Tablesaw!

Some stuff from the past week.

• Hitched a ride out to Mission Viejo (inorite?) to go to Farrell's for wjukknibs's birthday party. W's on a quest to have birthday parties at locations when Angelenos our age would have had birthdays as children. We've done Chuck E Cheese's, and he's contemplating a McDonald's party.
• My role-playing group has been having a lot fun playtesting a new game. Of the games we've played, this is probably the one most up my alley, and I've been smiling because of it for the past two weeks.
• Went out to eat at Little Dom's. I enjoyed it, but Ojou was a bit taken back by the too-much-porkness of the menu. My entree, linguine with New Orleans–style BBQ shrimp, sounded unlikely, but was very tasty.
• Short hiking through Griffith Park. I wanted to take the Ferndell-Observatory trail, but I was stopped midway by a lonely coyote. My policy is to just leave coyotes alone when I'm hiking by myself. I repositioned, and walked up from the Greek Theatre to the Observatory and back down again. It's always fun hiking after winter rains. I'm walking along the side of the mountain, and instead of gold, everything's black and green. It was like I was in not!SoCal.
• I've been playing Sam & Max: Season One. Adventure games in 3-D still feel a little clunky to me, but the dialogue is spot-on and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the used copy I bought is skipping a little bit. I'm goign to see if I still have time to find the recent and try for a different disc.
• jedusor was in town for grad school interviews, and on Friday, I met up with her and cramerica and Artistry and Mr. Pizza on Fairfax. I got a really (really) big calzone, and two bottles of Dr. Brown's Black Cherry. 'Twas yummy.

I'm running a game for ojouchan, cramerica, amythyst, and maybe thefreak (who's will probably be working) and pbchris (who hasn't let us know whether he's coming glare). Ojou asked for Call of Cthulhu, which I've run before, but I decided to switch to Trail of Cthulhu, which looked awesome and is nicely streamlined. I'm finishing up writing my notes now, which is good, because I still keep moving things around as I do it. But two things have been bouncing through my mind.

(There are no spoilers for the game in this post.)

One, it's awesome that the places that I walk to when I want to clear my head are exactly the setting of the game I'm writing. I live just a few blocks away from the old Krotona Colony. Krotona was a colony for Theosophy, an esoteric religion that still exists today. (So does the colony; it moved to Ojai in 1926.)

A regular feature in my walks is this stairway, which served as the southern entrance to the colony. I knew that several of the buildings up there were from the colony, but I didn't realize how many. A review of the architecture of the area (available as a PDF) has this to say:

Nearly all of Krotona's major and many of its minor buildings still stand occupied, though all have been to some extent remodeled and most changed dramatically in function. Together they comprise what may well be the largest coherent group of architecturally significant, Theosophical structures in the western hemisphere.

And sure enough, looking through the pictures, I kept recognizing the less flamboyant buildings as ones I walked past.

Tomorrow's adventure begins at this house, though not with its then owners, the parents of Mary Astor.

Second, I've always wondered the extent to which Cthulhu roleplaying games are fundamentally racist. Not in the sense of mechanically dealing with 1920s American race relations in roleplay. More in the sense of whether Lovecraft's stories structurally racist, whether they contain or foster or support ideas of the primacy of whiteness. There's no doubt that Lovecraft was a serious racist, even for the 1920s. (If you doubt it, read this; you can get the gist by looking at the title in the URL.) But the last time I ran the game, Ojou drew up a character that was essentially her grandmother, and it threatened to break the game. Not because of min-maxing or anything, just in having a view of the world that was not the WASP academic worldview that Lovecraft relies upon. That worldview is necessary for the horror to work, and as a result it supports it in the reader. Add a character that doesn't fit into that worldview (like a rich black woman withconnections to other African-American practitioners of Vodoun), and the story completely changes.

The role-playing games are very good at breaking down the stories of Lovecraft (and other Mythos writers), and examining them can give a sense of what's there structurally. There's definitely a sense of extended Terra Nullius. The Mythos contains a whole host of gods, creatures, and alien races that populated earth long before "humanity." And yet, non-White humans (like the native Tongva of Southern California, or ancient or even contemporary Africans) seem to have regular contact with this mentally toxic existence.

Trail of Cthulhu takes Call of Cthulhu's legendary "Sanity" stat and breaks it into Sanity and Stability. Stability is what many people consider to be "sanity"; it's the ability to hold yourself together when terrible things happen, whether they're natural or supernatural. Sanity is specifically tied to knowledge of the "Cthulhu Mythos." From the ToC manual:

Sanity is the ability to believe in, fear for, or care about any aspect of the world or humanity as we know it: religion, science, family, natural beauty, human dignity, even "normal" immorality. The horrible truth of the Mythos is that Sanity measures your ability to believe a comforting lie . . . . It is perhaps best understood as a long-term measure of how close you are to fully realizing the bleak and awful reality of the cosmos.

Given all this (and some other things), I start to see Lovecraft's take on horror as one in which Whiteness and its privileges is equivalent with "humanity." Horror comes from the threat to Whiteness, the comfortable (and comforting) lie that is threatened by incursion from or exposure to the Other, who are alien and unhuman. It's an attitude and analogy that does permeate the structure of Lovecraftian horror, and I'm trying to find ways to neutralize it.

Meeting ojouchan for lunch at Octopus. Lots of fun stuff in their lunch special.

Tomorrow, it's back to gaming. I think that's tomorrow. The e-mail chains have confused me a bit.

Back to actual games. After my shopping, I headed over to my first game.

Sunday, 10:00. Election Day (Mike Olson). Getting up at ten in the morning on the third day of a con can be rough (hello, NPL business meeting!), so there are typically a lot of dead games. The makeup of this game ended up being pretty eclectic. I'd preregistered, and I think only one other person (maybe two) signed up on the day of. But our party got bulked up by two GMs, who had nobody show up for their games. And a little bit after we started, we got added another player who'd come for a game run by one of the GMs folded into our game. (One GM and one player apparently weren't enough for the game he'd planned, so we welcomed her into our game.

Election Day was an adventure run in Spirit of the Sword, a fantasy hack of Spirit of the Century. Century is a pretty awesome game designed for pulp adventures. The mechanics are pretty simple, and they are designed to have players do awesome things with relative ease. (Compare that to players trying to duplicate Legolas's moves using AD&D 3.5.)

The key to Century, though, is something called aspects. For your character, these are the things that make your characters characters. The things that are special about them, their strengths and weaknesses, the things they always have to run back into the burning building to save. Other parts of the games have aspects too, your enemies, your environment, etc. And the game then reduces down to the cool parts of you character interacting with the cool parts of your enemies and the scene, and the rest of the rules are really just a formality.

Spirit of the Sword, as I said, is a hack on this system. Century is set in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the Western world (or a Western perspective on "exotic" or "oriental" locales). Sword has a detailed fantasy setting and several changes to skills and such to make it appropriate to the new world. It also comes with a magic system, that I got a taste of. (Olson has been posting his information on the hack on his website.)

Anyway, the game started with an overview of the world and the characters. I chose Yves, the "Spellcasting Thief" Olson posted PDF files of the character sheets, but the links are broken right now. (I still have my copy with me, though.) In addition to the technical sheet, we also got a page with our characters' backgrounds broken into five phases: Origins, Calling, Goals, People, and Adventure. That last one was left blank, and we started our game by having each player devise and then roleplay their character's latest escapade. For Yves, I said that she infiltrate the "Pepperers' Guild" and stole a huge box of very fine pepper. After our adventure, we added two aspects to the five already given us; Yves ended up with:

• Member of the Thieves' Guild
• Spell and Shadow
• "I've got an angle."
• Flashing Eyes
• Squirrel the Fence [that's a seller of stolen goods named "Squirrel"]
• Box of hot, hot pepper
• When the going gets tough, the tough hide in the dark

The adventures were a nice way to get started with the game. It demonstrated how the mechanics worked, and let us show off our characters. After everyone was finished, we got into the adventure.

It was essentially an escort mission. This ragtag bunch of adventurers had been hired to protect a huge cartload of money in the most dangerous part of town for complicated political reasons that need not be described here. We would, of course, be ambushed and then forced to recover the lost money. At the end, there was a giant monster.

Unfortunately, there really wasn't a place for a thief in this mission, especially after I'd taken Yves to a place where she was really more into hiding and taking things in the dark than guarding something with a whole bunch of people. Sure, she knew how to cast magic missile, but she was much more apt to cast Darkness isntead.

When the first battle was joined, Yves hid, and . . . then I was stuck. I couldn't really tell what the character would do. Attacking didn't feel right; I'd hidden nearly perfectly. Leaving that safety seemed against character. What I was really itching to do was betray the party—after all, I was a thief who was pretty much invisible at the moment and I had a huge sack of other people's money on my back. My instinct was just to run off and see what happened. Why I didn't was a little complicated.

For one thing, the adventure didn't really seem laid out that way. Having one character disappear with the loot would send things going a little crazy. Still, with most of the other people at the table, I probably would've felt safe doing it. However, one player— the one who'd come to play a different game—made thigns different. She hadn't played a tabletop RPG before, a fact that I'd picked up on pretty early and that she confirmed afterward. So, I just didn't feel right changing the game so drastically when she was still getting used to things. And she was having a great time, dominating the swordplay of the main battle. I felt better with her driving the adventure than with me doing it, so I laid off. I kept looking for a hook to get Yves into the story, but it didn't really gel.

Olson addressed this and other things in his own writeup. Overall, the adventure felt a bit more traditional than I expceted, but that might simply be because the size of the group and the number of enemies in the ambush meant that a lot of time was dedicated to fighting one group of guys (while, you know, Yves hid in the dark). Still, things worked out pretty well, and I know I would've enjoyed the fighting more if I'd been some sort of battle-oriented mage or something.

Still More Shopping. My last stop in the dealer room. At about this time, ojouchan called, and she was lonely. I felt absolutely terrible for leaving without her. I'd asked her the night before whether she wanted to come, but she demurred because she thought she might have to do some work. Then, when I left I woke her up to kiss her goodbye and asked if she wanted to come. Or I thought I did. It turns out, she didn't really wake up until a few minutes after I'd left. Feelign like an idiot, I picked up two games for her, a Killer Bunnies expansion (which turned out to be unplayable—making me feel even idioter) and Gloom, which we haven't played yet but which looks like a lot of fun.

And then, I finally remembered that I still needed dice. But this time, I actually did, I picked up two sets of black "baby dice," which were cheap and generally very nice (though the numbers on the icosahedron are a bit hard to read. And quickly it was off to my next game.

Sunday 3:00. The Council of Elders Has Convened . . . (Alejandro Jose Gervasio Duarte). This was a playtest of a game Alex is working on called Unwritten. (There's a development blog, but it's kind of hard to follow and doesn't give much concrete information on the game itself.) I'd describe it as a mix between In a Wicked Age and Shock. Since the game is still being designed, everything I say here is, of course, subject to change. In fact, Alex was making changes over the course of the weekend. Still, this is what the game was like when i played it.

First, players work to create a few "prompts" that are the seeds of the story, much like the an oracle in IAWA. Then one player frames a scene with or about their character, picking a prompt for inspiration. This player also picks a question off of his character sheet. These questions reflect a Hero's Journey–like character arc, and each one is designed to make the player either learn more about their character or change something about their character they already knew.

After one player (the primary player) sets the scene, the other players begin narrating everything that happens other than the primary character's protagonist. The goal for these players is to drive the scene to conflict. More specifically, it's to offer the primary player a conflict that they find particularly interesting. When the player has accepted a conflict, dice are rolled to determine the what happens in the scene, what happens in the story, and what happens to the character. The resolution of the conflict is then narrated, and the character sheet is modified, and story prompts are added or changed.

We based our story off of the rough guideline Alex had provided in the description of the game:

The council of elders has convened. They have decided to send out a task force to enforce the new law. You are that task force. You will be armed with a council wizard, a guardian, a spokesman, and a silent agent. The new law: complete submission.

We were legendary heroes resurrected to quash a resistance, though we did not know the nature of it. We represented the archetypal RPG party—mage, fighter, cleric, and rogue—though we differing views of the present conflict.

We didn't get through a full game (or even a half game). The system is a bit finicky, and it takes a little while to get used to. In a previous game, Alex said he'd been able to get things going much faster, and it may simply be that the amount of time the game takes grows drastically as the number of new players rises. Still, I enjoyed the game. It did a great job of spurring dramatic changes in the world and in the characters using a pretty spare set of rules. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one as it gets closer to production.

Dinner. I ate dinner with the same co-supperers as I had the previous two evenings. Colin was in a bit of a hurry, so we ate at the lobby restaurant of the next-door hotel. It turned out that it's a decent place to get a meal, without the crowd of the con hotel.

Sunday, Eightish. Inspectres Pickup Game (joshroby). There was only one game that looked interesting to me on Sunday night, Colin's Spirit of the Force. Many others agreed, which meant that the game was full, but also that there were a lot of people looking for a game. joshroby decided that he was too tired to play Inspectres, but he was coherent enough to run it. So a bunch of us gathered for another game.

In our first case, we had to help a child that had been transformed into a huge tentacle creature at the Beverly Hills City Hall. Plotwise, it was relatively straightforward. Our second case involved a mysterious something at a residential development, cultists, and a glowing door through space and time. But the highlight of the night happened in the first case and was unrelated to the plot. Alex (the GM of the Unwritten game) had left the game momentarily to take a phone call. When he returned, he decided that his character, who had been driving to town hall on his own, had gotten lost. So he started calling the other characters on our company cell phones (cell phones that were disastrously malfunctional). Despite having really nothing to do with the case, he called each character in turn for wacky hijinks. And with each call, he got farther and farther away from Bevery Hills. (I think he was close to San Diego by the time he turned around.)

Wrap-Up. After the game was over, many people left. I stuck around to talk with James about IAWA. We discussed how the problems that had plagued Friday's game could have been avoided. Then we went in to kibbitz on the end of Colin's Spirit of the Force before most of his players left. Morgan told us the fantastic details of his own Spirit of the Century games, the post-apocalyptic Spirit of the Shattered Earth. With so much Century hacking, Colin joked about running the most inconceivable variation and seeing who would want to play: Spirit of the Tax Code and Spirit of My Little Pony. Sadly, these two options may be too viable, as I later demonstrated.

And that's it, and I think it's enough. The next one's during Labor Day weekend. I currently plan on going, but I'm probably going to hold off on deciding. That's a big weekend for people doing stuff.

I had a plan to get to the con early on Saturday morning, sign up for some open slots of full games, and play something in the morning slot. But the night before, I had to take NyQuil to get myself to sleep, and that knocked me out a bit. When I came to consciousness, it was ten to ten; I drifted back off to sleep. A few hours later, I woke up a bit more refreshed. I puttered around the house, got some food and did some dishes, and headed back to the Radisson. I was a little bit later than I intended, but there was still time for a little shopping.

Shopping. After browsing around, I headed to the Indie Press Revolution booth to pick up Spirit of the Century (welcome, Google Alert user drivingblind!) and Primetime Adventures. I'd been meaning to pick up these and a few other games, but it's easier to resist the urge to spend when I'm sitting behind a computer screen. And no gaming store anywhere near Southern California carries IPR stuff.

I was going to buy some dice, when I was called by name. I looked up, and I saw my sister's fiancé. He was there for RPGs too, though he was interested in the other games. Wizards of the Coast had a whole lot of demo games to preview their upcoming Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. I'd hovered over a game on Friday, and was thoroughly unimpressed. I've really sworn off tactically minded RPGs. If I want that kind of experience, I'll play a videogame or a boardgame.

Still, it was a pleasant surprise to see him, and I managed to get him to buy Agon. But after all that, I had to head off to my next game.

Saturday, 3:00. One Can Have Her (bloodthorn). One Can Have Her is an odd little game. It's got a noir theme, every player creates a character based on lists of attributes. There is a list of appropriate occupations (nightclub singer, gangster, doctor) and a list of appropriate personalities (idealistic, greedy, depressed). And you put those together for your character. There's a list of crimes and a list of victims, and you put them together to create his past. There's a list of life dreams. There's a list of ways he may be related to the femme fatale. There's even a list of names; your character has to be from that list.

Then the GM creates the femme fatale, who will be a part of this disparate characters' lives. I was struck by the way that noir misogyny is hardcoded into the game. The femme fatale is literally defined by the relationships that the characters have with her. And the characters can only be men. She is the only woman in the game allowed to have underworld connections. All other women must be either victims or innocents. It's part of the tone and setting, I guess, but I don't know how I feel about it.

I played Holly, a greedy politician who had blackmailed a celebrity. Specifically, he was blackmailing a popular film star because of his ongoing relationship with an underage girl. Holly knew the femme fatale from charity events, and he dreamed of power. The other characters were a paranoid cop who had murdered a child, a hardboiled federal agent who was selling drugs to his own brother, and a depressed war veteran who had stolen something of great value, but couldn't find a fence.

With four characters, we ended up with three stories. While Jesse did a good job having connections between all of the different narratives, the cop and the federal agent ended up merging into one powerhouse of a story. Holly's story was a roller coaster. My first scene was with the femme fatale in my office, where things went pretty normally; but when Holly met with the actor, a real two-faced character became clear. So I kept bouncing between these scenes where Holly was polite, politic, and persuasive, and scenes where he was cruel, callous, and conniving. Eventually, the heat was turned up for him, and he hectored the actor into "getting rid of" the girl. I had foolishly not been specific enough in my request, and so a few scenes later, the girl turned up dead.

The veteran, in contrast, had a much calmer story. In another classic noir trope, nothing went right for him. Nothing. He just kept trudging along, getting beat up by life. I think that his story needed a little time to play out. (Holly's too, really. The vet kept losing, but Holly kept "winning." They were due for a change in fortune.) But the cop and the fed had driven their stories to such a beautiful self-destructive finish that we ended the game.

Dinner. I met up with some more of the Nerd SoCal group and because the sky bar had not yet opened, we had dinner and drinks in the lobby bar. After I was done, I realized I had not yet bought the dice I'd meant to earlier. I went to the dealer room, but it had been closed. Instead, I headed over to my evening game.

Saturday, 8:00. InSpectres (Morgan Ellis). I was a little leery signing up in the afternoon. There was only one pre-registered player, and I was the first day-of signup. But as the day went on, I learned that a lot of other folks were going to be joining the game, including banfennid and immortalthief, so I didn't have to worry about the game being canceled.

InSpectres was definitely my favorite game of the con; I played it twice (the second session occurred on Sunday). It was really an amazing game. There's so little to it. A tiny bit of character creation, a little bit of rules, a few cubic dice, and then—and this is not merely a cliché—hilarity ensues.

The game is written to mimic Ghostbusters, paranormal investigators comedically solving supernatural mysteries. They rarely get things right, but they always, as Morgan said, "fail forward." The story just keeps moving and everything works fine.

Really, though, it's a sitcom generator. You create wacky characters, then you give them a pretense for working together. Then they go out and do wacky things that may or may not have anything to do with their ostensible job. On Friday, I'd heard Morgan talk about using InSpectres to run a Futurama-like world—package delivery in the thirty-first century. It would totally work.

In this game—InSpectres Lackawanna—I played Olaf "Big O" Montpierre, a 6'10" albino and former wine critic. Other characters included Marian "The Librarian," a former librarian; Bob, the silent partner in our InSpectres franchise (thus, "Silent Bob"); Victor "Vulture Anthrax" Adams, a former punk drummer; our resident techhead "Einy"; and Frank. Just Frank.

The tone was set when out client tried to call the company and Vulture Anthrax picked up the phone in a hallucinatory daze. Then Silent Bob took the phone away from him, but wouldn't speak into it. Then Big O stood behind Silent Bob and shouted over his shoulder and into the phone, narrating Bob's gestures and general body language.

Soon we were investigating the preternatural pest that was keeping our client from turning a pizza restaurant into a tanning salon. Obviously, as an albino wine critic, Big O had strong feelings about this. Luckily, his ties to the anti-tanning activist community (he's a member of MelaNoWay!) provided useful information.

Vulture Anthrax preemptively showered the tanning beds with bullets, releasing the souls of thousands of albino ghost tans. Or something. Maybe it was the ghosts that were getting tan. Things were pretty crazy. Also, there was a giant ghost spider inside with the face of a little girl, who turned out to be the sister of Frank, who had died in a tanning accident in Schenectady.

In our second case, we had to get in our decades-old North Korean helicopter to fly to Amish country to investigate a strange smell. This was complicated by the fact that Silent Bob turned out to be secretly Amish, while Einy viciously hated the Amish and had a plan to destroy them. We helped Brother Tang (who had been a punk guitarist with Vulture Anthrax before conversion) after some tense contract negotiation. And when the vampire cows began attacking the village (oh yeah, there were vampire cows too), Big O turned them away with a papally blessed cowbell. The cowbell, sadly, created a fever among the villagefolk. After some bovine vampire slaying, Vulture Anthrax, Tang and Big O played "Don't Fear the Reaper" to relieve the fever.

Somewhere along the way, Vulture Anthrax was promoted from dogsbody to vice-president of FUCK YEAH!

After hours. I headed pretty much directly home. Others were going to play a midnight fame of Don't Rest Your Head, but I had preregistered for a 10 a.m. game, and I didn't want to miss it.

ThuNYTX: 8:45.

I went out to survey prices and models for a new TV in my new place. I found one I like, which is a 27-incher and costs between $200 and $220 (I think that one store may have factored a rebate into the price.) Then I bought a used Gamecube. It rocks.

So, yeah, two big days. And I need to finish some more moving soon, so let's see how quickly I can tell you all about this.

( Nobilis: Session One. )

( A long day of moving. )

( Harry Potter and Jim Dale )

( A search for my driver's license. )

( Afternoon Entertainment, Lilo and Stitch )

( Looking at my home come into being )

So now I've got to load up my Dad's jeep with boxes and boxes of books and assorted other stuffs. Then I need to sleep. Mmm... Sleep.

It's suprising, even to myself, how little my nocturnal schedule bothers me. It has a lot of advantages. I'm always driving against traffic. I get to avoid annoying lawyers at work. I can ignore holidays and such that I don't care for by sleeping through them.

One of the areas, though, which continually is online role playing times. Either they start too early or or they continue too late or the whole damn thing takes place while I'm dead asleep.

I've mentioned earlier that I've been very excited over a new game called Nobilis which is going to be run on ifmud. Well the first session was today. I'd tell you what happened, except that I was asleep. What I do know is that the two session times chosen by the people who were there and not asleep were both times when I will be asleep.

Why did I send my available times in hours after the game was announced if they are not going to be heeded? Why did I send in my character hours later if the later majority was going to drive the time to when I cannot play?

Everyone involved with the project seems to be gone now, and nobody has posted the transcript of the session, so I have no idea what happened. Pah.

FriNYTX: 15. FriLATX: 9:15. SatNYTX: 44.

[Update: It looks as though the times will be changed. Apparently, the organizer misunderstood the times I sent him.

As mentioned earlier, inkylj is going to be running an game of the RPG Nobilis. I've just about wrapped up my character, so I thought I'd put it up here, for interested parties. It might be helpful to read a summary of the system or refer to a general crib sheet. As mentioned before, I will be playing a demigod with control over puzzles of all kinds.

( Gerry Spinks, Duke of Puzzles. )

WedNYTX: 7. WedLATX: 4:45.

When I got home from work, I collapsed into bed without even taking off my clothes. I woke up two hours later and had a Happy Birthday talk with my sister. (We're celebrating on Sunday, so I have time to shop.) The conversation energized me, so I got up and checked my email while I made pizza.

The pizza is ready, so I've got to go, but this is my project for the month. I figure I can throw together a few good entries and see what happens.

G'night.