Pirates vs. Vampires: Alaric Anchorman

I've had a couple of insanely busy days and I have several lengthy posts that require a little more thought before uploading them. In the mean time, I present one of the players characters from my Sunday Pirates vs. Vampire game...

Alaric Anchorman
Description: Think Jean Luc Picard meets Jesse Ventura: bald and bold with a strong passion for military might and discipline. Unlike Piccard, Anchorman is ready to mix-it-up with his crew. He uses persuasion to achieve discipline, not the whip (i.e. not like Capt. Bligh of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame)

Cliches: Swashbuckling Lieutenant of the Royal Navy (4); Extreme Conditions Survivalist (3); Entertainer Specializing in Song and Accordion (3).

Hook: Strict disciplinarian (may snap or operate at a penalty when discipline fails). He also has a sense of duty to his crew.

Languages: English and Spanish.

Lore: Versed heavily in Royal Navy doctrine. After the Royal Navy comes a strong dedication to God. Having seen superstition nearly turn to mutiny, he is very opposed to the occult.

Tools & Gear: Multiple rapiers, several dozen pistols, a dozen finely crafted rifles, several throwing knives, two waterproof cases for his prized weapons. He also has access to various ship-board equipment.

History: Alaric Anchorman was born in Antigua to a very large family that produced tobacco, ginger, and indigo. He sailed on several trips to England and became obsessed with the sea. His family found it tough to control him, so the Royal Navy was deemed a good place to introduce order & discipline into an unruly child. His uncle, Capt. Allan Anchorman, is a captain of a Royal Navy sloop and oversaw Alaric's upbringing. At 12 he was a midshipman. At 17, he passed his lieutenant's exam. He has been eagerly awaiting the chance to command his own vessel. He is adapt sailor and fighter. He runs a tight
ship, but is respected by his crews.

Weekend Update

Word of advice to GMs who are also parents: do not schedule back-to-back games following hours of wrangling attention-starved two and four-year-olds. This is especially true if you are sleep-deprived and don't have your adventures totally mapped out ahead of time. Young children can easily suck the creative juices right out of you and therefor make it very difficult to come up with interesting encounters on the fly.

I learned this yesterday while attempting to run my latest Gurps 4e Knights of the Astral Sea session followed by out inaugural of Pirates vs. Vampire online Risus game. It's not that Knights was a bad session. I think we had a good time and there were definitely some memorable moments (including a running joke about owlbears). But I had been running this game for about six months with the express purpose of getting to the events of this session. I just don't think I lived up to my own hype.

A brief digressions...

Knights of the Astral Sea is a steampunk/pulp/dimension-hopping game inspired by such varied sources as the recently re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and Joss Whedon's Firefly. On a alternate 1930s-era earth in which the Great Powers have discovered inter-dimensional travel via specially modified airships, an off-world enemy initiates a cataclysmic ritual that brings about the end of the world. The player characters, lead by a swashbuckling cheese tycoon, manage to escape the devastation and find themselves racing through the Multiverse in attempt to regroup with survivors of their Homeworld empire.

Yesterday, my players finally reached the rallying point for Homeworld's survivors. It was a key moment in the campaign and I can't help but think that I fumbled the ball a little bit. There just wasn't enough tension or conflict. Hopefully, it's not too late to make up for it. Next time we play, the players will be venturing into Faerie to find the Once And Future Queen (who should then unite the people, take the fight to their enemies, and build a glorious new society in exile).

Back to Risus...

Last night's Pirates vs. Vampires game was really about testing the waters. Two other players showed  up and we played with full video for the first time. Not much to say about the session as we were mainly trying to relearn how to do play-by-chat. We did have fun, though, and I am definitely looking forward to beginning the game in earnest next week.

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: Mad Jack

To get my Pirates vs. Vampires game started, I thought I'd post my own personal character that I hope to run alongside the regular PCs (and as a full player character when the GM duties are shared). 


John "Mad Jack" Murphy

Handsome Irishman with unruly brown hair and a three-day beard. His brown eyes alternate between communicating the joy of new love to the mad fury of one who has watched his lover's heart ripped out by vampires.

Cliches: Swashbuckling Vampire Slayer (4), Disgraced Jesuit Alchemist (3), Navy Surgeon (3).

Questing Dice (Kill All Vampires): [] [] [] [] []

Hook: Tragic Love (driven by love; doomed to have his heart continually broken)

Languages: English, Irish Gaelic, French, Latin, and Greek at the very least. As a classically educated Jesuit alchemist (and world traveller), he can make a TN roll to know a variety of other languages.

Lore: Versed in a variety of Catholic rituals (including blessings and exorcisms). Also knows a number of common (and not-so-common) alchemical formulations. Examples include but are not limited to the "Elixir Vitae", unusually strong solvents (but no the Universal Solvent), Soma, and chemical light. Mad Jack can improvise or research new formulations, though this usually counts as not having proper tools.

Tools: A blessed crusader sword of the finest Damascus watered steel; 2 silver throwing knives; a blessed hawthorn stake, a hammer-backed hatchet; vials of holy water; communion wafers; two flint-lock pistols (with silver and lead balls); silver crucifix; rosary; small silver mirror; garlic; pocket bible; other (unspecified) vampire hunting tools; ship-based alchemy lab; occult library; surgeon's bag.

Other Gear: Personal affects (though the grooming kit rarely sees use). Keeps mementos of past loves.

Backstory (not a full Tale): Irish Catholic second son who entered the seminary to become a Jesuit scholar. As a Jesuit, he learned alchemy, became a missionary, and was seduced by a vampire. After his fall from grace he enlisted in the Royal Navy as a surgeon and achieved enough success to begin courting a virtuous maiden of good family from Bath. When his love was slaughtered by his former vampire paramour he dedicated his life to fighting the undead scourge. When he drew the notice of the Undead Secret Masters he was forced back out to sea as a pirate, or vampire-hunting privateer as he likes to think of it.

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.