Hot War “Scenarios”

I’ve been asked a few times about creating a Hot War scenario, or the characters, or both, so I’m going to write up a half-baked demo here (done in some spare time this afternoon fag-packet style), to give people an idea about the process. If someone (or several people) want to polish up this starting point to a finished scenario, then great! Please let me know how it goes. The following kind of assumes some basic understanding of Hot War, but not too much familiarity, so without any more preamble, lets get into it:

No Game Suffers From Too Much Pace

So, how do we inject more pace into a session? In order to keep a game zipping along you need someone to push the pace. This can be a GM in more traditional games, but equally a very proactive player. In some of the newer style games there is responsibility or authority distributed among the people at the table and it can change from scene to scene, but all that is beyond the scope of this article, although the principles still apply. So, the following is in the style of what a GM can do to speed up their games, while hopefully providing the odd pointer for other styles of gamer also.

Why Delta Green Needs Hot War

Delta Green is a wonderfully written setting for modern day Cthulhu, in a not dissimilar style to X-Files, but with extra Lovecraft; the setting is truly a thing of beauty. One thing that had upset me, is that it uses the usual CoC BRP system (understandably), and has tried an iteration with d20 rules also, but neither of these rules engines support the particular type of play that the mood and theme of the books suggest. Sure, most people can play Cthulhu without the rules “getting in the way”, but that’s not the same as actively supporting the gaming experience you want is it?

Conception Report 2011

With my bags packed I settled down to watch a movie (given the usual AK Time Delay) and wouldn’t you know it, Kenners turns up on time shocker! So we were off and down at the Drunken Lodge within four hours. Cool beans, an all time record. It should of course be referred to as the Healthy Lodge, as we had a veritable banquet every night of only the finest cuisine and nary a bag of crisps was opened. We did have booze, but a man’s got to live… and I needed something to fight off the impending cold that loomed large (both outside the lodge and in my sinuses).

One shot play: Kingsburg

Attended LemurCon last weekend and had a great time playing all kinds of one shots. there’s plenty of blog fodder in the weekend, but I wanted to start with something a little unusual for round these parts; a board game.

Smart Party Founder Member Simon has been getting his board gaming groove on for quite a while now. He has a weekly club night dedicated to the things, and a healthy collection to call on. Between him and Smart Party Quartermaster G2 I doubt there’s many games they don’t have. We’ve traditionally used board games as fillers between RPG sessions, or for when the party isn’t at full muster. This time round I got to sit in on a game I’d never encountered before, Kingsburg.

Front-load Your Characters

So I’ve been playing a lot of small press games on and off and reflecting on how to “write” a scenario for some of these – especially when it differs in many ways from your more traditional method of gaming or writing. Games such as Hot War or Dead of Night require very little in the way of story for a good game, all they really need are some strong characters with motivations and a good starting point – maybe with a few more “bangs” to keep the story moving when a scene goes stale. This sort of tactic can work well for a traditional game too, but whatever style of game you’re running it relies on good players and there’s no accounting for that…

Furnace 2010 Con Report

Furnace is an “All About the Games” roleplaying convention in Sheffield that caters for 80 passionate souls, all keen on their widely diverse taste in games and you can get to play all manner of things in this great little con taking place in a sandstone army barracks. All my games were run in the cells. Nice.

Five Obvious (or not) Tips For GMs

We’ve dropped advice and other top lists over here occasionally, so why not another? Here’s Five Tips for your convention games – its nothing revolutionary or mind blowing, but a few things to keep in mind and that might give your players a more positive experience if you’re not doing them already. Maybe not, but hey, they’re offered for free after all…

The Kraken – A Gaming Vacation

Only vaguely prepared – as frankly I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, and packing hippy left-field Indie games after all – I headed out on the strange and wonderful adventure that is The Kraken. Tuesday I headed off with a stop at Lemur’s house that evening to play games and break the journey to Stansted airport. We played a few hands of Dominion, which has always been highly rated by anyone I’ve talked to and it was indeed a great little game. This would prove important later in the week when I’d got to Germany.

Improvement Needed

So I went to CONcrete Cow last weekend and thought I’d do it as a punter if possible, relying on other people running games. I’d taken something to run, but we found a game with empty slots and signed ourselves up and given that the GM knows *a lot* about the 40k universe thought that Rogue Trader should be fairly cool. Now here’s the first problem I’ve been encountering at convention and it may be just coincidence. It may be that I’ve got silly high standards about what I get from a game. It may be rampant misogyny and I need help. But whatever it is,I just can’t seem to get a lady to run my a decent RPG these days…