Ingress / Mage for Android devices?

I've been playing a lot of Ingress on my Android phone recently. It's really growing on me.
The game functions on two main levels.

One: The crunchy strategy game.
The point of the game is to capture points on the map, Portals, and to control their resources. There are two factions: The Resistance and The Enlightened. You choose a faction then travel round your local area locating Portals and 'hacking' them.
Hacking a Portal gives you resources - useable inventory items such as shields grenades and resonators, keys - Portal access codes that allow you to manipulate the resources the Portal produces, experience - AP, and energy.
If you gain control of a Portal you can link it to other Portals. Link three or more Portals and you create a Control Field.
This leads is to the second level.

Two: The RPG setting
There is a growing back story to the game. The two factions have a scripted reason to be opposed. You choose your faction based on those reasons.
Portals are bringing a new kind of energy into our world - XM or Extraordinary Matter.
The Resistance want to stem this flow and protect the world.
The Enlightened believe that XM is a positive energy and act to encourage and nurture it.
The stated affects of XM is to change the brain waves and thought patterns of nearby people.
If you link multiple Portals together you create a Control Field over the area between the Portals. These Control Fields change the thought patterns of those within them to match the desires of the Faction that controls the field.

Apply this concept to Mage, Ascension or Awakening.
Both games feature two main factions: The Traditions vs The Technocracy / The
Orders vs The Seers of the Throne.
Both are arguably fighting an ideological battle to control or free the minds of the sleeping populace.
The Traditions want to reignite peoples imagination and belief. The Technocracy want to channel that imagination and belief into only one paradigm - Science.
The Seers of the Throne want to rule the Fallen World, with a docile and compliant sleeper populace whilst the Orders rail against this hubris.
The Ascension has Nodes, sites where Quintessence flows into the world that mages compete for and The Awakening has Hallows, sacred places where Mana crosses into the Fallen World.

Here's my reading: The core concepts of Ingress can easily be applied to a Mage game. Players have already chosen a faction and an ideology. They already seek to control sites of power.
Add to that a concrete way to influence sleeping minds - linking these sites together to produce magical fields between them. Maybe these fields affect paradigm as well, or reduce Paradox or provide bonuses to certain Spheres or Arcana.
That's a resource worth fighting for.

For years now I've had an idea about The Technocracy/Seers using mobile phone masts to channel mind controlling magic into the Sleeping populace.
Now I know how it would run.

Cash up front/how much would you pay?

Here's a question: How much would you pay for an RPG system?
Not just the core rules, but everything you *need* to run it.

I've been discussing the cost of buying certain Fantasy Flight Games, which are coming in at the higher end of the pricing spectrum with cards, custom dice, encounter maps and counters.

I feel it's all a bit too rich for my stomach, and have steered clear (although I have been assured that they're beautiful and play well).

I'm feeling that about £30 (US$47.50) is about my maximum. That's how much I paid for the Pathfinder Core Rules last year and Night's Black Agents this year.

I already have all the dice required to run those two games, so no further investment is required on that front. Maybe £10 if I didn't have any dice and wanted to splash out on a nice set.

Pathfinder, realistically, requires the Bestiary to run a game (unless you're going incredibly low fantasy and interacting with only the core races), so that's another £25. I paid that too.

Night's Black Agents is standalone, requires only a d6 per player, and for my £30 I got the hardback book, PDF, Android app and a PDF of an introductory adventure.
Bargain.

How much would you pay, and what do you expect to get for that?

Two fisted tales of Adventure! / The best game ever

I often describe Adventure as 'the best game ever'. This is not just hyperbole. One of the authors, Bruce Baugh, commented last year that he and the other authors had "bottled lightening" with the book.

For a game that I originally only bought to complete my set of the Aeon Trilogy (including Trinity and Aberrant) it has had a significant affect on me.
If I had never bought Adventure! I would never have read Planetary or Hellboy. I wouldn't have been exposed to Pulp literature. It paved the way for me to appreciate and enjoy Trail of Cthulhu and read Lovecraft's work.
This book, this game fired my imagination like no other.

Why? What makes this game so God damn good?
Everything. The commissioned short stories (including ones by Warren Ellis and Greg Stolze), the setting - presented as journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters and notices that makes up the first third of the book.
The control that just stops everything from tipping over the edge into complete absurdity and keeps it running on that razors edge of genius.

It is the swinging 20's and everything is possible if you're willing to seize opportunity by the lapels and shake it until the good stuff falls out. Those with the initiative to make a difference can change present and define the future.

You play one of the Inspired: either a Daredevil, a Mesmerist or a Stalwart - a traditional hero possessed of luck and determination, a person with mysterious psychic powers or a demi-god, a man of bronze capable of impossible feats.

The second reason that the game shines is the system. It's based on the standard White Wolf/Storyteller system, with additions that fit the setting perfectly.

Stunts: The game rewards creativity and engagement with mechanical bonuses. Describe what you want to do. If you've put on effort you get a bonus. If it's cool you get a bigger bonus. If everyone at the table goes "whoa" then you get an even bigger bonus.
You do cool shit, you get could stuff. Fortune favours the bold and all that.

Knacks: The Inspired get Knacks. Not quite powers, not quite enhanced abilities. Both. Neither. Daredevils get Knacks that allow them to push the boundaries of good fortune, Mesmerists get powers of the mind to push and pull objects and thoughts and emotions whilst Stalwarts get to dodge bullets, lift cars and walk across deserts without water or shade with no ill effects.

Finally, Adventure! is a game of undisputable character. It oozes it from its every pore. It is bold. It is bright. It is everything you need from a game.

And it is being republished. Onyx Path Publishing, the successor to White Wolf, has bought the rights and are working on new editions of all the Aeon Trilogy.
I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Do you remember the first time? / I don't remember the worst time

It was February 1996. I was in the rather awkward position of having been invited to my friend Lani's birthday night out, and meeting her at my good friend Eli's house, who was her very recent ex. By about a week.
Eli shared his house with a guy called Camo. Both were (are) colossal geeks. Oh, they tried to hide it - Camo was a professional dancer and Eli was a Jujitsu champ and anti-establishment punk - but more than a five minute conversation with them and you knew they were nerds.
At the time I was friends with Eli for the punk rock and camaraderie. I didn't really know about RPGs.

All that changed on that fateful night. A night that Eli's brother Angus describes as 'the birth of a monster'.

It was snowing when I arrived at Eli's house. A good deep thick settling of snow that wasn't going anywhere fast. It was pretty much a certainty that I wouldn't be catching the bus home to my village in the sticks that night. I was snowed in in Leeds.
Awesome! A night out and a solid gold reason not to go home. Something every teenager dreams of.

The snow kept falling though, and soon we got the call from Lani saying that everyone was staying in.
Ok. What to do?
Eli and Camo fellback to their default position.
"So, what are we playing?"
"I could run a Cyberpunk cops game..." Said Camo. "Nook, you playing?"
I said yes. I didn't really have a choice. Play, sit and watch or take my chances in the blizzard. I'm sure this is how the KGB converted Western spies into double agents.

As mentioned, the game was Cyberpunk - a dark high tech future game dominated by mega corporations and street gangs.
We started creating our characters. Somehow I generated skill and ability scores and worked out the basic numbers. I had, and still have, no idea what they meant or did. It was a strange and arcane experience, reminiscent of the time I bunked a whole term of maths GCSE lessons then had no idea what was going on for the rest of the year.
Once we'd statted up our characters it was time to start buying stuff. And, my god, was there stuff to buy. Camo and Eli started to eagerly devour three separate books of equipment, picking out guns, armour, sunglasses, cyber-appendages, portable computers, tattoos, gadgets... I floundered and was given the advice "it's not so much about utility, it's about cool shit."
I bought my cop some portable electronic bongos, to positive head nods "I think he's getting it"
I most definitely was not.

Play started. We patrolled the mean streets of Night City. No crime was apparent, so I started playing my bongos. Turns out I was shit at it. I felt cheated.
Next I decided that my cop needed to drain his lizard. I hadn't grasped the agency I had to affect the story, so fell back on the mundane.
The Camo responded by making the bar I chose to take a leak a mob run speakeasy. Some stuff happened. My cop was ejected from the establishment.
I still didn't really know what I should be doing. I kind of stood there.
Camo took another tack, and radioed in a mission for us - protect a corporate limo as it traveled through the city.
Less sandbox, more mission based. Ok, I can get behind that.
We followed the limo on our cool cop bikes, keeping our eyes on the road ahead for any danger or ambush.
We didn't look up, though, which I now understand to be a cardinal error.
A rain of explosive fire fell on the street ahead and behind us, penning the limo into a tight spot.
From the rooftop above the world's least subtle sniper loaded a bullet in his chamber and took aim.
Another thing I now understand is that in a ranged fight, tactics, cover and concealment are key elements that help ensure success or, at the very least survival.
Eli's cop took cover behind the armoured limo and opened fire. The sniper was unfairly hidden, with a 12" concrete parapet as cover. Eli missed.
So I climbed on top of the limo, to get a better shot, and started aiming with my standard police issue pistol.
The good news is that I hit. My shot went through the concrete, through the snipers armour, and did him 1 point of damage. I was elated. A few more shots like that, and he'd be down.
Then he blew my arm off.
What The Fuck?! My character's actual arm! I was assured that he'd survive, and could get a cyborg replacement that would be better than the original and would only erode my sanity and morality slightly.

I remember my mind racing afterwards as I thought about everything you could do with this Roleplay thing. I thought about superheroes, gods, knights, sci-fi, everything I'd been interested in so far in my life could be filtered through this new medium.

Throwing away all pretense, here's some dice packaged up like the drug they are...

Horror you can relate to / Changeling: the Lost

I flicked through my copy of Changeling: the Lost a couple of nights ago. It's still the best game that White Wolf have ever produced.

Unlike most of their games, it's a proper horror game. Ok, you're not playing / hunting a Vampire, Werewolf, reanimated abomination or channeling unknowable power. The horror in Changeling is subtle, rather than overt. There's none of the "I am a monster, and I must fight my unnatural urges lest I become nought but a callous soulless killer" angst.
Instead it is replaced with a more human horror, one that regrettably exists in the real world; the horror of abduction, separation, loss of self/identity, loss of family and friends.

It is much easier to imagine and empathise with this type of horror, much easier to imagine and to react to.
Many White Wolf games rely on the players reacting to the game line's driving horror - Vampires clinging onto their Humanity as they hunt humans for food, Werewolves struggling to balance their bestial rage with their conscious mind, Mages fighting the temptation to use magic for everything and anything no matter the cost - yet these horrors are conceptual stretches. These are things that we cannot experience, that are completely outside the frame of human experience.
Changeling, however, centers on a horror that people have experienced. Child abduction stories are unfortunately regular news stories. Tourists are abducted on holiday with alarming frequency. Home invasions happen. I've been held at gunpoint during a bank robbery. It's scary shit, and I can imagine what it's like. I can also imagine what it's like to live in fear of it happening again. Hell, I know what it's like. For weeks after my experience I was afraid that they'd come back, that they'd come to my house because they'd threatened me they would if I talked to the Police.

That's a real horror game. I really want to run it

Got my geek on / Warhammer Fantasy RPG last night

I've not made it to my Roleplay group that much in the last few months, real life shit and other commitments etc, and as a result I've found it hard to get enthused about it.
I've been happily telling more and more people about my hobby, and getting into discussions and conversations about it, with less and less embarrassment, but doing it less and less.
But I made it to a game last night, and had an absolute blast.
The game was already several sessions in, and I was introduced as "a Halfling who's always been with you, but hasn't done much so far". Yes. I play Halflings. What of it?
I've not much idea as to what's going on, plot wise, but I rarely concern myself with such matters. My characters usually don't, so I don't.

Which leads me to the conclusion that I'm the kind of player that I hate.
I'm mouthy, domineering, attention seeking. I don't really pay attention to the plot. I make constant ooc jokes. I distract other players - last night I pretty much spent the evening fist bumping with the Elf whilst making jokes about him being a 'hobo-sexual' - and bug the GM with inappropriate dialogue.

I usually don't enjoy myself as much when I behave myself...

Anyways: I'm playing Onan, a Halfling Entertainer/Thief. Nobody seems to get the joke yet, they think it's a Conan pun.

Ok, maybe I can get behind that / Promethean: The Created

I had a flick through my copy of Promethean: The Created this morning, and didn't hate it.
Well, I've never hated it, but I've not loved it either.
I was excited when it came out. I thought it'd be a bit ... I dunno... More.
I thought there would be more than animated corpses, specifically.
I get the Frankenstein's Monster angle, the perverse and ungodly spawn of mortal hubris, but that's where it ends.
If you're going to have a Golem inspired monster, then why not just have a Golem. Nope, instead we have an animated corpse commonly confused for a Golem.

I thought the game would have the following:
Reanimated Corpses - AKA Frankenstein's Monster
Animated Statues - AKA Golems
Robots - AKA Um, Robots, maybe Data from ST:NG
Dolls, Toys and Puppets - AKA Pinocchio
Clones / Bio-Engineered Humanoids - AKA Tyrell Corp. Replicants
Artificial Intelligences (AI) - AKA Skynet, although I'd use this one as an antagonist rather that a player option.

Promethean does have Clones as an antagonist option, and I believe that Robots feature in one of the supplements, but it's still not what I was looking for.
I firmly believe that the central theme of pursuing mortality and the threats of Disquiet etc are still relevant with the options I listed above, and this disappointment has coloured how I think about the game for years.

This morning I had a look at it with fresh eyes, though, and didn't find myself wanting to completely rewrite it. I just accepted things as they were. Much better.

I still think it'd be a hard sell to potential players - you're a monster who everyone hates, who rots and discolours the very earth and the surrounding environment if you stay too long there, and you are trying to become Human.
I only think Wraith: The Oblivion would be a harder sell.

And now, a short interlude / No messages from our sponsors

I've started getting crappy spam replies recently, so I've reluctantly switched captcha back on.
Believe you me, I hate it too, but not as much as spam...

Embrace the 21st Century and all its technological wonders / RPG apps? Yes please

The new game by Monte Cook, currently being Kickstarted via the link below, comes with an Android/iPhone app to assist with character creation and gameplay.

How good is that?!
And how... Unusual.

RPGs have been flirting with electronic and online play aids for years now, from virtual game boards to dice rollers, from PDF rulebooks to NPC generators.
I have tried out a number of different RPG apps for my Android phone, yet none have been official.
Not that I wouldn't buy an official app, I've just not seen one.

This is the thing... I don't get why there aren't any official apps out there.
I'd buy them. My gaming group would buy them. Apps are usually cheap, and they save a helluva lot of space. I just need my phone, not a bag o' stuff.

I would explicitly pay for any of the following official apps from White Wolf, Pelgrane Press, Paizo, WotC and the indie game press:

Virtual character sheets
Character generators
Dice rollers
Resource managers - Initiative / Health / Items
Rules and quick references
NPC generators
Campaign trackers

I think there's a market for this stuff - if there wasn't, then there wouldn't be so much fan material available - and I think that RPG publishers are missing a trick.

Numenera: A new roleplaying game from Monte Cook by Monte Cook — Kickstarter

Blocking is for chumps / Late to the Skyrim party

I'm late to this party, by about a year, so I apologise for the total lack of news flashes.
I am, however, going to talk about what I've learnt (decided) so far.

1. Blocking is for chumps, dual wielding is where it's at. As far as I can tell, the trick is to not let them get close enough to hit you.

2. Forget racial stat boosts, I want to see in the dark. I played about an hour of Oblivion, not including character creation, and soon realised that I couldn't see for shit roughly half the time. Solution: Khajit. I don't give a monkey's about cat-man cuteness, or claw attacks or bonuses to sneaking (ok, I care a bit about that). What I do care about is being able to see the goblin dog fuck that's just jumped me in the cave.

3. Cleanse with Fire! So far, a five second burst of flame has solved every single problem I've had. Hands down. I'm hoping that there's a "take off and nuke the site from orbit" spell later on.
I suspect that I'm screwed when I meet a foe with some level of fire resistance.

4. Beauty gets you killed. More precisely, stopping to admire the stunning visuals usually means that you're about to get ganked, like a tourist in Glasgow.

5. Minions are kinda cool. I've a guy called Sven following me around. Far as I can tell, his main functions are: distract foes, get in the way of my Flame blasts, stare at me with his piercing blue eyes. He got killed by a giant spider, and I was unexpectedly sad. I missed him. Luckily I was ganked by a group of Druegar (is that right?) and we were happily reunited in the save game.
But we're not a couple.

6. I am totally indecisive. Thief? Warrior? Mage? I'm racially predisposed to stealth, chose a combat blessing and use magic in every encounter. I'm conflicted. I've leveled up a couple of times, and upped my Magica and Health. It's Stamina next.

Admittedly, I'm yet to reach level 3, and I'm still on my first quest, so most of this is probably wrong... Actually, no. I'm adjusting the difficulty down a notch, so I can play like a n00b. Fuck it.