The Murder Hobo Show Premiere: Actual Play of Chickens in the Mist

To launch the Murder Hobo Show I've assembled an All-Star cast of role-players and Nerds-International personalities to play the infamous horror scenario Chickens in the Mist.

• From the +TableTop Twats, +Nikk Lambley and +Harrison Hunt!
• +Eli Kurtz of the Blackwood Codex
• Friend of the show, +Gary McCallum 
• From +The Wild Die Podcast and +The Gathering of Dorks, none other than +JPierson71 
• And me, Eric Lamoureux, co-host of the Wild Die Podcast.

If the last time we all got together to play is any indication, this promises to be filled with fall-off-your-chair laughter.

Be sure to tune in to www.twitch.tv/murderhoboshow Saturday October 29th at 9am EST

Savage Worlds at FG Con 9 (October 14th-16th)

Hi everybody!
Eric Lamoureux here to tell you all about FG Con 9 on October 14th-16th. FG Con is a virtual convention using Fantasy Grounds (the officially licensed Savage Worlds VTT)  and it's totally free to join! And you don't even have to leave the comfort of your own home.

There are many Savage Worlds games on the schedule from a wide variety of genre, settings, great GMs from all over the world and there is even a game in Portuguese!
Here's how you can join.

Have a look at the amazing selection of games (all times are GMT until you register and set your time zone in your profile)!

The Last Parsec: Omariss Death Worm [FULL]
Winter Eternal: Moth to a flame [FULL]
Savage Warhammer: Night of Blood
Brothers in Battle [Portuguese]
Deadlands Reloaded - The Taxidermist's Tale [FULL]
Shaintar - Fire in the Darkness [FULL]
Gotham Breakout [FULL]
The Commoners
The Savage World of Solomon Kane: Possessed
Badabing Badaboom!
Starsky and Hutch - Savage Sunday
Deadlands Reloaded: Savage Tales of the Magnificent Seven [FULL]
The Savage World of Solomon Kane: The Oncoming Frost
Tropicana - Die Easy (or Die Trying!) [Cancelled]
Savage Secrets: Lady in Distress, Code Name: Jackpot
The Savage World of Solomon Kane: From the Deep
The Wild Die Podcast presents: Live Stream of Deadlands Noir
TMNT in Gotham City [Cancelled]
Savage Warhammer: With A Little Help From My Friends [FULL]
Shaintar - Fire in the Darkness [FULL]
Weird Wars Rome - Fangs of the Viper [Cancelled]
Savage Secrets: Code Name: Skyhook

There's something for everyone at all times of the day and night regardless of where you are located in the world. If the event you'd like to join is full, you can still book. It's common for some people to back out. You'll be the first in line!
Come join us and make this even the largest virtual and international gathering of Savages!
I hope to meet you there!

Behind the Mutation Deck

The Mutation Deck is now available for sale here!

Back in April +Morne Schaap and I started working on a campaign setting for Just Insert Imagination.

Mutants & Tassels is a pulp fantasy setting set in the Blight, an eldritch 1980’s post-apocalyptic earth. In this Plot Point Campaign, the young heroes come together to defeat a tyrant, ensuring a brighter future for themselves and the people of the Dust Flats.

This started out as Plug & Play adventure. Plug & Play adventures are one-shot adventures designed to fit inside the Game Master screen, and comes with pre-generated characters, maps and various props making it easy to run a session on the fly or at a convention. The first one in the series, Fuhgeddaboudit!, was a success so we were already brainstorming ideas for the next one. Mutants & Tassels started out as a gritty exploration of a Chernobyl-like site but once my brain got a hold of it, it quickly degenerated into a silly gonzo adventure with plant-like lifeforms and an alien landscape.

I also found myself influenced by an excellent movie I had watched shortly prior to this called Turbo Kid. I really liked the imagery, 80's reference and the use of bicycles instead of souped-up muscle cars. To say this movie influenced Mutants & Tassels is an understatement.

What would be an 80's influence campaign setting without 80's role-playing games mechanics, though? I don't know about you but the games I played in the 80's or games from the 80's I played all had a lot of random character creation elements. In Warhammer for instance, your profession and stats were rolled randomly.

But wait a minute, this is 2016 and making a Savage Worlds character is about making choices for what YOU want to play. So I came up with a few minor mutation ideas that would be printed out on cards and dealt randomly at the beginning of the adventure.

During the design process I started looking at +Richard Woolcock 's Savage Abilities to help flesh out those mutations mechanically. There was a lot to work with there for positive abilities but not so much with negative ones. After talking with Morne we decided to contact Richard and see if he'd be interested in working on this Mutation Deck project. We went back and forth for a while, Richard had great ideas, we came to an agreement and a week or two later Richard had 56 cards, setting rules, instructions, Edges and Hindrances done.

Next up was play testing. We all loved the cards but needed feedback and input from more people and wanted to see how they held up during character creation and play.

The most interesting thing we learned during the play test was that the cards really inspired players during character creation. They knew very little about the campaign setting, so the cards helped flesh out a concept for their mutants.

While Morne worked on the layout and artwork, Richard made some changes from the feedback we had gotten and finally, editing by +Ron Blessing.

What I really like about this deck of cards is how versatile it is. It comes with trappings but you can change the trappings to theme it for Chaos or wild magic, aliens, aberrations or whatever your imagination can take them.

• A Minor Disadvantage is the equivalent of a Minor Hindrance or -1 racial ability
• A Major Disadvantage is like a Major Hindrance or a -2 racial ability
• The Advantage is the equivalent of an Edge or a +2 racial ability

So with that in mind, there's a lot you can do with all these mutations and the "mechanics" on the cards. As a Game Master, you can deal a few cards to generate a new race for your campaign setting. You can deal a card or two and add the Advantage to any monster or NPC template to make your own bestiary. You could deal a card to generate Backlash for a Wild Magic Arcane Background, side effects to radioactive damage, trappings for chaotic powers or new injuries from radioactive creatures using the new Mutation Trapping Setting Rules.

And yes, it's an Action Deck with big letters and numbers on them too so you can easily see them across the table!

How will you use your Mutation Deck?

In media res

This is the sequel to the blog I started about convention or one-shot games.

In the first blog I talked about the hook, now I want to talk about which scene I chose to run first. When you think about it, an adventure is a collection of scenes. When each scene is designed to follow another one, it becomes difficult to pull one out of the mix if you're running out of time and get the full effect. It's much easier to insert more scenes to make the adventure longer.
So maybe you only have 2 hours to run the game, you're expecting 6 players, half of them are new to Savage Worlds, there are 5 scenes in this One-Sheet, Savage Tale, adventure module or whatever you want to run (because you don't have time to prep). Chances are slim to none they'll get past the third scene if there's a combat in there, even with a fast system like Savage Worlds.
Now let me put on a black raincoat, cool shades and ask you: What if I told you there's a way to pace your adventure to last pretty much as long as you want it to last without having to remove any important scenes?

So you've got your hook, now let's wrap it in with the set-up, first scene and goal/destination.

The Don wants you to make Dominic the accountant disappear. Contact Jerry for more information.
[insert conversations with the Don and Jerry along with questions here]
[insert trip to hardware store to get everything on the "Kidnapping for Dummies" list here]
[insert kidnapping scene here]
Hey look at the time, you probably spent more time than you were willing to spend on this part of your adventure and most of it probably wasn't Fast, Furious or Fun with the exception of the kidnapping scene maybe.
Consider starting in media res (in the middle of things).
There's a mob accountant alive in the trunk of your car. You lost a lot of money because of him. The plan is to take him to Coaldale, toss him in a hole and pave a road over his body. You're cruising along on I-95 when your sideview mirror is blown up by what you believe to be a high caliber bullet. What do you do?
Bada bing bada boom! Your game has started with a bang. Maybe the players wouldn't have tackled it this way would they have played it, you say? You're most definitely right. But then again no group wants to role-play every minute of an adventure. Sometimes you fast-forward to the next scene. This is no different really. You just decided where it starts.
After this scene is over, you can answer any questions the players have and provide more details. What state is the accountant in the trunk in? I don't know, you tell me, what did you do to him? Would you like to play it out? Yes? let's go Pulp Fiction with this then.
Why do scenes have to be played in chronological order? Because how do you handle a character dying in a flashback scene Mr. Fancy Pants GM? Remember, incapacitated doesn't necessarily mean dead, and if it's during a flashback scene, why not modify that table and give the PC a permanent injury instead? You can also do as suggested in Beasts & Barbarians and take a Benny from the "deceased" PC.
You have to understand the players are likely playing their character for the first time. Yes, there are hindrances on their sheet and a bunch of stats giving them some type of direction but they still don't know their character.
What I found the best way to put them in character is to drop them in media res where they have difficult choices to make. From the latest examples, do they duck for cover, try to see where the shot came from, pull out their weapon or let out an expletive? This also helps you figure out what kind of players you have at your table.
For players new to Savage Worlds, this allows them to make a few die rolls and get the jitters out of the way.
Starting in media res basically cuts the crap. Do I always start a game out this way? No, I don't, but I found out it makes it harder for the game to switch gears if I don't.
In the next blog I want to show you how I turn this into a full adventure that I can ad lib with and make it last as long as I want it to.

One Sheet failures, Seven Deadly Sins and Fuhgeddaboudit!

It's been forever since I last wrote a blog. Between writing for +Just Insert Imagination, running two play-test groups for an upcoming products for JII, running games, filling in for Blaine on the Wild Die Podcast and my rekindled addiction to Civilization V, there has been very little time for blogging.
Speaking of the +The Wild Die Podcast... Episode 7 was supposed to be about convention games and encounter building but we ran out of recording time because we had so much fun doing the crossover show with the Savage Cast podcast guys. So episode 7 became the crossover show and the content we had planned for it will become episode 8. I also hear from a good source that Blaine will be able to join us for that one so I'm excited about that.
I was itching to tackle these topics, and having to wait another month to talk about it hasn't helped. So I decided to write blogs about it. There are a few challenges when running a convention or one-shot game and I intend to share my take on these issues and how I deal with them. Fuhgeddaboudit! is in a way the culmination of my efforts after years of experimentation.
If you've read Fuhgeddaboudit!, I'm sure you've noticed it has a different format then the popular One Sheets Pinnacles Entertainment and several other licensee put out. There are a few reasons for that.
I believe that a One Sheet is a solid framework to use for an evening a play, but it often has a "story" arc that spans over more than one session of play. It all depends how many hours you have committed to the session, how many players you have and their familiarity with role-playing games or Savage Worlds, and the environment you'll be playing in. It's very difficult for a designer to account for all these factors when the scenes escalating to the climax are all mapped out for you. Too often I've found myself half-way with a half-hour left to play. You're then faced with the dilemma: should I hurry things along and skip a scene or two, or should I end it when it ends, without the group playing the climax scene and maybe narrating that scene as an epilogue?
The introduction of the Quick Combat rules sure give a GM one more weapon in his arsenal to deal with the situation. I haven't used it yet but look forward to the opportunity.
The other thing about One Sheets is that you, as the GM, still need to do some work before you can play it. Often times you have to come up with your own hook. I believe a One Sheet is more a scenario so introduce in your own campaign than a one-shot or convention game scenario. It can certainly be the case but like I said, you'll need to do some work. Then you might need maps, figure flats or minis, pre-gens, etc.
In the end, unless you have no problem totally railroading the adventure, you'll realize you had to improvise for most of the session anyway because the group went in another direction than what the designer had planned. Is that a failure on the part of the GM or adventure writer? Could be. Having read how other RPG systems design their adventures, I believe in it's the format. The adventure writer needs to give the GM the information he needs to run the scenario, not a synopsis of how he believes it may turn out. Does that make sense?
While a veteran GM will usually look at a One Sheet and know how to make it work for his game, a novice GM won't. It lacks instructions due to limited space. Even I, as a long time GM, sometimes need the designer to hold my hand and guide me. How should I run this? Why did you chose to do it that way? One thing I really liked about Shaintar is how Sean Patrick Fannon talks to you throughout the book with the sidebars. He tells you why he chose to design something that way and gives you tips. As a GM I definitely appreciate that.
In recognizing what I believe are failures when it comes to One Sheets design I also recognized my own failures in the design of Fuhgeddaboudit!. When someone commented that we gave them too little to work with I immediately went on the defensive. "Really? five pre-gen characters, three maps, npc stats, setting rules, twice the length of a One Sheet, pay-what-you-want and it still isn't enough?" But after taking some distance and looking at it from the commentator's perspective I realized that this sandbox adventure needed a more thorough instruction manual or an example on how to put everything together and make it a scenario.
So while there's an actual play video here of me running Fuhgeddaboudit! and another one from +JPierson71 coming soon, I want to break it all down into a step by step example in a written format. Hopefully you'll get to understand what went on in my head when I designed and ran it. Look for it in the days (or weeks) to come.

So let's start with the beginning...

The Hook

What I feel is often neglected for a one-shot or convention game is the hook. What motivates the player-characters to jump in and risk their lives? It's easy to use the old trick that involves some dude paying the player-characters or a plea from a desperate and helpless NPC. It works, after all, the players have come to the table to play and they'd be fools to be difficult if they want to participate.
Remember, you don't have 10 sessions of a campaign to help you with the PC's motivations here. You most likely don't know who's going to sit at your table so you don't know which strings to pull. However, if you can manage to get them hooked and buy into the scenario right off the bat, the rest of the game will be much easier for you. So how do you do that?
You need to look no further than the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth and Greed.
Gluttony and Greed are the easy ones. The heroes want more gold so you give them more than they can carry. However, it's a one-shot, what the hell do they need gold for?
Last month I ran a Deadlands one-shot online called Pedro Must Die. I ripped parts out of a South of the Border Tale called Bat God, added an introductory scene involving npc interaction and changed the hook from Gluttony/Greed (going to a burial site full of riches) to Wrath. Here's the pitch: "He took your money and left you to die. He high tailed down to Mexico. Pedro must die."
The game hadn't even started and the players wanted to make Pedro pay for what he did to them. Promises of Pedro's demise flooded the thread. They couldn't wait. They were already motivated.
Let's pick another one. Envy. So you're running a Supers game. The Super Heroes are part of a team but there's this other team in town and they're stealing the show. Old ladies are baking cookies for them, the news want to interview them, children are asking their parents to go see them and get their autograph. I don't know about you but I hate their guts already. Imagine how your players will feel about them. Suddenly, while these jerks are enjoying the fame, the Super Heroes become aware of a menace in the city. It's their chance to get the spotlight back.

In the next blog I'll talk about the set-up and starting in media res without losing the introduction.

One Sheet failures, Seven Deadly Sins and Fuhgeddaboudit!

It's been forever since I last wrote a blog. Between writing for +Just Insert Imagination, running two play-test groups for an upcoming products for JII, running games, filling in for Blaine on the Wild Die Podcast and my rekindled addiction to Civilization V, there has been very little time for blogging.
Speaking of the +The Wild Die Podcast... Episode 7 was supposed to be about convention games and encounter building but we ran out of recording time because we had so much fun doing the crossover show with the Savage Cast podcast guys. So episode 7 became the crossover show and the content we had planned for it will become episode 8. I also hear from a good source that Blaine will be able to join us for that one so I'm excited about that.
I was itching to tackle these topics, and having to wait another month to talk about it hasn't helped. So I decided to write blogs about it. There are a few challenges when running a convention or one-shot game and I intend to share my take on these issues and how I deal with them. Fuhgeddaboudit! is in a way the culmination of my efforts after years of experimentation.
If you've read Fuhgeddaboudit!, I'm sure you've noticed it has a different format then the popular One Sheets Pinnacles Entertainment and several other licensee put out. There are a few reasons for that.
I believe that a One Sheet is a solid framework to use for an evening a play, but it often has a "story" arc that spans over more than one session of play. It all depends how many hours you have committed to the session, how many players you have and their familiarity with role-playing games or Savage Worlds, and the environment you'll be playing in. It's very difficult for a designer to account for all these factors when the scenes escalating to the climax are all mapped out for you. Too often I've found myself half-way with a half-hour left to play. You're then faced with the dilemma: should I hurry things along and skip a scene or two, or should I end it when it ends, without the group playing the climax scene and maybe narrating that scene as an epilogue?
The introduction of the Quick Combat rules sure give a GM one more weapon in his arsenal to deal with the situation. I haven't used it yet but look forward to the opportunity.
The other thing about One Sheets is that you, as the GM, still need to do some work before you can play it. Often times you have to come up with your own hook. I believe a One Sheet is more a scenario so introduce in your own campaign than a one-shot or convention game scenario. It can certainly be the case but like I said, you'll need to do some work. Then you might need maps, figure flats or minis, pre-gens, etc.
In the end, unless you have no problem totally railroading the adventure, you'll realize you had to improvise for most of the session anyway because the group went in another direction than what the designer had planned. Is that a failure on the part of the GM or adventure writer? Could be. Having read how other RPG systems design their adventures, I believe in it's the format. The adventure writer needs to give the GM the information he needs to run the scenario, not a synopsis of how he believes it may turn out. Does that make sense?
While a veteran GM will usually look at a One Sheet and know how to make it work for his game, a novice GM won't. It lacks instructions due to limited space. Even I, as a long time GM, sometimes need the designer to hold my hand and guide me. How should I run this? Why did you chose to do it that way? One thing I really liked about Shaintar is how Sean Patrick Fannon talks to you throughout the book with the sidebars. He tells you why he chose to design something that way and gives you tips. As a GM I definitely appreciate that.
In recognizing what I believe are failures when it comes to One Sheets design I also recognized my own failures in the design of Fuhgeddaboudit!. When someone commented that we gave them too little to work with I immediately went on the defensive. "Really? five pre-gen characters, three maps, npc stats, setting rules, twice the length of a One Sheet, pay-what-you-want and it still isn't enough?" But after taking some distance and looking at it from the commentator's perspective I realized that this sandbox adventure needed a more thorough instruction manual or an example on how to put everything together and make it a scenario.
So while there's an actual play video here of me running Fuhgeddaboudit! and another one from +JPierson71 coming soon, I want to break it all down into a step by step example in a written format. Hopefully you'll get to understand what went on in my head when I designed and ran it. Look for it in the days (or weeks) to come.

So let's start with the beginning...

The Hook

What I feel is often neglected for a one-shot or convention game is the hook. What motivates the player-characters to jump in and risk their lives? It's easy to use the old trick that involves some dude paying the player-characters or a plea from a desperate and helpless NPC. It works, after all, the players have come to the table to play and they'd be fools to be difficult if they want to participate.
Remember, you don't have 10 sessions of a campaign to help you with the PC's motivations here. You most likely don't know who's going to sit at your table so you don't know which strings to pull. However, if you can manage to get them hooked and buy into the scenario right off the bat, the rest of the game will be much easier for you. So how do you do that?
You need to look no further than the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth and Greed.
Gluttony and Greed are the easy ones. The heroes want more gold so you give them more than they can carry. However, it's a one-shot, what the hell do they need gold for?
Last month I ran a Deadlands one-shot online called Pedro Must Die. I ripped parts out of a South of the Border Tale called Bat God, added an introductory scene involving npc interaction and changed the hook from Gluttony/Greed (going to a burial site full of riches) to Wrath. Here's the pitch: "He took your money and left you to die. He high tailed down to Mexico. Pedro must die."
The game hadn't even started and the players wanted to make Pedro pay for what he did to them. Promises of Pedro's demise flooded the thread. They couldn't wait. They were already motivated.
Let's pick another one. Envy. So you're running a Supers game. The Super Heroes are part of a team but there's this other team in town and they're stealing the show. Old ladies are baking cookies for them, the news want to interview them, children are asking their parents to go see them and get their autograph. I don't know about you but I hate their guts already. Imagine how your players will feel about them. Suddenly, while these jerks are enjoying the fame, the Super Heroes become aware of a menace in the city. It's their chance to get the spotlight back.

In the next blog I'll talk about the set-up and starting in media res without losing the introduction.

Online Table top RPGs just aren't the same

Ever since I started being involved heavily into running and playing table top RPGs online I come across comments on social media such as "I prefer the real thing".

Now I have no interest in starting a debate here. I could tell you how it enables people living in remote areas to play, for old groups to be reunited once again because they have since moved away from each other. I know because I've heard many testimonies. I've had people tell me.

But this isn't about me.

Last week we held FG Con 8. It's an online rpg convention using the Fantasy Grounds platform. A whole weekend of games with hundreds of gamers participated in this event. We're always happy to hear people had a great time. One particular feedback from my friend +Perry Chalmers particularly moved me.

I'd like you to take a few minutes of your day to read what he had to say about his experience last weekend.

Here's Perry's blog.

No, online table top RPGs just aren't the same...

For someone like Perry, it's the only way to experience this wonderful hobby right now.

I'm glad you had fun Perry.