Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I've been listening to Magnum Bullets arguably too much the last couple days. But it definitely has my mind in a cyberpunk-ish space. One of the things that came to mind when I first listened to it is a central conceit of the genre that has always been a little... questionable. The genre sets up a society of haves and have nots. Those who are rich with corporate ties have reasonably safe lives where violence is fiction and the latest, greatest technology is within reach. Those without live in relative squalor, scraping by in fear of gang wars and body chop shops. I rather hope I don't live to see real life become that polarized, though it's a plausible dystopia - which makes it exactly why this type of science fiction has the value it does. But when looking at cyberpunk stories or games, there's a fairly large hurdle to overcome in explaining someone with millions of credits/eurobills/nuyen/etc. worth of hardware, weaponry, and skill is somehow existing in a world of...

Grittiness often adds believability. Reality is rarely pristine. People will point to Blade Runner as an example, though the earlier Star Wars movies come to mind for me (even if many of the Imperial glimpses are sterile). Whether it's stuff lying around or curses slipping out in stressful situations, these things help make a fictional setting feel more real and relatable. Blackwing might overdo it a bit. It's a fantasy (I suppose with a "dark" or "noir" descriptor) story that seems to really delight in trudging through the filth of its established world. There's a complacent border against threatening near-gods and their peoples. There's a blasted zone between with semi-toxic dust and monsters, navigable only by use of moons and math. It's got corruption, slums and shady dealings within the capital city. Basically all the characters are scarred in ways both physical and mental. The book is competently written, but I think the focus on all th...

So, when last we left off we had a pretty good tactical game that involved going SINless and saving a chunk of Hong Kong from supernatural badness. And... I was waiting for this mini-campaign that was promised as a stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign. It took longer than I was hoping to get here, but it's here. It is a mini- campaign, but it's nice to go back to a runner team and continue on some. I think I counted three primary story missions and two side missions. With the way it was paced, I sort of expected more side missions to be available, but didn't see them. So I can't give high marks for length of engagement. What it does well, though, is make the player feel like they're commanding an experienced team of shadowrunners. While money was tight in the main campaign - basically enough to get top-tier gear for a single specialization and second-tier for another - things open up a bit here. I was able to upgrade my decker's assault rifle and inves...

I backed the Kickstarter because Hairbrained Schemes had proved itself with SRR and SR:Dragonfall. I figured even if they churn out just another campaign with no changes, I'd be buying it, so advancing them the purchase price felt low-risk. And then, I didn't pay that much attention, because following a project like that gets maddeningly tiring after a while. The end result isn't dissatisfying. It felt a little on the short side, but that's probably because I didn't have much else in the way of games to play over the weekend. I think I put in around 15 hours. The campaign is pretty solid, though it does structure a couple relationships for your character, which could be a good or bad thing depending on opinion. Decking is pretty well essential at some point, but there's a solid NPC decker available throughout. The only major difficulties I hit on Normal were toward the end - a bug in one area stuck me in-combat with enemies off the main map, and one encounter ...

Well, I haven't been involved in RP offline in quite a while now. Just too hard to gather motivation and align schedules. Ah well. Online, the Lords of Gossamer and Shadows rolls on. 'tis weekly entertainment, though I'm still perhaps not as into it as I could possibly be. The combination of roster turnover, anything-goes setting, and such contributes to a certain sense of aimlessness. There's also a small D&D (5E) game I've managed a few sessions as player in, set in the MtG realm of Innistrad. That's been interesting, if young yet. And I need to get back to running scenes based in Rym, even if that's just for one person, really. WoW has been on my mind a fair bit the last few weeks with the Legion announcement, but at the same time, my interest in actually playing the game currently seems to be waning. After a big push Saturday, I'm at 30/33 tomes for the (I think) final collection stage of the legendary ring, so I should be able to finish t...

Well, I'm glad the Escape from Lion's Arch phase in GW2 is ending - I'm a little tired of that, even though it did allow quick completion of March monthlies with a large concentration of enemies, events, and counting as a "dungeon." I have plenty of materials for an ascended back piece, but not the skill for it yet. Heh. "Battle for..." starts tonight, and sounds like it requires some coordination (complete three events "simultaneously" to open the actual assault on Scarlet), which means it'll probably only be feasible during peak hours for the first week or so in a non-overflow server instance. Whee. It sounds like actual story closure is coming on the 18th rather than this week, though. After the last anime series proved short and, while not bad, a little disappointing, I ended up getting into Log Horizon . Is "players are mysteriously drawn into an MMO for real" a genre of its own yet? This one takes shades of Maoyuu or Spi...

It's nice to have a decent Shadowrun game around. This one's the single-player, toolkit-based one (whereas there's a Shadowrun Online that seems to be a quasi-MMO in the works). In general, I find it worth the $20. The campaign is pretty good in my book. It's not Planescape: Torment and there are several typos in the conversation text, but it takes a story and builds it up, upping the ante over the 10 hours (I read 12, but it only took me about 10). It's set fairly early in the SR continuity and it includes some big-name characters. Pretty engrossing and fun. And at $2/hour, that's better than movie rates for certain. Add to that all the player-created campaigns that are likely to be made, and it seems a pretty good deal. There are a few problems, though. The most grievous is the automatic-checkpoint-only save system. Not being able to manually save is annoying enough, but losing upwards of half a hour or so of activity because you have to leave the game is ...

So our Shadowrun game has died, or at least been put on indefinite hiatus. It's a bummer, but a little bit of a relief, too. It's times like this that get me looking at what went wrong and thinking back... Our 7th Sea game wound down early in 2007. I don't have a clear recollection of what other factors there might have been, but player scheduling was a notable one at the time. Our Exalted game was called back in January of this year. The problems I cited there involved the mechanics of the game dragging in the online format. I could also add that at least two people didn't fully grasp those rules, which could be attributed to the complexity of the maneuver-based nature of them. The game also probably suffered from a lack of focus (as we picked up so many "side quests" it was overwhelming to even think about what to do first). The game is supposed to be big and epic, but stories benefit from avoiding too much extraneous stuff. And Shadowrun? Well, let...

Hmmm... less than four hours 'til I start tonight's Star Wars session. Maybe. o.o; Four players, one of which found out last night he's working late enough show about halfway through our playtime window. E-mailed everyone for opinions. I've heard back from all of one of the others, who seems to be saying "let's just play as normal anyway." I dunno, I expected a little more response and a little more sympathy, I guess. I suppose I'm just strange that way. I've been holding off comments on the ongoing Shadowrun game because... well, I didn't want to be negative. I don't want to slam the game or hurt anyone's feelings. My initial problems with the game were very me -oriented, and I certainly didn't want to come down on things due to my own inability to get into my character. But... even with all that, I think we've still got a problem. It isn't my character anymore - though I might still like to "find" more to h...

And my sinuses, apparently. Ugh, allergies. I don't even know if the sleepiness/spaciness is more due to the allergies or the allergy medicine. That stuff is supposed to be non-drowsy, but I'm never sure I believe such claims. The Shadowrun game progresses. Sometimes, it's slow, sometimes not quite so bad. Maybe I need to put bells on my character, as his turn was overlooking in the initiative order once and we spent a painful chunk of one session going nowhere because a pose of mine was missed. Thusfar, lots of dealing with HMHVV-infected people. They're dubbed "vampires" and "loup-garou" and "sasquatches," but I have trouble picturing them as such in fantasy terms. They're vampiric in a sense, but not dead - hence not undead. There's no known cure and the infected tend toward beastial mentally, but it's a retrovirus-style disease. In theory, there should be a way to undo it. So we've been pulling punches to some exten...

Ugh. Headache. Printer problems. Such a fun, fun morning. Edit: And for lunch, I got to drop much truck off to have a screw removed from a tire, and that patched up. @whee! Statuses... Statii? Guild Wars So we officially finished Prophecies (the core campaign) Sunday. The twist in the opposition wasn't surprising to me, since I'd looked up previously where I could get the Hundred Blades skill (back when I was playing a warrior). It was kind of neat to end up in a room with most major figures from the campaign congratulating us, but otherwise didn't seem that impressive. I expected more from what is apparently the last cut scene in the game than the party getting on a ship to leave the hellish island upon which they had fought the last few missions. At least they give you your choice of a pretty good selection of uniques for beating the campaign. So it looks like we'll be starting in on Factions , and with new characters to boot. I have to say, I was used to pl...

There are times I think Atlantis is less a legend and more a warning, and that we are living in it now - that our civilization is ascendant, but nearing its peak and point of collapse. The current recession/depression brings this to mind. Being mired in foreign conflicts, fuel costs (and everything that's related)... all those big issues add up. But so do the little ones. Things like inconsiderate cell phone users, or gas stations that only require pre-payment or credit cards. It feels as though there is some society-wide moral slippage. Even the great Internet, where nearly anything can be found in less than a minute, contributes. Maybe - hopefully - it is undue worry, and the worst of what's going on will pass as the pendulum swings. But a part of me fears a larger-scale cycle, in which our civilization will fall before the next. My parents may be purchasing a shotgun or similar, at the urging of a neighbor in law enforcement (who also encourages stockpiling months of supp...

So after some discussion about the Exalted game, we've decided to suspend it indefinitely. Not a very good stopping point, but we were looking at several sessions worth of heavy combat, and when that's the part of the game that drags the most, it's disheartening. No one I heard really disagreed with what I felt were the main problems. And instead, we're replacing it with a Shadowrun (4th Edition) game. I'm not entirely convinced that's going to be better from a mechanical perspective, but we'll see. It has opposed rolls and lots of fiddly options in combat, but that may not be as bad as the heavy use of flurries, charms, and perfect defenses. I haven't played this generation of the game (and I'd describe most of the SR3 experience as 'Shadowrun Lite'), but one thing definitely hasn't changed: character creation takes frickin' forever. Several hours over a few days with aid of a chargen program and I still had a moment of "wait,...