#RPGaDay2018 Day Twenty Three

Day 23 Question:  Which game do you hope to play again?

I hope to return to Changeling the Lost at some point.  I ran a CtL campaign for five or six years.  Both picking up my campaign where it left off or starting a new game appeal to me.  It would be great to try this game as a player as well.

#RPGaDay2018 Day Sixteen

Day 16 Question:  Describe your plans for your next game.

After we wrap up this little Call of Cthulhu game, the next game I'm running will be my LotFP YotG campaign.  When we went on hiatus last August, I had been planning on running The Curse of Strahd with LotFP rules.  I'm still hoping to do that, but I want to talk it over with the group before committing to it.  Otherwise, I'll just pick the campaign up right where I left off.  The PCs are still investigating and hunting down the source of the Mimic Crisis.  BTW in my game Mimics aren't the D&D Mimics, they're changeling or shapeshifter type creatures.  Considering the game we played before starting LotFP was Changeling the Lost, I wanted less association with that campaign.  So when I started the LotFP campaign off with the adventure A Stranger Storm from the Grindhouse Referee Book, I went with the term Mimic instead of changeling.

I'm also planning to run some games online.  I'll be using LotFP, but I'm not sure what setting, yet.  Whatever I choose, I'll be running the games on G+ in the Flailsnails community.  So if you are reading this and want to get in on that action, go join that community and watch for my upcoming announcement.

#RPGaDay2018 Day Thirteen

Day 13 Question:  Describe how your play has evolved?

On the continuum of prep heavy vs. prep lite DMs, I've crept a few millimeters from being as prep heavy as I used to be.  Part of that may be attributed to the game type that I changed to starting about five years ago.  I had been running a Changeling the Lost campaign for about six years, but when I encountered Zak Smith's blog Playing DnD with Pornstars and his book Vornheim, I proposed running an OSR game for my group.  Between the Changeling game going on hiatus and the beginning of my LotFP game starting up, I read other OSR blogs, specifically a lot of Grognardia and Jeff's Gameblog.  I became convinced that I could do less prep and do it more efficiently.  So when I started getting ready to run LotFP, the amount of prep I had done was much less in comparison to how I had started my Changeling game.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit Review Part Two

     Vornheim: The Complete City Kit
      Art & Writing by Zak S.
      Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess
      64 page Hardcover, also available as PDF

The steed I rode that day.  She's in someone else's stable these days.

I rode my bike to the UPS Hub on a crisp January day in 2013 to pick up my copy of Vornheim.  At the time, I lived in an apartment building populated with package thieves, so anything that didn't fit in my mailbox required an expedition to one of the shipping facilities.  I had to "pick-up" a visiting friend at the train station right afterwards, so Vornheim sat unopened for the weekend while we all went to another friend's show and then played Skyrim.  When I finally dug into the package, I was instantly impressed by the map on the inside of the dust jacket and the die drop tables on the front and back cover.  There is no wasted space in Vornheim, whatsoever.

One of my Skyrim characters.  An Argonian.

At this point in time I was running Changeling: the Lost, so Vornheim's first use in my gaming life was as inspiration for an NPC table.  I spent days making a City NPC table for the Salt Lake City portion of my Changeling game.  The tool for making connections between NPCs was the next useful bit.

NPC connections in SLC.

I was already reading Zak's blog Playing DnD With Pornstars.  Getting the physical copy of Vornheim piqued my curiosity about it's publisher, so I was soon reading the LotFP blog by James Raggi.  By the time Free RPG Day 2013 rolled around in June, I was pleased to grab the LotFP offering that year, Better Than Any Man.  Meanwhile, I was losing interest and motivation to keep the Changeling campaign going and started talking about switching up the game with my group.  There had already been an aborted attempt the year before to start an AD&D 2nd edition game with me DMing, but scheduling conflicts on a main player's part and general " how do you do this again?" flailing on my part resulted in some characters getting rolled up and some drinks getting consumed.

We moved out to the boonies an hour north of Portland in 2014 and the Changeling game went on hiatus.  In early 2015 I started my LotFP campaign "Year of the Goat."  I've used Vornheim's "Navigation Shortcuts for Busy DMs" to create my city maps representing neighborhoods and main thoroughfares for the three large cities of my campaign.  The die drop table to see the most use in my game is the one that generates common game elements, the front cover of the book.  I've used the books, fortunes, and "I search the body" tables.  And the d100 buildings table.

Chizhova, capital city on a volcano.

Halwic, western industrial mill city.

In conclusion, this has been the book to see the most use at my game table, besides the LotFP Rules & Magic book.  I haven't used everything in Vornheim, but I've used so much that has added to my DM enjoyment and hopefully my players' enjoyment of blasting around cities in my setting.  Thank you Zak Smith, your mind is a glorious treasure!

Review Intent Statement

I wear my granny's sunglasses at night... AKA Bast lurks in former habitat, the Boreal Forest Biome

Two Years Ago I Started Mulling Over My Ideas For Reviews...


And came up with nothing earth shattering.  I did settle on how I want to do reviews on rpg books and accessories.  Two part (as in minimum two blog posts) in format; the first part being a review of the product in general and the second being a review of the product in play/use.  As I find a rhythm for writing these, I'll layer more onto this structure as needed.


Up next in FUTUREBLOGS

 The list of materials up for review.  Order of list will not dictate order of review release.  List will be updated both with links to completed reviews and new materials to be reviewed.

-Back in my posts https://mockorangecairn.blogspot.com/2015/07/my-campaigns-rules-and-resources.html https://mockorangecairn.blogspot.com/2017/06/changeling-lost-campaign-post-mortem.html  I hinted at how I had used Vornheim By Zak S. in my Lamentations of the Flame Princess Campaign "Year of the Goat" and in the tail end of my Changeling the Lost Campaign "Bridge."  A closer look at how I used this book in those two systems... Forthcoming!
-I picked up Lamentations of the Flame Princess Free RPG Day 2013 release Better Than Any Man by James Raggi IV on Free RPG Day 2013 at the FLGS.  That was six months after buying Vornheim...
-N2 The Forest Oracle by Carl Smith claimed the first PC death in the game along with a slew of henchmen.  I felt like I did a lot of work to adapt this to my campaign, but I didn't really fuck with stats for monsters and NPCs...
-Red Tide by Kevin Crawford has seen extensive use, not for it's setting, but the Sandbox Structuring Advice and the site creation tables.
-LotFP Referee Book Grindhouse Edition by James Raggi IV.  The adventure at the back of this book kicked off my "Year of the Goat" Campaign! 
-LotFP Rules & Magic by James Raggi IV.  Short take: I own three physical copies, have both versions of the PDF (paid w/ art; free w/o art,) and it's the rules basis for my "Year of the Goat" Campaign. 
-Changeling the Lost 1st edition by White Wolf/CCP.  They've made another edition since my campaign went on hiatus/died.  I'll give you my thoughts on this edition.  It would have been interesting to have done a review of this before my foray into "Old School" or OSR or whatever the fuck it is I'm doing now.  Oh well.  I'm afraid to dive back into this material for fear of wanting to attempt some system hacking (I don't fear the creative engagement, but don't have the time or player interest for this game at this time.)

Changeling the Lost Campaign Post Mortem

"I Loot the Body!"  "No, I do!" "Fuck, I never get any loot."

My Changeling the Lost campaign started in 2008 and played until 2014, when it went hiatus.  I ran 22 sessions, averaging 3.6666666667 sessions a year.  Zak S's blog Playing D&D with Pornstars recent post, Old-Schooling the World of Darkness http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2017/06/old-schooling-world-of-darkness.html, is a response to a fan's query on how to make their NWOD game more Old School.  He does this with eight suggestions that really would have saved my Dungeon Master/Game Master/High Priest/ess of Sunday Morning Mind Cartoon-Puzzles/Storyteller/Keeper/WranglerofCats bacon.  In reading them today, I find that I actually nailed/pulled off/figured out/stole shamelessly a few of them.  In analyzing what I did and didn't have or manage in that campaign, I'm able to do a post mortem on why I thought that I floundered and ultimately put the game aside.

My CtL Campaign Notebook has been sad and lonely since 2014

1. Make sure they're fighting things that can kill them in like 2 hits

     Nope.  I was lousy at this.  One of the SAS (White Wolf term for adventure module) had a nasty Gentry IIRC, but I sucked at throwing enough big bad meanies at 'em when I was making my own material.  I thought of Raymond Chandler's advice all the time, foolishly not ever using it enough, lol.


 2. Make sure they are weak, hunted and isolated, but have a chance to tear it all down

     I had ebbs and flows with this.  The game setting bounced across the USA about 4 times so different places had different Changeling enclaves and other supernatural entities of a variety of densities/concentrations. 


3. Don't use the words

     I used all the words.  ALL THE WORDS.  Oops.


 4. Making preying on humans hard

     I did this ok.  I used the "you have to harvest the glamour you are emotionally attuned to" rule, and that automatically throttled down the human juice box effect.


 5. The story is that it's hard

     I did this well and there was some great play that emerged from characters' hardship.   Somehow I got better at this as I went and the players took their characters to cool levels of guttersnipe I couldn't have foreseen.


 6. Use historical and occult stuff

    This was another thing I pulled off.  Inspiration is everywhere. 


7. Actually be scary

     Sometimes the game was unnerving, unsettling, spooky, or tense.  I don't think I achieved scary with this:-(


 8. PS There is actually a version of Vornheim re-written specifically for Vampire

    

I picked Vornheim up in early 2013.  It was a revelation.  I used the connections between NPCs diagram, the I Loot the Body Table, and I used the Vornheim/Vampire version to make my own City NPC Table for one of the cities in my game.

Left: NPC Relationship Diagram.  Right: Map from the Salt Lake City portion of the campaign.