Graph Paper Games

My one-on-one Champions Now campaign with my daughter had its second adventure.  It began with her PC, Jackie "Dark Matter" Lee having the usual college experience: suffering through boring classes with her frenemy Ashley "Dark Elf" Mason, awkwardly talking to a boy she likes (Ben "the Face" Rodriguez), and fending off the unwanted advances of another supervillain classmate (Joseph "Ronin" Kane). But all the teen drama is interrupted when several students at Waterford College are found suffering from a mysterious malady that leaves them weak and sickly.  Jackie suspects her friend Plaque from her old school, but discovers a strange, tentacled monster is stalking the campus instead.  Unfortunately Jackie, in her Dark Matter costume, is spotted near one of the victims by Captain Hollywood, a minor local superhero.  Now she is a prime suspect in the attacks and dangerously close to having the Guided Studies program exposed. Captain Hollywood, ...

Macy and I had our first Champions Now session, featuring her supervillain/heroine Dark Matter. The story was that Jackie Lee, scion of an Asian supervillain crime cartel, has been forced by her parents to miss a summer vacation and instead spend the semester at Waterford College where she will take several classes including her "Guided Studies" program in villainy.  Waterford is a small, liberal arts college in New England, a long way from her home in California. Jackie is introduced to many new people, including her dorm resident assistant Kirk and one of her roommates Indu.  Her villainy class is taught by the strict but helpful Professor Monique Richter.  Her fellow students are Bedlam, a female telekinetic who appears unstable Dark Elf, a feral supernatural creature and snobby girl who hates that she and Jackie have similar names Bronze Behemoth, another student from her old university and obnoxious frat bro Ronin, a handsome martial artist and gadgeteer, ...

My daughter Macy agreed to help me playtest the new Champions Now  rules.  We decided to set the campaign in the fictional superhero universe of the graphic novel she's writing, an untitled work featuring the main character, Dark Matter (I may end up calling the setting "the Dark Matter Universe" or DMU). The premise of Macy's graphic novel is that powerful and wealthy supervillains have arranged with universities and college across the country to educate their offspring in the ways of supervillainy secretly in concealed elective classes.  Thus Dark Matter, in her secret identity of Jackie Lee, is a regular Asian-American college student with a dorm room, roommates, dating drama, etc. but on the side is trained to be a supervillain along with several other students including Bronze Behemoth, Plague, and several others. So my campaign doesn't interfere with her graphic novel in terms of continuity, we decided to set the Champions Now game during a "semeste...

While the final product is theoretically about five months away, those of us who Kickstarted the quasi-retro-clone of Champions 3rd Edition called Champions Now  got the files of the old editions of the game plus the playtesting document.  Champions 3rd Edition was the first edition of Champions I owned and had a major impact on my high school gaming until I went to college and discovered the famous 4th Edition/Hero Games "Big Blue Book," which became the core of my roleplaying experiences for years. Taking another look at the third edition, I was filled with a huge sense of sentimentality, as well as a bit of appreciation for the much more simplistic rules in comparison to 4th Edition.  Gone are all the perks, talents, contacts, etc. that allowed Hero Games to be used for non-supers games (or detail supers ones).  Back was the steep Endurance cost that could leave a hero gasping for air after going full-bore for a couple of actions. But this is a time for pl...

As I become more familiar with the rules for Blades in the Dark , a gloompunk fantasy RPG where the PC's play a starting gang of scoundrels, I have begun to really appreciate how much gameplay is taken up with more than just immediate actions. Basically, in addition to just doing the heists, capers, assassinations, or other immediate criminal activities, the PC group also has to target other groups to increase their reputation, manage a cohort of NPC's lackeys, maintain and expand a hideout, and move into neighboring territories to increase opportunities.  This is on top of doing some abstract bookkeeping of resources, including deciding what you want to keep in liquid assets and what you want to sock away for your PC's eventual retirement.  Oh, and while you're at it, make sure that each PC spends some time engaging in whatever their vice-like activity might be in order to help relieve stress. A typical BitD character managing their gang.  Also what you get when ...

My gaming group decided to give Evil Hat's Blades in the Dark  a quick try.  The first session was last Friday, mostly spent introducing the group to the rules and the PC and gang creation system.  The initial PC's include A Leech specializing in pseudo-science technology A Whisper who can influence the weather A Cutter who is a former merchant marine A Lurk who can briefly enter the ghost realm And a Slide who is a professional con artist For a gang, they decided to be Smugglers, which I thought of as being a fairly "safe" choice and easiest to stay on the morally unobjectionable side (versus say, a Cult or Hawkers, who are vice peddlers).  Some of the younger players also picked fairly "soft" vices, like being obligated to their family instead of gamblers or drug addicts. Photograph by Orla on Deviant Art.  There is no shortage of possible group photos online for this game. I suspect that the game will likely be more of a "Han Solo...