Category Archives: gaming

Question 20:  Which game mechanic inspires your play the most?

The very fact that roleplaying games by their nature involve the players and GM sitting around a table (usually) and sharing in the creation of a narrative.

Sure, I, as GM, can say: “Boss Greblin wants you to take this sealed oak box to Los Angeles. Don’t open it.”

And then one of the players can have their character wait until Boss Greblin’s out of the room and be all: “I open the box.”

While the rest of the crew are shouting: “What the actual-“

The game can move wherever we want it to–sometimes in opposite directions, often with dire consequences. And yet it moves. Always.

Day 19: Music that enhances your game?

Another glib cop-out answer for this one: too many pieces of music to count, everything’s an inspiration, etc…

I’ve mentioned before that particular pieces of music have sparked whole campaigns, and I continue to listen to all kinds of stuff, so there’s still plenty of stories waiting to be born. 

As for when the games are being played:

We usually have something suitable playing in the background, just bubbling under and not getting in the way. Maybe something movie-soundtrack related, or music of whatever time period in which the game is set.

Unless there’s ominous music playing for an especially tense and quiet bit of gaming, I tend not to notice after a while anyway. Maybe I’d notice if it stopped.

One caveat to all of this is there’s a particular piece of music by Radiohead which for me always lets me know that we’re back in a long running game that our characters can never seem to escape…

Best not to think about it.

Question 18: Art that inspires your game?

Too many to pieces to count. Anything from game-book interiors to pulp novel covers to works by the old masters and random stuff discovered on the web. Everything and anything can spark something.

And the art for the new edition of Runequest is just incredible.

One specific image which was an incredible inspiration was by the artist Angus McBride in–iirc–one of the Osprey mil-history books about German Medieval Armies.

A simple soldier, wearing mail, plate greaves and vambraces, carrying shield and falchion and with a chapel de fer upon his weary head.

This guy…

This image had so much weight of history and story in it he became a character that I called Bernhardt of Bremen.

Question 17: Describe the best compliment you’ve had gaming.

As a GM, the fact the players continue to enjoy the games is compliment enough, isn’t it?

That said, the other day I was asked if the just ended session was from a published scenario or something I’d come up with myself. As I’d come up with it just that afternoon I was pretty pleased with this response.

As a player, I guess the fact we laugh a lot is where it’s at, and these days I reckon if our characters are doing cool stuff then we’re cool too, right?

Question 12: Wildest character concept?

Short answer: Denmark

The basic set up for the character was: Everyone in Denmark on a particular date vanishes without a trace, and this particular character has access to all of their memories and skills, one at a time and for a limited period only.

This was in a superhero game I was running a few years back, and it later transpired that the character had access to the powers and abilities of any superheroes that had existed in Denmark at the time of the Event.

Also villains.

When last seen the character had recently become the Danish super-science crime-lord Doctor Zinc, who–as an old man suddenly ‘reborn’ into a fresh young body–had set about reliving the glory days of his youthful crime sprees.

Good times.

Question 11: Wildest character name?

In the early years of my gaming experience I played in a group where the standard procedure was to choose character names by simply casting an eye around the dining room in which we played and picking something that caught the eye.

Sometimes it would be weapons list from that day’s gaming books. I certainly remember a knight called Lucerne Bec De Corbin. Or the label of a nearby wine: Captain Cabernet D’Anjou.

There was also once a character called International Land-mine Tow-truck, but I can’t entirely remember why.

There was a band of brothers in an D&D-esque game called Mylar, Kevlar and Lexan. Names that seemed totally in keeping with the sword-and-sorcery tone, whilst being entirely out of place.

I suppose the real issue here is ‘funny names’, but as others have said, that tends to risk breaking the immersion of the game, and is best avoided I think. It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other instances for comedy in the average game, but having a distinctly funny-ha-ha character name might be a little too on the nose?

Anyway, the most interesting name in a game of recent years was a for an NPC character in the Doctor Who based Seeds of Time campaign I ran. A lost princess, trapped on a dying starship as it fell into the last light of an angry star.

Her name was:

Lady Lara Sparkle De Castro Chollienne Atriplex Carvalho

Known to her friends and foes alike as Spark Cholly.