The Big Green Existential Menace has been good to me lately, so when the squamous hordes at the Flames Rising horror webzine sought me out for a contribution to their ongoing Cthulhu Week, I could hardly decline. Pop on over for “Inmates”, a Trail of Cthulhu campaign frame that starts where the careers of many investigators ignominously end. And stay for the rest of the tentacled goodness, all week long.
The first day of any Gen Con is always a crazy whirl. I probably say this ever year, but this time around it felt like an especially slamming tidal wave of chatting, selling, and general sensory overload. And yes, my voice is already ravaged. Trade at the Pelgrane stand has been brisk. Trail of Cthulhu has proven itself to be an evergreen title. The Esoterrorists, original pioneer of the GUMSHOE line, continues to surprise us by picking up a steady stream of new buyers. The new game for the show, Skulduggery, has been enthusiastically received as a pitch but has been lagging behind other titles when it comes time to the forking over of cash. I’m hoping that since it’s a new thing the folks nodding their heads as we describe its betray-o-rific fun will return to pick it up during their final buying frenzies. Graham Walmsley products have also been moving steadily. He’s produced a special run in chapbook-format of his notoriously bleak, Purist style Trail of Cthulhu scenarios, usually available from Pelgrane only in PDF. Each one is uniquely spattered with a disturbing, hardened liquid. (Okay, it’s nail polish.) Also passing into many hands has been his drawing room mystery digest-format game, A Taste For Murder. You have to love the premise: halfway through the game, the players decide whose portrayal has been the most obnoxious. That player’s character is then murdered; for the second half she plays the detective who arrives on the scene to identify the killer. Outside the Pelgrane bailiwick, I’ve been blown away by the positive response to Hamlet’s Hit Points. Signings can be scary for any author, facing the fear of a lonely sit at a desolate table. Instead I was able to inscribe a steady stream of copies and chat with their new owners. This book was by no means a sure thing, and I feel extraordinarily blessed to see it find a receptive audience. With meetings, interviews and booth duty I’ve had no chance to trawl for the new hotness. Thankfully Gregor Hutton swung by to show me Remember Tomorrow, his new digest format near-future game. Players struggle to achieve conflicting personal goals in a Gibsonesque world of mirror shades and AK-47s. Gregor also pressed into my hands Hell 4 Leather, Joe Prince’s contribution to the menu-sized game craze pioneered by Jared Sorensen. This glossy, handsomely graphic triple-folded sheet contains an entire game of biker gang mayhem, powered by a tarot card resolution system. Both Remember Tomorrow and Hell 4 Leather can be located at the Design Matters booth.
As an Ordo Veritatis team dedicated to uprooting the occult menace of the Esoterrorists, the PCs are dispatched to investigate a series of strange mailings. Prominent intellectuals suffering from life-threatening illnesses receive packages from an untraceable group called the Hope Bombers. They promise to pray for the health of the recipients, who tend to be outspoken atheists or icons of secularism. Soon after opening the packages, the targets succumb to their illnesses. As word of the Hope Bombers spreads through they media, prayer packages begin to arrive at the homes of perfectly healthy targets. Are they the next to go? The team learns early on that the campaign springboards from the so-called STEP study. It determined that sufferers of potentially fatal medical conditions were more likely to die if they knew others were praying for them. Can the PCs track the cell responsible for these long distance murders by prayer, before the reality-bending effect of public panic turns it into a worldwide epidemic?
For Ashen Stars, the now-finally-named Space GUMSHOE game, my brief was to design a ship combat system in which a) everyone gets something to do and b) several players have access to a group resource and have to decide how much of it to divert to the system they’re in charge of. Ship combat is the biggest new wrinkle the game adds to the GUMSHOE system and as we enter playtest there is much fine-tuning ahead for it. Usually information presentation isn’t in place before testing. Given the cooperative nature of the sub-system we can’t really tell if it’s working until we have that in place. Toward that end,
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simonjrogers has used a Cosmographer ship map first created by uthoroc as our template for a ship schematic. Check it out.
If you’ve been thinking of picking up my super-powered police procedural RPG, Mutant City Blues, but haven’t quite made the plunge, now’s the time. Or rather, anywhere from now till May 17th is your time, because the print/PDF bundle is 25% off at the Pelgrane Press Store, for a few short days.
A nighttime raid on a Barcelona construction site becomes a case for the Ordo Veritatis when DNA tests on blood found at the scene trace back to a known Esoterrorist operative. Further investigation leads the team to a startling discovery. During the Spanish civil war, the site, now slated to become an office tower was a prison. In its most secret cells, a renegade avant gardist used the principles of surrealist and abstract art to devise a so-called psychotechnic prison cell. Designed to drive its pro-Franco captives insane, the cell was known only to the leaders of a single anarchist faction. The Esoterrorists have excavated the buried chamber hoping not only to update the cruel science of psychotechnic torture, but to inch closer to the obscure origins of their own movement. By finding the cell, the PCs protect the membrane, save their colleagues from the threat of the psychotechnic cell, and find crucial historical intelligence.
The still-untitled Space GUMSHOE game is nearly ready for outside playtest. Yesterday I replaced this space combat diagram: With this space combat table: Will the table survive to final draft? Only playtest will tell.
robheinsoo and I serve as tandem interviewees on Alberta’s Best Nerd Culture podcast, Lazy Bastard Radio. Our waxings include dream licenses, stuff we find inspiring, the future effects of electronic gaming on tabletop, making bards not suck, and of course projects current and previous. Also it’s my first time appearing in a podcast intro’ed by Malcolm McDowell. Check it out.
Outside the swank Hotel Arts in downtown Calgary, the falling snowflakes are getting fatter. The first day of the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo is now a wrap. It’s a huge and growing show in a big modern convention centre. (As we say up here Canada way.) Media headliners include Leonard Nimoy, Malcolm MacDowell and Billy Dee Williams. The beloved Mr. Nimoy made national news on Friday by making a pilgrimage to the town of Vulcan, Alberta, which for many years ago leveraged its name into a celebration of Trekly kitsch. The gaming guest track consists of me and He’s also been demoing the heck out of his latest project, Emperor’s Gambit, the new version of Three Dragon Ante. It came out on Monday—if only someone had a bunch to sell at the show they’d be cleaning up. Meanwhile I’ve been talking to folks about Hamlet’s Hit Points, GUMSHOE and more. The con organizers have been taking care of us and overall the show gives off the mellow vibe of a smoothly run event. If you’re in the area and considering coming by tomorrow to wave the gamer flag, by all means do so.
robheinsoo. We weren’t sure what to expect as guests at a full-on comic con. For example, we didn’t realize until we hit the floor that there would be tables waiting for us in guest alley. Given the comics focus of the show I was entertaining visions of a lonely sit but in fact we had a steady stream of folks popping by to say hello. Even more gobsmacking was the packed seminar room we had for our State Of the Hobby Gaming Industry panel. The sub-tribe was out in force. After some opening pontifications, we opened the floor to questions. Fifty minutes went by way too fast as we discussed the impact of electronic gaming on classic wargames, the ongoing future of story-focused games, and hobby gaming as the vanguard of e-publishing. Rob handled some Qs in his capacity as 4E lead designer, from the reasoning behind the sharp break from 3E to the behind-the-scenes on the multi-classing/hybrid class rules.
Every so often our friends Lynne and Rich pop over to Toronto from Newcastle for a visit. As an alum of the Thursday night game, when she lived here, moons ago, Lynne naturally has a standing invitation to sit in whenever they’re in town. Each time they join us I’ve tried to find a way to fit them in that distinctively fits the series of the moment. The classic instance may have been the first time, when they guested in the Greek heroes series, seeming to be random temporary PCs, but were actually gods in disguise, sent to mete out cosmic justice and/or punishment. The regular players told them everything they’d been up to, resulting in a clip show. Their divine gifts and/or sentences changed the direction of the game from that point onward. For Mutant City Blues, they were visiting heightened forces officers from across the pond, tracking a possible assassination threat against a Blair-esque former PM. The implication was that they were lead characters from the British version of the MCB TV show, and this episode was a crossover. This Thursday it was still-untitled Space GUMSHOE game. This left only one option. I warned them ahead of time that they’d be playing redshirts. They played ex-colleagues of Anyhow, blogging will be perfunctory this week as Valerie and I take a mini-vacation to hang out with our visitors.
thebitterguy’s character, lending him a little background detail. And as the last hour of the game drew near, they began to succumb to a terrible transformation, finally becoming alien enemies for the regulars to fight.. They ran with it brilliantly and a classic space opera time was had by all.
