Gaming

Where I talk about roleplaying games, computer games, board games, and other interactive entertainment

The Dice Goblin Gains A New Dice Bag

PETERMBALL Gaming

My dad wore a tie to work almost every day of his adult life, and still had a vast collection when he passed away in 2019. My mum asked if I’d be interested in them, but a) I wear a tie for job interviews approximately once every three or four years, and b) I don’t have a lot of storage in my flat. Ergo, I took an old Phantom tie my father loved (for sentimental reasons) and passed on the rest.

Rather than give the ties to goodwill, my mum partnered with a crafty friend to give the surplus new life. They transformed some into cushions, which my sister and I received as Christmas gifts, but there was still plenty of tie fabric left over. My sister elected to get another cushion, but I have about as much need for cushions as I have a need for neckties, so I passed on that as well.

Instead, we had a quick brainstorm about possible transformations that would fit into my life. “What would be really useful,” I said, “would be a dice bag for all my gaming dice. The pencil case I’ve been using for the last few years has never really fit them all.”

I didn’t think about it much after that. Then, last month, Allan of pop culture artifact generators Type40 kicked off a weekly. Pulp Cthulhu campaign and I was reaching for dice every Sunday. The limits of my set-up were being tested, regularly, and coming up short, and I’d started searching for various replacements online.

Thankfully, I hadn’t pulled the trigger on buying one, because the first words out of mum’s mouth when we gathered for dad’s memorial birthday dinner were “I’ve got your dice bags for you.”

There’s two of them, which means I can split my dice collection into a d10-intensive Call of Cthulhu bag and a more general DnD bag. It may mean buying a few extra rounds of dice to bulk things out (oh no!), but it’s nice to be carrying a little piece of my dad along to every game.

Current Gamer Kit

PETERMBALL Gaming

I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session.

When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap.

The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew.

In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and attacked people with ghosts, ghost-bombs, spectral honey badgers, and impressionable college students.

I’ll give the system this: it excels at generating hooks from play, and what seems like relatively straightforward system is surprisingly complex when you start playing. I’m really digging the tone–we’re a little more anime action than the default system seems built for, but the slow sense of the characters miring themselves in the muck as they try to do good is definitely seeping in.

The the thing that really pleases me is how lightweight the whole system is. I’ve got a game folder that is on the verge of being sidelined, as I basically need the core rulebook, a handful of dice between sessions, and two notebooks (one for brainstorming, one for tracking things session by session).

I’m very late to the party for this one, but if you’re a gamer with an interest in stories and spec fic, I heartily recommend this one.

Putting the Gamer Hat Back On

PETERMBALL Gaming

We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I have a bad tendency towards playing other people’s games when I do.

Then we spent a week playing Zombies!!! and Killer Bunnies and my partner’s copy of the pirate-themed card game Splice, and my brain started poking at board games I might want to pick up soon. My partner started researching games and identifying those that looked interesting.

At the same time, I’ve been poking at new RPG systems for the first time since 2011. Getting familiar with the Blades in the Dark system so we can pick it up in place of our now-completed-after-nine-years Thursday Night Superhero Campaign. Kicking the tyres on a Shadowrun game I might run at some stage.

And it’s funny—for a few years, I didn’t really feel like a gamer. I played games every now and then, but I wasn’t really part of a gaming community in the same way I had been as a younger man. I didn’t get excited about new releases of games, didn’t go searching for new opportunities, and didn’t really gather to talk about them online or at conventions. The part of my brain that used to be all about gaming communities got subsumed by writing fiction, and there weren’t enough spoons to manage the gaming stuff on top.

One of my goals for 2019—often interrupted and hard to get back to—was trying to recapture that feeling of being part of a larger community. Putting my gamer hat back on, after years of being writing-focused.

It’s happening slowly, but it’s getting there.