Friday, April 17, 2009

Stoked!

Last night I rec'd a pckage from Chaosium. In it was a copy of BRP Adventures. It's a collection of adventures for the new BRP system. They held a contest for adventures. I wrote one of the adventures in the collection. I'm now a published game writer. I'm stoked!

My adventure is Terror At 6666 Feet. It's a B-movie adventure I've run a few times. I've since run another B-movie game. Now I'm now inspired to submit a collection of 13 B-movie adventures to Chaosium as a monograph. I figure I can write up my new B-movie game and convert several CoC adventures. Gotta figure out all 13 and submit a proposal to Chaosium. Fingers crossed...

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

An A+!

The first session of C-Punk with Player generated characters went off rather well. The run-up to the event was interesting. I asked everyone to write up their character background based on their original idea and any input from the Lifepath portion of character creation. Gotta say that this has produced some veeeery interesting characters. I also had them do 2 things. The first borrowed from Don't Rest Your head.
1. What Just Happened? Tell me what happened to the character within the last 24 hours that's bringing them to the Forlorn Hope (bar) where the game's gonna kick off.
2. What/who connects you to the Hope?

This combo of things made me feel like a teacher. Some Players sent me their bio within a couple of days, complete with photos. I use photos to create 4X6 'standees' in acrylic stands, which the Players put on the table to remind the other Players how cool they look. Others sent them on the last day w/o pics. Lastly, some phoned it in, giving me an hour or so to wedge them into the opening scene. So, some people got A's, some B's and a coupla D-'s. The D-'s had 'reasons' of course. It was fun to get the bio's but kinda weird as people were asking for approval and making sure they didn't need to make any changes. I got to have interesting dialogue with those who turned in early. Mostly the bio's were very cool with only minor tweaks needed.

Once we sat down, (everyone brought food and we had quite a spread) I asked them what time they arrived at the bar - a spread from 8PM -1:30AM. Everyone got a little time in the spotlight when they came into the bar. I played some music to set the atmosphere for the bar. There was a little crossover and then their various connections hooked them up. The next day, I got the following Emails from the Players:
Just wanted to thank Matt for a great 1st Cyberpunk 2020 session with our own characters! I had fun and thought everyone did a grand job getting into character. I can't wait to go play in the Colombian consulate next week. :)
Indeed, thanks.

Kickin' good start. The grand job of getting into character was totally due to the backgrounds. Awesome! The rest of the backgrounds should come in this week. Overall, the opening session gets an A+! (if I do say so myself)

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The Plan Comes Together

Spent Monday evening working on the Cyberpunk characters. Everyone picked roles they like and it looks like a team will emerge. The plan of running a sample game to prep people for this process worked like a charm. Folks came with ideas and them tweaked them easily during the process. + it was fun! Character generation can be a drag, but we had a good time.

I asked for them to work up bios based on the Lifepath process. I've already had several Email exchanges on this. Everyone's going to have a connection to the Forlorn Hope, a bar from an supplement. I Emailed everyone the background on the bar. I also 'borrowed' from the game DON'T REST YOUR HEAD. The character generation process includes a series of questions. One of these questions is, "What just happened?" For the C-Punk game, this will tell me why the characters are going to the bar at this time.

It goes against my grain to start the game in a bar. It's so old school D&D. But then we're playing C-punk 2020. It's now a retro 80's game. Weird. One has to go with the tech as imagined then, as opposed to where it's actually gone. It's like original Traveller where ship's computers were figured in tons. Funky. Next week's the kickoff...