Games

Tabletop Report – Session 3

Max Gaming , , ,

It’s time for Tabletop Report! For the uninitiated, Tabletop Report is a new series chronicling the adventures of my DnD group as I run them through a custom campaign and ruleset based off of Microsoft’s Gears of War universe.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Gears of War, and I’m totally not claiming otherwise. I just really love the universe, and have wanted to run a campaign set in it for the longest time. The system I built is entirely my own, and this game is a test-run of its viability as a full tabletop system.

This is the report summary for session 3. Prior sessions will be listed before the break if you need to catch up. Some knowledge of Gears of War‘s greater universe may be required. Now, let’s see what happened to our players after last week!

Session Three – Act 1, Chapter 2

So, when we last left the party, they’d arrived at Bedel, and reached the surviving stranded left behind during the evacuation of Tyare and Bedel holed up in the evacuation hub (which was the local school). They’d been welcomed inside and sent to meet with Keela, the one-time school principal, and now de-facto head of the stranded camp. Not by force, but more by inertia and the fact that she’s pretty darn capable at it. They found the members of the camp smelly and dirty, but friendly. Oh, and walking on lots of carpet. Getting the idea that maybe things that lived under the ground could track where you were by vibrations, they’d covered all the ground in the building with multiple layers of carpet. Whether or not it was working, well … they didn’t know, but better safe than sorry, right?

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Tabletop Report – Session 2

Max Gaming , , ,

It’s time for Tabletop Report! For the uninitiated, Tabletop Report is a new series chronicling the adventures of my DnD group as I run them through a custom campaign and ruleset based off of Microsoft’s Gears of War universe.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Gears of War, and I’m totally not claiming otherwise. I just really love the universe, and have wanted to run a campaign set in it for the longest time. The system I built is entirely my own, and this game is a test-run of its viability as a full tabletop system.

This is the report summary for session 2. Prior sessions will be listed before the break if you need to catch up. Some knowledge of Gears of War‘s greater universe may be required. Now, let’s see what happened to our players after last week!

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Tabletop Report

Max Gaming , , ,

So, in the last few months I’ve mentioned here and there that I was spending my spare time getting a tabletop campaign ready to go. My first time being a game master, and as you’re about to find out, also running a custom tabletop rule system completely of my own design.

Yup. I couldn’t find a good system for what I wanted to do, so instead … I made one. Over a good six-seven month period. And, as of January, I have taken on the role of DM in my DnD group and have been running a campaign playtest. I’ve noticed that other authors have put up their tabletop experiences for fans to read, and since I’ve been posting these on a Reddit sub dedicated to the universe the campaign takes place in anyway, it’s only a little more work to post these here for the enjoyment of those of you that play tabletop.

Now, before we get any further, I have a quick disclaimer: The universe that this tabletop is set in is the Gears of War universe, which is owned by Microsoft. I do not own Gears of War or make any claims to that effect. That’s wholly Microsoft. I’m using the setting for my game because, well, first you can’t copyright imagination and second, Gears of War is one of my favorite universes of all time.

I do, however, own the tabletop system we are using for the campaign, as it is 100% my own creation. See, despite a small demand over the years for a Gears of War tabletop system, or at least something that could work, nothing has ever been made or worked. There’s been no official tabletop release, and attempts to modify other well-known tabletop systems such as actual DnD, GURPS, Pathfinder, or any number of others into the universe has just led to a system that, well, wasn’t Gears. Failures, in other words. Knowing and having read accounts of these attempts, I knew when I volunteered to run the group’s next campaign that I was going to need to build a system myself. New rules, new stats, new everything. And though it is built to bring out the cover-heavy flavor of Gears, it could just as easily be adapted for any other cover-specific game, like X-Com for example (and come to think of it …).

Basically, Gears is owned by Microsoft, and I’m not claiming any ownership there. This homemade rulekit, character sheet set, and everything else? Totally mine.

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Op-Ed: The Indie Hypocrisy

Max Misc , , , , , , , ,

Yup, an opinion piece. Kind of an odd one, too. But why not? After all, I finished the first draft of Jungle yesterday. I’m in a good mood. It’s been a while since the last one. And this topic has been on my mind for a good week or so; seems as good a time as any to bring it up.

Last week I had an interesting encounter. I was on a forum devoted to discussing video games (bear with me, this gets back to books fairly quickly) when something unexpected happened. In a thread discussing indie games and how great they were (games that are built and published without the oversight of a game publisher, just as indie books are written and published without the oversight of a book publisher), a group of posters started going off against indie books.

It was the usual argument. How could any book be good if it hadn’t been “approved” by some publisher. Publishers “only approved” good stories so anyone who wasn’t publishing through them was clearly not good enough to bother looking at. Publishers had all the editors, so an indie book would be rife with errors. You know, the usual junk that gets spouted off.

But what really made this whole chain jarring was the fact that this was in a thread devoted to discussing how great indie games were, games that did the exact same thing indie authors did—eschew a publisher in favor of their own efforts to bring a game to the world. So what it had boiled down to was “Indie games are great, indie books are horrible” and the same reasons for one being great were being espoused as reasons for the other being terrible.

This got me thinking about indie books and indie markets in general. It’s not hard to find someone slamming indie books on the internet. In fact, it’s just about the standard reaction. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, at least from what I’ve seen, indie books are the only place that this happens. Everywhere else, indie is embraced by the majority.

And that doesn’t add up.

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Advent Faces a New Foe: The Dusk Guard and the Dusk Rogues Join X-Com!

Max Gaming , , , , ,

Aliens of all kinds? Well, it could be worse.

 

Yes! At long last they’re here! And totally not this late because I totally spaced it while working on Jungle until a fan reminded me. Nope, not that at all.

But at last they’re here. Fresh from the pages of The Dusk Guard (one of the fanfics that got me my start on the writing scene—it’s a long story) come … Well, the Dusk Guard. That’s pretty self explanatory. But they’re here! Steel, Hunter, Sky (everyone’s favorite waifu), Dawn, Sabra, Nova … and even a little bonus I’ll leave to those who grab to pack to discover.

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Being a Better Writer: Why Writers Should Play Games

Max Being a Better Writer , , , , , , ,

I’m back!

Yup, got my replacement ethernet port installed and I’m back in business. I actually did get a pretty good amount of writing done too. Two weeks without internet notwithstanding, as Jungle isn’t in any position at the moment where it requires internet. Okay, well, it required some worldbuilding documents on Google Docs, but those I could skim on my phone.

Jungle, by the way, is still in the finale. Everything’s blowing up, similar to Colony, and that’s not really that much of a surprise as this is a sequel. Hopefully I can be done by the end of this week. There are only a few chapters more to go, and everything’s coming together pretty well. Editing is going to be a chore, but … that’s the writing life!

Okay, enough yammering about current events in my writing queue. Now to yammer about something else. Just a quick reminder, if you’re a Patreon Supporter, check the reward posts! I checked the stats on Patreon yesterday and some of those posts have only ever seen two views despite the number of supporters! I’m not sure if I’m not making them visible enough, or what, but I was genuinely surprised (especially as a few supporters have hinted that they didn’t feel there were enough Patreon rewards for being supporters … and yet a large majority of those rewards have barely been looked at). There’s retrospectives, worldbuilding extras and notes for various books, and even previews and short stories I’ve not posted anywhere else!

If you’re a supporter, don’t miss out! Those posts are for you! You can check out the entire backlog here, or just head on over to my Patreon page if you’re not a supporter yet, but would like to become one.

Okay, that’s all out of the way. Now how about I get down to today’s topic. Which is a bit of an odd one, sure, but one that’s worth bringing up. Today, we’re going to talk about why writers should play games. And no, I’m not talking about the kind of games where you find a maybe significant other and lead them on. Not those games.

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Hunt: Showdown is like a 1890s Monster Hunter International Game

Max Gaming , , ,

I’ve been a fan of Crytek’s video game offerings every since they burst onto the scene in 2004 with the ambitious and impressive Far Cry, a game that boasted impressive AI and vast, colorful maps famous for giving the player a wealth of options and choices, as well as a graphical fidelity that pushed modern systems to their limit—both things that would become a staple of their games moving forward. Selling off the Far Cry license to another publisher, Crytek then went on to create 2007’s Crysis, a game that built upon the foundation of designs laid in Far Cry while simultaneously spawning the meme “But will it run Crysis?” due to the game’s incredibly demanding system requirements. But despite those astronomical requirements—so high that computing groups around the world, from NASA to China, began using the game as a benchmark for testing the newest and most powerful computers—Crysis was an impressive game at its core, boasting advanced AI, physics, a draw distance most games couldn’t even match a tenth of, and open gameplay brought about by player abilities that led to a wide range of playstyles and tactics.

Then it all went downhill. Emboldened by the sales of Crysis, Crytek got ahead of itself. Determined to bring their titles to console, the studio slimmed down the sequels to Crysis, creating games that didn’t so much push the envelope as they did constrict it. Dropping the linear maps, advanced AI, and most of the gameplay options led to games that could release on the vastly weaker hardware of consoles … but also that weren’t nearly as fun to play. Crytek, counting on the graphical fidelity of their engine to sell engine licenses as well as games, also woke the sleeping giant of Epic. As Epic’s Unreal Engine began making serious strides to both price itself competitively and catch up with Crytek’s own CryEngine, Crytek found that they’d overreached themselves, and faced cutbacks, closing of projects, and other issues. And, for a time, the studio became fairly silent.

Now, having spent the last few years relatively silent save for market deals and behind-the-scenes operations that really aren’t so exciting to the general public, Crytek is back, and they’re finally letting their new project see the light of day. The dismal, dark, moody light of day that steeps Hunt: Showdown from top to bottom.

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Op-Ed – Fixing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Max Gaming , , , ,

Sometimes those of you who peruse this site may find it easy to forget that I’m actually quite the gamer.

No no, it’s true. I’ve got a game list longer than my arm (and most other arms for that matter) and a backlog that would give an accountant fits. I like video games. Multiple genres, multiple titles, multiple systems. Right now? I’m playing through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and loving every minute (yes, it is every bit as fantastic a reinvention of an open-world game as the reviews claim).

Anyhow, being a gamer, I’ve got some favorite series I adore. And one of these is the titular Borderlands series.

Borderlands is an interesting one. Think Mad Max meets Diablo, in an FPS, in a distant Sci-Fi setting, and now throw in a bunch of kooky, dark humor, and you’ve kind of got the gist of it. Borderlands takes place on an abandoned mining world where (initially at least, since there are now four games in the series) crazed bandits (the descendants of prison convicts who were turned loose when a mining operation up and left) roam the desert landscape alongside monstrous alien life forms, as “Vault Hunters” battle both to try and track down a legendary alien cache of tech rumored to be somewhere.

It gets complicated fast, surprisingly. And there’s more to it, but that’s the gist of it. Anyway, the result is a fun universe I happen to enjoy with a lot of kooky humor, memorable characters … and plenty of shooting.

Anyway, what’s that got to do with today’s post? Well … today I want to talk about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Yes, you read that right. That kooky humor extends to the titles as well.

In any case, I want to talk about TPS—specifically one of the things it got tragically wrong, and how it could have been fixed.

Hey hey, don’t click away yet. This thing that I want to talk about? It’s a writing problem. After all, this is a writing site. That’s most often what I talk about here. So this is writing related. I’m going to discuss what went wrong … and how the developers of TPS could have avoided it.

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Advent Faces a New Foe: Jake, Anna, and Sweets Join X-Com!

Max Gaming , , , , ,

This is not the Earth we remember …

 

jake-tames
annalyne-neres
ray-candy

 

Yes, that’s right! Fresh from exposing a few of the many mysteries of Pisces come Jake Tames, Annalyne Neres, and Ray “Sweets” Candy, ready to put their boots on the ground (albeit with a little shaking in Sweets’ case) and take on Advent as they try to make their way home.

If you own X-Com 2, the entire team can be downloaded and added to your character pack by downloading and importing the character pool found here. And you know you want them. Just look at those faces!

Instructions for how to import said character file can be found here.

Note that both packs may use armor skins or elements found in the following Mod packs, which are recommended for maximum enjoyment: Military Camoflague Patterns, Ink and Paint, Custom Face Paints, Destroyer’s Female Hair Pack, More Hair Colors, CapnBubs Accessories Pack, and the X-Com International Voices Pack. These packs are recommended.

As far as sending them out to battle goes, I personally recommend making them the classes you see above for maximum parity with the source material: Jake being a sniper, Anna a Gunner (or SMG Ranger), and Sweets a Specialist. But it’s up to you. Enjoy!

Advent Faces a New Foe: Jacob Rocke and Hawke Decroux Join X-Com!

Max Gaming , , , , , ,

They’re here …

hawke-decroux
jacob-rocke

That’s right, they’re finally ready. Jacob Rocke, the unflappable NSAU Spook, and Hawke Decroux, the man who speaks with squirrels, have finished their training, strapped on their gear, and joined X-Com, ready to put their own unique skills to good use while they look for a way home!

If you’re a player of X-Com 2, these two new characters can be added to your character pool by downloading and importing the character pool file found here. And you know you want them. Just look at that duo!

Instructions for how to import said character file can be found here.

Note that both packs may use armor skins or elements found in the following Mod packs, which are recommended for maximum enjoyment: Military Camoflague Patterns, Ink and Paint, Custom Face Paints, Destroyer’s Female Hair Pack, More Hair Colors, CapnBubs Accessories Pack, and the X-Com International Voices Pack. These packs are recommended.

Personally, I recommend making them Psionics, as then you can take advantage of their natural talents in that area, but once they’re in your game, it’s up to you, I suppose. Enjoy!