Hearts of Wulin & Pasión de las Pasiones: Origins GoD

GRINDSTONE ADJACENT

For a host of reasons May got away from me and the blog. I’ve been running games and working on several projects, so I have lots of ideas and cool stuff to post. However I’m holding off for a little bit as Origins is next week! I dig that convention for the game space, chance to meet friends, and reliable access to food.

I will be running sessions for Games on Demand at Origins. Please come by and check that our amazing selection of games. I’m scheduled Thursday morning (9-1), Thursday evening (8-12), and Saturday morning (9-1). I’ll also be manning the desk for the last possible slot, Sunday morning. I’ve got lots of free time so I’m hoping to fill in if they need coverage, run pick-up games, and hang out with people I know from online and The Gauntlet.

Please come by and say hi! If you want to coordinate something, you can send me an email at edige23 AT gmail. I actually have a phone which can check my messages. It’s a crazy revolution in decades-old technology.

I have two games on my menus for the convention:

Hearts of Wulin

Virtue vs. Villainy! Obligation vs. Passion! Justice vs. Tyranny! The heroes of Wulin battle for a better world while struggling with their own intertwined duties, desires, and destinies. You are heroes trying to serve your family, faction, or ideals. High-flying action, romantic confusions, and secret schemes abound. This game aims to emulate the high drama feel of stories like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Fox Volant of Snowy Mountain; Painted Skin; Proud, Smiling Wanderer; Princess Agents, and more. Tales of misunderstandings, betrayals, and farce mix with martial arts action.

This PbtA hack borrows liberally from Apocalypse Engine games like Masks, Monster Hearts, and The Veil. We’ll tune characters and relationships in the first hour and then throw into action-melodrama in the wulin world.

I’ve recorded some sessions of this, you can check out the most recent ones here:

Session One: https://bit.ly/2LZ894W

Session Two: https://bit.ly/2sFWTle

Pasión de las Pasiones

Pasión de las Pasiones is a PbtA tabletop role-playing game where you play the cast of the world’s most dramatic and exciting telenovela: Pasión de las Pasiones, as well as the family watching at home. In Pasión de las Pasiones, lies will be exposed, plots will be shattered, hearts will be broken, and if you’re lucky, you might even get a happy ending…at least for now.

We’re using the rules from the Magpie’s recently released ashcan of this. I love melodrama and this game has it. 

If you’re curious about this game you can see my online sessions here:

Twin Betrayals: Session One: https://bit.ly/2sJLalB

Twin Betrayals: Session Two: https://bit.ly/2kPsJs5

The Scent of Love: Session One: https://bit.ly/2JgUF2N

The Scent of Love: Session Two: https://bit.ly/2LqQpP1

I’m also bringing along a couple of “just-in-case” rpgs, including Magic, Inc which uses Action Cards and whatever else I find that looks easy to pack. I'd love the chance to run HoW a few more times for folks who are interested. 

Origins and Gauntlet Gaming

ORIGINS

Next week I’ll be running at Games on Demand: Origins. I’ve done that the last couple of years and loved it. Sherri will be with me again. Last time she played a bunch of games that made me jealous. I’ll be hosting first thing on Thursday morning, and then running Fri night, Sat morning and evening, as well as Sunday morning. If you see me, please say hi!!! I have two games on my menu: Magic, Inc and Tales from the Loop.

Magic, Inc

In the sorcerous corporation, Magic, Inc, your department lies at the bottom of the labyrinthine Org Chart. You like it that way. Your team has just managed to hang on- avoiding responsibility and blame. But doing so is hard work; you desperate transmute budgets, curse rival divisions, and make your faked resumes vanish. Can you avoid The Annual Review while getting your time-card signed? This game uses Action Cards, a card-based Fate hybrid.

Tales from the Loop

Welcome to Wayward, Ohio. You play teenagers in the late Eighties, solving Mysteries connected to the under-construction “Loop Project.” Everyday Life is full of nagging parents, never-ending homework and classmates bullying and being bullied. You will encounter the strange machines and weird creatures that have come to haunt the countryside as the Loop is being built. You can escape your everyday problems and be part of something meaningful and magical—but also dangerous.

Rich taught me to always bring a backup game or two, in case you get burnt out on one. I’ve been working on some convention-style character sheets for The Veil, a mid-point between the complexity of the playbooks and the pre-gens of the Cascade QS. I’ll probably bring that. Mutant Year Zero also might be a fun back-up since no one seems to be running it. However that takes up a lot of carrying space between core books, dice, and cards. I’m also considering Cryptomancer or Kuro.

GAUNTLET OUTLOOK

In June for the Gauntlet Hangouts I’m running Grimm (2 sessions), Robert E. Howard’s Conan (2), and Mutant: Year Zero (4 sessions). July’s all hacks and reskins. I’m running Godbound with a Scion skin (2), Masks with elements from Rotted Capes (2), and Changeling the Lost PbtA (4). Last week I figured out my August schedule, which will be an all-Fate month. For that I’m doing Base Raiders shifted to Fate Core/FAE (2), a Hellboy game using Atomic Robo, and a Game of Thrones-inspired thronewar game using Fate and borrowing from things like Wrath of the Autarch. I’m also thinking that in October I’ll do another season of World Wide Wrestling since it has five Sundays. I like scheduling things this far out because it give me some deadlines for developing the material.

I record most of the games I run and post those on my YouTube channel. I've done many interesting and niche games Legacy, Cryptomancer, Kuro, The Veil, 7th Sea 2e, Feng Shui 2, and more. If you're curious about how they play, watch the videos.

This games are all part of the Gauntlet Hangouts. If you’re interested in online rpgs, check out The Gauntlet Patreon. We schedule 40-50+ online games per month, a couple months ahead of time. Patreon backers at the $7+ level get early sign up access to those; we open them up generally a week after posting. Our Patreon supports all of our podcasts: The Gauntlet Podcast, Discern Realities, +1 Forward, Pocket-Sized Play, and Comic Strip AP. Patreon supports also get Codex, a monthly themed zine with all kinds of cool stuff. 

Recent Games: Garage Bands, Hengeyokai, and Werewolf Receptionists

Just  a single post this week; next week I’ll have the next in my History of RPG Genres. In the last month or so I’ve played a mess of games, with many more one-shots than usual. Here are my impressions, including some notes on my Origins events. 

GAUNTLET CITY

I’ve played several sessions of Rich Rogers’ "Gauntlet City Limits," a series of small press rpg sessions linked by a shared setting. Those included InSpectres, Ninja Burger, High Strung, and 1%er - The Outlaw Biker Game. I enjoyed the first two. They have absurdity without full gonzo; you maintain a role even as things get goofy. High Strung’s more serious, an rpg of local bands trying to make it big. I liked the premise, but we got tangled in the rules. When it clicked, I had a great time. I think High Strung’s a dynamite game. The mechanics aren’t exactly my bag, but it won’t be hard to adapt. It’s unique and deeper than you might imagine. If you’re at all interested in the idea of a band-based rpg, consider picking it up.

Tuesday night we did the second session of 1%er - The Outlaw Biker Game. I’m not a Sons of Anarchy fan and I wasn’t sure what it would be like. The mechanics are expletive driven. It’s a rude rule book. But unlike Human Occupied Landfill or similar games, that actually serves a purpose. Somehow it avoids being juvenile and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I enjoyed 1%er more than I would have expected. It does go brutal and nasty. I wouldn’t want to play it too often and I’d be super careful who I played with.

I also played Dungeon World and Ghost Lines, both of which I’d tried before and enjoyed. We’re getting to the end of Crowsmantle, but I don’t want to write about that until we finish it up.

ORIGINS

I played in three sessions via Games on Demand

Urban Shadows: I backed the Kickstarter for this, but avoided reading it until the hard copy arrived. I loved what I saw and dug Mark Diaz Truman’s discussion of it on the +1 Forward podcast. Still I couldn’t quite grasp the game’s shape. Mark made a compelling case for the PvP aspects of it. But that’s pretty antithetical to my usual games. Playing in a one-shot gave me perspective. I saw how those tensions could work. We didn’t manage to fully engage with some of the mechanics, like Debts, but it worked. I can see how it would evolve and emerge over time.

Later Sherri and I talked more seriously about how we’d use Urban Shadows to do a Changeling the Lost campaign. We still love that setting. US isn’t really a World of Darkness-esque game. WoD tends to be internally driven, looking at the tensions within a particular community (even when you’re running cross-monster games). Urban Shadows has multiple factions working and vying for power, more like Dresden Files. I think it could work for CtL but would require some rethinking about how you define Seemings, Kiths, and Courts.

World Wide Wrestling: I’ve mentioned before my reversal on wrestling as a concept. I’m deep into Lucha Underground now. I enjoyed reading the WWW rules and had committed to running a session for friends. But I wasn’t entirely sure what play looked like. How much did the Creative work within matches? How did the control switch feel? What did commentary look like? Beyond being tremendous fun, this session answered all those questions. We had six players at the table and we probably could have handled a couple more. My character got eliminated from the tournament in the first round, but I didn’t care. I had a great time. You have play opportunities via off-screen moments, run-ins, and color commentary. Much fun. Playing this with a sharp GM allowed me to run a great session of WWW last night.

Side note: Both of these GMs, Marissa Kelly and Nathan Paoletta respectively, put out playbooks, had us do character creation, and then spun stories from that. I’m cool with improv and zero prep at home, but I’m not brave enough yet to approach a convention game cold. My fret-itude means I need a scenario ready. They did an awesome job.

Golden Sky Stories: Sunday morning we played this light, Miyazaki-esque game. You play Hengeyokai, animal people, living in a pastoral Japanese town. It avoids mechanics for violence, instead you focus on friendship and relations to give you the power to succeed. I had a great time and I think I want to run this locally now. We had a fifteen year old GM. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: I wish I’d been as good as GM as her when I was 15. She had things together, brought energy to the table, did her table prep, and seemed completely at ease running for a group of adults. Kind of amazing.

ORIGINS SESSIONS I RAN

Magic Inc: I did two sessions of this. Despite the same scenario they ended up radically different. When I run at cons, my first session’s often the weakest. My nervousness and uncertainty get the best of me. I felt that way about this, despite having two players I’d played with before. I’ll put part of the blame on me and part on a weirdness at the table itself. For Games on Demand you list down two games on your menu. The first player to choose your table sets which of the two you’ll play. The hosts then put a large red X over the other. We had our fourth player arrive a little after we’d started, clearly distracted. We got twenty+ minutes into character creation for this game about low-level wage slaves in a supernatural corporation. At that point the fourth player looked up and said, “I thought this was a game about ninjas.” We had to explain we’d chosen the other game.

We rolled on, but it put me a little off balance. Magic, Inc’s a comedy game. Three of the players bought into and listened to the others. I try to run comedic games as straight as I can- putting absurdity out there with a straight face. And, I don’t know exactly how to put this, our fourth player was a little tone deaf. He’d drop a joke and then when he got no reaction from it, he repeated it again and again to salvage it. We got through the session, but I pedaled furiously to make it go faster. I cut corners in my nervousness and I could have done a much better job.

For my second session on Saturday evening I determined to facilitate better. We had a great table of four players, one of whom had been among my local group years before. That session was awesome. I can usually keep a straight face when I run, but here I absolutely lost it. It has no real meaning out of context, but when I turned back to the department’s salesperson and said, “OK so you have twelve Mars Bars painted yellow,” it blew up. The table literally laughed hard enough we brought the neighboring games to a halt. The receptionist player had to get up and walk away from the table to recover. It took me several minutes before I caught my breath. A good session and one of my favorites of the convention.

Side Note: I need to clip down some of the character creation options. Each character deck has some strengths & weaknesses, but those aren’t immediately obvious. I should have done basic skill picks, with a couple of extra ranks for players to distribute. That would cut the time. Alternately or additionally I need to provide a ranking for each deck. If it’s a strong physical deck I should mention that and how the other three areas rate. I could also cut some choices, just by one or two for the “Stunts” and “Keys”. That would slightly reduce time and put more weight on their picks. This is mostly an issue for Magic Inc, as I’ve made the NSV choices pretty tight.

Neo Shinobi Vendetta: I dug this session immensely. John Alexander had play

ed in my NSV scenario last year and given me great feedback. Most of the changes I’d made came from that (moving to action faster, card-based damage). I also got to run for Yoshi Creel, a great gamer I played with in the WWW and Urban Shadows sessions. An awesome trio from Canada rounded things out. Everyone got into their role, they came up with sharp plans, and they played up their awesomeness. They gave me the high-octane cyber-ninja session I’d hoped for and everyone had at least one signature moment that stuck with me.

Overall I really enjoyed Origins, much more so because Sherri went with me this time. We had a great line up of GMs and I had the opportunity to talk with some people I only knew through G+. I also have to give a major shout-out to Evan Torner who oversaw the Games on Demand scheduling. After my Thursday session he came over and asked how things went. He talked me down and made me feel better about it. I then monopolized his time further, making him tell me about some of the awesome academic work he’s doing. He filled me in on many aspects of European Westerns, especially a connection German connections I had no idea about. It was great learning things in addition to playing games. 

RPG Bits: Origins, Campaign Shifts, and Beyond

1. ORIGINS
I’ll be at Origins in a few weeks. If you see me please say hello. I'm usually terrible at introducing myself to people I know via G+ or elsewhere, but I'm going to try my best. Sherri will be with me so the con will, by definition, be awesome. I have a massive wishlist of things I want to play. I’m running at Games on Demand and I’m scheduled for at least the Thursday 8PM and Saturday 8PM slots. I’ve submitted two events:

NEO SHINOBI VENDETTA
Keep to the shadows! Your cyber-ninja clan has been betrayed, mind-controlled, and used to serve sinister ends. The Mega-Zaibatsus behind this have concealed their role…until now. Your cell, hidden even from fellow shinobi, stalk through Neo-Kyoto. You plan, plot, and carefully strike from the darkness.

But sometimes things go wrong. Like now.

If it is the will of The Illustrious Orbital Mikado, you will survive! Uses Action Cards, a card-based Fate hybrid.

MAGIC, INC
In the sorcerous corporation, Magic, Inc, your department lies at the bottom of the labyrinthine Org Chart. You like it that way. Your team has just managed to hang on- avoiding responsibility and blame. But doing so is hard work; you desperate transmute budgets, curse rival divisions, and make your faked resumes vanish. Can you avoid The Annual Review while getting your time-card signed?

Uses Action Cards, a card-based Fate hybrid.

If you're at the con, consider playing in one of those. I put together new decks and received the last of those from DriveThru Cards this week. I’m super excited. I’m also taking Kingdom plus some pick-up board games.

2. CAMPAIGN TURNSTILE
Of course since that’s coming up, everything else has to get more complicated. We just began the Assassins of the Golden Age arc for Ocean City Interface. On Saturday characters hit the table, doing the legwork and plotting for their operation. They're ensuring their candidate gets elected to the High Council of Genoa. We’re also speeding towards the finale of Guards of Abashan. Last week they discovered alternate timelines had begun to bleed through into the city. The group made their made through various eras of occupation, heading for the showdown with the last of the Three “Evil” Sorcerers. I have to decide what games I'll put forward after that wraps. I have four or five ideas. 

We also did session eight of ten for Crowsmantle last night. That ended with the group attempting a rescue operation but being captured instead. Rich will run after we wrap that campaign. Finally we should be starting my Wednesday Mutants & Masterminds game soon, probably right after Origins. I’m going to begin with a Microscope session covering the span between the campaigns. We're moving to the Third Edition rules so I need to do another read-through of those to prepare. 

3. LUCHA WUNDERLAND
I’m seriously considering how to actually do the Monster of the Week/World Wide Wrestling mash-up. I need to figure out when I’d run it and how.

4. ACTION CARDS
I hope to have a "Beta" document for Action Cards available soon on DriveThru. By Beta, I mean truly rough, but enough to a run a game from. I’m about halfway through the first editing pass, plus I have a couple of small sections to complete. I want to have it ready and posted before Origins. I’ll talk more about that if I actually get it done.

5. PLAY ON TARGET
We’re recording new episodes of Play on Target this coming Friday. The first will cover Loot! in all of its forms. We’ll consider kinds of loot, treasure distribution, and what it all means from player & GM perspectives. Our second show will look at “Games Ahead Their Time.” We started with the idea of games containing new mechanics that only caught on much later. I suspect we’ll expand the topic when we get to the recording. Suggestions & Questions are welcome.

6. THE GENERIC-NESS
Finally, if I can push through, I hope to have the next installment of the History of Generic RPGs up by Thursday. It may be later, but I want to release that by the end of May. For the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing “Greatest Hits” posts on the blog. I'll take older pieces that I like or that others dug and add some new commentary. Ideally that will be easy, but I know how I operate and suspect I’ll overdo it.

IF YOU’RE AT ORIGINS STOP BY AND SAY HI! Hopefully my normal social anxiety will be minimal.

Origins Stories: Running, Playing, and Eating at the Con (Not Necessarily in that Order)

My Origins started several weeks before the actual show. We were lucky enough to host the EuroGeek RPGGeek contingent as they toured the “lovely” Midwest. Sherri and I took advantage of this impetus to do a major clean up and reorder of the house: we cleared the previously messy back basement, rear porch, and sun room; I patched, sanded, and repainted sections of the woodwork; I stripped and re-caulked the tub; and I cleaned and refinished the floors downstairs. We looked at our various linens and towels only to realize the most were eight years old and some we'd actually brought into the marriage in the '90's. So we finally bought new ones...soft, comfy new ones. Finally we loaded up the house with miscellaneous food treats, working to accommodate the various requirements. We made vegetarian chili, three salsas, and three kinds of cookie dough. We also laid in a great deal of beer- which ultimately led to my tire blowing on the highway (a story for another time).

Long story shorter: IT WAS AWESOME. THEY WERE AWESOME. I HAD AN AWESOME TIME.

You can read Jules' write-up of the events here: an overview, the boardgames we played, and the session of Guards of Abashan I ran for them.

They arrived late on Saturday and on Wednesday we took off for Origins. Bad planning on our part meant Sherri couldn’t go with us. And as amazing as Origins 2015 was, it would have been mega-awesome with her there as well.

Note: I didn't take pictures, so I pilfered everyone else's. 

Since this is my 992^nd post I’m filling these entries with countdowns as we head to 1000, therefore....

NINE THINGS ABOUT AWESOME ORIGINS 2015

1. I had a really solid time at Games on Demand Gen Con 2014. In fact, I’m pretty sure I said it was the best con experience I’d ever had. Origins topped that. Some awesome came from having a larger pool of friends and people I knew around. More came from my being less tense and more willing to play in interesting games. At this GoD I tried an Aliens hack of Torchbearer, Hope Inhumanity, and Wrath of the Autarch (which I’ll come back to). I got to play with some amazing people, including Dana Fried and Kira Magrann, both of whom I knew from my G+ feed.

2. Both my sessions of Action Cards went off. I had great players in both sessions, including Steven DesJardins, who’d played Guards of Abashan twice online and got to run his rogue again. Pamela Alexander and John Alexander played in both sessions. They owned the table and gave me great feedback on elements of the system. I also got to run f2f for Rich Rogers- something I was immensely nervous about. I loved running these sessions and learned a lot.I've been running a long time, so I'm always happy when I pick up new approaches and concepts. 

3. The dealers hall was the weakest part of the show. I picked up paper versions of a couple of rpgs I wanted (Monster of the Week 2e and World Wide Wrestling). I also finally broke down and bought Agents of SMERSH, a board game Id wanted for some time. It had been OOP whenever I'd hunted for it, so took the plunge. Most other things I had on my list just weren’t there: ding & dent board games; older Ars Magica stuff; mats for Wings of Glory; Mutant Year Zero; and the Stone Age expansion (sold out).

4. The food’s amazing at Origins: varied, reasonable, and easy to get. Unlike Gen Con each meal isn’t a trial. The North Market continues to amaze with excellent curry and decent BBQ. The “Slow Foods” place served me the weakest meal (which I can only describe as a salt burger with salt). I’ll skip that in favor of something else next time. I also went to a Mongolian BBQ place twice- which managed to sate everyone’s food proclivities. While there I fanboy’d at Tom Vassal while he waited for the rest of his party to return to the table. The only bad food moment came in discovering that Barley's no longer carried Blenheim Ginger Ale. 

5. Both of my hotel roommates were Pathfinder dudes. I heard a lot about Pathfinder that weekend and I made sure to check how their events went. Notably neither of them ever asked about my games or what I played.

6. I got the chance to talk to Phil Lewis several times. He told us about his project, Wrath of the Autarch. I’d seen the cover image from that pop up in my feed several times. To paraphrase his description it's a card-driven, kingdom management, troupe-style game, powered by Fate. That pretty much ticks off everything on my personal list. I got the chance to see some of it in action Thursday evening and I dug it. It has amazing ideas and mechanics running through it. And I’m not just saying that to be polite and because he gave me a print out of the rules. I run a seasonal, family-level Legend of the Five Rings campaign using Action Cards. I’d struggled with a handling development, resources, and trade. I came up with some quick fixes, but WotA has a set of smart approaches that I’m going to steal adapt. I also love the way the game establishes problems through the Deck of Fate elements. Sherri and I spent an hour going through the book the evening I got back from Origins. I’ll be backing this project the moment it pops up on a Crowdfunding site. 

7. For years I’ve heard that Lady Blackbird’s amazing. The hype made it sound up my alley, but for some reason I’d hadn’t given it more than a cursory glance. We played it on Friday. It kicked ass. That’s all I have to say.

....Well, I have a little more to say. Getting to hang out a bunch with Rich Rogers was a highlight of the convention. He’s sharp online and just as sharp in person, as well as funny and generous. He’s a dynamite off-the-cuff GM and I picked up many things from watching him. He uses his physical space really, really well and fully engages with his characters. Plus he threw around several pop culture references that I got while others did not, so that’s ego-boosting. His rare rants were artisanal and perfect. Rich played a ton of games and also ran Goblintown and Ghost Lines in addition to Lady Blackbird. I've been thinking about the latter game ever since he evoked the setting at the table. Rich is a cool dude and I can see why Dr. Tom the Frog hired him.

8. As well I got to play Microscope and a short game of Dread, both of which I dug. I met many amazing gamers; I’m probably going to overlook many of them- Matt Downey, Rishi Agrawal, Nicholas Hopkins, Justin Rogers, Jonna, Jan, Jules, Jonna’s friend Alex, Mick Bradley, and on & on. You can see me screaming for some reason in the picture. I saw other amazing people I knew from G+, but I'm terrible at introducing myself to strangers...

9. Based on comments from Origins (and some pre-Origins requests), I’ll be getting together a Beta-version of Action Cards in the next few weeks, hopefully by mid-July. That will include basic system mechanics, character creation, and general guidelines aimed at players familiar with Fate. I’ll likely post that on DriveThru, including the various deck set-ups I’ve put together. I have a GM deck, Consequence cards, standard play sets (with player-fillable cards), and draft sets for a couple of genres.