Live, from Gen Con

Well sorta. It's almost 1:00am here.

The day is ending on Gen Con Day 2.
I just finished running a marathon day of Ghosts of Albion: Obsession today.
Both groups were fantastic and I had a lot of fun.  Both group also managed to save a few of the NPCs before the demonic janitor did them in.

So my purchases have been non-existent.  I stopped by many booths today to say.  Talked to George, Derrik and Alex at Eden.  The new Hack/Slash game looks like it could be fun. Got to say hi Matt McElroy from DriveThruRPG. Stopped by to see the guys at Cubicle 7.  Andrew was in a my afternoon Ghosts game so that was awesome.  Nice parity since I was in one his early Victoriana games.
Said hi to Cam Banks at the Margret Weis Game booth.  Love to write a new magic system for Cortex, something awesome and cool and something people will want to buy and enjoy playing.
Kurt Wiegel of Game Geeks was in my night Ghosts game.  That was a blast.

Tomorrow is costume day and Day 3 of Gen Con; AKA the busiest of the whole con.  I have no major plans.  I had considered running some Ghosts games, but I am hoping to get some emails back on that.

Need to come up with a new Ghosts of Albion adventure I think.  Blight and Obsession were an absolute blast, but I don't think I can talk about Miriam White anymore.

The Dragon and the Phoenix: The Dark Druid

A Gen Con treat for those of you who can't make it to the "Best Four Days in Gaming".

The Dark Druid: The Director's Cut

- Download here -

A bit of history.  Back in 2002 Eden was getting ready to release their newest game, The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game.  As you know, I had already been playing a Willow/Tara focused WitchCraft game for about a year, so I was pretty excited by this.  Well I got asked by Eden to write the first Buffy adventure that would appear in "Games Unplugged" along with an interview with C.J. Carella talking about the game.
I took an idea I had been working on for my other game (tentatively called "All Soul's Night") and thus the Dark Druid was born.

The original featured, rather prominently, Willow and Tara, as to be expected.  I had to make some changes to make it playable for others and to make it an "intro" or season opener type episode.  The plot dealt with an enemy from the Cast's past as a portent to greater evil in the future.  It was designed to be a opening episode of the season, but one that may or may not be directly related to the seasonal arc.  We were going to use this i n part of the great "Djinn" story, but that never happened.

Fast forward a few years and I was finishing up work on Ghosts of Albion and another adventure that sprang from "All Soul's Night" called "Blight" (which I have played at Gen Con before).  I felt it was time to bring back the Dark Druid and restore it to the mythology that I had created in my games.  Now you can have it too.

I updated it not only to fit better with my world-myths, and with some of the work I did on Ghosts of Albion and the adventure Blight.  In fact you can run Blight and The Dark Druid as co-adventures, separated by time.

The story is rather direct and linear.  This was partly due to the nature of the story and what is was supposed to do (introduce new players to the game) and part of just me writing for the Buffy game for the first time.  I have opted not to change that here, despite nearly 8 years of Cinematic Unisystem adventure writing since then.  It is supposed to be a quick, fun little adventure dealing with past lives.

Enjoy!

Coming Attractions

So what is on tap here at the Other Side post-Gen Con?  Well I'll do some blogging about Gen Con, especially if I buy something.  But here are my big plans.

Cortex
I like this little system ad want to do some more with it.  I especially want to look at Supernatural, Demon Hunters and Smallville.  I have already seen some really cool posts on somethings people are doing with Smallville.

Super Hero RPGs
I also want to spend some quality time with some of the new super hero RPGs I have or will have bought.  As a quick rundown I want to look at DC Adventures, ICONS, BASH, Villains and Vigilantes 2.1, and Smallville.

Since my goal will be similar in each I might spend one day each week covering the game in question, instead of a week to look at one game in depth.

Horror Games
Every so often I feel like I am neglecting my RPGs of choice; Horror.  So I want to also spend some quality time with Slasher Flick and Little Fears.

Putting my money where my mouth is...

So I spent a lot of time and text ripping into Outlaw Press, James Shipman and his art stealing ways.

See:

• http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2009/12/outlaw-press-uses-stolen-art-and.html
• http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-from-outlaw-press.html
• http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2010/06/outlaw-press-is-back-and-still-stealing.html 

So I have decided to put my money where my mouth is.
I am going to buy a copy of Tunnels and Trolls directly from Flying Buffalo this week at Gen Con.

I have no idea what edition, what book or anything.  But I want to show my support this way.  It looks like 7 (or 7.5) is the most up-to-date edition.  But maybe an older edition would be cool to have too.

If you are going to Gen Con and want to support one of the true pioneers of our hobby, then I suggest you do the same.

SyFy stealing Amber Benson's "Drones"?

Non-game post today.  Just something that has me all irritated.

Syfy (formerly "The SciFi Channel") has always been on the verge of falling into complete suck to me for a long time.

I used to love watching their shows a few years back.  "Farscape" was one of the coolest "space" shows ever and "Lexx",  well I am still not sure what Lexx was all about, but it was fun to watch.

Well now SyFy (and I do hate that new name) has a new show coming out called Human Relations.  Here is their blurb for it released last week:

"The Office meets Men In Black in this project featuring an office Temp who slowly discovers that his off-kilter and odd-ball bosses at the strange hi-tech "ad agency" where he works are really aliens working on plan to destroy the Earth."

Sound familiar? I thought so.
Here is the blurb for Amber Benson and Adam Busch's movie Drones,

"The Office meets The Day The Earth Stood Still...is about a guy who works in an office with a kooky, off-kilter boss/co-workers, who then discovers that he's really working with aliens who are plotting to blow-up the Earth."

I know stuff like this happens all the time, and sometimes it even is innocent enough.
This does not look like one of cases.

I would love it if you could all shoot SyFy an email to let them know that stealing ideas from indie film producers, while it may happen all the time, is still not cool.
Shoot them an email at feedback@syfy.com.(though their email seems to be clogged now).

If there is one thing I can't stand is when someone steals an idea (esp to make money) and pass it off as their own.  So regardless of how you feel about SyFy, Amber Benson, TV or indie movies, this is obviously wrong.

Links
Amber's Facebook Page, http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1235011957&ref=ts
Her Blog post, http://amberbensonwrotethis.blogspot.com/2010/07/drones-tv-show.html
Drones Website, http://dronesmovie.com/
Some reports from others:
http://airlockalpha.com/node/7676/is-syfy-original-series-not-so-original.html
http://www.fangirltastic.com/content/did-syfy-rip-amber-bensons-new-film-drones-you-decide
http://angrygreekdyke.blogspot.com/2010/07/oh-fuck-no-we-are-boycotting-syfy.html
http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49514754.html?page=2

Ghosts of Albion and Gen Con

Good News, Bad News.

Let's do the bad first.
There will not be any copies of the Ghosts of Albion core rulebook at Gen Con afterall. 
To say I am disapointed is putting it rather mildly.  I am going to withhold my frustration about this, well, because I should.

I wish there was more to say on that, but there isn't.

Ok. Lets do the good news now.

I would LOVE to run another pickup game of Ghosts of Albion: Obession or even Blight if anyone wants to join me.  I am not sure what my bandwidth is going to be like, but I really would like to do this.

So.  If you are going to Gen Con and want to play and didn't get into the scheduled times, please email me at timothy.brannan@gmail.com and put "Ghosts" in your subject.  If I get enough people I'll run it.

Frankly. I am not sure I will be running Ghosts at Gen Con after this.  So this might be your last chance.

A Tale of Two Supermen

I have stated here in the past my preference for DC Comics heroes over that of Marvel.  Don't get me wrong, I read the hell out of Spiderman and X-Men as a kid, and reading The Tomb of Dracula was one of the things that got me into horror full scale.
But I have always liked DC's heroes more.  To me they were always more heroic than their Marvel counterparts.  So it should come as no shock that I am MAJORLY geeking out since I have not just one, but two DC-based RPGs out now.

 

I have seen both games now and I like them for very different reasons.  DCA is of course the sibling to the new Mutants and Masterminds 3.  It has some changes from the previous editions, most of which I am thinking are needed.  Abilities are rated different, and there are some new ones.  But all in all I like it.  

Smallville is Cortex but it is VERY different than previous versions of Cortex.  This is both good and bad.  I like the character creation system and it appeals to my desire to create a detailed character.  I like that the system has been opened up to play all sorts of different kinds of games now.  I can completely see how Leverage will work now.

Plus I still have Icons and BASH to look over, a full Cortex review to do.

I'd like to do up a character that works in all these systems.  I think I have the perfect choice too.  A while back we re-started our supers game and the world was a mixture of DC and Marvel.  Basically DC was Golden and some Silver age and Marvel was Silver and some modern age.  We were doing post modern.  Well I had read "Kingdom Come" and it dealt with Supes, Batman and Wonder Woman in a new age.   The final scenes dealt with Batman discovering that Wonder Woman and Superman were going to have a baby.  I thought wow, how power would that character be?  Half Kryptonian, half Amazon and Batman as a godfather?  Yes.  So that was my character.  Details to follow.

All of this will have to wait till after Gen Con of course.