Drunk and In Love In The Fortress Of The Blue Dragon

Notes on the last D&D session..
-The Jackalmen of the south: Rituals, psuedoEgypt, astrology, the Lottery In Babylon, curses, golden knives, dust, robes, devouring.

-Kimberly's character has fallen in love with one of their priests.

-Kimberly also took this photo of my dice.

-Here is the key GMing issue in the upcoming session: the games are fun--chaotic and fun, but the PCs are in the blue dragon's fortress and the dragon should loom over the action, thematically, dramatically. Ferox the Incinerator has to regularly reappear in the players' minds in order for the tension to build.

-I admit, I've been falling down on that. Largely concerned with keeping the tactical chaos rolling in the last session (-Izzy: "Three different wines and D&D. I love this night! I might be drunk. Thank you swype for fixing ny fucking typos."), and a "welcome to the new location, everything is confusing" situation before that. Keeping a single objective in front of the players without spoiling the mystery of the location isn't easy.

-I think I need to make the dungeon a little more transparent than I'm used to. Just hand a few ideas about how it works over. Something simple, but which can be gamed. When the dragon's here, you can do this, when the dragon's there you can do that, you want this, the dragon wants that. The creatures relate to the dragon this way... etc

Year One Tips For Running Google + Games

Constantcon has been going on for over a year now.

Here's some tips on running games over Google+...

1. Start at a point where the players get to do something.

Please. Please do this. Please. Please. Please. Please don't ever not do this. Maybe a little infodump first, but do not make people go through any pre-conceived motions. Hangout games are relatively short, play time is precious and someone always has to go to work in 2 hours.

2. In scheduling hell? Pick one person and have them assemble a team of players. Or just say "whichever team assembles itself gets scheduled"

3. Creating a "Google Plus Event" seems like a boring, redundant thing to do, I know, but the nice thing is it automatically adjusts the time to each player's time zone.

I play with Australians.

4. 3-4 players, one GM is perfect.

More than that and you have to start choosing between the amusing cross chatter and the actually getting the game to move forward.

5. If you are running a game with like 8-9 people, clear, simple objectives immediately are helpful.

You're in a dungeon: crawl it. There's a contest: win it. There's an NPC: talk to it. Etc.

James Mal manages to run a pretty big game smoothly by going "Ok, you're in Dwimmermount, play the game".

6.

Seriously, you can explain the mechanics as they come up during the game. It works fine. Front-loading the players with stuff they don't need to know is just sucking away time you could be using to play.

7. Do not send the campaign materials.

"Ok, I'll send you the campaign materials" Please Christ no do not do that. Let me play a session first and let me decide I care about your setting before asking me to read a novella about it. Srsly yo.

But you love your campaign materials, I know.

Look at them, imagine someone not reading them. Then think of the very important play opportunities they will be missing if they do not read them. Are there any, really? Then find a way to work those things into the first session. Anything else supervital should be able to fit into a sentence or three. If you have to.

8. If it's a system your players don't know, make a custom character creation doc and make it short.

Nearly every RPG has an obnoxiously bloated stupidfatlong character generation section that sucks and was obviously written by drunk lemurs who skipped school a lot. And it definitely wasn't written with your setting or house rules in mind. Write a thing.

9. "Player Cloud" campaigns are fun and work.

So you want all your friends to play but scheduling is a Lovecraftian nightmare and besides, if everyone showed up you'd have too many players. Try having a lot of players in the campaign but only a few of them per session.

So far on G+ it's worked out really well: you put up a short play report everyone can see, players ask each other questions and kibitz, information gets traded, it works out. Your game is a bar, the players are the regulars, sometimes this guy is there, sometimes that girl is there.

This beats splitting your game into two non-overlapping groups and beats it hard enough that it may well be worth re-arranging your game structure a little to accommodate the drop-ins.

10. You don't have to ask a million questions first

High fantasy or low fantasy, guys? Basic or advanced, guys? Should there be kobolds, guys?

Exactly what kind of game do your players want? Whether they know it or not, they probably want to run the campaign you're most excited about. Honestly: we might have slight preferences, but we have no idea, do what you're good at. Do your thing as well as you can, ask your players questions about how it's working after they've seen how you run it.

11. If you need players, use the Constantcon Blog and the attached calendar.

12. There are lots of fancy aps you can run over G+. Do not rely on them, they can easily break half your players' connections.

Test your widgets some time when you're not running a game. Adopt it once you're sure it works.

13. The Screenshare button works fine and is usually the simplest solution.

That button that says "screenshare" on the upper left will allow you to show the other players contents of any window you have open on your own screen. It will appear where your head would normally be. It'll show it in real time, so if you are building a diagram in photoshop or something, the players can watch. It also stresses the players' connections out way less then having them downloads aps or visit links to see pictures or diagrams.

SHIELD, High-Priority FASERIP ALERT!!!

So I started running this...

Class 8 allied arch-villains have launched a full-scale assault on the Earth!

Modok has taken Chicago.
Ultron has taken Los Angeles.
Dr Doom has taken Washington, DC.
Kang the Conqueror has taken New York City.
Communications and news networks are failing but reports suggest that, further, outside the US:
Mandarin and the Hand have taken Beijing
The Leader has taken Moscow and
Madame Hydra has taken Berlin.

All metahumans eager to aid in the liberation of Earth should form teams of 3-4 Marvel heroes and submit a plan of attack for coordination below or directly to Director Fury via Google + message.

Be sure to include the day, time (PACIFIC DAYLIGHT, 5pm-6am), location, and 3-4 approved, licensed Marvel personnel recruited for your assault.

http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cast_list/all.htm

Approved teams will be greenlit as soon as possible.

The counterattack begins _Monday_ this week.

The war will not be easy, this may be the beginning of a multipart crossover.

___

____

-In the prelude session, Brother Voodoo, Dr Strange, Hercules and the Hulk protected some kinda crystal tachyon thing from a rampaging Goliath just before Kang took New York City. Joethelawyer is a pretty good Hulk.

-In the first session, a crack team of mercenaries hired by the Kingpin consisting of Speed Demon, Jack O'Lantern, Hobgoblin and Electro managed to slip into the city under cover of darkness and rescue President Obama in exchange for a full pardon.
-During this session it was established, by vote, that Nick Fury was the Samuel L Jackson Nick Fury. Which means mission briefings are very loud and start with "Alright motherfuckers..."

-The presence of Speed Demon made urbancrawling occupied Washington DC for the missing president a lot easier (whoever did the Speed Demon write-up over at Classic Marvel loves the fucking Speed Demon), at least until he got knocked unconscious for 8 rounds by the mutant elephant that was trying to kill the president.

-Yes, the other villains made fun of him.

-Yes they considered just holding the president for ransom Hobgoblin: "Fuck Fury. Fuck him in his other eye.""

-Decided the president's endurance was Typical (6) but his agility was Good (10) on account of having been a varsity athelete and apparently still regularly playing and my surfer-girl pal once saying she saw a picture of him body surfing and he was doing it right. Calculating his karma score was so ideologically fraught I decided to skip it.

-Tomorrow, the Spider Man, his Amazing Friends, and the Hulk try to retake Manhattan from Kang, Master of Time!

Like GMing Cats

Game Time Minus 1 Week

"Thursday, 3 0'clock?"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"So...be there at 6?"

"Hey, there's a chance we'll actually start at 3. Right? A chance? Maybe? Possibly?"

"I'll be there at 6."

Game Time Minus 1 Day

"It's simple: we'll go to Malibu in the morning and then come back and play at 3."

"Uh huh."

T Minus 3 Hours

"We got up late."

"I am shocked. Shock courses through me as it were an infestation of electric eels injected beneath the surface of my frail flesh. You go to the beach and I'll push the game back a couple hours."

_____

(text)

"Girls late beach shocking I know blah blah game at maybe 5 maybe"

"Didn't I call it at 6? I said 6."

T-Plus 2 Hours

"Hey. Are the girls here yet?"

"Of course they are not. You could text and ask them where they are and when they're showing up."

"Ok...they are on their way home and say there had better be food."

"Alright. Let my girlfriend know their disappointment with whatever food is here will be precisely inversely proportional to the specificity with which they describe the food they want."

Complexities ensue.

"Pizza."

(Despite a 66% lack of glasses. The chart will need to be amended.)

Ordered.

T Plus 3 Hours

"Ok, they are still in Malibu and Frankie's dog is having seizures and they have to take it to the animal hospital."

"Mmmmm....................(terrible thoughts about the dog)........................Well, if they do ever get here, then we can just reheat the pizza anyway. But we aren't playing, I'm thinking."

"Now Izzy and Mandy want to know if I can pick them up on the south end of Sepulveda while Frankie goes to the animal hospital."

"That's...a lot of traffic."

"They want to know if Adam could maybe do it."

"Yes but then if Adam does it, we have to stay here and not do anything else because by asking Adam to do it we are, essentially saying, Yes, Adam, There Is Actually A Game Today And Your Reward For Being A Driving Hero Is We Are Playing And You Are Not Just Transporting Everyone Around For No Reason."

"Here is what is going to happen: they are going to show up and then be all eating and drinking and being tired and talking about dog seizures and you'll go 'So are we playing?' and they'll go 'Yes! We want to play!' and then Mandy will be really tired and it'll be really short and we'll play for like ten minutes and then you'll be like 'Mandy, are you ok?' and then stop."

"Your view has merit. However: I propose an alternate scenario--they arrive, the character sheets and minis and dice are out and there's warm pizza and strong drink: Poured. Ready. We don'thave an intermediate period of decompression, we just sit down and play. It goes."

"Mmm...fair enough."

T Plus 4 Hours

"Have a drink."

"What is it?"

"Whatever that wine you asked for was..Moscato? Here, have a pizza, this is you, let's go. So: you are here, on top of this mountain, the dragon's fortress is..."

"It's Frankie. Frankie is at the animal hospital. She can't drive. Somebody has to pick her up."

T Plus 4.5 Hours

"So: you are here, on top of this mountain, the dragon's fortress is..."

"I'm tired."

"Are we doing this or are we not doing this?"

"We're doing it!"

"Yes!"

"Yes!"

"We're doing it!"

"Ok... so..."

So the ranger convinces a pterodactyl to fly a monkey to the floating dragon fortress and the monkey ties a rope and the adventurers spider climb up it except with Izzy blindfolded on account of being vulnerable to vertigo.

Then Izzy finds and manually disarms a trap, some grubs get roasted and jackalmen are slain, but only after their cursed knives have inflicted unhealable wounds.

How To Use A Copy Of Gammarauders As A Post-Apocalyptic Hexcrawl Kit

I played Gammarauders for the first time yesterday. It was fun, but it took pretty much all of the entire universe of time to play.

Point being it's gonna be hard for you to get a game together. So what do you do with your copy of Gammarauders the rest of the time? Use it as a hexcrawl kit for your Mutant Future, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, RIFTS, or Gamma World game...

Bioborgs:

These are basically animal-based Kaiju with weapons mounted on them, used as armored units in the service of various Cryptic Alliances. Let's just get it out of the way that if you don't already have gargantuan crushbeasts bristling with cruel armaments in you game, you need to get on theat

The weapon cards:

Each beast has a number of weapons it can use, each of which is on a card. The weapons have a power number between I think 3 and 10 and some weapons offers immunity to another class of weapon (say: lasers).

So say there's a random encounter in your game: here's a bad guy, and you can pretty much pull a random card from this stack and there you have a weapon doing 1d6+3 through 1d6+10 (or whatever) and you have a possibility the villain has armor (laser-resistant armor, explosive-resistant, whatevs).

The hex tiles:

As you can see in the picture, each hex is divided into a stained-glassish patchwork of areas. These are: water, regular (desert?), mountain, city, and energy-pod zone (high radiation zone).

PCs want to know where they are? Drop the first tile off the stack down, "Here's what you can see...desert here, mountain here..."

All you need then is random encounter tables for each of these environments.

The numbers in the middle of the hex tiles:

Some of the hex tiles have numbers on them: 2-12. In the game you roll 2d6 to place energy pods, in your game you can roll 2d6 for whatever the Hell your players are looking for. When the tile that has that number comes up...bing! There's the mcguffin.

Chits:

The game comes with over 100 little cardboard chits. These are all the same size, and the faces have: soldiers (in 6 colors), hovertanks (in 6 colors), jets (in 6 colors), fortresses, fortress ruins, regular ruins, symbols of cryptic alliances, and energy pods.

So you put them in a bag, close your eyes, and pull some chits out: that's what's there. You can replace the hovertanks with, say, monsters, and the jets with flying monsters. You can also work the color code into it, but then of course at that level of switch around you're getting into the abstract territory where you might as well write your own tables.

The point is you just pull something out and, hey, that's exactly the thing, no looking stuff up, no mental translation, no nothing.

After Play Report

As usual, I'm amazed at the ability of this game to trash my apartment: Wasabi peas, caramel popcorn, chairs (where did we get all these chairs? where do we keep them?), hummus, Adam's dice--left on the TV table, beef jerky, miniatures: a half-orc, a lithe Werner Klocke vampire, Mandy's mini that looks like Mandy, a sneaky blue elf, a brown-skinned half-grey elf, a pointy-hatted wizard, electrical cords and laptops (their desktops are also a chaos tonight), bottles of Dr Pepper and beer, character sheets, a drawing Frankie made of a couch with snakes, every kind of pen, my ID (why is it on the floor?), empty glasses, several pairs of black shoes, Player's Handbook, a shirt soaked in Corona, plates. Izzy is hours ahead and needs to get her xp so she can sleep, Frankie needs to talk about dog training, Connie needs a cigarette, Kimberly needs to tell us about the sniper who attacked the swimming pool on her roof, I need to write this down so I remember it:

-3 halflings met, released, ran off

-4 goblins killed, looted, with 2 warhogs, warned by shriekers

-the party ends the session under the blue dragon's fortress, planning an attack

-the dragon is 10 miles away

A Year Of Constantcon And Some Other Odds and Ends

-As of July 26, Constantcon (that is: people playing games and meeting new gamers over Google+ videochat) has been going on for a year. In honor of its anniversary, there's now a calendar of all the regular open games. If you are running a Google + game of any kind in any system and don't have your player list locked down, go ahead and add your campaign to the calendar.

-Jack's random wizard tower generator is good stuff. Not a full dungeon maker but quite enough to get the wheels spinning anyway. Though naturally I wish someone would Abulafia it. And that someone would turn it into a split-column format.

-Received LOTFP's recent horror adventure Death Love Doom in the mail. Here is a brief, but exhaustively descriptive and wholly honest and useful review. It has spoilers so I made it all white and you'll have to highlight it to read it: Death Love Doom is an adventure that has a guy that shoots magic webs out of his dick and is not happy about it. If you're into that sort of thing, buy it. If you're not, don't.

-There's apparently a video game called League of Legends and apparently 32 million people play it. That's more people than live in Peru. Not really useful game info. It just quietly blew my mind is all. At least I'd heard of Warcraft before 1% of all people were playing it.

-Got a hit on this blog from "midget porn with santa's elves from 1990"

-Review of the Takashi Miike film '13 Assassins' (now available on Netflix.) by Frankie: "Oh my god, this so honorable!"

-All the monsters from Taichara's fantastic Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons And Dragons blog. Free because DIY D&D is awesome like that. I remember liking the shadow monster in particular. Her stuff is always very visual, and feels proper exotic.