Games

Teaching VTES to newbies

We have regular VTES (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle) games every week, alternating between Wednesday and Thursday. The schedule is here and the site is the pub “Kaisla” near the Helsinki railway station – they have lots of room and a good selection of beer.

From now on I’ll be bringing along a bunch of basic “demo” decks to the games, and if some newbies show up I’ll be teaching people the game; if we get enough new people we can run a separate newbie game table. We usually start playing at about 5pm, but play typically continues until 10pm or so – people are welcome to show up whenever.

So… if you want to learn the game, show up tomorrow (or some other game night) and join up. You don’t need to bring anything or know anything, an interest in learning the game (which is quite complex) is enough. The learning curve is well worth it. And hey, there’s beer available from the bar, always a good thing. […]

Minireview: Southern Leaguebook One, Southern Republic: Land of the Snakes

Continuing on with my project to read the entire Heavy Gear line, we now have the Southern Republic Leaguebook. In an entirely unsurprising turn of events, it covers “the Land of the Snakes”: the Southern Republic, the biggest member of the AST and the most powerful single nation on the planet.

The AST has a stereotype of being expansionist and militaristic, with citizens having very little political freedom. This is based firmly in truth. However, the other side of the coin is the fact that citizens enjoy vast amounts of non-political freedom; as long as they don’t try to attack the state or criticize how it’s run (too openly), they have almost total personal freedoms as compared to many of their Northern counterparts. Attitudes are generally liberal and art flourishes. It’s a study in contrasts, and part of what makes Heavy Gear so cool: the writers go out of their way to make their societies complex, living things instead of stereotypes.

The book covers all the general bases. We have chapters on history, social norms, general lifestyles, etc, followed by brief 2-3 page writeups of the major cities with some barebones maps. The land area involved is huge, so this book can’t help being a bit sketchy in some details. What it does detail is interesting. The cities are quite distinct from each other, with each one having a very specific “feel”. For a GM setting up a game in the South, there’s a lot here to help him/her get started even if the fine details would have to be generated separately.

Not much else to say here. The book does what it sets out to do, with the only complaint being the sketchy level of detail in many places; something that is mandated by page count. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #13, Shadow in the Sky

Here we go again. Shadow in the Sky (written by Greg A. Vaughan) kicks off Paizo’s third adventure path, Second Darkness. As always, there’s an ancient evil awakening and the PCs are initially small fry who are (probably) expected to save things. Skipping that cliche, things do look quite interesting – there is a science fiction-ish twist and the promise of lots of drow as the bad guys. Not “misunderstood angsty dark-skinned folk”, but “evil, murderous bastards”. All this is tied to a big chunk of elven history and politics.

This first installment places the PCs in Riddleport, a Freeport-style wild and rowdy seaside town. After participating in a gambling tournament the players get the chance to get a slice of the business for themselves, with all sorts of potential problems. The big plot is mostly in the background, in the form of a weird phenomenon in the sky and some dark rumors. The action here revolves mostly around small-time crime and lots of shady dealings, which in fun in itself; it’s quite workable to have the PCs all be small-time crooks, for example.

Paizo has again tweaked the format a bit. The main adventure is a bit shorter, but that’s compensated by a bonus standalone adventure that can easily be plugged into the “main” adventure. The practical reason for this is resourcing: this format lets Paizo divide the adventure writing between more authors, and the small “standalone” adventure bit is a good place for new authors to try their legs (so to speak). I like it.

Hard to say much about the whole thing yet, but the setup seems pretty cool. Waiting with interest to see where this one goes. […]

Minireview: Books of Sorcery, Vol. V - The Roll of Glorious Divinity II

Books of Sorcery, Vol. V - The Roll of Glorious Divinity II is, besides a tongue-twister title, a book of demons and ghosts for Exalted. It updates info about demons from the old Games of Divinity book into 2nd edition stats and adds the Abscissic demon summoning method (also updated) from Savant and Sorcerer. The second half of the book contains new rules and stats for ghosts, including rules for “Heroic” ghosts (though, bizarrely, it omits xp costs for those).

It’s a welcome update; I immediately included the new demon summoning rules into my own game (as of yesterday) – now those damn Blood Apes have to be kept entertained or they go…. apeshit. Or something. The writing is quite clear, though as always this 2nd edition lacks some of the fun flavor from the 1st edition books. Some of this may be due to reduced available word count per subject, which (while helping keep things clear) I feel is also one of the main problems with this book: there’s just too much crammed into here. I would much rather have seen the whole book devoted to the care and feeding of demons, since they are such a cornerstone of Exalted sorcery. Ghosts we’ve already had elsewhere, I would have stuck the text now found in this book somewhere else.

So… a good book, with welcome (and long-overdue) updates of 1st edition material to 2nd edition, but marred a bit by cramming a bit too much into one book and by having most of the book be just a repeat of material from older books. I’m hoping to see some more demon stats in other books down the line, now the book just gives the same list of demons that 1st edition had, with updated stats. Would be good to get some actually new stuff.

One new detail liked a lot: the “obscurity” rules for figuring out if a sorcerer has heard (enough) about a given demon type. Handy. […]

Minireview: A Shadow Over Heaven's Eye, by Tim Waggoner

This is a bit more like it. While still staying very far away from high art, at least A Shadow Over Heaven’s Eye is a pretty good read. Set in the horoscope-obsessed Varangian city-states, it has a young girl rebelling against her destiny, Swan as a visiting diplomat, and an interesting Sidereal-fueled main plot. The writing is good enough and the book has some nice details and flavor on this region of Creation. Swan is himself, trying to be the perfect diplomat while dodging assassins and the Wyld Hunt. I’d rank this among the best of the Exalted novels – nothing spectacular, but good entertainment and useful potential world flavor for GMs.

Like all the Exalted novels, it’s a very quick read; large font and not that many pages. […]

Minireview: The Carnelian Flame, by Aaron Rosenberg

Books based on roleplaying games (and, well, games in general) have a reputation of being crap. This is, sadly, due to most of them actually being crap, so the reputation is well-deserved. However, every now and then you run into a book which ignores that reputation and actually manages to be pretty damn good.

The Carnelian Flame is not one of those. If you want good rpg-related books, read the Delta Green novels and short stories, Greg Stolze’s Godwalker, Robin D. Laws’ Pierced Heart, etc. Avoid this book like the plague. Avoid it even if you’ve sortof liked the other Exalted novels, this is easily the worst of them I’ve read.

The problem isn’t the plot, as such; while not being amazingly innovative, it’s quite ok. There’s an up-and-coming Deathknight with a plan to Kill Lots of People (tm), a newly-exalted bandit, Arianna in the role of the required signature character wandering mage… nothing spectacular, but you can build a decent Exalted book from that. The problem is the writing. It’s klunky, and at times feels like it’s aimed at 10yr olds. The characters apparently have a competition regarding who can say the most spectacularly corny lines, with everybody doing their best to out-corny eat other. The plot develoment is painfully connect-the-dots. The ending reveals no surprises whatsoever.

Waste of time.

Oh, there were a few fun points. I liked the version of Shoat of the Mire presented here, the personality fits pretty well with the…. upbriging that the Shoats receive. I would have preferred a bit more “crazy” in there, but… it was ok. Likewise, the demon tree thingy was a fun idea. Not worth the book, though. […]

Minireview: Northern Vehicles Compendium One, Gears and Striders: Shields of Faith

Like the Southern book counterpart, the Northern Gear Compendium is a collection of gear and vehicle data collected from earlier books, this time focusing on the designs used by the North. Well, not much to say here. Like the South counterpart, it’s a big book packed absolutely full of info, and lots of the detail on the histories of the various gears is quite interesting – and hey, this one contains the Ferret. Ferrets rock.

As always, this book would be so much better in color… but color printing is something that is only slowly becoming a reasonable option and in older books like this it’s greyscale all the way. Maybe the new version of Heavy Gear than SJG and DP9 is working on will offer books in color ? I can always hope. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #12, Crown of Fangs

Crown of Fangs (by Tito Leati) provides the conclusion for Paizo’s Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. It’s pretty good, though not quite what I was expecting; I was ready for a grand assault on the castle and a climactic fight against the main villain. Well, we get that… but not quite in the format expected. I don’t want to spoil too much here, so won’t go into details on that.

The castle is (understandably) left halfway as a sketch, since it’s huge and there’s no way to map the whole place in detail. I liked what the author had done here, in that he’s provided detail on the most critical parts and given enough info on the rest for the GM to be able to make things up as the situation demands. There are also some fun hooks to alternate adventures that could be expanded on by the GM. The castle should provide the players of lots of castle storming fun, and a nice fight – but as noted, not everything is as it appears.

The continuation (second half of this installment) has the PCs set out for the wilderness again, and I can see it possibly providing some problems unless the players pick up some vital clues. I’m not sure I buy the logic of what the main villain is trying to do here, and why that specific place… but whatever. Assuming the players stay on rails, the whole things looks like a lot of fun, once again.

In retrospect, I think Curse of the Crimson Throne is a stronger campaign than Rise of the Runelords (which was by no means bad). I liked the fact that about half of the story happens within one city, there’s a lot that can be done in the context of “urban” adventures. The PCs can no longer throw fireballs around with total abandon, there’s always the risk of serious fire and the general problem of innocent bystanders. Of course, some players may not care about those things… in which case it’s the GM’s job to make sure the PCs start having approriate reputations.

On the minus side, this adventure path also suffers from a very linear storyline (I suppose that’s a hard thing to avoid). At times while reading this, I’ve honestly had to question why the players would ever do what the writers expect them to do. Of course, all that is fixable with proper foreshadowing and generous distribution of clues, it’s just something that you have to focus on right from the beginning.

Looking forward to the next adventure path, Second Darkness. It sounds interesting. […]

Minireview: Magic Burner

Well, the long-awaited (by some) Magic Burner is finally out. It’s a “magic system toolkit” for Burning Wheel, expanding on systems given in the core game book and adding a ton of new options. There’s also a system from creating your own magic systems, which was used in the creation of the systems presented in the book – a meta magic creator, if you will. The systems themselves are pretty cool, providing lots of different views of magic, how it is used and (this is important) what it costs you. The last part is ignored too often in many fantasy games, where you just have “magic points” and magic works just like a superpower. That can be fun, of course, but to me the most interesting magic/supernatural systems in games or fiction in general have always been ones where magic is subtle, mysterious and/or dangerous to use. This book provides lots of options for bringing all that to a Burning Wheel game.

I can’t say much more about this book than “looks cool”, since I have yet to actually run Burning Wheel and cannot really comment on how the systems might work in practice. It looks solid, but the real test is always in how it plays. I do know that I’d probably want to try some of these options out, were I to run BW at some point. […]