Highlights from Emerald City Comic Con

I went to the Emerald City Comic Con last weekend.  My wife joined me on Friday, but due to illness she had to skip out on the other two days of the con (and three days of work after that). Cons are better when you've got a friend to gawk with, but I still had a lot of fun despite being on my own for the weekend.

I ran two sessions of Psi*Run for the Games On Demand / Story Game Seattle booth. The first was a little disjointed and didn't really come together until the third hour of play. That happens sometimes with the game, due to its highly improvisational nature. The second session found its footing immediately, and just took off. One of the players posted "playing my new favorite RPG, Psi*Run" to her Facebook page. So that's definitely a success. Both games were over-the-top crazy, but I suspect the first group might have enjoyed it a little more if I'd reigned in the zaniness a bit early on and given them a more coherent faction of Chasers.

While at the con, I made frequent visits to the Flying Frog Productions booth. The Frog continues to impress me with their customer service, friendliness, and with the immense fun their games provide. They told me a lot of what's coming up in future Brimstone expansions, which deserves a post of its own here sometime soon. Now that I'm not nursing my wife back to health, I should be able to find time to type that up.


Other purchases I made last weekend included:

• 4 expansion decks for Shadows of Brimstone, including much-needed new artifact cards for Targa and Jargono and some more blanks just in case we burn through those in a hurry too.
• 2 expansion decks for Fortune and Glory.
• A die-rolling tray to reduce dice-related clutter when playing big board games. I've had one for years, and decided it would be useful to get a second one.
• Two expansion decks for Super Fight that add Locations and Scenarios to provide some context for the ridiculous battles in the game.
• A handful of custom Lego minifigs and accessory pieces. I have plans to use these in an RPG I'm running called BrickerWorld.
• An album by local nerd-rock group Kirby Krackle. Got it signed by the song-writer.
• The goofy godzillesque board game Terror In Meeple City.
• Crazy game and science themed nail art (for my wife) from Espionage Cosmetics. She can decorate her fingers in nebulas and dice.
• A gift for an out-of-town friend that I probably can't talk about until it shows up in his mailbox.

Beyond that, I played a few demos, geeked out a lot, and just generally had fun. It was a really good con.




EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention the expansion deck "Curse of the Werewolf" for Dark Gothic. It's a very small expansion, but solid. I had to build an entry for it on Board Game Geek it was so new.

Philosophical Reading

I just stumbled across a blog called "Points of Light: Mostly for D&D games". As the name says, it's mostly about D&D, which I don't play a lot of. It's also got a lot of "Edition Wars" related posts (he really likes 4th and hates Pathfinder), which are of limited interest to me. Every single paragraph has at least one "fucking" which seems a bit excessive.

But stepping past those complaints, as I read over his articles, I can't help but acknowledge that:
a) it's largely a fun read, with plenty of juicy rants and bitter humor,
and
b) I absolutely agree with his philosophy (and play style) every single time they come up. I found myself nodding yes as I read his posts about game balance, pacing, character niche, "noob traps", why requiring deep system mastery is a poor design choice, and what sorts of things really do provide a challenge to the players and what other mechanics claim to do so but actually are just unfair or annoying. I kept thinking that these were posts I would have written, if I engaged in more D&D, cussing, and sarcasm.

Overall, a fun site worth a read if you have any interest in recent D&D editions. I highly recommend starting with his snarky sarcastic review of what makes 3rd Ed "great".

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!

By the time you read this, it will probably be too late...

...to get the Humble Indy Bundle at the amazing price of "Pay what you want". Sale ends tonight, and I just found out about it twenty minutes ago. If it's still Monday when you're reading this, it's worth popping over to http://www.wolfire.com/humble

It's a bundle of five computer games in a bundle that you set the price on. You can even decide how much of what you pay goes to the developers, and how much goes to charity. I paid $20 total, divided evenly. The friend who told me about it had paid that much, and it sounded reasonable to me. I've never played any of them, but $20 seemed worth risking to support this business model, and get to try 5 games I know next to jack about (the only one on the list I'd even heard of before was World of Goo). Zero downside to me, not like $20 is gonna break the bank or anything.

Savagely Tricky

Here's what the Savage Worlds rule book should have said about Tricks, but didn't:

Tricks are only really worth it if your character has a low Fighting die but a high Agility or Smarts, and the enemy has a Parry higher than your average attack roll.

Despite what you might have inferred from the concept and fluff text of Tricks, they are not actually intended to model crafty or sneaky fighters. Any character who has actually invested points in their Fighting score and related combat stats will be more effective making normal attacks than wasting their time and actions throwing sand in the opponents eyes, or telling the enemy to look behind them.

What tricks do well is they enable typically non-combatant characters (such as gadgeteers, healers, and spellcasters who've run out of power points) to contribute to the group's success during a fight scene. Tricks are most effective against foes with a low Agility or Smarts, so they're better against Extras and henchman than against a named criminal mastermind that's intended to be a challenge for the whole party.

Even then, the best benefit of a trick will be felt only if someone is prepared to follow it up with a normal attack before the tricked foe acts again. Players should coordinate tricks so that one PC sets it up, and someone else acting right after them takes advantage of it. If you cannot guarantee this sort of situation, only use Tricks if you're the last PC acting in the round, as then a lucky initiative draw may allow the trick to be in effect when yourself of an allied character acts next round. If no one is positioned to follow up on your trick, the low-Fighting character is generally better off firing a pistol at a distant foe than using a trick on an adjacent one.

One exception to needing teamwork, however, is when a character that is not combat-oriented at all is stuck in melee and just wants to flee. With a lucky back-to-back initiative draw, you might be able to use a trick followed by an attack to shake a foe and get away without provoking a free attack. This is of course a desperate move, one best used when the alternative is probably the death of your character. If you succeed at the Trick escape, the GM should proceed to use the Chase mechanics instead of normal movement rules, as without the special Chase rules most foes will be able to automatically catch up with you again if they successfully unshake on their turn.

Honestly, no one writes rule books like that, but I really wish they did. If every game book discussed mechanics so frankly it would improve performance at the table for the casual gamer, and eliminate much of the advantage that can be gained by rules lawyering and munchkinism.

My buddy Erik recently did an amazing mathematical analysis of the Trick mechanic in Savage Worlds. Here's the link. Go ogle his charts and probability graphs for yourself. My proposed text above is really just a straight-forward summary of his discoveries and hard work. I've been meaning to provide a link for the past two weeks, but wanted to find the best way to summarize the heart of his findings. Thank you Erik, it was really helpful to me to see these things spelled out clearly!

High Scoring Vulgarity

Last week while my wife was convalescing from a back injury, we tried out a new little video game. It's called Clockwords. It's a little bit like Scrabble or other word games, but with a timer element that is represented by a battle between a steam-tech robotic weapon system and invading insects. It's actually pretty cool. Here's a link. She was bedridden much of the week, but she could still shout words at me.

Fun game. Very different from the sorts of games we usually play.

The majority of words you spell score probably around 50 points of damage. But I got vulgar, and it paid off. :) 394 damage from "Vulgarity". The yellow "R" is what did it, it made the 4 bronze letters explode while the evil insects were crossing each others trails.

1KBWC in ABQ

In Albuquerque last weekend we played 1,000 Blank White Cards. Our host, Jeremy, has put up some scans of the cards made for the game. Link to card images.

Here's a sample, there's another 81 cards where these came from:





Additional Blank White Cards link.

Chipped-in Wage-Slaves

Over at Pair o' Dice, they mentioned the concept of chipped workers in Shadowrun (and the same could be done in Cyberpunk), people who are slaves to the company they work for. A company that never had to train them, they just plugged in a skill chip that guides the worker's hands. Scary, creepy, sci-fi fun. And it's only a few years off.

Talking about it, Scott at Pair o' Dice wrote:

Wageslavery as a Backdrop to the Action

I am not suggesting players take on wage slave characters (although some runners have backgrounds as an ex-wage slave or corporate drone), that would probably be a terribly dull game.

But I gotta say, that actually gave me two really cool campaign ideas that aren't dull at all:

1. A game where the PCs are wage slaves, and some sort of mix-up happens. One day, they show up for work, and their "Assembly Line Efficiency & Company Loyalty" chip has been replaced with a "Urbo-Anarchist Badassery" chip. Or just a Martial Arts chip. You're playing ordinary people who suddenly have a single maxed out skill, which was no doubt slipped to them by someone for some reason. Cue the clues, interspersed with Matrixy fight-scenes. You have to break out of work, with company property still in your head, and the pursue the mystery.
   
2. A game where you don't play the meatbag, you play the AI. I'm a super-spy that only exists as a skill chip. Plug me into a person, and I immediately over-ride their personality as well as tacking on a couple of very important skills. If things go south and I need to lay low, I just convince someone else to try this awesome skill chip instead. You'd play the same character, but have new character sheets and background every time you swapped your plugging. There's some logistics to work out about the couple seconds between unplugging from your current body and getting plugged in to the other, but I'm confident it could be explained in a way that would at least diminish the risks and plot holes. If the persona lingers for a few minutes after the chip is pulled out, for example, or if the last thing you do before unplugging is auto-hypnosis. Every NPC you meet that has a visible chip socket becomes a potential bodysnatching.

Anyhow, the blog post over at Pair o' Dice is pretty cool. Check it out

More Crunchometer

Here's a quick link for anyone that found my Crunchometer useful or interesting. (The Crunchometer is a system for categorizing RPG mechanics by overall complexity level and burden on the players. Link to my original post)

Anyhow, the main point of today's post is to provide a link to a blog that used my idea. "Vampire", author of the blog Alea lacta Est, put up some crunchometer ratings for games he's run. Here's the link to his crunchometer ratings. Many of the games he rates overlap with ones I rated, but he adds Ninja Burger, and disagrees with me a tiny bit on a few White Wolf products.

A quick aside about that: Comparing our ratings, I see he marked Scion a little less complicated than I did, but Exalted more complicated. Hmm... Glad I never got past character-creation in Exalted. :) All joking aside, I will say that Scion starts out much simpler than it becomes. Hero-level Scion, especially if you're just using the Hero book, is probably a c12 in my opinion as well, it's just that as you push into Demigod and God the mechanics start coming apart at the seams and maintaining play balance becomes a continual chore.

Spheres of Magic

Just wanted to provide a quick link to something cool a buddy of mine made for a campaign he's running. He's got a unique magic system, and pretty spiffy flowchart to the schools of magic. I just might have to steal a few of his ideas sometime.

pimping the Arcana Wiki meme

Yesterday, I started posting to the Arcana Wiki. It's a fledgling wiki, less than a year old, but it's got some serious potential. It's similar to Wikipedia or the TV Tropes Wiki, except specifically aimed at gaming and gamers. Thus far, the articles tend to be much briefer than either of those longer-established wikis.

What makes Arcana Wiki cool is that each (or at least most) articles end with a "Game and Story Use" section, where various plot hooks and character concepts are provided, to explore ways in which the topic of that entry could be used in an RPG. It's not just an encyclopedia, it more like a big group brainstorm of neat things you could do in a role-playing game. Most pages start with the accepted facts on a topic, and then wrap up with conspiracy theories, what if's, ways you could twist it in an RPG, plotlines this topic would suggest, etc. With gamers being the intended audience, it can devote pages to subjects that would only get a skeptical gloss-over (or be vulnerable to constant flame-wars over how to edit it) on wikipedia.

I plan on contributing to Arcana Wiki quite frequently, and you might consider doing so, to. Come on, you know ya wanna. It'll be fun.

(Even if you don't contribute, you're still welcome to steal ideas from it, as that's clearly the point of the endeavor.)

Savagepedia

I posted some of my house-rules for Savage Worlds to Savagepedia today. It's a Savage Worlds wiki. Everything I posted there was already on this blog for some time, with nothing new beyond some organization-related edits and minor clarifications. Here's the relevant links:

• Cinematic Damage: aka "1 Hit = 1 Wound" rule. Speeds up damage rolls and prevents random anticlimactic PC death.
• Non-Arcane Cybernetics System: Uses a new thing called The Cyber Die instead of making Cybernetics just another form of Arcane Background (as I'd seen elsewhere).
• Cyberpunk 2020 Setting Conversion: A framework for catching the feel of R. Talsorian's classic setting without losing the mechanical elegance of Savage Worlds.

Time Travel (and Parallel Universe) Links

Mainly I wanted to share Timelinks, aetherco's big list of time-travel movie reviews. A related link is Andy's Anachronisms. Both review only movies and TV shows that feature Time Travel as a major plot point. What makes it cool is that the reviews have more to do with the consistency and logic of how time-travel functions in the setting of the films, than they do with the traditional film qualities most reviews focus on. At Timelinks, they list 700 films and shows, and score them from 1 to 12 (like the hours of a clock), though neither a 1 nor a 12 has ever been given, as a 1 would be too horrible to watch and a 12 would be actual video proof of time travel. Even the page on how their review system works is well worth a read.

To give you an example of what the sites are like, I offer their review of T3 - They ignore most of the films many mundane flaws to instead focus on how it deals with Time Travel, and how it muddles the rules of the first two films. The best part of the review is the supposition that maybe ALL the Terminators were sent by SkyNet, none by John Connor.

In fact, except for Kyle Reese, John's time-warped dad in the first movie, we have only the word of a bunch of Terminators about what the future holds. And even Reese could have been told to lie to Sarah Connor about the date of Judgment Day (originally August 29, 1997). After all, he memorized a speech to tell her.

There is even the grim possiblity that, since Terminators are programmed to lie constantly in pursuit of their goal, that ALL of the Terminators have been sent by Skynet. What better way to herd humans into desired events than by giving them a glimmer of hope?

I'd happily play in that Campaign.

(All this reminds me of Terminator: Salvation. That movie could be sweet. Fingers crossed.)

I just wish they'd get more reviews up, and more films rated. There's 700 time-travel films listed, but maybe half that many rated, and only a handful given full reviews.

...but while I'm providing links, here's a couple short scientific articles on parallel universes and how to make our own.

More PlayCrafter good news!

Turns out my game "Big Bad Fly" won the latest contest at PlayCrafter! It's now one of the featured games that shows up all big at the top of the mainpage. I'm on cloud nine!

Update: I realized I didn't really say what the contest was. It was for the best game made in the 2-week period between Dec 25th and Jan 9th. All the games made during that time were automatically entered. The prize is getting my game at the top of their main page - it's not like I won money or a trip to Hawaii or anything lavish. It still makes me pretty happy, though.

Possibly the best flash game ever made

(No, it's not one of mine. What kind of self-absorbed pompous egotistical windbag do you think I am?)

It's called Gemcraft, available at Armor Games and Game In A Bottle. This holiday vacation, while mostly snowed in, Sarah and I played it's entire run. We won 168 battles, killing a total of 45,336 monsters. The game was good enough to spend all those hours. ...and it's even free.

It's kinda like the various Tower defense games, but spruced up with:

• something very reminiscent of the gem and socket system of Diablo II,
• a skill-point and experience system,
• a compelling story and a cool ending,
• deeper strategic decisions then most of the Tower Defense games,
• 48 tactical battlefields to fight over across the strategic map,

This highly addictive and satisfying game kicks some serious booty. Each individual level is 5 to 30 minutes, so you can cram in a quick battle between other diversions.

The only complaint I have is a minor thematic/flavor complaint: why do the monsters respect and obey traffic laws? (The answer, of course, is that they do so because it makes for better game play, but it's still a little goofy.)

Savage Links

A few interesting links that a google search for Savage Worlds turned up:

On some guy's blog from a month ago, he talks about 3 things he hates about Savage Worlds. In adjacent posts he also discusses things he likes about it, and things the GM should avoid, but the "Three Bad Things" post is most interesting to me. Not because I want to bag on the game, but because his 3 nits are different from the nits I pick. I love bennies, and hadn't yet noticed the character generation issues he belabors. He considers the damage system (which I dislike) to be one of the best features of the game. The three consecutive posts make for an interesting read.

This Savage Worlds probability analysis pretty much confirms what I'd felt: the odds in Savage Worlds are a little strange. If the difficulty is 6, you're better off with a d4 than a d6. If the difficulty is 12, you're better off with a d10 than a d12. That much I'd begun to suspect, but I'm glad to see that once the numbers are crunched out further, the differences are only a percent or so off. I was a little worried the mathematical paradox would be far greater. Just the same, I still see little point in taking anything above a d8.

What every new Savage Worlds GM needs to know, according to the Pinnacle Forums. The most useful to me is the "balanced encounters" system. "System" may be too generous a term for it, but it's a step in the right direction. I've been playing Scion for the past year and change, so I'm sick and tired of RPGs that give you no clues how long a fight will last and whether the PCs will slaughter, be slaughtered, or just spin their wheels ineffectively till the GM improvs a solution. In a nutshell, the "almost a system" presented on the forum is this: determine average damage for the heroes. Set the Toughness of the foes at 0-1 points above that average damage. For every PC, add 2 extras or 1 wild card villain, or increase the toughness of an existing villain by 1. Roughly. YMMV.

Savagepedia is a wiki, so anything I say about it could be completely invalidated at the drop of a hat.

Combat Survival Guide is technically just a table of modifiers, but it's organized as a problem-solving tool, so you can figure out what you need to do depending on the situation. Even traditionally "non-combat" characters will find something in that PDF that they can do to help the group win the fight. Tricks and Tests of Will are some of my favorite parts of the Savage Worlds system.

Ultimate Mass

I was about to provide someone on the forum with a link to James McMurray's big ol' Scion mass chart, when I realized it had an error.

Epic Strength 1 gives +500 lbs lifting capacity. The 2nd and 3rd dots double that. The 4th to 7th dots Quintuple the bonus at each level. The 8th to 10th dots multiply the total of the previous dot by 10.

It would appear the chart at James's site (which I and formorach69 helped create) didn't take that last transition into account. The chart was made before any of us were playing God-level PCs, and may have been made before the God book was published (I don't remember). Whatever the timing, the chart seems to progress levels 8 through 10 at the same x5 multiplier of levels 4 to 7. As a result, it lists the Empire State Building as Mass 11, when it's actually Mass 10. Military Tugboats should be adjusted to Mass 8. The entries for Loaded Freighter, Cruiser, and Large Bridge should all be downgraded to Mass 9.

I'm gonna try to contact James McMurray and get it fixed. He's not currently active on the Scion forum, so I might not be able to get it changed. Update: I got in touch with him, and he updated/fixed the page linked above.

Two Trek Links

I've been thinking about the Star Trek RPG since playing it the other day. The scenario we played was fairly fun, but the mechanics were lame. After several campaigns (in the last few years: Cyberpunk, Continuum, Amber, Scion) of very murky morality, it was refreshing to play in the "we're the good guys" Trek setting. Refreshing enough to inspire me to google the game. I found two links I felt compared to share.

1. I read up more on the mechanics here. It's a fairly critical article that briefly digests the issues of the ICON system mechanics.
   
   That article pointed out to me that we were using a house-rule in the scenario last weekend. Getting a 6 on your wild die is supposed to let you add your second-highest die to the total. Jason had us roll the wild die again and add them together. Using that house rule has two effects:
   
   1. Slows down the game by a couple extra seconds every time you roll a 6 on the wild die.
   2. Makes the non-wild dice of your pool matter less*.
      
   Now, I suspect this wasn't an intentional house-rule. Jason said it was his first time running the system, and some mistakes are to be expected when that's the case. The game's mechanics already have an unfortunate habit of making dice beyond your third nearly irrelevant, but that house-rule just made it worse. Jason struck me as a bright guy, so I imagine it was probably a misread, not intentionally altered for the worst.
   

   *= For example, let's say the captain and first mate rolled 5 dice and 3 dice respectively, and got these results:
   Kirk: 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 1
   Spock: 6, 2, 1.
   Assume the 6's are their wild dice. Kirk's roll looks better, and by the official rules he's have a "11" total to Spock's "8", so Kirk would triumph. However, the house-rule wouldn't care about that - they'd each reroll the wild die, and have a 50-50 chance of beating the other. Having extra skill dice becomes less beneficial with that house rule.

   I can clearly say that while Jason's game left me wanting to roleplay more in the Trek universe, it (and the articles I've read on the mechanics since then) gave me no desire to play in the rules sets used by Last Unicorn. It seems mathematically flawed - as that article pointed out, Deanna Troi has a 23% chance of beating Data at arm wrestling, despite Data having super-human strength.
   



2. The second Trek-related link I wanted to point out was the Star Trek Crew Replicator. It's a cute little on-line tool that lets you build your own paper Star Trek miniatures. You pick the gender, race, skin and hair color, accessories carried, and era/uniform, and it makes you miniatures you can print out. It's very cool.

Turns out the books on my shelf are for the Decipher CODA system, not the Last Unicorn ICON system. While it looks like CODA fixes the dice-odds problem I was just complaining about, the newer system seems more fiddly than I like.
I'm not looking to simulate the minutae of the Trek technology and canonical Star Fleet hierarchy - I'm looking to capture the feel of the best Trek episodes. If I end up running a Trek game of my own someday, I'll probably make up my own lightweight set of rules. I've got a concept for how to handle starship combat...

Out Of Place Artifacts

I was surprised to discover that the wikipedia article on OOPArts (Out Of Place Artifacts) is pretty thorough. Well worth a read-through and click-through of the various sub articles. If this article had existed back when I was running continuum, I'd have worked several of these into the story.

Validated cases

• The Maine Penny found in Blue Hill, Maine. An 11th century Norse coin found in an American Indian shell midden. Over 20,000 objects were found over a 15-year period at the Goddard site in Blue Hill. The sole OOPArt was the coin.^[3][4] One hypothesis is that it may have been brought to the site from a Viking settlement in Newfoundland by seagoing Native Americans.
• The Iron pillar in India, dating around to AD 423.
• The Antikythera mechanism, a geared device manufactured ca. 100 BC, believed to be an orrery for predicting the motion of the sun, moon and planets.
• Tablets and artifacts discovered in Glozel, France in the 1920s and '30s, some of which were inscribed with an unknown, undeciphered alphabet.
  

Other parts of the article provide similar links to more controversial OOPArts, ones that are still debated, like the Baghdad Battery that they used to electroplate on mythbusters.

See also

• Anachronism
• Ancient astronaut theories
• Charles Fort, researcher of anomalous phenomena
• Fortean Times