Skip to main content

Posts

Jyayan of Kosala: A Thousand Year Old Vampire Playthrough (Part 2)

This is the journal for the playthrough begun in Part 1. This makes a bit more sense as a read. The numbers are the prompts from the game (25.2 would be the second prompt for number 25).  Journal 3.1 Sumitra is alive! She finds me in a camp near Dhara, where she has been a captive, a wife, a widow. She wishes to find a healer for me, but the bleeding means nothing. I cannot stand the daylight, though I see nothing. She gives me a wooden bowl for gifts of food, though nothing given will sustain me. As she begins to understand more, she lets me know where the soldiers carouse. I take of them what they once took from my people. 4.1 The healers would not leave me to my peace, and I am driven from the city by holy incantations. Sumitra wraps me like a bundle of cotton cloth and leads Sarantugala north by night. We arrive in the old capital of Udabhandapura, now under the sway of a sultan . I can tell without sight that the people here ride well. My songs are well-liked here, and I am ca...
Recent posts

Jyayan of Kosala A Playthrough of Thousand-Year-Old Vampire (Part 1)

This is a typewritten version of a playthrough of Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings. In part 2 I will add the journal, but that's an optional part of the game. All the mechanical elements are here. This was an interesting experience that took about two weeks of play to complete. Characters Sumitra , my reckless sister, a sorceress. Babaka , a swordsman and bandit. Vamadeva , a fellow conscript. Asadhi (i), a Deva who pitied me. Lomaharsana , who claimed the fields of my father. Arik , my ward from Samarqand who followed me to the eastern Khanate. Baram (i), the mendicant whose hunger made me a vetala. Soojin (i), a scholar-official who knows the stars well whose being I made as my own.  Nasif , an ecstatic in thrall to my songs who is alive again with a demon in his shadow. Darma Bansin , a Dutch colonial and descendant of Arik, my former ward. Satook , a brigand and eunuch. Absolom Bansin , a grandson of Darma, devoted to my destruction.  Jangye , a decrepit monk...

Resources in Over/Under

Over/Under was a month-long wargame within which a mass of more than 1,000 players roleplayed residents of the cyberpunk space station "Prospero's Dream" outlined in A Pound of Flesh . They did so in a single Discord server set up to represent the different factions at play on the station. For many (maybe even most) of the players, this game took over our lives during Mothership month.  I'm not going to try to explain the whole game, because neither I nor any other player played the whole game, very much including the GM. If you didn't play it, you can find a number of illustrative and interesting accounts. I intend to catalog the resources available to players (principally denizens) in the game. Hopefully by outlining these resources I can move toward a better understanding of how this game actually worked. In-Game Resources Denizens of the Dream who did not start as Bosses began the game with just the in-game currency, credits . This was the principal mechanical...

Running Mothership for an After-School Club

 "This is a bad idea," I think after one of the students grabs the Mothership box set from the pile I've laid out at the first RPG club meeting of the year.  Last year I ran a campaign of Knave 2e for a group of mostly 9th-grade students and had a great time with it, but for this second year I expected the club to expand and needed more games to accommodate new students. More than twenty signed up and I figured having a bunch of games running in rotation would fit the bill. One of the first games they went for was Mothership , decidedly not what I would think of for fun with my mostly 9th- and 10th-graders. Nevertheless, there must have been some reason I set it out on the table to begin with...  Maybe I just wanted to play it and this is my group? I went with Another Bug Hunt for the starter scenario, planning on three 1.5 hour sessions. I gave students materials to create characters, but came prepared with a lot of pregenerated PCs for students who were new to RPGs or ...

Generation 1: A Pound of Flesh (Mothership 1e)

Look at blog! This will be entirely unnecessary stuff about adventure and mystery games (RPGs, etc.). I'm starting off with a series of posts on setting and location generation in published books, modules, pamphlets, etc.  The Basics I just received physical copies of the long-awaited Mothership 1e boxed set. There was much wailing in the Kickstarter comments, but the end result is pretty handsome for all the delays. Among the offerings is an updated pamphlet of A Pound of Flesh by Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud, and Luke Gearing. It's a guide to the enormous (and complicated) space station Prospero's Dream. Tucked in the back of the text is a short section with prompts and tables for the creation of your own space station. Let's see what it came up with. Gorgon's Cross There are two options for your space station: Corespace or Rimspace. Presumably, you should pick which of them works better for your campaign. I generated one of each, the first being a Corespace station. ...