A bit of cruel whimsy from RPG Blog II, especially funny having just played octaNe:

"[Macavoy] just wouldn't stop talking to that bear", bystander Rashida Johnson recalled. "He kept saying stuff like 'OK, we're shifting stances, bear. OK, bear, we need to dictate story to push the conflict. Bear, you need to relinquish control. This is a safe place to explore this theme, ok, bear? Now, bear, the narrative structure is...'"

"If anything, I think it just made [the bear] angrier".

Police now believe Macavoy was attempting to gain what he called "narrative control" over the situation, by dictating to the animal what should have been happening in the "scene" of the Grizzly Pit.

Unlike other games where die rolls determine a character's success or failure at an action, die rolls in octaNe determine how much control the player and the GM have over the story at that moment. A low roll doesn't indicate failure. A high roll doesn't indicate success. The player who controls the narrative may decide to fail; the GM may decide it's better if the character succeeds.

Furthermore, if multiple players are involved (as in mass combat), you can easily have a situation where die results indicate that several players have total control over the outcome of an event. What if they disagree? The game suggests that everyone work together to determine the most awesome outcome, but I can see how that has the potential to bog down horribly.

This review at the Forge discusses some of the potential pitfalls. I like the author's approach to the problem -- narrative control as a "hot potato" that's passed from player to player. The game's designer also suggested a different way of handling some of the mechanics around order of action and the Might and Magic Styles that may help.

Fortunately I have good, experienced players.

And worst case scenario, there will still be pizza.

I'll let you know how it goes!

Today I run my RPG one-shot -- the first game I've refereed in something like 15 years.

We're playing octaNe, a freewheeling cinematic game set in a gonzo post-apocalyptic world of American trash culture. Die rolls determine whether the player or the GM has control over what happens next in the encounter. The goal is to create a story where awesomely cool things happen.

I won't be using the setting described in the game. Instead I'll be running an adventure of my own entitled War Zeppelin of the Iron Man that draws heavily on imagery from 1970s and 80s heavy metal. (I place it in the Stupid/Pretentious area of Jeff Rients' Threefold Model.) I've included a bit of the adventure's Prologue below.

I emailed my players in advance and told them what their character options are so they can start thinking about who they'd like to be, and how they want to roll. The options (called "Roles" in octaNe) are:

The Metallurgist
Guitar wizard who wields darke magick.

The Witchy Chick
A mysterious sorceress from the mists of Avalon, Utah.

The Demon Biker
A badass refugee of the Hell Wars.

The Frazetta Babe
She roams the savage Wastelands with her chainmail bikini and really, really huge sword, challenging any who dare test her steel.

The Crazed Aviator
Do you like squirrels? Hey! Let me tell you about my dream!

The Ninja
...

The Genius Monkey Scientist
One lab coat pocket holds a handheld supercomputer, the other a ray gun!

I even set up a streaming music station for inspiration: Listen to War Zeppelin Radio on Pandora

WAR ZEPPELIN OF THE IRON MAN: THE PROLOGUE

In the 1980s, the gates of Hell opened and Satan made war upon the nations of the Earth.

His armies of demons and hell-powered war robots ravaged the land in a time known as the Hell Wars. Humanity fought back with technology, and the secrets of ancient wizardry.

The Devil's unholy march was halted, but at a terrible price. All of the United States east of the Mississippi River became a province of Hell, ruled by the Beast. There, he plots and schemes and readies his armies for the day of total conquest.

In the Lands of the West, humans and mutants struggle to survive amid the desolation wrought by war. Many gather in the ruins of towns and cities, now turned to fortress-states. Others live a precarious existence in the radioactive Wastelands, where monsters, demons and war robots still roam, and eldritch sorcery warps space and time. It is a savage, hostile world, where uneasy truces are frequently broken by raiding and warfare.

Over the past year the armies of the Beast have begun to venture West. Led by an armored general known as the Iron Man, legions of demonic War Pigs have laid waste to dozens of settlements and enslaved their citizens. The attack is heralded by a massive War Zeppelin that rains destruction on the human defenses, smashing them entirely. With the War Zeppelin at his command, the Iron Man cannot be stopped. The Lands of the West will be conquered.

But now, word has gone out across the shattered lands: A mystical figure known only as the Prophet calls the warriors of the West to a gathering on neutral ground. He has gone from settlement to settlement preaching a message of unity and hope; some say that he has come to deliver humanity from its torment, and overthrow the rule of the Beast...

Eric writes about his last two one-shot RPGs at Talking Game, both of which I played in. He describes feeling unsatisfied with the first, a game based on Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels and using the FUDGE rules system:

The game was ... okay. The players weren't as into it as I'd have liked, and my usual off-the-cuff GM-ing style didn't seem to work. I had fun, and (apparently) so did the players, but I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied. And I didn't get the enthusiastic vibe from the players that you can get after a good session. It showed a lot of potential - and I'd definitely be willing revisit the game for a sequel at some point - I deliberately left a few plot hooks dangling - but I suspect that, if the players were filling out a report card, it would have received a B-minus or C-plus grade.

By contrast, he counts his CthulhuTech one-shot (which I also posted about) as a great success. I agree with him on both counts -- although I may have enjoyed Deryni more than he did. Here's why I would give the Deryni one-shot a B-minus grade, and why CthuluTech got an A-plus.

Setting

FUDGE: I just didn't grok the setting. I've never read Kurtz's novels.  I got enough information on its alternate, magical history from Wikipedia to navigate the adventure, but I had no sense of what I should love, hate, or want.

CTHULHUTECH: I'm a Lovecraft fiend, and also love cyberpunk and anime. I immediately recognized this world. I knew who I was in relation to the setting, and where to go from the starting square. But I suspect that even if I wasn't familiar with those genres, I still would have had a better time banging around the world of CthulhuTech, because this is an easy premise to digest: "The world is under attack by horrific aliens who are secretly served by corrupt humans, and they will probably win. Your job is to fight them."

Character

FUDGE: Rather than pre-generating characters, Eric asked us what sorts of characters we would like to play. I chose to be an itinerant healer with lofty ideals. This turned out to be a poor choice from a role-playing perspective: he had no real motivation, or conflict, nothing I could sink my teeth into. I didn't know who I was, so I didn't know how to respond to what was happening in front of me.

CTHULHUTECH: Eric gave us our choice of characters consisting of stats, skills and two personality descriptors, and that was exactly enough for me to run with. Police officer Patrick "Vader" Sullivan was a bad guy on the side of the angels, a violent man who shamefully tormented those weaker than him, but who would fight to the last for the survival of humanity. So perhaps I do better when I'm given several concrete options to work with, along with the freedom to add my own contributions to the character.

Plot

FUDGE: We were tasked with solving a mystery, recovering a missing item, and foiling some bad guys. We did these things. But when I looked at my fellow players and at the GM for confirmation that we'd won, I saw blank looks all around. We actually debated whether the adventure was really over. Eric said we could keep going if we wanted, but there were no strong storytellling cues that shouted, "More adventure THIS way!" So we sort of wandered off into the sunset.

CTHULHUTECH: We were tasked with solving a mystery, recovering a missing item, and foiling some bad guys. We did these things, and knew when we'd won. Part of it was that the GM had ways to help us along when we went astray, in the form of trusted NPCs. Part of it was that at the end, most everyone who needed killing or arresting was killed or arrested. Some got away and some went undiscovered; but the noir/Lovecraftian setting leads players to expect the worst, and accept the inability of human beings to deal with some levels of reality; so we were satisfied with having achieved something. ("It's Chinatown, Jake," I muttered to one of my fellow officers. I don't know if anyone got it.)

Executive Sunmary: I played CthulhuTech a couple of weekends ago and it was awesome.

When I was 14 years old, my parents bought me two dog-eared paperback collections of short stories by pulp horror author H.P. Lovecraft. For months afterward, Lovecraft and his Mythos were practically all I could talk about. 

Twenty years later I had a similar response to Japanese animation, and weird series like Neon Genesis Evangelion in which emotionally disturbed teenagers piloted giant biomechanical creatures in horrific combat against alien monsters.

The CthulhuTech roleplaying game smashes those obsessions together to make something entirely new and wonderful. It's set n a gritty near-future setting where Lovecraft's monstrous aliens are waging open war against humanity, and magic and technology have merged in bizarre ways. It seems likely that humanity will lose the war and become extinct. Or worse.

A couple of weeks ago I played CthulhuTech for the first time, in a one-shot run by Eric Franklin of Talking Game. The game was a blast. I'm a huge fan of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and really enjoy the roleplaying possibilities of scenarios where ordinary people are plunged into nightmarish situations that, more often than not, will kill them or drive them mad. In contrast, CthulhuTech characters are competent professionals who are trained and equipped to go up against alien monsters. Lovecraftian horror is exchanged for horror of a different kind; a sort of existential, macro-level horror as you encounter a corrupted, doomed world.

Eric let us pick from a stack of pre-generated characters. I chose a very strong, tough character who was an expert in Military Kendo, whose Virtue was courage and whose Flaw was sadism. The character's name and call sign were up to me. From that rough sketch I fleshed out a big, angry, intimidating beat cop who wielded a police baton with deadly skill and power. His fellow officers had naturally given him the call sign "Vader".

The elements of science fiction, horror and detective noir worked very well together. As a band of police officers trying to crack the case of an unidentified corpse that had disappeared into thin air, we plundered computer networks, prowled the red light district, tapped into shadowy military and underworld connections, slammed punks up against walls, and fumed as oily sleaze merchants cheated justice. At the climactic battle we had to fight smart, and we made some hard moral choices about who got to live and who didn't.

And yes, I went toe to toe with a Deep One, and beat him to death with a stick. It was one of my most satisfying gaming moments ever.