Dark Places

This has got to be game homerun of the year. Mouse Guard creator David Petersen has hired Luke Crane to write the roleplaying game based on Petersen's wonderful Mouse Guard comics. Mouse Guard as a comic is already one of the classics, and undoubtedly the game will be as well. Expect Burning Empires-like preorder craze, at least from yours truly, when time comes.

It has to be said that Clinton R. Nixon already delevoped the basics for a Mouse Guard RPG, called Tiny Triangles, but Petersen is not a gambling man, and being a more tradidionally founded roleplayer himself he went for Luke instead, probably based on what he knew about on Burning Wheel. Petersen was probably thinking that Burning Wheel was a solid traditional fantasy game. Boy, is he in for a surprise, in a good way.

Mouse Guard is not going to be published by BWHQ, but by Mouse Guard publisher Archaia Studio Press.

Two questions remain: will this be the entry-level Burning Wheel game and WHEN CAN WE PREORDER? 

I've been quiet around here since Conpulsion, but it doesn't mean I've been doing nothing. My good friend Pooka lend me his two One Roll Engine books Reign and Monsters and Other Childish Things, and I've been studying those. It's been a while since I read a more traditional RPG, but these are good.

Monsters... triggered my imagination so much that I wrote a pitch for a supplement for the game and send it to the publisher. They liked it. Now I'm writing it. Feels good, haven't written a game supplement since maybe 2001 and that publisher closed its operations before my book could get published. It was a Heist supplement for a "cinematic" roleplaying game.

Last week we playtested a game called unWritten and send feedback back to the game's author. uW is a no-prep collaborative game without a GM that helps you create literary fiction. It's got great potential and still has some rough edges.

Last, but not least, I am considering writing another story now "scenario" for the Danish Fastaval convention in 2009. I wrote a Sorcerer scenario in 2005, which was suitably hated and liked for different reasons.  I'm hoping that con-goers anno 2009 are less in entertain-me mode than four years ago. If they are, I'd like to think that our push for crazy-ass indie games since then has played a part in this. Maybe it's just a crazy dream. 

Conpulsion happened this weekend in Edinburgh - actually it's probably still going, as the final traditional pub quiz is possibly not over yet. But I'm back home after a long, tiring and absolutely fabulous weekend.

I was part of the eternally tireless Games on Demand team together with Joe Murphy, Pooka, Scott, Matt and Adam, a super swell and awesome bunch of guys. We had games running continuously, at least to full games in each slot over the weekend, plus playtests on the side.

Saturday didn't start too bad, as we got together for a game of In a Wicked Age and guest of honour Vincent Baker joined us. Pooka acted as GM, and we worked ourselves through a full chapter involving homunculi rebelling against wizards, weird poisons, missing genitals and more stuff than I could possibly account for.

On another table punters demanded Primetime Adventures, and judging from the screams and giggles coming from the players there, that went down very well as well. So well, in fact, that the group decided to meet again Sunday to play an episode more!

In the afternoon I ended up running a bunny scenario of The Shadow of Yesterday, using pre-made rabbits by Jason Morningstar. The three rabbits faced more dangers and excitement that is good for you - it ended well, but boy do rabbits lead a stressful life.

Sunday started for me with a game of Inspectres run by Adam, which I enjoyed, especially the confessional scenes. They rock.

I was actually not sceduled to run a game in the Sunday afternoon slot, but a couple of guys wanted to try Burning Empires, and I knew Neil Gow was around somewhere as well with the same wish, so that's what we did. I ran the demo scenario "Fires Over Omac" that is designed to show off the main features of this intimidating monster game, as well as sell it. And I think we did. That was an intense three hours of gaming, no breaks, all-out colour and action, ending in the player characters successfully assaulting and taking over the bad guys' space station and kicking me, the GM's, ass. Wonderful.

I'm in no doubt the GoD was a huge success, and I was enjoying it just as much as everyone else involved, I think, as we managed to attract more and more people to try our hippie games over the two days.

All the guys and girls I met, talked to and gamed with at Conpulsion: thank you so much. You totally made this a great experience!

Two weeks ago I ordered 214 custom made dice from Dice & Games Ltd. The dice are for me and a bunch of other BE/BW nerds. The symbols on the dice are handdrawn by Iron Empires creator Chris Moeller and digitised. Chris ordered some for himself as well of course.

These are without a doubt the yummiest dice I have ever seen. 

Saturday I ran Sorcerer & Sword at Nerdinburgh, a small, cosy homespun convention I held at my house here in Edinburgh. This was very much a demo of Sorcerer, being a one-shot over 4 hours, which meant I had to cut a few corners to get as much play in there as possible. Sorcerer is notoriously bad at these sort of things, but I’ve built up a reasonable experience in how the game works, so I thought I would be able to handle it OK.
My idea was to present the players with a tight situation and half-done characters - after the players had decided how their characters connected to the R-map and/or situation, all they had to do was to write a Kicker and we were off. That succeeded very well, I think. Here’s how I did it.
Firstly I chose to use the Charnel Gods supplement, because it narrows down a few things - there is one main type of Demon, the Fell weapons, and Humanity is also pretty straightforward. To quickly get inspired for a pulpy and explosive situation, I went to one of the In a Wicked Age oracles, the God Kings of War, and got:

•     A local warlord's ancestral sword, much honored.
•     The ghost of a tyrant king, strangled by his own daughter.
•     A warrior-woman, queen of her small wild tribe, hard-pressed by advancing civilization.
•     A vengeful and jealous god, displeased by the lapses of his followers, however scrupulously they observe.

From that I build a small R-map, looking like below. I since added a couple of extra characters, but this was the version I presented to the players, along with a short description of the situation.

The Blatonn village, inhabited by pale-skinned people, mostly farmers, was expanding north of the Southern Mountains and had reached the borders of the Black Tooth Forest, home of the Black Tooth Tribe. The tribe people were darker skinned and with their bodies covered in elaborate tattoos. King Alfreth is dead and there are rumours he’s walking around undead. He was killed, strangled. Blatonn is therefore without a King, as its formal leader at the moment is the Fell weilder Faldur, who is the protector of the village.
I premade three characters with stats and descriptors, and assigned each a Fell weapon from the Charnel Gods book, but nothing else. Here are two of the templates - Gregor must have kept his, as I can’t find it.

STA 5 (Savage-raised, Trained soldier), WILL 4 (Righteous), LORE 1 (Naive), PAST 4 (Captain in the Amber Guard), Flaw -1 (Disbelief).
Demon: Trinfendel, a black sword. STA 10, WILL 11, LORE 5, POW 11. Need: Flattery and praise. Desire: Tyranny.
David chose this guy and named him Markos. David decided not to be connected to the R-map beforehand, and arrived as a travelling swordsman from the south. His Kicker was that he landed in the middle of a skirmish between the Black Tooth tribe and the villagers (at this point without their warrior Faldur).
Next character.

STA 3 (Throwback), WILL 4 (Driven), LORE 3 (Mentored), Past 4 (Nomad), Flaw -1 (Paranoid).
Demon: Irkspire, a long pike/spear with a black metal handle and inscribed glyphs. STA 8, WILL 9, LORE 5, POW 9. Need: Wielder must promise in not to part with it. Desire: Melancholia.
Gordon took this one and the character became Shara Grieffinder, the lover of King Alfreth. Gordon’s Kicker was spot on with the village guard arriving to arrest Shara for killing the King. Bam!
Gregor decided that his character was Thulan, a tribesman, brother to the Queen, who had been away to the south and arrived back expecting to lead the tribe, only to see his sister on the throne. And that wasn’t even the Kicker, no no, Gregor threw himself fully into action: Thulan wakes up after a battle, captured by the villagers and his Fell Sword Periffon is gone.

Here’s the R-Map including the player characters.

And, finally, the entire R-Map with extra characters added, some of which never came into play.