Sleeper RPG: Playtest @ Birmingham Games Expo 2012 (Updated)

Introduction

[30 May - Added scans of documents

13 June - Added more scans of missing characters. Thanks Anna :) ]

I turned up for my first ever games expo excitedly on Friday morning to pick up my tickets and rush off to play an unreleased RPG game called Sleeper.  A disaster occurred, they could not find my tickets. Within minutes someone introduced himself as Tony and whisked me away and sorted me out with tickets then virtually escorted me across the road for the game.

Thanks Tony, disaster to superb customer experience in minutes.

Sleeper RPG: Before The Game

UK Games Expo: Game Link - http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/game.php?id=RPG37

Having never played a game at an expo before I thought I would try something new. The write up above looked quite intriguing and the briefest of scans of the Death Spiral website helped.

A bald gentleman introduced himself as Ben Counter, freelance author and one of the creators of the game, and said he would be running the session.

After a few minutes I figured out where I knew the name from, minus ten points for me.

The Famous Ben Counter

Sleeper RPG: Introduction

Ben introduced the general game concept. (from the Site)

Sleeper is a roleplaying game of Cold War relics and secret wars. It pits your character’s superhuman powers and elite training against the deadliest relics of the Cold War. The game combines military action, ultramodern gear, science fiction horror and the secret history of the twentieth century in deadly and thrilling battle for the survival of the world. During the darkest days of that conflict, the superpowers came to believe that nuclear war was a likely event. So they took their biggest secrets – the artificially enhanced agents and soldiers, possessing superhuman powers and the highest levels of training – and buried them in secret facilities from which they would wake when nuclear war had finished. These sleepers would then help found the post-nuclear world according to the principles of the regimes that created them.

I had a feeling of Cold City, Hot War meets military action movie. We had six pre gen characters to choose from. I selected Gravedigger as he was frankly the best. A teleporting KGB sniper agent. When I played him he developed a strange liking for the hot tub, I don't really know why.

Gravedigger

Return To RPGs III: From Boyz To Older Boyz

A New World

Over the following years until I left High School roleplaying games played a huge part of my life. Being geeky and unsocial I developed a great love of poring over the rule books and trying to work out what would happen if a wizard made a demon divide by zero. On the critical fumble table I made up very bad things happened. Very, very bad things. By this stage we had moved on up the role playing ladder to the giddy heights of the companion and the master set.

[caption id="attachment_545" align="aligncenter" width="439" caption="D&D Companion Set (Source The Acaeum http://www.acaeum.com/)"][/caption]

Return to RPGs II: Idiocy and Fat Club

Big Red Box Of Social Exile

So there I was with a big red box of RPG fun. I had no idea what to do with it and the solo adventure they had included looked fairly slim.

The books said that there were two kinds of people involved in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. The players who undertook exciting adventures and the dungeon master who set the scene and did everything else. I didn't know any dungeon masters to let me become a player.

For that matter I didn't know any players. D&D did not look like it would be much fun as a solitary activity.

Back then geeks, not that we were called that, tended to clump together at my school.

Return to RPGs: Appendix 1 - Pathfinder

Odd. I have not finished my series on my return to RPG gaming and here I am writing the appendix already.  In essays I always used to write my conclusion first so I knew what research I wanted to cite :) The reason I am doing a quick appendix is because of this:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800" caption="Pathfinder RPG Core, Cover"][/caption]

I have just got this through the post today.

During my return to roleplaying I tried to find out what had happened in the many, many years I was away. I learned that TSR was gone and some card gaming company had eaten it and done something potentially nasty to AD&D. Which initially did not bother me till I realised that AD&D was all that was left.

Guitar Hero Warriors Import Problem

Quick post here. Thanks to the forum member at the main Guitar Hero site that pointed out the blindingly obvious. The shop for my Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rawwk! Rock (PS3) has been offline. Leaving me unable (I thought) to import my songs from Guitar Hero 5.  Now despite the fact the songs I imported from Band Hero to GH5 showed up in GHWOR the solution still did not occur to me. Instead of repeatedly trying to import GH5 into GH:WOR all I had to do was import my GH5 songs into Band Hero.

It never occurred to me that I could import the songs from what I perceived as the main game into one of the adjunct games. From the looks of the site the games that support imported, and importing, songs are GH5/ Band Hero (basically the same game) and GH:WOR. Songs can not be imported down a gaming generation, so GH:WOR can not be imported into anything but GH:WOR can easily read songs that have been imported into earlier games.

The generations seem to be:

1st Gen: Guitar Hero World Tour. (Can be imported into GH5/BH)

2cd Gen: Smash Hits, Metallica, GH5/ Band Hero. (Songs from SH and Metallica can be exported into GH5/BH, GH5 and BH can import into one another)

3rd Gen: GH:Warriors of Rock. (Accepts imports from all earlier games)

The stores for GH5 and Band Hero still seem to be working fine alowing easy purchase of the import licenses. Also Band Hero can be picked up new for less than the second hand price.

Hopefully this will help someone who has been as daft as myself.