Late at Night in August

 

Me, writing this, presumably.

 Alright. Warming up the typewriter-ribbon, greasing the computer's pistons, making sure the calculator is wound up. I see that other than a brief note-let for my players, nothing has been posted on the ol' bloggo. This is right about the length of time I start removing blogs from my bookmarks, so I figure I better get some small check-in, one of those "I still remember life, if life is remembered as a few words saved on a post", a howdy-doo, a reminder that like all tens of you might still look here! 

So many silly things have been going on around the cat-castle here, both physical and personal, that I've been feeling a bit worn down. I completed the Summer race series here on the beach (doing fine, thank you, better than I expected), and thought I'd get some of the things done that had been put off for a week or ten. But it wasn't to be, as the oldest cat picked something up and managed to give it to all the cats. They're fine, it's just a lot of dealing with sick cats and baths and other issues like that. 

So, the two or three things that I was asked to take a look at by friends haven't been given proper perusal. One was a story I read (pulpy, entertaining after all), one an adventure I haven't looked at much, and the other a world-building thing I need to go back and look over (some great ideas in there). 

I make it hard on myself by being both lazy and brimming with fractions of ideas that want a home, so end up scribbled in my notebook, thought about (lots), and conceptually slopped onto something else I've worked on. Looking over other people's work, or learning or reading a new rpg, or even reading some book I've had on my to-read stack have been gently put on the back burner for a bit now. Semi-mindlessly, I've managed to play a butt-ton of Risk online, and semi-mindfully managed to freshen up then scrap a number of chess-openings while playing blitz extremely poorly. Add in a bit of running, a bit of catching up on wrasslin', and a bit of work, along with sick kitties and a distressed better half, and I've done the Secret Dance of Not-Too-Much. That dance is mainly sitting and wiggling on the couch watching Tube-You vids, as you well know. 

However! with all of that in mind, some things have gotten some really heavy-duty thinking about! Some games have been played (well one game-system mostly, a couple of groups)!  

 

 What's been played 

 

I'm a mf-ing storygamer now?! 

I mean, it's been Heart: The City Beneath as you might have guessed. And, it's pretty fun, really. I've set it in my current main campaign world, tucked away in a little catastrophe zone, hinted at for quite a while in some of my other games. As far as the game goes, I've done the whole customization to a moderate percentage of the game, but I am running it pretty much out of the book. The customization is primarily flavor: the ancestries are slightly modified and a few of the classes have been reskinned. 

My online group fired up with the quickstart which is bascially free, and even has a print version. Obviously it went off in its own direction very quickly, but was a good intro. A slight player-roster switch up, and we've been playing a decent stretch so far. 

The live crew jumped right into a small sort of point-crawl-esque thing I cooked up, and wrecked a portion of it already (yay!). The online group arrived in the vicinity, and in fact had to deal with some of the bullshit the other group left behind. Owl-hive spirit trap whirlwind in the Quiet Zone for the win! 

Heart is pretty fun. There's lots of character customization, and one player even mentioned that once you get going, the prompts mesh with your character and the way the story of the game is progressing, pushing into interesting directions. The main mechanic is super easy to use (small d10 dice pool with partial successes), and the primary driving feature is getting the characters absolutely wrecked. There's a cool tension between the high power level of the characters, looking to see if they are going to hit their ultimate goals (and powers, probably exploding a bit of reality in the process), and the "fallout" they accrue (that is the damage conditions which keep adding up and stacking up), looking to see if they die a possible glorious, though likely ignoble death. The tough parts, at least for me, are twofold, and actually a main part of the game

The first, somewhat minor one, is choosing fallouts. I feel like I'm lagging sometimes in the middle of glorious pacing right when a big smashing moment wallops the characters, and I want to flip through the book, or ask the player, "what feels right here?" If I had a slightly better intuitive sense of the relative levels of harshness, I could improvise better (which I am starting to do, semi-successfully I think). The story-gamey asking the player to join in on some of the choices, on the other hand, often feels slightly wishy-washy to me. Even though they ought to want the damage and despair for their characters in this game, it always gives me, at least, the sense of being taken out of the stakes of the encounter just a bit. 

The other is just keeping up with and remembering to incorporate the beats chosen by the players. Beats are chosen by the players, and if the character hits one of these "what I want to see" goals, they get to choose from the various powerups. Hopefully my players have been good with the way in which these have been checked off; sometimes I've taken a pretty loose interpretation on what constitutes hitting one. I'm usually so involved in what is going on within the game, that I feel like I'll just shoehorn in some random-ass event to qualify for one of the beats a player has chosen. Or, I really try to give a chance for one, and the player just doesn't recognize the circumstance. Which has definitely led to some amusing dialogue with me reeeeaallly emphasizing certain elements of the scene. And then saying "hey didn't you have such and such beat?" 

I don't think either of these nit-picks have really detracted from the game. I do think that it is a bit more tiring to run Heart than say, one of my OSR thingies that I've been DMing for quite a while. That slight exhaustion with two games a week (recently alleviated by fricking everyone being busy at this time of the year) has made me itching to run something else, I think. I mean, I am always wanting to try one of the games I have hanging around, and keep a running, rotating list of my next game-interest. With little floating, well, hearts, and a sweet frame, and a picture of a weird-ass RPG that I clutch to my chest. Well, not really, but I do want to run so many things! 

Which leads to...

What Will Be Played, Possibly 

Ugh. A bunch of things are off the shelf, on the way, stacked next to me, kept in mind. When I wrap up the Heart stuff, which I'm not in a big hurry to do, the top spot is held by Swords of the Serpentine for my live group. SotS being the Sword & Sorcery version of GUMSHOE of all things. But I think it could hold together really well, and definitely looks fun to me. It will be another stretch for me to get the gist of the game, since it's definitely different than anything I've run. Investigate?! Refresh tokens?! Rolling a single d6?! What am I going to be doing? 

Gettin' heisty.

 I actually thought the live Heart game would actually only go 10 or so weeks with like 7 or 8 sessions in there, but I think the players are good letting it progress at a slightly slower rate than that. So the time-frame to start SotS is a bit drifty. Which means I have plenty of time to mull over other games that would be fun. 

Sitting there on the table next to me is RipCrypt, another one I'm interested in, but one I'm not sure I'll get to the table any time soon. It's another small dice pool system by Kynan Antos, but one that uses d8s vs. target numbers based on difficulty. It bills itself as a "dungeon sprint RPG" which is totally appealing to me, and the black and green color-scheme give it some sweet spoochky vibes. I even got a big assortment of random d8s (and some blank ones, cause I can use those for...something...eventually). It's got gridded combat, so I can break out the minis, and a decent amount of procedural stuff that make it sound pretty easy to run. 

Look at that sweet color scheme. Makes me want to run out and grab some mf-ing loot!

One nitpick is that many of the tables, since they use multiples of d8s, are on a curve, but still ordered alphabetically. Not sure what I was going to do with that, since I sorta-kinda wanted for once to play a game as written (haha yeah right). Maybe just go with the strange artifact that the world the game will take place in seems to discourage the beginning and end of the alphabet? Really, other than that, RipCrypt feels like it could be pretty slick, and I wouldn't mind running it.

I ordered Lowlife 2090. The print-on-demand might take forever from DTRPG, I don't know. But I have been perusing the rules on the dreaded PDF format, and watched a video or two on it. I was looking for Cyberpunk-ish stuff after one of my players expressed a liking for the genre, and even though I have the slightly bizarre Dancing With Bullets Under a Neon Sun  (a Black Hack hack by Dirk Detweiler Leichty that I wanted to combine with the Black Sword Hack at one point for maximum style for some reason), I went into scan mode on the rule-sets people talked about here and there on the internet. 

A couple seemed interesting, the classics were way too crunchy for my taste, and one that seemed promising started off with jamming politics down the reader's throat. There were some supplements and some really esoteric (and interesting) rules out there. But Lowlife 2090 by Stephen J. Grodzicki, with it's easily recognizable 2014 (*coff coff* you know the one) d20 framework, fairly lethal rules, and Shadowrun DNA ended up catching my attention the most. 

I'm going to use this picture, instead of something Cyberpunky, cause it gives me the feels.

I know my 5e players would pick it up fast, since Low Fantasy Gaming, by the same author, is the bones I think. And I'm pretty sure I could pick up the slack for my relatively new players, since I know 5e reasonably well. (In fact, I wonder now how much I already had started to be influenced by LFG when I was contemplating Fiveee, my prospective 5e houserules.) Anyhow, I have vague daydreams about running some of the adventures from the hardcovers I have taking up space on the game-shelf. Heh. 

There's some other things. Zines I've backed that I'd like to incorporate here and there. Setting and adventure books (primarily OSR, of course) that I would like to get on the world-map, and tease their existences to my players. Modules. My insane urge to blend Wulfwald, Wolves Upon the Coast, and use a bit from Wolves of God, into one crazy game of Wolf World or De Wolvenwereld or whatever it would be called. 

But the one thing that has tickled my fancy is Ruination Pilgrimage by Donn Stroud. At one point, I was reading a book on the condottieri, listening to Apocrypals, and recently finished Lent: A Novel of Many Returns by Jo Walton. This combination (still) has me wanting to play something in a sort of Italian-esque warring states region, with demonic plagues and sorrows sweeping across the land, and characters making treks to holy sites for prayers and relief from giving into despair and whatnot. I think RP would work wonderfully for that.  This might be the one with the most gravitational pull to get me to run something with -- eventually. I think it will stick around, rattling the brainbox, and tickling the interest-nerves. 

Beatin' demons or some damned thing.

 And, unfortunately, Stroud has just launched a successful Kickstarter for a supplement. So that thing will be popping in eventually. Probably just around the time I'm gearing up for a new game, chosen by my players, that is none of these options at all! (I'm looking at you, Ruins of Symbaroum, set in my Not-Iron-Age-Britain setting. Ok, that might be the other one I sort of want to run, BUT NO! NO MORE!)