Campaign: London Calling

Last night was Dresden Files RP night, we use the Dresden Files FATE game for this published by Evil Hat Productions, I very much recommend it. This is the first FATE or FUDGE game we have played as a group, it uses those nifty little fudge dice with the pluses and minuses that I had often seen in gaming stores over the years but never knew what they were for. We've did a faltering Dresden Files Dublin game a few months back but to be honest the GM wasn't up to snuff. As in I was pretty bad at GM'ing this particular system. It's not the system's fault though, it just didn't seem like my GM style gelled well with the system itself and especially the prep end of the system centering on the player's aspects. I will probably give it a whirl in the future but to be honest I am very much enjoying just playing this game at the moment.

DFRP uses a very cool and well thought out process for developing both the world you will be playing in, usually a CIty, and character creation. It took us about 2 1/2 sessions to pull all of this together, about 8 hours in total, but it was great fun. The City for our game is London, a London a little different from the real thing but very cool. We have an active police unit involved in supernatural affairs who unlike the Black Cat or S.I. units in the the Jim Butcher books have a direct connection with the White Council of Wizards. We have the fairy courts struggling for a power with each other, including the waning Autumn and Spring court, a combined court of transition. The White Council themselves are a bit on the prideful side and don't supply London with much by way of Wardens, after all it's in their back yard, who would stir up trouble there? London itself has a very haunted feel mixed with that of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere series, there's a sort of London Below. We've hit most of the clichés, but that's the fun in playing these games, the clichés are grounded points we all can connect to, they then get twisted up in play in interesting and new ways.

Our cast of characters is a nice mixed bunch, we have the Autumn Knight, Danny, freshly minted and previously mostly unaware of the supernatural side of London; a White Council reluctant librarian, Eames, he wanted nothing more to join the army but his family's business keeps him locked down; a Minor Talent, Liesel,  she suffers from Cassandra's Tears but is also a walking font of knowledge; a Shinto Priest Whitechapel Police Officer, Megumi, a Champion who can leverage her faith into action; a Pure Mortal, Leon, he's a Whitechapel officer who has a habit of finding the Autumn Knight in awkward circumstances; and a Punk White Council Wizard, Drury, a throwback to 1970s London. It's a nice colorful cast of characters who have plenty of scope for growth and development but also have great character traits for the GM to work with and creating interesting scenarios out of.

So what has happened to our little troupe so far? Well we've had Danny at no less than two major crime scenes, the first after being semi-tricked by a Sidhe friend of his into finding the body seconds before Whitechapel arrived in the form of Leon and Megumi, the second was at what could only look like a terrorist attack after a Warlock summoned a whole heap of specters into a crowded market. Drury has dragged Eames and Liesel into a fracas with the Jack Frost a Sidhe noble, he now owes Lord Frost 2 favors in return for some information given. Finally the whole group ended up knee deep in specters in a crowded marketplace, leaving the Punk in some considerable distress having thrown himself into the middle of the fray to counter the ritual that had drawn the specters there. We have but one real casualty and some information to work with: our Warlock friend was having his mind worked over magically by some form of Necromancer, also London is becoming more haunted by the hour.

Yay!

Rules of the Game

I've said before that I'm a big fan of games, pen and paper roleplaying games are my game of choice, though boardgames run a very close second. I've run through my gaming history before so I won't do it again here, I'll get sick of hearing myself speak on the same things. Recently I've made a somewhat seismic shift in how I play roleplaying games in terms of being a PC and a GM.

It started about 18 months ago when I started listening to two podcasts, the first is The Walking Eye and the second is The Jank Cast. Up until I started listening to these casts I had played in an almost completely mechanical sort of way, nothing wrong with this per se but it wasn't what I nor what my regular group of friends and gamers were looking for. We were playing all sort of different games, mostly of the non-indie and non-story driven variety, but we were always looking for a good story. Now I have to say that two of the regular GMs in our gaming group are masters of the epic yarn, very good with prep and great a weaving our characters into the narrative of the prep they've done. They're really great at working with the awful wrenches PCs tend to throw into plans as well. A third GM I've only had the pleasure of playing in a couple of her games but she's exceptional at building atmosphere into her scenarios through lots of research and prep beforehand.

Despite my relatively academic nature I suck at prep for roleplaying games, I've always found that the more I prep the more stilted a session will feel, I also suck at weaving big stories for people to inhabit. My strength has usually been in dealing with unexpected ideas and letting players take the lead, introducing and reintroducing vague overarching antagonists for my group. I've always felt more comfortable with this sort of GM style, I also used to love simulationist-ish games as well or gamist games with lots of balance. My need for emergent story and my love for these sorts of rulesets didn't gel overly well. I GM'ed my share of 3.x D&D and 4e, I liked the combat in 4e quite a lot in fact, but I couldn't do the prep necessary for these games to float. I GM'ed a Planescape game using Mutants and Masterminds 2e with the Warriors and Warlocks content, it worked sort of but I ended up letting it slide away, much to the chagrin of the people playing in it (sorry by the way).

Then through the above mentioned podcasts I found two pretty awesome games, the first being The Dresden  Files game using FATE, where your background and history inform the themes of the game, the group work together on world building and your traits as a character can be compelled in game to affect them. I thought this was awesome! The whole game works toward weaving a narrative inside the themes that you as a group build. Neat stuff this, but the prep side brought me down again, I love playing this game but running it doesn't really fall in my skillset as a GM, one of the other regular GMs has it down though, his game is great!

The other game and indeed system I suppose is Apocalypse World and the attached engine, basically zero prep beyond a few between game notes, pickup in an evening and begin playing inside an hour and importantly the rules and role of the GM are defined in such a way as to be an engine of creation for emergent story. The shift for me has been from trying to balance and simulate to simply pushing and prodding players into making the story for themselves. This game has already produced what have been some of the most memorable moments of GM'ing for me. I'll probably do a post on those moments later this week in fact. 

I've run over word count by quite a bit...