Tag: Jason Cordova

We played Fiasco for Story Game Sunday this week. The playset was The Beast of Sucker Creek. 

It was hilarious, and a lot dark, dirty fun. We had a crooked, murderous sheriff; an ancient feud between swamp families; Dukes of Hazard-style jailbreaks; and a money-making hoax involving one of the characters being allegedly knocked-up by the legendary Beast himself. 

Thanks to Ferrell Riley Russell Benner and Jeff Burke for joining in on this little ‘swamp noir’ adventure. 

I didn’t take any pictures of Mandatory Fun Club: The Meaningless Video Game Competiton, so instead you get this TILF.

It was a blast! There was lots of cheering, laughter, and good clean fun. You can’t really ask for more than that, I suppose.

The winner was Kyle Kowalski. Thanks to him, and everyone else who came out: Kristen D Ferrell Riley Marcus Centurian Scott Owen Russell Benner Jorge Salazar and Stephanie! 

We had a terrific kickoff to our five-session run of Apocalypse World. We managed to minimize the fiddly weirdness of AW and set-up a good framework within which to tell these folks’ stories. Our characters were Dust, the Hocus; Sin, the Brainer; Diem, the Maestro’D; Doc Bon, the Angel; and Nail, the Gunlugger.

Looking forward to Session 2!

Thanks to the people who actually managed to fucking make it out last night: Gary Wilson Russell Benner David LaFreniere Derek Grimm and Scott Owen.

Fiasco is a game that always delivers, and today was no exception. We played the Los Angeles: 1936 playset and it was good fun. Our characters were a dirty cop, trying to make a few bucks on the side while keeping an eye on his two-timing wife; a duplicitous young homemaker with a seedy past, and dreams of getting back in the game and scoring big; a hapless young hood trying to impress his girlfriend by screwing over his boss; and a minor mafioso, desperate to move up the ladder, but destined to always be second banana.

Thanks to our new players for coming out and giving Fiasco a whirl!

For Friday’s meeting of the Mandatory Fun Club, we watched the movie Bad Education and then made a quick roleplaying game inspired by it. 

The night began with a selection of movie theater concessions. We then had a discussion about which of the five pre-selected movies we were going to watch. The choices were The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Bad Education; The House of the Devil; Best in Show; and Grey Gardens. Each of the films was chosen because they represented territory not often explored in a roleplaying game, and, since we were ostensibly doing an Apocalypse World hack, had the possibility of producing some neat, universal character archetypes. 

The rules for watching the movie were pretty straight-forward. We each had note cards and pencils on which to write down our thoughts, and we could each pause the movie once to have a discussion about what was going on so far in the movie, and how it was informing our thinking on the eventual game to be created. 

After the movie was over, we sat down to make our game. Right away, we identified the type of story we wanted our game to tell, which was heavily influenced by the events of Bad Education: a group of people, each of whom wants something from a fulcrum-type character, and each of whom is presenting a false image of themselves to said fulcrum character.

The immediate difficulty we ran into is that Apocalypse World wasn’t going to serve our needs very well. So, we ditched that aspect of the exercise and made a game from scratch that (hopefully) accomplishes the goal of our story better. In the end, our game was a GM-less affair in which each of the characters had spotlight scenes, at the end of which Truths were established about them, as well as Questions that hint at their duplicity. The Questions would be handled in a similar manner as those in Psi-Run, meaning the player of the character doesn’t know the answers beforehand. In later scenes, you re-incorporate Truths established about your character to answer a Question about another character.

We think it’s a neat concept. We’ll probably fiddle with it for a little bit and eventually turn it over to the group for play-testing and critique.

Thanks to Kristen D Scott Owen and Daniel Fowler for participating!

Time Cellist is a new KS project from Wheel Tree Press. Listeners may recall we briefly discussed it on Episode 7 of our podcast. I would really love to see this game do well. Wheel Tree Press is actually Todd and Megan from The Jank Cast. The Jank Cast, for those of you who don’t know, is a terrific show that focuses heavily on indie games and RPG theory. A few years back, when I was getting really deep into story games, Jank was responsible for shaping a lot of my thinking. These guys get roleplaying games, so this is an easy back for me.  

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wheeltreepress/time-cellist-rpg

Very happy to get this guy in the mail: Nathan Paoletta’s Worldwide Wrestling! I have also included a photo of my KS backer wrestler, El Toro, doing his finisher, Rocky Mountain Oysters.