From: wsb1@dolphin.upenn.edu (Bill Brickman)
Subject: When, when, when!
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 1995 09:57:10 -0500 (EST)
Greetings, gentlemen. Odd that I had to meet you through an international mailing list when I've been posting stuff all over campus to try to find gamers, especially ArM gamers. But nice just the same.
I'm dying to get into an Ars Magica campaign. The one we were running in Russia died because it had too many people (13!), the groups split up, and I've been without a game for months. I'm going into withdrawl. My own Castle Falkenstein game was destroyed by lack of player interest (I think I contacted you about it earlier, Robert). I've been trying to get together any kind of group, and failing. So I'd like very much to attach myself to another gaming group.
My work number's listed below, and my home number's (215) 928-0154. I'm in Center City, about a half block south of 10th and Pine. I'm only too willing to travel to a game, just give me time and place, and I'll be there.
Bill
a.k.a. Sgt. Brickman, blah blah blah, etc.
From: captain@pobox.upenn.edu (Mike Simpson)
To: wsb1@dolphin.upenn.edu (Bill Brickman)
Date: Tue 21st Feb 1995
Bill --
I'd love to have you. We're currently running with six players, one Storyguide, and three rulebooks. None of us have played AM before (I was running more or less the same group in Pendragon for a good chunk of last year), so you haven't actually missed much -- we'll be having our sixth session this week, but sessions 1-4 were a 'prologue' adventure not connected with the meat of the Saga ... I wanted everyone (myself included) to get used to the system in a fairly non-lethal, non-make-the-players-hate- the-Storyguide-environment. Mechanics-wise, we still do a lot of fumbling around looking stuff up. I expect that will decrease in the future as our familiarity increases.
Everything (and I do mean everything) related to the campaign is archived on my website, which is at:
http://pobox.upenn.edu/~captain/index.html , then follow the link from the word 'dead' on the index page.
There you will find campaign reference material, session summaries (in ridiculously dramatized format), info on the players, their characters, and the covenant, The Concilium, and all sorts of other useful/useless stuff. You'll probably want a graphical web client like Mosaic or Netscape -- text viewers like Lynx work okay but the formating goes to hell, unfortunately.
You might take a perusal through it, and make sure that the flavour of the campaign is to your liking. It's set a bit later in the period (1325) and I dispensed with the existence of the Order for reasons both practical (I didn't have access to OoH) and thematic (the Order's destruction provides one of the driving forces at the base of the campaign). It's a bit dark, not in the sense of WW demon-plagued angst-ridden darkness, but in the sense of grimy-'n-gritty middle ages ugliness. Plague, poverty, rigid heirarchical authority structures, little regard for individual life, all that sort of thing. I used to play a lot of Harnmaster ... it's infectious. The Concilium is also a strange sort of covenant, full of secrets and hidden agendas, a real bunch of misfits and outcasts. Lots of bitter players, I guess. ;)
You're welcome to sit in on our session tomorrow (2/22), actively or as an observer. The schedule may be a bit wonky -- I'm going to have to take a half-hour or so around 6:30 and drive my wife into work, then come back. You're welcome to bring prepared characters (each player get 1 magus and 2 companions -- I encourage variety and frequent switching off so people don't get bored) and I'm still allowing quite a bit of fudging with skills, specialties and such as we play, mainly because none of us knew the system that well when we generated everything and so we made a lot of mistakes, mechanics- and common sense-wise.
I reserve the right to reject characters in a fairly draconian, non-discutory style, mainly because my last campaign (the Pendragon one) died a hard and ugly death because I made a grevious mistake in allowing a player to use a character that was horribly, horribly unbalancing to the campaign. I did it because I was short on time, and in a good mood, but it almost cost me a good friendship and it pretty effectively killed the fun for everyone.
Other than that, I'm a pretty relaxed Storyguide ... we still do a bit more joking and bullshitting around the table than I'd like, mainly because of our unfamiliarity with the rules, but most everyone focuses in when things get tense, and I think we have a lot of fun.
There, now I've run off at the mouth for far too long. Bad habit.
Keep in touch --
-m.
From: wsb1@dolphin.upenn.edu (Bill Brickman)
To: camelot@graphics.cis.upenn.edu (Deadfire Folks)
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 11:11:00 -0500 (EST)
For those of you folks who didn't get a chance to get introduced to me last night, here's a little OOC info on Bill Brickman, yours truly.
First off, the requisite addresses/telephone numbs:
Home:
1001 Waverly Street (half block south of 10th and Pine, Center City)
Philadelphia, PA 19147-1226
Work:
Graduate School of Education
3700 Walnut Street, Suite A-36 (that's bottom floor comp lab)
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
898-1847
Yes, they'll take intramural mail as well, Mail Code is 6216.
Mike described my job perfectly when joking about jobs last night: I work for 3X grand a year, 9-5 (more like 8-9), 4 weeks vacation, in a basement office with no windows. This may or may not sound familiar.
I've been in Phila about 2-1/2 years now, and been working for Penn about 2 years, full time. I was also a student here at the Grad School of Ed (GSE) until they revealed that to complete my MA I'd have to be a full time student, which precluded my being a full-time employee with full-time employee tuition benefits. Hopefully I'll find another way to get a masters in some subject part time, and get Penn to pay for it. God help me, I've been thinking about applying to SEAS/CIS. Warnings would be appreciated.
I always give the "Highlander" answer when asked "So where are you from?"-- "Lots of different places." It's kinda hard to describe. I most recently moved from Chicago, where I graduated from the Univ. of Chicago (geek degree-- BA in Pure Math with CompSci minor). I'll leave it up to you guys to try to place my accent.
I've got a whole gaming resume in addition to my real-world one-- it's one flaw (?) is that I've never played in a D&D or AD&D campaign-- just one brief one-shot adventure. I don't even know that system. I've played (and run as GM) Champions, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS [Time Travel & Cliffhangers], Castle Falkenstein, and of course, Ars Magica (every edition). I've played in covenants in France, Spain, Constantinople, the Lake District, Pennsylvania (!), the Hebrides, Bavaria, and Novogorod from covenants built from the ground up to ancient Winter covenants barely in this reality. I've also played on tela, the ArM MUSH, when it was up (was a judge, even) and in an ArM LARP. But don't let any of this worry you, I'm just mentioning it as a resource.
I've been part of a gaming group here which broke up once because of too many people (13 in our last ArM campaign), and then for lack of people (3 in my Castle Falkenstein game) because we split up into too many different groups. Mostly, I just want to play. For the last month, I've been in serious RPG-withdrawl. I've had flashbacks to previous character's lives, etc. And I'm only too happy to join an intelligent troupe of ArM players. It beats the Magic playtesting I was doing, that's for sure.
Oh, and I am sort of involved in the ars-magica mailing list. Well, I've sort of been on it for three years, and, well, I'm not a member of the Secret Masters of Ars Magica (Sh! We Don't Exist), but I do work for their non-existant selves. How to put this... well, nevermind. Whatever I was going to say flew out my mind during the last luser interruption. Suffice it to say that I'll be your official "Order of Hermes" representative at Origins '95. I hope you'll all come (It's in July, at the Convention Center) and play in my event (an ArM LARP). I also have a few contacts in the gaming world, the most relevant to you is my best friend's girlfriend, Tamara, who's the manager of Showcase Comics on South Street (464 South), and an old player in a lot of my campaigns. She can special order almost any gaming stuff you might want, and will do it gladly and quickly. But drop me a line first, if it's Ars Magica stuff, I already have a copy.
Anyway, thanks for the chance to participate. I'll try to spend my spare time today looking over what character sheets are posted on the Deadfire pages, and perhaps sending suggestions for tweeking. And posting my own, of course.
How do you folks feel about the Hospitallers? I've got this other companion I've wanted to play for a long time, and well...
Be Seeing You,
Bill