Category: Roleplaying

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Oddities Roleplaying Science Fiction and Fantasy

Hermaphrodites and The Squick factor

Here’s an odd juxtposition that happened while browsing yesterday. I was enjoying a bunch of rpg.net threads, starting here: RPGnet Forums – Wraeththu out this week. The topic of these is the game they all like to snicker at, Wraeththu, an apparent Fantasy Heartbreaker (a Forge coinage for an attempt to write a game that was D&D, only better) crossed with a fanfic bible for Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu trilogy. A source of much sniggering is the characters you get to play, the eponymous Wraeththu, which are (squick warning here) a posthuman race of gay hermaphrodites with sexual organs resembling sea anemonae (the rpg.net folks have nicknamed these flower penises). That ejaculate acid.

So I turn back to my bloglines subscriptions, and find a new Carl Zimmer article has gone up in The Loom, titled Love Darts in the Backyard. It’s all about hermaphroditic garden slugs, and why they shoot boney arrows into each other before having (straight?) hermaphroditic sex.

Categories
Roleplaying

Roleplaying links – Valherjar and Wushu

Valherjar: The Chosen Slain sounds horrifyingly like a roleplaying idea I thought of (and ran twice in cons).

Wushu Open is an updated version of Dan Bayn’s action roleplaying system, released under a creative commons license. I really liked the original version, and it looks like this version includes some improvements to make it clearer how exactly to play a game where the players determine what happens before anyone even rolls their dice…

Categories
Roleplaying

Promethea!

… somewhere on the “internet”:

The Moniker: Did you read Promethea?
Paradox Backlash: I’ve read Promethea, yeah. Got the TPs to show for it.
The Moniker: Ah. I finally figured out the way to run Aya a greek mythology/superheroes/fantasy campaign was to run her Promethea, instead of noodging her to read it.
The Moniker: Then she says to me “but no psychedelia“.
Paradox Backlash: I’m laughing over here.

Categories
Roleplaying

Roleplaying epherma

Roleplaying links, assorted mix:

  • A thread on the rpg.net forums about the worldbuilding in Robert E. Howard’s work vs. that of Tolkien devolves pretty quickly into a petty flamefest, but picks up when the Ent posts his idea for a high-concept cross-over:

    As I always do when threads like this one crop up on Open, I’ll mention my über-campaign idea (or, is that ûber-campaign, since Tolkien’s involved? ):

    Conan and Elric team up and enter Middle Earth in an attempt to hunt down that bad mofo badass, Kane, who’s masquerading himself as “Sarukane” and, as usual, is attempting World Conquest!!!, by way of extreme threachery and extreme violence. On the way, Conan “makes love to” various female LotR characters (without asking permission, really), Elric kills various heroes by mistake, Kane destroys everything that’s even tangentially involved with him, and in the end, when Kane flees to some other dimension, still with Conan and Elric on the trail, they leave only some savages living in still-smoking ruins, “but, then, the civilizations had all stagnated and went into decay 1,000 years ago anyway, so no big loss, damn reactionary buggers!” as all three main characters agree on. Possibly except the Rohirrim, but “the Rohirrim just HAD TO DIE” as Conan put it.

  • Two threads on the rpg.net forums singing the praises of Shadowrun: newer, older. In the newer thread, SteveD quotes himself saying in the older one:

    Shadowrun is the most perplexing of games. From the outside, it looks like RIFTS.
    From the inside, it’s almost as good as Buffy.
    It is a FANTASTIC game. Every chapter, you’ll find something that’s now a staple of our hobby, because so much was inspired by Shadowrun.
    …
    It’s not the setting.
    It’s not the system.
    It’s the QUALITY.

    A useful link from one of the threads explains the differences between the 2nd and 3rd editions of the game. I was particularly interested in the explanation of how the changes in combat in the 3rd edition even the playing field a bit for characters that aren’t combat monsters or mages.

  • A set of GMing advice essays, including a nice series on How to run game X.
  • Jürgen Hubert’s development journal for Urbis, a d20 setting he originally conceived for WoTC’s setting search contest. Here’s a post where he takes apart his original submission for the contest.

And if you’re reading this on LiveJournal, you may have not noticed that I completed the entry on my deceased campaign (LJ link).

Categories
Empire of Doors long Roleplaying

Game Off

Last night I killed Empire of Doors, my latest roleplaying campaign, which has been running since April. Since those first two sessions I so carefully logged, the group bounced about some other planets, meddled in intrigue and made some good allies and some nasty enemies (and/or rivals). They lost a homeworld, a spaceship, a horse, a body and a moon, and gained an army and the begining of an empire.
Two of my players took extended trips abroad during the game (one after the other), and we ran an extended cycle of “background” sessions, which were suppossed to tie together the PCs’ backstories – they (the three that were playing) got to experience a flashback game where they each met the same sinister trio (Doctor Neave, scientist and war criminal, and the two feral children of an escaped dictator, all eager to revive his dark legacy). Each of these encounters involved a mysterious “pink box”, which became the central mcguffin once the missing player returned and we moved back to “the present”.
Oh, yeah, there was also an implausible plotline with a moon about to crash down on a planet. This moon just kept gnawing at my mind more and more. It actually figured prominently in the penultimate session, which I likened to “The boring parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, accompanied by fart jokes rather than classical music”.
So last session, bitching over the phone in a mid-session break about how I’m not having fun, I realized that, well, I don’t have to carry on with this. The Gingi[1] wouldn’t.
So I come out of the bathroom, share this insight with the party, who pull grave faces, and we think what to run now. And Bo wants to do superheroes, i.e., normal people in our reality getting cool superpowers, like we’ve done for, oh, the past 10-11 years? Every game I ran to him since the days was a bbs?
So Bo says “my character is an Indian cab driver in New York. He’s a student, on a scholarship. You two guys step into my cab. Who are you?”.
And Oren (who has drifted into silliness by now) says “Why can’t we all be in the circus?” and creates a native american indian who quit the Buffallo Bill show and ran off with Bill’s mustache to find some girl he met on the Internet.
Bo says Oren is being too silly, and that his character is more realistic, he actually met this Indian guy, who told him all these stories about Vishnu. Now, who you guys wanna be?
I look at Israel, and voice-over his thought balloons, saying that he’s too bummed to bother coming up for a character for the 10 minutes tops that this joke game will last.
And Israel says, I’m Vishnu. The Indian god. I step into your cab.
“Blue and glowing and with four arms,” I add.
And it gets funny from there. They go to a bar. The cabbie calls his dad in India (who doesn’t believe him), and asks Vishnu, why his life sucks so much, and why he, as the creator…
“umm, Vishnu isn’t the creator, he’s the preserver,” I nit.
“Oh, so he’s like the SysAdmin of the world?” Bo translates, “someone else writes the code, and he just makes sure it runs properly?”
“Brahma writes the code,” I agree, “Vishnu sysadmins, and Shiva does QA.”
Well, Bo thinks that as sysadmin of the world, Vishnu should trouble-ticket his character’s life. So Vishnu agrees. And adopting a less conspicious avatar (a dwarf), he joins the cab driver in his cab.
Umm, the native american guy is there too. But quiet.
I have them roll random encounters. We get an 8, which I say is a buxom but loud woman, complaining about her super (Bo’s character is in love; Vishnu thinks she deserves a spanking, and makes it so. The cabbie gets a slap, although the passenger is perplexed when she sees both his hands are full helping her with her bags). Then we get a 6, which I say is a pregnant woman about to give birth, and they wrestle Manhattan rush-hour traffic to get her to the hospital on time.
All in all, more than 10 minutes of amusement, mostly provided by my players. I think it turned out a neat sitcom, Bo says this is a romantic comedy.
Next week, maybe Israel does us Batman.

1 Gingi = Yonatan Miller; described by the 2nd Unit director as the “Unit 0 director”; guy who used to play with us, and was probably one good reason why I was willing to run the same game for Bo for 10 years. Probably deserves an entry of his own one day.