A Few Loose Cannons On Deck! Interest checks from the MadPanda

[MadPanda]

That's one of my eternal "wanna do" games, I'm afeared!  So, yes.

[MasterMischief]

Ooo!  Ooo!  Me!  Pick me!

Let me know when you start up a recruitment thread.  I am so there.

[Jefepato]

Anima Prime sounds interesting.  And I backed Far West way back whenever, but it's been so long I'd practically forgotten about it.

[MadPanda]

It's slouching the last five percent or so to completion.  Nearly there!  Nearly.

[HairyHeretic]

Tell them to hurry up :)

[MadPanda]

When the last reason for delay involves surgery and about 8 weeks of recovery time?  I'll be patient!  (This is also another downside of having two people finish a ten-person project.)

[HairyHeretic]

Okay, as excuses go, that's a pretty reasonable one.

[MadPanda]

Indeed it is!  But when at last it is good to go, I will be announcing it here for all and sundry, and maybe getting my lil' Jade Family lass up to speed.

[MadPanda]

Anima Prime sounds interesting.

Not to mention available for free!  Me, I splurged on the version with the artwork.

http://www.animaprimerpg.com/main/docs/Anima_Prime_CC_04-07-2011.pdf

I have a few setting ideas bouncing around in my noggin, as Muse could tell you, but the one currently playing is a mash-up of Final Fantasy, Gold Digger, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.  'Cause nothing says pulpy post-apocalyptic fun like catgirl treasure hunters, muscle cars, and velociraptor ninja!

[Jefepato]

I actually sprang for a hard copy; I have a nice new bookshelf that needed more RPG books weighing it down.

The rules are a bit more complicated than I expected, but it certainly looks worth a try.

[MadPanda]

They're quite simple, I think, but they take some time to get used to since they're so unusual.  All that shuffling of dice from pool to pool!  Still, the overall feel is about right for FF.

[Zeth]

Sword and Sorcery

I'm also a big fan of Ron Edwards's Sorcerer, which is a great indie game geared toward narrativist play and emergent stories.  Now, maybe it's the John Carter of Mars previews, and maybe it's just me, but a hoped-for back-burner project of mine is something along the lines of the early days of S&S.  (Muse shares some of the blame and credit for this one, since we discussed it once upon a whim.)

Here's the springboard--the description of a setting from Sorcerer and Sword:
Doesn't that sound like fun?   >:)  Some assembly, again, is required...I, for one, would like to try something with a stronger touch of India in it, as opposed to the usual Arabian/Persian thing.

Another Sorcerer idea...I just got to see the last half-hour or so of Fight Club.  Just enough to get my mitts on the whole Tyler Durdan thing.  Somewhere out there, there's a free playtest document for Sorcerer that uses the idea of one's dark reflection as a demon.  Three guesses where I'm going with that thought!

I am interested in a Sorcerer game. I have all the books but never had a chance to play it.

[MadPanda]

You mean someone other than me picked that baby up?  (laughs evilly)

[CarnivalOfTheGoat]

You mean someone other than me picked that baby up?  (laughs evilly)

<---- Guilty of having picked that up. Also the supplements (including Supplement 3, which has such amazing analysis in it that at times when reading it I forget what a transgression the whole thing can be seen as). Also some non-Ron supplements.

Never played it, though...

EDIT: A curious query about your vision of Xar as more "Indian:" there are many, many elements that one might label "Indian" ranging from the decidedly imperial settings of the Raj which Kipling enjoyed subtly deconstructing to saying 'Well, it's somewhat like the Arabian/Persian setting but it has caste-based social structures and the myriad pantheon-of-thousands, temple-on-every corner feel to its religion rather than Muslem-ish or Egyptian-ish religious trappings.' to a variety of other interpretations...So I guess what I'm asking is, "what aspects do you mean when you say 'a stronger touch of India'?" Not an expert on India or anything, just sort of an awareness of how much varied richness is involved in the huge mesh of cultures (and portrayals of cultures) which've occupied parts of what we now call India down through the years. I'd definitely be more interested in this than in the 'Fight Club' possibility...

[Jefepato]

I actually have Sorcerer as well -- I semi-recently acquired the two-volume version from the Kickstarter.  It's kind of hard to wrap my brain around, though.  I don't know if I could really handle a proper game.

[CarnivalOfTheGoat]

I actually have Sorcerer as well -- I semi-recently acquired the two-volume version from the Kickstarter.  It's kind of hard to wrap my brain around, though.  I don't know if I could really handle a proper game.

An awful lot of indies strike me this way, at first. It's one of those things I think is either best alleviated by reading APs, or by just getting in and creating a few characters and throwing them into situations and seeing how the rules work.

[MadPanda]

A curious query about your vision of Xar as more "Indian:" there are many, many elements that one might label "Indian" ranging from the decidedly imperial settings of the Raj which Kipling enjoyed subtly deconstructing to saying 'Well, it's somewhat like the Arabian/Persian setting but it has caste-based social structures and the myriad pantheon-of-thousands, temple-on-every corner feel to its religion rather than Muslem-ish or Egyptian-ish religious trappings.' to a variety of other interpretations...So I guess what I'm asking is, "what aspects do you mean when you say 'a stronger touch of India'?" Not an expert on India or anything, just sort of an awareness of how much varied richness is involved in the huge mesh of cultures (and portrayals of cultures) which've occupied parts of what we now call India down through the years. I'd definitely be more interested in this than in the 'Fight Club' possibility...

I do confess, I was thinking in terms of exotic and underutilized settings in an evocative sense rather than any more serious and deep examination, so your first encapsulation is more or less dead on.  However, I also have a passing interest in the Harappan culture, which was pre-caste (so far as I can tell), and you are quite right that there's far more depth and complexity to the idea than a mere surface impression would give.

Also, it's the architecture that came to mind.   :-)

[Zeth]

I actually have Sorcerer as well -- I semi-recently acquired the two-volume version from the Kickstarter.  It's kind of hard to wrap my brain around, though.  I don't know if I could really handle a proper game.

It can be hard to play on forums because the sorcerer is controlled by the player while the demon his/her power comes from is controlled by the GM.

Example 1. Sorcerer Steve tries to use his parasite demon eye Blinky to see through walls, but Blinky chooses not to let Steve activate the power because Steve hasn't filled his need of reading trashy romance novels. So  the two have a non verbal argument that stretches on for 4 posts or so then they compromise. Meanwhile as they argue the other player characters go off and achieve the goal which leaves Steve's player pissed because he missed out on the action.

[MadPanda]

You're assuming the others aren't willing to let the matter resolve first.

Actually, that's another game that's had repeated failures-to-launch, so while I'm willing to consider one-on-ones where such delays aren't really an issue, I'm currently very uncertain about trying a group game.  Maybe a 'shared setting' sort of thing with cameos...

[CarnivalOfTheGoat]

There are an amazing lot of games which have systems which are difficult to bring about on a forum. Option-to-intervene-during-another's-move is a particularly rough one.

[Zeth]

True, but we must try to play them anyways.  Sometimes you see a character idea that is so outstandingly great want to play it/play with it but, it will simply not work n another system. For example, I ran Sorcerer 'The Day of the Dupes' setting/scenario. (I think it is in The Sorcerer's Soul.) One of the PCs was an Agent of Cardinal Richelieu and a sorcerer. He actually had a epic swashbuckling battle with the Kings Musketeers and a Foppish Demon Swordsman.  That RP turned me on to swashbuckling games like Flashing Blades, 7th Sea, and  Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, etc. I admit I have shamelessly borrowed some concepts from the Sorcerer line and applied them to other fantasy games,especially Sorcerer & Sword.

[CarnivalOfTheGoat]

Admit it? You should brag about it. I, for one, feel like every new game should be an opportunity to drag in anything and everything fun I've picked up along the way elsewhere, however I can twist and tweak it to suit.

I have spent much of the day re-acquainting myself for the first time in several years with Sorcerer, Sorcerer & Sword, and The Sorcerer's Soul, and developing an itch that's just unimaginable in terms of brain spewing out possible concepts.

One of my chief issues with forum games is that often there's little focus on the players to meshing their characters into some sort of whole via interrelations, and inevitably this leads to GMs who feel that they have to set up some sort of a meet-n-greet scenario, and often this scenario ends up being framed in a fashion which one or more PCs have difficulty picturing their characters responding to, and the whole shebang falls apart before ten IC posts have occurred.

Sorcerer seems to scream for the alternate approach, where the GM says 'Here's my setting.' and the players look over it for a few minutes, and then it begins.

"That bit over there in the corner? Yeah. My character has just kicked that over and is currently enmeshed in a brawl with the guards, and apparently there just aren't enough of them, because he's winning."

"There aren't enough of them because most of them have responded to the fire my character set over here, which has nothing to do with planning to help out that other guy, it just looked particularly flammable from my character's perspective."

"You go ahead and deal with those two. While you're doing that, my character is going to be quietly going through the audience, rifling their pockets for loose change."

Or as one of my fellow players in a rather different RPG once said, "Y'all got a right purty town here. Be a shame if something happened to it."

Player agency is antithetical to an awful lot of gamers. And to an awful lot of GMs, too. Instead of going 'Whoa, it's on fire.' and fanning the flames in a direction that will make for maximum climactic events, you see a lot of GMs suddenly forgetting what they are doing and starting to play whack-a-mole.

At its most dramatic, this ends up with the teleport-railroad, where if a PC goes off the charted path, the GM literally has forces-beyond-PC-reckoning chuck the character back to where the GM wants them. And there are people who like that.

I now have a character kicking around in my head. I'm not sure if Sorcerer can handle it, because one of the concepts that attached itself to my backbrain before I got heavily into reading the game, was that the character is kind of stuck with their initial demon. There is no "easy out" of banishing it. It's not an original idea...For cying out loud, Sorcerer cites Elric and Bloodstone left and right. There's probably a way to sort-of-arrange that sort of situation in Sorcerer by setting up specific levels of PC Will and Lore vs. Demonic Power, but I'm not grokking the numbers enough to see it. Hmmmmm.

Odds are I will have to modify the character a bit to suit the mechanic, though. That's doable. But I have to say, today's reading has really churned my creativity to an almost disturbingly productive froth.

[MadPanda]

Have I created a monster?  Yes, yes I have.  I'm such a good little evil GM...I guess I should think about getting something Sword and Sorcerer together with that modified Xar setting.  Now, where's my copy of Legends of Araby?

The key to GMing Sorcerer, to paraphrase Houses of the Blooded, seems to be: make contingencies, not plans. And treat your NPCs like stolen cars--fun to joyride, but ditch 'em at any point.  But the nice thing about the annotated version is that at least I found out what I was doing Wrong.

Being 'stuck' with a demon works for me.  My two ideas on tap are a demon that craves to be used for justice (in a "smite the wicked" sense) and the one and only tentacle demon I ever wrote up...

[MadPanda]

Currently in progress (because I'm a bit of a masochist when it comes to this sort of thing, apparently)...League of Extraordinary Damsels, regeared for Numenera.  Because the Ninth World could use some equal-opportunity ass kicking from self-rescuing princesses.

Blame Monte Cook for this one.

[MadPanda]

Updated with an all-catgirl* reskin of Firefly, Powered by the Apocalypse!  How could this possibly go wrong?

Two thoughts on setup.  There's the easy way (pre-gens!) and the hard way (actually walking folks through char-gen)...



* okay, okay, dog-girls, bunny-girls, fox-girls, et cetera both permitted and encouraged.