Chateau What-d'If!

 Super happy with the Night's Black Agents session. Had two simultaneous thriller scenes: A fight on Chateau d'If with 3 PCs against the Man In The Iron Mask*, at the same time a 3-way fight in downtown Marseilles between 2 PCs, a team from the British vampire program, and a corrupt cop on the take from a French vampire, which then turned into a chase sequence. Two PCs got mauled by a vamp, 1 got tased by spy, sniper fire broke out on a city street, and a group of characters had to jump off the cliffs of Chateau d'If and swim to safety.

*= It turns out the Man In The Iron Mask is a vampire that's been locked up beneath Chateau d'If for hundreds of years. Also locked beneath the castle was a beheaded Moroccan Djinn, and the animate mummy of Jean-Baptiste Kleber. Their warden is one of Les Immortals (the 40 influential people in charge of the French Language) who happens to be a Karcist (Goetic Mage) who has been tending their prison since the French Revolution. He was originally their warden, but has sort of fallen under the influence of the Djinn. It's complicated. Also more creepy, and less campy, than this short summary would lead you to conclude.

Table for 8

 I just ran my first Amber Attribute Auction in more than a decade. I had invited a large group of players, but as of this morning, only 3 had confirmed that they'd definitely be playing, and one of those 3 said he unfortunately was probably going to have to miss the character creation system. 3 dependable players is enough to run a good Amber campaign, but it's not really enough to run an Attribute Auction, so I spent a good chunk of the day unnecessarily prepping for how I might handle character creation for 2 or 3 in a way that would allow me to seamlessly add another player or two at a later date. 

For those unaware of the intricacies of Amber, the auction has 4 major Attributes (Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare) and player bid against each other to be "1st Rank" in each. This is fundamentally broken with less than 4 players, and can easily fall apart even with 4. Basically, if one player manages to be first rank in 3 of the 4 attributes, you'll potentially have some very painful balance issues should those characters come to cross purposes. So I was worried.

Needlessly.

When the appointed time arrived, people just kept showing up to the google hangout and Roll20. I ended up with 7 players!

The auction went smoothly, despite my being a decade out of practice. If anything, my being rusty may have actually helped. I didn't oversell the attributes, so people had enough points to get Powers. Here's the Attribute "rungs" we ended up with:

Psyche rungs: 4 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 17

Strength rungs:  1 / 3 / 6 / 7 / 8

Endurance rungs: 5 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20

Warfare rungs: 2 / 5 / 7 / 10 / 12 / 15

It's kind of "weird" that 1st Rank didn't cost more than 20 for anything, and that Endurance was the highly competitive stat. Neither of those feels "normal", but they don't strike me as problematic either. Nearly every character ended up with Pattern, so they'll be able to move around the universe easily and they have reasons to interact. They're all cousins, and they have a vested interest in the prosperity of Amber.

This current batch of characters just feels like they are going to be so much easier to build stories for, than the crazy mixed-up groups of disconnected characters at the start of all my previous campaigns. No inexplicable enigma characters without a connection to either Amber or Chaos. No worries about anyone being "Shadow Lame" and unable to travel to the worlds where the plots are. No one caught in the unfortunate bind of having 60 points of Psyche and no Powers to use with it. This seems pretty great.

My only concern is in running a game for 7 players, especially a game like Amber where those 7 players are likely to frequently scatter to the ends of the universe. It's going to give me a serious workout each session, but thankfully we're only meeting every second week and I'll have plenty of time to catch my breath on off weeks. Should be fun. Wish me luck!

A Horse Of Another Timbre

 I'm going to be starting a new Amber campaign soon. I've sent out a few invites, and started building the campaign on Roll20. Not that an Amber game really needs Roll20, given that it's diceless and the rules are minimalist, but I've been so happy with the clue-storage and relationship-mapping aspects used in my Night's Black Agents campaign on Roll20 that I've decided something similar for this campaign is a good idea. The Roll20 will be a place to share images, if nothing else. 

I've decided the campaign will be called A Horse of Another Timbre, which just struck me as a clever thing to call an Amber game. The "horse" being the unicorn, of course, of course, and the music-term "timbre" is properly pronounced "tamber" and means the characteristic quality or "tone color" of a sound. It's a pun-inside-a-rhyme and cries out to be used for an Amber game.

I'll be running a Logrus-less Chaos, because I kind of hate the way Merlin's descriptions of the Logrus really invalidate the plot of Corwin's tale. (As in, we're told in the first 5 books that Chaos needs the Black Road and Dara's blood of Amber to be able to invade... but if Logrus is common in the Courts and functions as it does in Merlin's tale, that invasion should have been easy to start without Brand or Dara.) So I'm currently pouring over my old Amber documents here, looking for things that need updating. 

I'm also looking over the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow rulebook, and mulling over if there's a way to use the Grand Stair from that book, without it creating the same problem the Logrus does. I'm thinking maybe the Grand Stair is like a secret backdoor that Dworkin or Oberon created? 

One other change I'm going to make is just a rename of an ability. It will be Tarot Artistry, because the old name is unfortunately a homonym for the criminal-in-chief, and I don't want that constant reminder ruining scenes.

Quiet Conclusion

I just realized I don't think I ever did a post from the end of The Quiet Year game that I played with my buddy Brendan from Chicago. It was a lot of fun. Here's a picture from the end of the game, to save me from writing a thousand words of play-by-play for a game we finished up a few weeks back:

We played on Roll20. Just a heads-up for anyone thinking of doing the same: the game is a lot of fun on Roll20, but it does have some technical hurdles you'll want to prepare for. Drawing is clumsier in the Roll20 interface than it is face-to-face, and labeling things with text is super-easy and more legible than it would be in-person, so we ended up with quick little scribbles and relied a lot more on our ability to put text on the map (than the rulebook officially discourages labeling, but on Roll20 it's a welcome tool). You'll notice that the fence on the map was drawn in by a couple hundred strokes of the drawing tool. By the end of the game, things were lagging a tiny bit, so it might be better to not draw every individual fence-post next time.

I was surprised the Roll20 version isn't quite ready-to-play straight-off-the-shelf. The default page has nowhere for you to note scarcities, abundances, or characters, so I changed the page size (landscape rather than portrait fit my screen better anyway) and added a section for notes on the side. It also doesn't come with anything to represent the Contempt tokens, and no placeable dice. So I used a token I'd uploaded for an old Warhammer RPG for Contempt, and slapped together a rollable table token of a d6. It was all pretty simple, but just be advised that if you do want to play it on Roll20, you can't just fire-and-forget at the marketplace, someone in the group is going to have to do a few minutes of work to prep the game before the first time you play. Thankfully, the deck is already loaded up, so it does save you a whole bunch of time and effort by not having to scan the deck in. It does feel worth the 8$ or 10$ it costs on the Roll20 marketplace, and I'm glad I bought it, but I was a little surprised that I had to provide my own dice and tokens. It seems like if the publisher had included those in the Roll20 assets, it wouldn't have cost them much time or effort, yet would have resulted in a much more polished product.

About half way through the second session, we realized that we should have been making notes in the chat window of each turn's development and what all Projects and Discoveries were. If we had done so from the beginning, then we'd have a nice chat log of what had happened, and it would have been much easier to pick back up when we came back two weeks later for the second half of the game. So file that tip away for next time.

The Byzantine Dice of Torg

I played in a session of the new edition of Torg last night (well, a few nights ago now, but it was last night when I wrote the first 2000 words that follow). It was fun, but, man, are the die rolls complicated and weird in this RPG. I'm really glad we were playing over Roll20, because I wouldn't want to try to engage with the core mechanic of Torg without die-rolling software.

To use a skill in Torg, you: Start with your Attribute value, add your skill value,  and add any miscellaneous modifiers (like +4 for an All-Out Attack that leaves you Very Vulnerable afterwards).

So far, so good, it's not sounding any more complicated than d20 games.

Now you roll a d20, but instead of adding your roll to the total above, instead you look at a chart that converts your 1d20 roll into a Bonus from -10 to +7.
 

Okay, that's a little weird. Not horrible, but already a tiny bit clunky and hard to intuit what your average roll will actually be. At first, I thought the chart was flattening the roll by making the average roll more common... but on studying the math of the chart, I quickly realized it doesn't do that at all.

Things are going to get a whole lot stranger from here on out.

If your die roll was a 10 or a 20, it "explodes", giving you another die to roll, which can also explode if it rolls a 10 or 20. So it's a system with the potential for arbitrarily large successes, big memorable die rolls where you out-perform anyone's expectations. This is technically infinitely open-ended, but the progression of the resulting modifier slows down once you go further up the chart than a 20. So while a natural roll of 20 is +7 bonus, a total of 50 (which requires exploding at least twice to accomplish) is just +13.

Except, you can't actually roll a 20, because the natural 20 would explode, as would any roll of 50 (20+20+10 explodes for a 4th die, for example). So as near as I can tell, the entry for the +7 result (which only happens on a 20) is almost never needed, and the entry for the +13 result actually happens on 46-49, not 46-50 as the chart indicates. For that matter, the chart says a of 9 or 10 roll is a -1 bonus, but you can't normally actually roll the 10, so that's also somewhat misleading.  Well, you can roll a 20, 30, 50, etc, but only if you've got a bonus die from an Ups or Possibility (both of which are described below). Rolling an exact 10 is even harder to do (and requires an Ups).

So what is the actual average roll? The math is kind of tricky, but I made a big spreadsheet to figure it out.  The average rolled bonus is... -0.26127955.  Yep, on average, you'll roll slightly less than your Attribute+Skill combination. Which is counter-intuitive, because the potential for big memorable high-value rolls makes you expect that you ought to be averaging rather higher than your stats. That is not the case at all.

An aside about approximations: I only calculated rolls of 80 or less, so I'm probably low-balling it by a few one-thousandths of a percent. Rolling above an 80 requires rolling a "20" four times in a row, or a "10" eight times in a row, or some combination splitting the difference like 10-20-10-10-20-10. The odds of scoring above an 80 are less than 1 in 10,000, so I figure it's probably safe to round off at that point. Calculating it only to rolls of 70 or less returned an average of -0.26271358, a variation of only one one-thousandth of a point of bonus, and I'm pretty sure the math runs out to diminishing returns even as you approach infinity.

Yes, you could technically roll a one-million Bonus, but if you ever did the game would grind to a halt of multi-hour die-rolls and a re-enactment straight out of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen, and I don't feel I need to extrapolate the math out that far, either, just for the sake of accuracy.

So at that point, I'm already really glad that Roll20 has a die-rolling function that calculates it all in the blink of an eye. In our session, we had two rolls that were above 60. While rolling a d20 three to five times and counting up the math out loud would have been dramatic and awesome, it's also likely to feel weirdly clunky, and kinda suspicious. Like, if the same person rolled a 61+ twice in the same session, as GM I'd start wanting a closer look at his dice. Maybe I'm just an untrusting jerk, though. Roll20 eliminates the chance of dice-deception, so I didn't have to worry about it.

So the next question that springs to mind is how often you succeed at the standard difficulty. For that we need to know a bit about Character Creation. Characters are made with a point-buy method, and your point budget matches an average Attribute of 8. You're given 16 skill points to spend, with an initial cap of 3 in any skill. In my limited experience from making a single character, it seems like there are more than 8 skills that you'll want on any given character (I ended up putting points in 10 skills for my fairly simple fighter-y Edeinos character, because it would have taken 13 different skills to represent the more ranger-y concept I'd wanted), so you're almost certainly going to have a 2 or less in any skill that's not the centerpiece of your character. 8+2=10, and the Standard Difficulty listed as default is a 10, and the average roll reduces your Total, so you can expect to have a less than 50% chance to succeed at a random task. You will, of course, likely focus your character, getting an 11 or so in your best attribute, brought up to a 14 by the skill bonus. This comes at the cost of most likely having a 6 on some attribute (4 out of 5 PCs last night had a 6 in Charisma, and my character had two 6s and a 7 to afford his 10 Dex and 11 Str), so there are definitely going to be critical rolls that face a very low chance of success, and those will pop up from time to time regardless of your efforts to avoid them (unless you give your PC an 8 in all 5 stats and spread your skill points thin, too). Succeeding at an average Difficulty with a 6 attribute and no skill requires rolling a 17 or higher (or an exploding 10 followed by a 7 or higher) on the die, which works a 23.5% chance of success.

That is assuming that Difficulty 10 is the norm. While it is the stated Standard Difficulty, there's plenty of reason to expect that the actual Difficulty you're shooting at is going to vary from that quite often. Instead of a single Armor Class and maybe a few kinds of Saving Throw, each character has about 10 different defensive values calculated from their other stats, and the potential to take an Active Defense Action to raise the difficulty from an attack.

But it gets even weirder and more elaborate from there, as Torg has degrees of success, so it's not just hit or miss, succeed or fail. It's failure vs standard success vs good success vs outstanding success, with increasing degrees of success adding on extra beneficial results. Contrast this with D&D. In D&D, once I know the enemy's AC is 15, if I roll high I don't have to do any math and can skip straight to damage. In Torg, even if I know the enemy Melee Defense is 12, and I just rolled a 18, I still have to look at the chart, find that 18 = +5 bonus, add that to my 10 Dexterity and 3 Unarmed skill to know my total post-bonus is 18, then subtract his Defense of 12 to get 6 and know that I have a Good-ranked hit, which will do bonus damage. Again, with Roll20's lovely die-roller and the output from the automated character sheets this is pretty painless, but I imagine all that math would murder the pacing of a face-to-face game.

Torg also gives you a lot of ways to reroll or add a die, and all of those rerolls have special rules of their own. Before we can discuss these rerolls, however, we need to explore the Mishap rule, which can shut down your rerolls completely. Certain types of Actions are prone to Mishaps. These are generally high-risk Actions like full-auto gunfire, and spellcasting. These Actions will trigger a Mishap if the first die rolled is a "1", and some Actions may have a higher Mishap range (up to a 4 on the die in some cases). Mishaps are automatic failures (regardless of stats) that can't be rerolled, and they usually also trigger some sort of critical fumble consequence. None of my Actions were Mishap-applicable last night, but I was involved in a shooting-into-a-Melee situation, which we will discuss later, because it interacts very strangely with some of the reroll options.

One of the reroll options my character had available was that I was able to make "Favored" rolls in melee and stealth. During character creation, I read this sort of like having Advantage in D&D, but I was very wrong, as functionally it's quite different and not nearly as strong. Favored is a re-roll, rather than rolling twice and taking the better result. Since more than half the rolls in Torg have a negative "Bonus" (and the average Bonus is negative as well), Favored rolls are somewhat unlikely to produce a good result. Let's say I roll a 13, for a meager Bonus of +1. If I invoke my Favored ability, I will improve my total only 34% of the time. I will break even 10.5%, and I have a 55.5% chance of actually hurting my results. So invoking my Favored reroll is usually a poor choice in that situation.

So it seems like Favored is mostly useful to prevent really bad results, but you'll recall that a Mishap cannot be re-rolled, so for some types of die rolls, Favored doesn't actually mitigate the worst results, either. Which more or less means that Favored is only useful if the GM is very transparent about the Difficulty Numbers. Thankfully, page 260 of the Torg Eternity rules specify that the GM should be very forthcoming with difficulties. I didn't realize that last night, and as a result I felt like my Favored abilities were actually pretty useless. After all, I'm only willing to risk using Favored to reroll a +1 roll if I'm pretty certain that the +1 is a failure.

Having read the rulebook since last night, I now know that I can actually quiz the GM about the monster's stats. That seems weird to me, as it is very gamist and spoils some of the mystery that most RPGs provide by default. That said, I spent both of the two Perks you get in character creation to buy Favored status on die rolls, so if I don't want to feel like I wasted my choices, I'm going to have to invoke page 260 a lot (even if it does feel a little weird to me to do so). Honestly, having such non-intuitive math at the core of the game probably means you do have to be forthcoming with mechanics and target numbers if you want the players to ever be able to make the intelligent decisions that skilled characters should be making in-universe. The math is so fiddly, you can't really be sure your gut instincts are going to be probabilistically accurate.

Let's move on to the next type of reroll: The Up. Ups are really more of a bonus die than a reroll. They are triggered by certain cards, and generally affect the entire party of Heroes for a round.

Yep, eagle-eyed viewer, you read that right. We are 1,800 words into a discussion of the complicated mechanics of Torg Eternity, and I am just now making my first mention of any of the three major card-based mechanics in the system. Man, this game is weird.

Ups add a second die to every roll. These are combined into a single die roll value, but the rules say the second die is added after the first roll, probably to preserve the chance of a Mishap. Either or both dice may explode. So what do Ups do to the success rate? That math makes my previous calculations look like child's play. After a lot of number crunching, I think it works out to the average roll with an Ups being about +6.185. The doubled opportunity for exploding dice really gives it a shot in the arm, pushing it above the value of simply being double the roll. Going from -0.26 to +6.2 is a very strong swing in the PCs favor.

Again, I didn't take the math out terribly far (nothing above a roll of a 63 in this case, but it still took a hell of a lot more number-crunching to get that far than it did to get to 80 on a normal roll), so if anything I'm possibly underestimating the results by possibly as much as a few one-hundredths of a point.

Ups are rare, but I don't have ready access to the cards that trigger them, so I'm not sure how rare. When they kick in they often (maybe always?) affect the rolls of the entire side. So GMs need to be aware that when the card comes up that gives the PCs all Ups, they will crush the opposition mightily that round, and it may end your fight scene (and your major villain) earlier than expected.

The rules implied this Ups only appears on cards that help the Heroes, but I don't have the cards in front of me to be certain of that.  In the unlikely event that a card exists that gives Ups to all NPCs, the GM would likewise need to be prepared for the TPK that would likely cause. That threat of a TPK makes me suspect that bad-guy across-the-board Ups cards probably don't exist. For the most part, the cards exist to make the PCs look like badasses, not to randomly end your campaign anti-climactically. Or at least, that's the impression I get from the percentage of the cards that I have seen after 1 session of play.

The final, and probably most common, form of reroll is spending Possibilities. These are like Bennies in Savage Worlds or like Drama Dice in 7th Sea. You spend one to roll an extra die and add it to your total, and what's more, if the extra die rolls less than a 10, you get to count it as a 10. So in that way, it's even better than an Ups. The thing about the minimum value of a 10 is kind of crazy in that it is super good if your original roll was pretty awful, and only provides a very modest bump if your original roll was strong. It's a weird system, but kind of beautiful.

Let's say you have a combined attribute plus skill of 12. You rolled a 2 on your first die, resulting in a -8 "Bonus", so your final Action Total is a 4, which is almost always going to fail at anything. You spend a Possibility and roll poorly, so you get the minimum bump of turning your 2 into a 12. The Bonus on a 12 is +0, bringing your final Action Total up to a 12, so you've gone from a guaranteed failure to what is very likely a success.

Now let's say the same character rolls a 19 on your first die instead, resulting in a +6 Bonus, for a final Action Total of 18. You spend a Possibility and roll poorly, so you get the minimum bump of turning your 19 into a 29. The Bonus on a 29 is +8, so your final Action Total is 20. It's only an effective increase of +2 to your total, which might not even be enough to change the degree of success. 
 
There is definitely something really cool about how all the math works out on that. It's kind of awesome... but it's also just really arcane and complicated. I can admire how tightly and precise this system runs, and yet be really glad I'm not having to calculate it all by hand on the fly while people at the table are waiting for their turn. Once again, Roll20 makes an otherwise unwieldy mechanic very playable.

So now that I've explained all those different re-roll and added-die mechanics, I'm going to pivot and talk about a related rule in the game that really doesn't seem to fit well at all with everything else the game is doing. As described above, you have a mechanical base where rolls are open-ended, with varying degrees of success and lots of tools for turning a bad roll into a strong result. The game shines a spotlight on players, sometimes going so far as to empower the party to suddenly smash through against hardened enemies and wrap up a battle way early. So how do you imagine that game engine handles shooting into a melee? You might expect that firing into a melee scrum where a fellow PC is wrestling with a bad guy would mean that you had to be wary about the consequences of a Mishap. You'd be wrong. The Mishap rule doesn't apply in that situation. Instead, it's far worse. Seriously, shooting into a melee is damnably nasty in this game. Don't do it!

Whenever you shoot into a melee, if your die roll is odd, you hit a random participant instead of your target. So that right there is a little surprising, because the characters are mostly hypercompetent badasses, so the notion that they would have a close to 50-50 chance to shoot the wrong person by mistake seems odd. Again, the math turns out to be really complicated, because it's not just an equal distribution of odds and evens on a normal d20. You can't roll a 10 or 20, but you could roll a 37, so it's not 50-50 exactly.

In our session, the villain had taken a child hostage. I rushed forward to try to wrest the baby from their grasp, and succeeded, but the movement rules are a little vague (it's not really a map-and-miniatures game, at least not as our GM was running it), so when my action was done I was still arguably engaged with the villain. Another PC went to shoot him. They did a called shot to the head, and rolled an outstanding success... but the die was odd! So this effectively canceled out their success and their called shot, and meant they would instead hit a randomly determined person in the scrum: that being either the villain, or me, or the child. So a 2/3rds chance of disaster! It came up the bad way on the first roll, and the player's instinct was to spend a Possibility to add an extra die to the roll in hopes of making it even. At first glance they assumed it meant a 50-50 chance of fixing the problem. It doesn't however, because any roll less than 10 on the Possibility die is treated as a 10, meaning the overall total was still odd. Effectively, the extra die had 5 sides that would save my bacon and 15 sides that would kill me or the baby! Thanks to some card play, I survived. Obviously I'm not an objective observer, having been in the center of the target zone, but it definitely strikes me as a weird design choice to forgo the existing Mishap mechanic for something that's a lot more punishing.

3,100 words, and I still haven't gotten to the card mechanic. Damn. I guess this will have to just be an article on the dice, because if I dive into the card decks right now, who knows how deep I'll have to go before I can surface.  For now, let's just acknowledge that the cards enhance the game, but they also ramp up the complexity that much further.

TL;DR: Torg Eternity is math-intensive, card-driven, and chart-reliant. Playing on Roll20 with the button-programmed character sheets and custom die rolling API works like a charm, but I don't think I would want to play (or run) the game on the tabletop with nothing but dice and charts. Thankfully, online technology still works in my native Cosm.

On my Crunchometer, this is a big shiny c24. It looks weirder than it actually plays, and at first glance you might misjudge what it actually is. It's definitely not something that I feel every gamer needs in their collection, but I'm happy to have one in my dice bowl, even if it's mostly just to show off and gawk at. It's more complicated than the current edition of D&D.

Archive - More Amber Conspiracy Theories

I was toying with the notion of starting an Amber campaign again, and so I went looking through my old Amber stuff, including my old Amber Conspiracy Theory lists... and I realized I had only Archived half of them here on the blog. The others were thankfully still reachable via the wayback machine, but it's probably a good idea for me to repost them here for ease of reference.

Please excuse the frost and the dust, they've been in cold storage for years.

Unicorn as Pet or Pawn

Here's one theory that everybody likes to tell me is crazy. Dogma and Rhetoric, I say! What I'm proposing is that the Unicorn really isn't some godlike primal entity, but is just an ordinary horse with a horn on it's head. Well, not quite. I've already talked about the possibility of redheads or Random faking a Unicorn appearance in The Courts of Chaos.
It's not like Zelazny ever says "it's impossible for a shapeshifter to take the form of the unicorn". (In my campaign, all that stops them is social taboo, religious stigma, and the subconscious. It's a powerful enemy, and they are uncomfortable taking it's form. Sort of like a really religious christian not wanting to walk around dressed satanic imagery)

The Merlin saga really makes a big deal about The Unicorn and The Serpent being gods to the gods, capable of near omnipotence. There's plenty of campaigns out there set after Corwin's saga, but with little or none of Merlin's saga included. So, why must we accept the idea of serpent and unicorn being superpowerful? I've known gamemasters that rule no chaoslords can take the form of the Unicorn, and no Amberite can find a Shadow with Unicorns in them! To each their own, but I see nothing in the canon that says it must be so.
If your campaign is just based on Corwin's saga, there's no need for the serpent to even exist. For that matter, the Unicorn doesn't do anything that we can be sure would be impossible for a lesser being - maybe even for that bird that Oberon makes out of Corwin's blood.
Could the Unicorn be one of Oberon's agents? Perhaps formed from Oberon's blood? Could this magnificent beast just be a lousy 20 point creature? Could the entire religion of Amber be just a fallacy created by Oberon to ensure control of the peasantry via his own control of their God? Could Dworkin just have been crazy (heaven forbid) when he spoke of mating with the Unicorn? Sure, any or all of the above, and it wouldn't be the sneakiest or worst thing Oberon had ever done.
If the Unicorn is just a tool or pet of Oberon's, it makes a lot more sense for it to be pulling the Jewel from the Abyss. Oberon sent it there to do so, and Oberon picked Random. Maybe he thought his kids would be less likely against the imaginary god-horse than they would be to rebel against his own dying wish.

Or maybe Oberon's Unicorn was killed, or captured, and someone who wanted Random on the throne brought in their own shadow unicorn or a shapeshifter to bring the Jewel of Judgement to Random. Afterall, if the Unicorn is really all-powerful, and really has the best interests of Amber at heart, why does it get close enough to snag the Jewel from Brand, but not help innocent Deirdre out of the Abyss?

Hell, maybe there is no Unicorn at all, maybe it's always just been Oberon taking that shape.


Brand's Favorite Rug
So, we’re told that Brand is very sentimental, and didn't kill Corwin because the blood would stain his favorite rug. Does anyone believe this? Brand is a master of Pattern (and more, it would seem) and yet unable to find another rug just like it? Lowly Corwin can pull swords out of trees, but Brand can’t find a quality floormat, or at least a good drycleaners?

At the very least, there’s a story we’re not taking advantage of. If Brand is truly this sentimental, then we should ask ourselves why. Perhaps it was given to him by an old flame, or dear friend long gone. Are they dead, or merely alienated? If they’re this important to him, they must be more than some lame shadowling. If you really want your players to see your campaign as meticulously researched and crafted, come up with the background of the person who gave him the rug. A lady of Chaos? An unseen child of his? Or is it the last souvenir from Brand's favorite shadow-world, long ago destroyed like Corwin's Avalon.

In a more paranoid vein, perhaps there’s something magic to the rug. Maybe it reacts with Blood, shapeshifting to the form of the DNA that touches it. That could explain Brand being in two places at once on several occasions, as well as providing a motive for not shooting Corwin while upon it. Maybe it was a blood-activated trump, an escape route that Brand would be able to use if ever stabbed in his sleep and left to die.

Or maybe Brand just wants us to think that. He knows how suspicious Corwin is, expects that Corwin won’t believe he's that mushy over a piece of decor, and will start meddling with the rug. Perhaps it’s a trap or a curse. But those years in Shadow have made Corwin sentimental, so it doesn’t occur to him just how out of place sentiment is in Brand. In that case, here’s a trap lying about the castle years later for PCs to accidentally spring on themselves...

Fiona's Bad Timing
In Hand of Oberon, Fiona trumps Corwin and leads him to the Primal Pattern. This is after Brand has gotten the Jewel of Judgement, and is almost certainly headed there himself. They arrive a few moments too late: Brand is already on the Pattern, and Corwin has to chase him.

Fiona really cut thru shadow, taking only 15 minutes to reach primal pattern land from earth. But, wouldn’t walking the Pattern of the Mind (a sub-power of Advanced Pattern) have been much faster? Once there, she could have trumped Corwin. They could have talked at the Pattern instead of en route to it, and that speed would have prevented Brand from becoming partially attuned. Is this her error? or Zelazny’s? Or game designer Erick Wujciks? Certainly one of the following must be the case:

Possibility #1: Fiona doesn’t have Advanced Pattern, and can’t walk the Pattern of the Mind. She also doesn't have a trump of Primal Pattern Land. She must have been further away from Primal Pattern Land then the Earth is, so that Trumping Corwin first actually saved her time, instead of costing precious minutes. The problem is, has any campaign ever not given Fiona access to Advanced Pattern? She's definitely better at Pattern manipulation than Corwin, and she seems more skilled than most of the family. She's clearly in the top 4, along with Dworkin, Oberon, and Brand.

Possibility #2: Fiona has Advanced Pattern, but the rules for Advanced Pattern are incorrect, and just too generous for the source material. Walking the pattern of the mind and teleporting needs some other higher requirement. Perhaps to learn to teleport, you have to have actually drawn your own pattern first. After all, the only person who definitely uses this power in Corwin’s saga is Corwin himself, in the final chapters just after he draws a new Pattern.

Even if this restriction is truly the case, there's still a plot hole because a Fiona who can't Walk The Pattern Of The Mind can still probably make Trumps. She must have never painted a trump of that important place, which would seem unlikely. If I were her, and I knew of a primal place of order that three quarters of the family were ignorant of, I’d have painted a card of it years ago. I can't picture her not having done this, especially not if she's engaged in a multi-year strategy to weaken Amber by pouring blood on the Primal Pattern. She just doesn't seem that short-sighted to me.

Possibility #3: So, that leaves us with the ultimate conspiratorial view of Fiona. She planned it. Her timing was intentional. She tricked Corwin out on to the Primal Pattern, expecting him to skewer Brand. As it is, he does stab Brand, and his blood does damage the Pattern further. But, like Brand, she didn’t expect Corwin would know how to summon the storm that carried Brand away.

So, she was still playing the game open ended, willing to let Corwin kill Brand, obliterate the Pattern, and strand himself on the black parts and die. She wasn’t counting on his calling a tornado or using Greyswandir to cut a trail through the damaged parts.

The obvious implication is that Fiona was already attuned to the Jewel and was prepared to make her own universe as soon as Corwin’s suicidal sacrifice was complete. She’s colder than Corwin ever imagined.

Mnemelos Notes

I was sorting out an old harddrive today, and stumbled across this madness:

That was a scan of a prop I made for a LARP I was briefly running. It's the notes of a raving madman, a Narcisist from the Continuum RPG. Those weird mathematical symbols followed by numbers are what is known as Mnemelos Coordinates. They define the cosmological location of parallel worlds, and the energy/vectors needed to reach them.

The prop was not, however, made for a Continuum RPG campaign. It was made for a Changeling LARP that had a lot of cross-pollination from other worlds, settings, and fandoms. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have a scan of the flip side of the document, which contained mostly more insane rambling, along with some functional universe mapping and magical sigils. You can see a little of it bleeding through the paper. I wish I had the other side, but one of the players kept it. It's been a couple years now, so it's very unlikely I will ever see that prop again.  :(

How To Host The Magician's Dungeon

Some photos from my second game of How To Host A Dungeon 2nd Edition. I'm not planning a full turn-by-turn breakdown this time, because that makes the game take a lot longer.  (Click here for Index of all my How To Host A Dungeon articles.)

 Image number 1 is from the end of the Primordial Age. The "Sky Gems" was from the Geographical Inspiration table suggesting that some of the gems on my map were meteorites. My Nexus is Leylines, which I drew real large in hopes that it will provide many Bonus Stars to groups in the Age of Monsters.

 Image number 2 is from the Age of Civilization. This was my first time playing the new Magician's Civilization. There were a few parts in the write-up for this Civ that were kind of vague. So be prepared for that, you'll have to make a few judgment calls with the Magician Civ. The vague areas were: Am I meant to have 1 or 2 Magicians at the end of the first turn? If I Build a construction that doesn't use/require a Jinn, should I also build a Vault, or just accept that I may have more than one Jinn at the Standing Stone at various points in this Age? Does the Omphalos prevent me from building an Orrery in a later turn? Will the Omphalos be meaningful (or even be a thing at all) later in the game? None of this vagueness here really breaks the game, but it is confusing and murky, and requires you to rule on how it all works mid-game.

Image number 3 is from the end of the Age of Civilization, after the Diaspora, with the three Epic Treasure Tokens hidden, and the location labels unhidden, to make the map more legible.

The Magician's Civilization was pretty fun. It resulted in a sprawling construction all over the left side of the map.  I could have easily run it over the right, or the top half, or even the bottom of the map. The player has a lot of impact on how this Civ develops, it's not the mostly automated script of the first edition. Part of that is because the Build list has twice as many constructions on it as you'll ever get to use on a single map, and part of it is because 2nd Ed maps have a lot more resources on them. (And a small part of it is because I included more Strata on my map than the rules-as-written would suggest. Strata #7 on this map set-up seemed way too huge, so I split it up into 3 substrata. When I get to the Age of Monsters, I'm also going to us the left- and right- halves of the surface as different Strata, so that when a Surface Dweller spawns, I'll have a system in place that randomly tells me where they start.)

Aside from being kind of vague and unclear at parts, I was also disappointed with one tiny aspect of the Magician Civilization. There are two ways it can end: in Diaspora or in Vengeance. Diaspora has zero instruction, and basically just leaves everything empty on your map. Vengeance does this cool thing where a new layer of dust and debris buries part of your map. That sounds awesome! But as written, this will almost never happen. There are 13 constructions on the Build list for this Civ, and you'll only get to pick 6 or 7 of them on a typical map. The Vengeance only happens if you choose 1 specific combo of 7 specific Buildings with no variation from that path. If you pick any one of the other 6 Buildings at any point during this Civilization, then you'll trigger the Diaspora at least 1 turn before you could possibly trigger the Vengeance. There's a little bit of wiggle room if your Nexus or some other result on the map from the Primordial Era has the ability to kill Magicians, but the game tends to skip over death during the Civ phase, and it's kind of annoying and can be quite limiting to carefully set things up to make that work. In the rules, this Civ seems amazing, but in practice it plays out as "merely" very good, but not quite as amazing as the potential implied. Like I said, it's a minor gripe about what is mostly a tiny thing, and it wouldn't have broken the game if I had decided to just dump that layer of dust on the map like I was tempted to do.

Deals With Devils

The theme of my RPG GMing in recent weeks has been "deals with the devil".

In my Savage Worlds / DramaSystem / Deadlands / Brimstone campaign, the PCs have been interacting a lot with a literal snakeoil salesman. Mr Melchizedek's Traveling Emporium of Miracle Cures, Mystic Artifacts, and Scratch-Built Devices. They met him at a crossroads, and the character wasn't on the screen for more than a minute before the players started making "Something Wicked This Way Comes" references, and trying to get him to take off his hat to check for horns. One of the PCs had an in-character reason to want to learn French, and voiced this in front of him. The next morning, when that PC woke up, he spoke perfect French, but no longer understood English.

In my Gumshoe / Night's Black Agents / Dracula Dossier campaign, one of the PCs has recently learned Goetia, the demon-summoning magic (from the Gumshoe Zoom supplement). The PCs did a mini-op to steel the Munich Manual of Demonology from the state library archives, so he can eventually do a deeper-dive into the demony fringes of the occult. Meanwhile, the PCs have also infiltrated one Vampire's web of conspiracies, and (going undercover) have begun taking missions from that Vampire against Edom and other Vampires. So there's a supernatural war going on, and the PCs are helping one particular Evil get one up on other Evils. They seemed a little too eager to get in bed with this particular darkness, so I've taken every opportunity to remind them that he's just the worst. First there was that whole blood sorcery ritual he involved them in with only the faintest nod towards concent. Then the first mission he gave them was a straight-up assassination. When the PCs asked about pay, he produced actual bars of Nazi gold... which, I should mention, he apparently magically summoned to the negotiation by butchering rats in front of the PCs. There's just nothing good about this situation... but, being PCs, they went ahead and did it anyway.

Man, I just realized that "Deals With Devils" would be a great name for an Everway character.

The Noisy Season

Got together tonight on Roll20 with an old friend from half a continent away. After catching up (we hadn't seen each other since GenCon) we played 1/3 to 1/2 a game of The Quiet Year. If you haven't heard of it, The Quiet Year is a collaborative map-making game. We're building a community in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a lot of fun. Here's our map as it stands at the moment:

I like The Quiet Year quite a bit. Enough to buy it on Roll20, despite owning a hardcopy that I suppose I could have just scanned in, or played by drawing cards in meatspace and just reading them into the video chat. It was enjoyable enough we're going to get together next week for the second half. (There's more than half a game left to do, but we spent the first hour mostly gabbing and catching up tonight, so it will probably zip by fast next time.)

The Roll20 implementation is pretty minimalist. It has all the pages of the rulebook as individual handouts, which is great for searching up individual rules, or for splitting up the reading of the rulebook between players. I wasn't completely convinced that Roll20's drawing tools were up to the task, and as you can see our drawings are pretty rough. I gotta say though, it worked well enough and was every bit as fun as in-person play. The Roll20 interface actually sped the game up, because if you had something a little more involved to draw you could fill in details while the other player took their turn. That's not normally a thing you can do when passing one sheet of paper back and forth in the physical game. So in some ways the Roll20 version is better than in-person (speed of play, and being able to play long-distance despite quarantine), and in other ways it is inferior to tabletop (mostly because the drawing tools on Roll20 aren't as easy to use as a box of colored pencils is).

I have always wanted to use The Quiet Year to create a map and history together with a playgroup, and then later set an RPG for the same group in that world we'd created together. It occurs to me that the Roll20 implementation would make it really easy to do that, as well as much easier to tweak that map (or upgrade it with a fancy version) after the start of the campaign. You would, however, then have a few dozen redundant rules-handouts jamming up your journal that you would want to delete or archive.  Even so, that is really cool, and now I really want to try that sometime.

One thing that did disappoint me a little about the Roll20 implementation is the lack of bells and whistles. I had to add the tiny dice as rollable table tokens. For the Contempt Tokens, I had to steal a chip from an old WH40K RPG campaign I ran back in the day. The yellowed paper background was on a single pregenerated page that took a little bit of ingenuity to duplicate to other pages for a second game.

(Addendum: It occured to me a few weeks later that they probably set it up that way intending for you to launch the module as a new campaign each time you want to play, so having multiple pages per campaign wasn't even a thing they considered. I think I prefer to have all the maps from every game of The Quiet Year that I've ever done online all be accessible in the same campaign framework, for ease of reference, and so I can show off old maps when teaching the game to new players. I suppose that preference might change if I do ever get around to starting an RPG campaign with a round of The Quiet Year to make the map for the campaign. You might not want a dozen other maps clogging up your campaign in that situation.) 

All told, it was less than half an hour of work to set up a reusable online version of the game, but if I had just bought it and thought I could start play right away I would have been surprised that I needed to take those extra steps the first time. I don't really know the first thing about how hard it is to build a sellable product on the Roll20 Marketplace, but it seems like it wouldn't be too much to ask for the game to come with a few assets that were selectable from the art library of the marketplace item, such as a set of tiny dice icons (or better yet, a prebuilt rollable token), a themed graphic for Contempt, and the yellow parchment background that you could then drag and drop to start a new page (bonus points if you could use it in other games/campaigns). I wonder if that's possible?

Along those lines, I'm really surprised that the Roll20 interface doesn't really include any generic "glass bead" -style tokens. Maybe they worry that would cut into sales of art assets? It sure seems like it would be useful for any number of gaming applications, but not so cool that people would be willing to pay much for it. But it also doesn't seem like it would take much work for Roll20's staff to make a set of half a dozen colored bead tokens available as a freebie (Edit: Or just one, which the GM could color via the existing token Tint feature), since they already give away for free several dozen virtual miniatures that are way more detailed.

Anyhow, The Quiet Year is elegant, goofy fun, and I highly recommend it, whether in dead-tree or Roll20 version. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth the modest asking price in either format.