Thursday, June 14, 2012

A New Column - 'Worst Case Scenario'


'No one understands my mad, mad genius... '
(Who amongst you remembers that book cover?)
Ok, I have to come clean about something.

I have an addiction.

I'm hopelessly hooked on game scenarios.

You see, game scenarios are like a drug to me. They are my smack. My kryptonite. I am defenseless against their overwhelming power of dorkiness. I have stacks and stacks of the freakin' things stashed around the house. They can be for any game really; historical, sci-fi or fantasy, it doesn't really matter - cripes, most of them are for systems I don't even play. I usually have a scenario book in my shoulder tote at all times (you never know when you might get bored at a meeting). My wife even lets me read the bloody things at the dinner table - bless her soul. She puts up with me flipping through pages, looking at charts, chortling away between forkfuls of food and gulps of bad plonk, gleefully snorting at umpire's notes and idiotically grinning at victory conditions. Its a sickness really.

Next to reading scenarios I also really enjoy creating them. Grid maps, entry points, reinforcement tables, special events cards; to me they are like some kind of nerd poetry. I often will find myself reading a book or watching a film and think, damn, this would make an excellent scenario. Sometimes I get them onto paper, but often they slip past my espresso-addled mind.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this particular fetish with you by starting a new regular column on the blog that I'm calling either 'Worst Case Scenario' or 'Half-Baked Plan' (By popular vote its  officially 'Worst Case Scenario'!) which will focus on a dog's breakfast of ideas for game scenarios. To be honest these will be pretty rough concepts, not fully-developed or necessarily ready-to-play, but I hope that they might inspire others to take them to the next level and actually try them out. Anyway, I'll give it a whirl and see where it goes.

First up: some orderly, courtly and courteous slaughter from the Hundred Years War...