Planet Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Sunday's session of "3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars" was our longest yet. We usually wrap up around 4 hours, but this ran 6. We're reaching the end stages of the campaign, as the charts are mostly crossed off, and one of the PCs will have to take the "Hatred for Home" Weakness the next time he levels up (it's the only flashback left for him). So,  I wanted to wrap up plot threads and reinforce themes. That meant more time in the ship. I nearly skipped the planet-side encounters entirely, but as a group we decided to play late instead.

I can't go into a lot of detail on the ship-side plots and themes. Mostly that's because there's so much back story it would go over most casual reader's heads ("you kinda had to be there", but for the past dozen sessions or so).  I'll hit the highlights as fast as I can:

The PCs killed yet another superior officer, Colonel Shook, this time because they caught him in the act of sabotaging their vessel to eliminate any "corruption" caused by their repeated interactions with the aliens. I let the players know that Einstein's Twin Paradox is in effect, despite the warp drive, and that more than 100 years had passed back on Terra. Shook, by the way, was the officer who'd threatened to kill their families back home. Now that they knew this was a hollow threat, they had no problems cutting off his arm and pushing him out an airlock (though I did get one hit away from killing a PC in the process).

After that encounter, they handed over Watkins (an NPC deserter and alien-lover who'd been trying to lead them away from the fleet) to High Command, but first used technology to drive him insane so he wouldn't be able to rat on them, and they didn't hand over his invisible alien spaceship, either.

A number of possible hallucinations and other surrealist stuff went down, as well. I was on thematic overdrive. We'll skip the rest of these sideline embellishments and move on to the planet...

Planet Name: Michelangelo
Planet Description: Volcanic World
Alien Description: Lizards or Reptiles
Alien Special Ability: Armor

The two PC Captains had orders to bring their green companies full of fresh-faced replacements to a lava planet, pacify a few villages, establish a landing zone and a forward command post. Later, they had to assault an alien palace, which mostly went down to Strength-fueled Lynch/Herbert "family atomics vs shield wall" montage.

I made the aliens primitive. Flame-resistant salamander-men wielding pointy sticks and lava globs. They made structures of volcanic glass and hardened lava rock, which they could safely mold and sculpt while it was still hot. Sadly, the game has no fire-proof special ability, so per the rules you could do them in equally well with a energy blaster or flamethrower as you could with a knife or slug-rifle. We tried not to dwell on it, and they did have a bit of armor to protect them so it more-or-less worked out without too many worries.

Armor is yet another 3:16 power that looks so simple, yet is tragically presented in a way that lacks critical clarifications and advice. Once per encounter, the GM gets to declare that all hits against the aliens for a round are invalid because they all have armor.  There's two mechanical grey areas with this, as I see it.

• First, there's a timing issue there. They don't clearly state when you declare it. Is it before the PCs declare FA or NFA? If so, it buys you one extra attack round for the NPCs, but all the PCs will use that round to NFA into better positions. If it's after they declare, or sometime even later in the round such as after everyone's rolled, it's significantly more powerful. I chose after declarations, but before rolling, as a good compromise.
• Does armor prevent Strengths? This didn't even occur to me during the game, but I wish it had. If all kills for the round are prevented, you probably shouldn't be able to use a Strength, either. By missing that, I probably let the players off way too easy - the last two battles were both won by Strengths. As general philosophy, I tend to assume "Strengths trump all", but in retrospect I think the point of the ability might be that it can stop them. Rules holes so big you could drive an APC through them.

Ultimately, the armor and the lack of fire-resistance both fall afoul of one of the game's flaws. Namely, the rules are so abstract, that you can't always apply common-sense to them. When one attack roll kills anywhere from d6 to d100 aliens, there's not a fine enough grain to apply logic. A party can include one PC who hits 40% of the time, and another who hits 90%, so you have to be very careful about ad hoc penalties, especially since the semi-competitive nature of the game already tends to mean who ever pulls out into the lead stays in the lead, and the GM can't target individual PCs.

Normally, in an RPG, I apply common sense as a higher authority than mechanics, but 3:16 actively encourages the opposite.

The armor ability, in particular, is an example of a mechanic that doesn't do a very good job of emulating or simulating anything. The PCs might well kill 200 or more NPCs in this battle, and presumably they all have armor, but mechanically that's represented by making all the PCs miss in a single round of combat? There's this single instant where everyone is foiled by the armor, but for the rest of the battle it has no effect? There's really no way to justify that mechanic, it follows no in-character logic. Hand-wave and move on.

While that logic hole could be a game-wrecker and disbelief-eroder in a more serious or "normal" campaign,  I've been running this one surreal enough that it was just one more spastic moment of weirdness. Like when a PC was given a pocketwatch by a rabbit, or when they set foot inside the invisible ship that invisible from the inside as well, or Poodagooluk saw his ex-girlfriend on the back of a dinosaur, or when the traitor Watkins was handed over to Lt. Colonel Schwimmer and then another tech-specialist Watkins got assigned to the same outfit 4 days earlier? Or that time when the PCs killed Colonel Shook, but then another NPC reported getting orders from him after he died. Anyhow, I'd go into detail about more of this, but I don't want to spoil the "big reveal" I have planned for a session or two down the road. I assure you, there is a method to my madness.

45 minutes on Planet Monet

My latest "3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars" session was very light on actual combat. In fact, I didn't even send the PCs to the alien planet until the last hour of the session.

Planet Name: Monet
Planet Description: Heavy Atmosphere
Alien Description: Birds
Alien Special Ability: Impair

We're more than half way through the charts at this point, so if I roll up a planet or alien description that doesn't move me, there's not a lot to do about it. The same can be said about the alien's powers, many of which in the main game are terribly anemic.  Since I'd done flying aliens before, birds didn't really thrill me, and it didn't combine well conceptually with Impair. So I went with feathered jellyfish, which sounded weird enough to move me. I had the impair be represented as thick clouds of drifting flower-like lifeforms also native to the planet. Non-threatening flowery things, so the system didn't score them on the kill count, but still capable of blocking fire and vision, jamming up vents and joints on the armor, etc.

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Impair is a weird ability. Frankly, I don't like it at all, and if I were editing the 3:16 rulebook, I'd axe it and ask the writer to submit something else. Impair allows the GM to spend X threat tokens to reduce all the PCs FA and NFA by X for the rest of the encounter. The math on it is a little wonky. I rolled it up late in the campaign, when most PCs are sporting an FA of 7 or 8. So, taking one off the top means dropping their hit chance from 80% to 70%. It's not a huge decrease, and honestly, if the in-character alien goal is to do more damage to the PCs, you're better off keeping that one chip as one more threat token for the PCs to have to kill. Given that the typical 3:16 session has 5 fights, it's pretty weak. If you spend 1 token per fight in a 4-player session, you're gonna expend 25% of your threat tokens to reduce the PCs effectiveness by maybe as much as 14%. That's a losing proposition. However, if you spend multiple tokens in just one or two fights, it's a huge power. Taking -3 off the characters stats probably cuts their effectiveness by 40% or more. In fact, it's possible to hose players to the extent that some of them literally cannot succeed. Such characters will score zero kills, and have to invoke a Flashback to survive. If you then do the same in the following fight...

I just think this is a bad design for a power. So weak it's mostly a detriment to use it, unless you abuse it and sink every chip you can in to it. If you do abuse it, it mostly hoses the weakest PC, which the system already does plenty of by virtue of it's competitive nature. So now you've just dumped on the person who's been having the most frustrating experiences all campaign anyway. As a further side effect, the big threat-token investment and general mechanical impetus of it pushes you in the direction of having fewer encounters with larger stacks of chips. Large chip stacks are a more tempting target for the PCs to invoke strengths against, especially the PCs who got lucky early on in the campaign, leveled up the big guns and stats, and thus have strengths to burn. It's just a "dump on the little guy" power.

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The point of that rant about Impair is that I knew wasn't going to want to spend much time or energy on planet Monet. Conveniently, the platoon rosters were really low (most of the NPCs bought it on the last two planets) and the PCs troopship took some heavy hits from alien kill-satellites in the previous session. So it was a perfect time to pull the Company off the front line and give them some colony furloughs while the old ship was getting repaired and refitted. Significant role-playing followed...

All the actual play reports I've read on RPGnet and other parts of the internet have involved soldiers getting some sexual action, as soldiers deployed far from home are want to do. Sometimes it's hitting the brothels on colony worlds between deployments, and in other campaigns it's VR orgy-tanks aboard the troop ships to keep morale up.

Our game has been completely chaste and sexless by comparison. Possibly because 3 of our 6 participants are female, we early on settled on the notion that the characters must be chemically neutered or something. There's talk in the rulebook about extreme population control back on the crowded Terra, and about how Combat Drugs can wreck your libido, so it seemed perfectly in keeping with the setting.

So this session, I dumped the PCs on leave on a recently-settled colony world that they'd originally pacified several sessions back. Planet Titian, which had only a handful of dinosaurs left on it. There was a little opportunity for hunting with officer's sidearms (I put a total of three chips out across two scenes), but mainly I was waiting for the horomone suppressants to wear off and create some problems for the platoon. They handled it pretty well, and there was surprisingly little sex at all.

• Sergeant Harrington took efforts to make sure his Squad was still getting dosed with suppressants despite being on leave.
• Sergeant Hurr spent all her time out fishing in a local lake by herself. Her squad got into trouble, but since she was in her rights to be on vacation, she dodged any reprimands herself.
• Lt. Sanguine averted and shut down a potential romantic entanglement with a fellow officer. Trying to then push it the other way, I then painted that NPC (Lt. Viziario) as a serial killer. The PC kept it secret, and gave her implied approval while merely suggesting that there's more challenge and honor in hunting aliens. This series of interactions was probably the crux of the colony scenes, as the NPC tried to talk the PC into hunting a colonist or horny Trooper together. Sanguine is a bit of a psychopath, I really thought they were going to hunt someone.
• Lt Flowerdew dragged his feet, before finally allowing himself to be seduced off-camera by the 18-year-old colonist's daughter I had fawning over them. Flowerdew's player indicated she hadn't decided if he was gay or straight yet, and still really hasn't despite this short fling.
• Captain DeMolay's player was on a business-trip this week, so we assumed that due to his demotion at the end of last session, he was denied shore leave. Probably still attending his own Court Martial while the others were actively avoiding sex.

Really timid, tepid stuff, but I wasn't about to force anything on the PCs if the players weren't in to it. So I made sure one of the NPCs in the unit got arrested by the colony sheriff for sexual assault, and had two other NPC Troopers end up in a semi-secret relationship. Just enough background detail to sell the reality. A little buy-in would have been nice, but you can't force something like that. So I put the serial-killer-themed scenes front-and-center, and let the rest just be color. Not a great session, but not horrible either. What do you expect for a game where the GM prep is 10 minutes or less?

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At the end of the night, with less than an hour to go in the session, I had the PCs get emergency deployment orders to reinforce Alpha Company on planet Monet. Alpha was holding an alien temple. Some sort of taboo kept the aliens from approaching it except at sunrise. Every day there was a huge massed attack in the early hours, and then total safety the rest of the day. Alpha had been operating with low numbers (and was nearly rolled into the PC's Company in the previous session before Major DeMolay got himself demoted). The first morning assault on the temple took Alpha by ambush, and killed all their officers.

By the time the PCs got to their position, Alpha was down to 9 men, all of whom were drugged-out and completely messed up. Their platoon medic would get them in a chemical combat frenzy just before dawn for the daily ambush, then stone them out to keep morale from shattering in the long dull gaps between days. I put in a little flavorful subplot about Alpha's acting CO (merely a Sgt) having his tech specialists continually reprogram his kill counters so he could destroy the harmless floating flowers and have it register. In the final battle, his kill counter rolled over to a Million kills, which plays the Terran Planetary Anthem. He got so excited, he grew sloppy and got himself killed.

I gave the PCs just two fights. The first they arrived in drop pods, so the -2 Impair didn't really matter. The second fight, at -3 impair, was much nastier. PCs pulled through it, but just barely.

Lt. Sanguine amazed us all by managing to get promoted again during the post-mission rolls. So I gave her command of Alpha company, and let her bring over 1 officer and 1 non-com from her old unit. She chose a PC non-com (Sgt. Hurr) and an NPC officer (Serial-Killer Lt. Viziario). Haven't decided yet whether to bring in a troopship full of Replacements next session, or force a Alpha "Company" to go into battle with only 11 soldiers.

The later idea is highly amusing, but mechanically doesn't do anything. Which is rather a failing of the system, I feel. The fact that NPCs amount to nothing mechanically, whether individually or en masse, sort of erodes the suspension of disbelief. I find that I alternately love and hate this uber-lite abstract system. Perhaps when this campaign wraps up, I'll take a stab at making a fan supplement for 3:16 with optional rules and GMing advice for the later campaign.

Splitting Up The Party (in 3:16)

In most RPGs, if the party splits up, it's a detriment to the PCs. Resources are spread thin, they can be overwhelmed and ganged up on, etc. What's more, several players sit around twiddling their thumbs while 20 minutes (or more) of combat drag by. But that's just not the case in 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars. It's not like D&D where 6 ogres is a much biggger challenge for one player than for the whole party assembled. The fights are fast and really abstract, and if the isolated troopers have a Strength to spend, they can take out as large a pile of Threat Tokens as the GM deems to put before them. Splitting up, going out alone, etc, is all a huge benefit to the PCs that engage in such antics - as they'll get the most kills and rarely get punished for it.

As GM, you want to reward such behavior when the PC takes some big risk (night watch, recon patrol, searching a tunnel complex, or other situations of significant peril or isolation) or is enhancing the game in a meaningful way (figuring out a complicated situation, developing character by storming or goofing off, cleverly setting up a trap, etc), but not for just every-day "I go through the door first" antics.

Or so I think.

But I could see the other side of the argument. It's a competitive game, and thus anyone whose willing to take a risk (no matter how small) should be rewarded. I'd be in that other camp, if the scope and scale of the system were a little less expansive. "I'm first through the door of the hut, so I get to kill d100 baddies before anyone else follows me" is a bit extreme.

It would be really nice if the GM's section of 3:16 had covered in any way the notion of splitting the party. It seems to assume this will never come up, which strikes me as a little odd, given that it's relatively easy via the advancement system for a party of 4 PCs to be a Trooper, a Sergeant, a Lieutenant and a Captain. Four characters of such a diverse spread of ranks shouldn't necessarily always be at the same post. Late in the campaign, when all the PCs are likely to be Officers leading their own units, it becomes even harder to justify all the PCs being at the same battle. Not a major flaw, but more than a tiny bit annoying.

The Orbital Bombardment of Planet Rubens

Yesterday's session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars was the biggest challenge the PCs have faced yet. They actually had to rely on orbital bombardment, whereas on all previous planets, mere Strengths and Weaknesses were enough to get out of the trouble.

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Now, before we could get to the planet in question, there were some amusing hijinks involving ol' Sarge Harrington (a PC) and the captured alien stealth ship. This was the ship that the deserter Watkins (an NPC) had been using to shadow the fleet. In the final scenes of the last session, two of the PCs had captured Watkins and his alien vessel. But no one could figure out how to turn off the ship's stealth tech. It was invisible, and cloaked, even from the inside, and self-cleaning. Poor sarge was sent aboard it to try to figure out how it worked, and had a heck of a time trying to get back out of it again. He was actually listed as MIA, and rescue teams sent back to his last known coordinates, a few lightyears behind the fleet. Very amusing, since he was never more than 20 feet from where they'd last seen him. Got him so nervous about that, though, he did a lot of damage to the interior and hatches of the stealth ship trying to get out of it.

After much hilarity, I eventually moved the plot along to the Company being deployed planet-side.

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Since Captain DeMolay (a PC) had last session been promoted to Major, I now had more Threat Tokens in play, and fluff-wise the PCs were sent on a more important mission. Their troop ship would approach the next system powered-down, and well in advance of the rest of the fleet. Their objective was to capture the alien tower complex that was believed to be the control site for the planetary defenses.

Planet Name: Rubens
Planet Description: Pleasure Planet
Alien Description: Advanced Humanoids
Alien Power: Ambush

I went with the old Star Trek trope of the super-advanced race or planet that looks primitive, and remains peaceful unless really provoked. The system was defended by kill-satellites that implied a powerful culture once resided here. However, aside from three very tall (I compared them to the Tower of Babel, but in triplicate) high-tech towers in a tight cluster at one location, there were no signs of industry or technology on the planet itself. Medieval agricultural communities, populated by peaceful and primitive people. The aliens stood 7 to 8 feet tall, but weighed only 90 to 120 lbs. Graceful, elfin, feminine, and dressed in quaint pre-industrial clothing.

The PCs arrive by drop ship, and just slaughter the alien village near the tower complex. No resistance, just chaos and xenocide. A few aliens flee inside the towers, and once the players figured out how to use the local door tech, they pursued them. But again, the "second wave" of aliens inside were likewise slaughtered without raising arms. The only weapons the PCs had seen was one farmer with a pitchfork, and he died before he could even threaten with it.

The Company starts moving up the tower. As they progress further, they see more and more signs that the towers just aren't used. Other than the bottom floor, the rooms are mostly empty, and most of the work stations and computers are covered with dust. The locals are just poor dumb peasant folk. The players all start talking about how it feels bad to slaughter aliens that have no defenses, even if it's exactly what their characters would do.

And do so they did. An alien appears in the room with the bulk of the PCs unit.  Arms out, he tries to talk to them in a musical voice, and they blow him apart with a Machine Gun at point-blank. Down at ground level, more aliens arrive on pack animals and with wagons. They too try to talk to the Troopers, and are mowed down.

The terrain around the towers changes color a few times. I was going for the "mood planet" approach to pleasure planet. I also threw in a couple subtle references to that episode of Star Trek where the planet manufactures everything you imagine. There was a rabbit (with a stop watch) sighting that hinted at it, and reinforced the surrealist elements I've been bringing into the campaign. It worked reasonably well, though I don't think any of my players caught the references overtly (other than to Alice in Wonderland, which was only one level of it). Real combat was about to break out, and when it did, all curiosity about the properties of the planet became secondary to just surviving.

Again, aliens appear in the room. They just "sparkle in" to the midst of the unit, touch one NPC, and "sparkle out" taking the unprepared Trooper with them.

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I gave the PCs a few moments to worry about it, and then came the next wave. I activated the Ambush power, and aliens teleported in. They're still dressed as peasants, but clearly possess powerful transporter tech, and a few of them have some sort of energy weapon seemingly built-in to the fingers. Just point and burn. The Ambush does 1 "kill" to each PC, and messes up the NPCs in the unit pretty good. Like aliens teleporting away with people's limbs. The PCs counter-attack in the second round wipes them out without further harm, but it was clearly unnerving.

No way to track where the aliens teleported from, so there was little choice but to continue searching the towers. Room by room, level by level.

After several more floors of emptiness and dust, suddenly the first NPC trooper I'd abducted is returned via teleport. Except there's some sort of tattoo or tracery on his face now, like celtic knotwork in blue and green all over his skin.
He speaks: "People of Earth. Your aggression will not be tolerated. You do not wish to awaken a slumbering giant. You have four hours to vacate our planet peacefully, or your species will be eradicated from the galaxy." Immediate attempts a further parlay when south, and ended with most of the party being damaged by the grenade that killed the brainwashed/tattooed NPC trooper.

Clearly, medieval farmers these guys are not.

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So now the PCs are nervous, and start debating whether or not to call in an orbital bombardment and bug out off-world. They're almost out of Strengths, and I've still got a ton of Threat Tokens, enough to pull about 4 more ambushes easily. So, the last-ditch bombardment starts looking pretty good.

Problem is, orbital bombardment does 1 damage to each PC, and armor is useless against it. So if they call down the nastiness, a couple of them will have to either use Weaknesses or die. They call the ship, and tell it to risk coming closer to the kill-satellites so that it can bombard and/or extract, as needed.  They bring in the Platoon Medic (Doc Bubba, an NPC that has been in every session thus far), and line up for healing. I choose to hit them with the next ambush in the middle of it.

Given their wound status, and the recent out-of-character discussion about how armor can't stop an Orbital Bombardment, they all choose to take the Ambush wounds on their armor, and leave their health-boxes for the bombarment. So, aliens teleport in, touch people, and span off with large portions of their Mandelbrite Power Armor. Half the platoon is now half-naked.

Doc Bubba, sadly enough, loses not just her gloves and sleeves, but both hands and forearms. The PC she was treating grabs the stumps and tries to save her with an NFA roll (he had an 80% chance of success) but fails.

The Company returns fire, and gets a lot of successes, so the PCs narrate that they're figuring out how to predict the teleport targets by the shimmering just before the aliens arrive. The Major intends to call down the bombardment in the midst of this, but his player forgets its an NFA roll instead of FA, and declares the wrong skill at the start of the round. Too busy shooting, and dodging, he can't call in his coordinates. That leaves the aliens fighting long enough for one of the PCs to get hit for his last health box, and has to invoke a Weakness to live. Old Sarge Harrington has a weak ticker, and collapses from a heart attack. He survives, but is left for dead.

The next round, the Major gets the right skill selected, and rains down holy hell on the tower complex. This eliminates all the remaining threat tokens from the planet, and scores him d1000 kills. He rolls the d10s in sequence: 0, 1, and 3. So, massive destruction and terrain devastation, but only 13 enemies killed!

The teleporting aliens vanish. The kill-satellites all power down. Long range scanners reveal no life signs on the planet save what's left of the PCs company, most of who are buried under the collapsed towers. No clue where the enemy went.

In 3:16, if you use any of the really big weapons, such as the Orbital Bombardment or the Star-Killers, you have to make an NFA roll after the session to avoid being demoted. Early in the campaign, I made a point of this by giving them an NPC commander who was busted down from Colonel to Lieutenant for blowing up yet another habitable world.

DeMolay has NFA of 9 this late in the campaign. Even better odds for his NFA roll than Sarge had when he was trying to save Bubba. So, of course, DeMolay's die comes up a "10". The brass busts him down from Major to Captain for what they see as cowardice and a gross misappropriation of resources, as giving a plasma-bath to an entire continent only resulted in 13 confirmed kills.  Them's the breaks.

Huge Space Hulk, Tiny Rule

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Space Hulk: Death Angel in the past week or two. It's an awesome version of the classic Space Hulk board game / miniatures game, but in a portable semi-cardgame edition. (It's clearly a card game, but doesn't feel or play like one.) Best of all, it's cooperative. My wife and I play the Space Marines together, and the game itself controls the vile genestealers. Good times.

I was going to write a detailed review, but in the middle of writing it, I noticed a rule we were doing wrong. So, now I need to play a few more games with that rule correct before I can weigh in with my final thoughts. Normally, I'd just blame FFG, their rulebooks are always so poorly written. But in this case, the rulebook is actually really good and simple, I just somehow missed a critical sentence. A tiny little innocuous sentence, which no doubt completely skewed game balance. My bad.

House-Rules for Yesterday's Tomorrow

As mentioned in my previous post, I liked the core of Yesterday's Tomorrow, but various mathematical inconsistencies and a few vague passages in the rules really bothered me. I hate to be the guy that just whines and gripes, and never does anything to solve the problem, so here's what I would do to make Yesterday's Tomorrow work better...

Standardize the benefits of an advantage: Talents and Reputations would give +1 die each. Specials of any stripe would either give +3 dice each, or +1 die and open up a possibility like a power.  So a gadget could give +3 dice, or open up new narrative possibilities such as "rocket powered jetpack". The distinction is "can an unskilled person do this?". If it's something anyone can attempt, but you're just really good at it, the special gives +3 dice. If it's something normal people just couldn't attempt then it lets you do so, but only gives +1 die. Mysticism would be broken out into separate advantages so you'll get a larger advantage specializing in just one or two powers than grabbing them all for the bonus dice. You could still take multiple levels in a single "power", with the first level giving you the power +1 die, and subsequent levels being +3 dice each. Romantic Interest gives +3 dice to your rolls (only) if the Interest is an NPC. It gives +1 die to each players rolls if the Interest is a PC. Action Example: Fighting Styles would add +3 dice, but Piloting would be +1 die and the ability to fly and land airplanes, autogyros, and airships (which certainly opens up new narrative avenues).  So if you wanted to be a really good pilot, you'd take two levels of Piloting for the ability to fly all sorts of aircraft and a total of +4 dice on piloting rolls. You could conceivably come up with a special fighting style that gives a power and +1 die, such as martial art that gives the ability to run across the surface of still water.

Companions as a second (minor) PC: As per the rules, each PC can have a maximum of one companion. The companion is a second minor character you get to build. They have Styles of 3/2/1(0) as in the main rules, but you actually make them a character sheet with advantages. The get a maximum of 1 rank in one special of their highest Style, and are otherwise mundane. They cannot themselves take further Companions. Your Companion can be active in other scenes where your main PC is not present, and if so you play them, and they have their own pool of Peril. Be advised that they'll frequently end up over their heads and need rescuing by a proper PC. If your Companion and your main PC are in the same location or scene, then you combine their Peril and make rolls only for your main character. In such situations, the Companion counts as a normal (+1 die) advantage that applies to all your rolls in the three Styles they have. (As an optional rule, giving all Companions Styles of 3/2/1/1 and +1 to all your main character rolls when present probably wouldn't break anything.)

Divy up the Style wedges: We change the style ratings and access to specials based on the number of players. With one player, we use the normal 5/4/3/2 rules from the main game, with Specials available in your best two areas. With two players, we'd do the same, but strongly encourage them to not overlap strengths or weaknesses. With three or four players, we scale back to 5/3/2/2, still allowing specials on your best two Styles (even though one is rated at a "3"), but reducing the points available within it, so there's a more pronounced gap between your primary and secondary specialties. Again we strongly encourage the PCs to not overlap their primary Style (so just one PC gets a "5" in Science, for example). With five or more players, we stick with 5/3/2/2, but now only make specials available for your primary style. In general, the larger the group, the narrower the PCs should be so that you don't end up with characters that specialize in the exact same things.

One calamity = one Peril: This is a clarification stemming from last night's play experience with a very large group. Let's say the whole party is on an airplane, and someone narrates that it's on fire and going down. That does not mean the entire group each get a Peril. Sure, they're all in trouble, but any one of them can solve the entire dilemma with a single good die roll. If there's one PC that seems more endangered than the others, the GM gives them the Peril. If all things are equal, the GM gives the Peril to the PC who proposed the danger, to reward them for enhancing the drama. If this danger came about because of GM narration, you give the Peril to whoever hasn't had one in a while.

Mysticism clarification: Several of the example Mysticism powers seem like a poor fit for the stealth-and-detective theme of the Mystery style. This is okay, you just use their bonus dice on rolling whatever other Style makes sense. It works in the same way that a Jet Pack bought with Science could add to an action roll. So, if you have Mysticism: Invisibility, you'd roll it with Mystery to sneak without being noticed, but you'd roll it with Action to make a sneak attack. Clearly, in the main game rules (where Mysticism gave +3 dice and the power but Fighting Style gave just +2 dice) that was broken. But given the house rules above, it would be in balance. Yes, you could spend two (out of 5 maximum) Mystery points in Invisibility to get +4 dice on all your Action attacks. If you'd instead spent 2 points of Action towards a fighting style, you'd get +6 dice on those attacks. That's still not perfectly balanced, but it's much closer and probably not worth quibbling over.

Optional Rule if +3 seems too good: From my limited experience with the system, I think the game is at its best when the GM is cruel. The pace should be unrelenting, with something bad happening every time the GM gets narrative power (which they do constantly). Peril. Peril. Peril. Nothing ever goes right for the PCs unless they're spending a success from a die roll. Given that pacing, having all Specials give +3 dice (or +1 and a power) is the right call. PCs get a few really big dice pools, allowing them some narrative breathing room when their specialties come in to play. But some GMs just aren't comfortable constantly beating the players down. If you think you're going to be nice to your players, you might compensate for it by dropping the bonus for a special down to +2 dice, and maybe even having specials taken to gain a power give only the power  (no automatic die to go with it). If you're not planning to beat and torture the PCs at every opportunity, then there's no need for them to have such large dice pools. Personally, I think the +3 dice and unrelenting pacing would work better to make it feel cinematic and help differentiate between PCs, but some folks might feel that's over-the-top. I can't argue that it's not, I merely argue that I think over-the-top catches the spirit of the game a little better. Alternately, you could keep the +3 per level, but limit how many points can be put into Specials. Say, no more than 2 or 3 points of specials per Style.

John Wick could use an editor

Last night I played Yesterday's Tomorrow (a retro-pulp RPG, sometimes abbreviated "Yes. Tom." below, because it amuses me to do so) by John Wick. Between it, and my experiences running Wilderness of Mirrors half a dozen times in the past year, I've come to an inescapable conclusion. John Wick needs to get himself a number of assistants:  a friend who is really good with numbers, a blind playtest group, and a cold-blooded editor who is not afraid to hurt his feelings.

Don't get me wrong, I love John Wick's games. I subscribe to his YouTube channel. 7th Sea remains my favorite setting in all of gaming. I really admire the core idea of Wilderness of Mirrors, putting the "planning stage" of caper and spy movies front-and-center in RPGs. Yesterday's Tomorrow had some awesome concepts (Peril) and a great sense of genre. On an abstract theory level, all of these are incredible games. However, all of these games share one or two common flaws that really get under my skin and detract from the experience at the table. I love them, but I'm never completely happy with them.

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Off Balance: 

In Yesterday's Tomorrow, character creation makes no mathematical sense. There's four Attributes ("Styles"), and each rating point in them unlocks corresponding advantages: so far, so good. But the advantages make no attempt at either balance nor coherence. Most advantages boil down to just +1 die. The exceptions are the "Special" advantages, for which there are basically one per Style, and you can only get them for your best Styles. All this works well in theory, but the actual power-level of the Specials vary wildly. Fighting Styles and Titles give +2 dice per level of advantage, making them twice as good as normal advantages. They're "Special" and somewhat limited, so that's fine. But for each point put in Mysticism, you get +3 dice and a special power. There's no trade-off, nothing to balance it. The Specials for Mystery are just plain better than for the other three Styles, with no rationale or explanation of why. Plus, given that the rules specifically allow you to use Advantages from one Style on rolls of completely different Style, those bonus dice in Mysticism are really flexible. If you want to be the best fighter, don't waste your points on Kung Fu or Marksmanship, take Mysticism: Invisibility and attack people from surprise. If you want to social your way through situations, don't worry about Titles and Romance, just take Mysticism: Command and Mysticism: Hypnosis. Sure, it's a "high trust" game that's not really about success or failure, but when one of four attributes is so obviously more powerful than the others, the rules really shouldn't pretend that it isn't.

Then there's all sorts of other weird little blips to character creation, like the Athletics Talent that gets +2 dice for no specified reason (all other Talents are +1 die), several instances where "Imagination" is accidentally substituted for "Science!" without explanation, and the weird phrasing of the Romantic Interest special. Then there's the bit where it tells you further information on Gadgets can be found in the Risks section, but when you go to look it up, there's nothing there on the topic. There's a really simple and elegant character creation system hiding beneath these layers of unexplained and arbitrary wonkiness. The game comes very close to greatness, but ultimately fails to live up to it's potential. It falls victim due to balance issues, poor editing and lack of examples for some of the less obvious things you can put on a character sheet.

The weirdest bit has to do with NPC Companions - each PC can have one, but the rules don't really explain how they work. If they add to your pools, they're way over-powered, giving +6 dice (split across three Styles) for 1 advantage rank. If instead you have to spend your PC's Peril to activate them, you'll almost never do it, because your heroes pool will almost always be larger. If they're a second character you get to play even when your main PC is not in the scene... well that's just not ever stated and is only vaguely implied at best.

Wilderness of Mirrors had similar lack of balance at character creation. 5 attributes, one of which ("Saturn", the team-leader power) was a completely useless dump stat for every PC except the actual Team Leader, because it literally can't be rolled for any useful purpose during the game. So while there's no single ultimate stat like in Yes. Tom., there's one stat that's just obviously worse than all the others.

In 7th Sea, the best stat was clearly Panache, as each level of it gave you another action per round to use the rest of your stats. Every campaign I've played or GM'd of it had all the players openly envious of the PC(s) that had more Panache then them. A low Panache could make combat deathly boring for you, waiting your turn while everyone else took two to three times as many actions each round.  Likewise, Attributes were far better than Skills and Knacks, and the costs at character creation were completely different ratios than the costs later with XP. The player who put the bulk of his or her points in Attributes (especially Panache) would be at a great advantage over the player who wasted points on skills. Let's say you wanted to be a great swordsman - the way to do so was not to invest character points in Attack: Fencing or Parry. Putting those points in other areas (Panache and Finesse) would get far greater results for your investment. That's really counter-intuitive, and thus far from ideal.

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Second-best is too darned good:

This is also related to character creation, and is a recurring theme in John Wick's recent games. Essentially it boils down to lack of character niche or specialization. By default, every character ends up being really good at everything. There's no "I'm our breaking & entering specialist" or "she's the tank", or "he's the smooth talker", because everyone is almost equally good at everything.

In Yes. Tom. there's four attributes ("Styles") and each PC is really good at two of them. But even when rolling the one's you're supposedly not good at, you're still likely to get enough advantages affecting the roll that success is guaranteed. At four dice, you're looking at a 93% chance of getting the single success needed to narrate "I kill them" or "I jump out the window to safety" or "I convince them that I'm trustworthy". But four dice is about the lowest you should ever be rolling. Sure, I'll prefer to roll my best stat with the 10 dice it could generate for me, but effectively the characters have no weaknesses (especially if they took Mysticism). If the big lumbering thug with murder on her mind has to finesse her way through covert diplomatic negotiations at an upper-class soiree, she probably pulls it off. The only thing that could stop her is if she chooses not to roll, or intentionally narrates her own failure. So there's no risk of failure in your worst stats, it's just that you'll get to narrate more bells and whistles and flavor text in your best stats.

On one hand, I applaud the power-realization that the game enables. Certainly it's a fresh new way to approach the core concepts of fantasy gaming, and it definitely captures the dashing larger-than-life heroes of the pulp genre. It should appeal to narrativists, method actors, and monty haulers alike - I have to acknowledge that that is pretty cool in the abstract.

At the same time, it makes all the PCs very cookie-cutter. Your top two (out of four) styles are mechanically augmented, they get the specials, and just more advantages in general. There's no distinction between those top two, however. Action primary and Romance secondary will play and feel almost exactly the same as Romance primary and Action secondary.  Which means that there are exactly 6 character builds (Action & Mystery highest, Action & Romance highest, Action & Science highest, Mystery & Romance highest, Mystery & Science highest, Romance & Science highest). The mysticism powers should in theory expand that somewhat, but in practice there's strong mathematical incentives to spend most of your Mystery advantages on getting most of the mysticism powers, so two characters with Mystery as a high stat will mostly duplicate powers. With really good roleplayers and a small enough group, this will be a non-issue, but a game that only works within certain constraints should probably at least mention that fact in passing. Some advice for GMs in group size, or advice for PCs in character creation goals would be well worth adding a page to the short pdf.


Wilderness of Mirrors has the same problem. There's five attributes, and each PC has enough points to get themselves the maximum score in 3 out of 5 if they take the minimum score in the remaining two. Given that one stat ("Saturn") is an under-used dump stat for all but one of the PCs, it's not a hard sacrifice to make, at least for everyone but the Team Leader.   Your three high-rated attributes are flexible enough to cover most situations, and the typical character employing this "hat trick" build will almost never be forced to roll their one genuinely bad stat. If it does come up, they'll probably have a few spare Mission Points to cover it. End result: every PC is equally good at everything that matters (with the possible ironic exception of the team leader, who gets shafted).

Now here's where John Wick's recent creations have problems that his earlier works didn't always exhibit.  7th Sea did not have this problem at all. It featured half a dozen different types of Sorcery, each of which oozed flavor (literally, in the case of Porté), and had completely different mechanical engines and effect types. There were half a dozen (and five or six times that with all the sourcebooks in play) Swordsman Schools, each of which had it's own special moves and most employed functionally different weapons. There were enough attributes and skills that know one character could master them all. A large palette of Advantages, Arcana, and Backgrounds rounded out the options at character creation and gave each PC their own theme. It was a little fiddly as a result, but you could have a large party of 8 PCs with very distinct specialties and no overlap.

So why was 7th Sea better in that regard? Was it just a function of being more crunchy? Are his recent designs too rules-light to have room for play balance or character niche? Is it impossible to make a story game that is fair and mathematically sound, and also gives each PC something special? Is character niche only achievable in a crunchy, option-loaded system?

I don't think that's the answer or the cause. I suspect that explanation is that 7th Sea was a team effort. I've never met the man, but my take on this is that John Wick is an "ideas guy". The sort of person who brainstorms and dreams really well, comes up with cool ideas and isn't afraid to put even the wildest of them to paper. I am moved by his artistry, even as I criticize and decry the rough edges. I'm hoping that someday soon John Wick gets himself a really top-notch support team to help put the final polish on his games and fix mathematical awkwardness. I invariably love his core concepts, yet often end up frustrated over the presentation and finer details.

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 A few simple fixes:

I hate to be the guy that just bitches and gripes, and never does anything to solve the problem. So here's some links to possible solutions to the complaints I've raised.

House-rules and fixes for Wilderness of Mirrors.

House-rules used to reduce the excessive combat math in 7th Sea.
For those new to 7th Sea, or just making characters for the first time, following these short rules. (Delivered from memory, it's been a few years since I last made a character)

• Buy Sorcery and/or a Swordsman School, they make your character more interesting. Don't waste points upgrading their knacks just yet, you'll be fine with the basics for a while, and they're easy to raise with XP later.
• If you have not read your Sorcery thoroughly, only take it Full-Blooded. Some of the Half-Blooded sorceries are crippled in non-obvious and unsolvable ways.
• Panache is the king of Attributes. A Panache of at least 3 is a must have, or you'll regret it.
• Attributes are better than Skills, and a broad base of Skills is far more important than raising individual Knacks. Though it doesn't read like this should be true, Basic Knacks are far better than Advanced Knacks. Advanced Knacks only cost more at character creation, and are cheap with XP later. At character creation, there's no need to raise any Knack above 1.

In just a moment I'll adress the rules to "Yes. Tom." In my very next post, I'll provide a set of House-Rules that I think would bring out the best Yesterday's Tomorrow has to offer.

Post-Gamma World

I recently played two sessions of the new Gamma World. You know, the edition to which my kneejerk reaction was pretty unfavorable. A friend of mine ran it at the weekly one-shot group. Let's see if actual play experience improves or worsens my perceptions of it...

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One of the first steps in character creation was rolling up what type of character you're playing.

A quick aside: Some folks really don't like random character generation, and I can only conclude that said individuals will hate the new Gamma World. If memory serves correctly, previous editions character creation also had strong random elements as well. So I was okay with it, especially for a one-shot.

To give you an idea what I mean when I say "type of character", in these two sessions I was playing a Felinoid Hawkoid. You roll up two mutant categories, so I got cat-man and bird-man. Which was a little tricky trying to envision, but not too bad.

Overall, I actually really enjoyed this whole concept. You got powers based on your types as I expected, but type also determined your two-thirds of your starting skills and even gave you an automatic high score in your two most important attributes for your types. From a mechanical perspective, this was genius. I was really pleased with how it gave you stats that worked well together, and gave you an instant handle on your character. Especially for a one-shot or other short campaign, this was excellent.

But it didn't feel like Gamma World to me. One of the PCs was a Telekinetic Speedster. One of the other characters was constantly on fire. This sounds and feels like a Super-Hero game. Gamma World is over-the-top Post-Apocalyptic, not super-hero. Stylistically, at least in my opinion, those are worlds apart. I could see this char gen system working great for Supers (you'd have to elminate certain options from the chart, like Rat Swarm and Cockroach), but it failed to capture the Gamma World essence for me. It was too neat and tidy, too prefabricated, and it left the real weird themeless mutations to only appear in the card decks.

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So, let's talk about the decks. In my kneejerk post from back in October, I railed against the CCG element even whilst I liked the idea of powers on cards. Mostly the complaint was about cost and the inevitable duplicates from random packs. The idea of having your powers at your fingertips (instead of in a rulebook) appeals to me. I also really like the concept of niche-protection where no two players have the same card / power. Unfortunately, my two sessions of play showed me that the new Gamma World completely failed to capitalize on the aspects I found appealing about the notion of cards.

For starters, things that logically should be on cards, weren't. Those character types, along with their resultant powers, were not on cards. This meant there was no niche preservation. 4 of the 6 members of our party were: a telekinetic speedster, a radioactive speedster,  a radioactive swarm, and a cockroach swarm. This was, of course, just the luck of the dice. But if they'd been on cards there'd be no duplication, our party would have been comprised of 12 of the 20 options (instead of 9 of 20), and each PC would have had their own distinct identity. Also, since the powers associated with the character types weren't on cards, we had to frequently refer to the rulebook. (We could have just written them down ourselves, but the character sheets for the game lack room to do so. That is another fair gripe, but completely beside the point.).

Secondly, the notion of mutations randomly coming and going every twenty minutes is terrible. Even given the "worlds colliding" backstory of the current edition, it was still hard to conceptualize. I'll break this one out into sub-complaints:

• The notion that at frequent intervals the entire party mutates (or is replaced by the parallel selves) is weird enough.
• That these mutations always take place right after a combat is a little wonky, but could be tied in to adrenalin wearing off or something, so I can kind of dismiss my disbelief on that.
• Even stranger is the fact that, despite how I mutate (or however many parallel selves I'm replaced by, if that's how you choose to interpret it), nothing ever impacts or replaces my being a Felinoid Hawkoid. I may be an invisible Felinoid Hawkoid at the moment, and later I'll be a Felinoid Hawkoid that is literally made of steel, and an hour down the road I'm gonna be a Felinoid Hawkoid with really big feet. But my "real" mutations, of being a bird-man and a cat-man simultaneously, that sticks around.
• The NPCs don't experience any of this. The Badders and Porkers we were fighting back in the first combat of the adventure are identical to the Badders and Porkers we fought in the second, third and fifth encounter. Despite being mutant badger-men and hog-men, they apparently don't mutate hourly like the PCs do.
• All of this, though, I could perhaps manage to overlook, provided it enhanced the flavor and themes of the game. The rule of cool could win out, if I were immersed enough in the character or setting, (or even the tactical situation) to stay focused. This is where the cards really fail. They are informationally dense.  The main power text of the card is often quite complicated, and gives no clues how to visualize it. Then at the bottom there's the "overcharge" information, which tells you how the power can flare up beneficially if you push your luck, and the side-effects it generates if you get a bad roll. Very crunchy. Instead of everyone around the table describing how they've mutated or changed this time, we all just read our cards to ourselves. There's almost never any flavor text, so you often don't know how to visualize what you must look like now, let alone what anyone else does. Good-bye role-playing.

Those cards would be much better if they had simpler rules (get rid of overcharge) and used that space for more flavor text (or better yet, a picture).

Third, everything I just griped about in regards to the Alpha Mutations can also be said about the Omega Technology cards. When the enemy is blood-sucking birds that don't have a ranged attack, and you loot their body to discover a potent energy rifle on them, all suspension of disbelief goes away. More of the items gave clues to how they'd look than the mutation cards did, but it's still pretty bizarre to discover in the middle of combat that your buddy is wearing suped-up power armor he apparently got off the unarmored muties you wasted in the previous room.

My fourth and final complaint about the cards is just: "both decks have an identical back". Now that would be a minor and petty gripe, if the fronts weren't also extremely similar, and if you didn't have to discard and draw again and again during each session. GM + six players around a long table meant we were passing cards around a lot and you couldn't count on the decks staying put during our two sessions of play. Different color card backs sure would have cut down on the confusion.

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Other than those very central complaints, I mostly enjoyed the system. D&D 4th Ed is a very solid tactical combat system, and the rules are themselves pretty straight forward and consistent. Gamma World's only real tweaks on that involve character creation, adding Level to literally every die roll (simple enough) and the ever-so-fiddly cards I just spewed venom about. So for me, once I'd figured out how my latest card worked, the rest of it was familiar and easy.

Some of my fellow players had trouble figuring their actions and powers out.  I think that was a failing of the GM, who didn't explain any of the base combat and skill-resolution rules until we were in the middle of our first real fight, and never really explained any of the keywords of rule system. (Oh well, we all make mistakes. I can certainly forgive this small oversight.)  4th Ed looks more complicated than it actually is, and I'm confident all that confusion would have shaken itself out given another session or two.

Leveling up seemed to come a smidge too quickly. We achieved the XP for second level early in the second session. I was glad to get to see the leveling process, but have some concerns about the game's legs. It only goes to level 10. At the pace we were earning XP, that we'd hit level 10 in 13 or 14 sessions. In retrospect, maybe that's not a problem.

As for the setting, well, the intro adventure from the boxed set (which is what we played) was _not_ a good introduction to it. The adventure plot was linear, felt arbitrarily slapped together, and didn't show off any of the things that made the previous editions so cool. Old-school Gamma World is an esoteric and byzantine take on the typical nuclear Post-Apocalypse setting. It's bizarre on the surface, but has an internal logic that you can eventually figure out and enjoy, and has a lot of depth beneath the surface. Instead, the intro adventure was a random dungeon romp. I know I only played the latest edition for two sessions, but it felt like the depth had been gutted and replaced with random card draws.

I'm glad to have had the opportunity to try it out, but it's definitely not something I'll be rushing out to buy. I'm about where I was in October, I can tell it's not my cup of tea. Just as upset, but the exact nature of my complaints has shifted. The biggest complaint is the way the steady influx of complicated new cards mid-session distracts everyone from the role-playing.

In the end, this version of Gamma World is a lot like recent Hollywood "remakes" of old TV shows from the 70s and 80s.  Instead of updating it to modern sensibilities and lovingly fixing the original's flaws, they aren't taking the subject matter seriously.  The title is the same, but clearly the studio doesn't "get it". They don't seem to understand what made the original so cool despite the bad acting and dated haircuts. They made something that's bordering on parody, but with the same name as the original.

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I don't like being that guy who just complains and hates, and never contributes anything useful.   Let's say I got this game, and wanted to get my money's worth out of it, and run it for more than a session or two. How I would fix this?

I'd get rid of the random card draws after every encounter. Instead, I'd have each PC draw two alpha mutations at character creation, and discard the one they were least interested in. Whenever they leveled up, I'd have them draw another mutation, and decide to keep it or the one they already had. That'd be a little more believable then mutating every 20 minutes. Maybe around 5th level or so, I'd have them draw two cards, and keep a total of two mutations. The deck may need some customization as well, removing the most potent cards till later. (Maybe I'd pull out the weakest, too. I'd feel real sorry for a PC having to choose between Anti-Life-Leach and Footus Giganticus at first level.)

Tech cards would no longer be random draws, either. Instead, I'd use them as treasure and plot devices, and sometimes have badguys actually using the treasure until the PCs beat them and took it. The salvage rules might need to be re-written then, too. I didn't see enough of that (nor use enough Tech myself) to say for certain how to proceed in that regards. Guns that do 7d8 damage wouldn't show up until much later in the campaign.

At character creation, I'd either reroll duplicate results, or make a deck of the character types, to preserve character niche and individuality. I'd grudgingly leave in the super-hero flavored stuff like Speedster and (ever-flaming) Pyrokinetic, simply because coming up with my own balanced and in-genre replacements would take a lot more effort than I'm willing to do for this thought experiment.

"I wish I could say the same"

Yesterday, in my Continuum game, I had an amusing little situation, where someone said something without realizing the way it would be taken by the NPC they're talking too. Kinda like that famous exchange between Merlin and Julia in the Amber novels, where context tells us that the two characters will walk away from a conversation without realizing they completely misunderstood each other. It's a sick, evil GM like me that lets that sort of thing happen to his players.

First, some backstory...

Way back when the campaign started, I had all the players make me short lists of defining moments from their characters lives. It's a time-travel game, and as such there's reasonable chance a PC might be tempted to revisit their past.

One of the players included in his past a note about his character Ron's last romantic relationship. On the list of defining events in his life, he put the date they broke up, and made it clear that in the years between that break-up and his learning to time-travel, he'd avoided relationships and romance entirely. Maybe the player is saying they don't want romance to be in the game at all, their character will go through life single and unattached, just keep that sort of stuff away from them. On the other hand, the player may be saying that being cold and broken-hearted is part of the character concept, and they're looking to the GM for opportunities to let them play that. Asking the GM to challenge them, in a way. (If he is trying to signal that romance should not be in the game at all, it would be a vast change from the last campaign I'd gamed with that player in it, where he fell for a known enemy NPC and betrayed the party to her.) So my inclination is to dangle some minor romantic plot-thread out there to at least give them an opportunity to role-play that character element once. The plan is to then gauge based on their reaction whether or not to sweep the plot thread under the rug.

It being a time-travel game, there's a great deal of flexibility, and plots need not always be presented in a linear fashion. So, more than a year ago, I introduced an NPC that could potentially be a way to illustrate exactly whatever it was that the player was getting at. This NPC is a female time-traveller from Tibet named Penuri Pemba. Depending on the era and society she's encountered in, sometimes she's dressed as a well-manicured pulpy femme fatale with long beautiful hair, and other times she's been in the robes and shaved head of a Buddhist Nun.

I've had a lot of fun implying that she knows the PCs well, in particular Ron, the relationship-shy PC I was describing above. She calls him by a pet name that clearly indicates she knows a lot about his pre-time-travel life, and she plays coy little information games not exactly explaining how she knows him. Her past is his future, for the most part. I've kept it in a narrative quantum state, where depending on how the PC proceeds, they could turn out to be good friends, or another badly failed relationship. Could be an unrequited love, a predestined future betrayal, or she could even be stalking him. I know what my preferred default interpretation of their past & future is, but it being a time-travel game, I have to be prepared to scrap my ideas on a moments notice if Ron chooses a course of action that conflicts with my plans. The true nature of how she knows him will eventually  be defined by Ron's player's decisions and actions. The options are all over the emotional map, and could be dialed to any degree.

For the most part I've been gentle and subtle with it... except for one session several months back when another NPC who was clearly a friend of hers walked up to Ron, shouted something in an Asian language that included Penuri Pemba's name, and punched Ron in the face. Clearly, it's not all garden of happiness... but whether that guy was being protective of a friend whose heart Ron broke, or is a romantic rival, remains to be scene and will be defined by what Ron does. The punch definitely dialed things up a notch, but could still be interpreted in any of several directions.

Lately, I hadn't used Penuri Pemba much, just left things simmering off-camera. Seemed like Ron's player was avoiding the whole situation, and I didn't want to force anything if he wasn't enjoying it. But shortly after the start of Monday's session, he brought up the idea of seeking her out as a possible source of information on a mystery he was trying to solve (relating to possible murder/kidnapping of yet another NPC, and completely unrelated to Ron and Penuri's possible stormy past/future). He made the connection to her, it wasn't suggested by plot or clues, so I figured that's an indication that he's okay with what's been put out there so far.

So, they meet up. She's dressed as a Bhikkhuni (Buddhist Nun) with her long locks shaved away, and a sort of serene sadness about her. They talk for a while, and she's able to help him with things she knows about his mystery. After getting the plot-and-clue stuff out of the way, she says "It's very good to see you again after all these years,"

His response: "I wish I could say the same."

Just an absent-minded turn of phrase. From the objective GM viewpoint, it was clear at the moment (and later he confirmed it at the end of the session when I asked about it) that he meant that it has not been years for him, and that he still doesn't really know her as well as she knows him. But from the point-of-view of this person who might be his long lost future love, or his future bitter stalker, that sentence just couldn't be good. Either an insult or a let down, possibly both. She's clearly testing the waters, and he clearly hurt her, even though he didn't mean to. End of conversation, and she makes her exit ASAP.

While Ron didn't take a particularly strong stance or intentional action towards resolving what their connection is, I can clearly cross a few things off my list just the same. Sometimes it's good to be the dirty evil no-good rotten GM.

Planet Bosch

Exciting session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars this week. Here's a summary:

Planet Name: Bosch
Planet Description: Heavy Gravity
Alien Description: Felines
Alien Special Ability: Flee

I ended up with a really low AA for this planet, and knew the aliens were gonna be creamed. Especially since "Flee" is a really wimpy special power. Once the PCs were aware of it, they just started every combat at Close Range. Since you get to adjust your range after a successful FA roll, as long as they succeeded at one roll in the first two rounds of combat, they'd never fall out of the combat. It may have slightly reduced their kill count, but not by much.

So, given the wimpiness of my aliens, I made them sympathetic. Cute little cat-guys, who'd be receiving transmissions of old b&w shows from Terra. "Humans!" their village elder exclaimed ecstatically upon seeing them. "We've been looking forward to meeting you." Then he was chopped apart with a power blade. Others quoted I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and old game shows at them, before being blown apart.

The aliens went down fast, though not without twinges of guilt along the way. (Very brief twinges of guilt. Like, "I felt bad... until one of them mentioned The Price Is Right. It's a mercy killing.") Knowing there'd be little planetary resistance, I decided to move along various other sub-plots.

Captain DeMolay (a PC) has treated several of his NPC Lt's with contempt and scorn, and really not done anything to convince them he has any power to back it up. So, there was a bit of friendly fire, and an avalanche that he refuses to believe was caused by the High Gravity.

But the real show-stopper was the visit by Major Schwimmer.

Now, the real Schwimmer, Captain Schwimmer, was found by the PCs tied up in an air duct in the previous session. They'd been hunting through the ventilation system and jeffries tubes in search of possible infiltration by one or more shape-shifting aliens. Capt. Schwimmer says he's been replaced by said aliens, and that Major Schwimmer who'd recently been promoted was a fake. So they tried to lure fake Schwimmer to pay them an inspection, and since their efforts were good ones (and the aliens pushovers) I decided to give them their opportunity. What surprised me was the gusto with which they approached it. They lured him into an APC, dropped a TPK bomb in a hatch, and the blew up the APC from outside, just to be safe. I was thrilled to death with this.

Their cleverness didn't end there, either. They also managed to track down Watkins (an NPC who'd gone AWOL back in session 2, and been helping the aliens ever since) and capture him and his invisible alien ship. Victories all around.

...unless they killed the wrong damn Schwimmer. But what's the odds of that?