Putting my money where my mind is

I feel like a lot of my creative career, including For A Fistful of Coppers, has been chock full of good ideas and unfortunately lacking in final products.

This ends now.

On my computer, there is a folder called Campaign Planning where I keep all of my prep work and general RPG noodling alongside my rules PDFs and token art. Most of my work on settings like Assholes in Space, Heist D&D, my Savage Worlds Feng Shui conversion and other campaigns that I've outlined on this blog are there, but the vast majority of that campaign info is in my head, bouncing around and getting lost behind other works and worries. As a result, I never really feel like I've created a complete RPG product, in the sense that a lot of other game bloggers release games, supplements and settings either for free or cheap. Stuff like Christian's Loviator zine, Stuart Robertson's Weird West RPG, the myriad contributors to Fight On! and Knockspell and the tons and tons of cool little PDFs of house rules and adventure scenarios are unbelievably inspiring to me.

I want to try and put together quasi-professional product, both to inspire other gamers and readers of this blog and to prove to myself that I can follow through and expand my ideas into compelling gaming. Furthermore, I'd like to spend a little time with Publisher and learn how to lay out some supplement pages of my own (what do other people use to put their PDFs together? Inquiring minds want to know!)

In the future, expect information and potential products, including:

• A 60s Spy Setting Book and Plot Point campaign for Savage Worlds!
• My expanded Savage Worlds Feng Shui conversion!
  
• Technoir transmissions, including a Gibsonian Bridge location and the lawless highways of a cyberpunk future! I'll get into Technoir and why I think it's so groovy in a future post.
• My Dungeons and Dragons campaign building project, useful for any edition of the game! I've just finished the prep work for this thing, which will make it pretty darn useful, even for folks who have no interest in the campaign that I'm working on.
• More Assholes in Space!
  

Making the Western Weird Again

As much as I love the Deadlands setting and its alternate-history stylings, I have definitely come to terms with the fact that it's really codified a lot of what constitutes Wild or 'Weird' Western gaming nowadays. In the same way that fantasy RPGs are expected to have elves, bags of holding and giant abandoned tunnel complexes under most mountains, the 'Weird West' tends to contain a fistful of steampunk technology, some real-world figures that are actually demons or Draculas and a few Native American ancestor spirits, all topped off with zombies, zombies and more zombies. A lot of genre works or roleplaying games replicating genre works can get bogged down in this inspirational marsh: potential players want to have a certain amount of familiarity in their settings, a sort of 'buy-in' that allows them to imagine the world more clearly than a written description.

If I ever run a Western game of any stripe in the future, I want the buy-in to be the Western genre itself. There is so much unexplored gaming territory in the straight or slightly twisted Western just waiting to be mined that it's almost criminal. Action and suspense fans can have gunfights on top of moving trains or high-noon showdowns, planners have bank robberies and jailbreaks and social gamers have poker games and contests of intimidation. If I ever wanted to add Weird elements to the game, it would be more as an accent to the ongoing action rather than the be-all and end-all of the campaign. It would still be a recognizably Western game, just with a couple of interesting tweaks to vary the formula, not transforming the game into a fantasy or horror campaign with Western trappings. Of course, this is under the assumption that the only way to add Weird elements to a Western game is by including the supernatural or other types of mythical monsters. There are plenty of ways to make your Western weird without delving into the codified lists of fantasy creatures in spurs and Stetsons.

I think I'm going to take a couple of entries to talk about the different ways that a campaign can still remain a Western game at heart, even while adding strange or extraordinary elements to the mix.

A Crisis of Confidence

I think I've lost my game mastering touch. Or rather, I've been trying to run things in a way that I really can't run them.

On Thursday, my friends, girlfriend and I got together to play some pistol-packing, wild West Savage Worlds. We had a group of great characters, including a half-Mexican drifter with a buffalo rifle, a two-gun wanted outlaw and a delusional rancher out to see the world with his unlucky cowhand. Using the phenomenal Adventure Generator from The Day After Ragnarok, I whipped up a cool adventure idea involving a group of bank robbers recruiting ex-Confederate soldiers to "retake the South" while fattening their wallets. It was a good adventure seed and I was using a system that I'm intimately familiar with, one that I've said I know like the back of my hand. So what went wrong?

I have this misplaced notion that I can run a game purely on improvisation. Given that I'm a repetitious mess making unplanned speeches and a fairly crappy jam session bassist, I have no idea how I made this assumption. To be fair, some of my best gaming moments have been spur of the moment ideas, but generally there is some sort of exterior structure to them. The only preparation that I had done was writing up some stats for the New Confederacy army and brief descriptions of the town of Hogan's Bluff, Arkansas. As my friends continued to ask questions that I didn't have the answers for, I found myself feeling more nervous than excited about the continuing adventures of my friends.

Also, my 'cinematic' Savage Worlds distances rule? Totally didn't work for me. While thinking about keeping the action fluid and improvisational, I'd forgotten how much I really do enjoy my vinyl gaming mat and miniatures for RPG combat. It's something concrete that can be focused on, something visual that helps shift that burden of constant improvisation on my part. Sorry, Robin Laws, but right now, I could care less if it takes away from the immersion as long as it helps me feel like I'm not having a panic attack.

My new game plan is as follows:

• Plan out goddamned everything before running a game: My game notes are going to have to be detailed enough that I can give people the answers to their questions about game stuff without having to clearly make something up. Let the improvisation flow over a rock solid, well planned backbone, like all good printed modules or fellow blogger's entries. I need maps, I need names and I really need events and their logical consequences.
• Don't be afraid to be comfortable with the way you run games: I like how SW works with minis, so I'm not really sure why I decided to throw all of that stuff out. From now on, I'm going with my gut on these things.
• Separate things out: For the Bullets and Tequila game, I was simultaneously trying to help people make their characters while planning the adventure. Never again. Separate session for character creation, separate gaming sessions for everything. Not only will that give me more time for prep, it will help me tailor the game more towards the players.

So that's my current state of mind right now. I think I really need to take a little time and think about how to proceed with this whole thing.