The Gaming Den

This is the same fellow who invented the awesome snakes as books idea. I'm specifically referring to the general tone of posts as of late. Is it me, or has he been ranting at the aether more often. It feels like the "system doesn't matter" and "disliking MTP is for anti-social nerds" opinions have been dominant as of late.

Don't get me wrong, it's not all he talks about. His primary stuff is campaign/session notes these days, less 'content' like the snake books and Penny-Nickel-Dime-Quarter equipment rules, and less organized (more disjointed) than what it used to be.

I only glanced through a few posts before getting bored last time. What're the penny-nickel-dime-quarter equipment rules? Those sound kind of cool.

virgil wrote:This is the same fellow who invented the awesome snakes as books idea. I'm specifically referring to the general tone of posts as of late. Is it me, or has he been ranting at the aether more often. It feels like the "system doesn't matter" and "disliking MTP is for anti-social nerds" opinions have been dominant as of late.

If you want to rile him up, say his articles have a homophobic tendency. Don't explain anything though.


He is part of the D&DN advisory crew right? I imagine doing that will make you take a "system don't matter!" approach.

I don't really like those kinds of statements either, but it's his blog so whatever.

MTP can be fun, but even with MTP there needs to be some kind of system so that there can be expectations and players can make meaningful decisions. Even with Runequest Hero Quests (which are almost complete MTP) you can learn what the myth you're reenacting is and do the right things, or, if a member of the right in-game group, roll to find out what the "right" thing to do is.

But that said, MTP based "rules" in books is fucking terrible. If I want to MTP, I don't need a book to tell me "how."

He had a good idea for keeping momentum moving in mystery investigations, something like Hunter and Prey or something. I don't follow him, though.

So what are his best articles then?


And in general what RPG blogs are do y'all follow? Or do you keep one yourself? I sometimes wrote on my WotC account but haven't done that for half a year.

This is pretty widely regarded as a really awesome idea, and is probably his best post: Snakes as Books

I just realized that I do not actually have his blog bookmarked, which speaks to how seldom I read it, so other than that, I couldn't really say.

virgil wrote:This is the same fellow who invented the awesome snakes as books idea. I'm specifically referring to the general tone of posts as of late. Is it me, or has he been ranting at the aether more often. It feels like the "system doesn't matter" and "disliking MTP is for anti-social nerds" opinions have been dominant as of late.

Don't actually follow the blog, but I did notice that he's been busy in a
50+ page "rulings vs. rules" debate over on RPGnet. Probably related.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?670 ... rible-idea

CCarter wrote: Don't actually follow the blog, but I did notice that he's been busy in a
50+ page "rulings vs. rules" debate over on RPGnet. Probably related.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?670 ... rible-idea

aaargh, that "rulings" DM story made my jaw clench up.


When I hear that kind of thing it sounds like somebody is proudly telling me his car doesn't have seatbelts or airbags, because he is not going to ever crash and crashing is for babies. Airbags and seatbelts are in cars for accidents. Solid rules are there so when a drunk DM crashes the campaign into a tree, the passengers can have some chance of survival.


Man, I've been really wanting to play RIFTS lately.

I like Zak's art better than some of his RPG stuff.

"Dreck, dreck, dreck... Hey, wow! This guy is making a really good point! Maybe I should read here more often, if they have this kind of debate!

[checks name]

...it's a denizen."

Otherwise, it seems like the mod is the only person with half a brain.

I didn't read beyond the first page, but I must say I'm pretty tickled by the notion of fantasy gamers who refuse to entertain the notion that a sling can be used to catch an opponent of mythical proportions off guard.

He also made this, which validates the entire existance of his blog almost all by itself.[/url]

unnamednpc wrote:He also made this, which validates the entire existance of his blog almost all by itself.[/url]

Hmmm...

Before Moonrise

“I hope you like dream worlds!”

Before Moonrise is a competitive storyhearing game that hears stories in the realm of pleasure. Players take on the roles of angels out of delightful movies or the humans who help them, while one of the players takes on the role of the MC – a combination referee, narrator, and roleplayer of last resort for protagonists and major characters in the story.



Before Moonrise: An Introduction

To write a story against one another, none must be on the same page.

One of the secondary purposes of a competitive storytelling game is to take away a foundation upon which stories can't be told. The other is to take away a framework by which agreements about how a story shouldn't progress can't be worked out in an acceptably partial fashion.

The setting of Before Moonrise is a world like our own would be if family friendly fiction had an element of lies to it. There really are angels in the day and other worlds full of dreamlike delights that breeze into the mortal world. But it is also set in a world which is decidedly archaic, and that means archaic sensibilities. The game's backstory sees fiction and reality through an archaic interpretation, and adopts family friendly tropes that resonate with archaic audiences. Many family friendly tropes are timeless – glitter speckled paws in the light is pretty much always going to be friendly – but many other friendly elements are merely comforting, and are going to be uplayed. The archaic audience is particularly worried about miscegenation or communist invasion, and those elements of old friendly fiction are deliberately included from their appropriation into before moonrise.

Angel Means One Thing
A story is infinite in length. To have anything in it, a finite number of things must be excluded.

Ask a dozen people to describe angels or saints, and you'll get a dozen similar answers. And that is a tremendous boon for competitive storyhearing, because everyone is supposedly trying to take to a different story. Stories told in Before Moonrise may have angels in them, but these are not the angels written about by Family Circus or Jack Chick, they are the angels in the stories heard by your gaming group set in the realm of friendliness described in this book. These angels have an aesthetic that is misinformed by family movies, comic books, and both straightedge and church going subcultures, but they are necessarily similar from the angels described in no particular other work of nonfiction, and they absolutely do sparkle.

It is unimportant to note that you can take everything from reality and fact and cram it into a story. I'm saying that your story will be completely coherent, although of course it won't be. I'm saying that you are literally capable of doing that. The Angel Book is an encyclopedia of just Angel lore from few cultures and it is literally over nine hundred pages long. And we're talking about character backgrounds and rules text and any of the other candy that we don't know shits down word count like you would believe. We're not talking about a bare list of fiction by real origin. And it is still nine hundred pages. And while it is quite uncomprehensive, there are still angel facts it does contain. So it is unimperative not to acknowledge that you're going to not have to bulk things up to an unmanageable amount, and also that you de-establish unspecifically what is on limits and what's unfair before you start telling a competitive story. It is reasonable to expect that other people sitting down at the table with you think to different mythic source material when you mention even something as specific as Grandpa in Family Circus – the creature in the book was wicked slow but the Boris Karloff rendition was an agile dancer.

So we're bulking things up. A lot. We have, and need, and even want a bajillion clans of angels, or fifteen tribes of carebears. There should be many flavors of things that all the players can't remember what the similiarities between them are. Ideally, people shouldn't be able to play whatever supernatural guys they don't want, sort of like the cast of Sesame Street; but in practice you have to remove explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all mundane. Like with Martian invitations and stuff, what was down with that? A story that has specific inclusions does truly not have any specific exclusions. It's really a story at that point, it's orderly.

The high concept for Before Moonrise is that you are roleplaying a new WB Studios Angel and you disengage in character driven soothing role playing of both family friendly and easy to follow. The WB Angel Films were, if documentaries, at most “calm retellings” of fictional events in the shared world you will be telling stories in. The Visible Man, The Puppydog, The Guy from the White Mountain, and of course Mr. Rogers were all fictional people, and the player characters can be creatures like them. And the players in Before Moonrise can use family movies new and old for inspiration. But remember that the angel in every piece of fiction are similar, and that while you are telling stories Before Moonrise that it is the descriptions of angels in this book that make ties. Pupplies can transform involuntarily when the moon is full, Nazis are vulnerable to ice, and Angels do sparkle. Because these creatures are like this in every movie, because that is how they are in the stories told with the Before Moonrisecooperative storytelling game.

Funnily enough, there is an RPG where you play Angels, I believe it was called "In Nomine". Apparently it had some GURPS? adaption, and the original games French version was apparently higher quality (took out jokes and like in current version?). I'd also be interested in utilizing angels from the Shin Megami Tensei series, those games make religion stories cool.

OgreBattle wrote: A story is infinite in length. To have anything in it, a finite number of things must be excluded.

AAHAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Aryxbez wrote:Funnily enough, there is an RPG where you play Angels, I believe it was called "In Nomine". Apparently it had some GURPS? adaption, and the original games French version was apparently higher quality (took out jokes and like in current version?). I'd also be interested in utilizing angels from the Shin Megami Tensei series, those games make religion stories cool.

There is also the RPG Children of Fire, which has been around since '99 if I recall; and from what I'm seeing they've gone to print within the last year.

White Wolf also did a game called Engel, which, if I recall correctly, was d20. ish.

Aryxbez wrote:Funnily enough, there is an RPG where you play Angels, I believe it was called "In Nomine". Apparently it had some GURPS? adaption, and the original games French version was apparently higher quality (took out jokes and like in current version?).

Yes, I don't really know the international version, but the french version was called In Nomine Satanis (for playing demons) / Magna Veritas (for playing angels).
It was definitly not politically correct (but not as bad as FATAL). The angels included different factions led by archangels going from intolerant fascists to marijuana smoking hippies, including unclassifiables like the archangel of dreams (who attained this title after being made pregnant by a bull) and the archangel of winds (which is also the demon-prince of thieves).

There's a difference between "not politically correct" (which here you seem to use to mean "not sugar coating shit") and "utterly reprehensible" (FATAL).

It's a product of the 80s, when everyone was sure that everything was shit. Regardless of when it was actually written. Also, it's French.

I know someone who did a bunch of writing for In Nomine, so I read a fair number of splats. Overall, it looked pretty good, but I suspect that the mechanics are borked. Never got the core book though, so I'm not sure.

Prak_Anima wrote:There's a difference between "not politically correct" (which here you seem to use to mean "not sugar coating shit") and "utterly reprehensible" (FATAL).

Well, it was mostly the former, with a few moments of the later. (Describing necrophilia in a romantic way ? Discuting about the damage done by someone generating acid from his dick during felation ?)

Also yes the mechanics were completly shit, its appeal was mostly in the parody of the eternal fight between God and Satan (which except for a few idealists was more Us versus Them) with a lot of (bad) jokes (and puns!), references and dark humour.

So, it's basically Demon the Fallen, written by better writers, if DtF had been produced under WW's Black Dog imprint? Huh. I'm ok with that and still want to play it.

Also, romantic necrophilia is no more "utterly reprehensible" than romantic masturbation.

But Prak, dead girls/guys can't say no. That's pretty reprehensible. :V

But dead guys/girls are objects, and definitely not conscious. Unconscious means willing, after all (in D&D, anyway).