If you’re interested in some really good Monsterhearts play, I can’t recommend the video of our last session more…
If you’re interested in some really good Monsterhearts play, I can’t recommend the video of our last session more highly. This session was intense and enjoyable, and I think you’ll find it pretty entertaining.
This was actually the ninth session of our ongoing, mainline series of Monsterhearts: Mercy Falls. One of the things I was really focusing on was how to re-frame the fiction so that we essentially got a “clean slate” for this new series, but while still preserving everything that had been happening for the eight previous sessions. If you have been following along with Mercy Falls, you’ll find it very interesting.
Thanks to the players: Fraser Simons Lowell Francis Phillip Wessels and Kevin Lovecraft
I’m working with Dylan Ross on gathering all the disparate neighborhoods of Gauntlet City into something resembling a map. Would anyone like to help us draw some of this craziness?
I’m really excited about this project for a few reasons:
1) I think the core mechanic is really slick. Here, it’s used as the basis for a game about highly competent spies, but I can imagine re-skinning the game for different kinds of stories, and that’s pretty cool. It has the basic binary functionality of a traditional die mechanic, the sturdiness and narrative-focused quality of AW’s core die mechanic, while still incorporating a level of GM flexibility and abstraction I find really exciting. And it uses Fate dice!
2) I have had the privilege of being associated with the development of this game for awhile. My ultimate input was minimal, but I do like to think my very particular experience running a huge number of games, across a variety of systems and settings, was helpful to Kyle while putting Operators together.
3) Samjoko Publishing (comprised of Kyle Simons and Fraser Simons) are huge supporters of the Gauntlet. I count them among my friends, but more than that, they believe really strongly in what we are all doing here, and that means a lot to me (and should mean a lot to you if you feel the same way). They’re helping us out with Codex and a number of other projects, and so I’m excited to lend a hand with Operators.
Thoughts on “The Bite” RPG by Daniel Enders which you should definitely play and also maybe play with me sometime:
Thoughts on “The Bite” RPG by Daniel Enders which you should definitely play and also maybe play with me sometime:
Zombie Apocalypse games always come down to resources. Sometimes it’s guns, sometimes it’s oil, sometimes it’s food, or people, or time. In Dan Enders’ The Bite the resource which dwindles amid the moans and grasping hands is trust. The Bite is game about a lot of other things, but first and foremost it’s a game about asking yourself one question: Can you trust someone enough that you cannot justify killing them, even when it’s the best thing to do?
In the middle of a zombie apocalypse, you’re two people who have just gotten themselves to safety. You’re in a house, a studio apartment, a car. It’s the two of you in here, and for the length of your game the zombies will not break through that door. The biggest threat now is sitting across from you, wearing a dirty hoody and torn jeans. If they’ve been bitten, you’re dead…but there is a gun between you, which might solve everything.
Of course, you don’t know if they’ve been bitten. Or you know you’ve been bitten and you have to hide it. Or neither of you have been bitten and this is all a misunderstanding. This is where the decisions become apparent and the guilt sets in, so you do the only thing two people can do when they can’t trust each other: You make small talk.
You talk until you make a decision, or your “partner” makes one for you. Either you play your last card and decide to let the other live, or someone picks up the gun and decides otherwise. The decision is always justifiable: They could be bitten, and they’d kill you if you gave them the chance, and anyway, after all of that…in a world like this, to be shot in the head is small mercy.
But the decision will eat away at you. Were they really bitten or did you guess wrong? Who are you to decide who lives and who dies? Why was your last act before becoming a zombie to lie to, and therefor murder another person? Maybe there was another way?
Or they might be uninfected, and so might you, and the two of you might be able to steal a real moment of beauty in a world falling to pieces. In a game where trust is so absent, and so foolish, and so grossly punished, isn’t it worth it to just….try? Is it more important to preserve your life or to preserve humanity’s capacity for trust and teamwork?
I don’t have the answer to any of these ideas, and neither does The Bite. It offers only questions, and a remarkable, visceral way to ask them.
The Bite is available as a print & play from DrivethruRPG as Pay What You Wish. It cost me $5 AU to have a copy printed on 300gsm at Officeworks and they’re beautiful and make me feel things.
It just occurred to me, on top of everything else going on right now in Gauntlet-land, the podcast teams need to…
It just occurred to me, on top of everything else going on right now in Gauntlet-land, the podcast teams need to start thinking about Favorite Games of 2017.
Cc: Richard Rogers David LaFreniere Tom McGrenery Kate Bullock Rach Shelkey Lowell Francis Paul Edson
I gather videos for all four sessions of GLW from GauntletCon. Our World Wide Wrestling events filled 19 seats. We had a great roster with returning favorites, established talent, and hot new recruits. GM Bleakwood’s cost-cutting hunt for cheap wrestlers brought in a host of talent. You can check out the vids and more at the post.
