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For me DM started with a stopover at Lemur’s house on the Friday, and boy was I disturbed to note the picture of geese in the spare room, worrying that he might be subconsciously brainwashing me into playing Mouseguard the following day. I need not have feared…
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How can you not be tempted by a journey to play games in a castle on the Rhine? I was there for my third year and it was as great as ever.
The journey to Bacharach was as easy as ever, with only a slight delay at the airport on the Deutschland side while the bus turned up, but the sun was shining and a free beer on the journey over was most welcome. Everything about the con was ruthlessly organised as always, with the notable exception of games, for which there seems to be an almost masochistic desire to make it a scrum to sign up for things. I took to my usual method of avoiding troubles by taking lots of games to run. Apparently I now hold the record for most games played at a Tentacles, and as that was the last one… Read the rest of this entry »
So how do you write a scenario for a convention or one-shot? Simply don’t know where to start? Well, if its 4e there’s a ton of things you can buy or download, so just boiler plate one of them and change the baddies round. If its a left field hippy game then you probably make it up with the players along the way. But if you want some on advice on how to knock something together, with some interesting bits on the way then you might find the following useful. Its a method I’ve been using for some time, maybe it’ll help someone else with a place to start at least…
So I was having a brief conversation with my old mate Danurai today. He’s been working up a potential new character fore our weekly D&D game, a Drow Avenger. Fair enough. Then he wanted to know if it was ok to be evil. he’d been reading an article about just such a thing, so before I started replying to him in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS saying NO, I thought I owed it to him to give it a read. As I did I realised that there are all sorts of ways to play a game, but there are some that simply don’t sit well with your regular home game.
“Whether or not you agree to let one person in the game play an evil character, or let everyone in the game play evil characters, you should absolutely have the talk. What’s that? I like to call it the “don’t be a jerk and don’t be a baby” talk. It’s a real, honest discussion about the tone of the game you are about to play. It’s a verbal agreement to not let the nefarious actions of characters spill over into real-life arguments. It is the group realization that you are about to play something that will be challenging. It’s going to be more work than a normal campaign.” Stephen Radney-MacFarland
A one shot is another kettle of fish though. Could an all evil game be just right if you had 4 or 5 hours to let rip with all your dark desires?
Of course, some RPGs make playing the bad guys all part of the fun, World of Darkness immediately springs to mind. But that’s the default way of playing in that world. What would be fun to turn on it’s head?
There’s been some cracking zombie games of late, All Flesh… being perhaps the best known. Maybe it would be interesting to turn the tables and actually play the roles of the brains seeking ravenous hordes? On a related note, did you ever catch the Marvel Zombies series where the traditional superheroes all caught the flesh eating bug. There’s got to be mileage in running a supers one shot where you all play the villains, undead villains at that.
Of course, the traditional games could get a makeover too. D&D has always had Drow, Tieflings and other ‘bad boys’. I’m not convinced there’s a viable campaign in igt, but for a one shot, I’d like to see the results. Or perhaps just flip the presumed game on it’s head and play the monsters defending their dungeon against the predations of a band of shiny armoured adventurers. I’ve got an Ogre based scenario that does just that, I’ll do a review of it if I remember.
Your thoughts, comments and opinions, always welcome!
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