General Gaming Goodness

Between finally taking a vacation last week and this week being super busy (as first weeks back from vacation invariably are), it's been a bit since the last post.  I figured it worthwhile to give a few updates about my gaming-related life and where I'm at with certain things.

Burning Wheel Witcher 3 Setting Hack!

The first thing I'll address is what's garnered the most interest up to this point, which is the Witcher 3 setting hack that I talked about a bit in one of my last posts.  Unfortunately, in perusing the Codex a bit more, it turns out that the rules for creating your own monsters, traits, and lifepaths were not carried over from the previous editions of the The Monster Burner.  For this I say boo, as this was one of the biggest things I was looking forward to when the Codex was announced, and for it to not be included is kind of super disappointing.

However, what I DID find after some online snooping was the worksheets for trait burning and monster burning.  The two biggest hurdles for the Witcher setting are determining the correct traits for the witcher transformation process, and the skills and traits for the various folklore monsters.  Using these worksheets, I've started trying to piece together some of these details, which I hope to have to share within the next week or so.

My Game!

Some of the distraction from my witcher project has been due to the progression of the game that I've been working on designing.  It's my first real attempt at designing my own system, and I've been shocked at how it's been going on.  Originally, the game was inspired by non-fantastic games centered around ordinary folk, pushed forth by my desire to create a game about kid-to-teenager life and the perils therein.  Seeing games in this vein being worked on like Damn the Man, Save the Music and Sarah Richardson/Magpie Games' Velvet Glove hasn't cooled that thought at all.  As such, I took a lot of inspiration from Paul Czege's wonderful Nicotine Girls game, which provided some of the framework for the character generation and some terms. 

However, as I've been moving forward, the game has moved from being a hack to it's own system, which has been very exciting.  I've reached the point where I'm just about ready to start playtesting, which is both thrilling and terrifying.  But hopefully I'll have some tests soon, and then I may reach out to some of my far-off internet gaming friends to try and run some playtests for me.

Games I Wanna Play!

As is always the case with gamers, I have more games than I have time or people to play with. Out of these games, though, there is one I've been reading and thinking a lot about lately, which is Hannah Shaffer's Questlandia. I first heard about this game at PAX East this past year and saw Hannah's display as part of the lumpley/Make Big Things/everybody from Massachusetts booth, but whenever I walked by she seemed to be tied up talking to somebody, so I didn't get a chance to inquire further about it (probably a great problem to have, as a game designer).  I did make sure to grab one of her fancy bookmarks for the game and researched it a bit following the convention.  The game, which for those unfamiliar, is a GM-less collaborative world-building game of sorts, I found super interesting and kind of outside of anything else I've run into in gaming to this point.  

Not having much available cash (I'm having a baby finally!), I couldn't scoop this one up as quickly as I wanted, but fortuitously enough Make Big Things offered it for free for Free RPG Day and I grabbed the digital version until I have the free scratch to pick up a physical copy like I always need to do.  Actually having the game rules and seeing how it helps with such deep collaboration only made me more fascinated.  While it clearly functions as a game in and of itself, what I find most compelling is how well it can tie into any other game for a campaign.  Seriously - for any system you enjoy or want to start a new game with, start first with a session or two of Questlandia to flesh out the setting.  You can pull characters and world details from that game into the next when you move systems, and having that as a jumping off point for a campaign is bananas awesome to me.

Cons!

I've been itching to go to a gaming convention lately, most likely due to my regular groups dropping off due to scheduling and life.  However, we're kind of outside of the big con seasons, and unfortunately I missed almost all of them besides PAX East.  There is the Boston Festival of Indie Games coming up in the next few weeks, which I've been debating heading down for.  It seems to be more tabletop and video games than roleplaying, but I still think I'll end up heading down.  While I'm clearly more of a roleplaying geek, there are still some appealing board games and indie video games I get into from time to time, and at worst it'll be a chance to hang out with some new gamer people.  I do need to make it a mission to attend JiffyCon next year though.

Anyway, hopefully there will be some more substantial progress with the things I'm working on soon.

Getting My Wheels Burning

Busy and productive week this has been!  After months of trying toying with the idea of various different game designs and hitting various walls with each one, I had a random bit of inspiration the end of last week, and put together the early parts of a new game!  It's obviously still very raw, but I'm very excited with the shape that it's taken so far.  I gathered up some additional materials that I'll need, and I think the next step is to actually start some playtesting.  I've never hit this stage with a game before, so this is all very exciting.  Once I get a bit father along, I'll likely try to recruit some additional playtesters to get some more eyes on it.  But still, progress.

Also very exciting is the fact that I received my Kickstarter copy of the Burning Wheel Codex.  For those unaware, the Codex is a sort of rerelease of the original books that made up the original Burning Wheel set but weren't included in Gold - specifically, the Monster Burner, Adventure Burner, and the Magic Burner.

The Burning Wheel Codex

So not that I finally have the complete rules in hand, I've been pouring through everything pretty regularly.  The essays contained in the Adventure Burner in particular have been fantastic to go through, with a lot of great advice on running the game itself and some pretty rad ideas of gaming and GMing as a whole.

Anyway, the biggest upside of all the information contained in the Codex is that now I have better tools for making a setting to run a campaign!  Outside of the people I've played with online, the majority of the people I play (and I think a lot of casual gamers in general) are more likely to get behind the idea of a new game or campaign based on the setting.  So which one is the best to explore with my fancy new books?

Banner Saga
This one is partially on me playing this one recently, or rather Banner Saga 2, but I think from a Burning Wheel standpoint there are a lot of awesome possibilities.  The setting itself is pretty close to the out-the-box Sagas of the Icelanders game, but with enough distinctions that I think there would be a lot missed running in that system.  In particular, I think BW allows for really trying to flesh out the hulking Varl.  Still, pretty niche audience I think for the most part.

Elder Scrolls
In keeping with the northern European but not quite viking high fantasy idea, the Elder Scrolls series provides some great options for running a game I think.  The setting itself is incredibly fleshed out, which is a benefit as well as a bit of constraint, as there's more room for butting up against canon in terms of campaigns.  Not the hugest deal in the world, but something to think about.  The other question in using the Tamriel is settling on the primary province of the game, and how that will affect mechanics.  Skyrim?  At least one person is going to want to play as a dragonborn, meaning shouts will need to be fleshed out.  There's also a much greater number of race options that will need to be determined.  The various man and mer races are likely to be covered by limiting and tweaks various existing lifepaths, but what about the kaihjit?  Or the argonians?  Some heavy lifting would be required here.

Which, I think, brings me to my most likely setting for a future Burning Wheel game.

Witcher 3
I'll confess something here:  I have Witcher 3.  I've played Witcher 3.  I have, as of yet, been unable to really get into Witcher 3.  This is largely to due with the control schemes of the game itself, particularly when it comes to combat.  For whatever reason, the game is very counter-intuitive to my play style when it comes to video games.  However, what is inarguable is that I do find the game world itself incredibly fascinating, well developed, and (perhaps most importantly for my purposes here) open.

There's a lot of generic in Witcher 3 that I think it would be simple enough to try and convert to a default setting like Burning Wheel's, and likely without much fuss.  Are there towns in Witcher 3?  Are there important characters?  Yes, of course.  But while I know many players could tell you there's a character named The Bloody Baron, I would think fewer would be able to tell you what the name of his town is.  I'm a fairly reactionary GM - I plan scenarios, I'm good at interpreting player action and coming up with creative responses to that action, even if I didn't plan anything ahead of time.  Where I am very weak is in carefully planning out encounters and fleshing out the meticulous details of a world.  I'm perfectly fine referring to a town as "that place we went where the duke killed his wife while we were there" in my groups, and I'm much more apt to remember that than the name of the town anyway.

That being said, it doesn't mean there's no work to be done in order to convert Burning Wheel's default setting framework over to Witcher 3.  For one thing, there's a lot of limiting of the available character races.  Dwarves would make sense given their roles in the game, elves would be iffy I think, but no orcs.  Really I would ideally limit the PC choices to human and dwarf.  Then, assuming the players are mostly planning on playing witchers, there need to be some specific traits made up.  Witchers are sterile in game terms, and also have their unique cat eyes that allow them to see the magic secrets in the world around them, so there's some call-on or die traits to be dealt with there.

Where the Codex really caught my eye as it relates to the way magic and the witchers actually tackling supernatural creatures would be handled.  The game is largely based around northern European folklore, so the system works perfectly there with the Folklore skill.  Players can use that to try and discern remedies and charms for combating various ghouls and beasts, very similar in that regard to how the story progresses in the actual game.  The bigger question relates to how the game would handle magic.  The game has witches and the like in it, so there are some spells there, but by and large the witchers themselves have only a handful of magical powers to work with.  These come off less like true spells in the traditional RPG sense and more general skills that happen to be magical in nature.

This, I think, would be something best covered by using the Art Magic rules rather than the standard sorcery rules built into the system.  For the most part, the spells like Igni and such would be covered pretty well by the various functions of the Sorcery skill under the Art Magic rules, maybe with some slight tweaking and interpretation.  The big thing is that, in trying to emulate the game world, the witchers less learn new spells as they do improve their existing powers, which grow in strength as they go on.  In that sense, it seems to me to work better to just have a single skill, broken into different schools of magic in order to allow a bit more customization opportunity and less ability to munchkin as much, and having that skill improve through play as the game wears on.  Plus, then we don't have to constantly remember exact spell names and functions (again, planning and details aren't exactly my thing).

This will take some time and some percolating as far as the specifics go, but I think there's enough here to work with.  Once I get things fleshed out a bit more, I'll try and post some of my tweaks and such for anybody else out there who'd like to run their own Witcher game.

As always, thanks for reading.

Timely & Efficient Posting

So this has been a busy week games-wise, what with Gen Con going on and the 2016 #RPGaDay.  I've also personally had a busy game week this week - ran another session of Stars Without Number Sunday night, did some Mouse Guard prep yesterday (although tonight's session unfortunately ended up being cancelled), and got to get introduced to a bunch of new roleplaying friends through Epidiah Ravacol's Google+ post, so no complaints on that end.

I started mulling over this post yesterday, and I honestly wish I had gotten it up then because it dovetails pretty nicely with day two of RPG a Day.  For those unfamiliar, the #RPGaDay hashtag posts a different discussion topic everyday during the month of August for us roleplaying nuts to come together and talk about.  Yesterday's topic was "Best game session since August 2015?"  So I'll call it close enough and post a day late.

Interestingly enough, last week's session for my Mouse Guard campaign was completely accidentally one of the best single sessions that the group has had to this point.  This same group just came off probably our best campaign stretch where they helped a group of female outcasts from Grasslake set up their own community, which I've posted a bit about before.  This ended up culminating with the patrol meeting up and forming a relationship with a civilization of moles that exists in the Wilds east of the Territories, and then fending off an army of weasels lead by a sable warlord.  Needless to say, it set some pretty high expectations for the following year in-game.

This year I've set up something slightly different.  Coming off a merchant escort run in early spring, the patrol needed to clear the northern shores of crabs that were causing shipwrecks and shutting down trade routes.  However, during this adventure the patrol found that one of the wrecked ships had been carrying a suspicious shipment of weapons.  Following sessions saw them take the investigation east to the port cities where the ships had come from, and followed the trail back west to where the weapons were headed.  Turns out that the weapons shipment was being funneled to help fuel a long-overdue rebellion in Elmoss, where things had gotten so dire that the merchant leaders had begun gleaning wages off of the citizens to keep things afloat.  Somewhat unsurprisingly given the patrol's history by this point, my players jumped in on aiding the rebellion rather than trying to shut it down.

This is where it's gotten interesting, though, and the Big Moment that I honestly did not realize was the Big Moment when I did the prep.  The leader of the Elmoss rebellion, a young but hardened leader of a lass, didn't fully trust the patrol's intentions and was hesitant to involve them further in the coup.  She therefore (following a failed Persuasion test to convince her they were on the up and up) gave them a mission to help prove themselves: coming from Copperwood was a shipment of food and supplies to act as relief to the mice of Elmoss.  The patrol needed to ensure that shipment never reached Elmoss in order to keep the citizens hungry for change, both literally and figuratively.

When I originally designed the mission, I had assumed that this would be a covered by a test or two during the Player's Turn - it was a possibly twist, and I honestly didn't even consider this as being something that needed to be addressed during the GM Turn.  I was shocked when this revelation completely halted the game (in a good way).  As their table chatter went on though, I realized that this twist managed to hit on each of their Beliefs in some way or another.  For reference, the group's Beliefs are as follows:

• Never back down, never give up.
• The needs of the many outweigh those of the few.
• Always work to better myself and others.

The logic behind the rebellion leader's giving them this task is very important to understanding why this became such an internal struggle for the patrol.  In the 1E canon, Elmoss' government was originally set up when the city was a thriving supply hub for the western Territories.  However, once many of those towns began falling during the Weasel War, Elmoss began to fall in power and influence.  The government, though, made up of the heads of each trade practiced in the city, remained the same, and became a huge burden to the citizens of the town.  In the rebellion leader's mind, this rebellion had been coming for far too long, and now that she had the citizens ready to pull it off, the relief supplies would cool their heads and the coup would miss its window.  

The first mouse (the patrol leader) understood this logic right away, and knew the danger - these mice were finally on the door of real change, and something like this might turn them away from their goal.  The second part of his Belief really shown here, not wanting to see the rebellion in any danger of falling apart, even if it meant he needed to do something questionable and that mice might suffer for it.  The second mouse and third mice were the ones that really were struggling with what was going on.  For the second mouse who strives to work for the greater good, who represents the few?  Is the need for rebellion among the Elmoss mice forcing permanent change greater than the need for them to feed their families?  Is providing food really buying time and avoiding danger for an small oppressive elite?  Similarly, the mouse looking to make herself and others better had quite the quandary on her paws.  Is the betterment of the Elmoss mice really with overthrowing their antiquated government in a bloody coup?  Can she honestly view herself as taking the steps towards her goal of bettering herself by denying starving mice food?

Ordinarily with this kind of conflict among the group, I would have moved this into an inter-patrol Argument Conflict to resolve it, but there was really one side and two questions.  Two of the three were having such an internal debate over what was the right course of action that there didn't seem to be enough to combat against the one mouse who was game for sabotaging the shipment.  They might get there on their own eventually.  In the end, I at least got them to agree that we would address the shipment in the next session so we could finish out the rest of the mission, so it'll be interesting to see what the end result is and how they handle everything.

While the session itself was interesting enough, it was really this moment that stood out as one of the best I've had in my gaming history.  I am slightly bothered that it came about so unintentionally, and that I didn't recognize ahead of time what the situation actually represented for the players, but such is a learning experience as a GM for a game like this.  I am at the least very happy that I got to be a part of the moment.