Evolve Your Game: Houses of the Blooded Provinces

One of the features we love about John Wick's Houses of the Blooded game is the creation, maintenance and growth of one's Province.  Part Civilization, Part SimCity, this feature in the game allows us to feel a great sense of gratification as we see our lands and provinces grow.

One of the ways I made it even more fun for my group was to provide "blank" sheets suggesting the layout of each Province.  No, there is no actual system effect to these maps, nor do they affect the game in any balance-shifting way, but there is an even greater sense of achievement seeing how the land looks in one glance, and being able to further declare stuff like how one's Forest is close to another's region.  We don't always be sticklers to accuracy, but we love being able to state stuff that further the game's mood and feel by simply glancing at the map and being able to say stuff like "Having visited your Ruin in the last Althua, which is at this part of the map, I have seen your Farms.  I would love to see the rest of your Province."

Anyway, here are seven of the other maps I've made for you guys to check out and enjoy.   I realize now that maybe I can create these kind of maps to represent the Clan Provinces in the Blood & Honor games too!

Feel free to print them out and use them for your own games if you want!

All made using Adobe Illustrator. 

EDIT:
Added here the beautiful rendition that one of my players, Erich, did of his Province using the map layout I gave him for the game.  He mentioned he made use of brushes and brushes/stamps by Josephe Vandel, who is a cool guy that does RPG cartography professionally.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/members/schwarzkreuz.html

Evolve Your Game: Tabletop Audio

I just recently found another online resource that you can use if you want to add more atmospheric tunes to your games. The site is called Tabletop Audio and it is truly a wonderful resource for ambiances (these are 10-minute situational audio files, according to the creator) which you can use to enhance your games and give them that immersive quality you hope to achieve.

The creator of the website is a professional composer and has been enjoying tabletop role-playing games with his two kids. They've been playing Numenera and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire lately, which sort of explains the eclectic range of the available tracks.

Check it out and know that the music is all released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which makes it all a whole new level of awesome.

Clicking a desired ambiance has the built-in player start.  Since each ambiance is a playlist in itself, you can actually map out the others you want to play in sequence.  There's a loop function to keep the music going, so while some tracks are not actually loopable, given the intense length of the songs (10-minutes compared to the standard 3 minute tracks of a soundtrack), it is unlikely your players will catch the looped part.



So check it out and see how it helps evolve your game!
Tabletop Audio is at http://tabletopaudio.com/

Be sure to drop a donation while you're at it!

Evolve Your Game: Birth of a Community

Whether it be a Houses of the Blooded game set in the Wilderness, or a Shadows of Esteren game where you are establishing a new village, you will want to check out  A Dark Room.

Definitely evocative for a game with the minimal-est of imagery.
For certain, it will give you great ideas.
Maybe even tempt you to have your players play it, then have the results after 24 hours represent their village.

Try it today.

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Evolve Your Game: Music for the First Timer

Evolve Your Game: Ambient-Mixer
Game: Any

When I was running games way back in the 80s, I used to struggle with movie soundtracks played on a cassette player (A what?) to enhance my games.  I remember wearing down my Enya tapes as I ran them over and over to add a deeper emotional charge to my Dungeons and Dragons games.  I recall recording selected tracks from The Lion King, The Prince of Egypt and even Mulan in a single tape so rather than have to manually rewind the tape each time a song ran out, I could keep it playing over and over again.  Eventually, I could afford my own CD player and following that, mp3 player, that I started to burn CDs with various mp3s and would even create "Official Soundtracks" for the games I would run.

And I remember how other groups would be astonished, or impressed, or inspired by how I'd use music in those games, and in many instances, they would ask how to start doing something like that in their own games.    Thankfully, nowadays, using music isn't that hard to accomplish in one's own games.  The internet offers a wealth of opportunities to dip into and take a stab in adding music to their games.   Purchasing movie soundtracks, thematic scores and even mood music now is very easy.  Creating your own playlists to have tunes arranged according to a specific emotion or atmosphere are as easy as clicking and dragging songs to a window, depending on what software you use.

Finally, for those who aren't willing to take the time to burn discs or purchase songs, there are websites that make it even easier to do.  This post is focused on one such site:  Ambient Mixer.

Ambient Mixer is a free online resource with a thriving community that has been creating wonderful soundscapes for others to use.  The site requires no installation to use and all the music are created with royalty free audio files.  Need an evocative theme to add color to your fantasy games?  Hoping to embellish your board game nights by having appropriate dramatic music while your group plays Last Night On Earth?  Searching for a fun touch of ambient environmental sounds to suggest the group has arrived at that tavern? This site has got you covered.  

 And even better, each arrangement has the appropriate controls so the user can make adjustments where they feel are necessary.  Not too keen on the crickets in the forest music?  Then slide that audio sample down to mute.  Want that cityscape to sound more like a city with busy streets than one with just the occasional car horn?  And slide those portions up and tweak the frequency of the loop.

Ambient Mixer is the kind of website I wish I had back when I started my gaming days.  And I'm extremely happy that others have the opportunity to use such a site now to give their game that added dose of cool.

http://www.ambient-mixer.com/

Evolve Your Game: Love Letter of the Blooded

Evolve Your Game:  Love Letter

Game: Houses of the Blooded

My partner and I recently acquired a beautifully crafted card game called Love Letter by Seiji Kanai.  The game revolves around a group of suitors (played by up to four players) who hope to show their affection towards a Princess by sending her love letters.  However, since all the other suitors are trying to one up each other, the players must try to get their letters to the Princess through intermediaries.  These are represented by the other characters in the cards.  The game is played in multiple rounds, with each round having points awarded to the player who either remained in play or has the highest scoring character as his intermediary.  The player accumulating the most points at the end of all the rounds wins the game.

First, let me say that the game is just beautiful and there is an elegance in its simplicity yet strategic challenge.   Each player has a card in hand, and draws a second card, and between the two cards must choose which one to discard.  Most cards have an effect once discarded, and players vie for being the last one in the round to win the points of affection.  The cards come in a red velvet bag with is adorned with golden letters and a golden rope to tie it shut.  There are small red wooden pieces to use as counters, which I feel might have been better if they were stylized hearts of metal or tiny dried flower petal like counters.   But the cards are artfully illustrated, the writing is superb and the rules are very cohesively written.

You can find the official rules of the game here:
http://www.alderac.com/tempest/love-letter/

Just after a few rounds of playing the game, my partner and I very quickly realized how much the game reminded us of the infamous Althua that the Ven would celebrate during Winter.    The act of achieving goals through intermediaries whom were disposed of once no longer needed struck a chord with how the Ven were towards others.   We jokes at how in our next Houses game, this would be a great addition to have during a party scene.

I felt, however that I could go a step further.   Given how there seemed to be some other fan variants of the game (including an Adventure Time variant which had both Marshall Lee and Marceline?) I thought of making an unofficial version of the game with the Houses as the characters.  Given the superiority of the Senate, it seemed apt to make them the highest ranking card (and discarding the card would mean the Senate threw away your proposed matter to be discussed) while having the Veth as the last card seemed apt to symbolize how the lowly vassals tended to overhear things which, if used successfully could oust a rival from a political arena.

 So here you have it, each House matching a special ability that a card conferred.  The Bear, for example, found protection from their Circle of Protection blessing, while the Elk were ousted whenever an alliance with either the Falcon or the Wolf was raised.  Of course, the Serpent was given the chance to peer at another's hand, given their ties to Wisdom.  And the sly Fox would help upset an opponent, so long as you called upon their services at a time when you are prepared to make such comparisons.

I hope you enjoy this unofficial hack. And I do hope by not reprinting any of the actual rules (save for those already found online via images), I'm not breaking any rules.

Enjoy!

Download the printable PDF here.