I’m really excited to share that Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is going to be one of the featured game lines at the Star Wars Game Experience held May 3rd-5th . In addition to tournaments for X-Wing and the Star Wars LCG, my fellow producers and I will be running a character creation workshop, demoing Edge of the Empire itself, and doing a panel on creating your own campaigns in the Star Wars universe. Designer Jay Little will also be having a Q&A session about what it was like to create the mechanics for Edge of the Empire and the X-Wings miniatures game. We may even have other special guests, so check back for more updates.

You’ll need to register in advance, which costs $25, but that includes an entire weekend of gaming and exclusive swag. It’s like a mini Star Wars gaming convention right here in the Twin Cities. All events will be held in Roseville, MN at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center (1975 Oakcrest Ave, Ste. 10).

Below is the roleplaying game schedule we’ve got planned (all play sessions are 4 hours long). There will also be prize drawings and trivia on Saturday and more events for card and minis gamers. See the full event listing here.

Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Roleplaying Game Character Building Workshop
Friday 6:00pm-7:00pm
Learn how to create a compelling character ready for adventure at the Empire’s fringes in this workshop featuring members of the Edge of the Empire design team. You’ll be able to use these characters in the adventures throughout the rest of the experience.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game Play with Development Team Adventures
Friday at 7:00pm, Saturday at 1:30pm and 7:30pm, and Sunday at 11:30am
Play the Star Wars Roleplaying Game with the creative minds behind its design in these special sessions. Players can sign up for these events onsite. Don’t worry if they fill up – we will be running multiple tables.
The Design Team: Jay Little, Andrew Fischer, Tim Flanders, Katrina Ostrander, and Sam Stewart

Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Roleplaying Game Campaign Design Workshop
Saturday at 11:30am
Do you want to carve out your own piece of the Empire’s edge for roleplaying adventures? Find out what goes into making an absorbing and immersive campaign with the Edge of Empire design team of of Jay Little, Andrew Fischer, Tim Flanders, Katrina Ostrander, and Sam Stewart.

Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Roleplaying Game Introductory Adventures
Friday at 7:00pm, Saturday at 3:00pm and 7:30pm, Sunday at 11:30am
Prepare yourself for adventure as scoundrels and smugglers, explorers and expatriates, on the fringes of galactic civilization in the Star Wars universe.

Host a Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Roleplaying Game Table
Friday at 7:00pm, Saturday at 1:30pm and 7:30pm, Sunday at 11:30am
Are you a Game Master interested in hosting your own Star Wars® Edge of the Empire adventure? Table space, dice, and character sheets will be made available for you! Space is limited, and we will choose the best adventures based on the descriptions sent to us†.

†If you are interested in hosting an Edge of the Empire RPG adventure, send a 200 word description of your adventure plus a one sentence description of each Player Character in the adventure to ffg@fantasyflightgames.com under the subject heading: “ Star Wars™ Game Experience Edge of Empire RPG – YOURNAME.” Our development team will choose the standout adventures with the most fun and dynamic groups of PCs from the pool submitted. The deadline for submissions is April 5th. We will announce the chosen adventures and their creators on April 12th. You may submit more than one adventure for consideration, but we will only choose one adventure per creator.

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I’m tentatively going to be GMing 16 hours of Star Wars: EotE at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, June 12-16, as part of the contingent from the Wittenberg Role-playing Guild. I will be demoing the rules and featuring a number of adventures to choose from, so the group can decide what they’d like to play. Look for us in the event book!

In the meantime, here in the Twin Cities I have more role-playing campaign opportunities than I know what to do with. Last night I sat down with a new gaming group interested in playing in a Legend of the Five Rings campaign, which I have wanted to run for what feels like forever now. Granted, I did successfully pull off a 20-person Winter Court LARP using the Oriental Adventures rules in December, but I’ve never actually run a 4th edition tabletop game. They seemed fine with that, and were moreso excited for the prospect of a new GM, I think. They’ll start as part of the Imperial Legions traveling to Shrio no Usagi to respond to a cryptic scroll asking for help. The year is 1013, and the Great Clans are already edging closer to the precipice of war over a new schism in Shinseism that threatens the traditional order.

I also have a Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands: Reloaded, Star Wars and Pathfinder game to think about, but I’ll probably have to pare down that number in order to stay sane. That, and I will be getting a new cat tomorrow, and will want to spend more time with her while she gets used to her new home. So! We’ll see how that goes. Pictures of her may well be added to Twitter sometime soon, she’s a beautiful half-Siamese mix!

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We had a fair number of responses to the prompt that ran the gamut from session logs to gamemaster tips to game writing and design itself.

The Platinum Warlock talks about using “character vignettes” to tie his players’ characters to the larger world and each other in his post In Which the Warlock Pencils a Potential Plotline…, which includes one such sample letter.

In his musings about the Evolution of My RPG Writings, The Journeyman GM muses how his writing has changed to suit his current game exploits, shifting from character journals to blogging about gamemastering to game design and setting conversions for Savage Worlds.

Campaign introductions, player game handouts, next session teasers and campaign wikis are all a part of the Outremer DM’s writing arsenal, discussed at length in his post on Writing.

Shortymonster talks about the difficulties encountered in the process of Writing the Game, specifically when trying to translate a game you ran for your gaming group into a publishable adventure, but he also realized he (has more time) spends more time writing when on the player’s side of the screen.

Alex also lists the various forms writing takes in his games, including letters, missives/pamphlets, wanted posters, and–my favorite suggestion–books. I imagine there are a number of internet sources where spells, histories, and guidebooks could be adapted for use at the table, be it based on song lyrics, project Gutenberg, or Old English manuscripts… not to mention those fantasy language generators/translators.

Game Writing for the Tolrendor DM can be a form of world-building, inspired in part by such fantastic worlds as Middle Earth and Narnia that introduced him to the genre. He also uses templates and formulas (employing 4th edition’s layout styles in particular) to motivate him to do complete write ups of encounters.

Finally, Ken Newquist discusses his experience with Pen and Paper Journaling and how the medium can significantly impact one’s desire to write. Typing on your laptop is one thing, but scribing away in your Moleskine notebook conjures up a different feeling entirely. Imagine what a campaign souvenir you would have if you kept your character’s story in a journal that looked the part?

Thank you to everyone who participated! Troll and Flame will be hosting the next RPG Blog Carnival for December, so look out for their post on New Year’s RPG Resolutions!

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1. This site was originally founded in March of 2011 around when I first started the Marrakesh campaign for my local gaming group. Since then I’ve been musing on writing, gamemastering, and role-playing in my spare time. One hundred posts and 23,736 hits later, it’s going stronger than ever. Thank you to all my readers: these articles are for you.


Gamer swag from my interview!

2. I’m excited to say that I have accepted an offer of employment from Fantasy Flight Games to join their RPG development team as an Associate Producer. I’m to be working on the upcoming Star Wars RPG and have to say, after being able to demo the Beginner Box with its creators during my interview, I can’t wait to play and develop this new version. They sent me home with a signed copy of the Beta rulebook, which I’ll reading through in between homework and papers and tests. I’ll be running the included adventure, “Crates of Krayts,” for my gaming groups over Thanksgiving and finals week, which I’ll hopefully get to talk about here on my blog. So stay tuned for the upcoming revamp of Triple Crit to reflect my new professional identity and exploits!

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Whether it’s prep, history, flavor, descriptions, notes, or logs, writing is an essential tool in the arsenal of the GM. So too for players, who are famous for writing lavish character journals, backgrounds, and even novels chronicling their alter ego’s adventures. Not to mention all those freelancers and designers who write the core rules, settings, and supplements we consume inasmuch as our wallets allow.

While role-playing at the table is an actor’s affair, the plot behind the campaign and the foundations of the systems themselves is very much in the purview of writers. Yet the process isn’t nearly the same as it is for regular old storytelling. (If that were true, boy would my life be easier.) Writing a regular novel is different from writing a Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance one (where you can “see the dice rolls on the page”), which is still more different from writing a campaign or adventure. It takes some adjustment to go from GM to writer and vice versa, and some of us end up straddling the divide.

So what about you, RPG Bloggers? Why do you write about games? In what form does writing crop up in your campaigns? What’s your process, your stumbling blocks, your passion? How has writing helped you or your table? Or is writing more like a CR 8 Succubus whose torturous, siren song hurts so good and dominates your very being?

How to Participate

1. Write a post on the current month’s topic and in your post link to my blog post that announced the topic (this month’s permalink here).
2. You can also drop by my blog and leave a comment on this announcement post to be sure–track/pingbacks don’t always work.
3. That’s it! At the end of the month, I’ll write a round-up post and include a link back to your article.

My Writing-Gaming Story

The topic holds a special place in my heart, since writing is the reason I got into role-playing games in the first place.

I wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic participant at my first game some four plus years ago. I played Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, had participated in and even run play-by-post RPGs, sure, but Dungeons & Dragons? Pen and paper gaming? No, I wasn’t that kind of geek. Yet.

My then-boyfriend, himself a theater geek and budding wordsmith, instead tried appealing to the writer in me: “It’s like writing a novel, only you’re acting it out with other people,” he said, and I was hooked. It certainly seemed easier to get players to portray the cast than to have to handle them all on your own.

So I rolled my second-ever character* and pored over the 3.5 corebooks as my cohorts instructed me in the evils of the upcoming 4th edition. We escaped from the Keep, rolled dice into the wee hours of the morning, and collapsed in various states of disarray in his friend’s apartment. Ah, summer.

Disappointed by the DM’s lack of creativity, I embraced the medium and immediately set out to become a Dungeon Master in my own right to tell the stories I wanted to play. Having written serial fiction, short stories, and the beginnings of novels since I was in elementary school, I approached the task much the same way I did my books. I was well-versed in world building, and devised elaborate histories, races, countries and conflicts, but realized that DMing at the table was a skillset all its own.

I kept writing, but primarily worked on my delivery at the table, getting as much GM experience under my belt as I could. Now that I’ve seen a marked improvement in my games–even though I’ve still a lot to learn!–I’m refocusing on the writing aspect as I work on my own projects (Magnificent Seven, Sasarindo, the LARP Scenario Writing Guide, etc.). I’ve been reconsidering the book idea Andy and I were tossing around, and hopefully once I graduate college for good I’ll have time to re-write the outline and start going at it.

Then there’s those novels I intend on writing, someday. Sigh.

As the Carnival goes on I’ll be talking a little bit more about my experience with the creative process, the differences between novel planning and campaign planning, as well as some of the overlaps. Gamemastering is essentially writing a story with dice instead of words, but both passions still dovetail in wonderful ways. If it weren’t for my games, I wouldn’t write nearly so much, and if it weren’t for writing, I wouldn’t be gaming.

What’s your story?

* The first was with 3.0 back in 2002 at a slumber-party with my girlfriends, but we didn’t end up using our painstakingly-crafted characters. The idea of a dungeon crawl just didn’t appeal to us at the time, which was all our friends’s older brother had shown her how to run. If it had been more like the anime we consumed on a voracious basis, I think I would have gotten into the hobby much sooner.

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An Invitation to the Winter Court

Greetings, honored visitor, to an isolated corner of the Empire not often seen, but wondrous to behold.

Miya Katsura
Imperial Herald

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Part I: System and Structure

Last time I posted a short teaser about the LARP I’m running in early December for my college’s Role-playing Guild (of which I am president). At first, I anticipating expanding my “Sasarindō” tabletop campaign/scenario of Gempei War-era battle, betrayal, and intrigue. The basic premise is that you have two warring families and a faction (or two) caught in the middle, and they clash across the Japanese countryside as Emperors are cloistered and captured. Yet as I pondered the event further, I ran up against a number of limitations:

1. How do you crystallize five years on conflict into one court scene?
2. How do you ensure each individual character/player has enough goals and clout to keep them actively involved in the scenario?
3. How do you manage characters who are built around filling combat niches and make them useful in a party atmosphere and venue that can’t handle combat?
4. How do I convey the history of the conflict to a group who won’t want to do homework and won’t be able to discover it easily in-game?

A Matter of Medium

Quite simply, I realized that I couldn’t tell the same kind of story I could at a table, and that campaign vs. one-shot considerations asides, there was an inherent difference between tabletop and live-action role-playing.

The Role of the Gamemaster

Obviously, the game master would have to have a different role. Instead of being the prime narrator and plot-driver that characterizes normal games, she would be reduced to arbiter and counselor. The agency is instead played in the players’ hands. Some game systems have rules that do that (like Houses of the Blooded), and other play groups will tend towards that by virtue of player composition, but at the end of the day it’s the GM who has the monopoly on information. By sheer virtue of sitting down at a table with dice most players expect to react to the game, not guide it. In a LARP, however, the GM can’t be in all places at once, the party is inherently split, and shouldn’t seek to instead guide the story as a character lest she look like she wants to make herself the star.

The Role of the Player

Now they have the Power. What they say, goes, quite literally, as they have to rely on their words to drive the story with the occasional help of the dice or Style. But most people will flounder given complete license with no goals to guide them. You’d end up with something more akin to an improv comedy skit than a story to be told. I don’t know about you, but the very structurelessness of improv scares me. Give me a framework, though, and I can manage myself once I get past the awkward part of “I’m a character now.”

Unless you’re a legit actor or veteran LARPer, you’ll likely have the same trepidations if told to make up your character and motivations on the fly. Will it be too boring, too contentious, too heavy-handed? The GM bolsters the players by providing a foundation and suggestions in the form of backstory and goals.

The Role of Combat

Let’s face it, most role-playing games have more rules for combat than anything else, and thus the emphasis is clear. You build characters to be optimal killers, with less feats and class features dedicated to exploration/wilderness survival and fewer to social maneuvers (a simple Bluff/Diplomacy/Intimidate skill check covers most conversation possibilities). The Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying game is a notable exception, with equally complex social combat rules.

Likewise, the stereotypical and oft-ridiculed LARP is one where the fighters carry boffer swords and hit each other with them. Whenever the Wittenberg Role-playing Guild has to explain the LARP section of our budget during budget hearings, the organization funding officers ask for an elaborate explanation mostly with the intention of embarrassing us and trying to reveal that stereotype. We can usually sidestep it by calling up the Mystery Dinner Theater analogy. And in our case, and in the discussion of these articles, that’s certainly more the kind of game we’re playing.

Realism vs Abstract Depiction

I for one feel a little ridiculous hitting people with foams swords in a serious context. I still feel a little awkward bargaining with other characters in a literal/live action context. But I can get into the mindset of the latter more easily, as do my fellow guilders. It’s also much easier props- and rules-wise to forego or diminish the importance of combat. Finally, given the wider player-skill/character-skill divide on martial and magical aspects, which demand abstract depiction and more imagination, negotiation and intrigue just seem more realistic and thus, more believable and immersible when you’re playing a live action game without costumes and legit/stage weapons.

These players have the realism bit down, and I can totally see them getting immersed in combat without feeling silly.

A Feasible Solution

I found my answers when I set my sights on a different samurai role-playing game (also authored by John Wick), Legend of the Five Rings. The assumptions and setting lent itself particularly well to the LARP format, giving me flexibility with scope, an horizontal power structure, combat in context and a framework to present the goals that guide play.

Scope

How do you crystallize five years on conflict into one court scene?
The simple answer is, you can’t. In a LARP things have to happen in “real time” with the exception of such devises as flash-backs, skips, and theatric pauses. You thus only have 3-4 hours to work with if it’s a one shot, 3-4 hours a week if you’re running a chronicle, and are limited to the types stories that can be told in that span. No one event in the Tale of the Heike pitted the clans against each other in their entirety, much less in a court setting, without some heavy liberties taken on my part. And there were the other problems to consider as well.

In an L5R context, I can call the party a day in the life of a “Winter Court” and be done with it. One dinner, one story. A hundred thousand endings.

Horizontal Distribution of Power

How do you ensure each individual character/player has enough goals and clout to keep them actively involved in the scenario?

In “Sasarindō,” you see more of a vertical hierarchy within each Clan, with the patriarch, his close advisors, and the rest of his vassals. L5R has the advantage of making delegations the norm, so that you can have two-four representatives from each Clan, of which there are seven. You now have a horizontal distribution of power, giving each character more clout within his Clan and at the court more generally.

Combat Characters in Another Light

The bodyguard, ninja, and monk each can also have a purpose within a social setting, as well as unique means to achieve the Clans’ ends.

You have to limit the kinds of characters who play. Instead of having a falconer/archer who reigns in combat but takes a back seat in social situations, you have to make each character have a social “function.” I will go into character creation in depth in a later article, but to address the question now I realized I had to frame warriors as they stood relative to society. That means bodyguards and duelists who protect the courtiers, lieutenants who command the armies, and scouts who can report the situation on the ground to those that would act on the reports (the champions and generals). Of course, courtiers are given the most options, ninja and monks are also viable, and shugenja act as courtiers who have a few “tricks” up their sleeves as opposed to bonuses to pursuade.

Set-up and Build-up Combined

How do I convey the history of the conflict to a group who won’t want to do homework and won’t be able to discover it easily in-game?

At first I was going to create a primer booklet detailing the origins of the Gempei War in condensed form, but I decided that would ultimately be analogous to requiring literacy tests at the polls. To encourage participation, I had to minimize obstacles to said participation. Given that most players won’t read campaign wiki’s/guidebooks in the first place unless it’s to post their own character’s stories, I wanted to keep the background info to a minimum.

Instead, the background is built into the Clan goals themselves. In a short sentence or two, you want to achieve x because of y during your time at the Winter Court. You need to trade for Koku to feed your armies, negotiate border disputes, hunt down enemies or attack a philosophy that threatens your ideology. How you go about that goal is up to you and your fellow teammates, but there you have your basic motivations and the story behind them. I’ll talk a little bit about the metagame and structuring the rules to encourage Clans to accomplish their aims in a later article, but in a nutshell the way you score a game and write the rules encourages or discourages certain behavior.

A Different Kind of Game

By trying and failing to implement one story, I’ve discovered how the roles of the GM and Player, combat and context, change depending on whether you’re playing live action or tabletop role-playing games. Scope, horizontal power distribution, character types and set-up/build-up all have to be taken into account when shaping a scenario, and picking a system to suit.

Next time, we’ll look at character creation and conflicts and how to enlist your players to help you build a cast and determine the kinds of stories they want to tell.

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“More fully-integrated and streamlined than online Savage Worlds Character Generators, less expensive than having to add on multiple settings piecemeal, and compatible across Windows, Mac and Linux (with tablet functionality as a stretch goal), the Wild Card Creator is a golden addition to the Savage product lines and hopefully will be here to stay.” Read more…

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Because so many new members indicated that they had never played but were eager to learn, the Guild is trying something new: setting aside a one-shot night exclusively to welcoming and teaching brand new players (and players who haven’t gamed in a while, or ones who aren’t familiar with D&D 3.5/4e).

In addition to the Gamemasters (GM’s) running the scenarios, each table will have a dedicated Player Mentor (PM’s) who is there to help newcomers go over their character sheets, explain to them the rules, and answer questions the players might have. Typically, this is the GM’s job as well, but since it’s her job mainly to worry about the bad guys, we wanted to basically a co-GM to advocate for the good guys as well.

We’ve never done anything like this before, but we think it will make for a smoother experience at the table and encourage more questions on the part of the players, since they won’t feel like the GM is stopping the action just for them.

Right now we’re going to have a 3.5 and/or a 4e table, but we’re open to suggestions if there’s another iconic system people have heard about and want to learn.

Please RSVP, bring a friend, borrow some of our dice, and have a blast learning to play with the Guild!

As I was writing the plug for this game, I found it interesting how I was judging one system against another as to which would be best for “teaching” role-playing games. I felt drawn to 3.5 over 4e, but is that because it seems to be the “standard” for most other d20 systems and the most prevalent (including Pathfinder)? Or is it because it’s the system I learned first? On the other hand, 4th edition is more “current,” but the power card novelty is exclusive to the system, and it’s on the out and out, essentially having been lame-duck’ed by D&D Next. Finally, D&D Next is a sweet little system unto itself in terms of simplicity and straightforwardness, but playtester agreement aside, is it “kosher” to teach newbies with a beta release?

What about all the other systems out there? Does Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds system make it cut, considering it’s so simple? What about Fate, which has spawned so many different incarnations of late?

Secondarily, what sort of activities do you feature? Something run of the mill, staple fantasy (replete with Red Dragon and Hoard at the end?), or do you try to show them the different options to challenge players’ assumptions? I realized early on that I want to at least have 1st level character generation and the requisite “rolling of the stats,” which, despite the fact that it’s lost favor over the years, still resonates powerfully with me and is the most exciting part of any of the games I play. Even if it means cutting the adventure shorter, I believe we should simply because it helps to teach the nuts and bolts of a system in steps as opposed to being handed a fully-fledged sheet and trying to make heads or tails of it.

At the very least, there needs to be some dose of social, exploration, and combat, perhaps heaviest on the second. Oh, and don’t forget, something magical!

Finally, what do you think of the Player Mentor idea? Cool? Unnecessary? Could use some work?

Has anyone done anything like this before?

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