Odd Oracles

I'm working on two issues of A Random Encounter at the moment, and turning some ideas over in my head. I was transcribing my interview with Patrick Stuart for Issue 4, and we talked a bit about blogging and why he started, and it got me thinking about when I started blogging about games. This blog started on 21st March 2012, but on the same day I posted something on a Tumblr that I used to use, about the very first game that I GMed: In A Wicked Age.

I like In A Wicked Age: the Oracles that produce the inspiration and elements work really well, they produce a rich fantasy world at the table with no prep, and I think that playing it a few times gets you in the flow with the dice mechanics. There's a bit of AP in the post, and I was playing with Patrick and David, so it was a good game. There were also a couple of musings about the Oracle idea itself:

[Patrick] mentioned that there were “Oracle hacks” of the game, and I can understand why this would be quite cool to do. Because the set-up is so fast, straightforward and fun, it’s quite a freeing game to play. ... In my head I’m already imagining urban fantasy possibilities, superhero settings and even - dare I say it - zombie game settings…

We hacked together an Oracle or two and played some Tales From Zero Point, which was an element of a bigger space setting that we created collaboratively. I loved that the Oracle could produce a great game with no preparation. We could turn up and really tune in to make a creative story; and at the same time, I still felt that it was a bit clunky with the mechanics, and as someone running the game I wanted something to help support making NPCs and places - even just little possible story threads for the players to explore (I'm not a railroad fan).

For a little while now I've been turning over mashing an Oracle-setting-generator-thing with the Into The Odd resolution mechanics: a strip-downed game that could get people up and running quickly with no prep. Draw some cards to get character and setting inspiration from an Oracle, and while PCs roll dice to flesh out their characters, the GM can roll some dice or draw cards to flesh out the setting in an organic way. I think it's possible to do this in a reasonably small game, that provides a lot of prompts and support for the GM and the players to come up with the backdrop for a great one-shot every time they play, or which could organically create a sandbox-y story - each session being either an "episode" or just the next steps.

And now that this idea is back in my head again... I guess I have one more thing to add to the to do list... :)

An Odd Idea: Mechsuit O.D.D.

On top of working on A Random Encounter I have an on-again/off-again relationship with a hack of Into The Odd set in a semi-hard sci-fi setting at the edge of the solar system. Into The Oort, if it ever gets finished, will have spaceships, zero-gravity derring-do, exploration of ancient human megastructures and centaurs. (really)

Despite having only so many hours in the day and enough creative pursuits already, my brain keeps saying, "Nathan! Hey Nathan, think about this..." I blame Chris McDowall: he wrote a game with a very easily hacked set of mechanics. This post is the latest "odd idea" that I've had... It has some blanks and some spaces which are currently boxed out with [] square brackets because I haven't got that far yet. But I think I will, sooner or later...

Mech suit by flyingdebris

Actual Play: Escape The Undermaze

Yesterday was a Manchester Games Day, and me, Chris, Barry and Nick met up to play some games. I was excited because I had offered to run Escape The Undermaze, my tiny little RPG about thieves trying to find a way out of a labyrinth beneath a dead scientist's house. The game's mechanics are stripped-down from Into The Odd, and everything about the game and setting is on a sheet of A5. I made it as an experiment, was 95% sure it would work, but still hadn't tried it with a group.

The cover side of Escape The Undermaze

The thieves were:

• Chris, playing as Gizzard, we weren't sure if that was a first or last name;
• Nick, playing as Trevor Mountjoy, a disgraced officer;
• Barry, playing as Evans the String, a wily thief capable of Macgyvering out of any situation.

Technically everything below is spoilers of a sort: the sequence of Undermaze locations and encounters are generated from tables and a simple procedure. If you were to play this these would be shuffled around based on what the procedures spit out; plus you as player or GM would be inspired to use the ideas differently. I guess I'm saying, this AP has details that are both unique to this game and potentially common to any game of Escape The Undermaze. Sort-of spoilers below the cut!

A Random Encounter Issue 2 is out!

I've been a bit buried under work lately, trying to get this and that done, so haven't been making time to blog. I surface every now and then on G+ to try and hype A Random Encounter in a non-spammy way, and this is my hopefully non-spammy blog post shout-out now that Issue 2 is finally finished!

I say finally, but actually it turned around pretty quickly, around six weeks since the last one came out. Issue 1 is still available in print too, but the rest of this post is all about Issue 2, where I interview Chris McDowall, creator of Into The Odd. Just as with talking to Dave McGrogan for Issue 1, it was really interesting to hear about how and when RPGs hooked Chris, and also to chat for a good long while about how he makes games and how he approaches design choices. I'm still learning how to interview really - I've been interviewing people on a podcast that I do for nearly four years, but this is a different sort of challenge.

What I liked about talking to Chris was his commitment: this is something that I'm finding I can only really articulate now that I've got the issue finished and it's out. In reflecting on putting it together, editing down and organising information, one thing that really stands out is how committed Chris is. He frequently talks about doing things well; Into The Odd was a project that evolved over years; he has a clear aesthetic idea in mind for constructing his game and the supplement that's going to follow it this year. Maybe commitment is not the right word actually, maybe the word is vision: Chris changes his mind about stuff (as he says in the issue), but he's got something in his mind about his games that is like magnetic north, something he's working towards.

And I'm not just praising him because he did the second issue of my zine! Jonny Gray made a great colour cover showing Chris on the streets of Bastion. The issue also features great art pieces by Kathryn Jenkins and Anxious P. inspired by the setting of Into The Odd. Check it all out on the zines page.

Coming Soon! Posts about something other than A Random Encounter! Posts about Into The Oort! Hints about a thing I think I'm going to do this summer (hint: rhymes with stick-parter!)! And probably the odd post about A Random Encounter, because I can't help myself...

GMing Soon After A Long Break

The last few days have been pretty exciting, what with properly launching A Random Encounter, and at the same time I've been blitz-reading my way through a couple of books on start-ups and entrepreneurship - don't worry, I'm not about to enter this manic phase of starting lots of new businesses, because I think that way lies madness.

But it has got me thinking quite expansively about possibilities for future projects. I'm happy with how well people have taken to A Random Encounter, and there's a wave of people posting zine selfies that is quite good fun. I'm pleased to say that I have the outline of a plan to get another five issues out this year, all being well.

So now it feels about time to start playing games again, after a bit of a sabbatical. I have a semi-fortnightly games night with a friend that has become quite Android Netrunner focused lately, which is great, and something that I'll probably picking up a starter set of soon. But my friend's also an RPG fan, albeit I don't think he's played for a couple of years. So some time in the next few weeks we'll be leaving Hopesend Port, heading off across the wastes and exploring the Iron Coral for a game of Into The Odd...

It'll be my first game of 2016 and, I think, the first game I've run in over six months. Yikes. Following on from noisms' thoughts on imagination exercises, I'm wondering if there is a similar but more specific set of GMing exercises that people can do to build up their GMing ability. What do you think?

What can I do to get the old engine fired up again?

Oddpool OOP

Following a flurry of activity around Christmas-time it was only a matter of when, not if, I would sell the last copy of Oddpool from my tiny print run. One of the pre-order people for A Random Encounter picked it up the other day and so now all of the Oddpools that I made are gone!

Come to think of it, I don't even have a copy...

As I've said a few times before, Oddpool started as a little gag gift to give to some friends at a games night (Patrick, David and Chris, who were all by that point successfully published in the indie RPG-o-sphere). After their encouragement, it didn't take long for me to see that this was my way to start taking RPG projects forward. And once you start making things, and you realise that you can make them, you realise that the only thing stopping you from making more things is yourself.

(this even extends to blogposts; until recently I would have told you, "Oh, I don't have as much time, oh this is happening, that is happening," but really I'm the only thing in the way)

Anyway, Oddpool is out-of-print, for now at least. I have a couple of ideas for a few other small micro-zines, so I might see how they pan out over the next few months and maybe do a couple of print runs, then offer them all up as a kind of micro-zine pick and mix? That's my current plan anyway.

For now, there are still the Payhip and DriveThruRPG options for getting pdfs, both of which include pdfs for printing Pocketmods and a mobile phone screen friendly version.

Oddpool - go on, you know you want to...

Into The Labyrinth

On Saturday afternoon, whilst thinking about publishing and work and other things, my wife was baking a carrot cake and so I was looking after our almost-two-and-a-half year old daughter, CJ. CJ is old enough now, and has been for a while, to watch a movie. After a morning of running around and building Duplo megastructures, it felt OK to sit down for a few hours and watch something.

CJ loves a handful of Disney and Pixar movies, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (aka, "The Food Movie") and also Tintin, but we're trying to broaden her movie repertoire. Labyrinth has been on my mind a lot for the last month or so. And it's not that scary for young kids, right?

As it turns out, no, it's not; it's far more scary for thirty-something fathers who have seen it a dozen times or more in their life, and who have read a couple of academic papers about the movie and the symbolism therein. CJ was fine and kept up with her usual movie commentary:

• "Who's that?" "Sarah." "Sir-rahh." "Very good, love." "What's Sarah doing?"
• "An owl! ... Where baby gone?" "The goblins...are hiding him..."
• "Who's that?" "(lump in throat) The Goblin King." "What Goblin King doing?"

And that was just the first ten minutes. It's a joy watching a movie with CJ, because she's at the age where she wants to know everything. And once she gets past the first half hour and has a handle on who and what things are she just settles down and watches. So past when Sarah meets up with Ludo, I could stop my commentary for the most part as well.

Watching the movie then, thinking about Labyrinth, games and blogposts I've read recently, the following setting started to jumble together...

Into The Labyrinth
How did you get here? You're not quite sure. The walls stretch forever in either direction, and remind you of childhood, of singing and dancing and hair, big hair. But now there is silence. A whisper of wings fluttering nearby, an empty pond and a stone door fallen on the floor. An entrance. And still silence. There seems no way around, and away in the distance, at the centre of the walls and paths is a city, and beyond that a castle. It doesn't look that far...

...but it's further than you think.

Concept: start with a base of Into The Odd, simple mechanics and chargen, maybe a slightly tweaked starter package table. No Arcana. The Labyrinth is procedurally generated as the PCs explore, and strongly flavoured by the movie - but set some time afterwards. Factions of goblins. Features from the movie, but now decayed or time-worn by what seems like millenia. The Labyrinth itself is one giant trap, and can only be escaped at the centre.

Goblin groups, traps, travelling back from a hex to a previously visited location doesn't necessarily lead you back. Have hexes and locations be about features and flavour, people and monsters rather than describing a series of left and right turns. From the outside the Labyrinth is near infinite, inside it takes about thirteen hours, moving at a hex per hour, to get to the centre. But time runs weird in there.

If anyone mentions the late Goblin King in the presence of goblins they will stop whatever they do to shout, "Long live the King!" The goblins are aware of a ruler in the castle beyond the Goblin City but are not sure who it is. Everywhere is trapped but not every trap is dangerous; everyone you meet is dangerous but not everyone wants to hurt you. Paths lead to adjacent hexes, tunnels lead to nearby hexes, underground tunnels lead far, far away within the Labyrinth.

Any player/character who starts a phrase with "I wish the goblins would..." will most likely find that wish fulfilled in an unexpected way. At the centre of the Labyrinth is a fractured Escher-scape and a broken clock that is on the cusp of chiming thirteen. If it can be made to chime then a party of adventurers would find themselves waking up somewhere familiar "as if it were all a dream" except that they would have any treasure and possessions that they had in the Labyrinth.

So yeah, that's what I was thinking about...

Advert! A Random Encounter #1 out soon!

An Odd Christmas

A festive little something for Into The Odd, in the style of some of Chris McDowall's encounter tables...

"Keep Christmas in your own way" is an expression often heard in the districts of Bastion and beyond. Indeed, while people throughout the world do a multitude of things their own way, there is only the time around the Winter Solstice with which they demand and expect that they be allowed to do things exactly as they want.

If you are travelling at that most special time of year you encounter people or other things celebrating Christmas in their own way, perhaps you will be invited to join in...

What are those d8 Naythun Riders doing?

At the end of July, Chris McDowall wrote a post about his patrons, creating a load of people inspired by them. I've met Chris a couple of times, and I thought we got along, so was expecting that the people inspired by me would be cool ninjas, awesome dudes of noble birth, or at the very least a bunch of amazing bandits. Instead:

17: d8 Naythun Riders - Bearded Men riding Naked Men Twisted into Emu-Shape
3hp, Riding Crop (d6) OR Naythun Kick (d6)

- Offer you a chance to feed or pet their steed. 

- Muzzle their Naythun if it tries to scream out in repressed sapience.

- Defend their steeds to the death and nuzzle it uncomfortably.

Thanks Chris.

What Chris doesn't know is that the Naythun Riders have a strange and complicated society, and there are lots of subgroups and clans that one could meet on the road. In fact, researchers who have observed them - even lived with them for a time - have identified a score of situations in which they are met. When you meet Naythun Riders on the road they are...

1. Arguing over who has the most magnificent beard.
2. In the middle of racing their Naythuns.
3. Mourning the death of a Naythun.
4. Singing loudly and tunelessly.
5. Debating the merits of various beard care regimens.
6. Sitting drinking, halfway to a drunken stupor.
7. Shaming one of their number by shaving his beard off.
8. Planning a feast.
9. Forming a raiding party.
10. Looking for somewhere to camp for the night.
11. Trying to find something to drink.
12. Trying to find treasure that they hid when they were drunk.
13. Celebrating a young rider's first facial hairs.
14. Looking for new potential Naythuns to train.
15. Writing bad haiku / That's exploring life and death / And, like, things. Yeah.
16. Grooming their Naythuns.
17. Playing a game of pretend and make believe.
18. Washing their beards in blood and water.
19. Plotting murder.
20. Committing murder.

If they're plotting murder or committing murder you can be sure that their target is one of the Creesmac D'Walls - undead sommeliers from an underverse vineyard, 3hp, Glass Bottle (d6) or Boneblade (d6)...

Not appearing in Oddpool

Honestly, this is the last post about it for a while, I swear...

In making a Pocketmod-sized supplement you have to make really hard choices. What stays, what goes; how much detail can you afford; what sized font can someone read or not - I was tweaking and tweaking for a while. A very hard choice I had to make was whether or not to include the Superlambanana in the booklet. In the end, I decided not to include it, more because an idea like it would need artwork and I wasn't quite sure about what I could or couldn't do with a work of art, and I was struggling to come up with a name that was as expressive as Superlambanana.

So in the end, it was cut out, but it left a nice giant-sized hole for the Pool-Auks, which are actually much more symbolic of the city. The Superlambanana would have been nice though...

Superlambanana
Twenty-feet high, apex wandering creature
STR15, DEX15, WIL20, 25HP
Driven to protect babylambananas. d8 stomp, Armour 2. Can always hear any distressed offspring and will come to their aide. Spawns a new child every four days, extruding from the back surface over a period of an hour. Often accompanied by 2-8 babylambananas.

Babylambanana
Horse-sized smooth sheep/fruit hybrids
STR10, DEX10, WIL7, 2HP
Driven by curiosity. No attack, Armour 1. Harmless, mouthless, bleats. Will approach strangers and shiny things. Will have a nest of shiny objects, which may contain treasure.

(Oddpool - now down to the last six of the signed and numbered print copies!)

Thanks! and Small Projects

It's not about Oddpool at all.

Oh wait, it is a little bit...

At the time of writing, there are only ten print copies of Oddpool left. Given that it went on sale on Friday, is a teeny-tiny tome, and is a home-made DIY thingy, I'm quite pleased!

I was really inspired by a post I read some time ago on small projects. The TL;DR version: "doing lots of small things could help to develop ideas and to share them - and maybe feel more personally satisfied." Still, it took me a long time from reading that article, and re-reading it, to make the connection with even more tangible things like Oddpool - a small project if ever there was.

A year or so ago, in my day job, I ran a workshop where I was the subject of a business case study exercise: I ran some numbers by them about running my own micro-business of RPG things. A dozen very well-educated people told me: "The numbers say no. Good sense says no. Invest your time, skills and effort elsewhere and you'll do better." Which didn't sit right. Because I wanted - and want! - to do something in RPGs but I didn't know what or how.

I have a piece of paper with projects on it stuck to the wall next to my desk, looming over me, all daring me to do something. But until I got some feedback from friends - "this is fun" - I had stopped thinking that I could do anything. Small projects are the way forward for me, I think, with writing and doing things for RPGs.

Selling fifteen print copies of a Pocketmod is a beginning. Like Patreon campaigns, this is not a get rich scheme: it's a "help me" proposal. Picking up a Pocketmod or making a donation via pay-what-you-want for Oddpool means that my options open up. I can think seriously about other projects because:

• some people bought this first thing, maybe they'll buy something else.
• I have this money from the first thing as seed funding for the next thing.
• I have a little bit more confidence that I can work towards the next thing.

In many respects that last one is the most important.

I have plans, and Oddpool is helping make that happen - if you've picked it up, thank you!

Unused Oddpool artwork, maybe for another time...

Oddpool is out!

Want a peek at a weird ruined city for explorers to look around when playing Into The Odd or other role-playing games? Want to get your creative brains thinking about what people might find at places like the Dead Fields, the Copper Tombs or the Red Keep? Want inspiration for thousands of strange gangs that survive there? Want half a dozen creatures that have been sighted in the ruins?
And do you want it all to fit in your pocket?

You want Oddpool.

Inspired by the city of Liverpool, Oddpool is an eight-page Pocketmod mini-booklet which answers yes to all of the questions above. You can find it on Payhip where it's a pay-what-you-want pdf download, or if you want to be part of an exclusive club, you can buy a print edition from me! Details are on the Oddpool page: to start things off I've got a limited run of 25 numbered and signed copies, printed on good 120gsm paper, cut and folded by me: £1.99 if you're in the UK, £2.75 if you're somewhere else in the world.

But wait, there's more! I wanted to compare paper qualities, so got an equal number of 90gsm copies too, before settling on the 120gsm paper stock. I'll be putting a 90gsm paper copy in every order of a print edition from me, so you can pass it on to someone else. Details for ordering are on the Oddpool page.

Oddpool is the first thing I've made and shared like this, so I hope you like it. If you do, let me know - and maybe let other people know too, that's fine by me!

Big thanks to Chris McDowall, creator of Into The Odd for being so supportive of me making this! And thanks to you for reading this page, whoever you are, I hope you enjoy Oddpool as much as I enjoyed making it.

People in Oddpool

When I ran a game set in Oddpool, I was of course influenced by the people of the city. At the same time, the game city is supposed to be a ruin, filled with weird creatures, strange architecture and general bizarreness. The people who live in Oddpool do so in small groups/gangs, with their own customs, their own wants and needs, and their own ways of interacting with others. When I ran my game, I just slapped Redmen and Bluemen in, as substitutes for football supporters, but for the Pocketmod I wanted something better.

I've been heavily inspired by David McGrogan's inspiration tables over the years (I've shared a few of my own on this blog before), so it seemed like the most natural fit for the Pocketmod would be to provide a little inspiration tool for generating groups and gangs of Skalls: rolling gives a couple of details to then inspire the GM to create the rest of the group. I've used the table to generate the following, Skalls you may find on the streets of Oddpool.

The Why of Oddpool

At the start of 2015 I was really interested in playing Into The Odd, and while the print edition hadn't gone to press yet I had the pdf and two interested players in the form of Patrick Stuart and David McGrogan. The system looked so simple to run, I thought that I would take a stab at quickly putting some notes together for a sort of city crawl. Liverpool is just on my doorstep, and it's where all three of us grew up around or lived for a while, so it seemed like it would be fun.

As it happenened, on the day, we were playing in the cafe of the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton, which looks out over the River Mersey and at an old sea defence, Fort Perch Rock. It made sense to me then to start the adventure there, a weird some-when counter-Earth that is fundamentally Odd. Captain Jean wants Henry Winkler (Patrick) and Karl Kennedy (Dave) to go into the ruined city of Oddpool to scout it out, see what they can find and report back.

They cross the river on a converted ferry boat, and then creep around the streets, tangling with strange gangs, mechsuit-corpses, zombies and a bizarre sheep-banana-hybrid giant. They made deals with a gang, ran from danger and survived despite their retainers taking a couple of hits. It was a lot of fun to run, and then after writing a quick AP on G+, the ideas went back on to the back burner as with so many other projects.

Flash forward to the summer, and I'm meeting Patrick and Dave again, along with Into The Odd's Chris McDowall, in order to playtest Dave's new project. I bring along my copies of their books for them to sign, and made a little Pocketmod from some of my Oddpool notes so that I didn't feel left out. I shared the pdf on G+, zero artwork, really rough around the edges, and a fair few people seemed to like it, and so the wheels started turning again...

For the longest time I've wanted to publish something for role-playing games. Why not have the first step be a little Pocketmod? I have lots of pictures of Liverpool, I live nearby and can take more, I have the tools to typeset something simple... Why not do it?

So I am, simple as that. I've been working on this in my spare time (and sometimes not in my spare time!) for the best part of a month, off of notes and ideas that have been percolating for about eight months. It's a little 8-page booklet that gets folded from a single sheet of A4. Directly compatible with Into The Odd, easily hacked ideas for other systems. If I make any profits from making this available I'm going to be reinvesting them into artwork for other projects (and I might go for tea and toast with my wife and daughter).

More soon: tomorrow, three groups that operate within the ruins of Oddpool...

Eventually

In April I was working on a hack of Into The Odd - and I still am, it's just taking me longer than I thought it would. I had a busy time of things with work for a few months, and then my priorities shifted. Into The Oort is still coming along, but I have a couple of smaller projects that I want to do before then.

The first thing to do is to release Oddpool, an eight-page pocketmod that casts Liverpool as a ruined city for exploring.

Fingers crossed, last details to check and so on and so forth, I'll be releasing this on Friday! Which is very exciting. I'll be releasing it as a pay-what-you-want pdf download, and also looking at getting a small print run printed on 120gsm paper, home-made/-assembled and numbered or something - something a little fun. Over the next few days I'll say more about it - and maybe hint at another project I'm eager to start soon.

But the battery on my laptop is dying so I must sign off for now. More tomorrow.