Category Archives: Roleplaying

Cold of Cthulhu

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I woke up this morning and looked out the window to see this:

Blizzard

It’s really cold and snowy here today–there’s a blizzard warning in effect, and just about every church and school event in the state is cancelled. Heck, even the mall is closed today. You know it’s serious when that happens.

So how to while away the hours? My wife and I were originally planning to play the Call of Cthulhu RPG this evening (we’re romantic like that). The plan was to start the famous Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. But with the wind howling outside, and the snow blowing so fiercely that you can hardly see anything out the window, and our apartment heater struggling to counter the deathly chill… I can’t think of anything more appropriate than breaking out the Antarctic Lovecraftian horror epic Beyond the Mountains of Madness.

I’m finally doing it–I’m actually going to run this monster of a campaign. I’ll post again… if I make it through the weekend with my sanity intact.

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History of the game

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Over the last few months, Shannon Appelcline has been writing a column I’ve found really fascinating–A Brief History of Game, a history of some of the great companies of roleplaying history. Some of the great game companies of yesteryear are still around, while others are long dead and buried, but they all contributed something to the hobby.

Of particular interest to me was the two-part history of Iron Crown Enterprises (part 1, part 2)–that company was responsible for much of my gaming enjoyment when I first got into this hobby, and I’ve long tried to piece together from scattered internet rumors the details of their rise, fall, and subsequent rise again. Interesting stuff–and I’m glad somebody’s writing it all down for posterity.

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Batman Meets Rainbow Brite: the beauty and horror of internet fan fiction

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I spent a few hours the other day reading Transformers fan fiction.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, “I always knew he would come to this point… but I hoped he wouldn’t.” And for the rest of you, yes: I am talking about fan-written fiction based on the world of the Reagan-era transforming Robots In Disguise–Optimus Prime, Megatron, and the whole crew. But I’d like to think aloud a bit about this topic, because I have a dark confession to make: fan fiction, whether it’s about Voltron or G.I. Joe or the X-Files, fascinates me.

It doesn’t fascinate me in the sense that I particularly love reading it, although I’ve read some pieces of fan fiction that were enjoyable. Some fan fiction is, of course, quite wretched, for various reasons; much of it is badly written, and some of it exposes you to sanity-shattering ideas and images that will remain seared into your psyche until the merciful hand of Death finally ends the horror. (You know what I’m talking about; and if you don’t… cherish your innocence while it lasts. It is, alas, too late for me.)

But I don’t want to talk about the really bad stuff. The sort of fan fiction that interests me is the serious kind: the reasonably well-written, often lengthy, often surprisingly entertaining stories that people write in an earnest effort to explore and add depth to the characters and places of imaginary worlds not their own.
The question that always springs to my mind upon coming across fan art–whether it’s a story, a piece of artwork, or a song–is: Why didn’t this obviously talented person put their skills to use creating art that is their own?

Why are they pouring time and energy into writing stories set in, say, the Star Wars universe, when they have no real ownership of (and certainly no legal right to) that universe? Why spend hours sketching elaborate pictures of He-Man characters, when you could be drawing up fantastic images of your own creation? Why write long, introspective essays about the effects of war on the Decepticon Soundwave’s relationship with his family, when the same story with the names changed would be a perfectly respectable novella that isn’t tied to a cheesy (and copyrighted) ’80s cartoon universe? (Wait—Transformers can have children? But how do they *EMERGENCY BRAIN SHUTDOWN*)

My usual reaction–and I think the standard reaction–to fan fiction (and art, and music, etc.) is to see it as the result of stunted or broken creativity. These fans have trapped their own considerable creative potential in a box built by somebody else. They lack “true” creativity that would inspire them to create their own characters and worlds, and so they squander what artistic vision they have on other people’s work. This is an especially frustrating observation because some of the fan fiction/art out there is really, genuinely, good. A lot of it is written or drawn by people who, judging by the quality of their fan art, really could make a go of it in “real” art or literature, if they would only try. (Somehow, I don’t picture most fan fiction authors also writing a lot of original material at the same time, although this could be a false impression.)

But I find this reaction unsatisfying (and unduly harsh). For one thing, it’s fairly strict and demanding in its definition of “true creativity.” Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that there are different kinds of creativity out there, and that some people are extremely creative but would simply rather put that creativity to use refining others’ works, rather than “reinventing the wheel.” This creative eye spots (or invents) depth and nuance in characters and places that the rest of us casually dismiss. I don’t know why somebody would look at Soundwave (the Decepticon who transforms into a cassette player–admit it, you remember it well) and think “I’d really love to explore the emotional havoc the Transformers war is wreaking on his family life.” But hey, the end result is a story that’s strangely interesting and certainly adds depth to a cartoon character otherwise saddled with a completely one-dimensional personality. That might be a bit weird, but it’s not a bad thing, and if it’s either Soundwave fan fiction or no creative output at all from this amateur writer, I’ll take the fan fiction.

One of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate the odd creative value of fan fiction is that I see a lot of this type of creativity in myself, specifically as it’s evidenced in the way I play roleplaying games. I love to run roleplaying games, and as any gamer will tell you, it takes at least a modicum of creativity and storytelling ability to run a successful roleplaying game. But I have the hardest time in the world coming up with my own game and adventure ideas from scratch–I almost just can’t do it. After 15ish years of gaming, if I were given a blank notebook and instructions to write a cool game adventure, I would probably just stare blankly at the pages for a while before finally producing a stale and unoriginal variation of something I’d seen or read before.

But give me a pre-written adventure–where somebody else has sketched out an outline of the adventure and its characters–and I’m golden. I love taking adventures others have written and reworking them to fit my preferences and the interests of the friends with whom I’ll be gaming. I’ll often wind up practically rewriting the entire adventure–changing characters, locations, plotlines, dialogue, and everything else to fit my interests. Why, if I can competently rewrite and run somebody else’s adventure, don’t I just write my own from scratch? Because for some reason, I need a creative groundwork laid out for me before I can unleash my own creativity.

That’s why I’m hesitant to look down on fan art of any sort: it’s genuine creativity at work, and just because it’s using non-original ideas as a launching pad doesn’t lessen the value of the work put into it. It may be that this is an incomplete or underdeveloped creativity, but I suspect it’s more likely just a different creativity. It’s creativity that works best when the initial groundwork has been done, leaving the artist free to sketch out their own vision atop that foundation.

Let’s face it: your meticulously-written epic about the romantic tension between Storm Shadow and the Baroness isn’t going to launch you into the halls of literary fame, but if it’s the story your Muse demands of you… well, get out there and get writing.

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Insta-dungeon

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Here’s a fun one: an automatic dungeon generator that creates not just a map, but also a complete list of encounters for a dungeon based on the parameters you set. The results are surprisingly game-able, in an old-school sort of way! File this one away for the next time you find yourself at the game table woefully unprepared.

No insta-generated dungeon could possibly be worse than a few of the completely-made-up-on-the-spot dungeons I’ve foisted on my players in the past. Of course, cobbling together random monsters and dungeon layouts is a time-honored D&D tradition, and is made easier by the fact that typical D&D dungeons tend not to be marvels of architectural logic. As long as the players think you know what you’re doing, it’s all good.

It would be a fun gaming challenge to auto-generate a half-dozen of these random dungeon maps and then play straight through them as one mega-dungeon, using the listed encounters as written and not worrying about internal consistency. I’d say that has about an equal chance of either being the most entertaining gaming experience of my life, or the experience that finally makes me consign my Dungeon Masters Guide to the flames and take up a normal hobby, like golf or LARPing.

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Playing Star Wars like it's actually, you know, Star Wars

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While browsing the RPG.net fora today, I came across a link to a great essay by Steve Darlington on how to run a Star Wars RPG in the spirit of the movies. Even if you’re not a gamer, the essay has a lot of good observations as to what makes the films so immensely enjoyable. (Now if only Lucas had followed some of this advice while making the prequel trilogy….)

Darlington’s main point is that a SW game needs to convey the epic, space-opera feel of the movies–the heroes must be at the center of everything, they should always be fighting against impossible odds, and the stakes should always be huge. Epic lightsaber battles against a Sith Lord (who is, of course, actually your father) over a lava pit, outrunning the entire Imperial navy in your junk-heap space freighter (with a few little modifications), suicidal trench runs to take down the Death Star with twenty seconds left before it reaches firing range to blow up your planet…. those things are all Star Wars.

Fending off random thugs while delivering spice shipments to a backwater planet for the umpteenth time… that, while it is more along the lines of a typical RPG scenario, is definitely not Star Wars–unless along the way to deliver your spice shipment you get attacked by Imperials, escape legions of Stormtroopers ordered to capture you and send you to the Spice Mines of Kessel, and end up singlehandedly blowing up a Super Star Destroyer seconds before it destroys the whole frickin’ universe.

I’ve run several Star Wars games, and none of them felt nearly as fun as they should have, given my love for the SW movies. Reading this article, I think I have a better idea of why those games didn’t work. Next time, I’ll try to make the adventure a bit more epic and exciting than “get through the Imperial customs station without being noticed.”

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A lifetime of roleplaying, or roleplaying a lifetime: generation-spanning RPG campaigns

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Many people keep a list of things they want to accomplish before they slough off this mortal coil. That’s a bit too serious a topic to address in a game blog like this, but I suspect that I am not the only gamer who has a list of game activities I want to experience before I hang up my gamemaster hat for good. One of the things I want to do is run or play in a generational RPG campaign.

By “generational campaign,” I am referring to an RPG campaign that spans a much longer span of time than do most adventures and campaigns. I’m talking about a campaign that covers events all throughout the life and career of a PC–and maybe even the adventures of the PC’s children, grandchildren, and beyond.

Most RPG campaigns cover a relatively short span of time in a character’s life. The longest adventures–and here I’m thinking of some of the truly epic D&D campaigns of yesteryear–might take your character months or even a year or two of his fictional life to fully complete. And a game group that plays regularly for a few years might see their characters age a few years, maybe even a decade. And that sort of campaign can be mighty satisfying.

But in all of those cases, the PC doesn’t really have time to evolve and develop like a real human would; most campaigns take place during the PC’s “peak adventuring age” and end not when the character grows out of adventuring age and into the next phase of life, but when the gaming group gets bored or decides to do something else for a change.

In a lifetime-spanning campaign, however, you’d play out the most important or interesting adventures and experiences spread throughout the character’s life. Assuming your character isn’t killed by 3rd-level goblins during his first adventure at age 18, you’d see him pursue long-term goals; you’d see the consequences of choices made in youth cropping up later in his career; you’d see his goals finally achieved or forfeited in old age. You’d see relationships come and go, enemies rise and fall, and values stand firm or crumble in the face of a lifetime of challenges.

I’m aware of only a few published generational campaigns like this. One is the Sengoku campaign Shiki, which spans an 18-year period in feudal Japan during which the characters safeguard an important heir from infancy until he is old enough to assume his birthright. Another is The Great Pendragon Campaign for the Pendragon RPG; it spans 80 years and allows the characters to personally witness and take part in the Arthur legend from beginning to end.

Going even further are campaigns that span not just a character’s life, but several generations of characters. In these campaigns, characters might be connected through the years by blood, loyalty, or chance; but whatever the connection, their lives all fit together to tell a grand story. As far as I know, outside of Pendragon, only White Wolf has published much of anything along these lines. The four-part Transylvania Chronicles for Vampire: the Dark Ages spans hundreds of years of history, beginning in the medieval world and continuing all the way to the modern day. And the newer Vampire Chronicler’s Guide contains guidelines for creating and playing entire vampire family trees–the sins of the father visited upon the children to the fourth generation, and all the drama and horror that implies. I’m not a Vampire player, but I’d jump at the opportunity to participate in one of these uber-epic campaigns.

So why haven’t I tried to run a generational–or multi-generational–RPG campaign yet? Mainly because I have enough trouble getting a gaming group together for more than two consecutive game sessions; the idea of committing a year or two of real life to play through the entire lifespan of our characters is logistically daunting. There’s also the matter of such campaigns requiring quite a bit more preparation than most short-term games, both for the players and gamemaster. But one day I will run a game like this, or at least take a decent stab at doing so. And if I don’t, perhaps my children, and my children’s children after them, will…

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Games on the road

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I’m out of town on another work-related trip, so not much gaming of any variety is going on. However, I made sure to pack a few RPGs, “just in case.” Just in case of what, I’m really not sure; but here’s what I packed:

Shadowrun, 4th edition and Ex Machina: a few years ago I thought that cyberpunk in gaming was officially dead. No sooner did I make that pronouncement than the market was hit by a slew of new cyberpunk games: a new Shadowrun, the gorgeous Ex Machina, and a new edition of Cyberpunk. Reports of cyberpunk’s death have been greatly exaggerated by me, it seems.

Hunter: the Reckoning: this game never seemed to get much love from the general gaming public, but I still flip lovingly through its pages from time to time. Hunter captured a lot of Call of Cthulhu-esque themes–“average Joe faces unknowable horrors, goes insane, and dies”–while giving them a nice modern twist.

Shadows over Baker Street: OK, this one’s not a game book; it’s a collection of stories about what would happen if Sherlock Holmes went up against the mind-shattering horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Lots of fun, and if I can’t find some game-able ideas in there, I don’t deserve my Gamemaster badge.

So rest assured, while I’m not talking about games too much here at the moment, I am in fact continuing to read them incessantly. And I just learned that the coworker traveling with me on this particular work-related trip is an off-and-on D&D player. Perhaps my neurotic habit of bringing game books everywhere I go will finally pay off. If only I hadn’t left my dice at home….

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Ground-breaking roleplaying games (with commentary by yours truly)

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There’s a good rundown over at Gamasutra of ground-breaking electronic roleplaying games. A few quick comments on their list:

First, it does the heart good to see Planescape: Torment at #2 on the list; it’s certainly one of the most literary RPGs ever created. (I’d personally put it at #1, of course, but Fallout was so good I can’t really begrudge its place at the top of the list.) The time I spent playing PS:T ranks as one of my best gaming experiences. I’ll stop now before I’m reduced to blubbering fanboy praise….

Second: No System Shock 2? That seems an unusual oversight, given that game’s excellent fusion of roleplaying with the traditional FPS-style interface. I do note that Deus Ex, which seems to me to owe an awful lot to SS2, made the list. That said, I can see why Deus Ex might have surpassed SS2 as a roleplaying game–in DE, the player faces meaningful choices and interaction with others, whereas SS2 mostly kept you on the run from enemies who didn’t interact with you much outside of trying to kill you. I grudgingly submit to the wisdom of the list-compilers in this case, although SS2 remains a must-play game.

A really scary must-play game. A perfect choice for some Halloween gaming, but good luck tracking down a copy….

Third… Dragon Warrior! I sometimes wonder if anybody else played this game; it’s gratifying to see it on the list. It completely consumed my life for a period of months back in the NES days; it deserves more recognition than it gets for bridging the gap between Zelda-style exploration adventure games and the later Final Fantasy-style console RPG genre. I tried re-playing this recently and found its crude and repetitive console RPG gameplay to be almost unbearable; but back in The Day it was quite something to behold. Also, this game has an absolutely beautiful and haunting soundtrack (even if it did get annoying when looped repeatedly through the NES’ speakers for hours on end). It’s the sort of music you find yourself idly whistling 15 years after you beat the game and packed the cartridge away in storage with your NES.

This game had to be one of the only ones where, upon confronting the final Bad Guy, you were given the chance to abandon your quest and conquer the world at his side. And you could actually choose! (Of course, if you chose to side with the bad guy and betray everything you’ve been working to accomplish, the game ended and played some sad music, which was sort of boring. But hey, at least it was your choice, freely made!)

I used to have the Dragon Warrior world map set as my desktop background, but after a while it started making my eyes bleed, so I reluctantly changed it.

And finally, a general comment: it’s a downright shame that almost all of these games are completely unavailable outside eBay or sketchy ‘abandonware’ sites. Book publishers and movie studios don’t let their groundbreaking titles simply disappear from general availability after a few years–but most of the classics on this list are long gone from the market. While a few of these titles (like Dragon Warrior, as I note above) are too dated to be enjoyed by most gamers today, there’s no reason that the Ultima series or Fallout should be so hard to find. Come on, Game Industry–figure out a method by which you can keep classics like these alive and available for future generations to enjoy!

And now you’ll have to excuse me. I have a date with Shodan, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.

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All alone and happy in Azeroth

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Although it’s updated somewhat sporadically, Scott Miller’s Game Matters is one of the more thought-provoking game blogs out there. While catching up on my reading there, I came across an interesting post suggesting that World of Warcraft‘s extreme popularity is due at least in part to the fact that almost alone among massively-multiplayer games, it can be played alone. Says Miller:

There’s one overriding reason I played WoW, while I never played previous MMOs: I could solo all the way to the top. Not once did I group to enter an instance. Occasionally I grouped with players in the same area doing the same quest, and occasionally with a friend to share a quest, but 95 percent of my experience was as a solo player. And that’s how I prefer it. I like to be able to jump into the game and play without waiting to form a group, getting right down to the business of fun.

It’s a relief to see somebody else admit that, because I’ve had a similar experience with WoW and have wondered how common it is. For a multiplayer game, WoW works surprisingly well as a single-player game. I enjoy grouping up with other players a bit more than Miller apparently does–when the teamwork comes together, the experience of conquering a tough dungeon as part of a group is a real thrill–but I confess I’ve rather guiltily enjoyed a lot of the game without interacting much with my fellow players.

Miller then asks the obvious question: if you’re going to play the game solo anyway, why not stick with single-player-only games like Morrowind and its ilk, and avoid paying the montly Warcraft fee? It may sound strange if you’ve not experienced it, but his answer is dead on: it’s somehow just more fun when the world is populated by “real people,” even if your interaction with said real people is quite limited. Crossing paths with other lone adventurers in the far corners of Azeroth, making my way through the teeming, diverse crowds of Orgrimmar, and knowing that the potions I’m selling at the auction house are being bought and used by other real people–there’s just an intangible thrill to it all. There’s a hard-to-define depth and sense of immersion that simply isn’t there in even the most elaborate single-player games.

So it’s good to know that on those days when I just don’t feel like interacting with other players–when I just want to hike off into the Badlands without having to chat it up with guildmates, when I don’t feel like spending an hour organizing an expedition into the Wailing Caverns–I’m not alone. Solo players of World of Warcraft, unite keep goin’ it alone!

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Some miscellanea: kung-fu fighters and not-so-scary government conspiracies

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I was in Chicago last week for a conference–and while the conference was reasonably fun, my annual trip to Games Plus was even more so. Each year, as a reward for surviving several days’ worth of networking and schmoozing at the conference, I travel to Games Plus to browse the aisles of that gaming Mecca.

My acquisition this year was Weapons of the Gods, a wuxia martial-arts game set in mythic China (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). This is one of those games I purchased at least partly so that I can boast that my gaming library includes it–my game bookshelf (OK, make that bookshelves) contains RPGs covering most every genre known to man–fantasy, sci-fi, horror, western, pulp, samurai, and various combinations thereof), but nothing that would be of much help should a group of angry gamers burst into my living room and demand that I run a mythic China RPG right now. (Hey, it could happen!)

Of course, I had brought along some RPG reading material to the conference to help me survive through the several days until my Games Plus trip. My evening reading this year consisted of Conspiracy X and the new d20 version of Dark*Matter, both of them set in the government/alien/conspiracy genre and quite clearly based heavily on The X-Files.

Both are great games, but is it just me or is the whole government-conspiracy angle decidedly less compelling than it was a decade ago? Back in the early 1990s, it was perhaps shocking to learn, when confronted with a mysterious event or sinister cover-up, that The Government was responsible. Imagine, our own government doing something shady behind the scenes! These days, I’m so jaded that I’d be shocked to hear that the government isn’t responsible for a given sinister conspiracy. Whether or not the government-conspiracy angle is still scary, I may soon find out–both CX and D*M are on the list as potential candidates for my annual Halloween Game Day.

In the meantime, I’ll try and hark back to the day when “trust no one” wasn’t a perfectly reasonable way to approach politics, government, and everyday life…

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