Graph Paper Games

So if you've been reading Spider-Man lately, you know that there has been this whole "Spider-verse" storyline going on.  For those who aren't reading it, a family of interdimensional vampires has been roaming around feeding on the spider-essences of various spider-men (or women, or pigs, or monkeys) from different alternative dimensions.  Twigged to the situation, a bunch of the different Spider-men have teamed up to stop them, with the Doc-Ock "Superior Spider-Man" in the lead. Now while I think that Marvel has been dragging this event out for a very long time, and may be using it as a way to test-market new Spider-Man concepts (like the Gwen Stacy Spider-Girl, which appears to be a huge hit), my kids are loving  the gazillion different Spider-Men.  One of kids, readers may remember, is the player of "The Ferret" from my Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game last year and now he is on me to create a "Ferretverse" storyline where he can sta...

Even as I'm running Firefly (and I've told myself I'm going to run that game X number of times before I stop, just to justify buying it), and even as I'm doing little D&D games here and there to try out the new rules, I'm always thinking superheroes. By that, I mean I'm always thinking about running a superhero RPG, always coming up with villain NPC's and jotting down plot ideas, etc.  Most of these don't show up on the blog for loads of reasons (not the least of which is because at least one of the players in my game reads this blog), but I did want to externally process one idea.  And that is flipping tropes. In Mutants & Masterminds they did a GM's book where they outlined a bunch of stereotypical villains.  M&M actually uses this archetype notion a lot, given they did the same for hero concepts as well.  In the villains there is the mad scientist, the elemental-wielding guy (pick one: ice, darkness, fire, etc.), the robot, etc.  A...

In my continuing "what do I want to run now that I've been asked again" series (better known as "Premise Beach" from the old Kids in the Hall skit), I present another premise. To understand it, first I want to talk about one of the bigger differences between DC and Marvel Comics.  While Marvel is set in the "real world," with most of the superheroes living in and around New York City, DC has always relied on ersatz versions of American cities, the two best known examples being Metropolis and Gotham City. There's others: Keystone City, Central City, etc. all featuring pretty generic names and looking just as generic.  But Metropolis was always Superman's city, while Gotham was the Batman's home. Both cities have a different feel, more than just "New York by Day" and "New York at Night."  Metropolis was always modern, bright, and fairly prosperous, fitting for the Man of Tomorrow.  Gotham was always decayed, dark, a...

So at the last gaming session, it was announced to the group that we will be now having two monthly games, one run by one GM, the other by myself. I will share what I have been thinking about, which capitalizes on the fact that I have possibly two groups, not one, for my future game.  One group is my current group: mostly adults who have gamed for some time.  The other group is largely children (girls, in fact) and novices to gaming. My idea was to put the entire campaign on a space station, sort of a much larger DS9 or Babylon 5, something more akin to a small town in space.  One group (the novices) play the staff of the station, and are responsible for its safety and operation.  They would be the Star Fleet personnel, a more directed and reactive group.  The other group (the veterans) would play a group of civilians on the same station: freighter captains, merchants, and other associated ne-er do well's. Map by Daniel Swensen So I could have one lo...

I've been watching the television series Mission: Impossible  from start to finish, and am now done with the first season. For those who don't know, the first season didn't star Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, but instead the main IMF agent was Dan Briggs, played by Steven Hill (who went on decades later to plan DA Adam Schiff on Law and Order ).  More trivia: Hill agreed to the role as long as they respected his orthodox Judaism.  The producers did, not realizing that meant that he wouldn't work on the Sabbath.  As a result, Hill was often unavailable and the series had to rely more heavily on other cast members, especially Martin Landau, who had not wanted that active a role on the show so he could be free to do movie roles. While the cast would settle into the same five regular characters, the initial premise of the show had one sole full-time agent who would draw from a pool of volunteers or contract agents.  Despite having a consistent cast in the credits, ...

I continue to contemplate the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game , and my biggest stumbling block has to do with whether or not, should I ever run it, to use Marvel Comics' own universe or a homegrown one. Licensed universes, regardless of genre, have their pro's and con's.  The pro's are that you have a background familiar to at least some of your players and a load of pre-generated characters.  The con's are that the PC's are relegated to second-tier figures in comparison to the established protagonists, or at least start significantly less powerful than they are.  With MHR's very fuzzy ruleset the power discrepancy is less of an issue, but the otehr's remain. Plus, there's the fact that really well-informed players have a tremendous knowledge of the universe far beyond what the PC's would, and you end up with some meta-gaming issues. Homegrown universes have the plus of avoiding all the fore-knowledge issues of pre-generated ones, and you can t...

So right now I'm having a sort of creative blitz going on.  My son begged me to run a mini-campaign using the Pathfinder rules, so I pulled together a small adventure (about 12 encounters).  Once that's done, I have my 4E campaign, the sequel to the one that was run by another member of gaming group.  I'm trying to see if you can do a "sandbox" campaign in 4E. We're 11th level right now, having been quickly jacked up by the previous GM, who leveled us up every three or four encounters.  I'm going to slow that way down to where it is in the rules (one level every ten encounters or so).  My thought was to cobble together about thirty encounters: five 10th level, ten 11th level, ten 12th level, and five 13th level counters.  I'd then get them together in groups of 1 to maybe as many as ten, and then scatter them around the sandbox.  Get some rumors and other adventure hooks and then let the players wander around.  We'll see how it works. In additio...

I've been thinking about what to do in the very likely case that my D&D campaign is over (and I'll know in about a week).  I had two ideas that percolated up, not that either may be the one, but I thought I'd share them here.  As a bit of a notice, neither are particularly original. The first was cribbed from an old issue of Shadis Magazine (#45) called "Timeship--Titanic" in which the famous cruise ship has actually been hurled through a time/space vortex, cursed to wander the continuum for all time (or the end of the campaign).  Along the way it picks up people from various places and eras to make up a motley crew. So basically the Titanic is a gigantic TARDIS without a Time Lord.  There's a couple of issues with this, the first is the word "gigantic."  The Doctor's TARDIS is small, a phone booth, which can easily fit into the utility room of any spaceship or wherever the current adventure is locating.  That means the characters can jus...