Pre-Planning: Web of Wavemeet

This weekend I'm going to run a playtest adventure of the system that I've been designing, a system I'm planning on starting a campaign in during late January (more on that to follow in the future).


I've had most of the outline of the adventure done for more than a month now. I fleshed out a lot of the details a couple weeks ago. I've got everything stated out and planned as far as I can foresee things. But I'm still fairly anxious about it.


For one, the mission is a bit different than those that I normally plan. It has a mystery-element to it which I'm hoping I've been able to pull off well. I am missing one connection I'd like to have, but hopefully that's either a) unnecessary or b) something I can come up with before this weekend. I'm very excited about running a mystery, just because I haven't had much opportunity to before. In the past, it seems like whenever I plan a mystery, a group falls apart before really getting into it.


Additionally, I'm just anxious about trying my system for the first time. I have a lot of faith in my system and feel that it's been built up and designed on things I've seen work well in varying games. Still, I think there's an aspect of 'I made this thing, and I'm worried people won't like it' about it.


The adventure is called the Web of Wavemeet and focuses on a group of smugglers who arrive to sell their goods to a contact and who get caught up in the strange goings on of a port town recently beset with nightmarish monsters.

Being Thankful

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for:

1. My Wife
2. Both our families who provide support in the good times and the difficult ones
3. My friends, and the fact that I have people who I can share my worlds with through tabletop roleplaying games.
4. The fact that I have both the time and the privilege that allows me to do creative work
5. My pets, who help to keep me sane
6. Board Games, Television, Movies, and Video Games-and living at a time when all these mediums are flourishing and filled with an overwhelming number of new ideas.
7. Probably many other things as well.

Without saying too much, I would also like to comment, this Thanksgiving, on the irony of our current situation. As we sit down to have a meal which, according to the story, was shared by the Native Americans with the pilgrims upon their arrival to our land, there are two oddly ironic things going on. First, there is a good deal of hatred directed against immigrants, largely from people who are descended from the sorts of immigrants who were welcomed during the first thanksgiving. Second, there are currently Native Americans, like those who welcomed these people's ancestors, who are being abused and mistreated on their own land. I don't want to get into politics too much on here, but this is not right.

Looking Glass Moon: An Explaination

Invisible Sun promotional image by Matt Stawicki

I've mentioned Looking Glass Moon on here a couple times, but I haven't really talked much about it. If you've purchased either of my adventures, or if you've looked at the Upcoming page on this blog, then you may have seen that Looking Glass Moon is a surreal science fiction setting inspired by Invisible Sun and designed for Cypher System. I'd like to talk a little more about it.

Looking Glass Moon

Looking Glass Moon is primarily based around a planet and it's collection of eight moons. Each moon is a particularly unique environment, and each moon holds pieces of the puzzling truth of the universe.


The Looking Glass Moon, Miravis, the namesake of the game, bears a flat, silvery, and reflective surface that appears to be devoid of life. However, push against the surface, and you will find that you pass right through. On the other side, metropolitan cities, grown from the moon itself, thrive with life and civilization.


Players take the roles of Righthanders (most people who are natural born to the setting are left-handed). These are people who come to the world of the Looking Glass moon through an odd mirrored cube. They have no memory of where they came from, or of anything else before their arrival, only that it was somewhere else, somewhere very different than this place.


A cycle has been found-a way of repetitively moving through the spheres of the planetary system-through which one can learn more about the universe. In this way, one can learn varying Truths which are expanded on one's journey. The more one learns about a Truth, the more that Truth can be bent, granting strange and often mighty powers. This is not a path; it bears no beginning nor end. It can be begun at any point along it, and those who wish to gain the most of it, those who want to solve the mysteries of the universe, must continue to circle around over and over again. As a moon revolves around it's planet, and the planet revolves around its sun which revolves within its galaxy, so too do those who follow the cycle revolve around the Truth in never ending loops.

Invisible Sun

I was there at GenCon this year when Monte Cook Games announced it's new project, Invisible Sun. I missed the announcement, but I did look it up when they posted the video of the announcement. From the get-go, I felt like Monte Cook games had reached into my head and taken ideas I'd been thinking about for a while. Everything from the broad idea of having a game that engaged players when the session wasn't going on to having ways for players to be absent from the game and for session to still happen to a world built up on secrets that have to be solved even right down to the box. All of this was stuff I'd been considering in an earlier version of what would eventually become my Toybox project.


When the kickstarter for Invisible Sun launched, I watched it avidly. There were a lot of things about it that I felt captivated by, and I read through every update.  Admittedly, there were some things I was disappointed by. Some of my play is online and in my regular group, I have a player who comes in digitally. An absence of a digital play option was, is, more than a little disappointing, given that it means I can't really play with some of my more involved players. The price is also a bit restrictive. On the kickstarter, it was $200 for the base set, and $500 for one of everything. I had a hard time striving to justify the $200, and as a completionist, I have a hard time accepting a lower level when I know that a higher one exists.


Note that I'm not saying the product isn't worth the price. If you take a look at everything that's included, I'm sure that at either level you definitely get your money's worth. It's just also pretty hard for me to spend that much on an RPG, especially one I can't play with some of my regular players, all in one go. I do wish that they had come out with a version that was digital and slightly cheaper (maybe $100 for the base set and $250 for the set with everything but digital), even if it didn't provide access to 100% of the secrets that the physical set had.

Looking Glass Moon's Inception

I had been working on preparing The Machine God's Temple for release through Cypher Creator when the Invisible Sun kickstarter was running. As I moved on from that to working on The Wonder Vault Heist, I was thinking about other potential Cypher products that I could design. Thinking of how there were many MCG fans who were feeling sort of the way that I was about Invisible Sun, I realized there might be people interested in a somewhat similar setting for Cypher.


The idea was infectious and I began thinking through the hurdles immediately. To begin with, I was thinking with something of an 'opposite' type connection, and I'd thought of using a moon instead of a sun as the central base of my setting. Thus, the moon part. Then, I began thinking about how the moon wasn't really an 'opposite' of a sun, but how it just reflected it's light. Since I'd already been thinking about surreal fantasy, it was only a short jaunt past Wonderland to get the idea of calling it Looking Glass Moon.

Science Fiction Vs Fantasy

Invisible Sun is a Surreal Fantasy RPG, so that was what I was trying to make when I started with Looking Glass Moon. However, the further I got into working on the project, the more I realized that it was much more Sci-Fi than Fantasy. The role of space and travel through it was important in my setting. The idea of moons and planets and orbits was important in my setting. Overall, while the setting of Looking Glass Moon still captures a very surreal feel and shares many elements with Invisible Sun, it definitely has more in common with science fiction than it does with fantasy.


And embracing that has really helped as I've been going through writing the draft. There are many ideas that work very well within that genre that wouldn't have worked as well in Fantasy. I feel that I am able to do more unique surreal things to fit within Looking Glass Moon, and that the pieces just fit together better than they would otherwise.


On top of that, it does create more uniqueness to the product and makes it more different from Invisible Sun. While I feel that the two still share many core elements, I think that the paths I've gone down make my product unique in its own right and as through I am adding something useful to the masses of existing material, rather than just imitating something else.

Only the Paranoid Survive

I know, I was supposed to post yesterday and I missed it. But it was for a good reason(s), I promise.

Review: Paranoia: [Your Security Clearance is Not High Enough For the Title of This Adventure]

A few years ago, I kickstarted a new version of the slapstick dystopian dark humor RPG, Paranoia. Paranoia takes place in a future setting called Alpha Complex, which was built to save humanity from [REDACTED]. Now everyone lives here. It is run by an entity known as The Computer. Things run smoothly and efficiently all throughout the complex, and everyone has happy lives. Except that they don't.


Players take the roles of Troubleshooters, people who work for the Computer to root out trouble in Alpha Complex and shoot at it (or fix it through other means.) Given the Computer seeing threats behind every corner, somewhat malfunctioning, and all the things that go wrong, Troubleshooters tend to live very challenging, frustrating, and short lives.


The new version of Paranoia has been perpetually pushed back over the last few years, as kickstarter projects tend to be, but moreso than my usual experience. Shortly before GenCon, we got PDF files of the books. Yay. Sometime after that, we got "final" PDF versions. The most recent update on the physical version is "Early 2017". We'll see what happens.


So, last night, I got a group together and I ran the first adventure of the Mission book.


I really like Character Creation, in general as well as in Paranoia. The Paranoia system is designed to create tensions between the party to begin with by having them go in cycles where one person chooses a skill to have a positive rating in and then chooses someone to have that skill in an equal negative rating. I decided to run through Character Creation, rather than using the pregens provided in the Mission book.


It took a little longer than I'd expected, but I think this was in part because the players wanted to try to help each other/coordinate more than the game wants them to and partly because players like to think through their decisions more than the game wants them to.


Once done with that, we headed into the first adventure. This adventure is definitely designed for new players/GMs to Paranoia, and maybe to RPGs in general. It's very good at introducing things, and it does so in a very straightforward manner. It gives long selections of text for the GM to read to guide them in how to set scenes and run a Paranoia mission. Helpful. It goes pretty systematically through different setting and mechanics things for the players to get used to them. Also helpful.


However, it's also fairly restraining in it's helpfulness. The mission is rather linear, to the point of literally giving the players a yellow arrow on their iBall display to follow to each point in the mission. There are a few things that "MUST" happen in particular ways that seem to take control away from the players in manners that seem a bit forced.


So, it's very good for new people, but some more flexibility would be nice for those with some knowledge of the game and/or experience.


And it's very odd/in stark difference with the next couple missions, which I haven't yet run, but which I've read and feel are oddly lacking in direction. The second one gives a fair number of options of things to have the players do, but it gives a lack of guidance in how to lay out or handle presenting the main conflict. It has a general suggestion in regards to setup, but doesn't give specific ideas for how GMs can execute that. The third adventure is much more of a sandbox, with different things in different locations which the players can interact with. There's still a lot of improve/decision making on the GM's side, but I feel like there aren't obvious holes like with the second adventure.


I'll be running the second adventure in a couple weeks, but I'll be doing a fair bit of prep work to make sure it goes well-the actual product may be quite different than what's in the mission book.


I look forward to running the third adventure after that.

NaNoWriMo Update:

I passed the 50,000 word goal today. I expect to still write a fair bit more this month, but I do have some other things I need to focus on getting done, so slowing down and changing my focus for a bit will probably be good.

Observation: Limitless Magic

Lately, some combination of The Name of the Wind, Doctor Strange, and The Magicians (and probably Harry Potter as well, although that's less recent) has gotten me thinking about how magic is portrayed in fiction.


Namely, it seems like magic is a limitless resource. Sure, wizards have to learn their spells, and there are some wizards that are better at learning or performing spells than others, but it seems like in a lot of fiction magic is the gift that keeps on giving and once you have a spell you can use it over and over and over again.


(Of the things I listed, The Name of the Wind is an exception where there does have to be a source that's used for the magic, and the main character learns pretty quick that there can be serious repercussions for using the wrong source.)


But in Harry Potter, they can cast "Lumos" or "Expelliarmus" or even "Avada Kedavera" over and over again without stopping. In Doctor Strange, it seems like there's no cost to doing any particular spell. (It does mention the repercussions of using magic overall, but that's something different). The Magicians, same thing.


This gives magical characters an edge that non-magic users definitely don't have. For one, they get vast powers that aren't available to other people. A youth who has never fought might not have the skill of a swordmaster or know different fighting styles, but they can pick up a sword and swing it around and do some damage. A youth who has no experience in magic can't even attempt it. But on top of that, there seems to be no limit to the number of times these vast powers can be used. Even the strongest swordsman eventually tires, but so far as I can tell, a magician doesn't necessarily seem to tire just by doing magic (learning magic, maybe, or the conditions in which they are performing the magic, but not, apparently, the magic itself). On top of all that, magical users do also have a physical presence that they can build up that doesn't inherently need to be any weaker because of their magical talent.


I'm not, inherently saying that this is a bad thing. I think it makes these things somewhat less believable if I think too much on it, but I'm able to convince myself it's okay if the setting stays consistent. Mostly, I just think it's odd and unbalanced. It makes it so that if your main character is a magic user, then the antagonist must generally be a magic user in order to even begin to compete. Magic might give a broad spectrum of powers, but being limited to being someone who has it seems like a restriction I don't necessarily want to have. Besides that, I think a main character with any ability that is limitless tends to reduce the tension/drama of a story, rather than making it more engaging.


Anyway, that's just my thoughts/observation. What do you think?

Writing Update and Loss for Words

I wrote a guest blog about NaNoWriMo that has been posted today on the blog of my fellow writer, Rochelle Bradley. Check it out: http://rochellebradley.blogspot.com/2016/11/my-nano-story.html

I have finished the rough draft Heroism and Other Lies, Episode 104: Flashbacks. I'm pretty happy with it. It is definitely the longest Heroism and Other Lies episode so far, being about twice as long as the shortest episode so far. It also may be the most action packed and the one that reveals the most about the characters. It might be the best one so far (although, that is pretty relative.) However, it is also a good deal different than the others, and I could see it being the sort of thing audiences wouldn't let me get away with. We'll see what actually happens.

I saw Doctor Strange last night. I liked it, but I didn't find it groundbreaking (no pun intended?). I may decide to write a more full review on here later.

Other than that, recent events have left my mind and emotions a bit strained, so I don't know that I have anything to say here for now. I hope to have more exciting and insightful thoughts on writing or RPGs to share on Monday.

3 Ways of Writing The Future

I've been working on the fourth book of Heroism and Other Lies this year for NaNoWriMo, and it's gotten me thinking a lot about how people portray the future, be it in short stories, novels, movies, television shows, or roleplaying games.


It seems like, if you're trying to portray the future, there is this problem with the fact that the future is actually going to come to pass-probably somewhat differently than how you've shown it. In some cases, people just don't care. They take their fiction as fiction and don't mind the inconsistency. In other cases, people latch on to the historical inaccuracy and find it frustrating.


Here are some suggestions on how to overcome this problem.


1. Very Far Off Future
One of the easiest ways of writing the future is to jump so far ahead that we aren't likely to get to that future anytime soon. When you have galactic civilizations built on space travel, you have this sort of thing. Sure, we may have more common space travel in the not too far off future if SpaceX has any success, but we're nowhere near colonization.


This works because the setting is too different to compare our current society to. Knowledge of the world is entirely different by inventors and scientists of the far future than it is to us, and any number of events could have happened to bring things forward or back progress-wise.


Numenera, one of my favorite RPG settings is still set on "Earth", but it's a billion years in the future and there are leftovers from previous civilizations that are weird and not understood even by the inhabitants in that setting.


2. Divergent Timelines
In this method, the setting may have been our world at one point in time, but then *something happened* that was different. Some major event shook up the entire world and set it on a course differently than our own. The bigger the event, the easier any inconstancies between the setting and our own world become to write off.


In Heroism and Other Lies, this is a method that I employ. I haven't talked about it much in what I have written, but there was a major war that shook the foundations of the setting. Nations were overthrown, world powers shifted, new sciences arose while other studies were lost. This war took place probably around our present, and so the future of the series is altered, with some things being developed that we might have long before then, and some things being commonplace that we might be far behind in.


3. Same but Different, Another World
Fantasy settings are well known for doing this. They have unique place names and characters and government set ups, but many of them tend to look like a romanticized version of medieval/renaissance Europe.


This tactic can easily be applied to futuristic stories. It's easy to change place names and other details to make your setting look similar to our world and a possible future for it without actually binding it in with our reality. In this way, there's less concern about timeline discord.


I hope these ideas are helpful to you.


Do you know of any other ways of approaching the issue of differences between reality and fiction in the development of the future?

NaNoWriMo Update

While it is generally my goal to update here on Monday and Thursday, I have been rather focused on writing lately and haven't come up with something to write about here today. Therefore, I've decided to give you an update on how NaNo is going for me.


I knew going into this month that I was pretty busy and that I would become busier as time went on. My day job has been slowly ramping up and will soon be occupying a lot more time. I've got a short series of adventures starting up with my regular gaming group later in the month. While these are premade, at least one of the adventures will require a lot of work to be runnable. And then there's the general chaos of social and family obligations that comes this time of year.


Therefore, I set my initial goals very high. Specifically, I wanted to try to write double the suggested word count each day. This meant trying to write about 3,333 words a day. Since I knew that there would be days that I don't get to write at all, I figured this was a good way of accounting.


Currently, I'm doing better than my goal. I've got a little over 11,000 words.


Story-wise, I have written through the third chapter of Episode 104: Flashbacks, the fourth novella of the Heroism and Other Lies series. So far I'm pretty happy with what has been written down. There have been lots of action sequences as well as some good conversations. I think that this story will really help the audience get to know our heroes a lot better.

Publication Day: Wonder Vault Heist

I have released my second Cypher System adventure, The Wonder Vault Heist.


If you've read my posts on heist adventures, this was the adventure I was designing that got me thinking about them.

This is a heist adventure designed for a science fantasy setting, but which could easily be converted to other settings/systems.

The heist revolves around a mechanical/mystical vault, left by the ancients, which can bend space and time, and the sinister group that controls it. As the players get closer to the wonder vault itself, they learn more about their enigmatic employer, and about the events of the past which tore a rip in space and time where the vault now stands.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/197242/The-Wonder-Vault-Heist

If you haven't checked out my posts on running heist adventures and are interested in making/running your own, see the posts below:


Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges


Heist Adventures 2: Tips and Advice


Heist Adventures 3: Heist Campaigns