Year Eleven

It feels really crazy to think that this last year was the 11th year of doing this weekly Tessera Guild blog. I’m not sure that I would have thought I’d still be doing it when we started this website, but it has been a great help to ensure I do a little bit of writing (random as it may be most of the time) every week. It also makes an interesting way to look back at the previous year and see what blog posts I’ve written still ring true to me… or stick out in some way. That way I can highlight them (otherwise they get lost in the internet ether).

 

 

The Worst Game I Ever Played

It’s not all rainbows and unicorns when you go to a gaming convention. Especially since Egg and Lee and I tend to try games and gaming systems we normally don’t get to play. Such a bold move can sometimes lead to really cool discoveries. Other times it can lead to sessions which are probably best left forgotten.

And then, finally, there are those games which still haunt me to this very day. Will I ever escape?

Image by Gianluca from Pixabay

 

The One Where I Don’t Get Seasick On My Very First Cruise

My whole life I got motion sick when riding in cars if I wasn’t in the front seat. I’m not sure if my parents really knew that because I tried not to make a big deal about it. But it made family trips a bit of a literal headache. Flashforward to me preparing to go on a cruise for the very first time…

 

The Reason Why – In Our Dreams Awake

I started up a series of blogs where I talk about… well, The Reason Why I wrote the story/book/comic. It’s been an interesting exercise to try and really drill down to the origins of some ideas. Given that we had a successful Kickstarter for In Our Dreams Awake #2, this seemed like a good time to get into it.

 

The Song of Your Life III

I look through my music collection and nearly each album… hell, each song has a little personal moment for me. A signpost on the journey of who I was to who I am now. Through “The Song of Your Life” posts, I try and focus on some of those songs and stories.

 

Rebooting the Marvel Universe

Given the success of Marvel Comic’s new Ultimate line and the DC Absolute line, this blog feels all the more timely, even if it started as an answer to a question asked on Twitter. How do you restart the Marvel Comic Universe from complete scratch?

 

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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

The Worst Game I Ever Played

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I was doing my blog for the week of Gen Con where I give an easy compiling of the links from all the years I’ve gone (and you can find that “index” here), and rereading some of those old posts got me into a great mood for the upcoming week of gaming. However, it reminded me that somehow, someway I have never really talked about the worst experience in gaming I’ve had at Gen Con. And I feel like enough time has passed that it’s long since over due.

At Gen Con 2019, Egg, Lee, and myself played in a later night session of a game called Amber. Now before I get too into what worked and (mostly) what didn’t work, I realize that just because I didn’t have a great time during the game didn’t mean that the other 30+ players weren’t having the times of their lives. And that’s obviously OK, too. But…

First, this is what I said about the game at the time:

I kid Egg about diceless games, saying that they are Communist. Mostly I prefer games with dice… then again, I don’t have the horrible luck he does (seriously, it is odds defying). Amber is one of those diceless games that’s been around for decades, but none of us had ever played. Based on a series of novels I learned a few things about the game.

First, the people who are into Amber, are REALLY into Amber. Think of your favorite series of books (probably Game of Thrones or Dark Tower for me) and then multiply that love you feel for them by a hundred… and you’d still be short. They know everything about the world… everything…

Which can make it a little bit to penetrate such a thick history. The story seemed to trump everything throughout this session, which I’m not sure if that is how most Amber games go, or just more of a GM preference. I must admit that this one didn’t work for me. In addition, it ran over by 2 1/2 hours, so we didn’t get done until 2:30 in the morning, which threw off our schedules a bit for the remainder of the weekend (that lack of sleep starts here).

***

The first and immediate thing is the diceless thing. I’m probably never going to be onboard with a diceless roleplaying system. I feel like one of the things I like about the games I play is the uncertainty factor. The idea that there is a little bit of fate being pulled and pushed in various directions for me or my fellow players to react to. The joy at succeeding on a roll that could tilt the entire session/campaign in one direction or another. The agony at failing your die roll and suddenly having to scramble to find some way out of the predicament you find yourself in as a result of the disasterous roll… those are the moments I love.

At the same time I can also admit that much of the dice rolling during the course of a game may not really matter. If you have a perception roll for everyone in the party, more than likely you only need one person to have a success for all the players to effectively get the same knowledge… leading us to the question of why bother with the rolls in the first place? And we all have had the fun and excitement of a combat that runs on for far too long due to both the heroes and the villains not quite rolling well enough to sway the battle to one side or the other.

However, within this particular session, the idea of not using dice meant that everything was more or less determined by the GM only. Roleplayers talk about adventures in the terms of railroading the players or open sandboxes which allow those same players to pick and choose what they want to do. The idea being that the GM and the players should look to build a story together and not just exist at the whims of the GM.

He had more agency as a ghost than we did as players.

The problems with the session were as follows:

The Characters we were given/came up with had very little agency within the story. And this wasn’t a case where we (personally) we not getting agency, I don’t believe anyone really was. At one point, the three of us came up with some simple way to tie our characters together only to be told that we should be at odds. OK, no big deal. So we changed that and then immediately the story changed so we were tied together.

The GM was writing his own fan fiction. That night, long-since seared into my brain, felt completely like the GM had written us a fan fiction within the world of Amber and somehow we were all unwittingly playing a captive audience under the guise of roleplaying. To the point where after we had already exceeded our time slot, he proceeded to read page after page from his notebook detailing how the adventure’s story was to end. If there was any doubt that our character’s actions had any affect on the story he constructed, I’d been hard pressed to figure it out.

Too many players. I think there were at least twenty players for this game and one GM. Many of the things that we and other characters we doing by interacting (roleplaying) was completely lost because there was no need to check in with us if another player had somehow grabbed the spotlight.

One player tried to grab the spotlight. In college you have grad students who act as assistants to the Professor. They can help teach the class when the Prof is unavailable. They can grade assignments, etc. In this session, what that meant was helping to control the narrative to make sure whatever character you were playing had the most impact upon things. Oh, the guy did it in a very shrewd way by talking with players at the beginning and then being the point man for the GM. However, it got to a weird point where his voice was simply the loudest one in the room (and we were playing in Lucas Oil Stadium, so that’s saying something).

The session went over by 2+ hours. Listen, we’re all there to play games. Sleep is for the weak. Chicks dig narratively driven scars from tortured characters. But it is one thing to go over by 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and another to just disregard everything when it comes to time so that you can tell whatever story you wanted to tell.

Could we have left early? Oh yes, we could have left at the alloted end time of midnight. But I don’t leave games early. And I especially wanted to see if it would somehow turn around or remain the train wreck it appeared to be.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

***

The joke is that we actually are still playing Amber. The Shadow still grips us, and nothing we have done since is real. The three of us are forever stuck in an unending Hell where we can only watch as the story proceeds around us, never interating with anything… ghosts to a world who had long forgotten we were even there.

And much like any cautionary tale, I will not bother with trying to play another session in the hopes it was just a bad experience. I could not do that to myself. Living through it once had been more than enough.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

Gen Con 2019 Recap – Part One

For a third year, I managed to make the pilgrimage up north to the great state of Indiana and another installment of how many hours of sleep does a person truly need.

Also known as Gen Con 2019!

This year we stayed at the Westin, which was amazing as we were directly across the street from the Convention Center. It meant we could sleep in another 10 minutes or so, and when it came time to walk back to the hotel, it wasn’t a 15-minute walk, but more like a 5 minute one.

Day 1

Heroic Dark

Thursday began with a 10 AM game of Heroic Dark, which was developed by the same guy who did the Sythicide game (of which I ran a short campaign of around 10 to 12 sessions last year). Heroic Dark comes with an interesting premise in that the group gathered to play end up coming up with the setting and genre that they are going to play. The Creator mentioned that he’d game mastered a previous game where it ended up being Sailor Moon style girls fighting the big bad. Basically, each person has the opportunity to add something to the game based on some categories laid out before you: Monsters, Magic, Races, etc. So you could end up with anything from a Fantasy world to a world where, due to the development of some wickedly awful technology, humanity is now using demon parts in order to build their mechs. And the Angels have had enough, vowing to terraform the planet in order to start over.

We’d laid out a bunch of thoughts: Demons, zombies, mechs, terraforming, angels, and so on, and that’s where we ended up. Then, the GM had about 10 minutes to come up with some kind of story to run us through. Talk about putting yourself under some pressure. But he managed to bring together an adventure where the spare demon parts were disappearing, and it was up to us to figure out what was happening to them (turns out the Angels were purifying them and then using the now holy parts to fuel their own war machines).

The game is currently available in playtest form, with a Kickstarter likely due next year. You can find the game here!

Mutants and Masterminds

Normally when it comes time to pick the games, I leave it mostly to Egg, as he is the game guru. However, since the very first year, I’d wanted to find a way into a Mutants and Masterminds game. I’d read and heard, over the years, that if you wanted to play a superhero roleplaying game, it was the one to go to. This session ended up being a jaunt back in time to the Golden Age of comic books. A time when the Flash was not Barry Allen or Wally West, but a man named Jay Garick. A time where Superman leaped over buildings rather than fly.

Running as the Justice Society, Superman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman, Hawkman, and Hawkgirl (yours truly) attempted to save a woman wrongly convicted of murdering her husband… but we only had a handful of hours before she would be sent to the electric chair. Mobsters were rattled, giant robots were battled, a train was stopped from going over the edge of a ravine, and the mastermind foiled!

Using a pre-generated character was interesting, but it also meant there were TONS of stats to navigate through. All three of us liked the game but wondered how easy it would be to pick up if you were starting a new character using the system.

 

It was finally time to sneak over to the Dealers Room, which was just as enormous as it had been in previous years. It always seems like the first time in that room you are just trying to get a foothold on where some things are located. Throughout the weekend, Lee and I managed to make it through the whole thing probably twice, which is our best run at it so far.

After dinner, we ventured over to Lucas Oil Stadium to play on the field.

Amber

I kid Egg about diceless games, saying that they are Communist. Mostly I prefer games with dice… then again, I don’t have the horrible luck he does (seriously, it is odds defying). Amber is one of those diceless games that’s been around for decades, but none of us had ever played. Based on a series of novels I learned a few things about the game.

First, the people who are into Amber, are REALLY into Amber. Think of your favorite series of books (probably Game of Thrones or Dark Tower for me) and then multiply that love you feel for them by a hundred… and you’d still be short. They know everything about the world… everything…

Which can make it a little bit to penetrate such a thick history. The story seemed to trump everything throughout this session, which I’m not sure if that is how most Amber games go, or just more of a GM preference. I must admit that this one didn’t work for me. In addition, it ran over by 2 1/2 hours, so we didn’t get done until 2:30 in the morning, which threw off our schedules a bit for the remainder of the weekend (that lack of sleep starts here).

 

Day 2

Song of Ice and Fire

Sleeping as late as we could, our next game was to see the Song of Ice and Fire game system. However, when we arrived we realized that this game wasn’t exactly what we thought it would be when we selected it. Using the roleplaying game’s rules as a base, it was really a LARP (Live Action Roleplaying) which meant that you moved around the room and interacted with other players while a Jousting tournament was going on.

I just wasn’t in the right mindset for this one. Maybe it was the experience from the night before or just not getting locked in with my character, but I wasn’t feeling it. The session was interesting enough though, and some of the moves people did during the game turned out to be very interesting. The final recap at the very end opened my eyes to some of the possibilities I might have been able to explore had I been a little more engaged.

***

That’s the end of Part 1, next week I’ll finish up Day 2 and reveal the best game I played all weekend (by the same company as a Best game of Gen Con from a couple of years ago!).

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John McGuire is the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. The Trade paperback collecting the first 4 issues is finally back from the printers! If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Want to read the first issue for free? Click here! Already read it and eager for more?

Click here to join John’s mailing list.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow EmpireBeyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com