Worse Places to Be

Last week I did this for the positive Landmarks, so let’s look at the negatives. Now, Ruins aren’t strictly negative, but they aren’t as outright beneficial as the others. 

Hazard

BATS. Whichever way you move they’re facing you, like 2D sprites in an old FPS. When you aren’t looking at them you feel them scratching and biting at the back of your neck. When you turn around they’re back in their hung position. 

Curse

Things that throw you off course. Thick woods seems obvious here but let’s go further. Tiny shadow figures jump between the branches, gesturing for you to follow. They only take you deeper into the woods, distances not making sense. If you ignore their guidance they mock and taunt you, but if you follow they’ll just keep you going in circles. 

Ruin

This one actually ties into the Myth, being an overt hint at a Myth currently not in play. A stone mound conceals a huge cauldron sealed shut, apparently in some huge forge. Faint arguing inside can be heard inside. 

Do the Coven break free if the Knights somehow break the seal? Of course! It’s not in the rules for how Ruins work, but Primacy of Action must be honoured. 

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Landmarks in the Artwork

Part of the reason I put so much artwork into Electric and Mythic Bastionland is to act as a repository of ideas when you just need a quick detail.

Landmarks in Mythic Bastionland often call for you to to make something up. You’ll know if it’s a dwelling, sanctum, monument, hazard, curse, or ruin. You might have a prompt from the entries on the bottom of each page. Or maybe you forgot to do that, or the prompt doesn’t seem all that inspiring anymore.

Flick to a random Myth that you aren’t currently using in the Realm and grab some cool imagery, then run from there.

Let’s do it for each of the positive Landmark types.

Dwelling

The specific Myth doesn’t even matter for most of these, so I won’t bother naming them all. Remember we’re just looking for inspiration in the artwork here.

Take the spinning wheel. Wait, is it a spinning wheel? It doesn’t matter, it sparked the idea, so it’s real.

A weaver living out in the woods, their house practically being swallowed up by the encroaching roots and branches. A deer skull hangs above their door.

Now if I was being fancy I could claim that this is all a rich thematic tapestry, and if the group encounter this actual Myth later in the game they’ll feel a sense of mythic consistency in the world.

Hey, it could be true.

 

Sanctum

A Sanctum usually takes one of the Seers detailed alongside each Knight, but here let’s say it’s the Tawny Seer, a colossal owl-like being. They roost atop an isolated tower, sleeping for most of the day. 

Near the tower the stars are visible at day, and the night sky is filled with pillars of light. The Seer can interpret their positions to offer guidance.

 

Monument

A fortunate pull here, but remember that a monument allows recovery Spirit, so should offer some sort of inspiration.

Veiled mourners scatter petals among a Knight’s tomb surrounded by desolate bog. Flowers peek out of the murk almost immediately, and the sky seems to lighten.

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UFO 50 and Nostalgia of Structure

A bonus blogpost this week, because it's really nothing to do with tabletop games at all. Instead I'm going to rave about UFO 50. 

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games. 

The framing device is that this is a collection of lost 8-bit era games from a single company. They span dozens of genres and, from my experience so far, the quality is good to excellent, leaning toward the latter. 

Frankly, at the price it’s currently at on Steam, I’d encourage everybody to buy it. We're talking less than 50p per game, and there are some that I'd easily pay £5 for.

It got me thinking about nostalgia of structure rather than form.

Yes, it has charming pixel art and chiptunes, even little era details like Kick Club’s fast food collectables. But for me the whole package feels like a more specific memory.

My young brain was told that sports are good and fast food is good. 

It's the early 90s Christmas when my family got an Amiga 600. It came with one legit game, Captain Planet, but shortly after we’d finished unwrapping our presents my uncle appeared and dropped a carrier bag filled with copied game discs. None of them had manuals, and some of the names scrawled onto the floppies were unreadable. It was a wilderness of games.

Waldorf's Journey feels very Amiga-coded to me

The quality was... variable. For every gem like The Chaos Engine or Cannon Fodder there was a dud like Body Blows or Live and Let Die. There were also a bunch of wildcards in there. Games I’d be fascinated by, and return to every now and then, often trying to decode the game behind their opaque exterior. Stuff like proto-Farcry Hunter and the atmospheric but confusing Syndicate. I was limited by my age and lack of instruction manuals, but I kept going back. After all, I had the games, why wouldn’t I play them? This time I might work out how to play properly. There were a bunch of games where I never got past the first level, but I’d go back and play that first level over and over. 

Daunting but not as complicated as it looks.

This is stark contrast to some years later when I got a SNES. It came with three games (Super Mario All Stars, Kart, and World) and because of their high price I only ever bought one more (A Link to the Past). I played those games to death, right through to their credits. They were super accessible, fantastic quality, and unified by their Nintendo polish.

But I kinda missed that weird bag full of copied floppies. I’d always go back to the Amiga. 

UFO 50 feels like the best of both worlds. It’s an overwhelming heap of 50 disparate games, but the quality is consistently high. They feel at once arcane but accessible. 

This one is a dungeon crawler with Super Punch Out combat

It’s also a notably different feeling to scrolling through my huge Steam library of underplayed games.

If I play Velgress or Overbold or Pingolf for 15 minutes then I’m experiencing the real game for 15 minutes. A lot of games in my steam library would barely be scraping the surface of the tutorial, or at least have me caged in a starting area. Some might even curse me with unskippable cutscenes. Even roguelites, lauded for their casual appeal, often gate their best bits behind successive playthroughs.

I'm going back in now. On my first play of Mini & Max I thought it was an okay platformer with a little twist, but last time I stumbled onto a few things that really shake it up.

UFO 50 has captured my heart. Go and check it out. 

Getting into Pilot Mode

One of the goals of MAC Attack is to put the players in pilot view

This is where they focus in on the active unit, look at its modules, track its heat, speed, and facing, and learn to exploit the same factors in the opposing MACs. Of course you’re looking at the battlefield from a top-down view, but a big appeal of the mech genre is the nitty-gritty feel of piloting a particular machine.

This one needs to keep moving to avoid getting hit. This one runs hot if you fire all its lasers. This one needs to wait patiently for a sitting duck target. This one handles like shit over rough ground. This one absolutely must not let itself get hit in the rear. 

The initiative deck feeds into this. You're never asked “which of your units should you activate first?” 

No! You just pull a card and whoosh, you zoom in on that unit and you're the pilot now. What do you do?

The way I use counterplay in the game also feeds into this, and requires breaking it down into two types.

Strategic vs Tactical Counterplay

(Forgive me that Strategic and Tactical might not be the most accurate terms here, but they are the most memorable, which is more important)

Strategic Counterplay happens before the game starts. Like when you show up with a few anti-tank guns and I show up with an an infantry horde that renders them a bad pick. You bring a melee-focused faction and I take an army-wide ability that makes my units harder to hit in melee. That was a good pick for me. You can think of this as an abstraction of all the logistics, intelligence, and large scale manoeuvring that happens outside of the scope of the battle.

Tactical Counterplay happens at the table during the game. You have lots of archers so I avoid a direct charge, advancing through the woods. You’ve bought a superheavy tank that I’m not well equipped to fight at long range, so my mortars drop smoke in front of it, forcing it to stay put or advance into a more vulnerable position. 

For MAC Attack, and perhaps in most cases, I want Tactical Counterplay. Again, this focuses on “What would a good pilot do” more than “Which of these army lists wins?” 

This is a slight revisit of a topic discussed previously, but I’ve had more time to mull it over.

I've been fine tuning the module list to work toward this goal.

An example of where I’d gone wrong is a now-deleted weapon type that I tested out. The gist of it was that the weapon did more damage to bigger MACs, but was useless against Infantry and Vehicles.

Now this was wide open to strategic counterplay. If your force is all Light MACs and Auxiliaries then this weapon is junk. Worse, though, if you bring a bunch of Heavy MACs, because you like big bots, then I’m coming in with a huge advantage. There isn’t really a tactical answer to it other than “Keep away from that giant threat”. 

I already had a weapon type that executed this idea in a more tactically interesting way. Piercing weapons let you roll additional attacks for each hit you cause, meaning it’s very effective against easy targets, and less effective against difficult targets. Big MACs tend to move more slowly, because they consume more heat to rush or jump, so by nature these weapons already tend to favour attacks against heavy MACs. 

But the important thing. If you bring a force of heavy MACs and I have a load of piercing weapons, you can respond to this by, at the very least, not standing still and giving me easy targets. You might even rush or make more use of cover, anything that makes my shots more difficult. You can make tactical decisions to counter my counter. 

Active vs Engaged

We’re going down another tangent here, but this still connects to my goals around Pilot View. 

The Active Player is the one taking their turn right now. 

The Engaged Player is the one currently engaging with the rules.

These aren’t always the same.

I don’t want module effects that need to be remembered by a player when they’re not currently engaged.

So Plates are fine, because their passive effect occurs when the non-active player is engaged, specifically when the active (here, attacking) player says “Okay I hit modules 3, 4, and 6” and the non-active player (here, the target) looks at their MAC sheet to see what’s actually been hit. In that moment the non-active player is engaged, so we can expect them to notice that their Plate has been hit, triggering its effect.

Cloaks are not fine, because their effect (harder to hit at a certain range bracket) occurs when that player is unengaged, specifically when their opponent is adding up motion dice and modifiers to calculate the Target Number of the attack. In this moment the non-active player is unengaged in a mechanical sense. Even if they’re still paying attention to what their opponent is doing they aren’t necessarily looking at the specific modules of the MAC being attacked.

For this reason I’m chopping and changing a lot of the hardware modules to allow for Tactical Counterplay and for effects that occur when that unit’s player is Engaged. 

The current version of Cloak (pending testing) allows the unit to set its Motion die to 6 when it doesn’t Move, making itself harder to hit at the cost of limiting its own attacks. This is a nasty pairing with Guided weapons (which ignore your own Motion when you attack) but there are some pretty clear tactical counterplay options available (keep moving, drop Markers on the unit, forcing them to move or become an easy target, or bait them into moving with a juicy target of your own).

As always, this is a case of preference, not purity. I reserve the right to break my own rules, but keeping them in mind is bringing MAC Attack closer to where I want it to be. 

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Again and Again and Again

First I want to talk about some videogames.

ADOM does this cool thing where the overworld is (mostly) set in stone, but all of the dungeon levels below are randomly generated. So you're improvising a lot in the dungeon, but you learn the layout and secrets of the world above.

Teardown does this cool thing where you need to, say, break into a safe and then get away, but you get unlimited time to wander around the map preparing your run, including breaking down walls and stuff. The timer only starts when you set off the alarm, typically by grabbing the thing you're stealing. If you manage that you can try again with secondary objectives to chase after. Missions also revisit maps, so you get to know them pretty well.

Outer Wilds does this cool thing where you're living out the same 22 minute time loop over and over, each time exploring the solar system and learning a bit more about each planet. It's a great feeling heading over to a planet after you've learned a few of its secrets to see how far you can get this time before the sun explodes.

Hitman does this cool thing where it has a comparatively small number of densely packed levels, and it's pretty easy to complete the mission (typically kill a couple of targets) but you're incentivised to replay each map over and over, killing the targets in new ways and exploring every corner of the map. Sometimes I just follow people around to see what they're doing.

Shenzhen I/O (and most other Zachtronics games) does this cool thing where completing each puzzle is usually straightforward, but then you're rated on various factors like cost, speed, space efficiency, so the real game is in going back to tackle the problem over and over, chasing the cheapest, fastest, or most efficient solution (typically not all three).

These are all tapping into that feeling of doing something you've already done before, but doing it a bit differently.

I don't often get that feeling when I run and play TTRPGs.

I tend to prepare dungeons with the assumption that the players will stumble through them once and then move on. Even with larger (dare I say mega-)dungeons I probably nudge players into new areas for each delve.

In my current Traveller campaign we've been playing for 9 months, jetting around The Beyond sector, a vast hexmap of space, and we haven't returned to a planet even once after leaving (though some of that may be down to the mess my players tend to leave behind them).

I feel like I'm missing out on the joy of doing something again, but doing it a bit differently.

I have an idea how I might explore that. Let's see how it pans out.

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Is Imbalance a Problem?

This is even more of a stream of consciousness than normal, sparked by a recent playtest of MAC Attack.

With some handy unit cards

When we finished the game my friend asked:

"Why would I ever take a Short ranged weapon? I'd just make every weapon in my force Long ranged if I was building a new force"

Of course, we need to test this out, but for the time being it's given me food for thought.

Some context: In MAC Attack you have Short weapons (Max range: 9") and Long weapons (MIN range: 6"). There are also Arc weapons but ignore them for now.

Both weapon types cost the same, there are no other restrictions on their use, and they function identically beyond simply having a minimum or maximum range.

As you might imagine, if we're fighting on a big flat desert then Long weapons are the order of the day. Likewise, if the battlefield doesn't have any open stretches wider than 6" then Short weapons are going to dominate. For this discussion, let's imagine we're on a more balanced battlefield.

In fact, let's pretend my friend is right. Let's work on the assumption that Long is broadly a better choice than Short for most scenarios.

Is that a problem?

I've discussed before that the purpose of balance, for me, is to preserve interesting choices, not to make everything equal.

Now, at the very least, we can say that the choice between a minimum range and a maximum range still feels like a choice. The advantage of not having a minimum range is that you can collide and brawl with your target as well as shooting at them.

Better yet, if my friend wants to create a force of exclusively Long weapons then I'm absolutely going to double down on Short weapons and rush inside his minimum range to dirty box him with impunity.

Easier said than done, I suppose, as the quirks of the initiative deck mean you can't always put every MAC where you want them to be.

Engaging at Shorter range also means there's less chance of an annoying obstacle blocking the line of sight to your target.

So maybe the answer is to include a mix of short and long weapons on each MAC. I deliberately left a "sweet spot" between 6-9" where both Short and Long weapons can attack for this very reason. Could equally lead to some inefficient turns when you don't have the right target at the right range, though.

For another angle, what could we do it we wanted to make them feel more equal?

How does Battletech, an obvious inspiration for MAC Attack, handle this? It actually uses range quite differently. As well as defining a weapon's minimum and maximum range, weapons break down their range into subcategories of short/medium/long range, with medium and long providing penalties to hit. With a 2d6 system like Battletech these penalties can be hugely significant, so having a longer range generally has the side effect of making the weapon more accurate at common engagement ranges. Totally different to what we're dealing with here.

Previously in MAC Attack, Short weapons provided a bonus to hit, but that had some undesirable side effects. Piercing Type weapons (more effective when you have an easy shot) felt like a little too much of an obvious synergy with Short weapons (make your shot more likely to hit), and I wanted every combination of range, type, and subtype to feel viable. It was also one more modifier [shudder] to remember when calculating your target number to hit.

I could give Short a longer maximum range, but that risks making the distinction feel irrelevant.

I could Long an even more restrictive minimum range, but I don't want things to end up feeling too restrictive.

Or maybe it's fine as it is.

Back to the playtesting table I suppose.

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Unknightly Rulers

Mythic Bastionland suggests that Holdings are commonly ruled by a Knight. Last time I spoke about this I had one of the four Holdings in a Realm ruled by a non-knight, in that case a religious leader, but what other sort of person could be ruling a Holding?

Well, Seers obviously, but I personally think of that being a pretty rare situation. I imagine most Seers would rather be interfering from a slight distance.

Squires? First instinct is no, but that makes me want to try it out some time. Perhaps some twist of inheritance means that the group are charged with protecting such an important, but fragile, ward.

More commonly I expect Holdings wind up in the hands of Vassals, owing at least some loyalty to the ruler of the Seat of Power.

Let's roll up 3 potential leaders. I'll assume they all owe fealty to a Knight who holds the Seat of Power of the Realm as a whole.

We'll use the "Person" prompts found on the bottom of the Knight pages, and then the People Spark Tables to flesh them out. You could just use one of these methods instead of both, but we'll work around any contradictions that come out of the combination.

I'll dump the raw prompts and sparks for each and then work it into something useful.

Ruler 1 - Wodwale
Person Prompt: Hardened Scavenger
Appearance: Haggard Physique, Decorated Dress
Voice: Weak Tone, Intense Manner
Personality: Melancholic Demeanour, Art Interest
Relationship (with Ruler 2): Estranged Guardian
Desire: Mastery for Recognition
Task: Conceal Ruin
Background: Nomadic Upbringing, Memory of Injury
Ailment: Growing Shaking
Heraldry: Light Tree (White Tree on Gold Field)

We don't need to take "Scavenger" literally here. Perhaps they're seen as having Scavenged the Holding itself. Let's say they cosied up to the previous ruler, a generous Knight without an heir, and was able to claim rulership after the Knight died.

He's hardened and haggard, but dressed in the finery of a ruler. Weak tone combined with intense manner and melancholic demeanour paints a sort of dourly threatening character, driven by wanting to prove himself as a rightful ruler.

Conceal ruin, memory of an injury, and growing shaking, could be combined to something more sinister. An old injury that never healed, leading to a weakening heart. Let's say he suspects he doesn't have a long life ahead of him, but wants to conceal it from everybody, driven to achieve the recognition he craves before he dies. He was once a guardian to the next ruler, but "estranged" suggests he may not consider her to be an heir.

Ruler 2 - Tresera
Person Prompt: Zealous Student
Appearance: Short Physique, Gaudy Dress
Voice: Flat Tone, Relaxed Manner
Personality: Ambitious Demeanour, Animal Interest
Relationship (with Ruler 3): Adoring Friend
Desire: Travel motivated by Guilt
Task: Transport Animals
Background: Drudgery, Memory of War
Ailment: Intermittent Lethargy
Heraldry: Jewelled Star (Emerald Star on Silver Field)

She studied under Wodwale, who treated her like a daughter, even helping her gain a Holding of her own, but that relationship has since broken down.

She wears her ambition openly in gaudy dress, appearing most relaxed when holding court or leading hunting parties. She has the look of somebody born to rule.

Still, boredom stirs inside her, sometimes feeling that she's achieved everything she can here, or perhaps that she didn't really achieve it for herself at all, owing too much to her former mentor. Sometimes she dreams of riding off into a new Realm to start anew, earning a position she can be truly proud of, taking just her prized hunting dogs with her.

Ruler 3 - Dorza
Person Prompt: Sneaky Cobbler
Appearance: Sickly Physique, Tattered Dress
Voice: Mumbled Tone, Relaxed Manner
Personality: Rash Demeanour, Fishing Interest
Relationship (with Ruler 1): Sworn Supporter
Desire: Security motivated by Defiance
Task: Break Gold
Background: Pious, memory of Riding
Ailment: Mild Coughing
Heraldry: Rich Tool (Golden Axe on Purple Field)

Clearly from a humble background, she was anointed by a Seer after serving as their acolyte, placed in rule of a modest holding, but told that she was doomed to eventually lose it to a siege. She defiantly prepares to face this threat, courting the service of any Knights that travel through the Realm, and hiring mercenaries that her coffers cannot afford.

She adores Tresera, in awe of her seemingly effortless nobility, and swore her support to Wodwale in part as a way to emulate her.

Her task of "Breaking Gold" could represent her spiralling debts, and her need to find some way to be rid of them. Maybe she really needs a mercenary company taking out of the picture entirely.

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Landscapes of the Arthurian Tarot

If I'm not careful I can see a future where I own far too many Tarot decks.

Not so much for oracular life guidance, but I'm increasingly drawn to these decks of highly evocative artwork as a means to spark ideas when running or prepping a game.

In the throes of writing Mythic Bastionland I picked up The Complete Arthurian Tarot deck, which is a joy to flick through.

A significant feature of this deck is that (as far as I can tell) the non-Court Minor Arcana are all landscapes, completely devoid of people. This is in stark contrast to the Hanson Roberts Tarot which I have a personal soft spot for. Where the Hanson Roberts deck vividly humanises the elements of the non-Court minors, the Complete Arthurian deck puts the light firmly on the surrounding world.

Take the Grail Three (commonly 3 of Cups).

Usually this card means party time, with three women toasting and celebrating. Here a vacant table is laid out, allowing more focus on the surroundings. It's a feast of apples in a lush, shady orchard.

The Four normally depicts a man with three cups, either too distracted or jaded to notice the fourth cup being offered to him from a disembodied arm.

Here that's represented by a stagnant pond. Discarded cup and overcast clouds further setting the mood.

8 of Swords is normally a blindfolded, bound woman surrounded in a ring of swords.

Here we're trapped by a treacherous bog instead, requiring careful action to escape. Even beyond that a grey mountain looms over us.

Of course we have to look at everyone's favourite, the 9 of Swords aka "I'm sad because I have too many swords".

This is about as close as we get to human representation. A row of impaled heads painting an ill vision for the future of this shadowy night.

Each suit also corresponds to a season, and that comes through in the artwork to various degrees. Stones (commonly Pentacles) are tied to winter.

In place of the juggler, the concept of divided priorities is shown through a river splitting in two, weaving tantalisingly close to each other through a snow cloaked valley but never managing to converge.

The accompanying book does a good job of tying each of these cards to a particular Arthurian myth, but I enjoy the landscapes even when I don't remember the full mythic context.

So what's the point to all this?

Whether in prep or at the table, for me so much of running Mythic Bastionland is about describing a patch of wilderness as the Knights either ride through it, look over it for landmarks, or come face to face with Omens of a Myth. Sure, it's not the main part of the game, but it's a constant layer of flavour that I try to maintain.

Even if it's not a literal deck of cards, don't neglect the power of a heap of visual prompts to draw from for your game. Sometimes they can be as simple as a landscape.

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Where are We?

Chatting with people at GenCon, we occasionally drifted onto talking about Google+, the rosy past where we rejoiced in social media paradise [citation needed].

It's getting on for six years since I wrote about its upcoming closure, and where are we now?

No, I mean where are we?

I've bounced around a few places since then.

Blog: The staple. I'll keep it going as long as I have the urge to write stuff. I post weekly and check my comments daily. I mostly stay up to date with what other people are doing through blogs. If you aren't blogging, I'm likely to be unaware of your new thing.

Newsletter: Substack may not be the perfect platform, but I'm enjoying this as a parallel version of the blog. I know others write bespoke newsletters, separate to their blog, but really I just treat this as an alternative way to get the same stuff. In essence the archive acts like a blog of sorts, but I prefer reading on a proper blog page. Something about having that tantalising blogroll right there beside the post.

Patreon: This really sits on top of the two previous places. If you're creating anything, even if you don't want to offer anything extra, I'd recommend giving this a try. You might be surprised how many people just want to offer support for what you do.

Discord: My preferred way to just talk with people. I guess I like the old IRC-vibe, but I appreciate it's not for everyone. For reasons explained further down this is now my primary place for DMs.

Broadcasts and Podcasts: I have a lot of fun doing these but they're an occasional side-line for me.

Reddit: I really enjoyed doing an AMA on there a while back, but I'm more lurker than a poster. It's a great place to browse now and then to find cool stuff, but I don't feel like I get any real personal connections from there.

Twitter: Oof. I'll try to keep this succinct. This place was designed to reward the sort of behaviour I didn't want to engage with and has steadily gotten worse. I saw how it changed the way people interacted with each other. I saw the way it stoked unwelcome fires. I kept active there mostly as a point of contact to invite people onto the podcast or to collaborate on a project. Essentially, I went there because I liked some of the people there, even if it made them act differently.

I decided the feed was too much. I unfollowed everybody and just stuck around to respond to mentions and DMs, only posting to link to my other places.

Then they changed things so that I'd be fed recommended content instead. I could block these on my browser but it was trickier on my phone.

All the while the content of those posts got worse and worse, to say nothing of the company ownership.

Right now I'm ashamed to even have a presence there. I don't want to be associated with it. It's embarrassing that I was there at all.

I've complained for a long time, but never really walked the walk.

As of now I've left my account open mainly to keep the name, but I'm not going to go there anymore and I've removed the link from my other sites.

If you're able to do the same then let's just do it. We're better off elsewhere.

Bsky: Yeah this is a nicer twitter, so I don't feel as dirty for maintaining a presence there, but it's still probably something I'm better off without. I'm likely soft-quitting this too, but might dip into my incredibly restricted feed now and then.

What if I'm wrong?

A few potential problems come to mind.

What if I need to contact somebody I don't already have contact details for?
Twitter was normally a good place to do this, but I figure I can probably get hold of anybody I need to by asking around on other platforms.

Is this terrible advice if you don't already have a well-established network and platform for your own content?
Yeah, I guess I can only talk from my own perspective, so if you're hustling to make contacts and build your audience from scratch then maybe this is all a bit isolationist. 

In short:

Quit Twitter.
Newsletter Up.
Hit the Blog. 

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Shards of GenCon

This post is fuelled by jetlag and hazy memory, but I wanted to quickly talk about my experiences at GenCon.

I have no way of funnelling this into a coherent narrative, so it's just a list of things.

JFK is a terrible airport to transfer through. I have a new respect for the unremarkableness of Atlanta.

The opening of the trade hall felt like the end of civilisation. So many people in such density that I was concerned we might create a black hole. Luckily, I managed to pick up a couple of things I feared would sell out and then go hide for a while.

Later I would discover neither of these things sold out as instantly as I'd feared, and I could have grabbed them in a more relaxed manner if I'd kept my cool. There's a lesson here I guess.

Despite the arduous journey and crushing crowds, there's no denying that if you want to meet as many amazing RPG people as possible then GenCon is the place to be. Even just aimlessly wandering the Trade Hall I got to chat with Tony Vasinda, Spencer Campbell, Jay Dragon, Trevor Devall, others I'll have to apologise for forgetting right now.

The following day I met with Yochai, Brad, and Sam to stand in queues for longer than we would like, doing our best to transform it into some enlightening fable. I think we mostly succeeded. Later I selflessly offered up my hotel room as a space to record a podcast, allowing myself a ringside (more accurately: bedside) view of the performance.

Then came the Ennies. Favouritism runs rampant as I shamelessly throw my support behind people I like, who just happen to also create fantastic RPGs:
Kyle Latino won for Monstrous, perhaps the biggest cheer of the night.
Shadowdark and Eat the Reich obviously won everything they were up for.
Reynaldo and Greywiz were in attendance, bizarrely meeting in flesh for the first time, as Break!! won a much deserved gold. If you'd told me when Break!! started development, a mere fifty years ago, that I'd be sat at the Ennies when it won I wouldn't have believed you.

(I mean... technically I wasn't there, as I left in the interval, but you get my point)

Among my Ennies-buddies were JP Coovert and the mythical being behind Prismatic Wastelands who I'm fearful to out as human, rather than some sort of blog elemental. Actually, his name is Warren, and we shared some good snarky gossiping while the winners were offering heartfelt speeches.

We moved on to one of the hotel bars, where Luke of the Pirate Borg crew was celebrating his birthday. I'm told that Ed Greenwood was there, but he must have astrally transited before I arrived. The Pirate Borg guys are all jacked, semi-uniformed in black, but super friendly and passionate about RPGs. I'd describe their vibe as ethical mercenaries. They look like they could mess you up but they really just protect penguin sanctuaries or something.

Last year I signed up for a few different games, and while they were fun they paled a touch in comparison to the pickup games I stumbled into. This year I didn't sign up for anything, but I got to play even more.

Wednesday is the trade day, which means the convention centre is mostly empty. I got to enjoy a pick up game of Shadowdark (kinda) with my adoptive GenCon parents from last year, Kelsey and Baron. We explored an ice cave, burned the yeti, but died trying to escape from the flaming mayhem we'd created.

This was the last time I was able to enjoy sitting in a mostly empty space in the convention centre, so it's a real highlight in my mind.

We snuck into the quasi-abandoned mall that connects to the convention centre for the evening game, finding an eerily empty seating area. I got to play X-Crawl Classics run by Brendon LaSalle himself. My hobbit was called Slamwise. The neighbouring table were playing Macdeath, a twist on that play, run by Professor/Dan. Amongst others, Ben and Bob were there, and yes I'm putting them together because it's fun to say their names that way.

Brad ran a bunch of us through his Dream Shrine and... this module is something special. Definitely check it out if you want a good compact adventure packed with dreamy weirdness.

Later I got to run a brief game of Paranoia for Sam, JP, and Brad,. It felt like a good density of laughs for such a short session.

For most of the con I was wearing a t-shirt with one of my games on it. This made me feel like a gigantic tool, but the purpose was to transform myself into a walking business card, preventing the need for me to awkwardly tell people what I do. Steve from Epic Levels spotted this and said hi, after watching a D&D 3e seminar (look... I have nostalgia for it even if I don't like it). He warmly encouraged me to go and speak to Monte Cook, who had been on the panel and, based on shaky intel, I believe has played one of my games at some point. I did so before quickly fleeing, but appreciated the nudge.

The secret (I assume?) Rowan Rook and Decard bar is always a pleasure, and Grant is still one of the most generous hype men on the planet. Introducing myself to people is the worst, and I was glad to find the solace of a similar soul in Chase of Rascal.

Of course, as a cultured individual, I wanted to experience the real taste of America, so a special thank you goes to the connoisseurs who guided me to through the culinary complexities of the White Castle Drive-thru (on foot, mainly with Shadowdark crew) and the Waffle House (open 24 hours, but... not today, so the car park became our banquet hall). Too many people to list, but here's a selection:

Zeb, who I believe started the whole Waffle House thing.

Sillion who's working on some awesome looking deep-south cyberpunk thing.

Hunter is also working on that and has a bunch of other cool stuff.

Tomas makes this wizard thing, Gabe has this slice of space horror, oh and Kieron was there. I think he invented MODOK or something.

Is that everything? I'm not even sure.

GenCon continues to confound me. So much of it is inconvenient and consumerist, but then that magic is still there, lurking just beneath the surface.

Next time I hope to dig even deeper.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

A Second Bite of the Spore Mine

Did you read this?

Well, what could be more exciting to a 10-year old than their first White Dwarf magazine?

Could their second ever live up to that?

Let's go back to 1995 and enter White Dwarf 188.

As much as the Dark Elf cover of 187 was neat, this Tyranid piece is acid etched into my memory. This issue pushes them hard as the cool new 40k faction. They'd been around a while in various forms, but this really felt like they were being lifted up to another level. 

Their design has gone back and forth over the years, but I always liked the less bug-like versions like we see here.

I've never collected Tyranids, but I suspect this issue is part of the reason I have such a soft spot for them. 

Naturally, we turn to the back cover piece before actually reading this thing. That Rough Rider charge into the Tyranids nicely sums up so much of 40k's vibe.

Always good to see those classic alien cacti too. 

Okay, it's time for me to embarrass myself. 

Despite them becoming my first army, there were no Skaven miniatures at all in the previous issue, so until now I had no idea they existed.

With this piece being my first exposure... can you see why I thought they were called "Ska Ven" as two separate words? 

And no, I suspect at this age I wasn't familiar with Ska yet. 

Pre-internet I'm not sure when I got corrected, but the shame still lives within me. 

That kerning has a lot to answer for, but the image clearly resonated with me enough to join team-rat. 

I won't be going through every article, but I remember this one fondly.

Early on I realised that Space Marines were the poster-boys of the world, so I quickly developed a natural hatred toward them. This would only grow as I found myself having to play against them so often and grew envious of their luxurious amount of plastic multi-pose options. 

Still, I see the Blood Angels as one of the lesser evils, perhaps because the Death Company were one of the first examples I saw of marines actually being awesome and interesting. 

I've talked before about the power of these battle reports, but I just love how much space is given over for each player to talk about how they chose their force, and how they're going to tackle the scenario at hand. 

Gavin... Thorpe? Must have been some kid on work experience I guess. 

I could still look at these things all day. 

In the debrief our players get to reflect on their mistakes or successes. Although I love the stories that emerge from wargames, there's something special about seeing each general pour over their decisions, just as they would if they were on the field.

Well, maybe the Ork Warboss doesn't do that. 

Also, check out that Imperator Titan with an axe blade and titanic claw. Was that ever a real thing?

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

What Paranoia?

I have a handful of games that I don't want to outright review, but would like to talk about briefly.

Because I'm away for the next few weeks, with family commitments and then GenCon, I'm going to stretch this out slightly, then we'll return to usual programming.

Why not start with something right at the front of my brain...

Paranoia!

The only edition I've played is second edition (or maybe first, I'm not sure, it didn't really matter), but my research pointed me to either the current Perfect Edition published by Mongoose, or the fan favourite XP Edition. The former was praised for having solid mechanics, the latter with having the best flavour.

So I've hacked it into a Frankenstein thing mostly based on a streamlined Perfect Edition, but drawing in some of the more flavourful bits from XP.

Yes, I'm hacking the system before running it from the book, I'm a terrible person.

In summary here are the main tweaks to Perfect Edition:

• Cut the character creation system and make PreGens, ensuring that everybody gets nice conflicting interests.
• Successes explode, so there's always a chance, however slim, of succeeding at a task you roll for. If you want it to be impossible then don't bother rolling at all.
• Anti-Dice are d6s of a different colour. Each anti-die of 5 or 6 is an anti-success and explodes just like a normal success.  Anti-successes cancel normal successes or provide other negative consequences. When rolling with a negative dice total, roll the Computer Dice plus anti-dice equal to your negative score.
• Moxie is reframed as XP and is used as a favour currency, not for outright modifying dice rolls. Scrap the way XP is used in the main book, and just have it as a social currency.
• Scrap Initiative, it's more fiddly than what I want in here. If it matters then do a simple roll off.
• Mutant Powers: Just describe how you’re using/hiding it, roll d6: 1: fizzle, 2-5: as intended, 6: overkill. If sneakiness in in doubt have everybody make Bluff or Stealth rolls as appropriate and check the Mutant's result.
• R&D Prototypes: Generally just do their thing. The fun is in working out how they work. If in doubt, resolve as Mutant Power. 
• Characters can Assist/Interfere on a roll if in a position to do so. Before the roll, add a die or an anti-die respectively. Assistants suffer consequences if the roll fails. Interferers suffer consequences if it succeeds.
• Debrief Star Rating: At the end of the mission the computer takes a moment to assess your success. Count how many of the following were successful:
• Complete the Troubleshooter Task
• Perform Mandatory Bonus Duty properly
• Test the R&D Prototype
• Carry out Service Mandate
• Complete Secret Society Mission
• Earn 1XP per star, winner gets double and has officially won the mission. A tie means there is no Winner except Alpha Complex as a whole.
• Fair Game, Unfair World. The book has lots of examples of the GM acting unfairly to the players, which I appreciate is a touchstone of a certain style of play in this game. I'd prefer it if the game felt fair, but the world was deeply unfair. Conflict between the players is what excites me about this game, so I want the GM to feel completely impartial.

So what about that setting?

I'm mainly using Paranoia XP as my source for setting stuff, but most stuff from Perfect Edition also works here.

The major changes from XP:

• The book offers three "tones" for your game, and Straight certainly appeals to me most. Lots of dark satire, of course, but ditch the puns and groanworthy gags. A joke made by the people at the table will always be more effective than one written into the game.
• Economy is back to being fully controlled by the Computer, not the semi-capitalism of XP. Getting stuff is mainly about convincing PLC to give you a req form for the thing you need. Better clearance helps here. Free Enterprise will trade req forms for XP, flags, wounds, clones, whatever.
• Service Firms within the Service Groups actually represent different departments, rather than for-profit entities. Of course, they still want to grab whatever resources and influence they can from their rivals.  
• Coretech is there, so the Computer can technically log into your brain, but the bandwidth is super low so the Computer prefers traditional methods like cameras and monitors. It's mainly there so you can pass your memories to your clones.
• Talking to Computer can be done through Coretech Messenger but you can see the person’s mouth moving and the computer is all round slow and old. This is represented by passing notes to the GM.
• Secret Societies are as in XP, though I want to note that I largely agree with the way they were tweaked for Perfect Edition, merging those that felt too similar and removing some of the less interesting picks. However I also like the idea of secret societies that are strangely aligned with points of shared interest that still choose to remain distinct, so I'm approaching it as an opportunity for tension.

Wish me luck when I get this to the table.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.