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.

This is from a somewhat out-of-date note I wrote to myself, intending to post here earlier.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”

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.

Here is some musing I did on the role and quantity of research necessary to write, as posted in this Story Games thread:

What’s the going rate for research-to-writing. How much do you have to read before you’re allowed to write about a place, and how much are you allowed to write per page read? How valid is a public, international notion of a place, compared to a place as locals view it? How fictional is fictional — if your characters aren’t real people, then they presumably come with fictional apartments and houses and fictional relatives and fictional histories? Once you start telling a story set anywhere, you start lying a little bit, and you start getting things technically wrong. How much verisimilitude is necessary to offset what’s fictional? Where do you find the truth that makes for realism, and how much of that is truth as opposed to accuracy?

I pose these as troublesome, vaguely snide questions, rather than answers, because I think fiction answers these questions, each in different ways, by having the gall to come into existence, for better or worse.

Or, alternately, sometimes a city is just a city — sometimes a city is not a character but just a collection of tree flavors and weather selected to be the painted backdrop to a tale. Sometimes a city is just an adjective.

Am I crazy?

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.

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”

Took a half hour today to revise some of the category and tag management on this old blog, and moved comments around so that maybe they’re within easier striking distance near the end of posts. I’ve been told by prolific web users and knowledgeable designers that expecting people to scroll back up to the top of a post to comment is unrealistic, and I’m finally putting that lesson to use. (I’ve dabbled with these changes before, but have only now come up with a look and placement that I can live with.)

While writing this, Pandora has given me Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” You can go with this or you can go with that, indeed.

Something I won’t be doing: going back and adding tags to the 998 (as of this writing) existing posts here on the site. Some of them were tagged in previous lifetimes on Blogger and WordPress.com, but there’s no time and little benefit to re-tagging those posts, so I’m not doing it.

As it is, I’m pretty sure I only added tags so I could make the kind of tag jokes that John Hodgman makes on his imitation blog-like device — the same sort that are common on Twitter. Totally worth it.

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.

This question almost gave me a concussion. Over on my Tumblr page — where you can ask me questions via a built-in form — I got this question from Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: “Which do you see you as your primary creative outlet: writing or design?”

Probably, this should be a straight-forward question. But I’ve been percolating an answer for days and I still don’t quite have one. I’m not even sure I know what “primary creative outlet” means, though I’m sure that has more to do with a short in my skull than a problem with the question.

Writing is what I do when design gets frustrating. Design is what I do when I get stymied in my writing. I’m not sure either one trumps the other.

Read more »

Code of Everand

This summer I did some quest design and writing for a fantasy MMO called Code of Everand, which went live this week. It’s a free play-in-your-browser game aimed at kids and based out of Britain, so you don’t play it with your friends, you play it with your mates.

For me, the project was a hectic blur, because I was busy teaching world building and creative writing at Shared Worlds for much of the same time I was writing these quests in an empty dorm room on the empty campus of Wofford College in the summertime. But I dug the game world, with its patched airships, mystical contraptions, gem traders, intelligent courier pigeons, and handsome cartoon landscapes. Now that everything’s animated and has music, the game’s a good-looking affair, especially as a free pastime.

The designers of this game have made something clever and creative and fun, here. Plus they were great to work with—enthusiastic and dedicated. I’m happy to recommend Area/Code games (who also made Drop7, which Jeff Tidball and Paul Tevis seem to like).

Got kids? See if they want to spend some time playing as a heroic Pathfinder in the fantastical lands of Everand. I’m playing a little bit right now just to see some of the NPCs and landscapes again. Battle monsters, explore a realm of fantasy charms and perils, and maybe even locate the legendary Code of Everand.