SF and Gaming Blog

I’ve finally posted in both active threads in the Kalyr PBeM, after keeping my long suffering players waiting for far too long.

One problem I had was when a player made some references to Italian food. There is no Italy in Kalyr, so I had to edit those references a little. It’s now Keylinan food, in the style of the southern city of Keylin, which has a mediterranian climate and who’s inhabitants might well eat something resembling Italian food.

I attempted to rename Minestra di Pasta e Lenticchie into something in Vohrran (the language spoken in Keylin), but chickened out since the language is woefully undeveloped.

Actually, so is the food. Apart from the infamous “Earthworms in Garlic”, Kalyr cuisine is one of those ‘local colour’ things that needs work. All we have at the moment is this entry in the Kalyr Wiki.

Anyone want to contribute?

Game WISH 74 is Supplements You’d Like to See

Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?

First, I’d like to see another volume added to the GURPS Alternate Earths setting from GURPS Time Travel. The two existing supplements, snappily titled ‘GURPS Alternate Earths’ and ‘GURPS Alternate Earths 2′ each describe six worlds where history took a different turn, ranging from a brutal totalitarian world where the Nazis won World War Two, a world where Rome never fell, to one where the Vikings dominate the earth. While I’d like to see a third volume with six more worlds for crosstime adventurers to visit, I’d also like to see one detailing specific locales within some of the twelve worlds already published. What dark secrets lie in SS Burgundy, home of the occult Aryan mystics from Reich-5? What of the Benedictine monastic kingdoms in the Pyrenees from Midgard, surviving bastions of Christianity in a world dominated by Norse paganism?

Another GURPS books I’d love to see would be The Madness Dossier. This is one of the sample settings in Ken Hite’s GURPS Horror, in which there was a reality quake in 535AD. Everything in what we believe to be history before that date didn’t actually happen. The true history is that before 535, humanity was enslaved by the alien Anunnaku, who were not only overthrown, but completely edited out of history by means that we don’t really understand. But the Anunnaku aren’t totally vanquished, and occasionally irrupt back into our own reality. They possess the power to mess with people’s perceptions, and if enough people start to believe in them there’s the risk of a second reality quake, wiping out the last millennium and a half of our own history, overwriting it with theirs. Only the secret and ruthless men and women of Project Sandman stand in their way. All this is described in just seven pages; it deserves a full 128 page book of it’s own.

Finally, I’d like to see the In Nomine line completed. In Nomine isn’t quite dead, but its definitely on life support, and it’s by no means certain that any more will be published for it. Earlier supplements detailed many of the superiors (Archangels and Demon Princes), but many more are still to be defined in detail. Since many of my IN PCs have served Jean, Archangel of Lightning, I’d especially like to see detailed writeups of him, and of his arch enemy Vapula, Demon Prince of Technology.

This weeks Game WISH is about Religion and Controversy

A lot of neogamers I play with are uncomfortable with taking real religions and putting them into play. With all the “Satanist” backlash against D&D that there’s been, do you feel comfortable having any religion in your games? Do you scrub it of anything controversial?

Being a believer myself, I feel that including any real-world religion in a game that also includes magic and supernatural elements is always going to be a situation where you have to tread carefully, especially if any of the players are strongly religious. I would not want to include anything that made any player uncomfortable. Religious faith, much like sexuality, is an important part of people’s identity, which is why religion, like sex, can be a very touchy area.

My own position is that games must treat any real-world religions with respect; if the world-view of the gameworld is completely at odds with any mainstrean faith, then it’s better to avoid explicit mentions of that religion in the game. For example, I would never play a strongly religious character in a Call of Cthulhu game. On the other hand, I do play a believer in STD, a game based on Steven King’s The Stand, as does at least one other Christian player.

I had mixed feelings about In Nomine, the game of Angels and Demons. Some people feel the game is inherently blasphemous, and it can be if you play it that way. But it can also be one of the most explicitly Christian games out there; I’ve certainly played games that have had a very strong moral tone. It is about the ultimate struggle between Good and Evil, after all.

When it comes to fantasy worlds with fictitious religions, I have trouble imagining a plausible world where religion plays no part whatsoever. I’m very into well-defined and coherent worlds with detailed histories and cultures, and religion should play an important part in that. Take the religion out of Glorantha and you won’t have much left. Likewise my own Kalyr setting would be much weaker without the enigmatic Guardians and the array of wierd and wonderful human cults.

You may be familiar with Jack Chick’s infamous badly drawn loopy fundamentalist tracts (such as the infamous Dark Dungeons). Now it looks as if something unspeakably horrible has happened.

The 20′ By 20′ Room is a new group gaming blog, featuring some familiar names.

Game WISH 71: Unwritten NPCs asks:

For GMs : when you plan or play your NPCs, do you intentionally leave out some of the story for each? Do you hold something back and let the Players imagine the rest or do you present NPCs from the core of who they are? Is time a factor; a short game or one-shot not allowing much character depth? Does NPC expertise shine through? Or are there character foibles that cloud the better qualities of the NPC? Are there short-cuts to get this across?

I’ve very develop-in-play when it comes to NPCs. In pre-game planning I’ll often come up with large numbers of NPCs, all of which are defined by little more than name, race, profession and a couple of adjectives. As the game develops those that become more important get fleshed out; nobody starts out with either a detailed back-story or a full-blown character sheet. I tend to add details to individual NPCs as and when they start becoming important to the story. I probably have two many NPCs in the game, which results in many of them becoming little more than cyphers. If you need a database to keep track of them all, them perhaps there are too many!

Saying that, there are a few NPCs in Kalyr with extensive back story who have never actually come up in play; sometimes writing NPC back-stories becomes a form of solitaire play. I don’t think I’ve ever used the story of Lendor Tyr, former heir to the Tharn (City Lord) of Calbeyn, who had vanished into exile, accused of murdering his father. Neither have I made any use of the eight hierarchs of the Academy of the Mind. Maybe their time will come.

Let’s look at the active NPCs in the game at the moment. In one thread a party from the Technology Guild, consisting of two PCs, Karogeth and Luanu, plus an NPC, Vovir, have encountered a group of four street toughs, blocking their exist from the bad part of town. I made up the gang of toughs more or less on the fly, except for their leader, ‘Ug’, who had appeared in the arena as a gladiator much earlier in the game. A combination of a conciliatory approach by the PCs and some good reaction rolls have turned what were going to be opponents in a fight scene to potential sources of information, so instead of defining their combat statistics I’m now giving them some more knowledge and personality. They may well reappear as street contacts in the future.

The PCs are looking for a missing guild member, Batendal. Although he’s yet to appear in person, I’ve had to flesh him out quite considerably to explain why he’s disappeared, and why the PCs are looking for him I cannot reveal any more because the players might be reading this!

One of the PCs, Luanu, started life as an NPC. When the game went down to three active players, I put out a call for recruits, and suggested some NPCs that could become PCs, and Harald volunteered to take on Luanu. I sent him my GM’s notes and he came back with an extensive back-story which also happened to flesh out another NPC, Luanu’s street contact, Kal.

Vovir, the final NPC present, started out as the father of a now defunct PC, Narluis. He’s got something of a backstory as a man who’s alcoholism has destroyed both his once-promising career and his marriage, but who’s now given up drink and is trying to rebuild his life. I developed him during the period Narluis was a PC, and dropped him into the present thread because he was hanging about with nothing better to do at the time. It’s always better to reuse existing NPCs rather than continually creating new ones.

Game WISH is back. WISH 72: Character Interruptus asks:

Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?

Most of the longer-running RPG campaigns have folded before reaching any kind of conclusion; sadly it seems par for the course, especially for online (PBEM or PBMB) games. I’m not really an immersive player, so I tend not to play characters with deep, dark secrets or unresolved psychological issues. Instead when a game folds I’m disappointed in not finding out how the story was supposed to end. For instance, the Castle Falkenstein game running on the late lamented RPGAMES forum we never solved the mystery of what the Prussian baron in Zwickau was up to, and missed out on the masqued ball, in which my character, Arthur Trevithick, was to attend dressed as a bear. (Does this mean I’m a closet furry? Oh No!) Similarly, we never reached the final showdown with the lich archmage in the epic Spelljammer Vikings in Space game when the campaign suffered Death by Opera (it’s a long story). But I can’t say either character was unfulfilled; both had a long enough run, especially Mudgard the Norse Paladin, since Vikings ran for several years.

Of games that ended too soon, I’ve already mentioned Karl Tolhurst of Ümläüt several times before, as well as the fact that I resurrected him for another, quite different game. Two other characters I’d really liked to have played for longer were my two characters in different In Nomine games, Jack the Cherub of Jean, and Ed Cragentinny the Ofanite of Jean. Sadly both games folded before I could really develop either of them. Jack was about to cause trouble in New York by summoning his superior. There were plenty of other games that never really got started, such as Traveller Sword-Worlder Þorkell. One real disappointment was Lucanus, one of my early online PCs. I joined an established Runequest game in which I’d been lurking for some time, only for the game to fold almost immediately when two other players dropped out.

I could also mention a few player characters in games I GMed where their players faded away. From my Kalyr games, I had a lot of plans for Lan, the escaped human gladiator sold into slavery after having an affair with daughter of a powerful kandar noble. This including a reunion scene with the now pregnant young noble, herself exiled due to her disgrace. Similarly I had quite a bit planned for Karela the noble assassin, and Kolath the somewhat mentally unstable legionnaire. I find dealing with dangling plot threads when players drop out to be a major headache for an online GM, one reason some ex-PCs such as Iodeth and Kylar continue in the game as NPCs.