Fall of Magic Arrives

About two weeks or so ago I took delivery of The Fall of Magic, a project I had kicked into in late May, and a nice item it is too.

The box it comes in is reminiscent of the sorts of games my great grandmother had hiding in the back of her closet. More like the box in which you'd find a tenor recorder than a game. Inside is a really neat idea.

The chief component of the game is the map, which is presented on a linen scroll that the players unroll as they advance through the game, depicting a road and towns along the route, each with four locations picked out. There are counters for the players, cards that extend the map when the players reach "the islands" and a die for the rare random number needs.

The conceit of this GM-less RPG is that the magic in the world is dying. We don't know why. The players are students of The Magus. The Magus is undertaking a journey or pilgrimage. We don't know why. All the things we don't know about the magic, the Magus, the journey and the other players will hopefully be made manifest as the journey progresses.

Each turn a player can move his/her counter along the road to a new location or move the (non-player) magus to the next town. As each player moves, he or she adds a little more detail to the story of the journey, prompted by hints determined by that player's location.

There's a bit more to the game than this, but that is the gist of what the game is about. It is a cooperative storytelling, a cross between Fiasco! and Tokaido to put it entirely too broadly.

This game also represents something of a rarity: a game Kickstarter project that ran for less than a year and delivered what it said it would only about three weeks late. That should make it eligible for some sort of Kickstarter award.

I can't wait to play.

Pictures to follow later when I have time to arrange them; Watch this space.

Cluless In Nottingham

Thirty five dollars for an e-book format Codex?

And it isn't even available as a PDF?

Please stop sending me this nonsensical blither, Games Workshop. If you want people to buy your stuff again you must start getting realistic about how much they have to pay. It simply isn't sustainable to ask people to fork over $70 for a rulebook that then requires at least one $50 codex before it can be used in a tournament. Then there are the armies that cost in the hundreds of dollars to acquire, and the hours needed to assemble and paint the bugger.

And now you are "offering" me the chance to invest in overpriced e-books in formats notorious for markup f*ckups, formats that won't travel well and require a proprietary reader to access?

Still not getting real, chaps. Your heyday is o'er and the hobby you built from nothing is now as moribund as the daft gothic universe you made up to house it all in.

And it all started so well, too.

I guess you all lost the thread, a fact obvious to some when you killed off the bits business. The whole point of the hobby to most of us was the customizing of the miniatures to personal standards using stock pieces from other minis. To have to buy the entire mini just to get an arm or the wings, though, is a plan for millionaires and idiots.

And when you did away with the custom casting business you killed my Imperial Guard army expansion plans. "EBay" said a GW rep when I asked how I was to source stuff. This after two decades of being warned away from "recasters" and fakes.

"Time to die", as Rutger Hauer once said.

Reality Obscures

I just tried accessing the Reality Blurs website in order to catch up on what they were doing. Reality Blurs puts out the Realms of Cthulhu setting for Savage Worlds, among others, and I was looking to see what was new in the swamp.

Big mistake. The website is an animated splat of animate incomprehensibility, approaching Peter Gabriel levels of Function Drowned By Art.

Shame really. I might have been interested in buying something, but I'm damned if I'll fight someone's website to give them money, especially when it is drinking my limited mobile bandwidth like an Englishman drinks beer after someone says "free bar". Sorry, Reality Blurs, massive fail.

No link because if you really want to dip your feet in the toxic sludge you need the practice that searching for it will give you.

A Reboot For A Gothic Horror Classic

PEG are calling for backer on the reboot and rewrite of the spiffing Rippers setting for their Savage Worlds engine.

Werewolves, vampires and Jack the Ripper are examples of The Enemy. The Good Guys fight them, and neutralize The Enemy's (un)natural advantages by ... stealing their organs and surgically implanting them in their bodies.

Unfortunately this causes a strain on the body and mind, leading to organic rejection of the new parts and looming madness. Omelets, eggs etc.

You can get the original version in PDF from DrivethruRPG or RPGNow. It is my belief that these are actually the same outfit with different branding, though I only have personal observation of the sites to back that up.

You can support the Kickstarter project for the new version too.

You will also need a copy of the Savage Worlds core rulebook, which can be had in PDF for for about $10.

This sort of cinematic action/adventure horror setting is exactly what the Savage Worlds game engine was written to handle, so the game should play well. Actual game mechanics are simple to pick up and very easy to mediate as a GM.

The system has its weaknesses, mostly in the way damage has a nasty tendency to snowball at the end of a session because for most of the game players have the ability to shrug off damage suffered by their PCs using "bennies". As the game session nears its end, the players run out of bennies. This tends to manifest as a sudden escalation of PC casualties.

Not only that, players only have three "wounds", the fourth putting them down for the count and possibly killing them (though that is not the most usual outcome). This contrasts rather starkly with other systems that use "Hit Points", systems in which combat is a matter of slow attrition rather than sudden overwhelming catastrophe.

That said, I'm fond of the system for a number of settings, and have been toying with the idea of a short "Rippers" campaign for a while. Now I have a new incentive.

Godsdammit!

I just received a mailing from RPGNow.com informing me that they suffered a hack on one of their two load-balanced servers, and that accordingly I stand a 50% chance of having had my email and credit card number swiped during a transaction I made with them a couple of weeks ago.

They pin down the intrusion as being between July 10th and August 6th (which probably translates to "we had cause to look on August 6th and the last time we are sure things were okay is July 10th").

If you are affected you are supposed to have been informed. If you haven't been informed but did make a purchase from RPGNow.com within those dates I'd contact your bank anyway.

On the one hand kudos to RPGNow.com for getting in touch before I saw any shenanigans. On the other it is really inconvenient to have to cut up my favorite credit card right now as I have some significant purchases looming.

The RPGNow.com spokesdrone claims that there is less chance a problem occurred if you stored your card details with them before the Dates of Death because the card number would be encrypted, so this does highlight a security risk one incurs when trying to avoid the security risk inherent in leaving your credit card details on someone's e-tail server where general experience shows they get harvested en masse by evildoers periodically.

However, one must realize that in order to enact a purchase the encrypted card details must be decrypted into memory and sent to a bank, at which point they become vulnerable to harvesting in plaintext. All in all I generally (but not always) prefer to minimize exposure by not storing card details.

Just another hazard of going pdf all the way I suppose. It just boils my spuds that those in charge spend so much time making sure *I* don't make fast and loose with the pdfs by watermarking them, then let my card details get snarfed by some git. At least there's no DRM lock-in to speak of in the downloaded works.

Fergit.

D&D Again.

I spent some of Sunday trying out D&D 5.0 for the first time, which probably makes me the last gamer on Earth to do so.

It is too early to tell how it will all end, but it is a simpler system to use than the 3.5/Pathfinder one (not that I personally find the Pathfinder load too onerous as a player).

I like the way everything now keys more directly off the characteristics. No more spending points on skill points. Saves work that way too, which was a bit odd at first.

And that really sums up D&D 5.0. it is odd but not hard to work.

I do have to say that I despair when I contemplate a generation that cannot remember the way the grid works when you go diagonally or why it works the way it does in Pathfinder (which is all about Pythagorean geometry dumbed down to 2/2/3 triangles). Given that the most movement one can do on the grid is about 12 squares it is not exactly a feat of stage magic to remember the count.

Forget the howls of anguish over what did and did not trigger attacks of opportunity.

But despite the feeling that the system is catering to the Marching Morons it is easier to run from what I saw.

The system does pile on the awesome, to the extent that low level characters are now much better at everything they do. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it lets players access the bits of the game they like best as soon as possible, on the other there's a distinct smell of munchkin in the air.

But for all they've done to it the game retains the core things that make a game D&D. You still have to beat Armor Class to score a hit. You still do that by rolling a D20. Feats are now a very minor part of the game, whereas in Pathfinder they are a core complexity. I rather like them but I can see the logic in getting rid of them. Losing the skill spends was a good idea too. It means that all tasks should now be scaled so everyone at least has a chance of carrying them out. No more "you need to roll a 22 or ask your rogue to do it" skill checks.

Sunday's game was fun, mostly because my die rolls brought equal amounts of awesome success and miserable failure (there was a distinct lack of "meh" die results that day).

I was underwhelmed by the attempt to work in a background with a character flaw. D&D has never been strong on this and the latest version's take seems arbitrary and not terribly good. GURPS and Savage Worlds incentivize their disadvantage/hindrance systems so one gets interesting character flaws that work with everything else. The D&D version does not compare well.

And the others all made elves so I was forced to do the same to keep the party looking feasible. I prefer making human or dwarf characters. In fact, I believe this is the first elf character I've ever played.

And yes, I went "Legolas" on the build. If I have to play an elf I want to surf down stairs on a shield killing wantonly as I do so. Acrobatics 7. Longbow proficiency. Job done.

The one thing about it all that drives me nuts is that Wizards of the Coast cannot get a flippin' clue when it comes to PDF versions of their rulebooks. D&D is still a paper-only game in a world where even Chaosium is putting out (badly done, minimal effort) PDFs. Paizo (the Pathfinder guys) and PEG (the Savage Worlds chaps) have really integrated the PDF into their sales model and it is a Godlikebeingsend to people with large collections (although Adobe recently made their reader so unpleasant to use I downloaded a free alternative that lacks the hotkey plethora of the original, so all is not wine and roses in the e-book world either).

I'll keep you posted as to my evolving view as I play.

Savage New Acquisitions

As people may of may not know I am greatly invested in the Savage Worlds game engine, which I fell in love with after one game of Deadlands:Reloaded, a game that gave me more enjoyment as a player than any other I've played in for over 20 years.

Characters are built using points to buy "die types" for basic attributes like strength and agility, skills like fighting or swimming and edges like Quick Draw and Charismatic. Points are strictly limited and in short supply, so the opportunity to get more by taking on hindrances like Short Sighted or Mean is a welcome feature of the game. This gives Savage Worlds a similar character build to GURPS without the need for a degree in tax accountancy or a spreadsheet program (and, of course, without the richness that system provides).

It has its problems like any RPG rules engine does, most notably when it comes to the magic system, that many feel lacks the "oomph" of a proper High Fantasy setting.

There is some justification for this. The spell lists are deliberately foreshortened compared to other systems, and presented in a generic format intended to be padded out with "trappings" to give individual iterations of a given generic spell special feel and side-effects. One can, for example, easily imagine the difference in feel between an area-effect spell with an electrical trapping (call it "ball lightning") and one with a nuclear trapping (call it "ridiculously broken").

The spells are also of less over-the-topness than other systems, which means that problems can arise when it comes to player expectations. My gaming friend Will grumbles that a Deadlands:Reloaded Mad Scientist cannot make an ornithopter that would fly for more than a minute or so, and he's right unless the GM imports a certain "edge" from the Slipstream setting (or invents one of his/her own to do the job).

There is also the problem that in combats the game tends to be one of invincible players right up to the point the mulligan points ("Bennies") run out, at which point it can very easily become TPK time.

The GM must be aware of and cater for these shortcomings in the system.

What makes that worthwhile is the sheer number of settings that this engine has been pointed at. Deadlands was perhaps the first and remains the flagship setting, but one can also game in the Space 1889 steampunk setting, the Rippers gothic horror setting, pirate settings both with and without high fantasy elements, 1930s Saturday Space Serial settings, any number of fantasy settings. The list goes on.

Most recently, Pinnacle Entertainment have released a Lankhmar sourcebook and a book of adventures for that setting. Lankhmar is, of course, the city in which Fafhard and The Grey Mouser met and had so many adventures in the short stories and (one I think) novel by Fritz Leiber. I loved the books and so could not resist picking up these offerings in the hope that one day I can get the apathetic youth I'm surrounded with to play in that urban setting.

The books are lavish affairs, as so many of the Savage World books are. At least, they look like they should be lavish affairs. This represents one of the first times I've bought electronic only, having realized my house can hold no more books

And anyway, I usually do most of the referencing of my game books while on my interminable commute, which means reading e-versions on my laptop. I often need to synthesize an adventure from two or more books, and the lack of space while traveling makes using paper books impractical even before the extra weight they represent is considered.

Besides which, I have a tendency to start regarding the books as a treasure to be kept from the hands of others, who will handle the glossy-paper with grease smeared hands without a thought. I realize this is a problem, a minor obsession, but I can't do anything about it. I often make up player manuals with copied pages in greaseproof plastic sleeves for the players if they need such a beast. The players can paw that without triggering my "book anxiety".

I also took the chance to obtain electronic copies of The Path of Kane and The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane, adjuncts to the excellent Solomon Kane RPG (also based on Savage Worlds) that provide adventures and NPCs to star in them and which I already owned in hardback. The chance to run Solly Kane has come up and the price was right. I've been looking for these books for some time in an affordable e-package. I bought an e-copy of the rulebook years ago. Now I'm champing at the bit to get a Solly Kane game up and running.

I also chose to obtain a copy of the second edition of the One Ring rulebook.

One Ring is set in the time between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, mostly in Rhovanion. It aims to provide a different sort of game experience to D&D and its fantasy clones, concentrating on roleplaying and highlighting the difficulties of going from A to B over long distances in the wilderness. It is, in other words, what Wilderness Adventures should have been in White Box D&D.

I've agonized in the past over how to represent the epic levels of privation expeditions int The Wild should have without the need for soul-destroying shopping lists and endless Constitution tests. Well, the people at Cubicle 7 have engineered that into One Ring very neatly, taking a cue from old school wargames by using the concept of attrition and melding it all very nicely into an RPG that to me has a very "Tolkienesque" feel to the whole approach of adventuring. No "kick in the door and steal the treasure" game this.

Naturally, I can't get anyone interested in playing.

The game originally came as a player manual, a GM manual, a couple of maps (one for the players, much like the one that came in the back of The Lord of the Rings, and an identical one with a hex grid and a key for the GM to calculate actual distances) and some dice in a slipcase. The second edition, tidied up a little and somewhat re-arranged, now comes in a single book. If your taste runs to a less adrenaline-powered RPG you might like this game too.

You can download these and many, many other titles from DriveThroughRPG.com, my e-seller of choice these days. Paper copies can be had through your LFGS for the asking.

Resources:

One Ring RPG A system for playing epic adventures in The Wild
The Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane The core rulebook (does not require the purchase of Savage Worlds)
The Path of Kane Adventures for Solomon Kane
The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane Major foes for your SK game, and adventures in which to showcase them.
Lankhmar sourcebook for Savage Worlds (requires the Savage Worlds core rulebook to play
Savage Tales of the Thieves GuildFourteen adventures for Lankhmar-based campaigns

New Purchases

So I've kicked into two new projects over at Kickstarter.com.

The first is the Planet Mercenary RPG, a role playing game set in the universe of Schlock Mercenary, something I was toying with doing myself using Savage Worlds and a home-brewed sourcebook. The art has been upgraded from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic standard, which I felt was unnecessary. One can hope that the webcomic sensibilities survive the translation process too.

The second game is The Fall of Magic which I was directed to by fellow gamer and author-in-training Dunx. The Fall of Magic is a board-come-rpg game in which the players move across a printed map (the gimmick is that the map is arranged as a scroll that is only unrolled as much as is needed at the time in play) and extemporize a narrative for their character as to what is happening and why. It looks to be similar in general terms to Fiasco¹, and intrigued me enough to kick in at the Fall of Magic Kickstarter project.

I've also acquired two games through more traditional means.

Pandemic is a traditional board game in which players cooperate as medical teams to eradicate diseases as they bloom and spread across the world. The materials are well made and attractive to look at (very important in a board game) and the game play is straightforward. I've watched it played numerous times and everyone seems to have a blast. I'm looking forward to playing with people who haven't seen it before.

The second, Mars Attacks, is a dice and card game, superficially similar to Elder Sign in that dice are rolled and cards claimed by achieving dice scores "Yahtzee" style. The conceit here is that the players are Martians trying to collect buildings, artifacts and so forth by the sorts of shenanigans depicted in the movie. A simple game that looks like a lot of fun.

1. Just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on↑

Going The Extra Mile

So I have a player who may be relocating out of state in a few months, so I asked him if there was anything he'd like especially to do in-game and he immediately said "I wanna go back to Bonshonce".

Bonshonce was a scenario I ran about four years ago, for what was then six guys and a girl, three of the guys first-time RPG-ers. I wrote it myself, and it featured The Deep Ones, an aquatic race that has a special place in the Cthulhu Mythos and in the history of my BRP Call of Cthulhu games. They are nasty, capable of inter-breeding with humans to produce hybrid offspring. The canonical story is "The Innsmouth Horror" and it is a scorcher.

The basic story line of the game scenario, set in 1987, was that there was a degenerate community, a place I chose to call "Bonshonce" deep in the Louisiana bayous that had "an arrangement" with the Deep Ones going back into the early part of the 20th century, but the breeding lines had become too corrupted and so the Deep Ones needed fresh blood. The humans of Bonshonce (actually, hybrids) came up with a scheme to kidnap girls from around the country, but one of their victims was the relative of a Senator and so the team were detailed to find out what happened (they being FBI officers in "real life"). The players followed the clues of this "mundane" kidnapping case into a hellish situation that cost the lives of two of the player characters' lives almost as soon as they arrived in Bonshonce. It got bloody. It got seriously weird and it got very creepy.

Everyone had a ball and this adventure set the pace for what came after. I soon found myself spending hours writing plot arcs and manufacturing hand-outs to be used as clues to whatever the mystery of the day was. We play once a month and one scenario took the best part of a year to conclude, and required a portable white-board so the players could untangle the web of clues and lies and monstrously suggestive hints.

And I burned out.

When a major campaign plot point was reached I switched to running only published scenarios, and we lost a many players to real life, some of whom were replaced by new gamers.

When I was asked to take the team back to Bonshonce it actually tied into something I'd been mulling off and on for, well, years. I'd hinted and outright stated any time anyone asked that the Navy had taken over at Bonshonce. Well, in my head, a super-secret department of the Navy had cordoned off Bonshonce and established a number of facilities in order to secure the area, study the hybrids and look for Deep Ones.

The new scenario is set in '97 and the Hook is that the Navy project has been off the radar for years and in fact seems to have gone silent. Extreme compartmentalization, paranoid or simply self-serving information hoarding by those in charge, sudden and drastic changes in budget and an unfortunate death have prevented anyone who would have noticed from being aware of the issue. I had used a major character from the original game, now a high-up in the secret Delta Green conspiracy, as the NPC "feed" who gets the player characters involved.

Can't say much more as the player characters are only now finding out what's what.

I invested about four hours in producing the initial batch of paper-trail clues (partial logs, diaries and so forth), and about the same time in figuring out who was there and what they were doing and where they are in 1997¹.

One set of logs were from a burned-out site, with the log itself badly burned with only a few partial pages surviving. These give a fragmented narrative of the Navy project from one point of view and give an insight into the truly nasty person who wrote the log. I printed the pages on my laser using a distinctive script font, stained the pages with highly diluted sepia ink and then burned away the edges of the paper almost up to the text. This gave a very good illusion of a salvaged text block from a larger page.

I also made a bottle of pills from an old plastic vitamin bottle, a fake label and some salvaged BBs from my Airsoft tommy gun (for rattle), and added an Airsoft .22 automatic labeled "rusty"² which would reinforce a written clue from the log.

Long story short, one of the old group saw the game description and wanted "in", and I naturally welcomed him. We had a ball the first game session which took place mostly in Washington DC, Michigan and Florida.

The second session had the player characters moving into Louisiana and finding Bonshonce, or what was left of it, planning the mission in detail and approaching the town by Zodiac boat after a short recce of the Cannery. The team had to wade through head-tall grass and weeds to approach some sort of encampment in what had been the waterfront/main street part of town, and were more than a little put out when one of them saw a sign with "MINEFIELD" written on it. There followed a nice tense walk to the fence, a short debate and then they climbed the electric fence (long defunct).

The camp was a mess, large parts of it burned out with signs of multiple explosions having ripped through the staff quarters and laboratory building and signs of freed captives and assassinated captives in what was obviously some sort of detention dormitory. All good stuff that allowed the players to reconstruct a picture of what went down, with enough wiggle room for misconceptions and alternate explanations. In the last half hour of play they found the burned log and I gave them the burned, stained pages.

And there was my payoff for all that work. The look of sheer joy on everyone's faces at the look, feel and smell of the clues, obviously salvaged from a fire. And then they began reading and their buy-in increased tenfold. The players had their characters bed down for the night in an armored car they found in the motor pool and we closed the session. I felt it had gone well, and everyone was smiling and talking about how they would start the next session.

And the next day, as I was settling in for my bi-weekly Pathfinder game³ I got the nicest bit of feedback over the 'net from one of the players saying how much he'd enjoyed the game, which probably made my face light up the same way theirs had after finding the log pages.

Players like this group are rare in the gaming world. They work well together, play off each other well and have so much willing buy-in that they encourage me to outdo myself each session, upping my game. I like to think this in turn ups their game, a synergy that ramps up the energy and immersion for all concerned. Either way I've already invested about ten hours in yet more immersion-enhancing stuff, from paper clues to learning how to use Blender so I can model parts of the coming experience in 3D. Hope they get as much fun from this session as they did the last.

I'll keep you posted.

1. I'm sorry about the tense changes but it is easier to think about this stuff as if '97 is the current year↑
2. I didn't have time to distress it for real↑
3. I play this one, someone else runs it↑

Making A Portable White Board

My players often need to synthesize their ideas in a common forum, and a police-procedural style whiteboard is an obvious and, judging by my experience, successful way of doing this. Players get a double bang for their buck because not only do they all get on the same page, the process of getting there is often a revelatory and enjoyable RPG experience in itself.

So, how do you make one?

You'll need one of those three panel cardboard things kids use for science projects, which you can source from any good office supply store, and a roll of self-adhesive whiteboard material which you can find on Amazon.

You'll be covering the inside of the folding board with the whiteboard material of course. There will be a seam because this stuff isn't sold in the same size as the project board and you'll need to make two passes with the self-adhesive plastic.

The trick to laying this stuff down is to cut it to length first and flatten it out in a warm room for a bit before attempting to stick it down.  The project board is slightly backfolded to make it lie flat, and the plastic applied by removing the backing a little at a time and burnishing the plastic with a wad of paper towel (dry) to work out the bubbles as you go.

On mine the plastic co-operated quite well and I was able to get the two passes to lie adjacent with no gaps or overlay, which is important. If you have to go for one or the other, I'd go for a small gap rather than overlap.

The plastic sticks very well to the board but will peel a bit. Taping the edges can help sometimes.

When you fold the board into threes, make sure the plastic goes into the hinge rather than lifting outward.

The portable board can be taped to any co-operative surface. I found that tape would not hold on the enormous window I wanted to stick it to so I used stacked pairs of these magnets wrapped in paper towels on each side of the glass to "pin" it. (I happened to have a bunch of these magnets lying around when I needed them. There may be other, better ways of sticking the board to glass temporarily but I don't know of them).

Dry- and wet-erase markers can be used to good effect on the board, which can be folded between games preserving the precious clue connections.

If this seems a little too much for your game, a smaller, ready-made folding whiteboard solution is available from Amazon. I've got two of these myself and they work very well for all sorts of whiteboard needs and they have a grid on the reverse side which is useful for gaming too.

Rediscovering The Joy Of Home Brewed Adventures

For just about three and a half years I've been running a Delta Green game once a month, using the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules and the dual system sourcebook.

It all started as a one-off game run at RetCon 1. The players were all younger than me and were eager for more so I began crafting adventures kindasorta X-Files-y in nature set in the mid to late 80s, an era which we called "Delta Green: The Cowboy Years".

The players responded with outstanding role-playing and general enthusiasm for what we were doing, and I felt moved to outdo myself with each new adventure, culminating in a months-long story arc that had so many plot elements I designed a portable whiteboard so the players could do the Police Procedural thing with dry erase markers to sort it all out.

I recommend this, by the way. It is a great way to get the players all on the same page by their own efforts, and the GM can see where they might be about to make a colossal mistake and gently guide them back onto the path - or not, as the mood suggests. I'll do a mini instructable later on how to go about it.

Anyway.

The players began dropping out, with real-world concerns taking priority for some and general burnout doing for the rest. The core player set went from seven down to three, then back to four and is currently at five.

Worse was my own burnout. I pulled out all the stops for that aforementioned scenario, crafting clues that pushed my photoshoping skills (nonexistent at first) to the limit as I created photographs of locations and crime scene elements (I was proud of several of those), age-worn signposts, plans of extensive abandoned army bases etc. A five hour session could eat several days of clue manufacturing and plot tweaking.

By the time it all ended we made an agreement: The player characters would become major NPC movers in the newly reformed and reorganized Delta Green and we would for the foreseeable future be playing published scenarios.

A couple more players dropped out and a couple of new ones joined. My load went down to about a half of what it had been. I was surprised it took so long to prep for published scenarios but they turned out to be full of holes and mis-steps that needed patching before play.

One player announced he was probably going to be moving out of New York in a few months, and expressed a desire to return to a location I had used for the first adventure he and the others had experienced - I had said that when the original team had left there was a continuing story evolving there that would require a revisit by a Delta Green team at some point.

So I started writing the scenario I had had buzzing around in my head for a couple of years.

And two of the drop-out players immediately asked if they could rejoin the game (of course they were welcome) and we were off.

And once again I find myself madly building clue trails of memos and logs and newspaper articles and Azathoth-knows what else when I should be doing other productive stuff.

Example: The scenario calls for a submerged modular laboratory/base. I sketched out the first draft using Flash, my preferred drawing tool. There has been no tool to equal Flash in terms of usefulness and intuitive interface in my opinion.

But I found myself wondering if I couldn't do a bit better than a simple plan. You see, I can picture what it is supposed to look like, would look like if it were in, say, a first person computer game.

So I downloaded Blender, a 3D workbench and rendering tool that is truly amazing in what it promises, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get to grips with its "unique" interface. Nothing works the way a seasoned GUI user would expect and a lifetime of mouse habits have to be unlearned. Thank Shub-Niggurath for YouTube, where people, some of them articulate, can be found showing us all how to do various simple things you should be able to figure out yourself were it not for the godsawful Blender user interface.

It's not the tool designers' fault really. They have to cram so much into so little real estate. But some of them don't do themselves or us any favors either. It's as though the ability to code the amazing capabilities of the program comes at the cost of knowing how to communicate how to use their code to the world.

Anyway. You really have to look at Blender to see it for yourself. It is a gobsmacking achievement.

After three days cursing and fumbling I finally have a single module that renders the way I want in greyscale. I spent most of my trip in this morning trying to understand how to put a rusty metal skin on the basic cylindrical core of the thing.

Why am I doing this?

It started out as the idea of making a 3D picture of the entire shebang, but I'm thinking I might try and make a short movie of a swim-past. The movie part looks like it works much the same as Flash does.

I hope I can get it all done before they visit the place and abandon it, but it will be good practice anyway.

And the payoff will be the satisfaction of the players as they once again try and make sense of my deliberately obscure scenario.