I posted this message earlier on Kickstarter, as an update to the Children of the Elder Sign project, but it’s too good a story to not share here.
College buddy & GDW compatriot Tim Ryan, diced
Hey, gang!
Gen Con was great, but exhausting. Friends dragged me into four different Call of Cthulhu adventures—from 1920s, to cyberpunk, to the depths of space—and introduced me to several new board games. (I highly recommend For Sale.) And I picked up a few treasures in the Dealers Hall, ran into some old colleagues there, and introduced someone to the Bookmark No HP RPG in a spontaneous session while sheltering in a side room during a tornado warning. (Western setting involving cattle rustlers holed up in a farmer’s cabin during a thunderstorm.)
Saturday evening, just after the tornado warning was lifted, a friend asked me to snap a picture of them in front of a Chaosium demo room just off a main hallway. I set my bags and hoodie down at my feet in the middle of the hall to get the picture, waiting for a gap in the passing crowds, and when we were finished and I gathered my stuff, I forgot the little brown paper bag of dice sets I’d gotten at the Black Oak Workshop booth.
When I realized it a few minutes later, we were nearly at the exit, and I figured the bag was long gone. My friend convinced me to retrace our steps, but no dice. (Pun intended.) They suggested checking Lost & Found, but it was late, the halls were crowded, and I thought it was a lost cause.
The next morning, as my old college buddy and GDW compatriot Tim Ryan were on the way to an event, we stopped at Lost & Found on the off chance they’d been returned. And lo and behold, there they were. Someone in that crowd of 74,000 people had seen the unattended little bag, picked it up, and took the time to turn it in instead of taking it home with them.
The person at the counter said, “I work a lot of events, with a lot of crowds, and I have to say, gamers are by far the nicest, kindest of them all.” It’s a sentiment shared by restaurant owners and shop keepers in Indianapolis news stories every year. Gamers are the nicest, most polite of all the convention crowds they see.
I gotta admit, I was a little misty eyed to hear that said about our hobby. I’m a little misty eyed again just telling you. The dice would have been no great loss, but instead they gave me a memory to treasure.
The print-and-play PDF contains four pages to choose from: bookmark format in full color or printer-friendly black-and-white, and the same options for playing card format.
Physical bookmark and playing card versions are in production.
As you may recall, as part of Kickstarter’s “Witchstarter” promotion last October, I launched a role-playing game project titled Children of the Elder Sign.* It’s been a bucket-list idea for more years than I can remember, and this seemed a perfect motivation to tackle it at last.
The idea is basically “What if Hercules, et al., were offspring of Lovecraft’s pantheon instead of the Greek/Roman gods?”
Wilbur Whately is an example from Lovecraft’s fiction, of course. (See “The Dunwich Horror.”) And as the villain of the tale, he has a nefarious goal.
But what if he were recast as the protagonist? Better yet, what if his goal were merely to survive? What would it be like to be a half-monstrous character trying to hide in human society, similarly to My Favorite Martian, Resident Alien, etc.? Or ever on the run ala The Incredible Hulk, The Fugitive, or Poker Face?
(And how is it I just now noticed that Bill Bixby starred in two of those things?)
Further, what if instead of designing the setting for only one of my role-playing game lines, I did it for all four?
I’ve read all of Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry a couple of times over the years, so I set about first working on a D6xD6 setting chapter as a way to summarize it, with plans for full Bookmark No HP, d4ce, and D13 RPG versions by October 2026.
As I recall, there’s a bit in Samurai Cat where he finds the Necronomicon and starts reading it, and its curse won’t let him stop. Page after page he reads, with always another page to turn, until the book grows so heavy that it slips out of his grasp and breaks the spell. Writing the D6xD6 chapter has been something like that. The more I revisited the source material, the more I discovered I had forgotten, and I even stumbled upon public-domain stories in the mythos by 11 other authors concurrent with him or just after, and five preceding him.
I had hoped to finish that D6xD6 draft in February, then boil it down to Bookmark No HP RPG size. But come May, with the D6xD6 draft still growing, I decided that if I wanted to get something to my Kickstarter backers anytime soon, I’d better turn to the Bookmark No HP version first.
Fitting a setting within bookmark format is always a fascinating challenge! It’s like writing a formalist sonnet. Or a magic spell. There has to be something of real substance, but based upon dependable mechanics. Otherwise the sonnet, magic, or game just fizzles. And there are lots of “rules lite” games out there that fall limp, like trying to kick a field goal with a deflated football.
Yesterday, after two months of play-testing, revising, editing, and layout, I posted the print-and-play BNHP version to my backers. I’ll get it up on DriveThruRPG eventually, but if you’d like it on the cheap, along with hefty discounts on related stuff … *
*The Kickstarter is still accepting late pledges; here’s the link.
Vampire illustration by Sanford Kossin from Beyond Fantasy Fiction (1953)
As promised, an apolitical post this time around
What is it about vampires that so captures our imagination? Lately I’ve unearthed a couple of old vampire PC games that used to keep me up into the wee hours. I buried myself in the puzzle getting them to fly on my Steam Deck, and have been drinking in once again their ambiance and action. One is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, released in 2004; the other is Dark, released in 2013.
(Before I go on, let me say that playing these games with joysticks is sooo much better than with mouse and keyboard, especially when traversing those spiral stairs in Maximilian Straus’s house in Bloodlines.)
The Steam Deck puzzles for running each of these games have been absorbing tasks, a welcome distraction from the headlines.
Neither game is supported in the Deck’s Arch Linux build, but for Bloodlines the adaptation process is fairly well documented here and there online. Which is not surprising, given the game retains an amazingly large and active fan base even now, 25 years after its release. In fact, part of my impetus for playing again has been the recent release of a few pretty amazing fan mods.
The most important of the Bloodlines mods is the “Unofficial Patch,” without which pretty much none of the rest would work. This patch fixes some bugs from the original game, also restoring character options, maps, and side quests that were trimmed for the game’s original release, but whose files remained in hidden folders of the program. Those restorations alone have extended the game’s life throughout the decades. It even restores a completely new set of endings for the story, for players willing to join the Sabbat. Built on that patch, most Bloodlines mods follow the original storyline but add a few extra features such as extra clan choices or new side quests.
Of the Bloodlines mods, War Games is the first I’ve encountered that completely ditches the original story line and maps, replacing them with a World War II mission. When I first played War Games several years ago, the code was still somewhat buggy but playable. Since then it has been smoothed out quite a lot. Granted, without a professional budget, the mod’s voice acting remains minimal, sometimes jarring—the result a mix of dialog that’s sometimes human voice, sometimes AI, and sometimes merely text dialog. Frankly I prefer the text, with my mental ear filling in, especially for Sebastian LaCroix, who plays a minor role here but a central role in the original game.
Preludes I and II are a pair of more recent mods that have blown me away with their quality is Preludes I and II. A Preludes III is in the offing, to continue the trilogy. Preludes together are a story line placed immediately before the events of the original game—and that includes a couple of significant spoilers, so you should definitely play the original beforehand. As a part-time labor of love, the trilogy’s development progresses in fits and starts, and II still has a couple of side quests that remain unfinished. But even now, that pair of mods is so, so satisfying, with some real surprises. I’ve talked with the developer a bit by email, and plans for Prelude III have me very excited.
Turning to the second game … getting Dark to run on the Steam Deck is a much more difficult task. The game is much less popular, to say the least, so there’s nearly no discussion online of Linux adaptation, and virtually zero of potential Steam Deck use. In fact, had I not also tried the game on a Linux desktop installation, I’d’ve had no clue as to why it was launching nothing but a black screen on the Deck.
But on the desktop, I discovered that starting up the game first opens a Kalypso Media pop-up that connects to their website, and you have to click “Launch” on that pop-up screen to load the game. I ventured a guess that the Deck was choking on that pop-up, and I searched online for a way to disable that. Eventually I discovered a tactic of adding a “127.0.0.1 launcher01.kalypsomedia.com” line of text to the end of the Deck’s “/etc/hosts” file, redirecting the pop-up to the Deck itself as host, instead of the online site. Yeah, it sounds pretty arcane to me, too, and locating that hidden “hosts” file wasn’t easy. So you can imagine my satisfaction when it worked.
Honestly, part of why I enjoy dicking around with these tech puzzles is the gratification of subverting a system, making it do things outside its intended parameters. (See my “Playing the Oddball Options” post for some examples of subverting some TCGs.)
I mentioned above that Dark is “a much less popular game, to say the least.” Frankly, it gets hated on quite a lot, and I understand why: The dialog and voice acting are hackneyed noir; the story line is utterly linear, the movement options are sometimes frustratingly limited, and you’re pretty much forced to develop the character’s skills into a few specific choices, because the combat skills are lame. It’s clearly not an open-world first-person shooter.
But it ticks off three check boxes for me. Firstly, I like “walking games,” a category in which the experience of the journey is the whole point. Journey and Dear Esther are the epitome of the form for me. So Dark’s linear plot is satisfying. Secondly, I love puzzle solving, and I find traversing each locale in Dark thoroughly engaging. That the product includes a handful of separate “Challenge” maps outside of the main game adds to that satisfaction. And finally, the vampire’s shadow powers in this game feel so frickin’ cool! As a result, I can ignore the fact that I ought to be able to climb a particular hedge and can’t, or jump to a particular fire escape and can’t, for the sake of a game that let’s me jump halfway across the screen as an embodiment of shadow.
YMMV
Okay, before closing out this post, let me touch on something I absolutely hate about Bloodlines and find a bit irritating in Dark: the excessive objectification of females.
Yes, the vampire is a seductive, predatory creature in fiction. It is effectively a sort of incubus or succubus, and its prey is often drawn in by that sexuality. I’ve no complaint about the same being true in a game. As long as it’s true for all genders.
But you can’t swing a dead cat in Bloodlines without hitting a female hooker, and nearly every back alley has some woman performing fellatio on some guy in business clothes. Add in that one of the cheat codes is specifically for breast size, and the design team seems a stereotypical bunch of horny teenage boys with power fantasies. In fact, the release of Bloodlines 2 for decades while the publishers purged that game of the original developer.
Dark is less problematic overall, though I find the stereotypical “rescue the princess” ending an annoying unnecessity. But the especial crime is a lascivious statue of two women intertwined, gratuitously placed for a near unavoidable encounter in the game’s very beginning. Dark highlights anything you can interact with, and this is the first, but clicking it results in the protagonist’s infantile reaction, “Pretty! Pretty!”
So, Bloodlines makes me cringe upon stumbling across a gratuitous blow job or topless back alley character anywhere in the game. Dark makes me grit my teeth at that one spot, and frown that the female club owner at the story’s beginning becomes the protagonist’s “plus one” at the end.
Those things having been said, I do recommend Bloodlines for its many, many options for repeated play, Dark for the feel of the game and its inventive story line and downloadable content. And I especially recommend playing each with joystick controls, which the Steam Deck makes quite nice.
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