Fight On! #3
Hey, my adventure Khas Fara, Village of Fear appears in Fight On! #3. I really like Fight On! and appreciate what they are doing. Issue #2 evoked many fond memories.
Fair Play
MACE 2008
I just got back from MACE 2008, where I pinch-hit for Andy “I am laid up with Asian Death Cough” Kitkowski. Attendance was down 40%, which is ominous and not really unexpected given the economy, but there was still a room full of roleplaying games and gameage going on at all times. Unable to run Andy’s lunatic sessions, I ended up rolling a one-player session into Jeff Collyer’s PTA game (where my Edges were “The Dark Arts” and “The Dork Arts”) and running a playtest of Fiasco in the evening for five people, four of them pretty new to this sort of thing. I hadn’t tried it with five and it worked fine - they ended up with a very dark and funny story about two feuding brothers waiting for their father to die, with the women in their lives conspiring toward their own ignoble ends. There was some murdering, some pathos, two car crashes (one real and one faked), and a lot of laughter at the table. Outside of gaming I got to spend some time getting lost in High Point with the gracious and always-burning Luke Crane, which is such a pleasure. Luke also gave me some important notes on Brighton Beach attire and attitude for my Russian Mafiya PTA series. Come to MACE next year!
Fiasco: Garden State
I’m diligently plugging away on a small but fun project called Fiasco, which is ready for outside playtesting. It’s designed to emulate a certain sort of mishap-filled caper movie, and one of the fun bits is that you pull elements from sets, and these sets define many facets of play - the location, but also the tone of both the prospective crimes and the degree of carnage that will ensue. I’ve written a few and asked friends to author some too. Here’s Kevin Allen Jr’s awesome New Jersey set*. This is a bit of an information design headache as well, but I think I’ve got the whole “display both 144 discrete items and their causal and functional relationships in two 6×9″ pages or less” thing licked. Let me know if I’m wrong, or if you’d like to play Fiasco. 3-5 players, two hours, lots of mayhem.
*His set is actually better than this, including much more detail, but this is a format test first.
Beggar’s Opera
Graham “The Devil” Walmsley challenged me to write a game about a song. I accepted and he told me my song was some Kurt Weill nonsense that demonstrated his deeply flawed taste, so I wrote a little game based on John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera, which is pretty funny and cool. Does it work? I do not know. I should put in a rule requiring the narrator to mock Robert Walpole. Note how easy it would be to turn this into a contemporary Baltimore gangster drama.
Bodymore Murdaland
Jonathan Walton kicked off some jack-leg contest and of course I couldn’t resist. I miss The Wire so much it hurts. It’s pathological. Here’s the picture I’d use for my cover page if I could. I guess I’ll have to cruise up to East Oliver and Bethel and snap it myself. Did I mention I’m in The Wire withdrawal?