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by Rich Rogers, Keeper of the Fathomless Well (@orklord; website)
Last week I shared a rundown of my year of Star Wars-themed games in a living campaign run on Saturdays that I called, prosaically enough, Star Wars Saturdays (read part 1 here: https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/blog/a-year-of-star-wars-saturdays). This time I’m going to share some observations, discuss missed opportunities, and talk about my plans for 2019. During the thirteen month living campaign, I ran eleven different RPG systems. Some of the systems were a natural fit for the most well-known version of Star Wars and the “backbone” of the setting - the original trilogy. Others took some adjustment and explanation, as well as discussions on tone. The “best fits”:
Each of the “best fits” worked from the angle of the PCs either being part of the Rebellion, or, in the case of Impulse Drive, closely tied to it. They worked well with missions, carried action scenes well without ever becoming bogged down, and emulated swashbuckling with aplomb. Rebel Blackbird was likely my favorite for high action and setting a blistering pace. The Rebel Few was the best at huge battles and dogfights, it was so cinematic with those scenes. The “tilt your head and squints”:
I knew going in that 1%er would take adjustments. The original game has a stat called Fu@$s, which I renamed into Karks (my buddy Trevis Martin shared a link to an article on Star Wars Expletives that I still use to this day). Hutt Cartel is about spice dealers and corrupt Imperial Officers. Apocalypse World Tatooine has sex moves! And Void Vultures is about scavengers who venture onto space hulks to strip them bare (yes, Force Awakens has a bit of this which I really liked, but the setting for SWS was original trilogy, so it wasn’t our canon). I honestly expected to have to explain this more than I did, but the pitch, a.k.a. Write-up for each game listing on the Gauntlet Hangouts RSVP site, did most of the work to pave the way for the kind of game we were going to play. Also, having rocking players helps, of course. The highlights of the living campaign, for me, were numerous. Two that I most enjoyed were the continuity that we established and built as the campaign grew, and the gentle brushes with original trilogy canon. I openly declared that nobody would be hanging out with Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia, but that they were playing in the sandbox of those movies. Continuity:
Brushes with Canon:
The 1%er Swoop Gang 2 had lots of brushes:
Missed Opportunities: Not everything was perfect, though. There are things I wish I had executed better, some things I flubbed, others that just didn’t land as well as I’d like. Running eleven different RPGs meant I ran several games for the first time. While that’s good for me to grow as a gamer and GM, it meant sometimes I ran games less than optimally. I searched hard for reviews or explanations of game texts that confused me, or watched or listened to other people play it. But that didn’t always help (or wasn’t always available). Several times during Roses and Thorns (the feedback method I use after every session), I came to realize that I’d missed important rules and needed to bone up on the system before the next session. Other times, I came to find the rules system needed some tweaks to better support how we were playing. In the case of The Rebel Few, I did some research on dogfighting mechanics, from real-world articles on how it worked to thumbing through other RPGs for inspiration. Misspent Youth was a tough nut to crack for me. Luckily Robert Bohl, the designer, was very generous with his time, and there’s the Tabletop episodes that helped me, too. I still took a couple sessions to get the pacing of MY down, it’s a very different game based mostly on the order of operations and the specific intent of each scene. I struggled with the core mechanics of Sea of Stars. I wasn’t able to talk through the game as much as I’d liked with the designer (Michael X), and I had trouble getting the PC vs. PC relationship mechanics to work the way it seemed like they were supposed to work. Because this was a beta playtest, I didn’t want to change rules without talking with the designer, so I felt like I was running half the game, which was a disappointment. Due to the content of slavery in the Misspent Youth game (the PCs were Twi’Leks), I had a player nope the heck right out of the game, which made me feel really gross for a bit. It took me some time to work through the feeling that I’d failed a player in explaining the game setting and helping to include them so they could enjoy the sessions. The player was very generous with their feedback and helped me understand their problems with the content. I admired their bravery to be honest and leave instead of “toughing it out”. They made the right choice for their own fun, and I respect that. Hunt the Wicked, a game about bounty hunting, seemed like it would be the most perfect fit for Star Wars. The designer, Ben Dutter, put out lots of great supplemental info, from hunts to a listing of bounties, all of which made game prep a snap! But in play, the game worked so differently than how I thought it would work. Conflicts worked with a few dice for character traits and abilities plus a bunch of a pool of dice, with target numbers defined by the skill the player was rolling against. Then players would need to talk through how they were pursuing their motivations in order to build up that pool. What should have been a gritty hunt for dangerous criminals sometimes felt a bit flat. I feel like some more experience with the system might have helped me bring out the most in the mechanics, but after three sessions, I wasn’t sure it was the game for me. It was a real bummer, because Ben’s a great designer and Hunt the Wicked seems so darn cool. I just didn’t crack that nut. From a broader perspective, one big missed opportunity was that the different games played in this living campaign were only connected by three things:
This did help with making sure the games were inclusive! Nobody had “homework”, it was egalitarian in that everyone had an equal chance to kick the story forward, shape and mold it. I liked that! But some way for folks to see / hear / taste the cool stories from before without feeling impinged by it, that’s something I want to figure out. 2019 plans: After a year of Star Wars Saturdays, some folks may think enough’s enough and throw in the towel. Not me! I mean, I am the goofball who’s completed the Ladder of Insanity for three years running (2016: https://rpggeek.com/geeklist/202592/2016-challenge-ladder-insanity, 2017: https://rpggeek.com/geeklist/219284/2017-challenge-ladder-insanity, 2018: https://rpggeek.com/geeklist/235380/2018-challenge-ladder-insanity). I’m nothing if not… crazy? No, another “c” word - consistent! Seriously, there are more Star Wars tales to tell, and the Gauntlet continues to grow, so I’m keeping this thing going for another year, at least. What games do I want to run in 2019? Primetime Adventures happens in January. This is a game that is HARD to make happen in the Gauntlet short-run, open-table environment. So I asked for a four session commitment from all players involved. I made the same request with Misspent Youth, and we had a core 3 players who participated. We’re going to make PTA in the Gauntlet awesome! In February, I’m running two spots of Hutt Cartel, using some of Mark Diaz Truman’s new playbooks from recent Kickstarter updates, and two sessions of Void Vultures, a game I want to explore further after only one session with it. Beyond that, I have a short-list of games I’m itching to run (or run again), and for the first time:
Another thing I want to do in 2019 is run longer miniseries. I’ve had so much fun watching other Gauntlet GMs running quarterly series of games (Lowell Francis and Darren Brockes are two leaders here). I want to run bimonthly series, getting 8-9 sessions of a game in. Longer story arcs, more continuity, spread over more space, it sounds so cool! In closing, Star Wars Saturdays has been an experimental living campaign that’s brought me so much joy. I appreciate all the Gauntleteers who gave this game a shot with me, and I cannot wait to keep it going into 2019!
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by Rich Rogers, Keeper of the Fathomless Well (@orklord; website) I’ve been running online games for the Gauntlet community since we went online. I enjoyed running different game systems for new and returning folks. It helped forge new friendships and grow the community, too. After several months, I started to find the open table, one-shot or miniseries-only format a little unsatisfying for my storytelling tastes. I craved longer campaigns, ongoing stories, and character development. I wanted to find some way to shape the format of the Gauntlet game-running style to work for me. In 2016, I launched a living campaign I called Gauntlet City Limits (GCL). The goal of GCL was to create a loose structure to run lots of light-hearted small press RPGs with some recurring characters and a slowly growing set of player-created neighborhoods within Gauntlet City. It worked! We played dozens of hilarious and fun games in Gauntlet City for a couple years. I recently brought the series to a close this year to make room for new things in 2019. Riding high on the success of GCL at the end of last year, I started thinking about 2018 and what I could do next. I was jazzed about the resurgence of Star Wars in popular media, enjoying the Rebels TV show, excited for Last Jedi, and altogether hyped for that galaxy and fandom. With the power of Disney, it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere soon, and I was happy about that (still am, mind you). Some of my favorite college gaming memories were playing the WEG d6 Star Wars game with my buddies Christopher Robin (CR) Cronan and Chris Norwood. Me and the Chrises spun wild tales, sometimes playing through modules, often just playing what CR cooked up. We never rubbed shoulders with the cast of the original trilogy (which was the only trilogy back then), but we tromped around in the worlds of Star Wars and the WEG books that expanded the universe. It was a wild ride and we loved every minute of it. Side note: CR was the first GM who ever created a piece of media for a game I played in. He recorded a “emergency distress call” from a starship in trouble that we listened to at the beginning of a session. It. Blew. My. Mind. I’ll always think of that when I work on stuff to set up for games I’m running. With all of this in mind, I decided my new living campaign for 2018 would be Star Wars Saturdays. Rather than run a campaign of WEG d6 Star Wars, or Saga Edition, or d20, or even Edge of the Empire or the other FFG RPGs, I decided to do it my own way and run it like an anthology series, similar to GCL, where I would run a different game every month. To help decide what games I’d run, I created a set of guidelines to help me choose RPGs from my (embarrassingly large) library of RPG PDFs. Tenets
Run in miniseries - The Gauntlet approach for miniseries to that point had been to run miniseries a month at a time, so I worked in that framework. Game sessions run from 9-12 - that’s 9 AM to noon, Eastern time. I did a poll with the G+ community and it was the most popular game time. It’s also convenient for me to be “done with gaming” by lunch. Need 4-5 players per session - I knew we needed larger games because the community was growing, so I set a goal of looking for games that could work with larger tables (5 players in one online game can be hectic, I’d never choose to do more). Easy to allow for drop-in, drop-out play - this follows the Gauntlet open-table approach. It meant I would need games with fast character creation that can be fun in every single session rather than paying off three sessions in. Games I know relatively well - since I was already running a new RPG every month for GCL, I didn’t want to freak myself out by learning two new games every month. So, I wanted to run games I “got” or could learn easily. Prefer PbtA (to tie to +1 Forward podcast) - what can I say? I’m selfish that way, I wanted fodder for the podcast I co-produce with Rach Shelkey. Using my tenets, I created a short-list of potential games, then put out a pitch post on G+ (oh G+, how I’ll miss you). The pitch post was to stoke interest as well as put out feelers for new ideas from the community. This is what I posted: Starting this December and continuing through 2018, I'm going to be running Star Wars Saturdays The post garnered a great deal of interest and gave me a boost to finalize the games I wanted to run for the first three months:
Games played: December 2017 - Star Wars World - Omega edition January - 1%er Swoop Gang February - The Rebel Few Star Wars World is a brilliant PbtA hack written by Andrew Medeiros, fully playable in the Omega edition. I used the Edge of the Empire module Beyond the Rim, which is quite solid with beautiful art and a swift plot that allowed for lots of creativity and free play like a PbtA game needs. 1%er Swoop Gang was a reskin of Robert Nolan’s AWESOME 1%er, one of my favorite RPGs in the last few years. I had fun swapping in Star Warsy words for this fun game about bikers. The PCs were a swoop gang on Nar Shaddaa in Hutt Space, making trouble for Hutt crimelords and tussling with their rivals. The Rebel Few is a hack of an RPG about World War 2 pilots called The Few. My buddy Tom McGrenery pointed me to a play-by-post of it on Tavern Keeper, run by one of the original designers of The Few, who hacked it for Star Wars himself! I literally scooped out huge gobs of his amazing work to reuse in my game, reading his mission briefings and acting them out. I have no shame, his work was so very good! The next three months I ran a couple games I knew well and a terrifying experiment in the middle. March - Apocalypse World - Tatooine April - Rebel Blackbird May - Impulse Drive - Tramp Freighter Apocalypse World - Tatooine. I’ve run Apocalypse World quite a bit, live, online, and via play-by-post. Rather than run a version made for Star Wars, my approach with AW - Tatooine was to run AW straight up. We changed the names of some weapons to be blasters, but kept all their stats. For the psychic maelstrom, I found a cool bit on Wookieepedia that Tatooine used to be a verdant planet before a Sith plot ravaged the world and turned it into a desert. Sounds like a great excuse for a psychic maelstrom, right? As I expected, this game ran “like butter." We had a Faceless running around with a Sith mask from the Old Republic, a Hocus who lived with Tusken raiders, a Savvyhead raised by droids, a Togruta Gunlugger who was straight out of a noir film and a Brainer. It was an amazing crew. I will never forget the moment Tyler Lominack, who played a Force-wielding Brainer with a goal of maintaining the Light Side, realized that he had a set of Moves that pushed his powers into very dark places. It was such horror for him, seeing that he wanted to plant flowers and only had hammers and sickles. In April, I ran Rebel Blackbird (https://jesseross.com/games/Rebel-Blackbird.pdf), a Lady Blackbird hack that Jesse Ross and I developed from Jedi Blackbird. It was thrilling to work alongside Jesse, a fellow fan of Lady Blackbird and all-around creative dude. We had multiple meetings before that game to hammer out pre-gen characters, develop awesome keys and traits together. I’m really proud of our work and excited to continue working with him. ALSO, this game had our first lightsaber fight! Pawel Solowczuk literally whipped out a lightsaber on camera and it was the most wonderful moment!!!! May was Impulse Drive, a personal favorite PBtA game that slots in so very well with Star Wars. Maxime Lacoste and I worked on converting the playbook names and gear, but honestly he did the lion’s share. He also cooked up one of the most beautiful Character Keepers (Google Spreadsheet for online player character info) I’ve ever seen! (seriously, check it out) The next three months, I tackled another light conversion, some beta playtesting for a Gauntlet community member, and a return to a classic. June - Hutt Cartel July - Sea of Stars August - 1%er Swoop Gang 2 Hutt Cartel. I’d had the pleasure of trying out Mark Diaz Truman’s sharp Mexican narcofiction game Cartel a few times over the years he’s been developing it. From his successful Kickstarter in April, he released a Quickstart. I reached out to check with him to see if he minded if I hack it for Star Wars, and of course he was excited to see what I do with it. The game itself I didn’t touch. I renamed a few playbooks, and rejiggered the setup. I reframed the game as the Hutt Cartel on Coruscant on a subterranean level called 1313 (it’s over 1,300 levels down into the city, many hours travel away from any sunlight). I cooked up a little backstory that Emperor Palpatine had driven the Hutts off Coruscant in a big push for “law and order” and the PCs were the cartel that filled in the gaps, acting as proxies for the Hutts to move their product, all the while dealing with Imperials and the Black Sun, too. It was an intense and grimy game with double-crosses, nasty fights, and some tragic endings. In July, I ran Sea of Stars, a game in early development by Michael X. The game has some really fun playbooks, and one of them was so exciting that we just had to declare that the Twi’Lek species has royal families so we could have a Twi’Lek Princess. We had a rascally droid, a scoundrel and even a Force-wielding Trandoshan (it was awesome). I used an old WEG d6 module called Strikeforce Shantipole as the loose frame for the game series, and it was so exciting to see the players meet a PC from the movies! The party worked with Admiral Akbar (who was a Commander in the module) to get the plans for the B-Wing to the Rebel Alliance! In August, I just had to run 1%er Swoop Gang again. We had a bunch of new members of the Gauntlet, so I ran 1%er because I knew I could handle six players. I ran it for new Gauntlet folks only and while I was nervous going into a game where I literally knew nobody, the group was amazingly creative, engaged, thoughtful, and so very fun. We ran around on Tatooine and dealt with some of the fallout from the AW Tatooine game. Coming into the home stretch, I violated one of my tenets, went a bit “out there” with a game, tried a game I expected would be a cinch, and returned to another classic. September - Misspent Youth October - Void Vultures November - Hunt the Wicked December - Impulse Drive - Tramp Freighter I’d never run or played Misspent Youth, but during the Impulse Drive Tramp Freighter game I was describing a group of rebellious young Twi’Lek on Ryloth as “A group of punks who are starring in their own game of Misspent Youth”. That just stuck in my head and I decided in September to give it a shot. Robert Bohl, the game’s designer, was so gracious with his time as I asked him questions about the game, how to run it for five sessions, how to convert it for Star Wars, all kinds of stuff. Now, MY needs a consistent group, so I requested that all players sign up for every session. Turns out that due to shifting schedules not every player attended every session, but we worked through it! October was a light month for SWS with Gauntlet Con and other events taking up my time, but I got to squeeze in a session of Void Vultures, a game about starship scavengers by Josh Roby. I couldn’t for the life of me find any AP for the game to see how it played, but I was able to chat with Josh, read and re-read the game. I wasn’t sure on the best frame for the game until Rach Shelkey mentioned the module Starfall, which had maps of a Star Destroyer and that turned out to be perfect for our session! Hunt the Wicked. HtW, by Ben Dutter, is about Bounty Hunters, so it only took a little work to reskin it in the Star Wars universe. I’d backed Ben’s Patreon when he put out some bounties for HtW, so I reworked them for Star Wars and ran it straight up. It was a tight group of bounty hunters for two of the three sessions, but their last bounty was so vicious and challenging that it broke up the group! It was a sad ending to a team-up and one of the darkest moments in the SWS series. I decided to finish up the year with Impulse Drive again, this time with a new tramp freighter and a new crew. It’s the freshest on my mind, of course, but it really was one of the most solid series of the year. There was this make-your-own family relationship between the crew members and a patched-together astromech droid that I simply adored. I didn’t push them to become heroes, but they decided to be heroes nonetheless, stopping a genocidal weapon and helping to bring an end to a proxy war. Be sure to stay tuned for the second post in this series, where I will share some observations and missed opportunities from SWS 2018 and detail my plans for next year! by Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime Back in ye olde days of Gauntlet Houston (in the bygone year of 2015), an initiative named Mandatory Fun Club was started. These events were organized around a theme and usually involved playing an assortment of non-RPGs as an alternative to the otherwise RPG-centric community. Many laughs were had:  In the halcyon age of 2017, Gauntleteer and Houston local Daniel Fowler revived Mandatory Fun Club with a new purpose: to train and mentor new GMs and game facilitators for Gauntlet Hangouts. The structure is simple: The mentor helps to arrange a series of one-shots for the new facilitators and pledges to participate personally in each of their games. Each facilitator gets the opportunity to run a game of their choice, and, in turn, the facilitators also participate in each other’s games. It’s not necessary to enroll in MFC in order to run games for Gauntlet Hangouts; the modus operandi is to simply play at least a few games with us to get a feel for our culture and procedures, then contact Lowell Francis to get started on creating events. However, MFC offers a unique and supportive environment for people new to running games online through Gauntlet Hangouts. There’s something unique about having a veteran alongside you each step of the way, but even more reassuring is the fact that you’re stepping into the fray with a bunch of folks who are just as nervous as you, and willing to support you through the entire ordeal. I should know; I was a participant in Fowler’s first run of MFC. Not only had I never facilitated a game before, I was also new to gaming online. I have a lot of gratitude not only for Fowler’s guidance, but for my fellows-in-arms: Dylan, Christo, and Max. My first game was a train wreck, but the feedback I received was positive, considerate, and encouraging. This year I’m returning the favor and moderating another round of Mandatory Fun Club. Be on the lookout for upcoming spotlight articles on our participants and the games they’re running for MFC! We have an interesting assortment of facilitators with a variety of experiences and voices to bring to Gauntlet Hangouts. If things go well, there will be more sessions of MFC in the future; if not by me, than perhaps by one of my “students.” And if you have a tabletop gaming group, even of only a few members, I recommend you try a series with a structure like MFC’s: you’ll all leave feeling more connected, supportive, and optimistic of games to come.  by Tomer Gurantz, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below
What is it? The Listen Party is an ad hoc event I started a few months back. The first one was on a day I felt a little low and didn’t have the ability to leave the house, but really just wanted some connection and chit-chat. On that day, I checked in with some folks in The Gauntlet Slack group. Before long, some of us dove into a Discord voice channel and listened to segments from recent Gauntlet podcasts, and after 5-10 minutes of listening, hit Pause and discussed the topic. We did this for about an hour or two, working our way through a few segments. Since that first time, we’ve probably had about a half dozen of these crop up. Sometimes there’s just 3-4 of us, and the biggest was probably closer to 10 Gauntleteers. Some recent Listen Parties A particularly memorable one was when a large group of us listened to the Fear of a Black Dragon Podcast about Operation Unfathomable, specifically highlighting the segment where Jason and Tom discuss tips for good characterizations. In addition to getting to process the segment again, having each other as a sounding board allows questions to be answered, and additional tips and tricks to be uncovered from the plethora of experience we all have. In another we listened to one of the Gauntlet’s GM Masterclass episodes, and a few weeks later the +1 Forward episode about Dream Apart. The most recent involved us listening to the Gauntlet Podcast for Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars with Josh Fox. Prior to the podcast, we just caught up with one another and had a discussion about MR-KR-GR: The Death Rolled Kingdom. While listening to the podcast, conversations came up about cognitive vs improvisational load in Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) and other story games, tokens and GMless games, and mechanics in regards to Flotsam, Good Society, and others. How does it work? Our listen parties are actually quite low-fi. Someone simply announces they want to do the thing in Slack; we have a specific Slack keyword we use to allow for people to opt-in to get notified it’s happening. This call to arms has us gather into a Discord voice channel, and then once we have a critical mass, we choose what we want to listen to. Generally, we go for a recent podcast with a juicy segment or two. At this point, I do the “3, 2, 1…” countdown, we all hit PLAY, and listen to it on our headphones, individually. When the segment is over, or if someone pipes up and says they want to start a discussion, we just hit PAUSE, and then commence. This continues until we’ve decided we’re done. Simple enough. There was a suggestion of using Rabb.it, a service that allows people to watch or listen to things together, but we found it’s a little more than what we needed just now. Perhaps one day. Are you a Gauntlet Slack user who’s interested? Use the GauntletListenParty keyword to get info on how to setup the notification. And even though I’ve been the one generally making it happen, it’s anyone’s game, so don’t be bashful in starting a listen party when the mood strikes! |
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