A new thing

So I was reading this blog and watching the associated video series, both of which are a good deal of fun, and I thought to myself, hey, the people I play RPGs with are just as interesting and we have a good deal of fun and maybe I should write up some of that. In the past I've hesitated to do that because really, who wants to hear about people playing RPGs? But the answer appears on further reflection to be "precisely the people I'd want to talk to about people playing RPGs", so that works out well.

So the games I'm currently involved in:

I'm running Shadowrun 4e (urban fantasy + cyberpunk dystopia), set in Hong Kong, with a group of relatively small-fry PCs trying to make some sort of living in the midst of crime syndicates fighting it out. We all love the setting, we all hate the system, and we're trying to kick it to pieces and make a new one, which is apparently just the done thing with Shadowrun.

Apocalypse World is, as you might imagine, set in a post-apocalyptic world. (See Freakangels for a pretty good approximation. Also see Freakangels because it's good.) There's hard choices and constant vying for power in the ruins of a once-great civilization. So sometimes you agonize over what to do with the loyal lieutenant who's also murdering relatively innocent people with his mind, and sometimes you shoot him in the face with a ballista. Good fun.

There's a game of In A Wicked Age, which is more or less an episodic Arabian Nights-style game which over the course of a campaign sort of develops its own mythology based on your previous sessions, which is fun. Also fun: the fact that every session ends in a massive clusterfuck. In A Wicked Age has been on hiatus for four weeks, so in the interim, we've been playing one-shots of Universalis, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, and Dread again.

And sometimes there's also Paranoia, which is roughly 1984 meets the Marx Brothers. Which is just as fun as that sounds.

Just as important as the games we play are the people we play them with (I think I will not use their real names, just as a formality):

Jack is the guy who runs Apocalypse World and In A Wicked Age. He's really good at winning arguments, game design theory, and GMing awkward moral choices. He's less good at playing characters, but realizes this, so he uses random personality generators and tends to play people who really like punching things - as he does in my Shadowrun game. And that works well.

Scorpio is the other guy who knows a lot about game design - mostly from hanging out with professional game designers on the internet and having played D&D more or less since he could walk. As a rule, he and Jack are pretty good about poking at my incoherent vague feelings about games and trying to render them intelligible so they can disagree vehemently. He's very concerned with game mechanics, and his medic character in Apocalypse World is currently making my character's group of machine cultists look sane by comparison.

Kali, in games as in life, is very often the one holding everything together. In Shadowrun, she plays a fairly normal decent ex-smuggler who has a couple of fantastically nuanced relationships in his backstory and is trying to hold together a team consisting of of himself, Jack's amoral face-puncher, Sam's currently soulless killing machine, and Bertrand's deeply inept mage. She's also been working on a Lovecraft game system that in its first incarnation was a horrifying frankenstein of four or five different systems. Her character in Apocalypse World is, again, the sane one - a dredlocked techie who serves as a go-between for Scorpio's psycho and power-hungry medic, and my crazy cult.

Sam is a deeply creepy child, but that's okay. Her character in Shadowrun already had an excellent backstory consisting entirely of pain and death and the most terrifyingly Machiavellian crimelord - and then he got his soul eaten by an eldritch being in-game and is now incapable of feeling emotion, and must kill hundreds of people before he dies of apathy.

Bertrand is a genius logician, and also manages to be extremely well-versed in Kafka, philosophy, and foreign film - from whence he derives truly excellent characters, such as the genial sociopathic gambler who shows his affection for Bertrand's Shadowrun character by trying to have him assassinated every year as a birthday present.

Moishe is a skinny ur-nebbish who runs a damn good game of Paranoia, and also of Dread. Only seen him as a player in In A Wicked Age, so I dunno much about his play style.

Ann is kickass, but I've only seen her play in IAWA and also my one-shot Don't Rest Your Head session, which was less successful than it could have been, so again, dunno much about her play style. She seems to be good at it, though.

Jill I played Dogs in the Vineyard with, back when Jack was running that. Now she plays In A Wicked Age. She's not bad, but she's not a person you'd expect to powergame - and IAWA is really not a system that you can powergame in - but that certainly doesn't stop her from trying.

And that's the group, more or less. So I'll go this direction with the blog for now, trying not to forget to also write about music and stuff. In other news - I like Duran Duran way too much.