New Feature: A spot to record thoughts that have occurred because of personal events that have unfolded at the gaming table. Since we don’t tell gaming anecdotes on Bear Swarm! having a place to jot ideas could be useful. No promise on this being a reoccurring feature. There are three parts to this feature, what you need to be brought up to speed, the specific event in question, and my thoughts on it. Enjoy!

Episode Five: What’s in the box?

In which Rob discusses his new game, struggles with creative freedoms, and gives a GM Technique.

Part One: The Backstory

I’ve recently started up a new campaign. I’m calling it a Post-Post-Apocalyptic setting, one where the apocalypse happened and now humanity has recovered. I’m using the Reign system, which I’m quite happy with what I’ve read thus far, but I wanted to do some collaborative story building with my players before launching into a full game. Instead of just sitting down at the table and talking I wanted something a little more structured. Since I wanted to do a biker game I figured a great starting point would be after the events of a Revenge Story, told with a Hell 4 Leather game. Armed with the $5 rules sheet and a deck of tarot cards we gathered at the table to tell the story of the fall of the Edge Runners.

Part Two: Roll for Initiative

This part could be easy for me but a little more dedicated for you. We recorded the entire session and I’ve posted it here. There are two files, the first is the edited story only version and the second is everything including table talk. Still, all that is fairly unimportant and I shouldn’t force you to listen to an AP to understand the article. The whole point of this article is to discuss one (well, two really) points that came up.

During the game the players created a box and something inside the box. Only one character knew what it was and though the course of the story he died. The box was found later, empty. Another character feared what was in the box but no one knew what it was. The box was fairly important for some reason but no one knows why. Now the question remains, what was in the box?

There was also a book that three characters, both dead by the end, had at one point. The book seemed important as well but, like the box, no one ever bothered to mention what the book was or why it was important.

Part Three: Does a 26 hit you?

Seriously, what’s in that damned box? I have my ideas (although I’m curious to hear what yours are as well) but there is a more important question at play here.

When your players throw you something like this how do you handle it? I hope my group isn’t the only one that says, on occasion, “I don’t know what’s going on with this, I figured I’d just let you sort it out.” to their GM. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it. When I know what my players are looking for I can play to their ideas, tweaking them and creating something interesting. It’s like having a box of legos. If you have the instructions you can build something but if you’re creative you can modify it into something really cool. Without instructions I just have a bunch of bricks. I can make something but it’s unlikely to be truly impressive. I don’t know what these bricks are intended for. Their just… a bunch of bricks.

While I’m curious to hear how other people handle this I feel this article would be pretty terrible if I didn’t tell you how I handle it. Ready for my big secret? My players may want to look away now… Here it is: I do nothing.

That is what I’m going to do with this box and book. I’m going to do fucking nothing with it. I’m going to sit on it. I have a few ideas but I don’t know how well they would play out. So I’m going to just sit on everything and wait. Eventually something will happen and I’ll see where the book and box fit into the game and that’s where I’ll use them. If it never comes up, it never comes up. The box and the book mystery isn’t solved and that is all there is to it. If I can’t find a nice organic meaningful way to work something into my games, I’m not going to force it.

Once again, here is my special technique for hitting home runs from curve balls:

What do you do when the players give you something unexpected?
Just wait…

As some of you know I’m currently hard at work (cough) on Version 3 of Danger Close. In an effort to keep transparency while I work on the next PDF release I figured I would highlight some of the changes coming to Danger Close.  One of the biggest overall changes comes to Areas. While Areas are functioning the same the way they are decided and what they cover has changes quite a bit. Overall, I think this is a better metric and will lead to the style of game play that the system requires.

There is a lot of talk in this section that extrapolates out to other changes. It might be confusing in spots but when V3 is released it should (it better) all make sense.

Almost a year ago now I started reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series.  Currently I’m around 200 pages from completing the third book, A Storm of Swords. While I know I still have another massive tome to go before I’m caught up I wanted to write some commentary after the events of last night’s reading. For anyone who hasn’t read them yet I’ll be sure to clearly label where the spoiler section begins. Don’t expect much out of this. Just a few random thoughts.

I had been meaning to try this series for a number of years before I picked them up. I’m not a huge fan of fantasy but all my friends raved about the books so I figured I at least should know what they’re talking about. Who knows, maybe I would even enjoy them. I didn’t expect to like Harry Potter, but I did. Last November I was laid off from my job and I figured there was no better time to start reading 4,164 US paperback pages. I plowed through A Game of Thrones in around a month but when I hit A Clash of Kings I really slowed down. In fact, I had set the book down for months at a time between reading. This pace kept up until about half way through A Storm of Swords when I really started to enjoy the story again. It’s not that aCoK was a bad book, it was just slow. Oddly paced. At times it felt like the plot didn’t move forward. Plus the inclusion of more and more magic really started to bother me.

What initially attracted my attention to the series is how real it felt. It reads more of a fictional history that a fantasy story. When you first hear of Eddard Stark he sounds more like an actual knight then a Arthurian legend. And while there was some fantastical elements in there, the first book opens with creatures that are clearly monsters, it always seemed more rooted in reality. The monsters were in the North and no one had seen them for thousands of years.

Before I get into spoilers I want to thank www.ToweroftheHand.com. After reading close to three thousand pages a lot of the details have shifted. Not only does TotH give great summaries but it also has a Scope Filter. The Scope filter allows you to select the last book you finished and from there out all character, house, and location articles will be limited to details that occur in that book. It’s quite genius. Really, I’d love if they had a more granule scope filter that could sort by chapter, but that’s a lot more work.

Here be Spoilers

Now that that’s out of the way.

I started having issues with the series towards the end of aGoT. When Daenerys hatched her dragon eggs I rolled my eyes. Up until this point the main narrative had been rather well focused on a non-fantasy world. Now, astute readers will point out that earlier than that Jon Snow saves Lord Commander Mormont from a wight. That’s pretty fantasy right? Here’s where I start to get semantic. I dislike the tropes of Fantasy and to me the opening scene and the fight with the wight felt more like a Horror trope than a Fantasy trope.  The introductions of actual living and breathing dragons. They established earlier that the last “Dragons” died off over one hundred and fifty years ago and even they were small misshapen lizards and not true “Dragons”. For me the “Dragons Skulls” could have easily been akin to our dinosaurs, and not flying firebreathing lizards. Once Daenerys hatched traditional Dragons the books took a turn to the Fantasy that just doesn’t interest me. Luckily, Daenerys is so separated from the rest of the narrative I could manage to go on.

Then came the scene in aCoK where Melisandre used magic to create a shadow that killed Renly. No ifs ands or buts about it, that was fucking magic. First it tasted bitter because of my disdain for Fantasy but then it grew sour when I realized it was the cheapest way to have possibly killed one of the main characters. Martian killed Renly in the most hand-waviest, open-ended, weakest way possible. “Magic.” This is my numero uno issue with Fantasy. The reliance on “Magic” as an unexplained means to an end. When I ask how did something happen and you tell me it was Magic I feel like I’m a small child you think is too stupid to bother explaining things to.

“But Rob!” you might exclaim, “You like Star Wars and they hand-wave everything with ‘The Force’!” While you would be right, I don’t like Jedi. What attracts me to Star Wars, or at least the originals, is that the Jedi and Magic play a supporting role. Obi Wan gets cut the fuck down and Luke doesn’t know shit about magic yet. Plus it has Han Solo and Boba Fett. Fuck yeah. Anyway, ask my friends. Whenever we play a Star Wars RPG I prefer to not play a Jedi. What made the original KotOR great to me was that I started as a non-Jedi. I loved that first chunk of the game. Even after I became a Jedi I still preferred Scoundreling to Lightsabering.

Anyway, the books have continually pushed more and more fantasy at me. In aSoS Jon Snow introduces Giants and Mammoths. Sam shows us all magical doors. And Melisandre does a ton of voodoo that one could argue isn’t anything but the results make me skeptical. Still, the rest of the books are strong enough to keep me going. At least for now.

Last night I read the chapter that features The Red Wedding. I was literally angry about that. To make it worse later when Joff finally gets his comeuppance it seems trivial next to the horrors inflicted upon Robb. The Read Wedding not only robbed me of Mini-Eddard but it stole the satisfaction I should have felt when the vile Joffery died. Yet, unlike the Fantasy Tropes, I don’t find myself pushing the books away because of it.  If anything I’m more interested. Robb’s death at the hands of the Freys felt believable.  Horrific but not outside the realm of believability.

Something else I want to reflect upon while I’m thinking of it. The first book had 8 PoV characters, the second book had 9 and the third book had 10. I have complaints about this.  While I had no trouble with the first book and jumping perspective the stories get so spread out at times in the later books. Sometimes it takes literally hundreds of pages for me to get back to the events of an area. While sometimes (ie: Daenerys) it isn’t an issue there have been a few times (ie: Jon) that I really didn’t give a shit about what else was going on in King’s Landing, I wanted more of Beyond the Wall. I hear the next book has 12 PoV characters. Hopefully the plot, being split between two books, will be a tad easier to follow.

I feel that I have focused very heavily on the negatives so I’m going to talk about some of the things I really like about the series thus far. Right after I get two more gripes out of my system. There is way to much focus on food and clothing. I get it, it’s scene setting. You can tell the level of society people are functioning on by their food and clothing but sometimes it gets a bit much. Recently, at Joff’s wedding, it was ridiculous. There were literally paragraphs that did nothing more than describe food. I can stomach the food (hehe) but the descriptions of shirts and pants really wears me thin (hehe). Ok, got a couple of puns out of my system.

The books have a wonderful sense of suspense. Chapters tend to end, more often than not, on cliffhangers that leave me wanting to just keep reading about that character. The intervening chapters serve to draw out that sense of anticipation while not feeling like bloat. More often than not I read a chapter only to get angry that there isn’t more of that character immediately but get so caught up in the next character that by the time I get to the next ending I’m angry I don’t see more. It’s a wonderful pacing mechanism and I think it’s employed brilliantly.

I love the fight scenes too. While it bothers me that there is more detail given to food than to fighting it feels appropriate. The fights are quick, dirty, and brutal. Men are scarred, killed, and maimed. It reminds me of the Mass Murder rules in Houses of the Blooded. When someone gets into a fight in aSoIaF, someone dies. It’s just that simple. While I don’t need pages of blow-by-blow coverage there needs to be more than a passing mention and its a balance that the books strike quite nicely.

Then there are the characters. I love me some strong characters and these books are filled with them. Even the non-PoV characters are fantastic. My only complaint is that there are so many characters they get had to keep track of at points. Luckily I have www.ToweroftheHand.com to connect the dots for me. Seriously, I’m not sure how people coped with keeping track of everyone when the first book came out in 1996. Despite their abundance none of the characters feel cardboard. Even characters that are mentioned in passing seem to have motivations and agendas all of their own. Even characters like Ser Arthur Dayne who are long dead and only mentioned by other characters have a life to them.

My biggest fear right now is that the series will never see completion. George R. R. Martin is already sixty-one years old and he still has three books to go in the series. It was five years between the third and fourth book and five years has passed on top of that. If a Dance with Dragons comes out this year and we can expect a five-year gap that means The Winds of Winter will be out in 2015 and A Dream of Spring in 2020. Although to be realistic there hasn’t been a release date for Dance with Dragons set yet and I wouldn’t expect it before 2012 at the soonest.  I just hope Martin has another good twenty or thirty years left in him.

For those of you who don’t know what I look like… Here’s a picture. I also tried to emulate roughly my normal look of annoyance so as you have a better chance to recognize me. That is all.

Earlier today I tweeted a video to a fan made “At the Mountains of Madness” trailer. I was then told about how it’s in the works, a fact I already knew but wasn’t excited about. Here’s the fan video and after the break I’ll talk a little bit about why I don’t think the Del Toro movie will be good.

First, the facts as I know them. Guillermo del Toro has been slated to write and direct. Del Toro wrote the screenplay along with Matthew Robbins. The project would be made in 3D with James Cameron as producer. Not too much more is known beyond that. So, we have three names and I can make a few assessments based on their previous projects.

Del Toro hasn’t done anything I’ve really liked. As a director Blade II, Hellboy, and Hellboy 2 were alright. I didn’t care for Pan’s Labyrinth at all and I’ll admit to not seeing any of his other work. As a writer it’s just Hellboy, Hellboy 2, and Pan’s Labyrinth, none of which I think were much in terms of writing. On of my biggest problems with Del Toro directing a Lovecraft movie is that his features have always been very creature and visual heavy. He tends to focus on bizarre creatures too much for my tastes. Hellboy 2 was nothing more then a big special effects romp to me. Sure it was fun, but Lovecraft isn’t meant to be fun.

To my tastes, Lovecraft was always about the unimaginable. Once you give form to Lovecraft’s creations they loose their potency. While Lovecraft’s scant descriptions of thing could create a very visual palate I’d rather it not be long shots of sweeping cyclopedia vistas and protracted sequences in which monsters chased heroes down well lit tunnels. I don’t trust Del Toro to NOT show things that need not be shown.

Matthew Robbins helped write the screenplay and I had to look him up to see what he’s done. I think the last thing I’ve seen that he’s been part of was the 1981 Dragonslayer. Forgive me if I don’t have faith in his abilities, I’ve simply seen nothing out of him in almost thirty years and even that wasn’t very good.

This brings us to James Cameron. The word is that he’s provided a lot of the funding for the picture, which is a red flag to me. In 2005 the HP Lovecraft Historical Society made The Call of Cthulhu, a silent adaptation of the story. The budget for that movie was no where near the Del Toro \ James Cameron level and it is easily one of the best depictions of Lovecraft work on the big screen. Mountains doesn’t need the Avatar $237,000,000 budget.

As far as James Cameron goes, from 1984 to 1991 he did some movies I really liked. Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2… I can get behind all of those. Then he did True Lies… Titanic… Avatar. Nothing really impressive to me over the last twenty years. At least he’s not directing, he’s just producing in 3D.

Fuck 3D. Personally, I am part of a small fraction of the population that suffers migraines from this new 3D technology. That aside, I don’t need shoggoths jumping out of the screen at me. Again it ties back to the visual elements. 3D movies tend to show MORE, not less. When it comes to visuals Lovecraft is a less is more type of horror.

I’m not saying “At the Mountains of Madness” is going to be terrible, I’m just saying that I’m not excited for it. I don’t care for Del Toro or Cameron, neither have earned my trust to do this project right. But who am I to say, I’m just some jackass with a blog.

Before I started working on Danger Close I did some brainstorming for the Lovecraft System. The basic idea is that I dislike every Lovecraft inspired RPG I’ve ever seen and I think I would write it differently.

I did some brainstorming, came up with some basic ideas, and promptly moved on. I wasn’t sure of why at the time, but I lacked the confidence to tackle this project. I think writing Danger Close has given me some of the confidence back. Seeing my friends play something I wrote and enjoying it helped bolster my attitude. I’m still not sure if I’m ready to take on something I’m so passionate about but I think I’m going to give it a go again.

Once I wrap up Danger Close, maybe after Version 5 or Version 6, and feel like I brought that product as far as I could then I’m going to turn my sights back on the Lovecraft System. I make no promises, but maybe I’ll see this to completion this time.

Danger Close Character Sheet

We also sat down for a second round of character creation, no playtesting, but just crunching some numbers and doing some of the mental homework. In light of that there have been some significant changes to how Areas work. I also sat down and started watching Season 2 of Leverage and it got me thinking about the Areas and what they do. I wrote some expansion pieces and fleshed out what’s what. Capricorn is now the thinker, planner, and not just the leader. Capricorn is the team’s brain, Aries is the teams brawn, Gemini is the teams face, Virgo is the teams technician, and Scorpio is the teams grace. Just to give you and idea of what we’re looking at.

Anyway, I have some more writing to do before I’m ready to release the Version 3 PDF. I just figured I’d let you all know that what you have is out of date and, in many ways, unplayable. Sorry about that.

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I know, I know. A DAY later I remembered a sidebar I forgot. Add this into the Intelligence Gathering section.

Danger Close v2

With the vast and sweeping changes that have been made since Danger Close started releasing on this site, I’ve instead opted to stop the daily release and just put out the compiled PDF of the Danger Close v2 guide. The PDF is freely available by clicking on the icon to the right. Feel free to download it and let me know what you think!

Thus ends the daily releases of Danger Close.

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Continuing coverage of Danger Close, today we present the rules for how your character changes. Advancement isn’t Experience. Remember that and Enjoy.