Pen and Paper: Campaigns and One-Shots – a Taxomony of RPG Story-Lines

I'm a passionate pen & paper role-player and have been for about fifteen years (with a rather long interruption in active play)/ a bit more than half my life now. I started out around 7^th grade in a traditional group of misfits pen&paperin' it up trying to level their ill-conceived DSA (Das Schwarze Auge, the earliest German spin on the fantasy-level-grinding RPG type that DnD invented) characters through a string of loosely connected adventures GMed by the one amongst us with the least imagination. It wasn't pretty and after it all sort of stopped happening I didn't play until university. As we have an on-campus role-playing society, it was easy to find like-minded people there and I started enjoying the weekly gaming-session on campus every Wednesday, with two bi-weekly groups each semester, which also led to private gaming-sessions on an almost weekly basis. Good times. The topic of this post, however is a different one: The different flavor of adventure to be had simply by differentiating narrative length.

Playing Oblivion Day 2 part 2: Ghost Story

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I haven't gotten far away from the city, in fact, it's right on the other side of the water, when a bandit fires arrows at me from some interesting-looking ruins. I bring up the map and notice that this is a named place – interesting. Martor must get off his horse and charge the bandit. The place is half in the water, features a big statue that is strangely intact in comparison with the rest of the compound. By the dead bandit there are some bottles of dark beer sending a smile on Martors lips. Then I realize that there are stairs with an entrance to some underground dungeon. Adventure here I come! Maybe there is some of that mysterious side-quest-wine down there. Martor chugs down three of his newly looted beers and enters the dungeon.

Schmidtennistan Files part 2: Inner Workings of the Reich

Seven decades ago my grandfather was a child in Nazi-Germany, playing war-games with a friend of his. These games were rather elaborate and involved not only toy soldiers but also diplomacy and even bureaucratic processes of the two countries involved. I found the files containing what my grandfather made up back then and here is the second part of my analysis of them. For the first part, go here.

Schmidtennistan is a military dictatorship. A protocoll about an answer to a diplomatic letter sent to their closest ally/constant enemy Dreessenistan casually remarks that it was replied by the Dreessenistani military dictatorship, which makes it seem like they view themselves as something different but just look at the names of the list of the Schmidtennistani government my grandfather meticulously created: Reichspräsident (president) General Duro, Reichskanzler (cancellor) General Duro [both the same person - just like Hitler at the time, which for my grandfather, born in the 1920s, was probably a synonym for government], Foreign Minister Oberleutnant Wallmar, Ministry of Interior Hauptmann (Captain) Feng and the list goes on. Every single member of government is apparently from a military background. It's your typical fascist junta, I guess.

Talking about Boardgames: Cargo Noir

For my birthday my girlfriend and I bought a new board-game for our small but growing collection. An important factor in this purchase-decision was the fact that the box boasted that the game was one of the few auction-based games that work as well for two players as with a larger group. As we sometimes play with just the two of us this was interesting for us so we gave it a shot. Did it hold up? Find out in this review!

Cargo Noir is a game designed by Serge Laget, published by Days of Wonder. It’s an auction-based game with a couple of simple mechanics that have the players competing in auctions for wares of which they must gather as many of one type as possible. They can then exchange their wares for cards that are either boni for gameplay or simply victory-points for the ultimate counting for winning after the last round was done. It's all rather simple and elegant, it takes less than ten minutes to explain the game to a new player and all the mechanics are quite intuitive and obvious. The game features two different kinds of currency, coins and cargo. Coins are used in conjunction with ships, the play-pieces, to bid on batches of cargo. Cargo, unlike coins, is used to actually buy things like more ships, additional storage space, slight economic advantages when being overbid or simply victory-points.

Playing Oblivion Day 2 part 1: Lost in the Dark

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

So I have to do this whole slow-walking sewer-section again. Okay, might as well practice this little dashing-attack I noticed happening whenever running and pushing the left mouse button for a longer time. Martor goes for a yelling attack-lunge whenever I do that and I go berserk against some crabs and giant rats for practice. Baurus (the Blade I'm stuck with here) is not much of a help here, yelling “This one is mine!” at some point and then proceeding to not draw his sword and look at the rat that is attacking me. Martor rolls his eyes, draws his own weapon and cuts the rat down himself. Typical Baurus: Spouting big words but not following them with any sort of deed. He probably only got his position as the Imperial bodyguard for looking snappy in his Blade uniform…

Play Diary: Rogue Survivor - Max Jones

In this play-diary I'll do something different to the ongoing Oblivion-series and play a little roguelike called Rogue Survivor, which can be found for free here. Roguelikes are games usually based on procedural generation of worlds, the programmers choice of mechanical depth over graphics, and usually a high degree of difficulty. A famous example would be NetHack. Anyways, Rogue Survivor takes place after zombies have started to overrun your city and you play a random survivor (or zombie, if you want to), just trying to survive for as long as possible. My first Play-Diary of RS can be found here, the second one here.


This one is a longer one, making the perma-death at the end a very harrowing experience. It's not my longest run ever but I think it's second or third and the longest one I have written down. I'm posting this in celebration of the nice spike of traffic that Roguedjack, the maker of Rogue Survivor has given my blog by posting links on his developer-blog. Thanks, man!

Day 0:

The news were true and I had to get the hell out. Z everywhere, fighting, screaming. I ran the store and then left to the east side and found shelter in a subway station; then went hauling more ammo and guns from that weapons-store twice. Now I'll sleep. More looting to be done tomorrow, I guess.

Day 1:

Two more hauls, one for ammo, one for food. I have a decent stash of canned food now. Tomorrow that other gun emporium is going to be it. Not much else happening. The police warned about bikers and gangs trying to take over now that the city order is collapsing. I'll take care.

Day 3:

Two hellish days seem to be finally over. Yesterday morning I saw one of the notorious gangs of bikers marauding down West-street so I decided to delay my excursion to the weapons emporium and check out the police station. It was quite a hike there but I looted a pharmacy for some energy- and caffeine pills. At the station I got myself a riot armor and another shotgun plus shells for it. In the cell block I decided to set those trapped there free. There was this guy who said he was working for CHAR and that they were the cause of all of this. Right after he told me where the entrance to their secret facility was (and I started thinking he might just be nuts) his body burst apart and some monstrosity replaced him. The thing attacked and the prisoners and I were in complete pandemonium. I emptied round after round of buckshot in it, it clawed at me, it was horrible. In the end it was dead, a lot of the prisoners were too and I was hurt as well. I patched myself up and it was night but I had to press on so I took the caffeine pills and went through the night. Took a route via the weapons emporium to get more supplies. On the way back I ran into a group of bikers roughing up some guy. In the ensuing street-battle the guy and I killed three of them. Then I brought the loot home to my hideout. Went once more to get some more stuff. Tomorrow I'll have to set out and try to find more food and medical supplies. For now I'll take a long sleep and go to bed early.

Things to come 2

What's coming up next around here? As usual, in no particular order, posted when I feel like it throughout February:

-Continuation and conclusion of the Schmidtennistan-files. My grandfather as a nerdy kid playing wargames will probably be material for two more posts.

-Day 2 of the Oblivion play-diary. It gets a serious twist towards the end of that day...

-Some more Minecraft-musings in connection with some other examples of emotional impact in games. Why are these cubes so scary?

-Reviews of some board-games I've been playing recently. Not the most up-to-date ones, mind you but the twist is that I often play them with just two people (my girlfriend and me) and most games don't hold up to well with only two players. Some do though, so if you want to play the occasional game with your significant other, these could be interesting for you.

I'll also probably slow down the publishing rate to four times per week, roughly. Maybe every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Yeah, that sounds about right. So, thanks for your interest, all five of you who are reading this!