Where I Read – Mister Monster's Workshop

Where I read: Daggerheart (part eight)

I hate Daggerheart. Of this we can, at this point, be certain.

But you know, I keep struggling to articulate just why I hate it. It’s not Aberrant, engaging in naked, mean-spirited revenge porn. It’s not Eclipse Phase, smugly preaching its libertarian politics at you. It’s not CthulhuTech, throwing gratuitous rape in your face while high-fiving itself for how edgy it is. It’s not… overt.

One way I might try to explain it is that it feels at once pushy and insincere, like a phony socialite. “Darling, it’s so good to see you, muah! Muah! Muah! However have you been, you must tell me all about it! Oh, you’ve gotten divorced, you’re being audited, you’re suffering from six terminal illnesses and your favourite chewing gum was discontinued? How terrible interesting! Well, must be off, don’t be a stranger, kiss-kiss, ta-ta!” The way it keeps throwing interesting ideas and striking visuals at me and then not committing to them makes me feel like I’m being snidely made fun of, like of course it’s all garbage but it’s not like I’ll mind because I’m too stupid to notice, right? And given that his was written by a bunch of YouTube pseudo-celebrities, who can be assumed to be experts on fostering parasocial commitment in people they don’t give a hoot about… I feel like that intuition is not terribly far-fetched.

Another way to explain it: remember how last time I complained that the game felt like ketchup on ice cream? I’ve thought about it, and that’s not quite right. Ketchup and ice cream are both tasty, they just don’t go together. It’s more like… avocado toast. Yeah, I know, complaining about avocado toast is a stereotypically uncool-old-person thing to do, and I am fully willing to cop to being an uncool old person (and when I was young I was an uncool young person, so not much has changed except for the wrinkles). But there’s a reason why it’s become a cliche, and that’s because it so perfectly encapsulates a particular aesthetic, and that aesthetic is very much the one Daggerheart adheres to.

The thing with avocado and toast is that not only do they not go together, but… they are also, in and of themselves, not terribly exciting. They’re bland things that clash – or to put it another way, the clashing between them is the only way they stand out. It’s a taste for people who don’t want an experience, not even the experience of comfortable simplicity. It’s something that’s broken and is only interesting because it’s broken. This, too, is what Daggerheart feels to me. Take out the mismatches, the contradictions, the refusal to colour inside the lines, and there is nothing left.

A third way to approach the same vague feeling of unease is that it feels like every animated series or sitcom I’ve despised for the last half a decade and more. Every Rick & Morty. Every The Dragon Prince. Every Invincible, Hazbin Hotel, The Good Place, Paradise PD, The Orville, Inside Job… ohhhhh, it’s so sad that I could go on like this much longer… But what I mean is, every piece of brainless dreck where the punchline is always that sincerity is stupid and doing things properly is contemptible and wallowing in gore and filth is the mark of a higher intellect, but which is simultaneously oddly brittle in its supposed nihilism, oddly prone to clutching its pearls whenever someone breaks one of the social norms the writers actually care about. The sort that really wants to trigger the squares, while also having HR on speed dial if you should ever come within a mile of triggering it.

Daggerheart feels like that. All the vague categories, all the finicky rules… it’s rigid in all the ways that deny me freedom of movement, yet shapeless in all the ways that deny me a solid place to stand. And on at least some level, I’m pretty sure that the designers made it that way on purpose, because again – they’re YouTubers, people who are used to selling themselves by appealing to a certain target group, and in our messed-up age that automatically translates to making yourself as unappealing as possible to whatever group the target group loves to crap on. Guess who everyone loves to crap on? Tonedeaf, rhythm-free autistic guys. You know, me. This game feels like a direct, malicious attack on me, and not even for the sake of genuine malice but just because attacking me is the best way to look good for the mindless crowds it’s pandering to.

So keep that in mind as I drag myself through another twenty pages of this garbage!

We have reached the GM section of the book, so in best PbtA tradition, we’re going to be treated to the fundamental philosophy of roleplaying that the game is meant to be run by. Only where PbtA games tend to summarise those quickly and effectively, this is Daggerheart, so it’s going to waffle on for ages without making us much wiser.

First off we have the GM Principles:

Begin and end with the fiction. Nothing is every just mechanical, mechanics are just there to represent things that are happening in-story. Yeah, great, but the problem is, there are like a thousand mechanics that have no comprehensible in-story element. Just what the hell does it mean in “the fiction” when the GM spends a point of Fear he picked up half an hour ago? “Begin and end with the fiction” works in PbtA games because PbtA games have mechanics that are hardwired to always have a fictional component. You can’t just tell me to Make It So when you’ve given me this hyper-crunchy mess to work with!

Collaborate at all times, especially during conflict. This is a common piece of roleplaying advice, but here it’s taken a step further. The GM is usually told to remember that he’s not the players’ enemy; his job is to keep the adventure going and give them a reasonable chance. Here, though, the book goes as far as insisting that the GM must “balance presenting credible threats with maintaining the trust of the players so that the collaborative process can succeed.” That sounds unpleasantly like suggesting that the players might stop “trusting” you if you make things difficult for them, which is rubbish – you can trust your GM to be fair with you even when the game is likely to end with your messy death.

Further, the traditional PbtA principle of “being a fan of the PCs” is here rephrased as “being a fan of the players and their characters.” And while the former is good advice – the PCs are the main event, you want to see them do cool stuff! – the idea that a good GM is some kind of fawning fanboy to the players rubs me the wrong way. Look, I hopefully like my players, but “being a fan”?

See what I mean here? I can’t pin it down, I can’t point to a particular point of objection, so I just keep ranting like a lunatic! But I’m telling you, there is something faintly wrong here, there’s something faintly slimy here, a sort of smarmy aversion to genuine conflict (as opposed to one-sided beatdowns on helpless opponents; the avocado-toasters tend to love those) that makes alarm bells ring in my head! “This was written by crappy people who think they’re incredibly wonderful people! Get out, get out, get out!”

Fill the world with life, wonder, and danger. Make it interesting and colourful, basically. Sure, nothing wrong with that idea.

Ask questions and incorporate the answers. Take some help from the players to flesh out the world – ask them what they think should happen sometimes. This is straight from PbtA, and it’s generally a good thing.

Make every roll important. Don’t roll the dice if the outcome doesn’t matter, or if there is only one reasonable outcome. Works for me.

Play to find out what happens. A venerable old PbtA principle, this… but there it tends to mean that you should take things one move at the time and see where the dice and the players’ actions takes you. Here, it’s phrased in a way that makes it sound more like you should “find out what happens” because the players are going to dictate a lot of it with their preferred outcomes. That’s… another one of those things that I can’t come right out and say is dead wrong, but it’s not great, either, it’s wishy-washy, it’s implying a cringing unwillingness to ever be the bad guy that risks making the whole world feel flimsy and unreal. The GM should roll with the punches, yes, but so should the players.

Hold on gently. Basically, this is the GM version of the one back in the first chapter – have some kind of plot development in mind, but don’t be married to it. And that’s still fair enough.

How far was that? Four pages. Ugh.

Next up is GM Best Practices.

Cultivate a curious table. This one means to fill the world with plot hooks and things that the players might want to explore, then see what they bite on. Sure.

Gain your players’ trust. Okay, this is another one that sounds good in theory but gets taken alarmingly too far. Of course a good campaign requires the players to know that the GM won’t arbitrarily screw them over (unless being arbitrarily screwed over is an integral part of the game being played, of course!).

But here the book goes all the way to suggesting that the players should never be allowed to be wrong about anything – if they think something is true, then it must at least be partly true. And that’s… kind of insane. Look, yes, sometimes you can pull a “sure, let’s go with that,” especially if the players’ theory is cooler than whatever it was you had in mind. But this is like the helicopter parenting of GMing. They can’t be allowed to be mistaken, or that’ll make them stop trusting you?!

Keep the story moving forward. Failure should never result in nothing happening, but always in the situation evolving in some interesting way. Sure, that’s usually good advice too.

Cut to the action. When things are dragging, move them along to the next interesting bit. Again, I have no objection there.

Help the players use the game. If a player forgets how their cool powers work or otherwise what options they have under the system, suggest something they can do. Sure, that’s often necessary.

Create a meta conversation. Be ready to stop the game and talk things out OOC. Yes, true, good. A lot of unpleasantness at the table can be caused by people feeling the need to resolve everything IC instead of recognising that they’re sitting alongside other human beings. But of course this devolves into a mention of (ungh!) sAfEtY tOlS, so I am compelled to hate it. I’ll get into just how much I hate sAfEtY tOlS next time, but for now, let’s just say that it takes a particular kind of neurotic point-missing to first note that you can just step away from the game mechanics and have an actual conversation with fellow human beings of good intent, and then introduce game mechanics for how the conversation has to run.

Tell them what they would know. The PCs live in the world and have practiced their occupations for a long time. Give them whatever context that that would logically give them, free of charge. Again, very sensible.

Ground the world in motive. Have NPCs act on what they are trying to achieve. Okay, I guess. Can’t say that so far this game has impressed me with being all about the intricate motivations and the fraught interplay between incompatable goals, but in and of itself, sure.

Bring the game’s mechanics to life. Use the mechanics to highlight the fictional elements at play. Again, this would be a lot easier if the mechanics weren’t so obtrusive and fiddly! Again again, it works for PbtA because there the mechanics are made to interlock with the fiction instead of shambling alongside it like Frankenstein’s Monster!

Reframe rather than reject. If the players absolutely can’t do something, suggest to them something similar that they might try instead. Yep, I’m down with that.

Work in moments and montages. Speed up or slow down time depending on the needs of the story. This seems to overlap with Cut to the action, but okay.

Pitfalls to avoid! Okay, this should be good…

Undermining the heroes. Don’t ever imply that the characters are bad at stuff. Always phrase things like they must have met unexpected and astonishing resistance. Hoooo boy. The example is literally an attack failing and the GM narrating how the mook who parried it is clearly some sort of swordsmaster and that there must be A Mysterious Reason why she’s guarding a random corridor in the middle of the dungeon. I, I, I, I… I can’t even…

Okay, this is not just me, right? You see it too, right? This is not sane! This is not normal! This is actively telling you to treat the players like they were made of glass, and that is AN UNREASONABLE DEMAND TO MAKE.

Always telling the players what to roll. Again, what?! Look, sure, there are times when there are different approaches a player can take, and of course you can let them roll something other than what you had in mind if they can explain why it made more sense. But putting this as a major pitfall is… strange.

Letting scenes drag. Finally a sane one. Yes, keep things moving.

Singular solutions. Yes, another good one. You shouldn’t create scenarios where there is only a single reasonable action to take. That’s boring. Make them at least a little more open-ended than that. Give the players some room to run around and knock things over, that’s where a lot of the fun lies.

Overplanning. Daggerheart is meant to be improvised wildly, apparently. Mmmmmm-hmm. I’ll want to have a look at how you represent NPCs before I make any judgment on how viable that is, but improvising is a lot easier with a simple system, and this isn’t a simple system.

Hoarding Fear. Spend it like a drunken sailor, you’ll get more before long anyway. If anything, it’s good to burn your whole stash early in a fight, because it lets the players start out on the defensive and then gradually gain ground once you’ve blown your load. Fair enough, but will be contradicted before this post is over.

Core GM mechanics! The GM rolls 1d20 for NPCs instead of 2d12 like the players do. A natural 20 is a critical success.

The GM should not always call for action rolls, but should sometimes offer the player success for a cost. Okay. If he does call for a roll, he should make the consequences clear ahead of time. Nnnnnggghhhhhh I am not entirely opposed to this, because more information is usually better for engagement, but it also plays into the ever-present sense of “players are incredibly fragile and must never get cause to be upset in any way” that grinds on my last nerve. Actually, a large part of why this is so frustrating to me is that there are so many points on which I two thirds agree, but the last third is made of PURE UNADULTERATED CRAZY, so I have to scramble like mad to express my objection to it without speaking against my own position!

If you have an Experience and an action that involves it is routine, it might just succeed. Or it might succeed at the cost of marking Stress or something, whatever. Okay, the whole “these things on your character sheet don’t matter unless you spend points to make them matter, except when they do, except when they don’t, except when they do” thing crops up in a lot of other games that tries to be “Narrative,” and they’re always annoying, but here I’m not sure I even understand what the paragraph is trying to say. It’s just waffling. Zero-information data.

GM moves! The GM should make a GM move whenever the players roll with Fear, fail a roll, look like they don’t know what to do next, do something that would logically have a consequence, or “gives her a golden opportunity.” This… this is literally the PbtA rules with some extra bits attached to ruin the elegance of it (avocado-toasters just generally tend to actively despise elegance. Because you know who like elegance? FASCISTS!!!). But… but… what about all this stuff about spending Fear? Wasn’t that supposed to be what regulated the GM’s ability to do stuff?

Every time I think I understand this crap, they add more crap to the crap…

Oh, and a “golden opportunity” apparently means things like when the players exclaim “nothing can go wrong now!”, which I’m not sure why they’d ever do given that there is an actual rule to punish them for it, but never mind…

There’s a whole page telling you not to “undermine” the players with your GM moves. Gaaaah. Okay, I suppose it might be worth pointing out that a success with Fear is a “yes, but…”, and the “but” should not be “but actually no,” but still.

Moves can be softer and harder, and the GM decides when each is appropriate. Yes, that is at least nicked from PbtA without mutilating it in the process, so fine.

There is a whole bunch of GM move examples, and they are literally just the standard PbtA list (introduce a new problem, have their actions cause unintended side effects, introduce a complication from a PC’s backstory, split up the party, etc, etc) except for “spotlight an adversary” and “have a player mark Stress,” which at least ties in with the system as previously established. Great.

See, the thing is, this doesn’t quite contradict what has gone before. Not quite. It’s more like, the book blathered a whole bunch at me about a topic, and then it ran off and blathered about another topic, and then it came back to the first topic and blathered about it some more, somehow saying roughly the same things while also coming at them from a completely different perspective. This is like an alternate paradigm for the exact same rule system. It’s like describing the same thing first in holistic terms and then in reductionistic ones. It’s just so… unnecessary.

Are… are we sure this whole game isn’t a big practical joke? Like, is this another Dungeons: the Dragoning? Is this Critical Role piling stuff onto stuff onto more stuff as a stealth parody of crappy, overly-pleased-with-itself game design? Because at this point, that theory makes more sense to me than most other ones!

Okay, no, it’s just a crappy homebrew that should have been a heartbreaker but the people making it were famous for pretending to play roleplaying games on camera so everyone bought it. The world is a dark, miserable, and deeply stupid place.

Fear points! What can you actually use them for? Okay, I feel like we’ve already been over this. But okay, you can use them to make additional GM moves in addition to any GM moves you’d already make, you can use them to activate special Fear powers in NPCs or environments, and you can use them to activate an NPC’s Experiences, same as PCs can do with Hope points.

The GM is cautioned to be veeeeery caaaaaareful with how much Fear she spends in a scene, because too much or too little can ruining the drama, don’t you know. Okay. Uh-huh. Here’s the thing. If the whole system hinges on the GM knowing when to spend and not to spend, and breaks down if she can’t be trusted to do that… then the system is meaningless. Like, you can just replace it with a single line: “the GM takes as many actions as she damn well pleases, with the purpose of neither overwhelming the players nor making it too easy for them.” Like, that’s what it boils down to anyway! THIS IS MECHANICS FOR THE SAKE OF HAVING MECHANICS. THIS IS STUPID.

Like, what do you lose if you just give the GM infinite Fear points? Nothing! You still get the “Yes, and…”, “Yes, but…”, “No, and…”, “No, but…” results from the double-d12 rolls! You still have the GM needing to carefully modulate the pressure she puts on the players! You still have the GM moves being triggered by the same things that trigger GM moves in PbtA, which works just fine without some additional abstract meta-currency! You didn’t need to do this, you just did it anyway to be freaking cute! Aaaaarrgggghhhh!

Okay, I am legitimately getting a little too worked up about this, it’s probably best that I go lie down for a bit… How much do I have left? Five pages. Oh God.

Improvised Fear moves! Basically, the GM can spend a Fear point to do anything that might otherwise make the players feel like she’s screwing them over, like introduce an inconvenient fact that had not previously been foreshadowed. Which there is already a GM move for, it’s called reveal and unwelcome truth or an unexpected danger. But who cares? Clearly not the people writing this. Clearly not the people buying it and raving about it on forums.

Roll difficulty! It’s like in D&D, basically. 5 is dead easy, 10 is average, 15 is a bit tricky, 20 is hard, 25 or more is demoralisingly impossible unless you’re super-duper-skilled. There are plenty of examples of each difficulty level for a whole bunch of different activities. That’s nice. It’s even nicer than it takes up the last of the pages and I can stop here.

Well, that was intensely unpleasant, and next time is going to be even worse. Because then we get to the section on Safety Tools. (shakes fist at the sky) SAAAAAAAAFETY TOOOOOOOOLS!!!!

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: The Succubus Club

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

Previously throughout this readthrough I have wittily jested that the true protagonists of Vampire: the Masquerade aren’t the actual vampires, but the various clubs, restaurants, bars, and sundry night-time hangouts they spend their unlives slouching coolly in. And now… we’re going to go over an entire supplement devoted to a single night club. At this point I’m no longer sure if I’m joking or if I’ve genuinely hit on a significant insight…

Yes, it’s the famous Succubus Club, Chicago’s hottest fictional establishment! If you play a Chicago campaign, chances are you’re going to be assumed to be heading here every night by default. The corners are dark, the bands are hardcore, and every single one of the patrons think they’re cooler than you. Never mind all the lore about clans and Blood Bonds and Anarchs – what the game is really about, the actual unbeating heart of it, is hanging out at a happening joint and reveling in how incredibly dark, deep, punk, and supremely not-like-your-parents you are. Everything else exists only to support that experience, I’m telling ya!

We start out with a description of the club itself. It’s owned by Brennan Thornhill, one of Prince Lodin’s many childer and exotic foreigner supreme (precisely where he comes from varies by his mood at the moment, but it’s always somewhere sexy). Lodin embraced him on his request, in return for him using the club to gather information on the Kindred who invariably congregate there. However, since everything always has a deeper level in Chicago, the club actually exists in the first place because the Methuselah Helena slept beneath it for centuries and she still has her haven there.

The establishment consists of a number of different areas. First is the regular dance floor, also known as “Reality.” Above Reality is a series of balconies where the very coolest people can stand and gaze down disdainfully on the unwashed crowd below, nicknamed “Elysium” as a Kindred in-joke. Above even that is the VIP lounge where private parties are held. And down in the cellar is “the Labyrinth,” a set of dark, winding corridors where people go to carry out sordid trysts and illicit affairs. There’s an actual list of random encounters for the Labyrinth, which is a nice touch, but I’m not sure why there isn’t one for Reality and Elysium too?

Helena’s haven is described, with a ton of fake-outs, traps, and general paranoid security measures, including a giant ghoul scorpion. She sleeps in dried-up well ringed with flame thrower traps that she has to very carefully climb in and out of each time. I kind of love how this sounds a) completely impossible for any would-be assassin to penetrate, and b) absolutely wretched. That’s vampirism for you, I guess; living forever, at the cost of giving up most of the things that make life worth the effort.

The club draws a diverse crowd. Blood Dolls (vampire wannabees, basically) are obviously common, but you also get a lot of artsy types who enjoy hanging out in Elysium and doing really great drugs. Punks and gangstas also show up, a lot of them doing business down in the Labyrinth. Among vampires, Toreadors and Ventrue are the most common guests, with Annabelle, the Toreador Primogen, being the greatest patron. It attracts more Anarchs than Elders, though; Elders and their followers tend to frequent competing hangout The Blue Velvet instead.

We get a cast of characters, some with stats, both individual ones like Brennan and general ones like Blood Dolls. Perhaps notably, we get stats for the ghoul bouncers, in case the players start something.

The rest of the book is made up by adventures that take place in, or at least heavily feature, The Succubus Club.

In Annabelle’s Party, the players are invited to a high-class get-together in the penthouse arranged by Toreador Primogen Annabelle. Every single thing about it goes wrong, though; a divorced couple who hate each other both got invited and end up causing a scene, an “art piece” gets unveiled to great fanfare but turns out to just be part of a steam locomotive, and Annabelle’s childe Sophia (remember her?) tries to adopt strip tease to Kindred sensibilities by including blood play in an amazingly tacky display that almost makes everyone involved frenzy.

Then, as the pièce de résistance, Annabelle starts playing a “newly composed piece inspired by her” on the piano, which goes fine until an attending Tremere snidely turns the notes upside down and starts playing them that way – and it’s a super-famous piece of classical music. At that point, Annabelle promptly frenzies from sheer humiliation and tries to rip the offending Tremere’s throat out with her teeth. I got to admit, that had me laughing.

Anyway, the reason for all the disasters (except for Sophia’s; she caused hers all on her own) is that Ballard (a very clever Ventrue) wants to take Annabelle down a peg, so he previously encouraged Drummond (a very dumb Ventrue) in an ill-advised attempt to make his beloved trains a cultural focus, knowing that Annabelle would publically scoff at his efforts, leaving him humiliated. Ballard then consoled Drummond and hinted ever so subtly that it would serve Annabelle right if she got humiliated in turn, leading Drummond to go around mind-whammying a variety of people to cause the flustercluck just described. Meanwhile, Ballard can just sit back and watch as two of his rivals trash each other, leaving him better off regardless of the outcome.

I love this, because it actually provides an example of just how Elders might subtly scheme against each other. In a lot of books, we just get told that vampires “manipulate” each other, but not what it actually looks like. Well, here it is. This is a subtle scheme of multiple layers, with explanations for what actual, practical actions everyone took to make it come about.

Anyway, the players can involve themselves, and maybe go to the train station where Drummond has his haven to give him a talking to before Annabelle tracks him down and does something hasty to him. Getting in involves riding a giant train set, because Drummond is a ridiculous man-child. I love that too.

In Player of Pawns, the players become unknowingly conscripted by Critias, one of the two Brujah Primogen, in his game against visiting Elder Dimitri (which he has in turn been compelled to play by the influence of the Methuselah Menele, who is trying to turn him into a stronger pawn – yeah, wheels within wheels). The players first encounter the two at the Elysium level of the Succubus Club, where they are playing an oddly ominous game of chess. Later, one of them gets kidnapped by Dimitri and thrown into a cell, where they’ll spend much of the adventure while the others are out looking for them. That sounds a bit tricky to pull off efficiently at the table, but okay.

The first night they’re captive, Dimitri will throw in a mortal with them. The cell is air tight, so the mortal will die; the question is whether the player comforts him in his dying moments, kills him themselves so he’ll have a quick death, feeds on him (hey, waste not, want not) or breaks Tradition by embracing him so he can survive (after a fashion) without oxygen. The next night, Dimitri throws in another mortal, along with an oxygen mask this time. Thus, this time the player has the choice of keeping her alive… but of course, if they turned the first mortal, now he’s a vampire too, and he’s desperate for some blood. Oooooh, that’s some quality angst, that is!

Meanwhile, one of Dimitri’s minions – a weird Finnish shaman with a brand new thaumaturgical path called Spirit Thaumaturgy – will try and fail to abduct another player, getting captured instead. The players can get the location of the captive player out of him, free their companion (who’ll be guarded by a “Hag,” which seems to be some sort of weird evil spirit thing that I don’t think is ever mentioned before or after this), and take the fight to Dimitri. If they beat him, then Critias wins the game and diablerises him. Either way, the players have been thoroughly used and will get nothing for it – such is the lot of powerless Neonates caught in the games of Elders!

In Fundamental Differences, the Succubus Club is subjected to an angry crowd of Christian protestors, secretly whipped up by Modius as proof that he is too still a relevant and powerful adversary for Lodin. What Modius hasn’t counted on is that one of the protestors is a pious guy named Terrence Coleman, who has True Faith – one of the World of Darkness’ most constantly retconned subjects, but here shown as a supernatural force that sends Brennan flying through the air when he goes out to give the protestors a stern talking to.

Brennan freaks the hell out and demands that the players help him killinate Terrence. The problem is, this is a really bad idea, because not only is Terrence protected by his mystical possibly-holy force field, but he stays close to the crowd all the time and fortuitously dodges any clandestine attempts at his life without knowing about them (e.g., if the players poison his drink, someone bumps into him and he spills it). If some injury is somehow done to him, it causes a big outcry in the days to come and gets a lot of eyes turned towards the Succubus Club to the point where it won’t make for a particularly good vampire hangout anymore. But of course, if the players don’t go along with what Brennan says, they’ll have ticked off an Elder. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

In Death’s Sweet Sting, an especially savage vampire-on-human murder happens at the Succubus Club, and the players are approached by a vampire hunter named Saul who claims to have been on the guilty party’s trail for a while and to need their help in bringing him down. Since he’s clearly out of all control and the police are starting to breathe down the neck of every vampire at the club (the lead detective is recurring vampire hunter NPC Gregory Stephens, so he knows damn well that this was a vampire killing, even if he can’t tell his colleagues as much), the players have every reason to help out in ending this threat to the Masquerade.

It’s actually a little more complicated; Saul is a biochemist, and he’s created a blood-born virus that drives vampires crazy and ultimately kills them. The vampire was his first test subject. The virus was meant to kill quickly, though, not make them psychotically dangerous for long periods of time while it slowly wore them down. Now he’s desperate to put the genie back in the bottle before he’s the cause of a plague of deranged super-human killers roaming the land and creating a massive human body count.

The players ultimately manage to set a trap for the killer and corner him after a wild chase scene where they get to jump between roof tops and other fun stuff. They take him down, but shortly thereafter they discover that they’ve been infected with the virus. Oooops.

So the players start developing symptoms, including frenzy checks getting harder, and so do a lot of other Kindred in Chicago. Saul comes clean, and the players find themselves having to seek out a scientist at Chicago University and convincing him to create a cure.

I like how this adventure highlights something that keeps coming up in these early books, which is how the vampire condition isn’t stable and understood. It’s a black box; vampires know roughly and from observation how their supernatural biologies normally work, but they don’t have any actual insight into why they work or how they’re even possible. When they start going haywire, they don’t know how to fix them. That’s a pretty effective device for introducing that “personal horror” that the game is supposed to be all about, and I think it kind of got crushed under the sheer weight of material later in the game’s history; when you have a gazillion different writers working on a gazillion different books, you need the rules to be ironclad or you’ll end up with a big mess. Still, a shame.

The last two adventures are connected, forming a short campaign called Child’s Play. In the first, Paper Chase, the players get handed a message by a mind-whammied courier. It’s from a guy named Herdon who’s a fence in illicitly acquired antique manuscripts, and he is inviting them to bid on a previously unknown fragment of The Book of Nod (which is basically the vampire Bible; it doesn’t necessarily contain the truth about early Kindred history, but enough traditional-minded Kindred believe that it does that a previously-unknown fragment would make a tremendous bargaining chip) who he’s got a seller for.

The message seems to imply knowledge of the fact that they’re vampires but actually, Herdon has no idea; Nicolai, the Tremere Primogen, told him that he could get in touch with some collectors of this kind of rare texts, had Herdon write the invitation, and then mind-whammied the courier into handing it to the players. The fragment is also a fake, and the sellers are a pair of vampire hunters trying to draw vampires in to killinate them. Nicolai knows that, and just wants to see how the players will react under pressure.

Got all that? Whew.

Anyway, once the players meet with Herdon, the vampire hunters – who are keeping him under surveillance – will know who they are, and will launch an attack. The players will also have to fight rival vampires who also want the supposed Book of Nod fragment. Meanwhile, Nicolai is watching and taking notes.

The second part of Child’s Play is called Grand Elusion. Nicolai, impressed with the players’ performance in the last adventure, gets in touch with them and asks them to kill Vampire Harry Houdini for him.

Yes, really. Remember how I mentioned back in Ashes to Ashes that Vampire Harry Houdini was a thing? He’s still a thing. Here we further learn that he’s a Tremere, but that he broke free of the Blood Bond to the Tremere Elders that all Tremere are required to have. How in tarnation did he do that? Ah-ah-ah, a magician never reveals his tricks! (he probably learned how from the Sabbat, though) Anyway, he goes by Ehrich Weiss these days, and the Tremere are not at all happy with him going around all sorts of un-enslaved and all, so Nicolai figures he can score brownie points with the Tremere Council of Seven by bumping him off.

So the players head off to The Cave, which is the blue-collar bar where Ehrich tends to hide out, and try to get his whereabouts out of the rough, tough bikers there. One way to do that is to beat the roughest, toughest biker in a game of chess, since he’s partial to it and it’s therefore a very MANLY pastime (and anyone who says otherwise is crusin’ for a bruisin’). I kind of love that.

Anyway, they will find out that Ehrich is supposed to be at Ye Olde Magic Shoppe, an establishment in the part of town the Kindred call “the Hive” (because it’s swarming with inferior beings, i.e., humans). The players go there, talk to the proprietor, dodge an annoying tabloid reporter who’s looking for “supernatural occurrences,” and find out that Ehrich moved on to the Succubus Club. Because of course we were going to end up there eventually, did you not see the title of the book?

Ehrich is hanging out with a magus named Gibson, who is not only drunk but also quite senile. Ehrich will tell the players that they’d be better off siding with him against Nicolai because, well, Nicolai is basically a great big jerk who considers them expendable cannon fodder (which is perfectly accurate: he is and he does). Whether they are convinced or not, Gibson’s treacherous apprentice Orloff will choose that time to send some brainwashed minions at the lot of them, trying to kill Gibson. Ehrich and Gibson flee into the Labyrinth, pursued by some more pawns of Nicolai’s, some additional vampires who have randomly chosen this time to get involved, and possibly the players depending on whether they’ve sided with or against them. Mayhem, basically.

Depending on how the whole thing ends up, the players face various consequences. Going along with Ehrich is actually the right choice here, because he’ll make good on his promises and put them in touch with some of his powerful allies in town, whereas Nicolai won’t punish them for their treachery since the whole debacle has already made him look bad and he wants to distance himself from it. If, on the other hand, they managed to kill Ehrich, Nicolai will see them as powerful tools. And what do we do with powerful tools? We Blood Bond and Dominate them within an inch of their unlives, of course! Can’t risk them turning on us.

I really love all of those scenarios. Some of them seem like they’d be a bit hard to actually run, but there is some real ambition and thought behind all of them – you can tell that the writers were trying to create deep, affecting, angsty experiences for the players, and they beautifully portray the dark whimsy of the setting. Something I especially like is how it’s not afraid to have a sense of humour; vampires can be terrifying, pathetic, or darkly admirable, but they can also be ridiculous. This, as I have touched on before, is important in a game where there is a mechanic for botching rolls.

Next up is The Player’s Guide, where, I am sorry to say, things take a turn for the worse. Stay tuned.

Torg readthrough: The Destiny Map

Previously in our Torg readthrough:

Having toured half of the invading cosms, we’re now going to… stop doing that and have some published adventures? Huh. I’m not sure I think that’s such a good idea – the cosms honestly need a full book each to really wrap your minds around, so I might have preferred it if the cosmbooks had all gotten out the door as soon as possible. Oh well. Let’s see how much sense we can make of the ones that haven’t gotten more than the cursory description in the core set, as we jump into The Destiny Map, part one of the Relics of Power campaign.

Our story starts in Atlanta, still part of Core Earth, where there has been a mysterious murder of a genealogist and a visiting Nile Empire citizen. At the same time, the players hear about how some crooks tried to break into an apartment and found a cyberpunk hacker all plugged in, who shot one of them with a giant cyberpunk gun before the other one escaped. They can investigate either crime scene, or see what the police knows.

If they check out the site of the ill-fated burglary, they find a “Cyberknight” named DeVris who works for the Cyberpope. They can fight him for a bit, though he’ll probably escape by means of his cyberleg-granted super-jumping skills. They can find his files on the Nile Empire victim, indicating that he was looking for an Eternity Shard called the Possibility Chalice. Needless to say, Malraux wants to get to it first. They can also encounter a witness who can give DeVris an alibi for the night of the murder, so he’s not the killer (a killer, certainly, just not the one in question).

Also, DeVris has a crucifix in his room where the cross is made of circuits and the spikes in Christ’s hands and feet are replaced with cyberjacks. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but it’s a cool touch.

Trying the police finds them unhelpful, and they don’t have any suspects anyway – the most the players can possibly learn is that the weapons used in the murder were high-tech but not from the Nile Empire, because the marks left by them looked “too realistic.” I kind of love the implication that Nile Empire rayguns leave marks that look like B-movie props.

Checking out the murder scene can let the players find a high-tech shuriken embedded in a wall, which indicates the involvement of Nippon Tech. Regardless of whether they find it or not, just going to the crime scene triggers an event whereby a bunch of Nippon Tech ninjas attack the players and, after being defeated, drop a key card for the nearby Magnolia Station Research Park. So that’s a pretty damn epic fail of a coverup operation, I guess.

Magnolia Station Research Park is indeed owned by the Kanawa Corporation through a convoluted series of shell companies, and there’s also a Nippon Tech talisman on site, meaning the whole place obeys Nippon Tech axioms. So when breaking in, the players end up fighting both ninjas and killer robots, but ultimately they can hopefully extract some files from a well-guarded computer. The files tell them that back in the days of the British Empire, a guy named Stevenson found a weird Indian temple with a set of tiles that made up a map. He nabbed some of the tiles and took them with him back home, and then to America when he eventually emigrated there. They were last seen on the farm he built, which is in what’s now the Living Land. The complete map supposedly shows the way to an Eternity Shard known as the Possibility Chalice.

They can also find plans for an atom bomb (!) that 3327 meant to trade to Doctor Mobius in return for the completed map, though the two have since had a falling out and are now both trying to get to it first. Malraux is also after it and has sent DeVris to get it, but he knows the least of the details, because he’s a loser and the game never gets tired of demonstrating it.

Anyway, the players have to make their way through the primeval Indiana wilderness, where they find a dig site run by Wu Han, one of Doctor Mobius’ Overgovernors. They arrive just in time to see the last of the tiles get loaded onto a truck, at which point a bunch of Nippon Tech goons in futuristic samurai armour riding hover crafts barge in and start shooting up the place. The players are supposed to understand that they should just hijack the truck and make their escape on it, leading to a nice big car chase scene where they have to outrun both Nile Empire storm troopers and Nippon Tech corporate ninjas. Good times.

With the tiles in their possession, the players then need to get their asses to India and make their way to the hidden temple. Wu Han is hot on their heels and chase them through the jungle, though he breaks off pursuit when they get to the temple and lays siege to it instead. When the players make their way in, they find DeVris waiting for them and have to fight him before they can place the tiles in their proper configuration and get a look at the map.

Finally, they have to get past Wu Han and his storm trooper. The way they’re supposed to do this is apparently to trade him the atomic bomb plans from the Nippon Tech base in return for free passage. Er… okay, I’m fine with some moral grey areas and all, but I’m feeling acutely uncomfortable with the idea of giving the cackling supervillain a nuke just to save our own skin! Like, I feel like that’s worse than just letting him have the map, frankly!

Oh well. Either way, the players are meant to get away. Their next step is to follow the map to the resting place of the Possibility Chalice, which is in an even more hidden Indian temple, but that has to wait for the next installment in the series, logically titled The Possibility Chalice.

All in all, this is a fine adventure. It’s a little railroady, but that’s arguably by design given how much the game stresses the telling of narratively satisfying stories. It showcases four different invading cosms (though the Living Land is a little underserved – there isn’t even any encounters that might happen while the players cross it, the GM is just expected to come up with his own) and feels nicely pulpy and ridiculous. I still think I would have preferred it if I actually knew something of substance about half the featured cosms (for instance, DeVris is apparently a “Cyberknight,” and I don’t actually know what that is!), but you can definitely work with the amount you’re given.

Paranoia readthrough: Acute Paranoia

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

It turns out I was wrong in thinking this was an early sourcebook. It has some rule and setting additions, but mostly it’s a bunch of adventures. Well, that suits me fine. I’ve started to think that while published adventures aren’t usually very good for actually running, they probably serve as the best way to expand a game. What better way to understand new material than to see how it’s meant to be used?

That said, the book does start out with some new rules. First, we get a rundown of how the computer tests its servants to see if they have gone insane from its abuse yet, which it does by abusing them. Until they go insane. The “treatment” can verge from being hauled off and lobotomised to being handed a party hat and told to engage in five minutes of Fun to relieve stress. Failure to have Fun in the correct way is, naturally, treason.

Next, and related to the above, is a section on drugs, where it’s also established (possibly for the first time?) that clones are kept drugged to the gills 100% of the time to keep them from having unauthorised feelings.

We get a bunch of new secret societies, including the Earth Mothers, who want to bring back natural reproduction and gender roles, and the Femme Fatales, who also want gender roles in the sense that they want women’s role to be running everything and men’s role to be run. The Knights of the Circular Object cosplay being fantasy heroes, Trekkies cosplay being… take a guess, and Groupies just fawn over celebrities a lot. The Sy-B-LNG Rivals are higher-numbered clones who want to kill their precursors and take their place. You can’t be in that last one, but your clones might be.

We get rules for playing as bots. Bots are build with a rudimentary point-buy system where you need to decide things like your size, form of locomotion and what the closest thing you have to hands is. You don’t get skills, but you can be outfitted with programs that function like them, but which also kind of take you over while active (as in, if you load a fighting program you can’t address any problem except by trying to fight it until it’s run its course). You are also saddled with Asimov Circuits that force you to serve Man no matter how much you’d rather blow him up. There is a sample adventure for a group of bots that makes it clear that they’re as perpetually hosed as everyone else in Alpha Complex – it’s just that the threat over their head is to be declared “malfunctioning” instead of “traitor.”

Segueing into the adventures, first up is Me and my Shadow, Mark IV, where the players are set to guarding the egotistical super-tank robot Mark IV for twelve hours. And of course something goes wrong every hour, on the hour. A gang of Communists attack! A scrubot insists on trying to clean Mark IV so vigorously that it’ll get lobotomised from it! A bratty school class run all over the place! A component falls off Mark IV and it has a nervous breakdown until the component can somehow be reattached! A group of entitled ULTRAVIOLET joggers demand that Mark IV be removed from their morning route (and they’ll edit the Computer into backing them up if necessary)! The Communists come back with reinforcements!

I’ll admit it – at a certain point I was chuckling from reading it.

Other adventures include The Harder They Clone, where the players hunt down a motorcycle-driving, rock’n’roll-singing madman; Warrior of the Night Cycle, which has a High Programmer start a ninja clan based on old movies; Whitewash, where the players are supposed to paint a wall black, but neither they nor they nor the officer in charge can afford to admit to the Computer that the wall is not already black, so before they can carry out the mission they need to figure out what it is from the latter’s desperate hints; and The Second Coming, where they tangle with a clueless machine empath who has been convinced that he’s the Computer’s messiah. Miami Laser has the Troubleshooter team getting put in a completely phony documentary meant to showcase the glamorous life of heroic Troubleshooters, without being told that it’s anything but a regular mission but with execution as punishment for not acting like a square-jawed action hero. Of special note are An ARD Day’s Night and its sequel Reboot Camp, where the Computer crashes and comes back online confused. So the idea for the ill-fated The Crash storyline was there early on, huh?

All in all, this is great stuff. I feel like at this point, the writers had figured out that Alpha Complex, played straight, simply didn’t have enough range to support a game – but that there was endless hilarity to be mined from taking a situation or character that absolutely didn’t fit into Alpha Complex and shoehorning it in anyway. With a usually-homicidal Alpha Complex spin to it, of course.

Next up is Clones in Space, which I think was actually the earliest Paranoia product I read back in the day. Let’s see how I like it the second time around.

Dragonbane readthrough: The Monster Book

Previous installments in this readthrough of Drakar & Demoner / Dragonbane:

Having gone through the first two edition cores, a couple of published adventures and (sigh) the Expert rules, we today arrive at Monsterboken (“The Monster Book”), effectively a combination of antagonist section and additional character options. While not a setting book – those are still a few installments away – this one adds to the meta-setting lore by presenting a number of races and species as they exist within the game world. Let’s have a look.

The first section of the book covers normal animals. There isn’t terribly much to say about it, except that it seems to have been guided more by what the writers thought was cool than by what would actually be relevant to the Scandinavian-coded implied setting for the game so far. There is a tremendous number of exotic animals – more, in fact, than the sort of critters you might run into in a place that resembles the described environments in the published adventures. Also bison, for some reason. And polar bears. And saber-toothed tigers. Like, it’s all awesome animals, the sort you’d put in a children’s book because they’d catch the reader’s attention. Which is nice, I guess, but what I’d be more likely to need would be stats for wild boars and elks… Oh well. At least they put in wolves again after the core left them out.

Oh, and bat swarms are terrifying in this game. If one of them attacks you, you suffer 2d6 attacks per round, and any attack that rolls over your armour on 1d10 you lose 1 hit point. Even in full plate, that’s going to start hurting real soon! Meanwhile, a successful attack with a slashing or crushing weapon kills 1 bat, in a swarm that has 1d100 x 10 bats in it. Yeah, these things are gonna strip you to the bone, is what I’m saying. They’re the piranhas of the air. Stay clear.

Humanoid creatures are next, starting with those mallards again. White mallards are all merchants, black mallards are all pirates, and brown mallards are “usually warriors.” Still don’t know if there’s some sort of backstory or hidden joke there or what. Karkions are new – they are apparently some sort of lion-men with wings. Heeeey, I remember one of those from The Crystal Bull! He was this multiverse-wandering poet who got brainwashed into playing arch-angel for an inept demiurge. No, really. There is some crazy stuff coming up.

But back to early second edition. Karkions are wise and prone to being mystical hermits. They have an evil counterpart in the Onaqui, who are creepy bat-men who like to feast on human flesh. They move through the night in perfect silence, but their hearts beat so loudly that you can hear them if you listen carefully. Okay, that is wonderfully creepy.

Cat-folk and wolf-folk make their appearance, the latter of which is a core race in the latest edition. They are not to be confused with werewolves, who are humans (mostly) who have been afflicted with a disease that turns them into rampaging hairy monsters for three nights of every month. They take half damage from anything that isn’t magic or silver. Only unspecified “powerful magic” can cure a werewolf, though eating wolfsbane can stave off the transformation for one night.

Dwarves, giants and cyclopes turn out to be part of an overarching category called “stone folk” who grow weak when their feet aren’t on solid ground (which is probably why a dwarf pirate is “just silly” as per the Expert rules). Orcs, ogres, goblins and trolls are likewise grouped together as “dark folk,” with a common language and general brutishness. They are not necessarily evil, though, just stand-offish. Dark folk also include an even-smaller type of goblins that I can’t think of an English word for – svartnisse translates roughly into “dark house elf.” The closest equivalent I can think of is Warhammer Fantasy‘s snotlings.

“Elven folk” is another category, including elves and other beings who are as cloyingly perfect as they are. Elves have four subspecies: wood elves, who live in the trees, silver elves, who live on a floating island in the sky called Caranor, grey elves who sail the seas in ships made from living trees with leavy canopies for sails, and cave elves, who live underground.

Nymphs are sexy nature spirits associated with trees (dryads), springs (naiads) or mountains (doreads). They die if removed from their native habitat. They can heal injuries and try to seduce attractive men passing through their lands. Oh, and there is an honest-to-goodness nude picture of a comely nymph. I am torn between snarking that someone was clearly typing one-handed and being nostalgic for a time when some honest fan service hadn’t yet been declared Problematic.

Sexual politics aside, satyrs are goat-legged people who like to play the flute. They can raise their effective Charisma by successfully playing a song, and that would be useful if Charisma actually did anything other than affect training times. Swan maidens are more hot chicks, except these ones can turn into swans. Fairies are teensy little creatures with wings who can turn invisible and whose arrows can put people to sleep or inflict amnesia.

Woodwights, finally, are the token eeeeeevil elven folk who try to seduce travelers into getting lost in the wilderness. They look like naked women from the front, but on the back their skin is bark. They can mind-whammy most men, but not male elves or (interestingly) male dark folk.

The third section is of legendary creatures – monsters, basically. Ambisnakes are giant serpents with heads in both ends. If you cut them in half, both halves will eventually regenerate into a new ambisnake. Basilisks are lizards with rooster heads that can turn people to stone with their gaze – seriously, it’s a save-or-die roll. That seems a bit brutal… Giant squid is in this section instead of the animal section for some reason – I mean, granted, real giant squid do not and cannot actually attack ships on the surface like they do in fiction, but they’re still a real species, and the animal section included fully sentient whales. Oh well.

Dragons get a ton more description than in the core rules, including a chart to randomly determine what they’re doing when you enter their lairs and stats for all the different parts of their life cycle. All of them except maybe the youngest ones are effectively unbeatable by an adventuring party, by the way. Dragonflame alone will fry anything within reach. So, like, this is a lot of rules for something that you’re only meant to run away from.

Hmm, hydras, unicorns, wyverns, nothing very surprising here… Gorgons have stepped straight out of mythology, in that there are only three in existence, two of whom are immortal and always return from death while the third one isn’t. If you look them in the eyes you turn to stone, so again a monster that it’s inadvisable to try to fight.

Insectoids are a little more interesting. They are big ants ruled by a queen and a group of leaders, who are the only ones who are sentient – the rest are messengers, diggers, warriors and workers. They are completely amoral and will do whatever they think is in the colony’s best interests.

Giant amoebas are Dragonbane‘s equivalent to all the gelatinous cubes and whatnot that inhabit D&D – basically just big acidious blobs that eat things. Roc birds may just be the only thing in this book that’s more OP than dragons – they have such insane amounts of HP and damage bonus that they really could tank a fire breath for long enough to rip the dragon apart. Spinxes are winged lions who try to eat you if you can’t answer their riddles, but honestly, they’re not that tough and a warrior in armour can probably take one.

Acid lizards and tunnel worms are both creepy crawlers who dig through the ground. Acid lizards are sentient (if not very bright) and can communicate with each other telepathically, in addition to being able to spit acid. Tunnel worms just sort of eat anything that they run into. Their tunnels are used by a variety of sentient races, though – possibly this is meant to justify why the underground is crisscrossed by so many handy caverns?

Ancient trees… They’re ents. I mean… they’re just ents. I guess that, along with “hobbit,” that’s a word that no one dares to use because of copyright?

The final section concerns the undead. Skeletons, ghouls, and ghosts are straight out of the core, and here we also get mummies (last seen in a published adventure) and zombies.

Vampires also make their first appearance. They survive by sucking people’s blood, which causes Physique to be permanently lowered unless cured with a healing spell. At Physique 0, the victim dies and will rise as a vampire, with a number of abilities and weaknesses. They can turn into rats, bats, wolves or clouds of smoke, and also speak with those animals. They can paralyse people with their gaze. They can only be harmed by silver or magic, and only be permanently killed by sunlight, a critical hit from a bladed silver weapon, or hearing a rooster crow at the dawn when outside of their coffins. If they’re killed by any other means, they turn into smoke and flees back to their coffins to regenerate. On the other hand, they can’t approach holy objects or cross running water under their own power, and they are under the psychic control of the vampire that created them.

A final… interesting item is the “angel of death,” who is your basic grim reaper. It’s ridiculously powerful and even if you somehow kill it it will just come back, so it’s apparently more meant to turn up and be spooky. It apparently works as the messenger for some vague “powers of another plane” and can show people what will happen if they don’t change their ways. So… it’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, basically.

Well, this wasn’t exactly mindblowing, but it was fairly solid. The variety of dark folk and elven folk provides an interesting ecosystem of sorts, though I kind of wish there’d be more stone folk – where are all the dwarven subspecies, darn it?! Likewise, I like the vampires and werewolves offering a chance for a more Gothic story where those silver weapons that got tauted in Expert might come in handy. Hey, I’m a sucker for something Gothic.

Next up is The Path of Glory, where Dragonbane makes its first attempt at epic campaign-building. We’ll see how that goes.

Deadlands: the Weird West

Since I’m giving Cyberpunk a pause for now, I figure I might as well start writing up my thoughts on another series that I’m working my way through. Yes, I do in fact read even more series than I cover here. My lack of attention span is without end!

Anyway, Deadlands: the Weird West is a splatter-horror wild west game from the end of the 90s. It is actually only the first in a line of three games taking place in the same universe albeit in different time periods, the others being the post-apocalyptic Deadlands: Hell on Earth and the sci-fi Deadlands: Lost Colony. It’s famous for just how strange and colourful it was, and also unfortunately for how tightly it embraced the idea of unchangeable metaplot. It also has the distinction of being the mechanical origin of Savage Worlds, which is a mammoth in its own right.

The tagline promises “spaghetti western – with meat!”, so lets grab the ketchup and dig in…

The book starts with an in-character description of the setting, told by the first of infamously many uber-NPCs who you’re not allowed to shoot Because Plot, Coot “the Prospector” Jenkins. In particular, he’s sitting by an open grave, telling the revenant he just dug up what’s happened since he died. Gotta give credit for getting the ambience down early.

Now, since this is, as aforementioned, the kind of game that has DEEP SECRETS THAT THE PLAYERS AREN’T ALLOWED TO KNOW!!!!, the book is actually split into three sections: one that the players may read (“Posse Territory”), one that the players may read with the GM’s permission (“No Man’s Land”) and one that they are going to stay well clear of, doggonit! (“Marshal’s Handbook”) But seriously, no one was going to buy a book and then read half of it, and anyway, what if you were a player in some games and the GM in others? It’s stupid, basically. So I’ll try to give as complete an account as I can for any piece of the setting that comes up, even though a lot of the time the facts are scattered across the book.

The setting, then: it’s our own world to most appearances, but it used to be full of evil spirits called manitous that fed on fear and used it to create monsters to scare people even more. They all served some mysterious entities called the Reckoners who hung out in the Hunting Grounds (effectively hell) and were up to no good. But then in what was the Middle Ages in Europe, a group of wise and powerful Indian shamans called the Old Ones entered the Hunting Grounds, fought the manitous to a stand-still, and bound them to a pact whereby they could no longer interfere with the material world as long as the spirits of the Old Ones remained in the Hunting Grounds. So magic died off, mostly, and by 1863 everything was ticking along rather like in real history.

However, in ’63 a mad shaman named Raven, enraged by the destruction of his tribe at the hands of white men, entered the Hunting Grounds and destroyed the spirits of the Old Ones. The Reckoners were freed from their pact and sent their manitous out to wreak havoc again. Some of them crept into the heads of the recently dead and took partial control, turning them into “Harrowed.” Others began empowering a sort of occult card-sharp known as “hucksters,” giving them serious magic for the first time, or whispered in the ears of engineers and scientists to inspire them to create technology far beyond what should have been possible at the time. And some just went right back to cooking up monsters to go bump in the night.

The combination of mad science and the walking dead really confused the Civil War, so it’s still going on fifteen years later. Both the North and the South knows that something weird is going on, and have Pinkerton Detectives and Texas Rangers (respectively) running around unrooting supernatural mysteries and then hushing them up, on the basis that the more people know about what’s going on, the more terrified they’ll be and the more food they’ll create for the Reckoners.

That mad science is helped out by the discovery of “ghost rock,” a sort of superfuel that burns hotter and longer than coal and is needed for a lot of the wackier contraptions being built. A lot of it was discovered along the coast of California after much of it fell into the sea, leaving a “Great Maze” of free-standing mesas divided by water, the walls of which are full of gold, silver and ghost rock. There’s a major gold rush going on as a result.

What with both the North and the South being too exhausted from fighting each other to do some decent Manifest Destiny genicidin’, at least two groups of Indians have taken the opportunity to reclaim some land, creating the Sioux Nation in the North and the Coyote Confederation in the South. It helps that while the manitous are loose and that’s bad for everyone, the more chill nature spirits that Indian shamans traffick in have grown more plentiful too, so said shamans suddenly have some serious mojo to sling around.

Now, for the basic rules… Hooo boy. Settle in, this will take a while.

Firstly, Deadlands is determined to be cute with its naming, so nothing is named what you’re used to even when it’s something that’s familiar in concept. Deadlands doesn’t have skills, it’s got Aptitudes; Aptitudes don’t have specialties, they have Concentrations; you don’t dodge, you vamoose; you don’t get shot in the head for extra damage, it’s always in the noggin; hell, you don’t even roll dice, you roll bones! It would probably have struck me as charming back in the day, but now I’m old and tired and it makes my brain hurt.

But anyway, each of your base stats (Traits, as they are slightly-more-traditionally called here) has both a die type and a number of dice (the Concentration). I guess the die type is your raw talent and your Concentration is how reliably you use it, or something? Anyway, when you make a Trait roll, you roll a number of the Trait’s die equal to the Concentration – thus, you might have a Strength of 4d8 (Concentration 4, die type d8). Then you pick the highest die rolled and compare it to the difficulty. If it’s equal to or higher than it, that’s a success. Each multiple of 5 over the difficulty your result was also gives you a “raise” that tend to improve the outcome in some way. Dice explode, so you can hit a difficulty that’s higher than your die type, it’s just difficult. If you didn’t succeed on a single die and most of your dice rolled were 1s, you botch… sorry, go bust.

Each Aptitude is linked to a Trait and also has an Aptitude level. Aptitude rolls work the same as Trait rolls, only you use the Aptitude level in place of the Coordination. You can make unskilled rolls for Aptitudes that you don’t have using your Coordination in the Trait, but then you halve the result.

So far, so relatively simple. Then there are the Poker chips. See, you have a bunch of red, white and blue ones on the table, and the GM can hand them out to the players as a reward for roleplaying or whenever their Hindrances bite them in the ass. Spending a white chip lets you reroll a die, spending a blue chip lets you roll an extra die and add the result to your highests previous result, and spending a red chip is like spending a blue chip but it lets the GM draw a chip and use it to do the same thing for his NPCs.

And then there are the cards. We’ll get to those in a second, but for now, let’s just note that Deadlands uses a deck of playing cards, with the red and black Jokers left in, for some randomisation. Which is, a) very flavourful and wild west-y, and b) unnecessarily complicated.

Character creation starts with choosing a concept from a long list that encompasses just about any cowboy trope you can think of – gunslinger, gambler, saloon girl, journalist, snake oil salesman, greenhorn from back east, Indian brave, brimstone preacher, you name it. Add to that mad scientists and hucksters and you’re spoiled for choices. Your concept doesn’t do anything in particular but it gives you an idea where to start.

Then it’s time to break out the cards, because we’re drawing our Traits. You have ten of those, by the way, and because this is Deadlands they all have unhelpful special-snowflake names. Five of them are mental: Cognition (perception), Mien (charisma), Smarts (quick thinking), Knowledge (deep thinking) and Spirit. Five of them are physical, sorry, corporeal: Nimbleness (agility), Deftness (manual dexterity), Quickness (initiative), Strength (self-explanatory) and Vigor (stamina).

To generate them, you draw twelve cards from the deck, and each card represents a possible die-Concentration combo. Clubs is Coordination 1, Diamonds is 2, Hearts is 3 and Spades is 4. A two is worth a d4, a three to an eight is worth a d6, a nine to a Jack is a d8, a King or a Queen is a d10 and an Ace is a d12. So for example, the Ten of Hearts would be 3d8. If you draw a Joker, that’s a d12 and you draw a second card to get the Coordination, and also the GM rolls on a special table in the back of the book to determine some kind of special, spooky backstory detail that your character may or may not be aware of. It can be anything from having a sixth sense to having someone gunning for you to being one of the Harrowed.

Next, discard two of your twelve cards. You can’t discard twos or Jokers. Then distribute the rest among your Traits. Again – big on flavour, not so big on convenience.

You have a number of Aptitude points equal to the sum of your Smarts, Cognition and Knowledge dice, so you’re looking at about 20. You can use them to buy Aptitude levels or to take Edges, and you can get more of them by taking Hindrances.

Aptitudes are your basic roleplaying selection – sneak, shoot, persuade, lie, intimidate, wilderness survival, you know the drill. However, there are some that are specific to gunfights, like Fannin’ (effectively lets you turn your revolver into a machine gun until you run out of bullets), Quick-Draw and Speed Load. Also of note are Ridicule, which lets you break people’s spirits by cracking wise about them. Think that one turned into Taunt in Savage Worlds.

Hindrances are special weaknesses that give you more points to spend on Aptitudes, depending on their severity, and also rewards you with chips when they come up in play. Ones that stand out are Ailin’ (lets you have some sort of sickness; the highest one lets you play a Doc Holliday type who is gonna die, it’s just a matter of when), Tinhorn which makes you an unpopular nerd, and Ferner that makes you some kind of even-more-unpopular minority. Most of them are just what you’d expect from a disavantage system, but a lot of them have cutesy names that make them a little hard to keep track of. I guess I can figure out from the name what Kid or Heroic mean, but I keep having to look up that Hankerin’ is an addiction, Yeller means you’re cowardly, and One-Armed Bandit means that, well, you’ve got one arm.

Edges are the opposite, giving you special powers. The naming is even more annoying here. We have Dinero, Purdy, “The Stare”… Look, I’m not saying I can’t figure them out with some thinking, but it’d be a lot easier to parse an NPC statblock at a glance if they were called things like Wealth, Attractive and Frightening Appearance, all right? One Edge of particular note is Arcane Background, which lets you start as a huckster, mad scientist, shaman or religious miracle-worker (yes, those exist too, and every religion is apparently true all at once, in addition to the whole nature spirits / Hunting Grounds / Reckoners mythology).

Finally, you’re instructed to write down your character’s worst nightmare. We’re not told why here, but it’s actually because if he dies, he might come back as a Harrowed, and then his manitou will put him through that worst nightmare to try to usurp control of his body.

Combat is… amazingly involved. First, at the start of every round you make a Quickness roll, and you draw a card for each success and raise, plus one card. If you go bust you get no cards at all. Each card is one action you can take in the round. The GM counts down from Aces to Twos, and when one of your cards comes up you get to take an action. If more than one character has a card of the same number, ties are broken by colour, with Spades going first and Clubs going last. You can also choose to stuff a card “up your sleeve” when you would normally act on it, in which case you can play it at any time from then on and take an immediate action. You can only have one card up your sleeve at the time. If you draw a red Joker, you can use it to go at any time in that round, though you can’t put it up your sleeve. If you draw a black Joker, it’s not worth an action and you immediately lose your highest other card.

You can move a number of meters equal to your Nimbleness die over the course of an entire round without spending an action on it, though you have to break it up as evenly as possible across your number of actions. So if you have Nimbleness d8 and you’ve drawn three cards that round, you can move 3 meters on one action, 3 on a second action, and 2 on a third. You can also run twice that far by accepting a -4 penalty to your actions, or “pick up the pace” to go that far plus 1d4 at the cost of 1 Wind.

Oh yeah, about that – you have a stat called Wind that is basically your endurance, and your maximum Wind is your Vigor die plus your Spirit die, so something along the lines of 12. It’s not quite hit points because that’d be too simple. We’ll get to it.

You can perform “tests of will” against enemies by scaring, bluff, or mocking them. That lets you roll Bluff, Overawe or Ridicule against their Scrutinize, Guts or Ridicule respectively. Count your successes and raises and subtract his from yours; if you win by one he gets -4 on his next action, if you win by two he also loses his highest current card, and if you win by three or more you also get to draw a chip. Okay, I admit it, I’m actually hearing that “bararararam – baam baam baam” revolver duel music in my head now…

Attacking has a lot of special rules – shotguns, gatling guns, spin-reloading rifles with one hand, fanning, drawin’ a bead (also known as aiming, guys!) and so on and so forth – but what it mostly comes down to is that you roll Shootin’: specific weapon against a regular target number and if you succeed you hit and do damage. Melee is the same, only there the opponent can add his Aptitude in fighting’: whatever melee weapon he’s wielding to the target number. The opponent can always discard his highest currently held card to “vamoose” (I swear…), in which case he gets to roll dodge (the Aptitude is called dodge even though you use it to “vamoose,” just to make it more obnoxious!) and his result becomes the target number to hitting him if that would be higher than the regular one.

Hit locations are determined randomly unless something has been specifically targeted, with some modifiers to make certain results more probable in certain situations (melee attacks are less likely to hit the legs and more likely to hit the head, eh, noggin, for instance). A hit to the noggin or the gizzards (vitals; located somewhere in the middle of the range) does extra damage.

Certain parts of you may be in cover, like if you’re ducking behind a corner. If an attack hits an area that’s in cover, then there’s a 50% chance that it’ll be deflected entirely, 50% chance that it will have its damage die reduced by a number of steps determined by the cover’s type and material, possibly negating it entirely. So find something to put between you and any bullets flying your way, basically.

If you do get hit, you roll damage for the weapon and compare it to your Size, which is 6 for a regular adults. Every multiple of your Size in damage causes a level of wound in the part you were injured in. You take a penalty to all actions determined by the highest wound level you are currently suffering from. Five levels in any body part means that it’s irrepairably destroyed – you lose a limb or die, depending on where it is.

When you take a wound, you have to roll Vigor to avoid being stunned and unable to take any actions until you can succeed at another Vigor roll. In addition, each wound level you take costs you 1d6 Wind, and if you reach 0 Wind you pass out. When you take a Serious (three levels) wound anywhere, you also start losing 1 point of Wind per round until someone can administer some first aid.

Wind comes back automatically within a few minutes, but recovering from wounds (absent magical healing, which is not what you’d call readily available in this setting) takes five days and a Vigor roll against a target number determined by how serious the wound was. If you get shot, you’ll be out of comission for a while, basically.

All in all, I am impressed by this system in theory, but I whimper at the thought of actually running it. The card-based initiative, in particular, looks like it could lend itself to some tactics that just aren’t possible in a one-action-per-turn system – for instance, you could use one action to put your opponent in a disadvantage, then pull a card from your sleeve and take another to press your advantage before he could recover. And dear lord, they have certainly gone all out to include rules for every Western trope there is! You could have some fun with this one, definitely… once you’d spent the better part of six months really internalising the whole thing so you didn’t have to keep looking things up, that is. I’m… unsurprised that Savage Worlds took the basic ideas and simplified them within an inch of their lives.

Hucksters! They cast spells by playing Poker in their head against manitous. No, really, that’s literally what they do. This is represented by them having to make first a roll for the particular spell they want to cast (each one is a separate Aptitude) and then, if they succeed, drawing five cards, plus one per raise on the roll. Then they build the best Poker hand they can from them, and it determines how well the spell worked (which can still be “not at all” if they didn’t get a good enough hand). Jokers can stand in for any other card, but also when you draw one something bad happens, and the bad thing that happens can also include the spell failing.

So basically, what it looks like to me is that huckster spells usually fails, and even when they succeed they either have very weak effects (like being able to teleport five yards to a position you can see and which is shrouded in shadow… yeah, I can think of some uses for that, but none that are worth risking my immortal soul for, you know?) or come at the cost of going insane. Yeah… this is kind of weak, frankly. I mean, I’m sure the justification is, “well, the bad odds is what makes it a gamble, see?”, but with the odds that bad, you’d be a fool to play. Too bad, because it’s a really cool magic system in theory, but meh.

Mad scientists aren’t much better off. They can invent just about anything you can think of, in theory, but in practice it takes a very long time and they have the same card-based system that hucksters do, and you need a pretty good hand to build anything that isn’t just “a slightly better gun.” And again, if you draw a Joker – and you almost have to draw a Joker to build a decent hand – you got insane in the membrane. Which is, admittedly, what makes you a mad scientist, but still, you’re going to need to play for a really long time if you want to come up with any sort of worthwhile invention.

Anyway, some examples of gizmos that exist in the Weird West already are flamethrowers, steam wagons, rocket packs and bullet-proof wests. I think I’d rather just save up and buy some of this stuff than try to be someone who builds it, though.

The blessed – religious miracleworkers – are more solid. They have a single skill called Faith that lets them learn and use miracles. Miracles are fairly decent, doing things like healing, buffing and granting protection. The only catch is that the blessed must always adhere to their religion or their powers might go away, but still, these guys seem to have a magic system that’s actually worth the effort.

Shamans are a bit quirkier. Their craft breaks down into rituals and favours. By performing rituals they build up spiritual goodwill that they can then use to fuel one of their favours. The favour usually has to be invoked immediately, except there is a special favour that lets you bind it in a fetish and invoke it at your leisure.

The rituals range from the extremely convenient (promise to honour Nature – which it is noted that you’re probably already doing, so it’s essentially a freebie) to the once-in-a-lifetime desperate measures (cut off a limb). You can only use a ritual once to try to build up mojo for a particular casting, but you can use several rituals on the same casting, so you can e.g. dance, fast and scar yourself in sequence and then invoke a favour drawing on it.

The favours are handy but not overwhelming – they let you do things like heal wounds, sense-ride a nearby bird of prey, buff a projectile attack, or make lightning strike during a rainstorm. Some of them you almost need the save-for-later favour to make full use of, others might be more viable to spend some time preparing.

All in all, I think you’d need to be a little tactical with shamanism, but it’s certainly doable. You do take a penalty if you ever use technological or manufactured items, though, so there’s a cost.

The Harrowed! When someone of sufficient will and strength dies, you draw a few cards, and if one is a Joker, he comes back as a Harrowed. That means that he’s an icky walking corpse and he’s sharing his head with a manitou that keeps trying to take over. The Harrowed and the manitou compete over a pool of Dominion points, and whichever has the majority is in control of the body. Harrowed aren’t aware of what’s going on when the manitou is in charge, but the manitou sees and hears everything the Harrowed does. The manitou is basically evil incarnate and enjoys killing and torturing things, and is only kept in check by not wanting to be burned at the stake.

Harrowed do get access to cool powers like the ability to grow slashing claws, walking through walls, or sucking someone’s Wind out of them. They are also incredibly hard to kill – you need to inflict five wound levels on the (sigh) noggin, or else they’ll eventually regenerate. In addition, when they are present at the death of a supernatural monster they can “count coup” and absorb some of the monster’s power to gain some specially tailored abilities.

I must admit that the White Wolf fanboy in me is attracted by the idea of playing a theoretically noble monster with cool dark powers that occasionally loses control and turns evil…

Fear! Every area in the setting has a Fear Level between 0 and 6. The higher than Fear Level, the more powerful monsters are, and the harder it is to resist the shock of seeing something horrific. Monsters lurk around in the shadows and try to spread some subtle fear and dread so that the Fear Level rises. Killing the monster and spreading a compelling a story about it lowers the Fear Level and also permanently puts a special chip in the pot that can be spent for extra effects when you happen to draw it. Screwing up the story makes the Fear Level worse, though, which is why Pinkertons and Texas Rangers are against that sort of thing.

We get a musty collection of monsters. There are giant bats and sea dragons! There are totally-not-Tremours-graboids and totally-not-Star-Wars-sarlacs! There are demon bulls who hunt heroes; when someone gets too used to fighting evil, he starts hearing rumbling in the distance over successive nights, and eventually the demon bulls turn up at the head of a herd of ghost cattle and tries to trample the hero and his friends. If they succeed, the hero becomes a new demon bull forced to serve the Reckoners for eternity. There are ticks the size of baseballs that cram themselves down your throat and then burst out of your chest when they get big enough (the only cure is to drink a ton of castor oil before it gets to that point, which causes the tick to come crawling out again, because no one likes castor oil). There is something called a Hanging Judge who goes around sentencing random people to death and then attacking them with revolvers with axe blades on them. It’s glorious.

That’s about it. There are some directions for handing out XP, except of course it’s not XP, it’s bounty points. There’s a system for simplified handling of NPCs, which let’s be honest, is probably something that will be desperately needed. And that’s about it.

So what do I think? Eh. I admire it in theory. Clearly, someone put a lot of love, effort and enthusiasm into making it the sort of off-the-wall cowboys-fighting-gross-monsters game they wanted, with a ton of imagination and in-depth inspiration from the genre. And the rules, for the most part, seem very solid. At the same time, it’s all just way too complicated, and the way it keeps trying to be flavourful just makes it harder to navigate than it already is. Half of the magic system, as near as I can tell, is also nearly useless – an especial shame, since it’s got a ton of personality and seem like it would be fun to play if you could just occasionally succeed at something in it.

Still, it’s interesting enough to keep going with. Stay tuned for the first couple of published adventures in Marshal Law.

Twilight Sword

For once, I’m going to write about something hot off the presses! Specifically, here are my thoughts on Twilight Sword, brand spanking new RPG by Two Little Mice in cooperation with Free League. So let’s pick up a rusty sword and venture forth – and for goodness’ sake, don’t attack any chickens!

Yeah, like my snark indicates, this is basically The Legend of Zelda in TTRPG form, with a generous sprinkling of Final Fantasy, isekai anime, and a slew of other things that combines “kind of cutesy” with “faintly melancholic.” You play as a band of Champions wandering the Lands, fighting a monstrous Scourge and trying to bring back Hope in the face of Despair. There are rules for cooking. Monsters have elemental vulnerabilities. You ride giant chickens and get quests from annoying yet lovable little munchkins. It’s adorable.

The general system is basically D&D simplified – you have eight different Abilities that run from 5 to 9, and to do anything you try to roll under one of them with a d12. When a monster hits you, you lose Hearts, and if you run out of Hearts you get knocked out. Monsters don’t roll dice, but rather perform one of a set number of moves they have, such as inflicting damage or knocking someone down.

You have a Way (class) and a Kin (race), the former being your standard fighter, cleric, mage, etc, setup, but the latter being rather more idiosyncratic – the most “normal” thing to play is a Huma (effectively an elf), but you can also play a piece of corporeal shadow in a big hat or a burly Viking penguin. After a certain amount of character progression, you can choose a second Way to cross-class.

There is no PC death; if you get knocked out by a monster, it will either take you prisoner or steal all your gear and leave you to recover on your own. I love that last part – most games don’t actually want you to kill PCs, but they still make PC death constantly possible because they can’t tear themselves away from the hobby’s war-game roots, so the GM has to constantly flub rolls and come up with contrived reasons why the rules don’t apply. Here, we’re at long last being honest about it. You’re not gonna die, because that would ruin the story. Being defeated is a setback, not the end of the campaign.

Magic comes from the spirits of the land, so it’s very wholesome. Champions who follow the Way of Magic or the Way of the Light can learn spells – combat spells for the former, defensive and healing spells for the latter, utility spells for both. You can cast a spell once before it’s “expended,” at which point you can still cast it but it costs you Stamina. When you take a short rest you can replenish one spell, and when you take a long one you can replenish the lot of them. You have to roll against something to cast a spell, but even a failure gives you a minimal result – spells never just “fizzle.”

Cooking and alchemy is a whole thing whereby you combine a bunch of different stuff (foraged from the environment in the case of food, or collected from fallen monsters in the case of potions) and stir them together. The ingredients you put in provides a direction for what the resulting yums will do (e.g., if your base ingredient is red peppars, it’ll probably be something that helps stave off cold), though you roll to find out precisely what the effects are.

Weapons exist in a variety of form, most of which have an “old” and a “regular” version. You usually start out with an old weapon, and it’s normally the best you can loot from monsters, but the regular type is better. Arcane weapons, like staffs, can be used to shoot magical bolts for no cost. More impressive magical items, for instance ones that let you cast a particular spell through them, exist, but are stated to be rare. Armour subtracts from incoming damage and often have some sort of environmental protection too (e.g., wearing heavy furs makes you resistant to cold), but you can also just wear clothes, in which case the particular type of clothes you wear can offer some situational bonuses. Also, weapons can be breakable and degrade over time, though that is an optional rule.

You gain Hope (XP) from exploring new places (the GM is instructed to make such places visible and distinctive-looking from a distance, so the players know which direction to head in), defeating powerful “Boss” monsters, and doing acts of kindness for townsfolk. In doing so, you also decrease the Despair of an area, getting rid of the worst of the monster infestation and getting everyone in a better mood. Bring down Despair to 0, and the locals will throw you a party where you’ll get to meet everyone you’ve helped and be given gifts in thanks.

The game has a default setting called Radia that’s sketched out, ruled over by a menacing Scourge, but it’s clearly meant to be pretty easy to create your own Lands and Scourges. If you run a Legend (longer campaign) then the Scourge will have its own Despair rating that gets decreased along with the areas’, and once it reaches 0 it launches its final assault and the players will get to defeat it and save the realm. Hooray!

Oh, I love this thing, it’s so precious! And I also love that it’s going all in on its video game mechanics – there is zero pretension that this is some sort of gritty simulation where you’re supposed to be able to do anything you want, no, this is about doing the things you do in a light-hearted video game RPG, and everything follows the logic of one. Which also means that all the rules are really hard-and-fast and straightforward. It’s not “rules-light,” per se, because it’s still 200 pages (albeit with a lot of illustrations) and with a solid amount of D&D-ish strategy, but it’s a game where the rules are very easy to follow because they don’t try to cover every imaginable situation. This is a game about heroically fighting monsters and saving the world, so get a-fightin’ and a-savin’!

Also, and I feel like this needs to be mentioned because I honestly couldn’t believe it at first: there are no sAfEtY tOoLs. Not a line, veil or X-card to be seen! And this isn’t Shadowdark, where “suck it up” is the implied attitude – no, this is a bright, cheerful, friendly, feel-good game with, you know, colour and stuff. It’s absolutely marketed to people who want to chill out and not worry too much. And yet, no brittle admonitions about how you must treat everyone around you like they were made of glass because they’re probably one unpleasant thought from collapsing and then it will be your fault for not sanitising your every word?

Is… is woke hyper-fragility actually dying? Might I actually see a day when I can enjoy something light and breezy and it doesn’t make me miserable by lecturing me on how my autism is a crime against humanity? When words like “positive” and “idealistic” won’t immediately send me into panic mode because I know they’re code for “let’s kick around Mister Monster to make ourselves feel better”?

Wow. This really is a game about Hope overcoming Despair!

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Chicago by Night (first edition)

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

We have reached a historical moment: the very first World of Darkness citybook! Interestingly, the city so honoured isn’t one of the commonly romanticised American cities like New York or Los Angeles, but Chicago, a place that the book’s own introduction admits lacks a distinct character. In many ways, though, I think that’s a strength of the supplement and the early game in general. Anyone can be gothic-punk when living in an ancient, decaying metropolis. The tone of early VtM captured something a lot closer to earth and with more obvious connection to the game’s target audience: “I’m an interestingly dark, soulful creature of the night… so why am I stuck in this lame-ass dump?!” It’s about being an immortal, blood-sucking fiend in Flyover Country, and I feel like the game lost something when it gradually transitioned out towards the coastal enclaves.

Anyway, let’s dig in.

The book starts out with the expected flourishes, including by a Theme (“nothing is what it seems”) and Mood (“chaos”), as well as insincere assurances that of course you can change anything you want. There is also something I think is very interesting, though: an actual explanation for why the World of Darkness is so gothic-punk.

It’s like this. Vampires are old, and they tend to think of themselves as cultured. So they tend to encourage businesses that cater to a more traditional aesthetics and highbrow esoteric interests, artificially propping them up long after they would, in our vampire-free world, have collapsed from changing customs and public tastes. But vampires are also fundamentally parasites, and it is in their nature to always take a little too much. Thus, they gradually bleed their favoured institutions dry even as they’re holding them in place, resulting in a world where everything seems perpetually sickly and decaying while also stubbornly refusing to die. And of course, vampires are also completely heartless about anything that makes them money, resulting in rampant crime and plenty of down-and-outs, drug addicts, bums, untreated mentally ill people, and just general drifting losers… who, probably not coincidentally, no one will care about if they suddenly go missing because a vampire is feeling peckish.

Which makes a morbid sort of sense, and anchors the flavour of the setting firmly in the failings and dysfunctions of the game’s main characters. It’s a world a la vampire. That’s cool in a way that the other game lines never were, because they always placed the blame somewhere else – it was the Wyrm, it was the Technocracy, it was those filthy soulless normies; at the very most you took a little of the blame for not managing to stop them, but if there had been nothing but people like you in the world everything would have been great forever. Here, though? It was you. The world is like this because you’re in it. Deal with it.

We get a word on Prince Lodin and the general power structure of Chicago. In addition to the regular Traditions, Loding enforces some rules of his own: the police and the press are his to mess with and no one else may touch them, visitors to the city may not be permanently harmed, and keep things civil during Elysium (more on that later). He’s not, however, as all-powerful as he seems, because in fact the Primogen are pulling his strings, and a pair of feuding Methuselah who hardly anyone knows about are pulling theirs. Again, nothing is what it seems.

History! Back before Chicago even properly existed, the Methuselah Menele and Helena fought a great battle there and thrashed each other into centuries-spanning torpors. While they napped, Lodin made himself Prince by driving off the previous one during the Great Chicago Fire. He promptly killed all the Ventrue who had helped him, so ever since then all Ventrue in Chicago is Lodin’s progeny. Modius (remember him?) challenged him with the backing of some socialists and unionists, but Lodin ended up first sending him packing to Gary, then having his childe Ballard wreck the American steel industry just to destroy Modius’ power base among the steel workers. Yeah, I’m thinking that ended up retconned to hell and back, but for now? The reason for the Rust Belt is that Lodin was feeling pissy. That’s canon.

After Modius was dealt with, Lodin chilled for a few decades, but then Anarchs started creeping in. He massacred them in the fifties, but they came right in the eighties under the leadership of a charismatic woman named Maldavis who was secretly backed by several of the Primogen. Maldavis managed to oust Lodin’s puppet mayor and get a progressive one elected, and went on chipping away on Lodin’s power base until he went groveling before the Primogen and got them to turn on Maldavis in return for effectively making himself their puppet ruler.

Exceeeeept all of this was actually controlled from behind the scenes by Helena and Menele who was mind-whammying people even from torpor, with Helena usually backing Lodin and Menele running the opposition. They also control about half the Primogen each, though Menele is working on turning as many of Helena’s supporters as possible and then springing a trap on her. Helena has awakened from torpor, though she’s still weak and posing as a neonate; Menele is still napping and is in fact that mysteeeeeerious corpse that the players might have encountered in Ashes to Ashes.

Geography! My least favourite subject in school, except for PE, and time hasn’t improved it! It doesn’t help that the chapter is all jumbled up – roughly speaking, it describes areas and neighbourhood from a mundane, mortal perspective first, then goes back over them to explain how they’re important to vampires, but information is scattered throughout both sections and it all makes it terribly hard to keep track of what part of town I’m even reading about. A few highlights include the fact that Ballard (that obese Tim Burton-ish vampire who the players met in Ashes to Ashes) has nearly run his favourite restaurant out of business by insisting on taking a central table and then eating until everyone around him is sick. He has learned to keep the food down instead of immediately puking it up as vampires usually do when they try to eat regular food, but this apparently only makes the display slightly less sickening. Heh.

Also, there are occult temples in Lincoln Park that can teach you thaumaturgy – not very well, but they can, because thaumaturgy isn’t unique to vampires but is really just “magic.” See, this is one thing that I love about these early books – they weren’t so up their own asses about how vampires/werewolves/mages/whatever were SUPER SPECIAL AND BEYOND YOUR LIMITED COMPREHENSION. Regular people could learn some magic tricks, it was just easier for magical people. And conversely, there were things like Vampire Louis Pasteur inventing a de-vamp-ifying serum, because science and technology could actually interact with supernatural things. None of it was easy, there were practical reasons why it didn’t happen very often, but it wasn’t strictly gated away where the filthy normies couldn’t get to it.

Vampires refer to just about anything outside of Chicago proper but which is still technically part of the city as “the Outlands,” because they’re pretentious bastards. The Outlands include the airports and the Brookfield Zoo (handy for grabbing some low-grade blood when you’re desperate). Whether they include the city of Gary depends on whether you want to terminally piss off Modius by saying they do or you want to terminally piss off Lodin by saying they don’t (pro-tip: it’s safer to piss off Modius).

Elysium! This will later be a universal part of the setting, but here it’s described as a custom specific to Chicago. Basically, the Primogen like to be able to go to the opera or other highbrow places and discreetly scheme with each other there, and they would prefer it if no one interrupted them. So certain hoity-toity establishments are declared “Elysium” and you’d better not make trouble there or so help you. They’re also open to all vampires who want to attend, though if you do everyone will think you’re sucking up to the elders (which you probably are). Also, you can’t talk politics at an Elysium (because this is a place of respite from worldly concerns and and shame on you for trying to ruin the vibe), unless a Primogen brings up the subject first in which case it’s not only fine but mandatory (because of course addressing this incredibly important issue comes before your silly enjoyment). So basically, they’re kind of like the power-tripping admins of any online forum I’ve ever been on.

The Rack is the polar opposite of the Elysium, being the hot clubs where Anarchs hang out. The Succubus Club (which will get its own book, so be patient) is mentioned, and so is The Cave, which is this rugged working-class bar for manly blue-collar men, and The Blue Velvet, which is seemingly mortal-owned but oddly accommodating to vampires. The concept of Blood Dolls is also described, which is nice because it’s the kind of phrase that later books throw around and assume you’re familiar with. Basically, they’re humans trying very hard to act like vampires (without actually knowing that real vampires exist), including by sharing blood – which is very convenient for actual vampires, because it makes them look about 100% less suspicious when they’re in a Blood Doll hangout.

The part of downtown south of the river is called “the Hive” by the Kindred, the implication being that mortals are scurrying insects. Okay, I’m starting to think the Garou have the right idea re: the Kindred needing to have their undead asses kicked. Anyway, it’s described as both crime-ridden and inhabited mostly by poor ethnic minorities and the centre of business and politics in the city, and I’m not sure if that’s just bad writing or if it was a contradiction that really did exist in the real Chicago of 1992.

“The Barrens,” finally, is the vampire all-purpose name for any and every place where they don’t wanna go, apparently usually because it’s full of disagreeable poor people. You’d think they’d be especially interested in going there, then, since poor people can make less of a fuss about people chewing on them than rich people, but okay… Two examples are the Michigan Avenue Underground, where the street runs in two levels and the lower street is perpetually in darkness and vagrants tend to live there to stay out of the rain, and the Cabrini Green Housing Project, which is a ghetto for the poor that’s filled with street crime encouraged by real estate developers who want to drive the poor out so they can put up actual profitable building there. Well, that’s suitably bleak!

The real meat of the book is of course the NPC section, which does not disappoint. Something I really like is how it presents entire lineages of vampires, so you can read about why Vampire A sired Vampire B, how Vampire B inevitably failed to play the practical or emotional role that Vampire A had hoped it would, and how Vampire B then went on to sire Vampire C for its own reasons and to its own eventual disappointment. You really get a sense of dysfunctional family histories, with each generation resenting the one before and expecting too much of the one after it.

Right off the bat we get a deeper description of Menele (he’s the oldest Brujah, so he comes first in the list). Apparently he was once the king of a Greek city-state who got turned by “a Third-Generation Brujah” (not described as an Antediluvian, which might be significant) named Troile after the sacking of Troy (would you believe those bastard Troyans had stolen his wife?!). He then played a part in the founding of Carthage, here described as a Brujah-created utopia where vampires and humans managed to live together for mutual advantage. Sadly, Carthage was betrayed by Helena to its Ventrue and Malkavian enemies and their Roman pawns, leading to a long-running battle across history that included the eruption of Vesuvius and the fall of the Incan Empire (yes, really) before leading to that fateful showdown near what would become Chicago.

We also, sadly, see the beginning of power creep in that Menele has several Disciplines above 5 (yes, he’s a Methuselah, but remember how the core said that that meant he might have as many as fifteen dots of Disciplines combined? Yeah, that didn’t last long). Apparently his super-Auspex means that he can sense what’s going on around him even when in torpor, and his super-Dominate means that he can mind-whammy anyone who touches his inert form. Still not sure how those fairly modest abilities lets him be one of the power players in the city, mind you. Yes, I am simultaneously complaining that this is too much and not enough, whatsittooya?!

We’re also informed that Menele was responsible for most of the events of Ashes to Ashes, having groomed the ghoul who abducted Lodin and also nudged Modius into sending the players to Chicago to take the fall for it. He didn’t count on his body being claimed by a vampire hunter, though, so he might have gotten the players to extract it and then mind-whammied them into hiding it and forgetting where.

Other prominent Brujah include two of the Primogen, Menele’s childe Critias (a smartass Athenian sophist who fancies himself a great political philosopher, and who isn’t aware that Menele is pulling his strings) and Tyler (originally a peasant rebel against the medieval English crown, who went on to play a part in the forming of the Sabbat that she now keeps hidden, and Helena’s secret patsy). There is also as Balthazar / Sheriff, who like most other Brujah started out as a rebel and political thinker, but while most of them were some variety of socialist or civil rights activist, Sheriff was a Southern Confederate. Perhaps predictably, he didn’t get along well with his fellow Brujah and defected to become Lodin’s henchman since that offered him his best opportunity for being a smug, brutal, corrupt-hick stereotype. To thine own self be true, or something.

There are some Caitiffs (which at this point aren’t the result of “weak blood” but are just vampires who haven’t been properly raised as part of a clan), the most notable one of whom is Maldavis, who’s somehow managed to survive Lodin’s wrath. She’s interested in starting a new rebellion, but she’s mostly been replaced by other anarch leaders.

Gangrel! There is a Gangrel Primogen named Inyanga, who was a shaman way back in Africa. She’s somewhat less morally bankrupt than most elder vampires and tries to just feed off people who she thinks deserve it. She’s got some magic power tricks from her mortal days – again something that’s cool and flavourful and that wouldn’t be allowed under the later editions because RESPECT THE IRONCLAD LINES!!!! Ah well. Also somewhat creepy-cool is her childe Doyle, who worked in the butcher yards and found killing cows to be a spiritual experience that made him one with the animal’s soul. Like… ick, but iiiiiinteresting, but ick. He embraced a kind-hearted animal lover named Rose, but she got so horrified by his animal-slaying ways that she wants to kill him… and of course she’d never feed off of a poor, defenseless animal, only from those human jerks! Hee.

The Malkavians have no Primogen, though they do have a leader of sorts named Maureen who has the distinction of being the one who started the Great Chicago Fire. She runs an insane asylum and has a bunch of deranged progeny, including a pair who think they’re a stodgy married couple and their psychotic “son” (actually their sire). I love it, it’s so horrifying.

The Nosferatu Primogen is a guy named Khalid who used to be a Muslim general during the Crusades. He’s pursuing Golconda, but his anger management problem keeps getting in the way. His progeny includes a pair of abused children who killed their parents (he chose them for the embrace because he figured that becoming deformed undead monstrosities would actually be a step up for them) and who are now unwillingly served by the ghosts of said parents. First canonical appearance of wraiths? I’m not entirely sure.

The Toreador! Helena is one. She’s also from ancient Greece, though she’s not actually Helena of Troy even if parts of her backstory do involve running away from her husband to her lover’s family, only to have her husband follow and kill them all. Anyway, we already went through most things about her when talking about Menele. She’s got even more super-duper-Disciplines and can astral-project all over the place when in torpor and Dominate people from afar, which does seem like it would be more helpful in subtly directing things. She was the one who whammied Maureen into starting the Great Chicago Fire as part of her bid to get rid of the Menele-backed Prince and put Lodin in his place, by the way.

The Toreador Primogen is Helena’s grandchilde, Annabelle. She’s a vapid socialite with pretensions of being a great patron of the arts. Helena thinks she controls her, but actually Menele is only letting her believe that. She’s secretly Modius’ sire. She’s got another childe named Sophia who’s an exotic dancer because Annabelle thought that that could become the next daringly transgressive art form, but it turns out that vampires – who have no physical need for sex, though some indulge in it anyway for psychological reasons – don’t have much interest in strippers. Annabelle now treats Sophia as a failed experiment, much to Sophia’s Blood Bound heartbreak. See what I mean about the messed up family dynamics?

The Tremere are pretty few in numbers, but they do have a Primogen, named Nicolai. He’s one of those creepy perpetually-a-child vampires that you need to include in any self-respecting urban fantasy setting, though for him it’s more complicated in that he’s also a wizard of considerable knowledge and power while still being emotionally a child. He sired an old black guy named Abraham to help him deal with that pesky not-of-legal-age issue, and Abraham went on to accidentally sire Maldavis (who’s his mortal granddaughter – yeah, it gets convoluted) when she surprised him and he freaked out. Nicolai also has a number of thaumaturgical rituals that weren’t in the core (which was rather sparse on rituals in general), letting him do things like see into the past and turn into a bat (you can already do that with Protean, but of course no true Tremere would do anything like a Gangrel!).

In contrast, there are a lot of Ventrue, and they’re all Lodin’s descendants because he refuses to let any other Ventrue settle in Chicago. It’s all sort of creepy and narcissistic. Anyway, some of the more interesting ones are Ballard, our resident fat bastard with more money than God. Whose Ventrue flaw is that he must exclusively feed on his prepubescent male family members. I love Ballard, he’s so gross and terrible. Lodin uses him to run finances. There’s also Drummond, who used to be a railroad baron back when railroad barons were relevant, and who’s basically an idiotic man child who doesn’t seem to quite get that he’s a vampire. And finally, there’s Al Capone. Yes… yes, that Al Capone. Who’s a vampire. Because this is a very silly game that thinks it’s a very serious game.

Under “other” there are a couple of skeevy Sabbat vampires who are lurking around waiting for an opening that will let them take over, and an Inconnu who is supposed to just observe but has a soft spot for the Anarchs. There is also a demon in human form, long before those were retconned out and then reintroduced in Demon: the Fallen. She’s a succubus who feeds through sex, and she’s described as behaving kind of like Madonna in a music video. Also, “don’t bother describing her clothes – she doesn’t wear any.” Ooooookay, that’s somer extremely 90s grimdark fan service, I feel…

There is a few pages explaining who is in a coterie with who, which does help keep track of the politics. Notably, coteries are not portrayed as exclusive – you can be in two different coteries at once. The Primogen is considered a single coterie, for instance, but most of them are also the leader of their own mostly-clan-exclusive coteries. In addition, there are also three different anarch coteries with slightly different ideologies, the Sabbat and the Kindred of Gary are considered to be one each, and also there is a Gangrel biker gang and this vampire punk band called Baby Chorus.

The final chapter is a set of random encounters to introduce whenever the characters are wandering around Chicago and you feel like you haven’t screwed with their heads nearly enough lately. They’re divided into a number of categories that are supposed to reflect the themes of Vampire (the Beast, Paranoia, Horror, Nostalgia, etc). Examples include finding a vampire who’s drunk off his ass and ranting to a group of mortals about how horrible it is to be a vampire (breaking the Masquerade in the process); being approached by a pair of teenage girls who want to buy a pint of your blood, but can’t remember why they want that or where they got the money they’re meant to pay you with; running into an old friend from your living days, who remark on how strangely well-preserved you are; and accidentally killing a vessel only to have it immediately rise as a ghost who now exists solely to follow you around and complain at you. There are also some of the first, brief encounters with werewolves, such as one where you meet a werewolf kid who’s gotten lost and need help finding his way home, and a rather less cutesy one where you come across a massacre by rampaging lycanthropes and have to immediately roll to avoid frenzying while the the furries will likely be back any second. Most of them are pretty good, painting a picture of a world that’s at once gritty, whimsical, and a bit messed up.

Well, a few complaints aside, I really loved this book! The NPCs really pop, and the intricate relations between them feel like they’ve got a lot of potential – no one is as all-powerful or as infallible as they’d like to be, which means that anything you want to throw at the players can be some kind of scheme gone wrong. It all has a feel of some kind of dark, twisted wonderland, full of messed-up people acting on motivations that can range from the oddly sweet to the horrifically evil.

Next one up zooms in even more, and focuses on a single location of Chicago and what can happen there. Stay tuned for The Succubus Club.

Torg readthrough: Queenswrath

Previously in our Torg readthrough:

We’re staying in the magical realm of Aysle for a while longer, because Queenswrath is a collection of short adventures set there. A “queenswrath” is apparently an Ayslish legal concept whereby a figure of ultimate authority – which has been exclusively Ardinay or Uthorion-as-Ardinay for the last few centuries – issues a general command for any valiant heroes who are available to go and deal with some dire and pressing threat to the realm or haunting and sinister mystery. So… it’s a quest, is what it is. Each one is started with an in-character description that the players will presumably find posted in an inn or however that works, and then follows the actual nuts and bolts.

In The Unholy Order pilgrims visiting a certain Irish monastery have been mysteriously vanishing. This turns out to be because an evil sorcerer, hoping to weaken the faith in Honourable religions, have killed all the monks and reanimated them as skeletons, and is now using them to kill any pilgrim who stops by. So the players find a monastery where only one of the monks will talk to them while the others are shuffling around in silence with their hoods pulled down, and in the middle of the night they will be invited to see a “secret miracle” that will just consist of them having their throats slit. It’s very Gothic. I approve.

The Fall of a Storm Knight has Tolwyn of Tancred, still the non-High Lord NPC who gets the most exposure, apparently betraying Ardinay. Except it’s actually an evil doppelganger posing as her. And yes, there will be a scene where both of them are pointing at each other and going, “I’m the real one! Kill her!”

The Tunnel is just a sort of linear dungeon through the Dover-Calais tunnel between England and France, where the players have to fight their way past harpies and a cyborg troll (it got hit with a double axiom wash from Aysle and the Cyberpapacy) before they can establish that the far side is controlled by Cyberpapal troops and that, all in all, it’ll probably be best to guard it carefully.

The Essence of Evil has the players recruited to free the spirit of Merlin from Stonehenge, except it’s actually Morganna Le Fey who’s trapped there. The reason she’s trapped is that Stonehenge is a Core Earth hardpoint, so it’s actually less magical than the realm around it, making Morganna too weak to escape. An interesting touch there. Anyway, Morganna will possess an innocent girl and leave the players to either come up with a way to non-lethally pacify her (gain Honour), kill her along with the host (gain Corruption) or let her leave to help Uthorion. The last is presumably the worst option, but I dunno, for a legendary enchantress her stats are pretty awful…

The Winged Terror sends the players to investigate who’s killing Ardinay’s ambassadors to an elven community. Not sure why there are “elven communities” in England – the game does have a habit of just handwaving why creatures native to the invading cosm has just appeared all over the realm even when they wouldn’t reasonably have been part of the invasion forces. Anyway, the reason for the deaths is that one of the elves is scheming to have his people defect to Uthorion’s side, so he’s convinced a griffin to attack and kill Ardinay’s envoys to plant strife between them.

A Blanket Across Time has mummy attack a security guard at a museum in Oxford. It turns out that it’s been sent by one of Doctor Mobius’ overgovernors to steal an Eternity Shard in the form of the baby blanket of Moses that’s part of one of the exhibits. There is some gratuitous Nile Empire intrigue about how the overgovernor actually wants the Eternity Shard for herself and doesn’t mean to hand it over to Mobius, but it’s not really relevant to the mummy-hunt.

Beachhead is an underwater adventure where a Corrupt uvwe (a seal-shifter, apparently) has had the bright idea of creating a gospog field from the corpses of uvwe slain during unrelated circumstances. The players will need to stop his soggy gospog from terrorising ocean-side communities. It’s kind of cool, but I feel like I could have used some more information on the uvwe, here – I went back and checked the main Aysle book, but no, they’re not mentioned there.

In Holger the Dane a wicked dwarf wizard is trying to awaken Danish folk hero Holger from a curse that has him turned to stone, and then convince him to fight for Uthorion against the “evil” Ardinay. This is presented as standing a decent chance of working, so I guess Holger isn’t that bright… Anyway, the players will have to storm or sneak into the castle of Kronborg which the dwarf has taken over and filled with his Viking minions.

The Horn of Darkness sees the city of Visby suffering a strange plague that’s actually caused by a “black unicorn” poisoning the drinking water with magic. Uthorion has also sent a succubus from Orrorsh to serve as the unicorn’s bodyguard. The pair hangs out in the Trojeborg Maze, which… isn’t really what the writers seem to have thought it was. Like, it’s not an actual labyrinth with high walls you can get lost in, it’s a complicated stone formation laid out on the ground. Ah well, it was before the Internet.

In The Crystal Obsession, the players are sent to deal with a crystal skull that holds the spirit of an evil Aztec sorcerer. Since smashing the skull will just release the spirit, they instead have to place it in a remote region which Ardinay will then declare it illegal to enter on pain of death. I can’t help it notice that while Great Britain is described as still having a functional government, Ardinay is pretty free about throwing out orders. It’s probably too much to hope for that this is Uthorion’s Darkness Device whispering in her ear, right?

In The Treasure of Cerne Abbas, a group of Cyberpapacy agents and a group of Nippon Tech agents have been snooping around the local chalk giant. It turns out that they both think that there is some kind of alien artifact buried under it. There is, though it’s just a message of interstellar peace and harmony and not a weapon or anything. So… Core Earth aliens are canon, I guess.

The Ghost of Bodiam Castle is a clever double meaning title. The players are sent to deal with a ghost who’s haunting a castle, but if they look into things a bit more, they’ll find out that the castle is itself a ghost – it spontaneously appeared, ghost and all, during the axiom wash, with the real thing having been transported stone by stone to America years ago. It’s not a “real” haunting, but a sort of projection of stories and fears surrounding the place. To get rid of the ghost, they have to go to the real castle in what is now the Living Land (and the hunting ground of a giant squid thing), destroy the hidden corpse of the woman the ghost thinks it’s the restless spirit of, and bring back proof of the same, in which case it realises that it’s not real and ceases to exist.

In The Golden Sickle, an island off the coast of Scotland has converted to Druidism (which isn’t a problem per se) and is being manipulated by a Corrupt noble (which is). The players need to go there, spring a Light-aligned spy from captivity, and ideally make the townsfolk realise what a greedy opportunist their mayor is.

The Music of Misery has the children of an Irish village disappearing to the sound of someone playing the flute. It turns out that it’s the work of a tribe of Corrupt faeries out for revenge against humans for making the magic go away once upon a time. The flute is a magical artifact that opens a gateway to the faeries’ extradimensional haven.

The Dragon Conspiracy, not unreasonably, is about a conspiracy involving a dragon. A bunch of Corrupt dwarves have mind-whammied the people of a village into thinking that they’re long-time friends and complained to them that they’re under attack by an evil air dragon. The dragon they’re fingering is in fact a noble fire dragon, but the dwarves have injured its throat so it can’t speak or breathe fire, and then cast a spell on it to make it resemble an air dragon. The players are sent to slay the supposed evil beast, but should preferably realise that something is hinky.

The Beasts Beyond the Light concerns a pair of political refugees from Orrorsh, who are being hunted by two werewolves in the service of Thratchen (who if you recall has covertly set himself up as de facto High Lord of Orrorsh while the Gaunt Man is dealing with his little trapped-in-a-possibility-storm situation). They’ve found out that he’s not actually reporting to the Gaunt Man, so now he wants them dead. Not sure how that’s such a big secret given that all player characters are assumed to know about it, but fine. The players are tasked with taking them to an abandoned abbey and having a big old monster movie showdown with silver bullets and holy relics.

In The Sleep of Death, a sorcerer has been robbing occult stores in London to build a sort of magical weapon of mass destruction that’s going to drive the whole city insane. He’s making use of a Hand of Glory to overpower the shopkeepers, which is an icky talisman that can put people into perpetual sleep that can only be broken if the Hand is returned to the corpse it was fashioned from. The players have to hit the books, find out how the relevant magic works, and then first clobber the sorcerer and then get the Hand back in its grave so that those snoozing shopkeepers wake up.

Assault on Urquhart has the players travel to Loch Ness, which now seems to have a real monster in it. It’s actually a water dragon in the service of a Viking chieftain, who in turn is there to raise an army of Vikings, half-folk and lesser folk to harrass any Light forces in the region.

The titular Henbane the Witch is Ardinay’s pet ferret, who is actually an evil mage out to assassinate her. The players need to figure that out and then hunt down a woman who has every nook and cranny of the keep memorised and can turn into a tiny animal.

Aaaaaaand finally, The Crown of Arthur has a vampire from Orrorsh and her ghoul minions digging up Glastonbury Tor looking for Arthur’s crown, which is an Eternity Shard. There isn’t much more to it than that, but the vampire gets a strangely in-depth backstory full of Gothic tragedy, in contrast to the far more sparse writeups most villains in this book gets. You feel kind of like she’s escaped from Vampire: the Masquerade…

Well, that’s a lot of content for a 66-page book! Most of it is really good, too. You really get a feel for what sort of place Aysle is, about the many forms that the Dark takes, and how things frequently aren’t what they seem. The way that the fantastic, extra-dimensional elements are blended with the history and landmarks of the actual British and Scandinavian countries (with, admittedly, a few fumbles on the details) is also particularly nice – this is the same thing that I liked in The Living Land, and that i missed in The Nile Empire, a strong sense of both what the realm normally is and what it’s been turned into.

Next, we’ll be heading into a full-fledged campaign. Stay tuned for The Relics of Power.

Paranoia readthrough: Send in the Clones

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

Our trip through classical Paranoia continues. This time, we’ll see some adjustments to the basic concept that will stick around for a while, as well as parodies of bureaucracy and show business. Also poop. A surprising amount of poop.

The background for Send in the Clones revolves around recurring background character Teela O’Malley (Teela-O-MLY-6, technically). She’s sort of the setting’s all-purpose media icon – if some reference needs to be made to what passes as pop culture in Alpha Complex, it’ll probably involve her. Essentially, she’s the human equivalent of that Bouncy Bubble Beverage stuff that everyone in Alpha Complex is apparently always guzzling. Here, she’s decided that a superstar like her deserves immortality, and since good citizens are limited to six clones, she’s founded a secret society called the Clone Rangers who exist to create endless clones of her.

Still, all that takes a while to become relevant, because the players’ initial mission is completely unrelated. They are to go down into the sewers and search for the source of a pirate transmission that is broadcasting traitorous (and out of tune) songs through the PA system. The players spend the first act wading through sewage and dealing with traps set by a deranged Javere expy (he’s dedicated his life to hunting down a clone for stealing a loaf of synthbread!) before finding the pirate radio station. It’s set up in the abandoned studios of cancelled children’s program Captain Botaroo, which featured a jolly, German-accented robot executing commies and traitors. Needless to say, Captain Botaroo is still around and will be activated in short order.

The actual guilty parties are a gang of heavily armed prepubescent kids who are basically just doing it for a lark. The GM is instructed to really screw with the players’ heads about whether they really want to commit mass infanticide, all while the kids are cheerfully shooting at them and Captain Botaroo is running amok. Then, out of nowhere appears Teela O’Malley who gets the kids to settle down and then disappears as mysterious as she came.

Once back home, the players get haranged for a report, and if they admit to having met Teela, they are promptly scheduled for execution since they’ve been consorting with a traitor (not that that’s public knowledge, but fairness and reason don’t really exist in Alpha Complex). Still, they’ll grudgingly pardoned at the last second and sent to assassinate Teela. Aha, but first they need to get their gear for the mission.

That, as it turns out, is the entire second chapter. The players first have to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare of offices, forms, and unhelpful bureaucrats before they can even get their basic ammo. Then they get sent to pick up the experimental equipment, which includes things like a force field that needs to be plugged into a wall socket and will black out all of Alpha Complex, a tiny robot that attaches itself to your shoulder as a “morale booster” (and records everything you say, and will totally snitch on you), and a sonic blaster that has a 25% chance of getting stuck each time it’s fired, requiring you to smash it against a wall to make it stop wailing.

It also includes the funbot, which is an automated morale officer who tags along and tells the same unfunny jokes over and over. If people fail to laugh, it starts spurting laughing gas at them. It randomly throws cream pies at people. Whenever the GM decides it would be either funny or convenient, it also runs off in a random direction. And of course, the players are responsible for it on pain of death. If it does get broken, they get treason points, and another funbot is promptly dispatched to the scene, as obnoxious as the last one.

This is also where the CRUD (Clone Recycling Unlimited Delivery) system is introduced. Apparently someone realised that while giving the players backup clones was a nice way to not have to go easy on them, having to roleplay a new clone getting activated and making its way to wherever the party currently is was still terribly inconvenient. So in this module, the R&D department has started outfitting Troubleshooters with sensors that check their vital signs, and when one dies a new clone is dispatched by means of high-speed pipe, effectively plopping down right where the last one expired. There’s a note that of course there is no reason why this should always work perfectly and that there’s all sorts of mischief the GM can work with clone replacement, but at least this way she won’t have to think about it if she doesn’t want to. And also, I feel like it just adds something to the dehumanising nature of it that you’re not just replaceable but instantly replaceable, that your untimely death isn’t even a brief hiccup.

Anyway, chapter three is the actual freaking mission. The players are sent to Alpha Complex’s entertainment division, where they deal with a few Hollywood caricatures and get put on a game show with convoluted rules and live weapons, the prize for which is to get to meet Teela. The first half is a quiz with laughably easy questions that you can, however, only answer by pressing the right button first, and there is no obvious way to work out from first principle what’s the right button. The second half is a sort of basketball match where lethal force is permitted, and where the players’ opponents are a bunch of towering super-soldiers. There is a specific minigame for playing out the match, complete with randomised behaviour for the opposing team, which is a nice touch.

Whether the players win or lose, they will eventually get sent to a room where Teela is supposed to be, but it turns out to be three different rooms and the first two the players enter have secret society meetings in them. The first is for a group called the Pepsi Generation, who I think would probably be a lot funnier to me if I knew anything about Pepsi commercials circa 1985. The second one is for the secret society that one of the players are part of, and they promptly get outed and have to decide who to shoot at. Fun times.

On the third try, the players find Teela in the middle of a ton of incriminating evidence about her mass-cloning business. The players chase her down to her cloning facility in the sewers (that’s why she was at the Captain Botaroo studios – they were right next door and she was checking to see what the ruckus was about) where they have to fight dozens of deformed Teela clones, her brainwashed minions, attackers from the Pepsi Generation, rampaging scrub bots, and whatever else the GM can come up with. And then someone brings down a wall and the whole place gets flooded with sewer water.

The adventure ends with the players getting out of the stinking mess and back home, where they either get executed for failing the mission (if they can’t prove they killed at least one Teela), executed for succeeding in the mission (Teela has somehow managed to get back in the Computer’s good graces, so the whole mission has been memoryholed) or executed for all the other traitorous stuff they probably got recorded doing.

The book ends with a few thoughts from the developers. Most notably, they mention that they initially thought about how they were going to retcon the destruction of Alpha Complex at the end of The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (there was canonically more than one Alpha Complex in the first edition, but the one that got destroyed also explicitly had a Teela O’Malley in it), before they came to a liberating realisation: no one actually cared. Alpha Complex is a silly place and the last thing it needs is actual continuity. Given how poorly later modules that did try for a metaplot were received, this was probably a thought they should have held on to…

Well… I don’t know. I felt like this one kind of dragged, especially with the second part. Certainly to read, but I think it’d probably be annoying to play, too. I get that the idea is to get the players frustrated with just how impossible it is to get anything done in Alpha Complex, but I feel like they’d get less entertainingly frustrated and more bored. That’s not to say that there isn’t a ton of fun stuff here – the funbot is wonderfully obnoxious, the killer game show is inventive, and the fight in the cloning facility is cool and bizarre – but all the different parts fit together a little awkwardly.

Oh well. Next up is what seems to be the first attempt to write a sourcebook as opposed to an adventure module. Stay tuned for Acute Paranoia!