Fanboi!

So lots of casting for the HBO Game of Thrones is in! And I am collecting PICTURES. So stoked.
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I was introducing myself to some gamer people just now and it occurred to me that there was a fun RPG quiz embodied in my email. So: you're about to leave for a desert island. There will be four to six other people on the island; they will magically adjust to suit your gaming preferences without being annoyingly similar to you. Or if you want, they can be your best friends, whatever suits. It's magic.

You can bring ten tabletop RPGs. (You can also bring ten boardgames, but that's a different post.) You get the core book plus all the supplements. For something like the new World of Darkness, you get the core rulebook, plus the appropriate game-specific rulebook, plus all the supplements.

Me:

• Feng Shui, the best action game of all time.
• Hero 5th edition, to satisfy my desire for superheros. Also an acceptable framework for crunchy spy games and so on.
• Unknown Armies, for when I want to play modern weirdness.
• Over the Edge, for when I want to play modern weirdness some more. Don't judge me. It's also the go-to system for minimalist flexible gaming.
• Dogs in the Vineyard, my favorite indie game. Great for moral questions, and a super cool setting.
• D&D 4th edition, for fantasy gaming with tactical crunch.
• Trinity, a surprisingly flexible near-future game that can be used to do a ton of different stuff.
• Esoterrorists, for investigative play. I came really close to picking Trail of Cthulhu instead, but I think I want the Esoterrorists source material. And actually...
• Call of Cthulhu, which gets me all the Cthulhu goodness so I can run it with Esoterrorists if I wanna. Also means I have Delta Green.
• Sorcerer, which is really pretty much here for the sake of Sword and Sorcerer, which is here for the sake of Charnel Gods. Dear Scott Knipe: we miss you!

Vampire: the Requiem dropped off the list while I was writing this post to be replaced by Sorcerer. It's awesome but there were already four modern occult/horror/weird RPGs on the list. Five if you count Feng Shui. I guess Sorcerer is also a modern occult game but like I said, it's on there for other reasons.

More Applied Pragmatics

This is in fact the 4e campaign I'm gearing up to run. The campaign frame: the PCs are a group of three to five individuals who, for whatever reason, have hooked up together to apply to the course of education offered by Doctor Cavillard. You may have known each other beforehand; you may have met in an inn in Fairhaven and decided to band together on the spot. That'll all shake out in character creation.

I like a lot of things about Eberron. The things I like for this campaign are:

• The urban setting. Fairhaven is no Sharn, but it is a pretty cosmopolitan city. There will be adventure outside the city, but there will also be lots of adventure inside it.


• The conspiracy and intrigue. It is a very political setting. The Five Nations have just come out of a very long war, and they don't really get along no matter what treaty they signed. There will be both nobility and treachery afoot. Think Scarlet Pimpernel.


• The pulpishness. I like giving my players the chance to play big damn heros. Shake the pillars of the heavens, baby... maybe not at first level but characters will do things that matter in the end.

PCs will start at first level. I have at this point done the first half of the heroic tier a lot, so I intend to accelerate levels 1-5 as much as necessary to avoid boredom. If I wind up with players new to 4e, I'd make sure they had enough time to learn the system.

There'll be mix of combat and roleplay and skill challenges. On average, I'm thinking a fight or two per session. Some sessions may have none, some may have three. Battlemaps? Yep. Minis? Yep.

Weekends seem likely. Saturday morning, noonish? Four hours or so? Yeah. Weekday evenings are a possibility depending on commutes and such.

I like empowered players. I like players whose backgrounds offer up hooks and mysteries. I like players who want to define chunks of the world, particularly if they want to define them in ways that cause as many problems as not.