Planning: Gaming tonight, training tomorrow in the early afternoon and then meeting my mom for a meal and enjoying a beautiful day in NYC. Sunday we will get our Sagas of the Icelanders on at last.

Writing: I’m writing up our Dungeon World game as a short story, a process that makes me feel like an even bigger dork than usual but it is good fun.

And you?

I love what Bendis is doing in All-New X-Men #1-11. Long Story Short: Beast went back in time and brought the original 5 X-Men to the present, where they have to deal with the crazy world the mutants currently live in. It is an amazing plotline and one that could be done with any number of Marvel super-heroes, take your pick, the milestones below are general enough.

Imagine doing this with the Avengers or home-made heroes who suddenly have a future that you get to make up through play. Cool stuff.

Have fun, let me know how it goes.

Out of Time
Maps on my phone?
1XP When you interact with a piece of technology that was not around in your native timeline.

3XP When you you use a modern piece of information or slang in an odd or even correct way.

10XP When you either make peace with this timeline as your new home or become a bitter curmudgeon, refusing to acknowledge the new world around you.

Ashes
“How did I die?” “Which time?”
1XP When you unearth clues about your team’s past history.

3XP When you use something you did or done to you as an excuse to get into a conflict.

10XP When you either make an epic gesture in order to break away from your past self and become someone knew or fall into the same mistakes of your past self, repeating history.

Professor K
I’m a fierce competitor you sexist twit!
1XP When you bark an order at the pastlings.

3XP When you enter into a conflict with or alongside the team and teach them something in the process.

10XP When you either stay with the team until they become capable of leading themselves in the dangerous world or send them back to their time and end this farce.

Blue and Young
What is that handsome young man doing?
1XP When you team up with your future self.

3XP When you create an asset for your future self to use or get into a conflict with your future self.

10XP When you either welcome your future self into your life as a chronal sibling or decide that your interactions are unnatural and dangerous to the timestream, cutting off contact with them completely.

Sins of the Future
But I didn’t do that.
1XP When you discuss things your future self has done that have effected the world.

3XP When you get into a conflict because of history you have not yet lived.

10XP When you either decide that your future self was right to do what he did or destroy your future self once and for all.

Can’t Let Go
That is just what you said before.
1XP When you show your disgust at one of the pastlings for their future self’s actions.

3XP When you go into battle with or against a pastling whose future self you despise.

10XP When you either accept a pastling as a new person or do them trauma, hoping to change the past through destruction.

Post-Script: But Judd, MRH is dead! MW lost the license and now it is time to rip open the game’s corpse and do a post-mortem, figuring out what went wrong.

Alright, let’s talk. The truth is, we won’t know what happened until Cam is good and ready to sit down with someone and a recording device and talks about what actually happened. Until then we are barking at the moon. He might never be ready or be too busy making more awesome stuff to bother.

Either way, a game is dead when the players decide, not the gaming companies, not the IP owners, not yahoos on the internet. The game is dead when no one on the earth is playing it or making up cool shit to do with it or learning from its design.

I say it is alive and I say it as a player, as someone who enjoys making up fantastic things and posting them for others to use.

**Front: The Empire of the All-Seeing Sun**

Cast: God-Emperor, General of the Sun’s Own Army, Gladiators, Rebels, Unconquered Savages, Common Sun-state Citizens, Dead Sea Cabal Necromancers

Stakes:

Will the God Emperor become undead?

Will the God-Emperor pass on his All-Seeing Power?

Will the Empire take over the world?

Will the savages destroy this empire and deficate in its ashes?

*Danger: Dead Sun Cabal*

Type: Ambitious Organization

Impending Doom: Usurpation

Grim Portents: Gain God Emperor’s favor

Steal moonstone from the consort’s cult.

Gain Iron Liche’s artifacts for their own use.

*Danger: God Emperor of the All-Seeing Sun*

Type: Arcane Enemy

Impending Doom: Tyranny

Grim Portents: Gathers worthy predessessors to his palace.

Gathers unholy texts regarding undead transitioning.

Leads armies against enemies.

Leads diplomacy, helping his enemy’s enemies.

*Danger: Moon Consort’s Cult*

Type: Ambitious Organization

Impending Doom: Chaos

Grim Portents: Friends replaced by shape-shifters from the moon cult.

God Emperor is assassinated.

Dead Sun Cabal’s efforts are harried.

Werewolf plague!

*Danger: Northern Savages*

Type: Hordes

Impending Doom: Chaos

Grim Portents: Giant-moot!

Raids on the empire’s borders.

Fall of a prominent Imperial holding.

Death seen, riding a polar bear towards the Empire’s capital.

Fall of the All-Seeing Sun Empire.

**Front: Revenge of the Iron Lich**

Cast: Iron Lich, Steampunk Undead, Power Hungry Wizards

Stakes:

Will the Iron Liche rebuilt his towers crypts and charnel factories?

Will the Iron Lich take over the 1000 Road Republic?

Will someone be possessed by an Iron Lich body part/artifact?

*Danger: Dead Sun Cabal*

Type: Ambitious Organization

Impending Doom: Usurpation

Grim Portents:

Sends agents to steal Iron Lich’s shit.

Sends a spy to watch adventurers.

Member betrays cabal for promises of power and immortality.

*Danger: Undead Hordes*

Type: Hordes (duh)

Grim Portents:

Known town is over-run.

Crypts are ransacked.

Smiths kidnapped to create lightning ghoul’s harnesses.

*Danger: The Iron Lich*

Type: Arcane Enemy

Grim Portents: Sacking places important from the lich’s living days.

Domination over death cults and inventors.

Hand re-built.

No longer a towerless wanderer, but a force to be reckoned with.

*Danger: Ocean God’s Wrath (they threw the Iron Lich’s hand into the ocean, y’see)*

Type: Planar Force

Impending Doom: Destruction

Grim Portents: Flooding, storms, etc.

Sea’s minions kidnap wizards and sages.

Sea Monsters attack coastal towns.

The Flood

“I am going to be the first arch-mage in a long while. I’m really good and history will remember me but they should be writing about you. You change the world. We’re only here because of your idea about the sausages and Pyre should be thanking you for keeping Lord Harlow alive…we’d have 3 Gates knocking down our walls. I would have left those poor village girls to their fate without you shaming me into it. I’m a good sorcerer but you, Raff, you are going to be great.”

The skim reading meant I got the basic idea but got many of the details wrong, which turned out to be fine. My Captain-Senator was also a necromancer, with an Imperial Spellbook chained to his breastplate and he marched into town with a squad of 8 Imperial soldiers.

Janaki chose the Barbarian and Mike took a Druid. I adore how fast these AW-derived games steam through chargen while still providing lots of evocative details for the table to dig into.

Priscilla Foehammer and Nigel of the Stinking Mire had just gotten back from the Tomb of the Iron Liche. I asked Priscilla what she was attempting to destroy in the tomb.

“The Iron Liche.”

She rolled her Strength, got 7-9, so I told her that their battle brought down the tombs and gravely wounded the Iron Liche but she was not able to confirm the kill as he slid into a seemlingly bottomless shaft as the stones fell all around them.

I asked Nigel what he wanted to understand in the Tombs and he was seeking out the mysteries of the Iron Liche’s magics and he failed that roll, meaning that he had a hand of the Iron Liche, metal bones, rusted cogs and steam-powered exoskeleton, secreted in his bag like some kind of precious secret.

The adventure is a big glorious mess and it hit a hiccup when Priscilla died fighting some marauders in the abandoned dwarven mines. Rolling a 7 on her Last Breath move (thanks to her Barbarian move that gives her +1 on Last Breath) she confronted death, who looked kind of like one of the White Walkers from Game of Thrones, only he rode a polar bear. Death told Priscilla that she had to kill the necromantic Captain-Senator and stake his head in a high place with her name runes carved into his face.

This is when things got crazy. They rested up and healed for a day and then Priscilla called the imperial senator-captain/necromancer out and confronted him and his soldiers. Nigel turned into a War Elephant (straining the limitations of being able to turn into a domesticated animal) and stampeded the soldiers while the Foehammer cut off the necromancer’s hand and then head while holding on with 1 hit point left.

In the end, after a few more rolls and shenanigans, Nigel had secretly fastened the liche-hand onto his own hand (why do hands always figure prominently into my DW games…Vecna envy?) and was about to summon the Octopus God of the octopus folk so that he could turn the world into a swamp. Priscilla’s questioning of his actions caused him to hesitate and cut off the fell hand of the Iron Liche.

This game came very close to being Moby Dick and the Barbarian vs. Cthulhu but it didn’t get down that road. Nigel leveled up and Priscilla is 1 XP shy of 2nd level. I love the way XP works in this game now, love it to bits.

Pirates, chtonic deties, imperial necromancers, imperial necromancer’s head on a spear in the middle of a small fishing village by a glory-hungry barbarian, shape-changing into an alligator, a poisonous snake and a whale…it was a fine night of gaming.

Looking at their Bonds, Nigel realized that the danger the spirits warned him was following Priscilla Foehammer was actually him. Good stuff.

Ill-Met in Waterdeep

Dear Prime Newb Whose Home is still Digesting in Dis’ Guts,

Welcome to Dis.

You have what you could carry from your home and need to find some scratch so that you don’t have to sleep out under the alien stars.

Sure, this isn’t your first rodeo and you had plenty of adventures back at home but now you are in Dis. The trappings are familiar but the context is entirely new. Now you are all small fish in an ever-expanding pond that is constantly devouring other ponds.

Someone among you took the lead in getting you to Dis alive. Have that one roll +Int.

On a 10+, you either got out with a really amazing artifact or know someone in Dis who can help you settle in a bit.

On a 7-9, you have some remnant of your old world that isn’t immediately useful but you could sell it for 3d6 silver if you don’t mind it becoming a curio in a local parish’s shop window.

On a miss, trouble from the old world has followed you here.

There is a place for rent here in the Vecna Parish that has something that reminds you of the City of Splendors. Sure, all of the architecture seems to be littered with eyes and hands but something about this joint feels like home, dammit. Explain to the GM why you want to rent that place so badly. The owner, a one-eyed recovering wizard (recovering?), likes the idea of renting to new refugees, as it reminds him of when he first got here, fresh from Greyhawk City.

Chunks of your world are still floating on the top of the stew that is Dis. When your GM rolls on the job table, he will insert an element of the Forgotten Realms as either the Patron, Target or Job Type. The GM could describe a job and ask you what about that job is actually a piece of the Realms and how your character recognizes it.

The one-eyed former death cult wizard will hold the space for you for a few days while you do some honest or dishonest freebooting.

Hugs & Kisses,

Your GM

Please come to the thread and play along.

Bro, the above pic is by David Aja with words by Matt Fraction and bro, it was pasted with the utmost respect, bro.

Bro
1 XP when you take on the speech quirks of your enemies.

3 XP when you take stress from a conflict with a gang, crowd or horde of bros.

10 XP when you either trace the goons to their bro, er, I mean, boss or ignore them and go after bigger fish, bro.

Hawkeyes
1 XP when you refer to your partner as Hawkeye.

3 XP when you create an asset that allows your partner, Hawkeye, show off their mad skills.

10 XP when you either get into a romantic entanglement with your fellow Hawkeye or make a conscious decision to keep this Moonlighting-ish sexual tension thing going and never mess it up your chemistry like they messed up that show.

Hawkguy
1 XP when you just do normal stuff like normal people do.

3 XP when you manage to add a mundane, down-to-earth comment amidst crazy Avengers crap.

10 XP when you either take a break from Avengers crap to concentrate on being the ‘guy or make peace with the crazy back and forth that is your life.

Digital Immigrant Old Guy
1 XP when you say or do something that shows that you were born in the 70′s and thus no longer young, hip or cool.

3 XP when you do something that is cool.

10 XP when you either learn something from a digital native that will change something on your character sheet or become even more of a hovering-around-40 curmudgeon.

What drew you to Tribe 8 initially and what kept you playing?

Ghislain Barbe’s art and the use of fiction for setting drew me to the game. I remember seeing these punked out freaky looking people, iconic and alt and then reading the Prophecy of Joshua and being hooked. It was everything I wanted out of post-apocalypse games and wasn’t getting from anything else on the market: weird, edgy, dirty, and sexy.

It’s also how I’d get others into the game. I’d show them the pictures of Deus and Hal, of Kimber and Troy, and read them the Prophecy. If they were the sorts of folks who were going to be into Tribe 8, they’d be down as soon as I was done.

It also was rich material to keep you playing with. At the time I thought the metaplot was what kept the game going, but in retrospect I don’t think that’s true. It was the richness of the setting, the dynamic characters and stark opposition of purposes.

Does rich setting = metaplot?

What is the relationship between the two.

No, rich setting and metaplot are distinct from each other — though for a long time folks (myself included) conflated the two.

A rich setting, in my mind, is a setting with lots of details, usable fictional chunks, interesting personalities, and the potential for dynamic interaction with the players.

Metaplot is about the forced or pre-planned changes of the setting, usually as directed by the publishing house in order to drive a specific story of the world or agenda for play.

So Tribe 8 was a rich setting in that it had detailed specific locations, cool groups, awesome characters with specific and aggressive agendas, amazing art, detailed maps, a strong sense of time and place, and was set up so that no matter where the PCs went or what they did they would automatically end up in shit, on shit, or causing shit.

Tribe 8 also had a metaplot, in which the game world was changed and advanced by published adventure and setting books. The ideal state was that your PCs played in those adventures and stayed close enough to the central line that the events in the future books matched what had happened in your campaign, in broad strokes at least. This worked with greater and lesser degrees of success, and was run by the company with greater and lesser degrees of skill.

I know Exalted is another game with a rich setting and metaplot that you enjoy. Could you compare and contrast the way Tribe 8 and Exalted use setting and metaplot?

Its funny, because when I was into Exalted it didn’t have a metaplot.

See, Exalted had this vast fantastical world. It was huge. I think on the main map in the inside of the book covered every inch was like 800 miles or something — the Realm was bigger than North America IIRC. And many of the portions of that world were detailed in many different books.

At first the areas of the world were only lightly sketched out — like to the West there are many islands and archipelagos, filled with many different people who do cool things such as ride on whales and hunt sharks, or have a way to harvest magical pearls so they can breathe underwater, etc. Then setting books came and detailed many of the areas, built up details on different kingdoms and cults, republics and timocracies of the area. Some would detail a single city or kingdom  some a whole region.

A lot of that stuff was wicked cool. You had dudes with clockwork blimps and other people who lived inside giant trees, guys who rode on massive eagles to make war with the women who worshipped the bull god, you had cities ruled by spirits that were made up of the stories people told about the city, and on it went. It was a brilliant, beautiful collection of mad crazy anime-fantasy-mythological ideas.

Over time folks, largely on the fan side while I was still into the game, started wanting to canonize that. They didn’t want the crazy ideas to all be things you could do, they wanted them to be a coherent world with few (if any) gaps left to be filled. Over time the published material started to reflect that and the tone changed from “here are zany things across the world” to “here is the name and numbering of all things that are.”

Around that time, though my recollections are hazy as I was losing steam with Exalted at this point, “metaplot” like elements started coming into play. Parts of the world that had been previously established as dynamic and on the verge of change (so that PCs could walk in and screw it all up) were now written as having changed. That Bull of the North dude who we’d first heard about starting a rebellion was now in full out war with the Realm. The world was moving, progressing, without any action from any group of PCs involved.

If that’s metaplot or not depends on your definition. It could just be a living world — as there is so much in Exalted that if you weren’t interested in the Bull of the North you’d just ignore it to focus on your campaign in the Western Islands. But there was some change from it on the community, or at least the part of the community I interacted with, where the emphasis went from “how much cool are your PCs doing” to “lets talk about the world separate from whats happening in any individual game.”

Still, it wasn’t quite full metaplot as the world as a whole, the single story of the setting, wasn’t being changed.

At least not until the Empress returned. But I can’t speak about that, as by the time the rumors of that even started I’d moved on to other games.

Anyway, in Tribe 8 the world was small and specific. It was pretty much all on the island of Montreal, and was a closely detailed setting. And within the first 4 or so books being published that setting started being deliberately changed. And not like “well over there maybe the dude is having a rebellion” like in Exalted. It was more in the realm of “every possible relationship and power structure in the game is about to get hit with a bat, and it’s all going to change.”

When this was done well it gave the game energy, made the setting feel alive. The problem was that it meant that right from jump many folks were more about following the setting than playing in the setting. And those that did had to find various ways to manage their story within or against the game’s story. Because make no mistake, Tribe 8 was telling a story. A Story. And that story was the metaplot. Your story was the part you played in telling the A Story.

Exalted never did that. Tribe 8 did it as aggressively as any game I’ve ever seen.

Is metaplot just a lazy way to sell books thinking that folks who follow it and aren’t playing will buy the next book to find out what happened and the people who are playing will just ignore it?

No.

I mean, that is part of why metaplot was so popular with so many publishing houses in the 90s. But it was never just about that, and with the folks I knew it was never even primarily about that.

The folks that say that are much, in my mind, like the folks who accuse Vincent of writing Apocalypse World so that they can’t play the game they want to play — they have to play it as it is or that’s it, out the door!

In both cases there are issues with where the centrality of story/system/power lies — with the publisher or with the designer vs. with the players and the local group. However, both are, in my estimations, vast overstatements of what’s a relatively small and subtle gap.

Certainly many “indie” games have a strong designer as center of system bias. And yes, many metaplot games had metaplot to help move product. But Vincent isn’t there to run your game for you or take away your ability to roleplay, and Tribe 8 wasn’t just trying to move product.

Well said!

You did some writing on Tribe 8, yes? How did that transition happen, from gaming fan to writing for the property?

(And if you have talked about this or written about it elsewhere, feel free to just provide a link if you don’t care to re-hash anything.)

I did some writing on Tribe 8, yes. I think it was the second game I published for.

I’d been active on the Tribe 8 mailing list since near its beginning  (Ah, the old days of mailing lists…) I’d gotten some attention, and I’d been playing with a couple of groups of folks on and off through the period. Lisa Nicols, Josh Roby, Laura Bishop, and Moyra Turkington were the main group.

There came a point in Tribe 8 were the original writing team moved on to other things, and a call for MS submissions was sent out by the Pod. Lisa had a good idea for an original book and she brought me the outline. I worked with her to do the “game stuff” for it and we pitched it to the Pod. Hilary Doda, who was editor at that point, loved it and bought it from  her. That became Harvest of Thorns.

With that foot in the door we rounded up the whole group and started pitching for books on the planned roster – Adrift on the River of Dreams, Word of the Dancers, etc. I’d had a little RPG publishing experience (mostly magazines) at that point and some more significant non-RPG writing and team-leading experience to leverage, and we’d done Harvest both on time and proven ourselves easy to edit, so we got the books.

And turns out once you’ve done a few and done them on time, folks will keep hiring you. That we could actually all write was probably a bonus.

Anyway, after that we got the majority of books on the Tribe 8 roster until we killed the line.

“…until we killed the line.”

As in, we made a decision or as in, we just wrote and wrote until the horse was dead, dead, dead?

Until the horse was dead.

Though, at the time, as the line was running out of steam, the metaplot was getting harder to sustain, the 90s model of publishing was changing and D20 and indie publishing were altering the hobby on every level there were a lot of fans who pretty much accused me (and the rest of the group) of murdering Tribe 8.

Because, you know, freelancers suck.

As a fellow freelancer, I hear ya.

I sense some bitterness there? Any scabs you want to pick at in public?

It’s long ago enough that I mostly just joke with the bitterness.

But yea, at the time it got pretty ugly and personal. I had people trying to write to my day job to get me fired, had difficulty getting paid, and pretty much went down the road that leads to bitterness.

So pretty much, Freelancer story #3.

Still, I’m happy about what we did. The group won some awards, published a lot of cool shit, and learned a lot of things.

What is your favorite in-game moment that happened while you were playing (GMing, whatever) Tribe 8?

That would have to be after the PCs convinced Joan that the only way to atone for the murder of her brother was to let them sacrifice her to raise a new fatima to replace her.

When the new fatima, Deborah, rose from Joan’s ashes Mo started dancing around the room chanting “Debor-AH, Debor-AH!” until we almost got kicked out of our hotel. The other players didn’t chant so much, but (other than Josh) were all in tears.

(Josh doesn’t cry in games. He did, however, have some allergies that caused his eyes to get all shiny.)

Nice, I love those moments.

I feel like there is some kind of thematic link between Tribe 8 and Exalted…something about the way the both mutate and play with myth to make something new but familiar. You know them both far better than I do, is there something there or am I looking for something that isn’t there?

I’d say there is something there, but its nothing obvious.

In many ways Tribe 8 and Exalted are near opposites — one is all goth, grunge, punk and post industrial in an almost claustrophobicly small setting where the other is high flying, gravity defying marital arts and anime in a huge world of spirits and gods.

Perhaps that they’re both a different kind of post apocalypse with spiritual and mythic overtones? Tribe 8 is after our world, with spiritualism and a hint of Gnostic icecream, where Exalted is a fantasy post-apocalypse with the gods run wild.

Maybe that’s it, despite differences in tone, scope, and scale, they’re both about worlds in which after an apocalypse the spiritual order is out of whack and the physical problems of the world are a manifestation of that. And, of course, your characters are the only ones who can fix it.

Both games in some way are about fixing a universe gone wrong.

Rafferty: “If I say the Fire-bringer’s name, he can actually hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Will you teach me his name?”

“No.”

“Is the His name written in one of those books?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe learning to read isn’t as useless as I thought…”

I have been thinking about Mars lately after recently looking over the Dictionary of Mu in hopes of running a Sorcerer game in the near future.

I found a few links about Mars after looking over the past few months of reblogs on my tumblr:

• Invasions of Mars: Landings and Crashes

&

• Mars Exploration Family Portrait

And then Rose posted something really cool on G+ and posted some links to her upcoming game:

• Cavaliers of Mars Quickstart
• An Apprentice’s Tale
• Amazing preview of CoM art

A while ago, Rose asked if she could have some mention of the Damsel Messiah in CoM and as long as I’m credited and keep the Damsel as my creative property, I was totally cool with that. I’m happy to see her religion spread to a new and different Mars.

So, anyway, daydreaming about Mars.

Feel free to post what you are daydreaming about this weekend or geek out about anything linked above in the comments.