Span TwoPointFive... AKA expanding to Span Seven

In the Continuum RPG, PCs progress through 5 "character levels" known as Spans.  I have to come to conclusion that these levels are not divided correctly nor mapped ideally. The hurdles, jumps, and responsibilities of the various Span levels are not evenly distributed. In this post I will document the issues I'm finding with them as we move into the fourth year of my current campaign, and propose changes to the structure that I would happily implement if I had my campaign to do again. Adopting them now, mid-campaign, would be problematic, but they'd be a huge improvement if implemented from day one.

In the default rules, you start out as a Span One who can teleport up to 1 year into the future or past, and carry about 10 lbs of mass beyond their own body weight. Each "level" beyond that expands those limits by a factor of 10. (So a Span Two PC is exhausted and needs a good night's rest after traveling 10 years, and can carry 100lbs of equipment or wardrobe with them.) This works well in the early stages, and buys the GM time to get a handle on the setting and system before having to do a lot of historical research, or stat out 23rd Century Technology.

However, in my experience, players find themselves yearning for the historical exploration portion of the game long before their characters are technically accomplished enough to undertake it. When you sign on to play in a time-travel game, you're picturing visits to Ancient Rome, Elizabethan England, or at least WWII. Per a literal read of the rules and setting, however, you have no business investigating such places until you're Span Four, Three, or Two, respectively, at which points they are still several night's travel away and thus getting there is an adventure in itself. Promotion to Span Three in Continuum takes too damn long. Which is fine from in-character perspective (you advance based on merit, and self-control is a hallmark of the Continuum), but mostly annoying from an out-of-character perspective. If you pitch me on a time-travel game, I want to be hobnobbing with Shakespeare and Caesar within a few weeks at most, not only after years of play.

What's more, certain Spans have more going on within them than others. Span One is just about screwing up, surviving your own cluelessness, and eventually learning the ropes. There's a couple basic lessons that the Player (not just Character) needs to learn, then the flip switches and they're ready for Span Two. In Contrast, S2 starts out as "Span One, With Fewer Screw-Ups," but eventually transitions into "Visit the Nearby Decades" and/or "Split Up Into Different Fraternities".  The latter transition at the least feels like a major milestone and will heavily alter the tone of the campaign, but nothing within the game clearly demarks it's borders. Which means you have a lot of territory to cover before you reach Span Three, and players feel somewhat devoid of the status markers that other games have taught them to expect along the way.

While that does leave some maneuvering room for the GM to customize their game and it's pacing, it does so at the risk of making the players feel like they aren't progressing fast enough despite a string of successes.  "We keep winning, but we still haven't learned everything we need to reach Span Three."  A kind GM can hand-wave the mechanical/XP requirements (and the players are empowered to take the reigns on that part of it), there's not much you can do to gloss over the required setting familiarity.

You get to the point where you want to play S3 and S4 style adventures long before you could possibly have seen enough of the setting to justify such a promotion. My own attempts to accelerate this process have resulted in my roster of NPCs expanding to ridiculous numbers as I try to shoehorn in Fraternal NPCs into spare scenes as I can. For most games, if the players don't feel like reading the setting sourcebooks, you can usually make do as long as the GM (and maybe one player) know the world well, but over the past several years I've found that Continuum's many buzzwords, stratagems, and subgroups really do require an in-depth comprehension of the setting in order to advance. You reach a point where the player's in-character advancement is held back if they haven't read the sourcebooks.

Here's a break-down the current system, including major milestones and responsibilities at each Span, plus some estimates of how long it might take to reach this stage.

Span Rating	Lessons Learned	Experiences, Scenarios, and Accomplishments	Minimum Duration (per the rulebook, even an experienced player should not advance faster than this)	Actual Duration (how long it took my campaign)
Span One	The Maxims. How not to frag yourself in day-to-day mundane events.	Screwing up again and again. Wrapping your head around spanning in general. Briefly visiting each year of a single decade.	12+ hours of play, across 2+ months	70 to 100 hours of play, across most of a year
Span Two	Self-reliance. The finer points of solving your frag when it does happen. Master Rank in at least two skills from a particular list, Journeyman in four others from that or another list.	Your first real adventure, and several more thereafter, each with subsequently less coaching from your NPC mentor. Your first Time Combat. Trips to nearby decades. Some sort of meaningful interaction with each of the 10 different Fraternities. Picking one of those 10 Fraternities, and joining it. Leaving the nest and joining some other established Corner. Possibly making your own new Corner. Taking a part one or more missions or adventures for your new Fraternity and/or Corner. Wrapping up any loose ends in your mundane (pre-spanner) life so you're not a missing person's case. Acquiring a huge list of skills required to qualify for Span Three.	16+ hours of play, across 3+ months (plus 2+ months as Span One)	140 to 200 hours of play?, across nearly two years (plus a year as Span One)
Span Three	A tiny bit of Hypnosis skill. (Out-of-character, the play group learns how to juggle multiple plotlines and split the spotlight in an equitable way.)	Finally getting to explore places and times more than a decade or two from where the campaign started. Your first real Time Combat without your old Mentor being there as back-up. Probably more Fraternity missions/adventures.  Creating several new Corners of your own. Acting as Mentor to a whole pack of Novice NPCs. Successfully running a Corner of your own for 100 years of Age.	20+ hours of play, across 4+ months (plus 5+ months as Span One and Two)	This is roughly where we are now (some variation among characters). It took us just shy of 3 full years to get Here.
Span Four	Many more levels of Hypnosis skill. Photographic memory.	First trip to Atlantis... which takes a minimum of around 15 teleports (and full night's rests) just to get there and is thus a major adventure in itself. This is the most likely earliest Span to accomplish a trip to any of the juicier bits of the setting (Atlantis, Vielavayana, The Engineers Crisis, The Midwives Crisis, The Hunt Of The Sun, or various real-world cultures of antiquity such as Rome/Greece/Egypt/Sumeria/3 Kingdoms China), so you can bet there'll be a lot of sight-seeing and tangential adventures. At least one of the following: Scoring 200 points in the Greatest Game. -or- Successfully running a major Fraternal Corner for 250 years of Age. -or-  Going all the way Down to Antedesertium to act as a deep cover agent.	20+ hours of play, across 5+ months (plus 9+ months as Span One/Two/Three)	We're aren't there yet.
Exalted (Span Five+)	Crazy stuff that blows your mind. Telepathy.	The Atlantean Councils. At least one major mission against The Enemy, which could range from War in the Geminid to deep cover work inside Antedesertium. Probably a trip Up to the Hour of Inheritence. Any of those things mentioned under Span Four, but dialed up to 11.	There is no guarantee your character will get to this stage. Within the setting, most Spanners don't.  The authors of the game specifically request you not even attempt this level of play until you've had (at a bare a minimum) 14 months of experience playing Continuum. Seriously.	We're aren't there yet.

That's right, I've been running a Continuum RPG campaign ongoing for about 36 months now, and we've only just recently (2 or 3 sessions ago) promoted most of the PCs to "Span Three".  If that seems like slow going, it is. I am thrilled to have them ascend to this level, but I'm honestly rather annoyed how long it's taken.

Partly that's because my plots are convoluted. Partly it's because I've allowed friendly NPCs to transport the players Down into history, so they haven't _had_ to advance in order to get to the plots that interest them. Partly it's because we're playing over Skype, and sometimes lose most of a session to technical difficulties. Partly it's because we're all 30-something adults with lives that sometimes prevent us from playing for a week or two. Partly it's because the players are in 3 different timezones, which restricts the length of our sessions a little.

But mostly it's because there's a lot of ground to cover before you get to Span Three. Players, as well as characters, need to get really familiar with the setting and all the mind-bending ramifications of time-travel. After all, Span Three represents the transition from Novice to Master/Teacher.

And I think that's kind of a problem. My players haven't been further down than the 16th Century, and that only because friendly NPCs were willing to take them. You're really not equipped to travel the length and breadth of history until Span Four.


It's too late for my campaign, but if I had it all to do over again, I would completely rewrite the breaks for what happens at which Span rating, so that there were more but smaller milestones and a more rapid escalation in PC teleportation range. The chart would look something more like this:

Span Rating	Lessons Learned	Experiences, Scenarios, and Accomplishments	You Can Teleport This Far
Span One	The Maxims. How not to frag yourself in day-to-day mundane events.	Screwing up again and again. Wrapping your head around spanning in general. Briefly visiting each year of a single decade.	4 years, then you need a full night's rest
Span Two	Self-reliance. The finer points of solving your frag when it does happen. Master Rank in any one Skill.	Your first real adventure, and a couple more thereafter, each with subsequently less coaching from your NPC mentor. Your first Time Combat. Trips to nearby decades. Wrapping up any loose ends in your mundane (pre-spanner) life so you're not a missing person's case.  Your first brief interactions with most of the 10 different Fraternities.	16 years, then you need a full night's rest
Span Three (More or less equivalent to the second half of Span Two under the existing system)	Master Rank in a skill relevant to your Fraternity, Journeyman in some number of other skills useful to anyone spanning outside their century of origin. (Out-of-character, the play group learns how to juggle multiple plotlines and split the spotlight in an equitable way.)	Some sort of "Career Day" to introduce any of the Fraternities that didn't rear their heads in Span Two. Picking one of those 10 Fraternities, and joining it. Leaving the nest and joining some other established Corner. Possibly making your own new Corner. Taking a part one or more missions or adventures for your new Fraternity and/or Corner. Acquiring a huge list of skills required to qualify for Span Three.	64 years, then you need a full night's rest
Span Four (Equivalent to the first half of Span Three under the existing system)	A tiny bit of Hypnosis skill.  Master Rank in a skill relevant to anyone spanning outside their century of origin, such as History, Anthropology, Acting, Etc.	Finally getting to explore places and times more than a century or two from where the campaign started. Your first real Time Combat without your old Mentor being there as back-up. Probably more Fraternity missions/adventures.  Creating several new Corners of your own.	256 years, then you need a full night's rest
Span Five (Equal in prestige to Span Three under the current system. However they have access to centuries much more like a current Span Four.)	Many more levels of Hypnosis skill. Photographic memory. Telepathy is a possibility, but not  required.	First trip to Atlantis... which takes a minimum of around 15 teleports (and full night's rests) just to get there and is thus a major adventure in itself. This is the most likely earliest Span to accomplish a trip to any of the juicier bits of the setting (Atlantis, Vielavayana, The Engineers Crisis, The Midwives Crisis, The Hunt Of The Sun, or various real-world cultures of antiquity such as Rome/Greece/Egypt/Sumeria/3 Kingdoms China), so you can bet there'll be a lot of sight-seeing and tangential adventures.  Successfully running one or more Corners of your own.	1,024 years, then you need a full night's rest
Span Six (Equal in prestige to Span Four under the current system, because we're valuing teachers more, and acknowledging that not all PCs are up to running a Novice/Mentor Corner of their own. )	Master Rank in Teaching.	Acting as Mentor to a whole pack of Novice NPCs. Between "shifts" teaching the NPC scrubs, you have more  adventures of the sort mentioned for the previous Span, but getting there and back again is much easier.	4,096 years, then you need a full night's rest
Exalted (Equal to the current system's take on Exalted. There were more steps to get here, but each step was a little smaller.)	Crazy stuff that blows your mind. Telepathy, for starters.	The Atlantean Councils. At least one major mission against The Enemy, which could range from War in the Geminid to deep cover work inside Antedesertium. Probably a trip Up to the Hour of Inheritence. Any of those things mentioned under the previous spans, but dialed up to 11.	16,384 years, then you need a full night's rest. Which means you can go from the Hour of Inheritance all the way Down to the Atlantean Councils in a single teleport.

That's my proposal for a smoother version of the game. If I were designing Continuum 2.0, that's how I'd break it up.

From Span One to Exalted is 6 promotions instead of 4, but each promotion has less of a barrier in terms of xp requirements and familiarity with the setting. The largest barrier to PC advancement, which is the sudden redirection of the campaign to the PCs being mentors themselves, is pushed to very late in the campaign, and becomes a natural divide between those that do or don't advance to the final rank. The somewhat less-daunting barrier of picking a Fraternity, which tends to split up the campaign into more subplots and less screentime per player, is delayed a tiny bit, and becomes the focus of it's own milestones in-character.  Over all, character progression should be faster and cleaner. Players have more clearly defined goals, which are spread out more evenly across the ranks.

The x4 instead of x10 spanning range at each level isn't quite as clean or easy (the same can also be said about having 7 levels instead of 5), but I think that's a fair trade off for getting to actually visit other centuries before you have to start thinking about Mentoring for a gaggle of NPC Novices.





P.S.: Sorry for the ugliness of the tables. Blogger ate my original HTML, and the process of fixing it was much easier if I just stole someone else's code (in case blogger ate it because of some error I had made.)

Leonardo's Microscope

I've tried quite a few different rules-light GM-less games over the years (Off the top of my head: Microscope, Remember Tomorrow, Fiasco, Universalis, Rune, Baron Munchausen, and Pantheon), and I strongly feel that Microscope is the best of the bunch.

Microscope is settingless, and indeed that's really the point of it. In-game, you create a setting turn-by-turn, and then zip your focus around to various eras within that setting for impromptu scenes exploring it. In our experience, it was lively and wild, an excuse for everyone to ham it up... even the more usually quiet and passive players dove right in! I suspect it'd be hard to do an entirely serious setting and find it satisfying at your first go. Aim for humor and over-the-top cinematics in your first testdrive of Microscope, and it won't disappoint.

I read in a forum thread somewhere that Microscope works really well for alternate history since you have a common ground to riff off of, and thus plenty of inspiration. I'd like to submit our game as further confirmation of that observation.  Our setting began as just the concept of "Steampunkish alternate history where all of Leonardo Da Vinci's craziest  ideas work as imagined, and empower the Italian city-states to dominate the world." We opened right up with the cathedral-airship of the Anti-Pope pursuing the floating city of Venice.... and it just got crazier from there.  Assassination attempts against Empress Lucrezia; Sicily colonizing Japan; Napoleon leading the Genoese mammoth corps vs Baba-Yaga's lumbering mecha-bird-hut; analog computers stocking the Pope's personal bordello; and Venetians vs Zulu's at the battle of Beppo's Drift.

Like I said, it was a wild ride. Here's one of the tamer moments:

Click-click click-click. Vacuum tubes glow and fade, gears whir and ratchet. A large loom arm glides over the top of the machine, and then it spits out a punched card with rows of woodblock-printed letters across the top. His excellency The Steam Pope adjusted his lenses and regarded the message at arms' length.

It read: "Airship to Queen's Elephant 3. Checkmate. I am Deep Cerulean."

So as not to entirely disappoint those who expect me to be overly critical of every game system, I have a couple minor gripes I can air here. These are things I wasn't as blown away by as the rest of the system:

• The mechanism that the victim chooses the success and/or consequences of the attack worked plenty well, but didn't exactly motivate anyone to mount an offensive. Some scenes that could have been dramatic or violent lacked tension because of it. We had enough wackiness and scenery-chewing to keep it fun, regardless.
• Some scenes didn't suggest characters naturally. Especially since our group was large (the rules state it's for 2-4 players, but it worked smashingly well for our group of 7). You might think you're introducing a major character and then have nothing to do, or plan to play a background character and realize you're the only person representing one of the two factions involved in the scene.
• The "point" of Legacies is not particularly clear, nor is the "point" of rating every scene as light or dark. Both exist just for thematic considerations, but masquerade as mechanics.  It wasn't until I carefully read the PDF the day after the game that I could be certain there wasn't anything more to them. I think this could be spelled out better in the rules... or that the virgin design space of making such things matter more in-game could be explored.
• I think named characters could end up on cards of some sort. It's not really necessary, perhaps, since they might only be in one scene and have no stats, but I think a bit more to remind us they exist would have facilitated making them recur. Or perhaps we just could have done a better job of titling our scene and event cards to make the characters more accessible later. Without some way to record the characters,  the game definitely favors hamming-it-up and not taking things too seriously. Anything that fosters recurring characters and the time to develop them would help to reduce Microscope's need for grandstanding antics and outrageous humor.

Those are my four complaints, all very minor, and one of them was only an issue because our group was so large. Overall, I loved it, and I imagine it will get even better as we get more experience framing scenes. I'd happily play again without any house-rules, or with either of the following:

1. For a large group, I think it might be a good idea to pack a dozen chess pieces along with the note cards. Four pawns and a king and a queen of each of two colors. When you introduce a character, you grab a chess piece. Pawn vs Royalty indicates whether or not you're a major mover & shaker in the scene. Color indicates which faction you're with for conflict scenes. That way, if you're the last person to introduce a character in a round, you can immediately tell if it's 5-against-1 and then choose to side with the underdog. No restrictions, just a tool for helping spot who your friends and foes are amidst the narrative chaos.
   
2. If you find your group reluctant to take pot-shots at each other's characters given the mechanics, you might test out this variant: Have the person making the attack roll 1d6. On a "1" they get to narrate the results, on a 2 to 6 the target does (per the rules as written). That may make aggressive actions seem more worth it, without too badly subverting the point of the game. If using the chess-piece idea from the previous paragraph, you could even make it that the attacker wants to roll equal to or less than the number of chess pieces engaged in the attack. Just a thought.

Planet Pollock

Yesterday's session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars went rather well, despite some big interruptions (relatives calling in the middle of the game), and a patently absurd Alien Power.

Planet Name: Pollock
Planet Description: Forest
Alien Description: Sentient Planet
Alien Power: Stop Technology

Some tough choices on the planet description, based on what little is left to me on the charts. Pretty much all that's left are the things I'd intentionally put off.

Sentient Planet was avoided until now because it didn't particularly mesh well with the kills system, and what they represent in game. Since PCs gain medals and level-ups based on number of kills, exactly what counts as an "alien" and what counts as a "kill" is important. If literally the whole planet is out to get you, then every tree, blade of grass, or songbird could be a kill. That was a can of worms I didn't want to mess with when the campaign was just getting going. At this stage in the game, though, we have no illusions about the mechanics. They don't particularly represent any sort of reality you can apply logic too, and we all know it. As a result, I didn't have to worry much. Everybody took it in stride that they were getting the normal kill counts despite such a target-rich environment. Man, this game is weird.

Stop Technology is an alien special ability that I specifically held off using till late in the campaign. I figured the ability to shut-down TPK Bombs, Kinetic Energy Fields and Drop Ships used by high-rank late-game PCs was a lot better than just knocking out the meager arms of early-campaign Troopers. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was the right decision. For one thing, the point of going up in rank is that it unlocks all these cool "toys", so taking them away (even for a session) is more frustrating than fun. Plus, it wasn't as effective as I'd imagined it to be. This deep into the campaign, the PCs have really high FA and NFA stats. So, taking their guns away didn't do much. The PCs won the dominance rolls, and would set the fights at Close where they could use Hand-To-Hand. They then succeeded with nearly every attack roll, so the fights were short and favored the PCs just as much as normal.  Had I sprung "Stop Technology" back when the PCs stats were lower, they would have had to retreat or expend a lot of flashbacks. Using it late in the campaign, the only real impact was on the kill-count.

 Like "Sentient Planet", "Stop Technology" also reminds us clearly how the game rules don't represent reality well. There's dozens of questions that one needs the answers to in regards to this ability, but the game doesn't offer any answers. If my power-armor is shut down, am I immobilized? If a drop ship is "stopped", does it crash and kill everyone?  If our technology is stopped, can we still call an Evac or Orbital Bombardment? It gets even weirder when you try to apply logic to how or what is stopping the tech. EMP effects seem likely to shut down computers and vehicles, but probably wouldn't stop a slug-rifle (we decided it must have an electrochemical solenoid trigger). Some sort of air pollution or environmental effect shouldn't stop air-tight items that worked just fine on atmosphere-less asteroid belt or beneath the surface of the water planet a few sessions back. There's a lot of hand-waving in your typical 3:16 session, and this power just amplifies that. Suspension of disbelief takes some effort.

Which is why I've been putting in sub-threads and hints (sometimes really overt hints) that the PCs are actually insane. This session was tied for the most overt and unsubtle I've ever been. The PCs now have reason to believe they might actually be in an mental institution. Various "PTSD hallucinations" they've been having suggest they are actually being interrogated by FBI and DHS heavies. I gave them the Jack Bauer treatment, as a gaggle of officials at the insane asylum tried electroshock therapy, drugs, and torture to get the PCs to reveal where they put the dirty bomb that endangers 10 million residents of LA. At this point, I slide back and forth between these two realities, with the PCs either fighting aliens on a distant planet, or being interrogated in the looney bin. The clock is ticking in both realities. At the institution, the Homeland Security guys worry that the bomb will irradiate the city if they can't get some useful info out of these insane terrorists. Out in space, two PCs are now Colonels, and have access to Starkillers.

For example, while fighting the wildlife of the Sentient Planet, one of the PCs climbed out of his disabled power-armor, and went hand-to-hand with a flock of birds. Meanwhile, another PC was talking to the Brigadier. But then the brigadier was replaced by an FBI special agent, who grilled her about the bomb. An orderly entered the room (wasn't this a forest a moment ago?) and interrupted the interrogation with the news that one of the other inmates was naked in the courtyard attacking the pigeons again.

Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

May the Blackbird be with you

Last night I played in a one-shot called "New Hope" that was sort of set in the Star Wars Universe, and used mechanics somewhat based on the indy RPG "Lady Blackbird".

It was set several years after Return of the Jedi, and the New Republic was every bit as as nasty as the Empire had ever been. Everything you recall from the movies was just Republican propaganda. It was an interesting twist on the Star Wars setting as seen through the perspective of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." It was a good game and plenty fun, but could probably have used a stronger opening scene. The GM vaguely explained the situation, but since it's a game where the Players have a lot of narrative power, he left most of the details fuzzy at first. He was trying to leave us free to take things in whatever direction we wanted, but as a result, we had a really slow start. I think if he'd narrated the opening situation more forcefully and given us a memorable villain to really hate, the first hour of the game would have been a lot better.

The rules were really interesting. They were derived from or inspired by Lady Blackbird, which is an indy game I was ignorant of until last night. I downloaded it this morning and took a peek through it, and I can tell that New Hope customized and built on it quite a bit. Overall, I think the changes were good ones. That said, I kind of felt like the GM's backlash dice pools were just a little too small. I think they could stand to range from 5 to 9 instead of 4 to 8. It's hard to say for certain, because we had some really lucky rolls on the players part. I just think the game would have been in it's best possible light, if the PCs had taken 25% more damage across the board and had to start worrying about resources and situations. I was the only one really hurt badly during the game, and that was only because I took some very big risks and painted a target on myself. I was so intrigued by the damage system I intentionally left myself open to suffer more of it.

My favorite part of the rules were definitely the "hit points"-like mechanism, which were customized to each character and really made you agonize over damage. You had three rows of labeled boxes. The first row was more like traditional HP, or like a World of Darkness health boxes, in that they were labeled "Hurt", "Wounded", "Crippled" and "Dead" or something to that effect. Below that was a row that had to do with our social status and the level of pursuit, so they were "Recognized", "Wanted", "Hunted" and "Infamous", I think. Then the fourth row were customized to each PC. My character had a wife and family - their health and safety were 5 of my 6 boxes in the third section. When you take damage, it's usually 1 or two points, and you get to apply them to any empty box that seems appropriate. So in a bar-fight I'd probably take the damage as physical damage in the top row, but I might instead take it in the second row and narrate that I was now a wanted man for having killed the person I was struggling with. If my family was present during a conflict, I might knock boxes off of them and say they were captured or harmed in the battle. One of the other characters was a rich man, and he took damage to his wealth when he got backlash off a roll to bribe someone. Having these custom consequences for each character was pretty cool, and really spiced up the conflicts. I may just have to steal the idea sometime.

Overall, it was good fun, and I'd definitely recommend it if you like the free-form "story game" narrative approach to role-playing. The RPG it was closest too in feel (at least of RPGs I'd played before) was probably Universalis, and I imagine if you like that you'll probably get a kick out of New Hope (or Lady Blackbird). It had more structure than Universalis, but appealed to the same mental space and had a similar spirit.

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

We aren't far from Swarm Prime afterall

My apologies for using the narcissist term "Swarm Prime" to refer to the default Continuum universe. I know it's in poor taste, and I hope my fellow spanners will forgive me.

The Continuum RPG has a list in the GM's section about events that happen in the official timeline of the Aquarian Era (2001 to 2400 CE). It's full of crazy fun stuff, like the birthdate of the first human born on Mars, and the implementation date of one world government here on earth, etc. Since there's a couple of shadowy upper Aquarians appearing as NPCs in my campaign, I decided to add that list to my GM's notes yesterday, which I keep on a secure wiki that I can access during sessions.

Typing it up, I decided I'd skip the entry for "2006: Turkey reasserts leadership of the Muslim world." That obviously didn't happen in the real world, and I was sure it wasn't likely to happen in the near future. Then I read this CNN headline this morning: Turkey emerges as Middle East leader. Shows how little I know about world politics... or perhaps just how weird the political landscape is in the wake of the Gaza flotilla raid.

Correcting for that 4-year discrepancy, and assuming the LHC's problems were some sort of cover story to keep word about the first successful temporal relocation experiment quiet, we're now perfectly in line for the Continuum's future to actually happen. Nothing is likely to conflict with that timeline again until 2019. Happy spanning!

Lego Batman at GwenCon

My favorite game at GwenCon this year was Lego Batman. It had a great balance of goofiness and challenge, played wonderfully with tropes and expectations, and was just a delight to dive into.

The setting was a city that had outlawed superheroes. The Comedian was dead. Sounds familiar, right?

Except this city was Gotham, and The Comedian was a former sidekick of The Joker, a sidekick who'd gone on to become a hero of his own. The Joker, you see, was one of the outlawed Superheroes. We were all playing characters mostly known for being villains that Batman battles against - but in this alternate reality, we were the heroes. Our backstories were just a little different to fit that as well - they paralleled various superhero backgrounds. I was The Joker. My parents had been killed on our way home from the circus as a child, so I grew up to become a crime fighter, wearing a costume styled after the most terrifying thing I knew - circus clowns. I didn't get to read the other PCs backstories, but bits came out. The Penguin developed his super powers after being bitten by a radioactive penguin, etc.

The Comedian was dead, having seemingly been drained by a vampire bat, then thrown off his balcony. So I loaded up my clown car full of the old superhero gang, and started the investigation. Much hamming-it-up ensued. Before the night was over, the Bat had also kidnapped my current sidekick Eddie "The Riddler" Nigma. Our attempts at a rescue were nearly blown by the psychotic showboating of a Scarecrow that clearly had elements of Rorshach in him.

Not that I can complain about psychotic showboating. At the scene of the crime, where the police rushed to the decision that The Comedian had killed himself, I did a little psycho showboating of my own. A pretty lengthy performance, the Joker wearing a little black pillbox hat and black veil, wailing like a bereaved widow. Eventually, when the police wouldn't do anything, I took matters into my own joy-buzzer-laden hands. "The mask is it's own protection", I told them, and then got in Commissioner Gordon's face. In fact, with a few good Taunt and Intimidate rolls to back it up, I managed to make the good commissioner pee his pants on Gotham TV.

Mechanics either were True 20, or were based on True 20. I haven't read True 20 in years, so I'm not sure how modified it was. But it was fast and simple, easy to grok and worked really well despite the frequency of opposed rolls. I just may have to go take another look at True 20, 'cause this was pretty sweet. I'm not used to anything d20-related having an elegant and robust set of social mechanics that use the same basic rules as the combat system, but it was a beauty the way it allowed for the confrontation with the Commissioner.

Did I mention this was LEGO Batman? Tim Beach, the GM, went above and beyond by making a set of awesomely intricate lego models for the various locations and vehicles. No doubt many of the vehicles were published lego models, but the most important bits were Tim's own creation. I wish I could show you The Comedian's apartment and the building it was part of. Fully detailed, with all sorts of tiny details like little lego faucets and toilet. It must have been weeks worth of constructing. It was an extremely cool prop - almost cool enough to make me regret that we were playing such over-the-top characters, I'm certain there were clues and details we missed because we were too busy riffing. We were chewing the scenery instead of analyzing it.

And then there was the scene at the Superhero Bar. He made this bar model, complete with "sidekick shack" out back. The bar had more than 30 figures in it - all outrageous and awesome. I could only identify about half of them. Villains from DC and Marvel, badguys from Harry Potter, one of the Emperor's Royal Guard from Return of the Jedi, Amelia Earhart for reasons that boggle the mind, etc. Mr Danger-To-Himself-And-Others (that's Doc Ok to you, kids) was the multi-armed bartender. We were holding a wake to remember our dear friend The Comedian. In the middle of the ridiculous wake scene, me standing on the bar trying to eulogize the deceased, the Batmobile crashed through the sidekick shack.

This lead to a watery chase to that falling-apart waterfront lab from Spiderman II (where Dick Grayson was holding poor Eddie Nigma hostage), then an aerial chase from there to the BatCave. In the midst of it all, I ended up leaping from Earhart's biplane onto one of Batman's flying toys. I managed to cling on to the outside, and made him crash. Meanwhile the rest of the group trashed the BatCave and beat up his Butler. Or maybe I was fighting the butler? It's hard to tell when they're wearing the same costume.

It was a delight to behold. A cornucopia of fun. So much going on, on so many levels. Thank you, Tim, for running the best game of a really good con.

Cornerstones of Conspiracy

Verisimilitude is really important to me, even when I'm not running a "sandbox" style of game. The key to making your setting believable is to really understand how it works. Sooner or later, the players will ask some crazy question out of left field. When they do, you want to be able to answer it quickly while remaining confident that the answer doesn't contradict other statements you've made (or will make) about the setting. To be able to do so, you have to really understand the foundations of your campaign, and how things are behind the scenes, and how things got to be the way they are now. One way to get there is to ask yourself lots of questions about the setting.

I feel that the following three questions are ones the GM should know the answer to when running any modern-day game (or any game with time travel). They aren't the only questions I'd contemplate, but they are biggies with far-reaching implications. The questions are:

1. What was the Templar's Treasure, and where did it go?


2. What really happened in Roswell in 1947?


3. Who shot JFK, and why?

Crazy, huh? Those three questions answer over 90% of modern conspiracy theory, and will of course be of greatest value to a game dealing with such theories. However, they also fill in tons of other background details that creep into every corner of modern reality. Is god real and powerful, a meek absentee landlord, or just a mass delusion? That depends on your answer to question #1. Is mankind alone in the universe? That depends on your answer to question #2. Is our government a flawed but admirable system of, by and for the people - or is it nothing more than a brutal weapon of class warfare wielded by The Rich? That depends the answers to 2 and 3.

I suppose it's more honest to say that the answers to those questions depend on the various facts about the setting, rather than the other way around. A weather balloon crashing in Roswell doesn't necessarily mean there's no other intelligent life in the universe, for example, but that's just splitting hairs. It's more useful to ask yourself the three simple questions than to confront the big picture from a purely abstract vantage point. While dealing with an abstraction, it's easy to fall into the trap of contradicting yourself without realizing it, or leaving things in an unresolved quantum state. The questions force you to be concrete, and expose unintended contradictions.

But of course, there's a fourth question, the one that really brings the campaign alive:

4. What impact does all this have on the characters in my game?

LARPsploding

A couple of buddies of mine are playing in a Vampire LARP here in town, and last night it was one of many topics of conversation. They revealed to me that they'd just recently (despite having been playing for months) learned two very odd rules of the LARP's setting.

1. There are no bombs. Explosives just don't make it into Seattle, as the police and border patrol are really good at finding them.
   
2. There is no internet. No windows, either. Computers have a DOS prompt and a monochrome screen.

The game is indeed set in the modern day, they tell me, and people have cellphone cameras in-character. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around these decisions. I've never played with this particular LARP group, so it's possible there's some mitigating circumstances I'm unaware of, but from my vantage point this just seems like so much crazy talk. As a result, my response (below) may seem kinda crass at times, for which I apologize.

---

The "No Bombs" rule I can kind of understand. I played in a game once where some yahoo exploded Elysium, killing several characters and doing Agg damage to just about everyone. I certainly felt like he was ruining the game. So, I can see how a blanket ruling that you just can't smuggle bombs into the city might seem appealing.

But what did my friends do this past month when their request for a bomb was turned down? One of them took his action for the week to purchase a huge amount of gasoline. The other took his action to buy bulk supplies of packing peanuts. Dissolve styrofoam in gasoline and, according to the Anarchist's cookbook, you get low-grade napalm. Since Vampires have an unnatural fear of fire, it's in some ways better against them then explosives are, though I'm sure it's stinkier and requires greater quantities for the job than C-4 would.

My point is, that while there's plenty of reasons that blowing up Elysium is bad, you can't stop it by claiming there's super drug-sniffing dogs at the edge of town. If you try to limit such game-breaking activity via in-character constraints, it only encourages players to get creative. They saw it as a challenge. Given only an in-character rationale, they might crash a plane into Elysium, or a tanker-truck full of home-made napalm into the Prince's haven, or they invest in Police Influence in hopes of making confiscated C-4 go missing from the evidence locker. The explosives are merely a symptom, not the underlying root cause.

There's certainly uses for which Explosives are non-broken. Your vampire wants to build a new Haven deep in solid bedrock - explosives are the way to do so that doesn't break the Masquerade. He wants to defend that same haven with booby traps that will be active even while he sleeps - there's very little even arguably wrong with that. He wants to wage a messy resource war by blowing up buildings that other players have Influence connections at - depending on the scope of what he's doing and whether or not it'll bring DHS and BATF down on your city, it might or might not be acceptable. He wants to boobytrap several other player's Havens so as to vaporize them without warning - that's probably right out, or at least the victim needs some sort of chance to spot it.

And that intent is exactly where the issue is. When a player tries to do something that will ruin everyone else's fun, it needs to be stopped. Rigging Elysium to explode falls into that category, but so would breaching the Masquerade on live television. Are you going to rule that "within the setting the FCC prevents all live broadcasts", just so you don't have to worry about that? Probably not. So why should bombs be treated any differently?

Saying "no bombs" is easy, but it completely misses the real issue. The better way to deal with it is to ask why the player wants the bombs. At that time, explain to them that for the sake of verisimilitude you'll give them access to the bombs, but that it makes you, as the Storyteller, uncomfortable. Make it clear to them that if they intentionally create a situation where their bomb plot succeeding is clearly at odds with the enjoyment of the rest of the group, your decision will be easy. As GM, you have an obligation to provide a fun experience for as many of the players as possible, even if it means his carefully orchestrated plan failing spectacularly.

If you have that conversation, those otherwise likely to nuke Elysium will reconsider it. If you aren't blunt about it like that, they'll just find some dastardly alternate way to sew chaos and devastation, because they think it sounds like fun.

---

The other part makes no sense at all to me.

The lack of internet, Windows, everything you expect about home computing, etc, is a pretty major deviation from "it's set in modern day". I can certainly think of reasons for deviating from reality like that. The game is set in Seattle, after all, so maybe backstory of one of the first PCs or NPCs involves killing Bill Gates or some other past action that prevented Microsoft from ever existing. Or maybe the GMs just didn't want to deal with all that potential Computer Influence (for which the default rules of the game don't really have a system) and Industrial Influence so they eliminated the elements of the local setting that would have required it. They may even have held back computers expecting some player to want to be the Gatesian pioneer in that arena, but the players just missed it and nobody has pursued that opportunity.

But if you're going to deviate from reality like that, it needs to be front-and-center. The description of the LARP is no longer "Vampire: The Masquerade", it should be "like Vampire: The Masquerade, in a slightly altered setting that's like the modern day except with seriously stunted computer technology and no internet." It shouldn't be possible for multiple people to be playing in your LARP for 3+ months without having been told about this alteration that's absolutely vital to understanding the head-space of a modern character. I suppose it's possible my friends missed this detail, but they were adamant to me that there were no clues: never told it before, nothing in hand-outs they'd been given or on the LARP's website.

Suspension of Disbelief may require some ripple effects coming from that setting variation, as well. Camera-phones seem like a stretch if there's no computer revolution predating them, and no way to upload and share your photos. If computers still have the old monochrome screens, why would cellphones have color displays? If not for the advances in technology for home computer's monitors, we wouldn't have flat-screen plasma TVs. Colleges wouldn't have big Computer Science departments, and the departments they would have would have diminshed computing resources - so Education Influence gives lesser benefit than it did before. Same for Health Influence, because a stagnated computer industry means reduced tech for life-saving, and all the records must still be paper-based and hard to search. Sweeping alterations to the setting pour forth from this decision, but it sounds like they haven't been taken into account at all.

Or, again, I suppose it's possible there's some factor I'm unaware of, which the three friends playing in the LARP weren't able to explain to me.

---

I'm not just some random crackpot here ranting about how someone else's campaign sucks without a leg to stand on. I've got some measure of experience at this sort of thing. For several years, I ran a LARP. It was set (initially) in 1850, and at the end of every 4-to-6-month story arc we'd advance the timeline by 10 to 20 years.

Up front, in big letters on the character-creation packet, it indicated that this was an alternate timeline and an alternate setting. It went on to mention there was no Camarilla nor Sabbat, the werewolf NPCs were non-cannonical and didn't worship The Wyld, the Tremere-Salubri backstory had been altered, and we're using Koldunic (not Vissitudinal) Tzcimsce. Don't assume anything is true about the secrets of White Wolf's setting except for very basic things every neonate would know, such as names and archetypes of the clans, general vampiric strengths and weaknesses, etc. For the sake of the story, our out-of-character goal was for Albuquerque to become the most prominent city west of the Mississippi, and certain PC actions have resulted in Tesla defeating Edison, but other than that, you could generally assume most of history played out largely as the history books record it. Feel free to ask the STs and/or heads of the households if you have questions about anything specific.

This caveat did a good job of introducing the players to the setting, and prepping them for the notion that our game was non-standard. When and if something came up that someone wasn't aware of, they generally rolled with it, and weren't afraid to ask the GMs "what would my character know about this?" 9 times out of 10 the answer was along the lines of "Nothing. You've never heard of it before. Steam-powered cyber-werewolves are not an established part of the setting, it must be something new the evil railroad barons whipped up. Now you know something the other players don't - hopefully it won't eat you."

Hollows & Hobgoblins

3 posts about Thursday:Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Last night, we played Hollows and Hobgoblins. It's a dark fantasy RPG based on the Wushu rules. Humans were the minority, forced to live in the impoverished wastelands, not far from the haunted Hollows. The setting had a lot of depth behind it, I could tell, but our one-shot about a bar besieged by corrupted animals and something akin to a barrow-wight didn't provide us much opportunity to explore. We had fun, though, and I'd enjoy a chance to explore the setting further.

Wushu is a great system, a "hippy game" as they called it, since it's rules light and very flexible. Our characters were three descriptors, a magic item, and a signature move, all of which we made up. I made a somewhat Bleys-ian flamboyant warrior type, spiced up with magical power over metal. The magic was fast and loose: I made a doorknob bite a badguy, directed a coat-rack to grapple someone, and when the leaded window-glass shattered it fell onto the floor as caltrops per my command.

The best part of the mechanics is the huge amount of power granted to the players. On your action, you say what happens. Not what you want to happen, but what actually happens. The thing you described happens regardless of how you roll, but the roll quantifies the effects. For example, we faced an unspecified number of mooks, so we could freely narrate how many any given action killed and how we drove the enemy legions back. But until we scored 20 or more aggregate successes, there'd always be more mooks.

The cooler your description of your action, the more dice you roll (like Scion's stunt system, but more integral and more potent). The battle against the big bad was a bit more structured than the mook fight, but we were still empowered to describe amazing acts of heroism and skill. For example, we couldn't chop his head off until and unless we'd worn him down a lot, but nothing stopped us from using our actions to throw him off balconies or into the fireplace.

Alternate Settings I'd Like To Run

Here's some links to alternate setting ideas I'd like to run as RPGs, but may never get around to.

• Scion Babies
• Multi-Platform Warriors
• Galadriel's Middle Earth

Galadriel's Middle Earth

We start the campaign by watching the first 2/3rds of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring. When Frodo offers the ring to Galadriel, we pause while she's in "Terrible As The Dawn" mode.

I hand out character sheets of all the non-hobbits in the fellowship. The PCs barely escape, Galadriel kicks Sauron's ass, and sets up the Fascist Dark Elf State.

The PCs are tasked with tracking down Gandalf and Sariman and uniting Humanity and Orcs against the Goth Elf army.

Ultimately, while this could be a lot of fun, it has issues. First, I'd have to do a lot of research to do it right, and I have no faith in my ability to finish the Silmarillion. Secondly, I've never really cared for the rules systems of any of the Lord of the Rings RPGs that I've read. Just too much work all around.

Multi-Platform The Warriors

Have you seen the movie The Warriors?
It's an old 70's film about a New York street gang trying to get back to Coney Island while all the other gangs in NYC hunt them. It's got some really trippy gangs - like the Baseball All-Stars. For a while I considered just stealing the plot for Cyberpunk 2020 and it's various posergangs.

Then I realized, it'd be cooler if each gang were represented by a different RPG system. There'd be a CP2020 gang for sure, plus a Vampire gang, a gang of Spanners, some Pendragon knights, 40k Orks, a D&D party, etc. Eventually a gang shows up without any connecting theme, and hopefully the players intuit that it's the GURPS gang.

This would make a good GwenCon one-shot, too, so there's hope I may run it this fall or next.

I'm not sure exactly what system the PCs should be from. One option would be Amber, using hoodlum junior versions of the Elder Amberites trying to get home without their trumps. Problem is the lack of randomness to that system - I'm unsure if it's a good idea to run a fairly combat-and-chase-scene intensive one-shot in such an abstract system. I suppose they could use Amber mechanics when defending, and the enemies mechanics when attacking, or vice-versa. That would shake things up a bit.

Alternately, PCs could be the colorful (and full-color) Everway sample characters.

Scion Babies

I'm considering running this for GwenCon this year. The idea is a blending of Scion and the cartoon show Muppet Babies. PCs would be Muppets with Divine Parentage - or the Muppets imagine themselves as Scions, I'm not sure which.

Kermit is the Scion of Thor - though that'd be a reference to the old Muppet News Flash logo on Sesame Street.
Miss Piggy is the Scion of Aphrodite.
Gonzo is probably the Scion of Eris or Loki.

I've had the concept in mind (on the back burner) for almost 6 months, but have yet to work out any further details.

Twisted Expectations

It should be fairly obvious reading over this gaming blog that I'm a big fan of Alternative Settings that are at once familiar, yet also twist the player's expectations around to keep them off-balance.

• I've done a variety of alternate Ambers, mostly taking place at somepoint in the midst of the first 5 novels, and then diverting drastically. I've never done "Brand won" but I have cast Brand as a good guy a few times, vs Random and/or Eric and/or Bleys and Fiona as the villains. I've dragged reincarnation into the setting once or twice, and based entire plotlines on how abusive Oberon was when the "elders" were children.

• Using a similar trick to that I've done repeatedly in Amber, I once ran a Star Wars campaign set in the week before Episode IV. I few sessions in, Princess Leia told the PCs the tale of how when ObiWan died, Luke raged and turned to the dark side. Yavin blew up the next session, and Han Solo went off to settle his debt with Jabba. The PCs were left to shoulder the Alliance's burdens themselves, while the evil Skywalker's hunted them.

• I transformed an Amber campaign into an Everway campaign when the PCs failed to stop the villain and a reality storm swept across the cosmos. All the PCs died, and only one NPC from the old game remained in the new universe.

  
  

• I bisociate on all cylinders in my current Scion campaign, so the PCs have a hard time knowing which history is real. They just spent two sessions fighting Angels and Ghosts (Celtic, Greek, Turkish and Parisian) on an island that was a self-contradicting blend of Trojan Myth and Grail Legend.

• Stretching back a few decades, I recall a late-80s Elfquest campaign where I ran an alternate divergent tale of Cutter's quest. I guess this was the first occurance of the trick I'd later use in Amber - start "in media res" in the middle of (or shortly before) an existing story, and then make dramatic changes to the plot as the story goes on.

• Hearts of Darkness, my multi-year LARP, was a clearly "alternate history" game. We started in 1850, in a Camarilla-less version of Vampire: The Masquerade that purposefully twisted all the "secrets" of the V:TM setting. Giovanni/Cappodocians, werewolves, and Salubri/Baali were three areas that I took great pleasure in distorting. Every couple of months we'd jump the story ahead by 10 years, and Albuquerque grew to rival New York. Eventually, PC activity led to the repudiation of The Masquerade and the open revelation of the supernatural to mortals.

• Montaigne-based 7th Sea with heavy reincarnative plot-threads and some departures involving The Bargainers, the Sidhe, and the Syrneth.
  

The list goes on. I really like taking the familiar and corrupting the details.

Amber (Myth)

This was part of the binder full of hand-outs given to the players in my old Everway campaign. A few nods to Amberway can be noted in the text below.

Amber (Myth)

“In olden days, on the distant shores of Amber...”

Is there anyone in all the spheres who doesn’t know that phrase? It seems at least half of all fairy-tales start that way. Most are about a young lad who should have known better, or a beautiful princess in great peril. Sometimes it’s about both, and they meet, are crowned King & Queen, fall tragically in love, are tricked into the woods by their evil stepmother, battle against horrible inhuman tyrants, and/or learn they were twins separated at birth, though not necessarily in that order. One thing you can be sure of is that every tale that starts this way is sure to have a self-righteous moral. Indeed, most tales of Amber are gushy, sappy melodramas, with villains unbelievable and heroines too true. But if you are in need of a familiar, comfortable way to get a story started, you could do a lot worse than “In olden days, on the distant shores of Amber...”

Though the Realm of Amber is most assuredly merely a fairytale, bards, poets and dramatists alike all agree upon the Usurper Force. It’s a stylistic convention that is only very rarely deviated from, and it adds greatly to the verisimilitude of this entirely ubiquitous fairy-tale city.
Usurper Force: The Royal Family
Normal: Unbreakable Solidarity
Inverted: Over-Protective Elitism

Tales you’ve no doubt heard about Amber, and particularly the way it was in Olden Days include...

1. Amber was the first city ever. In these tales typically some silly significance is granted to the city: Perhaps it was founded by the Gods or the first Spherewalker, maybe it’s where Coyote revealed to man the art of sorcery and was chained to a rock as punishment, sometimes all the buildings are made of gingerbread or gold, and in a few tales all the citizenry are Spherewalkers or incredibly strong.

2. The king of Amber is often named Walker First-Born. Sometimes a tale will revolve around a young man discovering that he was merely adopted by the old couple or pack of wolves that raised him, then he’ll learn his true name, defeat a preposterous villain, and raise to the title of King of Amber. Sometimes, First Born is indeed the first person ever born, or the first to receive the God’s gift of speech or the Fortune Deck. Other times he’s just called Walker, and it is said he built all the Gates between worlds. In some tales he marries the first woman ever born, and sometimes he lives a vow of chastity and servitude protecting a marvelous unicorn.

3. Horrible monsters and mustached villains love to besiege Amber. They always fail, though. Every Amber story has a happy ending, usually involving a wedding, a naming, a great battle, or the finding of the true heir. Again, sometimes the bards overdo it and try to work in all 4 to final chapter of a single tale.

4. Near to Amber is a city that is almost exactly like it except magical in some way elemental. You’ve heard tales of Underwater Amber, Volcanic Amber, Forested Amber, Amber-On-The-Moon, Ghost Amber, etc. Often it’s like a mirror or reflection - everything being backwards from the way it is in Amber. In all these stories, the Reflected Amber is in some fundamental way inferior to Amber, but still holds a secret that Walker First-Born or one of his younger siblings has to go investigate.

5. The Royal Family of Amber is huge. Their family tree is convoluted, and includes numerous political marriages, which our hero & heroine often escape from via some clever trick or demonstration of awe-invoking purity. All the Royals are powerful, many to a degree that is unbelievable. They might run around a Sphere in a day, or save a sinking ship by drinking the ocean, outrageous claims like that are to be expected.

6. No one you have ever known has ever been to Amber. Maybe someone they used to know was there once, but it was so beautiful they decided to relocate for good. Only a fool would ever leave Amber on purpose. Why else do you think all those Ogres and wicked stepmothers try to conquer it? It’s the best city you’ve ever imagined.

BrewerBarrow and the old ghosts

An hour ago, I posted this as part of another file, but since then I've decided it's better to have it separate so I can reference/link to it directly if I want to. It was part of an Everway Realm called BrewerBarrow that I created.

The Barrows: Those who tread upon the barrows shall have to deal with the Old Ghosts.

Old Ghosts of the Barrow Downs: Dark and nasty life-leeches. These sinister shadows foretell the second death of the universe, and look forward to it with sickening glee.
Air: 7 Earth: 1 Fire: 1 Water: 3
Breathstealing: 1 pt, Major: This attack compares the Air Scores of the Old Ghost and its victim - it’s the only attack they have. The nature of the attack is that it sucks the wind right out of the target. Lungs collapse, the weak suffocate, and it can take days to get your voice back. To make the attack the Old Ghost must surround you, and whether successful or not they become fatigued by the effort and retreat to their crypt afterwards.
Darkening Touch: 1pt, Frequent: Anything touched or surrounded by an Old Ghost loses some of it’s color, turning black or dark grey depending on length of contact and the original color. It’s not harmful or damaging, just a little creepy.

Note that the campaign this was written for was a follow-up to an Amber campaign where Eric rewrote the universe. The old ghosts of BrewerBarrow are the ghostlike afterimages of those who fell upon the black road before Eric’s rewrite.

Everway Realms

Over the next day or two, I intend to post most or all of the Sphere and Realm files we made for the old Everway Campaign. Each had a player handout and a GM's "Full Disclosure" page. We made a big binder of 20+ realms for all our players, so they could start out with a clear idea of what their characters knew about the universe they lived in.

Addendum to Merankea

With no published setting or historical evidence of a society such as Merankea, I was free to improvise whatever details I desired. This will no doubt thrill Jeremy to no end - he's a stalwart believer that all the best RPG sessions occur from minimal GM prep.

Let's just not tell him that it's not really true to say there was no prep work. I'd been walking to work every morning since Sarah was in school. It was a 25-30 minute walk, often through weather that begged for distractions, so a lot of time was spent thinking about the game. I'd put the archery-thing in his Yet all the way back in Groeg Ydy Abar, so I'd had plenty of time to dream up the culture and it's incredible woven towers. In summation, the Merankeans are a conservative, mechanistic culture, secretly manipulated by Antedesertium. My hooks into the culture were big well-groomed beards, a totally sexist male-dominated society, unparalleled woodworking skills, an Archer caste, foreign slaves, and little masonic aprons. They were a prime part of the Hunt of the Sun, and a chance to play up on that Continuum sub-theme of "technologically advanced ancient cultures that vanished from the historical record." By making everything out of wood, they could have massive cities that would burn down or rot away over the 7,000 year gap before recorded history of Europe really got rolling.

Everything else could be improvised. Jeremy's attendance was at times spotty, so I didn't think it was worth ginning up a big codified version of the place and times. If he didn't show, it'd be a waste. Don't tell him I said that, either, though again I'm sure he'd be happy to know that I didn't do a bunch of extra work for him.

I went into the session knowing that I had the option of giving Jeremy his moment in the spotlight. He showed up, he read the writing on the woven walls, and his character Aaron spent a year amongst their culture. I gave him a ton of archery, and some odd madeup skills. He grew a beard and adopted a more "manly" cultural bearing. It was a very interesting bit of character development.

The Edison Gambit

Today appears to be the day in which I bitch about issues gaming related. I said who am I to blow against my own wind?

I used to be the Head Storyteller for a Vampire LARP in Albuquerque. In that game, I had a player named Joe. He was smart, clever, and far more mature than most of the other players. You could count on him to take a leadership role when you need it it, and he was happy to play supporting role when it was someone else's time in the spot light. 99% of the time, Joe was an incredible asset to your game.

This is a tale about the other 1%.

---

Like I said, Joe was smart. Too smart. I sometimes didn't get his obscure references, and I'm a fairly history-savvy guy. For example, I'm terribly embarassed just how long it took me to notice that his elder vampire was named Martell - I bet Rob and Gilbert noticed it the first time he was introduced in-character.

But I feel no shame in not catching his Edison set up. The game was set in Albuquerque in the 1800's. Joe arranged for his character to have just moved there (in 1850) from some place in Florida. His assets included two allies - a young engineer and hobbyist inventor back in Florida, and the vampiric Prince of the city that engineer lives in. Not knowing Edisons early career, I just assumed he'd always been from Menlo Park, New Jersey - and thus, I had no clue he'd started out in Florida.

As the game moved through the years, it deviated further and further from established history and the default white-wolf setting. Joe's faction (known as House Iron Horse, as they were rail barons) became positively intertwined with a group of NPCs called Titan Industries. The heads of Titan were european werewolves, using the transcontinental railroad to dominate the chi of the new world and win an age-old war with the native american werecreatures. Titan was intended as a foil, a dangerous obstacle. Joe (and Mike aka Doom) had done a great job of turning that around - they allied with Titan and were reaping all sorts of benefits. This made me very happy, and kept strengthening that connection. We also started pushing the steampunk and technomancy elements of Titan, including one memorable scene with a were wearing cyberware.

Then out of the blue, Joe pulls this deft maneuver that results in his old engineer ally being ghouled by his old Prince ally, and sent to Albuquerque as a birthday present. We'd already said yes to it about a week before Joe pointed out (to one of my narrators) that this Engineer was clearly Thomas Edison. Via email that week, Joe basically laid out that he was going to blood-bond Edison, loan him out to Titan, and become the richest most powerful man in America. He'd been laying the groundwork for this for over 6 months out of character, which included about 15 or 20 years of in-character time.

---

That munchkinny 1% of him that really wanted to win the game had somehow metastatized and spread throughout my campaign like a cancer. Funny thing is, I would have been okay with the Edison Gambit, if he'd just been honest with me. I would have downplayed Titan a bit, and given him Edison Labs instead. I would have let him be bigger than Rockefeller. We'd already let player action grow Albuquerque to rival New York - and we were still in the 1800's. This was an epic tale, and I was prepared to give players what they wanted as long as they worked for it and were being honest with me.

---

Long story short, he tells Titan that Edison is on his way. The were-CEO replies "This is not good. My cousin Nicolli is also moving here next week. He and Edison had a falling out a few years ago, and they tend to fight." I had people guest-star as Tesla and Edison for a session or two, constantly arguing. Rob did a killer job playing up Edison's well documented bigotry. Joe didn't figure out a solution to the conflict fast enough, and so eventually we ran a story time as follows:

Edison sits in his lab, working on some project.
Tesla knocks on the door. Edison ignores him.
Tesla pounds furiously. Edison just smiles and hums.
Tesla kicks in the door, and stomps in. Edison says "That wasn't smart - my floor is electrified" and flips a switch.
Tesla jumps, slumps, twitches, jumps again, then turns into a giant werecritter and bites Edison's head off.
End of story.

---

I penalized Joe's XP pretty harshly at the end of that storyarc - 1/4th to 1/6th what the other members of his faction got. I felt a little bad, but I needed to make sure the point got driven home. He never tried to pull the wool over my eyes again.

Moral of the story - just be honest with your GM. Tricks and duplicity never help.
Secondary Moral - I'm a mean and clever S.O.B. when I'm provoked.