Jeremy "Bolthy" Zimmerman

This is my fairly belated recap of this year's AmberCon Northwest. I hope you enjoy it.

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http://rdonoghue.blogspot.com/2009/10/competence-porn.html

I think I like this more than sparklypoo.

I wrapped up the Dragon Blooded game. I had very mixed feelings about it. This isn't to say I was unhappy with it. It's still one of my favorite games I've ever run. But it did highlight some stuff for me. ( Read more... )

I'm getting money for some game writing I did! Several years ago, when I thought I wanted to be a game designer and writer, I took a royalty-only project for a company called Seraphim Guard. They were known at the time for a small game book called Heartquest, a game of romance in shoujo manga. I got tapped to write a game book for fantasy anime called Spell-Slingers and Sword-Saints. I wrote it. The book went into limbo. The company changed hands a few time. I parted ways with them finally under bad terms.

About a year ago, the new owners of the company contacted me because they realized they had the rights to publish this game book. After some time, the decision was made to have someone else finish the missing bits of the manuscript and just cash me out rather than deal with the royalties. So, yay! Money!

I've had a love/hate relationship with this game for a while, which I'll touch on a bit farther on. I've been wanting to toss this onto the heap for a while to see how it goes. Plus, I'm wanting to use an abbreviated version of these rules for my half of Grindhouse at ACNW this year, but didn't want to fly in blind.

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Our next game may prove to be a bit of a divergence from the usual format as we may be playtesting a one-shot for AmberCon Northwest. This particular one-shot is billed as an Amber/Paranoia mashup. I guess you'll find out what we're doing when we get there.

This isn't so much a game I want to run as an idea I've been mulling around. Not sure if I'd want to run a game in such a setting, but I like the potential it has. So think of this more as a creative exercise. If I have enough ideas, I may even start up a Wiki for it.

I really like "prequel" settings for popular game settings. I loved the Earthdawn setting. Hated the rules, but loved the setting. Loved the connections between Earthdawn and Shadowrun. I've similarly loved the connections between the Exalted and the old World of Darkness.

The general idea for what I've been noodling about is, "What if there was an Exalted-type setting connected to the new World of Darkness?"
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Dream Pod 9 had a long wrong of hybrid games that featured a mix of roleplaying game and miniature war gaming. Heavy Gear was their flagship, but they also had games like Jovian Chronicles and the game we played, Gear Krieg. Then paradoxically they had a post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror game called Tribe 8, which featured no mecha at all.

Gear Krieg would not have been my first choice of game to try out the Silhouette system with. (Woo! Cute system name!) While mechas in WW2 are patently awesome, and was a core reason behind me buying the game several years ago, some of their other settings stir my cockles a bit more. But I was delighted to play this regardless.

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Next up: I'm going on the hot seat to GM a game of Houses of the Blooded. I'm really looking forward to this. I don't know that we'll use the land management rules, but I at least want to see how the narrative control mechanic works. I'm especially curious because I'm using these rules to do a high school B-movie one-shot for this year's run of Grindhouse at ACNW. Oh yes: High School of the Blooded. (I do it just to give John Wick headaches.)

I swear, Rob Donoghue's blog is one of my favorite things to read regarding game design. I find the man very inspirational. I ignore a lot of podcasts and forums on the topic, as they don't interest me. But I continue to find Rob engaging and approachable in his thoughts.

In this post he talks about minimalist game design and it's relation to "crunch." What I found particularly amusing is the comments which highlight that other people have already head the same thoughts as I did about the "game" aspect of roleplaying games, though admitedly from a completely opposite bias.

I've been mulling around ideas for a D&D or D&D-like campaign. I haven't decided what system I'm going to use, or when I'll have time to run it, but it's something I've been mulling around for a while.

Part of it comes from some ideas I noodled around back when I ran a cop game in D&D. Mainly it was a thumbing of my nose at the traditional adventurer model, where the law enforcement PCs looked down on so-called "adventurers" as mere tomb raiders and troublemakers. But that was more of a background setting piece than a cornerstone of the setting.

This idea got a bit of a surge from a quote from, if I'm recollecting properly, John Wick. I think it was from his Houses posts on Livejournal, prior to him locking his posts to private. I thought it might be in Houses of the Blooded, but I can't find it in the PDF I have of it. But the gist of it was this: Bands of armed thugs wandering the countryside are not adventurers. They are criminals.

I attribute it to Mr. Wick because I believe it came out as he was trying to distinguish the ven of his anti-D&D game from the ageless sociopaths of D&D. But I like the idea as a setup for a D&D campaign, especially since I love the thought of using a concept from Houses to do a non-standard D&D game. It's like... thumbing my nose at so many people at the same time.

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Had a couple thoughts that have been bubbling up regarding the gaming aspect of roleplaying games and how that indirectly ties into Amber Diceless.

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Here's a quick rundown of the state of my gaming, mostly focusing on the campaign I'm running. It's been several months since I did one of these and things have kinda changed.

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I have a couple posts brewing in me noggin, but for now: Link!

I thought this was a neat idea, and could be easily appropriated into a number of game systems and settings.
http://www.rpg.net/columns/wushuskidoo/wushuskidoo19.phtml

Blue Planet was sort of a poster child for why I wanted to start doing the One Hit Wonders. It is the pinnacle of "games bought because it sounded neat but no one ever actually wants to play." And we played it, oh yes.

Many game lines will put out the "adventures with water" sourcebook. Shadowrun had Cyberpirates, oWoD had Blood-Dimmed Tides and Changing Breeds: Rokea. There were a few different things that came out over the years for D&D, I think.

Invariably they seem like a weird marketing choice, because they seem to be loathed by many people I talk to. And they are a little useless, because you really have to want to run an all-aquatic game. And not many people are really jazzed by an all aquatic game. Otherwise you can't really make a character based off that sourcebook in many games. Being a cyberpirate in the Redmond Barrens is as useless as a fish on a bicycle.

It takes a special sort of dork to really want to play with these weird little settings. And I am that special sort of dork, my friends. I buy these books, put them next to my copy of Shadowbeat and practice my contrived slang from Shadowrun. ("Hoi! What the frag is up with all this hoopy drek, chummer?")

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I'm off the hot seat for next game, and we will be playing Gear Krieg. This was the less well known "mechas in WW2" game that was put out by Dream Pod 9.

This weekend I attended Go Play Northwest 2009. This is my recap. SRSLY. I am working on this in lieu of my novel, so I'm taking my life into my own hands.

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I've wanted to play this for... over a decade at least. I also learned a fun fact when I went to run it. Paranoia "5th" Edition, which is the only version I own, is apparently reviled by die-hard Paranoia fans. One of the players brought it up at the session, and Wikipedia confirms it. And if it's on Wikipedia, you know it's true. SRSLY. It seems that the absurdist, slapstick "kill each other because everyone is secretly a traitor" is not the original setup for the game. It was meant to be more of a dark humor game with complex satire.

I find this extra amusing because I have always loved the 5th Edition rules and it was what made me want to play Paranoia in the first place. Huh.

For reference, there was never a 3rd or 4th edition. I guess it was a joke. Ha. Ha.

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Next up is me on the hot seat again. I had a quick round of Instant Runoff Voting for our next game from a handful of options, and I'll be busting out some Blue Planet action. Whales! With guns! Before then I'm hoping to get some other posts written, commenting about the current state of my gaming and some game ideas I've been mulling around.

Hey, only took me a couple months.

April 16th-19th, I flew out with the special lady friend for four days of roleplaying at the 20th anniversary AmberCon US in beautiful, scenic Livonia, MI. For those who haven't attended one, these cons are relatively small (ACNW and ACUS have 80-100 attendees each year) and lack some of the features you see in larger cons. Like a sprawling dealer room and such. Instead, it's just solid gaming from Thursday night through Sunday night. And by gaming, I mostly mean "roleplaying." Like serious, immersionist, actor-stance, honest-to-Buddha roleplaying. There's a bit of indy gaming that goes on. Fringe weirdos like Amber players tends to have some overlap with the indy game crowd. But there's also some people who staunchly hate indy games. Especially the story game, roll-for-narrative control sorts of games.

The con definitely has a different feel from ACNW, which is the con I spend most of my time at. It was started by Erick Wujcik himself and has about seven years on ACNW. The median age often feels older. It seems like there are more ongoing campaigns than there are at ACNW, some of which may very well have started in the early years of the con. This is, and has been, the major stomping ground of many of the people I got to know through the old Amber Mailing List. When I think "Amber Community," I think of this place.

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Next up, I'll be recapping my Paranoia one-shot that I ran a few weeks ago.

Last of the horribly past due OHW posts before I do my AmberCon US recap. I'm only a couple months behind. Seriously. =P

For this one, we had a rousing session of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I'm not sure which edition the GM was using. I believe the newest.

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The next game we played was Paranoia. I was a little unexpectedly on the hot seat for this one. Before I get to that, I'm going to try and get my ACUS recap written.

Home with a nasty bug, figure I can at least work at catching up with this a bit.

The next OHW we did was Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds, the d20-derived superhero game.
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The next game we did was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Just one more of these posts and I can finally get to my ACUS recap!

I'm crazy behind on these. It wasn't much more than a couple months ago that I did my last one, and we've had three installments since then. Yikes. My life has gotten busy with work and a new girlfriend and starting a new campaign, so I've neglected typing this information up. But now I've got a post-con report for AmberCon to write, and I figure if I don't get these done before I get the con recap done, then these will never get done. Since our next One Hit Wonders is in just over a week, the heat is kinda on.

As mentioned before, this was game used the revised 2nd edition rules of the old d6 Star Wars system. This OHW covered two different things: Taking the old d6 system for a spin and seeing if I could play a roleplaying game without actually being able to communciate.

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The next game we did was Mutants and Masterminds with me in the hotseat.

One Hit Wonders: Wilderness of Mirrors

This is John Wick's simple story-game intended to emulate the spy genre, trying to fix what he felt was wrong in other spy games.

Unlike everything else we've had for our One Hit Wonders, I'd actually played this game before. A couple times, actually. Once at GoPlay Northwest 2007 and again about a year ago when I was considering using this system to try and do an Amber style game. I'd submitted it to the AmberCon US game book as "Wilderness of Princes," but no one signed up for it. But I did playtest it out to see how it worked, mainly to find that it didn't work the way I'd wanted it to.

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Next up is Star Wars, using the old d6 version from West End Games. It started when I mentioned that I'd always threatened to play a wookie diplomat in a game and spend the entire session "speaking" only in Shryiiwook (the wookie language), but could not in good conscience to do so in a game where I liked the GM. But when the time to pick the next game came, people clammored to play Star Wars so I could play this character. Another player has offered to be my protocol droid, "translating" for me during play. Most of the players refused to use the d20 rules, so we'll be going a little old school with this.