Game Props Part 1: Tarot Cards

I decided to do a short series on gaming props I've used in my face-to-face games.  Just some simple props that add to the atmosphere of the game.  To kick things off I'm starting with tarot cards.  I dug through my chest of cards and I see I have seven different decks.  I'm not a tarot card reader, but back when I was much younger and had hair, I collected them because they were cool.

The first time I used tarot cards in game it was to simulate a Deck of Many Things.  In the beginning this went over well.  Having the physical prop was too much for them not to dabble.  In the 1st Edition DMG there is a guide to using a regular deck of cards.  I used the Rider Tarot deck at the time.  And I assigned cards as close as I could to the cards identified in the Deck of Many Things.  Today you could use WotC DoMT generator or buy an actual Deck of Many Things.

While I was looking at all the cards I put off to the side I would see their design and think of different boons or punishments.  I wrote a post years ago called Deck of Many Things and Then Some, it provides an excellent example of what I ended up doing.  I made a Deck of Many More Things.  Here's an example.

Hazardous Journey

Tarot Card: 6 of Swords
Playing Card:  6 of Spades

Upon the players next journey any random encounters during the journey will not be random.  The encounter will occur and GM selects the most difficult creature/situation available on the list.  The creature will focus its attack on the character who drew the card.

Note: The GM will have to decide how many encounters the player will need to endure.  To activate this card the character should be going someplace that will at least take one day to travel.  

With the advancements with virtual table tops these days you could to something like this virtually.  Although there is not replacement for the tactile experience.  

Making Gaming Stuff

I've been messing around with developing an adventure using the Exoterrorists, GUMSHOE system.  Think X-Files if it had been on HBO (Maybe True Detective would fill the bill, but I've only seen one very good episode so I can't say).

So I thought I would make up fake, shadow government type documents.  The players would be working for Aegis.  I thought it fit the theme I was going for well.  But I could just have official government documents with Aegis on the header.  No, no, I have to come up with an official seal.

Don't Google official seal because I got a bunch of pictures of people killing baby seals.  Pisses me off just looking at it.  I want to hit those people with a big pole.  And there it is, I'm distracted from what I was doing.

As you can see, I made a seal up.  I was going to put more details in, but I'm happy with the outcome right now.  Plus my ability to fiddle with it will only make it worse.  Now I have a seal to put on the top of official government papers when I send them to my players.  See how I managed to avoid writing the adventure.  Not my first time.

Now go back to your porn.

Saturday Marathon Session was Filled with Athels

People drove from Michigan, Pittsburgh and Lancaster to join our game on Saturday.  We rented a conference room at a hotel ($100) for a 12pm to 12am time period.  Which I've already mentioned on Google+ has given me an idea about possibly starting an OSRcon here.  But one step at a time.

Dwayne from the Gamers Closet brought his amazing gaming prop, a Keep, Inn and Crypt beneath all molded from Hirst molds.  He did it all by hand and it is just incredible.  He did all the decorations, rugs, pictures, sconces, ect... and it really impressed me.

Dwayne is setting up our initial encounter at the Wulfgar Keep.

Dwayne created an adventure around his setting.  The gist, this keep is within a border barony that joined the Kingdom 25 years ago.  This barony is based off a Viking culture.  The Baron is enamored of the kingdom's ways which is in opposition of many his subjects.  We decided to use GURPS 4th Edition.  Rob made up characters for everyone before the session.  Now Rob will probably post his own version of what happened, but I have documented proof of what occurred.  All he has is a first hand account skewed to protect his dignity.  You'll only find truth here. 

Our group consisted of:
*Athelstan: Cleric of Mytria, Healing - (You are already here)
*Athelbert: Guard - Josh (he too cool to have his own blog)
Belafor: Cleric of Thor: only viking in out party.  He was blue. - Ken (Rusty Battle Axe)
Alia Rose: Scout, yeah let's go with that - Kelly Anne (Aliarose)
Sir Ellestan: A Foot Knight *snicker* - Rob (Bat in the Attic)
Cutie: Lego Knight - Gregory
* This became the running joke of the session.  How the game was full of Athels, from Athelburg.  It was funny at the time.  

A shot of the interior of the keep.  You can see all the detail Dwayne put into his keep.

Rewind a bit before we go to the keep.  We are gathered to help the border barony, we requisition supplies and in the morning when we go to pick them up there is a captain there that is going with us.  He and Sir Ellestan get into measuring the manhood battle (there was a lot of measuring tape not used).  We go on the road, its a 15 day trip to the keep.  Before we leave Sir Ellestan also gets a necklace from a powerful member of the mage guild to keep an eye on his progress.  A sleeping man talisman that allows communication between the two of them.  Its supposed to work while he sleeps, but can work when Sir Ellestan is awake.

While Sir Ellestan was on guard duty he got sucked into a dream conference and when he awoke from his meeting the captain he'd been measuring against was dead.  Throat slit.  Dead.  The blue Belafor cast See Secrets and found a pair of boot prints next to the body that were hidden by magic.

So no one slept well when Sir Ellestan was on guard duty.

We sent the body back to town when we reached a village then continued onto the keep.

Our group (bottom right) approaches the keep.

We met the baron who was very happy to have us.  I would even say he kissed our asses.  *smooch*  He explained a few people have gone missing and then his niece went missing.  Long story short, he asked for help.  No one around here seemed to know much or at least wasn't saying much.

Now Dwayne has this other prop...

Out of game knowing is okay...really.

So I used me clerical hoodedness and asked is there any weird location or strange temples in the area that might guide us.  Well wouldn't you know there was.  The Blood Oracle was down the road a bit, but no one goes there.  Of course they don't.  It's the Blood Oracle!

It was a day's walk away from the keep.  It was located in a dense thicket and we were told to only approach it from the front.  No explanation why.  With our group I was sure we would find out why.

BUT...something happen along the way to the Blood Oracle.

The tree across the mountain pass ambush trick. 

We were ambushed by orcs who blocked the way with a tree.  Remember, this is GURPS, not 1 HD meatbags that populate most games.  You need to take this serious and there were a lot of them.  We used our best and only tactic, mass confusion, one charging ahead, another running away, a few in between and me trying to dodge arrows while I kept people standing.  At one point Athelbert tried to ram an orc off the mountain side.  Great if is works.  It didn't.  Sir Ellestan caught him before he did a Wild E Coyote.  In the end we survived.

Then we arrived at the Blood Oracle.

The power of the Blood Temple caused my camera go out of focus. 

The oracle invited us in only after we defeated her guardians.  Okay sure.  Bring them on.  In Harryhausen fashion skeletons rose from the earth and attacked.  I would have been disappointed if they hadn't.

This is where everyone got polite, "No, no after you."

Sir Ellestan decided to go around the temple and got a lesson on when someone tells you to go through the front door of the Blood Oracle, you don't try to backdoor her....

It's a BYOB party at the Blood Temple.  Bring Your Own Blood.

Skeletons and nearly invincible plant monsters.  They were the ones guarding the sides of the temple that Sir Ellestan tried to not merge with.  As you can see there are many more skeletons on the ground than party members.

The Blood Oracle forbids skinny dipping.

We got inside the temple.  We slipped past a fat little imp by answering his riddle.  Then encountered this pool monster.  All we needed to do was throw in a coin, but instead Athelbert cannonballed in and nearly drowned.  But he didn't.  He's such an Athel.  (See how the joke works?  Its funny really.)

We discovered the missing people were in the crypts below the Keep.  Some shadow lord had them.  Crap.   Back we go.

*FAST FORWARD*

After some debate at the keep, the Baron's brother really didn't want us going down into the crypts.  Lots of arguing.  Needed to be persuasive.  We were.  Went into the crypts below and got another reveal.  The crypts beneath the keep and inn!

It's just a fantastic prop.  Just so cool.

So we get into the crypts and...

We get attacked by the Baron's men and his brother.  They've been sacrificing their own people to the Shadow Lord to gain power to expel the evil influence of the kingdom. 

What followed was an array of awesomely horrible rolls.  Rob rolled a lot of critical misses.  I have the proof.

In GURPS you only want to see this when enemy is rolling. 

Rob will tell you another story, but I have more proof.

That's Sir Ellestan on his back, Rob's guy.  The awesome guy in red is my guy saving the day.

The last battle was a collection of critical misses.  Even when the enemies had no defense.  All we needed to do was hit and we would critically miss.  In the end we won the battle, but we did not save the people.  We only managed to uncover the heinous plot. 

It was a fantastic adventure, the best prop set I've got the play on and it was a great day.  We played for 9 hours.  First marathon session I've played in for a long time.  We were out of the hotel by 10pm and got something to eat.

Ken bowing down before Dwayne for running such a cool adventure.  "I'm not worthy."

The Gathering

This weekend I believe we are going to have the whole gaming crew face to face.  We were talking about renting a meeting room at a local hotel so we could gather with some space and comfort.  None of us has the space the host all of us.  Well air conditioned space. 

Dwayne is bring his mega fantastic keep/inn/dungeon beneath he built brick-by-brick from Hirst molds.  Here's a few shots, its cool as it gets.  If you want to see his construction process run on over to his blog, Gamer's Room.

We are planning on meeting on this Saturday and I think we're just throwing dice and making rules up as we go.  A system less session with with a cool ass prop.  I'm looking forward to it.  I only get to roll real dice a few times each year. 

Lunch is over.  Well, it was over about 20 minutes ago so I need to haul ass outta here. 

Gaming Props Pro or Con

A couple of weekends ago at the Day of Gaming in Erie, Rob ran a great first adventure with Al and I. He used a erasable marker on a battle mat and we had a blast. A very simple execution that kept the game rolling along.

The second game he used (I can’t remember the exact name of the product or company) dungeon wall props. They were great looking, but it took up time to set up each hallway and room. Of course he did not build it ahead of time because we could only see the dungeon as we explored. The walls did look great, but it was tough to keep the flow of the excitement because each time we moved it took five minutes to setup the walls. This took me out of the game and I would gladly sacrifice the ‘look’ for the ‘play’.

The other con for me was that when you tried to move your figure there was a difficulty level 25 to not to knock down the walls as you moved your figure. I failed my check a lot. And beware of bumping the table. You know how graceful all us gamers are.

Rob was given the dungeon walls and I heard that set ran about $80 to $100 and you could only built a few corridors and rooms with them so the same pieces needed to be reused as we explored. He would have needed to buy at least four to five more of the sets to build the dungeon.

I ask the question is it worth to other out there in blog land? For me keeping it simple and bump the table resistant is the best. Miniatures on a erasable battle mat is about as wild as I like to get. Okay, maybe different color markers to make the water blue and trees green, but that’s only when I’ve gone mad. So keeping it simple on the props, keep the focus on the adventure and to maintain the mood you’ve worked so hard to develop is for me.

Fantasy Billboards in Game

In previous posts I mentioned using a billboard in my game. I did this to give the players a prop to interact with, to make it feel like the world was alive and moving. It provided places for possible adventure if the current story line hit a lull or if they wanted to do something different. I have downloaded samples of some of the billboard content. The content and fonts are very elaborate and very non-fantasy at times, but I wasn't going for realism just another splash of color for my world. I even created a 'journalistic' personality, Janon, who would report on whaatever event struck his fancy. The players enjoyed the updates and to see if they made the billboard news. It also had another effect, when the players trickled into the game they always went to the billboard to look for the new content. This got them into a game state of mind so there was not that long period of yapping about unrelated topics before hand. They got settled in quicker and I could start the game on time. Only two more miracles to go for my sainthood.




These are samples of personal ads. The players posted their own and were surprised by the response they got. It was a very effective method. The billboard always got a lot of traffic being in the middle of the market square.











This is one of Janon's reports. During one of the adventures they had an encounter in a tavern that Janon was in and the players were disappointed they did not get a chance to talk to him. He became an elusive celebrity in a way.







This final example is of a wanted list after a riot. While the players were going about their daily business they might see someone being shackled and dragged through the crowd. I always tried to have one of the posts on the billboard be apart of that session. It helped the players connect the news with the actually going ons.



If you have never used a billboard in your game give it a shot. It is time consuming, but you don't need to make an entirely new billboard each time. I added two or three new posts along with one of Janon's entries. And to keep the old posts interesting I sometimes had an old post that had been on the billboarrd for three or four sessions become relevant. One player would jerk his head up like a deer who just heard the crack of a twig and bolt for the billboard to find the connection.