Five Furious Fists Of Gaming
Feb. 18th, 2004 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004I got to meet Nora tonight! She is a cutie, a little round ball, except for her wrinkly feet with long monkey-like toes. I think you could make a wish on her feet, but of course her feet would twist your words and the wish would turn out evil. I had a nice chat with her Mommy & Daddy, too. Daddy's next spy game is diabolical, though still a work in progress. Right now it sounds like it will combine the simplicity of a LeCarre trilogy with the quickness of learning Bridge and the ease of ad libbing your own spy novel. But I'm looking forward to it.
Our pod is obviously in one of those creative cycles right now with a ton of neat RPG ideas being floated and not much actual gaming being done. Here I will add to the glut and do nothing to solve it, by describing five game ideas that have colonized my own headspace lately. But this isn't hot air. I'd run any one of these within the month if I had confirmed players. (Probably.) Which is not to say I'm not looking forward to all the groovy games everyone else has been proposing. Once again I ask in wonderment: what do the people (I presume some exist) who don't fantasize at length about teen superspies and glam-rock aliens and SoCal vampire slayers spend all their time thinking about? Reality TV? Jeez, what a way to live your life.
Spaghetti Eastern (Trollbabe without Trollbabes)
I've wanted to return to Trollbabe ever since we played it. It's true that some of our group said "fun, but what's the big deal?" after I ran one game of this. I respect that, but I do think there's something powerful in the rules that our one session didn't bring out. It's a game where failures do not postpone the story, they create it, and where the characters are defined entirely by their choices and their relationships, rather than by their equipment and their skills. If you can look past the, well, trollbabes, it seems to me a powerful engine for generating stories, particularly in the wandering ronin / gunslinger mode. But the fact that's it about giant women with horns and big 80s hair just distances people and opens the door to goofiness. So my current samurai kick, and in particular the Tomoe Gozen books, make me want to go back to the source, and use the Trollbabe engine to play the feminist samurai classic Kurosawa never made. Minimal in setting, intense in execution—a ballad of honor and blood as sparse and affecting as a zen haiku. The player characters would be masterless samurai in a mythic minimalist Japan. I would drop the trollbabe angle entirely, although I would keep the rule that all PCs are female: a) in order to problematize genre fantasies of gender and power, and b) because sword-fighting Asian babes are teh h0ttiez!
Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Wuxia Charnel Gods)
But there's another way I could get my Asian gaming fix. If Spaghetti Eastern is a haiku in Japanese steel, Battle Without Honor or Humanity is a Chinese opera of thunder and gore. Here's one of the original blurbs for Charnel Gods: "Imagine a fantasy world built on the backs of dead gods. Imagine that vile, unimaginable horrors are trying to claw their way up through that mound of divine corpses, to burst forth into the mortal world, all wet and glistening from their grisly journey. Imagine that the last gift the gods left man was an arsenal of sentient weapons, whose one driving goal is to keep piling corpses upon the world, so as to hinder the progress of the blasphemous things from below." Which isn't actually an accurate description of what the game is about, but it's a vivid image, and it does get across the testosteroney, heavy metal carnage, Elric and Stormbringer pomposity of the game. I'd set it in the swollen capital of a mythic decadent China, make the players masters of mighty monkish clans, and unleash every demented nightmare of wuxia horror on the world.
Starchildren: The Musical (Glam-Rock Alien Revolution)
No, I haven't forgotten my promise to run this: the game of glam-rock alien revolution against the dystopian thought controllers of 2074. And I still think I want to use Hero Quest for the system. But I'm definitely in a state of having too many ideas about the style, not enough ideas about the plot. I'll have to have a powwow with the players over what kind of stories people want: scrappy garage rockers reaching for their first big break? Decadent rock idols on the long pills-and-booze slide to the bottom? Musical-memetic revolutionaries determined to smash the synarchist state? Spacey androgynous aliens straining to comprehend this thing called love? Heck, some of the PCs could side with the bad guys: the beautiful fascists, Mother's Little Helpers, the secret police and agent provocateurs of the dreaded Ministry of Sound.
The goal for this would be to recreate the lush illogic of a rock opera in RPG form. So it's all about sounds and visuals. The canon setting is 70s glitter—Ziggy Stardust et al, though one could also imagine the P-Funk or some kind of heavy metal Monster of Rock along for the ride—pitted against that dreary 1980s dystopia the British do so well—1984, V For Vendetta, The Wall. I have a vision of an entire society dressed in British school uniforms: 50-year old salary boys trudging to work in short pants and beanies. But then other style elements keep trying to slip in: the P-Funk cosmology, Darkness videos, those 80s club kid pictures![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
narcissime posted, the Harajuku / Fruits fashion scene, some kind of lush Bollywood Sutra-Funk dealie. (And if all this just sounds like a random mush of terms to you, well therein lies my challenge.)
Father of Night (Soviet Hellboy Delta Green Dark Supers Pulp)
In the trackless wastes of Siberia, in the coldest days of the Cold War, in the paranoid mirror land that was Stalinist Russia, the players are Spetsialni Viedotstvo 8, a more secret than secret team of Soviet mutants, oddities, and altered humans. They fight a desperate double war for the Motherland against both the black science of the West and the eldritch evil at the heart of the Soviet state. So it's like Hellboy's BPRD or maybe Doom Patrol set in the Cold War USSR. The world of Delta Green spliced with the tone of Hellboy—pulpy, but dark. This springs fromsneech515's discussion of Soviet superheroes, from Bruce Baugh's observation that silver age comics worked best when they were still part horror comics, and from my desire to do something new with the Delta Green secret history, which I love. Can't you just see the crumbling hidden passages of the Kremlin as rendered by Mike Mignola? Or Baba Yaga, embodiment of Russia's darkest forests, as our heroes' secret patron? And looming over everything, the grim mustachioed visage of the Father of Night—Stalin, whom the corpse-eating ghouls worship as The Great Provider.
(I'm not sure about system. This would seem to be perfect for Wild Talents if that ever comes out (I have the playtest rules) and if some of the alleged hiccups in the One Roll Engine have been ironed out.)
Black History Month (Hitean Reality Quake Elseworlds Sci-Fi Superspies)
This is reality war. There are thousands of alternate worlds, none of them fixed. Quantum events create superimposed alternate histories whose champions do battle across time and times. The PCs hop from alternity to alternity, firing clioactive depth charges into the past, shattering some realities, defending others, seeking to unwrite their enemies' very existence before the same is done to them. But the histories that created them are never solid. The past is a battleground and each eimic shockwave changes everything.
Basically this is the alternate earths game, the time-shattering hyper-action movie I've been polishing for ages. I broke Jeremiah's Rule of Ten Mentions some time ago. So I really do have to run it. I just hope it hasn't become a solipsistic obsession that interests only me. I can't explain the game as well as I can picture it—so can I run it? Put less dramatically, this set up lets me indulge every wild alternate setting I can invent or steal, while the players get to be parachronic bad-asses, playing god with history, as long as they can remember who they are and what they're fighting for. So often the goal in time travel stories is to set things back the way they were. But I think that takes half the fun out of it. Who says this is the best of all possible worlds? Originally I imagined the PCs for this as overpowered superheroes a la The Authority. But Chris' magisterial Omega Event game covered that ground so nicely I'm now thinking of the heroes as shiny 21st century super-science-spies with a power level closer to Planetary.
...
Comments n' queries, cheers n' jeers, darts n' laurels, kicks n' kudos, slaps n' bennies welcome. Remember, kids: game ideas are like little fairies that need your love to live. When they don't get LJ comments, the fairies die... and it's all your fault.
Our pod is obviously in one of those creative cycles right now with a ton of neat RPG ideas being floated and not much actual gaming being done. Here I will add to the glut and do nothing to solve it, by describing five game ideas that have colonized my own headspace lately. But this isn't hot air. I'd run any one of these within the month if I had confirmed players. (Probably.) Which is not to say I'm not looking forward to all the groovy games everyone else has been proposing. Once again I ask in wonderment: what do the people (I presume some exist) who don't fantasize at length about teen superspies and glam-rock aliens and SoCal vampire slayers spend all their time thinking about? Reality TV? Jeez, what a way to live your life.
Spaghetti Eastern (Trollbabe without Trollbabes)
I've wanted to return to Trollbabe ever since we played it. It's true that some of our group said "fun, but what's the big deal?" after I ran one game of this. I respect that, but I do think there's something powerful in the rules that our one session didn't bring out. It's a game where failures do not postpone the story, they create it, and where the characters are defined entirely by their choices and their relationships, rather than by their equipment and their skills. If you can look past the, well, trollbabes, it seems to me a powerful engine for generating stories, particularly in the wandering ronin / gunslinger mode. But the fact that's it about giant women with horns and big 80s hair just distances people and opens the door to goofiness. So my current samurai kick, and in particular the Tomoe Gozen books, make me want to go back to the source, and use the Trollbabe engine to play the feminist samurai classic Kurosawa never made. Minimal in setting, intense in execution—a ballad of honor and blood as sparse and affecting as a zen haiku. The player characters would be masterless samurai in a mythic minimalist Japan. I would drop the trollbabe angle entirely, although I would keep the rule that all PCs are female: a) in order to problematize genre fantasies of gender and power, and b) because sword-fighting Asian babes are teh h0ttiez!
Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Wuxia Charnel Gods)
But there's another way I could get my Asian gaming fix. If Spaghetti Eastern is a haiku in Japanese steel, Battle Without Honor or Humanity is a Chinese opera of thunder and gore. Here's one of the original blurbs for Charnel Gods: "Imagine a fantasy world built on the backs of dead gods. Imagine that vile, unimaginable horrors are trying to claw their way up through that mound of divine corpses, to burst forth into the mortal world, all wet and glistening from their grisly journey. Imagine that the last gift the gods left man was an arsenal of sentient weapons, whose one driving goal is to keep piling corpses upon the world, so as to hinder the progress of the blasphemous things from below." Which isn't actually an accurate description of what the game is about, but it's a vivid image, and it does get across the testosteroney, heavy metal carnage, Elric and Stormbringer pomposity of the game. I'd set it in the swollen capital of a mythic decadent China, make the players masters of mighty monkish clans, and unleash every demented nightmare of wuxia horror on the world.
Starchildren: The Musical (Glam-Rock Alien Revolution)
No, I haven't forgotten my promise to run this: the game of glam-rock alien revolution against the dystopian thought controllers of 2074. And I still think I want to use Hero Quest for the system. But I'm definitely in a state of having too many ideas about the style, not enough ideas about the plot. I'll have to have a powwow with the players over what kind of stories people want: scrappy garage rockers reaching for their first big break? Decadent rock idols on the long pills-and-booze slide to the bottom? Musical-memetic revolutionaries determined to smash the synarchist state? Spacey androgynous aliens straining to comprehend this thing called love? Heck, some of the PCs could side with the bad guys: the beautiful fascists, Mother's Little Helpers, the secret police and agent provocateurs of the dreaded Ministry of Sound.
The goal for this would be to recreate the lush illogic of a rock opera in RPG form. So it's all about sounds and visuals. The canon setting is 70s glitter—Ziggy Stardust et al, though one could also imagine the P-Funk or some kind of heavy metal Monster of Rock along for the ride—pitted against that dreary 1980s dystopia the British do so well—1984, V For Vendetta, The Wall. I have a vision of an entire society dressed in British school uniforms: 50-year old salary boys trudging to work in short pants and beanies. But then other style elements keep trying to slip in: the P-Funk cosmology, Darkness videos, those 80s club kid pictures
narcissime posted, the Harajuku / Fruits fashion scene, some kind of lush Bollywood Sutra-Funk dealie. (And if all this just sounds like a random mush of terms to you, well therein lies my challenge.)Father of Night (Soviet Hellboy Delta Green Dark Supers Pulp)
In the trackless wastes of Siberia, in the coldest days of the Cold War, in the paranoid mirror land that was Stalinist Russia, the players are Spetsialni Viedotstvo 8, a more secret than secret team of Soviet mutants, oddities, and altered humans. They fight a desperate double war for the Motherland against both the black science of the West and the eldritch evil at the heart of the Soviet state. So it's like Hellboy's BPRD or maybe Doom Patrol set in the Cold War USSR. The world of Delta Green spliced with the tone of Hellboy—pulpy, but dark. This springs from
sneech515's discussion of Soviet superheroes, from Bruce Baugh's observation that silver age comics worked best when they were still part horror comics, and from my desire to do something new with the Delta Green secret history, which I love. Can't you just see the crumbling hidden passages of the Kremlin as rendered by Mike Mignola? Or Baba Yaga, embodiment of Russia's darkest forests, as our heroes' secret patron? And looming over everything, the grim mustachioed visage of the Father of Night—Stalin, whom the corpse-eating ghouls worship as The Great Provider.(I'm not sure about system. This would seem to be perfect for Wild Talents if that ever comes out (I have the playtest rules) and if some of the alleged hiccups in the One Roll Engine have been ironed out.)
Black History Month (Hitean Reality Quake Elseworlds Sci-Fi Superspies)
This is reality war. There are thousands of alternate worlds, none of them fixed. Quantum events create superimposed alternate histories whose champions do battle across time and times. The PCs hop from alternity to alternity, firing clioactive depth charges into the past, shattering some realities, defending others, seeking to unwrite their enemies' very existence before the same is done to them. But the histories that created them are never solid. The past is a battleground and each eimic shockwave changes everything.
Basically this is the alternate earths game, the time-shattering hyper-action movie I've been polishing for ages. I broke Jeremiah's Rule of Ten Mentions some time ago. So I really do have to run it. I just hope it hasn't become a solipsistic obsession that interests only me. I can't explain the game as well as I can picture it—so can I run it? Put less dramatically, this set up lets me indulge every wild alternate setting I can invent or steal, while the players get to be parachronic bad-asses, playing god with history, as long as they can remember who they are and what they're fighting for. So often the goal in time travel stories is to set things back the way they were. But I think that takes half the fun out of it. Who says this is the best of all possible worlds? Originally I imagined the PCs for this as overpowered superheroes a la The Authority. But Chris' magisterial Omega Event game covered that ground so nicely I'm now thinking of the heroes as shiny 21st century super-science-spies with a power level closer to Planetary.
...
Comments n' queries, cheers n' jeers, darts n' laurels, kicks n' kudos, slaps n' bennies welcome. Remember, kids: game ideas are like little fairies that need your love to live. When they don't get LJ comments, the fairies die... and it's all your fault.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Just add Dark! (tm)
Date: 2004-02-18 08:33 pm (UTC)1) I see three daughters of an old, insane king inheriting his kingdom. Well, two do. One tells the old man the truth and then goes into exile and raises a female samurai army, marrying the Prince(ss?) of a distant kingdom. She returns with her loyal samurai and has to win the battle both on the battlefield and with those the evil sisters have won over. Hilarity (and gratuitous violence) ensues.
2) Which of the thirty-six chambers of Shaolin houses the evil ghost-demon of a long forgotten kung fu master? Demons in the service of cackling eunuch sorcerers is old hat; put the evil right in the righteous fists of the monks who humbly serve the Emperor. In order to fly off walls and walk on willow branches, you have to make deals with bizarre, perverted, decidedly non-Confucian demonic powers...
3) By God, you finally got me interested in Starchildren. Invoking V for Vendetta is what did it, I think. Well, that and the The Darkness video that's on all the time now. Fighting space squid with the power of RAWK is inspiring, to say the least. Seriously, though, let's see, plots... I'm picturing Lou Reed and David Bowie in grey Berlin circa, well, Berlin. The glam is gone, Ziggy is dead, and the heroes are trying to tap into the power of the Drone and Metal Machine Music to fight fire with fire against the Conspiracy.
4) Law & Order, SV8, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Voluntary Castration. The Skoptsi (Shub-Niggurath or Cybele cultists, depending on whether you're going Delta Green or Hellboy here) have infiltrated SV8. Their decadent pre-Revolution backsliding into religiosity is doubly offensive to the People. But what happens when the Skoptsi are removed from their positions in the Politburo halfway through the campaign? Crop failures in the Ukraine, fertility rates plummet. Maybe they had something right after all...
5) History gets scrambled every session, eh? Sure does suck when your character goes to bed an expert chemist and veteran pastry chef and wakes up with the bizarre ability to hotwire a car and play left-handed piano etudes. Same personality, same appearance, TOTALLY different character. And the players never know which way they're going to turn out when they eliminate those "undesirable" histories.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 07:07 am (UTC)At any rate, five for five, these are all terrific. You oughtta be shot for the title "Law and Order SV-8," that's so good (in a "funny to a tiny core of geeks, meaningless to 99.999% of the world" kind of way). Hee. "In the Soviet criminal justice system, the purity of thought is protected by two separate bodies..."
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 08:45 pm (UTC)Sounds like my kind of game! Well, if you leave off the battle stuff and make it, I dunno, a building game. SimManyWorldsInterpretation or something. And put dance floors in the game, too. I like dance floors.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 07:02 am (UTC)The Starchildren game has dance floors.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 07:22 pm (UTC)Thanks to you I have just discovered "Scientific American Digital," a plan that lets me, for a small yearly fee, download as many issues of Scientific American as I want to.
*hyperventilating*
no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 07:14 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 07:47 am (UTC)Funkmythology. My old roommate
I love watching movies to prep for a game... if NetFlicks had them all, what would you recommend for each of the games above?
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 06:03 am (UTC)Hey, any friend of Brant's is... [thinks: what do I really know about Brant's friends?] well, at any rate, I won't hold it against you. :)
After watching the Grammies, I've been dying for a reason to research the Funkmythology
Did they do something P-Funky at the Grammies? Makes me think of this old Onion article.
I love watching movies to prep for a game... if NetFlicks had them all, what would you recommend for each of the games above?
Whoa, good question.
Spaghetti Eastern: since there's no Tomoe Gozen movies, it's all about Kurosawa. Especially Yojimbo, Kagemusha, and probably some I haven't seen yet.
BwHoH: Wuxia horror, like The Bride With White Hair, Chinese Ghost Story, Cult Master. Maybe a hopping vampire movie like Mr. Vampire (steer clear of the terrible sequel). These are all fun, but not as apocalyptic as the game would aim for.
Starchildren: This website. In the absence of a Ziggy Stardust movie, Velvet Goldmine is the closest thing to canon. Plus an old Canadian animated movie called Rock and Rule, if you can find it. But since I haven't fixed on the look and feel of it, influences could range from Tommy & The Wall to Party Monsters or the latest Bollywood extravaganza. I don't know of a really P-Funk movie. There are funky blacksploitation movies, of course, but have any approached the cartoon craziness of the Mothership?
FoN: No idea. Anyone?
BHM: Sort of defies pinning down in movie form. Alternate history movies tend to be rare, remarkably un-imaginative, and crappy.
Turn to the left.
Date: 2004-02-19 08:04 am (UTC)Soviet Supes
Date: 2004-02-19 06:14 am (UTC)Oooh...that'd be fun.
Godlike isn't bad. The "Hard Die" bit is clearly broken, but that's about the worst thing. The other cool bit is that you can do a generational thing:
Pre-WWI: PCs are various occult heroes running around trying to prop up a collapsing czar (or hastening the fall?)
The 30's: PCs are part of SUV-8.
WWII: PCs are Godlike Heroes (with a heavy dose of occult)
The Cold War: Keep up the Superhero bits, but now it's more of a spy game.
70's-80's...hrm...DISCO! I dunno...
Post-Cold War: Where do the Super-Occult-Spies go now? Oooh...perhaps they wind up in charge of various former Soviet states?
Just some thoughts...
Tom
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 07:17 am (UTC)Have you played Godlike then? I'll have to get you to tell me how it worked for you.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 07:28 am (UTC)When Godlike first came out, I ran a few strictly WWII demos. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I really like the system (Hard Dice included), especially power design. I just lost interest when further supplements never came out. If Wild Talents appears on my local store shelves at some point, I'll probably get sucked back into it.
Re: Godlike
Date: 2004-02-19 09:10 am (UTC)I ran the scenario in the back of the book.
German super with a couple of Hard Dice in Hyper-Sniping concealed in a church tower = FUH-atal!
BANG! *dead*
BANG! *dead*
The players got under cover and got real creative about trying to advance under fire. I also botched the grenade rules making them the magic weapon of the game, but that was about the worst of it.
Ron's assesment of it over at the Forge Review section is pretty spot on.
But the system is great and I love the roll-yer-own power setup. I should break out something for an Ad Hoc night...
Tom
no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 05:22 am (UTC)I knew you'd dig it. In fact, I came up with a Hellboy / Delta Green crossover specifically so that you'd add me to your Friends list.
Didn't seem to work, though.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 06:14 am (UTC)I wonder about the feasibility of pulling off the alternate histories game though. As you know I had intended to do a Doom Patrol type Zero Hour/Exiles timeline hopping game on the heels of Omega War. The problem is that unless the world setting is known and recognizable, the beauty of some of the changes will be lost. If you say "In this world Tony Stark is a vampire!" the players can clue in on what that means better than the big reveal of "Phil Johnson a vampire! um, Phil used to be the Steel Centurion. he was a superhero, you see..." I think it forces you to make the worlds themselves very hugely different, but for me the fun in those kinds of stories is figuring out what was the "lynchpin" that caused this divergence. And I'm afraid that level of subtlety would be lost.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 07:13 am (UTC)"As you know, Fred, a change in the wind in 1688 interfered with the Dutch fleet bringing William of Orange to England, with the following results..."
"Why on earth are you telling me this?"
Alternate History Game
Date: 2004-02-19 07:29 am (UTC)Taking a cue from the Cornelius Chronicles, what if each game involved the destruction of the universe? Your super-powered heroes shatter the universe and a new, radically different one rises from the ashes. Each time it comes back, so do the PCs, only they are changed based on how the last universe ended -- rather like the Invisible Clergy of Unknown Armies, but with a Nobilis power level and no Lord Entropy to crack down on them.
Thus you could have rampaging, action-filled battles which always climax in the destruction of the world. And next session, everyone is just a little bit tweaked beause of it. So they fight not only to advance their particular cause or Estate or whatever, but also to maintain their sense of self (or to deliberately change it).
Tom
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 10:17 am (UTC)Me, I'm all for dark Soviet occult superheros.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 05:28 pm (UTC)Battle Without Honor or Humanity rocks the mostest, because I want to play fabulously powerful characters knee deep in fun and angst and so on.
Starchildren: The Musical, except I don't want to play the beautiful fascist. Musical-memetic revolutionaries determined to smash the synarchist state would be good. I need something to balance out Reese.
Black History Month is of great interest, but I have no idea how it would play. Write up an example of play! (Serious suggestion. See various 20x20 discussion. It might help.)
Um... the other two tie. If you weren't suggesting Charnel Gods, I'd want to play Spaghetti Eastern, and I still kind of do. If Jere wasn't promising claustrophobic espionage, I'd wanna play the Soviet supers. Grf.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 05:32 am (UTC)Glad this got some love. The two Asian games are probably the two I myself would be most excited about playing right away (I listed those ideas in rough order of ready-to-play-ness), but I think they don't come off as well in this blurb format because they're less high concept-y than the others. The appeal is less about original setting or funky juxtaposition, more about the game system and the sort of play (I hope) it will create.
Starchildren
Obviously a fan favorite. I've got Hero Quest back, got to get on the keywords and such. I'll also need to find out who'd actually be playing in this. I've been threatening to run it for so long, about a dozen people have said "yeah, I'd play that!"
Black History Month example of play
Not a bad idea. More for me to stew over in my fevered brain.