Chimerical Realm

The story of Metal Angel has come to an end . I had fun playing that game--it was nice to try out a different genre and to play with some new tools. But, when all is said and done, I don't feel very satisfied  with how it all turned out.  There were actually a number of different elements in this game, and I want to approach them each on their own terms. In no particular order:

You've spent the past few months prepping for an exciting new game. You've purchased various supplements and adventures. You've carefully crafted NPC's and settings, and have done your best to make an exciting and engaging game. What do you do when everything falls apart? When the dice turn against the players? Or one simple plan turns out to be a disaster? When the entire party faces extinction at the hands of a "Total Party Kill?"

Random character creation is pretty antithetical to Vampire , in all honesty. The game values deep and nuanced characters far more than disposable volume, and as such each character, both PC's and NPC's, are meant to be built with care and consideration. Also, the mechanical aspect of character creation is so damn quick that, once a character is conceived, it takes only a few minutes for even a new player to fill out the sheet. Given that, why would I bother with random creation at all? Well, for a few reasons actually. The first is the search for inspiration. Sometimes you want to make a character and don't yet know who this character will be. In the past, I've used some different tools to help me figure out who the character is, using tools like  Central Casting , the "random Preludes" of the Masquerade Players Kit , and the Universal NPC Emulator . All have their virtues, but I wanted to try something different--instead of coming up with a character and...

When I first though of doing " The Great World of Darkness Chronicle ." my intention was to run a solo game of various groups through all, or at least most, of the pre-published stories for Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage.  Knowing that most of these are, eh, let's just say "thoroughly plotted", my thought was to heavily intersperse these tales with my own custom and randomly generated stories. Well, I've spend the past day or so trying to come up with a complete list of the adventures. So far, this is what I have. I spent far too much time trying to get blogger to post these images at the same size. Sorry. Now, looking at this, a couple of thoughts pop into my head. First, I'm clearly missing a few adventures. Possibly quite a few. My main source was the fan-based White Wolf Wiki  and I know for a fact they were missing some. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything close to a better source. Even drivethrurpg  didn't come close to the ...

After the relative success of my solo  Let's Play Alien Hunger  (success, in this case, being defined by the fun I had while playing/writing it, not on any other metric), I want to try something similar, but far more expansive. I want to solo "The Great World of Darkness Chronicle." Essentially, I want to go through all, or at least most, of the published adventures, starting from the earliest and leading up to the Gehenna books. Of course, "Great World of Darkness Chronicle" is a bit of a misnomer--I'm really just interested in doing the Vampire , Werewolf , and Mage games. Even that will be a tremendous undertaking, particularly since family, work, other "standard games" (running one and playing in another as of this writing), and the annoying thing we call "real life" will take up a huge amount of my time. Best case scenario, it will take me a year or so to get through everything. If I'm being honest, probably quite a bit mor...

Since the release of the V5 play-test rules , and particularly the included scenario, The Last Night , there has been a lot of outrage at the characters provided. Specifically, the character of Amelina. You're free to download the scenario yourself, so I won't go into too many specifics, beyond the most obvious. She is a monster. All four of the provided characters are monstrous assholes to one extent or another, but Amelina stands out as singularly vile. If an NPC, she would be the "big bad" of the adventure. As a PC, she is, to put it delicately, "problematic." Personally, I embrace the idea that she is a monster, and one the other characters should overcome in their adventure. Yes, she's vile and despicable, but she is so vile that one couldn't even pretend that she anything but an obstacle to be overcome. This, however, might be overly generous to the authors of the provided scenario. I really have no way of knowing what they intended, or what...

My "PC Emulator" take on Alien Hunger has come to a close, and it's been an interesting ride. It didn't go quite the way I thought it would, but I think the game and story went better for that. First off, the core of the game was to experiment with the idea of using the Mythic Emulator to replicate PC's in a module. And I have to say it worked extremely well. Now, Alien Hunger is something of a "sandbox" module, which is a bit different. Sure, there are plots and threads and the like, but how the players approach and resolve each one is up to them, and can vary greatly troupe to troupe. In fact, in my play through, they pretty much skipped two of the three plotlines. And one really awesome sub-plot. If you've read along, you'll notice some 'red herrings' dropped into the recaps--during their second night ,  I mention the character of Tony, but he never shows up again. His role in the module is to be something of a mentor figure, to ex...

I've been pretty quiet on my postings for the Shared Sci-Fi game that I spoke about a while ago. Which is a shame, as I was really excited about this concept, and a number of folks have done some really cool things with it. For me, though, it wasn't working. I think, for a couple of reasons. The first was the narrative approach I was taking. While certainly fun, and a break from how I normally do a Solo game, it was causing difficulties. It's hard to both WRITE well and GAME well, at the exact same time. As a result, I think it failed as both a story and a game. Secondly, the system. I was using the old Cyberpunk 2020 system, which I'm not terribly familiar with, so I had to teach myself what I was doing while playing, and it honestly isn't a game that works for me, as a Solo experience. Now, learning a game is one of the great reasons for doing a Solo game, but honestly I don't have a driving interest in learning CP--it's a cool game, and I'd love t...

The Kickstarter campaign for Rifts for Savage Worlds has launched.  Since Requiem has completely turned me off Vampire for a while, my thoughts turn to this other odd love of mine. Like many, certain parts of the game always bugged me. One of the big ones is the economy of the damn setting. For example, I just don't see how Triax can afford to manufacturer and sell a suit of power armor in North America, and get 100 million credits for it. NO ONE has 100 Million Credits. Even for the CS, that's a term used for accounting in national budgets, not something available in hard currency. In fact, I don't buy much of the "mass manufacturing for credit" economy. Instead, land and people are the key to wealth, and most equipment is custom made by skilled artisans. Yes, even Power Armor. Now, from a macro-economic view, this is incredibly wasteful in time, labor, and material; but the economy of Rifts Earth doesn't really work well on the macro scale. So, ...

So, I picked up a copy of Requiem 2nd Edition, hoping to give it a second chance. A lot of people speak very highly of the game, and a Vampire game with a murkier back story, no metaplot, and a stronger Humanity focus sounded perfect. Unfortunately, I don't think this game is for me. I still can't get into it. I've read maybe half of the core book, and I can't bring my self to finish it, not even to do a few "Let's Compare" posts, let along to run it.  This pains me, because it's not the ideas of the game itself that are turning me off. I mean, there are some really awesome ideas in there, that occasionally make the whole thing tolerable. It's the art, and the writing. Most of the art is just boring. There's no passion or anything interesting going on, and the bulk of it looks like clip art or something like that. There's no depth of field or tension in it. I don't think I can adequately express why the art is bad, since I do not ha...

I've managed to make it through my first Solo adventure, and I wanted to take some time to talk about what it's been like and what my thoughts are on it. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cverdier/5302914244 First of all, it's fun! It's a different kind of fun than one gets either playing or running a standard tabletop RPG, but this is unsurprising. It's also not the same kind of fun as one has developing a new game--creating a setting, NPC's, plots, mysteries, etc. It's not like a "choose your own adventure" or writing "fanfic." It's still a game, and that means it's still unpredictable and that you can still fail. Believe me, if I was writing fanfic, Andrei would not have been slapped around by every lick with Dominate.... Secondly, is see now why some people were warning me about being overly "random." You really do need to treat a Solo game as you would any game. You obviously don't need to develop plots, b...

One of the major announcements at this years Gencon was word on the upcoming 4th Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade . Already, various Facebook and forum posts are full of ideas by fans for the new edition. Ideas for revised mechanics, or changes to the setting. Different ways to handle Disciplines. How to improve clans and sects. How much of the "metaplot" to keep, and how much of it to change or alter. All in all, a whole slew of ideas and thoughts--some I feel area awesome.  Now, I've been a fan of Vampire  since the 1st Edition, and it remains one of my go to games for any type of gamer. Naturally, I have my own deeply held beliefs on what makes Vampire  awesome, and how it should be run. But, my dream is that Onyx Path Publishing does NOT listen to me. Do NOT make a game for me. Do not make it for the forum regulars. Do not make it for the Facebook and Google+ fans. Do not make it for the Kickstarter backers, and the V20 fanboys. All those people who have supported...

Since I haven't run Vampire in a bit, I wanted to spend some time thinking about various concepts and “tropes” (for lack of a better word) of the game, and what I like about it and how I want to approach things.  I had some idea to write these up and post them here on the blog, when I realized that I've already written them up about two years ago on a forum for rpg.net.  I'm not sure if I'm being lazy or indulgent by extensively quoting myself, but it’s quite possible that these are two great tastes that go great together. The initial question of the thread was “ What do vampires do all night? ” So, I've been thinking about this for a bit, and I wanted to give my "real" answer to the question. This will probably be a long and semi-rambling post; so to sum up my point, the answer to "what do vampires do all night" is simple--they hunt. Now, obviously there's more to it than that, but in my games a Vampires primary interest and em...