2007.09.30
Posted in Writing at 10:26 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Twilight is a time when the edges of things are blurred, and the fantastical comes almost within reach. It is a time when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and when perceptions can be irrevocably changed. It is a time of transition, of unexpected challenges and experiences. It is a time for stories.
It is also the title of a collection of short stories I am working on.
I’ve started the process of recording the stories completed so far into audio format, which is a large learning experience for me, but I’m having fun with it. At this point, I will not be publishing via podiobooks.com, since I do not yet have enough material. Still, I’m going to record what I have and post it here on my weblog, as part of an (ongoing) short story collection titled Twilight.
It will be published as any other audio podcast. I’ll probably submit it to iTunes and a few other places, since it won’t be any worse than half the podcasts I’ve listened to.
As the collection of stories grows, I may eventually publish it on podiobooks.com (still a goal of mine), but it’s just going to take a little bit longer. I’m actually pretty close to the minimums if I collect all of the material I’ve written, but I’d like to get to the point where I have about double my current material before I submit it for publication.
With that goal in mind, I have lots of work to do…
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2007.09.09
Posted in Board Games at 9:22 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Today Jason and I played a game of Lord of the Rings, and decided to try out the Battlefields expansion for the first time. To make a long story short, the fellowship crumbled in Isengard, Sauron ragained the ring, and darkness covered the land.
It was a struggle from the get go. Jason made a mad dash for Sauron during the Bree board. I think he hit 9 or 10 on the corruption line before we even got out of Bree. And it just got worse from there.
The new Battlefields boards definitely up the difficulty level of the game considerably. As with most of the expansions and variants that make the game more difficult, Battlefields makes the problems with resources (cards) even more acute. We struggled the entire game with very few movement cards, and our luck ran out in Isengard. Despite using multiple Gandalf cards, and suffering the indignity of using Watchful Peace rather early in the game, we still lost miserably.
I enjoyed the game, but it was definitely a lot of work. I felt rather battered after we lost. We’ll have to try it again. Maybe with more than two players it will be a little easier. At least I hope it will.
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2007.09.03
Posted in Board Games at 11:29 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
My first memory of doing anything remotely like roleplaying was playing games like “dress up” and “house” as a fairly young child. This type of play was fun because it wasn’t directed at all, though that was also part of the problem – since nobody was acting as a steward, we never stuck with it for more than an hour or two at a time.
The animated television series Rugrats provides a very good glimpse into why kids play these sorts of games. In particular, Rugrats does an excellent job of juxtaposing the world that exists in the imaginations of the characters with reality. Cardboard boxes, mops, and drop sheets take on very different lives in the imaginary world of Tommy Pickles and his toddler friends. This imaginary world is where all the truly interesting stuff happens, and the kids spend a lot of their time adventuring in this imaginary world. What I find quite intriguing about this is that even though Tommy is the leader of the group, and his vision drives most of the imagined world, he’s also an active participant on the side of the adventurers. He’s not controlling the challenges the characters have to overcome in the same way as we would normally associate with someone taking on the role of the Game Master (GM).
Fast forwarding to my early teenage years, my next brush with roleplaying came via the now long out of print board game HeroQuest. HeroQuest requires one player to act as the Game Master, and the other players play the roles of adventuring heroes. In a way, HeroQuest is one of the predecessors of modern games like Descent: Journeys in the Dark.
One thing always bothered me about HeroQuest, though. One person had to be the GM, and so there was no surprise when a trap was sprung. Perhaps the GM would giggle with glee at the misfortune of the adventurers, but HeroQuest was definitely balanced in favour of the adventurers, so the GM was bound to lose eventually. Don’t get me wrong; being the GM in a roleplaying game has its own rewards and brings a different sense of enjoyment than being a player does, but for some reason I find that less interesting.
As an older teenager and continuing into my university career, a group of friends and I used to occasionally organize murder mysteries, using one of the many pre-packaged kits you can buy (like How to Host a Murder, An Evening of Murder, and others). I always really enjoyed these games, for a few reasons:
- The settings and characters, because they were pre-defined, made it easy for everyone to get into their role, get a costume together, etc. And yes, we usually did these in costume.
- While the games told you what you were supposed to say in general terms, you could decide exactly how the facts should be brought to light, and how your character will act / react while you do it.
- It was easy enough to plan a meal to go along with the game, and I like dinner parties almost as much as I like board games.
But one of the key reasons I enjoyed the murder mystery style games is that it was almost always possible to host and participate in the evening as a character still not know the solution until everyone else did. We even played a few games where (surprisingly) the murderers themselves didn’t know they were the guilty parties until the solution was revealed at the end. Similar to the kids in Rugrats, there’s no GM for this sort of thing in the traditional sense, which is something I find highly appealing.
Another large part of the appeal of this type of game is that I can spend my time planning the logistics of the evening (who is coming, when, what are we eating, etc.) and not have to worry about also planning the story, the characters, and everything else. Developing scenarios for roleplaying is a very time-consuming activity, and the older I get, the less time I find I have for that sort of thing.
Games like Descent do appeal to me, but I’m not sure I want to invest the money required especially given that someone still has to be the GM, even if the work of building the scenario is already done. Maybe I should once again plan some murder mystery evenings instead.
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2007.09.03
Posted in Board Games at 11:00 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I really enjoy playing games like Arkham Horror, partly because it offers an experience similar to an RPG in board game form. There’s another reason, though. Arkham Horror is like Roleplaying without a Game Master (GM). For various reasons (which will be the subject of my next post), I tend to prefer this to games where someone has to play the role of GM.
One of the problems I sometimes have with Arkham Horror, though, is that the incredibly rich theme can sometimes get lost in the zillions of details that you have to keep track of on every turn. There’s no active narrator besides the cards in the game that provide the theme, and since no one character is the GM, nobody has the responsibility to keep the game in theme and the players in character.
As a way to re-balance the tables in favour of theme, and give the game a more RPG-like feel, I’d like to try the game with the following two changes:
- When you’re revealing a Mythos Card, you have to read it to all of the players as though you’re narrating a story, embellishing it appropriately. This will require some creativity, but I think the overall effect would be a lot of fun. For instance, for a Headline card, you could pretend to be a young hawker selling papers on the street, shouting “Extra! Extra!”. For a Rumour card, you could say something like “As you sit down to enjoy a quick bite at Velma’s, you can’t help but overhear a young couple at the next table…” Of course, the idea is to be inventive each time a new card comes out, and not re-use the same types of constructs too often.
- When you are having an Arkham encounter or an Other World encounter that requires drawing a card, the player to your left is the one who draws the card and reads it aloud to you. It’s your encounter, but someone else is narrating. The interesting twist to this (which I really like) comes with cards that give the player a choice. In this case, the person reading the card would pose the choice as a question to the current player, and the player would have to make their decision without knowing the consequences ahead of time. In other words, more like you would have to in a traditional pen-and-paper role-playing game.
The idea behind these changes is to build in the themes in the game without altering the rules. Because of the way the game flows, each player would in essence take turns being the voice of the GM, without actually having to be the GM. The game already does a good job of that.
I do see two possible pitfalls with this approach to Arkham Horror:
- I don’t know if these rules modifications would work for all players. In particular, players new to the game or unfamilliar with the concepts of Role Playing might have trouble, or have performance anxiety when it’s their turn to read a Mythos Card.
- These seemingly simple changes would probably lengthen the game significantly. We routinely play Arkham Horror in under three hours in my group, and I’m guessing these changes would mean that we should budget 5 hours instead, and probably end up needing 4 to 4.5 hours for a game played this way.
Jason and I have also in the past discussed other ways of making the game more interesting, though these merely add some flavour and don’t alter the game structure at all. Among the simplest of them would be to have someone introduce flavour into the game by revealing something interesting about a location, monster, or Other World. Chaosium publishes several Call of Cthulhu RPG source books that are ideal for this purpose. For Arkham Horror, the most useful two would be H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, which describes the city of Arkham and its locations in great detail, and Malleus Monstrorum, a staggeringly complete bestiary which covers virtually all of the creatures you are likely to encounter in a game of Arkham Horror with or without its various expansions.
I’m not sure if this last suggestion would be worthwhile given the amount of time it might consume, although perhaps a brief reading at the start of the game about the chosen Ancient One (From Malleus Monstrorum) would be a nice way to set the mood a little.
I guess I’ll have to try some of these ideas out and see how they work.
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2007.09.01
Posted in Writing at 7:13 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Well, it’s taken me nearly six months, but I finally managed to turn out a complete first draft of my short story. There were numerous interruptions and re-thinking of plot details throughout the process, and a whole ton of research I never made direct use of in the story, but I’m happy with the results so far. Weighing in at 12,000 words, it’s not a very long story, but it’s the longest piece of fiction I have ever attempted.
Now comes the tedious process of editing and revising, and then I will be recording the story in audio format. I’ve already read the story aloud dozens of times (piecemeal), so the prospect of recording it is particularly exciting for me.
There are numerous incidental topics I would like to address with regards to what I discovered during the process of writing, but those will have to wait for future posts.
For now, I’ll leave you with the prologue as it currently stands:
Arthur sat in an overstuffed chair, the red leather of its upholstery in stark contrast to the brown, fading cover of the book in his hands. Turning it over slowly in the soft light of early dawn, he paused to wonder if he would get it back when this was all over. After all, it was one of only two copies that remained. Sighing, he reminded himself that it was the only way to make contact now. Gregory had died too young, and she would not quickly come to trust anybody else.
They had known her all her life; had known from the beginning that it would be she who would represent them. Theirs was a delicate game; move too soon, and the enemy would learn too much. So they had waited. Waited too long perhaps, but it could not be helped. Now, with scarcely a week left, it could be delayed no longer. Contact must be made before the others found her.
Arthur put down the book and picked up the phone. First contact would be made tomorrow.
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