Geek Girls Rule! #105 – Man, I have a lot of stuff.

Ok, I don’t know if it’s like this for all geeks, but damn we have a lot of crap.  A LOT of crap.  We’ve been going through boxes and closets, and trying to divest ourselves of a good chunk of it.  I don’t know if all geeks are packrats like this, but an awful lot of the geeks I hang with are.

Part of it, geeks are information hoarders.  And yes, while technology is somewhat more compact than it was, I know I’m not the only one out there with a 12 year old computer sitting in my closet because it’s the only system that will play an old favorite game (Blood Bowl) and there’s a bunch of stuff on there I would like to retrieve one day, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Another form which information takes is books, and we have… many.  We have applied a second layer of insulation, in the form of bookshelves on every flat wall, to our living space.  Now, some of them I’m not ever giving up:  my copy of “Unicorn Variations” signed by Zelazny, my collected works of Manly Wade Wellman, the hardcover Little House on the Prairie books my grandmother bought me when I was little, the complete L. Frank Baum Wizard of Oz, and I could keep going.  We have gotten better in recent years about culling the collection every so often and selling them off or donating them to a library.  But still, after about six months of the Geek Husband What Rules picking me up at a Barnes and Noble after work, yeah, those shelves fill right back up real quick.

In addition to information, we also have music.  The Geek Husband What Rules is a Music Nerd of the first water.  He used to DJ at a college radio station and occasionally at the club where we both worked.  As a result, we have a couple thousand CDs, most of which we got for free.  We have a HUGE Reggae and Dancehall collection, as well as Industrial, Heavy Metal, Nu Wave, Punk, Ska, my chick rock, Rockabilly and the classics like the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline.

After that come the comics and comics-related collectibles.  I have the wall of Nightcrawler, which is not quite complete, but getting there.  We have a Man-Eating Cow action figure, lots of Spawn, the Hansen Brothers from Slapshot and lots of other random things that catch our fancies.

I also collect fountain pens, hedgehog figures and Devil Duckies.

THEN we have the gaming shelves.  Traditional, Indie, weird, all sorts of RPGs populate the collection.  Early White Wolf, two editions of GURPS, two editions of Warhammer FRPG, ASL, dozens of copies of White Dwarf and Dragon magazine all grace those shelves.

We really do have an insane amount of just crap, but we’re getting better.  In fact I spent this evening going through a bunch of my writing from jr. high and high school and tossing out old notebooks.  I have not yet decided whether to throw a dramatic reading or a bonfire.

G.I. Joe fanfic with a serious Mary Sue, anyone?

Geek Girls Rule! #92 – Single Gender and Multi-Gender Gaming Groups

Every so often someone “calls me out” because they perceive a hypocrisy between my insistence that girls should be made welcome in gaming, and the fact that I run a single gender “Girl Game.”

Ok, guys, seriously, nowhere have I EVER told you that you couldn’t have all-guy games (or if I have I mis-spoke and will accept my spanking).  What I have told you is that girls can game, girls want to game, and that I think gaming with girls is good for you.  I have told you how to attract girls to your game, and how to keep them there.

Mostly, if you want to have that all-guy game, what I want you to do is examine why you feel the need to, just as I examined why I wanted to do an all-girl game.

Roleplaying can be a very intimate experience, and some girls, hell, some guys, are intimidated by doing that in front of others at all, let alone in front of others of the opposite sex.  Much of our society sets the primary two genders (male and female) up as adversaries, and who wants to be vulnerable in front of adversaries?  I get that.

I weighed the pros and cons of having guys present in the Girl Game.  I had girls who had bad experiences gaming with guys.  I had girls who had awesome experiences gaming with guys, but wanted to see what an all girl group would be like.  And I had girls who hadn’t gamed before for whom the thought of doing it in front of guys was intimidating.

I can tell you that even when the only guy present is the Geek Husband What Rules, the dynamic changes. Quite frankly, I do not care for how the dynamics change and want to keep that roleplaying experience as undilute as I can.  Partially, it’s my own damage that changes the dynamics.  He’s my primary GM, and I have a tendency to defer because of it.

Now, if your game is just organically all guys, that is a totally different thing than only gaming with guys because “girls suck and will ruin gaming.”  Thankfully that attitude seems to be dying out, but it still rears its ugly head from time to time.

Or there may be a specific group of people you want to game with and they “happen” to be all guys.  It does happen absent malice. I recognize this.

Or maybe your group has “that guy” in it, and while he’s a great roleplayer and a good friend otherwise, you know he’ll suck around a girl for whatever reason (doesn’t like them, turns into a horndog, etc…).  So you decide to keep him and forego gaming with any girls, that’s valid, too.  Of course, it’s also valid to tell him to suck it up and grow up, and deal with having a girl in the group as well.  Honestly, I find a lot of the hostility from Geeky guys towards girls to be a lack of healthy exposure.  Once you demystify the vagina-bearers, we’re a lot less scary.

BUT all of that said, you need to remember that male gamers still outnumber female gamers by a HUGE margin, which is why I keep hammering at you to include girls in your gaming groups.

At the incredibly girl-friendly GoPlayNW, which had 70 attendees, there were 8 girls that I recall.  That’s a nearly ten to one margin.  Granted, I am far less likely to be the only girl at a gaming convention now than I was ten years ago, so I see the progress.  But it can be intimidating being the only girl at the table.  Particularly in a convention setting where you will probably be outnumbered at least ten to one.  Not only is it a little nerve-wracking to be roleplaying with strangers, but being surrounded by guys they don’t know well also tends to trip the internal alarms that have been societally conditioned into most women.*

If you don’t game with girls, who will?  Yes, I’m female and I game and GM, but there aren’t that many of me running around.   Probably more than I think there are, and far fewer than I hope.  And by excluding girls, you may well miss out on some awesome fellow gamers.  Plus, you want to keep the hobby going, right?  More gamers means more gaming books sold… I’m just saying.

Edit:  Here’s a link to the Stabbing Contest podcast where I discuss this exact issue with Clyde from Theory from the Closet. 

*This is a societal conditioning thing, and if you need it explained I can point you to the Polimicks blog.

Geek Girls Rule! #78.5 – What am I playing? and More News

I want to start off with a reminder that GGR now has a Zazzle store.  Buy stuff, and support my gaming habit.  It’s expensive.  Role-playing games don’t come cheap.  Well, some of them do, but I really want copies of Houses of the Blooded and Passages.

Also, on the news front, I want to welcome Fandom Savant to the Geek Girls Rule! family.  She is going to be your one stop shop for FanFic news, and also some awesome analyses of television and other media.  She prefers to publish here under a pseudonym, because unlike me, she’s still hoping to get a job in academia some day.  You’ll be able to hear her in the upcoming Geek Girls Rule! podcast 11, just as soon as libsyn let’s me upload it.  We talk about fanfiction, why it is so popular and the different tropes and such.  It really is a magnificent podcast, and really interesting.  And yes, that is Fandom Savant, even though I call her Frog.  We’ve been friends for about 16 or so years now, and you just don’t get through that many years without accumulating some entertaining nicknames.  

Now, what am I currently playing?  We have just started a game of Mouse Guard over skype, with my Geek Sisterhood co-host Sophie Lagace and her husband Edmund, and another friend of theirs, Jason.  I’m very excited.  So far all we’ve done is character creation, but I’m very pleased with my character, a very Aramis-like little mouse named Jasper. 

Also, the Sunday group is now playing two series of Prime Time Adventures simultaneously.  We’ve just started season two of “Mystic Palms” which is our Harry Potter/Beverly Hills 90210/Heathers cross-over.  And we’ve just begun a show about a Japanese chef, trained in France and working in a Cajun Restaurant an hour or two outside of New Orleans, called “Redneck Remoulade.”  We just did the pilot for that one, and it’s fun. 

Every other Friday or so, we have the Spirit of the Century Girl Genius campaign, theoretically.  We have yet to actually play.  Which reminds me, I need to look for our characters.  And the Girl Game, after a couple of month hiatus due to the insanely busy schedules we all keep, is gearing up for another run.  We’re getting ready to convert our Unhallowed characters over to GURPS because I’m more likely to USE the system since I already know it, and I think it will convert just fine. 

That’s about it.  Gaming Radio Network has the first Geek Sisterhood podcast.  I will post the particulars here once I have them.  We have recorded the second and I’m working on editing it this evening.

Geek Girls Rule! #68 – Why Do I Keep Buying Traditional Games? And RIP Forrest J. Ackerman.

Mr. Geek Girl What Rules and I have a HUGE bookshelf full of gaming books, including most of several editions of GURPS, a couple different editions of D&D, both editions of several of the World of Darkness books, In Nomine, Warhammer, Warmachine, Champions, etc…  We do go through them fairly frequently, although we rarely use any systems more complex than the Bridge (Two-die) system or PDQ.

So, why do we keep buying trad games?

For starters, we have always been very fond of taking story seeds from other media and scrubbing off the serial numbers.  For example, the Company of Aces game, which began as a thinly veiled Black Company game and evolved into something completely its own.  Also, The Wall game was initially based on G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books, again, mutated beyond all recognition.  The Mister has also run a Malazan inspired game.  I’ve run straight up Hogwarts games, as well as some that were just subtly different.  We’ve bastardized movies, books, television and the internet, and traditional RPGs are not exempt from this pillaging. 

One of the things that attracted the Mister to GURPS in the first place was this idea that you merely needed ONE system to play any type of game you wanted.  That there would be no need to learn a superhero system, a fantasy system, a strategic combat system, a high tech system, etc…  It was all the same system with different window dressing depending on what you were looking for.  And I can get behind that.  I hate having to learn new systems, it feels like homework.  I feel we’ve gone one step beyond that, instead of waiting for Steve Jackson to do the homework for us, we’re doing it ourselves.  And the best part is, with the incredibly “small” systems we typically use, the actual translation work is minimal. 

There are a lot of wonderful gaming worlds being invented every day, whether they get published or not.  And hey, as long as I’m supporting the author by buying their product, I don’t feel the least little bit bad about stealing their settings to use with other systems.   At first I felt a little weird about it, because some of these games cost upwards of $30 or $40 bucks, and for some reason I had this idea that what you’re really paying for is system.  I don’t think I’m alone in that, either.  But the truth is, you’re paying for the authors’ time, effort and creativity, as well as the system.  So, even if you never touch the system, I still say you’re getting your money’s worth (or in some cases, getting more of your money’s worth than if you WERE using their system). 

So, tonight I’ll be sitting down with my copy of Grimm and soaking up the story world, and not feeling the least little bit guilty about skipping the system section. 

On to today’s sadness.  Forrest J. Ackerman has passed away.  He was a fixture at west coast conventions, and I had the pleasure of speaking with him on multiple occasions.  Once, when my friend Kayo was buying Mr. Ackerman’s book, he realized he’d forgotten his wallet and Mr. Ackerman had already personalized it to him, so he left me (in full cat make up and frilly, psuedo-gypsy costume) as a security deposit, while he went to get his wallet.  At one point, I do believe Mr. Ackerman offered to take me in trade for the book.  He was funny, well-spoken and always behaved like a gentleman in front of me.  I enjoyed his panels, and had a standing invitation to visit his home if I ever made it down to California, as did many other fans.  He will be sorely missed in the SF/F convention landscape.

Geek Girls Rule! #65 – Emerald City Game Fest

Yesterday Mr. Geek Girl What Rules and I ran the Story Games Lounge at Emerald City Game Fest yesterday.  ECGF is a free gaming event in the Seattle area.  They usually get somewhere between 100-200 people.  Yesterday’s Game Fest was at the Northgate Community Center.

I spread out the indy games we brought with us and hung out until I could sucker some folks in to playing some games.  I got four guys to jump in for a game of “In a Wicked Age“, with a fifth joining partway through.  Since one of the players looked to be under the legal age of consent, and there were other children about, I informed them we would not be using the “Blood and Sex” oracle.  So we used the War oracle.  I’ve never had a bad game of IAWA, and this was no exception.  Even Mason, who’d never played it before, got into the spirit of it, as did Denisson (Sorry if I’m spelling it wrong).   Andy, Dave, Jackson and I had all played it before, but it was the first time I’d ever tried running it.

What you do in IAWA is that you extrapolate characters from the oracles you draw.  We began with the deserted campsite of a travelling army recently abandoned, the ghost of a tyrant king strangled by his daughter, a demon of atrocity bound for a thousand years who senses a minute loosening of its bonds, and a speaker of ancestors with messages from the dead.  Our list included the army, the demon, the speaker, the ghost, his daughter, the ghosts of the ancestors, and probably a few others I can’t remember right now.

Andy chose to play a wounded soldier abandoned by his army because he could not keep up, looking for a place to hide.  Jackson played the dead king, Andy his daughter, Mason the speaker of the ancestors, and I played everyone else until Dennisson joined us and took over the demon.  And in spite of my insistence on not using “Blood and Sex,” Andy’s character still wound up raped by the demon.

I had a few moments of uncertainty with the dice mechanics.  The problem with IAWA is that the text explaining the dice mechanics is less than clear, and the examples don’t help as much as I think they’re supposed to.  It’s a viral game, really.  Most people who play IAWA learn it from someone else who has already played it, usually with Vincent or someone he’s played it with.  It isn’t real intuitive at least to me.  But we muddled through and had one hell of a good time with it.  Being as I have played it with folks who know the dice mechanic, I think I need to sit down and really study the text, maybe take some notes on it.  I don’t think it’s unlearnable from point zero, just that it isn’t written in a way that jives with my brain.  That said, the game itself is amazingly fun and the oracles are incredibly evocative.

After the break, I ran the Keep again for Kingston, Mike, John Bradley and Denisson.  For the first time no one took the Blacksmith’s son.  We added my friend Kate when she showed up about midway through the slot.  The original four were the only ones left in the Keep and created a plan for destroying the Keep as it was breached and fleeing, which involved falling into the midden pile and setting the Keep on fire on their way out.  Everyone had a hand in destroying the big bad guy, and I hope got their moments of glory.

I think this game highlighted, for me, a problem with my gm-ing style.  I’m too nice.  I have a tendency to let players get away with stuff that maybe I shouldn’t, such as re-writing what they did before they left the Keep.  I finally got to the point where I’d leave it up to a die roll, even yes, odd no.  And really, maybe I shouldn’t have.  I also have a tendency to fudge die rolls when I’m rolling too well.   Mostly this is because I want them to have a good time and to succeed.  After the Keep and after the LARP last weekend, I realize that I could stand to be a little more ruthless as a GM.  Particularly after last week’s LARP at Ambercon.

I did have a fantastic time running and meeting folks.  I also made some new friends and got some Transporter 3 swag.  For those of you who may not know, any movie in which Jason Statham removes the majority of his clothing is a good movie.

So, for those of you who I promised I would have the info on next week’s Meet-up for, here it is:
Saturday, November 22 at 11am the Wayward Coffee House on Greenwood.  Bronwyn who owns and runs it is made of pure awesome, and even if you can’t make the Meet-up, you should stop in and say “Hi!” at some time.

I’m going to close now and watch the awful mummy movie on Sci Fi right now.  I’m feeling a bit poorly, and I think horror movies and soup on the couch are just what the doctor ordered.  Oooh, someone just got beat up by gauze!  Yay, bad movies!!!

Geek Girls Rule! #64 (For Reals) – AmberconNW 2008 Post-con report

Oh wow, such a good time!  I love AmberconNW so much!  The gaming, the socializing, the drinking, the conversation.  And the Edgefield added a big long soaking pool.  It was amazing.  We all invaded Sunday night and soaked and talked and splashed.

Thursday night, got there, got checked in, had the intro meet-n-greet sort of thing.  Then played in Thaddeus’ “Between Venus and Mars” game.  Set in the 1970s glam rock scene, we had to stop someone from assassinating Bleys, the lead singer of Bleysing Star, THE glam rock band.  We had Monroe Breckinridge the famous Photographer, Melodie Carole the up and coming singer, L the avant garde artist, Virgil White DJ of “White Noise,” Eddie Newton another musician and alien, Sidney Goldman Vietnam Vet, Michael Heron man of the scene, and Violette Skye fifteen year old call-girl/scene queen.  A complete blast.

Friday morning I played in an Amber Noir game, “Down these Mean Streets” run by Madeline.  I did not realize it was part of an on-going game, but loads of fun.  We had to stop Mandor from completing a trap created by the sacrificial mutilations of half-demon half-human crossbreeds.  We survived and succeeded!  Culminating in my character getting reprimanded by Gerard for telling him to tell his stupid brother to the King to listen to me when I advised him.

I took Friday afternoon off to nap and soak in the new incredibly awesome soaking pool with two friends and their sprogs.

Friday evening was the Pooh game, which is a long-running Amber/Hundred Acre Wood crossover game, and I could give you the plot of the game, but it would make no sense whatsoever.  Just know that the GM now takes special delight in outraging or making my character wail.  Ticketyboo the Trump Artist hedgehog.

Saturday morning we ran “Loose the Blood Dimmed Tides” a 17 player 6 gm LARP.  We made some mistakes, only had one major continuity error, and Ogre kind of sidetracked the plot.  But we did manage to keep 17 people entertained for six hours with it, so it went pretty good.  We’ve learned a lot from the experience, especially me since I’d never GM-ed a LARP before, or even co-GMed with anyone before.  The plot was that the Moonriders of Ganesh had returned to take Amber.  They succeeded in surprising the elders, and we began the game with Benedict, Caine and Dara crucified in the courtyard, Benedict with his arms cut off, Caine with his eyes missing.  Fiona came through a trump with a massive head wound.  And then it was chaos.  Woot!!!!

Saturday evening, I ran the Hogwarts/Amber crossover game “Wands of Avalon.”  It’s primarily returning players.  I’m running them parallel to the Harry Potter plot.  It is a blast with plenty of laughter and giggling.  At one point one of our players was conscripted by another game to play Gerard, trumped in to settle a dispute, so her having NO idea what was going on there was perfect.  I’m sure I’ll post more about it later.  But I did get to include a scene where Hagrid was wailing over the death of a stray chaos beast that he’d been feeding outside his cottage.

Then Sunday, I ran “The Keep” again.  This is the first time I managed to get them out of the bloody castle.  We had Gerald Fiona’s son, Vrazda Caine’s daughter, Linka Random’s daughter, Marcus Gerard’s son, and Byron Brand’s son.
After being stuffed in the bolt hole, they came out to find everyone gone, the Unicorn Shrine destroyed and the priest mutilated on the altar.  Gerald found some trumps but they didn’t know how to use them.  They saw something small and black spying on them, then the closed the gates, and Vrazda saw a man in green and black watching them from the trees.  They fled out the garbage/manure shoot and fled down the mountainside.  They captured the chaos critter that was tracking them, and Linka named it Blackie.  They got it to answer questions by nodding and carried it bound with them.  They happened across some shepherds, one of whom wound up being an agent of Caine.  They were attacked by more werewolves.  The shepherd shouted at them to “Call Julian!” and started killing wolves with a spear.
I’d let them get some inkling of how to use trumps earlier, so they finally managed to pull some elders through, and while the elders dealt with the werewolves, the kids faced down Dalt.
It was a blast.

So, yup.  I’m all excited about what I’ll be running next year now.  The Hogwarts game is a given.  And it looks like we’ve learned enough from this year’s LARP to make running another much more smooth.  And we’ve already come up with a great idea.  Also, I’m contemplating running “Amber Family Therapy,” wherein the players play elder Amberites in therapy with each other.  It’s something Ogre and Deb Donahue came up with a couple years ago. “Julian, can you use a feeling word to describe your sisters?”  “I don’t know, is ‘bitch’ a feeling word?”  This could be absolutely fantastic, or it could crash and burn.  We will see.

So, yes, a fantastic time was had.  There was gaming and soaking and drinking and giggling and laughing, and loads of inappropriate!  Yay!!!!!

So looking forward to next year.  Also, I’m contemplating trying to get back east for AmberConUS next April.

Geek Girls Rule! #64 (Sorta) – Leaving for AmberconNW in the morning

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All I have to do now is pack:  clothing, gamebooks, characters, notebooks, pencils, dice, erasers, knitting…

Tomorrow morning we drop the hedgepig off at his grandparents’.  And then we head down to Oregon to game all weekend long with 120 of our closest friends. I’m running two games myself and co-gm-ing a third with five other people and 18 players.  It should be interesting.

Go us!

Also, after reading all the The Devil’s Panties, I have decided I miss DragonCon and will find a way to get back there in the coming year.

Now I have to do go do some last minute game prep.  Talk to you all later!!!

Geek Girls Rule 63.75 – Comments on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

So, Sunday night a friend of ours was up from Olympia and a whole bunch of us decided to have a little impromptu meet-up to hang out with him.  When we first got there, it was just John Harper, Sage, and their friends Shannon and Paul.  They’ve been playing Warhammer FRP, and just started on their second careers, except for Paul whose character died heroically in battle. 

I voiced my gripe that playing first level characters in Warhammer makes me insane because you can’t DO anything. 
Me:  “Look, I’m the healer and… I just dropped the band-aid.”
Shannon:  “In the dirt, and someone puked on it, and they had the plague!”

Yes, first level characters in Warhammer are EXACTLY like that.  Except for elves, which can do everything, but have only get one fate point, which if you’re not paying attention and are fighting bad guys on the docks and you get knocked into the water in full plate and do not have the “swim” skill, you’re going to be burning through pretty darn quickly. 

No, that wasn’t my character (for a change), but it did happen in a game. 

I swear, if I ever run Warhammer, I’m starting everyone in their second career.  Or, as Ogre said, he plans starting them at level one, but keeping it really light and ROLE-play oriented and handing out copious amounts of player handjobs, er, experience points.

Geek Girls Rule! Podcast #7 – Emerald City Game Fest with Sophie Lagace

Talking about the upcoming Emerald City Game Fest, November 15th in Seattle, a free game day event.

Podcast #7 – Emerald City Game Fest with Sophie Lagace.

http://sirriamnicast.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=393970

Oh, we talk about a lot of stuff. Gaming as women, trying to build community amongst gamers, gaming conventions, lots of stuff.

Geek Girls Rule! #63.5 – Emerald City Game Fest

http://www.emeraldcitygamefest.org/

Guess who will be running at least one game, and Hosting the Story Games Lounge at Emerald City Game Fest this year?

This girl!

The game fest is a free event on November 15th, please follow the link above for location, directions and all that good stuff. 

I’ll be running a session of The Keep.  And if you think you know the plot because you read my earlier post on it, you are WRONG!  It’s different every time I run it.  So it won’t be werewolves this time.  Neener neener.

If you’re in the Seattle area, or planning on it, come on by, play a game or two, say hi!  I may bring the laptop and record a podcast, as may the Mister, who I believe will also be running a game or two during the day.  And depending on her work schedule, I may be able to coax the GeekMachine into coming out, too.