Speedster Haiku

scarlet and yellow
sudden, faint scent of ozone
fastest man alive


~~~

Character Sheet will resume next week!  Sometimes, when I'm stumped for a thing I want to write about, or I want to write better, I buy some time with a nerdy haiku - although, I actually quite like this one.  Enhance today's offering with Blake Neely's theme for The Flash, and hey...

Run.

Filthy Casuals.

Mobile games, I've played a bit
But actually, too much to mention
I played what I thought looked cool
And dropped most games - little retention

Sorry, I had a weird urge to parody just a little bit of Sinatra.  I'm over it now.

A running theme on this blog right now seems to be "Things that have happened since last regularly wrote on this thing."  I will now continue this theme.

I have had a few of smartphones, and - as a gamer - I have played games on them.  Sims, role-playing games, strategy, clickers - I'm all over the place.  Do you know that many of the classic Final Fantasy games are now available on mobile devices?  I know, because I have most of them.

A few notables:

Monument Valley is a perspective puzzle game with simple yet haunting artwork and story.  There's even a set of expansion levels you can play - good for a few hours.  Not free, but really impressive.

The Simpson's: Tapped Out let's you (re)build Springfield and make your favorite characters do chuckleworthy little tasks.  Micro-transactions allow you to get special characters (who all have their own list of tasks) and buildings.  I feel like I'd enjoy this game much more if I were more of a fan of the show - but I also come back to it often.

If you prefer Marvel superheroes to Simpsons, Marvel Avengers' Academy is...a remarkably similar game where you collect heroes and villains, and build buildings they can interact with.  Most of the heroes are portrayed as if they are in their late-teens/early twenties - think cartoonish CW Marvel.  It's still compelling enough to get me to spend far too much in micro-transactions, trying to keep up with special in-game events.

Alphabear is a word puzzle game in which you can unlock cute teddy bears for being clever with spelling out words on a grid.  After each game, it uses one or two words you spelled in a sentence, and the game makes it easy to share that screen - so you can compete for weirdest bearly English phrases on the social network of your choice.

Slimes - you spend around 2 hours fighting them before starting the real game. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And I mentioned Final Fantasy above, but...Square Enix has also ported all of the classic Dragon Warrior games under their original Dragon Quest titles!  It's admittedly tougher to play them on a
phone, but a big enough tablet is great, and hopefully I can get them to work on Android TV, too.  Graphics are upgraded slightly, but not too much - they still take me back to my first grindy, turn-based roleplaying obsession.  Both the DQ and FF titles all cost way more than your typical $.99 cent game, though.

Here's the thing, though - with my focus back on WoW's new expansion, I don't spend a lot of time on any of these or the dozen other games I've tried.  The ones that I do spend some time with are all games that I can play for 15 minutes and then drop for the rest of the day.  Mobile games are like snacks of gaming - if I'm really hungry, I'm looking for something else.

Theoretical readers, talk to me about your favorites.  I feel lucky I've found games like Monument Valley - I hope more of those surprises are around the app store.

It's World Trees All the Way Down.

Yes, I'm still running a Nobilis game!  And I need to gush about it a smidgen.

Our current campaign is a bit of a reboot of the game I was running when last I wrote regularly, so the principals will be familiar.  In the meantime, we played a game about a sort-of-doomed Creation staring a almost-certainly-doomed Familia of Nobles, the Powers of Openings, Awakenings, Patience and Vengeance.  That campaign (subtitled "Ashes of an Age") is a long, fun, dark story.  Remind me to tell it to you sometime.

But my players seemed really interested in going back to the characters and the campaign we never really finished.  So, we rebooted, giving everyone a chance to re-imagine their characters, and giving our new player a chance to work her ideas in.  Which didn't completely happen...

In Nobilis, the group plays demigods that each have/are one concept that actually belongs to a bigger being, called an Imperator.  The concepts, or Estates, that each player chooses help to define who the Imperator will be.  In this case (campaign subtitled "When Worlds Fall"), my returning players each rebuilt their Powers of The Dead, Tracking, and Blood, while I threw in an NPC Power of Blades.  Their boss was a giant serpent/dragon named Nidhogg, the Serpent Who Gnaws at the Roots.  But the newer player had a great idea I couldn't ignore - she wanted to play someone old, and powerful outside of the normal dynamic of Noble and Imperator.  That character would get injured, and Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - would come to rescue her.  What's left of that new character's mythic essence translates into the Power of Release, which Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - claims as his own.

Oh, and the character - the new one, old and powerful?  It's basically Lilith, Adam's legendary first wife.

I was pretty friggin' happy that this idea fell in my lap - my first Nobilis campaign dealt heavily with the origins of humanity - in that setting, I had decided that Adam and Eve weren't really created, so
much as imported from beyond Creation.  Now I have another reason to re-imagine lots of characters from that first campaign, dust them off and make them relevant for a new game.

Most stories about the Garden blame the Serpent.  The Peacock got off  scott-free. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Themes are important for lots of table-top RPGs, and maybe more so for Nobilis.  A lot of the theme comes from the Estates the players choose, but also from the Code their characters adhere to.  Codes are sort of like political parties of demigods - and this group overwhelmingly focus on Codes that talk about individual freedom in some way.  Some focus on Humanity's freedom to direct their own fates, especially if that has dangerous or deadly consequences.  Others favor every being's freedom to be exactly what they are or should be.  And one prefers focusing on how to protect Humanity, including from themselves.  We definitely range all over the security vs. freedom spectrum.  I find it compelling and fun, so I often feature NPCs that relate to that somehow.

So far these characters have a great time dealing with large plot points in the most complicated way possible.  I've always been fortunate with this group of players, because they are very good at providing more hooks just by playing, and they're all pretty great at enjoying themselves even when their characters are in trouble or pain.  I still want to stand by the idea that any roleplayer can play Nobilis - but these people make the game for me.

Sometimes literally.


Bonus Links:

• My favorite art of Nidhogg, by Ruth Taylor
• A whole DeviantArt group for Nobilis art
• Tumblr for Jenna K. Moran, game designer for Nobilis.