Dragon Age : a return to childhood

So last night we made characters for the Dragon Age RPG.  I don't/haven't played the computer/XBox game, and the dark of the fantasy setting really doesn't do much for me.  But the system is pure elegance of everything I wanted to play when I was 12 and just starting DnD.  Character gne takes all of about 30 minutes while reading the rules, probably 10 once you're used to it.  You get a background (some combo of race and heritage), a class (warrior, rogue or wizard), 8 randomly rolled stats (swap any two).  Roll on  at table for extra focuses, get some gear and done.  The book looks way better than the PDF.  For example, each class was on its own page in the book, making referncing them easy.  I hadn't noticed this reading the PDF because the pages don't fit easily on my lpatop screen.  It was oldschool brillance, melded with some newer ideas.  The only thing I saw lacking was no 10 foot pole on the equpment list (although they did have spikes for spiking doors).

It looks quite good on the chargen, now hopefully the gmaeplay (and stunt points play well).

I can easily see it being a good engine for a musketeers game I have ideas for.  But as Alton would say "thats another show"..

The Rig

I really enjoy the Laudry series by Charles Stross.  IT geek saves the world from unthinkable horrors while also having to battle beauracracy and pointy haired bosses (see Dilbert).  It helps that I'm an IT geek.  But when the Laudry came out in RPG form, they used the Chaosium BRP percentile system.  Not one of my favorites.  So I still love to read the adventure ideas, but I think it needs a better system.

Recently I read a good bit of Black Bag Jobs, the first supplement for the Laundry RPG.  The first adventure really grabbed me, Case Lambeth Witch, mainly due to the briefing by Angleton and the quote :

‘Without wishing to prejudice your findings, it is entirely possible that some moron has drilled into Cthulhu’s arse-crack.’

Its an adventure set on an oil rig in the North Atlantic during a storm (of course) with bad bad things coming up from below.  Good stuff all, but it needed a different system if I was going to run it.

Dread is definitely my goto game for horror and tension.  And I've had great sucess with my conversion of the Fiasco playset Objective Zebra into a full 4 hour long Dread convention scenario.

My idea is to make up questionaires (Dread uses questionaires instead of character sheets) for a Laundry based strike team, and run it that way.  My main problem with Cthulhu scenarios is how to make it different from the last one.  Sure people go crazy and there is impeding doom, but how do you make it unique.  How do you catch people off guard and give them something they haven't seen in horror before?

The New Myth Dilemma

I loved the fiction from Deliria : Tales for the new Millenium.   The game system didn't really get its hooks into me, but the fiction was just so magical to read.  Much like some Charles DeLint, the Fae and the otherworldness always seemed just out of reach, just beyond you the heat ripples on the sands.  Shimmering out there but never fully realized.  Always full of magic.  

Keeping that sense of magic in a scenario currently seems just as far out of reach.  

If you have the Fae, then the players head straight for them, they immediaely believe in the other worlds and the mystery drops away.  The characters would have a much harder time believing that a goblin is living under the stairs behind the local resturant, but the player, jaded by time and many games, just run right though it.

I have no idea how to recapture that magic in the players.

Jaded gamer syndrome seems to abound lately.  John ran a noir game at a con with a muredered 15 year old prostitute.  That would normally elicit at least some emotion in a book or movie, but at the table the players barely paused.  She wasn't a person, she was a plot point, and once discovered, no more thought about than the equipment list.

I wish I could figure out how to unjade the players...  maybe the goblin has a potion he'd sell me....