Con of the North: Get event requests in today!

Posted on by January 5, 2016

Eek! Life is busy, and deadlines sneak up. I just realized that the deadline for event requests for Con of the North is today! If you’re planning to go and you haven’t already submitted your event picks, go to the online registration page and let them know which games you’re interested in.

I’m scheduled to run two games:

The Wonderful Island

A brilliant satire of Taiwanese politics: Gain votes through street campaigns, rallies, TV debates or just fighting in the legislature. Smear your opponents with a negative press campaign or publish a fake popularity poll – and never let your fellow politicians know which party you’re really working for. Whether you’re Green, Blue, or just a politician, you’ll love this game.

FRI22-24 (Friday 10pm-midnight)

With the national election coming up in just over a week, this is more topical than ever.

Blade & Crown: The Iron Moon

On the island of Morensia, a civil war is brewing. Your band of mercenaries, the Company of the Iron Moon, resolve to defend your home town of Chaegrae from marauders (read: other mercenaries). You have your small but dedicated force, your native knowledge of the area and half a town wall to work with. You must succeed — mercenary pride and your own life depend on it. Adventure in Calteir.

SAT18-22 (Saturday 6-10pm)

I’m hoping to have a nice, flavorful mix of mass combat and derring-do roleplaying in this one. Lots of chances for players to narrate the outcome.

And of course I’m hankering to play in many more. I hope to see you there!

Ryuutama: The Dragon and the Frog

Posted on by October 20, 2019

After real life annoyingly asserted itself Monday night, those of us who were able to come had our scheduled game of Ryuutama. I was GMing, with a scenario idea that had occurred to me a few days before.

So far, all our games in Ryuutama have been about traveling through an island surrounded by steep cliffs, with gorgeous mountain views and deep blue ocean waves all around tiny villages hugging the coast.

'Frog Rock' in Taroko Gorge, TaiwanIn Monday’s game, the PCs discovered a village dependent on a river whose water was running dry. The PCs traced the river into a deep gorge, leading high into the mountains. They confronted a tempestuous, imperious dragon, then negotiated with a petrified frog. There were discussions about red lightning, golden crowns, and taxonomy, and ontology. In the end, they managed to get the crown returned, and the water flowing again.

At first, I was thinking we wouldn’t have enough time to finish, and that it would be another dangling thread in our weave of Ryuutama canon. But we kept charging ahead, and even though we took nice excursions for froggy pastures and mountainous beauty, we still managed to reach a satisfying conclusion in time. The players very nicely anticipated my scenario, adding details that not only didn’t conflict with what I had in mind, but in fact deepened and in one case seemed to directly prefigure it. And though there was conflict, there was no violence at all. It was another rather nifty session of Ryuutama.

More Ryuutama pleasantness

Posted on by December 29, 2015

We’ve continued playing Ryuutama the past few sessions. It’s been set on a mountainous island with great rocky cliffs and tiny villages hunkered beneath them, next to a big beautiful ocean. No fair guessing what island inspired this.

It’s primarily been John running the game, actually, as not everyone in my game has been available. Also, I’ve been really busy.

John’s game has been a lot of fun. It started as a sort of side-canon to my game, with most of the same characters as in my game. We’ve now run more sessions in John’s version of the setting, though. Neither one is the ‘primary’ canon now, really.

Sketch of my Ryuutama character, Akiko -- no fair laughing at my drawing skillsMy character is Akiko. I usually like to play a hunter or forester-type my first time out in a fantasy game, and Akiko is no different. True to her name, she has a cloak with what looks like autumn leaves as epaulets, and she’s pretty good at tracking. (Supposedly, anyway. My luck with die rolls has made this less than true.)

The previous session, we’d journeyed to a monastery on a mountain where they were using utterly flawless pearls as part of a giant abacus. What exactly they were counting, we weren’t sure. But they gave our characters provisions and set us on our way — and thus began our most recent session.

Descending the mountain, we got lost in the misty valleys, and eventually encountered a shark-boar-creature at a waterfall. As the two sides closed on each other, I had Akiko run along the edge of the waterfall, teetering along it before returning to balance, in true Hayao Miyazaki style. (Seriously, Miyazaki has this happen in just about all his movies. Please let me know if you find a movie where this doesn’t happen!)

Akiko’s bow was not nearly as effective as Farmer Parsley’s rake or Merchant Jo’s wakizashi. They made good use of the muck on the ground and the birds flying nearby. But Akiko landed the final blow. She took a handful of marsh boar teeth as trophies, and then danced around in a very cute way, proud of herself — her main reason for Traveling is to defeat great monsters.

Finally, we returned to the cave at the base of the mountain, where rejected pearls clatter down from the monastery above. Jo, ever with an eye to profit, tried to grab handfuls of the beautiful baubles. (He is Traveling in search of profit.) A quivering Slime came out of the pearls, and we were all suddenly braced for combat. We detailed the Objects of the cave and made up the combat record. But as my first action, I had Akiko try talking to the Slime, and to Jo: “Jo, are you okay? Slime, are you okay?” And I got a critical, so it worked! She was able to gain the trust, if not friendship, of the Slime, and the combat never happened. Jo traded bunches of beast teeth to the Slime in exchange for lots of pearls. (Akiko didn’t notice that the teeth were, sort of, hers.) It was easy to picture the slime with a cute grin on its face, getting a nice bargain and some new friends.

All in all, it was another great session. Ryuutama has continued to have a very Miyazaki-like feel, with some near-deadly combat and some peaceful resolution through communication. And a nice dose of cuteness.

Diversity & the Tabletop Gaming Community

Posted on by December 14, 2015

This video is pretty neat:

I have a few quibbles — being focused largely on game designers, being focused largely on Metatopia, tending to have more white cis hetero guys as the video progresses (and potentially implications of that) — but mostly, it’s just a really good look at how diverse people have experienced tabletop gaming, from the good to the bad. There is some nice, practical advice on building diversity in tabletop circles, as well as lots of important thinky thoughts. Well worth watching.

Thanks for posting about it, Brie!

Ryuutama, first session

Posted on by December 30, 2015

When Ryuutama was being Kickstarted and it was sold as “Miyazaki-style fantasy”, I was pretty much sold right away. Hayao Miyazaki is very possibly my favorite director; Laputa City in the Sky is one of my favorite movies; Valley of the Wind is one of my favorite manga. So it was an easy sell.

I paid for the PDF level. And when the weekly group was looking for a new one-shot-style game a few weeks ago, I decided to finally try to read Ryuutama and run a session or two. I had paged through the PDF a little, but not extensively.

A problem is that the PDF doesn’t page very easily. It seems to be because the PDF is a very large file, with lots of gorgeous images, so my PDF reading apps can’t handle it very well. However, I was taken enough by what I saw to order a print copy of the book. Andy K was kind enough to charge me no shipping cost for the physical book, since I’d backed the project. The book arrived around Thanksgiving, and I finally learned the rules well enough to run it last week.

Last Thursday, we tried playing it. It was pretty fun!

John‘s character, an alchemist/pharmacist, was also the journal-keeper, so he recorded with good detail what happened in the session. Here’s a snippet:

A section of John's record for our first Ryuutama game

There were many poetic elements: a disappointed vulture, a green cloud, a fishing village where they use pearls for currency, a field of tiny green flowers around a dragon statue. Almost none came from the rules as written; everyone around the table contributed a lot to the narrative.

A few general observations about Ryuutama:

  • It’s actually surprisingly traditional. There’s a full-on combat section, there are quite a few tables to consult during the game, there are lots of little sub-systems to keep track of. It has classes, hit points, spell lists, levels, XP for defeating monsters, and designated party roles.
  • Yet it has a lot of nice innovative systems: condition checks, travel checks, some nice systems for town design, spells that aren’t at all combat-oriented, GMPCs (ryuujin) with interesting but limited narrative power, equipment that can be rated as “cute” or “gross”, more XP gained from travel than from combat, lots of interesting setting detail ideas without imposing a lot of setting on your game… There are a lot of little touches that make it quite pleasant to play.
  • The emphasis on travel, rather than on combat, seems to make a big difference in how it actually plays. I don’t think there was any combat in Thursday night’s session; most of the tension came from navigating paths along seaside cliffs. Hopefully we’ll get a better sense of this as we play more.
  • It has some similarities to B&C. The skill rules, and in particular criticals and fumbles, remind me of the same systems in B&C. The Condition checks remind me of Exhaustion checks in B&C.
  • It has some nice narrative elements, but they aren’t very tightly tied to the mechanics. Instead, a lot of them come out of simple encouragement in the rules. For example, with journey checks, the rules say

    The GM should embellish the description of what happens, or perhaps leave it to the players to tell the group how they managed to succeed, or what occurred when they failed… Don’t let them become a rote chore that silences the players and just produces generic results. (p. 103)

    This, combined with some narratively inventive players who trust each other, can produce some very nice stories.

  • The book is very pretty, with lots of color and some very appropriate illustrations. But the text could be better organized; important rules are sometimes hidden as seeming afterthoughts in out of the way places. And though it has an index, a fuller one would be nice. And the game could probably benefit from a GM screen, since there are a fair number of charts that require consultation.

Overall, the first session was very positive. Hopefully we’ll have a nice little adventure or two with Ryuutama.

Fresh Out of Tokens, featuring me

Posted on by January 26, 2016

Fresh Out of Tokens logoWednesday night, I’m going to be on the Fresh Out of Tokens podcast. We’re planning to talk about all sorts of issues related to diversity and making it as a marginalized creator in gaming fandom.

Fresh Out of Tokens is headed by Tanya D, aka Cypher of Tyr, whose Patreon I posted about a couple weeks ago. I’ve known her for a couple years, and she’s doing extremely important work about diversity in gaming. So while I’m a little nervous about being on a podcast (haven’t done it before), I feel like I’m in good hands.

JOFCon, part 2: Gaming

Posted on by November 25, 2015

Mnstf traditionally has a fallcon, usually in October or so. This was, for a long time, called the fall Minicon, which is part of why Minicon 51 is not actually the 51st anniversary of Minicon. Anyway, most years, there’s a Mnstf fallcon, and it’s usually a relaxacon.

Running the fallcon is approximately as stressful for its conrunners as Minicon itself. Though the scale of the fallcon is far smaller than Minicon (frequently fewer than a hundred people), the number of staff members also tends to be smaller, so the stress levels are unfortunately preserved. For that reason, few people in recent history have wanted to run the fallcon more than twice in a row. And partly because of that, when Michael Lee and some other folks wanted to run JOFCon on a weekend that normally would’ve been the Mnstf fallcon, the Mnstf board were quite willing to let that happen.

As a result, quite a few who went to JOFCon were mostly there for the fallcon part of it, more than the conrunning part. And therefore, in addition to the conrunning track, there was a large amount of gaming going on. (As I’ve said elsewhere, Mnstf is, in terms of total time spent doing various activities, largely about gaming these days.) I got to participate in some of it. Here’s what I played:

  • Concept: This is basically charades done on a board. There are a bunch of abstract or not so abstract things illustrated on the game board: a night sky, a sun, many modes of transportation, arrows indicating ‘up’ and ‘down’, etc. etc. You get a single person, place or thing to illustrate, and then place counters on various concepts to illustrate what you’re trying to get across. While you’re doing so, you’re not supposed to talk. There’s apparently some kind of official competitive rules to it, but the folks I play it with have never played it that way; instead, we just try to see how well or interestingly we can get the concepts across. It’s pretty fun. I once got my fellow players to guess my target by just rapidly tapping the counter on the “sun” icon — can you guess what concept I was trying to illustrate?

    • Logo for Spaceteam

  • Spaceteam: Even since I discovered this game, during my research into simultaneous cooperative starship bridge simulators, I’ve been wanting to play it more. I’ve played a couple quick sessions, but I played far more than ever before (probably a couple hours total) at JOFCon. Once we got it installed on our phones and finally got our various devices to connect with each other (which took a little too long, to be honest), we had a raucous time. While it is possible to play this “cooperative shouting game” game without constantly raising the volume, it is very unlikely; the game quickly becomes semi-competitive, with everyone trying to get everyone else to pay attention to their increasingly-desperate cries to “engage fluxstack”, “set Eigenhash to 2” or “caramelize onions”. Frequently interpolated with quick, embarrassed admissions of “Oh, that’s mine” and demands that everyone shake their device to avoid an asteroid. It’s a very tense game, actually, but it’s also quite fun.

    Playing it this time, I learned a couple things: not only can you repair dangling panels by swiveling them carefully back into place, you can wipe away goo that starts to accumulate as your panels get into increasing disrepair. And the game seems to require that everyone be running the same (i.e., most up-to-date) version to connect successfully.

    In the games at JOFCon, I think the most hilarious command we had was to “eulogize previous crew”. All in all, Spaceteam is a lot of fun, and a great game, and one that I will try to get more of my gaming friends to play in the future.

  • Moneyduck: As usual, this local variant on EPYC was hilarious, enjoyable and very difficult to present in blog terms. I don’t even remember any of the particularly great lines, save again having confirmation that Emily is a great cartoonist.

I saw other folks playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which looked quite good, but I wasn’t in the right mood at the right time to play it. I’ll note, though, that it was another game that uses digital components to interface with friends face-to-face. Along with Spaceteam, it’s another example of games that combine analog/face-to-face interaction with digital interaction, and it’s interesting to see what creators are exploding exploring in this field.

There were probably about as many people involved in gaming at any given time as in programming. The gaming was quite fun, and good when I needed a respite from heavy conrunning conversations.

JOFCon, part 1: Building better cons

Posted on by November 24, 2015

JOFCon masthead imageAbout a month ago, there was a tiny little con here in the Twin Cities called JOFCon. “JOF” stands for “journeyfen of fandom”. It’s a knowing take-off of the term “SMOF”, for “Secret Masters of Fandom”. SMOFs are (at least supposedly) those who view themselves as secret cabal in charge of running fandom. JOFs, on the other hand, are folks who are just trying to figure out how to make it all work.

So JOFCon, which has been running for two years now, is designed for conrunners who want to make their cons run even better. There was a single track of programming, entirely about topics related to running cons: “Disability Access”, “The Future of Fan-Run Cons”, “101, 201, 301: Keeping Programming Fresh”, etc. Programming had its share of problems. I wanted to organize a training about harassment prevention, but Real Life got in the way and I wasn’t able to pull it together. Other aspects of the con’s organization left something to be desired, but that’s all I’ll say about that here. However, the actual discussions were for the most part pretty good, with some good wisdom shared among conrunners from different parts of the world.

The best part of JOFCon, for me, was the chance to connect with people heavily involved in other cons, whom I never get the chance to meet. When we go to each other’s cons, we rarely get even a sense of who each other is, much less a chance to actually talk about how to better run our cons. Usually, we’re too busy running around putting out fires or replacing table tents or whatever else to meet people who do the same things at other cons. And though our names may appear in the program book, it’s rare that we get to know each other face-to-face.

It was especially cool to meet a bunch of the cool people who run Convergence, the huge general SF con in the Twin Cities. A bunch of them are committed to some important, valuable improvements at Convergence. It was good to see what they have planned, and to maybe give them a little help in doing so.

Also, JOFCon was a valuable chance to, I hope, bury some hatchets. Twin Cities fandom has a very long, turbid history, with some real nastiness. There are strong historical reasons for some of the local cons to distrust each other. It was great to have a chance to hang out with people I don’t usually get to meet, and maybe mend some fences.

FLGS intro: Witch House

Posted on by October 31, 2015

The other FLGS (after going to two branches of Alchemy) I had to visit in Taiwan was 女巫店 Witch House.

It’s not strictly an FLGS, I suppose. They sell games, and they’re plenty friendly. Primarily, though, Witch House is a pub. Lots of people go there with no intention of gaming or buying games. There is sometimes live music; they serve alcohol; they serve snacks and set meals. I’ll note here that they also have one of the funniest, punniest menus I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you don’t know Chinese, and the current menu is actually a bit toned down from the original one. But still, if you’re in Taibei, I’d almost recommend going to Witch House just for the menu.

However, Witch House is also a boardgame cafe. They have a pretty huge selection of games to just use, and they sell a nice, large variety of games as well. (Not as many as, say, Alchemy, but still good.) On the day I was there, there were two groups of people playing games. One large group was playing Bang; another couple were playing Once Upon a Time. I’m not sure if Witch House does specific boardgame nights, but it seems like pretty much any time (except when there is live music, I suppose), you can just go there, get a game, and start playing with some friends.

女巫店 Witch House Pub interior

There aren’t a lot of Taiwanese-produced boardgames yet. There are lots (and lots) of translations, so it’s easily possible to play (for example) Terra Mystica, Settlers of Catan or Citadels in Chinese. But there aren’t yet many games actually produced in Taiwan. When I went to Alchemy, I asked them if they knew of any locally produced games I could get; they mentioned The Wonderful Island. I of course bought it. Similarly, when I went to Witch House, I asked if they knew any locally-produced boardgames I could buy. It took a little looking, but they found a copy of 無良商人 ‘Heartless Merchants’, which I bought. It looks quite good, but I haven’t had time to actually open it up yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to review it here sometime in the future.

It’s also worth noting that Witch House has pretty cool politics. Right next to the boardgames, they have a banner stating very clearly their support for Taiwanese independence; nearby is a poster stating their opposition to nuclear power. (Always a sensitive topic on a densely-populated island with not a lot of natural energy resources.) Also, I should mention, of those two groups of people playing games the day I was there, only a handful were men; it’s a very welcoming environment for women. And Witch House is downstairs from 女書店 Fem Books, the best feminist bookstore in Taibei. The two stores’ names rhyme in Mandarin (“Nǚwūdiàn” and “Nǚshūdiàn”), and I assume there’s some kind of relationship between them, but I’ve never been clear what it is.

女巫店 and 女書店 exterior

Boardgame cafes have become pretty popular in Taiwan; there are a lot of them. But Witch House was one of the first — it was certainly the only one when I lived in Taiwan, back in 2004. (In 2004, when I was looking for a place to introduce some friends to Search for the Emperor’s Treasure, it was the obvious destination.) If you’re looking for a nice, welcoming place to relax, have something to drink and play a good boardgame in Taibei, definitely check it out.

Yes, this post is partly inspired by Halloween.