Games

Last night my friends and I played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. There's not a lot new to that, except that we played on the new-to-me gaming table The Coolness was kind enough to allow me to set up in the garage. I built a pair of tables for Black Diamond Games' game center back in 2007:

Yes, that's a three year old Boo in the background.

This is not the exact table, as this one was beat pretty bad in its storied career at Black Diamond Games.

The first table is, however, now gracing my garage again. With the eight-by-four table I was able to use about 88 percent of the Dwarven Forge terrain I own all at one time, a first.

The players, my usual crew, enjoyed the display and accomplished a tiny bit more than I'd anticipated. Most importantly, it was fun. Fun for me and my players, who took to the rougher conditions with good humor and excitement. And now I can leave it up and not annoy the Coolness with my 'toy soldiers' and books lying about.

We knocked off at midnight.  I had a soccer game in Antioch, some miles away, at 0900. Last night was the time change. You do the math.

I made it in plenty of time. No one else was near the pitch. It's cold and windy, and the pitch is both slanted and canted toward one end.

As go time approaches we're short two players, one woman and one male. The other team has a very large roster, and leant us two players.

The first quarter was frustrating for the opposition, with several off-sides calls against them. They had several players who liked to shout out calls for the refs, who are really quite good at their jobs and needed no such prompting.

The field was a bit short, and the opposing goalie had a beast of a boot. He hammered one up and my center stop got a foot to it without stopping it. One of the refs-in-training, the center striker for the opposing team, shouts, "He can't touch it!" as he races me for the ball.

I use my feet to clear the ball.

"He couldn't touch it!" the guy continues to shout.

"You want to ref, jackass, put on a yellow jersey!" I grumbled.  I shouldn't have. It wasn't sportsmanlike, and I have no excuse.

Hearing me, he called me some version of fucker.

The ref, hearing him and failing to hear me, kicks the other player off for cursing. The quarter break came up immediately after.

As I am walking off, one of the yoked out players for the other team comes jogging up to me on our half of the field with his shirt off and stops me with a hand to my shoulder, asking me why I'm "Threatening players."

My expression was, I'm sure, contemptuous. I told him to take his hand off me, that I hadn't threatened anyone.

He didn't immediately remove his hand, so I removed it.

"Don't touch me man, I'll kick your ass!" he shouts, muscle-tits bouncing.

Clearly, I wasn't going to be able to communicate with him.

The ref, doing his job, came over and told everyone to shut it. The original ref in training came back on the field. I asked him to hold it a moment and spoke to the ref. I owned the words that led to the ref-in-training being sent off, and told him I wouldn't be upset if we were both given a yellow card and played on. Most everyone on our team was worried the game was going to be called on account of the muscle-bound guy's antics.

Thankfully, the ref didn't card anyone, and play resumed.

And it resumed cleanly. Their offense continued to be upset with the off-sides calls, but there was nothing approaching the level of drama from that first quarter of play.

We won 3-0. I had three saves I'm quite proud of and about seven more collections that were mine to screw up. I played well, but the rest of our team really clicked and played outstanding ball. I hope we can continue in this vein, perhaps with less drama. It's my first clean sheet since I began playing with the team, and I think I earned it.

Games

First game of the season today. Lots of good hope, expecting fun and a goal or three. Isabelle was sick last night, but seems fully recovered this morning. I had a little talk with the players abut respectful language and courtesy last night. I hear too many kids speaking to their parents as if they were siblings, and the parents responding in kind. I had two parents, hearing me, respond with "Yes, your hear coach Griffin?"

Tonight, Warhammer, and the Greedy Little Bastards. Two of my core players have returned after a long absence, which shall add to the entertainment value. The characters are in a recently-devastated town dominated by the soldiers of the local Graf, a grasping man of low character and ill-repute. In short; their kind of man.

And now, we're off.

Gaming News, and Something About Fiction Too

I still have yet to devote much time to reading fiction, though I have been reading a lot of Eclipse Phase, the roleplaying game I just picked up. It has a fascinating setting that I think I will enjoy telling stories in.

I have also been picking up the pace on my Rogue Trader game on RPOL. Delicious agonies will follow.

I let my face-to-face Warhammer game slide this last weekend to give the family more attention. I hope to add a new wrinkle and some 'new' players this weekend via webcam and microphones. One is willing to log in from England, and another from further north in California. Hopefully it will work out and everyone will have some fun. I think another heist might be in order, now they've dealt with almost all the enemies they know they have.

Today I will jack the headphones in and get some writing done on Bridge of The Broken, and consider plots for the other short story I have been thinking on.

But first, to get Boo to school.

Eclipse Phase and Warhammer WIth Old Friends

There's a game that kept calling to me from the shelves at Black Diamond Games. It has a starship or habitat in the foreground holding a space-suited humanoid in the grip of some biomechanical tentacle. Things don't look good for the humanoid. The game is called Eclipse Phase, and it is something completely different. Reading it has been a treat, and the possibilities for storytelling seem near-endless. I will continue to read it, and perhaps run it in a few months time... Perhaps on RPOL, I am not sure. The writing is of very high quality and the editing extremely well done (I have read one error in the 100 pages or so I read. Usually this number is closer to thirty for a proportionate amount of pages).

Saturday night the Greedy Little Bastards got together and dealt with Nadia, the Slaaneshi courtesan that has been preparing for the reckoning since the GLB drugged her and another prostitute at The Golden Trumpet as part of a heist. The actual theft was accomplished relatively easy, but there was a bit of a problem that led to the rat-catcher's immortal words, "If you're going to get this wound up every time a whore gets killed, I don't think we can work together."

As they stole something of great value from her, Nadia wanted it back and employed her Kislevite henchman and a local protagonist to recover the artifact. The Greedy Little Bastards weren't having it, and while one of them was savagely beaten, managed to beat off their attackers, killing the protagonist. A few days later, the Kislevite man died shortly after eating some tainted food.

While aware she was a threat, other business pressed them for time, and the Greedy Little Bastards decided not to deal with her.

A few months later, while trying to assemble information to use for blackmailing snotball league officials, the Greedy Little Bastards found out about a child prostitution ring with connections to The Golden Trumpet. They decided to catch the official in the act and one of their number arranged to be a client. Things went badly wrong, and two of the GLB were left for dead while the third one ran for help. One of the rescuers died.

Still more months passed before a man approached The Greedy Little Bastards with a proposition for them: kill Nadia and he would reward them.

They took up the challenge. With a lot of preparation, things went slightly less bad this time, despite the presence of two demons Nadia had invoked for her protection. Only one of the Greedy Little Bastards was nearly killed.

During the set-up for the assassination, the ratcatcher had yet another great line, "I'm afraid these cats are defective and not doing their jobs. I must inspect them."

Everyone had a great deal of fun, too.

Head Pain...

Occasionally I laugh so hard and so long I get major head pain. Saturday night, one of my players was on it so much that I lost it laughing. I laughed till I was out of breath, then laughed some more.

The world is Warhammer, a decidedly grim and ruthless place. The players have taken on the roles of a group of thieves, thugs, and ne'er-do-wells recently come to seek refuge in The City of Middenheim. Their hometown was sacked and razed to the ground, so there is no returning home.

If this sounds like the criminal portion of some immigrant groups, it's bloody well meant to. They have been commiting many crimes, but killed very few (that weren't deservin' of a blade 'tween the ribs, anyway). The name of the overarching story, Greedy Little Bastards, is appropo, I think.

At any rate, two of the characters woke up in custody after a lengthy heist. Several things went wrong on the job, not least of which was the drugs administered to knock a few prostitutes out killing one of them. One of the group also knocked himself out. Getting the dosing right on this kind of thing is so difficult, don't you know. At any rate, much of the proceeds from the heist ended up having to go for bribes of the magistrate and such to secure the release of the two men taken into custody.

The halfling, the group's second-story man, and halfling with a plan for the heist, asked the rat-catcher he'd employed as a scout, "What were you thinking?"

The rat-catcher replied, "If you're going to be this upset every time a whore dies, I don't know what we're gonna do."

Now, I am not sure what killed in that statement, but God I had a laugh. Laughed till my head hurt.

More Ick

Now I am taking horse-sized antibiotics for my sinus/upper respritory infection. I am tired of being sick. Really.

In other news: Kate Beckinsale is hot in leather and latex. Really, really hot.

In still more news: I got some writing done, both for The Last Captain and for Twilight 2013. Really.

And now for something completely different: I have played roleplaying games for 26 years now. Usually as a GM, running things, telling stories with a group of friends. It was and remains one of the easiest means of release for my creative energies. It is also cheaper and safer than drinking and hitting strip clubs, two other ways I could be spending time with buddies.

These players are my buddies. Most of the group has been sharing stories with me for five years now, one played with me in Geneva, where we met. Like a well-oiled team, they tackle most of what I put out there and add to it immeasurably. They are high-speed low drag roleplayers, able to take on most any challenge.

Just before the advent of the 2013 writing gig, I changed the group over to that system and started to run a campaign set in the Sierra Nevada. It is a slick system, but a bit numbers- and realism- heavy for some of my players.

I had been tired of playing Dark Heresy and Warhammer, as the games required a bit more mental work preparing than Twilight 2013. I am intimately familar with all three settings, it was just getting hard to find something that entertained me and was relatively new for my players in Dark Heresy or Warhammer.

I was slowing down, not feeling very motivated, and working hard on my second novel.

At any rate, I switched us from Dark Heresy to Twilight 2013. I didn't ask the guys, I just did it. Eventually it became apparent that some of the players were dissatisfied with the change. With only one night every few weeks to play, some of the players rebelled. One up and straight up told me he wasn't going to play in my group again. The others slowed their responses, begging off and generally not putting in quite as much time with the group. It left me nonplussed, I had some players enjoying the game I was running, and some new blood joined us, filling in the vacancy left by the one player that left.

Today I had a good talk with one of my player friends. He told me what was up. I came to a few realizations from what he told me:

It is about friends and fun. Enthusiastic players and good friends make for fun games.

So it's back to Dark Heresy and catering to my players, to have more fun.

Really.