Preparing for Pirates vs. Vampires

I'll probably break out the Adventure Funnel later tonight, once I have time for some clear-headed creativity. Meanwhile, I thought I'd catalog the various resources that I'll have at my finger tips when running Sunday's play-by-post Pirates vs. Vampire game.

Rules

• Risus: I don't really need to refer to it anymore, but it's good to have around for the groovy vibe that it gives off.
• The Risus Companion: I'll have it handy because there are a couple of Target Number charts to which I occasionally refer and haven't completely memorized.
• The Mythic Game Master Emulator: I'll need to have this handy if I decide play alongside my players or if I want the action to veer into really unexpected territory. There are a handful of charts that will see constant use.
• Mythic Variations: I'll probably use some of the variant event tables to better reflect the genre (Action-Horror). 

Name Generators

• Kleimo: Not as useful as it would be for a modern or near-future game, the random names pulled from real social security data are still useful for (mostly) anglo-saxon non-player characters.
• Chris Pound: Again, not quite as useful as it would be for a straight-up fantasy or science fiction game but there are still some useful tables for faking names from non-western cultures.
• Seventh Sanctum: Contains generators for pirate ship names, tavern names, and a few culturally-specific character names. Lots a stuff, really. Worth checking out.
  
• Everyone Everywhere: My go-to-list for names by culture.

Mythic Complex Questions

• Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: The url for the last entry is http://www.bartelby.com/81/17757.html. To randomize, simply roll d20,000, discard anything over 17,757, and then change the url accordingly. The results are often arcane but surprisingly well-suited for generating ink-blot answers appropriate to the genre and era.
• TV Tropes: Has a Random Item button to produce a random trope that can be exploited for certain complex questions. More likely to produce anachronistic results than Brewers, but the cinematic potential is much greater.
• Wikipedia: The random article link can produce a huge variety of material. I just use the first genre-appropriate idea that pops into my head. Though it can produce some real head-scratchers, it is especially good for geographical questions.
  

Other

• AEG's Ultimate Toolbox: Pricey for what amounts to be a giant book of tables, but many of these tables are highly appropriate to the Pirate genre. It was an impulse purchase that I hope to justify by heavy use in this campaign.
• UNE: It stands for Universal NPC Emulator. I don't find it that useful for NPC emulation, but it can be used to help create interesting NPCs when otherwise stumped.
• Instant Game: More useful tables, especially for generating settings.

Online Play

One of the great things abut Risus is its suitability for online play-by-chat or play-by-post games. If you have ever played either type of online game then you will probably agree that the pace, as compared to traditional face-to-face games, can slow down to a crawl. Games that might seem perfectly playable on somebody's dining room table become extremely unwieldy was transported to a different medium.

Disregarding the obvious problems of play-by-post games*, play-by-chat games slow the speed of communication in an exponential fashion. Maybe it's because of the slowness of typing (especially for two-finger typers like me) or maybe it's the lack of audio-visual context. Whatever the reason, the pace of these games limits what can be accomplished in a session and scenes with intense die-rolling, rule-checking, and tactical decision making seem to drag on and on. It becomes very difficult to produce that kind of seat-of-your pants excitement that should be possible in face-to-face games.

But this is where Risus comes to the rescue. Combat (and any other action sequence modeled as combat) is typically over very quickly in Risus. There isn't a lot of back-and-forth discussion of rules and tactical decisions are rarely important. Combat resolves into a few die rolls and the narrative abilities of the players involved to make things exciting and interesting. Speeding up combat makes room for more combat (and other cool activities) and hence a great deal more can be accomplished in a given session.

I know folks who love tools like Open RPG. I've personally used Screen Monkey on my Dragonspire game a few years back.  But as I prepare for Pirates vs. Vampires, I think I'd like to simplify things a bit. We're going to use iChat with audio and possibly video. That should speed things up a fair bit, though I may miss the transcript. I'm also not going to worry about preparing pretty maps at all (that was another cause of slowness in Dragonspire). For dice, I'm probably going to use a real-time dice-server like Hamete. Other than that, there's nothing to it. No need for  fancy character sheets or NPC trackers in Risus.


* I should note that while I love the idea of play-by-post games, I find them impossible to play for reasons entirely unrelated to speed. My problem is that they are always on and that I tend to get into a mode where I feel the need to respond to posts at all hours of the day. For me, it makes it much more difficult to get anything else done.

Pirates vs. Vampires

I week from tonight I hope to commence my first play-by-chat game in over two years. I don't yet have a fancy name for the campaign, but the working title right now is "Pirates vs. Vampires". I have not, as of yet, done a lot of preparation. In fact, the game will be something of an experiment in build-as-you-go world-building. In addition to cranking out content for this blog, I am already running two face-to-face games (a Gurps 4e Steampunk/Pulp/Dimension-Hopping mash up and Slaying Solomon). I simply won't have the luxury of detailing the world to any great degree of detail.

What I do have, however, is a simple and compelling premise. The campaign takes place in a fantastic (horrific) version of our own Golden Age of Piracy (early 1700s). The hook is that vampires rule the world from the shadows. Our heroes are privy to this terrible secret and have taken to seas for their own survival and to strike back against the commercial interests of the undead aristocracy.

For inspirations, I'm obviously going to rely heavily on the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movies for look-and-feel. I also like the aesthetic of Brotherhood of the Wolf, though it is slightly anachronous. Literary sources for swashbuckling goodness primarily include On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers and The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.

For the vampire elements I'm going to be mostly traditional. The whole reason the characters will take to the seas is that most vampires will possess stereotypical gothic vulnerabilities. Moving water and the high seas (not to mention the sunlight of the tropics) will be problematic for them. While (named) vampires will be complicated characters with a whole host of motives, they will not (by and large) be sympathetic. No Twilight-style sparkle vampires here! Vampires have to be scary to be effective antagonists. I'll save the rest of the vampire details for a spoiler-filled post later.

Back to my lack of time to prepare...

I have various tools to help me in this. For creating fully plotted adventures, I hope to use Dr-Rotwang's Adventure Funnel (first mentioned on this blog here). Once I figure out my spoiler policy, I hope to actually post my funnels as I come up with the. Additionally, the pace of play-by-chat games make me think that I'll be able to use the Mythic Game Master Emulator to assist in running free-form sessions. It's not so much that I'd have difficulty improvising from scratch, rather I might enjoy running a character next to the players and being surprised by what happens. The Mythic GME also has some wonderful tools to help move a game in unexpected directions. When improvising on my own, I often fail to consider the really interesting cases that might otherwise arise from the Mythic approach.

I forgot to mention the most obvious tool for a GM with minimal time to prepare: Risus! Can't beat Risus for whipping up a game in a hurry.