The Stickmen of Arosa

I've been writing down ideas for a world (toying with calling it The Broken Earth) in which I would like to run a DCC campaign or two (maybe one for the kids and another for a group). The binder is getting full and I wanted to start to get something out here in case folks have ideas/feedback/etc.

There will be no particular order - for example, this one is one of the more recent jottings...

The Stickmen of Arosa

• Think tiny ents, though more humanish than tree...
• Each wudj, or individual, is a short, thin humanoid with narrow shoulders, long limbs, long, thin fingers and knee joints that are reverse of most bipedal creatures.
• The skin of the wudj is bark-like, though more soft and flexible/pliable.
• Nobody knows if there are males or females or how they reproduce.
• Each brundle is made up of 10 – 40 wudj.
• Each brundle of wudj is essentially a kind of hive-mind of a single tree.
• Each wudj "worships" the tree with which it is associated.
• All wudj of a brundle form a kind of commune.
• Wudj warriors carry long sharpened sticks, the equivalent of spears.
• some carry one in each hand, two-weapon fighting.
• The specific coloring and look of a brundle is determined by the species of tree the brundle "worships".

Even here you can see how I have some ideas still being worked through. For example, is it a hive mind, a commune, or worship...or something that somehow blends the three?

In this case, I've even asked my nephew to throw some drawings together based on the above. We'll see...

(As a side note, I originally wrote most of this post around Christmas but the holidays then got in the way of finishing.)

When Gaming Matters

Some events are difficult to work through. Sometimes, instead of worrying about the how’s and the why’s, it makes more sense to get back to the basics; focusing on things that matter. So this weekend we spent quite a bit of time doing things as a family – both work and play.

Fortunately, it’s the holidays, so there was cleaning to do and a tree that needed trimming. When the necessities and the niceties of the season had been addressed, we turned to the other great family bonding activity…we played games. The kids were doubly excited due to the fact that I had invited one of my good friends, Paul, to join in the festivities.

We started off, after pizza, with Liar’s Dice. Lo and behold, Paul won – his first time playing! Then we switched to our homemade Zombie Dice and gave it a go. We played two games and my daughter won both. She has this uncanny ability to get six, seven, or eight on the first roll of the game and everyone else gets pressured into chasing her for the rest of the game. Unfortunately for my son, this meant he Jodi'd* two full games.

We finished the dice games around 9:30 PM, rested for a few, and then broke out the next game. Last Christmas I gave Paul a game called Zombies! from Twilight Creations. It is an “older” game from 2001 (apparently), but Paul and I joke about the Zombie Apocalypse all the time so I figured it would be a good game for him. Without being asked to, he brought it last night. Turns out since he received it as a gift he couldn't really get a group together to play it – something he was bummed about.

Skach’s to the rescue!

The game took a little getting used to. For our family, it started a little on the complex side. But one we got into the rhythm it started to get easier. Basically you follow a set of steps on each turn:

1. Pull a new tile – each is a section of the city – and place it.
2. Battle any zombie in your current square.
3. Draw cards to make your hand three cards full.
4. Roll and move – fight any zombies you run into along the way.
5. Roll for the zombies – for each pip on the dice you move a single zombie one space.

The Town Center is placed first and all the players tokens are placed in the center square.

You can see in this picture the center square (circled in red). You can also get a sense for how the city gets built - all the tiles around the Center were drawn as part of those aforementioned steps and placed.

The zombies get on the board in two basic ways. First, whenever a tile with a building on it gets placed, it outlines a set of zombies and life points and bullets that go in that building.

In this picture, you can see a hospital building placed on the map. The yellow circle shows the text that informs the players how to fill up the hospital - in this case 8 zombies, 4 life points, and no bullets. you can see the little zombie figures in each square and the red tokens are the life points.So if you want those life points and/or bullets, you have to go kill some Zombies…or someone does as you can always sneak in after someone does the killing and “vulture” them.

The other way zombies get on the board is through the Event Cards. At the start, each player gets three cards, and then replenishes  them each turn. A card can be played at any time, but only one card per player per "round" - from the beginning of a player's turn until the next beginning of that players turn. There are many of those cards that allow a player to load the board up with zombies, while others give weapons and such - some even allow one player to cause another to miss a turn.

Battling zombies is a simple matter of rolling a six-sided die and getting a four, five, or six. If you do, the zombie is yours. If not, you either have to use a life point to roll again, or add a number of bullets that will raise your roll to success – so if you roll a 3, you can add one bullet and make it a 4 and succeed. You do not get to walk away. Once you enter a square with a zombie (or if you start with one in your square) you have to keep battling until either you or the zombies are defeated. Death means you lose half your zombies and are moved back to the town square, where everyone began the game.

After quite a few turns, you end up with a board that looks like this:

As you can see, everyone was having a good time.

At some point, the most important city card is flipped over and placed on the board: The Helipad.

The circle in the lower left is the helipad. As you can see, as our luck would have it it was going to be an arduous task to get there. Once played, it becomes the place towards which everyone rushes because winning is getting to center square of the helipad and killing the zombie there. It is possible to win by being the first to kill 25 zombies…though that proves very difficult.

We played this game for three hours easy. That's right, my kids were engaged at 1:00 AM and playing just like it was 7:00 PM. In fact, my son formed and alliance with my friend Paul and the two of them very nearly won. My wife ignored the helipad towards which the rest of us were working and went for the 25 kills. At 1:30 AM we called it a night. with no clear winner. The kids were tired, but had an absolute blast.

So much so that the kids and I went to Games Plus today and bought ourselves the base set. We bought quite a few games and expansions today, though some will end up under the tree, so I don't want to divulge. Heck, while at Games Plus we got pulled into a game of Seven Wonders and had a great time.

So I think there will be even more regular gaming even if it's not RPG's. It's not only fun, but a great way to reconnect at the end of a busy week and restrengthen those bonds that really matter.

* Jody'd was a term coined at LokiCon for the player who kept getting zero brains because he would shotgun out.

My Secret Santa is Awesome

Because this is what he sent me:

That's right. The 2nd Printing of the DCC RPG, complete with Index, errata, and my son's name still wrong (Still a not upset, Harley!). Oh..and if that wasn't enough, the next four adventures I didn't have...70 thru 73. That crazy so and so almost completed by wish list single-handed!

Thanks reveal...your generosity is much appreciated. Merry Christmas to you, your lovely wife, and your brilliant son. I hope we can all get together for gaming again in the not too distant future!

Friday Night Dice

LokiCon (see previous) made me think about how well some of the dice games I played would translate into things to play with my kids. When I returned home, we started almost immediately with Liar’s Dice…and the kids are getting really good at it. The other game I wanted them to try was Zombie Dice. I explained to them how it worked, and they were both very interested. So I figured I’d get them/us a set for Christmas.

Only today they both brought home some pretty good report cards. I wanted to reward them and started looking around for somewhere local I could pick up a set. Unfortunately that was much harder than I thought it might be. I even considered driving to Game Plus, about an hour or more away (during rush hour). But a sudden headache took me unawares and the thought of leaving the house vanished with its arrival.

Zombie Dice

So I should probably explain Zombie Dice. It’s a set of 13 six-sided dice – 6 green, 4 yellow, and 3 red. Regardless of the color, each die face will be one of three things …a brain (yum!), footsteps, or a shotgun blast.  One takes three dice from a cup and roles them. You keep the Brains off to the side – those are your points. You keep shotgun blasts off to the side in a separate pile…those you want to avoid – you’re a zombie, after all. Footsteps are kind of like a tie…you’re still chasing. So those you set in a third pile. Now, add more dice from the cup to that pile of footsteps until you have three dice again and repeat. At any time you can stop the cycle and add up all your brains. However, if your total number of shotgun blasts reaches three, you lose everything – you get no brains that round.

So, for example, if on your first roll you get a brain, a footsteps, and a shotgun blast you would have a pile of one brain, another pile of one blast, and a third pile of one footstep. If you wanted to stop at this point, your score after this round would be one brain. If you wanted to roll again, you would add two dice to your pile of footsteps (bringing that set to three) and roll….and hope to not get two more shotgun blasts making you lose any brains you've accumulated.

You repeat this process for each player in turn. The first one to 13 wins (for simplicity’s sake – there’s actually a way to beat someone who gets to 13 first, but I don’t want to complicate things further).

The twist? Each color dice has a different number of the three possibilities making some dice more likely to get shotgun blasts and others more likely to roll brains. Green dice have 3 brains, 2 steps, and one blast. Yellow Dice have two of each. Read have 3 blasts, 2 steps, and one brain.

Rolling Your Own

I had a thought while I let the headache recede. What if I just made my own temporary set to use until the joys of Christmas morning brought us a Real Set ™? What would I need?

• 13 six-sided dice – no problem.
• Stickers – also no problem.

These two were the minimum. It would be really sweet if I had the proper colors for the dice and stickers that resembled the originals.  I figured I had the dice, I just wasn't sure about color – but I’d fake that.  I knew we had a metric s**t-ton of stickers in the house. The kids have been receiving them for years. I just didn't know if we any that were small enough and, if so, if we had enough of each kind.

I started by separating out all my six-siders from my set of dice. Then I tried to find dice that would best match a basic set of Zombie Dice.

Oh look, over to the left! Three reds (Squirrel Dice, ironically), four yellows, and six near-greens. Incidentally, the sets of black and sets of blue dice near the top of the pic were set aside for Liar's Dice. So now I have the 13 dice I need:

Now all I needed were the appropriate stickers. My lovely wife dug through the crafting...stuff...and found the drawer with many of the sheets of stickers. From them I noticed these sets:

After some perusal, I settled on some red hats to use for brains:

Onto the dice with them, I say!

Next, I found on the same sets of sheets a whole bunch of sandals and other footwear. Imagine that...now I have the footsteps! Here's the dice with both:

Last I had to find something for the shotgun blasts. Honestly, this proved the most difficult. There were some snowflakes in a set of Christmas stickers, but not enough of them. With the headache still bearing down on me, the kids and I settled on the dreaded Candy Corn. So the kids set about making it happen:

And here are the final sets:

Roll 'Em If you Got 'Em

And so we got down to using the dice. They worked like a charm. The shapes were easy enough to distinguish. the only thing my kids immediately figured out was the dice were shaped a bit differently - the red ones have rounded corners so you could pull out squared-off corners by feel. We had to institute the rule that you poured the dice into your hand to avoid being able to pick and choose the dice with better odds.

The dreaded Candy Corn:

Storm chooses her dice carefully...

 To no avail:

Collin faced a difficult choice.

His sister had 12 and she was next after him. He had 5, so he needed to get to 13 or more in a hurry.

At this point, he has reached twelve (8 on the books, and 4 on the table) but he has 2 shotgun blasts. He was always the risk taker in games, so he went for it. yo can see the results:

We played two games of Zombie dice with our makeshift set. We had a lot of fun. My wonderful wife won the first game after tying my daughter and winning the dice-off. My daughter won the second game. Then it was time for a milk and cookie break and on to Liar's Dice:

My daughter won both games of Liar's Dice - I have a monster on my hands.

All in all a good fun night.

Thanksgiving SIGPUP

So a few years ago, I coined, in jest, an acronym for a fictitious organization called SIGPUP – The Society to Increase the Gamer Pool Using Procreation.  This was, at the time, my way of summing up my thoughts that one of the ways to ensure tabletop role-playing games lived on was to pass it on to the next generation…to the point of making your own next gaming generation.

Those of you who know me know that I've already got my kids on that track, playing games at home when time allows, at GenCon, and at GaryCon. They've played The Warriors RPG, D&D 3.x, Gama World (4e), AD&D, and their current favorite, DCC RPG…among others.

I am fortunate that for the past four GenCon’s, I have been able to stay at a very nice condo in downtown Indy – my sister’s "vacation" place. On a few occasions, she and her two young boys have joined us in Indianapolis for a part of the weekend and we've done touristy things like the zoo, or the Children’s Museum. The last two years they have even gone to the convention hall on Sunday.

So this last year, I decided it was time to get her kids hooked. As a token of appreciation for allowing us the use of The Condo, I purchased a game my wife, kids, and I found in the Dealer Hall –“ Rawr! TheMonstrous Adventure Game”.  It’s a game geared towards kids and families involving good monsters – the PC’s – that battle the bad monsters. I figured it would be simple enough for my non-geek sister to pick up and would be a fun hook for her boys of eight and six.

About a month after passing the gift on, I received a call from my younger sister asking about…well…essentially how to run a game. The boys had been harassing her about playing since they returned from GenCon. Unfortunately, I was not familiar enough with the rules to offer anything more than general advice. “If he wants to pick up a rock, then let him. You just have to figure out what that means with respect to the rules…or hell, just wing it! It’s more about them having fun than anything else.” Stuff like that.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving a portion of which I spent at my Mother’s house in Michigan. My sister and her boys were there and they brought “Rawr!” along so either my son or I could run it for them. After dinner on Saturday night, while I was introducing Liar’s Dice to the adults in the gathering, my son took a stab at running the game:

Unfortunately, he didn't have a lot of time to get acclimated and so, I think, ended up in the same place as my novice sister did when she attempted to run it. So after my loss in Liar’s dice, I grabbed the rule book, took about ten minutes to get a feel for the rules, and went to it (unfortunately, no pics of that!).

We played through the first sample adventure of the game. I saw where my sister and, subsequently my son, ran into their first question. We had barely begun the first encounter when my nephew says, “I pick up a rock and throw it at his head!” Consistent little guy…

When it was over, my sister said something that struck me as interesting. “It wasn't that I couldn't figure out the rules, but when you ran into something, you seemed to know where to look for the answer much more quickly than I could figure that out.” Huh.

The Last of LokiCon - For Now

So this will be the last word on LokiCon (at least for this year)…and only because some of it needs to be said; just not this first part.

So a portion of my time on Sunday (before Dread) I spent gathering up as much as I could get packed and put in the car as possible. I had originally intended to leave in the early afternoon…but given the ride down to GA, I adjust my schedule, deciding to leave early in the morning. I didn’t want to wake the entire house Monday morning, so getting everything possible in the car would kill two birds…saving time and avoiding making noise.

So after Dread I said my goodbyes to the “Chalet People” - because I’d be gone before they returned on Monday morning – and hit the sack. I woke at about 4:30 in the morning. I tried to go back to sleep, but m mind kept running through the list of things that remained to be collected and worrying about my vehicle’s ability to get me home.

Finally I just said, “Screw it!” and got up, packed the car, and left. I was pretty confident I would be jacked up on worry-adrenaline and my suspicions were realized. Though I have to say, I had also convinced myself that the trip down the mountain was no longer my biggest challenge. No, it was the first jaunt up a significant incline near the infamous black gates, and then the winding, vertically-challenging road to Clayton with little transmission fluid.

All the drama was, fortunately, for naught. The Ford made it over the river and through the woods without incident. I stopped at the gas station at which I had last stopped on the way into the hills and topped off the transmission and the oil and checked all of the other fluids. Soon I was making my way through North Carolina and fearing only the weather front predicted to move through the south/southeast.

And, ironically, it was the rain that was the most troublesome…the rain and the strong, swirling wind that accompanied that front. One of the reasons I left early was because I thought I had heard the rain when I first woke up. I did beat the rain out of Georgia and most of North Carolina – most notably, through the mountains. But the precipitation harried me from just outside of Knoxville until I passed through Lexington. This was a challenge because in the craziness of getting everything ready to get to LokiCon, I forgot to check the tread on my tires…and on my front-wheel drive minivan, the two front tires were essentially bald.

The GPS had me continuing on to Cincinnati, but I had my suspicions that heading west would get me beyond the storm…and the decision paid off. Fifteen minutes outside of Lexington, the weather broke, the road dried, and I was happily back on track. I didn't stop for food – I barely stopped for anything. I cranked the tunes, hit Chicago right around rush hour, got lucky with traffic, and made it home about 13 hours after quietly rolling down the mountain in Georgia.

OK…enough of the travel log. For heaven’s sake it’s been two weeks and I’m typing this from yet another road trip. But I wanted to wrap that up so I could really do the following:

Thank you.

Thank you to diaglo for being a great and gracious host, for allowing us to invade his newly built getaway, and for always being one of the nicest guys I've met through gaming.

Thank you to all the people who took the time to teach me new games like Liar’s Dice and Zombie Dice. The former I've played dozens of times since returning home – my kids love it. In fact, I “introduced” it to a group of nieces/nephews at one Thanksgiving dinner and just tonight to adults in my family after the second Thanksgiving celebration. And Zombie Dice will be purchased before Christmas.

Thank you to the great GM’s/Keeper’s who ran games in which I played – dshai for Mammoth Vikings, Keeper of Secrets for CoC, and Rodrigo for Dread. Your time and effort is greatly appreciated.

Thanks to all my gaming cohorts who made every game I played in a riot.

One of the reasons I go to GenCon and do something crazy like drive almost 800 miles to LokiCon is because I know the games will be top notch – it’s always like an All Star event and I feel privileged every time you let me play in your games.

Thanks to all the people who brought and cooked food. I brought some food and was happy to contribute, but I was spoiled by the cooking.

And finally, thanks to all of you who welcomed me into the fold and made a weekend of gaming into a weekend of friends and fun…and all of it worth every moment of the drive.

Thanks all…I hope to do it again some day.

The Mind of LokiCon - Nothing Left

Honestly, at this point, I’m beginning to forget what took place when. From the time I finished my lunch on Saturday onward, I played so many games that I have, in the interim, lost track of what I played when. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think I was wrong about Friday – I think I played Deadfellas on that first night…maybe before Werewolf? In fact, I know this to be true as there's a picture of me playing Deadfellas and I'm wearing my Friday-just-drove-all-day clothes.

So I think I'll take a different approach. Here are the games I know I played and likely when I played them.

Mammoth Vikings of Cowboy Peninsula - at least I think that is what it was called. This is Klint's game of Western with Magic based on girls in a school in the old west....girls who are really quite special. The resolution system is custom and pretty slick. Each player has a full deck of cards. When resolution is required, the player and the GM essentially play War - that is, cards are flipped and high card wins and on ties you do the old "One, Two, Three, War!" there are variations where you play three or five (or even seven) cards face down and the GM does the same and best of three (or five or seven) wins. This was loads of fun - particularly with Vermicious Knid playing Crazy Old Pete who loved sticks of dynamite. Played in this one on Saturday.

Call of Cthulu - The classic game of horror and going insane, with a true master at the helm, Keeper of Secrets.I played a 1920's Yankee Lawyer and we were in the Deep South. Keeper squicked us out with one the creepier portrayals of a disturbing NPC. It was a blast, even though I died in the end. With two dead and at least two others of questionable mental stability, the professor of the group (diaglo) did succeed and return to the University with the book. I think we played this on Sunday mid-day.

Dread - Zombie Apocalypse - Dread is an interesting game. I've only played a couple of times and I this second time really got me thinking...and arguing with Loki about it! In this scenario we were in the classic zombie apocalypse setting. We had started late waiting for the Archer Fiasco game to end so Rodrigo could run Dread for us and so, I think, ended a bit short. And many of use were drunk. This is the game that gave us the line "I'm here to eat Twinkies and have sex...and I'm all out of Twinkies." Played this Saturday night...I think.

In between these three RPG's, I played:

Dungeon x 2 (see Spleen)

Zombie Dice x 2 or x 3

Liars Dice...a lot. 

Deadfellas

Bang!

Deadfella’s is a card game where you are playing Zombie Mob dudes trying to Hit other Zombie Mob Dudes.  It was a decent game – but I remember when I was playing that I was having trouble focusing and getting into it..and now that I recall when I actually played - Friday - I know it was because I was dead tired. 

I can tell you this - of those non-RPG games, at least three have/will make their way into our house. For example, we've already played Lair's dice here with the kids (substituting "Show 'em" instead of the expletive used in the adult version). I've explained the Zombie Dice to the kids and they keep asking when we will get it, and Dungeon will likely be under the Christmas Tree...

Games I wished I'd played? I missed out on some BSG, and apparently Lord of Waterdeep is supposed to be pretty good. I also would have liked to try Ticket to Ride...and they used some Monster expansion this time that seemed to impress at least one Dad in the crowd. Lastly, as I mentioned before, I'm still going to get into a Post Apoc game Rel runs. But I feel overly greedy for even mentioning these things given the bounty of fun and friends I got to experience...