Since last September we've been playing Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path using Strands of Fate rules. It had its highs and lows, survived the Christmas/New Year season and all that. What really stuck us, though, was flu season. Between my daughter being sick, my wife being sick, and our GM being sick, as we approached our fourth Sunday with no Kingmaker (we did take some of those sessions to get some much-needed board game time in) it was decided that the campaign was going back on the shelf for a while. The GM, belonging to a theater company, was about to start a show anyhow and that was going to take much of his time.
We hadn't really made firm plans going forward as far as roleplaying was concerned. One of the players that used to GM and I discussed an anthology campaign where we all had the same characters but we'd rotate GMs for short story arcs. But we never really nailed anything down.
Then I had an idea. I texted it out to the group to see what they thought of it.
"I had an idea for a Burning Wheel game. Make it close to late
medieval/early renaissance in tech. Strip the fantasy races, maybe a
little magic, but use the corruption rules. Maybe some faith magic too,
or maybe not. The game would be set in a huge port city on a
Mediterranean-like sea that acts as the trade hub between the different
cultures that have developed on this sea.
There was a guy in the
city that had managed to bring all of the city's underworld guilds,
gangs, and pirates under his control. This ended decades of lawless
chaos, but made crime nearly impossible to combat.
Yesterday was that man's funeral."
I learned about Burning Wheel about five years ago from a mention on the Dragon's Landing Inn podcast. It was the first game I learned about from a podcast that really grabbed my attention. Keep in mind that although I have the five core Revised Edition books and the Gold edition of Burning Wheel, I've still never had the chance to play it.
As we got together this week we played some boardgames as well as Microscope. Microscope is RPG-ish, it's really a set of cooperative world-building rules. You establish the premise, set up a beginning and and ending to the era of time you're creating, set up some of the world's dos and don'ts, and then take turns establishing themes, periods of time, and events to that era. It's fun. We ran my short, little text through the Microscope machine to help define the setting that we'll soon be playing in.
Below are the results of our Microscope session. There's some jargon involved, if curious feel free to ask what it means.
Premise
A port city thrives through corruption and crime.
Add:
-Criminal Guilds
-Tall ships
-Early gunpowder
-Fantastic races
-Slavery
-Social castes
-External political pressure
-Zealots
Ban:
-Non-corrupting magic
-Fantastic creatures
-Monotheism
Legacies
The Plentiful Catch; The Corruption Goes Unnoticed; Marriage Between Social Castes
Period 1: Traders establish settlement at natural harbor. (Good)
Event 1.1: Arrival of the "Dark Swords" crime syndicate. (Bad)
Event 1.2: The traders arm select men with newly imported blunderbusses to protect the citizens. (Good)
Period 2: Era of the Plentiful Catch. (Good)
Event 2.1: The early seers point toward the richest and most plentiful fishing waters. (Good)
Scene 2.1.1: Who convinced the fishers' guild to haul in the fish despite them knowing they had been corrupted? A traveller from the distant lands, doubted due to his mysterious nature. But the results of his methods speak for themselves. (Good)
Event 2.2: The boom in the fishing trade creates wealthy families from fishers and merchants. (Good)
Event 2.3: "The Plentiful Catch" was the groundwork for the power structure in the city. (Good)
Event 2.4: The Waterman's marry their daughter to the Lancaster's son. (Good)
Scene 2.4.1: Why did the Waterman's refuse to marry their daughter to the son of Ohmid? Ohmid's son, Corva, is a "renowned" thief in the minds of the populace. (Bad)
Event 2.5: The first great storm. Many blame it on the fishermen seeking dark methods to increase their catch. (Bad)
Period 3: War Amongst the Guilds. (Bad)
Event 3.1: As the waters become overfished, the fishermans' guild turns its eyes to maintaining control of the city. (Bad)
Event 3.2: Young Ewan learns bookkeeping from his father, a clerk for the fishermans' guild. (Good)
Event 3.3: A fire burns most of the city to the ground. (Bad)
Event 3.4: Using what he learned from his late father, Ewan founds the Tradesmens' Guild to unite assorted tradesmen against the aristocracy. (Good)
Event 3.5: Ewan befriends a man named Ajan, known in his homeland as Ajan the Dark, the man that helps him further his control into the darker guilds. (Good)
Period 4: Death of "Lord" Ewan. (Bad)
Event 4.1: Seeking allies in the struggle against the workers, the nobles turn to the dark magic of the old gods. (Bad)
Scene 4.1.1: Why would nobles embrace old magic? The influence of an overseas cult recently arrived. The nobles did not see the havoc caused by the cult in their homeland. (Bad)
Event 4.2: The renegade arm of the "Dark Swords" are defeated by the assasination of their leader, Relath IV. (Good)
Event 4.3: The people riot when inter-caste marriages are declared annulled. (Bad)
And that's where we left. It was a relatively short session of Microscope, we each only took one pass as the Lens. There's so much left to be explored in the back story and we haven't even established a scale for the timeline. And if we decide to come back to it with Microscope, we'll be adding events and periods in between the ones we have now, changing the context of what we have. But for now I'm going to begin piecing this together for our campaign. It will be a challenge because Burning Wheel is very outside of the box for what I'm used to. But it should be fun.
Burning Wheel's website
Microscope's website
Monday, April 8, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
WorldMaker: Settling on Setting and Merging Ideas
Hey everyone! I hope your 2013 has started off with great games, or at least the anticipation of them.
In my last WorldMaker post I talked about having two world ideas that were competing for my immediate attention. One being my take on an all-comers D&Desque world, and the second being a more intimate setting focused on intrigue. I decided to begin developing the second world. I'm calling it Drann. Oh, and Drann is on Aedora (my D&D world, a-yeh-dora). THAT'S MADNESS!!! Probably, but there's actually a solid reason for it. Drann fits perfectly into Aedora's prehistory.
In my last WorldMaker post I talked about having two world ideas that were competing for my immediate attention. One being my take on an all-comers D&Desque world, and the second being a more intimate setting focused on intrigue. I decided to begin developing the second world. I'm calling it Drann. Oh, and Drann is on Aedora (my D&D world, a-yeh-dora). THAT'S MADNESS!!! Probably, but there's actually a solid reason for it. Drann fits perfectly into Aedora's prehistory.
A bit on Aedora's creation: it was
formed by an overdeity. This overdeity was a PC of mine long, long
ago that gained omnipotence. Once that happened he ceased being a PC
or even an NPC in that GM's cosmology. No record of him ever
existing because he never did as far as the current fiction of those
realities are concerned (though our gaming stories certainly say
otherwise). He became the overdeity of my cosmology. He has
complete agency and omnipotence in my world, though he lacks
omniscience. His name is Tsalmaveth (sal-muh-veth).
As he created the universe in which
Aedora exists, he created for himself a companion named Naldrea
(nal-dray-uh). He creates a celestial plane for her to live in,
gives her the essence of Creation, and then leaves “for a short
while” (eons and eons, but what's that to an eternal agent).
Naldrea, feeling the instinct of motherhood, creates a race of beings
called the oestaua (oh-es-ta-wa). After millions of years the
oestaua plan a conspiracy to claim Naldrea's godhood for themselves.
Upon Tsalmaveth's return...well, let's just say bad things happen to
them. It's the fallout from this that creates the New World, elves,
man, dwarves, gods, planes, dragons, magic; all that good stuff that
we already know and love.
While this will still technically be
the same planet, the two “worlds” will be very far apart in time
and tone that each one could be ran for a number of years in real
time and would never intrude on one another. The biggest mechanical
change will be in character options which right now are ideas that
have not yet been given form by way of mechanics.
Now I've settled the wheres and the
whens. Next time I'll start lining up the things that I'm looking to
do in building the race and giving the different bloodlines some
thematic and mechanical distinctions.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Marvel vs. DC: A Tale of Two Deck Builders
Today I attended the monthly Saturday board game meet up at a local church, BoardGamers of Michiana. Anymore, this is where I go to play new boardgames, I more or less consider it a proving ground for games I'd be interested in acquiring. In the last couple of years I've had to adjust my priorities in what I want in a board from "I think I want that" to "do I like it and will my wife play it with me". So I've been getting leaner games and honestly I'm perfectly fine with that. I had been champing at the bit to play both of the deck builders based on the popular comic book publishers and there was a guy there that had both and I got to play them. Score.
I'll tackle DC first. My previous experience in deck builders has mostly been Dominion, the Ascension iOS app, and Quarriors (it's my blog so I'm going to say it qualifies). DC's game favors Dominion, but has shades of Ascension. Like Ascension, the cards available to buy are laid out on the table and as they are picked up, they are replaced by new cards from the common deck. Also like Ascension, you aren't limited in the number of cards you can buy and play. Ok, it has more in common with Ascension than I thought at first blush. It favors Dominion in the sense that there is only one resource, Power. Power allows you to buy Heroes, Super Powers, Equipment, and Locations, as well as defeat Villains and Super Villains.
In typical deck building fashion buying/defeating a card lets you put it in your discard pile for future use. They have more advanced levels of Power as well as provide the game with the rules exceptions that you'd expect from a game like this.
Each player comes into the game with their Hero. This isn't a card that you shuffle into your deck, it's an over sized card that you set off to the side that grants you your own rules exception for the game.
Game pacing is determined by the stack of Super Villains. There is always a Super Villain available to be defeated along with anything from the queue of cards from the common stack. When a new Super Villain is revealed it executes its power against every player in the game, from that point on he just sits there waiting to be defeated. Once defeated he'll go into the victorious player's discard pile like anything else. When played their effects tend to be very worth the effort of defeating him. Once the pile of Super Villains is cleared the game is over. Every card has a point value from Weaknesses (giving its owner a -1 to their final score) to Super Villains (which tend to be around 5 points).
Something that was pointed out to me during play was that the backs of these cards do not indicate that they are a DC game. They are a stylized rendering of the game publisher's logo, Cryptozoic. This leads me to believe that, while I'm sure they could come out with box after box of DC expansions for this game, they plan on capitalizing on other properties. They do have the current license for the WoW TCG and I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on other properties as well.
I'm not typically a huge fan of kitchen sink games, but a game where Batman is running around wielding Frostmourne? Yeah, I'm gonna be the guy that falls for that.
Marvel Legendary had a little bit more going on in it. Unlike DC, where you're all playing to win against each other, it is entirely possible for the game to beat the players in Legendary. Assuming the players win, there is still a final point tally to see which of the players is the winner (although in a more care bear environment I can see that particular post-game procedure being left out). The players all lose if the Villain achieves their scheme. Our Villain was Magneto and his scheme was to acquire the Cosmic Cube (schemes are chosen by randomized cards and aren't necessarily thematically appropriate to the Villain).
In Legendary the conceit is that you're part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you're trying to draft heroes to the cause of defeating the Villain. There are two types of resources that, in lieu of their technical terms, I'll call combat power and buying power. When prepping the game Heroes are chosen at random to form the Hero deck. When a Hero is chosen for the Hero deck all of that character's power cards are shuffled in with all of the other Heroes' power cards. At the beginning of the game the tableau of Hero cards is filled, waiting to be bought by the players. After a player takes his turn, the tableau is restocked.
There is a track immediately above the tableau for the Hero cards that gets filled with villains. The Villain deck is built similarly to the Hero deck, but instead of being a list of powers specific to the Villain (as the Hero cards are), a stack of Villain cards is done by theme of affiliation. So there won't be a powerset for the Juggernaut, but there will be a set of cards for the Brotherhood where you'll find Juggernaut, Mystique, Sabertooth, and all of the usual suspects.
So when a player begins his turn he places a Villain card on the first available space on the villain track and then proceeds to buy assets with his buying resource and defeating villains with his combat resource.
Like I said, Legendary has a lot more little moving parts than DC does. And one play through certainly isn't enough to provide a detailed review of how the game plays. I'm not doing the game justice. So if this makes no sense to you, I apologize. And I realize that this whole thing was written assuming that the reader has the context of Dominion or Ascension in mind.
If you were to ask me point blank which one was better, I'd have to say Legendary. The game is more thematic than DC (which honestly feels like an abstract with pretty DC pictures) and there's more game there to consider. I'm more of a Marvel fan than DC in general, but if the mechanics of the two games were reversed I wouldn't feel like Marvel got shafted. They're both good, just service a different complexity of deck-builder.
Bah! This is turning into a mess so I'll just leave you with this...
Excelsior!
I'll tackle DC first. My previous experience in deck builders has mostly been Dominion, the Ascension iOS app, and Quarriors (it's my blog so I'm going to say it qualifies). DC's game favors Dominion, but has shades of Ascension. Like Ascension, the cards available to buy are laid out on the table and as they are picked up, they are replaced by new cards from the common deck. Also like Ascension, you aren't limited in the number of cards you can buy and play. Ok, it has more in common with Ascension than I thought at first blush. It favors Dominion in the sense that there is only one resource, Power. Power allows you to buy Heroes, Super Powers, Equipment, and Locations, as well as defeat Villains and Super Villains.
In typical deck building fashion buying/defeating a card lets you put it in your discard pile for future use. They have more advanced levels of Power as well as provide the game with the rules exceptions that you'd expect from a game like this.
Each player comes into the game with their Hero. This isn't a card that you shuffle into your deck, it's an over sized card that you set off to the side that grants you your own rules exception for the game.
Game pacing is determined by the stack of Super Villains. There is always a Super Villain available to be defeated along with anything from the queue of cards from the common stack. When a new Super Villain is revealed it executes its power against every player in the game, from that point on he just sits there waiting to be defeated. Once defeated he'll go into the victorious player's discard pile like anything else. When played their effects tend to be very worth the effort of defeating him. Once the pile of Super Villains is cleared the game is over. Every card has a point value from Weaknesses (giving its owner a -1 to their final score) to Super Villains (which tend to be around 5 points).
Something that was pointed out to me during play was that the backs of these cards do not indicate that they are a DC game. They are a stylized rendering of the game publisher's logo, Cryptozoic. This leads me to believe that, while I'm sure they could come out with box after box of DC expansions for this game, they plan on capitalizing on other properties. They do have the current license for the WoW TCG and I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on other properties as well.
I'm not typically a huge fan of kitchen sink games, but a game where Batman is running around wielding Frostmourne? Yeah, I'm gonna be the guy that falls for that.
Marvel Legendary had a little bit more going on in it. Unlike DC, where you're all playing to win against each other, it is entirely possible for the game to beat the players in Legendary. Assuming the players win, there is still a final point tally to see which of the players is the winner (although in a more care bear environment I can see that particular post-game procedure being left out). The players all lose if the Villain achieves their scheme. Our Villain was Magneto and his scheme was to acquire the Cosmic Cube (schemes are chosen by randomized cards and aren't necessarily thematically appropriate to the Villain).
In Legendary the conceit is that you're part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you're trying to draft heroes to the cause of defeating the Villain. There are two types of resources that, in lieu of their technical terms, I'll call combat power and buying power. When prepping the game Heroes are chosen at random to form the Hero deck. When a Hero is chosen for the Hero deck all of that character's power cards are shuffled in with all of the other Heroes' power cards. At the beginning of the game the tableau of Hero cards is filled, waiting to be bought by the players. After a player takes his turn, the tableau is restocked.
There is a track immediately above the tableau for the Hero cards that gets filled with villains. The Villain deck is built similarly to the Hero deck, but instead of being a list of powers specific to the Villain (as the Hero cards are), a stack of Villain cards is done by theme of affiliation. So there won't be a powerset for the Juggernaut, but there will be a set of cards for the Brotherhood where you'll find Juggernaut, Mystique, Sabertooth, and all of the usual suspects.
So when a player begins his turn he places a Villain card on the first available space on the villain track and then proceeds to buy assets with his buying resource and defeating villains with his combat resource.
Like I said, Legendary has a lot more little moving parts than DC does. And one play through certainly isn't enough to provide a detailed review of how the game plays. I'm not doing the game justice. So if this makes no sense to you, I apologize. And I realize that this whole thing was written assuming that the reader has the context of Dominion or Ascension in mind.
If you were to ask me point blank which one was better, I'd have to say Legendary. The game is more thematic than DC (which honestly feels like an abstract with pretty DC pictures) and there's more game there to consider. I'm more of a Marvel fan than DC in general, but if the mechanics of the two games were reversed I wouldn't feel like Marvel got shafted. They're both good, just service a different complexity of deck-builder.
Bah! This is turning into a mess so I'll just leave you with this...
Excelsior!
Thursday, December 27, 2012
WorldMaker: In Which I Mull My Two Competing World Ideas
I have a couple of different world
ideas that I've recently been considering. The first one is my White
Whale, Aedora. It's a world I named better than 10 years ago, but
never really gave it “final” form. I've drawn and redrawn maps.
Developed and redeveloped its origin. Drafted lists of deities.
Redrafted lists of deities. Same with races and nations and magic,
etc. And each time I decide that this is it, I'm going to
finally sit down and make this thing work, I go back to the
ever-growing notebooks-turned-computer-files of notes. Each
edition's worth of notes being added to the collection. The idea is
that with enough time and drafting I can turn it all into a cohesive
thing.
My problem is one of scope. In its
current form Aedora has three continents, all three with their long
histories, kingdoms, legends, myths. Well, that's the idea. I don't
actually have them. I want it to be my iconic world, my
Forgotten Realms. I want to make that world that my friends and I
are still playing in when we're in our 40's and 50's (since we're all
in our early 30's now, with one guy being in his early 40's). I'm
not under any illusion that this is going to be some huge, published
phenomenon. I just want a huge tapestry to call my own.
Realistically, I'm approaching it wrong and I know that. My biggest
stumbling block is the fact that I have no restrictions. The canvas
is wide open to do what I want with as many little building blocks as
I can get my hands on, but the sheer number of options is
overwhelming.
The second of my ideas is really just
me stealing a bunch of stuff from other people (which is pretty much
what having an idea is anyhow). The scope of this world is far, far
smaller and is happy to be about one thing to the exclusion of all
the other types of fantasy. It's essentially what I imagine Houses
of the Blooded more or less is in tone based on what I've heard and
what little I've read. Take in some of the structure of Vampire: The
Requiem, and shades of A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones by
its more popular name) mix it all up and that's what you get.
From Houses I'm taking the idea that
the PCs are playing a literally superior race. They're smarter,
stronger, (you can make the argument that they won't be wiser). From
Vampire I'm taking the notions of Clans and Covenants. Though I'll
probably use the term bloodlines instead of clans, royal families
will have some kind of powers prescribed to them on top of having
superior stats. Covenants are something that I really like from VTR.
They are the political and philosophical affiliations you have.
There's so much potential in pitting characters' personal beliefs and
affiliations against family obligations in a culture where bloodlines
are ostensibly the thrust of political power (which is where you get
your Game of Thrones).
Those are the two competing ideas I'm
thinking about right now. The first one is largely inspired by my
gaming history. My cousin was (and still is) my GM, and he's got 25
years worth of binders full of histories and gaming sessions to fill
out his worlds. Huge, epic stories full of fighting gods, becoming
gods, destroying and birthing planes, getting duped by demons, become
Dark Lords (and thus becoming NPCs). And I know these stories start
small and end up huge organically, at least when you're building
worlds for the purpose of campaigns. The second idea is designed to
ratchet up the intrigue. It's not meant to be an expansive world.
On the power scale it's much smaller. Grounded in the real with just
a touch of something extra. One built on plot, the other built on
relationships.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Welcome to the Space!
My name is Nick and I love games. It's an addiction and the first step to getting better is more games...obviously. I often call myself a polygamist. Poly meaning many and gamist meaning a player of games. I love talking about games but often times find that I'm actually supplying both sides of those conversations because, well, I'm by myself. So I'm going to take a(nother) stab at a blog. My first blog attempt was aimed at RPGs specifically. My second was about my Warmachine/Hordes hobby (henceforth referred to as WarmaHordes). They've languished in Nowhereland for a good, long while and I wanted a clean break from them. Also, I don't want to pigeonhole myself as far as the content of my blog. I want to address board and card games, and the occasional video game if I choose (I probably won't).
I also listen to a lot of podcasts, the vast majority of which are game related. I may use this blog to respond to, or further explain my thoughts about, the topics of a given podcast. I am, in the words of Sean Nittner (http://narrativecontrol.libsyn.com/), "continuing the conversation".
Actually, to steal another catchphrase from Sean, I pretty much plan on "talking about my gaming experiences". I don't plan on writing much about game theory/philosophy, unless it's in response to something. I plan on keeping it practical. What I'm doing, what I plan on doing, how I'm going to do it. Practical.
Anyhow, that's this blog in a nutshell. I hope others out there will find it relatable and possibly helpful.
I also listen to a lot of podcasts, the vast majority of which are game related. I may use this blog to respond to, or further explain my thoughts about, the topics of a given podcast. I am, in the words of Sean Nittner (http://narrativecontrol.libsyn.com/), "continuing the conversation".
Actually, to steal another catchphrase from Sean, I pretty much plan on "talking about my gaming experiences". I don't plan on writing much about game theory/philosophy, unless it's in response to something. I plan on keeping it practical. What I'm doing, what I plan on doing, how I'm going to do it. Practical.
Anyhow, that's this blog in a nutshell. I hope others out there will find it relatable and possibly helpful.
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