Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

[SPOILER WARNINGS - All what follows]
What this meant was that rather than explore down the history trees of the NPC’s I tended to shout ‘we’re soldiers, damnit’ and glower from the command station as we chased the bad guy. So first time around, people died, other people acted like I should give a damn and mostly my take was ‘everyones expendable for the mission’ and so on. This was Renegade John, who was not a pleasant person and will probably be most missed by the makers of high quality assault rifles (of which he was fond) when he finally buys the farm. John ignored the humans on the crew in favour of the alien Merc and renegade cop who were both suitably … results oriented for him. John never even figured out where one of the crew could be found on the ship.

Second time around, I played as Paragon Jane the Sniper War Hero, who was initially based on WWPD (What Would Picard Do?) who Felt Your Pain and Did The Right Thing. This went well, mostly, resolving through silver-tongued charm much of what Renegade John did through snarling intimidation. Where the charm became odd though was when after spending time actually getting to know my crew, after one mission not one, but two of them seperately decided that Paragon Jane was delicious and they would have some, please. I nearly fell off my chair laughing and figured that channeling Picard had some how turned into channeling Kirk…

Well fine, a somewhat bemused but flattered Jane carried on around the galaxy righting wrongs and cleaning up the Admirals embarassing mistakes on the premise that if the council didn’t think there was anything to worry about and they’d been around a lot longer, who was she to gain say them. Mostly she did a lot of by-the-way mineral prospecting because she like driving around in the Mako and found that generally any settlement she buzzed past that took pot shots at a clearly marked, heavily armed APC was usually full of bad MoFo’s who needed a lesson in hospitality from a 155mm railgun slug. Then all of a sudden she gets back to the ship after yet another mission to find she has to talk down the two crew who’ve decided to make an issue over who’s the commanders personal plaything. Again, I fell around laughing, even Kirk never had to deal with this (afaik?).

By the time I actually got to the ‘this is a suicide mission bit’ – where John had been ‘shut up and suit up’, Jane was ‘oops, conflict of interest, um…’ and then – hilariously – scarpered off to rescue her honey leaving one of the hapless marines to hold down the trigger on a nuke – and this was the good and righteous thing to do in the eyes of the computer. Needless to say, the rescuee was very grateful for not being radioactive ash (more on this later).

Back to the Council, reported on what I found and again they went ‘meh, we’ll send some guys’. John had shouted and thrown things, Jane was still somewhat concerned she wasn’t hallucinating, so went with it. Once back in space, John had gone straight for the bad guys jugular, brushed off the crew whinging about dying on the morrow and got on with it. Jane took a big detour to find some antiques and kick the things known to be threats like invading Geth as opposed to what was potentially a prolonged hallucination that had been induced in both her and the bad guy by the same broken mcguffin. When Jane finally decides loose ends have been tied up enough and goes after the bad guy, again, the ‘night before battle’ plays out except this time Jane and the rescuee end up in the infamous Mass Effect sex scene, and again, I fell off my chair laughing.

Poor Renegade John, doubted and unthanked, like Ahab focused on his nemesis while the happy warrior Paragon Jane was the apple of her Admirals eye, beloved war hero to the public, flying around the galaxy with her crew fighting to share her bed. I think the system treated John a little unfairly – possessed colonists, people whinging about weapons research and all the Stuff That Doesn’t Matter If The Reapers Come – these things he brushed aside, drove over or filled full of incendiary death. This was because John took the mission seriously – Doom is coming, no I do not have time to hear about your sister, or fix what you dropped, or tell you its going to be ok – you’re a goddamn Colonial Marine, rub some dirt on it and get back in line!

This even came down to the very start – someone said ‘the captains waiting’ – so John went to talk to the Captain. Jane stopped to chat on the way – and actually got to know the Red Shirt from mission one; John had no idea who this guy was so when he earned his Red Shirt, he was somewhat less than crushed. Jane had actually seen the equivalent of the photo of his yacht, the Live Forever and went ‘aw…’ and meant it when she said ‘its a shame he got killed’ later.

But to get to the title of my post – playing through as John, its just and FPS, something like Half Life 2 – the people are there and you’re kind of attached to some of them but when bad shit inevitably happens, its not a tragedy. Playing through as Jane, actually getting attached to some of the people, I was really torn up at the end of it. These were my crew, I wanted that button from Civ where it lets you play on afterwards, just to keep beetling about the galaxy. I wanted to go sit on the beach back in Ilos and bullshit with them. I felt we’d grown as people *snfs*.

It managed to get me as invested in the characters as Buffy or Farscape at its best. This is from a 2D media which is at its core and FPS. I thought I was past all that, if not entirely immune, and so fully immersive, dedicated RP simsense would probably be my doom. Much like WoW, it is going on my preemptive Nyet! list.

Mass Effect 2 is due out in about six months or so, should tide me through next rainy season. Its supposed to tap the existing saves from ME1 and draw on the choices you made to set up the new character. Just enough time between this and then to play through it as a Terran Supremacist and see if I can surpass Renegade John’s badness (he kept getting brownie points for actually doing his job which kept him somewhat balanced). I think an biotic-slinging adept could be fun…

Luckily, Fantasy Flight Games picked up the franchise, and their books have, from my point of view, been pretty good so far. From what my (evil) GM has said, though, there does seem to be a bit of White-Wolf Syndrome, where they don’t let the GM in on much more information than the players, making an integrated campaign hard while the books are still coming out.

For those of you not familiar, the first game was about being the retinue for an Imperial Inquisitor. I presume we’re building to playing Space Marines, but each game is taking its time, and so much the better.

The next offering from FFG is an extension to the universe, where the party play Rogue Traders. Rogue Traders seem to be somewhere between break-bulk cargo traders and corsairs. The Rogue Trader has a warrant that lets him sail his vessel on the edge of the Imperium, and can end up with (limited) contact with Xenos.

The joy of the 40k universe is that everything is on a cosmic scale. Even when playing Dark Heresy, I had a real sense that we were cut off on each planet, and only rarely able to cross the vast, deadly expanse. I hope the same feeling can appear in Rogue Trader. The ships are vast, kilometers long and with tens of thousands of crew.

No Enterprise, these ships are thick, heavy, dirty and mysterious. The crew are superstitious, ignorant peasants, slaves to inherited roles tending great machines.

The possibility of playing out an entire game of mediaeval court power inside the walls of a ship flying through the Empyrean Waste is something I really look forward to.

You’d barely have to leave the ship to play out an epic tale.

Instead, you can have a written account.

The convention this year had several surreal elements to it. The first one was the Friday night was better attended than before. I have to say that I was impressed with the numbers. People came down and played in the LARP, and we were introduced to the fact that Doom had taken the lead of a platoon of L5R-playing Germans, who he led through the con and straight into the Sudetenland.

The LARPs seemed to run fairly consistently well. I heard good things about the Fan & Sabre, including the fact that the whole LARP were dancing in a courtly fashion, which must have been quite the scene.

We had at least 4 tables for tabletops for each event. There is a definite correlation between having BRO as your RPG dude and good RPG attendance. It’s been shown at Gaelcon and Leprecon now. A Kudo each to him & Siskington.

The Guest for the Con was Richard Borg, creator of Memoir ’44. I have to say, Richard proved a superlative guest. He added a friendly, avuncular quality. Richard was very eager and joined in games, told interesting stories, and even spent some time playing with the two baby con attendees this year. I had the honour of victory over him in the inaugural Battle of Hoth, under Rebel Alliance General Honan’s direction. The real heroes of Hoth were Princess Organa, and her unit composed of elements from the Echo Base Reserve Fizz Band, Woodwind section. Led by Senator Organa, the Bith managed not only to inflict critical damage to an AT-At, but drive the 20 metre tall walker back across the open, snowy battlefield. Though none of the Bith survived a second engagement with the Imperial Walker, another unit under my command delivered the killer blow after Gorman made me re-roll my victorious grenade result.

2009 will live as a year of infamy for another reason. This year, Le Mysterieux Table Cinq de Monté Cristo was defeated by Sample Number Nine. I am still in considerable shock, but suffice to say that we will be back next year, with a fully armed and armoured battle station.

The staff and committee this year were awesome. The Con went off with surprising ease, and all the good numbers (attendees, kotei, players at games) were up. We even had free pizza from Just-Eat, which rocked.

The closing ceremony was fun. Noodle instigated Order 66, which left the committee a smoking ruin of nerf-clustered corpses. We also had a short slide show to remember icecream by. I will leave that below for your perusal.

Closing

So as you’ve probably guessed from the opening, my rollercoaster relationship with that online monstrosity, which was riding high about a month ago, is once again hurtling down into “Oh-my-god-I’m-wasting-my-fucking-time”sville for the third time. This time around it comes complete with hourlong “Log on and do nothing” sessions, interspersed with the occasional 5 hour Naxx grind that makes me want to kill myself. So, having lost this fight on points twice before I can see how this is going to play out, and I’m throwing in the towel early this time, before my metaphorical boxer suffers too much brain damage.

But, much like a junkie starting out onto the straight and narrow, I found myself in desperate need of a methadone fix. First up I tried Painkiller.

Painkiller is a weird game. Imagine if Quake and Serious Sam had a love child. This would be the game the child wanted to grow up to be. It’s really fast paced, has tons of spawning enemies, and a hilarious cavalcade of weapons to mow them all down with. It seems Painkiller decided they were tired of the “2nd attack button just doing a similar attack to the 1st one” stuff that every game seems to have these days. You know…you get a rocket launcher. It fires rockets with the left mouse button and lobs grenades with the right one. Painkiller pretty much said “Fuck that,” and combined their grenade launcher with a gun that fires wooden stakes ala Von Goosewing from Count Duckula. Go check out the demo, if only for the arsenal of unbelievably ridiculous (and fun) implements of death. The whole thing is only 3 levels long, and you should play through it in about an hour (less if you’re not the ham fisted R-tard that I am), and the boss fight is pretty damn cool.

However, good and all as it was, I was not prepared to get the full version. And by “get the full version” I mean download it illegally from some torrent site. And that’s the real gauge these days, isn’t it? If I can’t be arsed stealing it, it’s probably not the game for me. Then it occurred to me…maybe the same inexplicable cosmic alignment that occasionally strikes Gabe over on Penny Arcade had affected me as well.

“Maybe that’s what I need, an RPG,” I thought, and set off in search of foul monsters to slay, gold to procure, and an insanely complex plot to ignore.

…to be continued.

It got me thinking about Gaelcon, and about writing con scenarios in general. Xaosseed suggested this a while back, but I thought I would put down my observations on how I think scenarios should be written to help GMs at cons run better games.

Structure & Length

The recurring question when faced with a blank, mocking page is how to fill it. In my experience, I tend to find that I tend to wait ’til much too late and then totally over-write.

A Con scenario is a particular thing. It needs to fit into a three hour slot, which can in reality be as little as two and a half hours. I think that it can be useful to break up the scenario into a set of scenes.

One scene can be something like a fight, or a conversation, or a travel or something of that sort. They need to be discrete and purposeful. Ideally, you can flesh out the interstices between scenes for the GM, but they should be able to do some of that themselves as well, and will need to given the way players can dance on a scenario writer’s intentions.

For length, I would recommend 5±2 scenes for the complete scenario. That means that there needs to be at the absolute minimum a beginning, middle and end, but that’s probably not enough. A five scene structure might look like this:

1. Setup
2. First Task
3. Reveal / Conflict
4. Second Task
5. Conclusion

Scenes

Setup means getting the characters sitting down, making it clear who their characters are. In your timing, you should budget for time getting into character and solving setting questions. Some parties are very slow to set up, while others get in within ten mins.

Tasks are how I am describing extended system oriented events. These could be combats, sneaking events, interrogations or long puzzles. I think two of these is enough in most scenarions, but obviously some scenes might look more like tasks as well.

Reveal/Conflict depending on the shape of the narrative, this is where the initiative will normally change, either with the party or their enemies taking charge for the remainder. Normally this should be where the party can say ‘we know what to do, now we need to do it’.

Conclusion is commonly forgotten. It’s more than the epilogue, though that is also good. Ideally, you will have built the scenario towards this scene, and have shown as much as possible in advance to the players. Player anticipation is arguably the most important way to build a railroad scenario like a con game, and so the more they know that their characters only suspect, the better.

Gamers drawn from all over,
shuffle of card, roll of dice.
Hallowe’en convention.

I’ve effectively stopped playing games at Gaelcon. For some years now I have volunteered to GM for slots wherever I am needed. It’s something I enjoy, and it seems to make everything run just a tiny bit smoother.
For me, conventions are primarily about the table-top RPGs. I like CCGs, and I have been to some really great LARPs, but the essence lies with the dice, the character sheet and the crazed accent. This year I ran five of the eight slots, including my own SLA Industries game. It was heartening to see that there were about 10 tables per 2-game slot this year, which is clear increase on previous years.

The people doing the heavy lifting this year were Graham (Black Robed One) and Fatz (Fatz) and they did a hell of a job. I know from experience that RPG&LARP co-ordinator is a thankless job of begging, borrowing, threatening and photocopying. Even the best-intentioned Scenario Writer will always find that his oeuvre will lose the fight against other priorities. One excellent scheme that Graham implemented last year was the Writer’s Award.

As with last year, I made the choice between a good, late scenario and a mediocre but award-worthy scenario. I chose to write something I was happy with. The SLA game I wrote seemed to get some interest, since it had six tables all in all. I am really pleased to see that SLA is making a return to the tables. It’s long been a game with secret admirers and it represents a very different experience to the current raft of popularity like WoD and DnD.

Overall, the Con ran very well though I continue to think another venue would be better. The hotel we were in has some of the slowest service in the world, and they upped the price of drinks at the nearest bar to the con over the course of the weekend.

Overall, congrats to the RPG/LARP team and to Aidan who co-ordinated the whole Con. Another successful Gaelcon is in the can.

This is haiku week:
Five, Seven, Five in three sweet lines.
Please form comments so.

Who knew that a night of D&D would begin with a roast duck dinner, proceed through three bottles of wine, and end in the hot tub under the stars with only a passing reference to the game along the way?

I’m not sure whether it was the wine or the spa that made things take a left turn, but it was an excellent night.

Either way, I’m sticking with Brudja, and never Broohah.

I am really excited about this – it’s sad to say since I think I might be the only person in Gamers who is interested in Traveller, but still! Woo! T5!

/fanboi

This message was not brought to you by the Tavrchedle. Go in peace, citizen.