Messages

1

General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: February 23, 2016, 11:05:33 PM »

I got through about three books of the Codex Alera before moving on to something else for a while.  It's a fun setting--more or less like Avatar: the Last Airbender, but set in a classical-Rome flavor of setting, rather than Asian wuxia flavor.

Plugged my way through The Prize[/i], mostly on worktime lunch breaks and such.  A lot of dry stretches, but definitely an illuminating read.

Also started reading The Devil in the White City, probably about five years after everyone else got around to it.  Fucken H. H. Holmes, man. 

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General Chaos / Re: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Draft

« on: January 06, 2016, 02:41:01 AM »

Matilda from The Professional, having grown up and become a professional assassin.

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General Chaos / Re: Best Internet Vidyas

« on: December 01, 2015, 12:10:08 AM »

I watched Dark Star: H. R. Giger's World on Netflix, and...uh...holy fuck, Giger's house EXACTLY what you would imagine Giger's house to be like.  He's like this strange old man puttering around in a house full of toothy dildomonsters and spike-boobs and phallic nightmares.  And human skulls.  And then a nice lady drops by and shares some fresh-baked strudel with him.

And it's not exactly fair to say so, because the film is catching him in the last couple years of his life...but sweet Jeebus he looks like a Deep One hybrid.

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RPGs / Re: Game Fodder / Story Fodder

« on: November 08, 2015, 07:09:35 PM »

So, unsure how well known or not this might be, but I just found this and it's kind of amazing. They're called a number of names according to wikipedia, including 'ribs' or 'roentgenizdats'. During the Soviet times, it was difficult to get banned music distributed. So someone figured out that by cutting grooves into x-ray shots they snipped into record shapes, they could produce (low quality) phonograph records.

I don't know if you're old enough to recall this, but they used to use the same sort of material to make cheap, flexible records that you could put into magazines and such.  The X-ray bootleg element definitely adds a layer of cool to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgwVwK0SPg

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General Chaos / Re: Posthuman and Transhumanist Vidya Games?

« on: November 05, 2015, 10:18:17 PM »

Minerva: Metastasis doesn't actually deal with transhumanist themes in any depth, but could be seen as existing in that sort of world.  It's a mini-campaign taking place in the Half-Life 2 universe, where the player is some sort of Combine trooper that has been hijacked/modified by an AI entity, and sent to destroy an island installation.  All the while, the totally contemptuous AI is alternately guiding and taunting you via text message.

It does have interesting elements regarding the player's humanity and free will, but that's a background theme rather than an explicit part of the game.

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RPGs / Re: Anecdote Megathread

« on: October 25, 2015, 06:09:03 PM »

Had a pretty intense Legend of Five Rings game last night.  The group had been tasked with eliminating a Scorpion daimyo and all his heirs, for treason against the clan.  This included the daimyo's nine-year-old son.  When they'd finally "rescued" the son from blahblahplot, they debated for a while what to do with the kid.  Unsurprisingly, most of the group was not willing to kill a little kid.  While they did that, the group's Soshi infiltrator (ninja posing as a rank-and-file samurai) wandered over and slipped the kid a poison drink; several hours later, the boy is dead.

At the end of the session, the player of the Soshi asks, "so how much XP for the kid?"

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General Chaos / Cheating on RPPR with other Actual Plays: Critical Role

« on: October 19, 2015, 03:02:20 AM »

So one of the guys in my weekly game says to me, "do you watch Critical Role?"  And then I did.  And it was pretty fucken boss.

It's this 5E D&D actual-play series, with a bunch of professional voice actors.  What really makes it good, though, is that this isn't an "internet celebrities awkwardly play D&D together" sort of thing.  These guys had already been playing together for a long time, and then the Geek & Sundry people suggested making a show out of it.  So they have this really great group dynamic--playing naturally off of each other, genuinely having a good time playing the game.

The only negative I'd say about the show is that, given it's a D&D game, you tend to get these 45-minute long combat sequences that can really drag.  Not really a fault of the players--there's only so much you can do to make dice-rolling and hit points interesting for a third-party viewer.  Everything else is gold, though.

(I did a quick search beforehand and "critical role" didn't come up with any hits on the forum, so I'm hoping there aren't like three different discussions already in progress that I missed...)

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General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: October 04, 2015, 02:08:10 PM »

For the first time, I've just read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  I was actually surprised by how readable it is.  I was a bit worried that it would be completely disjointed and anti-narrative like Naked Lunch or Gravity's Rainbow.  As crazy as the drug-crazed recollections are, they're delivered in an almost straightforward, journalist style.  Which was great.

9

General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: September 15, 2015, 01:40:58 AM »

I realized that I didn't have compilation 2 of IDW's Dungeons and Dragons comic.  So I fixed that.  So good.  So very good!  It's the D&D party you wish you could have at your table.

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General Chaos / Re: Horrors of War

« on: August 20, 2015, 01:50:44 AM »

We are currently tunneling our way into Adam Scott Glancy's house.  We are averaging four feet a day.  When we break through we will assault and retrieve the Horrors of War books for ourselves.  At night we listen for the sounds of counter-tunneling coming from Glancy's home office.  Sam says he sometimes hears whispers in between the scratching. 

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General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: July 14, 2015, 01:00:38 AM »

I'm most of the way through Seveneves.  I'm a pretty big Neal Stephenson fan, but I'll admit this isn't among my favorites.  It's definitely on the crunchier end of sci-fi, and very oppressive.  (Because, y'know, everyone on Earth is gonna die.  No spoilers.  It's on the fucking jacket blurb.)

I kind of put it in the same category as The Diamond Age.  Probably one of the biggest issues is just how most of the tech digressions tend to be about explaining orbital mechanics...AGAIN...or explaining the layout of a space vessel...AGAIN.  And the protagonists aren't as engaging as in most Stephenson books.  I mean, it's a grim story about the end of the world, so it kind of makes sense that you don't have any Shaftoes or whatever. 

Oh.  And the story is (partly) about humanity surviving the end of the Earth on a bunch of slapdash small ships all floating in orbit in a loose cluster.  Kind of a...swarm, you might say.

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General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: December 08, 2014, 01:15:59 AM »

Whatever you do, don't read any more books in the Dune series.  The first one is a great classic.  Everything afterward is just a gradually increasing series of letdowns.

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RPGs / Re: Anecdote Megathread

« on: December 06, 2014, 10:28:30 PM »

This is how my Inception/Dreamlands campaign ended:

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Upcoming RPPR One Shot games

« on: December 03, 2014, 12:10:42 PM »

I once watched a Livestream of a group trying to play a game of FATAL.  They spent 3 hours trying to get through character creation, got drunk, and gave up.  I imagine an attempt to play Synnibarr would work out about the same.

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RPGs / Re: THE QUEUE: Whacha got in YOUR gaming pipeline

« on: November 29, 2014, 12:30:53 AM »

"Okay guys, the only Call of Cthulhu character sheets are these Dark Ages ones, so you'll have to write in Computer Use and such..."

"What, we're not actually playing Dark Age?  That would be boss."

"Well, I was thinking about this thing with vikings-"

"We could be Templars!  I love Templars!  Do a Templars game!"

So eventually I'm going to run Call of Medieval Cthulhu, where the PCs are a group of Templar associates.  You could have a knight, a monk-scholar, a sergeant-at-arms, a traveling merchant, etc.  (Since the Templars owned so many properties and business enterprises across Europe, you could work in almost any sort of medieval character as someone who was working with/for the Templars, even if they aren't a knight/priest/monk.)  Current plan is to set it just before King Philip IV outlaws the Knights Templar--it lets me potentially use the looming persecution of the Templars as campaign-ending plot element.

I also think I'm going to work in the idea that the Templars themselves are riddled with Mythos forces.  Going with more of the secret-society/mystery-cult concept, where the higher you are in the organization, the more of the "mysteries" are revealed to you.  And it's all couched in Christian mythology and medieval superstition--the PCs may even get to use magical artifacts or mythos magic in the form of what they believe are saint's reliquaries, fragments of the Cross, and Solomon's lost writings.  There will totally be a Holy Grail and a Head of John the Baptist, and they're not actually going to have anything to do with Christianity.  I think I'm going to make up (or leave ambiguous) the Mythos power behind the Order's corruption--just referring to any manifestations as angels and demons.  So they might end up fighting Dagon or Shub-Niggurath, but as far as they're concerned they're taking orders from Garbriel or Metatron.

I'm planning it in terms of three approximate arcs.  First, the "monster hunting," where the PCs are just sent to do seemingly-mundane jobs and end up brushing up against Deep Ones.  Then comes the "holy warriors," where they start taking on increased powers from the leadership to handle more difficult and mysterious forces.  And then the climax, where they have the twin Big Bads of the French monarchy and their own cultist brethren.