Mister Monster's Workshop

Category: ports

  • Aberrant readthrough: postscript

    Aberrant readthrough: postscript

    So, some three months ago I got it into my head that I was going to tackle Aberrant as my next porting project, and since then, I have been manfully working my way through the 16-book first edition. My original estimate was that it started pretty bad, but got slightly better. Then I found that after it got slightly better, it got a whole lot worse.

    So does that mean I’m giving up on porting it? NEVER!!! I will hammer this stupid thing into something playable, just you watch me. It just might take me, er… a little longer than anticipated.

    Still, let’s start with sketching out a few things that need to be emphasised, de-emphasised, or completely changed to make use of the potential that is actually there.

    NERF ALL THE UBER-NPCS

    This is a great idea for any White Wolf game, frankly, DIvis Mal, Caestus Pax, Antaeus, and all the other monstrosities need to be brought down to a level where they can at least be affected by things that the PCs do. Essentially, everything that calls for Quantum 6+ needs to be cut.

    This is not to say that some NPCs shouldn’t be a lot more powerful than starting PCs. Divis Mal really is the world’s most powerful nova. He’s just not an untouchable god. And he really can whup Caestus Pax’s butt, which is something that should make everyone not 100% aligned with his values very concerned, he just has to break a sweat doing it and will have a few bruises of his own by the end. No unstoppable forces, no immovable objects.

    And while I’m at the subject:

    NO MORE KISSING OF DIVIS MAL’S ASS

    No matter how perfectly toned it no doubt is! Divis Mal doesn’t get to be 100% right and perfect, because no one gets to be 100% right and perfect. He needs to be presented as a larger-than-life character with larger-than-life flaws. Specifically, his assumption that novas will naturally gravitate to agreeing with him about everything (except for maybe a few details to spice up the late-night philosophical discussions, ho ho) is going to be founded on nothing but his egomania. Mal feels lonely, and he assumes it’s because no one is as smart and powerful as him, because he’s the kind of narcissist who naturally assumes that. The real reason he’s lonely is because he is unable to accept that someone might disagree with him without being an idiot.

    So no, Novas don’t evolve into a One Race of enlightened beings who will leave those filthy, filthy baselines behind to create a better, brighter, and more fabulous world. They evolve into a thousand different single-individual species, each one exaggerated into a caricature of his or her original biases and values. Mal hasn’t created companions for himself. He’s just created thousands of beings who will all be both as supremely powerful and as emotionally isolated as himself.

    And guess what? That’s not going to end well for anyone.

    NO MORE STUPID STERILISATION PLOT

    Because it’s dumb. It makes no sense in or out of universe.

    But fine, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s just say that eruption naturally causes fertility problems, precisely because it does start revamping your entire biology to better suit your idea of how it’s meant to work. Again, a nova is essentially a species of one – and the definition of a species is something that can’t reproduce with another species. That’s why everyone is hot and single, not because of some nefarious plot.

    Then let’s add the qualification that there are ways to allow novas to breed, but it takes either special medical procedures (that must be unique for each nova) or rare quantum powers. That’s in keeping with the setting, where those are ways that Utopia’s stupid sterility plague can be cured, but it turns nova infertility into a realistic-feeling consequence of personal evolution, not some skeevy conspiracy. We can even make it so that Utopia is supposed to be working on a cure but are notoriously dragging their feet about it and designating some of the more promising procedures as “black-tech” since they’re secretly worried that it might lead to a nova population explosion that might just rip the world asunder.

    Still a little too lurid and demoralising for my taste, but fine – we’re looking to make the least active changes to the setting here.

    UTOPIA’S FAILINGS NEED TO BE MORE REALISTIC

    Having gotten rid of the sterility plague, we need to come up with some better shady elements of Project Utopia. And the books actually do fumble in the direction of some on occasion, they just invariably fall back on inept Proteus schemes.

    So: Utopia really is trying to fix the world’s problems. The problem is, the world’s problems are complicated, and fixing one tends to either worsen another or create a brand new one. Brilliant experimental fixes for the environment turn out to have long-term consequences that no one foresaw. Ending poverty requires erasing local culture. Vigorous crime-fighting tramples all over the civil liberties of innocent people caught in the drag net. Not everyone agrees with Project Utopia’s solutions, because those solutions have actual downsides to them.

    Enter Project Proteus. Their job is to cover up all that nasty moral ambiguity and create the illusion that this is a bright, shiny superhero setting where the caped supermen are completely trustworthy and absolutely capable of fixing everything with a smile and a wink. Anyone complains? Discredit them. Anyone refuses to cooperate? Blackmail them. A T2M-er marketed as a wholesome role model gets drunk and makes an ass of himself? Bribe everyone into staying quiet about it.

    If someone starts to notice too many things they’re not supposed to and can’t be gently deterred, then of course more drastic measures need to be taken. Sometimes people really do disappear into black sites or have unfortunate accidents. The really dark stuff is still there, it’s just there at the end of a long trail of logic that starts with precisely the kind of brand-management and message-polishing that’s considered just common sense for anyone in the business.

    Divis Mal is sure that he’s right, and that the only reason people disagree with him is because they’re stupid – so he tries to make them smarter. Project Utopia is sure that it’s right, and that the only reason people disagree with it is that they’re stupid – so it tries to present them with a simpler, brighter picture that no one could possibly disagree with. Neither of them ever considers the possibility that people might disagree with them because they’re wrong. They’re each other’s reflection, and between the two of them they’ll wreck the world by trying to fix it.

    PUT TAINT FRONT AND CENTRE

    Taint should be the main event. It’s what makes the setting fundamentally unstable – and thus dynamic and interesting. Taint is, if not the only reason why Project Utopia can’t create a real-world Justice League of moral paragons, then at least one major reason. By the time someone has the power of Superman, he no longer has the inclination to be Superman, insofar as he ever had it. Why protect a human race that you can no longer relate to, either physically or mentally or both? It’s not that Taint turns you evil, necessarily. It’s that it makes you something other than human – and it’s hard to empathise with anything that is too different from yourself.

    Taint is also the reason why Divis Mal’s plan for the One Race is doomed. Again, he assumes that there is only a single line of evolution leading away from humanity, and that it leads to become something very much like him, since he is clearly perfection incarnate! In fact, every nova’s Taint will send him or her off in a different direction – each one an infinitely long branch of an increasingly bizarre and disjointed tree.

    And of course, sometimes a nova’s initial self-image is so warped that Taint really does turn them evil, because “evil” is the only way to describe the thing they most long to be. The Church of Astaroth should function as a sobering example, not a contemptible strawman. What happens when someone gets offered the chance to become whatever he want to be, and what he thinks he wants to be is cartoonishly evil? Then cartoonish evil becomes a real thing, and that’s not silly or pathetic. It’s terrifying.

    THE DIRECTIVE NEEDS SOMETHING TO DO

    The Directive may just be the most underserved part of the setting, to the point where I’m not exactly sure why the writers even put it in there, since they were so uninterested in doing anything with it. It’s presented as a cynical, scheming organisation of manipulators and secret agents, but there already is one of those, it’s called Project Proteus. The Directive can’t be the paranoia-inducing hidden hand behind the scenes, because Project Proteus already fills that role with more gusto.

    But fine – it’s there. And it needs something to do. I think that something should be this:

    The Directive is there to oppose attempts to change the world.

    Changing the world is meant to be a thing you can do in Aberrant, but since that’s so hard to turn into something gameable, it’s a theme that’s mostly paid lip service to. You want to revitalise the economy of the Philippines? Okay, then we can either have you make a single roll to see if you succeed at that lengthy project, or we can play out a long, boring series of meetings and late-night policy-writing sessions. Either way, it sounds kind of boring.

    So let the Directive stand in for the inertia of the setting. You want to revitalise the economy? Sure, you can do that, because gosh-darn-it, you’re a nova, you can do anything! But the Directive doesn’t want you to do it. It probably has some kind of reasons – it’ll disrupt things elsewhere, it’ll empower radical elements, or maybe the crooks who benefit from the Philippines being underdeveloped offered them something they want. Either way, this thing you want to do? The Directive doesn’t want it done.

    So now we an antagonist with some agency, not just boring procedures. Now you’ll have to fight off attacks by high-tech assassins. Figure out who’s blackmailing people into dropping their support for your plans. Prevent attempts at sabotaging your infrastructure. You know. Roleplaying stuff.

    And of course, sometimes the Directive will be right. Sometimes the thing you’re doing really is going to have nasty consequences that you’re blithely ignoring – just like Project Utopia is prone to.

    All right. That’ll do for a start. We still haven’t gotten into the actual rules aspect yet, but first I have to figure out how to actually run the game. But I think I can do this. I thiiiiink I can do this.

  • The Imperial weisenheimer

    The Imperial weisenheimer

    I still haven’t finished any of the remaining Aberrant books. I started on Underworld just to see if it was any easier than Player’s Guide, and it was, a little, but not enough to let me get through more than a third of it. I am so done with this game, I kid you not…

    I have, on the other hand, started sketching out my next Dark Heresy port in a little more detail. I give you, The Adept! I think here I have come up with a reasonably workable way of presenting someone whose superpower is to know a lot of stuff without having to turn each one into a separate move, Corruption has also been personalised so that each Career moves towards a different tragic end, but in a way that hopefully feels cool and flavourful instead of being a chore.

    We’ll see how the rest turn out – I’m sketching on The Arbitrator now.

    THE ADEPT

    Origins:

    [ ] Forge World
    The hyper-competitive environment fostered by the Tech-Priests taught you that academia is just another form of war. You can spend 1 Righteous Fury to get +1 forward to any Analytical roll.

    [ ] Imperial World
    As a scribe for the Administratum, you have a thorough understanding of the logistical underpinnings of the eternal war effort. You gain the Subject: War for your Common Lore move.

    [ ] Schola Progenium
    At the Schola, you were submitted to the rigours of a classical education. You gain the Subject: Philosophy for your Common Lore move.

    Starting moves:

    [X] Common Lore
    Choose 1 Subject from the list below, and also gain Imperium as a Subject. When you encounter one of your Subjects (your decide), tell the GM which weighty tome you once read something related to the situation in, and in what way the author of said volume was biased, sloppy, or otherwise not entirely reliable. Then ask the GM a question pertaining to the Subject and situation. The GM tells you the answer insofar as you would reasonably know it, keeping in mind the flaws of your source.

    • Adeptus Arbites
    • Administratum
    • Astromancy
    • Bureaucracy
    • Chymistry
    • Ecclesiarchy
    • Imperial Creed
    • Heraldry
    • Legend
    • Machine Cult
    • Occult
    • Tech

    [X] Researcher
    When you can use a library to research a topic, you are considered to have access to every Subject the library covers for purposes of using the Common Lore move. However, searching a library takes a while – the GM decides exactly how much, but certainly more than the mere seconds to recall something you already know.

    Basic moves:

    [ ] Attentive
    No detail, however insignificant, is beneath the notice of a true bureaucrat. Increase Intuitive by 1.

    [ ] Brilliant
    Your rational mind is honed to perfection. Increase Analytical with 1.

    [ ] Common Lore: Well-Read
    Requires Common Lore. Choose 2 additional Subjects for your Common Lore move.

    [ ] Common Lore: Scholar
    Requires Common Lore: Well-Read. Choose 2 additional Subjects for your Common Lore move.

    [ ] Contempt for the Flesh
    When you endure the effects of heat, cold or fatigue, roll +Disciplined instead of +Unyielding.

    [ ] Delver Into Forbidden Lore
    Requires Forbidden Lore. When you can use a library to research a topic, you are considered to have access to every Subject the library covers for purposes of using the Forbidden Lore move.

    [ ] Forbidden Lore
    Choose 1 Subject from the list below. When you ask a question about one of your Subjects, you gain 1 Corruption Point and the GM tells you what you might reasonably know. She then asks you what tale of horror you encountered this blasphemous fact in.

    • Cults
    • Heresy
    • Inquisition
    • Mutants

    [ ] Gopher
    When you fearlessly advance on the direct orders of a theoretical superior, roll +Disciplined instead of +Fierce.

    [ ] Logical Extrapolation
    When you assess the available facts, roll +Analytical. 10-14, you make an educated deduction about something interesting that has previously happened in this place,. 15+, the same, and the GM also tells you where and how you might try to learn more about it.

    [ ] Medicae
    When you provide medical care, roll +Analytical. 9-, you clean the injuries, but that’s all you can do without more expert help or more advanced facilities. 10-14, the patient immediately heals 1d5 Wounds. No further uses of this move is possible on the patient until they have either taken or healed at least 1 Wound. 15+, the same, but the patient heals 1d10 Wounds.

    [ ] Mind Like a Fortress
    Increase your Corruption Limit by 3.

    [ ] The Men of the Mind
    When you command their respect towards scribes, bureaucrats or scholars, roll +Analytical instead of +Charismatic.

    [ ] Speak Language
    When you hear a strange tongue for the first time, roll +Analytical. 9-, the language or dialect is unknown to you. 10-14, thanks to your studies, you can communicate a bit awkwardly in the language or dialect. 15+, you speak the language or dialect like you were born to it.

    [ ] Stickler
    You are a slave to proper procedure. Increase Disciplined by 1.

    [ ] Unremarkable
    When you stay beneath notice by mindlessly carrying out dreary, time-consuming tasks, roll +Disciplined. 7-9, clear an Exposure box, but without something to occupy your mind with, it strays to dangerous topics. Gain 1 Corruption Point. 10+, the same, but you fill your mind with nothing but servile piety and escape Corruption.

    Advanced moves:

    [ ] Armour of Contempt
    When you roll to gain Corruption Points (NOT when you gain a fixed number of them), reduce the result by 2.

    [ ] The Art of War
    You line up a shot with the same care that you apply proper punctuation. Increase Precise by 1.

    [ ] Common Lore: Walking Encyclopedia
    Requires Common Lore: Scholar. Choose 2 additional Subjects for your Common Lore move.

    [ ] Common Lore: Savantus Supremus
    Requires Common Lore: Walking Encyclopedia. Choose 2 additional Subjects for your Common Lore move.

    [ ] Cross-Disciplinary
    Select an Advance from another Career.

    [ ] Forbidden Lore: Dangerous Obsession
    Requires Forbidden Lore: Unhealthy Interest. Choose 1 additional Subject for your Forbidden Lore move.

    [ ] Forbidden Lore: Unhealthy Interest
    Requires Forbidden Lore. Choose 1 additional Subject for your Forbidden Lore move.

    [ ] Its Gates Locked and Barred
    Requires Mind Like a Fortress. Increase your Corruption Limit by 3.

    [ ] Lecturer
    You have learned that people are more likely to listen to your rants if you make them interesting. Increase Charismatic by 1.

    [ ] Master Chirurgeon
    Requires Medicae. When you provide medical care, the patient heals 2 Wounds more than indicated.

    [ ] Practical Application
    Select an Advance from another Career.

    [ ] Pragmatic
    A rational person takes whatever path promises the greatest probability of success. Increase Treacherous by 1.

    [ ] Scurrying Rat
    Requires Gopher. When you circumvent a threat by staying out of sight and relying on little-used paths, roll +Analytical instead of +Treacherous.

    [ ] Sound Constitution
    Increase your Wound Limit by 3.

    [ ] Total Recall
    Requires Brilliant. You can perfectly memorise large swaths of information. You can always ask the GM for any detail of your past life experience, no matter how seemingly trivial or irrelevant at the time. If given a few moments, you can completely memorise maps, lists, documents, etc, and later examine them at your leisure from memory.

    Corruption moves:

    [ ] Blasphemous Insight. Your thoughts have escaped the safe confines of Imperial thought, proving you with flexibility of thought at the cost of growing corruption. When you apply your intellect, you may choose to take +1 forward to the roll at the cost of gaining 1 Corruption Point.

    [ ] Powerful Secrets. Your study into esoteric knowledge has allowed you to kindle the natural psychic ability of all humans. Choose 2 Minor Psychic Powers from the Imperial Psyker’s list. You can activate them at the cost of gaining 1 Corruption Point per activation. When doing so, you must chant and gesture in a way that anyone even slightly knowledgeable will recognise as sorcerous.

    [ ] Thirst for the Unholy. Every taste of the terrible truths of the world renews your will to go on even as it damns your soul. When you roll to gain Corruption Points (not when you gain a fixed amount of them), hold Righteous Fury.

    [ ] You can no longer resist the temptation to use the secrets you have learned. You immediately attempt an ill-fated sorcerous invokation that gets out of control and rips open a hole into the Warp, into which you disappear screaming never to be seen again. Make a new character.

  • I have done actual stuff!

    I have done actual stuff!

    I didn’t manage to complete the Aberrant Player’s Guide this week – it’s long and it’s boring, and I’ve been distracted by more interesting things. See, it occurred to me that instead of reading PDFs of an outdated 90s game that I hate… I could read PDFs of outdated 90s games that I might actually like. I know, it’s a crazy idea, but what if I did something to not be miserable?

    Still, my Aberrant readthrough will eventually be finished, if it so kills me – I have one and a half book left, surely I can do it. And while I’m at it, I also intend to finish that loathsome piece of smirking, YouTube-spawned zoomer dreck Daggerheartat some point. I refuse to be beaten by self-righteous hacks, be they 90s hipster edgelords or 20s woke snowflakes!

    But, just for this week, I figured I’d actually post some work on my own projects for a bit. My attention span hasn’t been the greatest, but I’ve managed to put in some actual work on three different ones.

    THE DARK HERESY PORT

    My Dark Heresy port… works. That’s about the best you can say for it. It works, it’s not actively painful to use, it’s better (subjective statement, I know!) than the original rules. But it’s still not good. It’s over-complicated. It’s dense. It’s got lots of things that will never get used. It lacks the sort of punch that PbtA games should have, the sense of providing the flavour explicitly instead of trying to make it an emergent property of a hundred fiddly modifiers.

    So this week, I started scribbling on a new version. I’m keeping a lot of things from the old, but I’m stripping the basic moves down to one per Characteristic. I’m also renaming the Characteristics to make them represent personal qualities more so than raw talent – for example, I’m renaming Strength to Fierce, and you roll +Fierce to push forward, to advance, to remove obstacles. Like so:

    Weapon Skill – Lethal
    Ballistic Skill – Precise
    Strength – Fierce
    Toughness – Unyielding
    Agility – Treacherous
    Perception – Intuitive
    Willpower – Disciplined
    Fellowship – Charismatic
    Intelligence – Analytical

    I’m also merging Insanity and Corruption together into a single pool of “mental hit points.” Keeping track of them both just seems pointless, because honestly, I can’t remember many places in the fiction where anyone went crazy without being implied to be in some way corrupted or under demonic influence. Also, each Career gets three pre-defined conditions that they hit the first, second and third time they exceed their maximum number of Corruption Points. So for instance, the Adept becomes increasingly obsessed with blasphemous lore and ends up summoning daemons, the Arbitrator becomes less and less able to compromise and ends up getting himself killed in a pointless last stand, the Tech-Priest’s bionics take over more and more until he’s a prisoner in a body now wholly run by cogitors… and so on.

    Finally, I’m introducing two collective tracks: Exposure and Intel. Whenever the players make a mess, they mark Exposure, and once all the boxes are marked the enemy knows who they are and start seriously gunning for them. Whenever the players discover an important clue or valuable piece of intelligence, they mark Intel, and once all the boxes are marked they become able to call the Inquisition and request backup, or commandeer local Imperial forces in the Inquisition’s name.

    It’s still sketchy, and I don’t know how long it will take me to finish, especially with everything else I want to do… but I have a good feeling about this. Of course, I seem to recall saying that about the last two versions, too…

    THE MAGE: THE ASCENSION PORT

    One of the old PDFs I’m reading is actually the first edition of Mage: the Ascension and… do you realise that Mage used to be fun? Like, there used to be things to do, instead of just being dropped in a dreary world and being told to come up with your own motivation. You could use magick to do actual cool things, instead of the cool things being gated off behind unrealistic numbers of successes. And the Paradox rules actually offered some guidance for what sort of problems might occur at what levels of Paradox, instead of just shrugging and telling you to figure it out. I mean, Mage always fascinated me, but I started writing a port for it largely because I could think of absolutely no way to run it as it was and wanted to invent some workable structure for it. I guess I was reinventing the wheel.

    Anyway, that’s a lot of new ideas that I might look at implementing, but this week, what I actually did was sit down and iron out some better guidelines for Avatar Essence. I fear I’ve been frightfully inconsistent with what does and does not qualify a spell for that +1 bonus from a mage’s Essence, and since Arete rolls are locked at +0 for a long time, that bonus is kind of important.

    So here’s what I’ve come up with for now, and that I think might work:

    • If your Essence is Dynamic, take +1 to any Arete roll meant to radically alter a situation or infuse it with more energy. If it makes a mess, it can be justified as a Dynamic Effect. Creation and destruction are both highly possible, and so is transformation – the frequent problem is going to be making the changes drastic enough to qualify as Dynamic without resorting to vulgar magick. You can’t just shift around a few pieces, the very rules of the game must change in some way. Knowledge spells are almost entirely impossible to claim as Dynamic Effects – understanding the current situation implies a state of mind that assumes it will remain relatively unchanged, and that is against all the Dynamic Avatar stands for.
    • If your Essence is Pattern, take +1 to Arete rolls to make use of what already exists, without adding or removing from it. If you are playing off something that is already in the scene, you can probably justify it as a Pattern Effect. It is difficult to use Pattern to create anything whole cloth or to completely destroy, but you can “improve” on what is already there or put their pre-existing flaws into play. Likewise, transformation is possible, but only to make things either sturdier or more complicated, never to both weaken and simplify them (for example, you might sprinkle perfectly symmetrical holes throughout the surface of a door, thus making it more complicated but also more brittle and easier to break. You could not claim Pattern for just making the door rotten, since that would make it more fragile without adding to its complexity). Spells of pure knowledge are the hardest to justify; the Pattern Avatar is jealous of information and considers everything to be on a need-to-know basis, though you can sometimes sneak something through by baking into the spell the idea that you need to better understand something in order to strengthen it or obey its rules.
    • If your Essence is Primordial, take +1 to Arete rolls to remove things, especially barriers and restore the original, unconstrained state of things. The Primordial Avatar dislikes forcing anything to be, but you can get a lot of mileage out of removing the reasons for it not to be and then letting nature take its course. Pure knowledge spells are relatively easy to manage as long as you can argue that you are removing something that is “blocking your sight”; for example, you could see through a wall by removing its ability to hide what was behind it. Pattern Effects can also be used quite easily to either heal (by “removing weakness and damage”) or destroy (by “removing strength and wholeness”).
    • If your Essence is Questing, take +1 to Arete rolls to experience the world, either by expanding your senses or by introducing yourself into interesting situations. Pure knowledge spells are always allowed as Questing Effects, but spells that actually do something are harder – they generally need to be justified as serving to move yourself into a position where you can learn things. Questing can never be used to keep something at arm’s length or to remain stationary and let the world move around you, only in either affecting or facilitating your own movement through the world.

    It is possible to make an Effect draw on an Essence by defining it more tightly than the Spheres actually demand. For instance, a Disciple of Entropy Effect can disable any inanimate system, but this would not be a Questing Effect since most inanimate systems don’t block the mage’s movement (it would work fine as a Primordial Effect, since it would be dissolving artificial structures). However, defining the Effect to only target locks, bolts, and fetters in the mage’s path would let it be cast as a Questing Effect, since it would then be clearly in the service of the Questing Avatar’s goals. Assume that the Avatar is sentient and intent on enforcing its idea of the mage’s destiny; it will “bless” certain spells and not others, depending on whether those spells are in line with how it sees its purpose.

    Likewise, it is possible to align an Effect with an Essence by making mundane actions part of its casting. For example, an Apprentice of Entropy Effect to detect a flaw in an enemy’s fighting style can’t be a Primordial Effect, since it can’t be justified as removing a boundary (the flaw, if it exists, is right there – your problem isn’t seeing it, it’s recognising it). However, an Akashic might create an Effect in the form of a “conflict-ending blow” that instantly and non-lethally incapacitated an enemy by unbalancing her at a split instance of weakness. Since the casting of the Effect could only be used to end a fight at least for the time being and could not be used to acquire knowledge without immediately acting on it, it could be justified as a Primordial Effect. The Effects blessed by the Essences can overlap – something could be both a Dynamic Effect and a Questing Effect (such as a personal teleportation spell; both a drastic change and a way for the mage to move into a more advantageous position), or both a Pattern Effect and a Primordial Effect (such as a spell to render poisoned water drinkable; it would at once improve the water for the purposes of being drunk and remove its harmful qualities). However, when codified into a Rote, an Effect always has the Essence chosen by the mage who created the Rote.

    Again, it needs more work, but I think this will actually provide the sort of flavour I want.

    MONSTROUS MISHAPS (FOR ONCE!)

    Finally, I managed to do some actual work on one of my actual original games. Will wonders never cease? I’m trying to get the quickstart for my perpetually-almost-finished game Monstrous Mishaps together. I have gotten to the chapter on GMing, and that’s hard, because… er… I suck at writing GMing advice, as it turns out. It’s funny, I have no problem writing player advice, but for GMs I keep trying to think of something more helpful than, “just do it properly! You know, properly. Like, not in the way that causes me actual pain to watch. Do it in the way that isn’t like that. Jerks.”

    I don’t know. GMing is more an art than a science for me, I guess…

    Anyway, I did manage to put together ten suggested plot hooks, to give the reader a better idea of what sort of thing you get up to in Monster World.

    • A rival Monster managed to dump a barrel full of Jell-Oh over one of the PCs in full view of the Court. Now the PC has to find some way to PWN the prankster right back, or they’ll be a laughingstock for months.
    • Against his better judgment, a PC posted bail for his no-good brother-in-law, and then the jerk failed to show up for his court date. Time to go turn over every rock he might have crawled under, while an inept police detective is certain that the PC is hiding the fugitive and keeps interfering.
    • A PC’s boss is coming over for dinner. Nothing must go wrong! The problem is, the PCs live in a Maze, which is to say, a perverse haunted house with no regard for their career prospects…
    • A PC’s best mate has lost his job and his apartment, and a PC has graciously let him crash at her place until he can get back on his feet. However, after several months of him doing nothing but hanging around pitying himself, the cohabitation is starting to become a drag. The PC is going to have to somehow both find him a new job and get him to shape up enough to keep it.
    • A PC has somehow attracted an annoying Haunting that inflicts a taboo on him – whenever he hears a bell ring, he has to immediately do a silly song and dance routine or else suffer an unlikely and painful accident. There’s a counterspell to get rid of the curse, but it requires a bunch of bizarre ingredients that must be gathered from all over town. Too bad that the annual Bell-Ringing Festival is just around the corner.
    • A PC’s rich aunt wants him to babysit her bratty son for the afternoon. He’d better come back in one piece, or she’ll make some alterations to her will. The kid resents being babysat and has absolutely zero self-preservation.
    • A sneaky Slayer has spread the vicious rumour that a PC has been seen kicking a puppy. The good news is, the animal shelter needs volunteers, giving the PC an excellent opportunity to prove what an animal lover she really is. How hard can it possibly be to take care of a few dozen maladjusted critters with simmering grudges against all of humanity?
    • A PC has inherited an old house that needs to be cleaned out so they can sell it. This will require not only dealing with a bunch of squatters who aren’t happy about being ousted, but a grumpy Haunting that’s just woken up as well.
    • A PC’s ex-husband is refusing to share custody of their pet parakeet. Dragging him to court would probably not help, so there is nothing to it but a bout of parakeet-napping. Problem is, the ex is a Monster too, so it will require traversing his Maze.
    • The lady who accidentally ran into a PC’s mailbox last week is not only refusing to pay for damages. No, she’s also countersuing for emotional damages of the PC having irresponsibly placed a mailbox where innocent people might need to drive. The PC’s enemies are all too happy to offer damning character testimony, so the PC needs to find just as many people to assure the judge of what a nice fellow he is.

    So there you go. Three actual samples of what I’m working on right now. Yes, Aberrant is so bad that it’s driving me to try to do better myself. Which is, admittedly, a positive effect common to many bad games, so perhaps it fills some sort of function in the cosmic order after all…

  • 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!

  • Indecesive superheroics

    Indecesive superheroics

    I am happy to report that I am over my Warhammer 40,000 obsession for now. So instead I am geting obsessive about Aberrant instead. Hey, I got to get my OCD on somehow.

    For those who don’t know, and that may be a not insignificant number of people, Aberrant is one of the lesser known White Wolf games from the 90s, one of the ones that weren’t World of Darkness or Exalted. It’s a superhero game where one person in a million has “erupted” into a “nova” who can subconsciously manipulate the quantum energies of the universe, which in practice means that they develop superpowers like flight and nigh-invulnerability and we’re going to pretend that it makes sense Because Quantum. Oh, and though no one knows it yet, all novas are slowly mutating into mad, godlike mutants called aberrants who humanity will fight in a horrible cataclysmic war, because it’s just not White Wolf if your soul isn’t being slowly devoured by something.

    Otherwise, the big schtick of Aberrant is that it tries to be semi-realistic with the existence of superpowers. Most people don’t in fact put on colourful costumes and run around fighting crime – some do, but they’re mostly employed by the government or the UN, and far more novas are out there getting cushy corporate jobs, hiring themselves out as mercenaries in Third World proxy wars, or using their super-charisma to become world-famous celebrities.

    It’s all kind of interesting in theory, but the execution is a little half-hearted. For one thing, it has that problem White Wolf games frequently had whereby it wasn’t exactly clear what you were meant to do. In a regular superhero game you stop bank robberies, but this game is all about avoiding that kind of cliches, and that just raises the question of what you’re meant to do instead. There are all sorts of things you could conceivably do, but since they’re all presented as completely optional, they’re not especially well-supported. Which is a little like writing D&D but just describing the monsters and magic in general terms while mentioning in the passing that some people go looking for treasures in old ruins, but you totally don’t have to be among those if you don’t want to. It leaves the whole thing with a great deal of assembling required.

    It’s also got a major case of the White Wolf metaplot problem. Now, for most of these games, I don’t think the metaplot was ever as much of a problem as people made it out to be – it provided you with some texture and ambience, but the scope of the game would likely be about intrigue within a single city or region anyway, so it was easy enough to stay away from it. Not so with Aberrant. Here, the metaplot is in your face all the time, with the fundamental unimportance of single characters (yes, even the incredibly overpowered ones!) constantly stressed. Oh, this nova is really into Quebec secessionism? Yeah, that’s a ridiculous non-issue that doesn’t even matter now, so I am honestly perplexed as to how I’m supposed to care about it in a setting where physics have been turned on their head.

    And to add to the problem, the metaplot is really kind of… well… bad. Like the rest of the game, it seems to not know what to do with itself. Like, it revolves around the shiny happy UN agency Project Utopia using novas to turn the world into a shiny happy paradise. But it has also managed (somehow! Don’t get me started on how stupid that plot hook is…) to sterilise 100% of all novas without anyone noticing. But it also wants to create a peaceful, enlightened one world government. But it also imprisons unruly novas and vivisects them. But it has also all but eliminated crime and pollution. But it also keeps isolated wars brewing to get novas killed off at a steady rate. But…

    I am getting whiplash just from thinking about it. Like, I think it’s meant to be a case of a shiny happy facade hiding a terrible secret, but the facade is so shiny and happy and the secret is so terrible that it’s impossible to take either one seriously. It doesn’t give you that nice White Wolf feeling of a flawed ideal that it is possible to champion or oppose – it gives you the feeling that the pro-Project Utopia parts were written by a raving Project Utopia fanboy and the anti-Project Utopia parts were written by a foaming-at-the-mouth Project Utopia hater. The one thing that stays the same between them is that anyone who disagrees is clearly some sort of idiot or reprobate. That’s not shades of grey, it’s black and white constantly switching places!

    To make it work, I think you’d need to actually bone down in Project Utopia’s methods and figure out how, realistically, they would be flawed. Crime has been eliminated? Okay, whose civil liberties were trampled to make that happen? A unified world government? Yeah, because stripping away the national sovereignty of poorer places surely won’t lead to them getting exploited even harder by the richer ones! You could make it into a study of why superhero morality (which was, after all, originally intended for small boys, no matter how much latter-day geeks tried to graft mature sensibilities onto it) simply doesn’t work in the real world, why we have tradeoffs and compromises, That’d be really interesting.

    But no, instead we get one character screaming “what’s your sperm count?!” at another.

    All of which means that this is a game that needs some tender loving care. Which is, as it happens, my stock in trade…

  • Grimdark puttering

    Grimdark puttering

    No major progress on anything important this week – I’ve been two steps away from a nervous breakdown most of the time. Still, puttering around on this and that has, surprisingly, gotten me most of the way through outlining Rank 5 of the Dark Heresy port. And that’s kind of neat, because Rank 5 is honestly where the game actually starts to happen. That’s when you get to play around with power swords and big-boy psychic powers and cybernetic implants that lets you levitate.

    The entire first half of the game is you working your way up from “Imperial Guard draftee” or “underhive scum” to actually becoming one of the people the setting tends to really focus on. Which makes senes in theory – zero to hero is a thing for a reason, right? The problem is that it cuts you off from most of the source material – not all of it, by any means, there is the occasional piece of media that follows the people way down on the ground, but still, the pickings there are a bit slim. And I think the game designers did realise that, since they went on to release special rules for playing as an Inquisitor (even if they mostly amounted to, “just start by spending a gazillion points of XP”) and all the other games in the line were about being some kind of badass.

    I don’t know. I guess I’m not that much of a fan of zero-to-hero in general. It can be cool if you’re playing a really long campaign, but most campaigns don’t last for years of real life – whatever level you start on, you’re probably not going to be moving that far from it, so I think it makes sense to put at least a decent amount of cool stuff on it.

    I’m kind of looking forward to starting to adapt the other games in the series, because there I’ll find out if the system I’ve worked out can be adjusted to higher power levels and plenty of authority. That’s honestly what I enjoy running more – not games where the players are all-powerful or anything, but games where they have juuuuust enough power to get to make demoralising hard decisions. Being powerless means freedom from responsibility, and as my players could tell you (usually with a lot of long-suffering sighs), I do so love to inflict responsibility on them.

    In other news, today’s Mummy: the Resurrection session went well. It was the thirtieth one in the campaign, proving that sometimes they really do go on for a long time (so it’s kind of a shame that this is a system where character progression is a lot more plot-dependent and thus the players still aren’t that far from where they started out). It’s odd, it’s a pretty obscure and unloved game running on a glorified set of house rules, but somehow it just clicked. I kind of feel like I should change to a different campaign soon, because Lord knows there are plenty of other games I want to try, but at the same time, it seems a shame to stop when it’s going so well. Oh well, we’ll see.

  • Battle in the void

    Battle in the void

    Having continued my obsession with Warhammer 40,000, this week I sat down and wrote up some basic rules for void ship combat, drawing on the Battlefleet Gothic table top game and the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada video game. I ran a test session with those of my players who could make it this week, and it actually worked out pretty well.

    SHIP TYPES

    First off, I cavalierly ignored all the finicky rules about different hull types, at least as far as NPC ships go. Instead, I’ve divided ships into these categories:

    • Battleship: Hull 15, Shields 10, Armour 4, Turrets 4, Damage 2d10
    • Battlecruiser: Hull 12, Shields 8, Armour 4, Turrets 3, Damage 1d10h
    • Cruiser: Hull 10, Shields 6, Armour 2, Turrets 3, Damage 1d10 damage
    • Light Cruiser: Hull 8, Shields 4, Armour 2, Turrets 2, Damage 1d10l
    • Frigate/Destroyer: Hull 5, Shields 2, Armour 1, Turrets 2, Damage 1d5
    • Transport/Raider: Hull 3, Shields 2, Armour 0, Turrets 1, Damage 1d5l

    WEAPONS

    Secondly, there’s weapons. There are three kinds that I’ve outlined so far:

    • Lances: ignore Armour, but shields absorb them well. When a lance weapon hits a vessel, reduce the damage by the current Shield value, then reduce Shield by 1, to a minimum of 0. The remaining damage, if any, is subtracted from the ship’s Hull.
    • Macrobatteries: struggle against Armour, but can batter down Shields. When a macrobattery hits a vessel, roll the ship’s Damage, reduce the result by the current shield value, then reduce the Shield value by the same amount, to a minimum of 0. The remaining damage, if any, is further decreased by the ship’s Armour before being applied to the ship’s Hull. The Damage roll is also adjusted by the following considerations:
      • Targeted ship is at boarding range: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is at augury range: -1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving towards you: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving on a parallel trajectory: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a transport or raider: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a cruiser or battleship: +1 damage.
    • Torpedoes ignore Shields but can be shot down by Turrets. When a torpedo swarm hits a vessel, roll the weapon’s Damage and inflict it on the ship’s Hull, reduced by Armour+Turrets. If there is anything behind or right next to the target, roll the weapon’s damage again, minus the damage rolled the first time, subtracted by Turrets but not by Armour. If the result is positive, the object behind the target takes that much Hull damage, reduced by its own Armour+Turrets. Torpedoes can be fired at any range, even beyond augury range as long as the location of a target is known. Torpedoes must be reloaded in between each shot. The damage from torpedoes is adjusted in the following ways:
      • Targeted ship is moving towards you: +1 damage.
      • Targeted ship is moving on a parallel trajectory: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a transport or raider: -1 damage.
      • Target vessel is a cruiser or battleship: +1 damage.

    Ranged are boarding (up close and personal), artillery (at the maximum range of most guns), and augury (at the edge of what a ship can perceive).

    Weapons must be fitted somewhere, either as broadside weapons, prow weapons, or dorsal weapons (which can be used either as broadside or prow weapons). You can only fire a weapon at an enemy if it is correctly aligned according to the fiction.

    CRITICAL DAMAGE

    A ship that takes damage in excess of its remaining Hull suffers Critical Damage. That means that one of the following conditions get marked (the GM decides which one):

    When the players’ ship suffers Critical Damage, the GM marks one of the conditions below:
    [ ] Weapon offline (choose one) – the weapon can’t be fired.
    [ ] Shield generator offline – Shields drop to 0 and can’t be reignited.
    [ ] Enginarium damaged – the ship can’t come to a new heading or indeed turn in any direction; it can still speed up or slow down, though.
    [ ] Thrusters disabled – the ship loses forward traction and can only maneuver, poorly, by navigational thrusters; it can’t fire thrusters.
    [ ] Bridge destroyed – the command staff is driven from the bridge; take -1 ongoing to all void moves.
    [ ] Fire – a fire is spreading through the compartments. Until it has been put out, the GM can inflict 1d5 Hull damage, bypassing armour and shields, as a GM move.
    [ ] Augury array disabled – the ship is blind to anything beyond boarding range; it can not make an augury sweep or lock on target.
    [ ] Crew in disarray – the crew are rioting or panicking; the ship cannot fight in a boarding action, brace for impact, or refit and reload until order has been restored.

    VOID MOVES

    The following moves can be performed by any player taking a command position on a void ship. Void moves are primarily executed through dashing leadership and taking decisive charge of a situation, so any player can make any void move, irrespectively of whether it falls within their theoretical authority or not.

    When you fight in a boarding action, roll +Weapon Skill. 10-14, you inflict a Critical Damage on the enemy ship before being pushed back, or push boarders off your own ship before they can do any harm. 15+, you have the option to push onward. If you choose to do so, you either harry the enemy back to their own ship, inflicting a Critical Damage on it before retreating, or you gain a beachhead on the enemy ship; the fight will continue as a regular field battle, with the ships themselves playing no further part. If you do not choose to push onward, see result of 10-14.

    When you bring fire into the void, roll +Ballistic Skill. 10-14, you inflict damage by one weapon you have facing the enemy, and that enemy inflicts damage on you by one weapon it has facing you. 15+, the same, and you may also inflict a Critical Damage on the enemy struck, even if you don’t cause any Hull damage.

    When you fire thrusters, roll +Strength. 10-14, choose 1 option below, but you deplete your fuel stores; take -1 ongoing to this move and the come to a new heading move until you’ve had a chance to feed the engine. 15+, choose 1 option below.

    • You come to a sudden stop or power past a danger coming at you from the side.
    • You escape a pursuer or catch up to a quarry.
    • You ram another ship. You both deal damage to each other, reduced by Armour, and the other ship is knocked off course; if you have any broadside weapon, you may use it to deal damage on the victim on your way past.

    When you brace for impact, roll +Toughness. 10-14, hold 1 that can be spent on negating the effects of a hit. However, while you have any hold at all from this move, take -1 ongoing to all other void moves. 15+, the same, but hold 2 instead.

    When you come to a new heading, roll +Agility. 10-14, you change your heading to another one of your choosing, possibly aiming you away from a danger or getting a particular weapon facing an enemy. If there is an enemy, then he, at least for now, is sufficiently surprised by your deft maneuvering that it will take him precious time to adjust. However, you deplete your fuel stores; take -1 ongoing to this move and the fire thrusters move until you’ve had a chance to feed the engine. 15+, the same, but your fuel gauge remains comfortably stocked.
    Note: This move represents a sharp turn that puts serious stress on the ship and crew. Coming around in a wide, leisurely circle does not require rolling to come to a new heading.

    When you lock on target, roll +Intelligence. 10-14, you identify a weakness in an enemy vessel. Hold 1 that can be spent at a successful roll to fill the void with fire. If that roll is a result of 10-14, you can spend the hold to inflict a Crippling Injury. If the roll is a result of 15+, you can spend the hold to get +2 on the damage roll. 15+, the same, but hold 2 instead.

    When you make an augury sweep, roll +Perception. 10-14, you get a detailed analysis of everything that is currently with augury range of your ship and isn’t trying to hide itself, as well as being told if there is anything hidden or obscured (such as a ship running on silent or within a gas cloud or meteor swarm) within it. 15+, the same, and your excellent data makes planning easier. Take +1 forward to any other void moves within the same scene.

    When you command the ratings to refit and reload, roll +Fellowship. 10-14, choose 1 option below. 15+, choose 2 options, or apply the same option twice.

    • You reload a torpedo tube.
    • You prepare a new squadron.
    • You remove 1 point of penalties to come to a new heading and fire thrusters.

    When you order emergency repairs, roll +Willpower. 10-14, choose 1 option below. 15+, choose 2 options, or apply the same option twice.

    • You restore 1d5l lost points of Shield.
    • You undo 1 Critical Damage.
    • You restore 1 lost point of Hull.

    NPC SHIPS

    NPCs, of course, can’t make moves, and a lot of Critical Damage conditions don’t apply to them. They can be assumed to have a broadside macrobattery and either another macrobattery, a lance, or a torpedo tube in the prow. NPC ships will normally only fire torpedoes once in a fight. They have Shields, but they won’t normally reignite shields once they’ve been depleted.

    They also only have the following Critical Damage conditions that are normally marked in order:

    [ ] Shields disabled – the Shields drop to 0. If the Shields are reduced to 0 by being depleted by damage, this is also automatically marked; it exists as a condition to make it possible to drop shields prematurely (in the test session today, the players manage to bring down the enemy shields with a 15+ result on a torpedo barrage, without ever having to chip away at them).
    [ ] Weapon systems offline – the ship can’t fire any weapon. It almost certainly starts trying to flee or, failing that, shut down all systems and run on silent while performing frantic repairs.
    [ ] Enginarium damaged – the ship can’t navigate but drifts helplessly. The crew likely readies itself for a desperate last stand against boarders, though it might also activate the warp engines (likely resulting in a giant explosion if it’s still within the gravity well of a star system).
    [ ] Core meltdown – the ship explodes in a giant fireball, leaving a cloud of debris.

  • More 40K (now with space battles)

    More 40K (now with space battles)

    I just had to open my big mouth and declare that I was done, didn’t I? Cue me working just as obsessively this week to add in more rules to cover Rank 4. I am almost done with that now, at least. I just have like 30 more Psychic Powers to translate. And a ton of stuff to proofread, of course. Then I’ll get down to something else. Honest.

    I’ve also started consuming as much Warhammer 40,000 media as I can find, which may not be a good sign. But, well, it does have one considerable benefit: there’s a lot of the stuff. Like, a never-ending sea of it. If for whatever deranged reason I suddenly want to immerse myself in grimdark, Games Workshop certainly has me covered.

    One thing I am particularly studying is the main game’s lesser-known cousin, Battlefleet Gothic, since that’s where Rogue Trader cribbed its space combat system from, and I do want to port Rogue Trader at some point (it was actually the one I started out trying to port; it just turned out to be too demoralisingly impossible, partly because of those same space combat rules). Rogue Trader‘s space combat is famously horrible, but the original seems like fun. So it seems like the roleplaying line again took a good thing and destroyed it completely.

    The problem for porting it, though, is that Battlefleet Gothic combat is all about positioning – where your ships are in relation to other ships, where they will both be a turn from now. Which makes sense on a table top, but doesn’t translate well into a fiction-first design. I’ll need to redesign a lot of stuff.

    I guess the thing to do is to break down the whole thing into fiction. Isolate what different stuff happens during a fight – torpedoes launched, systems going offline, sharp turns, shields being knocked out – and trying to internalise it. Never mind a set of distinct moves for now, what I need is to be able to freeform a whole scenario for some players, putting them through a space battle while tutoring them as we go about what their options are and what the risks and rewards for each might be.

    Yeah. That’s what I’ll need to do.

  • Aaaand it’s done!

    Aaaand it’s done!

    I am pleased to report that my recent bout of mania has produced a semi-finalised version of my Dark Heresy port to Powered by the Apocalypse. It can be found on the downloads page, or if you’re too lazy to go there, you can just click here.

    Well, that was a lot of work for something that no one but me is likely to ever find much use for… but, well, at least it’s keeping my brain active. Better than doing crossword puzzles, I’m sure.

    And it’s certainly been a deep-dive in all things Warhammer 40,000. I think I’m starting to get the general gist of it, you know? The key thing is, you have to shut down any sense of tender-heartedness or even of basic self-preservation and really get in touch with your ghoulish side. You have to cultivate an attitude of, “incredibly awful things are happening all around – and that is SO COOL!”

    Possibly this is not so good for my always-shaky connection to normal humanity and I should go work on my Blue Rose port for a bit now to balance it out… Either way, I definitely do need to take a break from this one for a bit now. Work on some other project – possibly even one of my original ones, heaven forbid…

  • Grimdark Principles

    Grimdark Principles

    Woo! I have been hard at work with my Dark Heresy port – which I realise is all that I ever talk about lately, but when I get manic about something I need to ride it until it starts boring me again, at which point I can get manic about something else – and I’m actually pretty close to having it ready as a playable game. There is some fine-tuning, but most of it is in sorting the rules into a more easily accessible format. The actual function of them I think I can more or less stand by at this point.

    For this week, have a look at my Principles. Principles are one of my favourite parts of Powered by the Apocalypse – they’re specific assumptions and elements of playstyle that goes with the particular setting and genre of a particular game. I had to rewrite these about a million times, but now I think they actually work for the sort of game I’ve been running. Here they are:

    • Never whisper when you can roar. The forty-first millennium has no room for subtlety. Everything about it is oversized, overwrought, overwhelming, and not least of all loud. There are no genteel duels on sunlit streets, only frantic no-holds-barred chainsaw-wielding brawls fought atop the broken stained glass of ruined cathedrals; no calm discussions between dispassionate parties, only furious demands shouted over the thunder of enemy gunfire. Whenever you frame a scene, ask yourself: how could this be more operatic and baroque?
    • Fill the world with brooding ruins; afflict everything with slow rot. The galaxy is old, its decadent empires stubbornly clinging to life even as they are dragged, inch by inch, towards oblivion. Nor is anything replacing them – those that manage to prosper in this time of fire and blood are those that have no interest in building anything of their own, only in tearing down or consuming what already exists. The decay isn’t fast, but it’s omnipresent, visible in the blasted skylines of bombed-out cities and the jagged scars of grizzled veterans. Everything is either old and worn out, or new and crudely inferior.
    • Spin webs of baffling complexity. Nothing is simple and elegant. Everything is covered with unnecessary details and slathered in adjustments, caveats, reworkings and contradictory purposes. Every culture has a convoluted history that has given rise to bizarre practices, and every piece of machinery has been jury-rigged from components originally meant for something else. Things that are meant to be covert are even more so; whatever part of a secret plan you manage to unravel is probably a diversion designed to cover a deeper agenda, or else it was meant to go down a whole different way but was sabotaged by unplanned events or a third faction. If something seems straightforward and common-sensical, it means that you haven’t added enough detail and contradiction to it yet.
    • Beneath every demoralising appearance, hide an even more awful truth. Things always seem pretty bad, and they’re invariably even worse than that. If you think that you have a predator on your trail, there is probably a second one lying in ambush ahead of you. If you’re tracking a skeevy underhive cult, it will turn out to be only the smallest part of a vast, powerful conspiracy reaches into the highest spires. Whomever you most rely on will either stab you in the back or die right before your eyes. Show plenty of problems and threats to the players, and for each one secretly ask yourself: how might this be worse than it seems?
    • Hoard knowledge and spread deceit. Knowledge in the Imperium is at once tightly controlled and rapidly decaying. No one has a complete picture – the real facts are either strictly classified, distorted by propaganda, or simply forgotten or misfiled. As acolytes of the Inquisition, the players have a duty to separate the truth from the lies, but they should have their work cut out for them; even the most trifling pieces of accurate data are furiously protected and once acquired, turn out to have large holes in them.
    • Show that humanity is fleeting. The Imperium is fighting for mankind against all that would see it end, against the alien xenos and the mutating powers of the Warp. However, the way it fights invariably eats away at the humanity of its people in turn. Imperial Commanders accept, or initiate, horrific widespread atrocities because it’s the only way to keep the system going, turning the strong into sadistic monsters and the weak into whimpering animals. Psykers invite the Warp into their own minds for the power to meet it on the battlefield. Tech-priests replace their bodies with metal out of loathing for human weakness. Even Astartes, supposedly the ultimate champions of Man, have turned themselves into lumbering, brainwashed killing machines that have little resemblance to the men they once were. On every side, show human nature suppressed or corrupted, stolen away or abandoned.
    • Let there be no innocence, only degrees of guilt. No one is pure, no matter how impeccably they present themselves. The seemingly noblest of people are still driven to acts of petty spite and hubristic arrogance by the strain of their position. Lesser souls, realising that there is little justice in the galaxy and that their ultimate fate will likely be a grim one, sell out their integrity for a slightly more bearable life here and now. Some people are worse than others – there are depths of depravity in the galaxy that the common, everyday sinner could barely even imagine, much less partake in – but no one is both completely sane and completely righteous, and most are some combination of crazy and corrupt.
    • Explore the brutal power of faith. Faith in the Imperium is not about gentle comfort and community; it is a thing of cleansing fire and blood-soaked martyrdom, of baying mobs and dungeons echoing with screams. Faith can turn a crowd of cowering peasants into a conquering army, can move planets on their axis, can spit in the face of Hell itself. Terrifying, psychotic certainty is a weapon as powerful as any bolter, and as volatile as a promethium refinery. Let the players try to use it to their advantage, but also put them to the risk of finding themselves on the wrong side of someone’s crusade.
    • Make every victory pyrrhic. Victory is always possible even in the grim darkness of the far future. After all, if there was no reason to fight, how could there be war? However, victory is rarely uplifting or hopeful. Rather, it never comes without losses, casualties, and the dismal knowledge that this can’t go on much longer. Never let a victory completely restore the status quo. Every triumph has a too-heavy cost, and entropy always increases, whether from the collateral damage of the fight or from the ever-accumulating injuries and mental scars of the fighters.
    • Treat technology as magic. The Imperium uses advanced technology while being almost wholly ignorant of science. The oldest and most powerful devices are relics that no one knows how to build anymore, and even machines and tools that come off the assembly line are constructed by rote, according to ancient instructions that are treated with religious awe. As far as Imperials are concerned, their weapons and vehicles work by the will of the machine-spirits, who are appeased through maintenance rituals; accordingly, any high-tech device will be decorated with fanciful engravings and colourful prayer rolls to keep it in a good mood. This also means that “high” and “low” technology exists side by side, with waxen candles burning atop cogitor banks and the instructions for operating a mechanic walker being scribbled on vellum. Whenever technology is mentioned, add some detail to hint at how completely its wielders misunderstand it.
    • Relish the players’ fight against impossible odds. The players may be tiny insects struggling against the vagaries of an uncaring cosmos, but the story is nevertheless about that struggle. They are the antiheroes of this tragedy, destined to ultimately fall but compelling for their desperate struggle against their dark fate. Push them to the brink, because that’s where they have the chance to shine; cheer their temporary victories and relish the Heavy Metal brutality of their inevitable defeats. Don’t go easy on them, but always give them a way to fight back, to prove their manful defiance of the odds stacked against them.
    • Portray visceral realities, not abstract rules. Never treat the numbers and the rules like they have an existence of their own. Mechanical effects – injuries, penalties, moves – come from the fiction and have consequences in the fiction. If you’re down a few Wounds, then you have a specific injury; if you’ve gained a few Insanity Points, then some past event still haunts your mind. Never apply a rule without noting what part of the grimdark reality it represents.
    • Demand immediate action. Things in Dark Heresy happens quickly, relentlessly, and often brutally. Threats are always escalating, the chrono is forever running out. Whenever you stop talking, demand to know what the players are doing about what you just said, and then build off of their actions to a new dilemma. Keep the situation ever-changing and the players engaged in it.