Therefore this blog now lives at: http://mostlygeeknz.wordpress.com/

Please update your links.

• Start a new campaign set in a homebrew world. I’m currently working through my ideas and am hoping to start in late February or early March. Interestingly I finally checked out True20 to see if it would fit my ideas for a low magic world, with a not too heavy system and it’s great.
• Continue to get plenty of playing in. I can see one or two of my current games winding up at some stage soon and while one of those will be replaced with my own campaign I hope to fill the other with another longish term game.
• Get a PC. There are heaps of good CRPGs coming out this year and I’m sick of playing on the Xbox 360. I want a PC again, rather than using my TV.
• Talking of non table top games this year I’m looking forward to Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and maybe even my first MMO, The Old Republic.
• I’m going to continue to LARP in one off parlour games.
• Write and run a small LARP (for about 15 people). My ideas at the moment are running towards a steampunk-esque Society of Explorers.

And I think that should keep me pretty busy. What about you? Any plans for this year?

Luckily for me the group spoke and wanted to play 3: 16 – Carnage Amongst the Stars, so I grabbed a copy of the rules and Mike’s amazing set of props and talked people through the character creation. We had 5 marines in total which was a really great number is terms of banter and general camaraderie. While the players were working out what gear they wanted I rolled up the first planet.

Codename Reuben was a radioactive wasteland, populated by giant flying manta rays that shot bolts of lightening from their barbed tails which ignored the troopers armour.

About this time we had a last minute addition to the group so they made a character while the rest of the players roleplayed their more experienced troopers hazing the newbie and taking bets on whether he would even survive the first mission. I could tell this was going to be a great game.

There were so many wicked moments, and unfortunately I was too tired to take down everyone’s names but some of the highlights were:

• Svend’s character, Greenhorn making it through the mission, despite being dosed with two shots of the hallucinogenic combat drugs the squad were given. At the end of the mission he changed is reputation to “Lucky”.
• One of the troopers tinkering with the Sarge’s weapon, realising he’d broken it and then handed it right back. All with out the Sarge noticing.
• The Sarge managing to avoid a dose of the combat drug the squad had been chosen to trial, and then watching as the rest of the squad started to attack hallucinations of the aliens. It took him awhile to get through to them.
• The constant use of grenades, because of the opportunity to harm the other squad members.

We were running a bit early by the time they tidied up Reuben, so we went through the level up process, got some gear upgrades and shipped out to Codename Renoir. This was a helium gas planet, populated with giant eagle people who lived in floating cities. The squad were given the dubious honour of being recon for the planet, but on the upside they did get jet packs.

3: 16 – Assault on Reuben and Renoir was a great session of one of my all time favourite pick up games and got me pumped for the rest of the day to come.

After a lunch break to refuel the batteries with the traditional KapCon Sunday Burger Fuel I launched into the re-run of my Fright Night game, Still to Come. I had a great group to play with so I felt no issues with the slightly player driven element of the scenario.

The best thing about this run through, especially after Fright Night’s TPK after an hour and a half, was that the players took a totally different approach to the scenario than any of the others. This gave me a real kick, as I had been a little worried everything was too prescribed.

The highlights are too many to count, but some of them are:

• Liam, playing Lt. Cmdr. Fisher, hearing that there will be an orbital bombardment in an hour and not telling anyone else in the team… for another 45 minutes.
• The massive amount of note passing that went on. What a way to ramp up the paranoia!
• The Major, refusing to deviate from the mission. No matter the cost.
• Jon’s portrayal of Lexen, was just perfect.

All in all a very successful end to my GMing experience at this years KapCon. 4 Sessions was my utter limit I think, especially as there were so many games I would have been keen to play in.

Luckily however I had an in with one of my top picks for the Con, The Silver Kiss of the Magical Twilight of the Full Moon, and she agreed to run it after the dinner/prize giving break.

This game lived up to all my expectations and then some. It may have been exhaustion, it may have been the sugar, but it isn’t often that I’m laughing so hard I start to cry and need to leave the room and lay on the floor.

The basic premise for the game is a piss take of supernatural teen romance, a la Twilight. The group of 4 is divided into the supernatural love interest and best friend and the human love interest and best friend. In our group I was the supernatural love interest and between Carla and I was decided on being elemental goddesses. I was Fire, and after a mid game re-name was called Pheonix, Carla was Wind and called Autumn. We needed worship or in the high school way of thinking, popularity to survive, could transport any where in an instant and… There was something else but I can’t remember.

I could go on for pages about how awesome this game was, but I’ll just try to reduce it down to a few bullet points:

• Carla as Autumn as my really horribly mean, but super loyal best friend. She totally loved me.
• Jon’s awkward Callum, our love was doomed. But we tried anyway.
• Thomas’ deeply suspicious Jake. Terribly creepy but genius with his call on using an Earth rune to trap the Wind goddess.
• Callum not even noticing that Autumn existed, which caused her terrible pain each time he denied her existence. It didn’t help is case.
• The fraught Mexican standoff in Callum’s room, when Autumn had gone to kill him to make sure he stayed away from me. So much angst in such a small room.
• The final scenes of Autumn and Pheonix on top of Mt. Everest where they could no longer deny the love of millennia especially when compared with the fleeting love Callum offered, an Callum having set up a shrine to Pheonix in his room, worshipping her any way.

An amazing game, which ended an awesome Con. I still can’t believe it’s all over for another year, but am already plotting what to do at KapCon 20 in 2011.

Briefly (for those reading this who weren’t at KapCon) Reunion was a scifi LARP set 500 years after the catastrophic shut down of the gate system which linked the Union of Planets. Suddenly those same gates have re-opened and now all the players are part of a delegation to the Nexus station to work out where to go from here and re-connect with the other planets. More information can be found here.

While I had a number of goals which revolved mostly around digging up dirt on one of the other delegates, I also had a personal quest to find out what happened to my memories. Then there was the issue of what happened to the gates 500 years ago.

While I wasn’t all that successful in my goals, I had a great time running around digging up secrets and trying to work out who had taken my memories and how I could get them back.

The highlights for me were:

• Having an “oh my god” moment when the station Bartender told me that people were needed to power the gate, moments before the official announcement.
• My genuine feeling of horror when I also realised that unless people volunteered to run the gate, we would all die. Though I did play it rather fatalistic on the inside.
• Holding another member of my faction against a station bulk head, threatening to throw him out an airlock unless he told me why he’d stolen my memories. He didn’t talk.
• Being approached by the high priest of Ecclatisa to assassinate someone, which I agreed to. That same high priest then approached me again to kill on of his faction, which I did while everyone was busy watching the 6 volunteers give themselves to Nexus (the gate system).
• And finally, spilling the beans on the fact that the factions of Arboria and Chapparal actually shared a planet, to the Ambassador to New Berlin. I think that might have set off a chain of events that saw the King of Arboria assassinated and that same Ambassador made Queen… but maybe that was already in the pipeline.

So all in all a great LARP. I think I might be getting the hang of it now, and will always make sure that I tell all my secrets. After all what fun are they if no-one else knows?

This year I took on the rather daunting task of running three written scenarios and one session in the Games on Demand room. This took me to about my GMing limit and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do the same thing again.

Day 1 started with me running In the Blood, a scenario I had written for the new Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. From a GMing point of view it went fine, though I don’t think I’ll be writing a game for 6 players again any time soon. Unfortunately I’m particularly bad at taking down quotes from players during games but it was a really solid start to the Con. Special mention must go to Erik playing Orik the Dwarf, who just nailed the drunken, overly regressive dwarf stereotype. He even managed to save his fiancé. Awwww…

The first game I played in for the con was American Gothix. It’s a road trip homage to 80s Goth culture in small town America and it was fantastic. I played the Newcomer, a former cheerleader who had recently moved towns and was desperate to fit in with the Goths. Jackie did a great job GMing for the first time at KapCon and the rest of the players really bought into the premise. I was stoked when I basically failed at all my character goals, it was way more fun that way. All the players nailed their characters but a few special moments were:

• Scott, as the Artist, for his angst filled poetry and obsession fuelled crime spree to get a meeting with Robert Smith
• Kat, as the Brat, who I managed to bribe with candy to make sure she didn’t let my secret past out
• Svend, as the DJ, for his interaction with his new pet rat. I’ll never hear the term “the package” in quite the same way
• Frank, as the Uber-Goth, for being just oh so creepy and misunderstood
• Thomas, as the Outcast, for being so very dysfunctional.

Then, after dinner and a quick change into my LARP costume (more on that later) I ran Slayage by Gaslight a Buffy RPG scenario, set in Victorian London, I first ran for my regular Buffy group which I tidied up for the Con. I had a great group of players and I felt they really captured the feeling that I was going for. Happily they beat the Big Bad and saved the world.

Honourable mentions:

• Sam W was a fantastic Slayer and she seemed to have a lot of fun playing Anastasia’s arrogance and totally got into the style of having Slayer strength
• The other Sam was just amazing as Ernest the Watcher. I have never before seen someone sleep with a prostitute because it was the honourable thing to do.
• Penny, as played by Tigger from Auckland. In my mind she was timid and afraid of her power. He just made her kick ass.
• Phil playing the street urchin Charlie, trying to kill steal from the Slayer once again!

Day 1 was almost over, but first I had a LARP to get to.

• There are heaps of fantastic small print games out there that I wanted to have an oppertunity to play.
• I thought that the Wellington gaming scene would respond well to an event mid year.

So I stole an idea from New Zealand’s biggest RPG con, KapCon (which is held every January), and based my Day of Games on the Games on Demand room. The deal here is that there are a group of facilitators who each agree to run certain games that they’re really excited about and then people come, vote on which games seem cool and go play. Sounds easy right?

Well as I found out this supposidly easy concept needs (not surprisingly) more organisation that I thought it would. Choosing a date in mid-May which was roughly half way between KapCon and the one of the other main RPG events in Wellington, ConFusion which is held in August was easy. As was picking the old faithful, Turnbull House for a venue. I pimped my idea on the NZRag boards to get people to come and run games and even made fliers to go into the FLGS. I kind of forgot to set up a Facebook event until a few days before but dispite that lapse the day arrived an we had a pretty good turn out, even a guy who was from the US and travelling around NZ. After some discussion I decided to do a slightly different time table. Rather than the traditional 3 hour slot I split the day into two 4 hour slots and four 2 hour slots. This way if you wanted to play in a game that required more set up you’d still get time to play.

This was kind of where my grand idea fell down a little. I had a big white board and session times/lengths all worked out, but I felt there was too much standing around waiting and discussing what would happen next. Also a number of the GMs didn’t get to play in games that they wanted to due to having to run games. So I’ve been thinking about how to smooth out those waits and give everyone the oppertunity to play if they wanted to. So here is what I’m going to do next year, assuming there is interest:

• Get a clear list of games from each GM so other GMs can indicate what they’d also like to play in.
• Set up the whole day’s timetable to begin with so if people finish their session they know where to go next and time isn’t eaten up in the short sessions with arranging things.

In terms of my own Day of Games experience it was good. I ran an awesome game of 3: 16 for three Americans who really got into their roles as Space Marines. Then I “ran” an utterly terrible session of Capes (a game I’d never read, played in or even come across before) which I thought would be an easy supers pick game but confused me and all of the players with it’s unusual conflict mechanic. However I did really like the way characters were generated. Finally I brought out Hot War and actually got to run through game creation. This was my most satisfying game of the day and made me want to play in a multi-session game of this even more.

All in all it was a good day and the comments from others made me think that it could continue to grow in the furture. So I’m thinking that Day of Games will be around for another year yet.

One’s a throw away comment by designer Ken Hite in a  con review:

boardgaming boomed this weekend as it seems to be doing all over.

And the other is a longer, more considered piece by Steve Darlington, known for his work on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay line, amongst other things:

In short, for what people want out of an RPG – to move through something like a plot, to have a character of their own design, to make meaningful choices about goals and combat, to roll dice and produce random events, to make choices IN character even if they work against what might be best for winning the game…all of these are being met, more and more, in board games.

(as a side note, Steve’s a fan of this blog)

I’m not sure about this myself, but my experience of boardgames is that they are too directed in their story – one of my signle favourite RPG-things is that the GM can’t predict what the hell the players will do. I don’t miss the box set games of the past – big maps annoy me and I don’t need more crap in my life, just good ideas.

Do any of you feel that there’s an increasing convergence between RPGs and board games?

• Receiving, reading and playing Mouse Guard. An RPG of the graphic novels by David Petersen it has had a number of great reviews and as a gaming friend said to me:

“It is one of the most playable RPGs I have come across.”

• Pulling off Day of Games on May 16th. A small one day event here in Wellington with games being offered on the day and people voting for an choosing the game they feel like playing most. More info once I re-do the blog.
• As Nick mentioned in a previous post Green Ronin have announced that A Song of Ice and Fire rpg has been approved and is on it’s way to the printers. I ran through the quick-start adventure back in July’08 and really liked what they had done. The core book is due out in March so I’ll be doing a write up once I get my hands on it.
• Writing my Buffy: the Vampire Slayer RPG scenario series, The Slayer Chronicals.
• Playing in my new Buffy game (there seems to be a theme), Fall. It’s a great group of people and I think will be heaps of fun. I’ll do a write up on our first mini-session soon.
• Dollhouse starting on TV in the US.

I think that’s it for now. I’ll be back at certain points to see how these things all pan out.

So the games were:

• Mountain Witch – a game of Ronin in a mythical Japan fighting to the top of Mt Fuji in order to destroy the Mountain Witch.
• Not our Future – a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game set in the modern day around a group of misfits.
• My Life with Master – where all the players are the minions of some crazed ‘Master’ figure who makes them do many odd and morally questionable acts.

Mountain Witch

So first up Mountain Whitch. This is a system that I’d played once before at KapCon in an awesome Residant Evil game, so I was keen to give it another go. We started of making out characters and it became apparent for then that there was a bit of a disconect between some of the players around the tone of the game. However we carried on and I developed a Ronin named Tanaka who had killed his master due to being in love with his master’s sister and was now trying to find the money to buy her out of indentured servitude. It seem a dark enough past made all the better when I picked the Past Alligence dark fate.

The first few scenes didn’t really flow that well for me due to the tone issues, but once they got sorted it really got going. Tanak’s dark fate managed to keep itself pretty well hidden until the last scene, when he killed one of the other characters who was about to kill the Mountain Witch’s lover.

Key moments in the game for me were:

• Simon’s (the GM) describtions of all the verious Japanese demons. He really knew his stuff.
• Malc’s reveal of his dark fate as his character plunged his sword into is stomach. Very dramatic.

Not our Future – Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Next round was Dan’s game, Not our Future, and was a faithful rendition of a Buffy episode. Unfortunately Dan was caught slightly unaware and hadn’t known that he was running that round, so we were really a bit of a play test but that was all good. The group of people playing obviously really loved Buffy and knew the tone to take. The players and their characters were:

• Mitch the Slayer – me
• J.D. a former Vampire Groupie (I think) – Played to hilarious effect by Jenni
• Jo the geeky wannabe witch – Bryn
• Paul the werjaguar and Mitch’s on again/off again boy friend – Played in all his sullen glory by a girl I hadn’t met before and whose name I forgot to write down. Sorry!
• Brand the jock and Mitch’s protective older brother – also played by someone I forgot the name of! Talk about bad notes! Edit: However thanks the to joy of comments, his name Lance!

The characters where great fun to play and interact with and everyone around the table totally through themselves into the action and most importantly the pithy diagloge. It was awesome and unfortunately I didn’t write down the quotes due to excessive laughter.

My Life with Master

On the Sunday I got to play in my final game of the con, My Life with Master. I had played this game the year before, in the same session with the same GM and was very keen to give it another go.

After quite a long period of brain storming we established that our Master would be an Ed Wood-esque Z grade director named Hershal Castle. He needed money and props in order to make that movie that would finally show the critics that he has worth the time it took to review him! The townsfolk, not surprisingly were the people of Hollywood.

My minion was named Jamison, a very short actor who’s less than human trait was “Extemely short, except when on film” and more than human trait was “Utterly convincing, except when telling a lie”.

The others were:

• Earnest the AD played by Ruth
• Jack the elderly muscician played by Naomi
• Bob the blind special effects guy played by Christian

Unfortunately the remaining time was enough to finish off the game, but we had some golden scenes in the mean time. The highlights were:

• Bob’s scene with his dog, trying to gain more affection and constaintly getting stopped due to ties in the dice roll. Who knew that dogs were so hard to crack?
• Jamison’s scene with his very secret boyfriend, played by Naomi. It was actually pretty gut wrenching for Jamison when he realised that his main squeeze wanted him to get out of the acting game.

So there you have it. Another whirlwind two days of gaming. It was a fantastic time and I’m all ready thinking about next year!

With out further ado it was time for A.C.O.R.N. again. This time I’d made some timing changes and decided to make the start a bit different. And it rocked! The players were fantastic and totally jumped feet first into the craziness. I think it was helped by the fact that everyone had a chance to really get into the RP vibe by this stage. Svend deserves special mention once again for his awesomeness as the jock with an inflated sense of his own ego. A few key moments:

• I will never hear “One way or Another” by Blondie without smiling ever again. Thanks Svend!
• Paul the techie, played awesomely by Bryn, while looking at security footage in the middle of the dance floor totally brushes off a Geek Groupie. Even though she thought geeks were “Sooo hot! Right now.”

Next round I ran Project Breather for the fourth and I think final time. It went well, though I found it difficult to capture the creepy, claustrophobic feeling that I was going for. Once again though the players made the characters their own and I only wish that we hadn’t run so short on time at the end. I have to say that none of the other groups who have played through this scenario with me so far have been quite so trusting. I do still feel a little bad about poisoning one of the characters, though the player assured me it was ok!

I also just realised that I forgot to write down everyone’s names but special mention must go to Herbet Jenkins player for so playing the upper class prat so well. Also to Samantha Askew’s player, you guys really captured the characters. So thank you.

My final game of the con was another go of My Life with Master, which deserves a post all of it’s own.

All in all a great con which has left me feeling ever more fond of the great group of people who make up the Wellington RPG community. I’m also brimming with ideas that I can’t wait to get on paper.

Thanks again to the organisers for just being awesome, Simon, Dan and Malcolm for running such great games and all the people who signed up for and enjoyed the games I ran.