Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco is a hell of a game. I could write a few thousand words here about how and why it’s wonderful but you’ve already read other great recommendations of it online. The best, most persuasive argument for the game is simply to play it with clever, thoughtful players, so go do that if you haven’t.

Since playing it for the first time, earlier this summer, I’ve written or co-written a few playsets for the game. Some of them are scheduled to see the light of day in the future. One, though, is so crazy that I think it requires playtesting and advice to be gathered from the Fiasco community at large, to make sure the damn thing even works.

All The Damn Time

This is that playset: “All The Damn Time”

(It’s a PDF file.)

Here’s the gist of it: Sam Howard is a man unstuck in time. Some kind of quantum-level shenanigans have him traveling to and from key moments in his life. But if one Sam Howard managed to mess things up the first time, who’s to say that even more meddling Sam Howards can make things any better? Will Sam improve his life by futzing with his own history or will he turn a life of perfectly ordinary mistakes into a paradoxical catastrophe?

Who plays Sam Howard, by the way? You all do. You play Sams from different points in time. Good luck with that.

To be clear, this is a terrible starter playset for the game. If you have never played Fiasco, do not start here. Pick almost any of the great Playsets of the Month from the Bully Pulpit Games website, or play one of the sets that come packaged in the game book. If you’ve played the game a few times already, though, and you’re willing to tax your skills a bit, I’d love to hear how (or if) this playset works for you.

(Now for some advice, right up front. The Relationships are specifically designed to work across multiple Sams, young and old, but the first group is especially suited for the youngest two Sams and the sixth group is specially designed to “wrap around” from the oldest to the youngest Sams. You can tinker and meddle with the possibilities, of course, especially if you want a smaller story with Sams separated by shorter lengths of time. It should work either way. Just remember that the Relationships are open to interpretation.)

I’d like to especially thank Jason Morningstar and Logan Bonner for looking over this set once already. If it sucks, though, it’s my fault.

Tomorrow night I run the last session of the current playtest campaign I’ve had going for Razed. The game is still in active development, but I’m moving cities and sadly leaving this play group behind, so I’m trying to wrap things up in a way that is halfway satisfying.

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Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my old Vampire: The Requiem chronicle’s blog still up and hosted at a popular Internet blogging platform. I thought I might dig through it for some nostalgic fodder, as I’m pausing briefly to look back before I unveil some big news about moving forward, but the only thing I found in there of real substance was this list of 25 Vampire: The Requiem story ideas. I remember, I sat down and jotted down every two-word blood-related phrase or cliche I could think of in twenty minutes, and then went back and wrote a short synopsis for a Vampire story inspired by that phrase. Some of them still seem dramatically sound, for whatever that’s worth.

Curious? All 25 short synopses are after the jump.

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Look at this list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories from Wikipedia. It makes me feel hardly qualified to have my own vision for a post-apocalyptic world, for Razed, looking at how many of these stories I haven’t read or watched. Granted, it’s one hell of a list, and I’m not sure that I need to see Transmorphers before I’m qualified to use my own imagination, but still. Staggering.

How many post-apocalyptic stories do I need to consume before I’m ready to conjure my own and, more importantly, inspire others to conjure theirs? It’s obviously a ridiculous question. The goal of Razed isn’t to allude to the maximum number of apocalypses. The true answer, I think, depends on how real can I make the apocalypse seem during play, and how viscerally scary — and freeing! — can that apocalypse be made to feel in the text.

So that’s my goal right now: to be visceral.

In the last Razed post, I talked about the crypt of civilization at Oglethorpe University. Today I’m talking about another of Georgia’s great post-apocalyptic treasures: the Georgia Guidestones. You’ve heard of these, right? These monumental megaliths were designed and erected by anonymous benefactors intent on helping humankind rebuild after the apocalypse. They include a message to future, post-apocalyptic generations, etched in eight languages on four massive slabs. They are advice to the people that come after us.

Wired had a great article about these back in its formidable puzzle issue; read that here.

How do the Georgia Guidestones play into Razed? Symbolically, mostly. They’re not magical. They don’t have special powers in any literal sense. Instead, I’m using them as narrative devices — indicators that the scale of the story is changing.

My current Razed campaign is about survival on a small, local scale. Our three protagonists aren’t in a position to rebuild all of civilization, they’re just trying to make things in their little refuge safe for a while. But my game is set in Atlanta, not far from the Guidestones themselves, so I wanted to roll them in somehow.

So, in my campaign, they’re a kind of pilgrimage destination for travelers on the highways of the kudzu-choked American Southeast. Not because they contain actual powers or invaluable knowledge — the apocalypse in Razed is still going on, really, so the pre-apocalypse is still a vivid memory — but because they are monuments to hope.

Or are they? The Guidestones are introduced in my campaign as dream imagery first, and then expanded into the reality of the player-characters after they make their first post-apocalyptic foray from the ruins of Atlanta to investigate what remains of Savannah. The characters discovered evidence of an expedition searching for the Guidestones (without GPS or the Internet) and have a choice to make: do they pursue their hope that Savannah is a safe zone, or do they turn from that path and visit the mysterious Guidestones?

What this shows, in part, is how exploration is investigation. Clues winnow an overwhelming number of destinations down into a digestible number of choices to pursue. The world is still a veritable sandbox, insofar as the characters are free to pursue leads in any order, as far as they like, but the GM doesn’t need to devise every square inch of the world for play. Rather, she can devise branching channels to explore and interact with, giving the players a combination of options (”Do we go to Savannah or to the Guidestones?”) and guaranteed storylines (because no matter which way they go, there’s a story waiting along the road).

Once the characters are exposed to the Guidestones, in a scenario called “Dreams of Savannah,” the megaliths start to insinuate themselves into the characters’ dreams — including into unwanted visions that seem to increase in intensity as the characters approach Savannah. The Guidestones become a powerful symbolic presence, and part of the dream language that makes up the visions of those characters who are subject to the transmissions of… but I haven’t talked about that here, yet, have I? More on that later.

What’s important is that dreams were a facet of the scenario’s storytelling before literal visions were a part of the story, but as soon as the characters were exposed to the Guidestones (through a copy of that very Wired magazine article, found in a derelict car left running on a dead highway), the Guidestones began to loom. It’s what megaliths are meant to do, after all.

The Guidestones are, for my campaign, a literary device. Part MacGuffin and part raw imagery. In yours, they could be something else. What they’re meant to represent, to my players, is the scary reminder that their characters are now on the other side of the apocalypse from the world that built those stones. History has turned on a terrible hinge, and the characters are now on the other side of it. Maybe, then, it is up to them to rebuild civilization.

Something like this week, Family Games 100, the new book of game essays from Green Ronin and editor James Lowder, should be debuting at your local store. Like it’s older sibling, Hobby Games 100, this one looks to be a combination of guidebook and straight-up good-time. Authors of all stripes brought essays touting favorite, distinctive, or memorable family-friendly games for you to peruse. Looking for a good game to try playing with your folks or your kids? Open the book to virtually any page and get a recommendation.

This time out, I nabbed a spot in the book, too. Right next to my beloved Crossbows & Catapults, you’ll find my essay on Cranium — I played it while selling copies of it at Starbucks, back when.

Want a complete list of authors and games? Want a peek at Mike Selinker’s essay on the game Set? Want to order your copy right now? (You do.) Head on over to the book’s webpage and get clicking.

A few months ago, I wrote up a couple of quick characters and a sketch of a scenario to entertain some of my fellow RPG players on a night away from our regular, ongoing game. I’ve been enamored with the basic rules system from John Harper’s Lady Blackbird adventure, so I used that. The scenario itself was a riff on futuristic horror films like Alien and Pitch Black, set on a crumbling colony planet amid a nasty urban guerrilla war.

I’ve run one-shot games like this for years, using a bunch of different game systems, and they always have a rule: Only one player character can survive.

Sometimes no one survived. One time, two characters survived. But usually we stuck to the rule. Ordinarily I don’t recommend whittling down the number of active players in an RPG session down to one, but sometimes it’s good fun.

This weekend, I gave myself 20 hours to take the characters and my scenario notes and create something sort of like Harper’s Lady Blackbird. What I ended up with was Alien Survivor — a one-shot survival-horror RPG adventure. Tonight, I offer you Version 0.9 for free, as two PDFs.

The Narrator’s Guide contains everything, including the players’ characters, complete scenario notes, and SPOILERS about the player characters. Just add your own storytelling instincts, creativity, and play time:

Download Alien Survivor for Narrators right here.

The Player’s Guide contains just the information players need to get started, including characters and a quick rundown on the starting situation:

Download Alien Survivor for Players right here.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read or play Alien Survivor. I had fun with it and hope you do, too.

If you enjoy Alien Survivor, think about buying me a drink. Or visit John Harper’s game site and buy him one.

Edit: When you’ve had a chance to read the game, join us at the Story Games discussion thread.

Edit: I’ll find a more permanent home for these files in the near future, if demand warrants.

Music: DJ Shadow, “Uncharted: The Eldorado Megamix”

When I’m running an RPG, like Razed, I make CDs to play during the game session. They help set the tone for key scenes and, just as importantly, they help me pace the story out during actual play. (If I’ve only played two or three tracks after an hour and a half of play, I know I’m in trouble.) Here, then, are some songs that I’ve been playing during the writing or playtesting of Razed, my new post-apocalyptic survival RPG coming from Pelgrane Press.

This is no complete list — my main Razed playlist, right now, has 186 songs. This is just an hour’s worth of material available for sale individually on iTunes. (Note: I don’t get any money from this — it’s just a nice way to give you samples of what I’m listening to if you don’t own some of these tracks.)

Some of these (like Tom Waits’ “Earth Died Screaming”) are meant to indirectly evoke the vibe and character of the setting — visions of apocalypse and aftermath. Other songs allude to favorite apocalyptic tales of mine (as “The Court of the Crimson King” alludes to Children of Men). Some are quiet mood-setting pieces for safe havens  from the terrors of the razed world, like Andrew Bird’s “Yawning At The Apocalypse” and Bear McCreary’s “Elegy” (played on a busted piano for the post-apocalyptic future-past of Battlestar Galactica). Meanwhile, others are action cues I’ve played during fights and chases. I just dig the mechanical rattle and momentum in “The Harvester Returns,” for example, and the weird machine voice of “The Invid Attacks.” And, of course, if we’re talking about music that I write to, I had to include multiple hits of Bear McCreary and Nine Inch Nails, in one form or another. (I skipped “The Day The World Went Away,” here, in favor of a couple of Year Zero remixes.)

I think this gives a little bit of a clue as to the kind of setting Razed will ship with. At the very least, I think it hints at where my head’s at, in terms of tone, right now.

Thanks for listening.

It occurs to me that I didn’t mention it here after I mentioned it on Twitter, but I’m writing a new GUMSHOE-System RPG for Pelgrane Press: Razed.

Earth is a ruin. Inscrutable alien machines wander the planet, looting the Earth’s body. Humanity dwells in the ruins, having almost no knowledge of how the planet went from its former heights to this sorry low.

The law consists of a rare few who struggle to hold some semblance of civilization together with words, with guns, with wisdom, with compassion, with cunning.

Want the food those vagabonds stole from your camp? Follow the trail.

Want to avenge the murder of your bodyguards at a local refuge? Find the killers.

Want clean water? Want batteries you can use in trade? Want to know where they took your wife? Want to know what the aliens look like inside those metal suits? Want to know what the hell happened to Planet Earth? Investigate.

Razed is a post-apocalyptic GUMSHOE game in which investigation is the key to survival.

Now that I’ve been given the green-light to talk about it, I’ll be blogging about the design and playtest process here. It’ll be tricky, because on the one hand I hope that sharing my thoughts will be encouraging (to me), but at the same time I don’t want to reveal too much — writing is often best done behind closed doors. Things cook when the lid is on, in other words, and I don’t want to let too much of the heat out. But I’ll be sharing a bit about the kind of apocalyptic setting Razed describes, what’s influencing me from week to week, and what you shouldn’t expect from this particular game’s vision of the future.

Stay tuned.

What started as a sprawling, uncertain foray into the nature of character and identity became a sharper look at one particular and vexing choice in Fallout 3, and how characters can drift away from the ideal you want through actual play. It’s my article at The Escapist: Curiosity Killed the NPC — new today.

Some day, I hope I’ll get a chance to write that bigger article about character identity and the individual player, and how so many FPS games are actually also RPGs.