dem ROCK racy

I'm currently playing around with an idea for a mini-RPG. Inspired by a thread on RPGnet I'm developing a very silly concept I had for a post apocalyptic rock-themed game

I think we could have a post-apoc-style land ruled over by petty tyrants enslaving the people of their tiny isolated kingdoms through mind-numbing music into almost zombie like servitude. Players would travel about like Dogs of the Lord bringing ROCK into their hearts, inspiring rebellion and deposing the tyrants so the the people could rule themselves in a Dem-ROCK-racy.

Tyrants would have elite units of boy/girl-bands who fight the PCs dance-off style. Some of the more impressive tyrants could be corrupted former rock gods, or major players of other musical styles. Beware the opera singers!

Between kingdoms the players could fight roving bands of hip-hop gangstas, clear out nests of emos who bring the miasma of depression to their haunts, and tangle with the dreaded fanatics of the fabled evil musical god Cowell!

Things are flowing pretty well, but I stuck on combat. Or rather musical duels. At the moment each takes turn selecting which stat the combatants roll. And the loser of the roll drops a dice from that stat. But I've never been keen on the Death-Spiral. I've been looking at tennis scoring to represent the woing of the audience, and while the advantage/deuce method works, it doen't fit the theme.

I think I'll have to look at the other sectons and return to this later.

Team Plasma

Team Plasma are my Kill Team for the game Warhammer 40,000. Kill Team is a skirmish variant of the game in which a small team of hand-picked men go on missions in enemy territory. It is very The Dirty Dozen, and plays much better than the regular game.

Team Plasma had two aims:

1) Be cheap or free
All the peices used to construct Team Plasma were leftovers, freebies, or part of a Chaos Knight sprue I bought for 50p.

The heads were given to me by a friend with an Empire WFB army. The boxed sets come with far more heads than you need, so I rummaged in his bits box for five heads that were posed shouting or yelling. The bodies are mix and match from regular Space Marines, leftover Chaos Space Marines, and the aforementioned Chaos Knight bits. And the plasma weapons are modified bolters with fuel cans from a 1:72 jeep kit added for the barrel.

When assembling the bits, my least favourite was "Wulf", a chunky guy with a beard who looked like a Space Wolf But once he was painted, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Brian Blessed!

2) Abuse the rules audaciously
Rules-wise Team Plasma are a squad of Chaos Space Marine Havocs. Four members have Plasmaguns, one is upgraded to and Aspiring Champion with a Plasma Pistol. The few points left went to giving them the Move Through Cover veteran ability.

What's that you cry? "Rapid-firing those plasma weapons is likely to kill your team as they catastrophiaclly overheat!" Yeah, probably. But as Kill Team is a quick game, it makes for an amusing anecdote, and we can just play another game.

And of course, rapid-firing those babies often vapourises any Grunt Squad stupid enough to wander into range. And all for a single alert token.

Kill it With Fire

Kill it With Fire (KiWF) grew out of a desire to stop theorising about games design, and actually put it into practice.

The original idea it spawned from, was for a game titled Tranny-Finder General (TFG). Based loosely on the trials and tribulations of transgender blogger Becky Enverite and her quest to rid the world of fake profiles on Flickr, TFG would see players working together to uncover a faker by building a portfolio of evidence. The player taking the role of faker would utilise sockpuppets and Photoshop to cover their tracks.

The actual mechanism proved sound (and got re-used for another project I am working on), but I couldn't get the game to work as an entertaining multiplayer game.

Keeping the theme, but looking for new ideas, I expanded the scope to include the work of another fellow transgender blogger Jo Angel keeping her forums free from trolls.

Around the same time I rediscovered Jim Webster's Peter Pan: The Wargame, a solo game about the UN in Never-Neverland. The game uses a random events table, and managing limited resources to sem the tide of problems. Marrying the two ideas together I ended up at KiWF.

In KiWF the players takes on the role of an administrator or websites. Each turn internet trolls interfere with your websites (and your home life), and you must marshall your limited resources to stop them.

The game is fatalistic, in that it is more about how long you survive rather than winning (although with luck it is possible), but with this I have tried to match the game system to the subject matter, following the doctrine of "System Matters".

I'm quite happy with the finished result, and playtesters have agreed it models an uphill struggle sucessfully (although no-one called it fun!)

See what you think: Download Kill it With Fire from Scribd

What's it all about?

On my main blog I chat about all sorts of things, but I wanted somewhere to post specifically about gaming, and the games I write. Especially now that Geocities is being closed down, and I'll have to re-home some of my older work.

I'm also working on a couple of gaming ideas, and wanted a place to point colleagues from gaming sites to. It would be nice if they didn't have to sift through my ramblings to find it.

Projects in the works-

Re-housing Kill It With Fire
Repurposing KiWF as a castle defence game
Untitled two-player seige game
One-sheets for the Wushu RPG