Flaming Monkey

For those who haven’t seen it, Nuadha (aka James Arnoldi) started a thread on The Forge about making Ambercons more indie game friendly.

As someone who has run kpfs at both TBR and ACUS, run the Success system at TBR, plans to run The Mountain Witch this year at TBR, and played in both My Life With Master and Cat at Ambercons, this is definitely an idea that appeals to me, and as one of the members of the TBR con committee, I’m curious about how well it might work out. I don’t want to see the hardcore Amber crowd get driven off by other indie games, but at the same time I don’t want to see Ambercons not change for so long that they die off. I guess it comes down to a question of balance.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one doing the playing.

While I was travelling to ACUS, Vincent Baker posted to The Forge about the latest episode of his Primetime Adventures campaign, Epidemonology. Lots of useful insight into how necessary one of the rules turned out to be.

Oh, and I never noted something cool from Vincent’s previous post about the game, which is the use of cards.

We play with cards instead of dice. Red cards are successes, high card has buck-stoppage. This is going to be hard to explain, I think, but playing the game with cards is more fun than playing it with dice. I expected it to be just as much fun, but nope! It’s more fun. I think it’s because the interaction is streamlined. With dice, we count up how many dice everybody gets, then we roll them, then we count successes etc. With cards, dealing them out takes the place of both the counting up and the rolling. I’m like, “how many cards, three? Four? Okay, fwap fwap fwap fwap.” It’s a good little interaction. So I’d recommend playing with cards to anybody.

It looks like Matt Wilson is considering making cards the main way to play in the next edition, and they seem to still be working out well for Vincent’s group, so if I ever get the chance to play/run PTA, I think I’ll suggest cards over dice.

I just submitted my first game for this year’s The Black Road.

The Mountain of the Sorcerer-King

Players: 3-6

Even at the best of times, the life of a mercenary has been a hard one. You have traveled from shadow to shadow, looking for whatever jobs you could find. Often hungry and lonely, you have seen some of the few you’ve counted as friends die on the field of battle. You’ve known that one day you too would bleed out the last of your life’s blood in some foreign land, dying for a cause you cared nothing about, for a payment that you would never collect.

Perhaps that is why you so were so quick to accept this latest offer, not taking the time to really understand what you were getting into. The payment would be enough to buy a chance at a normal life; that was all that truly mattered. Now you find yourself far from help near the top of this cold mountain, preparing for an assault on the Sorcerer-King himself. At your side are men and women you neither know nor want to know. Men and women who all carry a story similar to your own.

Who knows what the dawn of this day will bring? How will desperate warriors incapable of trust react when their only means of survival is to rely on each other?

The Mountain of the Sorcerer-King uses the rules from Timothy Kleinert’s forthcoming game The Mountain Witch (http://www.timfire.com/MountainWitch.html). Rules will be taught, and dice will be used. Part of character creation will take place via email before the con.

Now I just need to figure out a description for Nine Losers in Tijuana (the sequel to Nine Losers in Akron).