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.

On Plauge Doctors and How Not to Run a Ship

Got the old crew back together last weekend, and so we broke out some one shots. 

The Plague Doctor
To make a long story short, the old crew has a run in with a Plague Doctor, but for reasons as of yet unknown, the doctors life sucking ritual fails horribly. Instead of taking the last of the life of one of the crew, the doctor somehow restored him. By the end of the session, the crew had burst into the doctors home a proceeded to set him alight. One of the crew was laid out by a knife to the back, and another had a wheelbarrow full of thaumatology books and a fallen comrade. 

Suds and Duds
The crew of the Suds and Duds are not the most typical group to fly amongst the stars. The pilot, an ex-trucker named Big Sugar, is a bone crushingly huge black man that spends most of his time in the cockpit hating any passengers on board and wearing a top hat. The ambassador, a man of leisure, spends most of his time aboard his yatch in his hot tub messaging his own bosoms. The captain, battle-scared cigar smoking chinchilla, will come flying out of air vents screaming at the slightest hint of peanut butter. The doctor, a con-artist who conned hospitals for so long that he figured out the trade, spends most of his time accusing poeple of having the "brain fever". 

Death By Darnivar and Bear Fisted

This week we departed from the usual in the Fallen Soldiers game and played some other characters that have been wandering about in the same world. 

I ended up with 'Bob' the closet homosexual that has been causing one of the PCs Shaajid so many problems. As the story progressed we discovered two things about Bob. He can be unintentionally really creepy and he is a pretty good guy and a bit of a badass hero. 

The creepiness came out in a situation that found a PC Darnivar in a dress and a compromising position with a guard. It was all part of a rather successful plan to take out a guard station, but the creepiness was enough to cause Darnivar to really have Bob. 

The hero bit came about when the party fought against the a rock crab pulled out out of the Tremors movies. Bob bravely stuck his axe into the ground and stood in the monsters way. He of course was tossed aside as it flew by beneath him, but that did not stop him from keeping on the assault. Although the rest of the team did most of the useful work , Bob was there clinging to its back with one hand while beating it with his axe in the other. He struck the final blow the felled the beast. 

It was later that night that Darnivar snuck into his room and slit his throat for being creepy. 


Bear Fisted
Hutch had her own side quest to kill a demon bear. As this was all part of a spirit quest, hutch had to take the beast allone and unarmed. Despite her best efforts to cheat, she ended up going toe to toe with the bear. She punched it in the face. It stood there stunned, unable to think comprehend a gnome punching it in the face. Unalbe to comprehend the amount of force packed into those little angry fists. Hutch punched it in the face again. This caused the bear to be more stunned. Where does this gnome get such nerve? Two more fists to the face and the startled bear fell to the ground unconcious. 

It wasn't long before the gnome struggled back to the party dragging a bear carcus behind it. 

New Systems

Recently I sat down with some friends to try to come up with a new and interesting system. I decided to try a system using tarot cards. There are two main reasons that I wanted to give this a try. 

The first is that many games have a magical or mystical feel to them, using tarot cards can be perfect for keeping the mood in such games. I think the cards can carry the mood of a game much better than most other props. 

Secondly, I have recently watched a rather interesting video of Richard Dawkins discussing cold reading and thought that many of the concepts discussed could be applied to gaming. Tarot cards are vague enough, while sounding concrete, that I can twist the cards to my story. 

The human mind is great at finding patterns, especially where there are none. This often can leave the players with the unseetling feeling that a card drawn was perfect for the situation. 

Of course there are cards that have enough meaning attributed to them that your story must change to fit the cards. 

While trying this system out, I returned to Cobblestone creek. One of the players was missing from the last session and his character was sent of on some vague mission. So to try out the system we followed his adventures. 

The system seemed to work well. Karma issues where being dealt all over the place. Eventually I drew some cards that where unmistakeably loyalty followed by a great revelation followed by a great gift. It was similar to rolling a few critical successes in a row. So I pulled it into the game and ended up giving the character a few extra powers. 

Not long after that, I pulled some cards that read close to the opposite. So I ended up taking the characters arm half off.

The problem that did aries came from the lack of influnce from the character makeup. When rolling dice, the character's sheet will have a modifier or of some form or another change the likelyhood of success. This is largely removed from a tarot based game. I could see this bothering enough players that I do not think that a tarot system on its own would be preferable. At the very least, this type of system needs the right crowd. 

Another aspect that I had examined: using the tarot cards as a random event generator. First, draw a card, but do not reveal it to the players. Keep a mental note of what it stands for. When the topic or event on the card is brought up or about by the characters, thats when you deal a few cards to change things up. 

I have had some decent feed back from this idea, and I think I will give it a few more tries to see if it keeps me amused. 

Trouble in Cobblestone Creek

Another one shot over the weekend. It went very well, but not as planned:


The Sheriff and three deputies of the town of Cobblestone Creek set out to the hamlet of Gibson. Rumors had come in that their had been trouble with the natives, and no-one had heard from Gibson in several days. 

When they got there, the town was dead. 

They found the bodies gathered into the town saloon. What was left of the townsfolk had been gnawed on by wolves. 

It wasn't long before the Cobblestone Creek crew had berried the bodies and went looking for wolves. 

Then the part split up and they started to get killed off in turn. 

This is where thing departed from what I had expected. 

The plan was for all of the PCs, the outstanding gunslinging law enforcement of the town, to die in horrible and gruesome ways. Then I would hand out the players real character sheets. It would be up to the alcoholic, gambling addicted, lowlifes to save the town of Cobblestone creek from the Werewolves. 

But here is what actually happened. 

I botched a stealth roll for one of the wolves. I rolled in plain sight, so there was no real way I could hand wave it. One of the characters got in behind the thing and pumped it full of as much lead in a round as the mechanics would allow.

So in the end, two of the PCs survived the encounter. Although one was rather gnawed on. 

This is were the players rebelled. They demanded that they be turned into Werewolves and be allowed to bring down the town of Cobblestone creek. They demanded it in such unison that I could not deny them. 

So the game ended with four newly made werewolves running free in the countryside wreaking havoc. I am sure this will be a one shot with a sequel. 

R.I.P. Jayden, Beloved Nephew

A duel was the only way to solve it. A duel or some underhanded kidnapping work. Thats the way it works with these people. You make it a matter of honor, or you ransom your freedom. 

Of course, being an older man myself, I cannot duel and must have a champion. My hired gun, Jordan, had taken off on some fool mission to kidnap a girl and solve the problem that way. I figured he would get himself killed or captured. 

Jayden insisted that I let him be my champion. He had held his own with our last encounter with our disgruntled shipmate. So of course I thought he could hold his own. 

And he did. 

He got a shot off first. But then two bullets ripped through him. 

Jayden's ever present cigaret fell from his lips. A soft "oh" escaped him. Then he slumped to the grass. 

It was a that moment, as Jayden lay slain at my feet, that Jorden came in over the radio. He had pulled off his escipade, and there was no reason for to duel. 

Jayden, you will be missed.

-Baron Harveset Bowmen MD.