The division of London runs beyond the confines of this map, but here’s the focus of many adventures I’ve run to date. It seems a sensible spot to write more about – in a separate supplement and featuring fixed details and random tables aplenty. A few of those fixed points will be shops, traders and key personalities on streets and alleyways north and south of the river – and herein lies the opportunity for early supporters.

At Dragonmeet, I will have a poster map of the area – and you can lay claim to one of the twenty available enterprises with a name and an email address. You Claim Your Plot for £10 on the day – and I’ll give you a flyer with the map and a note of your claimed business.

When the core rules release in print, I will send you a signed copy. The business itself may appear in adventures, if they’re released before Ossulstone Hundred, or else they’ll make their first appearance in the supplement.

The email address will allow me to keep in touch and get your mailing address when it comes time to send you your copy of the core rules. I plan to have the core out Q1 2020, with the Ossulstone supplement coming at some point later – I don’t want to confirm anything this early in the development!

If all the businesses aren’t taken by the end of Dragonmeet, I’ll open up to the wider world – though there will need to be an adjustment in the claim to cover international shipping should someone make a claim from outside the UK. 

More information to follow on the game and supplement – but, I hope to see some willing entrepreneurs of Elizabethan London at Dragonmeet next week.

Today, I have:

1. Tweaked the rules for completing tasks
2. Created an updated ‘character sheet’
3. Added 8 new cards to the character stack
4. Asked nicely for a special All Rolled Up dice bag

The task resolution system now supports losing something to push for success. You might get hurt, lose faith, or fall flat with a damning slap to the ego. Power, Penance, and Prestige can each take temporary or more permanent damage – the former ticked off in the boxes, the later written out as something more permanent.

So, you could tick off a Power, which indicates a twist, bruise or cut; three ticks mean something more permanent, like a broken bone, a minor concussion, or the loss of your favoured weapon.

The new character sheet has spaces at the bottom for your three character creation cards – in order A, B, and C – and room at the top for marking your state of wellbeing.

I have added more character cards – two new professions, three new affiliations, and three new bad books. That means I now have just one short of 12 cards for each – with the books falling short at 11. That works out as quite an array of skills, backgrounds and suggested period-appropriate names.

Finally, my wife was good enough to offer to make an All Rolled Up dice bag for my game – and I helped pick out material. I can’t guarantee that anyone else would want a bag in the combination of fabrics selected – but, you never know. I’ll post a picture when it’s done.

Aside from getting a handout or two prepared for the game, I should be ready for Expo (and tomorrow evening).

I ran two adventures, both of which I’d run before. ‘The Gongfermor Deception‘ has been run at least four times now, and I don’t think it has proceeded the same way on any of those occasions.

The adventure has a timeline in the background, to which the bad guys aspire to keep. The player characters have the opportunity to interfere with this timeline, if they can – though it depends on what information they can uncover.

I think I could benefit from applying some kind of countdown mechanic to this game so that I have the timeline forefront in my mind and give the players a greater sense as to their progress. I daresay seeing the counters slip away would add to the stress. The actions they take along the way occur within a confined location and getting a grip of distance and time expended wouldn’t be too hard.

I recently read (and posted a review at RPG Geek of) Levi Kornelsen’s Mechanisms For Tabletop Roleplaying. The short supplement offers five interesting mechanics to add elements to an existing game, one of which is a Countdown Stack that might work well in introducing this. I’ll have to give it some consideration.

The other adventure – ‘The Holy Wax Infant of Prague‘ – has more of a sandbox environment within which the events unfold. The characters have less pressure to face, but a wider range of options to consider. In investigating the mystery around the disappearance of an important relic, they have a whole valley of suspect people and locations to consider.

I ran this adventure at Dragonmeet and it ended quite differently to the one this weekend. It ended with a very different culprit to the original – and in writing this up, it will be very much a place with a detailed list of places and possibilities. I allowed the players this weekend to guide their own destiny and their actions gave form to the outcome.

In the end, they found themselves running for their lives from the rending claws and gnashing teeth of evil spirits. Finding solace in a church, they desperately called for the intervention of the angelic host to save them – and pulled off a credible success by slaying the unholy host with heavenly fire.

Both adventures ran well to time. The ‘Infant‘ ran 5 minutes short of the 3-hour slot, while the ‘Deception‘ closed 15-minutes off four hours. In both instances, the players managed to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

I really like the way the second session (Deception) ended, as it would have made the perfect start to a campaign, while definitely offering a single-session conclusion. The characters discovered a place of significance that could have served as the basis for long-term investigation and complications. Here, they walked away as Walsingham’s agents sealed the way with a thick black wax disc, bearing the insignia and motto of The Dee Sanction.

Quite satisfying.

Never so much. If only my brain would be that silent in the midst of the shower, on the commute to work, or upon the trip to the shops to purchase chicken thighs.

I do have a piece of writing to complete by the end of January not related to 214, which must take priority. Or else.

However, that’s not to say that my mind has been laser-focussed on said task. By no means. Worryingly not so. Even though I wish I could switch all other thought processes off for a while.

No. I have been considering two things.

Firstly, introducing random tables into the core rules to allow for the simple creations of characters from scratch. I believe I have some sort of structure gathering form. Like the cards I have been using for playtesting, the tables used for this process would have thematic links. I believe that each element of a table would present skills or traits, and then point directly to another table for the next roll in the series. Each entry on a table would, potentially, lead to a different next step.

It would present a life path of sorts. Although, I believe that too grandiose a title for three or four tables loosely gathered. A series of unfortunate events.

Secondly, I have been ruminating on the possibility of pulling together a collection of these tables to test them. In that regard, the intent was to utilise them in facilitation of a game akin to Space: 1889. Well, not akin. It would be the Space: 1889 background and an adventure cobbled together from flicking through a few old supplements.

However, the work never really for off the ground – and I ended up seeking a different alternative. Specifically, Savage Worlds. This, alas, was an error of judgement. I have not found solace or common ground within the soft covers of Pinnacle Entertainment’s hallowed volume of fair repute. I think those who favour the system have other needs than my own.

Anyway. Busy. And yet, not entirely focussed on matters of 214.

On the other hand, I very well may find myself running one or more sessions of The Dee Sanction at Conception, end of January, on the southern shores of England. After Indiecon, where my efforts to run Paranoia didn’t quite go to plan, I believe that the better rendition of 214 lies with supernatural investigations in Elizabethan Europe, for the moment.

(And, yes. I do have a great deal of time and respect for the diminutive and screech voiced Icelandic alternative rock singer songwriter, Björk. Thanks for asking.)

Dragonmeet 2014 at the ILEC Conference Centre saw me running another playtest session of 214. I ran The Dee Sanction setting using a new adventure called “The Holy Wax Infant of Prague“. I had five players and a table in the open gaming area (where I had the opportunity to build my own table).

I think it likely I’ll post more than once about this session as I consider it a little more and have the time to ruminate. For my own part, I had a bigger adventure in mind than I could fit into the time available, so it definitely didn’t feel “whole” to me.

Part of that came down to the confusing arrangements of the gaming area for the event – where for the first half hour I – and other GMs – spent quite a while telling people they’d come to the wrong area. I’m not certain we helped much – as we found out later we’d directed them to the wrong other place.

Anyway – as I sold the premise as a game about investigating the unknown, the magickal and the supernatural, I needed more of those. The way the adventure panned out, it turned out to be a far more mundane investigation of wrong-doing. That’s all well if you’re running the game and want a change of pace, but for a convention game I need to run something that showcases what I feel the game’s about.

It didn’t feel like it went badly. While we had a few real world distractions, the players remained engaged and worked together to fathom the mystery of the wax infant, the monks and conflict in a north Moravian valley.

The best feedback I had at the time related to the character cards. I posted about a minor redesign, so those saw play for the first time, including handy new name generator at the top. The feedback suggested these cards provided a rather neat way to quickly create and encapsulate a character from which players could then spin off their own slant.

The talents and expertise listed, by and large, gave a good spread of abilities with little overlap. One player queried whether you could use more than one card to influence a roll – and I said yes. However, the feedback suggested that this would likely be very difficult given the ability spread. On a rare occasion, a real focus of very narrow expertise might allow a player to do this, but most not.

Generally, a good session. Could be cleaner and better suited to showcasing the setting, but the game mechanics seemed to work well. I did rush the end a bit, so I didn’t give the right level of in-game respect for those characters who had redeemed themselves through discarding Incriminating Evidence. I don’t think anyone managed to get down to zero, but at least one player got damned close. On the other hand, another characters acts of atrocity against persons of “the Church” probably garnered them a few fresh black marks against their name and reputation.

While I’ll be attending Furnace in Sheffield, next week end, I will not be running any games – although, I might take something 214 along just in case I have the chance come evening time.

The following month I’ll be at IndieCon for three days (of the four day event). IndieCon, sited at Hobourne in Dorset, on the south coast, runs between 6th – 9th November. I’m there partly to assist with All Rolled Up, but also to run games and catch up with folk.

I will be running sessions of Complex 214, The Dee Sanction and Night’s Black Laundry – though not necessarily in that order. The first two will be playtest sessions for 214, while the NBL session will use my The Laundry/Gaean Reach mashup of the Gumshoe system. As they all use card-based character generation, that will be my focus over the next few weeks. I already have the set prepared for NBL, but only a few for C214 and none for TDS.

All being well, I might even squeeze in a game of Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF) – but, we’ll see how the weekend pans out.

Come December, we then have the new and enlarged Dragonmeet to attend. That’s Saturday 6th December at the ILEC Convention Centre.

I will be running a session of Complex 214 – though a different one to the IndieCon adventure. There’s a possibility I might have players attending who have played the previous session, so I had best be prepared. Also, it doesn’t make sense to playtest with the same adventure every time, as that isn’t really giving the system a proper run. I want to stretch my legs and try different approaches.

I will also be running a game of AFF that afternoon – as the game I run intentionally aims at just a 90 minute session. I will, however, look to vary this a little also – as I quite like the idea of having quick, drop-in style games suited to filling a partial slot of even doubling up in a big one.

All very busy – so, I need to get this computer/web stuff sorted and get on with it.

Not Necessarily Related articles…

• Complex 214 – Unethical Ends
• Back This: Chill 3rd Edition from Growling Door Games