I had the chance to play Dungeon World, with my friend Remi GMing. DW, is an old school D&D-style game using modern game ideas. It’s based on Tony Dowler’s Apocalypse D&D, combining D&D and Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World.

I have just started Running a Apocalypse World Campaign. If anyone asks I could post a audio recording of our game. Dungeon World, gives me that old school vibe. Like I was back in high school, trying to level my fighter. However it has tools that have us an coherent story. DW, is also kid safe, compared to AW. 

Now, I am thinking I might have to see if my sister would like to play some Dungeon World, maybe get my 13 your old Daughter involved too.

It's been a bit sense I last blogged, life picked up speed. But I wanted to give a shout out to all the great podiobooks that have kept me entertained. I tend to prefer complete books to ones that are still being recorded. It's so hard to wait for the next d/l, when the story gets good, I gotta know what happens. It doesn't hurt that I have plenty of opportunities to enjoy them.

Currently I am joying 7th Son: Descent by JC Hutchins. It's a neat technothriller, has clones and a memory transfer device. So far it's good, I wouldn't have believed that anyone could make 7 clones sound both similar and distinct. It has some descriptions of sex and swearing, so I'll not be sharing with my 13 year old.

I just finished 65 Below by Basil Sands. Another thriller, this one set in Alaska, it's a race to stop the terrorists from unleashing a nightmarish biological weapon. An podiobook commenter, Megain Pawlak describes it as somewhere between, Scott Sigler and J.C. Hutchens. Death and destruction meets hard science and military Top Secret exploits. Content wise there is some gruesome stuff in there, it's mostly veiled, not directly described.

This book really made me think about my fiction and storytelling. Basil has injected a authentic romantic, in what could have been an simple adventure story. I like how it was messy, not perfect that the characters where not really in control of their feelings. This made me reflect on the kind of stories we tell in our Role Playing Games. It's rare that a romantic happens, I think mostly cause most of the time it's just us guys playing, and someone would have to play the girl. That could be risky, what would it say about them? Something to ponder, and push an NPC that can take on this kind of role.

Lastly me and my daughter have been enjoying Tumbler by Brand Gamblin. A story of a young lady that tries to escape her troubles by becoming an asteroid miner. She soon finds herself in indentured servitude. I'll not spoil more of the story, it's a neat coming of age and learning who you are story.

Well that's it for now. Yea, I've been laying off the horror. Scott Sigler has scared me. I have sampled more stories however it's time for me to get some house work done.

Thought I would post about last night's gaming. Due to my rotating work schedule I can't really game every week. So it's been three weeks, I am dieing to play a game, and life throws me a wrench, and as it ends up me and my 11year old daughter end up up town, so she's coming with me if I want to game..

Now it's not really a big deal, this is her 5th RPG system. But I would have rather had planed out a game that I knew she would enjoy. Has it happens nothing is planed. After a lot of conversations, and dinner, taking my readings of Impro, I make the strong choose that I want to play "Microscope". I pitch it to my little one, as a game were we can explore alternate Egyptian History. She's enthusiastically jumps on board. Soon I have two more players: George zoatebix and another kid I can never remember his name.

Our starting pitch is exploring Ancient Egypt in the Stargate universe. George suggests we don't limit ourselves to just Stargate, as Georgianna, my daughter only has passing knowledge of Stargate. Our high level concept is "Alien's in Human History", we bookend history with "Aliens seeding Earth" and "Independent Humanity".

We had a good time, Surprisingly Georgianna had fun.  I was worried she wouldn't get the game, because the story jumps around in time. She did have some trouble with being assertive, but she is only 11.  We only had time for two players to be Len. Myself and Georgianna. 

A while back the I had the pleasure of play testing Emily Care Boss's Sign in Stranger. It's a game of human first contact with aliens, and colonization of space. It uses a cut-up technique, to add controlled randomness to the game. What you do is write down 10 verbs, nouns and adverbs to inspire your narration of the alien world.

I love this technique, people naturally want to tie things together and so we do, we connect the dots as it were.
Our group had some problems, one of which was the idea that soon as we can reliably talk to the Aliens then they cease to be so alien.

So what brought me back to write up a post on Sign in Stranger, was this post on Rudy Rucker's blog. Rudy is a SciFi author of very strange books, they will stretch your brain. In this post he is talking about the next book he is working on. How to make these alien characters better, by making them talk. But how would these characters talk.

In this book one kind of Aliens, talks in strings of Nouns, another in strings of Verbs. Rudy tells us that:

Realized I hadn't done a update on what Podiobooks I have been consuming..

Over the summer my daughter and I listened to Collapse at Hidden Verse Three Three Two. I was surprised by how much I liked it. This was a great coming of age story, with exciting space opera. And although I have grown out of space opera, these days love nice an gritty SF. I still enjoyed myself, the voice acting was very good. Each character has their own personality. At times I feel like I was there too.. If you have early teens kids I think they would enjoy it, I know my daughter really enjoyed herself.

Every so often, I end up giving my wife or mother-in-law a ride.. So I try and be careful and share something really good with them. They both are classic SciFi fans, so when I find something that reminds me of twilight zone, or one of those short run SciFi shows we used to get in the 90s.. Anything that reminds me of those, I gotta share with them, this next Podiobook is one of those.

Phil Rossi's Eden, it looked kind of lame. What there is this Space Tree in orbit of Uranus? Sounds like a bad joke. But it's not what you expect. Both world and character exploration. I ended up scared for these people, what was going to happen to them? It will give you chills, and pull tears out of you, but you will love every moment. Wishing you too could see the beauty of Eden.

A quick explanation for my friends that don't follow my hobbies. Last night I played Microscope is a roleplaying game, that is a game where we has players act out the dialog that various characters say. What makes this game unique is that it is played over a larger scale of time, and that you don't just play one character. Comparing to media most RPG's are like action moves but with stronger character narrative flow. That is individual character's actions tend to be more importance in traditional RPGs then the greater story arc. Microscope is more like literary novels like the Foundation Series that span many years. And include many characters, were legacies of those characters hold much more importance.

This isn't a review of Microscope I will not get into all of the mechanics it's in play test. It's more of a play report and discussion of the fun we had. Even if you haven't done any role playing Microscope is a fun game. This is a game of world building and defining the importance of an event in a greater context.

You could use this game to play out an alternate History of Egypt where space aliens rule as Gods. And follow the actives of human rebels that push these false gods back through the Stargate. At great scene in that game maybe, "Who betrayed Ra the king of the Gods?"

This game isn't played out in chronological order. You place bits of History on your turn. these bits may be Periods very large chunks of time, Events  specific things that happen during Periods, Scenes are the smallest nuggets of history. They show us exactly what happened at a particular place and time, answering a specific Question we have about the history. Each of these bits of History follow some kind of theme.

Now on to our game of our game was a movie it may have been called "The Bell legacy" or "When the Stars are Right". Our game started with contact being made with being from the Cthulhu Mythos and ended with the stars are right. Both of which are not really good things.

My first bit of History was the event that Alexander Graham Bell was the one that contacted the Mythos beings while trying to speak to the dead. Some how in my mind I had the idea that Bell did experiments trying to talk to the dead. Latter Niels Bohr channeling Nyarlathotep publishes an abridged version of these notes. I meant to have more about Copenhagen interpretation, answering what do these geometries mean, but things got crazy.. As in we revised an earlier event, that showed us how Niels first came into contact with Nyarlathotep. He attended a blackmass lead by Aleister Crowley. Also in attendance was a young Adolf Hitler who was still a painter  and Winston Church Hill.

Soon after Hitler was baned as a character, no one really wanted him in the story. But first his psychic powered brain was extracted, and stopped bullets only to be then squished. I know that's a gamer war story. It doesn't make all that much sense. However getting back to the Game system Microscope seems to generate narratives which lean themselves to gamer war stories. I will forever remember Sam playing Adolf Hitler asking Winston Church Hill if he should grow a mustache, cause the ladies like them. Or when Aleister Crowley covered in the ashes of Winston Church Hill signed away the freedoms of humanity to unify the world.. Or when Washington DC was blown up, resulting in peace for the solar system.

We had five players at our game. Several of us had read the rules. Five players felt like a lot. I want to try this game with four and see what happens. Everyone was played the focus player that is lens once. With five players we couldn't always find five characters to play in each scene. So not everyone was all that active in every scene. Often three players would be the leading characters. In retrospect more of us should have taken the roles of classes of characters. Cultist minions.

We had plenty of Tone Debt, this may have been the case of us not knowing the rules. But we felt that Tone Debt was often stuck on Events we didn't feel needed exploring. Next time we play we will push Tone Debt up to the Period it takes place in. So that it can be used anytime in the Period.

Scenes could use some kind of ritual phrases like in Polaris, and The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries. Something to push resolution of questions, so I can say yes do more of that, or no I have a better solution. We loved how characters were baned and chosen. It often resulted in the player that make the scene having to play one of the required characters.

Legacies and the Baned and Included list reminded us of Covenant's Conventions and Motifs. I felt that Microscope could use some strengthening here. Like how Committee's uses it's map to push reincorporation.

Our game did the feature of being playing in Cthulhu Mythos, and was partly historical so we had a lot of note worthy people and their descendants in our game. I don't know how that affected our game or pushed it to new highs.

So while thinking how I would title this campaign I came up with the evocative title of "Prequel to Apocalypse".

My inspiration for so far is one part The HeavenField podibook, a touch of Final Fantasy Movie, and dose of Ghost/Echo. Less ShadrowRun with more psychics, dream qualities, ghosts, and Need to Discover. The premise so far is taken straight from HeavenField, "The world has changed forever; we have opened the door to something which we don’t understand, and that door cannot be closed." 

The longer exploration is that a team as opened a door to a other world. Beings from that world threaten to escape it and enter into ours.. Can the team close the door? What is this other world like? What temptations does the team face that makes them hesitate closing the door?

I am looking strongly at Ghost/Echo for running this game.. However there is a strong discovery aspect to it. There should a slow build up of exploration and world building. Some idea's could be stolen from Sign in Stranger. It handles building weird stuff at the table with it's mad-libs mechanics. SiS did tend have crazyness and unfocused direction I would like to avoid. Then there is the race to stop the evil. That may require your sacrifice. Or do you just save yourself.. I am open to how to run this game..

I figure I could post some games I want to play. I am going to point out the media that inspires me and the game system I think would give me the story experience I want.

For some time now a story of a lost space station being reclaimed has been burning in my mind. The horror of exploring the contradiction of an ancient but more advanced place. It being Haunted seems just nature. That is if we don't understand something it's simple to think of it as haunted. But what if that place was really haunted? Then what?

When I read Phil Rossi's Crescent the dark contended there called to me.. Visceral and moist with blood, I love this setting. and I can still hear that dark calling.. You should download the Podibook too and see if it calls to you.

What Game System can live up to the Title, the epic ideals? I think that Burning Empires can. Base on the Iron Empires graphic novel. Whick rock by the way. BE features tales of worlds that are trying to fight off the worm. An alien beings that only gain sentience when they take control of a human host. Classic SciFi Horror, That I think will fit well with the themes I wish to explore..

Last night at our Thursday gamenight we Savage Worlds in the TORG setting. I didn't know ether system or setting well. I had the impression that they are not from the Story Now tradition. So I only played because no one wanted to play another game. Savage Worlds seems clunky and limiting, everything comes down to tactical combat. I found this boring. When PC failed a roll it was a boring, fuck up, for such baddasses we wiffed a lot.. For once I felt like the Gamer Girlfriend that is only playing to make others happy.

I did through myself into the pregen-character who I did find interesting. I played an androgynous bloodthirty cybermage, who was a former slave.. I game him/her the name valkyrie, which seemed fun at the time, got the name from the biker names in teh Names Project book. So I gave people lots of pain and got a lot of role playing rewards. But I didn't feel we got anything done. We had two rather pointless battles that took too long, and ate up our game time. Maybe it was the down time between turns or that the only real option was to fight cause none of us were good at sneaking. I did find it kind of silly that my magic was so limited. That all of the magic was so limited. I had only three spells all of which were combat related.

Thursday felt like I had falling back into a time warp, back to 1994. Everything we did could have been done in an hour maybe two with any number of Storygame systems. TORG fells like Rifts but with more shit happening. It could have been that I do not know the back story..