6 posts tagged “rpg”

I'm back to working on my friend's RPG that he gave me kuz he wasn't doing anything with it, and I'm wondering what I could do to make the writing more compelling.  Most Role Playing Game books are so dry that I'm unable to read more than a few paragraphs of one in bed before falling asleep.  I don't want any game I'm writing to be that way so I've been thinking up ways to make them interesting.

My gaming is the outlet I use for telling stories.

Exalted, Second Edition

Alan Alexander

I've been waiting for freaking ever for White Wolf to release another book in it's Exalted game line.  I've got to say I'm disappointed in their constant delays for the past 6 months.  I buy every Exalted book they realize because I run a regular exalted game and have the most serious kind of brand loyalty that there is.  I regularly visit their forums regarding exalted and even subscribe to a podcast put on by a couple of loyal gamers.  

Exalted Dreams of the First Age (Exalted)

John Chambers

One of the things I do out here other than blogging is run a Role-Playing Game over Skype.  It's been going on for a while, and it's been the outlet for my creative energies, which means you get more personal opininons and snippets of news on my blog than story ideas and whatnot.  But today as a random post I'll throw down some of the quickly typed descriptions that I do in Skype, this is unedited and usually thought up on the fly so it might come across as a bit raw, hope you guys like it.

The Golden City of Divine Light, is a glorious spectacle.  It’s walls are nearly a perfect circle constructed entirely of white marble with Gold Veins, in the center you see a spectacularly huge tower rimmed by 6 smaller but still massive towers, on top of a tesseract style hexagonal pyramid of 8 levels, each level over 30 feet to the next.  Around the temple is the gloriously beautiful squalor of the city it’s self.  All of the roofs are uniformly golden, and every main street is clean and pearl-white.  Just within the walls are 16 shining temples to all the major gods including the Uncoquered Sun, who’s temple is a topped with a massive golden sun.  Luna, and the 5 maidens, along with a single temple venerating the elemental dragons.
Overlooking the bay is the massive imperial castle-manse composed of  mother-of-pearl and Gold where the emperor would reside.  While not as imposing as the great temple, it overlooks the city from high upon a hill with a great golden tower looking out over the land.

Superfluous Blossom of Lithe Destruction is like many fair folk an exemplary example of the Raksha race.  Standing high and lithe, his skin a perfect mark-less ivory sheen.  His face smooth and ovular with eyes entirely black they seem limitless like the depths of the night.  His fingernails, perfectly shaped claws, match this blackness.  His ears are the long flowing tipped ears often seen on the raksha.  The tips of these ears are pierced and through the holes run crimson sashes which flow of their own accord like boiling blood.  These sashes connect behind him to form a lovely cape that trails behind him, sometimes moving or making shapes in the light like an animate shadow.

The rest of his clothing is black leather straps, concealing every part of flesh below his chin in a seemingly random array of crossing weaves.  One wonders if there is even a body beneath the straps and buckles at all.  His hands are white talons, each tipped with an ebony black claw, but they are surprisingly articulate as they move around gracefully offering beverages or handing out cups and platters.

He resides high in the trunk of a massive redwood, at one of the highest most affluent areas of Chanta.  The Branches of the high tree have been hollowed out to create wings, and balconies for this lovely and novel home.  Inside it is gilded with glamour crafted wonder, each nook and cranny is decorated with a unique item like a flower that dances, or a picture crafted from flower buds that open and close to change the picture as you look at it.

He hands you refreshments, some seeming Wyld as well.  The cheese on your cracker puffs little smoke rings from it's holes.  And the coatings on the cookies shine like emeralds.

 

The manse is embedded in a cave, which rises and falls with the tides, it’s great dead shell perpetually open.  The entire cave has a constant odor of rotton fish, and thus is not pleasant to be in despite the pleasant music that seems to echo along the walls.

A pathway along the side of the cave above the tide line skirts the edge of the edge of the shell, which is covered in seaweed and barnacles, but glimmers of the original mother of pearl can still be seen, while the white Jade at the top of the open shell stripes the white coral like a spiderweb, framing it’s jagged lid, the pathway arches up past the massive shell, which reaches up nearly 150 feet into the vaulted ceiling of the cave.  Two great stone columns stretch up from the water on each side of the shell to support the ceiling which is a 30 feet from the top of the shell in high tide.

Just above the shell’s peak the pathway turns into the rock in a tunnel wide enough for two large men to stand side by side comfortably, and 8 feet high.  It’s lit by large pearls protruding from the center of the walls every 30 feet which illuminate the tunnel quite well as it winds up.  The tunnel has two branches, one to the Immaculate Chapel in the Fort, and one to the lower storage cellar of the foundry.

All along the banks of the river lie small trees about 15 feet high each of them with wide but thin widespread branches.  The Branches and trunk are a frosty white like the tree is covered in snow, and the small pointed leaves are a faded green, and white blossoms hang down from the branches like a lovely veil the lowest of which float in the water.

Five shimmering gondolas with lanterns on their prows appear across the misty water illuminating the hundreds of thousands of lavender moths dancing above the water around them.  Each gondola is white with silver ivy embossed across it which reflects the moonlight at the stern of each of them is a strong looking man with stark white skin pushing the boat along.

There is one ideal I hold above others.  Freedom. 

Freedom in all it's forms, freedom of thought, freedom of body, freedom of expression, freedom of religion... financial freedom... all are things I've spoken about in the past.  Indeed the address of my blog represents that freedom, schoonerhelm a schooner being a fast ship and the helm being the point that controls the ship. 

I was once of the opinion that all people want the same thing I want, freedom is a universal ideal is it not?  No one wants to be told they can't.  Or do they?

I've mentioned before that I'm a gamer, role playing games is my passion and I run one on a regular basis.  Running a game is like this:  I take the game setting, which is published by a game company, the setting provides a basic framework for what can and can't go on in the game.  I then create a micro setting within that framework which I use to tell a story.  The players within the game take on the roll of single individuals who interact with my setting and story.

I love freedom, and the appeal of gaming is that I'm free to do what ever I'd like as long as I can envision how to do it.  So when I run games I pass that on to my players, I present them with a wide expanse for them to interact with and play within however they like.  I in turn have my setting respond to their actions in a way that I deem plausible, gently steering them through small events so that my story gets told.  There's a knack to it, and I've been doing it for years and am by no means a master.  This open style of game-play has a term, it's called a sandbox game, meaning you have a big sandbox that you can do anything in. 

Two days ago, one of my players was venting and said that I should quit running things like a sandbox, he said a lot of other stuff too, but that infuriated me.  Allowing my players the freedom to explore my setting without having them walk a tight line is what makes my games GOOD!  I'm not strict, you want to do something, go ahead, it'll be fun!  In fact I encourage my players to do things I don't expect, I love proactive players, they make my job easy and stimulate my mind by making me consider the consequences of their actions. 

I was listening to a radio show last year during national nonsmoking week.  One of the topics was that the city council of my town were being pressured to pass a bill saying that no business should allow smoking on it's premises.  The current law in effect was that no business that catered to minors could allow smoking, but all other businesses were allowed to choose whether or not they allowed it.  Many of the city councilmen were business owners themselves and believed that they would rather have the choice than to have the government take it away from them, and said as much.  I was very proud of them.

What came after I was not so proud of.  The radio morning show hosts held 4 hours of phone in's saying how bad smoking was to pressure the city council to take away that choice.  I tried to phone in and tell them that they were asking to have their freedom of choice taken, but I could not get on. 

These events and others lead me to believe that many people do not want freedom as I do.  They want to be told, to be hemmed in by boundaries and have their choices taken away.  If there is no choice then they do not have to be scared of making the wrong one. 

Indeed, myself and some of the most free-minded people that I know grew up in horribly oppressive and stifling atmospheres.  While others, who were given so many opportunities growing up have become very closed-minded and look at choice as an inconvenience, they would rather let others make the decisions for them. 

Is there a balance?  Should people be forced to walk the line so that they can truly understand what it means to be free?  I think perhaps.  We are creatures ruled by our desires, if we are not hungry we do not look for food, if we are not lonely we do not look for companionship, and if we are not confined we do not push our boundaries back.

One of the strongest passions in my life is Role-Playing.  I've been doing it over 10 years and it's my stress relief, social activity, and inspiration.  In my younger days when I worked less, it was not unknown to play in two games and run a second every week.  There was (still is, though I attend little these days) a gaming club in my town that I played at, or in someone's basement.  It was very stereotypical, a bunch of guys crouched around a table with stacks of snack foods laid out beside them.  Not glamorous, but fun nonetheless. 

Back in those days it was not unheard of to play a single game from 7pm until 4am the next day... sometimes running short, or sometimes running long.  A really good game might keep us up until 9am.  Often giving enough time to walk home, shower, grab an hour or two of sleep and then head off for work at noon.

These days I work far too much to be involved in regular games, or regular anything for that matter.  My work requires me to disappear from home to live in a camp far from civilization or simply to drive out early in the morning to some fairly remote location, only to return home 10 to 14 hours later.  During busy times days off are few and far between, though during quiet times I can have weeks or perhaps a month or two where work is quite sparse.   Many people are baffled how I can live this way, but the money is good, and after a while you can get used to it.  My work also has other advantages.

I write this from within my shack stationed at the Nabors 60 Drilling Rig.  I have time to do this because my job is Emergency Medical Standby.  The law of this province requires that industrial sites of this scale a particular distance from a hospital must have a person with the equipment and training to respond to an incident where someone gets injured.  I maintain my internet connection via a cellular modem witch costs me a ridiculous amount for a tiny bit of bandwidth.  The bandwidth limits make playing any modern online game impossible so about 2 years ago I began participating in the official online RPG chat that my favorite game company White Wolf offers on their website.  I participated in this for over a year and a half, before reasons I won't go into here forced me to leave.

Since then I've gathered a role-playing group via Skype that's very dedicated.  I run White-Wolf's Exalted, and have been working on a Piracy/Sailing game based in the late 17th century with a lot of help and contributions from a friend.  We utilize dice roller web pages, and play just about every day that I work.  My players’ dedication never ceases to amaze me.  This is a nice way of saying I think they have no life.  (Though in all fairness I don't think they're as addicted as WoW players.)  But it does flatter me that they find my game so enticing.

These days I look for trends that can help me game online.  Programs that generate and keep track of characters better, pictures of characters, programs that help design maps are all things I’m interested in.  I even search for games that allow a good custom avatar creation that could simulate the characters I want to build. 

These days I'm looking at Second Life.  A virtual world where you can build a character to look like anything.  I haven't played it but I do pay attention to the buzz and the concept.  I'm predicting that it and virtual worlds like it will become more prevalent in the next few years.  I see it becoming the new medium for my hobby soon.

Already I see potential in 3D worlds like this, potential to build characters for my favorite pen and paper RPG's. Even to place the same systems engineered for these RPG's in as plug-ins for the virtual world.  Already advertising companies are jumping on the virtual world bandwagon flooding Second life with posters and signs.  One can only hop that RPG companies will seize the initiative on this as well.