Do you like Nazis?

Do you like Nazis?  Either way you will want to play Tannhäuser.  Be the Army of the Union and kick some neo-nazi butt or be the Reich’s 13th Occult Division and stand around looking evil and cool and occasionally doing some nasty neo-nazi things (like kicking Union butt).

Apparently there is some back-story as to why the two factions are smacking each other over the head. Something to do with Obscura Cardinal Cornerstones.  This game has a loverly gothic/war-hero feel with loads of beautiful art.

Your requests here

As J said earlier, there is no new game this week since we will all be away having funs and not at work blogging.

So instead I propose an experiment:  Those that have read this far and would like more board game/card game reviews, reply with an “yay” or “nay”.  Any suggestions about which games to review will also be considered

Maybe, just maybe, MMOs are like DnD

There shall be a slight decrease in the number of posts over the next seven to eight days. PB and I shall be journeying down to Cape Town for the week and shall be meeting up with f00, Zen and maybe Trashcondor there. We haven’t got together to game in about 10 months. So, we’ll be spending most of the week gaming. I shall be GMing 4e for the first time and I think it may be the first time some of them would have played the new edition. Will report on it upon our return to the interwebs.

A public request

This is not truly a post – just a public request to f00 to get this: DnD Inn Fighting

I must admit that sounds like a massive blast of a game.

…I wonder if being sober confers any bonuses/penalties…

Taking Pride in Your DnD

Today, I present the last in the series of the 14 deities. I left this one for last, as this is the one I used most whilst GMing.

Tarlannar is a demigod, ascended to godhood with the aid of Bellentar and, as such, he shares much in common with Bellentar. However, where Bellentar is an admirer of beauty, Tarlannar is instead a creator of beauty. A powerful mage in his mortal life, Tarlannar spent his days perfecting the, as he called it, beautiful art. Favouring transmutation and conjuration magic, he would busy himself using his magic to create impressive architectural structures, magical constructs and beautiful, but potent magical weapons and armour. Never a work did he create of which he was not proud. Tarlannar is chaotic good and his domains are creation, magic, metal and pride. Tarlannar is depicted as young human male, dressed in untidy wizard robes and his holy symbol is a rose, crafted from steel. His favoured weapon is the light hammer.

Nothing too unique about him in the description above. However, through play, I developed the story around his human life, including romance and betrayal. Borrowing a bit from the story of Vecna, I created a brother for Tarlannar, also a wizard, but turned lich. Jealous of his brother’s godhood, he cursed Tarlannar’s still mortal wife and tore her body and soul into millions of pieces, preventing any for of resurrection magic from working. I’m not much of a writer of prose, so I can’t give the story the words it deserves, but that doesn’t matter, because I doubt that the bulk of my players even cared about NPC romance.

I have discovered that giving PCs titles is always a great reward (it’s good for the adventurer CV) and since most of Tarlannar-driven quests involved hunting for clues or pieces of his wife, we saw PCs called things like Heartfinder.

why a girl leaves home

after my first few sessions of playing DnD i cottoned on to the idea, that your character needs a reason for leaving home and going out to adventure, more so if the character is of the female persuasion………….hereto follows the list of epic reasons for a girl leaving home:

• to find her lost sister
• to trace a family heirloom
• to gain vengeance for the death of a sister/family member
• for fun
• to break the rules
• to find a unicorn – this one happened a few times
• to find a magic carpet: an intelligent, fire retardant one/ one that is the family heirloom/belonged to a dead relative – this happened a few more times than the one above
• to find a Pegasus
• and sometimes, very rarely, to rid the world of evil/law – i dabbled in the art of cg paladins

strange how i can’t really rememeber my characters, but i can remember there reasons for adventuring……oh well it is the cookie

Religion as a tool to control

This is the second last installment in the City of the Gods series. Today, I present the god of faith:

Mortals need to find meaning in everything as it is difficult for them to even contemplate that their short lives may be meaningless in the great scheme of things. Sirinon offers them that meaning – in service to him. Sirinon’s church offers his followers’ lives order, protection and meaning through their faith. However, Sirinon demands absolute loyalty and servitude in return. And the greatest service to Sirinon is the converting of others to the faith. Individual clerics take to this greatest task using various techniques, including the subtle brainwashing of the youth through propaganda or the forceful enforcement of the religion, by law, upon the newly conquered. Sirinon is lawful evil, rewarding his faithful with mortal power and wealth. His domains are domination, evil, law and war. Sirinon is depicted as a stern and elderly looking man with tanned, wrinkled skin and white hair, often dressed in black full plate. His favoured weapon is the warhammer and his holy symbol is an iron gauntlet.

In real life, I’m agnostic and it’s sometimes difficult for me to not at least suspect any  organized religion of being, in some aspects, Sirinonian.

Fun, Sex & RPGs

As j has pointed out on prior occasions; I tend to be on the more perverted side of life. This is great for me, but can on occasion be a bit much for player groups. In my opinion, however, there is a level of fun sexuality that is accessible to mostly everyone and that can also be appreciated by mostly everybody.

So allow me to illuminate what I mean by example. And to do so I’ll have to cover a bit of background. The epic City of the Gods campaign that we’ve been discussing in recent posts is great ofcoz – but there have been a great number of other campaigns that we’ve had. One specific campaign took place in the rule-space of BESM (third edition, I think).

To those not familiar to it: BESM – Big Eyes Small Mouth – is an anime-style role-playing rule set. The rules are very open-ended with respect to genre; so anything from sci-fi undead mecha, to historic samurai, high-school love romance or just plain slice-of-life is readily implementable in BESM.

The particular BESM campaign I have in mind was a lot of fun – and, similar to the City of Gods, the sessions were run by a different GM each time (often the DM would be determined by a twist of fate, such as throwing a dice at the end of one session). The setting was (mostly) modern normal, with a twist. (If any of you have seen Excel Saga… that could more-or-less be it.) But the genre varied a bit, or a lot, with each DM/session. So one session might be a harem-anime, the next a cyber-crime investigation – just the characters were a constant.

Which made for great role-playing diversity; since often a character would be completely ill-built for the particular genre of session that was being played.

But I digress a bit much… to get back on track. Since we were doing a fun modern anime style environment, and we kind of thought of the sessions as “episodes”, and naturally anime tends to be a bit formulaic, so it was obvious to me that I had to DM the Beach Episode: the entire point of the session was the characters having an off-day at the beach. Some minor plot detail was thrown in as well, but 70% of the session was designed to merely be frolicking about.

This is also where the healthy fun sexy bits come in. (J, be thankful, I think that sentence will make the blog skyrocket on the Google searches.)

A lot of the fun was in creating stereotypical events on the beach that would have the typical anime hero get gushing nose bleeds. I believe it was pb that ended up changing into a good dozen or so different swimming costumes/bikinis in the course of the session (as each set would somehow be rendered unusable – and each new set was described in exquisite and loving and sexy detail by pb). Throw in the odd ballgames, watermelon hunting, ice scream and the other usual details and you got yourself a meaningless but very fun day at the beach.

Not to mention – put a bunch of erratic weird anime characters (with vastly differing personalities and abilities) on a beach, and it doesn’t take long for them to come up with a myriad of ways to entertain themselves and give the whole event a spin that is unique.

I think this kind of environment (the beach) is a perfect setting to instill a sense of sex in players, as the characters are confronted with their gender realities when everybody is running around in skin-generous beachwear. Sure, this isn’t romance – but that isn’t what it is about: sexyness is a momentary, fleeting aspect of RPGing; whereas romance has the benefit of slow, gradual unfolding over the course of a campaign.
Where eroticism can be readily instilled at mostly any time – romance is something that blossoms independent of any input. Possibly between player characters, or maybe between players and NPCs. I guess it is fine to fabricate a romance between two NPCs, but this is primarily a plot device or background story – when romance happens naturally between player characters (and possibly a NPC) then there is a sense of reality and a measure of severity that gives a subtle sense of gravitas to the gaming sessions. Or at least a bit of a soap opera.

…uhm… guess it’s time to finish the post – until next time, remember that succubi aren’t merely something to slay.

99 red balloons

enjoying the title? :p the post is entitled such as i am convinced that i must have had close to 99 characters or something like it as the only ones that stand out in my mind are the newer ones…….i know i’m a terrible player, i don’t have a little scrapbook of the characters i played from one to 99 :p in this post i’ll be touching on two things i wanted to blog about and didn’t really get to. …….the first is a sort-of response to something i saw on one of the blogs on the rpg bloggers list.

a female blogger had put up a post on how guys – read guy geeks and gamers – could find a girl like her – read geek and gamer. i found the post slightly offensive on behalf of the guys i know – most of whom are geeks. they don’t seem to have problems finding girls like them, or at least girls who are semi-interested or at least willing to put up with their “silly boy” habits. then i realised that the guys i know and game with have managed to find the girls that have latent geek ability………….laugh all you want at the phrasing, but think about it, think about your SO and her/his hobbies, could they be construed as geeky/nerdy in some way? i admit that there are guys that aren’t all happily coupled up, but it could be that way for 2 reasons: 1) they don’t want to be and 2)they are afraid of unleashing their playboy gene the second thing i wanted to blog about was my favourite character, but i think she deserves her own post :0

Ps. this is also the 99th post on the blog :0

Sunflowers, Lions and Prostitutes

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival raps up next week. I’ll be presenting three deities today, so that we can through the list in time.

First, the god of gluttony:

Bellentar is the god of beauty, especially the beauty of nature. Bellentar is known to wander the mortal worlds, often stopping at one point for days, months or even years, at a time just to admire a beautiful natural scene, drinking it all in, often abandoning other important tasks. Bellentar is chaotic good and is known to travel through mortal worlds disguised as an artist of sorts; painter, musician and so forth. Bellentar is slow to anger, as he views violence and anger as ugly, but  when he fights, he fights with such violent fervour, that it sometimes frightens the other gods, especially when defending locations or individuals that he considers beautiful. Bellentar’s domains include animal, gluttony, plant and sun and his favoured weapon is the club. His holy symbol is the sunflower.

On rereading the enty about Bellentar, I now think that perhaps he should be chaotic neutral rather than good, as his reasons for protecting something are actually selfish reasons.

Second, the god of wrath:

Ethon, also known as the Guardian Avenger, acts as the self-proclaimed protector of the weak and downtrodden. His church does the most good work amongst the impoverished, often opening schools and orphanages on church grounds. This charity, however, is but one aspect of Ethon. Ethon primarily busies himself in a crusade against evil and tyranny, delivering swift and merciless justice on the those whom [he and and his church believes] deserve it. Ethon’s detractors often refer to him as a bloodthirsty killer using justice as an excuse to quench his thirst for violence. It is true, that in the heat of battle Ethon and his clergy enter near berserk frenzies and show no mercy to those pre-judged as guilty, but once the battle is done they often seem remorseful, seeming sad that they had to resort to violence and spending much time after tending to the wounds of the lands in which they had just waged battle. Ethon is often at odds against his sister, Arisstra, as they both aim to punish the guilty, but their definition of guilty varies as much as their means do. Ethon often appears as a redheaded, bearded giant of a man in gleaming battle armour. His holy symbol, the head of a lion, is emblazoned across his favoured weapon – his shield, Jara, which he uses to both defend and attack. Ethon views himself as lawful good and his domains are good, protection, war and wrath.

I never really liked how the entry on Ethon turned out. To me, it seems like the core idea I had for him doesn’t come through. I modelled him after an abusive husband/father that would use violence to ‘protect’ (read control) and then try and buy back the affections of his loved ones after every outburst.

Final one for today, Lust:

Cara is the chaotic good god of heroism. Although Cara is good, most of the other good and/or lawful gods frown upon her practices. Many of her detractors consider her a whore and her churches nothing more than brothels and dens of sin. So much so, that she has even taken on the title of the Whore. Cara sees the need that heroes [must] arise from amongst common people to fight against evil and tyranny, but at the same time she acknowledges that these same heroes need saving or protecting themselves , from time to time. Cara is said to watch over all heroes whom champion a good cause and her churches act as a place for such heroes to seek refuge, healing and somebody to talk to about the evils they [the heroes] must commit in order to further good. Cara’s churches are generally small, with only a few acolytes per holy site and each acolyte tends to the needs of only one hero at a time and only that hero until the hero or acolyte passes. It is not unnatural or uncommon for a kind of love to blossom between an acolyte and her charge and therein lies the root of the brothel myth. Cara is depicted as, at times, a beautiful, but genderless humanoid, or as a handsome blonde man or beautiful blonde woman, most often dressed in simple white silk robes. Her favoured weapon is the longsword or two-bladed sword. Cara, herself, carries two longswords, Ediel and Aviel, which she can merge together into one two-bladed sword. Her domains are good, healing, lust and protection. Cara’s holy symbol is two crossed longswords with a white feather resting upon them.

I’m sure that trashcondor will have more to say about Cara than I. He tends to take the lust thing a bit far…