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Sunday — The day kicks off with the ever-reliable GM Troubleshooting seminar. Tentacles offers a powerful incentive to ten a.m. seminar attendance. If you’re not in the cafeteria by 9:45 you miss breakfast. As always for this topic the bulk of the discussion revolves around the difficult trade-offs involved in balancing the action in your game to varying sets of player tastes.

Tentacles sells lottery tickets to game events run by its guests. My initial idea was to run Ad Hoc HeroQuest, an event where we’d pick the genre at the table and go from there. Then when Greg Stafford couldn’t make it I also offered to also run a second game of the new HQ set in Glorantha. I was too tightly scheduled to actually fit in two contributions to the lottery, so winners were given the choice of either of the two ideas. I thought for sure they’d leap at the Glorantha. By the time I arrived for the game the players were not only assembled but had come to a consensus with no prompting required from me. They wanted to play retired superheroes.

I asked each player to pick a superhero name, which would operate as the character’s highest ability. (A cool and ambiguous reference, in HQ parlance.) So the group had such abilities as Starlight, Dr. Shadow, and the Chief. Their next-highest abilities were civilian identity descriptors: native American beer truck driver, bad shoe salesman, pushy claims adjuster, et al. Then, explaining that the PCs were all ex-members of a super group called the Mighty Squad, I had each player specify the thing about the character to his right that he held responsible for its breakup. So each got further defined by another player with ability/flaws including control freak, collateral damage, and sell-out. In three hours the characters were reunited by crisis, confronted by a weird mystery, and brought to a series of personal epiphanies leading to a strange return for the Mighty Squad.

The set-up offered opportunities aplenty for fun discoveries and creative action descriptions. I allowed more rules discussion than I normally would in a demo. My usual rule (copped long ago from Jose Garcia) is that it’s not really about teaching the game but rather showing the players a good time. Here though everyone knew the current HQ and was there to get a taste of the new nuts and bolts.

The first ever Tentacles wine tasting followed shortly thereafter. I don’t at all mind a sweet white, so the five selections from the local Dur Fledermaus winery were right up my alley. It was late starting, so I had to try the last of them during the final Ask Robin seminar, which kept going with nary a lull for two hours. The almost exclusive topic was HQ new and old.

All told, I had a fabulous time, even though my brain was mush by the end of it. It was a three day visit to an alternate universe where the most popular RPGs in the world are Call Of Cthulhu and HeroQuest. Naturally this would be a happy place for me. In this dimension, it’s only the latter game that has an eagerly anticipated new edition on the way. There’s some other thing called 4E but that’s barely on the radar.

Monday — The traditional post-game dinner with the guests of honor takes place at the Alte Burg in Dreieich, which serves German fare with an emphasis on regional Hessian dishes. As is the case at many international cons, the guest is expected to consume something local and appalling that the organizers masochistically adore. Here it’s the infamous handkäse, a.k.a. musical cheese. And yes, it’s affectionately named after the explosive flatulence it is meant to provoke.



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Tags: food, gaming hut, heroquest, on the road

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The morning begins with the HeroQuest preview and workshop, which winds up being all preview and hardly any workshop. A gratifyingly full room is present to hear me spill the detailed beans in on the evolution, philosophy and rules structures of the new version. The simpler, completely different implementation of extended contests seems to click immediately, confirming my hope that folks will find it instantly intuitive. Anything said in the seminar is public info, so if any attendees feel like blogging it in the days ahead, by all means be my guest.

Right afterwards came the replacement run for What’s That Game?, an event postponed from last night when appointed moderator David Scott failed to get through traffic on his way to the event. This morning David ducks out again, this time on grounds I can only characterize as general punkitude. So, troupers all, Lawrence “Loz” Whittaker, Mike Mason and I proceed sans moderator. For fifty minutes we present each other with obscure games we had been allegedly been reminiscing about the night before and then press for elaboration. Secrets of such Ebay rarities as What’s That In the Well?, Football Stadium Bleacher Collapse, Whizkids’ rock collecting ARG, and the Joe Bazooka collectible gum game are blithely revealed. Also discussed: the unsuccessful game designs of prominent Marxist leaders and the esoteric Amish origins of Dungeons and Dragons. No doubt the original RopeCon panel event on which this was based is seriously mangled in the process. The proceedings are audio recorded, God help us all, for posterity, and so may eventually pop up on the web. Moments after it ends, all three of us rush to our rooms to frantically jot down notes to make a real game out of The Meatibles.

In mid-event, Charlie Krank surfaces to present me with a plate of ganzducken, thus making good on his solemn culinary vow. It adds a level of delicious additional challenge to the already daunting improvisational task at hand.

All other con organizers take note: Tentacles has the best-designed guest badges ever. The badge is laminated, hangs from a lanyard—and is the same on both sides. Flipped Badge Syndrome is defeated! A small stroke of genius.

Events in the Masters Of Luck and Death freeform mirror the HeroQuest resolution mechanic:


Contest Framing


Opposed Ability Rolls


Resolution


Consequences

My panel on narrative structure in RPGs also played to a surprisingly full house. I mapped out the pass/fail structure that characterizes genre pieces and procedurals, discussing its applications to the branching world of game story-making. Borrowing a passage from the new HeroQuest, I illustrated this by breaking down that early bit of pulp adventure, Beowulf, in pass/fail terms. Although I got to the Q&A portion sooner than in the morning's panel, it was still more monologuing than I usually try to shoot for in a seminar situation. Tomorrow I expect to achieve balance with two completely question-driven panels, with those ever-reliable topics, GM Troubleshooting and Ask Robin.

Tags: gaming hut, heroquest, on the road

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Last night I assisted in running a new variant of HeroQuest, which might aptly be named DrunkQuest. In DrunkQuest, one is called to the table to assist when a game has begun even though the GM and at least half of the players have been down in the old town dramatically overindulging in the libations for which the region is famed. The gaming equivalent of a designated driver, if you will.

Through a Q&A process it was determined that all of the players were residents in a tiny splinter version of Hell—an experimental rebranding initiative, if you will. PCs included a just-arrived soul, a pair of guardian demons, the beleaguered Stygian project manager, an auditor from the heavenly host and, just for variety’s sake, Jack Burton from Big Trouble In Little China. Hell itself is the worst place imaginable—Essex. A traffic circle of eternal congestion that sears the soul of inmate and warder alike with its cosmic mediocrity.

DrunkQuest must for obvious reasons be simpler in design even than the new stripped-down HeroQuest. There is only one rules mechanism: players who find themselves in conflict with one another roll d20s and the high one gets what he or she wants.

No doubt miraculously, the storyline was eventually steered to shore, to a conclusion that was positively Sartrean in its pitiless thematic appropriateness. The apocalypse came, and the participants, in order of success, all got to define one thing about the new cosmo-theological order.

You see where this is going.

Horribly, they wound up putting everything back just the way it had been before—except that now they’d forever languish in the knowledge that they could have made it all different, if only they had chosen to.

A silly and accidentally profound exercise that nonetheless reminded me of one of the inchoate questions bubbling on the mental back burner—that we have yet to really establish a solid way of resolving verbal conflict between main characters in a way that resolves as do like scenes in dramatic literature. Instead of a give-and-take of negotiation and resolution, each player tends to stake out a position and reiterate it until the GM calls for a die roll and one of them wins and the other loses. I’m seeing the opening glimmerings of a system to explore this goal, which could be bolted on to nearly any RPG, from HQ to D&D. (Though not Dying Earth.)


As the sun completes its warm and gentle orbit for through the sky, the competition among convention’s English contingent for the last waning patch of shade grows ever more desperate.

Although a few impromptu game sessions are staged here and there, the first day of Tentacles is devoted mostly to social events — opening ceremonies, Cthulhu For President, the pub quiz. (Note to self: submit much less difficult questions next time.)

I do my bit at a "state of Glorantha publishing" panel helmed by Moon Design honcho Rick Meints. Looks like the log jam of printing problems and scheduling issues that has plagued the line of late is about to break. I’m very proud that the new HeroQuest is part of this. And happy to hear very good feedback from playtesters.


The green lights and elder sign gobo on the castle tower are an eldritch delight.

Check out the Tentacles live web cam.

In what is surely mere coincidence, it turns out that the standard wine by the glass served by a hostel café in the middle of German wine country is exceptionally lovely. However, I stop at one. You never know when you’re going to be called upon to serve as designated GM at a surprise session of DrunkQuest.

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, heroquest, on the road

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My fraught relationship with European plumbing continues. No hot water in the hotel this morning.

The itinerary begins with a supply run to a massive wholesale warehouse selling everything from shoes to croutons. The turducken plan faces modification, given that the first of the three birds in the golden sequence is not a German staple. New plan: gooseducken. Or, in deference to our hosts, ganzducken.


Charlie and I take steps to introduce the two plant-related food groups to the menu.


No convention may proceed without skewers, toy pan flutes, and camouflage Ts.

Castle Stahleck is hands down the most visually stunning convention location I’ve ever laid eyes on. Overlooking the Rhine, it is surrounded by vineyards, with the old town of Bacharach below. The weather couldn't be more photogenic.





As the gang reassembles for another convention and delighted greetings are exchanged I am again reminded that what I think my job is about most of the year is incorrect. It’s not really about resolution systems, story theory, kewl new powers, or lovingly evoked settings. These things are just the lingua franca that helps create the space for what this is really about: the border-transcending bond of community between old friends and kindred souls.

For this first night we are sharing the space with a school trip or youth group or somesuch. The kids are young teens who have just slammed headlong into puberty. They’re running and screaming like a pack of wigged-out moonbats. The hallway of my current room reeks in the aftermath of a perfume fight. Adult supervision, assuming there is any, has withdrawn to a safe remove until they wear themselves out.

One of the Tentacles events I’m most looking forward to is new this year—a wine tasting staged by a local vintner. Naturally it took a non-local, Alison Place, to hatch this genius idea.

The tasting wraps up only an hour before my final seminar, the general “grill Robin” Q&A. So there is the chance that all of my answers will consist of variations on: “I love you, man! No, seriously, man — I love you!”

Tags: gaming hut, on the road

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Arrive at Frankfurt airport, 7 am local time, bedtime my time. Discover that my lengthy efforts while in the States to secure a prepaid cell phone that is cheap there and also works internationally have been in vain, at least on the second front. (American roaming on my Canadian phone? Crazy expensive. International roaming? It is to laugh.)

Then it’s a kip out on convention organizer Fabian Kuechler’s parents’ couch as we wait for the hotel room to become available. Lapse into a brief but satisfying coma. I have a sleep mask with me, purchased during my recovery from the Alarming Ocular Event, and it turns out to be a good weapon against jet lag, allowing a snooze in defiance of the lovely bright sunshine. I also have a baggie full of dried cherries, which according to some article somewhere are chock full of natural melatonin. Supposedly they help reset the body clock. I will report on their progress as the week goes on. If prior trips are any barometer, I will totally crash tomorrow at midday. If this does not happen, the cherries and sleep mask get to duke it out for bragging rights.

After hotel check-in, a shower and a net surf, Fabian swings by with Tentacles’ other overseas guest of honor, Chaosium prexy Charlie Krank. We head to a picturesque outdoor cafe nestled under fruit tree boughs. Conversation reveals Charlie’s perennial indispensability to the proceedings. He is imported not only to run games and provide the latest Chaosium skinny, but to serve as the convention’s BBQ master. This year Charlie threatens to introduce vegetables to the convention diet, a radical proposal I heartily endorse. Even more tantalizing is the dangled prospect of that culinary chimera, the legendary and mouthwatering turducken, though, ever girded for disappointment, I file this in the “believe it when I see it” category.


Fabian scrawls crucial last-minute notes in a mysterious agglutinative script.


Fabian and Charlie scour an ancient map for signs of Deep One activity.

Afterwards Charlie retreats to the hotel & I get to warm up my line of seminar palaver as Fabian and I talk HeroQuest, Glorantha, movies, and the thematic underpinnings of No Country For Old Men. Fabian displays the admirable quality of agreeing with my media recommendations. I am gratified by the gradual return of my vocabulary and syntax.

Tomorrow: meat purchase day, and the trek to the castle.

Tags: on the road

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Flew Air Canada to Frankfurt and was excited to see that they’d tricked the plane out with those seatback entertainment consoles, which they’re gradually adding to their whole fleet. Now only those who want to see Just For Laughs Gags need subject themselves to it. Those who want their middle-of-the-road Hollywood rom com or big budget kids movie get what they want. Meanwhile, I get to watch a Hong Kong heist thriller co-directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To, starring Simon Yam and Louis Koo!

Triangle is interesting in that each director took on thirty minutes of it, and had their own team of screenwriters, but it isn’t an anthology film. The breaks between the three auteurs are not immediately apparent, although you sense the film shift moods from hyper-accelerated storytelling to a subtler dread to atmospheric showdown. It also reverses the usual story arc of the heist flick in a way I shouldn’t spoil.

My assessment of its coolness might be colored, however, by the intervention of Mr. Space Invader. My seat was located across the aisle from a row of two in a space for three, meaning that there was an empty space. This attracted one of those gentlemen who can’t sit in a seat for the duration of a Transatlantic flight and wants to stand the whole way, leaning on somebody else’s seat back. When he put his hand on the seat back in front of me I felt an acute sense of having my limited territory further diminished, but I said nothing and eventually he went away. Until he came back, right at a crucial point in the film, to clamp a meaty claw mere inches from the tiny screen. I had no choice but to give him a firm but gentle finger flick. At least the console allows you to rewind.

I had not reckoned on his also being Mr. Incredibly Loud Talker. He moved back a few feet, found somebody to palaver with about cars or something, and proceeded to yammer throughout the climactic Johnnie To segment. That’s the problem with watching something you care about on a plane. It's not like you can go shushing people.

That’ll be the new trick with these thingies—to pick something that you only sort of want to see. If it’s horrible, it elongates the trip. If it’s a cool and unexpected find like Triangle, you want to see it too much to see it on a plane.

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Last weekend I was hoping to run a minor errand while completing a major one. The main mission was to head down to Chinatown to purchase a new wok. (What happened to the old one? I was badly advised on the seasoning issue, and the dang thing rusted out.)

I needed also to pick up some cheapo poker chips to take with me on my imminent trip to Germany. I’ll be running a session of the revised HeroQuest at Tentacles. Playtesters have discovered that chips serve as a useful visual aid for the all-new extended contest rules.

There are a couple of all-purpose discount import stores on Spadina selling everything from sake sets to gaudily painted figurines of spliff-smoking, accordion-playing Rasta dudes. I went into one hoping it would have poker chips, but it was not among the tchochkes on offer. Oh, well, I thought, I’ll just use beads or something else instead.

So we go to the Chinese housewares store, and what do we find, far nearer the front than the wok aisle? A well-stocked shelf full of inexpensive gambling accessories, from mah jong on down. Silly me! Of course a Chinese housewares place is going to have all that stuff. Shoulda headed there from the get-go.

Tags: heroquest, out and about

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Last week, commenter bignose.whitetree.org responded with concern to my post describing a cool online tool to generate real-seeming names. This post seemingly contradicts the advice given in Robin’s Laws Of Good Gamemastering, which suggests that you prepare to be spontaneous by having a list of suitable names already at hand. Am I asking people to do what I say, not what I do? I promised him a response and here it is. In fact I have a couple of answers.

First of all, Robin’s Laws was written six years ago. If I haven’t changed anything about the way I run games in that time I’m a sorry excuse for a GM. Questioning existing techniques, including my own, is part of my job as a game designer. I’m always looking for new ways of doing things. If I find one that seems promising, the fear of contradicting something I’ve written in the past is not a big deterrent to my deciding to share it with you here. What would embarrass me is the thought that I once developed an approach to gaming, let it harden into concrete, and have been defending that same patch of intellectual turf ever since.

Bignose mentions the need to provide yourself with setting-appropriate names and there I agree completely. The page I pointed out gives you good results only for the contemporary US. Other places and times will still require well-pruned name lists created through careful prep. I wouldn’t use them for Trail Of Cthulhu’s 1930’s setting, for example. To get the distinctive flavor of period names—no one is called DeWitt Bodeen, Minna Gombell or Brooks Benedict anymore—I find a movie of the time on IMDB.com and mix and match sur- and given names.

Then there’s the issue of laptop use at the gaming table. This points out the importance of finding the techniques that work for you, whether they work for anyone else or not. I was a laptop skeptic but now find it more useful than a jumbled sheaf of loose papers. I find it time consuming and obtrusive to flip through my stack of notes in search of the name list, cross it off, and jot it down.

Ultimately it’s a matter of focusing on end result and not getting hung up on process. How quickly and seamlessly can you name an improvised character with method A versus method B? I’ve reached the point where I can hit a browser bookmark and type a note in a document file more smoothly than that. Other GMs will find it easier to stick to pen and paper. As in acting or writing or any other creative endeavor, the technique that works is the one that works for you.

To the extent that I’m giving anyone advice, I should be suggesting that people keep sharpening their game by keeping an eye out for better alternatives. Prep time is finite; if you can cut the amount of time you devote to one task, you can devote that time to some other area of your campaign.

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Toronto just had itself a weekend-long transit strike , in a misadventure that illustrates the difficulty of predicting an organization’s actions based on an outsider’s view of its rational self interest.

Relations between the Toronto Transit Commission and its union have been rocky for decades. The city has a good transit system, once the envy of the world — and thus one that a large chunk of the population has come to depend on. Each strike has dealt a blow to the system, causing it to lose riders who never come back. Thus is a death spiral effect kicked into motion. With fewer riders brings cuts in services and threats to the job security of its workers. Every time a contract negotiation comes up and the threat of another disruptive strike looms, calls go out from residents to make transport an essential service, like the cops and firefighters, who aren’t permitted to strike.

This time around, as negotiations went to the wire and a new strike seemed likely, Toronto’s mayor David Miller found himself under pressure to call on the province to declare the TTC an essential service. This put him in a bind between the popular position and his progressive inclinations. He went with the latter, opposing essential service status.

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Were I involved in the illicit yet highly lucrative world of pet handbill wagering, I would lay money on the proposition that this guy is in no way lost, but is instead simply expanding his territory.

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Picking character names is tough. Often it’s not the major characters who cause the brow to furrow, but the walk-ons who nonetheless need proper nouns. Most random name pickers take no particular account of name frequency, so you get those weird spam header appellations like Lucretia T. Melon or Lyndon Flywheel.

Hit this link and you get four names, one male and one female, based on frequencies derived from census data. You get a statistically common name and an oddball pick for each gender. Refresh and you get four more.

This will be my new best friend for gaming purposes, now that I’m playing with a wifi-enabled laptop at the table. Coming up with decent names on the fly is even tougher than doing so for a work of fiction.

[Via John August.]

Tags: fiction hut, gaming hut, land o links

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When I was running my American Empire series last year, set in a satirical future, one of the details I improvised to evoke the awfulness of things was the ubiquity of vat-grown McNuggets . Many of the vexingly alien inhabitants of the planet the cyber-soldier PCs were policing considered this food an intoxicating delicacy.

If I’d been paying attention, I would have known that the technology for in vitro meat production won’t have to wait until the interstellar future. It’s not that far from the production stage— if anyone wants it.

The article discusses the difficulty of growing complex, quality cuts of meat but surely the technology will be used to create cheap processed meats. If I were trying to market the stuff, I wouldn’t call it meat at all, or underline the exact mechanics of its production. “Cultivated protein” sounds much less Cronenberg than “in vitro meat.” (Okay, make that somewhat less.) It might also be easier to sell something that isn’t trying to taste like a specific tasty animal.

Normally you’d expect the eco movement to recoil from something like this, as it has from genetically modified foods. With in vitro meat less energy-intensive and having a lower greenhouse gas footprint than cattle production, the question of whether to instinctively reject the idea becomes complicated. Is it the environmentally concerned carnivore's ethical obligation to prefer faux-burgers? Will a schism arise in the vegan community between purists and early adopter vat eaters?

Would you eat the stuff?

Tags: food, futurism

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