Contact With The Enemy, Zombies, and "Detect Plot"

As they say in the military, no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy Player Characters. I'm running a home-brewed zombie game called Death Warmed Over, and week after week, it has repeatedly proven that old military axiom. To be clear, I'm enjoying it greatly, but it's not at all the campaign I imagined it to be.

My favorite zombie films include quite a few where the characters are holed up somewhere, turning a house or shopping mall into a fortress.  Classic Romero stuff. They're nailing boards over the windows, improvising weapons, and finding clever ways to sneak in and out of the property without getting grabbed by the thousand arms of the nameless horde. These sorts of films tend to be slow-burning character dramas where the zombies are the external source of tension that occasionally kills characters but mostly serves as a backdrop for the inevitable collapse of the social unit. These sorts of films appeal to the parts of my brain that really appreciate greek tragedy as well as problem solving.

I've always wanted to play a game that catches that feel, but no one's ever been interested in running it as anything more than a one-shot. Two main mechanical hurdles traditionally stand in the way of this sort of campaign:

1. Such a game requires eventually the GM must play out scenes with hundreds of zombies, and most games just can't do that elegantly. No game I've seen really has the rules for the makeshift barricades. The handful of games that have rules that could be used for determining how many zombies it takes to topple a home-made wall are either so detailed you can't run 50 zombies in a scene without every turn taking an hour, or so abstract and random that one bad roll will result in a single zombie toppling your house.
2. Items, and resource management. You don't particularly want to make a list of every single item in every single house or business, as that takes far too much time and effort from the GM. Yet to stay faithful to the genre, scrounging for equipment, ammo, and food needs to be important. There needs to be a balance, where the presence or lack of an crucial item is meaningful, but you don't have to constantly define what's in every room of every location.

You can hand-wave that sort of thing for a session or two, but any sort of lengthy campaign needs a solid foundation of rules that reinforce the genre. Based on that, I decided my best bet was to custom-build my own set of rules, and run the darned game myself.

My design goals were as follows:

• Fast and light combat rules, because zombies really aren't that dangerous unless they show up in numbers. At the same time the rules had to be tactical enough that players could make meaningful decisions.
• High base odds of success for the PCs, so I can throw in some big swingy penalties for psychological trauma whenever things go more wrong than they had been before, without it completely nullifying the players ability to accomplish something.
• An abstract system for resource management so I didn't have to stat out every single item everywhere or dink about with encumbrance, but could still give both in- and out- of-character motivations for the players to make scavenging forays outside their makeshift fortress.
• Timelines as well as a few simple random charts for figuring out how bad the zombie infestation is from block to block and building to building, so that if the players suddenly decide to make a supply run to the sporting goods store in the middle of a session I can run that on the spot without having to pause the game for 20 minutes.
• A system for handling how likely zombies are to smash down or climb over a makeshift barricade. This needed to involve as little randomness as possible, because if the system was "roll a die per zombie" that would be wretchedly painful to play through when the zombies were in quantitity.
• Emulating a large number of classic zombie-genre tropes, but yet still having a few surprises and curveballs to throw at the players.
• Suspension of disbelief. The idea of the dead rising up to devour the living is far-fetched enough, the players shouldn't be scoffing at any of the details that come up later, so I really needed to think things through and do some research.
• In-character mystery in the beginning as the players are trying to figure out how the disease propagates, leading into a gradually unfolding understanding of the new state of the world.
• A flowchart or simple rules for zombie behavior, not just so I can run dozens of zombies at a time, but also so that they really come across as beasts of instinct and behave with a herd mentality. Additionally, this means that once the players figure out how the zombies "work" they can out-think and out-maneuver them.

I feel like I hit all of those goals. Not that there weren't any hiccups along the way, and I recently had to make some props/tools to simplify the tracking of the psychology modifiers because it was a little fiddly and opaque in my first draft. Overall, I'm pretty pleased. I did a lot of research to figure out how the infrastructure would fall apart, on what day the power goes off, when the food rots and the bugs move in, etc. I came up with a fantastical yet logical progression for my virus that would allow it to spread quickly and not burn itself out.

I started the PCs out as neighbors in a gated apartment complex that was initially a bit vulnerable to zombie infiltration, but which could be readily fortified as long as the PCs were willing to nail a few tables over their windows and what not. I used a complex I'd once lived in so that I knew the layout and the neighborhood intimately and could answer any questions that might come up. I printed off floor-plans and maps for the apartment buildings at combat-map scale and laminated them. I was ready to dig in for a siege. This was going to scratch my itch just perfectly.

And that's exactly where I come back to the first sentence of this post… no plan survives contact with the PCs. While I love the tragic siege sub-genre of zombie film, it's a forgone conclusion that things fall apart, the center does not hold. Staying in one place always gets you killed, and while very few zombie films end happily, those that do usually involve escaping to somewhere else. My players are, of course, motivated by survival. From session one, they just wanted to get the heck out of the populated areas and head for places with fewer potential zombies. Even though I set the game in the middle of a desert (Albuquerque, NM) so there's really nowhere to flee too, they just had to head out of town at the first opportunity. Trying to head them off, I throw a military quarantine up as one more obstacle in between them and anywhere else, but of course this just encourages the players to try to sneak past soldiers as well as zombies. I cut off every escape route and leave them a brightly lit Tram back down to their fortress, and they instead choose the arduous overland trek in the opposite direction, across mountains and deserts where there are, of course, no zombies.

Silly me. It should come as no surprise, as that's just how gaming works. Players cast "detect plot" and then take a hard left to steer clear of it. :)

Black Crusade / Broken Chains / Free RPG Day

This past Saturday was Free RPG Day, and my local game store asked me to run a demo in their store of one of the free modules they'd be giving away. Sounded like fun, so I signed up to run the introductory scenario "Broken Chains" for the upcoming "Black Crusade" RPG.

Before I dive in to what I thought of Broken Chains and Black Crusade, I'd like to take a moment to thank Greenlake Games. They were really invested in the whole Free RPG Day concept. They had tons of product to give away, and packed gaming tables into every square foot of space they had available. They were especially nice to us GMs. I walked home with a stack of freebie adventures, a commemorative d6, and a coupon for 25% off my next purchase and a free Iron Die. Very cool of them.

Now on to Broken Chains and Black Crusade...  

• SPOILER WARNING - Plot points of the adventure (as well as mechanics of the game) are discussed below. Read at your own risk.

Black Crusade is the next iteration of the ongoing Warhammer 40k RPG. This version is from the point-of-view of renegades of Chaos. 40k has always had a thing for anti-heroes. One of the major conceits of the setting is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" perspective, where the agents of the Emperor do horrible things in the name of saving mankind from itself. Black Crusade focuses more closely on that aspect of the setting, by having the players take on the role of the legions of Chaos. The PCs in this game are the very demon-worshiping psychic psychotic heretics the rest of the game line is trying to save humanity from.

Black Crusade uses mechanics adapted from Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch (the three other 40k RPGs currently in print), which in turn use mechanics adapted from the 2nd Edition of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Now, personally, I would have preferred it had it used 3rd Ed Warhammer's rules, because I love the dice and it plays fast and easy. 2nd Ed is a bit clunkier and old-school-ier, and not nearly as familiar to me these days. 2nd Ed is grittier, but certainly not easier.

The demo version reduced the mechanical complexity a little in various places, and I very intentionally played fast and light with the system myself. I cheated the initiative system a little, skimped on the die modifiers, and kept the combats short. Several of my players were clearly interested in taking it the other direction, however, and would have been happy to use the full system with all of it's many combat modifiers and special actions. In retrospect, I wish I'd anticipated that and spent some time refamiliarizing myself with the options available to them, as it may have enhanced the gaming experience for more than half the table. That said, I think everyone had fun, and at the end of the night I got thanks and hand shakes from strangers, so I don't think it bombed by any stretch of the imagination.

It's worth noting that this is a very lethal system. We actually only ended up with 1 PC getting hit at all during the game, but despite his thick Space Marine armour and his genetically uplifted Toughness stat, that single hit ate up about 80% of his hit points. Most of the PCs would have died from that blow, and it came as a surprise attack from ambush so it's not like anyone could really avoid it.

This brings up a few related issues I have with the game system.

I'm not certain the game concept is particularly well-suited to the high lethality nature of the mechanics. One can argue that in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader, much of the crux of the game is in avoiding gun battles. It's a dark, deadly world and the PCs should try to manipulate situations so that they don't end up fighting except when they have a strong advantage (or no other options). They've got the authority and power to push people around a bit, and should be engaging in as many social conflicts as physical ones. Death Watch (the space-marine version of the 40k RPG) certainly features less talking and more action, but the PCs are compensated with power armor, heavy weapons, and redundant bio-engineered organs. Black Crusade features a mix of PC types - armoured Chaos Marines, wild demon-possessed Psykers, and social-oriented Apostate Heretics.  The gap between the combat-focused and social-focused PCs is pretty wide, and quite quickly lethal. As renegades, you lack the support and authority to leverage conflicts away from combat. And if the party has even one Blood-God-worshiping berserker in its ranks, the squishier characters aren't gonna have much luck avoiding fights.

The adventure did include some special threats intended to challenge the parties heavy-hitters, but as mentioned above my first die roll of such nearly vaporized the toughest PC. There's a steep curve to figuring out system balance and encounter design given this PC mix, and any mis-step is likely to result in quick character turn-over. So while I appreciate that some efforts were taken to address this in the adventure, I really found the system far too lethal and unforgiving for my tastes. What's more, there just wasn't any justification within the adventure for including the non-beefy PCs. 3 out of 6 characters were geared for combat, and 3 out of 6 were decidely not. Of those 3 non-combatants, only 1 really ever had anything to do in the adventure as written, and the other two completely lacked a moment to shine.

Now it may be that that particular gripe is well addressed and balanced in the main rulebook. I'm not sure how, given what I saw in the Broken Chains intro adventure, but it's possible. I imagine doing so would probably take some high-end social and support powers, but such powers just weren't evidenced in the sample characters provided with the adventure. The closest I saw in this adventure was a character who had the ability to add +1 degree of success to all her successful social rolls. This sounds impressive on some abstract level, but as near as I could tell it did nothing in the adventure. There really wasn't any point in the scenario where you needed a particular level of social success, and the abbreviated start-up rules didn't offer any suggestions of what the in-character difference was, either. The difficulty chart was of no help, either, merely telling me that a "challenging" roll was +0 and a "very difficult" social roll was at -30.

This was further complicated by environmental factors around the first likely scene in the scenario where a social roll was going to be of use. The PCs wake up in a derelict spaceship that's been drifting for generations; most of the people they meet are half-mad cannibals who attack on sight. The first NPC they meet who actually has any clues to what's going on is down in the bilges. He lives in the sewers of the ship, hip-deep in noxious sludge and dedicated to the God of Plagues. My players looked at the entry point to his lair, and the three socially-competent characters decided to wait outside. The  combat-specialist PCs, being Marines, were equipped with full environmental suites in their power armour. So the three beefy kill-happy PCs marched into the muck, and engaged in a "don't ask, just kill" policy. The NPC with all the info is non-human, disgusting, murderous,  and yet a push-over that "in no way is supposed to be a challenging fight". The PCs got the thing they new they needed from him and ripped him apart (long before any mention could be made of him knowing roughly what had happened on the ship in past 200 years and who had woken them from suspended animation or why).

Even had the PCs tried to get info out of him, a lucky Intimidation roll would have done it just fine, so again the Marine characters are all you really need. This is, sadly, a recurring theme of the adventure. I guess you need the fallen Tech Priest character for the first scene or two as well, but once the PCs have all their equipment back (they start unarmed), everything after that can be solved with nothing but brute force. Given this as the "introduction" to the game, I don't have a lot of faith that the finished product will feature mechanics or advice intended to make the squishy human / social characters viable.

For that matter, I gotta say, I don't feel this adventure was a particularly good introduction to the game. Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's great way to start a campaign, just lousy at it's role as a one-shot introduction to the setting.

Here's the plot: The PCs wake up from suspended animation in a prison ship, having missed the riot by 200 years. They have to battle generations of prion-infected cannibal savages, a couple of creepy demons, automated defense systems gone haywire, and eventually the team of Inquisitors who were also woke up about the same time as themselves at the opposite end of the ship. There's some mystery stuff going on in the background, but if you don't have time to explore the vessel in its entirety, that won't really matter. Eventually, the PCs make it to the bridge and battle the Inquisitor. Assuming they win, they can pilot the ship to the Screaming Vortex (or some other Renegade gathering) and gain a buttload of Infamy Points for "capturing" a mile-long Imperial ship. It's a great place to start a campaign, and early success will reward the players with a huge creepy ghost ship that can serve as a long-term plot device or setting. Other than a lack of balance for the squishy humans, it sounds and plays great.

Problem is, it gives you absolutely no feel for what the session of Black Crusade is likely to be like. I imagine very few sessions will start with the PCs waking up in a prison. The likely enemies of the PCs, Imperial troopers and citizens, are almost absent from the scenario. Part of the charm of Black Crusade is presumably going to be that you get to play the rebels and renegades, but that streak of rebellion was almost entirely non-existent in this scenario. It didn't feel like you were playing the "bad guys" either - every NPC they met was more depraved and less civilized than even the PC berserker.  There are two demons in the scenario, but no appreciable word count is spent on any sort of Faustian deals that would have illustrated that the "heroes" of this adventure are supposedly in bed with Chaos.

So there was lots of genericly 40k-ish theme and flavor, but nothing about the Broken Chains adventure made it feel particularly "Black Crusade"-ish. While reading (and later GMing) this adventure, the thought that crossed my mind was that everything but the first and last scenes could have been run identically for a group of loyalist Imperial PCs in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader. Have the PCs be Inquistor Crane and his Acolytes, and make the encounter at the end be against a group of Chaos Marines who escaped from the hold, and everything in-between could be identical. In fact, I kind of suspect this adventure was first written (or at least brainstormed) as Dark Heresy scenario, and then converted to Black Crusade as an afterthought when it was realized that the marketing opportunity known as Free RPG Day would fall just a month or so before the Black Crusade release date.

I still enjoyed it (a lot, actually), but I don't feel it gave me any particular insight into what a typical session (or campaign) of Black Crusade will be like. Which means that as an introductory adventure to the upcoming game, it probably fails. As a generic starter-seed for a slightly atypical campaign of any of the four 40k RPGs, though, it's a success. Enough of a success, actually, that I regret running it as a one-shot. I kinda wish I'd hand-picked a play group and used a slightly expanded and modified version to start up a campaign of something. In our one-shot, we didn't get anywhere near the end of the adventure, but we did see enough of the ship that I couldn't reuse the concepts in another campaign without having to dream up a whole new ship and scenario. Whatch ya gonna do?

May the Blackbird be with you

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

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

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

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

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

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

Bride of Stankenfreen

On vacation a few days ago, I found myself GMing some improv roleplaying. Since I'd had some fun with my recent Stankenfreen's Monsters one-shot, I reprised it for a different group. Much as with the first play-through, it proved to be great fun, but somewhat hobbled by utterly flawed mechanics.

Before reading further, you might want to view my post from the first game of Stankenfreen's Monsters.

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Bad Mechanics:

Weird thing is, the mechanical flaws were different this time. In the previous play, the PCs were under-powered. Their skills didn't overlap much, and it was a rare roll that got +4 (the bonus from two bodyparts/skills on a single card). In this second game, the opposite happened. Most of the body parts were really broadly or metaphorically defined. As a result, nearly every roll a PC made had +6 or higher. Stop to consider the odds of rolling 11 or higher on 2d6+8... roughly a 97% chance of success. I'd say at least a third of the rolls were at those odds. Meanwhile, human NPCs were rolling 1d12+2. In all our various conflict scenes, I only managed to hit like four times.

The crit system for the game is flawed as well. In both sessions, curiously enough, double 1's were rolled twice. In the first session, John rolled double 1's twice. In the second session, Rob rolled double 1's twice. In neither session did anyone roll double 6's. For this second game, I increased the penalty of the critical failure, but it proved to be no better - despite getting two ticks on every card he had, Rob never lost a part.

I even tried to make the final conflict more interesting by putting them up against a boss monster - a rogue Stankenfreenian creation that had turned evil. While he took two parts off of one PC, he lost all 9 of his body parts before he could get a third action.

Beyond a doubt, this is the worst set of mechanics I've ever crafted. Yet both games have been incredibly fun, and the character creation process is a winner. One of the players told me this session was the most laugh-out-loud fun she'd ever had roleplaying.

I'm thinking that I may run it again sometime, but if so the die mechanics would need a major overhaul, probably a complete replacement. I'm thinking F# might be the way to go - but with Stankenfreen's character creation system.

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Amazing Characters:

The real joy of the game was, as with the first session, the player characters. I sadly don't have character illustrations this time, but here's the lists of bodyparts.

April's PC:

• The Feet of the Waiter
• Legs of a Dancer
• Vulcan Brain
• X-Ray Vision
• Hitler-style Face w/ Mustache
• Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth

April went to a great deal of trouble trying to get rid of her Hitler face. She kept trying to justify using it on rolls, so that she could assign ticks from rolled 1's to it, but never ended up with enough ticks to lose the face. The tusks apparently annoyed here as well, because she had one of the other PCs trim them. X-Ray Vision, on the other hand, was definitely appreciated and utilized.


Carrie's PC:

• Trunk of an Elephant
• Wings of a Bumblebee
• Vampire Fangs
• The Mustache of Luigi
• Heart of a Lion
• Lion'sheart

You'll note that Carrie was given the heart of a lion by two different players. Parts were created and assigned blind - nobody knew what anyone was going to get. Since she got two Lion hearts, she got +4 at a minimum for every roll where bravery or predatory instinct were beneficial.
During this session, I reused the Corwin-in-the-dungeon gimmick 'cause I thought it was cute. Carrie ended up using her Vampire Fangs to drain him, so I gave her the new part "Blood of Amber" which was rather potent.

Jeremy's PC:

• Lizard's Brain
• Toes of a Chimpanzee
• Breasts of a Prostitute
• Hands of a Pointilist Painter
• The Teeth of John Tesh
• Weight of a Feather

Poor Jeremy had probably the least-useful set of parts, and the least focus/overlap, but he was able to make them count in the final battle. Weight of a Feather was fun, even if rarely useful. He was constantly being blown around by the other PCs.

Sarah's PC:

• Elbow of a Tennis Player
• Amazing Spring-Like Jumping Ability
• The Spleen of Roger Rabbit
• Raven's Tongue
• Voice of the Siren
• Tentacles of a Squid

Jumping Ability wasn't really a body-part, but I was cool with it. It combo'd well with Squid Tentacles for acrobatic tricks. Voice of the Siren combo'd with Raven's Tongue (since Raven is a Trickster God) for potent crowd-control and smooth-talking. As a result, it won her:

• Ears of the Romanians (as in "Friends, Countrymen, Roman...ians, lend me your ears")

She then got in a fight with a crazed townsfolk that was trying to burn down the castle. From him she got the:

• Singed Scalp of an Arsonist

but lost her squid tentacles in the conflagration. In the final battle with the Big Bad, she lost her Voice of the Siren as well.

Christie's PC:

• Lips of a Latin Lover
• Super-Strong Hair
• The Claws of the Sloth
• Legs of a Giraffe
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Horn
• Owl's Eyes

Princess Sparkle Pony is this Unicorn that keeps showing up on Blank White Cards at Jeremy and Christie's house, so she was able to use the Horn to magically heal people (but not the Undead). One of my favorite images of the game was the idea of this 12-foot-tall giraffe-legged unicorn-horned character constantly leaning in with her lush latin lover's lips to make the other PCs a little uncomfortable.
At some point, the tips were trimmed off April's "Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth". After that happened, these tips were braided into Christie's Super-Strong Hair. It was part Wilma Flintstone, party improvised weapon.

Rob's PC

• Ears of a Bat
• Hyper-extending fully-controllable Tongue
• Hyena's Jaws
• Buddha's Knuckle
• Eye of the Tiger
• Eyes of a Child

Most of us pictured Rob's character with 4 eyes. He described himself as just having 2 - the eyes of a tiger cub. Turning a critical eye at the card now, I realize by the rules he'd have 3 eyes - two children's eyes and just one eye of a tiger. Speaking of Rules, Rob can rules-lawyer and munchkin-out like no one else I'd ever willingly game with. He makes it entertaining enough that we tolerate it, even appreciate it, at least in one-shots. I mention this because Rob was the only person I had to say "no" to during the game - he kept coming up with spurious ways to use 4 or 5 bodyparts on a single roll. The justifications were entertaining, so I usually let it fly.

Gene's PC:

• Skin of a Chameleon
• Legs of a Centipede
• Arm (just 1) of a Body Builder
• Liver of a Drunken Japanese Stockbroker
• 360-degree swiveling Neck
• Pouch of a Kangaroo
• Moebius' Splint

Moebius' Splint needs a bit of explanation. Moebius was the brand-new puppy that Jeremy and Christie got a few weeks ago. Within half an hour of getting this puppy, he'd broken his arm. The free puppy has cost them $1,500. Currently, Moebius is wearing a bright purple cast/splint. It makes one of his legs seem longer than the others, and it's a rigid object that smacks into people when climbs into their laps. All day, we'd been referring to it as his secret weapon. Gene interpreted this combination of cards to mean that 50 of his character's 100 centipede legs were in splints.

In addition to the PC's parts listed above, someone got this off an NPC:

• Strong Arms of a Pitchfork-Wielding Farmer

but for the life of me, I can't remember who got those arms.

The Big Bad
At the end of the game, the PC's had to do battle with Dr. Stankenfreen's Most Evilest Creation EVER. So, I gave everyone another blank card, and had them generate the body parts of the Big Bad. Thus did they face:

• Dragon'sbreath
• Vader's Helmet
• Mouth of an Asp (poison included)
• Picasso Face
• Blowfish-like Inflating Body with Spikes
• The Black Sulpherous Void That Was Dick Cheney's Heart
• Hung Like a Walrus
• Whiskers of a Kitten
• Will of Oberon
• Soul of Evil Incarnate

Despite having 10 body parts (3 of which overlapped - Evil, Oberon, and Cheney), and initiative, he went down in the second round. I got to deliver a post-modern monolog and use the dark sides of both the Force and Cubism, but to no avail. He went down with only minor injury to the PCs.

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Link to photos from the game. Probably not of interest if you don't know the players.

Stankenfreen's Monsters: More Than The Sum Of Our Parts

Last Thursday I ran a one-shot that started with something to the effect of: "You awake strapped to a laboratory table, having been shocked into life by the Lightning. In the distance, you hear your creator shouting 'My monsters! Come alive and rescue me!' as the angry mob of villagers drags him out of the room."

I used a home-brewed system for it, which was literally made-up on the walk to the game. I had a pile of index cards. Each player designed a body part for each other player, on cards which were then given out face-down so you didn't know what your monster looked like until you looked down at your body in the first scene.

The body parts were bits from people and animals. "Hands of a concert pianist", "heart of a lover", "eye of the hawk". That sort of thing. Here's the actual PCs, as drawn by their players:

	<- Sarah's PC, "Polly" Parts: Antlers of a Buck Hands of a Speed Typist Arms of a Wood-Chopper Voice of a Parrot Nose of an Ant-Eater
Laura's PC, "Cookie" -> Parts: Shell of a Snail Left Foot of a Great Tapdancer Bill of a Platypus Tongue of a Chef Claws of a Wolf
	<- John's PC, "Joe" Parts: Spit Glands of a Camel Hands of a Surgeon Hands of a Strangler Eyes of a Lecher Throat of an Opera-Singer Added via Surgery skills mid-game: Snout of a Pig (on the elbow) Hide of a Blacksmith
Mark's PC, "Jack" -> Parts: Jack Ass (Butt of a Donkey) Mouth of a Super-Salesman Tongue of a Snake Legs of a Can-Can Dancer Monkey Feet Added by feasting on an NPC: Evil Laugh of an Executioner

The best part was the parts. Everyone else made body parts for your character, and did so blind without anyone knowing what other parts you were going to get. We ended up with some pretty bizarre PCs as a result.

Beyond those parts, they also ended up with a set of "Eyes of a Curious Child", but instead of installing those on a PC, they used them to fix some blind NPC in the Vampire's dungeon (his name was Corwin, not that it matters).

The title of the body part functioned like a skill. Every time you took an action, you'd roll 2d6 and +2 for every body part you felt could help. ("Tongue of a Serpent" might help for sensing heat and scents, but also for tempting people like in Eden.) If your roll plus modifiers totaled 11+, you were successful.

If either die came up a "1", you'd make a tick-mark on one of the body-parts. If a body-part got 5 tick marks, it falls off. Double 1's is a tick on all your body parts, Double 6's means you've developed a soul. A soul changes your dice from 2d6 to 1d12. That means it doubles your odds of accomplishing unskilled rolls (2 in 12 instead of 3 in 36), and cuts your odds of taking tick marks by about a third.

Attack rolls were super-simple. A success killed a townsfolk, or ripped one part off a monster, depending on who was being attacked. The dice mechanics weren't amazing, but they worked well enough for a one-shot. In retrospect, modifiers didn't end up stacking as much as I'd imagined them to, so I probably should have had a lower difficulty. Dead townsfolk, by the way, became one body-part each, which basically made them into treasure.

The plotline involved rescuing the "good" Doctor Stankenfreen from the townsfolk. When that proved too easy, I added a second plot about the Vampires in the next castle over. Once you're a vamp, you're a vamp all the way. It was goofy fun, and not too deep.

my childish "Ha-ha, I told you so!"

A couple weeks ago, the latest Scion PDF released. I immediately saw some problems with it, and posted here a list of house-rules I planned to implement. Then I discussed them with my play group, who agreed on nearly everything, so I posted the majority of my thoughts on the topic to the Scion forum. To put it politely, this provoked a spirited discussion - one in which it was suggested that I was too quick to judge and was only house-ruling because I (allegedly) want Scion to fail. (Which is completely false - instead I want Scion to succeed enough that a revised 2nd Edition is justified.) I've been burned by Scion's need for mid-game house-rules, and wished to nip it in the bud this time by proactively ruling on things before they came up in a session. For this, I was treated very poorly.

I now find it funny that so many others have since created threads to discuss the same problems I had identified amongst the new powers. I feel vindicated. It would seem I wasn't being paranoid about flaws in the text. I just have an acutely honed sense of what makes mechanics break down, and a solid grasp of game balance. (I think that's why I was a good Magic judge, and why I enjoy playing combo decks.) Anyhow, I found it very difficult today to not pop on to 3 different threads and say "see, I told you so!" If it's alright with you, I'll keep my smug self-congratulatory backpatting contained to this blog post.

For those of you (presumably everyone who reads this blog with any regularity) who didn't tell me my house-rules were a knee-jerk over-reaction stemming from what you interpret to be a bitter hatred of White Wolf, I apologize. You shouldn't have to sit through me saying "I told you so" again and again. Please excuse the following outburst:

"See, I told them so!" Thank you.

Unwritten Rules on the USS Catastrophe

I used to work for a gamestore. Prior to that I worked at that gamestore. And before that I worked at the same gamestore, under different ownership. Before that, I worked at the Game Distributor (that had begun as the original store to which that store was a sister location, and eventually the sole inheritor thereof). For several years, I would attend the GAMA Trade Show (aka GTS aka Game Manufacturer Association Tradeshow) in Vegas every spring, scoping out the new hot games and getting the inside scoop on where the industry was headed.

At one of those GTS's in years past, I played this boardgame called Vapour's Gambit. It was a cyberpunk-ish racing game. Hoverboard racing, on a modular course, with ramps and pits and other hazards that would spring up through-out the game. It was fast, and fun, with simple concise rules and just enough luck to keep the finishing order in doubt till the last turn. But they'd signed an exclusive deal with another distributor, our competitor at the time.

A few years went by, and eventually the exclusive deal fell by the wayside. The game became available via other channels, and the game store I was managing at this point happily picked it up based on my recommendation. And it stunk. The game utterly lacked timing rules. There had been timing rules when I'd played at GTS years before. Somehow, they'd vanished, or, more likely, had never been written down in the first place. At those two intro plays of the game years before, there was clearly communicated understanding of when certain tiles could be played, and the game had a nice rhythm and balance because of that. Without said rules, the game lost much of it's strategic depth. Further, the game tended to devolve into arguments about who shouted "wait" first, and what space you were on when they did so. As a result, I've only ended up playing my copy a handful of times, despite my fond memories and anticipation. It's as though the game came with a rough draft of the rules, and that the demo had used something very different, an accumulated set of elegant house-rules that made the game much more enjoyable.

Side note: Not only did it feel like only 1/2 the rules came in my box, but only 1/2 the components as well. This was the same game (I remembered the artwork) but the board sections had no narrows, no intersections, just 4 corners and two straights making a grand total of 2 possible board layouts, without any of the cool stuff. Turns out the other boards (which we'd played with at GTS long ago) were from some little expansion they'd done, which was now out of print. What a pale shadow of the game I'd remembered.

On a similar note, I remember one of my coworkers at Distro telling me to never pass up an opportunity to play the L5R RPG with the crew from Alderac. He'd done so at two different cons, with different GMs (both were members of the design team, IIRC), and was struck at what a completely different game it played with them then how it read. Both used a similar set of house-rules on even basic fundamental principles of the game - house rules that digressed from the printed word significantly.

It's very easy to fall into this trap.

You're designing a game. You write up one set of rules, and then playtest it heavily. In playtesting, you start implementing house-rules to fix little things that weren't perfect in your initial ruleset. But unless you take very good notes, you'll end up missing one or more of these little tweaks when you get around to implementing the changes. The more complicated the game, the more likely that is to happen.

I wrote a really cool little game "The USS Catastrophe" a few years back. We playtested it a lot, and found the initial rules sucked, but quickly found things that fixed it. After a while, I had a fun little game that everybody really enjoyed. I never got around to rewriting the rulesheet to match the changes we'd implemented, since everybody just new how it worked. If I were to decide to seek out a publisher now, I'd have to play the heck out of it all over again first, and reinvent the wheel to restore all those little changes we'd made. I didn't have a business plan then, and I didn't take it too seriously. Honestly, I wasn't in the right head space to try getting something published back then - I was under the yoke of manipulative bosses I no longer have to bow to. So I daydream about spontaneously remembering what we'd done to make it work, polishing it up with some snappy graphics, and showing this thing off a bit.

I can't possibly speak highly enough of the value of blind playtests.

It's very easy to neglect something vital to the game when writing your rules, something you'd never forget when presenting the game in person. This often comes from the more casual way we describe things face-to-face than via the written word. If I say "it plays kinda like chess" (just an example) then that conveys all sorts of info: you expect it to be 2-player, on a checkered board, alternating turns, you move one piece per turn, the goal is abstractly derived from military conquest so capturing or destroying enemy pieces is important, position is everything, there's multiple types of pieces with differing movement and capture capabilities, etc. Rather than defining all that, I'll be defining what's different about this game. In face-to-face playtests, you can sum things up abstractly via comparison or verbal shorthand, and gather from reaction whether the other players understand the concept. But it's really damn easy to miss that in a rulebook. You're not going to say "this plays like Settlers" (unless perhaps your publisher is also the publisher of Settlers of Catan) in your rulebook, yet it's actually pretty easy to accidentally assume your audience is already familiar with the concepts behind your game and thus leave out something important.

Please forgive all the rambling above. The gist of what I'm saying is this: I look back at my old rules for The USS Catastrophe, and I see that they are but a thin shadow of what we'd played with. Like my experiences with Vapour's Gambit, or my co-workers tale about the L5R RPG, the designer (me) never thought to chronicle key details which were self-evident in face-to-face play, but which would hamstring those who tried to play without knowing those facts. We all knew how it worked back then, but clearly I don't even know how it's supposed to work now. So I now see how easy it is to flub up something like this.

If I'd used blind playtesting, I'd have had to write everything down in the clearest possible language and context, and I'd have a functional game to shop around today.