"The Game's About What The Game Has Rules About"

There are still people who believe this even though poker doesn't have rules for bluffing.

I could write a thing but Natalie already did it.

That thing Natalie wrote should be required reading for every single person whose ever even pretended to be a game designer ever.

It is so good and so smart and so right and I have to link to it like twice a month because even people who are professional full-time game designers think stuff like "Well if there's 8 pages of rules about cars and only one page about kissing it's a game about cars".

It's so sad.

If those System Matters essays spawned a whole website and then a whole forum and then a whole game design community then this essay deserves a whole continent to itself.

That is all.

Dueling Rules + Available Vornheim Hardcopies

FIRST THING...

It's getting pretty hard to find a physical copy of my RPG book, Vornheim: The Complete City Kit. This is nice because it means people want them but it's a drag because that book was designed to work best as a physical book.

You can't get them from the publisher any more, but here are a few distributors that still have hard copies:

Indie Press Revolution

FRP Games

Paizo

CoolStuffInc

And these guys in Europe...

There you go.

Lemme know if you know any place else that has one or if any of these sell out.

PDFs, as usual, available here.

____

SECOND THING...

DUELING RULES:

DUELS

While the standard combat system works well for the kinds of battles that usually come up in a game, it can be a little abstract for describing blow-by-blow fights with only two characters involved. These optional rules can be used to add grit and texture to formal conflict between paired combatants.

-Combat begins and proceeds as normal, remembering that either party may surrender at any time, however...

-When dueling, a character may drop no lower than zero hit points.

-At zero hit points, the character may still act normally but each successful hit inflicted by the enemy on a character already at zero inflicts an injury from the Dueling Injuries table below in lieu of hit point damage.

-If a character takes the same injury twice (i.e. the same number is rolled twice during the same duel) that character is unconscious (or dead, depending on what the local rules are). This is why the injury table is short--while a longer one might provide more room for various entertainingly grisly injuries, this one is designed to keep duels to a reasonable length and to keep each roll of the dice near the end of a duel feeling tense.

-Feel free to assume that "ordinary" magical healing after the duel will remove the mechanical effects of any dueling injury. However: whether the injuries leave scars on the affected parts of either combatant and what these scars look like is entirely up to the player controlling the winner of the duel. That is, if the winner decides that the wound to her own character's left eye leaves a scar like a dagger and the scar on her opponent's leg looks like a hippopotamus with butterfly wings, then that's what it looks like. So don't lose.

Duelling Injuries

1-Eye (-2 to anything involving seeing)

2-Left arm (or "off" arm) (-1 to most tasks)

3-Right arm (or favored arm) (-2 to most tasks)

4-Right leg (move at 50%, always lose initiative)

5-Left leg (move at 50%, always lose initiative)

6-Weapon or other worn item (attackers choice) destroyed

2012 in Game Stuff

Realized Secret Santicore was really good.
Speculated what 5e should look like.
Wrote a GM questionnaire, people answered it.
Saw my players fight ice monkeys.
Realized A Book of Beasts by TH White was really good.
Wrote an essay about people who love rules. Made people who love rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote random tables.
Told RPG companies to hire more women. At least one of them listened.
Played Dwimmermount with James Maliszewski. Fun.
Moebius died.
Thrown off Story-Games.com.
Got GMed by Satine. Twice.
Wrote a called shot mechanic.
Jeff stopped running his Wessex campaign. Everyone angry.
Wrote a superhero story game. It passed the time.
Wrote a Chill hack for Call of Cthulu consisting of one rule. It worked really well.
Wrote an essay about people who need rules. Made people who need rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Explained that, no, really, I got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Discovered blogger's Batmanalytic feature:

Wrote a story game using playing cards. Fun enough.

Had International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.

Got interviewed on some podcasts.

Half-bird ranger died in the home game.

Found an excellent RPG-thing carrying case at the antique mall in Medina, Ohio.

Realized the One Page Dungeons this year were really good.

Explained how 'GM Fiat' actually works. Angry mail. Trolls.

Wrote alternate fighters, rangers and thieves for old-style D&Ds.

Played Burning Wheel, had fun, wrote about it. Angry mail. Trolls.

Had an idea about a couple story-games and their connection to wargames. Angry mail. Trolls.

Interviewed author of one of those games. He said the idea made sense to him.

Interviewed authors of the old Marvel Superheroes game and the new one simultaneously.

Talked with people about Sword & Sorcery vs Anime Sci Fantasy. Angry mail. trolls.

Hello? Gammarauders?

Made that:

One year anniversary of ConstantCon.
Ran a lot of FASERIP games on-line. World partially saved. Northwest Russia annihilated.
Hired by LOTFP to write an Alice-In-Wonderland thing.
Realized that was going to be awesome.
Invented a PCs-in-the-middle-of-a-mass-battle mechanic (refining Pendragon).
Invented a PCs-crawling-on-big-monsters mechanic (refining Scrap Princess).
Party druid wrote an article about sexual harassment. Roundly lauded by people who'd previously claimed our game group appearing in the media was "bad for women".
Said Google + was becoming the best forum for talking about games. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote some notes on Dungeon World. Angry mail. Trolls.
Won a prize for game thing I wrote.
Went to video game conference about it. Got interviewed a lot.
Saved some FLAILSNAILS PCs from imprisonment in Castle Amber.
DMed for a college game design class.
Thoroughly enjoyed Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Played 4e for charity (again).
Made that:

Invented a sci fi storygame specifically designed to work in G+ hangouts. Passed the time.
Made the RPG Speedcyclopedia.
Hacked Deities and Demigods so you could use it at the table.
Hacked Carcosa so I could use it at my table.
Wrote about my favorite Adrian Smith picture.
Made a Random Villain Generator. Dave abulafia'd it.
Players faced a maximum age maximum size blue dragon. Survived.
Played Night's Black Agent's with Kenneth Hite. Fun.
Made up Murdermaze G+ game. Fun.
Made up Warlords of Vornheim G+ game. More fun.
Ran Cthulhu on Christmas.
Played in Vertique, Hill Cantons, Trash Planet, Cocanha, The Vats of Mazarin, The Malicrux Sector, HUSK, Aggravaina, Scrap Princess' game wherever that is, NGR Kazakhstan, Castle Nicodemus, The Caves of Myrddin, and Outland.
GMed my players from the Horrible Ice Monkey Cave across the sea to the Cobalt Reach and the Fortress of Ferox the Incinerator.
Saw the Goblin King of Gaxen Kane hire a gang of G+ FLAILSNAILERS to hunt down my home group.

Most fun game to GM: Mmmmm...maybe this one?

This one had its charm, too.

Most fun game to GM on G+: Warlords of Vornheim. (Session 1, Joe's maxed out FLAILSNAILS wizard gets killed by a catapult crit in round 1.) Close second to Chill of Cthulhu.

Most fun game to be a player in in real life: NBA with Kenneth Hite or 4e with Satine.

Most fun game to be a player in on G+: It's very close, but Jeff's Wessex games or the Murdermaze games Scrap and Joey ran. Though it's a reallll close run thing with a lot of other games.

West of the Blue Dragon's Fortress

War witches, radiation, old machines.

Did You Know...

...Secret Santicore has its own blog?

I did not know that. Well it does.

Here it is.

Here is my favorite thing I found so far, from the Hansel and Gretel adventure...:

HEY THIS CAGE, WHAT IS IN IT?

(insert macguffin npc’s here as needed)

D12

1.goblin,kobold or other small humanoid

2.Stray orphan or mostly unwanted peasant child

3.Child of someone who has stuff, like a noble or a dwarven Boozelord

4.A busting fat piggy!

5. Halfling Minstrel

6. Sheep in a Dress

7-12:empty!

What is Secret Santicore you ask?

Oh everyone sends someone their requests for RPG material to a central someone and then that somebody mixes all the requests up and sends them out to the requesters, who then complete whatever task they get.

Here's last year's.

_

These things remind me I haven't read all the cool free stuff out there yet.

Does anyone have a One Page Dungeon from last year's One Page Dungeon contest they particularly liked? Leave a comment saying which one and, most importantly,  explaining why you liked it.

Behind The Unappealing Cover Of This Dull Brown Module...

Currently working my way through Matt Finch's Spire of Iron and Crystal and Rob Conley's Scourge of the Demon Wolf. Maybe one day I'll get around to talking about them. Meantime here's my take on James Raggi's module God That Crawls.

 -The whole thing looks terribly professional. The basement aesthetic of LOTFP stuff from just a few years ago has been totally annihilated. There are still a few typos buried in there but what're you gonna do?

-That said, it's taken me this long to read it because it has possibly the worst cover in the history of RPGs. By no means poorly executed, I hasten to add, but radiantly lame anyway. It's a bunch of pilgrim-looking thanksgiving losers in brown walking beneath brown clouds toward a brown church. Pretty much every synonym for boring in the mostly very boring history of western painting and every single thing D&D adventurers go adventuring to get away from packed into one small rectangle. James: why on earth did you make Jason Rainville paint that?  Luckily: Jason's considerable technical chops are put to much better use on the Tales of the Scarecrow cover, so you can rip that off and glue it on here.

-So anyway, this plus the title The God That Crawls and the slimness of the volume suggests what you'll be getting is a very professional exercise in a single (Cthulhu-via-Carcosa-esque) monster against a backdrop of boring pilgrims.

-That impression is incorrect.

-Here's what you actually get:

A framing story of how a monster got in a place.

An explanation of how the villagers around it act.

A description of the monster and its schtick.

A dungeon with a nicely functional-looking map.

A lot of rooms with intriguingly weird things in them.

-Here's the best bit: these parts are written and presented in such a way that they can very easily be ripped out of this adventure without using any of the others.

You could easily...

...use the backstory without this specific dungeon or monster,
...use the villagers without the weird rooms and just have a simple horror one-shot,
...use the map and rooms without the main monster and its modus and just have a dungeon,
...use the backstory and modus for a different kind of monster,
...use the monster's schtick in a different dungeon,
...use the monster's schtick and all of this dungeon plus add stuff to make a bigger dungeon more interesting,
...use the room descriptions as a "list of weird rooms/items"*

Some dungeons you can't do this with because things are too interconnected: rooms and ideas rely for their functionality and significance on other rooms or the overall graphic and information design obscures which parts are cleanly detachable.

Now full disclosure. Not only was my copy of God free, but a team of amphibious caribou in black metal corpse paint haul a sackful of beer money from the far Finnish tundra and deposit it on my doorstep quarterly courtesy of the modules' author, so maybe I have no integrity and am lying to you all, but I tell you this: several things from this book are being copied from it into next week's adventure for my group as we speak, including the nifty map rooms and the fragmentary spellbook (which reads like a pulpified collaboration between JL Borges and Grant Morrison).

The overall tone does somewhat harken back to the rich weird dark vein James hit with his earlier thing  Death Frost Doom, though with an overlay of occasional gonzoness and researched pseudohistory that, for me,  alternates between intriguing and moodkilling. DFD--my favorite published one shot--was of a piece in a way you didn't really want to tear apart--this one is a bit more of grab bag.

-People think of Raggi and think "things that will kill you for touching them". I'm starting to notice another theme: he's interested in effects that only matter in campaign play. Like a lot of the tricks and curses won't necessarily make a difference right there in the dungeon trying to solve that dungeon's problems, but will change the nature of the campaign going forward--luck mechanics, stat changes, attracting unwanted attention, etc.

-Also: I hack everything. But as-is and uncannibalized it still looks like it'd run pretty decent, barring any kind of logistical hangups buried in the map that I haven't discovered. I'd put it up there in Challenge of the Frog Idol territory.




*(You also get what I strongly suspect is a pixelbitch puzzle for history obsessives, but solving it's not essential to understanding or surviving the adventure.)

Chainmail Bikinis And Parkinson's Law

Why is sexism in the game world blamed on pictures and games instead of things like economics, power dynamics, unequal distribution of decision-making power, hiring practices, Cold War era education priorities, history, and other far-ranging systemic stuff?

(Or substitute, say, "is sexism in the game world" for "are mass shootings".)

Short answer is:

People are stupid and are more confident and excited about having opinions on simple things than complicated things.

Longer answer:

Parkinson's Law of Triviality

(wikipedia)

First mentioned in Cyril Northcote Parkinson's 1957 book Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration,^[3] which has subsequently seen many editions, the concept was presented as a corollary of his broader "Parkinson's law" spoof of management. He dramatizes this "law of triviality" with the example of a committee's deliberations on an atomic reactor, contrasting it to deliberations on a bicycle shed. As he put it: "The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."^[3] A reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those that work on it understand it. On the other hand, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add a touch and show personal contribution.^[4]

And for those of you hoping this was about Keith Parkinson...