Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’ve just finished listening to the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobooks.

And when I say audiobooks, I mean the radio plays. Proper Hitchhiker’s, as I like to think of it.

I’ve been introducing Megan, my daughter, to Hitchhiker’s. I was about her age when I discovered it—I started with series 2 (the total perspective vortex, body debit cards, the Nutrimat machine, the séance, the statue of Arthur Dent, Belgium, the shoe event horizon, Zarniwhoop, Lentilla and the Allitnels, the ruler of the universe).

Series 1 (the destruction of Earth, Vogons, infinite improbability drive, Deep Thought, 42, Magrathea, Milliways, the Golgrincham ark fleet) never hit the mark for me—series 2 always seemed newer and crazier. It also had the benefit of never being fully repeated in print—it’s chopped up in the novels.

And series 1 was repeated. First as two albums (which I listened to repeatedly), then as the BBC television series, a computer game, and eventually as a movie. Series 1 was never the same twice: the TV series included the dish of the day, the albums replaced the Hagunenons with Disaster Area. But the radio series was always proper Hitchhiker’s.

(I didn’t see the play. However, I do have a towel and the radio scripts (which are wonderful for their footnotes.))

I’m not sure exactly what Megan thinks of Hitchhiker’s. She says she likes it, but I don’t think it will replace Harry Potter or Shadowhunters any time soon. We heard them in tiny sections, when I ran her to Guides or Rangers. (They’re not Mrs H’s thing, so we had to wait for when she wasn’t in the car with us.)

However, Megan lasted only about twenty minutes of the Tertiary Phase (the dramatisation of Life, the Universe, and Everything). “You’re right, not as good as the others,” was her damning assessment.

I carried on listening.

There are things I like about the later audiobooks: reuniting the original cast; using Susan Sheridan and Sandra Dickinson (radio and tv Trillian respectively) for Mostly Harmless; Douglas Adams as Agrajag. And little things, like Geoffrey Perkins (the original BBC producer) playing Arthur Dent’s producer.

And I liked the happy ending they gave the otherwise bleak Mostly Harmless. (I was intrigued to learn recently that Douglas Adams had admitted that he would like to write a sixth book with a happier ending.)

But… the latter phases aren’t proper Hitchhiker’s. The story makes sense (rather than seeming to be random flights of fancy), there are fewer random asides, and the ambient sounds don’t quite match the original.

But that’s because they are based on the novels, which felt less and less like proper Hitchhiker’s the longer they went on. (And let’s not talk about the sixth book, And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer. It was a nice try, but I wish they’d never bothered. The happy ending to the audiobooks was good enough.)

I haven’t re-read the books in a long, long while. So it’s probably time I revisited them.

I have two Douglas Adams stories.

He came to Leeds on a book tour, and I saw him in Waterstones. He read the opening to Mostly Harmless (which is much funnier when he read it than it was when I read it later) and the bit with Marvin and the Frogstar Robot in the Guide's offices.

Before that, I wrote him a fan letter about the Lintilla clones. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was something about the 578,000,000,000 Lintilla clones—and if you assumed that it took a second to make each clone, that meant they were around 18,000 years old. While I can’t remember my letter, I can remember his reply almost word-for-word: “You’re right. Appalling, isn’t it?”

I wish I still had that letter.

All Flesh is Grass

All Flesh is Grass is the second episode of a series of first-contact freeform larps with the working title of The Fermi Solution. It was originally meant to be a prologue to the series, and I started writing it first. That’s until I realised that I wanted an even earlier prologue, set in Roswell in 1948.

So despite having All Flesh is Grass mostly written, I wrote The Roswell Incident and ran that first.

All Flesh is Grass is set in Millville Wisconsin in 1965. The locals have woken up to find a strange barrier surrounding the village. Solving that mystery is the heart of the game.

The game itself is closely based on Clifford D Simak’s 1965 novel of the same name.

After Roswell

Although it was mostly complete before I ran Roswell, but with Roswell’s completion I realised I wanted to make a few changes to All Flesh is Grass. The main changes were:

• Adding two characters from The Roswell Incident (my original idea for The Fermi Solution is that episodes will feature some continuing characters—not always the same ones).
• Adding a paragraph about what the characters knew of Roswell and what happened there.
• Improvements to how I managed/explained the Discord bot.

Adding two characters solved a problem I had with two of the weaker characters—it meant I could give them to a single player to play. That presented the slightly different problem of finding someone happy to play two characters, but I covered this in the casting form (see previous post) and it wasn’t a problem.

Running All Flesh is Grass

From where I sat, in the GM desk and flitting around, listening in, the game seemed to go well. Some notes:

• My original estimate of how long the game would take was too short. I pessimistically thought we would be done in two hours, but I wrapped the game after about 2.5 hours. I think that’s my brilliant players making the most of the characters I gave them.
• The Discord bot behaved itself and didn’t cause any problems this time—although not everyone had read the instructions.
• The returning players (those who had played The Roswell Incident) seemed happy, and the new players dived right in and embraced the daftness.
• I forgot to take any screenshots of play—so I’m afraid these are from Roswell. 

This is Roswell...

Epilogues

After the game, I sent out a feedback form to capture feedback and allow players to tell me some of their highlights and what their characters would be doing in five years. I used this to create an epilogue sheet (which I enjoyed creating—I hope the players enjoyed reading it).

I based the epilogues mostly on the player’s description, with some curating as I have an idea of what is coming up. My favourite epilogues are where the player ran with an idea and did crazy stuff to their character. My favourite:

After reporting on the events in Millville, Preston quits her job as a journalist and writes a tell-all book: Millville: Village Under the Dome. Preston passes it in instalments through the barrier, and when the FBI finds her manuscript, she is arrested. Nevertheless, her manuscript is published and becomes conspiracy fodder for cranks everywhere.

Stars

When I wrote about stars and wishes I noted that I’d not used them for a freeform larp. Well, now I have.

As part of the feedback, I asked players to award stars (Give a star to someone and tell them what they did that was so great). This was my favourite bit of the feedback—an outpouring of lovely stories about the game.

I shared this with everyone—I hope they enjoyed reading it as much as I did.

Feedback

Feedback included ideas for arranging the spaces to allow people to talk privately. I feel strongly about not limiting game spaces, having been bitten that way before. But some players didn’t like having other players drop in on them when they were deep in a private conversation. So in future, I will highlight some channels as PRIVATE and encourage players not to disturb anyone in those channels (without limiting them by numbers).

One player wanted more pronouns on the character sheet, which I understand but I’m not going to do. I wrote the characters as gender neutral so anyone could play them—and I don’t want to go through the character sheets adding he/she/they pronouns each time I run it.

A couple of suggestions were made to give those in power more reason to think that aliens (rather than Soviet agents) were behind the events. I agreed and have tweaked some characters so that should be more likely.

Someone suggested that I make the game structure clearer. For example, at the end of the game there’s a big decision to be made, and it’s worth identifying that at the start of the game so the players don’t become distracted by trivial matters. So I think that’s worth trying next time.

Next time

So now I need to write the next one—we’re leaping forward to the 1980s (I think) and will be more international in scope. No title yet, but I have ideas of things I want it to include.

Casting All Flesh is Grass

I find casting freeform larps much more stressful than I suspect they need to be.

Here’s how I did it for All Flesh is Grass.

The questionnaire

I try to keep casting questionnaires fairly simple—I don’t ask many questions. That’s mainly because as a player I find it hard to answer a detailed questionnaire. That’s partly because I rarely know what I want from the game, but also because I don’t know the assumptions behind the questions because I know so little about the game. And so I struggle to answer them.

So my questions for All Flesh is Grass Were:

I am interested in playing:

• A resident of Millville
• A visitor
• Someone in authority
• An alien
• Two characters
• I don’t mind who I play

[These were all Yes, I don’t mind, and No. I stressed that I would consider the “No” answers first to avoid casting anyone in a role they didn’t want.]

Are there any characters in the cast list you really want to play? [Free text—for those who want to play a particular character based on nothing more than their name and occupation]

Are they any characters in the cast list you really DON’T want to play? [free text]

If we become oversubscribed, would you be willing to be a reserve player? [Yes or No]

Is there anything else I should know? [Free text—for anything else]

May I use a photograph of you playing the game in future publicity? [Yes or No]

Characters who needed care

The first thing I needed to consider were the two characters needing the right players:

• The alien character was a disembodied voice. I needed a player who didn’t mind being an alien.
• Captain Yip and Jamie Flanagan would be played by the same player, switching between the roles as required. (These two roles were slightly underdeveloped, and while I’ve enjoyed playing more than one character in the past, it’s not for everyone.)

So I needed to make sure that the person playing those had ticked “yes” or “I don’t mind”.

Questions I should have asked

As All Flesh is Grass is based on the novel of the same name by Clifford D Simak, I really should have asked the players whether they had read it. For some characters, it’s best if they haven’t read the book, while for others it matters less.

Player restrictions

I had a couple of players who put detail into their free-text sections explaining what they like in a game. That was wonderful, although worried me slightly in case All Flesh is Grass wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.

How I did it

I cast the alien and the player playing two characters first, as I was worried about them most of all. One player noted that they had read All Flesh is Grass. As they said they would like to be the alien, that’s how I cast them. Only one person answered ‘Yes’ to two characters, so I cast them as the dual character. (There were several who said they didn’t mind, so I had fallbacks.)

I then cast those players who had given me some detail on what sort of character they wanted to play.

Then cast those who said they wanted a particular character.

Then cast those who were flexible but with one or two requirements.

I cast the most flexible people last—they filled in the gaps. (Thank you, flexible players!)

Emails

I then wrote an email to everyone telling them who they were playing, and sometimes I explained why I had cast them that way (especially where I hadn’t exactly followed their casting sheet).

I also reminded them of the date, and noted that I would send a Discord invite later on.

Then I let the reserve players know they were on the reserve list.

Casting success or failure?

We’ll cover that next time, when I talk about how the game ran.

Contacting players in 2022

I sometimes miss the good old days, before Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord and a million websites and apps scattered players to the four winds. In those golden days, we had email and that’s how we communicated.

(Well, even then it wasn’t that simple. There were discussion forums, bulletin boards, usenet and maybe more. Please don’t expect me to be logical.)

Why do I bring all this up?

Well, I’ve been chasing casting forms for All Flesh is Grass, a first-contact freeform.

I advertised the game in three places:

• By email, to those who had played in The Roswell Incident. (All Flesh is Grass is set a few years later and some characters reappear.)
• On the uk-freeforms mailing list.
• On the UK-Freeforms Club House Discord Server.

I didn’t use Facebook for two reasons:

• First, I know quite a few of those on the mailing list who aren't on Facebook, and I wanted to give them a chance to sign up. (That was the opposite of what I did with The Roswell Incident.)
• Second, I’m frustrated with how Facebook decides what you see and what you don’t. So I didn’t use Facebook this time.

If I hadn’t filled All Flesh is Grass I would have advertised it on UK-Freeforms and Remote, Digital Larps, and Live Action Online Games, but I didn’t need to as I filled the game.

Signing up and casting

I asked everyone for their email address when they signed up. I then used that to send out the casting form.

I gave everyone a few days to fill it in, then I started chasing the four or five stragglers. And as I had everyone’s email address, I chased them by email…

The problem with email

Everyone has an email address. Some people have more than one. (I have at least three.)

But email doesn’t always get through: aggressive spam filters, blacklisting—or simply not checking your email. And some people don’t check their emails much.

Or something will go wrong with the reply (like being stuck in draft folder, as just happened to me).

With email, you don’t know if an email has arrived or not. Read receipts aren’t reliable (if available at all—my Gmail account doesn’t include them). At least with a Facebook or WhatsApp message, you can see whether the message has been read.

One last player

So I had one player for All Flesh is Grass who hadn’t filled in the casting form. They hadn’t replied to me, so I didn’t know if my message hadn’t got through or they were no longer available for the game. It wasn’t someone I knew, so I couldn’t message them on Facebook, WhatsApp, or anywhere else.

I wondered what to do—until I remembered Discord.

While I posted All Flesh is Grass on Discord, I honestly hadn’t thought anyone would sign up for it that way. That’s not how I use Discord—I use it for playing games (RPGs and freeform larps). I don’t use Discord as a discussion forum or a chat area, and I switch off the notifications because I don’t like distractions.

But just because that’s how I use Discord doesn’t mean that’s how others use it…

So I logged back on, and, luckily, someone with a very similar name to my missing player had also posted in the UK Freeforms Club House announcement section. So I direct messaged them—and found my missing player. Phew!

Next time – amending the sign-up form

My lesson from this is that next time, I need to add a backup to my casting form. While I collect email addresses, I might need to collect their Discord ID or some other way of contacting them.

Secrets of the Ancients: First Impressions

I recently bought the 2022 edition of Mongoose Publishing’s Secrets of the Ancients campaign for Traveller. These are my first impressions—I hope to run it one day, but it’s a long campaign and a significant time investment.

When I talked about the 2012 edition, I compared it with GDW’s 1984 Secret of the Ancients and noted how epic the new campaign was.

Well, the 2022 edition feels even more epic than 2012!

First impressions

So my first impression of this 256-page hardback book is that it’s heavy. It also looks stunning—it’s full colour throughout with some lovely artwork and deck plans. 

As for the campaign itself, while it follows the basic structure of the GDW’s original Secret of the Ancients, everything is described in so much more detail. Although, as I said before, I was originally disappointed with 1984’s Secret of the Ancients—I’m not disappointed by Secrets.

Secrets of the Ancients is split into 10 self-contained chapters, each an adventure in its own right. The introduction suggests each chapter will take 2-4 sessions to complete, so that’s around 30 sessions, or the best part of a year. When (if) I run it, Secrets will be the longest campaign I’ve ever run.

I don’t think that will be a problem, though, as there’s plenty of variety in Secrets. There’s an NPC-heavy meet-and-mingle session, a starship chase across Regina, Ancient sites to explore, Vargr to negotiate with, and even a prison to escape.

How am I going to run Secrets of the Ancients?

Secrets of the Ancients has a definite story, and a helicopter view suggests that it’s fairly linear. However, when you get into the detail, the players will have plenty of decisions to make (in parts, the adventure gets quite sandboxy), so I’m hoping the players won’t feel like they’re being railroaded.

Some of the leaps from location to location are not always super clear to me. I’ll need to summarise each section with bullet points for the overall plot, but I would need to familiarise myself with it anyway.

There’s also a fair amount of boxed text to read aloud. I’m not a fan of that, so I’ll see if I can do something different. I’m in a dilemma because the boxed text is often excellent and sets a good atmosphere, but I’m not a fan of reading to the players.

I may see if I can use Banter, which I used for Destroyer of Worlds. 

What’s going on with the handouts?

One thing I found a bit weird was how Secrets deals with handouts. Handouts are provided in a separate pdf rather than in the text, which is odd. Presumably, that’s to save space, however, it does mean that if you pick up a physical copy of the book, you need to get the handout pdf somehow. (The text doesn’t tell you where you can get this.)

Mind you, you will want the pdf copy anyway, even if you get a hard copy. That’s because there’s loads of stuff you’ll want to share here, such as numerous deck plans and pictures of people and creatures.

Comparing 2022 with 2012

Comparing the 2022 edition with the 2012 edition is like comparing chalk with cheese. With better layout and good use of colour and illustrations, the new edition is so much easier to read.

2022 (left) compared with the same page from 2012 (right)

I don’t often say this about modern coffee-table book RPGs, but I find the new Mongoose Traveller format clean and easy to read. The 2012 edition isn’t as easy to read, and the 2022 edition will probably be easier to run as a result.

This has made it longer—Secrets is now 256 pages compared to 198. And as a result, it’s more expensive, but even if I never run it, I don’t regret buying it for a moment.

2022 (left) compared to 2012 (right)

As well as colour and illustrations, the new edition has more (and nicer) deck plans--a smuggler’s station, Far Trader, Heavy Scout, a Kinunir-class ship, several Vargr ships, two Ancient ships. Some of those were in the 2012 edition, but none were as good looking as they are here.

Too many words?

As I’ve said before, I find many RPG supplements and adventures are dreadfully overwritten. So at 256 pages, can I say the same of Secrets of the Ancients?

In short, no. While long, and while I didn’t read every word (I skipped some animal descriptions and star system descriptions in the more sandboxy bits—I’ll only read those if I need to), I didn’t find myself wading through unnecessary verbiage or padding.

The could-do-better department

There are a couple of areas I’d like to improve.

• I would have liked more character portraits. I know they’re a luxury (and key NPC portraits are provided), but they’re a nice luxury.
• From what I can see, there are times when the game could stall (or die) due to some unlucky dice rolls. Yes, there are some understandably tricky challenges, but in a couple of them failing means ending the campaign prematurely—so I know I’ll be generous.

I also spotted a couple of errors:

• The section on Shimmersuits doesn’t explain that energy weapons do only 1/16th of their damage (a fairly big omission given the high-energy fights that the Travellers will get into).
• The deck plan on page 33 doesn’t match the description in the text.

Overall

I want to run Secrets of the Ancients, but the question is whether I have the patience for it. I like short games because I like playing a variety of games. So I need to ask my players if they’re up for a 30-session marathon. We can take breaks between chapters if we find it too heavy going.

Airecon 2022

So last weekend found me spending two days at Airecon 2022, the friendly boardgame convention in Harrogate. I’ve been to four or five Airecons—the last one was in 2020 and was the weekend before everything locked down because of the pandemic. (Previous posts here.)

Airecon was my first big event since lockdown. I’ve done a few things since then, but nothing on the scale of Airecon and I was shattered by the end. And I was there for less than 50% of the time…

On the Friday I played a few demos, chatted with some old friends, and ran some Fate Accelerated. On Saturday I attended with family (my daughter, brother and nephew) and we played games. I didn’t attend on the Sunday.

Boardgames

We played a load of demos and games—these are the ones that stuck with me.

Moon: I played two demos of Moon, the forthcoming game by Haakon Gaarder and published by Sinister Fish (and coming to Kickstarter in May). Moon completes a trilogy of games with a similar look that started with Villagers (which we really like) and continued with Streets (not such a hit with us, but I should give it another chance). In Moon, you are running a moonbase, and it’s a drafting game much like Seven Wonders or Sushi Go.

As I don’t have either of those in my collection (and given that Megan enjoyed it when she tried it on Saturday), it seems likely that I’ll back the Kickstarter.

Trek 12: Trek 12 was Megan’s favourite game—rolling dice and creating chains or groups of numbers. I found it surprisingly tricky, and Megan well and truly thrashed me. She bought a copy (and is playing it as I type this).

Sagrada: I enjoyed Sagrada, a dice-placing game about stained glass windows. I won the four-player game we played, but Phil picked up a copy, so no doubt I’ll be playing it again.

The Aurors

On Friday afternoon, I ran The Aurors, my Fate Accelerated adventure of hunting dark wizards in the world of Harry Potter. I had five inventive players who came up with lots of suggestions. None had played Fate before, but they picked it up pretty quickly.

I started the game with a Setting Grid and questions (as Backstory Cards). I could tell the players hadn’t done anything like that before, but they embraced the concept, and we used several ideas during the adventure.

The players clearly knew their Harry Potter and came up with loads of great ideas, including:

• Asking if the first victim’s ghost was around. A Fate token made that so, and they got key clues much earlier than the previous times I’ve run it.
• Rather than fight the acromantulas, the animagus changed into one and spoke to them instead. That was great—during character generation I told the players they could choose stunts and other aspects of their character during play, and this was a great choice.
• The plot involves a powerful wizard’s wand, and one player had an idea to go to Ollivander’s and see if there was a twin, and whether it was available. Again, another Fate token spent, so I gave them the twin wand (a special +2 stunt).
• They looked up Aberforth as an old member of the Order of the Phoenix.
• And they posted lots of ministry guards—but of course, Lucivere cut through them like a hot knife through butter because the PCs are the heroes of our story.

I think my GM-ing was okay. I ran with their ideas which meant deviating from my notes now and again, but we ended up with a big battle at the end during which they defeated Lucevere Razorblood, dark wizard and Dementor inventor. We took about three hours, all told, which was about right.

You can download The Aurors here and I wrote about it previously, here.

Overall

I like Airecon. Next year I’ll try to run more than one RPG—but there’s so much going on that I don’t want to spend my whole convention in the RPG room.

Published scenario roundup

Nearly two years ago, I realised that I rarely run published adventures or scenarios. So I resolved to change that, and in this post, I look back at them and reflect on what I’ve learned.

Scenarios I’ve run

So since May 2020, this is what I’ve run (all online because, well, pandemic).

• Prodigal Son and The Haunting both by Paul Mitchener for Liminal.
• The Lightless Beacon by Leigh Carr and Lynne Hardy for Call of Cthulhu (although I used Cthulhu Dark).
• Lady Blackbird by John Harper. Is it a scenario or a system? It’s both.
• Hope’s Last Day, Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds by Andrew EC Gaska for ALIEN.
• Dad Overboard and Jingle Bell Shock by Jason Cordova for Brindlewood Bay.
• Lost in Translation and Ex Libris by Paul Baldowski for Liminal.

(The links above all go to blog posts where I talk about each.)

The best and the worst

So, taking them in terms of easiest to run at the table. (So that’s a combination of layout, writing, how much preparation they needed.) This is how I would order them.

• Lady Blackbird—concisely written situation and setting with delightful, proactive characters. Needs almost no GM preparation to run, easy to improvise.
• Dad Overboard and Jingle Bell Shock—short (two sides of paper each, mostly bullet points), easy to run and improvise with. Although I’ve realised Brindlewood Bay isn’t for me, they were both easy to run.
• Lost in Translation and Ex Libris—traditional RPG scenarios in an old-school style. Neither needed much preparation, but they both required a fair amount of reading to understand them.
• Prodigal Son and The Haunting—short, traditional RPG scenarios. However, some structural issues meant a fair amount of preparation to get them to fit my GM style.
• The Lightless Beacon and Hope’s Last Day—short scenarios, but overwritten. I found it difficult to find key information and I extracted the key points so I could run it.
• Chariot of the Gods—again, overwritten and poorly organised. Needed some work before I could run.
• Destroyer of Worlds—overwritten and extremely badly organised. A lot of work required beforehand.

Key takeaways

So the main takeaway for me is that I like to see concise writing and the layout designed to be easy to run at the table. If I have to spend time just trying to figure out how to run the scenario, well, that’s never going to endear a scenario to me. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scenarios by the established big-name publishers (namely Chaosium and Free League) are at the bottom of this list.

I find the pretty, coffee-table book layout that typifies most of the mainstream RPG adventures and supplements is generally hopeless for actually running the things. I’m pleased I had digital copies of the scenarios at the bottom of this list, as that meant I could extract the text into something more usable. I probably wouldn’t have run them if I had only physical copies.

I have a theory

While I find it depressing so many modern RPG adventures are badly presented, I have a theory why this happens. I think it’s for a few reasons:

• The modern coffee-table format, with full-colour pages and lots of words clearly sells. They look attractive in the shops, they’re attractive to read (although the font is often too small for my ageing eyes), and they sell. And that’s what matters—play is less important than sales.
• A high word count creates the illusion of value. Lots of words gives the impression of quality and depth—even if those words aren’t important or obscure the key messages.
• Authors are often paid by the word and aren’t incentivised to write concisely.
• The layout person and the author are different people with different needs. Neither is specifically thinking about how GMs will use the scenario.
• There are few examples of excellent scenario layout. The existing model sells, so why change it?
• Publishers are not getting the feedback they need to improve scenario layout and design. (Are they even wanting it?)

So?

As an occasional RPG scenario writer, I try to make my scenarios easy to run. As I’m not selling to the publishers (not any more, at least), I’m not constrained by their house styles. I’m also not trying to fill a book, and because this is just pocket money for me, I don’t have to worry about making it seem like value for money.

So I write and format my adventures so it works for me—and hopefully for others. I like to think that they’re easy to run—although feedback is scarce, so who knows? (You can find them here.)

Clearly some designers/publishers understand how to lay out a scenario to make it easier to run. If there were more of them, I’d be delighted.