Games until end May 2023

 

The latest doughnut of games

As May draws to an end, the pattern of my gaming has shifted too. No longer is one game dominating and for once I have played a lot more than I've run. North Star has bumped my game count up, with two run, three played.

Top games this year (all on 3 sessions each) are The Yellow King RPG, Trail of Cthulhu (Eternal Lies) and the Heroic Fantasy 2e playtest that Graham is running. D&D5e is on two sessions (the end of Curse f Strahd which I really need to write up) and Conan 2d20 had its second session tonight. 

I'm really enjoying the 2d20 system as I get into it.

A good month for games.

31 May 2023

First Impressions - TIME SCAPE (CY_BORG RPG)

The full TIME SCAPE package

TIME SCAPE is a 42-page full colour zine supplement for the CY_BORG roleplaying game, available on Itch.io, with physical copies released thanks to the Kickstarter campaign. My copy included three pamphlets and a folded card.

TIME SCAPE is a supplement that allows you to bring echoes of popular cyberpunk adjacent movies to the table; primarily the one with the killer time travelling cyborg infiltrator, but also the one with the trophy hunting alien, and the one with the xenomorph if you happen to have the pamphlets. TIME SCAPE lets you draw deep into the well of 1980s SF films, presenting stats and an adventure to allow echoes of the Terminator, Alien and Predator franchises. However, it’s primarily focused on the machine apocalypse, as you can probably guess from the cover artwork.

TIME SCAPE provides stats for hunter-killer cyborgs which progress through a number of states, starting with wet-ware encased, then moving to skin-peeled and exposed, before the final fleshless horror underneath is exposed. Your players will have to kill this thing several times to prevail, and it will feel relentless.

It also provides descriptions of four variant weather effects for the city of CY, ranging from the fog through to chemical snow. All will add a little variety.

The meat of the book is the adventure which includes four locations and enough randomness to do it again. The initial kick-off places the characters in media res, about to kill the CEO of a hated corporation which has debt data on much of the populace of CY (and who is ultimately responsible for initiating the machine apocalypse). Someone managed to get this hate figure’s itinerary as they visited the city and post it city wide. The characters got there first, and will likely prevail. Unfortunately, that provokes a response from the future, and after they succeed they’ll find themselves several hours later at a club as a relentless assassin is sent back through time to stop them killing the CEO and changing causality. The scenario becomes a mix of trying to escape or destroy the hunter-killer and trying to kill the CEO to end this, again. They’ll get help from the future, but exactly what motivates that help and how it manifests will be up to the GM.

The locations have just enough detail to bounce around but I found two of the maps challenging. There is a one on a boat which is coloured in pink lines on light blue water (just physically hard to read) and the penthouse layout takes some studying.

Overall, the scenario is fun and has hooks (QR codes) to initiate sequels.

The pamphlets present upgraded hunter-killers (for example liquid-metal nanotech ones), xenomorphs and alien hunters. These let you mix up the scenario or just take them and use them elsewhere. The folded card lets you design a K9k electrical pet to create fun and havoc.

Overall, I like TIME SCAPE. It’s perfect to add some 1980s SF movie fun and horror into your CY_BORG game, presented well, with an engaging scenario that has a degree of re-playability.

Recommended.

26 May 2023

Virtue Signalling?

 

The bird-site thread.

This annoyed me, because it seems very much like virtue signalling on a project that is already six months late. As my bird-site accounts are gone as I’d not have seen this except a number of blogs referenced it.

It’s entirely Leyline Presses’ right not to work with people who work with companies they don’t like.

If they didn’t realise that someone did work for the other company, and found out, then they could have just quietly ended that relationship, paid up what they owed and walked away.

Posting a vague thread like the one above (which incidentally isn’t mentioned on the Kickstarter page or comments) wasn’t needed - it’s just virtue signalling. I know whom the post refers to, because I have the v1.0 and the v1.1 downloads of Salvage Union,  and can compare the credits.

The editor is extremely professional and didn’t deserve this.

Leyline Press should be ashamed of themselves; they could have done this in a way that didn’t malign the editor, especially when they admit it’s their own due diligence that failed. Really unimpressed.

23 May 2023

Dune 2d20 Cribsheet

Dune version of the cribsheet.

Looking back through my blog entries, I don’t think I shared the Dune 2d20 roleplaying game cribsheet that I created a while back to the blog. I think I only posted it on the bird site and the Gaming Tavern. Here’s a link to the sheet, which is open for comments and builds.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jJDPFWuSlAeFF7AOhhg3Hb30uYswDSxAggF2YzY6VYs/edit?usp=sharing

Looking at the two together, I think that Dune is a more stripped back take on 2d20 but the level of abstraction makes it harder to deal with than Star Trek Adventures. It doesn’t help that the various Modiphius sources often give slightly contradictory advice and the examples in the core book are lacking decent mechanics explanations.

The Spice Must Flow!

20 May 2023

Star Trek Adventures 2d20 cribsheet

Another Google Doc cribsheet,,,

While I was preparing for North Star, I created a crib sheet for the 2d20 Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game because that’s one of the ways I best learn a system.

Here’s a link to the sheet - feel free to make any comments or builds if you feel that I’ve missed something or got it wrong. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ODV_R6CEsUwtapDgOKSoiIf4zlb6lMHUJ3ZW5Jz2UEg/edit?usp=sharing

Live Long and Prosper

20 May 2023

Second thoughts - Svalbard - Lovecraftian Modern Day Horror [Spoilers]

Reading Svalbard just before I ran it at North Star.

The final slot at North Star 2023 saw me running Svalbard, a standalone scenario and game set on the Norwegian Arctic Island of the same name which I've previously reviewed back in August 2021. I'd backed this at Kickstarter and it seemed like an ideal convention scenario. I'm going to discuss the experience of using this at a convention so there will be spoilers after the break. The creators told me that they had tested this at conventions, so I had high hopes that we could complete a run in one of the longer game slots.

North Star 2023 (VI) - After Action Report

North Star, our SF TTRPG convention underway

This last weekend brought North Star, the sixth run of our SF tabletop roleplaying convention held at the Garrison, and I think the fourth held face two face (with two years lost to COVID and replaced with virtual conventions). I missed last year because we had COVID in the family and I didn't want to risk exposing people, which was disappointing after I spent quite a lot of time preparing.

Overall, the run up was smooth and the game allocation went well. A few GMs were disappointed (and I feel for them, because I've been there) but they all got games. We had reduced numbers on our peak, and lost some more in the run up. However, we got there and no game ran with less than three players and most games were full to capacity. It would be nice to get another ten people at the convention though.

I've pretty much got the method sorted now, so processing is simple. Everyone knew what game they were in coming out of the Bank Holiday weekend before. I do have to thank Dr Bob, as they were very accommodating about my need to move them from a game after I made a small error in allocation. Fortunately, their second choice was available.

I arrived to find the Garrison set up, just waiting for me to do table names, X-cards and get the allocation out. Graham had stayed over the night before to prepare. As we'd decided to have a bring and buy because we had no traders, I'd spent Friday night filling two boxes of games that I wanted to sell and happily the attendees made good in-roads into them.

Graham did his opening speech, and we were off.

I was typecast as an engineer (!)

I didn't play the game I'd planned to in Slot 1, because one of the perks of being the games organiser is making sure that games happen. I dropped out of the game that I'd been planning to play to make sure we had the minimum number of people when someone's car broke down, and found myself playing Dr Mitch's "New Eden", a Cortex Prime game set on a colony sleeper ship where we got to wake up early and deal with the issue of a megalomaniac starship Captain who had stayed up the whole voyage and then work out an accord with an AI lest we lost the last survivors of humanity in a pointless war. I really enjoyed this, and we had some fun discussions of ethics and psychohistory led by our humaniform android played by Graham. A lovely game run by a GM on form. It was the first time that I'd played Cortex Prime and I liked it. Echoes of Savage Worlds.

What Dark Heresy is this?

Slot 2 saw me in another game that I hadn't planned to play. I'd stepped into it at the end of allocation to make sure it went ahead. This was a hack of Dark Heresy, a game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, into the Genesys engine. Now, I've never really played Genesys before and the system seemed to give the Remi, our GM, a huge amount to do try interpret the runes dice symbols. I didn't really feel that the system added a huge amount, not to knock the huge amount of work that someone has done hacking an existing game to the engine. Remi did a splendid job though; it was in effect a police procedural, except that we couldn't really use our official status openly to avoid upsetting the nobility. I enjoyed the scenario, but the system didn't doing anything for me. However, I've no idea what the original game engine was like, so it could well be a billion times better!

Live long and prosper, TOS style

Slot 3 brought my first game, a duo of games set in both The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG) of Star Trek using Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures. I ran the TOS side, and Dr Mitch ran TNG. We'd originally planned to run this last year, but my absence stopped it happening. Due to a player dropping out, I ended up with three players and Dr Mitch with four. I'd put a fair bit of effort up front, getting some Eaglemoss models for the ships and also making sure the character sheets were nicely presented in some menu holders that you could dry wipe. We'd never really finished writing the scenarios, and it's fair to say that we put the finishing touches in on Wednesday the week before. It was a delight riffing ideas backwards and forwards with Paul, and I think we ended up with a fun pair of adventures. Naturally, it involved time-lines going awry, characters swapping between past and future and then a set of walkie-talkies when the characters worked out how to build a temporal communicator. The players took great delight when they got myself and Dr Mitch to role-play the two Romulan Captains talking to each other. 

My favourite bits? Debbie's young TNG Science Officer pointing out to Declan's TOS Captain that she looked like her mother. When she disappeared back to the future, the rest of the TOS crew said that Debbie's character was like a younger version of Captain Moore, who then replied "I was never that cheeky"! I also enjoyed Shachar's Lt. T'Pren stashing a vacuum frozen Romulan body in a shuttle 'for the good of science', directly against the gung-ho first officer's instructions. Overall, all the players embracing the genre and the scenario and it was fun.

I had been terrified of the game system before I ran, but overall the 2d20 engine worked smoothly, and Remi also was a star as he managed the momentum pool like a pro. I'm not a huge Trekkie (I have fond memories of TOS, but never really got into TNG or Deep Space 9 as I preferred Babylon 5 at that time) but I hope we caught the feel of the setting. Dr Mitch and I have been asked to do a sequel and some ideas have started to be exchanged.

I had time for a nice pint of Guiness with Jag, Dr Mitch and Glenn before last orders, and got a good night's sleep. I was up not long after seven in the morning and started to dive deep into Svalbard, the afternoon game I was running.

Happiness is Mandatory.

My first game on Sunday was 'The Traitors Among Us', a mash up of Among Us and Paranoia prepared with Declan. We all had the usual Alpha Complex hidden agendas from mutation and secret society, but we also had the issue that perhaps all of us were under some kind of alien influence. Which, naturally, was treasonous. A humorous PVP (or more accurately, Character vs Character) game followed. In the end, bizarrely, I managed to come to a deal with Simon's gelatinous imposter by feeding him Craig's clone bodies. It was fun, and a nice return to a game that I have not played for perhaps thirty years. I've never played a sensitivity trainer before either.

 

Preparing on the veranda

The last game was Svalbard, which was standalone game and setting. I'll post some separate notes on running this later in the week, but our brave players didn't hesitate to put their lives on the line repeatedly to try and save the world from destruction. I was a bit nervous with this because I thought that it could have become a bit dry and mechanical, so I stole some session 0 approaches from indie games to try and make things work properly. The players managed to succeed; their characters saved the world, but according to the number of runs they did, they died in their helicopter evacuation when rocks came down from the side of the mountain above the Secret Underground Base (tm) that they'd just destroyed. I think everyone one had a good time; we'd a great group and they riffed off each other well. I forgot to take a picture of the players at the table, so I've used one of my final prep looking out from the Garrison's roof veranda. 

The game wrapped at 17:45, and I cleared up and then headed out, just in front of the last few attendees. It was nice to see happy chatter about the games that had been played and the fun that had been had.

North Star will return in 2024.

Thanks to everyone who attended.

16 May 2023

Books in April 2023

 

April’s reading rate.

April was a steady month. I read 10 books (which brings me to 38 for the year), reading every day again for a total of 2,328 pages.

The mix this month was tilted heavily towards roleplaying books, including re-reads of Svalbard and Star Trek Adventures in preparation for North Star in just under a fortnight. I read the whole Liminal roleplaying game line (4 books) and loved it, along with Thay: Land of the Red Wizards for D&D, inspired by the recent movie.

I spent a chunk of time in the car so listened to two reasonably serious non-fiction audiobooks. One “We Own This City”, by Justin Fenton, covered police corruption in Baltimore and the operation that brought it down, and was fascinating. The other was “All In” by Lisa Nandy. I don’t often read political books but I was interested on her take on ‘levelling up’, especially as she’s looking at it from a Northern perspective. It was an agenda focused on localism and empowering communities, and leaves me with hope that if Labour win the election we may see something different rather than more of the same unmanaged decline in favour of London which we’ve faced since the late 1970s.

The only novel I read was N K Jemisin’s “The City We Became”, which I enjoyed a lot, a tale of New York’s avatar’s awakening. Five different people develop powers reflecting different boroughs as the city attains consciousness and they become aware that something is attacking them. Enjoyable.

Overall, a good month in books, except I failed to read First Age’s reading challenge set on the https://www.gamingtavern.uk/ so I shall have to return to that and read the book for this month as well.

3 May 2023