Hey, look what I got in the mail:
The titans of indie and old school pretty much saved my GenCon last year — it was nearly a bust because I wasted too much time doing business stuff. Oh no my friend, we’ll not be making that mistake again…
If you’re wondering where the Advanced Agon posts are, I moved them over to ars ludi where I should have put them in the first place. Deeper Quests and Wrath of the Gods are already there and a third installment is coming soon. Agon up!
So you love story games but you are drawn by the irresistible lure of the crunchy 4e battlefield? You want to smack some orcs but you want it to have meaning?
Check out Simon Carryer’s Say Yes or Face the Dungeon:
The GM should give a very short description of the dungeon, something like “It’s an zombie-filled labyrinth” or “It’s an orc warren with a surprise at the end”. All the players then brainstorm a way for the dungeon to be related to the conflict at hand…
For example, the PCs are trying to get a village of elves on their side in the civil war. The elves are undecided, and the GM makes the PCs “face the dungeon”. The dungeon the GM has prepared is a nest of harpies at the top of a crag. After some discussion, they decide that at some point during the negotiations, harpies will capture the son of an elder, one of those opposed to their plan. If they can rescue the young elf from the harpies, the elves will join in their cause. The GM marks in the dungeon where the young elf is being held, and play begins again - later that night, just after the harpies make off with their captive.
Yes, it’s a totally different way to play the game. Go read the rest. Very good stuff. And if you don’t get the reference, you owe it to yourself to go look up Vincent Baker’s famous “Say Yes or Roll the Dice.”
Everyone wants to play the latest game hot off the presses and of course no game can match the molten lava power of the new D&D 4e. Even though we don’t play a lot of D&D or fantasy combat now, would we even be gamers if we weren’t curious about a new version of the staple of the gaming world?
To satisfy our curiosity, I’ve been running Keep on the Shadowfell, the introductory 4e module. Save an ill-fated AD&D game in college, I’ve never been behind the DM screen. I’ve also never been one for spending a lot of time statting characters (the longest series of games I’ve run used Truth & Justice) let alone dungeon-craft, so running the intro module was definitely the best way for me to get out of the gate and to the table. I am pleased to say, it’s been fun. But, I’m surprised to say it’s been really fun, and we all want to play more when I thought maybe we’d play once or twice and call ourselves educated. I’m even finding myself thinking about the higher level modules due to come out later this year, heh, heh, while the players flip through the PHB plotting their next level.
My job with this module has not been one of creativity. After all, it’s all there on a platter right down to where each monster is placed on the map. Instead, it’s been an exercise in restraint. There’s an agreement that the deal is to kill monsters on a battlemap and the players don’t need much of a plausible reason to do so, but it still can’t insult their intelligences. I’ve tried with varying degrees of success to eliminate the ridiculous elements of the module to keep it a reasonably serious affair. For the most part that means scrutinizing the town, townspeople and so-called town encounters. I’ve tried to keep people behaving and interacting like normal human(oid)s instead of video game barkeeps and merchants (”Good day to you, adventurer! Would you like to see my wares?”). Despite my best intentions, though, it’s been tough to get all of these things working well.
I think as a introductory module for 4e, it’s not bad and the encounters have been different enough and challenging for the players. 4e seems to offer a lot of choices for the players, and they have to coordinate to get the most out of their abilities. Speaking as a newbie DM, because we are all happy to learn the rules together, I thankfully don’t have the extra burden of having to teach anyone the system or police it alone. My job is to know the module, run the monsters and run the game. That’s complicated enough because the goal seems to be for every monster to be a unique star in the monster firmament. Every kobold has different powers and movement. This one shifts if someone moves near it, that one shifts if someone misses an attack. This one does fire, that one does acid. It’s not that it’s overwhelming even if sometimes I forget which one’s which, but it means that I have to be sure to understand each monster’s powers and what tactical and descriptive effect they have and how they work in a particular environment which also seems to be purposefully unique for every encounter. If you’ve seen one kobold in the wilderness, you really haven’t seen them all.
A couple of weeks ago, Ben and I went to Go Play Northwest, a small, mostly local roleplaying convention that focuses on indie games though given the timing there was some downright gleeful D&D 4e too. Besides meeting a great bunch of gamers and playing totally new games, there’s something very eye-opening about gaming with new people. You learn a lot about your good and bad habits that being in the same group for a long time might be masking. Sure, some games were much more fun than others, but I think that’s the grab bag of gaming and part of the con. Suffice it to say, we had a blast.
I have to tip my hat to the GoPlayNW organizers for making everyone feel welcome and making sure everyone had a game to play. Before each game slot, Tony would ask if anyone was game-less or if any GMs had open slots. If after that there were still stragglers, groups would just form ad hoc and play. Beautiful. One of the best things about many indie games is they’re designed so you can just sit down for a few of hours and play with no prep. I straggled a lot and played 3 ad hoc games, a teen slasher flick themed game of Geiger Counter and 2 sessions of In a Wicked Age, possibly one of the most fun, no-prep, quick start roleplaying games out there. Ben goes into more detail about the joys of IAWA in his Indie Exploration Kit article.
GoPlayNW won’t come around again until next year, but taking a look at the Meetups and Conventions thread on Story Games, there’s a lot of opportunity between now and then.
Here at the lame mage skunk works we’re always coming up with new ideas. And drinking coffee. Sometimes both at once.
Sometimes we come up with ideas that seem like they’d make great games, but making a whole game just to use one cool idea… well that seems like work. If there are already systems that do most of what we want to do, why reinvent the other three wheels? Why not just take that idea and attach it to an existing system?
Nothing revolutionary there — adding new rules to games has been around since someone made red chess pieces. But if the concept doesn’t rely on the mechanics of a particular system, why wed it to just one game? Why not make a portable rules fragment, a game plugin, that can work with a variety of games?
Why not indeed. Here’s our working definition of a game plugin:
1) It’s a chunk of rules that you use with another game (the host), not a whole game
2) It’s independent of the rules of the host game, so it can be used with any game that fits the concept
You might have already been making game plugins and not even realized it because you instinctively tethered your ideas to one system without thinking whether or not you needed to.
Let’s take a concrete example. The Tripod of Deceit concept I used in my Western Paranoia game is pretty much a game plugin waiting to happen:
Game Plugin: Tripod of Deceit
Character creation plugin that establishes character-to-character deception, allegiance, and conflict. Characters might be who they say they are and they might not. Allies might really be enemies or vice versa. This plugin only works for settings where there are distinct sides and it is possible to pass yourself off as something you’re not. It should only be used if you are willing to have direct conflicts between characters and want to encourage inter-character distrust or tension.
Define two roles that are directly opposed and a third that is neutral or uninvolved. These roles should be central to the game theme. For example:
western — Lawman / Outlaw / Cowboy
crime drama — Cop / Crook / Citizen
espionage — Government Agent / Foreign Spy / Uninvolved Bystander
sci fi bodysnatchers — Investigator / Pod Person / Ordinary Person
vampire — Hunter / Vampire / Victim
witch hunt — Inquisitor / Witch / FlockEach character should pick one of the three as their true identity and then one as their surface appearance. If both are the same, it means the person really is what they appear to be. Otherwise they’re hiding something:
A police detective (surface cop) who’s really on the take (secret crook)
A drug dealer (surface crook) who’s really an undercover cop (secret cop)
A gentle schoolteacher (surface flock) who’s really a witch (secret witch)
A threatening old crone (surface witch) who’s really just faking having powers (secret flock)
An ordinary guy (surface bystander) who really doesn’t know anything about the secret plans (secret bystander)The surface trait is how society sees and reacts to that person. So even if a cop is crooked, he’s still a cop until he gets caught and loses that authority. An undercover cop has to be so undercover that other cops don’t casually know he’s on their side. Someone framed for murder is a surface crook/secret citizen because they are wanted by the law even though they didn’t do it. The player creates the rest of the character background based on the surface/secret picks.
For maximum entertainment value, have players conceal their true identity pick (except from the GM). Even if everyone plays completely honest characters, no one will ever be certain they’re telling the truth. Let the chaos unfold as people suspect truly innocent characters of harboring terrible secrets and put their undying trust in characters that are really on the other side.
See what I mean? You can use that plugin with just about any game under the sun without ever touching the host game rules.
Combining plugins with different host games can also make whole new mutant species of games. Some plugins might be small additions, others might completely change the tone of the game system. Take the example above: I added the Tripod of Deceit to Star Frontiers and got something a lot more like Paranoia. If I added it to a different host game or setting I might get a whole different result. That’s part of the beauty of the idea: lots of possible permutations.
Game plugins aren’t the answer to everything. Some concepts rightfully need to be part of the backbone of the game system. But others don’t. Here’s a hint: different games focus on particular things and have blind spots towards others. Those blind spots are fertile plugin territory. Just thinking about what isn’t in the game you’re playing, where plugins could be useful, can be interesting food for thought.
I’ve been so busy gaming and scheming that I almost missed that we had hit 1000 sales. That’s a nice round milestone.
I was going to say “it seems like only yesterday when Zodiac Ring was the first third party release for M&M2…” but that would be a total lie — it seems like a million years ago.
“Wretched man! Short indeed are the memories of mortals, that you O king should stand in this shrine and without shame ask for a father’s blessing! You who gave your first daughter in sacrifice to the Beast of Kolkoris, defying the will of the immortal gods!”
In the labyrinth of Kolkoris a monster lurks, hiding its face from the immortal gods. It has ravaged countries and eaten the flesh of the living, but now the gods have declared that the Beast must die.
Yep, Beast of Kolkoris is ready for download.
Big thanks to Antagonist Phil Lewis and his players, Gene Hughes, Tom Peters and Mark Trosien, plus all the brave players who burned through so much Fate in the first playtest round: Gavin Cummins, Mike Frost, Kevin Lewis and Ching-Ping Lin.
Think you can do better against the Beast? Now’s your chance.
We went a mad binge last week with the new Descent campaign game (The Road to Legend). It’s an improvement over the original game in a number of ways, mostly because there’s more long-term development and planning instead of the usual “>spang< Gold treasure!" inflation at the end of every dungeon.
One thing that's a little slippery is that getting killed doesn't have any immediate consequences. The Overlord (aka Zargon) just collects conquest tokens which he can spend on new stuff next week, but the hero just springs back up fully healed. Mathematically it’s a win for the Overlord, but because the consequences are basically abstract it becomes too easy for the players to brush it off. “Sure I went down,” the hero says, “but then I ran back in and wiped out two manticores!” It looks like a victory (sort of), but by the rules it’s a loss because the Overlord scored a lot more conquest than the heroes. The heroes are losing the campaign and don’t even feel the sting.
Same thing in our early games of Agon. The heroes can’t die in Agon. The worse that happens is you are “defeated” and out of the fight. Don’t want to be defeated? Just spend Fate and ignore the wound. You can do that over and over again (16 times anyway). The trick is that you’re burning the lifespan of your character. It would be like playing D&D (a concrete defeat game) and every time you died having someone say “okay, you’re back up, but now your character can only reach 19th level before he retires” and so on. You aren’t losing the current fight, the concrete short-term, but in the long-term, in the abstract, you’re losing.
All in all I think using abstract defeat in game design can be a bit dodgy. It requires players to pay less attention to the immediate situation and think in terms of a meta strategy for a meta victory — basically the opposite of what you want in play. You want immersion, involvement, not abstract thinking.
Fresh on the heels of Temple of Hera, our next Agon adventure Beast of Kolkoris has gone to playtesting.
When I originally ran the game it set the record for “most Fate spent in a single quest” among my heroes. Seriously. Piles of Fate (somewhere John Harper is cackling with glee). Will the playtest heroes do better? We’ll see.
Assuming everything goes well Beast of Kolkoris should be ready for release in mid-May. Sharpen your spears.
Oh, I know: you wanted to run some Agon this weekend, but work got kind of crazy, and you had a lot of errands to run and blah blah blah so you didn’t have any time to prepare. Well now you have no excuse. Temple of Hera is done and ready for download.
Big thanks to all the playtesters: George Austin, Jeff Collyer, Jonathan Davis, John Farrish, Jeff Hosmer, Mona Hosmer, Patty Kirsch, Georgianna Marshall, Joshua Seigler, and Elliott Wu, as well as the Antagonists who tortured them, Nick Marshall and Mel White. Extra thanks to Mike Frost, Jem Lewis, and Kevin Lewis who I smacked around in the first playtest round, Ching-Ping Lin for her tireless ninja-like vigilance, and of course John Harper for making Agon in the first place.
And when you play it and cunningly force your heroes to spend Fate like there was no tomorrow, come on back here and tell us about it. Tell us which of your heroes scored all the glory and which got punked in every contest. Heroes may die (or at least retire at maximum Fate) but their legend lives on eternally in the comments field…
Our first Agon adventure, Temple of Hera, is now in playtesting and peer review. If you listen carefully you can hear the clash of bronze and the anguished cries of heroes as their comrades bludgeon them with oaths and steal their glory.
I had intended to send Beast of Kolkoris out first, but as I was finishing up the playtest draft there were things about the text I just wasn’t happy with, so instead it’s getting revised some more while this round of playtesting goes on.
When will you be able to download Temple of Hera and inflict it on your brave heroes? Should be about two weeks from now.
Interested in playtesting some upcoming Agon adventures? Now’s your chance.
I’ve already run them, but I like having outside groups do “blind” playtests so I get an objective opinion of whether they really work, whether there are any kinks, etc.
The playtest windows will be fairly short, probably just two weeks for each adventure, but since each can be played in one sitting that should be doable. Groups providing feedback will get listed in the credits, not to mention earn the eternal thanks of all the other gamers who come after them and have more fun because of their brave playtesting. Plus you get a d12 god oath.
If you have a gaming group and you’re interested, email me at info-at-lamemage-dot-com. You can also leave a comment here if you want to make sure I’ll be on the lookout for your email.
“Heroes, my anger is hot within me! Slay those who defile my shrine! Cleanse my temple! Let not one escape the wrath of Hera!”
What’s coming up next from Lame Mage? I’m working on a series of adventures for the AGON role-playing game by John Harper. The plan is to make them free releases, so everyone who wants to will be able to partake of the mythic heroic goodness (so long as you have Agon anyway).
The review draft of Temple of Hera is already finished but I haven’t decided which one I want to release first. The popular vote seems to lean towards the notorious Sack of Lemotea.
I’m sticking to a particularly Classical tone in the adventures — no creatures or situations that wouldn’t feel right in Iliad or the Odyssey, lots of heroic hubris and smack talk.
Why Agon? Same reason I wrote adventures for M&M: it’s a fun game.
We have this little thing we do. One of us says “y’know, I’d really like a game for genre/movie/concept X” and then someone else says “hmm, well, I’ve never even considered making a game for this idea, but how about this brand new idea I just thought of entirely off the top of my head in the time it took you to ask that question? And is there any more coffee?”
Today’s off-the-cuff project: a role-playing game for the Ship-of-the-Line era. Horatio Hornblower, Master & Commander — that kind of thing.
The first thing that jumped out at us was the perennial problem of when military organization meets role-playing: if one of the players is the commanding officer, theoretically he just tells the other players what to do and they do it. It’s a role-playing buzz kill.
Let’s say someone is playing the captain and the other players are playing the other major officers of the ship. First off, let’s emphasize rather than ignore: there _is_ a power imbalance between the character who is the captain and all the other officer characters. The captain is the absolute law on the ship. How that gets played out is an interesting part of the genre, so instead of sweeping it under the rug we are going to include mechanics that highlight that difference.
When the captain issues a controversial order, like to flog the popular cabin boy who was caught stealing or to cut grog rations to keep the crew alert for a coming battle, the other officers don’t get to openly disagree or countermand the captain’s orders (unless they are jumping straight to mutiny). But privately they are either pleased or displeased with what the captain decides. They may think he’s a tyrant, an incompetent leader, whatever, and that displeasure no matter how well concealed is going to influence the moral of the ship. If the officers are passing on orders they disagree with, that’s going to taint how those orders are received by the sailors beneath them and so on.
Here’s the rules fragment: after the captain issues a major order, each officer places a face down tile that’s green (for approve) or red (for disapprove). That secret vote is tallied up and becomes the new morale of the ship. In effect the officers are sitting in for the ship’s crew at large, and their votes represent the whole crew.
Players aren’t allowed to openly discuss what they are going to vote, except in the context of roleplaying their opinions. The captain is absolutely forbidden from asking the officers what they are going to vote. Because of rigid command structure no officer would normally give his opinion to the captain unless he requested suggestions.
The tricky bit would be for the captain to give the orders he wants, but not lord over his officers so tyrannically that their unspoken opposition undermines the morale of the ship. Then again if he just caters to his crew’s wishes he isn’t really in charge any more.
Questions remain: What’s to discourage everyone from just voting green because that’s what’s best for the whole ship? Different officers could have conflicting agendas, making it impossible for the captain to please everyone all the time.