Tetsuyama

Cool. There's at least one folk (this one right here) who's interested in how this turns out.

That's why you have to get a "welcome back" thread started for yourself, and get lots of people to post so you can respond reasonably without it looking weird. But I think (not sure here) that they belong in "Non Gaming Discussion" or something like that.

D'oh! I could have sworn that you were listed in the art credits as one of two artists for the cover for Dark Champions. I'm gonna have to blame my apparent memory problems on the diet pop, since I'm not naturally fallible.

Waitaminute... Is that being a geek or being lazy? 'Cause I'm *definitely* lazy, and I'd consider having two FREDs at home for that reason (well, that and I always come up with ideas in front of the TV, but my computer is upstairs and most of my gaming "work" is done up there). The extra at the office is totally understandable, since you can't hit *pause* on your job to run home and grab your FRED. I would think that a true geek would have two in the same room so that he could have more pages open at once; or maybe one pristine and one with the pages cut off the binding and put into a 3-ring so that he could pull out pages and have them handy to refer to as needed. I dunno about that second guy though, he comes pretty close to sacrelige what with marring the book and all.

I think that the watercolor look really works well for this one. I think that where I start to run in to problems with watercolor is when I see a piece where the subject is cartoony and I would expect bright primary colors, but the colors are a little dim and the edges not as sharp as I tend to like. The subject here is a bit more muted than most four-color supers, and the edges are well-defined in all the right places. That reminds me, I really like the cover to Dark Champions (the old one; haven't seen the new one), and the character firing two guns while diving around the piano from FREd. Those are probably two of my favorite gaming pieces of artwork. Very nice stuff.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Angel" the RPG You don't suppose you could thwart these by drinking only rainwater and pure grain alcohol do you? I suppose you could say that vampires have been "done to death", but that would probably be in poor taste, and probably only partially accurate. You can always change up how vampires are created, and they tie in pretty well with a variety of other nightmarish creatures (demons of various sorts is really what I was thinking of). Movies and literature seem to agree that being bitten by a vampire is a critical part of becoming one, but at that point there are several variations on the theme. Sometimes you have to drink the vampire's blood, sometimes you have to be bitten a certain number of times, sometimes you have to have all of your blood drained, sometimes you have to have some of your blood drained and you slowly change over the next several days. I think one of the more interesting things to do would be to let the players know that a few of the genre rules are going to be bent a bit, and then change some characteristics of vampirism. Maybe it's a genetic disorder that takes over later in life, maybe it's a result of a close encounter with a demon of some sort, maybe it's even a result of possession by a migrant demon (say the demon gets "stuck" in the body until it dies, but at that point is free to start searching for another likely body to inhabit). Can vampires create other vampires, or can they only create zombies of some variety, or do they only kill? Do they actually have control over their creations, or are they autonomous? Will a vampire actually live forever barring a freak accident or direct action on an entity's part? What powers, if any, do vampires possess? Hypnotism? Can they change shape? Are they bulletproof? Another topic to tackle is the slayers themselves. If the vampires aren't overwhelmingly powerful, it's reasonable that the slayers are just relatively ordinary people who've had a close encounter of some sort with a vampire (loved one killed, or the slayer was actually attacked and got away somehow). Otherwise the slayers probably have to be exceptional people (special ops or enhanced humans of some sort). Is there a large organization of slayers, or are there just a bunch of lone slayers and small teams wandering around? Do the slayers work for the government or are they on their own trying to stay under the government's radar? Why haven't the slayers gone public? Why haven't the vampires gone public? I guess that was actually more questions than ideas, but maybe answering them will give you more of a starting point?

Very nice artwork. I agree with some of the other posters in that I'm not a huge fan of the watercolor look, but I do like the sketchy relaxed feel of the original piece. I really like the "Cobalt" drawing. Very sharp. I also *really* liked the adventure descriptions. I haven't run across a story hour-type board here, and that seems like something that a role playing community can always use. Anyways, I bookmarked the Green Ronin thread so I can keep up with what's going on! Hopefully you'll keep finding time to update it!

Hmm.. This post isn't as well organized as I'd like, but hopefully all this stuff is useful to someone. The "Dungeoncraft" series of articles from Dragon are a pretty good resource for getting started. They used to have them online, but it looks like the site's been rearranged and I can't find them right now. The author had a suggestion that really stuck in my mind: give everything - every person, place, or thing, a secret, and have a clue for every secret. You can of course go overboard with this, but it's not a bad guideline. If most things have some secret, you can get a lot of apparent depth out of your world for somewhat less work than you might otherwise put in. If you start with the characters as relative newbies in the world, it's pretty easy to cut them off geographically from the areas you haven't fleshed out yet. For example, reasonably large mountain chains to north and east, rapids to the west and a large lake with a ferry that they don't have the money for to the south. It may seem a little contrived, but it's not a bad way of giving yourself a little extra time to get everything worked out. As far as maps go, I kind of like taking a map from part of Earth and just modifying it a bit. Adding a couple of interesting geographic features, changing the temperate zones and weather a bit, stuff like that. For example, in my last campaign I just used a map of Japan, but I replaced some of the area between the Honshu and Hokkaido land masses with a large crater lake. The backstory for the crater was that they had been connected by a land bridge, but Hokkaido had been overrun by evil, and a powerful group of heroes had called down a huge meteor to sever their bridge to Honshu, thus saving most of the land but leaving Hokkaido as the troubled "Cursed Lands" to the north. Another handy tool is census data. You can get a list of names by frequency and such, and throw that into a spreadsheet. With a little bit of "programming", you can make it generate a list of 100 or so names. These are useful both during world generation and on the fly in GMing. I had two spreadsheets, one of typical American names and one of Japanese names, and I'd bring a couple of printed sheets to each game I ran. One sheet English, one Japanese, with half of each list masculine and the other half feminine. When I needed to come up with a name, there it was, and I could refer to it by number in my notes to fill it in later with the actual name when I was at my computer.

Looks like I'll be using some of my leftover giftcards from Christmas. Let's see, we've got Warehouse 23, Delta Green, Suppressed Transmission, and Sub Rosa on the list. Good thing I've been too busy at work to spend 'em so far! It does seem like one constant of the genre is that the PCs kind of get treated like mushrooms (fed fertilizer, and kept in the dark). Maybe that's part of what keeps it interesting (and humanly possible for the GM)? It does seem like ultimately the PCs have to work for one conspiracy or another, probably not unwittingly. As has been pointed out, it has two huge advantages: no plot hole from the characters not getting the black panel van treatment since they're tracked assets, and it gives the GM an easy "nudge" to point them in almost any direction (like using the nifty trick with the three apparently unrelated articles). Are there any major disadvantages to having the PCs work for a conspiracy? Has anyone found a way in which that doesn't work well? Interesting about using a real city. I live near Seattle, but unfortunately I don't know the city all that well. From that standpoint, it'd be easier to just throw my PCs into a new city from whole cloth since I'd know it better than they do. But of course, I can get street maps of Seattle and such. And the players can argue over the fastest way to get from the Eastside to Downtown endlessly, giving me extra time to come up with the next scene. Muhahaha..

GitS = Ghost in the Shell (manga by Masamune Shirow, published in the US by Dark Horse Comics, anime available on DVD and VHS from Manga Entertainment directed by Mamoru Oshii). Good cyberpunk stuff -- heavy on the cyberware, the characters are all a little estranged from the man on the street, but the world isn't too dark because they actually work for a pretty hardcore agency that provides good backup.

Modern & "Realistic", eh? I've played in a couple of those using Hero, but it was at least an edition ago. It actually worked pretty well. We had to be careful, and no PCs died, but we didn't play the campaigns for that long. To assure our survival, we made sure that any time we were going to wind up in combat, it was a pitched battle that the other guys walked in to and had no chance of walking out of. It took a lot of sneaking and peeking, and making sure our contingency plans had contingency plans. Something between modern day and cyberpunk really appeals to me. I've always like Masamune Shirow's work (the Appleseed/Ghost in the Shell world is so cool), but the amount of work that would go in to something quite that detailed is beyond me. It's got cyberpunk-like tech, but in some ways the world doesn't seem as dark. Maybe it's because the protagonists work for the government and don't have the same "us vs. the World" complex that frequently shows up in cyberpunk. Anyways, one partial solution to the problem is what I'm thinking about running for some friends in a couple of months, an X-Files/Conspiracy X type game. If the PCs work for a government agency (or an outside agency with enough juice to fake it), then they can get away with a little more. They also probably have slightly better than standard tech, thus hopefully a better survival rate. Of course, you could ease things a little by having the characters be largely package deals with a bit of customization, and have each player run a character pool (this has been mentioned before, and seems like a *great* idea for this sort of game) that gets drawn from for each mission. Was that mostly back on topic? Tetsuyama

Archer: Awesome! I like the tarot idea -- INWO is a hella fun game. Allen: Feel free to steal the rolodex idea. Unfortunately, I can't claim credit. I'm not the world's best GM, but it's not from lack of trying or rooting around the net looking for helpful hints on how other people do it. That particular one is from "Worldbuilding" out of Dragon. I'll have to stop by Border's some time in the next couple of days to check out the Big Books. Hopefully I'll manage to wrangle one or two people into helping me come up with ideas. I've often thought it'd be nice if there were some GM boards to bounce ideas off of other GMs and see what they thought. Of course, the trick is to keep your players from reading them. I've also done a little bit of thinking about a conspiracy campaign sheet -- i.e. something that helps you solidify your ideas on some kind of basic stuff. Do the PCs work for the government or not? Are the PCs trying to protect the conspiracy or uncover it? How many large conspiracies are there? What kind of resources do the PCs have access to? Fake IDs? Police powers? *REALLY* big guns? I was thinking about that because the different source material I've been looking at so far tackles it from several different angles. Most of them have the PCs working for one conspiracy or another, but there's almost always more than one conspiracy (unless you count as "conspiracies" aliens with no human assistance, werewolves, vampires, and other assorted nightmare critters). I suppose it'd be kind of interesting to go through some of the agency generation stuff for a variety of different conspiracies, maybe something like writeups from Super Agents or something like the point system/checklist from Ninjas & Superspies. Do you run your game in a real city or a fictional one? It's pretty easy to see arguments for both -- authenticity for the real city, flexibility for the fictional. I'm just wondering if anyone's gotten hit with a real downside (or upside) of one or the other. Thanks! Tetsuyama

Back at last... Anyways, I've been thinking about running some sort of X-Filesish type game for some players (probably 4-5), and I was wondering what your experiences have been trying that with FREd? Were there any resources that you found were invaluable when coming up with ideas? Where did you place it geographically? What kind of resources did you give the PCs? I've been rooting through some GURPS books (Conspiracy X, Black Ops, and Illuminati), as well as Bureau 13 (an old Tri Tac game). There seems to be lots of good source material in those, as well as some decent stuff in the old Champions supplements (Super Agents, mostly, but I've been looking through the old Dark Champions book and its supplements). Does anyone have any suggestions for other good source? What kind of techniques did you use to make GMing these easier? How much of the various conspiracies did you think out ahead of time vs. what was on the fly? I've been trying to come up with some fake newspaper clippings and some sort of "Rolodex of Secrets and clues" that I can shuffle and use to come up with adventure hooks and ideas. Tetsuyama Back from the grave! Er, I mean, working too hard!