicely bound. Still my favourite old school game, too. Note that it includes even more hardcore-shock imagery than previous versions I have seen; not for kids. 5/5
• I've read the PDFs of Numenera, from the Kickstarter last year, but still awaiting the book (hopefully it is on the way). Basically cool, and the character generation is quick and very neat. Planning a one-shot for my regular crew's next game to see how it goes (the main book has a few introductory adventures, plus I have one funder extra; I'll play one of those). System is fairly simple but with a few knobs and levers. I like the setting, but it might have been a little better described in broad strokes and the rest inferred from the rules and gadgets. Worth a look if weird far-future science fantasy is appealing (especially Dying Earth or Book of the New Sun). 4/5  (provisional).
• I got Carolina Death Crawl which is a lovely set of cards and great (if horrible) scenario. I played this with the regular crew when someone was absent (preventing regular The One Ring episode), and it fell a bit flat. The problem comes from having to set your own scenes and create your own opposition (although the cards help with both). Having a GM to do that might make things run better, for my tastes at least. 3/5.
• Dungeon World is good! That said, I've mainly run the stripped down World of Dungeons instead (generously seasoned with things from the main DW book) using Planarch Codex: Dark Heart of the Dreamer (both may be found in the treasure trove). Also, let me give a shout out to Adventures on Dungeon Planet, which is a kick-ass sword and laser science fantasy supplement with a huge bag of awesome stuff. 5/5
• And while we're on dungeon crawls, Torchbearer is also really cool and on the "to be played" list, as soon as the book is finished and shipped here. It's a spin on the Mouse Guard system which focuses on dungeon crawls as a primarily resource based problem: how do we do achieve our goal with the supplies and abilities we have available? 4/5 (provisional).
• Dog Eat Dog is a really elegant, simple system that deals with colonialism, resistance, and assimilation in a (by default fictional) Pacific island nation. Although reading it through, it seems a super light system, in play there's just enough to make the story really work. I've only played the one game, but it quickly became emotionally hard-hitting. There weren't any simple answers for our people, and that was with a fairly black and white contrast between occupier and native cultures.  5+/5
• Another Apocalypse World descendant, tremulus, takes on Lovecraft. There's a lot of great stuff here - in particular the Ebon Eaves setting, where the group answers a questionnaire and the answers allow the GM to look up what's really going on in the town based on the results. It looks like it will make a good setup for a one-shot, and has loads of great seeds for stories in the entries. Some of the other parts I'm not so keen on - I feel like the classes and basic moves didn't move far enough from the source: to really get a Lovecraftian game, the changes need to go a bit deeper. 3/5
• Speaking of which, I have the PDF of Sagas of the Icelanders, which also uses the Apocalypse engine. This is a fantastic historical game, with a focus on 9-10th century Iceland. Bursting with cool stuff and with a really neat take on the moves (there aren't any general basic moves: men, women, and children each have their own sets). Looks great, but haven't had a chance to play yet. 5/5 (provisional).
• I've now had a chance to play fellow-Wellingtonian Dale Elvy's EPOCH survival horror game. It's great, really gets a good survival horror vibe right away and the flashback mechanics to flesh out characters, as well as it being your own choice how badly you get hurt in each act of the story, work well. I've even written a scenario that's going to be in the upcoming war story-themed collection (it's set during the 1939-1940 Winter War, when the USSR invaded Finland). 5/5
• Stalker is a great setting book, but I really didn't like the diceless system. I ran a one-shot with a World of Dungeons variant as the rules (inspired by Jason Morningstar's AP reports for a game doing this), and that went pretty well. Fair warning: the main text of the book is in Comic Sans, which is disconcerting and a little hard to read. 3/5

That's most of my games this year. I'll keep you posted when I run the provisionally rated ones.

Game Chef 2013

It's on this week! Details: http://gamechef.wordpress.com/. Aspiring game designers, I recommend taking part as a way to stretch yourself a bit and try out some game design ideas. It's good fun.

It's crazy, the theme and ingredients are all pictures in a bold, iconic style from http://game-icons.net/.

My mind was pretty blank at first, but now I have a solid idea. I'll see how it goes!

Monster of the Week: Year One

As I find reading about other game publishers' sales interesting, I thought I would give you a summary of how Monster of the Week has gone, now that it's been about a year (specifically, a little more than a year since the IndieGoGo campaign ended and a little less than a year since my first print run).

First up, the campaign gave me 50 electronic and 123 book orders). I put pre-order buttons on the website after the campaign was over, and got a few pre-orders a month.

The first print run was at the end of June, of 200 copies. Shipping out the funder copies and pre-orders took an evening of packing and a morning at the post office. The number of packages was too much for their receipt printer, causing some consternation.

I also set up the book to print on Lulu at this point, hoping that this would lead to more reasonable shipping than I could offer from the antipodes. I also made the PDF available on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow in November 2012.

As I was getting pretty low on copies, I had a second print run of 150 done in December.

Moving into just plain sales, I've had the following results since July 2012:

Month	Direct PDF Sales	DrivethruRPG PDF Sales	Direct Book Sales	Lulu Book Sales
July 2012	20	N/A	9	19
August 2012	20	N/A	11	12
September 2012	26	N/A	11	9
October 2012	18	N/A	5	2
November 2012	13	21	5	12
December 2012	6	34	5	14
January 2013	7	30	14	3
February 2013	4	21	6	0
March 2013	4	34	4	4
Totals (including campaign and pre-orders)	184	140	200	75

That's total sales of 324 PDF and 275 print copies, making 599 all up as of the end of March (up to 608 as of today).

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from such a small amount of data, but here are a couple of things:

• DrivethruRPG/RPGNow adds a significant number of sales (I took part in the GM's Day sale, too, which gained a number of extra sales).
• I noticed a few cases of a mention somewhere leading to a few extra sales, and also from some convention games.
• There's definitely a big burst of sales followed by a slow dropoff. I had a couple of things (Christmas, DrivethruRPG sale) that bumped sales out of the dropoff temporarily.

In terms of money, the fundraiser just managed to cover the costs of all the stretch goals, editing and art, the first print run, and shipping. Since then, overall steady sales have led to a modest profit over the year (enough to buy me an Xbox 360 and XCOM to play on it, as well as paying some bills) but unfortunately not anything like enough to consider giving up my job as a software developer.

On top of my own sales, there's an Italian translation that's just been launched (via Narrativa) and a Russian translation on the way (via Studio 101). The Italian edition includes all new art, which looks very nice (although I haven't seen a copy in the flesh yet, just photos of them).

Overall, I'm very happy with the results! I was confident enough of the game that I knew it would sell, but I was expecting sales more in the range of one- or two-hundred in the first year. I've made contact with a number of fans over the course of it all, which is great - especially hearing about other people playing and enjoying themselves!

hollowpoint review

I've played two games of hollowpoint recently - one at Kapcon games on demand, the other with my regular group.

It's a great system for one-shot action. Both games ran at a breakneck pace, with crazy action scenes quite naturally developing out of the conflict mechanics.

The games were fairly different in detail: at Kapcon, we had a mob revenge/reprisal scenario. This week, I had a team of anti-terror agents working for a mysterious organisation in 80s action movie style.

Despite the rather different feels (albeit both action), the system handled both with ease. For the anti-terror mission, I changed two of the skills from the default (which suggest 100 Bullets or Reservior Dogs in feel) to give the agents a more military edge. This is suggested in the book, with a fair range of examples to give you ideas.

The system is simple enough to explain quickly, but has a few emergent effects that mean there's rarely an obviously best choice about how to approach a conflict (for the agents, is it worth asking for help - with the possibility of rebuff?; for the GM, do I introduce a principal character and split up my dice pool?). That makes the mechanics of the dice a bit more interesting than many simple systems, especially those intended for ease of play as a one-shot.

Another nice feature is that players choose if and when their characters die. If your agent takes two hits, you can choose to "move on". If you take that option, you reinforce the shared teamwork dice pool, and make a new (higher ranked) agent to come in and fix up the (obviously screwed up) mission. It's very fun to have the new character come in with the explicit requirement that they take time to chew out the rest of the team for their failures!

Highly recommended for nasty, violent action games! If the slogan ("bad people killing bad people for bad reasons") can fit the action scenario you have in mind, hollowpoint will almost certainly fit the bill. I'm sure I'll be taking to conventions as a reliably fun, easy to run option.

Additionally, I made myself some reference sheets to cope with the rules in these first games, which you are welcome to grab if you think they'll be useful. There's a GM summary, an agent summary, and cards with the agents' special abilities by rank.

Kapcon 22 Games Played

I've been posting quick accounts at NZRaG. Rather than typing them again, I'll just leave the link there. I've still got Sunday to fill in as I write this.

 I'll post reviews of The Quiet Year, Hollowpoint, and possibly some of the other games played. Quick version: they're both great, as was my game of World of Dungeons/Dark Heart of the Dreamer.

 Durance remains great. It was interesting to see similarities and differences between yesterday's game and my previous one.

Game Review: Durance

I backed the Durance kickstarter, on the strength of Bully Pulpit's previous work (especially Fiasco). I was a little dubious based on the very specific focus of the game, but after reading and playing it I feel like it will have a fair amount of replay value.

The very specific focus is that you'll be telling a story about a space penal colony where things are going bad. It's a SF take on the Australian first fleet and the early days of Sydney (in fact, there's a chapter on using the game for the historical scenario, if you want to try that).

You can see that the system is closely based on Fiasco, with most of the game being free narration and roleplaying. However, there are plenty of extra bits that give a particular spin on things.

To start with, you define the planet and colony. There are six features that initial surveys said were beneficial. You take turns picking one to be true, and another to be false. Once you have defined all those, you can look up your specific world and colony in the rulebook: each possible result has details listed to use in your game. Then you pick what drives your colony - there's a list of six possible drives, and you take turns deleting one until there's only one left.
Then you create two notable characters to play. One will be a convict, the other a free person or agent of the Authority. Your two characters must also be of different ranks - each side of the colony is divided into a ladder, from the top dog (colony Governor, or the convict bigwig the Dimber Damber) down to the lowest of the low (convicts who have served their sentence on the free side, and the lowly political prisoners and ruined convicts on the other). Each notable also has taken a solemn oath, which may be picked by another player for you - that is done turn by turn as well. A final discussion about relationships and implications of the notables picked finishes up the colony setup.

Play then begins, with no one GM as you might expect. Instead, you take turns as scene guide. The guide's job is to pose a question, like "I wonder how Freesh the bolter [an escaped convict] is surviving out in the wilderness?" or "I wonder what the governor does when he finds out his captain of marines was murdered in cold blood?". The other players then set a scene exploring that question and play out what happens (possibly with a few more questions asked along the way). In general, you aim to include your notables in the scenes as much as you can.

Uncertainty in the resolution of a scene is worked out via a choice (after a dice roll by the guide) of which of the colony drives is used in the situation. The choice is between "servility", "savagery", and the particular drive you picked for your colony in setup. The die roll provides some randomness, restricting which drives may be chosen. When the resolution method is picked, the actual resolution is played out by the group.

I've played only a single session one shot, but we had a great time. The setup gives you both an unstable, failing, colony and a bunch of characters with various issues and relationships that push them into action. The oaths, in particular, very naturally push your play of the notables into certain patterns - especially some of the crazier ones (I had a character who had sworn "to never keep a promise"). We wrecked the colony - the senior Authority notables and the Dimber Damber were all overthrown, and a republic declared. But with my promise-breaking convict in charge, we knew that it would not go well.

The resolution mechanics and story guidance are just enough to get things going the right direction - it shares that light touch with Fiasco. The individually generated planet and colony also assure that each game with have its own particular flavour. For example, our planet was so hostile that none of the colonists left the town. Only the wretched bolters attempted to live out in the wild, fighting off the natives and scratching for alien moss to eat. Most of the game took place indoors to avoid the harsh climate.

Overall, recommended. Especially if you're a Fiasco fan who is interested in exploring and even darker story.

Links: Durance at RPGNow or IPR. Fiasco at RPGNow or IPR.

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

I just finished Red Country - latest book in the First Law world. It's at least as good as the others, and revisits a few characters we've seen before to show how the intervening years have treated them.

The main story is great too - Abercrombie's ability to make characters (even horrible ones) human is here in full force. The story takes them to a piece of country that's an obvious parallel to the US West. The story isn't exactly a fantasy western, but that's a pretty good quick description.

Recommended! But read the other books first (knowing the history of the returning characters adds a large dimension to the story).

Just read: Burnt Ice by Steve Wheeler

Burnt Ice is a hardish (firm?) science space opera that reminded me a little of Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds*.

It's about a team of military engineering intelligence agents: they basically go in to check out weird tech and decide how to use/destroy it. As you might expect, a routine first mission draws them into a much more complicated situation.

There's a lot of getting into the details of the tech, enough that it's clear Wheeler has thought the implications of things through (even if not everything is fully explained). The world he introduces us to has a lot going on, as well (note: this is the first book of a series).

Recommended!

* Important footnote: Wheeler does not have any of the torture scenes or gratuitous awfulness that often appears in Banks and Reynolds stories. This is good.

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.