Random Weird Office Politics Generators

I did a Focus Group for Magic, INC at Metatopia- a con I'll eventually talk about when I get that post done. I built several random generators for the game. Part of the idea is to allow GMs to whip up a random weird problem scenario based on a template, complete with a relationship map. Here's the random tables for generating those relationships between select office colleagues. They're built on d6 generation, hence the weird set up. See also: What's Up With Your Co-Worker? Random Weirdness Tables
Help! My Co-Worker Is A....Random Weirdness Table

	NEGATIVE 1-3
	1-3 Part A, 4-6 Part B
A11	Antithetical Faith/Philosophy
A12	Believes Them Incompetent
A13	Betrayed
A14	Blackmailed
A15	Boss/Subordinate, Antagonistic
A16	Built a Shrine To
A21	Bullys
A22	Can't Stop Bitching About
A23	Can't Stop Bitching To
A24	Constantly Questions
A25	Cursed
A26	Deadly Rivals
A31	Disappointed By
A32	Discredited
A33	Doubts Skills
A34	Dragged In
A35	Envious
A36	Fearful Of
A41	Files Reports on
A42	Fixated On
A43	Former Business Partner
A44	Former Inmate/Captor
A45	Former Lover, Bad Breakup
A46	Fought Opposite Side of a Secret War
A51	Harasses
A52	Hates Personal Habits Of
A53	Hungers for Approval Of
A54	Hungers for Revenge
A55	Hurt a Friend
A56	Jealous
A61	Killed a Friend
A62	Knows Dark Secret Of
A63	Literally Can't See
A64	Lover, Uneven Power
A65	Lover, Weird
A66	Magically Enslaved
B11	Makes Fun of Openly
B12	Makes Fun Of Secretly
B13	Manipulates
B14	Married, Secret
B15	Married, Unhappy
B16	Married, Weird
B21	Master/Apprentice, Negative
B22	Mutually Destructive
B23	Once Accidentally Killed
B24	Once Deliberately Killed
B25	Overburdens
B26	Parent/Child, Hated
B31	Parent/Child, Secret
B32	Parent/Child, Weird
B33	Planning to Betray
B34	Prejudices Towards
B35	Promoted Over
B36	Records
B41	Resents
B42	Scammed
B43	Scapegoat
B44	Secretly Created Them
B45	Secretly Monitors
B46	Sees in Them Their Own Failures
B51	Shifts Work Over To
B52	Sibling, Secret
B53	Sibling, Hated
B54	Sibling, Weird
B55	Slowly Poisoning
B56	Steals Lunch Of
B61	Stole From
B62	Stole promotion From
B63	Teacher/Student, Negative
B64	Uneven Partnership
B65	Unreasonably Favored Others
B66	Wants to Fire

	NEUTRAL/POSITIVE 4-6
	1-3 Part A, 4-6 Part B
A11	Alternate Timeline Version Of
A12	Believes Them Infalliable
A13	Best Friend
A14	Boss/Subordinate, Forgotten
A15	Boss/Subordinate, New
A16	Boss/Subordinate, Positive
A21	Brought In
A22	Clone of
A23	Co-Conspirator
A24	Comes to For Advice
A25	Confides In
A26	Co-Religionists
A31	Created
A32	Dated an Ex-Of
A33	Dealt with Rival Of
A34	Direct Report
A35	Drinking Pals
A36	Engaged To
A41	Fantasy Arena League Colleagues
A42	Fellow Veterans
A43	Forgets Name
A44	Former Lover, Good Terms
A45	Friendly Rivals
A46	Grew Up Together
A51	Ignores
A52	Imprisoned Together
A53	Indifference
A54	Infatuated With
A55	In-Laws
A56	Like a Second Child
A61	Lover, Casual
A62	Lover, Ongoing
A63	Lover, Secret
A64	Magically Tied Destiny
A65	Married to Ex-Of
A66	Married, Apathetic
B11	Married, Happy
B12	Master/Apprentice, Positive
B13	Mirror Dimension Version of
B14	Mutual Protection
B15	Neighbor
B16	Only One Who Remembers Birthday
B21	Outside Business Partner
B22	Parent/Child, Apathetic
B23	Parent/Child, Happy
B24	Plays in a Band With
B25	Productive Partners
B26	Protects
B31	Put into their Position
B32	Rescued a Friend
B33	Respected Mentor
B34	Secretly Assists
B35	Secretly Trained With
B36	Shared Allergy
B41	Shared Interests
B42	Shared Soul
B43	Shared Upbringing
B44	Sibling, Apathetic
B45	Sibling, Loving
B46	Silently Judges
B51	Teacher/Student, Positive
B52	Trained Together
B53	Treats with Respect
B54	Trusted Advisor
B55	Twins
B56	Unquestioning Support
B61	Unrequited Love
B62	Used to Be
B63	Wants Approval Of
B64	Wants to Promote
B65	Worked to Advance
B66	Would-Be Protector

I have a couple of others to post over the next few weeks.

Apocalypse World GM Jam: Play on Target Special Ep #5

This week Play on Target assembles a stellar group of GMs to talk about Apocalypse World. Vincent Baker’s game has generated many amazing campaigns. But it has also influenced a host of designers. We have four dynamite experts talking about their experiences running and playing Apocalypse World: Jérôme Larré, Brennan Taylor, Mark Diaz Truman, and Rachel E.S. Walton. As the noob in the conversation, I hope you’ll bear with my ignorance. I also hope despite that we’ve managed to provide a solid introduction for new players and ideas for old hands.

This episode is part of a series of Play on Target "GM Jams". Previously we’ve covered Changeling the Lost and Amber Diceless/Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. I’m hoping to do more of these in 2015- at least one per quarter. Feedback, suggestions and such are always appreciated. Well, maybe not always...

Apocalypse World GM Jam Special Episode #5

Play on Target Episode Round Up

APOCALYPSE FUELED

Up until last week I’d only played a single session each of three Powered by the Apocalypse games: Monster of the Week, Headspace, and the 'Dark Ages' playtest. On New Year’s Day, I finally got to experience a lengthy Dungeon World one-shot run by Jeremy Friesen. I had a good time. He spun out a great adventure from our characters’ bonds. Right out of the gate, an offhand detail I’d created became central to motivating my character for action. It turns out Dwarven "Justice" turns on restitution...and I may have murdered for less than noble reasons, but that's beside the point. It was a good game- with tough choices and the loss of my character’s nose. I also stared enviously as Jeremy's excellent and diverse rpg collection. 

Though we talk about Apocalypse World specifically in this episode, eventually I’d really like to cover several Powered by the Apocalypse games. In particular Monsterhearts, an amazing game, deserves treatment. To me it feels like a game where new players or GMs could benefit from the others' experiences. I also like Monster of the Week but it works in a different space than some of other AW games. But there are many more worth examining. Take a look at this (incomplete) list of AW-based games. I know of probably a dozen other in-progress hacks or soon to be delivered Kickstarter projects beyond those.

HACKERS DELIGHT

It’s a tangent, but man we live in amazing times for gaming. I love the other OSR movement- Open Source Reconfigurations. Despite the blood trail of dead publishers from d20/OGL collapse, I think that’s generated some amazing games. We’ve seen designers working with new versions of FUDGE, Fate, AW, and Gumshoe. I’m sure we’ll see more in the next few years as gamers figure out what they want from DramaSystem, 13th Age's Archmage Engine, and Cortex Plus.

As I mention on the PLOT site, Metaopia offered a panel called ”Hacking Apocalypse World.” Mark Richardson put this together and it featured himself plus Vincent Baker, Misha Bushyager, Marissa Kelly, & Mark Diaz Truman. You can hear the whole recording over at Jason Pitre’s RPG Design PanelCast. Some of AW’s mechanics appeal strongly to me- especially the playbook approach with moves and customization. I appreciate the way those offer an easy entry for new players even as they boil down challenging game elements. Talking with Rishi Agrawal afterwards the panel, I came away with a new appreciation for that. Playbooks represent serious thinking about gameplay and a distillation of design. That made me reconsider some hacking I’d had in my head and realize the effort and energy required to get those right.

ALL THINGS IN MODERATION

On a slightly related note, I contributed to a ConTessa post on moderating panels. If you compare the advice I give to my actual practice in this episode, you’ll probably discover a gap. Despite that, the post is awesome- with smart advice from several experts more expert than I. I scribbled down notes once finally got the chance to read the whole thing. If you host panels or discussion- online or f2f- check it out. I’m sure you’ll find one or two helpful tricks.

Apocalypse World GM Jam Special Episode #5

Play on Target Episode Round Up

If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check it out. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page at www.playontarget.com.

Islands, Maps, and World Building

We’re eight sessions into our 13TH Age campaign. Players built the world over via a Microscope session, and then I fleshed it out. We ended up with 12 Icons unique to this world, plus one borrowed from the original (The Prince of Shadows). Right out of the gate, the players threw me for a loop with the inclusion of an enormous, visible Titan holding up the sky. A world of islands spun out from that.

• Microscope session
• The New Icons
• Session Video Playlist
• Campaign Wiki
• Guide to 13TH Age

WHERE ARE WE?

Over the sessions we’ve added to the backstory: new places, filling in concepts, figuring out big setting issues. The PCs have visited several locations: Ascarioth, Cerika, Unconquered Port. So far I’ve been able to handwave distances and directions. But last session they asked for more exact figures and some kind of map. Given that they’re going to have to make choices between different destinations I knew I needed to draw one up. The holiday break gave me the perfect excuse to work on it, so of course I put it off until the last minute.

Below you’ll see two versions of the map- one with locations labeled and the other with “national” regions marked out (I’ll come back to why the latter’s in quotes). I’m not an artist and I’ve never gotten the hang of cartography tools I’ve tried. Despite that failing on my part, I managed to put together something decent, I think. I spent a chunk of time figuring out presentation. I made a circle in Photoshop, printed that out, and drew in the outer edge stuff (which you can barely make out) and the big six landmasses. Then I rescanned it. Because I’d printed it on weirdly flecked paper, I got some nice artifacts out of it. I drew in some islands in Photoshop, but mostly I searched for splatter patterns in Google images and dropped those in various places. For the ocean texture I found a world map and grabbed a relatively empty section of the Pacific and layered that in after resizing. I opted not to color/texture the larger land masses because I want to leave those open for later.

WHO CONTROLS SEA-BARTERTOWN?

Both maps are intended to be rough and not necessarily to scale. For the second map I tried to mark out the major cultures/organized peoples on the map. At first I kept all the marking text from the other map, but it made things too busy. Looking at this now, my color choices are pretty appalling. Anyway, these two should provide the players some reference points.

When I sent it to them, I gave them this overview:

Here's the map with the largest organized political/national/cultural areas marked out. Keep in mind these are rough, and represent more the furthest extent of power for each of these groups- i.e. where the frontier or border posts and fleets can be spotted. The vast waters and endless seas make exerting power or control much more difficult, so borders are diffuse. Most of these are linked more by racial, cultural, or trade ties. The rest of the world is populated, but not really organized into groups larger than linked islands or allied city-states. The death of 80% of humanity less than a century ago left many, many places emptied and abandoned. Devastated peoples more often died off in a generation or moved to join together with other groups. It also encourages a much higher degree of inter-species trading and co-existence.

The two major human "dominated" areas are the Houses of Titan and the Frost Currents. The Sheten Consortium's the most multi-cultural. The White Hound Horde is the gathering of various barbarians and disorganized violent peoples under the flag of Chu Chuliann.

CLOSED AND OPEN

One of my design goals with the map was to paint in a few details, but keep things open. For example, I’m not marking out every island. I imagine in some places they’re dense conglomerations, while in others loose. Beyond that we still have large segments of open water. I’m picturing the visible islands on this map either being of significant size or showing an area filled with more islands. I’ve also avoided distances, keeping that relative. Someone on G+ asked me about prevailing winds and currents. I’m not going to mark those out. Instead, they’ll appear as necessary to shape travel times in my games. (i.e. “the Spicewine Wind comes through, through there, making that route faster” or “The Blackwater Current means travel will likely be much longer.”). I imagine that for any trip, the players will have at least two options: stay closer to islands and shores (safer, but longer travel) or hit open waters (faster, but more risky).

I also hunted through various “Sea” sourcebooks for other RPGs- Stormwrack, The Book of the Sea, Citybook II: Port o’ Call, etc. Some had more interesting ideas than others. Mostly I wanted a rough list of features I might throw in. From that came many of the new names and labels I dropped on the map. Do I know exactly what they are? Sort of. Part of the joy of playing will be figuring that out over time. A few things I did decide that I’m particularly happy with.

• The players came up with giant sea-turtles (and other beasts) with rich farmlands on their backs. I think there are two kinds of massive sea turtle farms. The first, domesticated ones, remain close by particular islands. They're usually smaller and some suggest they're actually younger. The second are Wild Sea Turtle farms, usually claimed by a family or a tribe. There's a loose community among those farmers. Wild Sea Turtles migrate between two regions, the Highyear Seafields and the Lowyear Seafields. The Icon of Magic, Grandfather Turtle moves with these, so he can be found among them- and his rough position can be determined from the time of the year.
• The six larger islands are somewhere between the size of England (244K sq. km) and Japan (378K sq. km). Malatesta is an island of giants- all the various kinds I imagine, organized into clans. They don’t usually sail out. Perhaps some of the small ones might. But I also think there’s a sub-culture of peoples living and surviving there. In caves maybe or literally underground? Perhaps ivory-skinned Drow-like humans? I don’t know. Did the giants come in there and wreck an existing civilization or did they always live there? Not sure yet.
• The Hellforge range has a larger than usually number of volcanoes. The Iceclad Sea is often frozen. The Unfrozen Sea is super, weirdly cold. Things freeze on contact with it. The water itself ought to freeze but doesn’t. The Spike’s a giant mountain spire reaching out of the waters almost to the sky. The Bowl’s a weird depression in the sea that ships can fall into. There’s more…
• The Titan holding up the sky is at the center of the world. It can be seen outdoors from anywhere in the world. That doesn’t entirely make sense vanishing point-wise, but “Magic”. Navigators calculate position and distance based on the Titan: what they see of him relative to the sky, sun, and stars- how large he appears. The Titan’s breath regulates the tides. I don’t know exactly how that works. When the Titan was injured and shifted, the tides went wild and seafarers took years to refix the navigation logs.

PLAYER GOOB

I’m loosey-goosey, but some of my players aren’t. From a conversation with one of them.

CARL: The elves bypassed the Orc’s naval defenses (Fathrist invaded Gharne).  Looked again saw the “Leviathan’s wake” marking.  BTW, I am thinking the ocean is vastly deeper than Earth’s (7-10 miles max) so like 25 miles average, which would allow for monstrous creatures like Titan Sharks.  I see Orc’s being transported inside the Shark’s mouth and 1,000-10,000 troops coming out (the ultimate beach assault).

BTW, quick demography, world population on earth during Middle Ages was 400 million.  Assume w/ 2/3 of the world is ocean.  If 90% is ocean we can estimate that at Titan world would have 120 million, then 80% die, so 24 million left 100 years ago.  My model says (yes I am a goober) that 1.3% growth is a good estimate

So 1.3% growth for 100 years = 87 million people presently

A large army in medieval times is 30,000 based on a pop of 400 million, so a large army in Titan would be (87/400 = 0.21) so 6500 would be comparable.  I looked up Alexander the Great’s army and it was supposed to be 150,000 max but only about 32,000 were fighting men.

I figured this would give us a better idea how individual characters would affect the whole world.

ME: I'd actually cut that population number down. The world's smaller than our Earth, and the carrying capacity of the land is likely much tighter (island vs. standard arable agriculture). I'd say you'd want to cut that world number down to maybe 75 million and kill off from there. However, keep in mind that the 80% death rate is only among humans (which until that time had been the majority race by far).

CARL: Sounds good, I was just doing Order of Magnitude effects so call it

75 m 100 years ago

Assume 90% (?) humans

So 13.5 m humans left (64%), 7.5 non humans (21 m total)

Grow a@ 1.3% for 100 years

= 49 m humans, 27 m non-humans, total = 76 m total

Large army is 5700 people

ME: You are the master of crunchy bits.