The Last Express Play-by-Post Game

Inspired by The Last Express, a beautiful and elegant videogame set in 1914 which I did a Game Translation on, I've been running a play-by-post game using the Call of Cthulhu system and setting over here.  You can see the written trailer over here which has a nice set of pictures and introductory statements that I think helps advertise it.

The game is built on a different premise to most play-by-posts that makes it more robust to player attrition, which is good, because so far I have lost about 10 players.  Basically each player develops a character independently of the others and boards the train with their own goals to complete.  These goals might be mundane and sociable or they might be intensely malevolent or even supernatural.

Generally most of the goals have been inadvertently at cross purposes though there's been thus far a distinct lack of lizardmen and a greater number of academics than I thought would happen.  So much for opening the floodgates by making that a possibility!

Basically each individual then boards the train which contains both NPCs and PCs where they are slowly exposed to stranger and stranger details until finally they're hooked into one adventure or another.  Since they're not encouraged to investigate together (though that does occasionally happen), there's less likely to be bottlenecks where one player drops out and the game grinds to a halt as the other players are forced to wait -- often dropping out themselves as they grow bored of waiting.

The main threat to this game's sustainability is that only self-motivating players can get involved.  Those who are easily confused or too timid to take an excuse to involve themselves or talk to people quickly find themselves lost and alone.  I've tried to help that where I can but it's still pretty hard in this sort of game.

On the plus side, no other traditional play-by-post would survive the kind of player attrition I've had.  The game also moves quite quickly (generally 15 minutes passes each week or whatever time interval would take them to the next stop with Time Stamps placed to remind them) which it couldn't do if we all had to wait for the same folks to post.

Especially since there's about 5 - 8 active players at this time (at different rates of activity).

So the first day is done and now the night time antics are beginning, if any of my beloved readers would like to dip their toes in, now is the time!  Mosey on  over here to sign up and get involved!

A rambling rant on one shots, vampire and my social calendar

I'm getting a real kick out of planning for this one shot. Enough of a kick that I kinda want to run a couple more rather than going with another persistent campaign just yet. As I sit here and go over the various details, little ideas for other one shots keep rearing their heads. Imagine setting up market stalls for a Changeling Hedge Market? Or a Call of Cthulhu archaeological dig? Or about a haunted house? All kinds of ideas....

Plus this article over here kind of sums up my concerns about persistent vampire. My last vampire campaign only lasted two years and that one was full of hope and sunshine, comparatively, with some pretty high humanity vampires run by players who used to declare that they loathed politics and its divisive nature (bit of burnout from an Elysium LARP they had once played, methinks).

Don't get me wrong. Vampire persistent LARPs are a lot of fun and they are relatively easy to run as a Storyteller because the players largely take care of themselves but they also require a delicate balancing act between external troubles to liven up the place and allowing space for internal strife. Plus, most players don't take public humiliation well and that's a really good tactic to use against a political enemy. Add in the kind of character investment you can only really get from a few years in-game and ... yeah. A recipe for some rather painful situations.

So I'm not so sure about running a persistent Vampire campaign. I want to pinch a bunch of ideas from the one I was going to run and maybe use that for another persistent campaign in the future as vampire does lend itself marvellously well toward persistent campaigns, in general, but I'm not sure I want to run vampire, per se.

It also helps that while I have players curiously watching the developing of the vampire game, I don't have much excited banter. This could be because the interest just isn't there but, knowing folks in Adelaide, it's equally possible that they're all nattering with much fervor and speculation among themselves but just aren't relaying it to me.

Even if you're an Adelaide person, you may be sitting there going .... "Right, I'm sure that's it." (Poor girl, how delusional ... why would people keep silent about something they like?)

I don't know if it's tall poppy syndrome or just excessive courtesy (best not interfere in what another person cares about), but past experience has told me you can't just an Adelaide crowd's excitement by its silence.

I almost cancelled my last Halloween party as my every attempt to talk about it either on the Facebook Event Page ended in me talking to myself with maybe one or two comments from people in total. Attempts to talk about it in person fizzled out quickly into an awkward moment or a hasty subject change even though I was only broaching the subject and hadn't talked their ears off in the past. Naturally I figured that for some reason everyone was either disinterested to an incredible extreme (I've had chats to my friends about incredibly dry and boring topics before) or were experiencing some kind of negative reaction to the party.

So I figured that I might either cancel it or, alternatively, just not put in the effort. I already had purchased a stockpile of sweets from a month ago so I figured that rather than bake anything or worry about decorations, I'd just lay that out. Best not to make a big deal of it.

Two weeks before the event a friend confided in me out of the blue and without provocation that *everyone* was talking about the event, that my Halloween parties were considered the big social event of the year in our group, and that some of my friends were eagerly awaiting it. NB: Halloween is normally quite a small, generally nonexistent, event on the social calendar that's just now coming into vogue - likely due to zombie movies and the zombie walk craze.

Cue a quick trip to buy decorations and more supplies!

Twice as many people actually attended that party than any other I'd held.

Now I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back and say I'm awesome. I'm not. If an American came down to see my Halloween party, they'd just smile to themselves and think it lacked a certain amount of effort and appeal. I just happen to be the main host out of my friends with a real love of everything creepy which means I dress up my house more than most.

The moral of the story is more that it's really hard to judge the hype of anything in Adelaide as people have the annoying tendency of expressing their interest and excitement to everyone except the key parties involved! This cultural trait may also be why few others in my social circle host much. No one expects accolades pre-event but knowing if folks want to come is a help.

Anyway, long story short ... I may have drummed up heaps of excitement for the persistent vampire LARP just off my Facebook page alone. Or not. I'm not sure. But the fact that I'm not bombarded with eager messages and comments means that they have given me the opportunity to consider my desires in an unpressured environment - which is probably the cultural intent of that habit. We wouldn't want to impose, would we? We're way too laidback for that.

And in an unpressured environment, I don't know if a persistent PvP and competitive game is what I'm really after. I'm yearning for more collaborative affairs that foster a team environment. I'm also a heavy plotter. I'm no LARP Director, don't get me wrong. My players have flexibility in how they handle things but things *will* have a habit of needing to be handled. That's just who I am.

And that works in vampire one shots but maybe I should be turning my eye to a different type of persistent game.

And maybe I should be gaining further experience in different genres through one shots before doing that at all.

What do you think?

Game Translation: Blood Dragon

Sometimes it's good for a game to not take itself seriously. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a shooter which satirises 1980s action films. The setting is a mixture of retro and futuristic and it sprawls across an island filled with those who need a good killing. You play eye-patched cyborg protagonist Sergeant Rex Power Colt.

In a game like this, tropes are the thing. This game has cyborgs, Russian - American nuclear war, rogue agents, zombies, literal blood dragons, rescuing scientists and conquering bases. Naturally there's a hot female doctor who assists you in, ahem, more ways than one.

This is the kind of tongue in cheek affair that many players would love to play, at least once in awhile, and I'd thoroughly recommend horror STs try their hand at it once in awhile. It's a good way to get some escapism, unwind, and laugh at yourself, your hobby, and everything else you're dealing with at the time. The big trick here is to not let it get into cutting satire. You don't want to lambast it as the sorry state of roleplay. You just want to pack so many tropes into a single game that it tips over the border into absurd.

Firstly, remember this is a shooter. The system you use needs to give the players plenty of hit points to play around with and the combat needs to be short, sharp and sweet so that they can mow down dozens of bad guys in between healing up. Pathfinder can work for this, though I'd recommend reducing the hit points of most creatures so that most of them are, at best, paper tigers. They hit hard but they die easy. At least easy compared to the players. There are other systems that would probably work even better (i.e. Tenra Bansho Zero) but that's the most mainstream one I can think of which would work out.

The gameplay should be varied, as well. Throw in some creatures that are more powerful than others! Let them mow down a dozen of the running dead and then throw down with some kind of super-cyborg. And remember to describe all the damage they deal to the bad guys with relish (though not to the point of evoking imagery of pain and grotesquery - think comic book style).

If I were you, I'd recommend including some kind of narrator. The players could occasionally take turns at this or it might be storyteller only. Basically, start each session with a summary that evokes bad blockbuster movie trailers and which drops heavy, yet bizarre, spoilers for the next session. "Last time...." "S/he was just doing his/her job smashing bad guys when...." "Little did they know but things were about to get a lot worse...." "On a mission they weren't expected to survive...." This page will give you some ideas of what to say or, at least, how to say it.

Go Big or Go Home....

To help diversify the bad guys, play around with the idea of called shots. These could be quite narratively done. If you say you hit its eyes, you deal damage normally. Otherwise the damage is halved. No penalty to hit the eyes, though. Of course, if you do use these quirks make them uncommon so that they're entertaining rather than an irritating game of "strike every body part once". Also the players should be able to look at the monster and get an idea of where to strike just by the look of it. In other words, a giant eye or a fleshy mouth that is only open sometimes is just begging for a smack. Yes, it may not be as much of a Blood Dragon thing but it's a pretty big gaming trope anyhow.

Hammy one liners should deal extra damage to an enemy. Make it small but significant so that the players keep making them. If it ends up making everyone laugh, let the damage be a full (but small) damage dice or something similar. Only let each player benefit from this twice a battle, though, you don't want it to grate.

Use the game as an excuse to watch over-the-top movies or shows. Or at the very least, play a trailer of one as the starting ritual to get everyone on the same page. This can also act as handy inspiration for you. As can the web-site TV Tropes.

You should include at least one puns that's really important to the game. It could be a password, a description of a boss, or even a vital clue said by an NPC. C'mon, you know most folks hate puns. Time to get them groaning.

Anyway, a campaign based around Blood Dragon or including elements of it, should appeal to - you guessed it - Action Heroes the most. I could take you through the rest of the list but really most of the other groups will tag along for the entertainment value but probably wouldn't be into it for the long haul unless the satire was really funny to them. Still, that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy it as a breather adventure or short campaign. If you want to check out the trailer, you can find it here. If you want to read up on the TV Tropes you can find them here.

For the next Game Translation (which will be in a fortnight's time), you have a choice of these: Tomb Raider (the latest), Dracula: Origins, Outlast, Vampire: the Masquerade (Bloodlines) or Deadly Premonitions. If no one picks anything by next fortnight, it'll probably be Deadly Premonitions.

If you want to see the list of games I've done thus far, you can find the Game Translation series starter over here.

Musings on Masks: Episode 13

CAMPAIGN SUMMARY: James Paterson, Australian private investigator in New York, has been hired to investigate Sydney Silvers who went missing only a night or two ago but whose home was found ransacked by the receptionist.  He needs to find Sydney Silvers because she had been investigating the eugenicists who may be responsible for the death of James' beloved back in London.

EPISODE SUMMARY (Unwary): Wherein James Paterson, Australian private investigator in New York, reluctantly teams up with Martha Collins who lives with Sydney Silvers to investigate her disappearance.

EASTER EGGS: There's a few subtle prods here to point him in the right direction as the poor player is doing this on his own. While this does help reduce the amount of tangents and confusion around, it also means the campaign relies on one man's insights and ability to remember all of the facts.  Hence why I try to guide him to the right insights and conclusions when such things matter for the successful resolution of the plots.  I could leave him to it, but he'd probably just get frustrated.  On the other hand, it's a delicate balance because I don't want to make it too easy.

How do you think I've done?

Also, I meant to do some jive speak with the man at the Cotton Club but after taking a look at the truly atrocious Cotton Club menu I couldn't bring myself to do so.  It felt better to make him a bit taciturn and cautious.

I'll probably have a very jive talking black person using the slang in the Secrets of New York book (even though it'll doubtless be anachronistic, being as this is set in the late thirties rather than the early twenties) at some later point when the person is trying to specifically annoy him.  Perhaps when he pokes around the Ju-Ju House?

Horrors: Player-Viewable GM Content

Player-Viewable GM Content is a pretty handy consideration for me now that I'm thinking again about whether I want to have a core rulebook and a Game Warden's Guide. The trouble with splitting the two too thoroughly is that a person may purchase the core book without thinking to purchase the other and that should be okay. The trouble with including them both in the core book is that players often do read ahead, especially if they are the ones who discovered the system and setting. Heck, some players are notorious system collectors who purchase anything in their favourite genre to read greedily. If they like it enough, they may even convince their current GM to give it a spin. In that case, though, they'll normally stop short of reading any pre-generated adventures and may cast a less intensive eye on the monsters but everything else is fair grame.

There's a number of ways that Game Designers are now coping with this habit, especially as Game Designers generally would like players to purchase a copy because it lines our pockets and provides a wonderful financial excuse to keep producing content (notice I say 'excuse', because it's generally not something you can rely on to pay the bills so most folks do it because they're driven to do it).

Some Game Designers throw it all into the same book. This is appropriate when it really doesn't matter what the players read, when the players are assumed to have experienced the setting elsewhere or when the characters should have a firm understanding of the setting. I particularly noticed that in books based on other properties like Firefly tend to put it all in one. They may then release 'specialty' GM-focused books which target secret areas which players should not immediately know about.

Some Game Designers only put the system in the one book and everything else can be found elsewhere. Even Pathfinder does this -- likely because it's already a mammoth weighty weapon with all the rules packed between its firm covers. If the players only read the core rulebook they'd be likely to pick up on certain cursed weapons, magic item uses, and guess at an NPC's class based off their spells but even in those case they'd need an impressive memory to do so. The rest of the information is packed into 'specialty' books which are divided between Player Friendly and GM only.

Some Game Designers create a core rulebook and then create a player friendly book. Normally both of these contain the rules which is a bit of a repetitive dump of information. The advantage of this is that players normally don't get a lot of advice and have to read the GM advice sections (which is normally, but not always, reasonably player friendly) and then apply the advice backwards to figure out what to do. The disadvantage of this is that normally the same content could benefit both. Normally what actually happens is that the Player's Guide is a cut down version of the core rulebook. Stats, some tips and some setting without any monstrous goodness.

The other method is to create a core rulebook and then a GM focused book. The GM book has the monsters, secret setting, rules and other special sundry items inside of it. Normally what this boils down to is that the core rulebook has a little bit of everything but the GM book goes into things a lot more deeply. Oftentimes the GM's book suffers from a bit of bloat, either because some information is still being withheld so the Game Designers can sell more 'specialty books' or because the writers haven't learned the art of succinct yet evocative detail-oriented text. In other words, there's a lot of fluff and not much delivery. This doesn't mean it's not a good read, you just don't get as much actual advice and information out of it. (NB: Too much brevity can actually cloud learning as the brain sometimes needs the same detail put three different ways to soak it in and because there needs to be breathing space between each major point which can be assisted by expanding on a single point for at least a paragraph).

I'm not sure which direction I will go with mine. I know that I will include some Player-Viewable GM content even if I create a single core rulebook or a focused GM's book because, well, some secrets don't need to be secret. Hiding information on how to create a crime scene with forensic detail also means hiding information on how to analyse one, after all, and never revealing a single potential monster also means the player has to fall back to expected methods of despatch borrowed from other games which may not actually either a) work or b) involve something a person would actually do.

In other words, drop Slenderman among a group of D&D players and they will understandingly attack it if they don't know any better. They will then die and have to create new characters. This would potentially be a good start to a horror campaign in D&D where the in-game assumptions are turned on its head but would suck as a start for a Call of Cthulhu campaign where the academics really should have fled screaming because that's what an academic would do the first time they were confronted by a bizarre otherworldly being. The main reason the D&Ders *would* and *should* attempt to attack a monster outright the first time around is because that's what they're expect in the rules of the game.

Seeing chapters on "Constructing and deconstructing crime scenes", as an example, could help kerb such behaviour as the players, through reading it, get a better idea of what they should and shouldn't be doing.

Anyway, what do you guys think of the different methods of rules and setting delivery? Prefer a Player's Guide or a GM's one to come out alongside a core rulebook (core meaning one that both can read)? Prefer it all in one?

Sorry about all the formatting issues!

I am so sorry when I forget to include the spaces. Due to the computer I use, I actually have to write my articles in HTML rather than Composing them normally so I have to use pointy brackets and br / to create a space. Sometimes I forget because the text looks normal to me. I do try to check it once it's published but I don't always manage it. Please feel free to leave me a comment when I've done it wrong. I won't be mad at you or anything. It'd help us all out.

In A Game Now

I'm now on the other side of the GM screen in a proper multi-player game. I am a player! A player in a party! One of my former players from the Flashpoint campaign before it folded has obtained a few Pathfinder adventures that he wants to run us through. One of these adventures, alas, was one that I had run before in a solo adventure but the others I know are good through reputation *and* all have a creepy horror vibe from what little I remember of them. Score! Anyway, that's it from me today.