Viscera!

The particular proximate 'prod' that prompted me to resurrect this blog was - having temporarily stepped away from Twitter and reactivated my account at RPGnet for a less unhealthy social media experience - being asked by Andrew Wright (who blogs at Fantasy Game Book and has written several supplements for Advanced Fighting Fantasy) whether there was a working link to Viscera!, a little booklet of critical hits and other stuff that I wrote for Fighting Fantasy-based games nearly a decade ago. Ooof. 

And so, while you can access it (now) by clicking on the little link on the left hand side of blog, here it is again; just click on the image above. It *should* work. 

Andrew Wright has covered Viscera! in his thread "Exploring combat and other rule systems in Troika! and its relatives". In fact, if you want to keep track of when people are saying something interesting about Fighting Fantasy-based systems on RPGnet, do follow Andrew (greyarea13).

While I would likely revisit some of the stuff in Viscera! were I to produce a new version, or a "MyAFF3e", the thing I like about what I did produce is that there really is very little there, in terms of "crunch" at least. YOU are the Hero, and YOU can make this game, on the fly, at your table. If I were to produce a "MyAFF3e", that would be the principle by which I would try to check any instincts I might have towards the baroque.

My Monster Manual

Not quite, but here is a rare occasion where my professional life has *some* connection with fantastical, gameable content.

Later this year - just in time for your Christmas lists, hopefully - Routledge will publish a book I have written with Jamie Lewis on the sociology of Bigfooting.

To be fair, Jamie did most of the actual research, which involved well over a hundred interviews with Bigfooters - current, former, and even disillusioned - as well as a other people in the orbit of knowledge making re: Bigfoot - sceptics, academics, etc. What we have tried to do is reconstruct the rationality of Bigfooting as a knowledge making community, to treat it fairly and seriously, as Bigfooters themselves take the subject seriously.  

We published a precursor paper in Cultural Sociology last year, which is Open Access so anyone should be able to read it, should they wish.

The Magic of Familiarity

So what have I been playing over the past five years? Not a lot, at least not as regularly as I would have hoped or liked. I most recently ran OpenQuest 3e, an elegant distillation of d100 fantasy. I've run a few one-shots (even if it has taken us several short sessions) of Barbarians of Lemuria/Everywhen, one of my favourite systems. And in that time I did, of course, run a fair bit of Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, a system to which I will inevitably keep bouncing back, despite my desire to 'fix' it - or perhaps because of that.

I will have more to say about each of those games in time, but the one thing this sporadic gaming had unfortunately reinforced has been the advantage of familiarity. Oh, yes, I am like all of you; I am constantly distracted and tempted by the new shiny thing, or even some quite old shiny things - I have recently been rereading/skimming through a lot of Fate rulebooks, keen to internalise the game logic that promises that player characters, in all their complications and diverse sources of narrative agency, power the rhythm of the game. We will see if I get there.

But this familiarity is why Advanced Fighting Fantasy really rolls at *my* table in ways that even OpenQuest and Barbarians of Lemuria do not. I can knock up an adventure more or less on the fly, or at least with half an hour of preparation. I can, roughly, anticipate how long each encounter or node will take to resolve mechanically, how likely is failure, how heavy might be the costs of success, and how much fun it will be to play out. At least at *my* table. 

So just default to published adventures, yes? Let the familiarity of another GM guide your path. But published adventures - even very good ones - are dotted with places and events where the GM using the adventure has to divine the intention of the writer, else risk a cascade of GM interpretations, undoing the advantage of relying on the crystallised familiarity[1] of the writer. Roleplaying games are a *lively* experience, and the adventure writer is 'dead'. One of the first things I do with a published adventure that I plan to run is print a copy and, with my red fineliner, go through the text (after changing the names to ones that I can pronounce) marking sections where I need to think carefully - and produce possible answers - about the ways in which the choices of the players might unravel what the writer assumed might happen next.  

I am not just talking about situations in which the PCs murder an important NPC, or set fire to an important (and flammable) adventure location. The great wonder of roleplaying games is that they are open and unconstrained; players can always do something to surprise you (murder and arson are rarely that surprising). But when it is *my* adventure, I do not need worry about how to roleplay Lord Blackstone's reaction to the PCs' diplomacy, their theological arguments, their threats, or whatever. Of course I know what Lord Blackstone is going to do, how he is going to react, because he is me! I invented him, perhaps months ago, perhaps five minutes ago. And my familiarity with the world and the system *as a way of producing an adventure game* means that even if I somehow get Lord Blackstone 'wrong' I can, as GM, unfold the world in a way that stands a chance of being satisfying to the people at the table. 

Apologies for the ramble, going over what it pretty old ground. Stuff about actual games soon, including some more stuff for AFF2e.

[1] I am using 'familiarity' here to mean something different to the way I would use 'system mastery'. It is not so much that a GM can resolve situations at the table with minimal rules reference, but that a GM has a intuitive feel for the logics and rhythms of the game - encounter, session, adventure, campaign, etc. - and player and GM *experience*. I think that you can have system mastery with a low level of familiarity, and given how often I check the rules for magic and priestly powers in Advanced Fighting Fantasy, I think you can have a high level of familiarity with imperfect system mastery. I possibly need a better term than 'familiarity', but I am wary of inventing new terms in my professional, academic writing, so I will not do so here.

Five years, my brain hurts a lot

"I cast 'Resurrection'."

<Rolls 'System Shock'.>

<Succeeds.>

Blood Sundown Review

I've actually been running games recently! Bully for me. I decided that I'd start reviewing the products I actually use - this was my first review on DrivethruRPG.

I've been running the sample adventure in Blood Sundown for the past few nights for players who are relatively new to RPGs and it has worked a treat. Everywhen's simple mechanics with little bookkeeping or arithmetic make it ideal for new or casual players, and the range of pregenerated characters included mean you can be up and running almost straight away. The sample adventure could probably be played in an evening if players most fast, but it'll have taken us three sessions of 2(ish) hours. The adventure itself is a good introduction to a 'Weird West' setting, and while everything needed is there on the page, there's no reason a GM couldn't put extra meat on the bones and turn the conflict between Dr Vitale and the townsfolk of Bliss into a longer campaign. The adventure does contain a section that implies some pretty basic information is hidden behind a dice roll, which is something that I try to avoid at all costs as a GM - player agency requires some information, even if it isn't complete or entirely correct - but that's an easy enough fix. You still need to reward characters who have, for example, the 'keen eyesight' boon or high Mind scores, but the reward cannot be the basic information required for action. That said, the adventure doesn't require the PCs to any particular thing for it to work, but that doesn't mean it is a railroad - Dr Vitale has his own plans and will put them into action if he can.

The rest of the book is a very good sourcebook for running a Western game using Everywhen. It doesn't have to be 'weird' - it'd be perfectly possible to run a 'historical' or 'Spaghetti' Western game using Everywhen and Blood Sundown, as long as it affords for competent protagonists (and even here, to add more grit to the game simply lean the balance of NPCs away from Rabble and towards Toughs and Rivals). The book includes a range of setting appropriate careers (as you'd expect from any Barbarians of Lemuria adaptation) some new equipment and setting appropriate rules (such as advice on how to handle a fast draw shootout), as well as a discussion of Faith and Magic appropriate to a 'Weird West' game, which would be well suited for 'weirding' other historical settings too. There's a fairly slim, but perfectly adequate bestiary of mundane animals and supernatural creatures.

I can recommend this both on its own terms, and an example of an Everywhen 'build'. I was a little underwhelmed by the examples in the core book, but that is par for the course when it comes to a system that aspires to be 'universal'. As an example build - and this, I expect, is true of all the recent Everywhen releases - Blood Sundown shows GMs what they can do fairly straightforwardly with the Everywhen engine.

As a final point; the layout is clean, the page decoration uses only greys and blacks, and the art is perfectly good black and white work and it all prints well. While I have stumped up for the PoD, before that was available I printed it 'booklet sized' on my home printer and found it worked well.

Troika! review/overview

As an avowed Advanced Fighting Fantasy fan, I've been a big fan of Daniel Sell's Troika!, even though I've STILL not got it to the table. It's a really terrific 2d6 fantasy game built on the Fighting Fantasy chassis but very much doing its own thing. There are tons of reviews out there, but I'd like to point YOU (if I was to trust the visitor data, the YOU these days is mainly adult webcammers) in the direction of a nice little review by Jakob Schmidt HERE.

A Sensational Atlas

I was thinking about the bullet point format that has been (was? I'm well out of the loop these days)  discussed in OSR circles for a while now - basically digesting the sort of information found in the much maligned 'boxed text' (which I think is incredibly useful for new/rusty/tired GMs, but that's another post) and text for the GM's down into a series of bullet points. Sometimes these are presented as nested bullet points, so that the GM can see at a glance how one piece of information leads to another. Perhaps the extra information is revealed with time, by player questions, or through character action. I think this is an excellent format. [I can't find the original posts that got me thinking about this, but I'll add links if anyone points me in their direction]

This is done at the level of a dungeon 'room' or 'encounter location'. But years ago, running a WFRP game, I reflected on the 'placelessness' of my GMing. By this I mean that each inn, each city, each forest, each river etc. were almost utterly interchangeable. Except for 'plot elements', so to speak. Now, I'd like to think that I'm doing myself down, but I don't think I'm missing the mark by too much. And you could say that the 'plot elements' are what is important and that too much 'colour commentary' will mislead the players and take their focus off the important stuff. Perhaps. Nevertheless...

Nevertheless I want the players to get a sense of place, and movement, of travel when we play. To remember a place as more than just "where we did x or y". I am reminded here of a post from Monsters and Manuals - which again, I cannot find - in which he talked about the descriptions of travel and the countryside in LotR. I don't think a GM should try to ape this, but a GM can produce a pale, but effective simulation of the effect. To do this at the table, when I begin my next game I am going to assemble a 'sensational atlas'. This will be incomplete and ever changing, but in essence it will consist of a deliberate effort to identify a stack of descriptive words and phrases that can be used *without a great deal of thought* to evoke a particular location. Nothing else to get in the way. Just an index card for each location with smells, sounds, sights, even tastes and more tactile sensations when appropriate. 

So a jungle might have:

Emerald shadow of the canopy

Smell of rotting leaf litter

Thorny vines catching on your tunic

Constant hum of insects

Sweat dripping into your eyes

Trunks as broad as a cottars hut holding up the green

Vivid reds and yellows of sickly smelling flowers

Hooting, echoing calls and replies from the heights of the trees.

Thick undergrowth pulling at your boots

Sprawling ridge-like roots

Swarms of tiny flies crawling into your nose

Sucking mud of a boggy hollow

Crumbling, fallen log crawling with fat squirming larvae

and more more more, but no fat, nothing that isn't descriptive or, by my own low standards, evocative. 

And so on, and so on. I'm no poet, but that doesn't matter at the table. A different card for each town, for each environment, and even, when possible, between different iterations of each environment. And these would build up during play, of course, as new descriptive details are added at the table.  I bet *you* already do this. But I need to formalise this process to ensure better GMing practice.But at the table, I could do with this kind of aide memoire, this kind of prompt sheet, to keep the game *in the world*.