Patreon and the Smart Party

We are 12 podcasts in now, and we are not letting up. We believe our podcasts are good quality conversation, with insights and humour aplenty. If you think we are on to something then please do head over to our brand new Patreon account and give us the cash based encouragement we desire. For less than the price of a coffee you’ll get to be one of the good guys. Yeah, we can talk about rewards and all that shizzle, but really you should be clicking through with your wallet in hand because that’s what the smart party would do, right?

http://www.patreon.com/thesmartparty

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Historical Gaming – The Three Mathematicians

Episode 12 – Historical Gaming
(a.k.a The Three Mathematicians)

Why play in the real world when you’ve got a fantastical one? Wait, there’s our own history with lots of excellent genres and documents to mine! What do the Smart Party know about such things? Not enough, so we’ve recruited that bastion of Britishness and sartorial authority on Tweed, Dr. Mitch to join us. From Ancient Greece to Alexandria, he’s written his fair share of historical RPG material so we get him to join the fun and share his thoughts.

You can back Dr. Mitch’s work at his Patreon site.

P.S. What happened to Episode 11? It may surface later, but it’s secret for now.

[Friday Map] Regional Map of Lake Velth

[Friday Map] Regional Map of Lake Velth.

Love this blog. You’ll see hints of this sort of thing in my Knee Deep book.

Furnace 2012 Con Report

Furnace was great as always. Been every year, coined a catch phrase, nominated it for victory in the convention awards and well, yeah, I know, I’m nothing to do with organising it, but I’m going to steal whatever reflected glory I can get just for showing up…

The Kraken 2 (and this time its personal)

The Kraken is a fantastic Gaming Vacation in the east German countryside and is truly made of awesome sauce.  I was back for my (and the event’s) second year and it was another thing of beauty.  The idea is essentially that gamers from all over can get together, experience great games and events, and also have enough time to relax, socialise and otherwise take the intensity out of a gaming convention.  No need to run from slot to slot and have a packed timetable – you’ve got five days and plenty of time.  You’ve guests such as Sandy Petersen running Cthulhu games, and a good range of ancillary events like horror seminars, workshops and other things too.  With an all inclusive price tag, there’s no need to worry about paying for anything and you’re well fed and watered in the grounds of a historical German Schloss.  What’s not to like?

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:

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.

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…

Con-Quest Sign Up Sheet Creation

Sign up sheets have always been something I’ve done in a fairly singular way. Different one for each game, relevant fonts, catchy colour scheme, eye for getting the information out, tags of the key bits… so with a ton to print for Con-Quest it came as a bit of a challenge to think of something that would be suitable for all the eclectic games we’ve got. Essentially all the important info had to be there and ideally it’d be elegant.

Hot Character Sheet Action

Having played Hot War / Delta Green cross over at IndieCon and getting the right vibes from my character sheets from the assembled masses, it only seems right to pimp them on the blog a bit. Here’s thumbnails of the front and each of the alternate backs. I’ve blurred out the text in case I need to use them again.

Paintshop Pro is the weapon of choice, dropping an image into the back ground of Excel for the stats and using formulas and conditional formatting to get the agendas made easy for future use.