I need to both make some money as well as make room in my bookshelves, so I’m putting up for sale my entire Vampire: The Dark Ages collection. These are all physical books, and most are in near-mint condition (exceptions noted below). I’m looking to get rid of them, so prices are low. If you’re in Miami/South Florida and want to save on shipping by picking them up, something can be arranged.

Prices below are per book, and I will be happy to bundle titles together, or sell the whole lot for the right price. Shipping is extra and on you, the buyer, so we can talk about that privately as well.

Got an offer or a question? Leave it in the comments below. Thanks.

Vampire: The Dark Ages RPG Collection

• V:tDA Core Rulebook (Hardcover, some spine and cover damage) – $4
• Storyteller’s Screen + Character Sheet pad (Parchment-like paper) – $4
• Book of Storyteller Secrets – $3
• Dark Ages Companion – $3
• Constantinople by Night – $3
• Transylvania by Night – $3
• Clanbook: Cappadoccian – $3
• Clanbook: Baali – $4
• Liege, Lord & Lackey – $2
• Three Pillars – $2
• Libellus Sanguinis 1: Masters of the State – $2
• Libellus Sanguinis 2: Keepers of the Word – $2
• Libellus Sanguinis 3: Wolves at the Door – $2
• Transylvania Chronicles I: Dark Tides Rising – $2
• Transylvania Chronicles II: Son of the Dragon – $2
• Cainite Heresy – $2
• Bitter Crusade – $2
• Clash of Wills – $1

Serious post/conversation following. You’ve been warned.

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“Um, Hi. My name is Daniel and I’m an Escapeoholic.”

Seriously, I am. Let me backtrack a bit.

During Gen Con, some stuff happened that made me face this fact face-against-the-wall-on. It’s not something I did not know, to whatever extent; it’s been a trait of mine for as long as I can remember. I am the kind of person that retreats into his own little, mental world and stays there for extended visits. I am an escapist, and my escape is my hobby (gaming).

Well, to call it a hobby right now would be a misnomer; I let it take over to the point where it began to dominate a huge chunk of my life, with all the repercussions that brings in regards to real-world dealings. I’ve tried to escape my escape at times in the past, but I end up slipping back into bad habits very easily.

To provide a little context: I had this dream of being a professional in the hobby gaming industry. Not a bad dream to have, per se. To this end I applied all that I’d learned in years of gaming towards creating a name for myself: I did some freelancing, formed my own company, networked, created a couple of blogs, wrote for free, created a couple of podcasts, spent time forging that persona that Daniel M. Perez would be in the industry. This in and of itself was a full-time job effort for little to no reward; I saw it as paying my dues, as laying the groundwork. But the truth is that after almost 10 years after deciding to purse that dream I am nowhere near it. Yeah, I have some amount of recognition, but I haven’t capitalized on it, either because I have not gotten the opportunity or because I didn’t pursue them hard enough.

I did what I did because I saw it as part of a master plan, and that’s fine. But last year my life changed drastically. The loss of my mother was a slap in the face by Reality, and I made a decision to change my life and pursue a new goal, thus why I am now pursuing a Nursing degree. That day my dream changed, my goal changed, but deep enough I did not grasp that this change needed to include a revision of the previous one, and all the work that it entailed.

Now, I haven’t done bad in my studies so far, but I have continued to retreat into my fantasy world where I am a relevant part of the hobby gaming industry/scene, which is total bullshit. Don’t get me wrong: I value what I have created, and the connections I have made along the way, but I had not faced a simple truth which I was now forced to stare in the face – all that was not important anymore, not in the same way.

I continued to delve into my escape, almost with the same amount of effort as before except for whatever I was using for my studies. But it really should be the other way around. I need to turn my hobby back into my hobby, not my (not-leading-anywhere-significant) life.

It’s a struggle, I won’t lie. I have an addictive personality and escaping into gaming became my addiction (and not even the actual act of playing a game, but just the actions related to gaming, which is probably the saddest part). Thus my introduction.

I am working on relegating gaming (and all it’s satellite activities) back to the proper place a hobby should have. As a friend told me over a beer at Gen Con, “This is all fluff. And fluff is nice, but it’s still fluff.”

Maybe I’m revealing a bit much here, but I cannot be the only one who has fallen down the rabbit hole. Maybe there are others who’ll derive some benefit from my experience as well.

I’d love to hear from others out there on how they maintain the balance between real life and the hobby, between reality and fantasy. My peer-models for too long have been guys whom I love a lot but have gotten into holes deeper than mine, and that has affected me. I’m looking for new points of view from those who have maintained this balance. I know you’re out there, so help a fellow gamer out remain a gamer but in the proper context in relation to Life.

In the meantime, I continue to work at my 12 steps back up from escapeoholism.

This first playtest for the rough first draft of the vampire game was indeed played at Gen Con 2010. Let just state it up front, in case you want to move on to other things: it was a disaster; the kind of good disaster you want a playtest to be, but a disaster nonetheless. If that’s all you wanted to know, then you’re free to go do groceries or whatever else you had planned; if you want to read more, you are a masochist, but in that case, just go on.

For a number of reasons, this Gen Con was one in which my head was a in a thousand different places. Working at the Exhibit Hall was good in the sense that it drove everything else away, but after it closed every day it was back to unfocused, scattered mind, which did not help at all my plan to run a playtest of a game I have barely assembled in any coherent fashion. End result, when Saturday night rolled around I was one player short and this close to calling the whole thing off.

The only reason this game happened was because of Tim Jensen, bless his heart. He was at the place I’d chosen for the game before I was, with photocopies of the character sheet I threw together the day before leaving for Gen Con, and an eagerness that made me feel like an ass for thinking about canceling. The other player, Chris Sims, didn’t make it due to a miscommunication on my part about the time and place to meet up. It would be an hour later than my original call time before we’d start, but I had Tim and some dice, so what the heck.

I would like to interject here that I was nervous as hell. To the point that I actually wanted to not do this. For all the game design I’ve done (and it hasn’t been a lot, either), I’ve never tried to create an entire game wholecloth, so this process is alien to me, and I worry that I am simply not good at it and that I’m wasting other people’s time with my shenanigans.

We ended up playing a very short game, little more than a couple of scenes to explore how conflict and the dice mechanics moved in practice, not just in theory. Tim built a character named Thomas, with a Joy defined as Old Bruno (a vamp who helped the newly-created Thomas survive). I decided to attack that Joy for the conflicts, so off Thomas went to look for Old Bruno, who seemed to have been kidnapped.

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go through the entire narrative.

I set up a couple of conflicts where Tim decided to use some vampiric powers, which means a minimum of Beast dice in his pool, but I went with allowing the player to assign as many dice to a conflict as he wanted. It took two conflicts to realize this was going nowhere; by going in with 7 or 8 dice, most of them Humanity dice, it was highly unlikely that Tim would roll more Beast dice successes than Humanity dice successes, the pre-requisite I had in mind for triggering a Humanity check. There was no threat, really, just a chance of loss of ground to the Beast.

Eventually Tim lost a conflict and took damage to his Willpower (damage defined as difference between # of successes rolled under minimum # of successes needed to win the conflict). He decided to take the damage to Willpower instead of taking a Consequence, mainly because there was no downside to having a reduced Willpower. We decided on the spot that lost Willpower points would also reduce his maximum dice pool for conflicts, but he accepted the 3 points in damage any way. Loss of Willpower is an immediate trigger for a Humanity check, so we moved on to that.

And then I froze. I went blank. For 10 minutes. I could not remember at all how I had defined a Humanity loss check played out. What’s worse, I could not come up with an on-the-spot option. Total game design fail.

Tim decided to accept the Humanity loss and we moved it along (because, really, it had no effect on the game whatsoever), roleplaying through the end of the scene and closing it up.

It was painful to me. Mainly because I felt I had cheated Tim out of time he could’ve spent playing Dresden Files with another group. Tim was far more gracious than I deserved, I have to say, as he said he actually enjoyed the exercise.

We stayed there chatting about the game. I realized my entire dice mechanic, at least as I saw it there, sucks. There was no threat of the Beast taking over, at any point, and this game is supposed to be about the Beast breathing down your neck. Every time you roll the dice in a conflict, there should be at least a minimal threat that things will go wrong and the Beast will come roaring out to claim one more piece of Humanity for itself. Great flavor, but it never happened at the table.

Clyde Roher happened by and sat down with us to chat about the game and game design, and in explaining things to Clyde, who was not at all familiar with what I’m working on, I had to distill my ideas down from wordy blog posts to sentences conveying meaning, which was very helpful to me in reminding myself what it is I am actually trying to do, and for Clyde to actually help me out in figuring what it was about the game that truly I wanted to shine, and thus should really focus on.

As I told Clyde, the focus of my game is the Humanity/Beast scale; it’s in that sliding-scale stat that the game resides, and the items on the sides (the Blessings of Humanity and the Curses of the Beast) are all simply ways for me to attack that central stat, with Willpower acting as a shield. As I replied to Clyde when he asked what was my game about, this is a game about exploring what does it mean to be Human when your Humanity is being eaten away from within.

Those are sentences I need to print out on a banner and have it pasted on the wall opposite wherever I sit to write/work on this game.

I also voiced out loud that this game is really not about vampires per se, but about cancer devouring you inside and you trying to make the most out of life before it wins. The vampire is an application, an allegory, placed over the core topic.

Some ideas were tossed about on how to tackle the issues in the game mechanics, and I got a couple of reading suggestions, including one I picked up at the con from James Brown (thanks for selling me your copy). We’ll see where this goes from here.

Next week I start classes again, so expect work on this to slow down, but as always, it remains in the back of my mind, gnawing at my brain, growing, preparing to burst forth.

From Within.

As I write this it’s been a week since Gen Con Indy 2010 opened on Thursday, August 5. I’ve been back for a few days and have had time to process all that happened to me at the show, so here goes, my review of the best four days in gaming, 2010 edition.

The City

I don’t cease to be amazed at the reception 30,000 + gamers get in this midwestern city every year. And every year I see it grow. Banners welcoming Gen Con line the streets, and about 90% of the local businesses roll out some sort of welcome for the con, be it a simple window cling to full-on embracing of the magnificent nerdery with themed menus and drinks or Gen Con-specific specials. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, when you consider that the estimated Gen Con economic windfall for Indianapolis this year was $27 million. Still, the welcome feels honest, which is rather nice.

The Con

I heard last year was a subdued one due to the bad economy, but boy, was that not the case in 2010! The entire downtown area was busy from Wednesday till Monday when I flew back, and the convention center itself was rarely, if ever, a calm place. There was palpable excitement in the hallways and hotels and on the street. And when those Exhibit Hall doors opened on Thursday, what everyone saw was a flurry of activity that contributed to record-breaking sales for pretty much every vendor I spoke to. The Gen Con LLC team continue to improve their craft of running this massive pop-up city and keep making the experience a great one for us attendees. A special thanks goes out to the Press Room team, because we of the gaming media can be a tetchy and annoying bunch and you always found a way to help us out (my only suggestion: please enforce that the Press Room is a quiet-zone; I was recording an audio interview there at one point and we had to shush down others that were there ourselves). Also thanks to Rio Grande Games for the free Wi-Fi in the convention center (I found it annoying that the coverage excluded the Exhibit Hall, though I understand it).

The Booth

This year I volunteered to be a booth ninja with Rogue Games, makers of one of my favorite games, Colonial Gothic. I wanted an education in what it was to be on the other side of the booth, and boy, did I get it. Working a booth is fun and rewarding, but also hard and tiring. I barely got to see the hall on Thursday and Friday, except for what I could quickly check out on the way to the restroom or to grab something to eat. Yet meeting so many gamers, being able to share my enthusiasm for the games we had for sale, getting gamers to try out new games, that was fantastic. Being stationary at the booth also afforded me the chance to see a lot of people, which then gave me a chance to sell them on the games. It just worked out that a lot of the people I know are in gaming media, so Rogue Games ended up getting some nice coverage during and after the show. I will neither confirm nor deny it was a plan.

Working with Richard Iorio, Greg Videll and Jae Walker was a great experience and one of the con highlights for me. It may lead to future gaming coolness, but that was a nice side-effect. The chance to develop a friendship forged in the trenches of Gen Con – that rocked.

The Games

Because I was helping out at the booth for a good part of my time there (and it was so busy that we needed the extra help – seriously, great sales this year!), I didn’t have as much of a chance to play stuff, though I did get in a few plays here and there.

On Wednesday night Richard ran a game of Colonial Gothic for a group of 7. It was lots of fun; I mean, we were rolling horribly, and ended up using gunboat (or is that flintlock) diplomacy quite a lot, but it was indeed fun. There is now one less witch threatening upstate New York, I can tell you that. Though I was supposed to run a game of Colonial Gothic myself on Thursday, some stuff came up and I did not get a chance, for which I apologize to my players. I owe you one for the next time. Then on Friday afternoon, I ran a game of ICONS for four players that was hilarious. I’ll do a review of the book in which I’ll talk more about the game later on. In addition to this, I got to play a couple rounds of Dominion, Forbidden Island and Get Bit! A bit of roleplaying and a bit of boardgaming – neat.

The Friends

So this is going to be a bit long, but the simple fact is that Gen Con is all about the friends you get to meet and reunite with during this faerie market.

Enrique, David and Itamar – You three are now true friends of the kind I have tattooed on my heart. This was a hard weekend for me emotionally for various reasons, and you were always there to be supportive, to call me on my bullshit if needed, and to help me figure out Important Things (TM). The fact of the matter is, without your acts of friendship, I would not have made it through the weekend, and there’s no way to repay that. I look forward to a long friendship with each of you, regardless of the distances in between. Except for you, Enrique; dude, we live in the same city – we need to hang out more, driving distances be damned.

Richard, Greg and Jae – You made working a booth a really fun experience, even with all the work it involved. It was great getting to know you better. You are now friends.

Clyde and Tim – Thanks a million for the playtest of my game and the good conversation that came afterward. I appreciate that you gave of your selves and your time simply to help me out.

Thomas, Eloy, Tim (again) and Sean – Thanks for trusting a couple hours of your Gen Con experience to me as GM for ICONS. It’s been a loooong time since I last ran a game and I was nervous, but wow, we had fun.

At the risk of forgetting someone: Matthew Kaiser (so awesome finally getting to meet you), Dan Repperger, Chad Wattler, Chris Hussey, GrungyDan, Johnny G, Adam Pinilla, Luke Mayer, Zack Houghton, Michael Wolf (from Germany, no less!), Dan Houser (dude, the art, thanks), Rob Schwalb, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Ryan Macklin, Paul Tevis, Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, Brennen Taylor, Rob Bohl, Mark Reed (you made it!), Chris Perrin (hands down, the happiest moment in the con was suddenly seeing you there – what a surprise!), Mark Kinney, Carol, BG Josh & Meg, Trapcast Jenn, John Harper, Daniel Solis, Nathan Paoletta, Chris & Jessica Beauchamp (GeekyClean is awesome!), Wolfgang Baur, Eddy Webb & Ethan Skemp & Rich Thomas (I don’t care what others said, I loved the White Wolf booth – now, make me a PDF of it), Justin Achili (I want your music collection), Nicole Lindroos (thanks for the hug), Chris Pramas (I didn’t tell you about my character), Hal Mangold, Steve Kenson (hope you enjoyed being the villain), Tom Tullis (you have a beer!), Tom Cadorette (thanks for the beer), Donna Prior (thanks for the die), Jeff & Carol Himmelman, Mario Dongu & Dan Jones (we need to hit the Claddagh next time), David Moore, Ed Healy, Will Huggins, Cam Banks, David Hill (nice dress) & Filamena Young, Jennifer Brozek, Adam Jury (I saw you wear pants!), James Brown (thanks for selling me your copy), Vincent Baker, the guys from Tabletop Hooligans (thanks for the beer), Chris Sims (next time we play for sure), Robert Posada (man, 9 years later – we need to shorten the time in between meetings), Henry Lopez, Eric Wiener, Emily Care Boss, Tim White, Chris aka Zeike and the rest of the TOFtBCH team, Quinn Murphy, Sean Holland, and everyone else I met at the show, even if for a minute, even if only once, please know that it is those moments that truly make Gen Con for me, and you are all a part of it.

The Loot

A small but nice bounty returned home with me (see last picture in the slideshow below). I got 10 Days in the Americas from Out of the Box as a review copy (that will go up on The Gamer Traveler), got three custom d6 dice (Gen Con 2010, Scotty’s Brewhouse, Sages of RPG), and then there’s the RPGs: Mecha (special hardcover Gen Con edition, signed by Chris Perrin); Annalise: Final Edition (signed by Nathan Paoletta); Colonial Gothic – Flames of Freedom: Boston Besieged campaign; Shadow, Sword & Spell: Basic; Death’s Door; and had the chance to get my copy of Colonial Gothic signed by Richard Iorio, and ICONS signed by Steve Kenson, Gareth-Michael Skarka and artist Dan Houser.

Gen Con 2010 is in the bag, and it was great and memorable.

The Future

That’s a whole ‘nother post.

The Photos

On Flickr or in the slideshow below.

As I prepare to leave for Gen Con, I whipped up a simple character sheet to use for the playtest of When The Fall…

It’s incredibly bare bones right now, containing only the stats I have outlined here in previous posts. The main statistic is the Humanity/Beast scale, front and center. To the left are the Blessings of Humanity, where a player writes his Joys and Sorrows; to the right are the Curses of the Beast, where the vampiric powers are recorded. At the bottom is Willpower, grounding everything in reality.

The spaces at the bottom are for recording Consequences taken during conflicts, and I may have other uses for them if I can organize my thoughts in time before the game (guess what I’ll be doing during my flight to Indianapolis).

I’m going with a dice mechanic of a total dice pool of 10, with players choosing how many dice they commit to any action up to that number, with minimum Humanity/Beast dice based on the trait they are using, whether a Joy/Sorrow or a Vampiric Power. Target number will start at 7 and be adjusted during gameplay as needed, with 2 successes needed for any Easy task.

I haven’t written yet about Feeding, but very quickly, I’ll be using that as a scene option that a player can call for. After framing the scene and roleplaying the action, dice are rolled: if successful, Willpower is entirely refreshed if the vampire kills the victim (which triggers a Humanity check), 2 points are refreshed if the victim is left alive (which triggers a Frenzy check as the Beast does not like to be denied). These checks are rolled with the character’s Humanity or Beast dice respectively, and they need to score more successes than they have current Willpower points to not succumb to the Beast.

I’m both excited and nervous to run this game on Saturday night. I’ll be sure to write about the experience after I return from the convention.

I’m going to be running a game of ICONS at Gen Con, and I got line artists Dan Houser to do some art for the game.

What’s it about? Read on!

The premise is simple:

A cosmic force has taken over superhero RPG designer Steve Kenson and turned him into the maniacal RULES LAWYER! It’s up to The Conventioneers to stop him before he erases from existence all forms of gaming!

Players will use one of the pre-generated characters and battle the minions of Rules Lawyer. The heroes are:

• Roleplayer - Armed with the Sword of 1000 Faces, he can take the shape of any humanoid he’s ever played as a PC.
• Cardslinger - Fastest one-combo-kill on the Pro Circuit, she slings her supercharged cards to bring justice!
• Dicechucker - Lady Luck’s favored daughter, she always rolls a natural 20. Always.
• Wargamer - This grognard commands his miniature armies and reshapes the terrain to deliver a massive attack against Evil.

I’ve scheduled the game for Friday, August 6, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM (location to be determined). I’m a first-time Icons GM, so this is going to be an easy, learn-as-we-go adventure to the tune of a Saturday morning cartoon, with a very strong Bam! Pow! ZONK! vibe.

NEWS: Prize Support!

Adamant Entertainment (Twitter: @AdamantEnt) has been extremely kind and offered a prize support for this game! Upon completion of our game, the players will decide among themselves who was the best at the table and that person will receive a brand new print copy of ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying, either at the show if they’re not sold out or shipped home if they have.

Many thanks to Adamant for this great treat.

Want to play? Let me know over at this thread or below.

Ok, it’s time. Gen Con is in a week and a half, and I want to run my first playtest of this game there. I’ve dropped the ball a bit on blogging and development during the last couple of weeks, due to traveling and vacation time, among other things. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about the game, about the parts I had yet to build, about where to take this. I have, it’s just been all behind the scenes. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is that in a week and a half, I need to have a working draft of this game to play at Gen Con so I can start putting the idea and the system through its paces.

I’ll be running the playtest on Saturday, August 7, from 9 PM to Midnight, almost assuredly at the Embassy Suites. The game information is already up on my Gen Con Schedule post, as is the list of the players that have confirmed their attendance.

I must warn: this will be work. Playtesting is fun, but it’s a different kind of fun than just roleplaying. We’ll be making characters, seeing how that moves, then play a few encounters, both pure roleplaying and conflicts, to see how those parts of the system behave. If something’s not working, we’ll  make changes on the fly to see if we can fix it. I want and need feedback, and that will only come from putting the proto-game through the wringer. After it’s all done, we’ll chat for a bit and I’ll gather the playtester’s feedback, then we can all go and enjoy the last night of Gen Con.

Lastly, I now have a working title for the game (though the series will continue being called Rebuilding Vampire). Through all the development, one phrase has been the clearest idea of what the theme of this game is, and in my mind, it titled the game a while ago; I’ve just come to accept it. For the time being, the game is titled “When The Fall Is All There Is, It Matters.” Or more simply, “When The Fall…”

Ready or not, here we go.

As I write this, Gen Con is just about a week and a half away and I cannot wait to board the plane that will take me from Miami to an extended weekend full of gaming goodness in Indianapolis. Seriously, I am stoked. I missed Gen Con last year due to the death of my mother so this year’s con will be making up for two years of Gen Con awesomeness.

This year I will be working alongside my friends at Rogue Games, repping their games at their booth (#1539 ), hopping to get gamers to try out their very excellent games Colonial Gothic, Thousand Suns and the new Shadow, Sword & Spell. Why work with Rogue Games? Two reasons: Richard Iorio asked for volunteers to help him staff the booth and given I always go to Gen Con with an empty schedule, I did not see any issue with lending a hand; in fact, I was thrilled to do so. That is related to the second reason: I have been to Gen Con three times before, as a regular gamer once and as a member of the media twice, and I wanted to experience the con from the side of the vendors. I am a publisher, but my products so far are all electronic, so this is an opportunity to get an education on what it takes to staff a booth at the con which will hopefully pay off in the future once I have physical games to take there for sale. It also relates to a general shift in philosophy in my life, that of helping others; it is the reason why I decided to start studying Nursing at 35, and it also influenced my decision here. By helping Richard, I am able to gain a small personal benefit in terms of a learning experience, but mainly I am able to help him have a more relaxed con experience since he won’t be running the booth by himself as he has done in years past. Win-win situation.

Schedule

If you want to find me, here are the hours I will be working the Rogue Games booth, arguably the best times to pin me in one place. Know that if you drop by, along with the greetings, I will also talk to you about the awesome games at our booth.

Wednesday, Aug 4
1:oo PM – Arrive in Indy. I’m staying at the Embassy Suites.
7:00 PM – Playing in a Colonial Gothic game.

Thursday, Aug 5
9:00 AM to 4:00 PM – At the Rogue Games booth (#1539 ).
7:00 PM – Dinner with the Rogue Games staff.
9:00 PM – Running a Colonial Gothic game (see the comments).

Friday, Aug 6
10:00 AM to 2:00 PM – At the Rogue Games booth (#1539 ).
3:00 – Running an ICONS game (see the comments).
8:00 PM – Shabbat dinner. If you’re a Jew who’d like to join me and David Miller from Purple Pawn Gaming News website, leave a note in the comments, please.

Saturday, Aug 7
It’s Shabbat, so I’m off-duty. I’ll be walking around the hall and playing games with friends.
8:00 – At the Media Meet & Greet.
9:00 – Running a playtest of my vampire game-in-progress, When The Fall… (see the comments).

Sunday, Aug 8
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM – At the Rogue Games booth (#1539 ).
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM – Breaking down the Rogue Games booth. After this, I am free for the evening.

Monday, Aug 9
Fly back to Miami

Games

I plan to run three games during the con though I do not have any set times yet. These are:

ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
A cosmic force has taken over superhero RPG designer Steve Kenson and turned him into the maniacal RULES LAWYER! It’s up to The Conventioneers to stop him before he erases from existence all forms of gaming!
4 Players, pre-made characters.

Colonial Gothic Role Playing Game
Paul Revere has called on you to hunt down an escaped werewolf somewhere on the outskirts of Boston. Will you find the beast before it claims more lives and jeopardizes the nascent revolution? Loosely-based sequel to Revere: Revolution in Silver (PDF, Print) from Archaia Entertainment LLC (it helps if you’ve read it, but not necessary).
3-4 Players, pre-made characters.

Unnamed Vampire Role Playing Game Playtest
If you’ve been following my Rebuilding Vampire series on this blog, I will be running the very first playtest of the vampire game I’ve been building (working title: When The Fall…). This will be extremely rough-&-tumble as the rules are still new and in flux. This will be work. You will be helping me to see how the first draft of this game moves outside of my head. Hopefully you will also have fun.
2-3 Players, by invitation only. You need to have a good knowledge of Vampire tropes in gaming, as I expect I will be using a lot of shorthand to get the game moving. More info on this in a future post.

As for what I’ll be playing, I only know that I have a game of Colonial Gothic set up at the moment, and that I will be looking to play as much as I can. We’ll see what I can find.

On A Personal Note

Sunday, August 8th, will be the first anniversary of my mother’s death, her yarhzeit. I know it will be a hard day for me; I’m preparing myself mentally for it. I’m glad I will have good friends around as well. She would want me to be happy while at Gen Con, and I intend to honor her wishes and memory.

I will need to say kaddish that day, so I will need a minyan at some point during the day, ideally during the morning. If you are a Jewish man, and can help me out meet the quorum of 10, please let me know so we can coordinate to meet for 5 minutes. I will appreciate it in ways you cannot even imagine.

I will have my phone with me, which means you can find me via email, Twitter (@Highmoon) and also I’ll be using Foursquare to check-in to my location (4sq: Highmoon).

See you at Gen Con.

I write this on my iPod Touch from about 37,000 feet in the air as I fly away to have a nice vacation. From up here, looking down on the Florida landscape pass by, on this fourth of July, I’ll take a moment to talk about a discovery of Self I experienced not long ago and which is still revealing its implications and wonders to me.

I am an American.

For many this is a given; they just are. For me, however, this is only a very recent fact which I have accepted and made a part of me. I am an American.

I was born and grew up in Puerto Rico. Though by birthright I have always been an American citizen, I was first and foremost Puerto Rican. I had my own flag, national anthem, history, country. I had my own traditions, food, dances, legacy. I was Boricua, like the coqui. Beyond my citizenship, my only claim to anything American was the “Yankee” commercialism that had become part and parcel of my own culture. That part wasn’t bad at all; I certainly liked having access to all the American consumer products, from food to clothing, toys to movies and more. But when it came to identity, personal and national? Back off, gringos, I’m Puertorriqueño.

I grew up in a household where my mom openly displayed her Independentista beliefs, where songs of protest played on the radio, where toasts were made to a free Puerto Rico. What can I say, my mom had been a hippie, or at least the Puerto Rico equivalent, and was very much ensconced in the student culture of the University of Puerto Rico, which has always been notoriously pro-independence. My point is, I grew up with this influence on top of the natural national pride in PR as its own country under American rule. That shaped my sense of identity completely.

I’ve never been anti-American, though. I’ve spoken English since kindergarten, read English language comics and magazines, loved American TV and movies. In fact, from from my mid-teens on, I pretty much knew I’d end up moving to the States one day, because as much as I loved my island, it was a place that was stifling me little by little. But I remained Puerto Rican.

I had, however, developed a certain apathy towards the US. I had no issue living in here, but it remained a separate thing from me. I didn’t care about its history even though I do love history as a subject, looked down upon travel within the states even though I love traveling. It was bullshit elitism, I know, and I was called on it by my girlfriend (now wife). Though of Cuban parents, she was born and raised in Miami; she was an American girl, just one that had a good culinary legacy and spoke Spanish. She was blunt: if I was going to hate on America, I’d be hating on her as well.

Little by little I began to accept parts of America in me. Bits of history were added to my knowledge base as they intersected other histories I was exploring. In traveling to Europe, I learned to appreciate what I had back home with a bit more fervor. In opening my eyes to the vastness of this country, I began to find places to add to my travel list. But I remained separate, an entity apart, a visitor – one that kept embracing this adopted home more and more, but a visitor nonetheless.

Earlier this year I got a new roleplaying games called Colonial Gothic, a game set in the colonial/revolutionary era of American history. I’m a sucker for historical RPGs, and I had already visited this era via another game I had called Witch Hunter, which was more an alternate history than speculative historical fiction. With Witch Hunter, I had all the details I needed in the game book, and the rest I could make up without a problem; with Colonial Gothic, which featured more of a hidden-history-behind-the-real-history approach, the more I learned of the actual history of the era, the better I could play the game. I won’t say that this game was the reason why I finally went and read a comprehensive book on American colonial history, but it was a catalyst for sure.

The more I read, the more I learned the history of this nation, the more I began to identify with it, the less it became the “them” and more the “us.” It really was very simple: I was born in a Puerto Rico that had been under American control for two or three generations; my American legacy was as strong and valid as was my Spaniard one. My world was as much the Spanish castles in San Juan, the Taino blood in my veins, as was the American influence in our government, media, way of life. I was as much a child of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson as I was of Ponce de Leon, Guarionex, Hostos. I was Puerto Rican, but I was – am – also American.

So on this fourth of July, as the plane begins its descent on North Carolina, I officially lay claim to my American legacy and heritage. Whereas other fourths of July I’ve not cared about what is being celebrated, this year and henceforth I will celebrate the declaration of our independence from England in 1776. Our independence. Our history.

I am Boricua, I will always be Boricua, but I am also American. And proudly so.

My friend Judd Karlman has been talking both on Twitter and his blog about a new Burning Wheel game he’s started set in the city of Waterdeep, in the Forgotten Realms (FR), arguably the most detailed campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. This, of course, has gotten me thinking about FR as well, and has brought a flood of nostalgia washing upon me, causing me to write this post where I can wax poetic about my love for this world.

Let us travel back to the last years of the Rubik’s-Cube-and-leg-warmers era and to the little island of Puerto Rico. In 1986 I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons, or more precisely to Basic D&D. To say that I fell head-over-heels for this game of the imagination would be an understatement. We played the game as much as we could, as much as 8th-graders can manage, as much as was humanly possible at our age. And given we were playing Basic D&D, all our adventures were in the Known World (later to be known as Mystara): we played through B1-9: In Search of Adventure straight through, once, twice, more. The Known World as our world far more than the real world was. But this isn’t a post about the Known World (though I certainly think one will eventually have to be written as well).

A couple years later, we finally got our hands on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) books. Getting RPG books in Puerto Rico during this time was about as difficult and exiting as Indiana Jones finding the lost ark (sans snooty French nemesis), so these were great treasures and the literal keys to even more adventures than before. Problem was, AD&D didn’t come with a built-in setting. There were a couple to choose from: my friend Braulio wandered down the road to Greyhawk, and me, I took the road leading to a brand new land just recently discovered, a placed called the Forgotten Realms.

I’ve no idea how long this gray boxed set had been published (this was way before I would follow or even care about such things), but I do know it hadn’t been long. Its cover was well known to me, as an ad for it would appear regularly in the pages of many of the comics I read. I didn’t know who wrote it, nor cared: this was from TSR, and it was AD&D, and that was all that mattered. I bought my boxed set with my own money (huge!) and started to read.

One of the reasons this gray box made such an impact was that it was an experience. The maps were large and enticing, showing you the breadth of this world with only names to whet your appetite; the clear hex-grid overlays with the logo on the corner were these items of legend, things we could never make ourselves (this was before Kinko’s), which freed the map to be its own beautiful piece of art without the grid pre-printed on; and the books, the two thin books held a veritable world of adventures right at my fingertips. What most impressed me then, and remains one of the thing I still admire about them now, was that, in presentation as in content, they were all about creating an experience.

The cover art for both box and DM’s Sourcebook of the Realms, this lone Mongolian-looking warrior mounted on his horse in the middle of a rocky landscape, said immediately, ‘this could be your character; you can be this horse-riding, spear-wielding, bad-ass warrior – you.’ The cover for the Cyclopedia of the Realms showed an action scene, an intense actions scene where the explosive movement of a high-speed chase on horses had been frozen for a second, long enough to make you wonder if the woman would survive the orc’s axe. This cover said, ‘this could be your adventure; you can be the woman escaping the orcs and being forced into a fight, or you can be the ones to go rescue her after these events – you.’ That was powerful art mojo; the art alone had me chomping at the bit for our group to get together and roll some dice!

Then you opened the books. It’s a parlor trick, I understand this, but the parchment-looking pages of the two books instantly told you that these were no ordinary books, these were special tomes of knowledge. They set the tone, without even having to read a word, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t smile wide when I laid my eyes upon them. The even more awesome thing is, the text was even cooler than the presentation.

What I always loved most about the Forgotten Realms was that this was a world that was alive, that breathed, that had things happening while the books were tucked away in my bookbag. My characters, once they were rolled up and ready to go, would join a thousand other stories all going on at the same time, taking place in this specific point in time, influenced by what came before. The Realms had History: there’d been empires risen and fallen, heroes come and gone, events that had shaped the very face of the land yet now were forgotten except for tiny bits of legend tied to a few locations covered in ivy or dust. It was like my own world, but with magic and dragons. The Realms were a world where a nerdy boy who likes history, like me, could indulge in that love even in game. It’s not a coincidence that my love for the Bard character class emerged hand-in-hand with my love for the Realms.

And all that history? I learned it. By heart. At one point in my life I was far more knowledgeable of the history of the Realms than I was of our real world; I was no Ed Greenwood (the creator), but in my circle of friends I was the encyclopedia. (Yes, I was proud of this, no, it’s not the case anymore.) I learned it all because it allowed me to play to what I saw as the strengths of the setting. When we traveled and arrived in Cormyr, I knew that this was a land ruled by King Azoun IV which also had a standing army of War Wizards; if in Luskan, I knew it was a mercantile-driven nation usually at war (overt or not) with Cormyr; if in the Dalelands, I knew the elven empire of Myth Drannor had risen and fallen here and the lost city still hid in the forest, overrun by demons (and that the dale known as Mistledale had as capital the small city of Highmoon). I knew that to the west was the Sword Coast with Waterdeep as the shinning jewel of civilization, to the north was the Savage Frontier, where an ice dragon had fallen to a dark elf; to the south the jungles of Chult and the magocracy of Halruaa; and to the far east the exotic lands of Kara-Tur. I knew this because my bard would know this and it would make our own adventures seem as an integral part of the very same world.

To the gray box I eventually added the Forgotten Realms Adventures book, which expanded on the very same type of information provided in the gray box (updated for AD&D 2nd Edition) and was thus like water to the thirsty for me. The switch from 1st Edition AD&D to 2nd Edition had been brought about in the fiction of the world by an event called The Times of Trouble, a cataclysmic event that saw the death of a couple of deities and the emergence of three new ones, along with other changes to fit the new rules. I’d joined the Realms shortly before the new edition, so I accepted the changes without any issue; it was all part of the greater story. In fact, in many ways, as much as the 1st Edition gray box was my introduction to the Realms, it was this post-Times of Trouble world where I truly developed my lasting love for this setting. I collected all the regional sourcebooks I could find (my fave? The Moonshae Isles) that had been published to date for 1st Edition AD&D, but this was the time when I got to buy sets as they came out, starting with the new campaign boxed set. The Realms were being uncovered before my eyes, and I felt like a historian who suddenly finds a trove of new documents revealing more of that subject which holds his passion. I will always be thankful to Ed Greenwood (original creator of the setting as his own homebrewed world), Steven E. Schend (how many books and boxed sets did he do during this time!), Eric L. Boyd (he started his work on the FR mailing list and usenet group, and that’s hardcore fan-to-pro stuff right there) and Jeff Grubb (for Alias and the AD&D & FR comics, among many other projects) because to me, they were the architects of this new explosion of discovery (I know many others worked on the products of this era, and I thank them as well, but Greenwood, Schend, Boyd and Grubb were the first ones to make me search the credits page for their names and buy products solely on their involvement).

Time passed, I moved to Miami, and eventually my D&D games died down. I continued to collect all the books I could, but with the collapse of TSR in the late 90s, my golden era of Forgotten Realms came to an end. When an update to the Forgotten Realms for the new 3rd Edition D&D was announced, I planned to get it (actually, I got this at Gen Con 2001 for free, after someone left their copy lying around at one of the RPGA Living City events I was participating in as part of the Bard’s Guild) but that was it. By then the magic had faded. The Realms had grown far too large for me to keep up with the hundreds of stories I once knew about. Larger-than-life NPCs seemed to dominate the action far more than that one dude on a horse with a spear from long ago, and I just didn’t have it in me, emotionally and economically, to buy all the new books that were sure to come out for the new edition. I greatly enjoyed the campaign setting book, but with that one tome I bid farewell to the Realms and consigned them to my bookshelf. (In case you’re wondering, I have not even looked at the 4th Edition version of the Forgotten Realms, nor do I have any interest whatsoever.)

Obviously my love for the Realms is not gone, even after all these years. Now that I am older I can understand something about why the Forgotten Realms had such an impact on me: the Forgotten Realms were my Narnia, my Middle Earth. I did not grow up reading fantasy literature; avid reader as I was in my youth, it was mostly comics, not novels that I devoured. My first fantasy genre novel was Richard A. Knaak’s Firedrake, not The Hobbit. I had read more Latin American magical realism by the time I got into D&D than pseudo-European fantasy stories; I just come from a different cultural background. So when I arrived at the Forgotten Realms, in copying the standards set by Tolkien and Lewis, it provided me with the very thing those two authors had provided many others before, a fantastical world for their own imaginations to run free within.

Though today I’m more well-versed in the greater realm of fantasy literature, the Forgotten Realms is ensconced in my psyche as that fantasy world where my imagination first soared, and for that I will always have a place in my heart for it.