I’ve been…

…so many people over the past few days again, it was delicious. It was that time again, where a plethora of nerds descended upon the non-existent town of Bielefeld and gathered to eat, drink, be merry — and play games!

The food was delicious, the drinks came in just the right amounts and potency, the merriment filled the days but I guess what you really want to hear about are the games. Let me indulge you. I’ve been…

…a progressive alien species, trying to gain control of the galaxy during its second dawn. Alas, I could not make use of my extraordinary powers of research, as every attempt to expand my realm was thwarted by the vicious robotic remnants of the Ancients fleets. During most of the game I just held on to my meager three sectors, eking out some technological progress. Only once I managed to assemble a fleet and watched it get annihilated by the Ancients in a short but brutal fight. (Eclipse, Second Dawn of the Galaxy)

…a successful Unicorn Breeder, filling my stable with the most wondrous of creatures, scheming and plotting to bring misery to my fellow Unicorn enthusiasts, trying to be the first to fill all slots in my stable. A hilarious game, full of puns, innuendo, and most of all, unicorns! (Unstable Unicorns)

…a sailor, a pirate, no, a cultist, trying to direct the course of our ship to the chosen location. Covert collaborations with fellow pirates or cultists, mutinies, bluffing, and the occasional surreptitious changes to the logbooks steered our proud ship. And never did it reach the safe harbor of Bluewater Bay, but instead got fed to the Kraken or entered the dreaded pirate island… (Feed the Kraken)

…a greedy innkeeper, luring adventurers into a near-certain deathtrap. My cunning plan was to feed them to the naked-bear-thing I had chained to the dungeon below my humble establishment. But the motley crew of ne’er-do-wells and murder hobos managed to not only dispatch my minions and beasts, nay, they made off with all of my ill-gotten-riches and escape through the undersea on a magical obsidian rowboat. (The Undertavern, run with Into the Odd rules)

…Loddar, the DIY-King of YouTube, hiking through the black forest as part of a streamed challenge, with four other more or less well-known internet celebrities. Loddar, a cabinetmaker in retirement, gained internet-fame when his grandson filmed his antics testing how well the new rip-stop trousers would protect him against a chainsaw. Clueless about technology he now got thrust into a gaggle of youngsters who film themselves doing weird and (to Loddar) incomprehensible things for the sake of something called „Likes“, which he didn’t quite got. But his grandson said this was good stuff, and the likes would translate into income somehow, and Kevin knew computers after all. What followed was deliciously silly, full of drama and eventually even action, with high speed car chases and bullets flying everywhere! (a custom adventure with a d100 FATE derivative)

…an english industrial baron of the 19th century, building factories and transport links all across the Black Country, vying for domination through two distinct eras of early industrialization, seeing train tracks started to displace the narrow boat channels. A brainy but accessible game with glorious artwork and theme. (Brass Birmingham)

…Peter Rath, the holy sinner and bearer of the tome of 99 demons. A moderately famous fiction author, secretly a vampire of the White Court, Peter spent the past few years very privately, minding family and his own affairs. But the recent devastation of Berlin and the retirement of his sister from her office as head of the paranormal investigation unit drew him out of hiding once more. He joined a small task force trying to figure out what eerie things were responsible for recent oddities around the local cemeteries. Weird Pterodactydemons were fought, ancient religions uncovered and a long-term plan on keeping these forces of evil at bay became implemented. After an inspired lecture, Peter found himself the head of a new holy catholic order, secretly blessing places to protect them, and doing who-knows what else! (Dresden Files RPG)

…a middle-aged summer camp guide in the Midwest. She desperately needed a job, and found a lot more than expected, when she walked into the lone guy who squatted in one of the camp huts, hastily shoving something into a freezer. A few hours of increasingly bloody and campy fun and drama, topped by two women chainsawing a Wendigo into sausages. (Fiasko)

All in all an excellent few days, a fun NYE party and a welcome reminder of good friendships.

2. Januar 2023 playing Keine Kommentare zu I’ve been…

Mail Order Apocalypse is live!

If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that I do a lot of crowdfunding as a backer. Kickstarter alone lists over 200 projects that I have backed in some way.

Well, now it is time for me to jump into the other end of the pool: I have just launched the Zine Quest 4 campaign for Mail Order Apocalypse! Follow this link to the campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jollyorc/zine-quest-mail-order-apocalypse/

What is it about?

Mail Order Apocalypse (or MOA for short) is a dark future roleplaying game, where capitalism eventually shut all humans out. Paradise is within humanity’s reach, but our ancestors made sure we cannot afford it.

This may look to be a game about survival, figuring out how to eke out an existence when the machines have claimed everything worth anything. But that isn’t entirely true. This is a game about daring heists and robberies!

See, the machines don’t hate us. They don’t actually want to kill anyone, but the laws humanity put into their programming don’t allow them to give us anything for free. And we don’t have currency to pay with. So survival takes the form of trying to make a living in the wastelands, trying to farm algae, or to recycle the scraps we find.

But the more efficient and much more fun way is to trick or rob the machines:

We hijack their communication network, set up a pretend address and then have a drone deliver your order while the fake credit score is still good. Or you hold up one of those post trains that link the factories, overcome the guard machines, and live richly!

Some have learned how to infiltrate the automated farms. One can live well there, provided the machines don’t recognise you as the pest you are.

Of course, there are also those who live on the work of others, who raid settlements for their own gain. Maybe you are one of them?

2. August 2022 playing Keine Kommentare zu Mail Order Apocalypse is live!

Hacking Runs for Fun and Profit

A key element of modern games is often the heist, caper, or in the case of cyberpunk-esque games, the „run“. The common part here is that the target is usually a complicated and large system, full of people, computers, security systems and other components.

In movies and books, we follow the crew through their preparations and then see them pull off the perfect caper, where each element more or less seamlessly enables the next part, until it all comes together in a showdown and ends with the heroes walking (or running?) off with their ill-gotten gains.

There are quite a lot of attempts to map this into game mechanics, and here is my own one:

It introduces two concepts:

  • the network map of the entity that is to be robbed
  • failure cascades

Lets start with the network map. It could look something like this:

The goal is to escape with the loot from the vault. Except that as long as there is someone or something to call reinforcements, things will go bad. And if the vault door isn’t opened, they can’t get to their loot in the first place.

Researching this network is the usual preparation phase for the players, where they can dig for information, ask around, bribe people, steal floorplans, and so on. It might even be that you, as the DM, don’t even have the network map prepared but you create it with your players as you play along.

In the end, the map shows the possible choke points that need to be taken out, as well as the objectives that need to be met. Either directly, or indirectly. 

And that is where the second core idea comes into play: Cascades. I’m stealing those from the boardgame hit Pandemic. Disease occurrences are marked by adding little cubes to a city. Whenever there are three or more cubes of the same type in one city, there is a virulent outbreak. That means that every neighbouring city also receives a cube. If that tips them over the 2‑cube-is-safe limit, there is an outbreak too.

Let’s apply the same idea here, but with a lower limit: If there are two incidents at one place, it triggers the cascade. So if Joe the Guard does not get his coffee from the Cantina AND the toilet is clogged, he’ll fail at his job (calling the reinforcments in case he sees anything). And that means that the „Reinforcements“ node gets its first little cube. 

A similar effect could be achieved by simply taking Joe out (kidnapping, poisoning or bribery for example), but that might not always be possible — and it won’t create a cube at Reinforcements.

So, the planning and execution phase means that the crew selects points in the network, take them out and hopefully create cascades that take out adjacent points for them.

This isn’t playtested, but I think it should be fun to run things this way!

14. Mai 2021 random 1 Kommentar zu Hacking Runs for Fun and Profit

Return to Hypogea

It has been a while. So long that I couldn’t even find my stack of characters and had to roll up a new one.

But yesterday, I returned to Hypogea, the karst under the valley of fire. Joining the Clockwise Observatory as Alpascal, a short, stocky first-year student of the School of Artificers with an everful crock of shit.

This was a very happy reunion, even though I didn’t know any of the other players yet. Still, Alpascal was quickly welcomed by his peers, and the backstory involving Alpascal, a frog, and the chimerists love spell ended up happily for me, as the chimerist now has to care for the five pollywog-creatures. (Who are adorable, but Alpascal isn’t ready to be a father yet, and Fred the frog needs the help,)

The group made its way to the sickle marsh, looking for the lone savant that imprisoned a few errant students into some gem. They swam, stomped, rafted and walked on the way, met water vipers, cephalopod patrols and other assorted creatures and during the whole time never stopped punning.

Really, the punning, it was bad. So bad. All the time. All the punning.

Can’t wait until next time!

5. März 2020 playing Keine Kommentare zu Return to Hypogea