Masks

 I wanted to have a change of pace today, and it has been about a month since writing, about RPGs I enjoy. To qualify for this list I actually have to have played it.

I tend to run shorter campaigns because damn it I am an RPG player and not a collector. I plan on playing through my collection until I have gotten use out of the RPGs I have.

The first one I want to talk about is Masks, which is a teen superhero game. It was the first Powered by the Apocalypse game that I really understood. Admittedly, that understanding was severely helped by the actual play "Just Us Heroes" from Happy Jacks. I recommend Happy Jacks for lightly produced Actual Plays that sound like your friends around a table playing a game. Their advice show it top notch too.

Masks is powered by the apocalypse, so it is 2d6 + a positive or negative attribute. A 7-9 is a success with consequences and a 10+ is a success.  Instead of hit points or anything else there are conditions like "Angry" which cause the player to be -2 to certain rolls.

The game is about being a teen where everyone wants you to be something different: your parents, the government, your peers, mentor superheroes, etc.. Your character evolves based on these expectations. The game really is about how you change in relationship to yourself, others, and the world at large.

The city itself is painted with such broad strokes that a GM can add their own flair to it. I had fae wackiness ensue based on the history of a PC or two. They had a crime computer that used a magical mirror as a screen (words and images would appear there), and it turned out the processor was a group of gnomes led by one named Larry. The gnomes liked alcohol which led to quandaries about underage kids getting liquor for the gnomes (they decided against it).  Then they had an airship that was manned by gremlins (think Bugs Bunny rather than Gizmo). All in all, it was a fun if silly campaign.

My games for that particular group of players has gotten darker over time, going from monster hunter to now doing 19th Century Nordic Horror, but that will be for another time.

If anyone actually reads this, please feel free to share the blog with others. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and be safe.

Michael

In regards to my friend who has cancer, normally I would run immediately to another friend of mine for how to respond to the current situation.

Problem is that friend has been dead from cancer for about four and one half years.

Mike was amazing. He was my GM for a long running D&D campaign.  We ended up fighting Demogorgon at the end of that campaign, and it involved turning our monk into a Titan to do MEGA DAMAGE to anything she punched. I played a dwarven wizard because no one plays a dwarven wizard in D&D.

Mike was amazing. He was the type of friend you said "I love you" to without it feeling weird. Since his passing I try (and admittedly sometimes fail) to say "I love you" not just to my family but my friends as well.

Mike was also known for playing two different characters in the LARP we played in. His second character and my character HATED each other, which was fun because after game we would joke around about what level of trust you needed to play characters who had that sort of relationship. There's a group of friends I have purely because 

I miss Mike every single day.

Love Your PCs

Love Your PCs.

Love Your PCs.

Love Your PCs.

I cannot say this enough as both a Tabletop and LARP GM.  If you hate the PCs (or even worse the players) or just like being a cruel jerk that believes "they get what they deserve," you have no business being a GM of anything.

We challenge the PCs to see them overcome the situations.  Will they fail at times? Yes, and that is fine. I am not advocating making things all sunshine and rainbows for them, just that no matter how hard the challenge, you should be rooting for the PCs to overcome it.

Admittedly, I have needed my PCs, especially my LARP ones, as heroes for my own sanity. Sandy Hook left a negative imprint on my psyche for a long time, I ended up creating a similar NPC in game just so the adventurers could pass judgement and kill him. The fact that it also served as a dark mirror to one of the PCs was completely a bonus.

I am writing a story right now where the player is eating ALL THE ANGST BISCUITS. She is having an enjoyable time of it. I just gave her a challenge of sending her to what basically amounts to Hell in our LARP to retrieve her 3yo son's soul. Nothing major.  ;)  It is a challenge that I root for the character to succeed in, though success is not guaranteed. I will still root for her, though

Always Love Your PCs.

Vaesen

We started a new monthly tabletop campaign called Vasesen, which is 19th Century Nordic Horror.  It's made by Free League Publishing, the same people who make RPGs such as Forbidden Lands and Tales from the Loop.

My one player Casey likes to mention that the system is brutal. You roll Attribute plus skill and any sixes you get are considered a success. You can push a roll to generate success but it doesn't guarantee success, just a reroll.

So far we have the following characters:

An Academic

A Private Investigator

A Lutheran Minister

A Military Officer

A Rich Doctor

(I am sorry but I don't have access to their names where I am right now. All I remember is that the private detective is named after one of Sherlock Holmes' disguised identities (which I believe is Ulf Sigerson)

We have done half an adventure so far, and the Military Officer has shot at monsters, gone a bit batty, and ended up screaming uncontrollably at the sight of a hanged man. There was haunted shadow puppet theater going on. People fainted,  The Doctor and the Private Investigator are the only ones who kept their heads on straight so far but we shall see what happens when more stuff goes on.

It's a lot like seeing a Call of Cthulhu group lose it's collective mind in a way.  An interesting event to say the least but it'really can throw a wrench in the story.

I know some people prefer the fear mechanic in things like Legend of the Five Rings, where you just get penalized on rolls to the point where running is probably a good idea. I have found this doesn't work as well with groups that mainly play D&D because instead of embracing the fear they just get frustrated at the penalties. Then again, it's tough without getting the proper buy in from players in L5R without it turning into D&D with Samurai. When the GM tries to describe zombies without saying it and really give a good horror to the situation and the players are all like, "YAY!! ZOMBIES!!!" it really can take the wind out of the GM's sails.

Back to Vasesen. I find the game fun.  Hopefully other people do too, since they are playing in it. Hopefully everyone survives. As the GM, I root for my players, but that is another post for another time.

I Don't Know What to Call This Post

 I should have punched him in the face.

It was college, my sophomore year, and I should have punched him in the face when I realized what was going on.  Never-mind that he was my favorite teacher up until that point. Never-mind I was in a state of shock. I was the metal head. I should have beat the crap out of him. I was drunk at the time when he kissed me and groped my genitals.

We went after him through the college board and administration. I never got the police involved. My one friend he also did it to broke down and asked if this is what it felt like to be raped. Only later I found out he had been doing it for YEARS from a friend who was an alumni from before.

He was an awesome teacher.  Amazing, really. He had three themes to his Western Civilization class and we applied those three themes to each lessoj. It made for a fascinating class.

I should have punched him.

In the end he was dismissed from the college and moved to be closer to his family.  We never involved the police. He was allowed to go on, and possibly continue doing it to other people.  I don't know.  Maybe he would be cowed by other people doing that but I doubt it. Once a predator always a predator.

I thought I had dealt with that but then the whole Penn State/Sandusky thing exploded.

I broke. I have my boss at the time to thank because she knew I was going through a mental thing.  She could have fired me because I couldn't function at work at all. 

Thing didn't get better until I was on my second set of head meds. (I will talk about what happened with the first ones another time.)

I alienated a few Penn State alumni with my outspokenness about how the Sandusky stuff was handled over the years. A lot of that, though, came from an internal place because I didn't truly stop HIM.

Any person he hurt after me, that's on my head, because I could have stopped him and didn't.

I am sorry but that's the way I feel about the situation. 

"Preistly" Duties

 In the LARP I play, my character aspires to be a priest to the goddess of knowledge and love, named Tara. It's an interesting path because in real life I am an atheist but at the same time the whole experience brings me closer to religion in general. I find some religious writings to have significance in terms of people's lives and how people should interact with each other. Religion has done good and bad in this world, and I would like to focus on the good (while standing up against the bad).

Some examples of things that are in my Book of Tara:

Never stop learning.

Never stop loving

Sorrow and Remembrance - Happy is the heart that still feels pain.

Generosity - while this can be of time, physical items, etc. I always think of Generosity of Spirit. Colored by the path of Sorrow and Remembrance (My path), Generosity would be interpreted as empathy, sympathy, or compassion.

To know Generosity of spirit is to act with kindness, to be open and willing to share with others without expectation of receiving something in return.

A nurturing environment is one that gives Tara's children the security and opportunity to discover themselves and their world.

Some of this is Christian based that I have discovered over time.  Some is song lyrics. Some is a little of everything else. All I know is that playing my LARP character I am trying to be a better person outside of LARP.

Hopefully it is working. In the meantime no matter what path you follow, I hope you give and receive kindness in this world.

LARP Coming Up

 So tmorrow I will not be me.  I will be Hayward the Bastard, healer to people who fight far better than him.

Gods I need this. 

It's funny how I use my LARP character to reset my brain. Hayward was my place to go to cry for years, to the point where everyone knew Hayward was going to cry at one point or another during a game. What they do not know is that sometimes I need Hayward to cry for me. LARP is always the safe environment to deal with situations where I cannot deal with them in real life.

Nido, who was the 1920's Lovecraftian Coward, did this for me also. I had an insane exterior because I was so scared of many things, first of all my alcoholic father. Man, when I was a teenager I feared that guy. I would watch the clock when he was supposed to get home from work, because you knew if he was late then he was out drinking after work. The later he got the more fear would be built up inside, because you knew the drunker he was.

I stood up to him once, yelling across a kitchen table at him that he was a drunk and abusive and all of that.  The table between us disappeared and I briefly considered throwing myself through the window behind me to get the hell out of there.

That was many, many years ago. I don't know if I ever truly processed the situation and didn't know back then what sort of help I could have gotten.

Playing Hayward gives me strength, though, and I need that right now. Hayward is slowly transforming into what I want to become. Hayward is slowly losing the crying aspect of the character and leading more towards a heroic figure.  I need to tap into that for my own life.

I need Hayward.