SF and Gaming Blog

One of those “You know you’re a gamer” moments happened at Stabcon a couple of weeks ago. Out of the window we saw a squirrel make a death-defying leap from the top of a building to a nearby tree (and got a round of applause). We then got into a discussion over what card he’d just played (we were playing Castle Falkenstein at the time), and what his skill level was. Sad, I know…

New round of posts up on the Kalyr PBeM. If you want to know what a Play-by-Email game (for that is what the acronym stands for) looks like, you can always follow that link.

I’m currently using Moveable Type to archive the turns, using categories for threads, and numbering each post to ensure they’re sorted in the right order. The category archives are sorted in ascending rather than descending date order, so that they read as a narrative of sorts. The game itself runs on the list server run by those nice people at Phoenyx.net; so far it hasn’t become play-by-blog using the comments facility for player responses. Yet.

One of the threads has got becalmed again, something that seems to happen every so often. Perhaps I should be more amazed that the game is still running after more than seven years than the fact that it sometimes runs very slowly.

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 54: Background Hooks

This week’s question concerns character backgrounds.

Do you like to have bits and pieces from your characters’ backgrounds appear in the game? Do you write hooks into your character background for the GM to use in the campaign for your character? Do you like it when the GM gives you a background hook into an adventure or scenario with a previously unknown hook, such as creating an old friend of your character’s who is somehow involved? What are some examples of cases where hooks have worked or not worked for you?

In one word, yes. If a GM isn’t going to use a character’s background in the game, there’s little point creating much of a background in the first place! Two of my favourite characters, Neil Jones from a GURPS Cyberpunk game, and Karl Tolhurst (who I’ve mentioned before, and will probably mention again), originally from a modern-day Call of Cthulhu game, both had extensive character back-stories. In both cases the GMs wove these backgrounds into the plotline of the game, in Karl’s case some figures from his background became significant NPCs.

Neil was a former railway mechanic, who’s backstory had him jailed for manslaughter after being wrongly blamed for causing a fatal train crash in the middle of the channel tunnel by negligent maintenance. The GM turned into an act of deliberate sabotage, and it turned out that seven of the casualties (A party of nuclear scientists) weren’t actually dead but working on a evil secret project, and the crash was a cover to explain their disappearance. Several NPCs turned up at various stages as well.

Karl Tolhurst was the guitarist from a defunct goth-metal band who’s singer had disappeared after allegedly murdering the keyboard player (who was also Karl’s lover). The GM took this and ran with it in big way; this singer had been incorporating forbidden dark rituals into song lyrics and getting audiences to chant them, and this had been a major cause of the irruption of tentacled Things Man Was Not Meant To Know into our reality. Various other band members and their relatives turned up as NPCs, including the singer himself, as a hidious undead creature.

When GMing, I like players to come up with detailed backgrounds too. Not only does it prove they’ve actually read and understood my gameworld, but it also gives me plot hooks to work with. In some cases elements from these backgrounds have worked their way into the gameworld, and turned up in other unrelated games using the same setting. A prime example being the terrorist^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hrevolutionary group “The Right Hand of Vandrak”, originally from the character background of the revolutionary and rabble-rouser Hollis, one of the PCs in my Kalyr PBMB game on Dreamlyrics, who I’ve used as the villains in a convention-style FtF scenario. I got a lot of plotline mileage out of the story of betrayal and treachery in the background of Kolath the legionnaire in the same game.

The July Dreamscribe is out! It may look as butt-ugly as the default blogger template (sorry guys, but it does!), but the content is an awful lot better. In particular, check out Neil “Dr Mesmero” Marsden’s Asian Film Cruise.

First, one of the Great Old Ones gives us The Cosmic Finger. Then this gets washed up on the shores of Chile. Have Ümläüt performed one dark ritual too many? Or have I just been playing too much Call of Cthulhu?

Game Wish 52: Your Robin Laws Type

Robin Laws identifies several types of gamer in his book of GM tips: The Power Gamer, the Butt-Kicker, the Tactician, the Specialist (plays one type only), the Method Actor, the Storyteller (plot and pacing fan), and the Casual Gamer. Which of these types do you think you are, and why? Most people aren’t pure types, so multiple choices are OK.

Like a lot of people, I’m a mix of more than one of them. I think I’m more of a Storyteller than anything else. Plot and pacing matter a lot to me, especially as I currently GM as much as I play. I’ve never been much of a munchkin^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hPower-Gamer, which I attribute to not discovering RPGing until my twenties, and I not really into deep immersion enough to be a Method Actor, at least face-to-face. Of course, there’s no room for method acting when GMing! I’m certainly not a Specialist, since the character’s I’ve most enjoyed have been a real mix of types.

I’ve got a bit of Butt-Kicker and Tactician in me; good fight scenes can be entertaining provided they don’t get bogged down in too much fiddly detail (For instance, I much prefer GURPS basic to Advanced Combat), and it helps to have some sort of plan even if I get bored spending the whole session planning.

On-line it’s a different story, and I become a bit more of a Method Actor, and the Tactician in me vanishes completely. I remember one combat scene in my first on-line game, where the traditional RPG combat of dice, minatures, maps and hit-points vanished, to be replaced by a sense of sheer terror as my cyberpunk technican was confronted by heavily-armed ninjas who’s ambushed us in the hotel, and I was convinced my character was going to die. In both that game and another I wrote long surreal posts detailing what my character was dreaming about, something I’d never do face-to-face.

According to this well known publication, a central asian power has been relieved of a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Warning. If you read this, they may have to kill you.

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 51: New Genres

What are three genres that you’ve had limited exposure to as a gamer that you’d like to try or play more of?

First, an Alternate Earths/Parallel Universes game. I love the parallel worlds defined in GURPS Alternate Earths, and a campaign using those worlds as the setting is one of the games I want to run ‘someday’. I’m not totally sold of the Homeline/Centrum conflict as the theme of the game, and I’ve thought about using something along the lines of Luther Arkwright’s Disruptors as the bad guys. A convention-style one-shot at a future Gypsycon or Hatcon cannot be ruled out.

Second, a realistic hard-SF Game, either Traveller or GURPS:Transhuman Space. I did play in a Traveller PBMB on the CompuServe RPGAMES forum called HST which ran rather slowly for a couple of years before fizzling out, and played in a Transhuman Space demo game at last year’s GenCon UK, but it’s still a genre I haven’t played nearly enough of. Transhuman space comes over to me as a setting very rich in adventuring possibilities, especially in the lawless deep beyond; the outer fringes of the 22nd-century Solar System.

I also haven’t played nearly enough Call of Cthulhu. CoC is still the Gold Standard for horror games, even if some people can’t grasp the concept of a game when the point of the game isn’t to gain XPs and go up levels, but merely to defeat the monster, and that character survival is a bonus.

Finally (I know we were only supposed to list three), In Nomine, SJG’s Angels and Demons game, the ultimate Good vs. Evil struggle. The original French game (which I haven’t played) was essentially a satire on French Catholicism, while SJGs translation is a rather different beast. It’s able to be played in many different styles, not all of which are in any way irreverent or sacrilegious. While the whole concept is going to upset those fundamentalist twits who were burning D&D a decade or so ago, it can be played as a deeply religious game with a strong sense of morality. Sadly it’s probably going to be eclipsed by White Wolf’s Demon:The Fallen, which I suspect is full of typical White Wolf angst and pretentiousness.

David Edelstein (a.k.a Amadán) tells us what he really thinks about the World of Darkness.

I make a lot of fun of Vampire: The Masquerade, and the whole World of Angsty Prentiousness. But I had a prerelease copy of VtM when it first came out, 12 years or so ago, and it was very cool and full of flavor and atmosphere and just the right amount of angst. Then came a bazillion supplements and new lines and Werewolves and Mages and Changelings and Wraiths and Cyborg Ninja Angsty Mutant Demon Turtle Goth-Punk Dweeb-Marauders, and now the WoD looks kind of like Rifts, with less chrome and more black eyeshadow.

I’ve never actually played Vampire: The Masquerade. The nearest I got was a modern-day horror game in which the PCs were normal mortals, and the vampire was the monster. And the one WoD game I’ve played was one session of Changeling:The Dreaming (Mr Bindle and the Magic Train), which is an awful lot less angst-ridden than the rest of the WoD. So I don’t know how accurate David’s description of the game is.

Of course, if you want to play in either of those possible games David is threatening to run, membership of Dreamlyrics now costs much less than it used to be!

Ginger has just partitioned a hard drive into three partitions named “Amber”, “Rebma” and “Tir”, and concludes she’s been playing too much Amber.

I find server names say a lot about the personality of whoever’s in charge of the IT network. Someone boring and unimaginitive will name things “uksun1″, “uksun2″ etc. Other IT network people will name servers after their favourite things:

So far, I’ve seen

• Boring: “uksun1″, “uksun2″ etc.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Galahad”, “Lancelot”, “Robin” and “I’mNotDead” (What, no Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?)
• Classical mythology: “Charon”, “Styx” (But no “Lethe”. I wonder why?)

I’m still waiting for D&D monsters or Cthulhu entities. Do you know of a server called “Otyugh” or “Nylathotep”?