D&D Zombie Apocalypse, Part 1: Genesis
A few weeks ago, I got to attend New York’s ComicCon as one of Wizards of the Coast’s volunteer DMs. I ran a few “Learn to Play” events, using the recent D&D Red Box and a few level 1 pre-generated characters to entice new (and returning) players back into the fold.
As I was getting ready to play the less than stellar adventure found in the Box, the event’s organiser pulled me aside and told me these magical words:
“Forget about the red box adventure, make something up entirely. Just start with a Roleplaying encounter and play it by ear from there.”
I had just given me the keys to the kingdom… and no one was there to watch me steal the crown jewels.
(Ewww, get your mind out of the gutter!)
You see, while the adventure in the Red Box is quite ordinary and the character generation method is one of the worst I’ve seen since Battlelords of the 23rd Century, the Red Box’s DM’s book is a solid piece of introductory gaming. Thus, armed with the monster chapter and the digest rule-42 on the last page (i.e. the DC table for level 1-3 gameplay), I got ready to inflict my very own brew of D&D on unsuspecting players.
I decided to put all my small press experience to bear on those games and approached the game as such:
Chatty: Okay, so you’re all relatively new adventurers who’ve banded together in the recent past. Can you tell me about your last adventure? More specifically, can you tell me one thing that went really good for your group and what that was really bad…
This post is about one of the best answers I got: [Read the rest of this article]
Friday Chat, Early Edition: The Geeky Road Trip
In about 24 hours, I’ll be leaving for the Toronto Fan Expo with my friend PM. The Expo is Canada’s largest event for Sci-Fi, Horror, Anime and Gaming fans where they get to meet some of their favorite industry personalities and stock up on merch.
So soon after Gen Con and after having been at Ground Zero for Pax East, I’m not sure how to set my expectations for the Fan Expo. I have no ideas what the show will be like nor what I’ll be doing except game for most of the day on Saturday.
Regardless of what awaits us over there, I still have a 5 hour car trip to plan so I thought I’d reach out and share/ask how the travelling part of the trip should be prepared! [Read the rest of this article]
Barf Forth Apocalyptica! Review: Apocalypse World
What started out as a short review ended up being a 1500 word text where I try to summarize what the game is about so I can run it next week. Feel free to read the Capsule Review and then jump to “So Chatty, what are your thoughts”
The first new RPG I bought at Gen Con 2010 is Apocalypse World by Dogs of the Vineyard designer Vincent Baker. I met him early during the con and he made a great pitch while I was looking for a post-apocalyptic game for my gaming group. Our mutual interests collided and I left with a beautiful, autographed, pocket-sized paperback.
I’d likely play it next week with my gaming group so here’s a chatty style review.
Capsule Review
Not for the faint of heart from both a thematic and playing philosophy point of view, Apocalypse World presents a very clever and apparently engrossing game. It’s main focus is not so much on player accomplishment or setting exploration(although the PCs are complete badasses) but rather the relationships that form between PCs and the constantly mutating loyalties and rivalries between them.
If you’ve started enjoying story games that thrive on failures like Mouse Guard and Burning Wheel but want to explore a darker, very adult theme, Apocalypse World is well worth giving a try.
Buying the book+PDF: Click Here
The Core Play Philosophy
As can be expected from a Lumpley Games RPG, Apocalypse World is first and foremost a Story Game focusing not on collecting whacked out technological gear while fighting mutants. Rather it’s very much about the loyalties and rivalries that form when exceptional, kickass beings (the PCs) band together against a merciless, you’ll-get-screwed-no-matter-what world of decay, scarcity and multiple threats coming from everywhere.
Play focuses on players getting into trouble and how they resolve it (usually by getting into more trouble, leaving behind numerous dead NPCs). The PCs follow their own agendas for survival: performing tasks, raiding groups of NPCs (or even those of other PCs) to gain resources and acting on obligations that often crop up.
Play also follows meta-plots, called Fronts, where events and/or major NPC groups move in the already busy schedules of the PCs to make things more interesting and prevent players from establishing too much stability in the world.
For example, a new cult can move in near the PCs holding, bearing a strange viral plague that reprograms people into new fanatical converts before they die horribly of some form of brain cancer 3 months later.
Finally, the game forcefully tells GMs (called Master of Ceremonies or MCs) to refrain from prepping stories and adventures. Prep focuses on keeping NPCs and organizations created through play straight (there are plenty of tools available online for that) and organizing the game’s fronts.
The Implied Setting and World building
The game’s implied setting starts unspecified yet remains very specialized:
Here be the post-apocalypse and some serious, undefined shit is brewing in some ethereal entity called the psychic maelstrom.
The world takes shape as the players flesh out their characters while the MC innocently peppers the discussion with questions about the PCs pasts, current location, make of vehicles and names of every NPC around them.
The answers of such questions, with healthy doses of “Just make it up” whenever players falter, create the world as the MC notes relevant details on the very elegantly designed 1st session worksheet.
Character Generation
Characters are presented to players as playbooks: a combination character generation rules, character sheet and character specific rules. Each playbook represent an established Post-Apocalyptic badass archetype and two players can’t play the same since each represent a unique exceptional individual.
Some examples:
- The Angel heals people, and has a medical clinic with staff.
- The Battlebabe kills and intimidates everyone with her custom whacked up weapons.
- The Gunlugger is the ultimate killer badass with more guns than shorts.
- The Hocus is a religious leader prophet controlling a cult of NPCs (think Season 4 Gaius Baltar).
- The Brainer screws with people’s brains with her psychic abilities.
- The Hardholder is the leader of an established community of variable size .
And so on.
The playbook outlines all the choices that players make to create the PC, from names, look, equipment, and stat range so it is a clever, self-contained document.
Oh yeah, and thanks to Ron Edwards’ influence (among many other Indie luminaries), the PCs have special powers when they have sex with one another.
Yeah, that kind of game.
The Game Mechanics
Mechanically speaking, the game is an exchange of narrative “moves” where a move describes an action/event/game element with a significant impact in the game’s fiction.
All characters have basic moves like “Going aggro” and “Read a Situation” and character specific ones like the Angel’s “Healing Touch”. Establishing success of such moves (when significant) requires a player to roll 2d6 and add a relevant stat (which usually goes from -2 to +4). A 7-9 is a soft success (i.e. it works but something goes wrong/different than planned as described by each moves) and a 10+ is a hard success.
While the player will use the terminology of their moves (basic and character-specific) to clearly indicate to the MC what they are attempting, the MC will ask the player to fictionalize said move to make it cooler by saying, over and over again: “Cool, how do you do that?”
The Master of Ceremonies
The MC is guided by a set of formal narrative principles like “Barf forth Apocalyptica” and “always respect the logic of the game”. He also has very specific moves like”Announce Future Badness”, “Separate them” and “‘take their stuff away”. In essence, the MC announces that something happens whenever he makes a move and asks players to react with moves of their own. For example:”A bad guy slinks away behind you and loops a steel wire around your neck, what do you do?”
Most everything the MC does in the game is make moves that lead up to the “what do you do” question, the MC almost never rolls dice. PCs get hurt (Shot at, drugged, strangled, etc) when they fail rolls. It’s the move players choose reactively that either gets them out of trouble, lands them into different trouble or leaves them lying in a puddle of blood.
The MC must also makes crap up on the spot (NPC moods, appearances, actions) while narrating. When well done, players don’t notice anything other than an apocalyptic tinged fully interactive story that remains internally consistent with both the rules and the apparent onscreen/offscreen logic…
Things become really interesting when PCs either miss a roll or give the MC a golden opportunity to screw with them… thus the MC is invited to go to town and make the most heinous-yet-interesting-for-the-PCs move he can think about. A bit like Mouse Guard’s failure mechanic… only not G-rated and guided by the MC’s list of moves (and any custom ones that fit the game).
The MC also names everything so that all NPCs gain a semblance of substance… but never so much that he gets to hesitate to get them killed, maimed, destroyed at the players whim.
The game’s fuel is the MC’s questions to the characters (not players). Those questions (and answers) build the world and shape where the action goes. Many (if not most) of these questions should be embedded in the MC’s moves or in response to players Moves/questions (i.e. turning player questions back to the group).
Chatty: You’re reading this awesome review, What does it remind you of? What does it make you feel like?
Exactly like that.
So Chatty what are your thoughts?
After reading the book and going over the game’s forums, I definitively want to try it for a few sessions. This is NOT Fallout the RPG. There is very limited space for armour, explosives and advanced weaponry. What it is about is scarce water, savage gangs of bikers/cultists, warlord raiders, driving through the desert in search of medicines and trying to decipher what the hell is the Psychic Maelstorm before it rots everyone’s brains.
Oh and see if you can get in Marie’s pants before she makes a move on Roark.
I’m completely intrigued by a game with no formal planning and especially by the “you don’t roll stuff, the players do”. It makes me feel the game is hard to master for both players and the MC. There are a LOT of little bits here in there that can be easily forgotten.
I’ll spend the week thinking of some visuals and sub-themes so I can barf forth the appropriate levels of Apocalyptica.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask… this is a hard game to describe.
Buying the book+PDF: Click Here
Chatty's Halloween Post: The 2012 Zombie Apocalypse
This one is for The Maze, Scott, and HermitDave, and is a 100% RPG post inspired by my Influenza article.
I give you the Zombie Apocalypse RPG Trope Post!
Zombies are people, too… Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.
- USA Network commercial for Night of the Living Dead
Stop being so pathetic! …Humans send robots to Mars. Zombies are baffled by doorknobs.- How to Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith
The Real Pandemic
In 2010, humanity scrambled and achieved the near-miraculously vaccination (often at gun point) of 75% of the world’s population. The virus turned out to be benign. The conspiracy theorist had a field day… and a lot of science types looked like idiots.
Unfortunately, in mid 2011 the A(H1N1) virus recombined with new mutations of the Swine and Avian flu and a new, very deadly strain arose. A new pandemic started but this time no one wanted to get the vaccine and no government had the courage to impose it.
Things changed when the death tolls rose rapidly. Panic and civil disorder exploded. Mass Vaccination began again, through riots and armed conflicts. However, the conventional vaccine could not prevent infection.
Before the new pandemic broke out, the top vaccine manufacturers, grown fat with the profits made from selling the H1N1 vaccine, fell on one another like crazed jackals. Out of the corporate carnage rose GeneCore now the world’s sole manufacturer of vaccines and gene-therapy.
Faced with the threat of the new Flu virus, GeneCore proposed its experimental, non-FDA approved gene-therapy vaccine. The idea was to infect the body with a benign genetically-engineered virus that would reprogram all of the body’s DNA to protect it against the Killer Flu.
Mass vaccination, at least in the countries that could still afford GeneCore’s price, was started in late 2011. Protesters and conspiracy theorists were silenced, often violently.
Something was in that Vaccine’s virus… Something primeval, something almost evil.
54% of humanity had been vaccinated when it happened…
(fade to black)
In December 2012, 50% of humanity was dead, 30% had mutated into near-mindless cannibalistic predators and 5% were… something else…
Welcome to Zombie Apocalypse 2012.
The Game’s Setup
This 2012 Zombie Apocalypse idea is good for a short Post Apocalyptic modern campaign where most of the humans have become flesh-eating Zombies. What’s left of the world’s population hides in pockets all over the planet, trying to survive civilization’s collapse and the new predators.
PCs are not humans or zombies. They are part of the 5% that were mutated in something far better and worse, Vampires! With intact minds and prodigious powers, they need to feed on human blood…pure, unzombified human blood.
Thus, they must battle the hordes of zombies (and other mutants) and try to find humans to feed upon.
In terms of game system. I’d suggest using d20 Modern or World of Darkness. If you use d20 Modern, I propose you use Monte Cook’s World of Darkness for the Vampire PC Class (it works perfectly for that). You can also generic systems like Gurps or Champions but you may need to build the proper templates for PCs and adversaries. They all work.
Adventure Seeds
1) PCs “wake up” as starved Vampires in an abandoned hospital ward. The place is filled with Zombies. The PCs discover their powers as they fight through the hospital to find the hospital’s Blood Bank (or maybe a few hidden humans”. Great for a one Shot.
2) The PCs are newly created Vampires that have been enslaved by a Vampiric Coven that discovered how to successfully create new ‘members’. They must learn to play their captors against one another in order to escape. Aided by a few heroic human NPCs, they must then evade Zombie guards and Vampire enforcers to reach freedom into the blighted wilderness. This scenario works great for a more storytelling experience.
3) The PCs are virtuous adventurers seeking the ‘cure’ for their condition and must storm the Headquarters of GeneCore, held by a few Vampire Lords and an army of Mutated monstrosity. Great for players who want to play the internal struggle of killing humans to survive.
How about you? What cool ideas would you add to this setting? Adventure Seeds? Some monster concepts? Some other idea or cause for the Apocalypse? You tell me!
Afterschool Trope Special: The Dungeon Crawl, Part 1
This is Post # 600 on Musing of the Chatty DM! To celebrate this and my Dungeon theme week, I decided to write an article in the style that has made me known as a RPG blogger: a Trope post! You are new to the blog and don’t yet know about Tropes? Here’s a handy link to get your started.
In order to celebrate Dungeon Week at Musings of the Chatty DM, and to get your gears going for our little contest, I thought we could explore one of the two foundation Tropes of our favorite Fantasy Roleplaying game:
Dungeon Crawling is the act of exploring a dungeon (or other dangerous area) while looking for treasure or some other important object. The characters must battle enemies (usually monsters) and use their skills and equipment to negotiate obstacles (usually traps.) Usually, but not always, there is a Boss Battle at some point, and a Mac Guffin or Plot Coupon at the end.
(Snip)… it is actually Older Than Dirt, since even old myths feature it (heroes like Orpheus voyaging into the Underworld, for example). However, it was the Cliff Hanger film serials of the early 20th century that defined the trope, and the Indiana Jones movies that made it popular again later.
Dungeon Crawling. The word implies slow progress through damp corridors of an underground complex, carefully checking every square inch for potential death traps. For decades, adventurers have prodded the depths of countless published and home-brewed dungeons, equipped with such classic staples as 10 foot poles (to trigger the traps), Iron Spikes (to stuck doors shut or prevent sliding doors from closing) and a mule-drawn cart to transport treasures.
Of course, experienced players of old school dungeon crawls have found much more creative uses for such staples and anything else that they could their hands on.
Dungeon Crawling can be defined many ways, as each era of Dungeons and Dragons found new ways of staging adventures around the concept of exploring a (relatively) fixed site where PCs discover various challenges and reap whatever material rewards they can find. Hot debates are sparked daily in RPG blogs and forums about Old school gaming and how it differs from the game styles encouraged by later editions of D&D.
My goal is not define what dungeon craweling is, nor to add to the debate. Rather, I’d like to explore dungeon crawling through the lens of game’s history to explore applications of the trope.
The Dungeon as the Campaign Setting
Many early campaigns (and several current ones based on retro-clones of older editions of D&D) were based upon the exploration of large, multi-levels underground structures. Later renamed Megadungeons, these sites were where most of adventures would occur. Partys of adventurers, drawn from gaming groups that could sometimes be counted in the dozens, got together and explored the dungeon, clearing large swats of a given levels before exploring deeper.
One of the core assumptions of such campaigns was that the deeper PCs explored, the harder the challenges were and the higher were the potential rewards. Another assumption was that cleared levels of the dungeon would eventually be repopulated, forcing returning adventurers to deal with new occupants or find alternate, less crowded paths to the deeper parts of the dungeon.
Creating a Dungeon-based campaign
Starting such a campaign is relatively simple, you need to set your dungeon in an area of your favorite game world (or you may create your own world to host it). You don’t need to flesh out the outside world too much. You can usually place your dungeon under ruins of some sort. Popular choices are:
- A ruined monastery, See here for a very recent example.
- Under a Mountain, usually within and under the ruins of some sort of underground city
- Under a City, like Forgotten Realms Undermountain found under Waterdeep or Monte Cook’s Ptolus
- Under a Castle, like the classic Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns from the co-creators of D&D
But you can also break out of the classic approach and build your megadungeon in other ways:
- Inside a crashed Spaceship (like the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module which could be grown bigger by adding more floor decks)
- Inside the cone of a volcano (making your dungeon doughnut shaped) like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
- Across worlds/planes of existence (by placing portals that transport PCs from one world to the next)
- Outside! By making the dungeon stand on the various ‘levels’ of a stripped mine or on the side of a mountains with gigantic ‘steps’ carved on its surface.
Its usually a good idea to find a reason for your dungeon to exist. This will help you define the type of encounters found within it, acting like a baseline theme on which to build upon. If you build your dungeon in a desert, you might want to borrow from Egyptian myth to give your campaign an exotic flavor. In a similar manner, if you want to place your dungeon under the ruins of a lost Jungle temple, than you can borrow from Indiana Jones or a plethora of classic pulp era adventure and Sword and Sorcery stories.
Once you have chosen the site of your dungeon you need to chart the closest point of civilization (City, town, village, Frontier Keep, etc) to the dungeon. The further away your dungeon is from civilization, the longer the transit time between forays and resupplying expeditions, allowing more restocking of the dungeon. Large distances may also explain why the dungeon hasn’t been touched by other adventurers before and may play a role in your choices if you are the type of DM that likes to have such questions answered.
Finally, a dungeon far from civilization often makes it more likely to remain the sole focus of the campaign as there is little or no ‘distraction’ to deter PCs from exploring deeper and deeper.
Dungeons that sit closer to civilization are more likely to be plundered faster, with shorter resupplying interludes between forays. It could also make it more likely to have been partly cleared by prior adventuring parties or being explored by ‘competitors. Such NPC adventurers may interact with the party, acting as friendly but competitive support or antagonistic cut-throat jerks.
In my own Primal/Within campaign, I made the City so close, it’s actually inside the dungeon itself!
Once you’ve established your dungeon and the closest point of Civilization, you are free to start mapping your dungeon. The one-page dungeon template is an excellent tool for that!
Such campaigns often don’t have an overarching plot line, the story is the one that the PCs forge through their exploration. In such cases, story arises from the players actions in and out of the dungeon. Planning future forays with other PCs, forging alliances with dungeon factions, buying real estate outside of the dungeon and developing lasting relationships with hirelings are all ways that roleplaying occurred and stories progressed in such campaigns.
DM creating such dungeons can therefore focus more on story hooks than developed storylines. By creating various opposing factions within the dungeon you create opportunities for PCs to discover and exploit the possibilities of such opposition.
Example:
The Orcs of the 4 fingered-Claws have recently invaded the Kobold Warrens of the 1st level of the Great Abyss, a semi-open megadungeon set on a mile-high cliff overlooking the cursed Dagonite Ocean. Many kobolds are now enslaved to the Orcs, the remaining kobolds have retreated to the cliff side network of ledges and tunnels. Hating the orcs above all, they will willingly let adventurers safe passage through their new found lair so they can get to the orcs faster.
The Brotherhood of troll-magi, a group of highly intelligent trolls trained in the arcane arts have subdued a Dragon and taken control of its sizable horde, scattering the dragon’s minions to other, less ‘comfortable’ parts of the dungeon. As the PCs explore the dungeon, looking for the horde, they catch hints that something happened to the dragon and need to prepare to face something mightier what they initially planned.
If you are interesting in capturing the tropes of classic dungeon-based campaigns, here’s an excellent list of assumptions to run an Old School dungeon (mega or otherwise).
Do you have ideas and concepts for dungeon-based campaigns you’d like to share?
Part 2 will be about… I don’t know yet, but definitively about more dungeon goodness!
Under New Management
Good day! I am Vanir the Chatty DM. You probably came here expecting Phil the Chatty DM. I’m sorry to say that Phil has taken an extended leave of absence due to a severe poutine-related injury and will not be back for some time. In the meantime, he has handed his cape and sceptre to me, and now I am the Chatty DM.
Phil’s shoes are quite large, and it will be some time before I am able to adequately fill them. Being a kind and generous former potentate, Phil gave me a practice exercise to run. Here it goes:
I find it best to separate the colors and the whites, because the whites stay much brighter that way. However, you may find yourself out of underwear if you don’t alternate loads. Washing baby clothes is an entirely different story. A person who can keep baby clothes clean probably made a pact with the devil at some point, and I cannot say the payoff would be worth it for me. However, some people are much more into doing their laundry than I, and if for some reason you find yourself at the fabled Crossroads ready to make a deal with Old Scratch, far be it from me to keep you from bargaining away your eternal soul to keep your whites whiter and your brights brighter. I don’t like socks very much. My wife and I threw away all our socks and bought 20 pairs of the same kind that we both wear so that we don’t have to sort. However, the dresser keeps spawning versions of our old socks and sprinkling them randomly into the sea of perfectly uniform socks. I’m not sure if an exorcist would even show up to get rid of this problem but as long as my socks don’t start spinning around and projectile vomiting on me, I think I can make do.
Phil was right, I feel much more competent now. However, he told me that to truly become a Chatty DM, I must discuss tropes at great length. I have just googled that word, and I feel ready. Let us begin.
Tropes are a process of inbred fertilization which employs certain decomposed organic materials– including, but not limited to animal sediment– to blanket an area in which vegetation is desired. The procedure enriches the soil for stimulated plant development while, at the same time, preventing erosion and decreasing the evaporation of moisture from the ground. To properly trope your garden, all you need is some simple household chemicals. I recommend about 1/2 ton of lawn clippings, a can of beer (for the enzymes, which are the catalyst to get all the bacteria going and give your tropes some real kick), 1/8 cup of antifreeze, and a few hefty squirts of Palmolive dishwashing liquid to give those bugs diarrhea. Wrap everything in newspaper over the winter, or your tropes might collapse, taking the foundation of your house along with them. Before you install tropes, you should check your local city or state zoning ordinances involving tectonic shift and/or manslaughter.
Upon further review, it seems that I was talking about something very similar to tropes, but not actually tropes. Please forgive me, I am but a novice Chatty DM. These powers are intoxicating and difficult to control. Please allow me to refocus:
One of the most common tropes in fantasy roleplaying is that every character has underarms. Subverting this trope might seem impossible to the novice, but daily diligent practice will allow you to overcome your limitations. PC’s frequently have heroic (or “good aligned”, as we say in the parlance) underarms, but this certainly does not mean a clever DM can’t speak in private with the PC’s underarms to make them do something unexpected. (Protip: try bribing them with food or diamonds.) Also, the number of underarms on a villain is typically directly proportional to the number of arms he has. (Or she! Don’t forget, girls have underarms too!) If you want to really spice up your campaign, try giving your villain three or four extra underarms. Or just one extra, but it’s a giraffe’s underarm! Now that’s what I call Proper Villainy!
(NOTE: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES give your villain two giraffe underarms. You want your players to feel like they can win at least occasionally. Remember: you’re successful at being a DM when everyone is having fun.)
I think this would be a good place to stop. Phil told me not to lay too much on the audience at once. He said he gave out too many secrets at once this one time, and it killed his entire readership right there on the spot. Rather than undo all the hard work he has done rebuilding his user base and hiding the bodies, I would rather leave you all aching for more. Please don’t cry. I love each and every one of you just as Phil did.
However, I must tempt fate and leave you with one final golden nugget of wisdom: grow a beard, because the evil twin will always beat the good twin at Scrabble.
Good night, Chatty Nation!
Vanir used to write for Stupid Ranger before ascending to this higher plane of existence. His love, like Phil before him, is joy eternal.
Raiding the Library : Neal Stephenson's worlds, Part 1
Man, I haven’t felt like that in months! I feel like spending the whole damn day at the keyboard and churn out thousands upon thousands of words just for the sake of it. That’s always a good sign.
I’m one avid reader. I read novels by the buckets when I have the time to do it. When my urge to write waned these past months, I made up for it by reading and watching TV more.
Having been around long enough to resist falling into the trap of trying to make a RPG campaign out of everything cool I read or saw on a screen, I had an idea.
Why not try a new series where I share plot elements of books I read with you guys to set the ideas engine off for our collective RPG campaigns. Not quite reviews nor campaign plans, I just plan to ramble about cool stuff I’ve read and maybe try to churn new ideas for RPGs.
I start the series with my favorite author.
I’ve long been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s work. To this date, his Snow Crash and Age of Diamonds novels are, by far, my favorite Sci-Fi stories . I’ve read Snow Crash every two years since it’s first printing as a paperback and I’ve read the Diamond Age 3 times already and I’m starting to feel the pull to read it again.
Do note that Stephenson, much like the early work of William Gibson, assumes his readers are expert in the field he writes about… or are goddamn geniuses! This made me throw a few of his books away in disgust!
FYI: Feel free to skip any long Data Dump you can’t fathom, chances are its not necessary for the story. I ended up doing it for his 3 book Baroque cycle!
So here’s a quick summary of each story and sample of the key tropes I got from each book:
Summary:
A jerkish ecological militant, bordering on eco-terrorism, is the chemical equivalent of a film noir Detective. He gets caught in a conspiracy-level ploy that leads to the discovery of massive amounts of toxic wastes being released in his city’s Boston’s water.
Selected Tropes:
The well meaning jerk: The main character is one monumental asshole and he knows it.
The evil corporation: There’s always one, willing to pitiful things like client safety and future growth for some thing more important like this semeter’s bottomline
The cool boat: Zodiac boats! Weee! Not as cool now, but still the Eco-Guerrila vehicle of choice!
RPG nuggets:
I think that the well meaning Jerk NPC is a great way of modeling a modern day Magnificent Bastard. As usual, be careful not to piss your PCs too much (unless you want them to). This NPC model lives to annoy PC and motivate them through negative reinforcement.
Eco-terrorism is going to be a subject whose popularity will likely rise in the current global polarizing of opinions and stances. This makes it an interesting approach to explore, especially if you go at it cross genre.
- Fantasy: What if the rising use of Magitek had noticeable, yet still debatable ecological impact on the world? Final Fantasy VII’s initial plot hook IIRC.
- Horror: What if rising global pollution was a condition for summoning the Great Old Ones as they can’t survive if the Ocean is not polluted enough? Maybe those crazy cultists that blew up 5 stolen nukes under Bikini Atol are on to something.
Snow CrashSummary: TV Tropes writes it up better than I ever could.
The tale of a Mafia-backed badass pizza delivery guy who teams up with a badass courier in a Post Cyber Punk disincorporated USA to fight “Snow Crash” – a computer virus for the brain. Oh, and there’s a badass biker with glass knives and a nuclear bomb strapped to his motorbike, too.
This book is pure applied Rule of Cool.
Selected Tropes
Bad Ass characters and villains: This book is bursting at the seems with characters who are scary strong.
Cool Car and Boat (see a theme here?): The Deliverator is a high tech military grade car for… delivering pizzas. And part of the action of the book takes place on an Aircraft Carrier turned into a floating refugee city.
Big Fraking Gun: “Portable”-nuclear-powered-depleted-uranium-needle-shooting Gatling Gun… ’nuff said! It’s called “Reason” and you should listen to it.
The Plucky girl: A “I don’t take crap from nobody” 15 year old sketboard courrier girl. She somehow managed to also show up in a William Gibson novel… fancy that!
Serious Business: Your pizza in 30 minutes, or the delivery boy murdered free!
As I said, if you are a geek, like cyberpunk and haven’t read Snow Crash, go get it now!
RPG Nugget
I really like the concept of brain hacking. There’s something sinister and powerful behind that idea. You can easily build a whole campaign, regardless of genres, around an Evil Overlord (corporate or classic) going around and making zombies of the average population without having to invoke complicated rituals that PCs can interrupt by dropping a d20 on it.
Also, having tried it, making your characters Bad Asses in the eyes of ‘the average’ NPC makes for an Epic feeling in your game. Yes the bad guy waiting for you outside the bar can rip cars in half. However, while you are in that bar, the waitress is impressed with YOU.
I also really like the concept of the frail looking, Waif-fu mastering, teenaged NPC. So much so that my players now automatically assume that any underaged NPC I introduce in my games are automatically some sort of Avatar for a god of Battle or a guidance system for an Orbital laser cannon.
Then, there’s something to be said to let PCs handle an experimental, exceedingly deadly weapon and then throw something equally stupid cool at them for the weapon to be used. I mean, if you are going to be giving them a Wand of Nuking with four charges left, I suggest that you send them a squadron of flying Titanium Elemental Bombers!
Finally, that ‘serious business’ part, makes for such a great tyrannical, Lawful Evil, setting spark.
Anyone else got ideas from these two books?
Afterschool Trope Special: Fill Up the Nighmare Mobile
What, two Trope posts in the same week?
Why not? It’s been ages since I wrote any of them, and this is Halloween after all.
With a satisfying ‘thunk’ Tragak the barbarian sheared the Orc Shaman’s head, sending it flying in the room’s dank, dark corner. As he was looting the body, he failed to notice the eight spindly spider legs bursting out of the shaman’s brain case and 2 huge mandibles pop out of the head’s eye sockets in a jet of aqueous gunk. Tragak was in for a surprise.
A lot has been written about Horror RPGs and how to host a scary game. The word out is that it’s not easy scaring players, even less easy to scare PCs without coercion.
Well I decided to add my voice to the echo chamber by digging in the deepest wells of my depraved soul to come up with some seriously troubling imagery.
And what better way to look for new ways to scare the guts out of your players than looking at one Horror Trope I find intriguing and troubling:
A catch-all term describing stuff in popular culture that gave us nightmares, whether they meant to or not.
To really be effective Nightmare Fuel, as our examples show, you’ll need something that was meant to either amuse, entertain, or be only slightly scary to the audience. In execution, they’re so trauma-inducing that they may cause even adults to void themselves in terror.
When the effect is 100% intentional, the trope becomes Unleaded.
Take an aspect that defines your favorite Roleplaying game but push it too far and see the result. Go for out of this world creepiness that will make your players skin crawl.
Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #1
The PCs are asked to recover a legendary suit of plate mail armour renowned to be nearly weightless and make it’s wearer nigh invulnerable. As the player race to recover the item against a recurring villain, they arrive just too late and see him wearing it.
During the ensuing fight, the villain is hard to hit and the armour lashes out with tentacle-like metal spikes whenever it is hit. However, as soon as the villain becomes bloodied/badly wounded, the tentacle dig in the Villain’s wounds and the armour starts flowing inside the wearer’s body!
Screaming inhumanly, the villain’s organs burst out from all sides as the armour fuses with his wearer’s muscles and Bones, becoming a dread construct of gore and Steel, ready to unleash its true potential.
Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #2
While eating at the Inn and waiting for the next dancing plot point to show up. the PCs hear disgustingly wet popping sounds all around them. Looking up from their mutton, they notice that all other customers are turning inside out, exposing their insides and rising as freakishly bloodied and chunky zombies… Then have the Innkeeper’s family burst out of the kitchen, fangs-a-showing, telling the PCs that ‘this meal is on the House’
Modern Nightmare fuel #1
A lone, very anxious 6 year old is running scared and crying in the streets of your campaign’s metropolis. Whenever people stop to help her and look her in the eyes, she screams in fear as they turn into grotesquely inflated fanged psychotic clowns!
The circus is in town, and the only way to stop it is to wake the sleepwalking girl, gently…
Modern Nightmare Fuel #2
On a dark night under the shadow of some ancient evil, a gun fight erupts between the PCs and a street Gang. An inordinate amount of screaming and cries of pain are heard throughout the fight. Investigating leads to the gruesome discovery that all bullets are alive and doing all the screaming, drowning in blood and suffocating in the bodies of the dead people…
Further investigation leads to the discovery that a twisted priest of chaos has trapped the souls of countless innocents into ammunition and is engineering gang violence to sacrifice all these souls to bring about Chaosocalypse.
Modern Nightmare Fuel #3
One name, The Corinthian
Fear is in your head
Horror roleplaying is about atmosphere, setting, mood and description. Don’t try to scare PCs, go for the players. Give them the creepiest WTF moments you think they can handle… and the ask them how their characters react.
Therein lies you next drum of nightmare fuel that will leave your players creeped out long after the game.
Happy Halloween.
Credits: Robin Stacey (Ragz), Sandman comics (The Corinthian)
Afterschool Trope Post: Holy Super Heroic Fantasy Batman!
This month, I am the custodian of the RPGbloggers Monthly Carnival which is about Super Heroes.
I thought it would be a perfect occasion to do a new Trope post about mixing some Super Heroes in my D&D Kool Aid!
Trope: A narrative shortcut taken in a story that the audience will recognize and have expectations about. See this site if you have never heard about them.
Some of the critics on D&D 4e revolve around the fact that the PCs are too heroic and too competent, robbing the genre of its historical Zero to Hero vibe. That’s a perfectly valid critic and is part of the Old School revival we see on the net.
My stance on this is to embrace the new design philosophies and turn the volume to 11.
By default, D&D 4e is be about:
- Exceptional Heroes equipped with powers few mortals share
- A world filled with Evil and Danger
- Combat in dynamic and challenging environments
- Teamwork to surmount difficult odds
I don’t know about you but that really does sound familiar…
A series where the main character has powers and/or abilities that set him aside from other people. Usually (unless he’s Not Wearing Tights) he is a costumed do-gooder with a colorful outfit (which likely sports a Chest Insignia), a Secret Identity and often unusual and useful superpowers or equipment (Snip)
Sometimes the show focuses on a team or other grouping of powered individuals.
So basically, most of the work has been already done to make a D&D 4e campaign into a fusion of Fantasy Super Heroes. Let’s explore this a bit:
Powers and Origins
That one is the easiest. All D&D classes come packed with powers who are derived from a specific Power Source. You can therefore tweak the fluff behind each source to make it more inline with Super Powers.
Martial Power Source: PCs are Batman-style super normals. They learned the secrets of killing people with dull spoons and 3 headed flails through secret Monastic Orders and long lost martial lore. You need to describe moves with silly Anime names like ‘Avalanche of Monkey Thunder’ (Thanks Bobzilla) and ‘Wall of Raging Steel Elephants’.
Divine Power Source: Fearless Leaders, these characters can call both destruction and healing from the Powers of the Planes. From the Tankish Paladin to the Buffing Cleric you need to play these guys like Avatars of Divine Powers, exuding Glowing Holy Energies like a Leaking Plutonium Reactor Core.
Arcane Power Source: The Blasters of the campaign. These guys laugh at the rigidity of physical laws. Need a light? Ding, here’s one! Need these mooks to be fried? Boom there it is!. Oh noes, I’m being cornered by orcs! Poof! Suckers, I’m over here now!
If I was to make a Super Arcanist, I’d make him into a Teleporting Warlock and I’d make him as Chatty as Spiderman
In fact, a key point of doing a Super Fantasy game is to encourage players to come up with an origins story to explain, in their own ways, how they got thier powers. It would also increase the feel of the story to have players come up with reasons why they would learn new powers upon leveling up. They can visit their old mentors, study old scrolls during adventuring or practice new moves during rest periods.
Costume and Secret Identity
I find it hard to imagine why a Fantasy Hero would want his identity to remain a secret. It is however one of the key difference between the genres (apart from the whole medieval vs Modern theme of course).
Here’s how I’d envision it:
The world has fallen through dark times, hordes of monsters and marauding barbarians have overtaken the old kingdom and the self-contained Free City is the only standing bastion of safety. This safety has been brought at the cost of ever increasing power to the civic leaders and severe limitations on freedom.
“We control your life so that others don’t try to take it from you!”
Much like Feudal Japan, all non military citizen are prevented from bearing arms and all must toil in the City’s Gardens, merchant Navies and Services under the watchful eyes of the the City’s Blackcloaks, the Secret Police arm of the government.
Enter the PCs. They have learned thier (Illegal) powers in secret and are motivated to fight both the encroaching danger of the wilderness but also the choking tyranny of a state that has had power for too long and now clings to it.
Being all citizens of the city, with family and loved ones, they must hide thier identities to perform thier deeds, for fear of reprisal.
Of course, at a certain point they become stronger than all Civic Forces and need to decide how to restore freedom and still protect the city… Fun Times!
Alternative to Secret Identities
Have all PCs be part of an adventuring group, complete with tabards and a name.
Then thier costumed identity makes them more recognizable and more likely to be invited by the leaders of your campaign world for request of help. It becomes a marketing thing to wear the Blue Cloaks or to proudly wear the Tabard of the Order of The Soup Bowl… don’t laugh, its a very very respected all Halfling adventuring group.
Campaign Models
One thing a Super Heroic Fantasy campaign does not do very well is ‘Kill them and take their stuff’.
Super Heroics is about saving people, facing world-destroying threats and dealing with one’s inner vulnerabilities, making the genre perfect for Psychodrama seeking players.
The campaign should be under the theme of our heroes being asked for help by different organization to face dangers no average mortals can deal with. That model can then be made more complex by having each organization’s agenda become incompatible with other’s and have the PCs find out how they are being used and abused.
So here’s a few campaign ideas:
PCs are Rangers (in the Tolkien sense) protecting a region from encroaching hordes of baddies… and a rift to both the Abyss and Hell opened and things are pouring out… and fighting each other!
There’s a crazy Wizard-Alchemist that developed a serum to “unlock” to true potential. By a stroke of sheer luck he managed to do one ‘good’ batch. The PCs (all orphans) were exposed to developping their current power. Since, the mad man has been trying to re-create his early success but has only managed to create and release psychotically savage monsters in the city. The PCs must trace him back in the depth of the dungeons under the city and put a stop to his activities.
Magic Items as Powers
Since money more or less becomes irrelevant in such a campaign, I suggest that Magic Items (the main reason to keep track of money in 4e) be unavailable for purchase per say. Instead have Magic items become part of the PCs’s Powers as Super Equipment! Then have this crazy allied gadgeteering Gnome or Dwarf NPC make Magic Items out of whatever pieces of strange doohickeys the PCs find in their quests.
So Magic Items then become the Bat-gadgets of our heroes.
of course, PCs will still find magic items in their quests, but then they players will need to work together to weave them in thier stories.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to don my Flanged Plate mail and Full Face visor for I must foil the latest plans of the Evil Eye, Mastermind Beholder of the Underworld and his Death Gnoll Minions!
What more? Check Out Ninetail’s take on the same subject!
Credit: Nice One Entertainment (Image)
Afterschool Tropes Special: What's That Fridge Doing at the Table?
I’ve decided to rename my trope series because the posts feel like I’m writing a new season. I’m also experimenting with slightly different formats of trope posts. It remains to be seen if I’ll be jumping the shark or making the series grow a beard.
Have you ever had the experience, at school, in your families or at work of throwing out a clerverish expression and slowly seeing that expression take root and start being used by others?
While writing my Worldwide D&D Gameday post, I mentioned an unexplained plot element that could lead to a “WTF?” moment if players stopped and though about it.
I referred to this as a Fridge Logic moment.
I’ve since then seen the expression adopted by a few readers and bloggers and I was told that it also crept up on Enworld.
Now I didn’t create the expression, it’s actually part of the TV Tropes Wiki (and an industry term). However, since it seems to be making its way in our collective RPG subconscious, I thought I’d discuss it and ponder how to use it (or ignore it) in your RPG sessions.
Half an hour after the show is over, J. Random Viewer is staring into his refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that his six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to him to wonder how in the hell Sydney Bristow (Chatty: from the Alias TV Show) went from Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, then to LA, all within 24 hours.
It hadn’t bothered him during the show. It wasn’t until he discovered he was running short of beer that it became an issue.
So Fridge Logic isn’t a trope per say. It’s more like a safety net on which writers can afford to thin (or ignore) a plot element and not break the viewer’s suspension of disbelief during the show.
Fridge Logic has been the writer’s-room term for these little internal-consistency issues for a good while, as in “Don’t sweat the fridge logic, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. We’ve only got 20 minutes left to work in three costume changes, a foreign language, and a weird wig.” The phrase is often attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, who referred to the delayed recognition of a Plot Hole as “the refrigerator moment.”
Carefully avoiding/subverting Fridge Logic events is what we have started to see in what I like to call ‘cleverly written shows’ like Lost, Heroes and Battlestar Gallactica (well, the good parts thereof).
Thing is, as a Game Masters (GM), we too have way too many fish to fry. We usually can’t afford to prevent such refrigerator moments. While some GM will try to do exactly that, such careful writing comes at a cost of:
- Taking time from prepping more scenes (or more complex/exciting ones)
- Favoring logic/verisimilitude (note my not using the term realism here) over excitement/fun
- Squelching cool ideas because “there’s no way this can fit in the story!”
In my very first trope post on the Rule of Cool, I mentioned that…
…my efforts as a DM should not so much be on far-reaching World Building and tight nitpicking-proof plot lines and such. I should go all out for encounters and role playing that will swamp my players in coolness
I still very much believe that you should not spend too much time trying to unify every single plot hooks and thread in your campaign.
What you don’t want is for your players to have time to ponder fridge logic during the game either because pacing is too slow or because you have been sloppy and left a gaping/railroading plot hole for all to see.
As a Dungeon Master (DM), you want to grip your players in an exciting storyline, amazing action scene or high-flying stunt-ridden combat. You should just go with the flow of where your gut feeling leads you and do whatever you feel like to entertain the players.
If you liberally use the Rule of Cool both in creating your adventure scenes and let your players invoke the same rule when they get creative, any fridge moment you let through won’t be picked up on…
Here’s a little GM secret: Since players are at the frontline of your adventure/story and not a detached audience, they most probably will be too focused on their somewhat selfish perception of the game to tug at any loose threads.
If they liked the game and had fun climbing over that Gargantuan Colossus in the Caves of Woe, chances are they’ll recall the mind-bogglingly crazy stunts they pulled. They probably won’t stop and wonder how the hell a 90′ walking fortress got into the dungeon in the 1st place.
So don’t fight the Fridge Logic, embrace it!
In fact, if a player does mention that there’s something fishy about how that Gelatinous Cube could acquire sentience and ally itself with the Lawful Good Illithid Barbarian, put on your sliest look and wink.
If the player insists, take a note and start planning a follow-up plot arc where you explore how this came to be. If no-one bats an eye, feel free to ignore it for more promising threads.
They say that constraints fosters creativity, I tend to agree.
In fact sometimes you will have to fill a hole discovered during one of your player’s refrigerator moments and discover a series of plot ideas that will lead your campaign to a memorable series of adventures.
Now let’s have a look at another Refrigerator-themed ‘viewer reaction’ that I’ve seen happen a lot online in the last few weeks.
First impressions are really important. They build relationships and opinions, and you will wish you could do it over again.
Yet, there are times when your opinion of someone or something might change. It could be upon receiving additional information, learning the alternate opinion of someone else, or simply that you have grown up just a little.
Fridge Brilliance is the idea of gaining a new respect for something that you initially hate. One night, as you get up for a midnight snack, you open the refrigerator door and the light dawns on you, “This is the real purpose behind this plot!”
With the advent of D&D 4e, a lot of emotionally charged, often negative posts have been written on it.
Now I’m not going to launch in another “4e is teh Awesomez” post as I’ve done enough of those lately, but suffice it to say that I have been reading a lot of Fridge Brilliance posts about that game lately.
Take about any random RPG blog and look in its archive (including this one). You’ll almost invariably see a neutral to negative series of post prior to the release. Then, from the moment the PDFs got leaked in early June and especially after people got to try it you start seeing a significant shift in opinion.
Most spectacular of those is Robin Stacey’s (aka Greywulf) 170 degrees turn on it (he dislikes the parts of the PHB like I do the DMG).
My take home message? If you can, give the game a try, from either the player’s seat or the DM (they are two different beasts).
What’s that? How could we use Fridge Brilliance in a RPG game? You mean gushing about 4e is not enough anymore? Awwww…
Let’s say you want to sell your group on another RPG (any game). Chances are you’ll have someone (or more that one) opposed and being vocal about it. Take the time to note the players’ concerns and issues with the new game (be they factual or irrational). Also take the time to note what kind of player type that person is.
In the course of discussion, try to get the player to agree, gracefully and in good faith, to giving the game a one session try. (If he/she won’t, don’t bother).
Now check if the proposed system can accommodate your player’s type and choose/create an adventure that will address his concerns/issues.
I believe that resistance to change exists because our perceptions of something are deeply set in our emotional centers. Rational discourse can eventually overcome it, but fighting fire with fire and using emotions is a almost always more efficient.
If you focus on your players’ needs (including the less than enthusiastic ones) and give them an emotionally satisfying session, it’s quite possible that a Fridge Brilliance moment will occur and the new game will be adopted.
It’s a very tall order, but if you really want to GM that new game, seeking a gut-response Fridge Brilliance moment in your change resistant players is the best path to achieving your goal.
Anyone has had positive experiences teaching a new game in the face of active/passive resistance? What were your strategies?
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