Well whaddaya know, posting my last post was actually the kick up the arse I needed - behold, Six Bullets for Vengeance, in it's current incarnation! The text is (almost all) complete, but has hardly been read through by people who are not me. I'd appreciate feedback on the text itself - does it make sense, can you envisage what the game looks like from the text, and so on - as well as playtesting of the game in general.

It's been a long time brewing, so lemme know what you think so I can kick this game into layout!

Seeing as our original plans for the weekend fell through at the last minute, me and Ruth had a cinema day today, with pizza in between. Saw District 9, which was awesome (and a little sad). Also saw GI Joe, which was intended to be something of a guilty pleasure - it had it's moments (and some cracking action scenes), but was strung together with some truly awful acting.

Need to kick myself up the ass and finish a game or two - both Six Bullets and Memories & Madness have been lingering in the "almost done" pile since last year. I'm going to aim to do that tomorrow, if playing Arkham Asylum (game of the year, for my money) or painting Tomb Kings doesn't get in the way (again).

For a lesson in what happens if you leave a game for too long, you might notice John Wick has a new game coming out called Yesterday's Tomorrows. Which means I'll need to find a new name for my own Yesterday's Tomorrow and redo the cover, I guess! Not that it's finished yet, but I have tinkered with it again recently. Serves me right for not finishing it 7 years ago when I started it!

If you imagine the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London necessitating giving the cast of Hollyoaks guns and telling them to get on with the business of catching terrorists, you'd pretty much have Spooks: Code 9, with all the bleak dystopia that such a scenario implies. Yes it has mushroom clouds on the opening credits, secret detention centres, id cards and Jack Bauer-style primetime torture, but there's still time for nice haircuts, cardigans and nights out in bars.

The first two episodes were jaunty enough and the premise is actually pretty good, apart from the cast all looking about 12. They even embraced Spooks devil-may-care attitude to the longevity of its cast members, Spooks being one of the few shows where actors are all on temporary contracts because, well, accidents happen.

In other news, the Mummy 3 really was as bad as Peter Bradshaw said. Michelle Yeoh was as watchable as ever, but even her presence alongside a trio of cgi yetis couldn't save the day. I could have come up with a better sequel. Hell, I could have come up with a better sequel whilst waiting for the film to start. The humour felt forced and the acting was dreadful - Maria Bello, taking over from Rachel Weisz to play Evy, was either carved from wood especially for the part, or was so busy concentrating on maintaining a prim and proper 1940s English accent that she forgot to, y'know, act.

And this concludes our Sunday night review!

It's the weekend! Yay! Normally a cause for celebration at the best of times, but this weekend is even more precious than normal as it's the weekend before WD deadline week, which makes it the calm before the storm. I've bought a whole bundle of Imperial Guard and am going to spend my time in blissful decadence assembling and painting them, as I doubt there'll be time for much hobby during the week.

Also - cinema this afternoon. We were hoping to go to see Hellboy 2 but it's not out til wednesday, so the occult/pulp itch will have to be scratched by the Mummy 3. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian hated it, but as my view is normally polar opposite to his I'll take that as a good sign.

Tom and Izzy's wedding was great last weekend too - a really beautiful, humanist ceremony followed by some lovely speeches, all wrapped up with the feeling that it was taking place in Hogwarts (it was in St John's College, Cambridge). The company was good too, and it was nice to hang around with friends who we don't see so much for the whole weekend. For once we took photos, so will post them up when I get round to it.

I'm sure most of you have watched it already, but the internet has been a stranger to me and I've only recently caught up! So, if you're a fan of Joss Whedon, Nathon Fillion, musicals, supervillains or any of the above, you owe it to yourself to watch Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog. It's Joss Whedon's online 3-part series about a wannabe supervillain (Dr Horrible) and his nemesis (Captain Hammer, played with able smugness by Nathon Fillion who, as I'm sure you all know, was Mal in Firefly). And it's superb, songs and all.

In other news, I'm writing again, this time for Fantasy Flight. First time I've done any writing since starting at GW (except for White Dwarf of course! My Tale of 4 Gamers is in print in the current issue. Oh, and Apocalypse: Reload, which netted me my first writing credit too for loads of fun datasheets), and it's really hard juggling it with a full-time job. Hence why today I'm trying to break the back of my 10,000 word assignment. And also hence why I'm procrastinating by posting on my lj for the first time in an age!

So that's another natural "disaster" I've slept through then, to go with the hurricane of 1988. I was awake for the one in 2002 in Birmingham, which happened the night we moved into our new house there. Couldn't work out if it was the house falling down or an earthquake! Still, I don't think I missed much. Nottingham is, of course, still standing.

... so how about 2 major changes in as many months? So life has turned a little, shall we say, upside down of late, but in a good way. A really, really, awesomely good way.

Those of you who know me well will know that since leaving uni and moving in with ms_haze I've worked part time at Chesterfield College, running their IT helpdesk, whilst at the same time coming home in the afternoons and slogging away either freelance editing and writing or doing the same thing for myself. It's been quite a prolific arrangement, and whilst I haven't made enough money to give up the day job, I have written games that I'm really proud of.

Anyway, all this changed back in September when I moved jobs, giving up the part time work in favour of full time work at the local NHS trust. I won't bore you with the details, but it revolved around chemistry and stats and not at all games design or editing. Why I made the switch revolved a lot around my increased commute following our move, the need to pay the mortgage and a general dissatisfaction with my previous day job and a growing realisation that freelancing and games design would only ever be a hobby, not a viable career.

But no sooner had I started at the hospital than I got another interview, this time with Games Workshop. This would be my 5th or 6th interview for an editorial post with them in about 4 years, so much so that I'd begun to not only lose count, but also joked with friends and interviewers alike about my annual interview with GW. Each time, of course, the interview was unsuccessful and I went back to my day job a little disappointed.

Of course this time was different. This time I was a week into a shiny new job that I could walk to, and was feeling pretty content with myself. So naturally I get offered the job.

I started today, as the new sub-editor of White Dwarf, the GW website and the games development team. It's gonna be helluva hard work, but it's going to be great fun! As my mum always says to me - I've been preparing for this job for the past 15 years of playing Warhammer!

It's been a while since my last Ordinary Angels post, partly for reasons I'll cover in my next post. I've only really discussed the core mechanics and premise so far (mostly in the comments, here and here), but this weekend I've been working on one of the major aspects of the game - the pacing mechanics and the Plan.

The Plan is the Divine Plan, laid out by God to the angels instructing on them on how to spread the word and carry out his work. Thing is, the Plan is fairly vague and not everybody got a copy, so much of it is left wide open to interpretation on the fly and in the field. In game terms, the Plan represents the progress the angels are making towards their immediate goals as part of their current case (called a Chapter).

At the start of a new Chapter, the GM and the players work together to set the game up, splitting a number of plan tokens (I really need a more evocative name than that, but it'll do for now) between different types of obstacle (mystery, adversary and intervention, roughly mapping to investigation, physical confrontation and social interraction conflicts) as part of a briefing scene. The players all take it in turns to spread the tokens about, and as they do so they narrate an aspect of the case.

So, for example they might say something like, "the soul we're looking for is a dead junkie named Maurice, but we don't know where he is" and place a couple of mystery tokens down on the Chapter sheet. The next player might step in and say "we don't know where Maurice is, but we've got a lead on one of his former associates - a demon named Birgazal" and then plonk both an adversary and an intervention token down. And so on, until all the tokens have been assigned and the GM has a pretty good setup for the game session.

So how does this feed into pacing? Well, in the same way as Strife works in AGON or Budget works in PTA, when the GM wants to do stuff, he spends these tokens to create mechanical adversity for the players. So to buy in to a conflict, the GM spends tokens and gets himself dice. He can also invest tokens into making a more robust obstacle, such as a big bad Fallen or a really nasty mystery. Conversely, when the players win conflicts, they get to take some of these tokens off the Plan as their reward (I'll discuss what they do with them in a later post).

When all the tokens are gone from the Plan, either because the GM has spent them all or the players have earnt them all through winning conflicts, that's that Chapter of the Plan closed, for good or for evil depending on how the PCs did!

When we ran through a playtest of this way back when I allocated 5 tokens per player and the game clocked in at about an hour, which I had thought too short until drivingblind reassured me that with this sort of pace you could string a couple of chapters together for a pretty satisfying session.

Anyway, they seemed to work nicely in play, although it remains a little fuzzy as to exactly how and when I should be spending them, and whether the players could help themselves to a token or two over the course of the game to complicate matters for themselves too.

So a couple of recent threads at Story Games, coupled with a comment from Rich and my own experiences lately, has led me to ponder the long game: campaign-style playing.

In my own experience, we've tended to favour the long-form game over the shorter game, but I wonder why that is. Certainly with online play we went from one 5 year DnD campaign to a 13 month Etherscope game to our nascent WFRP game, which the players specifically requested be a long term game (albeit broken into manageable, season-esque chunks). 

In my weekly real life game we had a period of about a year where we switched games every 6 weeks or so, peppered with my own attempts to introduce them to indie games via one-shots. But we all agreed about a month ago that what we really wanted was something long-term to get our teeth into, so now we're alternating between Deadlands and Conan. 

If you'd asked me a year ago which style I'd preferred, I'd have plumped for short bursts of games to scratch the itch of trying lots of games out. But now I'm starting to appreciate (or re-appreciate?) the enjoyment of playing the same character, telling their story, making their legend, and seeing them grow. And do you know what? I kinda like that.
So what is it that makes a game playable week after week, compared to a game that can be played in one or two sittings? 

Can we get the same level of satisfaction from both styles of play, or does the desire for character development, immersion or the need to try out all our shiny new games preclude one over the other?
And can any game be played in either way, or is there something about traditional games that leans towards the assumption of long-term play, and something about indie games that leans towards the short-form style? 
 
(Cross-posted to the Collective Endeavour)

 "[Saying Ratchett and Clank is the] best PS3 game to date ... [is] a bit like saying MRSA is the best superbug to have."

taken from the Guardian games blog

I have to say, the PS3 holds no appeal to me whatsoever. Apart from the fact it's a Playstation (which slew my beloved and underappreciated Dreamcast, way back when) and that I'm now an Xbox 360 owner, there just don't seem to be any decent games for the PS3. Certainly not the must have games that the Xbox has, nor the list of mouth watering releases in the run up to Christmas. Mass Effect, anyone?

Thursday afternoon, day off tomorrow and flexitime to finish early today. Boss is at a meeting, co-workers have all vanished for the day, leaving me, alone, with the internet. Bwahahahahaha ... ahem.

I discovered ficlets, via Wil Wheaton's blog, which are short (1000ish characters) stories used to inspire sequels and prequels. Pretty fun, and a nice idea especially when you see the network of stories inspired by yours grow. 

But by far the best bit is the "inspirations" page, which has a first line/last line generator. My favourite combination so far is:

FIRST LINE: the monkeys told me I'd find you here ...

LAST LINE: BOOM!

I'd like to see one of those full of scene openers for an rpg. That'd work quite nicely for Six Bullets I think, where it doesn't necessarily matter how you've started a scene as you have done, especially the epilogue, because it's meant to be explained as the game progresses.

I know it's 10 years old, but I've been reading this fascinating article at work today about the mythologies woven through the stories told by homeless kids in Miami. If taken as gospel (pun intended), it'd make a great setting for Ordinary Angels, especially one set after the events of the film. 

Here are some particularly choice and tasty bits:

The War in Heaven

"On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble ... No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell."

Spirital Dispatches

"Spirits appear just as they looked when alive ... but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead ... Spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels."

Angelic Guerrillas

"There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades ... Says Phatt: 'But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. ... and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!' ... It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts."

Powerful and evocative stuff, and exactly the sort of mythology and imagery Ordinary Angels seeks to capture - the mythic, the divine and the celestial, right here on our streets and neighbourhoods.

It's horror week over at rpg.net, and despite me not getting my ass in gear to do any promo or prize support, Dead of Night got reviewed anyway!

I really need to get more on the ball and do something for halloween - I'm thinking either Dead of Night in pdf format, finishing up my 28 Days Later scenario (which I'm running for the last time tomorrow night at Furnace) or putting 

rpgactionfigure's fright sheet idea into practice.

 

From a link over at 

ken_of_ghastria's lj, rumours from Alan Tudyk about a possible second Firefly movie. Woo and indeed hoo! Here's hoping kids.

 

Lots of Ordinary Angels stuff to report today, although very little of it concerns the game.

First off, and most importantly, the dvd of Ordinary Angels is now available to buy from the indie film outlet, Film Baby, which is to indie films what IPR is to indie games. I've yet to see the film, although having read the script, watched the trailer and talked to Todd endlessly about it, I know it's gonna be good! Me and Todd have talked about selling a double pack containing both film and game, but don't hold back buying the dvd now!

Secondly, the website for the Ordinary Angels film is now up, complete with an faq and a new trailer. My favourite bit from the website is on the faq, which asks the question "did anything freaky happen during shooting?" The answer, of course, was yes:

"90% of the crow sounds were caught on location during the actual takes and occur as if on cue. The church bells ringing on Lucifer’s exit were caught during the actual take. The weather did exactly what we needed it to do on the day. A stage photo of the director’s deceased wife made it into the background of the deathbed scene (unbeknownst to everyone on set). And one actor was mugged the night before he was to shoot, sending him to the emergency room and necessitating the inclusion of production designer Caleb Long as the angel Gavreel."

Finally, the game is zipping along, stalled only by me being ill this week. The rules are slotting into place and I've finally got most of them down on paper. I'm angling for another playtest in the next month or so, all going well. Expect a rules update in the next few days!

And that's about it I think!

The Ordinary Angels movie premiered this weekend at the Dragon*Con film festival in Atlanta. My good friend Todd, who wrote and directed OA, talks more about it here, here and here. Dragon*Con sounds absolutely wild, especially the 300+ stormtroopers!

If you've got any interest in indie films or film making in general, check out TD's posts about hot films to look out for.

OA seems to have gone down very well indeed, and Todd mentions that there's even a bit of buzz and interest generating around the game. Better get a move on then, hadn't I!