Friends
Nov. 6th, 2009
09:20 am - Me At Dragonmeet
Once again I will be attending the flagship Dragonmeet in London, which happens on November 28th. I would have said that I was happy to be going and left it that. However, I am indebted to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
spencerpine, who kindly reminded me via the Twitter earlier this week, that certain persons react with profound unease to simple declarations of happiness. Knowing that some of these folks might be of the English persuasion, and thus the target audience for this message, I hereby aim to oblige by listing a number of factors which could conceivably mitigate my, or someone else’s, pleasure during or after this trip:
* I will miss the sterling company of boon compadre Kenneth Hite, who regrettably will be doing something sensible instead of hanging out in London with me.
* My travel this year occurs under the promotional largesse of Pelgrane Press, as opposed to the show itself. Attendees primed to complain about the convention spending their admission fees to invite the same person twice in a row may find this inconvenient fact saddening, perhaps even disconcerting.
* Undoubtedly I will be struck by crushing jet lag at some point—perhaps right in the middle of a panel, as happened last time round.
[Potential Dragonmeet disappointments, Christmas Sandwich sub-category]
* I may eat too many delicious Christmas sandwiches, afterwards feeling vaguely guilty about their delightful, bacony decadence.
* Christmas sandwiches may prove to be suddenly unavailable, perhaps as a fad that has passed me by.
* After returning to Toronto, where purveyors of Christmas sandwiches are not to be found, I will greatly miss them.
Despite the effort of shouldering the above Job-like burdens, I look forward to meeting, reconnecting, and chatting with everybody at the UK’s Friendliest Convention.
Nov. 5th, 2009
09:20 am - Blood Elementals (Batch 2 of 2)
Here are the rest of the blood elementals; their buddies appeared yesterday.
Whitecell Blood Elemental, Level 12 Soldier
Medium elemental humanoid, XP 700
Initiative +11 Senses Perception +9
HP 120; Bloodied 60
Immune gaze; illusion; Resist 15 acid; Vulnerable 10 radiant
AC 28; Fortitude 25; Reflex 24; Will 24
Speed 6
M Arterial Disruption (at-will; standard) • Acid
+19 vs AC; 2d6 + 5
Arterial Shatter (recharge 5 6; standard)
+19 vs AC; 4d8 + 5
Bloodspatter (at-will; no action)
When Whitecell Blood Elemental is damaged by a melee attack, the attacker's square becomes bloodspattered terrain until end of encounter.
Arterial Harmonization (at-will; no action)
Gains Combat Advantage against targets occupying bloodspattered terrain.
Alignment Unaligned, Languages —
Str 22 (+12) Dex 16 (+9) Wis 16 (+9)
Con 16 (+9) Int 16 (+9) Cha 16 (+9)
Veinshatter Blood Elemental Level 12 Lurker
Medium elemental animate, XP 700
Initiative +16 Senses Perception +9
HP 94; Bloodied 47
Immune gaze; illusion; Resist 15 acid; Vulnerable 10 radiant
AC 26; Fortitude 24; Reflex 25; Will 24
Speed 6
M Veinstrike (at-will; standard) • Acid
+17 vs AC; 2d6 + 5 plus 1d6 damage if target occupies a square of bloodspattered terrain.
Veinshatter (recharge 5 6; standard) • Acid
+17 vs AC; 4d8 + 5 plus 1d8 damage if target occupies a square of bloodspattered terrain.
Bloodspatter (at-will; no action)
When Veinshatter Blood Elemental is damaged by a melee attack, the attacker's square becomes bloodspattered terrain until end of encounter.
Course Through (at-will; move)
Veinshatter Blood Elemental may teleport from any square of bloodspattered terrain to any other square of bloodspattered terrain within 10.
Alignment Unaligned, Languages —
Str 16 (+9), Dex 22 (+12), Wis 16 (+9)
Con 16 (+9), Int 16 (+9), Cha 16 (+9)
Nov. 4th, 2009
09:22 am - Blood Elementals (Batch 1 of 2)
The gaming hut has been very theoretical around here lately. In a gesture of self-correction, I present you with some monsters. These guys are statted up for 4E and gave the local group an entertaining work-out last week—though no one was reduced to the brink of death. As you’ll see, their gimmick lies in the creation of a special terrain condition which they then interact with in various ways. This motivated the PCs to move around the battlefield, and to move their opponents.
These blood elementals differ from the creature seen in Open Grave, which is more on the blobby end of the spectrum. I gave them acid instead of necrotic damage because the local campaign is very undead-based and a variation in damage type seemed called for. They could easily be switched back to necrotic.
Gorehound Blood Elemental Level 12 Brute
Large elemental humanoid, XP 700
Initiative +14 Senses Perception +8
HP 148; Bloodied 74
AC 24; Fortitude 26; Reflex 25; Will 25
Immune gaze; illusion; Resist 15 acid; Vulnerable 10 radiant
Speed 6
m Coagulated Smash (at-will; standard) • Acid
+19 vs AC; 2d8 + 5 damage, and ongoing 5 acid damage (save ends)
Furious Coagulation (recharge 5 6; standard) • Acid
+15 vs AC; 4d8 + 5 and ongoing 5 acid damage (save ends.)
Bloodspatter (at-will; no action)
When gorehound blood elemental is damaged by a melee attack, the attacker's square becomes bloodspattered terrain until end of encounter.
Bloodfeast (at-will; immediate reaction)
When gorehound blood elemental damages a creature occupying bloodspattered terrain, it regains 10 hit points.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Str 22 (+12) Dex 18 (+10) Wis 14 (+8)
Con 18 (+10) Int 11 (+6) Cha 12 (+7)
( More monsters after the jump )
Nov. 3rd, 2009
09:20 am - The Birds
View series to date here. Updated archive soon.
Nov. 2nd, 2009
09:20 am - Open Design Podcast
I was happy to chat with Wolfgang Baur and Rone Barton for installment six of the Open Design Podcast. I’m in good company on its guest list, so check it out.
Oct. 30th, 2009
09:20 am - Ripped From the Headlines (Halloween Edition)
In the world of The Esoterrorists, a cabal of high-placed sorcerers weakens the membrane between this world and the dreaded Outer Dark by launching operations employing media saturation to subvert the populace’s collective sense of reality. The heroes, the dedicated men and women of the Ordo Veritatis, confront these plans, in plot hooks which have been... ripped from the headlines. These are their stories… [CHA-CHUNK]
An Internet hoax, in which a faked news story describes the work of nonexistent conceptual artist Nero White, causes continent-wide trouble for the Ordo Veritatis when it metastasizes into an urban legend. The original article, claiming that White has designed an art piece called a rape tunnel, in which any viewer who makes it through the tunnel is sexually assaulted, is quickly exposed as satire. But when it spreads via social networking sites, it enters the consciousness of students on far-flung campuses. Within weeks it evolves into a rumor about a team of serial killers who use a Halloween fun house to capture victims. The PCs are called to the campus of Strunk College to check out persistent sightings of a phantom fun house, from which entrants never emerge. The Esoterrorists have used the psychic energy generated by the urban legend to summon an intermittent gateway to the unspeakable hell that is the Outer Dark, which appears in the form of a plywood Halloween funhouse. It’s up to the team to find and stop the rogue magicians, and deal with any ODEs (Outer Dark entities) who may have escaped into our reality through the tunnel.
Oct. 29th, 2009
09:20 am - Player-Generated Premises
We’re back to the 4E campaign after a long hiatus spanning convention/festival season and in-house Skulduggery playtesting. Over the years I’ve had campaigns that either gel or don’t gel, but this one is odd in that it oscillates back and forth between gelling and not. I’d point to a number of reasons for this, ranging from our collective sense of focus to a mismatch between an epic storyline the picaresque behavior of the characters. I’m also looking for ways to go further with the group storytelling techniques I started with. Some of these made their way into the DMG2, so now it’s time to further extend our bag of tricks.
Accordingly, I’ve asked the players to provide story premises for their characters. These are brief plot hooks, a sentence or so long, written in the format you’d see in TV listings. Each player was originally to write three premises for their own characters. My group had an even better idea, that they write two apiece for their own PCs, and then a third one for another character.
Among other things, I’m hoping to address an imbalance, where some of the characters have ongoing storylines attached to them, while others tend to float free from the narrative. Like an ensemble show, I foresee dividing the spotlight between players on a rotating basis. One episode will be a Shoryu episode in which others take supporting roles, then a Lacklow episode, and so forth.
I’ve collected the hooks together and printed them on cardstock in index card format. With these at my elbow, I can reach for them whenever the storyline cries out for a fresh fork. Surprise is preserved because no one, including me, knows which ones will appear in which order. Also, I’ll modify them as need be to fit the game’s evolving continuity.
This is the premise that incorporated itself into our season two premiere last Thursday:
Since the world has now been reduced to a post-apocalyptic state by an undead invasion, the caravan turned up to be a flying ship instead of an overland convoy. This modification of the premise keyed off another player’s suggestion that a flying ship might be the thing to have in a zombie-infested environment. So when the Zhood appeared, they were on a flying ship, and the favor they sought from El-Haumarzeid was that he go get a second flying ship for them.
Now that this premise has been folded into the narrative, the player will have to replace it with a new premise. At the player’s discretion, it might build on the expended premise, or go somewhere else entirely.
Other premises submitted so far include:
Many of these give me permission to do things to the characters that players might easily resent if sprung on them purely from the GM end of the table. Some of them build on existing threads, while others allow the players to shape the narrative around their characters in previously unanticipated ways.
Oct. 28th, 2009
11:20 am - Not Drowning, Waving
Boy, those Googlenauts sure are slick, the way they roll out happening new services through a viral system of artificial scarcity.Nothing increases consumer desire for a product quite like being forced to beg for it. My response to the Wave thing so far has been to slump in my chair and think, great, another damn thing I have to learn. What do you mean, you can’t explain it, I have to experience it? I don’t have time for experiences, man!
From the outside, Wave looks like a chaotic fudgecluster of everyone typing at once. This article examining it as an RPG tool concludes that it’s badly in need of a moderation protocol.
Well, Will Hindmarch has not only an invite but the the time to go and think further. Here he proposes the protocol needed to tame the chaos for gaming purposes: the action of the game takes place in a screenplay-like pane which is modified over time, while the chatting and cross-talk happens in other windows. He suggests that Wave’s persistence allows incremental play over time, thus overcoming the annoying lags and pauses of standard chat play. With this insight, Will becomes the first person to make Wave seem like an attractive option for online play. And I’d say that even if he weren’t suggesting GUMSHOE as an ideal match for its strengths.
09:20 am - The Birds
View series to date here. Updated archive soon.
Oct. 27th, 2009
09:20 am - In a Lonely Place
Thanks to everyone who helped me out with my enigmatic query.
To those worried that I might be about to embark on another odyssey in which I analyze a canonical work four beats at a time every Friday for nearly a year, consider your fears allayed. There will be more beat analysis, but you will not be subjected to it in a slow motion deluge here. An announcement will come in the fullness of time.
My money would have been on Glengarry GlenRoss for the win, on the grounds of second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired. I wasn’t sure this crowd would reach back all the way to the 40s and Casablanca. Glad to see a love for the classics. I also assumed a strong showing for There Will Be Blood, which came in third.
On the other hand, I am led to suspect that there are film fans among you who have not yet seen Nicholas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. If you dig Bogie in Casablanca you owe it to yourself to check out this, his best performance. It’s also by far a career highlight for the smoky-voiced Grahame, who usually played molls, femme fatales and assorted other bad girls.
Bogart is embittered screenwriter Dixon Steele. He brings a hat check girl back to his apartment to recount for him the plot of a bestselling novel he’s too jaded to read himself. When the girl is murdered, Steele finds himself the chief suspect. His world weary new neighbor, Laurel Gray, supplies an alibi. They fall in love, but the unexpected happiness they find is threatened by her growing fear that he might have done it after all.
The screenplay is based on a serial killer novel, but the thriller elements have been largely stripped from the story to leave a haunting, heartbreaking drama of fragile love between a pair of damaged souls. The pervading heartache is all the more poignant knowing that Ray and Grahame’s own marriage was disintegrating even as they made this movie together.
The trailer does its best to make it look like a thriller, rather than a drama with a murder investigation in it:
Ray is best known for Rebel Without a Cause. Also worth checking out on DVD is the early lovers-on-the-run movie They Drive By Night, the snowbound noir On Dangerous Ground and, in some regions, the gray flannel psychological freakout Bigger Than Life. I keep hoping that The Lusty Men, a melancholy rodeo drama from 1952 featuring Robert Mitchum’s best performance, will someday show up on home video. When we caught it at the Cinematheque Ontario during a Ray retrospective a few years back the audience was told that only three prints of the film were known to exist. It wasn’t clear who owned the rights, a necessary step to any restoration effort.
Oct. 26th, 2009
09:20 am - HeroQuest Gateway License Terms Unveiled
Rick and Jeff at Moon Design have revealed their equivalent of the open gaming license, which will enable third-party publishers to create products using the HeroQuest 2 rules set. I’ve wanted to see this happen since the original Hero Wars came out. It’s fitting, though, that the license should appear for HQ2. As a generic rules set, it’s the version of the rules most clearly suited for adaptation to other properties.
The license allows use of the rules mechanics, but not the Glorantha setting. Non-professional Glorantha items are, as before, allowed under the terms of a fan publications policy.
Like other open game licenses, the agreement imposes no financial costs on those who adopt it, but does expect them to accept a certain level of hypothetical risk. One of its provisions specifies that its terms can be revised by Moon Design, and that licensees are responsible for keeping track of, and abiding with, any changes they may choose to make to it. I can see both the critique of this sort of open-ended provision and the need for it from the rights holder’s point of view.
An open license entails a leap of faith on both sides. Part of the due diligence involved when entering into any such arrangement involves getting to know your licensors. From there you can determine the likelihood of the licensor actually abusing its self-protection clauses, as you’d assess all the other risks associated with a proposed business venture. My feeling is that on the list of possible pitfalls realistically attending the launch of a new RPG line, licensor abuse ranks pretty low. There are much more commonplace problems you should educate yourself about before jumping into the hobby game trade. I want to see a thousand HQ2 flowers bloom, which will happen only if interested parties go into it with their eyes open.
I’m not the rights holder or responsible for any of the lawyering here, so comments, queries and quibbles regarding license terms are best directed to Jeff, perhaps in the comments to the announcement linked to above.