Let’s be good to each other this year, too!
Another year has come to a close, and as I relax on the laziest day of the Japanese year, I naturally think about all the great gaming I have done over the past year, and my plans for next year. Although I only have one gaming group, which we loosely refer to as Team WTF, and this year our gaming group’s cohesion has been compromised by life commitments, it’s been a pretty great year. Here’s a brief review of our main campaigns and the one-offs I have enjoyed in this year of gaming.
New Horizon Campaign
Our regular, ongoing campaign has been our Cyberpunk campaign, set in the fantastic multi-tiered city of New Horizon and GM’d by the Fantastic Mr. E (not me). This campaign started in 2014, and we’re up to the 16th or 17th session, all of which I have recorded here. Most of my campaign reports are written in the voice of my character, Dedicated Retribution Unit 471 (Involuntarily Demobilized), aka The Druid or Drew. Drew is a 19 year old girl with pscyhopathic tendencies who is good at only one thing: shooting people. She is also very poorly educated and not so bright, and playing her is really fun – she’s been one of the most entertaining characters I ever played, and an excellent evolution from a similar girl I played in a Feng Shui campaign some years ago.
This cyberpunk campaign has been a GMing revelation. Our GM has put so much effort into the world and the plot, and produced such a convincing world and adventure, that even though we all agree the system sucks (seriously, Cyberpunk 2020 is bad news), we have been completely immersed in our world and really enjoying every aspect of what has been a very tough campaign so far. This campaign will probably end sometime around March, which means it will be up around 20-22 sessions and have lasted 18 months, a pretty sterling effort for a group of working adults. It will be, I think, one of the most memorable campaigns I have ever played in.
After the Flood mini-campaign
I managed to GM a short campaign called After the Flood, set in a post-apocalyptic ocean world based on the books by Stephen Baxter. This world has been flooded by some geological catastrophe (not global warming) and all the land but for a small patch of the Himalayas has been drowned. Set about 70 years after the catastrophe, the campaign followed the adventures of a small group of operatives for an ocean community called the Gyre, as they first tried to recover some vital information on lost resources, and then explored a possible lost community in the Arctic. This campaign was run using the Cyberpunk rules as well, because they seemed suited to the low-tech and basic nature of the world, and although it was only six or seven sessions long it was a really enjoyable world to game in. The game reports are on this blog, along with a bunch of background material, but I wrote the whole thing into a book that you can download in pdf form.
GMing this campaign was a lot of fun, even though it had no magic and was very rules-lite. I intend to revisit this again sometime in the next year, but to run it using a Fate-type system that is a bit more freeform and a little less punishingly stupid than the Cyberpunk system.
Spiral Confederacy Campaign
I also started GMing a Traveler campaign in a post-scarcity space opera setting called the Spiral Confederacy. We’ve only played four sessions so far with a reduced crew, on off-sessions, but it has run well and I’m enjoying it, though rumours have reached my ears that some of my players find the system itself boring. The settings so far have been great – an exploding space station over a blockaded desert world, an encounter with a huge and super-powerful space ship, and an ice planet with strange spiders and behemoths – and the PCs seem to have been caught up in some kind of human trafficking mystery by their own stupidity.
I’m really excited by the possibility of a big campaign arc for this setting, with a lot of mystery and conflict along the way, and hoping that in 2016 this can become our main campaign commitment once Cyberpunk finishes. It’ll be my first Traveler campaign in 20 years and hopefully will involve wide exploration of a galaxy that is part Culture, part Firefly and part Star Wars. I’m hoping we can achieve big things in the gulf between the stars this year!
One-off adventures
In 2015 I also joined a couple of one-offs, though my work schedule prevented me from enjoying all the games our group played. I GMd two sessions of Warhammer 3, running an old Warhammer 2 adventure, Slaves of Destiny, for two stupendously strong Dwarf PCs, which the players say they want to continue with more players in 2016. At the beginning of the year I joined an entertaining Dark Heresy adventure set in the Hive Desoleum, playing a fanatical voidborn seeker called Suleiman the Lost. Playing Dark Heresy is fun because it is so comically grim, and you can really let out all your inner demons in a world where no one is innocent and no measures too extreme. The adventure I joined was finished in a subsequent session, with a lot of heretic-burning and sacrifice before the chaos was hunted out and destroyed, but I wasn’t there for that, unfortunately. I don’t really like the Dark Heresy system, which is a shame because the universe is a lot of fun. One of our members, Tall B, objects to Dark Heresy as a campaign setting on the grounds that it is too grim, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this.
We also played a session of Seventh Sea, which I never got a chance to write up, in which I played a hilarious little arsehole called Tom Fumb, a tiny thief who “goes where ‘e’s gotta go, to do wot’s gotta get dun.” The Seventh Sea system is entertaining and it held a lot of promise but the session got drawn out and exhausting in a duel that no one could win (broken combat rules, I think). One of Team WTF’s members, Grim D, wants to run more of this, so I think we’ll be revisiting it sometime this year. More Tom Fumb will be awesome.
Finally I got to sample a brief End of the World adventure just before Christmas, my first ever attempt at playing in a zombie setting, and it was fun but not as satisfying as I expected. I missed out on Dragon Age, which the group ran as a 2-3 session mini-campaign, so I think in total this year I missed one Dark Heresy, a couple of Dragon Age and one Cyberpunk session.
Experimental writing
I also tried my hand at writing a few short stories for this blog in 2015, something I might try and do a little bit more of in 2016. I wrote a brief cyberpunk story, Naming Rites, about the past of one of the campaign characters, that got linked to on Reddit and attracted a tiny bit of attention. Along the same theme I wrote a bit of background for my cyberpunk character, Drew, called Russian Ghosts, and she also tried her hand at travel writing in A Siberian Druid in Venice, in which she takes a brief trip to Venice after killing the Pope. I wrote that while I was in Venice, as my attempt at offering a critique of some of the museum-like aspects of that strange town. I tried out a few other voices too, for example Gael the Plague Doctor in the Loser’s Vignette, my report of a Darkest Dungeon (computer) gaming session that didn’t work out. A lot of my writing is based on game reports, for example the attempt at fragmentary stories for Cyberpunk session 16 (Chaos Vignettes), but this year I aim to try my hand at a little more writing from outside of the games. I have also written a few personal posts this year, about growing up in the UK and Australia, and dealing with family, and I might put a little more of that on the blog too this year – I have things I want to say about growing up poor, and maybe some more historical gaming experiences to talk about. If I can find the time …
Gaming plans for 2016
In total this year I think I played or GM’d on average every fortnight, and our group met slightly more frequently than that, though we weren’t all present at every session. That’s a really excellent level of gaming for a group of adults in their 20s to 40s, with all the life commitments that adults have. I’m hoping that in 2016 we can maintain the pace. We lost one member, Killkat, to a different country, so we need to recruit new members. For 2016 I aim to explore other groups a bit, to see what else other people are doing and look for new members, but my main gaming goal for 2016 is to run a full-blown Spiral Confederacy campaign with Team WTF, and to see what fantastic adventures they can take me to in that universe. Let’s enjoy gaming together in 2016!
Compromise and Conceit 
January 1, 2016 at 8:38 pm
Nice! Must ask though, is the irony here intentional?
“This campaign was run using the Cyberpunk rules as well, because they seemed suited to the low-tech and basic nature of the world…”
Just made me laugh, that Cyberpunk is suited to a low-tech world.. Anyway, Flood was definitely one of the two best things I played in 2015!
January 1, 2016 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for commenting Killkat! It’s funny isn’t it, but I think it’s true. The PCs had slightly lower stats than in the Cyberpunk campaign (values of 3-5 instead of 5-9) and lower skills, and also less armour and weaker weapons, and for some reason it made the rules more balanced. You haven’t been in the Cyberpunk sessions to see it (traitor!) but at the moment our characters are getting bonuses on our d10 rolls that are 3-4 times the value of the rolls themselves, and we’re dealing (and taking) huge amounts of damage that involve lots of calculations to almost no purpose (since most of the damage doesn’t go through our fantabulous armour). It makes the system slow and tricky, especially with rapid fire. But in Flood we just had single shots, limited armour, and a good chance of missing without having to worry about modifiers and cover and all the complexities of an actual firefight. The cyberpunk rules seem to work better in that environment!
I’m glad you enjoyed Flood! Ryan was an awesome character, I’m sure you’re very grateful to Captain Dilmer for giving him him the opportunity to shine!
January 2, 2016 at 3:30 am
Right, I definitely want to sit and properly read through all your cyberpunk stuff. I’ve read some of the initial blogs and it’s nice to recognise some of Yukiko’s voice in the char! Is there an easier way to read it chronologically as there’s a lot of it and it’s presented back to front by default on the blog of course which makes it very hard (especially on the phone).
I liked the Dark Heresy blog as well. We’re dipping into that as well over here but only a couple of episodes so far.
January 2, 2016 at 11:39 pm
Jesus Merton, you big bludger. Here’s a list in chronological order, from the first session…
1. Ungrateful extraction, where the team meet and don’t get along well
2. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up space, where they run into some trouble with a booster gang and lay down some problems for a rainy day
3. Do not revive, where they ice some crazy dude called Lima and discover that Pops is a bit unhinged
4. Downtime 1, transcript of a long interlude run on Facebook (we call these downtimes), in which the group loot the abandoned hospital
5. Downtime 2, in which Pops and Drew defend the others leaving the rundown hospital, and Pops loses a leg
6. Dialectical Ephemeralism, in which the group discusses the implications of the diaries they have found and makes future plans, and Drew falls in love with a radical South American revolutionary
7. In the thrall of the failing moon, in which the team make a deal with their employer on the Lima mission, a transgender body-swapper called Alt
8. Downtime 3, a report of Ghost’s adventures when he left the abandoned hospital and got involved with a carnivorous goldfish-hunting team
9. Big trouble in little Boston, in which our earlier mistakes come back to bite us (not for the last time). Americans!
10. Treacheries, in which we start trying to track down a gang that might hold useful information
11. I believe my kingdom will come, in which the team run into big trouble because Ghost is sometimes an incompetent hacker, and Drew gets a pretty gown
12. Sanitarium, in which the team raid an upscale cyberpsychosis clinic to rescue a dude with information, and Drew goes wild on the staff (I wasn’t there for this). This is the first time that Drew’s psychotic tendencies really show…
13. Attack on Titan, in which we do a side mission raiding a ginormous train for a dude called Winter, and encounter our first Full Body Replacement (FBR)
14. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, in which we do a couple of side jobs just to make some money (all this looking for Alt’s sister was starting to use up our cash)
15. An unexpected research audit, in which we start to find out what the big companies are up to in their FBR research, and Drew turns nasty on the human experimenters
16. Ramen 1/2, in which we go on a rampage through a night market to find a guy who has some info about a drug-production facility we need to raid
17. Hideous dark secrets in holes in the ground, in which we raid that facility and stumble into a murder scene
18. Desperately seeking Samantha, in which we dig up the secrets of the underground drug production facility, and identify the location of Alt’s sister Samantha
19. Chaos vignettes, where we raid the oil rig Samantha is holed up in
which brings you up to date! You can thank me later! If you survive that wall of stream-of-consciousness blather from Drew …
Also there is some background material and related writing:
1. New Horizon, a description of the setting
2. Russian Ghosts, which describes how Drew became a renegade
3. A Siberian Druid in Venice, in which I used Drew’s voice to express my frustration with the cultural mausoleum that is Venice (I really saw the glass women, and they really were amazing)
3. Attack on Titan: A solo’s view, which is a description of a fragment of one of our big battles from the point of view of a dude who spent most of it rolling around naked, on fire
January 4, 2016 at 8:30 am
Oh I was just wondering if there was a better way to peruse the blog in the right order but an annotated contents page is much much better 🙂
cheers dude!