Some Risus News

I'd be remiss if I didn't pass along the following items of interest to the Risus community:

- 1 -

S. John Ross is on the verge of producing a new series of short adventures for Risus. The idea is that he would fund these with Kickstarter and then give them away for free if they achieved their funding goals. Count me in! A Kringle in Time is one of my favorite published adventures in any system and I'd love to see more adventures that captured that groovy official Risus vibe.

- 2 -

Busy beaver that he is, S. John has also squeezed the entirety of the Risus rules onto a single (two-sided) page/pamphlet. Get the file here, print it out, and convert the uninitiated by strategically placing it around conventions, game stores, community notice boards, libraries, and coffee shops. 

- 3 -

Brent Wolke is back with the Thwaak. His new eight-page setting is called We the People. This time it's colonial fantasy, focusing on the secret war between Freemasons and the Illumninati during an alternate American Revolution. I confess that I have a not-so-secret desire to run a colonial fantasy game and this is the template that I'd use if I ended up running the game with Risus. 

On Playtesting Ethics

On Saturday night, I assembled my gaming group for an unspecified playtest. Even though it's not exactly a secret as to what I was running (I used social media to recruit an extra player), I still feel weird about mentioning it directly until I hear from other playtesters on how things are done.

And that's the thrust of this post. This is my first official playtest and I'm currently assembling the after action report. 

For those of you out there in the blog community, how many of you have participated in official playtests? And at what point is it ok to talk about it?

Right now, the game is still in preproduction, so my operating assumption is that I don't talk about specifics until it ships. After all, the game is almost certainly not in its final form and it would be unfair to set unreasonably high/low expectations. 

But what happens after the game comes out? Are you free to comment on the development? Or would that be bad form? In the absence of direction, I'll lean towards discretion.

Japanese Fart Scrolls

Just in case you've ever wanted to run a game featuring Samurai farting at each other... Legend of the Five Rings by way of Risus? 

 

Wow, look at the dude farting through plywood!

 

A bit of context. A came across this link to a guy who stumbled upon a mid-19th century Jspanese Fart Scroll. The full collection of images is hosted here on the Waseda University website.  

 

Really, who doesn't think farts are funny?

 

(I'm such a twelve year-old)

Anglo-Saxon Hoard

Yesterday was President's Day in the US and I made the best of the day off by taking my family to see the Anglo-Saxon Hoard exhibit at the National Geographic museum in DC. For those of you not in the know, the Staffordshire Hoard is the largest (only?) hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever discovered. Discovered on a working farm by a hobbyist with a metal detector, the collection consists of over 3,500 items, nearly all martial in character (ornamental bits of swords, helmets, and such). Estimated value: £3.285 million. Can you imagine the luck?

Anyway, as is usual for these sorts of things [see my trip to see the Terracotta Army two years ago], thoughts went immediately to gaming applications. I have a periodic (if infrequent) fascination this period of British and Northern European history. Not only does it scream D&D to me, but it also screams Tolkien. With all the castles and knights in fully articulated plate armor, most people seem to play D&D in a setting more reminiscent of the late middle ages. But I dig the grim look of these Anglo-Saxon Warriors and the pre-feudal period seems much more magical and pregnant with possibilities for grubby treasure hunters. Besides, you've got the historical King Arthur, the post-apocalyptic fall of the Roman Empire, and Beowulf. 

I'm going to allow my thoughts to dwell on running a game with a Dark Ages aesthetic for a few days before shifting to a much earlier period for my Hillfolk play test on Saturday night. Hmmm, Lamplighters seems tailor made for Dark Ages imagery (even though I had mentioned a desire to avoid western influences)... 

Knights of the Astral Sea #26

In our previous session of Knights of the Astral Sea, we reached a significant campaign milestone with the defeat of Chairman Meow. Genevieve was now restored to the throne of the Autumn Court of Faerie (having dropped a house on the previous monarch way back this session). Having accomplished that, the players were somewhat anxious to get back to Tudor and help Queen Artoria's ongoing war with the mysterious Spanish Empire.

Lacking our usual chroniclers, I'll do my best to summarize things for the absent players and anybody else that is interested.

The session opened with the crew of the Lady Blackbird discussing their options in the aftermath of the counter revolution. There was still the matter of the Spanish Cardinal Vicente Diaz's interrogation and Lord Tybalt was eager to get started. So, over the course of several hours (with human party members assisting Tybalt in interpreting the very human memories of the Spanish bureaucrat), the party learned that Diaz was set up to fail in Faerie. The Empire's real business in Autumn (involving the transport of dozens of large boxes filled with disassembled machinery) was conducted by an unnamed and seemingly very competent "advisor" (handler?). Diaz, it should be said, was anything but competent. Being directed to advise the Autumn insurgency and manage things until a Spanish governor could be appointed, all he did was was set himself up for luxurious living in Genevieve's former palace. 

It took a lot of invasive probing to discover useful information. That information included hints of a possible Spanish Homeworld and the path that Diaz and the others used to travel to Faerie. For the record, there was a gateway in the blasted remains of a pseudo-Britain [the Avalon of Theah], one world out from the Spanish Homeworld. 

Before returning to Tudor, Tybalt suggested that the Lady Blackbird make a bit of a tour of the four courts of Faerie, in order to use Diaz to demonstrate the Spanish threat. This was especially pressing after information gained from Diaz helped the party to find the blasted remains of the region where the Spanish entered the Realm. Elspeth suggested that nuclear weapons may have been used to blow up the gateway (as was likely the case with Camaret-sur-Mer). At the very least, weapons of mass destruction were used to obliterate the pseudo-Britain on the other side of the portal. The party did not attempt a crossing for fear of contamination.

In Summer, the party retrieved Jude Averill, under house arrest by King Oberon for the "affection" shown to him by Queen Titania. Never mind that she had already achieved everything she wanted from the young mage. 

In the Winter Court, the party granted Lord Garavan the right to conduct his own "interrogation" of Cardinal Diaz. He was returned in "reasonable" condition and mostly suitable for ransom, should the need ever arise (he was born into enormous wealth and achieved his rank through familial influence). 

And so the party finally made ready to cross back over to Tudor. Unfortunately, they were left in a bit of bind. Other than Iris (who arrived on the Lady Blackbird after the excusion to the Cloudlands), the party members had all crossed over by following a very specific path on foot. Flying the Blackbird along that path proved to be extraordinarily difficult. 

It may have been problems with the crosing or it may have just been the nature of Faerie, but when the party arrived back in Glastonbury, they soon came to realize that roughly a year and a half had passed in their absence. They learned this when captain Alastair Hawkesworth confronted them via semaphore from the HMAS Lemon Lander. Amazed and overjoyed at their reappearance (though heartbroken that Genevieve was not yet with the party), Hawkesworth called upon the Lemon Lander and other airships in the region to escort Lady Blackbird back to London.

In their brief voyage, Hawkesworth marvelled at the strange and obviously Spanish Airship. He also recounted what had transpired in the intervening months. It would seem that the war on Tudor had finally been settled, after decisive use of air power had decimated an armada of continental forces (local Spanish and their allies). In Scotland, Queen Mary's insurgency was put to rest and Kelley's treasonous faction of demon worshipers was purged from the Royal Society. For the moment, at least, the local and colonial populace had rallied around their Queen and the Dominion of Tudor was booming with new construction and renewed offworld commerce.

That offworld commerce was still limited to select out-bound paths, as mysterious Spanish raider ships (not unlike the Lady Blackbird) continued to plague the paths leading to the core worlds. Very little traffic was getting through, and what traffic did get through required enormous convoys for protection. 

To make matters worse, the Spanish and their local allies had decisively won on Geneva, Mehrikah, and Murnau, cutting off nearly half of the known worlds from contact. Even on worlds that could still be reached, Spanish influence/espionage complicated efforts to secure invaluable orichalcum resources. At this very moment, Britannic forces were reinforcing the early medieval world of Daer and anticipation of a Spanish invasion.

With Hawkeworth's briefing in mind, the party landed in London as greeted warmly by Her Majesty the Queen. Artoria had grown into her office in the last year and a half and now seemed to possess an aura of stately command. Marcus also noted (to his dismay) that she also seemed to command an inordinate amount of attention from captain Hawkesworth. A lot had happened in the intervening months and clearly there would be some interpersonal issues that would need to resolved.

But first, the party had to get settled in Whitehall. Iris was welcomed as visiting royalty and Elspeth was charged with outfitting her in proper local attire as befitted her station. Jude met with his father and his subordinates at the Royal Society. And George Rasmussen was immediately enlisted to help rebuild the decimated Magickal Corps. Marcus, to his pleasure, was ale to locate the long-lost Sophie, who had absconded with the Fair Leonore shortly after the death of Lord Crabbe.

Finally, the session ended with war council with the Queen and her advisors. Echoing their own thoughts on the matter, the Queen orders the party to attempt passage to the Cloudlands in the Lady Blackbird. Their objectives are threefold: 1) recapture the Britannic outpost and restore the flow of gravity-defying etherium, 2) reconnoiter the Spanish outpost and cut off their access to Cloudlands resources, and 3) overthrow Iris' father and install her on her throne (if possible). 

Risus Monkey at Gen Con

I don't have my badge yet, but I will be attending GenCon this year. I'm really excited because it's been several years since I last made the trip and previous trips were uniformly awesome. This will also be the first time out since I became active in the DIY RPG blog community and I'm eager to meet readers and other blogging confederates. 

I'll be easy to find in the exhibit hall as I'll be pushing DungeonMorph Dice with Joe Wetzel at the Inkwell Ideas booth. As a direct result of this, I won't be doing quite as much gaming as I would otherwise be doing. Gaming for me will be pretty much limited to off-schedule evening sessions. While I want to play in at least one game run by an EN World/Game Day/OSR Blog luminary, I promise that I will be running games as well. Matt Jackson has already requested the next installment of Moon Soldiers Must Die! (well received on the Game Day circuit) and I'm really tempted to mash up Old School Hack and Trey Causey's Weird Adventures. 

Things will firm up in the coming months. If you are interested in meeting up for games or just socially, drop a comment on the blog sometime. 

Hot Off The Presses: Weird Adventures!

I returned home from work today to find this on my doorstep. Hot cha! With convention season coming up, I feel a tremendous urge to run some Weird Adventures one-shots. Also, watch this space for some Weird Adventurers posts as I develop those scenarios and explore tools that might be helpful for adventures set in Trey Causey's marvelous setting.

Lamplighters

With yet another version of D&D in the works, my thoughts turn to the initial excitement that I felt in the run-up to the current version of D&D. I remember really getting sucked in by the pre-release setting/concept art books and the whole "points of light" campaign frame. I thought the idea of isolated settlements in a very dangerous world really got to the heart of what D&D felt like to me. I remember working out a pseudo-Points of Light campaign set in an alternate version of New Zealand that was tailor-made for the new system.

Well, long-story-short, I decided I wasn't all that keen on 4e.

There was a lot that I liked in the initial batch of 4e books, especially the DMG and Monster Manuals. But in play it just wasn't my thing. I moved backwards (OSR) and sideways (Old School Hack) and tried to stay out of the edition wars.

Unexpectedly, my thoughts have returned to fantasy. I'm not even really tuned in to the 5e discussions. I just want to do a little world building in anticipation of squeezing an occasional fantasy game into our already crowded schedule.

So here's my thought:

I was thinking about Justin Cronin's The Passage and how the vampires were kept at bay by electric lights in the post-apocalyptic world. Why not have a fantasy world where the creatures of Chaos (i.e. pretty much the entirety of the Monster Manual) could be kept at bay by lighting lamps that burned a combination of rare materials?

The lamps would create light in their local area, but nothing as bright as the stadium lights of the colony in The Passage. I'd still like to have night in the settlements.

The lamps would be large and bulky because if they were really portable, adventurers would be able to keep monsters at bay in the wilderness (and the dungeon!). I do imagine caravans carrying slightly less bulky versions of the lamps, but these might have their own difficulties. Portable lamps, might not be effective enough to keep monsters at bay but they could, perhaps, provide some benefit (that may or may not be worth the expense).

The lamps would require three or more ingredients from disparate geographical areas. That pretty much forces the existence of tenuous trade routes, linked by the aforementioned caravans. I'd do this because I've been itching to run a silk road campaign and I have some specific imagery in mind for the various settlements.

Finally, I imagine that world wasn't always like this and that some kind of apocalypse wiped out a grand civilization. I do not think that this civilization was our own and I think I would prefer to have it be distinctly non-medieval (and non-western). I think the level of pre-apocalyptic technology would at least be industrial, though much of that technology has now been lost (waiting to be discovered in the ruins).

Dave's Mapper and Side View Geomorphs

David Millar of Dave's Mapper fame is starting to tackle a back-log of geomorphs. The big news is that he has added side-view geomorph functionality. Look for the "SV" designation under Map Types. I only did a few of these, but it's cool to see a bunch of them linked together. It's especially cool to see them linked together with the awesome side-view tiles of Matt Jackson, Stonewerks, and Dyson.

Terra Tori Episode Summary

After a rather long delay, we are finally catching up on our Slaying Solomon episode summaries. Up first, is episode 6.5: "Terra Tori", which initially "aired" back in October of 2010! Reading Jodi's write-up, I can only smile at what fun that session was. There are not very many games where you could pull off adventures featuring "evil" (sort of) alternate versions of a player character with such satisfaction and style.

Episode summaries for the sixth and final season of Slaying Solomon can be found here, on our ENnie Award nominated 1990s-stye "fan site". More will be posted soon.