I am Dr Rotwang!

I am NOT the fella who goes by "Doktor Rotwang" on Substack. I've never met him. I'm not a Navy veteran. We are not the same guy, no matter what Google AI says. I'm sure he's swell but we're different dudes. 

I am also not Noah Lugeons. I'm flattered that someone would think so, but I doubt he is. 

Get your act together, Google AI.

GAME REVIEW: Four-Color Heroics

 Before we get started, here are some disclaimers:

• I am reviewing a comp copy provided by the author
• The author and I are friends, and have been for many years
• It is my hope that the author knows me well enough to trust me to be fair, impartial, and honest
• I have read but not yet played this game

Okay? We good? 

Good.

I really like it.

"Welcome to my new fantasy game! You do not get to know the rules."

 You've heard of Eisen's Vow, yeah? 

No?

Okay, that's not unusual. It's only been called that for a while, although it's an idea as old as D&D itself. Over in his book The Elusive Shift (and on his blog, Playing at the World), Jon Peterson defines Eisen's Vow as --

the position that player enjoyment of the game is diminished by understanding how the referee resolves system events.

There's history behind this idea; in the interest of not re-hashing the wheel, you can also go listen to this here episode of the Roleplay Rescue podcast, where host Che Webster discusses it in detail and has a neat accent. 

But anyway. The basic notion is that if the players don't know the rules, and you -the GM- handle all of that on your end, then the players are interacting with the world and not the game mechanics. This, as I mentioned previously, hopes to front-load immersion. 

When I first read about it in the book, and again when I listened to Che's podcast episode, I was all, like, "Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh I dunno." Players -of which I am sometimes one- like knowing the rules to a certain point, so they know what risks they can and can't take. That's fair; that's just being smart.

But.

You can argue that players can still learn what risks they can and can't take even if they don't know the rules, and they learn those limitations the same way they learn anything in life: 

Through experience.

Plus, I'd rather my players poke around at the world because they can, not because they are told they can. I'd rather the risks and rewards in, say, fighting a handful of kobolds be present and evident by the information that I can give them, and that their characters grow in ability through lived, rather than tallied, experience. 

And that's what Rovainne wants to be: a play experience. It wants to come alive at the table, to be a thing that the players sink into and enjoy.

And! Plus! Also! There's another advantage to this play style: in the absence of to-hit modifiers, armor classes, target numbers, feats, skill levels and such, creativity and description become paramount. Can your party defeat these kobolds? Maybe. Probably. How? What are your tactics? No no no, not "what are you going to do to get +2 to hit them", I said what are you going to do? Do you just wade in? Do some of you flank them out? Are you dumber than a kobold? What about the one with the spear? 

The argument can be made that you can have a game that focuses on those same tactical considerations even if you have modifiers codified for every abstraction, and you know what? You can.

But you don't gotta. You can have a rich play experience that hinges on not having tactical modifiers and instead pretending that you're a knight and a scoundrel and a wizard's apprentice and a witch who have to get across this clearing in the woods, and there are some lizard-dog-things that say "No way", so what do you do about it?

Obviously, this requires a lot of trust between the players and the GM. That's why I intend to play this  with an established group who I trust will trust me. 

So the rules I'm using will be invisible to the players. But what rules am I using? 

...that would be telling. But I'll tell you what they're not, and I can tell you that they're not those rules because I considered all of the below but ultimately decided that they didn't fit what Rovainne wants to be:

• AD&D 2nd Edition or Rules Cyclopedia - despite being my favorite iterations of Brand Name D&D, as I've already stated, Rovainne doesn't want to be D&D.
• Castles & Crusades, 13th Age, Labyrinth Lord, OD&D and its clones - despite being other great ways to play D&D, well...they're...still D&D. With all the D&D expectations that I'd just end up chucking out anyway.
• GURPS, D6 Fantasy, HERO FREd, Savage Worlds - despite being some generic systems that I liked, Rovainne resisted being those games because they just wouldn't easily bend to what Rovainne wants to be. They could, eventually, but...it seemed like a lot of work, and the temptation was there to go down pathways that could lead away from the pure experience of what the setting wants to be, and risks me turning it into something else just because it seems like a good idea at the time.
• Dungeon World - too much to cut out, again. Though I did consider a basic PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ target spread and interpretation, but I had the feeling that it wouldn't give me the right feel that I wanted. I co-opted some of the ideas, though...
• Fate Core/Condensed/Accelerated - despite being one of my favorite ways to tell stories and such, some of my players balked at the odds of rolling 4dF, and I just really don't want to argue about that. 
• Cortex Prime - yeah, no, I ain't doin' that much work. Screw that. Nice game, but noooooo.

So the rules are none of those, and they're not a lot of other systems, either. They'll be my secret. Don't ask. 

Now...you've probably noticed that I keep talking about "what Rovainne wants to be". That's a whole topic unto itself, and I'm looking forward to discussing it with you and telling you what it means and how it intersects with my jacked-up creative process, which is one of the original themes of this blog...

...but not right now. You've already had enough to read. Come back later. 

FKR WTF FYI OK: Rovainne Edition

Yeah, okay, so. Yesterday I mentioned my new game setting. Today I'm gonna tell you about it. It's becoming kind of an important thing for me, for reasons that I-

What's that? You don't care? Okay! That's fine. This post will just be about what, not why. Later I'll talk about why.

Anyway...

Man, I gotta fix some stuff in here.

 Just so's ya knows, I am seeing some Blogger issues on my end. Like, I can't see any comments (even old ones!), tags aren't showing on my posts, and who knows what the heck else isn't working right. I may need to spend some time under the hood on this thing to get it back up and running the way I want it to/remember it. 

This is frustrating.

I'm Back, FKRs!

 ...ha ha ha ha, that is a joke. I will explain it, in case it's not funny.

But first...

...yeah, it's been a long time since I updated this damned thing. You wanna know why? It's because I really haven't had much to say about gaming that I hadn't already said, or that I wasn't saying on Reddit, or that merited a full blog post and stuff. Oh, sure, I coulda written blog posts about other stuff -- but you don't wanna know any of that stuff, because frankly it's mostly personal drama stuff and not gaming stuff. 

You dig? Yeah, you dig. 

Having thus dug, I'll get back to why I'm all of a sudden posting again. As you may have surmised, it is because I now have stuff to say about gaming again. You clever, clever person, you.

So long story short, in this new year of 2023, I'm fixin' to get ready to run me one of them fancy FKR games that the kids are talking about.

What's that? You don't know what I'm talking about? And you wonder if I do, to start with? Well...okay, let's go slow. HIT THE, THE, JUMP THE BREAK, DO THE, UM, CLICK!

SERBIAN WOMEN ARE WAITING TO PLAY D&D WITH YOU!

The following story is 100% true. It'll sound dubious at first, but no -- it's legit. I've changed names to protect privacy blah blah, and I'm paraphrasing some of it, but...troof.

I help moderate a FB group for local gamers.

NO WAIT THAT'S NOT THE INCREDIBLE PART

KEEP READING

In the far, far future of mankind...they apparently remember Flans.

I'm developing a space opera setting for SF RPG shenanigans, and this is the 'map' of the known, inhabited star systems. It's a map that I created, so it looks like, and has names on it, like this:

Most of it is inhabited by humans. I'm limiting non-human PC choices (for reasons); there is a species of 4-armed and very theatrical humanoids called the Garrana (whose worlds are in the center-top, haloed in purple) and a sub-species of Replicants (as in "the ones from Blade Runner, but emancipated and no longer limited by a 4-year lifespan"). You can tell that the Replicant 'homeworld' is the one with the white halo, because it's called Memory. BECAUSE BLADE RUNNER. GET IT?!

But what you probably can't tell is the reason why its only connection to the other stars is with Wilde, in the Benatar Sphere. [If you haven't figured it out, or aren't an 80s music nerd like me, note that the worlds of the Benatar Sphere are named after female singers popular in the 1980s.] As it turns out, Kim Wilde, she of "Kids In America", wrote a song called "Bladerunner", and released it on her "Teases And Dares" album in 1984. The song was inspired by the film of the same name, and featured sound effects from same. Hence the connection.

The Movida Unity, in the upper left, is composed of star systems named after Spanish and Mexican singers (and, in one case, a band) likewise from the 1980s. "Movida" means "movement", and refers to the cultural Madrid Movement (or Movida Madrileña) of that decade; "Olvido" is the first name of the Mexican/Spanish singer better known as Alaska, while Irma, Ilse, and Ivonne are the members of Mexican girl group Flans. (Irma ususally went by Mimi, but that didn't look or sound right.)

Most everything else explains itself, except for the orange systems in the bottom left. One of my players is Serbian, so I snuck in those worlds to amuse her; the names are "Fuck Off", "Don't Bother Me", and "Girl-Boobies". "Grozan" means "grouchy", since my player looked at those system names and commented, "It looks a very unwelcoming place to be".

As for why these names are still relevant in whatever future century we're playing in...there's no explanation other than "I like it that way and I think it's funny".

Hi, have we met? I'm Doc Rotwang!. I do this kind of thing.

Rotwang! vs Cyberpunk Gaming, 2019

What's this? An I Waste The Buddha with my Crossbow post?! MADNESS!

"Yes?"

So a thing happened, and it is this: that over on Reddit, there is a post about a Kickstarter for a new cyberpunk game called Retropunk. And the post title asks, "What do you think?" So I thought. And I began to reply, but as I did so, I realized that what I was saying belongs less in that Reddit thread and more on, oh, maybe a public platform where I can spew forth thoughts and stupid jokes and obtuse referncIT BELONGS HERE ON MY BLOG.

So here I am, and here's my response.

Agents of D.O.F.I.E.

Now and then, I make notes for some game-thing-or-other, then forget about it. Then I'll find it again, and laugh at my own jokes, then forget about it again. Then, I'll find it again.

I started writing a scenario called "Smell the Breath of Dracula", in which the players are some of the above agents of the thing and stuff. They're on a mission to Dracula's house to --

Oh, hell. Here's as far as I got. Read it if you wannoo.

I Made A Custom Cover for "Far Trek"

It's inspired by the one on C. R. Brandon's blog, but I tweakified the layoutification and assembulated some images from 'round the computernets.

Came out OK?

Results of Attacking The Darkness in Various Role-Playing Games

Just kidding about Traveller. I loves me some Trav.

Mind Maps!

Part of my creative process looks like this:

You saw what I did there. I know you did.

WYC 2017:Stars On Fire!

Hey! It's 2017 (surely you noticed). Who's Yer Con, my local gaming convention hoedown, is coming up at the beginning of April. It's currently January.

That means it's time for me to start pondering what events to run this year.

My current short list includes

• Spirit of '77
• Fear Itself
• Risus (probably a goofy space opera)

...but one of the above is gonna hafta move, probably, because I had a bit of inspiration today. Dig it:

From the original Streets Of Fire trailer:

“You are about to enter a world unlike any you have seen before, where rock and roll is king, the only law is a loaded gun, where the beautiful, the brutal, and the brave all meet in streets of fire...”

My variation on the above, pitching a game for Who's Yer Con:

“You are about to enter a universe where retrowave is king, the only law is a charged blaster, where the alluring, the alien, and the adventurous all meet -- in Stars Of Fire!”

What does any of this even mean? Well, figure it's retrofuturistic space adventure shenanigans with an 80's vibe. 'Cause, you know, it's me.

That's all I know for now. I'm gonna go monkey with it some more. In the meantime, enjoy this here Lazerhawk jam. Oh! And this!

Huh huh huh. Ellen AIM.

"They're For My Girlfriend in Hollywood."

I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and in the front yard of my Granny's house, when my cousin asked me why I was stuffing some flowers into an envelope. I told her why.

"What girlfriend?" Still poking little flowers into the envelope, I answered as if it were the most obvious fact in the world.

Goodbye, first crush.

I'm Not Here To Talk About 2016.

You already know it was total, unfiltered suck for the world at large. I'm not gonna go into how sucky it was for me on a personal level, because who cares. I could talk about how kick-awesome Stranger Things is, but you already know that; it's not inconceivable that I could mention the ongoing game of The Strange that I'm in, which is being run by Scott Kellogg of Hall of Blue Illumination fame (you know, the Tékumel podcast, where they talk to Jeff Dee and James Maliszewski!). That's worth talking about, as is the fact that I'm trying to get off my ass and write a book already. And I'm certainly not here to talk about how this blog is ten years old, but I haven't posted to it in over a year, and the posting frequency has dropped off since --

-- aw, crap. I talked about it.

 BUT no no nonononononononono. Noooooooooooooooo. Those things, no, no, I'm not gonna -- nooooooooooo.

I'm gonna talk about how, in the new year, I'm gonna run a Star Wars campaign.

This one.

Is it because I saw Rogue One? Maybe. Maybe it's because I saw Rogue One and I enjoyed it but I didn't exactly like it, and I'm compelled to do better. Maybe it's because I just kinda felt like it. Maybe it's because Star Wars turns 40 next year, but no, it's not because of that, actually.

[HINT: IT'S BECAUSE I FELT LIKE IT]

Tell ya th' trooth, I vacillated between using WEG's venerable game (pictured above) and Fate Core, which has nestled itself riiiight next to D6 as one of my favorite games ever. As (hypotherical) long-time readers may (hypothetically) know, Star Wars gaming is MY THANG; virtually every time I look at a game system, I'm judging it in terms of its suitability for Lucasian shenanigans. I've no doubt that Fate Core is more than equal to the task -- in fact, it's one of only two other systems that I've seriously considered using.

In the end, I just felt the D6ness a touch moreso than the Fatetitude, and so here we are.

"Here", of course, means "opening up a new TreeSheets document, making a cell labeled "Names", and inserting a sub-grid full of, you know, names. For, for, for people and places in my Star Wars universe. (It also involves yanking my collection of Star Wars Adventure Journals from the shelf, and ripping names and NPCs and everything else out of 'em for inclusion in said TS doc, but I digress.) And, yeah, you read that correctly: MY Star Wars universe.

My Star Wars universe is one where the words "midichlorians" and "gungans" have no meaning whatsoever, because I WILL NOT RECOGNIZE THE PREQUEL TRILOGY IN ANY WAY. The Clone Wars will be A Thing That Happened, but it won't have spit to do with, you know, the cartoon and stuff. (The cartoon is OK, but it's connected to the prequels, so out it goes.)

My Star Wars universe recognizes the events of Rogue One, but they really won't matter that much -- see, 'cause my game will take place in the classic RPG era known as "After the Battle of Yavin, before the Battle of Hoth". And considering how Rogue One went down, well, it's a foregone conclusion that...

...anyway. No spoilers, but if you're reading this...c'mon, man.

My Star Wars universe will include selected bits of what we're now calling the Legends, i.e. the EU stuff that Disney/Lucasfilm jettisoned from canon. If it's in a WEG book, it's probably OK to go; the exception being the Zahn stuff because

1. It hasn't happened yet; and 
2. Noghri and hot chocolate? Ehhhhhhh...

I trust my point is made.

 So anyway, it's 2:13 am EST as I write this, and I'm listening to the Stranger Things soundtrack, and getting kind of tired, but not so tired that I can't start leafing through my Adventure Journals and get busy cribbing stuff for, you know, later.

For the game.

When I'm running it.

Star Wars.

Hi! How are you?

So I Picked Up Cypher System

You know, I really do ♥ The Strange. I mentioned that, right? Yeah, I think I did. So now there's a toolkit version of the rules, and it's called Cypher System, and I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know because COME ON, DOC, THAT WAS LIKE GENCON AGO.

Yeah, this...this one.

Anyway. I immediately wanted to use the system to run an adventure or two in my Radical Space setting, the one best described as "What if Star Wars and Indiana Jones had a baby, and its fairy godmothers were Fading Suns, a humanist rant, and 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'?" And I think it'd be fun to do this, but I just got the book yesterday and only today finished skimming enough of it to create an NPC for it.

And here he is: Kobayashi Flynn (that's a PDF you can download). Part Belloq, part Doyle Blackwell from The Secret Saturdays (look it up), and a bit Boba Fett, back before the prequels ruined him up.

Okay, so I'll monkey with it a bit more, and maybe I'll remember to tell you what happens. HEY LOOK SOME MUSIC!

What Does Rotwang!'s Cyberpunk Game Sound Like?

...as of right now, anyway. There are some gaps.

You Have Waited Far Too Long For This Moment To Arrive

Hey, guys and gals! Guess what I'm doin'?

...well, yeah. I mean, that's all the time. But, uh, no, no no no..guess again.

Close! I'm not doin' that exactly, buuuut...you're on the right track. Hey, why don't you have another go at--

-- yeah, I'd be tired of guessing too. So maybe I just will tellya that I'm (very, very slowly) working on a Recursion (you know, for The Strange?) based on--

No one is surprised. Okay, so dig this:

The Breakin'verse (quit lookin' at me like that) is a world of graffiti-scrawled underpasses, scrappy community centers, sharply-pitched neighborhoods and occasionally a fancy mansion, where all major conflicts are resolved via acrobatic dance battles with vaguely-defined victory conditions -- a utopian wonderland where hospital staff can do the worm, and a single man and his nameless Mexican girlfriend can, with nothing less than some pizza boxes and a couple of dance steps, not only stop a fleet of bulldozers cold in its tracks, but then immediately HEAL HIS BROKEN LEG and PUT ON A SHOW.

 Until a few seconds ago, I was driving a backhoe.

Now...when I had the idea, I had no illusions* that it'll be good for anything other than a one-shot novelty scenario. Maybe your PCs track down a bad guy who hides out in the Breakin'verse because he or she is aware that physical altercations cannot occur there -- the moment you get froggy with someone, a bunch of people grab you and hold you both back. Ergo, no harm can come to him or her; it's reality-armor.

But the PCs translate in, dressed in parachute pants and weird-ass hair and mismatching earrings and bright, bold colors...and discover that they can suddenly Pop And Lock (a draggable focus, of course)...the Vectors in the group are suddenly trained in Dancing, and the Paradoxes can walk up walls and the Spinners can totally oh my god look at them go...

...yeah, not a lot of replay value. But it'll be fun, I think, and it's my game and I DO WHAT I WANT.

There's no stoppin' us.

Um.

Me.


*...That I'd ever find a glimpse of Summer's heatwaves in your eyes. THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS

Versus That One Game

Don't talk to me about that one game, man. I don't wanna hear it. Makes me mad, so don't even.

And it's not like I hate it, or somethin'; it's a thing with me that I don't hate anything. Hating's not my style. I don't wanna play it, and it's the opposite of what I want out of a game. Anybody else likes it, that's fine. I like Xanadu, after all -- I'm not gonna dog on anyone just 'cause of how they wanna get down. 

But that's the problem -- it's like everyone seems to like that game, and only that game. It's that game, or nothing.

"Hey, ev'rybody!" I will often say, "I'm running a demo of this other game, here! All kinds of different games, in fact! Come on over to the games store, let's have some fun, it's free! Supposedly I don't even suck at it!"

Yet no one shows up, because it's not that game.

"Okay, I dig that you like that game. I have lots of favorites, too. There are lots of games! This is a crazy bigass hobby! Here's more of it to enjoy!"

Deaf ears, brick walls.

"What am I doin' wrong, fellas? What's -- am I stinky? I shower before these things, I swear...what can I do to get you guys to try out this game?"

Now I get answers: I'm too invested in my game. I can't afford a new one. I only have so much time.

"Um...the demos are free. No one's trying to take your game away, just share a new one with you. And the demos are all one-shots, just so you can see if you li-"

My game is what I want! They get defensive, here; close ranks, put signs on the clubhouse door.

"..."

So, yeah. I suppose it's not really the game's fault for being popular, no matter how much I think it's an overcomplicated, pandering exercise in excess. Other folks dig it and that's aces.

I suppose, then, that it's the players who treat it like it's a cult, who perceive (or seem to perceive) offers of other games as an attack against them, or...some...thing, I dunno. The net result is that what should be a game I can simply ignore has become a foe to me. Beyond an annoyance, it's a symbol of my frustration.

"Well, okay. Thanks for your time," I say, and go back to the drawing board...

...and all the locals go back to finding a path, or whatever.