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Since it appears that a number of people in this community feel that it is appropriate to put words in my mouth, I’m going to post this comment response in the same way I posted the original post. It was on a share of my IWD post (below) that +Christopher Mennell posted. In the Comments, Eric Kervina divined my thought process and let everyone know what I was REALLY saying, which was, apparently:
“But by all means, feel free to denigrate anybody doing their earnest best to be decent, and unilaterally declare they are doing it wrong, should you find their efforts wanting.”

After reading some of the back and forth and taking a look at the names of those who +1′d Eric’s divination, I decided to respond and further explain my stance. That response is below.

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Blaming sexism on depictions of women in art or media is victim-blaming. It is the exact same logic utilized when a man defends his sexual assault on the woman by blaming her dress. It takes the responsibility for the bad behavior off of the shoulders of the person exhibiting those behaviors and places it onto the shoulders of a concept, where there can be no harm done. The man gets off the hook for his behaviors, and the concept takes all of the blame.

Saying that teens are more likely to become sexist after seeing women posed or presented in a particular format is also victim-blaming. Whether you deem the poses or clothing “realistic” or “reasonable” is irrelevant. The pictures depicted are those of the female body. Commentary on the depiction of those women’s bodies in this format has the net same result as making those comments about women’s bodies in the first place.

Telling girls that we need to depict them completely clothed in “reasonable armor” looking as masculine as they possibly can in order to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted, hit on, or mistreated sends theexact same message as telling teen girls that they need to cover up because they’re riling all the men to do things they don’t want to do.

The message should always be that sexism and sexual assault are the sole responsibility of the person who is inflicting harm upon the other. Violence is never okay. Treating someone poorly is never okay. The people who DO these things need to be corrected, not allowed to do whatever the fuck they want while we subtly change the media and hope that (eventually) it will have a net effect on bringing the level of assholedom down.

The same thing goes with getting more diverse artwork in books, and I’m talking about global diversity, not the narrow “more plus-sized models” bit that I generally see from the usual suspects in this community. I mean more short girls, more freckled girls, more red, brown, black, yellow, and even chartreuse girls. Girls with tits and asses of all sizes, with curves everywhere, and curves nowhere. Short girls, tall girls, ugly girls, pretty girls, girls that are feminine and passive, girls that are strong and aggressive, bookish girls and kick-ass girls … girls that dress conservatively, and girls that dress provocatively. Girls in reasonable armor, and girls in completely unreasonable armor. If we continually blame the art orders for the lack of diversity, the victim, is again, being blamed. We’re not doing anything to further equality, we’re just begging men for something else for women to consume.

Because really, here’s the point. Forcing male artists and writers to conform to “what women want” does not further equality. It just gives women yet anotherproduct to consume. Conceivably, down the line, some of these women consuming these items may in turn become game developers, but that is a long timeline away, and there is very little evidence to support that such a thing actually works. While the desire to do this may have the best of intentions, it’s just about effective a means of furthering equality as selling women washing machines and lipstick.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, women have been teased with equality through consumerism by an obscene amount. Buy this lipstick and you, too, can be respected at work! Purchase this washing machine and you, too, can have more free time for your own interests! Give us money, ladies, and you’ll have equality! Except that it was male advertising executives and male product designers that either deemed or were told what it was that women really want, sot hey did that.

Equality is not a difficult thing to measure. We have several baselines with which to do it. How many women graduate college, how many women go on to careers, how much women get paid, how many women work on a particular project (and in what roles), and so on.

Having spent 20 years of my life as a woman not only working in a male-dominated industry, but working in the male-dominated SIDE of that male-dominated industry, I know very well what that picture looks like. Chances are, that pink-it-and-shrink-it website “for women” all about making smart financial choices and being the mommy you always dreamed of was hatched from the mind of a male entrepreneur who wants to get on this “for women” bandwagon. Chances are, he hired predominately male engineers to build out the site with a few women thrown in here and there. He may go so far as to make sure plenty of women are hired, but chances are those women will fit “traditional” roles doing things like project management, human resources, product management, and administrative assistance. Yet, when his fantastic website is launched, it will be lauded as something women desperately need in a world dominated by men!

Hypocritical much?

I’ve seen that pattern time and time again in my professional career, and I see it happening in the RPG industry as well. If all a woman wants is diversity in consumerism, she’s not actually fighting for any sort of equality other than the equality of consumerism (which has been skewed towards women since the dawn of advertising, but that’s another discussion altogether). What she should be asking is, “How many women did you hire to build this product, and what were their responsibilities, and how much did they get paid?” if she wants to start pushing the conversation towards actually achieving true social equality. SO MANY of the self-proclaimed experts on social justice in our community NEVER ask these question. They only ask about art depictions and rape depictions, and it astonishes me that when +Zak Smith  consistently suggests that more diversity in hiring automatically LEADS to a more diverse product AND actually directly moves the equality needle, he’s frequently shouted down.

Take the measurements that I gave you: Break down how many women are working at games publishers, the percentage of women broken down by department and responsibility, the amount that those women get paid versus the amount that their male counterparts get paid, and add in the turnover rate based on gender, and you have a crystal clear picture of whether or not a publishing company actually does anything to further equality. And while the frame of reference here is about women, the same measurements should also apply to race and sexuality.

I can guarantee that a majority of the RPG publishing companies out there would completely fail this test, yet many women are just asking them to ask their male artists to depict women in another way while not only NOT asking them to hire for diversity, but actually defending them when they don’t. Yes, finding the right candidate is hard, but moving the needle of equality is alsohard, and also a worthy task. Excuses blame the victim, too. If there were only more women available who could DO this, then we’d hire them! They’re there! It may be harder to find them, but they’re there! So are all the different cultures, and sexualities. All there, all represented, all filled with fantastic artists and writers and managers and dreamers. Not taking the time to look for them is lazy and foolish.

Now, Eric (and all the people who +1′d him) put words into my mouth that I did not say and do not believe.

Think about what that means. Counting Eric, seven visible people have decided that they know better than I do what I’m stating when I write. Seven people have decided that they have the capability of looking into my mind and divining what I was think, and they all seem to have enough arrogance and hubris to determine that what they’ve divined – without ever so much as meeting me once – is correct.

This is not surprising, as this is their MO. Take a piece of artwork, whether it’s a game or a book or a single image, divine what the creator was thinking, then react to that divination. It does a wonderful job of stirring up the masses and creating attention, but unless they can step directly into the mind of the creator – and we haven’t developed mind-reading technology yet - they’re just reacting to a fiction they’ve developed in their own heads, and applying that fiction to someone they don’t even know.

The only part that I agree with even remotely is “should you find their efforts wanting”. YES! Should I find their efforts wanting is the PERFECT reason to tell them! In no way, shape or form should mere intentions excuse someone from offensive behavior. Looking at the list of who’s +1′d this, I can see why those people would definitely want to hide behind the idea that mere good intentionsare enough to excuse bad behavior, but it doesn’t - especially when the people you are offending are of the same social class that you’re claiming to protect.

A lot of sexist things occur based on good intentions. Societies that require women to take a secondary roll in life and wear protective clothing believe that they are doing this for the best interests of the women. They believe that they have the best of intentions and are protecting the jewels of their society. That doesn’t suddenly make it okay to cut off their genitalia.

So don’t come in here and tell me that the “good intentions” of a publisher who asks the males who work on their projects to produce “female friendly” work outweighs the fact that they didn’t do the very first and easiest thing they coulddo to further equality – which is to hire more women.

Asking to become better consumers isn’t enough. It’s like getting to the glass ceiling and saying ‘Okay, I’ll just stop here’. If you’re really intent on moving the needle, if you really want to be a catalyst for change, you have to be able to say that’s not enough. It isn’t enough to merely be a games consumer, we won’t achieve true diversity until the game creators are diverse.

The sheet is super easy to use and has some automated special functions to help make using it easier that I’m going to detail in this post. If you’d like to skip all that (most of it is available on mouseover of cellst hat have notes), then simply follow this link, then go to File -> Make a copy… for your very own copy.

Now, on with the detailed explanation!

Update Log

[2/1/2013] Released Version 3.0

Need Help?

Version 3.0 adds the addition of a ‘Help’ tab in the spreadsheet (the tabs are located at the bottom of the screen). This tab highlights many of the special functions of the character sheet and XP log (which is also new). It also gives you legends for the special auto-fill boxes.

The Basics

Anytime you see a cell with a little black triangle at one end of it, you can hover over that cell to get a helpful little note. In most cases, I was able to give specifics on game mechanics and character creation. In all cases, there are also book page numbers to guide you to a deeper explanation, and in some cases all you’ll have is the reference to the page number in the book.

Filling in a ‘dot’ is as easy as putting a ‘.’ in the cell. The Spreadsheet will automatically change the background color of the cell to make it look like you’ve got a filled-in ‘dot’. To delete a dot, you can just target the cell, then hit the ‘delete’ key on your keyboard. If you need to add a specialty to a skill, there should be enough room to place it next to the skill name.

In addition to the grey dot that you see above, you can also choose to use some additional characters to easily change the color or dots. You might want to do this to keep track of points that you’ve gotten from certain pledges or contracts, points from second-hand skills, or to explore what you might want to do with your experience points in the limit. The new ‘Help’ tab in the character sheet has the legend helpfully listed for easy access. It looks like this:

HEALTH: Your health behaves a little bit differently than the rest of the ‘bubbles’ on the sheet as you can record several different states. First, record your permanent Health – basically, the number of times your character can get hit with lethal or aggravated damage before they die, in the top row (Stamina + Size). Do this just by putting ‘.’s in the appropriate number of cells. They’ll come out in a dark green color, like in the example below. Additional states can be recorded, along with temporary health that your character might get from special abilities.

Also added with version 3.0 is an extra line below the bottom of the health bar, allowing the player to record the penalty states in the last three boxes of that character’s health, and now instead of hiding the special characters that record health, they are being displayed.

Damage and health are recorded according to these legends:

Additional information about the  recording health and taking damage can be found on the ‘Help’ page of the character sheet.

Glamour: Glamour is now recorded as a number rather than as a set of bubbles, since the amount of glamour a character can have can get pretty big. Also, there are spots to record the maximum amount of glamour a character can have (according to their Wyrd level) and how much of the glamour can be spent per turn. The tables for both of these pieces of data can be found by hovering over the black triangles.

Willpower: Record your permanent willpower score in the top dots, and your temporary willpower in the bottom dots, using the ‘.’ method. When you use a point of Willpower, just delete the ‘dot’.

BONUS: For particularly high-powered games, there is enough room to put up to eight dots for any of the skills, contracts, merits, etc… just select three of the sells adjacent to the empty cells that are already outlined and ready to act as a ‘bubble’, select them, and copy them (ctrl-c or option-c).

Then, paste the cells into the empty slots. The cells will come complete with the formatting necessary to just put a ‘.’ in the field to fill it.

NEW! XP Log

As a special request by Shoe Skogen, I’ve added an experience log, and I’ve also tied it into boxes around the character sheet that display statistics about your character’s experience. This should make it easier for you to keep track of when you get XP, how much you spend, and how you’ve spent it.

NOTE: Previously, the experience box on the character sheet was edited directly to add experience to the sheet. This box has now been locked, and displays the total sum of the experience from the XP log as well, as do the boxes on the XP Log tab. To add experience to the sheet, just add lines to the experience log. There is a small, working version of this functionality on the Help tab for experimentation.

Coming Soon

For the next version, I hope to start developing and adding in some quickie tools (either through a web interface or right through the Spreadsheet) that will allow players and GMs alike to develop Pledges super fast and keep track of what their oneiromancy rolls are.

How to Use

As a GM, I’ve been using these character sheets both for the players and for the major NPCs. I may develop something that allows for something more like ‘stat blocks’ for NPCs here in the future, but for now it’s working just fine.

You can give this link directly out to your players if you like, and have them make a copy of the spreadsheet. When they’re done, they can share it with you by hitting the blue ‘Share’ button in the upper-right hand corner of Google Spreadsheets.

Happy Gaming!

This is my entry into the 2012 Secret Santicore project (as was posted about here on Wampus Country). The request was for a some steampunk magic items for a rogue artificer. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what a rogue artificer was, but I extrapolated out to ‘neat Steampunk magic items’ and went from there. You can also access the catalog via google drive at this link. There’s some more things I’ve been wanting to add, but I haven’t gotten a chance to. My hope is that when I make a change I’ll keep this up to date with a changelog to show you what’s new.

Also be sure to check out the rest of the Secret Santicore projects. There’s a metric shit-ton of awesomely usable material there. Get ready to dive in. 

Optional Rule: Random Items

 Random Item Table

Optional: Roll here to give out a random magical item from this list. Many items have additional rolls for their specific features.

Accessories

Mr. Parsnip’s Build-Your-Own Accessories

The most ubiquitous of personal accessories – the parasol or the cane – is also the most modifiable of accessories. At Mr. Parsnip’s, we value your continued patronage and work to exceed your every wish.

Canes, parasol, staffs, and the like can be filled with any number of gadgets or accessories. The higher quality the accessory, the more options are available for modifying. See tables below for the whole list.

Optional: To randomly pick a magical item, first roll 1d10 to find out which implement, then roll 1d10 to fill the capacity. If an effect would take more capacity than is available on the item, reroll the d10. 

Clockwork Automatons

Clockwork Insects

These little bugs are made out of clockwork materials and gemstones so that they resemble the real thing. They’re imbued with enough magic to take telepathic commands of a slightly-more-than-simple variety. Emerald-green beetles, bright yellow wasps, black-as-night spiders… each one can hold a certain amount of modules to help it assist in it’s task. Anything from gas canisters to handguns can be mounted on these little insects.

Optional: To randomly pick an insect for treasure, roll below to select the bug, then again as many times as required to fill the capacity. If a roll results in an effect that will not fit the insect’s capacity, reroll until one comes up that does.

* Capable of flight
** Capable of wall-walking

Mimic Tome

The Mimic Tome is truly our finest and most impressive piece of work. It represents years of testing with Magical Intelligent Instruction Code (MIIC) and Miniaturization Technologies (MT). Mimic Tomes are difficult to make and, as a result, are incredibly rare, highly coveted, and very expensive.
In order to create each tome, the artificer must FIRST create tens of thousands of tiny, clockwork automatons (called ‘pixelbots’). These already-small pixelbots are then imbued with magical intelligence and made even smaller, until they are only visible with the aid of a magnifying glass. The pixelbots then come together to form the fabric of the individual pages of the tome. The pixelbots have two main ‘sides’ capable of either being black or white.
The outer shell of the Mimic Tome contains the appropriately magic-imbued clockwork designed to be the Main Controller of the tome’s MIIC. It is responsible for organizing all of the tiny pixelbots into pages.
When the Mimic Tome is placed on top of another tome, document, painting, or any reproducible piece of work, the Main Controller sends out the pixelbots to conform to the structure of the item. They form a sheet, each remember their particular ‘state’, then dissolve again to return to the Tome. This process is done relatively quickly, but can still take some time, particularly for larger or more complex works. The end result is a tome that perfectly mimics whatever it was set upon (within reason and in black and white), allowing the user to peruse the information at their convenience.
These tomes look like thick, heavy book. They are bound in metal with exposed clockwork on the front, spine, and back of the book. The clockwork actually functions as an inconspicuous combination lock. The tome will only function in ‘Mimic’ mode if the lock is set properly.

Miniaturized Clockwork Automaton

These little devices are disguised as small jewelry (most often cufflinks or earrings), and are infused with just enough magical energy to receive a single instruction to perform one simple task. These little automatons could, for example, fly through a keyhole and push a button on the other side or inject someone with poison, but they could not open a safe with a combination or handle any sort of complex logic. When we’ve tested giving these automatons more complicated instructions, they most often ended up in a logic loop and shut down.
The design of the automatons are fairly simple. They operate by a single rotor and are wound up prior to use by the individual using it. Their range is approximately a 50′ radius before they shut down. The magic in these automatons comes in their ability to take instruction. After the initial deisign, they are infused with magic as both a source of power and as a source of intelligence.
Exact decorative designs vary, but the miniature automatons are generally designed to be inconspicuous. Individual payloads (such as a poisoned pod, a syringe, or a tool) are often disguised as jewels and baubles. The only distinguishing factor that all of these tiny automatons maintains as the same is the rotor design. As such, the blades are often part of the earring or cufflink’s design, most often as the post and backing.

Eyewear

Eagle-Eye Monocle

The best way to not get caught doing something is to make sure you do it as far away as possible. The Eagle-Eye Monocle makes this dream a reality – with style. When collapsed, the monocle looks like an ordinary, fine gentleman’s monocle. When expanded, the monocle becomes a telescope capable of seeing up to 500 yards away. A magical enchantment then allows the user to use any effect as if they were standing at the position the telescope is focused, thereby increasing the range of many spells ore spell-like effects to 500 yards.

Liquid-Buffered Intensity Transducing Vision Enhancers

Goggles, monocles, blinkers, pincenez, rims, specs, they’re all over the place these days, and now you can get yours especially enhanced for various tasks. The lenses themselves are made up of two thin pieces of glass that are filled with a liquid enchanted to give the viewer a particular type of sight. Only one effect can exist per lens. Some airship pirates have been known to make shutters for their goggles so that they can have two different lenses, but only use them one at a time.

Optional: To randomly choose a set of vision enhancers, roll first on the first table to choose a setting, then on the second table to choose a lens color.

Survival Gear

Everlight Lantern

One of the bare necessities of working as an artificer is conjuring up enough light to work well into the wee hours of the night. That is why the Everlight Lantern is one of our most common and most plentiful of creations. Built with a flame that is kept in magical stasis, this lantern sheds light and heat without ever expending oil or blowing out. It looks like a brass, hooded lantern, and can only be ‘put out’ by closing off the shutters.

All of the previous banners I’ve made have been using older, existing photographs and manipulating them into the proper size. For this set, I actually took all of the shots with the dimensions in mind so that they could stand alone.

I’m sharing these under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Feel free and use them for your profile banners, to highlight posts, and, of course, for their most important use – as event banners for all the awesome hangout games you’re going to run!

I’m dealing with some latent Geek issues lately. First, Disney bought Lucasfilms and everyone (or close to everyone) in the Geekmunity went apeshit bonkers over the chatter of three more films taken out of George’s wretched little hands and maybe given to someone who grew up on Star Wars instead of the guy who abused the franchise to death. Still, I wasn’t thrilled. Not a freaking little tingle of excitement spread through my obviously geeky little body. Nope. I just sat there and said, ‘Meh’.

Now, a couple of things are happening in conjunction. First, the new Star Trek trailer is going around:

Then, The Hobbit was released. Okay, maybe I got the order wrong (no idea), but that just underscores the deep feelings of apathy that I get when I look at all of these old franchises pushing more material in the same worlds that they’ve been pushing material in since I was a kid. Add on top of that all of the comic book movies, and, well, you have a recipe for my own, personal apathy.

Now, dear reader, please do not make the mistake some Google+ers did of assuming I’m talking about originality. I’m not. I know all of the old cliches about everything having already been done (but not by you). This apathy I’m feeling doesn’t go that deep. I could probably watch the same story play out in a million different new worlds in a million different styles with a million different characters and not find myself as hopelessly bored as I am with the same franchises that I was interested in as a kid. You know which ones they are. We all do. Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, DC, Marvel, Harry Potter (which just drug on far too long – I never got past the third movie) and I’m sure there’s two or three that I missed stuck in there somewhere. We’re all Pavlov’s Dogs – trained to drool whenever a ginormous film studio poops out another big-budget sci-fi action film placed in one of the worlds that we’ve loved since we were children. As much as I want to drool, I find the whole experience getting more and more hollow with age. It was still novel when the first LOTR films were released. Now, it’s just stale and a little hollow. Like putting a coat of paint on my old toys and saying ‘Please, buy them again!’.

We’re adults, now. We might have grown up flying around model Enterprises and X-Wings made of Legos, but I’m more interested in seeing the new worlds and new strands of imagination those early periods of play created in the minds of young geeks who are now geeks in the prime of their lives, at the top of their careers, ready to show the world what they can do. I want to see all new toys. Worlds that have depth and life and interesting stories associated with them. Worlds that can turn into NEW franchises, franchises that my kids might get an opportunity to crush on in the same way I crushed on all of those older franchises. I feel like, by and large, we are stagnating… stuck in the worlds and with the stories that we were told when we were children.

When I posed this question on Google+, I got a mixture of reactions. Some were defensive about being allowed to like what they want to like (my opinions on how I feel about things are mine alone – I don’t expect others to share them, and I have no truck with people who don’t feel burnt out on these franchises). Some were in agreement, and others told me that the newest, most interesting stories are actually not being told on the big screen (unless you have a very large monitor) – they’re being told on the Internet… so now I have a whole slew of links to peruse to find the hidden, secret, yummy new stuff as opposed to the old, tired franchises.

So consider this my plea not just to movie studios, who will follow the dollar regardless of where it leads, but to the men and women who are writing those worlds, building those environments… those who are my age, who are in the prime of their lives and at the top of their careers, those creative people out there who, like me, grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek and Tolkien and everything in between…

…it’s okay. You can stop remaking the old stuff. Now that you’ve made it to the big time… can we see something new?

No comments on this blog, now! I’m handling it all via Google+! If you’d like to comment, jump to the G+ post here.

Also, welcome to the new layout! I finally found something that I was pleased with mostly right out of the box so that I can focus on the actual blogging instead of the web development.

When I was 19 and running games, I seldom wrote down anything that I planned to have happen. Games would go like this: Get paid. Run to gaming store. Use rent money to buy new books. Run home. Crack open book. Play until dawn. This often resulted in tons of fun and lots of cacophony, but there was never anything as cogent as a theme or a plot.

I sort of just made shit up as it happened. Much fun was had.

Later, I’d start to get plot ideas, and I’d just run them from my memory. I’d get an idea for a snippet of a scene, or a plot formation idea, and I’d run with that little kernel of whatever. The details, I’d make up as we went along. This resulted in a little more theme and plot, but not a whole lot as I found that my memory is just as fallible as any human’s. Consistency? Meh, who needs consistency?!

Lots of making shit up, but still … much fun was had.

Then, for YEARS I determined that in order to run a game, I had to have everything prepped from start to finish before we sat down to even the first session. I went from doing things with very little prep to believing that if I didn’t have every NPC statted down to the last one and every scene determined ahead of time (in a flowchart kinda way in case the players made other decisions), then I wasn’t being an effective GM, and should stop doing that.

I still ran, and I was never that prepared, but I believed that I just wasn’t prepared. I was too lazy, and, thus, a mediocre GM at best.

Then, Steam & Crumpets came along and I thought I’d have the perfect chance to be more than just a mediocre GM.

The first couple of sessions were extremely well prepared. I had floorplans and discussions all planned out, orders of events, details to read aloud about how things looked and felt and smelled, flowchart-style bullet points on what to do if the players did X or Y. I finally got to the point where I honestly thought I had achieved this golden status of ‘game prep’ that I’d been reaching for for so long …

…and it frustrated the fuck out of me.

Players don’t pay attention to flowcharts. A series of if/then statements about scenes only works if the only options available are the if/then statements in the flowchart. When a player goes off the reservation and/or comes to a situation where they make a decision decidedly not in that if/then box, the resulting confusion on my part as I try to sort out what should happen next is a momentum halter. Not to mention, there were enormous blocks of text that I had to wade through to find the answers to rather simple questions.

The choices available to me on how to deal with out-of-the-box thinking were limited thanks to the enormous amount of prep that I’d already done. The ideas, thoughts, and decisions that the characters made in the game were creative and interesting, but I had a tough time imagining how to fit them into the story that I’d written. A lot of the time, even though I had more work done for my games than I ever had done before in the 20+ years I’ve been running games, I felt like I was being hobbled by my own prep.

After a few sessions, I ran out of content that I’d pre-generated and didn’t have time to make more. I found myself frustrated because the players were circling around parts of the plot that were unimportant as if they were the most important things in the world. They kept coming back with empty results with their searches, and I could tell that some were getting frustrated at the wild goose chase that they were on. *I* was getting frustrated, too, because here I was with all of this well-planned story, and the players weren’t able to actually FIND the story.

So, quite on accident, I went back to running a session or two the way I used to – with heavy improv. So, I took some mental inventory, and after prepping in this way for the last 6-8 game sessions, I’ve found a way that works for me incredibly well. Now, I’m not saying here that this is the one and only true way. This is my way. Try it out if you like, and then tailor it to suit how you like to run games.

Stacy’s Game Prep Rules

• Do prep with bullet points, not paragraphs. Each one should take up no more than 1-2 lines. If you find that a bullet point is longer than that, split it up. Bullet points are easier to read in the middle of a game session than paragraphs.
• Don’t decide how the PLOT will go, decide how the actors driving the plot will behave. In other words, spend more time prepping NPCs and really getting into their heads, especially of your major antagonists than you do on anything else.
• Do give the NPCs goals, however. I find that those goals go much further to writing a plot (the NPCs end up writing it for you) than anything else.
• Don’t decide what your NPCs are going to do until you’re prepping for that session. This one is pretty important to me. Once I abandoned the idea that I make the plot and just let the NPCs drive the plot, I also realized that I shouldn’t decide things for the NPCs until they’re actually reacting to something. Thinking about how the NPC would react to further his or her goal (or save his or her ass) makes for some deeper, more interesting NPCs than just using them as automatons to fulfill the GM’s goals. The distinction is subtle, but to me it makes all the difference in the world.
• Don’t prep too much too far in advance. Things change all the time. If you do that, you’re going to find yourself with material that you’ll never use. Have enough prepped for the next two sessions, but leave out a lot of the extreme details for the latter part until the former is completed.
• Do prep what you’re bad at improvising. For me, that’s mainly names of both things and places. I like to think I do a pretty good job naming my characters, but only when I get the chance to actually think about those names. So, when a new NPC is about to make an appearance or just starts to exist in the world, I name them right away. That’s usually the first bullet point.

I haven’t completely mastered my own rules, yet. For example, I’m still feeling around as to what makes up about two sessions worth of prep. I usually prep too much, thinking that the players will drive through more content in theory than they actually do in practice. That ends up being a waste of time as it can often change.

However, preparing for games has become much, MUCH simpler, and much, MUCH less time-consuming. Also, more enjoyable. The games have become more enjoyable, too. The worlds are becoming more and more an echo of the people who play them than they are my own vision, and as a Storyteller/GM, that’s like gamer’s crack. I still have players coming to me and apologizing for their zany ideas of off-the-wall requests, but honestly … I don’t mind them, I relish them and enjoy them for the creativity they represent … and I’m no longer prepping myself into corners where those ideas represent a threat to the chronicle/campaign/story/etc…

My NPCs are diligently going about their days and living their lives, even if my players don’t interact with them for weeks and months at a time. They’re not just robots there to give the players clues or new quests, they’re people they interact with on a regular basis. I want the players to connect with the NPCs so that if/when those NPCs die, they really feel something, even if that something is a grudging respect for an antagonist that’s been plaguing them for who knows how long. When I sit down to do game prep, the first thing I ask myself now is, “What have all the NPCs been doing in the meantime?” Then, THEY tell me what the next session is going to be like.

YMMV, of course. I don’t think there’s one perfect way to prep for a game. What each person needs in game prep tends to differ by quite a bit. I’ll detail the tools I use and maybe even share some game prep notes of mine for past games in a future post (if there’s interest).

So, it’s been a looooong time since I’ve played Vampire: The Masquerade. Back in the day, I lived Vampire – on MUSHes, in LARPs… I lived and breathed that shit. It was fantastic. I was a struggling young tech wannabe in San Francisco at the height of the Vampire era, drinking it all up like crazy. Vampire was my escape from the mundane world of trying to make it in a tech world that was juuuuust becoming visible. I was always broke, but somehow usually managed to find just enough money for new gaming books…

I haven’t run Vampire in probably fifteen  years. It’s marvelous to go back through the old books again. I realy feel like RPGs each have a certain personality to them given to them by the layout and the type of artwork that’s shown. So, opening that book again was kind of like reacquainting myself with an old friend.

I’m looking forward to running this game. Our first session is tomorrow morning, in just a little over ten hours, now. We’ll be airing the episodes live and I’ll be posting here about the games.

The above is a labor of love. I polled a bunch of G+ gamers and asked them to tell me what music they listened to when playing Vampire THEN, and what music they’d listen to when playing Vampire NOW. This is the result. I spent five hours doing YouTube searches and listening to a whole ton of really truly awesome music. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have a request to add to the list, just tweet to me, @StacyRex.

I think I can keep up with ongoing session reports if I limit myself to writing about the completion of individual stories rather than writing about each and every night. I’d like to write more, the the reality is that I’m running at 90 mph as it is and something’s gotta give!

These two episodes largely comprise the goings on at the Crystal Palace. This whole leg of the adventure was something I didn’t plan for. I expected the changelings to eventually go there, but by eventually I mean in a few weeks time in-character, when the Goblin Market is in town.

The changelings were looking to a key that they’d need to fit into a door that they would have to create to close up and lock the Trod that was under their former Freehold (the one that was destroyed by an enormous, brass steam octopus during the first session). In some of the old Freehold texts, the changelings found that the portal has traveled with the changeling Freehold as it moved about town while London was growing. Prior to being at the Hobgoblin Pub, it was at the site where the Crystal Palace is presently built.

Well, I think I oversold the Crystal Palace. I put a couple of posts up on G+ about it, and chatted with some folks about the other places the Crystal Palace has shown up, so when I said ‘The Crystal Palace’, all most of the players could see was neat shinies that they wanted to go and look at because I’d already teased them with it.

WHY I didn’t expect that is completely beyond me, but once the characters were in the palace, I couldn’t very well have nothing happen. For the record, I LOVE it when things I don’t expect to happen happen. I do my best thinking when I suddenly have to create something new for someplace I wasn’t even thinking about.

I kept the info light, doing even LESS prep than I have for the last few games before that. I’m improvising more and more as the world spreads out into my mind’s eye. I know that sounds hopelessly corny, but it’s the truth. The less i seem to prepare, the more the characters get through and the more fun we have. I don’t know why that’s the case and I don’t care. So long as it works, it works!

I’m focusing on the things that I know I have the hardest time NOT improvising. NPC names and possibly a smidgen about their description or personality. I actually like it better when I let the personality and voice come to me on the spot rather than trying to play to whatever I’ve written out before hand. Much of the rest of it, I’m leaving to what happens on the spot.

The last two sessions I ran (one Steam & Crumpets, one Steam Francisco) had less than one page of session notes each. Now, Steam & Crumpets already had a backlog of notes I’ve been creating as we’re going, so that half page of notes was literally just refresher little things for this particular game and notes about things I wanted to foreshadow and stuff like that. That foundation I set up in the first place with a few random encounter tables, and a variety of faerie-like monsters all statted up is what’s making it easier, more efficient, and all around better for me to improvise all of the other details.

That backlog of monsters and their stats is particularly important. The Steam Imps have now shown up in Steam & Crumpets sister game, Steam Francisco, in a slightly different shape. I’ve also got a large handful of other things statted that haven’t even shown up in the game yet, and I’m adding new things all the time. My Secret Santicore project is even going to serve a dual purpose and add even MORE to that foundation. So, my learnings boil down to one phrase, really: Build a strong foundation and go from there.

That said, I need to devote some more time to strengthening my foundation. Especially with the things that are coming up next on my mind. I’m extraordinarily thrilled about the upcoming sessions. At the end of these two episodes, I did a small tease scene into the next leg of the story, which is an old school dungeon crawl changeling style.

Ahhh, yes.

Poking around for Victorian things online, I found several sets of blueprints for things like Victorian row houses. Row mansions, really. This thing is enormous. When I made the decision to start off the Chronicle with destroying the other Freehold and leaving these guys the only changelings in the city, I had already planned to give them an opportunity – through the course of the game – to get a new, even better Freehold that the motley could truly make their own. After earning it, of course.

The actual plot is based off of this incredibly creepy book that I read when I was in middle school. Of course, without the PG rating, that is. I’m not even sure what dislodged the memory enough for me to decide that it should absolutely be a plot element, but I’m loving the idea. I’ve got a lot of rooms to write up for this one, but I’m really looking forward to getting to tell the story.

Well, that’s all I’ve really got for now. Keep an eye out for my games on Google+. I’m now running three Hangout games, all of which are being broadcast via YouTube.

Rather than cluttering this post with four YouTube windows, I’m just going to link the playlist with all 7 episodes (starting with the third). These four episodes largely encompass the first adventure, which was to save Patrick, the guy who proves the rule that “Nice guys finish last”.

And here’s Patrick’s mini-fiction to go along with the story:

A waiter with a hidden talent for playing the piano was walking home one night when he came across a clearly destitute old man with a badly broken leg. The leg was splinted, but it was clear the man was doing poorly, and surely wouldn’t last through the cold and the night.

Taking pity on the hurt old man, the waiter paused and crouched down to see if he might be able to render some aid. “I am certain there is a hospital near here.”, he stated, “Perhaps I could carry you there.”

The old man shook off the help and insisted, “They will not see me, they will not take me! I am far too old, I shall die this night. Surely.”, the old man said to the waiter, “Surely, you are a man of great kindness. I can see it in the deep blacks of your eyes. You are young and you are strong – could you not take my broken bone for me and heal the pain yourself?”

The waiter smiled at the old man fondly, thinking him daft and gone to delusions. With only the warmest intentions in his heart, the waiter bent forward at the waist in a deep and formal bow, as if he were addressing none other than the Queen Herself, he said, “Surely, surely, old friend, I would take any amount of pain and grievance on my person so that you might live another night. Surely.”

The old man patted the waiter’s arm and smiled ruefully. “Ah, if there were but something to take away the bite of the cold, at least, at least … for one last night.”

Not knowing what else to do, and blocked by other attempts to render aid to the destitute old man, the waiter merely left his hip flask filled with Brandy and his cloak to aid with warmth before making his way back to his own home to sleep the night away.

Upon the morrow, the waiter awoke with such a pain in both his hands, he thought he might die from it there on the spot. The pain was so great, he could not even use his hands to rub the sleep out of his eyes so that he could clearly see. Blinking his eyes open and sitting up, crying out in desperate pain to no one, the waiter looked down to find all of the fingers on both his hands twisted and gnarled into impossible shapes, broken and in pain. He cried out to the heavens, “How could this be?! How could this happen?! I am a good man, I am righteous and kind, and I am humble! How could this happen? My future, it is ruined! I will never touch the keys of a piano again, I shall never look upon my fingers again!”

Just as he spoke the last, a small, goblin-like thing appeared out of steam at the foot of his bed. It was red and scaly, and stank of brimstone. When it grinned at the waiter, it showed rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth, and it laughed merrily at the start it gave the young man. “You swore and you promised, and you bowed to my friend!”, he cried gleefully, “…and now you must suffer the pains you said you would!”, he cackled again, louder than the first time, shaking his little body so aggressively that the waiter’s tiny bed moved all around his tiny little apartment.

As the imp cackled, more curls of steam coalesced into more imps, who bound his legs and, no matter how hard he fought, he found it useless to prevent his ultimate fate. The imps together, humming a merry song, drug the waiter, screaming, through the Hedge, his soul being ripped and torn by the thorns as they went, their song never ending…