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.

The newest issue of Pelgrane Press’s feature collection, Page XX, includes an update on Razed, which I wrote especially for this issue. The piece also includes some images from playtest graphics and a scenario map, showing what the game looks like in its current, rough state. Head on over for a look at that.

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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This is from a somewhat out-of-date note I wrote to myself, intending to post here earlier. Still, it’s not too late to weigh in.

This is just a rough thought right now, but I may attempt to devise a new combat mechanism for Razed’s version of the Gumshoe system. To date I have been playing with the system as presented in Trail of Cthulhu and The Esoterror Factbook, to varying degrees, to make sure I grok them as they currently exist. They work.

Yet, still, I wonder if Razed doesn’t need something a bit different to help it feel distinctive, to give it a kind of action that’s frenetic and desperate, but not in quite the same way that fighting and fleeing eldritch horrors is in Trail of Cthulhu.

In our playtests to date, action in Razed has been chaotic and quick, but not always especially dangerous. It seems to be all or nothing — the characters emerge unscathed or almost dead.  Like in Trail of Cthulhu, characters often find themselves outgunned and on the run… which is good for about half of the encounters in Razed. But Razed also needs to handle wilder, more frequent combat while simultaneously being more merciful. (There are not, after all, a lot of well-stocked and working hospitals left.) Razed isn’t necessarily about action-movie stars, but it does need to facilitate more action-oriented play sometimes. Characters need to be a little more adventurous than ordinary folk, at the very least.

It’s a balancing act. Sometimes, the right thing for characters to do is hide out, hold their breath, and hope the alien menace moves by without detecting them. Other times, the characters want to make a coordinated strike against their extraterrestrial foes, using their combined might to hurt the invaders. And sometimes you want to battle it out on the back of a moving truck. Razed needs to be able to handle all of that, with individual scenes playing out for different dramatic purposes, while still being recognizably Gumshoe.

It’s a tall order, and the best fit might be to subtly tailor rules that already exist. But I have a few ideas I’d like to test in actual play, too, to see how they work. Stay tuned.

This is an exciting time in the design of an RPG — when lots of ideas are still on the table. But it’s also a tricky time to write about, because I’m sure some spectacular failures still stand between me and the final game rules. I don’t want to get your hopes up for a new combat system when one may not be forthcoming, but I do want you to know that the combat mechanisms of the game are still open for debate.

Music: Ladytron, “Destroy Everything You Touch”

Apparently, back when Vampire developer Russell Bailey’s writing career felt new to him, I told him to “Be Fucking Mamet.” That meant something different to me back then than it would mean now, but I don’t doubt that I said it. I said a lot of things. Rusty’s quoting that line in his post, today, about how crime novelists don’t get women, and it’s a good one — very Russell Bailey. (The post is notable, too, because of what it says, and doesn’t say, about the canceled EVE RPG.)

Rusty’s absolutely right that Vampire must be, on some level, crime fiction. And, of course, that can mean a lot of things. Earlier today, Chuck Wendig was saying that The Wire is a model Vampire: The Requiem chronicle (or set of chronicles), and he’s right, too. I used to tell people that The Shield was an archetypal Vampire game, what with its layers of loyalties, its constant lies, and its underlying involvement in the illicit trade of something illegal — in The Shield it was often drugs or prostitution, in Vampire it was the Blood.

So, yeah, as much as Requiem is gothic — and that’s a theme easily circumvented by the individual Storyteller — it’s definitely crime-fiction-style storytelling. It’s a game about monsters that commit crimes to survive. Their very existence defies one of the only strict laws of living: Thou Shalt Die.

Anyway.

Rusty’s post also reminds me: The naming of the clan books may be the best work I did at White Wolf. It’s something I remember being proud of, at any rate, for whatever pride is worth.

In general, I don’t post at RPGnet anymore. I still stop by to read things, now and again, but my experiences posting over there haven’t been real rewarding in recent years. On Twitter, I have a standing rule: instead of posting at RPGnet, I punch myself in the face. It’s just faster.

Yet still I post over there, sometimes, when I think I can jump the tracks and offer actual praise or first-hand clarifications that will do another poster some good. I try not to encourage or correct the sometimes staggering amount of hate and vitriol over there, and I don’t write to score points for pithiness. The general rule on an web forum, after all, is that one sentence of sass trumps a paragraph of substance — but I ignore that when I post, and so I get ignored in return. Works out for everybody, I guess.

Or, like late last night, sometimes I post when I just get the itch for writing purple melodrama like I did back in my Vampire: The Requiem days:

So, you distract or placate the Beast by getting your Blood going as if you were on the hunt — the hunt for this foe, the hunt for his data — and making a move like an electronic predator, prowling through the Internet like an alligator in a swamp, tracking your prey, and getting that much closer to the moment when your work will warrant Blood, when your digital hunt will yield up real Vitae.

That’s how your character placates the Beast long enough to let him get his cerebral work done. How he plies the Beast into riding along with him, for a change, and feeling the animal thrill of the prowl.

RPGnet is free to be the constant competition for wit and snark that it sometimes likes to be, but I’m much happier and more productive since I stopped trying to, you know, correct the Internet.

XKCD: Duty Calls

This is one part of a multi-part look at the nature of the cataclysmic events that shook and tumbled the world of the post-apocalyptic survival-and-investigation game, Razed. These entries reference various popular media sources, especially movies, and shamelessly spoil them in the process.

So: Beware of Spoilers Beyond This Point.

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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.