Mister Monster's Workshop

Author: Mister Monster

  • Nothing new to add, so here, have some mages

    Nothing new to add, so here, have some mages

    This hasn’t been a very productive week by any means. I didn’t manage to do any actual work on any actual project – instead, I seem to have spent most of it inventing NPCs for my Mage: the Ascension game. Which I guess needed doing at some point, but still, my inspiration remains fickle and unreliable.

    All that said, here’s what I’ve come up with for the Traditions in the San Francisco area:

    • Cassie Moran – aging rock goddess and Cultist of Ecstasy. She uses her precognition and clairvoyance to play the entire underground music scene like an instrument, trying to build it up to a force for enlightenment, rebellion, and all-around grooviness. Anything she does is probably motivated by its sixth-level consequences.
    • Jonathan White Eagle – life coach to the wealthy and Dreamspeaker. Is gruff and set in his ways, all the more so since he worries that his attempts to make rich people connect to their spiritual side is diluting his own ancestral ways. He’s the last Dreamspeaker in the area, and looking to take on an apprentice.
    • Jeremy Linton – geeky pencil-neck and Virtual Adept. He messes around with nano-machine clouds and is enthusiastic about the idea of turning the Earth into “computronium” that will rearrange itself to the will of any human. Well, any human who’s good with computers, at least, but who cares about those other meat-headed jocks?
    • Rosa “Rush” Martinez – tough biker chick and Virtual Adept. A “neo-nomad” who thinks that permanent residence is just something The Man has invented to keep track of you better. Part of a cabal with Jeremy and Ranjit, and tends to handle the rough stuff for them.
    • Ranjit Morrow – a self-proclaimed “Doctor of Mesmerism” and Son of Ether. Practices hypnotic suggestion to manipulate “archetypes of the collective unconscious” and draw forth “unresolved defense mechanisms from failed stages of development.” Likes to stroke his beard wisely at people and puff his pipe. Tends to hang out with Jeremy and Rosa and handle all that nasty “people skills” stuff for them.
    • Rowan Flynn – a “warrior bard,” a Cultist of Ecstasy who would probably have been happier as a Verbena. An erstwhile apprentice of Cassie’s, but seems to be having some conflict with her now. She can heal people through harp music, incense, and touches, or work herself into a berserker frenzy where she can feel no pain. Has some anger management issues.
    • Aloysius Crane – a masochist and piercing enthusiast and Cultist of Ecastasy. Looks absolutely terrifying but is extremely soft-spoken and mild-mannered if you get to talking with him. He considers submission to pain to be the path to true enlightenment. He mostly backs up Cassie in whatever she does.

    And for the worthy opposition in the Technocracy, without names as of yet but called by the names the Traditions give them:

    • “The Nice Doctor”, NWO: A middle-aged man with long, wild-grown grey hair, usually wearing shabby clothes, cracked glasses, and untied sneakers. Despite looking like a crazy hobo, he’s a frequent visitor of city hall where he “consults” on details of policy being written, and a popular guest lecturer at USF within a surprising number of social sciences. His go-to apparatus is an innocent-looking device about the size and shape of a pen, which can emit high-frequency sonic waves that renders people instantly pliable to hypnotic suggestion. People who threaten to rock the boat in a serious way might be meet him, and the person who walks away from such meetings frequently has very different views than the person who came to it.
    • “The Woman in Grey”, NWO: a prim, plain woman in her forties, always dressed in a grey business suit and with her hair in a bun. She is most commonly seen taking part in investigations of major crimes and threats to national security, with the other detectives and agents involved being under the impression that she’s from one of any number of alphabet-soup agencies, or possibly one that’s too secret to even have a name. Either way, her cases tend to get solved promptly and without her taking credit, but almost always in some way that demonstrates the reliability of public investigators and the absolute need to keep giving them any and all powers they ask for. If you have done something illegal in your life – anything – then she most likely doesn’t care, but she absolutely knows about it, and has a meticulously prepared dossier to present you with should she ever need to apply some pressure.
    • “The Blank”, NWO: the Traditionalists are only mostly sure that this is a single person, and only because a number of people who seemed to have very different physical appearances have been noted as having suspiciously similar magical Resonances. Either way, the Blank kills people who the Technocracy regards as irredeemably disruptive to the Consensus; Marauders, Nephandi, terrorists, serial killers, the occasional non-human supernatural. When no one needs to be bumped off, the Blank is believed to be managing security at the San Francisco construct, but hell knows.
    • “Ol’ Henry”, Void Engineer: not technically part of the NWO amalgam made up of the Nice Doctor, the Woman in Grey, and the Blank, but sort of loosely attached to it, Henry is a Void Engineer who’s been grounded for extreme uncooperativeness and set to track down and dispose of the hobgoblins, rogue spirits, or sundry creepy-crawlies that San Francisco has more than its share of. He looks like a scruffy man in a faded jumpsuit, with a pair of high-tech bracelets with a tremendous array of built-in weapons. The Paradox building up from his use of vulgar Effects (the Umbra is so much more forgiving of such things, and he’s too stubborn to change his ways) has caused him to develop some peculiarities, like nictitating membranes and odd subdermal tumours that sometimes seems to move across his body. He has been known to grudgingly team up with Traditionalists to take down his prey; he has no particular love for Reality Deviants, but then, he seems to have no particular love for anyone or anything.
    • “Mr. Slick”, Syndicate: young, trendy, confident, and oilier than a can of anchovies. He firmly believes that what people want, really want, is the coolest and most expensive toys, and he’s got the personal collection of overdesigned bleeding-edge gadgets to prove it. He is also heavily into youth outreach, trying to mold the next generation into proper go-getters by showing them the benefits of a completely materialistic lifestyle; this has led him to both sponsor the Trinity Burning gang and to take promising young students from underprivileged backgrounds under his wing.
    • “Numbercrunch”, Syndicate: a strange, autistic teenage girl who rarely ventures out of her den of a thousand monitors beneath the construct. When she does go out for a field investigation, she wears a hood and headphones to prevent sensory overload. Her Empowering came when she read “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and then spent the next forty-eight hours writing a new edition with another forty-two habits. She goes through media output and statistical data and predicting the future over the entire area, making the Syndicate amalgam very hard to take by surprise.
    • “The Slav”, supposedly Syndicate but actually Nephandus: a surly, hirsute Russian who looks more like a janitor than the master of middle management that he is. He does consulting work for a number of R&D divisions, where he snarls at engineers until their output skyrockets. He also heads up the a reclusive team that produces experimental weapons for field testing. Unknown to his colleagues, the Slav is actually in league with Pentex, who supplies him with Bane-powered fetishes that slowly corrupt the mages who use them. In his youth, he was a fervent believer in the American Dream and the promises of capitalism, having been raised on horror stories of his grandparents’ time in the Soviet Union. However, he Fell upon realising just how amoral the Syndicate truly was and now works to make capitalism every bit as bad as its worst critics claim it is; a human race that can turn any and every economic system into a nightmare, he believes, deserves to suffer.
  • R.E.S.P.E.C.T., find out what it means to me

    R.E.S.P.E.C.T., find out what it means to me

    This week’s roleplaying session was cancelled, I’m sorry to say – one player not being able to make it I can roll with, but when we’re down to half strength I have to admit that the stars are just not right. At least prepping Werewolf got me going on some alterations I’ve been meaning to make for a while now.

    For one thing, I’ve scrapped the Bonds system, which is meant to help the players start out with some pre-defined relationships to each other. Sounds good in theory, but in practice all the players I’ve ever subjected it to have hated it. As a result, I’ve been drifting away from it in my later ports. It’s only in the Werewolf port because it was my first and I was still cribbing a lot of stuff from Dungeon World and Apocalypse World.

    Still, I really do want some kind of mechanic that encourages players to act out the meeting-between-cultures aspect of the game. I feel like a major part of any World of Darkness game is people with very different viewpoints coming together and realising that they all have something to offer, and that’s really cool. And it feels especially vital to Werewolf, where the backstory has a ton of disasters and tragedies caused by one faction deciding that it was just plain right about everything.

    So here’s my new attempt: whenever a player in some way pays tribute to their Tribe’s distinctive nature (whether by words or deeds), and the other players are down with it, that player holds Respect. Respect can be spent to give bonuses to other players’ actions. Essentially, proudly representing your heritage and being open to learning from each other allows you to function better as a team.

    I’m not sure if it needs some more support. What I mean with “pay tribute to their Tribe’s nature,” I mean things like being a scheming bastard for a Shadow Lord or a street-smart survivor for a Bone Gnawer – acting out the archetype, basically. I guess that might be pretty easy for a long-time World of Darkness freak like me but a bit harder for someone I’m trying to introduce to the setting? Dunno. I’ve made the mistake of over-explaining things before, though, so I’ll leave it like this for now.

  • A matter of time

    A matter of time

    I’ve gotten a bit more work in on my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. I’ve been thinking, too, that perhaps I’ve been looking at it wrong. Instead of feeling like I’m just writing the same game again but with less stuff in it, I should take it as an opportunity to identify the parts that are important and the parts that aren’t? God knows, I threw in everything but the kitchen sink when I wrote this thing. It might not be the worst thing in the world to consider whether I actually need all of it.

    For example, the Interval rules. Now, in theory I think those are pretty solid. They are essentially a way to manage time-keeping in game, and let different things take different amounts of time without too much nitty-gritty counting of seconds and minutes. And taking significant extra time with a task – as in, spending hours instead of minutes of it, for instance – gives you a big boost to your action, because it should.

    But when I think back to my playtesting… I’m not sure I’ve actually used the system terribly much? Maybe it’s the players I have, but no one ever did say, “okay, I just spend as long on this as it takes.” They usually wanted to be done in a reasonable time or not at all. Likewise, I like the idea of putting events on a timer and counting down to when things happened, but the game actually ran better those times I didn’t do that but let things happen more or less as I felt like.

    Maybe I should be on the lookout for things that should quite frankly be simpler. I’m not going to edit the whole game all over again, because I don’t think I’d ever finish if I did, but still… it might be handy to have a simpler version available. And if nothing else, there’s always the second edition.

  • First free download is up!

    First free download is up!

    This week, I can report a milestone in this site’s existence: I have put my first PDF up for download. It’s my Powered by the Apocalypse port of Mummy: the Resurrection. I added the fourth level of every Hekau and wrote up some obambo wraiths, so now I’m declaring it to be finished. I might add more later – there are always the need for more NPCs, and there are of course fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth levels of Hekau that I haven’t converted – but for now, anyone who wants it can go over to the download page (link to the upper right) and help themselves.

    I’m quite proud of this port, since Mummy is a game that always needed a lot more love than it got. I didn’t just need to create a bunch of rule systems, I needed to come up with an intended playstyle and setting from the rather anemic hints that exist in the official books. In the end, I tried to make it a game about sinister plots foiled and strongholds of evil infiltrated, since that seemed to be what the spells and rituals in the source material encouraged: the impression I get was of mummies as a sort of secret agents, James Bond with mystical amulets and alchemical potions instead of high-tech gadgets. And I spent a lot of time researching Cairo, Egypt, and Islam, not to get the details right (because let’s face it, I probably got most of them wrong) but to get some sort of feel for it all, some idea of how the Middle Eastern parts of the World of Darkness look and sound like.

    It’s not perfect, of course. Like I’ve talked about before, there were areas where I just had to give up, where the problems I saw with the game were inherent in the setting and I couldn’t fix them without rewriting the whole thing from scratch. For one thing, if I created my own game inspired by Mummy – and I might some day – I would dial down the way that things in the Shadowlands are impossible to manipulate because they are reflections of material things, and instead make it more like a zombie apocalypse setting or a survival horror game: everything is broken down and unhelpful, but most of it can be salvaged, repurposed or repaired, if you just work long and hard enough at it. “Maybe, if you’re persistent and lucky” is a lot more interesting to tell the players than, “no, that’s impossible.”

    Still, it’s the first officially finished project of the game-design kick I’ve been on for the last couple of years. Hopefully there’ll be many more to come.

  • Breeds of Monsters

    Breeds of Monsters

    This week, I have started hammering away on my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart again. I absolutely need one of those, because I need something I can hand out for free to give people a sense of what the game is all about, so that they might become inclined to pay me actual money for it… but man, it’s not exactly playing to my strengths. As my snarkier friends love to remind me, keeping it short and sweet isn’t really my thing. Adding another 200 pages so I can be absolutely certain I made myself clear, that’s my thing.

    Still, I’ve made some progress on the brief descriptions of my game’s splats – “Breeds” in the game’s nomenclature. The following are my five favourite ones out of the total twelve. See, I’m leaving the other seven out for now! I can be brief! Though it pains me.

    BREEDS

    The first thing you need to do when creating a character is choose a Breed. Your Breed is the sort of creature the world insists that you “intrinsically” are; a shambling Zombie, a foul-smelling Harpy, or some other character straight out of fantasy central casting. Most Monsters surrender to the strictures of their Breed to some extent, since it seems to be no escaping them, and at least being a Monster gives you an excellent excuse for not being socially acceptable (“of course I haven’t done the vacuuming – I’m one of the walking dead! You should be amazed I can do anything other than decompose!”). Others try to fight against it, usually with limited results (“crap, my B.O. is back. Guess it’s time to take the sixteenth shower of the day…”).

    Each Breed is marked out by having a particular curse, a Bane, that applies to it. It also provides access to a set of special powers called a Doom. Both are described along with their associated Breed. In the game proper, each Breed has several Dooms and several Banes, but for this quickstart, we’ll make it easy for ourselves and stick to one each.

    A Doom provides several different powers, one for each Level of the Doom. Since in the quickstart each Monster is assumed to have reached the Limited Level of its Breed’s Doom, your character has ready access to the Minimal and Limited powers for his Doom, can make a one-time use of the Basic power by spending 1 GP, and can make a one-time use of the Advanced power by spending 3 GP. Don’t worry too much about what any of that means – we’ll go over it in more detail later.

    Each Breed is called by the name of the mythological beast it designates a Monster as being, but each one also has another, more informal name, that reflects how other Monsters tend to see it. Thus, Dragons are also known as “Hoarders” for their obsessive collecting of one thing or another. The two names are used interchangeably through the rest of the quickstart.

    CREEP (GOBLIN)

    Creeps can’t seem to help getting on people’s nerves. Part of it is their habit of, well, creeping around and spying on people, all in the service of their insatiable curiosity. Part of it is the attempt to use rote memorisation of pop psychology as a substitute for developing actual people skills. But mostly, there is just something about them that ticks people off, something that makes them give off an air of perversity and weakness that makes others want to punch them on general principle. This, needless to say, just gives the Creeps more incentive to skulk and hide, making them even creepier and easier to hate, and furthering the vicious cycle. Their mythological source appears to be Goblins or the nastier and more old-fashioned kind of fairies.

    Bane: Abhorrent Face. It doesn’t matter how hard a Creep tries to please others; it always comes across as incredibly slapable. Once per Session, the GM may have an NPC physically assault the Creep on the flimsiest pretext. The NPC is only affected for a moment, so after taking the initial swing he might immediately calm down and be shocked and apologetic, unless of course he’s the sort of person who takes a pride in always finishing what he’s started.

    Doom: Fae’s Trickery. Goblins are mysterious and elusive, or at least slippery little bastards who never seem to be around when you’re looking for them. The Doom of Fae’s Trickery is one of stealth, illusion, and getting out of trouble – a highly useful skill for a Breed that’s always in hot water.

    • Minimal Fae’s Trickery: Just Pretend I’m Not Here. The Creep can make itself undetectable, for an Interval of Minutes, in any way by anyone who does not pass a Minimal Grit Challenge. Since almost no one has less than Minimal Grit, this in practice means that the Creep can only hide from people who not only have low Grit in the first place but who for some reason suffers Disadvantages to Grit Challenges – for instance, the intoxicated, the exhausted, or those in serious pain. If the Creep does anything other than stand or walk very slowly while keeping absolutely quiet, the effect immediately ends.
    • Limited Fae’s Trickery: Please Not Me. Whenever the GM declares that the someone targets the Creep at random with any Action (e.g., an angry dog deciding who of two intruders in its yard to bite), the Creep can use this power to redirect the unwanted attention to another possible party. This does not work when the Creep is the only possible target, nor when the attention is evenly spread over all possible targets (e.g., if there were two angry dogs in the yard, each would naturally go for a different intruder; this power could not be used to make both of them go for the Creep’s companion). This trick sees much use from teenage Goblins who don’t want to be called on to answer questions in class.
    • Basic Fae’s Trickery: No Soul. The Creep can cause itself to have no reflection in mirrors for an Interval of Minutes. During this time it also does not show up video recordings or photographs. The same goes for any other technological way of detecting someone’s presence, like proximity alarms, etc. The Creep remains fully visible to the regular human senses. Edge cases may create strange results – for instance, a near-sighted person would see the Creep through her spectacles looking as blurry as if she wasn’t wearing them, even though everything else in her field of vision remains clear.
    • Advanced Fae’s Trickery: Behind A Single Blade of Grass. The Creep makes itself capable, for an Interval of Minutes, of hiding even in the complete absence of any visual cover or concealment; effectively, the Disadvantage caused by lack of cover is completely negated. The Creep must still win a Hiding vs Keenness Contest against the people it tries to hide from as normal, and any Disadvantages not related to cover still apply normally.

    HOARDER (DRAGON)

    Hoarders like to, well, hoard things. Usually it’s some weirdly specific thing, like porcelain cats or works of Czech literature in their original language. Whatever it is, the Hoarder is constantly scheming to get more, better, and rarer specimens to increase its mostly worthless treasure trove, even if it means spending its last dime or getting thrown in prison for it. Their mythical origin seems to be the cunning, greedy Dragon, forever roosting on its pile of gold.

    Bane: It Must Be Mine! Hey, a Hoarder’s gotta hoard. The PC has an obsessive need to collect some sort of items. It starts each Story having picked out some moderately hard-to-get-hold-of item that it absolutely must have for its collection (if it was trivially easy to get hold of, it’d have already have gotten it). Until it has managed to secure the object, it is distracted and doesn’t notice what’s going on around it, taking a Moderate Disadvantage to all Keenness Challenges.

    Doom: Wyrm’s Discernment. Dragons are cunning and wise, capable of seeing what others cannot and of spotting things of value where others see only dross.

    • Minimal Wyrm’s Discernment: Read the Writing on the Wall. By passing this Challenge, the Monster can instinctively know which of the people and objects currently within its line of sight are in some way “important.” Precisely what that means is up to the GM; generally, it means whether they have a major part to play in a currently ongoing adventure (for instance, named GMCs are usually “important”). The power imparts no further information, but it does make it possible to make cryptic utterances that will later make it seem like you knew what was coming all along.
    • Limited Wyrm’s Discernment: Ooooh, Look at The Colours… Passing this Challenge enhances an Understanding vs Bullshitting or Understanding vs Grit Contest to get an idea for a GMC’s personality, granting a Minor Advantage to the Monster by giving it a vision of a coloured aura around the target. The power also tells the Monster whether the target is currently acting under some kind of duress, though if they are it provides no insight into just how and why and by who they are compelled.
    • Basic Wyrm’s Discernment: Nose For Gold. By passing this Challenge, the Monster immediately knows the location of the most object that is most valuable or useful to the Monster (by the GM’s best estimation, and as the Monster defines value) within an area roughly equivalent to a large room. It does not provide any information about the nature of the prize. The usefulness of the object can depend on factors that the Monster is not currently aware of, e.g., if the Monster is about to be attacked the power might point it to the closest convenient improvised weapon.
    • Advanced Wyrm’s Discernment: By the Pricking of My Thumbs… For an Interval of Minutes after passing this Challenge, the Monster can sense the presence and rough direction of any immediate threats to its person, its friends and its property. When applicable, this grants a Major Advantage to Keenness Challenges to spot and identify such threats by the normal senses.

    KLUTZ (GIANT)

    Klutzes take up too much space. It doesn’t matter how large or small they physically are, they still can’t seem to fit comfortably inside regular human-sized buildings, and certainly they can’t be trusted with breakable human furniture. Accordingly, Klutzes tend to walk through life with the put-upon air of people who spend a lot of their time apologising and promising to pay for the damages. They appear to be intended to be some kind of Giants, or possibly trolls – some kind of big, clumsy thing that’s prone to stepping in it, at any rate.

    Bane: World of Cardboard. Once per Session when the Klutz does something that requires speed or finesse, the GM can declare that it breaks some inanimate object. It can be anything, up to and including entire buildings, but it’s never organic or sentient (because that’d just be too sad!).

    Doom: Titan’s Prowess. Unsurprisingly, the Giants’ Doom revolves around being very big and strong.

    • Minimal Titan’s Prowess: Mr. Muscle. The Giant can cause its muscles to swell and bulge to grotesque size for a few seconds. Unless the Giant’s clothes are unusually spacious or flexible, they burst and are reduced to tatters. Any restraints the Giant is in are also destroyed, though the Giant takes damage from the process depending on how sturdy the restraints were, on the general Level of 1 HP for cloth, 5 HP for rope or 10 HP for chains. The display is also unsettling and may provide a Minor Advantage to Volume Challenges against people who saw it, at the GM’s discretion.
    • Limited Titan’s Prowess: Fists of Fury. The Giant causes its bare hands and feet to have the weight and hardness of solid stone, and therefore count as a Minimal Weapon. The effects last for an Interval of Minutes.
    • Basic Titan’s Prowess: Made of Iron. The Giant gives itself 3 extra HP. These HP are lost before any of its normal HP are lost. The power does not restore any lost HP; current injuries remain, only future ones are lessened. If the power is used when the Monster still has one or more extra HP left from previous uses of the power, the old extra HP immediately disappear. The effects last for an Interval of Minutes.
    • Advanced Titan’s Prowess: That Hideous Strength. The Monster can break and destroy any inanimate object that it can hold in its hands or wrap its arms around, regardless of how durable it is.

    LOUDMOUTH (HARPY)

    Loudmouths are, well, loud. In fact, they tend to have a thing about drawing attention in general – positive or negative doesn’t matter so much, what’s important is that everyone looks at them and only them, all the time. In this, they seem to be the avatars of the mystical Harpy, a dirty and disagreeable creature that was also big on screeching to high heavens. This is not to say that they are an all-female Breed, mind. In fact, those Loudmouths who are of the feminine persuasion often feel that being obnoxious, overbearing, and in dire need of shower seems to be more socially acceptable for men, and that this double standard is definitely something that needs to be pointed out as often and with as much volume as possible.

    Bane: Shutterbug. The PC thrives on attention and can’t stand feeling unseen and ignored. It has a Moderate Disadvantage to all Challenges where no one can see what it’s doing. That means all Challenges performed in solitude (though a webcam counts as someone watching) and also all Bullshitting, Trickery and Hiding Challenges where the PC obscures its true motivations and actions from all the people watching. However, the PC can still hide its actions from some or all the people present without penalty, if it has told at least one present person ahead of time what it’s planning to do so that he can see how clever it’s being as it does it.

    Doom: Garuda’s Swiftness. It is the way of the Harpy to soar on the high winds, or at least to be very quick to get away from people trying to beat it up. The Doom of Garuda’s Swiftness embodies this need for speed.

    • Minimal Garuda’s Swiftness: The Hand Is Faster Than the Eye. For an Interval of Minutes after passing the Challenge, the Loudmouth blurs oddly when it moves, seeming to snap from stance to stance so quickly that its motions can’t be seen. This does not bestow any actual speed – its limbs stay still for the same amount of time they would otherwise have spent moving before suddenly blinking to their new position – but it looks cool. It also grants a Minor Advantage to Trickery Challenges that rely on hiding what the Harpy does with its hands. This explicitly includes picking pockets.
    • Limited Garuda’s Swiftness: Dance Like a Butterfly. Passing this Challenge grants an immediate Moderate Advantage to a single Asskicking vs Asskicking Contest where the Loudmouth is being purely defensive, trying to dodge and weave and avoid being hit.
    • Basic Garuda’s Swiftness: Ah-HUP! Passing this Challenge while standing near an immobile straight vertical surface immediately makes the Loudmouth float up along it like a soap bubble, ending up at the top of it after an Interval of Seconds. The precise height of the edifice does not make a difference as long as it rises straight up at roughly a ninety-degree angle; tall trees and skyscrapers can be ascended with equal ease. Note that the power does not offer any opportunity to steer, nor any protection against obstacles; using this on an indoor wall will lead to you bumping your head on the ceiling before falling down again, and when scaling a mighty redwood it is advisable to first check that there aren’t any sturdy branches immediately above you.
    • Advanced Garuda’s Swiftness: A Leaf on the Wind. For an Interval of Minutes after passing this Challenge, the Harpy does not take any damage from falling, no matter how high the fall. While it doesn’t fall “slowly,” it effectively stops accelerating after the first meter or so, causing it to land hard, but not hard enough to cause injury.

    MOOCHER (VAMPIRE)

    Moochers mean well, really. They just have this… thing they have to have, often and in great quantities. Just what it is varies, and it’s usually something silly; some Moochers absolutely have to eat themselves sick on sour cream bagels, others need to apply overpriced beauty products to their tender skin. And the problem is, being honest about having a problem somehow removes all the satisfaction from it. Thus, Moochers are forced to lie, scheme and connive to get their fix, and have their sorely strained friendships and relationships to show for it. They resemble somewhat shabby Vampires, out to charm the unwary… though their ultimate aim is not to sink their teeth into their victims’ throats, just to borrow some money.

    Bane: Horror Hunger. The PC has a supernatural addiction to some sort of activity or physical sensation (choose one when creating the character), and if it doesn’t get to binge on a regular basis it grows weak and haggard. Once per Story, the PC must indulge in a virtual orgy of its particular craving, or else it starts the next Story at 3 HP below its maximum. The player needs to negotiate some sufficiently over-the-top way of binging on their addiction with the GM – if what he suggests is too easily achievable, the GM is perfectly within rights to raise the stakes in whatever way she can think of.

    There is one hard and fast rule for this Bane – the binge must be acquired in a way that does not involve any other person’s agency in any way. Horror Hunger is about personal, selfish gratification – the moment someone else gets involved, it spoils the satisfaction. Thus, the binge cannot involve anything being given (as that requires someone else to willingly participate) or taken (as that requires violating someone else’s agency) but only stolen (whether literally through picking a pocket or breaking into a house under cover of night, or figuratively by lies and deceit). Vampires are decidedly icky with their skulking and scheming to get what they want, but they are also physically harmless – they can’t violently force someone to give them what they want, no more than they can forthrightly ask for it.

    Doom: Siren’s Voice. Moochers have a preternatural ability to charm and beguile people, all the better to take advantage of them.

    • Minimal Siren’s Voice: Eyes Meeting Across the Room. By passing this Challenge, the Moocher causes another nearby person to notice and look at it, without knowing why.
    • Limited Siren’s Voice: Charm You with A Smile. Passing this Challenge enhances a single Schmoozing vs Grit or Bullshitting vs Understanding Contest where the Vampire is trying to persuade or cajole someone into something, removing all Disadvantages caused by unfamiliarity. The target instinctively and irrationally feels like the Vampire is a long-time casual acquaintance, even if they only just met; while it does not in any way predispose her to do any favours for it, she will not show any reluctance caused solely by not having known it for long. All other Modifiers apply normally.
    • Basic Siren’s Voice: To Me, My Minion! By passing this Challenge, the Moocher makes a single human who it has met in person instinctively know where the Moocher is and what its current dominant emotion is (for instance, the human will know if the Moocher is currently fearing for its life). The power works irrespectively of distance. The target has no direct compulsion to do anything, though if he cares about the Moocher and is inclined to trust his intuition he will probably come running if he gets the sudden sense that it needs him. Likewise, a human who knows about this power will know that getting a sense of irritated impatience with an address attached means that the Moocher wants him to come and get yelled at over something.
    • Advanced Siren’s Voice: Promise You the World. By passing this Challenge, the Vampire compels a single person to believe it when it claims that it will reward him in a certain way if its terms are met. The target is not forced to take the bargain, but he is forced to believe that it is a genuine and honest one and is incapable of even imagining that the Vampire might go back on its word on this subject. The Vampire must be reasonably capable of performing the named service to the best of the target’s knowledge for the power to work; if it promises to pay the target a million dollars, the target must have reasonable cause to believe that the Vampire possesses or can acquire a million dollars.

  • The Challenge System

    The Challenge System

    I didn’t really do much this week, so let’s talk about something I’ve had almost finished for years now: the resolution system for my great work-in-progress, Monstrous Mishaps. I call it the Challenge System, for lack of a better name.

    The thing that stands out with the Challenge System is that it’s entirely free from randomisers – not just “diceless” (a term people keep applying to games that rely on alternate randomisers, like card draws or coin flips, to my constant annoyance) but completely deterministic, with no randomness except the GM’s whimsy and the players’ refusal to stick to the plot. Because let’s be honest, those two are more than enough!

    The Challenge System gives each character a set of Abilities, twelve Primary Abilities that are bought and raised individually, and twelve Derived Abilities that are each calculated as the average between two Primary Abilities. For example, your Score in Bullshitting (telling lies) is the average between your Score in Schmoozing (charm and charisma) and your Score in Mindgames (psychology).

    Each Ability has a Score that usually goes from 1 to 15. The Score translates into a Level, as such:

    Score 1: Minimal Level, the sort of thing anyone can do just by being a healthy adult.

    Score 2-3: Limited Level, the equivalent of a natural talent or passing interest.

    Score 4-7: Basic Level, the equivalent of professional skill; the I-do-this-for-a-living sort of competence.

    Score 8-15: Advanced Level, the peak of consistent human performance.

    There are three more Levels: Heroic (Score 16-31, anything Batman could do), Epic (Score 32-63, anything Superman could do), and Godlike (Score 64+, anything no one could possibly do), but Player Characters can’t have those in their Abilities. So why do I bring them up? Stay tuned, I’ll get to it.

    When the players try to do something, the GM assigns it a Challenge Score (and associated Challenge Level) equal to the Ability Score it would reasonably take to accomplish it. So anything a seasoned professional might do within an Ability would be a Basic Challenge for that Ability. Advantages come in categories of +1, +3, +5, +10 and so on. They matter the most in Contests (where one character matches one of their Abilities against one of another character’s) since for regular Challenges you can just set the Challenge Score to anything you want to start with.

    Finally, you can apply Upshifts and Downshifts. Those can come from any source that dramatically change the parameters of the Challenge, such as drastically extending or shortening the time the character has to work in, but the most common source of Upshifts is from paying Grit Points (of which a character has a fixed amounts). Paying 1 Grit Points gives one Upshift, while paying 3 Grit Points gives two Upshifts. An Upshift multiplies the Ability Score (after adding Advantages) by 2, and thus also increasing the Ability Level by one step. Downshifts do the same to Challenge Scores.

    If, after all this, the Ability Score is equal to or higher than the Challenge Score, the character succeeded. Otherwise they failed.

    I’ve playtested the system extensively, and it’s actually really smooth once you get used to it. When it comes right down to it, it’s just about deciding whether it would make sense for a character to succeed at something. And it’s nice, sometimes, to always get a result that fits the scene, instead of having come up with ways to justify the swinginess that comes from die rolls.

  • The ghost of the ferry

    The ghost of the ferry

    This week, our dauntless mummies crossed the River Nile and approached the spectre fortress, where they were promptly ambushed. Nothing much else happened, it was a fairly slow session – partly because I’ve been to tired, demoralised and tooth-achey this week to really do much preparation.

    At least the players liked the wraith NPC I created on the spot, Sabriyah the anal-retentive ferrywoman. Having some quick categories to mash together is really helpful for making NPCs. For wraiths, I have one list of traits based on cause of death, and one list of traits based on their main supernatural powers, so for a ferrywoman I lumped together death by drowning (meaning her cause of death was Happenstance) and the main abilities of Usury and Argos (meaning she can transfer spiritual energy between people, all the better to collect her fee, and travel instantly between spots, suitable for if the ferry capsises).

    Physically, that meant that Sabriyah had pitch-black unblinking eyes, a slack and bloated face, and an overly precise way of talking… which instantly gave me an impression of someone who seemed deeply autistic, who fussed over every detail while having very little grasp of the big picture. I decided that, having died from being insufficiently mindful of safety while out on a boat, she had emerged into the Underworld hyper-focused on always minding her Ps and Qs. She’d been sitting in her boathouse down by the Nile for years when the players found her, waiting for instructions from a Hierarchy that no longer existed in any meaningful way, because she couldn’t bring herself to act improperly. Tragic, romantic, and a bit creepy – precisely the right mix for a wraith.

    I doubt I’ll get to use her for much in the future, but it’s nice to know that I can still improvise, at least with the right tools.

  • Starlight Dreams

    Starlight Dreams

    So this week I actually ended up working on an original game, just not the one I meant to work on. Oh well.

    The game in question has the working name Auturge, though I have never been entirely satisfied with it – other ones I’ve toyed with are Self-Created or Ex Nihilo, and right now I am leaning towards Starlight Dreams. By any name, it’s about being a genderless self-created god (your pronouns are yt/yts, and someone please shoot me for uttering that sentence) in a young and innocent cosmos called the Sublime that is under attack by evil Nazi goblins called the Sordid. You battle faceless hordes of enemies, treacherous ex-allies, and creations gone bad.

    I guess the game is what you might call an affectionate parody. It came about after I had read one too many threads at the Something Awful forums where people were screeching about every game being deeply problematic because it had sexual themes, or because it wasn’t high-powered enough, or because it depicted the bad guys as anything short of completely irredeemably evil. I started sarcastically planning out the sort of game that these perpetually offended people would actually want… and then, after I got into it, I realised that what I’d come up with actually sounded like a lot of fun.

    So basically, it’s a game that makes fun of wokeness, but it’s also a game that revels in wokeness, that takes its worst excesses and runs with them. That might make it a game that pleases absolutely no one, but it’s one that thoroughly captured my imagination. And I’ll say for it, there is very little on the market like it.

    I’ve previously written up a playtesting version, but then I put it away to consider it. This week, I started writing up the basic rules from scratch again. So far, this is what I have. The next thing I need to work out is Miracles, the way that players can make things happen through sheer divine will rather than just superheroic action.

    CHARACTER CREATION

    When creating a character, first choose your Virtues. The four Virtues are Outrage (used for aggressive and forceful action and zeal), Nurture (used to care for and empathise with others), Elegance (used to perform nimble feats and eloquent rhetoric) and Self-Love (used to protect yourself and be mindful of your surroundings). You start with two of them at 1, a third at 2, and the last at 3.

    Choose your Identity:

    • Ganesha, a god of animals and the flesh. Increase any one Virtue by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Body.
    • Mimer, a god of thought and ideal. Increase Elegance by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Abstract.
    • Persephone, a god of plant life and mysticism. Increase Nurture by 1 and start with the Harmony of Growth.
    • Raiden, a god of natural forces. Increase Outrage by 1 and start with the Harmony of Forces.
    • Terra, a god of the inanimate. Increase Self-Love by 1 and start with the Harmony of the Inanimate.

    Choose your Calling:

    • Creatrix, a maker of beauty. Increase Elegance by 1.
    • Kindness, a gentle carer for those who suffer. Increase Nurture by 1.
    • Mourner, one of who remembers what has been lost. Increase Self-Love by 1.
    • Strident, a warrior for justice. Increase Outrage by 1.
    • Wisdom, an arbiter of disputes. Increase any Virtue by 1.

    TASK RESOLUTION

    When performing an action that might conceivably fail, a player must build a dice pool.

    1) The player picks up 5 Hope Dice (green).
    2) The player replaces as many Hope Dice with Faith Dice (yellow) as they have points in the relevant Virtue.
    3) For every established Fancy the player invokes by describing how it aids their action, they may replace a Hope Die with a Faith Die or a Faith Die with a Love Die (red).
    4) For every point of the relevant sort of Esteem the player spends on the roll, they may replace a Hope Die with a Faith Die or a Faith Die with a Love Die.
    5) For every established Fancy the Guide invokes by describing how it hinders the action, the Guide may replace one Love Die with a Faith Die or one Faith Die with a Hope Die.
    6) The player rolls the dice. Count one success for every Hope Die that shows a 6, one success for every Faith Die that shows a result of 4+, and one success for every Love Die that shows a result of 2+. The total number of successes is the Result.

    The Guide compares the Result with the task’s Difficulty. Difficulty is set as follows:

    • Difficulty 0: anything a regular human being could reasonably do. This does not even require a roll.
    • Difficulty 1: the absolute peak of mortal effort; a once-in-a-million achievement.
    • Difficulty 2: something that could be done by an animal of the right type (e.g., staying under water indefinitely, flying to the opposite side of a mountain).
    • Difficulty 3: something that could be accomplished by means of a handheld modern implement or tool.
    • Difficulty 4: something that could be accomplished by an advanced human civilisation. Note that this is rarely instantaneous.
    • Difficulty 5: something that absolutely couldn’t be done without magic or divine intervention; effectively, this allows the player to perform a Miracle without needing either to spend Esteem or to possess the right Harmonies.

    If the Result equals or exceeds the Difficulty, the action succeeds and the player gains Esteem of the appropriate form equal to the Difficulty. Acts of Outrage generate Righteousness Esteem, acts of Nurture generate Charity Esteem, acts of Elegance generate Beauty Esteem and acts of Self-Love generate Serenity Esteem.

    If the Result is lower than the Difficulty, the action fails, and there is some kind of consequence. The consequence is never simply that nothing happens, the situation always deteriorates in some way.

    When opposing another self-moving entity (another auturge, demiurge, sordite, Whim, Wicked, Urge, or Gloom) the Difficulty for the action is the entity’s relevant Virtue. Thus, taking cover from sordite’s laser beam is an Elegance roll against the sordite’s Outrage, seeing through the lies of a Gloom is a Nurture roll against the Gloom’s Elegance, and resisting an Urge’s poisonous bile is a Self-Love roll against the Urge’s Outrage.

    FANCIES

    Fancies are facts of the immediate situation that have been established. “The golden palace shines with a blinding light” is a Fancy, as is “we stand on rocks floating in the middle of an endless void,” and “the Crustacean Sultan is greatly wroth.” When a player attempts an action, both the player and the Guide may describe how some number of Fancies help (for the player) or hinder (for the Guide) the action. This is called invoking a Fancy. A Fancy can only be invoked once for a given action. This also means that if a player has invoked a Fancy to help the action, the Guide may not invoke the same Fancy to hinder the action.

    The Guide can introduce Fancies at any time by describing them, either as an introduction to a scene, because something changed in it, or just because the players noticed something for the first time. The Guide can also alter or remove Fancies at will, in accordance to what makes sense in terms of the changing situation. Fancies arise from what is happening within the game world, not the other way around.

    The players can create, alter or remove Fancies by taking actions that change the situation. The Difficulty is set as normal, depending on how difficult the Guide judges it to be. If the action is successful, the local Fancies change accordingly. Failing a roll may also affect Fancies, just not in the way that the player intended.

    Some Fancies are Passing Fancies, which disappear once they are invoked. Such Fancies usually describe some temporary advantage or setback that can easily change. For example, the Fancy “the Emerald Giant is distracted by Xia’s song” disappears once one of Xia’s friends invoke it to strike the Emerald Giant in the back – after that, yts attention is definitely no longer on Xia’s song! While the Guide can always create, remove or change a Fancy for any reason at all, declaring a Fancy to be a Passing one is mostly just a way to remind everyone not to get used to it. Fancies that aren’t Passing Fancies are Persistent Fancies, and can be invoked any number of times. If nothing else is mentioned, assume that a Fancy is a Persistent Fancy.

  • Injuries are a pain

    Injuries are a pain

    I had reason to fiddle with my Blue Rose port this week. It’s one I’m particularly fond of, since it’s more experimental than the others – and a lot more divorced from the original rules, for that matter. Blue Rose, in both its editions, is really just D&D “but without, you know, the problematic stuff.” This is not to say that that’s without its appeal – hey, I may not be refined enough to be acceptable to the woke, but I’m not crude enough to be acceptable to the lowbrow roll-around-in-sewage crowd either! I have my own craving for prettiness and cuddliness. So sometimes I enjoy slaying monsters but in a nice, genteel, socially acceptable sort of way.

    That said, there is a considerable mismatch between the rules and the stated intent of the game. If it’s all about teh feelz, then there shouldn’t be hundreds of pages of combat rules. D&D has hundreds of pages of combat rules because it really is mostly about making other living creatures go SPLAT (and keeping them from SPLATing you first). If you want to create a game of noble brightness, cute talking animals and refined tea parties, you shouldn’t take the D&D rules and then add a few stern instructions about not using them too much. You should make a game that is about the thing you mean for the game to be about.

    So when I sat down to port Blue Rose, I made personality and disposition central to the rules. More specifically, I took the mostly-irrelevant-except-as-a-roleplaying-aid Tarot motif of the original game and put it first. Every character has three Traits: one card of the Major Arcana that represents their overall goals and ideals, one card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest virtue, and one reversed card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest personal failing. When you roll to do anything, you try to involve your Traits, and each one you can invoke gives you a bonus. It’s working out pretty well so far.

    Which brings me to the damage system. Damage systems are almost invariably the hardest part for me in making a game, because they’re so hard to keep from being fun-spoilers. The risk of getting hurt has to be omnipresent, because that’s always going to be a stake in any sort of action scene (and even Blue Rose should have action scenes). But if characters get hurt too easily, and particularly if it takes too long for them to heal up, then they can end up sidelining players for absolute ages. No fun.

    Part of the problem is of course that in real life, injury is incredibly serious. Even a strained muscle is going to cramp your style for days. A serious injury, like you can easily get in mortal combat? That’s going to leave you bedridden for months. A game where there is easy access to magical healing can get around that, but of course a game like that is high fantasy almost per definition; a world where someone can unbreak your leg with a wave of their hand is a world that is very, very far away from our own.

    I almost invariably start out making the injury rules too punishing, and then have to scale them back (while grumbling about how I am having to compromise my artistic vision just because those darn players can’t keep themselves out of harm’s way…). In this case, the way I handled injury in the game was by making players “lock” their Traits to indicate emotional distress. A locked Trait still gives a bonus when it’s invoked, but it also gives a penalty to any roll where it’s not invoked. The idea being that the more stress a character is under, the more she defaults to her fundamental convictions and has trouble seeing how anything that is unrelated to them could be important.

    So far so good. Now, the rules for healing has been rewritten to the following:

    When you give yourself time to heal, roll +Conviction. If you are in some way aided by an NPC who has Touch on you, take +1 forward to the roll. 6-, you unlocked a Trait, but your introspection allows something new to sneak up on you; the Narrator makes a move. 7-9, you unlock up to two Traits. If an NPC aided in your recovery, they put Touch on you. 10+, the same, and if you want you may also either clear Corruption or remove one person’s Touch on you (which can be the NPC who aided in your recovery, if any).

    Note: While give yourself time to heal is a fairly passive move and can seem difficult to apply Traits to, the Narrator should encourage the player to describe what she is ruminating on over her convalescence, and what lessons she has learned from the pain. As long as her description is broadly in line with a Trait, it should apply. Thus, it should actually be fairly easy to at least roll with +2 for recovering.

    Examples: Bandaging your own wounds, having a drink with your friends, enjoying some me time.

    That means that even if the roll fails, you still unlock at least one Trait, and you can potentially unlock more with a success. Hopefully that’ll make players a little sturdier and less likely to spend all their time neurotic and sulking – it’s still suppose to be a nice game, after all…

  • Gear Porn

    Gear Porn

    I ended up spending this week working on the Dark Heresy port, particularly on the gear section.

    I have to admit, I’m not really a fan of gear in roleplaying games. It just feels anal-retentive to have to list every fiddly little implement your character carries around, and to have creative ideas that you can’t implement because you just didn’t bring the right tool. I’m more about the skills and inherent properties, the things that are always true about your character. But of course this is Warhammer 40,000, and running Warhammer 40,000 without drooling over the badass toys is just making a complete mockery of the whole thing.

    I did try to streamline it a bit, though. I assigned every weapon, armour and doodad a Req value between 1 and 10, and then assigned every Career a starting amount of Req. In between every mission, your Req refills and you can spend it on requisitioning new equipment. And the effects of different items have been simplified to the point where it’s hopefully easier to remember – a lot of things just give a +1 bonus to some particular move.

    I note, not for the first time, that it’s very unclear who this port is even for. I mean, I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes Powered by the Apocalypse games is going to think it misses the point entirely by having so many over-specific rules, and anyone who likes Dark Heresy the way it is is of course not going to see the point of my converting it to an entirely different format. I guess in the end, it’s just for me, to make it possible to at some point run games in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that don’t feel quite so painful.

    Of course, disliking pain might also be missing the whole point of Warhammer 40,000…