Genital Warts

Lately I have been running a Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies (S7S) game with my group. A few weeks back some of my players found themselves with some extra time and asked me to run a bonus session. I have a few one shot prepared for just such occasions, but they were pretty specific in wanting to play an extra session of S7S. To complicate things, not all of the players could make it, and one of the players that showed wasn't from my regular group.

Obviously I cannot run an adventure from the main campaign, as it would be completely unfair to the players that could not make it out for the bonus session: "Wait, you ran a session without me and you managed to sink our ship!?"

During the regular sessions, the PCs are captain and crew of the privateer vessel The Blacklass. The session prior, the crew had made a stop at cloud-island of Crail for a few supplies and alchemical ingredients. I thought the obvious thing to do was to let the players play the until-now unmentioned members of the crew on their shore leave at Crail.

By this time, the players were familiar enough with the system that tossing together some new characters took less than ten minutes and they were ready to go. I however was not. I hadn't found time to prepare for this last minute session, and had zero plot beyond having the B-Team on shore leave. So I needed something quick that would spur the players to action, something that the players could shake their fist at me for.

So the session is starting and the only thing that comes out of my mouth is: "So you have all contracted genital warts." followed by blinks and stares and nervous laughter. And then the adventure began. The cloud-island of Crail is known as the crossroad of the seven skies. If there was anywhere to find a cure for genital warts, Crail is the place to do it.

Quickly the players had split up to track down the ingredients for the cure. At this point, the game was going in the right direction, but I wanted something more from this session. I wanted things to be worse on the characters. I quickly came up with a mechanic to allow the players to bestow misfortune on the other players.

A PC was trying to flirt information out of a sailor when one of the other players throws in: "Its a well known fact that genital warts have a very distinctive smell. You reek of genital warts." And from here the game descended into brilliant madness.

For the players that made it out that night, this session is still the most talked about out of the entire campaign. All it took was genital warts and a little bit of friendly antagonism.

Throw Everything At the Wall

I contributed this post to the Carnival found here.

Not too long ago I wrapped up a Spirit of the Century (SotC) game. It was a fun game with a fantastic group. Before we started the game, I sent out a list of game pitches and asked my players to vote on them. As Murphy demands the players choose the only game I did not have a plot for. I could not seem to get my creativity going and come up with an original plot. After staring at a sheet of paper with nothing more than the heading "A Totally Awesome SotC Plot" for some time, I finally gave up and decided to run an adventure found in the SotC book.

The story was a simple one, there is a science convention and the PCs are all invited. Then there is a murder or two and the PCs run around and solve it.

So the night of the game arrives, and I find myself sitting in the game room waiting for players to show up, and it hits me: Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. The players are at a science convention, it should be a mad science convention. Every doomsday device, robot, portal device and hyper-intelligent ape should be represented at the conference.

I had no plot ideas for any of these at the time. But the plot of the entire campaign evolved naturally and effortlessly from the half hour of twiddling my thumbs before the game. It just so happened that by the end of the campaign I had worked in every invention at the conference.

Mistakes and Infinite Hallways

A small group of people with boring monotonous live taking the subway late one night find themselves let off the train as it goes out of service.

As the train pulls away they realise that they are at a station that they have never heard of before. When another train does not come, they explore the station looking for an exit only to find that the station is barred up and they are locked in.

As things continue there seems to be no way out of the station, and some people claim to have been here for years. Each time they turn there back someone disappears or new arrives, or their are signs of much time passing.

Each attempt to escape the station is thwarted by an infinite hallway or a looked door.

Finally the people at the station either become part of the station, a permanent fixture, or they think of the monotony of their lives and how they would change it.

Little clues are given throughout that they have been leaving the station, only to return the next night without any memory of having been gone.

When they decide to change their monotonous life, an exit can be found. They leave the station and they are presented with their lives. If they follow through with the desire for change, they are free. If they do not change their lives, they will wake up back in the station, their escape only a dream.

That is the game that I wanted to run this last week. I wanted a game about the monotony of life and the daily commute becoming purgatory. It was an excellent idea that a friend of mine back from my home town suggested I try.

Sadly that is not the game I ended up running. I will start off by pointing you to an article over at Gnome Stew.

My first and most major mistake was in giving out characters. I did not emphasise enough the monotony of their lives. As the game progressed, two of the three characters turned out to have been happy all along. It slipped by me that they were happy at first. But as the players filled out the characters, there was really on reason to be stuck in at the station.

So the game, at least for two of the players, was simply a case of being stuck somewhere in time.

The second main mistake was with what I like to call "infinite hallways". Its a reference to a game I played in a year back were we were stuck in some compound for some ridiculous number of sessions. Every idea we had for escape was met with an infinite hallway or some other arbitrary and insurpassible obstacle.

The infinite hallway has always been something that I have tried to avoid in my games. But it seemed needed in this case. The nature of the story was vary Dues Ex Machina, and you could not have people just strolling out of purgatory.

However, since two of the players were playing almost an entirely different game, it was just an annoying and brutal case of infinite hallway. I think I need to apologize to these players for this.

One of the tools I like to use in my games is The Stool. A little to the side of the circle of gamers I place a large wooden stool and occasionally I send people to it. Then we play it a little "reality tv" style. When a player is on the Stool they have to give the internal monologue of their character, in character. Just like the confession booths in various reality TV shows.

In general, this helps the player fill out their character and lets everyone get a sense for that character. It also seems that roleplaying spills over from the Stool and can facilitate a much more lively session.

My third mistake for this game was that I did not give the players enough back story for their characters to use in the Stool. Instead the Stool became awkward and no-one seemed interested in it by the end of the session.

I had planned for the Stool to let me know when a character had reached some sort of breaking point to move the story forward. But it was not so helpful in this session.

But in the end there was one player who had a terrifically monotonous character. He went through various stages of coping with the situation including contemplating suicide. He even escaped from the station once only to carry on with the monotony and wake back up in the station. His character found a new resolve and up making it out of the station permanently.

Looking back on the session, I find it difficult to decide if the success with the one player outweighed the disaster with the other two.

I think I will put this idea back on the shelf. Perhaps I will give it another try a year or so down the road. But next time I will have learned from my mistakes.

Bright Star

In a recent sci-fi game that I GM'd in, I found myself in a conundrum. One of my players had rolled himself up a character that did not work well with others. He was good with the other PCs, but when it came to NPCs he would create friction. This did not work so well in a game based around a close nit crew on a small ship. Particularly, Mac the character had a problem with Johnson the NPC.
Introduce the ghost ship. The Bright Star misjumped, and found themselves stranded in a system with no way home. One of the few things in the system is an incredibly old capital ship. A derelict that had been sitting in orbit for thousands of year. However, since the White Star had reached the system, the old ship had started to power up again.
A small away team, including Mac and Johnson, went aboard to search for anything that might be of use on the ship. One of the first things found on the ship has a low birth with several occupied cryo-pods. One of them was open.
Johnson was good with alien tech and began fiddling with a console to bring up a map. After fiddling with the map for a time, he pointed out a few doors that were open that he claimed were closed before. There was something else on the ship.
Johnson stayed behind to help guide the away team over the radio using the map. He kept on sending them updates as to the location of a mysterious red dot that as traveling around the map. Occasionally old droids would jump out to attack the crew. The away team would have to jump out of the way when a door would slam shut almost on top of them.
Then it came to a point when Mac found himself isolated from the rest of the crew. He was in a position where he could easily be jettisoned into space.

I took Mac out to the balcony so we could play out the next bit away from the rest of the players.

Instead of carrying on the adventure from that point, I took it back in time to Mac and Johnson
s days at the academy. I left mac in a scenario where he would have an easy opportunity to play a brutal prank on Johnson. Then I skipped forward a little, to another opportunity for Mac to mistreat Johnson. Then forward again. And Again.

It did not take long for the player playing Mac to clue in. There was no one else on the ship. Johnson was at the map. Johnson was learning how to control the ship. Johnson hated Mac.

New and Old

The Retirement of Baron Harveset Bowman M.D. 
We finished our last travelers game this last week. In the end we got revenge on Treece, killed that damn dolphin that had been messing with us and even won ourselves a planet. 
Perhaps latter I will fill in more details when I can do it justice.

Burning Wheel

As our travellers game come to an end, we have decided to start a new game. We will be using the bruning wheel system. Burning wheel is specifically designed for "middle fantasy" games. Games with little magic or where magic is mostly in the background. Books like George RR Martins A Song of Ice and Fire would fit nicely within this game. 

The game is designed to revolve around politics and battles of wits. 

How to Dispose of a Kadariak Kepf

Through various adventures Chuck, John and Joe wound up in a cavern beneath a mosuleum in the middle of a forest in Maine. Trapped in a cage in the corner was a demon. The cage sparked with blue electricity. 

The demon had already lured one group into the cavern and convinced them to start a murderous cult. They were on the verge of completing the ritual that would release the demon from his cage. We put an end to those plans. 

so there we sat, trying to figure out how to dispose of this demon before he formed another death cult. Our research showed us that it was a Kadariak Kepf, and that it might be vulnerable to fire, or perhaps water. And apperently it could be contained by electric cages. 
So we gathered up our guns and built a flamethrower, and a tried to dispose of the KK. Sadly, it seemed that the cage would not let anything past it and we would have to release the KK from the cage to kill it. Then we realizede that we had no idea how to open the cage. Everything we tried only released blue sparks from the cage. 

Eventually, we gathered up some cable and some jumper cables. We connected the jumper cables to the cage and ran the cable outside to some metal spike we had planted in the ground. Efffectively grounding the cage and releasing the KK. 
Several shotgun blasts, flamthrower bursts and axe swings later we had the KK's head seperated from its boddy and both aflame. 

But there was still the matter of disposing of the boddy. We tried burning it some more, but that produced to much smoke which could draw attention to the site. We tried to drag it out in a boddy bag, but the boddy would not stop smouldering and melted anything that touched it.
We were not certain of KK biology, so we were not certain if the KK was truely dead, despite its severed head. It had servived a milenia or two in this cage and had not died, and its mouth was located over its heart. So we were rather skeptical of its demise. 
Eventually, we decided to try its other weakness. We poored some water over the boddy. With a billow of steam the boddy dissapeared. 
We stood there blinking at where its body had been, uncertain of what had just happened. 

Psychics and Rats

Psychics
The first game I ever ran was about an group of psychics that formed a gestalt and had to escape from an evil sentient asylum. It had many fun twists and turns as the characters discovered that they were the main tool in the asylums plan. The game took place in Chicago in the 80s and involved allot of bad hair.
I recently begun to rerun a condensed version of this game with my Saturday group. However, the first thing they did once they escaped from the asylum was to head to Connecticut and flee from my plot. There characters then spent a year there being beach bums.
I think I will have to run a game where they are all stuck on a train, so when they derail my plot they will go with it.

Rat and Mushroom Kingdoms
I am planning on running a game or two this Saturday. Recently I have bee inspired by a DS game called Mushroom Men and a comic called Mouse Guard. From these I plan on running two somewhat related games.
The first will be the Dark Woods. It will revolve around the boarder territories of the mushrooms where the woods meet the swamp. This game will have more of a voodoo and shamanistic feel to it as the mushroom men struggle to survive in a world where superstition servers you better than knowledge.
The second will be the Old Oak. It will revolve around a kingdom of rats that have transformed a great oak tree into a fortress. This game will have a medieval feel to it with many aspects borrowed from Redwall and Mouse Guard. Inside of the Old Oak the Rats will forge weapons of bronze and Iron to fend off their enemies.
I want both of these games to have a very different feel from the other. One of swords and the other of sworcery. Then, after a session of each I will reveal that the worlds are the same and that the Rat and Mushroom Kingdoms have a common enemy and that the two Kingdoms also have conflicting goals.

It's My First Day

The Saturday crew got together again and there was gaming. This time Hutch took the GM's chair, and showed us that she can run one heck of a game. Hutch is a theater tech and decided that we needed to have an appreciation for the terror that is theater school.


Theater School Hell
I played Marcus A. Threegood, and Darnivar played Unnamed Sanchez on our first day of theater school. The first task was finding the room that we were supposed to report too. We quickly figured out that half the people that we talked too would outright ignore us if we asked for directions. When we finally found where we were going, we discovered that the fourth years ran shit in this place, and they had a strong distaste for first years.
Threegood and Sanchez got assigned to their first task: Commando Training. Plug in three lights in the crawl space above the stage. Sounded simple enough. Two hours later, we had finally figured out where we were going in the maze, plugged in the light, replaced the light that we had broken, and managed to get back down alive. I however ended up in the infirmary covered in bite and scratch marks from things that at one time could have been rats.
I nearly got out the door before I got dragged back in to the infirmary. I was having a bad reaction to the medication.
Sadly, the day did not end up there.
Hopped up on pain killers and wireded out on some bad reaction, Sanchez and I were sent out on our next task. Go fetch foue stacks of chairs from the basement of the theater school. Sounded simple enough. Several hours later, we had finally figured out were we where going, found the stacks of chair, moved some and gotten locked into the boiler room of a basement. Sanchez saw the crawling arm of one of the many ghosts that reside in that place. I did not. I was passed out from heat exhaustion. Luckily someone had wandered by and heard Sanchez pounding on the door. It was back to the infirmary for me.
Sanchez managed to finish delivering the three stacks of chairs that we had gotten out of the basement before the ghost arrived. When questioned about why he was missing a stack, Sanchez replied with a straight face "The hand got it" and went back to see me in the infirmary.
Exhausted, he fell asleep next to my unconscious body in the infirmary.
We woke up the next morning, 8 am, sprawled unceremoniously in the hallway outside of the infirmary. A fourth year walked in with his cup of coffee. He looked down at us and said "Good, your early. Time to get to work."


Since last I posted, one campaign has come to an end, another has started, and I have gotten into a brand new system. I am sure I will post more on that later.