/var/log/orava

It’s an older indie game from 2002, but partly because of that age it’s also apparently been an inspiration to many Forge-style game writers… so when I heard that Matt Snyder’s Dust Devils was going out of print in the near future, I decided to pick up a copy.

It’s an interesting, compact game. Like most modern(ish) indie games, it’s focused on telling one specific type of story; in this case, a Western. The rules mechanics are very light but have the fun twist of using poker hands to resolve conflicts – something that fits thematically quite well with the theme. It’s a not a campaign game; the story is intended to have a very specific end, you’re expected to bring your character’s story to a Western-appropriate conclusion. Maybe you need to kill the man why killed your sister, and you do it while dying yourself in the attempt. Stuff like that. I can see why this game has been an influence, it’s very compact but still manages to do what it sets out to do.

The current “reloaded” edition also contains a short appendix with variant games the same mechanics could also be used with. We’re given the frameworks for an agent/spy game, a samurai tale, and a “film noir” setting. Sure, they are just quick sketches, but they are still fun ideas.

This is a pretty cool book. It’s a tie-in / companion of sorts to Activision’s (first) Heavy Gear game, which was published at the same time this book came out. Instead of being some sort of game tactical manual or strategy guide, The New Breed is something much more interesting: an rpg campaign setting based on the scenario and events outlined in the game. I haven’t played the game (it was apparently pretty buggy), but it was set aboard one of two huge landships, one Northern and one South. I get the impression that in the game, you could play either side – and if not, at least here you can.

The book is split into two halves. One details the Northern Vigilance, with NPC details, maps and overview of the ship, and finally a campaign that has the players doing a lot of interesting things as crewmembers. The other half details the Southern Draco, and gives a counterpoint campaign – same events, but seen from the other side. If nothing else, this approach is interesting in that the book works as a starter for either a Northern or Southern campaign.

I was pretty sceptical about this book, computer game tie-ins have a spotty record. I was happy to be proved wrong and ended up liking this thing quite a bit. There aren’t all that many campaign settings for Heavy Gear, anyway.

War of Ages collects two old (1st edition) Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebooks, Elysium and The Anarch Cookbook, into one compilation.

Elysium is a soucebook for playing and running Elder characters in a Vampire chronicle. Now, these are pretty damn difficult characters to play – most of them have been “alive” for hundreds of years, and have (quite static) worldviews that are mostly quite alien to modern sensibilities. How do you play or run a creature like that? Answer: usually, not very well. Elders tend to become either overpowered cliches or overpowered monsters stealing away the limelight from the players. And what if one of the players is an Elder? Can he/she think about the character beyond “whee, I have tons of kewl powaz!”? All too often… no. While this book doesn’t give any real solutions to the above, it does outline how Elder society and society games differ from those of younger vampires, and gives some pointers on how to play them (many stolen directly from Machiavelli). While the book doesn’t contain a huge wealth of info and didn’t really give any new info to me (having helped run a Vampire LARP thingy for ten years)… it’s not bad.

Anarch Cookbook shows the other side of the coin, the (usually) younger generation who have left the Camarilla and who wage a war of sorts against the Elders. The book goes into why this is usually doomed to fail, but also highlights that it can work, now and then. There are notes on tactics, logistics, and on how to survive when an organization with lots of power is out to get you. Trust becomes a major issue, especially when you feature in things like a possible Blood Bond and the various Disciplines that may be used against you. There’s a small bit of silly emphasis on the words “Gothic-Punk”… but that’s forgivable, this is an old book from the era when Vampire really tried to be “Gothic-Punk”. Whatever that means.

When these books were written, Vampire was still something very new and different and the WoD metaplot hadn’t yet started to descend into the silly depths (mostly). Oh, I have a fondness for those silly levels myself – but these are from an earlier time, when the game was still figuring itself out.

While touring the Pacific Northwest during our honeymoon some years back, we stopped by Seattle. Now, I have no idea why some people tend to diss the place, I kind of like Seattle myself. Sure, the weather is… temperamental and it does rain a lot – but so what. Anyway, we went to check out the Seattle Underground Tour, which proved to be a lot of fun. Due to the way the place was built (and due to various natural disasters), the old sections of the town have multiple layers, with the current buildings having been built on top of older ones – and the tour goes in and out of old cellars, some of which used to be streets. I found it very interesting – though, as some drunk has commented, “I have no idea why these folks come here to root through our dirty cellars”. Like most tours, it ended up at a gift shop, where among other things they had a book on sale on the history of the city, written by the founder of the “underground tour” thing. Bought a copy.

Sons of the Profits (subtitled “There’s No Business Like Grow Business – the Seattle Story 1851-1901”) does what it says on the tin. Focused mainly on economics and business ventures (some more sane than others), it outlines how greed and the race after the allmighty “profit” created the city and made it one of the bigger cities in the Northwest. Here “greed” isn’t seen as a bad thing as such, more as a defining characteristic of the “founding fathers” of the city. It’s an entertaining tale, especially the beginning parts, and told in a folksy tone as if everyone were sitting in the living room after a good meal, and some old guy was telling stories from his younger days. It works pretty well, most of the time. Towards the end the book gets bogged down in a lot of (to me) less interesting moneytary details, but parts of all that (especially the fights with and amongst the “railroad barons”) is interesting.

A fun look at Seattle local history, and gets bonus points for not painting the “city fathers” in an undeservedly favorable light. Some are called “bastards”, quite unashamedly, while some others are praised while not forgetting their less glorious moments. It seems quite even-handed, though of course it’s impossible to know for sure.

Ok, now I’ve finally read it. Houses of the Blooded is huge, complex, intimidating, weird and quite fascinating. John Wick wrote a game that he would like to play himself, and the end result features betrayal, social status games in an alien society, bloody duels and romance (which always ends badly). And opera. Which also always ends badly.

It’s a weird game. Quite clearly a labor of love, it’s written in a very strong authorial tone. Unlike Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, though, the tone here does not annoy me a bit, it just lends flavor.

So, what’s it about? Well, the players are all “Ven”, and “Blooded”. Members of an ancient race of beings originally created as slaves/servants to a now-dead race of sorcerer-kings, they do everything by extremes. All players are nobles, and all control land and are lords over a large population of lesser Ven – land serfs, essentially. Non-Blooded Ven are essentially property, and non-Ven are even less: they are collectively called “orks” and treated as unintelligent animals. The Ven are xenophobes and elitists in the extreme, and laugh at our weak “modern” ideas of equality and moral relativity. Players belong to (or claim association with) various animal-themed factions… one might be Blooded of the Elk, another Blooded of the Bear. This matters, in various ways.

There is sorcery, but it’s illegal. Everyone does it. There are rules, which are strict. Everyone breaks them. The words for “love” and “revenge” are almost identical, and this is extended into the mindset of the Ven – love is seen as a dangerous obsession, a weakness which often leads to bloodshed. Still, almost everyone chases after it. The color of your clothes matters. Nobody wears black, by choice. Some are forced to.

Mechanically, it uses an “Aspects” -based system (modelled after Spirit of the Century) with tons of clever bits tacked on. The winner of a (mechanical) test does not necessarily win the current challenge; he/she gets to decide what happens, and how. This is an important difference. There are no levels and no hit points, none of that crap. Combat is lethal, so you want to avoid it – until you can’t, when someone challenges you to a duel or insults you. Which happens, more often or not.

The Ven don’t die of old age, they retreat into cocoons, and whisper in the dreams of their children.

This is one of the more impressive “indie-style” games I’ve encountered in a while. It has so many neat things that I don’t really know where to start. It’s also a bit intimidating, I do have a small “well, what do I do with it?” problem. There is a very good Narrator section on the book, though, which helps out a lot in this regard. The characters actually age, and must make land-rule decisions in a small resource-management minigame of its own. John has said it’s a sort of an “anti-D&D” game: dungeon crawling is for peasants, this game is about all the bits D&D is not about. Including opera.

The game is very strongly player-loaded, and players are expected to develop a large part of the game world as the game progresses. This will not work for more passive game groups which are used to the GM providing the entertainment, here the players absolutely must chip in. It’s also (optionally) a slightly player-vs-player game – the PCs are expected to plot against each other, at times. This may not be suitable for some play groups, so it can also be left out.

If you’re at all interested in unusual fantasy games, get this game/book and read it. It will give you ideas about gaming, even if you never run it. I’m still not sure if I’m brave enough to give it a try.

I have a few small niggles. The layout is a bit chaotic, with rules scattered all over the (big) book. A more clear “rules section” and “fluff section” might have been better. Also, while the conceit in the book that the Ven were a real, historical race and that the book is based on actual archeological research is fun in a way, it gets a bit old. I would have kept that stuff in the player section, and left them out of the GM-only parts.

Ok, True Blood is now officially the best thing currently on TV. Or “coming soon to TV”, or “recently on TV”. Dunno, I don’t watch broadcast TV.

Anyway. Watched the last episode of the season last night, and now I’m very eagerly waiting for season two (coming next year). Wish there was a soundtrack CD available, the music here is great.

One of the best vampire-themed TV shows I know of, if not the best (ok, comparison with Buffy is pretty much impossible, the shows are very different). Not to everyone’s taste. The show has apparently been a hit for HBO, but the reviews have been extremely polarized. Some love it, some hate it, very few neutrals. This doesn’t surprise me a bit. Safe “family-friendly” entertainment fare this isn’t, even if it’s damn funny at times.

In the Humanist Alliance book for Heavy Gear, we get an overview of one of subsidiary republics in the AST: the Humanist Alliance, once independent but then conquered by the Southern Republic… and not happy at all about it.

The HA is a society based on a “scientific” caste system and a sort of Panopticon society, where every move is observed and privacy does not really exist. In lesser games this would have been written as a stock Orwellian control society nightmare, but here it becomes quite interesting. While being oppressive in a way, it also works (in a way)… there is very little crime, and the citizens aren’t an especially unhappy or oppressed lot. One can’t help but draw parallels to moden-day Japan (where police have extensive powers, but where that also has resulted in a very safe society). As an additional factor, the HA is under siege by the Southern Republic, which is trying to mold it into a society more like itself. There is resistance, of course, but it is more in the careful disinformation direction than actual guerilla warfare (which also exists, of course).

Another very interesting sourcebook for HG and a pretty fun read. I appreciate how DP9 has avoided the temptation of going for the easy caricature here, and has instead created something a lot more complex and harder to categorize.

Hunter: the Reckoning was a conflicted game. People were expecting something like what the new Hunter is: a game about people kicking supernatural ass, in Buffy style. The artwork for the game (especially the covers) supported this view. Problem? The game was nothing like that, and featured normal people given strange supernatural powers by unknown entities, and struggling to survive in a world they suddenly see is filled with monsters. It’s easily the most “horror” game White Wolf has ever done, and also totally dark and nihilistic. It got a very mixed reaction, probably due to the above mismatch between advertising and reality. I was very sceptical in the beginning, but then bought a huge pile of the books from a sale. After reading them I was quite impressed with the game, and now consider it one of the better “old WoD” games. The books are all written in an intentionally confusing multi-viewpoint subjective style, which I loved (but which also split opinions), and are the best reads of all the White Wolf books I’ve read to date. And I’ve read quite a pile. Special mention goes to the book Fall From Grace, which is a fantastic and disturbing look at what happens when the “Imbued” (Hunters in this game) get to high power levels. It’s not superhero territory.

So, nowadays I’ve been tracking down the few books I’m still missing from the full set. I recently managed to get The Infernal, a sourcebook about demons for the game. Like most of the H:tR sourcebooks, it’s very good. It also features the trademark shades-of-grey style of the game… demons are shown to be evil, but not mindlessly so and not necessarily so; the “evil” they do is often a function of them being alien, not malevolent as such. There is even some viewpoint given to demons trying to do “good” (in a fashion). Told in typical fashion for this game, it features four separate storylines, all telling the story of one encounter between the Imbued and demons. All are very different, though none of them exactly have happy endings.

I remain impressed with this game… and the game’s split personality remains with this book: the cover shows some sort of demon summoner in what seems to be some sort of occult (summoning?) circle. All fine and good, but “summoning demons” is almost non-existent in this book – the things are quite capable of entering our world on our own. So once again, the cover has very little to do with the actual content.

By the way, this book is a link between Hunter and White Wolf’s short-lived Demon game (which I haven’t read, but have actually heard quite good things about). Might have to pick it up sometime.

Well, the new VTES set Keepers of Tradition is out, and it’s looking very good. It’s a new “core set” for the Camarilla – and it’s been a while since the Cam got any new toys. The vampires are all new, and the library consists of part new cards, part reprints. The best value of all this is, of course, for new players: this is a chance to get some cards that have been quite difficult to find for a while now. For the older players, the value here is the new set of vampires, the new cards, and the reprints (which feature some very much in-demand cards). Some weird choices among the reprints, but generally there’s a lot of good stuff there.

The new cards and vampires are interesting, and some open up some very cool new tactics. Too early to tell yet what will work in the long run and what won’t, of course. The set includes a weenie hoser Event, an anarch + ally hoser Event, and off-clan stuff like a (poor) combat end for Obfuscate. Oh, and the promos include a card that will probably become quite significant: Two Wrongs, an OOT Master which hoses bleed bounce. Honestly, it should have been part of the core set, not a promo… but thankfully VTES promos aren’t all that hard to get, in the long run.

We had a “post-release” tournament for this set on Sunday, braving the snowstorm. 19 players, and the Malkavian starter proved to be far and away the most powerful: the top 4 rankings were all Malkavian. Not that the other starters were bad, strictly, but there was nothing there that could really stand up to the stealth bleed power of the Malks.

Very happy with this set, myself. Oh, and it also contains (nice) new art for a lot of old “staple” cards.

Will wonders never cease? We now have an actual new adventure module from Pagan Publishing. Between this and the resurrection of Delta Green, things are looking great on that front.

Unlike the previous Cthulhu scenario I read (Murder of Crows) Final Flight is not suitable as the beginning of a campaign – since it’s very doubtful there will be any characters left alive to start said campaign with. For the same reason, plopping this in the middle of a campaign might also not be the brightest of ideas… this thing is lethal. I think it would work best as a one-shot, with maybe a continuation campaign if any characters actually manage to survive.

The story has the PCs setting out to attend an archeological conference in South America, aboard the (prop-driven) Flight 101. This is a “classic era” scenario, so “modern technology” isn’t all that modern. Things go awry, and when I say “awry” I mean “crash in the middle of the jungle”. Hilarity ensues, as characters with skills more suited for academia try to survive hostile sort-of-natives, the hostile environment, other passengers, and other fun stuff. As noted, the probablity of any of them making it back to civilization are on the lowish side. Never underestimate the ingenuity of players, of course….

While I don’t think this is quite up to past Pagan quality, that’s purely because that quality has been so very high. The scenario is quite good, and goes in a “survival horror” direction that isn’t the most usual theme in Cthulhu. I think the biggest problem is that it’s quite sparse; the GM needs to do quite a bit of prepwork for this one and figure out how he/she wants to make the jungle lethal – no rules support is provided here. A somewhat bigger page count, with some additional detail, would have helped. That said, the price point is very low, so you are getting plenty of bang for your buck.

So… not a “must buy”, but not bad at all. If you want some jungle horror in your Cthulhu, take a look.