#251

Jul 9, 2023

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

No Arden Vul this week, because I was visiting friends instead. But we did play, in person, a bit of Thousand Year Old Vampire and Delta Green.

Thousand Year Old Vampire worked pretty well as a cooperative game, we just discussed the prompts as a group and advanced the story together. We played for a few hours, and our vampire was running kind of low on resources (and so getting close to death), and we also were starting to think about wrapping the game up to make dinner, so we just picked a few prompts that would lead to them getting killed.

Our vampire began the wife of a Mayan chocolatier (did they have chocolatiers? doesn’t matter) and ended up getting killed several centuries later in some European war, while trying to hide out and wait for it to blow over. Along the way she kept a succession of pet birds, even though in the end she couldn’t remember why (her husband gave her a bird while they were courting). Friends turned to enemies, and enemies to friends. Some characters died, some came back changed. An immortal posing as a local deity became a bitter foe. Business dealings went south. A fun story.

For Delta Green we started playing The Last Equation but unfortunatly didn’t have time to finish it off before I had to go catch a train—we’ll just have to continue online. This is only the second Delta Green scenario we’ve done, so we’re still kind of learning the ropes, but it’s fun and I think we’re all getting the hang of it. I do have to keep reminding the players that their characters aren’t actually interested in solving the case, they’re just posing as that so they get access to things and can act to shut down further investigation into the unnatural (and if they can best do that by committing crimes like falsifying evidence to blame something else and destroying the actual evidence, so be it).

It’s like we’re playing an RPG about LARPing.

Miscellaneous

As mentioned above, I visited friends this weekend. It was actually really nice, and not something I do that often. I don’t really travel to visit people much; I tend to hang out with people when they’re visiting my area, and otherwise mostly just talk to people online. But hopping on a train, going somewhere, and hanging out for a weekend is a nice change of pace and something I should do more often.