Gaming geekery

[annathepiper]

Hey chipmunck and kathrynt! I keep running into Chad on my way in to work in the mornings; it seems he catches the 545 from the same place I do downtown, though he gets off at a later point on the route than I do.

He sat with me on the bus this morning, though, and we had a pleasant chat about roleplaying games. He showed me the manual for a game he's currently all excited about: Blue Rose, which is all about romantic fantasy RPG but which includes pictures of pretty queer boys embracing in the artwork. Hee. Shades of Mercedes Lackey and the Vanyel books. Also, he showed me the RPG book he himself worked on: Spycraft: Dark Inheritance.

I told him he was the second person I knew working on gaming systems, and when I said the words "Rebecca Borgstorm" he lit right up. (I mention THIS, of course, for the benefit of risu, whose work on the Fair Folk book for Exalted he especially admired.) And, of course, I had to mention jesshartley's Exalted novel. He was reading the first in the same series in which her novel appears, and he perked up when I told him I knew the person who'd written the third book in the series!

All of this makes me want to do some gaming myself. It's been too long. Especially now that I'm not MUSHing anymore. :)

Comments

[jesshartley.livejournal.com]

Oooh, neato! :) Thanks for the PR! Feel free to pass along my contact info if he wants to chat about exalted.

[annathepiper]

You're most welcome, and I shall! :)

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

I miss gaming, too. Wah. Especially 7th Sea- when K and I were in Kansas, one of the local gaming folk was an *excellent* storyteller-type DM. I played a Castilian carpenter, and it was a hella lotta fun RPing my character drunk out of his mind and raving in Spanish. I knew all those classes would come in handy someday. ;)

[annathepiper]

Hee! That sounds fun. :)

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you wanna start up some tabletop gaming - regular, irregular, whatever - I'm interested. I bet we could scare up a group. Blue Rose does sound interesting.

[annathepiper]

Ah, but the tricky part is finding somebody to GM. ;) This did, after all, kill our last gaming group! (I'm not at all sure I could play GM anymore, what with all of my creativity braincells going into the writing. I half-suspect it'd be like MUSH roleplay is to me these days--not quite the same skill, but close enough that if I tried to divert any thought over to it, it'd take away from the writing.)

[suntop.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about Blue Rose, but it does look interesting :)

[annathepiper]

I have enough Mercedes Lackey on my shelves that I can hardly scoff at the overall flavor--and hey, I'm as much of a sucker as the next Misty fan for "mages coming of age and telepathically bonding with super-smart animals" books. ;) So hey, it might make a fun roleplaying experience!

The book was pricey, though. Thirty bucks, said Chad. Don't know if I'd want to plunk out money for the book unless I knew I was going to actually play the game!

[suntop.livejournal.com]

I was thinking much the same thing...and then with the supplemental books it comes to something like almost $90!!

I saw that you can download it in PDF form for $16...I was thinking about doing that. I'd love to get my hands on a hard copy to look through though.

I have a bookshelf of Lackey's books too and I love the world she created. I'm still trying to decide, from what I read, if this world is very limiting or if it's allowing more creativity than, say, D&D. They don't seem to have character classes so I do find that odd...and the 'everyone can have magic' is another I'm not so sure I agree with. But I think that with some tweaking it could be fun to create a world and use the system as a basis for that.

I do love that it doesn't focus on Hack 'n' Slash. I tend to play Bards and Thieves with the occasional Mage in D&D...they're not very combat-heavy :)

[annathepiper]

It's way cool that they provide a PDF form of the manual. Ah, the online age. :)

I haven't read the rules in depth yet, but I was poking around a bit on the Blue Rose site. I read the essay they have up there about Romantic Fantasy and what it is, and that was somewhat interesting reading--though I don't necessarily agree with all of the assertions that the author made about what constitutes Romantic Fantasy. He even contradicted himself, claiming that the genre does not include non-human races such as elves or dwarves, and then mentioning Anne Logston as an example of authors who write the genre. I've got a whole bunch of Anne Logston's books, and several of them involve elves. Hell, a she-elf thief is the heroine of a couple. :)

[suntop.livejournal.com]

I didn't read that essay, but I did look at the 'sneak peek' of the rules and the sample characters. I'm just worried that limiting the game to one kingdom with only a few 'races' all of whom seem to have very similar cultures will, well, get dull.

The thing I liked about the Lackey books was that she had a bunch of different cultures, even if most of the 'races' were humans. There were those who lived in Valdemar, but there were the Rethwellians who were sort of like Germany to Valdemar's England/France, the Karsites (Eastern), the Hawkbrothers and the Shi'a'nin (sp?) who all had their own cultural identities. I didn't see that in the rules that I saw. Maybe there's more in one of the supplemental books, but it seemed to focus solely on one kingdom.

Now, if I did decide to play that game, I would definitely expand it to include some other cultures that could be played...just so that everyone didn't have to come from the same, or similar, backgrounds.

Even the Lackey races had their own animal-telepathic race for each different human race. The Hawkbrothers and Shi'a'nin had the Gryphons and the dyheli (?). Valdemar had the Companions. Karse had the Firecats.

Even the Robin Hobb books have different cultures even if the focus is on one area in particular.

[kieri.livejournal.com]

Wow! You know the author of 'Nobilis'? That's so awesome -- I really love that game! Never found anyone to play it with, though. :( And I left the book in the States when I came over! (double pout)

Still, very cool! :)

[annathepiper]

The author of Nobilis is, in fact, my housemate. :)

[kieri.livejournal.com]

WHOA!! :) TOO COOL!

:) That's extremely awesome. It's a gorgeous and very well-written book. Pass along the praise for me? :)

I even paid retail for the thing, from a shop, because I figured it'd be better for the sales than buying it at Amazon. O:)

[annathepiper]

I'll be more than happy to pass the word! Thanks, hon! ^_^

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Depending on the RPG, I'm willing to PLAY but not GM. I'm just putting that out there in case someone starts up a game in the future.

[annathepiper]

Gotcha. As I mentioned to kirbyk, the tricky part would be finding a GM. :)