Messages

196

General Chaos / Re: CREEPY THREAD OF DOOM

« on: July 23, 2009, 11:49:45 PM »

I know there are three images in this post, but they're all details of the same creepy thing, so I'm gonna go ahead and hope that it's all right.

Okay, so a few of my friends used to attend SUNY Purchase in Westchester County, NY. The college recently installed this sculpture (probably a student project) on The Mall, their main quad. Every time a Purchase student walks past the library, they get to look at this...hideous thing:



::shudder:: It makes me want to cry.

And in case one photograph wasn't enough to make you lose bowel control in terror, here's a detail of all the crazy stuff that the sculptor saw fit to put in its head:



There's a pick axe sticking out of its head...oh God oh God oh-

But anywho, looking at this thing from yet a third angle, it's clear that it has some artistic merit beyond the discomfort it inspires in those who view it. Here's a shot of the sculpture from behind, one which shows even more of the sculptor's dim view of humanity:



So it's actually a novel re-imagining of The Ascent of Man that depicts our development from skeletal figures straining to pull free of the primordial ooze into hideous, technology-obsessed murder machines.

If that isn't deeply unsettling, I don't know what is.

197

RPGs / Re: How much do you game per week?

« on: July 20, 2009, 03:05:32 AM »

I would say, on average, 1-2 sessions per week. I've been running a weekly Mage: The Ascension campaign for a while now, and usually if I miss a week, someone will step in and fill the gap. There's also the occasional weekend where my friends and I will hold what we call a "gaming tent," a reference to the fact that when we were in high school, we'd have gaming sleepovers in an eight person tent that I purchased for that purpose. These marathon sessions are usually eight to twelve hours long, divvied up into two or three hour blocks of time during which each of us take turns running, and last well into the wee hours of the morning. However, these are becoming far less frequent now, and usually don't include the overnight any longer.

All told, I think gaming occupies 4-5 hours of my life per week, with exceptions.

198

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Tom's Call of Cthulhu WW2 actual play

« on: July 14, 2009, 03:31:15 PM »

I was also very impressed by this game. Tom's GMing (Keeping?) style is spot-on: he populated his game with memorable NPCs, a setting rife with vivid imagery, and a villain that made me want to scream and hide under the bed.

CAUTION: Ahead be spoilers.

I loved Grunefeld especially for the antipodal aspects of humanity and inhumanity united in his character--he listens to Mozart while he dines on human flesh, for God's sake! Kohl and Schuller turned out to be total badasses, one because he pulled himself back from the brink of insanity, and the other because he competently navigated his way through the scenario while his squad mates fumbled at every turn (thanks to Tom's lucky die rolls).

The setting was also a gem for a CoC / survival horror game--isolated, buffeted by severe weather, and somehow claustrophobic even in its open spaces. Tom dreamed up some wonderful images for the game as well. The two that come most readily to mind are the defrosting portrait of Hitler in the colonel's office and the sentry frozen to his machine gun in the guard tower. Stuff like that really puts you into the world as a player, and Tom sprinkled it in like a pro.

Perhaps the best part of the game was the villain, a presence from another place slowly changing the Nazi complex into its home away from home. The monster that chased them down a the end, the dead colonel sitting up and speaking in the bath tub where he committed suicide, and the radio that channeled the voices of the Nazis trapped in Area G were flat out awesome devices, each of which added to the inhuman power and cunning manipulations of the mysterious unseen enemy.

I hope this scenario is published at some point, because I would love to read it and run it for a group of my friends. I think they'd really get a kick out of it.

199

RPGs / Re: Anecdote Megathread

« on: July 12, 2009, 04:46:17 AM »

Hi all! In case anybody missed my waves and salutations in the Introduction thread, I'm Ryan, and I'm new to the forums. I've been listening to the podcast through iTunes for about a week now, and I love it more with each new episode I hear. One of my favorite bits of the show is when Ross and Tom share anecdotes that they receive, so I thought I'd toss my own chips into the pot and share a hysterical happening from my gaming experience.

In my gaming circle, several people have picked up the reigns as storyteller / GM at one point or another, but no one has failed as epically or as frequently as our friend Erik. Erik is one of my oldest friends, and a regular face at the table when I'm running a game, but to us, his turns behind the screen have become the stuff of bad game legend. Even before I joined the group during my freshman year of high school, Erik was running games that were so bad that we still talk about them today, more than a decade later. The example that springs most readily to mind is a travesty that came to be known as...

"The Birthday Game."

I'm tempted to believe that if Andy Kaufman ever ran a Mage game, this is the kind of game he would have run. Given Erik's track record though, I'm pretty sure he planned this out as a straight game and was completely perplexed by the fact that it irritated and confused everyone at the table.

I am happy to report that I was not involved in this session; I heard about it from another friend, Paul, a few months after it happened. The premise was simple: the players were a group of mages who were summoned to an abandoned warehouse by an informant claiming to known the whereabouts of the big bad that they were chasing. As soon as they set foot in the building, the doors slid shut and sealed behind them, eliminating their only visible means of egress. What the players found within was a series of locked doors that could only be opened by solving puzzles, word games and math problems that Erik provided them with in real life. Once they'd solved a puzzle, the door it was associated with would open, and they would get an item for their trouble, as well as passage through to the next door. Once they had completed a few puzzles and collected an armful of imaginary random crap--including a shovel, a bottle of ketchup, and a floorlamp--my friend Paul began to grow impatient.

"This is bullshit," he said. "We're just collecting a bunch of useless junk. Why don't we just blast our way through and find this guy?" The other players balked at this notion.

"I don't think we should," my friend Evan said. "We're probably going to need this stuff at the end of the game. I mean, why would he be giving it to us if we weren't going to need it?"

Even though he had glimpsed the terrifying outline of Erik's designs in the misty distance, Paul decided to bite, and played through another two hours of puzzles before he finally became frustrated enough to take action. By this point, the party had solved so many puzzles that their characters were hauling their door prizes around with a shopping cart that they'd won along the way. Paul began to bore his way through the remaining doors using Forces magick, disregarding everyone else's protests that they were going to need the items that solving the puzzles netted them. When Paul breached the final door, the scene that awaited him left everyone at the table speechless.

"You see a man sitting at the head of a long table that's covered with confetti," Erik said. "He's wearing a polka-dotted party hat and a cheesy bow tie. Behind him, there's an enormous banner that says, 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY!' in big, bubble letters. On the table in front of him is a gigantic birthday cake with chocolate butter cream icing, a single candle burning on top."

" 'What the hell is this?!' " Paul asked, in character.

" 'Welcome to my birthday party, friends,' " Erik responded. " 'Did you have fun playing the party games that I set up for you?' "

" 'Don't you have some information for us?' " Evan asked. " 'About the villains we've been trying to hunt down?' "

" 'Oh, no,' " Erik replied as the hapless NPC. " 'I just told you that so that you would come to the party!' "

As you can imagine, the reaction to this was violent. They tore down the banner, tied this guy up with it, doused him with kerosene, and lit him on fire with his own birthday candle.

Even though it happened more than ten years ago, The Birthday Game is a story often revisited and retold among my gaming friends, and is perhaps the most popular with those who weren't there, myself included. It was a predictor of disastrous things to come in Erik's GMing career, a pathway littered with the bones of abandoned campaigns and sworn oaths that he would never again run a game.

I'll save those stories for another time, so that this post doesn't turn into a novella. However, I have affectionately entitled them, "With Do I Can Kick Your Guts Out," and, "Kill the Mayor, Spare Us The Details."

Thoughts? Comments? Threats on my life?

200

General Chaos / Re: Introduction

« on: June 29, 2009, 03:54:36 AM »

Hello, folks! My name's Ryan, and I'm a twenty-five year-old roleplaying gamer from Long Island. I've lived in New York my entire life, aside from a four-year sojourn in Baltimore during college, but I'm looking forward to seeing and possibly living in other parts of the country (maybe the Midwest or California). I like to read (pretty much whatever I can get my hands on), write, make films (when I can afford to) and videos (when I can't), cook, take photographs, and--of course!--roleplay. I came across RPPR listed in iTunes and it hooked me almost instantly because Ross and Tom are a lot like all of my friends from high school. (I apologize for saying that, by the way--I'm not entirely sure it's a compliment. Eighty-five percent, though!)

I have over a decade of experience with tabletop roleplaying; I've been playing in games since I was fourteen and running them since two years after that. Most of what I've been exposed to has been White Wolf WoD games, but I've also played in an Aberrant chronicle, a few odd Paranoia games, and a few other one-shots here and there. I run Mage: The Ascension mostly--2nd ed. rules with some Revised thrown in wherever I like it better--but I also dabbled in Wraith when I was a young GM. I've been running a pulpy Mage campaign for the past two years called "City of the Damned" that I consider to be a WoD cross between an old, short-lived TV show on Fox called Brimstone and The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo. (Both shows had similar plots--the heroes have to capture a series of nasty spirits that escaped from their eternal imprisonment--but one had John Glover playing the devil and the other had a plucky orphan in a yellow jumper called Flim-Flam.) When that's over, which should hopefully be in a month or two, I want to try to run something different. I'm still trying to decide on what, though.

Anyways, I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself here. I look forward to jumping in on some of the threads I perused before I signed up. See you on the boards!

Sean-o-tron said:

My name's Sean (one of the many here), I'm 19, and am going to be working at Walt Disney World in Florida (paid internship).

That's fantastic, Sean! One of my friends just finished doing one of those about a month ago. She worked at the confectionery on Main Street, USA, and she had a wonderful time. I hope you will, too!