Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Xenon: is entering real playtesting tomorrow night. I’m very excited. Dare I say Gen Con 2010?

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Over at Anyway, we’re talking about our factions for Mechaton. Here are some of the forces of the Sisterhod of Taw:

Two Sisterhood of Taw Sympaths emerge from Between Space. These ships, among the smaller classes of ships to come from the Udu shipyard, where they are constructed from rote and carefully maintained for centuries. They are solely for the relief of suffering among the foes of the Sisterhood — strictly for boarding actions, they latch onto opposing vessels and cut holes into the side, flooding the interior with the nuns of the Sisterhood.

A Sister of Taw, armed with the traditional weapons of her kind, the Sister's Thighs. You can see one such weapon at the top of this post. They are longs daggers made from the thighs of fallen comrades. They fight in tightly coordinated teams.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Back in August, I played a game of Hot War at Gen Con with Malcolm Craig, Rob Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth), Matt Machell (designer of Covenant), and Greg Stolze (designer of Unknown Armies). Hot War is the follow-up to Cold City, one of my favorite games and the spiritual descendant of The Mountain Witch, which makes the following story all that much stranger (sadder?).

You will note that Rob seems to be a recurring character in the drama of my drama. He was much more reasonable than I was.

See, here’s what happened. Malcolm, the designer of the game, was at my house the week before Gen Con. We’d been talking about what we wanted to do in a game of Hot War. I’d said, first jokingly, that I wanted to play James Bond.

Then I realized, no, seriously, I want to play James Bond.

See, the first game, Cold City, takes place in 1950. WWII is over and the old powers of Europe — and the emerging Superpowers of the US and USSR — all want some of that occult Nazi technology that the Thule Society was so keen on. So they send secret agents, ostensibly to aid each other, but usually to steal the goodies for their own purposes. These powers, being ganglial conspiracies themselves, often don’t inspire the greatest loyalty in their own agents, who then accept the mission for their own purposes. It’s very grim. The tone is that there’s something horrible writhing under the skin of Berlin, and you’re about to trap and release these horrors for purposes national or personal — but whatever the outcome, they’re horrors.

On the other hand, in Hot War, the writhing ugliness under the skin of society has frothed into the open. It posits that, in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis became more than a mere crisis and not only were nuclear weapons unleashed, but also the mysterious and occult Nazi technologies that had been collected a decade earlier. Clockwork soldiers, ghost guns and medusoid gazes are overt weapons of apocalypse. Despite that, the British government, such as it is, believes it can retain secrets and control. Wanting back its power and finding no one to conquer but its own citizens, it has turned inward. Ration cards are hoarded by those who want their neighbors hungry. Communication about the supernatural horrors you’ve seen is treason. Spam is once again a wartime delicacy. The skies of London are free of pigeons, the last of which were eaten weeks ago. The waters of the Thames, never potable in recent memory, are a clogged and polluted sludge.

Enter Bond. James Bond. Sent to sabotage a Soviet submarine off the coast of Cuba to prevent WWIII, he’s returned to London. But he doesn’t know. When he left Cuba in a British sub, the world was normal, even if there was to be a war on — after all, there was always to be a war on. But with the nukes flew the ghosts in Zyklon B canisters, the diesel-powered and human-brained robots, the things unknown and unknowable, between all powers and all who wished themselves powers. When his sub surfaced in the UK, the whole world had changed. But he was going to save Queen and Country, and he was going to do it with the techniques that worked so well: by sexing up beautiful scientists, by shooting the bad guy, by blowing up a building, and by exposing SPECTRE.

That was months ago. He’s still in his tuxedo, but he can’t get it cleaned or mended, so it’s a bit of a mess. The only person remaining in M Branch in Moneypenny, who’s doing her best to shield James from the news and tell him he did a good job. His gadgets are used up or comically unreliable. SPECTRE seems to be wholly a figment of his imagination.

Now, Matt Machell played a cop. A vicious, racist, misogynistic, stupid cop. He was hilarious. He was a vomit fountain of profanity for hours on end. And so here’s the thing. I wouldn’t have played my silly, fish-out-of-water James Bond if he’d come up with a straight character. Really! I would have come up with something else! But his character was designed to be irredeemably vile and hilarious. Sort of like Cartman with a York accent and a truncheon. And even were it not for Matt’s character, I still might have gone for something more serious were it not for the choice of starting situation: there are people exploding all over London. I mean, it’s not like it’s the souls of citizens, turned to pure quantum state by nuclear fission, and asking if their children are alright. It’s not like there were the brains of RAF pilots wired into rocket interceptors that were supposed to destroy incoming missiles, wondering if they can go home now. This is exploding Londoners. I just couldn’t see it seriously.

If I sound a little defensive, it’s because it’s how I feel. Rob’s character, a Jamaican cab driver, was the only reasonable character in the story. He talked to a witness while James was seducing a secondary character and Machell’s cop was shoe-groining some kid. The taxi driver came up with clever solutions and rolled his eyes as James took credit and gave his “sidekick” a pat on the back, completely missing the racial epithets thrown at him. I just hope I didn’t diminish Rob’s fun. There was some gnarly shit about racism that was going on, but I’d committed to a course. The course that led to my scientist paramour exploding in her tattered nightgown when she looked into her microscope.

(Greg seemed to be having a good time. He likes to laugh, and the game was absurd. Adding to the absurdity was Greg’s astounding impression of a London accent. I wish I could remember his character, but all I recall now is the accent. It was amazing. It was )

Malcolm’s games are gritty by design and use clever devices to make the humanity of the characters apparent. He said it was the only game of Hot War that had ever gone the way it went. I’m hoping that it was a fun way for everyone to go, even if it’s probably best to not go that way again.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

From our game Human Contact, this is Ayizé, a character of mine. She’s an anthropologist with a (scandalously) tight team. She was working to put herself in a position of political power in the station, but as she sees the Robusts as more and more human and interesting, she’s starting to feel like her political responsibilities are a distracting burden. She hasn’t even assumed her new position yet, and she’s regretting having achieved it. Well see how that hashes out.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’m in a regular game right now called Human Contact, also with Rob Bohl, and with Meg and Vincent Baker. We’re using the resolution rules from the imminent Apocalypse World, combined with the Owe List and Oracles from the Anthology Engine (as used in In a Wicked Age… and Beowulf). We’re making up Oracle elements on the fly and tossing them into a bag, pulling them out at a slower rate than we’re writing them. It’s working quite well. Because of the Oracle system, we’ve got a shit ton of characters, so I’ll give only broad strokes:

At some point, Humanity sent out starships to every conceivable humanly-habitable planet. They would take hundreds or thousands of years to arrive, and when they did arrive, they’d have no way of communicating home. Sometimes, colonies would be close enough to each other that they would be in contact, perhaps more than one planet in a system, or colonies on separate continents of a planet. Usually, a colony would be lost. A million years have passed since that time. Each planet that had survivors has grown its own humans. Some remember their ancestry. Some don’t.

One that does is the Graciles. Inheriting their Zulu names and developing a powerful academic culture, they explore the galaxy with a network of wormholes, finding and contacting their fellow humans. They have tatooed dark skin — jewelry is impractical in 0-G — and are tall and gangly. They have opposable toes. Their clothing is subdued, their lives centuries long, their technology familiar but flawless. They are masters of the strength:mass ratio, having developed gossamer structures of titanic strength and a ubiquitous communication network. Their society is a meritocracy based on their scientific work.

Another group, called the Robusts, developed cities and maybe even local spaceflight, but has since disregarded those technologies as irrelevant. Instead, they have the Dirt, a thin information-saturated crust covering the six continents of the world. It feeds them endocrinal information about their own pasts, each other, their quarry. They live in tribes of a few dozen. They are physically strong (at least compared to the Graciles, many of whom have been wounded accidentally when trying to take liberties with Robusts), they are confident of their place in their world, and they possess information about their existence in the world that clearly contradicts the Graciles’ records but is no less credible. The Robusts have shown themselves quite capable of eliminating the Graciles, but hold themselves in reserve, hoping for a peaceful exchange with their cousins, whom they believe left them in the world to develop into better people. Personally, I’m hoping the Dirt makes it off the planet. It’s got some sort of apocalyptic agenda, itself. It’s some sort of vast endocrinal system.

One episode was composed entirely of a debate over academic credentials. Another was what society had the right to raise a baby borne of a Gracile and fathered by a Robust. There’s always was a lot on the line.

Our principles in designing this world are that:

• There are no monocultures. Cultures develop in the same varieties that they do among humans, including subcultures and languages.
• Speaking of language, it’s hard. Everyone has some common language root back on Earth, but so do we and Persians. Mistranslation is a common phenomenon in the game. It brings both comedy and terror. Usually at the same time.
• Everyone believes they’re doing the right thing for good reasons. Sure, there are laws, but that doesn’t mean they’re obeyed. The Graciles have some sort of prime directive thing, but it goes out the window in approximately the time it takes for an anthropologist to get interested in their subject as a person. That is, about a week.
• Everyone acts like humans. They fall in love with the wrong people, they lie, they refuse to see things about themselves that are inconvenient or uncomfortable, and somehow, life goes on.

Vincent and I have been illustrating as we go. I’ll scan some illos. We’ve got a Gracile, a Robust, and some wildlife so far. I think there’s a landscape, too.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been playing Misspent Youth every week for the last couple of months with Evan Torner, Kat Jones, and the designer, Rob Bohl. It’s his first publication and it’s in ashcan form. I believe it’s sold out now (EDIT: It’s not! But there aren’t many left. Check the comments to get a copy!), but the ashcan phase is nearing completion, so you’ll be able to get the full version sometime soon.

It’s maybe 50 years in the future. New Orleans has been hit by hurricane after hurricane and its management has been handed over to the Mangrove corporation, a hotel and disaster population management company.

In the center of the city are the floating remains of New Orleans, repolished and slick for a few hundred “perfect” people living inside — perfect being a matter of genetic fashion. Outside is a ring of desperate people, used as cheap labor and fed on a nourishing but narcotic “Goo”. It keeps their bellies full and their motivation low.

This vast ring is all floating rafts, lashed so tight and close you never see the water. People live in houseboats. Neighborhoods have tides and waves. And everyone knows that the Big One, the truly terrifying hurricane, is on its way. But three kids are tired of that shit.

They are Lillybelle (played by Kat), a hippie earth mother, genuine and naïve and infectious with her passion …

Sammy (played by Evan), a kid with money and connections whose firmest belief is that he is a great author and a great hero…

and Benoît (played by me), an Algerian/French punk raised on the inside by (and to be) a chef, back when they had real food in there and everyone wasn’t just to be fed Fancy Goo.

They wanted people to eat real food, smoke real weed, and fuck for love and passion. Together, they sold drugs (a lot of drugs), beat policemen very badly, did what you do to rats (a lot of rats) and raised a (frankly, shitty) popular revolution against Mangrove. They (at least two of them) fucked a lot and had a vague, 17-year-old kind of relationship.

We finished the game with some revelations about the characters:

Sammy was truly asexual — I couldn’t ever figure out if that was going to change about him, and Evan played him that way to the end. And it turned out, he truly had it in him to be a real author. His fake accent, attention whoring, and action movie heroics were just grist for the eventual mill.

Lillybelle was curious: alternately gracious and scheming, sexually free but manipulative, she first raised a crowd to our aid, then wound up founding a religion.

Benoît was furious at Mangrove. He wanted to simply kill every person therein and turn it into a populated greenhouse, with the able people from the ring farming and living inside in the safety of the dome. It turns out, the one thing that was in his way was Lillybelle. For all his narcissism, he actually loved her and knew that he relied on her to keep himself from self-destruction. In the final episode, in our epilogues, Benoît had sold out completely. He’d been willing to sacrifice everything for his revenge against the people in the dome, but Kat sold out Lillybelle to save him. She spread her religion — a watered down “Spiritual, but not religious,” crystal-waving religion — for Benoît. My big plan had been for him to self-destruct completely without his democidal dream to sustain him. But the rules intervened on Kat’s and Benoît’s behalf. Benoît wound up farming, teaching everyone how to cook again, and eventually finding a non-violent compromise when Mangrove came back to finish the job. It was in no small part due to Kat’s public, religious persona that Benoît was able to so negotiate. But he was so disappointed in her, they never managed to see each other again. Sammy wound up having a clique of asexual artists. They wrote together and formed the “creation myth of our society”.

The game does what it’s supposed to do. I was some extreme version of 17-year-old me, all violence and comedy. The dude got laid a lot more than I did, though.

There were also, of course, scenes of underwater action, a fight with not one but two hot ninja women, a storm that scrubbed away a city, a villainous black-eyed middle manager with an escape pod, illegal rooftop gardens full of tomatoes, basil, and marijuana, a plastic underwater chill room, Cajun sepratists, sabotage of the Goo network. The game gives plenty of latitude and direction on the aesthetics of the environment. But all of that is in service to the teenage rebellion that you are the center of — in our case a teenage rebellion about drug use, social class, and sex. Its story arc mechanics give you good direction on what’s to do at any moment.

The game really does what it promises. It’s a good time.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Beowulf is off to press on the morrow! I’m doing a very limited run, Ashcan-style, so if you want to read the poem, consider the exegesis, play the game, and give me feedback, this is your chance!

I’m selling it for $14+$5 S&H, or just regular $14 at Gen Con. Since the run is limited, I’ll be selling the remainder at Gen Con that I haven’t sold via my own site, so if you want to make sure you have a copy, preorder and I’ll shoot it off to you as soon as they get to my doorstep. If you want to wait until Gen Con, you can, but I’ve had a few people interested in preorders already, so you take your chances with the Wyrd.

Even better than picking up a copy at the Playcollective or Ashcan Front booths, order one from me, play with your friends, play with me at Gen Con, and give me feedback that will both be fun to generate and help produce a great final book.

It’s 244 pages long, 5″ x 8″, and I’ve made uglier things in my life.

(sold out. Please give feedback!)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

In memory of a Shock: game at Dreamation last, I offer this, the flag of Shangri-La, a totalitarian state based on government-controlled reincarnation.

(I can’t for the life of me find my notes. If you could let me know that you were in that game, it would be great. I gotta give credit for the awesome creativity at that table.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve just spent the last two weeks exploring the Mid-Atantic states, spending time with friends and family in Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and Durham, NC. Thank you all for hosting me. I had a spectacular time. I am blessed with wonderful people. Thank you for your support, your indulgence, and your senses of humor.

A week ago Last Monday night, I landed with the Durham Three (who are, mysteriously, Four, but Jason was sick. And I was there. So that’s four…) for an evening and we played a game of Shock: about individuals sacrificed for politics, demagoguery, and the responsibility of the Press. These were amplified with the Shock of a robot running for President — John Toyota-Kennedy (he’d married in). He was running on the popular but divisive platform of citizen’s rights for all sentients. Political sentiment was anti-robot to the point that Green Cards — required for robots to work, since they’re not citizens — had been altogether eliminated. Many robots had become citizens over time, but the process of naturalization had been wholly suspended and now Joe’s Protag — a Salvadoran line cook — was the man with the Last Green Card. That made him politically valuable and a celebrity. His Story Goal was to be reunited with his family. Instead, the government (in the form of the Office of the Secretary of Media, played by Clinton as my Antag and the INS robot with a deep contempt for robotkind played by Remi) conspired to use him up and throw him out with false promises after making him do horrible things.

Clinton’s Protag was a militant Pete Seeger, a combat robot with a banjo and one leg. He traveled around the US and Canada as a veteran combatant pleading the case of his own obvious humanity to a receptive audience. His pleasant demeanor belied a calculating and clever politician — a very human character indeed. He eventually negotiated the secession of Alaska as a robot homeland to share with the First Nations who’d been (apparently) trying to figure out how do such a thing on their own. He wound up being assassinated alongside Remi’s Rabbi Vivek Shapiro.

R. Shapiro was alone in his niche. As the world’s religions had rejected the prodigious robotkind, he’d found himself in an amazing position: the only religious leader in the world for millions of robots using his television show to stay in touch with them. His wife, Hadassah, was a robot, and though she played little part in the story as a character herself, she set things nicely: in the opening scene of Remi’s story, he was confronted outside the TV studio where he worked by a woman babbling about her boy having been killed by a robot and it getting away scot-free. The Rabbi and she shot each other. The good rabbi had shot low and defensively. The woman, Susan, shot high at his face, shattering it. He’d decided to become converted, and in the process, became the Vice-Presidential candidate just as he was assassinated. The EMP bomb that killed him also killed Clinton’s protag — who later emerged, backed up, and still missing his leg. Hadassah also died in the assassination.

The whole time, my Protag, a journalist, was being yanked around by the atrocious Secretary of Media — Angelina Jolie on the outside, Joseph Goebbels on the inside. He job was to establish the safety of US media, using law, smokescreen controversies, and eventually assassination to achieve her ends. It was never stated, but she was pretty clearly the most powerful public figure in the country. In the end, she and her office’s mandate were exposed as violently anti-Constitutional. Also, I got to beat up my chickenshit editor. It was a rare shard of optimism for a game of Shock: frankly.

I’m not sure when the episode will be up. It looks like it’s the next one, but I’m not sure. But thanks, guys. I had a really good time. You really know how to bring it.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Back at the end of April, Emily once again got together a bunch of great people to play games and rock out together. This time, it was in Boston at Pandemonium Books in their new digs in Central Square.

We had a blast, but the point is, Em’s got some of the pics up and you can see for yourself!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

This last weekend, I went to Triangle, VA to go to Camp Nerdly, a gathering for self-deprecating awesome people. I played a bunch of games and all were good. But I’m looking for something when I go to Nerdly or a convention: I’m looking for a real experience, where I learn about myself and the people around me, where we make some really affecting fiction. This last weekend, that game was not either of the fun Shock: games I played, nor was it the game of Dogs in the Vineyard that I ran (the bloodiest one I’ve ever seen), but, unspurprisingly, a game of PTA.

It was called End and it was about trying to find meaning and human connection in a literally disposable world, where sex is used to control and maintain the status quo and never for love of any sort.

Remi Treuer Produced and I (Solin Trrur) played with Tony Lauer-Basch (Melody), Nick Novitski (Donnie), Krista Evanouskas (Kandra), and Travis Farber (Julien). Remi’s started an AP thread over here. It’s sexually explicit, but if you’re reading my blog regularly, you’re not put off by the F-word.

(The picture at the top of the post was cropped from one that came up in a Google search for “awkward sex”. I chose it for the detached expression on her face that I saw a lot during End.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A few weeks back, Emily, Vincent and I got together to battle in the space over Tarkut. At issue was a communications satellite held by Emily’s Rasili Empire. Through it, any one of us could command the communications of the entire planet for propaganda purposes. Vincent made a big threat early on: “I’m gonna keep you from getting that satellite no matter what.” I took that to heart. I also realized that I wasn’t going to be able to fight off both of them, cuz they were both going to be gunning for me. So I started my setup with one guy out front to make Vincent think I was going to be fighting for the satellite, which got him good and committed. I placed the rest of my guys behind him. The look on both of our faces is Vincent going “Holy shit, how am I gonna pull this out?” and me thinking, “Have I just made a terrible strategic error?

Vincent didn’t pull it out. I didn’t win, but I got close, and in the Campaign rules, that counts for something. Next game, Vincent’s gotta be gunning for Emily again. I may find myself an ally. We’ll see.

In any event, I had three new models for this game. Here they are.

The Shuttle. This came up from a remote launch point in the desert outside Tarkut. It was supplied by our mysterious benefactor.

The deep space craft. We hijacked this old piece of shit and use it to haul mecha around orbit.

The only purpose-built space mecha among the Paktali. It was on artillery duty.

So there they are. We’re planning up another battle for the near future. Keep yourself appraised of actual events in the ongoing Battle of Tarkut here, or read scandalous propaganda over at Anyway.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

One of the nice things about Shock: is that it generates these artifacts from play; the Minutiæ, the Grid, and the *Tags. But those tell the stuff around the story, not the story itself. So I was very excited at Dreamation when Dan Ravipinto offered to record the game we were playing, Cannie Row (from a couple of posts back). He’s posted that recording (watch out! It’s 4 hours long!) along with the other games he played that weekend over at his new funspace, peccable.glyphpress.com. These are bound to be of greatest value to those of us who were actually in the games themselves, but if you want a full fleshout of how World Generation works in Shock: it’s a good way to get it. Dice hit the table at around 00:85 with a grouchy Orion dealing murderously with New Cannies. I haven’t finished listening to it yet, but we’re having a good time.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A couple of my fellow fiction game players have commented that I make characters who I get really into. I want to share my technique because it’s really satisfying to me. This is strictly for Narrativist play by the Forge definition; without rules to support this kind of play, I think you could really wind up making yourself unhappy.

First, some nondefinitive definitions:

• Protagonist: An active character in a moral conundrum sufficiently similar to our own experience that we understand why that character behaves the way they do.

• Antagonist: A character taking the opposite moral stance from, and acting against the interest of, the Protagonist.

• Situation: The circumstances over which the *Tagonists conflict.

So, let’s take a look at my character, “Jesus” (pronounced the English way, not the Spanish way) from last weekend’s game of carry, a game about war. The following is kind of explicit, so I’ll put it behind a cut so you won’t accidentally read it if you’re not up to hearing a story about soldiers losing their shit during the Viet Nam War.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

At Dreamation, I got to run two games of Shock: Social Science Fiction. In the first, the Shock was “Post-Scarcity”. It was a good game, but overbooked. I wound up sitting out and trying out an improvised “audience” role. It worked just fine. I wish there’d been four Protags instead of five with someone else playing the audience, but live and learn. In any event, it was enjoyable, but eclipsed by the second game on Saturday night, Canny Row.

But that was far from all. Here are the bands I got to play with:

Friday

1. Mechaton with Ben Lehman. He’d finally gotten his mecha after they’d been lost in the mail on their way to him in China for months. He won. I made a bad strategic decision followed by a bad tactical decision and he didn’t make any bad decisions. That’s how that game works.
2. Shock: with Matt, Jeff (a Son of Kryos), Luke Crane, Shane, and Phredd. Post-Scarcity highlighted issues of Unemployment, Deception, Duty, and Love. It featured rival economists (one of whom was an AI modeled on Yogi Bear), a nanobiologist trying to cure a disease brought about by the ubiquitous nanotech in the wold, and a universal personal integrity rating system being hacked for social currency by a broker and a rogue nanobiologist. The integrity network wound up playing heavily in the story, with the irony being that the highest integrity seemed to be gained by those with the least scruples, and the earnest losing their integrity as they fought it.
3. carry, a game about war. This was played by me, Nathan Paoletta, Dave Cleaver, and Adam Dray. I’ll write more up about this later. The game’s about soldiers in Viet Nam and was pretty explicit.

Saturday

1. Burning Wheel with a pile of people, plus several other peoples’ worth of Luke Crane. This game sure does what it does. I’m pretty certain that this game’s not for me. If you want a traditional-looking fantasy game with lots of gnarly character stuff, where tactical thinking and dramatic conflict are both significant, though, this is one rockin’ game. It featured lots of lying characters and bigotry. Good stuff.
2. Shock: Canny Row. See below.
3. Verge. This was a very productive playtest with designer Adam Dray, Ben Lehman, Dave Cleaver, John (sorry, man, I don’t remember your last name), and me. The game uses a focused brainstorming process, the product of which is a game board on which you play the story. Weight is given to players whose ideas are best liked, which is important for a Science Fiction game. By the end, we’d eliminated the need for a GM, realizing that Adam was playing a part like anyone else. I eagerly anticipate its completion. I’ll be very happy to play this with my friends. This game started while Dave, Ben and I were coming down from Canny Row and we very excitedly leapt into another SF story. We stopped play around 4 AM. Ben and I talked about it until 5. Then we passed out cold.

Preview of Shock: Canny Row

Issues:

• Immigration
• Xenophobia
• 2nd Class Citizenship

Shock:

• Planetary colonization

The players were, from my left:

• Dan Ravipinto (Who was nice enough to record the session)
• Dave Cleaver (for whom I ran a Shock: demo via chat over at Story Games a few months ago and also played Carry with me a few hours before)
• Ben Lehman (who wrote Who Art in Heaven, the fiction in Shock:)
• Me (who wrote the game and was kind of sleepy)

I’ll have a full Actual Play up as soon as I can. That report will sell games. It was such a good time. We made a really good story about ethnic divisions on Europa and just how poorly people can get along. Plus, sex!

Dan recorded the whole thing. I look forward to listening soon! Dan, if you’re reading this, please contact me. You’ve got my card.At the end, we started speculating about a sequel. I think that’s how I’m going to consider “campaign” games from now on: distinct stories in series. We really wanted to check in a century later, around 24oo CE. If we’re together again, I’d really like to tell that story. Maybe we can arrange things that way?

The whole con was great for the indies. We were tremendously overbooked (I had twice the signups that I had space for. It’s a good thing people were sleepy by Saturday night and only three people showed for my three slots). Vinnie, one of the organizers of the con, said that we were the majority draw for RPGs this year as a group. He encouraged us strongly to spread the passion over to Dexcon, in July. We’ll have to see if we can do that.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

The Human Marvels is a fascinating blog about freaks of various stripes. Absolutely fascinating. I mean, just look at the top billing.

Edit: Human echolocation? Holy crap!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Last night, Paktali freedom fighters struck a blow for righteousness as they hit deep inside the heart of Tarkut. Rasil’s puppet dictator Mukhawat Nuttun was leaving his court of effete whores in his expensive bribe of a limousine when five of our brave Paktali, armed only with construction tools and the steel will typical of our people, leapt from the truck in which they had been hiding and grabbed his vehicle. Unprepared for such an attack, the Rasili guard there was weak, underestimating as they did the preparedness, ferocity, and resolve of our brave Paktaliya.

While even our greenest recruit fought hand-to-hand with one of the Rasili death machines, treacherous Tarkutli boys stumbled into battle in their ill-kept machines, throwing their own soft, milk-fed city boys at the Paktali engine of righteousness that challenged their ill-gotten might. Many of their boys died needlessly and we hope that others will see their pointless sacrifice and will convert to the Paktali cause that is their only route to freedom from this foreign empire with its iniquitous ways.

As a gesture of goodwill, we have allowed the Tarkutli the honor of executing Mr. Nuttun. They now see that we are without fear and that we can strike anywhere. If their forces join ours, becoming Paktali themselves, the Rasili will run home, their noses bleeding again, like little girls who shouldn’t have tried to fight in the first place.

Today, the Rasili whores were struck a blow that will no doubt make them reconsider the wisdom of their stumbling into this nest of swords. To date, they have not even admitted this defeat. No doubt, they are trying to figure out how to tell the uncommitted, sisterfucking backstabbers that make up the population of their “mighty” empire.

Naturally, the Tarkutli city boys wish to make this sound like a victory. Allow them their boyish shouts of joy. We have shown that we can strike anywhere and without warning. Of their boys who survive to manhood, they will join our cause!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

We’re just about ready to get rockin’ on the first ever Mechaton campaign. It takes place in the Republic of Tarkut, just after the Democratically Elected Peoples’ Government That Was Totally Democratic has collapsed. Into the power vacuum come three factions. I’m playing the Paktaliya, a group of guerrillas of an ethnic minority called the Mukun. We’re tired of being pushed around by everybody and we have some nonsense legend about how “we” pushed out the iniquitous Red Circle a thousand years ago, who we think Emily’s faction, the Rasili Empire, resemble. Vincent’s sort of taken the Battle for Algiers route; his people are the people of Tarkut who have a network more than a capital. They’re the real government of the people of this country.

Here’s my army as it now stands.

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Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Over at Vincent’s blog, there’s been a lot of talk about Mechaton, a superfun mecha fighting game. You build your guys, say what all the parts do, then take strategic objectives while smashing each others’ guys, leaving Lego body parts strewn across the table. It’s the best such game I’ve ever played. Strategy’s very important, as is tactics, and luck has just the right effect on things.

Here is the army I like to use the most. There’s one more guy than I can use, and I decide at game time what I want the loadout to be.

This guy’s all defense. He’s got 2 Reds at Long range in the form of a recoilless rifle on his back and a pair of smashin’ guns for 2 Reds at Direct range on his arms.

The same guy. You can see the Glaug influence.

This is Shiva. One Green for bird legs, ECM and carbon chassis for stealth (2 Blues), lasers for kick you ass at Direct range.

This is Scout. 2 Yellows for the sensors, a Blue for ECM, two Green for running on all fours, and a Green d8 for not having ranged weapons. Sometimes, he gets Big Missiles. I couldn’t find the missile rack, so none are shown.

These are the Fuchikoma built to fight as a single, revolting mass. They’ve got two Reds at HtH, a Yellow for their sensor dome, a Blue for being little, and a Green d8 for not having ranged weapons. Their optional Green for having four legs is left behind so they get another initiative die.

One of them, alone.

The game will be on sale at GenCon Indy. I was going to sell kits, but it’s a huge amount of work. I’d have to have a huge demand up front to put that energy in. Nonetheless, you should totally buy the game and play it. I’ve had more fun with this game than all the time I’ve spent playing Warhammer and Battletech combined.