$tarGuard Season 7: An Icons Campaign

By | Published October 26, 2011

Saving the World from Villainy, Injustice and Cancellation

As I said last time, Runequest has gone the way of all games and my group has started up a new Icons Campaign. The premise is that the PCs are ‘heroes’ who star in a reality TV show that covers their exploits. I’m really hoping to get a Venture Brothers meets Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes vibe going. I also had to recruit some new players, so I put together this pitch:

“StarGuard is the West Coast’s number two super-team and a reality show on its last legs. The team’s (questionably) heroic acts are usually caught on camera, but so are their private lives. Originally a novel way to make heroism pay, StarGuard has degenerated into a sordid circus populated by clueless washouts, bitter has-beens and well-intentioned never-weres. StarGuard’s battles with addiction, scandal and the occasional super-villain have been provided seasons of T.V. and inspired numerous spin offs (‘Just Love,’ ‘Real Housewives of Protector Mansion,’ ‘Super Apprentice,’ and ‘Super Celebrity Apprentice’). Unfortunately, the public just doesn’t care anymore.

The player characters will be members of StarGuard’s latest incarnation as they face their gravest threat: cancellation. Without a ratings bump, you will lose your pay check, your beachfront villa and what little fame (or notoriety) you have left. Clearly, this calls for some serious super-heroics.

Using Icons we will generate a motley crew of well-intentioned (or not) super-heroes. Influences on my end will include the Venture Brothers, No Heroics, X-Statix and the thousands of comics and cartoons I’ve consumed. Check this and this out for an idea of what I’m talking about.”

So that was my big pitch and it seems to have done the trick. Next time: The Players and the PCs.

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Runefate Questville

By | Published September 28, 2010

I’ve been on a general hiatus since the birth of my son, but now I’m getting my game group rolling again.

I threw two pitches at them: Smallville or a sword and sorcery Runequest II campaign.

Although I did try to slightly tilt them towards Smallville, the majority of them seem to be in more of an ‘I stab you in the face’ kind of mood.

Now don’t get me wrong—I am pretty stoked about Runequest—but I’ve decided to splice in some of the elements from other games I’m digging at the moment. I mean, why bake a cake if you can’t eat it too?

So here are the houserules I’m cooking up at the moment:

Aspects

To start, each player is going to have to come-up with:

  • A Concept (steady-handed killer, escaped gladiator, Devoted Cultist of Hune)
  • A Flaw (heavy drinker, sucker for a pretty smile, “I can take ‘em”)
  • A Relationship with one other PC (“Zag can’t be trusted,” “Cybele is purty,” “I’d trust Lorne with my life)

When a player wants to spend a Hero point to:

a) get a 20% bonus before a roll or

b) a re-roll afterwards

c) get an additional Combat Action

they must invoke an Aspect. The Aspect can be one of theirs or, if the circumstances justify it, another PC or NPC’s. Unlike Fate, Hero points will not automatically restored at the end of each session, but may be handed out as rewards (along with RQII’s improvement rolls).

The other way to get Hero Points will be to have your Aspects compelled. Should an Aspect get a PC into hot water, the GM can bribe them with a Hero Point to take (or not take) a particular course of action. The player can always refuse the compel, but they will not get the Hero Point in that case.

Relationship Map

Ok, stealing from Smallville, I’m going to make a small location/relationship map.

Each player will put a their PC’s initials on the sheet and draw lines between each PC. Then:

  1. Each Player will write the name of someone important to their character (an NPC), encircle the name and draw a line back to their PC. Along this line, they will write why they are important to the PC. (i.e. Thrax, High Priest of Gul- Mentor or Councilor Aurelian of Estades- wants me dead)
  2. Each Player will then write the name of a location or organization, enclose it in a square, and draw a line to their PC. Along the line they will write why the location is important to the PC (ie. village I grew up in, gives me sanctuary, I escaped from the Cult)
  3. Each Player will then draw a line between any of the above Circles or Squares (including those added by others) and any other Circle, Square or PC. The Player can then define the relationship between the people, places and things so linked (ie. Thrax is High Priest of the Temple, or another PC served under Aurelian). The general rule here is not to be a dick.
  4. Each Player draws their choice of a circle or a square and links them to their PC as above.
  5. Each player repeats step 3. After everyone has gone around once, each player can repeat step 3 again.

Each circle or square that leads to a PCs name should be written down on their sheet. These relationships can be invoked exactly like the aspects above (or if they are more complicating than positive, they can be used to earn hero points).

In addition, a PC can spend a hero point (and come up with a reasonable explanation) to:

  • Have an NPC from their sheet show-up in the current scene
  • Have an envoy, citizen, etc from a location or organization show-up

Further, if the GM (or a Player) can plausibly work a location or NPC into a scene in a way that will complicate the PCs life, they can earn a Hero Point as if the NPC or Location was an Aspect that had been compelled.

Hopefully, these rules won’t make my Players run away screaming and will add a little spice to the game.

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Back!

By | Published July 23, 2010

Ok, I flaked out.Dweezil

Work got busy and the immanent arrival of my son kind of threw me off.

Now, the Spambots have taken over. Personally, I want a Cyberpunk setting where that happens.

But now, Theodore Wolfgang Schulz has arrived, my wife is healthy and were all happy, so let’s see if I can get this blog thing back off the ground!

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Confessions Finale: The Scottish Game

By | Published April 22, 2010

So after droning on about Jr. High and an OSR pet peeve (and I generally like a lot of the OSR blogs out there), we’re nearly up to date.

Fast-forward at least ten years.

Ten years with a biggish gaming gap and a mish-mash of non-D&D campaigns. Some damn fine campaigns, if I do say so myself.

New city. New life. New gaming group.osric

We played a Mongoose Traveller Tramp Freighter campaign for about seven months and a Noble Houses Burning Wheel game for another six.

And then I got it in my head to play D&D. Break the curse. Go to the sources I like.

Well truthfully, I thought that if I ever ran old-school D&D again, I’d do it as the anti-World of Warcraft.

See, in the World of Warcraft, every bloody being in the game is an adventurer. You can’t get milk without killing 25 womprats or whatnot. Every Gnome Hunter can also be the Town Tailor.

In other words, in WoW, at least as I see it, being an adventurer isn’t exceptional, its conformist. The punks are the ones who never leave their farmstead.

I wanted to run the opposite.

A game where no one says ‘adventurer’ without spitting afterward to get the taste out of their mouths.

Where people say ‘a wizard did it’ in the same tone reserved for lawyers and politicians now.

A game where the towns folk try to lock up their daughters, overcharge the PCs for everything and, as soon as every last bit of their dungeon delved dollars have been spent, arrange for a mysterious hooded man to tell them of adventure two towns over in Shelbyville.

And to start with, it was fun.

I drew up a hex map and a dungeon using oodles of random tables.

My players rolled up a motley crew and we played.

The first few sessions were a blast; until I realized that they were still in that first dungeon I’d drawn up and that it was going to be a long time before they were done with it. With that epiphany, I started to get bored and dream of ‘The Next Game.’ Always the kiss of death.

And then the scheduling problems started. St. Patrick and Easter derailed the game; as did illness, allergies, and a great deal of personal drama. Until finally, last week, I proclaimed the game dead and had the few players who had made it begin to make Rogue Trader PCs.

D&D is my Macbeth.

No good can come of running it. The game is just cursed to crash.

D&D is Dead! Long Live Rogue Trader!

Although…since it does require so little DM prep, it might be the kind of thing I could run on weekends in addition to my current game someday… If I’m willing to risk a divorce, that is.

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Confessions of a Cursed DM Part 2

By | Published April 20, 2010

I’m starting the second part of my confession of a failed DM with a bit of a digression regarding on a take on D&Ds history I find fairly common in the OSR crowd.

Basically, its that D&D was tarnished silver by becoming too clean. And I

Doesn't look too squeaky clean to me

Doesn't look too squeaky clean to me

think it was as murky as it could be given the climate.

See, there’s a certain faction of OSR Grognards and aficionados that like to condemn Gygax and company for cleaning up TSR and D&D’s image during the so-called ‘Silver Age’ of D&D.

But the thing is, even in the early 90s there was still a bit of hysteria in the air when it came to D&D.  Maybe this was just out on the particular frontier of the bible belt where I grew up, but I suspect my experience was pretty common.

And keep in mind that this was after years of TSR carefully doing their best not to give anyone any ammunition that could be used against them.

Years.

I can only imagine the intense pressure TSR must of felt at the height of the D&D panic.

If it had been my company and my family’s livelihood on the line in the face of a full-blown moral panic, I should hope I’d be brave enough to stick to my guns and continue to put out the offending product, watered down art or not. I think that the good people at TSR should be saluted for their courage and not sneered at for selling out.

But that’s another aside.

The point is that D&D was still ‘the game’ in my  neck of the woods. Its forbidden allure and fantasy draw still worked its magic on my friends.

And while I enjoyed the nearly NPC-less dungeon crawl that a friend of mine’s elder brother perpetually ran, I always felt I could do something better. Something bigger. Something epic.

This was, of course, despite the fact that I hated epic fantasy and never managed to finish a single D&D tie-in novel or the Lord of the Rings, for that matter.

So every once in a while I’d borrow ‘The Books’ from one of my D&D-owning friends and secretly start to cobble together a campaign. Usually it was drenched in the half-baked plots I’d somehow picked up from my rare forays into Final Fantasy and mish-mash of concepts I’d picked up from comic books, anime, and old movies.

Falling Empires and Time Travel were staples, along with an Urgent Quest to defeat an Unbeatable Foe!

I know, sounds pretty lame now, but when I was thirteen, it seemed awesome.

Characters would get made, back-stories drawn up and adventures prepped. The first session would usually go ok and then…then things would fall apart. Rinse and repeat a few months or years down the line.

Sometimes I’d just lose interest. Or the semester would change or summer holidays would start or we’d suddenly be invited to parties with girls, beer and other substances. After that gaming just didn’t seem so important.

The main point is though, I just couldn’t get a D&D game off the ground and I wasn’t enough of a fantasy fan to make it happen.

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D&D is my Macbeth: A Confession

By | Published April 20, 2010

D&D is the one game I have never, ever been able to properly get off the ground or sustain.

This my attempt to blurt out why I think D&D is cursed.

C'mon, I was 12 when this came out!

C'mon, I was 12 when this came out!

Partially it’s my own flakiness. When I was a grade school student, full of beans, and playing in a long-running AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Crawl Game, I would occasionally try to start up my own D&D game.

Now starting up my own game was not an uncommon thing. These were the heady days of Jr. High and I was usually running at least two games as well as playing in the aforementioned D&D game. I ran great little games of Star Wars, Top Secret SI (in the FREElancers universe), Heroes Unlimited/TMNT/After the Bomb/General Palladium Mash-Up and just about anything else I could waste my part-time dishwasher dollars on.

For, the most part these went well and, if they didn’t always last long they did usually provide a great deal of fun while they lasted. D&D though.

This was early in the 2nd Edition.

I hear nightmarish tales of the bloated creature that would die a horrible death and I’m grateful that this wasn’t the 2nd Ed I knew. In retrospect, I guess its later fate isn’t too much of a surprise. I remember the brown, faux-leather, character class books. The first couple were interesting and well-loved, but by the time they hit the bards…

And oddly enough, at least in the rural Alberta town I grew up in, D&D still had a stigma.

D&D was heavy-metal, satanic, and poor. D&D probably smoked and hung out at the local arcade. Yet somehow, my folks were ok with me playing other games (or at least they were better with it). Still they, like the parents of several of my friends, drew the line at D&D (which I, like thousands of children of the 80s and early 90s, secretly played anyways).

Personally, this is one of the reasons I think some of the Grognard/OSR crowd are a bit off their rockers.

Next- I’ll explain my Slander.

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God Told Me To (Larry Cohen, 1976)

By | Published April 2, 2010

An off-beat, creepy and strange b-film, God Told Me Too is a low-rent supernatural detective film worth checking out.

How can you lose with a Poster like This?

How can you lose with a Poster like This?

On one level, it’s a gritty police procedural set in 70s New York at its ugliest.

On another, it strings together kooky alien astronaut theories, hermaphrodism, and bizarre cult killers into a suspenseful occult thriller.

In other words, it’s a film of stark contrasts in a washed out and dirty grey world.

The main contrast is between Cohen’s protagonist and antagonist. The hard-boiled Peter Nicolas and the barely seen Bernard Phillips.

Tony Lo Bianco plays Peter Nicholas. At first glance, Peter is a stereotypical 70s tough-guy cop. He’s middle-aged, working class and divorced. About the only thing that sets him apart from the usual cop character is his intense Catholic devotion, that is illustrated by his slinking out of his young lover’s bed to go to mass each day.

Richard Lynch plays Bernard Phillips the enigmatic cult messiah who is little more than a rumor for most of the film. Only visible at its climax, Phillips embodies everything that square society finds distasteful about hippies: he is long-haired, slender, almost hermaphroditic. He wanders around the filthy city penniless and barefoot. Moreover, anyone who listens to his subversive message instinctively knows he’s the son of god and obeys his every command.

God Told Me To is in no small way about the clash between these two characters. Told firmly from Peter’s perspective, the narrative shows Peter gazing a little too deeply into the abyss. Without spoiling anything, their conflict is pretty transformative and ultimately results in Peter becoming a character who is as disturbing as Phillips.

In other words, God Told Me To plays on the theme of becoming the thing you are hunting.

Alright, you might be saying, but how does this play out plot-wise?

The film opens with a sniper taking out random targets in downtown Manhattan. Another in a series of seemingly senseless killings in the film that Peter is obsessed with getting to the bottom of. The only obvious connection between the murders is that each spree ends with killer committing suicide after saying, with serene sincerity, ‘God Told Me To.’

Disturbed because of his religious principles–and because he’s just that kind of movie cop–Peter sets out to find the force behind these killings. This propels him into clashing with the golden haloed hippie messiah Phillips and a coterie of wealthy and devoted disciples. As the plot rolls on, Peter witnesses more and more acts of madness by Phillips’ thralls and digs deeper into a mystery involving religion, strange abductions, and, ultimately, his own identity.

By the end of the film, God Told Me To gleefully smashes together religion with science fiction, mind control with faith, and nature with nurture. The film doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but it sure makes a fun mess.

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Damnation Decade Pitch

By | Published March 29, 2010

The Quick Version20321

Run with FATE, it’s League of Extraordinary 70s Film and TV characters racing to save the world before world ends on Dec 31st, 1979.

Characters modeled on an Angel, the Bionic Man and Woman, the Omega Man, Shaft, Coffy, a Kung-Fu Dragon, the Condor or the Man Who Fell to Earth would be strongly encouraged!

It’s a world gone mad inspired by the Parallax View, The Warriors, RollerBall, Logan’s Run, the Omen Films and The Final Programme!

The Long Version

It’s 1976

The west coast has fallen into the sea, albino mutants prowl the southwest, and a crooked president is clinging onto power. In perfect suburbs, factory built families are slowly replacing their flawed human neighbors. Swinging New Age Gurus preach radical selfishness while secretly preparing for the return of ancient alien astronauts.

And, to top things off, the leading presidential candidate may just be the first born child of the devil.

It’s 1976 and the end is near. According to a set of eerily accurate prophesies the world is exactly four years away from the apocalypse. But fear not, for aviation giant and casino magnate—turned hermit Royce R. Rundell and the super-computer M.I.N.D. are putting together a team to prevent the apocalypse.

So the word is out for every Omega Man and Bionic Woman willing to brave killer bees, gangs out for ultraviolence and bell bottoms in order to turn back the tide. Have you been called a private dick who gets all the chicks, a fierce foxy angel or a man who fell to earth? Are you a funky kung-fu fighter, roller-skating omegaball star, jive talking vampire hunter or a far-out practitioner of the mystic arts? Then Royce R. Rundell needs you!

This campaign will be a low powered, anything goes FATE game that uses Green Ronin’s Damnation Decade as its chief campaign guide. Think the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen meet 1970s film and TV and you won’t go far wrong in capturing the scope and types of characters I encourage you to make.

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If You Are Reading This…

By | Published August 18, 2009

It would seem that if you are reading this you are, in all likelyhood, a Russian spambot.

I’d just like to thank my Spambot readership and encourage them to continue submitting comments. Should I ever need penile enhancements, you will be first on the list.

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No Fun in Funerals

By | Published July 24, 2009

Howdy Folks,

On the off chance I have any readers, I’m posting to explain why I’ve been awol. The first reason is the arrival of Mad Men 2 on Blu Ray. The second is that I have a funeral to attend. Promise I will be back on Monday.

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