[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...

This should exist: Video-sharing chat rooms

Right, so while I was helping Charlie host her occasional Ustream (where she does all the Photoshop work on the next Templar, Arizona page), I suddenly hit on the idea that it would be awesome to have a chat-room-and-streaming-video thing that could stream from video files on your hard drive instead of just from a webcam.

Now, this might already be possible with Ustream and other webcam sites: Charlie has a bit of software that streams video of her desktop while she works, and Ustream doesn't know the difference between that and a cam stream. So maybe all I need is a piece of software that can play an AVI or whatever and turn it into a stream. But, really, I'd much prefer a site that's based around the whole idea of sharing video clips. It'd be especially cool if a room moderator could let other users play their own clips, instead of everything coming from just one person.

Maybe everybody who wants to show something just cues up their file, and the server buffers a little bit of video and creates some little thumbnail screenshots from various points in the file. Then the room moderator sees a little "I've got a video to share" icon next to everybody in the chatroom who wants to contribute, and can mouseover each of them to see the video's filename and thumbnails. Then he or she can click something to add the video to the queue or tell it to play immediately (or something to stay "Video rejected; pick something else", of course).

I know this kind of thing would be a magnet for porn spam and worse shit, but keeping your room unlisted from any public directory would probably prevent that (or password locking it would definitely work, if that fails). I'm kind of torn about whether I'd want the site to allow totally anonymous contribution or not.

So does this exist, already? Anybody know? Because I ain't gonna make it. And I've got a whole pile of animated shorts and other crap I'd love to show off to my Internet friends.

Post-holiday blog post of thanks

God damn, I have much better friends and family than I deserve. Seriously, we had a really great Christmas over here, and we got so many gifts in the mail that I actually kind of feel bad. We received way more than we gave. And it was all such great, well-thought-out stuff, a lot of it made just for us by awesome and talented people.


Books from my parents! I'm really digging this 4e Monster Manual, but now I've gotta finally break down and buy the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide...


Clothes from my parents! All in my usual preferred spectrum of black-gray-blue. This is good, because I almost never buy clothes. Get a load of the Pandemonium Books t-shirt by Rich Burlew! Really great SF/RPG book shop in the Boston area. Love that joint.


My brother Keith got me these DS games, and they've been pretty much occupying all my attention since I opened them. Puzzle Quest is like Bejewelled as an RPG, but that is actually awesome. Megaman ZX Advent has these really embarrassing anime cutscenes, but it's looking like a solid game so far. It's blowing me away how complicated Megaman games have gotten, but that's cool. I like complicated.


God, I love these. They were for both my wife and me, made by our incredibly talented friend Brenna Zedan. On the left are "The Twins", the mascots for our little Internet forum. In the middle, a reverse griffin (lion head, bird butt and feet, no wings) with a mane of fluffy string. And, on the right, a mummified rat. That one's because we mummified our rat. Anyway, Brenna makes loads of cool stuff like this and sell 'em on Etsy.


...And another incredibly talented friend of ours, Roxxy Goetz knitted little dolls of us as superheroes. Oh, man, there's a whole bunch of backstory to where these characters came from--I mean forum discussion backstory, not character backstory--and I ain't getting into it now. Also, she made a sweater for our dog. We actually got a bunch of dog clothes this year, and I should probably take some photos of the poor creature all dressed up. (Roxxy, I should also mention, designed the forum mascots shown above. She's really great.)


I think this one is technically more of a belated birthday gift for my wife, but it's awesome, so I'm posting it anyway. This is a painting of the protagonist from her comic, done by our buddy Nina (who is once again overhauling her whole website, apparently).


Anyway, Nina also sent us fancy Brazilian chocolate-covered biscuit things. They are huge and extremely delicious.


My mom has started taking pottery classes, and she sent us the very first bowls she made. They're simple, of course, but they're really beautiful. My poorly-lit photos don't really show off how cool their colors are, but I really dig these things.


Speaking of candy, my parents sent us marshmallow Santa things with some rather interesting packaging. Santa looks like he's just started transitioning, here. Or maybe it's just Santa Claus crossplay?

Man. There's actually a load of other stuff I ought to post, but this is already kind of a huge post. Let me just end by saying HOLY GOD THANK YOU EVERYBODY. You're all great folks, and I wish I deserved you. Happy holidays, all.

[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.