Archive for December, 2010

[Conventions] Galileo Games’ Convention Team

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

We’re recruiting GMs to run our games at conventions in 2011 and beyond!

I will personally be attending Dreamation and GenCon next year, along with NYC games event Recess (probably several of these, they hold about four a year). Other conventions local to me include DexCon and Ubercon, and I will likely run games at these events as well.

That said, Galileo Games currently has two games on the market, Mortal Coil and How We Came to Live Here, and several more coming out next year, beginning with Kingdom of Nothing and followed by Bulldogs! and two other projects not authored by me. Jeff Himmelman will be doing some duty at Dreamation and probably GenCon, but he and I can’t run five or more sessions per con, so other volunteers willing to help out are needed.

Also, if you are attending a convention that I’m not personally going to, I’d love to have you run some Galileo games there as well.

To that end, I’m starting a convention GM organization, or street team as Rob Bohl terms it (stealing a page from indie music acts). If you don’t own a copy of a game you’d like to run, it can be provided, and some convention scenarios will be made available on this site for each game. If you want to develop your own materials, that’s great! Share them with me and I will post them with appropriate credits here along with the stuff I generate.

When you run a game at a con, let me know if I’m not there. Members of the Galileo GM organization will get some premiums as a thank you just for them. This will include early access to preorders and limited editions, some premium freebies like t-shirts, jackets, and plushes as these are produced, and free supplemental products like the Mortal Coil campaign frames.

If you’d like to sign on, send me your e-mail and contact info, as well as what conventions you’re interested in attending. Also let me know what games you are familiar with and are willing to run.

[Now Playing] Remote Gaming

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

I’ve mentioned it on the front page here, and also in the Voice of the Revolution a couple of times, that I’m playing in a Legend of the Five Rings game with a friend currently living in Birmingham, England. We accomplish this feat using Skype, and this has worked reasonably well.

There’s a pretty brutal time difference (5 hours I think), so we start early and stop around 5:00 pm our time (US Eastern). So far it has worked out just fine. Scheduling in a single player remotely hasn’t really been any harder than getting folks together locally. The connection, via Skype video chat, works quite well, and is also free.

For dice rolling, our remote player has designated a local proxy who shakes the bones. The remote player does all of the bonus calculations and the like and just tells his proxy how many dice to roll and keep and what to add in, then we can all see the result.

The video function works quite well. Since we have five players on our end, we had to get a good wide-angle webcam, but our remote player has had no complaints. The only issue, and it is minor, is talking over one another, which happens from time to time, especially when I as a GM and dealing directly with the remote player. Side conversations can easily drown out the main conversation, both for him and for me, so I try to keep things at a dull roar when dealing one-on-one. Last weekend we had our first connectivity issues and the remote player had to drop out early, but he only lost about half an hour of game time.

Still, it’s been quite satisfying, and pretty cool, really, to be able to game with someone thousands of miles away. It inspired me to try another remote gaming experiment, this time with two friends farther west. One is in Denver, and the other Portland, Oregon. We had a successful character generation session so far, but haven’t run an actual game. I will report on any difficulties or lack thereof in this game once we start going in earnest.

This one will be a Spirit of the Century game, and I’m really looking forward to trying it out with these two gamers. The game is right up their alley and I have been wanting to run it for them for some time. Technology has finally caught up to my aspirations.

[Mortal Coil] Divinity Campaign Frame by Fred Hicks

Monday, December 13th, 2010

The latest Mortal Coil campaign frame is available now at Indie Press Revolution and DriveThruRPG!

Divinity is a campaign frame for Mortal Coil written by Fred Hicks. Fred is an author with credits for Don’t Rest Your Head, Spirit of the Century, and Dresden Files RPG and his campaign frame brings more of his unique perspective. Fred’s take on the interaction between fairy and humanity is a great place to play Mortal Coil.

Divinity is set during the early Industrial Revolution. All beings have a spark of Divinity, and among the fairy it is used to fuel magic. Among humans, it is now being harnessed to create machines, factories, and lay claim to the land. This uses up Divinity at a startling rate, stealing it away from creatures that have long been with us. Each being has the same amount, meaning for a giant or a dragon, most is used just to move it around. Watch out for the wee folk, though. They have magic to spare.

As usual, the cost is only $2.00. Divinity is a great addition to the series, check it out!

[Galileo Games] Soon to Be Available in Portuguese!

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Mortal Coil and How We Came to Live Here will soon be available for Portuguese-speaking gamers thanks to a deal with Retropunk. Retropunk has the rights to reprint these and other Galileo Games titles, and I’m happy to be able to allow gamers in Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries the ability to get our titles in their own language.

I’m excited about this, not least because Brazil has a great gaming community.