North of Nowhere

A common troupe in fantasy literature is the journey. From The Hobbit to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to countless other stories, a major component of the plot is a journey. However, traditional fantasy roleplaying games don't always represent these well, particularly if you are trying to complete a journey in one game session.

My saturday morning group was going to play fiasco, but we didn't have enough time, so instead we continued to try out a friend's game that he's developing. While I don't want to get into much of the actual mechanics with his game until he's ready to share it, I will share some of the rules that I used to make the journey work.

This worked better than I hopped. The story was they lived on the edge of civilization, and the town they lived in was suffering from a strange wasting disease. Few people if any come through their town, and so they must set off on their own to the capital city to find a priest who can cure their people.

Setup

I put a bunch of different titles on notecards, and gave each player 2 cards. The notecards had titles such as the following, and each represented a different location.

• A small village
• Eyrewild Forest
• The Darkmark
• The Abyss
• The cavern
• Castle Ruins
• The Old Wizards Tower
• The Impassable Mountains
• lonely farmhouse
• ring of stones

The players each wrote a threat and a reward on each notecard. For example, a player wrote on the impassable mountains that the threat was fire giants, but the reward was lots of treasure. Another

I then included a couple more, including a couple forest cards and stretches of roads. I shuffled them all together, and then took the bottom 5 cards and shuffled the city card in with them and added them back to the bottom of the deck. That way, the players would know they are getting close, but not know when they would arrive.

I knew it worked when near the end of their journey they ran into some bandits, and one of the players just said. “Listen, we just survived fire giants, a volcano, a monstrous tree. Just get out of our way.” In that statement, it incapsilated the way I wanted it to feel: they had had a long, trying journey. They had started as locals and became heroes.

Seriously, a fun way to spend the morning. Thanks to Matthew for his game design!

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In an effort to focus this blog more, I’m splitting my RPG and gaming blog off to The Game Players of Titan.  My brother, Peter, will be posting there as well.  I’ll post at both sites when it’s something that I think has a wider audience, but this site is going to become more focused on some of my other interests like Comic Books, Books, Writing, Music and more.

I first discovered Scalzi with a paperback copy of Old Man’s War. I can’t even remember how, perhaps it was boingboing that had mentioned it was similar to Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers. It was all that and more, and I found myself drawn to many of the other books that Scalzi has written, as well as his blog, Whatever.

I had originally planned on picking this book up in hardcover, as I don’t really buy many books in ebook form. I’m not really sure why, because I buy a ton of music online. It likely has to do with the fact that I have no good system yet to keep all my books organized like I do with itunes for music.

But with the announcement that Redshirts would be free of DRM, it made sense to me to buy it. Sure, I don’t yet have a way to organize all my books the way I like, but at least with this book, when I do, I will be able to with ease. Plus, I could easily share it with my brother, who I knew would like the book, but would never read it unless I put it in front of him.

In many ways, this book reminds me of some of the mid-level Philip K. Dick books. This isn’t another Old Man’s War, which I consider to be a modern classic of sci-fi. It is however, a quick read, with deeper concepts than any book that is a send up of sci-fi tv shows in the vein of Star Trek, much like a number of my favorite Philip K. Dick books which would take a simple concept and bring out deeper philosophical issues than you would have expected.

This is on the surface a “popcorn book”, a quick and entertaining read, but upon closer inspection, gives the reader something to more to think about. And in my busy life, sometimes that’s the best kind of book. I don’t have as much time to read through a book like Dahlgren, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to think and be challenged with interesting concepts. So thank you, Scalzi, for writing a fabulous book.

I think the weirdest thing about this card is that it does not match up at all the guy I remember my grandpa being. And anyways, he was 36 at the time and had been married for many years. I wonder if it was just a cheap card he could get at the camp commissary. He signs it “your hubby”. Also weird. I definitely miss the guy.

The card itself is probably from sometime around 1943 as that is when it was sent.