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the_eggwhiteFirst things first, I hate colds. Especially when they specifically time themselves so I bear the brunt of it not just over a weekend, but over the weekend containing Dragonmeet. I would not have been able to actually play any games or have long in depth chats... but I decided to go along anyway. I went late in the day, but I managed to get a decent bundle of stuff. I acquired A/State and Esoterrorists, as well as ordering @ctiv8 from Grim's Portmortem studios - I'd been intirgued by it for a while (being a fan of Global Frequency and all that). He didn't have copies there due to a printing cockup, but as I ordered it he gave me a DVD with a pdf version on it for free... I've not had a chance to look at it yet, though.
A/State is an interesting one. I've not read it in detail yet, but from a chat with the Author, it seems to be quite Dark City / Perdido Street Station ish... An opressive enclosed city setting with weirdness, but where the characters are hopeful and striving towards better things. Looks interesting and is very well presented. System looks to be quite crunchy in character gen, but runs as a fairly straightforward percentile system.
Esoterrorists is an X-files / Delta Green / Cthulhu style whatnot, but is geared in a quite different way to most other games. It's written with investigation in mind. The reasoning behind the differences is as follows:
Most games are still modelled somewhat after dungeon crawls in that you move from room to room and then make rolls to fight/search whilst you're there - the action takes place in the fighting and searching, but progress comes from the moving from room to room. If you had to roll to find the next room, the game would stall every time you failed a roll.
In invetigative games, progress comes from getting clues and the action comes from interpreting those clues and taking action based on them. This means that getting hold of clues is more like the moving from room to room part of a dungeon crawl, and so making it dependant on dice rolls is going to lead to a lot of potential stalling points.
So that was Dragonmeet.
Other than that, my plagueridden weekend has largely been spent doing two things: Rebuilding my website again and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I'm rebuilding my website because I decided that whilst my last redesign was technically very clever and incredibly well put together, it was kind of dull. So I'm retooling it to look a lot more bold and snappy. No, there's nothing for you to see yet. Expect something in a week or two.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is, for want of a better description, "america does anime". It actually does it rather well... nicely put together, well rounded characters. Good dialogue (although at times marred by my knowledge of 1980s homophobic playground slang... "He is a powerful bender!"), good story, lots of research put into the setting and the combat (each school of elemental combat is based on a real martial art).
Now there's today. I have plague still, but it's subsided enough that I think I'm good to go for a visit to the dentist... which is handy, as I have an appointment booked. I was expecting to have to cancel it, but when I spoke to the receptionist she said that if I felt up to it then it was fine. So I'll be leaving work at lunchtime and heading off to get a hole plugged up. The rest of the afternoon will most likely contain drool. Oh well.
A/State is an interesting one. I've not read it in detail yet, but from a chat with the Author, it seems to be quite Dark City / Perdido Street Station ish... An opressive enclosed city setting with weirdness, but where the characters are hopeful and striving towards better things. Looks interesting and is very well presented. System looks to be quite crunchy in character gen, but runs as a fairly straightforward percentile system.
Esoterrorists is an X-files / Delta Green / Cthulhu style whatnot, but is geared in a quite different way to most other games. It's written with investigation in mind. The reasoning behind the differences is as follows:
Most games are still modelled somewhat after dungeon crawls in that you move from room to room and then make rolls to fight/search whilst you're there - the action takes place in the fighting and searching, but progress comes from the moving from room to room. If you had to roll to find the next room, the game would stall every time you failed a roll.
In invetigative games, progress comes from getting clues and the action comes from interpreting those clues and taking action based on them. This means that getting hold of clues is more like the moving from room to room part of a dungeon crawl, and so making it dependant on dice rolls is going to lead to a lot of potential stalling points.
So that was Dragonmeet.
Other than that, my plagueridden weekend has largely been spent doing two things: Rebuilding my website again and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I'm rebuilding my website because I decided that whilst my last redesign was technically very clever and incredibly well put together, it was kind of dull. So I'm retooling it to look a lot more bold and snappy. No, there's nothing for you to see yet. Expect something in a week or two.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is, for want of a better description, "america does anime". It actually does it rather well... nicely put together, well rounded characters. Good dialogue (although at times marred by my knowledge of 1980s homophobic playground slang... "He is a powerful bender!"), good story, lots of research put into the setting and the combat (each school of elemental combat is based on a real martial art).
Now there's today. I have plague still, but it's subsided enough that I think I'm good to go for a visit to the dentist... which is handy, as I have an appointment booked. I was expecting to have to cancel it, but when I spoke to the receptionist she said that if I felt up to it then it was fine. So I'll be leaving work at lunchtime and heading off to get a hole plugged up. The rest of the afternoon will most likely contain drool. Oh well.
