Monthly Archives: December 2009

Procrastination Released

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My final game of the year is done, and boy did I delay it to the last minute. “Procrastination” is an abstract experimental game, my attempt to communicate purely through game mechanics. It’s my tribute to Rod Humble, if you must.

Play “Procrastination” at Ludus Novus.

Astute fans will notice that I have only released eleven games this year, despite my resolution to do a game a month. Fear not; the twelfth game is done, but “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” will wait until it is sponsored before it gets released. Does it still count? Sure it does. I set the rules for this thing.

My other work-in-progress, the procedurally generated metroidvania with the working title of “Millions of Space Stations,” will be released in early 2010.

Dream Project 3 – The Kidnapped Farmer

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This is a summary of my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition game, played with some friends from college over the internet using MapTool and Teamspeak.

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town. They arrived at their theoretical refuge to find the city of Decolay in ruins, and camped in an abandoned fortress overlooking the town. The fortress seemed to be able to transport people into long-lost dreams in their sleep, where the party was guided by a tiefling scholar named Sampa. The next morning, the party made an alliance with a kenku tribe, the Ravencrows, living near the southern edge of the city, and explored an old botanical laboratory.

The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to be developing vampiric tendencies
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level three.
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A Chain of Fake People

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Any creative work is a sort of conversation between two people: the author and the reader. Except it’s not.

Books, movies, music, video games, and so on are created by one or more people, and then are consumed by one or more people. The work in question (let’s call it a game) serves as a medium by which the player communicates with the authors or developers. One can imagine an experience analogous to digital gaming where two people sit in a room, one telling the other what’s happening and the other responding with their actions. This actually wouldn’t be too different than tabletop roleplaying.

But playing games doesn’t really work like that; there’s this big thing between the authors and the players called a game. The authors and the player can be in different states; they might not speak the same language; the original author might be literally dead in real life. But the work, the game, spans this void of time and distance to allow a sort of mediated communication. And in the middle there are a bunch of imaginary people existing in a series of nested universes that make the exchange possible. Let’s meet them, shall we?
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Dream Project 2 – Exploring Decolay

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This is a summary of my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition game, played with some friends from college over the internet using MapTool and Teamspeak.

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town. They arrived at their theoretical refuge to find the city of Decolay in ruins, and took refuge in an empty, abandoned fortress overlooking the town. The purpose of some of the strange structures there was revealed when the party found themselves sharing a dream, where they encountered the private demons of a long-dead eladrin noblewoman and saw echoes of a tiefling scholar named Sampa.

The dream was experienced by five people:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level two. Note that I began doubling experience at this point.
Continue reading Dream Project 2 – Exploring Decolay →

Brea’s Crossing

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I’ve written a short story.

In the process of creating a fantasy setting for my roleplaying system LORE, I’ve been playing with a lot of world-building elements: cosmology, racial influences on culture, magic, spirits, and the like. A great way for me to get a feel for these elements and how they fit together is to write a story about them.

This story is called “Brea’s Crossing,” and it’s about the dangers of caravan travel, dueling, and leylines. Let me know what you think in the comments to this post. I’ll likely be releasing more stories in the future.

Read “Brea’s Crossing” here.

Backup Released

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I’ve put together a game! I guess this is my November game, as the space station game would be October’s, and it’s still under construction. “Backup” is an Interactive System Failure about killing.

The Prosperity Commission transportation facilities are designed for the utmost safety and reliability. They are equipped with weapon dampening fields, highly-trained security forces, and four redundant computer cores. You are the third backup computer core for a facility under construction. You should never have to wake up. Something is wrong.

Download “Backup” from Ludus Novus.

To play the .zblorb file, you will need a Z-machine interpreter, which is like a media player for interactive fiction. If you use Windows, I recommend Gargoyle. If you use Mac OS X, I recommend Zoom. If you use Linux, I recommend the Linux version of Zoom.

This game is heavily inspired by Gun Mute. It is a (potentially) violent piece of interactive fiction with multiple endings set in a science fiction world of robots, plasma swords, and intergalactic finance. I’ve attempted to create something that rarely occurs in interactive fiction: a game that requires tactical thought as a challenge rather than puzzle-solving. In-game instructions and hints are available by typing HELP in-game. “Backup” is written in Inform 7. Let me know what you think in the comments!

The RPG Campaign as Episodic TV: Two Techniques

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In addition to the regular D&D game I run, I’ve just started up another tabletop RPG campaign using the Geist system. Like many of White Wolf’s “limited series” games (Promethean, Changeling), the concept is incredibly provocative. You died, and in the moments of death, a being “more than ghost, less than god” offered you a partnership. This being, called a geist, shielded you from death and allowed you to survive. You are a living human, but now you can see ghosts, control strange creepy powers, and even travel the underworld. The mood of the game is a cool mix of the macabre (you died, and now you see death everywhere) and the celebratory (you got a second chance at life! Live it up!).

The bittersweet mood, morbid theme, and cool antagonists reminded me of shows like Angel, Dead Like Me, and Death Note. So I decided that I wanted my campaign to run like an episodic, ensemble-cast television show. I also wanted to explore giving players more control over the game, while maintaining primary authorship as GM; tossing a strong flavor of the indie RPG into a traditional system. As a result, I’m using two techniques: Episode Previews and Cutscenes.
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