The Laundry Files rpg part 2

Continuing on last weeks theme of the Laundry Files RPG, I have now read GOD GAME BLACK and I'm in the process of reading the Agent's Handbook.

I love GOD GAME BLACK . It's insanely well written and oh so informative.

Although it seems to bill itself as ”just” the follow up book to the original core book, documenting the events in Stross's Apocalypse Codex, its' actually so much more.

I'm of course not going to go through the whole book bit by bit, but the best, most valuable part in my opinion is the section concerning the Black Chamber.

The Black Chamber, or Nazgul as they're also called (but not to their faces), is the American equivalent to the Capitol Laundry Services. But they are a really terrifying lot. If you thought the Laundry could play rough, the Nazgul take it to another league altogether.

Being the biggest and most proactive of the occult agencies, the write up they got in the core book was in no way enough. Here you get all you could ever wish for. And then some more.

All in all a very useful book for running the games in the Laundry-Verse, but not perhaps for other CoC games.

The Agent's Handbook is luckily more than just the gear book. It is that, but it also goes through what's needed to succeed as a spy as well as expanding a great deal on life and death (and after life) in the Laundry. After all, you can't always go out cult-hunting. You also have to file the appropriate paper work. Otherwise something much scarier than the odd soul eating beast will come after you. Namely Human Resources and Financial Control.

I haven't gotten far enough in the Agent's Handbook than this, so it'll have to suffice for now.

Have a great week!

The Laundry Files rpg part 1

A couple of weeks ago I went past my friendly local game shop, or FLGS for you who are familiar with RPG abbreviations.

There I ran across the Laundry RPG, based upon the laundry files novels that I reviewed at the start of this blog. I was immediately tempted, particularly since it struck me that my idea to use side campaigns to illustrate historical happenings fits perfectly into the world of the Laundry.

I took some time to think it over, and two days later I plonked down some cash and picked up The Laundry Files together with some source books. I laid my filthy paws on the Core Book, the Investigators Handbook, License to Summon, The Mythos Dossiers and GOD GAME BLACK. Unfortunately Cultists Under the Bed hasn't been released yet. There is an adventure book – Black Bag Jobs as well as a GM screen, but I decided against them. It got expensive enough as it was.

I thought it'd be in order to share my impressions of these books. I say impressions and not experience since I haven't yet had time to play.

Let's look at the core book first.

It's really well written, first of all, and the art is solid. Not perhaps the best I've seen in an rpg book, but very cool none the less.

The rules are the familiar BRP rules used in Call of Cthulhu since it first crawled out of the squamous ooze of pre-history, also known as 1981. But they've been updated and expanded since those days.

New to these rules are things like Computational Demonology and the whole package is really well adjusted for what you need to “get” the Laundry-verse.

Naturally, you get a lot of info on the Laundry itself, it's international colleagues, and lots of other interesting stuff.

It's a hefty read though, hard covered and packing 288 pages. That said, it's easier to get through than I had expected, and a really good read besides.

Like all good core books, it contains all you need to play, if not all you want. This leads us to;

License to Summon.

This is the magic book of the series (if you want to be crass about it) but it is also more. Rather than just list a bunch of spells, it takes you through computational demonology as well as traditional sorcery, psychic power, dreaming, alchemy and more. Speaking of more, you get a really nifty section of gear that would make Batman jealous. He never had an anti zombie aerosol...

I get an almost Mage the Ascension feel from it, though of course not as free form. But the lads at Cubicle 7 have really thought about this stuff when they penned this book.

Finally for today, I want to talk about The Mythos Dossiers.

This book is a bit hard to pin down. It contains detailed write-ups and files on the major minor mythos races, but it's not a monster manual. Since the Laundry is a part of the British Secret Service, everything is officially re-designated, so the Deep Ones are called BLUE HADES, and the Elder Things are known as ANNING BLUE SKULL, with the shoggoths ANNING BLACK.

This book is amazing, one of the best rpg supplements I've ever read. It really made me think about what these beings are, and what they can do. If you run CoC or indeed any of the multiple variations thereof, get this book!

As an example you get to read about what happened during OPERATION HIGHJUMP (real event by the way), as the U.S. Government investigated the aftermath of At the Mountains of Madness.

That's it for this time. When I've had the chance to read the rest, I'll post the second part.

Iä Iä and all that.

Crime pays!

The last couple of days have seen me pretty busy playing Payday 2.

Created by Overkill Software, it's the sequel (no kidding) of the original Payday the heist.

Like the original which I never played, and thus won't be commenting on, the point of the game is to commit heists and robberies.

The game is designed for up to four players, and although you can play with less, and even with bots if you like, some of the more advanced missions really require a full team. That said, I'd rather play with three than use a bot, since the AI is a bit limited.

During one mission that I soloed while trying to learn what's what, one AI companion just stood leaning against a wall instead of shooting at the police.

What really makes this game though is the possibility to stealth through almost any mission. The sense of accomplishment that comes with being able to pull off a “perfect crime” when the plans really comes together is awesome.

Of course, most missions seems to – in this writers experience – devolve rather quickly into a vicious gun fight with the law. Some missions even start that way, and can't obviously be stealthed.

If you want a fun co-op game with good opportunities to plan and sneak, Payday 2 delivers. If you want to pull off daring crimes with your friends, Payday way well be your game. Or if you like wearing a suit and a creepy mask, go for it!

All in all, this great game is as close to real crime as I want to get.

Show us your ID!

This weekend I've had a very interesting gaming related experience.

My wife and I used to play Star Wars The Old Republic when it launched, but like with all games you can only play it for so long. So we quit. That's not the interesting thing by the way. Wait for it.

Recently we haven't been gaming all that much together, and we've missed it. Mostly it's been a combination of no MMO and pretty different tastes in other games.

Anyway, we decided to re-activate our SWTOR accounts, in order to game together. Now the easiest way to do this is to purchase some game time from Biowares online store. Except they have some kind of error going on with that, which meant that neither of us could complete the transaction. Lots of people have encountered this error, so it wasn't just us. Also, it was Sunday, so we couldn't nip down to the nearest Gamestop and pick up a couple of game time cards.

Back in our WoW days we often ordered our time cards from an online store on Åland – an island between Finland and Sweden that belongs to Finland. They have slightly different tax laws there, so some stuff is cheaper- but they were out of SWTOR time cards. The only remaining thing to do was to look around for another online store with cards in stock, and who delivered the time codes via email.

Eventually my wife found one. Fast2play.com. She ordered them, paid for them (payment guaranteed by Visa). And we started to wait. Here comes the interesting thing.

They sent her an email demanding to see a scan of her drivers license. Yeah, a copy of her ID card to complete strangers... Not!

She mailed them back demanding to know what for, and this is what they eventually said: Our security system has detected suspicious activity with your account!

Suspicious activity? Buying two time cards with a value of less than 50€? Using their own process? On an account a few hours old? Pardon my language, Ladies and Gentlemen, but that's utter BULLSHIT!

Finally the missus said, forget it, your service is unacceptable, refund our money asap!

What do they do? They – to our enormous surprise – actually send us the codes. Without seeing a copy of her drivers license. All this back and forth took several hours, one reply from them taking almost two hours to arrive, and it's content was pretty much: “please just send us your ID already”.

The codes came with a slightly snarky comment in the vein of “We already sent you your order, what are you whining about?”

Now I don't know if we were really unlucky, and Fast2play.com is an awesome business, but dammit, you don't give out that kind of info to strangers, that's the first thing we teach children about Internet Safety! We've ordered things like contact lenses and E-cigarette stuff that's been considerably more expensive than these measly game cards without any such hassle.

Imagine you want to buy the latest book from your favorite author. You enter the bookstore and pick one up. Then you think, “hang on, my friend is going to want one too, I'll get it for him now that I'm here”. You then go to the register to pay, but the clerk tells you that you queued suspiciously, and she's going to have to take a copy of you ID, and keep it. Would you still buy those books? Don't think so....

Use Fast2play at your own discretion, but in all honesty I can't recommend them. They were polite, but that's the only good thing I can say with a straight face.

Movie Night

So as you know, a couple of weeks ago, we were without internet. In a desperate effort to stave off the madness, the missus and I decided to watch a movie.

Looking around at what we had laying around that neither had seen, we decided on Robin Hood (2010). This film seemed to have everything going for it.

1. Directed by Ridley Scott, the man behind amazing classics like Alien, Gladiator and Blade Runner.
2. Russell Crowe as the kick ass protagonist.
3. A great supporting cast with luminaries such as Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow and Matthew Macfadyen.

Yet despite all this, the movie stunk to high heaven! We gave up after roughly an hour. It was all wrong. The timing, cinematography, dialog, everything.

I clung on to the hope it would improve with grim desperation, but finally I had to surrender to the inevitable. It should have been to medieval England what Gladiator was to Imperial Rome, but no. Lousy is all I can say. Avoid at all cost.

Instead we put on Priest (2011) a (sort of) post apocalyptic vampire slaying movie. It wasn't a great movie, but it was entertaining, and that was all that mattered. If dystopian wastelands, futuristic frontier stuff and vampires appeal to you, go for it!

With some time left we rounded off the evening with The First Men in the Moon (2010).

This is a remake of the 1964 H.G. Wells film of the same name, and boy did we like it. It had a wonderful whimsical atmosphere, almost like a Lovecraftian fairytale. Two men in 1909 go to the moon with the help of a sphere coated in Cavorite, a gravity nullifying substance invented by one of the main characters.

Well worth watching!

Details details

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about my experimental idea for running historical off shoot games from your main campaign.

Today, we're going to take a look at some useful tricks for running a game set sometime in the past.

Like with all projects the devil hides amongst the details, and historical gaming is no different.

Obviously there's no point in turning your campaign into a historical lecture, but you have to include enough vital facts and details to make the era come alive. Otherwise your Roman campaign is just “now but with togas”.

Most gamers will probably head to the armory first of all, and it's a good place to start. Find out what the major weapons of the time was, at least in general. What you find may surprise you. For example, the first pump action shotgun was designed in 1882, well in time to hunt Jack the Ripper with, should the need arise.

Naturally, the closer your game is to the present, the greater the availability of weaponry becomes. But assembling a list of the most popular firearms of the day, will be the first step in creating a good setting.

Next, look at clothes and fashion. This may seem as a bit of a lame thing to do, but it's vitally important unless every one in the world runs around in their birthday suits. Again, you don't need to go nuts here, but a couple of examples of what men and women wore amongst the lower, middle and upper classes should be enough. That's twelve pictures you have to hunt down and show the players. Not all that arduous eh?

Take a quick look at food and drink while your at it. This is not necessarily all that big of a deal, but as a reminder; any game set in pre Columbian Europe can not feature the humble potato. It has yet to cross the Atlantic. A small but important detail.

Next is transportation. What were people driving in, or were they driving anything at all? Again, a couple of the most prominent examples will do fine.

By now I'm sure your starting to get the idea. Thanks to the plethora of film and movies set in all kinds of cool eras, it's getting easier and easier to bring these times to life again.

Naturally it get's harder the farther back you go, but funnily enough, the same happen when you only go say, twenty years back. Take a look at a random X-files episode and look at what kind of technology is and isn't available. Remember that in 1993 cell phones were practically non existent and people actually faxed each other instead of using email. But keeping straight what happened when it's still so close is sometimes maddening.

Finally, I want to talk about the hardest detail; talking.

This is not something I enforce too rigidly in my games, as it gets very tedious after a while. Too many Prithy good Sirrah, and you will all be likely to try kill each other. I like to keep my players somewhat aware of their characters social standing at least. I don't want the Baronet of Whitlington to scream “Fuck you, I told you to waste that asshole”, when he could say “Damn you, I told you to kill that oaf” without spraining either his tongue or my ears.

That's it in a nutshell. With the easy availability of smart phones it's become very easy to quickly check years or events without holding up the game too much.

Now you just have to find a balance between what you feel your game needs and what your players will put up with!

Good gaming!

Damnation!

Not much of a post today, since I'm without internet, and have been all weekend.

You see, I ordered a new connection(?), and of course it didn't work. My ISP still haven't gotten off their behinds to fix it, so I'm writing this from work.

Regular updates next week. Hopefully...