http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/30/man-arrested-robbing-runescape-virtual-characters/

I know of some kids in my library system who at least attempt to do this kind of thing.  I’m surprised, actually, that this is the first time an arrest has been made (at least according to this blogger).

Haven’t heard any buzz yet this year about the World Bloggers’ Championship of Online Poker at Pokerstars.  Hope it’s not a victim of the recession …

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.

… 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.

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 …

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.