Okay, so I have been bad about keeping this updated with campaign information. My Dark Sun game has turned into in an exercise akin to herding cats. Which to be honest is something that I really love about running more intrigue based games, but it does make blogging about it a bit of a hassle ;p

So instead I want to raise something that have recently really impressed me about this community of ours. The internet has done wonderful things to bring various players, gms, deck builders and other creative people together in support of their hobby. A quick [search engine of your choice] search will bring up user created content for most any game you play.

What I am really impressed by is how the companies that we "support" have taken to this. I've recently e-mailed a popular boardgame company with regards to some promos that was available for one of their games, and even though these same promos were available to buy in their online store I was sent the package and all they asked in return was that I mention to my FLGS that they will be giving away more promos at a later date. They even keep a strong presence on Boardgame Geek to answer questions even though they have their own forums.

A player from my group submitted a system question with regards to a game we were playing. Not only did he receive an actual useful answer to his question, but that answer came from one of the actual game designers instead of someone with some standard responses.

As a last example, I like collecting stuff, I like having complete collections of the games that I like. I came into one of my other games a bit late so I was missing some of the free adventures/modules that was released. I was very rude and e-mailed someone in that company that I have been following on RSS. Even though that person most likely won't be able to find me the adventures I did receive a very friendly reply telling me that they will see what they can do.

I would like to say a very big thankyou to all the companies that give us as players good service and support. The internet has definitely brought your product to more people and have exposed more people to the actual people behind your games beyond the few that would have met people at cons before that.
For the most part the public face of these companies are friendly open and approachable.

Thanks! =D

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Next post I'll be back to detailing my Dark Sun run, but instead of doing it session for session I'll detail some of the characters and bounce around some ideas I have for them with regards to the main plot and side quests.

See you soon!

Encouraging cooperation.

TheSheDM over at newbieDM.com made a good post about 'bribing' players to cooperate in building their game world on Obsidian portal.

http://newbiedm.com/2011/05/27/bribing-participation/
(I'll fix this link when I am back at me computer. In the mean time it can look all gritty)

This got me thinking since I've been having a similar problem getting buyin from players to contribute to the Dark Sun wiki on our Epic Words page.

There were some really good suggestions from other roleplayers and TheSheDM even posted her notes for me. Thankyou so much again :)

After toying with some of the ideas I've decided to go with the following:

The idea is to get the players on the wiki and get them to contribute in a way that is meaningful to their character. To this end I've roughly assigned each character a social group.
Each player can create npcs that are well known or friendly to them. They can decide all the who's what's where's and whens about the npc inside of the constraints of the setting.
The only real catch is that they cannot add a new npc if the previous one has not been added to the wiki.

This should encourage them to work at the wiki as well as their character backstory.

At least that's the idea, will bounce this off of my players this coming tuesday and keep you updated on how it goes.


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Dark Sun - Cell 17 : House Lavara

As I mentioned previously there was no game this week as I was out of town, watching a road race and all.

As such I'll use this post to highlight one of the organisations that is currently featuring in the campaign; House Lavara.

House Lavara is a trade house that was created by one of the players as part of their character backstory. I'm going to be purposely vague about which player created it so as to avoid spoilers as far as possible, chances are that this will be cryptic and read like my game notes ;p

The house is currently an up and coming trade house based in Tyr. On the surface they trade in textiles and have a very large interest in the gladiatorial games. Their support of the games have won them a large amount of fame with all levels of populace in Tyr and as such they are on the verge of taking their place as one of the major trade houses in the region.

Under the surface though the house is something completely different. House Lavara is ruthless family organisation that specialises in espionage and assassination. The original plan for the House is lost to all but the most ancient members of the family. The current head of the house is in the dark as to their original purpose and mainly just building towards political power.

Hargan Lavara, the trader that the group met in session 1, is a minor member of the family and as such mostly overlooked. He has recently made some discoveries that made him question his loyalties, as such he is currently make a play for power.

House Lavara has one very closely guarded secret, their ace in the hole, they have available to them a wrinkly old master of the way called Stone.
Stone is able to overwrite an operatives peronality and psyche completely, creating a totally convincing and impenetrable personality with its own memories, hopes, dreams etc.
These agents are programmed with explicit triggers and instructions to perform once those triggers are met. They form the core of House Lavara's assassins.

The player that created the house is playing one of these sleeper agents. Usually I really dislike characters with amnesia or anything which is mostly the player saying 'I don't want to do character history' but since this player is usually very invested in roleplaying the character I allowed it.

We had a very long talk about how it is most likely to play out and whether what I envisioned the rp-payout to be was the same as the player's expectations. In the end we settled on it playing out like a mix between the Family of Blood pt2 episode of Doctor Who (s3e9) and the first Bourne book. The character should be fairly straight forward at least until I start seeding the real personality and start toying with what's real and what isn't.

Really looking forward to it.
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