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.

Wheaton's Law: Don't be a dick / Alert the monopolies commission

My Roleplay group are on a recruitment drive at the moment, so I've 'designed' some amateurish flyers advertising our club.
The aim is to ask local gaming shops to put them up on boards, in windows and maybe have a pile on their counters.

The key point is to ask, and to understand that the shops are under no obligation to help out.

However, I am ... Disappointed by the reaction of the first shop I went into.
Their answer was a definite 'no'.
Their reason: we would be in direct competition with them, because they'd recently started a game night of their own. On a different night.

We play on a Tuesday night.
They play on a Wednesday night.
We play 8pm to 11pm.
They play 6pm to 9pm.
We have a room that will seat 30, for free, in a licenced pub.
They have a room that will seat 20, at a surcharge, in non-licenced premises that does have a 'tuck shop'.

I'm not convinced that we pose a legitimate business competition, being a non-profit, loosely organised group that does not trade in goods or services.

So, my personal opinion is that this guy is being a dick.

Building a geek / My five games

To steal an idea from Character Generation, here are the five RPGs that made me the colossal geek I am today...

Cyberpunk 2020
I've no idea what edition it was, and I've barely played it since, but Cyberpunk was the first RPG I played. I got snowed in at a friends house one February night, and a Cyberpunk cops one shot was the only entertainment on offer.
I had no idea what I was doing. It made no sense. I tried to 'make a cop'. This was acceptable. I bought a pair of bongo drums and was suddenly told 'now you're getting it'.
I wasn't sure that I was.
I still have no idea what happened. I can presume that a law was broken, and we started shooting. I could handle shooting. I understood 'kill him before he kills you'.
What I didn't understand was that I couldn't shoot through the solid concrete wall that I was using as cover. Before having at least two limbs blown off, I did manage to shoot through the wall, through a car door and through his armour. I did the smallest possible amount of damage the system allowed. It's entirely possible the GM just fudged that to give the newbie a break.
Then I got detonated.

From that point I was hooked.
I didn't quite understand what had just happened, but I did grasp the concept that this RPG thing allowed you to do literally anything you could imagine.
Mind. Blown.

Ars Magica
I played a few more games with this group - Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia - but the one that stuck was Ars Magica. Again, I totally didn't get it. I may have only 'gotten it' sometime in the last two years (16 years and two editions later), but it fired me up some more.
Three different classes of characters under my control.
Magic!
Mid fantasy setting.
Stuff I could learn about without buying the book (Latin, history, folklore, however this did turn out to be my ArM undoing. I worried too much about authenticity).
My first characters were based on Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, a Merinita magus, Hobbes, Moorish were-tiger companion, and Spiff, a daring grog.
Yeah, I didn't get it. There's a theme running through this.
But I loved Ars Magica. I was enraged that the Tremere were a vampire clan in V:tM. I hated that the Order of Hermes was reduced to just one of nine Traditions in M:tAs.
Yet I've never successfully played it or run it. I always get bogged down in historical accuracy and my fear of the finer points of the rules.
I hope to change that.

Vampire: the Masquerade revised
It's with V:tM rev that I became a GM. I hated the game I was playing, basically because the Storyteller was focussing entirely upon the story, at the expense of the rules and player expectations.
Rules were only ever used to tell us we couldn't do something, not to tell us how we could do something. They were applied inconsistently and unfairly.
It really pissed me off.
So I bought the Revised Edition and a shed load of supplements and set out to show him how a game of Vampire should be run.
Not that I did a brilliant job. I did ok, for a novice Storyteller. I got better.
I think.

Song of Steel LARP club
Ok, not a table top RPG, a Live-Action one instead. I played the pilot game in February 1998 (i think it was then) and finally left in early 2003. In the five years I was there I spent three on the Plot team, writing and running adventures, two months as Club Secretary (I was shit, and quit) and a year as Head of the Rules Team. It was the rules position that broke me, and I was totally burned out after it.
Positives, though. I spent three years exploring various adventure ideas, and towards the end had a good idea of what I was good at, what worked and what didn't, through trial and error. Which means I fucked up a lot, but learnt a little from each mistake. My major error was over reaching, and the best adventures I ran were simple, low resource ones.

World of Darkness Storytelling System
This is what I'm best at. When White Wolf rebooted, I completely ditched all of my old Storyteller games and fully embraced the new WoD.
Yes, I regret giving my 100+ books to charity, mostly because the shop that got them probably didn't know what they had, because it was a rash decision, because there were some gems that I should have kept.
But I totally get nWoD. It's second nature to me. I don't have to think about the rules or the setting, I just kind of default to it. It frees me up to enjoy the game and what the players are doing.

What would Rick Grimes do? / Being the good guy

I'm playing a Fire Dept EMT in a d20 Modern zombie holocaust game at the moment, and I'm trying to play him good. Lawful Good, to be exact.

It's really hard.
I'm trying to play my Character, Henry Fallon, as someone who will do what's right, not what's convenient or safest. I see him as someone who runs into burning buildings and pulls people out because it's the right thing to do, and it's his job.
Walking to the game last night I got to thinking about playing good characters, and how often I do it.
Not very, seems to be the answer.

I'd consciously decided to play someone solid, reliable, moral and, well, good, this time around, and was wondering why I don't do it that often.
I remembered the Chaotic Good Bard I'd played in a Forgotten Realms game some ten years ago (that long?). He was active and immense fun, but also vain, self interested and a glory hunter. He did good things, but mostly just because it would get him chicks.
It's not hard playing that kind of 'Good'. It's basically win-win with little effort.

Back in the days when I LARPed, the last character I played before I quit was a Priest of Truth, Brother Cornelius Woodrow. He focused on protective spells and had vowed to always tell the truth. He constantly strived to be open and honest and fair. He was constantly frustrated by the inherent selfishness of the world, by the little lies we habitually tell, by shortsightedness.
I had a cracking headache, without fail, after playing him.
Thing is, he was a fun character, or a character who liked fun. He was game for a laugh. He was useful, and a team player.
Yet I didn't enjoy playing him, because RPGs don't often reward selfless altruism. Paladins are seen as boring. Good guys are automatically suspect.

It seems as though most RPG characters default to a Neutral position. Not Evil, not Good, just reactionary beings that do whatever they want as the mood strikes them with no long term plan or consistent intentions beyond their own benefit.

Thing is, I do love me a morally and ethically absent character. I'm just as guilty. I enjoy the freedom and release of acting upon desire and whimsy alone.
I have fond memories of my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Halfling who gleefully murdered old women and threw children to Skaven because it was what was required at the time for his continued survival and/or entertainment (he was, ultimately, trying to save a city from a Skaven siege and chaos infiltration from the sewers. That makes it alright, yeah?).
I loved my LARP evil necromancer, Hans Karlos, a sadistic, traitorous maniac who betrayed two kingdoms, his friends and allies, to save his own skin. Good times.

After my game finished last night, I sat in on the Serenity game running alongside us and played the ships cook, who is clearly an ex-assassin with the ability and conviction to wipe out a ships crew with ease.<br>
God, I loved it...

I find playing a good, honest character hard work, yet can drop into a dodgy fuck's role in a heartbeat.
Is that normal?

Cheating for fun and profit / Not everyone is created equal

I just remembered something important - NPCs, especially important ones, do not need to be legal starting characters.

They just need to make sense, be memorable and serve a function (other than "wank all over the players").

Start at the beginning / Aeon Trilogy timeline in Aberrant

I'm on a massive Aberrant kick at the moment, after the successful session I ran for my group last week and their exceptionally positive feedback.
We've one more session before our normal GM comes back from holiday and we resume our normal scheduled zombie apocalypse.

Thing is, whilst plotting out what I want to do with this next, last session, I've started thinking in terms of an ongoing game. This is probably a mistake.

Anyways, that aside, here's what I'm thinking...

Aberrant is very much a game if it's time. It was released in 1998 and is set in 2008, ten years after the first 'Nova' erupted.
Ten years of super (or Mega) participation has resulted in leaping technological progress and widespread cultural change. The world has embraced these enhanced beings, and is a different place because of it.
This is all great, until you run it in 2012. Now, the 'future' technology doesn't seem that impressive, and the world has turned. Events like 9/11, global recession, the first US black president, the Arab Spring, Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese Tsunami, Swine Flu and numerous more have changed our focus away from the direction the game designers predicted. Which is understandable. And inevitable.

The core conflict in Aberrant still stands up - Novas, Terragen, Aberrants, Utopia, Proteus, Aeon, Divas Mal, The Directive et al are all functional and relevant. It's just the timeline that isn't.

Which is why I chose to run the game from the day the day the Galatea exploded in orbit and spread cosmic charged radiation all over the globe.

The player characters are new super beings in a world that has never known supers.
Right now, a lot is going to shit, and the players don't know it. They only know what happened to them, and even then they don't understand it. They're currently running scared with amazing abilities that they can barely control. They'll find out soon enough...

So, my plan is to run with the Aberrant timeline from the start, and make changes where required.
I'm pleased to discover that the Galatea exploded on March 23, and we played on March 27, so that with minimal fudging I could run a campaign in 'real time'.
Which is awesome.

Hello, my old friend / Returning to your favourite system

The game that really got me into paper and pencil RPGS was Vampire: the Masquerade, back with the Revised Edition in, what, 98? I'd been playing in a couple of other World of Darkness games prior to that - Vampire, Dark Ages, Changeling: the Dreaming, Mage: the Ascension - and chose the Revised V:tM as my entry point to serious GMing, or Storytelling, to use the game language.
I immersed myself in White Wolf products from then on, with little or no time for other systems.

Of late, I've tried to break out of that thought prison, and expand my horizons somewhat.
I'd already given d20 a shot in the early to mid 2000s, and looked elsewhere.
In the past year I've run Fear Itself and Trail of Cthulhu, both Gumshoe games, and Star Wars Saga Edition, a d20 derivative. I've also invested heavily in Pathfinder and dug out my In Nomine books.

Tonight the GM for the d20 Modern game I'm playing can't make it, so I've offered to run a one shot game.
After a short discussion, we've settled on a supers game, which means Aberrant.
As a result, I've been pregenning some characters, and I cannot express how good it feels to come back to the Storyteller (ing? I forget which is which) system. Filling in the dots. Not having to reference stuff constantly. Understanding things I do have to reference.
It's great.

More, please.

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...)

A h8ers regret / I was wrong about Mage Revised

Eels - I'm going stop pretending that I didn't break your heart

I realised something recently. Mage: the Ascension revised took the right path.
Ok, maybe not with the Avatar Storm.
But the whole "the Technocracy have won and the Traditions magical paradigms are fast becoming a forgotten history" thing now makes perfect sense to me.
It was the only way the line could go, without diverging into Shadowrun.

As such, I am hoping to god the Mage20 becomes a thing. The translation guide has the potential to be a genius addition to the Awakened line, and Mage20 itself should take into account the last 10+ years of Technocratic supremacy and progress.

Game ideas I would love to run with / Star Wars Saga Edition

Where: Cloud City
When: During Empire Strikes Back
What: The player characters, all inexperienced youths, flee into the air shafts of Cloud City during the evacuation, hoping to evade the Imperial occupation.
Whilst making their way to an evacuation point, they find a freshly severed human hand and a laser sword.
They know nothing of the Jedi, only that their elders command them to get rid of the weapon, and never speak of it again.