Abecedarian Arcana

I keep a pocket notebook in my bookbag for the scrawling of notes and ephemera to remind myself something at a future date. Occasionally, my notes are a little too ephemeral.

Last night, for instance, I found the phrase “abecedarian arcana” on a line all by itself. The uses of the word generally have to do with the alphabet: ordering it, learning or teaching it and so on.¹ Now I’m not sure why I wrote “abecedarian arcana” down, as it doesn’t seem to be a title or name for anything on a cursory search. It was probably a turn of phrase that popped into my head one day.

It immediately puts me in mind of one of Unknown Armies‘ less well-known schools of post-modern magick, anagram gematria (also known as A Grammarian Gate). What sort of power does a magician wield through the ordering of letters? They’re the visual symbols for the sounds we make to talk to each other. By changing the qualities of letters, maybe one could obscure meaning or remove certain words from consciousness.

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¹ Interestingly, the Abecedarians were a 16th Christian sect that eschewed human knowledge and instruction, believing God would grant them knowledge directly. I wonder how they managed to pass on their teachings.

The Kickstarter Compulsion

I’m starting to think of Kickstarter projects as addictive little rushes. I’ve done two now — I can’t remember if crowdfunding the original edition of Wild Talents was actual Kickstarter or something Kickstarter-esque — for Conspiracy X books. There’s more than a bit of frisson, repeatedly checking in on the total, wondering if the project will reach its goal in time.

Most recently, with The Paranormal Sourcebook, Eden Studios threw in some additional enticement. First they offered Zener cards for pledges of a certain level, then created a secondary fundraising goal, on attainment of which the pledged get GM screens for the game. The project reached that secondary goal today, so I’m feeling pretty jazzed, like I accomplished something good and right for the world. That’s probably a gross overestimation of a role-playing game supplement’s impact on the destiny of billions, but it’s possible the book may not have seen the life of day if I hadn’t pledged and done my portion of sharing links and so forth.

And that’s maybe one of the cleverer parts of Kickstarter: the projects are set up that the pledged are motivated to promote. They want the thing being promised, so it’s in their direct self-interest to make it happen by telling friends and interested parties. It’s a built-in marketing effort. And at the end of it, one gets to feel good for contributing to the creation of something that likely otherwise would not have existed.

Of course, I’m crowing before the game’s over. I haven’t actually gotten any of this stuff for which I’ve pledged. The Extraterrestrial Sourcebook has reportedly gone to the printer by now. I wasn’t happy that the two fundraisers overlapped such that I wouldn’t be able to receive and gauge the first book before the pledge deadline for the second passed, but I took a gamble. The play’s still underway, so we’ll see how it goes.

[Arkham Horror] The Kingsport Variations

Since I cracked open Miskatonic Horror last week and spent some time ogling all the cards, one thought in particular has recurred to me: how could the Kingsport board be made more appealing? As it stands, visiting Kingsport is seen as a chore: investigators have encounters at locations in order to shut down rifts or prevent them from opening. It can get repetitive without a lot of tangible reward; “there’s no dimensional rift spewing creatures into the streets” fails to satisfy in the way racking up a pile of monster corpses can, or sealing a gate.

So I’ve been brainstorming some house rules to make Kingsport not only a little more appealing, but less of the time sink trap that it usually works out to be. This is an untested list of wild ideas at the moment, and I wouldn’t recommend using them all at once.

• When adding a token to a rift track, place a clue token at the pictured location.
• When a rift track fills, randomly select one of the four tokens used to fill the track. That location is now replaced by a gate to an Other World, which behaves like all other gates for the purposes of investigating and closing or sealing. The matching rift token is turned over and any duplicates replaced by new, non-duplicate tokens from the supply.
• At the start of the game, randomly draw three markers from the rubble token pile from Dunwich Horror and three rift tokens. Place one of the rubble markers on each of the Kingsport locations. Thanks to the dimensional instabilities that plague Kingsport, those locations are now colocational with the Arkham locations pictured on the rubble tokens. When moving into either the Kingsport or Arkham space, investigators may choose which they stop in. Investigators in these spaces may trade items and use other abilities as if they were in the same space.

Another, more involved project I kind of want to attempt is to completely rework the Kingsport board. Ideally that would make visiting the Strange High House less of a trap, rework rifts or repurpose the materials for some other interesting challenge and otherwise spicing up the town. It would not mean making locations unstable, because that spins out into redoing or adding a stack of mythos cards to trigger gates opening in those locations — unless maybe unstable locations in Kingsport replace counterparts in Arkham. That’s kind of interesting. Hmm.

 

New England Role Players Association Digs for a Dead God

The New England Role Players Association (NERPA) just posted an actual play recording of Digging for a Dead God, the first act of John Wick’s Curse of the Yellow Sign, using Cthulhu Dark. Future acts are to come. I’ve got the first one playing right now.

I got to talk to James of NERPA very briefly at Carnage this year. I may have heard more of his voice in his recording of Brad Younie’s On the Brink of Invasion for The Unexplained than in actual conversation. We’ll have to rectify that.

Arkham Horror Actual Play on Carnagecast

If I’m producing a podcast, you know it won’t be long before Arkham Horror gets into the mix. Episode 3 of Carnagecast is the first in a multi-part recording of an Arkham Horror session from last month. We played with the Dunwich, Kingsport and Miskatonic Horror expansions, so there were cards flying every which way.

Give it a listen, won’t you? I would love to get some feedback.

Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition System Reference Document

One mighty-thewed soul, John Reyst, has assembled the open content from the third edition of Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds role-playing game into a hyper-linked web site.

And it’s attractively marked up, to boot. Seriously, this is a slick-looking  rendition, all cool colors and rounded corners. I had no idea one could do that with a Google Site.

When the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds hit the market in the wake of the licensed implementation as DC Adventures, I opted to give it a pass because of three things:

1. I didn’t see myself returning to the superhero genre in the immediate future.
2. My gaming purchases have dwindled and I wasn’t prepared to lay out for a book I didn’t know I wanted to own.
3. The changes and new material being discussed by early adopters didn’t appeal, as I was honestly happy with the relative complexity of second edition Mutants & Masterminds — occasionally overwhelmed, I admit, but generally happy to have a system on which to fall back.

Now with the SRD, I can click around, browse the material and evaluate the touted changes on my own time at a very appealing time and money cost.¹

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¹ I’m much happier reading rules content for free on a computer than I am paying to read the same. Go figure.

Game Design Discussion on the TotalCon Podcast

Episode 12 of the TotalCon podcast is a panel of game designers taking questions from the moderator and audience. It’s a mix of folks I have met in real life, on the web and only know by repute.

This was the first time I dipped into the TotalCon audio corpus and I’m glad I did. The panelists are all very down to earth and matter of fact about how they do what they do and why. They get into the behind the scenes shop-talk of freelancing and self-publishing, which is always my topic of interest in these matters. It only takes a couple clicks and some art to be a publisher these days, as one panelist notes, but it takes a lot more investment and work to be good.

Thanks to Ben at Troll in the Corner for the link.

Carnagecast

One of my goals the last couple years has been to produce a podcast. Since my first days of listening to All Games Considered and Never Not Funny, the medium has appealed. Not only does it vaguely overlap skills and knowledge utilized in my professional life, but it has a strong DIY ethic, which I appreciate. My biggest hurdle was finding a cause or entity to which I could hitch my good intentions.

After a couple false starts, I’m finally on my way. Carnagecast acts as a component of  Carnage Gaming’s presence on the web and in social media in particular. Episodes will visit with members of the Carnage community to talk about their gaming endeavors, thoughts about the games they love — or not — conventions they go to and more.

Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Carnage I Go

Oh my giddy aunt, where did the fall go?

Carnage is this Friday. My scarce spare time in the last couple months has gone to ironing out scheduling issues, helping with logistics and, of course, working on Eye of the Qlippothim and The Girl in the Looking Glass.

It’s gonna be a good time!

The Apotheosis of Arkham Horror Storage

Travis of Boardgamegeek brings us the pinnacle, the acme, the highest of achievements in figuring out how to store the sprawling excesses of Arkham Horror and its expansions.

The picture to the right is just the tip of the iceberg. Travis takes you into the case, its myriad compartments and the many pieces of accoutrement with which he gussied it. Check it out now — and bring a snack. It’s a long journey.