A Role Playing Games Blog
Advice
Ask The Stargazer!
1October 31, 2011
For a while now I have been thinking about starting a new hopefully regular feature on Stargazer’s World called “Ask The Stargazer!”.
So what’s the idea behind this new feature? You can send in your questions and the team of Stargazer’s World will try to answer them to the best of their abilities. You have a question about an existing or upcoming Stargazer Games product? Ask away! You want to know what we think about a recent development in the RPG industry? Send in your questions. You always wanted to know what we think about game X? Send us an email.
Of course this will only work with your help. So please think about what you want to know and send your questions to askthestargazer@stargazersworld.com! Please note that it may take a while until we publish our first “Ask The Stargazer!” post here. And if it’s possible try to keep questions short and to the point.
So what are you waiting for you? Send us your questions!
NaGa DeMon, NaNoWriMo and Scrivener
4October 26, 2011
No, we’re not talking about demonic snake-like people from Indian mythology here. Nathan Russel, the guy who created the awesome FU RPG among other things, had a great idea. Why not take the idea from the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) an bring it to the game table? So this year he challenges all of us to design a game in one month. This November will not just be NaNoWriMo but also Naga DeMon! And of course, the latter sounds much cooler! 
Of course there are a few rules (it wouldn’t be fun without those!):
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Create the game in November
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Finish the game in November
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Play the game in November
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Talk about your experience
By the way, the NaGa DeMon is not just about pen & paper RPGs. If you want to create a boardgame, wargame, cardgame or even a computer game, you can do so and it’s still part of the official NaGa DeMon! I am basically working on some game design project all the time, but perhaps I will use this event to see a project through next month!
And there’s one more thing. For a while I have followed the development of the Windows version of Scrivener. Scrivener is software that was initially developed for Mac only that was meant as a tool for writers. I think explaining all the features of this software would definitely be beyond the scope of this post, so it’s perhaps best you check out the official website for more details. What I have been wondering for a while now was if you could use Scrivener to help you in game design, too. And November may actually be my chance to do so!
You can get a special NaNoWriMo Trial Edition of Scrivener for free that you can use until December 7th. And if you are among the NaNoWriMo winners you’ll get a 50% discount on the full version of Scrivener. And even if you don’t manage to churn out a novel of 50,000 words next month, you still get a 20% discount by entering “NANOWRIMO” as coupon code at the purchase! 
But there’s more. I actually found a very interesting blog post on “Population: One” today, that shows how you can use Scrivener for RPG Writing. If you are interested in using Scrivener for NaGa DeMon, you definitely should check the article out.
Puerto Rico Role Players GM Workshop
2October 12, 2011
I often write about these things after the fact… maybe I should write about them before and more people will find out about it. Food for thought!
This past Sunday Puerto Rico Role Players held its very first GM Workshop. We’ve had some other activities before, Geeknics, miniature painting workshops, model building, but a friend and fellow member suggested we needed to do something to help Game Masters. So new people get excited about running games, newer GMs can learn from others that have been at it for a longer time, and even those that have GMed for some time learn from others. Thus the GM Workshop was born.
We had to reschedule it once (mea culpa!) but we eventually made it to a local burger joint in the Guaynabo area called John Doe’s, had some burgers, some sodas, some beer, and talked about games. About 26 people made it out to the workshop and we had a semi- formal plan with a group of GMs chiming in about topics such as how to put together a group, whether to use pre-packaged settings or creating your own, and even round robin GMing.
We had a nice mix, a younger newer GM, some old farts; I mean experienced GMs, and everything in between. I hope we get more newbies next time; the more GMs there are the more groups get created and the game community keeps growing. And now you know my nefarious plan!
I was amazed at all the good ideas; I shared some of my experiences and was really excited about all the new strategies and tools I heard about. Some I will use in my game tonight! I would like to thank all the friends, old and new, that made it. The group keeps growing, we are at over 350 members already, and I look forward to future activities together. We have more activities planned, the next Geeknic, a possible Christmas dinner, and people have suggested another minis paining activity, maybe even a terrain building seminar. So many games so little time!
I encourage you to try it in your neck of the woods, get together, exchange ideas and help other GMs become better at what they do. I know I certainly will be thanks to all my fellow GMs who participated in the GM workshop.
Free FATE
6October 10, 2011
Recently I decided to switch to Free FATE for my current FATE games. This has mainly three reasons:
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It’s free. We used Starblazer Adventures before, which is an awesome FATE game, but I just can’t expect all my players to get the book.
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It’s short. With just 48 pages is much more compact than most other version of FATE. Of course it doesn’t genre-specific rules, but I can easily use what I need from other FATE games.
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It’s available in German. One of my players don’t speak English at all, so I had to translate everything for him. Especially when it comes to stunts this can become quite the task.
Some people might say that my first reason is moot, since not every player needs a copy of the rules. That’s of course true, but some players are interested in reading the rules themselves – which I support if possible – but I just couldn’t lend them my book because I needed it to prepare for the next session. And SBA with it’s 600+ pages is not what I would consider “light reading”.
Free FATE is basically the shortest version of FATE I could find that doesn’t oversimplify things. I especially like the way stunts are handled. Instead of listing dozens of individual stunts Free FATE provides you with guidelines for your own stunts.
From what I’ve seen so far the rules presented in Free FATE are 100% compatible to Starblazer Adventures. So the switch from SBA to Free FATE should be pretty painless.
By the way, Free FATE is one of the few games where the German translation is actually better looking than the original one. While R Grant Erswell did a great job collating, modifying and augmenting the FATE rules, he’s layout skills are not up to par. It would be awesome if Kathy Schad, who did the layout for the German translation, would give the English original a facelift as well.
More Google+ Hangout musings
4September 28, 2011
Yesterday I had my second game over Google+ Hangout (check out my post about my first game there) and again, everyone had a blast. Of course we had to fight some technical issues first and even though we tried we couldn’t eliminate a nasty echo entirely. But as one of the players mused, we were exploring a cave after all, perhaps it’s supposed to sound like this. 
Like the last time Chris ran “Into the Odd” for us. After the game I realized that because of Google+ I have actually played more during the last two weeks than in a long time before.
Scheduling a game has always been a major issue, and since most of my local players live up to an hour’s drive away from me, the time they need to get home after the game has always been another problem. So most of the time we tried to play on the – much too short – weekends. And if then one or more players can’t make it you have to reschedule to the next weekend or the weekend after that. The end result is that you don’t get to play that often.
Almost as good as the real deal: playing RPGs over Google+ Hangout
6September 23, 2011
Yesterday I joined Chris McDowall and a group of three players I didn’t know before that in a game of “Into the Odd” over Google+ Hangout. In this post I want to talk a little bit about both. Let’s start with “Into the Odd”.
“Into the Odd” is basically a highly streamlined and simplified version of D&D that did away with classes, three of the attributes and includes a totally new magic system. In this game magic is not fully understood and based on artifacts left behind by some race that supposedly came from the stars. While it’s a fantasy games it brings a lot of horror and SF themes to the table. The focus of the game is exploration and in our game we explored the “Iron Coral”.
Teaching new games to an old group …
5September 14, 2011
I think a lot of GMs love to try new stuff: new games, new rules, new campaigns. But more often than not players are hesitant to try something new. Some groups never want to adopt new rules, getting them to leave the well-trodden paths is like pulling teeth.
As I wrote in the comments of yesterday’s post, there’s only one thing you can do when you want to try something new: don’t expect them to buy rulebooks and learn rules. You have to do the heavy lifting all by yourself. Learn the rules, teach them to your players, and help them to create characters. When you expect your players to take initiative you can often wait until hell freezes over.
You have a question about an existing or upcoming Stargazer Games product? Ask away! You want to know what we think about a recent development in the RPG industry? Send in your questions. You always wanted to know what we think about game X? Send us an email.
