Monthly Archives: February 2009

For the Free Change in (virtual) location

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I had been running “For the Free” through a personal wiki. However, the guys at Obsidian Portal asked for a “celebrity campaign” to be featured on their site, and apparently my minuscule fame qualifies, so I volunteered to feature our cycle on the site.

I played with the site for a while, and found it to be pretty cool — it replicates 95% of the functionality of the wiki, and adds a GM Only section to most pages (which gets rid of the need for the private Google Doc I had). The forum nearly gets rid of the email group I have as well, though I might keep that just for ease at this point.

Anyhow, here’s the new home for the game:

“For the Free” campaign home

Also, if for some reason you want to be instantly and immediately informed of when I update it, you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

I still plan to cross-post game summaries here. For example, here’s the first game session.

For the Free Chapter 1: Call to Adventure

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We just completed our first chapter of “For the Free,” our Scion game. You can read what happened on my wiki. This game has been unique in a few ways:

1) This is the most I’ve prepared for a roleplaying game in a long time. Usually I just jot down a handful of notes and improvise the rest, but the structure of Scion (and indeed, this cycle) made that hard. I made the decision early on to use the wiki to organize the details of the cycle (combined with a Google Doc for my scene notes in a short-hand SAS format), which has amounted to over a dozen Storyteller characters, a handful of locations and tracking the state of dozens of Gods. I spent several hours last night and this morning updating the wiki with photos, character sheets and location information to run the first session, which is a lot more prep work than I usually do.

2) I ran the game entirely via my laptop. I had a PDF copy of Scion: Hero up, along with the wiki, the Google Doc, a simple text editor for notes and an online dice roller. Originally I planned to use the laptop as a support piece while I conducted the game with my usual paper notes, but I realized that 95% of my game was on the computer anyhow, so it just made sense to use an online dice roller and text editor for the rest. It also made it easy to look up quick pieces of information (like JeanRo, since I didn’t expect the group to look for Dionysus’ restaurant this session).

3) I gamed with a rough mix of people in terms of my familiarity with them — two I’ve run a lot of games for before, two I’ve played in a couple of games with, and one I’ve only gamed with in a LARP, but not tabletop. Also, I put a lot of the initial cycle construction and idea-building on the players, and I was more open about letting them handle rules interpretations and nuances instead of me acting as the primarily rules arbiter and subject matter expert for the game.

All in all, the game went really smoothly — we got through an entire story of about five scenes (four planned, one improvised) in four hours, with plenty of time for roleplaying and combat. The group gelled really well. Some of the elements of the Scion world (such as liberal use of Fate to justify disparate story elements) helped to smooth over what might normally be rough spots, and the players really seemed to gravitate to the almost comic-book style game play.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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First, a bit of background. I have been a fan of Ian Fleming’s novels for many years, and a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for even more. Over that time, I have had friends and acquaintances express surprise that I was totally unfamiliar with John le Carré‘s work, particular his George Smiley novels. When we were waiting to see Coraline this weekend, we hung out at the nearby bookstore. I found a book containing le Carré’s first three novels for $10, so I picked it up on a lark.

By Sunday afternoon, I had already finished the first one, Call for the Dead, and I’m kicking myself for missing this author earlier.

What’s interesting is that even though it’s about a British spy in the Cold War of the 1960s, the people who recommended it to me because I like Fleming were actually not nearly as accurate as the people who recommended it because I like Hammett. The protagonist, George Smiley, is about as far from James Bond as you can get — fat, timid and middle-aged, he has a realistic view of the world that is at odds with Bond’s rather monochrome view of the world. His ex-wife sleeps around far more than he does, and even his expensive clothes look worn and sloppy. But he has a razor-sharp mind and a moral code that is complex but unwavering, and in that he resembles Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe more than Bond.

The book is short — barely 160 pages. The writing isn’t as florid as Chandler or Fleming, but rather has the simple effectiveness of Hammett. The plot’s a bit muddled in places, but le Carré uses Smiley’s propensity to think through his writing to help reiterate key points for the reader while showing interesting peeks into his protagonist’s thought process. As a mystery it plays by the rules and is fair, but like Hammett it’s less about a particular clue unlocking the puzzle Holmes-like, but rather learning the nature of the characters involved and realizing which lies are which.

If you’re a super-spy fan, you might not like Call for the Dead. However, if you’re a fan of noir and a cast of characters that all have a little bit wrong and a little bit right with them, then check this book out.