Mister Monster's Workshop

Category: playtesting

  • Grrrrr! Aaaarrggghhh!

    I got to break out my Werewolf port for the first time in ages (I have one campaign I run for the whole group and one campaign for each player who might be missing… yes, even I think it’s a little OCD, okay? But anyway, the player who needs to be missing for us to run Werewolf is the second-most reliable player in the group, so the Werewolf campaign doesn’t see much use). It was fun, especially since I think the mechanics really clicked for the first time.

    The big thing with Werewolf is supposed to be Rage. You’re a werewolf, you’re going to go berserk, it’s kind of your thing. You’re the Hulk, only furrier. Rage strengthens you but also takes away your control. And a large part of my reason for starting on this port in the first place (which led to my all-around porter madness) was trying to find a way to model that mechanically in a way that wasn’t too fiddly.

    I may have actually worked it out now, at least in a rough fashion. The way it works is, each player has a number of Rage boxes that start out unmarked. Every time a player fails a roll, they mark a Rage box. They can then clear a Rage box to heal wounds, pull off different stunts in combat, fight whole groups at once, and badassery of that nature.

    However! Whenever a player gets taunted too harshly, or fails in a way that feels too humiliating, or gets injured too badly, they have to roll +Rage (that is, 2d6 plus the number of marked boxes). If they roll 10+, they frenzy. If they fail the roll with 6-, conversely, nothing happens, but they mark Rage as usual when failing a roll. So the more Rage you have stored up, the more of an unstoppable killing machine you are in combat, but the greater the risk is of you completely losing your cool and smashing something you didn’t plan on smashing.

    The Rage economy worked out really well in the fight scene we ran tonight – the player used Rage to hit far above his normal weight class, got hurt and had to fight for control, gained Rage from avoiding frenzy, and then used that Rage for more fighting. This player is a relatively feeble little Ragabash (think scout/trickster), and his opponents were two fomori with military-grade rifles and body armour, so it was a tough fight, and I think the Rage mechanic made a lot of difference.

    We never did have to play out a frenzy, which is probably good, because those rules still need some work. Mechanics that take control away from the player are always tricky to formulate – you need players to still have choices, or else you’re just sitting there talking to themselves, but the whole point of Rage is supposed to be that you sometimes lose control. I am sort of considering an approach where I view it kind of like driving a speeding car that you can’t break, only steer – instead of asking, “what do you do?”, I might ask, “do you fight or flee? If the former, who do you attack? If the latter, which direction do you blindly charge off in?” With rolls required whenever they try to do anything that requires hesitation or forethought. I don’t know, though, there are a lot of pitfalls here. I’ll need to think on it.

    But it was definitely fun to try out this part of the rules!

  • 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.

  • Dark Heresy powerup

    Dark Heresy powerup

    Well, tying back to my thoughts from the last Dark Heresy game, me and the player talked about it after today’s session and it was agreed that the higher starting Characteristics would be a good idea, for many of the reasons I mentioned in that post. We’ll see next time how that works out, but I feel like it’s the right move.

    I did manage to write a bit on the Corruption rules this week in preparation for this session, too, so here is where they stand:

    CORRUPTION AND MUTATION

    Humanity is eternally under spiritual siege, the dark lore of Chaos threatening every second to find its way into each human’s soul. When it finds a vector, whether through unclean teachings or the direct touch of Warp entities, it threatens to remake the victim of the revelation into its twisted image. Whenever you encounter blasphemy or supernatural horrors, you gain some amount of Corruption Points. Whenever your Corruption Points equal or exceed 10, reduce them by the largest possible multiple of 10 (i.e., from 17 to 7, or from 23 to 3) and roll to battle for your very soul. This may cause you to advance your Damnation Track, which looks as follows:

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Mutation.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Mutation.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] You permanently transform into a deranged Chaos Spawn under the GM’s control. Make a new character.

    Malignancies and Mutations are both permanent. Purity, once lost, is never regained.

    MALIGNANCIES

    • Wasted Frame. The flesh wither on your bones. Permanently reduce your Strength by 1.
    • Poor Health. Your breathing is laboured and your blood flows sluggishly. Permanently reduce your Toughness by 1.
    • Palsy. You suffer from constant tics and tremors. Permanently reduce your Agility by 1.
    • Dark-Hearted. You are filled unholy spite that you can never entirely hide from others. Permanently reduce your Fellowship by 1.
    • Morbid. Your critical thinking is constantly distracted by macabre fantasies. Permanently reduce your Intelligence by 1.
    • Malign Sight. Unclean voices whisper in your ears and nightmare visions dance in the corner of your eyes. Permanently reduce your Perception by 1.
    • Skin Affliction. You become plagued by boils, scabs and weeping sores. You are immediately noticeable and memorable. If you have or acquire the Unremarkable talent, it cancels out this Malignancy, making you recognisable to anyone who’s ever had a good look at you but not immediately noticeable in a crowd – you look terrible, but no more so than any dozen other diseased beggars. Without that talent, people stare at you in horror wherever you go and there is probably not as wretched a visage in the entire star system.
    • Night Eyes. Bright light hurts your eyes, forcing you to squint. This does not confer any sort of ability to see in the dark, so unless you have access to that from some other source, your vision is always impaired from either too much light or too little. Your visual acuity at the best of times is roughly equivalent to what it would be in darkness lit by a single candle, with all what that implies for your ability to spot things and discover people sneaking up on you.
    • Witch-Mark. You gain a cosmetic but highly obvious physical mutation, such as a small tentacle growing from your elbow or a third eye in the back of your neck. You must conceal the mutation at all cost or risk being executed for being a mutant.
    • Night Terrors. Like the Horrific Nightmares Disorder.
    • Strange Addiction. Like the Addiction Disorder, but instead of a normal drug, you are addicted to some strange substance, like rose petals or widows’ tears.
    • Ashen Taste. Food and drink tastes foul to you, and you can’t bring yourself to ingest more than absolutely necessary. As a result, you are perpetually weak with hunger. Whenever you achieve a result of 10-14 on a roll to refuse to fall, take -2 ongoing to further rolls to refuse to fall instead of -1 ongoing.
    • Irrational Nausea. Something entirely innocent causes you to feel sick at the sight of it. When you face your anathema, roll +Toughness. 9-, you become violently ill and must spend the next scene doing little more than puking your guts out. 10-14, you master your treacherous belly, but take -1 ongoing while you remain in the presence of the anathema. 15+, you manage to push down your bile. For a weakness, choose one of:
      • Flowers in bloom
      • Human laughter
      • Fresh food
      • Prayer books and holy items
      • Bare skin (other than faces and hands)
    • Blackouts. You suffer regular blackouts. As a GM move, the GM can declare that the consequences of something you have no recollection of doing suddenly catch up with you.
    • Hatred. You develop an irrational hatred for some group of people. This is not the sort of holy fury that the Imperium approves of; not only do you have no socially acceptable reason to hate the group, but instead of being strengthened by your hatred you loathe them so much that you can barely function when one of them is around. You take -1 ongoing to all Fellowship and Willpower rolls at such times. Choose one of the groups below:
      • Soldiers and warriors.
      • Priests and the deeply religious.
      • Scholars and bureaucrats.
      • Lawkeeper and authority figures.
      • Common labourers and the poor.
      • Tech-priests and technomancers.
      • Criminals and outlaws.
    • Bloodlust. When the battle frenzy is upon you, mere victory is not enough; you must see the light die in the foe’s eyes. If enemies flee from you, you must chase them by whatever available means is most efficient, even if that might catch you in a trap or if it pulls you away from your true objectives.
    • Distrustful. You cannot bring yourself to trust a stranger, and it makes interaction with them problematic. When making a Fellowship roll that involves strangers, treat any result of 10+ as a result of 10-14.
    • Self-Scarification. Like the Self-Mortification Disorder, except instead of wholesome religious flagellation your self-harm takes the form of carving elaborate occult symbols into your flesh with a blade.
    • Vivisector. You are driven to cut up living creatures and study their insides. While PETA has been disbanded for many thousands of years, this behaviour draws its share of ire. As a move, the GM can proclaim that you sliced up something you really shouldn’t, whether someone’s pet, a valuable prisoner, or a creature with a big, angry mate.

    As you can see, the Mutations are still missing, but since by these rules no one can get a Mutation before taking a whole lot of Malignancies, I still have some time to work on converting those.

    No work done on the GM Moves, though. I really do need to sit down with one. I feel like I’m getting better at bringing the grimdark (this session included stifling bureaucracy in the face of humanitarian crisis, misanthropic religious fanaticism, and a band of renegade plague victims, so I think I did okay), but I still don’t feel like I’ve done a very good job of codifying it.

  • Mummy fatigue

    Mummy fatigue

    Another session of Mummy went down reasonably successfully. The players interrogated the evil sorcerer they captured last time and gave me a chance to try to roleplay a Nephandus. It’s not an easy thing, because Nephandi are supposed to be inherently and irredeemably bad, but they’re not supposed to be cartoonish about it; they genuinely believe that the absolute best thing they can do with their lives is try to damn the entire world. I did my best to express a philosophy along the lines of, “existence is a cruel lie, and that means cruelty and lies are what everything is all about, and therefore the only thing a person of integrity can do is be as cruel and deceitful as possible.” Which… feels sort of apropos for the teenage angst-fest that is the World of Darkness, to be honest.

    I don’t know, though, I keep pounding my head against the nature of the Underworld. It just feels like you can’t be true to the stated rules of the setting without running a boring game. Everything about the Underworld is meant to make you feel helpless and like you can’t make a difference, but roleplaying is all about making meaningful choices. I’ve tried to come up with a solution, but honestly, I’m starting to think that there isn’t one – that what I really should do is just write my own game that tries to do what Mummy tries to do, but to do it properly.

    So all right, then. Perhaps I should call this port finished, at least in the sense of “it ain’t gonna get any better than this.” I should start looking at my original games again anyway…

  • Fiddling with Underworld rules

    Fiddling with Underworld rules

    In the World of Darkness, the Underworld is where ghosts hang out. It’s the main setting for Wraith: the Oblivion and a secondary setting for Mummy: the Resurrection (as in, wraiths spend all their time there because they’re dead, and mummies spend part of their time there preparing to come back from death). It’s a pretty cool and Gothic place, where everyone walks around wearing their fatal wounds on full display and your trusty sword was probably some unfortunate slave who got melted down for his plasm.

    The problem is, it’s also a pain in the ass to run games in, because a lot of things are more flavourful than practical – not to mention, not particularly well defined as to how they work in practice (see Changeling: the Dreaming and its “chimerical reality” for a similar problem). For one thing, it’s never quite clear if the Shadowlands (the part of the Underworld that lies closest to the Land of the Living, and from which you can affect it with magic) is a place in and of itself that just happens to be close to the Land of the Living, or if it is the Land of the Living as experienced by the disembodied ghosts that are haunting it. When writing my Mummy port, I’ve had to flesh out a number of things, and I’m still not sure about some of my decisions.

    Case in point, the fact that there is very little actual matter in the Shadowlands beyond the plasm of the wraiths themselves (which is why they practice soulforging to get their gear). That’s very bleak and evocative – it’s a world where production and commerce literally uses the working class as gristle for the wheels, it’s all very punk and rage-against-the-machine. But what it means in practice is that you have to constantly veto the things your players try to do, because they have once again forgotten that they have no tools, not even so much as a strip of cloth to bind a wound with (in the Underworld, your clothes are part of your body and can’t be removed).

    I mean, I love in theory, because it feeds the nightmarish feel of the Underworld – in a bad dream, you are always facing doors that won’t open and find yourself having forgotten something important at home (including, indeed, your clothes!). But in a game where the players are supposed to be able to do stuff, that feeling of helplessness is… not helping. I’ve been grappling with that for several sessions now.

    Here’s my latest adjustment: from now on, players can spend Balance hold to cast a spell that would normally require some sort of tool or ingredient. That seems fair – wraiths, after all, don’t need tools to use their arcanoi, and mummies should surely be at least as powerful as wraiths. And it also means that Balance is still useful for something even after you’ve hoarded enough to resurrect but decided to postpone resurrection while you deal with some issue in the Underworld.

    We’ll see how it goes.

  • Dark Heresy playtest

    Dark Heresy playtest

    So, we ended up playing some more Dark Heresy this week. It involved the daring acolytes trying to escape from a collapsing mine while being gassed by inflexible authorities and trying not to be eaten by a river of daemonic slugs, so I feel that at the very least the “grimdark” was firmly in place…

    This was the first session with the new version of the rules, and I do think it went a lot more smoothly. The success chances are rather unforgiving, but that might be on point – possibly it helps with the feeling of a hostile universe where your skills are only moderately helpful? Not sure.

    I do think that there’s a problem with the stat increase Advances, though. See, I’ve streamlined everything so that there are certain Advances that just says, basically, “you get +1 to such-and-such stat.” Which is nice and simple… but it also kind of makes those Advances sort of overpowered. I mean, in the original game only the first increases to your core stats cost 100 XP apiece, everything else costs 250 XP or more, so there is some incentive to instead choose the skills or talents that cost less. Without that price hike, there’s really very little sane reason to not take stat increase Advances as long as you have any at all that are available.

    One possible solution would be to take out the stat increase Advances and instead make characters start with +1 in their core stats, +0 in their non-core stats, and -1 in their weak stats, and that pretty much just keep it like that. Maybe let them take stat increases after their first 10 or 20 Advances or something. Of course, then we don’t get that aforementioned feeling of all your traits being equally useless, so if we want that one that’s bad.

    But we’ll see how I feel after another bunch of sessions.

    Other things to work on: the corruption rules. They’re going to become relevant sooner than I thought, since two of the players are now heading into corrupted territory. Also, I need to expand the World Moves and Chaos Moves (for Imperial Worlds and Nurgle, respectively, for this particular scenario – the others can wait) and add some more granularity to them.

  • The Bandage Brigade goes forth

    The Bandage Brigade goes forth

    In tonight’s game of Mummy: the Resurrection…

    … ye gods almighty, I am running Mummy: the Resurrection. If you’re not familiar with it – and you’re not – it’s this weird kinda-sorta-but-not-really World of Darkness game that started out as a half-assed supplement to Vampire: the Masquerade but ill-advisedly got transformed into a weird sort of hybrid supplement that didn’t belong to any particular game line and wasn’t exactly its own game line either. The editing is a mess, the writing is hopeless, and there are a hundred and one problems that no one ever cared enough to address. So why have I been running it for the last year? I have no idea. Like most things involving my roleplaying campaigns, it just sort of happened…

    … but anyway, in tonight’s game of Mummy: the Resurrection, our plucky band of currently-but-not-permanently-deceased immortals set out into the howling storm of the Underworld, on a quest to plunder an old Hierarchy cache and actually have something to hit spectres over the head with. They started out on an unfortunate note by botching the spells they tried to use to make themselves better suited to venture out, but they eventually got to the subway station where the cache is supposed to be hidden.

    There, they milled about aimlessly for a bit before they were suddenly attacked by a weird dude with wings and a scythe who they resolutely managed to avoid fighting, to the point where I was starting to feel like he was mostly just swinging and missing. But apparently I managed to make him seem interesting enough that now they all want to get to know him, if they can just get him to stop trying to kill them first. I guess that’s a win.

    I feel like I wasn’t entirely on the ball with this session. I was running on very little sleep, and as a result I kept defaulting to my preparations instead of improvising in ways that might make the game more interesting. In retrospect, I think I should have brought in a little more action, or at least some plot twists, the moment I saw that the players weren’t sure how to proceed. Oh well.

    I’m also starting to wonder if I’m making magic too hard in this game. So much of it relies on lengthy rituals and boosting some spells by other spells, and by the rules players only have something like a 60-70% chance to pull them off at the first try. I feel like it might make things unnecessarily hard when they have to succeed at a long string of rolls before they can get the effect they want. I don’t know, maybe I should make some spells and rituals succeed automatically as long as you invest the time and resources in them? Something to consider, I guess.