Questions, questions, questions...

Cool series of questions from a cool blogger, Zak Sabbath. Check him out...

My answers are below:

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

Probably the stretch of improvisation I had to do in order to expend the 24 hours between uses of "plane-shift", while on my own and totally outgunned.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

Monday, 1/16.

3. When was the last time you played?

As a player? Wow... 2005?...

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

The garrison commander of a besieged large (1,000+) town pulls a Benedict Arnold, and the bewildered PC's are now thrust into organizing the defense.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Provide taunting mood music, or imply a countdown.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Last time, smoked almonds and red wine. Aw yeah.

7. Do you find GM-ing physically exhausting?

Yeah, but it gets easier. Ask me the next time I run a session that falls flat... That's exhausting...

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Upon losing all his cash to a cutpurse, rather than simply doing a song & dance at the nearest tavern, his bard proceeds to scam his way into a wealthy merchant's home and seduce his daughter... Didn't really see that coming.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

It's joyous to see both happen, in quick succession: when everybody's laughing their asses off, and then they get hit with something that makes everything *stop*. Priceless.

10. What do you do with goblins?

Make them entertaining, or make them really fucking devious.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

The de Sade graffiti trick from "Quills", but with blood instead of poop. (Look it up, kids)

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

Not terribly hilarious, but I had a great time the first opportunity I had to start throwing little notes exclusively to one character about something going on in his head. My noobs hadn't seen that, yet...

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

Planescape: Well of Worlds. Looking at throwing some major curve-balls at my gang of noobs.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

I would buy any product that hired Eddie Campbell as its illustrator.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

Yes, and it's a very, very cool feeling...

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

Plunging my noobs into a dungeon created solely with Paul Jaquays' "Central Casting" system. Put together some connective tissue, and it's a hell of a ride.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

A retired nuclear cooling tower. Awesome reverb, and quite a bit of underlying contemporary anxiety about one's general well-being...

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

The old Twilight: 2000 series and Ars Magica. Going from meticulous number-crunching to a total devotion to story development.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

Shakespeare, Joseph Campbell, and High On Fire.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

Imaginative, and un-self-conscious.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

Nightmares. I've used some exceptionally vivid imagery from horrific dream experiences to describe specific elements of game action. Works pretty good.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

A really good planet-scale terrain generator that's not dependent on computers.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Not really, but I'm working on changing that.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, mage...

I've got a bit of ex-po-ZEE-shun to take care of, here, so I'll bite the bullet and get on with it.

With a group of players who haven't had gaming take over their lives for long stretches of time, I needed a way to introduce the elements slowly, but not so slowly as to be utterly boring. (To be fair, one of the players had played before, but using one of the later editions....)

I decided to use the edition that I was most familiar with - 1E - as the basis for the game, liberally seasoned with some stuff from Labyrinth Lord, various blogs like Land of Nod, Daddy Grognard, and Hill Cantons, and even some 2E stuff. Frankly, I've never been enamored of the later versions and the first edition demands engagement of the imagination, something that my particular players crave.

I picked a free fractal terrain generator (I forget which, at the moment) and worked up a planetary biosphere. I found a series of tables for generating a large-scale history somewhere on the interwebs, and proceeded to mold my world. The randomness of both types really plays to my taste for Jungian synchronicity: I just generate the random elements and trust my imagination and improv skills to provide the links. Love it...

Anyway, I worked up a basic cosmology founded on principals of fundamental elements gradually becoming more fractured and complex, and voila!... It not exactly the Silmarillion, but it'll do. I'm pretty proud of it, actually.

For specific cities and sandbox elements I'm heavily indebted to Matt Stater over at Land of Nod, one of the smartest and cleanest blogs out there. (My players are advised to ignore this paragraph, upon pain of... um... pain.)

Throughout this whole process, I've only had one major concern: over-thinking everything. I'm sorely tempted to stuff all kinds of details into the plans of a session, and then beat myself up for leaving something out or not anticipating something. I've seen it written elsewhere, and I now consider it to be the cardinal rule of GM-ing: Just Have Fun. Do your prep work, but remember to enjoy the game. You're playing, too...

The Past is Prolapse...

I always tend to start with disclaimers, both verbally and in writing, and this instance looks to be no different.

This is, in fact, the first blog that I've ever written, contributed to, or begun. I've done comments, on occasion, but this is definitely the furthest that I've ventured in the new frontier of Infinite Visibility and Exposure. As with a lot of things in my life, the novelty of the experience is one of the primary motivators; as soon as that ebbs, however, the impetus to contribute on a regular basis is likely to wane. I'll try to compensate for that, but I make no promises...

My second disclaimer is that I'm terrible at exposition - the art of laying down the background of a situation without boring your audience to tears. My writing is kind of like my thinking: under-structured and over-impulsive. When I've got new relevant details for old posts, I'll try to go back and make edits. Again, though, no promises...

I guess that this is the point where I should get to the point.

I'm starting this because I have a growing volume of material for which I don't really have a forum of expression, and that I don't want to simply lose to the sands of the hourglass... namely, the goings-on in my D&D sessions.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the reading of this kind of blog was what got me back into the gaming community after an absence of more than a dozen years. Now, I'm enjoying the game so much that I want to set this material into a framework that's accessible to my players and the interested public at large (no matter how small that group may be).

Feel free to comment, to suggest, and to leave opinions. I'm not sure what else I should be asking of a readership, other than patience and civility, so I'll go ahead and request those two items.

For now, I should probably stop starting, and start doing. Thank you for your consideration.