[Atomic Robo] San Diego Comic-Con Playtest!

Okay, I'm biting the bullet here and finally settling on a time for the ARRPG playtest on Saturday. It's going to be in room 15AB at 2:00 pm.


I've decided that there's no way I have the patience to get into Hall H for The Hobbit anyway, so let's play Atomic Robo instead.


Saturday, 15AB, 2:00 pm. Look for the guy in the Tesladyne shirt. First four or five people there get to play. I FORGOT MY TESLADYNE SHIRT. Damn it. Well... look for a guy in some kind of shirt who looks like he's playtesting a cool new game about Atomic Robo.


Those of you lucky enough to be at Connecticon, of course, can maybe squeeze into Adam's ARRPG playtest, also happening Saturday at 2:00 pm. Get on it!


Incidentally--playtest last night (Thursday) at Gam3rcon went really well. Only one guy knew Atomic Robo, and only one (other) guy was familiar with FATE. The other three were just curious about new games, I guess. But they acquitted themselves well and had a lot of fun. The scenario (based on a premise by Scott Wegener) was effective and the players enjoyed sorting it all out. We didn't have time to finish, due to a variety of factors--it's been a pretty harried Comic-Con for me already--but that didn't dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the game. Everything rules-wise was well-received. Despite their best efforts, though, they evinced a nearly frustrating lack of criticism!


Morgan Ellis will probably be harsher at tonight's playtest. Or maybe not.

[Atomic Robo] Progress so far...

Note: Progress not to scale.

For the last couple weeks, I've really been pushing to put things together for the upcoming ARRPG playtests at San Diego Comic-Con and Gam3rcon, Connecticon, and [another almost-confirmed convention in Wisconsin] next month.

(BTW, have you seen the gaming schedule for Connecticon? Swords Without Master! Misspent Youth! Fiasco! Shock! Dresden Files! Damn, that looks like a pretty great con.)

(Also remember that, at this point, we expect Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, and Zack Finfrock to be in attendance at Connecticon, possibly playing ARRPG, possibly just hanging around the table and pointing out everything that's wrong about it. Either way!)

As for the game itself, I'm really pleased with where things are so far. I sent the GMs in question four PDFs, entitled Skills and Stunts, Making Characters, Other Rules, and Sample Characters. I'll give you three guesses what they're about!

There are a lot of new twists and turns to the FATE you know and (hopefully) love, and more than a few to Fate Core, but you haven't even seen that yet so there's almost no point bringing it up. If you're a Strange FATE fan, you'll find some familiar tidbits in there as well. As I've said before, a major design goal for ARRPG is the versatility of Strange FATE in a more streamlined package.

I'm happy -- almost pleasantly surprised, even -- with how easy and fun those sample characters were to make, even if Robo's is likely to draw some criticism. I mean, I think it looks good, but it's a given that when you make a character sheet for a comic-book character, someone's going to point out that you've done it wrong, right? I have nothing but respect for those people. Keep me honest, pointer-out people.

In an odd way, the thing that might stand out the most as a big deal about these new rules is the elimination of Refresh as a character-specific stat or measure of power. It's something that's been in every FATE-based game I've ever played or seen, as far as I can recall, so for that reason alone it feels kinda cool to cut it out. That was another early design decision, too. This way is better, at least for Atomic Robo. You'll see for yourself soon enough.

Anyway. That's the update. I'll post another after Comic-Con, when there's something new to report. Until then, remain calm and trust in Science!

[Atomic Robo] Playtesting at San Diego Comic-Con

Real quick note here -- I know the blog's been concentrating on the "blank" part lately, but I wanted to get a post out to announce that I'll be running at least one playtest of the Atomic Robo RPG at Comic-Con next month. That's in addition to playtesting at Gam3rcon just down the street that same weekend. (More info to come on that soon.)

For some reason, it didn't occur to me to, y'know, register a game officially with Comic-Con until yesterday. Now, of course, it's too late to get something on the schedule. But there's an "open play" room at the con where I can basically run whatever I want whenever I want to run it, so that's what I'm doing. What better place to playtest ARRPG than at a huge pop-culture-and-oh-yeah-also-we-have-comics convention?

So I don't have a day and time worked out yet, because Comic-Con hasn't published their schedule yet. But when they do, I'll post about it ASAP here and on Twitter. There'll be no way to pre-reg in advance, so it'll have to be first-come, first-served. So get someone to hold your place in line for Hall H, and we'll play a one-shot without you having to miss that panel on, I dunno, The Dark Knight Rises or whatever.

[Atomic Robo] Bear Swarm Podcast

Last weekend -- not this past weekend, but the one before that -- I know how important it probably is to you that I clearly define when a thing happened before I even get around to telling you what the thing was -- Rob and Kevin of the Bear Swarm Podcast were kind enough to have me on as a guest. The topic, naturally enough, was mostly the Atomic Robo RPG. Fine by me. I could talk about ARRPG all day. But we also found time for me to turn one of their own unfair questions back on them. Ha! Ask me what my favorite RPGs are these days, will ya? You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Anyway. The episode's available here for your listening probably-pleasure. And yes, my name's misspelled. A delightful error we can all laugh about later!

UPDATE: Hey, they fixed my name. Thanks fellas.

[Atomic Robo] [Kerberos] GenCon Events! Again!

I Googled "gencon logo" and got this.

A while ago, in a moment of benign "The sky is falling!" confusion, I incorrectly warned about the imminent opening of event pre-reg for GenCon. I was wrong, I apologized, and, as a nation, we all moved on. Now, though, it's on -- that thing I was talking about in the previous sentence (see above) starts tomorrow, May 20th, at 9 am PST.

To help get you ready for that, here are the dates and times of the FATE games with which I will be involved in some way.

First, the Atomic Robo RPG sessions, run variously by myself, Morgan Ellis, Andy Blanchard, and Chris Czerniak:
Thursday, 2:00 pm
Friday, 2:00 pm
Friday, 2:00 pm (another one)
Saturday, noon (changed from 2:00 pm)
Saturday, 2:00 pm
And also another one for Saturday, 2:00 pm

They're all at the Marriott in the Indiana Ballroom, as part of Indie Games Explosion, a subsidiary corporation of Games on Demand. So there'll probably be more ARRPG games available on demand, as well.

I'm also running one session of The Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) on Friday at 2:00 pm. It's called "A Past from the Blast," and, to recap, the blurb is as follows:

Danger! Intrigue! Explosions! It's all in a day's work for the Strange members of the Kerberos Club, who answer the call when a series of bombings spark panic in the streets of London.

That one's also at the Marriott, in Ballroom 2, if I'm reading that correctly. Let's hear it for centralized gaming.

It'll be very interesting running both of these systems at the same convention. In many ways, the world of Atomic Robo feels like a kindred spirit of the world of the Kerberos Club -- if you advanced the setting of The Kerberos Club forward several decades and changed a few (admittedly big) things, you could end up with Atomic Robo. So I guess it only makes sense that the versions of FATE that power these two games have a similar relationship. Some of the design goals for ARRPG owe a lot to Strange FATE, and some elements of the latter have been carried over whole-cloth into the former. I'm looking forward to it. Look forward to it with me, won't you?

UPDATE: And a few hours after pre-reg opened, everything's sold out. That's encouraging, right? If you missed out, buy some generic tickets and keep hope alive.

[Atomic Robo] Super-Secret Playtest

I trekked down to San Diego yesterday to run a super-secret playtest of Atomic Robo as part of a Gam3rcon Game Day. It was advertised thusly:

Super-Secret Evil Hat RPG Playtest
This is an early playtest of an RPG in development, to be published by Evil Hat Productions (Spirit of the Century, The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game). Your name will appear in the credits as a playtester. All necessary materials will be provided. That's, uh... about all we can say about it. Don't worry; it'll be fun. Remain calm and trust in Science.

It was a pretty loose little adventure, inspired by this charming but absolutely bogus "news" article from a few years ago, and my four players and I had a good time. Feedback was very positive. They liked the way skills work. They liked being able to define their characters during play, in the moment, instead of doing everything in advance. They liked collateral consequences. They liked the story. Basically, they thought everything was great.

Normally, that'd be fine, but c'mon! Playtest! Gimme problems! Back to the drawing board... to... look at the drawing board, I guess.

Seriously though, I'm not especially concerned with the lack of issues -- I'm happy everything went smoothly, plus there's enough to do as it is, thanks -- and it's actually even more notable considering that two of my players were 12-year-old twins with no prior FATE experience. They were able to pick it all up with minimal difficulty, aspects and all, and even managed a couple perfectly valid self-compels, so that's encouraging. Maybe it helped that they're already Atomic Robo fans, which, of course, means they're smart.

So when and where is the next Super-Secret Playtest? You're not cleared to know that, Citizen. (Wrong game.)

[Sword-and-Planet] The Spirit of the Red Planet

Late on mentioning this -- I've been sick, and then other pressing matters just kept on pressing -- but I got to play with the Actual People, Actual Play crew a few weeks ago, and the podcast of our after-game discussion is now available online.

Hopped up on John Carter as most of us were (all of us who'd seen it), we decided to play Morgan Ellis' excellent Spirit of the Red Planet, his sword-and-planet FATE hack. I've talked about it on the blog before, I'm pretty sure. Previously, I'd played Throk, the token Thark-esque Martian. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that my favored Spirit of the Shattered Earth character is Gorlla the Mighty Crorc.)

This didn't happen in our game, but it could've.

Nobody played the John Carter surrogate Cyrus Turner, so, in a weird twist, he ended up an antagonistic character, the third corner in a love triangle between the princess and Kalyan the heroic-ish pirate. Me, I played a Red Martian psychic/shaman-type. There were towering three-legged battle-mechs, an epic sandstorm raging out of control forever, and an extremely Pyrrhic victory, among other things. Great stuff, as always.