Monstrous Mondays: Oni

[ED Note: We’re back to Amy for another month of monsters – enjoy]

Photo by Xeal on Flickr

Oni

I first came across this creature in Magic: the Gathering’s Kamigawa expansion.

History  

An oni is an ancient eastern monster often with red/blue skin, an ugly head with horns and sharp teeth.

The story tell of how they were once men, men that were so wicked that they became oni when they died, some of them were so wicked that they became one in life – often through a mask that they had been wearing to disguise themself fusing to their skin. These beings are so evil that they attract other evil beings to them.

The theories is that Oni once just meant a ghost or soul it only over time that it has come to mean evil ghost or being. Since this monster is depicted with horns it is often seen as a demon when put into a western framework, but could also be seen as an ogre, giant, or poltergeist.

In the media they are seen as a Japanese monster but it appears they actually come from a form of Buddhist mythology that has roots across north Asia.

They are often depicted as demons like in magic the gathering where they had two types of them the big bads were demons and the lesser ones that were under them which were a type of ogre.

 

Physiology

  • An ugly human face with horns, sharp teeth, glowing yellow or red eyes and they usually have black messy hair on their head and face.
  • The body can be very muscular or have a very big gut.
  • The arms are strong and muscular with big hands that usually carry a metal club.
  • Strong muscular legs with big feet.
  • They usually have red or blue skin.
  • Are about 8ft tall – larger than any man.
  • Supernatural strength
  • Supernatural toughness
  1. How it acts
    1. Evil they eat and terrorise people
  2. Where it can be found (if need).
    1. They can be found anywhere, but they have been known to hide until they an army of evil beings following them.

Ideas

You could have a story where someone becomes one and they seen the error of their ways and they try to turn them self back to human but they have to act against their nature to do so.

Since they attract evil to them you could have one set up near a peaceful town and then all these bad things start happening and the party have to work out what the cause is.

You could have the party get into town on the night of hyakki yakō which is the night parade of one hundred demons, and see what the party do when surrounded by monstrous beings that are currently well behaved.

 

References

http://yokai.wikia.com/wiki/Oni

https://www.britannica.com/topic/oni

http://yokai.com/shutendouji/

http://yokai.com/hyakkiyagyou/

http://yokai.com/oni/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oni

 

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Gaming History: Twissen

We’ve each talked a bit about how we got started on gaming – but there are four of us, and this month has five mondays, so we decided to leave the best for last: The prologue of Artemis Games – the story of our first games together.

We met at Vague – The MMU 1)Manchester Metropolitan University tabletop gaming society – despite the fact that none of us had ever attended MMU, nor had any intention of doing so. I was, at the time, studying Physics at University of Manchester, while Amy was studying Biology at Salford University, and both Loz and Ali had finished their university careers already.

We were largely brought together by a friend who (though not part of the business) remains part of our gaming group – Iain Fortune, who appears in our Concept Cards as “Iain The Fortunate – creator of the Pot of Endless Tea”. Me, Loz and Iain played a brief D&D 4th Edition campaign at Vague, and then Loz mentioned that their gaming group was down a player – and as it happened we lived just down the street from them, so me and Amy ended up joining Loz, Ali, Iain and their friend Shiny 2)actually named Amy – the Amys had to be distinguished so one became Shiny and the other Purple for their respective obsessions in a new campaign at their house.

After the first two stories in this campaign we decided to sit down together and build a world for it – Twissen, a cylindrical world orbited by two suns (one northern, the other southern) and a single moon – and one where the gods themselves were all mad.

This campaign lasted for several years but as we’re talking origins, I might as well finish this up by explaining the its origin story:

The Beginning

The world was created when the Elemental Chaos, substance without form or order, collided with the Divine Prism, form and order without substance. The center of this collision became the mortal world, but the impact was felt throughout both realms – suddenly the Elemental Chaos had minds capable of shaping their surroundings, and the infinite minds of the Divine Prism had matter on which they could act. The northern end of the cylindrical world fell off into the Divine Prism, while the southern end sank into the Elemental Chaos.

This new-formed world had a sun, Shamedan, born of the elemental fire which burnt the southern lands, and a moon, Procan, born of elemental water which brought rain and tides to the southern lands.

Shortly thereafter gods, elementals and nature spirits formed – each within their own realm. The elementals cared little for the oddity that was the mortal world, while the nature spirits were born of it and could not leave, but the gods saw it as a toy with which to play – matter to shape to their whim.

It is at this point that the world gained its northern sun, Pelor, and its northern moon, Sehanine, as gods reached into the world. The sun was born of pure radiance, and the moon of condensed thought.

Intelligent mortal life appeared from nature – the dwarves from the soil, the dryads from the trees, and the merrow from the sea itself. Each lived in harmony with their element, drawing from it just as any other animal would, and returning to it with their death.

Three gods, seeing these new forms of life, decided to create their own immortal races: Amat created the dragons to rule over all; Corellon created the fey to experience the world; Io created the deva to explore and learn.

The dragons started the war of worlds by attempting to conquer the Elemental Chaos – leading to that chaos striking back against the gods, with the mortal world stuck in the crossfire. Amat was slain – split in twain to become Tiamat and Bahamat, the two dragon gods – but the war raged on.

Unable to endure this war the spirits of nature waited for an opportunity – the Grand Conjunction when the elemental and divine realms were closest to mortality – and struck against the gods, using two great weapons:

The first was born of Mawra, spirit of predators, and was a great beast of indestructible power – known as the Tarrasque – which sought to consume all beings of divinity.

The second and greater of the two was born of Nurgle, a spirit of pestilence, and became known as The God’s Plague. This pestilence was carried to the Elementals by Nurgle, and to the gods by Mawra.

The God’s Plague spread through both sides of the war, infecting their essence and driving them to peculiar insanities. The southern sun and moon were first to show the effects – Shamedan’s heat grew, burning the southlands ever more intensely, while Procan first reached upwards, then threw himself into the ocean while ranting about the powers beyond the stars.

Eventually all the gods, and all their immortal children, would grow equally insane, and so Corellon and Io sought to save their people by pulling from them their sparks of divinity.

The Fey

Corellon first attempted to save his people by isolating them – pulling them into their own dreams so that their divine sparks could be safe. In doing so he created a whole new realm of reality, the land of Fairy, a dreamlike mirror of the mortal realm. But while he succeeded in creating a new world he realised that he himself was infected – and that this infection would spread regardless of his actions. Thus he changed his plans – pulling the divine sparks from almost all the fey, concentrating it into the lords of the fey courts whose job it became to dream Fairyland into existence.

The fey he had pulled into Fairyland became split among the “high elves”, or eladrin, who maintained their separation from the dream and held themselves tall through pride, and the gnomes who became part of the dream, made of illusions and fragments of the nature around them.

The fey left in the mortal realm had many different fates. Some lived in the forests of the central lands, and those became the “wood elves”, living in concert with and as part of nature; but most lived in the southlands and were faced with death beneath the burning sun. More than half died within the first few weeks of becoming mortal, but the rest found themselves forced to choose a path. Some changed themselves to be as harsh as the desert, becoming the desert hags, a race known for their worship of fire; others copied the snakes and crawled beneath the sands to live, becoming known as the “dark elves” or drow; a third group chose to dive into the oceans, becoming the first merfolk; and a fourth chose a darker path – they sought to follow the souls of their dead friends, and found themselves in a new mirror of the world, the Shadowfell, created as a place for immortal souls to go after death – these became the “shadow elves” or shadar-kai.

The Deva

Io reacted more slowly to the threat, having first to study its nature, but once she did she began systematically extracting the divinity from her children. The majority of deva became humans, a simple race that possessed a thirst for knowledge beyond most others.

Some of the deva however had been in different forms when their sparks were removed – and those found themselves stuck with their transformation. Those in mammal forms became the bestials, capable of changing from animal form to beastmen though not fully back into a “civilized” form, but those who had taken non-mammal forms were permanently stuck in a hybrid form, losing most of their intellect in the process as they became Harpies, Lizardmen and other such monstrous humanoids.

Io’s delayed action meant that a whole city of his people kept their spark too long, and became infected with the plague. These became the rakshasa, a dangerously amoral immortal race that would do anything for knowledge – no matter who might be hurt – and experimented on every other race.

The Dragons

With Amat dead, and Tiamat and Bahamat still reeling, there was no-one to pull the spark from the dragons – leading to them all becoming crazed with their megalomania, and most of them dying in battle with one another. Their children, the dragonborn who had been created for them to rule, became their successors, running the dragon-cities as they always had just without the dragons lording over them.

The Greenskins

When Procan entered the ocean, he brought with him change and monstrous entities, serving as a portal to a realm that should not be. Many of the merrow sought to flee the corrupted ocean – and so they did. Most fled on to land and islands, becoming the orcs – a race of pirates and sailors known for raiding the coastal lands – but some found themselves pulled through the portal, and became known as the gith, green skinned warriors that could swim through the void as though it were water, with minds attuned to the impossible.

 

And with that, the second age of the world began – a world where immortal and mortal races collided, and crazed gods begat even more crazed devils.

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References   [ + ]

1. Manchester Metropolitan University
2. actually named Amy – the Amys had to be distinguished so one became Shiny and the other Purple for their respective obsessions

Gaming History: Ste

Amy’s blog post from last week ends about where this one begins: shortly after we met.

My first ever roleplaying experience was at 19, joining her weekly gaming group for a one-shot – a D20 Modern game in which we were all soldiers sent into a building full of eternally reanimating zombies (one got minced – it got back up a while later, as a humanoid shape composed entirely of blood and viscera). It was a very utilitarian example of roleplaying, because the characters were hardbitten soldiers the in character thing to do was simply fight the enemy and not worry about personality clashes.

My second game is the one I usually talk about when explaining my introduction to gaming, because it’s one that really seems to have set the tone for everything since. Once again it was a D20 modern game – well, D20 future, but it’s the same system – and this time I was playing a Tough character, I was the Obligatory Bodyguard Boyfriend 1)the male equivalent of the Obligatory Healer Girlfriend trope.

I started the character creation process as a normal human soldier, but during character building the GM suggested my character might have suffered injuries from an attack in his past, so he ended up becoming a Cyborg Soldier. All well and good.

In session 1 we were sent to investigate what was causing a small region of people to mutate into animal-esque forms – we were given gas masks, antibiotics and antivirals to ensure we weren’t affected. Unfortunately, in session 2 we discovered the we were changing anyway, and my character swiftly became a Cyborg Bear.

In session 3 we had abandoned our previous chain of command, having been ordered to eradicate all the mutants, and had instead decided to investigate the source of the effect on our own. We soon discovered that it was caused by nanotech, and headed for a nearby shut-down nano-lab in an old army base. My character, being somewhat clumsy, accidentally set off the base defenses near the entrance to this building, which we then had to destroy – damaging the wall and causing it to vent a thick cloud of mutagenic nanites. I was now a Cyborg Bear With Spiky Metal Fur.

In session 4 we were following up a new lead, sending us onwards to a city based nano-factory that was apparently spewing out the same animalising nanites. We made it a good way into the city, coming across a shockingly small number of people and a shockingly large number of military robots, and as the session ended I came across a vial of some strange chemical – and pocketed it for later study.

In session 5 we reached the factory. It was surprisingly small 2)nanites eh? and unguarded – but as we approached we were attacked by a giant mech, and found ourselves once again fighting for our lives. We defeated the mech, but it activated a self-destruct function. It was right next to the wall of the building… and out came a ploom of mutagenic nanites. Now savvy to the situation, I dived out of the way; but not fast enough – it turns out that my cybernetic limbs weren’t very agile, especially when they were inside a bear, and the spiky metal fur really wasn’t helping matters. So I became mutated once more, gaining glowing green eyes (and night vision). Then the GM remembered the vial in my pocket – that had shattered, and it contained mutagen too. I became a Giant Superstrong Cyborg Bear with Glowing Green Eyes and Spiky Metal Fur… I had a constitution of 30, at level 3.

That game didn’t last beyond that – I think the GM struggled with the level of silliness it had reached) but I played a few more games with that group, including one in which I was a werewolf with a leather whip fetish who specialised in tying people up (specifically his whip had been bound with the spirit of an anaconda and was extremely good at keeping people bound – it was inspired by Wonder Women’s Lasso of Truth).

Then I moved on to GMing for my housemates and some of their friends. We had a D&D 3.5 campaign for a while, with members dropping in and out as we found out who in our group actually liked playing tabletop RPGs (or at least, who liked playing it when I was running – I was very much a novice at the time so my plots were lackluster).

As the other players in that group became more experienced we started taking rounds running different games. And then the uni year ended, and many of us moved, after which the group started falling apart. I joined a university roleplaying society, and had fun there – especially once I got introduced to their sunday boardgaming nights and discovered the joy of a deep boardgame – and eventually ended up meeting Loz and Ali there, through a mutual friend named Iain, and joining up with their gaming group.

That’s the story coming next week – the first game we played together.

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References   [ + ]

1. the male equivalent of the Obligatory Healer Girlfriend trope
2. nanites eh?

Gaming History: Amy

I didn’t get into gaming until I moved to Manchester at age 18. The people I was hanging out with were into Magic: the Gathering and they got me into it too, serving as my gateway drug for gaming. I bought my first deck but a lot of my cards at the time were given to me by my then-boyfriend Stuart, who gave me a shoebox full from his collection; it slowly grew bigger and stayed with me even after the relationship ended.

At that time I would spend most of my day, after looking for work, at Fanboy 3 playing Magic and watching all kinds of games – not just MtG but RPG’s too.

It wasn’t until a couple years later that I played in my first RPG, a Buffy game which was fun but didn’t go too well. We were playing the pre-made characters from the book, which I think was the first thing that was wrong for me, as I like to make a character with a story and explore the world and the stories in that world through their eyes. I started out playing one kind of witch and switched to one that had more story, that was still from the book (because I had joined the group late and the GM liked players to use premade characters) by the beginning of the next scene. I did have some fun with it, and I played to the end of the story… I think. I don’t remember anything about the other people or their characters – I was playing with people I didn’t know which may have been one of the reason it didn’t work for me

I started playing RPGs with a regular group soon after that – with my best friend and Dan, my new boyfriend of the time, we met once a week for a game. We played modern d20 which was my first meeting with the d20 system – I was playing a techie who was a mutant dolphin person, I had metal armour before the rest of the party, which was needed because my dexterity was terrible [turns out, Dolphins are not agile on land], because I made it myself.

That campaign and Character taught me few things, like it was more fun to make my own character and how much fun it was to be something i’m not – having created my own character let me feel very proud of her achievements.

Having found both a new job and a new hobby, I gave the magic cards to Dan, put Spycraft and other card games to one side, and focused on the roleplaying which I enjoyed more.

I played in the same group for a few years and we played a few different systems and settings like Werewolf the Apocalypse, and BESM [Big Eyes, Small Mouth], though not all went as well as my first game with that group, such as our In Nomine campaign which never fully got off the ground.

With Werewolf I liked the world and story but hated the system – especially trying to get honour to level up which you mostly got from killing things; I was playing a smart schoolgirl who didn’t get much chance to kill. This lead to people leveling up at different times even though we had all contributed – something I’ve tried to avoid in games since.

I game for same reason I write, or read, to get away from me and the real world. To be someone else for a bit, to be able to do the things I can’t do like be able to move like a gymnast or a monk or a cat, or to able to play with tech in ways I can never understand, and make magic.

I like to make a character with a story and explore the world and the stories in that world through their eyes – so when the mechanics get in the way I tend to either ignore them or as for help in working around them.

The BESM game was the first time I GMed – it was ok for my first campaign, though a bit clunky, as I didn’t own the book and hadn’t read the whole thing – and I hadn’t played in a game with that system which is how I generally run games now since my dyslexia makes it hard to fully read a rulebook, I learn by playing and have Ste help with the more mechanical parts of running.

Sadly I had to leave the group not long after I met Ste but the Magic cards came with, not just my shoebox but pretty much the whole collection as my ex, Dan, passed them on to Ste [Ste Note: I’ve now declared that these cards don’t belong to me, they belong to whoever Amy is with – but hopefully the difference will remain irrelevant :-)].

Once we left, we started up own game with him running and I’m able to make better character now, making them a bit more well rounded.

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Gaming History: Loz

I’ve been gaming for so long I genuinely can’t remember the details of my first games. I was 12 when my older brother Tim got into Warhammer 40k. So I played 40k against him, and lost a lot – but I enjoyed it. I think he had Eldar, Orks and Space Marines, and I used his models as I didn’t have my own.

For I think my fourteenth birthday I received the Warhammer Fantasy boxed set. It had elves and goblins in it. I built an orc and goblin army, and played that for ages, against my brother’s dark elves, and against my friends various armies – it’s at least in part from here that my lifelong dislike of fantasy dwarves stems, because of a friend’s really cheesy dwarf army.

Somewhere around the same time I picked up my first role playing game – Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I honestly cannot remember most of the games we played with it, they probably made little sense as we didn’t know what we were doing, I mostly remember creating characters by the dozen. It clearly triggered something inside me though, because I’ve loved RPGs ever since.

By the time I was doing my A-levels (17ish) I had a regular gaming group, and we played White Wolf’s various games (Vampire: the Masquerade, Mage: the Ascension, Werewolf: the Apocalypse), and Dungeons and Dragons second edition. Planescape is a fantastic setting, but due to having too few players we played two characters each – I had Bjorn Bjornson son of Bjorn Bjornson’s son Bjorn, a taciturn norse fighter, and his twin brother a wild mage named simply Krapotkin.

I went to university in Bangor. I went there hoping there would be a gaming society of some sort. It turned out they had what was at the time one of the largest and most respected university gaming societies in the country – Bangor Wargaming and Role Playing Society, or BWRPS. I also met Ali there.

While there I played and ran just about anything I could. I was rarely in more than three games a week though, which was probably wise – I knew someone who was in eight (one every night and two on Sundays), and he failed his course and dropped out! That’s not to say my studies were unaffected by gaming – in my third year I would regularly go to a Vampire game run by Ali on a Tuesday evening, play until 2am, then go home and work on my project until my nine o’clock lecture in which I would frequently fall asleep!

I also played a lot of different wargames at BWRPS, including various historical games, something I still find interesting but don’t really get a chance to do any more. I kind of stopped playing any wargames after a while, I never really intended to, it just happened that way.

After graduating I lived in Bangor for a few more years, it’s a very pretty part of the world and I had good friends there, but eventually I managed to escape and moved to Manchester, where i stil live. Here I fell in with Vague, Manchester Metropolitan University’s gaming society. Here I’ve played and run a lot of different RPGs as well with a lot of very good people over the last decade or so.

But to bring things full circle rather nice, I’ve recently finished playing in a Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (second edition) game, and the latest edition of 40k has got me back into the game as well – my Space Marine army even has some of my brother’s old models in it! .  

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Gaming History: Ali

Ste suggested we talk about ‘our first game’ That’s tricky. First played, first rpg, first time GMing?

 

As a kid, I remember two gaming moments distinctly. One was my sister deciding the way to win at Monopoly was to be the banker. The other was the summer I decided to ‘solve’ the Choose Your Own Adventure book I’d been given, by going full on decision tree. Two months and lots of computer paper later, I discovered there wasn’t actually a path from start to win. Several endings where you died or failed or some such. But the win didn’t track from the start. Moral: plan your games. I still don’t entirely, but i generally have a shape to how I expect things to pan out.

Fast forward to Uni, and I joined the RPG society. Sucked in by the ‘Have a Go’ LRP (technically LRP was a sport since you needed insurance) I turned up to a roomful of fellow nerds – some of which were even girls! No longer the Only Nerd In the Village!

My first proper rpg was Whoops King Arthur there goes the Round Table! I played Sir Bruce Sans Pitie, pretending to be Lancelot, and later pretending to be several other knights. The line I remember was the closing one. Most of the PCs crashed through the ceiling from Guinevere’s room into the Great Hall, where Mordred was looking forlornly at a lone cupcake. Arthur extracted himself from the pile and said “Happy birthday, son, we got you a sex-scandal-o-gram!”

The following week we had Whoops Sauron there goes the One True Ring. Totally sensible starting point. Moral: have fun. Now I work in gaming, some things I play are not necessarily what I would choose to. But there’s a joy in sharing time with my mates, in taking turns to play different people’s ‘most fun’  If I didn’t enjoy making game for other people, I’m in the wrong career!

Then I settled down to a Discworld campaign – playing an Ex-Sacrificial Virgin, and a Shadowrun campaign, playing something magical I think, but that didn’t last all that long, because we ran into a problem. Mike wouldn’t play in Alvar’s game, Alvar wouldn’t play in Mike’s game, Ian didn’t want to run two games in a week. So the group suggested I could GM. Mike had a load of the adventure modules, and I stumbled through most of them over the next couple of years – including one summer where we played five times a week. Oh the halcyon days of youth. Moral: try to maintain a work /game balance

Since then I’ve played several Vampire games; a long running Werewolf campaign set in Canada, full of epic poetry and snow; and a lot of DnD 4th. I’ve dipped my toe into most of the big systems, and had more indie and oneshots than would be feasible to namedrop. – last Nationals it was easier to tell them the categories I couldn’t run for! Long campaigns I’ve run include a lot of WOD – often crossover. All of those are firmly in the “action and antihero with horror elements” category – I don’t do well with true horror.  Moral: find what you like, and explore that. Until it gets old, then find something else.

After a long time of playing the local linear LRP,  a bunch of us went to try this new fest called Maelstrom. I had five characters over a decade of play, and loved each one. The perfidy of betrayal, real tears at loss, the joy as schemes came to fruition, the anger at invasion of our lands, and finally being on ‘the winning (surviving) side, leading a procession of converts into the sunset Moral : throw yourself at games hard, and they will reward you with experiences. I still play the next game from the same company , Empire. After six years,Sofia i Del’Toro i Riqueza has quite some depth, but I haven’t finished her story yet. The clan is growing, and we’re starting to be a political powerhouse.

I’m currently in a 13th age campaign, although this year I’ve dipped in and out of other short games as work and health dictate. I’ve been doing a lot more boardgaming, and recently dug out the cardboard crack which is MTG – and discovered that some of my cards are valuable, but most of my decks can’t play in anything other than casual. Moral: variety is the spice of gaming

So there you go. A whistle stop down Memory Lane. Why not share your weirdest gamer story with us? If we get enough, we might even publish some of them!

 

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Geeking About Gaming: Amy on Board Games

 

I love playing board and cards games, but I’m not very competitive – it feels nice when I win, but I will happily play a game that I know I never win, such as Power Grid.

I prefer games that encourage polite socials interactions, like cooperative games such as Arkham Horror: The boardgame is actually my favourite game as it’s a game that not only encourages you to work together to beat the big bad but does storytelling in a very elegant way.

Arkham features another two elements I like in a game – firstly its design is cohesive, and I find that cohesive design make that game easier for me to pick up because it feels like it just runs smoothly. Secondly I tend toward turn based games, like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan, both of these games I like to play, although I never win I often come second, which is a significant improvement on my previous tendency towards last place.

We’ve started playing deck building games which bring back for me some of the things I used to enjoy about Magic the Gathering without spending anywhere near as much and without the sore winners that you sometimes come across in that world.

I like how I can sit there building my deck quietly and there’s usually a theme or some cards that I like to put in – like in clank, I’ll always try to get the cute cat, I know this is bad in some ways [Ste Note: That cat is seriously powerful – it’s not a bad choice at all] but it makes it fun for me and the last thing I like about this game is to watch the deck roll out – and these games I can win sometimes.

Another type, I tend to quite good at is betting games but this is a thing that has taken some time because I’ve gotten better at working out the odds – though I’ve always been good at the social aspect.

There are a few games I really don’t like, like Werewolf and The Resistance: I know most people see these as social games, but I find the behaviour they encourage uncomfortable, the accusations making me feel targeted at times and these games seem to encourage fighting, and may be left team up with someone who being a dick to you, since the teams are random and I know in the end I can be happier to make him lose than anything else because he’s a sore winner – so I think these are more anti-social games than social ones.

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Geeking About Gaming: Loz on Board Games

What do I like about board games? Well that’s a difficult question. I’ve been a gamer for over two decades, but my primary interest is roleplaying games, and then tabletop war games, with board games falling somewhere down the list. My first introduction to this form of geekery was when I was 12 and my brother introduced me to the original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader (not the more modern RPG of the same name).

So what attracts me to these things? I guess the answer is creativity. I like the creating stories in RPGs, and I like the lore and background of wargames, plus the emergent story of how a battle plays out – I often theorise about how unusual things happen, like the Space Marine with a missile launcher defeating a Striking Scorpion in close combat by shoving a Krak missile somewhere unfortunate! I like the tactics of wargames too, and enjoy that in RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons – In all honesty I’m not very good at it, but I do enjoy it.

So what pushes board games down the list for me? Part of it is simply a lack of experience, it’s not something I grew up with in the same way so there is less emotional attachment. Another issue is rules – I don’t much like learning them. With an RPG or a war game I’ll likely have to learn the rules once and then use them many times, but with a board game that is less likely to be the case as they are usually more limited in scope and so have less replayability. Oddly this isn’t helped by the fact I am actually quite good at analysing rules, which means if there is a particularly good strategy I can often see it even if I can’t actually master it in practice.

So what do I like? I like storytelling games, and I like games that are rules light (or at least quick to learn) but have some depth. I also prefer competitive games to co-op games because playing against other people provides a different challenge than playing against a simple AI (Artificial intelligence in computer games is another matter – it can be significantly more complex and less predictable).

I do like creating games – it scratches a similar creativity itch to writing, but with a more mechanical bent. I try to design games I think I would enjoy so previously it has mostly been RPGs but recently, at the prompting of Ste and Amy, I’ve been thinking about board games. I have ideas, oh so many ideas, but I don’t know how many will actually end up working out. I guess only time, and experimentation, will tell.

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Geeking about Gaming: Ali on Board Games

This month, we’re looking at board games. Loz and I play less than the other half of the team, so a few weeks back we went to a seminar on board game design. The fundamental question they told us to ask is “What makes this fun?” Who is it fun for, and what elements add to that kind of fun? Then one can work out how to make that kind of fun – be that problem solving, storytelling, surreality or whatever.

Not everyone enjoys the same things, so we’ve been thinking about what kind of games we like, as sample gamers, and this will hopefully help us make better games. May be not as technically brilliant, but more fun.

Me, I hate playing anything where the winner is pretty much “whoever owns the game”. I loathe the idea that a new player (especially if it’s me) can make a fundamental error through ignorance and just not stand a chance. I accept that there’s skill to most games, and that strategies develop with time. But it would be nice to think I’m not just fodder for a foregone conclusion. Conversely, I also dislike games where the outcome is totally random. Snakes and Ladders will not be featuring on my top ten anytime soon.

Best example of this ‘newb = loser’ problem is the Serenity boardgame. There is a best winning strategy here, and it basically goes *SPOILERS* get River Tam as fast as possible. I remember one evening playing through the game three times (someone had got it for a birthday and wanted to thoroughly road test it), and by the third one, we had resorted to making up our own stories about the cargo we were carrying, and pretty much ignoring the progress of the board part of the game.

One metric to consider is the “Christmas Day Test” Assuming you got this game for Christmas, how soon after that could you play it? Most boardgames, it should be a couple of hours or less. Wargames take a little longer if you have to paint models. RPGs, you need a group of mates, so that could be variable, but how long does chr gen take once you sit down with the book?

When Ste asked what my favorite mechanic is, I went with “incremental increases, slow build up of power”. I play a lot of RTS on computers, and my standard strategy for those is to fort up. Lots of towers, troops parked at chokepoints, and climb the tech tree. So I kind of like boardgames that have this element. Ticket to Ride, Stone Age and Privateer have all been played multiple times, and still have replayability.. I once played Lords of Waterdeep – and barring that it took ages to set up, that was great fun too.

Oh and in a complete opposite, quick little social games. I boardgame largely because my mates do, and so something a bit silly fits this nicely.. Braggart, In a Pickle and Ninja Burger fall into this category. Oh, and as a side effect of the mates I have, we tend towards words rather than numbers. That may seem odd for a bunch which contains multiple dyslexics – but words have more clues to meaning than numbers.

I guess I’m not a good fit for a boardgame market sample because one of the answers to “what games do you like” is ‘new ones’. That’s why I love the idea of boardgames libraries. Play something different every time!

That’s nice lead-in to giving a shout to our friend over at Dungeons and Flagons, who are doing a day event for Free RPG day on the 16th of June. Hmm, I’d better write something for that!

By the by, anyone who does Empire LRP, I’ll see you in a field this weekend. Hope for some good weather for us.

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Geeking about Gaming: UK Games Expo, Grokking, Modding and Creating

UK Games Expo was a draining weekend for me, followed by an unfortunate cold, so I’m a bit late in getting this up for you – but hopefully it’ll be interesting.

This month we’re concentrating on looking at various experiences and inspiration we each have with tabletop gaming – and I’m going to be talking largely about the most recent experiences at UKGE itself.

We met a lot of new people, but I’m not really going to talk about that today because social interactions are complicated and not really something I excel at – even if Board Games do make that much easier for me.

Instead I’m going to talk about the elements of Boardgames that speak to me more than the rest of our team:

Grokking Games

Loz likes learning new games – and may well talk about that on his week of this subject – but he tends to only go one-step deep with most games. He’ll play them until he fully understands the rules, and then move on. That early stage appeals to me, but I tend to be more of a deep-diver: once I understand a games rules I need to learn its metarules. 1)For an example, a simple metarule of Sudoku is that if you have two numbers that each have only the same two spots in a row/column/box they can be in, then every other number is impossible for that pair of boxes, even though they haven’t been filled. I then need to prove my understanding of the game by beating other players – but the winning isn’t the goal, that’s easy if I can choose my opponents, it’s the understanding that matters to me.

At something like UKGE I don’t have the opportunity to grok games without buying them. So, of course, I buy some of them. This time around I bought a discounted dice-crafting game called The Masters’ Trial and a simple munchkin-esque game called Champion of Earth. Both seem flawed, to some extent, but they also each have a level of fun.

The Masters’ Trial is quite a deep game, so I don’t know it after a few hours of play, but it lacks somewhat in the theming arena, and in the way the boxes contents are arranged when first unpacked – a lot of effort got put into some things, while others just missed the mark. Specifically – the cards are organised by card name, but have to immediately be reorganised by which deck they go in 2)yes, cards of the same name go in different decks. It makes sense in context and despite the fact that each monster is tied to one of the four elements they are all lava beasts…

Champion of Earth is a bit too easy to grok for me, so it’s not likely to get much play during my “serious gaming” time – but it’s a less cruel, and more pop-culture, version of Munchkin so it’ll probably see some play with my many friends who aren’t as deep into gaming. It also seems to lack the one player mode mentioned on the box – we’ll be asking the designers about that, given as we were chatting with them at the Con.

Modding Games

Talking about player numbers, we encountered Game of Thrones Catan at the con, but were unable to properly try it as it needs a minimum of three players (like all Catan games) – which inspired us to start discussing rules changes that would make it work for just me and Amy.

Modifying games is one of my favourite long-term hobbies. It started with computer games, but my programming skills are sub-par so I could never actually implement things like the four extra balanced teams I designed for Starcraft, so I eventually moved onto things like custom M:TG cards and houseruling board games, where I could actually implement my thoughts.

Making Games

Modify something enough and you make something new. For instance we did some more playtesting of Clash of Blades – our Swordfighting Card Game – at UKGE; it’s a game that started off as a concept of “How would magic look with a completely different resource system” and now looks basically nothing like M:TG.

Making something more purely innovative is where our story-telling memory game Adventurer’s Backpack comes in. We created it whole cloth, because we understand enough other games (including storytelling and roleplaying ones) that we were only taking a single thread from each – making the game as a whole new from its very beginning.

Of course no matter how you get to making the game, you then have to go right back round to the top – grok it, then mod it, rinse and repeat – because it’s never going to start out perfect.

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References   [ + ]

1. For an example, a simple metarule of Sudoku is that if you have two numbers that each have only the same two spots in a row/column/box they can be in, then every other number is impossible for that pair of boxes, even though they haven’t been filled.
2. yes, cards of the same name go in different decks. It makes sense in context