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.

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.

 

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!

So yesterday I had some friends over and we had a quick playtest of Ordinary Angels, my game of angelic cops. Me and

drivingblind talk about it quite extensively here.

We were going to play it on saturday night but I suggested we watched the Prophecy to get in the right mood (for those who haven't seen it, it's Christopher Walken chewing up the scenery as a bad-ass Gabriel) but it proved to be such a big turn off we ended up playing something else. So sunday afternoon, with the Prophecy fading in our memory, we tried again.

Crossposted to the Collective Endeavour

Ok, so Six Bullets seems to be on hold at the moment whilst I wrap my head round some of the issues with structure and narration. So Ordinary Angels has swaggered forwards to fill the gap. I know what I want the game to do, and I have a check list of rules that I want in it, but I'm having trouble piecing all the pieces together.

But first a bit more about the game, which is based on the film of the same name by my good friend, Todd Downing. It's a cop show or police procedural, thematically and stylistically similar to the Shield or the Wire, if you've seen those. Oh, except the cops are angels, the criminals are Fallen and the victims are souls caught between the two sides.

You play a cell of angels making hard choices between doing what's right (saving humans, killing the Fallen, trying to make the world better) and what's necessary (reaping souls for the War, making concessions and deals with the Fallen, and sacrificing humans in line with the Plan). Each session is a "day in the life" of your cell, as though being filmed by a documentary crew, a la Cops.

So here's what's in so far:

Dice mechanics

• 3 stats - humanity, will and belief - rated by a number of d6.
• when you make a roll you roll a combination of all 3 stats, although i'm not yet sure how or why you might want to.
  rolls are opposed, with 1-3 being good, 4-6 being bad.
• triple 6s are super bad, and triple 1s are super good. So the more dice you roll, the more likely you will be to get a triple in some capacity. Not sure what happens on a triple yet, but probably some sort of manifestation/narrative FUBAR.
• i'm toying with borrowing slightly from Don't Rest Your Head and having whichever stat rolls the most successes "colouring" the outcome in someway, or putting a restriction on the narration. So if your humanity comes up trumps, the narration will be grounded
• in mundane reality, whereas if belief dominates it's likely to appear full-on miraculous.

Faith & Duty

• on the next layer up you have faith, which is a pool of points that you can use to perform supernatural stuff with, either by spending some to create an effect or introduce a story element, or to add additional dice to a conflict.
  
• you get faith back by acting in line with your duties.
• Duties are very much like keys in TSoY, set responsibilities coupled with restrictions on what thou shalt and thou shalt not do. Acting in line with them gets you faith back, but obviously the more complicated the situation you end up in as a result the more faith you get.
• Breaking your Duties puts you on track to Falling, although I'm not sure if there should be a mechanical incentive for neglecting them too - perhaps bonus dice too?

The Plan

• The Plan is the spine of the game, a measure of opposition and progress, inspired by Agon's Strife mechanic.
  
• The various elements of the game are each assigned a number of points from the Plan, be they mysteries, Fallen opponents, plot complications or whatever.
  
• Whenever the angels solve or accomplish one of the elements from the Plan, those points are discarded. When all the points are gone, the angels accomplish the Plan and the adventure is successful.
  
• I'm thinking the angels can go "off plan" by burning faith, allowing them to ignore or overcome an element of the Plan in some other fashion.

Testimony

• The to camera monologues by Afriel are one of the best bits in Ordinary Angels, and I'm hoping to do something similar in the game, very much like Testimonials in InSpectres. I'm not sure what game effect this will have yet though.

So, there you have where I'm at at the moment, which is 4 separate mechanics that only tie loosely together. I'm hoping the Plan will tie neatly in with Faith and Duty somehow, and those in turn link in with the trinity of stats. Where Testimony fits in I don't know, but I think it'll be the players way to tweak with the Plan.

I don't think my dice mechanic is funky or interesting enough just yet though - am I missing something obvious I can do with 3 pools of 3 stats?

Is it too fiddly? Am I trying to squeeze too much into it at the moment?

One of the things that has come out of the past few playtests is the need for information about the antagonists and revelations to be presented clearly to all the players.

The revelation map was the first way of presenting this information, alongside all the information about a given scene, but this got confusing at times.

In the Spodley playtest I also introduced an antagonist sheet for each antagonist, divided into chapters to keep the information clearly laid out.

One comment was that the antagonists only used a small bit of their sheet, if any at all, so Malcolm suggested it be combined with the revelation map. I didn't quite go this far, instead rolling all the antagonist information and scene information into a single sheet. The protagonist has their own sheet, and the revelations have a sheet of their own, along with space for reward dice.

For the game I ran last week, I made a fancy protagonist sheet, antagonist sheet and revelation map, designed to be shared by all the players. They worked well in the game, and were used by all the players, so I'm pleased with how they've turnd out. Let me know what you think!

I playtested Six Bullets for Vengeance with my mid-week group last week and, to be brutally honest, it went rather badly. The game never really clicked, for a variety of reasons, and left me frustrated. But, every cloud and all that, it has proven to be a very useful playtest, as bad playtests tend to be, with plenty of food for thought and areas that need addressing highlighted in my mind.

I've posted a thread dissecting it quite brutally here. If any of my players are reading this, please don't think I'm singling you out or levelling any criticism at the group! The only person I hold responsible is myself.

So over at the Forge my Six Bullets playtest report from Spodley has sparked an interesting discussion with Ron (Edwards) about how much setup the game really needs.

Ron is arguing that I'm putting too much setup into the game, and that much of the fun comes from it being the ultimate blank-sheet game.

Those of you in the game at Spodley will recall that I was agonising over the other end of the spectrum, that the game didn't have enough setup and that I was leaving things too wide open. I'm thinking in terms of the genre, setting, locations and characters here.

So now I'm agonising about how much should be left to the game itself, and how much should be decided before the game begins.

So how much setup is too much setup? Should you literally be able to sit down and start playing and things like genre and protagonists emerge in play, or is it a good idea to talk about the setting and who is playing what upfront? Or is there some sort of happy medium?

Epilogue

The epilogue is one of only two scenes that the protagonist gets to setup and narrate, and is best thought of as the final scene of a movie. In past games it has showed the death of the final villain, but in this one it didn’t.

Malcolm narrated the closing credits: “James Pilgrim returned east and opened up a successful practice in New England.”

He then described the town in silence, with everybody huddled behind closed doors, and a small column of smoke rising from the mine entrance up on the mountainside. Pilgrim then appeared, walking purposefully through town with a rifle in one hand and a doctor’s bag in the other. He places it by the dead tree in the centre of town (which we added to the revelation map) and continues walking.

Chapter 5

The protagonist gets to choose the order he’ll fight the antagonists in, and logic dictated that the final antagonist would be the company boss, Thomas Deacon.

At the start of the chapter I grabbed 2 dice per player to use to create scene attributes and npcs, handing 3 to James and 2 to Jan and investing the remaining dice into the attributes “old mine equipment” and “darkened tunnels.” I also had my own dice to use for creating attributes for Deacon.

I began outside the mine, with Deacon telling one of his men, Mason (who James played) to stay outside the mine, and ordering the other to follow him into the mines. James had Mason hide behind a boulder ready to spring an ambush when Pilgrim showed up.

Having reached a natural pause, narration then passed to Malcolm to describe what Pilgrim did. This would be the pattern followed throughout most of the game – the antagonist would set the scene, describe what his character was doing and who else was there before turning to the protagonist to react to the situation.

I’m not sure if this is a problem, or simply the way the game proceeds. Malcolm explained the concept of different types of authority (as he does here) and how this needed to be made clear in the game text.

So Pilgrim climbs up the mountain path and Mason springs his trap, dislodging a boulder to crash down onto him, the first conflict of the game as well as the first problem. Both James and Malcolm set stakes, which in themselves posed a problem. After all, Mason couldn’t actually be successful and kill Pilgrim with his ambush, so instead they settled for the stakes “does the ambush alert Deacon or not?”

We rolled, Mason won and the boulder crashed down the mountainside, its echoes reverberating around the town and causing the townsfolk to flee indoors. Deep inside the mine Deacon heard the sound of the boulder but ordered his minion to “keep digging.”

Ok, so conflict one worked ok, but now that the ambush was sprung there was another conflict brewing. If you recall the previous playtest, we adopted a more gritty, close-up, blow-by blow conflict mechanism, which almost worked like rounds. It worked, just about, although I did feel at the time that we were struggling against the system somewhat. It didn’t work this time round.

Malcolm and James set stakes once again, but yet again Mason couldn’t kill Pilgrim with his shovel, so instead Pilgrim tried to persuade Mason to stand aside and go back into town. The conflict was whether he would have to shoot Mason or not to get into the mine.

Now this was a more juicy conflict with a much more interesting scope. It wasn’t about the inevitable, which was that Pilgrim would get past Mason and into the mines, but instead about how complicated it would be, what sacrifices Pilgrim would have to make. They rolled again, this time tying, which was a grey area of the rules. We decided it made sense that the protagonist should win ties, so Pilgrim talked Mason down and he returned to town.

This is where we took a time out. It became obvious that stake setting was very important, and couldn’t concern the inevitabilities of the game (which is that the protagonist survives til the end, he dispatches each of the villains and so forth) but instead had to concern complications, sacrifices, whether the protagonist had to get his hands dirty along the way. Considering up til now stake setting has a single line in the text, I think this needs expanding into a whole chapter.

The other issue Malcolm brought up was that, because dice are a commodity in the game, spent on dice rolls and traits and gained as rewards for winning conflicts and doing cool stuff, he was being forced to waste dice on dispatching a single mook. This led to the very real possibility that by the time he reached the real villain, Deacon, he’d have used up all his dice and we’d all be forced to fudge things his way. The quick fix was to say that minions only ever take a single conflict to deal with, one way or another. We came up with a much bigger patch later in the playtest, but for now this seemed to make things right.

I resumed narration. Deep in the mines, surrounded by chundering equipment and with his man digging a deep pit was Deacon. Narration handed back to Malcolm, who asked to spend his revelation token (earnt for taking part in conflicts and spent to add stuff to the revelation map) to find a big crate of dynamite. This was just part of the narration, not a revelation, so Malcolm got it for free, describing Pilgrim emptying out one of the tubes and hurling it at Deacon. Deacon did the heroic thing and hurled his henchman at it whilst he dove the other way. No conflict here, it just happened.

The next conflict saw Pilgrim take out the minion and told Deacon that he was here to exact his revenge for the townsfolk, and that he had evidence that Deacon was the reason women and children were dying – revelation token. We talked for a bit, scaring Janos who was sitting between us as we shot vengeful glares at one another, before Deacon laid out Pilgrim with a pickaxe handle, leaving unconscious whilst he finished digging. I narrated that I found a big chest and Malcolm spent another token – the chest was empty.

Whilst Deacon railed and screamed, Pilgrim had got up and had his rifle aimed at Deacon. Final conflict. Not whether Pilgrim killed Deacon or not, but whether Deacon died with dignity or not. He failed, and his end would be very undignified indeed. Pilgrim tied Deacon to the chundering, whirring machinery, tied a tourniquet round his arm and withdrew a huge syringe from his bag.

At this time James interjected, spending the revelation token he’d picked up earlier, declaring that “the machine has been killing the townspeople.” Both myself and Malcolm visibly recoiled at the idea – it jarred with my view of the game and Malcolm clearly had other ideas. But James had spent a token and his addition was valid, unless Malcolm disputed it with his last remaining token. We debated it for a bit, but both outcomes felt wrong – James’ revelation clearly didn’t fit with Malcolm’s idea, but Malcolm didn’t want to throw out a player contribution.

Instead we tabled the revelation and discussed it, with both James and Malcolm outlining what they were thinking. This should have been the way we handled it in the first place, as it led to a far more interesting outcome. Deacon’s mine was mining silver, using all the townsfolk to do so. The machine was washing the silver, producing mercury as a by-product that was poisoning the townsfolk. In a way, the machine was killing the townspeople.

Malcolm backtracked a little, narrating that Pilgrim filled his syringe with pure mercury and injected it into Deacon’s arm. He then emptied out the bullets from his rifle, from Deacon’s pistol, from his henchman’s sidearm, tossing them all down the pit so that Deacon knew there would be no escape from a slow and painful death. As Pilgrim left Deacon dying, screaming and blubbing and crying in pain and madness, he dynamited the entrance of the mine, leaving a pall of smoke behind him as he returned to town.

Which is of course where the epilogue began.

Questions and comments

Revelation tokens look to work, controlling the flow of revelations and rewarding people for taking part in conflicts, but I’m still not entirely sure whether there should be a mechanism for disputing them. On the one hand, I think there should be a way to counter a less-than-satisfactory revelation. But on the other hand, doesn’t that devalue one player’s contribution over the other. Do you think either are valid concerns?

Saturday afternoon at Spodley Grange I got to run a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance, I think for the 5th time. Each time it’s been with a subtly different set of rules and a different group of players, and this outing would be for the first time since I made the changes that arose from the Conception playtest.

Setup

There were 4 of us playing – myself, Malcolm, James and Janos. Everyone except Malcolm had played before, although only me and James had played with anything approaching the current version of the rules.

We brainstormed ideas for the setting and quickly decided to play it straight – ie as a Western. We wanted a subtly different feel though, and after brushing aside the idea of a Western set in Mexico, Malcolm suggested we go for a Pale Rider feel with a cold Western.

We set it in the mountains of Nebraska during winter, Malcolm suggesting a town swathed in snow with characters wearing thick overcoats buttoned up to the neck against the cold and hats pulled down over their ears.

We talked about what sort of settings and scenes we wanted to see and James suggested we go for quite a strong visual feel and have each chapter and antagonist confined to a single locale in town – the saloon, the hardware store, the church and so on.

After we’d settled on the setting, we threw about some ideas for characters. Malcolm opted to play the protagonist, James Pilgrim, a doctor.

We then discussed antagonists and I made it clear I wanted to avoid clichés with characters, so no corrupt sheriffs or the like. We decided instead to go for a town run by the mining company, with us all playing various characters associated with the company.

I was Thomas Deacon, the company boss, Janos was Bill Bishop, the corrupt union official, and James was Douglas Priest, the general store owner.

Because there were only 4 of us, and I wasn’t sure how long the game would take, we decided to play one antagonist each to start with, possibly increasing this to two towards the end. 

After the game Malcolm pointed out that 3-4 players was really the ideal number for the game, with 2-3 of the players taking on a couple of antagonists each, which was so obvious I’d managed to miss it.

After playing around with Everlasting Empires in the morning it became obvious that I needed a bit more structure in the setup, perhaps with some questions to get the juices flowing and give everybody a strong premise to begin the game with.

This article by Naomi Wolf about 10 easy steps to making a fascist America is absolutely terrifying. I'm sure many similar examples can be drawn from Britain too.

As alarmed as I am by the whole thing, it does make for fantastic research and inspiration for the dystopian setting in Yesterday's Tomorrow. Of course, I can see I'm going to have to ratchet up the dystopia another notch to make sure the fiction is more dystopian than the reality - unfortunately, not for the first time in the past 5 years either.

I've been thinking of Dead of Night supplements for a long while now.

My first idea was for a straightforward book of scenarios, based around the fictional town of Chaddlestone that features in the original (and entitled "Things to do in Chaddlestone when you're Undead" or something equally b-movie-ish.

My second was a proper, full-on 50s b-movie expansion for the game, filled with aliens and pod people and the like, but I'm not sure if that should be a supplement or a standalone. The working title is be something along the lines of  "Attack of the 100ft Cheerleaders."

Both, I feel, fill a neglected niche in the core game - the adventure book complements the game's pick up and play, instant game style, whereas the b-movie expansion twists the game towards a different genre.

Or, would a better approach be to take

boxninja's idea (for a Best Friends supplement) and go for a supplement that features some fully fleshed out alternate settings and genres, with monsters and adventures for each?

 

Malcolm/rpgactionfigure has some very insightful comments to add on the cloned thread at the Collective Endeavour, which is possibly  the direction I'm going to end up going in.

It occurs to me that I might have failed to mention the Collective Endeavour on these hallowed pages, and if that is true then I really am dumb.

The Collective is, well, a collective of UK based indie games designers (myself, Malcolm Craig, Gregor Hutton, Joe Prince, Matt Machell and Iain McAllister) who have banded together to have a stronger presence at conventions and promote indie games here in the UK.

It's also a fast growing website and forum focused on games design, where we all chat about our designs, bounce about ideas and, most importantly, help other people with their designs. We're by no means exclusive or restricted to members from these fair shores, and games designers and gamers of all stripes are welcome.

So there we go, dumbness corrected, mention made. Sorted. Done.

I'm in the middle of re-evaluating/redesigning my website and am pondering the future of my forums. Currently we host our own forums, but they're very, very quiet for the most part, except for the usual legion of spam bots who sign up.

Now I notice most of the indie crowd have their forums over at the Forge and was wondering about doing the same, or hosting them at the Collective Endeavour site. So what are the advantages of hosting my own vs having them hosted at the Forge or elsewhere? What do people think?

So, ever since Dead of Night came out there have been requests for a pdf version of it. But I've long put off the idea for the simple reason that I've no idea how to go about it.

Mainly, this is due to it being an odd size, to say the least. I don't think this will be much of an issue for viewing on screen - you'd just need to set it up to display pages side by side and it'd look fine. But it could cause issues when people come to print their own copies off.

So how best to do it? Do I upload it as is (with errata and bookmarks added in), along with a print version which has the pages as spreads.

Or do I go back to square one and lay it out again all over in a more suitable format/size?

What is the best way of handling this? If you were a customer, what would you want?

One of my favourite parts of Six Bullets is also one of the most innocuous – 6 little red dice that the protagonist has, called vengeance dice. Next to the mountains of other dice floating about the table (see here), they’re easy to miss. Yet they’re one of the most powerful – and coolest – elements of the game.

Vengeance dice have been in the game since the very beginning, although they’ve been dropped and brought back a few times since. They started out as an attribute that the protagonist had to have, which got reduced as the game went on, and were meant to represent the protagonist’s consumption by his quest for revenge.

Now they’re an extra pool of dice that the protagonist gets to add to a conflict whenever he wants, although they’re lost once rolled until the start of the next chapter. The idea is that they give the protagonist an edge against the antagonists who outnumber him, an extra pool of dice he can call on to even out the odds.

But they come with an almighty catch … and that’s what makes vengeance dice so cool.

The catch is this. Whenever one of those little red dice hits the table, blood and violence and pain follow in its wake. The narration of the conflict in which a vengeance die has been rolled has to include bloody violence in some capacity, to someone, anyone, in the scene.

If the protagonist wins the conflict, all well and good. Odds are he was intending violence anyway. But if the antagonist wins, the rules remain – he must narrate violence of some kind as part of his narration. To anyone. Including the protagonist, including the protagonist’s allies and companions and friends and loved ones.

They’re the moments in films when the protagonist guns down all his enemies in a blaze of bullets, or cuts down his foe in a single furious sword blow. But they’re also the moment when the protagonist takes a body blow himself, or when his staunch companions get cut down mercilessly by the bad guys.

Vengeance dice are like the ultimate escalation, and in that regard they’re a little like pulling out a gun in Dogs in the Vineyard. Sometimes they can go in your favour, sometimes they can go against you horribly.

Conception was superb, although I'm still absolutely knackered. I'll probably post reports about it piecemeal as the week goes on. The highlights for me were the game of Dead of Night: 28 Days Later I ran on the thursday night, the rather splendid game of Primetime Adventures we played on the saturday (I guest starred as Zombie Crimelord Bob in a Shaun of the Dead-esque series) and the Six Bullets for Vengeance playtest I managed to squeeze in on saturday morning, which turned out rather like Get Carter, or, as we put it during the game, El Mariarchi in the East End.

I've posted a rather lengthy playtest report both on the Forge and the Collective Endeavour, and comments will be welcomed at both sites!

Tomorrow is the start of Conception! Yay! I'm heading down with the usual crew - who else is off there?

I plan on being busier than ever this year, mainly because I'm running both the Collective Endeavour demo table and Playtest Camp. Here's what I'm up to ...

I'll have copies of all our games on sale (Dead of Night, Contenders, Covenant, Best Friends and Cold City), and will be running 15 minute demos on demand for all of these.

I'm also running full length games too (times TBA):

28 Nights Later - emerging from a bunker deep beneath Whitehall, London, you find a city devastated by a virus that turns its victims into bloodthirsty zombies. Can you evade the zombies and escape the city, or will you succumb to the rage? A Dead of Night game for 6 people, inspired by 28 Days Later and Day of the Dead.

Gladiators! - pick up your gladius, grab your shield and enter the arena. Can you garner the adoration of the crowd and earn your freedom, or will it all end in blood and tears? A Contenders game for 4 players.

Things Fall Apart - you have spent your entire life preparing for an apocalypse that never came. The Covenant, the conspiracy that shaped your life, is falling apart, and you no longer know what to believe or who to trust. Will you stand by the conspiracy, or more importantly, will the conspiracy stand by you? A Covenant game for 4 players.

Prisoner #8 - in Cold War Berlin, what connects the suicide of a young soldier, the horrible murder of a German family and the mysterious figure in a photograph? Just who is Prisoner #8, what terrible secrets does he possess and how can they be harnessed for your nation? A Cold City game for 6 players.

Finally I'm running Playtest Camp, which you can come along to and try out some new games! Some are fully formed, others only part baked, but hopefully a good time will be had poking and prodding at them.

Merry Christmas, happy new year and all that! I've had a lovely holiday, but will post more at some point later. But for now, some games design!

This is an idea that has been floating around for a while now, but which I have only just refined enough to put down on paper. The point is that it's meant to provide a reason for players to tie their revelations and scenes in with what has gone before. It might be good, it might suck, only playtest will tell if it's useful to the game.

Revelation Maps

At the centre of Six Bullets, acting almost like a map or character sheet for the entire game, is the revelation map. The revelation map shows the protagonist and each of the antagonists, connecting them together with events and occurrences, forming a web laying out the intricacies of the story.

At the start of the game the revelation map is blank, save for the protagonist’s name. As the game proceeds players add names, character traits and other details, filling in the story as it is played out. Everything written on the map is called a revelation, even when it’s not actually revelatory in nature.

New revelations are simply written on the map and connecting lines are drawn to other connected revelations. Connections between revelations must make sense and must be narrated – lines cannot be arbitrarily drawn between otherwise unconnected revelations unless some justification has been made.

To encourage players to make use of what is already on the map and to tie their own revelations into the story, bonus dice are rewarded for incorporating existing revelations into their scenes and for connecting new revelations to existing revelations.

When a player incorporates one or more existing revelations into a scene, he gains 1 bonus die.

When a player adds his own revelation to the map, and that revelation connects to one or more existing revelations, he gains 1 bonus die for each connection he adds.