My Better Half (Part Two)

Megan during a podcast recording session.

When I realized that I wanted to push my game a little further into dramatic territory, my wife Megan was the first person I tried to "sell" on the idea. I remember being hesitant about it, even though she's a drama nerd from way back, because she had bought into the idea of RPGs as monster-ass-kick-a-thons as much as I ever had in my teenage years. Her character Rosa, who had begun life in that long ago ANGEL campaign, was a combat monster.

My Better Half (Part One)

Today is my 11th anniversary. 

Yeah.

Me (with much redder hair) and my lovely bride Megan.

More Eberron by Gaslight

Sorry for the gap. Where were we?

Oh yes.

Last time, I talked about the history of this Victorian setting embracing Eberron going back to the reign of Elizabeth I. One of the things I seized on when I was leafing through the original Eberron campaign book was the section on cosmology, where different planes would align with the game world (including the realm of the dead, the plane of the monstrous Quori, and Xoriat - the realm of madness). That seemed too interesting to lose. I began imagining a world where the Dal Quor, the home realm of the Quori, was going to align with our world and unleash a massive Quori invasion. To defend their territory, Elizabeth I and Titania strike an alliance that is made manifest in their very bodies - they join together to form a new being, Gloriana. Good Queen Glory.

Campaign Workshop: Eberron by Gaslight

I mentioned this last week as the "mash up" I was currently crushing on. To be fair, since then I've realized that a lot of this idea can probably be traced directly back to Benjamin Baugh's superlative THE KERBEROS CLUB, but what the hey. And if you haven't read that one, you should - if you have any love at all for Victoriana, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, WILD TALENTS, or just stunningly good RPG sourcebooks, it's the bee's knees. 

A couple of years ago I wrapped up my long-running Victorian vampire hunter game, SUNSET EMPIRE (and as some of you know, I often still mourn its loss in these pages - alas!). The concept for that game could be described, in broad strokes, as Victorian adventure in a world where the fantastic existed secretly below the surface. Like THE KERBEROS CLUB, as my game went on, the world got weirder and weirder until the vampires had conquered London with a magical weapon and German werewolves in silver-bullet-proof armor raced to the rescue. OK, it wasn't a subtle game.

RPGaDay2015: Big Set Piece Finale With Lots of Explosions and Special Effects

29. Favourite RPG website / blog?

Once upon a time, I was a big reader of forums like RPG.net, but over time there's been less and less there for me. I still drop by once in a while to dip my toes in the pool, but it's been a while since I've actively participated. To be honest, although I often enjoyed the discussions there, despite the occasional tendency toward absurd flamewars (now I have Twitter for that!), I often found that it was hard to actually participate in any discussions. The real chatter was among the guys who seemed to be there 24/7, and if you only dropped by once a day, you weren't worth their attention. No one would engage. Insider baseball.

RPGaDay2015: The Chocolate and Peanut Butter Files?

27. Favourite idea for merging two games into one?

I'm actually going to talk about this at greater length next week, but I'll give you the thumbnail here. I recently grabbed a copy of Ed Greenwood's new book, The Iron Assassin, from my local library. It's a steampunk kind of thing in an alternate England with scheming nobles and Holmes-ian heroes doing their best to save King and Country, with airships and wind-up zombie killers. I'm not loving it so much, but it's got enough of what I like in Victoriana and steampunk to get my brain cells working. What it really made me want was to take the things I liked in it and plug them into a game that told a better story. And the thing that immediately leapt to mind was taking EBERRON, that old D&D setting that emphasized pulpy action and clanky fantasy robots, and giving it an injection of Gaslight-era goodness a la THE KERBEROS CLUB.

This has actually proved to be a pretty interesting rabbit hole, for me at least, so again - I'll talk more about it later. It may be an interesting exercise in showing how ideas percolate and ultimately mutate into something different.

RPGaDay2015: Mechanics

25. What's your favourite revolutionary game mechanic?

Probably Aspects in Fate, although (as has been mentioned by others) they're hardly a new mechanic at this point. Aspects, if you haven't been paying attention to the goodness that is Fate, are a way of drawing attention to something in the game world that is significant in the fiction. Characters have Aspects to support important elements of their character and make them relevant in gameplay. A character's Weird Intuition or Cultish Affection for Libraries could be an important part of a Fate game, just by assigning an Aspect to them.