'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'

-Robert E. Howard
Beyond The Black River

Corrupt Cliffs

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Showing posts with label Convention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Convention. Show all posts

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Calamity at House Ralto



Two House Minors, Vondar and Ralto once stood as allies. That time has since past, now a bitter rivalry burns between them.  Once the pharmaceutical industry of Ralto and the scientific equipment and engineers or Vondar created profit for both houses.  As is the way of such things, the delicate balance of friendship can be tipped by the slightest flap of buttefly wings.

Since the announcement that House Harkonnen was to give up Arrakis to House Atreides, the politics of the Landsraad has begun to shift and change.  Now House Ralto has begun to gain favor with some of the House Majors. The Marquis and Marchioness of Vondar has seen this as a dire turn for Their House and has sent emissaries to House Ralto in an attempt to gain favor with the house once more.

Knowing that an end of the rivalry, even at some cost to the house is better than the potential destruction of the house They have chosen an entourage, you, to carry Their words to the Baron and Baroness of Ralto...

Can you help ensure the continuation of your House?  

Choose one of four agents: Bene Gesserit, Sword Master, Mentat or Suk Doctor and join us on a Spacing Guild heighliner to travel to the House Ralto to bring the will of your Marquis and Marchioness to House Ralto. 

Monday, March 9, 2020

ALIEN: Hope's Last Day. Prep and Running It.

Introduction

The local convention that got me started GMing publicly decided to do a "mini-con" at the start of 2020. Normally I have GMed Conan 2d20, but with the release of Alien RPG by Free League I jumped on board to GM the introductory adventure in the core rule book, "Hope's Last Day". I thought it would be a great intro for new players as well as myself, and require less prep for myself, at least in terms of adventure design. It being a short adventure should lend itself to running in the shorter 4-hour game slot of the convention as well.

Having a look through the rules, I liked the maps in general but didn't think they would lend themselves to miniatures. I could do a strict theater of the mind game, it's not really how I work. I needed a way to combine the in book maps with miniatures.

Since Alien basically works between two basic modes; stealth, and combat, I thought I could use this to get a cool game presentation. Using the maps of Hadley's Hope for interaction in Stealth Mode, and then zoom in to a more miniature heavy version of the colony when we were in combat mode or exploring a room more thoroughly.

Prep & Play

Stealth Mode

My first task was to get the maps from the book into a fairly playable format. Step one was to grab the PDF and bring them into GIMP. Once there I broke down each floor into a separate map and then cleaned up the background. This would allow me to display one large format map at a time to the players. As I type that, let's hope the PCs don't split the party onto multiple floors.

One of the reasons I wanted to be able to place one map out at a time was due to space constraints, I always struggle with the size of the tables we play on, not that they are too small, just that I use a lot of stuff.

My plan was to blow up each floor's map to decent enough size to allow miniatures to represent where each player was even if it wasn't a 1:1 scale. To do this and to keep costs down I decided on 2'x2' for each map. This left them at a pretty decent size, but also allowed me to have them printed at VistaPrint during a 50% off sale and get all 4 maps for about $25cad printed as a 4'x4' poster.

In the end, this provided a good interface to allow the players to see where they were in the colony, but after running the game I would provide each player with a copy of the map as well, so they were more able to see the entire layout of Hadley's Hope, including the levels they were not on.

Visually I would grab some kind of markers or blips to represent their location on the map. I would probably use blue or green for the PCs, one for each player and a group icon allowing the PCs to split the party if they desired. For the Aliens, a nice red marker. In the end, I used a small blue d6 for the PCs and a red die for the Alien. Using the actual miniatures on the map and moving them back and forth from the map to the 1:1 scale representation would have been a little clumsy.

Combat Mode

I still wanted to use a more true scale representation for combat and in-depth exploration of areas. For this, it was pretty clear that I wanted to use a sci-fi version of the "Ultimate Dungeon Terrain" or UDT. I would just need a way to represent walls and such.

Having used UDT for Conan I knew I needed some basic scatter terrain as well as some walls. Foam dungeon walls are pretty easy to put together, but when it comes to sci-fi things can be a little more difficult. I spent some time scouring Thingiverse for something that would work, but in the end, I didn't find a solution that I wanted to use.

A little while ago I had an idea where I would model some wall ends for 3d-printing and then use straws to connect them giving us some nice pipe walls. I decided to adopt this idea, but with foam-core instead of straws. I modeled some wall ends that allowed the insertion of foam core, giving me modular 45-degree walls. I was pretty pleased with the overall design.

Then I watched Aliens and re-designed the wall ends to be more in line with the colony. These new ends allowed a vertical piece of foam core to be used. Despite this redesign I ended up only using them to frame a door.

These worked well in play as a concept, but I could have used a few more lengths of them, all of the ones I built were around 5" long, to really fill things out and allow wall runs that didn't extend past the UDT edges.

Other models and props I found on Thingiverse: desks, computers, eggs and facehuggers. The only thing I couldn't find on Thingiverse was an actual Xenomorph. There was a few of them, but nothing that stood out as a cool gaming mini.

I looked around and found a piece of software called Xara Posing Studio AND a model for it for the Xenomorph. Being pretty confident in the new Elegoo Mars, I set out to give it a pose and added a based and some misc parts, rocks, and a pipe, to make the pose make sense. I added these to the model in "3D Builder" and exported the whole model as an STL. After a couple of tries, I got the pose and model to work on the printer, and I had a pretty cool Xeno miniature. I added this to Thingiverse, so now all the models I used (minus the PCs) are on Thingiverse.

To make a set of PCs for the adventure I ran over to Desktop Hero 3d and put together a few characters. I did this mostly with their free assets but ended up paying a little extra for a few of them. I grabbed a few props from Thingiverse and added them to the models in "3d Builder" again, giving me a fully custom set of figures designed for the adventure. At this time I can't make the .STLs for the characters available, but they should be pretty reproducible if you want.

Model Links


Notes

Like all adventures, the GM has a notebook or similar with, at least, key elements for the adventure. This is normally pretty simple to accomplish as you write the adventure. Since I don't normally run pre-written adventures I wasn't sure where I wanted to go, especially since this adventure is pretty directionless for the players, giving them the entirety of the colony to explore and die in.

In the end, I built a Google Slides presentation with interactive maps to allow me to move around and have some key tables at my disposal. So much for running a pre-built adventure because it would be easier!

This presentation worked excellently, but as it was my first time running something like this on a new platform, I think I would try and do things a little differently: Keywords and descriptors for each location as well as a basic mapped layout for the area using UDT. This would allow me to do better with area descriptions and not need to think about how I want to layout each area on the fly unless I choose to.

Conclusion

The game went well, and even if everyone died, fun was had by all. There were a couple places I was a little weak in the rules, but for my first time ever running the game, it was a pretty easy system to get your head around. Running it again I would have more preparation done on describing the offices and other areas of the colony that aren't really fleshed out in the adventure because they aren't key locations.

Overall I was pretty happy with the collection of Sci-Fi bits I came up with to work with the combat mode. I was doubly pleased I got them all painted up, but if I had had the time I would have used a slightly lighter color scheme on some of the parts, just to break up the overall terrain, which was pretty monochrome.

Since the game ran I have modeled a few more bits, including a sloped wall panel joint with a built-in computer terminal. I am also working on a set of wall ends that can be linked and some new doors. Expect to see some videos in the future on sci-fi terrain.

In the end, the experience with RPG Alliance has remained a positive one. Everyone around the various tables has fun, I am glad to be part of this convention in my small way. If you are in Calgary or planning on coming by drop by the Rpg Alliance on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook OR the webpage!

Special Thanks

I would remiss if I didn't say a HUGE thank you to Free League, publishers of ALIEN, who sent the convention special edition copies of the RPG to give away as door prizes (which I sadly didn't win.) Generosity from these companies is incredible. Thank you again to a great company making some great games (Alien, Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Lands, Coriolis, the upcoming Vaesen and numerous others I've not even looked at!)

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Monday, November 4, 2019

What I Learned in a Year: RPG Conventions & PDF Rules

Introduction

One year ago I sat down at a table with 5 strangers, a place way outside of my comfort zone and GMed a game of "Robert E Howard's Conan". I was unsure of what this was going to be or if I would be any good at it. It turned out to be a pretty positive experience and since that time I have gotten to know a few of the people who played in my game. Some because we have continued to GM together at RPG Alliance events, and some because we have talked about game ideas and mechanics a lot since then. That was 2018, I dipped my toes into running a game at a convention.

Since that time we decided we should run RPG Alliance Con again in 2019. It was decided it should be bigger and better but remain a one-day event. It moved to a two-game day on Sunday and remained at Dickens Pub. Some of the GMs involved ran a series of RPG games over the summer at various locations such as Eastridge Sports Cards & Games, Zero Issue Brewing and the now-defunct Titan's Vault. We also ran a few games at the Calgary Expo early in the year and had a definitive presence at FallCon 2019 as the Rpg Alliance.

The convention this year was split into a morning and afternoon program, which was really more of an afternoon and evening program, running 11:30am-3:30pm and 4pm-8pm. We had sold tickets through tabletop.events, and ticket sales at the door as well. My game had seen good pre-sales with 3 of 5 seats being taken up, and the remaining 2 being filling by day of sales. The end result was a solid table of 5 people who had never played Conan before, including one gentleman who had never played an RPG before. If there was a single daunting aspect to my game, that was it. Being someone's first foray into RPGs and wanting to be a fun and positive experience for them.

At many of my previous games, I attempted to bring in a pretty small kit, looking to only bring what was necessary; using tokens and tiles rather than minis and terrain. By FallCon I had given up on this idea, bought a big tote, switched to UDT(Ultimate Dungeon Terrain) by Professor Dungeon Master on Youtube, and started running pretty much a full kit. These displays of terrain and paper-minis are always a big hit with the players who love seeing all the work and attention that has gone into building the world they are playing in.

Teaching the Rules

Maybe I take a while to come to a conclusion, or maybe I am just stubborn. Either way over the last year I have attempted to highlight Conan 2d20s rules before play in a 20 minute overview. Some of these have gone better than others, but at the end of the day talking at people about rules and mechanics in a lecture setting is boring a dull. This last group didn't even get through them all before we started playing. Either way, this is lesson 1 for this post. Don't spend more than a few minutes going over mechanics. It will be far more fun to have a quick scene where the players can learn the majority of the system. So for Conan we might include a scene where the players do some fighting and other skill checks.

Take Home Message

Keep your rules intro light and engaging with your players.

Finshing on Time

Although I got through an adventure with the same format at Fall-Con, I was a little short on time for this adventure, and we failed to complete the final encounter. There were certain places where we could have cut time down, but for about 90% of the time at the table, I thought we were going to run WAY short. So here is my advice for you, especially if you are teaching the rules: If you have 4 hours, plan for a 3-hour game, or at most 4 encounters. This will give you an hour buffer that will most assuredly be filled with starting a little late, introductions and chat, rule instructions and intro encounters, and hopefully, it will leave you a little time at the end of the game to get some feedback from the players. My biggest issue with my deadlines is I haven't gotten a huge amount of feedback from players, just because we were generally playing right up till the end.

Take Home Message

A four-hour time slot really only allows for about three hours of actual gameplay.

Rules & Adventure Materials

The sheer amount of paper a game uses is mind-boggling. Between rulebooks, adventure materials, character sheets, monster information, etc, you can get swamped in paperwork. At RPG Alliance 2018, my first convention I tried to go lightweight and small with components, but still brought all the actual rulebooks I needed. As you can imagine this ended up making my bag not exactly lightweight. Over the next year, I sought to remove the weight and the rulebooks from my kit. I thought a tablet might be a useful addition, but after looking at them and talking to a friend who tried to use them, I determined they might not be for me, although the idea stayed in the back of my mind.

Game Changer

If we FFWD a little, I was still considering a tablet. Part of my issue was certainly the issue of how LARGE .pdfs loaded, anytime I tried using the CONAN book in-game to find something and to do a search I would have to wait for it to catch up with the load, and it ended up being faster to simply use the hardcopy. This was not really a hardware form factor issue or an old-school connection to physical books, it was simply a functionality issue.

Still switching out all the books for a tablet? Pretty appealing. The solution came through a conversation with Chris, a fellow GM and player in my first convention game. Chris told me about a piece of software called "XODO".

This free PDF reader was everything Adobe Reader wasn't. Documents didn't load in a linear fashion; if I went to page 300, it loaded page 300. It allowed me to set up bookmarks to places in the document and it created a useable table of contents in most circumstances. Without a doubt finding, this application solidified me into getting a tablet for my rulebooks, and so the research began.

Most people I watched and articles I read suggested we need at least a 10" tablet for books, anything smaller wasn't worth it. So I went to look into 10" tablets. These machines range anywhere from ~$100 to over $1000 depending on what you get, and although I would love one of those higher-end tablets, I just couldn't afford it.

The Rules Tablet

In the end, I ended up picking up the Amazon Fire HD 10 for $159CAD (on sale) in Canada or if you are in the US Amazon Fire HD 10 for $149USD, and I couldn't be happier with it after 6 months of using it as my go-to rules library.

PROS
  • Price
  • Aspect Ratio
  • Screen
CONS
  • FIRE OS
  • Speed
  • Memory

Price: Coming in at $199CAD, and often dropping to $159, it is easily on the lower end price point for a 10" tablet.
Aspect Ratio: The Fire HD 10 is a 16:10 tablet, which isn't ideal for the standard rule book. The slightly smaller display on the 16:10, hasn't been an issue for me though and having that ability to display widescreen if I need it is awesome. A second note, I find it be a little narrower than a standard 4:3 tablet due to the aspect ratio. I find this easier to hold, but I am a big guy, so you may not have the same experience. You can check out this video to see the aspect ratio differences and decide if it is a pro, con or neutral feature for you.
Screen: Although the screen is a little shiny, I haven't had an issue with it when playing. Beyond that the resolution is 1920x1200, most are 1280x800 in this price range. Color wise I have been happy with it as well.
FIRE OS: This is probably the biggest single CON the Fire has. the FIRE OS is an Amazon centric android OS. It doesn't natively have access to GOOGLE PLAY, and all apps have to come through the Amazon store. This could well be the nail in the coffin since XODO isn't on the Amazon store. Fortunately, with a little reading and following some simple instructions you can add Google Play to your Fire and run XODO no problem.
Speed: Like many low-end tablets the Fire isn't the fastest machine on the block but using XODO as the app I have no issues with the FIRE being fast enough for the purpose I picked it up for.
Memory: I sound like a broken record here, but as a low-end tablet, it only comes with 32gb of space. You can get the higher-end version of the FIRE with 64gb, but it will cost you a little more, if all you use it for is storing PDFs, 32gb is going to allow you to store 700+ 40MB PDFs. For me 32gb is plenty.

Overall this tablet has been an excellent and inexpensive addition to my arsenal of tools for the convention. It is of note that I use this at home as well for rules. It is just better.

The Reference Tablet

Beyond using the Fire for rules I generally have 3 tabs open in XODO: Rules, Adventure, and Monsters. I don't always use the tablet for the adventure, as I do sometimes write them out in a notebook, but when space is at a premium having everything in a single small tablet is quite handy. It also means you aren't sorting through a bunch of loose pages trying to find your adventure or the stats for the monster they are attacking.

Take Home Message

Tablets are incredibly useful, but you don't need the latest and greatest for it to be an effective tool.

Summary

I recommend trying to GM at a convention if you get the chance. It has been a very positive experience and I have met some great people and had some cool opportunities. Jump outside your comfort zone and be a positive part of this hobby!

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Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!