Shadow’s Eleven

ByDankelzahn

With our Renegade Horizon games getting postponed, I have another space to fill in with some Shadowrun information.

As I’ve previously stated, I’m going with pre-generated characters for this campaign. For most of the players in the group, this game will be both their first exposure to the Spirit of the Century rules as well as the Shadowrun universe. Typically that means the game starts off a bit slower as everyone tries to grasp the rules and setting in order to figure out how their characters would act. In order to help them out in both regards, I’m going to do something different with the first session’s run. Part of the enjoyment of a good caper movie is how we as the audience aren’t aware of the protagonists’ plans and get to see them unfold piece by piece. Even if the event goes of entirely to plan, we are kept in suspense and continuously surprised because we see the obstacles that get thrown in the heroes’ way and watch as they are able to overcome them.

Since most Shadowrun adventures can break down to a caper of some sort the same parallels can be drawn. So after talking to the players about the first introductory mission of the mini-campaign, I’m going to pull a few tricks out to give them the same type of experience. They’ll be thrown right into the job with no time spent with the players sitting around planning every detail.

The problem to a set up like this is obvious – how are the players supposed to role-play competent shadowrunners sneaking into a secure facility if they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing?

I think I’ve found a solution.

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Shadowrun – Mixing The Flavors

ByDankelzahn

Since my Star Wars and Renegade Horizon games have had to cancel the last couple sessions due to scheduling conflicts, I might as well follow up my last Shadowrun post with another one. Although I previously mentioned starting with an overview of the campaign and talking about characters, I realized that starting with my vision of the Shadowrun world and how I will be running it would be a better place to start.

There are a number of people who don’t like the Shadowrun setting due to its mix of genres. For them the inclusion of fantasy in their cyberpunk is like the ice cream in their Pizza. Normally I’d agree with them, but there’s an additional factor that has to be taken into account – Earthdawn.

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Next Up – Shadowrun

ByDankelzahn

I’ve finally started to settle on the game I’m going to try to put together for my next stint at gamemastering. After taking a good look at how Earthdawn went and where the problems arose as well as what parts of my gamemastering style need improvement I’ve decided to run a short Shadowrun mini-campaign – a single mission that will involve a basic run and then some follow-up in a more open format.

There’s still some time left in our Star Wars campaign, and I’m not trying to rush that out the door early in order to play something else. I’m hoping to use this blog as a design log and document some of the campaign design and planning that I do to get the game ready to be run. In the future I’ll be talking about the system I’ll be using, the campaign setup, the group template, and other aspects of the game but for my first post I’m going to start with how I’m going to address the problems of my Earthdawn game.

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Star Wars: The Twilight Path, Reborn!

ByDankelzahn

After a long break to allow the new father in our group to get accustomed to parenthood, we’ve finally restarted our Star Wars campaign, The Twilight Path. The session went pretty well for the most part – the action, roleplaying, and investigation elements were pretty well balanced and paced well throughout the adventure. Things started to drag at one point, but after a break for food we all came back to the table refreshed and regained our earlier vigor.

Unfortunately the gamemaster and I felt that the system was working against us this game. After our experiences with the Spirit of the Century rules, the d20 implementation of Star Wars felt even more clunky and cumbersome than when the game started. On the other hand the two other players really weren’t interested in any possible conversions and were more comfortable with the d20 ruleset so we won’t be converting this campaign.

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Renegade Horizon!

ByDankelzahn

Renegade HorizonLast Friday I finally got a chance to try out the Spirit of the Century rules in the first session of Renegade Horizon, a game set in our gamemaster’s homebrew world of Aria, and really enjoyed it. The game mechanics for SotC have proven quick and simple but with a depth that both encourages and rewards creativity and narration. However none of us were overly interested in the default setting of SotC – we wanted a world of high action but without the pulpiness of giant gorillas flying biplanes.

Because of the genre-mashing involved, it’s difficult to give a one-sentence summary of Aria. The closest RPG comparisons I can come up with would have to be Privateer Press’s Iron Kingdoms, which they describe as Full Metal Fantasy, and Misguided Games’ dieselpunk game Children of the Sun. A fantasy world at his heart, it does have some basic technology. The most advanced branch of science is aonics – the use of sigils and runes to bind minor “demons” to objects to create a specific effect. This new field has opened new avenues of technology such as limb replacement or airships. In addition men have learned that inscribing certain sigils onto themselves allows them access to a form of sorcery. However such sorcerers must constantly fight a losing battle against the bound demons for control and thus have been labeled heretics by the rest of the civilized world.

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The Failure that was Earthdawn: First Dawn

ByDankelzahn

In my last blarg I talked about the storyline I had put together for my recent Earthdawn game. If you haven’t read that blarg yet please do, because otherwise some of the issues or events I’ll be discussing below may not make sense.

First Dawn started well enough, with the characters interacting with the various residents of the kaer. Everyone had the opportunity to show off a bit of their character’s background and motivations (except the ork’s player who couldn’t make it) which I think they all enjoyed. After that the party was gathered together for a ceremony that ended with the kaer doors being opened and the party heading out through the traps to the surface with tokens which were supposed to disable the traps for them.

At the far end of the trapped area, the party was introduced to the obsidiman that was supposed to act as their guide. Centuries ago he had volunteered to enter the kaer and enter the Dreaming through the Scourge to be able to guide its people back to the surface when the time came. The party, being told he was how they would open the kaer doors but thinking he was just a statue/key, had drag him up to the surface with the aid of a disk of True Air which levitated him and allowed him to be floated to the front antechamber. Due to the proximity to the surface awoke while the party was resting, leading to some interesting interaction.

After some discussion with the obsidimen about who he was and then ultimately what to expect outside, the adepts finally opened the front doors to the kaer and saw the destruction the Scourge had caused to the countryside. With that visual the first session ended. In hindsight it was a successful session and had hit all of the goals and themes I had set (with the exception of the missing player).

Everything went downhill from there.

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Earthdawn: First Dawn – The Campaign that Wasn’t

ByDankelzahn

As mentioned previously, for the last two months I have been running an Earthdawn campaign I had titled First Dawn. The story was originally intended to cover one kaer’s reopening to the world above and the adepts who were sent to scout the surface. The game was scheduled to run roughly six to eight sessions and start with the exploration of the valley between Southhome, the player’s Kaer, and Northhome, their sister kaer.

Unfortunately during the second session I let the campaign take a sharp left turn away from my intent and things only went downhill from there. I primarily blame myself for this, but afterwards I just couldn’t get the story back on track. I’m going to try and identify the problems I had and what I could have done to correct them below. However in order to convey the magnitude of diversion from the intended story and feel I first need to start with a description of the campaign as it was intended to be.

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Earthdawn: First Dawn, Session 1

ByDankelzahn

We finally had a chance to start First Dawn, the Earthdawn campaign that I’m running, this last Sunday. After talking to the players, we decided to start this campaign a little differently than our normal style. I wanted the characters to be more powerful than starting Adepts to rationalize their choice to be leaving their Kaer, but not all of the players were familiar enough with the game system to make more advanced characters without a lot of help. So to speed character generation and to help build a more cohesive group, we met a couple weeks before our first actual game session for a character generation session where the players would design their characters and personalities and I would take those and create stats later.

After giving the group the rundown of life in the Kaer and the different races and disciplines that they might have to choose from, everyone came up with their general character concepts. From there we began fleshing out backgrounds and motivations, tying the characters together while at the same time developing the Kaer where the game would start. Before the character generation session I had known what sort of overarching plot I wanted for the campaign, but I hadn’t imagined that the players would hand me the perfect vehicle to make it personal for them during character generation.

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Dankelzahn the Gamemaster

ByDankelzahn

I’m not going to pretend I’m an amazing gamemaster. I’m usually told my games are fun, but there’s a lot of things that I see myself do that I wish I would do or had done differently. The blarg that follows probably shouldn’t be taken as advice that should necessarily be followed – it’s collection of my thoughts on my own gamemastering style inspired by some of the discussion that took place in the comments of my introduction blarg.

In my opinion, nailing down a gamemastering style is more difficult than a playing style due to the different nature of gamemastering. This isn’t true in all cases – some gamemasters run games completely transparently, where the players are aware of most of the decisions, difficulties, and stats surrounding everything he does. But I’ve noticed I don’t run games like this, which can give players one perspective based on what they see while giving myself a different perspective knowing why I’m doing what I’m doing. This probably needs some clarification.

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Earthdawn: OneStep System

ByDankelzahn

My current group has decided to set aside Star Wars for now while one of our players settles in to his newfound role of fatherhood. Instead of waiting for him to be able to play again, we’ve decided to run another semi-short term game to give the rest of us something to play while he gets used to his new schedule. Since I’ve had some ideas for a short term kaer-emergence Earthdawn game called First Dawn floating around my head (I almost decided to run it as a play-by-post), I volunteered to be the interim GM.

The group as a whole has had very little experience with the Earthdawn system, and given the intent to have a short term game to begin with, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on system explanation. In addition after talking to one of the players I learned that while he didn’t have a problem with the system, looking up what dice to roll for a given test was a little annoying.

Personally Earthdawn is probably my favorite RPG to run and play and I enjoy the varied dice of the Step System. That said I want to be sympathetic to my players’ complaints and I want to make the game run as fast as possible for this mini-campaign. In addition I love tinkering with rule systems; making little tweaks to the mechanics to make certain aspects of a game run more like my preferences. As a result I’ve decided to make a few slight modifications to the Earthdawn ruleset for this campaign.

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