Geiger Counter plans for C2E2

So, a couple months from now, the wife and I have got like four webcomics friends staying with us for Chicago's brand new comics convention, C2E2. Naturally, a captive audience--especially a bunch of artists--makes me want to do some kind of one-shot RPG thing.

Since we're not going to have a lot of time, that means either pre-gen characters or a zero-prep game, and I don't really dig pre-gen. The zero-prep game that immediately came to mind was In a Wicked Age--someting I love the hell out of, but have still barely even played--but then I thought of one that I haven't gotten to play at all: Jonathan Walton's Geiger Counter.

The deal with Geiger Counter is that it simulates the sort of movie where most of the characters are killed off, one by one, until finally a few survivors maybe escape or defeat the threat. Something like Alien or Nightmare on Elm Street, generally. Maybe it's because a friend of mine has been screening cheesy monster movies for fun and derision, but that just sounds completely awesome, right now.

I've got a few plans on how to enhance the game with additional coolness, too.

One of the coolest parts of Geiger Counter is the fact that all the players get to come up with the setting, the tone, and--best of all--the monster for their movie. Just in case we need a little inspiration, I grabbed whole mess of plot keywords from IMDB, added some custom stuff, and threw them into Abulafia. I think the resulting generator actually works pretty well. Almost every time I hit refresh, this thing suggests a perfectly believable movie to me. Like this:

• Africa
• Human Sacrifice
• Eclipse
• Egg
• Desert
• Space Travel

Or this...

• Full Moon
• Giant Bug
• Mental Institution
• Surgery
• Old West
• Whispering

Or this!

• Serial Killer
• Book
• Bones
• River
• Small Town
• Exsanguination

Anyway, I think I'll only bring this thing out if people are having trouble coming up with an idea by themselves.

Another extremely cool aspect of Geiger Counter is the idea that, as you make up characters for your horror movie, you can actually cast them all, choosing Hollywood actors who seem appropriate. I love the hell out of this, and I intend to make it easy by producing a pile of cards with photos of various character actors on them. This will probably be a real pain in the ass to produce, but it's definitely something I could use for a whole lot of different games (Primetime Adventures, for example!), so I figure it's worthwhile.

Finally, I already happen to have an ungodly huge collection of movie soundtracks--with a particular focus on just the kind of movie that Geiger Counter sets out to emulate--so I'd be a fool not to make a quick playlist and just leave iTunes playing the whole time.

If all goes as planned, this ought to be pretty cool.

[RPGs] Judd's "Make Your Own New Crobuzon" meme

Judd Karlman had an awesome idea about how to create a D&D setting that attempts to achieve the same kind of polyglot fantasy metropolis weirdness and anthropological complexity of China Miéville's New Crobuzon. Naturally, being a giant pervert for setting creation, I had to give it a try.

The Maw

Located on a lush jungle island well-situated near several major trade lanes, the Maw is a vertical city built into the igneous walls of a dead volcano's throat, crossing it in places with spidery bridges. The city extends so deeply that most of it rarely sees sunlight. Its positioning makes it a perfect center of trade between the civilizations of the surface world, and those of the labyrinthine lands beneath. The primary citizen races are humans (ever the most ambitious of the surface races) and dwarves (the subterranean race humans are most comfortable dealing with).

Minor races

Goblins - Most of the local archipelago is controlled by a small empire of jungle goblins. They are confident, organized, and as hairless and brightly-colored as poisonous frogs. All three goblin subraces live and work together with no acknowledged distinctions. The Maw is a completely separate political entity from the goblin empire--the Strand of Jewels--but a large number of goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears have made their home in the city, attracted by the foreign wealth it offers, and eager to wield whatever political and business connections they might have throughout the archipelago to carve themselves a piece of it. For the most part, they've set themselves up as middlemen and facilitators in surface-underworld trade, storing good, changing money, and arranging transport from the island's teeming ports. They also have a substantial stake in local organized crime.

Umber hulks - A handful of quasi-civilized umber hulks--the descendants of slaves purchased from the drow and freed upon the death of their owner--live and work in the depths of the Maw. They're only barely sapient, incapable of vocal communication, stunningly dangerous, and subject to a number of repressive ordinances, but their tunneling ability puts even the dwarves to shame, and they've proven to be extremely useful members of the community. They're paid poorly, but as they do a tremendous amount of work and hardly ever seem to actually spend money, it's assumed that they must have a tremendous hoard of it, somewhere. Just what--if anything--they plan to do with it is one of the Maw's most widely speculated-upon mysteries.

Homunculi - The combination of human arcane experimentation, strange materials from the underworld, and the wealth brought by extensive trade has given rise to generation after generation of increasingly advanced alchemical constructs. The humans purpose-grow them for a wide variety of jobs, from message-carrying and guard duty to bookkeeping and research assistance. While even the most intelligent homunculus cannot legally be a citizen of the Maw--in fact, they technically have fewer rights than the umber hulks--the smarter and more humanoid varieties tend to be considered people by most locals, and are almost universally trusted as honest and incorruptible despite the fact that most technically have free will. As homunculi take on ever-greater roles within the production of more homunculi, it's possible they could become a race in their own right. Some would say they're already there.

Monsters

Aboleths - Humans, dwarves, goblins make up the Maw's ruling council, but it's something of an open secret that a group of aboleths are pulling the strings. Just how much of their control is obtained through psychic domination and how much is simply the result of their having some very interesting artifacts to trade is uncertain. But if they have any kind of sinister agenda in mind for the city, it's apparently too slow and long-term for even the dwarves to notice. It's very possible that the whole Maw settlement was their idea in the first place, though, and it's apparent that they've got exactly the right blend of superhuman intelligence and utter ruthlessness to make a city like this work.

Kruthiks - Several decades back, an incautious tunnel expansion in the depths of the Maw disturbed a massive kruthik hive. The hive was destroyed at great cost to the city's defenders, but more than half of the kruthiks escaped. Ever since, kruthik incursions and infestations have been a regular hazard in the Maw, particularly in the deeper regions. Affected neighborhoods have taken to hanging up kruthik corpses--preferably fresh ones--to ward off attacks. This has given rise to the erroneous belief that even a small part of a kruthik--say, a hatchling's mandible--made into a pendant will protect its wearer from them. In truth, such a small amount of kruthik deathscent is actually much more likely to attract their attention.

The eidolon - In all of the Maw, the only organized resistance to the aboleths' rule comes from a cult of dwarves and humans who worship a rogue eidolon of tremendous power. This titanic, quasi-divine construct was unearthed in one of the Maw's farthest-reaching tunnel systems, and immediately seized control of the dwarven clan who discovered it. The eidolon is powerful enough to grant divine power to its followers, and to roam through the solid earth at will, avoiding detection by the city's authorities. The cult operates semi-secretly, with most of its members hiding their faith, but a few evangelists work openly to bring converts, in spite of the cult's outlaw status.

[RPGs] Skype SotC planning: Party stuff

Okay, so what I'd like to do next is sort out just how the various player characters (or at least the initial group, since more might be showing up later) know each other.

Right now, the characters we've got are a gun-slinging flapper, her German archaeologist husband, an educated sasquatch, and a feral swamp boy.

My first instinct is to suggest that everybody be members of the Van Helsing Society, which I used in my last SotC game. Here's the quick summary I threw together for it probably over a year ago:

• founded by the young Quincey Abraham Harker (born between 1890 and 1897, should be in mid-40s in 1937, son of Jonathan and Mina) in honor of the late Abraham Van Helsing


• studies and hunts monsters both supernatural and human (serial killers, cultists)


• Some agents may themselves be touched by the paranormal (psychics, werewolves who've learned to control their curse, practitioners of magic, Tibetan yetis, Children of Set, etc.).


• follow Van Helsing's philosophy of understanding one's enemy


• secretive, believe the supernatural should be hidden from the public


• funded by donations from those they've helped, the personal fortunes of members, and loot taken from destroyed monsters


• recruit from talented people they seek out and from ordinary people who have had brushes with the supernatural in connection with the Society's cases


• headquarters in London, but local chapters based in many nations friendly to the British Empire

Also, H.P. Lovecraft (who officially died in 1936) is working for the Society's London chapter, researching pre-human civilizations.

I think all four PCs could easily belong to the VHS. On the other hand, maybe it's just Sul's married couple who are Van Helsing investigators, and they end up investigating stuff in Hieronymus and Gator Boy's neck of the woods (the Florida Everglades, right?). Or, for that matter, Dagmar and Lee might be investigating on their own, and we could leave the Society out of it completely.

The nice thing about having some organization behind the party, though, is that it gives us an easy way to introduce new characters and other handy stuff. Of course, if you guys want to just make up your own organization, that is totally cool.

[RPGs] Skype game character stuff

Spirit of the Century is a pulp game. So its protagonists are generally at that pre-superhero level of capability, where they're fantastically capable in some specialized area, maybe even to a level that's effectively superhuman. And of course all kinds of crazy-ass backgrounds are totally possible. You can be an intelligent gorilla or an Atlantean awakened from suspended animation or . . . hell, we could probably figure out a way to do a robot or vampire, even. The game really is very flexible in a loose kinda way.

Anyway, the basic component of a SotC character is their skill pyramid. That is, you've got one skill you're really freaking great at (that's the top of the pyramid), two you're just plain great at, and so on down to five that you're just average at (the base of the pyramid). 15 skills in total, chosen from this list:

• Academics
• Alertness
• Art
• Athletics
• Burglary
• Contacting
• Deceit
• Drive
• Empathy
• Endurance
• Engineering
• Fists
• Gambling
• Guns
• Intimidation
• Investigation
• Leadership
• Might
• Mysteries
• Pilot
• Rapport
• Resolve
• Resources
• Science
• Sleight of Hand
• Stealth
• Survival
• Weapons

A few clarifications: "Academics" is a huge catch-all for history, linguistics, and all manner of soft sciences. "Contacting" is generally about who you know, the contacts you've got. "Empathy" is detecting lies and intentions. "Investigation" is searching for clues and doing forensics. "Mysteries" is sort of a catch all for magical stuff, but mostly in a typically pulp-like vein, so it's largely about hypnotic effects. "Rapport" is making friends an influencing people. "Resources" is about how much money or material support you have or can get access to. "Science" covers medicine as well as various research fields. "Survival" is wilderness survival, tracking, riding, stuff like that. "Weapons" means things with a shorter range than guns and arrows, but either throwable or long enough so that they give you some range.

So, you can see how picking 15 such broad skills means you can be good at a whole lot of stuff. And really crazy awesome at a narrower bunch of stuff.

But where things start getting really awesome, and really coming to life, is with the heart of the Spirit of the Century system: aspects. A character's aspects are basically just a list of ten things about that character. Almost any kind of thing: physical stuff, personality stuff, background stuff, relationships with other characters, signature possessions, running plot shticks, even catch phrases. Here's a list of examples, and you can also look at characters I've posted on this blog for more (they're mostly SotC characters, if not all).

Aspects make you better at doing whatever they logically suggest you ought to be good at. So if you've got a "Crusty Old Prospector" aspect, you can use that to get bonuses on rolls when you're trying to dig, look for water in the wilderness, appraise gold, and maybe even for stuff like drinking moonshine or driving strangers away from your property. The important limiting factor is that whenever you want an aspect to help you, you have to pay a "fate point".

The thing that makes this really cool is where fate points come from: You get them by following your aspects when they lead you into trouble. So if your Crusty Old Prospector pisses off a friend by being cantankerous, or gets distracted by gold, you'd get fate points for your trouble. On the other hand, if you want him to overcome his natural inclinations, you've gotta pay a fate point, instead.

So the game really rewards you for playing your character. And it's really important to make an interesting one, with foibles and weaknesses as well as strengths. Not only do they provide fate points, but they can really drive the game's plot.

Now, the final element of a SotC character is their stunts. These are like the feats of a D&D character: they let you break the rules in little ways, give you bonuses in specific situations, allow one of your skills to do more stuff than it normally does, give you things like allies, vehicles, or weapons, etc.

...But the list of available stunts is frigging huge, and it can really bog down character creation. So, personally, I'm kind of leaning towards the idea of just skipping stunts all together, and maybe using this stuntless rule variant. It just lets aspects do stunt-like stuff, and aspects are the coolest part of the system, anyway.

Anyway, here's where everybody should post ideas and questions about all their character concepts, and we'll figure out a way to get all your dudes tied together.

[RPGs] Skype campaign planning!

Right, so I'm planning to run some kind of game via Skype and probably MapTool. Weekends definitely make the most sense, and I'm leaning towards Saturday afternoons/evenings (Chicago time, anyway). The game? Spirit of the Century, because it's a damned great game, easy to learn, and should be very playable via Skype. Best of all, the rules are available for free.

...But there's a lot of different stuff we can do with SotC. Its default pulp mode is loads of fun, but people have hacked it for space opera, martial arts, and various flavors of fantasy (low magic stuff, generally). I think it could do a hell of a cool horror or post-apocalypse game, too.

So here's where I ask my prospective players just what they want to play. (And I'm doing it in public because I don't have everybody's email address.) What are you guys interested in, genre-wise? What you be interested in in doing or being in the game? I'm kind of digging the idea of some sword and sorcery (or sword and planet!) stuff, or maybe a shady-adventurers-and-smugglers-in-a-spaceship thing in the vein of Firefly. Or crazy, cartoonish post-apocalypse like Thundarr the Barbarian, maybe. Something kind of simple is probably best, at least to start with. On the other hand, SotC makes social conflicts just as interesting and complicated as physical ones, so something involving a lot of debate, persuasion, and interrogation would totally work.

I'm open to some format gimmicks, too. SotC has some cool stuff for running organizations (gangs, companies, armies, countries, whatever), so if you want to be the leaders of some kind of group or community, that's no problem. Also, if you want to play multiple characters in a troupe-style thing, that's cool, too.

Hell, this is getting long. Okay, interested parties, just comment here and let me know what you're interested in doing. Also, what you think of playing on Saturday afternoons/evenings (time zone issues, blah blah)?

[RPGs] Campaign idea: War of the Space Gods

In my last post, I mentioned how the superhero genre can be a whole lot of different things. One superhero subgenre that I don't think really gets enough representation in games is the Jack Kirby mode.

It's a little odd to talk about one dude's work as a subgenre, but when you look at a comic like Gødland or that old 1963 miniseries, it starts to make sense. Kirby had a very distinctive thing going on, and there was more to it than just his art style. The most kirbyesque Kirby works were the ones where he went beyond superheroes and into what I'd describe as sci-fi mythology: the various Fourth World books, The Eternals, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, OMAC, and others.

I'd love to run a game sometime that mines that vein for setting material, but doesn't actually reproduce any specific elements. Here's what I've got right now.
There are two tiny planets orbiting Earth, each smaller than the Moon, but with as much mass as our own world. And they're both hidden from us. Even their gravity is blocked. The first, Kaliba, is a wild, green planet dotted with soaring white cities. The second, Shath, is a barren, cloud-wrapped world of stony deserts and grim, black cities.

Kaliba is inhabited by a race of living gods. They're largely human in appearance, but an idealized kind of human, with a wide range of vivid coloration, sometimes including patterned skin, or even a metallic sheen. Their eyes glow brilliantly, as does their golden blood. They're very nearly immortal: ageless, immune to all disease, astonishingly resilient, and able to regenerate any damage short of the destruction of the brain or heart. What's more, they're invested with a brilliant cosmic energy that they wield to create a variety of effects. Their power is so flexible that they've never developed technology in the sense that we're familiar with. Their cities and clothing are built through the direct application of their strength and energies. They can also invest simple metal and stone tools with some of their power, or use it to change and sculpt living things for their own purposes. They've populated their world with extravagantly modified Earth animals, and are served by semi-sapient worker creatures.

Shath is also home to a race of gods, but one for more physiologically diverse than those of Kaliba. While still mostly humanoid, they exhibit monstrous or animalistic features as well. Their coloration is just as unusual as the gods of Kaliba, but less vivid, tending towards, dull, pale, or muddy tones. Their blood is black, with a faint iridescent sheen. They are essentially immortal, with less resilience and more regenerative capability than the Kalibas, but they have a tendency to change gradually over time, becoming ever more inhuman with the centuries. They wield a cosmic power of their own, but theirs is dark and murky, and far better at affecting its wielder than affecting the outside world. The Shathen tend to be gifted with powers of shape-shifting, invisibility, intangibility, and the like. Unlike the gods of Kaliba, they have needed technology. Their machines are in many ways more advanced than those of Earth, but are generally bulky, unsubtle, inefficient, and sometimes dangerous to be around.

For reasons that have long since passed beyond memory, the two races of gods have been at war with each other, on and off, for as long as they've been aware of each other. It's a bitter conflict, driven by the same hatred it generates, bereft of ideology or purpose.

The planets of the gods are hidden from Earth, but Earth isn't hidden from them. Both races visited our world often our distant past. The Kalibas were called gods, and devils, and fairies. The Shathen were also called these things, as well as dragons, vampires, goblins, and the like. Both races taught, terrorized, enslaved, and enthralled humanity, shaping our history and culture. But, most of all, they fought each other. Sometimes directly in divine battles that scarred the Earth's landscape for millenia, and sometimes by human proxies, through wars and pogroms and myths that we will never truly understand.

Now, though, the gods call Earth neutral ground, and their endless, senseless war is in one of its colder phases. Humanity has forgotten them, and both races of gods work to keep it that way, both for our good and their own. In the past, the gods' interactions with mortals had done us much harm. And now, as our technology has grown to rival that of Shath--and shows every sign of surpassing it, someday--it's very possible that humanity could actually threaten the gods to some degree.

Of course, by the same token, it's obvious that mankind could be the key to the Kalibas' or the Shathen's final victory, if only they could quietly turn enough of us to their cause. So the war between the gods has become a secret struggle to gain influence on Earth. But, as each side becomes aware of the other's breaches of the treaty, their cold war is heating up.

...Okay, so if that's enough setting info, I'll finally talk about just how this could be played. Naturally, I'd use Mutants & Masterminds or some variant of it. Player characters would probably be a mixed group of Kalibas and Shathen, also possibly Kalibas-Shathen hybrids, god-human hybrids, regular humans who've gotten ahold of powerful divine artifacts, or even regular humans who are just really awesome at stuff. Maybe servitor creatures from Kaliba or robots from Shath, too. Just how these people would know each other and why they'd work together--and, yeah, I'd really rather we have that worked out from the very beginning--would depend on just what kind of mix of characters we end up with. I like the idea of the group being centered around young gods from opposite sides of the line who became friends and hope to end the war, or gods and humans who are breaking the rules to learn about each other. And, naturally, some larger external problem would loom before long, forcing the PCs to stand alone between the warring gods against a threat only they are aware of.

The whole tone I'd be going for with this game is BIG. Epic, bombastic, mythic stuff. Interplanetary adventure, apocalyptic threats, the discovery of secrets older than mankind, divine tragedy, that kind of thing. Not superheroes. Sci-fi mythology.

Would it work? With the right players, hell yes. I can only hope to actually get a chance like that some day.

[RPGs] Campaign idea: The Alliance

My big white whale of RPGs--the thing I think I'm least likely to get to do, anyway--is a superhero game. I think superhero games are especially dependent upon a gaming group's experience with and ideas about the genre. I mean, if five people sit down to play a game, variously expecting it to be like The Tick cartoon, 1980s X-Men comics, Warren Ellis' run on The Authority, the Watchmen movie, and the TV show Heroes, there is going to be some cognitive dissonance. Getting everybody on the same page would be a project in and of itself, and might not even be possible if there isn't enough common ground in the group's experience. My own group ain't really filled with people who read superhero comics, so I'm not sure I'll ever get to do this. But I do like to dream.

This is what I've been dreaming about lately.


The Alliance isn't so much a static superhero team as a loose network of associated superheroes who can contact each other, share resources and information, and work together as circumstances require and their schedules permit. When a case or mission comes up, a team is assembled from the available Alliance members and pointed at the problem.

The gimmick here, game-wise, is that the Alliance is a pool of characters that all the players can pull from on a session-by-session basis. No character belongs to any one player; they're all shared equally. So, of course, the characters would all have to be created cooperatively by the players. And that's where the character creation sheet at the right comes in.

Actually, though, I'd start by discussing with my players what kind of tone and tropes they're interested in for the game. We'd try to establish a target seriousness level, and come up with some example media. Then we'd talk over the setting a bit, see what kinds of components people are cool with (magic? aliens? time travel?) and just how "superhero-ish" characters should get (costumes? spandex? masks? code names? secret identities?).

...And then I'd hand out the character creation sheets, two to a player with a pile of extras. I'd explain all the different bits: "Purpose" could be something along the lines of "glory hound" or "With great power comes great responsibility." "Relationship" could mean a romance or rivalry with another Alliance member, or it could be a civilian NPC friend or family member, or even a recurring arch enemy. "Weakness" might be something like "poisoned by kryptonite," but it could just as easily be "hardened alcoholic" or "dangerously short temper".

Anyway, the deal with the character creation sheets is that each player would write something on their sheets, and then pass them off to other players to write some more stuff on, with everybody freely sharing ideas and talking openly about what they're doing. Hopefully, at the end of the session, we'd have at least two filled sheets for each player, and everybody should have some idea about the whole array of characters they'd outlined.

Then, I'd before the next session, I'd do the actual game mechanics side of building all the characters. I'd almost certainly use Mutants & Masterminds, in spite of the mention of "aspects" on the character creation sheets. I just really dig aspects, and think they can be imported from Fate into almost any RPG system. Also, I think they could be employed here to encourage the kind of ensemble-cast soap opera effect that tends to arise in long-running superhero team comics.

Part of what I'd be hoping to achieve with this kind of character generation is a player mindset that doesn't regard the PCs as representations of the players so much as shared game pieces. As such, they should be easier to sacrifice. Dramatic PC deaths would be a really cool and genre-appropriate thing to work into the game. I'd even like to incorporate some variant of Ryan Stoughton's death flag mechanic to encourage it. (CliffsNotes version: Normally, no PC dies. But you can trade this plot immunity for a temporary powerup, thus very possibly going out in a blaze of glory.)

Will I ever actually get to run this game? Dunno. Might not work too well with my local crew, but I'm edging closer and closer to running a Skype game of some kind, and I know I could find the perfect crew for this game once geography isn't a factor. So maybe. Some day.

[RPGs] Campaign idea: Necropolis

Once again, my brain is clogged with ideas for campaigns I'd like to run, and I've got to at least type them up here if I'm ever going to be able to think about anything else. So, today, I'd like to show off a concept that's very clearly the result too much Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3.

I'll come right out and say it: This would be a zombie game. I will shout to the goddamned hilltops that zombies are the most overused trope since pirates and ninjas, but dammit, I think cool stuff can still be done with them. And, since the focus of this game ain't really on the zombies themselves, going with something more original might actually be counterproductive.

Anyway, the deal here is that it's two years or so after a plague of zombieism swept across the globe, effectively ending civilization as we know it. Governments and infrastructures fell, countless billions died, etc. You know the drill. I think my zombies will be the result of a macroscopic parasite (something that slithers into a corpse's mouth is a lot more interesting than another invisible virus, in my opinion) of either extraterrestrial, artificial, or antediluvian origins. Infested corpses would become stupid-but-vicious automatons, concerned only with feeding on the fluid contents of any vertebrate life they sense, and then vomiting a black soup of embryonic parasites all over whatever's left. When not in the presence of any acceptable prey, they'd roam for a bit, and eventually fall dormant, waiting. They wouldn't feel fear or pain, and could only be "killed" by the destruction of the parasite within the skull and upper spinal column, but would be (in most cases) somewhat more fragile than a living human, and would assiduously avoid direct sunlight. So what we've got now is a world of dead cities where every shadowy place full of ragged lumps that will immediately lurch to their feet at the slightest sound, chasing down and tearing open any living human they can.

Now, as bad as all this sounds, humanity is still hanging on. Even coming back. The zombies are dangerous--and, worse, staggeringly numerous--but they're extremely limited. And once people know their limitations, it's possible to live with the dead.

This game would center around a survivor community in the middle of a large city who are managing to do exactly that. While old population centers are now teeming with the undead, large buildings are an effective defense against them. So this settlement would be on the upper floors of a skyscraper, with the lower floors devoted largely to a system of barricades. The inhabitants would subsist on produce grown in rooftop gardens and canned food obtained on daytime expeditions through the perilous city below.

Now, the real gimmick here is that the players would actually take on the role of the whole population of the settlement. I'd generate 40 or 50 regular people--including name, sex, age, race, occupation, Myers-Briggs personality type, and simplified Fate system stats--with this insane TableSmith application I've cobbled together, and that would be the whole community. The players would share this whole pool of PCs, playing whoever they want, even controlling multiple characters at once. They could also add to the population by rescuing and incorporating lone survivors and smaller groups.

So, like I mentioned, the zombies won't really take center stage in this game. Really, it'd all be about running and improving the community itself. Managing exhaustible resources (including food, medical supplies, and the population itself), setting up things like farms and generators and plumbing, arming the populace and maintaining the settlement's defenses, dealing with other human communities that might have different ideas about how to survive the apocalypse, etc. The zombies themselves would be more of an environmental threat than actual antagonists. You'll have to fight some when you go out on scavenging runs, but it's what you gain (and potentially lose) on those runs--and what use you put it to!--that really matters.

System wise, I'd use a hacked, slightly simplified Spirit of the Century. There'd be no stress tracks, so every hit a character takes in a conflict would go straight to Consequences. The skill list would be a bit truncated, and each character would start out with a randomly-generated skill pyramid of variable size (customizable by the players in order to make it fit their generated occupation better than it otherwise might). Each character would get just three Aspects, starting with their occupation and personality type, with an open slot for players to define whenever they feel like. There'd be no Stunts at all, so some Stunt effects would just be folded into skills (medicine and tracking come to mind).

Characters wouldn't have Fate Points, but the players would. They'd get a refresh rate of three each. They'd be encouraged to self-compel to pick up Fate Points whenever they can, so saying out of the blue "This guy's an alcoholic, so when he's called to go on this run, he shows up drunk." is a totally legitimate move. What's more, if you voluntarily take a Consequence while attempting an action ("How about this guy twists his angle while climbing through the rubble looking for salvage?"), that'll get you a Fate Point to spend immediately on that same action. Finally, when one of the players' survivor community dies, all players get a Fate Point each.

If you're getting the idea that all of this would encourage the players to play the survivors as a bunch of expendable extras who have lots of problems and get hurt a lot, you're catching on.

Now, since the community itself it the real focus of the game, I'm thinking it might have stats of its own. Not too certain on this one yet. I really love Rob Donoghue's organization rules, but I don't think they're exactly right for this job. A very small post-apocalyptic community should probably be represented much more simply, after all. I'd just need players to roll for stuff like whether or not the barricades are manned properly, or how many people they can muster for a scavenging run. And I'd like to track resources like food, medical supplies, and technical materials, too. Not sure if those should be skills or stress tracks, really.

Another thing I want to try would be something like long-term D&D-style skill challenges to handle big community-improvement projects. The players could assign characters to a jobs, and then make daily skill rolls for them, marking off their successes along some kind of progress track. This could be used for stuff like getting the elevators running, teaching all the able-bodied adults how to shoot, building a bridge out to a neighboring building, researching the causes of the zombie outbreak, searching the city for a specific kind of item, or even establishing a system of government.

I think another big element of this game would be random generation. I'm already dedicated to randomly-generated PCs, so why not randomly-generated zombie encounters, community problems, and scavenge hauls? Maybe. Maybe.

So, anyway, the whole thing is a big, sprawling, unwieldy idea that I'll probably never get to use. But I really love it.

Still thinking about hybrid game systems...

Man, you'd think playing D&D 4e and running Spirit of the Century would have cured me of this, but lately I've gone back to my D&D 3e-esque simulationist fantasy heartbreaker ideas.

Specifically, what I've been thinking about is a shambling hybrid starting from True20's excellent base, removing character classes completely and replacing them with feats, and replacing True20's magic system with something based on Monte Cook's 20-level system (from The Book of Experimental Might) and the spellpoint system from Unearthed Arcana.

Essentially, what I want is greater flexibility than D&D's classes-and-Vancian-magic system ever allowed, but to still hold onto the insanely vast body of potential material provided by the whole d20 phenomenon. I don't plan on ever trying to sell this thing, so I'd freely steal from any source I can find.

The trouble is, I'm the only dude in my gaming group with enough of a d20 background to easily engage in the whole character-creation-by-catalog-shopping experience that this modular, feat-based paradigm would lead to. So I dunno if there's any point to the whole excercise beyond my amusement.

And there's another thing I'm wrestling with at the moment: How many different kind of token pools can your average gamer handle at once? I'm considering replacing attack and defense bonuses with a pool of points that can be shared between the two, and I'd probably represent these through poker chips or something. Also, tracking wounds in a True20-style combat system would be pretty nicely handled by another kind of token. And, naturally, if I'm going to do spell points, I should have tokens to track those. Finally, I really feel like grafting SotC-style Aspects onto everything, and that means yet another kind of token to track fate points...

See where this is going? My poor friends, drafted into being guinea pigs for this absurdity, trying to remember which kind of point the red poker chips represent. And even if I use a method that's clear and obvious, like printing up a bunch of cards or something, it'd still potentially be a lot of crap to manage at the table.

But is it worse than having to do bookkeeping, instead? I really don't know.

Anyway, the whole thing is still far from being any danger to anyone. It's just an idea I like to play with in my Google Noteook space. I oughta see what my group thinks of all this, though...

A combined resource tracking and random resolution idea for RPGs

Okay, time to take my mind off my tumultuous--but increasingly interesting--employment situation with a little game-related pipedreaming.

Universalis is a fascinating little storytelling toy of a system that I haven't yet gotten a chance to try out. Its central mechanic is the spending of a regularly-refreshed resource called "coins" (although they could certainly be represented by any kind of easily-handled token) to create facts about your shared story. Another thing you can do with coins is buy dice to roll in conflicts against other players when competing over where the storyline should go. Since you buy dice on a one-for-one basis, I realized, you could actually just use dice to represent your coins in the first place. But that'd be a hell of a lot of dice. Some people have that many, sure, but I don't.

On the other hand, if you reduced the dice mechanics to a simple 50-50 pass-fail dice pool, you could skip the dice and just use literal coins. That'd be pretty awesome, if only coins weren't just slightly too thin and heavy to handle well, and their heads and tails side were more immediately distinguishable. I mean, flipping a whole handful of pennies, counting out the heads in the result, and then picking them all up again would actually be pretty annoying.

So, I've been thinking, what about the lightweight, bi-colored chips from an Othello (a.k.a. Reversi) set? Those would be great for both resource tracking and simple dice pools (better than dice, in fact). So great, in fact, that they'd be worth building a whole system around 'em. Although I'd like them a little smaller, for easier mass-flipping. And I wouldn't want to buy a whole bunch of Othello boards just to get the chips.

This stumped me for a while, but I think I've hit on the perfect substitute: buttons. I could buy like 200 or so small, black clothing buttons--they don't even have to all be the same size or shape, really--and just spraypaint one side of 'em white or silver or something. I figure that ought to be just about perfect. They'd be easy to pass around and store in piles or little bowls, and you could shake up a handful, toss them down, count the silvers, and collect them again without even having to think about it. Compare your silver results to your opponent's to see whose decision stands. You've got better chances if you sacrifice a lot of buttons on the contest--and also if other players donate to your cause--but the outcome is still random.

I think this could work. I'm not even sure if whatever I'd do with the idea would end up looking like Universalis, but I'd really like to try something along these lines. Maybe I could use it for some kind of group setting-creation session...

[IaWA] Clutch Oracle

I don't know if I've mentioned the band here before, but I'm a really huge fan of Clutch. They're pretty much my favorite band. (And Charlie's, too. We go to basically every show they play in the Chicago area, and she's give the band some art a few times. Last show, we actually got to go backstage and hang out with them a bit. Extremely nice guys.)

Anyway, in addition to rocking hard and huge, just about every song they've ever recorded has extremely interesting and evocative lyrics. There are some weird ideas and stories, there, and--inevitably--they tend to make the think about roleplaying games. So I've been playing around on Abulafia again, building a Clutch Oracle for In a Wicked Age.

Who could fail to come up with game ideas given a set of story elements like this?

The robot revolution is coming.

A homeless hoodoo practitioner sells temporary cures in return for service after death.

A young folk healer in Latin America, rejected by her community for offering mercy to a defeated demon.

An order of assassins who wield wooden blades, raised from infancy under an oath of silence.

Or this?

A society of swamp women, drunk and deadly as maenads, armed with shotguns and consorting with boars.

A woman storms castles while riding a pterodactyl.

A dead cosmonaut contacts Earth to discuss the gluttony of the starving stars.

The dread capital ship of Hell's forces, crewed by dog-like demons and bringing its own black ocean with it.

To be honest, I'm not sure when or if I'll actually get to use this oracle, as I still haven't even managed to get get people to play regular IaWA. But I dig the idea, so I'm going to keep working on the oracle and adding elements.

Campaign setting/plot generation gimmick

I'm messing around with a simple little idea over the weekend. I was talking to Brian a little while ago about maybe trying out Dungeons & Dragons 4e, and I've recently been thinking about how Mutants & Masterminds could be used to run a fantasy game, so I've generally had fantasy campaign settings on the brain.

So, just for the hell of it, I've been writing various fragmentary campaign setting/plot elements on bits of paper, scattering them randomly on the table, and then arranging bits that seem to work together into rough relationship maps. It works beautifully. I definitely want more setting elements to play with, though. Maybe ones written by other people. The concepts I put together are familiar to me, since they're made up of components that have been rolling around in my head for a while, now. I've gotta try this game with other people, some time. That sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

Random color selector

Over the past couple days, I made a thing over at the completely awesome wiki-based random generator site, Abulafia. It's full of all kinds of RPG-oriented random generation goodness, and one of its coolest features is the fact that a user can build generators that use other generators. So I figured it might be useful to somebody if I created a generator which just picked random colors, and displayed both the color name and a sample of the color itself.

Here, check it out. The example implementation you'll see at that page is really simple: It just pulls three colors from the list of 500 or so that I gave it (taken from Wikipedia, naturally). In theory, though, this bit could be used as part of a larger generator. Like, say, to describe the flag of randomly-generated nation, or the pigmentation of a randomly-generated alien.

It's the first thing I've ever made for Abulafia, so I can only hope that I didn't do something drastically wrong.

Dark, part 2

So, like I mentioned before, I'd like to try and hack Mutants & Masterminds to run a Doom/Quake-themed survival horror RPG. Maybe I'll call the resulting system "Mutant". Dunno.

Anyway, since a big part of beating a four-color superhero RPG into such an unaccustomed shape as this would be just removing material, there's actually good reason not to have the M&M core book on the table at all during play. So this abomination is free to be its own creature, allowing me to make some changes that are more for taste than to fit the specific themes of Dark. The first thing I'd start with would be a minor change to the standard, D&D-inherited ability scores. I'll rename Dexterity and Constitution to Agility and Endurance, and reorganize Wisdom and Charisma into Perception and Willpower. Perception obviously takes over all sensory abilities, but also Initiative checks, while Willpower handles both mental stability and focus, and social abilities.

Oh, and I'd ditch the ability scores and use modifiers alone (True 20-style). That should just be standard practice.

I'll also get rid of a few skills, introduce a few others from the Mastermind's Manual or elsewhere, and reshuffle some ability score dependencies as seems logical. The result (at the moment) is this:

Strength
Climb
Jump (separated from Acrobatics)
Swim

Agility
Acrobatics (loses its jump function)
Drive
Escape Artist
Pilot
Sleight of Hand
Stealth

Endurance
Stamina (similar to D&D 4e's Endurance skill)

Intelligence
Chemistry (effectively Craft: Chemicals and Knowledge: Chemistry)
Computers
Demolition (from Mastermind's Manual)
Disable Device
Gunsmithing (effectively Craft: Guns)
Investigate
Knowledge (might divide this into a few specic skills, like Biology, Tactics, etc.)
Medicine
Repair (from Mastermind's Manual)
Trapmaking (effectively Craft: Traps)
(Might be a lot of other Craft skills I could adapt...)

Perception
Initiative
Search
Sense Motive
Track (the tracking function from Survival, which otherwise doesn't have much use in this game)

Willpower
Bluff
Concentration
Diplomacy
Intimidate

I've added a few skills here, but I've subtracted a lot more. Since this version of M&M is intended to run a very specific kind of game, things like Disguise and Ride just didn't seem useful. A PC who plays the harmonica can just be admitted as a good harmonica player, with no need for a Perform skill.

The other big area I'm changing is saving throws: They can go turn into D&D 4e-style "defenses" quite nicely. I'd also add a passive Perception-based defense--also quite 4e-style--called Alertness. This replaces the Notice skill completely. So we'd have the following defenses:

Reflexes = 10 + Agility + bonus (costs 1 power point per +1)
Fortitude = 10 + Endurance + bonus (costs 1 power point per +1)
Alertness = 10 + Perception + bonus (costs 1 power point per +1)
Resolve = 10 + Willpower + bonus (costs 1 power point per +1)
Toughness = 5 + Endurance (These ain't superhuman characters, so they can't increase their Toughness with experience. They have to find some armor.)

(Thinking on my feet, here: What if I moved Toughness over to Strength--since it represents sheer beefiness more than Endurance does, and melee damage bonuses don't count much in a gun-focused game--and then made a lie-detecting Insight defense based on Intelligence, replacing the Sense Motive skill? One defense for each ability appeals to my sense of symmetry . . . although I don't believe that kind of symmetry is a worthwhile goal in game design. Might go with it, though.)

Now people get to make damage rolls! Damage rolls are fun. And instead of comparing a Toughness save result to a damage DC and then calculating the difference to determine the result, every character can have a series of clear and simple damage thresholds right there on the sheet. So if a character's Toughness is 7, it'll say right there on the sheet that a damage roll of less than 7 has no effect, a roll of 7 to 11 produces an injury, 12 to 16 injures and also stuns, 17 to 21 stuns, staggers, and disables, 22-26 leaves the character unconscious and dying, and 27 or more kills the character outright . . . and messily (because a game like this obviously needs a "gibbed" result).

I'm not even going to address non-lethal damage, here, as there isn't really a place for such a thing in this variant.

I'm also thinking about removing the possibility of a "no effect" result (since any successful attack roll ought to hurt the target at least a little), but I'm not sure of the balance implications there. Obviously, this game should be grittier than standard Mutants & Masterminds, but I don't want to go too far.

Anyway, just to keep the damage threshold on each character sheet simple and static, modifiers from a target's injuries and armor would be applied to the attacker's the damage roll instead of the target's toughness score. So when an attack roll succeeds, the attacker rolls damage, adds the target's injuries and subtracts the target's armor value, then compares the result to the damage threshold track on the target's character sheet. I think this would result in faster combat, but I'd have to try it to be sure. One thing I'd like to do to speed things up is keep track of injuries with tokens (poker chips or similar), to that damage bonuses against injured targets can be tracked without resorting to pencil and paper.

I'd also treat Attack and Defense bonuses (maybe I need a different name for Defense, since I turned the Saving Throws into passive "defenses"...) a little bit differently. It's the easiest thing in the world to split Attack into Melee Attack and Ranged Attack. I think, though, that I'd actually have characters pay 2 power points for each point of Ranged bonus, and only 1 for each point of Melee, since ranged weapons will be significantly powerful and plentiful than melee ones. Meanwhile, I can take Defense and the Dodge Focus feat and reverse engineer them into Active Defense and Reflexive Defense: The former costs 1 point per point and is lost when the character is surprised or flat-footed, while the latter costs 2 points per point, can't exceed half of the Active Defense bonus, and works as long as the character can move freely. Strange as it sounds, the costs work out the same as standard M&M Defense and Dodge Focus.

One last thing: I believe I'd use 2d10 for the standard die roll in this system, rather than 1d20. I think a probability curve that's actually curved--and thus produces slightly more predictable successes and failures--would fit gritty, cautious, strategic gameplay a lot better than the flat probability curve of a d20 roll.

Okay, that's way more than enough for now. I'll probably have more to say later, though. I've been thinking about it enough.

Dark, part 1

So a few days ago I found myself reading a thread on RPG.net about CthulhuTech when the Quake soundtrack came up in rotation on my MP3 player. It was then that I knew I had to figure out a way to run a sci-fi survival horror / bughunt RPG incorporating themes from both Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and id Software's Quake and Doom games (as well as other first-person shooters). I don't ever expect to actually run such a game, but I love theorizing about this kind of thing.

After much dithering, I'm currently calling it "Dark", largely because first-person shooters of that era tended to have monosyllabic names that didn't really have much to do with their actual content.
The way I'd set it all up, the player characters would be a small mercenary team in a vaguely-defined future that could be anywhere from Blade Runner to Dune. While it's a big detour from the source material, I think it's important that the characters not be a legitimate military force, since roleplaying proper military discipline and command structure sounds like more hassle than fun, and it gives them a reason for all their equipment and tactics to be individualistic and sub-optimal. If one PC arrives with a flamethrower, it's not because the mission brief said there's a specific need for that weapon here, it's just because he's the dude who likes to use a flamethrower.

Anyway, the PCs' employers would naturally be the weapons R&D branch of some giant megacorporation (not unlike Doom's UAC) who have hired them to quietly take care of some monstrous fuckup in one of their research facilities. The weapons research angle is important because--in accordance with both first-person shooter and survival horror tropes--the characters must have the opportunity to pick up bigger and better guns in the field than the ones they came in with. The employers' monster-ridden facility naturally has to be a source of both mundane and highly experimental weapons and armor.
It also has to be so remote as to be virtually inaccessible. It might be deep underground, underwater, in space, or in another dimension, but for one reason or another, no reinforcements are immediately available, and whatever monsters the corporation has released are (temporarily) contained. The PCs would have only one obvious means of escaping the facility after completing their mission, and that would be whatever conveyance brought them there. For drama's sake, of course, they might lose that option and then have to find another one.

The setting idea I'm really liking, at the moment, would be some space station or or ship that has fallen halfway into another plane of existence through some tear in reality that may or may not have been a naturally-occurring phenomenon. The different physical laws of the other universe--and their applications in weapons development, of course--were the primary subject of the facility's research, but Something Went Wrong, and now the whole thing is sinking inexorably into a dimension inimical to human life.

It also might be fun to have the bulk of the facility be made up of modular cubical sections which have perhaps been rearranged somewhat randomly by a confused or maddened central computer. I dig the idea of actually rolling on a few tables to determine what's behind the next door. (Seriously, in a lot of ways, Rogue was the first survival horror game, largely due to its randomness: You could never count on the game's levels to be even remotely fair to you and your dwindling hit points.)

I'm not too sure exactly what kind of swarming, shootable monsters infest the facility, yet. Certainly, a major component of the hordes must be mutated / possessed / infested / mind-controlled humans; the "former human" is an important genre cornerstone. They're a great source of weapons and ammo, and just about everything in the players' arsenal works on them. Beyond gun-wielding zombies, though? I'd like to Quake's fleshy, quasi-Lovecraftian route, but I've got no final ideas about just what the monsters should be like or where they should come from. Maybe I'll draw on CthulhuTech a bit.

There are a few different possible objectives for the PCs' mission. They could be sent in to the facility of its infestation or simply plant a nuke and leave. They might also have to retrieve data or valuable prototypes, or even specimins of the monsters themselves. And I think I'd actually break with genre conventions and make it a rescue mission, we well: For a change, there'd actually be some non-monsterized survivors to save. These NPCs could also provide aid to the PCs, and both exposition and roleplaying opportunities to the players. Not to mention the fun moral issues they might introduce: Do we save the prototype, or the wounded researcher who might be harboring an interdimensional plague? Should we set the self-destruct timer and get out of here, even though we haven't checked every part of the facility for survivors? Are the guys who shot at us possessed by alien parasites, or just scared?

So, what system would I use for all this? As far as I'm aware, there is no perfect fit for something like this. There are cases to be made for GURPS, d20 Modern, and 3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars, and of course I really should consider CthulhuTech's own Framewerk system, but--if only for the purposes of this academic exercise--I want to try hacking my old favorite, Mutants & Masterminds, for the job.

On the face of things, M&M is a terrible fit: Its default power levels are high, most of its crunch is devoted to superhero powers, equipment is regarded as part of a character, ammunition--on the rare occasions that guns are addressed--is assumed to be infinite, etc. I'd get around all of this, though, by just using M&M as a construction kit to develop a much slimmer, simplified player's document, which would largely feature modified lists of skills and feats, and a big equipment section. And, because not all players have my burning love for point-based character generation, I'd offer mix-and-match ability, skill, and equipment packages. Equipment--as is appropriate to the survival horror tone--would be expended, destroyed, and replaced with fresh loot constantly (with no regard to M&M character point totals whatsoever), so each piece of gear would have its own card, including both stats and ammo boxes to check off (and maybe an illustration stolen from a computer game).

I've been doing a lot of thinking on what this hybrid mutant system would look like (oh, man, that is a perfect names for it: "Mutant"), but I'll save the big crunch dump for another post.

I am a Dungeon Master, and my wife is awesome

Right, so my wife is awesome. She's been commissioning comics about me being a really, really bad Dungeon Master from various cool webcomics people. I'm not really sure why she started doing this, but it is extremely cool of her. I want to make "Minus 10 horse points" my avatar / custom title on every RPG forum I frequent, now.

Anyway, the first comic is by John Campbell, who does the odd, quiet, and very funny Pictures for Sad Children. The second is by KC Green, who does Horribleville and a whole mess of other bizarre and hilarious comics. They are cool guys.

Absurdly, these actually make me want to start running a D&D game again. But then, hey, freakin everything makes me want to run or play some RPG or another. Now I gotta go figure out when my used-to-be-Tuesday-nights game crew can meet for Spirit of the Century, next. (Yeah, the game's been moving along nicely, even though I can't be arsed to post session summaries, lately.)

Something Secret Steers Us

Right, so I've finally got time to type up the ideas I was talking about in my last post. For an appropriate--if obvious--soundtrack to this blog entry, click here.
Something secret steers us. It calls us up in a dead, distorted monotone; it leaves us email that comes from no address; it whispers in the hiss of static and stray radio broadcasts on our headphones; it hides messages in the system code of our computers; it strobes words and images in the snow of old television screens. We can't understand much of what it says, but we know it wants something. Wants a lot of things. Sometimes it gives us names, sometimes strings of numbers we've managed to decode into dates and times. Sometimes it turns out that those people later do terrible things, and sometimes things--terrible or just strange--happen on those dates.

And sometimes--a lot of the time, really--it shows us how to build things. Most of us wouldn't know where to begin following its instructions, and a lot of us are afraid to try. But some of us have done it. One made something like an antenna that caused patterns and shapes to appear in dust and cigarette smoke. One modified a monitor so that it displayed strange diagrams, demonstrating more things we could build. One mixed up some kind of drug that turns the human body into a receiver for yet more messages. Bit by bit, it speaks to us louder and clearer, if we're willing to help it do so.

We're learning from it, even as it learns from us. Building new things. Some don't seem to do anything yet, but others are letting us fly. Walk through walls. See the other side of the earth. Talk to machines. Burn things by pointing at them. Some are changing us on the inside, letting it talk in our heads and rewrite our bodies' operating systems.

But we still don't know what it is.

For almost all of us, it started on the Internet. There were unexplained service outages in the beginning, even some rolling brown-outs. All over the world. And after that, weird glitches kept showing up. Only those of us who spent a lot of time online really saw much of it, and only those with a little knowhow could really recognize just how weird--even inexplicable!--these things really were. Meaningless images that somehow displayed at a higher resolution than desktop settings allowed. Echoing audio phenomena in the absence of any microphone. Destructive bugs that seemed to communicate from one site on to others that it merely linked to.

So some of us looked into it. Anonymously, on fast-turnover, auto-wiping boards, as was our habit. We found new traces, and posted them up for anyone who was looking at the time. Uncountable nobodies, sharing secrets no one else even knew to look for. And I think, as we did that, we started to attract its attention.

We've got a lot of theories, fueled by its own cryptic images and shreds of circumstantial evidence and a great deal of fevered imagination. Most of us think it's some kind of living or sapient computer program or energy pattern, beamed through space and caught by our communications satellites. Who knows from where or why. Maybe it's some deliberate attempt to contacting or invade Earth, or maybe it's just the result of some galactic-scale malfunction. I heard one theory that it's a naturally-evolved information entity born from some titanic alien internet, and the reason it's having so much difficulty expressing itself it just that it can't function properly in our limited and unfamiliar technology. Another idea, though, says that it's actually our Internet, gradually gaining self-awareness and beginning to stretch its limbs.

Some of us think that, whatever it is, it isn't alone inside our networks. The names and dates it gives us, the incidents they point to . . . they look like the work of the very technologies it's teaching us to build. But I think it wants us to kill those people before they use it. And we might not have a choice. Because I think, maybe, something else is telling those people to come after us.

Something secret steers us. And I think it's sending us to war.

Strange alchemies of ideas

I listen to a lot of soundtrack music, and some of my favorite stuff is from the various Half-Life games and expansions. Mostly created by Valve's own Kelly Bailey, it's some of the best music ever composed for a game. Really atmospheric work.

And, lately, I'd had the title of one of these tracks stuck in my head. Not the piece itself, but merely the title: "Something Secret Steers Us". It's just evocative as all hell, especially when paired with the music from all these Half-Life soundtracks. And, naturally, it's had me thinking about campaign settings.

At first, I just wanted something that would literally express that title. The idea was that the player characters would have some unseen--perhaps immaterial--allies or guiding force that would give them low-level superhuman abilities . . . as well as instructions as to what they should be used for. Voices in their head urging them to use their new power to walk through walls or turn invisible in some secret, bloody war . . . against other unseen forces, which also act through human intermediaries. Maybe these factionalized manipulators would be aliens, or sapient computer programs, or electrical ghosts, or higher-dimensional intelligences. The whole concept was just a vague scattering of theme, tone, and imagery. (And, of course, soundtrack.)

But today, somebody posted something on RPG.net that just clicked. It was an idea about a setting where energy-based aliens are invading our world via the Internet. And, before I evenreally thought about it, I posted this reply about Anonymous and the /b/tards getting ahold of alien technologies before the rest of the world even knows something weird is happening.

Then I realized how these two ideas fit together.

More about this later.

In a Wicked Age character sheets, etc.

So I finally bought a copy of Vincent Baker's extremely fascinating In a Wicked Age. It looks fun as all hell (yeah, I retract my previous statement about not digging the mechanics now that I've read them in Vincent's own words), and I really hope to get a chance to play it soon. However, I was surprised to see the game does not include any character sheets.

Now, John Harper has already designed some beautiful ones, but I really enjoy doing this stuff myself. Also, this let me make additional IaWA paraphernalia in the same style. And, I know it's kind of a cheesy move, but I thought the name "In a Wicked Age" just fit with the font Endor.

So, check 'em out.

Spirit of Cthulhu? Horror of the Century? Unspeakable Fate?

I've been listening to Yog-Sothoth.com's excellent Horror on the Orient Express audio sessions, once again, and it's got me wondering once again about how to hack Spirit of the Century / the Fate system for Call of Cthulhu-style horror. On the face of it, the system is a very poor fit for the genre, seeing as the former is known for superhuman player characters and extended, less-than-lethal combat systems, while the latter generally expects a level of harshness that goes beyond "gritty". But I think it could work.

More to the point, I think it could be awesome. There are a lot of peculiarities to the Fate system that, if calibrated appropriately, should be able to produce a meaty, flavorful kind of brutality that would fit the Call of Cthulhu mind set better than the very oldschool BRP system.

Puny mortals

First and most obviously, the PC power level should be lower than the SotC standard. I'd go with "Good" quality PCs, meaning they'd each get a skill pyramid capped at the Good level (+3) and just 6 aspects.

I think I'd also scrap stunts completely, since that would further lower the PCs' power level and save a hell of a lot of time in character generation (which, after all, needs to be quick in a high-lethality horror game), but the upcoming Dresden Files RPG might include genre-appropriate stunts that'll change my mind. Anyway, if stunts are out, then I'd use some variation on the stuntless SotC variant rules to give aspects a bit more utility.

Another severe change I'm leaning towards would be to limit the fate point refresh to half the number of aspects, so PCs would start each session with only 3. Limiting players' narrative power is crucial to the genre, and it would also increase the importance of compels (and, therefore, encourage players to make more flawed characters than usual). However, I'd take some of the sting out this fate drought by letting PCs spend a "virtual" fate point if, in the course of the same action, they also take a consequence. That is, they have the option to take some physical or psychological sacrifice in order to give themselves better chances at success. After all, sacrifices (as a theme) and consequences (as a mechanic) are pure gold for horror games. More on that below.

A terrible price

...In fact, I'd say that consequences are so important that I'd remove stress tracks from Fate combat system all together. Yep, any shifts of damage inflicted on characters would either be converted into consequences or take them out of the fight (a variant originated, as far as I'm aware, by Colin Jessup for his Star Wars Fate hack).

Now, in order to make room for all these consequences the poor, brutalized characters will be collecting, I'd let physical and psychological consequences use separate slots, and extend the spectrum of potential survival harm one more level, as below:

• Minor consequence - Covers up to 2 shifts of damage. Goes away as soon as the character gets a few minutes' respite. Things like "bruised", "winded", and "shaken" would be appropriate.


• Major consequence - Covers up to 4 shifts of damage. Lasts until the character can get a serious rest--like a night's sleep--or some specific remedy is obtained. A physical major consequence like "bleeding" might be remedied by medical treatment, while an emotional one like "infuriated" or "humiliated" might require something like an apology from the party who inflicted the consequence. I think any remedy that doesn't require several hours of time ought to require some kind of skill check or story-based accomplishment.


• Severe consequence - Covers up to 6 shifts of damage. These would, by default, last until the character has a chance to get days or even weeks of downtime, but might be reducible to major consequences by some kind of skilled treatment. Broken bones and real mental trauma would fit this category. Also, I might deviate from the SotC rules a little bit by saying that a character who takes a severe consequence is taken out, just not permanently, and not on the attacker's terms. So, in that way, it would work a little like a concession.


• Extreme consequence - Covers up to 8 shifts of damage. This would cover permanent harm, things like lost limbs and lasting mental afflictions. Naturally, taking an extreme consequence would definitely include being taken out of the conflict, as above. And, what's more, it might mean the permanent loss of the character--to death, madness, or what have you--if they can't get help afterwards: If all the PCs are lying around in pieces with no one functional enough to so much as provide first aid, that's a total party kill. With time and treatment, however, extreme consequences become regular permanent aspects. (Clearing that extreme consequence slot for more hurt, of course. Just because your character's already lost an arm doesn't mean he can't lose an eye once he's back in action.)

(Originally, I was going to call the 8-shift consequences "critical", but I just learned that Dresden Files is already planned to use 8-shift "extreme" consequences to describe permanent harm. So, yoink!)

I'm a little bit torn as to whether or not the Endurance and Resolve skills should give characters in this system more consequence slots the way they give SotC characters more stress boxes. On one hand, I'd hate to devalue those skills, and the strategic question of whether to take a 4-shift hit as two minor consequences or one major one sounds like fun. On the other hand, I'm afraid it might make them--especially Resolve--too important. After all, Resolve is already rolled as an active defense against emotional and psychological attacks . . . and that's something a horror game should include a lot of.

Speaking of which...

A fate worse than death

Arguably, the defining element of the Call of Cthulhu gaming experience is the sanity check. Any system trying to emulate this genre absolutely needs to include something along those lines. And, believe it or not, I think Fate already has a system which can that kind of thing beautifully: our good friend "consequences". Just let sanity-threatening situations make a psychological "attack" on characters (which would naturally be resisted with a Resolve check). Any consequences a character suffers as a result of such an attack could be states of fear or nausea or confusion, or the kind of colorful temporary (and sometimes permanent!) insanities familiar from good old Call of Cthulhu.

And, of course, because the "death spiral" effect is also important, new shocks would get to tag the consequences inflicted by previous shocks. That is, if you're already shaken by the corpse you found in the street, you're all that much more likely to lose it completely when the thing gets up and lurches towards you.

I'm not entirely certain, however, if sanity threats should actually roll to attack, or if they should just have a static horror factor that characters have to roll against. I suppose it's a question of just how much randomness feels right in play (and how much dice-rolling you want to do).

I'm toying with the idea of letting very successful sanity checks create temporary aspects along the lines of "keeping cool", "ready for a little blood", or "facing the darkness". Like a kind of anti-consequences, these would show that the character is hardened or inured to certain shocks, and would be invokable for a Resolve check reroll or bonus when a similar situation comes up. They could even mirror consequences in their values and time limits. That is, getting 4 shifts on a successful sanity check would create a major anti-consequence (for lack of a better term) that would last the rest of the day. I could complicate matters further by having these things actually take up psychological consequence slots--so that they'd make you more likely to break more severely once something does manage to crack your defenses--but I fear they'd become a punishment for rolling well rather than a reward. Not too sure.

A desperate struggle

Other than the elimination of stress boxes, I'm only envisioning rather minor changes to the combat system.

Naturally, I'd have weapons grant bonus shifts of damage on a successful hit, as a whole lot of Fate mods do. I don't think I'd bother introducing any sort of armor rules (beyond the possibility for characters to invoke aspects like "bullet proof vest" or "squamous hide" on their defense rolls).

I'd like to replace Fists, Weapons, and Guns with simple Melee and Ranged skills. Melee might continue to be a defense skill--but only against melee attacks--while Ranged might only be for attacking, and dodging ranged attacks might only be done with Athletics. I worry this could be a bit too harsh, though, since PCs in this variant would have far fewer skills than SotC PCs.

I haven't really done any thinking about magic rules. There are a whole lot of Fate variants addressing that issue already, and even one specifically aimed at Call of Cthulhu-style magic, and I'm not sure it's really high priority to begin with.

At any rate, I don't expect to have a use for any of this system-noodling any time soon, but it'll be worth looking at again when I've got a copy of Starblazer Adventures or Dresden Files in my hands.