The Hundred-Dollar RPG

In this post, I present a fairly detailed review of what I do and don't like about the 3rd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play.

You may or may not have seen the latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, the version that comes in a big box full of custom dice and full-color cards, with a $99.95 price tag on it. I've wanted that game ever since it released last fall, and just couldn't justify it. Luckily, my birthday is this week, and my wife is the most amazing woman on the planet.

A quick aside about that $100 price tag: That number nearly scared me off, which is kinda weird. I mean, I'm more than willing to spend more than twice that over time for any RPG I really like. The dollar value of D&D books, or 7th Sea books, or d6 Star Wars books, or Cyberpunk books on my shelf is way more than $100 for any of those. Just to run 4th Ed D&D you need three $40 books, so that's more than WFRP. Looking at it from that perspective, I don't know why I held off for so long.

Now that I've had a few days to look it over and play a sample combat, I feel like I can at least share my initial impressions of the game. There's a lot to love about this edition of WFRP. Let me fill you in on the things I like best...

• The Dice: Okay, I'm a sucker for dice, and WFRP has 36+ of them, with all sorts of crazy little pictures on them instead of numbers. So, right out of the box, I was smiling. Reading the books and running a sample combat, I was happy to learn that the mechanics and the dice really work together to make a fast-playing fun-filled system.
• Minimal Math: One of the cooler features of those dice is that there's almost no math during the game. You could, with a really awesome attack roll, maybe have to be able to count up to 110 or 12, but that's gonna happen very rarely, and when it does you're guaranteed to have killed your enemy. For the vast majority of rolls, you only have to be able to count to about 2 or 3.

  (In WFRP you'll never hear: "I rolled a... lets see... 6 + 6 + 5 + 3 + 2 + 2... +4... +1 more for higher ground... 29! Is that a hit? Nope, nope, I needed a 30!"")

  Actions are resolved quickly, and without being torn away from your mental image of the action.
• Succeed but with side-effects, Fail but with a silver lining: That is to say, those funny little dice are designed to allow for benefits and drawbacks to happen in addition to your overall success or failure, so actions are no longer simply binary. Quirky little developments that happen in novels and movies can finally appear in games.
  
• No damage roll: I've always hated that every single combat action gets two rolls, but saving the day with science or chutpah is usually just one single roll. I'm always on the lookout for games that either streamline combat, or expand out non-combat actions to get the same love and attention. In WFRP, damage is contained organically within the attack roll, and the same system is used for talking, tinkering, running, etc.
• Simple situational modifiers: You're on high ground? Have a fortune die. You're rescuing your true love? Have another white die. It's raining cats and dogs, add a black die. All three are happening at once, add two white dice and one misfortune die. Fast, simple, on-the-fly. I love it.
• Abstract combat positioning: This came as a big, beautiful surprise to me. Previous editions of WFRP have always been fairly miniatures-reliant. Now, I like my minis, but they usually come with a fair amount of baggage about character positioning, movement rules, attacks of opportunity, etc. So I was pleasantly surprised that the game uses very abstract positioning rules, with the assumption that a melee is "like a rugby scrum" with everyone in constant movement. If you're part of the melee, you're engaged with everyone. If you _need_ to get somewhere, you just do, but it costs you a few fatigue points. This is a completely different paradigm, and it feels fresh and innovative.
• Cards for all your feats and spells: Beautiful, full-color cards, that put all your rules and tactical options at your fingertips. No more leafing through a 200-page rulebook to find the data on your special ability or obscure combat rule - it's on one of the dozen or so cards you've got next to your character sheet.
• Reckless vs Conservative Stance: Before getting the game, I'd heard some grousing about "the little puzzle pieces that complicate battle". I'm pleased to say those complaints were unjustified, and most of them seem to be made by folks who haven't actually run a combat with them. Once explained, the system is simple and intuitive, and the stances provide a lot of flavor. Charging into battle full-tilt and headstrong plays very differently than opportunistically waiting for an opening. It accomplishes this without any obvious rules holes, and without breaking you out of the in-character scene. This is a very well-constructed mechanic.
  
• Party Tension Meter: While not quite as awesome as the stance system or the fancy dice, this mechanic is very flavorful, and certainly unique. The concept of what your party is, and why it formed, gives you bonus abilities and a fine-tuned tension meter. If the party is at cross purposes, if the characters are squabbling, if the enemy tries bribing you, if the group's thug uses his "Fear Me!" power, the tension meter goes up. In short, you get rewards and benefits for selecting a theme that unifies the party, combined with a weakness the NPCs and situations can prey upon. I like it.
  
• Unified Rewards: Experience and Fortune Points don't go to individuals, they go to the group as a whole. The problem with bennies or xp bonuses in most games is that if your gaming style and the GM's style don't match up 100%, you get shorted valuable resources. Meanwhile the person who really clicks with the GM gets the intangible benefit thereof, but also gets the lion's share of the out-of-character mechanical rewards. WFRP sidesteps that trap completely by giving bennies to everyone when one player does something good. No longer will you envy and harbor a grudge against the wittiest player at the table, or the guy who steals the spotlight, instead everyone gets to reap the rewards evenly.
• Miscellaneous Tools: The game has figured out a clever way to get all the best aspects of crunchy systems like insanity rules, critical hit charts, fiddly combat options, fatigue, morale, etc, without requiring complicated rules and mid-game page-references. It's pretty darned amazing just how much they managed to retain amidst all the streamlining.
  
• The Setting: This post is about the rules, mechanics, and components, but the reason you really play WFRP is because of the rich setting. It's not just generic fantasy, it's a grim, gritty world where the supernatural is really evil, the peasants are really smelly, the conspiracies are far-reaching and sinister, the orcs are football hooligans, and Monty Python quotes are not out of place for once.

Overall, I'm really thrilled with this game. In terms of character options, and how much it's got going on at once, it's every bit as crunchy as D&D or Savage Worlds. But if the sample combat my wife and I ran last night is any indication, the moment-by-moment math and resource tracking is so much simpler than most crunchy games, that it plays like something a good deal lighter. I'm very pleased.

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But, of course, nothing's perfect. Here's the places where I think they dropped the ball...

• You can't play the race card: The vast majority of your powers and stats come on these lovely full-color cards. The only exception is the racial abilities. The dwarven abilities such as ignoring penalty dice from darkness, and gaining bonus dice when fighting orcs, should be summarized on a card somewhere. They're not, and there's not even room on the character sheet to add them yourself.
• No Weapon Cards: Like racial abilities, weapons have special abilities that don't appear on cards, and don't really have room to summarize on the character sheet.

  (I've got a bunch of item cards from Paizo's GameMastery line, which I'll slip into cardsleeves with rules summaries on little note-card scraps to take care of it, but it's a shame to have to go to that effort myself for a game that puts everything else at your fingertips)

  
  
• No summary chart of Actions: It's awesome that all your actions and special abilities are on little cards, so you don't have to pass around a rulebook, but they should have been in the rulebook as well. What if you lose a card, or spill soda on it? What if you'd like to read up on higher-level powers between games? There's no easy solutions for either situation, and character creation (see below) is exasperated by it, too.
• Hard to House-Rule: Since everything is on cards, and there's no good index or summary chart, house-ruling or customizing could be a pain in the butt. You want to be damn sure your new house-rule is a good one before you start inking it onto the relevant cards. Balancing new monsters or spells is a bit trickier than in a numbers-based system.
  
• A weird approach to Niche Protection: I'm all for the idea that players shouldn't double-up on special abilities. You want your character to be unique, and to do something special no one else can do. Putting all the powers on cards does this, but game never clearly states whether or not two characters could "share" a card. The existence of multiples of the basic action implies you can't share. If they can, then there's no niche protection at all, which is a little sad. If they can't, then there's serious benefits to making your character first, spending your experience first, buying a particular card the moment you qualify for it, etc, which is equally sad.

  (Now, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that there's nothing that stops a person playing a Student or Scribe from taking cards like "Troll-Feller Blow" or "Berzerker Rage". Nor does anything stop a two-bit Thug from taking "Honeyed Words" and "Winning Smile", which blurs the lines between character niches.
  
  The impact on a character introduced late in the campaign, when all the most interesting Action Cards have been bought by others, would be bizarrely limiting. "My randomly-generated character class is Elven Wardancer, but unfortunately, all the Ritual Dance cards were already taken by the group's Dockhand," seems guaranteed to result in hard feelings.)

• Analysis Paralysis in Character Creation: The default rules assume a semi-random approach to character class. You shuffle up the deck, deal out three classes, and pick the one most interesting to you, instead of choosing from the 35 different starting character classes. Unfortunately, the rest of the options in character creation involve individually reading through 154 action cards, a couple dozen talent cards, etc. And then you spend your 20-25 character points on bonus dice, skills, wealth, and the aforementioned cards, with a completely open-ended point system and no solid advice for what's good to start off with. There's several thousand different viable starting builds, which is admittedly kinda cool, but it makes creating your first character very daunting.
• Opacity in Card Evaluation: As mentioned in the first section of this post, I love that the game provides flavorful non-binary results, and that I don't have to do any math while playing. But boy does that make it tricky trying to figure out which card is best for my character, or for the current battle. The cards seem pretty well balanced so far, but there could easily be hidden brokenness that a munchkin might exploit, but a casual gamer would completely miss.

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The phrase "diamond in the rough" springs to mind. The game has many beautiful polished facets, which shine brilliantly in the spotlight, but are sometimes going to be obscured by the shadows cast from the rough edges that surround them. Figuring out how much the genius of the game outweighs or is outweighed by the downsides will take some time. At first glance, though, it does seem apparent that the rough bits are at least outside of the action. While actually playing, the game is an elegant dream. All the downsides lurk in character creation and advancement, which can probably be house-ruled and simplified without impacting the way the game plays.

I'll have to haul this one with to my weekly one-shot group from time to time, but when I do so, I'll have pregenerated characters, with the relevant cards prepared and sorted. Teaching this character creation system to 4 or 5 people at once would take far more effort than is justified for a one-shot.

GUMSHOE, from the other end of the table

I've been running a fair amount of GUMSHOE lately, but in two recent sessions at my weekly one-shot group, I finally got the opportunity to play the game. It was really neat to see the system from the other end of the table, and I think the experience has already improved my GMing of GUMSHOE.

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My most important advice for GMs new to GUMSHOE is this:

• Whenever possible, ask the players "Do you have any relevant skills?" or "Would you like to spend a point of something for a breakthrough?", instead of "Does anyone have a point of Anthropology?"

Phrasing it in the open-ended way engages the players better, coaxes them into problem-solving mode, and makes them more familiar with their characters.

Naming the skill, and phrasing it the "You need Skill X, does anyone have X?" way makes the game feel more stilted, and provides the appearance of railroading, even if there isn't any. It's a seemingly-minor presentation difference, but it has a fairly significant impact on the way it all comes off to the player.

Plus, by leaving it open for the players to pick the skill they think will work, it opens the door to the players coming up with something the GM hadn't even considered. If they have a cool idea for how to pump someone for information using First Aid, when the scenario called for Reassurance, everyone benefits from that improvisation.

In the case of the two-part scenario that John ran at Emerald City Game Feast recently, for the first session, he was using the "laundry list" approach, saying things like "Geology or Biology would be helpful here. Does anyone want to spend a point in them?" It was just okay, fun but not exceptional. In the second session, he was being more organic, less mechanical, and very flexible, and it really made the game come alive. I had great fun playing last night.

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My best advice for people designing GUMSHOE modules is this:

• Go back through your work, looking for every situation that might come up that where a Stability test or a Sense Trouble roll might come up. In each such situation, determine the difficulty of those rolls, and then put that information in a really obvious sidebar that is impossible for the GM to miss.

When you're in the middle of a scene, building tension or narrating action, it's really easy for the GM to completely forget those things (Stability tests, especially) and skip past them. As GM, you really don't want to break the scene to have to go look at a chart and make a judgment call. You need the information right at your finger tips, with a big box around it to make jump out of the page and get the GMs attention. The GUMSHOE rules are light on purpose to keep the narrative flowing. When you make the GM break open the rulebook to look up something obscure or hard-to-guesstimate, you undermine one of the strengths of the game.

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The module he ran was The Black Drop, a Trail of Cthulhu adventure set in a remote location, with a multi-national cast of PCs. If you're interested in reading my feedback comments intended for the module's author, follow this link. It has a few spoilers, though, so is probably not a good read if you plan to play the module.

Skype / MeBeam Gaming

I've been doing a lot of Skype gaming lately - which is to say, I've been running an RPG campaign via the free online conference call features of Skype.

What I really like about it is that it's allowing me to game with friends in other cities and states. Given how bad I am at keeping up with normal phone calls, email, and letters, Skype is a godsend.

Originally, there were 5 players, plus GM, and due to social implosions, it has consistently been down to 2 PCs + GM. Prior to this campaign, I'd played in a few other Skype sessions, running up to about 8 players. Having tried several permutation, I can now clearly say that the ideal number of players for a skype game is 3. The further you push above that, the more the dynamic breaks down. "At an exponential rate" is probably accurate. Gaming with a large group always takes a bit of patience, as you don't get as much spotlight time as you might like -- but on Skype, this is seriously magnified.

The reason that Skype doesn't work well with larger groups, is that when one person is talking, there's no good way to butt in. If you interrupt them, neither of you can be heard or understood - it's one big audial mess. More often than not, they won't even hear you, and will keep on rambling. Since you can't see them, there's no subtle visual clues to let them know you want to butt in. This then drives people to use Skype's instant chat functions. The instant messaging seems simple and helpful at first, but quickly gets out of hand. Especially with a large group, which is almost guaranteed to end up with at least 3 or 4 chats happening simultaneously as people try "secretly" messaging one-another. Your attention gets divided, and sub-divided, and then sub-divided again. Everybody starts missing things, and it's impossible to get a good interactive scene of actual role-playing going.

A very frustrating experience, and at first I thought the only way around it was for the GM to micro-manage and be draconian. It was almost enough to make me quit Skype gaming, but luckily one of my players discovered something that would fix it.

For one-on-one calls, Skype has video, but the conference call function is audio-only. We quickly learned that you need video. Seeing the other players is how you know when someone else has something to add, and is bursting at the seams, but doesn't want to just rudely talk over you. It's how the GM knows if he's going overboard and boring the players at the peripheries of the scene. It's how you know you've lost someone's attention because their cat just vomited all over their desk, and that maybe you should pause the game for a moment while they clean up. Conveniently, there's a few easy video options out there. We've been using MeBeam. MeBeam is simple, and great for video. I've considered just switching over to it for the totality of the video-conferencing, because then we'd only have one program to worry about. The only thing stopping us is that sometimes mebeam audio ends up with excessive lag. Skype has less lag, but also crashes or disconnects more than MeBeam, so it's hard to say which is truly better. I'd say look into both (and maybe search the net for other options), and use whichever has the more consistent performance on your computers. But definitely use video of some sort, because the visual cues make it a much more nuanced and human experience.

Even with video, there's still some minor communication difficulties, as it is a little slower and more removed than actually gaming at the same table. I recommend using a very light rules system, and only gaming with people you trust. Now, honestly, I recommend that for in-person tabletop as well, so I may just have a personal bias. However, I've found that the technical hurdles of the various video conferencing programs make rules questions and arguments that much more annoying, so I try to use a system that minimizes them. Another option is to use a game system that has a solid online rules database. That way, since you're at a computer anyway, players can just bookmark the trickier bits and pop open a second browser window to look things up on the fly. Likewise, I'd choose a system with minimal die-rolling, so you don't have to worry about interfacing with some other die-rolling software, or rolling in front of the camera.

All this lead me to GUMSHOE for my online gaming. The system is transparent, almost invisible, during play, with rules questions almost never coming up. The few times that there is a rules question, they're generally about my Continuum-to-GUMSHOE conversion, not about the GUMSHOE core rules themselves. Die-rolling happens, but not with great frequency, and it's just a single d6 so repeated cheating would be easy to spot.

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll sign off for now, and return to the topic to talk about my specific campaign again at some future date.

Social Implosions

So, this place has been kinda quiet lately, and it's largely been because I've been unable to talk about my ongoing Continuum Campaign. Back in late December, there was a social implosion that cut the size of the play group in half. This is a gross over-simplification, but basically those 3 players are no longer on speaking terms with one-another. This put the status of the campaign in question for a while. I told the remaining two players that we would keep going while we waited for the fall-out to sort itself out.

It's nearly two months later, and none of the players have come back. Two of the three of them were playing characters who were siblings with intricately interwoven backstories, which makes them not interested in returning as the same characters. Who is on speaking terms with whom changes fairly frequently, as I understand it, so none of them are 100% comfortable coming back. It just wouldn't be fun for them to interact with each other. I find myself very wary about trying to encourage any of the players to return to the game, out of concern that I might be perceived as taking sides in the greater conflict between the people involved. It's pretty yucky.

The weird thing is, despite being down to just two players reliably, and the constant uncertainty of who else might show up week to week, the game has been really good. There's this unjustified awkwardness for the first ten minutes of every session as we all wonder who's going to show up this week. Unjustified, because despite people saying they plan to come back, no one has. Once that initial weirdness passes each week, the rest of the game is awesome. The plot has picked up speed, and I left with great cliffhangers the last two weeks. The sessions have been a great balance of action, humor, characterization, and exploration. I'd be happy to have 1 or more of those 3 missing players come back, but I'm also thrilled with the in-game dynamic as it stands. The two players/characters that we've got work really well together. It's a great campaign, but I almost feel guilty for enjoying it considering the social context of it all.

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.