They said "Dinosaurs", not giant blooming Cockroaches!

At last night's weekly one-shot, my buddy Mark ran this awesome little Risus scenario inspired by a TV show Primeval. I'd never seen the show, but the premise is pretty simple: portals open up to the ancient past, dinosaurs pour out, and the PCs have to wrangle the monsters back in. Kill a dino and you might change history.

He said for player characters, we had basically four options.

1. Badass
2. Scientist
3. Badass Scientist
4. Some combination of 2 or more of the above.

That cracked me up.

My three Cliches (the Risus system's form of attributes) were:

• Croike! I'm like that crocodile hunter guy!
• Parkour traceur
• Chemistry Set

The team was rounded out with an ex-special forces commando, a quick-thinking facewoman, and multilayered inventor type. We built our characters to complement each other, and the group functioned great as a team.

Mark did a wonderful job of handling the game, and it's mechanics. I've found that, despite being a light and simple system, the spiral of death inherent to Risus can really be a problem. Out of probably 8 games I've played of it, this was only one of 3 where the mechanics really shined, instead of hindered. It's a deceptively simple system, that takes a good GM to make it work - and Mark was up to the task, I'm happy to report.

To start the session off, we were called down to the Pike Market in Seattle, responding to an anomaly / gate that something had come through. We all had dinos on the brain, and as the clues amounted to some smaller critter, we assumed little compsognathses or the like.

Turns out they were trilobites, instead. This was a fact we discovered when I was dangling some bait over the hole in floorboards. Instead of a little lizard popping out, long exoskeletal tentacles lashed out and tried to pull me in. "Croiké! They said dinosaurs, not giant bloomin' cockroaches!" It was a great surprise, and really shook up our assumptions. Well done, Mark!

He did a series of short encounters, spread over several in-character days, as various gates opened. When all was said and done, we'd wrestled with trilobites, commandeered a DUKW from a tour group, swam with an apatosaurus, crashed an ATV into a smilodon, and exchanged trophies with primitive hominids. The plotline was simple, and largely an excuse for megafaunal havoc in the modern day, but it was a hoot. Great game, all around.

Even More Modding (Drives v3.0, plus a wiki)

More weird worlds modding this past week. It started with a tiny little update to Drives'R'Us, that was supposed to be just v2.2. And then, that snowballed into major changes so significant that if I didn't call it v3.0, nothing would ever qualify for that title. It's only been a little over 2 weeks since 2.0 went up, but I saw no reason to delay something that was a radical improvement in every way.

Here's a download link for Drives'R'Us version 3.0



Brief list of changes in 3.0

• Added 4 new mercenary / ally vessels.
• Radically improved graphics on all 6 of the custom ships from versions 1.11 and 2.0, and tweaks to the stats on most of them.
• 7 new items (on top of the 30 new ones from just 2 weeks ago), including the Shroud of Primordius, which is definitely my favorite of all the items I've ever added to the game.
• Miscellaneous minor tweaks to various graphics and game play elements. Very numerous, but none of them major.

I'm finding modding to be much easier than it was when I was doing it two years ago. Not sure what's changed, but I'm grokking all sorts of things that had been obfuscated from me before. And since I was having breakthroughs, I thought I'd share them with other modders. So I set up a wiki for Weird Worlds modding, and I'm giving myself a goal of adding at least one page to it every day from now until either it's exhaustive, or I'm exhausted. Hopefully, it'll encourage some more modding, as the community is a little slow and sparse these days.

Here's a link to the modding wiki. Should any Weird Worlds modders care to contribute, the secret code to signing up is "shrapnel and eel". You don't need to sign in to view it, but you do need the code to edit anything.

On a related note, I've been helping one of the other modders at the forums (ExplorerBob) debugg his mod. He's got a really neat set of quests that make the relations with various races unpredictable. So in one play, the Muktians might hate you from the start, and then next time you play they're friendly and amicable. It's pretty clever, and spices the game up a lot. I'm looking forward to his first real release, not just the partial beta test / debugging files he's given me.

Creeping up on sentries

We all make mistakes while gaming. I've made plenty. There are times where craziness happens, or where one mistake leads to another. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes all you can do about it is learn not to make the same mistakes next time.

Advice for the next time you're creeping up on the sentries around an enemy camp:

• Don't split up the party if you don't have to. If you do split up, don't get impatient and head away from your agreed rendezvous point without permission.
  
• If you happen to know that your groups Tank / Fighter is prone to wandering off and stirring up trouble, and you see him wander off, follow him. Don't do your own thing instead.
  
• If the sentries are of a race that has infravision, your stealth precautions need to be more significant than putting out your torch, and carrying the smouldering remains of it with you. This goes doubly so if the system in question doesn't put a limit on infravision range, it just says "Goblins and Orcs suffer no penalties for darkness".
• If you don't know the total numbers of the enemies at the camp, dispatch their sentries with something silent, like a knife or a bow, not an area-effect stunning spell.
• If you do use the area-affect stunning spell on the two sentries you can see, arrange the area-of-effect so that it includes both of them.
  
• After you use your area-affect stunning spell, and it alerts a huge crowd of orcs to chase after you, if you can cast it again, do so. Don't spend several actions standing around trying to make a persuasion roll against the two dozen orcs that are charging you. They're not listening.
• When the resulting chase lasts so long the GM asks for a Vigor roll to resist fatigue, AND you roll double-ones on it, use your last bennie to reroll that. Don't save it for "if things get really dire later". Double ones on your Fatigue-resisting roll when dozens of orcs are chasing you is dire.

In the end, all the PCs survived, but extricating themselves from the situations this caused took over 6 more hours of play, and a lot of die rolls. It was ugly.

Daybreak as an RPG

My wife and I recently Netflixed a TV show called Daybreak. It's sort of like if Groundhog Day were a serious Detective show. The lead character is living the same day over and over again, and it's a heck of a day, with murders and conspiracy aplenty.

The show could inspire a really awesome RPG campaign, especially for a single-player campaign. You'd set up two or three mysteries, all happening on the same day, all with serious consequences for the PC if they were left unattended. In the background, you probably set up an additional mystery of a more sci-fi variety, that explains why the character is stuck in time.

The PC experiences each day over and over again, with things happening on a particular course if they do nothing. They need to solve all the mysteries, and then figure out how to resolve them all positively on the same day that they undo the time loop. You'd have a campaign with a definite end-goal in sight from the start.

There'd be a big burden on the GM, and I'd say you'd want to run it with a laptop at the ready, so you could have instant access to a lengthy timeline of where every NPC is at every minute of the day.

I'd run GUMSHOE for it. Both because I really like Gumshoe, but also because it has really easy mechanics to repeat actions again and again. When something comes up that goes poorly, you can spend a point to make it work out better next time. If you get a version you're happy with, a simple point spend ensures repeat performance when you try it again the next day. Very little dice karma to complicate things.

I'd have the PCs point pools refresh at the start of every day, so they had a limited supply of points to juggle for overcoming the obstacles. Experience would be tricky - as the cyclical nature suggests you'd never get to level up. However, if you watch the show, he does find ways to change things over time, and that might result in bonus dedicated pool points in GUMSHOE.

And I'd definitely use Daybreak's precedent for damage. Your whole body is doing the time loop, so if you're shot, you wake up with a bullet hole the next morning. Health and Stability would NOT refresh daily, so getting medical and psychiatric care may prove important if things go badly early on. That helps keeps the tension, and prevents certain Bill Murray style antics.


A tiny bit more about the show: Daybreak ran for less than a season. One season's worth of episodes were made though, and the last episode was clearly crafted knowing that they weren't gonna get picked up for a season two. It wraps up the plot neat-and-tidy, including several things that would have made a killer second season. It's really sad it got canceled, 'cause it's 5-star material, IMHO. Great acting, intelligent scripts, and plenty of unexpected twists. It's 58% mystery / detective, 40% action / adventure, with 1% humor and 1% sci-fi. If you've got netflix, it's well worth the rental.

Mods 'R' Us

I put up another Mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

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This one is the 2.1 version of my Drives 'R' Us Mod.

Changes from the 1.11 version (which I'd made almost 2 years ago) include:

• Recalibrated prices on everything. I did extensive testing and number-crunching to arrive at more-accurate values for almost every item in the game.
• Technology items are now split into Civilian Tech and Military Tech. The Military mission focuses on military tech, and the Science mission gives a little bit of emphasis on civilian tech.
• Changed the starting equipment for all Terran ships, and what spawns on Hope.
• Over 30 new items!
  • 9 New Weapons
  • 3 New Drives
  • 2 New Sensors
  • 1 New ECM
  • 4 New Combat Computers
  • 5 New Repair Systems
  • 5 New Thrusters
  • 2 New Shields
• Miscellaneous tweaks to various systems and weapons.
• Added a couple new ship variants. Should mix up the fights a bit.
  
• Bloodfang is very different from the main game, and better balanced than he was in version 2.0.
  
• Removed all the Superweapon KEYS. The sheer quantity of items in this mod makes it unlikely you'll get a large stockpile of so-called superweapons.
  
• Tweaked the Civil War event. It's now a little more unpredictable (there's two versions), and no longer claims to be a supernova after the fact. I'm much happier with it now.
  

If you're thinking I jumped from 1.11 to 2.1, I didn't. There was a 2.0 version that I forget to link to from here, but it was only up for 3 days before I found some minor issues that I fixed in todays version.

Here's the download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35857&page=

Have fun!

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I also updated Tech Transparency 2.1 to v2.1.1.
It's just a small fix concerning the text on the repair units.
Download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44512

Savage Boomerang

I have a player in my irregular Savage Worlds fantasy campaign whose character uses a boomerang. Just for flavor reasons, the boomerang is her main weapon. I think it's rather cool, in a Road Warrior sort of way.

In the previous session, in which she made the character on-the-spot and dove right in to the game-in-progress, I just used the same stats as a throwing knife. Which, not surprisingly, is a little wimpy. Chances are, those stats will result in her feeling underpowered, and eventually swapping to a better ranged weapon, like a bow. That would be a shame.

She's a new player, with no previous tabletop experience, so rewarding her flavorful decisions is the right thing to do. My hope is that it will encourage her to experiment and invent, and overcome any shyness or awkwardness about the game. It's always best to make someone's first couple of gaming experiences positive and welcoming, so I've spent a tiny bit of energy figuring out ways to make it a feasible weapon choice in the long run.

First, I'm pumping up the range to match that of a sling: 4/8/16 (instead of a daggers 3/6/12). That's a pretty minor boost, and something I can do without any worries about balance, but of course it still makes it inferior to a bow.

So, to pump it up a notch, I made up the following edge for her.

Boomerang (Combat Edge)
Requirements: Agility d8, Notice d8
When you make a Throwing attack with a Boomerang (the weapon), you may pick a secondary target, which must be a different character than the primary one. If your attack misses against the primary target, you may immediately make another attack roll against the second target. Only one target can be hit per round - if you hit against the primary target, you do not roll against the secondary one. You're only throwing one boomerang per action, but the circular flight path "buzzes" past more than one target.

It's not terribly realistic, admittedly, but it catches the proper cinematic feel of someone using a boomerang weapon. More importantly, the the second attack roll will help compensate for the low damage rating, making it a good mook-killing weapon even in the later stages of the campaign. The secondary attack will take some of the sting out of bad dice rolls, which is something that can be very frustrating for new players.

Advanced A Touch Of Evil

I played several more games of A Touch Of Evil over the recent holiday. We broke out the advanced rules and added them in.

With all those Advanced Abilities on the villain, I thought for sure it was going to boost up the difficulty a lot. To my surprise, we're still winning the cooperative game just as often as we had been when using the basic rules instead of advanced. The villain's Advanced Abilities are basically watered down by the additional Secrets cards, that make treachery less likely.

In fact, we've only lost the game twice total, once to the scarecrow on Basic, and once to the Dellion Dryad (a "web extra" downloadable villain) on Advanced. That's out of more than a dozen plays. We've had a few close scrapes, but as long as you get to the showdown, it seems the PCs are almost certain to win out in a cooperative game. The villains just aren't as powerful as you imagine them to be. We've decided, starting with our next play, to start using the Optional Showdown Chart to spice it up and add to the difficulty. I'm really glad they provided that chart, because as you get better at the game, it needs a little boost to the tension.

Now that we've transitioned to the Advanced rules, I'm really glad we're playing the cooperative version. If not, I think my opinion of the game may have suffered when we hit Advanced.

In particular, the new Secrets cards have an annoying amount of "gray area". I'm specifically talking about "Hero of the People" and "On The Hunt". In our most recent game, the Lair was in the Fields. Those two secrets cards had assigned one town elder to the PC who was about to encounter the Lair, and another town elder to the Fields space. Both those cards allow the PC to use the town elder's stats in interesting ways. Problem is, neither the cards, nor the rules, nor the FAQ at the manufacturer's website, explain if those interesting abilities apply during a Showdown or not. They also don't indicate whether the elder being with you or at the site of the Lair includes them in the Showdown / Hunting Party, and whether or not you can still bring along other elders in the Hunting Party.

Since it was a cooperative game, this was no big deal, we made a ruling based on objective play balance and variety of play experience. But if we'd been playing competitively, this would have been ugly. In this specific situation, how you interpret it would mean the difference between the PC having +2 dice or +9 dice on the fight, whether the villain split his dice between 3 targets or 5, and whether or not we had to take our chances on revealing the secrets of 2 more town elders. That compiled list of differences is pretty huge, and I could see where that would result in an otherwise enjoyable game ending in a rules argument. Glad we dodged that bullet.

Similarly, we also had a situation in another recent game where a card had resulted in a town elder having 2 secrets. When they were revealed later, that one elder had both "Hero of the People" and "On the Hunt". There were no clear rules in the game to dictate which card takes precedence, and whether the elder ends up in a space or attached to a player. Hopefully, Flying Frog will issue some errata or clarifications about those two cards.

Sherlock's Combat Monologues - in Gumshoe

Yesterday my wife and I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie, and I have some ideas of how to use parts of it in the Gumshoe RPG System. What I liked most about the movie was the clever way they converted Holmes from "merely" a cerebral character to an action hero, without losing any of his genius along the way. He has these awesome internal monologues where he figures out the badguy's weaknesses and how best to fight them. He's no slouch in the Physical Attribute arena, but it's clearly his Mental Attributes that win the fights for him.

As I was watching it, I kept thinking how easy it would be to work some of that in to Gumshoe, the system used in Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu.

In the Gumshoe system, one could argue that attacks, particularly gunfire, aren't quite as damaging as they could (or should) be. Your typical character can take a gunshot or stab wound and be just fine. That's great if you're running a cinematic adventure game, but most of the rest of Gumshoe is geared towards bookish investigator types and gritty realism. So, a method of situationally boosting your combat effectiveness might not be a bad thing. Putting in a Holmes-inspired system is overall pretty simple and elegant.

Here's how it works: For each NPC, the GM comes up with 1 or 2 weaknesses, and the corresponding skills that could be used to ferret them out. In the film, you might argue that Holmes only used Medicine for this (or only used Evidence Collection, depending on your point of view), but for a campaign it'd be important to spread it around so that no single Investigative Skill suddenly becomes a combat powerhouse.

For these weaknesses, the GM assigns one of the following opportunities:

• The weakness represents a way to incapacitate, or more severely harm the NPC. On a successful hit, you may make an appropriate skill spend to get +2 damage.
  Example: A //Use// of the Medicine skill reveals that the foe has a trick knee. If you hit the foe, you may immediately //Spend// a point of Medicine, Scuffling or Weapons to further injure the knee. If you do, you deal an extra 2 points of damage.
• The weakness represents a whole in the NPC's defenses. If you //Spend// a point of an appropriate skill while attacking, it provides a +2 bonus to hit.
  Example: A //Use// of the Outdoorsman Skill allows you to recognize the specific camouflage pattern the sniper is wearing. Armed with that knowledge, it's easier to tell him from the background as you return fire. When shooting you may now spend a point of either Outdoorsman or Sense Trouble on each shot, and if you do you get +2 to the attack roll.
• The weakness represents a limitation to the NPC's attack capability. An appropriate //Spend// can increase your own Hit Threshold, versus their attacks only, by 2. Whenever you do this, the affect lasts until your next action, and if you wish to maintain it beyond you must continue to pay Spend points.
  Example: A //Use// of Weapons has revealed the weakness of his fighting style. He over-relies on a handful of moves, and always telegraphs his attacks. You may //Spend// Weapons or Athletics to boost your Hit Threshold to 5 against his next melee attack.

Of course, you'd need the plot or situations suggest to the PCs that using skills to size up the opponent is a good idea. In the first of my examples, you might narrate a slight limp when the character walks. In the last example, you might have part of the investigation take place at a dojo or gym, and the PCs arrive while the NPC is sparring with someone.

If the GM is feeling adventurous, and really trusts the players, you could also do this more free-form. Allow the above abilities to be something the PCs can invoke with their spends, and in fact make up on the spot, at any time. Just say to your players: "At any time you can spend a skill point to create a weakness in any NPC that doesn't already have one. Spend an appropriate skill, narrate in the NPCs flaw, and it becomes part of the character." There's some potential for abuse there, in that a player could build their PC in a very min-maxed way and then always give every foe a flaw that can be exploited with their one particular maxed-out skill. If you think that's likely to happen with your group, then fall back on the first system I described, where only the GM defines the weaknesses.

Teeming With Life mod, version 1.4

I just posted a new version (v1.4) of my "Teeming With Life" mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.




Download the new version here.

I'm much happier with the look of the mod now, but I still really need to go tweak the amoeba-ships. Getting those to the level I want may take some time.

Cyberpunk F#

Last night I ran a sequel to the old Cyberpunk "MOC" campaign, using F# instead of the clunky old rules for CP2020. I really like F#, it scores highly in the flexibility, elegance, and collaborative story-telling arenas.

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Tone and Themes:
The setting aspects were:

• "Dark Comedy" would be the prevailing theme.
• Cold, harsh world where life ain't fair, the rich abuse the poor, and cybernetics is cheap and dirty.
• The PCs are crazy enough, or desperate enough, to join a gang that indulges in random mayhem.

It was a lot of fun, but didn't quite capture the feeling of the old campaign. I think that is because the GM doesn't have any real fangs in F#. The GM can give out negative aspects as a form of damage, but the rules strongly encourage only doing that once per session per PC, and you really can't kill off a PC at all. There's no fear of death, which for many settings is actually a good thing, but probably isn't in keeping with the tone of Cyberpunk. In the old campaign, when the big fight broke out at the end, the PCs would have run and probably scattered - heroism in CP2020 gets you killed. Instead, the PCs stood toe-to-toe with the badguys, and there was nothing I could do to really make them sweat. They had fun, and got to be courageous, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

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Plot, such as there was:
Despite that tonal difference, the game was a lot of fun. The PCs were loser punks in a bizarre little gang that gets together for random mayhem rolled up on Morton's List. The List told them that this week's adventure would be to commit a major act of vandalism in another gang's territory. There were hijinks (involving the night city transit authority officers) on the bus-ride into enemy territory, a dead body in the park-and-ride, and then a big gang-vs-gang conflict at the soup kitchen.

The enemy gang was the Kennedy's Posergang. They faced off against cybernetically-enhanced duplicates of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jackie O (in pink), old Teddy Kennedy and Mayor Quimby. Okay, Quimby I probably never would have done in straight-up CP2020, but the improvisational nature of these light systems just takes me over the edge.

JFK had retractable head armor that (once deployed) was described as dinged up and chipped such that you could tell people liked to play Oswald on him. He was the gang leader, and eventually unleashed a very anime-style attack, where he shouted "CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!" and launched a dozen micro-missiles. Jackie O had souped up Cyberlegs and did a ballerina attack. The "Vote Quimby" sash had a built-in monowire. Teddy's weight problem was actually enhanced Skin Weave. Etc. Governor Connolly was driving the get-away convertible. It was pretty stupid, but quite enjoyable at the time.

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Character Sheets:
F# gives PCs 6 Aspects, which I've found is probably more than you need. Most PCs end up with some that overlap, and since Aspects don't stack, there's not much benefit to be gained with it. I tried to mitigate this a bit, by restricting the Aspects into categories to encourage diversity on each PC. It also let me ensure all the PCs were properly CyberPunk. The blank character sheet looked something like this:

Rating	Aspect	Category
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Useful piece of cyberware, cool gadget, or bio-implant.
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Bizarre useless cyberware, or just something that defines the look of your character.
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	What type of hoodlum, criminal, ganger or loser are you?
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Other background element or character backstory
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Catch phrase
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Your choice, this can be anything.

Most characters had one major piece of cybergear, some managed to squeak a second out of the bizarre / fashion category, and everyone had the option of using the last category for one more major tech bit if they wanted.