Gateway to a World of Darkness - Hunter: the Reckoning 5th Edition Review

Full disclosure: I have been a paid contractor for Renegade Game studios working as a Test Reader on World of Darkness books that have included Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition products. I did not work on the corebook or any of the other products covered specifically in this review, nor was I paid for this review. This review is my personal opinion. That said, I am writing this review to help promote some upcoming Storyteller's Vault material I will be publishing for Hunter, so it is not entirely without Crassly Commercial motives. You can find my full list of RPG credits here.

TL;DR

I think Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition is a great introduction for new and returning players to the 5th Edition World of Darkness. It works well for both one-shots and longer chronicles, the rules are easy to explain and on the balance its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. I would recommend it to any Gamemaster or group interested in a modern day horror RPG focused on hunting the supernatural.

The Murder Hobo's Dilemma… "Are we in the Dungeon yet?" - Dungeon World

(Full disclosure, I'm sure this is more an issue for me, with my wanting more realism in characters and plot than realism in rules.

I've know played in three sessions of Dungeon World and I've been enjoying them but last night I realized that there was something that kept me (yes, I managed to let the group decide I was their leader, must to my chagrin) from leading the group full force ahead into adventure. The premise of the game is a modern day Twin Cities metro, but with magic and dungeons, where Adventuring Companies (emphasis on the company) send adventurers into dungeons but otherwise it's straight forward fantasy version of the present. The GM was explicit that the normal humanoid fantasy races, goblin, orc, kobold, weren't inherently evil, and that is leading to some quandaries. I had gone in expecting a fairly lighthearted game, and tenor of play-wise, it's been fairly lighthearted but the plot has been drifting much grittier.

In the first two session, the party, with the conceit that we were the local "neighborhood watch" went into a dungeon near a graveyard and fought a mixture of goblins and an elf (or two, I don't rightly recall if there was more than one) who were in what the GM described as a teenage party pad (wrecked furniture, oil barrel fire, empty keg) and while the elf was a member of a previous adventuring party to disappear into the dungeon, the goblins were definitely high school kids, ya know, wearing letter jackets and such. Now, there was a lower level of that dungeon with a definitely evil undead creature of some kind, so I think we partly rationalized things as "oh yeah, the evil undead thing was controlling them, so we're not total murder hobos for slaughtering those unarmed teenagers".

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 3 - Rocket Sled to Failure

Long time no podcast... but I finally returned to the lair of the Ginger Giant.

Discussed herein: The depressing end of my Apocalypse World game, things I'm stealing for my Fading Suns game, my online Vampire the Dark Ages influence game and a long tangent on player assumptions leading to wild conclusions.  Oh, we also touch on my blog post about Failure.  Also, other things, but I forget.

Episode Three: Rocket Sled to Failure

We also recorded a second secret podcast that may never see the light of day or the ears of listeners.

PS.  Thomas, who is taking over GM duties on future Online Influence Games, started a new blog: A Game of Influence  If you want to read all about our continuing adventures in attempting to improve influence style games, which I touched on tangentially in my "LARP's Lessons Lost" post, then you'll enjoy his new blog.  I expect to be a regular commentator.

LARP's Lessons Lost

A Blog Post Wherein I Play the Fool.

I used to run and play in a lot of LARPs, or Live-Action Role Playing games for those of you who have arrived at this blog from some other dimension, and some of those games were shit.  Not "the shit" as in good, though some of them were the shit, but some were terrible shit, as in shitty and terrible games.  And I'm talking about the games I ran as well as the games that I played in.  I have run some shit LARPs in my day.  Many of these games I played in, wrote or ran, I also played in, wrote or ran with Thomas and because we enjoy talking about games nearly as much as we enjoy playing them and because it is often easier to talk about games just the two of us than to find a group, schedule a time and play a game, we talked about the problems that we found with LARPs a lot.

Of course, not having played, run or written a LARP in a few years, I forgot all my LARP gripes and lessons when I started running an online influence game using a mishmash of the original World of Darkness Vampire the Dark Ages or VtDA (actually the confusingly re-named Dark Ages: Vampire which has an less impressive DA:V acronym) and a heavily modified Influence System derived mostly from Mind's Eye Theater (MET) Dark Epics.  Since I've been more focused in the last several years on party-driven tabletop games like D&D or even more story-driven games like Dread and Apocalypse World, I let my years of LARP experience go almost completely untapped, much to the detriment of the game I was running.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode One: Roll Initative

The inaugural episode of the new podcast I'm doing with Ben of Because In a Blog No One Can Here You Scream.

We discuss:

• Games we've played, run and want to play in the future.
• Ben's thoughts on D&D Next after playing in the weekend-long session I ran of White Plume Mountain in celebration of my 30th birthday.
• The Player Principles I outlined in my recent blog post: Principled Playing
• And answered some listener questions to "Dear Dungeon Master"

Listen and download here: In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode One: Roll Initiative

Let us know if you have comments, feedback or are interested in being a guest to talk about running or playing in RPGs.

Three Game Fortnight

Tomorrow marks the start of a Three Game Fortnight for me, wherein I shall run three games within two weeks.  It's actually, strictly speaking, only 8 days and not a fortnight, but that has less of a ring to it.

First up will be Reign Last Rest: Episode 6: Tough Times in Tribute, the rough midway point of that campaign.  I'm excited because I've gotten a couple of the players to knowingly or unknowingly agree to some "Devil Deals", a concept that I stole from my friend Tavis, who is one of the best GMs I've had the pleasure to know.  In a "Devil Deal" a Player/PC accepts something awesome or enticing for their character knowing that it will have strings attached that the GM will call in later.  I have very little planned for the Sixth Episode, other than the Players arriving in Tribute.  I was going to showcase the Reign Company rolls/challenges and advance time 3-6 months and have the PCs face a number of Company Challenges, but that is now dependent on if I have all my players as family emergencies may call a couple away from the table.  Other than that, tomorrow night will be pure Sandbox.  I've got some ideas for what the PCs might encounter, but mostly my goal is to loosely set up and let the PCs choose from the half-dozen possible campaign climaxes so I can start steering plot in that direction.  In theory the campaign will be wrapping up around the end of April/beginning of May, leaving the door open for a new season of Reign set in Last Rest or for a new campaign in a different setting/system.  Watch the Last Rest blog today for a character journal spelling out one of my favorite Devil Deals that took several days of negotiation...

The Face vs The Captain vs Individual Impulsiveness - Party Leaders in RPGs

I've been thinking about Party Leaders in RPGs a lot lately.  Beyond just what I mentioned in my last GM Commentary, this is something that I've been pondering since the summer. To my mind, there are two broad types of party leaders in RPGs, though they easily overlap in individual characters, which are:

• The Face - The Face is the social leader of the group.  This is the character who serves most often as group spokesman to NPCs, usually due to the social skills of the PC, the social skills of the player and  often due to in-game character status as well (ie. being a Noble in the system setting).  The Face may not set battle tactics or make any plans outside of social situations, but by virtue of being the character doing important social interactions with NPCs, the Face of a party often leads simply by being the party spokesperson.
• The Captain - The Captain is the plotter, planner and tactical leader of the group.  Unlike the Face, the leader is not a outside facing social spokesperson for the group, instead the leader is the character who comes up with the battle plans or the infiltration schemes or does the plotting of the group's next moves.

The Face and Captain can often overlap in the same character, but they can also be separate characters, depending on the make up of the party.  The Face is probably the easier to play, since at the simplest it can be decided just by the players looking around and saying "You've got the highest Charisma/best social skills/speak Troll" you talk for us.  But, in my mind the Captain is the more important or influential of the two, since any deals, diplomacy or social shenanigans that the Face makes are easily ignored by the other characters once that social situation has ended, or even during. (That brings to mind a D&D game I ran where after the other characters had just finished averting combat and talking the tribe of lizardmen out of attacking them, the party's wizard decided to just hit the lizardman chief with Acid Arrow and then chaos ensued).  The Captain, on the other hand, if he's actually the group's tactical leader, if he commands the respect of the other characters and the players, can help set the group's course, and therein lies the rub... To play the leader of your RPG group, it's not enough to convince the characters that your character should lead, you have to convince the players as well...

GM Confession: XP

One of my least favorite GM chores, aside from player wrangling aka game scheduling, is keeping track of XP.  I can recall many of the sessions of the 3.5 game I co-DM'ed starting out with the players and DM discussing exactly how many XP we each had and trying to keep track of it all as some players would have less due to missing sessions or the DM would have forgotten to announce the earned XP at the end of the last session or the players would forgotten to have written down said XP...

Theme and Mood, pt 2: Mood

As I wrote previously in my earlier post about Theme, Mood has always been the easier one for me to convey.  It's always been much easier for me to focus on conveying a Mood, especially for a single session or adventure, than it has for me to focus on reinforcing a Theme over an entire chronicle.

This doesn't mean, though, that as I plan my upcoming campaigns that I want to let Mood out of my sights.

Theme and Mood, pt 1: Theme

So, as I prep for my new Reign chronicle and a possible Fading Suns game, Thomas (of the Tower of Infinite Evil), in his ongoing role as my RPG Spiritual advisor, has admonished me to think about Themes and Moods, and specifically directed my attention to the game-mastering sections of the old World of Darkness books that cover these topics.

Basically, the Theme is the idea or concept that runs throughout the entire chronicle, helping provide a unified feel for what the chronicle is about.  Mood on the other hand, can be a more temporary, thing, with the Mood changing from session to session or episode to episode.  Mood is the underlying feel of the game.   Of the two, I've always been much better with Mood.  This post will focus on Theme and my thoughts on how I'm going to work it into the chronicles I'm planning.