Since we’re half-way into the year, I thought to look back a bit and write about how things have been progressing and what my feelings about them are.

First of all, the good news. We managed to complete the Henryn viimeinen iso keikka -campaign. There was a lot of things in it that didn’t work out the way I had planned, but that’s what always happens when you’re creating a new RPG system and put it to playtest. Things need fine-tuning, a lot of it. But the basic idea works, and that’s the important bit. The campaign turned out to be a petty bet between two old criminal masterminds where people’s lives were put into stake for a single dollar and ended on a cliffhanger with all characters on their way to a possible trap. The great thing was that we actually managed to complete a full campaign run even if it was only 7 games + character creation. Our games have had a problem that they have slid to oblivion instead of actually reaching a conclusion. A way to restore faith on gaming.

Secondly, peoples’ timetables are a total pain. Both the Changeling and the Summer D&D games have suffered from this and even Henry had slight problems. Month or two long breaks aren’t unheard of because people aren’t around at the same time. But that’s life. I’m quite pessimistic with Changeling, since it’s 3 people who all need to be there for the game to work, and we can’t manage to get a time for the game together. And it’s one of those games that really suffer from long breaks as the mood of the fairytale needs to be recaptured and the not-fully-human characters re-immersed into. Game-wise it’s been a fun experience when we’ve been able to play – surreal landscapes are fun and the rules don’t come to the way too much. The Summer D&D on the other hand can surprisingly live even with the breaks. While I’m not fully happy with what D&D wants to be as a game, I am slowly seeing the potential in it. Lots of neat moving parts that are fun to twiddle.

About future plans regarding gaming – There will be a round two of Henry in the near future with the tweaked system. Also I might have gotten slightly inspired again to go try running larps after the Knutepunkt trip a couple of months ago.

I’ll hopefully get some more inspiration / time to write some actual stuff in the blog in the near future.

This was the spotlight game of Mikko’s character Johnny Smalls, who is a great conman, an expert womanizer, and 100% on top of his game, always. His aspects (important thingamobs that quite well define what he’s about) were “Stylized image”, “Non-violence” and “Lyonne Ritz – an heiress girlfriend” plus the two that all characters have “Health” and “Primary role”.

When a player is in a situation where he still wants to accomplish something in the scene with his character but he is out of chips (the mechanical way to track how much stuff the character can still do) he can trade in one of these aspects to get more chips. Now, Johnny-boy has been spending the past two games hanging out with a rap-star Puppy D and his crew of gang thugs to get Puppy as a pawn in his schemes. During this session, Johnny ended up with D’s gang on the desert, where the gang was doing drugs, shooting cans and drinking booze. For a while, everything is good, but then the drugs come in. Johnny declines taking any, and a moment later he won’t shoot beer cans with the guys (Johnny has a strict no guns policy). The thugs aren’t happy. I set up a challenge with two parts – “Stay good friends with Puppy D (3 chips)” and “Stay in terms with Puppy D’s crew (2 chips)”.

(I might remember the details wrong, but it went something like this) Mikko has one chip when he actually got to paying things off. He decided to use his Con Artist role to buy off the three chip part of staying friends with Puppy D, but that meant the crew would be left disgruntled. So, Mikko sacrifices Johnny’s “Stylized image”, and Johnny unbuttons his shirt, lowers his Armani pants to a ridiculously low gangsta-position and gets a scarf on his head and some bling-bling and a funny hat… and by lowering Johnny from the standards he’s set for the character, Mikko gets 3 chips, two of which he uses to get the gang-members to accept Johnny even if he doesn’t take their drugs or shoot their guns.

Now, why I think this was very nice test of that part of the system – until Mikko has a moment to take a break, and enough chips to buy the aspect back, it’s gone. This means that for the rest of the session, Johnny was never quite as sharp-looking as he’d like to be. He chose the wrong shoes for the suit, forgot his belt, that sort of stuff. And according to Mikko, when I talked with him after the game, it was something that really hit him bad. Since the aspects are character-defining things, loss of one feels like a loss. A blow to even an insignificant one like “Stylized image” can hurt like a bullet in the upper leg area.

Mikko also lost the “Lyonne Ritz” aspect during the game, to keep the FBI from realizing Johnny’s schemes and keep the secrets for a while longer, by what was probably the most horrible break-up I’ve ever seen or heard of in my life. Matti’s old Russian gentleman mastermind ended the game session as a short-tempered drunk who didn’t care if people got roughhoused around during a gig. Matijas and Maija on the other hand, survived with everything just fine. Such is gambling. When I say I’d do things differently on the second run, I’d make the gig a bit more personal – the fact they’re running other peoples’ errands makes it less about “what I want” and more about “what I have to do”.

But the greatest thing is that we got the damn game session played after 6 weeks of cancelations. Next session coming up maybe in a week, unless something goes wrong again

Henryn viimeinen iso keikka – The current heist mini-campaign I’m running. It’s only 7 games + prologue and epilogue, so I should very well be able to make it happen. The band of thieves have now set their sights on their score and are about to pull it off. Considering we have 6 games and the epilogue to go, and we hopefully manage to do a couple of sessions per months, I’d say this one will be completed somewhere between April and May. I will run a second game of it with fewer game sessions after I’ve completed the first one, and possibly a couple of one-shots, followed by it hopefully giving me a free pass to RoPeCon with a couple of gaming runs. At that point, I also hope I have a nice PDF version ready to show the internets.

College of War – The fourth incarnation of the campaign should continue soonish. University Drama. Magical theory as a science. It’s a lighthearted campaign. Something of a Fantasy Heartbreaker. And most of all, it’s a campaign that I love a lot. And that has been the stage for various stories in the past years. The CoW has something like at least 20-40 game sessions left in it, so barring any players leaving the country (which caused the current pause the campaign is on), we should have more than enough for the whole year.

Sneak:run – This is a campaign that almost got started, and one that I would still like to run. The previous try to start it got horribly mangled by people having ideas and me not having enough preparation to bring to the table a basic proposition what I wanted the campaign to be. Basically it’s a dualistic campaign – two player groups with similar goals but different means. I’ll probably start this campaign after Henry’s is done.

One-shots and playtests – apart from the previously-mentioned Henry-oneshots, I’ll try to have a couple of other small games that aren’t related to things. I’m still rooting to get the play group to try out The Shab-al-Hiri Roach at some point as well as run a game of either Burning Empires or Mouse Guard to them. Also we’re doing playtesting for the Tokyo Rain RPG, so we’ll probably continue doing those playtest runs as long as they’re needed.