I don't think there will be many people reading this who are (a) gamers and (b) not already aware of Claw/Claw/Peck, head58's groovy new gaming blog, but it occurs to me there are a few.

(For instance: Ephemeral Circus, meet athenalindia and theclevermonkey--I've been gaming with them (among others) in London, at least until I had a baby and completely marooned our post-apocalypse Deadlands campaign at an excruciating cliffhanger; athenalindia  and theclevermonkey , meet the Boston circus (among others)--sorry for being AWOL so long.)

Claw/Claw is off to a nice start, with an admirable focus on praxis, both in the sense of "actual practical application" and also in the sense that that's the name of  one of editswlonghair's Agon hacks. So far I have contributed three Alternate Alpha Complexes, which isn't especially praxis-y, but hey, that's how we do.

(I think at one point the excellent Allen Varney and his merry band of traitors were working on a book of alternate worlds for PARANOIA, which is the sort of thing that could bring even me out of lurktirement. But I don't know what ever came of it. My understanding is that PARANOIA is now the work of one in-house writer, so Allen and the traitors' more glorious schemes have probably been shelved.)

Does the world need a new gaming blog? Perhaps not, but I'm more interested in what these particular guys have to say about gaming than I am in 90% of the gaming pundits out there. Plus the most recent post gives me credit for inventing the flashback, so I'm digging it.

Tags: gaming, not my other blog, owlbears

Can't you hear that singing, sounds like gold
Maybe I can only hear it in my head
Five years ago, we owned that road
Now it's rolling over us instead
Waylon Beulay is dead

Five years ago tonight (same day of the week, too) was the final session of Unknown USA. I hope to post something longer to mark this little anniversary in the next few days, but I am packing the car just now for (appropriately enough) a long drive. Much love to my old and often missed road-tripping companions. Pancakes are on me.

Tags: gaming, nostalgia, not my other blog, unknown usa

Random idea I'm too busy/lazy to work up into a series of posts:

Anyone remember that "Just Imagine" series of comics where a wondering world "finally" got to see how Stan Lee would "re-imagine" the classic DC Heroes? So you had "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creating Superman," "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creates Batman," and so on. Insert Stan-bashing joke here, except it's just too easy, so instead I'll link to "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creating the Watchmen."

So I was thinking about how, in both good ways and bad, Gary Gygax was like the Stan Lee of gaming. And I started to amuse myself by "just imagining" Gary Gygax's Dogs in the Vineyard, or Gary Gygax's Unknown Armies, or any fairly non-Gygaxian game you have an affinity for, with all kinds of Gygaxian verbiage and random tables and anagrams of Gygax for all the place names.

And then jeffwik  and bryant  both posted postmortems on recent games they've run (and let me just say that you two may not be entirely happy with everything about them, but I'd have knifed a moderately-sized orangutan to play in either one) and that got me thinking about old games I've played in and old games I wish I'd played in, and that turned the Just Imagine idea into something where I'd mix and match the names of classic games from our circle onto the interests and obsessions of game masters from same.  In other words:

• Just Imagine... jeffwik's Orlando Trash! (you know, because of Jeff's Disney thing)
• Just Imagine... bryant's Airportation! (no idea what this would be - it's just a name with potential)
• Just Imagine... robotnik's Uncanny Valley! (no idea what that would be about either - robots, presumably - I've just always been jealous of that as a name for a game)
• Just Imagine... jeregenest's Through the Delbruek Gate! (dunno - the name just sounds like it could be Jeremiah's), that or else jeregenest's Unknown USA (that I'd dig).
• Just Imagine... mgrasso 's Pantellos! (faeries, natch)

(I'm missing lots of key people, I know, but I'm coming up with these games off the top of my head. And the names of most of the cool head58 games I can remember reading about take the form "[adjective] Star Wars.")

So anyway: just imagine... I finished and fleshed out this post!

Tags: boston, gaming, gilts, not my other blog

"Whoa, sounds like somebody's living in the past. Contemporize, man!"

P.S. I'm aware there's something sorta kinda sad about posting pages of text on a five year old roleplay campaign. Of course, I do live in the past, in more ways than one. But in the spirit of living in the now, I should note that I am still playing in that ridonkulous 30-year OD&D campaign I mentioned before and I've also hooked up with a promising bunch of local gamers whose style might be closer to what we had in Boston. I'm hoping to run a 4-5 session Cold City or PTA game with them. The beast, as always, is scheduling.

Tags: gaming, london, not my other blog

A few months ago I mentioned the film student who was interested in trying to turn Unknown USA into a screenplay. He and I have bounced a couple of emails back and forth since then with him asking for clarifications and elaborations of various things on the wiki. All y'all who have GM'ed before know how fun and rare and self-indulgent that is, somebody actually asking you to yammer on at length about some old game of yours. So that's fun.

The first question he hit me with was "what's the deal with Danny Greer?" and my answer turned into a frickin novel, which, among other things explains what the hell I thought was going on in that session with the Hollow Earth and the Silver Age Knights of the Road and the Oneiros. Which you sure didn't ask to read, but ( that's what LJ-cuts and the vertical scroll bar are for. )

Tags: gaming, nostalgia, not my other blog, unknown usa

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, not my other blog

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

This is mostly directed to bryant, though maybe somebody else has answers also:

themoniker's post today, in which Umberto Eco weighs in on the great game between zeppelins and bicycles (!), inspires me to ask: are all the various wikis & lexicons lost when innocence.com exploded gone for good? Are recovery efforts truly "in progress"?

I know Unknown USA was retrieved and hermetically sealed and I'm grateful for that. But I don't have any other copy of my For Want Of A Nail contributions or any of the Dungeon Majesty wiki, and that makes me sad. Even if you don't want to repost/rehost all that stuff (and I can totally understand if you don't feel like weeding the spam off five-year-old wikis until the end of time) is it in any retrievable form that you could send to me? What I'd really like in the short term is "Gernsblack," but the other stuff would be nice to have too.

Will gladly repay with some kind of old-style nostalgic gaming post: an episode guide for the first season of that 1970s Warren Zevon inspired Buffy game you once proposed? five unknown deleted scenes from Unknown USA? my requisite Lost rip-off (nb: cannot guarantee it involves miniaturization)?

Tags: gaming, help me my aquatic friends!, not my other blog

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, not my other blog

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: gaming, gilts, not my other blog

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, not my other blog, 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, not my other blog

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, not my other blog

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, not my other blog