Games of Future Past / Planning my next game

I'm running a successful campaign at the moment, which obviously means that I'm thinking about what I want to run next.

I've been toying with a few plot ideas and potential settings for different games for awhile now, and suddenly have hope that I'll be able to run them.

I'm probably getting a bit giddy...

The games are:

Trail of Cthulhu
The first Gumshoe game I bought, and a work of beautiful genius. It successfully evokes multiple interpretations of Lovecraft's work, from the pulp two fisted tales of dark adventure to the doomed and weak minded soul not long for this world with the tenacious and fearful academic somewhere in between.
I have an idea for a game that draws upon The Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu for mood and theme and a real life lost Arctic expedition for setting. I've already started mentally mapping out this idea. It's a strong contender.

Trinity
Originally released as Aeon and soon to be re-released under that name, Trinity is the game from the Aeon Trilogy that I have played the least and have the most books for.
I think I ran a short one shot game for two players back in 2001/2.
It's a game that deserves another crack of the whip - a mix of epic sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, post apocalyptic wasteland, Starship Troopers, intrigue and horror. You can set the equalisers to any level you want just by varying the locations and organisations involved.
I'd run a vanilla Aeon Trinity game with a mix of investigation, combat and political manoeuvring.

Hunter: the Vigil
I think of all the World of Darkness games, H:tV has the broadest appeal. Used to playing the monsters in the other games? Have fun playing the other side for once. Never played a WoD game before? Here's a no nonsense gateway to the setting. Not sure about playing a monster? Play a legit human instead.
I was running a nWoD cops game when Hunter: the Vigil announced, and it quickly became apparent that I was running a proto hunter game.
When I finally got it I ran a short introductory story arc for my gaming group, then promptly got my wife pregnant again so had to scale back my gaming for awhile.
I've still got a load of unused ideas that I'd like to try out, and my wife bought me the Compacts & Conspiracies splatbook for my birthday, so it's fresh in my mind.

Ars Magica
My first gaming love. The second game I ever played, the first game I ran. Over the years I've built up and lost a sizable ArM library. I had about 20+ books for 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition, some of which are probably worth a bit of money now, and stupidly gave them all away to charity when the 5th edition came out. To make matters worse, 5th edition wasn't what I wanted it to be, and I gave up on it.
A few years and a bit of perspective later I realised that I wasn't giving it a chance. Different doesn't mean bad. And it couldn't be as much of a disappointment as Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.
So I'd like to run Ars Magica again.

Changeling: the Lost
Look, this game is fucking brilliant. Really. It's the most well rounded game that White Wolf has ever produced. It's beautiful, horrific, terrifying, paranoid, innocent, brave, redemptive and compelling. It's everything good about folk tales and myths and everything good about modern horror.
It's the best Slender Man pictures meets Pan's Labyrinth meets The Evil Dead.
As I see it, Changeling: the Lost is a game about self discovery and personal agency - freed slaves learning that they can do anything they want, and trying to work out what that actually is, whilst fighting to preserve that freedom.

Mage: the Awakening/Mage Noir
It's hard to get a grip on Mage: the Awakening, to definitively say "this is what the game is about", especially when compared to its predecessor, Mage: the Ascension.
In Ascension it was explicit within the setting that you were caught up in an ideological, metaphysical war with clearly defined sides and an achievable goal. Awakening lacks this direction and forces the players to determine what they want to do and who they have to fight to do it.
The rules are great though. They allow the player characters to bend reality to their will and do a truly impressive range of miracle working.
If running Mage: the Awakening I'd use the Mage Noir setting and play in post war America, late 40s to early 50s, with the players hunting down magical artifacts like an arcane Maltese Falcon.

Pathfinder
Every now and then I have an urge to run a good old fashioned high fantasy dungeon bash.
So far I've primarily used Pathfinder to run Goblin games, because Goblins are ace. The Goblin games I've run so far have been independent of each other but set in the same game world, so the events of the first game (slaughtering a farmer and his family, burning their house down and eating the livestock) informed the second (humans try to drive the Goblins out of the area, Goblins retaliate by setting fire to what they think is a religious monument but is in fact a signal beacon) and the second will inform the third (possible war due to the sudden amassing of an army after an invasion has been signaled).
In every game, though, the players have basically been looking for food and tribal status.

Breaking Radio Silence / The Corruption of Youth

It's been ... some months since my last post. Why is this? Real life, my friend, real life. 
Real life has been systematically poisoning me in my sleep. Never enough to kill or debilitate me, but just enough to stop me straying too far from its embrace. 

Which has struck a sickening blow to my gaming of late. The last bit of face to face gaming I did was in June when my 14 year old Nephew came down to visit. He plays a lot (a lot) of Skyrim, and bamboozles me with jargon:

I'm a high elf that's mostly magic

I have azure's star but I lost it, ring of hircine, mehrunes razor, dawn breaker, mace of molag bal wabbajack and the skull of corruption

I'm a vampire lord level 80

I have all dragon priest masks

I have no idea what about 65% of that means, but it tells me that he's ready for Pathfinder or D&D. 

My Dungeoneer character sheet

So when he came down we played Pathfinder and HeroQuest with a friend of mine, then he joined my gaming group on the evening and we played Dungeoneer: Advanced Fighting Fantasy. The rest of the time he just pwned me at video games. 

The final encounter in HeroQuest

He loved it. 
He played to type - A magic using Elf in all three games - and was basically a sneaky little bastard. He left my Barbarian to die in the HeroQuest dungeon, commanded a battalion of Goblins in Dungeoneer and let the Rogue take point in Pathfinder. I'll never trust him to have my back again in a game, ever.

A Goblin lair from Dungeoneer

Since then, though, I've not been able to find the time for face to face gaming, and my weekly fix has slipped by the wayside. 
Which has basically meant that I've not had much to talk about, gaming wise. It's all been a bit of a pipe dream.

Thankfully I've found a way around that, which is remote gaming over Google Hangouts. More on that in later posts.

The Elf legs it, leaving the Barbarian to deal with the undead

The siren song of the dungeon crawl / Guilty pleasures

So I've been playing this game, Pixel Dungeon, on my Nexus 4 a lot recently. A lot.
Loads.
It's getting a little out of hand.

It's one of those retro RPGs that are so popular these days. As the name suggests it's a pixel heavy, lo-fi dungeon bash. You descend through randomly generated levels of an unnamed dungeon, kill anything that moves, collect gold and items (weapons, armour, wands, potions, scrolls) and face off against occasional bosses.
Your progress is determined as much by the luck of the draw - which items are randomly placed on each level - as your tactical skill as a player (at least, that's what I tell myself).
Death is usually tragically often and frustrating, so much so that a friend and I have taken to messaging each other stating what killed us and how far we got:
L1 Rat
L5 Goo (fucking goo)
L4 Sewer Crab
L7 Burned to death after drinking an unidentified potion

All of which has got me thinking about the old school dungeon crawl, a mode of play I've strenuously avoided as a GM.
I... I think I'm ready to run one now.

In the past few days I've found myself flicking through my Pathfinder books reading up on hidden doors, traps, monsters, potions, magic items and treasure.
I've been looking up dungeon mapping apps and websites.
I've been thinking of ways to make a cool, engaging, three-dimensional dungeon that makes sense and what set pieces I'd want in there.

There's a possibility that I'll be using some OSR micro lite rules as well...

Help.

Give in to your poor impulse control / Pathfinder Goblin game

This week at Geek Club both the regular GMs were AWOL, so I ran a one shot Goblin only Pathfinder game.
After getting the Goblins of Golarion book for Christmas I statted up a Goblin version of every applicable class from the Core Rules (so no Paladins, Wizards or Monks [yes, I know you can technically have a Lawful Goblin. It's just highly unlikely]), and sketched out a rough 'plot'.
I realised last night that I put more time into the prep for it than we actually spent playing it.
Not that I'm bothered. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of statting the characters.
I went with a set score range of 9, 11, 11, 13, 15, 17, reasoning that this split is slightly more interesting than even numbers.
This produced two types of Goblin; all-rounders and specialists.
Any class that likes a high Dex score came out well, specifically the Ranger (bow user) and Rogue.
The classes with a reliance on Str and Cha - Barbarian, Fighter, Bard, Sorcerer - came out as ... Ok. Their highest stat scores went into their racially deficient attributes, building a Goblin that was generally good at couple of things, but not brilliant at their main shtick.
The Cleric and Druid, two classes that rely on Wisdom, were able to enjoy a high Wis score, but were hit hard by the -2 to Str and Cha.
In retrospect, I can see why Goblins of Golarion states that Goblin Rogues are the most common, and that Barbarians don't last long at all.
But that's still to come.

On the night I had four players: Adam, Chris, Jon and Ni. They chose the Fighter, Barbarian, Bard and Sorcerer respectively.

The set up was pretty simple. It's been a hard winter, and the food store is running low. If fresh meat isn't found soon, the tribe will have to eat the turnips. Or the children. Whichever.

I gave them two choices for food:
On the other side of the hills is a big human town, and sometimes they use hated horses to pull carts along the track through the hills.
At the base of the hills is a human place where they build fences around tall grass and keep moocows.

They chose the farm.
Events proceeded along these lines.
The Fighter braced the front farmhouse door shut with wood from the log pile.
The Sorcerer used Burning Hands to set light to the door and fire wood.
The Barbarian and Bard tried barricading the back door with hay, but were startled by a dog barking.
The Bard began using Mage Hand to catch chickens so he could eat them.
The Sorcerer decided to check out the barn.
The Fighter tried to throw a burning log onto the roof, fumbled, and took for points of damage.
The farmers forced their way out the partially barricaded back door, and were instantly sent to Sleep by the Bard, who correctly surmised that they wanted to take the chickens off him.
The Bard, Fighter and Barbarian then spent about three rounds failing to Coup de Grace the helpless farmers.
Some more chickens were killed as well.
Meanwhile, the Sorcerer had discovered that the barn was full of moocows, and jumped into the middle of them with manifested Aberrant Bloodline claws, doing a massive 1d3-2 damage.
Once the two farmers were dead, the Fighter went off to find the dog, the Barbarian went to investigate the sudden, terrified mooing coming from the barn, and the Bard raided the hen house.
By this time the cows in the barn were terrified, stirred up by the smoke and the smelly Goblin ineffectually clawing them and Acid Splashing them. Which is an excellent time for the Barbarian to throw open the doors.
The cows stampede.
The Barbarian survives through sheer luck, rolling a crit on the first cow, knocking its legs out and creating a bovine wall to shelter behind as the rest of the herd trample past/over.
Meanwhile the Fighter has survived a drawn out battle with the ferocious Jack Russell chained up behind a farm building and the Bard continues to loot eggs.
I decide that the night is wearing on, and throw in a CR4 Bison and tell them the Bull is loose. I realise too late that it's got a +10 to hit and does 2d6+12 damage. Damage and attack rolls are fudged to ensure things are not a complete forgone conclusion.
The Barbarian survives the first attack, and is joined by the Sorcerer and Fighter.
Meanwhile, back in the hen house, the Bard faces up against that rarest of fowl, a Dire Rooster. It has baleful eyes and a comb of blood red.
The Fighter is dropped to minus hit points in his first turn of combat with the Bull. The Sorcerer makes it to two rounds and the Barbarian is killed the round after.
The Bard rolls well against the Dire Rooster, which rolls horrendously, and emerges from the hen house to find a farmyard strewn with dead and dying cows, chickens and Goblins.
He eats well, and sings a song about chickens.

The attached picture was drawn by Ni during the session. It's pretty ace.

One night stands / Non-exclusive gaming

I've just wound up the Star Wars Saga Edition game I have been running for my local club. It's a Clone Wars era game that I'd envisioned as a lead up to Order 66 and the fall of the Jedi. The last session ended with the party ambushed unexpectedly by Clone Troopers during a New Hope-esque award ceremony.
I'd only planned past this point in the vaguest of sense, so it seemed like a good end of season cliffhanger for Season One of the game.

I've signed up to play a game next, which is quite unlike me, and have decided to work up some one shots to have in reserve should the regular GM not be able to make it.

As soon as I started thinking in terms of single session or two session games a whole new world of possibilities opened up to me.
I normally have an idea for a game, then see if I can use it as the foundation for a campaign. Which means that I usually end up running games that lose steam after certain story arcs have completed.

Focussing just on one short arc eliminates that.
I feel liberated.

I can run that Trail of Cthulhu game that has bootleggers and feds running afoul of the Mi-Go in the wilderness without worrying how to make the characters work in an ongoing campaign.
The World of Darkness Aliens vs Predator (Azlu vs Werewolves) idea? Perfect for a throwaway evening. It's not as though the characters could be used again.

One mental obstacle I've had to hurdle is the idea of a pre-genned character.
I've always been adverse to doling out ready statted characters to players. I've always enjoyed character creation myself, and pre-gens prevent that pleasurable experience. Sometimes I can't get behind playing a pre-gen, and I've had players from past games tell me that they don't feel like it's their character.

However, I found myself statting characters for two of players my Star Wars players. They told me what they wanted, and I generated something in that ball park.
I thought it worked pretty well, and received no complaints.

I'd run a one shot Trail of Cthulhu game a few months ago, and pre-genned some characters for that. About eight characters. I only got three players, who were spoilt for choice.
They all professed to enjoy themselves, and I loved the interpretations they bought to their characters. It was an experience I'd love to repeat.

At the moment I'm working up a one shot game for Pathfinder, using only Goblin PCs. By necessity it will be a one shot, as I don't expect the survival rate to be high (although the Goblin Barbarian I've statted is surprisingly hard to kill...)

D&D Next / A concern

The internet is awash with opinion and conjecture about the pending 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
I have no intention or authority to add to it, but I do have a concern.

One of the possible goals of this new edition is to bridge the gap between OSG, 3.5 and 4th ed.

Does this mean WotC are going to sell us conversion guides?

I shall rely on my feminine grace to avoid ... Oww / Women in Reasonable Armor

I was watching the final episode of the current series of Merlin with my wife last night, when it was remarked that one of the characters seemed to be practically naked in comparison to the others.
The main cast were joined by two new characters, Tristan and Isolde (yes, I know...), for the final two episodes, and these two participate in the final, epic battle.

In this battle, Arthur and his knights are wearing chainmail, the bad guys are wearing studded leather and Merlin does not engage in physical combat (he's a fucking wizard! They're doing it wrong if they have to enter melee).
Tristan and Isolde are not so well armoured. Tristan wears a long leather coat and leather top, so is at least making the effort. Isolde looks like she's just gotten back from a run, and didn't have time to change (see image below).

In fact, I'd say that the costume designer for the series really could not be bothered...

So, we talked about this for a little while, my wife and I, and I recalled something I'd seen awhile ago, a blog called Women in Reasonable Armour, which I would recommend to anybody looking to visualise a capable and competent female fighter. It covers several genres.

Hypocracy / Ooh, I am excited about Pathfinder

I swore myself off Dungeons & Dragons about six years ago. I'd finished running a year long 3.5 campaign with seven players that had taken them from Level 1 to approx Level 15, killed off all the original characters except one and sapped my will to live.
I think it was the extreme silliness of spells, spell-like abilities and general epic prowess D&D characters start acquiring around Level 10 and above that did me in.
The sheer number of modifiers, potential for insane actions and improbable escapes that got me in the end.
I just couldn't comprehend just how epicly competent these characters were.
It did my nut.
When 4th Ed came out, I ditched all my 3.5 books in the bin and embraced the new edition whole heartedly. After all, it was streamlined, improved, easier to grasp.
It was differently insane.
And seemed to focus entirely on tactical dungeon combat. It was like playing Diablo.
Or Dungeon Siege.
I ran it for my local gaming club, and after about 3 sessions jacked it in and played a halfling in somebody else's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game.
Every now and then I'd look in on the D&D guys. They were always in some dungeon working out if they should plow on and get the Action Points, or take a short rest and heal, or weighing up if they should use their per day power now or save it.
I never actually saw them have a conversation with an NPC or do something non combat related.
So, I swore myself off D&D entirely. I'll stick with my WoD and Gumshoe games, I thought.
Earlier this year, though, I realised I had an itch for D&D style fantasy.
I thought about hacking WoD into a fantasy game, and bought World of Darkness: Mirrors. Good ideas, just not quite the same...
I picked up my copy of Ars Magica 5th Ed and flicked through. Yeah, but not quite. It's not epic fantasy. It's not disposable. It's not fast paced.
So I've bought Pathfinder.
I'm halfway through it, and I'm getting a little giddy about it.
Yes, I know its essentially 3.5 with tweaks, and I can see characters becoming insanely powerful by 10th level again, but it sings to me.
The Classes and Races look like fun to play, I'm already familiar with the rules, so just need to spot the differences, it encourages multi-classing and non-standard skill point distribution.
It's a game I hated 6 years ago, and right now I think its great.
I first went out with my wife in 95. We split up some five months later.
Ten years later, we get married.
Not that I'm comparing my wife to D&D/Pathfinder...

Player reactions / Is it ever acceptable to throw a Tarrasque at a 1st level party?

 Tarrasque
I've an idea for a D&D/Pathfinder game, which riffs off Cloverfield a fair amount.
I want to destroy the city the players are in, and make their challenges about saving themselves and others, and generally getting out alive.
It would not be about fighting the big ass monster.
Repeat, not.
That would happen in the background, with the level 20 NPCs throwing heavy ordinance at it, running up its flanks like Legolas or commanding legions of enchanted Mechawarriors (as cool as that would be) to crash against it like waves against the rocks.
My chief concern is the "moron son from War of the Worlds" effect - one of the players exits the main plot because they don't want to survive, they want to fight futilely against the unconquerable foe.
Players can be morons too.
So, advice, should a DM ever throw a Tarraque level threat at a starting party?