Canon Puncture Game Blog

For the next five weeks, I will be GMing a beta playtest of the exciting Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies by Atomic Sock Monkey Press for the CP crew.

I’m still working my way through the text (which is a whopping 311 pages), but there are gobs of interesting bits.  I keep finding tidbits that make me say hmn and oh and make mental notes.  With such a thick text, I believe once I have PCs to build stories around and with, the text will be even more valuable.

 Speaking of PCs, we haven’t started character generation, but after finishing the After Serenity game, we discussed how the PCs will be a party.  I listed out the party suggestions straight from the S7S book and the players were interested in all being together for revenge.  Perrin said he wants to play a priest who is after the villain because of something that happened to a member of his flock.  I’m not sure where Norwood and Josh (of Something Wild) are with their PC concepts.

 We’ll hash out PCs and get some details on this villain during the next game session.  I’m prepping an intro that should work pretty well regardless of the details, something somewhat generic swashbuckling that I can throw at them, and then flesh things out on the fly.

 Before we play PTA, I’m planning a one night playtest of How We Came to Live Here, a game Brennan Taylor is devolping.  The game is a Native American-inspired setting.  I’m just reading through the background setting now, but I like the gender differences and the brief yet tantalizing descriptions of the clans. 

After playing Prey on my XBox 360 recently and also watching The New World, this is making me want to get my imaginary tomahawk and whip up on some evil spirits!

We have probably one session left for After Serenity.  This means the PTA pitch session is upcoming.  I received my copy of PTA from my lovely wife for Christmas and I’m pretty happy.

I also believe I’ve found a solution for playing cards over the net.  Twelve Penny Software has a program called House Rules 2.0.  We will be giving the 30 day trial a go.  If it works, I’ll buy licenses for the group as a belated Christmas gift and we’ll be able to play PTA over Skype without any problems.

The After Serenity sessions are set for 2 - 3 nights, so the CP crew should be able to squeeze in a couple sessions of something else before year’s end.  I’m hoping we can play Cat and perhaps Primetime Adventures (PTA).

PTA should last into January.  I’m quite excited about the game.  I’m not sure how we’ll play cards over Skype (that’s the method used for conflict resolution instead of dice.  If we don’t have a deck to use online somehow, then we’ll need to use actual physical decks, and that throws off probabilities since that’s three decks, not one. 

Norwood mentioned he’d like to play something not centered around war or battle, and that sounds peachy to me.  Since we haven’t done our “pitch session” (that’s where all players and the GM, or Producer, create the campaign together), I have no idea  what we’ll end up playing.  Man, I really wish I knew what we will be playing!

This December 2007, the Canon Puncture crew is playing a module Common is creating for the After Serenity setting.  Our PCs are former crewmates of a transport ship that was lost in a card game.  Norwood is playing an engineer, Orklord is playing the pilot, and our guest player is playing the captain. 

In the first session, we began on a derelict spaceship where we landed a job acting as “security” for a battered old Firefly class transport as it delivered goods to a dustball planet.  No, the Firefly didn’t have Mal or Jayne… or sadly, Inara. 

Common, Orklord and Norwood are playing Shadowcoil.  What’s Shadowcoil?

Its a mash-up of the Shadowrun 4th edition setting as seen through the lens of Mortal Coil.  We’re using all the Shadowrun background in the Mortal Coil rules system.

Norwood is playing a Troll Shaman.  Orklord is playing an Ork Combat Mage.