Ramblings in a State of Insanity
hobbies
Reverb Gamers 2012 #10
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #10: Have you ever played a character originally from a book/TV/movie? How did the character change from the original as you played? If not, who would you most like to play?
Nope. Playing other people’s characters is not my thing.
Although…
If the Atomic Robo RPG (by Evil Hat! Of course!) has a stat block for Carl Sagan? It may persuade me to relent so I could say a very ponderous “billions“.
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #9
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #9: Have you ever played a character of the opposite sex. Why or why not? If yes, how did the other players react?
Yeah. Anyone who knows me knows that 90% of my characters are male. I have a two pronged answer to why this is.
Story #1:
By time I started gaming in earnest in college I was busy climbing to the crest of a grand and beautiful wave of open-throated misogyny. The sand kicking in the face started back in High School with small but poignant reminders of the Harsh Reality (“you cannot take the AP Computer class because there’s only one slot and, well, you’ll never do computers anyway…”). In college it began to reach that glorious crescendo of assholery. I’ve told these stories before so I shant rehash them again. Suffice they are legion and they are tiring and, back then, I made the mistake of living with it instead of doing what I do now, calling the bullshit to the carpet and not standing for any of it.
When it came to Fun Time Pretendy Games which were, above all, supposed to be fun, I had little interest in bringing all the baggage to the table. So I made male characters. In my world, men weren’t questioned why they wanted to be engineers or physicists or Starship Engineers in Starfleet or Jedis or Deckers. Men didn’t have to justify why they were picking up a sword and going off to adventure or throwing around fireballs. And to me, who had grown up on a steady diet of novels starring almost exclusively men in science fiction and horror, it was just easier. It was an escape from having to deal with the stupid all the time.
To all of their credit, my long suffering friends have put up with my quirk for many years.
I prefer female characters in precisely two settings: one-off con games and Cthulhu. At a con, I will not force random strangers to deal with my weird psychological hang-up from years of a faceful of crap.
Story #2:
Online is different. I will never play a female character in an online game unless it is in a private, closed chat room. I know the Internet. I know it is an open sewer. This is one of many common sense protection measures, like firewalls and anti-virus and using non-Windows machines. I’m on to it, I know its tricks, and I take proper procedures to protect myself and others from the jerks.
In 1992, I was exposed to the wonderful world of MUDding. Hey, I was on the University of Michigan Engineering UNIX boxes! They could talk all over the world! I just needed to type:
telnet blahblahdyblah.net 12345
Bingo! Midgaard! The game in question was a Diku. It was named Alpha. It was hosted in Finland. This was miraculous. I could go play a game in Finland. With crazy Finnish people.
I made a female character and it was ~ two days before the propositions began. And they were constant. I suppose at the time they assumed, and rightly, female characters were men looking for online hookups and TS. Why else would anyone make a female character? I logged out, logged back in, made the exact same character with a different gender and… presto!
I achieved Enlightenment.
I played Alpha for a little while but, like all Dikus, it got boring real quick, especially in the face of LPMuds. And MUSHing and MOOs. And chatroom-based games, my very favorite. We grow. We evolve. The Internet is what it is — the home for arguments and cats.
When people do meet me in person I guess it’s a bit of a jolt. But hey, it’s the fucking Internet. Here’s your beanie – it has a propeller! For all you know, I’m a well-designed bot who spews out random blog postings via scraping up bits of this and that from other blog postings and rearranging them in mildly readable ways.
Or, more likely, I’m a sentient can of Folger’s Crystals. How could you tell otherwise?
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #8
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #8: What’s the one gaming accessory (lucky dice, soundtrack, etc.) you just can’t do without? Why?
Two objects must come to the gaming table: the iPad and post-it notes.
Post-it notes come from Rob, from whom I’ve seen it in action. It’s a pretty simple system: during a session, when a player or the GM invokes a noun (person, place or thing), the noun goes on the post-it and the post-it sticks to the table. As the players reveal new information or arbitrary attach new information to the noun, the post-it note gets a note with the update — a new Aspect, a note about a relationship, dice, some fact, etc. Everyone sitting at the table can see what nouns are in play without having to remember them or make frantic notes. When players use up the noun or it becomes irrelevant, the GM pulls the post-it and throws it away, or hands it to a player. It’s a great system.
The iPad has on it:
- Goodreader for gaming book PDFs
- Note software like Penultimate or Note Taker HD
- Various dice rollers
- iKeepScore, a fantastic die rolling/game score keeping app
We use iKeepScore for a bunch of board and card games. It can sit in the center of the table and everyone can reach forward to update their scores as they take turns. It’s great.
There you go. Two items I could not live without: post-its and iPads. It’s gaming…. in the future.
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #7
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #7: How do you pick names for your characters?
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #6
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #6: Describe your all-time favorite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much?
I lean heavily toward nerdy dps characters — wizards, shamans, deckers, nerdly smart people who use their brains to do massive damage to the enemy through overly-complex plans. I also create artistic non-combat sort of characters: bards, artists, musicians and the like. I enjoy taking role-playing games and figuring out the singular most useless and/or goofy and/or idiosyncratic build imaginable and making that character because, why not? Anyone can win with a mini-maxed out tank (fighter, street samurai, your big one-on-one damage dealer) but it takes work to be effective with a D&D 3rd edition bard all the way up through 20th level — which, to be honest, I never did.
I was never completely satisfied on the answer of the perennial and fundamental question: Could a bard could use Summon Monster IV, summon a whale, and drop it on someone from 100′ up? Ever had a whale drop on your army? Because that would rule.
Favorite character of all time: Ezekiel Moonstartulip (it sounds better in Elvish), Ship’s Engineer and Navigator of the Royal Flush, Half-Elf, Mage, and AD&D 2nd Edition Spelljammer Character. Wearer of a Fabulous Coat, Snarker of Snarks. He was completely out of tune with nature. Zeke once watched FRITZHOLM HAMMERMILL eat 50 pancakes in one sitting!
Here’s an image of Zeke in attractive LEGO form navigating the Royal Flush through MAGIC. And a mighty battle on the deck with skeletons!
Second favorite character of all time (but only by a single amazing hair): Terry “Teraphim” Jackson, an NPC for my In Nomine game, the Balseraph of the Media, consumed completely by greed and burning need for good shoes, whom I did play a bit on a play-by-post board for a while. He was the demonic partner of my demonic PC Daimon Lightner, whom I played in Fiat Justitia, run long ago by the lovely Genevieve Cogman. (Daimon comes in at a cool #3, beaten out by Terry because that’s how one rolls when your best friend is a giant serpentine sunglasses-wearing demon.)
Sadly, it looks like the Fiat pages have been lost through time and the dissolution of io.com.
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #5
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #5: Have you ever introduced a child to gaming, or played a game with a young person? How is gaming with kids different than gaming with adults?
Katie beating us all at Dixit
Katie (age 7) plays Dixit, 7 Wonders, Blokus, Castle Ravenloft/Wrath of Ashardalon, Fluxx, Ascension (paper and digital version), Ticket to Ride, and a host of card games like Uno and Crazy-8s. One of her perennial favorites is Magic Labyrinth. Last weekend she played Forbidden Island. She regularly plays at the table with the adults during board game night. We haven’t tried Settlers of Catan yet but that’s due to my not owning a hard copy. We are planning to try Pandemic.
We have tried straight-up role-playing games. In our experience with multiple attempts, we learned the games designed “for kids” are too simplistic. The dull rules result in bored children after a while. After abandoning the for-kids games, we tried the D&D Red Box Starter Set. That turned out to be too complex even with the simplified ruleset. We have a copy of the beautifully crafted Mouse Guard Box Set — and it is gorgeous (a birthday gift from Rob) — we are itching to try. Reading through Burning Wheel, it holds promise.
We’ve learned a couple of important factoids while teaching Katie how to game:
o Board games and card games are a big win because they’re contained and social. Games need a good beginning, middle and clear ending to keep interest.
o She easily can play any game rated “Ages 8 and Up” and try any game “Ages 10 and Up.”
o Rule sets can be complex (see 7 Wonders) but she’ll keep up fine with adults if the rule sets are clear and concise with clearly stated objectives and winning conditions.
o She is a fiercely competitive card player who likes to shark opponents. (You have been warned!)
o Kids come up with crazy ways to win games you, an old and boring adult, never imagined.
o A typical RPG session of 3-4 hours is too long for a 6-7 year old. A good session is 1-1.5 hours. After that, she loses her attention span and gets fidgety. This is completely normal. It’s the same with board games: if Ravenloft is dragging on, she will leave the table at the one hour mark to go do something else.
o RPGs need streamlined and easy to understand rules with enough flexibility to be fun but simple enough to get playing immediately. A kid needs to understand how to roll the dice to kill d00ds in about five minutes. This is a hard balance to find.
o Stabbing orcs is lots of fun. Getting stabbed is not so fun. Power balance is less important with kids than you think. Also, trying to “role play out” scenes more complex than a dungeon crawl tend to be failures. Condensing games down to their essentials and planning for minimum time yields a maximum result.
o Dungeon crawls/missions/games with clear goals work much better than opened ended games. Kids need goals or boredom sets it quick.
o Kids make awesome playtesters for board and card games. If the kids find the rules boring, the game has structural issues. If the kids play through one game, it’s a pretty good game. If kids play two games, the game is a winner. If you’re making a card or board game, find a kid to beg, borrow or steal and make them play. What you learn about how the game is played and how well the rules work will surprise you.
o Rory Story Cubes fit in a bag or purse and create RPGs on the fly. Buy a set.
And the big one:
No one has yet successfully produced a good kid’s RPG. The rules are either too simplistic or too complicated for kids, both which bore kids in the first few minutes. This opinion may change after we playtest through Mouse Guard but, so far, none we have tried have hit that 1st-3rd grader demographic well.
What shocks me is the lack of a kid’s supers game. No one loves supers the way kids love supers and they get supers. Kids toys, kids comics, kids video games, kids tv shows, kids movies — supers! The ruleset for most Supers games are too complex (even for me). The thought of playing Champions or GURPS Supers or Hero with a 7 year old gives me the Fear. Mutants and Masterminds isn’t too bad but it has that D&D 3rd Ed flavor. Silver Age Sentinels may be slimmed down to a core BESM set but the book, being out of print for ages, is now hard to find. The new Marvel RPG might come close with a simplified Cortex system but I don’t know. Can you make a character in under five minutes? Does it have a spot to draw the hero on the character sheet in crayon and marker? Does one have to know the universe?
A good kids easy-to-play goal-based supers game is the Holy Grail.
I’ll post a lengthy follow-up to this question when we finally play Mouse Guard.
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #4
1Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #4: Are you a “closet gamer?” Have you ever hidden the fact that you’re a gamer from your co-workers, friends, family, or significant other? Why or why not? How did they react if they found out?
I’m a serious geekgrrl nrrd. I’m a chick with multiple engineering degrees from a school that bills itself as “the public ivy league” who is a huge booster for girls to get their geek on. I am not a closet geek.
I’ve had some pretty weird and uncomfortable experiences with gaming and gender — are there any questions in this list on gaming and gender? I do have some horror stories coming up. But anyway. My parents knew I had a major video game and comics addiction. Later when the sourcebooks showed up it was “stuff I liked.” I met Eric through gaming. Most of my friends (although not all) game in some way — RPGs, board games, video games. Mostly video games. I work in a pretty deep geek industry so video gaming conversations are normal watercooler/hallway daily convos every day.
I’ve walked around with a big old “you weirdo” Mark of Cain on my forehead many times for many, many different reasons for most of my life, the least of which is: “You play D&D? NERD.” You like math? NERD. You like literature? NERD. You like computers? RICH NERD. Etc. etc. etc. We need to dig to discover I also enjoy rolling dice and by time we get there, we have so much ammo it’s small fry. We are who we are, man, and live it or lose it. Be a geek grrl and be proud or go home. No closet nonsense. No need to proselytize to other people. Just be who you are.
I don’t like this question much. I’ve rewritten this post three times and not come up with a satisfying answer. It’s annoying me because writing this post on the Internet in public where it shall be stored in the WayBack machine and in search engines evermore and can be trivially found with a google search sort of belays the answer. As it’s starting to work me into a “pro girls in science/engineering” froth which, to my mind, is a much tougher issue with larger social implications than “someone said something mean once about my game” I’m moving on to the next question.
Next!
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #3
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #3: What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer, Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? (Search “types of gamer” for more ideas!) How does this affect the kinds of games you play? For example, maybe you prefer crunchy rules-heavy systems to more theatrical rules-light ones.
A highly-placed well-informed anonymous source claims I play RPGs to win. This is most likely true, although I would classify it a bit more diplomatically as a “Narrative-based Goal-Oriented Explorer/Achiever.” Who likes to win.
I’m not a PvP gamer. I do not like to pw0n n00bs. Halo holds no interest for me. I’m an obsessive Civilization player who carefully opens the entire map with packs of scouts, takes all the goodies, and then aggressively expands until reaching a turtled civilization I can only cap with a stomp stack. I’m that guy who looks at big lists of achievements in Steam games and has to open them all no matter how stupid because they are there to be opened. I like to have little DINGs on computers when I reach some sort of new apex of awesome.
I enjoy leveling up.
In traditional RPGs, I like to consume all information possible (strange tomes, source material, in-game references, bits of hallucination pulled from my feeble mind) and, once I have exhausted all resources and attained a bit of mastery, find a way to achieve, achieve, achieve. If my character has no mountain to climb, no challenge to overcome, no power-up to get and no foozle to defeat, I’m done and wandered off.
I am, what you might call, a Call of Cthulhu player.
Nothing gets the molars a-grindin’ faster than being cheerfully told “the role playing is the reward!” I will run in tiny circles of madness being told there’s ultimately no goal and I should enjoy the character interactions. I am not a killer — again, I don’t want to simply roll dice and cap orcs — but to me, stories have dramatic structure, they have a climax, and cultists should maim someone in the end. We win, we all get advancement and we’re set up for a sequel.
To get a better feel for me as a gamer, here are Games I Feel are AWESOME (for me):
o Leverage RPG
o Shadowrun
o Trail of Cthulhu/Esoterrists/GUMSHOE-based games
o D&D 3rd Edition
And equally, Games I Feel are NOT SO AWESOME (for me):
o World of Darkness*
I am currently reading nWoD and this opinion may change. I have discovered a bizarre fondness for Vampire: the Requiem I lacked in all earlier versions of Vampire. Introspective moping did nothing for me.
o Smallville RPG**
Great game, great relationship mechanics. I need to be able to shoot Lex Luthor, not hug him.
o D&D 4th Edition
I am flat-out not 4th ed’s audience. It’s the other direction — too much munch, not enough narrative. Crazy! I like 4th ed more when I stop thinking of it as an RPG and as a tactical board game with no hope of story.
The best games for me are those that can be run episodically. Tiny highs and lows with a season finale. Encapsulated stories, a super cool setting with lots of information to explore, and seriously hated bad guys who get away. Trail of Cthulhu-like games with research, mystery, exploration and sudden action are my apex, my all, my perfect game.
Reverb Gamers Post #2
1Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #2: What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?
What I enjoy most about gaming:
Reading sourcebooks.
My house is full of the damn things. They’re packed in boxes in the basement. I just carved out a new niche in a bookshelf for brand- brand- brand-new hardcovers. I own a fair number in PDF on my iPad.
Most of them are awfully written but I’ve wised up over the years and now I check the credits page for QUALITY. I know who writes these things. I have my list. I know who you are.*
I have read an order of magnitude more games than I will ever play.
Second to reading the sourcebooks is going on to the Internet and arguing about said sourcebooks. I’m unclear what else the Internet is for other than funny pictures of cats and inane arguments about meaningless topics. I keep hearing things about expansion of consciousness and great collections of knowledge and freeing oppressed societies but as far as I can tell? Gamer arguments and cats.
Why do I game?
It’s my blog so I’ll cough up an honest answer to this one — because my friends game. If my friends didn’t game, I wouldn’t game. I’d play video games or write my Magnum Opus or write music or do something that contributes to society. It’s that simple. When my friends aren’t gaming, I’m not playing either.
Not everything falls under this aegis. I don’t do everything because my friends are up to no good. I can get up to no good on my own — as has been suitably proven. Yet, gaming needs people participation and if my friends are doing it, I want to do it, too.
This is how I get hooked on MUSHes and other online outlets. My friends are online playing, so I am online playing. My friends are scening, so I am scening because that’s what my friends are doing. When my friends take off, as they inevitably do, I’ll linger around to make sure they’re good and gone and then wander off myself.
Gaming isn’t some great paean to some higher existence or greater consciousness or a way to get in touch with my inner self. I’m not in search of some greater literary drama enacted through playing, say, Vampire. Honestly, guys, I’ve read James Joyce. I’ve read the collective works of Tom Wolfe. I’m good with the highest in English Language Drama. I want out of gaming to hang with friends, eat some doritoes, and roll a bunch of dice to do crazy things and maybe shoot something Cthulhuoid in the face.
Looks like my answer is: “I game because I enjoy the social interaction with my geeky peers.”
* My twitter feed.
Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #1
0Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games. I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill. You can do it, too! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.
REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it? How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?
When I was twelve, three friends (all girls) and I played the original Red Box D&D game at a sleepover when we were supposed to be painting our nails and giggling. To set the stage: This was a long time ago (mid-80s) in a land far far away (Brighton, Michigan), almost as distant as a Super Star Destroyer but twice as cold and less of a trap. It wasn’t my box set.* I know whose it was but I will not names to protect the nominally innocent.
No one had told us gaming was for boys and it looked like the sort of game one plays at a sleepover. It had books and manuals and dice and pieces of paper and half intelligible instructions. I dimly remember rolling up a thief. No one knew how to play. The walkthrough manual was worthless. We fought — something! Someone scored hits! Dice was rolled! Treasures were found! We played until nearly four in the morning.
And then, oddly, we never played it again. We just… never did.
I gamed a bit with a High School gaming group (all boys). D&D and a little Battletech. I dimly remember rolling a moose pilot for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game that was never played. I owned a very small number of well-thumbed D&D 2nd Edition splats by time I graduated bought from God knows where. That’s literal. I honestly do not know: God knows where those books came from.
I did not seriously get into gaming until I stepped into that open slobbering gaming maw, a college dormitory next to an engineering school. And then… and then… and then I had access to not only gamers, great insane piles and gouts of gamers, but a hobby store. Rider’s Hobby.** And you know what Rider’s Hobby stocked?
Shadowrun.
Honestly, I only ever bought a small handful of Shadowrun 2nd edition books — core book, the Decker book, another one I cannot recall as my Shadowrun splatbooks are packed away in boxes and eaten by weevils for years. How I got away with this small set of purchases over a four-year span I can chalk up to my core college addiction: music CDs. One only had so much money for Shadowrun sourcebooks when one needed Nine Inch Nails that much more. And once I laid my hands on money enough to blow on Shadowrun, I had been overtaken by Call of Cthulhu (5th edition, always 5th edition) and that demonic pox on all of humanity, Amber Diceless Roleplaying.
College was D&D 2nd edition until Shadowrun and then Shadowrun Shadowrun Shadowrun until it was overtaken by Star Trek (WEG) and CoC and ADRPG and a little Vampire and that awesome Star Trek game we played with the Shadowrun rules.
I’m left with a warm fondness for huge handfuls of dice, a vague notion in more than four stats, and a belief in a convergence between the Amber’s insane diceless dramafests and the need to quantify and roll dice to adjudicate results on a test of skill or combat. After suffering through AD&D 2nd Ed’s rules, the Shadowrun “roll a crapload of dice and use rule of sixes” was such a breath of fresh air it took over everything like a creeping cthuloid mass. Somewhere there’s an exciting table showing my gaming sweet spot: enough dramafest to keep coming back to the table, enough dice to make it feel like a game, and smooth enough rules I don’t need to read the rulebook. I tend to read RPGs through this lens and judge them all against the simplicity of “you have a 16 roll 16 dice use rule of 6s hit a target number of 30 to succeed.”
I think we’re getting there. I love FATE but it’s a little too complex. I dig Cortex but sometimes I want to roll more than 2 dice. I love GUMSHOE for the problems it solves. But what I want, at the end of the day, is to mash old Shadowrun rules up with ADRPG and have Brand hose down Caine in the Amber Tech ™ Arcology Throne Room with his two Ingram Smart Guns, enormous dice pool born of wired reflexes and an insane stim addiction and then stand there giggling and chanting “I’ve got all the BULLETS, SUCKER.”
* Until recently, I never owned a copy of the Red Box D&D set.
** Rider’s Hobby was by no means a great hobby store but it was a hobby store which was a great deal better than no hobby store whatsoever, my earlier condition.***
*** To get to Rider’s Hobby: “Walk down East Liberty until it hurts and look left. When your feet hurt, it will be before the costume store.” These instructions never failed me. What failed me was this route took me past Borders #1, then the 2nd greatest bookstore on Earth.****
**** The 1st is the Strand in NYC.
Nephilim – Secret Society: The Knights Templar
0The Knights Templar are the guys with the Plan.
They are the guys, to put a fine point on it, with the Grand Plan. The Grand Plan has a large number of wiggly bits to it but in essence it looks like:
- Steal all the occult knowledge in the world;
- Kill all the Nephilim;
- ?????
- Profit!
In the Official Templar Publications and Documentation the Grand Plan is more formal on gold leaf with gold ink. When boiled down to its essence that’s what they’re about. Come with us! We kill Nephilim and we have a Grand Plan for the Magical Domination of the Earth! Also, pie! We have PIE.
In 1014BC, about the time when the great King of Kings were memories and the Pyramids slowly overtaken by the sands and Egypt herself was torn to shreds by another round of internal civil war and strife, twelve military commanders laid hands on the secrets of the Priests at Heliopolis and learned the truth of the Nephilim, Akhenaton and the 22 Major Arcana. They conceived a plan to steal the Emerald Tablets which held the greatest of Nephilim secrets and learn them for themselves. They were thwarted at the last moment and they, and their followers, disappeared into the sands to lurk and wait. They become excellent lurkers. A thousand years later, the Templars felt they had an opening to unleash their Grand Plan with the Birth of the Fool but they were thwarted again by Nephilim in the guise of Romans in Judea. Then again in the 12th Century they emerged, the Poor Knights of the Temple, to guard pilgrims to the Holy City and to search for the artifacts buried by the followers of the Fool at the Temple Mount. It stuck.
Armed with the knowledge found in scrolls found under the remains of Solomon’s Temple, the Templars enacted their current version of their Grand Plan. By the 13th century they spread through all of Europe as bankers and financiers for the Great and Mighty. They owned the land. They owned the world! And it would have worked too if it wasn’t for those meddling Nephilim who used their positions in the Church and the French Court to make the Templar Treasure Horde a tasty snack to desperate despots. As being burned at the stake as a witch was the trend in the 13th century, the Templars partook. They burned well. Their forces dispersed with their occult knowledge and their money as far away from the French Court as they could go which, at the time, was Scotland.
The Templars reconvened underground and nursed their wounds and their hatred of the Nephilim. This was well known territory: they had skulked underground for thousands of years, stalking Nephilim, and turning them into Elixers while slowly worming their way into power. They could do it again. So they did. The Templars prepared to ride out another ten centuries until they could rise again.
Never having given up banking, the modern Templars are the great brokers of occult services in the underground world. Need someone capped? They have assassins. Need a spell cast using an Elixir? They can get sorcerers and bottles of Ka-elements. Have a Nephilim infestation and need an Orichulka sword? They are the go-to guys to find that weapon. The Templars long learned debts were worth more than hard cash (although cash is nothing to sniff at), and everyone owes the Templars with an extra 10% interest off the top. They call in their debts when they need something done. And one better do it, because someone else owes the Templars, too, and they’ll call in that favor to wipe you out for lack of payment, the bastards. They sit like a giant, plump spider among all the other secret societies helping some and hindering others to work the levers of the Grand Plan.
The Head of the Templars is the Grand Master. He rules the society with an iron fist. Second to him are Eleven Bailiffs who rule eleven parts of the world. Beneath the Bailiffs are the Commanderies, smaller units of geographical area ruled from secret Templar lairs. Each Commandry is ruled by a White Coat and his Six Knight Companions. Below the White Coat and his Six Companions are Knights, Squires and Pages. A page is the lowest unit of Templar.
And one cannot have a paranoid secret society with Internal Affairs. The IA wing of the Templars are called the Obediences. The Obedience Heads are the Crosses. What’s super fun is when the Obediences get into fights with their Commanderies and an entire Templar power node implodes.
The Templars keep two kinds of outside influences going: their Companions and their Farm. Their Companions are groups and organizations who know of the Templar existence and work with them for monetary bribes or mild power gains. They are not terribly well informed but they do give material help. The Farm is a network if in the dark dupes who do the Templar’s dirty work without ever knowing the truth. The Templars exercise the Farm liberally to keep from expending their own resources.
The modern Templar goals are simple: 1. Kill All Nephilim. 2. Enact Grand Plan. Whenever Nephilim put their heads up and look around, Templars are there ready to lop their heads off with Orichulka swords. All the plans, the plots, the conspiracies, they all ultimately come back… to the Templars.
CMS Updates and Adds
03 months ago
I added ~15 pages to the Nephilim FATE Conversion CMS on the site. Most of these are cut and paste jobs although some are cut-and-paste-2-or-more-together jobs. I’m pondering one of those fancy edit-right-in-the-page buttons for when I come through and clean things up. All the links in the main index page and in the table of contents included on every page should be good.
What the system desperately needs is examples so duly noted I will need to add examples. I also need to move major arcana and game seeds out of the blog stream and into the right place.
WordPress isn’t really a great tool for this but it’s what I have. Ultimately something like Drupal is better for a blog+CMS build out but I didn’t want to migrate all my crap into Drupal due to complete laziness. I may be forced to over time.
So! If you ever want to publish a ton of gaming materials on your site for people to pick through and download AND you want to have a front page blog AND you’re cheap and wish to spend no money AND you are starting from scratch, Drupal is your best choice.
Bookhounds of Nephilim
0This an example of a full Nephilim campaign.
Out on the edge of town a small band of strange people run an eclectic bookstore. They show up to all the estate sales and pick over the booksellers searching for choice and rare books, the more occult-like the better. One or two of them are auction hounds known for sniping sales. And they are a bit creepy.
They’re Nephilim. And they’re Bookhounds. They have been Bookhounds for thousands of years. Now they’re awake and they crave knowledge.
1930s London is soaked in the Occult
It is the time of the Emperor Arcanum. Great powers grind together across Europe to slow inexorable destruction. A country falls to the forces of the occult. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is on the wane and their secrets published for the world to see. Aleister Crowley still lives — bloated, fat and drunk, but alive. Would-be occultists lounge in coffee shops and exclusive clubs to swap politics and gossip. Dark things stalk the alleyways of London and most of them inhabit human forms.
No one likes Occult books like Nephilim
Floating around among the detritus of the swiftly changing world of the 1930s is the hastily copied and poorly printed accumulated knowledge of the Occult Nephilim since the Dawn of Time, badly copied and handwritten and misprinted. One man’s Kabbalah scratchings in the frontspiece of a book is another man’s Greater Summoning. Occult tomes are like Pokemon to Nephilim — no matter how worthless one must catch them all. The Nephilim collect books with purpose. Those half-hearted confused rituals work for them, after all.
And Sometimes the Books Come With Bonuses
That book full of Theosophy and Dream-Magick has, buried in it, the ritual summoning of a horror from beyond time and space, ripped from some plane unexplored by Nephilim-kind. It’s a little unexpected but hey! It’s a new Summoning! We want to keep that one in case the Templars show up…
Everyone wants — and are dying for — occult books
In the meantime, something new and horrible grows. The rise of the Thule Society in Germany in the 1930s is deep and fertile ground for Nephilim Adventures stationed in London. The world’s first truly magickal human government is bent on world domination, and eliminating all Nephilim. Not those who stand in their way — all Nephilim.
- The High Priestess Arcana will do anything to collect the now-scattered secret Occult knowledge before the now highly trained occult societies of humans do and they will kill to defend their libraries;
- The Emperor wishes to preserver his power from the rise of the Thule in Europe and expects those who dwell in his Domain to do his bidding and collect the Occult knowledge and shoot Nazis for him;
- The Tower scours the Auction halls and bookseller tables to pull forbidden knowledge from the hands of humans, knowledge leaked out by the rise of Occult Societies in Victorian London;
- The Magician wants to put magic into the hands of mankind to help them combat the rising tide of Occult Evil and sponsors more than a few post-Golden Dawn Occult Circles and is getting into all kinds of trouble;
- The Templars, via Secret Governmental Organizations, consider working — maybe, in an enemy of my enemy is my frenemy — with the Nephilim Arcanum JUST THIS ONCE to combat the rising horror of the Thule but they still will pull Occult books out of the grasping hands of Nephilim Bookhounds at estate sales;
- Meanwhile, the Thule Society may already have their hands on the Spear of Destiny and, worse, are establishing Occult bases from Berlin to Alexandria to Tibet and they are hunting Nephilim;
- The race is on for the Thule, the Nephilim, the Templars, and any opportunistic secret societies — ancient Nephilim-worshipping groups and Black Moon Selenim and horrible cults — to collect all the Occult tomes floating around on the streets of London and use the magic contained within to win the upcoming World War. That 15th century grimoire is more than a book full of dark evils; it may be the key to winning the World.
Bookhounds of Nephilim is a heady stew of Occultists who can actually practice the occult, London, Nephilim Major Arcana jocking for position in the morning hours of WWII, Templars making backroom deals, Nazis, trips through the snows of Tibet, chases through the desert for ancient artifacts of power, guns, car chases, book auctions, and more Nazis. And maybe the Ark of the Covenant. Or Cthulhu. It all starts with a couple of Nephilim, friends throughout their Incarnations through time, putting up shop in a bookstore. Who would ever suspect eccentric book collectors in a book store in London?
Start with the Nazis and Occultism resource and work from there. It’s a fertile ground for great stuff. Also some high quality crazy. Simply read through the Internet and assume every rumor about the Nazis and the Occult are true. Now, stir.
You can get Bookhounds of London from Pelgrane Press. But I assume you already own a copy. Setting is “Extreme pulp.” It’s not the right system but it’s full of the right flavor.
The 1930s Nephilim Bookhounds vs the Thule vs the Templars game is high on my list of games to run.
The Nephilim Job
0There you are, all popped out of your stasis, in your spiffy new body, in some city newer than your last incarnation, living out some insane science fiction dream. One minute you were being skewered by Templars in the late 15th century and next thing you know, you’re standing on the streets of New York (or Atlanta or LA or San Francisco or Seattle…) Things are weird but it’s better than being held in suspended animation in your Babylonian sword. Speaking of your stasis…
… where is it, exactly?
You didn’t think you were waking up in a new Simulacrum with it in your hand, did you?
Right off the bat, you have yourself a problem. Or, more to the point, a set of problems.
1. Your Stasis is not sitting around in a convenient, low security location.
Babylonian swords don’t hang around waiting for Babylonians to come along and sword with them. That sword is a precious cultural relic that goes for millions at auction. It’s either sitting in a museum, in a private collection, or in an archeological dig. And if you didn’t just wake in a Simulacrum in Iraq — which would have it’s own fascinating set of problems — it’s in a museum or a collection. And you’ve got to find out which one it is, in the middle of an unfamiliar city, in an unfamiliar century, full of unfamiliar stuff.
You’re going to need some serious help.
2. You’ve got to get the crew together.
You cannot possibly be the only Nephilim in this God forsaken century and in this stinking, loud, insane city. There must be other Nephilim wandering through the dark, strange, and Starbucky places, those places where the occult and the hobo codes meet. And interesting enough, other Nephilim do wander the same occulty gatherings hoping to bump into other Nephilim. Wouldn’t it be fortuitous if you happened to meet Nephilim you knew?
Along the way, picking up some of the gossip about the various Arcana is helpful. Who is fighting with whom? And who has the Tower stabbed lately? How have things changed since you last walked the Earth?
But now you have a few… not so much friends as Nephilim with some plans in common (for now) so now it’s time to locate your Stasis.
3. Wouldn’t you know it, it’s being held by the damned Templars.
With the help of a crazed Chariot Angel with his head wired and plugged into the Internet while he does some strange ‘net-based Alchemy you hardly comprehend, you locate your stasis. You didn’t think it was far away: it’s in a swank expensive location owned, as you find out after some serious research and casing of the joint, a prominent Templar. A Templar who believes a Good Nephilim is a Dead Nephilim. The kind of Templar who has guards and security systems and friends.
Good thing you and your friends uncover an upcoming gala/an antiques auction/a huge benefit at a local museum where lots of people will be around the stasis. You and your friends can maybe sneak in with a few well-applied spells and summonings and waltz out with the Babylonian Sword in hand and a few other occult and highly mystical trinkets.
4. Getting it has some operational issues.
Not only is the Stasis well guarded, a Babylonian Sword doesn’t slip into a convenient pocket. Getting it out of the gala/benefit/giant well guarded fortress without riling up the Templar who owns it — and knows what it is — isn’t going to be easy. It will take planning, and prepping spells, and intelligence. And even then, something always goes wrong. Because that’s what happens. It goes wrong.
Even if the crew gets out of the Heist with the Stasis in hand and only a minimum of complete mayhem and a smallish body count, it will leave a pissed off Templar in their wake. A Templar who knows Nephilim are running around. And he wants them dead… before they interfere with his plans. Maybe for World Domination! But maybe also just for pie.
Nephilim can be run as a full on Occult Heist game. Stasis, Athanors, Focii, Secret Mystical Tomes, Freeing Homunculi, foiling ancient enemies… Nephilim, as an underground occult street species breaking reality for fun and profit, are natural thieves, hackers and grifters. The world is full of stuff to steal, enemies to rob, and marks to screw. Nephilim don’t turn to the temporal human authorities to follow through on their plans. Instead they break into houses, run savage burns on marks, and sneak off into the night with the new magic book full of the secrets of the Higher Planes of Summoning in hand.
A fantastic source for inspiration in running Heist games is the Leverage RPG. Sure, this is a direct plug of a pretty good game. Also, the chapter on running the game has a great flow for building Heists in general. Nephilim are made for Heist games. And for Nephilim, the Mark? He’s probably some god damned Templar.
(I could add much more on this subject but this post is already getting long.)
Nephilim FATE – Now What?
0After the lengthy buildup of system, the end chapters of the original Nephilim sourcebook doesn’t provide hints on what to do with the system. It offers a hodge-podge of secret societies, a bunch of colorless Nephilim NPCs and an unconnected bestiary. It’s a headscratcher. A cool magic system and a neat incarnation system dripping with history and the book shows no way forward. No wonder the game collapsed and the line was canceled; no one could play it because no one knew what to do with it. The sourcebook glossed over little things like setting and examples.
I’m not a huge fan of the canned adventures at the end of sourcebooks but, somewhere along the way, and I’m not certain when or where, we figured out a game needs all the game bits to be a complete product. It needs skill/combat resolution systems and character sheets and an example of what to do and where to go. I don’t run canned adventures (although that may change soon) but I read them. I like to know what the designers were thinking when they put the system together and use them as an example of how to apply the system.
Now that I’m at the end of converting the core rules in the core Nephilim sourcebook + a big chunk of Chronicles of the Awakening + scraping some stuff out of Major Arcana, it’s time to do something cool. So the next big chunk of posts will be everything I can think up, no matter how wacky or bizarre, of things to do with a pack of immortal, occult-obsessed, mystical beings who ride around in fleshy meatbags and chase some philosophical ideal they may never reach because they believe somewhere, out there, if they just are pretty enough, they will get delicious cake. And such delicious cake it is!
Also, Templars.
The ideas trotted out are just that — ideas. And they may be exceptionally lame. But I’ll try to show off what one can do with Nephilim if one thinks about it super duper hard. If any of these are GOOD or USEFUL or should be EXPANDED, leave a comment and I’ll work them up past the original 500 words.
Meanwhile, I am slowly shoving webpages into my CMS. It’s taking me forever, though, but I’m hoping that activity picks up soon.
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