I opened up my LiveJournal client to write about something else this afternoon and found this mostly finished post from a year ago, I think. I'm so out of practice on these Games I'd Like To-style posts anyway, rather than delete it or let it languish until such time as I get around to cleaning it up, I'mo just pull the trigger and post as is:

(Post title is, as is so often the case, an inside joke amusing only to me and maybe my older sister.)

( Five half-baked settings for kooky indie games! Or vice versa... )

Tags: corvette summer, gaming, gilts

So as the seven stalwart players (although not Chris F., with whom my only contact is occasional ghostly music on my car radio late at night) already heard, a film student emailed me the other day to ask if I was the person behind the game Unknown USA, and if so, if it would be OK for him to adapt it as a screenplay. I said it was up to the other players as well as me, but that if he wasn't doing anything commercial, I didn't have any problems with it, and indeed I'd love to see the finished project when it's done. (If any of you who played in the game do have reservations, let me know. It's your baby as well as mine.) It's just a student project, but it's flattering, and hey, who hasn't imagined a screenplay or a movie of one of their games?

But I'm already doubting if I have the equanimity for adaptation: I said in an email something about how big and sprawling the story was and that I wondered how it could be shaved down into a screenplay. The student said "oh, I know I'll have to cut things - for instance, I was thinking the Doc Lully subplot will have to go." And in my head I was instantly CUT DOC LULLY NO WAY HOW CAN YOU CUT DOC LULLY WITHOUT LULLY THERE'S NO IAM AND NO DERO AND NO WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN IV IN MEXICO AND DANNY'S STORY WON'T MAKE ANY SENSE AND DANNY'S LIKE DOROTHY, HE'S THE MORAL CENTER OF THE WHOLE THING!!! Even though intellectually I can see how one might cut the Lully-IAM-Monarch mind control/historical shift part of the story, the truth is my emotional response would be the same to any cut. The homicidal state trooper with the chimp? The Cuban cop with a walk-on part in the second session? The old couple selling frozen lima beans outside Ochopee Swamp? Deathless brilliance, I tell you! Remove the tiniest figment and the whole masterpiece collapses like a house of cards!

Would you be any different if it was your game?

Tags: gaming, not my other blog, unknown usa

Many years ago, when jeffwik's AIRPORTATION was in flower, I had this idea that I would write up summaries of each session and then Photoshop them onto extremely boring postcards of airports with a dusty timeless-retro look. As if they were postcards by California from Hong Kong Airport, Stalingrad, Idlewild, and so on. I even found images of Soviet postmarks and Orson Welles stamps to doll them up with. ("Fun" fact: There are a LOT of extremely boring postcards on the internet.) But as you may have noticed, I never got around to it. Just as I never found her speaking voice, I couldn't figure out how to do California's handwriting.

Here instead, a mere two years after Goofy's betrayal and Jim(?)'s rocking demise, is a top secret apparently real life map from the Soviet archives (dated 1973 - détente? what détente?) depicting Yuri Andropov's top secret plan to wipe the continent of North America off the face of the earth. The world of AIRPORTATION, revealed:

“This is a scheme of assumed changes in geographical structure of Earth continents which may happen as a result of correction of gravity field of the Earth by the A-241/BIS device.” (Via Strange Maps.)

Tags: corvette summer, gaming

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for Lions on the Precipice, foreign_devilry's notional Dogs in the Vineyard expansion. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime, this emo snippet of alterna-reverse Dogs occurred to me. I started out by thinking about that gloriously stupid bit of early D&D laser-sharking, the Anti-Paladin. Then I found myself actually sympathizing with these guys. (Oh, but if you've heard me mumbling about my "Dogs heartbreaker" lately, this isn't it.)

( A Land of Thorns and Vice )

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts

Not a Route 96 post. Much much geekier. Mostly for mgrasso and head58, though gammafodder1 and sneech515 may be amused in spite of themselves.

So ever since Mike linked to that Star Trek reboot, and then started talking about running the old Dragonlance modules, and then news came out of the Dragonlance movie (Lex Luthor as Tanis! Jack Bauer as Raistlin! Xena as Goldmoon!), I've been threatening to write a big post on how one might revamp or reboot the Dragonlance series, scraping off some of the fromage and finding new hotness within. Battlestar Galactica is obviously the touchstone here, Exhibit A in how to resurrect, retool, and reimagine even the mustiest of old geek loves. (But see also many of Grant Morrison's superhero comics, and, if I may be immodest, my Starchildren game in a way).

But then Andy and the Story Games kids came along and stole this terrible, terrible idea right out of my head and made a thread of it, forcing my hand! (And probably saving me from mulling this over for another six months.) So I banged out my ideas in the thread. Here's my contribution (behind the LJ-cut) though if you're nerd enough to have made it this far, the whole thing is worth checking out: Dragonlance Gets Awesome-O-fied.

( Read more... )

(No, I'm not going to link to the Hotties of Dragonlance Gone Wild '05 thread.)

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts, nostalgia

NOT originally published at Route 96. You can't comment there.

The Owlbear Challenge:
http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=1002

The Entrants So Far:
http://www.1km1kt.net/results.php?terms=24-Hour-RPG-Owlbear-challenge

The Only One I've Read Yet:
http://kallistipress.com/blog/2006-08-01/mark-twain-versus-the-owlbears/

Tags: dungeon majesty, gaming, owlbears

I admit I've only skimmed the website, but White Wolf's Promethean doesn't look like my cup of tea. I never loved the WW systems, and I'm just not feeling the six flavors of sad-eyed Mexican Frankensteins. But mgrasso's posts on it, plus this book I was looking at, somehow planted this idea in my head yesterday. So here you go, Mike, this is my one stab at twagic twee.

Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don't have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the world of self
--Warren Zevon, "Splendid Isolation"

My Life With Michael
A GILT for My Life With Master, Puppetland, or (if you insist) Promethean

It has been ten years since his trial. Ten years since Michael Jackson closed the golden gates of Neverland and sealed himself away from every human soul. Yet he is not alone. You are Michael's twisted menagerie--his creations, experiments, and pets. The delicate bubble boy, his T and B cells swapped for Michael's transplanted fears. The moonwalking clockwork robot, assembled from discarded toys once used to lure and bribe young guests. The wan fading pixie, trapped in half-life by Michael's flickering belief in her. The grinning clay tulpa, into which Michael pours all the urges and rages and blackness he cannot admit to in himself. And loyal long-suffering Bubbles the Chimp, desperate to keep his master's affection from straying to younger prettier things. Together you dwell inside the gates of Neverland with the dwindling Fisher King of Pop. He keeps you. He needs you. He knows you will never grow up, never leave him, never blame him, never tell.

Time elapsed since my last game: 1 year, 1 month, 14 days.

Tags: gaming, gilts, in which somebody steals somebody's bit

So how jealous am I of all you guys who have played or are playing in editswlonghair’s Caper game? Here’s a post (a bit long and kinda unedited) I started writing for the 20’ by 20’ Room (actually the first half of the post—it grew, like they always do) when head58 began talking up heist games a few weeks ago. (What happened to the “Bothans’ Eleven” idea, by the way?) I wanted to write this out before I actually sat down to reading John’s game, because it sounds like Caper works well enough to make much of my long-winded speculation on How A Heist Game Could Be Done kinda moot.

(John, let me know if it’s cool to post what follows, specifically the 3rd paragraph where I mention you and your game, on 20x20. If you want, I’ll take out the mention of Caper. Or I could just take out your name and the name of the game and say “a friend of mine.” My thinking is, it doesn’t hurt to mention your game, spread a little buzz, even if it’s not ready yet. I won’t include a link. But if you don’t want anything mentioned to the Teeming Dozens, that’s fine of course.)

( Yoink! )

Tags: gaming, gilts

Calling on the LazyWeb here: Does anybody remember a board game, I think it was called "Disaster!", in which the board had four disaster areas—an earthquake, a burning building, a crashing airplane, a sinking ship—and you went around the board trying to escape each disaster in turn while trapping your opponents therein? We had this game when I was a kid, and I loved it. The plastic pawns were excellent. I think they were (understandably) nervous-looking little hunchbacks. I went Googling for images of this game to illustrate a post over at Old is the New New about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (today's the 100th anniversary) but I can't find it anywhere. Anyone? Bueller?

Edit: Well, that didn't take long. head58 hied straight to Boardgamegeek.com and found it, and mgrasso might've beat him back here if he hadn't stopped to type in the "img" tag:



( See Inside. )

Man, does that bring back memories. I'd forgotten it was bilingual. Tremblement de terre! Ecrassement! Fire, fire, incendie! "Sunk... Naufrage!" sounds like it oughta be a leet-speak putdown, like own3d. Thanks, guys.

Tags: gaming, nostalgia

I posted this way down in the comments to jeffwik's LJ, but it may be of interest here, in re: the current burblings of the gaming blogiverse, or in re: whatever other internet arguments you may happen to be or become embroiled in.

At JOHO last week, (that's "Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization"), Dave Weinberger linked to some discussions of New York Times editor Bill Keller's complaint that on the internet, arguments never end:

There is a great thread that starts with Jay Rosen picking up on Bill Keller (editor of the NY Times) complaining that in the blogosphere arguments never end. It's a throwaway phrase, but Jay is right to pick up on the mindset in which it's a plausible complaint. Jeff Jarvis solos on the melody, and Scott Rosenberg brings it on home with the observation that the complaint is really about who gets to end the argument.

This is one of the top five most important effects of the Internet*: We are not going to settle our arguments. There's enough room on the Web to permit that. You argue for a bit, maybe you learn a little or maybe the argument hardens your position so that you become a little stupider, and then you move on to something else. That's why the "conversation" meme is so powerful: Conversations are explorations, not title fights.

The big question is whether we can adapt this lesson of the Web to the real world with its finite space and inescapable proximities. If we're never all going to agree, can we at least all keep talking?

*No, I don't have a list of the top five. I was bluffing. [Original Post.]

I like that. Make of it what you will.

Tags: gaming, rob explains the interwob

"Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry..."
—"Mandelbrot Set"

"It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."
—"The Colour Out of Space"



Before he started kicking six kinds of Kryptonian ass this week with a series of Superman mythos posts, ezrael wrote something about "The Endless Black," a sci-fi horror game he'd like to run, in which humanity takes its first faltering steps into the endless dark of Lovecraftian outer space. princeofcairo floated a similar idea in an old ST column a few years back (I know ezrael loves it when I lump him together with princeofcairo, but hey, there's worse company to be lumped with): "Ships disappear, pilots go mad, colonies fall into dark worship on distant planets ... As the Earth's ossified systems splinter under madness and anarchy, the human colonies see themselves left alone in the dark." I dug Ken's take from the start, but Matt, who strikes me as just the fellow to GM a game where the universe is cruel and bleak and cold, added the crucial Catch-22: the very tools humankind must use to navigate the extra-cosmic gulfs of space—eldritch mathematics, Dune-like mentats and spice addicts, strange eons of cryogenic sleep—ineluctably corrode our humanity. Yeah, that's the stuff.

There's only one thing I need to make this G a G that I would truly LT, and that's comedy.

( Seriously. )

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts

"OK: any historic figure."
"I'd fight Gandhi."
"Good answer."
"How about you?"
"Lincoln."
"Lincoln?"
"Big guy, big reach. Skinny guys fight 'til they're burger."

So Clinton Nixon and Vincent Baker have been "interviewing" each other in a thread at Fair Game—I put scare quotes around "interviewing" because it looks suspiciously like two friends just having a fun, free-ranging conversation—and one of them asked the other who their dream gaming group from history would be. They both had great answers:

Clincent: I'd like to play a game of Dogs in the Vineyard with Thomas Jefferson, Mae West, Wyatt Earp, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. Twain's the GM, of course. Jefferson's all "the-what-the-what" when he finds out what happened in the western US. "A theocratic governorship? Nonsensical fantasy!" And we all laugh, and Mae's character shoots someone in the face and then she winks at me across the table.

Vinton: We're playing My Life with Master. It's me, Jesus, Salvador Dali, and Christopher Robin Milne (as an adult), with Michael S. Miller GMing. Jesus gets really into it, he's all like "yessss masssster" and rolling his eyes wildly, but Michael makes Salvador Dali cry. Christopher Robin Milne OWNS the horror revealed.

I especially like that "of course" Twain's the GM. Like, duh.

I'll have to think about who my dream gaming group would be. Some of you have already heard my reverie about Elvis Presley's Jungle Room at Graceland, and how it is the Platonic Ideal of the 1970s rec room, and how certain I am that if Elvis had lived only a few more years he would have played D&D there with the Memphis Mafia, because that is so clearly what the room is built for. But it wouldn't have been a dream game, it would have been lame as hell, because Elvis wouldn't DM, he'd get Sonny West or somebody to do it, and Sonny would just totally kiss up to Elvis and give his character 18/00 Strength and 18/00 Charisma and tons of magic items and every other dungeon room would just be elf girls in white cotton panties.

I'm posting a lot, huh? You might think that means I have no work to do... but really it means I have lots of work that I don't want to do. I want somebody to "interview" me!

Tags: elvis, gaming, nostalgia