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Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

more Scion tidbits

I’m a bit proud of this idea from the game I’m running, so I wanted to share. It will make the most sense to those who already know the cosmological setup for White Wolf’s Scion system, but for everybody else, I can quote the nutshell description I gave when I posted about my concept for the game:

The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They’re truly impersonal, elemental powers: the “body” of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren’t precisely evil, but they’re not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn’t a good thing.

Got that? So, it mentions in the books that some of the Titans were never bound. Hundun because it’s the Greater Titan of Chaos and can’t be bound; Logos because the Greater Titan of the Word struck a deal with the gods. Etc.

I was trying to decide what to do with the Mississippi River, cosmologically speaking. I failed to turn up any useful info on how tribes along its length viewed the river — no deity names or anything — and I knew “Old Man River” was a relatively late concept, but at the same time it seemed necessary and appropriate to have some kind of unifying entity for use in the game.

What I settled on was this: that Iteru, the Great River, is a Greater Titan, and it, like Logos, struck a deal with the gods way back in Ye Old Mythic Times. Part of its body now serves as the Godrealm for the Pesedjet, the Egyptian gods. (In the game books, Iteru is the name of that realm, and it’s also the Egyptian name for the Nile.) Major rivers around the world are avatars of Iteru, and they individually formed contracts with the gods of early civilizations along their banks: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Ganges in India, the Yellow River in China, etc. Old Man River is just a recent (from the viewpoint of game-time) name for the Titan avatar that is the Mississippi River, which hasn’t had a contract with any society since the decline of the Mississippian culture exemplified by Cahokia. But since this game is in part about the attempted land- and people-grab of a whole bunch of pantheons, you can bet they’re all courting Old Man River’s favor . . . .

Anyway, this is what happens when I let Archaeologist Brain out to play with Folklorist Brain. I come up with ways to mythologize and then translate into RPG terms the frequent pattern of early civilizations forming on the banks of rivers.

Next task: figure out what I’m doing with 1876 New Orleans.

some Friday fun

I almost used a writing icon for this, then realized it really ought to be the Roman d20.

For your Friday delectation, issue #22 of the Intergalactic Medicine Show has gone live, containing my story “Love, Cayce.”

Dear Mom and Dad,

The good news is, nobody’s dead anymore.

Yeah, this would be one of the goofier stories I’ve ever written. Letters to home from what amounts to the kid of some D&D adventurers, giving her parents a series of heart attacks as they find out what their wayward offpsring has been up to.

I’ve got to say, props to Dean Spencer, who appears to have done the art: this story got slotted into the issue’s lineup on very short notice, which means he must have put together that painting on even shorter notice, and yet it matches the story quite precisely. Once you orient yourself — the dragon is up and the elf is down — that becomes the scene where Shariel is falling off a thousand-foot cliff, pursued by a dragon, and casting the spell I wasn’t allowed to call “Feather Fall” because it would have been a copyright violation. ๐Ÿ™‚ Nice work!

The rest of the TOC includes stories from Aliette de Bodard, Tony Pi, Brad Torgersen, George Lippert, and David Lubar, along with other goodies. Aliette’s story in particular got some gorgeous art. Check it out!

today’s dose of gaming geekery

Courtesy of lunch with my husband, I give you The Lion in Winter (preferentially the Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn version), with the characters re-cast as Changeling sidhe of various Houses:

  • Henry — Gwydion. The rage says it all.
  • Eleanor — Fiona, most likely; one of them has to be, to explain their screwed-up marriage.
  • Richard — also Fiona. Philip, plus “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”
  • Geoffrey — Ailil. Naturally. He’s a cold-blooded scheming bastard.
  • John — this one is hard. Tongue-in-cheek, he’s a Dougal; he made that little headsman toy, and clearly his physical defect is his brain. As kniedzw said, though, “I respect the Dougal too much for that.” Problem is, we respect all the Houses and kiths too much for that.
  • Alais — Liam, maybe. On account of being stepped on by everybody around her.
  • Philip — Eiluned. Mostly because I can’t tell when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth in the bedroom scene, and neither, I think, can Henry.

why, brain, why?

So I’m hauling laundry out of the dryer, and my brain randomly decides it wants to distract itself from the tedium by figuring out how to hack an RPG system to run a Wheel of Time game.

I have no intention of actually running a Wheel of Time game, mind you. But as I said to kniedzw, I think it’s the fanfic impulse gone sideways; there’s stuff I really like about the setting, but also stuff that really annoys me, and a game would give me a way to mentally inhabit my preferred version of that world — maybe even critiquing it in passing. I have no concept for such a game, and probably nobody to play in it anyway (since it would go best with people who know the series), but every so often my brain likes to play with mechanics, and today was one of those times.

Yeah, sure, there’s already a rulebook for it. It’s d20, people. Which may be the Official System for Epic Fantasy Gaming — but it’s abysmally unsuited to handle the magic paradigm presented in the novels. Anybody with an interest in system hacks or running their own Wheel of Time game is invited behind the cut to see how I would do it.

There's more than one solution, I'm sure. But I like mine.

why I love gaming

In the midst of summarizing tonight’s session to kurayami_hime, I typed the sentence “And then they went and burned down San Quentin Prison.”*

Gaming, my friends, lends itself to gonzo behavior I would never put into a novel. (Other writers might; I’m just not that sort.) Torching San Quentin ain’t no jet-ski down an elevator shaft, but it amused me anyway. Random destruction of public property for the win! Guess that historical preservation thing won’t be happening after all . . . .

*Before one of the players corrects me: the xiuhcoatl was the one that actually burned down the prison. But it was the PCs’ fault that happened, so.

Once upon a time in the West . . . .

I mentioned early this year that I was running a Scion game set on the American frontier. Well, it recently occurred to me that the players have gotten far enough into the story, and uncovered enough of the metaplot, that I can now divulge publicly what the game’s about.

To follow this, you need to know three things:

1) Scion is a game about playing the half-mortal children of gods in the modern world, starting out as “heroes” and ascending in power and fame to become demigods and (if you survive) eventually gods in their own right.

2) The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They’re truly impersonal, elemental powers: the “body” of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren’t precisely evil, but they’re not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn’t a good thing.

3) One of the Scion books included material for how you could do a WWII-era game. In this, they proposed that Columbia (of the U.S.), Britannia (of the U.K.), and Marianne (of France) were all sisters, daughters of Athena sent out as an experiment in governance. It also proposed a Yankee pantheon, made up largely of tall-tale figures (Paul Bunyan, John Henry, etc), headed by Columbia and Uncle Sam.

So here’s what I did with those three things . . . .

U.S. history, as seen through a mythological lens.

Mechanical difficulties

I haven’t run a lot of games. (In fact, I’ve run precisely two: Memento and the ongoing Once Upon a Time in the West, plus one almost completely rules-free LARP session.) In the case of Memento, going into that game, I had a large amount of familiarity with the LARP mechanics for Changeling (i.e. what sorts of things their powers did, though there were occasional points of massive discrepancy between the two sets of rules), and a similarly large amount of familiarity with basic World of Darkness tabletop mechanics (i.e. how combat and such worked, though certain Changeling-specific rules were new to me).

That isn’t the case with OTW, and man, is this an eye-opening experience.

With all due respect to certain readers of this journal who were involved in the design of Scion, there are some honking big holes in the mechanics, which I mostly find when we fall into them headfirst. For example, there’s a first-level Justice Boon which allows you to accuse somebody of a specific crime and know if they’re guilty or not. The rules specifically tell you that the roll isn’t contested by the suspect’s player. So, in theory, a brand-new Scion of Tyr could walk up to Loki and say, “Loki! You arranged for Baldur to be murdered!” And know immediately that Loki was guilty. Erm, no: I respectfully submit that a trickster god should not be so easily caught, unless he wants to be. Also, there are a truckload of Manipulation knacks that have no mechanic for resistance; you could just say to Loki, “Tell the truth!” and he would have to obey, at least briefly. This seems unbalanced to me.

But the interesting thing to me — and the point where I diverge from some of the attitudes I saw expressed on the Forge, back when I was reading their forums — is that I don’t think house-ruling is necessarily a sign of failure on the part of the game designer. I do think the examples I’ve just given are things that would have been better fixed before I got my hands on the book, but that isn’t true of everything. For example, I prefer to have Legend increases (which are kind of like level increases) happen at narratively appropriate points, rather than whenever a given player saves up enough XP to buy the next dot. Ergo, our house-rule is that I announce when the PCs all go up in Legend, and in return they don’t have to pay for it. That’s a personal choice, not necessarily a flaw in the original design.

Then there’s the stuff that isn’t broken, I just have to learn how to use it. Boy howdy, does it make a difference how familiar you are with a system before you start running it: things like “what difficulty should this roll be?” and “will this opponent be somebody the PCs can take down?” and so on are tricky enough when you’re trying to remember which of the eighteen different White Wolf dodge mechanics this system uses, and a good deal harder when you start throwing in system-specific powers that can really change the odds. Scion has a particularly brutal setup on that front, I think, because of the way epic attributes scale. I think the scaling is appropriate — we’re talking about characters on their way to becoming gods, after all — but it makes me remember that the one thing I like out of D&D mechanics is the nicely mathematical formulae for calculating challenge ratings.

And yet, I wouldn’t want to run D&D, because I find its rules too confining for the kind of game I want to run. (Or for that matter, play in: most of my D&D experience was in a game that was really just a Forgotten Realms game, a world for which D&D happened to be the system. We regularly threw the rules out the window, and got by on group consensus.) It all just hammers home to me that whatever some die-hard fans preach, there is no such thing as a perfect system: there are systems better or worse suited to what you want to do; there are systems you know well or poorly and navigate accordingly; there are systems with more or fewer obvious mechanical holes. Only that third aspect rests in the hands of the game designer.

And that’s why we don’t live in a world where every game runs on GURPS or d20 mods. But I admit, there are times when I think about how much easier my gaming life would be if I only had to know one system. ๐Ÿ™‚

the Wikipedia Limit

So I’m running this game, and it’s set in the 1875 frontier, which is not an area or time period I know very much about.

I have this knee-jerk reflex to research the hell out of it. Gee, I wonder where that came from? I’m having to actively remind myself this is a game, not a novel somebody’s paying me for, and so while research is okay, obsessive amounts of it are not. Thus I have instituted the Wikipedia Limit: I am allowed to read as many Wikipedia articles as I like in the course of doing game prep, but if figuring something out would require more in-depth reading, then I say “screw it” and just make something up.

There are exceptions to this rule. The major one is for Native American matters — religion especially — because Wikipedia’s coverage of those isn’t good. I’m also allowed to google phrases like “famous [fill in type] people” to get a list of names I will then look up on Wikipedia. But if I discover, as happened just a few minutes ago, that a person I want to include in the next session was arrested in 1875, but Wikipedia doesn’t say when in 1875, then I am allowed to decree it happened after this session’s events were over. Which I would never permit myself to do for the Onyx Court.

Thank god for Wikipedia, because it’s actually a really great resource for this kind of thing, offering me (in most cases) plenty of information for my purposes. But it’s funny, how hard it is to hold myself to that limit.

for the gamers reading this

If you’re a fan of White Wolf’s Scion game, I just discovered they’ve put out a new supplement, covering the Yazata, the Persian gods. So far it’s only a .pdf, though it looks like there are plans to do a print edition early next year.

What interests me about this is that, according to the place where I first saw it mentioned, the supplement is based on fan-created material. Scion‘s original books covered a wide range of polytheistic religions (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Norse, Aztec/Mayan, Japanese, Voudoun, Celtic, Chinese, and Hindu), but there are still parts of the world they missed, and so there seems to be a small but energetic base of people designing additions to the system. (I’m using a fan-created supplement as the basis for my own handling of native North American religions; with my game set in the 19th-century frontier, I needed something to address that question.)

A quick glance at the original Yazata writeup, that I downloaded when I first began looking at fan supplements, shows there’s been a non-trivial amount of revision. For example, the pantheon-specific purview — which is probably the biggest hurdle for pantheon design — appears to have been completely replaced. Also, the new purview of Time has been renamed as Stars and changed on various points, though it still mostly has to do with the manipulation of time. So this tells me that White Wolf didn’t just grab the old pdf, typeset it to look like the rest of the books, and fling it out there; somebody, somewhere along the line, sat down and reworked things. I don’t know if that was the original designer, someone at White Wolf, or what, but they put some effort into it.

Which really pleases me. This is potentially the ideal way to handle Scion expansions, at least of the “pantheon module” sort: it’s a small enough addition that it doesn’t really justify putting out a big expensive hardcover book, but vital enough that it’s worth picking the good ones out of the mass of stuff on the internet and distributing them in an organized fashion.

Of course, one big concern is accuracy. I’ve been very pleased by the quality of the White Wolf-produced material; I’m enough of a mythology geek that I would have been put off by shoddy research, but everywhere I know the material, their work looks solid. (And this goes beyond the familiar grounds of Greek and Norse mythology. When the first book came out, my litmus test was to look at the Mesoamerican gods. They listed three alternate names for Quetzalcoatl, two of which I recognized, the third being something I’d never seen in my life. Which told me they’d done more research than I had, which was basically my minimum requirement for the game.) Is the fan-created Persian material accurate? I have no idea. I know that there are (at least) two Native American supplements out there, one of which calls the pantheon the “Anasazi” and boils the entire thing down to archetypes like “the Trickster” or “Mother Earth;” that is NOT the one I’m using. If you open the door to fan-created material, you may end up trusting that whoever wrote that supplement knows what they’re talking about, and you may be wrong. So I hope there’s still a degree of quality control happening on the White Wolf end, before they put their stamp of approval on something. The changes to the Yazata writeup make me hope that it’s so, even though I can’t judge them for myself.

I’m also a bit curious as to how White Wolf is handling rights and compensation, but that’s probably private information I’m not likely to get. If they’re paying a fair price and not exploiting their fans, though, this is potentially a very cool way to approach the question of expansion.

game ideas I don’t have time to run

Changelings (in the Changeling: The Dreaming sense) strike back against the Banality of the modern world by adapting to a mythology modern Americans are prepared to believe in:

They frame themselves as superheroes.

Wind Runner to fly, Flicker Flash to teleport, Quicksilver for super-speed . . . Skycraft to throw lightning, Pyretics to throw fire . . . the troll birthright for super-strength . . . you can’t duplicate every power ever given to superheroes in the comics, but you don’t have to. You just have to get far enough, and then let the bright spandex costumes do the rest. Clark Kent turning into Superman is just a question of calling upon the Wyrd.

(Nockers as gadgeteer heroes. Holy crap, does that make Batman a nocker?)

I so don’t have time to run this, but. The idea amuses me.

Updated with ideas, from kniedzw and me wandering around the farmer’s market:
Batman’s a Dougal sidhe, not a nocker, provided you can find a good physical flaw. Iron Man is ABSOLUTELY a Dougal. Superman’s a troll; he even wears blue! Spiderman, maybe a spider pooka. Catwoman, cat pooka definitely. Cyclops as a Balor who’s trying to be good? <g> And the Incredible Hulk fighting against his ogre nature’s worst instincts. Aquaman as merfolk. Swamp Thing as a ghille dhu. Gambit as an eshu with Legerdemain. Mr. Fantastic maybe has Metamorphosis (Go Ask Alice, applied selectively); Human Torch has Pyretics. Storm has Skycraft, obviously. Can’t really do Rogue, or Professor X’s telepathy. I could see Wonder Woman as a Gwydion, maybe. I’d probably make Wolverine’s claws a Treasure, implanted in him by a crazy nocker.

Admittedly, there *is* a downside.

Not counting a one-shot LARP, I’ve run two games in my life: Memento and the Scion game currently in progress.

The year I ran Memento was the year I did not write a novel.

If there’s a causal relation there, it goes in the direction of “no novel, ergo free time for a game.” I was in negotiations with my editor for what I would write next, and reluctant to commit to a spec project just to fill time, when odds were good that I’d have to drop it halfway through in order to do something contracted instead. The causality was not that running a game ate the energy which would have otherwise gone into a novel.

(And the negotiations ended up settling on Midnight Never Come anyway, which grew directly out of Memento. So.)

But it is true that I did not write a novel while running that game. This year is the first time I’ve tried to do both at once, and the result is . . . interesting.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to find a way to build some downtime into my noveling process. The usual way of things is that I work virtually every day for three or four months straight, and at the end of it I have a book. But that’s exhausting, and after two months or so I start getting really bitter about not having weekends or days off.

One idea I’ve toyed with is giving myself a break on Thursdays. That’s the day I run the game, and it turns out to be singularly difficult to get anything done then — especially since I have physical therapy appointments Thursday afternoons, too. So I spend part of my afternoon at PT, and the rest of it prepping for game; since I am not a morning writer, that leaves me with only the time after the session ends to do any work. Which requires a rather massive change of gears in my head: game and book may be only about nine years apart temporally speaking — 1875 and 1884, respectively — but one’s in the Western frontier and the other’s in London, and their vibes are VERY different. Last week I managed 733 words after game because I knew where the scene was going, but last night I did jack, because the scene needed chewing and my brain already had its mouth full.

I’ve built in enough margin of safety that I could afford to take Thursdays off and still finish the book on time. But it does eat a large portion of that margin of safety: if the book runs long, or I miss days for reasons of backtracking or being sick or whatever, I’ll still end up with some crunch time — though hopefully not as bad as it was for Ashes and Star. On the other hand, once PT is done, odds go up substantially that I’ll be able to do at least some writing during the day, so I can then give my brain over to Scion with a clear conscience. So I think what I’ll do is this.

Until PT is done, I have permission not to write on Thursdays. I should, however, try to make up that lost ground in subsequent days, if I can do so without too much trouble. After PT is done, I’ll try to write something every Thursday before game, even if it’s not the full quota; if I manage that, I’m not required to play catch-up afterward. Put that together with the more complicated background math (involving certain things that add to the word total of the book, but don’t get counted toward quota, etc), and this should work out.

But yeah. Unsurprisingly, running a game eats many of the same processing cycles in my brain that book-writing does. (Moreso than if I’m just playing in a game, by quite a bit.) I do believe I can do both — I will certainly try — but this is going to require some awareness and planning on my part.

video games as art

Link from jaylake: Roger Ebert on why video games can never be art.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Ebert, but in this instance I think he fails signally to construct a rigorous argument for his point, even as he’s taking apart Santiago for the same failure.

I could go through his article responding line by line, but that would produce an incredibly long and rambling post, so I’ll try to just hit the central points. First off, he dings Santiago for “lacking a convincing definition of art.” Given that no one has yet managed to come up with a truly convincing definition, that’s a bit unfair. And indeed, he immediately follows that criticism by asking, “But is Plato’s any better?” Okay, so he recognizes the contentious nature of definitions in the first place — but then the rest of the paragraph is spent on his own definition, which at the end, boils down to taste. Art is the amazing stuff. Everything else is . . . something else.

He clearly means “art” as a category of quality, rather than anything structurally defined. Which is an approach I fundamentally disagree with. To pick the simplest way of pointing out the flaw of that argument: Ebert says video games aren’t art (and won’t be) because none of the examples he’s seen impress him. But I guarantee you there are movies that do impress him which would bore me stiff, while there are video games I consider artful. The message I take away from his argument is that my opinion doesn’t matter; only his does, and people who agree with him. And that’s why quality as the delimiter of “what’s art?” is a bad way to go.

More ways in which he’s wrong . . . .

incentives in schooling (and games)

Time has a fascinating article up about the use of monetary incentives in schooling.

The first thing that struck me was the title: “Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?” I was glad to see my immediate response echoed during the article. As Fryer points out, we do this all the time as adults; we give bonuses and raises and other forms of monetary reward to employees who do their jobs well. So why is it “bribery” when we offer kids the same kind of incentive we give ourselves? Granted, there are differences between work and school; your son’s math test isn’t used for any purpose other than judging how well he understands math. It doesn’t feed (directly) into a larger economy of labor. And there is definitely merit in learning for the love of learning — as the article duly describes. But the difference is maybe not as absolute as people assume.

What really gets fascinating is the finer-grained material, the evidence for what works and what doesn’t. Rewarding kids for good test grades? Not helpful. Not because they don’t care enough to try and earn the reward; they do. But they don’t know how. Test scores, to the type of kids this study worked with, are not sufficiently under their control. They don’t see how to get from where they are to where they want to be, because the educational system has already failed them on that front. It appears to be more useful to target the things the kid knows are under her control, like attendance, good behavior, and the successful exercise of skills she already possesses. That lays the groundwork for the belief that other things — like test scores — can also be controlled. Education is a game she can win.

I use that phrasing because this morning’s blog-crawl produced a semi-terrifying juxtaposition between that article and a piece on Cracked.com, about 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. It lays out how MMOs (which operate on a subscription model) use psychological tricks to make you keep playing, even when it isn’t fun. Which is all about incentives and reward.

Maybe if we ran our schools more like MMOs . . . ?

Not sure how long I can keep this up . . . .

. . . but it’s good while it lasts. I’ve spent a couple of weeks now bouncing between more narrative projects than I would have thought possible: the Victorian book, a Sekrit Projekt I can’t talk about, “Mad Maudlin” (not done; so close), the revision of “Remembering Light,” and my Scion game. It’s been a pleasant surprise, how much I’ve been able to gear-shift from one to another, but I feel like I’m nearing my limit: the brain can only be flexible for so long. Fortunately, the Sekrit Projekt thing pretty much just needs one more push from me, so if I can knock that and “Remembering Light” off the list I might have enough brainpower for “Mad Maudlin,” and then I’ll be down to two, the Victorian book and the Scion game.

Which is good, because both need a little more attention than I’ve been able to give them. I do want to get moving on another short story once “Mad Maudlin” is done, but I think it’s going to be a new draft of “On the Feast of the Firewife,” which will take less brainpower than a full-blown new story. I’ve figure out what I want to do with it; now it just wants doing.

changing modes . . . now.

I wish I had a switch I could flip in my brain, that would let me transition cleanly and quickly from thinking about one story to thinking about another.

Because I was working happily on game prep for tonight when something came along and knocked my brain onto another track entirely, and now I can’t get it back. It’s hard enough, gear-switching from the nineteenth century American West to nineteenth-century London; now I’ve got Option C distracting me, too, and it’s completely unrelated to everything else.

It’s potentially a good distraction, mind you. But still very inconvenient. If only I could turn it on and off at will.

narrative space

Using my gaming icon for this post, for reasons that will shortly become obvious, but this is as much about writing as RPGs.

Tonight — presuming none of my players manage to contract ebola or something in the next eight hours — I’ll start running Once Upon a Time in the West, my oh-so-cleverly titled frontier Scion game. This is the second tabletop game I’ve run, with Memento being the first. (No, I don’t expect this one to turn into a novel, much less a series. Then again, I didn’t expect it with Memento, either. But this one will be more heavily based on game materials, so I’d say it’s unlikely.) As a result, I’ve been thinking about games and how I plot them.

I’ll take pity on your flists, since I was wordier than I expected.

like riding a bike

It hurt my soul a little bit to play a changeling in a Vampire game — but man, it was fun getting to LARP again last night.

The problem is that all the nearby games I know about — where “nearby” is generously described as “within a half-hour drive” — are One World By Night Vampire games, and it really isn’t my genre. Their politics make me want to spork my eyes out, and the alternative to politics is generally Superheroes With Fangs, as they send out boot parties to take down whatever ridiculously overpowered beastie is causing trouble now. Despite that, I’d still probably play in the San Francisco game, except they play outside and it being San Francisco, I froze my toes off the one time I went.

I froze last night, too, but apparently I’ll do that for Changeling, when I won’t do it for Vampire. (The truth of the matter is that I was told the game had a partially-indoor location; what nobody told me was that it would turn out to be 43 degrees that night and the heat had, as near as I can tell, been turned off.) kniedzw having recently become the Changeling Coord for OWbN, he agreed to go up to Santa Rosa to help them finish off a faerie plot that’s been going on there. And when he asked me if I’d be interested in joining him . . . hell yeah! I miss LARPing. amysun and zunger‘s murder mysteries have been my only other fix since I moved out here, aside from my one attempt at the SF OWbN game; that’s three games in nearly a year and a half. I like tabletop gaming, too, but LARPs have a theatrical element that I really enjoy: costumes and body language and physical interaction, the spatial arrangement of a scene.

So I got to cameo as a Liam baroness, negotiating with a group of vampires whose previous leader was stupid enough to let himself be manipulated by a Balor Shadow Court operative into trying to assassinate me. It’s a pretty well-constructed plot, if by “well-constructed” I mean certain characters will be screwed if they make the wrong choice, and others will be screwed no matter what happens. <g> (Those in the latter category brought it upon themselves; the stupidity of the previous leader goes well beyond the nutshell description given above. People: DON’T SWEAR OATHS WITH FAERIES.) Negotiations did not go well, but they aren’t over yet; they have a chance to redeem themselves, and I may have a chance to play the baroness again.

Need moar LARPing. I have a closetful of costumes going to waste. <sigh>

Awesomeness in the Old West

If nineteenth-century America is something you know something about, this post is aimed at you.

For the second time in my life, I’m gearing up to run a game. The first one was Changeling (and resulted in the Onyx Court series); this one is Scion (and god help me if it tries to turn into a novel). For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Scion is a role-playing game where the characters are the half-mortal children of gods. Think Hercules, or Cú Chulainn, or the Pandavas, running around in the modern world. Except that my game will be set, not in the modern world, but in the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Larger-than-life personalities doing over-the-top deeds? Nah, there was nobody like that in the Old West. ๐Ÿ™‚

I’ve already got a nascent list of people I can reinterpret as half-divine, but I’d like more. This is where you, O internets, come in: who really seems like they might have been the child of a god? Who excelled in their chosen field? Whose deeds acquired legendary status?

The game will likely take place in the mid-1870s, so while people who predate that point are okay (they might fit into the backstory — or not be so dead after all), anybody born later is out. Mostly I’m looking at the frontier, but will also entertain suggestions from back east; the game may wander there at some point. I am especially interested in people from the groups more often overlooked by history: blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, etc. One of the things I want to look at in this game is the way in which a wide variety of cultures collided in the space of the frontier. (Adding a mythological layer should make that extra interesting.)

Bonus points if you can suggest a possible divine parent along with the Scion. Whose kid is Doc Holliday? How about Marie Laveau? Pretty much any god is up for grabs; the books provide rules for handling nine different pantheons, and I’ve found decent-looking player-created material for three more, so I can field most things.

Suggest away. The more names, the merrier.

Only in a game . . . that’s crazier than mine

Okay, I’ve been in games where we blow up elevator shafts with a jet-skis, and I’ve been in games where we steal reincarnated lama/camels from Tibetan peasants, and I’ve been in games where meddling dwarves send their friends off with picnic baskets full of spells designed to make them stop blushing at each other and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT ALREADY . . .

. . . but I’ve never been in a game where a character glued an NPC to his back.

Nor, now that I think of it, have we ever driven the GM to drink. Must try harder!