Digital Duelists

Raster opened the door from backstage, and let the roar of the club pour over him. It wasn't good - It wasn't, after all, his fingers on the controls, massaging waveforms and huge decks of samples into driving, dance-able greatness, but he could find, in a corner of his heart, a certain admiration for the sound's creator. DJ Cesium threw his body around the booth, too busy to notice Raster's approach to the stand, the heavy case in his hand.

DJ Cesium trailed his fingers trailing through a cloud only he could see in his HUD. Underneath the heavy notes that swayed the crowd, his blippy, trippy freestyling lingered, the more complicated rhythm lurking, waiting to be picked up by the more adept dancers and performers in the crowd to underpin their gyrations.

Aces of Stasis

Audio Accompaniment - Sleigh Bells - Comeback Kid

The wing of blasters cruised low, until the fractured, glassy surface of the plains suddenly fell away, descending into the depths beneath them with a suddenness that stirred Wreck's stomach.

He found himself looking away from the view, looking at the distant, shattered horizon and tried to concentrate on the numbers spewed up on the inside of his goggles. In training, they'd meant something valuable, readings for targets and the efficiency of the collectors. Right now, with the cold, black surface far below, it just showed how far his blaster had to fall if something happened suddenly. Having the plug pulled on your sim session was bad enough. Actually having a team have to burn their tanks just to get out into this wilderness and save your butt would be orders of magnitude more embarrassing.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Calliope's slightly distorted voice, glazed but not dripping with sarcasm, emerged into the cockpit, cutting through the  cosmic background buzz of the scanners. With a few deep breaths, he finally slid the useless headphones off - They wouldn't find anything out here - and pushed up his goggles, staring down at the landscape below.

In the canyon, jagged crystalline shapes loomed, lit only by the sunlight that entered their jagged spires and bounced haphazardly down towards their shadowed bases. Nothing moved. Nothing even glinted, just a white to black gradient into the depths, punctuated by the occasional flash of reflected light, or the sinuous paths that looped through the shadows.

"Stasis." The voice was Magpie's, from the rear of the formation. Even his voice, Wreck thought, sounded jaded. No sarcasm, and no reverence either, just the plan fact. Wrecks shivered a bit; The flight's senior pilot reminded him of the landscape below, the color drained out of him on his previous sorties. He was right, though. Stasis. There wasn't any other word for it.


It had stopped everything. Motion. Sound. vibration. Color. They'd all been arrested, seized, and condensed.

Legomania

I feel like when it comes to LEGO bricks, you either understand, and nod sagely, and reminisce about a childhood spent with huge bins of the bricks, or maybe your carefully sorted wall of parts back home... Or, you roll your eyes a little and call them a toy.

So, if you're in that latter camp, this might be a very, very boring Blogpost for you.

If you don't know, however, Adult-Fans-Of-LEGO are absolutely a thing. There's a cottage industry of sorts - If you go to a convention and see a huge setup, or are browsing Pinterest and see an enormous LEGO construction on someone's Inspiration board, you're probably seeing the work of an AFOL.

They're a recognized component of LEGO's market, too. They know that grown-up fans are still out there. After all, while we accept that the $300 death star playset might be on some kids list, it is harder to imagine that the static, ten thousand piece Collector's Edition super star destroyer is intended to be purchased by a 12-year old.

So, let's talk LEGO.

Wolfspell Actual Play - Part 3, Wolves and War

Picking up from Part 2, which you can read here

On level ground and heading towards the clan’s land, the wolves move through the forest. As they slip through the trees, they note that the moon has moved along in the sky. it sinks behind the mountains behind them, out of sight, as they come across a river. Vegeir considers it, and notes the clear taste of the frigid water - And then remembers that it is the same as the water at home, that the river leads back to the Clan’s hold.

The wolves travel along the river beneath the now, moonless night, well on their way to their quest’s completion, and then a howl sounds in the distance. It is a call to gather, a howl to bring a pack together - But not their pack. Nonetheless, the wolfish instincts take over before any of them can arrest themselves, and they howl back in greeting - Only for the tone of the gathered wolves in the territory to shift suddenly, singing with confusion and curiosity, before the whole of the pack begins to come towards the new voices of intruders. They begin to run, not eager to be caught in the other pack’s territory, but find themselves trapped by a river, wide and strong, and not quite frozen over.

The details about the river are from another Behold the World roll. With players feral rising slowly, it’s not surprising that most of these are panning out as senses / instinct results with high wolf values, and more rational, human intuition based Blood results are rare.

Read on for the conclusion of my Wolfspell AP!

Wolfspell Actual Play - Part 2, Shifting and Peril

Picking up from Part 1 here.

The Wolfspell itself, the process of changing, is a big, key component of the game. I felt like I needed to give sufficient setup, but also, needed to get to it relatively early, so that we could set the tone and move on to the rest of the game.

I am going to admit up front, the progression post-shifting is probably one of my favorite things in the game - But we’ll get to that in a moment.

I think that I've been using a longer voice here and spent awhile lingering over the thematically heavy opening experiences of the game. As the action picks up and the wolves start to encounter more complex problems, I'll probably fall away from further explanation. Actual Play isn't something I've written much of, so there's tinkering to be done. 

As the moon begins to rise, the Pack is gathered around what was once the camp of a giant. They have brought him a dozen goats and casks of mead in order to show they mean no harm - unlike the rest of their clansmen who have hunted them to this last individual. They sought the Giant for magic - Magic to make them into wolves, to defend the clan their new, weak king has made vulnerable, without offending ancient taboos of war on their land. First, they had all sacrificed tokens of their humanity - Jona’s sword, Crow’s breath, the giant snapped to show the frailty of humanity’s arms. Vegeir’s necklace of troll ears, won by the king, torn and faded as all Glory inevitably is. Inwyr’s medicine bag, poured out and ripped to show how fleeting their Wisdom is.

Once the moon crests the bowl of mountain peaks however, that humanity begins to recede. None of them are quite sure when it begins; There’s the anticipation, calculated waiting, and then suddenly the changes are upon them…

Read on below!

Wolfspell Actual Play - Part 1, Setup

On Sunday afternoon, I gathered to me three players, some dice, paper, and a few copies of the rules for Wolfspell.

After settling in and waiting to see if any of my other players planned to make it that night, I took a deep breath and started. I had read the rules a couple of times, I’d envisioned a few scenarios, but I took it to heart not to force anything. I wanted to see this game work in it’s intended, no prep environment.

More or less, we flowed through the rules in order. The premise - You are adventurers changed into wolves to complete a quest or curse - then, I showed my players how the dice worked - One die is blood, One die is Wolf, Subtract the lower from the higher for your total. Results range from 4+ Blood to 4+ wolf, with a 0 being either a Blood 1 or Wolf 1. After that, we jumped right into character creation.

Check it out, below.

Might start up again...

Yeah.  You heard me.

Start. Up.

But really... I'm looking down the barrel of writing contests, I was invited to run games at GenCon, I'm trying to branch out and play more and get involved in the indie tabletop scene.

Obviously, gaming has changed for me a lot. Long gone are my days of playing 8 games. I'm down to Vampire, one online D&D game, and whatever my local group organizers on the weekends, usually Edge of Empire, or my own Eberron World game.

I'm not juggling 3 high-prep high fantasy games, either. Not that I miss that as much as I complain to.

The truth is, I originally felt both blown away and left behind by the wave of new indie RPG's coming out. I think I was a year or so behind the bus on Fiasco, and while it's fun and cute, maybe just due to the nature of the games I've played I still haven't had a completely off the wall, 100% bought in game of it.

Then I got into Kickstarter, and it's been downhill, and my shelf keeps filling with games I don't get to run enough. I'm probably batting .200 for games I own and have run. Well, I'm pretty much done with that crap. Time to run things.

It's only in the last couple of months, probably since the last RinCon in October, that I finally feel like I have a handle on this brave new world of indie games. And not just that, but _holy crap I can actually participate in it_.

I also want to be in top shape for GenCon. So, that means more one-shots and con style games instead of my lofty dreams of running more campaigns. So, today, I started that.

I'll be posting Part 1 of my Let's Play of Wolfspell, an awesome game from the Patreon-pushed World's Without Master RPG Zine, later tonight. Hopefully, it is the start of