‘It must be a great feeling’ said my aunt afterwards.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Everything hurts. I feel like I’m recovering from major surgery.’
‘Ow,’ I added. ‘Ow.’
Not so much “up periscope” as “blow ballast tanks”
Certain people on twitter have taken to using ‘up periscope’ or ‘down periscope’ to denote going on or off the internet in order to get some work done. For the last few weeks, I’m not sure if I’ve been stuck at the bottom of the ocean or ashore on a sandbar; either way, blogging has been minimal. I look forward to July – after marathon, after wedding, after current deadlines – as a promised land of milk, honey and minimal to-do lists.
Currently, my main project is an adventure anthology for the Laundry, entitled Black Bag Jobs. I’m also working on an adventure path for Traveller based on the old Secret of the Ancients adventure, and this weekend I’ll be rewriting and editing the special bonus actually-set-in-Arkham Trail of Cthulhu adventure to go along with the not-actually-set-in-Arkham-at-all-stupid-working-title Arkham Detective Tales. After that, I’ve got some more Cubicle 7 and Pelgrane Press work lined up (yet more adventures!), and many other projects (such as Milkyfish, finally).
We’re still on track for the marathon on the 7th of June. There’s still time to sponsor us, if you’re feeling generous. The last few weeks of training have been disrupted by stag/hen nights and illness, so we probably won’t have as good a time as we hoped, but we shall finish the damn thing or explode our tendons trying.
(I must also publicly applaud my best man, Aidan Rafferty. It takes a special kind of courage to let this interview get published on a weekend when, traditionally, the groom is supposed to be one who is mocked and humiliated.)
Back to work. Gotta keep the wolf from the door. (Actually, the wolf is pretty far from the door, but the deadlines are rolling closer….)
Ephemerals, Who Strut Upon The Stage
As a spin-off from last week’s thoughts – one element that works well with antagonistic PCs is the concept of ‘temporary’ characters. If you kill off my 12th level D&D elf wizard who I’ve levelled up from 1st, that’s a big thing. If you kill off the elf wizard I came up with ten minutes ago, using something like Over the Edge where his stats are ‘Elf Wizard 5d6′, it’s not as big a blow to me. I don’t have as much time and effort invested in that character.
Future project: A semi-adversarial game where all the players have a high-level main PC, and scads of temporary ones. Your main PC is sacrosanct, but the temporary ones are fair game. (I’ve a Traveller variant based on this idea, where you’re all playing interstellar empires, and game turns are decades apart, but anyway…)
Temporary characters also solve the spotlight time problem. If PC#1 is going to be away from the rest of the group for a long time, then any time the GM spends with him is time spent ignoring the rest of the group. If, however, the GM can give the other players temporary PCs to go along with PC#1, then everyone’s still involved. It skirts the edges of collaborative play without actually growing its hair out and going full hippy. One potential problem: In my experience, temporary characters tend to be played for laughs more than long-running PCs. If I’m only going to be playing Bob the Redshirt for a scene or two, then I’m instinctively going to give Bob some absurd personality quirk or accent to give me something to hang on to.
To drag this tangent in the direction of Grognardia, have I just partially recreated the whole concept of Hirelings? How often did players roleplay their hirelings back in the day?
The Party Dynamic, Continued
I asked if there were any games where the PCs are not working together, and a few examples were suggested. Cold City is a great example of how a strong group structure can be used in a game. All the characters are part of a secret police force set up to deal with left-over Nazi occult weapons in post-war Berlin. You’ve got plot hooks and a reason to work together right there. Each PC is from a different country (a great roleplaying hook) and has a secret agenda (conflict! betrayal! plot complications!). There’s a Trust mechanic to bind it all together and bring it to the fore in every game session.
The Party Dynamic
Writing adventures (and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately), I was struck by the odd gap between the player’s side and the GM’s material. What’s the first or second chapter in most RPGs? Character creation – how to make your player character. Your singular, lonely, self-contained player character. Then, on the GM’s side, individual characters are hardly mentioned. It’s always plural: “the party”, “the adventurers”, “the investigators”, “the PCs” and so on. The assumption in most rpgs is that the player characters are working together as a group, an ensemble cast, and that the GM should treat this group as the primary focus of the game.
Yet, if an rpg addresses group character creation at all, it’s usually as an afterthought.
In Memoriam
The Cork City marathon takes place on the 7th of June.
I’m running it.
In much the same manner that an oil tanker pirouettes, or a mountain gently bounces, I’m running it.
I have never been the most athletic individual, even for a gamer, and I still darkly mutter that the best way of moving forty kilometres is to put thousands of years of science to good use and use something with a wheel, preferably four of them and an internal combustion engine. Or, since the marathon starts and finishes in the same place, I could stay right there. Nonetheless, deli & I are going to run the damn thing.
We’ve another reason for doing this, beyond fitness and hatred of one’s own knee cartilage. My mother Helen Hanrahan passed away in September of last year. She suffered from a lung condition called sarcoidosis; it progressively reduced her lung capacity. In her last few months, just walking across the room would completely exhaust her, and she needed the support of oxygen machine almost 24 hours a day. The disease forced her to retire early, and then restricted her more and more until she was virtually bedridden.
Through it all, she remained herself – endlessly generous, scathingly intelligent, and thoroughly wonderful.
We’re running the marathon in her memory, and we’re asking for sponsorship. Any money we raise will be donated to the Irish Lung Fibrosis Association. The sponsorship page is here. Any donations or supportive messages will be immensely appreciated.
Scheduling, Projects, Axe Cop (with lemon)
When I was working full-time for Mongoose, scheduling time was comparatively easy. The month went like this:
1) Get assigned new project #1
2) Do a bit of research, outline it, get enthused about it.
3) Get told that new project #1 has actually been changed to new project #2.
4) Curse the gods, curse the editors, realise I’m now technically a week behind, start writing as though my fingertips were tiny, tiny badgers trying to escape across the bridge of letters from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
5) Finish the book and mail it in. Take a day off, GOTO 1. (Considered harmful.)
My preferred writing time was a morning block from 11ish until 1ish, and then 2ish until 5.30ish, ideally spent in coffee shops aggressively not-playing-world-of-warcraft. Assuming, of course, that I didn’t get interrupted, or procrastinate by texting people until they interrupted me. (How to work from home, lesson 1: alienate your friends to save time.)
Now, things are different. My work day is no longer entirely mine, as I’m sharing the house with a) a deli and b) a puppy. The puppy needs to be fed, watered, walked and restrained on a regular basis, and has developed the habit of leaping onto my keyboard if I don’t throw her ball for her regularly. The deli takes her of her own food and water (as well as my own), but does demand that I give her a modicum of attention and tea. Plus, we’re in training for the marathon, so we’re running for at least an hour every day.
To complicate matters further, I’ve got from working on one or two projects simultaneously to working on:
- The Laundry (which requires an awful lot of research, and is taking up 90% of my time at the moment)
- Milkyfish (just gearing up, but taking up a lot of brainspace)
- Traveller material for two companies (very different adventures for both of them, and while I’ve outlined both sets, I need to start in on them)
- A Pathfinder gig (just a few monsters, but it’s a foot in the door)
- A 4e gig (waiting for them to get back to me with approvals)
- I owe another outline to another company at some point, assuming they’re still interested in the Ahnernabe and the punching thereof.
- [REDACTED DUE TO IRELAND'S BLASPHEMY LAWS]
- Sundry other minor projects (fish for fish, two campaigns, my mother’s deathbed request that I write a novel, of which more anon).
Oh, yeah. And organising a wedding, and trying to stay on top of the disaster area that is an overfull house with a chaotic puppy, and a surprising amount of organising of flights to the far side of the world (not for us – various family members on both sides are jetting around the world). I’ve been trying to schedule myself using remember the milk. (Which I keep thinking of as ‘remember the guilt’.)
Things will calm down. The wedding will happen, the marathon will be run (or kill me; either way, it can be marked off the schedule), the puppy will tire out, and I’ll get into a new rhythm.
Or I will go mad.
* * *
I am aware that I am about six weeks before the rest of the internet on AXE COP, but as I tried to explain, things are rather busy right now.
Making a City
I started a new D&D4e campaign with my sunday group. It’s the third time I’ve tried running a fourth edition campaign for that group. I’m having trouble hitting the right tone – the first game’s setting was too restrictive, the second was my attempt to run Old School play with a ruleset that’s not suited for it. 4e needs a looser, more varied setting than I’m used to running.
So, the new campaign pitch:
Cubicle 7 Entertainment to publish roleplaying game based on Charles Stross’ Laundry Files novels
Cubicle 7 Entertainment is producing a roleplaying game based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and the forthcoming The Fuller Memorandum) by the even-more-award-winning Charles Stross, and uses the also-award-winning Basic Roleplaying System (Call Of Cthulhu) by Chaosium Inc.
“We love the Laundry Files novels, so we’re really excited about this game,” said Dominic McDowall-Thomas, Cubicle 7 Director. “The world of the Laundry is a perfect mix of espionage, conspiracy and tentacled menace from beyond the stars.”
“The books are Lovecraftian spy thrillers. The best elements from both genres are thrown together with a sprinkling of long lost Nazis, terrorist cultists, other foreign governments wanting a piece of the action, as well as Her Majesty’s Civil Service.” added Cubicle 7’s Angus Abranson.
The Laundry is a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth. Players take the part of Laundry agents, cleaning up the mess after things go wrong or, sometimes, even managing to prevent the manifestation of ultimate evil. Agents have access to the best equipment they can get their superiors to approve, from Basilisk Guns to portable containment grids to a PDA loaded up with Category A countermeasure invocations.
The game has been designed and written by industry veterans Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall and John Snead.
“I’m really excited to be working with Cubicle 7 to bring the sinister world of the Laundry to a wider audience,” says Charles Stross, Hugo award-winning author of “The Atrocity Archives” and “The Jennifer Morgue”.
The Laundry RPG is a self-contained rulebook and will be supported by a number of sourcebooks and adventure campaigns. The game is due to be released in July 2010.
For more information on The Laundry RPG, please contact info@cubicle7.co.uk
