|  |
We are looking for playtesters for a new Purist Trail adventure,Watchers in the Sky the follow-up to the excellent Dying of St Margaret's. Email me simon@dyingearth.com if you are interested.
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) robin_d_laws has completed the first draft of The Armitage Files, a campaign setting for Trail of Cthulhu, and I'm looking for playtesters. Please </a>email me subject Armitage Files if you'd like to playtest it.
Edit: Playtest slots are now all filled.
Documents, apparently written by Dr Armitage have appeared in the Miskatonic Library. Dr. Armitage has no recollection of having written them, nor of the people or events laid out on their grime-stained pages. Speculation rages as to the provenance of the files. Is this an elaborate prank, or a hoax played by one of the Inquiry’s growing list of occult enemies? Or do the weird warnings in these impossible documents portend real doom, if not investigated?
This book provides the raw materials for an open-ended epic campaign, in which the PCs investigate the cryptic references laid out in the files as they see fit. As the players choose which leads to follow and which to leave on the backburner, the Keeper improvises a series of scenarios allowing them to avert the future cataclysms the files foretell.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Here is the second batch of original playtest feedback for our first in-house Mutant City Blues session. Please bear in mind It was never intended for publication, and was written to the designer robin_d_laws. Comments which offer explanation to you, gentle commenter, are like this [comment]
( Playtest report with spoilers and mild invective )
5 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Here is the first batch of original playtest feedback for our first in-house MCB session. It may contain spoilers for a forthcoming adventure, if I ever get round to writing it up.
( Playtest report with possible spoilers )
If you want to read part two, let me know!
17 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
We've got a new Trail of Cthulhu supplement - Shadows over Filmland - to playtest. Think Gothic films and monster movies meet HPL. We got seven short scenarios to test, as well as an intro and roleplaying guide for the setting. If you are interested, please send an email to simon@dyingearth.com, subject "Shadows Over Filmland."
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
This is a call for round one of playtesting for Trail of Cthulhu. The current playtest document is about 25% of the final MS, the core rules, character creation and conversion notes for the BRP system.
Round one is for people at least passingly familiar with both the current Call of Cthulhu and either Esoterrorists or Fear Itself.
You'll need to adapt and run, or improvise an adventure.
Playtest reports will need to be in by the end of the month.
If you want to participate, first ask your group. When you have done this, email me simon@dyingearth.com subject Trail of Cthulhu playtest.
Please repost this call elsewhere if you wish.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Leonard Balsera (lcdarkwood) has submitted a well paced and action-filled Esoterrorists adventure for publication. It's scary. Lenny must have given himself nightmares after writing it*. We are looking for play testers. Email me if you are interested.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
We are looking for playtesters for a big Esoterrorist adventure written by Ian Sturrock. Playtest will finish in six weeks' time. Please email me if you are interested.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
Robin's GUMSHOE Horror book (formally the Game of Unremitting Horror) has passed through the playtest process. Robin rewrote the manuscript to include player tips, firm up a few loose ends in the adventure, add a new general skill Sense Danger, and gave excellent advice on running the very rules-light flashback scenes. We emailed back and forth with the two groups who had issues, and they are satisfied with the final version.
Adrian Bott (cavalorn), original co-author of the d20 Book of Unremitting Horror (d20 BOUH) has edited the GUMSHOE rules into the GUMSHOE Horror manuscript to make it a complete game. Adrian has also updated his Final Case adventure from d20 BOUH to the new rule set, and we'll be sending that out for playtesting in January.
The new rule set fits the adventure much more neatly, with flashbacks at the beginning to establish a relationship between the PCs and the missing private investigator and Risk Factors to explain why the PCs should continue in the face of terrifying opposition. The playtest results will be an interesting test case for "system matters."
Adrian is now working on The GUMSHOE Book of Unremitting Horror, incorporating the d20 book and adapting it to the new system, with a new adventure and new creatures, too. The creatures can be used as personal horrors with GUMSHOE Horror, or as in-your-face creatures summoned by The Esoterrorists. The adventure will feature low-powered ordinary folk, though.
We are looking for playtesters for the Final Case, so if you didn't playtest d20 BOUH and you are interested, email me simon@dyingearth.com.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Robin Laws has just supplied me with a new RPG based on the GUMSHOE system used in The Esoterrorists. Its called The Game of Unremitting Horror. If you'd like to playtest and are able to start within two weeks, please email me. The Game Of Unremitting Horror plunges ordinary people into a disturbing contemporary world of madness and violence. Players take the roles of regular folks much like themselves, who are inexorably drawn into confrontation with the creatures of the Outer Black, an unearthly realm of alien menace. With or without its distinctive mythology, GMs can use it to replicate the shudders and shocks of the horror genre in both film and literature. GUH is written Robin D Laws and is based on background material found in the Book of Unremitting Horror by Dave Allsop and Adrian Bott.
Please pass this on.
6 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Mission: Ineffable is the winning entry in the 2005 Game-in-Day competition held at Dragonmeet.
As a disembodied spirit, you occupy the bodies of those on the way to damnation. By redeeming them, you set your self on the path to salvation.
You can download the game as a 100K PDF here for the purposes of deciding whether you wish to playtest. If you do, email simon@dyingearth.com. Playtest reports can be posted on the playtest forum here at the Forge.
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
The strangest thing about the Esoterrorist playtest was that the perception of railroading absolutely did not reflect what was going on in the games. We had comments from both the players and GMs, and what we found was that GMs who were improvising the most scenes based on player input, were the ones whose players complained the most about being railroaded. Perception is massively important. The best thing is that every report had players doing very different things and achieving different goals despite the structure of the adventure.
As a result, Robin wrote a piece for the on railroading - a worthy and useful addition to the rules. The game itself is no more or less susceptible to railroading GMs than most other games.
Here is a short excerpt:
An investigative story in any medium is, by its very nature, highly structured. The investigators learn of a mystery, then move through a series of scenes, each of which concludes in the acquisition of a clue which segues into the next scene. The story reaches its climax when the investigator discovers and reveals the answer to the mystery. It may or may not conclude, for extra punch, in a physical confrontation with the story’s now revealed-antagonist.
Structure can be difficult to achieve in the roleplaying medium. Guide the players too little and they lose the thread, resulting in a loose and sloppy narrative that provides none of the neat, order-making pleasure the genre is meant to provide. Guide them too much and they feel that their freedom of action has been taken away from them, and that they’re merely observers moving through a predetermined sequence of events. (As you probably know, this latter syndrome is known in roleplaying jargon as railroading.) There is an interesting issue here - is the illusion of choice in a game as good as real player choice? A computer game example - in Doom 3, you are at one point asked if you want to call the Fleet in to help, or not. As it happens, bar one short video clip, it actually doesn't make any difference to the game at all.
4 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
Here is an analysis of the playtest process for the Esoterrorist game. We are still awaiting a few reports. It was a very succesful playtest in that the rules were initially broken and ended up completely fixed, are easier to understand, please most people and yet the final version is compact and matches the brief. The temptation for Robin must be to try to please everyone; some groups wanted more combat crunch, others to give the players more narrative control; some wanted more structure, others less; some found the adventure to straightforward, others had problems solving the mystery.
I was GMing one of the playtest groups, so I saw the process from both sides.
23 of 28 playtest groups passed the initial hurdle of agreeing to an NDA by email. This is much better than the old approach of having them sign and send one back, and is probably just as secure. I saved different groups for different versions of the rules - it's essential to have some new groups unsullied by previous rules failures try out the latest version.
I decided to send out an early version of the rules before Robin had a chance to test it properly so that we didn't lose impetus. At this stage the combat and conflict rules (a pool-based mechanic) were horribly broken. This didn't matter too much; the conflict occurred later in the adventure. Robin tried a new version of combat which worked well, but again playtest reports let us tweak these. Intially, character generation was unecessarily complex. When the maths-loving player in our group gbsteve has to do a GURPS-style look up table to help others assign points, you know something is wrong. It broke the guidelines for all our new games:
- Easy to learn
- Easy to teach
- Easy to play
- Innovative
- Approachable
Robin fixed this with a super-simple assign points to skills mechanic which worked just as well. A tiny thing like the wrong number of points being available for character generation can completely ruin a game, and playtesting is ideal for this. Some other improvments which came out of playtesting:
- New skills such as History and Forensic Psychology
- Dealing with the absence of players who have core skills
- Modifying the pool refreshing rules
- A new section dealing with the perception of railroading; improvising scenes
- Much rewording, fixing of examples
- Dealing with plot holes in the adventure (for example, who discovered the body?)
- The abandonment of competitive experience point rules
The playtest process is a microcosm of the social environment of gamers; the difficulties of persuading people to try a new game, to accept its background and tropes, or even to get a group together at all. Seeing how many GMs fail to get their groups to play the game is interesting in itself. - Four playtesters dropped out after the first hurdle without further explanations
- One group wouldn't play because his group "really have been burned before by stuff going to print being broken"
- Two groups thought that the background really wasn't to their taste; one of those were repelled by Unremitting Horror (which was name checked in the playtest call out)
- Four playtesters agreed games with their groups which then fell through
- The rest (twelve) gave us playtest reports; some of them multiple reports .
More playtesting comments tomorrow
5 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Robin D Laws has submitted the final draft of the forthcoming Pelgrane Press game, The Esoterrorists. My original brief was to create a set of investigation rules that aren't broken, and Robin's original proposal follows. He also proposed a default background for the ruleset. Most of the nitty-gritty didn't survive playtesting, but the original idea remains. I'll add more articles about the playtesting process which led to the final version in other article.
Concept: Elite investigators combat the plots of occult terrorists intent on shattering the population’s sense of collective reality. Mechanics: We replace the old Call of Cthulhu “one failed roll and the mystery grinds to a halt” syndrome with a resource management system.
During character creation players choose their skills from a finely-delineated menu of investigative techniques. (Also a few broader adventuring skills like combat and so forth, but the emphasis is on different flavors of investigation.)
Examples: Forensic Pathology, Ballistics, Academic Research, Textual Analysis, Graphology, Interrogation, Charm, Intimidation.
Like Dying Earth, your ratings in each ability correspond to a number of points you have to spend on it.
However, rather than a reroll mechanism, the points you spend give you additional degrees of success on a skill attempt.
Having a skill in the first place assumes a certain base level of accomplishment. If you get to the right scene and try to use the skill, you always get at least a base success, which is enough to propel you further into the story, moving the group into the next scene.
So where in CoC you’d have a chance to find the Eldritch Tome containing the map to the basement, and roll Library to see if you do find it, in Esoterrorists a character with Academic Research automatically finds it. The scenario may also give you the option to spend points to enhance your success: 1 point might prevent the map from crumbling, so you don’t have to rely on your memory of it. 2 points might allow you to spot the marginalia written in the volume by the secondary villain, which gives you an edge in interrogating him when you catch him later in the scenario.
When facing active resistance (generally in the broader adventuring abilities, like Fighting or Acrobatics) you auction points to see who wins, with a coin toss adding a degree of unpredictability to the outcome.
Certain other successes in climactic situations may require that you have X number of points currently in your pool without requiring you to spend anything.
11 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|