/var/log/orava

Ok, so on to A Dirty World, which is Greg Stolze’s new “film noir” standalone roleplaying game. As I mentioned eariler, I was lucky enough to play in a demo run by Greg at Ropecon and I had a blast. The game really seemed to promote the “feel” of film noir, though of course part of that credit goes to the very nice demo scenario we were playing, and to Greg’s quite excellent GM skills.

It’s a small, compact game engine, based on the ORE engine (as seen in Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign, etc) – though this incarnation has been tweaked heavily in the “Forge” direction. In a good way, I think. The stat/ability design is quite clever, and the game has your stats changing every scene – the player characters get challenged and change all the time. A “femme fatale” character might begin her slow climb from corruption to purity – or become even more corrupt with every scene. It’s up to the player, and dependant on how the character acts in the scene. As befits the genre, going towards the “bad” direction is much easier than “good”, generally. This mechanism rocks, since “noir” tends to feature people confronted with difficult choices and being forced to compromise, and then to live with the results of those choices. The ruleset is extremely abstract and combat is handled in the same way as any other test in the game. For some games this might be a problem but here it seems to work wonders, since in the noir genre social skills (and attacks & backstabs) are at least as common and deadly as are flying bullets.

The book includes a “random noir plot generator”, in the style of the random one-roll generators found in Reign. It’s very cool, and gives you a basic story framework to build on. Greg also includes a couple of nice examples of how to build a story with it.

All in all, this is an excellent, modern “indie” roleplaying game that is tightly focused on one genre and one type of story theme. It also shows how versatile the core ORE framework is. Recommended.

A quick “what’s up” note, this. Ropecon 2008 came and went, I had a lot of fun despite getting very little sleep. The traditional big VTES tournament was a success once again, I now have a tournament report available for that. The other highlight of the con, for me, was managing to attend Greg Stolze’s demo of his new game, A Dirty World. It was actually the first convention rpg game that I have ever attended, and boy was it worth it. Besides being a kick-ass game designer, Greg proved to be a very cool guy and extremely competent GM. I had a ton of fun playing a heroin-addicted femme fatale…

The rest of the week has been spent in recovery, of sorts. Janka and I are both on vacation now, so we’ve just taken it easy for a while. That said, it feels like it’s been an extremely busy week, I’ve continually been doing something and feel that I managed to only do a small portion of the stuff I had intended. So it goes.

We decided that we needed a short break from all this, so we booked a flight to Paris – leaves tomorrow morning, back on Saturday. It’s been… what, 30 years since I was last there, so I don’t remember much anything, and Janka’s never been there at all. So we’ll spend three days doing the tourist things (Louvre, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, etc) while trying to get by on our extremely limited French vocabulary. Should be fun. I’m trying (in vain) to remember the basic rudiments of French verbs…. and since I know that’s doomed to failure, I’m taking along a phrase book and trying to resist the urge to go for a Monty Python French accent.

Back by the weekend.

Ok, the tournament report for Ropecon is now finally available. Sorry it took so long, but better late than never.

It’s still missing deck lists from Juha Nyholm and Tommi Hakumaa, I’ll add them if I get them.

Let me know if you spot any errors there.

Well, even though I’m on vacation somehow I haven’t had much rest or idle time. Part of that is due to my decision to start each day off with a 2km swim at the stadium, and then see what else I need to do… that cuts out a large chunk of the day. The weather had been great, so swimming outdoors is wonderful. No complaints.

Anyway, seems I haven’t gotten around to writing my EC impressions yet, and they will have to wait till after Ropecon (which starts today, with the big VTES tournament I’m running kicking off at 18:00). I’m starting to have everything ready now, but I continually have a feeling that I’ve forgotten something.

I do intend to write about EC, too. Until that point in time, Marko Saari has some pictures available from the trip.

Now off for a swim, then back home to do a last check on email and then off to Ropecon. I don’t expect to sleep much during the weekend, since I have the 03-07 (yes, AM) info shifts on both days, and the VTES tournament will run until 1-2am. Sleep is for the weak.

The tournament report for Ropecon 2006 is starting to be in shape. I’m still hoping to get the last few deck listings and maybe a few more pictures, but those are small details. I’m glad I took the trouble to write down a transcript of the final round (never did that before); it’s fun to read it now to get an idea of what actually happened, and apparently other people have liked it too.

It’s over, just got home – the rest of the gang headed off toward the restaurant and GoH dinner, I was/am just too tired to go. About 4 hours of sleep last night, bracketed by turns behind the info desk, followed by a Rage tournament, followed by the con shutdown and cleanup stuff… well, let’s just say that my t-shirt says “It’s Alive!” but I consider that to be a gross distortion of the actual truth. So I’m sitting at home reading my email and waiting for the sauna to warm up, and wondering how many hours I’ll manage to stay up before I really have to hit the bunk.

Good con, as pretty much always. It’s a staple of the Finnish rpg scene, and I mean that in a very positive way. Weekend full of games, friends, people-I-like-but-see-too-rarely, semi-strangers, and general weirdness. And coffee. Oh yes.

Hamster! A Dentist! Hard porn! Steven Seagull!

Ok, we had an absolutely huge tournament last night, with a record-breaking 95 players in total. Was a lot of fun (yes, even just to watch) and everything went great. The final round stretched till 3am, so when we got home we pretty much collapsed on the bed. I’ll write up a tournament report some time next week, a lot of stuff I want to report from that game in detail. I’m hoping to get deck lists from the players in the finals and maybe to get some photos from the people who were there with cameras. Will have to ask around.

There are still some unclaimed EC-qualifier t-shirts and a (very) small cash runner-up prize for the guy who came 7th. I’ll post the details on the Con intenal TV, and later here if I don’t find the right people at the Con.

Now having a quick cup of tea before heading back towards Dipoli.

Ok, Ropecon is almost upon us again. Thanks to the server crash I had lost all my normal printouts and sheets for running a VTES tournament, so I spent most of last night creating them from scratch. I think I now have everything ready, including an “ugly-but-it-works” player randomizer script written in Ruby. Looks to be another big tournament, we already have 56 preregistrations as of this writing. Nice.

I picked up the prize support stuff from White Wolf from Fantsu yesterday, turned out to be a big and heavy box. Mostly that was because this is (for the first time) an EC qualifier, so we have a pile of t-shirts for the people who qualify (top 25% based on total scores for 3 rounds). There’s also 2 new promo cards, and some boosters for the finalists. Thanks to WW for the support, once again. The EC-qualifier t-shirts look pretty cool, they have the anime-style picture from one of the new(ish) Ahrimanes cards on the back (“Ahrimane Protectorate”) . As an additional bonus, I get one too – regional qualifier game organizers automatically qualify themselves, too. Which is nice, since there is no chance in hell of both running a tournament of this size and playing in it.

At the moment my schedule looks somewhat like this:

• Friday 16 - 16:30 - arrive at the Con, set up camp at the registration table upstairs
• Friday 18(ish)- the tournament begins
• Saturday 02(ish) - tournament is over, lots of bleary eyes and people running on pure caffeine
• Saturday - do Stuff(tm) at the con
• Saturday 19- 23 - my turn at the Info desk
• Sunday 07 - 11 - at the Info desk again, after a luxurious 6-hour sleep
• rest of Sunday - play in Rage tournament (if I have time), do some more Stuff(tm).

See you there.

Looks to be another big Ropecon VTES tournament, the pre-registration page already has 42 entries. Nice.

Haven’t done much about the tournament yet other than to gather those pre-regs, but tomorrow or Thursday I’ll have to gather up the required pile of Stuff(tm) and print out another ton of Stuff(tm). Work work.

The prize support, EC qualifier t-shirts, and other stuff is still at Fantasiapelit, I’ll have to arrange to pick those up, too, before Friday. Janne has (again) done a great job in providing logistics for the tournament and communicating with White Wolf, thanks are due in that direction.

Moved the VTES page to a Typo-managed page for now. Ideally I’d want a wiki for that stuff, but one thing at a time. The “public” link of http://www.orava.org/orava/vtes should still be used, that will redirect to the correct place.

The big Ropecon 2006 tournament is in a few weeks, and this year it’s also a qualifier for the European Championships. Whee! Please note that, like last year, I’m closing registration at 17:30 on Friday – either be there on time, or pre-register by emailing me. See the VTES page above for details.