Age of Ravens

Kingdom of Ierendi: RPG Items I Like

2012-01-26T09:34:00.000-05:00

WHATIS IT?

Regionsourcebook covering a island confederation dedicated to "adventure"in the Mystara  setting.

ONFIRST LANDING
Icontinue my reviews of the entire classic D&Dgazetteer series.After a series of really strong entries in the series, we come to aweaker one. GAZ4:The Kingdom of Ierendi  feelslike a throwback. Instead of the focused setting building of theprevious three entries, Ierendi presents classic adventures and storyseeds. Not that this is a bad approach, but it doesn't quite fit withthe other books. It offers adventure sandbox- with the culturaldetails purely as flavor. The material on all levels depicts Ierendimore as a place for PCs to go to or through rather than come from.Again that isn't bad- just different. Still there's a great deal ofinspiration- general and specific- to mine. I like the idea of a setof islands as a former fantasy penal colony. I've certainly usedthat. For more on the Mystara and gazetteer series in general, please see here .

PRESENTATION
Onceagain we get a tri-fold screen, with interior panels featuring acastle and a diagram of one of the key islands. There's also a colormini-hexmap showing Ierendi's relation to its neighbors. The fold-outhexmap enclosed shows all of the Ierendi island chain. It also has adecent and useful map of the City of Ierendi, with insets showingsome of the port defenses. On the reverse side, it has a black &white hex sheet (strangely with black as the background). This isintended for use with the sheets of counters included with thesupplement. These cover ships and navies from across the area so thatDMs can set up grand sea-based battles.

The64-page booklet follows the same basic design as the three previousseries entries. However, there's a greater use of white space here,and the font size has clearly been increased a point or two.Strangely, after the density of the other volumes, that actuallymakes this seem more empty- even though it is easier to read. CyldeCaldwell  providesanother signature cover, and StephenFabian  providesinterior illustrations. These are mostly atmospheric scenes from thevarious islands, plus a handful of NPC faces peppered throughout thebook. Ierendiusesa good deal more boxed text than the other books- mostly to mark outall of the suggested adventures. The center of the booklet is a pullout section for the players, intended to offer a “tourist brochure”for anyone thinking of heading there. AnneC. Gray  wrotethis, as well as several other D&D books.

THEBOOK ITSELF
Thebooklet opens with a brief description of the contents, followed bythe key background points for the nation: history, timeline,geography, key people, government, and economy. Ierendi has a strangelayered history- beginning with conflicting stories of the origin.The Makai are described as aboriginal natives, but the “Islanders”seem to be the more dominant group. They claim to be the originalsettlers- exiled criminals from the Five Shires (covering in GAZ8:The Five Shires ).Those original criminals are said to have numbered eleven humans,four haflings, three dwarves, and five elves...which must have madefor an odd culture. These criminals survived and flourished. Whenword got back to the Shires, they sent ships to stake a claim to thelands. However the exiles (along with the native Makai) managed tofight them off. The true stories a little more complicated- involvingthe Thyatian Empire who controlled the Shires at the time ofcolonization. It was a more formal penal colony (ala Australia), setfree by a rebellion which established a monarchy. They managed tofight off Thyatian Naval forces with the aid of a local secretmagical chantry located on Honor Island. That power keeps Ierendi asone of the most important naval forces in the world- hence theinclusion of the various naval game bits in with thesupplement.

Ierendiis made up of a number of islands, with a wide range of climates andterrain. That gives the DM a great deal of range to run in. Volcanicactivity and magic can, of course, be used as an excuse forstrangeness in the area. Ierendi also differs in being ruled by an“Adventurer King and Queen" elected in a competition everyyear. A council exists as well to advise- and there exists a kind ofhereditary noble class on the island, with a hand in the Navy, theRoyal Brigade, and the tourism industry- that being a key source ofrevenue for the nation. That's an interesting twist- and given theheavy use of magic for things like transport, it actually makessense. And tourism was a historically important source of revenuesand interaction- the Greeks toured the Ancient Pyramids, just asmodern tourists do today (though perhaps with less creaturecomforts). The Ierendi book only offers a single page of key NPCs,six characters. It seems like an oddly truncated entry in the book-but the focus here is on session seeds and adventures. Ierendisociety presents a strange mix of “Islander” traditions mixedwith what I can only call “Adventurer” culture. It is a classicfantasy feudal society, with those rulers chosen yearly in atournament. Some of the implications of that kind of power transitionare mentioned, but only a little. The focus of the society is ontourism, with the wealth of that any local food plenty making this atropical paradise.

Allof this material is covered in the first 17 pages. There are someinteresting ideas there, and more than any of the previous books, theideas seem aimed at offering DMs ready quick adventures. Severalboxed story seeds appear within this section alongside, the societaldiscussion. It is worth noting that there's a significant section onThe Eternal Truth, the religion of Ylaruam presented here (coveredin GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam ).It is odd and given more space than some of the more related materialon Ierendi. the section depicts the faith as militant, joyless anddemanding. That presentation's somewhat at odds with that of theearlier gazetteer. There's certainly historical evidence for greatermilitancy among Muslim groups outside of the Middle East, and Iwonder if that's the analogue source for this. Perhaps it draws onthe nature of Islamic trade groups in places like the Pacific.Whatever the source, it just stuck out for me. Finally there's almostnothing offered on making up a character from Ierendi, compared tothe material given in the other books.

Themiddle of the booklet has two different pullout sections. One offersa tourist guide to Ierendi, which- while more than a little goofy-will be useful for DMs using the nation "as is." The otherprovides four pages on Ierendi's military, in particular the Navy. Itpresents more detailed ship rules and naval combat options, intendedto complement and expand the rules given in the Dungeons& Dragons Set 2: Expert Rules .There's some basic discussion of the different port capacities acrossthe nations of Mystara, a combat resolution table, and a sea battlechance event table. The rules aren't deep- and while they have awargamey feel to them, they aim to give a DM tools to play out such abattle, rather than to simulate precisely these kinds ofconflicts.

Therest of the booklet (19-28, 37-64) covers each of the major islandsin turn. Though it varies from section to section, each has between1/3 to 2/3 of the material devoted to adventures from seeds todungeon locations. That's quite a shift from the other books whichfocused on background and mostly offer plot seeds (often a linkedseries) in a chapter at the back.

THEISLANDS
IerendiIsland: Thelargest island, and the one which most holds to the social materialpresented earlier in the book. The material focuses exclusively onIerendi City, rather than the island as a whole. That's useful sinceadventures will probably use this place as a hub. The details hereagain play into a looser and more wacky kind of campaign: magicalP.I.'s, a formal Adventurers' Club, and royal postings forquests.
SafariIsland: Anature preserve, wilderness tour and theme park. The parks offerarenas for adventurers- with spectators able to observe throughwell-protected galleries. Weapons give are non-lethal, with aLazer-Tag like belt registering damage done and taken. Two separateadventures are presented with maps, one involving Lizard Men and theother Hill Giants.
AlcoveIsland: Apirate nest among the islands. While people have now settled here,pirate still hide among the lagoons and there's a secret port forthem here as well.
UtterIsland: Adeliberately creepy place, it is the home of a group of geneticalbino humans who have lived here for generations. They have a uniqueImmortal patron, but are otherwise pretty normal. The presentationseems aimed at making the PCs nervous.
WhiteIsland: Adifficult to access island of white stone, it has a small Druidicabbey. Legends surround the local white birds and apes, and thepractices the Druids undertake to keep an ancient evil fromreturning.
RoisterIsland: Anisland exclusively settled by the Makai natives. It seems set uppurely to provide a backdrop for adventures involving theMakai.
AloysiusIsland: Aformer penal island, host to sickness carrying mosquitoes (oddlycalled mau-mau). The recent discovery of mineral resources there havemade it a target of increased settlement and development, despite therisks.
ElegyIsland: Siteof ancient Makai burial grounds and ceremonial markers.
FletcherIsland: Aloose take on FantasyIsland (completewith Mr. Coarke who spins the illusions). Ugh. (*Yes, they make a"The Carpet, the Carpet!!!" joke. )
HonorIsland: Thesecond largest of the island descriptions, Honor is home to a secretcabal of mages. They're the secret behind Ierendi's naval success.They jealously guard their knowledge of their existance, with achantry in the heart of a volcano. That actually conceals a passageto the Plane of Fire- with elementals and mages exchanginginformation and resources.

OVERALL
Theweakest of the gazetteers so far, TheKingdom of Ierendi stilloffers much for a DM. It adds some interesting color to the setting-and some global material in the naval discussion. It does raise thegoofiness bar a little- if you like more staid and serious settings,then Ierendi may be well out of your comfort zone. I'm a littlesurprised at the absence of any West World referencesin the adventure theme park section. For my own campaign, I took someof the key concepts and changed them up signifjncaitly. Ierendiremains a naval power, an island nation, and a former penal colony.I've played up the tensions its existance creates between severaldifferent powerful kingdoms who see it as their “property.” Iused the Honor Island concept, although that particular chantry wasdestroyed in an earlier campaign. I also think of Ierendi as a muchlarger set of island, dozens and dozens of them, some of them withmagical micro-climates. Perhaps the biggest change came in myconception of the rulership of the nation. Given that our game worldleans more towards fantasy combined with steampunk and swashbuckling,I ported over the concept of AlAmarja from Overthe Edge tohere. So Ierendi City is a kind of strange crossroads of magic andconspiracy, the 'Casablanca' of my game.

THE GAZETTEERS IN REVIEW

GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri
GAZ4: The Kingdom of Ierendi

GUMSHOE: A System Guide for New Gamers

2012-01-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

I'd put together this guide over on RPGGeek a while back, and forgot to cross-post it then.

Below is a guide to the various lines of GUMSHOE products, arranged by date of initial publication. I've provided a brief description of the premise and what new ideas this iteration brings. As well, you'll find a link to the core book for the system, reviews for that core book, and links to other products in that line. In the case of Trail of Cthulhu, I've provided a link to the Gamer's Guide to that RPG.

Pelgrane Press has used their GUMSHOE rpg engine across a number of game lines. The mechanics of that system uniquely focuses on mysteries and problem solving. Not a generic system, GUMSHOE instead has a set of base mechanics and ideas tweaked, shifted and added to for each version- aiming to offer the best genre emulation.

For more game overviews, see the RPG System Metageeklist.

System: GUMSHOE
GUMSHOE is a ability-based system, with characters being defined primarily by the abilities they possess. Characters have two types of abilities: investigative and general.

Investigative abilities include fields of knowledge such as Ballistics, Forensic Anthropology, and Streetwise. These have a rating which serves as a pool for use of that ability. Possessing at least a one rating shows the character has expertise. When a player uses that ability to examine a scene, they do not have to roll. Instead, if there are core clues present which can be found by that means, they locate them. Points may be spent from an investigative ability to gain additional or extra information, at the GM or player's suggestion.

General abilities cover areas where players can risk failure- Athletics, Health and Shooting for example. Use of these abilities is uncertain and success or failure can have a dramatic impact on the story. General abilities also have a rating which represents a pool. To make a test, players roll 1d6. If they wish they may make a spend from the relevant ability's pool and add that to the roll. Players must meet or beat a difficulty set but not revealed by the GM. General ability pools require special circumstances to refresh (end of a story, time in a hospital, etc).

Review: GUMSHOE: RPGs I Like

The Esoterrorists
Premise: Players take the role of agents for the Ordo Veritas, a benevolent conspiracy. They battle against the Esoterrorists, a network of radicals and maniacs dedicated to breaking down the membrane between this world and the supernatural outside. They do this by crafting terror and manifesting otherworldly creatures. They operate like a terror network, with a focus on fear and publicity.

System Additions: This book sets up the basic GUMSHOE rules, with expert agents operating in a modern setting. Pelgrane plans to publish a second, revised edition of this game.

Core Book: The Esoterrorists
Additional Products: The Esoterror Fact Book, Profane Miracles, Albion's Ransom: Little Girl Lost, Six Packed, The Book of Unremitting Horror

Core Book Reviews: The Esoterrorists: RPGs I Like and Review Of The Esoterrorists By Pelgrane Press

Fear Itself

Premise: Players take the role of characters, perhaps victims, in a modern horror setting of slashers, creatures and maniacs. Fear Itself aims to simulate modern pop horror, especially cinematic horror of movies like The Ring, Pulse, and House of Wax.

System Additions: The list of abilities has been modified to reflect the lower relative skills of characters in this setting. The rules also include very basic psychic powers- with dangers associated with those. Characters can start from a list of stereotypes, and/or choose special Risk Factors- drives which explain why the character remains in the story rather than fleeing. Additional rules for stability appear as well.

Core Book: Fear Itself
Additional Products: The Book of Unremitting Horror, Invasive Procedures

Core Book Review: Fear Itself: RPGs I Like

Trail of Cthulhu
Premise: Investigators against the Cthulhu Mythos. Adapts the key ideas of Lovecraft's work and the rpg traditions established by Call of Cthulhu into GUMSHOE. ToC notably moves the timeline forward, setting the game generally in the 1930's, rather than 1920's.

System Additions: Retooled ability sets to fit the genre. The rules offer two approaches to campaigns and mechanics, Purist versus Pulp, with the latter offering the players more of a fighting chance. Characters now have Drives which guide their behavior and choose a Occupation to start. Occupations determine starting abilities, credit rating and special talents. Stability has now been paired with Sanity as two distinct abilities. Those rules, including madness mechanics, have been expanded.

The rules offer a significant discussion of the Cthulhu Mythos, followed by an extensive bestiary for creatures from there and elsewhere. Rules for setting-specific magic and tomes appear as well.

Core Book Reviews: Hiking with Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu: RPGs I Like, A perfect marriage of setting & rules, and My Profane Thoughts

Trail of Cthulhu: System Guide for New Gamers

Share A Game - Trail of Cthulhu

Mutant City Blues
Premise: An event ten years ago resulted in 1% of the population gaining super powers. Players take on the role of officers with powers dealing with "heightened" crime and criminals. A predictable structure and pattern to the superpowers allows for investigations based on meta-forensics.

System Additions: An extensive set of super-powers, some of which operate as investigative and some as general abilities. Unlike other superhero games, powers must be chosen along certain lines. These lines make up "The Quade Diagram" a resources for players to figure out which powers associate with which evidence. Other abilities and rules focus on the police procedural nature of the game.

Core Book: Mutant City Blues
Additional Products: Hard Helix, Brief Cases

Core Book Reviews: Mutant City Blues: RPGs I Like

Ashen Stars
Premise: A far-future sci-fi setting in which players take the roles of "Lasers," freelance law enforcers. These operate in the Bleed, a region of space once controlled by an empire known as the Combine, now left to its own devices. Navigating between disparate planetary cultures and races, the Lasers balance ethics and the need to make a buck. Moves the idea of mysteries forward more broadly to problem-solving.

System Additions: Several alien races with special talents provided. Alien specific abilities and psionics, as well as an ability list tuned to the sci-fi setting. Cyberware and biological implant rules. Extensive systems for spaceship combat. Notes on handling improvised investigations.

Core Book: Ashen Stars
Additional Products: Dead Rock Seven

Core Book Reviews: Review & A Couple of Thoughts, Ashen Stars - A review, and Stars Like Ash

Lorefinder
Premise: Not a stand-alone core book, Lorefinder adds elements of GUMSHOE's investigative rules to the Pathfinder system.

System Additions: Character creation within Pathfinder; drives for PCs; and new skills, feats and magic

Core Book: Lorefinder

Core Book Reviews: Is that GUM on my Pathfinder’s SHOE? Or, can an “old” dog learn new tricks?

Night's Black Agents
Note that the final version of this game has not yet been released. A pre-order is available, allowing purchasers a pdf version of the rules without art or layout.

Premise: Players take the role of spies who have been "burned" by their company. The reason: their discovery of a massive vampiric conspiracy behind the scenes. Now the PCs must remain alive while striking back at the monsters.

System Additions: Highly tailored set of abilities for the genre- with new ideas and uses for abilities. Rules for using investigative abilities and general and vice versa. Benefits for high level purchases of general abilities. Role specific talents. Mechanics for trust, contacts, networks and betrayal. Now options for cinematic combat. Chase rules. Vampire and conspiracy construction toolkit.

Core Book: Night's Black Agents

Core Book Reviews: I'm a secret agent there's nowhere you can hide and Tinker, Tailor, Vampire, Spy

The Principalities of Glantri: RPG Items I Like

2012-01-20T09:26:00.000-05:00

WHAT IS IT?
Classic D&D region sourcebook covering a Magocracy in the Mystara setting.

GREATER THAN THE BORROWED PARTS
Though the Red Wizards of the Forgotten Realms setting get more attention and have lasted longer, Glantri's IMHO the more interesting and playable nation of mages. The third in the gazetteer series (see here for more on the series as a whole), Glantri is essentially the Western European analogue within the Mystara setting. But- and I may sound stupid saying this- I didn't really get that until I went back to reread the series. Other entries, GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos and GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam for example, wear their sources on their sleeve. The Principalities of Glantri conceals that beneath details of magic and the melting-pot background of nation. It is a country of immigrants, powerful noble families here having united under the banner of magical superiority. Only those possessing sorcerous skills have rank or power here. Each family borrows from a particular culture (German, Spanish, Italian, Scottish, etc) but that always felt like a surface trapping when I read the book. As a whole, Glantri feels most like France, with the different provinces sharing a common heritage, but with distinct expressions of identity and a strong independent streak. In rereading I spotted more of the literal borrowings, but they still work. For all that it riffs on those European stereotypes, GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri manages to elevate those ideas and do something new with them.

The Principalities of Glantri remains my favorite of the gazetteers, with Karameikos coming in a close second. I've used ideas from it more than any other volume in the series. And I've only really only presented surface elements. We've had a few sessions skirting Glantri, but I've used characters from there, with their distinctive approach to magic and the cultural ideas. That's trickled down and informed other parts of my setting.

THE BOOK ITSELF
GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos presented a small nation, with two distinct cultural groups, and a focus on local NPCs. GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam compressed a large number of cultural groups, essentially a sub-continent, into one country and focused on ideas and themes. GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri again takes a large and diverse cast of cultures and brings them together, but with a tight focus on noble family. Beyond that, Glantri organizes itself very differently from the previous two volumes. Larger than the last two, 96 pages instead of 64, it presents a structure for a specific campaign. Glantri presents the tools for a DM to run a full party of mages from apprenticeship through adult adventuring life. That campaign has the characters uncovering the secret behind the power and powers of Glantri itself, the Radiance. Despite its difference, this approach still fits with the rest of the line.

It isn't surprising that Glantri- in some ways the most full-fleshed and developed of the gazetteers- comes from Bruce Heard, product manager for at least the early line. His name appears on most of the significant Mystara products in one way or another. The Principalities feels like something that the author has run and played with, rather than a product created to fill a niche ("OK we've got a Hobbit place on the map, who wants to do that?"). Heard's name also appears on the later version of Glantri- Glantri Kingdom of Magic- when TSR brought the setting up into AD&D 2e. I dislike that later product intensely, in great part because I like the material here so much. Instead of adding to it, that knocks down and ravages it in the name of change. Eventually I'll get to a review of those products after I've worked through all of these.

Besides the change in length, Glantri only has a couple of other minor changes to the physical design of the series. The main saddle-stapled booklet comes with a folio cover as usual. Instead of the tri-fold of the first two, this cover is a bi-fold. The two interior pages have location maps- one a common Wizard Keep and the other The Great School of Magic. The latter's a little disappointing, because it doesn't really look all that grand. It would be a few more years before we saw epic mage locations like those of Ars Magica, Harry Potter and Redhurst, so that can be excused. The enclosed poster-sized map is the first in the series printed on front and back. One side shows the hex-grid map of the Principalities, plus three inset map locations that are OK, but not great. However the reverse side offers a really awesome map of the City of Glantri- wonderfully laid out with canal waterways. Three inset images present details of the harbor and special buildings. This is one of my favorite city maps. It is interesting and useful- I can imagine running a chase using it.

The booklet sticks to the same three columns with tiny text of the previous two volumes. Some of the pages have a watermark, but those with illustrations or colored sidebars don't. Stephen Fabian provides the excellent art- there's a nice mix of images for key NPCs and illustrations of material discussed in the text. This book, more than the previous two, relies on narration and stories. We get tales from newcomers and foreigners, as well as testimonials from important NPCs. Just about every major section has some kind of game fiction dialogue. These are very targeted, with the narrator describing a particular event, person or institution. I'm often pretty negative about game fiction fluff- but here it works well. It sets the tone of the material and offers some insights on presenting the ideas to the players.

WHAT IT OFFERS
The Principalities of Glantri provides some of the same basic material as the previous two entries in the series: history, economy, geography and so on. But the actual execution of that material, as I mentioned above, is in the form of first and third person narratives. The stories say as much about the narrators as they do about the topics. The author also sets up the gazetteer explicitly as a campaign from the outset, discussing how the pieces presented fit into that. But even if you're not planning on running a Glantri-mage centered game, the material still works. I can attest to that, having adapted the ideas across years of my house campaign and across several different systems. DMs should be aware of a couple of important structural restrictions right off the bat. Dwarves are welcomed in Glantri, but mostly because of their desirability for magical experimentation (i.e. they can survive longer). Second, and perhaps more importantly, clerics of any kind are illegal within the lands. That's an interesting distinction- and offers some insight into a world where ascended Immortals take the place of gods.

I don't want to dwell on the specifics of the chapters- they thoroughly covering important aspects of life in this nation. That's tough to do given the diversity of peoples here. The DM will have to do some serious filling in of details of normal life, since the focus stays on the elite of the country. Different family lines govern each Principality, each with a distinct origin and cultural background. While they share a common adherence to the magocracy, they are (of course) at each others throats. That makes Glantri an interesting and highly political setting. A number of the families don't even come from this world originally. Most of the material presented in the first third of the book focuses on setting up those different families and their personalities for the players.

THE FAMILIES
House of Sylaire aka d'Ambreville: "Mutant Werewolves of Averoigne"- I mention them first both because they're the most powerful and also because they have the strongest tie to classic D&D history. Veteran players may recognize them from the module X2: Castle Amber (Château d' Amberville). They came to this world from that one. They're also a lift from both Edgar Allen Poe stories and from Clark Ashton Smith's stories of Averoigne. CAS remains my favorite old-school fantasy author, and it is interesting to see how his weird fantasy ideas translate into a game more heavily influenced by the likes of Vance, Tokien and Howard. As you might imagine, the d'Ambreville borrow from French cultural traditions.

House of Crowngaurd aka McGregor: "Chauvinistic Scots of Chaos"- another family who came here from the same world as the d'Ambreville. Heavily invested in necromancy, they are governed by a leader who has converted himself into a lich through the powers of Radiance (a concept I'll come back to).

House of Igorov aka Gorevitch-Woszlany: "Expansionist chaotic vampires"- another family with necromancy in its blood. Trace their family line back to the Traldaran's of Karameikos. As you can imagine, they come off as very Transylvanian.

House of Linden aka Vlaardoen: "Vengeful Followers of the Fame"- a family descended people originally from another world, their fellow refugees went on to found one of the two great empires in Mystara, Alphatia. They seem to be borrowing from the Dutch, but those connections are pretty light.

House of Ritterbeg aka Von Drachenfels: "Warmongering Military Technocrats"- The military backbone of the nation, and one borrowing heavily from Prussian and German cultures.

House of Silverston aka Aendyr: "Sneaky Alphatian Imperialists"- Rivals of the Vlaardoens they descend from more recent exiles from the Alphatian Empire. They don't borrow distinctly from a single culture.

House of Singhabad aka Virayana: "Lawful Pacifists of Ethengar"- They originally come from the nomadic peoples of Ethengar (covered in GAZ12: The Golden Khan of Ethengar). They have the most tolerance for clerics.

House Sirecchia aka di Malapietra: "Poisonous Thyatian Machiavellians"- They come from the other major empire of Mystara, Thyatis. However they have a more classic Renaissance Italian feel to them- which differs slightly from how the Empire ends up portrayed in the later boxed set Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia. In fact, they have more in common with the presentation of Darokin (GAZ11: The Republic of Darokin) the nation of merchants.

Clan of Alhambra aka Belcadiz: "Proud Elven Swashbucklers"- This Elvish family doesn't come from the Elves of this continent, but rather from a land far away. They're short, hot-tempered and based on Spanish themes.

Clan of Ellerovyn aka Erewan: "Tree-Loving Elven Ecologists"- This Elvish family, on the other hand, comes originally from Alfheim (covered in GAZ5: The Elves of Alfheim). They're more classically 'Elfy'.

So you can see Glantri bursts with ideas and plots. Several excellent sections break down those families, provide insight on their relations and describe the major NPCs of each. That material bleeds over into the other major power-players in the lands- guilds, brotherhoods and secret societies.

LIVES AND ADVENTURES
The middle third or so of the booklet (running from page 38 to 63) covers Glantri City and the Great School of Magic. While the various provinces have their own towns, villages, and castles, Glantri city is the hub. Most campaigns will begin there, and it alone could offer the background to many sessions worth of gaming. This chapter breaks down the city by neighborhoods, provides a calendar of festivities, and outlines the laws, atmosphere and daily life of the city. All of it is great and useful information, well-presented. More than any other GAZ in the line, Glantri brings to life a city with rich detail for the DM to draw from. On the other hand, I'm a little surprised in going back how little information the booklet actually gives for the Great School of Magic. It offers some mechanics and details (tuition costs, some feat-like bonuses which can be picked up, and graduation tests) but it seems a little bit of a missed opportunity. That may be in hindsight, given other more famous magic schools which popped up. Still the ideas given are excellent and fun.

The last third of the booklet offers substantial DM tools and mechanics. First, it provides a toolbox for creating new spells and magic items. Such things cost gold to create- representing resources invested in the project. Next, the book explains the secret of the Radiance, magical energy present in Glantri and tied to the Immortal Rad. The secret's in the name and ties back to elements from the Blackmoor background. This section provides some ideas on how the players might learn these secrets, harness spells from the Radiance and even change the course of history. That's, however, optional to the setting and feels a little unnecessary. Beyond that, the section offers new seven secret crafts (with new spells): alchemy, dragon magic, elements, illusions, necromancy, runes, and witchcraft. These offer some great ideas for a GM wanting to expand high-level magic in their campaign. Finally, the booklet finishes with a list of adventure seeds, broken down by level. Many of these are linked- given the GM the skeleton of a long-term campaign in this region.

OVERALL
I love this book. a DM could easily run a campaign just using the stuff given here. That economy is admirable- a booklet which offers in 96 pages what many books would have needed twice that to do the same thing. There's little waste here. There are a few goofy things- like the Scottish Liches and the Apocalypse Now references in the adventure section. But it offers a wealth of ideas, cultures and peoples. Most of all they're fun- even when they're a little sinister. Even the bad guys here have to function in cooperation with the other families, making it both more real and more interesting than the Red Wizards of Thay ever were to me. I've used the ideas, families and characters from this supplement for years. My players know those family names and can remember the distinctive traits of many of those lines. I count that as the mark of great source material- when it creates fun and memorable moments at the table.

THE GAZETTEERS IN REVIEW

GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri
GAZ4: The Kingdom of Ierendi

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T09:02:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that the last couple of years have really managed to complete my disillusionment. I'd described myself as a cynic, but really I had a measure of hope and faith in our government and elected representatives to do the right thing in the end. That we should even be considering legislation like SOPA and PIPA: ineffective, ill-conceived and so pernicious to free speech, under a Democratic President, seems bizarre to me. Where are the legislators and elected officials who can be role models, standing against this kind of corporate-sponsored awfulness? There seem to be no profiles in courage remaining.

As others have said:

The Emirates of Ylaruam: RPG Items I Like

2012-01-12T10:12:00.000-05:00

WHAT IS IT?
Classic D&D region supplement covering a fantasy nation with an Arabian flavor.

TO BEGIN...
We come now to the second volume in the gazetteer series. I talked a little bit about the series and Mystara setting as a whole in my first review on GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos. It's interesting to look at how the follow up matches the patterns of the first book and how much it deviates from them. The Emirates of Ylaruam generally stays with the style of the first gazetteer, but doesn't rigidly adhere to it. There's greater emphasis on adventure seeds, a more distinct player character section, and a richer treatment of a single city. I like each volume in the series seems linked but at the same time shift to fit their subject. In this case we have industry veteran Ken Rolston at the helm. He would later design two other entries in the series, GAZ4: The Kingdom of Ierendi, and GAZ7: The Northern Reaches.

PRESENTATION
Design-wise, The Emirates keeps the same basic three parts: folio cover, map and 64-page booklet. Clyde Caldwell provides a cover combining the classic Arabian tropes with a map background. There's beefcake and cheesecake present in the illustration. A full-color page has smaller map of Ylaruam, showing its relation to its neighbors (the Dwarves of Rockhome, the Empire of Thyatis and- oddly- the the Viking-like Soderfjord Jarldoms directly to the north). The folio interior shows two top-down building illustrations and a two-page spread of an underground complex. That's accompanied by three detail inserts. The large fold-out map offers another classic hex-treatment of the Emirates, and five city maps. These are a little more detailed than those in GAZ1. They have keyed and labeled locations. The saddle-stapled booklet keeps the basic text design, with three columns of tiny text. This volume has much lighter and less obtrusive watermarks on the pages. Doug Chaffee provides all of the interior B&W illustrations. They're OK, a little basic and echoing the style of Elmore or early Easley. Unlike the previous volume, the images here focus on places and general scenes, rather than the NPCs.

The Emirates are the Arabian analogue for the Mystara setting. It's interesting to look at given our present context. I'll talk a little bit later to some of my reaction to the material and choices. For the moment I want to focus on the details presented here.

THE BOOKLET ITSELF
Ylaruam takes magical geography to an extreme- a desert kingdom bordered by mountains with icy climates and more temperate lands directly next door. It has ocean access as well. The booklet of material opens with two versions of the land's history: the local and the DM version. Ylaurum has historically served as the home to two distinct groups- hazar (city-dweller) and nomad. Conquered early by the Thyatians and Alphatians, with both establishing colonies in the more hospitable areas. Then arose a prophet, Al-Kalim, who quested and petitioned an Immortal to aid his peoples. Al-Kalim brought back his support and created the Nahmeh, the text which describes the dream and rules of the people of Ylaruam. Armed with this, the people of the Emirates threw out the foreigners. A confederation arose from the various tribes under the dynasty of Al-Kalim, the first Sultan. He established the Eternal University in the Emirates and a wise council known as the Preceptors. However with the passing of Al-Kalim, two factions arise. The first believes in rules by choice of the most wise, i.e. the decision of the Preceptors. The second believes in rule by the family of Al-Kalim. The former have control in the setting currently, but the latter represent a significant force in the region. The supplement lays this out in some detail over three pages, complete with a nice timeline that includes a few future events.

Several topics get 2-3 page treatments next: ecology, peoples, and economics. The Emirates have a fairly rich and diverse environment. Each of the six provinces possesses slightly different climates and resources. While the desert makes up the majority of the land in the region, it includes coastal plains, grasslands, and plateaus. Some provinces possess greater access to fertile lands, encouraging a focus on urban settlement and lifestyle. Others much rely on a nomadic lifestyle. The provinces have distinct cultural heritages, with several heavily influences by contact with one or more of the colonial or foreign powers. Add to that significant ethnic groups in the land. While the Alasiyan culture and people dominate the region, the Emirates have peoples of Makistani, Thyatian, Alphatian and even Nithian descent. That's one of my favorite details of this supplement, and a story that runs through the various gazetteers. As you read through them, you begin to get a strong and present sense of older cultures, especially the Makistani. We see how they spread, rose, fell, and integrated with the various nations of the continent. That's a challenging concept to get across to readers, and perhaps even more challenging to get across to players. Consider that as a GM you can set up a particular set of elements as a national archetype: the Arabs of Ylaruam, the Italians of Darokin. Now add to that the complication of ethnic lines and sub-groups, people who live within the land but don't stake their primary identity as national. In Karameikos we got two primary groups: the colonial nobility and the native Traldarans. In GAZ2 we begin to see a richer and more complicated approach.

THE WAYS OF THE EMIRATES
The largest section of the booklet covers society in the Emirates. That begins with the life and history of Al-Kalim. His words and teachings, as recorded in the Nahmeh, provide the key text for life in the Emirates. Interestingly, Al-Kalim began as a conventional hero- a skillful tactician who organized his people against foreign oppression. It would be only later in his lifetime, when it proved practical, that he focused on mysticism and philosophy. Again there's a practicality here that just begins to grapple with what living in a fantasy world like this would mean. Al-Kalim quests and bargains, gaining aid for the Emirates and pushing him forward on his own path to become an Immortal. Al-Kalim, retired from life, does not die, but continues on that quest for immortality. Lacking gods in a conventional sense, Mystara borrows more than a little of the Heroquesting themes of Glorantha. It actually becomes a little hard to follow in the text- on the one hand, Al-Kalim seems to be using the Immortals, in particular the Old Man of the Sea. His work seems to be focused on results, manipulation and general philosophies. On the other hand, the articles of faith have the people of the Emirates giving faith to the Immortal Guardian. How much that's a specific or abstract figure isn't as well described as it could be.

Al-Kalim's writings, as laid out in the Nahmeh, provide guidelines for right living and treatment. They also provide for the division of the peoples into three “ways”: of the Follower, of the Warrior and of the Scholar. The Scholar includes clerics, and the rules offer four culturally specific spells (including detect water and truthtelling). The rules include an interesting concept as well, gaining experience in ones social status. That's a new model for consideration. The book suggests ways in which NPCs “level up” and gain EXP through following the codes and rules of their particular class and status. That's a neat idea and the book doesn't overplay it. Instead it offers the DM a new way of thinking about the how and why of NPCs in a setting.

The sixteen pages of the society chapters cover many topics. From social structures and obligations, it moves to cover the politics of the region. The Emirates offers an interesting challenge for players in the form of a strong bureaucracy insulating the nobility from petitions and possessing a great deal of power. The book considers the policies operating internally (a focus on water resources, clamping down on tribal rivalries) and externally (peace with neighbors with some exceptions). Next it details laws, including the differing senses of ownership within the region (something which might have a significant impact on player behavior). Various customs are also addressed. For example, mages must wear particular clothing to identify themselves. It is worth noting that generally the Emirate supplement avoids the question of women and their treatment. While offering a fantasy refit of the Arab World, it leaves any question of women as second-class or restricted citizens.

FOR THE PLAYERS
The next section is one of the most interesting, a new development that would appear in some- if not most- of the later gazetteers. The middle of the booklet has an eight-page pull-out section, utilizing a slightly different background color. This covers “What Everyone Knows About the Emirates.” This is a great idea- opening with dialogue perspectives from several different sources. In two pages it offers a rich, playing-facing resource which the DM can easily pass around to players. Next the pull-out covers character creation, including a guide to naming (in some of the tiniest type I've ever seen in an rpg book). Following this it covers mechanics for riding checks, travel rates, heat exhaustion, EXP for playing points of honor, and storytelling. The skills system presented in GAZ1 does not appear here however, and is not referenced at all. A new class, the Dervish or Desert druid is presented, as a Cleric variant with a distinct set of five spells available at each level. The section ends with courtesy tips for foreigners and a glossary. One notable oversight here, and throughout the book is any kind of guide to pronunciation. Given some of the odd names thrown around, that would have been helpful.

ADVENTURES IN YLARUAM
Where GAZ1 offered an overview of the important locations of Karameikos and the key NPCs of the nation, The Emirates of Ylaruam takes another approach. Instead, over fifteen pages, it provides a rich and detailed location for DMs, the Village of Kirkuk. This trade crossroads showcases an important caravan stopping point. That makes it particularly useful for DMs who might simply want to take their party through Ylaruam, rather than centering a campaign there. This section offers plenty of details and many suggestions for how to stage the city and tie players into the stories and adventures. Following this the booklet ends with twelves pages on running campaigns in Ylaruam. It offers some excellent general advice on campaign-building, beyond simply talking about the region. As expected it includes typical monsters and rare treasures of these lands. The chapter presents nine adventure seeds, each with a nice multi-paragraph set up and suggestions about what experience levels might be appropriate. If I have any quibble with this section, it is that it too literally adapts material from the Arabian Nights, rather than coming up with new setting specific concepts.

OVERALL
I have to say I'm of two-minds about this supplement. I'm at something of a disadvantage based on my background. In high school and college, I took Arabic as my language requirement; I majored in Anthropology with a focus on the Middle East; and I studied for a year in Egypt. I'm a little wary about representations of other cultures- and the fantastic has been used as cover before for some pretty awful depictions. I'm not necessarily a subscriber to Edward Said and his Orientalism approach to all depictions of the foreigner. But I am a little wary when the figure of Mohammed gets rewritten in such a thinly veiled way. I have to wonder if as transparent a version of Jesus in a fantasy setting would be received well? That being said, I think this book is pretty amazing for how it manages to bring together some of the key elements of classical Arab traditions: the split within the faith (essentially the Sunni/Shia division), the division between urban and nomad culture and the values associated with it, the focus on scholarship. It balances the difficult differences and contrasts of the Muslim and pre-Muslim world.

Several of the gazetteers take a whole region and compress it down to a single nation, as here where the tribes/provinces represent the distinct and different facets of the Arab World. I think The Emirates of Ylaruam is a pretty great supplement- but I think it stands better as a fantasy treatment of Arabian history than perhaps it does as a living part of the Mystara setting. I think a couple of opportunities get missed here- especially about what faith and religion really look like in a world with Immortals instead of gods. The material here contradicts itself from section to section. Still, I have used The Emirates in my own campaign. Where I've changed and transformed the material from the other gazetteers, I've used this one pretty much whole cloth. In the end, that ought to be my yardstick for judging this material. I've been able to bring it to the table and it has served well as background for many sessions over the years.

THE GAZETTEERS IN REVIEW

GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri
GAZ4: The Kingdom of Ierendi

Stolen Princess Syndrome: A Tabletop RPG Read on WKC

2012-01-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

CONFESSION?
I like beating up monsters.

When a video game rpg has a good, fun combat system, I really enjoy the process of tuning it, figuring out the right approach and farming monsters for experience and loot. That's actually what I really love about the last couple of Final Fantasy games. FFXII had the best combat system, allowing you to tune and program your actions. FF XIII, while it runs on rails, actually has combat mechanics you can consistently tweak and tune- each time working to get your kill time down and your stats up. I like the mundanity of it.

But I would cut my own throat if I had to do that in a game with a GM. I like stories, I like choices, I like characters. Actually, even when I'm playing through a video game rpg, I tend to tell myself little stories about what's going on. When I played Valkyrie Profile 2, I got irritated when a new mage character popped up in the party late in the game. I'd already leveled and equipped so many PCs that he became superfluous; I didn't want to grind to level him up. So I stipped off all of his gear and put him in the active party anyway. Whenever we got into a battle I imagined him saying “Um...please, can someone give me a weapon...” or “So cold....so cold here without armor...”

That made the process palatable. But the one video game recently that really forced me to come up with an alternate story was White Knight Chronicles. That's really what inspired my post The Worst GMs from Video Game RPGs. White Knight is a pretty game, with an OK combat system, and a story arc where all the PCs send up having to carry the stupid ball down the field. It was in the middle of it that I realized that the GM of the game was a dick. Once I realized it was a bad tabletop game, everything fell into place...

SESSION REPORT: THE WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES CAMPAIGN
So the first warning sign comes at the start of the game. You've just finished making up your character, your Avatar. In the game that means choosing your appearance and gender. At the tabletop, you just finished rolling up your PC. You join the group and immediately get relegated to the back of the party. The other characters have real names, backstories, and they're clearly the focus of the GM's story. Leonard's the youthful hero, Yulie's the bow-wielding healer, and Eldore is the elder grizzled warriors with magic. You're joining a new group, one where the other players have played in the setting and know the GM's style. You play quiet, remain behind, because hey- it's a chance to play. I mean even later when the GM does a long sequence with the Leonard, you're willing to listen because you figure he's going to come around to you, but he doesn't. And then Leonard gets a big magical artifact right out of the gate. You look around at the other players- they don't seem to be reacting so this must be par for the course. So now you have four players in your group, but one of them can summon a giant fantasy robot from time to time to fight instead of him.

And then at the end of the first adventure, the GM pulls his first trick. The Princess you've been protecting gets grabbed. Despite the group being right there- despite the bad guys having to run to get to a giant lumbering airship, they manage to get away. The GM doesn't even let you roll. They're “too far” to catch up to, despite having been less than ten feet away a moment ago. He doesn't even let the archer take a shot.

You begin to see where this is going.

Still you press on, and have a couple of decent adventures. The recurring villain attacks and you defeat him- but of course he manages to fly away. You can buy that it builds up tension. Then after traveling through the desert, you arrive at a new city, at which point things start going downhill slightly faster. A new player joins the group, a girl the GM's clearly smitten with. Though she doesn't ask for it, she gets to have the coolest equipment. She gets to use a katana one-handed but no one else does. At least she doesn't get a giant artifact robot...yet. Of course it is pretty clear from the start that she has a dark secret.

Hint: she's in league with the bad guys.

But of course the GM won't let you follow that line of inquiry at the table. Whatever, you move on. It's another player at the table. And then you rescue the Princess again. And despite specifically saying that you wanted to keep an eye on her, the bad guys again manage to sneak up and snatch her away in the middle of an open stone courtyard. You grit your teeth and press on, even though the GM seems to have trouble remembering your character's name and you never get any scenes in the spotlight. Still it is an interesting world, the combats are decently fun, and the other players seem to be having a good time. Except for the new girl, Kara, the one the GM likes. He keeps taking her out of the room to do secret squirrel stuff and she always comes back a little creeped out.

Anyway, you eventually get to the next city. That's actually pretty cool- a mining colony built on the back of a giant monster. This could be good. But then the GM introduces a new NPC to the party. Cesar- he's that worst kind Mary Sue GM character. He's cool because the GM says so, he's the son of the ruler of the city, he has a shit-eating grin all the time when the GM plays him. He's constantly joking lamely. And of course, he's immediately hitting on Kara. Still, you think, I can put up with this for a little while. So you play along and finish the dungeon in the city- and then it becomes clear that Cesar isn't leaving the party. He's here to stay. And now you have to listen to the GM do scenes between his Mary Sue NPC and other NPCs.

And it gets worse when you get to the end of the next dungeon, as the GM doubles-down on bad choices. First, it becomes clear that Cesar is another chosen one. He gets the next super-cool robot artifact. An NPC- not you or the other party members. Second, after you beat the bad guy- the party doesn't get to finish him. Instead the bad guy's lieutenant does that. And third, because he hasn't done it enough- the GM snatches the Princess away, despite the group outnumbering the opposition, being within ten yards, and possessing magical battle mecha. They get away again.

By now you've invested some time in the game. In some ways, you really want to see if things can get worse. They do- as the GM plays out scene after scene between Kara and Cesar. That gets more and more tiresome. You almost pray for death when the group of pygmies capture your group- another instance of GM fiat, given your overwhelming firepower. Somehow they not only defeat the group without a fight, they manage to tie everyone to posts for execution- because suddenly all of the magic the group has acquired doesn't work? The GM waves his hand and moves on to yet another scene of an NPC rescuing the party.

Luckily, it is about this time that Kara quits the group, more than a little fed up with the GM and the way his NPC keeps hitting on her- despite her obvious irritation with it. The next session, the GM has Kara (now an NPC) reveal her surprise- she was working for the bad guys! Cesar begs her to change her mind, and she seems about to, drawn by his clear charisma, but the bad guys take her away. Ugh. The next few sessions are a blur, with yet another session where the GM has the bad guys get away with the Princess before you can do anything. Then the GM introduces yet another obvious traitor NPC into the group. You try to follow up on that but the GM just keeps shooting you down. Quietly, you work out a plan with your fellow players- a fairly obvious gambit. When the traitor NPC springs his trap, you're ready for it, with preparations made beforehand.

The GM is, as you imagine, a little pissed that his “clever” plot has been found out. He glowers for a minute and then says that the ground beneath the group's feet collapses suddenly- it was a double-trap since he knew the players would see through his transparent first trap.

You sigh, clear the table and set up for another fight against a giant monster who will smack you around until Leonard and Cesar pull out their giant mecha. It will make the GM feel better.

Eventually you climb out of the hole. You're a little relieved- this is clearly the last part of the campaign. Your misery will soon be over. You fight your way through yet another dungeon, with the same bad guys you've been fighting for the last two. The GM has a “puzzle” here which is easily solved not through any cleverness, but by exhausting the possibilities. Eventually you reach the end, and fight the boss who goes down easily. You've been saving up for the big fight and the GM looks shocked. So suddenly, that isn't the final fight. Kara reappears- and declares her love for Cesar, and how she was wrong earlier for treating him like he was a jerk and creepy. It is an awkward moment at the table with the GM playing out this dramatic scene between his NPCs. Then the bad guy kills Kara, which adds another layer of creepy to things. Eventually you fight the bad guy and beat him, but only because of the mecha. Still you get out and flee the temple as it collapses...

...and are saved once again by the actions of an NPC, as the Princess, finally rescued. summons a giant flying ship out of nowhere.

A flying ship? Really. We walked all the way across the continent because this world apparently doesn't have horses and an NPC summons a flying ship at the end to rescue us so we could feel truly useless?

Delightful.

LASTLY
The fun doesn't end there. White Knight Chronicles 2 continues this tradition. Kara returns in a disguise even an idiot could see through...she's carrying the same weapon for god's sake...and her reveal is treated as a major surprise by the GM. And of course Kara reveals her love for the GM's NPC Cesar in a truly awful scene.

Anyway, the next time you're playing a video game rpg, consider what it would look like at the table. I'm not saying it couldn't be good- I talked about that a while back in this post- Emulation & Beyond: More Thoughts on RPGs & Video Games. But it does provide an amusing lens to look at what's happening and how much fun it is.

The Worst GMs from Video Game RPGs

2012-01-09T15:08:00.002-05:00

Video game RPGs arose out of tabletop rpgs- with D&D arguably being the font from which the genre sprang. Of course they evolved in different directions, utilizing the strengths of their particular mediums. What I look for in a computer or console-based rpg differs hugely from what I want at the gaming table. And some of the things that happen in VGRPGs would make me quit if a GM tried to pull that. Yet I'm pretty tolerant of that when I have a controller in my hands.

So below is a list of a few moments of video game rpgs, and what they would look like at the table-top. Don't get me wrong- I love some of the games below (and hate some). Some of these problems can be seen in many, many games (especially the "I Win, You Actually Lose" problem). Spoilers ahead in a couple of places.

1. Wild Arms 2
GM: OK, you beat the bad guy...
Player: Yes!!!
GM: And he leaps up to his feet, grabs the item you were defending and flies off.
Player: Again?
GM: He's fast.

2. Persona 2
GM: The monster hits you.
Player: How much damage to I take?
GM: None, but everyone loses half of their money.
Player: Wait...what? (The fight continues). OK, I killed them, we get our money back from their bodies.
GM: Nope, it seems to have magically disappeared.

3. Xenogears
GM: You guys mind if I do a little time lapse and move the story forward a little.
Player: Um, sure.
FOUR HOURS OF GM NARRATION LATER.
GM: OK...got all of that? Next week we'll take up with the final boss fight.

4. Shadow Hearts: From the New World
GM: OK, so I'm going to run a kind of supernatural investigation game set in 1929.
Player: Like Call of Cthulhu?
GM: A little, it has Arkham in it, but it has more magic and fantastic stuff.
Player: OK...well it sounds cool...
GM: Great. So I made up some pre-gen characters. So I have a boy detective, a Native American sorceress in a bikini, an crusading old man trained by South American ninjas, a fat ballerina vampire, a mariachi player with a gun-guitar, or a giant drunken cat. Everybody pick.
Player: What the what?

5. Might and Magic IX
Player: Man, I love this campaign world- I can't wait to get back to playing.
GM: Yeah, about that. I destroyed that campaign world. I'm not going to run it anymore. But it is really the same campaign.
Player: Wait...you blew it up?
GM: Yup. And I decided to go with a new set of rules. But don't worry, you won't know the difference.

6. Suikoden III
GM: That was a great session, but I think I want to run a different campaign in this game setting.
Player: OK, but we were just getting started with this one...
GM: No, I want to do another story...roll up new characters.
(Several sessions later)
GM: Yeah, so I want to try another story in this world...
Player: What? Again? We just got into the groove of this one.
GM: I have a cool idea, just roll up some new characters.
(Several sessions later)
GM: Yeah, so I was thinking...
Player: I'm going to kill you.

7. White Knight Chronicles
GM: With a mighty blow, you knock your adversary down and bask in your victory.
Player: OK...now we...
GM: But the bad guys sieze the Princess and make off with her.
Player: She was ten feet away from us, and the rest of the party was guarding her.
GM: They snuck up and grabbed her.
Player: OK, we'll chase them.
GM: No, you're stunned by the turn of events.
Player: Grrr...OK, we'll recover from stun and shoot them with our freaking bows...
GM: Too late. They ran across the courtyard, jumped on an massive sky-anchor that dropped down and are now sailing away in their skyship.

8. Dark Souls

GM: TPK again!
Player: I wasn't done making up my character...

9. L.A. Noire
GM: So, yes- all those murder cases you solved. They were all done by someone else!!!
Player: What about the crime scenes? The evidence?
GM: All faked. He was really clever.
Player: What about all the rolls I made and work I did?

GM: Moving on....

For some further discussion and analysis of this see my follow up post: Stolen Princess Syndrome: A Tabletop Read on WKC

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos: RPG Items I Like

2012-01-05T07:38:00.000-05:00

WHAT IS IT?
Classic D&D region supplement covering a fantasy nation with an eastern European flavor.

INTRODUCTION
The D&D Gazetteer series (GAZ) remains one of my favorite TSR product lines. I came to this not through D&D but the hunt for world building materials for other fantasy campaigns. I picked up the first couple at the same time and then after that I bought them as soon as they hit the shelves. They're uneven, strangely conventional in some places, but full of dynamite ideas. Some of the big hitters from TSR in that era wrote them (Allston, Rolston, Perrin). I'm a sucker for a book series with a uniform dress and it really works here. In my review, I want to talk about what the gazetteer offers in general and consider how adaptable it is.

ALL ABOUT THE CONTEXT
Before I do that, I do have to get into the strange and contorted history of the Gazetteer series and The Known World aka Mystara (for reference see the Wikipedia entry). There's some strangeness about how this “world” came together that has to be addressed. I came to D&D pretty early, playing mostly from the original white box and then the D&D Basic Set (First Edition). When AD&D came out we moved quickly up that food chain, because that was the new and more “Advanced” version. So when the Second and Third editions of D&D came out, I didn't really pay attention. I recall picking up a copy of the third edition at Target, as much for the novelty of being able to buy rpg stuff there. So that's how I managed to miss the D&D Expert Set, where the names and places for this setting first appear. X1 Isle of Dread used some of those details as well, IIRC.

Originally sketched out in the Expert Book, later modules in the X and B series (for example B10 Night's Dark Terror and X10 Red Arrow, Black Shield) fleshed out the world. In 1987, TSR began to produce the GAZ series, detailing the nations of the world. The series would include fourteen books (plus one boxed set Dawn of the Emperors) produced over five years. The world feels like a design by committee, which it was. It notably placed theBlackmoor setting in continuity in the distant past. This world has ascended Immortals instead of gods, with that epic path and their conflicts figuring into many stories. The Known World represented lands covered by the gazetteers, with Mystara being the larger world. The Hollow World setting also resides within Mystara; that sub-setting began publication just as the GAZ series wound down. In 1994, TSR decided to bring the Mystara setting “up to date,” moving it into the new AD&D fold with new boxed sets advancing the timeline, several crappy interactive CD projects, the new Red Steel & Savage Coast areas and The Voyage of the Princess Ark adventure. These later projects have a few cool things, but often they stomp over the best material from the earlier line.

GAZ vs. FR
Historically, the Gazetteer series came out the same year as the Forgotten Realms box set. It is interesting to compare how those fared in later years, or even how Mystara stood against later campaign settings- better than Maztica, but worse than Dark Sun or Ravenloft. Perhaps closest toBirthright in terms of reach?

THE PRODUCT ITSELF
The Grand Duchy of Karameikos comes in the classic TSR folio format, with a stapled 64-page booklet, a large fold-out map and the tri-fold screen cover. The enclosed poster-sized map is printed in color on one side. Half of that shows a classic hex-gridded map of the nation, with a detailed key. The other half shows three of the main cities: Kelvin, Threshold and Specularum. This last city map has some keyed details, but the other two more offer shapes without specifics. The interior of the screen has two maps, printed in various shades of brown on a light-blue background. You get an overhead shot of a castle, and a detailed section of the bay and docks of Specularum. A great deal is unlabeled, but is does offer more useful geography than the larger scale map. On the front side of the screen you get the back blurb, a map showing the neighboring nations, and the excellent cover by Cylde Caldwell. This sets up the illustration template for the rest of the series, though I'm not sure if Caldwell did all of them.

The meat of the supplement lies in the booklet, written by Aaron Allston, a gaming vet with amazing credits (including Strike Force, GURPS Autodueland Ninja Hero (4th Edition)). Laid out in three columns per page with tiny, tiny print, the book goes the extra mile to make it hard to read with large solid blue watermarks on most of the pages. The book includes a few detail maps of locations, a useful calendar, and clip art quality heraldry. Only nine pieces of art appear, but they serve a specific purpose: character shots of the important NPCs, all with two or three characters shown. Stephen Fabian, one of my favorite rpg artists, provides all of these. They look great. The booklet overall may be short, but it is dense and packed with information.

SOMETHING BORROWED
Probably the most distinctive thing about the GAZ series and the Known World setting is how many of the region books adapt real world analogues. In the case of Karameikos, we have an Balkan themed setting, complete with a foreign ruling class. Names, terms and themes here borrow heavily from Eastern European sources. Later series books emulate Renaissance Italy (Darokin), classical Arab culture (Ylaruam), and Vikings (the Northern Reaches) for example. Not all the books share this approach, but most embrace it pretty fully. Before I read this series, I'd always seen this approach as lazy world-building. It felt like a cut-and-paste approach. But I think the GAZ series, for the most part, really sells the concept. Some weirdness does pop up based on neighboring cultures being lifted from very different time frames and peoples. Later games, like Al-Qadim, Legend of the Five Rings, and 7th Sea would also take this approach.

WHAT'S ON OFFER
The Grand Duchy of Karameikos opens with a statement describing the origin of the Known World setting, in particular the modules where Karameikos has figured previously. Nine pages then present the Players' Background, aimed at those hoping to run a character from there. We get a history of the native Traldaran people and an explanation of how the country came to be occupied. That lead to two parallel cultures, natives and the Thyatian nobility. The tension between those two groups runs throughout the supplement. Brief material on major locations and cultures appear next, followed by rules for character creation. Key to this is the idea of social standing, rolled randomly. Details on names, races, place of origin, and available spells follow. The rules also introduce the concept of skills, with a beginning character knowing four general skills. Some examples are provided for these, but players are encouraged to come up with their own.

A more detailed history of Karameikos follows, with a timeline. These four pages open with “Ancient History as the Characters Know It” followed immediately by the less shiny truth. Politics gets covered next- continuing the focus on social status, ethnicity and rank for the area. There's a nice example showing how political disputes spark adventures. A dissection of Karameikos Society follows, with fifteen pages covering everything from nobles to the Thieves Guild, from laws to holidays. The book stops off in each discussion to talk about how players might encounter, interact with or join with the various groups and events. A page on economics has a funny bit discussing how DMs should handle issues of wealth.

From general cultural issues, the book moves to the specifics of the land, first with seven pages on geography. Different settlements and key locations are very briefly covered. The little bits presented focus on one or two key thematic details. Nineteen pages then showcase the major NPCs of the setting, complete with stats and combat notes for each. The assumption is that the party will be interacting with the movers and shakers of Karameikos. Descriptions of the foreign ambassadors offer a nice sneak peek of the other countries and cultures of the world. Allston makes the most of the character backgrounds. Each helps illuminate the region and/or provides hooks to hang a story on. There's a liberal mix of heroes, villains and those in-between.

The booklet wraps up with adventuring. Two new monsters appear (Chevall and Nosferatu) along with a list of those native to the region. There's a very general section on adventure and campaign creation, less about Karameikos and more about what players should generally do at different levels. Two+ pages offer tiny adventure seeds, drawing on the earlier present material and NPCs. Finally there's some discussion of existing published adventures which feature Karameikos and how to use them.

UNDERLYING THEME
There's an interesting conflict going on throughout this supplement. On the one hand you have the native Traldarans who are generally depicted as primitive, but wise. They have a strong national identity and tradition, but they have many internal factions. New religious schisms help divide them. On the other hand, the Thyatian occupying nobility have their own contradictions. Lord Stefan Karameikos III, ruler of the Duchy is presented as a shining example. Other nobles of his people aren't nearly so enlightened. The Duke aims toward reforms, but maintains the structures and privileges of of the nobility because he has to. Most of the characters presented run black or white, but taken as a whole, the setting offers a complex set of interactions resulting in a much more ambiguous background. GMs have plenty of room to shift those complexities in one direction or the other.

OVERALL
This is a nice, thematic supplement with interesting material. It requires work by the GM to bring it to the table however. DMs wanting an well-detailed setting to run a classic D&D or OSR game will find a lot to love here. The cultural discussion and interesting NPCs make this a great read. Not having played the conventional D&D modules associated with this world, I don't have a nostalgic attachment to the material. Instead, as a GM I'm looking to see what I can borrow for other campaigns. On that count, this supplement works. I've used it as an area in my patchwork fantasy world for many years now. The mechanics on offer are minimal, and the serial numbers on the module could easily be filed off and ported elsewhere.

THE GAZETTEERS IN REVIEW

GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri
GAZ4: The Kingdom of Ierendi

Goals (Gaming and Otherwise) for 2012

2012-01-02T22:26:00.003-05:00

Three years ago today I began this blog with a set of resolutions. And I keep coming back to that well. So goals...measurable? Perhaps in some cases. I've tried to be more concrete, but I fear these are more resolution-y than I want them to be.

1. Write an RPG

We've been playing our homebrew Action Cards for over a decade now, with many versions and variations. I think, though, with the most recent variants drawing from FATE, we've come to a pretty workable base system. I want to write up those core rules in a clear and useful way. Ideally, I want to get that put together and laid out so that the players can print out nice bound copies for themselves. I'll include a number of the optional modules we've used, but focus on a simple set of mechanics for campaigns, plus the options for running it as a pick up game.

2. Assemble and Develop the Age of Ravens Book

I have three years worth of posts here on the blog. Let's assume that at least three-quarters of that is trash, reviews or specific to a time and context. Of that remaining quarter, I'm guessing half is fluff and and half is solid with ideas. I want to pull that material together, edit and focus it and assemble a single book. I had some additional material I unfortunately lost when the primary hard drive died on my machine. I envision quite a bit of rewriting of the ideas, removing duplications, and expanding my discussions. I think that would be a useful exercise and perhaps one other gamers might find helpful.

3. Produce Board Game

We've been playtesting and refining our design of Right of Succession now for two years. I think it is pretty solid right now. I've tried it with a number of groups. Now I have to rebuild the layouts (lost with the hard drive) and rewrite a final version of the rules. I need to price prototypes and figure out a unit cost. Ideally, I'd like to get a couple more blind playtests done as well. Then I want to see if I can get finance, backing or even a Kickstarter to get the game done and published this year. My first step will be to make a solid list of project steps and outside labor I'll need (art, etc).

4. Submit Proposals

I have a number of comic pitches I've been working on, and several more in process. I want to get some of those out the door and into people's hands. I need to get packets with my recent work out to editors. I've put those together, but I really need and want to get things moving forward this year.

5. Build a Website

Related to that, I need to get a website built- at least to establish a brand identity. I want to keep blogging, but I need to have that channel draw more opportunities and offer an easy place to check on my work.

6. Set Simple and Regular Blogging Schedule

Two posts a week, plus an extra post every once in a while. Generally a game review, plus another gaming related post. I probably won't post session reports this year, unless I can use them to illustrate some point about gaming. Those posts tend to be the least read.

7. Recruit New Players

Ideally, I'd like to recruit at least one new and solid person into our regular play group this year. I'm going to be changing over a number of campaigns, so there might be an opportunity. We've have some people leave over the last couple of years- some for the better, some not. But I think it is important to change things up every once in a while. I don't necessarily mean completely new people, but people I haven't played with for a while.

8. Manage Campaign Transitions

I have six on-going campaigns, many of which will wrap up this year. I really want to make those go out with a splash- especially the ones we've been playing for a long time. And I want to get some new and exciting campaigns off the ground this year as well.

9. Play a Skype-Based Game

I haven't done any games over Skype. I really want to try that, just to get a sense of the restrictions, structures and benefits of that approach. Ideally I want to play a session or two of that before I'd try to put anything together myself. I'd like to do something rules light, like FATE or GUMSHOE.

10. Try a Forum Game

I also haven't tried to do any play-by-forum gaming. I want to at least play in a game like that this year, again so I can get a sense of how they work. I'm a little nervous about the time commitment and what's involved with it- I really don't know all that much about it.

11. Play New Games

This year I got to try many new board games, but fewer new RPGs. I read many new games, but haven't had a chance to play them. I want to fix that this year. I want to play at least a dozen new rpgs. That may mean going outside my comfort zone and seeing about sitting in on games in the local area.

12. Go to Conventions

Related to the above, I want to see about going to at least one gaming convention this year to play. I've only run at cons over the last decade. And I haven't been to a gaming convention in a couple of years. I want to have the chance to sit down and play with new people. I also want to see about doing more networking and building contacts through that. My sister, the esteemed author Cat Rambo, is very good at that and I wish I had her talent. I am going to C2E2 in Chicago again this year, so perhaps I can meet up with some gamers there. IIRC The Hopeless Gamer attended last year.

13. Do More Writing

Beyond comic scripting, I have some other writing projects, including two novels, that I need to focus on. I lost some work with the HD crash, but much of that involved sketches rather than finished material.

14. Obtain More Work

Ideally I'd like to get more freelance work this year, and even perhaps some steady part-time work. The economy has been a drag around here and I've gotten more than a little tired of sending resumes out into the void every week. I'd really love this year to be able to actually buy my wife a Christmas present. But that's stuff I can only just keep working at and hoping for the best.

15. Get on a Podcast

I had the chance to be on the comic book podcast, Raging Bullets this year and I really enjoyed it. I want the chance to be on a gaming podcast this year. Not as a regular thing, but I'd like to do that- especially for a field I enjoy so much. I don't know how I'm going to do that, but I'm going to strategize...

16. Finish Video Games

I want to finish off more games before I start any new ones. I did manage to complete a number of CRPGs this year, but I have more I'm part-way through. It does help that the gaming industry is producing fewer and fewer games I'm interested in. I like turn-based games, and that has declined in recent years.

17. Play More Rock Band

On the other hand, the industry has produced games I keep playing solidly. I still can't get past Medium on Guitar or Bass, but I love singing in RB. I didn't play nearly enough of this in 2011. I want to play more in 2012.

18. Daily 30 Minutes of Exercise

I've fallen behind on walking regularly over the last couple of months, and I need to get back in that habit. I need to do thirty minutes of something each day- walking, exercise biking at the gym, playing Dance Central, or do the routine with the sledgehammer.

19. Reorganize Game Room

Sherri wants to reorganize some of the game room. Right now we have the board game collection downstairs along with the rpgs. She want to move the BGs upstairs to the front room. That's not a bad idea- and we really need to get things reordered now that we no longer have a houseguest living with us.

20. Finish Outstanding Reviews

I have two reviews that I've found difficult to do because of the flaws in the products. I need to finish and submit those.

21. Read Projects

I have several different longer pieces by friends which I need to seriously read through. I want to do that by the end of January.

22. Be Mindful Consistently

I've read and listened to a number of books this year addressing mindfulness. Most importantly, they talk about a conscious acknowledgment of happiness. When I don't do this, I'm fine. When I do do this, I'm great and even awesome. I want to be more awesome this year.

23. Be a Better Friend

I want to strive to be a reliable friend this year. I want to make sure I'm listening to other people and be someone that people actually want to hang around and talk to.

500th Post: RPG Lessons from 2011 (and more...)

2011-12-31T12:06:00.002-05:00

LET'S REVIEW
Today marks my 500^th post, done over three solid years. Earlier this week I finally broke 100 people following, and my thanks to everyone who has read or commented on the blog. This has been a pretty dynamite year for gaming, and below I talk about some of the key things I learned (or relearned) this year about gaming. Microscope, Changeling the Lost and Cthulhu Invictus continue to be the big search hits that lead people to the blog. In mundane news, I had modest success in comics this year with the publication of a story in Rocketeer Adventures, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard won an Eisner (I had a story in issue #2), and I got to script and co-plot Flashpoint: Project Superman. I hope to get more pitches and ideas out there in 2012 and get more work. I had a couple of interviews for regular work this year, but the conventional employment situation in my area remains bad. Hopefully I can find more freelance and/or part-time work in this coming year. I finally had surgery on my right hand, which dramatically improved the quality of my life. I regained serious mobility with it and eliminated 90% of the pain. Most importantly, I managed a number of game reviews this year and remain in the running for the RPG Geek Iron Reviewer contest.

As a sidebar, I'll direct anyone interested to two lists I've put together:

List of Campaign Ideas The Next Worlds: Campaign Plans
Is the list of campaign ideas I've put together for 2012. This is a unified and easier to look at version of the earlier list I posted on the blog Any feedback, suggestions or advice on any of them would be appreciated (either on the list or here).

List of Review Ideas edige23's Iron Reviewer for 2012?
Is the list of things I'm thinking about reviewing in 2012. If anyone has preferences or requests, feel free to comment there or here. Thumb something is you want to see it reviewed.

WHAT I PLAYED THIS YEAR
I read more RPGs this year than I got to run or play in. Most games in 2011 were some flavor of our homebrew Action Cards system. We continue to tweak that. We've added in elements from FATE and the magic system in our latest campaign borrows heavily from that in Novarium. I keep fine tuning the system and I'm pretty pleased with it. I also played several sessions of Microscope, ran several sessions of Strands of Fate, ran our Storyteller-based wushu homebrew White Mountain, Black River, and did a one-shot using Dread. I wish I'd had a chance to play more games, but there's always next year...

THE CAMPAIGNS
Fallout RPG
Dave Enyeart ran his Fallout RPG campaign this year, using Action Cards as a basis, but heavily modified. That was pretty awesome. The only game I got to play in this year.

White Mountain, Black River
I ran a half-dozen sessions of this wuxia homebrew in 2011, but opted to put this on hiatus (in favor of The Fleet Departs campaign, below). We'd been playing it for over a year. I will come back to wrap up this story in the future. The campaign began as a vehicle to to try out some martial arts rules and give some out-of-town players a campaign they could drop into easily. Both of those goals had mixed success. Despite that, I love the tale we've been telling and the characters the players created. I want to give that some closure in 2012.

Continuing Campaigns
Libri Vidicos (Steampunk Fantasy Academy)
This February we'll hit the fifth year of playing this campaign. In that time we've gotten through three years of the PCs time at the school. This school year was more difficult for the characters, with greater pressures from on high. We also lost a player who'd been in the game since the start, taking us down to five plus me. But we managed some pretty amazing scenes and episodes: the great race, Valarain and the Elf Demon, the return to Codici Malefactus, the student exchange, the school invasion, and the travel to Sigil (from Planescape). The system's showing its age- it was the first real version of the homebrew we tried for extended play and we've made some advances since then. But it remains a game of solid and fun PCs.

Wayward (Changeling the Lost)
The nature of this campaign means that we move pretty slowly. Modern games can make it harder for a Gm to implement time lapse. That's especially true with so many issues on the table. We lost a player here as well, but I think that actually refocused the game. The group deepend and developed their connections in the freehold and found roles for themselves. They also uncovered some of the real sources of problems and fought successfully against the Winter Court several times. Probably the greatest shift came when they quested out and made contact with a supernatural aspect, the figure of Judgment. They returned from their quest with a blessing to establish a new Court and bring balance to the Freehold. That's changed the entire situation in the city, including a shift in game mechanics. Several times now the players have surprised me with their choices- and they've really taken control of the story in the campaign.

Pavis High Fantasy
This remains a solid high fantasy game, with the players battling the Clanking City, the Godchainers, allying with the Rider tribes, destroying the Pavic rebellion, encouraging sedition, and harvesting from the Giant Tree. The system works, despite having been planned for a much shorter game. I look forward to wrapping up some of the interesting story threads we have happening in Pavis, and seeing what the players want to do next.

The Fleet Departs
A new campaign for this year, my fantasy take on the premise of Battlestar Galactica. I've enjoyed every session of this immensely. I love the characters and the system has really begu8n to click for me. They went through a number of disasters and have finally made it to the "new world." Now they have to figure out the politics and peoples of this new place. There's a war going on between two empires here- both Elvish- and the players may have to choose sides. We're going into session ten, I believe, of what will be 26 sessions total.

Treasure Hunters
Another new campaign, where each player has an sentient magic item and have banded together to stop a spell burning the land. I'd initially planned this as just seven sessions, but we're going into session eight next time. I expect we'll have another four to five after that. The story's still coming along- and I hope to tie together more of the details I've been dropping. The campaign has a fairly linear course (they choose between two directions at each junction point) but I've left what they do in each location pretty open-ended. I've been using tags and aspects more seriously here and that's been fun. I really love the world the players created through the Microscope session at the beginning.

Atelier Auzumel
The alchemical campaign I'm running for just Sherri. We've done about four sessions of this, but haven't been able to get back to this for a while. She's begun to see elements of the larger arc of the story and some of the key NPCs have been introduced. I'm looking forward to seeing where we can take the story this year when we have time to play.

LESSONS
This year I learned a few lessons about rpgs- at least things that I hope will stick with me. Some of these are new, some rediscoveries, and some just simple reminders. But thinking back on this year in gaming, I want to point to these. I read many gaming blogs, and they're the source of many ideas I've brought to the table this year. I really want to thank Risus Monkey, who pointed me in the direction of many new concepts I might not have come into contact with. He told me about Microscope and I owe him a great deal for that. I also have to thank Dave Enyeart, who ran the Fallout campaign I played in this year. I only got to play in one campaign in 2011 and Dave raised the bar for me once again. Both he and Kenny have given me the opportunity to play in versions of the homebrew rpg rules I've been subjecting them to for years. That was illuminating, to say the least.

Microscope
I keep coming back to it, but it bears repeating: Microscope's a cool game on its own, but it is also an amazing tool for structuring collaborative world building. It's shown me how important player buy-in to the setting can be, and how easily that can be managed. At the same time, it has made me even more willing to share power at the table: both in the creative and play management process. I can understand why some GMs might be uncomfortable with that, wanting to tell the stories they have in their head. That's a reasonable position. But I really believe that this collaborative approaches offers direct and tangible benefits to play at the table.

Scene Aspects
This is the first year I actually "got" how FATE works. I'd read a couple of versions of it before, but somehow it finally clicked for me. From those mechanics I've learned several lessons. Most important has been the concept of Scene Tags and Aspects. Just that little device- describing n place of conflict through those aspects has added enormously to our play. They make players conscious of the situation, they present a quick and tangible mechanical benefit, they make me as a GM slow down and think about the context of the fight, and they give players something interesting to hang their action descriptions on. When you state the chamber the party's about to battle in has the aspects Fog Laden, Damp, Flickering with Magical Light, Strange Brackish Pools, and Uncertain Footing, player immediately begin to think of how to use those things. It is a little device which obviously can be used across many games. FATE offers much more, but that technique I'll be using everywhere.

Player-Facing Resolution
Earlier this year I read a description of combat in the Dragon Age rpg that ended up changing how I handle conflict resolution in our homebrew. In DA players roll their attack and then, depending on the margin of their success, can add bonuses and effects from their maneuvers. So instead of stating "I try to do X," and roll with an increased difficulty, the player gains the option to do X if they've done well enough. There's a little bit of retcon there. I like that- and I think that's especially useful for various kinds of heroic games (perhaps less so for horror and games which want players to have more uncertainty like The Esoterrorists). I realized I wanted a system that operated more like that. But to do that, I'd have to change around how actions got resolved.

Previously in Action Cards, players stated the action they wanted to attempt- including any elements, additional effects or spin they wanted to cause. They'd make their draw and tell me their result. I would then pull for the bad guy and tell them if they made it or not. At that point they could invoke skills or other mechanisms to get redraws or bumps. That meant an extra stage of resolution, and scrambling around after the fact for the players. If a player had done really well on an initial pull, a pull from me could negate that. So I switched the order around. Now, the player states basically what they want to do. If it is unopposed, I state a difficulty. If opposed, I pull for the opposition and tell them what they need. They can then draw and apply their various effects and options to their results- they only come back to me with what they manage, rather than trying a sequence of pulls.

The bottom line of this is that I've made the system player-facing. I tell them what they need, and they must figure out how to rise to that challenge. The steps go A-->B, rather than B-->A-->B and the player has more control over their final result. That's been successful, except that I'm still so used to the "OK, make a roll for me..." mode of play that I forget I need to set the difficulty or make the pull first. Just as important, if the players choose or realize they'll be failing, they have the choice to frame that failure themselves- creating their own explanations and descriptions.

Spam Details
I still haven't been able to settle down and read through Apocalypse World. I have the pdf but I really want to read it in hard-copy form. But the one idea I picked up from various gamer's discussion of it has been the idea of "spamming the setting." That is- when you're in a particular genre (Post-Apoc, High Fantasy, Modern Fantastic, Gritty Noir) make sure to throw details and elements of those tropes at the players. Make the fantastic sing, make the gritty feel grimy. Go over the top. That little piece of advice has been easier to remember and follow through with at the table than telling myself I need to add sensory details, drop names or the like. Instead I write "Spam XXX" at the top of each prep sheet and it sticks in my head.

Execute Plots
Earlier this year I was thinking about a couple of related topics- why some PCs had frustrated me and what I wanted to do about a particular plot thread that the players had latched on to much earlier than I'd expected. Then the connection hit me. The PCs in question had made themselves static. They had character problems and issues but they wouldn't move forward on them. They had excuses- not enough time had passed in game, they weren't ready to share them with the group, they didn't want to change who their character was, they liked having secrets, they didn't trust their fellow PCs, no one really understood them, etc. That's a kind of defensiveness. John Wick in Blood & Honor explicitly talks about this- about players who have all of this super-cool baggage and backstory in their heads and won't share it at the table. The reasons for that can be various (not wanting to commit, not wanting to shift from the perfection in their mind, etc). But the result is that the other players don't and can't understand that player. They set up a loop of frustration between themselves and the rest of the table- because the other players "just don't get it..." and the other players can only logically assume that the player's being a selfish prick.

And a GM who doesn't let loose what's in their head is committing the same kind of selfishness. You may have the coolest plot and idea in your head, but it doesn't mean anything unless the PCs are actually making contact with it. Your precious snowflake of an idea is going to get battered around by the party. It is never going to be perfect- so pull back the curtain even if the time doesn't feel quite right. There's nothing worse than trying to tell the players after the campaign's over about all of the cool stuff you had planned but they never saw. Pull the trigger on your plots. You'll make new ones, you'll raise the stakes, and you'll give the story momentum.

Show Victory
Be explicit about victories for the players. Sometimes players do things that had repercussions elsewhere- shifts in bad guys' plots, changes in NPC reactions, or a tangent in the direction of the campaign. That knowledge serves as an intangible reward for the players. Give that to them. Either through meta-commentary or through news in the grapevine, tell the players when they've had success on that level. That's especially true for darker games where the down beats can keep coming fast and furious.

Boxes
I ordered a large number of 12"x10"x4" Literature Mailer boxes. I've been using those to sort and organize my old campaign information and other projects. They store nicely on shelves and I can label them clearly. They're large enough to story small binders, plus notebooks and folders. Because I have a number of simultaneous ongoing campaigns, I put all of the materials for each on in a separate box. Then when I go to work on or run a session, I just pull that box down. When I'm done, I pack up everything and put it back. That's worked really well and helped keep me on task.

LASTLY
I'm really happy to have made it to 500 posts. There are other better and more interesting gaming blogs out there, but they're not written by me. I'm always glad to have comments and feedback, and I hope some of what I've put out there over these past three years has been useful. Tomorrow I'm going to redesign the site slightly and then move forward with more posts. I do want to specifically thank Derek Stoelting, Steve Sigety, and especially Jim McClain who really gave me the confidence to actually do a blog.

Most importantly, thank you to my wife Sherri- who reads all of this stuff and then has to talk it over with me ad nauseum. I'd like to point out her guest post from earlier this week now ranks in the top five posts for sheer number of hits across the lifespan of this blog.

Anyway- have a great new year!

Let Us Now Praise Famous Players

2011-12-29T07:59:00.002-05:00

...And the Games Which Begat Us
Every once in a while, I'll post a piece and at the next game I'll hear, "Man, Lowell...someone pissed you off." I've usually taken on a particular player pet peeve, pointed at a bad behavior, or a addressed problems I've seen at the game table. They're often ones I (and other GMs) have wrestled with. Breaking down player types, trying to identify disruptions & riff on solutions, and figuring out "what went wrong" are easy fallback topics in many ways. They offer the illusion of being practical.

But here's the thing- I have really good players. More often than not, I'm not talking about the present games. Most of the problems I've talked about over the last couple of years, the biggest ones- well, they're in the past. I'll admit that it is easier to focus on the negative, to pick out what goes wrong in a group than to pick out what goes right. With that in mind, I want to analyze what my players do well.

Right now I have a solid core group of a dozen players spread across five campaigns. In the extended group beyond that, I know about another dozen who I've played with or met and would play with again. We've lost a few people from the group over the last few years, but generally that's been about incompatibility. And we'll leave that at that. I want to focus on the positive here.

Connected
I love having a diverse cast of background characters- and the players usually do as well. They're open to the extra detail of having lots of names, knowing that they get greater choice about interactions and relationships. The players generally treat NPCs realistically- not assuming them to be cardboard cutouts, tools for the GM or a means to screw them over. Attitudes may shift once they get to know the NPCs, but players understand that an NPC has his own agenda and desires, existing for themselves and not for the party. At the same time, the players assume that should the players wish to engage to conflict with an NPC, that will be handled realistically. The shopkeeper won't turn out to be 50th level, an urchin won't be an assassin, etc. The players don't read NPCs as Mary-Sue characters who can't be overcome or as tenpins to be knocked over.

Sharing
The group's unselfish. That's a trait that really demonstrates mature play. If a player knows they're about to get a chance at a big scene, more often than not, they'll bring along another player to share in the action. If someone hasn't gotten as much table time, the players are just aware of that as I am and try to push that forward. If another player wants to interact with an NPC that a player has a standing relationship with, they encourage that. If someone's had the center-stage for a long time, they'll usually step back in the next scene. If other players need help or support, the players inevitably step up to the less glamorous task of backing someone up.

Open
Just as the GM strives to say Yes or Yes, But... instead of No, my players do the same thing with each other and with plot, subplots and details that I throw at them. They don't negate things but take those elements and run with them. They're excellent improvisers and quick on their feet.

Undaunted
When presented with a challenge, my players rise to it. I'm not talking about the easy stuff like combat. Combat's a fallback- a place where people have solid ground underneath them, and mechanics to back them up. No, what I mean is that when my players face real questions: moral dilemmas, character development questions, social challenges, problems requiring sacrifice- they don't shut down. They might grind their teeth, they might wrestle with the problem, they might get upset (in character) about the costs involved- but they rise to deal with it. They don't pout, they don't get angry, they don't go passive-aggressive at the table. They use those challenges as a chance for drama, a chance to show who they are, and a chance to move the story in the direction they want.

Good Losers
They don't like to lose, but when they do- they run with it. They deal with setbacks and use them as a motivation to push themselves forward. They expect me to be fair with that, and give them serious obstacles but not GM fiat losses. They also know that I'm careful with some of the player hot-button issues (like hostages, surrender and being captured) and pull those out rarely.

Voices
I have a group of players who approach problems in very different ways. Some tend to direct, some to sneaky, some to negotiation, and some to crazy. Combine that with differences in what the players value in terms of solutions- compromise, victory, a heap of bloody corpses and you end up with some radically different takes on the game. But the players work through those differences. They balance those contradictory impulses. They talk to one another. Everyone gets a voice.

Planning
I had a player several years ago get really angry at the table because the other players were discussing an approach to invading a bad guys stronghold. He hated the need for discussing at all at the table- everything had to be get 'em. He doesn't play with us anymore. Planning is a part of play for most of the group- a chance to discuss options, figure out player strengths and call on resources. Players who step up to the leadership role are usually pretty good about involving everyone in that discussion. Everyone participates in that process.

On the flip side, my players don't overplan. They talk about what they can do, they assess possible obstacles, and consider solutions- but they don't dwell on every conceivable obstacle. They know that sometimes they have to just jump. We've also worked out some openness with that- if the players have taken at least some time to talk about their approach, they gain some room to "retcon" preparations. They have the tools they need, they can spend resources like drama points to set things up, etc. They also know that challenges and surprise are part of the game. Sometimes things go like clockwork and sometimes a monkey-wrench comes flying their direction. But they trust the table enough to be willing to go forward.

Surprise
I've been playing with some of this group for many, many years. We've played through many of the classic genres and tropes (fantasy, horror, supers) but my players still manage to throw me for a loop. I tend to set up open-ended situations, without defining solutions or exits. I count on them to be able to figure something out- I trust in their abilities. But from time to time, they absolutely blow my mind with the connections they make, the ideas they pull out and the approaches they take. They've completely turned the direction of campaigns around more times than I care to count. Years ago, that might have been grounds for me to retool the plot to make it more challenging, but now I try to reward inspirational success like that.

At the same time, I can pull out surprises for my players- and they're generous enough to admit shock. I'd say I manage to pull out fewer of those twists on them than they do on me, but they're pretty smart as a collective group and as individuals.

Forgiving
I try not to run when I'm sick, tired or off my game. But it happens. Just as players have sessions that don't click for them, I do too. They're willing to take a skip week if necessary. When I quit smoking a couple of years ago, just as I was coming off three weeks of bronchitis, all combined with my birthday ending up crummy, most of the players were incredibly gracious and generous towards me. They're good people.

No Lawyers
Rules rarely come up in the group. If I'm wrong about a rule, the players know enough to mention it after a game or scene is done (unless it will dramatically impact the moment). They're tactful and good with their criticism, never coming at me antagonistically. Rarely, if ever, do we end up going to the books to look things up and bringing the game to a halt.

New Things
I'd say only a few people in the group seriously follow what's happening in rpg gaming. You end up with a couple of folks who keep an eye on that, myself included. I read a lot of gaming blogs and try to see what's going on with new games. And every once in a while I bring some of those things to the table: new techniques for character examination, new approaches to resolution, new mechanics for handling sub-systems like chases. Most of these are experiments and some of them work better than others. The groups are really good about willing to try those out. That's how we've ended up with an evolving homebrew that's picked up a lot of elements of FATE in the last year. Its how we used a modified version of Night's Black Agents chases for a fantasy session last Friday, and its how we decided to use Microscope as a tool for play.

But at the same time, the group's willing to speak up and advocate for what they do or don't like. They like some systems and games and speak up for them. That keeps the worst of my toolboxing tendencies in line. They seriously consider what they like about Game X vs. Game Y and will talk about that. I'm never worried that they aren't giving me their straight opinion on something.

Characters
They make me like their characters. That's not to say they always have likable characters- but when they have more prickly characters they balance that with vulnerabilities. They openly show their weakness and secrets, because playing those out at the table is more fun than being angsty and brooding. Ward's hard-bitten commander in HALO seemed like a gritty *sshole...until we ran into an alien race that terrified him with flashbacks from a mission gone wrong. Sherri's Wizened Changeling Sarah No-Tears is prickly and angry, but she explicitly addresses that in her play. It undercuts her in some situations and she lets the other players use it to wind her up. Chas; crazed fire warlock loves her pet dog magic item. Even when their characters are solidly good guys, they have flaws that make them sympathetic. Sergei's a handsome and noble hero, but he worries about the responsibility that brings. He has the pressure of expectations hanging over him- not all the time, but enough that his character feels solid and human.

Dynamic
My players like growing their characters. Beyond the concrete markers of spending points or adding levels, they like to evolve and change their characters. They learn from their mistakes and make new ones. If they have a tragic past, they might work to overcome that, fall back, and then struggle forward some more. They like playing limitations and flaws and enjoying figuring out opportunities to advance and move beyond those. They also know that secrets, flaws, plots and backstories don't mean anything unless they actually get played out at the table. That makes them much more open about dealing with and addressing those issues.

Trust
I really trust my players. And I think that they've got a degree of trust in me. I trust that they will rise to the occasion, and that's why I throw heavy stuff at them sometimes. I trust that they will talk to me if they're not enjoying something in the game. I trust that they'll mention and point to plots and stories that they really want to see played out. Trust doesn't come easily- it is a currency built up over time. I'm lucky enough to have a dynamite group, and I keep working to make sure I earn and repay their trust.

Finally
I have to thank a great group of players for an excellent year of gaming. I got the chance to participate in some campaigns that were an absolute blast to run. I also had the chance to play in a superb Fallout campaign run by Dave Enyeart, who sets the bar pretty high for me with his preparation, story and attention to detail.

My thanks to this year's group Sherri, Steve, Scott, Kenny, Dave, Sharon, Ward, Jacque, Chas, Jeanne, Alan, Chris, Rob, Gene, and Kali.

Guest Post: The Best Thing to Happen to RPGs

2011-12-27T11:22:00.001-05:00

A couple of friends in my gaming circle generously offered guest posts for this month, to help me round out the year with some different voices and ideas. Today's post comes from Sherri Stewart, my wife and fellow gamer. She brings a different set of tools to thinking about games- as a woman and as a DBA. In discussions about rpgs she inevitably manages to clarify my thoughts about rpgs or turn me towards something I hadn't considered before.

The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Tabletop RPGs

MMORPGs.

What was not to like? Online RPGs had it all:
*...continuous incremental reinforcement and accrual
*...instant calculation of complicated “simulation” formulas
*...loot and quests and and tons of content—always something new and always something for any mood—player's choice
*...constant reassessment of class balance and additional skill improvements. No one strives harder for “fair” than the MMORPG designers
*...whatever versions of “social” worked for each player—be it guild leadership/politics, anonymous assholery & griefing or just chatting with acquaintances on a friends list
*...visual reinforcement of player achievements
*...strategic planning with others for epic battles—cooperative play that required strict roles and orderly implementation of a plan
24/7

Everquest took the first toll at our table—and World of Warcraft stole away a lot of the fence-sitters. Once the dust cleared after all the desertions, things looked different. And with every passing day, they look better.

We seem to have permanently lost a few players—most were problematic--needy for the constant continuous reinforcement or to have the content revolve around their whims. MMORPGS really were a better fit for them than tabletop.

A few players who left later returned. Some people, even among the tabletop stalwarts, still play MMORPGs. There's plenty to like there. But when they sit down now, they know better why they are there. Appreciation for the games is at an all-time high.

And we've gotten some new players—wives & sisters & friends of friends who would never have considered sitting down at table if they hadn't gotten sucked into the MMORPGs; these 'novices' come to the table with a vocabulary of strategic cooperative battle and the desire for something ...more.

These things are merely anecdotal evidence. Still, when I look around the table and I see how much things have changed, I'm amazed. There is more to it than just the passing years. I imagine these phenomena have occurred elsewhere. Certainly, the RPG industry seems to have changed. To my eyes, RPG designers began thinking harder about why people were at the table—or maybe just the RPG communities did- paying increased attention to products that delivered that 'something more' and thinking hard about what did make the hobby fun.

I haven't seen a lot of discussion of the MMORPGs in the RPG community– what I have stumbled across treats MMORPG players as an entirely separate customer base or hobby community. But they're not. MMORPG players are RPG players—past, present and future.

What the industry response has been, whether a direct response to MMORPGs or not, is a boatload of really amazing and satisfying RPG material and some interesting back and forth about what RPGs really are.

In the last few years, we've seen some the corporate RPG houses take a distinctly business-like tact. The Old School community, on the other hand, is keeping their chin up and throwing some punches (and a lot of insults). Indie gaming has deployed their agents to every lecture hall, three-ring circus and performance art venue in the industrialized world. Different responses, each of them—but ones that each distill a distinct set of essences from the RPG paradigm and proffer it as the 'more' that fills the MMORPG voids.

It's The Real Thing
Some MMORPG players came out of those games expecting 'fair and balanced' systems of some complexity, lots of skill options, strong roles with important duties assigned to each role, and constant updates. If they came back to RPGs, they came back because they wanted more of the same at a slower pace and in a less-populated (and possibly as less-competitive) setting. Corporate RPGs sensibly filled that need. It was an established (and large) consumer base—why ignore it?

THE Corporate RPG, D&D 4e, opted for video-game simulation. Weird, huh? It's popular with the kids after all. And they're right. A great deal of what drew tabletop players to MMORPGs is in 4e. What's the difference? It's much slower. It's not 24/7. Players get all the crunch, but don't need the reflexes or the attention span or the patience for organizing a guild raid. And no one can get ahead by playing more hours. The balance, the strict roles and the constant changes/improvements...nerfs?...to each class—as well as a ton of mechanics to allow players to leverage their every experience point—still gleam with promise. But the pace is so much nicer. And 4e has all the usual tabletop charm—socializing, a little story, a character to call your own. Like all the best-known brands, it's got a comfortable universality too—lots of other people are playing it.

Now I'm also going to categorize Paizo's Pathfinder as corporate. Don't hate me. I know they're not WOTC. But they took the old corporate package, cleaned it up, tied a bow on it and taught the RPG community all over again about what's important to have from a corporate RPG system: good packaging, familiar system, large user base, steady stream of new product including new options & modules, and the ability to maintain a semblance of concern for customer feedback. They share the same feature list as 4e for post-MMORPG appeal. Just by virtue of not being entirely new (because we all know it's 3.5 in a better tailored suit), they've acquired a thin coat of attractive sepia-toned nostalgic lacquer that the the Old School revolution claims as their own.

Of course, not all corporate RPG designers joined the revolution. GURPS, for example, is still the same old attempt at a blow-by-blow simulation of everything under the sun. It has it's niche and it's loyal players and those don't seem to be going away—but GURPS hasn't changed nor has it's community. White Wolf blew it's setting up and rebooted with more mechanics on top of their old system—and while a few of the new lines were strong, they lost a lot of their loyal fans by changing their heavy hitters. They seem to be responding more to changes in the publishing industry than to changes in the RPG community. Plenty of other true-to their-tradition RPGs are still out there treading water.

And while neither exactly traditional or corporate, D20 did manage to become the Linux of the RPG world; it inspired a bunch of DIYers by giving them an open-source version of a less-than-cutting-edge system. It's had it's heyday—but the overwhelming number of mediocre products undermined it's credibility. If it tapped into anything that resonated with the post-MMORPG crowd, it was the joy of creating—but this was at the level of the publication and not a process that occurred at the table. Some interesting content was created—and some of the best thinkers about that system (or minor variations thereof) put together very good materials. Mutants and Masterminds remains the greatest standout for me—one of the best superhero systems yet made. But I don't see it or any of the other d20 products/offshoots as being a response to MMORPGs. It was more a reaction to the idea of open-source than to MMORPGs.

Nostalgia Makes Everything Prettier
The Old School community responded to MMORPGs by digging their heels in. They knew what was good—and if you couldn't see the charm of the Old School RPG, you weren't right in the head or one of the club or something. And they were correct enough. No MMORPG offers the experience of the Old School canon (or their new stuff). And curiosity has a purpose.

The Old School movement maintains that the charm of RPGs lies in the very quirkiness of the old mechanics and settings and the shared experience of playing those modules. Balance be damned. This is about gaming history and the fun of mining a pre-designed setting and doing it by the book. These are the champions of the funhouse dungeons and the Runes of Death. And, frankly, it's the province of something that MMORPGs are definitely not—this is where heroes, loners and munchkins all bow to the inscrutable failure. Old School knows the dice will kill you—and if they don't, a single bad choice can. Did you look in the chest? You die! Or are possessed! Or find the key that you absolutely need to leave the dungeon! And there were no hints! Okay—maybe it's not all like that. But it's there. Sometimes it's about 'rolling a character'-- where there are clearly better and worse options—and you are stuck with what you roll. The sickly, ugly, unskilled beggar and the handsome, well-trained noble start out in the same group—and, yes, the beggar is truly a wretch in all ways—no hidden talents or secret organizations...

And the fun of it is that every group who plays the module or the setting has to survive the same hazards. Failure is okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't get you kicked out of the guild. After each untimely death, you just roll up a new character and get back in there. Who knows, maybe this time you'll be to be a pit fighter or a circus acrobat. And hopefully you laugh a lot and rejoice in your hard-won triumphs. That idea is pretty gorgeous.

It also stinks of old-timey fun that isn't always all that fun. Like a croquet game in whites on a too-hot summer day, the stories afterward may sound intriguing and a little romantic. But if you are truthful, the pleasure of the game was 9/10s the company you were in and only 1/10 the game and the costumes and the setting. Still, there's value in re-visiting the old stuff—there were snatches of brilliance. And the ability to laugh off a horrendous outcome for a fictional character that you enjoyed playing is invaluable to enjoying all the rest of your RPG years. So if I'm not convinced that nostalgia is actually the response to MMORPGs that fills any need except for the wish to draw a line in the sand and establish us/them on experiential grounds and bragging rights, well, that's probably because I don't have a great many fond Old School memories. Maybe I didn't play the right Old School game.

There! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ...
An Indie game? Hoo boy. Here's where the theorists are at work. It's a feast, if you're in to that sort of thing..and by that sort of thing, I mean any sort of thing. There's an Indie game that's just as in to that sort of thing as you are. The ones that seem to me to have gained currency due to the MMORPGs involve a few core concepts: 'the RP stands for roleplay', genre simulation, shared creation and increased player control. There's too many to even get close to listing all the note-worthies—so I'm going to point to a few examples.

I tie these to MMORPGs because they are exactly what no MMORPG can give anyone in satisfying measure. A MMORPG player is an insect in swarm—a well-served insect, but still, a mere insect. Sometimes the MMORPGs come up with some system to respond to the behavior of the swarm in a permanent and world-changing way—but a single gnat never makes a difference. And there is no roleplay—you can blather all day in your character's 'voice' but you can't really do anything outside fighting/crafting/questing/sightseeing the same things everyone else can and does fight/craft/quest/sightsee.. And no amount of creativity will allow you to turn WoW into a shared spy caper. You can't trump the random-number generator of the MMORPG engine no matter how important the situation is to you. You can't make up your own city and have any meaningful content there.

And here's the thing. RPGs are a form of creative play. There's the creation and acting out of a character. There's a story that is being told—but who's telling it and how that's arbitrated decides what's getting told and how. There's a setting and a reason the group is in the same place—maybe that's decided by genre, maybe by the GM or maybe by the players. MMORPG players have got their constant continuous reinforcement—but that doesn't mean they have found satisfaction. They come away from the swarm wanting experiences that are unique, stories that they can get involved in right away, characters free to do what makes sense...and they want to have some control when the random number generator betrays them. After years of grinding their characters up to max level, they've been rewarded with ...the opportunity for more grinding? No—there must be somewhere their devotion pays off.

This is not to say that corporate RPGs or Old School RPGs don't have anything for some of these issues—but the majority of those systems consist primarily of extensive mechanics for skirmish. The roots of war-gaming is apparent. And so, if the antidote for a malaise borne of hacking your way through a dungeon online is to hack your way through some other whatsit at the table at a slower pace and with fewer people, then you're definitely okay with one of the above. But it might be time for something a little different.

What about horror? Don't Rest Your Head
What about hard-boiled action? Hollowpoint
What about dark comedy? Fiasco
What about drama? Dogs In The Vineyard

What's interesting is that these are NOT just setting books plunked on top of a system...these are games that build the genre conventions into the mechanics. The games are engineered to deliver the mounting suspense and the inevitable (and often tragic) endings of their genre—and to do it fairly, logically, evenhandedly and ruthlessly. These are genre simulations. First time players are going to come out of these games amazed at what has just happened that they willingly helped happen.

It doesn't take a degree in Drama Engineering to make an RPG that can simulate a genre. The time-honored method of using a good rules engine and altering it to fit a genre lives on. The trick is to choose a rules engine that features some of the desired qualities. FATE gives the player quick access to an interesting playable character and control when the dice play hard-ball—and the system has been beautifully adapted to a range of genres. For instance, Diaspora, a FATE adaptation for sci-fi gaming features player-created clusters that serve as the home base for the players, mini-games for different conflict types and an array of interesting ways to use the simple FATE mechanics to drive dramatic scenes—ways available to both GM and players. A FATE adaptation of Kerberos Club actually delivers a surprising amount of the Steampunk you may have been wishing for and never finding elsewhere. GUMSHOE was built for investigative games and has been adapted to multiple genres--and it has able handlers in Robin Laws and Ken Hite. Burning Wheel has a couple variations—including it's own strange fantasy setting and Mouse Guard (which is one gorgeous RPG book)--and it has a unique method of sharing control between GM and player that may be exceedingly palatable to players coming from the absolute GM-control world—Burning Wheel is not at all loosey-goosey.

There is no game that more clearly reveals the honest pleasure of shared creation than Microscope. Further validation of the players' efforts by incorporating the results in a standard RPG campaign just keeps the good feelings rolling. The game itself is simple enough that people want to argue that it's hardly revolutionary—but they are crazy-wrong. Try it. Play it with people you've known for years—especially ones you think you know backwards and forwards. Play it with mere acquaintances. You will come out of the experience with a completely new appreciation of your gaming circle. They're brilliant people, it turns out. At least, I hope for you it turns out that way.

And then there are the Indie games that put the roleplay back into RPG. I do think these are the ones the haters are most afraid of. Kagematsu is certainly a fearsome beast—and Love in the Time of Seid is not for the faint of heart. But dang, even if I never get to play these games, I need to be thinking about these types of games and surrounding myself with people who would play these games so that I can remember that roleplay is more than funny voices and awkward explanations when you choose to do something suboptimal. Because if I want to be heroic, I've got to learn to risk being foolish or tragically wrong...

So I wrote this.

Next year: more games, more risks.

Campaign Frames 2012: Finishing the List

2011-12-23T11:48:00.011-05:00

So last time, I presented the first few campaign proposals I'm putting on the table for 2012. At least these are the ideas I have in my head right now. Here's the rest of the ideas #7-23.

7. Last Call
System: Homebrew based on Scion.

I ran Scion a couple of years ago and like the concept, but the system got in the way of the game by the end of it. It was pretty clear that a few more step ups in power and the combats would becoming really difficult to manage. Certain aspects and choice can make a devastating combination at the Demi-God level or above. But I like the idea and I want to run it again, with a different system.

Last time I ran a game set in Las Vegas that borrowed more than a little from Tim Powers' novel Last Call. I have a group of new players, none of whom played in that. It might be fun to rework and rerun that general campaign from them. I'd made some tweaks, strip out some of the unnecessary elements and let them go to town with the fun of playing children of the gods. Another option would be to run a continuation of the previous Scion campaign with the group that played in the first part. I'd shift things to a different city- making each campaign block about exploring that place's history and ethos (Detroit? Atlanta? Boston?). I'm a little hesitant to do that, however, because it would require either running in the original Scion system to doing some serious retooling and conversion of characters.

8. The Stars like Ash...
System: Modified Ashen Stars

I like some of the core concepts of Ashen Stars, and I think a kind of freewheeling campaign in that setting would work. I'd want to establish "Planet Noir" or "Station Gotham" asa location the players could come back to between their adventures- some kind of key industrial, trade or administrative world that they could also have adventures on from time to time. That would give me the chance to build up a stable of interesting NPCs. I think I'd probably make some of the more radical races (like the one with psionics) NPC-only and limit the craziness of the crew. I'm not sure I'd want to do an extended campaign like that, but a number of sessions could be really fun.

9. The Armitage Files
System: Straight or slightly hacked Trail of Cthulhu

The Armitage Files is a dynamite campaign sourcebook and I really want to run it. The trick will be to find the right group for it. Some players enjoy horror and Lovecraft more than others. I'd also want players who relish an investigation type game. Finally, I'd need to have a table of 4-5 to do this right- I think fewer would be too tight and more would feel crowded.

10. The First Casualty
System: Night's Black Agents, with some hacks

I really like spy and espionage games, but it has been years since I've run one. NBA offers a toolkit of cool for doing such games. I like the introduction of a supernatural threat into the mix. I'm not sure I would want to run a straight spy game in a modern setting- unless I built a more crazy mad organization substructure (like the Shadowforce Archer set up). Alternately, I could run something set in the 1960's or so and use James Bond 007.

But if I wanted to do something contemporary, combining paranoia and a clear bad guy, I would use NBA. But I might also push it forward a little bit- into the near future to add some more tech and sci-fi elements to the mix. I'd want a solid mix of action and procedural, with perhaps some cyberpunk thrown in.

Alternately, I haven't actually done a Victorian-era game, though I've run some steampunk stuff. It might be fun to do a kind of Sherlock Holmes, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Rippers mash up with the characters on the run from a dark conspiracy.

There's also the idea of trying to do a version of Assassin's Creed II with this (maybe a mash up with Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade?)

11. The Forgotten City
System: Unsure. This might be the place to try out Pathfinder.

After a prologue, the PC group find themselves at the entrance to a city. It appears abandoned, and something seems to have kept others away. The city appears intact, but many other parts of it appear locked off. There are vaults, locked doors and whole other quarters are closed. The players can set up shop there. Eventually the players will realize that in order to bring the city to life, they need to bring people here to settle: craftspersons, farmers, scholars, etc. If they can create a working community, then more parts, more places, more resources will unlock. Eventually another quarter will open, and along with it, another city gate. Except this gate exits out into another part of the world. Eventually the players will realize that the city once served as a magical trade crossroads for the continent, before some event in the distant past. The campaign would be a combination of city-building and standard campaign finding and fighting ancient evils.

12. The Night Watch
System: Homebrew, with elements of GUMSHOE.

Essentially this would be a fantasy campaign, with the players taking on the role of city guards. The twist would be that the group would collaboratively build the city at the start of the campaign. You can see a full write up of those ideas in this post .

I really like this one. Definitely in my top five of these.

13. HCI: Darkening Lights
System: Homebrew

I've run a version of this previously, you can see discussion of that here. Essentially this is a cross-genre campaign, built around a framing device. In the past this has been based around a VR turned reality breach concept. I have a couple of other frames which twist those concepts. I learned some lessons from that previous campaign- notably to establish a small pool of key frames, rather than an open-ended approach. I've also been thinking about how to maintain the stakes across the settings and to reduce the need for different system mechanics. I don't necessarily want to use a generic system, but rather an engine that can be tuned. This kind of campaign does require more sessions to play out well- and a commitment on the part of the players, so I have to think about this further.

14. Episode VIII
System: Homebrew

Last year I ran a short seven session Star Wars campaign, essentially the first film in a trilogy taking place after the end of Return of the Jedi. I'd like to do the second part of that, another six or so sessions. The only problem is that a couple of the players now have scheduling conflicts. The other four shouldn't be a problem. So I can wait for those conflicts to wrap up; kill off those characters in the opening sequence; or have someone else run them. The later might be the best idea- but that would be tough in the case of the character who has served as the Jedi mentor to another one of the PCs. I'll have to figure out about that at some point in the future. If I can't get it done in 2012, I doubt we'll be able to do it.

15. The Emperor in Yellow
System: ???

I'd really like to do a Rome or at least a Roman-analogue game. I don't think a straight procedural (I love me some Didius Falco) would necessarily work. I think the transition to that period would make the whole mystery solving think more difficult- or that might be my over-thinking it. History games aren't as interesting to people, so I would have to sex it up more than a little. I like the idea of a team of special agents of the Emperor, each with special powers, traveling across the land and taking care of evil cult and dangerous mythics and supernaturals. Perhaps putting down rival stories that outshine the Empire. Killing little gods in the name of greater deification of the Emperor. I imagine that as either a LXG or Hellboy flavored game.

On the other hand, if I really wanted to spend the time on it I could run a Lunar Empire campaign in my hack of Glorantha. The players could be members of a noble house vying for power, influence and authority. There'd be more than a little touch of Houses of the Blooded to it. I'd stress the Lunar Empire as very Roman and have a slightly deranged version of my history game.

16. Crux Redux
System: Exalted (1st Edition) or homebrew version of that

I ran a Dragon-Blooded campaign a few years ago that I really enjoyed. They remain my favorite Exalts in the setting; I don't like the Solars and loathe the Abyssals and Infernals. The idea that these exalts are more powerful than normal people, but still need to work in a team to achieve really great things appeals to me. The campaign I ran had the players all coming from one DB house- young, they ended up sent into exile together in order to make a name for themselves. They were sent to the city of Crux, where the fortunes of their family had fallen.

It was a building game, with a fairly evocative setting and the tension of these high and mighty characters have to figure out a means to restore their place, while at the same time living day to day. Unfortunately we lost one of the lynchpin players from the campaign. The group agreed to wait to play again until she could return, but that window of opportunity passed.

But I worked really hard on the setting and set up and I don't want to waste that work, so I'd like to do a reboot- starting over from scratch, with returning players being allowed to use their same character concepts. I'd have to spin the dials on the plots and the alignments of various NPCs, but it might work.

17. Touring Middle Earth
System: Uncertain, possibly The One Ring, possibly homebrew

I've had an idea for a couple of years that I'd like to do a short campaign which would be a journey across most of Middle Earth, to give the players a taste of different locations and peoples. I'd probably use the MERP campaign frame, set well before the events of Lord of the Rings. The Rangers of the North still stand, defending their lands. I would have players come from there and have to travel all the way to the far south to either deliver, find or destroy something.

This might be a chance to try out one of those OSR systems- finding one that would simulate the setting best.

18. Challengers of the Unknown
System: ???

I did a whole post on disasters and apocalypses, but I realized afterwards that I haven't really done a post-Apocalypse campaign. I mentioned a fantasy approach to that earlier- but here I'm thinking something less high fantasy, but more modern or sci-fi. I don't necessarily want to do straight post-Apoc with either of the "go to" approaches. On the one hand I like to save zombies for one-shots and horror effects. On the other hand, my friend Dave's Fallout-based campaign pretty much set the bar for that kind of thing. So how to handle this? I have a couple of ideas.

One of them includes a Summerland-like approach, where the world has been overtaken by a strange or fantastical event. I like modern fantasy and I think you could do a great campaign with one of two approaches. First, trying to figure out the world in the immediate aftermath of the event. Uncovering the new rules and logic of the setting could be great fun- mystery and survival. Second, a surviving group perhaps a year after the event decides to send people out in an attempt to discover what has happened elsewhere. I know Pelgrane has a post-apocalypse procedural in the works- I really want to see what kinds of new tools and ideas that offers. I hadn't put together the link between mysteries and this genre until I started to think about the framework.

I also really like Greg Christopher's framework in Cascade Failure. I could do something like that. Or perhaps a slight variation on that. The players planet/settlement suffers an event and the stellar background shows that some time, years, have passed in an instant. Now they have to leave to figure out why they've lost contact with the rest of the Empire. Ashen Stars has some ideas that might work with something like that. I've also been thinking about the various galaxy-spanning/destroying stuff in videogames like Mass Effect and HALO. Could I play with those concepts for a post-apocalypse game?

19. The Agency
System: Homebrew, perhaps The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game

I really like modern fantasy, and I've enjoyed running it in our Changeling the Lost campaign. But I'd also like to do a more noir take on this- perhaps with some light horror elements. I like the idea of the players being low-level mages- either in a world where magic's open or else where it lies behind a curtain. There's a lot of material out there for this, including some of the great stuff from Mage: The Ascension. There's also the strange noir set up of Edge of Midnight, although in that cases I'd want to change up the magic which seems more psychic than occult. But most importantly, I'd want the players to have a business, an agency, perhaps not even a detective one, but one that puts them in the path of high strangeness. I'd borrow some concepts from Bookhounds of London to work out the details.

20. The Open Chantry
System: ???

In reading through Novarium recently, it occurred to me that Greg Christopher had really hit on some of the elements of the setting that I enjoy: multiple characters, a building game, seasonal growth, interesting non-adventure activities, and flexible magic. I think it would be interesting to do a campaign, historical or otherwise, where the magical covenants and chantries exist out in the open. The group could take up control of a new chantry- figuring out how to deal with the location and their neighbors. There might be some resentment or prejudice, but they wouldn't have to hide themselves. Then you could have the group more active locally, deal with power struggles, and include a more dynamic organization of the orders a s a whole. The Mages would exist as a strong and independent power group, paralleling the nobility and the church(es). If you went straight historical, you could have a lot of interesting alt history material. On the other hand, if you went full fantasy, then you could do some collaborative world-building to set things up.

21. On the Expansion of Horizons
System: Pathfinder, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (3rd Edition) or one of the new OSR systems with support.

I write all my adventures and sessions, rarely do I use published adventures or modules. On the other hand, I do borrow mercilessly from other source material for elements. I've also not tried some of the new, more mechanics oriented systems. Given that I always want to hone my skills and try something new, I might break both those habits in one stroke.

I could pick one of these systems and select an adventure path. I know most of them have a series or linked set of adventures. I'd try to run these by the book- sticking to the core rules, rather than buying anything extra. I might even try one of those fancy beginner boxes. If I decided to go Pathfinder, I'd go to this excellent resource: The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: System Guide for New Players.

22. Players' Choice

So I have a number of ideas on the list, but I also have to talk to the group and see if there's anything out there that some players really want to play. Perhaps someone saw Deadlands and always wanted to game in that system. I don't picture anyone in the group having a penchant for the Wild West, but who knows? I don't have anything swashbuckling or pirates on my list, but maybe there's a strong desire for that? Or mecha?

One thing I do want to try to get off the ground this year is a "Run Club," where we get together perhaps once a month to try out one-shots of various odd-ball games like Fiasco, Time & Temp and Dragon Age.

23. Auzumel's Choice

I'd also like to get my wife's input on what she really wants to play. Generally she's good about liking whatever comes to the table- though she has some things she isn't as interested in playing. I'd like to find some things that hook her. She's mentioned a game based on relationship ties- as a secondary feature, not the foreground. But the PCs would all be recovering from personal tragedies, like betrayal or lost loves. It would be romantic in the sense of being humanist. On the other hand, she's also expressed an interest in a more classic police procedural if that could be done well. So I have to see if she has some strong ideas I haven't listed here.

For the first part of this list, see here.

Campaigns: Endings & Beginnings

2011-12-21T13:05:00.004-05:00

PREMISE VS. PROMISE
A campaign's only as good as its last session.

I really believe that- at least as the campaign stands in memory. There are some exceptions- campaigns which peter out or crash & burn will likely stand on a singular good session or memory of what led to the game's collapse. But if you wrap your campaign up, if you have an ending- it had better be a damn good one.

No pressure.

PARADOX OR CONTRADICTION?
As a GM you're desperately trying to serves different masters. On the one hand, you want that session to stand on its own. It should have a rising arc, a climax and then some form of denouement or resolution. You have to lead into your swing- and a rookie mistake is to have a session setting up the big fight and then handling the fight on the next session. You need some build up, a chance to build anticipation for that session itself. Rolling for initiative isn't that- and it focuses on the tactical aspect over the narrative. That last session has to be a complete story, setting the stakes, providing the conflict.

On the other hand, that last session has to support the weight of all the sessions which came before it. It has to live up to the challenges which came before it. It has to resolve some, if not all of the dangling plot threads. At the very least it has to tug on them before moving on. Depending on the kind of story you're telling and how long the game's been going on- that can be a hell of a lot of threads. And that doesn't even take into consideration that what a GM sees as a thread to be resolved may be very different from what the player sees.

DESTINY VS. FREE WILL
Another difficulty lies in the path of a train. If you're a GM who prides themselves on openess and improvisation, how do you "plan" for an ending. The concept seems a little contradictory. On the other hand, if you have written your ending- planned it out. How do you handle it when the players jump the rails? For other sessions you'd have more games to put the fixes in, so it wouldn't be a problem. And smacking players back onto the path is a sure way to make them feel powerless in the place where you want them to feel most powerful, or at least in control.

I'm a loose game planner. Depending on where the plot is, I usually try to focus on brainstorming details and ideas, think about which NPCs might interesting to encounter, figure out something for each player, and come up generally with plots that are open or need to arrive. I set up situations, but I don't usually think about solutions- I leave that in the players' hands. I might have a couple of ideas, but generally a table of smart people chewing on the problem will come up with a better approach than I can off the cuff. As a GM I'm usually thinking about a different level than the players and that can give them an edge.

SCRIPT OR PLOT?
So for an ending, I'm usually thinking about these things:
*getting them to the conflict
*how do I set the stakes
*what's the potential environment like
*who the opposition is
*what cool things can the opposition do

But, of course, I try not to marry myself to those sketches; the players may pull something out that makes all of that invalid. So I try to focus on those last two things, plus these two key elements:
*One or two moments for each player
*The twist

For the first, this may be a chance to show off their particular skills, the appearance of a hated rival, the presence of a beloved NPC, or the revelation of something regarding their character. For the second, something the players weren't expecting has to happen during the conflict. It can be bizarre or tangential- but something has to happen that runs counter to their expectations. Avoid things that undercut the players cool (like the appearance of an NPC or group to save the day) and know that it doesn't have to be adversarial- it can just be strange. The twist should make the players uncertain about the way that they'd pictured things rolling out. They may have a sense of the inevitability of their win (and it may be inevitable) but this introduces a moment of doubt.

Kill one, all but one, or none. Now if you're playing a tactical RPG with no room for error or modification of results, then ignore what I have to say- in fact, probably most of what I'm saying here won't apply to you. It may get a bad rap, but the "Man behind the Curtain" GM approach really helps in the final session. If you're going to seriously go for the death of a death in the final session, assuming you haven't been killing them all along, then just kill or martyr one character. By martyr, I mean, allow them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. If you kill more than one, then you split the power of that dramatic scene in half. If you're going to kill more than one, then gack everyone except for a last man standing to tell the tale. Anything in between dilutes the moment.

Late in the key conflict- chase, fight, debate, caper- be on the lookout for significant moments. Play those up and give them emphasis- slow down and use them as an excuse for a turning point or to wrap things up. And a good turning point is a quick false or real victory, with a resulting sudden rise of the stakes and continuation of the conflict. For example, a player stabs the demon possessed emperor who has been behind things, killing the villains- but it turns out there's an infernal portal which still needs to be closed or the world will be destroyed. Or the characters blow up and escape from the bad guys wasteland fortress- only to discover an army of crazed biker minions still pursuing them.

Both true stories.

Or at least they happened in a game.

Finally, remember that for the final conflict you don't have a budget. Spam the fantastical or whatever elements dominate the genre you're running.

CURTAIN VS. EPILOGUE
Once the conflict's over- don't be afraid to move to some narrative moments. Keep an eye out- the player who managed to get the least cool in the conflict should get the most immediate scene or thread resolution. I mentioned before the GM fear that they won't wrap up every plot thread. The truth is: you won't. But if you wrap up at least one major or significant thread per player, they will forgive you. They'll focus on that. Get to those quickly. If elements of those threads are present at the scene of that conflict, then do those immediately. You may be exhausted, but press through.

Here's where it gets tricky. You've got a couple of approaches here, two big choices. You can either walk off into the sunset or go for an epilogue.

Walk off into the sunset really works for shorter campaigns- but sometimes they just pop up out of the blue- a visual moment that seems to sum things up. I had that in a fantasy campaign where the players did some HeroQuesting, fought the big bad, and then popped out in a field, now turning verdant green outside their adopted city. They looked at each other, dusted themselves off and walked on home as the camera panned away. It was the right ending for that game, even though it left many personal sub-plots unresolved, if encapsulated the practical theme of the campaign.

If you decide to go for the epilogue- get in, get out, get done. Take control of the narrative and run it- you can let players react and perhaps interact with a couple of people, but don't stretch it out too long. Don't be afraid to do some scripting ahead of time. If it fits you can use it, if if doesn't then drop it. Again, try to focus on one or two details for each player- threads that need to be resolved. Taking a strong narrator approach to wrapping things up here can work- "the camera pans over the ruined city..." or "...you see the doors open and the heroes come down to receive medals...". If players have stated ambitions- then you can have those fulfilled. Otherwise be careful about making decisions for them- have them offered a job or a position, rather than taking in (think of the ending of Sanjuro for an example). Tell the story quickly and with some closure. You can make it work, but...

Don't drag it out. Quickly told- in and out- wrap it up. Then the players can talk about what happened and decompress.

Whatever you do: don't over explain stuff. Leave questions unanswered. If there were things happening that you thought were particularly clever as a GM, but was either stuff that the players missed or couldn't have known- SHUT UP. If the players want to know about that, they can ask later. Focus on their story, rather than yours.

SO WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?
In 2012 I plan to wrap up five of the six on-going campaigns. The odd man out is something I run as pick up and so it doesn't count. But I'm hope to finish up these five with a solid and comprehensive endings. One of the campaigns will hit five years of play in February, and two others around three years each. The last two were built for shorter runs (26 and 8 sessions respectively). So this will be a year of massive endings for the groups.

But I'm not going to stop running games- in fact I hope to hit the ground running and have new campaigns thought about and selected by the various groups. It might be a chance to add new members or bring back old players. It will also be an opportunity to talk to some players about what they want from the games- and to perhaps add more buy in to some campaigns. In many cases, I hope to use some collaborative pre-game world building as drawn from Microscope, Blood & Honor and Diaspora.

And, of course, I have more ideas for campaigns than I could ever possibly run. So for reference, here are the twenty-three I've got in my head that I'd like to run someday, maybe this year...who knows? I will probably pare the list down and perhaps do a survey by group to see what they'd be interested in, as I did here Choosing the Next Campaign Survey and the results.

So below you'll find the first six, I'll post the rest on Friday.

1. Superhero: Year One
System: Mutants & Masterminds 2e

I have a couple of different superhero campaigns I've been talking about with my players. I've mentioned a couple of them before. This one would require a group with at least a passing familiarity with comics books, especially characters from the big two. To start the campaign, players would each choose an existing superhero from any universe (Marvel, DC, or whatever). Based on those choices, we'd set some of the cosmology of the world (i.e. more realistic or more fantastic, more sci-fi or more mystical). We'd obviously have to play around with the setting and details.

But players would make up a fairly low-powered version of that hero. In some cases, that might mean dialing back what they can do. I'm imagining something like PL6-8 in M&M. The game would begin with the idea that these heroes are just starting out. We might use Microscope to craft a history of superheroes prior to the characters or we might simply assume that the characters are among the first heroes. Either way, it would give the players a chance to play someone they like and perhaps put a new spin on them: different race, gender, origin, etc. Think of it as a big reboot campaign.

2. Bloodlines: Armor Wars
System: Mutants & Masterminds 2e

Some time back, ugh, almost six years ago, I ran a short supers campaign in which powers had a genetic basis, one rooted in different family lines. You can see some of the material and posts about that campaign here. I'd like to revisit that setting, but with a slight twist. Some of this comes out of how much I enjoyed the first Iron Man movie, and some of it out of a desire to consider some areas of the Bloodlines setting that I didn't get a chance to before.

Essentially, the players would play supers- but not ones who had genetic powers (with some exception). Instead their powers would come from devices, equipment, armor and experiments (some created by super-powered geniuses). They would exist as a attempt to balance the power of superbeings- demonstrating that normal humans could also deal with the threats posed by powered criminals. Some players could take low-level powers, perhaps combined with expert skills or enhancing equipment. The players would be put fighting against meta-villains, those who follow a magneto-like vision of genetic superiority, and those who want to use them as a weapon against all of superkind.

3. Truce of Consequences
System: Homebrew based on Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade

I'm pretty sure this is a campaign which will never see the light of day- I've been thinking about it for eight years, and have a fairly strong idea for the set up and twist. The problem is the historical nature of the setting. I don't really have anyone in any of the groups interested in the period or history games in general.

I'd like to build a campaign that creates some bridges from an Ars Magica set up to the battle between the Council of Traditions and Order of Reason. M: SC posits the rise and growing influence of the Order of Reason, with the Council hindered by paradox and magical backlash. I imagine a game taking place in a kind of stalemate between the two sides: with both "new science" and "magic" causing disruptions and problems. I've got more built of that, but given that I probably won't run this one unless something changes, I don't want to invest in too much more planning.

4. Legend of the Fading Suns
System: Homebrew, with elements from Ashen Stars.

This is a campaign concept I talked about in a couple of blog posts here and here. I like some of the core concepts from Fading Suns, and I haven't really done a solid science-fiction campaign, though some might argue this would be more science-fantasy.

The key, for me, would be first to loosely rework the concepts of the Houses to make them more playable from my perspective. Next, to get the players to collaboratively decide on a new family to add to one of those houses. I might even combine that with a Microscope session to have them build recent events and fit themselves into the timeline. Bottom line- what I really want are some of the best structural elements from Legend of the Five Rings (the interplay of houses, strong and interesting social codes) with the star spanning travel and exploration of Fading Suns.

5. The Great Rokugan Campaign
System: Likely homebrew, possibly FATE, possibly HeroQuest, elements of Blood & Honor- will need some crunch to it.

I've been reading The Cardiff Boys session reports with a mixture of glee and jealousy. An that got me to read more about The Great Pendragon Campaign, a monumental framework for the history of that period. I love seasonal approach, the multi-generational characters, and the idea of playing against the backdrop of those stories. That got me to thinking about one of the few game histories I actually care about, that of Rokugan and Legend of the Five Rings. I bought into L5R when it first came out as a CCG. When the rpg came out, I ran two different campaigns (using different systems). I've stuck to the period of the first edition, ignoring the evolving history after that because there's just so much gaming room in those early days.

And those early days encompass so much, so why not run a year-by-year campaign covering that time. Begin perhaps in 1103, with the ascension of the new Emperor, Hantei XXXVIII. Continue on through the next years with the rise of the Bloodspeakers. Then the Scorpion Clan Coup in 1123. Then the Clan War and through to the Second Day of Thunder. More events could follow, depending on the outcome of that. The timeline could change at that point or the GM could press on further. Sourcebooks Time of the Void, The Hidden Emperor and The Four Winds offer rich details of these periods.

And the course of history could be changed by the players- perhaps not the biggest events, but depending on their status they might be able to shift some tides. Ideally I would have the players begin by choosing a Clan and creating a new family for them, ala the system John Wick presents in Blood & Honor. They would then have a shared goal and heritage. It would be a newly founded family, allowing the players to come to it from different schools or backgrounds. I think it could be really cool- and might be an amazing way to get the full epic sweep of the history.

However, when I mentioned this idea to my players- they were skeptical. We've never done anything like a seasonal campaign, and the idea of a multigenerational character I think make them hesitate. That's something I'd have to consider before I tried to do anything like this.

6. Regicide and Shadow
System: ???

Some time back I talked about Clockwork and Chivalry, in particular how the authors had managed to make a kind of fantasy post-apocalypse game. That's been done in other ways in other games, as I mentioned in More than Flirting with Disaster: Cataclysmic RPGs. I like the idea that a battle between factions ended in a symbolic act with significant magical and spiritual repercussions. What those repercussions are and what the path forward is remains in doubt. As a result you have many splintered factions with different readings on the situation. Add to that a focus on community. The players come from a settlement. They may have different philosophies, but they have the same goal of preserving and protecting that place.

Now I can see a couple of different ways to make this playable at my table. A really severe transformation could make for a Dogs in the Vineyard-style game. That's interesting but perhaps not the best approach. I could go with a more classic fantasy approach- perhaps using Microscope to set things up and see what the players come up with. I could set a few terms (a political event which has had fallout, multiple factions or the like) and let them define them further. That could work. On the other hand, I could also use that as a framework/background to do a couple of pseudo-historical games I've imagined. For example, the Mage: Sorcerer's Crusade game I mentioned above. It would be cool to do a game set in Britain during that period. I've also wondered if it wouldn't be possible to do that History of Hogwarts game during that period. That the kinds of schisms in the Muggle world impact the Wizarding world. That leads to Hogwart's: First Class.

to be continued...

Novarium: RPGs I Like

2011-12-19T12:58:00.006-05:00

WHAT IS IT?
Free fantasy RPG with a dynamic magic system set in a world where women control sorcery.

FIRST WORD
Once again Greg Christopher has created an amazing rpg product, a work of professional quality, and released it as free download. As with his previous creations, including Cascade Failure and Errant, he's crafted a deceptively simple game, presented in a format that has design goals of its own.

Novarium is a fantasy rpg with a system backbone that feels close to the "Old School Renaissance" or OSR work of the last few years. But that's a superficial analogy and the author takes some of those simple mechanics in a new direction. Beyond that Novarium brings a sharp and distinct premise to the fantasy table. Magic exists, but can only we done by women, the Novaria of the game's title. That gender-based magic echoes themes from fantasy literature (such as Jo Clayton's Duel of Sorcery, Dave Duncan's The King's Blades and even Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time). As well, Novarium is a kind of re-imagining of Ars Magica, done with an OSR spin. Players have multiple characters, including a mage, effectively a troupe. The magic system itself is flexible and improvised, based on combining two factors to create a spell.

THE BOOK ITSELF
Novarium can be obtained from RPGNow or the author's site. The zip file includes several elements, all in pdf format. Novarium's core content comes in the form of an introduction document (11 pages) and the rulebook (99 pages). There's also a nice separate file with the two-page character sheet, clean and with plenty of space. I often look at the cs first to get a sense of a game. Excessive details, bad layout, or overly dense design turns me off. Christopher juggles the need to have a number of factors at the ready with user-accessible design. He manages a neat trick of providing a sheet laying out the information for magic users, but which can easily be used by other character types. The set includes a number of sample materials as well, three different maps, working down in levels. First a world map, then a continent map from that world, then finally that continent broken down into sample regions. These full-color, unlabeled maps offer an excellent resource for gamers lacking map-making skills or software who still want to put their own spin and names on the game world. At the lowest level, there's also a truly lovely sample "Mark" map. Marks are the sets of properties granted to the players at the beginning of the campaign (more on this below).

Greg Christopher has an eye for good, clean design. This particular product combines that with some new experiments- working to make the game more accessible to new players. The introduction chapter tries a more graphic and iconic approach to explaining the game. To complement that, Novarium once again marshals an amazing stable of artwork, donated by artists. Each image has a hyperlink back to the artist's website and there's a complete list of sites at the front of the rulebook. Modern rpgs have moved towards more consistent art - with a single artist, one artist per chapter or at the very least a small talent pool. There's something to be said for that approach. Novarium comes from another direction, by necessity, with art of very different tone and style from page to page. It works, evoking an 'anything can be imagined' feeling that reminds you of classic rpgs. That art is pretty great- and amazing for a free product.

INTRODUCTION
Novarium begins with a separate 11 page pdf, introducing both the core concept of the game and the idea of role-playing in general. I'll admit that I usually skip the "What is a RPG?" section- but Christopher here tries a new approach, one that made me slow down and consider how we actually show new players what an rpg is. Barring a mentor or a group, how do people actually pick up and learn a game? The last few years have seen more products aimed at a younger audience (Argyle & Crew, The Princes' Kingdom ) or as introductions (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box). I had the luxury of being taught by older players when I first started. Novarium's approach combines simple icons with quick text to show players what to expect. It includes a example of what a session looks like, leading into a teaser that hopefully pulls the player into the main book.

At the same time, Novarium sets up what makes it different from most other fantasy rpgs. It puts magic into the hands of a narrow group: women only, a radical shifts from the usual D&D set up. The game explicitly comments on those gender roles, with power and chauvinism moving in the opposite direction. Power creates a hierarchy for the setting. Each player in the game will play a Novaria, but they will also have secondary characters to play. The introduction sets out several other cornerstone concepts loosely- the idea of attachments, which join a diverse group together is suggested but not explained. Novarium begins with a fairly definite campaign frame: the players take possession of a Mark, delineated by magic and possessing sources of power. It also suggests that arcs in the game will take place over seasons. That scale allows for growth of the mark, as well as adventures within that time. If you've played other games with seasons, such as Blood & Honor or Ars Magica, such ideas should make sense.

CORE RULEBOOK
The main Novarium rules take up 99 pages, with a hyperlinked table of contents jumping readers to the eight chapters. One important detail is that the introduction is a vital first read. I began with the main rules, and was a little puzzled that the core concept of the game setting wasn't presented right away. That illustrates that a stupid user can always undercut a smart design. Chapter One, Basics, lays out a little more fully the "What is an RPG?" begun in the introduction. It then goes on to lay out the basic kinds of tasks and rolls. Novarium primarily uses d6 and d10's, with the other dice types only used for the damage resistance of armor and a couple of minor randomizations. The GM, here called the Architect, controls the narrative and set up.

The system itself is fairly simple. For standard actions, players roll a number of d10s depending on the difficulty. The tougher the action, the more dice rolled. The final result is compared against a relevant attribute. Rolling under the attribute means success. Special traits and other effects can modify the value of the attribute tested. The system does mean that the GM will have to set the difficulty for any action (as opposed to players having a standard reaction to "make a roll for me..." invocation). Saves constitute a special kind of test where players may not benefit from certain bonuses. Opposed actions are conducted via standard rolls with the margin of success being the tie breaker. Characters involved in such a contest may roll different numbers of dice, depending on the situation.

Chapter Two presents the fairly simple process of making up a character. This twenty-six page section walks the reader through step by step. Novarium uses random stat generation, with 3d6 being the default (though two other options are provided). Six attributes define characters: Agility, Fitness, Knowledge, Magnetism, Perception and Willpower. That's an interesting shift of roles from the classic six and their foci. Still those difference won't be too hard to pick up. After this players pick an Identity, effectively their class or profession. I should note here that Novarium does change a number of expected rpg terms. That works when the change points to an important distinction or shift in role, such as Architect instead of GM or DM. For the most part that works across these rules, but I will admit to replacing the terms in my head as I read them.

Novarium offers seven Identities, three of which cover the demi-human races of the setting. Female humans can be Novaria (magic users) or Tavaria (knights errant serving a Novaria). Male humans are second-class citizen and can be Sculari (warriors) or Rendari (scholars), Players may also choose to be Elves, Dwarves or Haflings. Each identity has an attribute bonus, specific weapon training, different starting gold, and a number of extra traits. These remain the same for all members of that identity. Each character also chooses four additional traits from a list of 69. These advantages range from Animal-Fried to Engineer, Lip Reading to Undertaker. Each character gains a number of languages depending on their Knowledge attribute. The setting puts an emphasis on literacy and the power of words. To help define a character's personality, players also select a major ambition. This offers a bonus in play when striving towards that goal. As well, in play minor ambitions may be added. Several other choices round out the creation process (equipment, magic and attachments) each dealt with in other chapters.

Chapter Three covers Equipment- with players having to spend starting money in order to outfit themselves. The section's brief but comprehensive, with a general statement on the economics of the setting. Weapons and armor get the most extensive treatment, with many of them having special rules or exceptions.

Chapter Four gets into the meat of the setting, laying out how this differs from a standard fantasy campaign. The group of player characters is collectively called a Novarium, which may have ambitions like a character. One problem here is that the game isn't clear about the process. It suggests that players will each have a Novaria, but will also play multiple characters. How many? Does each player make up two characters? Three? Is there a pool of these? It is left open-ended, but could use further discussion and explanation. On the one hand, for gamers who have played Ars Magica, the process will feel natural. But for new players or players unused to the concept, that needs further discussion. Given how Novarium opens by trying to make itself accessible and clear to those players, it needs follow through here.

The Campaign chapter does do a nice job of offering options which will entertain players who enjoy a building game. Each Novarium starts with a March. Different Marches have different fonts of magic, players can recruit diverse retainers (though the list of types offers no discussion of role or effect), and unique landmarks may appear. A discussion of "seasonal" campaign lays out some basics, with the division and assignment of labor being important. Several kinds of specialized activities are offered (such as crafting and social influence).

Chapter 5- Mechanics- talks about the application of the basic resolution system. Combat is a simple opposed roll, but damage is done using d6s. Each weapon does a certain number of dice damage. That is applied against a random attribute (1-4 Agility, 5-8 Fitness, 9 Magnetism, 10 Perception). Armor offers a die roll which is subtracted from the damage taken. The combat system has some detail and options; players can choose from a number of action/maneuvers on a turn. Moving and attacking, for example, adds one die to the attack difficulty. Defensive actions- Parry, Dodge or Block- take up a character's action. It is unclear what that means for multiple attackers against the same target. Based on the rules, I assume characters get only one defense as an action against one attack per turn. That has a significant impact on combat tactics. Finally as befits a game with OSR DNA, the game offers encumbrance and food rules, among other details on exploration.

Next comes Chapter Six covering magic. The magic system for Novarium offers a imaginative and flexible approach. For any spell, players choose a method and a materia. Method defines the effect they intend (for example control, create, protect, strike, or transform) and materia defines what they're using or affecting (for example fire, life, light, or thought). The rules present 8 methods and 12 materia, each with their own distinct icon. Novaria have ratings in these areas- so for example a character with Control 7 and Earth 9 has a target number of 16 for spells of that type. The relative power of the spell determines how many d10 the caster rolls. Failure means a point of willpower damage. Additional options exist for pushing spell use.

The magic system is the bedrock of this game- a really simple system with great depth and choice. Novarium lays out examples of casting with lovely graphics, making the system easy to grasp. Each method and materia is discussed, with excellent definitions of power, effect and difficulty. Anyone interested in magic for rpgs or how to lay out system information to make it accessible should read this chapter.

The last two chapters of the book, about fourteen pages, describe the Novarium setting, the world of Vaena. While brief, the discussion of the history and especially the social structure are particularly evocative. There's a great deal of room for GMs to play with the elements given, but at the same time the world could be run from the text alone. The Gamemastering chapter provides ideas for designing the Mark, fonts of magic, and creatures.

OVERALL
I'm honestly intrigued by the setting Novarium provides for several reasons. First, I like the focus on gender politics, which could be a great window into those issues (perhaps akin to the themes of Kagematsu). On the other hand, the GM will have to be fairly certain of their group before running. How will they respond to those questions? More generally, I like the idea of Ars Magica, but without the need to hide and stay underground. It takes some of the best and most interesting concepts from that rpg and makes them more accessible and playable. Historically-minded Ars players will cringe, but it makes it a solid fantasy game.

Any quibbles I have are minor- a few places where rules need to be clarified or repeated for emphasis (mention armor in the damage section, clarifying character building, defenses, explain attachments). Honestly my initial thought after reading this is that I want to see more- a larger, expanded version of the rules. Novarium feels like it is straining against the bounds of the rules size. I have the sense that gaps and problems come more from the desire to keep the material tight and focused while still allowing players freedom. This is an amazing game; lovely, well-written and an example for anyone wanting to see how to put a game together. And it is free.

Free.

Go and download it.

PORTABILITY
If you have a system of choice, the basic setting and concepts of Novarium should be fairly easy to port over. The trick will be converting the magic while maintaining its freedom. In the other direction, Novarium offers more than a few mechanics which could be lifted elsewhere. For our most recent homebrew campaign, I borrowed and only slightly reworked the magic from this system. That's honestly been the most successful of several different approaches to magic which I've used.

Guest Post: Two Influences on my Gaming Life

2011-12-15T11:44:00.008-05:00

A couple of friends in my gaming circle generously offered guest posts for this month, to help me round out the year with some different voices and ideas. Today's post comes from Steve Sigety, who blogs at Kaijuville. Steve and I have played together since- I think- the mid '90's. He's run Call of Cthulhu & AFMBE for me, and I've run CoC, GURPS, M&M, d20 and our homebrew for him.

Two Influences on my Gaming Life

Like most people I'm a product of my influences, and that is particularly true of my gaming hobby, whether it means video games, board gaming or tabletop role-playing games. The experiences I've had with elements of popular culture have affected how I play and run RPGs. These various cultural properties have taught me many lessons, and represent many different attributes. In this post, I'll discuss what a novel and a television series taught me about gaming.

If you delve deeply into Robert E. Howard fandom, eventually you will encounter the arguments about L. Sprague de Camp and his role as editor in charge of Conan and other Howard characters and stories. While I understand the fervor -- and when looking at his role in changing and adapting stories in order to gain ownership, I agree with the reasons -- it has to be acknowledged that de Camp played a vital role in popularizing Howard's work in the mainstream of popular culture. One reason that I will give de Camp a pass on this score that he is partially responsible for one of my favorite books, Conan the Conqueror.

Howard didn't necessarily plan to write a Conan novel. Initially, he has submitted some short stories to a British book publisher. Denis Archer returned the stories because the British market wasn't at that time conducive to a collection of short stories, but if he had a novel... After reading that letter, Howard went to work on a manuscript. Archer went out of business before Howard could send it, and it was later printed serially in the pages of Weird Tales from December of 1935 to April 1936 as "The Hour of the Dragon". Published as a novel by Gnome Press in 1950 under the title Conan the Conqueror, it later became part of the Conan series of paperbacks edited by de Camp, starting with Lancer in 1967 through to Ace in the 1980s.

It wasn't until the Berkley Putnam edition of The Hour of the Dragon, shepherded by fantasy author Karl Edward Wagner in 1976, that Howard's version from Weird Tales saw print as a novel. This or the recent Wandering Star/Del Rey edition are the preferred texts, but I can't help but have a special spot in my heart for the Ace paperback. It became one of my favorite books growing up -- I'm fairly certain that I picked it up from among the shelves of books with similar Frazetta covers at the Waldenbooks on the second floor of the local (now demolished) mall. The paperback is comfortable and fun to read -- each page is jammed from header to footer with text but it never seems crowded. The font appears to be plain Times Roman, although a little more rounded and easy on the eyes. I've put books back on the shelf because of an uncomfortable text font. This paperback just seems like the perfect way to read pulp fiction.

A frequent criticism of Conqueror is that it's too derivative. It used the basic plot and some scenes from "The Scarlet Citadel" and ideas from "The Phoenix on the Sword", two early Conan tales. Certainly if an idea is successful once, Howard might use it again in his work. It also seems fair to think that Conan would have faced multiple challenges to his throne. Another criticism is that it's too episodic. While that may be a valid observation, I think it's one of the novel's strengths. This isn't a book full of meaningless dialogue and scenes where nothing of consequence occurs. Leave that for the multi-volume fantasy epics. This book moves. Things happen, and they're directly related to the plot. Al Harron recently discussed some of the plot elements of The Hour of the Dragon on his blog, specifically the motivations of the characters involved in the betrayal. Those were some points that I didn't really think about before.

Conan the Conqueror taught me several lessons about gaming, one of the first being about the episodic nature of events in a campaign game. I frequently try to plan and pace my games with a TV or movie feel, and thinking of each session as a TV episode can help. The scenes in Conqueror feel like different sessions of an RPG. Each separate scene could be fleshed out as a short story, but here they all tie together into the events of the novel. Another point is that the scenes are distinctive and the atmosphere is visceral. The Ace paperback was without illustrations, but they were unnecessary. From Howard's descriptions I can clearly visualize the back-alleys of Tarantia, the hills of Poitain, and the haunted catacombs of the vampire Akivasha under the pyramids of Stygia. The descriptions vividly brought these places to life for me. Finally, this was one of the first books outside of Dungeons & Dragons where I discovered vocabulary words like hauberk, cuirass, poignard, and burgonet. The only other work of popular culture that did more for my vocabulary was the Fantastic Four.

"Risk is our business! That's what the starship is all about!" -- Captain James T. Kirk

As someone who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, I'm part of the Star Wars generation. I like Star Wars but I've always considered myself more of a Star Trek fan. As early as I can remember, my family and I would watch the syndicated reruns of the original series on TV.

Maybe it's because of my love of history, and Star Trek portrayed "future history". The crew of the Enterprise were real people, (mostly) from Earth, just like us. There was a chance that humanity would make it out of the 20th century and into a future of space travel, exploration, and contact with new life and new civilizations. Despite the dangers being faced, Star Trek shows us an optimistic vision of our possible future.

What Star Trek taught me, with respect to RPGs, was optimism in the face of danger and the value of cooperation. Those could be life lessons as well. It portrayed a future where competent professionals went about their business, doing what they do best, together as a team where each member had value as a person and skills that were valued. They were judged on their expertise and not who they were or what they looked like. The Medusan ambassador Kollos in "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" is from an alien species that is so mind-bendingly different in appearance that humans cannot look at them directly without going insane (a very Lovecraftian idea).

One of the best and most obvious instances of this philosophy occurred in the 3rd season episode "The Savage Curtain". After the alien "Abraham Lincoln" is beamed aboard the Enterprise there is this exchange between Lincoln and Lt. Uhura:

"What a charming Negress. Oh, forgive me, my dear. I know that in my time some used that term as a description of property."

"But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words."

Even though there are moments where it flared up again, at least in most of the Original Series prejudice is a thing of the past.

It is also worth mentioning that Star Trek was among the first dramatic TV series to have B-plots that directly impact the A-plot. S. John Ross referred to this in the Star Trek Original Series RPG Narrator's Guide and Ken Hite has mentioned it when discussing Star Trek in interviews. Will the crew discover the vaccine for the aging virus in time to re-start the engines before they spiral down into the planet's atmosphere? That's a great multiple-plot race-against-time trope of the sort you might see in an RPG scenario.

These are two pop culture influences on my gaming life that immediately came to mind. Others would include H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, giant monster movies, Star Wars and many more. What are your influences and how do they manifest themselves in your gaming today?

Campaign Frames: Microscope for City Building & Night's Black Muggles

2011-12-13T22:50:00.003-05:00

CALLING ALL GUARDS
Next year will see all five of my campaigns wrapping up, so I've been working on a list of capsule ideas. I'll give a comprehensive list of those in a later post. Some of the ideas I'd batted around I'm enthused about, some might work with the groups, and some might not work at all. Below are two ideas, with some discussion of how I might handle them- the first one I really like, and the second one I think might be a little too goofy, though it might work as a one-shot.

UNIVERSAL TOOLS
So far I've used Ben Robbins' Microscope three times to create campaign world backgrounds (The Fleet Departs, The Hunts Begin, and The Road to Doubtfall). Each group has enjoyed doing that and I think they've been more invested or at least aware of the background as a result. They know as much as the GM at the start, and can still be surprised when the GM twists or uses something from that history in a new or novel way. That's especially true when something created by a player comes back to them at the table. In any case, Microscope has been the best game purchase I've made this year and the product which has most inspired me.

When I started thinking about these new campaigns, I also began to think about how I might use Microscope as a lead in. It works better for some concepts. For example if I end up doing a Trail of Cthulhu game, I want an aura of mystery and detachment. But for other games it practically demands to be used. One idea I had that has stuck with me has been a fantasy City Guards campaign (given my love for games like L-1: City of Lies). I figured I could set that up with a session of Microscope. Then I started thinking further- having a history could help, but what I really need is to build an interesting and living city- one the players knew and had an investment in.

MICROSCOPE VS. SURVEYOR'S TOOLS
So here's my approach- a pretty obvious one- but one I hope the players will enjoy. Most of them have done Microscope before, so they should be comfortable with the structure. We've played with a modified version of the "scene" rules. We did this in interests of time, since we had a larger group. In the standard rules, a player adds a scene below an event. That scene takes the form of a question about the event (Why did the Duke decide to abandon his mistress? What made Aquaman decide to call off the sharks?). Then players take up characters on the fly and play until that question has been answered. Then play moves on. In our games, players could add scenes by stating a question about an event. They could then answer that question themselves or point to another player to answer it. This lacks the actual rp of Microscope but it worked fairly well for our purposes.

Here's how I imagine City Building using Microscope:

Begin with a premise, a simple statement about the city. (Decaying New England Industrial Town, Dwarven Trade Center). Obviously you should have some sense of the genre there.

Build a palette. If there are elements which might usually appear in the setting/genre but you don't want, establish those (i.e. no dragons in a fantasy game). Alternately, if there are elements which might not appear in the setting/genre, this can be established (i.e. fairies in a vampire game). This should be done by some consensus, with players offering options until someone passes. So pretty much we follow the normal Microscope structure, with a narrow focus.

Normally players would now take turns adding elements to the timeline. We follow that structure for turns (one free round, players begin and end a round, legacy ideas) but what we're actually adding differs:

Neighborhoods: At the top level, players will name and describe a neighborhood of the city. These can be districts, neighborhoods, sections, markets, souks, precincts, wards, quarters, hoods, etc. They might be defined by walls or by common lore (the High Castle vs. the Gathering Wells). Any neighborhood should be large enough to contain a number of lesser elements. Right now we won't care about the relative size or if there's any overlap (the GM can sort that out after). We also don't care about the geography. Players should name and offer a general description of their neighborhood. The general tone and wealth of the neighborhood should be understood from the description. Order and placement doesn't matter. This element corresponds to Eras in Microscope.

Sights (or Sites): Below each neighborhood will be a collection of sights. A sight is a Person (shopkeeper, rumormonger, civic leader, mysterious wanderer, local kook), a Place (a store, an inn, a burned out grotto, place of execution, warehouses, a temple, a gypsy camp), or a Thing (a particular festival held there, an important guild, the enclave of a race, a secret organization). The order of Sights below a neighborhood doesn't matter. This element corresponds to Events in Microscope.

Rumors: Finally, each Sight may have one or more Rumors attached to it. A rumor should be a statement or question about the sight. Rumors can be floating among the populace or may be limited to a particular group. Most importantly, they may or may not be true- or they may be partially true. So a rumor about a person might be "He's actually legate for a demon prince from the land of Iod." A rumor about a place might be "People looking for rare herbs can usually find them here." A rumor about a thing might be "The festival may be delayed this year because of the vanishing of the youngest daughter of the high priest." This element corresponds to Scenes in Microscope.

Players will end up constructing the history, people and details of the setting as they build the city. They're encouraged to develop connections between people, use elements from one neighborhood in the story of another, and twist things around as they wish- so long as they don't directly contradict something established. Of course rumors don't directly establish things, but more hint at concepts. The idea behind rumors is that these develop local color, give the GM plot hooks, and even more importantly give the players storylines they can opt to pick up and develop as they see fit in play. In that way, players will be building their own version of the The Kaiin Players Guide or the RumorQUEST system from products like Geanavue: The Stones of Peace.

NOW TO THE MAPPING
I think this might actually work- but to put it into play after will require the GM to organize things after. They should draw a rough map after the creation, actually putting things in a physical relation to one another. Special locations can then be marked on the map. I have to do some more thinking about the process- for example, how determining the Focus works in the each round, but I think it has real potential.

Now here's how I'd actually put this into play...

CITY GUARD
The players taking the role of city guards in a fantasy city. The actual genre background could be anything (steampunk, high fantasy, more medieval)- determined in this case by the city creation session. Players would work to maintain order, uncover conspiracies, limit the Thieves Guild, and most importantly- keep adventurers from burning the whole place down. I imagine the city would work best as a crossroads (like Lanhkmar) with several distinct cultures and/or races. Players could come from all walks of life, perhaps some having been sell-swords before taking an arrow to the knee. I see this as a hybrid procedural/networking/adventuring campaign.

To that end, I'd probably use a portion of GUMSHOE- at least the investigation mechanics. I talked about a number of hacks for that earlier. One option would be to pick up Lorefinder, the GUMSHOE adaptation for Pathfinder, and use that. That might work for other GMs but I haven't played PF and heading that route would take some investment or time and learning. More likely I would build a hack using either modifying either the standard resolution rules of GUMSHOE or FATE. For the former, I could easily adapt over some of the new "Thriller" combat, chase and action options from Night's Black Agents. For the latter, I'd have a little bit looser framework to play with. FATE has the advantage of being something my players have started to enjoy and building some of the sub-systems I want would be easier. Some things to consider:

MAGIC
In Mutant City Blues, all superpowers fit on a chart called the Quade Diagram. So if you see evidence of one kind or power or effect, you can look nearby on the chart and make an assessment of the other likely powers. That's a conceit that helps make the set-up playable in a straight mystery campaign. I think that you could build a similar device for magic in a fantasy setting. Mages might have access to several different schools, each with some specialties. They could be really distinctive, like the magic traditions presented in Greg Stolze's Reign. Alternately, it might be fun to build a set of characteristics (smells, physical components, visual cues, etc) associated with different kinds of occult practices. Different chantries could be given their own magical personalities or signatures. Perhaps different magics might be distinctive across racial or ethnic lines. Ideally these kinds of details would be nice pieces of the puzzle for the players. I don't necessarily want to have the logic challenge depth of something like Lord d'Arcy, but magic should offer clues and have limitations.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE
I'd go with a smaller pool of investigative skills (a always default to that terminology)- and I probably should look at Lorefinder to see how they handle it. We'd want a number of lore skills. Cultural and/or Racial Lores would be useful and ideally we'd keep the number of those small, which offers a constraint on the setting. Monster Lore would be a useful ability as well, especially if something got loose in the city. That would be an investigative skill with a combat or tagging element as well. How one breaks up 'forensics' would be a question. Could a warrior identity a style or a weapon from the wounds inflicted?

RELATIONSHIPS
I would also consider issues of corruption, evidence disposal, covering up and so on. (I've been watching the Aurelio Zen series, so I have that in mind). Pull with superiors could have a rating and be based performance and "keeping things quiet" instead of how well you actually solve crimes. That rating or pool could be used for favors, access to resources or covering one's ass. Drawing on it too much depletes it- meaning you don't have it as a defense when the heat comes down. Cover Up or Evidence Disposal might be its own skill, or simply an aspect of the existing skills. I wouldn't have the player competing against one another- instead I think have aspects or ratings represent trust and teamwork between them could be more useful. Of course all of this could be treated more seriously or more comedic, depending on how the GM wants to turn that dial.

Also of interest to me would be developing some mechanic for players establishing relationships with people or groups. I know Smallville uses something like this and Ken Hite mentioned a mechanic like this in discussing the future Evil Hat project, Bubblegumshoe. You could have a general network or contact skill, but then gain specific affiliations. Your relative reputation and level of corruption could affect who would deal with you- I like the idea of tracking those on a spectrum. But for example, if a PC has established a link/relationship with someone from a minority group (let's say Gnomes) he might be able to spend or invoke that connection when dealing with a Gnomish Anarchist collective. Of course doing that strains and might even break the tie. The obvious idea would be to have friends in places like the Wizards' Chantry, the King's Guard, the Thieves Guild and so on. I think having some mechanism for public trust and friends in the community could serve as a nice balance or "carrot/stick" device for the players.

LASTLY
So that's the idea- when I try out the city building exercise I will report back. I'd be curious if anyone else has done collaborative city creation, either using this system or another.

NIGHT'S BLACK MUGGLES
THE SECRET PILGRIMAGE
So last week I wrote quite a bit on Ken Hite's Night's Black Agents. I'm a big fan of spy thrillers and campaigns. The first 'adult' book I read was Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy in fourth or fifth grade. The first rpg I played that really hooked me outside of D&D was Top Secret. I'm not so keen on technothrillers but I love the combination of the mundane and the dangerous that comes in the best spy fiction and cinema. I like the world of mirrors implied by that. I'll admit that when I first heard that NBA would include elements of the supernatural I was skeptical, but reading through it and seeing the way Hite's framed it really makes me excited. It's something I want to run eventually- with unambiguously monstrous opponents and characters trying to stay ahead of the opposition while trading on their past lives and careers. Anyway this idea hit me and stuck, so I had to get it written down and out of my head.

DEFINING MONSTERS
Night's Black Agents has vampires- but they can represent any of a number of hungry, powerful and control monsters. Other supernatural creatures show up in the setting, usually as secondary adversaries (zombies, werewolves). Of course that got me thinking about the World of Darkness. Some might dismiss NBA as simply a Hunter game, but I think it is better than either the supernatural weird of Reckoning or the loose and cobbled grab-bag of Vigil. It offers a distinct atmosphere. And I'd want to keep that atmosphere intact in my version. NBA suggests that the group begin play with the burn- the moment they came into contact with the conspiracy and it smacked them down. It left them out the cold, isolated and now driven to do something about it. Optionally that may have happened before the start of the campaign- but figuring out who these supernatural adversaries are should serve as the lit fuse.

In some ways this riffs off ideas from a thread about HP from about a year ago. So what if the players discover a cabal operating behind the scenes? A group with a parallel government, one which gives orders to our own. They possess powers beyond those of normal humans, and treat that as a birthright- gifts handed them by destiny rather than earned. They fight, battle and have their wars in the middle of the daylight world- thinking nothing of wiping minds, causing collateral damage, and leaving others to hold the bag. They're wizards, and they are awful people. Even the most enlightened of them use derogatory terms to refer to those without the gift...muggles, or worse. They take for granted their role and position, a paternal control behind the curtain.

They're dangerous, wielding great power combined with a narrow focus on their desires, interests and hobbies. They have access to monsters and relics of massive power, and well ready even the lowest of them present a dangerous foe. Some can teleport, some can shapechange, some can blast your mind from across a room. They can walk among us and not be known.

SHOOT THE WAND
But they are not invincible. They're hidebound- clinging to old traditions and ignoring the developments of the modern world. This isn't simply a question of ignoring technology, but everything about their culture remains traditional, a hierarchy of noble lines and old powers. Students in their schools are trained in their own history and stories, but almost nothing of the outside world. Beyond that, their training focuses almost exclusively on their craft, the arts and powers they possess. It is a kind of narrowly focused trade education- with no disciplines covering art, literature, the humanities, math, ethics, business sense, philosophy or any kind of training to make them into better people. They're stunted- with an enhanced sense of self based in the powers they've been born with. That's the way the upper echelon of their community want it. A happy class basking in their privilege and not wanting power, responsibility or answers to the why.

Beyond social and intellectual limits- limits to their thinking and planning, the mages operate under practical limits: the need for foci, the need for preparation for some of their more powerful effects, and certain somatic components. They can range from crafty to foolish, depending on their level in the conspiracy. But of course the agents will have to discover that in time.

SNAPE'S PEOPLE
So a couple of things about this idea- first, it would be really easy to set this up as a twist- with the characters "misreading" the world of the wizards and seeing a conspiracy where none exists. That's a little too empty a joke. Instead, I'd like to treat the wizards as a serious conspiracy. If you file off some of the softer details of the HP universe- the structure seems pretty dark. And Voldemort doesn't seem to be that much of an aberration- that in the past there have been similar battles over ideology among their society. Plus, if you stop to consider the sheer power put into the hands of these beings at a young age, without a real set of limitations, then you can see how that might turn out dark. If the GM wanted to stick closer to the original, then Voldemort or someone like him won- and the rest have been purged. I like that Ken Hite offers no good guy or ally monsters in Night's Black Agents, and I think that needs to hold true to make something like this work.

Of course how you do the reveal will depend on whether or not you do this as a one-shot or a campaign. In a campaign, you'll want some misdirection as to what these beings can do- perhaps they do read them as vampires or even psionicists. You'd have to consider the practical limitations of a wizard's power. Some seem potent, while others seem to simply uses wands like guns. You'd have to balance that raw strength against the careful planning and calculation of trained agents. The trick would be to make that satisfying- with the wizards appropriately dangerous. Of course, you'd also have to consider what a cell of the conspiracy looks like. As well, how the determination between muggle and wizard is made: how visible is it? How is it sensed?

Anyway, it is goofy bastardization of the original NBA premise, but might be fun to play with.

The Blood: Building a Vampiric Conspiracy in NBA

2011-12-11T18:20:00.001-05:00

A first exercise in thinking about a different Vampiric Conspiracy for Night's Black Agent's.

THE INCIDENT
In 1987 a team of researchers were called by church authorities to investigate a decrepit Catholic Church in an undisclosed northern European city. The facility itself had effectively fallen off the map until the death of the final priest operating there. When local authorities contacted church bureaucrats about the dispensation of the church, a mid-level auditor was dispatched. He investigated the location and quietly called in a team of scientists to examine what he'd found. The details of what transpired there have never been made public: the church auditor went mad, at least a dozen graduate students assisting in on-location research died, along with three professors. Only two beings made it out of there, and one of them wasn't human.

That creature vanished into the night. It had been for the moment, stopped from its plan to call forth the Anti-God and bring about the destruction of the world. It had been reduced, cut off from its power- the sad, cast-off trappings of a force of once incalculable power- essentially Satan's Blood possessing one of the survivors of that incident. In the almost twenty-five years since it's escape, the Blood has been working to secure a power base for itself and to set in motion the devices necessary to rip open the gates between worlds and allow the greater darkness into this one.

THE VAMPIRES
The Blood
The primary vampire and head of the pyramid, it essentially is Satan's Blood in a human body. The Blood is powerful, but can only exist in a single physical being at a time. It moves between bodies through the transfer of its essential fluid. It doesn't do this that often, mostly because of the difficulty of making arrangements and maintaining cover. The Blood doesn't interact as a human, in fact it doesn't really speak- instead it gives mental commands to the Infected in its service. The few non-Infected who interact with it have the impression of having had a conversation with someone, but without specific details recalled. The more they think upon it, the more dread they feel.

The Blood keeps dwells isolated on an far northern European estate (picture the household from Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). From there it works and pulls strings trying to generate the capital it needs to carry out its eventual plan, the alignment of various electronic devices to open a gate and allow its father back through to devour the earth. In the meantime, it prepares the earth, creating places where the mindless and the chattel can be managed for the culling.

The Blood has a number of visible effects, causing by its own nature as a being which bends space-time. Mirrors and reflective surfaces ripple when it approaches, like the surface of a lake. As well, those who hunt the Blood, and who have come into contact with the Infected will eventually begin to be haunted, but this is not The Blood's doing. Instead, they will begin to suffer future visions- bad and grainy transmissions and warnings from a future where the Blood has won. This may test the stability of the agents- but may serve as a source of clues or information. They may be able to use this to find others who have fought against them, probably in sanitariums.

Free Powers: Darkvision, Dominance (limited to Infected, Touched and Mindless), Infection (creating Infected), Regeneration, Vampiric Speed, Strength, Temporal Distortion, Acidic Blood (for the fluid outside the body)
Other Powers: Body Jumping, Mental Attack (Confusion, Loss of Identity)
Banes: The Blood should be significantly tougher than normal. It cannot be killed by normal means- but it can be trapped. In particular, the fluid which makes up its essence can be contained in a ritual constructed mirror vessel.
Signs: Distortion of mirrored surfaces, visual distortion in recording devices, the greenish fluid which contains itself when it transfers.
Requirements: The destruction and eating of souls on a monthly basis. Eventually bodies the Blood possesses will burn out and collapse, but this can take years. It has time to make proper preparations.

The Infected
The Blood can only imperfectly reproduce- can only imperfectly create senior level agents for itself. For all intents and purposes, these agents are the Blood, but a lesser version. They have little in the way of independent will or thought, a factor which makes them somewhat uncreative. The Infected have been created by direct fluid transfer from the Blood. This destroys the host body's mind within a matter of moments. They can mental communicate with other infected or the Blood within line of sight, but otherwise must use other methods to receive orders and exchange plans. The Infected can be detected by birthmark like bruising appearing somewhere on the body. Usually these take the form of an occult symbol.

The Infected have access to several different powers, however they have a major drawback. When they spend Aberrance to power an ability, they gain a permanent blemish, deformity or mark. This might be boils, it might be bloating, it might be a pulsating wound. The most basic of these can be concealed, but over time, they destroy their own effectiveness if they exert themselves too much. At this point, they must take on a new body, by direct exchange of fluids with a target. The previous body will then fall away and suffer a series of grotesque transformations before boiling down into a ichorous stew. To sustain themselves in a body, even without using powers, the Infected must feed every two weeks or so, absorbing energy through the fear and terror given off by murder. An Infected create new Infected, usually to replace itself. Otherwise this is an involved process, requiring the Infected make itself vulnerable They can however create lesser copies of themselves, the Touched.

Free Powers: Darkvision, Dominance (limited to Touched and Mindless)
Other Powers: Infection (creating other Infected takes time, energy and ritual); Infection (creating the Touched is a Plague-like attack, requiring fluid transfer); Vampiric Speed, Regeneration (through Aberrance Spend), Strength
Banes: while tougher than normal, the infected can be killed through normal mean if enough damage is done quickly- and their fluid is kept from splashing
Compulsions: Infected can be distracted by mirrors, objects which fascinate them. Depending on the size this may hold them in place for a time. They're reminded of the Other Side where the Anti-God dwells.
Signs: The most potent of the Infected may also cause a slight ripple to mirrors when they come close to them.
Requirements: feed on the stark emotional energy of a death, usually a murder they've committed close up.

The Touched
The Touched are essentially husks who can carry out the simple mental commands of Infected within range. These commands are non-verbal. The Touched have little in the way or skills or powers, but suffer no pain and effectively serve as fast meat shields for their master. Any Infected can only have a number of Touched operating for them at one time. The GM can base this on the Infected's relative importance or longevity, but shouldn't be more than the number of agents. While the Infected can pass as human, at least until then begin to show marks, the Touched begin to decay shortly after being turned.

The Mindless
Large groups or swarms, such as rats, flocks of birds, or insects can be commanded by The Blood or the Infected. This is s free power, but the Infected can only do this for a short time (a few minutes) or until some significant distraction or noise shakes the swarm into consciousness. This can also be used to command groups of human beings- crowds, gatherings, people working in a mindless state, those with mental problems or compromised self-identity.

GM NOTES
First, apologies to John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. This is a rough first attempt, trying to come up with a fairly narrow vampiric group with a single master at the top level. I'll have to think about the various links in the chain moving up- but the conspiracy clearly needs money and victims. The Big Plan, the construction of a massive reflector or mirror for the Anti-God to come through should be something appears in pieces through the campaign. Research institutions or universities ought to appear scattered throughout the chain- perhaps crazed mathematicians. I imagine this as a game with a fairly limited and set arc with a final confrontation on the frozen tundra. The GM has a couple of tools for linking the PCs- the story and any survivors from the original release of the blood and the broadcast from the future.

Night's Black Agents: Tinker, Tailor, Vampire, Spy

2011-12-08T16:51:00.008-05:00

WHAT IS IT?
This is a kind of pre-review of the newest GUMSHOE game, Night's Black Agents, written by Ken Hite. I'm basing my comments on the preliminary pdf released with pre-orders of the game from the Pelgrane site. They also sold bound copies at the recent Dragonmeet convention. What you get is primarily the text, not illustrations, but cleanly and usefully laid out. You could easily run the game with the material offered.

This is a game of modern spies taking on the vampiric conspiracy.

ASSESSMENT
This is my new favorite GUMSHOE game and one of the best espionage game sourcebooks I've read. That's my review in a nutshell- I'll present a fuller assessment when the game actually comes out, but it is pretty excellent.

WHAT DOES IT BRING TO THE TABLE?
What I want to focus on is considering what Night's Black Agents (NBA) adds to the GUMSHOE toolkit. For example, Ashen Stars added cybernetics options, large scale vehicle combat, and ideas for improvisation. GUMSHOE is an engine, rather than a generic system. If you know the basic rules, you can pick up most of the other games fairly quickly- but there will be functional differences- in how abilities get refreshed, how weapons work, etc. That approach allows each game to stand on its own and be a solid emulation of a particular genre or genres. I like the toolkit offering and I think it could be easily used to build many kinds of campaigns.

1. Story Structures
Spy thrillers include investigations, but have other kinds of problem solving and information gathering as key elements. NBA covers those, shifting the mechanics and considering more open story structures. Beyond the default cinematic thriller approach of the game it presents options throughout in four different spy "modes": Burn: which considers psychological damage and issues heavily (Bourne, Alias, Graham Greene); Dust: in which the players are relatively normal agents (Rubicon, Three Days of the Condor); Mirror: a game of hidden agendas and player betrayal (LaCarre, Ronin, The Prisoner); and Stakes: games with players adhering to higher natures and loyalties (Taken, Burn Notice). More than any other GUMSHOE game so far, NBA offers supported campaign style choices and options throughout the rules.

2. Characters
NBA has a carefully tailored set of abilities for the spy genre- including Urban Survival, Human Terrain, Tradecraft, Digital Intrusion, Cover, and Network. These last two are interesting in that they represent a permanently expendable resource pool. Each character also gets to pick a specialty from the general ability sets- a MOS- which they can automatically succeed at once per session. General abilities also have a new option called "cherries" which are special abilities which may be invoked if the player has a rating of 8 or more. NBA offers many more options for spends from abilities, but also offers many more options for refreshing and recovering those ability points. Finally, Hite presents a compelling rationale for the ability pools- as a mean for players to take the spotlight and be cool. Spending down gives other players a chance to come forward in that area until the refresh happens. I like this conceptual approach.

3. Drives
Stability serves a major function in the game, essentially mental hit points. Contact with the supernatural as well as bad choices can impact a character's stability. Each character can gain a source of stability, some of which may get "burned" in the course of play. It reminds me a little of some of the Hollowpoint mechanics. Drives get used for more than simply character aims. Instead they offer ways of gaining refreshes. Several of the implementations of abilities and drives in the game remind me of aspects from FATE which I think is a good thing. I like players have some options for gaining benefits by taking losses. There's also a system for tracking trust within a group- allowing for a pool of benefits based on a kind of relationship map within the team. If the campaign includes betrayal, that can get flipped around and used against players.

4. Chases, Combat and Heat
NBA offers an excellent set of chase rules, useful from foot to car to plane. They're easy, but allow for some really interesting tension and choices. They strike the right balance between detail and simplicity. These rules will be useful in other GUMSHOE games. I especially like the narrative options for players. While not becoming a high-crunch system, NBA offers more combat options and maneuvers. These can be chosen and tailored depending on the kind of experience the GM wants at the table- a nice point. The idea of "heat," as in pressure by the authorities, is a great one which can be easily be translated to other games. The mechanics offered for that could be used elsewhere to represent abstractions like loyalty or facade.

5. Tradecraft
As you'd expect, Hite gives us a dynamite discussion of tradecraft and how players can actually apply that in game. Some of that's mechanics and some of its detail and color. I especially like the material on capture and modeling teamwork.

6. Vampires
In this setting, Vampires can be anything. They are monstrous- a point Hite makes clear at the beginning. While the moral areas may fade into the grey, the fact remains that the vampires are monsters. I love that as a baseline, and I think it helps establish a strong signpost for players. Of course figuring out exactly what the vampires are will often be the first stage of any NBA campaign. To that end, Hite offers a dynamite toolkit for building vampires and their agents. This is handled abstractly, choosing from a buffet list of concepts and powers- with vampires demonic and aline covered. Hite's comments about the implications of the choices for the GM make this section worth the money alone. It is great stuff and good campaign planning advice.

7. Gamemastering
It is worth mentioning how much fun this book is to read. There are in jokes, sidebar commentary and examples from playtesting scattered throughout. The materials a pleasure- especially when you come to the sections on conspiracy building, running in European cities, and gamemastering GUMSHOE in general. It offers a number of really great ideas for running any kind of modern game: investigation, conspiracy and/or supernatural. I'd recommend it as a sourcebook for that alone.

OVERALL
I'm looking forward to seeing the final product of Night's Black Agents. I love the tools it offers and I think it has relevance beyond GUMSHOE aficionados. I will say that it is a pretty dense game, and does assume some real experience with RPGs. If you like Spycraft, Conspiracy X or Delta Green, consider picking this up.

OTHER WORLDS, OTHER LIVES
Like most of the GUMSHOE setting books, this one has got me thinking about slight variations and more extensive hacks. NBA offers a wide-ranging toolkit for players and GMs. A few things occurred to me, ideas that I'll file away for the future:

I was talking with a couple of players about future campaigns and I mentioned cyberpunk. We'd played a lot of that back in the day and I'd even done a street-level superhero/cyberpunk mash up that was interesting. Of course, that was fifteen years ago or more and technology has rapidly advanced. I've generally been negative about cyberpunk as a genre because I'm not a fan of chrome-fetish or nihilistic settings. I like some of the cyberpunk window dressing, in particular the social impact and cost of developments like chipped skills, a shared VR space, and artificial personality implants. I like the rough, leading edge of those developments, rather than the fully integrated situations of most cyberpunk or transhumanist settings. And I like a challenge for GMing, so I have to wonder if I could run an interesting cyberpunk game.

Imagine Night's Black Agents done in a near future- we've seen sci-fi vampires like this in the awful Ultraviolet movie or more recent in Daybreakers. Moving forward to "the day after tomorrow" allows some access to interesting and weird technology, the kind seen in things like Mission: Impossible. You could integrate some of the cybernetic and viroware ideas from Ashen Stars. It wouldn't be that hard to build an interesting and flexible system system- NBA already offers some ideas for how to model "eye in the sky" support for groups. On the other hand, it might be a little too far- double mumbo jumbo- spies vs. vampires...in the future!!! That would be a Luc Besson film.

In the opposite direction, I also like the idea of using some of the premise and mechanics to do an Assassin's Creed II style game- taking place in Renaissance Italy, our characters have been in the service of various cabals and organizations battling across the continent. Then they discover the vampires behind it. So we take the video game and replace the Templars with Vampires. NBA has some interesting ideas for handling chases and parkour, and you could use maps from those games themselves- with characters acting as spies and assassins among the various Italian City States. Look to Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade for additional material. You could even do this as a cross-history or cross-generation nested game with players in one campaign finding the stories and tales of players in another.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite existing RPG nest of spies, Al Amarja. I know it begins to trail off into a high weirdness that might pushing the setting over the top, but it could be a great base of operations or refuge for players in an NBA campaign. Plus, Over the Edge already has a couple of existing conspiracies which could be easily adapted over into the major threats to the world. The Pharaohs, on the one hand, could be retooled to be more vulnerable and vampiric, but still sitting atop a powerful network. The Kergillian aliens could easily serve the same role. I think that could be fun- dialing back something of the most fringe bits of the setting, but leaving a great deal of the color intact.

WhineSHOE: Rethinking GUMSHOE

2011-12-06T22:10:00.002-05:00

FANNISH ADMISSION
I'm a big fan of GUMSHOE, I have all of the core system books, and even have the limited editions of Bookhounds of London and Ashen Stars. I think there's dynamite stuff there- and the recent pre-order of Ken Hite's Night's Black Agents really caught my attention. I've been going through that pdf and I hope to have a couple of other posts on that this week- a sample conspiracy and an overview of what NBA brings to the GUMSHOE system. That being said, I'm a also a wuss apparently.

THE FUTURE OF GUMSHOE
I've expressed some reservations about GUMSHOE's system for contests, for rolled resolution. That primarily uses one side of the system, general abilities. Last week, I happened to listen to the Pelgrane Press forum which took place at the Dragonmeet convention, a panel including Simon Rogers, Ken Hite and Robin Laws. You can find the hour-long audio here. The panel's especially interesting in that they give some insight into upcoming projects- including the possibility of a Trail of Cthulhu China sourcebook.

They also touch on some areas close to my interests. Robin Laws shoots down the idea of a GUMSHOE Companion or Compendium. And he does so quite rightly- as he defines it. He describes a compendium bringing together the variant rules and options from the different GUMSHOE books into a single resource. I agree that's a bad idea- it isn't particularly useful, undercuts the market for the different game lines, and establishes a "canon" for GUMSHOE rules. GS isn't a generic rules system in the way that Hero or GURPS is- instead it is a game engine which means that while the different flavors share some basic mechanics, there's no call for uniformity or established baselines between the games. I talked about that factor in generic systems a while back.

On the other hand, I don't think that completely invalidates my desire for a GUMSHOE Compendium. I imagine it more as a factbook or a collection of new ideas and options. Perhaps something done purely electronically, pdf rather than print. I talked about my wishlist for that kind of project in this post- which included (among other ideas) brief articles on historical period mysteries, new versions of the Quade diagrams for other settings, and Nancy Drew style games. This last one, it turns out, will be among the versions of GUMSHOE which Evil Hat will be doing- using relationship mapping as an element. I'm really looking forward to that.

EMBRACE THE NEGATIVE
But of course, one thing I'd like to see are some alternate rules approaches, some serious retooling of the system- hacks and options. Ken Hite takes up that question in the panel- suggesting that what might be useful would be an approved wiki or webspace where GUMSHOE people could offer their own system flavors and options...

...which he calls Whiny-Baby GUMSHOE, or later, WhineSHOE. I shouldn't be too surprised by that, since Robin Laws specifically calls players and GMs who want to state difficulties ahead of rolls wusses (page 68, Ashen Stars).

So here's the thing- I'm willing to accept that label, to take that dismissal. I really love GUMSHOE, and you can see that in the many positive reviews I've written of the products. (GUMSHOE, Trail of Cthulhu, The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars, Bookhounds of London, The Armitage Files, etc.). And my goal is to have a game, a system that my group will enjoy playing. Because they didn't over the several different campaigns we played it with, across two GMs and distinct casts of players.

And mean to to use some of the elements I really love about the game, I have to run a WhineSHOE campaign. And I'm fine with that. I have to hack the parts my players didn't enjoy. And I shared their reaction when I played. I suspect our group's developed in a different direction- we've been playing together for many years, the longest of us together since the mid-1980's. Even the newest members of the group have been with us for at least five years. That means that we've developed habits of play, likes and dislikes, and have tried many different systems. All of the group's have a remarkable level of trust and they're generally willing to try anything, any genre, any system. We have a few exceptions- my wife would cringe if I ran HERO and a couple of people would flee if I suggested Rolemaster. But we have a solid level of fun- and that's the group I want to run for.

I think we have tailor the game to the group, not the other way around.

MAKING IT MY GUMSHOE
Again, I don't want to suggest GUMSHOE is bad or broken. If I were doing conventional horror, I would stick with the GUMSHOE. Esoterrorists, Fear Itself and Trail of Cthulhu all pretty much work for me. The uncertainty and feeling of stress and powerlessness works there. That's why I think highly variable "The dice screwed me" systems like All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Cyberpunk 2020 work to model their respective genres. The die represents the fickle middle digit of fate. If I were going to do a longer horror campaign, however, I'd probably make changes because I've found the resource tracking wearisome for more than a few sessions. And for games like Ashen Stars and Mutant City Blues I would significantly retool because I don't want the same tension as I want in a horror game. Just as I wouldn't use Dread to do a classic high romance fantasy game or FATE to do a terror scenario, I wouldn't use GUMSHOE as it is for certain genres with my group.

THE BREAK-DOWN
So let's consider the dimensions of the problem, based on the reactions I had from our group. I should also point to to responses Simon Rogers had to a couple of the issues I mention here- with some interesting approaches to the system.

1. Range
GUMSHOE uses a single d6 for action resolution. That means a fairly narrow range of results, with any modifier positive or negative, offering significant shift. This means that certain elements, such as weapons fall end up grouped together, with only a few options. I'm not opposed to that, though some may not care for it. But the flat line of the d6 bothers some players- especially those who prefer a curve or at least some granularity to the results. I think some of this is more an emotional reaction to the sparseness of the results, but that's still a legitimate response.

2. Spends and Uncertainty
In our groups players often felt a lack of control in the general ability system, despite the spend system. Not knowing the difficulty obscured judgement. The narrow range of the system made spends feel like guesswork, rather than a strategic or tactical decision. As a result, they viewed their characters as completely buffeted by fate or incompetent. A good roll could be just as wasteful as a bad roll depending on the amount spent.

3. Tracking
As the years have gone on, we've moved to less reference and less tracking of details in our games. Fringe systems such as fatigue, exhaustion, reaction rolls and the like have fallen to the wayside. General abilities (and to a lesser and more manageable extent investigative abilities) require tracking, marking and revising. Some abilities refresh at different rates.

There are a couple of other problems which could be considered, but I think they're secondary-

4. Can GUMSHOE Model Action?.
The blog Nerdtropolis has discussed this. I'm not sure I entirely agree with him, but he has a point- especially if that's the experience his group had with the system. I'd suggest looking at the new tools Night's Black Agents offers. Many of them make chases, combat and action more interesting and more dynamic. Beyond that, I'm not sure any of the options I suggest below address this problem, especially since our games have been moving towards more and more abstract combat/action sequences.

5. Excessive Number of Abilities
This is a personal preference. I come out of years of playing games with lots of detailed skill lists and options. What I've learned is that the more skills you have, the fewer opportunities for use most of them will get, and the more weight will fall on a handful of really useful ones. My preference these days is for "create your own" skill lists. But GUMSHOE, by its nature, requires a set list. Given that we want to make each ability cool and have the power to generate its own story, I'd like to see fewer abilities.

SOME APPROACHES
Option One: Changing General Spends
A somewhat unsatisfying option would be to allow spends after the die is rolled. That breaks suspense, but gives absolute control. On the other hand, it does beg the question as to why you'd need a resource system then. A better alternative would be to follow the standard procedure- declare action, declare spends, check success and then allow an alternate, stop-gap spend. In this case, players could spend from another source to make up the difference: Stability or Health, to represent their pushing themselves to their limits to succeed at a particular roll. The stakes on future rolls become pressing when players gamble with their "hit points."

Option Two: Overspends
In GUMSHOE situations, players overspend easily, so that a with a high spend feels like a waste of resources. Some test situations have a compared margins of success, but many don't. When the player makes a spend and rolls a they could perhaps be allowed a one or two point pool refresh, in another ability. This could be a related ability which has been tapped out, or perhaps Stability or Health. This is more a device for the GM to keep players from feeling frustrated with the system.

Those two options are minor tweaks, intended to keep most of the GUMSHOE engine intact. The next two are more draconian.

Option Three: FATESHOE
I've mentioned before my idea for using FATE as the engine for certain GUMSHOE genres. The excellent skalchemist suggested a few modifications. Essentially players would have a set of Investigative Abilities with no rank. They would also have a set of General Abilities, but these would have a rating. If the GM wanted, he could also have a set of stats to pair with those abilities, or else stick with success rolls based on the ability ratings. Players would also have a set of aspects, with one of them representing their investigative drive. You'd have two stress tracks, Stability and Health. In most other respects, the system would operate like FATE. However investigative abilities would not require rolls, but FATE points could be spend on them to gather extra information.

I like this one, as our group's really embraced some of the ideas from FATE. I can imagine trading off negative elements and scenes- being tailed, running into enemies, being captured- for FATE points. It also fits in well with the improvisational structure of something like the Armitage Files. It does put power into the hands of the players- reducing tension potentially but offering greater buy in.

Option Four: WhineSHOE Lite
A more elaborate approach to retooling GUMSHOE would start by knocking down the barrier between 'investigative' and 'general' abilities. In the chain of development, by the time we've gotten to Night's Black Agents, with have general uses for many investigative abilities and vice-versa. Certainly many abilities will be more often used one direction or the other, but the premise holds. So first we reduce the number of abilities down to a more manageable number- collapsing certain ones together. Let's say that we want to end up with something like thirty abilities.

Each ability would have a Rating and a Spend. When used in a contest (opposed or unopposed) players would roll and add their rating. The numbers for rating would vary, depending on whether you wanted the flat of a d10 or d20 or the curve of 2d10 or 3d6. In any case, we would balance the rating and the difficulties to the dice in that system. When used for information gathering, no roll is necessary.

The Spend for an particular ability is rated from 1-3. Spends are purchased independently from rating, and have a rising cost. I'm imaging each ability line will have three boxes to show and mark spends. If a player uses an ability for investigation, they may spend from that pool (if any) to gain additional information. For the most part this operates the same as investigative abilities in GUMSHOE. But players may also spend points from that pool to gain a general benefit. This could be either a bonus to a roll, with declaration made beforehand, or a special option- taking a cue from Ken Hite's new system of "cherries" for high level skills in Night's Black Agents. This would be kept simple but interesting, with no more than one of two non-investigative spend benefits. A more elaborate system might have addition epic picks for investment, but that's really more chrome than anything else.

This approach serves as a kind of "quick-start" GUMSHOE- it keeps the important elements of investigative skills. But it also has a much reduced and easier to handle tracking system and resource management. It works to reduce the barrier the rules offer between a player and their narrative. And it takes out most of the problems our groups had with the system.

LAST WORD
Several of the campaigns I have on my agenda are GUMSHOE settings or variations on those. I think the system remains among the most interesting out there. The trick I have to work out now is crafting a hack that I like and that my players will enjoy.

Why I Hate NPCs

2011-12-02T13:40:00.003-05:00

Some days I hate NPCs.

But I also love NPCs. They're the engine that drives great and memorable campaigns for the players. In the kinds of narrative and dramatic leaning campaigns we play now, these characters offering sounding boards, connections, and windows into the setting. I've written about how great and important they are in many, many, many, many posts.

But sometimes....sometimes they drive me crazy. I want to clear the deck, kill them off, and tear the game down to players, plot, scenery.

Why?

1. MEMORY
Let's start with a basic problem- keeping track of the cast. I run six campaigns, and remembering all of the characters between them, is hard. I usually have to scan through the list before each session. And of course for the longer running campaigns, we've an assembly of personalities to rival Game of Thrones. I can usually remember the who and why of characters, but what I lose is the name. Which makes me feel stupid at the table. And I don't like going through my notes while I'm running. I get especially frustrated if I've done a particular 'voice' for a character and I can't remember it- either cadence, accent or tone.

2. AVOIDANCE
A friend of mine ran a game with a large cast of NPCs. He's a good GM and does an excellent job of creating interesting characters. Each of his players had an affiliated group. However some of his players didn't get along- there were arguments between them and conflicts of agendas. As a result players played less and less with each other, and more and more directly with GM. That created greater fragmentation of the plot and annoyance among the players when the GM actually put the PCs together through the NPCs. I've seen that in my games, where some players will ignore everyone else and go off to talk to NPCs by themselves- deliberately ignoring plot hooks or even short circuiting the arc in order to have the table to themselves. Essentially the player uses the positive of the NPC to justify a kind of selfishness at the table. I like to give players individual scenes and moments, but I like it even better when I can put two or more players together in a scene.

3. MINE!
The even greater danger arising from this we can call Mr. Jealousy. In this case players decide to consider certain NPCs as their own. Some do this from attachment, some from paranoia, and some as a way of taking control of the table dynamic. Players who operate this way become hugely defensive when other players attempt to interact with "their" NPCs. I've seen players get actually furious at the table when other players have suggested talking to or bringing in an NPC they were attached to. In other instances, I've seen players use those reactions to bully other players to keep them from stepping into plots they believed they own. In one case, another players became furious when we talked to their character's family, despite their being at the center of the adventure and despite the discussion being fairly innocuous.

4. FICKLE LOVE
I know some tables handle romance fairly well- and that's an element in many of our campaigns. I'd say the play more echoes anime more than anything- light and stereotypical. It is more about affection and misunderstandings, or offering plot complications. But sometimes players will start down the road of romantic sub-plot and then suddenly a shinier or more interesting NPC will catch their eye. Or more likely the NPC doesn't precisely validate their character's self-image, doesn't fawn over them the way they want, or actually presents some obstacles to overcome. Then the player decides to drop that NPC and wants to completely ignore previous developments in favor of a new tact. If you've spent any time as a GM on that, or have built any plots on the relationship, it can be maddening.

5. OMNIPOTENCE
I've played in games with omnipotent NPCs- or Mary Sue NPCs that take center stage. So I try to avoid that, but I also want to demonstrate competency and have characters in positions of authority for real reasons, not just goofs with a title. And some players react badly to NPCs in leadership positions. That's fine and something I can usually work past. But sometimes players assume that the NPCs are omnipotent and won't even attempt to engage with them. They just get angry. Ironically, in most cases that's been the reaction from players who GM and have those very same omnipotent figures in their games. Because that's what they would do, they assume an NPC will be invulnerable or unassailable. So a NPC who ought to be an interesting foil or interaction suddenly becomes a stumbling block. You're left with the choice of bending over backwards to show the agreeable or useful nature of NPC or just dropping the thread.

6. THE TRAIN
Having a large cast of NPCs, especially ones the players really like mean that as a GM you want to offer a chance to interact with them. That's fine if you have a static campaign setting, like a city. But for classic fantasy or exploration games, it can be a bigger problem. You have to plan around those NPCs showing up or the players returning to the NPCs location. If they're spread around the setting, then you want to make sure each player gets time with the NPCs they like which may mean more travel or strange coincidental devices. The Gm doesn't have to, but once the door's been opened to this kind of play, the group may expect it. An obvious but even more problematic solution is to bring the NPCs along, effectively doubling the group size and creating more things for the Gm to worry about. If you're at all considering the struggle for survival in dangerous environments as a theme, a host of camp followers undercuts that quickly.

7. AT THE TABLE
And of course bringing along all of those NPCs leads to a logistical problem. I'll admit combat's where I'm weakest at the table. I get flustered and I want to race though as quickly as possible. I cut corners but I tell myself that's in the interest of maintaining the pace. As well, I'm just not a tactical thinker. When I pit my forces against the combined skills of a table of gamers, I'm at a huge disadvantage, even with "all the points." I want to balance winning, providing a challenge, and making it feel fair. So the last thing I want is to have to deal with extra characters. With allies, I'm suddenly responsible for defeating the players and helping them at the same time. The details I have to track and worry about expand- in detailed games like Champions it becomes even more difficult. Its why I don't usually allow pets for characters either- one more thing to track.

I dread that moment in a combat when I've just got the rhythm going and I hear a player say "What about Sir Dorkus, he hasn't gone the last three turns...?" If I forget about the NPCs, then the players may think that I'm cheating them or that the NPC's just useless. The former only comes up with bad players or those in really tense situations. But I've also had players get angry at NPCs for not really 'being there' in combat, something not in the NPCs character but more in my desire to focus on the PCs. I certainly don't want to swing the other way and have the NPCs steal their thunder. The problem gets more complicated when you have a detailed system- one with plenty of combat options, styles and maneuvers. I don't want to track those options for NPCs. But that runs the risk of making them seem more incompetent than they are on one hand, or more powerful on the other if I completely wing it. I don't want to be asked afterward how X NPC was able to do Y thing that they players can't. I could spin a story about it, but I've already stepped on the players' toes there.

Here's the other thing: players like the idea of their NPCs being in conflicts alongside them (for utility, to show off to them, to deepened connections) but they hate when those NPCs get damaged, seriously injured or killed. I can certainly understand that, but on occasion they flip out. I suppose that ought to be a good sign- that the player or players have an emotional connection to the NPC, but every once in a while it can create a problem. We had a session years ago where one of the PCs effectively got an NPC killed and some of the table lost it. As a GM, I have to asses the cost benefit of targeting those NPCs- knowing that players will scrutinize those actions even more tightly for "fairness."

TABLE SOLUTIONS
For my first six points I don't have any quick solutions- beyond monitoring and balancing. For actual table play, I have come up with a few approaches. These may be obvious to veteran GMs, but I hope someone will find them useful. You'll note that I avoid giving players the actual NPCs, fully-statted, to control. I don't like that option for a couple of reasons. First, it means having to write up other sets of characters. Second, unless everyone has a 'buddy' then some players don't get the cool advantage. Third, when players control more than one figure in a combat, it feels less like an rpg and more like a tactical wargame.

1. Get the NPC Off the Table. If there are support tasks or things which can be done elsewhere (finding the winch to lower the portcullis, getting someone to safety, hacking a console) then say that the NPC will do it. A couple of caveats on this approach. First, those tasks shouldn't step over a player's role. For example, if you have a Rigger in the group then they should be the one to hack the electronics. Second, if you want to use this tactic, then don't screw the players with it. If you as the GM suggest that X NPC can move someone to safety, then they should get that person to safety. They should not get captured as a plot device. If you do that, the next time you make a suggestion that an NPC could do something off table, the players won't trust you. On the other hand, if the players suggest that an NPC could undertake a task, then the gloves are off. You haven't pushed them and they've made their own decision.

2. Trade-Off: This works if you have the players facing hordes or overwhelming odds (which you can, of course, engineer). During the first round or so, offer to have NPCs tie up a certain number of mooks or minions for the fight. The players can say where they want the NPC(s) to operate as crowd control. Essentially pawn neutralizes pawn. Don't roll for resolution or track damage, just let them keep a position secure. Again you're offering the players a benefit in exchange for making your task as the GM easier. The NPC should be effectively off the table in terms of attacks, at least until the stakes get raised or the situation changes.

3. Support: Pair up NPCs with PCs and give them a straight bonus. The NPC effectively vanishes into that bonus. The bonus or effect may vary depending on what the NPC does. If you don't want to directly pair up, say that the NPC serves as a floating bonus one player can use each round. A player can't use the bonus again until everyone has used it.

4. Advanced Support: As with the idea above, but with more complexity. This takes a page from FATE and HeroQuest, where NPCs can be aspects or abilities. You could, for example, pair NPCs up with PCs and have them offer a benefit- but they can also be sacrificed (K.O'd) to do other things, like prevent damage, use a special ability or give an uber-bonus. Another option might be to say that any NPC offers a power which can be called on by the players. However, once the players opt to do that, the NPC becomes 'at risk' and can then be targeted by bad guys or taken out as a consequence. This puts that choice in the group's hands.

HATE'S PERHAPS TOO STRONG A WORD
Of course, I'm exaggerating on most of these points. I can’t imagine a campaign without some interesting NPCs, especially recurring ones. Most of my campaigns are built around a cast of NPCs first- and I get a real delight when players become interested in their stories and ideas. But every once in a while, they do lead to frustrations. The vast majority of the time, they add to the campaign. But I do have to watch some players to make sure that they don't fall into bad play patterns with background characters. I've played in campaigns with zero NPCs. Or at least all of the NPCs were exclusively "roles" or "questgivers," like early computer RPG characters. I played with a GM who never introduced a female NPC, mostly because it never occurred to him. I played with a GM who put the only interesting NPC into a coma. Strong and returning NPCs are huge part of a solid story- in a tabletop rpg, a computer rpg (any Bioware title), television (Buffy) or elsewhere.

Generic RPGs: Hate & Love

2011-11-30T23:06:00.003-05:00

Pitchforks at Ready

So today I had a weird conjunction of rpg topics. First, it turns out Hero Games decided to cut down to a one man operation, letting go a couple of the remaining people, including Steve “My Name's On the Cover of Every Hero System Book” Long. That apparently came out of the blue for most people- a company with a wide range of material, affiliation with an on-going MMORPG, and a storied history. They might try to Kickstarter the last planned book the line. I know they've gone through some rough patches, but didn't expect a pre-Christmas bloodletting. That I expect from WotC. But the decline of one of the more interesting systems in gaming connects to some discussions I've seen on RPG Geek. In particular, some attitudes about generic systems- with GURPS in particular coming in for some real venom.

There was a recent thread considering the voting for the RPG lifetime achievement award on the Geek; a nice idea to get a core list of systems and games people see as important or influential to the hobby. Last year was the first year, and obviously D&D won. But this year was a tighter race. GURPS, among others, had done particularly well- early on in a tight race with Traveller, though the latter won strongly in the end. But, as the thread showcased, some people really don't like GURPS. Some of the criticism was aimed at SJ Games, some at players of the system, and others at the generic approach as a whole. I saw similar comments pop up in a "Question of the Day" thread, asking what things in an rpg book were a “red flag” which would keep you from buying it. Again, that the game was generic or universal was cited as a reason not-to-buy by several people- and fairly adamantly.

Agree/Disagree/Retry

And my initial reaction was to be a little put off, but then I stopped to think about it. Honestly, if I saw a generic or universal system on the shelf, I'd probably skip it. I've bought and played enough games in my life that more mechanics without substance- in terms of setting, story and drama- probably isn't for me. I say that, but I also picked up the Strands of FATE rulebook- a generic implementation of that system. And while I didn't love the game, it did finally give me insight into how the FATE Engine works. So that wasn't a lost purchase. But I haven't bought many other core books for generic systems - and those I have of late have eventually let me down. However, I'm an old gamer- and I still remember how cool I thought GURPS was when it came out. We'd seen some implementations of systems used across games before- bringing us back to Hero Games. Before they actually put out the generic Hero System rulebook, alongside Champions 4e, they'd already done several different variant games using the same basic mechanics (Espionage! and Justice, Inc for example). And, of course, Basic Role-Playing had already started to chart a course towards that- linking together the various Chaosium products and giving us Worlds of Wonder.

But GURPS put that universality to the forefront- and gave players a fairly easy toolkit for building characters. Buy stats, buy skills, buy some advantages. But I think we recognized pretty quickly that GURPS really wasn't usefully a 'universal' system, though we tried to use it that way. Our first games were a former gladiators-turned huntsmen survival campaign and a dimension hopping Amber-homage campaign. The cracks showed in some places, but it offered the best toolkit for doing cross-genre stuff and the best toolkit at the time to have some of the interesting details of Hero System, without the heavy crunch and complications. But it would always be a game about relatively normal heroes, those skilled and talented, but not superhuman. The baseline in an effective GURPS campaign was well below that of a Champions or Rolemaster game- those dealt well with different power levels. So we ran horror, espionage, space, and classic fantasy in that system. But high fantasy, superheroes, wushu, and all of that we left for other systems. Going past 200 points in GURPS got into silly territory. And out of that toolkit came many really interesting campaigns. Fantasy games where fighting an actual monster, something like a beholder, was a terrible prospect, resulted in fear checks and cost PCs their lives.

Engine vs. Toolbox

The distinction, for us, between Hero System and GURPS had another dimension beyond power level. Early on, before they came out with sourcebooks for them, we tried to work out approaches to fantasy and wushu in Hero System. But that was really about figuring out how to tune the powers and details rather than making any changes to the system. Hero, for all of its flaws, is an incredible engine, one with little room to make changes to the actual mechanics. On the other hand, we never ran GURPs straight. We dropped lots of the overcomplicated rules, stripped away elements that got in the way of fun, and used the most basic details to run our games. So fatigue, experience limits and training, second by second tracking, and much else got discarded in favor of a GURPS Local Flavor 454. It meant some serious rethinking when I played GURPS games at cons and the like. But the system had enough room to do that. And you had to in some cases- GURPS has a terrible magic system. We ended up having to change a lot to make them interesting to play, and as fun in combat as other roles.

But in some ways that's the great downfall of generic or universal systems- the need to be balanced and beholden to internal consistency. GURPS Magic IMHO (and that of others in our group) works to highly limit the power of mages in combat with energy costs, extra rolls, prep time, and other significant limits. There's the sense, in some ways, that the game must keep a tactical balance and a balance with “realism.” But that means that other modules and systems which get strapped on- alternate and interesting forms of sorcery and the like also have to be hamstrung. Everything has to balance together and be consistent across the books. Some elements might get classed as more super-hero-y, fantastic, or restricted, but they have rules limits and costs which allow them to work within the same universe- for better or worse.

On the other hand, game engines don't have to worry about that so much. We have many different flavors of FATE out there, and no one cares about the balance or interchangeability or elements across those systems and settings. The same thing applies to GUMSHOE and One Roll Engine. Even d20- as an engine- didn't really have a core balance to worry about and compare to. I think the original intent of the generic system was to allow players access to a set of rules everyone could learn and use for many different games. It would also allow a GM to bring diverse elements and genre ideas together. But it also required a measuring stick, a universal center. I think that's one of the problems with the World of Darkness rules- lashing themselves to a core rules and then trying to keep some balance and interoperability between the sub-rpgs. That results in games which ought to be narrative driven, but in fact have massive amounts of rules, often asymetrical and complicated across different abilities.

But I like the idea that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, that some workable core mechanics can be taken and reused- without regret. And we can make changes freely and play with those ideas. So we perhaps lose the ability to have a universal gaming language or the power to take characters and drop them into any campaign. But out of the great generic old-school systems, like GURPS, BRP and HERO, and even Masterbook, we got interesting lighter generic systems like Savage Worlds and Risus, and game engines which can be toolkitted elsewhere like Fudge and Burning Wheel. And we can accept that certain systems and engines work better for some things than for others.

Almost Done

So a couple of last thoughts: first, what universal systems still have some vitality now that Hero seems to be dropping off the map? Savage Worlds is still out there. Basic Role-Playing maintains itself, though there's all the Mongoose weirdness for the different flavors of that. GURPS presses on, though it seems to have less and less relevancy. On the other hand, True20 seems to be falling to the wayside and I'm unsure about the state of the d6 System brand. Second, consider the tangible benefits that generic systems have brought in terms of sourcebooks. We've gotten excellent historical, regional, thematic and genre books out of them- tools which can be used for many different games. If they'd had to be tied to a specific setting or narrow game, I wonder if we would have gotten as many. From GURPS came the really interesting books GURPS Russia, GURPS Celtic Myth, GURPS Mysteries, GURPS Horror, and GURPS Voodoo, just as a few examples. Take a lot at the library of new BRP ideas and or even the wackiness that is Lucha Libre HERO. I think those of us who hack, dismantle, adapt and stitch together gaming materials have a lot to thank generic systems for.

Stormbringer (1st ed.): Crazy, Random, Cool RPGs

2011-11-22T10:49:00.006-05:00

LAIR OF THE WHITE WOLF
I don't know when or where I got my copy of the Stormbringer rulebook. I bought my original copy when it came out in 1981- I'd just finished reading the Elric books and looked forward to playing in that setting. I'd first come to Moorcock's novels through the original Deities & Demigods, before TSR had to remove the Melnibonéan mythos from the book. Everyone in grade school wanted to have Stormbringer, Mournblade or a sword like those. The hot summoned chicks drawn by Jeff Dee helped raise interest as well. In the years since I bought the game, my original copy of the rules vanished. The rulebook I own now comes from a later printing, judging by the errata on the inside front cover. But I love this copy because I know someone else owned it: it is worn, there's coffee and other liquid stains on the front and inside. Someone started to trace the letters of the logo with a silver pen, but stopped half-way through the "o". Inside a previous owner highlighted every single heading and sub-heading throughout the book. Every page has four or five of these marks, despite those headings being in bold. There are annotations throughout, but the most notable thing is that someone went through and added an accent mark by hand to every single instance of the word Melniboné. Every single one. It appears a lot.

That's pretty awesome.

EARLY DAYS YET
And Stormbringer itself was pretty awesome. 1981 would have been the same year as the first editions of Universe, Aftermath!, Merc, the D&D Expert Set and Call of Cthulhu. Thirty years ago. It stands as one of the earliest licensed adaptations of a fantasy setting to an rpg- though interestingly it came out the same year as Thieves World, also from Chaosium. The boxed set included charts and tables, blank character sheets, a large and very nice map of the Young Kingdoms (done by William Church) and the 144 page perfect bound softcover. The book itself is solid- with decent page layout for the time, and only a few significant typos (like the accent mark mentioned earlier...). For a game thirty years old, the spine's held up better than more recent games I've owned (*cough* GURPS 3e... *cough*). It uses the classic old school grognard system for rules, so you get headings like: "5.7.1.4. Special Demon Abilities"). But what I love about the book are the Frank Brunner illustrations. He provides a set of six full-page black and white images (as well as the box cover). These show a more visceral and weird fantasy side than the art approach used in later editions of the game. Chapters begin with one of the large images and then use small cut-outs from that picture for spot illustration. The cover of the rulebook reuses two of those illustrations- but in red and white.

Ken St. Andre and Steve Perrin, two titans of the hobby wrote Stormbringer, basing it on a fairly simple version of Basic Role-Playing, Chaosium's house system then as now. I should be noted that the game's based pretty exclusively on the first six 'books' in the Elric series, given that this appeared before Moorcock decided to go back and ~~milk~~ revisit the the setting and create more tales. St. Andre & Perrin mention some of the other places where Elric had appeared beyond those stories-including comics and magazine tales not yet collected. The authors show an understanding and affection for the material and ideas. Even if some of the systems end up being more than a little clunky, there's a sincere and honest attempt to take the magic and world presented in Elric and make it work within the rpg paradigm operating at the time. I think there's an interesting parallel to be drawn between Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu, both of which have gone through several editions- but the former which has had to change and be retooled to match the tastes and approaches of modern rpgs and the latter which set the bar high enough to remain relatively unchanged.

ROLL, ROLL, ROLL
Stormbringer opens with a chapter offering an overview of the setting. There's a few paragraphs give over to the question of what is an rpg- but it really feels a little like lip service. The game itself assumes the players have played other rpgs. Likewise, while the setting material and story synopsis are excellent- they still really need someone who has actually read the books. Ten pages give an overview of each nation of the Young Kingdoms with special attention paid to the "cool" places of Melniboné and Pan Tang. That's follow by three pages on money and a few more notes on Fantasy Role Play or FRP gaming.

Chapter Two moves into character creation. Players begin by rolling straight 3d6 for each of seven attributes (Strength, Constitution, Size, Intelligence, Power, Dexterity and Charisma). Size offers a whole set of charts with additional rolls to get the specific height and weight. There's no system for extra rolls or choosing placement of values, but some of the numbers can change later in character creation. Hit Points remain within a fairly limited range; these are equal to a character's CON plus one for each point of SIZ over 12 or minus one for each point below 9. Next players roll to determine their character's nationality. Here's where it starts to get a little odd. The game mentions that certain campaigns may require players to be from a particular nation, but otherwise they roll on the table. There's no balance between those nationalities- each one can restrict or allow certain classes and most have modifiers to the character's stats. For example, if you roll a 01-02 on the table, you win. You're a Melnibonéan. You roll 1d10 and add it to your INT, add 2d6 to POW, and +3 to SIZ. You're either a Noble or a Warrior, unless your total INT and POW is 32 or more, in which case you're a Sorcerer. On the other hand, if you roll 82-88, you're from Lormyr, roll 1d4 and subtract that from your INT and add +2 to SIZ. Luckily you get to roll on the class table without restriction- or course you can't be a Sorcerer, because that's not available there.

So yeah, those are the oddities of the early days of gaming. I'm certainly not in favor of absolute balance, and there's an appeal to random generation- but holy cow with these options you can end up with huge disparities in real power and cool factor. Now, the game does suggest that GMs could select a single nation for everyone. But you have to wonder about the game design logic of the early days. Why the random chart for both this and the classes? Using randomness to create an illusion of balance? Were players going to be attracted to that as an option or simply discard it fairly quickly? Perhaps they wanted to emulate the brutal and fickle nature of the Young Kingdoms stetting? Perhaps it was simply trying to break new ground in game design, asking players to move out of their comfort zone? Or perhaps they recognized that they'd have to apply massive penalties or bonuses on one side or the other to keep everyone from playing a sweet Melnibonéan? I'm not sure,

As I said, players also roll for their classes- with some restricted or switched depending on nationality. There are ten basic classes (Hunter, Farmer, Beggar, etc) representing background more than anything else. These determine starting skills and access to initial equipment. In play, they don't have any role. Three classes have sub-classes (if you roll a Warrior, you can be an Assassin if you get a 9 or 10 on a d10). Classes really only affect the character's starting skills and equipment, with a couple of exceptions, for example Priests have to choose a cult and Beggars get 1d4 random afflictions. If you were lucky enough to qualify as a Sorcerer based on nationality and stats, you get your class skills plus Sorcerer abilities. After class skills, players get 1d6+2 additional skills to pick (with melee weapons counting as two picks for attack and parry). These additional skills have a rating of 1d100/2, meaning that again the player ends up subject to the whims of fate. Skill ratings are also affected by various abilities bonuses, a percentage bonus based on characteristics. For example, a character's Manipulation bonus is affected by STR, INT, POW and DEX with each point over 12 adding +1 and each under 9 subtracting -1. Manipulation includes such skills as Tie/Untie Knot, Set/Disarm Trap, Sleight of Hard, Juggle and Pick Lock. Every skill falls into a category, with different numbers of skills under each and different bonuses or penalties. The character creation section wraps up with the mention that, unlike Runequest, attributes cannot change in this game except for divine intervention or players having made a significant attribute save, called for by the GM requiring the player to roll under the value on percentiles. Alternately players may have their attributes reduces if, as the example in the book states, they have their hands cut off.

LET'S YOU AND HIM FIGHT
In most books, I'd expect to move from Character Creation to Skills, since those serve as the backbone for the system. However, here we go Movement, Combat and Damage. It is a hallmark of these older games that we spend time defining the terrain effects on daily grand scale movement. Combat rounds have three segments:

Declaration of Intent: with a round of declaration of actions, with the GM choosing either to alternate declarations between players and NPCs or else have lowest DEX declare first.
Resolution of Missiles and Melee: Done again in DEX order from high to low.
Movement of Non-Engaged Figures and Appearance of Conjured Elementals and Demons: Perhaps the first and last time that particular wording appeared for a game sequence.

The combat options are pretty much swing to attack- rolling under the relevant Attack skill for the weapon on percentiles. If successful, the opponent has two options. They may parry- with each parry done in a round taking a cumulative -20 penalty. Alternately, they may opt not to attack, and instead Dodge, rolling under that skill. Missiles may be parried at half value, but arrows can only be parried by shields. Critical hits happen if the character rolls under 1/10 of their skill, causing double damage and additional effects. Criticals can only be dodge by a critical dodge roll or a standard parry success, but with the parrying weapon breaking. The system offers a few other standard options (fumbles, surprise, fortifications, sea battles, and mass combat). The rules suggest for grand scale mechanics, that the players look at the Chaosium board games Elric! and White Wolf. (The latter of these may actually be a typo...perhaps referring instead to White Bear & Red Moon or a cancelled game?) The chapter presents the usual weapon and armor choices, with players restricted on their choices of such depending on their class background. Probably the thing which struck me most when I was younger was the major wound table, with characters suffering permanent injuries (hamstring cut, lost eyes) for being on the receiving end of criticals. There are particularly brutal and offer nasty attribute penalties.

The chapter on Skills follows- with each skill being percentage based. As with other Chaosium BRP games, success with skill use allows a roll to check for improvement after a session. Unless you're rolling for Poison, Plant or Music Lore, in which case you can only improve those through training. Beyond combat skills, Stormbringer offers 40 skills broken into six bonus groups. Four of those are Language skills however. It does offer some interesting social skill options such as Persuade, Orate and Credit (the first time I'd seen that in a fantasy game). Evaluate Treasure is probably my favorite Old School skill from the list. Each skill gets a brief treatment and all use the same roll under the rating for success. There's little or no discussion of time, modifiers, or difficulty- a skill value is a skill value.

I SUMMON ARIOCH
The longest chapter follows, the centerpiece of the game, Sorcery. Twenty-six pages offer a very, very different set of magics rules- distinct from the D&D approach or any of the three magic forms of its source game, Runequest. Instead Sorcerers have a Rank, from one to five, based on the total of their INT + POW. At each rank, they gain more power and access. For example, a rank one sorcerer can learn to summon one (randomly determined) type of element at a 90% rating. At higher ranks, they can summon more types, but also summon demons, and eventually at the highest ranks can on Elemental Lords, Beast Lords, or even the Lords of Chaos and Order. There are no spells in the game- no simple fire and forget magic. Instead sorcerers have to prep beforehand. Elementals can be bound, with a POW struggle, for various effects depending on their type. However, binding too many risks the wrath of the Elemental Ruler. Some of the effects are presented abstractly, for example a sylph can "...blow arrows off course." But no mechanics are given for this. On the other hand, the sylph may also "...produce enough air to last one person 1d6 minutes underwater or underearth, but doing so will slay the sylph." The effects are a mixed bag, but do offer an really interesting set of restrictions and requirements for the players. It reminds me more of the kind of work necessary to do magic in the much later Ars Magica.

Even more crazy are the rules for summoning lesser demons. Any summoning is a hugely risky proposition- with a battle of POW between sorcerer and demon. That value is randomly determined by rolling 3d8, so things can quickly get crazy. The rest of a demon's attributes are determined by totaling the sorcerer's stats, subtracting the demon's POW. The sorcerer then gets to distribute those points- usually differently depending on what type of demon they're going for. Losing a struggle can have severe consequences for the sorcerer, but winning against a more powerful demon can increase the character's POW. So summonings, of various types, are the road players need to take to increase their rank.

Stormbringer offers six types of demons. Demons of Combat can be made into weapons or else serve as bound warriors. For the former, putting stat points into STR, DEX and CON have tangible benefits. For the latter, the character can tailor a warrior and by dropping 20 attribute points gain a special ability, like Regeneration or Fear, rolled randomly. Demons of Protection can be made into armor, as guardians or to serve as a warding against certain things. Demons of Knowledge serve as general source of information- with pretty loose rules and subject to limits from the GM. But they can offer information to the sorcerer on most topics. Demons of Travel can more the sorcerer on this world or into others. Demons of Desire...well...um...they're essentially demonic sex toys. Finally Demons of Possession can take over the bodies sacrificed to them. But it gets crazier.

The section finishes out with details on the dangerous process of summoning the Elemental Lords, the Beast Lords (Melnibonéan only) and the Lords of Chaos and Law. "And then my character blew up," would seem to be a likely end in a campaign like this. One the other hand, the following chapter offers some other options- detailing the Cults of the Young Kingdoms. Players can be initiated into a cult (Law, Chaos, or Elemental) and build up elan. That can then be use to attempt divine intervention or gain particular associated virtues. Characters can become agents or champions of these cults- with some significant requirements and restrictions. The game offers some interesting ideas, but less so on how these actually play out at the table.

The final chapters of the book provide a bestiary, four pages of GM's advice, stats for major characters from the books and a very, very basic introductory scenario which has the PCs assaulting a sorcerer’s tower. Ten pages of sample charts and sheets are provided...and then, bizarrely enough a four page, highly-detailed index appears- but one without page numbers. Instead it directs players to the 5.1.3.2, etc coding for the items.

OVERALL
So why am I fond of this? For one thing, it is interesting to see new approaches to games in that early age. But more importantly, Stormbringer was one of the first games I saw that really warped the system and rules trying to emulate a setting. It unabashedly works to try to simulate the Young Kingdoms, without regard to balance and player choice. This was the first magic system I saw that completely broke the paradigm of spell lists and magic items. It was a mess, a crazy mess that colored my thinking about games for years to come. I was disappointed when I picked up later editions of the game (in its incarnation as Elric) and saw that they'd pull back from this and offered more conventional spells, as well as making the elemental and demonic magic more reasonable. I ran Stormbringer for a time, with everyone miraculously managing to roll up Pan tang sorcerers and Melnibonéan nobles. They weren't great games, but I was young. If you're interested in gaming history or want to look at a really evocative magic system, take a look at this game.

LAST NOTE
We put on Thanksgiving for our family and then have the gaming groups over for a video game day on the Saturday after, so this will probably be the only post for the week.

Cataclysms & Catastrophes: Disastrous Campaign Frames

2011-11-18T11:47:00.005-05:00

THIS IS THE DAY
There's nothing like destroying the world to get your players' attention. That's why disasters offer an excellent campaign starter, event or frame. In my previous post Disastrous Games: RPGs & Cataclysms I mentioned some games which put the players in the direct path of these events. I want to expand on that with a few thoughts and examples of how I've put those into play over the years.

In my mind there's a hierarchy of terms- disaster, cataclysm, and apocalypse. A disaster is an event, something the players might be able to even stop. It affects a small area over a short time. A cataclysm is more fuzzy, covering wide area and lasting longer. Players can only work to reduce the impact of these things. An apocalypse, well, everything changes and players better think about their own survival first. It's a rough guideline, but one that works.

A GM has to think about several questions with a disaster game:

Is there warning? Are there omens? Can the players get prepared? Can you steer them towards prep without giving the twist away? Can they alert authorities?
What's the scale of the event? Can the players stop or at least ameliorate those effects? What kinds of scenes and skill challenges can you throw at them based on this? Is there a mystery at the heart of things or a physical challenge? How will this affect their loved ones? Is this going to be a scene, a session or a series of sessions? If longer, how do you break that apart to keep the pressure and energy?
Does this change the world? How can you show those changes? Do you want to time-lapse or deal with the immediate results? How dark do you want to play this?
How can players pick up the pieces? Is recovery and rebuilding a theme for the game or not? Is the game now 'post-apocalyptic'?
Given that most disasters can be pretty grim, a GM needs to make sure they don't wear down their group. How do you offer small victories along the way? How do you offer hope?

INFECTED
Zombies. I really have to get those out the way right now. They've become the "go to" disaster in recent years, although I'd say rpgs were ahead of the curve on that. AFMBE covers nearly all the zombie genres, but we have many other games working that territory (The World of Aruneus, Outbreak: Undead). I don't know what it means in terms of society anxiety that the zombie genre has become so prolific across media (Marvel Zombies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). They're an interesting disaster trope to me because they can be used to consider many kinds of issues, about identity, limits of survival, contagion. But I think GMs who go for zombies need to consider which of the two camps their players fall into: people who want to shoot zombies and people who want to survive. Depending on the balance of players, these campaigns can swing in radically different directions. It can even drive a wedge in the group- good perhaps for a short-term campaign, but less useful for a longer one.

OUT OF THE BLUE (INTO THE FIRE)
A Rolemaster campaign really made me look hard at the concept of the disaster kick-off. We'd been playing for perhaps a session or two, trying to get a sense of the world. This prologue made us think we were pretty much in the same run around and kill things style we'd been in for the last several campaigns. Then the hurricane hit. A massive world-shattering hurricane that devastated the land. We went through a session of desperately trying to survive the winds, storm and water. After that we wandered in a world overthrown by the event. Of course it was worse than that, this being a fantasy setting. The hurricane heralded the return of a demonic foe who used the weakened defenses to begin invading. Of course, being adventurers, we had to face him down. IIRC we lost.

Violent natural disasters: hurricanes, floods, monster invasions, plagues of frogs, can be a great way to drive the PCs together at the start. They come from different places but are literally or figuratively thrown together. It allows the GM to begin in medias res, for the players to show what they can do right away, and creates a shared bonding experience. The other tactic I like is to let things get set up and in place for a few sessions before springing the big event. This allows the disaster to raise the stakes, offer an inciting incident or even completely change the direction and expectations of the campaign. For example, run a couple of sessions of a SWAT campaign. Then the players raid a cult compound to rescue children. However they manage to get in the middle of an apocalyptic ritual. When they come out they find a world transformed. If you've played the video game Nocturne- that's a great example of of set up before things switch direction. Doing this kind of trick does require the GM to have a pretty good sense of what the players want. If players came into the SWAT campaign really loving and expecting a tactical police enforcement game, then the switch up to something like F.E.A.R. probably isn't going to go over too well. How much of a change the disaster will cause can be tweaked. For example, in a set of parallel fantasy campaigns, I used a massive event to create changes to the world and to link both games. In this case, a massive piece of land fell from the sky into the ocean, causing a tidal wave that rocked the western shores. One group was on the falling land, the other saw the event and had a short time to prepare for the awful wall of water. The event shifted the political climate of the west, destroyed several nations and ended up driving the Dwarves from their homeland, events the groups ended up bearing witness to.

ARMAGEDDON DAYS ARE HERE (AGAIN)
Of course, disasters don't have to be natural. In a couple of cases, I've begun with the destruction of the players' community- driving them off into the wild, changing them and giving them a central purpose for revenge. In one case, the players were members of a common military and priestly order (Agrikan from the Harn setting). After a session or two, the players traveled to a major convocation of chapters. In the middle of those festivals, the winds of political fortune shifted and a trap was sprung. Their order was declared heretical and the group just managed to escape the purge. They returned home, only to find the attacks had been carefully planned and their compound razed. The campaign then shifted into several stages of their travels as the PCs reconstituted their order, gathered forces and planned on taking revenge against the other chapters. There's more than a little echo of the fall of the Templars in that plot.

I used a similar approach in another recent campaign opening, but in this case I gave the players a heads up that there would be a shift and we would begin with a prologue. I had them make up relatively youthful characters. All of them had come of age in their isolated community at relatively from the same village. They were sent off together as a rite of passage. When they returned, they found a magical enemy army laying waste to their town and families. They used a device they'd found in their adventure to make an escape. At that point, we cut to five years later. Each player had the chance to advance their character. They also drew a set of random details they had to integrate into their life story (Imprisoned, Haunted, Made a Noble, Awful Master, etc). It ended up being a potent device- giving players a strong, shared background and a driving purpose. That campaign's nearly reaching the point where they will be able to take the conflict to their enemy's front door.

THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN CALLING...
A couple of times, I've begun with the classic crash device to kick a campaign off. You remember this from such famous sources as Gilligan's Island, and its later remake Lost. This is a great way to bring together disparate characters and give them a common purpose. In one case, I began simply enough with the players on a ship suddenly struck by a massive sea-monster. We jumped into the middle of things, with players making survival and swimming checks right out of the gate. In this case, the question wasn't whether they'd live or die, but what kind of shape they'd be in when they finally got there. Immediately they had a crisis and a struggle, and I had their attention. In a Steampunk campaign, on the other hand, we began with the characters meeting in the passenger lounge of their airship. After some low-key establishment of personalities and roles I introduced the disaster. The ship came under a strange assault. The players had the chance in this case to act and attempt to mitigate the damage- or at least better prepare for the landing. They crashed, revealing that one of their fellow passengers had been a strange robot in disguise. If you've played Arcanum, you may note that it begins in a similar way (though I did it first!).

In both cases, the games began with questions of survival, determining location and reaching civilization. Right away the players had to work together to function- and other agendas got set aside in favor of that purpose. In the two cases, I ended up going in different directions. The sea-monster of the first campaign was purely a device, and something which only reappeared in the final session, as a way of bookending the game. On the other hand, the attack on the airship had a sinister purpose to it, and unraveling that led to the main threads of the steampunk campaign.

THE TWILIGHT HOUR
Another approach I've used with some success, especially for one shots and short-term campaigns, is to begin in the middle of a massive failure, sometimes with the PCs as a party to it. For example, in one scenario, the players were entrusted with recovering a magical artifact for their lord. This had to be brought to the battlefield where he engaged a magically potent adversary. However, the PCs opened the session returning too late. Now they had to figure out how to perform their duty or if they would carry that out at all. Artifact in hand, the game shifts to a freeform planning exercise- will they charge in or will they take a more careful 47 Ronin response? In a supers campaign, I began with the PCs being recruited as a kind of B-Team for a smaller Midwestern city. However, in the middle of their initial meeting, they hear news of a catastrophe at the super-villain containment center. A massive battle between the major super teams, good and bad, resulted in the deaths of most of the participants (think of the end scene from Kingdom Come). Suddenly the players had a major responsibility- moving from secondary heroes in a nation filled with superbeings, to among the few left. It was way to have a history of superbeings, while at the same time putting the novice characters into an important position.

Not all disasters need to be literal or physical, social disasters can spur a campaign. If players owe fealty or loyalty to a suddenly disgraced lord or group, they may have to join them in exile. Uncovering conspiracies, regaining status, forging a new name could all be keys to such a campaign. Perhaps the exile is literal and distant, forcing the players to uproot and travel to a new and strange place. The dramatic downfall of someone they respect- or their own disastrous decline- could easily motivate players. Legend of the Five Rings lends itself especially well to this. I ran a Dragon-Blooded Exalted campaign which opened with a variation on this. The players were younger members of a single house, tainted by battling a Sidereal Exalted who had ruptured the lines of fate. The family didn't want to lose the characters, but neither could they allow those dangerous wyrd magics and fractures to harm the house. So the PCs were sent away to make their own fortune in a distant place- if they could forge a fate of their own, they would be allowed to return.

THE BEAT(EN) GENERATION
What I've talked about has had players dealing with the immediate impact of a disaster, either as the kicker for a campaign start or as a major event in the course of play. Obviously, the bigger genre has been post-apocalyptic, dealing with life well after the collapse. Anxieties and fears over nuclear disasters sparked games like The Morrow Project, Aftermath!, Twilight 2000, and (perhaps less so) After the Bomb. These are interesting in a different way than the straight disaster genre. The threats can be less immediate- dealing with questions of civilization and new political environments. These settings usually take up far enough away from the initial incident for new structures, societies and technologies to have evolved.

Beyond those classic future war or economic collapse settings, we seen a number of interesting twists on the approach. In the fantasy realm, we have Desolation where the characters pick up the pieces of their world a little over a year after the big cataclysm, in this case a host of disasters of biblical proportions. Midnight posits a fantasy setting after a Sauron-analogue has won the war. Earthdawn has a world recovering from and living in fear of The Horrors. Those serve as a reason for isolation and a constant threat hanging over the campaign. Of course the big daddy of post-apocalyptic fantasy has to be Dark Sun, with a world depleted and worn down. For my own campaign, I inserted the disaster of the "Parade of Monsters," essentially a mad creator god deciding that the world had too few animals and dumping new beasts across the land. This destroyed all but the central heart and most fortified cities of the nations. It also explained why you couldn't walk outside your village without having a random encounter. Over time we've considered the ecological impact of that event- and how various monsters rose to the top or became eliminated from their new ecological niche.

Other genres offer non-nuclear takes on post-apocalypse as well. In science-fiction, Greg Christopher's excellent Cascade Failure has the players rebuilding their world after an space empire-wide disaster. They have to reestablish contact and order with other devastated worlds. Traveller: the New Era took a similar post-collapse approach. Some modern apocalypses take unique turns such as GURPS Reign of Steel's android war, the post-Hastur world of Yellow Dawn, or Summerland's world engulfed by forest. For alternate history, consider The Day After Ragnarok which has a post-WW2 world devastated by the combination of an atomic bomb and the Midgard Serpent. Or Clockwork and Chivalry which has a combination social and magical disaster arising from the killing of the sacred monarch. In supers we have eCollapse which presents an awful future or Necessary Evil which simply has the villains winning.

HEARTLAND
I've done a version of post-apocalypse for supers, but with a slightly different take. I'd just finished reading a run on The Avengers which had their old adversary Kang taking over the world for several issues- complete with devastation to New York and super-powered internment camps. The Avengers won, of course, but by the next issue, the world seemed to have returned to business as usual. The events hadn't faded away, as characters referenced them, but it seemed more like a blip on the radar screen. For the short campaign I ran, the players founded a new group in a city recently devastated by a superpowered event. In this case, the goal and theme of the campaign wasn't so much about repairing the city, but about repairing the local's faith in heroes- in building a reputation and fighting back against that ill will. I don't know how successful that was- but I think that's an interesting approach. Consider how players might deal with the fallout and recovery when they're either responsible for tied to those responsible for a disaster.

Disastrous Games: RPGs & Cataclysms

2011-11-17T23:35:00.004-05:00

There's nothing like throwing your players into the deep end- with events, cataclysms, and disasters beyond their control. These can take many shapes or forms, as a way to open a campaign, a major game changer, or the climax of a story arc. Some disasters are natural (earthquakes, floods), some are man-made (network collapses, tailored viruses) and some are otherworldly (alien invasion, return of the Demiurge). This list collects together a number of sourcebooks offering those scenarios for play.

These could be the starter for a post-apocalypse campaign, but that genre usually covers a recovering world. In those, the disasters happened some time before the campaign start. Society's in the process of rebuilding or recovering from the disaster. Hence I've left off games like Aftermath!, The Day After Ragnarok and Earthdawn.

Please feel free to suggest other games in which the group finds themselves caught up in an immediate disaster.

1. All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Disaster: Zombies
In some ways, the Zombie disaster campaign's the most typical and common. Players find themselves in a strange new world falling apart around them and try to stay safe. However, in many cases there's no respite from that disaster- it keeps going and going. There's a big difference between the weekend horror of Shawn of the Dead and the uncertain future of The Walking Dead or even the Romero series.

AFMBE stands for me as the game that best exemplifies the zombie genre, although several other games have tried to offer alternatives. The sheer number of disaster genre variations, as well as the various forms of what a "zombie" means makes these supplements fresh.

2. GURPS Y2K
Disaster: Infrastructure Collapse (among others)
A book like this can't help but seem dated, but SJG did an admirable job trying to provide a GURPS Disaster sourcebook. This book both a look at the Millennial Panic as well as the methodologies of survivalists. It covers all kinds of worldwide cataclysms. Perhaps they can relabel and release it for the more modern 2012 "end of the world" panic.

3. When the Sky Falls
Disaster: Meteor Strike
Part of the short "event" series from Malhavoc Press. This one covers a number of variations on the idea of a magical meteor strike in a fantasy setting. While it offers many options, the primarily arc of the book covers a magical impact with fallout in the form of new magics, new monsters, and new items. It covers a lot of ground in a small space. It is too bad they didn't do more than a few of these event books.

4. Requiem For a God
Disaster: Death of a God
Another Malhavoc event book, this one considers the impact of the death of a god (naturally or unnaturally) on a fantasy civilization. This book considers all of the ramifications of such a disaster from the loss of clerical power, to the withering of that god's array, to the struggle for power in such a vacuum. The book mixes up a consideration of the short term and long-term effects of such an event.

5. Time of Judgment
Disaster: Take Your Pick
The World of Darkness wrapped up with a capstone series of books intended to offer an "end game" to the campaign lines. Gehenna, Apocalypse, Ascension and Time of Judgement offered some very different takes on how the world ends for these creatures, some with a bang and some with a whimper. White Wolf did a good job of not only offering approaches tied into the metaplot of the setting, but options for those who hadn't really told those stories. The scenarios vary in quality and not all of them offer "disasters," but there's enough of them, including the rising of the Antediluvian Kindred to make it worth listing.

6. Wrath of the Immortals
Disaster: Gods' War and Comet-strike
If memory serves correctly, this is the module that moved the classic D&D setting Mystara (aka The Known World) from that system up into a new and revised version under AD&D. So the gazetteer module of GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos got redone as Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure. The module has the players interacting with the plots that lead to the fall of a comet on the magical kingdom of Glantri, and the wars between the various empires. I remember it for the cataclysm it added and the disaster it made of an interesting setting.

7. Crash Course Manual
Disaster: System Collapse
I've never actually read this module or the Paranoia supplements of this era, but I know some people loved it and others really disliked it. I do like the idea of dealing with the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the computer, though perhaps it would be better dealt with in a more serious campaign (as we saw a little bit later in the Fallout video game series). Still the idea of injecting a further disaster into the chaos of this world could be overdoing it or might be just what the players of an extensive Paranoia* campaign might need.

*Long-running continuous Paranoia campaign: Possible or Impossible? Discuss.

8. Disaster!
Disasters: Every One from the Movies
This is why I love going through RPG Geek, you find things like this- an rpg dedicated to simulating every cheesey disaster movie (though not all at once). How can you not love something like that? It is short, but it has the look of an extensive game.

9. Villainy Amok
Disaster: Alien Invasion/Fires
This Champions sourcebook ought to be on the shelf of every supers GM. Each chapter takes on a particular topic and offers tons of ideas for how to play them out at the table. Two included offer different options for two classic disasters: the alien invasion and the grand burning building. You get buffet of choices for presenting those, although from a supers perspective. The earlier module Invasions: Target Earth also presented a number of generic approaches to making that a campaign arc.

10. The Apocalypse Machine
Disaster: The Old Ones Return
This book offers two different approaches- one which has the players dealing with the immediate events of the disaster and the second with the players trying to pick up the pieces afterwards. This series actually begins with The Dead White World, but I love the title of this one. That's a tough and awful kind of disaster to put the players in the middle of- with the significant question of whether they can scrape together any kind of victory at all.

Blogs I Love: Never See the Light of Play

2011-11-17T11:26:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to point people to a relatively new blog that is fairly awesome, Never See the Light of Play. It hasn't been around that long, so can easily be read from start to finish. In each post, Mr. Finn takes a game system and walks through the character creation process, with commentary. He creates a character as the post goes along and then discusses the results. Finally, he talks about what kind of campaign he might put together using that system. It's a great read and makes me furious that it didn't occur to me as a format for session reports!

The most recent games he's written on (with links)
Dark Heresy Post Here
The Mutant Epoch Post Here
Werewolf: The Forsaken Post Here
Run Robot Redux Post Here
Triune Post Here

He's also done Feng Shui, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, octaNe, Changeling: The Lost, and Godlike

Robot Zero Tuesday: Game Night

2011-11-15T16:34:00.003-05:00

Previous Entry.

“So...” he says as he clears some kind of lingering mucus from his throat I don't even want to think about- and I know he's about to try to get under my casing because I'm up pretty well in this hand and the doubler's been rolling hot this evening. Which is to say I might actually come out ahead from one of these card game nights. But he's been saving up this comment all night- his one stupid little dragonfly wing buzzing and twitching from excitement. It creates an ultra-high frequency than somehow the dog across from me doesn't ever hear, but manages to interfere with my pre-set emotional channels. I keep getting hungry which isn't something I can actually deal with.

“So...” The Assemblymantis repeats to make sure he has the attention of the whole table. Which he does, since it is his play and we can't do anything until he actually lays some freaking cards down. “I'm surprised you're here tonight, Robot ZZZZZZZero...I saw your team on the news just before I left to come over.”

And here it comes.

“I'd already penciled in my time off...”

“Really?” breaks in Pull-Yourself-Together Man. “Jeez...if I could get on a team, I'd be out there fighting the good fight, I mean they're doing something important...something real...” And he looks of wistfully in the distance even as I hear one of his legs drop off and bang against the floor. He's earnest, which might be more irritating that Assemblymantis' wing drone. It helps that I call him Putem for short.

“Tell them what your team's doing, ZZZZZZZero.” I look bug boy in what passes for a face. He's a composite alien, built from several different alien species, but not necessarily the useful parts. Some kind of cosmic intelligence cut and pasted an experiment together. Multron's the better known result, with the spectacular natural talents of each of the seven races, including humanity's cunning. I won't tell you what human part Assemblymantis got, but using it to fight crime might generate a whole level of Rule 34 I don't want to think about.

And Putem's looking to me for an answer, so I tell him.“They're busting up Occupy Peoria. Yes Man hopes Oakland will give us a call after that. It's an audition...”

Assemblymantis lunges at the chance. “Not sure that's going to happen. Chrysalis Archer got in the middle and someone grabbed the quiver off his back. Then all hell broke loose. Someone hit Cyber-tron with a water balloon and Kim Reaper went nuts...”

“So all hell, literally...” This is going to be a mess.

“Ya'll know what I think...” comes the deep southern drawl across from me and all of us groan.

Wrathwolf, the talking dog, who's just to the right of Super-Patriot on the political spectrum. He's got an American flag bandana for a costume and a jaw full of razor sharp teeth and jingoism. Sometimes we actually manage to stay away from politics on these nights...not often, in fact, once...and that was because of an accident with some aerogel. Of course when I say accident, I'm distorting things slightly.

“Hippie-Kibble. Round 'em up and throw up in the ocean and let them swim back to Uzbekasocialistan or wherever they want to feed off other people's labor and effort. Get a job and shut up you ungrateful whiners. You should thank god you live in a country that's going to be back in the right hands in 2012 and ready to fight once more against the Islamo-Marxist menace sneaking across our borders. Damn right they should clear them out- I just wish they'dve used right two-fisted justice instead of godless magic...bust them back to their stupid sand...”

The mummy coming back in from the kitchen brings Wrathwolf's foaming diatribe to a halt. His lumbering form fills the doorway.

“No offense, shiek...” Wrathwolf mutters and noses down at his cards.

Viking Mummy comes back and sits down with his reheated pizza, a little confused. He salts his slice and looks over at me. “I miss something, no?” he says, his thick accent muffled by bandages and helmet. I've to explain to Wrathwolf that Viking Mummy comes from Norway, but he doesn't get it. And mummies aren't even...ugh. My processor reboots slightly.

And I look down at my hand and realize that I've just purged the game-state. I have no idea what card to play.

“I hate this game.” I say to no one in particular.

Which I do...I really do. We could have simply gone with something like Poker- then I could have downloaded an app and be able to keep up with everyone. Instead we played Cubit Red Nine, a game Assemblymantis claims comes from the Bonsuphrax people, a race of calculational telepaths. Mind you, Assemblymantis's only one-seventh Bonsuphrax and that's his left leg. I suspect he'd made it up instead. The rules seemed remarkably flexible owing to the “transtemporal probability bug” built into the cards themselves. That handles the shuffling and every once in a while declares that everyone's lost- at which point the pot vanishes.

But Cubit has a couple of advantages, beyond being difficult to cheat at with powers. For one thing, the cards are made of a difficult to destroy metal. Some of them chew on them...I'm not naming names. For another, they can levitate, which make it playable by some of our less handy members.

Yes, I make that joke every single time.

We're effectively a card game and support group for artificial supers or those sufficiently marginal to be lower than C-List. Wrathwolf had perhaps the most prominent of us (besides me), having briefly being in one of the big league super teams. Then he went off on a Tea Party rant and bit a single mother on welfare. He'd then been summarily rejected by the League of Super Pets because he could actually talk. Pull Yourself Together Man was an animated doll, Viking Mummy was a mummy, and Assemblymantis was a dick who was clearly about to run the table on this hand.

We would see about that.

Combat Complexities

2011-11-11T17:03:00.002-05:00

Last Saturday I started the big fight in our game at 11pm.

Your reaction to that will probably say a lot about your age and what kinds of rules you play. This particular group's split pretty evenly between forty and thirty-somethings...older gamers by some reckonings and younger by others. Once upon a time our games regularly ran past midnight, but not so much now. Some games, of course, allow you to run the epic fight from start to finish in under an hours. Some games go the other way- we used to play a lot of Champions, and a fight like the one we had (6 players, 18 mooks, 7 named baddies) would have taken the entire evening. A friend who runs Pathfinder had a big fight the same evening. He started it at the beginning of the session just make sure he could finish it, and he only has four players. My fight used a heavily modified FATE variant with damage rolls and detailed stress tracks it still took a while

LET ME LOOK THAT UP
So today I want to talk around a couple of questions about combat complexity. Obviously system complexity doesn't solely determine how long a conflict takes to resolve- but I suspect it is the major factor.

Let me start with one of the places where I have my real love/hate relationship with combat complexity: martial arts systems. You can see some examples of this in a couple of lists Boot to the Head: Martial Arts Treatments in RPGs and RPG's that feature Fencing (by Bruce McGeorge). Primarily I love the idea that you can create a set of options that give the flavor of a particular 'style' and make different builds of fighters feel distinct. So narrowly, we're talking about MA, but more broadly any system which offers sets of combat maneuvers which players can add to their character.

IT'S A COOKBOOK
What really got me thinking about this again was the game I ran last Sunday (the day after the big fight in the other game). We'd missed a couple of sessions and then we had a couple without fights. That night the players transported into a major bad guy base, facing a dozen+ mooks and eight named adversaries. And the fight felt like molasses. At the start players had to shift around their character sheets, pull out the rules and organize their combat options. Some time back I'd hit on what I thought was a fairly decent idea. I ended up using it as the basis for the Wushu campaign I ran and for the combat system in this fantasy campaign. Basically players learn martial styles- with each style offering elements (like additional damage, defense bonus, grappling bonus, sweep). Players can then mix and match those elements to create new maneuvers with limits based on the styles they know and a separate rank determining how many they can apply. In theory, it works. In practice it works, up to a point. When a player knows one style, they have five elements to play with. Two styles doubles that, still a manageable number. Three styles and above- well, at that point we start to get into serious slowdown. Most of the players have written their options on blank business cards- which means shuffling through those, organizing them and trying to figure out what to put together with what. Some of the problem arises from figuring out the best way to access that information. But the greater problem comes from the base mechanic.

So some of the complexity issue comes from # of distinct choices and another comes from how you ask the players to organize those options. My system hoped to get around the problem of maneuvers all with slightly different parameters- with some choices not optimal. Some of the World of Darkness systems suffer from this. Beyond the "buyable" combat choices, as well, some systems offer a host of options that can be overwhelming. Any game where you have to have reference cards for the basic actions anyone can do seems to me to be problematic. Mutants & Mastermind 2e for example, overwhelms players with choices and discrete resolution systems for those choices. Even with a deck of reference cards printed and distributed to players, most fall back to "I punch him." I've commented on Champions as a slow system, but actually handles this well. All of the basic combat maneuvers and elements appear on the character sheet. You knew what you could do at any point.

WHAT DOES THIS DO?
Of course one major factor in determining combat speed comes from the players' experience with those rules. Hero System and Rolemaster both had a lot of complexity options and decisions in them, but I ran them enough that I was able to get the fights to go fast and smooth. Both systems had stages of resolution. For the former you had declaration, roll to hit, roll damage, calculate final results and apply effects; for the latter declaration, decide ability allocation, roll to hit, check damage, roll for critical, calculate final results, determine reactions, and apply effects. Systems like World of Darkness and FATE reduce these steps, collapsing and doubling up the purposes of rolls. But any of these will be slow playing with new or untrained players.

In the fantasy case I mentioned above, we hadn't gone to combat for several sessions. In effect, the players had to relearn the system and their own abilities. Depending on the campaign, the number of actual combats I have varies. Most games average one combat every other or every third session. Fantasy and superhero games will likely be higher. But rarely do I run more than a single combat in a session. That means, ironically, the games where more narrative weight rests on the combat because it happens less frequently are the same games where players may lose touch with the combat mechanics and options.

That's more true if those mechanics also differ greatly from the other resolution systems in the game. If, when we get to combat, it feels like a very different game, we'll have more of a barrier to player transitions. So some systems, like FATE and Heroquest, resolve everything in pretty much the same fashion: all tested conflicts and results are fairly equivalent. Consider how much space is devoted in the rules you're playing to combat. Then consider how much of the non-combat rules have an significant or exclusive role in combat (like many spells).

GIMMIE THE SPOTLIGHT
Another interesting issue comes up when you want to do something pretty specific with the combat: where you want to simulate a duel. These kinds of showdowns are crucial to Wushu, Samurai and Western games (among others). But they're actually hard to pull off. In systems where you have to wear down an opponent, like games with high HP values, then instead of a real sense of balance and shifts you instead get a weird dice-based race game: with both sides seeing how fast they can wear their opponent down. Introduce risky maneuvers, and the complications mentioned above, and you get more options, but at a cost. The blog Whitehall Paraindustries posted on that this week. Giving players the feeling of a deep one-on-one struggle adds complexity. And how do you balance that against what's going on in a larger scale combat?

Because of course, the difference between the classic duel centerpiece scene and that resolved at the table is that you have multiple protagonists. In films, even when you have a group of heroes, you have one (maybe two) actually fighting a "duel" and then we cut to the rest of the group carrying out supporting actions- like fending off mooks, keeping the castle doors shut, setting up a distraction. You could do that at the table- but you'd need a group with real trust for one another, a belief that if X persons gets the spotlight for this scene, they'll get there's latter. Doing an amazing job as support still comes in behind doing an OK job fighting the big bad. There's a mental calculation there- and if you aren't doing combats every session, then it can take a while for the non-aggressive players to get their "duel."

Then there's the functional part of the showdown duel. How do you best simulate something that happens that quickly- like a fast draw at high noon or the flash of a blade for an iaijustsu duel? L5R and some others use a raise system, with players wagering until we see who goes for the resolution first. Another approach is to have several stages of the conflict: rolls for assessing the opponent, for psyching them out, for maneuvering into just the right position- with those providing a bonus to the strike when resolved. Some systems have skills, advantages and abilities for just those narrow circumstances...which adds more complexity. And how can you integrate those moments into a larger fight or into the actions of the wider group of players?

LAST WORD
I don't know if it is an absolute battle between highly detailed options (feats, maneuvers, advantages) and generic approaches (extra dice, aspects covering everything). The former can mean a slower game and players perhaps left out in the cold. The latter potentially means reducing everything down to sets of +2 bonuses or the like. They might have different names, but when they're absolutely interchangeable, do those names matter? I'm not sure yet, but I do know that we started that combat at 11pm and drove home pretty satisfied, if more than a little wired from caffeine.