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Establishing Questions

Establishing Questions

Today on The Gauntlet Blog, I continue my GM techniques series that I started with 7-3-1 and Paint the Scene. The new entry is Establishing Questions.

Check it out!

http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/blog/establishing-questions

Hey Gauntleteers, I’m back crowdsourcing the miscellany for Codex – Flame.

Hey Gauntleteers, I’m back crowdsourcing the miscellany for Codex – Flame. This miscellany is called “Three Dozen Separated Lovers.” Submissions need to be a single sentence, or 2-3 short sentences. By submitting here, you’re agreeing to let us use it (you’ll get a credit on the issue). We’re looking for evocative things; the purpose of the miscellany is to inspire the reader.

Here are some examples:

“Magda Borland is accustomed to years alone, but the famed Captain Ulrika ‘The Bull’ Voss is long overdue. She’ll pay handsomely for any news of her wife’s ship, or better yet, for help getting Captain Voss out of whatever’s befallen her.”

“Starcrossed lovers meet in the hours of dawn and dusk, when the Lords of Night and Day briefly share the sky before continuing on their eternal opposite courses. Gifts of morning glory and evening primrose adorn the makeshift shrines that pop up wherever someone seeks their blessing.”

“It’s unusual but not unheard of for multiple people to share the same chassis. The cyborg begging for assistance with the ransomware sequestering his partner’s data is new, though. His movements are hesitant and clumsy, one mind trying to remember how to control processes long shared.”

I just listened to Episode Zero of Asians Represent — a new podcast co-hosted by Agatha Cheng and Daniel Kwan –…

I just listened to Episode Zero of Asians Represent — a new podcast co-hosted by Agatha Cheng and Daniel Kwan — and it sounds great! As the name suggests, the show will highlight the work of Asian creators in analog games — which is a unique and important focus. Also, Agatha and Daniel’s banter is very natural and fun to listen to. I just subscribed and can’t wait for the first regular installment. Here’s the web link for the show:

http://oneshotpodcast.com/category/podcasts/asians-represent/

The Gauntlet (and Richard Rogers specifically) has been fantastic supporters of Impulse Drive, so I wanted to thank…

The Gauntlet (and Richard Rogers specifically) has been fantastic supporters of Impulse Drive, so I wanted to thank everyone for your interest and support.

I hope you’ll check out the kickstarter

Originally shared by Adrian Thoen

Impulse Drive is live now on Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1743149756/impulse-drive

Impulse Drive is a space opera roleplaying game about Misfits and Spaceships, using the Powered By The Apocalypse engine, popularized by games like Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, and Masks. Play as a crew of volatile, bombastic scoundrels and troublemakers as they navigate dangerous situations involving deadly environments, untrustworthy NPCs, and strange aliens.

This campaign will raise the funds to pay some very skilled professionals familiar with RPG design and Kickstarter funded publishing and turn Impulse Drive into a fully realized Print on Demand book, printed and distributed through Drivethu RPG.

Impulse Drive is rules complete. If you want to check the game out before backing, the Preview version of Impulse Drive is available through Drivethru now. This link will always have an art-free version of the most up to date rules available as Pay What You Want, so that people who cannot afford to buy the game can still play.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190933/Impulse-Drive-Preview

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1743149756/impulse-drive

After the great discussion of laogs – live action online games – on the latest Gauntlet Podcast episode, I thought…

After the great discussion of laogs – live action online games – on the latest Gauntlet Podcast episode, I thought it was time to write down a summary of my experience with designing and playing laogs.

https://alles-ist-zahl.blogspot.com/2018/09/designing-and-playing-live-action.html

These games were on the Gauntlet Calendar:

Winterhorn by Jason Morningstar

Election of the Wine Queen by Björn Butzen and Silvia Ochlast

So Mom I made this sex tape by Susanne Vejdemo

End Game by David Hertz

Find all the material to play the games with your group and a Youtube playlist with recordings from each game at the bottom of the article.

https://alles-ist-zahl.blogspot.com/2018/09/designing-and-playing-live-action.html

Hey, Gauntleteers, I hope this post finds you well.

Hey, Gauntleteers, I hope this post finds you well. I’m new around here, and I’m definitely not in the habit of using G+, so please pardon me as I ease into the community. I’m excited to get to know you all better!

There’s something I’ve been thinking about lately that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. If it’s come up before and it’s easiest to point me to an old thread, that totally works!

I play regularly with a couple of groups who are very comfortable with story games and collaborative storytelling. (A friend and I will often call it a “table full of GMs” since we regularly rotate between different systems, with different people running them in a cycle.) Recently, though, we’ve brought on a good friend of ours who’s relatively new to RPGs and isn’t accustomed to “generating story” for lack of a better way of putting it. They and I have chatted offline, and some of it sounds like those new-to-roleplaying jitters I’m sure many of us have been through. The other thing I’ve gleaned, though, is that they have a seem to have bent toward a certain brand of traditional-style roleplaying, where there’s lots of rolling of the dice, a focus on action, and more often reacting to things the GM puts in front of you than coming up with new stuff yourself.

Through our conversations, we figure there are a few things we can do when running a game to help make their experience more comfortable and pleasant (and, I think, all of these are certainly doable in the system we’re running):

1) Setting or framing scenes for them — rather than asking what they’re doing in a completely open-ended way — to put a clear obstacle, conflict, etc. in their way, and then letting them react.

2) Focusing on external, tangible conflicts rather than internal, personal, or intangible ones.

3) When it does come time for character development or the like, suggesting something fairly specific and letting them “fill in the blanks” or, should they feel so inclined, letting them suggest an alternative.

Put another way, perhaps: We’re a bunch of story gamers who have played or run traditional stuff before, but we’re no longer used to it, and now we have a player who, at least for the time being, would probably be more at home in traditional games. Aside from the “obvious” answer of sticking to trad games for now (which is totally valid and something I may recommend to our friend if it seems that’s best), I’m curious to hear what thoughts you might have on adapting story games to a traditional playstyle and easing new players into story-driven systems. Thanks!

Demo-character creation for Divine Blood 2nd Edition Playtest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ix5d7PvirM

Long Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzexFKDrN4

As a side note, I accidentally cut off the screen share when I started doing the Stunts and Stress tracks, so here’s a link to the character sheet on google drive I was working with.

I’ll be putting the stats on a single file later and getting into the player resources along with a quick thing on building characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ix5d7PvirM

Yesterday I ran the first session of Perdition and it went pretty well.

Yesterday I ran the first session of Perdition and it went pretty well. This is becoming a bit a kitbash adventure. Originally what I was going to do is craft a unique race for the characters as angels/angelic beings. But the problem with that is I was interested in making space for the characters to express their own interpretation of what a being like that would be like. Placing a static ability and modifiers to their attributes felt too restrictive.

What I ended up doing what switching to The Whitehack and giving the players an additional group–specifically Species–nebulously defined as Divine. What that means exactly, because it’s a group in the game, is up to the players to define while pushing for fictional positioning that fits that subjective notion. I also added Wickedness from Perdition. A measure that will quantify the corruption that setting has on the player characters, which might also increase if they end up taking actions that would reasonably increase their corruption. I’m using the monsters and other portions from Perdition in the overall concept of the adventure.

I’ve ascribed the player characters’ angels to the fictional choir of the Bellator, special angelic warriors that are activated when an unforeseen calamity strikes. The angels are in stasis until a danger is detected. When that happens they are dropped to another plane of existence outside of the timeline to a temporary limbo-like plane where another angel, a watcher, describes what has happened and what their mission is.

In this particular case, a demon has stolen a powerful divine object. A horn that when trumpeted 7 times, each “trumpet” taking a nebulous “age”, would call forth an Armageddon. The angels are to cut down the demon and prevent this from happening.

We’ve gotten as far as the players getting the mission after character creation, arriving in Perdition, and combatting the guard of a place where Raphael, the angel who gave them their mission, has said they would find holy weapons. This place is called The Trickle. A fun little thing I found on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/292030357079101720/)

So far I’m excited about it. There are the usual pains of getting to know a system. I’ve only played Whitehack myself 4 times so it was hard for me to articulate the ruleset and some stuff I just have not internalized yet. I expected that and think it’s fine. I’ll be prepping fairly heavily for the future sessions since it’s such a weird adventure and not many tropes to draw on. In my head, the fiction looks like an animated version of classic paintings like The Fall of the Rebel Angels and others.

Anyway, so far it’s going pretty well and I’m excited to play it some more and get the fiction more in hand. Thanks a lot to the players for their patience and willingness to roll with my weird idea! Lauren McManamon, Luiz, Maria Rivera, and Darren Brockes.

Here’s a link to the actual play for those curious: https://youtu.be/439aOr3KzJY

And the Pinterest board: https://pin.it/cxukrmn3c53c34

In preparation for my gauntlet con event with my Divine Blood game, I’ve started converting the old Fate Accelerated…

In preparation for my gauntlet con event with my Divine Blood game, I’ve started converting the old Fate Accelerated pre-gens into characters for the current playtest version of the Divine Blood 2nd edition.

Character creation is the main thing changing in this edition as the first edition used primarily Strands of Fate resulting in a bit of clutter as well as licensing issues. Which is underscored by the fact that one of the two scenarios is run for the Divine Blood setting was run with Fate Accelerated.

I’m moving closer to Fate Core / Accelerated but still retaining some of the granularity I like from Strands. The result is far more streamlined.

And I figured I’d build one character here as a demo for people thinking of bringing their own ideas.

But here’s a poll to see which character to use as demo for the char gen of this game.

Anyone have thoughts on a game that would do Attack on Titan well?

For those unfamiliar with AoT, it is a manga/anime series following a group of soldiers who attempt to protect the last remnants of humanity by keeping them behind great walls that keep the titans out. Titans are largely mindless humanoids of gigantic proportions who seek to eat humans. The titans can only be killed in a very specific way (slicing deep in the back of the neck), so humanity has developed devices that allow users to fire spikes on lines to attach to objects and maneuver through the air to slice at the back of the titans’ necks. The story has a sense of mystery about how the world became like this, and * minor spoilers* it is revealed that certain humans have the ability to turn into titans. The story has frequent character death as well.

Thoughts on a game that might do this well, or does this game need to be written, or does this type of story not translate well to tabletop games?