more manifesto
9) Don't overdo special rules. (Again, I fall down on the side of playing a game instead of creating a simulation. I find such a position easily defesible when you consider I restrist my wargaming to fantasy and sci-fi subjects.)

I think I've got my ideas solidified for a set of Illuminati tournament rules. After talking it over with Don (chairman of the Winter War convention where I plan to run the tournament), it looks like I will run the entire tourney on the Friday of the con. Prelims with be Friday afternoon and evening, with the final round during the dreaded Friday twilight slot. I say dreaded because I have a feeling my wife won't appreciate me being out so late. Anyway, I hope to type up a first draft of the tourney rules in the next week or so.

I've started work on a D&D Expert adventure for my friends Goph & Dave. It looks like the scenario will revolve around following a treasure map. I'm shooting for half wilderness, half dungeon.

I posted a link to my BattleTech scenario over at www.rpg.net. So far the feedback has been very positive.

manifesto continued

7) Unless you have a good reason otherwise, be sure to include the stock units. For BattleTech this would mean using the Mechs from the rulebook, House specific units (Dragons for Kurita, Vindicators for Liao) and House-specific variants of the old standbys. For a Trek game, make sure the Fed have a Constitution class heavy cruiser and the Klingon's use a D-7.

8) New and variant units are dandy, just use caution when making them the centerpiece of a scenario.

towards a scenario writing manifesto
Since I started writing scenarios for Starmada and BattleTech I've been doing a lot of thinking about design principles for these things. Here are my insights so far:

1) Terrain is nice, but don't make the scenario about the terrain. Sometimes a blank starmap or the Battletech basic maps are sufficient.

2) Only have duplicate units when absolutely necessary. No one else wants a BattleTech scenario with a lance of Urbanmechs or Star Trek fight with three Saladin class destroyers. Tracking which control sheet corresponds to which unit is a pain in the butt and I want no possibility of mistaking your Shadow Hawk for the enemies' SHawk.

3) Victory conditions should be interesting, but simple. Big "+5 VPs for this", "-3 VPs for that" charts are a big pain to balance properly.

4) A little background fluff really spices up an otherwise plain scenario.

5) In theory people are piloting these Mechs and starships. Try to keep that in mind.

6) A good "historical" scenario does not always make a good game.

So I decided to skip trying to turn my scenario into a PDF and simply posted it to my website. You can go directly to the scenario by clicking here. I've been thinking abit about "historical authenticity" vis-a-vis the Ripper scenario. I think authenticity (or more accurately, the illusion of authenticty) involves several elements: 1) real historical personages as PCs and NPCs 2) real locations 3) real timetable (except as altered by the PCs, of course) 4) a plausible milieu (finding ways to show that the PCs are in Victorian London and not Anytown, Anywhen) Of course, to make the Ripper work as a mythos-inspired CoC scenario will require taking a few steps away from known historical information.

BattleTech scenario
I finished the graphics for my BattleTech scenario. A shot of Arakkis from the first Dune movie will be standing in as "Messick IV from space". I used the nifty Traveller world/system generation program Heaven & Earth to make a hexmap of the planet surface. Finally, I wanted a little hexmap of the battle field, which I put together using Bruce Gulke's excallent Wilderness Mapper, found at the bottom of his utilities page. I think I will post the scenario to my website as soon as I can figure out how to turn it into a PDF.

Call of Cthulhu: Jack the Ripper
A good, solid, historically-based, nightmare-inducing Jack the Ripper adventure represents to me the Unholy Grail of CoC gaming. I feel like if I could pull it off with aplomb, I could probably retire my CoC stuff permanently. Here are the features I want the game to have:

1) A sense of period authenticity.
2) Use of historical personages for as many characters as possible.
3) Attempt to adhere to the Ripper timeline.
4) The PCs are all people nowadays suspected of being the Ripper, even if they weren't back then. The idea here being that these folks are suspects because they were unofficially investigating the crime.

BattleTech scenario
Well, I finished the text for my first BattleTech scenario last night. I'm still thinking of jazzing up the presentation a bit. I'd like a pic of the planet (swiping a graphic of Arrakis or Tatooine ought to work), maybe a map of the planet a la Traveller isocadedral projections, and a hexmap of the battlefield.

Project 3 of 3: Game Weekend
This is my short term project. Gopher and Dave have been my friends for longer than anybody else. We went to the same K-12 school. All my earliest gaming experiences were with them: D&D, Call of Cthulhu, BattleTech and many others. We still try to get together once or twice a year. We play some games, knock back some drinks, smoke some cigars, and chew the fat. We're in the middle of trying to schedule a new game weekend at my place. BattleTech and D&D Expert rules will be on the dance card for sure. Dave's become a big Catan fan, so we'll probably play one of those. He also mentioned a card game called Bang. I'd like to add Carcasonne to the mix, time permitting, but my main objectives are to finish the BattleTech scenario I started several weeks back and to get cracking on some notes for a D&D game.

Project 2 of 3: Winter War
Winter War is the local game convention that I have been attending and GMing at for over a decade. I've reached the point where Winter War has become completely integrated into my gaming activities. My goal is to start planning for Winter War events on something like a two year cycle. The first year I come up with an idea for a con game I just let it percolate. If twelve months later the event concept still intrigues me, then I might make a casual inquiry with the convention chairman, to determine if he thinks the event would be viable. If he greenlights it then I might run the evnt the following year.

Here's the list of the events I'm thinking of doing at the next Winter War, or maybe the con after that.

Starmada
Carcassonne (the recent upstart of the group)
Call of Cthulhu: Jack the Ripper
Star Fleet Battle Manual
Illuminati Tournament

I plan to outline what I want to accomplish with each in the next week or so worth of blog entries.

Project 1 of 3, my current campaign
Home Team, my super hero campaign

Rules: Heroes Unlimited 1st edition, plus some Ninja's & Superspies Revised

Setting: Marvel New York

I like using pre-existing supers settings (Marvel, DC, Amalgam, Image, whatever floats yer boat) but there is always the problem of the established heroes. My solution is to set my "twelve-issue limited series" mini-campaign during the run of the Secret Wars. The Avengers, FF, X-men, and Spidey are off fighting bad guys on another planet, leaving the PCs behind to keep the tide of villainy at bay. Sure, some of the best villains are gone, too, but you can always find more villains. (And I plan on using Kang the Conqueror and Dr. Doom anyway.)

Issue #0 of the campaign was character creation. My three players, after throwing dice and fiddling with the rules, produced the following heroes:

Jill Montgomery, Agent of SHIELD
Cyborg, the 7.5 Million Dollar Man
The Dingo, the Aussie from Outer Space

In Issue #1 ("Night of the Dreadnoughts") we established the premise of the comic with the public disappearance of the NPC heroes. The Dingo had some great mini-scenes. His character had moved to the Big Apple to find work with a bigtime crimefighting superteam. He was rebuffed by Jervis, the Avengers' butler and over tea Doctor Strange informed him that the Defenders had to disband to save the future timeline.

The main body of the adventure consisted of Shadow Master, leader of the Crime Masters, using his criminal genius to remotely activate some Dreadnought robots. Our heroes defeat the rampaging robots then track down the Crime Masters and capture them in their lair. The session ended with Agent Montgomery finding out "the boss" wanted to speak with her first thing the next morning.

Incidentally, the Crime Masters are the sample villains in the Heroes Unlimited rulebook and the rampaging dreadnoughts idea comes from a scenario suggestion in the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Rules (the old FASERIP version).

Next issue: Hydra!