7th Sea Maps and Tokens

Earlier this year I ran a short 7th Sea campaign via the Roll20 online interface, so I needed to whip up some tokens and images. The campaign ended earlier than intended (less than half a dozen sessions, IIRC) for scheduling reasons, so rather than let it all go to waste, I figured I'd share some of the props I made.

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Maps and Locations:

We'll start with a world map of Theah. This one is cobbled together from two very similar maps. The political map of Theah from the front of the 7th Sea Player's Guide, and the geographical map of Theah from the front of the 7th Sea GM's Guide. Each was individually available as a file from the publisher, I just melded the layers into a single image that had the names of forests and mountain ranges and yet still had the capitals and the national boundaries clearly marked.

Most of my actual campaign took place on a mysterious jungle-covered island where the PCs were stranded (think 7th Sea meets Lost). This was the basic backdrop map image I used as they explored. Two mountain peaks, miles of shoreline, and plenty wild uncharted jungles that could be hiding anything (such as poor abused photoshop brush plug-ins, see below).

While it's still "island shaped", I did my best to make it fill the rectangular screen space of Roll20 without wasting a lot of area on empty blue open water. Dead space would be wasted opportunity, and I planned the map to be pretty crowded once the island was fully explored.

Individual ruins and other points of interest were represented on that map by little icons that I dragged and dropped over it. For example, when the PCs found an old Porté Gate that had gone disused for so long it now was dangerous and had a telltale reddish glow, I placed this little image on the appropriate part of the map. On Roll20 I had the map scaled up and the icon here scaled down.

When the players moved to an actual site, I'd switch to either a local map or an image of what they saw.

On page 14 of the Explorer's Society splatbook there's this captivating picture of a bizarre Syrneth tower that really I wanted to use for the game. Over Roll20, you can't just hand the book around to show it off, so I scanned it, deleted the surrounding text, and added a little color and texture. The result is to the right. They explored that for a while

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Character Tokens:

The PCs are shown here in red-bordered tokens for moving about the map. (Again, the tokens were usually shrunk down much smaller, and the map was always much bigger on Roll20. Also worth noting, I didn't create any of the art for these tokens, I just googled images and dumped them into tokentool.)

The PCs were a Giselle Roux (a Montaigne Porté mage) and Vadim Verekai (the only surviving twin from a pair of Ussuran circus acrobats). These PCs were associated with the Explorer's Guild, which was how they ended up on the mysterious island in the first place (their ship vanished after their arrival, resulting in the temporary stranding).

NPCs:

There was a relatively small cast of characters, given that they were stranded on a deserted island for most of the adventure.  I wanted to get just the right image for each character token, so I made up several and then chose the one that best captured the concept when shrunk down to map marker size.

Here's some vodacce characters, including a fate witch I never used, and 4 different dark and brooding vodacce men that I eventually picked from.   I used one of them for the cruel Bosun of the ship they arrived on who was also stranded on the island with them, so there'd be at least one pain-in-the-ass but mostly grudgingly trustworthy character that they couldn't just kill without there being consequences.
Next are tokens for two Vestenmannavnjar women. One of them I used as a crazy woman, named Githrun Thithransdottir, who'd been stranded on the island for years before the PCs arrived. The less-crazy token didn't get used at all.
The crazy viking lady was usually being chased by Ghouls; the island had quite a few of them. If there's an actual illustration of a Thean Ghoul in a book somewhere, I haven't seen it, and nothing useful comes up in a google search. They're described in the GM's guide as roughly grey carnivorous apes, rather than the undead humanoid that the word usually brings to mind. They're basically just another wild animal within the setting, albeit one that is known to attack humans in the middle of the night. I wanted them to straddle that line between intelligent and monstrous, mostly mundane but just a touch feral and alien. So I stole art from an old school Magic: The Gathering card (Barbary Apes from Legends) that I thought caught close enough to the right feel. This art wouldn't have worked for Ghouls on mainland Theah, but it was just fine for a remote island.
The other major NPC was a "fish out of temporal water" character who'd been not just stranded, but somehow preserved within the old Syrneth tower (pictured above) for hundreds if not thousands of years. He was dressed as a servant from Old Numa, and spoke in an oddly accented version of the old academic tongue.

The PCs set him free, and I was slowly hinting that this was a big mistake... like he might be a willing servant of Legion, or been a Bargainer himself, or a skinwalking Syrneth murder-monster, or just the unwitting victim of some old curse or enchantment... but the campaign ended early (for out-of-character reasons) so they never got find out what he was exactly, nor try to put the genie back in the bottle. Suffice it to say, lots of creepy things happened in his presence. His name was Nymphidius Curio Maior, but in the player's defense they didn't learn his full name until after they broke him out of the ancient prison machine.

Second-Fiddle to the Urchins

The Urchin RPG is weird. It’s not just because you’re playing crazy homeless people living in the tunnels beneath New York. The mechanics of the game upend the usual power-structures, leaving the GM the person at the table with the least control of the plot and world.

A week and a half ago, I played Urchin during one of the midnight time slots at the Dragonflight convention in Bellevue, WA. Two days ago, I GM’d urchin for a group of 6 that included 4 new gamers with very little (1 to 5 sessions each) previous RPG experience. Seeing it from both sides of the GM screen in such a short time has convinced me Urchin is a game where the GM has the least interesting job, and the least narrative power. The GM is at best second-fiddle to the urchins, but even that probably over-estimates the GM’s importance in this game.

At the game where I was a player, I absolutely dominated (and created from whole cloth) the plot. At the game I GM’d, I couldn’t make my pet plotline materialize no matter how hard I tried to push it.

Band On The Run, aka Let Me Tell You About My Character:

At Dragonflight, I played a has-been failed punk-rocker with dreams of getting his band back together.

In the real world, I (the player) once (many years ago) met a friend of a friend who claimed that they’d accidentally left a diary at a bus stop and a year later one of the poems they’d written in that lost journal was now a top 40 pop song. I was skeptical, but, whatever, the truth of their story is beside the point. The idea at least has dramatic potential. I’ve always kinda wanted to use that notion in a character (in an RPG or a piece of fiction) but never got around to it… until the game at Dragonflight.

My character, Rory Wanker (of the once-almost-famous “Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickahs”) took that diary story and dialed it up to 11. He also had serious psychopathic delusions, and was convinced that he had previously killed Sir Paul McCartney four times and They just kept replacing the blighter with clones. I was basically claiming to have written the lyrics to every Lennon-McCartney song ever, and also claiming to be the cause of the “Paul is Dead” meme. I just riffed off that nonsense all night long.

Every time it was my turn, I pushed the rest of the our group of punks and bums towards tracking down Sir Clone McCartney and offing him again. As a group, we raised the Kill Cartney Count up from 4 to 6 over the course of the session. At least one of those two kills was deliberate misdirection from my fellow PCs, but who was I to quibble over the identity of the body they’d shivved? So our characters invaded the random hotel that I, in my delusion, insisted was where Sir Clone McSongthief was staying while he was in town.

So there’s this major player-driven plotline that served as the backbone of the session. About the only decision left for the GM was whether Paul McCartney was actually staying at that hotel - but from my crazed perspective it was irrelevant because no matter who was in that penthouse, I would fill in the connection to make them part of the Clone McCartney conspiracy. That’s kinda the point of playing a crazy person.

Long story short, I jump off the roof of the pent-house where we just killed McCartney #6. I did this at the end of somebody else’s scene that I happened to be present for. I chose my timing because I’d get to Kick the next scene:

Fade to black. Fade in to a fancy office with a huge desk, and framed gold records on the wall. Rory is there with his agent. “And that’s how the concept album ends, hence the name ‘Paul is Dead’. I’ve got most of the songs written, I’m ready to go to the recording studio.”

That’s a complete dick move, right there, narrating that the session only existed in my character’s album pitch. I tell myself it’s okay because my character is nuts enough that if anyone has an issue with my ending, they can just write it off as the crazy thing running through my head as I fall 20 stories. I was being a bad player, grandstanding and spotlight-hogging, then invoking my own Deus Ex Machina after I made a bone-headed suicidal move. That's totally the sort of nonsense I engage in as a player, especially in a rules-light "hippy game" like Urchin.

In any normal RPG, it’d be appropriate at that point for the GM to say “No, you’ve jumped off the roof, and now you’re dead.” Or at least roll damage or call for a saving throw vs falling or something.

Mechanical Failure:

Urchin’s mechanics aren’t really set up that way. PCs don’t die unless the player wants them to. Instead they end up “in the gutter”, which is just this unfun quantum state where your turns are skipped until a fellow PC brings you food, then you’re magically all okay. With the rules as written, the only way your PC can die against your will is if all the PCs end up in the gutter at the same time… or if all your fellow PCs hate you so much that no one will bring you a candy bar to save your life. You are expressly granted the narrative control to set your scene where-ever you want, and the GM’s main job is say “yes” repeatedly.

I feel urchin is broken. The rules are flawed. Every time I enjoy the game (and I usually do) I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky. The game is a house of cards that could topple over at any moment, but more often than not we get to the end of the session without bumping the metaphorical table.

In Urchin, players go around that table taking turns. Turns are entire scenes that could last anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. You can either “kick” a scene, or “grab” a scene. Kicking a scene is where the player narrates the situation and what their character is trying to do, and the GM just adjudicates the rules (and maybe sets the difficulty and results if the player chose to do something that’s not covered by the rules). When you Kick, you as player are usurping at least 80% of the power a GM normally has. A good game of Urchin is one with colorful PCs who take the initiative to do interesting things.

The other option is Grabbing a scene. Grabbing frees up the GM to narrate and frame the scene (giving them back the power most other games assume they always have). The rulebook also provides a chart the GM can roll on if no obvious scenes spring to mind. The Scene Grabbing Chart ranges from absolutely devastatingly terrible (attacked by multiple bad guys that each individually outclass you), to just mildly better than the average turn. Once the players have been bitten by that chart once or twice, they’ll stop grabbing and start kicking hard.

There’s only three ways a session of Urchin can end:

1. Agharta — Someone raises Mind up to 10 via the Blessing, receives a quest, and follows that to fabled hobo heaven. This is the intended ending the rulebook sets you up for.
2. Total Party Kill - Usually the result of failing to pay the light bill. Sometimes the lights are covered, but you still get a TPK when somebody grabs a scene after they or other players have stirred up the sort of trouble that could logically draw a police response.
3. Fizzle — The party splits and rambles, having some good flavorful scenes but never really engaging in anything that smells of plot. You eventually call the game because you’re getting tired and the game is growing old.

Of the three ways the game can end, two are generally undesirable. The occasional TPK or plotless rambling can be fun, but more often than not most players prefer some sort of dramatic arc and some chance of success. If you’re actually getting a group to play Urchin a second time within a few months of the first, there’s a good chance they’ll be on-task for the whole Mind 10 trip to Agharta thing.

Sadly, the path to Agharta is mathematically solvable. Each time around the table, one scummer needs to collect money to pay the lights. Everyone else can focus on the Blessing. You can scavenge for the raw materials, which you’re guaranteed to find, and if you’re willing to Push you can even ensure nothing bad (other than Mind Rot) happens while you’re searching. So Scummer A finds the components, and passes them off to Scummer B. Scummer B brews a few hits of the drug, pushing the roll if needed, and possibly suffering some Mind Rot. They pass the finished blessing to Scummer C who sells it to meatheads for 2 to 3 cash tokens per hit. In a four (or more) player game that can be done in one round. In the second round (or the same round if you’ve got a lot of players) you spend the cash buying more blessing from NPCs, and then selling it to other NPCs. It’s a goofy loophole that lets you, once you’ve got the initial investment capital, generate a feedback loop that slowly inches towards infinite blessing. Even if the GM plugs that rules-hole (and they might not want to, as being able to buy the blessing from NPCs is a nice safety net for low-mind PCs struggling with Madness), it’s still pretty easy for a 4-scummer circle to generate large amounts of blessing in just a couple low-risk rounds. Ultimately, Blessing is easy to come by.

Lots of blessing = lots of money and a high mind score = the lights never go out, and somebody becomes Captain. So if you’re concerned about winning the game, and willing to cooperate like a normal RPG party instead of struggling like scummer nutjobs, “winning” the game becomes a trivial exercise. The only thing that can trip up a coordinated party is rolling a 3 or a 5 on the Quest chart (but even that can be solved by aiming the blessing machine at a second player to generate a new Captain and a new Quest in the next round).

About the lights and turn order: 

It’s vital that the turn order get shaken up from time to time (don’t always start the round with the same player) or else the player at the end of the line usually gets stuck having to chase Cash Tokens every single turn. That player is left feeling like they have no freedom (as their only choice is whether to panhandle or mug from turn to turn), and probably won’t enjoy the game as much as the others. They may be tempted to not pay the light bill. The Lights Out Table is certainly fun, but it has at least a 1 in 3 chance of producing a TPK. I'm happy when that table gets action on in any Urchin game I'm involved in, but I can understand how it may not be some scummer's cup of tea.

The more I play the game, the more strongly I feel that Urchin desperately needs a 4th ending scenario. It could really use a little more narrative structure in case the players scatter, but that would require rules revisions, since the rules-as-written keep the GM from introducing any sort of plot at all.

Curse of the Were-Gator:

When I was GMing Urchin on Sunday, I tried to work in this oddball subplot about a were-alligator in the tunnels. In a five-hour game with 6 scummers, they Grabbed a scene exactly twice. Every time I could get away with narrating a background detail in somebody else’s scene, I mentioned the beast howling in the distance or causing problems with the subways, but nearly every time the players Kicked a scene they (wisely) narrated themselves far away from my were-villain. Most of the group individually chased after the Blessing right away, but weren’t very cooperative or coordinated about it early on, so they doubled-up on redundant steps and never actually got enough of the drug to boost someone to Captain status. Along the way, they mugged a rich person just outside an opera house, and drew police attention. Immediately afterwards they neglected to pay the light bill and rolled a Meathead Invasion that resulted in a (police-based) TPK that had nothing to do with my alligatanthropic monster.

The one time I got people to interact with my were-gator, the player Kicked his next scene by narrating that he was searching for ricotta cheese. Because “everyone knows” that ricotta is like wolvesbane for were-crocodiles. In a normal game, the GM would have control of whether or not this ludicrous notion was valid or just going to endanger you further… but in urchin searching for a piece of gear that gives you +1 die on rolls vs the crocogator is an automatic success and the player gets to narrate what that found gear is. In later turns they can even DIY themselves a better version of the object (maybe a cross-shaped cheese-log?) that gives even more dice. That’s cool. Bizarreness like this is at the heart of Urchin, but it does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the GM having very little power. I leaned hard on my big threat, and all it got me was one player spending one action to invent it’s weakness while everyone else just steered clear.

Everybody had fun playing weirdo nutjob scummers, so it all worked out for the best despite the relative lack of plot and the the TPFM (Total Party Ferguson, Missouri-ing) ending. Urchin is broken, but it’s not unplayable. It’s like the first edition of Og - you can run it as a one-shot and have a lot of fun, but consecutive plays in a short time frame are less fun and become increasingly focused on the mechanical failings. Urchin could really use a revision with the same goals as Robin Law’s “Unearthed Edition” of Og (which is to say a rewrite that preserves all the best bits of the current game but fixes core mechanics and gives you more reason to play a second time). I’ve got a couple ideas towards rebalancing it, and I may type them up in a future blog post, but for today I’ve probably rambled on long enough. There's blessing to brew, and somebody's gotta pay the lights around here.

The Doctor meets The Great Gazoo

Lesson learned while running Og last weekend at Dragonflight:

Never schedule The Doctor and The Great Gazoo for the same session of Og. It's too hard to keep their voices and personalities separate.  Limit one annoying time-traveler per session, please.

The End of Warhammer 3rd

Yesterday, FFG finally announced the thing all WFRP fans have suspected for more than a year. Warhammer Fantasy RPG 3rd Ed is over, and no new products will be released. They did kindly make a few final updates to their FAQ/Errata and Index files.

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I really like WFRP 3rd, but it had some major flaws. The overall concepts were great, but the execution was often sub-optimal.

• I love the narrative dice, and the non-binary results... but I felt I could never get their full potential out of them (and have had better luck with them when running rules-light spin-offs instead of the game itself). I feel that most of the cards give such small bonuses for most results that it leaves the GM very little room to improvise. If you interpret random left-over symbols on the rolls, your improvisations risk invalidating most of the printed Actions and Talents. 
• It also feels like there's too many symbols on the dice. Boon/Bane/Success/Failure would have sufficed, but we got those plus Comet/Star/Exertion/Delay. Those last four weren't truly necessary and the game would have been stronger without them.
• I like the idea of Reckless vs Conservative stance... but the benefits don't outweigh the clunky rules baggage. The difference between Reckless and Cautious makes sense, but transitioning from 2 deep to 3 deep in your current stance is jarringly gamist and hard to role-play or envision. "You know how I was really reckless and crazy last turn? Well now I'm officially 50% more reckless!"  The fights are too short, and the benefits of stance depth are too minimal, to justify building your character around the mechanic. Yet it's too integral (built into every Action and Career) to cut it out of the game without suffering a million little ripple effects. 
• I love having cards to reference with all my powers so I don't have to flip through rulebooks during play... but in practice, the large numbers of cards and tokens laying everywhere make a huge mess on even the largest table. The lack of a good summary or analysis anywhere makes it hard to pick out cards during character creation and encounter design, so whatever you time saved at the table is merely shifted to pre-game prep sessions. Still over all a savings (because during play is when time matters most), but it's not what it could be if it were better indexed.
• I like the idea of real-world careers, for the gritty realism they bring to the setting... but find it hard to suspend my disbelief during most actual career transitions.  You can choose Knight without ever doing anything worthy of being Knighted. Rat-Catcher today, Noble Lord tomorrow, all without the slightest nod towards storyline justification. Even when voluntarily restricting yourself to more sensible choices, the climb from raw Initiate to High Priest is usually accomplished in less than a month of in-character time.
• And as much as GM's love the idea of gritty careers, I find most players want to be knights, wizards, and other combat-oriented D&D staples, rather than starting as Warhammer's default "dregs of the Empire".
• I like that the critical hit, miscast, insanity and similar decks can be customized and updated on the fly to set the difficulty and tone of your campaign... but the game failed to ever take advantage of that flexibility and instead encouraged a shotgun approach where you just blindly throw in every card they made. The GM's guide really should have had some discussion of this, with custom decklists for various play styles.
• I hate: 
• the contradictory and confusing healing rules; 
• the non-obvious high-lethality of every single disease, and the uselessness of the medicines that give bonuses only after your 4th day of save-or-die treatment; 
• the opaque economic system and all those damn haggling and availability checks; 
• the sad fact that being on horseback is a major disadvantage for your Knight; 
• the advancement loopholes that allow you to career-swap for infinite Fortune dice; 
• the prohibitively high monetary barriers associated with Runesmithing; 
• the Rank One blessings of Verena and Ranald that break every single mystery-dependent plotline in the published adventures;
• and a few dozen other smaller rules-holes that should have all been caught and fixed if anything got playtested for more than a single session.

Grr! I admire so much about the game's theories, but next to none of it's implementation.  Running this for the past year and a half has left me very bitter.

The press release about the end of WFRP3e makes a cryptic hint that maybe a 4th Edition is in the works... but FFG has sat on the license with releasing anything over a year, and had slowed the release schedule to a crawl in the year before that, so they may very well continue to hold the license hostage without releasing anything. That sounds silly, but it may be that the WFRP license comes tied to the more profitable WH40K license, and thus worth them sitting on it.

It's a shame, because there's so much of the setting that could use sourcebooks (for 3rd, 1st/2nd, or a new edition). I'd love to see sourcebooks for any of the three types of Elves, or the Norscans, the Chaos Dwarves, Tilea and Estalia, the Ogre Kingdoms, etc.

Even if someone picks up the license (or FFG is hard at work on 4th Ed), it'll be years before we see such books in print. First some publisher would have to:

• 1) Pick up the license.
• 2) Design and release a new main book, or reprint (and possibly update) the core book of a previous edition
• 3) Write and release a new adventure to help ease new GMs into the setting and system. (Even if you were just reprinting a previous edition, you'd almost certainly put out a new adventure because it's an easy add-on sale and shows you're serious about reviving the product line.)
• 4) Produce and release the minimum sourcebooks necessary to just play the default Empire-centric setting. 
• So I'd guess at a minimum a magic sourcebook plus a religion sourcebook, and maybe some sort of GM's supplement or bestiary. 
• 4 to 6 products published in total, counting the corebook and initial adventure, before they get around to exploring new territory.
• 5) Sell enough copies of those 4 to 6 products to justify continuing work on new titles. This will take time, and for best results they'll be released about 1 per month.
• 6) Decide entirely new content is a better investment of time and energy than merely rehashing old stuff initially covered in existing books from previous editions. In other words, choose to do things the hard way instead of just cashing in on the existing body of previous work.
• 7) Get GW's approval on their manuscripts, which may be tricky if GW is (as has been rumored for months) rebooting the miniatures setting soon.

If someone picks up the license, and both major branches of the fan base embrace the new (or reprinted) version, then we'll eventually get some truly new content 4 months to 2 years after the new (or reprinted) core book releases.

If instead we splinter into further little angry sub-groups like the fanbase mostly did when 3rd ed came out, the new game (if there is one) won't survive long enough to explore new ground. I don't have a lot of hope here. I've been to the Strike-To-Stun forums, and they are not a friendly place to fans of 3rd Ed.

It's not impossible that FFG could be secretly working on a 4th Ed to be announced at GenCon. That would be the fastest track to us getting actual new content. If they are being that secretive about it, though, I'll be worried about whether or not it got enough playtest before publication. I love 3rd Ed, but as I said, it really needed a more thorough blind playtesting than it got.

If FFG is not secretly at work on a new edition as we speak, then the next best hope for new content would be if a new licensee was to launch a Kickstarter (etc) to gather up tons of fan money and not release the mechanics (since they'll likely be unappealing to at least 1/2 the possible fanbase either way) until after the money is in their hands. I don't know if GW would let them do that, but if they did, a successful crowd-funding might actually free up budget early on for exploring new corners of the setting. Even then, most Kickstarters take forever to deliver their product. I wouldn't hold your breath.

Old-School Conspiracy-Mapping with Night's Black Agents

I think I need a bigger corkboard. Here's what my Night's Black Agents PCs have uncovered of the conspiracy as of session 3 (and that third session was only about 2 hours of play). Mostly stolen from The Zalozhniy Sanction: Russian mafiya in the top and left, undead in the the middle and creepy locations below that, plus a subplot or two over on the right. NBA's mechanics actually give the PCs bonus points for every piece of string linking people or places.

When non-gamer visitors come over they see that wall and immediately start asking if I'm investigating a murder. (Note to the surveillance team in the white van that's always down the street: It's all just a game. I promise.)

No Use Matrix Tables, Play Og!

I just signed up to run a session of Og: Unearthed Edition at the Dragonflight convention next month. I'll also be GMing it this weekend for a group of friends from my wife's workplace.

I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen.  Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.

I'm also currently toying with the idea that a sheet of black construction paper and an old Icehouse set makes a good simulation of the table with the matrix of control crystals from the inside of a pylon in Land Of The Lost. The idea is to present the players with the sort of intellectual challenge that makes D&D gamers groan and start asking to short-circuit it with an Intelligence check... knowing full well that as cavemen, they'll just smash the device with rocks and clubs. It's your classic unsolvable puzzle situation, but this time no one has any delusions about needing (or being able) to actually solve it. I mean, I did work out a puzzle for it, but I'm not expecting the players to actually solve it, and the plot won't bog down regardless of whether or not they do. No use smart thing, play Og!

Push 'Em Off The Pier

Here's an NPC action I made for my Warhammer Campaign. It's very situational, only any good for staging a brawl on the docks.

The card also hasn't been tested at all, so I make no promises about it. The PCs in my campaign short-circuited the encounter before the henchmen could even show up. They dropped the villain to within 2 wounds of a KO before he could act (or call for help), and then shot him again after he surrendered.

My plan had been to use the "Overboard!" card from the Dreadfleet Captains POD expansion as the "new terrain card" mentioned on the triple-success line, but you might choose a less daunting card if your water isn't quite so deep and fast.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT: The above card is very loosely based off an encounter from The Enemy Within, and to a lesser extent the Grapple card from the core set. I scaled it back considerably from the effects of the opposed Athletics rolls on page 132 of TEW because the original tests were a bit over the top. In the adventure, the NPCs only needed a single success to automatically knock a PC out of the fight. This meant a simple Ruffian NPC with 1 Expertise had a 30% chance of effectively one-shotting a min-maxed melee-oriented PC and as high as an 80% chance of doing the same to the party's wizard or other low-strength character. I know the game is pretty deadly, but those numbers seemed un-fun. My version cuts those numbers down to 7% and 20%.  (GM's who feel I'm going too easy on the PCs could change the triple-success line to a double-success line to set the numbers at a more threatening 16% and 63%.)

Middenheim NPC Cards

SPOILER ALERT: This blog post reveals plot points and NPC stats for The Enemy Within for Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition. If you're a warhammer player and haven't already completed Book 2 of that adventure, you should probably skip this post.

This weekend my play group reunites for some more Warhammery goodness after about a month-long break. We're on Book Three of The (New) Enemy Within, which takes place in Altdorf. Since we've left Book Two behind, I can safely post a few GM's aids I put together for the Middenheim section.

The rest of this post is mostly NPC stat cards for plot-relevant characters (plus a few other related bits). The adventure really should have come with cards for all of these characters, but (probably for budgetary concerns) didn't. It's especially annoying because the index of monster and NPC stats at the back of the adventure doesn't include them either. For reasons that completely boggle my mind, it only includes stats for NPCs from Books 1, 3, and 4. As a matter of fact, many of the important NPCs in Book 2 lack stats entirely, or list only the difficulty to sway them with a Fellowship check and leave any further interactions up to GM improvisation.

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NPCs for "The Wizard's Task" in Book 2
Let's start with a gaggle of Ulrichian Priests:

 Acting High Priest Weiss is the guy you really want to talk to.  He appears on pages 89-90 of The Enemy Within, but doesn't really have stats there other than those specifically pertaining to the social rolls needed to sway him to the cause. I filled in the rest of his stats as befits a career official in one of the most macho cults in the empire. The art for the card I screenshot-ed out of some fan supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but I'm afraid I've lost track of where that came from or who the artist was. My bad.

 Unfortunately, getting to Weiss is complicated because he has a number of gatekeepers in the way.  Priest Frost is the more capable and sympathetic of the two. I based his stats on the generic Priest card, which I then upgraded a little to represent that he was an up-and -coming Priest before his tragic accident (the lingering effects of which I loosely based on the rules on page 14 of Liber Carnagia).

Priest Albrecht, the first gatekeeper the PCs encounter, is not sympathetic at all. He is likely to be played as either annoying or farcical, depending on the GM's whim. Correspondingly, he's actually a down-graded version of the NPC Priest card. I never saved nor used the art for the other side of the card, as it was far too manly and competent looking for the character as written up. Instead, when I went to introduce the character to the players I used a Paizo Gamemastery "Face Card" that showed some old fat guy in robes.

To even get an audience with the Priests the PCs first have to meet up with Professor Robertus von Oppenheim. There's a good chance the players will haul him off on a wolf-hunt, so he needed stats and again the adventure doesn't really provide any. I considered giving him some dreadful "2" ratings in attributes, but was worried it would make him too likely to die and stall out the plot. I decided instead to simply make his stats very average with modifiers depending on his access to reference materials. This resulted in the PCs carrying around an amusingly large stack of books to help him out, so I consider it a success. Again I used a card from Paizo as a visual aide for the players. I find their face cards extremely helpful as reminders, especially when running a complicated scenario with as large a cast as The Enemy Within.

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NPCs for "The Noble's Task" in Book 2

 One of the other major plotlines going on in the adventure involves the trial of Graf von Aschenbeck, so I made cards for him and his daughter. His cards (and most of what follows) are devoid of artwork, because by this point I'd decided to just use Paizo cards for all my remaining major NPCs. I made the Graf's stats deliberately underwhelming since he's effectively just filling the "damsel in distress" role. The rules for Noble Rank presented here aren't technically correct (or at least are a liberal interpretation), but they're close enough for NPCs and somewhat more elegant than what's in the Lure Of Power rulebook. The other special ability is of functionally identical to having socketed one of the least practical Talent cards in the game.

Chances are I'm mistakenly applying the Freiin title to Margarete, I don't claim to be an expert on the noble titles of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Warhammer Empire. Sadly she's a relatively minor bit of set-dressing / clue-giver / damsel-in-distress / red herring, without much depth. In retrospect I wish the scenario did more with her.

The red image here is my interpretation of the von Aschenbeck crest as described in the book, useful for marking the Graf's properties and businesses, and for marking the Bravos when they first show up.

The lives of those poor nobles above are being ruined by this fellow. He's the weaker of the two villains of Book 2. He's also rather less dangerous than the thugs and mutants he can throw at the PCs if he realizes they're on to him. The adventure is heavily stilted towards him escaping in the night, and I imagine if the PCs got their hands on him it would be a little anticlimactic, as he's a pushover in combat. Good thing there's bigger fish to fry and a Book 3.

Ilse the con-woman is a minor criminal caught up in Markheim's scheme. I only used one of her prepared scenes, personally, as my players were pointed straight at Markheim and the Bravos without her testimony. I was a little torn about whether or not to include the bit where the villain tries to tidy up loose ends. The Bright Wizard in my party could have used the spotlight moment, but stopping the arson/murder would have taken exactly one easy die roll (he has the spell that controls fires and renders them harmless) and thus had zero dramatic tension. For the record, one of the Paizo decks has a perfect Ilse card, but I never used it because it was only going to draw attention to her before the PCs learned she was a baddie. I wanted her to feel improvised and unimportant until the PCs had reason to suspect her, which is probably a dirty meta GM trick on my part. So sue me.
 
The Aschenbeck Bravos are the most legitimate set of goons that Markheim can send after the PCs.
 
The adventure says to use the generic Soldier card with a couple modifications based on equipment and (for the officers) skills trained. I didn't want to have to consult both a card and a page in a book at the same time to run the scene, so I made cards out of them. For all the cultists and mutants I could basically just use pre-existing cards (though I did stack the "Monstrous" Upgrade sheet under the especially leggy Mutant boss), so I didn't feel the need to make cards for them.

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NPC for "The Captain's Task" in Book 2

Gregor Helstrum is a potential ally for the PCs, and an escape hatch / safety valve for the GM if things are getting out of hand with Adele or any of the other plots. But again, like so many of the NPCs in Book 2, he has no stats. That's fine if you plan to use him as a Deus Ex Machina, but I wanted to make sure the PCs could fight at his side should that be their intent. (In the end I didn't really need stats for him because the PCs at my table are pretty badass in a fight and also did a good job of following the clues. They put down two entire cults that the adventure script didn't really expect them to get anywhere near, so I was quite proud of them. But, I digress...) His "bad eye" isn't in the book at all. It corresponds to the eyepatch of the Paizo Face Card I used for him, and I think was based on a Critical or Serious wound card, but I don't remember whether I chose the image first and picked a wound to match or dealt a random serious wound and found a face to match it. Either way, GMs who want a less grizzled version of the character can freely ignore it. It's not present in the official picture of Hellstrum on pg 79 of the adventure, but that page has serious spoilers on it so I didn't want to flash it at my players anyway so a Paizo card was in order. Exactly which 2 insanities you attach to his NPC card will greatly color the character. (The same can be said for Adele Ketzenblum, for that matter.) I played Gregor as very shell-shocked and burned-out in the one scene I used him, which probably contributed to the PCs deciding not to ask him for additional help.

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In closing:
I think that's all the official Enemy Within Middenheim NPCs that I made cards for. Hopefully they'll save some other GM a bit of work. I clearly had too much time on my hands.


I also made this Talent-sized card based on the Middenlander rules from Hero's Call. In practice it was rarely relevant or needed. I present it as a possible upgrade should the GM desire making the fights a little tougher, or if you really want to emphasize the differences between the various Imperial Provinces.

Beyond the above, I made stat cards for a few more NPCs that weren't in the adventure as written, introduced to give my PCs some spotlight moments and interesting subplots, or to build out the city into something a little more sandboxy and show more of the greater Storm of Chaos metaplot. That's probably worth a whole additional post some other time, as there's a lot of backstory to convey if I want them to be useful to other GMs.

Paint Og

I realized yesterday that:

• It had been a really long time since I last broke out the paints and canvas
• "Cubist" is not on the Og word list

Recent Ogsomeness

Just a typical day in the land of Og:

Here you have sleestacks about to sacrifice a caveman on an altar to their unholy alien god. Behind them, several more neanderthals ride up in a flinstones-style car, while a phorusrhacidae (giant flightless carnivorous "terror bird", here played by an oversized dodo miniature) and an allosaurus watch on. The weird lump in a net next to the tirepile in the foreground is yet another hominid "hero" bound and awaiting his chance to be sacrificed by a lizardman priest. Yep, perfectly average day for our prehistoric ancestors, just dripping with verisimilitude.

I've run two games of Og in the last two weeks. One session had 4 players, 3 of whom had never played an RPG before. The other session had 7 players, 2 of whom I had never met before. Both games worked bangingly well, and I've been asked to break out the game again next month.

This is a big step up in Og-GM-ing frequency for me; I usually run the game about once a year. Mainly the long cooling-off cycle was because coming up with genuinely funny plotlines is hard, and the only alternative to running a truly funny scenario in Og is to dare to run its' bare-bones ass-backwards stupidly-simple d6-only retro combat mechanics.

Anyone who's ever read those rules thinks "OMG, this system is horrible! It's too limited and it takes forever to kill anything. I don't want to ever run this part of the game, so I'll just avoid all the fights and it'll be much better."

Those people are wrong.

True, the system is ridiculously light, and the fights are all rigged against the PCs, and it takes far too many hits to kill anything of importance, and your character will probably forget how to attack three times before the combat is done... and that's what makes it so awesome. In both of these recent sessions I had multiple combats running simultaneously on different parts of the table, and the pacing was still smooth and speedy. Seriously, if you've avoided big fights in Og because it seems like the combat system is made of un-fun, you're doing your players a disservice. Break out the biggest ugliest plastic dino you can find, and let them fail miserably for an hour or so. They'll laugh themselves to death.

As you can tell, I GM Og with a lot of props close at hand. It's an RPG where characters have extremely limited, damn-near-useless, vocabularies. This results in the "party", such as it is, scattering to the winds every chance they get. There is absolutely zero tactical planning and next to zero in-character cooperation. So I load the game down with as many WYSIWYG props as I can, so that everyone understands where things are and can judge for themselves just how screwed they are. (For the record, it's "very" screwed. Just sayin'.)

Towards that end, my wife and I have thrown together a few custom props for Og.

Props are a caveman's best friend.

From left to right:

• D&D minis make fine cavemen. Ghouls, ghasts, taers, quaggoths, morlocks, poorly-equipped orcs, etc. Anything brutish and almost-human works fine as long as it's underdressed. I use a mixture of species for the PCs so they're easier to tell apart.
• Land of the Lost references a plenty: 
• the little crystal-matrix table I made from sculpey, in scale to the pylon and the cavemen.
• the larger translucent crystal is from an icehouse set, and not to scale, but I sometimes use them to represent the pylon's matrix in-game.
• the construction-paper pylon has little foldable flaps that let change it from open to closed formation as the fickle whims of fate demand.
• My lovely wife made the excellent sculpey nest. I plan on using it every time we play. You can never have too many dino (or terror-bird, or pterodactyl) eggs.
• "You Go Bang Food" are four of the cards I use to assign vocab words at random. Rarely do the words empower fully-formed sentences like that.
• The doedicurus (5000lb spiky-tailed armadillo) is made by Safari Ltd, whose line of very fancy megafauna and dino minis can be found at all your better toy stores. (I shop Top Ten Toys in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.) If your budget is tight, most thriftstore toy departments will have some truly wretched hand-me-down plastic dinos that will work just fine, and the teeth-marks merely add to the authenticity.
• The framework of a sculpey flinstones-style car I made yesterday just before heading to the game. It fits four cavemen in comfort.
• My wife made a series of little sculpey flames useful for noting where the campfire is, which caveman set himself ablaze this time, and what portions of the jungle are currently being consumed by the wildfire.
• She also crafted the stone wheel and it's too less-than-perfect prototypes to match the illustration of the "Build" skill from page 12 of Og Unearthed Edition. Stupid cavemen.

The crawling chaos; the plush abomination; Gnarly Hotep!

Sometimes all that hard work and sacrifice really pays off, such as shown above when the lizardfolk managed to summon up their foul god, Gnarly Hotep via an offering of caveman blood. Ia, Ia, Sleestack Ftagn! (Apparently some people spell it "Nyarlathotep", but he'll always be Gnarly Hotep to me.)

The crappy plastic trees and rocks in the backgrounds of my various pictures came in 2-dollar bags of plastic dinos or green army men. They are absolutely horrible, but they do the trick. They also get caught in my long hair every time I lean over the table to move a mini, so apparently I need to pack a pony-tail holder in my box of dinos and terrain.

Thanks to the in-character Draw skill, you can also sometimes ask your players to contribute props mid-session. Last night, one character was searching for beloved possession that had been stolen by the sleestacks. He was using Explore or Forage (I forget which) to search his tribe's cave (because the lizardmen who abducted half his tribe clearly weren't the main suspects in his infallible caveman logic) for the missing item, and rolled a "1".  Something caused him to forget how to search... so I turned to another PC who had the draw skill, and asked her to draw the dirty pictures that had distracted him.  You ready for the state-of-the-art in cave-painting porno?

NSFW Og Porn Alert!

Og Porn: Doin' it mammoth-style!

Yep, I run a classy game.