Superior GMs
Come on, you've always wondered what games Superiors
run. OK, maybe you haven't - but guess
what? You're about to find out anyway.
Blandine: She thought Nobilis was fun
if a little hard on humanity and ran a memorable Castle Falkenstein
campaign once... but she comes back to Changeling like an old,
old friend.
Christopher: Remember the first really good AD&D
campaign you played as a kid, when you ran around fighting the forces of evil,
stayed up with your friends half the night and generally got to be brave and
save the world? Christopher runs
campaigns like that all the time.
David: Bunnies and Burrows. No ranged weapons, no armor, it's
underground and it had the first real martial arts rules. What's not to like?
Dominic: GURPS; he switched from AD&D
after people complained about his methods for enforcing alignments one too many
times. Incidentally, he told me to tell
all of you that Stat Normalization is a crock.
Eli: Toon. Live-action Toon.
Do I really need to describe his style of GMing?
Gabriel: Went through most of the White Wolf stuff
before descending upon Hunter: the Reckoning with a happy
screech. She's apparently also
got/worked out the LARP rules. Contrary
to popular belief, it's not hard to tell the difference between a Gabrielite Hunter
LARP party and a group of Servitors of Divine Fire fulfilling their dissonance
conditions: the correct term would actually be 'impossible'.
Janus: Well, as a general rule Janus runs Feng
Shui, or indeed anything else that lets a PC fire two AMT Automag IVs
while driving a burning Scorpion* cycle through a plate glass window and into a
crowd of evil Colombian drug lords with Heckler & Koch MP5 K SMGs and
backup ninja. Mystic kung fu powers are
not-really-optional.
*I'm sure that somebody's going to tell me that
Scorpions are lame. Sue me.
Jean: Jean experiments with a wide variety of game
systems and campaigns, all of which are carefully constructed to both challenge
and entertain the specific entities playing in them. His regular players marvel at his unparalleled ability to
accurately gauge the mood of the table, as well as the way that the Archangel
of Lightning can evoke complex and interesting NPCs with nary a wasted word or
gesture. His refusal to let personal
issues get in the way of his gamemastering is also deeply appreciated.
All of this goes right out the window when he runs Cyberpunk,
of course.
Jordi: Werewolf: the Apocalypse, only
cheerful.
Khalid: For crying out loud, the guy just moved back
in. Pester him about starting up that Unknown
Armies campaign later, OK?
Laurence: Seventh
Sea, Legend of the Five Rings, Deadlands
and a Lord of The Rings campaign using the old I.C.E. sourcebooks. Yes, he's doing this simultaneously; you
see, he had a bunch of people ask him to run at the same time, and some of the
players had issues with some of the other players, and well, it just sort of
ended up that way...
Litheroy: It's odd: his Call of Cthulhu
game has a waiting list almost as long as Marc's, his players make all the sessions
(and are always on time, too) and nobody says anything bad about the campaigns
- but nobody's played for more than one campaign and, now that I think about
it, nobody says anything about the campaigns, period. Curious, really.
Marc: Well, he was reluctant to run a game at first
- Marc prefers to play - but there's a waiting list a mile long for his first
edition rules Traveler trading campaign. Some of his players have forgotten that
their characters even know how to use weapons.
Michael: Rolemaster. Three words: Critical hit tables.
Novalis: All Flesh Must be Eaten. Hey, it's all about catharsis and harmlessly
letting off steam, right? And shooting
zombies in the head, of course.
Yves: They say that he's got this weird homebrewed
thing about angels and demons going on, but it's hard to tell, because tracking
down precisely where in the Library he runs the blessed thing has yet to be
accomplished by anybody who hasn't gotten an invite. No, nobody is precisely sure who plays in it, either. Isn't ineffability grand?
Zadkiel: She doesn't run any games on her own, but
all the other Archangels know to tap her if they need an emergency replacement
GM.
Alaemon: Currently, somewhere in Stygia there are
seven demons sitting at a table in a room with no doors. Six of them remember nothing about their
past lives, their abilities, their limitations or, indeed, anything at all that
happened before they sat down at said table.
They have spent the last three months working out that there is indeed a
universe beyond the room, and are now currently working out how to exit.
The seventh is, of course, one of Alaemon's
manifestations, and he finds the entire exercise fascinating.
Andrealphus: The Prince of Lust apparently
misunderstood the question, "What's your favorite roleplaying
game?" The answer cannot be
repeated in public, private or indeed even in the privacy of one's own mind:
all attempts to type out the mere... props... have resulted in the spontaneous
combustion of numerous keyboards. In
other words: guess.
Asmodeus: GURPS, with special
homebrewed rules. It's a decent enough
system, for something designed by humans, but the rules needed a lot of
elaboration before they were even remotely up to the Prince of the Game's
rigorous standards.
Baal: Roleplaying games are for wusses: Baal
wargames. He's got all the miniatures -
and I mean all of them. The real kind,
too: only wimps worry about lead poisoning.
And no, he hasn't gotten around to painting them
all, either. What, you thought that you
were the only one?
Beleth: Delta Green, only
cheerful.
Well, for a given value of 'cheerful'.
Belial: Please: Hackmaster all the
way, baby. Do you have any idea how
many different versions of fireballs that game has? What do you mean, 'they're for the players'?
Fleurity: "Rifts". The quotes are there because he hasn't
really run a game in three decades.
Sure, the players all show up, but then out comes the bowl, then
everybody tokes up, then somebody gets hungry, so people are sent out for
munchies, and the bowl needs to be refilled, so everybody tokes up again, then
drifts a little until the food shows up, which gets eaten, and then there's no
more weed, so somebody has to go get more, and by now the haze is enough to get
rocks stoned, and did I mention the bad puns and lame-ass "Remember when
my character did X?" stories?
Haagenti: Never GMs, never plays - but he's got all
the books. Why, we may never know.
Kobal: Someone who lacks subtlety and/or an
appreciation for irony might be forgiven for thinking that Kobal would run a Paranoia
game ratcheted up to 11. Actually, they
had better be forgiven, because they'd be right.
Kronos: Nobody talks about it. Nobody. Nobody even refers to the game's full title. It's considered remarkably dangerous to even
use the initials in conversation, which meant that Kronos' Bureau of Ethereal
Surveillance & Manipulation had to undergo a sudden name change...
Lilith: Lilith will run any game you ask for, any
time that you want to play and anywhere that's convenient for you. She'll also be more than happy to stop along
the way and pick up the snacks and drinks that you requested, tailor the
campaign to reflect the themes that you want to explore and even adopt as the
official Gamemistress uniform that interesting little thing that you last saw
on that drow chick in Dragon Magazine... ah, well,
let's just say that she's more than happy to be accommodating.
Malphas: Homebrew rules, homebrew system, homebrew
players - Malphas is the ultimate solitaire player. Apparently, the only entity that can give Malphas a challenge in
a RPG is, well, Malphas. This is not a
problem for Superiors, per se... but it can make his life difficult in all
sorts of odd ways: after all, most entities usually can't stiff themselves over
paying for the pizza. Malphas can: he
can backstab and betray himself in game, too.
Weird, but that's Factions for you.
Nybbas: Um, you have noticed the sudden spread of
3rd Edition D&D, right?
Saminga: Remember that AD&D game
you played when you were 15 or so? The
one with the pimply-faced GM and his habit of snorting laughter at
nothing? The one with the players with
similar facial conditions, no hygiene, no social skills, no personality and an
endless string of lame jokes? Remember
the endless dungeon crawls, complete with acts of random genocide, pointless
combats, gratuitous use of fireballs in narrow passages, stale nachos, hot drow
chicks in chain mail bras, flat soda, ponderous puns and exceedingly dubious
morality? Remember how you eventually
went on to play something else?
Saminga didn't.
Valefor: Nothing would be suitable for the Prince of
Thieves except Commonwealth, the finest RPG ever made. Infinitely adaptable, capable of
accommodating any playing style and concept, possessed of both a intuitive
character generation system and a simple yet effective combat resolution
system, Commonwealth deserved every single one of the awards
bestowed upon it by a stunned and amazed gaming community - and later, the
world, after it broke out into the mainstream (and made roleplaying
respectable). The game even proved that
you could actually make good money writing roleplaying games, too...
Well, of course you've never heard of
it. Valefor, remember?
Vapula: A
LARP Mage Sons of Ether/Technocracy game that periodically
expands to the point where it takes over Tartarus. Nope, nobody ever notices.