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!

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.

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.

The ENnie Awards winners have been announced, and with a very strong showing by my friends at Black Industries (well done guys - you've earnt it), the WFRP Companion has won a gold award for best supplement! I guess I can claim to be 1/10th of an ENnie award winning writer now, right? :-D

Congratulations to all the winners, especially the BI writers and developers, and the Evil Hat crew for their silver in best rules!

Here is the full list of winners.

Best Fan Site, presented by Russell Morrissey:
Silver: Planewalker
Gold: Dragonlance Nexus

Best PodCast, presented by Dan Repperger of Fear the Boot:
Silver: Yog Radio
Gold: Have Games, Will Travel

Best Cover Art, presented by Kevin Kulp:
Silver: Hollow Earth Expedition, by Exile Games Studio
Gold: Five Fingers, Port of Deceit, by Privateer Press

Best Interior Art:
Silver: Qin, by 7th Circle
Gold: Mutants and Masterminds, Ultimate Power by Green Ronin Publishing

Best Cartography:
Silver: WFRP GM Toolkit, by Black Industries
Gold: Ptolus, City by the Spire, by Malhavoc Press

Best Production Values:
Silver: Mutants and Masterminds, Ultimate Power, by Green Ronin Publishing
Gold: Ptolus, City by the Spire, by Malhavoc Press

Best Writing:
Silver: WFRP Children of the Horned Rat, by Black Industries
Gold: Five Fingers, Port of Deceit, by Privateer Press

Best Rules:
Silver: Spirit of the Century, by Evil Hat
Gold: Mutants and Masterminds, Ultimate Power, by Green Ronin

Best Adventure:
Silver: Mutants and Masterminds, Time of Vengeance, by Green Ronin Publishing
Gold: WFRP: Lure of the Liche Lord, by Black Industries

Best Setting, presented by Kieth Baker:
Silver: Five Fingers, Port of Deceit, by Privateer Press
Gold: Ptolus, City by the Spire, by Malhavoc Press

Best Supplement, presented by Kevin Kulp:
Silver: Mutants and Masterminds, Ultimate Power, by Green Ronin Publishing
Gold: WFRP Companion, by Black Industries

2008 ENnies Judge Election, announced by Richard Miller:
Kathryn -Gertie- Barden (Xath)
Elizabeth Bauman (Queen_Dopplepopolis)
Chris Gath (Crothian)
Zachary Houghton (Zachary The First)
Kevin Kulp (Piratecat)

Best Aid or Accessory, presented by Kevin Kulp:
Silver: GameMastery Combat Pad, by Open Mind Games/Paizo Publishing
Gold: Deck of Many Things, by Green Ronin Publishing

Best Miniature Product:
Silver: EZ Dungeons, by Fat Dragon Games
Gold: Game Mastery: Flip-mat Tavern, by Paizo Publishing

Best Regalia:
Silver: Liber Chaotica, by Black Industries
Gold: Order of the Stick, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, by Giant in the Playground

Best Free Product:
Silver: Classic Battletech Free Package, by Catalyst Games
Gold: Savage Tide Player's Guide, by Paizo Publishing

Best Electronic Book:
Silver: Magical Medieval Society: European Warfare, by Expeditious Retreat Press
Gold: Classic Battletech Free Package, by Catalyst Games

Best d20/OGL Product, presented by Rodney Thompson of Wizards of the Coast:
Silver: Five Fingers, Port of Deceit, by Privateer Press
Gold: Mutants and Masterminds, Ultimate Power, by Green Ronin Publishing

Best Game, presented by Rob Boyle of Catalyst Games:
Silver: Qin, by 7th Circle
Gold: Scion, Hero, by White Wolf

Product of the Year, presented by Peter Adkinson:
Silver: WFRP, Children of the Horned Rat, by Black Industries
Gold: Ptolus, City by the Spire, by Malhavoc Press

Fan's Choice, Best Publisher:
Silver: Green Ronin
Gold: Wizards of the Coast

Voting for the 2006 ENnie Awards closes ... imminently. If you haven't voted, do so NOW.

Not only is it a great year for indie games at the ENnies, with the likes of Burning Empires, Spirit of the Century and Dictionary of Mu nominated, but the Warhammer Companion, which I have a chapter in, is up for Best Supplement and Contested Ground are up for Best Publisher.

So vote now, before it's too late!

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.

Just for a change of pace, and to prove I can turn my pen to most anything, my first d20 product in aaaages has just been released. It's the 5th installment of EN Publishing's monthly campaign, War of the Burning Sky, and is a mid-level adventure entitled Mission to the Monastery of Two Winds. It's all good, including an entire army as the opposition, a 3d fight on a cliff-face with an elemental, a monstrous airship and a climactic, full on wuxia fight in a laboratory!

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.

I'm not entirely sure where this all started, although I'm fairly sure it involved me staring out my window, but for the past few months I've been pondering the concept of a true "modern fantasy." I don't think I'm the only one either, as Chris was yearning for the same thing in the Most Wanted Settings thread over at Story Games.

And I'm not talking a modern fantasy as we convention normally has it, whereby fantasy elements are grafted onto our own world (a la Urban Arcana, Shadowrun, Neverwhere, Harry Potter) but a fantasy world advanced into a modern age akin to our own.

So what would such a world look like? What would the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance or Greyhawk look like in a thousand years time, after their own industrial revolutions? I'm not really looking for specifics for those worlds, but if you wanna chuck something in that's cool too.

So here's what I've come up with, as a random spool of ideas that might one day go into making a consistent whole:

*a cold war between two rival theocratic superpowers, perhaps one of them made up of Drow in the Underdark, another made up of LG paladins.

*a global ban on SMDs - spells of mass destruction. All Class (read, level) 9 spells are banned by international treaty, and any country found possessing or using them is in violation and is punished. Maybe by wish.

*the Imperial Age has ended, in which the old empires colonised other planes of existence. Those colonies still exist there, perhaps connected by decaying portals and comprising an interplanar commonwealth.

*many magic items are now produced on an industrial scale, so you have gun-like magic wands.

*vehicles contain bound elementals as power sources.

*a great ethereal web of bound spirits and demons exists that everyday folk can tap into to communicate or research stuff.

*the police make use of diviners, coroners use speak with dead and the justice system is all about the geas.

*planar/international travel is accomplished by private portals/plane shifts/teleportation, if you have the money. If not, you have to take the elemental-train through a great planar tunnel. Like the Channel Tunnel, but to the Abyss and back.

*all this interplanar summoning and travel has a detrimental effect, and the world is warming as a result of planar magic, possibly causing the barriers between the planes to break down and the elemental planes to leak in.

So, how else might a modern fantasy world look? And what system would you use to play in it?

Although the book was announced ages ago, details (not to mention a beautiful, beautiful cover) have finally been released for the Tome of Salvation, which is my 2nd product for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and my biggest contribution yet to the line. I got to write about all sorts of fun things such as crusades and templars and the day in the life of a priest and so on.

I also got to be cheeky and sneak my WFRP PC into the book in one of the illustrations - look out for the Harry Potter-esque priest of Verena!

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.

When you're changing every reference in a manuscript from PCs to heroes, herpes is an alarmingly common typo.

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.

I'm up in my new writing garret (i have a garret to write in now! yay! well, more of a converted attic really, but it has a big ol' window that looks out over the rooftops so it kinda counts) and I swear that if it rains any harder it's going to come right through the ceiling and onto my head.

Taken from judd_sonofbert

Reading: Just finished Children of Men by PD James. Very different from the film, in tone and ending at least. Just started Iain M Banks' the Algebraist, which is my first delve into sci-fi for a long time. Promising so far.

Planning: Christmas stuff to go away, trying to get the first Steampower release of the year out the door, tinkering with Six Bullets some more, getting ready for Conception.

Wearing: my blue shirt and troosers, albeit without the tie and with a jumper.

Writing: had a spurt of Six Bullets writing at the start of the week, but been tied up in design and layout for the rest of it. Back to writing over the weekend though.

Keith has posted the first piece of artwork for Six Bullets over on his livejournal. To use the word awesome would be an understatement.

When I started writing Six Bullets, and contacted Keith about doing the cover and the interior art, I had a very strong vision as to what I wanted. I wanted 6 villains depicted in Keith's inimitable style on the front, with the hero over on the backcover. Keith took the idea and threw it back at me 10 times stronger, and it's fantastic to see something great coming out of it. I for one can't wait to see the next villain!

Six Bullets is plodding along, although I'll admit I haven't touched it in a few weeks, what with Yesterday's Tomorrow, moving and the new mystery project I'm working on. But ideas have been fermenting in my brain, including the possible development of a "revelation map" (as opposed to a relationship map) and some sort of reward mechanic involving dice/bullets.

The Cabal Guys

A cabal of evil sorcerers is terrorising the world by summoning demons to do their bidding. The heroes are a group of junior wizards gifted with magical amulets that let them summon and bind their own magical creatures to battle the cabal.

Unlike in other settings, the heroes themselves have no real powers of their own, and instead their powers manifest as the various creatures they can summon using their amulets! Of course they save the giant radioactive lizards, fire-breathing dragons and nefarious arch-devils until things get really bad.

The obvious nemeses for this setting are the various members of the cabal, each of which might summon and control a different flavour of monster or demon. One might control ice-based creatures, such as monstrous polar bears, frost elementals and glacier devils, whereas another might favour fire-based monsters, such as fire hawks, flaming imps and living maelstroms of fire.

The main themes and conflicts for the Cabal Guys are dealing with great power and even greater responsibility, the notion that power corrupts and making deals with the devil (sometimes literally). Heroes might face temptation to use their creatures for selfish reasons, and at times ask how different they really are from their nemeses.

Think Harry Potter meets Pokemon.