SF and Gaming Blog

One reason I’ve been slow updating this weblog recently; I’ve been busy writing up material for the Kalyr Wiki. Much of this is the material that’s already been on line for some time, but I’ve been revising and rewriting a lot of it. If you’re a player in either of my online games, please don’t read any pages marked by spoiler warnings!

I’m definitely tempted by this new horror game on DreamLyrics. A pity the GM has to trash a perfectly good GNER Mk4 set when he could have wrecked a Virgin Voyager instead.

Amadán (aka David Edelstein) warns us about her in Online GMing Tips 2

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 62: My Favorite Villains

Describe three of your favorite villains from campaigns you’ve played in or GMed. What makes them good villains? Why are they your favorites?

This is a difficult one. Much of my gaming, the ‘opposition’ has been dumb monsters or ‘bad guy of the week’, and I haven’t done much with recurring villains. Since much of my face to face gaming nowadays is convention-style one-shots, there’s not so much scope to develop villains. Therefore most of the ones that come to mind come from online gaming.

First, from one of my own games, there’s Tanala. Tanala started out as one of my cast of background NPCs for Kalyr, a member of the psionic guild called The Academy of the Mind, and defines in my initial three-line description as a racist kandar-supremacist telepath. (The alien humanoid Kandar are the ‘master race’ in Kalyr; humans are their oppressed slaves). One of the players, Sean, wanted to play a human psionic and member of the same guild and asked me some questions about the other guild members to help him flesh out the character submission. We decided that Tanala would have to be an Enemy, which prompted me to flesh her out further; she remains one of the few NPCs to have a full-blown character sheet. She became a leading light in the underground kandar supremacist cult known as Kaasranth Sar, and acquired a lover in the form of a rather stupid and headstrong kandar knight called Kluranyr. Most of the time Tanala lurked in the background, but the knowledge she was there kept Reylorna, the human psionic PC on edge. Ultimately we has the famous incident on the road, when what started as a bout of verbal taunts ended up with Kluranyr challenging a quite different PC to a duel, and losing quite badly.

Tanala is currently recovering from a psychic interrogation gone horribly wrong; and a third PC has a contract on her. We’ll have to see how that plays out.

I can’t not mention Steve Leywood. He started life as a character in the back-story of the character submission for my own PC, Karl Tolhurst, in a present-day Call of Cthulhu game. As those who have read some of my previous Game WISHes, Steve was the singer of the band Ümläüt in which Karl was the guitarist. In the original backstory Steve had vanished after the murder of Ravila, the band’s keyboard player, who was also Karl’s lover.

The GM took all this and ran with it; weaving it all into her own campaign background. It turned out that Steve had been incorporating bits of blasphemous Cthulhoid rituals into song lyrics, getting audiences to sing along. Steve turned up as a hideous shrivelled undead creature, turning up at regular intervals to taunt poor Karl and strip away his SAN, while hunting down and killing the other surviving NPC band members in front of player-character witnesses.

Sadly the game folded. I since resurrected Karl in a completely different game, only this time Steve is a player character, played by Jill, (recipient of a Warm Fuzzy in an earlier WISH). The original game’s GM is on record as saying that Jill is the only roleplayer she knows that could play Steve as a PC. Will the bloody history repeat itself?

Sybil from the online game GURPS Cyberpunk game HVG has to be one of the strangest RPG villains I can remember. Sybil was played as a PC, without the player knowing her true nature. Sybil was an AI who’s lost her memory; it was only at the very end of the adventure we found that the green slime we’d found was Sybil; escaped experimental nanotech. And it wasn’t until the sequel we found our just how Evil this slime really was, and who was behind it. Yes, folks, not just a metaphor, this one!

The Zombie Infection Simulation simply defies description. (Requires Java, Link from Chad Underkoffler)

An awful lot of PBeM or PBmB games fold after a few moves, but I have to wonder if this is taking things a bit too far?

I seriously want to run a ‘non-game’ where we would have a game we were planning to play, create characters, discuss settings and plotlines, maybe even do a scene or two, but not ever intend to actually play it.

I seems to have sparked quite a lot of interest; I suspect it may well end up spawning an actual game or two.

Reason the blog’s been silent all weekend is that I’ve been to another gaming convention, Conjuration, held in Cambridge. It’s the first time I’ve been to this convention, and it’s well worth the four-hour trip to get there.

It’s a smallish convention, with less than a hundred attendees. It’s a quite different atmosphere to something like Gencon; it’s small enough you can actually speak to most of the people there. It also boasted a real ale bar, which lasted until about 2.30pm on Sunday when the beer finally ran out.

A great many games in a great variety of systems took place. Someone even ran a game of Skyrealms of Jorune (anyone else remember that one?). One game conspicuous by it’s absence was d20 in all it’s forms. So much for D&D taking over the universe. Somebody suggested this may be because of the age range; the average age of attendees was closer to 40 than 30.

The first game I played in was the Dying Earth LARP, a systemless freeform game with sixteen players, in which we were the apprentices of sixteen magicians who had vanished, and were charged with the task of appointing a leader, otherwise the sun would go out, and the world would end. The rules of the election were held in a document called “The Monstrament”, of which three of us had copies. Unfortunately not only were the three copies different, but all were in Dingbats, which we couldn’t read. Much fun was had by all, although I got injured by failing to keep a straight face during a Dark Ritual.

As well as LARPS, there were plenty of more conventional RPGs; I played in games of Call of Cthulhu, Hero Quest (the new name for what is really the second editon of Hero Wars) and GURPS, the latter set in the very wierd “Madness Dossier” universe created by the convention’s guest of honour, Ken Hite, in which all history before the year 535 is completely made up. Best moment was the CoC game when those of us that failed one SAN roll too many were transformed into invisible cats the size of double decker buses, to rampage through central London. It’s a pity I couldn’t think of a good in-game excuse to climb the Post Office Tower. The GM accused us of having far too much fun playing the giant cats that we lost interest in actually trying to solve the mystery! I think she was probably right.