Google Wave

I’ve been looking at some of the video Google made for its product called Wave. It’s a communication/collaboration tool that works in real time.  I think it will have some interesting implications for gaming. I foresee transferring my online Traveller game to it at some point.  It could also be an interesting thing to figure out how to use in a library setting – both for gaming and non-gaming applications.

My friend who works for Google has sent me an invitation, but he says they’re backed up, so it hasn’t arrived yet.  If you go to the Google Wave page, there’s also a way there to request access to it, but I’m not sure if or how that’s different from being invited.

If anyone has seen it already, I’d be interested in how you think it will work for various games.

If I cared about stats …

… I would be perplexed by the occasional stats spike I get.  Yesterday there was a spike of about 500% of what I usually get.  Of course, what I usually get is “not much”, so 500% of that is also not much.

Old school gaming

Someone recommended the quick start rules for Swords and Wizardry, and I read those, and then looked at their site to see the full rules – which are available for free in PDF format at http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/?page_id=4.  The idea is that they’re essentially reissuing the original D&D rules (with a few edits and some reorganization so it makes a bit more sense).  So now I’m off to read the full rules.

What’s attractive to me about this idea is that clearly, D&D has evolved over the 35 years since its initial release.  The opportunity that’s being presented is to take the original and “re-evolve” it, with someone else making the decisions – you, or your gaming group, or a bunch of interested teens at your library, or whatever.  In a sense, that’s what we did back then when we were playing it the first time around: we made changes that we thought would make the game better.  We introduced additions to the rules or the setting or the way we thought about the game.  In a sense, it’s now possible to do it all again.

Could be an interesting starting point for next year’s Ian’s Awesome RPG …

Thursday game, final session

At long last, here it is.  After the game ended, I hit a bit of a crisis of blogging motivation, but I’m back.  Sorry for the delay.

Just before the beginning of the session, I pulled out a piece of paper and started jotting down a couple of key words that were in my mind after reviewing what Conrad had told me about his session.  Then I added a few notes about what kinds of relationships might be happening between them.  My list looked like this, except with more arrows: 

Fontaine – wrong hand 
dinosaurs
Dagobert? 
hatchling
Lizard Men 

I picked up the story right after Fontaine had screamed in pain that it was the wrong hand.  Fontaine was looking pretty bad, down on his knees and elbows, face contorted, like he was trying to master the pain.  Then he slowly stood up and raised the hand above his head, and it started to change, morphing slowly into a lizard claw.

Meanwhile, some of the characters, including the lizard man and the half vampire, were in another location, keeping an eye on the goings on of the Hatching Ceremony.  They noticed that everyone suddenly started walking around a hill toward where Fontaine was, so they went with everyone else to see what was happening.

Fontaine was looking around a little wildly at the growing numbers of lizard men and dinosaurs gathering around him.  When the lizard man character said he wanted to do something, I told him no, he was too busy being in awe of the lizard claw hand on the end of Fontaine’s wrist.  Everyone started to get the idea that Fontaine was controlling the lizard men, and that made them uncomfortable, so they leapt into action.

When the half vampire started to go for Fontaine, one of the full grown Tyrannosaurs got right in his face and roared a roar full of pointy dinosaur teeth.  The half vampire decided to wait for a better moment. Then the newest Thunder Brother started looking around for something near him in the sand, and after sniffing a bit, he took two quick steps and put one of his powerful back claws onto what seemed like a pile of sand, but turned out to be the ninja that the characters had fought before.  The dinosaur picked him up and bit him in two.  Some players were sad that the ninja died, but I think it’s because they wanted to do it themselves.

The Thunder Brother then rooted around on the ninja’s body, and pulled out a wooden hand.  The dinosaur quickly bit off one of its own front claws and jammed the wooden hand onto the stump! Shara decided to look into The Hidden to see if she could figure out anything about the hand on the end of the dinosaur’s arm, and she came face to face with Dagobert.  

“But he died!” everyone said.  

“Apparently not,” I responded.

Shara noticed that Dagobert was missing a hand, and instead hand a small dinosaur claw on the end of one wrist.  Since Dagobert was controlling the Thunder Brother’s actions from The Hidden, the young Tyrannosaur was not subject to the control of Fontaine’s lizard hand.

Everyone turned their attention to Dagobert/the Thunder Brother, with the intent of destroying him, except for the lizard man character.  As everyone else shot at the dinosaur, he attempted to transfer Dagobert’s consciousness to himself.  He was successful, inasmuch as you can call that being successful, since now he was in a conflict to maintain control of his own body.  Meanwhile, Ella Van Damme shot the dinosaur in the forearm, and the hand was broken into sixteen pieces that went flying into the surrounding rocks and sand.

Theo was able to find the intact pinky of the wooden hand, so of course he cut off his own pinky and jammed the wooden one onto his hand.  It did seem to stay on fairly well, but he wasn’t aware of any new powers immediately.  This sent others on a chase to find more pieces of the hand, but they were mostly unsuccessful.

The lizard man character finally won his battle of the mind with Dagobert, who died the final death.  The game ended with the lizard man trying to rally the rest of the party to help him go after Fontaine, who had withdrawn to pursue his new plan of mental domination of the lizard men and their dinosaurs, but meeting with little success.  Most of the characters drifted away on their own personal errands, though the magic-using faction left the scene through The Hidden.  Ella Van Damme, who had been holding the party’s money, departed before anyone thought of getting their share of it.

—

Unfortunately, I’ve left a few things out because I can’t remember what happened.  If I can get some of the players to remind me of anything, I’ll edit this post to add the missing events.

Thursday game, session 7, Conrad guest hosting

First I’ll share most of what Conrad wrote up for me so I’d know what happened, with a few of my comments or clarifications in [brackets]:

“I was welcomed to the group area and told where to sit (corner chair, or we WILL shout at you) and the circle gathered, tables were exchanged and introductions were made.

The group REALLY wanted to wait for Theo [character name] to put their plan into action [it was known before the start that he would be late] and so I started things off by asking for introductions and character descriptions and how and why they ended up where they were.  While waiting for things to get under way, I asked them to describe things they were doing to prepare for the ‘plan’ and we went through some action-reaction (The Alchemist was mixing up some sleeping potions, Shara was talking to the sharpshooter NPC [Cornelius] from the last session, the half vampire was smoking with some lizard people… I just went with it.  The player with the lizard man was very intent on power gaming and mostly tried to be everywhere at the same time, so I described more of the hatching ceremony for him as a side plot.  While he was more or less present, he was very combative verbally with the other players, and they were just as combative back, so I decided not to interfere unduly in adolescent politics, and tried to give him as much story as he seemed to be able to handle.

Due to the desired delay, I had to come up with some action and so had Dagobert come to Michael [character name] and Shara, complaining about feeling something dangerous in the air and asked if they could help him perform a ritual to tear a hole in reality so he could see the future.  He warned them that it could be dangerous, deadly even, but they jumped right in.  We ran a conflict pitting their two characters against reality with the stakes of “I will see into the future”.  Shara took 5d of fallout in this encounter, but they proved successful, and Dagobert got fried as he looked into the future (literally cooked as Ella [character name] asked if smoke was coming out of his ears, and I went with it, blue smoke, his tattoos got fried off).

Ella ran a short challenge to wake Dagobert up, and succeeded in getting him to tell a bit of the future, seeing a beautiful day with blue skies and gravestones with all the names of the present characters carved in them except for the half-vampire, and the lizardman, who Dagobert kept thinking of as an evil illusion.  Then Dagobert died.

At some point, Fontaine came into their tent and asked for some progress.  Half vamp pulled a gun on him, and I pulled some tough guy talk.

Meanwhile, half-vamp and lizard man were doing their own thing keeping tabs on the Ceremony of Awakening, and I pulled one of those contested skill checks for the ninja to appear in their tent and tell them thanks for taking care of his wounds and oh, BTW, the other group is sneaking out of the encampment, which prompted a massive exodus in chase of the other group until both groups were stopped in their tracks by nine tyrannosaurs coming over the ridge and surrounding the valley where the ceremony of Awakening was taking place.  Everyone retired back to their tents and finally Theo arrived and the plan was put underway.

At this point, everyone was getting a little tired and the girls were batting the dancing thing back and forth and lizard man made a rude gesture which was not appreciated by anyone, so I accelerated things by just saying yes, right down the line.  The got the box the hand was in, it was smuggled out, Theo got to do his avoid suspicion routine and I just kept saying yes.

Things got a little hay wired near the end as party cohesion went south and Theo and the half vamp took opposing positions so I ran a conflict between them, which would have ended up in shooting had not Michael intervened and threatened to blow them both up.  Shara had predicted the plot development of Armand getting the hand and cutting off his own and replacing it [which Conrad had come up with in a phone conversation with me], so I went through with that, and Theo said yes to all Armand’s actions, to the point of handing him a knife, so I described right down to the wire.

Armand cut off his own hand and jammed the Dead Man’s onto the stump.  There was a pregnant pause, and then I said: He screams in pain, clutching his stump and crying out, “That’s not the right hand…!”

And I called it there.

I got a round of applause at the end.  That’s good, right?”

A couple of other impressions shared with me by the players:

• the half vampire thought it was really cool that his name didn’t show up on the tombstones – “because I’m already dead!”
• Conrad putting the smackdown on someone complaining that “Ian wouldn’t do that!” – “Well, Ian isn’t here – this is Conrad’s world!”

Great job, Conrad!  Thanks again!

Monday game, session 7 and 8: Fail

The Monday game fell apart at the end.  Only a couple of people showed up, no one was inspired, and nothing really happened.  I offered the people who did show up on the last Monday a way into the last session of the Thursday game, but none of them showed up for it.

Part of the problem was due to simple chance – several people couldn’t make it all at the same time.  However, another part of the problem was, I think, a loss of a couple of the players who were instigators in the group.  One of them moved away, and the other wasn’t interested in playing after that.  That left a leadership vaccuum, though it wasn’t insurmountable … but combined with the lack of attendance for other reasons, it spelled the death of that session.

Now … on to the session hosted by Conrad, and the situation he left me with for the last session.

Monday game, session 6

The mystery of how the Occhariad Clock worked was the central question for this session.  The players decided to go to the El Dorado Public Library (!) to look up the runes to see if they could gain any clues.  There was talk of breaking into the library and stealing what they needed, but cooler heads prevailed and they simply waited for the library to open.  (Historical note: The El Dorado Public Library was, in this timeline, established in 1906.  I decided it wasn’t a huge stretch to let it open 16 years earlier in their timeline.)

Armed with their new knowledge, the characters went back to the clock portal, which now had two armed guards posted beside it.  The guards were friendly and not terribly swift – they revealed that the Mayor had posted them there, and when the characters told them “we’re your replacements, ” they left.  Study of the clock portal commenced.

Some of the group went to talk to the Mayor to find out his take on things. He told them he had it guarded because no one knew anything about it and it could be dangerous, especially since Hammesdorf was involved, and he didn’t want anyone going through.  Our heroes convinced him to let them study it for a day or so.

So they studied it for a while, and then a couple of them decided to go through.  They did, and found themselves in a crystal city, with clean streets, beautifully landscaped, and people in robes walking around. They started doing some tinkering with the gate, and one of the robed people noticed them and came over to ask them to go with him to see the Master.  ”Who’s the Master?” they wanted to know. “Why, the Master of this city.”  One of the characters decided to stick his hand back through the gate and motion the others to come through.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gate, the Mayor had changed his mind, and appeared at the gate with a troop of 30 soldiers.  There was more arguing about whether the characters should be allowed to go on with their studies, but the Mayor was adamant.  So those still on this side slowly packed up their stuff.  While they were doing that, they got the surreptitious hand signal, and instead of getting out of the way of the Mayor’s troops, they ran through the gate.  The Mayor followed, and as they were looking around and trying to figure out where they were, the robed man reiterated his wish for them to follow him to see the Master.  The Mayor ignored him and made clear his intention to find Hammesdorf.  Then, of course, the robed man said “Oh!  Then you’re already acquainted with the Master!”

That made everyone curious, so they followed him down to the riverside, where they found Hammesdorf in debate with an obviously accomplished Alchemist in a big open-air amphitheater.  When the debate was done, Hammesdorf came over and told the characters that he really wanted to thank them – without their involvement, he would never have been set upon the path to true enlightenment.  When asked how and by whom this amazing city had been built, Hammesdorf replied modestly that he had done it.  When the true nature of the Occhariad revealed itself to him, he used it to go back in time several years so that he could study it more, and create this place of restful study.

Hammesdorf asked the characters to be his guests and to join him for supper that evening, and sent them with the robed man to find some accommodations.  They accepted, though not without reservations – they weren’t quite ready to think of Hammesdorf as a good guy. In fact, before dinner, a couple of them decided to take a walk over to where the gate was, and see if they could figure out anything more about it, and possibly use it to see if Hammesdorf was telling the truth.

“So you’re going back to the gate?” I asked.

“Yes,” they replied.

“… What gate?”

Yes, it had disappeared entirely.  And that’s where we left it.

Thursday game, session 6

About three weeks ago, I made plans to visit a friend on the East Coast who is writing a novel in order to help with some feedback, revisions, etc. I was instant messaging with him about what to do about the Thursday Awesome RPG session, since I’d have to miss it.  I thought maybe I’d schedule a make-up session, or maybe just have to shorten the total number of sessions from 8 to 7, when he asked whether there was anyone who could sub for me.  As I was typing “No way,” my wife, who was watching the exchange, said ” … Conrad?”  

She wishes that I could have seen the expression on my face. I didn’t think of Conrad because he lives a couple of hours away, and my focus was on someone in my library. If you haven’t been following, Conrad is the guy who supplied not only the initial suggestion for the setting, but the main plot ideas for both the Monday game and the Thursday game. So he has an excellent qualification right there – he’s invested in the game; his other excellent qualification is that he’s played in and run a game using Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics in the same way that I’m using them in the Awesome RPG.

Cutting to the chase, it’s going to work. Conrad is taking the day off at his library and driving down for the day in order to run the game. So I’m trying to coordinate with him in terms of what kind of situation he’d like to inherit when he gets here, and I think it’s going to work out beyond my wildest dreams.

The session started with the continuation of the chase that we were in the middle of last session.  There had been shots fired and Alchemical attacks exchanged, but no real damage to either side except for the ninja had been hit pretty badly by Cornelius with his first shot. The bad guys regrouped and hightailed it out of there, with the heroes following in hot pursuit.

As they came down into the valley and got closer to the valley floor, they saw a large ring of raised earth, guarded by lizard people, with a smooth, white thing protruding from the ground in the center. Beyond the ring were more lizard people. One of the new characters, a lizard man, explained what was happening to the rest of the group: The lizard people from hundreds of miles around had gathered to welcome the newest Thunder Brother, a modern version of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was a kind of totem animal for the lizard people.

The bad guys rode up to the guards and started gesticulating wildly, pointing back toward our heroes. The lizard guards all raised their rifles and pointed them at the group. They decided to stop charging after their quarry so as to seem less threatening. The lizard man character decided to write a message: “We do not mean any harm to the ceremony” and have his hawk carry it down to the lizard guard. As the hawk flew, one of the bad guys took out a pistol and aimed it at the bird, but the head lizard guard knocked him flat before he could shoot.

After reading the message, the lizard guard said something to the rest of the guards, and then he said something to the bad guys, and then he wrote a message and sent the hawk back with it. It said “you must not offer violence to another living being during your time in the Hatching Ground.” The characters decided to ride in then, at a more sedate pace, and they were told the rule in person and warned that anyone offering violence would be swiftly punished. Our heroes and the bad guys both agreed, though the bad guys hands were hovering nervously near their weapons.

Theo decided he was going to visit the bad guys’ camp with Ella Van Damme, the doctor. They saw that the ninja was not in good shape and offered their services to try to heal him, so there was a conflict which they won, so the ninja lived. Later, they tried to get information out of the ninja, but he apparently didn’t feel any gratitude about them saving his life. They did find out that his main objective is to finish the job he has been paid to do, which is to deliver the Dead Man’s Hand to the person paying him to do it. Theo hung around so long that the bad guys were starting to get sick of him, and they started trying to bribe him to leave, but he left only after they said he could return in the evening to chat some more.

Then Dr. Van Damme came up with a plan. She thought Shara could entertain the bad guys by dancing, and maybe while using a little Phantasmagoria and Mesmerism on them, Dr. Van Damme could sneak around in their camp trying to locate and steal the Hand. Shara wasn’t completely sold on this plan, but she does have the trait “I’m a good dancer 2d8″ and so the rest of the group started trying to develop the plan to make it work. And THAT is the conflict that Conrad will start the next session with, which is pretty much the best thing ever! 

The player playing Shara was kind of leery of doing this plan partly because she is not a *demonstrative* kind of person. She’s a bit shy, though she knows most of the people she’s playing with pretty well, and so I think it’s going to be really cool. And Conrad, you have to pretend you don’t know what’s coming! Just that they have a conflict to resolve with the bad guys at or near the start of the session.

Thursday game, session 5

This was kind of a short session – we had trouble staying focused, and we had to create two more characters in the middle of the session.  

One of the fun things, though, was telling them about their riding lizard mounts. Shara, the character with the dragon, heard her dragon say “Ouch!” and she tried to find out what the problem was, but the dragon didn’t know. Then, as they were going to their mounts, I nonchalantly referred to the riding lizards that two characters had. One said “what? I thought I had a horse.” I said “No, it’s a riding lizard.  You might want to change that on your character sheet.” He said “How did I get a riding lizard?” I said “Your character is not even wondering about that. It’s your riding lizard. You raised it from a hatchling.” 

It came out that Shara, who has the trait “I am magical 2d10″ was able to piece together that something had happened, and her dragon was able to corroborate partially – “I don’t think there were all these lizards around before.”  Michael was also somewhat sensitive to it, but the rest of the party had had their memories rewritten to match the new timeline (created by actions in the Monday game).

My one regret is that the player of Whiskey Wilson was not there for this session – I had planned to use him as the example person with a riding lizard, and to turn his jackass, Missy, into a pack lizard as well – “Misssssy”, her new name would be, and through some strange trick of space-time’s effect on the vocabulary of the new world, this kind of lizard would still be called an ass.  Because I didn’t want to deprive the group or, especially, the player, of all the references to his ass.

The characters regrouped and tried to figure out another way to follow, since obviously the ninja was aware of them with the last method.  Since Michael Rivencourt and Theo Beaufort had lost the conflict with him and he’d told them not to follow, they took that to mean “using the same method”.  

It was determined that Shara’s dragon, Crystal, was able to sense something and could lead the group in following the people who have the Hand.  Cornelius Gaston (NPC, acquaintance of Shara) expressed interest in speeding up the pursuit to the point where they were in sight of the bad guys, within half a mile or so, so he could get off a shot or two.  Then the group spent some time coming up with a plan that used that idea, but that involved the rest of them being closer and doing other things.

However, Cornelius wasn’t really down with that plan, and the moment he got close enough, he reined up and took his shot, hitting the ninja, who sent a backlash of Alchemical fire up the wake of the bullet toward Cornelius.  Michael Rivencourt, the group’s most accomplished Alchemist, dove in front of the flames, saving Cornelius from harm. There was a bit more long range Alchemy involved, including preparing a shotgun full of shot that would turn into killer bees, but we ran out of time and had to stop.

Monday game, session 5

As the characters got out of the mansion where the dynamite was going off and the chandelier was falling, they saw that the structure was starting to morph and waver.  They gathered outside at a safe distance and watched as the mansion collapsed in on itself and disappeared, leaving behind an arch made of the fused glass of the chandelier, with the clock mounted at the top. Within the arch there was a swirling of dark blue and purple on black. They started to approach it when the horse – the one that had had the dynamite strapped to it – emerged from the portal.

The werewolf approached the horse to see if he could find out anything, but the horse whinnied and shied away.  

 Werewolf: The horse doesn’t know I’m a werewolf, does it?
Me: Its nostrils flare as it smells you, then it shies away.
Werewolf: (smells his own shirt with a hurt look on his face)

The horse went back through the portal, and the werewolf followed it. He found himself on a vast plain, with grass from horizon to horizon, and the sun beating down. He came back.

Meanwhile, another character decided to go through the portal as well. He found himself in a steamy jungle, with a shoulder-high lizard-looking thing standing on two legs staring at him. It made a noise, and two more appeared. They slowly started stalking him. The description of his surroundings and the creatures actually took longer than this, and the player was trying to figure out what was going on and where he was – but was missing the mark completely. The rest of the group was yelling at him to get out of there, they were velociraptors or something, but he just wasn’t getting it. At one point he asked if they were kobolds! Finally he said “wait, have I walked onto the set of Jurassic Park?” and as they started moving closer to him, he turned and ran. After he had come back through, one of the dinosaurs poked its head through the portal, took a look around, screeched, and disappeared back into the portal.

When the werewolf came back through, they started talking about what was going on. At this point, I told them that most of the people who had escaped the mansion had left, but one had been injured.  He had been lying in the street moaning, but he stopped moaning and started hissing. They approached him to investigate, and when they rolled him over, they saw that he was some kind of lizard-man. A couple wanted to kill him right away, but the others pointed out that there was no reason to do that. They started speculating that Hammesdorf was undoubtedly alive and using the power of the Occhariad to change things.

Some of the characters with Alchemy traits decided to try to see if they could fix the lizard-man – change him back, as it were. There was a conflict in which every sign from the patient made them think that he had always been that way, and that no change had taken place!

This led to the suggestion that perhaps the dinosaurs were really in their own time and the clock was allowing them to travel in time … which meant that the dinosaurs, having seen what they saw, had the whole course of their evolution changed, so that they didn’t die off, but instead developed alongside mammals into intelligent beings. This theory was supported by the evidence they discovered when they decided to get their horses together in case they wanted to go through the portal: the character who went though to visit the dinosaurs no longer had a horse, but a riding lizard.

Next they decided to heal the lizard man so they could talk to him. They did so, and found out from him that the Civil War had been about slavery – of the lizard men, who were native to North America. Benjamin Harrison was President, but his VP was a lizard man. And at this point, one of the players actually made the connection to the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder. That really made my day! He’d seen the movie, not read the story, but still.

There was some discussion, instigated by the player whose character went to visit the dinosaurs, of going back and finding them and killing them or at least making sure they didn’t see what they saw … also sort of reminiscent of Eckels in A Sound of Thunder. But cooler heads prevailed, pointing out the extreme likelihood of doing something much worse. Though the witch hunter decided he was going to go through to see what happened.

What happened was he found himself in a town very like the one he had just left (El Dorado, Kansas – just realized that I haven’t mentioned that yet). The mansion of Hammesdorf was still standing, but there weren’t many people about. He walked down the street a way, and then met a zombie. It came toward him, and another appeared behind him. They attacked. The witch hunter attempted to wrest control of one of the zombies away from whoever had it, and succeeded, and then shot the other one with his crossbow, but not before being bitten by it.

Zombies are, of course, people being controlled with Mesmerism. Some are alive, and some are dead, but this one was alive, so the witch hunter set him free.  The man asked who he was and where he’d come from; the witch hunter said “far away from here”, and the man said “do you have the plague there?” The witch hunter didn’t think so, and the man said “then you should go back there – and take me with you!”

So he did. Back through the portal they went. The other players were all saying “are you crazy!? You’re bringing a zombie plague back with you?!” When they came back through the portal, the Alchemy- and Mesmerism-minded characters tried to make sure that the plague would not infect anyone on this side of the portal. There were some very involved conflicts with the zombie plague, which kept trying to convince them that it was gone so it could lie dormant and come back, but they healed the former zombie fully, and then, in an epic conflict in which the plague infected the character working on making sure that the witch hunter was not carrying it, it came down to the player’s last die – a two – being the difference in the conflict, so they wiped it out entirely. (Too bad, a zombie plague would have been fun.)

Post Script: I was chatting with a player from the Thursday game about whether I should make the change in the timestream extend to the Thursday game – after all, I have been thinking of them as being in the same space-time continuum. We talked about whether they would even notice – postulating that the characters near the time portal would actually remember how it was before, but that’s in Kansas and the other group is in Texas. He said that perhaps magically-inclined characters would be more likely to notice something has changed. And then he said something that I absolutely must find a way to bring about: he thought that if I made the change to their game as well, they would have to find some way of affecting the world in a different but equally dramatic way in order to prank the Monday group right back. Heh heh heh … exactly.

Another PS: The original setting suggestion by Conrad, on the IARPG blog, was “fantasy/historical: the old West with spell slingers and lizardmen”. So I’m pretty psyched for that last bit to have been implemented through the game action.