OrcCon 2009, Mass Combat, etc.

So I've been derelict in my duties as of late, at least publicly. Behind the scenes, I've been sweating over the two games I'm running at OrcCon (and which I've utterly failed to pimp here). This has included revamping "SotS" pretty severely, to the extent that at least four or five posts I've made on it are now pretty irrelevant to its current iteration, ripping out the spine of "Spirit of the Fist" and putting it back in again, and playtesting the mass-combat system for the first time (very elucidating -- and, more importantly, fun).

Like I said, I've pretty much neglected to post anything about the "SotF" (Saturday at 3:00!) and "SotS" (Sunday at 3:00!) games I'm running, and I've also been slow to follow up on my first post about the mass combat system, but I think I can kill two birds with one stone here.

Here are revised character sheets for the two characters -- Silver Crane and Shining Yu Shu -- I mentioned last month. If you want to read more about the mechanics behind what's going on there, I invite you to check out my "Spirit of the Fist" site. Saturday will be the first playtest of these revised rules, but I'm expecting good things. That first "SotF" playtest was fun, but it wasn't nearly as dynamic as I would've liked. These changes should go a long way towards fixing that (fingers crossed).

And here's a one-page cheat-sheet on the mass combat rules I slapped together for my "Spirit of the Sword" players. I'm pretty pleased with how stripped down the whole thing is. I just hope they (and you) feel similarly.

Oh, what the Hell -- as long as I'm linking to stuff, here are a couple character sheets for Sunday's one-shot. Namely, they're a couple of Kurglaff barbarian-types from the Denbecan clan: Molmoria, the clan's warrior-queen, and Torin, her punier-than-his-older-brother son. For those of you who've been following along at home, a quick look at those sheets should reveal some pretty significant divergences from "SotS" as it's been presented here.

One last note: That "Spirit of the West" one-shot I ran a couple weeks ago didn't go that well. I mean, the players said they had fun, but I didn't feel I presented them with any significant challenges, and I missed a number of opportunities to just make things more interesting. Basically, I let them walk roughshod over the opposition, and it ended up being not especially rewarding as a result. To me, whether or not a FATE game is fun hinges largely on how threatened the PCs are, and these PCs were not threatened at all. Letting one of them run around with an effective Fantastic Guns skill that he could use to both attack and defend was only the most obvious of the poor decisions I made. But anyway. The scenario's still a viable one -- so much so that my good friend and co-setting creator Andy will be running it using Boot Hill at OrcCon on Sunday at 3:00. Check it out!