Zombies at the Gates

Session three of Death Warmed Over (my home-brewed zombie apocalypse) went pretty well.  Society is cracking and going out with a whimper, and the most of the infected still look more like victims than threats. I've got the creepiness dialed in just right. The despair and worry is coming along fine. The writing's on the wall.

Pacing is still a little slower than most RPGs, but it will pick up as society crumbles further and more of the undead transition from "sympathetic infectee" to "flesh-eating monster". So far we've only had 2 low-key chase scenes and 1 real fight scene, which was a very short PCs with guns vs a single zombie.

None the less, we've had our first player character death already. Mark was playing a compassionate man of faith who put altruism and generosity above his own safety a bit more than can really be advised during a zombie epidemic. He got himself exposed to zombie fluids repeatedly in the process of helping get infected people to shelter at the Kingdom Hall.

When he turned, I didn't tell him right away. He was up most of the night, and I described a few early symptoms as sunrise was approaching. Itches and rashes, a slight fever, and some distortions to his field of vision and light sensitivity. He knocked on the door of his neighbor the doctor (another PC), so I cut to her player and told Laura (playing the doctor) there was a pawing at her door. She looked out the peephole to see Mark's character, covered in blood and self-inflicted scratches. For the rest of the scene, I let Mark tell me what his character was trying to do, and I then I spit it back out to Laura through this filter of how the infection was influencing his perceptions and actions.  Much as the other infected have been easily distracted, I narrated to Mark that random objects and sounds would just suddenly get brighter or more beautiful and really capture his attention. It took most of the party to get him contained without killing him. They lured him with noise, knocked him over, wrapped him up in blankets, and then locked him in a spare bedroom. Incoherent and obviously infectious, his "word salad" included a few bits that were mostly intelligible, and a number of biblical references. Clearly the zombies are not entirely mindless, nor in all cases immediately violent. Those facts complicate the days ahead.

Mark took his demise really well. I've been keeping a lot of the mechanics under cover, which is probably frustrating to the players. To keep things mysterious, as they should be in the opening days of an epidemic, I avoided letting anyone know exactly what their Exposure Rating was.  I did eventually reveal that Mark's character had an Exposure Rating of 6. Which meant he needed to roll a 6 or better to not contract the disease. I'm using some elements from the "Night Zero" graphic novel series, specifically the notion that a high blood-alcohol content can help keep the infection from taking root. So exactly what dice you roll vs your Exposure Rating is determined by how drunk you get. Of course, at this point the PCs had no way to know that in-character, and Mark's PC in particular was very religious and not likely to imbibe. So he was pretty much screwed.

Mark's new character entered the game just a couple scenes later. That's one of the benefits of the rules-lite approach, you can cobble together a new character in just a couple minutes.

His new character is a Cop. He'd been on the job for over 30 hours and was finally returning home on the second day of the outbreak. It's not that they'd let him off duty. It's that while out on yet another call responding to looters, he lost contact with the police dispatch office. Around sunrise, they stopped answering the radio or phone. When he drove to the police station he was based out of, he found it full of infected, many of whom had been fine when he'd last seen them just a few hours before. Being the last living cop in the substation of the damned, he decided it was time to retire.

So the other characters are standing around the apartment complex courtyard arguing about what to do with Father Gil and the infected and quarantined NPCs they've got locked up, when Officer Ray pulls his police cruiser up to the gate and rushes inside, shotgun in hand.

Since then, the PCs have raided the apartment manager's office, which was inside one of the other gated areas on the property. They've got all the spare keys from the lock box, some billiard balls from the clubhouse to use as thrown weapons (you know how gamers are), and all the chips and chocolate they could carry from the vending machine in the office.

On the return to their own part of the complex, they ran into a one of the bonafide zombies. She looked like the other infectees, covered in her own blood and strange blistery rashes. However, instead of acting like a newborn or simpleton as most of the infected have, she got right up and started chasing them. Her jerky motions weren't quite up to a running pace, but she could keep up with a fast walk. The PCs tried to stay ahead of her, but had some delays at the gate.

The game has psychology rules, and while they're simple and elegant, they're pretty punishing. So getting the gate unlocked while a zombie lurched towards them took a die roll and some delays.  Eventually, the infectee got close enough to try grabbing Officer Ray, so he blasted her with the shotgun at point-blank. Took most of her arm off. Instead of doubling over from the pain and trauma, she just stopped to look at her arm. Waved the stub around a bit, pawed at the dangly bits with her other hand. That's when another PC arrived (from the side of the gate that doesn't require a key) and let them in.

The PCs have had a few other encounters with the undead in the hours since then. There's half a dozen milling about outside the gates of their courtyard. One slipped it's head between the bars, but luckily didn't have the clarity of mind to twist it's shoulders in. So the latest project is the reinforcement of the fences with lumber, book shelves, spare furniture, etc. One of the PCs also built a barricade in front of their own stoop and door as an extra obstacle in case something gets past that outer fence. The game has Resource Points instead of strict inventories, so you can purchase items on the fly and narrate that they were in your closet. In the case of makeshift barriers, each point spent increases the Barricade Rating on one section of the wall. However, the players don't yet know for certain what zombies roll to try to beat the Barricade Rating, or how often, so they can't feel too secure behind those fences. Basically, the players get to know all mechanics pertaining to their own actions, but have to figure out how the zombies work in-character.  (Note-to-self: I should probably make a point next session of expressly stating what a PC would have to do to get over such a barrier, because they could probably judge for themselves whether or not the wall they've built is sturdy enough to keep themselves out.)

There's more to say, but I think I've hit the most salient points from the latest session. Sometime soon I'll post the character sheets here so you can see what the PCs look like.

Herding Zombie Cats

Yesterday I ran the second session of Death Warmed Over, a rules-light zombie RPG I've been writing. Our first session covered just a couple hours at the start of the outbreak, so I couldn't blog too many details because there were a lot of surprises to spoil. There's still a number of things I have to keep close to the vest, but I can talk a little more about it.

First session started around sunrise in-character, with the PCs all neighbors living in the same gated apartment complex. I chose this because it would allow for a number of possible starting backgrounds, yet still give the players some justification for knowing and trusting each other. Plus, it gave them a fall-back location to keep returning to between excursions outside the gate. Just the same, while most of us recognize our neighbors, and some of us are social enough to know our neighbors, most apartment dwellers don't really know our neighbors. So the party isn't exactly a cohesive group with a clear leader. More on that later.

As mentioned in my previous post, my zombies look more like victims than traditional zombies, at least in the earliest stages of the illness. They've got rashes and blisters, and are compulsively scratching themselves. They aren't trying to hurt anyone, but their thinking clearly isn't normal. They seem almost childlike and easily distracted, have an oral fixation, and don't really comprehend spoken words. Most of them are covered in blood or pus from all the scratching.

In the opening hours, the news wasn't really covering what was going on. There were several infected NPCs in the apartment complex, though, so the players had a good notion that bad things were afoot.  Something similar was going on in another city (our PCs are in Albuquerque, the other city with an infection is NYC) several hours ahead of them. So the media is mostly focused on the Big Apple at the start of the day, as it's had more time for people to realize there's a problem.

In the course of the whole first day (which has taken two sessions), the PCs have seen only a handful of obvious infectees, and only one of them was behaving violently aggressive. While the disease has a wide distribution and high infection rate, it doesn't seem immediately infectious in the same way that most zombie films would do it. None of the NPCs who are clearly infected have teeth-marks on them. The one NPC who was bitten and had early symptoms seems to have recovered. Three of the player characters have had direct contact with infected blood, and are not yet exhibiting any symptoms. 

As the day went on, the news reports first got more dire, and then more hopeful. Eventually the reports came in that the NYC disaster response teams and the national guard were having good luck getting the victims contained, and that once people stopped panicking and started doing as the CDC asked, things were mostly under control in New York. Therefore the people of Albuquerque, NM, should hold tight and stay indoors, and eventually the authorities would get things well in hand.

Of course that would never stop PCs from taking action. They visited four stores in the first two sessions. One was a little gas station / convenience store where the clerk was clearly infected. There was a grocery store that opened late and jacked up the prices, but otherwise was unaffected by the plague as far as they could tell. There was a 24-hour department store type place where clearly some sort of incident had happened, complete with blood-streak and an employee carrying a shotgun from the sporting goods section. Despite usually be open 24 hours, it announced it would be closing in 20 minutes. Lastly, PCs swung buy a hardware store to get materials to reinforce their gate and fence, but by the store was locked up and they couldn't get anything. They packed into the car all the food and supplies they could at the places that were open, but were not yet willing to stoop to breaking and entering or outright theft.

There was a little bit of drama where one of the PCs had to rescue his girlfriend from the bloody creep outside her window, but he was able to engineer this without resorting to violence. Another PC was organizing his congregation to survive the end of the world, and that included some hands-on interaction with the infected that he may later regret. A couple of NPC relatives tried to get to the hospital and found that to be a bad enough idea that they broke into a deserted liquor store on the way home. Largely, though, this day passed without much obvious danger... just a lot of anxiety and speculation about how the illness is transmitted.

Trying to keep such a slow boil going is hard. In general, as a GM, my instinct is always "if the plot isn't already racing, throw some action at them!" However, that doesn't necessarily fit with what I'm trying to do here. As mentioned in the other post, once the police or army decide they can ethically blast away at the infected (because they're not infected people, they're just bloodthirsty zombies), the outbreak should wrap up quickly. So I needed a slow sinking sense of impending disaster instead of a wall of murderous undead, at least until the authorities are too compromised to do anything about it.

That pacing and lack of immediate personified threat meant giving the players plenty of time and freedom to do whatever they wanted. As I said, the PCs visited multiple businesses this session. They also went to a church, the girlfriend's house, and nearly another church. They also knocked on every apartment door in the complex, to make sure all the neighbors knew what was going on, and to check that there weren't more infected to worry about. However, they did not do any of this as a single large group. It was like herding cats, plus the occasional zombie. The whole "party" wasn't assembled except once very near the end of the session, just after sunset. After some debate and planning, they were just about to split up again (due to a disagreement), and it wasn't going to be easy to reunite them if that happened.

So that's when a military HMMWV rolled through the neighborhood. Sticking out of the port on the top was a soldier in full NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) gear, using one of those lovely LRAD (Long-Range Acoustic Device) units to convey a message to everyone in the area. Something to the affect of:

• "Remain indoors. Stay calm. Stay at home. A curfew is in effect. 
• If you have infected, quarantine them to a separate room. 
• Do not kiss, hug, or shake hands, even if you do not exhibit symptoms. Wave politely instead. 
• Doctors are on their way. Emergency crews will be delivering supplies tomorrow. 
• If you have infected people with you, hang a sheet out your window. Use paint or markers to write on the sheet how many infected you have in large, easily read, numbers. This will help us assess your need. 
• Remain indoors..."

That kept the PCs all together, though it gave them plenty more to disagree about.

The Careful Timing of a Zombie Apocalypse

Zombie Apocalypses: We've all been through them a few dozen times. There's these painfully slow, utterly mindless critters who spread a terrible infection only if they bite someone. No worries. I mean seriously, how hard is it to avoid being bitten by a slow-moving dim-witted attacker that looks patently unnatural at first glance?

Even if you do get bit, that victim usually has to die immediately in order for them to turn instantly, and when we do get to see that happen in a zombie film, it usually involves the zombie-to-be being ripped apart limb from gory limb by a horde of shambling undead. Otherwise if they escape with just a small bite, it takes hours or days of dramatic agony for them to become a monster.

So, realistically, that first day should be rough going for a zombie plague. Sure, humanity's not ready for you, but once we do see you coming, we've got the advantages of speed, firepower, and brains. Brains...mmm.  Seriously, any city big enough to have a SWAT team should have the whole zombie thing under control on day one.

Yet despite those obvious truths,  within no more than one in-character hour of the first zombie sighting, most films have the undead outnumber the living by a factor of 100 or more to 1.  Sometimes, that's hard to swallow (unlike all those tasty brains, they go down easy).  Unless absolutely no one at the police department has ever heard of a zombie before. But I'm interested in gaming on planet earth, usually in the post-Romero world where everyone knows that a pale dead-looking thing with blood pouring from it's mouth probably isn't friendly, long before it ever shambles into biting range.

Now, if you've got fast-moving zombies with rapid-onset zombie infections you might logically be able to go from patient zero to full-blown zombie apocalypse in a day or two. But even 28 days later, the movie that started the whole "fast zombie" revolution, realized that the apocalypse doesn't happen over night, it takes 28 days or so to get to the stage where most zombie films start.

Problem is,  fast zombies with instant-conversion is really hard for table-top gaming, and this is after all a tabletop gaming blog.  Players just generally don't care too much for an endless stream of "save or die" effects that would be required for a "1 drop of blood on your face and you go zombie" scenario. How do you get attached to a character who's that expendable?

So for my recently started zombie RPG, I turned a critical eye towards how I could make a slow-zombie apocalypse happen on a time-frame that was still interesting to play out. I didn't want to jump ahead four weeks past the end of the world, I wanted to game in the last days of mankind. Nor did I want my players to have to invest hours in a character creation process that might have to be repeated every three combat rounds.

Here's a few things that I figure any slow-zombie virus needs to get it's self up to the world-threatening stage before the CDC and US Army can shut it down.

• Densely Populated Epicenter: There needed to be some event at which a large group of people were gathered, and all exposed. There can't be one Patient Zero who personally bites every other zombie, there has to be a Ground Zero mechanism for a large group to be exposed all at once. Could be contaminated food or air, could be a deliberate act of bioterrorism, but it probably can't be one dead guy and his dentures.
• Delayed Conversion Allows For Dispersion:  All those people at Ground Zero need to head home, or at least flee at human speeds. They need at least a few hours to disperse before they convert to undead status.  That first wave have to spread out, and not even realize they're a danger to themselves or others. Ideally, the early infected need to be able to travel by plane and land in other cities before they know they're sick.
• Compromised Police Response: I'm sure we've all read tragic news reports that suggest that Police under pressure tend to get trigger-happy even when there's nothing about the suspect any more threatening than the color of their skin. Now put those same cops responding to the hordes of shambling dead. Yeah, it's a 6-gun massacre writ large and gory. So if the slow zombie apocalypse wants to have a chance in the big city, something else has to distract the police, or at least complicate things for them. Such as...
• Sympathetic zombies or carriers: The zombies can't be immediately distinguishable from humans. They can look sick, they can look hurt, but they can't look like flesh-eating monsters in the first hours of the outbreak. When the healthy see the infected, their response shouldn't be "shoot it!", it should be "OMG are you okay?!" A zombie plague that makes you want to bandage or medicate the early-stage zombies, and doesn't provoke the knee-jerk reaction of heading for the hills with gun in hand, has a much better chance of catching the most flies. After you've hit critical mass, you can have the zombies enter a bloodthirstier stage, but in those fragile opening hours there probably needs to be some doubt and moral ambiguity.
• Reason not to Nuke: Dropping in a daisy cutter, tac nuke, or the like is of course a cold and calculating solution to the zombie outbreak scenario. So the zombie plague has to be damn subtle, or leave some hope for a cure. Or else it needs to strike places too valuable to nuke, and too many of them. There's a number of possible solutions to this conundrum... or the GM can just let the PCs know the nuclear option is inevitable and suggest they go hide on the other side of that mountain. You've got options.

I started my game with the President being in town, and things getting ugly at the big protest/counter-protest/counter-counter-protest rally near his speech. 8 hours later, all those protesters, and the cops they wrestled with, start turning. They aren't monstrous yet, their brains are clouded, they've got fevers, and they're scratching at pus-filled rashes.  In the meantime, there's news of some other(?) disease outbreak in another major city far away. Just enough confusion and uncertainty to let things get out of hand.

My original plan was to start with sympathetic zombies, and only show the first bloodthirsty one as the final image of the first session. It seemed like a natural cliff-hanger. However, my early sympathetic zombies were _really_ successful. There was a point where I was going to have to bridge the gap from disease victims to murderous zombies, or else the rest of the party was going to nursemaid themselves into terminal infection.  Despite springing the predatory undead ahead of schedule, we still ended the session with one PC covered in zombie blood and driving a car full of infected to the church full of survivors.  This does not bode well for that PC.

Oh well, at least there'll be no nuclear option until the motorcade makes it back to Air Force One.

1% of the population

Ran the first session today of Death Warmed Over, my new rules-light zombie RPG. It went smashingly well. Will blog more about it later this week.

Currently, the zombie infection rate is estimated at just less than 1% of the population in Albuquerque (or at least the neighborhood the PCs are in), with ominous news reports indicating it may be happening in New York City as well.

Recent Gaming Projects

Been a while since I've posted, but I've been keeping busy. Here's a brief statement of the gaming-related projects that have been keeping me busy:

• Death Warmed Over is a new Zombie Apocalypse RPG that I'm writing. The first playtest will be this Sunday.
• Interior Dredmorating 1.2.4, the latest version of my mod for the rogue-like Dungeons of Dredmor, has been released. It features new rooms (including new shops and zoos), vastly improved artwork, and miscellaneous tweaks and fixes. I've got some exciting news to announce soon about ID and DoD, but for now I must remain silent.
• My Continuum campaign continues ahead on it's two nights. Both play-groups are about a session away from major tangles with narcissists. Ron and Heilyn are about to rescue a fellow spanner from a narcy nest in 1998 London, while Declan and Casey are currently planning to foil a narcy serial killer operating in Basel, Switzerland circa 1530. Should be some exciting sessions in the next couple weeks.

So I'm keeping very busy on multiple fronts.

Bonus Fun Link: Nokia has patented vibrating tattoos that talk to your phone. Cyberpunk may actually be here by 2020 after all. You know this tech is will lead straight to sub-vocal mastoid communicators and Mr Studd implants. All night, every night, and she'll never -- wow, that's incredible sweetheart, where'd you learn how to -- no, wait, that's just my phone.

Your Princess Is In 6X Castle

About a week ago I played a short but very enjoyable game of 6X.  6X is a two-page-long settingless RPG rule-set, intended for improvisation and pick-up games. Link to 6X rules.

The core mechanic of 6X is simple, and collaborative. Whenever someone tries to do something that would logically take a die-roll in another game, the group builds a d6 chart for that roll. The player picks what happens if they roll a "1", listing off exactly what they wanted to accomplish if everything goes perfectly right. The GM picks a "6" result, basically the worst case scenario. "2" to "5" are filled in by group consensus, with "2" and "3" being good things but not the full intended success, and "4" and "5" being failures or side-effects you'd probably rather avoid.

Honestly, I was a little dubious about the system going in. I couldn't imagine I'd be happy with a flat 50% success rate for all actions, and I feared the collaborative table-making would slow things down terribly. I'm pleased to say I was wrong. Table-making is super fast and simple, and is at the heart of the fun.

Our game was set in a fantasy kingdom made up on the spot. Since we did all the charts on paper, I can easily transcribe them here as an example of play.

Theme: Medieval Fantasy
Plot: The Princess has been kidnapped

Player Characters:

Captain Midea
Captian of the Royal Guard who hails from an Amazonian land. Good at archery and swordplay. Strong leadership skills.

Fülöp the Transmutor
Duttering old court wizard several years past his prime. Powerful sorcery in a frail body. Very poor eyesight. Wielder of the Sacred Staff of Bitterness.

Bevan Rees
Plucky young annoying assistant to Fülöp. Stupid lucky, sarcastic, underpaid. Magic is not advanced.

Set-up and Pitch:
Ireeki, the Royal Princess, has gone missing, and it's our job to find her… but we don't know that yet. The PCs are all servants of the royal court of a the King of... anybody got a name for a country?  Okay, it's called Walterland. The neighboring Kingdom called... Chevalier... is very antagonistic and may or may not be involved in the kidnapping. Go!

The 3 PCs and a few NPCs are standing outside the Grand Hall of His Majesty's Castle. We've been summoned to a private audience, but then told to wait until The King calls us in. The wait was pretty long, honestly, and the party-like sounds coming from the other side of the door did nothing to make us feel that there was a mystery or adventure afoot. Our interactions with the Royal Court Jester were silly enough to keep us amused even if the plot was spinning it's wheels. I really couldn't tell if the GM was floundering, or just trying to subtly let us know that the King wasn't really too concerned about his missing daughter. We chewed the scenery, developed our character personalities, and turned Bevin's fingers intermittently invisible with a minor transmutation.

Eventually, we realized out-of-character that the King wasn't really getting to us and the plot wouldn't start till we did something.  So that's when Bevin decided to sneak into the Grand Hall.

Bevin sneaks into Grand Hall

1. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a beautiful woman in the royal court that is happy to dance with him.
2. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a slightly attractive woman to dance with.
3. Bevin sneaks in, and is about to dance with a beautiful woman, when Fülöp realizes he's gone missing and casts "summon assistant" to drag him back.
4. Bevin sneaks in, and gets himself slapped by a beautiful woman.
5. Bevin is kicked out by the guards, and it's really embarrassing.
6. Guards catch Bevin sneaking about and throw him in the dungeon.

We rolled a "1", allowing Bevin a fine time dancing with a courtier. But the player of Midea figured she really out to be doing her in-character job as Captain of the Guard. So she heads in to the Grand Hall to drag Bevin out. 

So this was our second roll, and we didn't even know the plot, yet. The rules probably would have had us roll initiative and take interwoven actions, but we figured it'd be faster and easier to just make a contested roll table. Midea's player would chose the "1" result, Bevin's player the "6", and a single roll would resolve the conflict. I feel this was a great way to handle it, and will be my preferred way to resolve PvP conflicts in the game from here on out. There's a bit of abuse potential if the PCs chose results that affected the world more than each other, but I'm pretty sure the GM could easily punish such bad behavior in later charts.

Midea heads into the Grand Hall to get Bevin

1. Midea pulls Bevin out without incident.
2. Midea pulls Bevin out, but the earlier transmutation proves contagious, and now her fingers are intermittently invisible.
3. Midea pulls Bevin out, but stops the party, causing a scene. This is NOT becoming of a guard!
4. The King sees Midea and calls her over to talk. Bevin keeps dancing.
5. "Sorry, Ma'am." The rest of the guards stop Midea from setting foot on the dance-floor.
6. Midea tries to get Bevin off the dance floor. The beautiful courtier thinks Midea is trying to cut in, and scolds her in humiliating fashion.

Looking back on it, the table was kinda stacked against Midea, but at the time it wasn't obvious. The dice favored her however, rolling another "1". She halls Bevin out, and we all now get the joy of waiting patiently once again.

The GM eventually gives us admittance to the Grand Hall, but decides to throw me a little challenge in the form of the King's  Steward deciding my wizard is too old for whatever this mission is.  So I pull a Gandalf on them: "Do not take me for a conjuror of cheap tricks!"

Convincing the King's Messenger to admit Fülöp

1. Fülöp briefly grows to 12 feet tall, wreathed in lightning and emphasized by a dramatic crash of thunder. The steward and messenger as so impressed and terrified, they show me nothing but respect forever after.
2. Minor lightning hits the messenger, who is slightly dazed and somewhat impressed by this. He lets Fülöp in.
3. The light show is kinda scary, they let Fülöp in just to get away from him.
4. Fülöp gets the targeting wrong, making Bevin 12 feet tall. The apprentice runs into the hall and the wizard hobbles after him.
5. Fülöp reverses the polarity, shrinking down to 6" tall and squeaking with minuscule rage that impresses no one.
6. Fülöp accidentally turns himself invisible and the guards cannot find him.

We rolled a "3", which got the job done well enough. The GM, however, was not yet done making things hard for me. Seriously, I can't recall ever having to struggle this much just to be told what the mission was. Anyhow, I suppose I did it to myself by being the only PC with obvious flaws to poke at. Since Fülöp is old and frail, he can't bow before The King. At least, not without magical assistance to overcome his arthritis.

The Bowing Spell

1. Fülöp successfully casts the spell, gracefully bowing despite his aged and stiff spine.
2. Fülöp successfully cast the bow spell, but with the side-effect of turning purple.
3. Fülöp successfully casts the bow spell, but lets loose a loud and undignified fart in the process.
4. Fülöp bows, but the spell haywires and causes him to do some weird acrobatic upside down levitating bow.
5. Power-word: Bow. Everyone but Fülöp feels compelled to bow. His Majesty is not amused.
6. The senile old wizard accidentally confuses the "bow" spell for the "bath" spell. It's not pretty.

A "4" has Fülöp twisting and contorting, but at least not pissing off The King.  After proper respects are paid to His Majesty, we learn the plot.

Princess Ireeki has gone missing, and was probably kidnapped. Her lady-in-waiting was present when she vanished, but The King has held off doing anything about it out of suspicion his daughter had just run away to get attention. Suitors from a nearby kingdom are due in a few more days, however, and we must get the Princess back before they arrive for political reasons.

Midea suggests we interrogate the Lady-In-Waiting. This results in a skill roll that I think came very close to stalling out the adventure before it could even get started. Clearly, there's a learning curve to 6X, and we were about to realize it.

Interviewing the Lady-In-Waiting

1. She gives us a good description of the man who kidnapped the Princess. He has a dark beard and a heavy unibrow, is 6 ft tall, and was wearing a dark cloak. When he put the cloak around the princess, they disappeared.
2. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but she thinks magic was involved.
3. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but he left behind an eyebrow hair we might be able to use for some sympathetic magic to locate or track him.
4. She won't stop crying and has nothing more to add.
5. Her thoughts are muddled. The man doesn't actually have a unibrow, that's just a masking spell that prevents her from remembering what he really looked like.
6. She saw nothing. In truth, she was busy in bed with The King, and not at her post in the Princess' Quarters at the time of the kidnapping. Her description was made up, and His Majesty will cover for her.

Isn't that horrible?  "2" and "4" are both total derailments for the plot with no further obvious direction for the plot to go. They'd be better as "5" and "6" than "2" and "4", given that they represent total failures to follow the clue trail.  Entries "3", "5" and "6" all give a tiny bit of information, coupled with another derailment that's not quite as bad as "2" or "4" but would still result in some wheel spinning.  Only "1" advances the plot or provides useful intel, and even that doesn't really give much of a "lead" to follow. Regardless of what we roll on that chart, it will require another roll just to figure out what direction to go in.  All our tables after this one were constructed to be far more dynamic and less likely to stall out the plot engine.

As it turns out, we rolled "3", and were blessed with a single hair to enchant in hopes of finding the suspect. Of course, our wizard was a bit dodgy and senile, so this was far from guaranteed to work. Knowing it had even odds to go horribly wrong, I asked for something pretty darned advantageous on the "1".

Fülöp's Follicular Flight

1. We are magically transported to the eyebrow man. We catch him with his pants down, sitting in the privy.
2. We are transported to the eyebrowed man's town. He's in a tavern.
3. We get a vision of the unibrow, and know his location.
4. Miscast! Bevin loses all his body hair!
5. The spell transports us half way to the unibrow man. We end up in a swamp.
6. The spell transports all of the unibrow man's extended family to the castle we're in.

I felt the GM was being far too kind to us, and I told her so. I was asking for the moon on the "1" result, and I felt the "6" should be just as punishing. Instead, the "6" on this chart was more directly useful than the "2" on the previous chart.

Not that it matters, since we rolled a "3". The spell revealed his location, and we had to ride all night to catch him. He was in the village of Targethorpe, staying at the Lamprey Inn. Targethorpe was also known for its large monastery full of orthodox bell-ringing monk mystics.

We arrive just after dawn, and attempt to find out from the inkeeper whether or not the kidnapper or princess are still here.

Lamprey Inn

1. They're upstairs sleeping.
2. They left at the crack of dawn, and they're less than an hour ahead.
3. They're an hour down the road, and accompanied by a platoon of soldiers from the rival Kingdom of Chevalier! Those fiends!
4. The owner leads us out back and facilitates us getting mugged.
5. He's not sure what happened to the princess, but the unibrowed one was found dead and drained of blood earlier this morning.
6. The bar keep pours you a drink to answer your questions. You are drugged, and pass out quickly.

A "5" put us back into investigation mode, despite what was almost going to be a chase or fight scene. A discussion follows about whether or not this entry on the card definitively implies that the blood-draining was vampiric in nature. I'm not sure we ever came to a consensus.

Since the only other thing that had been established about Targethorpe was the monastery, we decided to go ask the monks if they knew anything. Gwyon, the bell-loving Abbot, was a wise mystic, and old acquaintance of Fülöp's. So, once the begloved abbot was done deafening us with his bells (another great characterization by the GM), we were able to ask if he'd seen Princess Ireeki recently.

Monastery of Targethorpe

1. Good news! She's actually up in the belltower as we speak, and Gwyon thinks it will only take him a fortnight to cure her vampirism.
2. Your princess is in another temple. She's been sold for a sacrifice to the temple of Nergal.
3. The monk knows of a vampire nest in the hills, and we go to rescue the girl.
4. Gwyon hisses as you realize that he's become a vampire. He sneers "You'll never get her from our nest in the hills!" - and flies away.
5. She was captured by slavers from Solarian Wastes. Their caravan is three days ahead.
6. The Orc leader Gloksnag and his clan have been doing the bidding of the high wizard Dloththal. He has Ireeke.

Apparently the GM wasn't as enamored with the vampirism concept as some of the players were. But she had awesome NPC names, and that's cooler than undead any day. When the die rolled the GM's way, she got to tell us all about Orcish blood magic, and the dred wizard Dloththal.  Clearly, the Princess was in peril and we must ride out to save her.

We didn't get far. The orcs were waiting for us. As they sprung their ambush, mighty Amazonian Captain Midea tries to defend the dottering old wizard and his young apprentice. Yep, that would be another die-roll.

Orcs Attack

1. The orcs are all female, and are mad because the evil wizard Dloththal has stolen their men. Midea convinces them to join us.
2. There's a fight, and Fülöp's Sacred Staff of Bitterness glows so brightly the half-blinded Orcs flee in terror. They'll be back for round two after we get to prepare defenses.
3. Midea wipes out half of the orcs in a mighty battle. Bevin hides. Fülöp accidentally sets the forest on fire, scattering the rest of the attackers.
4. We defeat the orcs, but one of us loses a limb, and another of us is slain. Luckily, the slain hero is magically reincarnated as a sentient talking truffle-hunting pig.
5. The orcs capture us.
6. Fülöp turns the party into mules, hoping that orcs only drain the blood of humans. 

Again, we experienced a bit of trouble getting the 2s through 5s to fit. (Our 2 and 3 should be switched, and our 4 and 5 should probably be switched as well). This time it was my fault.

Not that that mattered, as a "6" came up on the die. We're all turned into mules!  That seemed rather silly and fitting. Plus, it was late. So, we all decided to end it there. Game over - we're mules now! Presumably, hopefully the orcs used us as pack animals instead of dinner. Then there'd be a chance for a sequel next time we're all feeling goofy.


Gotta admit, 6X was a ton of fun. It's easy to run, and great for engaging everyone at once. Even when you split the party, everybody gets to contribute to the possible results of every single die roll. I definitely recommend it for pick-up games, impromptu sessions, and groups that experience a lot of chaos at the tabletop. PCs working at cross purposes, players hogging the spotlight, lack of focus, and many other potential problems for crunchier traditional systems actually work as strengths for 6X. That's pretty cool.

Reading the rules for myself several days later, I see that the game is expecting for fights to be handled with several die rolls. The examples feature NPCs getting wounded at "1" and PCs wounded at "6". That's certainly more conventional and balanced, but I've got to say that for our purposes the wilder results tables worked just great.

On that topic, I must admit that the rules, despite being so minimal and looking ripe for abuse, turned out to be very enjoyable and really well balanced.  I tried _hard_ to break the system every time I was getting to propose a "1" result. That I could just as easily fall victim to an equally-ridiculous "6" (as we all eventually did) kept things from being too easy.  We sometimes had trouble filling in an appropriate "3" or the like, but for the most part that didn't matter as long as the best-case and worst-case scenarios were clear. The GM getting to define the 6 after the player defines the 1 is critical to keeping the game balanced and exciting.

Interior Dredmorating

A while back I blogged about how I was getting a lot of fun out of a graphical roguelike computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor. It's darned good - PC Gamer awarded it Indy Game of the Year for 2011.

I enjoy it enough to do some significant modding for it these past couple months. It's high time I provide a link here to my mod, Interior Dredmorating. ID is now on it's 1.2.1 release, and it's been pretty warmly received by the Dredmor fan base.

Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/Interior Dredmorating 1.2.1.zip

Sometimes a dungeon isn't really a dungeon.

Primarily my mod adds new rooms, items, art and flavor text to the dungeon. While there are a lot of mods out there for Dredmor, most are skill-and-spell based, the sort of thing you plug into the game to up your character's power (or your build options). Mine's not like that, it's more about providing new challenges and new things to explore. Not surprising at all to those who know me - I'm usually happier being the dungeon-master than being a player.



Those interested in the full details of what the mod adds to the game should check out the thread on the Gaslamp Games forum:  http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/interior-dredmorating-1-2-1.2158/

Continuum Conversion Overview

Just got an email from someone asking me for a few more details on my Continuum-using-Gumshoe conversion. As I typed up the response, I realized this should probably go on my blog in case anyone else wants to know what we changed to make this setting work with a different set of rules. (I think I typed something like this up a while ago, but I couldn't find it with a casual search today).

Mainly I use GUMSHOE rules, modified as needed for the setting. Here's a few things I changed that I can think of off the top of my head:

I cut the size of player character point pools down significantly (building characters from far fewer points in general than any iteration of GUMSHOE), but then made all pools refresh automatically at the start of every session. That way there's no need to remember from week to week how many points you spent in previous sessions. I figure CoNTINUUM has so much book-keeping via spanbooks and just general time-travel-related notekeeping, that I didn't want to have to waste extra effort and energy recording how many points are left over from last week.  The smaller pools are to balance that.

Off the top of my head I don't remember exactly how many points I trimmed them down to, but I've frequently thought I could have trimmed them down a lot smaller than I did without any real consequences. Gumshoe characters get so many points, since the refreshes are only at the start of entire new mysteries/adventures, and with weekly free refreshes they only need a handful of points to advance the plot. If you trim it down too far, it's pretty easy to give the PCs bonus points later, or just let them train skills via normal Continuum training over time rules. Taking points away mid-campaign because you were too generous at the start would be rather harder.

In general, I found/ruled/converted that each Continuum skill rank above Novice is roughly equivalent one point of Gumshoe skill rating. I use 'clocks' more or less like they appear on the Continuum character sheet - each spend or roll of a skill gets you 1 step closer to the next level. If a character has no points to spend but engages in a roll anyway, they also get a clock in the skill, so it's possible to advance in a skill that you don't have or have spent all your points in already. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.

I had to add a couple of skills to cover things specific to Continuum, such as the various Aquarian Skills, and a few "better at spanning" skills to compensate for the lack of a Quick stat. 

I made Gemini into a skill you could spend to have your Elder bail you out, which allows me to throw harder challenges at the player and still give them an "escape switch" for if I overdo it. These Gemini points go away when spent, and only refresh if your Span Rating increases. I did something similar with "Mentor" and "Fraternal Favors" so each PC started the campaign with a couple of "my Mentor shows up to save me" and a handful of "my chrony in the (insert specific fraternity here) owes me a favor that I can cash in right now' points. This gives the PCs a bit more narrative control than they would otherwise have in Continuum, but that's balanced by being Graceless (thus unable to spend any of those points because of too much frag, etc) feel more dangerous.

I also added a "Range" skill, of which all players have 50 points. Spending 1 point of Range lets you span a certain amount of time and/or distance, depending on your Span Rating. This was done partly to match other Gumshoe mechanics, and partly to reduce the amount of time spent calculating the exact minutes and seconds of shorter spans - while knowing your exact Age to the second is important from an in-character performance, we found it was getting in the way of keeping the plot rolling, and Range points helped make that faster. Full details at: http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2010/10/extreme-range.html

Besides adding things like I mentioned above, I simplified the gumshoe skill lists a bit. Most versions of Gumshoe have more crime scene forensics and evidence collecting type skill than Continuum really needs, but you may have to "season to taste" on that. There's a really light Gumshoe book called "FEAR ITSELF" that I recommend for this. Intended for less "CSI" style Gumshoe games, it has a smaller investigative skill list. It also has some good psionics-type skills that can be easily converted to represent your Aquarian Skills by just cutting out the creepy cthulhu bits.

I use Stability per Esoterrorists / default Gumshoe, and not any of the extra bells and whistles (sanity, sources and pillars, etc) from Trail of Cthulhu. I also added Continuum-specific Stability challenges/penalties, an early version of which can be seen at: http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2010/10/stability-chart-for-gumshoe-continuum.html   

Time Combat is basically the same, but with various Gumshoe spends and rolls instead of Continuum's reliance on the Quick stat. Incidentally, that seems to have made time combat a lot more balanced, whereas before it could be really hard on characters that were created with lower-than-average Quick. 

Physical Combat is much easier because Gumshoe is not a combat-intensive system. I was a little worried about that at first, but honestly it's turned out just fine. Continuum's weird hit location rules were way crunchier than the original game needed, anyway. One thing to be wary of is the Gumshoe rules for wrestling over a gun or getting the drop on someone. It's just too easy to surprise someone in Continuum (span in behind them), so I had to eliminate that or else every fight would be a single roll.

Obviously, that's not everything I converted to make this game run, but it's a good place to start, and about all I've got time for today. If you've got questions, drop me an email or comment.

New Year Continuum (Cart and Horse)

I'm pleased to say that my Continuum campaign successfully jumped back into full swing after the year-end break. The sessions Tuesday and Wednesday were both really good, with opportunities for the PCs to chew the scenery a bit, and both groups made some good breakthroughs on the projects and mysteries at the top of their "to-do" lists.

I did a little reflecting on the game during the break, and thought a lot about where we were now that the campaign's been going for 2 years. I've decided I'd like to speed things up a little, but we'll see if I can make that happen. As mentioned in recent posts, in a game where all the PCs can time-travel a decade or more at-will, it's hard to put any sort of "you have to do this now" pressure on them. You can keep throwing narcissists at them, but that eventually grows old (or overwhelming, if they just keep dodging instead of defeating the enemy). So my plan instead is to throw accolades and achievements at them. They've been in "slow simmer" mode for a while, working on various projects that will gain them some notoriety within the Continuum once everything is said and done. Well, everything's been said and the doing is happening in the next session or two. With any luck, they'll be climbing the ranks quickly this year.

As I see it, they've entered a period in the game where the rewards are higher, and the risks are correspondingly greater as well. Which is a little backwards from most gaming dynamics, but that's Continuum for you. We put the cart Down from the horse.

Dungeons of Dredmor

Get used to seeing this screen a lot. It ain't easy, but it's fun.

My Continuum campaign is on hold till the new year, so I've been filling my time playing (and modding) a wonderful little computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor.  It's essentially a roguelike, but with nice graphics instead of little ascii glyphs that populate that genre. So, more like Diablo, but with a wicked sense of humor (much of it fueled by anachronism and a keen understanding of the tropes of the genre. The remainder is fueled by lutefisk and booze.).

Dungeons of Dredmor has a ton of variation and is highly replayable, largely due to the various character builds interacting with the dungeon in completely different ways. It's not class-based, you chose your own combinations of 7 of the roughly 30 skill trees. If you can teleport, turn enemies into meat products, build your own armor from items found in the dungeon,  and rob from vending machines, you'll get a very different game then if you choose to be a vegan archaeologist with a pet mustache-golem. I'm not making that up.

Best part: Dungeons of Dredmor is dirt cheap. I got mine via one of the Humble Indie Bundles, but you can pick it up on Steam or Desura for $5 and the expansion is just another $3. The wife and I have logged over 170 hours playing it, and have shown no signs of slowing down. Seriously. You can't beat that value for your money.

As mentioned, I'm working on mods for the game, which I'll link to from this blog when they're ready for release.