FireWater Productions

Yes, Indeedy… I have put together a quickie one-shot that covers the basic set-up for gaming in the Chaos University universe, complete with field trips, get-together starts, a 301-killer adventure, and pregenerated characters! The only thing it’s really missing is art…sorry, but hey, It’s FREE! There will be a pile available at DexCon… Have a ball!

Took a trip off to Long Island to see a friend about future plans. And get a look at the game he designed. I see potential, so I’ll be helping him put it together. In other news, still scriptwriting, still working for Avalon Games, this time doing conversions.

It looks like New Gods of Mankind from Dark Skull Studios will be moving forward and I will be involved (Yay!). There will be new Chaos University stuff (Yay!). And (hopefully) I will be setting up some other potential games through the online PDF stores.

Soon as I figure out layout a little better.

Talk to you soon…..

I just received a report of Stephen Sciame who ran two demos of the game (which would be the REAL reason for its success) and it was apparently labeled top Demo’d game at the Con. On Friday they received 10 people and on Saturday they had to push two tables together.

I’ve already told Stephen to give me a run down of the adventure and the rest he’s done and I’ll put them together in its very own adventure pack. So thank you everybody who participated and I hope to be on that coast soon, inundating everyone with the MAX!

Well, Dreamation is this weekend in NJ, but sadly, it is before my tax return comes in so it’s a no-go. CosCon in Butler is also in early March so it is likely that’s not going to happen either.

Chaos University will be demo’d at LunaCon this year by Stephen Sciame, who has also sent me a load of new ideas to turn into the next adventure book. LunaCon is in Rye Brook NY, March 18-20 and you can find more information at 2011.lunacon.org.

What I am definitely doing is a Craft Fair in Dempseytown PA on March 26; I have lots of crocheted baby hates and other interesting crocheted items, as well as my gardening book and may some other strange stuff to sell. Once spring moves in I hope to be doing a weekly flea market in Franklin PA, selling costume jewelry and debris as I create it. Then DexCon in July, Pennsic in August, and maybe SibCon in September.

Chaos University, the Game, actually came from Chaos University, the Novel. Back in 1994 or 1995 I was going to Binghamton University and had a reveltation that the university and its campus would be a great place to set up for an Apocalypse. In fact, that’s what I called the story for years.

Essentially, two-thirds to three-fourths of the people in the world die when magic comes back all at once, kinda like a rebound effect from some wizards blocking magic from the world a couple thousand years ago. All the otherkind of magical races were blocked from coming here. But, like everything else, entropy happens; the spell starts to break apart, allowing for more psychics and stuff throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Wiccan comes forth as people start feeling the magic coming.

Then, in a huge wave, magic breaks through. Anyone psychic or sensitive is fried. However, those whose magic was from otherworldly ancestry are not as affected and survive. So a small percentage of the third or quarter that survive are now pretty powerful in manipulating magic. Also, those human-based psychics/sensitives that are nursed through their near-death are unpredictably powerful in some sort of magic.

I had an ending where the lead character’s final act as an old lady is to finally open the ancient Gatways that allow magical races to return (the Gate has to be established from the earth out to the other dimension). She finally meets the voice of the creature that’s been guiding her–a dragon.

But this is what Chaos University kinda exploded out of in 2001 when my gaming group was discussing how nice it would be to be able to blend any genre or any type of magic. Creating a magical school where the classes are your skills (allowing for any magic) and the field trips create the setting was a flash of excitement I may never get again.

Everybody’s heard about them. Disney got a lot of them. A company annoys an artist and in the middle of their art piece, they throw in a horrifying image.

Yeah. Back when I was working for West End Games I was giving a new Paranoia supplement as a lark. Nothing had been done with the line for years, but a couple of wonderful writers–Jennifer Brandes and Chris Hepler–had been bugging the owner with a new idea and he decided to throw it at me. I had my own line of products and I was excited. I commissioned the art with our WEG artists, Tim Bobko, Tom ONeil, and Brian Schomberg, and it looked GOOD. I was so excited to put this thing together and I wasn’t going to let anything mess it up. So the art starts coming in and I start having changes made… as one of the artists had a style that was maybe too sick in his art. And I kept on him and the other artists trying for the best product ever.

Incidentally, Creatures of the Nightcycle made it to number 14 in Diamond’s RPG top 20. A lot of people were so happy to see a new Paranoia product come out after all those years. I was slated to continue on the Paranoia line after that, cementing my future glory as a game designer.

It wasn’t until my first read-through of the book that I found “the picture.” It’s on page 16, if anybody still owns it. The artist threw in a little pic of a clone holding a dog by the neck. The dog’s mouth is obviously covered in foam or liquid and the guy is holding up his pants.

“Mortified” doesn’t cover it.

Never piss off the artists.

I was asked at the beginning of February to come up with a batch of plot hooks for an adventure supplement: 68 quickies for dice rolls, 8 seasonal plot hook options, and 4 larger adventure hooks. I had it done in less than a week. Here’s how I do it.

The setting is nothing more than a location in time and on a map. These are your limits. If you’re in a setting involving New York City in the 1800s, your plot hooks are pretty much boxed in. You can add something that may be from the future or from another country, but then you have to have a good explanation for it. Within that setting you have a certain amount of space to fill in before you start to overlap. This space can either be filled physically or metaphorically.

Say I want to make a batch of quickie plot hooks for a random setting: a laboratory (this was really random—I have a card deck of possible locations). We’ll use an alchemist’s laboratory to put this into a standard high fantasy setting.

One way is to think up the most common scenarios that occur in the lab, so I’ll start by writing down the first thing that comes to mind: an explosion! Very easy to imagine, but very cliché. Now make the scenario work in a way to allow multiple feasible solutions that can be taken by the gamemaster off into full adventures all on their own. So not just an explosion that causes Monster A to appear or Symptom Z to manifest on the victims, but….

The sound of an explosion shakes the timbers and brings everyone to the door of the alchemy lab. It swings open and the alchemist staggers out. “Can’t stop… Must save….” He collapses. One look in and it is apparent: the floor is being eaten by a thick bubbling red paste that seemed to have mixed from two different spilled canisters. Nothing is safe—the paste readily consumes a tome that had been thrown on the floor by the blast. It even begins to dissolve a chair, reaching greedily up the legs as the wood collapses. The paste grows larger as it spreads. Several dozen rats, cats, and other animals in cages begin to chatter and squeal in dread.

This gives the player characters an option, or not; book or animals lovers would not hesitate to start moving such items from the room even as others start dealing with stopping the chemical slime itself (know your audience!). Also, the player characters are not sure what they’re dealing with. The ooze may be resistant to magic or, worse, absorb it, getting exponentially bigger. That’d be fun. Another possibility is that the explosion throws a few ingredients together that produces an awesome potion; the characters see the results, but no one knows exactly how those ingredients went together. This allows them to experiment until they blow themselves up.

Another way to create a bunch of plot hooks regarding a location is to divide up the place into a grid and come up with one scenario at each marker in the location. Although this usually works better for larger acreage, the laboratory can get this treatment as well:

Door to Lab: There is a knock. The Alchemist opens it and sees a package. The package flashes when opened causing amnesia; it is from a rival alchemist in town.

The Storage Room: A passing mouse chews a hole through a cork on a bottle, releasing a intoxicating gas that slowly permeates the sealed smaller chamber. Now someone just happens to open the door.

The Ceiling, the Basement/Cellar, the animal cages, etc.

Another possibility for creating plot hooks for locations is to alter social aspects of the people involved. Instead of a traditional picture of an alchemist, make the alchemist very young—a child still living with her parents. Add flavor in the form of diversity. Perhaps the alchemist is of an unliked race, such as a troll or a demon, but likes the work and has no interest in eating or subverting humans. Such an alchemist may not have the most pleasant customer service skills, but deals fairly in the end.

So when given a setting you can fit a lot of plot hooks from various aspects of the setting by seeing the setting from different perspectives. You can see the setting as a physical map to divide up, or focus on traditional roleplaying or story elements (but turn them on their ear!), or you can divide the setting up socially, mentally or emotionally. You can literally take a setting and create plot hooks as one sad one, one happy one, one, terrifying one, etc.

Once they’re written down, you can read through them again and arrange or tweak as needed. Soon you’ll be cranking away plot hooks by the ton.