I missed the Vampire phenomenon because I was out of the hobby when it was new and cool. So I'm curious: in terms of "illusionism" and GM as auteur and such, how much of that was really new to the hobby? How much of it was not already in, say, the James Bond 007 RPG, Dragonlance modules, the GM advice in Prince Valiant? Again, I was not around, so this is a genuine rather than a rhetorical question. Geezers welcome.

immlass said of upgrading Macbook memory that "If I can do it, you can do it." If anything, that understated the ease of the act: upgrading the memory was fast, easy and fun! The white unibody MBs are a cinch to open and the memory sockets are off by themselves unobstructed by anything else. It was no harder than swapping out a watch battery, maybe even easier considering that all the stuff you're dealing with is bigger.

Thanks to Bryant and montoya I DLed the Mac version of Adobe Reader. (Motto: We're gonna make you click through a LOT of screens to get to your download!) It reads my OD&D PDFs fine. Meanwhile, Boo Preview!

Preview is FAIL when it comes to reading my PDFs of 0D&D - an awful lot of dropped lines and larger text blocks. Does anyone recommend a more robust PDF solution for OS X?

Jim

___Should

___Should Not

dive into the recent Story Games threads on immersion.

On the OD&D boards, they think about inventing FATE. Possible problem: "But maybe the whole concept is too story-based and not old-school enough?"

I'm actually digging a bunch of OSR-influenced design work. The one-page manifesto stuff, Jason Vey's investigations into the forgotten byway of Chainmail-based combat, the energy and imagination put into house rule ideas. People like what they like, and it's not like the OSR is going to come to your house and take away your copy of Exalted or Shock:. That said, some of it gets churchy and/or musty. Some of the stuff on Grognardia I enjoy. A lot of it puts me in mind of Sting's character watching his old James Brown videos over and over, or sipping mint juleps before the burnt-out shell of Tara. Others lack that level of nostalgia, but I feel more awareness of the last thirty-odd years of design would save them from reinventing a bunch of wheels.

Holy crap! I didn't realize that the_tall_man was on rgfa during its heyday. The things you learn browsing old threads on immersion theory because of something ewilen wrote.

Since last I wrote, we had two more sessions of In a Wicked Age, probably our last.

Chapter 5 was our first Antonella-free chapter. I decided to give my beloved blood-sorceress a rest after she bit off more than she could chew in Chapter 4 and nearly choked on it. Chapter 5 had Ram-Rama, K's whoremonger - excuse me! love-temple high-priest at the top of the Owe List, and he chose the God Kings of War oracle, our first use of it. We had a battlefield with many dead on both sides, a bandit queen, an escort for a cask of honeyed wine to be presented as a gift, and another card I forget. I played the bandit queen, whom I promptly named Valeria ("looks like a Bollywood starlet, but ripped") and gave her the best interests of sacking the Temple of the Love God and bearing the child of a veteran soldier, played by Daniel, who has joined her bandit army in order to kill her. Hard feelings over some bandit-queen activity in the recent past. I am pretty sure there was a shapeshifter of some sort involved. Things went well for Valeria, she sacked the temple and there conceived a child by the veteran soldier in between his attempts to kill her. An earthquake was involved. Blood sorcery by an NPC? I don't quite remember! Ram-Rama got gelded and renounced his priesthood - I believe at least one of these represented his best interests. Because I held Antonella out of the chapter, it did not resolve her original goal of rescuing her brother from temple prostitution one way or the other, which was as I wished. (I've dropped hints in other chapters that the rescue did not go so well from Antonella's perspective.)

In Chapter 6, Ben's tempter-demon from Chapter 1, Kirigalzu, headed the owe list. Ben didn't really want to replay any characters, but he had to miss the Chapter 5 session so he didn't manage to get Kirigalzu safely crossed off. An official ruling was sought and delivered: it did not matter if Ben wanted to play Kirigalzu or not; Kirigalzu was at the top of the owe list, so Ben was obligated to play him.

Ben turned out to be okay with this. Through collaboration with N, GMing, we determined that Chapter 6 took place in the distant past of the novel, possibly even a prior age. We had a wielder of luck magics pursued by a fierce storm (D.), a half-beast in a magical grove where he entertained his lovers (K.), a cranky prophet preaching the scarification of the flesh and denial of earthly pleasures (me, in my first IAWA turn as a dude), a childless woman tending a flower-strewn altar (NPC), a lover of the half-beast (NPC), and Kirigalzu (B.) in a far more benign, less-cynical incarnation as a kind of local forest deity.

This chapter had some great stuff, including a lot of really fruitful freeplay. I particularly enjoyed Toth Seren's (my prophet) byplay with D's luck-magician. I gave my prophet the Particular Strength of Onyx Skin - so while he could preach self-scarification, he couldn't practice it. K's beast-guy was delightfully cranky and N. made the altar-tender appealingly practical for a nature-cult quasi-leader. Toth Seren kept insisting that the storm following his friend was apocalyptic in nature, and over the course of the session the GM seemed inclined to incorporate this assertion as true.

This was another chapter where improv principles were our friend. Once again we decided, at the start of the opening scene, that Luck-Mage-Whose-Name-I-Forgot and Toth Seren were old friends. Toth Seren is a hard guy to be friends with, so it gave D a chance for some fun, understated relating. And toward the climax genuine magic happened.

N had the altar-tender ask Toth Seren when his "gift/curse" of onyx skin came upon him. This was a question that deserved a decent answer, so I thought for a second and realized that it obviously had to be: puberty. Nick built on that with an IC theory about how Toth Seren was, in cruder terms than he used, one great big boner. This got Toth Seren uncomfortable and looking at the altar-tender in a new light, and considering that, gosh, tending an altar every day from the time you were eight-years-old sure did represent self-discipline and self-denial.

At this point, I was ready to have Toth Seren throw over his own best interests (converting everyone in the beast-god's love-grove to self-mortification and settle down with the altar-tender. To cap it, I did something that was probably extraneous and driven by a Forgeyish compulsion to use the conflict system at least nominally for anything important: I inveigled Ben into having Kirigalzu tempt Toth Seren into marrying the woman. I made sure to bring lower dice to the fight and lose. This struck me as dubious behavior at the time and now seems stupid to me. There's no reason not to have inter-character accord grow through consensus and freeplay in IAWA. Hell, by the system it's the only way inter-character accord can grow. That's even a powerful feature of the system IMHO.

Regardless, Toth Seren gave up the self-mortification advocacy and married the priestess - actually there was an orgy then - , fulfilling her best interest at the expense of his own. It brought home how cool it can be in IAWA not to get your best interest but to renounce it, in the right fictional context. There was a Bond-esque coda in which the beast-god made one last attack on Toth Seren, losing and getting driven off. While all this was going on, our Luck-Mage moved on down the road, figuring that even if doings at the altar stopped the storm - it did - there would be some other trouble coming along soon enough. And they all lived happily ever after, even the beast-god. It was almost like closing the show with a big musical number.

And it does seem to be the close of the show. One or two of the folks decided they don't like IAWA as a system. Part of the reason was, interestingly enough, related to Vincent's rightward-pointing arrow worries. Part of it was dissatisfaction with the lack of a more sweeping conflict-resolution system a la Dogs in the Vineyard. K. argued, frex, that the cool stuff at the end of Chapter 6 arose without "help from the system" since we freeplayed it.

I mostly disagree. I reject the idea that nothing important should come about through freeplay, and further disagree that IAWA wasn't providing "support" for what did happen. (The owe list, best interest and particular strength rules surely all count as "the system" and they powerfully condition the flow of play. So does explicitly placing final narrative authority for things outside the scope of the injury/exhaustion/negotiation purview of the face-stabbing rules.) We did occasionally fall into the trap of powering through dice rolls without a ton of reference to their fictional context, but we pulled ourselves out of it. My experience of IAWA as a rules set was altogether more positive. BUT, we're in the position of a couple of us liking the game better than a couple of others, so we're winding up. I hope Antonella pulls herself together . . .

If this works, then tonight I will write about our two final (*sniff!*) IAWA sessions. But I should try some blockquoting while I'm here because it was one feature that Semagic seemed to always get wrong. So:

UOJim

The mighty oak was once a nut like you. #acornfacts
less than 5 seconds ago from web

Let's see then.

So like, what's the best LJ client for this new Bookintosh machine? Ideally, "just works."

I have discovered that a) I can actually get reasonably far with my lapsed schoolboy French in understanding Epees et Sorcellerie; b) The combination of autoformat and "translate entire document" in Word 2007 gets reasonable results in most cases; c) still, there are the usual computer-translation boners, like the one that gives this post its title. It was aiming for "that which is appropriate to his/her campaign." But surely that which is appropriate has, all in all, its countryside indeed. Fightez-Sur!

Er, 190 words! That leaves me only 3144 off the two-day pace of 3,334. I'm still rereading the "first book," though, to get the continuity straight in my head before plunging full steam into the "sequel." Also, the NaNoWriMo Facebook app: I installed it, but it does not appear to, like, do anything.

I cannot tell you how compelling I find the "microclone" Searchers of the Unknown right now.

Except, call me crazy, I might want to make rolls on 2d6 Chainmail-style rather than the 1d20 "alternate combat system" way. And no, I wouldn't change the target numbers.

Via Grognardia.

Note: Searchers has inspired a bunch of other one-pagers, some meant to be used with Searchers, others not. A list of them is on RPG.Net, but it's linkless so you have to put the keywords into an internetworked searching engine to find them. I personally do not favor Spellcasters of the Unknown as a Searchers add-on. I like the pulpier, "gestalt-class"-like approach of Searchers to much to layer re-nerfed Magic Users back into the schema.

So, things I realize I don't know:

1. In what literary works or folks traditions do wizards sling massive fireballs around? IIRC, Merlin and Gandalf didn't do that shit. Who did? Note: AD (After Dragonlance) novels don't count!

2. What is the historical or literary/folkloric inspiration for "clerics?" Is it medieval fighting orders like the Hospitallers and Templars? Was there a religious fighting order that forbade its members from using blades? Note: Not a rhetorical question! In literature/folklore, is there a model other than Friar Tuck, whom I don't recall ever donning chainmail or swinging a mace?

So you all know that for the last year or two I've been into animal cognition and consciousness. AND I've been continually intrigued with the idea of a combo fantasy/swords&sorcery system/setting combination that would punch my various buttons. Alternatively, NaNoWriMo is coming, and at the last minute I might decide to write some straight SF/F as opposed to a "sequel" to 2007's First-Level Humans. So a couple nights ago, having been reminded that Gnolls exist in various versions of D&D, I began to conceive of a fantasy world packed with sapient species from the various social genera rather than goblinoids and stuff, with each "race" having an awful lot of its behavior and culture grounded in what we know of their real-world umwelt and mental/social makeup. Instead of goblins, rat people. Gnolls as your apex canidae. Far less social upright felines. Probably some kind of lizardmen, of course. Relations among the various species would range from cooperation to enmity. Locals would believe in champion gods resembling their own species. A few sages would suspect that some divine power had blown the spark of thought into each major species to test their worth. It might turn out that this was the far future of an Uplift project, or it might not.

So here I am, pretty jazzed about the idea, thinking about hacking some retroclone to fit, or finally buying Blue Rose, when it hits me with full horrific force: Isn't this Furries????

The oldest-school move of all is to decide OD&D isn't good enough for some reason.

The first-ever two-day DC Gameday (DC Gamedays now?) is in the books. It was bitchin'. Yesterday I played HEX in Session One, reprising my character from last Spring in a sequel adventure. This was something of a You Can't Go Home Again experience, but had its moments. (The other player-characters were great. The NPCs were only worth killing or ignoring.) I did get to distract a werewolf while my girlfriend killed it with a magic sword, and that's never a bad thing. Yesterday afternoon I watched animadversio run Lady Blackbird for six very jumpin' PCs. It was more fun than I might have hoped to have watching other people play: a blast. I might like LB's hack of Solar System better than the original.

Yesterday was also special because I finally got to meet chadu in person. He's every bit as nice as you'd expect from his online presence, and had a lot of great stories about game design and play. He came to the group dinner at Capitol City Brewing Company (great appetizers, so-so main courses) and made our end of the table that much brighter. I'm told he also ran a terrific space-opera-themed S7S hack for the organizers, who were otherwise light on gaming opportunities.

Then this morning I Read a session of A Penny for My Thoughts for animadversio and our friends Matt and Kathryn (sp?). Penny was everything I hoped and more: a couple of worries I had in advance, mostly about the endgame, didn't bear out. Play was inventive, emotionally engaged and engaging, and smooth in execution. (A couple of us tended to pack enough words and action into our suggestions as to make it almost impossible for the Traveler to comply with the repeat-verbatim rule.) I began the session liking the other players a lot and ended it liking them even better. Everybody was very pro-Penny, and in fact, "the A-Word" was uttered. Since there's no review yet on RPG.Net, I'm going to write one.

This afternoon I was in a six-party B/X D&D adventure. This was a version of the game I neither played nor ran back in the day, as I had already moved into other games by the time Mentzer/Moldvay came out. GM Marty's version included some, well, feats (not called that) that worked pretty smoothly. I played a swashbuckling neutral Fighter named Katarina the Red, who had thiefly skills and athleticism. She did, in the Boss Fight at the end, get to jump off a balcony 20 feet and plunge her rapier into a surprised cultist. Twice really. (Haste spell.) The other players were very good-natured and we ran the party as longstanding (7th-level) compadres. It was quite a lot of fun, really.

Now six months or so until the next Gameday, which is a drag. But a very enjoyable weekend of gaming!

In the Why was I not informed? category, we have all the gameblogging that rob_donoghue has been doing on a bloggy-blog-blog rather than here on LJ. Had it not been for ptevis, now doing his gameblogging on a bloggy-blog-blog rather than an LJ, I still wouldn't know.

Anyway, one of Rob's posts is on "Mechanizing Reincorporation" and it reminded me of a thought I had the other day: You can totally do this with In a Wicked Age. In fact, I well may at some point. The person at the top of the Owe List gets to pick both the Oracle (suit) and the first card for the next chapter. Nothing stops that player from picking a card that has previously appeared in the campaign. The card could represent pure reincorporation - same character or place, frex - or thematic reincorporation - e.g. every few chapters we pull the "battlefield with lots of dead on both sides" card, but it represents a different battlefield every time.

Among the options presented in the thread is not assigning NPCs any stats at all, ever. Which makes me wonder, what would a game be like if ONLY the NPCs had stats?

"Indie gaming" aspires to be Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "Trad gaming" aspires to be The White Album. I was going to call this post "Strictly for My Geezers," but my 13 and 9-year-old lurve the Beatles. Almost as much as they love Michael Jackson I think.

Do I need to tease out the comparison, or is it obvious enough as framed?