Islands had a fairly long gestation process which gave me plenty of ideas to work from but despite the abundance of ideas, I was not able to pull a game together. When the ISS people began to solicit games to Playstorm, I threw this idea into their laps.

We met a week before the actual Playstorm to discuss a system since I was at a complete loss. The first thing we tackled was the problem of the mystery - how do you construct a game around a mystery, with a system tied to the solving of that mystery, without having the players dismantle the mystery ad-hoc?

Jason suggested that rather than have the mystery spelled out before hand, have the players add facts about the mystery as the game goes on. It tied in very nicely with my desire to give players as much narrative power as I could. They would be creating the island along with the GM so it seemed natural that they would also be writing the mystery along with the GM.

We also talked about having a central Trait - Addiction - that the game would revolve around, and having all the characters belong to an addiction support group or have them all in group therapy as a way to start off on a common ground. From there, we began to talk about how a game session might go - How to start? As the world reached the point of disintegration, what happens? And just how important would the real world be to the game?

Incorporating the bag and tokens idea was easy. I knew I had to do something with the central trait of the island that would descend as the players acted against it, and when it hit zero, the whole space would fall apart. The tokens would be an easy way to track that descent and different colors would add in some randomness. What then?

We began to discuss the idea of what the players could take out of this, and since they were competing to get these tokens in game, how would they effect the end game? This was when the session really jelled and the idea of taking away something from this island began to take focus. In this stage of the game, we saw the possibility of taking some small part of the island with us, learning something about the character or the character’s addiction, that the dream world exposed and writing it down on the sheet as a permanent way of marking the encounter.

We knew the structure of the game, we had a rough system, and we set a date a week later to run an actual Playstorm(tm). In the week’s time, I wrote up some notes and added a second central trait to the system (the first being Addiction, the second being its inverse, Resonance.) I began to play with the idea of these two traits being a sum of ten, and whenever one goes up, the other goes down.

Addiction in general is a bad thing, and Resonance in general is a good thing. In some way, Addiction is the character’s connection to the dream world and Resonance the connection to the real world. For a resolution system, I decided to go with some very basic, general traits (positive or negative) that could be stretched to fit the situation and have a point value. The player would roll the number of dice assigned to the trait against the target number of the dream world’s Resonance rating. A high enough roll would let the player reach into the bag for tokens and when one red or a multiple of five white tokens were on the table, the resonance would drop by one.

It seemed enough to go on, and I was ready to run the Playstorm!

We love wrestling.

Why? The drama. Forget competition, backstage politics or fight simulations. Wrestling is a soap opera where muscles flare alongside tempers, threats loom beyond every false smile, fist or championship belt and the stakes can be as impossibly high as a woman or man’s hard won reputation or as humbling as a broken collarbone. Wrestling is like the finest parts of comic books made real: heart-stopping action, ruthless villains, awesome (well maybe just very tight) costumes and live action superheroes!

But, allow us to focus on what no other sport or performance can hold a candle to: Wrestling’s love affair between the fans and wrestlers. It’s passionate, sweaty and embraces like a standing-corkscrew-Irish-guillotine to an inverted-gutwrench-suicide-spinning-Japanese-scorpian-bear-hug. All great wrestlers are fans and die-hard fans wish (on some level) that they could be wrestlers. They’re reflections of one another and in turn nourish each other. Fans gather around the ring (or television) in anticipation of emotions dashed, then bashed, then risen again all within the safe confines of a 3-hour pay-per-view. The wrestler steps into the ring expecting an entirely different sort bashing, but the pain is only secondary to the surge of love (or hate) he or she is relying on to make their risks entirely worth it.

Can you think of any other instance comparable to that of the wrestler: performing potentially life-threatening stunts and practically naked–physically and emotionally–under the guise of playing a character for the entire crowd to see? They break their necks, cry their hearts out, and bleed themselves dry. And they get up to do it again for the chance to hear thousands of people screaming their name. It’s here, in the midst of battle, where the fans decide who is hated and who is loved. Within seconds of either cheering or jeering the wrestler learns what is boring or exciting or which feuds will live on or be forgotten. With enough passionate fan support even a 5 foot 150 pound jobber can topple a 7 foot, 500 pound monster! It’s not enough for the fans to like or dislike you…they must shout with love or rabidly, hissingly hate you!

The heroes are delivering to the fans what they need and at the same time making the villains look like credible threats. Villains are taking from fans what they hold most dear all while casting the heroes in a shining, sympathetic light. The villain does their job right when the fans want to punch them in the face. And since the fans can’t, the hero does it for them. Everyone gets revenge and both the hero and the fans reign supreme.

It may all sound like dramatics, but these brazen athletes are not actors. They are still just men and women in their underwear positioned to fight each other. Not to mention surrounded by thousands of eyes dissecting their every move and projecting their own hates and desires. As important as headlocks and pile-drivers, the wrestlers observe the crowds and react: they do everything they can, holding back nothing, willing to sacrifice their bodies, lives, families, and futures to enthrall their fans. Filtered through their gimmick, they forge parts of their personalities into exaggerated, extreme forces to be reckoned with. I would like to think that some push it to the next level and even take what they hate about themselves or who they wish they could be and boldly weave it into this fierce and fluid costume.

And what is this all for? It’s all about giving the fans something to care about beyond their ordinary lives and pressures. It may be make-believe, but it’s a conflict that demands to be taken seriously. Resolution is not option here. No loose ends allowed!

It’s drama stripped naked down to its core, served up steaming hot on a weekly basis.

There’s one other drama-cored love in our lives… role playing games! In the coming weeks we’ll be talking about why wrestling and role playing are two great tastes that go even better together. Till then, be sure to catch up on your weekly wrestling fix. Or get together your friends and break out the dice.

One sunny afternoon last summer, I cornered Mr. Epidiah Ravachol, (designer of ENnie award winning horror game Dread) and told him about an idea for a game that was rattling around in my head. It was going to be about people who go exploring in strange dream worlds. The twist was that the players make up these strange dream worlds as a group with the GM. I wanted the game to have a Lovecraftian feel, but instead of exploring cosmic horror through monsters, I wanted to emulate stories like The Silver Key and the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the dream worlds are reflections of the characters and there’s a meaningful but horrific connection between them. Eppy gave me some sober advice, “I think there’s a game there, but you need to figure out what this game plays out like, and while you can get the story game people with the player investment, you have to make sure you like it.” He also gave me some practical advice I could follow-up on, right away. “Try writing a story about it.”

So I went away, and wrote a story fairly quickly. It was about two friends who used to dream walk their way into a rainy and swampy island where a sleeping and forgotten city holds some malevolent secret at its heart, where a third friend had gone missing. While I liked the story, I wasn’t sure how I could possibly contort its moody and dreamy atmosphere into a set of rules to fit the game, or how to make it compelling enough, that people would want to play it.

I spent some time making mad scribbles about what the game might be. I wrote about the dream worlds as corrupt ideas, I wrote about the flash of inspiration that makes these dream worlds exist, about selfish secrets that wants to protect themselves by trying to absorb the explorers, by infecting them with their own corruption. The game would be a struggle between the explorers and the dream worlds, and just when the mystery is finally resolved, when the secret is revealed, the dream world is robbed of all meaning and starts to disintegrate, but not without leaving a mark on the explorers. This was exciting stuff!

But, for some reason, it stalled there. The idea just did not boil down to an abstract. I couldn’t make any more progress, no matter how much I tried. The more I looked at the structure the more messy it seemed and eventually, it started to look like a mistake and other projects took my attention away. The game stayed in the back of my mind, and I found myself returning to it now and again, and talking about it with people.

At some point (I don’t remember when or how) it moved from being a game about Lovecraftian horror to a game about addiction. People addicted to these dream states, these out of this world experiences, and the game became about a struggle to resist being sucked into their dream lives while falling headlong into them.

I had some further ideas for system inspired by an old Dragonlance book which had a basic system in it for alignment shifts, where you selected your alignment on a horizontal scale and depending on the actions taken in game would move one slot to the left or right. Somehow, I managed to recall that bit of information a decade after I last saw it, and wanted to incorporate something like that as a way of tracking the character getting closer to the dream world, being influenced and absorbed by it. This began to change the way I saw the dream world and I began to realize I would need to pay attention to the dream world as I would a character, with a character sheet and all the trappings that went with that.

The last idea to became a firm element that I wanted to integrate was from a friend of mine who’s not a gamer, but is very interested in Lovecraft. When I mentioned the game to him in its early state, he suggested something about a black bag filled with tokens that the players had to reach into for a pull rather than (or perhaps in addition to) rolling dice. It seemed very moody and appropriate to the game at the time, and I kept that idea as something valuable.

My biggest issue at this point was this mystery that the players would be exploring. I wanted it to be resolved with dice, but I didn’t want the GM to have to come up with an actual mystery for each session - it seemed like a monumental task to create meaningful mysteries that connected to the characters and were surreal and dream like in their logic for every single session. It also seemed very important to avoid the issue of either having a player guess the ending in an anticlimactic way, or having the game drag forever because the players couldn’t get the clues.

By this time, I had run out of steam and ideas. Maybe this was a flawed concept to start with, or perhaps it was a book or a story rather than a game. I didn’t know what to do with it and was loathe to turn my back on it entirely after spending half a year on it.

That was when I heard about the Imagination Sweat Shop.

This is a formal invitation! If you can read this, then we (Terry and John) are talking to you! We personally invite you to join us. Join us? Yes! We need your help.

This blog is dedicated to the development of our non sexist, zero preparation, improv-theater-like, no GM, start playing in 15 minutes, play with 6, 10, 20 or more friends, play in multiple settings (superheroes vs. wizards vs. ninjas vs. pirates vs. unicorns vs. vegans vs. cowboys vs. robots vs. red pandas vs. regular pandas vs. punk rock vs. American Idol)… wrestling party game! A game capturing the drama of a live wrestling TV show from the audience’s perspective where the audience has as much control over what happens as the wrestlers themselves along with whatever crazy shit our imaginations throw into this sledgehammer-flavored stew.

Heat: Soap Opera Violence is our working title at the moment. Although that’s likely to change now that you’re here!

When we first sat down to play Heat: SOV, there were no rules. This was one of the first games where Jim, Eppy, and John playstormed before we knew what playstorming was! We imagined what the game could be like for an hour and then started playing, making up rules to match our imaginations. We wrote everything down and started again with new people. 14 different people in the last year and a half. Rules that came up again and again stayed, the rest went away. Gaming evolution at break neck speeds!

Don’t know anything about wrestling? No worries!

Hate wrestling? Even better!

Here is our ambitious plan: it’s a little bit like being admitted to virtual wrestling boot-camp, with no pain and all the gain. We aim to post once a week (sometimes more). Initially these posts will be purely background as in; What wrestling means to us, what is wrestling?, the nuts and bolts of how wrestling works. In addition to the sweaty, grappley stuff: what makes a soap opera, how it relates to episodal television and what makes drama dramatic. Lucky for us, there are also plenty of great video resources to school us (love that YouTube!). As we find ourselves increasingly on the same page then comes the gritty laying down of the structure and defining the rules. If we’ve done our job right, the guts of wrestling will be a cake-walk to you (and who knows, you may even end up loving wrestling). By then we’ll have some lean and mean rules grounded in bad-ass source material ready to hit the anything-can-happen arena of play-testing.

And that’s just the beginning.

Please ask questions. Offer diverging opinions. Offer support. Push these ideas to their limits. Don’t pull any punches: take to task any questionable material. Always feel free to ask why. And help make this game kick some serious ass! Just like in wrestling, it doesn’t matter if you hate or love us. The only thing that sucks is silence and indifference. So please comment away and get involved!

We want to play with you! At conventions, at parties, when you come visit us in NYC, when we come visit you on vacation. And this blog will help unify our expectations so that when we do meet up in person, we can dive right in, put the rules in a headlock, and make them tap out!

Next post: Why we love wrestling!

This past weekend saw the first official Spell playtest, wherein the freedom fighters of the Blood Fens pulled a last-minute victory over the heavily favored Skylords. There were crocodile men, warmages, massive explosions, and proof that tackling is the best form of diplomacy.

Anyway, the playtest was pretty successful, with some minor caveats. We used the tweaked beta version of the ruleset, which cuts out some of the clunkier ideas, but adds an XP system of sorts. Also, there’s a character sheet now!

That being said, the game still needs some minor tweaks here and there. The idea behind the “categories of words” that you want to try to spell out needs to be made more concrete (or more examples need to be given). Plus, the long-term playability of the game needs to be put through its paces.

Of course, all of those updates will be available here in the near future!

With slight fanfare, I’m proud to announce the alpha-version ruleset of Spell, the game of wizardry and Scrabble tiles!

Be forewarned that the rules are still being tested (and the document itself could use more pizazz), but I feel that the foundation of the game is solid and ready to be played. Over the next month or so, we’ll be putting the rules through their paces. If there are any updates, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Also, if you give the game a try, I’d love to hear your feedback!

One more thing: If it isn’t obvious, you’ll need a regular set of Scrabble tiles to play the game. If you don’t own Scrabble, you can always make your own “tiles” from slips of paper according to the standard Scrabble letter distribution and scoring chart.

War Eternal is a warstorygame set in a grim future after humankind has crossed a thousand stars only to find endless war. (And has apparently reached the theoretical limits of shoulder pad technology.) You know the one.

The players field miniatures and duke it out, vying for position and dominance on their homemade battlefield in order to gain control over the personal tales they are telling about the soldiers fighting their war. When the battle is at its grimmest, you choose a hero to rise from the ashes and spur your troops to mold a victory out of their own anguish.

Read the rest of this entry »

With our other projects firmly in the “being written and fully tested” category, we wanted to put something together that could go from playstormed idea to full game as quickly as possible. And I had just the half-baked idea: something to do with Scrabble tiles.

The basic idea started with characters being wizards of some sort and manipulating the names of the things to do magic. Players would get Scrabble tiles and spell words for points, trying to beat a target number. That’s about all I had before we started.

Epidiah and Jim made characters (a bookish halfling and an elf mercenary, respectively) and starting pulling letters. As we started to play, the rules began to take shape. I think we went through about three incarnations of rulesets before landing on something with which we could all agree. Most of my original ideas got scrapped, but it was for the best, as we ended up with a fun little game for people with good vocabularies.

Oh, and it wasn’t until after we had finished and we ready to get some lunch that I was able to come up with a name for the game: Spell. Nice and simple, eh?

All in all, it was a great success for our first true playstorm. An alpha version of the rules should be available real soon.

Yesterday was our second time playing He Who Fights With Monsters, the dungeon crawling game where the PCs are medieval warriors battling the forces of hell.

We spent a lot of time yesterday working on and testing out new Virtues (which are basically equivalent to feats in D&D: little abilities you assign to your character that manipulate/change the rules in your favor).  We also spent time working on and testing out different types of demons and what their powers and abilities might be.

It wasn’t really much of a playstorm since the current set of rules seems to be working pretty well (as evidenced by the fact that we had loads of fun playing).

I think the next step for this game is to write up a rules document (which I will post on this site for everyone to see!) and start playing with different groups of people.  In other words, I think this game is done being playstormed and now it’s ready for  some casual playtesting.  Exciting!

We talked a little bit more about Hellspace (which may need a name change) today and the theology of its universe. I got it into my head at some point that the demons of Hellspace are not the conniving types you might find in D&D or some other fantasy game, but rather animalistic predators. In the hundred or so years since humans first opened the Hell portals, the demons have adapted into a sort of infernal deep-sea angler fish. They use sin as their lure; so, one demon’s belly might glitter like a pile of gold (while the rest of it remains camouflaged until its too late), while another may possess a lustful siren’s song.Of course, this brings up the question of religion, and I think we’re going to try to make faith something resembling a sanity-point mechanism. Now, the setting is dominated by the Christian religion (after all, they have proof that Hell exists). But that doesn’t mean that every character has to be a true believer. Those with strength of faith, may use that to either harm or drive away the demons. However, they’ll have to deal with temptations of sin. Those weak of faith may instead take those same temptations and turn them into indulgences, bringing some much-needed relief after dealing with horrors from another dimension.

Of course, this all needs to be tested out.