Less Magpie in Magpie Night

This past Monday marked the beginning of a turning point for our Magpie Night RPG sessions.  The night was originally designed to try out a variety of game systems using one or two shot adventures.  We did that for a while bi-weekly, then added a Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign on the off weeks.

This was working quite well for some time, but lately things have changed.  First, we lost one of our founding members when she moved away, and the Kingmaker campaign has been dragging a bit since then.  With another of our players now taking a (hopefully) temporary leave of absence, I made the decision to put Kingmaker on hiatus.

Meanwhile, I have been getting some push-back on the core Magpie concept of bouncing from system to system fairly rapidly.  A couple of the players are either frustrated at constantly having to come up with character ideas, or else have a desire to explore their character concepts more deeply than a single adventure allowed for.

Also, I want to explore some games that require more than a single adventure to get into, so while I do want to still do some more one-shot adventures in the future, I am abandoning them for now and doing short campaigns instead.

With this in mind I created a spreadsheet of all the games I am willing to run, along with ratings as to how great my desire to run them is, my preparedness in terms of understanding the rules, and some other factors.  At the top of that list is Ashen Stars, but Trail of Cthulhu is right below it, and two of my three current players are more interested in it than in Ashen Stars.

Thus, we have started a Trail of Cthulhu campaign, while possibly doing some Ashen Stars adventures whenever I need a break from running Trail of Cthulhu.  Since they are both based on the Gumshoe system, there shouldn't be much difficulty in switching between games.  More on this in my next post.

I'm a little sad to see the format change, but we got through a lot of games over the past year or so, which has been a lot of fun, and which I think really helped some of my skills when it comes to roleplaying.  I'm now looking forward to running some longer games.

Fiasco

We played Fiasco as a quick pick-up game at Magpie Night after the planned session of My Life With Master sort of melted down due to GM burn out. I totally understand how that happens as it's what happened to me with the last session of our Dresden Files mini-arc.

I have to say that Fiasco pretty much works as advertised, which is a GM-less storytelling game that takes around two hours to play. We had four players with myself as the only one that had read the book and the session took just a little over the advertised two hours.

We used the Lucky Strike playset and created a story involving a hulking goldbricking bully, a fresh faced recruit with a gambling addiction, a conniving supply sergeant and a French prostitute. We basically ended up with two parallel scams going on, one involving the supply sergeant and the recruit trying to steal from the locals and the other involving the bully and the prostitute attempting to recover a cache of stolen goods hidden behind enemy lines. Connecting the two threads were a case of cognac and a truck that was needed to pull off both scams.

Of course, both plans ended in near disaster, but somewhat surprisingly everyone made it out alive. The bully ended up getting a medal after nearly getting shot to death while going after the cache. The prostitute ended up marrying the bully and moving to the states after having managed to secret away part of the cache, something she never bothered to tell her new husband. The fresh raced recruit also got shot up, but survived and went on with his life neither better off nor worse off than he began the story. Only the supply sergeant ended up with a bad ending. A final twist at the end revealed him as a German agent, but it turned out that his superiors weren't happy with his performance and threw him in prison where he stayed until "liberated" by Americans, one of which recognized him as the "supply sergeant" allowing him to go free, albeit without job or prospects.

This is definitely a storytelling game more than an RPG, but everyone enjoyed it so I'm sure we'll play it again before too long. One player has expressed interest in using "The Ice" playset included in the book, while another player is already working on their own playset!

Dresden Files: Northwest Arkansas

We had our setting and character generation session for our Magpie Night Dresden Files game about a week ago. We have a lot of interest in this game, so we're doing things a bit different. Instead of our usual one shot, we're doing two adventures for Dresden Files. Our regular Magpie Night attendees (Josh, Liz and Jonathan in this case) will be playing in both sessions, while the four other people who expressed interest are going to play in one session each, two in each session.

I wasn't sure if this was going to be completely necessary, but after our first session with all seven players and me, I'm glad we decided to do it this way. We got most of the stuff done that we needed to do, but it took longer than I expected, and we had to take a couple of minor short cuts. I was also so busy managing things that I really didn't get a good grasp on anyone's character, which is a big deal for a GM in a Fate game, since pretty much everything revolves around the characters.

I think there should be fewer problems with only five players instead of seven, and I'm looking forward to putting together the adventure once everyone posts their finalized characters to the thread on the NWARPG Forums.

As to the game itself, the overall process of setting creation seems a lot more involved than in Diaspora. There's no random element to give you a starting point. Fortunately, we'd already decided we were going to set it here in Northwest Arkansas, so I did a little research into legends of the area. Having spent about two thirds of my life in the area didn't hurt either.

Some of the players came to the table with ideas as well, so we had a decent starting point. If this hadn't been the case, then I don't think we'd have gotten very far. As it was, getting this all down into three overall themes and threats, plus nine locations and twelve aspects and faces to represent all of the above still took some time. We're still short an aspect or two, but most of the work got done.

At this point we'd already used more than half the time I'd expected the entire process to take, and we still needed to make characters.

Most of the players had a better idea of what they wanted to see from their characters than they did from the setting, and that helped things somewhat. A couple had no concept or only a partial concept, and that slowed things down a bit, but not too much. I couldn't complain about it either, because I'd made a point about not being too committed to character concepts in case the communal setting ended up not supporting a concept, or suggesting a better one.

We did end up having at least one concept changed by the setting and the contributions of the other players, and the one player that didn't come to the table with a concept was able to develop one largely from some elements of the setting. In fact, his ended up being the only PC that is also a "face" in the setting.

Another item of interest that came out of our session included our decision to go for the "submerged" power level, which is the highest starting level, and equivalent to Harry Dresden in the first book in the series. I had wondered whether this area would justify such a high powered group, but the threats and themes we ended up creating developed a supernatural presence for the area that is quite strong.

For example, in the Dresden books there's a bar that is considered neutral ground among the supernatural. We established an entire town that is neutral ground, complete with a ruling council made up of representatives from all the supernatural factions, including those currently at war with each other outside the town.

Now I just need to get everyone to turn in their finished characters so I can create the first adventure.

Rolling it Old School

We finally got in another session of Magpie Gaming Night this past Monday, and I ran a one shot adventure for Swords & Wizardry White Box. It wasn't anything too fancy, but I had fun, and I think the players did too. After a lot of indy games it was nice to get back to some classic hack and slash for a little bit.

The players each rolled up a 4th level character. We ended up with a Cleric, a Magic-User and an Elf. The adventure found them killing time at a tavern (imagine that!), when the small town they were in found themselves inundated by a horde of undead, mostly skeletons and zombies. The cleric went to turn them, but found them strangely resistant to his efforts. He could still turn them, but it was not as easy as it should have been.

The group held back the major push of the undead long enough for most of the villagers to make it to the keep before being forced to retreat into the keep themselves. As the drawbridge was being raised the cleric fell, and the others pulled him back into the keep where they were met by a Lieutenant Nunoz who led them to the makeshift infirmary to drop off their fallen comrade before heading to a meeting with the commandant.

The commandant outlined the situation, which they were already mostly aware of, and then conscripted them into the militia for the duration of the siege. He explained that they could spend the time on the walls if they wished, but that he had a special mission that he believed they would be perfect for, if they were willing to volunteer.

He had reason to believe that there was a necromancer behind the attack, and he wanted the group to find and deal with the necromancer in the hopes that once the necromancer was gone the siege would be lifted. The party agreed, and the cleric was raised from the dead by the local priestess so that he could help them (don't ask why a priestess of high enough level to raise dead couldn't deal with a horde of skeletons and zombies on her own, this is not the plot hole you're looking for...).

If this had been a campaign I would have come up with some sort of system other than the default one of zero hit points leading automatically to death, but as a one shot I tried to just let the dice fall where they may for most of the adventure.

Lieutenant Nunoz led them out of a secret tunnel that opened beyond most of the siege lines. A short skirmish got them the rest of the way through, and they eventually decided to follow the tracks of the shambling horde back to where they came from in the hopes of locating the necromancer.

They managed to track him down to a broken down tower on the edge of an old battlefield. On the way they destroyed one of his wight lieutenants. In the tower they found another wight along with the necromancer working on animating more undead. They destroyed the wight, but only after it drained one of the cleric's levels, while the necromancer decided to exercise discretion and used a combination of hold portal and dimensional portal to delay the group long enough for him to get away and join up with the main part of his undead horde.

This was the one point in the adventure where I decided to pull a punch for the good of the game. The necromancer had a fireball ready to go, but as I looked over the spell again, I realized it would almost certainly lead to a total party kill if he used it on the group, so I decided that instead of using it on them, he was going to use it to attempt to breach the walls of the keep.

So, instead of using his one fireball on the group, he escaped from them and returned to the keep, where he used it to burn through the gate of the keep.

It took a while for the group to figure out where the necromancer had gone, so they arrived just in time to see the gate on fire and getting ready to collapse, with the horde of undead getting ready to storm in.

They attacked, and while the cleric kept the undead away with successful turning, the others managed to take down the necromancer. As he realized he was about to be defeated, he polymorphed into a small dragon to gain the protection of its scales and to fly away, but just as he was about to escape, the magic-user thumped him on the head with her staff and brought him down!

All-in-all I thought it was a fun little adventure, and I think the ending worked out pretty well considering that I really didn't have anything planned beyond "confront the necromancer".

It was definitely a big change from the kinds of games we've been playing up to this point. We've been playing mostly games with systems built in for handling social conflict, and Swords & Wizardry doesn't even have skills!

Game Nights Update

It's been a couple of months since I last talked about our Wednesday night board game night at Castle House Games. We continue to meet every week, and have increased the number of regulars. Including me, we now have around five players that are there on a semi-regular basis, along with one or two more that attend intermittently as schedule and interest permits. We're reaching the point where we can start thinking about having more than one game being played at a time. We're regularly maxing out the amount of players that the "featured" game can handle. Although we haven't been forced to pull out a second game yet, I think it's only a matter of time.

Magpie Gaming night, our RPG night, is pretty much a wash for May. A combination of factors means that we won't have another meeting until the 31st, although after that we should be meeting every Monday for either Magpie night, or Liz' Dogs in the Vineyard game. While the lack of activity this month is mildly frustrating, it appears to be a temporary thing, and not a real threat to the continuing viability of Magpie Gaming night. I'm looking forward to what we have planned with this group.

World of Dorkness II

As I suspected, the second session of Liz' World of Darkness campaign was more enjoyable for me than the first one was. I ended up choosing a Fairest Draconic as my Changeling template. This is a template that basically means my character is related to dragons in some way, increasing both my social and combat abilities.

I chose this in order to shore up my weaknesses instead of playing to my strengths. My strengths would have dictated that I go with something that would have increased my academic skills, but that seemed likely to be boring in play, so instead I decided to go with a template that would increase the areas that were weak on my original character. It worked out well.

The situation presented by the scenario consisted of two of us being sent out with a number of NPCs to hunt two of the other PCs for the amusement of the "big bad". The fifth PC was the, *ahem* "prize" for the most successful hunter.

The course of the story was fairly simple but in the process of working through it our characters all began to recall their past existence in the "real" world, and as a result all of them ended up becoming the hunted, not just the original two. This led to a final confrontation with the "big bad" that resulted in our victory and allowed us to escape back to the "real" world.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the simplicity, it was quite enjoyable. Lots of good table banter in addition to good roleplaying.

I've always wondered if I'd actually enjoy playing in the type of game I like to run, and since Liz' style of GMing is very close to my own, this gave me a good opportunity to find out. I liked it!

World of Dorkness

See, we're dorks playing ourselves in World of Darkness... OK, the joke's been done, but it's still an appropriate title for this post.

We had our first of what will probably be two sessions of Liz' New World of Darkness game, and it went about as I'd expected. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it except me, and I enjoyed quite a bit of it, but was unable to generate a great deal of interest in the play itself. I enjoyed the character generation, and I was a bit surprised at how much I liked the system, having mostly stayed away from White Wolf games over the years. The humor at the table was quite strong and I laughed myself silly at a lot of the table talk. I just couldn't get into my character.

Which, of course, is pretty strange given that I was playing myself. As I explained to Liz after the game, rather than dispensing with the layer of separation between self and character, it seemed to instead add another layer. Instead of just playing myself, I was myself, playing a character, that was supposed to be myself. This was taken to yet another level by the nature of the scenario which caused us to lose our memory of our identity.

So just as I was getting used to playing myself, now I was myself, playing a character, that was myself, but without a sense of identity! No one else seemed to have a great deal of difficulty with this concept, but I was a bit flummoxed trying to determine what that would actually mean. I didn't know my name, but did I remember my alma mater, or what town I was born in? I had so many questions that I didn't really know where to begin, so I simply sat back for a bit and watched what everyone else did, only really taking part once things shifted to action.

I think I would have had an easier time adapting if I'd been playing a fictional character put into that situation rather than myself, because there would have been less "background" to worry about in terms of what I knew and what I didn't.

That said, I think I will enjoy the second session much more, as I'm no longer playing myself, but playing myself as a changeling. I think that should prove more interesting.

If you're curious, you can get a description of the play itself from Liz' writeup here.

Diaspora In Play

Diaspora went well, if not quite as well as I'd hoped. While I've been familiar with Fate for what seems like ages now, I had yet to actually play a game using it, so it was a little rough getting up to speed with the mechanics.

Also, we quickly stumbled across some glaring holes in some of our character designs. Namely that having at least one social skill is a good idea, as well as having either a defense skill or good armor. I should have probably suggested that we stop and tweak characters mid-session once we realized the problems, but it didn't even occur to me to do so until after the game was over. If we come back to these characters in the future I will definitely allow rebuilds of the skill pyramids at the very least.

The adventure itself went fairly well. I tried to structure it around the abilities of the player characters and I was at least partly successful in getting everyone involved.

We started with a social conflict involving the crew trying to get their cargo out of impound while others tried to have it confiscated. We stumbled a bit with this, but I knew that was going to happen. I wanted to start out with the mechanics so that we could hopefully get the hang of them with a situation that wasn't crucial to the main scenario. The group ended up handling the situation fairly easily, despite all the questions with the rules, and we then moved on to the main part of the adventure.

Basically, the crew found themselves stuck in a quarantine as a pandemic broke out in the world they were on. Liz' character was able to identify the disease and propose a cure, and determined that the cure would be greatly accelerated with the proper technology. Unfortunately, the use of that technology was prohibited by the theocratic government of the planet. This eventually led to a second social conflict in which the players managed to convince the relevant government officials to approve the temporary use of the technology.

This kept Liz and Jonathan's characters fairly involved due to their skill sets, and kept Josh fairly involved due to his character's background and beliefs, not helping the others, but instead arguing that they didn't have the right to interfere with the religion of the people of the planet. This led to some interesting in-character discussions as to the proper course of action.

Unfortunately, I don't think I did as good a job at keeping Seth's character involved. I had planned to give him some opportunities to bring his mechanical skills into play once approval had been made, as he worked to alter some of the necessary equipment. We touched on that in passing, but I failed to make as big a deal out of it as I had originally intended.

We ended with a quick combat as some fundamentalists attempted to remove the "foreign infidels" that were daring to interfere. The players managed to pull things off, although Jonathan's character was seriously wounded in the process. From a game perspective I missed a real opportunity to make things interesting as Seth came up with a really cool course of action for his character to take, but I failed to make sure that it actually influenced the course of the battle. Part of that was simply my own unfamiliarity with the rules, and part simply because it was getting late.

There was still lots of praise for the character design. People seem to really want to play these characters again and I think that says a lot about the strength of the underlying game. I expect this one will come around again. Next up for Magpie Gaming Night is Liz' New World of Darkness game, so I get to take a break from GMing for at least a couple of sessions and just play!

Magpie Gaming Night

It's time for an update as to how RPG Night is going. We're now calling it Magpie Gaming Night, to differentiate it from other gaming groups meeting to play RPGs. I believe Liz came up with the name based on my self-described magpie gaming tendencies. I got the term from the D6 Generation, which I believe got it from somewhere else. Basically it refers to the tendency to be attracted to anything new and shiny, which perfectly describes my gaming habits, and was one of the primary motivators behind establishing RPG Night.

I've already described the 3:16 game and the Dogs In The Vineyard game that we ran as our first two games. We've now started a Diaspora game. We met to create characters on the 22nd and had a really good time generating the cluster and characters. Seth wasn't able to make it, but we added Josh to the group, and Seth should be there for the actual adventure.

You can check out the results of our session in our thread on the NWARPG Forums. This Monday we'll be running an actual adventure using what we created. I suspect we'll finish the adventure in a single session, but I'm usually wrong about this stuff, so it may take two sessions.

After that, Liz has an idea for a game set in the New World of Darkness where we play ourselves. I'm a bit leery of this idea as I've got a real "been there, done that" vibe when it comes to playing myself in an RPG, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. Liz seems really enthusiastic about the idea, and that's always good to see in a GM, so I expect we'll have a good game

Jonathan also feels he's about ready to run Mouse Guard for us. He's been running a game of it with another group. He was really pleased with how his first session went. He had reservations about his second, but it sounds like they still had fun. I've been looking forward to trying this game for a while now.

If he's not quite ready to run that after Liz' game, then I'll probably run something. I'll certainly be itching to run something after it if Liz' and Jonathan's games are run back to back.

I've got a number of potential games I'm considering. Since we'll have had a mix of sci-fi, western, and modern day up to that point, I'm leaning towards a medieval fantasy game. Third Edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WHFRP), Chronica Feudalis, and Reign are all strong contenders. I think I actually like the system from Chronica Feudalis the best, but the setting is the least inspiring of the three, which is ironic considering my normally strong interest in history (the setting is 12th Century Europe).

I really want to explore the mechanics of both WHFRP and Reign. I think Reign might be more interesting to the group as a whole due to the Company mechanics that focus on the organizations the characters belong to, but I also think it would require more than just a one-shot to explore those mechanics.

Then again, there's always Burning Wheel or possibly The Mountain Witch. Fortunately, I have some time to narrow down my options.

After Jonathan does Mouse Guard, we may try to run a Burning Empires game. Jonathan picked up a water damaged copy of the book on sale from Castle House Games, which makes the logistics of running it much more practical, and some of the core concepts are shared with Mouse Guard, which should smooth the learning curve a little. It would definitely be a bigger commitment than any of the other games we'll have played up to that point, since we'd likely play a full Phase rather than just a one-shot, which would probably take around a half dozen sessions according to the book, plus a session of world building.

We've also started talking about maybe doing a campaign on the Mondays between Magpie Gaming Night, and if we do that, that might be the best way to do Burning Empires. I don't know if I can do a weekly RPG night yet, so that's still just an idea.

Overall, we're still going strong, and I'm very happy that we got this thing off the ground.

Dogs In Shepherd's Rest Part 2

We wrapped up our Dogs in the Vineyard game, and it went pretty well. The players identified what they believed to be the root causes of the problems in Shepherd's Rest and came up with a solution that didn't involve shooting anyone in the head... maybe next time.

The short version is that while questioning one of the townsfolk about something completely different, one of the dogs uncovered an illicit affair between the two single women of the town. The dogs' solution was to quickly marry off both women to the two eligible men of the town. They had actually joked about this affair existing earlier in the game, but it was apparently a bit of a surprise when they found out it actually existed.

It was interesting to see how the group suddenly reversed their own successes from earlier in the game in establishing their chosen solution. The group had been focused on matching the younger woman with the younger man and convincing the older suitor to go after the available widow instead, and had run several conflicts in an attempt to further that goal. When it became apparent that the younger woman was actually the instigator in the illicit affair, they decided it would be better if she was married to the older man after all as he would be able to exercise firmer control over her (remember folks, this game is set in a fictional 19th Century Utah, and the players were playing characters that have bought in to the morality of the setting).

After arranging the marriages, the dogs then left Shepherd's Rest confident that they had set things to rights. Too bad they only discovered one of the two illicit affairs going on in the town...

We had a shorter session this time as there was a meeting of the NWARPG prior to the session, and so I decided to let the group implement their chosen solution without further conflict resolution. After the session was over, I probably got a bit too chatty about the affair they missed and some other details of the motivations of the NPCs, but I usually can't help myself from revealing those kinds of details after a game is over. In the future I'll try to restrain myself more, at least delaying the reveal so that the players can dwell on their own resolution for a few days first.

Overall, an enjoyable and satisfying session, and it's highly likely that we'll be returning to this game after trying out some others. I'll also probably get to try it as a player at some point as Liz has expressed interest in running a town either for RPG Night or for a NWARPG Game Day.

Dogs in Shepherd's Rest

We had our first session of Dogs in the Vineyard on Monday. I can't go into too much detail, because the story of Shepherd's Rest hasn't yet finished, but I can at least describe the cast of characters so far.

To start with we have the dogs. Melissa "Missy" Whitehoof (Liz) is a half-breed with a mountain-folk father who comes from a troubled family. David Snow (Jonathan) is a pious student of the Faith. Kimble Smith (Seth) is a not-so-pious young man with a temper. They're all newly initiated members of God's Watchdogs out to do good, and their first stop after leaving the temple is Shepherd's Rest.

Shepherd's Rest is a small community overseen by Steward Matthew, a middle aged man that the dogs have not had a great deal of interaction with yet, although he was the first man they talked with upon arriving at the town.

Next they met Widow Joanna, the woman who is providing them with room and board while they stay in Shepherd's Rest. She is frustrated by the lack of attention that the available men of the town are paying to her.

Brother Silas is one of those available men, an older gentleman recently granted permission to take a third wife by the Elders of the Church.

Brother Caleb is the other available man, a young man looking to find his first wife.

Sister Sarah is the young woman that both men have set their sights upon, but who desires neither of them.

Sister Mary and Sister Rebecca are Brother Silas' first and second wives respectively.

Finally, Brother Giles is Sister Sarah's father, who wants to see her married to the relatively well-to-do Brother Silas.

Oh, and there's something about some bandits who have robbed a supply wagon, killed the driver, and stole some sheep.

So far the dogs have dealt with relatively mundane matters, but we still had a good time exploring the mechanics of the game and getting to know Shepherd's Rest. I'm looking forward to seeing how the dogs decide to resolve the problems of Shepherd's Rest in our next session!