I thought I'd post this here - not sure where the best place to post it is but I'm fairly sure there'll be some people interested in it...

My RL job is a teacher (for anyone who is interested I am head fo ICT at a small-medium CofE high school). It's international book day this week and the school library co-ordinator and the English dept have organised a whole week of special literary-based events. It's almost been like a mini multi-genre convention hosted within school. Every day we've had different special events taking place at lunch times and a special book sale too.

As I run an after school gaming club (atm mostly Warhammer as the schools' league competition is about to start - with any look we'll qualify and I might get to bump into Andy at the finals :) ) I was asked by a teacher in the English dept who's son is into GW stuff and thought it might be an interesting addition to the book week events. However, on speaking to her she didn't know anything about the hobby beyond GW, so I ruled out miniatures games and said I'd run some RPGs instead.

I marketed them as "story games" and came up with five basic story ideas to touch on some classic genres that I thought the kids might be interested in: modern military, fantasy, superheroes, harry potter (esque) and sci-fi.

So all week I've been running 30 minute games over lunchtime with a number of kids who have had no previous experience of RPGs. The experience has been really interesting and rewarding, and hopefully I'll have a few converts to my after school club and I can make RPGs more viable at the club again, which will be great.

Anyway, given the time I had to run games and the time I had to prepare 5 different games with pre-gens in the middle of coursework marking season I had to run games that I knew well and were quick and simple to pick up.

On monday I ran a modern military game (British troops in Afghanistan) that ended up involving zombies I used 3:16 with the serial numbers filed off (I wanted the military theme to be key rather than a zombie one) and just changed the names of the weapons and swapped the armour box for an extra wound level. This game went particularly well, although I've only previously run the game for 2 or 3 players, so I found it a bit harder to balance the encounters properly for 6 (no one suffered a wound!), but I still managed to run a 3 encounter story to within a few minutes of conclusion before the bell went. The kids seemed to love it.

On tuesday a ran mutants and masterminds using the sample PCs in the book. I ran it very "story-ish" rather than hard, cold d20 system tactics. We only had time for a single encounter, but they really enjoyed imagining their super powers, and ripping the electronic heart out of some evil super robots.

Today I ran a fantasy game. I had initially planned to give Barbarians of Lemuria a run out, but I left it too late to familiarise myself with the rules and so had to botch something together at the last minute. What I eneded up with was essentially a heavily modified 3:16 (which was great for the characters mowing down goblins at a rate of 10 or so a round!). It was kind of 3:16 mixed with Advanced Fighting Fantasy. It actually worked realy well for a dungeon crawl and I'll probably play it again at some point. If people are interested and Gregor doesn't object I could post up my mods - I'm sure it'd turn the purist's stomach, but it did work nicely.

Tomorrow I will be dressing up as Alan Quartermain (a la the LXG comic) and running my harry-potter-esque game (actually a draconic-legacy-magic-in-modern-day-school setting).
I'll use Gateway for this, as I've got most of the stuff done for an earlier rules draft of the game.

Finally on friday I'll be running a pure 3:16 game.

I'll let you know how the other games go later.

Cheerio for now,

Ben