Chatty’s Mailbox: Playing Castle Death for First Timers
This week, reader Franky B sent me an email about my Castle Death RPG. I found that publishing it and my answer would make for a great Friday post.
Here’s the email, paraphrased from French:
I love your articles, especially those where you share your game sessions. Your last series on Castle Death blew my mind. I’m the father of a soon-to-be 10 daughter and I think that she would love to play this kind of game with me.
Never having been a Game Master, I’m not sure I’d be able to run the game with just a blank piece of paper and a D6. Do you have any kits, books, maps or something similar to suggest that could help me jump start things? Since this would be a first experience, I feel it has to be very cool, or chances are it will be the only time. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty on Creativity: Muting the Judge and the What If Exercise.
Creativity Away From the Judge
Creativity is a strange, untamed beast. The mental process to generate ideas is a fickle one. I agree with author Stephen King when he says, in his essay “On Writing,” that ideas are not created but rather recognized and combined in one’s mind. Ideas are as much about opportunity (being receptive and available) as they are about the willingness to use them creatively.
The obstacles that people have when trying to come up with ideas are many and covering them would go beyond the scope of this blog post. In the technical/scientific/geek circles I travel in though, I would probably say that the greatest idea killer is “The Judge,”* that state of mind where ideas get discarded before being given a fair amount of consideration.
Ideas have no practical values, they are just glimpses of possibilities, most of which eventually get discarded. The problem with that is that judging ideas takes a lot of “brain space”, the same space that you need to generate ideas in the first place. In essence, people who evaluate and discard ideas as they are presented to them create a creative chokepoint that slows, and often kills the creative process.
Ideas are easy for me. I like to think it is because I can stem my internal judging process until after the point where I’ve had enough time to jot down enough ideas to start moving on to the next creative stage. Also, like many other things in my life, I’ve tried to make a game out of my creative process to motivate me to create more.
My favourite one remains the “What If” game. I’ve discussed it a few times before but I thought it would be fun to explore it in more detail here. [Read the rest of this article]
Collateral Damage #0: The Making of a New (Marvel RPG) Series
I have a gaming group that meets monthly on Sundays. It is composed of my close friends Yan, Franky, (Ubisoft) Alex and PM.
Not too long ago, they approached me to let me know they wanted to go back to classic campaigns. We spent most of the last 2 years playing one-shots of mini-campaigns of various game systems. When I asked what game they’d like to tackle, the answer was unequivocal: Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. They wanted to play with heroes they’d make from scratch and participate in home brewed adventures.
This request brought quite an interesting challenge for em. You see, the Marvel game is principally presented to play out specific events set in the Marvel Universe using pre-established heroes. These events will be based on published plot arcs like the upcoming Civil War or Age of Apocalypse. The events will mix events that occurred in the official storyline with ”what if” elements where players make decisions that may send the story in directions not covered by the original stories.
Thus, what my players requested was not something that I felt entirely comfortable doing right off the bat. Thankfully, I wasn’t without options. The basic rules provide plenty of guidance to make/adapt characters and create your own adventures. But I wasn’t sure I could pull off what they expected: a structured campaign based on my own ideas and my (still) limited knowledge of the Marvel Universe.
(Game designer aside: With over 70 years of history and 9000 characters, I’m not ever going to be a Marvel expert. I joined the team as a Game Designer and as the token “13 y.o boy who played FASERIP“)
Then it dawned on me, I have the tools I need. All those different game systems I’ve been playing these last 2 years give me a lot of options. much like the stuff that Dave and I blogged about here. The Marvel system itself doesn’t inhibit telling my own stories.
Thus I hatched the following strategy to prepare my first RPG campaign in over year.
Character Generation
First, we’d take a whole session making characters. The game provides clear guidelines to create/adapt your own hero but they do require a certain level of rules mastery to get exactly what you want. We spent a few hours individually then together at the table picking Distinctions (personality traits and catchphrases players), Specialties (skills), Power Sets and, more importantly, Special Effects (ways to use powers that bend the rules of the game, like Captain America’s area attack). Getting special effects right was what took us the longest as we wanted to go beyond those found in the book and tweak/create effects that went perfectly well with each hero’s powerset.
We ended up with the following four characters:
Nightcrawler (Franky): Using the available rules, we were able to create a faithful rendition of our favourite swashbuckling mutant teleporter. We established that the character was not being held to canon unless Franky felt it was fun and didn’t constrain his creativity.
The One Man Army (Yan): Inspired by Multiple Man, the self-duplicating mutant seen in X-Men 3 (and X-Factor), He’s a wisecracking troublemaking ex-con who’s idea of problem solving is throwing more manpower at it until the problem vanished under a pile of clones.
The Great Gregory (PM): Inspired by Nick Cage’s character in Next, Gregory is a jaded low-end stage magician and casino cheat with the ability to see one minute into his future. I must say that making a precognitive character was quite a challenge but as you’ll see in Issue #1, the game’s engine can support it much better than I expected.
Tsunami (Alex): A water elemental-like creature that looks like a Japanese idoru. Ami Tsun used to be a physicist who got caught in the Fukushima nuclear reactor in last year’s catastrophe. She got caught in one of the flooded reactors and developped Water Controlling powers.
Player Generated Setting Elements
In order to have something upon which to build our campaign world, I suggested an overarching setting based on the Marvel Universe. Using my recent research for the upcoming Civil War event books, I proposed that the players could be one of the federally-backed supers teams assigned to a specific American state (very loosely based on Marvel’s Fifty State Initiative). They agreed and we chose California.
Borrowing from my own “party generation template” and Dave’s excellent Gammarizer, I asked each player to come up with one setting element (places, recent events and minor characters) linking their character to the setting. Here’s what we came up with.
Sharon S.: S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and former actress. She was to act as the team’s liaison to her organization.
Tow-Wing’s Garage and Halal Fried Noodles: The One Man Army’s work place. I apologize if you find the name culturally offensive, but Yan’s PC is named “Mohammed Chang” a Muslim born from a Sino-Arab union. We all assumed that the business was named by a socially incompetent person… Which kinda fits TOMA to a T.
Hiroito Takashima: A crackpot scientist conspiracy theorist (or is it terrorist?) obsessed with the origins and powers of Tsunami. He has been diverting his own research grants into tracking her to America.
Thomas Redgrave: A Paranoid Casino Security Consultant who once caught Gregory slipping from his usually disciplined casino cheating routine (win slowly and quit before being noticed). He lost many jobs in various Las Vegas casinos trying to convince people of Gregory’s threat. The man is on a vendetta.
Father O’Reilly: Kurt’s Irish confessor and local community leader. Recovered alcoholic, of course.
Le Cirque: A seedy ripoff of Le Cirque du Soleil featuring a pool and scantily clad acrobats. Tsunami works the show’s controls and mechanical sharks. Yes, you read that right.
The Circus Act: Nightcrawler makes occasional guest appearances at the circus in a cheap Houdini act featuring an iron coffin covered in chains, dunked in a pool and stabbed by sword-wielding acrobats. Of course, when that happens, Kurt is safely reading magazines in his dressing room.
Your Mutant Past Will Bite/Help You Someday: In TOMA’s recent past, he dealt with Magneto and Mystique in some undefined way. There’s a good chance they’ll be back to follow up on that.
This setting element brought another one that Franky didn’t want to assume initially but he chose to go with Canon.
Nightcrawler’s Parents: As established, Kurt was born of Mystique and Azazel.
That’s so much material to pick from to create a game.
Milestones
The last element that we needed to establish before the game started was to give character milestones (the game’s experience system based on rewarding specific actions). According to the game, players get to choose 2 from an established list of event or character specific milestones. We took the time to generate one character-specific milestone per hero, agreeing to make setting specific ones in later sessions. I won’t go into specifics as they”ll likely change with time but here’s a summary of each.
TOMA: Dealing with his criminal past. Bring criminals to justice and get his record clean.
Nightcrawler: Being a devout catholic. Putting himself at great risk or even exposing himself in order to save ordinary people. Possibly becoming a priest even.
The Great Gregory: Deal with his boredom by choosing ways of putting his allies in trouble and letting villains escape for a later confrontation. Might even go as far as putting a friend or himself in mortal danger.
Tsunami (To be further defined): Retain her link to humanity or chose to forgo humanity altogether.
Armed with all these, I was totally ready to start a campaign. And let me tell you, it started with a BANG!
Up Next, Issue #1: Electric Ninja Boogaloo!
Instant Dungeon Crawling, The Formula and the Setup
Earlier last fall I was at the New York Comic Con as a volunteer DM for Wizards of the Coast. I asked to be assigned to the “Learn D&D” activity. The organizers asked me to provide an improvised adventure using the material available in the D&D Red Box (the 2010 version) rather than play the adventure found in the box.
I played 3 such games and they each were incredibly entertaining. I recounted one of them here.
In the last game I played, I wanted to create a dungeon crawling experience with absolute minimal prepping in advance. More importantly however, I wanted to be able to play without floundering for ideas whilst in the middle of running the game. As I pondered my options, I came up with a formula for running a quick 2 hour game. I’m sharing this with you because I think you might find it useful.
I started with the Red Box , including the dungeon battlemap packaged with the game. I then took a fistfull of glass beads (which I dubbed “treasure tokens”) and wrote the following table:
Roll a d10
1-2 Empty Room, Treasure out in open
3-4 Trap
5-6 Puzzle
7-0 Monster
The idea was to have the treasure beads distributed in various rooms of the dungeon and roll on the table whenever the party entered one such room. I’d make up an encounter based on the result using nothing but the list of monsters in the Red Box’s DM’s booklet and the mini-Rule 42 found on the booklet’s last page (the DC for level 1 adventurers and a damage chart for hazards). If I rolled “monster” I’d make a level 1 encounter on the spot based on what made most sense or was cool.
With only a 40% chance to face monsters (combat not being the only outcome even then), I thought this distribution to be ideal for fostering exploration and creating the classic “poke with a stick” experimentation that I fondly remembered of my early D&D games as a tweenager.
Turns out I was right…
Armed with these, I got a group of 4 players and we created the setting for the game by having them answer these questions:
You are adventurers that banded together recently. Tell me what your last adventure was about. More specifically, tell me one good thing that happened to you and one bad thing that requires you to return adventuring in dungeons.
The wizard player (sensing an exploit) said “I found a very powerful staff”
I answered “Ha! Sure, no problem… But since this is a one shot level 1 game, please work in your ‘bad’ stuff how you lost that staff… even if only temporarily.”
The Dwarven Slayer piped in: “I know! I spent all of the party’s loot from our last adventure on ale and whores… I even pawned the wizard’s staff! I’m so sorry guys, I’ll make it up to you!”
Everybody was laughing their heads off, the game was already a great success.
Chatty: Okay then, well the dwarf knows this Goblin “Bookie” called Groo that specializes in booking high risk, high paying, no-questions-asked forays into vaults, catacombs and other subterranean locales in exchange for a very fair share of the spoils.
Dwarf: Oh yeah, he’s the one who spotted me the money for the staff.
Drow Ranger: You are so not leaving our eyesight, ever again!
Dwarf: Oh come on, I told you I’d waive my part of the treasure until I paid you all off!
(The guy was so funny…)
Chatty: Okay so Groo tells you that the thieve’s guild has had one of its minor vaults run over by monsters from the Underdark and were ready to sign off the valuables stored as a “business loss”. Groo bought back the “content” of the vault at 1 silver piece to the gold crown and wants you to recover as much from it as you can… he promises to let you keep 50% of whatever you recover.
I pulled out the Red Box’s Dungeon map and handed out a pair of glass beads to every player.
Chatty: Okay each of these beads represents a small generic treasure pile whose worth you’ll evaluate once you leave the dungeon. You’ll alternate turns placing these tokens onto the dungeon map, representing in what room treasure can be found. Whenever you enter a room with one of those beads, I’ll play on my little table here to see what you meet, it won’t necessarily be monsters.
The players started placing the beads commenting on some of the features appearing on the map, like braziers, pools and ominous runes on the floor. It reminded me that these were all new players or players who hadn’t played in decades. It dawned on me that I had a very important job here: present one of my favourite games to these players so they could taste how awesome playing D&D is.
Chatty: Okay, before we start, here’s one last thing about the beads. Since they are generic treasure, it’s possible that they could be useful for you in a given situation. So at anytime that you need a particular tool or object, you can “spend” a token and tell me “Oh but I have this doohickey that’s great for disarming traps” or “Oh look, here’s the key to that locked door” or better yet “Hey guys, what does a “healing potion” do?”
They loved it.
In hindsight, they mostly used them as healing potions as things got HARD, but I love this mechanic and will use it for all the “unattributed treasure parcel” I keep struggling with to this day.
The game was a huge success, Up next, I’ll share the highlights of the game. It turned out to be among my great D&D games and certainly one of my most successful convention games ever.
Chatty’s Adventure Scaffold #1 : Words with Fiends
As some of you may know, I’ve spent the last few weeks working preparing my latest batch of seminars and writing freelance assignments. Last March, I sent off a 4e article for Kobold Quarterly (to be published in the Summer issue). I’ve since been working on two big projects for Margaret Weis Productions (publishers of the Leverage RPG among many other licensed RPGs).
One such project is the upcoming Dragon Brigade RPG, a Swashbuckling game in a world of airships, dragons, intrigue, and magic . The other project is a series of hacks destined to get people who already own the Leverage or Smallville RPG books, to play alternate themes or with new options.
Just like when Wil Wheaton works on a TV series and can’t talk about it, there’s a ton of things I’d like to share with you that I can’t right now (one of the infuriating aspects of freelance writing for a blogger). My need to blog is driving me nuts and I feel the strongest urge to blog about what I’ve been doing lately… and I know that very few people want to read about my “Writing effective Standard Operating Procedures” seminar.
So here’s a little something something related to my working in the freelance cave this last month or so.
In one such project, I came up with a few tools to help me playtest the material I wrote. I can’t share the tools outright but I can surely discuss the new form my prep session output has taken, which I dubbed “the adventure scaffold”.
What’s this you ask? Well have a look, it’s better than 500 words of explanation.
Words with Fiends
Quest Summary: One of the heroes’ older brother, a crippled ex-adventurer, obsessed with finding the one responsible for slaughtering his old adventuring party, comes up to the party with a solid lead to the killer who’s apparently working some sort of dark ritual hidden somewhere in a natural cave formation near a mining port city.
The crippled brother wants revenge and asks the party to exact it. However, the villain is not quite what the party expects. He’s a damned soul sent back from the infernal planes with an impossible diabolical mission. But the soul is quite the hustler and found a loophole to achieve its goals…
The Patron: Family/Ally
An older, handicapped brother comes to one of the heroes, convinced he’s finally tracked the man that killed most of his adventuring buddies 10 years ago. He implores his sibling’s help.
The Quest: Red Herring + Stop the Villain’s Plan
Exact vengeance on the villain. The Dark Lord is up to something involving dark elves and people from the city disappearing into the Mines. Find what he’s up to and stop it, making him aware who sent the heroes (a red herring, see The Dungeon’s Secret).
The Dungeon: A natural cave formation
The various mines surrounding the port city are connected to natural sea caves that pepper the rising cliffs forming the city’s natural harbour. The caves go deep, reaching the Underworld, where a dark elven outpost lies, guarding the way to one of their undercities.
The Dungeon’s Secret: I am NOT your Father!
The Hell-bred Dark Lord’s body is that of the sibling’s party killer… but it’s just the shell of a low-grade villain who signed away his soul and lost it while his body was still useful. The Dark Lord, a damned soul, got a reprieve to return from Hell in this body in exchange for turning in souls at an impossible rate… which the Dark Lord has managed to deliver so far.
The Lord has NO idea who was the person whose body he now occupies.
The Main Villain: Dark Lord
A reincarnated damned soul, living in the body of the ex-villain who killed the brother’s adventuring party. A very powerful infernal being, with one wing, horns, claws, Hellfire and all.
Features: Soulburning; Great sword; Soulforged armour; Hellfire blasts; “I’m smarter than everyone”; Greedy; Deadly afraid of getting caught
Agents: Devilish Thugs and Dark Elf Scoundrels (see below)
Minions: Imps and lot’s of them!
The Villain’s Plan: Harvest a Resource + Perform a Dark Ritual
The Dark Lord harvests souls from surrounding humanoids by having them mind-controlled and sign faustian deals with devils… a few hours before they die.
FACTIONS
Faction #1: Goblin Warren, Outlook/Plan: Seeking
Goblins are among those being “stolen” by the Mind Parasites the Dark Lord uses (see below). Goblin elders are aware of the Dark Lord’s presence and suspect he’s behind the disappearances, but are afraid of confronting him.
Goblin Hunters: Spears and Shortbows
Goblin Witch Mother Crone: “I Curse You”
Faction #2: Infernal Lawyers, Outlook/Plan: Trading
A Group of devils are present in the dungeon, happily drafting and signing up very lucrative faustian pacts with appallingly short lived humanoids. They are unaware (and uncaring) of the loophole the Dark Lord is using.
Infernal Lawyers: “What we do is legal”; “Is the Paperwork in order?”
Infernal Assistants: “This Book of Law is Heavy!” “Right away boss”
Faction #3: Psychic Worms, Outlook/Plan: Trading + Allied With Main Villain
A race of physically weak sentient parasitic worm-like creatures (2” in length, mouth like Carrion Crawler, very slow) that feed on brains. They’ve entered a bargain with the Dark Lord. The Lord provides relative safe transport to defenseless “hosts”, the Worms burrow in the hosts’s spines, take control of the bodies and return to the Cave where they sign away their hosts’ souls shortly before consuming their brains.
Dark Lord: It’s the perfect symbiotic deal!
Psychic Worms: Hidden; Psychic Blast; Psychic Explosion (kills the worm); physically weak
Faction #4 : Dark Elves
Outlook/Plan: Seeking
Dark Elven Scoundrel are paid by the Dark Lord to seek out and deliver canisters of mind worms into the vicinity of likely targets. They use the gold and gem to finance a future excursion/invasion on the surface.
Dark Elf Scoundrel: Sneaky; Poisoned Weapons; Infravision; “We Hate elves”
Faction #5: Battered Infernal Auditor
Outlook/Plan: Hiding
An infernal auditor and his retinue of agents were on the trail of the Dark Lord’s scheme, trying to catch him red handed. However, the auditors were bushwhacked by the Hunter Construct (See Wandering Threat below) and barely survived. They are hiding from it, trying to find a way to achieve their objective.
The Auditor: Red Pen of Doom; ” Just one more question”; Badly wounded
Repo Devils: Grabbing Claws; lack of imagination; Badly wounded
Wandering Threat:Crafty Beast
The Discordian Hunter Construct
Sensing a significant infernal disturbance affecting the multiverse’s balance, the Discordian Council has sent a Hunter Construct to seek and destroy it. So far the construct hit the auditors but has managed to miss of the faustian lawyers who are protected by the Dark Lord’s forces.
The Discordian Hunter Construct: relentless; Crushing claws; Single Minded; Inflexible programming
How to play this Adventure
As you can see, the “Scaffold” makes no mention of maps, scenes, encounters, treasures or anything. Yet, I find it easily adapted to any fantasy RPG. By adding stats for the Villain, its Agents and Minions; factions and the “Wandering Threat”, an enterprising GM could improvise scenes solely based on setting an initial scene and then running with it based on player choices. More classical GMs could draw (or borrow) a dungeon map and create areas with the various factions, traps and treasures in the purest Gygaxian form.
However, where the model really shines for me is that they are totally compatible with “Mouseburning” game play. Players miss a skill check? Something goes wrong? Your game of choice wants you to implement a complication? Just look at the Scaffold and pick what could happen… maybe the Hunter Construct shows up? Maybe PCs get caught in a Goblin Trap? The Auditor may send his Repo Devils to try to enlist the PCs…
The possibilities are there, ready to be exploited!
Chatty’s Playtest
For instance here’s how my game went:
Scene 1: Players inquired in town about the mine. They were told that mining stopped in the northern shaft because it was run over by goblins. They were also told that people rose up at night and could not be prevented from walking into the mines short of killing them, they never came back.
Scene 2: Heroes laid watch at the nearest exit of the mine and caught a pair of Dark Elves carrying 4 ivory tubes each. After overpowering them, they found the tubes to contain disgusting, hostile worms with psychic powers, which they dispatched. Nobody came form the city that night…
Scene 3: Using a map found on the dark elves, the heroes navigated the mines, caves and upper underworld to find the dark elf outpost. They ambushed and kidnapped a sentry and learned about the deal with the Dark Lord, the worms nursery and the gold and gems mined by the enslaved goblins.
Scene 4: Heroes found cave where Dark Lord was hidden, discovered he wasn’t who they thought he was, fought him until he surrendered, begging for mercy. Heroes exposed his soul-stealing con and refused to let it pass so they dispatched him.
(Fin)
Many elements of the Scaffold never came into play, but that’s all right, they could fuel a further quest…. or not. We had fun for a few hours and that’s what counts.
Do you find an adventure “crib sheet’ written in this format helpful? Would you want me to share another one soon?
Let me know!
Soon, I’ll reveal how I got that adventure plan made.
Chatty Plays: Freemarket Part 1, Character Generation
Last August, Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard fame) and Jared Sorensen (creator of Action Castle and its siblings) launched Freemarket, a Science Fiction roleplaying game.
I had the privilege to play a 4 hour demo game with Luke (thanks to Gnome Stew‘s DNAPhil who invited me) and the game blew my mind away. I was dumbstruck by the originality of the game and its sheer scale as an engine for trans-human Sci-Fi stories… Even though the action is entirely confined within a lone space station.
I finally got a chance to play it with my friends about 3 weeks ago and I’ve been wracking my brain to find a way to convey my impressions of the game without falling all over the details of the game.
Then I decided to dive in and share how our character creation session went. But first, context!
The implied Setting
Freemarket follows the adventures and tribulations of members of a MRCZ (pronounced Mercy) who strive to bring change and new trends on board a Space Station parked at a Lagrange point between Saturn and Titan, one of it’s moons carved out and turned into one ginormous solid-state data storage vault.
The Station is home to 80 000 nigh immortal, cyber-wearing, telepaths who thrive on access to instant Data and a strange mix of status, influence and power called “flow”.
The parallels to current social media is evident, that’s why I once described it as “What if Humanity and Facebook merged and caused the Singularity?”
Apart from that (and a few more details about the Sapient computer running the whole place), the setting is left undefined, open for players and GM (called users and superuser respectively) to build a different one with each campaign.
Founding The Fixers MRCZ
Like many recent RPGs, character generation is a group activity that supposedly takes about 2 hours. We ended up spending more than 3 hours, getting confused and hung up on some elements and being challenged with a few sprees of analysis paralysis to the tune of “gee man, I don’t know what the game is about so I don’t know what I should create”.
Aside: That’s where I see what mastering the rules of a game can be very useful for a GM. Luke breezed us through it in less than 2 hours by pushing us at just the right places and not sweating that we didn’t get everything perfect… just “right enough”. The lessons I learn from the guy never cease.
Character generation is done by following very well described steps. It is one of those supremely clever combinations of setting creation, party cohesion and character background building. Here’s the rundown and what my players (Yan, Mike, Franky and PM) chose.
Clade and Generation
While nominally the “job” of the PC it’s actually the character’s concept in a short phrase. Players choose it first to help them conceptualize what they want to play. Generations represents how remote each character was from the original settlers of the stations (that’s about 40-45 years old now): Seconds (kids of originals), Thirds (kids of seconds), Blanks (Artificial humans with implanted memories) and Immigrants(Born off Station). The group ended up with:
- Mike: Blank, Hardware Interface Fetishist
- Yan: Second Gen, Body Artist
- Franky: Immigrant, Old Tools Replicator
- PM: Blank, OCD Investigator
Geneline
Up next came the character’s genelines which are names representing what “genetic family” you ail from and 3 “tags” that defined your genetic background. Tags are adjectives that qualify the inherent potential of your character like “flexible” or “Lightning Quick Reflexes”. They have a direct impact in the game as any character can invoke thematically adequate tags as the driving ability of a challenge. The book provides example Genelines with pre-selected sets of three tags each, but players are encouraged to design their own.
Our MRCZ:
- Mike, “The One”: Obsessive, Wired, Religious
- Yan, “Michaelangelo”: Creative, Serene, Sure Handed
- Franky,”Dell Amico”: Merciless, Technical, Old World
- PM, “Monk”: Investigative, Obsessive, Chameleon
Experience
Each character has experience in a few fields which represents the game’s skills used in the card-based challenge system (more in part 2). The game has 14 such skills, ranging from Breaking (destroying objects and structures or hacking into software), Ghosting (Stealth, stealing, tracking), Mobbing (Creation and installation of Interface) to Wetwork (Temporarily killing).
Aside: Yeah, dead people get re-printed and lose memories, depending on how completely”deathed” they were.
This is one of the places where the game explodes in story possibilities. The players can do SO much with these 14 skills it’s unbelievable and they can only bring about changes in the setting and story by playing challenges with those skills.
For example, they could use Ghosting to track a sneaky, discrete courrier they heard about. Then, they could play a Wetwork challenge to discreetly wipe him out and grab that ancient computer disk it transported. They could then use breaking to find and extract Data from the disc. That data would then be Thin Sliced (another skill) to give the Data specific meaning within the setting. That Data could then be flooded (another skill) in someone’s brain by stealing one of the target’s memory (yet another challenge). Finally the players turn that stolen memory into a song (using the Ephemera skill) and blare it across the station to create a new Meme.
That would be a pretty typical Freemarket session. This is pure Peter Hamilton, Wiliam Gibson and Vernor Vinge Sci Fi stuff.
Our crew chose a mix of experience that gave them a pretty badass rep. Their choices told me that they wanted to create cybernetic/software implants and tech, repair and create tech with tools, create art, investigate interesting data and do some killing on the side.
I think my gang wants to be a futuristic A-Team. I’m cool with that.
Interface and Technology
Each character has several pieces of Interface (Implants, both hardware or software) and technology, pieces of equipment that help characters in various ways in challenges. Interface are involved in error correction, helping circumvent failures during challenges while technologies can support (or replace) the experience used in a challenge.
Players can select them from the book, but they are also encouraged to create their own by making up snazzy techy names and adding three tags to each that identify what skill they are related too, what their function and so on. This is another great occasion to have the players define the setting by introducing trademarks and designer names to some of the tech they used.
Here’s a few from the group:
Interfaces:
- Morphological Retina: Breaking, Ocular, Duplicating (Used by PM’s investigator)
- Swiss Army Hand: Recycling, Old World, Technical (Used by Franky’s Old Tool Replicator)
- TAC 10 006: Wetwork, Neural, Reflex Booster (Used by Yan’s Body Artist)
- Optic-BF (i.e. Brain Fryer): Wetwork, Optical, Scambler (Used by Mike’s Fetishist)
Technology:
- Light Katar: Wetwork, Sword, Plasma
- Adaptive Perfume: Flood/Bleeding, Chemical Scent, Adaptative
- Mech’s Bench: Recycling, Mechanical, Old World
- Monofilament Garrote Nail Jewel: Wetwork, Close Range, Stealth
You can see that my players are expecting to fight a lot… I shall try not to disappoint them.
Memories
The last part of character creation is the creation of long term and short term memories. This is the aspect of the game that made my head explode. Players are required to create 2 long term memories (one life changing, the other from childhood/creation) and 1 short term one (form the day before). Each memory is a sentence made up of three out of five imposed elements: person, place, object, MRCZ or action.
The sheer genius of this is that the GM then uses those to create his adventure by mix and mashing them up (more or less eliminating prep time). But the game takes an all new level when you realize that since the technology exists to steal, inject, influence and blend memories of all station residents, including the PCs, there’s really no way to know how real each memory is, if it’s your own or who the hell put it there!
So let me conclude this post with my PC’s memories:
OCD Investigator (PM)
Long Term:
I was fired from the Operators MRCZ because I wouldn’t stop investigating the theft of the Micro Nova Missile Schematics
I created the buzz around the popularity of the KIS3 MRCZ by discovering the band’s emerging music style.
Short Term:
Yesterday, an anonymous passerby told me that my memories about one current investigation had been replaced.
Old Tool Replicator (Franky)
Long Term:
Miro, my brother, involved me in a failed old tech transaction and forced me to flee and go into hiding on Freemarket
I found specs for a FTL starship on an old computer I was recycling
Short Term:
Yesterday, I built a sexual-tool for Serina of the Ambassadors MRCZ
Body Artist (Yan)
Long Term:
I printed Shanon Apple, an extremely popular Blank that is part of the Kis3 MRCZ
I created a revolutionary, very efficient Blank design that I hid in a old relic satellite
Short Term
A negotiation session with the Arachne Textile MRCZ went badly as members of Gunz4Hirez stormed in and deathed almost everyone before getting gunned down themselves.
Hardare Interface Fetishist
Long Term
Korg, the 1st generation creator who printed me incorporated numerous interfaces as an experiment but ended up rejecting me, horrified with what he created.
I found an ancient brain chip interface containing the Prophet’s proselytizing of the Coming of the New Order.
Short Term
Yesterday, I pinged a member of the Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ and found an Interface I MUST possess.
What now
So now all I have to do for the next game (tomorrow) is to create 4 plot hooks (one per player) by mixing and mashing all those memories by, for example, picking the name in one memory with the place of another and adding an object from a third one. Then present it to the players and see how they’ll react.
I just can’t wait to see how it’ll turn out. Expect a play report!
Savage West, Session 1: The Riverboat Poker Heist, The Plan
I bought 3 copies of the pocket-sized Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition at Gen Con last summer. It was a game I was told I might like given the limited time I could spend playing on Friday nights. I asked Yan if he’d like to GM a demo to our once-a-month Sunday geekout crew (PM, Maze, Ubisoft Alex and I) and he agreed.
Savage Hybrid
The best way to describe Savage Worlds I heard was to say that it’s what would happen if D&D and GURPS created an offspring. It’s purported to be fast and furious. This is mostly achieved by a dead simple task resolution mechanic: all attributes (Strength, Agility, Vigor, etc) and skills are ranked in terms of polyhedral dice (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12). When you attempt a task (or try to hit a target), you pick the appropriate polyhedral and you try to roll a 4 or more. All dice are open ended (i.e. you keep rolling maximum results and add them together). As a PC, you also get a bonus D6 wild die for all rolls and you get to choose which of your normal or wild die rolls you keep for the task at hand.
Combat is done on battlemaps (squares or hexes, GM’s choice) and is indeed fast and swingy. There’s no Hit Points to worry about, just combat conditions likes “dazed” and “incapacitated” plus various wound levels that make your character progressively less effective. Mook NPC are even easier to deal with, going down after one solid hit or 2 minor ones.
Action and general character badassery are helped by the expenditure of Bennies. They are Savage Worlds Action Point and allow PCs to do things like re-roll failed checks, soak up damage or cancel a critical failure. Each player gets a few every sessions and can win more through play.
Finally, character generation is simple yet covers a very wide range of possibilities through the existence of setting specific Edges (advantages) and Hindrances (disadvantages). Each character buys attributes, skills and gears. Then, they pick two edges and one major (or two minor) hindrances and they are ready to go.
Thus after a bit of brainstorming, Yan offered to run a Far West game and we made PCs accordingly. [Read the rest of this article]
Re-examining the Dungeon: Section, Factions and Fronts
Do you remember those guys?
A few times a year RPG discussions and recent gaming “tech” converge on my radar to present a completely new insight as to how I perceive the game could be played at the table.
The 8×8 Combat Room Issue
Yesterday, Robert J. Schwalb, one of D&D’s most prolific writers, wrote a transcendent piece that may very well be the most thought out, “hammer meets nail” critical deconstruction of D&D 4e’s encounter design yet:
When writing adventures using this format, there’s less room to develop story content because every expected combat must fall in the one or two page encounter spread.
… Without a doubt, the encounters I hate the most are the 8 x 8 rooms with one creature per PC. These fights drag. Everything interesting about the encounter lives inside the monster stat-blocks. And, it is rather upfront about what it’s there to do: let the PCs mine for XP/treasure.
…What it seems is happening now is that the designer/DM creates a warband to throw against the PCs. They duke it out. The PCs win. The PCs get their reward. The PCs move to the next room and face the next warband.
…This system works and it works well, but its structure has replaced the familiar game play elements that existed in prior editions. Exploration and roleplaying exist in the lulls between encounters. And, when the challenge presents itself as monsters spoiling for a fight or a complex skill challenge, game play shifts toward a mechanized procedure, wherein resources are spent and, at the end, recovered.
This rings so damn true it’s scary. I recall saying it a few months back, I think that one of reasons the 8×8 room fight with 5 monsters has become so ubiquitous is because DMs have become complacent with the DM toolkit 4e offers. They keep to the basic templates instead of trying to be creative.
Now I’ve dabbled in the writing world enough to know that the average freelance writer can’t afford to re-invent the wheel when he’s paid peanuts and works under crashing deadlines. I think that pressure becomes too strong a temptation not to default to the average encounter formula. The same applies to the typical DM who only starts prepping a few hours before his game… the urge to default to the templates (or steal from Dungeon mag adventures who have similar designs) becomes very strong.
I think one of 4e’s problems is that DMing tools are now so structured, it becomes a hindrance for people with creativity issues to push through the proposed models and discover “new tech”. I know I’ve been having a hard time selling some of my weirder ideas like “Trap-Monster hybrids” and “The whole party stuck in the same body” because it seems people can’t see it done (or can’t afford the effort to squeeze the concept) in their 4e games.
The Solutions?
Rob then presents a solution which is completely elegant in bringing back some lost aspects of dungeon crawling like exploration, to the forefront:
I propose going back to the older model. Then, divide the dungeon into multi-room sections I’ll call sectors for lack of a better term. A sector might be a large single room or several smaller rooms linked by corridors, staircases, and so on. Each sector exists for a reason. There is something the characters must do, find, or survive before the sector can be “completed.” We’ll call this the victory condition…
Next, populate the sector. Use the standard XP budget, but for one or two levels above the PCs. Use the XP to by monsters of around the PCs level. This should give you more critters to play with. You don’t have to link them to each other, though you do have to link them to the sector.
The “tactical encounter” begins when the PCs enter the dungeon sector. The PCs don’t roll initiative yet as they are in exploring mode. As they move through the sector, they might encounter the smaller groups, at which point they could roll initiative and fight, sneak by the enemy, or talk their way through the monsters.
So in essence, divide a dungeon level in areas which have mini/minor-quests linked to them. Then populate those areas in loosely linked encounters (with a few unrelated ones thrown in) and then let the PCs decide what to do when they meet sub-parts of each: Sneak, Parley, Fight and so on…
I love that. And I really wanted to share Rob’s ideas with you.
But nowI want to build on his idea because I feel it’s not enough. We can push this boundary further.
Neo-Gygaxianism and Fronts
One of the things that the “collectible warband game” mentality of D&D 4e has hindered is the recreation of old Gygaxian factions in dungeons. Those were environment where an Ogre hermit lair, complete with chained Owlbear, kept a warband of Orcs and a Goblins’ den from going at each other’s throat, allowing the Necromancer to work in peace in his laboratory.
In 4e, with challenges properly balanced to allow a party to (narrowly) defeat all encounters, there’s no clear incentive for characters to try to convince the kobold Lord living close to the northern entrance that the Goblin Shaman and her tribe are trying to oust them from their strategic raiding camp.
Much like the DM toolkit gives incentives to the harried DM to colour within the lines of pre-established encounter models, players expect to gain more XPs by slaying every encounters AND they get a more rewarding mechanical experience when they get to use their powers… which, when taken literally, are mostly good in combat only. (They aren’t if you are a flexible DM, but that’s another post).
So Rob’s proposal is great to recreate just that: dungeon sections populated by one main factions (plus associated beasts and/or “natural fauna”). Yet, those who’ve followed my Apocalypse World post may see me coming with a way to make those Sector/Factions come ALIVE and become true dynamic dungeons.
We could make the whole dungeon (and it’s underlying plot) into a Front.
In Apocalypse World, an improv-driven Sci-Fi RPG of conflicting loyalties, all NPCs and places are named and associated “emotions/states” (Envy, Ambition, Hunger, Ignorance, Fear, etc) that could become threats to the PCs or the things they chose to defend.
When the GM builds an adventure, some of those NPC/places are regrouped in “Threats” according to how they could share a dark agenda, a common nefarious goal. A “countdown clock” is then established, a series of steps/event to bring the agenda to its conclusion.
Then you take a few of those threats (the dungeon being one of them) and you unify them into common higher level agenda, and you get a Front, a unified wall of trouble for the PCs.
Well, reading Rob’s post crystallized an idea I’ve had for a few days now:
A dungeon is a perfect element for a D&D Front.
See, a classic 3 encounters + a finale dungeon adventure could be divided into 4 sectors, each populated with a faction that represent a different Threat, for example:
- The Orcs: Establish a permanent raiding camp to reach nearby villages, will eventually destroy the local economy.
- The Kobolds: Snatch humanoids from the surrounding countryside (including unsuspecting orcs) , burn them in sacrifice to bring back spirit of the Dark Dragon God into this world.
- The Mad Wizard (there’s always one): Who’s scouring the temple for that one last element to complete his wand of Very Painful Domination and then test it on whomever is close by!
- The Dungeon: An old temple dedicated to the mad ones and their 5 dimensional dreams of conquest and destruction. Filled with wards that brings it closer to full sentience whenever it catches someone in them.
Each faction would have an agenda… and killing the PCs should not be in any of them, except maybe the Dungeon’s. And yes, it does bear an uncanny resemblance to another approach to adventure design I talked a few months ago.
Players should receive full XPs for dealing with the faction if they manage to thwart their agenda. In practical terms: add the whole XP budget of the monsters/Threats/Skill Challenges of the sector to the Minor/Major Quest that’s linked to the threat. Use that as a pool to hand out XPs as usual, but empty the pool and distribute the remaining points once the threat’s agenda has been nullified, regardless of how it was done, as long as PC choices and action were key in derailing the threat’s plans.
For example, if the PCs convince the orcs to storm the Mad Wizards and they end up all killed by the Temple’s traps, they win all the remaining XP in the “Orc Threat” pool because the villages are safe. Of course, the Temple’s agenda will then be nearly complete. 
So you’d design the dungeon as before but you would then add a new layer over it by creating the factions, their agendas and their “countdown clocks”. During play, whenever there’s an occasion in the story (extended rests, key PC choices, long negotiations with one faction, PC captured, etc), you could push some “Countdown Clocks” further and re-imagine the dungeon’s organization in function of what happened, taking all opportunities to have PCs react to those when possible with generous use of “What do yo do”?
And use those agendas to keep things moving if players get stuck in apparent story dead ends. Players are captured by the Orcs? Well maybe the Kobolds spring them out and give them back their equipment if they accept to deal with a problematic Temple Ward that screws their Divine link to their deity. The Dungeon nearly reaches it’s last countdown clock step and the PCs are down to their last Healing Surge? Well maybe then the bumbling Wizard drops by and disintegrates the newly summoned Gibbering Mouther when his wand misfires during its test run. He then invites the PCs to join his mad quest, providing a short respite of safety for an extended rest.
Explorations, diplomacy, double crosses, twists, complications… all things that this model of adventure should be able to support.
I think it’s a dangerous idea worth exploring.
Thoughts? Ideas?
Tales of the Apocalypse, Part 3: Prepping the Game
Last Friday was our second Apocalypse World game. I could see from the email chatter that the players were getting excited about it. This time, Yan was not going to join us so Colonel Allison wasn’t going to be part of the action.
Before I get into the actual game report, I wanted to share some of my prep for that session.
While Apocalypse World is a low prep RPG, it is by no means a no prep one. The game/author reminds us in no light terms to refrain from plotting out a story. Instead, the book provides a series of structured tools to build what’s called Fronts, templates of linked threats that loom around the PCs, trying to forward specific dark agendas the PCs may decide (or have no choice) to go against.
The game offers 2 sets of tools to create a front:
The First Session Worksheet
This sheet is a legal-sized of paper available as free downloads here (I got a full set of those sheets as a Gen Con bonus). You write down the name of each and every (living) NPC or places that interact with the PCs. Each named NPC or significant emplacement is placed on some kind of 2 dimensional matrix that list various threats categories they can represent toward the PCs. Examples of threats are ambition, hunger , ignorance, fear and decay, all of those can be either literal or figurative.
To that list, you add resources that each NPCs (or group/emplacement) has that the PCs might not have direct access to. This creates opportunities for some interesting conflicts and PC-NPC-PC triangles.
For example, in our game, I put Forteress-City (a place) between the “envy” and “ambition” threat as either the party or Fortress-City itself expresses those feeling toward the other entity. The Fortress has a bunch of resources like walls (defence), Living space, strategic position and (why not) books.
Finally, there’s a space on the worksheet for unanswered questions you have asked yourself during the 1st session. In my case, I had the following questions:
- Why is there a rebellion theme developing in Shanty Town
- Does the reprisal from Shanty Town’s raid a normal occurrence or is this one special?
- Can the Factory fall?
Those questions are the fuel on which the fronts can be built.
The Fronts Worksheet
A Front is where you create new NPCS and places or pick them from the 1st session sheet and bring them together in 3 to 4 organized threats from a list of Apocalyptic-themed templates.
For instance, I created a “dictator” leader for Fortress-City called Sun who’s some sort of psycho-paranoid Louis XIV warlord raving about any affront to his rule over the desert. I created an agenda for him focused on wiping out Shanty Town and broke down, as instructed, his plan in steps that I’d cross out as completed or thwarted depending on how the PCs reacted to their changing environments.
Then I I brought together 2 members of Allison’s gang and 2 more from Thunder’s and called them “The Traitors” whose goal was to bring down Thunder. I also created a new NPC called “Frankie” who was a skin collector that wore suits of patches of sewn-up human flesh who was fixated upon the female PCs of the group.
I also created the actual Fortress-City, based on the image you can see in the post’s heading (click to enlarge) and gave it a clear agenda to start shelling Shanty Town with the ship’s guns if the PCs didn’t stop it in time.
So these 4 threats came together in a Front I called “Sun’s Rise” which explained Sun’s intent to crush Shanty Town once and for all using all his resources. You’ll see how it started panning out in part 4. What I really liked about the approach was that I had no scenes prepared and I had no idea what threats the PCs would face and which they’d ignore… because they can’t deal with everything at once.
But they sure tried!
Image taken from the excellent and funny Post-Apocalyptic webcomic Romantic Apocalyptic.
Tales of the Apocalypse Part 2, Reprisal at Ambush Hill
Warning: This play report covers some hard subject matter, including a reference to rape and player characters having (consensual) sex , please skip if you are offended by that kind of content, I have no intention of discussing the relative morals of that here.
See part 1 for character creation.
Apocalypse World has a name fetish in regards to PCs and NPCs. One of the many principles the Game Master are asked to abide by is “name everyone”‘. That’s why I’m going to share the PCs names again, for the sake of reference:
- Colonel Allison, female Hardholder, played by Yan
- Raven, female Faceless, played by Franky
- Eternity, female Battlebabe, played by Math
- Thunder, male Chopper, played by Eric
- Smith, male Brainer, played by Mike.
The initial situation
As things stood, the social ties of the group was such that Allison was Thunder’s boss. He was the leader of the biker gang she sent out on her most daring and lucrative raids. Smith was also working for Allison, although Mike clearly indicated that he was going for a Lone Wolf character, he was going to play his cards close . Early play also led to Eternity getting hired by Allison as her bodyguard.
That left Raven standing out from the group, not yet integrated into any formal social dynamic other than having met Smith at least once and having stolen something from Allison (something she already knew about).
Apocalypse World instructs the Master of Ceremonies (the GM) to start the first session as “let’s follow the PC through a normal day and see what happens”. This was made easier by Allison having to check if Shanty Town (the settlement she owned) produced surplus wealth at the session’s beginning.
Yan rolled and achieved a “soft-hit”, a success that’s usually attached to a player/master-invoked complication. In Shanty Town’s case, the town managed to produce it’s surplus wealth, but at the price of “retaliation”, a concept I assumed I was free to interpret as I saw fit.
Pinned down at Ambush Hill
Apocalypse World is VERY improv-driven, thus the MC must use the tools at his disposal (GMing principles and a series of “moves”) to get the characters in trouble and react to their own moves. The story gets created as the byproduct of the back and forth between characters and MC.
I invoked the game’s 1st MC principle: Barf forth Apocalyptica. I focused the first scene on Thunder and Raven, describing how Thunder’s biker gang were returning from another triumphant raid on the resource-rich but very inaptly named Fortress-City settlement, bike bags brimming with metal loot to be recycled in the Shaty Town’s weapons factory.
As Thunder was entering the town and Raven sitting on the hill, doing her daily inventory of the knick-knacks she scrounged to survive another day, they both saw the red dot of a targeting laser zig zag chaotically all over down the hillside, passing over Raven and more or less vectoring in on Thunder’s slow moving, big ass chopper.
(That’s an example of a MC move called “Announce Future Badness” ).
Play proceeded more or less coherently as I tried to wrestle handling all the play principles, MC moves and keeping proper pacing. I often found myself asking for the PC to tell me what would happen next through the traditional “I describe something vague, you the PC tell me what you want to do”.
Diversion?
A bit later, after Thunder’s cycle got punctured by a high-powered hunting rifle and Raven had a quick, silent discussion with its Mask for guidance, I switched the action to Allison, Smith and Eternity who were standing near the factory. Initially, I more or less asked them to react to the sounds of the gunfire they could hear from Ambush Hill, but I realized that I wasn’t making any of my MC’s moves. That’s when I went back to my playbook and pulled another one: “Announce Off Screen Badness”
Phil: Allison, as you are instructing your settlement’s goons to go and support Thunder’s pinned crew, you hear a huge blast coming from the factory.
Allison: Oh Shit… I guess the ambush was a diversion.
So Allison and Eternity went back in the factory and confronted one of Fortress-City’s raiders (Oni-Wise) who had somehow obtained the cooperation of 2 factory workers (Parcher and Bar). That ended with a very dead Oni-Wise and 2 jobless Shanty-Towners.
Allison (To Parcher and BAr): Leave this factory and never come inside it again!
Eternity: But isn’t the factory the only real job here?
Allison: Not my problem…
Mr Smith goes on a stroll
Smith decided to let Allison deal with her factory troubles so he could move closer to all the fun going on over at Ambush Hill. I pulled another MC move called “Put them on the Spot” and had a pair of Shanty Towners (Tom Tom and Joe’s Girl) confront Smith with a Baseball bat and a piece of blade taped to a haft.
Tom Tom: You Mindfucker! I’ll make you pay for what you did to my brother!
I had no idea what Smith did to O’ Tory’s (Tom Tom’s bro). So I applied another MCing principle and asked… Smith.
Phil: So why are Tom Tom and Joe’s Girl so mad that they’d overcome their fear of you and threaten you like that?
Smith: I recently scrambled O’Tory’s mind back into early childhood for breaking Allison’s Law. Now he spends all his days playing with Lego bricks (O’Torys now rechristened “Legoman”). That’s why Tom Tom’s so mad.
Phil: Cool!
As the pair was about to attack, Smith used “direct brain projection’ to go aggro on Tom Tom (i.e. use the threat of force to get character to do something, in our case, back the hell down). Tom Tom, being so angry, forced Smith’s hand and got half of his brains turned to mush. Joe’s girl, having lost her 2 lovers in a matter of days, ran off crying.
(Maybe in the arms of another character? One principle is called PC-NPC-PC triangles).
It always comes together in the end.
As is always the case when I’m GMing a completely new game, I grow mentally tired more easily, so I wanted to see the session through and I was running out of creative steam. But that was greatly underestimating my 2 psychodramatists playing Raven and Thunder.
Shortly after Thunder’s crew and Allison’s cleaned up the remnants of Fortress-City’s retaliatory raid, Raven caught one of the straggling raiders raping Mill, a teenaged girl and one of Shanty Town’s “gentle souls”. Seeing this, Raven calmly took her machete out and placed it strategically between the raider’s exposed buttocks to get the rapists’ attention.
A few minutes later, we had a young, Mill running back to safety and 2 half-raiders steaming on the ground.
Raven: I’m excited that I helped that young girl, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t aroused a bit by all of this, where’s that big manly Biker?
Thunder: Right here baby! (See quote from yesterday’s Monday’s post)
And so we had 2 characters invoke their “gain short term buffs when you have sex with one another”. I had both Thunder and Allison’s gang cheering them on during the act, the whole place erupting into an impromptu victory party.
During that time, playing off Raven’s suggestions that they should all go do a counter-counter raid after their little amorous interlude, I had Phil, Thunder’s lieutenant, start mobilizing Allison’s gang to join them.
Then tried to invoke that “create PC-NPC-PC triangles” principle I had had trouble with so far. I had Phil start plotting something with the other NPCs and had Smith notice it when he read the situation. Something was afoot and Smith had the choice to tell someone or not…
During that time, both Thunder and Smith noticed that Rum, the raiders’ leader, was still missing, so I put Smith on the spot again…
Rum (cocking his .45 revolver and pressing it against Smith’s head): I’m right behind you fucker, I’m not leaving here without a hostage!
(I’m taking some artistic licence here)
Smith: I slowly grab his nuts with my Violation glove…
All players: Ewwwww!
Smith: And I do in-brain puppet string…( he rolled perfectly) and implant a command for him to shoot himself in the head.
R-rated splat…
Yeah, Smith’s going to be very scary soon.
Wrapping it up
The last scene of the evening was when Smith cryptically informed Allison that someone could maybe try to make an attempt at Thunder’s life during the upcoming counter-counter raid (I love saying that).
Allison left her HQ and went to Thunder. There they had another of what appears to be frequent spats. This time it was about the next raid’s timing. Thunder wanted to leave now and Allison wanted everyone to wait a few hours to prepare a better raid.
That’s when we played our first PC on PC roll: Manipulation. Allison threatened not to pay Thunder for the previous raid… and Thunder was in dire need of bottle caps to repair his hog and get more fuel. She won the roll and Thunder grudgingly agreed to wait out.
(Thunder got experience for accepting to be manipulated, a great little social mechanic just there)
That’s where we stopped for the night. We played for about 2 hours beyond character generation and I was exhausted. Now I have to distill what was created in the first session and start planning my fronts (meta-plots that will come thrash the PCs attempt at stabilizing their world) based on NPCs and places we created, both withing and outside of Shanty Town.
Post Game analysis:
What the players liked:
- Much faster turnover between ‘turns’
- The Badassness of the characters
- The strength of the characters stories from the get go
What players liked less:
- Incoherent time frames between ‘actions’
- Time jumps or action by other PCs that invalidated their setups created by previous moves
- Unequal experience “points” because some players rolled a lot less dice. I assume it averages off after a few sessions.
Lessons Learned:
- When in doubt, ask the players. It works.
- I need to go back to my playbook of moves instead of relying on the traditional describe/explore paradigm I fall back on in improv-heavy games.
- I’m allowed a few sessions to master the game’s intricacies.
Next Session: Counter raid in Fortress-City against the Cannibals!
